On not wanting more: feminist drift in Zeyneb Hanoum’s A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions

ABSTRACT

This essay reads Zeyneb Hanoum’s A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions as a key site where early-twentieth-century feminism, Orientalism, and queer modernism intersect. Zeyneb’s text offers a feminist critique of the western model of temporality in which subjects are compelled always to want more and to work for the future. Drawing on the queer modernist strategies of Pierre Loti, Zeyneb uses the familiar trope of Oriental lassitude to explore an alternative to western time and to Orientalist narrative modes, which inevitably tell stories about women from the harem who internalize this desire to want more. Zeyneb, like Loti’s hero, finds an existence in the “nothing happens” time associated with scenery and incident. But while Loti’s hero morphs into pure desire, Zeyneb retreats into a passive, self-abnegating state of illness in which she radically avoids self-assertion, to the point that much of her autobiographical book is written by her collaborator. As she erases herself, she opens up a homosocial, communal, female world where the self-promotion and future-orientation of the west become irrelevant. Grounded in the idea of the silent harem, she imagines a static world in which desire itself is replaced by sympathetic, feminist understanding.

KEYWORDS:

• Orientalism
• harem
• queer modernism
• work
• temporality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Heather Fielding is an associate professor of English at Purdue University Northwest and the author of Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Her articles on modern and contemporary British fiction have also appeared in MLQ, Modern Fiction Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, and Studies in the Novel.

Notes

1 Ellison, introduction to Zeyneb, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, xiv.

2 Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 144. For example, western writers regularly claimed that Ottoman women writers, including Zeyneb, were not who they claimed to be (see Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 22–3, 164).

3 Marc Hélys—a penname for the writer Marie Léra—published a tell-all confession, Le Secret des “Désenchantées,” in 1924. The role of Zeyneb, Melek, and Hélys in Les Désenchantées has been analyzed by Yeazell, Harems of the Mind, 45–55, and Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 19–24.

4 Lewis’s Rethinking Orientalism is the most prominent example. She builds on the work of Melman, who explores the problem of authority faced even by English women in their writing about the harem (Women’s Orients, 210–31). This focus is also clear in the scholarship on Zeyneb’s work specifically. Nakai frames her article, “Shakespeare’s Sister,” as an attempt to uncover Zeyneb’s voice, to read her as not silenced by Grace Ellison. Konuk similarly theorizes Zeyneb’s authority, using ideas of ethnomasquerade and mimicry to imagine her as something more than “a site of projection” for Western Orientalism (“Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters,” 404).

5 Zeyneb’s real name was Zennour. She was the daughter of Noury Bey, the Minister of Foreign Affairs under Sultan Abdülhamit II (Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 19).

6 Zeyneb, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 99.

7 Loti, Les Désenchantées, 5.

8 Ibid., 23.

9 Yeazell, Harems of the Mind, 9.

10 Boone, Homoerotics of Imperialism, 201.

11 Flaubert, quoted in Yeazell, Harems of the Mind, 237.

12 On Ellison’s role in this tradition, see Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 182–4.

13 See Lott, The English Governess, 38, 122. Melman, Women’s Orients, 159–62, presents many more examples.

14 Melman, Women’s Orients, 162.

15 Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism, 138.

16 I am thinking of Lee Edelman’s vision of queerness as “the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism” (No Future, 3).

17 Yeazell, Harems of the Mind, 192.

18 Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism, xxviii. The critic who has gone the farthest in these terms is Emily Apter. She shows how French women writers writing from North Africa—including L.M. Enfrey, Myriam Harry, and Isabelle Eberhardt—reworked the concept of the Arabic mektoub, the principle of fate or submission to divine will, by locating it in the all-female world of the harem. There, the sensual, passive, submissive state of women in the harem becomes the ground of a “countereroticism”: “a fatal voluptuousness pegged to a feminocentric libidinal economy” (Continental Drift, 111). This vision of mektoub, which also involves submission rather than asserting authority, is parallel to the “drift” I trace in Zeyneb’s work, but with an emphasis on the erotic that Zeyneb might reject as evidence of wanting more.

19 This abandoning of authority is part of what constitutes Loti’s modernism for Barthes. As Kandiyob puts it, “the démodé turns into modernist writing and a campy nineteenth-century author becomes an innovator” (“Roland Barthes Abroad,” 231). This link between the queer and the modernist is, as Heather Love has pointed out, inevitable: they are potential synonyms, both concerned with the margin and the alienated (“Introduction,” 745). While it is beyond the scope of this essay to travel further down this path, it is worth noting that this link between queerness, modernism, and Orientalism moves through an interest in static spaces in narrative, in spatial form that resists forward-moving temporality.

20 Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 225.

21 See, for instance, Heffernan, who, quoting Ellison, argues that Zeyneb “willed herself to die” because she was unable to accept life in either Europe or Turkey (Veiled Figures, 113).

22 Zeyneb, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 69.

23 Melek, Abdul Hamid’s Daughter, 163–4.

24 Ibid., 164.

25 Ibid., 37.

26 Ellison, An English Woman in a Turkish Harem, 16, 17.

27 Zeyneb, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 69.

28 Ibid., 65.

29 Ibid., 67.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., 68.

33 Ibid., 69.

34 Ibid., 155.

35 Ibid., 155–6.

36 Ibid., 162.

37 Ibid., 214.

38 Ibid., 203.

39 Ibid., 190.

40 Ibid., 183 (first quotation), 193. Lewis describes this moment as evidence of what she calls Zeyneb’s “haremizing” gaze, which makes the west seem strange and allows her to see oppression that her western colleagues overlook (Rethinking Orientalism, 222).

41 Zeyneb, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 187.

42 Ibid., 187.

43 “How can we enter the professions and yet remain civilized human beings; human beings, that is, who wish to prevent war?” (Woolf, Three Guineas, 75). Heffernan also traces connections between Woolf’s outsider feminism and that of Zeyneb (Veiled Figures, 113).

44 Zeyneb, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 187, 188.

45 Ibid., 187.

46 Ibid., 98. This idea that Turkish women had been damaged by reading European books was a common theme across early twentieth-century auto-ethnographies about harem life, including Demetra Vaka Brown’s Haremlik. See Yeazell, Harems of the Mind, 46, 54.

47 Zeyneb, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 187.

48 Ibid., 226.

49 Ibid., 243.

50 Ibid., 244.

51 Melek, Abdul Hamid’s Daughter, 39.

52 Yeazell, Harems of the Mind, 9, 171.

53 Zeyneb, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 80.

54 Loti, Les Désenchantées, 254.

55 Zeyneb, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 99.

56 Barthes, “Pierre Loti,” 108.

57 Ibid.

58 Barthes, “Pierre Loti,” 113, 108.

59 Ibid., 109.

60 Ibid., 111.

61 Ibid., 108.

62 Ibid., 119.

63 The details and exact date of Zeyneb’s death are not known. Lewis notes that Zeyneb’s story “muddles” beginning with her return to Turkey in 1912, since other sources say she returned at the beginning of the first world war. See Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 22. By the time of Ellison’s 1923 visit to Turkey, Zeyneb was already dead (Ellison, Turkey To-Day, 120).

64 Loti, Les Désenchantées, 228.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid., 118.

67 Ibid., 116.

68 Ibid., 114.

69 Zeyneb, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 147.

70 Ibid.

71 See Ellison, An English Woman in a Turkish Harem, 20, 37, 137.

72 Zeyneb, A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions, 29, 51.

73 Ibid., 103.

74 Ibid., 25.

75 Ibid., 50.

76 Ibid., 190.

77 This scene has generally been read as a moment where class difference prevents a bond between women. Nakai, for example, sees Zeyneb as repulsed by a “vulgar mob” (“Shakespeare’s Sister,” 29; see also Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism, 179).