Fresh like a flower, invisible like peace: locating Phuong Within the orientalist margins of Graham Greene's The Quiet American

• Main Author: See Tow, Alexis York Ian
• Other Authors: Bede Scott
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities; Orientalism; The Quiet American; Gender; Phuong; Subaltern studies
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/175526
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The narrative of Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American is set on the imminent backdrop of the Vietnam War and contends with the changing international influence over Vietnam in the 1950s. Scholarship argues that Phuong, the main female love interest caught between two men, is trapped in and subjected to the cage of the Oriental gaze. However, I argue that it is a shallow reading of Phuong herself, and if one were to comprehensively investigate Phuong, one would find that she astutely capitalises on her position as an Oriental subject, a gap that I find is absent in present studies of Phuong. This essay will expand and include thorough analysis of Fowler, Pyle and Miss Hei so as to identify, critique and understand the construction of Oriental/Occident boundaries with close engagement of Edward Said’s Orientalism. By operating within the boundaries implemented upon her, I argue that Phuong builds a house with the bricks of Orientalism thrown at her, exhibiting not only a political awareness of herself as an Oriental subject, but also a quiet manipulation of the ideological structure to her advantage.