"Julia Pardoe and Fanny Blunt recording “Turkish manners” (1837-1878): female objectivity for posterity after the Tanzimât era? " - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Imaginaires Année : 2017

"Julia Pardoe and Fanny Blunt recording “Turkish manners” (1837-1878): female objectivity for posterity after the Tanzimât era? "

Résumé

In Intrepid Women: Victorian Travellers (2005, 7), Jordana Pomeroy referred to Julia Pardoe (1804-1862) and Fanny Blunt (1839-1926) as intrepid Victorian female travellers, who were following the footsteps of Lady Mary Montagu, in the Ottoman Empire . Indeed, Julia Pardoe and Lady Blunt rank among these few nineteenth-century British women who did not only travel in, but lived in the Ottoman Empire. Though little remembered today, they were both very famous in their own lifetimes and their works about the Ottoman Empire went into several editions in an era when Britain frequently looked towards the Levant and the Balkans. After contributing Traits and Traditions of Portugal (1835), Pardoe won acclaim with two travelogue-like pieces, respectively entitled The City of the Sultan (1837) and The Beauties of the Bosphorus (1838) – which were both derived from the memories of her yearlong stay in Constantinople where she accompanied her father, a retired soldier, in 1835 – as well as with a collection of Oriental tales gathered in The Romance of the Harem (1839). Lady Blunt had lifelong acquaintances with the Ottoman Empire, being born in Therapia of an English father who represented the East India Company in Turkey and of a Turkish mother of Persian princely lineage. But her intimate knowledge of the People of Turkey (1878) owed much to her wedding in 1858 with Sir John Blunt, a British consul in the Levant and the Balkans, whose different posts had allowed her to bear the witness to life and manners of Ottoman people in the Balkans for about twenty years. Though writing in and about different timeframes, both had a common ideal: that of producing a true, demystified, unprejudiced, unbiased account of what was then called ‘Turkish manners’ as they felt that the Ottoman Empire was more and more Westernised, due in part to political pressure of the great European powers who dreaded the reopening of the Eastern Question, but also to administrative reforms conceded to by successive Sultans in the Tanzimât era (1839-1876). It is this quest for truth and verisimilitude by women insiders and yet foreigners that this article would seek to examine by first focusing on the places of truth (the harem, the hamam, and political institutions), then on the means to get to this ‘truth’ (Pardoe cross-dressed to get access to a convent) and their limits, before contrasting their viewpoints on ‘Turkish manners’ as Pardoe’s works eventually reads less exotic and less factual (and more entertaining), just as the reading of My Reminiscences (1918) by Lady Blunt sheds a new light on her 1878 – definitely less neutral – study. Throughout, the article will also raise the questions of how important it was that they were female foreigners writing such accounts and how such accounts, often about gendered spaces that they visited and that sometimes involved challenging gender bars, were read back in Britain. In particular, the article will ask how such accounts could have an impact on the burgeoning feminist movement, especially as with new developments in the Eastern Question, the harem became not only the symbol of Turkish, not to say Islamic oppression, but also the ultimate embodiment of male oppression and female slavery that some women back at home fought against. The poem ‘A Cry from the Depths’ anonymously published in the Women’s Suffrage Journal precisely the year the People of Turkey came out (1878) is particularly intriguing as it likened alleged male Turkish monstrosity to that of ‘The British Turk’, by which men/ husbands oppressed women/wives through marriage in the way of a ‘Christian harem’.
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hal-02558732 , version 1 (29-04-2020)

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  • HAL Id : hal-02558732 , version 1

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Stéphanie Prevost. "Julia Pardoe and Fanny Blunt recording “Turkish manners” (1837-1878): female objectivity for posterity after the Tanzimât era? ". Imaginaires, 2017, "Féminisme & Orientalism", Dossier spécial coordonné par Laurence Chamlou, 21, pp.61-98. ⟨hal-02558732⟩
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