The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Why such a weird configuration? At least part of Bernier’s answer seems to lie in physical appearance. In skin color, the third people (Asians) are “truly white, but they have broad shoulders, a flat face, a small squab nose, little pig’s-eyes long and deep set, and three hairs of a beard.” The Lapps are “little stunted creatures with thick legs, large shoulders, short neck, and a face elongated immensely; very ugly and partaking much of the bear.”

  Veering off toward sexual desire, Bernier dedicates more than half his paper to the relative beauty of women, employing phrases that became commonplace and ideas fated for oblivion. Showing a certain relativism, Bernier admits that each people will have its hierarchy of beautiful and ugly women, but, he insists, some peoples really are better looking than others: “You have heard so much said [already of] the beauty of the Greeks,” he says, and “all the Levantines and all the travelers” agree that “the handsomest women of the world are to be found…[among the] immense quantity of slaves who come to them from Mingrelia, Georgia, and Circassia.” Nothing beyond the commonplace so far. But Bernier continues, speaking, he says, only for himself: “I have never seen anything more beautiful” than the naked black slave girls for sale at Moka, in the Indian Ocean off the coast of East Africa.1

  While Bernier’s paper appeared in a prestigious journal and laid a lot of groundwork, its brevity soon consigned it to history’s footnotes. A longer travel account by Jean Chardin appearing five years later gained much wider circulation. Its depiction of the beautiful white slave echoes through the ages.

  JEAN-BAPTISTE CHARDIN (1643–1713)—also known as Sir John Chardin—a French Protestant (Huguenot) whose family were jewelers to the court of Louis XIV, traveled routinely to Persia and India in the 1670s and 1680s seeking rare baubles for the French royal household.* His two-volume account Journal du Voyage du Chevalier Chardin en Perse & aux Indes Orientales, par la Mer Noire & par la Colchide (The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East Indies, 1673–1677) (1689) describes a trip that deviated from his usual route. Preventing his going via Venice through Constantinople to Asia Minor, local disputes rerouted Chardin north of Constantinople through the wilds of the Caucasus (today’s Chechnya) and Georgia. In the seventeenth century, this was untamed country, according to Chardin the lands of “people without Religion, & without Police.” A scientist at heart, he took meticulous notes while racked by constant fear.2 Chardin loathed this chaotic Black Sea region, where brigands controlled the highways, often threatening his goods, his freedom, and his life. As he says of the Circassians,† “it is impossible for them to glimpse an opportunity for thievery without taking advantage of it.” They eat with their hands, go to the bathroom right next to where they eat, and then continue eating without washing.3 Chardin is totally disgusted.

  The habits of the Mingrelians (Caucasian people on the northeast coast of the Black Sea) are vile. They “and their neighbors are huge drunkards, worse than the Germans and all the northern Europeans when it comes to drink.” Not only do Mingrelians consider assassination, murder, and incest as admirable traits, they steal each other’s wives without compunction. The women are not much better; they wear too much makeup, and their bodily stench overcomes whatever amorous intention their appearance might have inspired. “These people are complete savages,” Chardin rails. “They used to be Christians, but now they have no Religion at all. They live in wooden cabins and go around practically naked…. The only people who go there are slave traders.”4

  The hugely profitable slave trade powered the Black Sea economy. Turks made the money, but Mingrelians supplied the goods. Chardin deplores Mingrelians’ unbelievable “inhumanity—their cruelty toward their compatriots and even people of their own blood…. They sell their wives and children, kidnap the children of their neighbors, and do the same thing. They even sell their own children, their wives, and their mothers.” Chardin was appalled to find “these miserable creatures were not beaten down; they seemed not to feel the tragedy of their condition…. Knowing their value as slaves, women are erotically adept and entirely shameless when it comes to the language of love.”5

  And a precise value it is, too. The cargo of Chardin’s Black Sea vessel sold according to an erotic price scale. Pretty girls aged thirteen to eighteen went for twenty crowns,* plainer girls for less. Women went for twelve crowns, children for three or four. Men aged twenty-five to forty sold for fifteen crowns, those older for only eight or ten. A Greek merchant whose room was near Chardin’s bought a woman and her baby at the breast for twelve crowns.

  The woman was twenty-five years old, with a smooth, even, lily-white complexion and admirably beautiful features. I have never before seen such beautifully rounded breasts. That beautiful woman inspired overall sensations of desire and compassion.6

  This particular scene was destined for greatness, but Chardin found other lovely faces and figures among the people of the Caucasus mountains and, especially, in Georgia.

  The blood of Georgia is the most beautiful in the Orient, & I would have to say in the world, for I’ve never noticed an ugly face of either sex in this country, and some are downright Angelic. Nature has endowed most of the women with graces not to be seen in any other place. I have to say it is impossible to look at them without falling in love with them. No more charming faces and no more lovely figures than those of the Georgians could serve to inspire painters. They are tall, graceful, slender, and poised, and even though they don’t wear many clothes, you never see bulges. The only thing that spoils them is that they wear makeup, and the prettier they are, the more makeup they wear, for they think of makeup as a kind of ornament.7

  The enduring legend of beautiful white slave women—Circassians, Georgians, Caucasians—dates from Chardin’s seventeenth century. (See figure 4.1, “Young Georgian Girl,” and figure 4.2, “Ossetian Girl.”) However a twentieth-century photo of Georgians shows them as fairly ordinary looking people. (See figure 4.3, Georgians in Tbilisi.)8

  In fairly short order, Chardin’s unflattering descriptions of squalid and smelly Caucasians would fade from race theory, but his image of the powerless, young, disrobed female slave on the Black Sea acquired eugenical power.9 So well received was the work as a whole that The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East Indies, 1673–1677 gained its author membership in the newly founded Royal Society of London.10*

  Within fifty years, Chardin’s erotic figure had invaded Western art, whose preferred term, “odalisque,” derives from the Turkish odalk, meaning “harem room.” Georgian, Circassian, and Caucasian were interchangeable names for the figure. Each term refers to young white slave women, and each carries with it the aura of physical attractiveness, submission, and sexual availability—in a word, femininity.11 She cannot be free, for her captive status and harem location lie at the core of her identity.12

  Fig. 4.1. “Young Georgian Girl,” 1881.

  Along with a number of others, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) picked up this theme. Living in northeastern Germany, now part of Poland, Kant put forward his own ideas of race in Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1763). Here Kant actually attacks the idea that standards of human beauty may differ by culture. Beauty ideals are universal, he maintains, for “the sort of beauty we have called the pretty figure is judged by all men very much alike.” Cueing on Chardin, Kant agrees that “Circassian and Georgian maidens have always been considered extremely pretty by all Europeans who travel through their lands,” as well as by Turks, Arabs, and Persians. He even picks up Chardin’s statement that Persians beautify their offspring through connection with slave women and deplores the fact that great fortunes could arise from a “wicked commerce in such beautiful creatures” sold to “self-indulgent rich men.”13 Only one ambivalence appears in Kant’s analysis: the progeny of such unethical unions often turned out to be beautiful, and clearly, Kant concludes, Turks, Arabs, and Persians (Kant lumps them
together in ugliness) could use a lot of genetic help.

  Fig. 4.2. “Ossetian Girl,” 1883.

  Next to weigh in was one of Kant’s younger East Prussian colleagues, the philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), who remains almost as influential. Although remembered for questioning the idea of an unchanging, universal human nature, Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity, 1784–91) carries on by connecting servitude, beauty, and the Black Sea / Caspian Sea region, “this centre of beautiful forms.” Like Kant’s treatise, Herder’s text—when translated into English—echoes Chardin, but changing Chardin’s Persians into Turks, and spelling with a lower-case T: “The turks, originally a hideous race, improved their appearance, and rendered themselves more agreeable, when handsomer nations became servants to them.”14 In taking note of slavery’s alteration of a host society’s personal appearances, Chardin mentions a demographic role that upper-class Europeans and Americans seldom recognized at home.

  Fig. 4.3. Georgians reading in the “Square of the Heroes of the Soviet Union in Tbilisi,” in Corliss Lamont, The Peoples of the Soviet Union (1946).

  BY EARLY in the nineteenth century, these iconic notions of beauty and its whereabouts had moved steadily westward, across France and over the English Channel into British literature. In Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa (1810), the prolific scholar-traveler Edward Daniel Clarke (1769–1822) considers the notion of Circassian beauty an established truth. The contrast between handsome Circassians and ugly Tartars appears prominently in Clarke’s narrative: “Beauty of features and of form, for which the Circassians have so long been celebrated, is certainly prevalent among them. Their noses are aquiline, their eye-brows arched and regular, their mouths small, their teeth remarkably white, and their ears not so large nor so prominent as those of Tahtars [sic]; although, from wearing the head shaven, they appear to disadvantage, according to our European notions of beauty.” And once again, Circassian beauty resides in the enslaved: “Their women are the most beautiful perhaps in the world; of enchanting perfection of features, and very delicate complexions. The females that we saw were all of them the accidental captives of war, who had been carried off together with their families; they were, however, remarkably handsome.”15

  Also in play were military rivalries that broke out around the Black Sea region, pitting the Russian and Ottoman empires against each other first during Greece’s war for independence in the 1820s and then during the Crimean War in the 1850s.* Both hostilities brought white slavery increased attention in the West, especially once word spread that Turkish slave dealers were flooding the market with Circassian women slaves before the Russians cut off the supply. Even Americans followed the Crimean War closely, picking up European culture’s enthrallment with the beautiful Circassian slave girl. This was only natural, given the American slave system, with its fascination for beautiful, light-skinned female slaves and growing sectional tensions, as exemplified in the figure of Eliza in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–52).16*

  The New York impresario P. T. Barnum, never one to ignore a commercial opportunity, took note of this purported glut of white slaves, and in 1864, as the Civil War raged, directed his European agent to find “a beautiful Circassian girl” or girls to exhibit in Barnum’s New York Museum on Broadway as “the purest example of the white race.” In the American context, a notion of racial purity had clearly gotten mixed up with physical beauty. Barnum cared a lot less about ethnicity than about how his girls looked, advising his agent that they must be “pretty and will pass for Circassian slaves.”

  Barnum’s “Circassian slave girls” all had white skin and very frizzy hair, giving them the appearance of light-skinned Negroes. This combination reconciled conflicting American notions of beauty (that is, whiteness) and slavery (that is, Negro). In light of this figure’s departure from straight-haired European conceptions of Circassian slave girls, it was probably for the better that Barnum never imported the real thing. In truth, few in the United States knew what a Circassian beauty would actually look like. But by the late 1890s Barnum’s formulation had jelled sufficiently for Americans that the idly doodling artist Winslow Homer captured her essences of white skin and Negro hair. (See figure 4.4, Homer, “Circassian Girl.”)17

  Fig. 4.4. Winslow Homer, “Circassian Girl,” 1883–1910. Ink on paper drawing, 53/4 x 83/4 in.

  The durable notion of Circassian beauty invaded even the classic eleventh edition (1910–11) of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which fulsomely praised Circassians as the loveliest of the lovely: “In the patriarchal simplicity of their manners, the mental qualities with which they were endowed, the beauty of form and regularity of feature by which they were distinguished, they surpassed most of the other tribes of the Caucasus.”18

  AN INTRIGUING disjunction dogs this literary metaphor—few images existed of actual people, whether in photographs, in paintings, or in the works of anthropologists. Such a deficit left nineteenth-century artists of the odalisque dependent on four sources: the eighteenth-century tradition of erotic art, all those sexually titillating scenes invented for aristocratic patrons; Napoleon’s time in Egypt from 1798 to 1801, which yielded a bounty of plundered objects and triggered a harvest of scholarly books; the early nineteenth-century French conquest of Algeria, which opened a window onto the Ottomans; and the Italian career of one of France’s greatest painters.19

  Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), a wildly successful French painter when the French dominated Western fine art, began his career in Italy, a country rife with Eastern influences. His odalisques, epitomes of luxe et volupté, lounge languidly amid the splendor of the Turkish harem. They look like the girl next door, always so white-skinned that they could be taken for French. The result was a sort of soft pornography, a naked young woman fair game for fine art voyeurs. Witness Grande Odalisque (1814), an early Ingres work painted in Rome, which established his reputation. (See figure 4.5, Ingres, Grande Odalisque.) Typical of the Orientalist genre, Grande Odalisque depicts an indolent, sumptuously undressed, white-skinned young woman with western European features. Her long, long back to the viewer, she looks over an ivory shoulder with a come-hither glance.

  Grande Odalisque portrays the subject by herself, surrounded by heavy oriental drapery, but many other works feature a spacious harem full of beautiful young white women. Even when “odalisque” does not figure in the title, characteristic scenery and personnel designate the scene as the Ottoman harem and the naked white woman as a slave. Now and then black characters appear as eunuchs or sister slaves. Le Bain Turc (1863), painted when Ingres was eighty-three years old, displays a riot of voluptuous white nudes and one black one lounging about the bath and enjoying a languid musical pastime. (See figure 4.6, Ingres, Le Bain Turc.)

  Fig. 4.5. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1819. Oil on canvas, 91 x 162 cm.

  American art was not far behind. The country’s most popular piece of nineteenth-century sculpture was The Greek Slave (1846) by Hiram Powers (1805–73). Larger than life and sculpted from white marble, it depicts a young white woman wearing only chains across her wrists and thigh. (See figure 4.7, Powers, The Greek Slave.) Granted, Powers’s title makes the young woman Greek not Georgian/Circassian/Caucasian, and a cross within the drapery makes her Christian rather than Muslim. But even so, The Greek Slave demonstrates Orientalist whiteness in its material, the white Italian marble so critical to notions of Greek beauty. When this monumental piece toured the United States in 1847–48, young men unused to viewing a naked female all but swooned before it. To be sure, The Greek Slave was no ordinary naked woman; Powers deemed his sculpture historical, the image of a Greek maiden captured by Turkish soldiers during the Greek war for independence. Only a few abolitionists drew connections between Powers’s white slave and the white-skinned slaves of the American South, where no measure of beauty or whiteness or yout
h sufficed to deliver a person of African ancestry from bondage.20

  Fig. 4.6. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Le Bain Turc, 1862. Oil on wood, 110 x 110 cm. diam. 108 cm.

  Fig. 4.7. Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave, modeled 1841–43, carved 1846. Marble, 66 x 19 x 17 in.

  Back in France, the odalisque retained her allure. The popular and prolific painter Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) occupied the visual art summit as a teacher at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris and frequent contributor to the Académie’s influential annual salon. His Slave Market (ca. 1867) replaces the usual harem with another characteristic Orientalist location. Standing before us is a beautiful white slave girl stripped for examination by buyers. (See figure 4.8, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Slave Market.) Once again, a black figure (here an official in the market) reinforces the painting’s exotic and erotic character.21 Not until well into the twentieth century did the genre lose its attraction, as colonial populations began pressing for independence following the First World War. Oblivious to anticolonialist rumblings, Henri Matisse (1869–1954) painted a score of odalisques in the 1920s, some of the last nonironic odalisques in art history. (See figure 4.9, Henri Matisse, Odalisque with Red Culottes.)22

  Fig. 4.8. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Slave Market, 1866. Oil on canvas, 33¼ x 25 in.

  Where culture goes, there goes critical theory. Thus, in the late twentieth century, a new field of cultural studies called Orientalism began to explore Western fascination with the exotic East and the feminization of Muslim peoples. Although this new Orientalism squared off against the voyeurism and stereotypes of nineteenth-century Western Orientalism, it remained in the thrall of Gérôme’s overpowering white slave iconography. Book jackets on two classic texts—the field’s foundational work, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), and Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather (1995)—both feature details from paintings by Gérôme: Said’s jacket does depart from the usual female odalisque to show a naked slave boy. (See figure 4.10, Orientalism jacket.) McClintock’s stays with a detail from one of Gérôme’s harem bath scenes. (See figure 4.11, Imperial Leather jacket.) Here we see more white female nakedness, black figures, and interior settings, all hallmarks of the odalisque. Yet, despite the white slave iconography of their covers, the content of neither book dwells on white slavery. Late twentieth-century American scholars seemed unable to escape Gérôme or confront slavery that was not quintessentially black.23