Colonialism and gender in the east: representations of the harem in the writings of women travellers.

ABSTRACT

Edward Said's analysis of the Orientalist discourse constructs a position of enunciation more questionable when the Western observer is female. Women were generally recipients of, rather than active participants in, colonialist projects. They accessed the Orient from a differently gendered perspective. Following Reina Lewis and Billie Melman, who suggest how female writers contested or subverted Orientalist discourse, this paper seeks to show that European women's texts, though shaped by race and class, could offer a counter-hegemonic viewpoint. Their writings about the Middle East and the harem challenge the dominant textual codes. Their empathy and receptivity co-exist with Eurocentricity.

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Edward Said's well-known discussion of Orientalist discourse centres on the idea of the Other, 'a collective notion identifying "us" Europeans as against all "those" non-Europeans [...] the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European people and cultures'. (1) The traveller/observer accesses the alien or unfamiliar through various strategies contingent upon an imperialist position of Western supremacy, defining the foreign in terms of opposition (which often means negation or abstraction). Said's theories are dependent on two assumptions: first, that the sense of self against which the Other is positioned embodies the age's cultural hegemony, thus representing the dominant voice; and second, that the 'self' exists as a trope of positive function and value against which an alternative 'not-self' can be measured. As many feminist critics have pointed out, however, these theories construct the position of enunciation in colonialist or Orientalist discourse as essentially male, based on an East/West oppositional relationship as one of 'power, of domination', governed by 'a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections' and expressing 'a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different [...] world' (Said, pp. 5, 8, 12). Furthermore, Said argues that the Orient itself has a principally feminine cultural resonance, signifying a sexuality which is both desired and feared in the Western (male) imagination; Flaubert's representation of his Egyptian courtesan, possessed and voiceless, becomes a model here.

Said's Orientalism clearly becomes questionable when the Western observer is female. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European women were generally recipients of, rather than active participants in, colonialist projects and their accompanying ideologies. Moreover, while female travellers, as much as their male counterparts, may already have 'received' the East as a region of exoticism and promiscuous sexuality, through literary and pictorial representation as well as from ethnographic studies such as Edward Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), it was not available to them as a site of heterosexual desire. At the same time, their gendered sense of selfhood, conditioned by factors such as the position of Western women within marriage and the nature of European domestic life, impacted upon their responses to the foreign Other. Said himself has acknowledged this skewing within his thesis. In a later revisionary article, he admits that Orientalism is not a monolithic and autonomous praxis, but relates to a larger enterprise or critique that includes feminism and women's studies. He also raises the question of 'how knowledge that is non-dominative and non-coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics, the considerations, the positions and the strategies of power'. (2) This raises further questions. Do women, as much as men, render the Orient as Other? Are they empowered to speak with an alternative voice free from or subversive of the dominant (male) discourse? Or, to put it another way, are they more likely to establish a dialogic relation with the Other, in a way that erodes, instead of erecting, difference? Reina Lewis reminds us that women's alternatively gendered access to positionalities of imperial discourse produced a gaze on the Oriental Other that was both less monolithic and less reductive than Said's formulation suggests. (3) Similarly, the project of Billie Melman's study, Women's Orients, is to write women into discussions of the cultural experience of colonialism and its textual reproduction, and to posit ways in which their voices contested or subverted an Orientalist discourse. (4) This paper, then, while noting that European women were involved in Orientalist cultural production, with their works at least partly structured by the dynamics of colonial discourse, will seek to show that they were also able to offer a counter-hegemonic viewpoint. Though inevitably influenced by the structures of race and class--central features in the imperialist discourse--they could challenge the dominant social and textual codes from their gender positioning, which both freed them from pervasive Orientalist tropes (the Orient as female object of male desire) and permitted them access to experiential engagement (visiting the harem).

The central signifier in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalist discourse was the harem or zenana. (5) The harem was perceived as a site of sexual licence, forbidden territory, a segregated space barred to men and charged with erotic significance, about which 'knowledge' could be only voyeuristically obtained and imaginatively reproduced. Thus it was (to use Derek Gregory's term for the way in which Egypt itself was produced as a theatrical 'sight') 'scripted' by pre-knowledge of artistic and sociological texts (largely male-authored). (6) For women, on the other hand, the harem was accessed somewhat differently. It was not forbidden territory, and hence as a 'sight' could, for female eyes, be experientially authenticated; in fact by the late 1840s a visit to a harem had become a regular item on the female tourist itinerary, and in her guide of 1871, Turkish Harems and Circassian Homes, Annie Jane Harvey supplies details of how to negotiate such a visit. As Mary Rogers, a traveller of the 1860s, notes, this exclusive experience conferred ethnographical advantage: in Palestine, 'I was placed in circumstances which gave me unusual facilities for observing the inner phases of Oriental Domestic Life'. (7) Women could actually enter the enclosed space and were therefore in a position to receive and convey knowledge about it. It would, of course, be simplistic to suggest that such 'seeing' automatically produces authentic representation, uncontaminated by cultural conditioning or preconception. The harem visit, however, as depicted by women writers, provides a fascinating test case of the extent to which, in a site-specific context, the addition of gender into the class/race paradigm of Orientalism may challenge the male hegemony.

As Reina Lewis notes, female accounts of the harem had a range of representational options, contingent upon various factors. The woman's gaze, for example, is both female (where gender is not only a discursive agent but also gains access to the harem) and Western (the observer is still spectator within 'them/us' parameters). Furthermore, it is essentially bourgeois, socially and politically; nineteenth-century female travellers were largely middle or upper class, embodying contemporary assumptions about family, labour relations, and female occupations, as well as accepting social hierarchies. Such women, too, would undoubtedly have had some acquaintance with aesthetic recreations of the Orient. It was gender, however, that could most destabilize a Eurocentric perspective on this Other. The Eastern harem women were both like and unlike their Western observers, and their societal structures, while in many respects quite different from the latters', still offered an arena of familiarization as much as alienation. Thus Western female engagement with the harem allowed for a flexible response in which a variety of voices was meshed, and whose textual representations were distinctive in degree, if not wholly in kind.

Across the range of nineteenth-century women's writing about the harem, there are recurring areas of interest. Of greatest relevance here are those that may be considered most traditionally female: dress, furnishings, food and how it is served, female roles and activities. The harem as prototype home space is also scrutinized, particularly with reference to family structures and the bringing up of children. Inevitably, the female body is the object of attention; while few travellers actually visited a Turkish bath, many were confronted by an unfamiliar degree of physical exposure, either in Oriental (un)dress itself or in the dance entertainments provided for them. And of course the sexual arrangements of the harem, incorporating the practice of polygamy, were adverted to, often with shock or outrage. Discussion of these concerns will show how colonialist and more transgressive discourses overlap, with race, class, and gender as interlinked influences, and the political imbricated with the social, the public with the private. While direct articulation of Western superiority may be rare, even within apparent gestures of sympathy and sisterhood unease or anxiety in the context of social and physical difference may betray itself; this is observable in the tendency to patronize or to stress the alterity of the Other. Aspects of the harem, especially its sexuality, are also politicized in terms which, while demonizing the patriarchal and phallic structures that underpin it, fail to acknowledge some of its social and economic realities: few observers, for example, note that the laws of inheritance are far fairer to women here than they are in the West. Such commentary, indeed, tells us more about the authors' own relation to Western hegemonies than about the Oriental Other.

In general terms, the social-political commentary engendered by harem sexuality and the institution of polygamy can be seen as an analogue for concerns about individual freedom and gender roles. As Jill Matus has argued, a mode of female existence, which in the male gaze was constructed as a site of sensual and alluring femininity, was transformed by women observers into evidence of thwarted and bored womanhood. (8) Such perceived idleness and mindlessness were quite antithetical to notions of the useful activity of the Western housewife, whose moments of leisure were to be managed by schemes of self-improvement or benevolence. Disapprobation of such a life-style thus covertly articulates a need to separate the wastefulness of Eastern female indolence from the freedom from domestic chores enjoyed by many middle-class Western women. So Ida Pfeiffer, a Viennese world traveller of the 1850s, considers the lethargy of the harem inhabitants a sign of their 'contempt [for] employment and work of every kind' and deplores the state of 'these poor ignorant women' who have nothing better to do than to 'sit cross-legged on carpets and cushions, drinking coffee, smoking nargile, and gossiping with one another'. (9) Lady Sheil, another mid-century visitor to the Middle East, is similarly critical of the idleness and enervating luxury of harem life, which she too sees as all gossip and scandal-mongering. Emilia Hornby, stifled by the atmosphere of indolence and oppression in the harem, expresses her disgust and pity that Turkish women's happiness is dependent solely on 'being degraded to a mere animal state, eating, drinking, and basking in the sun. [...] Poor things! They are so greedy after a little amusement in their utter idleness'. (10) Harriet Martineau, who visited the Middle East in 1846, is a particularly interesting example of how even the most liberal sympathizer with women's wrongs is still conditioned by cultural preconceptions. After several hours of being entertained by the harem inhabitants, during which she closely scrutinizes their faces and actions, 'I saw no trace of mind in any one except in the homely one-eyed old lady. All the younger ones were dull, soulless, brutish, or peevish.' (11) Genuinely moved by the plight of those whom she considers 'the most injured human beings I have ever seen' (p. 167), she nevertheless moves into a briskly moralizing mode in commenting on their lack of occupation: 'There is nothing about which the inmates of hareems seem to be so utterly stupid as about women having anything to do. That time should be valuable to a woman, and that she should have any business on her hands, and any engagements to observe, are things quite beyond their comprehension' (p. 166). Her feminism is clearly overdetermined by her national and class affiliations here.

In such a context, moral responses are frequently articulated as sympathy, representing the harem women as victims of a system that enslaves their bodies and colonizes their minds. Many writers express the conviction that the harem as an institution is shameful and tragic. Lady Sheil is 'sure' that it is a site of despotic power, and envisages its patriarchal overlord as 'a needy, harsh, disappointed profligate man, responsible to no one, [who] often wreaks his temper on the persons least capable of resistance'. (12) Conceiving the harem as a mode of imprisonment (Emilia Hornby describes it in terms of enclosure, approached through a series of rooms, and with latticed windows pierced only by peep-holes), these travellers assume that its inhabitants can only long for release. The Honorable Mrs William Grey, who visited the Middle East in the suite of the Prince and Princess of Wales in the late 1860s, declares that 'in spite of all this finery and luxury, I would rather be the poorest peasant woman working for my bread than one of these miserable creatures'. (13) For Harriet Martineau, the harem is simply another form of slavery, 'whose working is such as to make one almost wish that the Nile would rise to cover the tops of the hills, and sweep away the whole abomination' (p. 159); her abhorrence of the (perceived) sexual and social abuses conducted here ('These two hellish practices, slavery and polygamy [...] are here avowedly connected') is also displaced on to a political agenda of pitying outrage which reinforces Western notions of monogamous respectability, as well as feminist claims for freedom for women. The frequent reference to harem women as childish, even when this is not overtly contemptuous, similarly separates the (inferior) observed from the (superior) observer. Sometimes, however, the travellers do acknowledge the Eurocentricity of their responses. Ida Pfeiffer's admission that 'perhaps they [harem woman] may be more happy than European women' (p. 165), since they look contented enough, gestures towards a more reciprocal vision of the Other. Lady Sheil, too, tempers her adverse judgements on the harem life-style by noting that her criticism is 'according to our ideas of existence' (p. 145). Alongside the insistence on viewing Eastern culture as a violation of 'civilized' moral and social codes, there is, then, some recognition of an alternative position that questions rather than seeks to vindicate Western superiority.

Two linked areas of observation--clothes and the female body--are of particular interest here and may be seen as paradigmatic of nineteenth-century women's engagement with the harem as a site of cultural difference, foregrounding the competing discourses within the texts. Because cultural values are written on the body, clothes and appearance are taken as indicators of value systems and social ideologies. Judith Butler has argued that for the woman traveller herself dress can be a performative act, both a self-protective shield and a visible assertion of authoritative difference from the Native Other. (14) If the colonialist opposition of civilized/uncivilized is thus enacted through clothes and the body, it follows that the dress of the observed, subjected to the gaze of the observer, will become part of the set of signifiers constructing that opposition. The woman visitor to the harem, confronted with sartorial difference, found herself, moreover, both performer and spectator, watcher and watched; she was thus metaphorically, if not literally, exposed in a way which not only threatened to destabilize her gendered identity but also invited her to re-examine her own society's conventions.

In its more Eurocentric manifestation, the response of the European visitor to the appearance of Middle Eastern women polarizes between two extremes: directly negative criticism and enthusiastic admiration. The first occurs where difference is too great to be accommodated, and here a self-aggrandizing note of imperialism is evident. Martineau's description of an Egyptian harem's chief lady betrays her inability to shift her national point of reference: 'Her headdress was of black net, bunched out curiously behind. [...] Some of the black net was brought round her face, and under the chin, showing the outline of a face which had no beauty in it, nor traces of former beauty' (ii, 150). A feature of Eastern female adornment which Western travellers constantly found distasteful was the habit of pulling the eyebrows and painting lines or patches on the face. Emily Beaufort offers a good example of a colonialist reaction to this particular aspect of difference: noting the ugliness and fatness of harem women, she remarks that their plucked eyebrows and decorated cheeks and brows add to 'the silly, inane expression of their faces'. (15) In this context, too, her text presents some of the most unmediated Orientalism to be found in women's travel writings. The simile she uses to describe the Negro slaves in the harem, while striking, has uncompromisingly racist overtones: 'Each had a nose-ring with one turquoise passed through the wide flat nostril, looking exactly like a forget-me-not dropped on a bank of black mud' (i, 320-21). Mrs Grey's journal narrative similarly denotes an imperialist stance. She disparages the Turkish dress because it makes walking so difficult as well as ungainly, while the slaves (of whom she comments, 'I did not see a single really pretty face and hardly even a good-looking one among them') 'are dressed in the most ridiculous and tasteless manner. [...] In short [...] in the most vulgar and ugly manner it is possible to imagine' (p. 31). The dancing girls she views are 'hideous' and 'frightful', and she is particularly critical of their appalling figures, with 'waists about a yard round' (p. 99). Conversely, however, she can access the East only as long as it remains the exotic foreign: like the Western dress worn at an evening party given by the Sultan and Sultana of Constantinople, the European clothes of some of the slaves are a cultural disappointment because they spoil 'the otherwise so very Eastern effect and look of the Harem' (pp. 31-32).

As with expression of pity or sympathy, appreciation of the foreign appearance can also voice a colonialist stance. Aestheticization that renders the observed an item for cultural consumption is a familiar strategy of imperialist discourse, which frequently transforms the objects of gaze into Western cultural icons. Beautiful Eastern women are compared to Roman empresses or Greek statues, and admired accordingly. Anne Katherine Elwood, an earlier nineteenth-century harem visitor, notes the richness and elegance of the women's dress, the sumptuous materials and tastefully arranged turbans; she especially stresses the splendour of the harem's chief lady who 'had on handsome striped silk drawers, and a silk vest descending to her feet, richly trimmed with silver lace'. (16) Significantly, she also calls attention to her slender figure and delicate features. Lady Hornby's observations about the beauty and grace of the Turkish women she encounters also enact a process of reification: 'As to beauty of mere dress and ease of attitude, nothing that I have seen in life or in pictures can give the slightest idea of the wonderful grace, the extreme delicacy, and bird-of-paradise-like uselessness of the Turkish belle. Women of rank look like hothouse flowers' (p. 59).

Underpinning all these responses is an assertion of a positioned self, distanced from the Other and seeking to assert its own cultural superiority. So mockery of odd cosmetics reinforces the mythology of the English rose (unpainted) female complexion, as well as confirming assumptions about the unhealthiness of Eastern skin; fatness becomes a signifier of unfeminine indulgence of appetite and bad diet (chiefly too many sweets) in marked contrast to the Western codes of female abstinence and sylph-like slimness; and richness of dress and furnishings, however spectacular they may appear, indicate extravagance, conspicuous expenditure to no evident purpose other than ostentatious display, especially undesirable in women. Not surprisingly, as in Western portrayals of other 'native' peoples, beauty which most approximates to European standards is most admired. Circassians, the lightest racial group, often with fair hair and blue eyes, are always accepted, while African Blacks, usually Nubians who constituted the largest proportion of slaves in the harem, are represented as doubly alien on account of their blackness and their 'grotesque' and 'hideous' features.

So far it has been suggested that within the nation/class/gender triangle gender is in fact the least determining factor in female travellers' responses to the harem. In the case of dress, however, there is also the possibility of a more reciprocal, empathetic response, contingent upon perceived gendered linkages. As has been pointed out, cultural differentiation signalled by dress meant that, on the harem visit, the Western woman was as much the object of curiosity as she was herself a curious observer. Many travellers comment on the way in which harem women are fascinated by the strange costume of their European visitors, just as they themselves foreground the ethnic distinctiveness of exotic Eastern costume. Being exposed to the Oriental gaze as it was turned on the perceived oddity of Western dress could lead the traveller towards a reciprocity, enabling self-examination and assessment of cultural difference. Moreover, many observers actually enacted a form of cultural cross-dressing by replacing their own clothes with those worn in the harem, a transformative, even transgressive, act that signifies a willingness to exchange a public, defined gender identity for one which confers strangeness and permits retreat from a known personality. (17) This could further encourage awareness of how dress, the identifier of selfhood, is also a signifier of national identity, and thus instigate questioning of cultural hegemonies. What, for instance, is the social significance of garments that fasten at the back instead of at the front, close-fitting corsetry that confines the wearer, and heavy layers of ruffled petticoats? And are these markers of national and cultural superiority? Indeed, the constraints of Western female dress may come to seem less desirable than the looseness of Oriental female garments, allowing unrestricted movement. Certainly, in a process of defamiliarization, the contrasts between West and East here alert some of the travellers to the peculiarities of their own dress, as if for the first time.

For most of the travellers under discussion here, cross-dressing was not a form of 'going native' but merely a kind of temporary cultural experimentation, even in some cases, a game, the transformation embodying self-advertizing appropriation of the foreign. Gregory's assertion that many travellers viewed the Eastern experience as 'a short-lived adventure, a lark [... enabling] the tourist to move in and out of "the Orient" at will' (pp. 130-31) is relevant in this context. Many harem visitors present this experience as a 'performance'. Anne Elwood recognizes herself as an object of interest to the harem women: '[I began] to think that I should have had to undress to satisfy their curiosity' (p. 336). On this occasion, however, the performance is only partial, since she merely removes her cap, lets down her hair, and shows off her shoes and stockings. For Mrs Grey, cross-dressing is part of the whole adventure of harem-visiting. In Cairo, the Viceroy's wives dress her and the Princess of Wales in ethnic costume, including painted eyebrows and veils, and, in their adoptive costumes, the pair return to their lodgings hoping to astonish all their menfolk. (Unfortunately the dramatic role-play backfires; everyone has gone to bed by the time they get back.) Emilia Hornby, less discountenanced than her companions at the prospect of being uncased from 'our tight-fitting European garments' and 'rolled up' in huge shawls which the slaves bring in, actually welcomes being undressed by 'fairies' (p. 244), as she terms the harem women. On a second visit, Hornby herself submits to the insistence that she dress in the vast selection of finery produced for her. The event for her becomes what she terms a 'masquerade' in which she delights in playing a part: 'You would certainly never have known me in the gorgeousness of Eastern array, which however they pronounced became me very well' (p. 326), she writes to her putative correspondent. Such self-transformation, of course, is not permanent; she soon feels stifled by the finery and jewels that surround her and is glad to escape from them.

Discussing the exploits of some turn-of-the-century male travellers who cross-dressed in veils in order to pass invisibly in the community of Oriental women, Emily Apter argues: 'Caught up in a double-edged representational system of travestissement, colonial writers flirted with colonial mimicry and in doing so helped to dissipate the boundaries of difference used to keep colonial authority in place.' (18) While transvestism is clearly not an issue here, the notion of cross-dressing as partly engagement with biculturalism has relevance even for those women who most 'flirted' with it. For some travellers, chiefly those who stayed longer in the Middle East, taking on the identity of the Other reflected a more serious attempt to deconstruct the hierarchical binary of subject/object positionality. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, travelling in the early eighteenth century, is especially notable, showing far more openness towards the difference of Oriental dress than most of her nineteenth-century counterparts. (19) She is quick to recognize how 'extraordinary' (p. 58) her travelling dress seems to the harem women, and notes wryly that they interpret her stays as a machine invented by her husband to lock her up. When she herself is dressed in Turkish costume (in which she later had herself painted) she delights in its comfort and delicate workmanship, described in detail in a letter to her sister. She notes, moreover, that the veil and head-covering without which no Turkish lady can enter the streets function as a disguise, giving them 'entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger of discovery' (p. 71). Her recognition of the advantages of national dress here is echoed nearly a hundred and fifty years later by Lady Sheil, who notes that Persian women's costume does not simply signify difference but may also represent an alternative to the public/private dichotomy of European female existence: 'The complete envelopment of the face and person disguises them effectually from the nearest relatives, and destroying, when convenient, all distinction of rank, gives unrestrained freedom' (p. 145). (20) Later in the century, other female visitors to the Middle East adopted native costume for essentially pragmatic purposes. Isabelle Eberhardt and Alexandra David-Neel did so for disguise; Lucie Duff-Gordon and Gertrude Bell did so for convenience. In each case, the abandonment of Western dress is a strategic acknowledgement of its limitations in a different national context.

Consideration of dress is, of course, linked to responses to the female body and (usually indirectly) to female sexuality. As has already been mentioned, few visitors actually visited a bath, but the semi-nakedness of some harem women, as well as the physical exposure of Oriental slave dancers, were common features of the harem visit. The dancing in particular presented Western women with female physicality in an unfamiliar context, and many found the sight disturbing rather than pleasing. (21) Both fascinated and shocked, they use a variety of discursive strategies to displace their unease. Like criticism of dress, dismissive or mocking commentary here may be a covert or metonymic adversion to sexuality: as 'tasteless' costume is seen as a sign of moral laxity, so 'disgusting' or 'frightful' dancing signifies sexual promiscuity. Grey's abhorrence of the dance entertainment provided for her is a good example: 'Some movements were graceful enough. Others, on the contrary, were simply frightful. For instance, they had a way of moving and shaking their heads and other parts of their bodies all separately, as if no one part belonged to the other parts, which was quite monstrous' (pp. 28-29). The use of 'monstrous' and the refusal to identify 'other parts of their bodies' (surely breasts and stomachs) articulates an inability to deal directly with a subject which at home was taboo or shrouded in innuendo; they also suggest how the sight called disturbing attention to the observer's own sexuality.

In contrast, writing in an age before constraining notions of female modesty and sexual propriety had become part of the cultural hegemony, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu could visually enjoy the female form, including its natural sexual suggestiveness. On her visit to a bath (bagnio), she observes that the naked women 'walked and moved with the same majestic grace which Milton describes of our general mother'; full of admiration for their shining white [sic] skins and beautiful hair, she also notes that 'there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture amongst them'. On her own admission, the sight makes her re-think her attitude to the body: 'I was here convinced of the truth of a reflection I had often made, that if it was the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observed' (p. 59). Montagu's response to the naked female form is matched much later by that of Lucie Duff Gordon, one of the most genuinely open of mid-nineteenth-century travellers to Egypt. In her Letters from Egypt (1865), Gordon tells her correspondent (interestingly, in this case her husband) that she intends to find one of the fine young Negro girls in Luxor and that she will get her photographed to show you in Europe what a woman's breast can be, for I never knew it before I came here--it is the most beautiful thing in the world. The dancing-girl I saw moved her breasts by some extraordinary muscular effort, first one and then the other; they were just like pomegranates and gloriously independent of stays or any support. (22)

Gordon's unconditional enthusiasm here, quite unusual for its time, voices a response to the Oriental body in which gender affiliation and natural admiration override moral and social conventions.

It is undeniable that social and cultural conditioning are powerful determining factors in female representations of the foreign Other. The harem, however, offered women travellers direct encounter with this foreign in a context where gender played an essential part, not only in the contextual situation itself but also in the discourses of representation. While their responses are never wholly free of colonialist attitudes, their engagement with a difference that was both alien and a skewed image of their own society's cultural patterns reveals itself in empathy and receptivity as well as criticism. As their accounts show, the experience gave them some awareness of how they might reposition themselves in terms of both their national allegiances and their own femininity.

(1) Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 7.

(2) Edward Said, 'Orientalism Reconsidered', Race and Class, 27.2 (Autumn 1985), 1-15 (p. 2).

(3) Gendering Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1996).

(4) Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992; rev. edn 1996).

(5) It is worth pointing out that the original meaning (and function) of harem was merely 'a social space where women could gather and talk'.

(6) See Derek Gregory, 'Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the Cultures of Travel', in Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, ed. by James Duncan and Derek Gregory (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 114-50. Gregory argues that through cultural pre-knowledge 'sites' become 'sights' which the traveller can control by textually depicting them. Influential imaginative texts of the period include William Beckford's Vathek (1787), Thomas Moore's Lallah Rooke (1817), and Lord Byron's Don Juan (1818-24); despite the satiric content of the first and third of these, the exoticism of the East is still strongly conveyed.

(7) Domestic Life in Palestine (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862), p. vii.

(8) 'The "Eastern-Woman Question": Martineau and Nightingale Visit the Harem', Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 21 (1999), 63-87.

(9) Visit to the Holy Land, Egypt, and Italy (London: Ingram, Cooke, 1853), p. 165.

(10) Emilia Bithynia, Lady Hornby, Constantinople during the Crimean War (London: Bentley, 1863), p. 327.

(11) Eastern Life, Present and Past, 3 vols (London: Moxon, 1848), ii, 155.

(12) Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia (London: Murray, 1856), p. 147.

(13) Journal of a Visit to Egypt, Constantinople, The Crimea, Greece etc. in the Suite of the Prince and Princess of Wales (London: Smith, Elder, 1869), p. 36.

(14) 'Performative Acts and Gender Constitution', in Performing Feminisms (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

(15) Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines, 2 vols (London: Longman, Green, 1861), i, 309.

(16) Anne Katherine (Mrs Colonel) Elwood, Narrative of a Journey Over Land from England by the Continent of Europe, Egypt and the Red Sea to India, 2 vols (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830), i, 337.

(17) Interestingly, there is no suggestion that the harem women themselves ever donned the discarded European clothes. Nineteenth-century photographs, however, do show upper class harem women posing in Western costume; such portraits were often placed beside ones of themselves in native Eastern dress.

(18) 'Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem', Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 4.1 (1992), 205-24 (p. 215).

(19) Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters (1717), ed. by Anita Desai (London: Pickering, 1993). The era in which she was writing is probably mainly responsible for this openness, though her own personality also clearly played a part; nineteenth-century writers were constrained by much more prescriptive attitudes towards sexuality and the body.

(20) The sexual implications of this observation are less explicit than in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's account, but the subversive possibilities are still suggested.

(21) Although it was--and is--widely assumed that this dancing was designed to titillate a male audience, it may in fact have originated as a form of female exercise and gender-exclusive amusement.

(22) Letters from Egypt (1865; London: Virago, 1983), p. 103.

SHIRLEY FOSTER

Sheffield University