Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History
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eloquently expressed by Zilia in Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne
(1747). Zilia also clarified her position vis-à-vis her benefactor who wanted to
marry her. “Come, Déterville, come and learn how to spare the resources of our
soul and the gifts of nature. Renounce your tumultuous and destructive feelings;
come and learn the innocent and enduring pleasures … you will find in my …
friendship.”92 For Zilia as well as for Théophé the substitution of amitié for amour
signified an association with men unencumbered by the trappings of beauty and
desire.
For Théophé, this substitution was the key to liberation from her past and the
dawning of new possibilities. Having rejected the eastern code, she was now
entering the third stage of her conversion—the predicaments of her “free choice.”
She thought that the path to it was direct and unclouded by hidden designs and
diversionary tactics; such subterfuges were her emancipator’s domain. His memoir
is a prime example of the complexity of the motives of a liberator who seeks to
justify his will to possess and dominate the beneficiary of his actions. When the
latter asserts her independence, “a curious dialectic” begins “between contempt
and esteem.”93 Thus Théophé is both contemptible as a former concubine and
potentially admirable if he can transform her into la première femme du monde
who would voluntarily bend to his will. Should she refuse, as she does, then
his invective becomes “a rhetoric of inculpation.”94 Théophé, he declares, is an
“ingrate” whose purported transgressions he presents as prosecutorial evidence
to the reader-judge. But he subverts independent judgement by reaching his own
verdict at the beginning of his case. “I am a lover rebuffed and even betrayed …
by an ingrate who has been the continuous torment of my life.”
To make his case more convincing—and, in a way, to exculpate himself—his
testimony is not wholly accusatory: “Nevertheless, I was listened to as a father,
respected as a master, and consulted as a friend by the person I loved.” Thus,
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Théophé’s voice reaches us through the layered and contradictory allegations of
her protector, accuser, judge, and, ironically, defender, whose “testimony is all the
more problematic because he is absorbed in a solitary and deforming passion.”96
This was the passion for possession. He was like a predator who stalked his prey,
but with one important qualification: his prey had to come to him of her own will:
“I do not desire from a woman,” he told Théophé, “that which she is not willing
to grant me voluntarily.”97 If the prey resisted, he set up traps so it would destroy
itself, and in doing so prove him right. This was a game of power—not brute,
naked power, but the power of the self-righteous benefactor.
What were some of the traps he set up to bait what he thought was the rightful
prize for his magnanimity and charity? The use of her past against her and the
enlistment of deceitful and mendacious persons to surround her. A pattern had
emerged from the very beginning of their first meeting. As soon as the relation
between mentor and pupil, protector and protégée had been established, a reversal
occurred that alternated between moments of peace and harmony on the one hand,
and agitated periods of suspicion and jealousy on the other, with the concomitant
stigmatization of the coveted object. Mistrust arose simultaneously with his
decision to take her out of Chériber’s harem. “I had no doubt … that she had
taken a dislike to life in the sérail … and wished to link some love intrigue with
me.” Her Greek origins reinforced his suspicions about her dissembling: “Today,
as in ancient times, Greek good faith is an ironic proverb.”98
Nevertheless, he took her under his protection and settled her in his country
house near Constantinople. There, he promised her respect and freedom that
would enable her to forget “the ideas of the sérail.” It was he, however, that
refused to forget, because these ideas and the images they conjured stimulated
his erotic fantasies and armed his vindictiveness. Théophé had left the harem,
but, in his eyes, the harem had not left her. When she finished recounting her past
to him, he formed his own conclusions. She drew no absolution from him, only
the desirous glimpses of a voyeur contemplating scenes of an imagined harem.
“While gazing at her figure admiringly, I was doubtlessly flattered by the desire
she must have had to please me.” But the thought alone that “she was coming out
of Chériber’s hands after having been in those of another Turk, and perhaps of a
multitude of other lovers she had hidden from me, saved me from the temptation
to which the ardor of my age could have exposed me.”99 Still, temptation persisted
and fueled his will to possession through conversion.
In this self-flattering expectation, he overcame his “repugnance” and offered to
marry her. She was now all too aware of the dangers lurking under his promises and
refused. To avenge his indignation and affirm his honor, he treated her with scorn
and reasserted the rights of the master who dispenses freedom and punishment in
equal measure. Her freedom of choice was his to grant, since she “belonged” to
him. The rejected lover became a punitive judge who, however, needed to gather
evidence of her present transgressions before pronouncing a sentence. He became
just as obsessed with proving her guilty as he was with desire for her. If he could
not possess her body, he had to destroy her soul. It was at this point that her
augustinos, eastern ConCuBines, Western mistresses
33
entrapment began. Since he controlled her environment, he placed her in what he
hoped would be compromising positions. The “slaves” he employed to ostensibly
serve her better, were envious and conniving women who became his spies and
accomplices by fabricating incriminating evidence against Théophé. Even after
their treachery and machinations had been discovered, he kept them in his house
alleging pity and charity. He was like a director who set up the stage but refused
to take responsibility for his actors’ performance.
The relentless pursuit of inculpation spurred by Théophé’s unyielding virtue
was epitomized by the episode with Synèse, her alleged brother. The Frenchman
took him in with the pretext that he would be a good companion for his sister
and would also provide a buffer zone between the protector and his enticing
protégée. Synèse’s intimacies, however, went beyond the bounds of brotherly
love. Théophé’s protestations only served to increase her liberator’s suspicions
and contempt.
The Synèse incident illustrates the theme of incestuous love, l’équivoque
incestueux as Singerman calls it. Prévost treated the same subject in more explicit
fashion in Cleveland (1732–39); in Histoire d’une Grecque moderne it was more
veiled, but equally pervasive. Incest was manifested directly in Synèse’s amorous
gestures, and metaphorically in the hero’s contradictory roles as simultaneously
Thèophé�
��s adoptive father and aspiring lover.100 Though more subtly than the
incestuous brother, he played the role of father in order to gain the favors of a
lover.101 Paternalistic domination and seignorial rights had also been claimed by
M. de Ferriol, Aïssé’s protector. In 1711, when she was seventeen, he sent her a
letter in which he unabashedly stated his rights:
When I took you out of the hands of the infidels and I bought you, my
intention was not to chagrin myself and to become unhappy; on the contrary,
I intended to benefit from the decision of destiny on the fate of women in
order to dispose of you as I wished and to make you one day my daughter or
my mistress. The same destiny dictates that you be one and the other, since I
am not able to separate love from friendship and ardent desire from fatherly
tenderness; quietly, then, conform to destiny and do not separate that which
it has pleased heaven to join. You would have been the mistress of a Turk
who would have shared his tenderness with twenty other women, and I love
you exclusively.102
Although Aïssé had never been in a harem, its legacy weighed as much on her
as it did on Théophé because it was part of their oriental heritage. They were both
saved from a concubine’s fate, by definition shameful, and they were both offered
the position of a mistress presented as more binding by the feelings of a surrogate
father. The moral equivocation of this proposition never entered the mind of
these liberators. Ferriol even gave this unholy alliance quasi-religious sanction.
Théophé stated its untenability when she pointed out to her protector “that it was
not proper either for her to engage in a passion that would renew the disorders
and misfortunes she was trying to rectify; or for me who had been her master in
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virtue to abuse the just power I had on her … thus destroying the feelings she
owed to my advice as well as to her own efforts.”103 She was now fully aware
of the uses and abuses of power that threatened to destroy this delicate balance.
This realization was a sign of her deepened understanding of the antinomies of
her conversion and the ambiguities of her conditional freedom demanding her
voluntary submission.
In his relentless obsession to possess his protégée, the diplomat destroyed not
only his relationship with her, but also whatever generous impulses he might have
had and any possibility of self-insight. After the last and most explosive episode
of false incrimination perpetrated by the treacherous governess he had assigned
to Théophé, he rendered mock-Solomonian justice: he meted out punishment on
both of them, claiming that it was impossible to prove either guilt or innocence.
They were both going to be confined in the same prison, his house. Théophé’s
entreaties to be freed from such “cruel persecution” by being allowed to enter
a convent were met with contempt and stern refusal. “Suddenly, redoubling her
tears, she reduced herself to those Greek humiliations of which she should have
ridden herself in France.”104 Once more, her past came back to torment her, only
now it was not her harem history but her Greek origins whose nobility had faded
just like her beauty. Unable to bend her mind, he had lost interest in her body.
With her physical charms waning and his own health declining, harem scenes no
longer excited his passion. She was no longer la belle Grecque and contemplated
mistress, but une aimable étrangère from whom he became totally disengaged.
Even her death was not known to him for some time.
In the end it was he who became a stranger to himself, because he had betrayed
his professed principles of virtue, probity, and, above all, freedom of choice.
But he did not destroy them because they lived on in Théophé during her brief
life. His duplicity contained a double message: the promise of the West, whose
idea of self-definition through the conscious application of learned principles
made the Grecque moderne a truly free person; and the circumvention of these
ideas by their propagator, who was consumed by the passion of possession and
domination. Once the idea of freedom had been implanted in Théophé, however,
no constraints could obliterate it. Her life and death are testimony to the rewards
and perils of free choice, perhaps the key to this enigmatic novel.
Théophé’s choice between the promise of the West and the experience of the
East was an educational voyage whose final destination would elude her. By
privileging the former over the latter, she faced the contradictions of dependence
and independence, of estrangement and a search for belonging. In her quest
for renewal and selfhood set within a new value system, she experienced the
predicament of cultural transposition alternating between freedom and constraint,
praise and contempt. Her only constant guide was virtue, which began as a
connector with its source—the West—and eventually became her only sustenance
and provider of inner strength. It empowered her to renounce both her past as
an eastern concubine and a future as a western mistress, and to become mistress
of herself. The encounter of East and West in her formation, and their ensuing
augustinos, eastern ConCuBines, Western mistresses
35
intersections and collisions, set her apart from her Greek predecessors in Ottoman
harems because they had known only one world, the East.
Notes
1. The fictional diplomat has been identified as Charles Augustin, marquis
d’Argental, comte de Ferriol, Ambassador to Constantinople (1699–1711).
In 1698 he bought a four-year old Circassian girl, Aïssé, at the slave market
and brought her to France where she was raised by his sister-in-law. See
Sgard 1995: 254.
2. Prévost 1978, 4: 14.
3. Ibid., 13.
4. Schwartz 2003: 270.
5. Hill 1969: 199.
6. For a descriptive list of sixteenth-century French travel accounts on the
Ottoman Empire, see Rouillard 1938.
7. Grosrichard 1998: 125.
8. For an examination of this issue, see Nussbaum 1994. Also, the traveler Aubry
de La Motraye pointed out its advantages, chief among which were “the
curtailment of all public debauchery … and the prevention of the problems
that bastards and illegitimate heirs create for families.” (La Motraye 1727,
1: 205).
9. Nussbaum 1994: 141.
10. William James Joseph Spry, Life on the Bosphorus (1895), cited in Schick
1999: 198–99.
11. Schick 1999: 202.
12. Prévost 1978: 81.
13. Grasset [de] Saint-Sauveur 1796, 1: xiii–xiv. The superiority-inferiority
antithesis between western and eastern women was placed in a Christian-
Muslim context in the nineteenth century. “Only Christian men know how to
honor and cherish their wives,” wrote “Me D…,” a pseudonymous nineteenth
century novelist. “They share everything, suffering, love, pleasure. Religion
has made their love eternal. Oh! The smile of a faithful wife … is worth all
the seductive caresses of the houris created by the perverse imagination of the
Muslims.” Me D
… 1822, 2: 27. Sophia Poole wrote in the same vein: “That
Christianity is the only medium through which happiness may be attained …
is most certain; therefore, as the Easterners are very far from being Christian,
… so they are very far from being really happy.” [Poole] 1844: 74–75.
14. Nussbaum 1994: 140.
15. Jean Racine, “Seconde Préface” (1676), in Racine 1960: 24.
16. Barthes 1964: 97.
17. Racine 1960: ll.538–42.
18. Barthes 1964: 100.
19. Racine 1960: ll.155–56.
20. Martino 1971: 206.
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
21. Grosrichard 1998: 124.
22. Ibid., 175–76.
23. Racine, “Seconde Préface,” 24. Lady Montagu expressed a similar idea in a
letter to Pope written in Adrianople on 1 April 1717: “I read over your Homer
here … I can assure you that the princesses and great ladies pass their time
on their looms … in the same manner as you find Andromache and Helen
described.” (Montagu 1837, 1: 262.) The same linkage was expressed by
Delacroix when he visited Algiers in 1832: “It is beautiful! It is like Homer’s
time.” Delacroix cited in Yeazell 2000: 38.
24. Segalen 1995: 749.
25. For the evolution of the Oriental tales and romances during the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, see Mannsåker 1990.
26. Pucci 1990: 150.
27. Grasset [de] Saint-Sauveur 1796, 1: 8.
28. Prévost 1978: 43. The loneliness inflicted by the Sultan’s neglect became
even more stringent after his death when “his women were locked up for the
rest of their days in the old Seraglio [the ‘Palace of Tears’] where they dry
up languishing.” (Tournefort 1717, 2: 234.)
29. De la Porte 1757: 167.
30. To ensure the absolute control of harem women, older women supplemented
the services of black eunuchs. “These old women have the task to watch
over the conduct of young girls. They sleep in the same Hall as them in order
to hear what they say and to see what they do.” (De la Porte 1757: 168.)
Another traveler was more explicit as to what “they might do”: “By every
ten virgins there are lamps burning so that one might see plainly throughout
the whole room: which doth both keep the young women from wantonnesse,
and serve upon any occasion which may happen in the night.” (Withers 1653: