SOURCE: “Scudéry's Theatre of Disguise: The Orient in Ibrahim,” in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 32, No. 3, 1992, pp. 51-61.

In the following essay, Stone maintains that the Orient depicted in Ibrahim “is the medium through which the European (hero and reader alike) comes to understand himself and to know his place in the world. … The Orient thus serves as a theater for the European's play, a device used to display him to himself.”

It is hardly surprising that Scudéry's Ibrahim (1641), despite a verisimilar and largely favorable description of Turkish history and culture, depicts an Orient more European—serving the Western world view—than Oriental. Thematics alone suffice to suggest how the Oriental setting is but an elaborately veiled feint for European domination. Color is doubly local, that is, located not only in the exotic difference of the Orient but in the very prejudicial mind of the hegemonic European...