An Examination of Otherness, as the West Encounters the East

Abstract

If Christie’s texts repudiate the othering of English femininity, representing it as a central, unalienated ‘part of us’ within the books, what occurs to the portrayal of gender when the further formulation of the ‘alien’ or ‘other’, that of race and nationality, compounds the depiction? Christie’s ‘conservative’ reputation includes a racist, anti-Semitic position and this too needed detailed textual examination to decipher how founded a reputation it was, in relation to the othering of the East. A postcolonial awareness of how English writers of the 1930s and 1940s construct foreign cultures, particularly Arabic-speaking countries, has grown more and more sophisticated since Said,¹ Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin,² and Bhaba.³ Said’s seminal range of stereotypes that Occidental writers invoke in their binary divide between East and West to assert the European superiority, with the Orient as the ‘other’ of Occidental mastery, have been challenged and complicated, but they still prove useful to someone analysing English representations of the East. Christie’s representations of foreign cultures delineate three major types of the East – the Arab, the Jew and the Greek (often linked textually to the Turkish) – and where the latter two are encountered in England, the Arabic-speaking countries are encountered via the English abroad. A comparison of the Western Mediterranean of the fashionable Riviera in France and Italy with the Arabic-speaking, Eastern Mediterranean of Egypt, Israel and Jordan notes what differences occur in these settings of leisure and licence, away from the prying eyes of little England, particularly in relation to murder.