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Belphégor, 13-1 | 2015 Only the “Outward Appearance” of a Harem ? Reading the Memoirs of an Arabian Belphégor Littérature populaire et culture médiatique 13-1 | 2015 Distinctions That Matter/Fictions Économiques Only the “Outward Appearance” of a Harem ? Reading the Memoirs of an Arabian Princess as Material Text Kate Roy Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/belphegor/611 DOI: 10.4000/belphegor.611 ISSN: 1499-7185 Publisher LPCM Electronic reference Kate Roy, « Only the “Outward Appearance” of a Harem ? Reading the Memoirs of an Arabian Princess as Material Text », Belphégor [Online], 13-1 | 2015, Online since 25 July 2015, connection on 19 April 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/belphegor/611 ; DOI : 10.4000/belphegor.611 This text was automatically generated on 19 April 2019. Belphégor est mis à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International. Only the “Outward Appearance” of a Harem ? Reading the Memoirs of an Arabian ... 1 Only the “Outward Appearance” of a Harem ? Reading the Memoirs of an Arabian Princess as Material Text Kate Roy AUTHOR'S NOTE I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Liverpool, which enabled and supported the research for this article. 1 “Mrs. Ruete, the Berlin-based sister of the Sultan of Zanzibar, will soon publish a two- volume work entitled ‘Memoirs of an Arabian Princess’, which is said to contain both personal experiences and particularly impressive descriptions of Mohammedan [sic] culture in East Africa”1 states a notice in a German illustrated magazine of April 1886, an example of the publicity preceding the publication of Emily Ruete’s autobiography Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin (Memoirs of an Arabian Princess) that same year. The memoirs, written in German, primarily describe the childhood and young adulthood of their author, who was born Sayyida Salme, daughter of the Sultan of Oman and Zanzibar, near Zanzibar Town in 1844, and who lived in Zanzibar until the age of twenty-two, when she left the island after her relationship with her German neighbour was discovered. The memoirs are widely acknowledged as the oldest published autobiography of an Arab woman in existence (Reynolds 2001: 8). As memoirs, extending from a personal life to “a meditation about the place of the self” in history and culture (Whitlock 2007: 20), they also describe episodes from Ruete’s later life, such as her journey to Zanzibar in 1885, where she and the inheritance she hoped to claim were used as a bargaining instrument, playing a central role in German colonial ambitions in East Africa. As the notice in the illustrated magazine heralds, they additionally discuss important aspects of Muslim and East African culture for her German readership, such as “The Status of Women in the Belphégor, 13-1 | 2015 Only the “Outward Appearance” of a Harem ? Reading the Memoirs of an Arabian ... 2 Orient”, “The Fasting Period”, and “Slavery” for example. “I don’t want to write a scholarly book”, writes Ruete, “I just want to try to make it possible for the European reader to have a correct understanding of the more important views and customs of the Orient” (Ruete 1886, vol. 1: 179). 2 Before the publication of Emily Ruete’s memoirs, the Ruetes’ relationship and subsequent perceived flight from Zanzibar had proven enticing fodder for asides in the narratives of explorers and for articles in the illustrated magazines of the day. These imaginative retellings of this episode in Emily Ruete’s life read like a “fairytale from the Thousand and One Nights made real” (Kersten 1869: xvi), and have arguably provoked the distinctive sober language and style of the memoirs themselves, termed “ethnographic” by Annegret Nippa, editor of the contemporary modernised and somewhat abridged German version of the memoirs (1989: 280). The memoirs’ factual reporting disallows the previously established fantasy element, in turn enabling pithy comparisons between the constructs of East and West through the medium of the everyday and the author’s appropriation and manipulation of the traditionally subordinate role of the “Oriental.” The “love story”, specifically, is impoverished and domesticated (in Tarek Shamma’s strategic sense of the word)2 in contrast to what has gone before, thereby moving this episode, and thus Ruete herself, until then so often represented, into the realms of the indescribable.3 3 Given the potential workings of the text as I have outlined them here, it is all the more telling, particularly in view of Gillian Whitlock’s comments on the “cultural authority” of memoir writers,4 that the memoirs should have gone through so many guises in their afterlife. In 2014, for example, they are available as an academic-style text,5 numerous print-on-demands, a romance novel and a Victorian erotica Kindle book. Despite their different forms, however, all but the romance novel use the text or translated text of Ruete’s original.6 Clearly, then, this is an instance of the book as “unstable physical form” with “multiple material lives” that has connected with its cultural contexts and discourses in varying ways over time (McKenzie 1986: 297, Moran and Stiles 1996: 6). Gérard Genette’s analysis of the paratexts of a work is illuminating here in demonstrating how a text can engage multiply with the world through its packaging:7 Being immutable, the text in itself is incapable of adapting to changes in its public in space and over time. The paratext – more flexible, more versatile, always transitory because transitive – is, as it were, an instrument of adaptation. Hence the continual modifications in the “presentation” of the text (that is, in the text’s mode of being present in the world). (1997: 408) 4 When Emily Ruete published her memoirs, the material and paratextual elements that shaped them into a book – such as cover design, illustrations and title page – and their provenance as a text by an “Oriental” woman writing about her life immediately entered them into the genre of harem literature, a genre Reina Lewis describes as inherently viable and marketable in the eighteenth and long nineteenth centuries: “whether you wrote about living in one, visiting one, or escaping from one, any book that had anything to do with the harem sold. Publishers knew it, booksellers knew it, readers knew it and authors knew it” (2004: 12). In its “generically unstable and intrinsically porous” state, placement of the harem narrative, which encompassed women’s popular (auto)biographical writing on this subject, vacillated between popular memoir and (romance) novel (Lewis 2005: 113, Whitlock 2007: 99-100). As one of the first of these texts to write back to the West from an “Oriental” point of view, the interaction between the linguistic style and the paratextual features of the memoirs conveys the tensions Lewis Belphégor, 13-1 | 2015 Only the “Outward Appearance” of a Harem ? Reading the Memoirs of an Arabian ... 3 speaks of between the commercially-driven need to satisfy, and the simultaneous bid to defy the established paradigms that fed the market for harem narratives. Suggesting, therefore, that the packaging is shaped by and confirms genre expectations, even when the content of the text might tell a very different story, Lewis draws particular attention to the inclusion of genre-appropriate keywords in the books’ titles – in our case “Arabian” and “princess” – and to the associated images, most notably that of the books’ authors in veils on the cover or frontispiece (2004: 12, 17). 5 Proceeding largely chronologically, my contribution aims to explore the material history of the memoirs in their German and English-language contexts: that is, the history of the major elements that make them, in textual theorist Jerome McGann’s understanding, a “bound, printed edition […] ‘held in the hand’” (Colebrook 2007: 26). It is these aspects of a book’s materiality – “its original matter of publication, its marks, deletions, binding and actual circulation” – that actively interact with the networks they propel themselves into with their publication, namely the public reading spaces I have labelled “the world” (Colebrook 2007: 26-27). Mapping the journey of the memoirs’ materiality thus entails a focus not only on the manner in which the various editions have been “materialised” through their paratextual features – in particular cover images, illustrations, and the so- called value aspect of the text (its physical format and corresponding cost) – but also on the “networks of resonance, action and circulation” they insert themselves into (Genette 1997: 4, Colebrook 2007: 27). This journey will take us through the memoirs of 1886, the early translations and the modern reprints, before I go on to briefly discuss and contrast the materiality of two very recent German re-writes of the memoirs: a postcolonial novel and an historical romance. 6 The ethnographic content and expression of the memoirs-as-book, I argue, do not preclude the book itself existing in a liminal space between autobiography and fiction, and finally being subsumed by its popular fictional paratexts and becoming a novel in the German context. Indeed, the liminality that is produced via the book’s materialisation in paratextual effects is a further tension that has accompanied the reception and adaptation of Ruete’s memoirs, most notably in their inclusion (surrounded by advertisements for corsets) in Collier’s Once a Week Library in 1890, and their recent doubled high and low culture fictionalisation in the German context. This
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