Shakespeare’s sisters in Istanbul: Grace Ellison and the politics of feminist friendship

Abstract

This article attempts to reconstruct a story of friendship between an English journalist, Grace Ellison, and two Turkish sisters, Zeyneb and Melek Hanoum. The sisters served as Pierre Loti’s models for the main characters of his novel Les Désenchantées. In 1906, they left Istanbul to escape from the oppressive regime of Abdülhamit II and started living in Europe, where they met Ellison. Ellison encouraged them to write, and edited and co-authored their books in English. She pursued Virginia Woolf’s idea of women’s solidarity, working for women whom Woolf might have termed “Shakespeare’s sisters”. Although her friendship with the sisters raises the question of subaltern agency within the discursive domain of orientalism, it cannot be reduced to the binary relationship between orientalism and its silenced Other. Taking the historical context and class background into account, this article argues that what Ellison sought for was an eternally postponed, future friendship between women across cultures, nations and classes.

Keywords:

• transnational feminism
• orientalism
• Ottoman Empire
• Grace Ellison
• Pierre Loti
• Virginia Woolf

Notes

1. Young Virginia Stephen appears to be a cultural essentialist who insists that “no Christian, or even European, can hope to understand the Turkish point of view” and “The difference is in the blood that beats in the pulse” (Woolf 2004, 355, 356). Yet the proposition of “the Outsiders’ Society” in Three Guineas (Woolf 1938) indicates that, albeit abstractly, Woolf’s feminism, at least in her late years, envisions women’s solidarity from the cosmopolitan perspective.

2. Gayatri Spivak reads the motif of female friendship in A Room of One’s Own via Derrida, arguing that the essay’s fictive presuppositions, by which “Woolf takes us into the impossible possible of the ‘perhaps if’” (Spivak 2003, 40), should not be mistaken for merely constative statements. Spivak also suggests that the phrase “we work for her [ … ] even in poverty” in the last paragraph of the essay undoes Woolf’s previous argument for the improvement of women writers’ financial conditions.

3. In The Future of Constantinople, Leonard Woolf (1917) called for “administrative internationalism” in Istanbul on the grounds of Istanbul’s demographical cosmopolitanism, although his argument was certainly motivated by economic interests – that is, Europe’s free access to the Danube.

4. Lewis spends a whole chapter of Rethinking Orientalism in analysing these photographs, pointing out that in most of the shots the sisters are dressed in Turkish costume even though the photos were taken in Europe, where there was no need for the sisters to be veiled.

5. With regard to this impressive picture, Lewis points out that Miss Chocolate’s change of identity through cross-cultural dressing is not a voluntary act, whereas Ellison, always photographed in Turkish clothes, voluntarily performs the commodified Turkish woman; and Lewis argues that Miss Chocolate is there to serve as a symbol of the idea of “benign” slavery in the Orient – an idea which itself runs through the long history of orientalist tradition.