Discovering Scheherazade: Representations of Oriental Women in the Travel Writing of Nineteenth-Century German Women

This article explores how three nineteenth-century writers, Ida Pfeiffer, Ida Hahn-Hahn, and Luise Mühlbach, represented women from the Orient in their travel narratives. Because European women travelers such as Pfeiffer, Hahn-Hahn, and Mühlbach had privileged access to female spaces in the Orient (harem and the Turkish bath), their accounts challenged the traditional image of the lascivious Oriental woman and, by doing so, confirmed the established Western idea of the beautiful Oriental woman. Hence, I argue that these writers used their travelogues not only to describe the appearance and habits of Ottoman women but also—in juxtaposition—to heighten the position of women in Western society. Furthermore, I claim that Eastern women were not passive subjects of Western constructs but cleverly manipulated their visitors’ impressions.