Identities in Motion: Reading Two Ottoman Travel Narratives As Life Writing

Identities in Motion: Reading Two Ottoman Travel Narratives as Life Writing

Roberta Micallef

Journal of Women's History, Volume 25, Number 2, Summer 2013, pp. 85-110 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2013.0023

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/510532

Access provided by Boston University Libraries (18 Mar 2018 19:11 GMT) 2013 Identities in Motion Reading Two Ottoman Travel Narratives as Life Writing

Roberta Micallef

This article examines two travel narratives by two Ottoman women: Haremlik (1909) by Demetra Vaka Brown and A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions (1913) by Zeyneb Hanoum in order to understand how they represented themselves in a well-established field of harem literature. I ask how they constructed their autobiographical subjectivity. In their representation of life at home we see how memory interacts with the processes of identification and differentiation to illuminate the authors’ textual autobiographical subjectivity. I focus on three topics that both texts emphasize: education, life in the harem, and political participation. The narrators’ commentaries on these topics at times coincide, but more often are in conflict and reveal much about the relationship between their location, the historical moment, and their evolving autobiographical personas.

he lives of Ottoman women provoked much interest in the imaginations of Europeans and North Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentiethT centuries. Travel writing was a very popular literary genre of the time among western readers, and harem literature operated as a related field of travel writing that gave particular priority to western women writers’ perspectives.1 Educated in western languages, elite Ottoman women had access to books and magazines written about them by western men and women. This article examines two travel narratives by two Ottoman women: Haremlik (1909) by Demetra Vaka Brown and A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions (1913) by Zeyneb Hanoum in order to understand how they represented themselves in a well-established field of harem literature, mostly produced by western women.2 I ask how they constructed their autobiographical subjectivity when intervening in a dominant life narrative discourse. Life writing, a phrase used widely in eighteenth-century Europe before autobiography became a well-established, even dominant genre, encompassed autobiography, biography, letters, and diaries.3 The humani- ties and women’s studies scholar Marlene Kadar’s contemporary working definition of life writing includes all texts “that are written by an author who does not continuously write about someone else, and who also does not pretend to be absent from the . . . text himself/herself.”4 The literary scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson also understand life writing as a general term for writing that takes a life, one’s own or another’s, as its

© 2013 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 25 No. 2, 85–110. 86 Journal of Women’s History Summer subject. They describe life writing and life narratives as inclusive of the heterogeneity of self-referential practices: biographical, novelistic, historical, or explicitly self-referential and therefore autobiographical.5 Written in English, Haremlik and A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions are first-person narratives where the authors are overtly present from the first page of the text to the last. By examining these works as instances of life writing and by placing emphasis on the narrators’ self-presentations during their travels we learn much about the narrators’ formations of their subject positions, including their shifting senses of identity and belonging. By reading these two texts as examples of life writing we can trace how each author constructs “herself defined.”6 These two narratives, which reflect a gendered subjectivity formation in motion, begin to fill a lacuna identified by the Turkish scholar Deniz Kandiyoti in reference to the discourses about the modern family and the construction of gender, from the Ottoman reform era to contemporary Turkey. Kandiyoti writes, “Comparatively little attention has been paid to the less tangible effects of processes of social transformation on the emergence of new identities and forms of subjectivity, and there has been little critical awareness of the specificities of the ‘modern’ in the Turkish context.”7 After providing the historical context for the narrators and their texts, I discuss the importance of travel in infusing their voices with authority. However, it is in their representation of life at home that we see how memory interacts with the processes of identification and differentiation to illuminate the authors’ textual autobiographical subjectivity. In this section I focus on three topics that both texts emphasize: education, life in the harem, and political participation. The narrators’ commentaries on these topics at times coincide, but more often are in conflict and reveal much about the relationship between their location, the historical moment, and their evolving autobiographical personas.

Autobiographical Data in Historical Context In 1909, Demetra Vaka Brown published a book titled Haremlik: Some Pages from the Life of Turkish Women chronicling her trip back to Constanti- nople after six years in the United States.8 Vaka Brown was an ethnic Greek from the Ottoman Empire. Having grown up among the Turks but not being a Turk herself, she claimed to be a unique expert who could explicate the Turks, and in particular Turkish women, to an American audience.9 Vaka Brown writes: “And to be able to judge the Orientals one has, like me, to be born among them, to live their life for a time, and to breathe the air of contentment that fills their homes.”10 In 1913, with the publication of A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, also a travel book but arranged as a series of letters, Zeyneb Hanoum, a Muslim Ottoman woman, joined 2013 Roberta Micallef 87 a small and exclusive group of Ottoman women who appropriated the pen.11 A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions is a collection of letters Zey- neb Hanoum exchanged with Grace Ellison, a British journalist who spent many years in the Ottoman Empire and advocated for the Turkish cause in the British press.12 The collection chronicles the time between 1906 and 1912 when Zeyneb Hanoum and her sister Melek Hanoum lived in Eu- rope. Ellison provides an introduction and intervenes throughout the text and occasionally provides the readers with her own letters, which elicit responses by Zeyneb Hanoum and thereby provide a context for some of Zeyneb Hanoum’s comments. Ellison also peppers the collection with footnotes, some of which are purely informational and some explanatory. For example, Zeyneb Hanoum mentions “babouche” in a letter that Ellison footnotes and explains them as “Turkish slippers without heels.”13 A more extensive footnote serves to explain why Zeyneb Hanoum would refer to a cemetery as “comfortable.”14 Ellison’s presence and the inclusion of two letters by Melek Hanoum prompt the cultural studies scholar Reina Lewis to classify this collection of letters as “a composite text.”15 Multiple voices are not uncommon in life writing, and the interplay of voices in this text is intriguing. In this article, however, I focus on Zeyneb Hanoum’s presentation of herself as a speaking subject. Zeyneb Hanoum refers to herself as a Turk throughout her text, but she was the granddaughter of a French marquis who had converted to Islam.16 Although she received a Europeanized education, her family still expected her to lead the life of a traditional secluded Ottoman lady. Her given name was Hadidje Zennour but she adopted Zeyneb Hanoum after gaining notoriety as a character in Pierre Loti’s novel Les Désenchantées.17 As the real-life person hidden in Loti’s 1906 novel, Zeyneb Hanoum became a figure of interest in Europe. This information, provided on the title page of her book, alongside a note that the book included a Rodin drawing, seemed to give Zeyneb Hanoum the European artistic community’s seal of approval. The prominent presence of Ellison, a professional woman and journalist, only added to Zeyneb Hanoum’s credibility and pedigree for her readers.18 However, Zeyneb Hanoum was not always received or accepted as such by all of her European audience, some of whom critiqued the book by questioning whether she was Turkish at all.19 Vaka Brown refers to herself as “a child of the Orient.”20 Born in 1877 on Prinkipo (Büyükada, in Turkish), an island off the coast of Asia Minor in the Marmara Sea, Vaka Brown immigrated to the U.S. in 1894 at the age of seventeen.21 The early death of her father forced her to earn a living and she therefore came to the U.S. as a nanny of the Ottoman consul to New York, who was also an ethnic Greek.22 When he was called back to Constan- tinople with his family, she remained in the U.S. and began working as a 88 Journal of Women’s History Summer journalist. Eventually she married Kenneth Brown, an American journalist and novelist. Between 1907 and 1946 Vaka Brown went on to write and publish well over a dozen romances and personal narratives; some of these she co-authored with her husband and some appeared posthumously. She became the most prolific Greek-American writer to date.23 Although I focus primarily on Haremlik, I will also refer to A Child of the Orient, where Vaka Brown describes her childhood and early womanhood in Constantinople, her immigration to the U.S., and her brief return to her motherland as an Americanized “child of the Orient.” She writes that her family had been in the Ottoman capital since before the Turks arrived in Anatolia—a prece- dence which seemed important to her sense of self.24 By nature of her family background and her education, she was exposed to European languages and ideas. From what she tells us in her work A Child of the Orient, she was raised by her father’s uncle, a patriotic Greek. The first pages of A Child of the Orient describe how her father’s uncle woke her up on her fifth birthday and presented her with a Greek flag and told her, “The people who rule here to-day in the place of your people are barbarous and cruel, and wor- ship a false god. Remember all this and hate them! You cannot carry this flag, because you are a girl; but you can bring up your sons to do the work that remains for the Greeks to do.”25 Vaka Brown believed that he held her in contempt because she was a mere girl and could not fight for Greece but she also found his injunction to hate Turks confusing. She may have found the impetus to behave more like a man of her time period by immigrating to America to find a new life because she was raised by a great uncle who scorned women. She writes that the person whom she loves more than anyone else on earth at that moment in time is her “Turkish attendant, Ki- amele.”26 This confusion about where she stands vis-à-vis the Turks is also reflected throughout Haremlik. Both authors were part of a variety of networks, and their circles may have overlapped. Vaka Brown’s books as well as other autobiographical works from the period, such as Halide Edib’s memoirs, reveal that there was some interaction in the neighborhoods, in the schools, and among peoples belonging to different religions, social strata, and nationalities.27 Both authors, like many other women living in the Ottoman capital, were exposed to foreign languages, European magazines, and women from elsewhere. This was an outcome of historical developments. The Tanzimat (1839–1876), a nineteenth-century reform movement in the Ottoman Empire, had been in part an attempt to counteract the Ottoman lag in development and to act as an antidote against the nationalist movements that had arisen across the empire. From 1850 to 1914, the Ottoman Empire, striving for political modernization and inspired by the wish to develop European-style military forces, took steps that also had an important effect on Ottoman culture and 2013 Roberta Micallef 89 society.28 Coinciding with the early phases of the Ottoman women’s movement (1868–1908), this period saw new opportunities for women.29 New Ottoman schools for girls (1859), the hiring of female teachers (1870), and the first Ottoman women’s magazine (1868) offered Ottoman women new possibilities in the public sphere.30 Western-style schools, magazines, books, and ideas, as well as western artists, intellectuals, educators, businessmen, and missionaries, circulated and presented ideas and modes of being that were consumed by Ottomans at different levels, depending on proximity to the metropolis and education or socioeconomic background. The encounter with European modernity extended to literature. By the mid-nineteenth century this was reflected in Ottoman writers’ embrace of European genres such as the novel, memoir, and biography through trans- lations or adaptations of European works.31 Novels became the genre par excellence for the modernizing empire. In fact, the first Ottoman female novelist, Fatma Aliye Hanim (1862–1936), used her novel Muhazarat (1892) to critique Ottoman patriarchy.32 At the turn of the century small numbers of Ottoman women (Muslim and non-Muslim)—among them Vaka Brown and Zeyneb Hanoum—travelled to Europe and North America to accompany male relatives, flee political persecution, or in pursuit of leisure pursuits or education.33 Seen in the context of the waning Empire, Zeyneb Hanoum’s and Vaka Brown’s narratives provide valuable information about the effects of the Ottoman modernization project on women, at least as the narrators saw it. In one of her letters, for example Zeyneb Hanoum describes the dramatic changes that occurred in women’s lives and the new roles that were available to them: “the terrible war, and the fall of the two beloved Sultans, woke the women from their dreams. Before the fact that their country was in danger, they understood their duty. From odalisques they became mothers and wives determined to give their children the education they themselves had so badly needed.”34 Zeyneb Hanoum’s comment is interesting and yet riddled with contra- dictions. It is hard to imagine that Ottoman women viewed themselves as “odalisques.” The Ottomans engaged in war for centuries and their country had been in danger before. Why would this particular moment require that they become wives and mothers? Zeyneb Hanoum suggests that the social transformation taking place in the Ottoman Empire prompted women to question their role in society. Zeyneb Hanoum is not, however, bold enough to suggest that women should pursue individual fulfillment; instead, she argues, women should try to improve their children’s lot. At the time they wrote their narratives, the two authors were subjects of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual empire. They shared neither religion nor ethnicity or language. At the same time, they were both 90 Journal of Women’s History Summer members of a privileged group of Istanbulite women who had access to westernized education and ideas. Their standing in society also afforded them the opportunities to travel abroad of their own volition and then to write about their experiences in such a way that they were published and continue to be read today. The texts are replete with examples of the effects of modernization on Ottoman women’s lives. According to Vaka Brown’s and Zeyneb Hanoum’s descriptions of discussions among Ottoman women, Europe and the U.S. were seen as the ideal societies for women who wanted some control over their own lives and intellectual companionship from their husbands. Both authors provide very different and yet gendered analyses of the social transformations taking place in Constantinople. While Zeyneb Hanoum evaluates both Ottoman traditions and European modernity, Vaka Brown comments on Turkish attempts at westernization.

Travel and Autobiographical Subjectivity Travel added an important layer of self-discovery to these female authors’ perspectives. These two travel narratives pose an “I” in migration and encounter. Identities can be formed in opposition to and through a felt similarity to others. In her letters, Zeyneb Hanoum’s identity as a Turkish Muslim subject is presented as increasingly more stable, as her identity is formed “in opposition to” European women. She disapproves of the amount they eat and the way they dance and utilizes her presentation of European women to narrate her idea of what a Turkish lady should be.35 She not only criticizes European women in her text but she also extols Turkish customs. In one letter she contrasts Turkish hospitality with European hospitality, writing, “I have often thought when in a Western drawing-room, where one stays a few minutes, and eats perhaps a sandwich, how different are our receptions in the East. We meet without being invited, talk till late in the night, and a proper supper is served.”36 When Zeyneb Hanoum meets her compatriots while travelling in Europe, she realizes “what fine qualities” they have.37 She writes in one of her later letters: “But I told you it was from studying the customs of Western Europe that I was beginning to better understand the land that I had left.”38 In contrast, Vaka Brown’s identity remains unstable throughout her text.39 Haremlik traces Vaka Brown’s first journey back to her “native-country” Constantinople, “her birthplace and that of her ancestors for seven centuries.” She was returning after a six-year absence with “a mind full of occidental questioning.”40 The very title of her first chapter “Coming Home” alerts the reader to her organic, biological, and strong emotional ties to this location. Vaka Brown tells us that the land where she had lived 2013 Roberta Micallef 91 for the past six years had marked her. This “Turkish subject” now had western questions.41 She writes that she was a child when she left at the age of seventeen, and now she is returning as a twenty-three-year-old woman. By telling us that she has organic links to Constantinople that go back seven centuries, she establishes her ties to the glory that was Byzantium and her legitimacy to speak of the Ottoman Empire. At the very beginning of her work, the author establishes herself as an insider who has access to information and insights that no outsider could have. Due to her birthplace, she knows about the Turks and because she has lived in the U.S. for six years she has been retrained to ask the “right” questions and disseminate that information to the Occidental world. Sitting on the steamer that brought her to Constantinople, waiting to disembark, she distinguishes herself from a fellow traveler, a Frenchman, who like other foreigners “thought he knew Turkey and the Turks,” because he had lived in the Sultan’s dominion for a time. Early on in her text she defines herself and Greeks in general as the cultural translators of the Turks and Turkish culture to the West because “I was a Turkish subject, and we had been Turkish subjects ever since there had been Turks in Europe.”42 In the same section of Haremlik Vaka Brown confidently writes that nothing but herself has changed in her absence: “I was born a Turkish subject, and as such I returned. I found nothing changed. Everything was as I had left it; and when I met my mother, we finished the argument I had so cavalierly interrupted six years before.”43 However, Vaka Brown contradicts herself within the same chapter, echoing the disap- pointment voiced by certain western female observers who eagerly visited harems around the same time. She is invited to visit her childhood friends who now share a husband and she is disappointed with their dining room, which has changed: “The dining-room was not different from a European dining-room. I gave a sigh for the good old times when the Turks used to sit with their feet curled under them and eat with the ten forks and spoons that nature had provided them with, maintaining that taste is first trans- mitted through the finger-tips.”44 This makes the reader question: why is Demetra Vaka Brown opposed to change in Turkey? Is it that her home is changing and that she is not there to change with it, or is it that she cannot be an expert while living abroad for long stretches if the country and its people are undergoing changes that she cannot observe from afar? Or is it that new habits among the Ottoman elite might not offer enough exotic color for her presumed audience? The final chapter of Haremlik, titled “A Flight From the Harem” narrates the story of a Turkish woman who leaves her home and family to follow a British man to his home in Scotland. The lady is miserable and her Turkish husband comes to rescue her from Scotland and brings her and her new baby back to Constantinople. Now the British man’s family must 92 Journal of Women’s History Summer search for his child. Vaka Brown is asked to help keep the daughter of this Turkish lady and the British gentleman in Constantinople rather than as- sist her paternal family in locating her. This tale serves to emphasize that Turks cannot be Europeanized but also reveals much about the author’s changeable identity. Vaka Brown writes that the “mystery of the East” has seduced her, and because of this her “Western prejudices fell from her.”45 Therefore the author does not divulge the girl’s location. By the end of her voyage, as she is about to return to New York, Vaka Brown’s Americaniza- tion appears to be a veneer that can be removed. If we follow Smith and Watson’s argument that subjects become what institutional practices and discourses make of them, one could say that the instability of Vaka Brown’s identity is a reflection of the unstable political situation and the increasingly homogenizing Turkish Muslim nationalism, which emerged in the declining years of the Ottoman Empire.46 Through their travels, the authors began to understand that Europeans and Americans viewed Ottoman women as oppressed victims of tyrannical Ottoman men who had to be “saved.” Both Vaka Brown and Zeyneb Ha- noum were clearly well aware of the stereotypes regarding Ottoman women that pervaded much of western literature about the Orient. In fact, in her first chapter Vaka Brown writes, “But during my stay in America I heard Turkey spoken of with hatred and scorn, the Turks reviled as despicable, their women as miserable creatures, living in practical slavery for the base desires of men. I had stood bewildered at this talk. Could it possibly be as the Americans said, and I never have known it?”47 Zeyneb Hanoum writes about the same topic, “How I wish that nine out of every ten of the books written on Turkey could be burned! How unjustly the Turk has been criticized! And what nonsense has been written about the women!”48 Yet neither author was averse to manipulating these stereotypes for her own benefit. Zeyneb Hanoum and Vaka Brown made use of the western fascination with harems and the lives of eastern women to acquire readers while commenting on western-inspired modernity and challenging the stereotypes about Ottoman women. Women who wrote about the harem knew full well that their work was read, commissioned, and distributed as specifically female-produced work, for which there was a sizeable market.49 From the very title of Vaka Brown’s text and the cover page of Zeyneb Hanoum’s book, which depicts a veiled woman, it is evident that the authors or their publishers exploited western stereotypes about the world of Ottoman women. The title of Vaka Brown’s book, Haremlik, would have been enough to garner interest in such a market. Their mobility seems to have given both authors not only new perspectives but also a newfound authority to speak to and manipulate multiple audiences. Their travels allowed them to gain valuable insights into their 2013 Roberta Micallef 93 own communities and also about Europe and the U.S., which they share in their texts. Zeyneb Hanoum’s quest for freedom in “modern Europe” revealed to her that the truly free woman was not to be found in Europe at that moment in time. She has an exchange about her travels with a woman at her British ladies’ club in London, which she calls a “curious harem.”50 She explains to her fellow club member why she travels so much: “Like Diogenes who tried to find aMan , I have been trying to find a FREE woman, but have not been successful.”51 Vaka Brown expresses a similar newfound authority when she attends a suffragettes’ meeting in Constantinople and in her own words she “who represented freedom and intellectual advance- ment smashed their ideals unmercifully.”52 Therefore, as we read Zeyneb Hanoum’s critical commentary of Europe and Vaka Brown’s observations of women’s lives in Constantinople for autobiographical insight, and as we explore their notions of identity, community, and history, we have to keep their (dis)location in mind. It is their exposure to both cultures that gives them the authority to speak to and about both cultures. Both authors are able to claim first-hand experiences in the East and West. Thus they have the authority to describe what they have seen and to compare each location and each culture with the other. Vaka Brown can tell her Turkish lady friends what it is that the Americans are saying about the Turks and, in particular, Turkish women, because she lives among Americans. The opposite is also true, as her book suggests. Because she lived among Turks and befriended them, she can explain them to the Americans. That she sees herself as the only one who has access to both sides becomes clear from a number of her comments throughout her text, “Naturally they were very curious about America, and I told them much of woman’s position here. In their expressive faces I read their pity for them, and inwardly I smiled as I thought of the pity that American women feel for them.”53 It is this knowledge of both cultures, of being able to mediate between them, and to smile at them both inwardly that makes Demetra Vaka Brown an authority, a cultural mediator. Her ambivalence about her group affiliation is a strength. It is also her weakness: she can identify with both groups and she can differentiate herself from both groups, and yet she will never be a full-fledged member of either group. Zeyneb Hanoum, on the other hand, makes no claims to understanding western women or their thoughts. As her text progresses and as she spends more time in Europe she is increasingly more aware of what it means to be Turkish. While she identifies with some aspects of Europeanness, she increasingly differentiates herself from European subjects and identifies herself as a Turkish subject. In one of her later letters to Ellison she describes a conversation where a Spanish custom’s officer asks her if she has anything to declare. She replies, “my hatred of your Western ‘Customs.’”54 Here Zeyneb Hanoum rather succinctly declares 94 Journal of Women’s History Summer her troubles in crossing both physical and metaphorical borders. Not only is it challenging for her to cross a European border, but she is also having a difficult time fitting in in the West.

Life at Home and Autobiographical Identity: Life in the Harem It is in their depictions of harems, the inhabitants of harems, and harem life that the reader has the opportunity to observe how the two authors make themselves known as autobiographical subjects through identification and differentiation. Zeyneb Hanoum and Vaka Brown differ greatly in their depictions of harem life. Zeyneb Hanoum actually experienced harem life first-hand. Yet while Vaka Brown knew some Turkish and grew up surrounded by Turkish neighbors, life in the harem was not an experience she had lived herself. She claims, however, that she can write objectively about harem life from a voyeuristic vantage point because she moved in and out of harems as a visitor since she was a little girl. In their conflict- ing representations of life in the harem, Zeyneb Hanoum and Vaka Brown attempt to achieve different objectives. Zeyneb Hanoum gains agency by interrupting a dominant narrative, whereas Vaka Brown presents herself as an authority because, although she had spent much time visiting harems, she had never been a member of a harem herself. She thus presents herself as both having access and retaining an outsider’s presumed “objectivity.” Harem life and polygyny were clearly of great interest to European and American readers because they are mentioned in many fictional and non-fictional texts about the Middle East from this period. Yet research on Istanbul conducted by the economist Cem Behar and the sociologist Alan Duben demonstrates that while harems—simply women’s and children’s section of the household where only close male relatives could enter—ex- isted in the capital city, polygyny was extremely rare at this time.55 Contrary to western expectations, few harems housed more than one wife of any single man and most polygynous men had only two wives. By the nineteenth century polygyny was an expensive practice that was mainly practiced by the elite.56 In fact Ellison herself relates that she witnessed a conversation between a European woman and a Turkish woman about this topic. In an attempt to create an instance of identification rather than differentiation, when the European woman asked the Turkish woman how many wives her father had, the Turkish woman answered: “as many as your husband, Madame.”57 In a letter to Ellison, Zeyneb Hanoum chides the western audience’s voyeuristic interest in “Oriental marriage” and points out that polygyny is rarely practiced: “I know even you are longing to make the acquaintance of a harem, where there is more than one wife, but today the number of 2013 Roberta Micallef 95 these establishments can be counted on five fingers.”58 The one example of a contemporary household with a harem of multiple wives that Zeyneb Ha- noum mentions is not a harmonious one. She portrays a patriarch who is an old-fashioned tyrant who never lets his wives leave their house because he is jealous of them and sees them as his possessions.59 This negative description alone provides clues as to the changing nature of family, roles within the family, and gender. Zeyneb Hanoum differentiates her own household and the modernizing households of the Ottoman capital from the traditional ones. Her portrayal presents the Ottoman households as converging with western households. However, she allows that a pre-modernizing Ottoman Empire could include happy polygynous households. Zeyneb Hanoum describes her grandmother’s polygynous household as one where “life was just a lovely long dream.”60 The woman she refers to as her grandmother in her text is not her father’s mother but her grandfather’s seventh wife who loved all of her husband’s children and grandchildren as if they were her own.61 Zeyneb Hanoum’s representation of the grandmother’s household is reminiscent of Vaka Brown’s harems. From the very beginning, Vaka Brown describes content polygynous households in Haremlik. The introductory chapter, “Coming Home to Turkey,” includes a visit to her childhood friends who are now co-wives: “Nassarah and Tsakran, though married and the mothers of two children each were as gay and full of life as when they and I rolled hoops along the Bosphorus and cast pebbles into it. They looked like sisters, and very loving ones. One was clad in a loose pink silk garment, the other in rich yellow, and both had their dark hair dressed with pale pink plumes. They seized me and nearly carried me into their living room, made of glass and called yally kiosky, ‘glass pavilion.’ There we reclined on low divans and talked for a few minutes before luncheon was announced.”62 Another chapter, “A Day’s Entertainment in the Harem,” begins with Vaka Brown’s memory of the tumultuous beginnings of her friendship with a young, upper-class Ottoman woman, Djimlah. Although they come from different social, religious, and ethnic backgrounds and their first conversation involves a fight, they become good enough friends that they want to see each other as soon as Vaka Brown returns to her hometown. That she begins this chapter with a memory of a fight once again serves to demonstrate that Greek-Turkish relations can never be smooth, that there is always a problem that must first be addressed. Their adult friendship exists despite the different paths they took. Vaka Brown’s description of her childhood friend as a grown woman is both eroticized and exoticized.63 Vaka Brown forgives Djimlah for refuting the idea that women have souls because she is beautiful. Djimlah’s “radiant loveliness” erases the impression made by her words. Vaka Brown goes on 96 Journal of Women’s History Summer to write: “the Greek in me, looking at her, forgave her words—one of the judges who liberated Phryne, because she was so beautiful, may have been an ancestor of mine.”64 Her portrait of Djimlah differentiates the author from her friend and thus establishes the author as a Greek, a Christian, an intellectual, and as someone who is not a beautiful object of desire. Phryne was a famously beautiful courtesan; the judges were men. Emphasizing her friend’s erotic qualities, Vaka Brown gives herself the power to gaze at a woman, thus aligning herself with not the women of her own cultural group but the powerful men and western female visitors to the harem. While polygynous households may have been rare, harems did continue to exist and women continued to be secluded. Zeyneb Hanoum was fleeing the confinement of the harem. In fact, in response to Ellison’s question about her first impression of France, Zeyneb Hanoum writes about freedom. She describes the intense happiness she felt upon being able to gaze at the world through a wide-open window, which had “neither lattice-work nor iron bars.”65 Thus both Vaka Brown and Zeyneb Hanoum suggest that in European and American imaginations Turkish women are presented as victims of oppression; but Vaka Brown also attempts to show that harem life can be perceived as pleasant for some of these women, while setting herself apart. In contrast, Zeyneb Hanoum’s depiction of Constantinople during Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s reign leaves the reader with the impression that everyone was confined to some degree. 66 According to her, the pervasive sense of oppression strengthened family ties: “But I am not really pitying women more than men under the Hamidian regime. A man’s life is always in danger. . . . One result, however, of this awful tyranny, was that it made the bonds, which unite a Turkish family together, stronger than anywhere else in the world.”67 The notion that Ottoman Muslim women could see Ottoman Muslim men as victims was most likely shocking to European or American readers. A united, strong family contradicted the western idea of a tyrannical patriarch brutalizing women. And yet the reader cannot help but wonder why a woman who left her home country would make such a statement without explaining her own decision to leave. Was this statement perhaps more of a reaction to her perception of European notions about Turks or has Zeyneb Hanoum once again discovered something that makes her ap- preciate her homeland and her family more now than before? In Vaka Brown’s version, most of the households and harems are run by a benevolent patriarch and a mother-in-law or a wise older wife. In her descriptions women in most harems are sheltered and do not have to worry about the ugliness of the world beyond the threshold of their home. Such women are also infantilized and need protection from the outside world. 2013 Roberta Micallef 97

Vaka Brown establishes quite clearly that she is different from these women, despite her friendship with them. The contrast that she provides in her text aligns her with American women and differentiates her from Turkish women. Zeyneb Hanoum’s portrait, on the other hand, provides the reader with a family image much like their own idealized and caring family unit. Both authors are trying to create bonds with their readers and to demonstrate that they are similar to their readers. These Turkish women are trying to challenge a narrative where they are presented as erotic, exotic, beautiful creatures whether as victims or as willing denizens of a harem. They are trying to present themselves as similar to western women when it comes to marriage. If they succeed, the need for an interlocutor such as Vaka Brown will cease. Turkish women who are similar to western women in marriage practices will no longer be seen as exotic. Vaka Brown’s defense of harem life for Turkish women can be interpreted as a defense of her position and livelihood as the bridge between the two cultures; thus the disappearance of this lifestyle can be linked to the disappearance of her sense of agency as a commentator. After all if Americans and Turks can communicate without a cultural mediator where does this leave Vaka Brown?

Education While the two narrators disagree on the prevalence of polygyny and the degree of happiness it afforded its practitioners, they agree that women’s education was at the root of women’s discontent. Both narrators write about the contribution of foreign literature to Ottoman women’s unhappiness. Yet they show it is also elite Ottoman women’s level of education that facilitates their engagement with both a foreign and a Turkish elite audience. Zeyneb Hanoum states in an early letter: “As we told you on Sunday, we Turkish women read a great deal of foreign literature, and this does not tend to make us any more satisfied with our lot.”68 In A Child of the Orient, Vaka Brown writes of her own education and how it had not prepared her for life. “Brought up on books and nourished on dreams, I had a poor prepara- tion with which to fight the battle of life particularly in a foreign country.”69 In contrast, Zeyneb Hanoum describes life rather nostalgically as she imagined it was in her “grandmother’s day”: “In our grandmothers’ days, the women used to assemble in the evening and make those beautiful em- broideries which you admire so much. Others made their daughters’ trous- seaux, others told stories of the Arabian Nights style, and with that existence they were content. Not one of them wanted to read the fashionable French novels, nor had they any desire to play the piano.”70 In a conversation with her grandmother, who was trying to understand why she was so unhappy, Zeyneb Hanoum places the blame on her education: “‘Grandmother’ I 98 Journal of Women’s History Summer asked her ‘is it our fault if we are unhappy? We have read so many books which have shown us the ugly side of our life in comparison with the lives of the women of the West. We are young. We long for just a little joy;’ and ‘grandmother,’ I added slowly and with emphasis ‘we want to be free, to find it ourselves.’”71 Zeyneb Hanoum paints a world where women are frustrated and depressed because they know what it is that they are missing. According to her, their grandmothers did not suffer because they did not know that there was a “lack” in their lives. Girls’ education is a topic of much conflict for Zeyneb Hanoum. It is her education that has brought her where she is and she has told us earlier that Ottoman women are fighting for their children to have the education that they lack. However, at the same time, it is this very education that is at the root of their misery. Zeyneb Hanoum will have to figure out how to put her education to good use to find satis- faction. Her hopes of finding such an opportunity in Europe were, as she tells the reader, dashed. In a meeting of Turkish suffragettes, Vaka Brown converses with many unhappy Ottoman women who want the right to vote, to go out alone, to choose their husbands, and to live as they imagined European and Ameri- can women live. The author quotes one such woman, an “eighteen year old beauty of the East,” as saying: “I am tired of my humdrum life, when such delicious things as one reads of in books might be happening to me.”72 Zeyneb Hanoum and Vaka Brown describe the same unhappiness with the disjuncture between the vision offered by their education and their reality. They had been educated in foreign languages. They had been raised with foreign literature and piano lessons, and they believed that in the West they would be free to live their lives as they wished to live them. Vaka Brown and Zeyneb Hanoum agree that Turkish women misun- derstood what modernity afforded women. Both authors write about their disillusionment. It is here that we really see Zeyneb Hanoum differentiate herself strongly from European women and identify with Turkish women. Vaka Brown also differentiates Turkish women and society from American women and society, but she does not clearly identify with either group. However, she presents herself as having become Americanized in several examples such as this: “I was back again in the calm leisure of Turkey, where eternity reigned, and no one hurried. Not to stay, for I fear that he who tastes of American bustle can never again live for long without it.”73 While Zeyneb Hanoum wonders what women would do with their political rights, Vaka Brown is happy to claim opportunities offered to her in America for herself but adamantly opposes to such changes for Turkish women. This suggests how her status as a mobile subject may have shaped her sense of self. Unlike Vaka Brown, Zeyneb Hanoum is profoundly disil- 2013 Roberta Micallef 99 lusioned when she arrived in Europe. She discovers that she had given up one harem for another. Zeyneb Hanoum makes this statement in reference to her club in London. She writes that “a Ladies’ Club is not a big enough reward for having broken away from an Eastern harem and all the suffering that has been the consequence of that action.” Here she finds herself in a harem where the food and the company are sadly lacking.74 Furthermore, this harem lacks charm: “A club as I said before is after all another kind of harem, but it has none of the mystery and charm of the Harem of the East.”75 Zeyneb Hanoum conveys a sense of betrayal when she describes her visit to the Ladies Gallery in the British parliament: “But, my dear, why have you never told me that the Ladies’ Gallery is a harem? A harem with its latticed windows! The harem of the Government! . . . Is it in Free England that you dare to have a Harem? How inconsistent are you English! You send your women out unprotected all over the world, and here in the workshop where your laws are made, you cover them with a symbol of protection.”76 Her visit to the British parliament makes it clear to her that women in Europe are also excluded from power. In the West, women may have certain freedoms not available to women of the East—dancing with men, exercis- ing—but these came at a price.77 The women who take advantage of such liberties are rendered less than ladies. Zeyneb Hanoum’s reaction to these women reflects her growing sense of who she is, an identity formed in opposition to European women she observed. Despite her western education and facility with languages, the more she interacts with European women the more she discovers that she is not like them—and does not want to be. Absences and omissions also reveal the authors’ constructions of subjectivity. It is curious that the conversation Zeyneb Hanoum narrates to explain how her unhappiness is linked to education takes place between her and her grandmother and not her mother. In fact, the authors’ mothers are barely mentioned in either text. In traditional Ottoman society, it is the mother’s duty to socialize her daughters properly. By leaving their hometown, both narrators distance themselves from their mothers and reject their mothers as role models. If we are to believe these texts, the social transformation taking place in the Ottoman capital caused strife between mothers and daughters. Vaka Brown mentions her mother once in her text and only to say that she has resumed the fight she interrupted before she left for America. Zeyneb Hanoum is a little more forthright about the alienation between mother and daughter. About her mother she writes: “She lived like a stranger among us, not being able to associate herself with either our thoughts or our ideals.”78 100 Journal of Women’s History Summer

Political Participation Women’s political participation also generates different views between Vaka Brown and Zeyneb Hanoum. Here again Vaka Brown strongly dis- courages Turkish women from pursuing such goals. The suffragettes she observes in London intrigue Zeyneb Hanoum, but the thought of partici- pating in a movement that would allow others to perceive her as anything but a lady is quite discomforting for her. Vaka Brown and Zeyneb Hanoum discuss suffragettes in two com- pletely different contexts. In Constantinople, Vaka Brown attends a suffragettes’ meeting of about forty well-educated, elite women who wanted to have lives outside the confines of their home.79 These young women want to take advantage of their educations and to serve society in some capacity. They also want to choose their own husbands and have love marriages instead of arranged marriages. Vaka Brown is thoroughly disgusted by these women. At the meeting, the suffragettes discuss improving their situation in life and put forth the idea that they are just as capable as men. They cite women writers such as George Sand and George Eliot to emphasize their point. One woman asserts that “women were mere playthings in the hands of men” and calls on them to rouse themselves and show that they are better.80 Vaka Brown’s reaction, at least in her writing, is visceral: “I was thoroughly disgusted at the whole meeting. I might just as well have been in one of those silly clubs in New York where women congregate to read their immature compositions.”81 According to her narrative, Vaka Brown spends her time at the meeting challenging these women’s notions of the freedom of American women. She tells them that American men are not interested in intellectual women. She tells them, finally, that they can not and should not be influenced by what was going on in America because they were not American. Yet her very presence in their midst—as a woman from Constantinople, who had made it to America, found a job, and was able to support herself and take charge of her life—contradicts her words. At the same time, as she reminds us many times throughout her book, she is not a Muslim Turk. Vaka Brown, who is forthcoming about many topics, does not give a satisfactory expla- nation for her opposition to change in the lives of Turkish women. She writes that such change would corrupt Turkish women. Furthermore, she warns that if Turkish women proceed with imitating westerners, they will lose what is best about the Turkish character, and by not being American or European, they will at best only be able to approximate what is good in the Americans and Europeans. And yet her own group identity is not clear. She is Oriental and yet she is Greek, but after six years in America she is an Ottoman subject of Greek ethnicity with American questions. Could 2013 Roberta Micallef 101 her reaction have something to do with her own insecurity regarding her position vis-à-vis these cultures? She further explicates her position when she describes Europeanized Turkish men: “The most discouraging thing about Turkey is that, while the old-fashioned Turk is a man on whose integrity you may depend, as soon as a Turk becomes Europeanized he loses his own good qualities, without obtaining those of the West—exactly as the American Indian does. He is so vitally different from us . . . that the result of contact with our sophisticated thought is very harmful.”82According to this passage, Vaka Brown and the Greeks belong to the civilized West whereas the Turks are relegated to the same status as Native Americans, or “noble savages.” Her statement serves to emphasize her identity as a Greek subject of the Ottoman Sultan in contrast to her Turkish compatriots, but also emphasizes her adopted identity as a white American. While westernization and modernization were appropriate for her, they were not suitable for Turks. And yet if we are to believe Zeyneb Hanoum, the processes of transformation in Turkish society were already having an effect on social norms. Vaka Brown’s descriptions of Turkish women’s lives seem set in the past, for they parallel those that Zeyneb Hanoum describes as: “the life of a Turkish woman before the regime of Hamid and thoughts of Revolution haunted our existence.”83 Contrary to Vaka Brown’s reaction to Turkish suffragettes, Zeyneb Hanoum encounters British suffragettes and is left in awe of them. Yet the encounter affirms that she is “a lady” and emphasizes her class affiliation. She observes a suffragette on the street making a scene demanding political rights and is most shocked that this woman is treated as if she is not “a lady” and is told to go home and do her washing. Zeyneb Hanoum finds the whole scene ugly and an affront to womanhood.84 She considers that British suffragettes are very different from their Ottoman counterparts. In fact, she writes: “I was glad when the meeting was over . . . If this is what the women of your country have to bear in their fight for freedom, all honor to them but I would rather groan in bondage.”85 Both Vaka Brown and Zeyneb Hanoum lament the layer of protection that gets lost when women gain the power to speak for themselves. Zey- neb Hanoum was invested in her class position and what went along with being a lady. She writes in a letter to Grace Ellison that she would hate to be mistaken for anything but a lady.86 Vaka Brown may have agreed with Zeyneb Hanoum’s assessment: “I wonder, when the Englishwomen have really won their vote and the right to exercise all the tiring profession of men, what will they have gained? Their faces will be a little sadder, a little more weary, and they will have become wholly disillusioned.”87 Zeyneb Hanoum and Vaka Brown agree that there is such an entity as an Ottoman lady. In the above exchange Zeyneb Hanoum strongly identi- 102 Journal of Women’s History Summer fies herself as a lady and does not want to be mistaken for anything else. Zeyneb Hanoum would certainly see herself and her peers as Ottoman ladies. These included the well-educated young women of Constantinople who agitated for change. The very women that Vaka Brown dismisses as misguided are the ones that Zeyneb Hanoum would define as Ottoman ladies. For Vaka Brown the Ottoman lady is her beautiful friend Djimlah, Nassaran, or Tsakran, the pampered women who enjoy being sheltered wives and mothers. Once again she presents herself as someone who would like the Ottoman world to remain as she remembers it. An Ottoman capital where women are similar to western women means that these women are also similar to Greek women. While she wants to be similar to western women, are we to understand that Vaka Brown does not want to be similar to Turkish women? Vaka Brown makes it clear in many instances in her text that while the Greeks have been Turkish subjects for centuries and know the Turks well and have lived with them side by side there is a strong an- tagonism between the two cultures, especially among the men. If both the Turks and the Greeks are similar to people in the West, then they will also be similar to one another. Once again, where will that leave a self-identified cultural mediator like herself?

Identities in Motion Cultural identities are constructed and marked by time and place, and they are also constructed through language.88 Both authors had an excellent command of the English language. Both authors crossed gender boundaries and appropriated masculine attributes when they chose to assume a public speaking voice. Both texts were printed abroad: A Turkish Woman’s Impres- sions in Britain and Haremlik in the U.S. Both were printed initially only in English. Middle Eastern women writing in English knew that they had a dual audience: the western reader who was curious about foreign lands and the reader at home who was interested in local debates about the changing role of women in society.89 These women knew that English and French were the languages of elite literary status. Elite and middle-class women were sometimes literate only in foreign languages: religious education often taught girls to read rather than write in Arabic or Ottoman.90 These texts reveal much about the authors’ subjectivities and how they were shaped by the times in which they lived and their travel experiences. As Smith and Watson write, identities are not fixed or essentialized, and autobiographical writing is a site where that fluidity emerges. Each text opens the door to understanding each narrator’s location and dislocation— geographically and in terms of the author’s place and role in her new world. They highlight their desires and their disillusionment. Neither author was 2013 Roberta Micallef 103 happy with what she found on her voyage. Europe was not what Zeyneb Hanoum imagined it to be. In fact, she writes as she is being forced to return home: “Désenchantée I left Turkey, désenchantée I have left Europe.”91 Both narrators were inspired by the emancipatory potential of western modernity to claim agency, to take charge of their fates, to escape arranged marriages, and to flee to America and to Europe, respectively.92 Zeyneb Hanoum’s letters are focused on her and her sister Melek Hanoum’s escape from Constantinople and their quest to be free to lead meaningful lives. This is a significant lacuna in Zeyneb Hanoum’s text. She never explores the implications of being “free” while financially supported by a parent. Vaka Brown on the other hand had to support herself in the United States. Perhaps this added to her sense of agency and her authority to write about life as a working woman and to contrast it to the Ottoman ladies’ lives. Perhaps in her vehement statements about how wonderful the pampered life of an Ottoman lady is, we have a sense of how much she struggled and how many difficulties she overcame in New York herself. Both Vaka Brown and Zeyneb Hanoum warn that westernization and the new identities that it affords women come at a price. Based on their experiences abroad, both women also suggest that modernization, as it is perceived in Turkey, is not at all what is being practiced at the point of origin. Zeyneb Hanoum has qualms about the modernization project. She is more concerned about the effects of modernization on men than about its effects on women. Her description of her visit to Monte Carlo reveals her ambivalence. Upon hearing a performance of Wagner, her first reaction is bliss: “Why should we regret having left our country when such master- pieces as this are yet to be heard?”93 Yet when she sees people gamble, she is thoroughly disgusted and writes: “I think of the honest men of my country, who are concentrating all their energies on the acquirement of Western civilization. They will not accept Europeanism in moderate doses—they will drain the cup to the very dregs—this awful vice, as well as drunken- ness and all your other weaknesses.”94 She argues that women’s mobility and dismantling of segregation in Ottoman society will go a long way to improve conditions for women and dispel their unhappiness. The processes of social transformation, and shifting understandings of gendered roles and identities, affect all of society. In their accounts Zeyneb Hanoum and Vaka Brown construct themselves as subjects caught between time periods, educated for one purpose in life, but unprepared for changing social realities at the same time. They are both concerned with the effects of modernization. Both display nostal- gia for an older version of life in Constantinople. However, while Zeyneb Hanoum acknowledges that those days are long gone, Vaka Brown ve- hemently opposes change for Turks. Both texts reveal the importance of 104 Journal of Women’s History Summer mobility to the possibility of these life writings. It is travel that allowed the authors to have a comparative perspective and a wider perspective in general. While necessity may have prompted them to write, it is travel that gave them something to write about. Neither Zeyneb Hanoum nor Vaka Brown could have known truly what it was that made “how they lived” unique until they left home. While Zeyneb Hanoum and Vaka Brown wrote for foreign audiences, they also wrote to Ottoman women to warn them of the consequences of westernization. In positioning themselves vis-à-vis their audience, Zeyneb Hanoum and Vaka Brown define their own groups and their positions in them. Both authors use their texts to create an “I” in opposition to a “them.” By the end of her text, Zeyneb Hanoum emerges as a distinctly Turkish Muslim lady. The reader is aware of the fact that in the early twentieth century Turkish Muslim ladies did not dance western dances, did not eat to excess, and did not exercise for no reason. A Turkish Muslim lady, as presented by Zeyneb Hanoum, was interested in higher pursuits. She wanted the freedom to engage others in intellectual discussions and to make the world a better place. Vaka Brown repeatedly states that she is a Greek and that, while she is a subject of the Ottoman Sultan, she is not to be taken as anyone but a Greek. Greeks, as she describes them, know how to make money, how to survive, and have a love-hate relationship with Turks. Vaka Brown claims that while Greeks can handle modernization, the westernization of Turks and certainly of the ladies of Constantinople will lead to the loss of authen- ticity and any good characteristics that they may have. Both authors provide much information about the groups to which they belonged originally and the new groups to which they came to belong during the course of their narratives. Their allegiances changed as did their group affiliations and senses of belonging. Zeyneb Hanoum considers herself a member of a group of emancipated, well-educated intellectual ladies. By the end of her text national divisions are clearly defined and she identifies herself as a Turkish lady. As such, her class affiliation and national affiliation are clearly defined. Vaka Brown initially presents herself as a Turkish subject but by the end of her text it becomes clear that she identifies herself primarily as a Greek who has been affected by her life in the U.S.95 These changes confirm that people have to be understood as members of a variety of webs that sometimes overlap and at other times stand apart. Thus these life writings or first-person texts that are presented as non-fiction are replete with autobiographical traces. The texts present us with a gendered critique of the influence of changing educational systems and shifting boundaries on the role of women in Ottoman society. They provide us with a broader view and more of a dialogue than a monologue. Zeyneb Hanoum is con- versing with Ellison, but she also quotes several other women during her 2013 Roberta Micallef 105 narrative. We are exposed to the voices of British women from her club, the suffragettes, and her own grandmother. Vaka Brown starts her voyage in response to American pronouncement about Turks. Throughout her text, she reports her conversations with a variety of men and women. These two texts, framed with an audience in mind, allow each of these authors, who do not hide their presence but take pride in it, to tell us about themselves, their experiences, and the world around them. Their topics— education, mobility, politics—allowed Demetra Vaka Brown and Zeyneb Hanoum to acquire a public speaking voice. The Ottoman Empire was crumbling as these two texts progress, and thus we bear witness to national identities in the process of gaining supremacy and creating boundaries between peoples. Vaka Brown insists that Turks cannot be Americanized because unlike Greeks, they are too different from Americans. Zeyneb Hanoum discovers that she cannot be happy in Europe as it is at that point in time. These two narratives do not focus on one person’s thoughts or important events in a woman’s life as a more traditional autobiography might, but rather provide us with a broader lens, even if seen through the authors’ viewpoints. Not only do we learn a great deal about the authors themselves, but we also glean a plethora of information about their friends and their social and physical environment. The authors’ dialogues with others, and conversations that they are surrounded by, give us much opportunity to observe them as their “I”s evolve over time and across geographic locations, and to observe the ambiguities in their senses of self as projected for an An- glophone audience. Zeyneb Hanoum and Vaka Brown, both authors who did not feel “at home” at home, had to travel: Zeyneb Hanoum to Europe to discover that she was a thoroughly Turkish young woman in terms of upbringing and Vaka Brown to America and back to discover that she was not truly at home in either location.96 These texts are products of their time. In this period—the final days of the Ottoman Empire and the impending emergence of the Republic of Turkey—modernization efforts created new imagined communities for women. New hyphenated identities were tried on and discarded rapidly with or without the subject’s consent. Some of the identities were inscribed on the subject’s body, replacing the veil with a hat in the case of Zeyneb Hanoum, and some in their language, when English became the language of choice to open up dialogues with multiple women. With texts such as the two discussed in this article, Ottoman women revealed that they were not only the recipients of top-down modernization efforts, but they also took part in public debates and discussions about the effects of modernization efforts on their lives. 106 Journal of Women’s History Summer

Notes

I would like to thank the editor of this issue Dr. Marilyn Booth and my col- league Dr. Renate Wise for their patient reading and thoughtful comments on several versions of this article.

1Reina Lewis and Nancy Micklewright, introduction to Gender, Modernity and Liberty Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings: A Critical Source Book (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 1–29, 3.

2Ibid. 3Marlene Kadar, “Coming to Terms: Life Writing From Genre—to Critical Practice,” in Essays on Life Writing, ed. Marlene Kadar (Toronto: University of To- ronto Press, 1992), 3–20, 4.

4Ibid., 10. 5Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpret- ing Life Narratives (second edition, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010), 4.

6Gail Scott, Spaces Like Stairs: Essays (London: Women’s Press, 1996), 88–89, in Kadar, Essays on Life Writing, 7.

7 Deniz Kandiyoti, “Gendering the Modern on Missing Dimensions in the Study of Turkish Modernity,” in Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, ed. Resat Kasaba and Sibel Bozdogan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 113–132, 113.

8Demetra Vaka was known as Vaka Brown after she married Kenneth Brown, an American author.

9Turk and Turkish at this time were imprecise terms that referred to Muslim Ottomans.

10Demetra Vaka Brown, Haremlik: Some Pages from the Life of Turkish Women (New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1909), 222.

11The writer’s given name was Hadidje Zennour but Zeyneb Hanoum, which simply means Lady Zeyneb, has become her public name and I will refer to her as such throughout my article.

12Her sister Melek Hanoum also contributed two letters. Lewis and Mick- elwright, Gender, Modernity and Liberty, 11; Reina Lewis, “Iconic Disenchantment: Evaluating Femininity in the East and the West,” in A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions (1913, introduction to reprint; Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2005), xiii.

13Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, (1913; reprint, Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2005), 97.

14Zeyneb Hanoum, Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 14. 2013 Roberta Micallef 107

15Lewis, “Iconic Disenchantment,” xiii. 16Ibid., vi. 17Ibid., vi. 18Grace Ellison (d.1935), a British journalist and photographer made it pos- sible for this book to come into existence. She edited the collection, in fact she inserts herself occasionally and provides comments on some of the letters. She wrote an introduction as well as providing an introduction to the volume.

19Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 23.

20Demetra Vaka Brown, A Child of the Orient (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914).

21Yiorgos Kalogeras, “Historical Representation and the Cultural Legitima- tion of the Subject in Ethnic Personal Narratives,” College Literature 18, no.3 (1991): 30–34, 38.

22Vaka Brown, Child of the Orient, 258–259. 23Kalogeras, Historical Representation, 40–41. 24Vaka Brown, Haremlik, 3, 6. 25Vaka Brown, Child of the Orient, 4. 26Ibid., 5. 27 Halide Edib Adivar, Memoirs of Halide Edib (New York: The Century Com- pany, 1926).

28 Malcolm Yapp, “Modernization and Literature in the Near and Middle East 1850–1914,” in Modern Literature in the Near and Middle East 1850–1970, ed. Robin Ostle (New York: Routledge, 1991), 3–16, 4.

29Yaprak Zihnioğlu, “Kadın İnkılabı,” Tarih ve Toplum, Sayı 207 (Mart 2001): 154–156, 154.

30Carter V. Findlay, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism and Modernity: A History 1789– 2007 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 117.

31Hülya Adak, “Introduction: Exiles at Home—Questions for Turkish and Global Literary Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 1 (2008): 20–26, 20.

32Findlay, Turkey Islam Nationalism and Modernity, 188–189. 33Lewis and Micklewright, Gender, Modernity and Liberty, 11. 34Zeyneb Hanoum, Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 101. 35Ibid., 69–70 and 67. 108 Journal of Women’s History Summer

36Ibid., 174. 37Ibid., 177. 38Ibid., 117. 39Lewis sees Vaka Brown’s identification as an Ottoman and “Daughter of the Orient” as complicated and contradictory. Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 24.

40Vaka Brown, Haremlik, 12. 41Ibid., 5. 42Ibid. 43Ibid., 12. 44Ibid., 16. 45Ibid., 267–68. 46Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 42–43. 47 Vaka Brown, Haremlik, 13. 48Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 178. 49Lewis and Mickelwright, Gender, Modernity and Liberty, 4. 50A British club for ladies, Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 183.

51Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 200. 52Vaka Brown, Haremlik, 169. 53Ibid., 27. 54Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 157.

55Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertil- ity 1880–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

56Edib, Memoirs of Halide Edib, 41. 57Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 49. 58Ibid., 39. 59Ibid., 40. 60Ibid., 122. 61Ibid., 121. 2013 Roberta Micallef 109

62Vaka Brown, Haremlik,15–16. 63See Chapter IV, “Exoticized Bodies: Representing Other Women” in Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 142–177, for an extensive discussion of representations of “Oriental” women’s bodies as markers of difference in harem literature.

64Ibid., 60–61. 65Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 53. 66 Sultan Abdul Hamid II (reign 1876–1909) ruled as an absolute monarch. His reign was marked with censorship and repression.

67Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 41–42. 68Ibid., 38. 69Vaka Brown, Child of the Orient, 256. 70Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 101. 71Ibid., 121. 72Vaka Brown, Haremlik, 171. 73Ibid., 220–221. 74Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 185. 75Ibid., 186. 76 Ibid., 194. 77Ibid., 70 and 67. 78Ibid., 86. 79Vaka Brown, Haremlik, 167.

80Ibid., 166. 81Ibid. 82Ibid., 189. 83Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 122. 84Ibid., 190. 85Ibid., 191. 86Ibid., 190. 87Ibid., 187. 110 Journal of Women’s History Summer

88Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 33–34. 89Lewis and Mickelwright, Gender, Modernity and Liberty Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings, 2.

90Lewis and Mickelwritght, Gender, Modernity and Liberty, 5. 91Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 246. 92Lewis, “Iconic Disenchantment,” vi. 93Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 149. 94Ibid., 150–51. 95Kadar, Essays on Life Writing, 7. 96Z. Esra Mirze, “Implementing Disform: An Interview with Orhan Pamuk,” PMLA 123, no. 1 (2008): 176–180, 179.