Becoming Woman and Gender Typologies 199
With some exceptions, the genre of the novel in general can be said to have
close links with becoming-woman of male writers as Woolf argues that “it was
the desire to write about women perhaps that led men by degrees to abandon
the poetic drama [...] and to devise the novel as a more fitting receptacle”. 13
Writing about women is not becoming-woman but sparks it off, it helps male
authors to dismantle their phallocentrism and set off to meet their true dou-
bles which is mostly a woman, if not an animal or a child. For Deleuze and
Guattari, the best example of becoming-woman in Literature is the work of
Henry James.14 Becoming-woman is the first in the whole series of becom-
ings and “the key to all the other becomings”.15 It is followed by becoming-
child, becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, and so on. Finally, there comes
becoming-imperceptible. Becomings are lived realities of entering into com-
position with other forms of affects. Becoming is not imitating, representing,
sympathising with, or identifying with what one becomes. In that sense, there
is no becoming-woman in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, for Deleuze; it is only a
work of hysterical trickery.16
Pickthall and Becoming-oriental
I use the term becoming-oriental as a cover term for the whole series of be-
comings Pickthall undergoes in both his life and fiction such as becoming-boy,
becoming-Arab, becoming-woman, becoming-revolutionary, becoming-Turk,
becoming-Muslim, and finally becoming-imperceptible by leaving behind
both his homeland England and his career as a renowned writer of fiction.
Looking through his two biographies, we find some landmarks which pre-
pare Pickthall for his becoming-oriental. He inherited from his mother an
odd blindness to class distinctions; she had once lived in India with her first
husband and used to read the same old copy of the Arabian Nights, declaring
Pickthall to be “born with an Eastern mind” (inherent becoming). Pickthall
“lost his capacity for arithmetic” after a brain-fewer. He never liked competing
or contesting as a schoolboy and later confessed “I must be the wrong sort of
Englishman” so demonstrating deterritorialisation and resistance to archetypi-
cal Englishness, and resistance to being herded.17 When Pickthall meets the
13 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 1989), 83.
14 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 290.
15 Ibid., 277.
16 Deleuze, Dialogues, 43.
17 Fremantle, Loyal Enemy, 15, 16, 17.