The 19th Century Harem and Egypt and Syria

The purpose of this research is to examine the harem in Egypt and Syria, reflected in Victorian travel writing in English literature. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical and cultural context of the Victorian interest in the harem, and then to discuss, in turn, Victorian-era commentaries (chiefly, though not exclusively British) that formulated popular perceptions of the harem; Western women's interpretations of harem life vis-a-vis the position of women in Victorian culture; the response of Arab women to their English visitors as well as their own accounts of domestic life and marital arrangements; and social implications of the Victorian discourse of middle-class women compared to the Islamic perspective on the proper function and status of women.

Contemporary with the Victorian era of empire building in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia was the protracted decline of the Ottoman Empire, which from the sixteenth century onward had extended outward from Istanbul, Turkey, into the Middle East and central Europe but which by the late nineteenth century was known as the "sick man of Europe." The Ottoman Empire appears not to have persecuted non-Islamic religions. Until Ataturk transformed Turkey into a secular state, however, Ottomans also very much reflected the culture of Islam, which survives not only in Turkey but also (and indeed more strikingly) in the countries of the Middle East.

It is a commonplace of Islamic culture that the sta

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ishman among all other Englishmen. As much as Burton is saying that his reading audience is English and civilized and the sheik is not, he is also saying to that audience, "I am Sir Richard Burton, and you're not." Notice too, in the above-cited passage, that Burton does not say he never saw a woman but as it were very woman. This is not the superiority of European culture or education or of master over slave, not even the presumption of superiority that one must rather presume Burton as a man felt toward any woman on earth. No, this is the confident superiority of race, a judgment that some people--specifically and programmatically non-European women who are also slaves and Africans--cannot be considered quite human. There is indeed a sense of entitlement to speculate in a quasi-scientific way about the characteristics of the slave girls, whose voices, Burton says, "are strangely soft and delicate, considering the appearance of the organs from which they proceed." Now apart from the factitiously objective and scientific tenor of the observation, it is nothing if not a back-handed expression of Saxon disgust regarding Negroid lip features, which differ in thickness from Caucasian lip features and appear to have offended the poor

Category: History - T