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‘The small talk of the harem’: discursive communities and colonial silences in Edith Wharton's In Morocco

Edith Wharton's travel narrative In Morocco (1920) is an endorsement of French colonialism underwritten by central tropes of Orientalism. During Wharton's travels she takes on a masculine agency and, consequently, presents an androcentric account of her experiences. Wharton's alignment of herself with a colonial administration she describes in highly masculine terms is disturbed during a visit to a harem, when a moment of identification she shares with a woman she meets there compromises the androcentrism that informs her colonial politics. However, this ambiguous moment is itself colonised by the Orientalism to which Wharton is committed. The masculine ideology of colonialism is confirmed by her inadvertent and long-deferred acknowledgement of herself as a woman. Instead of advocating colonialism, Wharton becomes gendered proof of its necessity. In Morocco attests to Orientalism's flexible resilience, because its ideological underpinnings re-entrench themselves through the context-specific silencing of its own advocate.