Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems

by Fatema Mernissi

  But to get back to my harem obsession: What happens to shifting boundaries and unstable privileges when the filmed or painted harem image is introduced as a strategic component of sexual dynamics? Could it be that Ingres’s odalisques were a kind of shield to protect him from his own emotions? I could not wait to get back into Monsieur Ingres’s world.

  1. George Dimitri Sawa, Music Performance Practice in Early ’Abbassid Era (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1989), op. cit., p. 20.

  2. Ibid.

  3. My translation from the Arabic version of Description of Africa, translated from the French by M. Hijji and M. Lakhdar (Rabat: al Jami’a al Maghribiya li ta’lif wa tarjama, 1980), p. 234.

  4. The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 108.

  5. al-Jahiz, Kitab at-Taj: Fi akhlaq al muluk (The Book of the Crown: Behavior of Kings) (Beirut: Ach-charika al lubnaniya lil-kitab, 1970), p. 44. Jahiz died in 276 hijira, or A.D. 889. For a French translation of this essay, see Charles Pellat, “Le Livre de La Couronne,” Société d’Editions (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1954), p. 65.

  6. al-Jahiz, op. cit., p. 65.

  7. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated from the French by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 73.

  8. My translation of the original, from the famous Book of Songs (Kitab al Aghani) by Abi l-Faraj al-Isbahani. The quote is in vol. 16, p. 345.

  9. Bernard Lewis, Islam, translated from Arabic (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), vol. II, p. 140.

  10. Hilal Ibn Sabi’, Rusum Dar al Khilafa (Rules and Regulations of the ’Abbasid Court), translated from Arabic by Elie A. Salem (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1977), p. 73.

  11. Quoted by Imam Ibn al-Jawzi , Kitab dammu l-hawa, publisher not identified, 1962. The author lived in the twelfth century.

  12. Al-Asbahani, Al Imaa Ach-chawair (Slave-Girl Poets), op. cit., p. 41.

  13. “Mais des médecins commencent à parler de l’homosexualité (le mot n’est guère utilisé couramment par eux qu’à partir des années 1880) comme d’une perversion à soigner et non plus d’un vice à punir. C’est là un progrés important puisque l’ ‘inverti’ n’est alors plus justiciable des tribunvaux correctionnels mais des cabinets médicaux. A Vienne, Krafft-Ebing, l’un des maîtres de Freud, publie sa ‘Psychopathia sexualis’ où il étude longuement, au titre de la ‘sexualité antipathique’ ‘les sentiments homosexuels dans les deux sexes.’” Odon Vallet, L’Affaire Wilde, collection Folio (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 30.

  14. Mas’udi, Meadows of Gold, op. cit., pp. 390-391.

  10

  In the Intimacy of a

  European Harem:

  Monsieur Ingres

  How did Monsieur Ingres manage to have a real Christian wife, whom he married in front of a priest, and at the same time officially paint and sell nude odalisques? Did his wife get jealous when he gazed for hours at the buttocks and thighs of La Grande Odalisque? As an Arab woman, I would have been watching him very carefully, just as the jarya had watched Harun Ar-Rachid in his harem, where jealousies flared and burned many lives. Was Monsieur Ingres in love with his wife or was theirs an unromantic mariage de raison, an arranged marriage? Was he a wildly passionate man, so hot and sexy that Madame Ingres could not cope with his lustful cravings and so accepted the fact that he painted nude images to calm himself? This could be an explanation for the presence of the mysterious Turkish odalisques in a republican French household. It is similar to the explanation frequently given in my hometown of Fez, whenever a middle-aged wife looks for a young bride to help her satisfy her husband’s virile demands. Or, at least, those virile demands are often the official explanation provided. The real reason is usually economic: In a country where polygamy is enforced by men as sacred law, the aging wife volunteers to find her husband a second bride in order to be able to stick around. The wife swallows her pride and controls her jealousy as she tries to create a new role for herself — that of the removed, but dignified, asexual, menopausal first wife. Without the security of a salary or second income, to express jealousy when your aging husband is ogling younger women is to risk embarking on a penniless future.

  Jealousy is so demeaning, as we all know. When I am jealous, it is the only time I can understand how easy it would be to become a criminal. Often, the Muslim woman who chooses to swallow her jealousy turns to religion as a substitute and creates for herself a spiritual life by regularly attending the mosque and religious celebrations. This, after all, is the “Orient,” where injustice against women is still camouflaged as sacred law. But when a modern Muslim woman has a salary, like myself, the jealous fights that rage in Muslim kingdoms are similar to those that rage in the republics. Many of my male university colleagues complain about jealous wives and girlfriends who slice their car tires so badly that the gentlemen think twice before upsetting them again. And Madame Ingres was freed from the priests and their manipulations thanks to the French Revolution, wasn’t she? Did she really enjoy witnessing her beloved husband dreaming so openly about exotic rivals? Did Monsieur and Madame Ingres have a stormy marriage? Did she scream at him to stop him from painting odalisques? Or shove him down onto her couch and ravish him? I would have buried the damn brushes or given them away to needy painters. How do the French deal with emotions? Does the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen say anything at all about jealousy?

  Ingres was nine years old in 1789, the year in which the French people established “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” as the foundation of the Republic of France. And Ingres was a true son of the ideals of the French Revolution: Born in modest circumstances, he then rose up the social ladder effortlessly, his talent recognized, honored, and splendidly rewarded. But if the Republic changed social conditions and paved the way for children of humble origins to shine professionally and thrive economically, nothing of the sort was guaranteed in the more shadowy fields of romance and emotional fulfillment.

  Ingres’s public life unfolds like a magnificent advertisement for the French Republic. But the Revolution did not seem to have made the successful young man any bolder emotionally. He was not able to take the initiative in choosing his own wife, but instead fell back on the traditional arranged marriage. He got engaged twice to young women who attracted him, but for whatever reason, both engagements were broken off.

  For me, as an Arab woman extremely preoccupied with human rights, Ingres’s life is fascinating. Although he was a liberated Western man fed on democratic ideas, he couldn’t choose his own wife and fantasized about slave women as the epitome of beauty. What kind of revolution, I wonder, do we need to make men dream of self-assertive independent women as the epitome of beauty?

  The 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was a landmark in the history of mankind. In it, subordination of women was rejected as a sign of despotism. Despotism and slavery were both condemned as shameful characteristics of uncivilized Asian nations. “The servitude of women,” wrote Montesquieu in The Spirit of Laws, “is very much in conformity with the genius of despotic government, which likes to abuse everything. Thus in Asia, domestic servitude and despotic government have been seen to go hand in hand in every age.”1 The writings of Montesquieu, who was born in 1689 and died in 1755, twenty-five years before the birth of Ingres, inspired the French people. And the monstrous Asian despotism that Montesquieu so roundly condemned when defining his cherished democracy was none other than that of the Turkish Ottoman empire.2 Therefore, one would expect that a painter who celebrated odalisques, or Turkish slaves, as ideal beauties in the early days of the French Republic would have been rejected as an uncivilized savage. But this was not so; not only was Ingres’s career successful, but his paintings of odalisques were bought by some of the most influential political figures of his century.

  Ingres was born to modest parents in Montauban, a small city in Tarn-et-Garonne. “His father, Jea
n-Marie-Joseph, had settled in Montauban as a decorative sculptor and rapidly became the artist for every job in the town. . . . In 1777, he married Anne Moulet, the daughter of a master wigmaker at the Court of Aides, by whom he had five children, of which the oldest was Jean-Auguste-Dominique.”3 Montauban was a troubled city during Ingres’s childhood, and he lived under the shadow of religious violence. A city afflicted with social unrest is never an advantageous environment for a child, but it is especially unsettling for the firstborn of a large family whose father is an artist with an irregular income.

  Although Ingres was born in a secular republic that guaranteed freedom of thought and pushed priests out of the political limelight, religion still had an enormous influence. As a small boy, he was literally immersed in Christian culture, starting with the ritual of baptism. Later, he was sent to a religious school where he surprised his stern instructors by developing “profane” skills in such areas as music and drawing. “First, the child was put in school with the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes (Brothers of Christian Schools). These monks, troubled by the events and in search of a difficult re-adaptation, taught very little and badly. What knowledge the child acquired was mediocre: too many gaps, great lacks of learning even in the basics. Ingres would regret this for a long time to come. Yet, precocious gifts showed up in him: they took the form of violin and pencil.”4 Music and playing the violin would become the painter’s lifelong hobby and he would give the French language a new expression: “Le Violon d’Ingres.” This meant, among other things, that a person who has many talents is forced to relinquish some and enjoy them as hobbies only. Nonetheless, Ingres was, according to experts, an excellent musician.

  At the age of eleven, Ingres was sent to the Académie de Toulouse, and at age seventeen, his painting abilities were so impressive that he was dispatched to Paris to study in the studio of the great master painter Jacques-Louis David. There, he discovered that his classmates enjoyed an affluence and savoir faire that he lacked. This realization, according to one Ingres biographer, Norman Schlenoff, caused him to develop an enormous shame for his humble origins that he never really overcame. Ingres seldom spoke, for example, about the time that he worked as a busboy in his uncle’s café, rinsing glasses, drawing portraits of clients, and playing in impromptu orchestras for neighborhood dances. The young painter would soon take his revenge on his well-to-do classmates, however.

  At the age of twenty-one, Ingres received the first Grand Prize of Rome, an honor coveted by every student in David’s atelier. The Grand Prix would permit him to continue his training at the French Academy in Rome. Money problems did not allow him to actually leave for Rome until five years later, in 1806, but receiving the Prize had another immediate advantage — he was excused from military service. This was not a minor privilege at that time, as Napoleon’s army was then transforming the map of Europe and the Mediterranean. In 1798, the French army had invaded Egypt, one of the jewels of the Muslim empire, ruled by Ottoman Sultans. That invasion had shaken the world because up until then, it had been the powerful Ottoman Sultans who were threatening Europe. Ingres had turned eighteen that very year, and especially welcomed being excused from military service because he abhorred the sight of blood and never painted battle scenes, a favorite topic of many artists of his time. For many French artists, to be invited to paint battle scenes or join diplomatic missions was their only chance to travel to exotic lands at the expense of the state. Delacroix, for example, a contemporary of Ingres, was invited to travel to Morocco as part of a diplomatic mission in 1832. And it was during this trip that Delacroix made a detour to Algiers, where he visited the harem that as to inspire his famous Women of Algiers painting, re-created in France a few years later from memory, diaries, and sketches.5

  Although Ingres had not been particularly anxious to accompany diplomatic missions or visit the Orient, this does not seem to have hampered his career in any way. Years later, in 1834, he was named Director of the Académie de France in Rome, and in 1841, when he returned to Paris at the end of his mission, he was triumphantly welcomed; “The Marquis de Pastoret organizes a dinner in his honor with 426 guests followed by a concert conducted by Berlioz. King Louis-Philippe invites him to Versailles and receives him at his home in Neuilly. Commissions for portraits are multiplying.”6 In 1850, he was appointed President of the École des Beaux Arts; in 1855, he received, from the hands of the Emperor himself, the Cross of Grand Officier of the Legion of Honor; and finally in 1862, he was named Senator and given the Médaille d’Or (Gold Medal) by 215 French artists.

  But athough Ingres did not meet Napoleon on the battlefield, he could not escape him altogether. In 1803, Ingres received a commission to paint the commander’s portrait, as did Greuze, another of the era’s most important painters. The two men traveled together to the residence of the First Consul in Liège for a short sitting, but when they arrived, they discovered that they had to work fast, for “the feverishly active Napoleon had little time to pose.”7 To paint Napoleon was the dream of all French painters at that time, and after receiving recognition of such magnitude, Ingres turned to romance and love. He started to look for a bride.

  The first two women Ingres loved enough to want to marry were far from being passive odalisques. The first was Mademoiselle Julie Forestier and she was a painter and musician. Ingres was twenty-six when the engagement was officially announced in June 1806. A few months later, however, the two had to part company because Ingres finally had enough money to go to Rome. In October 1806, he arrived in the Italian city, and for the first time in his life caught a glimpse of the sea, at Ostia, a beautiful spot a few kilometers from Rome. The director of the sumptuous Villa Medicis, where the French Academy was situated, gave him a private studio with a fantastic view of the Pincio.

  Once settled in Rome, Ingres did not forget about his fiancée, and sent her father a gift — a painting of a landscape of the Villa Borghese. But one year later, during the summer of 1807, he broke off his engagement and Mademoiselle Forestier hastily returned the painting to him. That very year, as if to compensate for his disappointment, Ingres painted La Baigneuse à mi-corps, which depicts a nude seated woman, seen from the back, her arms apparently crossed over her breasts. She is wearing a magnificent silk turban carelessly tied that is so characteristic of many of Ingres’s later odalisques, including his famous Baigneuse de Valpinçon (Bather of Valpinçon), named after the person who acquired the painting. The bather seen from the back was “Ingres’s first great painting of the female nude,” writes critic Robert Rosenblum. “[It] creates a world of breathtaking stillness [of] the elusive ideal of timelessness, classical perfection, which periodically haunts Western art.”8 This same mysterious, faceless bather will also haunt Ingres for more than fifty years. She will still occupy center stage in his Turkish Bath, which he finished in 1862, when he was an old man past eighty. “Ingres must have realized that with this nude he had achieved a kind of immutable perfection,” writes Rosenblum, “For just as he might copy, with variations, the eternal harmonies invented by Raphael, so too was he to re-create his own Bather of Valpinçon in a series of more elaborate bathing compositions that culminated with The Turkish Bath.”9

  After his first failure in love, Ingres waited five years before he became engaged again, this time to an exotic Scandinavian woman. He was thirty-two when, in 1812, he wrote to his parents asking for their permission to become engaged to Laura Zoega, the daughter of a Danish archeologist. But this engagement was even shorter than the first, and broken off abruptly.

  The following year, Ingres decided to take a much less romantic approach to choosing a companion — he would marry someone he did not know. He turned to the wife of his friend Monsieur Lauréal, a high-ranking official in Rome’s French court, and she suggested her cousin Madeleine Chapelle, a thirty-one-year-old modiste, or maker of fashionable attire. He corresponded with her, decided to marry her — a woman he had never seen — and asked his friends to schedule an interview. Madeleine
came to meet her future husband, and they convened near Nero’s tomb outside Rome, on the road to France.

  Then, on the fourth of December, 1813, Ingres and Madeleine Chapelle wed. Although not much is known about Ingres’s domestic life, one thing appears to be certain: He and Madeleine had a monogamous marriage. However, only a year after their wedding, Ingres introduced a slave woman into his emotional life — his famous Grande Odalisque. But citizen Madeleine Ingres did not scream and protest as a Muslim woman would. In my native Fez medina, women staged huge uproars when their husbands married a second wife, holding funeral-like protests, during which their friends and relatives wailed along with them in the harem courtyards. The fact that polygamy is institutionalized by male law does not make it emotionally acceptable to women. Many queens, as historians have written, suffocated or choked their husbands when they discovered their plans to acquire a second wife, or when the rival actually arrived in the home. Still other historical records show that it was often the women who were the victims of jealousy. “A seventeenth-century document in the Topkapi Palace archives,” writes Alev Lytle Croutier in her book, Harem, “speaks of the rivalry between Sultana Gülnush and the odalisque Gülbeyaz — (Rose-white), which led to a tragic end. Sultan Mehmed IV had been deeply enamored of Gülnush . . . but after Gülbeyaz entered his harem, his affections began to shift. Gülnush, still in love with the sultan, became madly jealous. One day, as Gülbeyaz was sitting on a rock and watching the sea, Gülnush quietly pushed her off the cliff and drowned the young odalisque.”10

  It was 1814 and Ingres had just turned thirty-four. Unlike Madeleine, his French wife, who could walk and talk, and probably had many domestic chores to attend to, La Grande Odalisque was created to do nothing but lie around and look beautiful. In effect, by spending months painting a beautiful woman, Ingres was declaring daily to his wife that she was ugly! Or, at least, that is what a Muslim woman would conclude. How men’s and women’s emotions unfold in a French harem like the one created by Ingres is incomprehensible to me. What was Ingres’s emotional problem? Was he afraid to invest too much emotionally in his wife? The emotional landscape is definitely one of the keys to understanding cultural differences between East and West, I realized. Clearly, I could learn much about my own emotional problems if I could understand why Madeleine Ingres was not jealous.