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

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ilization is the more likely its transactions are to be publicly conducted. Consideration of the following passage in relationship to the Islamic structuring of their world around the secretive chambers of the harem is quite revealing. Coinciden-tally, Van Gennep uses an architectural motif to frame his thoughts: A society is similar to a house divided into rooms and corridors. The more the society resembles ours in its form of civilization, the thinner are its internal partitions and the wider and more open are its doors of communication. In a semicivilized society, on the other hand, sections are carefully isolated, and passages from one to another must be made through formalities and ceremonies which show extensive parallels to the rites of territorial passage (26). Although current multicultural scholars might debate his value-laden observations, suggesting that differences between civilizations are not always best arranged in an hierarchial order, nevertheless, Van Gennep's imagery does underscore that the physical structuring of the harem reinforced the society's desire to turn inward in the midst of the threatening disarray which lingered outside its boundaries. The formality of ceremony and ritual safeguards against t
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Approximate Word count = 5043
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page)