Provocations
Page 19
The female principle was given great emphasis in the religion of ancient Anatolia, as shown in its multiple goddess cults. Cybele, whose priests castrated themselves and dressed in her robes, emerged from Phrygia (central Turkey) to importance throughout the Mediterranean basin. A black meteorite representing Cybele as Magna Mater (the Great Mother) was brought from Anatolia to Rome as a protective idol during the Second Punic War. The popularity of Cybele was paralleled by that of the Egyptian mother goddess Isis, to whom temples were built in Rome. Later depictions of Mary with the baby Jesus in her lap were directly influenced by traditional portrayals of Isis holding the baby Horus. Another major goddess of Anatolia was the so-called Artemis of Ephesus (an Ionian city visited by St. Paul that would play a pivotal role in the spread of Christianity). The immense temple of Artemis, built by the fabulously wealthy Croesus, king of Lydia, was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. This deity was probably originally a fertility goddess, as suggested in surviving sculpture by the many strange breast-like sacs hanging from her mummiform torso.
The birth and evolution of Judeo-Christian religious doctrine were heavily influenced by opposition to the pagan goddess cults of the ancient Middle East. Inanna, goddess of love and war, is invoked at the start of Gilgamesh, an epic from Sumer (modern southern Iraq) that predates Homer and is considered to be the oldest known story in the world: the hero-king Gilgamesh is celebrated for his construction of Inanna’s temple at Uruq (modern Warka, Iraq). Inanna’s dramatic combination of sex with aggression or physical force, which would be repeated in her descendants, the Akkadian Ishtar and the Phoenician Astarte, separates the Middle Eastern goddesses from the Greco-Roman pantheon, where the roles of love and war are split between Aphrodite/Venus and Athena/Minerva.
Inanna was also a patron of prostitutes, whose ambiguous but possibly official association with the great temple of Ishtar at Babylon horrified the Hebrews during their 59-year Babylonian Exile, following their deportation from Judah after its conquest by King Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century B.C. The memory of that culture shock would last for centuries and would take lurid, nearly cinematic form in the apocalyptic vision of St. John in the Book of Revelation ending the New Testament: the ultimate challenge to the Judeo-Christian God is the Whore of Babylon, riding a monstrous seven-headed beast (representing the seven hills of pagan Rome, the new Babylon) and holding a gold cup filled with “the filthiness of her fornication” (presumably indiscriminately harvested semen). The glamorous urban exhibitionism of aristocratic Babylonian women must have seemed sinfully decadent to the sexually conservative Hebrews, pastoralist and agrarian, with their body-shrouding wool tunics, cloaks, and flowing head-gear, designed to block the desert sun and heat.
The father god of the Old Testament is a bodiless spirit who transcends the gross material world of nature, with which pagan antiquity identified omnipotent mother goddesses. Eve, seduced by a devious serpent in a garden, was probably originally a Middle Eastern nature-goddess whose emblem was the serpent. The description in the Book of Genesis of a perpetually fertile Garden of Eden may have been inspired by the lush gardens and flowering orchards created by the marvelous gigantic irrigation projects of ancient Mesopotamia. It has been suggested that a probable location of the Bible’s mythic garden was between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in northern Iraq near the Iran border. An intriguing tale in the Apocrypha of the Bible claims that Adam divorced his first wife, Lilith, because she demanded the dominant position in sexual intercourse: Lilith was the name of a Babylonian wind-demoness.
The virtuous women of the Bible, like Sarah, Ruth, and Mary, are modest and self-sacrificing, charitably elevating the needs of others. A quite different type of Middle Eastern woman from outside the Judeo-Christian system was represented by the Queen of Sheba, who enamors King Solomon when she arrives in Jerusalem with a great caravan of camels carrying gold, jewels, and spices. It is thought that the location of wealthy Sheba was modern Yemen in southwestern Arabia. Many other strong-willed Middle Eastern women appear, however briefly, in history and legend: Semiramis (Sammu-Ramat), a ninth-century B.C. Assyrian queen, said by Herodotus to have built the famous river embankments in Babylon; Turandokht, an imperious Persian princess of the seventh century B.C. whose story was transferred to China in Puccini’s opera Turandot; the empress Theodora, wife of Justinian (sixth century A.D.) and the most powerful and politically engaged woman in the annals of the Byzantine Empire, based in Constantinople (modern Istanbul).
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D., there was a reversion to feudalism in Europe and an ebbing of international travel and contacts. The next major era began in the seventh century, shortly after the death of the prophet Mohammed, as Muslim invaders from Arabia conquered Egypt and Palestine, including the city of Jerusalem. European attitudes toward Islam and Muslim culture in general were forged in incomprehension and hostility from the start: the medieval Crusades to reclaim the Holy Land for Christianity (1095–1291) began a pattern, often called “the clash of civilizations,” that has been seen by some as still operating as recently as the invasion of Iraq by allied forces led by the United States during the Second Gulf War (2003–11). However, Islam itself has historically been expansionist by ideology and policy, spreading west through North Africa to Spain and east through the Indian subcontinent to Indonesia.
Little was known or even rumored about Muslim life until the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 and overthrew the Eastern Roman Empire, with its ancient Christian creed: the great basilica of Hagia Sophia became a mosque, flanked by four tall minarets. The immense and autocratic Ottoman Empire, which would last for nearly 600 years until it was cut up into sometimes illogical ad hoc new nations by the victorious European powers after World War One, is the ultimate source of many of the lurid fantasies or misconceptions about Middle Eastern women that fill Western literature, art, and movies. Orientalism in most of its forms is a lingering bequest of the Ottoman era.
The Ottoman-Venetian wars, which began in the fifteenth century and erupted sporadically until the early eighteenth century, disseminated rumors and aroused curiosity about Turkish life and customs. In his book, Turkish History, which described his captivity by Turks during the 1470s, the Venetian Giovanni Maria Angiolello gave one of the first descriptions of the imperial harem at the Ottoman sultan’s vast Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. A general European awareness of the ongoing Ottoman military threat is evidenced in Shakespeare’s Othello, which begins in Venice but quickly transports its characters to the island of Cyprus, where Othello commands the Venetian forces countering an attack by the Turkish fleet. It would be a Venetian bombardment in 1687 that ignited a Turkish gunpowder arsenal on the Athenian acropolis and nearly destroyed the Parthenon.
Orientalism as we know it began to take shape in the early eighteenth century, when the first European translation of The Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern and Indian folk tales, was published by Antoine Galland in twelve volumes (1704–17), to huge success. This book, also called Arabian Nights, contains the tales of Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sinbad the Sailor that have become part of world literature and popular culture. The central character, dominating and structuring the narrative frame, is a woman—Scheherazade, who postpones execution by (and then enamors) a despotic sultan through her mesmerizing power of story-telling. It has been speculated that Scheherazade may have been modeled on Al-Khayzuran bint Atta, a Yemen-born slave who married a sultan and gave birth to two Abbasid caliphs in eighth-century Persia: one was Harun al-Rashid, who turned Baghdad into a glittering capital city. The magic and mystery of the Arabian Nights were beautifully captured by Rimsky Korsakov’s haunting tone poem, Scheherazade (1888), which was used as the score for the Ballets Russes production of Scheherazade, starring Nijinsky as the Golden Slave, in Paris in 1910.
French culture seemed particularly receptive to Middle Eastern themes, perhaps partly be
cause of France’s longtime involvement with Algeria, which had been conquered by Muslims in the eighth century A.D. In 1671, Jean Chardin, son of a wealthy Parisian merchant, published a description of the coronation of the shah of Persia, which he had witnessed on his travels through the Middle East. After further years of wide-ranging exploration, Chardin published Travels in Persia (1686), which was so well-received that it went through several expanded editions. Racine wrote a fact-based play, Bajazet (1672), about perilous machinations at the Ottoman court in Constantinople. In 1721, Montesquieu, inspired by Chardin, published an epistolary novel, Persian Letters, in which two Persian noblemen leave the polygamous seraglio to travel through France. Giovanni Paolo Marana’s Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1734), influenced by Montesquieu’s book, intrigued European readers further with tales from the Middle East. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman sultanate, lived in Istanbul for two years (1716–18) and sent a first-hand report to friends of a hammam (Turkish bath), where groups of women bathed scandalously nude; however, like virtually all outsiders, she was unable to penetrate the imperial harem and could only relay what she had heard rumored. Nevertheless, when Lady Mary’s book, Letters from Turkey, was published in 1763 after her death, it made a sensation throughout Europe. Mozart’s opera, Abduction from the Seraglio (1782), partly borrowed from a prior libretto, illustrated an increasing appetite for titillating sexual innuendo about harem life under Ottoman rule.
Napoleon’s 1798 expedition to Egypt was a military fiasco but a cultural triumph: the teams of scholars and cartographers whom he had brought with him collected a huge amount of information that, after its laborious processing in France, inaugurated the field of Egyptology. Among the chief French achievements was the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, leading to Champollion’s decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. There was a wave of Egyptomania across Europe, influencing jewelry, clothing, furniture, architecture, and tombstones.
Lord Byron was instrumental in shaping a vision of the Middle East as a realm of the exotic. His verse drama, The Tragedy of Sardanapalus (1821), depicted the fall of Nineveh, as the last king of the Assyrian Empire destroys his palace and treasure, along with his concubines and himself, in an apocalyptic conflagration. Delacroix’s tableau painting, The Death of Saradanapalus (1827), inspired by Byron’s poem, is a masterpiece of High Romantic theater, overflowing with sex and sadism. In his picaresque poem, Don Juan, Byron shows his charmingly boyish protagonist thrust into female clothing by a masterful sultana, Gulbeyaz, and then smuggled into the imperial harem for sexual mischief.
Byron joined the Greek war of independence against the Ottomans: he even had his portrait painted while wearing a luxurious flowing turban with Orientalizing Albanian dress. His death at age 36 from a fever at Missolonghi, Greece, shocked the world. Two major paintings by Delacroix were inspired by the Greek rebellion: The Massacre at Chios (1824), where the Turks are shown as cruel villains slaughtering women and children as well as combatants, and Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi (1826), which mourns a punishing Turkish siege. (Over 20,000 civilians may have died in the atrocity on the island of Chios.) Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales (1829), a collection of poems inspired by the Greek uprising, similarly portrays the Turks as barbarians.
The most indelible images in art of the Ottoman imperial harem were certainly created by Ingres, the primary figure of nineteenth-century neoclassicism, following Jacques-Louis David. Ingres’ Grand Odalisque (1814) embodies the ultimate sexual fantasy about the inhabitants of the harem. A naked odalisque (meaning “woman of the oda,” Turkish for “room”) lounges with passive indolence, undoubtedly enhanced by her opium pipe, which sits to one side. She is turned half away, so that we contemplate her strangely elongated, pear-like hips and buttocks from behind, even as her sullen eyes meet ours over her languid shoulder. A piquant erotic touch is the exposure of the soles of her feet, which are as soft and pampered as a baby’s: this privileged prisoner of the harem has never walked anywhere; her identity is defined by horizontals, like the opulent divans and patterned rugs from which she rarely rises.
Ingres’ odalisque is so light-skinned that it is natural for us to assume that the artist has projected his own European racial preferences or assumptions into the picture. But no: the Turkish sultans did indeed favor light-skinned Circassian or Georgian concubines, slaves purchased as adolescents from the mountainous Caucasus region of Southern Russia. Ingres’ opium too is authentic: both the sultans and their female flock partook heavily of pleasure-inducing opium of the highest quality (often in pill form), refined from Asia Minor’s plentiful fields of white poppies. More than 40 years later, Ingres’ sensual vision of the Ottoman harem remained unchanged, as he executed his other famous painting on this theme, The Turkish Bath (1862). Its tondo form (used for the Madonna by Michelangelo and Raphael) makes it resemble a secret peephole, as we voyeuristically peer into a packed, humid, all-female womb-world, where nudity and intimacy have lesbian overtones. It is important to stress that the hammam, which descended from the Roman baths (thermae) of late Byzantium and Constantinople, never had pools or tubs of water during the Muslim era: standing water was thought to be infested with evil spirits. Instead, water was poured from silver or gold bowls held aloft by attendants, who used loofah sponges to briskly rub and cleanse the bather, seated on a stool. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who refused to remove her stiff corset in the Istanbul hammam, found the scrubbing unpleasantly harsh.
Among other notable Orientalizing works of the nineteenth century were Flaubert’s novel, Salammbo (1862), which depicts ancient Carthage with a Hollywood-like luridness of sex and violence, and Verdi’s Aida (1871), which was commissioned by Ismail Pasha, the khedive (viceroy) of Egypt, for the new Cairo Opera House and which portrays ancient Egypt as a hotbed of tyranny and treachery. But in the late nineteenth century, a new persona of the Middle Eastern woman gradually emerged: replacing the passive, recumbent odalisque of the sequestered harem was the belly-dancer, hyperkinetic and spellbinding, a virtuoso performer commanding an audience and shattering Judeo-Christian sexual taboos. Interest in the novelty of belly-dancing was provoked by the appearance of real Middle Eastern women dancers at the gigantic, massively popular industrial expositions held from mid-century on in London, Paris, Philadelphia, and Chicago, where a wide range of international cultures were represented in exhibits and performances. Of three dancers called “Little Egypt,” by far the most famous was Farida Mazar Spyropoulos (a Syrian married to a Greek), who performed in the “Street in Cairo” exhibit of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and who successfully toured Europe afterward.
A glamorous image of the Middle Eastern dancer as merciless femme fatale took root in late-nineteenth-century French and British culture and helped create the perverse ambiance of decadent aestheticism, which spilled over into Vienna before World War One and into Weimar Germany after it. The persona was incarnated in Salome, who was identified by the ancient Jewish historian Josephus but who remains unnamed in the Bible, where she is described in the Books of St. Mark and St. Matthew as having been instigated by her malevolent mother Herodias to demand the head of John the Baptist as a reward for dancing before her stepfather, Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee. At the 1876 Salon in Paris, the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau exhibited two parallel works that had an electrifying impact on the writers and artists who saw them: Salome Dancing Before Herod and a watercolor, The Apparition, where the seductively bejeweled dancer seems immobilized on her toes by a hallucination of John’s bloody head, hanging in midair in a bursting corona. It is said that Moreau was inspired by a head and halo that he had copied from a Japanese print at the Palais de l’Industrie in Paris in 1869.
Gustave Flaubert, already working on his story, “Herodias” (the last thing that he wrote), visited the Salon and saw and admired the two Moreau art works. Before she dances, the Salome of Flaubert’s “Herodi
as” removes her veil—a new motif in her legend. Flaubert’s interest in Salome actually began during his childhood in Rouen, where the tympanum of one of three front doors of the cathedral (whose facade was repeatedly painted by Monet) contains a fascinating medieval bas-relief of Salome acrobatically dancing on her hands, as an executioner lifts his sword over the praying St. John. During his extensive travels in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey (1849–51), Flaubert had been deeply impressed by the Middle Eastern women dancers, particularly Kuchuk Hanem (a native of Damascus performing in Egypt), with whom he evidently had an intense sexual affair.
Another French writer, Joris-Karl Huysmans, stunned by Moreau’s paintings at the Salon, inserted a very long and ecstatically detailed ode to The Apparition in his novel À Rebours (1884), which would be called “the breviary of the Decadence” and which became the unnamed evil book that corrupts Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. In 1877, The Apparition was exhibited at London’s Grosvenor Gallery, where Wilde surely saw it, because he published a review of the British paintings displayed in the Gallery at that time. Wilde saw the painting again at the Louvre in 1884, the same year that À Rebours was released. Wilde’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, states that the Salome chapter of À Rebours had “a staggering effect” on him. The result was the play Salome, which Wilde wrote in French in 1891. An English translation, illustrated with stylishly erotic black-and-white Art Nouveau drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, was released in 1894. Wilde’s heroine is a dreamy fantasist and aggressive fetishist whose dance of the seven veils becomes a symbol of art itself. A premiere production of Salome starring Sarah Bernhardt was shut down during rehearsals by London authorities in 1892 because biblical stories were prohibited onstage. Wilde never saw the play performed: the first production opened in Paris in 1896, while he was in prison.