The Oriental Woman as Objet Petit a: Subverting Orientalist Fantasies in Lord Byron’s Don Juan

This article examines Lord Byron’s satirical depiction of the Oriental harem and its women in Canto Five of Don Juan (1821/1859), arguing that Byron’s departure from conventional Orientalist narratives subverts Western fantasies, revealing the intricate dynamics of power, desire, and signifying processes. Through a Lacanian lens, the study explores the Western subject’s desire to signify the Oriental other, positioning the harem and its women as the elusive objet petit a—the unattainable object-cause of desire that structures Western subjectivity. Byron’s use of satire and gender role reversals disrupts the Western gaze from within, exposing the mechanisms that sustain Orientalist discourse. By analyzing the interplay of gender, sexuality, and the semiotics of desire, this article contends that Don Juan functions as a critique of Western attempts to construct and control the female Oriental other. In doing so, Byron not only deconstructs the imagined authority of the Western observer but also reconfigures the representational politics of Orientalist literature, offering a complex and self-reflexive engagement with the discursive forces that shape cultural perceptions of the East.