Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters: Reenacting Lady Mary Wortley

Montagu
Author(s): KADER KONUK
Source: Criticism , Summer 2004, Vol. 46, No. 3, Special Issue: Extreme and Sentimental
History (Summer 2004), pp. 393-414
Published by: Wayne State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23127324

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 ©0
KADER KONUK

Ethnomasquerad
Encounters: Ree
Wortley Mon

The year 1718 marks a significan

demarcating the first spate of W
(1718-1730)—which sought to st
in Vienna at the end of the seve
encounters were cast in a new lig
was the year Lady Mary Wortle
sador to the Ottoman Empire, r
Montagu's journey constitutes
accounts about the Orient.1 Larg
Ottoman-European relations in h
bul, Montagu immersed herself
Ottoman women. For the first ti
exclusively female spaces became
tagu gained entrance not only to
In her Turkish Embassy Letters
that by learning Arabic she was a
could now "boast of being the fi
Along with her interest in Arabic
Ottoman clothing. She wrote ex
veiling and wearing Ottoman dr
ethnomasquera.de.
This article deals with the que
accounts, highlighting key mom
course of three centuries. Ethno
of an ethnic identity through th
guage, cultural codes, or other c
nomenon that can be observed

Criticism, Summer 2004, Vol. 46, No.

Copyright © 2005 Wayne State Univers

393

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394 Kader Konuk

providing useful insights into the workings of hegemonic discourses. Edward

Said, Marjorie Garber, and Kaja Silverman have dealt extensively with ethno
masquerading travelers, such as Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence.4 Garber, for
example, in her study of Western ethnomasquerading cross-dressers in the Ori
ent, proposes that ethnomasquerade operates as a subversive form of mimicry.5
In this study, I suggest that it is misleading to ask whether ethnomasquerade
is subversive per se. Instead, I am interested in the historically specific ways in
which ethnomasquerade operates as a literary strategy in travel writing. Thus, my
question concerns the extent to which ethnomasquerade is indicative of chang
ing attitudes vis-a-vis the Other in Ottoman-European encounters. Whereas
scholars have engaged with ethnomasquerading European women and the ques
tion of gender, ethnomasquerading Ottoman travelers to the West have attracted
little attention. The study of Ottomans dressing in Western clothes, however,
promises insights into the formation of subject positions in the history of
Ottoman-European encounters and raises key questions about the function of
ethnomasquerade itself. Hence, I explore the performative function of dress in
Ottoman-European encounters from both sides—European and Ottoman—and
focus on Istanbul as the site of arrival and departure for four travelers: the British
Mary Wortley Montagu, Julia Sophia Pardoe, and Grace Ellison, and the Ottoman
Zeyneb Hamm.

European Women Traveling to the Ottoman Empire

According to her letters, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu dressed in Ottoman

attire for a number of reasons: to satisfy her curiosity, to claim authenticity
through close experience, to travel incognito by passing as an Ottoman woman,
and to serve as a corrective to men's travel writing on the Orient. Montagu clearly
enjoyed the aesthetic pleasure of ethnomasquerade and even had herself painted
in Turkish dress. Montagu's masquerade, however, is not a stage in the process of
cultural conversion. I suggest that Montagu's example shows no more than a
short-lived fantasy of embodying the Other and serves as a narrative strategy in
her letters. Her identification with elite Ottoman women serves the purpose of
asserting her own aristocratic background and emphasizing her eccentricity. Her
masquerade also keeps her Englishness intact, a fact that becomes evident in the
famous hamam scene, in which she is reluctant to get undressed.
In this scene, not dress but the state of undress is the central element: in her
letter describing the visit to the bath, Montagu invites the reader to imagine being
an invisible observer of naked women in a hamam for women, thereby invoking
the trope of the traveler in an invisible cloak who does not interfere with the scene
he or she observes. However, the stir that she causes when she enters the hamam
in her riding dress and undresses only as far as her stays is evidence of the fact that
her presence does of course make a difference to the women in the bath.6 While

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 Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters 395

mimicking the voyeuristic male gaze of an Orientalist painter, Montagu describes

the sight of two hundred naked women:

To tell you the truth, 1 had wickedness enough to wish secretly that Mr
Gervase [an Irish portrait painter] could have been there invisible. I
fancy it would have very much improved his art to see so many fine
women naked, in different postures, some in conversation, some
working, others drinking coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying
on their cushions while their slaves (generally pretty girls of seventeen
or eighteen) were employed in braiding their hair in several pretty
manners.7

On the basis of her gender, Montagu claims to be the first Western eyewit
ness of a hamam for women. She writes: "tis no less than death for a man to be

found in one of these places." Her portrayal of the scene conjures up Western
stereotypes of leisurely Oriental women by reenacting the heterosexual male
gaze—to the degree that her hamam scene becomes the blueprint for Jean
Auguste-Dominique Ingres's famous Orientalist painting The Turkish Bath in
1862.8
In order to establish her narrative authority, Montagu needs to invoke the
male gaze as a model for perception. Her intention here is not to replace male fan
tasies but to strengthen her credibility as a travel writer.9 As her strategic appro
priation of the male gaze runs the risk of being read as lesbian desire, she
impresses upon the reader that "there was not the least wanton smile or immod
est gesture amongst" the women in the bath and that—most importantly—she
herself is not fully undressed. This did not, though, stop Ingres from portraying
what Montagu's letter suppressed: the image of naked women fondling each
other in a Turkish bath. Better than any of Montagu's lengthy passages on the sen
sations of being in Turkish dress, the bath scene shows that her narrative author
ity derives from the perpetual performance of her Englishness against the threat
of transgression of ethnic and sexual boundaries in an all-female Oriental world.
Ethnomasquerade, then, is not, as is generally argued in Montagu's case, about
understanding the Other by becoming the Other; rather, it is a narrative strategy
to demonstrate control over the perceived seductive allure of the Orient.
Ethnomasquerade was neither Montagu's invention nor reserved for women
as an exclusive form of travel. For centuries, the strategy of dressing in indige
nous clothes, growing beards, and shaving heads was recommended as an appro
priate or safer way for men to travel through the Orient.10 However, Montagu's
Turkish Embassy Letters became the template for European women's journeys to
the Orient. Following in her footsteps and her practice of ethnomasquerade,
travelers such as Julia Sophia Pardoe in the nineteenth century and the British
journalist Grace Ellison in the early twentieth century claimed to have entered
and experienced firsthand segregated and sacred Muslim spaces.11 Each of these

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396 Kader Konuk

women tried to one-up Montagu by making use of ethnomasquerade in a slightly

different manner. By retracing the journey travel practice, and textual strategies
of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, they subtly altered the modes of representation
and cultural practice.12
In 1835, Julia Pardoe, a fiction and travel writer of the Romantic Period,
went to Istanbul in pursuit of romance. At the time, the second Westernization
reform of the Ottoman Empire, called tanzimat (1839), was about to be launched.
The clothing reform of 1829, which replaced the turban with the fez, robes with
frock-coats, capes, trousers, and slippers with black leather boots, preceded the
fundamental reorganization of Ottoman society.13 The opening chapter of Par
doe's travel account includes a comment upon the "hideous and unmeaning" fez
as "a mere caricature of the worst of all originals—the stiff, starch, angular Euro
pean dress."14 Regretting Sultan Mahmud II's ban of the "gorgeous turban of
muslin and cachemire"—the emblem of the Ottomans—she dismisses the

reform as a frightful change in national costume.15

Like Montagu, Pardoe displays a particular interest in the aesthetic pleasures
of the Oriental world, but unlike Montagu, whose Orient is atemporal and seem
ingly untouched by the West, Pardoe stresses the changes that Ottoman society
is undergoing at this crucial juncture in its history. Nonetheless in search of mys
tery in the Orient, Pardoe engaged in ethnomasquerade to gain entrance to Saint
Sophia, a Byzantine church, which had been turned into a mosque after the
Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. She also wanted to visit the nearby Sultan
Ahmed mosque, which allegedly no "infidel" had ever entered before. Pardoe's
cross-dressing is, though, a performance along both ethnic and gender lines. In
the following passage she describes her disguise as a Muslim man:

What European traveler, possessed of the least spirit of adventure,

would refuse to encounter danger in order to stand beneath the dome
of St. Sophia? And, above all, what wandering Giaour [infidel] could
resist the temptation of entering a mosque during High Prayer? ... I at
once understood that the attempt must be made in a Turkish dress; but
this fact was of trifling importance, as no costume in the world lends
itself more readily or more conveniently to the purposes of disguise.
After having deliberately weighed the chances for and against detection,
I resolved to run the risk; and accordingly I stained my eyebrows with
some of the dye common in the harem; concealed my female attire
beneath a magnificent pelisse, lined with sables, which fastened from
my chin to my feet; pulled a fez low upon my brow; and... I sallied forth
on my adventurous errand. [My companion warned me] that "should
you be discovered, and fail to make your escape on the instant, you will
be torn to pieces." This assertion somewhat staggered me, and for an
instant my woman-spirit quailed.16

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 Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters 397

In Montagu's hamam scene the danger of transgression is embedded in the

Ottoman-European encounter, but the threat is not spelled out. In Pardoe's
mosque scene, however, the traveler openly addresses the threat of transgression
as the danger of "almost" losing her identity. And, not unlike Montagu's resistance
to undress in the hamam, Pardoe resists bowing with the Muslim believers dur
ing High Prayer in the mosque.17 In addition to asserting her British identity and
femininity to maintain her narrative authority, Pardoe's masquerade affirms her
Christianness.

A further example of British women ethnomasquerading in Istanbul during

the declining Ottoman Empire of the early twentieth century can be found in An
Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem (1915), written by the journalist and travel
writer Grace Ellison. (Fig. 1) One-upping Montagu as well as Pardoe, Grace Elli
son presented herself as a kind of participant observer who claimed to be leading
a Turkish existence in order to "have an idea of the real value of that people. By
sinking for a while one's own personality one obtains the recompense of superior
knowledge."18 Unlike Montagu, learning one of the languages spoken in the
Ottoman Empire was not one of Ellison's concerns. Aware that a "veil, after all,
does not make a Turkish woman,"19 she learned some of the cultural mores but
never became fluent in Ottoman-Muslim culture. Her endeavor to go native was
limited not only by her lack of knowledge of Ottoman Turkish and hence
dependence on translators and speakers of English or French; her host Fatima
also resisted treating her as anything but a special guest who, for example,
according to custom, had to be insistently offered the honorary seat in the house.
However often Ellison claims to be leading a Turkish existence, her travel account
is rife with instances showing that she was generally treated as what she tried to
conceal herself to be: an Englishwoman and a Christian.
For Ellison, coming to an understanding of Turkish women is filtered
through ethnoreligious reenactment. Yet her respectable aim to provide "supe
rior knowledge" about Turkish women by covering herself with a veil ends in
frustration. "I have really tried to put myself in a Turkish woman's place," she
writes, "but I cannot somehow pity her."20 The loss of pity potentially under
mines Ellison's notion of European superiority. Pity, however, is the precondition
for Ellison's political engagement for Muslim women in the Ottoman Empire. In
the end, Ellison makes a conservative and culturally relativistic argument: even
if she does not support the institution of the harem per se, she is not willing to
advocate its abolition for nostalgic reasons. In the concluding remarks to An En
glishwoman in a Turkish Harem, Ellison argues that Turks need to progress "on the
lines of their own civilization." Never doubting the perfection of her own mim
icking performance, she warns Turks against becoming a "poor imitation of us."21
Vis-a-vis the veil, Ellison expresses a contradictory opinion, thereby also
taking a different stand from her precursor Montagu. Whereas for Montagu the
veil signifies a "perpetual masquerade" that offers women the freedom of moving

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398 Kader Konuk

Fig. 1. "The Author in Turkish Costume," in Grace Ellison, An Englishwoman in a

Turkish Harem (1915).

incognito in public,22 Ellison condemns the veil for a number of reasons. Fir
she claims, it does not offer protection from men's sexual desire but rather in
sifies the attraction; second, the veil "dispenses women from taking responsi
ity for their actions."23 In Ellison's view, the veil is not only a threat to the "path
virtue" but also an obstacle to becoming an accountable citizen. Ellison ackn
edges that women played a role in the revolution of 1908 by obscuring lett
under their garments but does not believe this capacity to be sufficient to suppor
the veil.

It transpires that Ellison's residence in a Turkish harem was tantamount o

to the excitement of having performed a role: "I have felt like an actress seate
the theatre, watching another play my part—indeed a restful sensation."24

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 Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters 399

cernible in Ellison's account is what gives rise to the thrill of ethnomasquerade—

the constant switching back and forth between the veil and hat, the positions of
actress and spectator, and passing and not passing as a native.25 Interestingly
enough, Ellison is especially excited and bemused not by Ottomans but by En
glishmen who take her for an Oriental. This might say something about the dif
ficulties of passing in the eyes of natives, as well as about the main addressee of
Ellisons ethnomasquerade, namely English men. Ellison writes:

Personally I find the veil no protection. In my hat I thread my way in and

out of the cosmopolitan throng at Pera. No one speaks to me, no one
notices me, and yet my mirror shows I am no more ugly than the major
ity of my sex. But when I have walked in the park, a veiled woman, what
a different experience. Even the cold Englishman has summed up
courage and enough Turkish to pay compliments to our "silhouettes."
We have not heeded them, walking as real Turkish women, with
stooped backs and bent heads and a rather swinging gait, but these two
silent figures only served to excite their curiosity, and no doubt they
wondered at my thick veil.26

Several times Ellison's ethnomasquerade is put to the test. One of her high
lights in this regard is her disguise as a Muslim to enter the holy tomb of Eyoub
(Eyup), a place that is all the more beautiful to her "because of the difficulty of
seeing it" as a Christian. Her masquerade does not involve the added excitement
of cross-dressing as in Pardoe's case, but it is nevertheless depicted as a danger
ous venture where a Christian in disguise could be "torn into pieces." Under these
supposedly extreme conditions, Ellison tests the credibility of her performance.
When she discloses her identity to the Hodja—a functionary in the mosque—
her claim to have passed as a Muslim in the tomb becomes questionable. His all
embracing response "There are no Giaours in our religion" creates doubt about
the credibility of her performance. The test must be renewed, this time outside of
the tomb in front of English tourists, to whom she is introduced as a Turkish
woman: "I felt just a little guilty at their delight in meeting a real Turkish woman,
but it was too dangerous to undeceive them in those fanatical surroundings." The
scene discloses once again the fact that the credibility of her ethnomasquerade
does not hinge upon passing among natives. Her fellow citizens constitute the
main audience of her ethnoreligious performance and are the ones who ulti
mately affirm its credibility.
If reenactment cannot ensure knowledge of the Other, the question remains
as to what in fact constitutes the thrill of masquerading as an Oriental. In my view,
it is—as evident in Montagu, Pardoe, and Ellison—the sexual frisson at home
that propels the masquerade. The performance of heterosexuality is central to
Montagu's fascination with the possibility of arranging secret liaisons when
veiled, as well as Pardoe's account of cross-dressing for a visit to Saint Sophia/Aya

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400 Kader Konuk

Sofya, and Ellison's encounter with Englishmen in Istanbul. With respect to the
specific cases of British women I discuss here, I suggest that ethnomasquerade nei
ther guarantees meaningful knowledge about the Other nor functions as a figure
of subversion. Rather, ethnomasquerade is a literary trope that reaffirms the East
West dichotomy and religious divide and, moreover, functions as a spectacle of
heterosexuality in order to fend off lesbian desire in an all-female Oriental world.

Ottoman Women Traveling to Europe

If the early eighteenth century marked a significant shift in Orientalist travel

literature, it also witnessed a change in the Ottoman discourse about the Occi
dent. It was during this period that a new Ottoman travel genre emerged: the
sejaretname, or the account of ambassadorial travel to Europe, which offers an
insight into the Ottoman Empire's attempt to cultivate its relations with Western
European powers.27 During the eighteenth century male travelers conveyed to
the Ottoman court information about social, military, cultural, and economic
structures in Western Europe. These largely official travel accounts contributed
significantly to Ottoman Westernization reforms. It was not until the nineteenth
century that increasing numbers of individual travelers undertook journeys for
personal and scholarly enrichment. These journeys were frequently the pretext
for letters and travel accounts, the seyahatname that were subsequently pub
lished.28 To my knowledge, the Ottoman travelogue continued to be an exclu
sively male genre throughout the nineteenth century.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new phenomenon emerged,
namely the literature written by Ottomans in European languages specifically for
a European audience. Borrowing Mary Louise Pratt's terminology, I categorize
these texts as autoethnographic in order to emphasize the fact that Ottoman sub
jects represented themselves in ways that engaged with European representa
tions of the Orient.29 Examples of these autoethnographic texts include: Malik
Hanim's Six Years in Europe (1873),30 Osman Bey's Die Frauen in der Tiirkei
(1886),31 Halil Halid's The Diary of a Turk (1903),32 Zeyneb Hanim's A Turkish
Woman's European Ii?ipressions (1912), Melek Hanim's Abdul Hamid's Daughter:
The Tragedy of an Ottoman Princess (1913), Hasan Oglu Bey's Tiirkische Frauen: Ihr
Leben im Harem und im Spiegel tilrkischer Erzahlungen (1916),33 Demetra Vaka's A
Child of the Orient (1914) and her The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul (1923),34 Leyla
Saz Hammefendi's The Imperial Harem of the Sultans (1925),35 Halide Edip's Das
neue Turan: ein turkisches Frauenschicksal (1916), her 1926 and 1928 Memoirs,36
and Selma Ekrem's Unveiled (1930).37
These autoethnographies enlighten the Western reader about social issues
in the Ottoman Empire. Striking in this body of literature, which emerged in
Western Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, is the predominance of
Ottoman women authors and their thematic treatment of Oriental women. I sug

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 Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters 401

gest that there was a decisive shift in knowledge making in the beginning of the
twentieth century when European powers competed over the dissolving
Ottoman Empire. These autoethnographic texts are evidence of the shifting sub
ject positions in the arena of Ottoman-European relations, including a tendency
toward what I call self-Orientalization. In the following section I discuss this phe
nomenon as evidenced by A Turkish Woman's European Impressions, the letters
Zeyneb Hamm (Hanoum) wrote in English during her six-year stay in Europe
from 1906 to 1912.38
Zeyneb Hamm's letters, edited by Grace Ellison, represent one of the earliest
accounts of Ottoman women to have traveled independently to Europe. Zeyneb
Hamm and her sister, Melek Hamm, were the daughters of Nuri Bey, minister of
foreign affairs under Sultan Abdulhamit, and the granddaughter of Marquis de
Blosset de Chateauneuf, a convert to Islam.39 In 1906 the sisters fled their harem
lives in Istanbul and set off in search of a life of freedom in Western Europe. This
is not a piece of early-twentieth-century Orientalist fiction, as one might think;
rather, it involves an attempt on the part of two highly educated, feminist women
to oppose the absolute rule of Sultan Abdulhamit in the late phase of the Ottoman
Empire. Orientalist fiction in Europe nonetheless did not go unnoticed by the
two sisters. Quite the opposite: what prompted their escape to Europe was the
sisters' engagement, along with a French friend, in a vigorous performance of
Orientalist fantasies of harem life in order to attract the attention of Pierre Loti,
one of the most popular authors of Orientalist literature of the day.
Zeyneb and Melek Hamm persuaded Pierre Loti that a third woman in their
company—a French woman disguised as a veiled Turk named Djenan—had
been passionately in love with him and later committed suicide, apparently of a
broken heart. In carrying out this charade, the sisters responded to Loti's Orien
talist fantasies with a sophisticated concoction of ethnomasquerade and the stag
ing of Orientalist ambience, all informed by a feminist subtext. Loti, who had a
passion for ethnomasquerade himself, did not see through the sisters' scheme.
He was taken in by the three women and became a mouthpiece for Zeyneb and
Melek Hamm's concerns, namely making their oppression in Ottoman society
known to the Western public. Loti was only happy to believe the women—who
never raised the veil while in his company—and he went on to write a novel based
on their reports and meetings.
The result was a literary work that presents a transparent fusion of fiction
with reality; it appeared in 1906 under the title Les Desenchantees and was trans
lated into English the same year.40 In his preface he wrote: "This is a purely imag
inary tale. Any endeavour to find real names for Djenan, Zeyneb, Melek, or Andre
would be a waste of time, for they never existed. The only real thing in it is the
high level of culture now prevailing in the harems of Turkey, and the suffering
which comes of it."41 Loti's attempt to disguise his own identity and those of his
protagonists was soon uncovered after the arrival of the two sisters in Europe. It

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402 Kader Ktinuk

was not until after Loti's death, though, that the plot behind the novel, however
real it appeared to Loti, was shown to be fictitious. Marc Helys (pseudonym for
Maria Lera), the author of Lejardinferme: Scenes de la vie feminine en Turquie, dis
closed in 1923 that it was she who had staged herself as the Turkish woman. The
preface begins with the following revelations: "Djenane n'est pas morte. Djenane
n'etait pas Turque. Djenane etait une Frangaise qui, traditionaliste, avait toujours
ete attiree vers la Turquie, notre amie seculaire. C'etait une Frangaise qui aimait
et plaignait les femmes turques, et qui voulut leur faire du bien."42
Once Zeyneb and Melek Hamm arrived in Europe, the French press quickly
picked up the story of the two unusual sisters. Their identification as Loti's hero
ines secured the women's entree into the most important Parisian salons. Both
women spoke fluent French and English and soon began to write for a European
public.43 As will become apparent, Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters served as a
template for both European travelers—-Julia Pardoe, Elizabeth Craven, and
Grace Ellison, for example—and Ottoman women travelers of the early twenti
eth century: Zeyneb Hamm self-consciously followed the example of Montagu,
her literary progenitor. She wrote:

Over and over again, and always with fresh interest, I read those charm
ing and clever letters. Although they are the letters of another century,
there is nothing in them to shock or surprise a Turkish woman of to-day
in their criticism of our life. It is curious to notice, when reading Lady
Mary's Letters, how little the Turkey of to-day differs from the Turkey of
her time; only, Turkey, the child that Lady Mary knew, has grown into a
big person. . . . There are two great ways, however, in which we have
become too modern for Lady Mary's book. In costume we are on a level
with Paris, seeing we buy our clothes there; and as regards to culture,
we are perhaps more advanced than in the West, since we have so much
leisure for study, and are not hampered with your Western methods.
And yet how little we are known by the European critics! The people of
the West still think of us women as requiring the services of the public
letter-writer!44

In this passage, Zeyneb Hanim legitimizes her own authorship by simultane

ously acknowledging and criticizing the European perceptions of the Ottoman
Empire to which Montagu's letters contributed—a common rhetorical move in
travel writing. Here, the reference to Montagu helps Zeyneb Hanim to carve out
a previously uninhabited space as an "authentic" Oriental within the context of
Ottoman-European travel literature.
Zeyneb Hamrn's reenactment of Montagu also serves the purpose of reveal
ing the complex, cultural-political context of Westernization, which was the
unspoken backdrop behind Montagu's travel account; namely, the radical shift in

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 Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters 403

Ottoman-European encounters and the launching of the first Westernization

reform in the history of the Ottoman Empire. I suggest that the intertextual links
between Zeyneb Hamm and Montagu draw attention to the fact that the Tulip
Period made the ambassadorial journey of the Montagus possible in the first
place. Mary Wortley Montagu claimed it was her gender that enabled her to con
stitute a specific kind of authorial voice that superseded her male predecessors—
a claim that has gone surprisingly unquestioned in Montagu scholarship. Zeyneb
Hanim's letters help, however, to historicize and contextualize Montagu's Turkish
Embassy Letters. They reveal that it was not solely her gender but the Ottoman
Empire's own interest in Western European culture that enabled Montagu to
come into close proximity with the Ottoman elite.
From 1906 until her return to Istanbul in 1912, Zeyneb Hamm recorded her
experiences in Europe by writing letters expressly for later publication. She cor
responded with Grace Ellison, who at the time was living in a Turkish harem,
"studying women through the veil" and documenting her own impressions in
Istanbul.45 Dress conventions are one of the crucial topics in both travel accounts.
In her letters, Zeyneb Hamm devotes much comment to European codes of behav
ior. Shortly after her arrival in Europe, she writes from Switzerland:

One thing to which I never seem to accustom myself is my hat. It is

always falling off. Sometimes, too, I forget that I am wearing a hat and
lean back in my chair; and what an absurd fashion—to lunch in a hat!
Still, hats seem to play a very important role in Western life. Guess how
many I have at present—twenty.

I cannot tell whom I have to thank, since the parcels come anony
mously, but several kind friends, hearing of our escape, have had the
thoughtfulness and the same original idea of providing us with hats.
Hardly a day passes but someone sends us a hat; it is curious, but charm
ing all the same. Do they think we are too shy to order hats for ourselves,
and are still wandering about Switzerland in our tcharchafs [veils]?46

Like Montagu, Zeyneb Hanim presents ethnomasquerade as an important factor

in facilitating contact with Western Europeans. At the same time, though, she
stages her unease about Western European dress conventions. In contradistinc
tion to Montagu, who waxed lyrical about the comfort and aesthetic merits of
Ottoman clothing, Zeyneb Hanim's text provides evidence of a cultural-historical
conflict in Ottoman-European relations.
The question arises of how to interpret Zeyneb Hamm's ambivalent appro
priation of European dress codes. An interpretation along the lines of Said's Ori
entalism thesis comes to mind: for Said, Orientalism is a Western discourse that
at once dominates and restructures the Orient, as well as representing it as a site

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404 Kader Konuk

of desire and colonization.47 Accordingly, Zeyneb Hanim's imitation of European

clothing conventions would be interpreted as a response to Western European
Orientalism. 1 would reject this, however. Such a reading—which sees Zeyneb
Hamm merely as a representative of the Orient and, so to speak, "site of projec
tion" for Western European Orientalist discourse—overlooks the fact that sub
jects of the Ottoman Empire were not passive observers of a European drama but,
rather, independent agents.48
Zeyneb Hamm's style of dress provides evidence of a longer cultural history
of contact between the Orient and the Occident. Interpreting Zeyneb Hamm's
ambivalent response vis-a-vis Europe necessitates a look at the larger picture.
Changes in clothing conventions were part of the modernization efforts in the
empire and reflective of Ottoman-European relations. Accompanying the
decline of the Ottoman Empire was the idea of imitating the Western European
world, an idea that became one of the key elements in the Ottoman reform move
ments. Said's study of Orientalism deals only with the European side of the struc
tural relations between Orient and Occident; left out of the picture is a notion of
the Ottoman subject as an agent capable of negotiating different subject positions
as seen in the example of the two Ottoman sisters, Zeyneb and Melek.
Thus I pose the question: Is Zeyneb Hamm's staging of herself as an Ottoman
reluctant to embrace Europeanness wholly a gesture of ambivalence in the posi
tioning of her identity? Or does it constitute a moment of failure in the imitation
of the West? Following Homi K. Bhabha's concept of mimicry, it would be possi
ble to view Zeyneb Hamm's case as evident of a process of Europeanization that
is doomed to failure because, ipso facto, the subject is barred from attaining the
privileged status of the "natural" European. According to this reading, Zeyneb
Hamm cannot embody the Occident; her Europeanized education notwith
standing, she can only repeat or mimic the model. Her mockery of the hats given
to her as a kind of "welcome-to-Europe gift" could possibly be seen as disruptive
to the hegemony of the West. However, her ambivalence toward European dress
codes may also be seen as a device employed in order to stage an Oriental char
acter on behalf of her Western audience. This is evidenced by the two images that
frame the book. For the publication of A Turkish Woman's European Impressions,
Zeyneb and Melek Hamm posed for photographs in European as well as Turkish
attire: the frontispiece shows a photograph of the veiled Zeyneb Hamm in her
Paris drawing room. (Fig. 2) A photograph of Melek Hamm on a veranda at
Fontainebleau in a French dress appears at the end of the travel account.49 Self
Orientalization as well as ethnomasquerade is employed to strengthen the nar
rative authority in Zeyneb Hamm's letters.
In these letters, Zeyneb Hamm attempts to correct Orientalist visions and to
convince her European readers of the high degree of Westernization in the
Ottoman Empire. At the same time, she weighs the advantages and disadvantages
of Westernization for Ottoman women, repeatedly emphasizing that she does

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 Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters 405

Fig. 2. "Zeyneb in her Paris Drawing-Room; She is wearing the Yashmak and
Feradje, or cloak," in Zeyneb Hanoum's A Turkish Woman's European Impressions
(1912). By permission of the Special Collections Department, University of
Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

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406 Kader Konuk

not completely identify with European culture. The hats from Europeans are
strategic summonses to engage in mimicry of the dominant culture: they are invi
tations to Europeanize extended by anonymous donors, which Zeyneb Hanim
initially accepts, but not without irony. Her letters signal that she could effortlessly
master the use of the European hat, if she only wanted to. Instead, she retains and
reiterates her cultural difference throughout her letters, which she exhibits in this
case through her awkwardness with the hat. Cultural mimicry does not unfold
here as an abiding strategy of resistance.
Zeyneb Hanim fell into the trap of believing that the West could help
improve the conditions for women in Ottoman society. Her collaboration with
Pierre Loti brought her fame in Europe—but nothing but exile from Istanbul. The
alliance with Grace Ellison, the editor of her letters written in Europe, proved not
to be beneficial for her feminist cause either. A review posted in the Times Liter
ary Supplement shortly after the publication of A Turkish Woman's European
Impressions shows how Zeyneb Hamm's thought-provoking letters fell into
empty space, as they were neither part of the Orientalist genre nor representative
of Western feminist literature. Lacking an understanding for the conditions
under which the letters emerged, the reviewer measured A Turkish Woman's Euro
pean Impressions against the portrayal of women in Marmaduke Pickthall's Ori
entalist novel Veiled Women. Compared with the Orientalist novelist who "knows
the soul of the Muslim" and whose "insights into the hearts of Eastern women"
are claimed to be authentic, Zeyneb Hamm's letters can only fall short. The
reviewer asserts that her rebellious character derives not from her Oriental her
itage but from her French origins:

She is no typical Turkish lady, but the granddaughter of a Frenchman,

who, to use Mr. Pickthall's coinage, "islamed," and her upbringing and
the political unrest encouraged her inherited disposition to revolt. She
is apparently one of those women who belong by temperament to the
rebels. She detests the suffragists; yet, but for her high breeding and tra
ditional fastidiousness, she has the making of one. For, however much
she differs from and excels the average woman of her race, she possesses
to the full that characteristic of clear vision and independent thought
which Mr. Pickthall sets first among the virtues of the harem.50

The confusion caused by Zeyneb Hamm's scandalous escape from Istanbul, her
critical letters about Europe, and her unsettling return to harem life cannot be
resolved, as the reviewer bypasses critical information about the reasons for
Zeyneb Hamm's return to Istanbul, namely her forced return upon the declara
tion of war between Italy and the Ottoman Empire. The review empties the let
ters of their historically specific context and maintains the Orientalist image of
the harem.

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 Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters 407

At the outbreak of war, Zeyneb Hamm decides—with some ambivalence—

to return to Istanbul. Happy, but also regretful, she discovers that she no longer
owns a hatbox. Her sister, Melek Hamm, goes on to coauthor two books with
Grace Ellison about women of the Ottoman court and marries a Polish aristocrat.
After losing her newly gained wealth due to the Russian Revolution, she becomes,
ironically, a dressmaker of Western fashion and a successful businesswoman in
Paris.51 The only records about Zeyneb Hanim's later life can be found in some of
the accounts of Ellison's trips to Turkey. The British journalist recounts Zeyneb
Hanim's state of unhappiness in the East as well as in the West and her suicide
before the age of thirty.52 To my knowledge, Zeyneb Hanim's feminist agenda had
no input into the pathbreaking feminist movement of the late Ottoman Empire;
instead it proved to be a failure and brought her only isolation. Today, Zeyneb
Hamm is still widely disregarded as an agent of Ottoman feminism and moder
nity in both the East and the West.53 The translation of her letters into Turkish
was only undertaken almost a century later, in 2001.54
In conclusion, I return to the question of what difference Zeyneb Hamm's
letters make with regard to Mary Wortley Montagu. Recognizing the significance
of Zeyneb Hamm's citation of European Orientalism, scholars have argued that
she returns the European's gaze in an attempt to write her own history.55 Zeyneb
Hamm's reenactment of Montagu indeed serves as a corrective. I suggest, how
ever, that Zeyneb Hamm's letters go beyond an attempt to reverse or dismantle
the Orientalist gaze. For Zeyneb Hamm, there was neither an empire to strike
back at nor a home to hold on to. Nonetheless, I do not construe her as a hybrid
figure but as a conflicted avant-garde Ottoman feminist. I propose that Zeyneb
Hamm's letters are the complex product of intersecting interests and dis
courses—evident in both the plot behind Pierre Loti's novel and her own writ
ings: namely, a mixture of feminism, critique of Orientalism, modernity,
Westernization, and simultaneous self-Orientalization.
There is another form of reenactment evident in the practice of ethnomas
querade that I discuss in this article. The visual representation of Montagu in
Ottoman dress and the photographs of the veiled Zeyneb Hamm in her Paris
drawing room and of Melek in a French dress on a veranda at Fontainebleau are
performative moments that capture and emphasize the authenticating literary
strategies of the respective authors.56 Ethnomasquerade, however, is not only a
rhetorical device to constitute authenticity and authorship. There is a crucial dif
ference between Ottomans and Europeans with respect to the function of re
enactment in Ottoman-European encounters. For European travelers,
ethnomasquerade is a long-standing travel practice, a tool for amateur ethnogra
phers, a common practice in travel photography, and a textual strategy in travel
literature. It constitutes a rhetorical gesture of rapprochement and cross-cultural
understanding on the one hand and—as we have seen in the cases of Montagu,

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408 Kader Konuk

Pardoe, and Ellison—on the other hand, a demonstration of control over the
threat of transgressing ethnic, religious, and sexual boundaries.
For Ottoman travelers, though, donning European clothing serves different
ends. As I have argued elsewhere, Ottomans staging themselves as European in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ottoman travel writing is a result of the trend
to modernize, that is Westernize, the Ottoman Empire.57 In her letters to Grace
Ellison, Zeyneb Hanim reflects on the way she has fallen victim to an Occiden
talist discourse that upholds an idealized image of the West: "You hear so much
of the mirage of the East, but what is that compared to the mirage of the West, to
which all Orientals are attracted?"58 As for most of the Ottoman travelers to
Europe in this period, the West signifies a superior culture; the transgression of
cultural boundaries is not inherently threatening, but rather desirable. Staging
themselves as European is the result of Occidentalism and an expression of shift
ing subject positions due to the nationalist discourse, which emerged in the late
nineteenth century.
To conclude, I stress that there is a relationship between dress and nation
building. Whereas Ottomans staging themselves as Europeans could be seen as
a form of ethnomasquerade, the same practice took on a different meaning after
the foundation of the Turkish Republic. The appropriation of Western fashion in
1925, which followed the ban of the fez, ceases to be ethnomasquerade. The
dress reform, which was initiated to facilitate the identification of the former sub
jects of the empire with modernity and national unity, was thoroughly gendered.
The Panama hat came to signify secular Turkish citizenship and functions as a
metonym for the transformation of the Oriental Ottoman to the Western Turk.59
Today, the fez merely serves as a tool to reenact the Oriental in order, for exam
ple, to attract tourists. The veil, however, never disappeared as a common piece
of headdress in Turkey. When the fez was banned and the Panama hat went out
of fashion, the veil was turned into a signifier for the supposed incommensura
bility between Islam and modern nationhood.

University of Michigan

Notes

This essay has benefited greatly from Vanessa Agnew's ongoing support, critique, and
advice. I would also like to thank Jonathan Lamb, Julia Hell, and the participants of the
conference on Extreme and Sentimental History at Vanderbilt University in April 2004 for
their thoughtful suggestions and feedback.
1. Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918, Sexu
ality, Religion and Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 10.
2. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters (London: Virago, 1996),
132.

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 Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters 409

3. Katrin Sieg, for example, defines masquerade as the "playful site of the inauthentic"
and ethnomasquerade as "the theatrical embodiment of other ethnicities by a subject
that thereby exercises power and simultaneously hides it" (Katrin Sieg, "Ethno
Maskerade: Identitatsstrategien zwischen Multikultur und Nationalismus im
deutschen Theater," Frauen in der Literaturwissenschaft Rundbrief 49 [December
1996]: 20). The idea of ethnomasquerade is closely related to Bhabha's concept of
mimicry. Following Bhabha, mimicry identifies a certain phenomenon of identity
construction in the colonial context—an imitation that is "almost, but not quite" the
same as the original. Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reconstituted, recognizable
Other and constructed around the ambivalence created by the potential eradication
of difference between the original and the copy. Bhabha describes mimicry as one of
the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge making
(Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture [London: Routledge, 1994], 85ff).
4. For a psychoanalytic approach to T. E. Lawrence's masquerade, see Kaja Silverman,
Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992). For a more recent arti
cle on ethnomasquerading and cross-dressing European men in the Orient, see
Joseph A. Boone, "Vacation Cruises; or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism," in Feminist
Postcolonial Theory, ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003).
5. Garber suggests that "Westerners have looked East for role models and for deliberate
cultural masquerade—for living metaphors that define, articulate, or underscore the
contradictions and fantasies with which they live" (Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests:
Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety [New York: Routledge, 1992], 352). Anne
McClintock offers a sustained critique of Garber's argument that cross-dressers are
figures of disruption that question the binary of "male" and "female." McClintock
writes: "Cross-dressing can ... be mobilized for a variety of political purposes, not all
of them subversive. That... cross-dressing disrupts stable social identities does not
guarantee the subversion of gender, race, or class power" (Imperial Leather: Race, Gen
der, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest [New York: Routledge, 1995], 67).
6. "The lady that seemed the most considerable amongst them entreated me to sit by her
and would fain have undressed me for the bath. I excused myself with some difficulty,
they being however all so earnest in persuading me, I was at last forced to open my
shirt, and show them my stays, which satisfied them very well, for I saw they believed
I was locked up in that machine, that it was not in my own power to open it, which
contrivance they attributed to my husband" (Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters,
50-59).
7. Ibid., 59.
8. Melman, Women's Orients, 89.
9. For a stimulating analysis of Montagu in the hamam, see the work of Srinivas Arava
mudan, "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam: Masquerade, Womanliness,
and Levantinization," English Literary History 62, no. 1 (1995), and Meyda Yegenoglu,
Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
10. See Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Collections of Travels through Turky into Persia, and the East
Indies, vol. 1 (London: Moses Pitt, 1684), and Monsieur Thevenot, "The Travels of
Monsieur Thevenot into the Levant," in Navigantium Atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca:

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410 Kader Konuk

Or, a Compleat Collection of Voyages and Travels, ed. John Harris (London: Thomas Ben
net, John Nicholson, and Daniel Midwinter, 1705).
11. It is interesting to see how Grace Ellisons account of her visit to a Turkish bath differs
radically from Montagu's. In an effort to draw a more realistic than Orientalist picture,
Ellison eschews any heterosexual interest and lesbian allusions in her account of her
visit to the hamam—to the point that it becomes overtly discriminatory. Her descrip
tion not only denies the presence of any naked or half-naked beauty but also leaves
out any references to her own body. She writes: "Fat old ladies in gaudy-coloured
tunics sit huddled up in corners singing contentedly, others walk about, dragging
their clogs over the baking marble floors, whilst little girls and boys, with wine flasks
tied round their waists in the place of lifebelts, swim about the fountains like little
brown fishes" (Ellison, An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem [London: Methuen,
1915], 146).
12. For a discussion of the function of citation in travel literature, see Donna Landry's arti
cle on Montagu and Craven. She writes that "views of Anglo-American women trav
elers to Turkey have been remarkably repetitive since Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
[... but as there] is no repetition without differences, subsequent travelers have often
prided themselves upon correcting the reports and views of previous travelers. Mon
tagu claims to correct George Sandys, Paul Rycaut, Jean Dumont, and Aaron Hill;
Elizabeth, Lady Craven, asserts that she, in turn, is correcting Montagu.... Despite
this constant repetition and correction, however, British and American travelers write
as if they were the first to ever to experience Turkey properly" (Landry, "Love Me, Love
My Turkey Book: Letters and Turkish Travelogues in Early Modern England," in Epis
tolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, ed. Amanda Gilroy and W M. Verhoeven
[Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000], 52).
13. John Norton, "Faith and Fashion in Turkey," in Languages of Dress in the Middle East,
ed. Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper and Bruce Ingham (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1997), 153.
14. Julia Pardoe, The City of the Sultan; and Domestic Manners of the Turks, in 1836, vol. 1
(London: Henry Colburn, 1837), 6-7.
15. Dress is a common signifier of tradition, change, progress, inferiority, or failure in imi
tating Western civilization in travel literature. The Ottoman clothing reforms
attracted the attention of European travelers, who used the success of the dress reform
(or lack thereof) as a yardstick of Ottoman civilization. Bayle St. John, for example,
discussed the weakened position of the Ottoman Empire at the height of the
Ottoman-Russian conflict. His book The Turks in Europe: Sketch of Manners and Poli
tics in the Ottoman Empire (1853) mounts a devastating commentary on the inability
of the Ottomans to correctly don European dress and move appropriately in it. On
the substitution of the turban for the fez, St. John wrote that the barbaric character of
the Turks—hitherto hidden by the turban and Muslim clothing—was only now fully
revealed. Nor did St. John have any confidence in the progressive students of the time:
he condemned them outright for their chameleonic assimilation of European culture.
What St. John observed as the Muslim Ottomans' clumsiness with European cloth
ing only reinforced his conviction that Muslims were inferior and Christians superior:
"The horde of barbarians which of old threatened to overrun Europe and submerge
its civilisation... retain now scarcely a trace of their former character The domi

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 Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters 411
nant race may almost be called an aristocracy in rags." According to this line of argu
ment, the Ottoman Empire was on the brink of ruin, and the inferiority of the Mus
lim Ottomans offered grounds for legitimizing the future dissolution of
Ottoman-Muslim rule by a Christian state. See Bayle St. John, The Turks in Europe:
Sketch of Manners and Politics in the Ottoman Empire (London: Chapman and Hall,
1853), 12.
16. Pardoe, City of the Sultan, 376.
17. Pardoe writes: "I had ... polluted, with the breath of a Giaour, the atmosphere of the
True Believers ... I had stood erect when every head was bowed and every knee bent
at the name of the Prophet" (ibid., 382).
18. Ellison, Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem, 17.
19. Ibid., 53.
20. Ibid., 196.
21. Ibid., 198.
22. Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters, 71.
23. Ellison, Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem, 70.
24. Ibid., 195.
25. For a discussion of Isabelle Eberhardt's ethnomasquerade, see, for example, Sabine
Boomers, Reisen als Lebensform: Isabelle Eberhardt, Reinhold Messnerund Bruce Chatwin
(Frankfurt: Campus, 2004).
26. Ellison, Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem, 69.
27. For an extensive study of Ottoman embassies to France in the eighteenth century, see
Fatma Muge Gogek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eigh
teenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
28. Ottoman travel literature received a dramatic impetus from one such individual trav
eler, Ahmet Mithat, who reflected upon the impact of dress codes in cross-cultural
encounters. During Ahmet Mithat's lifetime (1844-1913), the might of the empire
dwindled significantly, and the idea of founding a constitutional monarchy and
strengthening the national identity found increasing resonance among the populace.
His awe of European expeditions, colonial triumphs, and the European culture of
travel did not hinder Ahmet Mithat from criticizing Western European Orientalism
and its distorted image of the East. He expressed his views in a lecture before the Ori
entalists' Congress in Stockholm, a congress to which he had been invited as a repre
sentative of the Ottoman Empire. For a discussion of Ahmet Mithat's travels, see
Carter Vaughn Findley, "An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmed Midhat Meets
Madame Gulnar, 1889," American Historical Review 103, no. 1 (1998). In his 1889
report Avrupa'da Bir Cevelan he describes, among other things, his participation in the
Orientalists' Congress and the significance of clothing in the contact between partic
ipants from Europe and the Orient. He notes that simply wearing Oriental clothing
makes contact between European and Oriental participants more difficult. Further,
he reflects upon the fact that Europeans do not expect participants in Oriental garb
to master European codes of behavior, while they brook no mistakes from partici
pants in European clothing. Ahmet Mithat is an example of the Ottomans' belief that
European clothing facilitated contact with Europeans and that a wide-ranging cloth
ing reform in the Ottoman Empire would be necessary. This shift in attitude was due

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412 Kader Konuk

in part to the reception of nineteenth-century seyahatname dealing with Europe. For

a more extensive discussion of Ottomans traveling to Europe, see Kader Konuk,
'"Meine Herren, das nennt man einen Hut . . Kleidungsstrategien Osmanischer
Reisender in Europa," in Reisen uber Grenzen: Kontakt und Konfrontation, Maskerade
und Mimikry, ed. Renate Schlesier and Ulrike Zellmann (Munster: Waxmann, 2003).
29. Pratt suggests that autoethnography does not mean authentic. Autoethnography
denotes texts "Others" construct in response to or in dialogue with metropolitan rep
resentations (Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
[London: Routledge, 1992]).
30. See Malik Khanam, Six Years in Europe: Sequel to Thirty Years in the Harem. The Autobi
ographical Notes of H. H. Kibrizli-Mehemet-Pasha, ed. L. A. Chamerovzow (London:
Chapman and Hall, 1873).
31. See Major Osman Bey, Die Frauen in der Tiirkei (Berlin: Verlag von Wilhelm IBleib
[Gustav Schuhr], 1886).
32. Halil Halid had fled the Ottoman Empire due to the repercussions following the sup
pression of the so-called Young Turk movement (Halil Halid, The Diary of a Turk [Lon
don: Adam and Charles Black, 1903]).
33. See Bey Oghlu, Turkische Frauen: Ihr Leben im Flarem und im Spiegel turkischer Erzah
lungen (Munchen: Delphin-Verlag, 1916).
34. See Demetra Vaka, A Child of the Orient (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head [Lon
don]), and Demetra Vaka, The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul (Freeport, NY: Books for
Libraries Press, 1923; reprint, 1971). An interesting example is provided by the
Greek Ottoman Vaka, an emigrant to the United States, who modeled for a picture in
Turkish attire in order to give her book credibility. The reenactment of her cultural
origins is all the more interesting because she can only make herself recognizable as
an Oriental to her Western audience by masquerading as a Muslim woman. Reina
Lewis is right to point out that this is an example of transculturation—a process that
denotes the reciprocal influences of modes of representation and cultural practices
in a hegemonic context. Reina Lewis, "Cross-Cultural Reiterations: Demetra Vaka
Brown and the Performance of Racialized Female Beauty," in Performing the Body/
Performing the Text, ed. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (London: Routledge,
1999).
35. Leyla Saz Hammefendi's The Imperial Harem of the Sultans portrays daily life at the
Gtragan Palace during the nineteenth century. Interviews were first published for a
Turkish newspaper after the abolition of the sultanate in 1909, then in French in
1925, then in Czech; later an abridged and condensed Turkish version was published
in the 1960s and in English in 1994 (Leyla Saz Hammefendi, The Imperial Harem of
the Sultans: Daily Life at the Qragan Palace during the Nineteenth Century, trans. Landon
Thomas [Istanbul: Peva Publications, 1994]).
36. See Halide Edib, Memoirs of Halide Edib (New York: The Century, 1926), Halide Edib,
The Turkish Ordeal; Being the Further Memoirs of Halide Edib (London: The Century,
1928), and Halideh Edib Hanum, Das neue Turan: Ein turkisches Frauenschicksal, ed.
Ernstjackh, vol. 6, Orient-Biicherei (Weimar: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1916).
37. Selma Ekrem writes in Unveiled about ethnomasquerade in Istanbul. She does not
want to wear a veil, cuts her hair short, and wears a cap so that she is taken for a boy

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 Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European Encounters 413
or a Christian girl when she is younger and for an eccentric American as she gets older
(Unveiled: An Autobiography of a Turkish Girl [New York: Ives Washburn, 1930], 250).
She goes to the American College for girls and wears a tie and jacket. Ekrem published
a cultural survey of Turkey in 1947: Turkey: Old and New (New York: Charles Scrib
ner'sSons, 1947).
38. Given the absence of surnames in the Ottoman Empire, Zeyneb's letters appeared
under the title "Hanoum," or "lady" in Turkish. Throughout the article, though, I use
the Turkish spelling, Hamm, instead of the English transliteration, Hanoum.
39. Marquis de Blosset de Chateauneuf went on a military mission to the Ottoman
Empire, fell in love with a Circassian woman, changed his faith, and was henceforth
known as Re§it Bey. For more information on the family background of Zeyneb and
her sister, Melek Hamm, see Melek Hanoum, "How I Escaped from the Harem and
How I Became a Dressmaker," Strand Magazine (January-June 1926): 129-30.
40. See Pierre Loti, Disenchanted (Desenchantees), trans. Clara Bell (London: Macmillan:
1906).
41. Ibid.

42. "Djenane is not dead. Djenane was not Turkish. Djenane was a French woman, a tra
ditionalist, who had always been attracted by Turkey, our secular friend. She was a
French woman who loved and pitied Turkish women, and who wanted to do them
good" (Marc Helys, Le Secret Des "Desenchantees," 2d ed. [Paris: Perrin, 1926]). Marc
Helys's other book, Lejardinferme: Scenes de la vie feminine en Turquie, was published
two years after Loti's Les Desenchantees (Helys, Lejardinferme: Scenes de la vie feminine
en Turquie [Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1908]).
43. Melek Hantm collaborated with Grace Ellison and wrote the story of an Ottoman
princess: Melek Hanoum and Grace Ellison, Abdul Hamid's Daughter: The Tragedy of
an Ottoman Princess (London: Methuen, 1913).
44. Zeyneb Hanoum, A Turkish Woman's European Impressions, ed. Grace Ellison (London:
Seeley, Service & Co., 1913), 38-39.
45. Grace Ellison, "Introduction," in A Turkish Woman's European Impressions, xv.
46. Hanoum, Turkish Woman's European Impressions, 66.
47. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 3.
48. Halil Inanctk's extensive study of the Ottoman Empire views "Ottomans as agents
capable of independent and internally consistent actions and not, as had been the
case for too long, as passive spectators of a European drama" (Halil Inancik, An Eco
nomic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Volume One: 1300-1600 [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999], 3).
49. Reina Lewis argues that Zeyneb Hamm's clothing in the frontispiece of the book looks
like Oriental drag, as it was both unnecessary and uncommon to wear a veil
indoors—hence this dress becomes a form of historical reenactment. See Lewis's "On

Veiling, Vision and Voyage: Cross-Cultural Dressing and Narratives of Identity," in

Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Sara Mills and Reina Lewis (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 536.
50. "Veiled Women," reviewin Times Literary Supplement (1913), 107.
51. For a short autobiographical piece, see Melek Hanoum, "How I Escaped from the
Harem."

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414 Kader Konuk

52. Grace Ellison, Turkey to-Day (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1928), 120.
53. Scholars such as Bernard Yeazell, Yeshim Ternar, Orhan Kologlu, and Reina Lewis
have dealt with Zeyneb Hanim's work, and given her credit as one of the very few
Ottoman women to write for a European public. See Kologlu, Loti'nin Kadmlan:
Osmanlt Hareminin Gizemli Dunyasi (Istanbul: Dunya Yaymcilik, 1999), Lewis, "On
Veiling, Vision and Voyage," Yeshim Ternar, The Book and the Veil: Escape from an Istan
bul Harem (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1994), and Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the
Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2000).
54. A translation of Melek Hanim's and Grace Ellison's book on Sultan Abdulhamit's

daughter appeared in 1938: Abdulhamidin km: Hakikt roman, trans. Irfan Konur Gur
gen (Istanbul: Hilmi Kitabevi, 1938). Ellison's "An Englishwoman in Angora" was
published in Turkish in 1999 (Ankara'da bir Ingiliz Kadim, trans. Osman Olcay
[Ankara: Bilgi Yayinevi, 1999]), and Zeyneb Hanim's letters in 2001 (Zeynep Hamm,
Ozgiirluk pe$inde bir Osmanli kadim, ed. Ellison, trans. Nuray Fincanoglu [Istanbul:
Biike, 2001]).
55. See Landry, "Love Me, Love My Turkey Book," and Lewis, "On Veiling, Vision and
Voyage."
56. The photograph of Melek appears as the last of twenty-three illustrations in A Turkish
Woman's European Impressions.
57. Konuk, '"Meine Herren, das nennt man einen Hut.'"
58. Hanoum, Turkish Woman's European Impressions, 186.
59. For an extensive discussion of the dress reform, see Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper and
Bruce Ingham, eds., Languages of Dress in the Middle East (Surrey: Curzon Press,
1997).

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