Hygiene in the Harem: The Orientalism of Cristina di Belgioioso

If Edward Said wrote little about Italian Orientalism (with the exception of asides to Marco Polo and Dante), it is likely in large part because Italy has no Flaubert, no Gautier, no Nerval; no Lane, no Burton, no George Eliot; no major canonical writers who traveled to, imagined, researched, and wrote about the Orient in the nineteenth century. Italian Orientalism has correspondingly not been the topic of the kind of scholarly analysis we have seen in the British and French contexts since the 1978 publication of Said's Orientalism. And yet if Italy's canonical novelists did not share the fascination of the British and French with the Orient, preoccupied as they were with the internally imagined geographies of north and south, Italy does have a long tradition of what we now classify as travel writing: accounts by merchants, explorers, exiles and emigrants too numerous to count. Among these is the mid-nineteenth-century princess-patriot and anti-emancipationist feminist, Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso, whose political exile in Anatolia in the 1850s provided the occasion for Belgioioso to take up the Orientalist tradition with reformist zeal.

An active proponent of Italian Unification, Belgioioso sought political exile in the 1830s in order to escape retribution from the Austrian authorities; she chose France, already in many senses her intellectual and cultural "home."¹ After the failure of the revolutions of 1848 in Milan and Venice, and of 1849 in Rome, she once again sought exile. But by then deeply disappointed by the role of the French in squelching the Roman republic, during which she played an active role as director of military ambulances, she left Europe entirely to set up residence in Anatolia from 1850 to 1855. Her detour through France was cultural and political, as well as linguistic; with the exception of her 1866 "Della presente condizione delle donne e del loro avvenire" and her 1868 Osservazioni sullo stato attuale dell'Italia e sul suo avvenire, Belgioioso wrote her major works in French, including the texts that will be of interest here. These recount a second detour through the Ottoman Empire: the travel narrative La vie intime et la vie nomade en Orient (first published in the Revue des deux mondes in 1855), and her epistolary collection, Souvenirs dans l'exil, written en route to taking up residence in Anatolia in 1850. The second detour is thus recounted through the first; French, and French Orientalism, are the home from which she departs and to which she writes back, all the while in exile from her native Italy.²

Like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the lesser-known Amalia Nizzoli before her, Belgioioso features the trope of "penetrating the harem" as the main attraction in the opening lines of her travel narrative.³ But whereas Nizzoli deployed it as part of a rhetoric of modesty, the Princess Trivulzio di Belgioioso is rather more at home with a rhetoric of privilege:

Il est vrai que j'étais mieux placée que la plupart des voyageurs pour connaître tout un côté fort important de la société musulmane,—le côté domestique, celui où domine la femme. Le harem, ce sanctuaire maho-métan, hermétiquement fermé à tous les hommes, m'était ouvert. J'y pouvais pénétrer librement; je pouvais converser avec ces êtres mystérieux que le Franc n'aperçoit que voilés, interroger quelques-unes de ces âmes qui jamais ne s'épanchent, et les provoquer à des confidences précieuses sur tout un monde inconnu de passions et de malheurs. Les récits des voyageurs, incomplets en ce qui touche la civilisation musulmane, le sont bien souvent d'ailleurs en ce qui touche la nature et l'aspect matériel des lieux. Que de mots ils emploient sans les expliquer, et qui, dans ce qu'on pourrait appeler la langue européene, ont une signification toute différente de celle qui leur appartient quand on les appliquer à des usages orientaux!

(Belgioioso, Asie mineure 2)⁴

The cultivated Belgioioso—author of a four-volume work on Catholic dogma, translator of...