Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History
Page 6
the pagan practices of women—accompanied the Greeks during their historical
transformations in the eyes of the westerners. Greece’s more desirable legacy,
on the other hand, had already been transplanted to the West, more precisely to
France. Cligès is the first articulation of this perceived cultural emigration, a
theme that became a leitmotif in modern times.
Our books taught us Greece was extolled
both first and most prestigiously
for learning and for chivalry.
Then chivalry came next to Rome;
now all that knowledge has come home
to France, where God has ordained
God grant that it may be retained,
…
That nevermore from France be flown
What God gave others as a loan.68
In Cligès we see the first manifestation of the promise that the West, represented
by France, held for the reeducation of the Greeks. Not unexpectedly, its first
beneficiaries were men. The first fictional Greek woman to embrace this world was
the heroine of Madame de Lafayette’s oriental romance Zaïde (1670). Set in the
ninth-century Spanish kingdom of Léon threatened by feudal clashes and Moorish
attacks, it is one of the first works of modern fiction to depict the Mediterranean as
the setting of the encounter of Islam and Christianity in their crisscrossing paths,
conflicts, and convergences. It is a hybrid world with gradations of otherness:
the Moors, though Muslim, are gallant and courteous, more like the Spaniards
than the “dissolute, barbarous” Africans. Zaïde, who was born in Cyprus, was a
product of this hybrid world. Her mother was a Christian Greek, and her father an
official of the island’s Arab ruling class. The two groups, Christians and Muslims,
intermingled freely. The language of the educated elite was Greek. The young
augustinos, eastern ConCuBines, Western mistresses
27
Arab Prince of Tharse (Thrace?) “spoke Greek with the politeness of ancient
Greece.”69 This is the work’s only reference to the classical past. Christianity was
the identifying characteristic of the Greek world that distinguished it from the
Muslim Arabs. Zaïde, who was raised a Christian, refused to marry the Prince of
Tharse because “his religion allowed [men] to take as many wives as they deemed
agreeable.”70
While en route to Muslim North Africa, the ship carrying Zaïde and her family
was blown off course, and the young Greek woman was washed ashore on the
coast of Spain where she was rescued by the Spanish nobleman Conslave. He
was struck by the great beauty of this stranger, by “the proportion of her traits,
the delicacy of her face, … the beauty of her mouth, the whiteness of her bosom,
… and by her big black eyes.”71 Images of Greek female beauty placed in an
oriental setting were already circulating in Europe. The traveler Chevremont
relates the intriguing story of an Italian captive, a young girl who was a talented
painter of portraits. She was brought to Constantinople and entered the service of
a Jewess who had access to the seraglio.72 Allowed to go there with her patroness,
within a few hours she painted “in miniature” the portraits of the most beautiful
odalisques. These portraits were then sold by the Jewish woman to Ottomans and
Europeans alike, falsely presenting them as those of Greek women. “Not only was
there scarcely any young Ottoman officer who would not hasten to pay whatever
price she asked for these rich paintings, but they even circulated in Germany and
Italy, and as far as Madrid, where they passed into the hands of the Rich and the
Curious under the agreed name of Beautés vivantes de la Grèce [Living beauties
of Greece].”73
Conslave did not, however, immediately recognize Zaïde’s features as
“Grecian,” and looked for signs of her identity. Her magnificent attire betrayed
a Moor, but she spoke no Arabic; her face was expressive, but her tongue was
incomprehensible. Looking at her without communicating was like looking at a
statue, “an eternal absence.” Only when she learned Spanish did their love blossom
and their union become possible.74 It was verbal communication that made their
love meaningful, thus fulfilling the western code’s dictum of reciprocity between
the sexes.
Théophé shared certain characteristics with Zaïde: they both came from the
hybrid world of Christian—not Hellenic—Greece and the Islamic East; they both
possessed exceptional beauty—not the beauty of ancient goddesses, but that of
exotic nobility; they both had to learn the speech of their new milieu. However,
there were just as many, and perhaps more, differences between them. Zaïde’s
family origins were undisputed, whereas Théophé’s remained ambiguous and
obscure; Zaïde’s new language skills introduced a direct line of communication
with Conslave, clearing away all the confusion of sartorial and bodily semiosis;
Théophé’s mastery of French made her liberator’s suspicions even more
pronounced, because he always injected a double meaning into her words. More
importantly, Zaïde’s westernization was an unconflicted transition guided by
a straightforward and secure male protector. Théophé, on the other hand, was
28
Women in the ottoman Balkans
manipulated and exploited by men posing as protective fathers or acting as
possessive lovers, and thus had to tread alone the path of western virtue.
In a way, their differences exemplify those of the two centuries: Zaïde
belonged to the seventeenth century, with its explicit antinomies—such as Islam
and Christianity—and unshaded symmetries. Madame de Lafayette’s readers
could identify with her characters, historically distant though they were, because
their passions and conflicts were universal. Théophé, on the other hand, was a
product of the eighteenth century, when cultural differences had become more
complex and problematic. Under the current of universal principles seen as the
fountainhead of civilization lay an undercurrent of particular values and practices,
the ingredients of culture.75 This distinction constituted the double discourse of
the Enlightenment in its encounter with diversity. The previous two centuries,
and particularly the Renaissance, had discovered and recorded it as part of the
variegated human and physical world; this was mainly the diversity of naturalists
and cosmographers. During the Enlightenment, empirical interest in cultural
diversity continued, but now it was accompanied by an emphasis on difference
exemplified by the duality of East and West.
Difference was considered either as the permanent, irreducible exotic, or as
a challenge to convert the alien into the familiar. Though a secular undertaking,
this conversion “belongs to the most common Christian tradition.”76 Prévost, to
whom religious education had undoubtedly revealed the tactics and psychology
of conversion, transposed it to the secular sphere of the cultural encounter of East
and West. Unlike Lafayette’s unproblematic victory of western Christianity over
eastern Islam, however, Prévost “challenges the notion of European superiority.”77
Théophé’s weste
rnization was one of the earliest examples of the dilemmas of
conversion cast in moral as well as cultural terms, because her removal from
the harem was a personal liberation as well as a cultural transplantation. In
this respect, Histoire d’une Grecque moderne can be seen as a bridge between
seventeenth-century universalism and eighteenth-century particularism.
There were four facets to Théophé’s conversion: renouncement of her personal
past as a prerequisite to moral reformation; the choice between the eastern and
western codes of female conduct as social determinants of individual character;
the concomitant conflict between her search for empowerment and her liberator’s
pursuit of entrapment to secure possession of her; and, finally, her deracination and
estrangement from the Orient she abandoned, and from the West that abandoned
her. Thus, under the text of conversion lay the subtext of subversion inhering in
the dual role of her liberator-possessor.
We have seen that Turks were not preoccupied with tracing and authenticating
family and ethnic origins in the selection of harem women. “There are not any
traits,” Chériber points out to the Frenchman, “that are more characteristic of our
women than they are of those of other countries.”78 Since ethnic and family origin
were of no consequence, all women entered the harem on an equal basis. This
equality, which extended to their children, remained unchanged over time: its
augustinos, eastern ConCuBines, Western mistresses
29
continuity was attested by such writers as Busbecq and Gérard de Nerval, whose
observations were separated by three centuries.79
If there was no distinction by family and national affiliation, there were
differentiations based upon beauty as well as training. The education of young
women in preparation for the harem is a leitmotif in travel accounts. Before they
were sold, these young women had to be instructed in the arts of singing, dancing,
playing musical instruments, and embroidery. The more accomplished they were,
the greater their chances of entering a wealthy household. Their education began
at the age of eight or nine when they were bought or brought in as war captives,
and continued until they reached the age to enter a harem. It was the task “of
the older slaves to take care of the young girls. To learn them to embroider, and
to serve them as carefully as if they were children of the family.”80 Unlike lady
Montagu’s neutral account, most western descriptions presented this pedagogy
as induction into the arts of love. Voltaire’s comments on Circassian women
typify this view—all the more so because he culled his information from travel
accounts:
The Circassians are poor and their daughters are beautiful, thus it is in them
that they trade the most; they furnish the harems of the Grand Signior with
beauty … they raise these daughters with the best of intentions to caress
men, to perform lascivious suggestive dances, to kindle the appetite of the
disdainful Masters … with all sort of artifices: these poor creatures repeat
every day their lessons with their mothers, just like our daughters repeat
their catechism without understanding anything.81
Théophé was the product of such an education. At the age of six, she had been
sold by a man who posed as her father to the Turkish governor of Patras and taken
to his harem quarters. There, she recalled, she was raised by a slave woman who
could hardly wait for her to be ten in order to explain how happy she would be
to please her master. “What was announced to me as my highest fortune,” she
reminisced, “was presented only in this fashion.”82 When she came of age, she
was contested by the aged pasha and his young son. Their violent confrontation
led to the death of the older man and Théophé’s journey to Constantinople. This
incident was the inception of a long series of contestations that would follow her
to the end of her life.
Her confession was the first stage of her conversion. Both she and her liberator
wanted to replace her past with a more worthy present and future that would
redeem her degrading harem experience. To initiate this process, he wanted to
ascertain that she had noble origins and was thus worthy of his protection and
attachment. Purity of origins would compensate for the impurity of her body.
“The information I wanted to obtain,” he stated, “would enable me to discover
her birth which would raise her a little in my eyes, without however wiping away
the shame she had recounted to me.”83 As in the case of Greece itself, the elevated
distant past—classical for Greece, Byzantine for Théophé—never could erase the
recent and less glorious one which returned time and again to haunt them.84
30
Women in the ottoman Balkans
Théophé herself was ready to cast off this past and turn her sights onto a new
world. She had had vague intimations of its existence when the opulence of the
harem had lost its glitter and lassitude had set in after her original bedazzlement.
She soon grew weary of the other women and their petites attentions and
looked beyond the harem walls, searching “for something good of which I had
no idea.”85 This indefinable “good” was embodied in the magic word “virtue”
which encapsulated an alternative way of life. She needed no persuasion to be
converted, because she was already predisposed to receiving the new message.
“The names of virtue, honor, and conduct … became attached to my mind …
as if they had been familiar to me. … There are men who esteem advantages in
a woman other that those of beauty. A woman can develop other merits and can
obtain other benefits.”86 If one were to look for feminist signs in Prévost’s novel,
as some critics have, Théophé’s desire to cultivate qualities other than beauty and
her disdain for the complacency of her fellow concubines certainly point in that
direction.
Théophé’s vision of life outside the harem meant both freedom of the body
and freedom from the body, because it was its very beauty that had enslaved her.
In a probing self-examination, which her liberator interpreted as a mea culpa
rather than as deepening self-consciousness, she recalled the two principles that
had guided her harem initiation. “One that had made me look at men as the only
source of women’s fortune and happiness; the other that had taught me that we
could exert on them a kind of an empire through our complaisance, submission,
and caresses.”87 In the harem imagined by the West, there was no reciprocity in
these relations and no emotional involvement. Delivered at a young age to her
Turkish master, when she was still ignorant of “the difference between the sexes,”
Théophé never knew the attachment of sentiments nor even the pleasures of love;
it was simply a “habit.” To this sensual polygamy devoid of goût et sentiment,
the Frenchman counterposed an “affective monogamy.”88 He spoke to her “of the
happiness of a French husband who finds in his life’s companion the virtues that
were lost for the Turkish ladies because of their misfortune to have never found in
men a return wo
rthy of their sentiments.”89 Intimacy and a one-to-one relationship
were what he proposed as an alternative to the infamie de l’amour in Turkey.
Up to this point, she had shared his condemnation of harem life. Her
interpretation of virtue, however, differed from his. He was perplexed and
disappointed to see that she had misconstrued his lessons. “What have I taught
her,” he remonstrated, “to inspire in her this unbending virtue? It is she who is
mistaken and who has misunderstood me. … It would be ridiculous for a man of
the world like me to engage a girl of these merits in maxims more appropriate
for the cloister.” She, however, had no doubts about the clarity of his lessons and
her interpretation of them. Now they were her own tools for self-construction.
“Your friendship and generous protection,” she asserted, “repaired from the first
moment all the misfortunes of my fate. I am indifferent to everything that does not
contribute to making me more prudent, because from now on prudence is my only
augustinos, eastern ConCuBines, Western mistresses
31
possession.”90 This firmness of purpose led her not only to repudiate polygamy,
but to reject monogamy as well.
Abstinence, then, is how she perceived virtue, because it would enable her
to break with her past and develop those “other merits” that would make her
mistress of herself. Adherence to it gave her a sense of empowerment, guiding her
on the path to self-definition. Her choice parallels that of many Christian women
saints and martyrs, both in the Eastern and Western Churches, in earlier times.
Abstinence was particularly imperative in her relations with her mentor, because
his knowledge of her tainted past would prevent her from overcoming it. But
instead of suppressing her past, she used it as an instrument to reject his marriage
proposal, which would have compromised her independence. “The memory of
her past,” he recorded, “which was always present in her mind, made her utter
injurious and contemptuous expressions about herself … [and] she pleaded with
me to open my eyes … and to cease letting such an unworthy passion blind
me.”91
Instead of intimacy, she insisted on a celibate togetherness that would exclude
the body and engage only the soul. This reordered relation between the sexes was