Sexualization of the Orient in Paul Bowles’s Let It Come Down

This article is an attempt to analyze Paul Bowles’s Let It Come Down from a perspective of postcolonial ism. American novelist Bowles is a stereotyped Orientalist. Staying in Morocco for about a half century. he wrote many fictional and nonfictional works on the formerly colonized region. In Let It come Down, the sexualization of the Orient is embodied most profoundly. The protagonist Nelson Dyar is drawn by the immanent forces of darkness and undergoes corruption. Eunice Goode, a marginal and deviant female, seeks Otherness. Both Dyar and Goode have relationship with a native Arab woman Hadiia, a specimen of sexualized Oriental women. Through the relation with Hadiia, Goode tries to resolve repressed desire. Goode’s observation of Hadija as an object exemplifies the Western gaze upon submissive Oriental women. Although Hadiia wants to belong to the Western culture, she cannot be fully identified with Goode. As a typical Western male, Dyar pays money to have sex with Hadiia, Hadiia cannot escape from the bondage of the Western representation controlled by colonialism. By fetishizing Tangier, Bowles disseminates Oriental ism. Later fictional works of Morocco, subservient or resistant to Orientalism, should be evaluated in relation to it.