The Stereotype and Perceptions of Ottoman Imperial Harems in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Sex, Luxury, and Power: The Stereotype and Perceptions of Ottoman Imperial Harems in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Sara Krechel Faculty Mentor: Dr. Nabil Al-Tikriti University of Mary Washington 0 The mystery of the imperial harem has been a constant curiosity. Legends and dramatic tales of the caged women at the beck and call of greedy and controlling sultans have fascinated Westerners for centuries. The Ottoman Empire had significant contact with the Western world, and visiting officials and travelers related stories back home, some fact, some hearsay, and some pure fantasy. Stories featuring the sexual practices of the sultan and embellished descriptions of the harem helped sell books and fuel interest in the harem. Fact mixed with fantasy, but it is unclear just how much and where the line was drawn when taking literary liberties. Prior to the nineteenth century, the Western concept of the harem was driven by popular culture, created by men writing or drawing out their fantasies. These creations are highly sexually charged—full of debauchery and power struggle, and the works are still visible today—spectacular operas such as Abduction from the Seraglio, erotic paintings such as those by Thomas Rowlandson, or dramatic tales such as The Arabian Nights. It was not until after memoirs and documents written by traveling European women, who were allowed to see the inside of a harem, were published that the stereotype of the imperial Ottoman harem began to unravel. Additionally, the publication of memoirs and diaries written by harem women allowed for a truly insider view and showed the true nature of the harem that the West was refusing to grasp. While there were indications prior to the nineteenth century that the popular stereotype of the imperial Ottoman harem, visible in opera, art, and literature, was overly dramatic and sexualized, it was not until the publication of European women travelogues in the eighteenth century and harem women memoirs in the nineteenth century that the story of the harem began to be told, lifting the veil from the mysterious inner workings of the Ottoman palaces. The Stereotype in Popular Culture Descriptions of the imperial Ottoman harems in early nineteenth century art created a vision where women were continuously fawning over men, completely willing and subservient to them. Thomas Rowlandson drew pictures that are borderline pornographic, such as Harem and The Pasha, both completed after 1812.1 Women in Harem are lined up naked before the man, and Rowlandson emphasizes that there are an untold number of them by blurring the edges, and creating a second row of naked women, floating on an unseen platform.2 In The Pasha, there are five naked women fawning over the happy man, and the women are ready and fervent to share the sexual attentions of their master.3 Rowlandson plays upon the fantasy of European men as his audience, using the harem scene to tease their imaginations. The male in Harem sits alone in the picture and it is from his perspective that the viewer also sees the scene. The frontispiece for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters, completed by Daniel Chodowiecki in 1781, depicts harem women crowded in a large room, all naked and reclining on cushions.4 Ruth Bernard Yeazell suggests that the perspective of the viewer of the painting is one that allows the rendering to be a dream with heightened eroticism.5 The image of naked women lounging, eating, and gossiping entices the viewer and was one that interested and captivated European viewers. Lady Montagu’s travelogue tried to break the harem stereotype, telling a story that was more docile and domestic, but Chodowiecki makes a point of depicting naked lounging women, presumably ready and waiting for the call of their master. Early and pre-nineteenth century art depicting harem women emphasizes nudity and subservience to the pasha, a portrayal that appealed to and interested the European audience. In operas of this period, harems are involved as part of the mystery and debauchery of the Orient, and the theme of them in the operas highlights this description. The premise is frequently 1 the abduction of European women who are then sold as sex slaves to please the sultan. Indeed, the eighteenth century saw a mania for harem stories, and those stories often came with an abduction theme.6 These operas helped transform the harem into a symbol of Islamic culture in the European mind.7 In Voltaire’s Candide, first published in 1759, the old woman relates to Candide her tragic and horrifying experiences of being sold into harem slavery. She talks about, at the age of fifteen, being raped daily and seeing the savage torture and killing of her mother by their captors.8 “[…] I was a virgin; I did not remain so long […]; he was an abominable Negro who thought he was doing me a great honor.”9 While the old woman does not go into great detail, she clearly thinks of them as barbarians. Voltaire paints the harem as a place where the men can take what they want, even the pure young virgins. Candide especially emphasizes this clash of ideologies and cultures, and the old woman talks about the differences between Africans, Turks, and Europeans. It is a difference of ideology, and as a child, the old woman had been appalled at their sexual promiscuity. She was betrothed to a prince and was saving herself for him, but lost everything when she was captured.10 The theme of abduction into the harem is also seen in Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, composed in 1781. In Abduction, the main female figures Constanza and Blanche have been kidnapped by Turkish pirates and sold to Pasha Selim. The entire opera narrates the efforts of Constanza’s and Blanche’s loves to rescue them from the clutches of the pasha.11 As the imaginations of Europeans went wild, the harem became a place where the pure and honorable European women were raped and ruined. The theme of rape is one that carried over from seraglio operas into the early nineteenth century literature about harems. The Lustful Turk or, Lascivious Scenes from a Harem Faithfully and Vividly Depicted in a Series of Letters from a Young and Beautiful Lady to Her Cousin in England, written by an anonymous author in the 1828, details the repeated rape of European women after their capture and placement in a harem. The story is told from the perspectives of letters between two particular women and several written by the various Turkish men in the story. While the heroine, Emily, comes to enjoy her time with Ali, the dey to whom she is given as a slave, the rape of the European women in The Lustful Turk is particularly violent and is written with erotic detail.12 In the dey’s letters, he seems to get pleasure from taking the virginity of his new European slaves, saying “[t]he Grecian slave, I rejoice to say again, I found a pure maid,” and “[a]lthough the novelty of her charms has gone by, the certainty of having cropped her virgin rose, has created a lasting interest in my bosom.”13 As a rapist and captor, his evil nature is further emphasized in this same letter when he admits to drugging Emily, giving an opiate to “cull her sweet flower.”14 While the theme of rape is not nearly as common in The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, the version of The Arabian Nights translated by Richard Francis Burton in 1885, abundant sex and women is a common theme. Just as in early Orientalist art, women are sexual creatures, and the harem is a symbol of “royal and patriarchal authority.”15 Thousand Nights and a Night is not as openly erotic as stories like The Lustful Turk, but many of these stories are derived from The Arabian Nights. The basic premises such as slave-girls, caliphal favorites, and concubines come from The Arabian Nights, and it is from there that the descriptions of harems became focused on and obsessed with sex. The frame story of Thousand Nights and a Night involves several lascivious scenes, including an orgy between women as well as a woman who blackmails men to make love to her, all besides the familiar story of a king killing virgins every night.16 Sexuality is presented in the stories in its dual character, “a source of enjoyment and 2 lasciviousness and a force undermining authority and the moral order of society.”17 The women can have control of their sexuality, but they use that power to control the men around them. Just as the description of the harems in popular culture emphasized an overly sexual nature, the setting that was illustrated supported and highlighted this theory. In early and pre- nineteenth century art, harem women are frequently portrayed either on cushions in an intimate setting or in a public bath. Eugène Delacroix, for example, frequently depicted his subjects lounging on cushions, in dark curtained rooms.18 Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres painted Turkish women in a bath, with varying levels of nudity, in La Petite Baigneuse: Intérieur de harem (1828).19 The figure in the forefront is a nude woman whose back is turned to the viewer, but in the background, women are bathing or caring for one another, at once theatrically exposed and withheld from view.20 The setting in these images is determined by the attitudes and actions of the women inside—a sexualized woman should be depicted in a sexualized location, hence a dark cushioned room or a bath. Many of these male artists had never been inside a harem, so they were forced to come up with ideas on their own of what the inside of a harem would look like, and creating the scene required an act of imagination.

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