Notes
- Major and Mrs George Darby Griffith, A Journey Across the Desert, from Ceylon to Marseilles: Comprising Sketches of Aden, the Red Sea, Lower Egypt, Malta, Sicily and Italy, 2 volumes, London: Henry Colburn, 1845.
- Linda Nochlin, ‘The imaginary orient’, Art in America, May 1983, pp.118–31, 187, 189, 191.
- Lisa Tickner, ‘Feminism, art history and sexual difference’, Genders, no.3, Fall 1988, p.105.
- For an analysis of this issue of the female gaze in relation to Henriette Browne's harem paintings see: Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism. Race, Femininity and Representation, London/New York: Routledge, 1996.
- Sophia Lane-Poole, The Englishwoman in Egypt. Letters from Cairo, written during a Residency there in 1845–46, second series, London: Chas. Knight, 1846, p.89.
- Martin Jay characterised the labyrinth as ‘that potent figure…used to challenge the putative clarity of a God's-eye view of the world’ (Jay, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, p.364).
- Anonymous, The Lustful Turk, (first published 1828), reprinted, New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 1983.
- Arthur Joffé (director), Alain Sarde (producer), Harem, Sara film, 1985.
- The relationship between fear and the experience of colonised space has been analysed by several recent writers. In his essay ‘Sly civility’, Homi Bhabha argues that fear and paranoia are integral to the ambivalence at the origins of colonial authority: ‘The colonial demand for narrative carries within it its threatened reversal…the hybrid tongues of the colonial space make even the repetition of the name of God uncanny’, (‘Sly civility’, in The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, pp.93–101).
- Jacques Lacan, ‘The line and light’, Seminar XI, published as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977, p.96.
- ibid, p.106. As Kaja Silverman argues, this is a ‘monumental challenge to all such notions of mastery, [because] the geometrical point is only a partial dimension in the field of the gaze’ (Kaja Silverman, ‘Fassbinder and Lacan. A reconsideration of gaze, look and image’, in Male Subjectivity at the Margins, London: Routledge, 1992, p.146).
- Silverman, ‘Fassbinder and Lacan…’, p.150.
- Jacques Lacan, ‘What is a picture?’, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977, pp.105–12.
- Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures, London: Macmillan, 1989, pp.14–26. For an analysis of the early feminist film theory alignment of gaze and eye with masculine privilege and the later revisions of this assumption see, Craig Saper, ‘A nervous theory: the troubling gaze of psychoanalysis in media studies’, Diacritics, 21:4, Winter 1991, pp.33–52.
- ‘This is the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting. Something is given not so much to the gaze as to the eye, something that involves the abandonment, the laying down, of the gaze’ (Lacan, ‘The line and light’, p.101).
- Emilia Bithynia Hornby, In and Around Stamboul, vol. 1, London: Richard Bentley, 1858, pp.307–08.
- Freud specified the operation of humour as a defense mechanism for the subject, encapsulating it in the following terms: ‘Look! here is the world which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children—just worth making a jest about!’ (Sigmund Freud, ‘Humour’, 21, 1927, p.166).
- Laura B. Starr, ‘Ladies of the harem’, The Ladys Realm, vol.4, 1898, p.318.
- Lucy Matilda Cubley, The Hills and Plains of Palestine. With Illustrations and Descriptions by Miss L. Cubley, London: Day and Son, 1860, p.34.
- Wendy Leeks had noted an exception to this in Ingres’ bather paintings—the first in the series—the 1808 Bather; Leeks argues that this figure appears startled by an onlooker (the viewer) from which she attempts to cover herself (Wendy Leeks, ‘Ingres other-wise’, Oxford Art Journal, 9:1, 1986, p.31).
- Mrs Romer, A Pilgrimage to the Temples and Tombs of Egypt, Nubia and Palestine, in 1845–1846, vol. 1 (of two vols), London: Richard Bentley, 1846, pp. 222–23; Saint Bartholomew was one of the twelve apostles whom, tradition asserts, was flayed alive in Armenia (J.A. Hammerton [ed.], Concise Universal Biography, London: Amalgamated Press Ltd, p.199).
- ‘He [sic] maps himself in it. How? In so far as he isolates the function of the screen and plays with it. Man [sic], in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze. The screen is here the locus of mediation’ (Lacan, ‘What is a picture?x’, p.107).
- Robert Halsband (ed.), The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965, pp.313–14. For an analysis of the portraits of Montagu see Marcia Pointon, ‘Killing pictures’, in Painting and the Politics of Culture, New Essays on British Art, 1700–1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp.39–72.
- Isabel Romer, The Bird of Passage; or Flying Glimpses of Many Lands, vol.2 (of three vols), London: Richard Bentley, 1849, p.261.
- Lady Alicia Blackwood, A Narrative of Personal Experiences and Impressions During My Sojourn in the East Throughout the Crimean War, London: Hatchard, 1881, p.86. The comments Blackwood recorded contrast with a conversation about Western fashion amongst women at an Armenian wedding that Sophia Lane-Poole attended; ‘Doudou, do you notice how stiff and stately Mariemme Hanoum sits in her new polka? Her husband, Baron Carabet, who has just returned from Constantinople, has brought her a machine made of whalebone and steel, in which the Franks cage their wives in order to fill up what is missing, and tone down what is superfluous’ (Stanley Lane-Poole [ed.], The People of Turkey. Twenty Years Residence among Bulgarians, Greeks, Albanians, Turks and Armenians, By a Consul's Daughter and Wife, Part III, London: John Murray, 1878, p.69).
- Female narcissism is attractive to men, ‘not only for aesthetic reasons… For it seems evident that another person's narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own narcissism and are in search of object-love’ (Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology. The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985, p.83).
- Lacan's model ‘calls radically into question the possibility of separating vision from the image—of placing the spectator outside the spectacle in a position of detached mastery’ (Silverman, ‘Fassbinder and Lacan…’, p.146).
- For an analysis of the role of women's travel writing as operating according to the ‘logic of supplementarity’ within the Orientalist tradition see, Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies. Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Sara Clement exemplifies this attitude. She wrote: ‘But alas! a fancy for European dress has penetrated even the most carefully guarded harems, and the bad taste manifested in the curious medley of garments and colours that are worn would be ludicrous were it not pathetic’ (Sara Erskine Clement, Constantinople. The City of the Sultans, Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1895, pp.253–54). For further analysis of European women travellers’ fantasies of the harem and the role of harem women in contesting these western preconceptions through the process of commissioning harem portraits, see my essay ‘Contested terrains: women orientalists and the colonial harem’, in Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts (eds), Orientalism's Interlocutors. Rewriting the Colonial Encounter, Cross-cultural Art Series, (series editor, Nicholas Thomas), North Carolina: Duke University Press, forthcoming.