Intimate Outsiders. The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (review)

Mary Roberts’ Intimate Outsiders takes up a well-worn theme – the Romantic-era western orientalist fascination with the harem – and breathes new life into it, turning it from a static study of hegemonic, unidirectional “representation” into a lively account of the interaction between the (largely female) elite western visitors to the harem and the oriental elite women who occupied the harems of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire.

The academic interest in Western images of the harem by now has of course almost as venerable tradition as the Western preoccupation with the harem did in the first place. So were Roberts’ work to focus on this alone, it would not, elegantly written though it be, emerge as a standout from the pack. What makes Roberts’ book striking is the other side of the coin, its parallel interest in and analysis of “the ways Ottoman elites, particularly Ottoman women, engaged with…Western visitors to their cities in order to fashion their representations” (4). What Roberts is interested in is not so much what Western visitors thought of the harem (though we do get some of that) as how the harem itself served as a zone of encounter between Women – western and Oriental – that allowed for an unusually high level of cross-cultural interaction and even exchange.

Roberts’ work is concerned with the “high nineteenth century,” the eighty years from the rule of Abdulmecit (1839–61) to that of Abdulhamit II (1876–1909), during which the Ottoman Empire underwent unprecedented social, political, and economic change and reform. Even as the Empire came under increasing Western influence – and became increasingly beholden to it from an economic standpoint – the core foci of Western colonial activity were elsewhere, to the east and to the south, and Ottoman reform (the so-called Tanzimat) was undertaken by the Ottoman state itself, not at the urging or imposition of the West. The fact that the Ottomans were not formally colonized, Roberts argues, allowed for “a significant difference in attitude to Western culture among the indigenous elites” from that of elites in, say, India or Algeria – where the trappings of Western modernity were imposed upon the indigenous subject peoples. For the Ottomans, Roberts argues, and particularly for female elites, this “difference in attitude” took the form of an easy interest in the sartorial markers of western modernity. So it is that her account reveals not just the usual story of orientalist westerners “turning Turk,” but of oriental women themselves, as it were, “dressing west.” Indeed, some of the visitors Roberts profiles come to the harem armed with valises filled with western clothes with which to ingratiate themselves with the Oriental women they have come to visit.

Robert’s narrative is fluidly written, and makes its argument clearly and well. Intimate Outsiders has the winning effect of all exposes of things that ought to be taken for granted, but that actually have never been given much systematic consideration or thought (Said’s Orientalism being itself a case in point). In Roberts’ case, the thing which ought to be taken for granted (but hasn’t, or at least, not sufficiently) is the simple surmise that just as Westerners were fascinated by the “exotic” life and ladies that were to be found within the walls of the oriental harem, so too must the harem’s own inhabitants have been fascinated by the Westerners who came to observe them.

And fascinated they were: as Roberts shows through a series of carefully-wrought case studies, a whole cast of Western women, those who’d managed to gain insider access to the harem, arrived there only to find themselves just as much observed as observer, and no less an object of curious scrutiny than the women they’d come to visit. Particularly strong, if brief, is Roberts’ fourth chapter, “Being Seen,” on the reaction given to many Western female visitors to the harem, who were compelled by the curious harem denizens to reveal their peculiar undergarments, corsets, and stays...