Limits of the Imaginable in the Early Turkish Novel: Non-Muslim Prostitutes and Their Ottoman Muslim Clients

In the first Ottoman Turkish novels written during the late nineteenth century, the development of romance between a man and a woman was restricted by certain rules that migrated into fiction from the social sphere. Since unrelated Muslim women and men were hindered from cultivating a romance by various social rules, the problem of representing romance was solved by bringing together an Ottoman Muslim man and a non-Muslim Ottoman woman from the ethnic and religious minority groups in the Ottoman Empire, such as women from Greek, Armenian, or Jewish minorities or from European communities. Therefore, the space of the novel becomes a forum for the ethnic and religious anxieties of the time. Early Turkish novels, in this sense, imaginatively embody the unspoken boundaries between different ethnic and religious groups, allowing the reader to visualize, allegorically, the complicated relationship between the Ottoman Muslim and non-Muslim minorities in the nineteenth century. In these novels, while wives and cariyes (domestic female slaves) in Muslim households represent a sanctioned, domesticated form of sexual conduct, prostitutes and courtesans inhabit a danger zone that is associated with pollution, contamination, and disease. This bifurcated sexual code, when thought of within the complexity of late Ottoman history and culture, presents a cultural metaphor—the threat of sexual contact with prostitutes—through which to read the era's ethnic vulnerabilities and sensibilities. A critique of Westernization is mixed with the critique of non-Muslim values and traditions, ultimately producing an exaltation of Ottoman Muslim identity and its value system.

Drawing on the early Ottoman Turkish novels written by elite men, but especially focusing on Ahmed Mithat Efendi's novel, Henüz On Yedi Yaşında (Only Seventeen Years Old; 1882), I demonstrate just how this dynamic functioned: that is, how the non-Muslim prostitute, representing a dangerous female sexuality linked to contamination and the disease of Muslim men, poses a threat to Ottoman unity.¹ In reality, Ottoman men who lived in or traveled to İstanbul often met prostitutes at the brothels located in Beyoğlu, on the European side of İstanbul. The brothels and other public spaces, such as European-style cafes, theaters, restaurants, bars, and beer and music halls of Beyoğlu made it into a center of attraction and anxiety for young Ottoman men, for it provided a zone in which they could meet with non-Muslim and European women and develop a potentially amorous relationship. The authors of the first Turkish novels were drawn to these peculiarly modern İstanbul spaces, and to the non-Muslim and European women who were encountered in them when in search of an erotic narrative dynamic. Without the excursions to Beyoğlu, where "free love" (or love at a price) could be experienced by Ottoman Muslim men, it would be almost impossible to write a love/romance story. The plot would remain within the realm of allegorical or symbolic love, which were popular romance narratives in Turkey and in other Muslim territories such as in Persian and Arabic cultures. In other words, I argue that it required the very existence of an "Other"—in this case, a non-Muslim Other—to drive the development of the novel genre in Turkey.

In Only Seventeen Years Old, Ahmed Mithat constructs cultural context and the language of sexual intimacy between strangers. By portraying the brothel as the commercial and political as well as the familial arena, he produces the thematic links of different worlds of commerce, politics, and literature. The sexualized female body is most often represented by a prostitute, but in Only Seventeen Years Old, Ahmed Mithat expresses ethnic and religious anxieties by making the prostitute an Ottoman Greek woman. My questions in this article are the following: How did this novel help define the terms of cultural and ethnic verisimilitude for early Ottoman fiction? Why is it in the realm of the most private relations (the sexual) that the most public relation (the dependence of the Ottoman Empire on non-indigenous economic, political, and cultural support) finds its aesthetic symbolization? Several of the cultural...