SOURCE: “Escape from the Seraglio: Cultural Transvestism in Don Juan,” in Rereading Byron: Essays Selected from Hofstra University's Byron Bicentennial Conference, edited by Alice Levine and Robert N. Keane, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993, pp. 175-85.

In the following excerpt from an essay originally written in 1988, Richardson maintains that in Don Juan, where the title character assumes the dress of a woman and an Oriental, Byron uses the motif of transvestism to critique Western patriarchy and imperialism.

Within the Western literary tradition exoticism or (what is often the same thing) Orientalism has been largely implicated in the establishment of European hegemony, cultural as well as economic and political. Edward Said defines “Orientalism” as a system of representations through which Europe was “able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period” (3). But while the most influential, Said's is not the only...