Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 27, 2000

Volume 29, Number 8

Book explores conceptions of harems in art, literature

In her recently published "Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature," Professor Ruth Bernard Yeazell examines how a mysterious Middle Eastern institution captivated the Western imagination and put its mark on European culture.

From the defeat of the Ottomans by the Hapsburgs in 1683 through the 20th century, the harem was a particular object of fascination for Europeans and an inspiration for poets, composers and artists.

Yeazell, the Chace Family Professor of English, examines some of the paintings, illustrations, novels, plays and operas that grew out of this fascination and shows how those works reflected myth rather than reality.

Before the 18th century, few European travelers to the Moslem world penetrated the unexplored territory of the harem, notes Yeazell. Yet even as eyewitness reports increased, the harem continued to be less a matter of fact than fantasy, she says.

"For everyone who attempted to debunk a popular conception of the harem, it often seems, there were many more who continued to imagine what they wished," she argues.

"The desire to believe in a place where a man could have as many women as he wanted was evidently stronger than any testimony to the contrary," she says alluding to the most common male fantasy of the harem.

Among the book's 59 illustrations are graphic representations of how painters such as Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and the Victorian John Frederick Lewis envisioned sequestered women of the East.

Written commentaries from women, including the 18th-century bluestocking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and pioneering public health advocate Florence Nightingale attest to a range of feminine attitudes toward the seraglio, from the apotheosis of an enviable sorority to the epitome of male enslavement.

"Harems of the Mind" is published by Yale University Press.

-- By Dorie Baker

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