When Julien Viaud published his first novel, Aziyadé,
a story about, among other things, the relationship between a
British naval officer and a Turkish odalisque (harem resident), in
1879, it was read by an audience that already had definite visual
impressions of the Near East in general, and of harem women in
particular. These visual impressions came, very specifically, from
the works of several painters who, since the middle of the century,
had created often very popular and frequently reproduced paintings
of Oriental scenes. One way of approaching Aziyadé,
therefore, is to see how it conformed to, and differed from, these
artworks in its presentation of similar scenes and characters.
The title character of the novel, and the figure who most
certainly most interested most of Viaud's original readers, is
herself a young odalisque. When Harry Grant, a.k.a. Loti, first
encounters her, and for a long time thereafter, the reader gets to
see very little of her body. She is always wrapped in veils.
Here is their initial encounter.
I thought I was so completely alone that I experienced a
strange impression upon perceiving, close to me, behind thick iron
bars, the upper part of a human head, two large green eyes fixed
on mine.
The eyebrows were brown, slightly knit, brought together to the
point of touching each other; the expression of this look was a
mix of energy and naivety; you might have called it the look of a
child, it had so much freshness and youth.
The young woman who had these eyes rose, and showed down to her
belt her body, which was wrapped in a Turkish style cape (féredjé)
with long, stiff folds. The cape was made of green silk, decorated
with silver embroidery. A white veil was wrapped carefully around
her head, allowing only the forehead and the large eyes to appear.
The pupils were very green, that sea green of years gone by sung
about by the poets of the East. (Part I, Chapter IV)
What you see here is how little of Aziyadé herself the reader
actually gets to see.
Algerian Women in their Chamber - 1834
Women of Algiers
Odalisque
Odalisque with a Slave - 1840
French art of the time
had occasionally presented Eastern women in a similar, or almost
similar, fashion. Here, for example, are two paintings by Eugène
Delacroix (1798-1863) depicting odalisques in their harem. The
location here is Algeria, but how much if any distinction a
nineteenth century French reader made between an Algerian harem
and a Turkish harem it would be hard to say.
We don't think of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) as an
orientalist, but he, too, did a depiction of an odalisque.
Yes, she looks much more like one
of Renoir's nineteenth century French women than a Turkish harem
dweller:)
Far more often, however, the odalisque had been presented with
little or no apparel. Indeed, the naked odalisque stretched out on
her divan had been a standard genre painting for several centuries
by the time of Viaud's novel. Sticking to France in the nineteenth
century, one might note the famous foray into the genre by
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) .
What
one should note here is that all these odalisques have in common a
langourousness, a lack of energy, that is often linked to a
heightened voluptuousness. Let us go back and look at each of the
odalisques in question individually.
The
three women in Delacroix's first painting, of 1834, are certainly
langorous, though there is more than an element of voluptuousness
in the one on the left. As Stephen F. Eisenman has written, "The
three harem women . . . are the embodiment of the European
masculinist image of Middle Eastern and North African people as
sensual and irrational" (Nineteenth Century Art [London:
Thames and Hudson, 1994] 202).
The same is true of the
second, undated Delacroix tableau.
The Renoir odalique's lack of energy and perhaps related
voluptuousness (idle hands are the devil's playground, etc.) is
obvious from the painting as we presented it above. Just look at
her face! She is clearly thinking about something a little more
exciting than her income tax:)
Ingres' odalisque would
seem to be the most obvious of them all. If she has not just had
sex, or at least fantasized about it, I can't read a face. And her
luxuriously outstretched body is not exactly bristling with energy.
(Yes, I could have reduced the image somewhat so that it would all
appear on your screen at once, but in this case, better you should
scroll slowly over her outstretched, inviting form, to realize the
full effect of the painting:) [Click to see the enlargment]
In
this sense, Viaud's title character was a very clear departure
from the image of the odalisque that the art of the time had
created. Though we see almost nothing of her, remember that she is
introduced to us upon her first appearance with the qualities of "energy,"
"naivety," and "freshness." These are, if anything, the very
opposites of the qualities suggested by the paintings just viewed.
Aziyadé is not just, or primarily, a creature of sensuality, as
her artistic predecessors had been.
Arab Girl with Waterpipe
The Orient was given a
very definite visual image in France during the second half of the
nineteenth century with the very popular paintings of Jean-Léon
Gérôme (1824-1904). Readers of Aziyadé would most certainly
have had his images in mind when reading Viaud's tale. Though not
specifically an odalisque, here is one of his paintings of a young
Arab girl.
This certainly comes closer to the "freshness and youth" of
which Viaud's text speaks, though not of the "energy."
Dance of the Almeh
The Almeh
Almehs Playing Chess in a Cafe
Gérôme also did a series
of paintings of almehs, Eastern dancing women. Though not
odalisques, they are worth noting for their dress, as it must have
shaped Viaud's readers' notions of "Eastern women."
The Whirling Dervishes
Not all Orientalist
painting focused on odalisques, however, or even on women. In Part
IV, Chapter XX, of Aziyadé, Viaud describes a young Turk
who suddenly in a moment of extasy claims to see Allah. Instances
of what Western Europe saw as religious extremism were also
portrayed in the art of the time. Here is Gérôme's depiction of a
dervish in a transe.
Two things are worth noting here.
First, as you can see in this
close-up, the dervish, though a man, appears at least sexually
ambiguous, both because of his dress and because of the extatic
expression on his face.
This very much coincides with Viaud's depiction of the third
main character in Aziyadé, Samuel, Loti's native friend,
who though strong and masculine in appearance, also has soft,
gentle, to the West feminine qualities.
Second, Viaud's depiction of the exstatic oulema in Part IV,
Chapter XX, lacks any of the negativity that such a subject might
have provoked among self-styled "rational" Frenchmen. Here is the
passage in question:
In the middle of the group
[of oulemas], a young man was pointing to heaven, a young man
who had an admirable mystic head. The white turban of the oulemas
surrounded his handsome, wide forehead, his face was pale, his
beard and his large eyes were black like ebony.
He was pointing up above at an invisible point, he was looking
with exstasy into the depths of the blue heaven and saying:
"There is God! Everyone, look! I see Allah! I see the Eternal
One!"
And we ran, Achmet and myself, like the crowd, close to the oulema
who saw Allah. (Part IV, Chapter XX)
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