Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History
Page 4
as ancient. Their customs and manners are entirely different.”23 Racine was one
of the first writers to equate space, mainly cultural space, with time, and on this
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
basis to bring the Orient closer to antiquity, thus enveloping both in the aura of the
exotic Other. Racine would have agreed with Segalen’s remark that “exoticism is
not only given in space, but is equally a function of time.”24
The harem woman in Antoine Galland’s Les Mille et une nuits [The Thousand
and One Nights] (1704–17) and the genre of oriental tales it spawned was
different from Racine’s heroine.25 She was a beguiling and enticing woman who
used her charms to gain and keep her master’s favors. Unlike Roxane whose
predatory love precluded any erotic fantasies, the woman of the oriental tales
and romances “is figured in the seductive veils of the ‘oriental’ harem that at
once hide and exhibit her.”26 Her face and figure were all the more enticing
because they were invisible. As we have seen, she was not identified with a
particular nationality, social class, or religion, but with the space that confined
and consumed her life. It was a place laden with contradictions: though a fiercely
private institution, it allowed for no privacy; though identified with the feminine
sex, it was ruled by eunuchs who had no sexual identity; though a terra incognita
for all outsiders, its textual and pictorial representations filled the imagination and
excited the fantasies of generations of European men and women; though a place
dedicated to love, not all of its women tasted its pleasures, and even fewer, if any,
its affective bonds. Even the master of the harem—which existed only for his
jouissance, as Grosrichard called it—indulged in loveless lovemaking, because
“a Muslim in his harem perhaps has never known love and its resources. … Only
the lascivious tableaux that drive chaste love away can light the sparks of the eyes
of debauchery.”27 It was also deemed to be a place of loneliness: “Put behind you
all the ideas of the sérail,” the French diplomat advised Théophé, “that is, those
of solitude and perpetual constraint.”28
The “perpetual constraint” of which the diplomat spoke was enforced by the
black eunuchs, whose asexuality freed them from desire and therefore qualified
them to guard the boundaries of harem women’s desires. Women’s every
movement was scrutinized by the Argus eyes of their keepers, who
punish severely their least infractions. It is with great difficulty that their
severe guardians allow them to take a walk in the gardens. These ruthless
jailers accompany them incessantly; at their signal, the Gardeners line up
along the walls holding long sticks with cloth panels attached to their tips,
which form a wall between them and the girls. So great is the jealousy of
the Eunuchs, that if they catch a Gardener looking at the women through the
openings of the panels, they cut off his head on the spot.29
Fear-inspiring though they were, these overseers shared some of the experiences
of harem women. They too came from all parts of the empire, and had been
taken from their homes between the ages of eight and sixteen. They too had been
severed from their families and origin, a fate that relegated them to an existence of
immediacy to better render their undivided allegiance. Since individual and ethnic
identities were inconsequential, physical traits became important not as racial
markers but as task qualifiers. For the black eunuchs, the more pronounced their
augustinos, eastern ConCuBines, Western mistresses
17
blackness, the more effective they would be as deterrents against transgressions of
the boundaries of female desire.30 “Those Eunuchs whose face is less malformed,
are intended to guard the first door of the enclosure; but those who guard the
entrance to the women’s quarters, and who ordinarily converse with them, in
addition to being black, they have considerably more deformities, which make
them hideous.”31 Their “hideousness” contrasted with the names they were given,
typically chosen after the most beautiful flowers, such as Narcissus, Hyacinth,
and Rose. This practice was a way to separate the name from its bearer and thus
to further neutralize his presence. The names were more akin to the qualities
attributed to the women than to the eunuchs themselves, because “serving the
women, and being always near about them, their names may be answerable to
their virginity sweet and undefiled.”32 They were the protective shield of those
qualities that kept “the harem women’s mouth unsullied and pure” when they
addressed their keepers.33
Female purity, then, was just as much prized in the East as it was in the West.
However, from the western point of view this quality was inscribed differently
in the two codes of conduct. In the East, purity touched only the body and was
safeguarded for the master’s enjoyment alone; once the body was no longer
pure, then its value was commensurate with the pleasure it gave. In the western
context, on the other hand, purity enveloped a woman’s body and soul and
remained inviolable in a relation of monogamous fidelity and reciprocity, the
twin trademarks of her virtue. Prévost’s hero prided himself for trying to recast
Théophé into the latter mold while still indulging in images of the former.
The coexistence of purity and impurity in the harem setting was given a spacial
configuration in western accounts. Silent and secluded like a nunnery, it was
imagined as the setting of wanton scenes. Its monastic appearance was belied by
its moral disorder. The traveler Aubry de La Motraye, whom Prévost knew and
whose work he admired, claimed to have entered the women’s quarters when
the Sultan and his harem were away. From outside their rooms appeared to him
“similar to the cells of Monks and Nuns.” A eunuch opened the door to one of
them and La Motraye imagined much more than he saw, inviting his readers to do
the same: “Its window panes were painted in different colors similar to those of
several Christian Churches. In comparing the rooms of the women of the Grand
Seigneur to the cells of a Nunnery, one must exclude the rich furnishings as well
as the usage of these rooms, whose difference one may well imagine without
the need of an explanation.”34 Just as the purity of the eastern woman intimated
images of her erotic destiny, the ascetic exterior of her room conjured scenes of
sensual luxuriance.
The more concealed she was, the more vividly did the image of the oriental
woman scintillate in European eyes. Through her eyes she entered the western
imagination. The eye had many dimensions in harem literature, but they all made
it a locus of desire. It was the channel through which desire was both emitted and
attracted. “We saw you,” wrote Zachi to Usbek in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes
[Persian Letters] (1720), “wander from enchantment to enchantment … you fixed
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
your envious gaze in the most secret of places; you made us move in an instant in
a thousand different position
s.”35 Looking at the oriental woman was her master’s
exclusive privilege, “a kind of visual mastery over her.”36 The western outsider,
however, had another means of penetrating the forbidden kingdom: the visible
representations of invisible fantasies. Conjuring Théophé’s “stained” past, her
liberator let his imagination wander through her harem experiences and in his
anticipation of a charmed future when Théophé’s body would have been cleansed
and therefore become more delectable. “The caresses of her two lovers, had they
not imprinted on her a stain..? A stigma of this sort, could it not be erased by the
respite … of a few days, particularly at an age when nature renews itself … by its
own means?” Images of past sensuality and future purification were the ultimate
attraction: “I stood for sometime looking at her with an appetite, or rather an
avidity, I had never felt before.”37
In the harem, there was one eye that saw everything but felt no desire. The
eunuch’s look, like that of his master, surveyed the female body, but his was the
scrutinizing look of the examiner, not the participant. When a new woman was
brought to the harem, he inspected her thoroughly, looking for imperfections.
His sexual mutilation gave the eye unconditional freedom, because it engaged
no other senses. “Being a minister of innocence,” wrote the Chief Black Eunuch
to Usbek, “I use the freest of actions and chaste looks which cannot but inspire
innocence.”38
A woman’s eye, the only part of her anatomy uncovered in public, was deemed
the seat of forbidden desire. As with all things forbidden, the oriental female glance
peering from behind the veil—dark and mysterious, soft as velvet and burning
like coal embers, daring and cautious—mystified the western traveler. “Their
eyes,” remarked the eighteenth-century traveler Aaron Hill, “are of a Piercing
Black, almost Transparently Bright and Striking, and the larger they are, the more
esteemed. … Their Motions carry a Peculiar Grace … the Native Charms of an
Amorous Softness appear unfeignedly in every look.” In his eyes, their suggestive
“motions” revealed their “incontinent” sexuality, a result of their ignorance of
the rules of “morality” and the segregation of the sexes.39 Alexander Kinglake,
writing in the nineteenth century, found no offense in the oriental woman’s gaze,
only allurement:
And perhaps as you make your difficult way through a steep and narrow
alley … you meet one of these coffin-shaped bundles of white linen that
implies an Ottoman lady. … Of her very self you see nothing except the
dark, luminous eyes that stare against your face. … She turns and turns
again, and carefully glances around her on all sides, to see that she is safe
from the eyes of Musulmans, and then suddenly withdrawing the yashmak
[veil], she shines upon your heart and soul with all the pomp and might of
her beauty. … There is fire though, too-high courage, and fire enough in
the untamed mind … that drives the breath of pride through those scarcely
parted lips.40
augustinos, eastern ConCuBines, Western mistresses
19
The eye behind the veil, however, enjoyed a liberty unknown to western
women: the liberty of anonymity, to see and not to be seen. Not surprisingly, it
was a woman traveler, Lady Montagu, who first noted this freedom: “Their heads
and faces as well as their shapes are … wholly covered by … a ferigee [ ferâce, i.e.
overcoat]... [which] disguises her so that … ’tis impossible for the most jealous
husband to know his wife when he meets her. This perpetual masquerade gives
them entire liberty of following their inclinations.”41 Grasset de Saint-Sauveur,
echoing Lady Montagu, was more explicit in his conjectures: “Under such
Domino … one can judge how such costume favors gallant intrigues and gives
freedom to women.”42 Both authors concluded that freedom under the veil was
but a sexual escapade.
Although she did not have direct contact with the sultan’s harem, Lady
Montagu visited the private apartments of two upper-class Ottoman ladies, one of
whom was a former haseki sultan [imperial favorite], and gave an inside glimpse
of their private lives. The living space she revealed “was not merely picturesque
and exotically exciting.”43 She demystified the harem and its associations and
described a real feminine space with its own rituals, etiquette, and pleasures. She
made the two visits on the same day and was accompanied on both occasions
by a Greek lady who served as her interpreter. She was exceedingly proud to
be the first Christian woman to have received such invitations and donned the
appropriate apparel.
I … therefore dressed my self in the court habit of Vienna, which is much
more magnificent than ours. … I was met at the door by the black eunuch,
who … conducted me though several rooms, where her she slaves, finely
dressed, were ranged on each side. In the innermost I found the lady sitting
on a sofa in a sable vest.44
Her second hostess was a noble lady of extraordinary beauty. Following a similar
ceremonial reception, she entertained her guest by having her “fair maids”—
twenty of them—dance:
She made them a sign to play and dance. Four of them immediately began
to play some soft airs with instruments … which they accompanied with
their voice, while the others danced by turns. Nothing could be more artful,
or more proper to raise certain ideas. The tunes, so soft!—the motions so
languishing!—accompanied with poses and dying eyes! half-falling back,
and then recovering themselves in so artful a manner that I am very positive
the most rigid prude … could not have looked without thinking of something
not to be spoken of.45
For a moment Lady Montagu looked at this scene through the eyes of a “prude,”
simultaneously satirizing his puritanism and sharing his pruriency. Though she
insisted that in her reporting she relied on personal experience and not external
authorities—particularly male authorities—this dance activated in her images of
sensuousness and seductiveness so copious in harem literature. What the Turkish
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
lady undoubtedly intended to be an aesthetically pleasing entertainment, the
European lady saw as the enactment of the harem of the mind, which allowed for
only one interpretation of the dance and its musical accompaniment, the erotic.
Demystifying the harem was not an easy task even when undertaken by women,
because they too “are capable of seeing as men do.”46
One of the most erotically charged scenes depicting a Turkish officer and his
concubine was composed by a nineteenth-century writer using the pseudonym
“Me D…” The scene takes place in 1821 on the besieged Acropolis, where its
disdar [governor] revels in carnal delights amid violence and destruction.
A Turk of a mature age, possessing a martial face and tall stature, dressed
in a magnificent costume, was lying nonchalantly on silk cushions, next to
a marble table laden with liqueurs; facing him was an odalisque of about
/>
twenty years of age with a face more pretty than beautiful. … Her bosom
was almost uncovered and her mousseline dress trimmed with gold fringes
was so light that she was almost nude. She had set aside a lute that she
had just finished playing; the Turk, his eyes inflamed, held her hand while
pulling her closer to his cushion while passing his arm around her waist.
…
The apartment was furnished with all the Asiatic luxury; white marble
pilasters with gold decorations were placed between voluptuous paintings
and formed the enclosure …; the ceiling, made entirely of mirrors, repeated
scenes even more voluptuous than those of the paintings, which, if one
raised one’s head, one would believe oneself to have caught a glimpse of
the pleasures of the Houris.47
Like the mirror on the ceiling, the author’s vivid tableau encapsulated western
images of oriental love: opulence, enervating languor, excitement and indulgence
of the senses, music as a sensual stimulant, violence and pleasure cohabiting in
the oriental male, cultivated seductiveness emanating from the female.
The harem in Prévost’s novel has almost none of this graphic sensuality. “The
Bacha’s women,” observes the French diplomat, “numbered twenty-two and they
were all together in a ‘salon.’ … Among a large number of servants of both sexes,
I remarked that mine were eunuchs. They all stood at the corner ready to execute
every order. … They [the women] had their instruments brought in; some began to
play while others danced with sufficient grace and elegance.”49 Chériber’s harem
is almost desexualized here, because it is the place where the two codes of female
conduct, the eastern and the western, met and began to compete for ascendancy in
Théophé’s conflicted identity. It was only later, after Théophé had left it, that her
mentor began to fantasize—not about what he had witnessed, but about what he
imagined. Fantasy was more potent than the eye.
augustinos, eastern ConCuBines, Western mistresses
21
Greek Women in the Harem
Why did Prévost choose a Greek woman, une Grecque moderne, as his heroine?
Perhaps because her “noble origins” and oriental present made her a potential
candidate for reform. In her double heritage, the boundaries between East and