Oriental Panorama: British Travellers in 19th Century Turkey (review)

Oriental Panorama: British Travellers in 19th Century Turkey, by Reinhold Schiffer; pp. viii + 445. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999, $36.00.

How did British travelers experience and describe Turkey during the nineteenth century? Filled with lively anecdotes and interspersed with illuminating insights, Oriental Panorama surveys such diverse topics as the difficulties of journeying to and through Turkey, the practice of dressing in Turkish attire, images of the countryside, reactions to popular sights such as the Hagia Sophia, the moral character of the Turks, and the meaning of the harem.

The author, professor of English and American literature and cultural studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, takes as his primary target Edward Said, who wrote famously in Orientalism (1978) "that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was [. . .] a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric" (204). This "leveling assertion," Schiffer counters, is simply "not borne out by the sources," at least those he consulted, some 160 travel narratives. Instead, Schiffer emphasizes "[t]he number of contrasts, fractures, differences, modulations and nuances of the 'Ottoman experience'" (2). He pays great attention to changes in the discourse of travel over time, in a sustained attempt to undermine Said's ahistorical approach. He notes, for example, that travelers interpreted the landscape first in theological (Christian) terms, then on a historical (secular) basis, and finally on aesthetic grounds (82).

Elsewhere he charts the shifting assessments of Istanbul's labyrinthine streets, which "served alternately as indices of a romantically Oriental town, or of a backward civilization, or of an utterly unpleasant hybrid--a town no longer Oriental and yet not sufficiently European," and then finally by the end of the century, "of the age-old Oriental city hidden among the masses of Europeanized houses" (153). And, in a chapter on the physical and moral character of the Turks, Schiffer traces their transformation (at the hands of British writers) from tall, solemn, and haughty during the late-eighteenth and early- nineteenth centuries, to "oppressor[s] of freedom, a cruel and bloody foe, an enemy of civilization, [and] the epitome of barbarism" during the Greek War of Independence, to sober, virtuous gentlemen who resembled the bourgeois Victorians who were describing them (240).

One of the most important contributions this book makes is to de-glamorize the world of nineteenth-century travel. As Edwin John Davis wrote in 1872, "A man needs the digestion of an ostrich, the skin of a rhinoceros, and the strength of a horse to travel in Anatolia" (45). Roads were poor if they existed at all; there was the threat of pirates in the eastern Mediterranean and bandits on the approaches to the larger cities; and hotels, especially in Eastern Turkey, were characterized by "filth, stench, and vermin," although as Schiffer points out, "filth became picturesque, as long as it was Oriental filth" (51).

Schiffer is also much better attuned than Said to the difference between representation and reality. For example, his analysis of Jean-Léon Gérôme's Slave Market (1866)--although the painting itself is one of several that is strangely not included among the book's twenty-six black-and-white illustrations--which argues that the light-skinned girl who is being inspected is not a symbol of the cheapness of life in the East, but was in all likelihood prized for her paleness, provides a badly needed corrective to the criticism of Orientalist paintings by Rana Kabbani and Linda Nochlin.

Schiffer similarly takes great care to point out those instances when Turks represented themselves in ways similar to British representations of them. In a chapter on the behavior of Turks, Schiffer notes how British travelers emphasized the "silence" of male activities such as resting, meditating, and smoking, in contrast to noisier women's activities such as dancing and gossiping. For some authors this "Oriental calm" served as a healthy contrast and an antidote to "European bustle"; for others it was "a moral defect...