SOURCE: Schueller, Malini Johar. “Missionary Colonialism, Egyptology, Racial Borderlands, and the Satiric Impulse: M. M. Ballou, William Ware, John DeForest, Maria Susanna Cummins, David F. Dorr.” U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890, pp. 75-108. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Schueller discusses Cummins's use and dissection of contemporary stereotypes of the “Near Eastern Orient” in her novel El Fureidis.

Like DeForest, Maria Susanna Cummins, in El Fureidis (1860), also uses the figures of the male archaeologist and the missionary woman to provide a basic structure for the raced imperial narrative of the new frontier. In El Fureidis, however, the racial-cultural hybridity of the Near East powerfully intervenes into the dynamics of imperialism by making the Oriental subject resistant to definition and by providing gender possibilities that question the phallocentric basis of imperialism.

Cummins's very authoring of a Near Eastern Orientalist novel...