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

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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. The harem became a “tyrant’s arena for willful political and sexual power games.”21 The setting even determines the dress that the women wear, and this dress is meant to highlight the erotic femininity of the harem women.22 The women wear opaque sheets or robes, carefully draped around their shoulders, chests, and hips. This strategic draping highlights and draws the viewer’s eye to her breasts, making the woman a sexual object, even if no sensual body part is showing. Just as Rowlandson was explicit in his near pornographic sketches of harem scenes, the setting of other harem art discreetly underlines the perceived sexual nature of the harem, whether in a bath or a dark, closed room. Early seraglio operas were varied in what they believed the harem setting was like. The strongest theme is that the harem is an exotic, mysterious, and probably violent location. Abduction from the Seraglio sets the harem behind high palace walls. Constanza and Blanche are captive behind the walls of the palace, and it is the duty of their lovers, Belmonte and Pedrillo, to penetrate those walls and rescue their damsels in distress. 23 They concoct an elaborate plan to scale the wall with ladders and take out the guards.24 The Abduction harem is nearly impenetrable and heavily guarded. Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, completed in 1897, has the same idea of an impenetrable fortress, and this harem is more focused on slavery. The heroine, Aida, is one of many slaves on an early version of a slavery plantation.25 For Aida and her love Radames to escape, they create a plan to break out of the palace walls and hide out in the desert.26 The operatic settings are certainly more varied, but the theme of the impenetrable fortress is consistent. Security both inside and outside the harem is tight, and the women are heavily guarded and watched. The interior is mysterious and suspected to be violent. Similar to the operas, the harem in Thousand Nights and a Night is a fortress. Its key narrative asset is its inaccessibility. As scholars Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen describe it, the harem is the “quintessential enclosure, locking women in and excluding any interference from the outside.”27 Because the harem is so strict on gender separation, it is an optimal setting to tell stories of forbidden love in the harem, such as “The King’s Son and the Merchant’s Wife” or “The Reeve’s Tale.”28 In the same way as in Abduction from the Seraglio, men are smuggled into the harem, in these cases by hiding in a trunk. Even within this impenetrable fortress, the harem is still depicted as a place of “fairy-tale wealth and beauty,” filled with gardens, fountains, jewels, and other items meant to show a sultan’s wealth.29 Just as

3 in the Orientalist art, the idea of wealth in Thousand Nights and a Night was continuously supported with slaves, dancing girls, jewelry, and grand decorations, and Europeans truly believed this wealth a reality. It was thought to be an “abode of love and beauty… in these mysterious retreats one is to find collected together all the wonders of luxury, art, magnificence and pleasure.30 Just like in the art, the setting is frequently described with drapery, gold, cushions, and beautiful gardens.31 Though the harem and its women are not present in all the stories of The Arabian Nights, the addition of these themes of wealth and beauty to the other harem stories enforces those themes in European minds. Because Emily is a captive in The Lustful Turk, one would assume that the harem is a fortress where she is kept under lock and key, waiting for the call of the dey. On the contrary, Emily is given a suite of apartments in the harem. The bedroom has its own key, which the dey gives to her, and overlooks the sea.32 The dey also gives Emily several female slaves to attend to her and a few other gifts to make her stay or captivity an enjoyable one.33 The security he gives her, however, is a false one, and the dey enters her room at night when she thinks she is alone. She writes, “My shrieks must have been heard through the palace, but no help was nigh […].” Even though she comes to enjoy her time with the dey, she begins her stay captive in a beautiful place with a multitude of riches afforded to her. It is a combination of the themes found in The Arabian Nights and the seraglio operas. The harem is indeed an impenetrable fortress but one with riches and beauty. Contrastingly, Eliza, the servant of Emily, is placed in the harem of a neighboring bey.34 She resists more strongly than Emily to the advances of the bey and is subsequently severely whipped over and over again for her disobedience, after which she is brutally raped.35 The room in which her rape takes place is the bey’s equipment room where her hands are secured above her head through a pulley in the ceiling and her feet are tied down through rings in the floor.36 It is a much more horrific setting than the one Emily is in, and the contrast in their experiences is represented in the rooms they are placed. Eliza’s rape and torture at the hands of the bey in a dark and oppressive harem contrast the setting of Emily’s harem and many of the other representations of the harem in early literature. The attitudes of and towards harem women in the art are ones that suggest sex and subservience. When males are included in the artistic rendering, the sexual element heightens the eroticism and fantasy for the viewers. In Rowlandson’s pornographic drawings, males, while not the obvious subjects of the picture, add sensuality. The male subject in The Pasha is being sexually pleased by the women around him, while in Harem, he is entranced by the array of women before him.37 The blatant suggestiveness of the images is indicative of the European attitudes towards harem women. They were viewed as sexual objects and, if the viewer believes the attitudes displayed in The Pasha, happily at the service of their master. When a male is removed from the piece of art, the female subjects are depicted with more modesty, such as in Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque (1814).38 The singular subject, nude, is turned away from the viewer, but she lies on her discarded clothing, only wearing her turban and jewelry. Her body is both concealed and exposed, and she is still a sexual object. Ingres conveyed eroticism in a way that was simultaneously subtle and compelling, prompting some critics to say it exceeded the standards of taste for high art.39 It displays a belief that harem women were at the service of man, always available for his call. While the women in harem art are objects for sexual consumption, the women in seraglio operas are terrorized by the masters of the harem. In seraglio operas, authors frequently gave

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European women more agency and morals than the women of the Orient. When forced to become subjects of the sultan or pasha, the women of seraglio operas they are still passionate and loving in a way that is not driven by sex. Women become either victims of the harem who struggle to maintain their morality or temptresses who try to control and manipulate their environment. The plot of the operas frequently involves the abduction of European women, and these women hold strong to their morals, as Constanza does in Abduction from the Seraglio. The pasha asks for her love, but she resolutely declines.40 When Blanche is put into slavery, she is given to Osmin, a servant of the pasha, and she is treated more as a slave. She complains about her treatment, but Osmin reminds her, “We are in Turkey here […] I am the master, you are the slave. I command, you obey.”41 Blanche remains a good European woman, and firmly refuses to do what he asks, saying things such as “Girls are not cattle” or “A woman is a woman, wherever she is.”42 These attitudes of European women in a harem are opposite harem women in other operas, such as Amneris in Aida. Amneris is a princess in love with Radames, a general. When she suspects that Aida, one of her maidservants, is in love with him, she tricks Aida into admitting her feelings and plots revenge against her.43 She is conniving and selfish, a direct contrast to the pure and virtuous European women in harems such as in Abduction from the Seraglio.44 The women abducted into the harems resist their treatment, while some harem women accept and enjoy their servitude to sultan and become manipulative of the other women in the harem. The sexualized stereotypes of harem women in the West show the gender and sexual differences between European and Ottoman culture, a comparison where the stereotype of harem women becomes visible through what they are not. The dual themes of manipulative and innocent women are continued in the writings depicting harems. As Mary Roberts suggests, the women are either “beautiful tragic victims or scheming femmes fatales.”45 As Emily and Silvia come to enjoy their sexual experiences with their master, they too begin to fit this stereotype in The Lustful Turk. In the same letter as Emily describes her first encounter with her dey she both admonishes her experience, “Oh Silvia, your poor friend is now the polluted concubine of this most worthless Turk,” and expresses her satisfaction, “how strange then it was that pleasure should overcome with such fear about me.”46 This image of pure and innocent women is contrasted with an Italian woman already in the harem of the dey. She laughs at Emily’s innocence and simultaneously displays her own sexual abilities, suggesting that Emily watch the next time she is “favored” with a visit by the dey.47 The story of the rape of a total of seven girls is told in The Lustful Turk, and some are particularly gruesome. Women of many ethnic origins are raped and placed in the harem in The Lustful Turk—English, Italian, French, and Greek. An Italian girl is even taken from a convent and sold into the harem.48 In all but two of the stories, the women experience a sexual awakening and come to enjoy their time with their respective “masters,” one being Eliza. The only girl to successfully retaliate and stop the rape does so by assaulting the dey, cutting off his penis and committing suicide.49 It is a dramatic story and one that ends The Lustful Turk.50 This slave girl and Eliza, being the only ones to vehemently retaliate against their rape and not succumb to the pleasures of the harem master, are the only ones to take control of their situation, even if it resulted in their beating or death. The erotic nature of the harem in The Lustful Turk, even through rape, emphasizes the willing and submissive woman, including European women, despite the view of them as innocent in the operas. While seraglio operas tended to maintain that the European women made every last effort to stay pure and moral, The Lustful Turk takes a

5 different idea of harems and suggests that all women in the harem, European or Oriental, were submissive to the master of the harem. Thousand Nights and a Night also has this depiction of women as sexual objects and manipulators in such as stories as “The Tale of Aziz and Aziza.”51 In this story, there is a scene where a beautiful young woman grabs Aziz, rapes him, and forces him into marriage. When he finally is allowed to return to the girl he actually loves, she refuses him because he married, castrates him, and throws him out.52 Despite his continual love for one girl, both his beloved and the beautiful young woman embody femmes fatales who ruin his life, and this theme is one that is frequently present in the harem literature. Aziz is innocent of all the evil that occurs to him at the hand of the women in his life. Women, like Amneris from Aida, are depicted as envious and manipulative, such as Zubayda, who drugs her husband’s favorite concubine and smuggles her out of the palace in a trunk, a story which is told multiple times in Thousand Nights and a Night.53 The stories suggest that a harem woman who is given any level of power will use it to control and influence those around her. The woman who does not have her own agency is too weak to have power or not smart enough to control her own situation. The Changed Understanding and European Women The harem myth was wildly popular throughout Europe, and soon even Turkish works that mentioned the harem began to repeat the stereotype.54 These stereotypes of harems would have continued for centuries if not for European women travelers. These women visited harems and wrote about and published their experiences, and the attitude towards harems began to be challenged with these publications. They enjoyed greater accessibility to the harem due to their gender. Barriers to their understanding, however, include cultural limitations and misunderstandings and the physical impenetrability of the harem.55 Women travelers more easily overcame the physical barrier, but the limitations of cultural interpretations and misinterpretations are still noteworthy. Peirce notes that a touchstone of the reliability of the travelogue was the treatment of the valide sultan, the importance of whom will be discussed later.56 The European women travelers emphasized their claims to originality and truth, and indeed these sources appear closer to a more factual understanding than was previously available in Europe.57 While the European women travelers still faced some limitations, their interpretation and information regarding the harem is one that cannot be ignored, and has added to the research on the harem and the women inside it. When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s husband was appointed as the British ambassador to Turkey in the early eighteenth century, she took it upon herself to correct the stereotypes of Oriental women that had been so heavily emphasized by the European men’s travelogues.58 In Turkey, she was able to see harems from the inside, as no European woman had really done before. She wrote about her experiences in Turkey, and in 1763, nearly a year after her death, this travelogue was published.59 The letters were wildly popular and reprinted multiple times. While her popularity peaked nearly a century before we can really see the stereotype start to change, Lady Montagu’s work was an important catalyst to Europeans’ understanding that harems were not the dramatic overtly sexual scenes that had been described. Indeed, she says, “You will be surprised at an account so different from what you have been entertained with by the common voyage writers, who are very fond of speaking of what they do not know,” and in another letter, “I am afraid you will doubt the truth of this account, which I own, is very different from our common notions in England; but it is no less truth for all that.”60 She was truly 6 revolutionary in how she understood and talked about harems. Lady Montagu compared European and Oriental practices, saying that the behavior of sultans and European monarchs was actually quite similar in that their attention and favor was desired by those around them.61 She broke down the cultural misunderstandings not only of the women but also of their supposed “masters.” A modern day discussion of harems and their stereotype is not complete without Lady Montagu, and she is frequently a reference point when looking at the harem. Lady Montagu was not the only European woman given an insider’s look into the imperial harems. Other women, such as Julia Pardoe, Lady Ramsey, Lucy Garnett, and a number of other women visited the harem in the nineteenth century and wrote about their experiences. All of these women claim that the initial reports of the harem and the women inside them were completely overdramatized and given a sexual tone that was simply not true. Pardoe traveled to the Ottoman Empire in 1835 and spent nearly fifteen months in Istanbul, and she was critical of travelers who wrote without first-hand interviews of the Ottoman elite and made erroneous reports.62 She expressed exasperation with the perseverance of the harem stereotype, saying “[t]he European mind has become so imbued with ideas of Oriental mysteriousness, mysticism, and magnificence, and it has been so long accustomed to pillow its faith on the marvels and metaphors of tourists […]”63 Lady Ramsey published a book entitled Everyday Life in Turkey in 1897 after her travels through the country, and she denounced the understanding that Turks were evil, and she found the people to be “simple, peaceable, hospitable, and friendly—living amicably with their Christian neighbors.”64 Certainly there spans nearly a century between the visits of these women and Lady Montagu, but their consistency in describing the harem and the people of the Orient as civilized and amicable suggests that the popular understanding of the harem bore little factual information. The more these travelogues were published and the European women reported what they saw, the more the popular understanding broke down, but that understanding certainly did not completely disappear. While not all the European women travelogues reached the same popularity levels as Lady Montagu’s work, they equally defined the harem as more domestic and hospitable than the popular culture of Europe believed. More specifically, in finding a harem that was totally different from the popular and widely known conception, the European women described a harem that was more refined, clean, and devout than the Western world believed. Julia Pardoe described the women she encountered as having great hospitality. “The never-failing hospitality of the East prompted the first question of the venerable hostess. She inquired if I had been satisfied with my reception […] and in the most courtly manner admired every thing that I wore.”65 It seems to have been a surprise for the harem women to be “courtly,” but the level of hospitality and generousness that Pardoe and other travelers received made it worth mentioning. Some travelogues addressed the modesty and chastity so blaringly missing in the popular stereotype. A French woman traveler wrote, “The careful protection of national tradition and customs by both the people and the police makes it impossible for women to lose the trait of modesty that is so natural for the fairer sex.”66 Ultimately, the European travelers witnessed a harem that was spiritual, respected, and courteous. Even Lady Montagu, who visited nearly a century before Pardoe and the other women travelers, stated, “Upon the whole, I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the Empire; the very divan pays respects to them, and the grand signior himself […] never violates the privileges of the harem […]”67 The women of the harem were more free than the Western world believed, and some European women considered the harem women more free than European ones.

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From the Eyes of Ottoman Women Perhaps the most important addition to breaking the popular stereotype of Ottoman harems was the publication of memoires of women from the harem. It is rare to have these written accounts because writing such a thing was not considered while the sultan was on the throne. Hence, the few accounts that exist were written and appeared after the Ottoman Empire fell and the social system which included the harem had been destroyed.68 Çağatay Uluçay, historian of harems in the mid-twentieth century, describes these sources as “small rays of light that leak out from the harem… these letters will expose the thoughts and passions of those that lived in the harem [and] their influence on the sultan and other men of state; the private lives of women, and sultans and their characters…”69 Indeed, the importance of these sources cannot be overstated, as they have granted access to the harem through their stories, and the rarity of these memoirs only increase this importance. The account by the concubine Filizten is one of only three known memoirs by slave women in the Ottoman imperial harem.70 She never kept a diary, so this memoir is an oral history, spoken to and interpreted by journalist Ziya Şakir in the early twentieth century. Filizten is in her seventies at the time of dictation, but Şakir ensures his readers that she has full command of her faculties.71 The memoir was actually intended to aid in his biography of Sultan Murad V and was published in 1943 as Twenty-Eight Years in Çırağan Palace: The Life of Murad V.72 Princess Ayşe was the daughter of Sultan Abdülhamid II, born in 1887, so her story is one that comes from a time when the harem culture was being destroyed.73 Her memoir was completed in 1955 and appeared in serial format in a Turkish magazine later that decade.74 Frequently, her memoir is used to study the sultan, but when looking at the harem, Ayşe creates a portrait of a beloved childhood home with an adoring family and a classic upper-class upbringing.75 From these memoirs, it becomes apparent that the previous conceptions of harems were mistaken and what the European women travelers saw was only the tip of the iceberg. The memoirs by harem women show that the harem was a place with hierarchy and power and treatment unlike that from The Arabian Nights. A challenge in reading these memoirs comes from the reason behind their scarcity. Because writing such an account would not be considered while the sultan was on the throne, the accounts that have become available are not as comprehensive as they could be. Even after the death or demise of the sultan’s rule, the women could be hesitant in talking about their experiences in his harem. Ziya Şakir, the biographer of Filizten, the concubine from the rule of Murad V, never mentions her by name but rather gives clues to her identity in the narrative. It is unclear whether this decision was made by the biographer or the concubine herself, but the discreetness of her persona is undeniable.76 The accounts by harem women only appeared well after the downfall of the system, but it is arguable that they still protected the sultan and the harem system. Their loyalties to the sultan continued long after he was gone, and it is possible that this loyalty also applied to the harem system that was so severely judged and stereotyped by Europe. Brookes suggests that “the veil that insulated the imperial harem during its existence has survived nearly intact,” even years after the end of the harem lifestyle.77 Princess Ayşe, daughter of Abdülhamid II, is much more open about her identity since her memoir was published as a magazine serial and a book, all before her death.78 Likewise, the memoir written by Safiye Ünüvar, a schoolteacher who taught in the harem of Sultan Mehmed V Reşad, is frank and forthcoming about her experiences in the harem. She did not tolerate pretensions in others and fashioned her memoir as an educational text. Safiye discusses the structure and customs of the imperial harem based off her interactions she witnessed and her own interactions within the

8 harem.79 Even regarding the royalty she met, Safiye openly discusses her interactions with and the personality of Sultan Reşad.80 While the modern researcher must be aware of the possible limitations of the harem memoirs, there are some examples where the women were completely open and informative about their experiences and the lifestyle within the harem. Changed Representations The new representations of the harem were understood to be more realistic understandings of the women, and hence the popular culture changed to reflect that. The popularity of seraglio operas and harem-themed literature decreased around the mid-nineteenth century and the art changed to show a less-sexualized version of the harem women. This evolution coincided with the changes in European artistic sensibilities from the Enlightenment Orientalist to Modernist. The new representations came from both male and female writers and artists. Just as the wives of diplomats and travelers came to see inside the harems, so too did traveling female artists. One such female artist in the mid-nineteenth century was Henriette Brown, who was allowed direct access into the harem. Like Montagu and the other women travelers, Brown exposed the previous conceptions of harems as fictitious. Billie Melman argues that these attempts to normalize and humanize the harem were meant to invoke “a sisterly spirit across different cultures.”81 Brown’s famous painting, A Visit: Harem Interior, Constantinople, done in 1860, depicts a much different scene those of Rowlandson, Ingres, Chodowiecki, and the other earlier artists.82 While her rendering is still shadowed and mysterious, it is also a sober, nearly empty hall, where the women are veiled and fully clothed.83 They still, however, are much more ordinary than earlier depictions of harem women.84 It is a more somber scene, one where the women are not even close to the sexual objects that they were in earlier paintings and drawings. In fact, with “their fully clothed figures, polite gestures, and austerely undecorated spaces,” the images are “closer in spirit to the images of nuns,” which Brown had painted prior to her harem work.85 The women in art are domesticated and humanized, a reality and viewpoint that earlier artists did not and could not grasp.86 Male artist John Frederick Lewis painted portraits of harem women in the mid-nineteenth century. He lived in Cairo for a decade during the 1840s, living as “native” as best he could.87 Like Brown, his work is also in direct contrast with the early depictions of the harem. His paintings are bright and colorful, and the harem women are clothed in their native dress. In Hhareem Life, Constantinople (1857), a woman lazily plays with a cat in the window, attended by another woman.88 As opposed to earlier paintings, where the relationship between women was somewhat spiteful or overtly sexual, these women seem to share an ambiguous relationship.89 It is an intimate scene, but not in the same sense as earlier paintings. Similarly, Hhareem (1849) shows a bright harem scene, but in this case the hierarchy to harem life is obviously shown in the painting. In this narrative scene, a new woman slave is being introduced to the bey and his three wives, all of whom are judging the new girl.90 It is not nearly as sexual as earlier paintings, but instead displays the hierarchy within the harem and the power and involvement allowed to the important harem women. The theme behind it is more authentic than previous work, and the attitude is more of power, one that also involves the power of the women of the harem. The setting of his portraiture was also significant because many of his portraits were done in the garden. Examples such as The Bouquet (1857), In the Bey’s Garden (1865), and Lilium Auratum (1871) show harem women in exotic gardens, caring for and picking flowers.91 Because the women are outside, they appear free to wander, and the images “evoke a sense of

9 privileged seclusion rather than airless imprisonment.”92 Even their attitudes change as they move outside. The attendant in Lilium Auratum is smiling happily, breaking the pattern of harem women appearing stoic and bored. As the erotic imagery diminished, it became about a different, more decent kind of visual pleasure.93 The art becomes more about documenting the women and telling a story about their everyday lives, one that does not necessarily revolve around a greedy master. This is not to say that after the publication of women’s travelogues and harem memoirs around the mid-nineteenth century all popular culture changed to depict the harem women as ones with power, a complex hierarchy, and a domestic life. Ingres continued to paint sexualized images of harem women late into the nineteenth century. For example, he painted women lounging naked and presumably waiting for the call of their master in Le Bain turc (1863).94 The setting is in the bath, and the imagery, like the earlier paintings, is explicitly and overtly sexual. The women are lounging, bathing, playing music, and seemingly have no other life purpose than to obey the wishes of the sultan. Like Rowlandson’s drawings, it is unclear just how many women are in the room, creating a scene of endless pleasure. It is reminiscent of the earlier paintings, and Ingres is continuing the harem stereotype with this type of imagery. Jules Joseph Lefebvre painted Odalisque in 1874, and like other odalisques of early in the century, the woman is lounging naked in a dark room on a cushion.95 She is somewhat modest, as her back is facing the viewer, but it is a suggestive painting. Bath scenes still had some popularity, and artists were still painting scenes like that, with such works as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Le Bain maure (1870) or Jean Lecome de Nouÿ’s L’Esclave blanche (1888).96 Fernand Cormon painted a harem scene that exemplified the common stereotype of a harem woman being manipulative and evil in his work Jalousie au serial (1874).97 It shows the murderous glee of a harem woman who has apparently ordered a eunuch guard to kill a rival harem woman. Both women in the scene are naked and the body of the murderous woman is coiled “with snaky lasciviousness as she clutches the divan.”98 So late in the century, Cormon created a blatantly erotic image with female rivalry and the violence and sensuality of the harem. While the popularity of the erotic sensual and sensual harem never truly went away, the number of them decreased after the mid-nineteenth century. The imperial harem stereotype that was so popular before the nineteenth century appears so obviously false now that the sexuality and eroticism of the popular culture depicting harems from before the nineteenth century seems ludicrous. Art, literature, operas, and many sources of popular culture portray a harem that was full of sexually-charged, submissive, eager vixens, or manipulative and power-hungry women, or pure and moral European captives. The harem became popularly known as a place of sex and debauchery, an impenetrable fortress, even if it was beautiful and full of wealth and splendor. In reality, this description is not truly accurate. The women of the harem led lives that were busy and relatively powerful, completely opposite of the European conception of them. They exercised power over the sultan and influenced the Ottoman Empire, even if they were not public about it. It was not until the publication of European women’s travelogues and memoirs of harem women were published around the eighteenth and nineteenth century that the popular conception was even questioned, and the influence of these documents is substantial. While the stereotype is still present today, through the publication of these documents, the mysteriousness of the Ottoman imperial harem unraveled, and the Western world learned some of the reality of what happened behind the harem walls, a view totally different from the erotic and dramatic stories that were once so popular.

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Works Cited

Anonymous. 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. Chatsworth: Canyon Books, 1967.

Barzilai-Lumbroso, Ruth. “Turkish Men and the History of Ottoman Women: Studying the History of the Ottoman Dynasty’s Private Sphere Through Women’s Writings.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 5, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 53-82.

Beynon, John C. “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Sapphic Vision.” In Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature, edited by Philip Holden and Richard J. Ruppel, 21-43. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Booth, Marilyn, ed. Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Brookes, Douglas Scott, ed. and trans. The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2008.

Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition (November 2011).

Fisher, Burton D. Aèida. Opera Journeys, 2000.

Halsband, Robert. The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.

Highet, Juliet. “Behind Orientalism’s Veil.” Saudi Aramco World, March/April 2009, 16-23.

Kuehn, Julia. “Exotic Harem Paintings.” Frontiers: A Journal Of Women Studies 32, no. 2 (June 2011): 31-63.

Marzolph, Ulrich and Richard van Leeuwen. The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2004.

Montague, Lady Mary Wortley. Letters from the Levant During the Embassy to Constantinople 1716-18. Reprint. New York: Arno Press & The New York Times, 1971.

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. The Abduction from the Seraglio. In Seven Mozart Librettos, translated by J. D. McClatchy, 132-269. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Pardoe, Julia. City of the Sultan and Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1836. 3 vols. 2nd ed. London: Henry Colburn, 1838. Peirce, Leslie P. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Ramsey, Lady W. M. Everyday Life in Turkey. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1897.

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Roberts, Mary. Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Sancar, Asli. Ottoman Women: Myth and Reality. Somerset: The Light Inc., 2007.

Sonnenberg, Ben. “The Imperial Spectacle.” Grand Street 6, no. 2 (Winter, 1987): 82-104.

Verdi, Giuseppe, Burton D. Fisher, and Antonio Ghislanzoni. Verdi’s Aida. Opera Journeys, 2005.

Voltaire. Candide. In Candide and Philosophical Letters, translated by Richard Aldington, 3- 103. Toronto: Random House, Inc., 1992.

Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Ziter, Edward. “Kean, Byron, and Fantasies of Miscegenation.” Theatre Journal 54, no. 4 (December 2002): 607-626.

1 “Pasha.” Columbia Electronic Encylopedia, 6th Edition (November 2011): 1. A pasha is the highest honorary title in official usage in the Ottoman Empire. It includes those of both civilian and military status. 2 See Appendix A1. 3 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 249. See Appendix A1. 4 See Appendix A2. 5 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature, 43. 6 The term “seraglio” is the Italian rendition of “saray,” meaning “palace.” 7 Edward Ziter, “Kean, Byron, and Fantasies of Miscegenation,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 4 (December 2002): 618. 8 Voltaire, “Candide,” in Candide and Philosophical Letters, trans. Richard Aldington (Toronto: Random House, Inc., 1992), 31. 9 Ibid., 28. 10 Ibid., 27. 11 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Abduction from the Seraglio, in Seven Mozart Librettos, trans. J. D. McClatchy (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), 136. 12 The title of “dey” denotes a provincial ruler in Ottoman times. The term in Turkish is usually “bey,” but “dey” could be a North African variation. 13 Anonymous, 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 (Chatsworth: Canyon Books, 1967), 15. 14 Ibid., 15. 15 The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2004), s.v. “harem.” This paper focuses on Burton’s edition, published in 1885. While this is a very late edition, for the purposes of comparison, Burton added and combined many of the stories from previous editions by other editors. 16 The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2004), s.v. “Shahriyâr and His Brother; 1 The Story of King (Burton from the Calcutta II edition.” 17 The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, vol. 2, s.v. “sexuality.” 18 For samples of Delacroix’s work, such as Odalisque allongée sur un divan, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, Femmes d’Alger dans un intériuer, See Appendixes A3 and A4. 19 See Appendix A5. 20 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature, 27. 21 Julia Kuehn, “Exotic Harem Paintings,” Frontiers: A Journal Of Women Studies 32, no. 2 (June 2011): 34-35.

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22 Joan DelPlato, “Dress and Undress: Clothing and Eroticism in Nineteenth-Century Visual Representations of the Harem,” in Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Places, ed. Marilyn Booth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 275. 23 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Abduction from the Seraglio, 138. 24 Ibid., 140. 25 Burton D. Fisher, Aèida, (Opera Journeys, 2000), 2. 26 Ibid., 3. 27 The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, vol. 2, s.v. “harem.” 28 The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, vol. 1, s.vv. “King’s Son and the Merchant’s Wife, 196 The (Burton from the Calcutta II edition” and “Reeve’s Tale, 25 The (Burton from the Calcutta II edition).” 29 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature, 205. 30 Ibid., 205. 31 The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, vol. 2, s.v. “beauty.” 32 Anonymous, 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, 27 and 28. 33 Ibid., 29. 34 “Bey,” Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition. “Bey” is the general title of respect used by Turkish pople, denoting a provincial ruler in Ottoman times. Its definition is much the same as “dey.” Anonymous, 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, 87. 35 Ibid., 91-92. 36 Ibid., 88. 37 See Appendix A1. 38 See Appendix A6. 39 Joan DelPlato, “Dress and Undress: Clothing and Eroticism in Nineteenth-Century Visual Representations of the Harem,” in Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Places, 265. 40 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Abduction from the Seraglio, 171. 41 Ibid., 185. 42 Ibid., 185,187. 43 Giuseppe Verdi, Burton D. Fisher, and Antonio Ghislanzoni, Verdi’s Aida (Opera Journeys, 2005), 27. 44 Ben Sonnenberg, “The Imperial Spectacle,” Grand Street 6, no. 2 (Winter, 1987), 93. 45 Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 63. 46 Anonymous, 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, 18 and 23. 47 Ibid., 61. 48 Ibid., 107, 110. 49 Ibid., 159. 50 Ibid., 159. After the assault by and suicide of the slave girl, the dey preserves his manhood in wine and sends it home with Emily and Siliva. 51 The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, vol. 1, s.v. “‘Azîz and ‘Azîza, 41 The Tale of (Burton from the Calcutta II edition)” and “Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad, 14 The Story of the (Burton from the Calcutta II edition).” 52 Ibid., 112. 53 The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, vol. 2, s.v. “Zubayda.” 54 Asli Sancar, Ottoman Women: Myth and Reality (Somerset: The Light Inc., 2007), 11. 55 Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 115. 56 Ibid., 117. 57 Ibid., 115. 58 John C. Beynon, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Sapphic Vision,” in Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature, ed. Philip Holden and Richard J. Ruppel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 24-25. 59 Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 288. 60 Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Letters from the Levant During the Embassy to Constantinople 1716-18, reprint edition (New Yrok: Arno Press & The New York Times, 1971), 154 and 188. 13

61 Asli Sancar, Ottoman Women: Myth and Reality, 43. 62 Ibid., 13. 63 Miss Julia Pardoe, The City of the Sultan and Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1826, 3 volumes (London: Henry Colburn, 1938), 130. 64 Lady W. M. Ramsey, Everyday Life in Turkey (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1897), 1. 65 Miss Julia Pardoe, The City of the Sultan and Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1826, 58. 66 Asli Sancar, Ottoman Women: Myth and Reality, 28. 67 Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Letters from the Levant During the Embassy to Constantinople 1716-18, 128. 68 Douglas Scott Brookes, The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2008), 2. 69 Ruth Barzilai-Lumbroso, “Turkish Men and the History of Ottoman Women: Studying the History of the Ottoman Dynasty’s Private Sphere through Women’s Writings,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 5, no.2 (Spring 2009), 68. 70 Douglas Scott Brookes, The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem, 13. 71 Ibid., 14. 72 Ibid., 14. 73 Abdülhamıd was the last official sultan of the Ottoman Empire. 74 Douglas Scott Brookes, The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem, 123. 75 Ibid., 126. 76 Ibid., 14. 77 Ibid., 1. 78 Ibid., 123. 79 Ibid., 195. 80 Ibid., 227. 81 Julia Kuehn, “Exotic Harem Paintings,” 35. 82 See Appendix A6. 83 Juliet Highet, “Behind Orientalism’s Veil,” Saudi Aramco World, March/April 2009, 18. 84 Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, 53. 85 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature, 222. 86 Julia Kuehn, “Exotic Harem Paintings,” 39. 87 Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, 11. 88 See Appendix A7. 89 Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, 40. 90 Ibid., 33. 91 See Appendixes A9-A11. 92 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature, 229. 93 Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature, 45. 94 See Appendix A12. 95 See Appendix A12. 96 See Appendixes A13-A14. 97 See Appendix A15. In English, the title means Murder in the Seraglio. 98 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature, 185.

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Appendix A: Illustrations

Thomas Rowlandson, Harem, after 1812, in Yeazell 2000, no. 25.

Thomas Rowlandson, The Pasha, after 1812, in Yeazell 2000, no. 51.

A1

Daniel Chodowiecki, Frontispiece for letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--- W------y M------e, 1781, in Yeazell 2000, no. 19.

A2

Eugène Delacroix, Odalisque allongée sur un divan, 1827-1828, in Yeazell 2000, no. 1.

Eugène Delacroix, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, 1834, in Yeazell 2000, no. 5.

A3

Eugène Delacroix, Femmes d’Alger dans un intérieur, 1847?, in Yeazell 2000, no. 7.

A4

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, La Petite Baigneuse: Intérieur de harem, 1828, in Yeazell 2000, no. 11.

A5

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque, 1814, in Yeazell 2000, no. 3.

Henriette Brown, A Visit: Harem Interior, Constantinople, 1860, in Yeazell 2000, no. 35.

A6

John Frederick Lewis, Hhareem Life, Constantinople, 1857, in Yeazell 2000, no. 40.

A7

John Frederick Lewis, The Hhareem, 1849, in Yeazell 2000, no. 36.

A8

John Frederick Lewis, The Bouquet, 1857, in Yeazell, no. 44.

A9

John Frederick Lewis, In the Bey’s Garden, Asia Minor, 1865, in Yeazell, no. 47.

A10

John Frederick Lewis, Lilium Auratum, 1871, in Roberts 2007, plate 9.

A11

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Le Bain turc, 1862-1863, in Yeazell 2000, no. 13.

Jules Joseph Lefebvre, Odalisque, 1874, in Yeazell, no. 2.

A12

Jean Léon Gérôme, Le Bain maure, 1870, in Yeazell 2000, no. 27.

A13

Jean Lecome de Nouÿ, L’Esclave blanche, 1888, in Yeazell 2000, no. 22.

A14

Fernand Cormon, Jalousie au serial, 1874, in Yeazell 2000, no. 32.

A15