Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (review)

620 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:4 Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Harems ofthe Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. xii + 314pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-300-08389-0. Harems of the Mind explores Europe's enduring fascination with the East, with a focus on one of the key components of this obsession, the representation of the harem or seraglio. As Ruth Bernard Yeazell explains in her introduction, in the European imaginary, the harem—the quarters reserved for women in many Moslem households—has often been conflated with the seraglio, the palace of the Sultan in Constantinople, with the result that all Moslem men have been presumed to practise polygamy and to live amid a cohort of willing concubines. As this slippage suggests, and as Yeazell demonstrates throughout her book, Europeans' lack of knowledge about the harem has often spurred on the desire to represent it. Harems ofthe Mind is ambitiously broad. It covers a period that begins with the defeat of the Turks before Vienna in 1683 and ends with the birth of the Turkish republic and the abolition of polygamy in the 1920s. It mainly examines the work of British and French writers and visual artists, but includes a few references to Italy and Germany. As the title suggests, Yeazell approaches these representations as "imaginative projections" (p. 8) or creative exercises. Unlike many critics who have written in recent years on this topic, she does not think that they are primarily expressions of power or imperial ambition. She does, on the other hand, acknowledge that depictions of polygamy and the harem have always been intertwined with European attitudes towards marriage and the relations between the sexes. The book is divided into six parts, each of which addresses one of the major themes around which Western representations of the Orient have been organized . The opening section examines the emphasis on optics—visual experience, eyewitness testimony, stolen glances—that necessarily accompanies the representation of an institution characterized by inaccessibility. Part 2 turns to the theme of confinement and liberation. It demonstrates that although for many Europeans, harems were nothing less than prisons, for others, notably Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish life offered women freedoms and privileges lacking in Western Europe. Part 3 investigates "sex and satiety," charting European responses to polygamy that ranged from the pornographic explorations of the Lustful Turk (1828) to the wistful envy of James Boswell, and the famous assertion, made in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), that the Moslem male is like an athlete worn out by conjugal duties. Building on this foundation, part 4 shows the way in which many late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century works, including Marmontel's Contes moraux (1761) and Rossini's comic opera L'Italiana in Algeri (1813), assembled negative stereotypes of the harem to promote monogamy and the couple. Part 5 examines the representation ofemotional relationships in the harem. Here again Yeazell stresses diversity, showing that whereas in Bajazet (1672) Racine turned the harem into a "theater of Jealousy" (p. 172), other writers, including Delarivier Manley in Almyna: or the Arabian Vow (1706), celebrated the sisterly affection that blossomed there. This section also shows that REVIEWS 621 for some Victorian artists, notably the painter John Frederick Lewis, the harem signified home: a clean, orderly, secluded place far removed from the dirty, viceridden streets ofLondon. The final section addresses the temporality ofthe harem, defined primarily by European assertions of the timelessness of the Orient. Drawing on Ingres's Bain turc (1862-63), Yeazell suggests that the image ofthe timeless Orient has often been interwoven with the contemplation of death. The principal strengths of Harems of the Mind are its extraordinarily broad range of references (particularly to little-known works by women writers) and the clarity and elegance of Yeazell's prose. The author's impressive knowledge means that she is able to organize representations into coherent thematic groups, to identify the principal topoi of this corpus, and to compare and contrast representations in a manner that highlights both shared preoccupations and unexpected differences. These very strengths, however, are tied to some significant weaknesses . In her preface Yeazell notes that the book originated in...