Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History
Page 54
objectifying women and portraying them as natural objects of appropriation and
targets of violation. As Nancy Paxton has written of colonial rape narratives,
the metaphoric use of sexual violation “performed double duty”: it “naturalized
British colonizers’ dominance by asserting the lawlessness of Indian men and, at
the same time, shored up traditional gender roles by assigning to British women
the role of victim, countering British feminist demands for women’s greater
political and social equality.”47
The stereotypes discussed here are alive and well. Tales of Balkan maidens
and Turkish ravishers played an important role during the conflicts in Yugoslavia
in the early 1990s,48 no doubt going a long way towards justifying the mass
rapes and other atrocities in the minds of their perpetrators. What is more, every
deployment—every “tour of duty,” so to speak—makes them stronger: as Bloch
wrote more than eighty years ago, “One easily believes what one needs to believe.
A legend that has inspired resounding actions, and particularly cruel ones, is pretty
close to indestructible.”49
schick, christian maidens, turkish ravishers
297
Figure 10.7. Greek and Bulgarian nationalists respectively rescuing Crete-as-woman and
Macedonia-as-woman from Turkey-as-harem. Cartoon published in the Bohemian paper
Humoristické Listy (20 March 1897). John Grand-Carteret, La Crète devant l’image: 150
reproductions de caricatures grecques, françaises, allemandes, anglaises, autrichiennes,
hongroises, bohémiennes, danoises, espagnoles, italiennes, russes, suisses, américaines
(Paris: Société française d’Éditions d’Art L.-Henry May, [1897]).
Notes
1. Bjelić and Cole 2002: 285. In a more recent context, Bjelić and Cole criticize
the “sensationalistic act of ethnopornography in which a country… appears as
a metonym for the universal rapist” (294). A very enlightening critical study
of the projection of sexuality onto nationhood (though not necessarily in the
context of war) is Mosse 1985.
2. Duehren 1901; Morin 1918.
3. The best known work on the subject is Hirschfeld 1930; an abridged English
translation appeared as Hirschfeld 1937, and a third volume focusing on World
War II was published in German in 1968. Less known books and pamphlets
include Gallo 1912; Debenedetti [c. 1916]; Spier-Irving [c. 1917]; Vorberg
1918; Baumgarth [c. 1919]; Brunner 1922; Schoene 1925; Fischer and Dubois
1937.
298
Women in the ottoman Balkans
4. As the following pages demonstrate, Kerstin Grabner and Annette Sprung are
wrong in asserting that rape became a propaganda tool for the first time during
World War I. (Grabner and Sprung 1999: 161–76.) At most, what World War I
may be credited for is the uprecedented level and sophistication of its wartime
propaganda. For a discussion of the “sexual fear” motif, see Schick 1999:
140–47 and the references cited therein.
5. Pettman 1996: 51. On the symbolic identity of woman and territory, and the
consequent symbolic role of the trope of rape in times of war, see also Seifert
1996: 13–33.
6. Dauzat n.d.: 45, 59 (my translation). On “the micro-modifications that the
message undergoes as it propagates itself,” see also Ploux 2003: 9.
7. Bloch 1921: 17, 31 (my translation).
8. The literature trying to make sense of wartime rumors and propaganda
during and soon after World War I is quite large. See, e.g., Langenhove 1916;
Lucien-Graux 1918–20; Bloch 1921: 13–35; Ponsonby 1928; Viereck 1930;
Wanderscheck 1936; Gloag 1939; Read 1941.
9. Langenhove 1916: 198 (my translation).
10. McCarthy
1995: 62, 64. Here I am less concerned with what did or did not
take place, and more with the effect the dissemination of these stories had on
the political realities of the day. I might mention in passing that a counter-
narrative did exist, albeit a marginal one; on Ömer Seyfettin’s novella Beyaz
Lale (White tulip), first published in 1913, see Arslantunalı 2006.
11. See
Skidmore 1935: Chapter 10. On the motif of sexualization in medieval
anti-Muslim Christian polemics, see Daniel 1960: Chapter 5; Setton 1992:
Chapter 1. As Daniel shows, it was not only Muslims that were sexualized in
this discourse, but Islam itself.
12. Jacques
de Clerq, Mémoires, ed. J.A. Buchon, in Chroniques d’Enguerrand
de Monstrelet (Paris, 1826), 13: 147 (my translation); Mathieu d’Escouchy,
Chronique, ed. G. du Fresne de Beaucourt (Paris, 1863–64), 2: 35–36; both
cited in Schwoebel 1967: 12–13, where other interesting examples also
appear.
13. Johannes
Brenz, Wie sich Prediger und Leien halten sollen, so der Türck das
Deudsche Land uberfallen würde: Christliche und nottürfftige Unterrichtung
(Wittemberg, 1537). A full translation appears in Bohnstedt 1968: 46–51; this
passage is on 47.
14. Ein Sendbrieff darjnn angetzeigt wirt vermeinte vrsach warumb der Türck
widder die Hungern triumphirt vn obgelegen hab. MD xxvij (Dressden:
Wolffgang Stöckel, 1527); cited in Bohnstedt 1968: 24.
15. W
olfthal 1999: 78–80.
16. See for example Droulia 1974; Spencer 1973;
Tsigakou 1981.
17. All Byron quotes are from Byron 1905.
18. Grosrichard 1998.
schick, christian maidens, turkish ravishers
299
19. McGann
1968: 156; Sharafuddin 1994: 247, 158. I discuss the nineteenth-
century western identification of Circassians with Greeks—a spurious
connection, needless to say—in Schick 2004: 97–104.
20. All Hugo quotes are from Hugo 1944.
21. I
have discussed the ubiquitous theme of captive Christian women and their
Muslim/Turkish masters—and the various functions their captivity narratives
played in western thought—in the Introduction to my annotated anthology,
Schick 2005.
22. Anon. [1828]: 5–6. Other page numbers in the text.
23. Pardoe n.d.: 150.
24. On
the strained relationship between Powers’ Greek Slave and slavery in
America, see Nelson 2004: 167–183. For a discussion of public reception to
Powers’ Greek Slave, see Kasson 1990: Chapter 3.
25. The
poem was reportedly published under the initials “H.S.C.” in The
Knickerbocker Magazine; it was reprinted in the pamphlet Anon. 1848: 19.
26. Lester 1845: I: 88.
27. “Hiram Powers’
‘Greek Slave’.” ([Browning] 1900: 198.)
28. DelPlato
2002: 93; more generally, on the figure of Greek harem women in
orientalist painting, see 90–103.
29. W
illiam Ewart Gladstone’s notorious pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors and the
Question of the East (Gladstone 1876), which was first and foremost an
opportunistic tool with which to attack the Disraeli government, did much
to create violently anti-Turkish sentiment in Britain; see, e.g., Harris 1939.
A good example of the hysterically racist discourse that followed is Freeman
1877.
30. Smith 1908: v–vi.
31. I
thought initially that this may be a spurious reference, but it is genuine. I am
very grateful to Ozan Yiğitkeskin for tracking it down and providing me with
a copy.
32. V
illiot 1905: vi–xx (my translation). Other page numbers in the text.
33. See,
for example, Sherman 1980; Carpenter 2004. The latter is a readable,
journalistic account; one could, however, take issue with the characterization
of this incident as America’s “first” modern hostage crisis: after all, the
Barbary Wars were fought precisely because Americans had been taken
hostage, and the early nineteenth century would be considered “modern” by
most historians.
34. In
this book, as elsewhere, non-Turkish Balkan Muslims (e.g. Albanians) as
well as other Muslim subjects of the Empire (e.g. Circassians, Arabs, and
Kurds) are often depicted as mere proxies for the Turks.
35. Introduction
by Herbert Stone in Smith 1909: 3 (my translation). Other page
numbers in the text.
36. In
fact, this arbitrary change of context is far from unique. Although Jaroslav
Čermák’s painting in Figure 10.5 was situated squarely in Herzegovina when
300
Women in the ottoman Balkans
first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1861, its engraving is titled “Episode of the
Massacre in Syria”! (Strahan [c. 1880]: 1: plate 137.)
37. Cf. Bryce 1916: xxi.
38. Pratt 1916.
39. Smith
and J.S. 1932: 6–7. I am grateful to Ivan G. Schick and Mirna Šolić for
their help with Czech texts.
40. For
example, Brunner (1922: 84) mentions postcards intended “to incite the
soldiers against the Turk” that circulated in the Romanian army during World
War I. He describes six of the postcards and reproduces one, and although he
appears unaware of Sieben’s Balkangreuel, it is clear that the images to which
he refers were all taken from there.
41. I
must say that the style of these images appears to me to be very different
from—and quite a bit less refined than—Sieben’s; however, all the books in
which they are reproduced attribute them to him. In any case, here is a list of
all the images in this set that I have found to date, and where they appear: A
harem scene in Institut für Sexualforschung in Wien 1928–31, 3: 697; another
harem scene in Englisch 1932; an Arabian scene in Welzl 1929: 75; a Balkan
scene in both Welzl 1929: 96 and Institut für Sexualforschung in Wien 1928–
31, 2: 848; and another Balkan (?) scene in Welzl 1929: 152. In addition,
I have recently acquired a period photograph of an apparently unpublished
harem scene from this series stamped on verso “ARCHIV D. INST. F. SEX.
FORSCHUNG WIEN,” for which I am most grateful to Isabelle Azoulay.
42. This
book was published as the first volume of the series Die Disziplin bei
allen Völkern. Eine Geschichte der Körperschaften aller Nationen. It is
organized in two parts, one on corporal punishment and cruelty in Turkey—
notably in the harem—and the other on the Balkans. I am only aware of one
other volume in the series, on corporal punishment in Russia.
43. Editors’
Introduction in Kleinman, Das, and Lock 1997: xi, emphasis added.
44. Kleinman and Kleinman 1997: 9–10, emphasis added.
45. Pettman 1996: 49, 51.
46. Sharpe 1993: 66–67, 120.
47. Paxton 1992: 6.
48. This
is perhaps not the place to delve into recent politics. Interested readers are
refered to the following sources for examples of sexualized war propaganda
rooted in the material discussed in the present essay: Gutman 1993: ix–x,
quoting Milovan Milutinović; Cigar 1995: 70, quoting Nada Todorov;
MacDonald 2002: 268, quoting Nikola Marinović.
49. Bloch 1921: 28, my translation.
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schick, christian maidens, turkish ravishers
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