The Harem During the 19th Century

Scrutiny of nineteenth century harem life in the East and travellers' responses to what they observed there provides an instructive pair of contrasts. Life in the eastern harems was elaborately organized to provide a constant or stabilizing oasis in the midst of the ongoing chaos which often reigned outside its walls (Walther 10). Travel presents itself as a continual transgression against established boundaries relying upon a nearly constant sense of movement (Leed 3). If as Albert Camus quipped in 1963 "What gives value to travel is fear" (Leed 1), what the orientalist custom of the harem offered was a sense of permanency, even if it was mere illusion, derived from an intricate design of restriction. When Westerners visited the Far East, their eye was often tricked and failed to see this lavish panorama set before them without colonialist prejudice. A study of the harem transfixed by both the masculine and feminine gaze of the nineteenth century observer is necessarily filtered through an almost equally patterned culture of restraint, that of the Victorian era. The Western response to the harem, especially by that of British imperial subjects, is poetically rendered through the Mohammadian custom of veiling. Due to its ingrained reserve, and even further heightened by its near overvaluing of gentility, nineteenth century culture in its Islamic, Judaic and Christian molds was conspicuously drawn toward investigating in