Sophia Poole: writing the self, scribing Egyptian women.

Sophia Poole (1804-91) was the sister of the Arabist Edward William Lane, She visited Egypt and wrote a book, in three volumes, about Egyptian women which was meant to be a companion book to Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). The Englishwoman in Egypt (1844-46), always regarded as a correct and objective representation of Egyptian women, is also a reflection of the writer's own visualization and inscription of her identity. Poole, this article argues, defined herself as both an English person and a woman, two aspects that were hard to reconcile at the time. Poole was faced with a conflict which she tried to resolve by both complying with her gender identity and creating a role for herself as a functional Britisher. Yet, she did this largely at the expense of Egyptian women.

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Sophia Poole, sister of the Arabist Edward William Lane, established herself as a writer after the publication of her text, The Englishwoman in Egypt (1844-46). The text was pronounced a success immediately after its publication, enjoyed a good reception, and a second edition of it appeared the following year in America (Kararah 153). According to Stanley Lane-Poole, the writer's grandson, who is regarded as an authority on the topic, The Englishwoman in Egypt "gained for her [Poole] ... a place in literature" (121). After the lapse of a century and a half, in 1994, Jane Robinson, author of the anthology of women travelers, Wayward Women, wrote of Poole:

   When her highly popular accounts of a lady's life in
   Egypt were published back in London, they caused a mild
   sensation. It might be permissible for a learned chap like
   Lane to immerse himself in the exotic culture of the
   East--but an Englishwoman? A Christian wife and mother
   dressing herself up in Turkish "trousers" and visiting
   the city's harems? Living in what she insisted is a haunted
   house, and witnessing barbarous murders almost on
   her own doorstep? And, worst of all, taking Turkish baths
   with the natives? Sophia tempered the sensationalist--with
   a serious study--to complement Lane's Manners
   and Customs of the Modern Egyptians--of the habits and
   customs of harem life in Cairo ... and qualified herself
   admirably to write a definitive text to Filth's stupendous
   photographs of Egypt in the 1850s. (Robinson 305.
   Emphasis in original.)

Robinson's writing on Poole is representative of the current feminist view of our writer. Robinson makes the double argument of the oppression of white women under white patriarchy, and points out Poole's admirable qualification of herself as a competent writer whose work can be placed on equal footing with Lane's and Francis Frith's. Such readings create the double problematic of constructing the female self as a one coherent self that verges on the heroic, thereby following in the footsteps of patriarchal definition and practice. Such readings also tend to applaud imperial perceptions and colonial collaboration rather than acknowledge the rights of the topic of the text along with those of its writer. Robinson's important reference book indeed echoes the initial reception of The Englishwoman in Egypt. Poole's efforts and courage were celebrated by Victorian male reviewers, ironically much praised because coming from an inferior gender, a mere woman. (1)

The Englishwoman in Egypt: The Egypt in the Englishwoman

On his third visit to Egypt the by then renowned author of The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) persuaded his sister together with her two sons to join him for a long residence in the country for the explicit purpose of her supplying a complementary account to Lane's, one that would be descriptive of the harem to which he was not allowed access. (2) While Lane supplied the "objective" in the form of geography and history, his sister supplied the female, personal and the domestic, simultaneously diluting and fetishizing his authorial account, ultimately lulling and popularizing the academic into the descriptive and anecdotal. Thus they divided the then nascent manners and customs anthropologic discipline between the male and the female worlds and practices. They divided the category "Modern Egyptians" along the axis of gender into the academic and the domestic, the pleasurably instructive and the instructively pleasurable.

While Poole was engaged in supplying the domestic and female side to Lane's text, Lane's notes, manuscripts and the discursive space he filled in The Englishwoman in Egypt were there to construct her text. She liberally borrowed from his notes reproducing whole chapters, as well as consolidating and complementing her discourse by long appendixes extracted from the Modern Egyptians and from the notes to his translation of the Arabian Nights as well as from other male authorities on the topic. (3) Poole's text was also a pretext for Lane to correct the "erroneous" and to add to the "deficient," albeit liberal and tolerant, information of his previously published account. His updated account of "Superstition," for example, is a re-writing of his curiosity as disgust and Egyptians' tact as deceit; his appendix on Mohammad Ali reveals a political specificity that is more aggressive than his original ahistoric account of the government of Egypt (Lane 222-75 and Poole II: 162-68; Lane 64-131 and Poole II: 213-40). Their collaboration is illustrated by their co-authored narrative of the wedding of Zeinab Hanem, Mohammad Ali's daughter, where Lane describes outdoor entertainment and Poole sketches the indoor harem jubilee. Lane supplied the plan and did the editing for The Englishwoman in Egypt, and Poole sketched the chosen topics. (4) She heavily depended on her brother as she was "encouraged to hope for their [the letters that form her text] favorable reception, for the sake of the more solid matter with which they are interspersed, from the notes of one to whom Egypt has become almost as familiar as England" (Poole I: vi). Opting for a good reception and admitting the source of her information, she confirms to her readers:

   My brother's account of the hareem, and all that he has
   written respecting the manners and customs of the
   women of this country, I have found to be not only
   minutely accurate, but of the utmost value to me in
   preparing me for the life which I am now leading. (Poole
   II: 94)

Along with Lanean, masculine topical interests, Poole incorporates her brother's perceptions of the women. It was the studious Lane who stamped Egyptian women as lascivious beyond control: "The women of Egypt have the character of being the most licentious in their feelings of all females who lay any claim to be considered as members of a civilized nation" (Lane 295). He also posits:

   The most immodest freedom of conversation is indulged
   in by persons of both sexes, and of every station of life,
   in Egypt; even by the most virtuous and respectable
   women, with the exception of a very few, who often
   make use of coarse language, but not unchaste. From persons
   of the best education, expressions are often heard so
   obscene as only to be fit for a low brothel; and things are
   named, and subjects talked of, by the most genteel
   women, without any idea of their being indecorous, in the
   hearing of men, that many prostitutes in our country
   would probably abstain from mentioning.... But with
   respect to the majority of Egyptian women, it must, I fear
   be allowed that they are very licentious. What liberty they
   have, many of them, it is said, abuse; and most of them
   are not considered safe, unless under lock and key; to
   which restraint few are subjected. (Lane 295-96)

The sin of these women was their non-conformity to Victorian rules: a violation of propriety as silence and euphemism, and the lack of the restraining masculine control. Lane's logic places the deficiency in the area of inter-sexual relations, simultaneously stigmatizing Egyptian women as whores and emasculating the males who could not restrain and control this excessive freedom of speech and act. He justifies the Westerners' violation of these Egyptian "licentious" women and suggests the castrated status of native males. Ultimately his concern is with an alleged social problem that demanded correction.

Poole was imported to Egypt to serve as an eye-witness for Lane and the English reading public, exclusively as a dismembered but privileged organ. It was precisely her gender that qualified her for harem penetration. Apologizing over and over for trying her hand at writing, she also stresses the authenticity of her delineation by continuous references to the fraternal authority behind it. Charting her rhetorical strategies, she explains to her readers:

   I shall therefore content myself with offering to you
   detached sketches; and you may amuse yourself by trying
   if you can to put them together so as to make a consistent
   whole. You will, I fancy, find them to resemble a dissected
   map, which some naughty child has played with in
   such a manner as to lose many of the pieces; so that some
   of the pieces will fit together very well; others will fit
   only on one side; and others will not fit at all, or can only
   be made to suit imperfectly by turning them upside-down.
   (Poole III: 8-9)

She is the "naughty child" in the above passage, the readers are the cartographers. She will sketch the women, they will reconstruct them. She would copy the anarchy, they would order it. What she found inside the harem was indeed a puzzle to her. She could not decipher it or give it meaning, but could export it and offer it to the demanding market. Strictly conforming to the male rules of the genre, she commodified the women by posing and sketching them to be consumed by the reading public.

The harem is represented by a series of sketches that borrow from Lane and add to his discourse. She minutely graphed the internal decoration and architectural plan of the place, moving to oriental dress and ornament, re-producing Lane's descriptions but dressing them in female bodies so that the figures simultaneously embellish and degrade the ornaments and the whole becomes a sign that reads a culture. Inside the harem, the walls and the women form a divided whole where "chaste and beautiful" decorations complement and oppositionally define the "costly" bodies bedecked with jewelry and gold embroidery (Poole III: 82). Focusing on masculine attractions, she sketches the women's bodies and "oriental riches."

While in Egypt, Lane kept a mistress, Nefeeseh. In 1832, Lane was asked by Robert Hay (who supplied her) to marry her, but he refused. However, he finally did in 1840 (Ahmed 38-40). The date of the legitimization of his liaison coincides with the presence of his sister as a member of his nuclear family. Poole's first appearance in Lane's biographies dates back to her approval of the marriage. (5) During Lane's third and longest residence in Egypt, Poole and Nefeeseh, together, constituted Lane's British/Egyptian family. While Poole was imported to westernize her brother's household and validate it for English readers, giving credibility to their writing, she was not immune from his desire for the "oriental." The English household that he wished to construct was basically oriental--one that dragged the Englishwoman into its terrifying abyss, orientalizing her rather than allowing her to westernize it. It has been reported that "the household of Sheykh Lane, consisted of a wife and sister ... Both always wore the Egyptian dress, and never left the house except heavily swathed and veiled." (6) In Egypt, Poole had to live with a double identity: she was brought there mainly to report as an English observer, but one who had to live as an Egyptian. Lane supplied her with a foothold in a protective family and an accommodation in which she was confirmed but from which she could observe and report. Her vantage points onto the few exteriors she delineated were "windows" where, protected and secluded behind the mashrabia, she maintained her elevation and distance from the delineated object, sustaining her privilege as a concealed observer and a reporter.

Inside the orientally designed house, they lived a l'orientale, "adhering strictly to habits cherished by the people.... We have even gone so far as to adopt their manner of eating; and here I must digress to beg you not to say 'How very disgusting!'" (Poole II: 13). Although Lane did not have to apologize for his adoption of the oriental style of life, but partially justify and partially conceal it from his readers by adopting masculine objectivity, the domestic station of the female Britisher demanded a reference and an apology for what she found herself doing. Doubly-educated into the "necessity" of living the experience and maintaining her objective distance, Poole's very existence in Egypt was threatened by the horrifying prospect of being passively invaded by Egypt and having to win the combat.

Her house was a haunted place, one haunted by the western construction of the orient as an Other. A recurrent theme in the first two volumes of her text is that they lived in a house haunted by an afreet, a demon. They were nightly disturbed, so the story goes, by

   noises [that] continued during the greater part of the
   night, and were generally like a heavy trampling, like the
   walking of a person in large clogs, varied by knocking at
   the doors of many of the apartments, and at the large
   water-jars which are placed in recesses in the galleries.
   (Poole I: 200)

The readers, however, are left no chance to wonder or ponder. The mystery is explained by the "natives" as it is enunciated. The Egyptian servants in the house are made to interpret it locally. Where Poole described, they were made to decipher. Her account is curiously double-leveled, oscillating between the incident as a personal experience and relating it to the general cultural code by making references to such authorities as Muslim belief, ritual, and the Arabian Nights (Poole I: 201, 204). Poole presents the afreet as a threat to the servants, and thus to Egyptians, while demonizing the Egyptians themselves. During Ramadan, she explains, the Muslims believe that devils are confounded. However, during that month those Muslims took over the afreets' task and nightly disturbed the Lanes by their noisy celebration. The whole country is turned into a space haunted as much by Egyptians and their Islamic rituals and culture as by the afreets. The Egyptian Woman in Egypt's construction of a demonic, supernatural presence and its projection onto humans at once represents Egyptians as terrified and terrifying. The duality of the construct turns Poole's account into one that allows and prevents the natives' stigmatization, thus promoting her narrative. Admitting the family's failure to "bolt" and "bar out" the offender (Poole I: 201), her anecdotal narrative smoothly floats over the obstructing tension, recognizing and denying as it tells of the family's domestic conquest (Poole I: 204). She becomes obsessed with the "oriental spirit" that flooded the house and degraded her by placing her on equal footing with her otherwise illusory sister-in-law: "My brother went round the gallery, while I and my sister-in-law stood like children trembling hand in hand" (Poole I: 202). With a guilty conscience, she later apologizes for allowing herself to be invaded by Muslim superstition. Guilty of the sin of passively allowing it, she confesses and asks for forgiveness. (7)

Threatened and conquered, the Lanes evacuate the house for another in the same cultural space only to be attacked by a fresh Egyptian sign:

   From visits I turn to visitors; to tell you that a most unwelcome
   guest made his appearance yesterday. Between the
   blind and glass of a window in the room where we usually
   sit, I discovered a large snake, more than a yard and a
   half long. It was outside the window; but directly it saw
   me through the glass, it raised its head, and protruded its
   black forked tongue. It was of light brown colour, and
   down the centre of its back its scales were of a bright yellowish
   hue. It was in such a situation that it was scarcely
   possible to catch it, and indeed my brother was the only
   man in the house who would attempt to do so; for our servants
   were so overcome by superstitious dread, that they
   would not approach the intruder. (Poole II: 47)

An impending snake, apparently barred but pointing its forked tongue towards her, is presented as an unwelcome guest, as an intruding "visitor" with a dreadful tongue. Partly distancing herself from the dangerous "superstitious dread," daring to "look" but not to "approach," she places herself in a position between the "overcome" servants and "the only man in the house." The refa'i--the snake specialist--is called for and the snake pronounced harmless, but it would not surrender: "With regard the serpent still in our house, let us say, with the Muslims, we are thankful it is not a scorpion" (Poole II: 48). "With the Muslims" she accepts the contained invader, but escalates the tension by a reference to the possibility of a poisonous conquest. Besieged by signs of Muslim culture, she escapes her house to others' but finds herself surrounded, as she rides across the narrow lanes, by malignant air, longing all the while for the "salubrious winds" of English culture. (8)

Like other vanguard English, Egypt-resident Orientalists, Lane disguised himself as an Oriental. He explained his strategy of disguise as one needed, not for survival among Egyptians, but for his survival in the West as an acknowledged cultural contributor. It enabled him to maintain an "objective distance" vis-a-vis his topic, keeping him separate from the Egyptians while he was physically among them. (9) It is this distance that gave his account its objective power, as Edward Said posits (158-64). Lane used disguise as an empowering strategy that simultaneously enabled him to be among them and see, yet be concealed and not seen. (10) He explicitly stated his justification for it: "for I wished to avoid being seen." (11) He familiarized himself with "their language, their customs and their dress," as necessary accessories for the deception: (12)

   I have lived as they live, conforming with their general
   habits; and, in order to make them familiar and unreserved
   towards me on every subject, have always avowed
   my agreement with them in opinion whenever my conscience
   would allow me, and in most other cases
   refrained from the expression of my dissent. (Lane xiii)

Lane alleged to his English readers that during his earlier visits he had to endure the inconvenience of a bachelor among Egyptians, thus denying his having a mistress (Lane 155-56). During his last visit, however, his disguise was complete with a harem. To live "as they live, conforming with their general habits" meant to orientalize and veil his English sister.

While in Egypt, like Lane, Poole adopted oriental dress, especially outdoors. Although her disguise was one of the accessories devised to complete Lane's disguise, unlike in Lane's case, it tightened the patriarchal-oriental siege around Poole. While oriental dress was allegedly meant to protect her from the "natives," it was deeply disturbing for her as it suggested her proximity to Egyptian women. The acceptant Poole echoed the "necessity" of adopting the oriental dress, but also found it "stifling to a degree not to be forgotten" (Poole I: 63). Busy learning how "to carry the dress" (Poole I: 117. Emphasis in original) and stumbling in it as she toured the crowded lanes of Cairo, she could neither observe nor report, but took to introspection. However, she points out that exteriors are not her domain and, indeed, hers was that of domestic interiors where women are unveiled. There, devoid of the privilege of being a concealed observer and resuming her identity as an Englishwoman but one wearing an oriental underdress, she was metamorphosed into a hybrid Egyptian and disturbingly placed on equal footing with the inmates she visited. While disguise helped Lane in his mission, it hindered Poole.

Like Lane, however, Poole used dress as discourse and changed her underdress as fitted her destination: "At home, and when visiting ladies of the middle class, I wear the Turkish dress" (Poole I: 210). On the other hand:

   In visiting those who are considered the noble of the land,
   I resume, under my Eastern riding costume, my English
   dress; thus avoiding the necessity of subjecting myself to
   any humiliation. In the Turkish in-door costume, the
   manner of my salutation must have been more submissive
   than I should have liked; while, as an Englishwoman, I
   am entertained by the most distinguished, not only as an
   equal, but generally as a superior. (Poole I: 210)

Arrogantly fearing a similarity with "the noble of the land," she converts to English costume as a discursive expression of superiority. Englishness as dress acquires a political meaning, invades the ruling harem and reconstructs its power politics, placing the female alien on top.

Spurred as much by western masculine desires as by her own desire, she steps into that central topic, the oriental bath. Willingly, she violates "propriety" in fulfillment of a "mission." "I am not surprised that you are curious on the subject of the bath," she wrote anticipating curiosity on the part of her feigned correspondent (readers) (Poole I: 216-17). More than a year later, she fulfills her promise: "When I promised you a description of the Bath, I did not anticipate that I should enter on the subject with pleasure. Whatever others may think of it, I confess that the operation of bathing in the Eastern manner is to me extremely agreeable" (Poole II: 171). Into a place of nudity she ventures, but shielded by a wrap:

   On entering this chamber a scene presented itself which
   beggars description. My companions had prepared me for
   seeing many persons undressed; but imagine my astonishment
   on finding at least thirty women of all ages, and
   many young girls and children, perfectly unclothed. You
   will scarcely think it possible that no one but ourselves
   had a vestige of clothing. Persons of all colours ... conversing
   as though full dressed, with perfect nonchalance,
   while others were strolling about, or sitting round the
   fountain. I cannot describe the bath as altogether a beautiful
   scene; in truth, in some respects it is disgusting; and
   I regret that I can never reach a private room in any bath
   without passing through the large public apartment.
   (Poole II: 173)

Reluctant, she passively delineates the demanding scene. With her photographic technique, she shoots the live mobile scene to a deadly still descriptive tableaux, timelessly freezing it on the surface of the page. While they persist in their nudity, she moves around and out, immune in her "vestige of clothing." The amalgamating bodies of all ages and "all colours" are perpetually thus engaged in that excessively heated place in the hot country while she, having seen without apparently taking part, passes out. The nude, lascivious harem postures narrate the deed. (13) But there she was and she figures in separate, voiced, complementary scenes. Joining but aloof, her bathing experience is split and linguistically opposed, rendered pleasing for its "disgusting" amalgamation. (14) Hers was a feminine desire to see and violate, but keep chaste; hers was a passive penetration of the scene (seen); hers was the conflict of the English/woman in Egypt.

Subverting Femininity

With the emergence of the idea of race as skin color in the nineteenth century in the West, white males employed the racially and culturally deviant as an object against which they could construct white women, the ambivalent dark angels of western patriarchal fantasy. An example of masculine discourses of the opposition between white women and women of color on the level of epistemology can be found in J. G. Herder's pioneer text, Outlines of the Philosophy of the History of Man (1800). Writing "Europe [as] the seat of female empire," he politicizes gender, elevating European women to climatalogical chastity and oppositionally consigning Eastern women to climactic voluptuousness (212). (15) Similarly, in an article published in 1844 in the popular Quarterly Review on "The Rights of Women" the author cites The Englishwoman in Egypt and infers: "it is by her more highly gifted mind, or rather by her nobler habits of thought, that the European gentlewoman excludes her sister of the East from all pretension and shadow of claim to come and stand compared with her" (Kinglake 111).

Across disciplines, white males were closing the racial-cultural boundaries of whites. White males constructed white females in compliance with what Robert Young refers to as "the ambivalent protocols of [patriarchal] fantasy and desire," albeit, as angelic demons ("Egypt in America" 151). With an anxious desire to create a space for themselves in the dominant male identity, white women drew on the available partial definition of themselves as "white" and measured themselves against the "black," usually appropriating the opposition through the metaphor of aesthetic and ethical contrasts. Terrified of exclusion on account of their gender, they took to a narcissistic re-construction of themselves as Europeans, consolidating and protecting themselves by dwelling on the racial-cultural difference between women, hence subordinating gender sameness to racial-cultural difference. They were thus subverting their femininity by writing it as pure whiteness, borrowing from, and feeding back, patriarchal fantasy. Poole adopted this strategy of self-definition by opposition to Egyptian women. (16)

After coyly trying her hand at masculine knowledge of the country, such as its geographic situation, topography, climate and history, in volume three, Poole apologizes and shrinks back in femininity: her own femininity and that of the delineated. Women are her topic, she declares. Yet, aware of her topical confinement, she converts her disadvantage to a privilege. She repetitively stresses the inaccessibility of the harem to males, hence highlighting her importance as a "valuable helpmate" (Poole II: 18). Besides, she also repetitively refers to the confining harem curtain that excluded males and created a role for the Englishwoman in the service of patriarchal imperialism (Poole II: 9-50). Unprivileging western males, Poole reminds everyone that the harem curtain is an "impassable barrier to men" (Poole III: 80). Her references to the curtain culminate in a woodcut of it where it is framed by vines and jasmine and is partly drawn by an oriental male figure. In this visual representation, the exterior wall suggests an alluring interior but denies the readers access to it. The oriental male figure, about to enter, suggests the possibility of masculine penetration but excludes western men. The harem curtain signifies the inmates' confinement and Poole's privilege as a woman, who could step through, see, and report. However, Poole's privilege was more than she realized. The harem and its inhabitants were a center of interest and desirability to male readers. At the time D. Urquhart, British ambassador to Turkey, stressed the need to "know" about "oriental women": "I hold it to be impossible to form a correct estimate of any portion of the Eastern mind, and consequently of Eastern existence, unless you are thoroughly master of the whole" (II: 380. Emphasis in original).

Shut out and prohibited from access, Englishmen were doubly curious about what was behind the walls and inside the veils. With its feminine euphemism, indicated by redundant references to the unutterable and repetitively interspersed with ellipses and blanks, The Englishwoman in Egypt passively allows a phantasmic reconstruction of the harem in the readers' imagination. With such rhetorical strategies she marks the difference between these women and their illicit deeds on the one hand, and herself as a representative of Victorian propriety, on the other hand. Thanks to such references, she contributes to the association between oriental women and promiscuity as a self-protective measure in compliance with patriarchal laws. (17)

Other strategies for turning her femaleness into an advantage are also at work. What Poole is not supposed to partake into, as a woman--be it masculine objectivity or outspokenness--she expresses through illustrations. Her personal account of the pyramids is completed by illustration. Two woodcuts that chart the plan of the pyramids and the process of their construction in geometric figures supply the studiously masculine dimension to the feminine impressionistic domesticity (Poole II: 107-29). In a similar manner, illustrations complement the verbal sketches and anecdotes of the harem. They contain and present the euphemistically unaccommodated excess. It is through the interplay between letterpress and illustration that her distorted/distorting perception emerges. She narrates how two western travelers exploring the Shubra palace gardens ended up in the presence of Mohammad Ali, naked in his bath, because they were met with no resistance when they wandered into the palace (Poole II: 70). Along with this anecdote, that suggests the accessibility of the naked premier to imperial males, the facing page attracts but disgusts, calls for and shuns western males simultaneously. The portrait of two oriental female beauties supplements the masculine anecdote. Hugging and leaning on each other, their posture suggests an exclusion of heterosexuality and thus of masculinity. (18)

While Poole figures in some verbal harem sketches, illustration allows her to occupy a detached position of power and propriety, placing her apart and opposed to the delineated scene. Abstaining from enunciating the perverse, she euphemistically incorporates it. Being abroad allowed the Englishwoman a space wherein she subverted her powerless gendered position in compliance with Victorian patriarchy. It allowed her to incorporate herself as a functional Britisher among her nation. Poole indeed attempted to subvert her femininity, as Jane Robinson argues, but not by setting it against masculinity. Rather, she defined her superiority by culturally and ethically opposing it to oriental femininity, complying with, rather than rebelling against normative white maleness.

Englishwoman: English Politics

Poole's penetration of the Egyptian harem was a response to a political imperial demand. In his Report on Egypt and Candia (1840), addressed to Palmerston, the British Prime Minister at the time, John Bowring refers to the exclusion of the Egyptian harem from British surveillance: "No doubt fearless crimes and horrible abuses are perpetrated in those recesses which exclude all inspection, all interference, all control. The very organization of society thus stands in the way of justice" (122). The report was published shortly before the Englishwoman's visit to Egypt and her work, now celebrated as "the first [female authored representation] in the English language based on personal observation," was an act of collaboration in the service of British "justice" (Robinson 305). (19) She both provided harem "inspection" and confirmed the conclusion that Muslim violence in the form of "the seclusion of the hareem ... stand terribly in the way of improvement" (Bowring 150). Bowring's Report marked the terrain and pointed out the demand for what Poole topically covered, namely, the women and their dress. Bowring states: "Cotton cloth is the only article at present which has injured [Egyptian] commercial importation; for it appears that England sends these articles far less frequently, especially cloth of the low quality; and India muslins, formerly so much used, are now scarcely at all sent to Egypt" (35). According to Bowring, oriental female dress with its heavy embroidery and peculiar style was one of the factors that closed the Egyptian market in the face of British textile, thus the women should change their dress and learn to consume more cloth. For this to be effected, they need to break away from their confinement, shop for, and frequently consume, English fashion. The target of the British "Civilizing Mission" was to market civilization, not as culture, but as superficial "dress" that has nothing beyond its monetary value. It is not that Egypt needed the socially and economically disrupting textile, for it manufactured its own products and exported the surplus; rather, the problem was that Egypt's "new establishments enter into competition with those of Europe" (Bowring 35). The Egyptian market needed to be widely opened up to English goods. Harem habits and mode of life were of crucial importance for British economy and colonization.

Poole identified herself as a Christian Britisher and wrote her identity through the construction of a relation of opposition between these terms and the people she encountered. Foregrounding her national identity and moving within the parameters of British colonial politics, but with a feminine accent and a narcissistic self-perception, Poole persisted in reading the encounter as a national one. She constructs a gender-specific hierarchy and places herself on top. She was particularly interested in the upper class and royal harems which she divides nationally as Egyptian and Turkish. She elevates her harems and contemplates the distinguished status of "the great ladies of the land" but holds that both distinct/distinguished parties are subservient to the Englishwoman (Poole II: 64). Minutely charting the manner of her reception in the different harems, she came out with a monolithic conclusion. Of her first visit to the Governor's harem she reports, "I could not help feeling exceedingly amused at my situation; and considering that these ladies are of the royal family of Turkey, you will see that I was most remarkably honoured" (Poole I: 216). On the occasion of a following visit, she confirms: "On my second visit to them I was almost perplexed by the honour with which they distinguished me; for the chief lady resigned her own place, and seated herself below me" (Poole II: 43). After a visit to the legendary Princess Nazly of western travelers' accounts, who is also the Viceroy's eldest daughter, (20) she imperatively reported, "I think it due to the hareem of the Pasha, and others of distinction, to show the respect they manifest towards the English" (Poole II: 85). With the repetition of the visits, as she walked in and out of the harems, her identification of herself as a national representative became more and more accentuated, allowing her to overcome her anxiety and self-supportively write herself as a national imperial figure with a mission to fulfill.

In Poole's representation of Egyptians, the invocation of a term invites sometimes speculations on its opposite: the women are represented in relation to men; Copts to Muslims; children to adults; slaves to masters; the mad to the sane. However, her hierarchies are fluid, allowing an exchange of positions between the terms of each of the geo-specific binaries. Oppressed by their husbands, the women are all deceptive; children, if they grow up at all, become oppressors; slaves cunningly subvert the power politics; the mad harm the sane. This continuous displacement allows an interchange of positions within the barbarian/savage hierarchy, affirmatively and negatively defining Egyptian culture, but always reserving the top "civilized" position for the Englishwoman to inhabit.

The British obsession with religion, triggered by the missionary quest, among other factors, together with the Victorian Englishwoman's definition of herself as Christian, ensured a reading of herself in the mirror of the opposite culture. As ever, moving within the parameters of the British policy of divide and rule, she subdivides the Egyptian population along the axis of religion into Muslims/Copts. She represents Islam as a barbaric creed, but one that was on the wane. Muslims are represented as pathologic figures whose inevitable forthcoming death is dictated by, and is an outcome of, their culture. (21) She thus negates the perception of Islam as a potential threat and dismisses its cultural place, leaving behind a blank space that needed to be culturally rehabilitated. Her fantasy for the elimination of Muslims is particularly manifest in her reports on the death of children. (22) On one of these occasions she writes:

   I heard it with feelings of unmixed thankfulness to God.
   What had been his prospect here? Of Muslim parents, he
   would have been educated in a false religion, mentally
   and physically dark, to grope his way in poverty through
   childhood, with life's struggle before him, the child of
   oppressed parents who could rarely afford to lighten his
   burden by their presence; lonely, blind, and miserable.
   When I hear of the death of children under circumstances
   such as these, I always rejoice. (Poole III: 43)

While Muslims are barbarians, Copts are represented as sheer savages in Poole's writing. On one occasion, she describes a Coptic funeral in a language that recalls to the readers' imagination the many representations of cannibalistic feasts written about in travel literature at the time, as she utilizes the same discourse. (23) The corpse is laid in the middle of the setting and is circled by women "beating the tambourines and singing," others "were crying aloud, and slapping, or rather beating themselves, keeping time with the instruments" and some others "were jumping, and clapping their hands, while their bodies were bent almost double" and "time after time, they renewed the jumping, or rather dancing and screaming, around the corpse" (Poole III: 34-36). As Nicolas Thomas argues, while barbarism posited a potential threat to colonialists, those savages "who are naked can ... be dressed" (73). Poole held that the Copts needed to be re-educated in the "correct" Christianity and during her Egyptian sojourn, she befriended and aided Mrs. Lieder, the first missionary activist woman in Egypt who, having failed in converting Muslims, targeted the Copts.

Poole's metaphoric framework for political-cultural intervention and self-definition was Christianity. She explicitly held that:

   Until enlightened by the truths of the Gospel, no important
   reformation can be effected in the Hareem system,
   nor in the general morals of the East .... There is one
   truth alone which can revise such a state of things one
   holy influence--it is, and must be, Christianity. (Poole
   III: 12, 17)

Pursued through the constructed religio-imperial hierarchy, Muslim/Coptic, the imperial call has its resonance in the feminine religio-imperial discourse. Poole pursued the colonial male ideology in her fixation on "the dominant class" and the ruling "Turks" as well as in her division of the population into Muslims and Copts. She states: "This always important city [Cairo] may now be ranked among 'men's thoroughfares' in a wide sense" (Poole I: 109-10). Poole was collaborating with the imperial males to turn that "important city" into an English "men's thoroughfare," a route to their colonial possessions in India. Her now celebrated status is the outcome of her national writing of her identity, which she did in compliance with the rules of the game. Rather than reading her as a monolithically heroic figure--as some feminists have argued--perhaps one should revert to her own understanding of the position of the oppressed, which she projected on Egyptians. She believed that "every one who has studied the human mind will agree with me, that, with few exceptions, the oppressed become the hardest of oppressors" (Poole II: 97). Ironically, this statement applies to Poole herself: she was definitely not one of the "few exceptions." Sophia Poole's self-delineated image was the outcome of her scribing the Egyptians, a consideration that remains overlooked, despite the lapse of many decades of changing politics. Her work and her "self" were and still are being read out of, and apart from, their "context."

Notes

(1) See, for example, Holme's review, "Mrs. Poole's Englishwoman in Egypt."

(2) Besides The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Lane also contributed one of the pioneer translations of the Arabian Nights, The Thousand and One Nights, Commonly Called, in England, the Arabian Nights' Entertainment (1838-41) and a translation of the Koran, Selections from the Kur-an, commonly called in England the Koran: with an Interwoven Commentary (1843). Lane's lifelong endeavor was the Arabic-English Lexicon. Derived from the Best and the Most Copious Eastern Sources. The first five parts of the Lexicon appeared between 1863 and 1874 while parts 6, 7 and 8 were edited by S. Lane-Poole and published posthumously in 1877, 1885 and 1893.

(3) Jason Thompson points out that "roughly one-third of her book's letters, really chapters, were almost entirely based on the Description, while shorter passages from it were interspersed elsewhere in the letters" ("Editor's Introduction" xxiv).

(4) It was Lane who did the editing of the book and at least in one instance, as Jason Thompson reveals, Lane changed the voice in the narrative from the writer's "I" to the editor's "my brother" ("Edward William Lane's 'Description of Egypt'" 574).

(5) No reference to Nefeeseh is made at all in the standardized biography of Lane contributed by his great-nephew, Stanley Lane-Poole.

(6) A. Amin, "Sheykh al-Dessouki and Mr. Lane," cited in Ahmed, Edward William Lane, 34.

(7) Poole's haunted house proved very popular among English readers. It is celebrated in the review of the book published in Blackwood's Magazine; it is frequently referred to by later travelers and is quoted at length in Bartlett's Nile Boat, or Glimpses of the Land of Egypt (76-79). It doubly testifies to the "superstition" of the Egyptians and the femininity of the Englishwoman, i.e., it served as a confirmation of both stereotypes.

(8) After Lane, she advocated the climatological theory that held climate largely responsible for cultural achievement and national disposition.

(9) See Timothy Mitchell's illustrative critique of "objectivity" and analysis of disguise in Colonising Egypt, 18-21 and 23-28.

(10) The reference is to Michel Foucault's analysis of the panopticon in Discipline and Punishment, 195-228.

(11) Lane's MSS, cited in Ahmed, Edward William Lane, 26.

(12) Lane's MSS, cited in Ahmed, Edward William Lane, 1.

(13) Billie Melman points out that most descriptions of the baths "testify that the Ottoman women never bathed in the nude, but covered themselves with linen-wrappers (I have come across only one reference to nudity in the bath, in Sophia Poole's description of one high-class establishment in Cairo in 1842)" (91).

(14) For an elaborate discussion of the relation between disgust and desire, see Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race.

(15) Herder was a pioneer of the climatological theory which referred racial cultural difference to climactic and topographic factors.

(16) For a discussion of the different women's reactions to the encounter and their concomitance with males, see Sahar Abdel-Hakim, "Gender Politics in a Colonial Context."

(17) She demonstrates hyperbole through omission: "I once told you that in all the hareems I had seen, the chief lady was the only wife: I can no longer make such a boast; but look and wonder, as an Englishwoman, how harmony can exist where the affection of the husband is shared by--I do not like to say how many wives" (Poole II: 42).

(18) The association between the harem and homosexuality is recurrent in many western women's narratives of the harem at the time. See, for example, Harriet Martineau's representation of the harem in Eastern Life (235-45). Besides, the impropriety of male exclusion from oriental harems is one of the themes of Poole's text.

(19) Such generalizations, however, should be treated with some caution.

(20) Very much like her father, Nazly was turned into a tourist attraction and an account of her became a necessary part of western women's writings on Egypt. Englishwomen reporters represented Nazly as a mythological figure, either excessively nice or appallingly ruthless. See, for example, Georgiana Dawson Damer's Diary of a Tour in Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and the Holy Land. For an overall survey of the representation of the ruthless Princess compiled from the literature of travel, see Mostyn, "A Cruel Princess" in Egypt's Belle Epoque, 29-34.

(21) Poole was also obsessed with death in Egypt. She finds that "Muslim ceremonies that have references to the dead are ... generally very interesting" (Poole II:99). Watching a couple simply walking down the road during Ramadan she notes, "the fear that they too might prove martyrs to the requirements of their religion was far from groundless, and naturally present to the mind of the observer" (Poole I: 108).

(22) For a lengthy analysis of this fantasy in other writers on Egypt, see John Barrell, "Death on the Nile."

(23) Peter Hulme argues that cannibalism is always present in the western colonial mind as a threat from the Other, a form of othering. Cannibalism, he holds, is often represented as around the corner even though it is never there (83). For a discussion of cannibalism as one of the hallmarks of colonial discourse and as "a term that has gained its entire meaning from within the discourse of European colonialism," see Hulme, Colonial Encounters (86).

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