Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History
Page 3
1. See e.g. Todorova 1997; Goldsworthy 1998; Bjeliæ and Saviæ 2002.
2. Ayverdi 2005, I: 273.
3. Not, of course, that this view is entirely unfounded: see MacDonald 2002.
4. Obolensky 1974.
5. On the debates surrounding the early history of the millet system, see Braude
1982.
References
Ayverdi, Ýlhan. Kubbealtý Lugatý: Asýrlar Boyu Târihî Seyri Ýçinde Misalli Büyük
Türkçe Sözlük, 3 vols. (Ýstanbul: Kubbealtý Neþriyâtý, 2005).
Bjeliæ, Dušan and Obrad Saviæ, eds. Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization
and Fragmentation (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2002).
Braude, Benjamin. “Foundation Myths of the Millet System,” in Christians
and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, ed.
Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, 2 vols. (New York and London: Holmes
& Meier Publishers, 1982), I: 69–88.
Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
MacDonald, David Bruce. Balkan Holocausts? Serbian and Croatian Victim-
Centred Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, 2002).
ButurovIæ and schIck, IntroductIon
9
Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe 500–1453
(London: Sphere Books, 1974).
Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997).
1
Eastern Concubines, Western Mistresses:
Prévost’s Histoire d’une Grecque moderne
Olga Augustinos
Et si elle avait … consenti à se livrer à mes soins, n’était-il pas
naturel qu’elle eût cette confiance pour un homme à qui elle devait
les images de vertu qu’elle commençait à goûter? Dans cette
supposition ne devenait-elle pas respectable? et pour qui l’était-
elle plus que pour moi-même, qui avais commencé à la servir sans
intérêt, et qui … devais me faire honneur d’une conversion qui était
proprement mon ouvrage?
[And if she had … consented to surrender herself to my care, was it
not natural that she should have such confidence in a man to whom
she owed the images of virtue that she was beginning to taste? On
this assumption, was she not becoming respectable? And for whom
was she more so, if not for me, who had begun to serve her without
interest, and who … should honor myself with a conversion that was
in fact my own doing?]
L’Abbé Prévost, Histoire d’une Grecque moderne
Being virtuous was a woman’s duty, one that erased Eve’s stain and simultaneously
ensured social peace through fidelity within the fold of marriage—or, in its absence,
through the moral probity of abstinence. This dual bond entwined Christian ethics
with the secular, middle-class desire for familial felicity and stability. The purity
of the female body ensured the purity of family origins. Honor, on the other hand,
was a male prerogative disassociated from the male body. It was the principle,
both individual and collective, that guided the reciprocal obligations among men,
and demanded the chaste fidelity of a woman worthy of esteem.
Théophé, the heroine of Prévost’s novel Histoire d’une Grecque moderne [The
Story of a Modern Greek Woman] (1740), chose the path of abstinence as the
surest way to possess her own body and soul. But before she could even be aware
of this choice, she had to be converted from the eastern code of female conduct to
the western. This binary opposition was a western construct which sought to define
the ideal European woman in part by contrasting her with her eastern counterpart.
12
Women in the ottoman Balkans
Théophé’s conversion was the task of a French diplomat who liberated her from
an Ottoman harem in Constantinople and embarked on the mission to refashion
her into a western woman of “virtue.”1 She had pleaded with him to buy her
freedom from the Turkish pasha Chériber, “in the name of the esteem … that [the
diplomat] had expressed for women who loved virtue.”2
She had heard this magic word during a brief encounter with him in the harem
quarters, where he had been invited by the aged “Bacha” [pasha] to meet his
women. There were twenty-two of them, their ages ranging between sixteen and
thirty. Théophé—or Zara, her harem name—was one of the youngest and most
attractive. The only thing her master knew of her was that she was Greek. Her
charm and spiritedness had endeared her to him and drew the French visitor’s
attention as well. In the latter’s eyes she stood out among the other concubines,
and he regretted to see her “born for a destiny different than the one she deserved
because of her complaisance and kindness.” Then he spoke to her of the women
in Christian countries whose husbands ask only for “gentleness, tenderness and
virtue” of their life companions. For Turkish women, however, “these virtues were
… lost … because of their misfortune to have never found in men a reciprocity
worthy of their sentiments.”3 Thus, he established the contrastive roles of eastern
and western women in relation to men at the very onset of their relationship.
Of the three qualities he cited, Théophé focused only on virtue because it
presented her with an alternative way of life and a reordered relation to men. In
her view, however, virtue meant not monogamous fidelity and familial bliss, as it
did for her mentor, but celibate chastity leading to an independent construction of
the self. This could be achieved only outside the walls of the harem, and outside,
as well, of those of the family fold which, she intuited, would merely impose
new restraints and dependencies. Therefore she saw him only as a potential
liberator. He accepted this role gladly and readily because he injected into it his
own interpretation: the double promise of the mission of conversion and the right
of possession over his neophyte. To his dismay, he soon discovered that the belle
Grecque identified virtue with abstinence so steadfastly that she made it the mark
of her new identity. In this instance, virtue was not “a straightforward negation
of female control” but an “interplay of constraint and will.”4 It was her will to
self-creation stemming from self-consciousness, “the bitter knowledge … of the
status” he had granted her.5
Théophé’ s efforts to overcome her past as a concubine and to become a virtuous
woman were thwarted at every step by her mentor, her “liberator, father, and god”
as she called him. Like a new Pygmalion, he aspired to make her into a femme
distinguée, a creation worthy of her creator to whom she owed “the honor of her
conversion.” She, like a new Schéhérazade, used the eloquence of the “images
of virtue” he had so successfully impressed upon her, to rebuff his passion which
threatened to undermine them. She saw in him the father she never had; he saw
in her, or rather would have liked to see, a redeemed concubine refashioned into
a western mistress, exchanging slavery for voluntary submission. Her struggle
augustinos, eastern
ConCuBines, Western mistresses
13
for personal freedom thus began when she found herself in the vortex of these
clashing forces once she had left the harem.
This essay examines the antinomies and ambiguities of Théophé’s conversion
within the framework of the binary opposition between the feminine worlds of the
East and the West. Her tumultuous relation with the French diplomat became the
battleground where these two worlds came to be entangled with personal visions
and desires. Their comparative analysis will demonstrate that Théophé’s conversion
was a complex process as she tried to forge a new identity by extricating herself
from both the physical bondage of the harem and the psychological intricacies of
western rules of conduct. To follow her progress along this tortuous path, I look
through the prism of the diplomat’s layered narrative and its refracted images:
hers, through the web of praise and accusation he cast upon her; and his, through
his inner contradictions. To better understand her transposition from East to West,
I place her story within the context of Ottoman harem culture as it was portrayed
in the West, and of representations of Greek women, many of whom lived in
harems. Indirectly, her story presaged the history of her birthplace, enmeshed in
“noble” origins and hybrid sequels enveloped by an oriental veil.
Behind the Veil: The Bonds of the East
Imaginings of life behind the veil—by definition a taboo for all outsiders—and
the more or less observable and verifiable facets of Ottoman life that poured into
the West through travel and historical narratives, became the locus of a different
social, moral, and aesthetic order. The institution of the harem in particular, often
known by its synecdochic appellation Seraglio or Sérail, had attracted the interest
and stimulated the curiosity of travelers at least since the sixteenth century, when
the Ottoman world burst into European consciousness.6
The harem’s multiple textual and visual representations entailed, among other
things, a caveat for the West which “was beginning to question the principles of
its political institutions, the goals of [female] education., the role of the family,
and the … relation between the sexes.”7 This last element was of paramount
importance for the definition of women’s role in western society. Its formulation
was facilitated by the construction of a contrastive Other, the “oriental woman.”
The two opposed prototypes and the codes of conduct they represented, were
embodied respectively by the institutions of monogamy and polygamy. Although
there was, during the eighteenth century, some discussion of the merits of
polygamy, its moral inferiority with respect to monogamy was never questioned.8
The latter was considered the abode of “maternal womanhood [that] frequently
contrasts to the wanton polygamous Other.”9
Who was this “polygamous Other,” and what were the rules of her conduct?
Harem women were of diverse ethnic backgrounds, a fact noted by travelers
since the earliest times: “What vision of lovely daughters of the Caucasus and
the Archipelago” exclaimed one of them; “Musulmans, Christians, Jews … pass
like shadows under the silver domes.”10 This ethnic diversity notwithstanding, the
“oriental woman” was an essentialized construct sweeping over local differences
14
Women in the ottoman Balkans
and past origins. She was “always portrayed as a multiplicity, a plurality”11
because the harem was seen as a crucible where female individuality dissolved
into a collective induction in the art of seductiveness channeled to the master’s
desires. Erotic, sensual love precluded the true intimacy and affection that were
known only to western women. “I presented to her [Théophé],” noted her mentor,
“the infamy of the kind of love practiced in Turkey; this facility of delivering
oneself to men’s desires, this vulgarity in the uses of pleasure, this ignorance
of everything we call taste and feeling.” Western love, on the contrary, “is a
well-regulated relation, which is the sweetest of all possessions and the greatest
advantage beauty can bestow on a woman.”12
Reciprocity, then, was the key to a western woman’s relation with a man. This
fact entitled her to a feeling of superiority over her Asiatic counterpart. Deprived
of an inner dimension and of true communion with the opposite sex, the oriental
woman was a prisoner of her own beauty, to be pitied rather than reviled. The
traveler Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur used these arguments to flatter his
female French readers: “It is mainly for you that I have written about the manners
and the usages of the seraglio. This work will furnish you many opportunities
to exercise this exquisite sensitivity, your greatest appanage. Take pity on these
beauties of the Orient and become even more grateful for the good treatment you
receive, which is owed to you, but requires a reciprocity of feeling.”13
Since reciprocity in gender relations was absent in the Orient, harem women
were confined to female company. This condition would either “set women
against each other,” or “may bond them together in collective pleasure.”14
Many observers of the Orient saw this “pleasure” not as companionship but
as concupiscence. One such observer, the seventeenth-century traveler Michel
Baudier, dedicated a chapter of his account Histoire généralle du sérrail et de la
Cour du Grand Seigneur (1624) to this kind of love, and its title is indicative of
its content: “Des Amours des grandes Dames de la Cour du Turc et des ardentes
affections entr’elles” [On the loves of the Great Ladies of the Turk’s Court, and of
their ardent affection for each other]. Thus, unlike the western ideal home bathed
in visions of domestic felicity, the harem was represented as the abode of soulless
sensuality.
It was Racine who put harem “passions” of sensuous love, jealousy, and cruelty
on the stage in his tragedy Bajazet (1672). Unlike the ancient mythological themes
of his other tragedies, this play was based on recent historical events distanced
by their exotic setting. While Sultan Amurat [Murad] was away, his “Sultana”
Roxane fell in love with his imprisoned brother Bajazet. This latter was enticed
by the promise of the freedom she could confer on him, but was held back by
his love for the Ottoman princess Atalide. The discovery of this liaison aroused
Roxane’s destructive fury, which brought about the death of all three. In Racine’s
tragedy, love and jealousy were stripped of the erotic fantasies westerners were
already associating with the harem, and were treated as universal passions. Yet,
they were orientalized because they were deemed inherent to the nature of the
harem. “In effect,” Racine asked rhetorically, “is there a court in the world where
augustinos, eastern ConCuBines, Western mistresses
15
jealousy and love are so well known other than a place where so many rivals are
locked up together and where all these women have no other occupation … than
learning how to please and be loved?”15
Roxane exemplifies these traits in
their most intense form. Racine made her the
incarnation of imagined oriental love: seductive and sensual, but also imperious,
menacing, and cruel. In the Sultan’s absence, she had taken on some of his traits.
In effect, she “wield[ed] absolute power” as his “delegate,”16 and decided to use
this power for the love she had chosen.
Bajazet, écoutez; je sens que je vous aime:
…
Ne désespérez point une amante en furie,
S’il m’échappait un mot, c’est fait de votre vie. 17
Bajazet, listen; I feel that I love you:
…
Do not throw into despair a woman in love’s fury,
If a word escapes from me, your life will be over.
This inversion extended to Bajazet, who thereby became a harem woman. He was
“transformed from a man to a woman … who openly employs his beauty as an
exchange value.”18
Bajazet est aimable: il vit que son salut
Dépendait de lui plaire, et bientôt il lui plut. 19
Bajazet is attractive: he saw that his salvation
Depended on pleasing her, and soon he pleased her.
Pleasure was all hers, and so was revenge when she discovered that Bajazet’s
promise of love had been feigned. It is her physicality and carnal love that
distinguish Roxane from Racine’s ancient heroine Phèdre [Phaedra], whose
passions were just as explosive, but more rarefied and subtle. In Roxane we see
no trace “of what we call modesty; she does not … have the delicacy or the pride
of a western woman.”20 The physical space wherein this love intrigue unfolded
was no less sinister and impenetrable: dark corridors, immured apartments, and
secret chambers where the mutes awaited their next assignment of strangulation.
In Bajazet “the seraglio is more than a setting for a tragedy; it is the supreme
tragic site.”21 In it, Racine dramatized the more sinister images of the Turkish
harem, and in Roxane’s unleashed passions, love and violence coalesced within a
place closed onto itself, a place with no exit.
At a time when interest in the Orient was increasing, and Turkey was the
Orient’s main representative,22 Racine placed the harem world in the distance
of spatial and cultural difference, which is the difference of the exotic. “The
character of the Turks,” he noted, “however modern they may be … can be seen