Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures: Representing the Harem, 1800-1875 (review)

Given the flood of publications that succeeded Edward Said's incendiary Orientalism of 1978, it is hard to find a text that breaks new ground in the field of imperial studies. Joan DelPlato's Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures, however, is a noteworthy exception. In this work, DelPlato provides both an overview and an iconographical analysis of a rich visual tradition that flourished in France and Britain between the years 1800 and 1875: the representation of the harem.

Her subject, of course, is not a new one. Malek Alloula, Alev Lytle Croutier, Fatima Mernissi, and Ruth Bernard Yeazell are just some of the many authors who have published on the institution of the harem as it pertains to the arts, and countless others have written more briefly on the wide range of multidisciplinary issues that it inspires. But DelPlato's work distinguishes itself from its predecessors in several ways, including its democratic approach to images. Though photography is regrettably absent, more than 170 fine art and popular images are illustrated in the text. These range from the most canonical of harem pictures, by such renowned artists as Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, and John Frederick Lewis, to scores of mass-produced prints and little-known paintings whose popularity has suffered with the passing of years. The wealth of visual material that DelPlato examines allows her to demonstrate both the tremendous differences within the genre of harem representation, as well as the recurrence of certain pictorial formulas—the figure of the odalisque, for example—that have defied time, space, and artistic medium.

In her preface, DelPlato provides a well-balanced but cautionary introduction to the complicated political dimensions of the idea of the "harem" in the visual arts vis-à- vis Western customs and culture. Clearly, no twenty-first-century European scholar should seek a final, authoritative, or "correct" interpretation of a given harem representation— or of the system of harem representations—and DelPlato does not attempt to offer one. She explains that she is instead interested in how presumed knowledges of the harem, based on French or British decontextualizations and fetishizations of this space, are linked to the formation of power and pleasure in France and England at a particular historical moment (12), in "how these pictures functioned to both delight their original viewer and obfuscate political events taking place at home and overseas," (13). In other words, she suggests, although the referent in reality of any given image should not be ignored, it must be recognized that each harem representation in the arts was informed, manipulated, and deformed by spoken public discourses surrounding it, and that western concerns about politics, gender, class, and so on were what artists made visible. In this highly politicized context, DelPlato suggests, "each instance of the harem space functioned as a microcosm of the East—another larger space that was also (1) lived in, (2) manipulated, and (3) resisted in complex ways" (10-11).

The author's persistent application of the conservative art historical methodology of iconographical analysis does, however, limit the impact of her otherwise highly self-conscious investigation. At times, this approach trivializes individual images by presenting them as simply one in a series; at other moments, a formalist dissection of an image loses sight of its historical surroundings. Lewis's Life in the Harem, Cairo (1858), for example, does indeed illustrate the recurring motifs of the "happy slave" (70) and the serving of coffee (120), but does it not offer anything more substantive than this?

The overall structure of DelPlato's work can also lead to disjunctive or even superficial analysis. The book is organized around five thematically inspired chapters, each containing up to seven subchapters. These latter divisions are further split into an overwhelming number of narrowly focused sections comprised of one or more of the iconographical details that DelPlato has taken such care to single out. Topics for consideration therefore range...