Mary Roberts. Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0822339670. Price: US$23.95

Mary Roberts’s book marks an important turn in the study of representations of the harem in both visual and written texts. The West has had much to say in words and pictures about the harem in the nineteenth century but, until now, few records have been located about historical Ottoman women themselves. In her short and highly accessible book Mary Roberts develops the newest direction in Orientalist studies by considering “intimate outsiders”: those British and Ottomans – artists, writers, and patrons – who had privileged, cross-cultural connections to the harem. She investigates the grey areas between East and West, challenging the strict binary articulated most notably in Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism (1978). She demonstrates that the divide between western Orientalists and Ottomans in the field of nineteenth-century visual art was bridged, more open to historical contingency, and more engaged with micropolitical exertions of power and constructions of blended identity. She locates western artists–John Frederick Lewis, Mary Walker and Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann–and about a dozen women writers who enter into cultural exchange with Ottoman hostess-patrons. And far from being stereotypically opiated odalisques lounging half-dressed in anticipation of their paşas, passive objects pitched toward a male viewer, elite Ottoman women in Istanbul and Cairo exerted their agency in helping to formulate their own self-representations as a mixture of eastern and western influences at a time when Turkey and Egypt constructed respective modernization movements. This means that Roberts’s book covers much ground. Her own research took her to six foreign countries. Hers is a compelling demonstration of the intertwining of fashion history and social history with the histories of art and literature. The trajectory of Roberts’s book is to establish the dominant masculine fantasy of the harem in Part 1, to consider its reworking by British women authors who create their own “feminine harem fantasy” (15) in Part 2, and, finally, to document in Part 3 the contestation of both clusters of attitudes by two specific Ottoman women who commission their own portraits. Part I considers the masculine fantasy of the harem through the pictures of John Frederick Lewis, a major Oriental painter whose work has experienced a renewed scholarly interest in the last few decades. Roberts does well to separate analyses of Lewis’s harem pictures from the tired Victorian “realist” explanation that would see his views of the harem as authentic because he was immersed in Cairo life for a decade and, therefore, having gone native according to William Makepeace Thackeray, used a highly mimetic technique. Instead Roberts rightly claims that Lewis produced “a convincing visual fiction: the realist fantasy” (21). She provides a fresh reading of Lewis’s harem pictures in analyzing the dynamics of gazes at play when viewers looked at his pictures and in considering the painted gazes of the characters themselves. For Roberts, Lewis’s harem pictures represent visual experiments in creating the harem’s intimacy for the viewer. She concludes that Lewis “redefined the harem fantasy with this new strategy of providing entry into painted space” (54). This intimate entry was achieved by his works’ offering a wealth of detail and pleasure in multisensory synesthesia – suggesting fragrances of flowers and tobacco; the tactility of satin, silk crêpe and velvet; and the sight of light playing over intricate fabric. Roberts notes insightfully that these are also the concerns of the women writers whose works occupy the second part of the book. Women’s writing on the harem has become a subgenre that feminist scholars have interpreted as a challenge to the masculine fantasy. Female travelers saw the harem not as a den of excess but as the locale for home and family. …