"The Myth of the Oriental Woman" in H. Melville's travelogue "Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, October 11, 1856-May 6, 1857"

The study is focused on the image of the Muslim woman, as well as on creative and cultural differences in the approach to gender identity and understanding of the colonial experience. The research is based on narratological analysis, comparative historical method and methodology of feminist and colonial studies, as well as the imagological theory of Other, as part of modern literary comparative studies. The theoretical basis is the research of orientalism. The novelty of this study lies in the first serious reference to the text of Melville's travelogue «Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, October 11, 1856-May 6, 1857» in order to conduct an imagological analysis of the structuring of the image of an Oriental woman. It is revealed that the specificity of the representation of the image of an Oriental woman in the artistic consciousness of Western Europe is mainly related to political and ideological considerations as a representative of an imperial power. It is shown that the East and the Oriental woman as its, perhaps, main element are considered exclusively as a gender-sexual model of Other, on which Western European society projects its own sexual fantasies, while accusing the region of moral decay. There are slight differences in the narrative strategies of Western European and American authors. Thus, the American author paints a sublime, spiritual image of deeply religious, humble Oriental women, admiring their natural beauty, but not overly eroticizing them. It is concluded that there is a certain continuity in Melville's reception of the image of oriental women, which is based both on exotic ideas about Turkish women common to the romantic worldview, and on specific, well-known orientalist works of the XIX century about them, but the images of oriental women created by the American author also contain his creative worldview.