Miscegenation, an anxiety rather pronounced when it came to many exotic locales, is often absent in Polynesian romances, which frequently include a white man romancing a Tahitian, Hawaiian, or other Polynesian maiden. The fantasies associated with the South Pacific influenced some of the ways in which Muslims were represented, especially in Romantic fiction, such as the novellas penned by Pierre Loti. Loti wrote himself into many love stories with foreign, nubile, young women, including both Polynesian and Muslim maidens. In The Marriage of Loti, he falls in love with a Tahitian named Rarahu, and in Aziyade, with a Turkish girl. These two excerpts, which describe the two characters, demonstrate how Polynesian and Muslim females functioned as almost identical objects of desire in Romantic fiction

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and broader scholarship on Western exoticization of non-European women.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 370