- Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature
In 1893, Cairo's Arabophone newspapers tracked representations of Egypt at Chicago's World Exposition. Furious that belly dancers on the Midway were the most noticeable emblem of their nation, editors posed a question to readers: why weren't Egyptians in control of representing Egypt to the fairground's swelling audiences? Yet, Egypt's literate elite, if they could not materially alter these representations, were not passive bystanders. One woman writer called on female compatriots to send their handiwork to [End Page 754] the Exposition's Women's Building to make spectators aside Lake Michigan aware of women's industry along the eastern Mediterranean. Late-nineteenth-century Arabic, Persian, and Turkish periodicals demonstrated consistent, anxious local vigilance over representations of "the Orient." Gendered representations were key: as it did in Victorian Britain, debate raged over women's rights, specifically women's access to public spaces. Sensitivities about Western portrayals of local women fed into struggles over control of space and image.
Intimate Outsiders considers a parallel story: encounters among Victorian English and Ottoman elites that yielded images of and from Ottoman harems. Diverging from earlier scholarship on Orientalism, Mary Roberts argues that these artifacts cannot be seen as monolithically "Western" but rather were products of collaborating and competing priorities among Ottoman elites as well as European artists and audiences—a call to bring complexities of Ottoman culture into histories of Orientalist art. Like other recent scholars of imperial culture, Roberts focuses on how entanglements of Western travelers, artists, and writers throughout the late-colonial world shaped their work, not always in expected or controllable ways.
Roberts identifies European artists and memoirists who claimed privileged access to elite society in Ottoman Istanbul and Cairo by virtue of residence and, for European women, physical access to elite and royal harems. This gave them cultural capital as interpreters of "the East" to their home societies. Roberts crosses boundaries both generic and geographic, putting European Orientalist painting into conversation with travelogues by women (and a man or two). Intimate Outsiders moves from a European masculine perspective on harems, in the career of painter John Frederick Lewis, to European women's refurbishing of harem spaces for Anglophone readers, to Ottoman royal women's interventions in European visual modes as they sought portraits painted by Western female artists—and sought to manage those images and their circulation. Roberts interweaves textual portraits of these individuals with deft readings of paintings and memoirs.
Engagingly written, Intimate Outsiders is situated within a conversation among academics that has continued at least since publication of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), and occasionally it assumes academic insider-ness. For example, Roberts never really explains the term "harem" for a broader audience or discusses its variability (she focuses closely on royal harems while sporadically invoking "elites" in a general sense). Forays into aesthetic theory are too brief to help academic outsiders: the reader who does not already grasp Jacques Lacan's theorizing of the gaze and its reconfiguration of agency that need not privilege the masculine eye may find Roberts's brief encapsulation insufficient to give her use of Lacan convincing purchase.
But these tracings of lives and works are captivating. Lewis's mimicry of Ottoman "tradition," in dress and domestic life, gave him ethnographic authority for Western audiences eager to consume Eastern interiors. (Never mind that of all Lewis's harem paintings, only the first was not produced in his Surrey studio!) His visitor William Makepeace Thackeray—whose 1844 travelogue made Lewis a household name in Britain—thought it a successful performance, contrasting it distastefully to the "modernizing" dress of young Ottoman elite men on the street. Roberts beautifully establishes Lewis's first, and famous, harem painting's construction of a masculine gaze through perspective and narrative organization; its ethnographic authority through [End Page 755] elaborated detail and overpowering "authoritative" social information; its representational authority as confirmed by reviewers of...