A Bridge Over the Balkans: Demetra Vaka Brown and the Tradition of “Women’s Orients” 9781463216511

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To Eurydice and George

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ................................................................................vii Introduction. Turning East, Turning West: Women Orientalists, Spatial Representation and Identity Politics .......................................................................1 I. Space, Location, Positionality: The “New” Cultural Geography....................................1 II. Women Travel Writers “Unveiling” the Orient..............8 III. Writing Travels, Writing the Self: The Life and Career of Demetra Vaka Brown ..........13 Chapter 1. Demetra Vaka Brown: “Child of the Orient” or Cultural Mediator? ............................29 1.1. Theorizing Vaka Brown’s Shifting Identification: Mapping the “Space Between” Two Names..............29 1.2. “A Child of the Orient” in “the Heart of the Balkans”: Orientalism versus Balkanism ......................................35 1.3. Exploring the Poetics and Politics of Self-Representation: The Hybridic Layerings of Demetra Vaka Brown’s Autobiographical Narrator............................................45 Chapter 2. Thinking Geographically / Thinking Historically: A Child of the Orient, “With a Heart for Any Fate,” Journalism.......................................................................................55 2.1. Moving through Spaces, Moving through Cultures: Demetra Vaka Brown as a Social and Cultural Geographer ...........................55 2.2. Mapping History onto Topography: The Flâneuse in Vaka Brown’s Autobiographical Writings ............................................68 2.3. Geopolitical Orientation versus Ideological Self-Location in Vaka Brown’s Asia Articles .............80

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Chapter 3. Women and/of the Orient: Demetra Vaka Brown, Hester Donaldson Jenkins, Anna Bowman Dodd, Halide Adivar Edib .......................................................................95 3.1. Orientalism “Unveiled”: Demetra Vaka Brown and Hester Donaldson Jenkins.....................................95 3.2. The Complexities of “Women’s Orients”: Demetra Vaka Brown and Anna Bowman Dodd ...........................................108 3.3. Suffragettes in the Harem: Demetra Vaka Brown and Halide Adivar Edib...............................................117 Chapter 4. Demetra Vaka Brown and the Modern Greek State: The Heart of the Balkans and In the Heart of German Intrigue......135 4.1. The Politics of Travel Literature and Literary Journalism ...............................................135 4.2. The Heart of the Balkans: The Emergence of Modern Greek Nationalism as a Territorial Ideology...............................................142 4.3. In the Heart of German Intrigue: Modern Greek Irredentism and American Diplomatic Policy ...............................152 Epilogue .................................................................................................169 Bibliography ..........................................................................................175

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Although a book project is a personal venture, mostly composed in isolation, this specific project—the result of the postdoctoral research I conducted under the auspices of the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (I.K.Y.)—could have never been completed without the invaluable assistance and steadfast encouragement of several people. Above all, I wish to thank my adviser, Dr. Yiorgos Kalogeras, without whose direction, advice, and expertise this book could never have been realized. Dr. Kalogeras’ commitment to my postdoctoral project was as deep as mine, his enthusiasm about it inspiring, his criticism stimulating, and his wealth of knowledge enormous. Three people, even though at a distance, have fueled my determination to pursue and realize this project and to them I owe profound gratitude: Dr. Jeanne Reesman of The University of Texas at San Antonio, Dr. Michael Kiskis of Elmira College in New York, and Dr. Greg Zacharias of Creighton University. Their unflagging generosity—academic, intellectual, and personal—is rare and commendable. For fellowship and scholarship support in the course of my post-doctoral research, I wish to thank: the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (I.K.Y.) for a post-doctoral fellowship that allowed me to conduct research on the life and work of Demetra Vaka Brown; the Friends of the Princeton University Library and the Program in Hellenic Studies who, by awarding me a generous Research Fellowship in August 2005, allowed me the opportunity to conduct original research using the Rare Books and Special Collections of the Princeton University Library; the Lucy Kulukundis Foundation for awarding me a travel grant that defrayed the cost of my research visit at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library of the University of Virginia; and the Karipeion Research Foundation Macedonia Thrace for ix

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subsidizing the editing of this book. More specifically, I wish to acknowledge the assistance of the following people: at Princeton, the Executive Director of the Program in Hellenic Studies Professor Dimitri Gondicas, the Manager of the Program in Hellenic Studies Carol Oberto, as well as Margaret Rich, AnnaLee Pauls and the staff at Firestone library; in Charlottesville, the staff at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library— especially Heather Riser and Regina Rush who have been extraordinarily helpful. A section of chapter one was presented at the 2002 conference of the Portuguese Association of American Studies and was subsequently included in the selected conference proceedings entitled Novas Histórias Literárias / New Literary Histories (2005). A section of chapter two first appeared as part of an essay in the Journal of Μodern Hellenism 21-22 (Winter 2004-2005). A section of chapter 3 first appeared as part of an essay in the volume entitled Women in Dialogue: (M)uses of Culture (2008). They are included here by permission of the editors. Dearest friends, George Pappas and Anna Papafragou at The University of Pennsylvania not only welcomed me in their house upon my conducting research on site at the Van Pelt library, but also added their own keen insight into things literary. I also wish to express my deep gratitude to friend and colleague Maria Schoina whose encouraging interest, active support, and confidence in my project were indispensable to the writing of this book. The editorial team of Gorgias Press, especially Katie Stott, read the manuscript with remarkable diligence and greatly contributed to the final stages of this project. My deepest gratitude is for the sustaining help I have received from my family members who have been a constant source of emotional support. My parents, Lazaros and Evangelia Arapoglou, and my sister, Paraskevi Arapoglou, have never ceased to supply buoying relief. They have provided me with the unconditional sustaining love that only family can offer. Finally, this book is affectionately dedicated to my husband, Stavros Vougioukas, and our children, Eurydice and George, as a token of my eternal gratitude to them. Words could never express my deep appreciation not only for the sacrifices they have had to make to see this book materialize, but, more importantly, for reminding me that human space is personally constructed!

INTRODUCTION. TURNING EAST, TURNING WEST: WOMEN ORIENTALISTS, SPATIAL REPRESENTATION AND IDENTITY POLITICS

Can I today write better about this people which is my race? The task is fraught with difficulties. [. . .] I ought to know these various Greeks pretty well, since I was born and brought up among those of Constantinople, have travelled through the interior of the Ottoman Empire, lived for a while in Athens, and have been in almost all of those towns throughout the Balkans, in Servia, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Albania, where the Greek population forms a larger part of the total. I have also been on some Greek islands. [. . .] The Greeks have been nearly as scattered as the Jews, and even more nationalistic; that is one reason why it is not so easy to write of Greece and the Greeks as it is to write of the other Balkan nations. Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 205–6

I. SPACE, LOCATION, POSITIONALITY: THE “NEW” CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY More than forty years after Michél Foucault’s unequivocal proclamation that “[t]he anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time,” the importance of spatiality in history, sociology, anthropology, as well as in literary studies figures more prominently than ever (23). As Sara Blair has correctly observed, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, “[i]t is old news [. . .] that we inhabit a posthistorical era 1

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[. . .] [since] temporality as the organizing form of experience has been superseded by spatiality, the affective and social experience of space” (544). What Blair’s observation reveals is that, following several decades of scientific and academic devaluation, questions of “space” and “place” have reemerged on the scholarly agenda, thus adding another dimension to the above-mentioned fields of study: history, sociology, anthropology, as well as literary studies. Hence, addressing the concept of spatiality, sociologists have become engaged in the “geographical moment” and, therefore, view place today as “a cultural artifact of social conflict and cohesion.”1 Along similar lines, anthropologists have paid closer attention to the empowering aspect of place, while those working in the field of American Studies use the concept of place to provide a new basis for their research. Consequently, they “reground” their studies by addressing the question of how place evokes and shapes art. Over the last two decades, numerous scholars and texts have addressed the question of spatiality versus temporality. Some of these intellectuals, theorists, and researchers have agreed with Foucault’s proclamation about the significance of the “spatial” in critical thought and have elaborated on spatiality as the organizing form of modern experience, while others have counter argued and dismissed the affective and social experience of space. For example, preeminent Marxist intellectuals, such as David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), have conceded that space— rather than time—hides consequences from us today, because it raises the “omni-present danger that our mental maps no longer match current realities” (306). At the same time, geographers, like John Urry in The Tourist Gaze (1991), have argued for space as the distinctively significant dimension of contemporary capitalism. Also, post-colonial theorists have not only applied but also extended the concept of space in discussions of cultural identity; The term comes from R. Friedland’s article, “Space, Place, and Modernity: The Geographical Moment,” that appeared in Contemporary Sociology in 1992. In it, the sociologist argues that the aspect of spatiality is as important as that of temporality to the study of modernity. Subsequently, he employs “locality,” “region,” “landscape,” “territory,” and “area” as keywords for his theoretical study of modernity. 1

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thus, Homi Bhabha has coined the term “third space” (“The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha” 211). One of the effects of this renascence of scholarly interest in the debate over spatiality as a valid critical consideration is that the terminology of space, location, positionality, and place is today as much at the center of literary discussions, as it is at the center of wider scientific, social, political, and cultural debates. Therefore, many strands of literary and cultural studies are being reoriented toward spatial questions and, certainly, the increasing awareness of the “new” cultural geography as an important field of study has significantly contributed to this end. However, the renewed interest in geography as part of the scholarly agenda is not the sole reason for which “space” and “place” constitute foci for literary studies today. The interdisciplinary nature of space studies undoubtedly suggests the valuable contribution of geography to literary analysis. Hence, the central geographic question of how place, landscape, and space both define and provide the context for human experience is an important one to be addressed in the study of literature. This is because space can no longer be viewed as a topographic concept, but rather as socially and culturally produced and constructed. Indeed, looking at the place of literature as a dynamic and fluid contested terrain, the function of authors’ geographical imaginations is crucial and yields interesting insights. The works of Demetra Vaka Brown discussed in this book specifically address questions of space, geography, and identity. My aim in this study has been to examine these texts for the different theories of human-place relations that are inherent in their narrative discourses. More specifically, I argue that the development in spatial representation that the author’s works illustrate raises an important set of critical questions related to the concept of cultural identity and the process of self-identification. Vaka Brown’s spatial poetics also enquire into the socio-political stakes involved in the formation of alternative identity positions and the intriguing relationship between place and self. This is because the events in which Vaka Brown was involved—such as the Balkan and First World Wars, the setting of the border between Greece and the Balkan countries, the Eastern question, the Young Turks Revolution of 1908—as well as specific aspects of the history of the formation of the Greek and Turkish modern nations

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have not only had an impact on Vaka Brown’s authorial choices, but also affected the politics and poetics of the female self-identity she constructed and projected through her writing. Hence, one of the central concerns of this book is to explore the generative role of place, culture and travel in the formation of Demetra Vaka Brow’s cultural identity. At the same time, my reading of Vaka Brown’s works elucidates the complexities and ambiguities of women travel writers’ imperial positionings at the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. A careful examination of the terms in which spatial representation has been discussed to date reveals that scholars in general and geographers in particular have not viewed space consistently through the years. Most geographical analyses before the 1970s adopted an absolute understanding of space, and viewed it as a static geometric concept within which objects are located and events occur. Such a “scientific geography,” appropriating terms from Euclidian geometry, theorized space as an abstraction and did not pay attention to the problematic of spatial representations. As a consequence, the critics who theorized space in works of literature—influenced by classical Newtonian physics—viewed it as a passive arena, the setting for events, characters, and their interaction. Consequently, in poetry, fiction, and drama, “space” and “place” were examined as aspects of “setting.” However, the fact that many works of literature offer topologically detailed accounts of distinct spatial contexts, although of interest to ethnographers or historians, obscures the function of authors’ geographical imaginations with respect to the imaginative re-construction and literary representation of space. Nowadays, “scientific geography” is not popular as an interpretative tool for the study of literature. In the 1970s, the application of humanistic theories about subjectivity, meaning, and experience shifted the focus of geography from the study of abstract space to that of personalized place. Accordingly, and since the ideas of human geography were also applied to the study of literature, mimetic readings of texts were substituted by interpretations that foregrounded the human significance of places. The pioneering geographer who rejected the geometries and quantifications of spatial science was Yi-Fu Tuan, whose work on the creation of place illustrates how existential philosophies inspired the development of “new” human

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geographies in the 1970s. Tuan’s work unearths the ways in which space impinges on the process of self-identification. To this effect, his books Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception Attitude and Values (1974) and Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977) have elaborated on the idea that human identity is structured through the individual experience of space and place. Tuan’s work shifted the focus of geography to the importance of people’s feelings and meanings—hence, the term “human.” To him, place raises precisely the question of human meaning and, therefore, constitutes the “key” human geography concept. The humanists brought the sensibilities of every-day, placebound life into academic discourse. Edward Relph, another important scholar in the field of human geography, has argued that the sense of place itself is a feeling, that of belonging and inclusion. Relph’s contestation has given rise to discussions about the “authentic sense of place” as a direct and genuine experience of the entire complex of the identity of places (63). Subsequently, human geographers have turned their attention to affectionate attachment to specific places such as “home.” Relph has suggested that home is “an irreplaceable center of significance” (39), while Tuan has claimed that hearth, shelter, home or home base are intimate places to human beings everywhere (Space and Place 136–48). In fact, Relph has drawn on Heidegger’s notion of “dwelling” to further elaborate on the connection between humanity and a sense of “insiderness,” making the claim that a sense of place is a universal human trait, which, he acknowledges, is mediated by cultural differences (49). Tuan’s and, by extension, the human geography school’s significant contribution to space studies is that it de-contextualizes the notion of space from passive geometry and raises the question of how space is constituted and given meaning through human endeavor. This question has also been addressed by another school of geographers, those with a Marxist/Historicist background, who also reject the view of “space” as solely physical landscape, but who contextualize it as a social construct. Geographers’ turn to Marxist theory represented a critique of humanistic interpretations of texts as essentially nostalgic, “using literature to identify a harmonious relationship between people and place which had seemingly been destroyed by progress and modernity” (Hubbard et al. 129). Marxist geographers agree with human geographers that the model of “fixed” spatial dimensions of existence has to be

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rejected, but argue for this rejection on different grounds. More specifically, they contend that space is a product of cultural, social, political, and economic relations. To them, space is not essential in nature, but constructed and produced through certain processes. The Marxist/Historicist uptake questions the perspective of human geography, according to which places are comprehensible and meaningful to humans, by calling attention to the destructive effects of modernity on spatiality. Mainly, Marxist/Historicist geographers contend that place can no longer be seen as a solid ground for the process of identity construction, and that it needs to be dissociated from notions of stability and community. The notion of treating space as dynamic and socially produced was first suggested by the French sociologist and philosopher, Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre, in his seminal work The Production of Space (originally published in French in 1974, translated into English in 1991), questions why space cannot “constitute a principle of explanation at least as acceptable as any other” (275). He is the first to distinguish between three distinctively different types of space— all of the same substance and force: physical space (nature), mental space (spatial abstractions), and social space (the space of human activity, conflict, and perception). Lefebvre also identifies the three elements that make up space: spatial practices, representations of space, and spaces of representation. He uses Marx’s theory about the periodization of capitalism to illustrate how the different relations between these three elements of space can produce different forms of space; for example, the historical space of classical times, or the contradictory spaces of late capitalism. Considering the emphasis Lefebvre has placed on the geographical analysis of social life, his contribution to geography has been tremendous. Inspired by his theory on the “social production of space,” contemporary geographers like Doreen Massey and Edward Soja have further built on the idea of places as constituted of multiple, intersecting, social, political, and economic relations. For example, in her article “Politics and Space/Time,” Massey asserts that “to the aphorism of the 1970s—that space is socially constructed—was added in the 1980s the other side of the coin: that the social is spatially constructed too” (146). Massey convincingly argues that the fact that society is constructed spatially determines how it works (146). To her, space does not connote rootedness and tradition but flow and movement, because “the

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social relations which create it are themselves very dynamic by their very nature” (156). Soja, on the other hand, agrees with Massey that space is given shape through material processes, flows and relationships, but in his book Thirdspace (1996) suggests a more restricted definition of spatiality than Massey’s. Although he agrees with Massey that “spatiality” equals socially produced space, he also qualifies this by claiming that, whereas all spatiality is socially produced, all space is not. Although utilizing both human and Marxist geography principles in literary discussions might initially appear contradictory—since the two schools are often seen as approaching space from completely different angles—this is a deliberate choice I have made in this study that has been dictated by Vaka Brown’s texts themselves. The main premise of my argument is that Vaka Brown’s writing communicates a strong, but at the same time highly idiosyncratic sense of place. For example, the awareness of history and politics that Vaka Brown’s narrators exhibit shapes their spatial view and determines their spatial poetics. For this reason, I propose that the author’s spatial poetics are theorized given two underlying considerations: first, the historical and cultural background of the specific works, and second, the suggestions the texts themselves make about the links between the structures of place and the politics and processes of identityformation. The latter suggestions guide my reading as much as the social, historic, and cultural background of the specific works. After all, I do not consider the two geographical approaches—one emphasizing the affective and social experience of space, and the other emphasizing human subjectivity in relation to spatiality—to be antagonistic. Rather, I see them as two different emphases in the complex relation between space and literature. Because of my attitude toward the human and Marxist modes of thinking about space and place, my perspective is synthetic rather than exclusive. Therefore, while I espouse the Marxist approach that views space as a product of historical, social, political, economic, and cultural processes, I also recognize its limitations with respect to the specific ways in which individuals relate to place. This is why I believe the humanist perspective on space to be equally important for my discussion. Ultimately, although I am aware that cultural Marxism—emphasizing spatial texts as realizations of social, political, and cultural relations—has

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been theorized as an alternative to human geography—examining texts as resources that reveal the intricacies of human interaction with the environment—I do not wish to use any one of the two schools of geographic thought as my exclusive frame of reference. Instead, the alternative approach I am proposing synthesizes Marxist considerations with considerations informed by a human geography perspective. The section that follows sets up the theoretical framework within which the work of Demetra Vaka Brown is contextualized and interpreted, taking its bearings from the problematics of “Western” representations of “the East” in travel literature and related issues of identity construction, place-making, cultural mediation and translation, all informed by the insights of cultural theory. More specifically, the second section of the Introduction identifies three research directions in the book: first, it points to the discursive techniques employed in women Orientalists’ identification processes; second, it highlights these women’s “unveiling practices” vis-à-vis the context of the dominant themes and preoccupations of the Orientalist tradition; third, it foregrounds the ambivalences and contradictions underlying the models of identity shaped within and by these women’s texts.

II. WOMEN TRAVEL WRITERS “UNVEILING” THE ORIENT Although women’s representations of “the Orient” were often overlooked or underestimated in seminal discussions of the interchanges between “the Empire” and “subaltern elements” outside it—as in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978)—recently, scholars have extensively critiqued and revised conventional conceptualizations of the Orient that do not incorporate an analysis of gender into their approach. More specifically, critics like Antoinette Burton, Inderpal Grewal, Lisa Lowe, John Mackenzie, and Kenneth Parker2 have illustrated how women’s travels to and records of “the East” have played a decisive role in determining the Antoinette Burton At the Heart of the Empire (1998); Inderpal Grewal Home and Harem (1996); Lisa Lowe Critical Terrains (1991); John Mackenzie Orientalism (1995); Kenneth Parker Early Modern Tales of Orient (1999). 2

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politics of representation, which, as cultural theory informs us, are involved in the production of a version of the world. Contesting the Saidian paradigm considerably, the above mentioned scholars have also pointed out that travelers’ representations were not homogeneous but inflected by such parameters as race, class and nationality. Moreover, they have indicated changes over time; hence, Ali Behdad’s term “belated travelers.” As all theorists of Orientalism agree, for centuries, “the West” textually represented “the East” in such a way as to reinforce the relations of power and assumptions that lay at the foundation of Western imperialism and colonialism. Casting “Occident” and “Orient” as binary terms was of extreme importance for the development of Western subject-hood in the age of colonialism and, as Billie Melman puts it, “hinged upon the construction of the colonized as an ‘alterity’ ” (“Transparent Veils” 434). According to the founder of the study of “Orientalism,” Edward Said, following the rise of modern colonialism, the Orient became particularly essentialized and exoticized as a figure of “otherness.” In Said’s view, “Orientalism,” functioning as a type of Foucauldian discourse, managed and even produced the “Orient” politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively. Echoing Said’s arguments, A. L. Macfie has claimed that the “Orientalist” has assisted in the creation of a series of stereotypical images, according to which Europe (the West, the “self”) is seen as being essentially rational, developed, humane, superior, authentic, active creative, and masculine, while the Orient (the East, the “Other”) (a sort of surrogate, underground version of the West or the “self”) is seen as being irrational, aberrant, backward, crude, despotic, inferior, inauthentic, passive, feminine, and sexually corrupt. (8)

All those “orientalist” fantasies have contributed to the construction of a saturating hegemonic system, designed to dominate, restructure, and have authority over the “Orient,” ultimately promoting Western imperialism and colonialism. When Said’s Orientalism appeared in 1978, analysing colonial or cross-cultural relations within the context of cultural and American studies involved mythical and gender archetypes, such as, for example, the “Virgin Land” archetype in Henry Nash Smith’s

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work, the “machine” and the “garden” archetypes in Leo Marx’s study, or the gendered struggle for domination discussed by Annette Kolodny.3 The revolutionary change brought about by Said’s Orientalism was the introduction of the work of Michél Foucault to the colonial scene, as well as the “decentering” perspective in studies of imperialism, a perspective which is today frequently adopted by scholars. Based on Foucault’s discussion of the relationships between power and knowledge and building on the concepts of discourse and epistemic field, Said’s work identified the nature of the “orientalist” discourse as a created body of theory and practice, designed to serve the interests of Western imperial powers. Perhaps the most valuable legacy of Said’s work, the “critical eccentricity” of looking at imperial cultures from their margins, has prompted a range of extensions, revisions and critiques by scholars who have by now firmly established the view that colonialism and imperialism are not marginal and/or negligible by-products of modernity. Critiques of Orientalism have revised Said’s conventional and essentialist conceptualizations of the Orient as a unified and monolithic topos and have recovered a history of writings about and travels to the East that illustrates a subaltern voice and agency that critics such as Said seemed to overlook. For example, Homi Bhabha’s insights in The Location of Culture (1994) on the heterogeneity of colonial and postcolonial experience, which he explains as a result of a fundamental ambivalence in the colonizer’s relation to the colonized, constitute an important contribution to the field of contemporary studies on the Orient. Furthermore, feminist scholars, such as Billie Melman in Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918 (1995),4 have protested against the writing out of gender and class from Orientalist Henry Nash Smith Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950); Leo Marx The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964); Annette Kolodny The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975). 4 The phrase “Women’s Orients” in the title of this book alludes to the tradition of female Orientalists that Billie Melman discusses in her book. 3

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criticism and ethnocentric scholarship. As Melman contends, “[i]n Edward Said’s script of the exchange between the West and the East, the occidental interpretation of the Orient is a symbolic act of appropriation from which Western women are excluded” (5). Sara Mills also argues that western women’s voice was distinctive, lacking the authority of the male coloniser, and “therefore not straightforwardly orientalist in the way Said has described it” (62). Probing into the relations between imperialism and gender, Mari Yoshihara in Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (2003) observes that women played pivotal roles in inscribing gendered meanings to the “Orient,” “both complicating and replicating the dominant Orientalist discourse founded upon the notion of ‘West = male vs. East = female’” (6). It is important to recognise the significant differences of approach in the wide range of Western female authors writing about the East. As Reina Lewis points out, women’s orientalism was not “either simply supportive or simply oppositional”; it was also “partial, fragmented and contradictory”, and often produced less degrading forms of representation of the orientalized other (Gendering Orientalism 237). Moving away from the androcentric representation of the imperialist experience and tradition and acknowledging that the discourse about things “oriental” is polyphonic, this book heavily relies on the insight that the study of “women’s Orient has a meaning beyond the discovery of new evidence, the unearthing of the debris of unknown lives and of an experience ‘hidden from history’” (Melman, Women’s Orients 6). Hence, in my study I follow the current trend in studies of Orientalism and the “culture of women’s Orients” as this is exemplified in the works of Demetra Vaka Brown to reach a historically informed understanding of cross-cultural relations that associates women both with social and political history. This is why I devote a chapter to Vaka Brown in the context of other female Orientalists—Hester Donaldson Jenkins, Anna Bowman Dodd, and Halide Adivar Edib. As I argue, these authors follow the long line of women travel writers that began with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters (written in 1716, but published in 1762) that challenged the tendency of many European travellers to exoticize the “Orient.” Vaka Brown, Donaldson Jenkins, Bowman Dodd, and Adivar Edib all wrote about the places they visited/lived in and the women they encountered in terms that contested the fantasizing of their male

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contemporaries. Thus, in demonstrating those women’s role in the conceptualization and representation of the “Orient,” this book also traces the cultural history of the relationship between women and Orientalism in the period between late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As I note, the above-mentioned authors played multiple, but not mutually exclusive roles: they were simultaneously critics, experts, and practitioners, but also consumers and producers of Orientalism. The tradition represented by those women travel writers undermines the assumption that female experience of the Orient was subsumed in a hegemonic and homogeneously patriarchal tradition. Vaka Brown, Donaldson Jenkins, Bowman Dodd, and Adivar Edib experienced and represented the East—Turkey in particular—in resistance to popular stereotypes; hence, their writings “deconstruct” the conventions of Orientalist discourse. This “deconstruction,” however, is performed differently by each one of them, producing in turn significant variations in their texts. My reading of the specific works acknowledges that such variations derive from differences in social class, age, religion, and ethnic group. Hence, I explore the patterns of diversity in these travel narratives for the broader social, political and cultural differences that they reflect. Vaka Brown, Donaldson Jenkins, Bowman Dodd, and Adivar Edib manipulate the “Orient” and Eastern imagery in their texts, enabling their feminist projects by portraying escape from both the domestic boundaries of the West as well as the stereotype of nineteenth-century Oriental femininity. Confronting cultural frontiers almost as fraught as the “savage” frontier of the American West, these women established themselves on the contested terrain created by the constant juxtaposition among the distinct cultural traditions of which they partook. Hence, their novels suggest transcendence as well as fusion of boundaries and result in the formation of a space which, by allowing these cultural traditions to form and inform each other, can give rise to and legitimize multifaceted and highly contradictory identities.

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III. WRITING TRAVELS, WRITING THE SELF: THE LIFE AND CAREER OF DEMETRA VAKA BROWN Demetra Vaka Brown “is the first Greek immigrant woman to the U.S.A. whose name, date of birth, date of immigration and life story can be established with relative accuracy” (Kalogeras v).5 She was born in 1877 on the island of Prinkipo (Bouyouk Ada), off the coast of Constantinople in the Sea of Marmora. She was the daughter of a Greek official who was working for the Sultanate, thus her family was one of the upper middle-class Greek families living in Constantinople under Ottoman rule.6 Vaka traveled extensively since an early age: at age 10, she spent time in the Crimea among family members who were Russian Greeks, and at age 12 she made her first journey across the Balkans—visiting Rumania, Serbia and Bulgaria—in the company of her aunt. In her autobiography serialized in Athene magazine, Vaka states that she attended the school supported by the Greek community which was located on the island where she was born and that within a year she was able to skip two classes and was placed among students who were 3 and 4 years older than she was. Vaka admits, though, that what she learned at school in a week she could learn in an hour at home, working with her father on books that were ordered from France. The family’s socio-economic status allowed Vaka to pursue studies in Paris for two years—possibly at convent schools. However, following the sudden death of her father, the author had to return to Constantinople, as the family faced financial difficulties. There, she resumed her studies at private French schools which prepared students to study in Paris. Vaka Yiorgos Kalogeras, “Contested, Familiar and Exotic Spaces: The Politics of Demetra Vaka Brown’s Identity,” Introduction to the 2004 Gorgias reprinted edition of Haremlik. 6 As Kalogeras correctly notes, the accuracy of this information is contestable, but we, nevertheless, have to rely on Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narratives as exclusive sources. For example, although, as the critic reveals, a brief search through the archives of Greek schools for girls in Constantinople did not turn up her name, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical texts present her as a student of “Zappeion.” 5

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immigrated to the United States in 1894, at the age of 17, as the governess of the children of the Ottoman government’s appointed consul to the United States, who was a man of Greek descent. Grant Overton explains that the author’s immigration was partly arranged so that she could avoid an arranged marriage (286), a view which is corroborated by Vaka’s serialized autobiography where her mother is quoted saying that a marriage has been arranged for her. When in the United States, significant historic events altered the course of Vaka’s life. The Armenian massacres by the Ottomans in 1894 and 1895 put the Christian consul in a compromised position: since he could not successfully “justify” the killing of Christians by Muslims to the American public, he was refused his salary by the Sultan, thus forced to abandon his position and return to Constantinople. Vaka did not follow the consul when he was recalled to Constantinople, but decided to stay in the United States with the purpose of studying medicine7— a goal she ultimately had to abandon due to financial hardships. Before becoming fluent in English, she worked as a copy editor, writing in Greek for the national daily Greek newspaper Atlantis, whose chief editor was the opinionated Solon Vlastos.8 Soon, growing restless in what she considered a tedious and unrewarding position, she resigned and undertook private tutoring in Cooperstown—where one of her pupils was the great-grandson of James Fennimore Cooper—and teaching classical Greek and French at private colleges such as Comstock School in New York. At the same time, she was following literature courses at the University of New York. Vaka’s ultimate professional transition In her autobiographical novel, A Child of the Orient (1914), as well as in Haremlik (1909) and The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul (1923), where she presents life in the harems, Vaka Brown confesses that she initially dreamed of studying to become a doctor so that she would be able to return to Constantinople and work toward the emancipation of Oriental women. 8 Solon J. Vlastos was the publisher of Atlantis (1894–1972). As Charles Moskos writes, “Vlastos was a fervent admirer of King Constantine and defended the monarch’s policy of Greek neutrality in World War I” (38). 7

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was made when she became a correspondent and regular contributor to major popular publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, Asia, The Century, Delineator, Colliers Magazine, and The Outlook. Although the author’s autobiography does not explain the exact course of her professional development, it is certain that her marriage in 1904 to author Kenneth Brown must have had a strong influence on her career as a writer. Demetra Vaka met Kenneth Brown at a tea party organized by Mrs. Stedman, whose “tea afternoons” where artists and authors gathered Vaka frequented. Following a brief period of courtship by correspondence, Vaka was invited to Kenneth Brown’s home, “West Cairns”9 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she met his mother, Mrs. Caroline M. Brown.10 Vaka returned from Virginia engaged to be married. The marriage took place in 1904, first in Washington Square, New York, where Kenneth Brown’s mother had taken a flat, and then in the Greek Orthodox Church, where the Greek consul gave Vaka away. After a summer in Virginia, the Kenneth Browns moved to New York, where Mrs. Caroline Brown had taken an apartment. During that year, Vaka’s health deteriorated to the point that Kenneth Brown had to carry her up the stairs to their flat. For this reason, in the summer that followed, they returned to “West According to The Architecture of Jefferson Country (2000) by K. Edward Lay, “[a]bout 1912 the rambling two-story stone house called West Cairns, designed by architect R. E. Shaw, was built for H. B. Boone and Kenneth Brown. It was on the site of the present Kluge Rehabilitation Center on Route 250 just west of Charlottesville” (264). 10 Mrs. Caroline M. Brown of Charlottesville, Virginia was married to Mr. Franklin B. Brown who died in Chicago in October 1870. After the Chicago fire, she went abroad to educate her two children—Kenneth and Francesca—and settled in Naples. The family also spent some time in Germany. Mrs. Brown returned to Chicago again in 1875 and erected the three storey apartments at 269 East Erie St. There, she founded the Chicago Woman’s Club in 1876. Being a strong and sophisticated woman as well as an ardent supporter of the women’s cause, it is not surprising that her intellect and character strongly appealed to Vaka who maintained a close relationship with her mother-in-law throughout her life. 9

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Cairns,” where country life helped Vaka make a fast recovery. The couple also spent several weeks at Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, because of hay fever—a disease, as Vaka admitted in her autobiography, which made them pariahs for the greater part of their lives. Vaka Brown’s first publication was a short piece entitled “My Last Journey to Russia”—recounting the author’s visit to the country in 1901—which was accepted for publication by the Associated Sunday Magazines and earned the author one hundred dollars. As Vaka admits in her serialized autobiography, the reason that urged her to consider writing as a career—a career she had never envisaged as her own—was financial difficulties (41). Following the success and acclaim with which the story was met, Vaka resolved to put down on paper the things she had seen and bring to America the world in which she was born (41). Kenneth Brown had already published several novels before he met Demetra Vaka.11 Vaka Brown’s handwritten inscription on the copy of her novel Haremlik (1909) found in Kenneth Brown’s personal library—which is today held by the University of Virginia Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library—in which she acknowledges her husband’s contribution to her writing in English testifies to some form of collaboration between the two: “To my own dearest Kenneth Brown this first volume of the ‘Haremlik’ which he helped me write. his Demetra Kenneth Brown.” Equally important to Demetra’s inscription, the nickname “Märchen”— which translates in German as “fable,” “fairy tale,” or “myth”— that Kenneth Brown used to affectionately refer to his wife12 also bears witness to the creative exchange between the two authors. Kenneth Brown published six novels: Eastover Court House (1901) and The Redfields Succession (1903) with his brother-in-law, and four of his own, Sirocco (1906), Two Boys in a Gyrocar (1911), Putter Perkins (1923) and The Medchester Club (1938). With Putter Perkins as the only exception, all others received favorable reviews, including those by The New York Times. 12 The nickname appears in several postcards Kenneth Brown sent to his sister Francesca from the couple’s travels abroad which are today part of the Kenneth Brown collection at the University of Virginia Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. 11

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Together Kenneth and Demetra co-authored three romances as the books’ publication information reveals: The First Secretary (1907), The Duke’s Price (1910), and In Pawn to a Throne (1919). During the First World War, the Kenneth Browns spent the year 1917 in England, France, Italy and Greece—Athens and Thessaloniki—, doing research on Greece’s political and diplomatic scene and the country’s involvement in the war. Their trip and research were commissioned by Collier’s which paid Demetra Vaka a thousand dollars for each piece she contributed to the magazine. The serialized pieces were then collected in book form and published by Houghton Mifflin as In the Heart of German Intrigue (1918). In the Heart of German Intrigue paints such a picture of wartime Greece that the London Times book review commented that “[n]o student of history can afford to be without this book, and posterity will be grateful to Demetra Vaka for disentangling that period of Greece’s history. It reads like a detective story.” In 1920, together with Aristides Phoutrides, Vaka Brown translated into English and introduced the first collection of short stories by Greek Demoticists 13 to appear in a language other than Greek. In 1921, Demetra Vaka and Kenneth Brown left the United States again: first, they spent time in Paris and the Pyrenees in the company of Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936),14 working with The “Demoticists” were writers who denounced the stilted, official language of nineteenth-century Greek literature and opted for the language spoken by common people—the “Demotiki”—as the language of literature. 14 Eleftherios Venizelos was one of the most prominent modern Greek statesmen, whose political career began during the Greek revolution of 1897 with his contribution to the drafting of the Cretan Constitution. In 1910, he became Greece’s Prime Minister and founded the “Liberal Party.” According to the information posted on the website of the “Greek National Research Foundation Eleftherios K. Venizelos,” Venizelos’ contribution to the political and economic progress of Greece and the outcome of the Balkan Wars (1912–13) was of extreme importance. During World War I he clashed with the Crown and the Royalists and, at the expense of the National Schism (1915–1917), he 13

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him on a project they envisioned as his biography which was, however, never published; later, they traveled to Turkey, where they studied the country’s political and social changes at the time. While in Turkey, they met with several public figures, including most of the ministers of the Sultan, but also interviewed various people, from the most violent Kemalists to the most extreme antiKemalists. The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1923, gives Demetra Vaka’s impressions of the near Eastern maelstrom at the time and forms the last part of a trilogy, including Haremlik (1909) and A Child of the Orient—her fictionalized autobiography published in 1914. The trilogy can be read as a fictional account of the Turkish nation’s history since the time of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1842–1918)15—a period which is depicted in A Child of the Orient—to the time of the Young Turks revolution in 1908 and the Second Constitutional Era of the

enforced his pro-Entente policy. Venizelos lost the vital elections of November 1920, and subsequently withdrew from the political scene, but returned after the Asia Minor disaster of 1922. Because of his two initiatives—the mandatory exchange of Greek and Turkish populations and the Treaty of Lausanne which defined the boundaries between Greece and Turkey—he re-oriented Greek policy. His last term of office as Prime Minister (1928–1932) was a period of stability and creativity. His major achievement was the signature of the pact of friendship between Greece and Turkey in 1930. The end of his career was marked by the attempt against his life in June 1933 and the failed Venizelist coup of March 1935. He went into self-exile in Paris where he died on the 18th of March, 1936. (“Eleftherios Venizelos biography” available online at . Date accessed: June 10th, 2010). 15 His Imperial Majesty, The Sultan Abdülhamid II, Emperor of the Ottomans, Caliph of the Faithful, was the 34th sultan of the Ottoman Empire. His ruling from 1876 until his deposition following the Young Turks Revolution constituted a period of decline in the power and extent of the Empire.

INTRODUCTION

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Ottoman Empire,16 as these are reflected in The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul. By the time of her death in 1946, Vaka Brown had written over a dozen romances and personal narratives—two of which appeared posthumously following her husband’s initiative—almost all exclusively published by the established, mainstream publishing house Houghton and Mifflin.17 During the last years of her life, Vaka Brown worked very hard for the Greek War Relief Association and was the founder of its “mercy corps.” The Greek War Relief Association raised funds in the U.S. to buy food in Turkey and ship it to Greece in four boats purchased by the association for that cause. The boats were allowed to enter Turkish ports and, upon their return from Greece, The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 reversed the suspension of the Ottoman parliament by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, marking the onset of the Second Constitutional Era. The Revolution constituted a landmark in the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and was the result of the combined efforts of diverse political groups: reform-minded pluralists, Turkish nationalists, Western-oriented secularists, and anyone who accorded the Sultan political blame for the harried state of the Empire. The Second Constitutional Era of the Ottoman Empire began shortly after Sultan Abdülhamid II restored the constitutional monarchy after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and established numerous political groups. 17 Her works include: The First Secretary (1907), Haremlik (1909), A Duke’s Price (1910), In the Shadow of Islam (1911), A Child of the Orient (1914), The Grasp of the Sultan (1916), The Heart of the Balkans (1917), In the Heart of the German Intrigue (1918), In Pawn to a Throne (1919), The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul (1923), Delarah (1943), Bribed to be Born (1951), her autobiography serialized in Athene magazine (1947–1953), as well as a volume of modern Greek fiction, Modern Greek Stories, which she translated together with Aristides Phoutrides in 1920. Phoutrides (1887– 1923) was an important Greek-American classical scholar and poet, who immigrated to America from Icaria at the age of 19. He became a professor of Classics at Harvard and Yale universities and, throughout his life, he remained actively interested and involved in Greek affairs, while at the same time upholding the ideals of liberty and law as essentially American. 16

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they carried war orphans to live with Greek families residing in Turkey. As India Moffett in “Women in War Work” reported in the Chicago Daily Tribune on April 5th, 1942, “[l]ast year, the association sent 6 million dollars to the Greek army while it held out for six months against Hitler. Miss Vaka, who is a member of the relief association, personally raised $3,000 thru lectures on Greece. She explains the history and culture of her native land to Americans and she interprets her adopted country, the United States, for other Greeks” (G3). In the same article, India Moffett writes that Vaka was also the general chairman of a series of benefit bridge parties supporting the same cause (G3). Vaka Brown did not give public lectures only to support the Greek cause. As early as 1910 the author lectured in front of various clubs in New York and Boston on the life of Turkish women as the article “Active Women” in the Los Angeles Times of January 30th, 1910 reveals. Other examples of her public lectures include her talk to the Chicago Women’s Club on the living conditions in Greece in November 1918, the one she gave to the New York Woman’s Town Club on “European Conditions” in February 1925, and the one given to the Chicago Latin School for Girls on “Famous Men I Have Interviewed” in April 1935. The home of the Kenneth Browns since 1915 became “Glimpsewood,” in Dublin, New Hampshire, but the couple spent the winters in Chicago, where the author died of heart failure on December 17th, 1946. During her life, Vaka Brown was esteemed as an authority not only on Oriental politics and culture, but also on domestic and social life in the Orient. She was also regarded a valuable source on the international politics surrounding the prospective division of the moribund Ottoman Empire among the European Powers. However, with the exception of two of her novels which were recently reprinted by Gorgias Press [Haremlik, (2004); The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul, (2005)], the rest of the author’s written corpus— including over a dozen novels and personal narratives, almost exclusively published by Houghton and Mifflin—remains today out of print. Yet this unique case of a female Orientalist—a woman writer of Greek descent who became a spokesperson for her ethnic community and an important American journalist specializing in matters relating to the Oriental Question—has not received the critical attention it deserves.

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The Gorgias Press republication series entitled Cultures in Dialogue, which returns to active circulation out-of-print sources by women writers published in the period between 1880 and 1940, has begun what should be a revival of interest in Vaka Brown. Its first series includes a wide range of genres—memoir, travelogue, ethnography, political commentary—which illustrate the “exchanges” between and amongst Ottoman, British, and American women authors whose work addresses such issues as imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, race relations, the East/West dichotomy, Islam as it faces modernity, and female emancipation. The series includes two titles by Vaka Brown: Haremlik: Some Pages from the Life of Turkish Women (1909) and The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul (1923). Vaka Brown is the only writer in the series who is anthologized twice, testifying to her important function within the culture of “women’s orients” which undermines the binary of the Western colonizer and the Eastern colonized. Indeed, Vaka Brown’s work, bearing witness to the female experience of the Orient, operates against a hegemonic and homogeneously constructed patriarchal tradition of Orientalism and revises conventional conceptualizations of Ottoman and modern Turkey as a unified and monolithic “Oriental topos.” Thus, not only is she of historic importance in American literature, but her concerns mesh with the most recent advances in postcolonial theory as they provocatively address the timely global issue of relations between the Islamic East and the Christian West. The purpose of this book has been to read Vaka Brown’s texts within the multiple contexts of history, culture, modernism, and gender studies in order to demonstrate the author’s important position within and against nationalist and imperialist practices of the early twentieth century. I read Vaka Brown’s texts as products of and contributions to particular historical, cultural, and political circumstances. Furthermore, biographical information is presented both as a means of gaining insight into the primary texts and as a text itself—a product of the historical age in which the author was writing. Taking its bearings from the problematics involved in Vaka Brown’s narrative identification(s), Chapter 1, “Demetra Vaka Brown: ‘Child of the Orient’ or Cultural Mediator?” makes the case that the narrative persona Vaka Brown assumes in her autobiographical writings is an ideological construct that reveals an

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underlying tension between “Orientalism” and “Balkanism.” Furthermore, the narrative personas Vaka Brown fashioned in her works illustrate a hybridic discourse that seeks to obscure the contradictions, ambivalences and modalities inherent in the author’s self-representation. The fact that Vaka Brown initially published her works as “Mrs. Kenneth Brown” obliterated, at first, their ethnic content in the eyes of American readership. Such identification constituted an intentional and, therefore, significant gesture on the part of the author. Rather than allowing her status as a female immigrant writer to place her in the periphery of mainstream American culture, Vaka Brown defied identity boundaries and, as a result, spatial, social, cultural, political, and ethnic divides. In fact, she experimented with and manipulated the ambiguity of the “space between” “Vaka” and “Brown”—her maiden name alluding to her ethnic background and her married name connoting her assimilation and acculturation within American society. In this way, the author claimed a territory that could include her by avoiding any single specific identification that would exclude the plurality of her Greek, Byzantine, Ottoman, European, or American identifiers. Thus, she established herself on the “liminal” space between the two names. Ultimately, Vaka Brown’s hybrid Balkan identity—established on the contested terrain created by the constant juxtaposition among the distinct cultural traditions of which she partook—suggests transcendence as well as fusion of boundaries and results in the formation of a space between and beyond them: a space which, by allowing these traditions to form and inform each other, gives rise to and legitimizes such a multifaceted and highly contradictory identity. Chapter 2, “Thinking Geographically/Thinking Historically: A Child of the Orient, With a Heart for Any Fate, Journalism,” investigates Vaka Brown’s representation of her life as a constant experience of crossing political, cultural, and social boundaries: boundaries between nations, states, empires, worlds, ethnic groups, as well as any notion of traditional identities. In this chapter, Vaka Brown’s ambiguous identification process is grounded on space studies and explored in readings of her autobiographical and travel writings, especially A Child of the Orient (1914) and With a Heart for Any Fate (1947–1951), as well as several important magazine articles. As I argue, the seeming ambiguity of Vaka Brown’s identity, rendered problematic in an ethnic, gender studies, or

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purely historic frame, is resolved when her texts are contextualized in space studies. Beyond the constraints of an intellectually hegemonic historiography and an intellectually subordinated geography, Vaka Brown’s work is read as that of a literary historian and hybrid social geographer, who viewed and, subsequently, mapped the spaces in which she lived or which she visited in the context of both historical developments and social relations and practices. It is this creative interplay between both the physical and the social spaces—spaces that the author inhabited in life, spaces that her autobiographical narrators map in writing—that, ultimately, allowed Vaka Brown to embrace and exemplify fluidity of identity: a necessary condition of the modern tradition within which she operated. Vaka Brown’s experienced and fictionalized travels, in the course of which the author constantly crossed spatial, cultural, political, ethnic, and identity boundaries, illustrate the way in which her autobiographical narrator manipulated spatiality and temporality in a modernist gesture of unifying the world inside her with the world outside her. Through this gesture, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator emerges as the prototypical modernist subject: a travelling flâneuse playing the role of a cultural mediator between worlds that appear irreconcilable in the contexts of Orientalism and/or nationalism: the East and the West, the Old World and the New (America), or Greece and the Ottoman Empire. While Chapter 2 is concerned with Vaka Brown’s autobiographical writings and travelling correspondences, Chapter 3, “Women and/of the Orient: The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul and Haremlik,” focuses, through detailed reading and analysis, on two of the author’s novels (published in 1909 and 1923 respectively) that deal with everyday life in the Orient. In addition, I examine Vaka Brown’s most popular books against the context of a tradition of female Orientalists—European and American women writers who travelled to and wrote about the East, thus catering to the reading market’s fascination with the “Orient.” As I explain, female Orientalists constructed and represented the “exotic Orient” in such a way that they both upheld and undermined cultural, ethnic, and racial stereotypes perpetuated by the Western male literary tradition. In this chapter I compare Vaka Brown’s works with Hester Donaldson Jenkins’ Behind Turkish Lattices: The Story of a Turkish Woman’s Life (1911), Anna Bowman Dodd’s In the

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Palaces of the Sultan (1903), and Halide Adivar Edib’s Memoirs (1926). As my contrapuntal reading reveals, Vaka Brown’s “harem novels” on the one hand function within the tradition of “female Orientalism” because they challenge masculine Orientalist stereotypes of the harem by highlighting the cultural, social, and political agency of individual, vibrant, Ottoman/Muslim women and by documenting the undercurrent exchanges between the Eastern and Western cultural traditions in early twentieth century. At the same time, however, Vaka Brown’s complex and ambiguous narrative discourse defies the tradition of “female Orientalism” on the grounds of the responses it articulates to dilemmas such as nationalism, female emancipation, race relations and modernization. Ultimately, the chapter problematizes the stereotypes of Western “harem literature” by illustrating the multiple ways in which the specific counter-narratives by Vaka Brown, Donaldson Jenkins, Bowman Dodd, and Adivar Edib undermine the Western male canon of Orientalism. The final chapter, Chapter 4, “Vaka Brown and the Modern Greek State: The Heart of the Balkans and In the Heart of German Intrigue,” focuses on a pair of political works by Vaka Brown: her travel narrative The Heart of the Balkans (1917) and the political testimony In the Heart of German Intrigue (1918). These texts are “cultural narratives” with specific ideological functions in the construction of a modern Greek nation-state and national identity, yielding important insights into modern Greek nationalism as a territorial ideology that implicates the modern Greek and Turkish nation states as well as the countries in the Balkan region. The first part of this chapter discusses The Heart of the Balkans, which reports the author’s journey through the Balkan Peninsula prior to her emigration to the U.S. In it, the autobiographical narrator’s geographical and cultural account of the Balkans is condescending in tone toward Serbia, Albania, Montenegro, and Bulgaria. Conversely, the narrator’s traveling vision of Greece is romanticized and follows the conventions of nineteenth-century Romantic Philhellenism. The cultural condescension expressed by the narrator toward the countries and cultures that were then considered non-Western is politically significant. Such condescension complies with the ideological expectations of Vaka Brown’s middle-class American audience, while it illustrates multiple determinators behind narrative self-fashioning: mainly, the

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author’s assumption of an American point of view that is fabricated in such a way as to convincingly tie disparate histories and cultures—Greek and American—together within a modern Western(ized) frame. This part of the chapter questions the specific political and cultural contexts and contingencies within which practices such as geography, folklore, and travel literature develop. The second part of the chapter concentrates on In the Heart of German Intrigue, which narrates Vaka Brown’s 1917 investigative trip to Greece and her interviews of political figures such as King Constantine I (1868–1923) and Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936). Significantly, the author’s journalistic coverage of the civil war atmosphere in Greece and her political critique of the country’s stance with respect to World War I reveal an underlying context of explicit propaganda promoting Venizelos’ anti-Royalist politics and diplomatic choices against a pro-Royalist European diplomatic corps. Vaka Brown’s narrative discourse reveals internal tensions inherent in the conflict between her militant modern Greek nationalism that aspires to irredentism and her political affiliation to modern American diplomatic policy. Clearly, a mixed agenda dominates Vaka Brown’s work and accounts for her contradictory political discourse—namely, the fact that she aligns herself with American diplomacy while at the same time being actively engaged in the cause of promoting Greek political and diplomatic interests. As I conclude, caught between the competing narratives of nation emerging from the Turkish, modern Greek and American states, Vaka Brown predicates herself on the interstices between the Balkans and the United States, nationalist aspirations and Westernized critique, ethnic versus cosmopolitan identification.

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Demetra Vaka Brown: Portrait Papers of Kenneth Brown, Accession #9732-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

INTRODUCTION

Demetra Vaka Brown: Portrait Papers of Kenneth Brown, Accession #9732-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

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CHAPTER 1. DEMETRA VAKA BROWN: “CHILD OF THE ORIENT” OR CULTURAL MEDIATOR? They were different from us, these women, these children of the Turks. They were so different, indeed, that I rarely spoke to them of the things I felt or thought about at home. I came to them ready to enjoy them, and to enjoy life with them; [. . .] I learned to see what was noble, charming and poetical in their lives; but I also became conscious that, in spite of the faults of my race, in spite of the limitations of our religion, our civilization was better than theirs, because it contained such words as discipline, duty, and obligation. Vaka Brown, A Child of the Orient 34–5 “But your history is my history,” I argued. “I belong to the Balkans as well as you.” “What!—you belong to the Balkans!—how can that be?” they exclaimed. “Greece is the most educated country in the world—how can it be a Balkan state?” Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 130

1.1. THEORIZING VAKA BROWN’S SHIFTING IDENTIFICATION: MAPPING THE “SPACE BETWEEN” TWO NAMES As concepts, “identity politics” and the process of “identification” have remained at the center of contemporary theoretical debates, despite the deconstructive and anti-essentialist critiques of ethnic, racial and national conceptions of cultural identity. In fact, as Paul 29

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Gilroy has stated, “we live in a world where identity matters” (301). Furthermore, as Stuart Hall has explained, although identity is an “idea which cannot be thought in the old way,” without it certain key questions remain unanswered (“Who Needs Identity?” 2). Hall’s discussion of “identity politics” challenges essentialist, unified views on identity; in fact, the cultural critic substitutes the term “identity” with the alternative term “identification,” thus stressing the importance of construction and conditionality in the process of self-making. In “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Hall further explains that cultural identities are fashioned within the discourses of history and culture and do not constitute an essence but a positioning (226). Similarly to Hall’s view of identity as a “positioning,” Edward Said contended that people have multiple identities founded on the opposition of inside and outside. The critic claimed that “all cultures and societies construct identity out of a dialectic of self and other, the subject ‘I’ [. . .] and the object ‘it’ or ‘you’” (Said, After the Last Sky 40). Therefore, to Said, identity is a matter of signification, a sign that obtains its meaning by its difference from other signs. In “The Local and the Global” Hall echoes Said when he argues that “[i]dentity is a structured representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative” (21). Based on this assumption, the cultural critic holds that identities are always situational, and, therefore, can even be contradictory. What Hall’s and Said’s arguments reveal is that the process of identification involves the interplay between the subjective experience of the world and the socio-cultural and historical settings in which subjectivity is shaped. In other words, identities may be fashioned on the grounds of gender, race, class and culture, but identity construction is also the product of political and cultural discourses and particular histories. As I illustrate in this chapter, Demetra Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrators construct their self-identity through the multiple intersections of race, class, gender, and always in terms of difference—both internal and external—to the human environment by which they are surrounded. Moreover, Vaka Brown’s narrative identification—being enacted in terms of an ambivalent oscillation between “Western-ess,” “European-ness,” “Balkan-ness,” and “Oriental difference”—illustrates the theories of critics, such as Said and Hall, viewing identities as a matter of construction, even invention, constituted through a process of

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othering and emerging within the play of specific modalities of power. Indeed, Vaka Brown’s carefully constructed discourse of mediation between the Old and New World—Greece, Turkey, the Balkans and the U.S. respectively—negotiates personal legitimization of the immigrant within the host culture of America while at the same time appealing to the familial bonds of the home country. In this sense, Vaka Brown’s narratives reveal that much as the autobiographical narrators identity is based on racial descent, it is also imaginatively engineered and contains a political vision that undercuts the idea of an unproblematic “natural” national identity. Vaka Brown’s politics of identity and the author’s conditional, shifting identifications constitute key issues in the critical investigations into the author’s work. The first critic who has extensively discussed Vaka Brown in his journal articles is Yiorgos Kalogeras. Kalogeras has also written the critical introductions to the reprinted editions of Haremlik and Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul published by Gorgias Press. The critic has examined Vaka Brown’s texts as the metaphoric “fare” the author had to pay for her transatlantic crossing, texts that function as mediators between the discourses of the host culture and the ethnic. He sees both discourses as forming and informing the autobiographical narrators’ identities, since they function as legitimizing agents for the author’s identity as an American, without, however, silencing Vaka Brown’s essential allegiance to her ethnicity. He has also argued for a polyphonic construction underlying Vaka Brown’s writings: a construction that establishes processes, rather than essences, at the core of the formation of the author’s cultural identity. These processes result from her position between empires—a position, as Kalogeras claims, that undermines the colonial concept of cultural independence. The complicated issue of Vaka Brown’s divided nationalist allegiances as it becomes evident in her romances has also been addressed in articles by Kathlene Postma, who has decontextualized the work of Vaka Brown from its stereotypical categorization as popular romance and uncovered the historical and social forces operating on both Vaka Brown the author and her audience. Postma seeks to penetrate the surface of the “exotic” by closely examining the vigorous discourses of American expansionism, feminism, and philanthropy. She considers these three underlying discourses evidence of Vaka Brown’s deep

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political commitment to both American and Greek nationalism, asserting that the author appropriates the genre of the popular romance to express two overt socio-political questions: first, the question of women’s rights, and second, the question of the political and cultural conflict between Westerners—assuming the role of “guardians” of freedom and dignity—and Ottomans— viewed as “threats” to the harmony of the Western Empire. Ultimately, she asserts that Vaka Brown advocates “a union of American expansionism and Greek nationalism combined with a plea for the support of educated American women” (“American Women Readers Encounter Turkey in the Shadow of Popular Romance” 79). In chapters one, three, four, and five of Rethinking Orientalism (2004), Reina Lewis places Vaka Brown in the context of Orientalism and Orientalization and illustrates the dynamics between the author’s Oriental-ness and American-ness in her discussion of the complications of the author’s Greek Ottoman identification. As the critic explains, “Vaka Brown is both critical of the Ottoman oppression of minority populations and horrified at Western ignorance of all things Muslim and Turkish” (31). Furthermore, Lewis probes the paradox of Vaka Brown’s “investment in challenging some negative Orientalist stereotypes” and her nostalgic refusal to see changes happen in harem life (108). Therefore, although the critic does not deny that Vaka Brown “used her first-hand experience to dispute the ‘sugared’ vision of harem life” (145), she also identifies the repeated instances in which the author invokes “the stereotypes that make the Ottoman woman recognizable” (164). The context of multiple processes of identification that is an issue for Kalogeras, Postma, and Lewis also surfaces in the criticism of Ioanna Laliotou, who, nevertheless, discusses Vaka Brown’s life-story as an example of “early twentieth century female diasporic subjectivity” (169). In the last section of the fifth chapter of Transatlantic Subjects (2004), Laliotou discusses Vaka Brown’s fictional as well as non-fictional works and criticizes the author’s proposed form of subjectivity as “superficially modern,” because, rather than being an emancipation gesture, it constitutes a conscious performance of historical conditionality (162). Such a performance, Laliotou thinks, because of its dependence on the author’s disengagement from traditional, monolithic concepts of

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nationhood, migrancy, and womanhood, ultimately remains conditional, contradictory, and incomplete (170). My analysis takes issue with Lewis and Laliotou and presses arguments in alignment with Kalogeras and Postma to indicate the complexity of Vaka Brown’s engagements with her multiple concerns and contexts. More specifically, in my study I probe the ideological context of Vaka Brown’s identity discourse by questioning the power and appeal—as well as the problems and limitations—of employing “Orientalism” as an interpretative frame for Vaka Brown’s “identity mapping.” Therefore, even though I agree with Lewis and Laliotou that the discussion of gender and race sheds light on the work of Vaka Brown, I am also aware of the limits of “Orientalism” as a discourse and a theoretical paradigm. Therefore, I feel that a cultural geographical approach that stresses space and time (with their developmental aspects) as determining factors in Vaka Brown’s identity formation and enactment can prove a useful interpretative frame. Although the above-mentioned Vaka Brown scholars have discussed the historical terms under which the author’s narrative identity was produced, they have not considered the particular geographical terms that shaped Vaka Brown’s narrative selffashioning. Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator has been called “a Christian Turk,” “an Ottoman Greek subject,” “an American writer,” even “an American Turk.” The author’s own discourse of self-presentation gives rise to and sustains ambiguity of identification: her autobiographical narrator speaks as “a Romia in the heart of the Balkans,” a “Child of the Orient,” “a Byzantine Greek,” “a Christian Ottoman subject of Greek ethnicity,” a modern female raised and educated in Europe as a Westerner, but also a cultural mediator between the East and the West—her home and host countries—one who speaks of the East and the Balkans as a Western observer and an American journalist, while simultaneously looking at America from a European/Balkan perspective. Born and raised in Constantinople (Istanbul) to a Greek family, educated in France and the United States, living in the United States and spending considerable time traveling in Europe, the Balkans and Turkey, Vaka Brown’s positioning illustrates an ambivalent oscillation between “Western-ess,” “European-ness,” “Balkan-ness,” and “Oriental difference.” This historical and topographical complexity that characterizes Vaka

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Brown’s identity formation manifests itself in the ideological conflicts inherent in the autobiographical narrator’s encounter with the host and home cultures and results in an identification that is susceptible to ideological fashioning. In my view, the geography of Vaka Brown’s marginality vis-à-vis both her home and her host country can be interpreted in geographic terms and points to the significance of the Balkans as an elastic and ambiguous spatial frame on which Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator bases her own sense of importance. Vaka Brown’s concept of identity is envisioned geographically/spatially and shaped by the idea of a frontier existence. Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator symbolically presents herself as being “at a gate,” or “at a crossroads” between different worlds. Rather than assuming a peripheral narrative position that would be justified by the author being an immigrant and a woman, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator derives and projects a sense of centrality from a position “at a crossroads,” presenting herself as a “European buffer” against the East or the interpreters of it. Such narrative fashioning rivets on an identifiable Balkan identity which, although underlying Vaka Brown’s discourse, has not been critically examined to date. By positioning herself in “the heart of the Balkans,” Vaka Brown alludes to the Western narrative tradition which has traditionally associated the Balkan Peninsula with the image of a bridge or a crossroads between East and West, Europe and Asia. Maria Todorova, in Imagining the Balkans (1997 and 2009), and Vesna Goldsworthy, in Inventing Ruritania (1998), have drawn attention to the centrality of the Balkans in the Western geographic imagination and to the importance of the Balkan Peninsula in postcolonial studies on the grounds that the Balkans constitute a “Second World” “which defines both the ‘First’ and the ‘Third’” (Goldsworthy xi). According to Goldsworthy, “the Balkan Peninsula provides a unique instance in modern times of Eastern colonization of an area of Europe. Instead of descriptions of an ‘exotic’ Other, we encounter perceptions of Balkan identity in an ambivalent oscillation between ‘Europeanness’ and ‘Oriental difference’” (2). Along similar lines, in the opening chapter of Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova questions whether “Balkanism” and “Orientalism” are different categories and argues that “balkanism is not merely a subspecies of orientalism” (8).

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Following Todorova’s argument on “Balkanism” versus “Orientalism” and building on Goldsworthy’s discussion of Western travel narratives about the Balkans, in the section that follows I explore the geographic/spatial and historical concreteness of Vaka Brown’s identity discourse to highlight its points of departure from a unified tradition of “female Orientalism.”

1.2. “A CHILD OF THE ORIENT” IN “THE HEART OF THE BALKANS”: ORIENTALISM VERSUS BALKANISM The titles of two of the most important works by Demetra Vaka Brown—A Child of the Orient (1914), the author’s autobiographical novel that narrates her life up to the point of her immigration to the U.S., and The Heart of the Balkans (1917), a travel account of Vaka Brown’s journey through the Balkan Peninsula in the spring of 1895 in the company of her brother, who was compiling a report for the Turkish government—foreground the importance of spatiality in terms of the author’s worldview and identification. At the same time, these titles set up an interesting dichotomy in terms of spatial positioning and orientation—one that is delineated by two important geographical as well as “imagined” locations: the Orient and the Balkans. “Spatiality” is a charged figure for Vaka Brown because it alludes to more than a physical, geographical location or a topographic reality. More specifically, the representations of actual places in the works by the author are neither ornamental nor accidental. They are a way to reveal that the creation of space is intertwined with cultural practices such as the creation of cultural identities. On the basis of this realization, this section demarcates the boundaries and intersecting realms of topography and subjectivity as they appear in A Child of the Orient and The Heart of the Balkans. The spatial figures of the Orient and the Balkans in the abovementioned works by Vaka Brown do not merely identify specific places on a map, but also allude to imaginary geographies to the extent that “the Orient” and “the Balkans” are strategically fashioned: seen, imagined and represented by the author for a Western readership. In other words, at the same time that Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator realistically represents actual

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places—the loci of Turkey as well as Balkan countries—she alludes to figurative grounds and literary commonplaces—the topoi of “the Orient” and “the Balkans.” A Child of the Orient is, essentially, the book by which Vaka Brown introduced herself to her audience. Despite the fact that the book is the fifth one Vaka Brown published, it is the first in a trilogy of autobiographical novels—including Haremlik and The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul—and presents the life of the author up to her first few months as an immigrant in the U.S. The telling title identifies the autobiographical narrator’s origins in the Orient and, thus, aligns her with a specific tradition in the eyes of her Western readers: Orientalism. As I have illustrated in the Introduction to this book, Orientalism as a tradition is the literary means of creating a stereotypical, mythic, and exotic “East.” Vaka Brown’s Western readers, whose sense of “cultural and intellectual superiority” granted them the authority of spectator and judge of “Oriental” behavior, had a romanticized notion of the “East” and understood the “Orient” to be static in time and place, backward, and unaware of its own history and culture. On several occasions in the book, Vaka Brown’s narrator caters to such expectations on the part of her Western readership by appealing to their sense of curiosity and perpetuating conventional Oriental fantasies of harem life, such as when she narrates her first visit to a Turkish home at age eight: My first glimpse of the interior corresponded exactly with the pictures of my imagination; for in 1885 Turkish homes still preserved all their Oriental customs. The hall was large, dark, and gloomy; and the eunuch, who had opened the door by pulling his rope, added to its terrors. And since that was a great festival day, and many ladies were calling, the hall was lined with these sinister black men, the whites of whose eyes glistened in the darkness. (26)

The description of the Turkish house foregrounds the fantasized image of the eunuch and plays on the excitement and “terror” his figure inspires in a Western audience. It also alludes to the tradition of the Gothic story by means of the reference to the “dark and gloomy hall” and the evocation of threat and fear in a setting that blends the exotic/alien and the familiar. In A Child of the Orient, the representation of Turkey often reiterates the discursive division of

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Western “reason, progress, and modernity” from Eastern “hedonism, stasis, and passivity” and, thus, reproduces the Oriental topos of Ottoman Turkey: In the Turkish homes there was no history to be learned. All they seemed to know was that they were a great conquering race, that they had come from Asia and had conquered all Europe, because they were brave and the Europeans were cowards. There was no past or future in their lives. Everything was ephemeral, resting on the pleasures of the day, or, better yet, on the pleasure of the moment; unconscious of the morrow, and indifferent to the moment after the present. (34)

Despite such conventional descriptions setting Turkey and its culture apart from the Western world on the grounds of historic discontinuity, throughout A Child of the Orient Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator vacillates between critically examining Turkey as an Oriental topos and finding comfort in it. A case in point is the chapter when she describes how she interrupted her studies in Paris and returned to Constantinople: [. . .] as I emerged from my compartment of the Oriental Express, [. . .] my soul answered to this call of the east [the shrill sweet voice of a young muezzin]. I felt as if I should like to throw myself on a prayer-rug, face Mecca, and cry with the young muezzin, “Allah-hu-akbar!” I had left the West behind—I was again in the East, the enchanting, poetical East. (197)

The intense emotional attachment to the East that the autobiographical narrator expresses in the above excerpt illustrates a tension between appropriating and deconstructing an Orientalist discourse, celebrating and undermining Turkey as an Oriental topos. In this instance, the Western subject—an enlightened, modern narrator—responds to the archaic, primitive, exotic “call of the Orient,” thus discrediting the critical distance that she has tried to maintain throughout the narrative. The narrator’s discourse in A Child of the Orient undermines the notion of an oversimplified, consistent, univocal Orientalist discourse that effectively produces “cultural differences.” This is because at the same time that Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator presents Turks as prototypically “Oriental”—culturally backward, peculiar, and unchanging—she

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also celebrates them on the grounds of their “calm, contemplative spirit which is the keynote of the Turkish character” (45). Such an ambivalent attitude is extremely meaningful if interpreted as the gesture of a modern narrator who feels that, in order to speak with authority about the East, she has to be involved with it beyond the limits which the distanced role of stranger and/or honored guest allows. The inherent conflict in the autobiographical narrator’s use of an Orientalist discourse which surfaces in A Child of the Orient resembles the tension embedded in the narrative of The Heart of the Balkans. There, Vaka Brown’s narrative persona challenges the binary oppositions inherent in another, highly contestable, discourse: that of Balkanism.1 More specifically, the narrator of The Heart of the Balkans constantly oscillates between nostalgically referring to “Europe’s lost people”—its wild warriors and passionate geniuses—and using the term “Balkan” pejoratively. Interestingly, both A Child of the Orient and The Heart of the Balkans focus on the relation between “East” and “West”: in the first the “East” is Ottoman Turkey, whereas in the second it is the Balkan countries. In my view, although the two books have a different geographical location as a starting point, the two topoi of “Oriental Turkey” and the “Balkans” converge. This convergence is reinforced by Vaka Brown’s ambivalent, oscillating narrative discourse that problematizes the contextualization of the books within a conventional, purely Orientalist or Balkanist frame. That ambivalence and oscillation raises the question of the appropriate interpretive discourse, methodological tools, and theoretical framework that can be used in discussing A Child of the Orient and The Heart of the Balkans. It is my contention that one needs to refer to the discourses of both Orientalism and Balkanism in order to fully explore the ambivalences and contradictions in Vaka Brown’s narrative identification and interpret such identification as a carefully fashioned ideological construct.

The term “Balkanism” was coined by Maria Todorova in Imagining the Balkans (1997 and 2009) to refer to the derogatory representation of the Balkans. 1

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In introducing Imagining the Balkans with the question “Balkanism and Orientalism: are they different categories?” (3) Maria Todorova argues that any similarities between the two discourses are rooted in what Edward Said terms “the general crisis of representation” and, thus, both Orientalism and Balkanism are discourses born of unequal power relationships which grant the power to name and create narratives to Westerners (9). As a result, similarly to Orientalism, Balkanism is a process in which, through the arrangement of knowledge about the Balkans by expert Westerners, the Balkans are imagined, fashioned and bounded by their conversation with the West (11).2 The imaginative construction of the Balkans as a literary topos—that of Europe’s “Other”—has also been discussed by Vesna Goldsworthy who, in Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998), has accurately observed that “[a]ny attempt to define the boundaries of the Balkan Peninsula shows that, as a specific geographic entity, the Balkans themselves represent a historical construct, a series of overlapping imagined spaces” (3, emphasis added). Indeed, even considering the coining of the term “Balkan,” one realizes that the choice was arbitrary. August Zeune, the German geographer who is credited with the invention of the name for the peninsula in his 1809 book Gea. Versuch einer Wissenschaftlischen Erdbeschreibung, named the region after a mountain range—the “Balkan Mountains” Here I must note that beyond pointing to the shared fate of Orientalism and Balkanism as defined interlocutors, Todorova views the two discourses as very different. The scholar grounds the differentiation on what she terms the concreteness of the Balkans as a geographical and historical entity which stands in stark contrast with “the Orient” as an imagined “topos” (See the Afterword in the updated edition of Imagining the Balkans, especially pp. 193 and on). In this, she moves away from the direction pointed to by scholars such as Elli Skopetea who, in Orient’s West: Last Images of the Ottoman Empire (1992), explores the “East” and “West” as continuously interconnected entities, focusing on their relations and their interaction. In her work, Skopetea reveals the “mutual images” of East and West, by investigating the junctures of the two systems: the Western figures through which the East learns from the West, and the Eastern figures through which the West learns from the East. 2

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referred to in antiquity as Haemus—that was neither the most extensive nor the highest in the region. Moreover, the name itself is a misunderstanding of the Turkish noun “balkan,” which translates as “mountain chain” but does not refer to the specific range. Although the name was used sporadically at first, the need to refer to the new states forming in the 1870s and 1880s in the territory but previously known as “European Turkey” solidified its use. The absence of any concrete geographic features3 that could serve as an identifiable dividing line between the Balkans and mainland Europe4 has significantly contributed to what Goldsworthy has termed “the narrative colonization of the Balkans” (x). This textual colonization has been made possible by means of a discourse of “Otherness” that typifies the Balkans as “savage Europe,” setting them up against an enlightened, democratic West.5 Even a cursory examination of fictional and semi-fictional literary Balkan settings since Lord Byron’s discovery of the Balkans in 1809 reveals a vision of the Balkan Peninsula For example, the entry for the “Balkan Peninsula” in the 1991 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana states that “[a]lthough European Turkey, including Istanbul (Constantinople) lies geographically within the confines of the Balkan Peninsula, it is now part of a non-Balkan state, and generally it is not considered part of the region.” 4 In addition to the lack of an indisputable borderline between the peninsula and the rest of Europe, Goldsworthy uncovers a more insidious reason for the contestability of the term: mainly, the negative connotations associated with the term “Balkan.” More specifically, because “Balkanization” as a geopolitical term was originally used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or non-cooperative with each other, the Oxford English Dictionary cites the figurative appellation of the adjective “Balkan” as “with allusions to the relation (often characterized by threatened hostilities to each other or to the rest of Europe).” 5 Note that the boundaries that set the Balkans apart from the rest of Europe follow the fate of the Ottoman Empire which was superceded by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the North. It was this shift in the setting of boundaries that turned Hungary into a “Western” country. 3

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which conjures up a part of Europe still exotic, “a time capsule world: a dim stage upon which people raged, spilled blood, experienced visions and ecstasies” (Kaplan xxi). Such a “time capsule” image is evoked by Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator in The Heart of the Balkans who introduces the Balkans to her readers by means of a statement her brother makes that contextualizes the region and its culture within medieval times: In the Balkans I am no longer in the nineteenth century; they transport me back hundreds of years. I do not have to read of the Middle Ages—I am of the Middle Ages. [. . .] In all the civilized world you would not find a child like eight-year-old Pantele. Here he is common: he was common in the Middle Ages. Before he is fourteen he will be taking life—and running for his life—as they used to in the Middle Ages. (16)

The narrator’s brother sets up the image of the Balkans against the concept of the “civilized world” and suggests that Pantele—an eight-year-old Albanian whose dream in life is to kill as many Turks as possible and fight for an independent Albania—embodies the Balkan spirit: a spirit that is fierce and thirsty for blood. As for the autobiographical narrator herself, she subsequently expresses her opinion on the region by saying: “I was young and full of enthusiasm: my world had been made up of books, and the mystery of the Balkans attracted me beyond the desire for comfort” (33). The keyword in the narrator’s view of the Balkans in this excerpt is the word “mystery,” conjuring up a dim and distant world, a shadow land that places visitors under a spell. As Todorova has observed, what is interesting about the way the Balkans have been represented in the Western imagination is that the “balkanist discourse is singularly male” (15). Indeed, as Vaka Brown’s narrative illustrates, the journey across the Balkans can be compared with a mythical escape to the Middle Ages, and makes a distinctly male appeal: the appeal of medieval knighthood, of arms and plots to which the figure of Pantele alludes. In fact, Pantele stands for the prototypical Balkan male: uncivilized, primitive, crude, cruel. Undoubtedly, the narrator’s framing of the journey across the Balkans as the romantic adventure she is seeking as an alternative to her “world of books” echoes the standard Orientalist discourse of escapism. As all studies of “the Orient”

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have conceded, the East was constructed for the West as an exotic and imaginary realm, epitomizing longing and offering an alternative to the prosaic world of the West. However, the point of departure of Vaka Brown’s distinctly Balkanist discourse from the stereotypical Orientalist discourse of escapism is its lack of appeal to sexuality, sensuality and lust. In fact, unlike the standard Orientalist discourse which resorts to metaphors of its object of study as female, Vaka Brown’s balkanist discourse is singularly male. Much like A Child of the Orient, The Heart of the Balkans hovers uneasily between the coyness which seems to have been expected by the Western readership to which Vaka Brown addressed herself, and the obvious signs of the autobiographical narrator’s resistance to stereotypes and conventions. On the whole, readers are not offered writing which is either naïve or sentimental. Rather, Vaka Brown’s account of the conditions in the Balkan Peninsula is filtered through the prism of a literary genre—a travel account informed by history and politics—and, more significantly, the author’s need to make a statement about the world and her place in it. It is important to note that to a large extent this statement is political in nature as, on different occasions, Vaka Brown’s narrator campaigns openly for the causes of particular Balkan peoples— such as the Greeks—whose interests the author espoused. This is something that will be extensively discussed in chapter 4 of this book. What is of equal importance, though, is the autobiographical narrator’s reflection upon her own experience and identity, framed by her encounter with Balkan cultures. This “inward journey” is as significant as her crossing of geographical or social frontiers. Once in the Balkans, Vaka Brown does not only embark on a physical exploration but also a spiritual one, in which she discovers new, exciting and rewarding aspects of her identity. Finding it difficult to maintain a critical distance between her and the host Balkan societies/cultures and still speak authoritatively about them, Vaka Brown assumes various narrative personas—such as that of the “adopted child”—that come in stark contrast with her educated and emancipated self back home. A case in point is a discussion between her Serbian hosts that takes place only three weeks into her journey across the Balkans, upon which she begins to question her role as a woman:

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My last hostess, in perplexity over the reason for my existence, turned to her husband and asked:— “Master Nikita, can you imagine this young girl ever giving sturdy sons to her husband?” The husband caressed with his two hands the belt which carried his many weapons and shook his head doubtfully. “That is why the Greeks are of no account nowadays,” he replied. “They pamper their women, and they school them as if they were boys …” And so much did they marvel at my slenderness and smallness that I began to wonder myself if I were not really a pretty useless baggage. (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 111–12)

The autobiographical narrator’s closing statement reveals that, like her hosts, she has started questioning her female identity—an identity that she was proud of before her journey across the Balkans. However, the closer she has come to living with Balkan people—moving out of her tent and into their homes—the more her incorporation into a role that is acceptable and considered appropriate by her host culture has become necessary. Such conformity illustrates her acceptance—even if temporary—of Balkan socio-cultural codes and customs, as when, for example, she follows the advice of her hostess who says that “people don’t lie down in the daytime unless they are sick” (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 68–9) and, “[a]fter a few days in Montenegro,” learns “not to speak of lying down” no matter how tired she feels (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 77). In turn, her conformity to the behavior expected of a woman in the Balkan world ushers her into the “family circle” which is signaled when the lady of the house where she stays in Cetinje calls her “my dear child” instead of using a polite title that would be appropriate for a guest or stranger. Vaka Brown’s encounter with the Balkans and her highly idiosyncratic Balkanist discourse that on the one hand upholds the conventional Western view of the Balkans as a separate, different part of Europe—quaint, romantic, and Oriental—while on the other it temporarily rejects the conceptual framework composed of violence, discord and backwardness which delimits the antitype of the enlightened West, plays its own part in the development of the author’s narrative project and identity. More specifically, the in-

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betweenness of the Balkans and the transitory character suggested by their representation in the novel as a “bridge”6 between the East and West mirror Vaka Brown’s own positioning. As Todorova has argued, whereas the West and the Orient are usually presented as “completed antiworlds,” the Balkans have always evoked the image of a bridge7 or crossroads, stressing their “transitionary status” (15). In The Heart of the Balkans, the representation of the Balkans as a bridge between East and West, Europe and Asia, or between stages of growth, much as it borders on the banal (to quote Todorova again), reveals an underlying assumption about their socio-political, economic and cultural status: the Balkans are “seen” and, therefore represented by Vaka Brown, as semi-developed, semi-civilized, semi-oriental. In my view, this cultural liminality of the Balkans reflected in the book becomes emblematic of the author’s own sense of existing both “between” and “among” states of being, as opposed to more static and repressive identity markers. Ultimately, Vaka Brown’s liminal presence between the “West” and the “Balkans,” as well as her position between the “West” and the “Orient,” serves as an ideal standpoint from which to challenge the binary oppositions of Balkanism and Orientalism and begin to reimagine and re-invent the “Balkans” and “Oriental Turkey” redirecting these categories as a site of political engagement and critique. In “Spatial Stories,” Michel De Certeau discusses the figure of the bridge as “alternately weld[ing] together and oppos[ing] insularities” (Roberson, ed. 100). According to the French critic, bridges constitute “transgressions of the limit”; they represent departure, but also “disquieting familiarity” (Roberson, ed. 101). 7 The bridge as a metaphor to represent the Balkans is, of course, closely connected to Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina (first published in Serbo-Croat in 1945) whose epic force was cited by the committee that awarded Andrić the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. The bridge which is central to the book—both in its inception and at its destruction— constitutes “a symbol of the establishment and the overthrow of a civilization that came forcibly to the Balkans in the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries and was no less forcibly overthrown in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (Andrić 5). 6

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1.3. EXPLORING THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF SELF-REPRESENTATION: THE HYBRIDIC LAYERINGS OF DEMETRA VAKA BROWN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATOR Hybridity has explosively emerged in studies of the experience of modernity as both a reaction to purist ways of thinking about “race” and as a more widely used term in post-colonial studies, anthropology, and cultural studies to suggest different forms of cultural mixing and interactive exchange. For example, Stuart Hall in “New Ethnicities” writes of cultural identity as always hybrid (502), while Salman Rushdie describes hybridity as transgressive, counter-hegemonic, resistant, and interruptive in “Good Faith.” At the same time, Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity as “colonial mimicry”—taking form, on the one hand, in the imitations the colonized makes of the colonizer and, on the other, as a double process whereby both the colonized and the colonizer produce hybridity through interaction—has been extremely influential in cultural as well as literary studies (The Location of Culture 85–92). In Demetra Vaka Brown’s case, it is important to think of the hybridic layerings of her narrator’s identity as these are produced through her wide-ranging travels and the processes of cultural assimilation and appropriation that these travels involve. One cannot ignore the fact that Vaka Brown’s constant moves between the East and the West, to a certain extent, problematize her identification process and subsequent self presentation, both of which, in the author’s work, are interrelated with notions of space and history. The way in which critics and anthologists have identified the author is indicative of the problematics of Vaka Brown’s self-identity. She has been called a Christian Turk, an Ottoman Greek subject, an American writer, even an American Turk. Indeed, Vaka Brown’s own discourse of self-presentation gives rise to and sustains this ambiguity of identification: her autobiographical narrator speaks as a Romia, a “Child of the Orient,” a Byzantine Greek, a Christian Ottoman subject of Greek ethnicity, a modern female raised and educated in Europe as a Westerner, but also a cultural mediator between the East and the West—her home and host countries—one who speaks of the East as a Western observer and an American journalist while simultaneously looking at the West from a European perspective.

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Born and raised in Constantinople to a Greek family, educated in France and the United States, living in the United States and spending considerable time traveling in the Balkans and Turkey, Vaka Brown’s identity seems hybridic on many levels: cultural, psychological, ethnic, racial. Moreover, her autobiographical narrator’s hybrid identity is produced both in geographical and in historical terms: on the one hand, on the basis of her traveling, migration, and border crossing, while on the other developing over time and under specific historical conditions. In “With a Heart for any Fate/Faith,” references to ambiguity about the autobiographical narrator’s identity abound and point to the historical complexity of Vaka Brown’s hybridity: “I was born the child of a conquered race and sensed very early that we Greeks, under the Turks, lived in fear [. . .] That may be the reason why the Greeks in Turkey so strongly impressed on us our heritage, telling us that our ancestors had created a civilization in Europe never yet surpassed” (87); “I naturally belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church [. . .] [but] at heart I was a pagan. The gods of Olympus were my gods. Their glorious doings obscured the gentleness of the Christian martyrs [. . .] They held my allegiance, for they were connected with the grandeur of ancient Greece” (88). Clearly, the author vacillates between identifying either with the classical Greek or with the Byzantine Greek tradition and leans toward the first as a means of reinforcing her national self-esteem. This is marred because of the fact that Greece—her country of descent, the nation and race with which she identifies by means of birth—is occupied by the Ottoman Empire and Greeks live under Turkish rule at the time. Stressing the historically produced aspect of her hybridity, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator reveals how the mingling of the ancient and the Byzantine cultures constitutes a temporal and cultural palimpsest of sedimentations. These sedimentations acquire additional significance because of the particular set of conditions at the narrated historical moment and because of the wider cultural context in which the narrative appears. The autobiographical narrator’s reference to classical and Byzantine Greek history and culture—and not to modern Greek culture—is historically, politically, and culturally significant. First, classical and Byzantine allusions obscure the bleak historical circumstances of the narrative: mainly, the fact that the Greeks live under Turkish rule. It is not surprising that the autobiographical

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narrator’s questioning of her identity juxtaposes the importance of classical Greek culture for the Western tradition with the fear of the Ottoman ruler under which the Greek race is forced to live. The implication here is that the Ottoman Empire is not part of Western civilization and does not keep apace with the rest of the modernized world. Second, writing for a middle-class American audience, Vaka Brown does not overtly deal with the issue of her ethnicity, but contextualizes it within Western classical notions of Hellenism. As a result, her discourse does not disclose nationalist or ethnic trends—which would marginalize her narrative in the U.S. as socially, politically, and culturally aberrant—but promotes the Hellenic ideals which her American audience not only recognizes but values greatly. Beyond the level of politics, what is culturally important in the autobiographical narrator’s selfpresentation is that the Western tradition to which she lays claim is the same one to which her American readers can relate as a Western nation themselves. In other words, familiarizing—rather than exoticizing—her ethnic background to her American audience lies at the heart of the autobiographical narrator’s ideological gesture of Westernization. This is not to suggest that Vaka Brown’s narratives completely disregard the author’s status as an Ottoman subject. On the contrary, the excerpts in which Turkish/Oriental culture is discussed figure prominently in the author’s works and deserve careful attention for the suggestions they make about the autobiographical narrator’s hybrid identity. At the age of eight, the autobiographical narrator in A Child of the Orient, who identifies herself as “Demetra,” pays her first visit to a great pasha8 and admits to feeling “quite at home” in his house (Vaka Brown, A Child of the Orient 28). His kindness and generosity encourage a feeling of “involuntary friendliness” to grow in her (Vaka Brown, “With a Heart for Any Fate” 90), which, in turn, causes her intense ambivalence: “Was I being a traitor to our traditions? Was I betraying not only my Byzantine ancestors but the heroes of our This visit is narrated both in Vaka Brown’s serialized autobiography as well as in A Child of the Orient. Hence, the relevant excerpts quoted come from both sources. 8

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revolution as well?” (Vaka Brown, “With a Heart for Any Fate” 10). Her meeting with the first Turkish girl she befriends, again, bewilders her: “‘I am Greek’ [I proclaimed and] [ . . .] discovering that I was beginning to like her also, I added vaingloriously: ‘We Greeks are the finest race in the world’” (Vaka Brown, “With a Heart for Any Fate” 10). Discussions with her father on the subject intensify her oscillation, as he contends that, in the case of the Turks, “a nation that conquers another and keeps it in subjection,” Christian principles of brotherhood cannot be applied (Vaka Brown, “With a Heart for Any Fate” 10). Obviously, her father’s nationalistic discourse and patronizing attitude advocating his antiOttoman politics undermine the autobiographical narrator’s spontaneous emotional response to the pasha’s benevolence. Still, her childhood image of the pasha’s house as “a play-box, [which] transformed into a fairy house” weakens the effectiveness of the socio-political history on which her father insists (Vaka Brown, A Child of the Orient 31). Such intense internal conflict leads the autobiographical narrator to ultimately confess her ambivalence: “I had the distinct feeling of partaking of two worlds, mine and theirs” (Vaka Brown, A Child of the Orient 33). “Demetra’s” ambivalent response to the Ottoman element in Constantinople exemplifies her ethno-social hybridity and testifies to the author’s geographical approach to history and spatial identity politics. More specifically, the fact that “Demetra” presents herself as a citizen of two worlds—“theirs” referring to the Ottomans’ part of the world, and “hers” referring to the Greeks’—stresses the geographical terms in which she conceptualizes identity. The formation of her individual as well as collective self depends on two parameters: first, the material space she inhabits which is no longer Greek territory; and second, the imagined space of her Greek ethnicity on which her father insists. Her father, being a traditional nineteenth-century ethnic Greek, envisages the rebirth of a Greek nation. Therefore, he sees Constantinople as the dreamt-of-capital of a re-born Greek Empire and refuses to acknowledge it as the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, “Demetra’s” highly personalized sense of space defies the binarism between her father’s vision of Greek irredentism and the imperial reality of the Ottoman world. Instead, her acknowledgement of a bond existing between her highly personalized sense of the world and the reality of the space

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occupied by the Turkish population illustrates her act of border crossing. The autobiographical narrator neither projects herself as a militant ethnic Greek—aligning her positionality with dreams of lost territories—nor appears as a subjugated Ottoman subject. Alternatively, she sets herself up as a hybrid who refuses to “fit” one of the two established categories and who legitimizes her presence in the world by personalization of history and inscription of personal experience onto space. In this way, her historically and culturally significant identification gesture transcends the boundaries of nationalism and ethnic conscience. The autobiographical narrator’s obvious ambivalence about her identity can be interpreted in terms of Bhabha’s discussion of hybridity. Specifically, the cultural critic views “hybridity through a psychoanalytic analogy, so that identification is a process of identifying with and through another object, an object of otherness, at which point the agency of identification—the subject—is itself always ambivalent, because of the intervention of that otherness” (“The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha” 211). Vaka Brown, in her progress toward identification, struggles to define herself “through” the Turkish element by which she is surrounded. It is this element that, in her case, constitutes “the object of otherness” and that, because of its friendly “intervention,” causes her ambivalence. When the discourse of oscillation between what it means to be Greek versus what it means to be Turkish surfaces in the novel A Child of the Orient, the autobiographical narrator admits: “In the abstract, the Turks, from the deeds they had done, had taken their place in my mind as the cruelest of races; yet, in the concrete that race was represented by dark-eyed, pretty little Kiamele [the pasha’s granddaughter], the sweetest and brightest memory of an otherwise bleak infancy” (Vaka Brown, A Child of the Orient 15). Even in subsequent chapters narrating Vaka Brown’s adult life, the autobiographical narrator often admits to seeking refuge in Turkish homes, “leaving [her] own life outside” (Vaka Brown, A Child of the Orient 34). The fact that Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narratives do not obscure her personal involvement with the Turkish population reveals that the autobiographical narrator’s identity construction process resists fixity and shifts fluidly, depending on her geographic, social, and cultural setting. This is why, on the occasions when the autobiographical narrator converses with her

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father, one cannot overlook some degree of allegiance to the politics of race that the father fervently supports since “Demetra” instinctively pursues a connection with Greece’s glorious past. In fact, to a certain extent, this past, by nature of its lionization as the foundation of Western civilization, does allow her the superficial sense of a solid identity. Nonetheless, living in the modern world where questions of identity remain unresolved, the narrator also becomes aware that her struggle to pinpoint the essence of her identity is futile. This becomes obvious when “Demetra” is surrounded by the Turkish human element with which she interacts and to which she responds on an emotional level. Vaka Brown’s depiction of modernity as an experience of interaction mirrors Marshall Berman’s observation that the modern world “unites people across the bounds of ethnicity and nationality, of sex and class and race” (6). Embracing such a world-view, Vaka Brown’s hybrid alternative to the static and monolithic sense of identity that her father’s discourse promotes depends on her awareness of the volatility of relationships in the modern world she inhabits. Part of this awareness means that she has to translate, rethink and extend fixed identity principles. Therefore, progressively, the author rejects fundamentalist discourses showcasing historical linearity and spatial two-dimensionality as essential to the construction of the self. Instead, she “acts out” and writes about a multi-dimensional modern world, where both temporality (implying social history) and spatiality shape hybrid, fluid, idiosyncratic identities. The reason Bhabha’s model of hybridic transgression is so applicable to the work of Vaka Brown is that the critic’s complex theory of hybridity encompasses the three basic directions that the politics of hybridity have taken. All of these directions reflect Vaka Brown’s highly complicated identity politics. As Susan Friedman has pointed out, hybridic analysis involves three modes (89). According to the first mode, hybridity is an effect of oppression manifested in the process of intercultural contact (89). In this case, “a dominant group forces some form of deculturation [. . .] upon a less powerful group and either expels or appropriates that group’s cultural forms into its mainstream” (Friedman 89). Considering Friedman’s description of the first mode of hybridity, we can identify the Ottoman rule over the Greeks as a strategy of containment of the Greek culture, which, as its subjugation reveals, poses some threat to the Ottoman hegemony. This dynamics

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surfaces in the discourse of the narrator’s father, who views the relationship between the Turks and the Greeks as that between the oppressor and the oppressed. Obviously, even though Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator does not whole-heartedly embrace her father’s views, the fact that she contextualizes her ethnicity within glorifying Western classical ideals of Hellenism reveals her awareness of the negative effects of this intercultural contact for the Greek race. The second mode of the politics of hybridity deconstructs the first by presenting the hybrid subject as exceeding the “borders of the normative and expected, thus calling into question the inevitability of the status quo” (Friedman 89, 90). This model suggests the alternatives of mixing and transgression, both of which are evident in “Demetra’s” friendly relations with the Turkish population. Those human exchanges displace the binary of “Turk” versus “Greek” and represent the cultural principle of mixing which the narrator’s presence as a hybrid manifests. Taking into account this second alternative to hybridity, it becomes obvious why Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator does not seem to represent a marginalized or subordinated group, as the first mode of hybridity would imply. Instead, the personalized sociocultural geography of Constantinople that the narrator maps— including, as it does, both “the Turkish” and “the Greek human element” and involving them in a meaningful interaction— illustrates her agency as a colonized subject. Thus, whereas her social and cultural designation may not allow her much freedom over the cultural hegemony of the Ottoman colonizer, her personal initiative is what ultimately determines the way in which she engages with Ottoman culture and in which she partakes of “their”—as she calls it—world. The third approach to hybridity questions the historical and geographical underpinnings of intercultural mixing (Friedman 90). In contrast to the first and second modes that assign agency to the dominant power and the hybridic dissident respectively, the third mode does not prioritize either of the two. Instead, it proposes a pattern of “mutual agencies [. . .] though not necessarily equally unencumbered” (Friedman 90). This is the mode that Bhabha also proposes as becomes obvious from his “concept of a double hybridity of colonizer and colonized which is produced through interaction” (The Location of Culture 33, 34). In my view, the third

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mode of hybridity captures the essence of Vaka Brown’s hybridic status. More specifically, because the third mode of hybridity is not limited to either plots of hegemonic oppression or to scenarios of hybridic defiance, it can best theorize the status of “Demetra” as a subject positioned in the contact zone between the Ottoman and the Greek. The liminality of this contact zone shapes the autobiographical narrator’s social and cultural experience. For this reason, it also determines her process of identity construction. Speaking from the interstitial space between the two races— Greek and Turkish—Vaka Brown’s narrator highlights the interaction between the two rather than the action of any one of them exclusively. In this sense, the divide between “them”—the Turkish population—and “her”—the autobiographical narrator—is not an empty contact zone, but, rather, a social space of cultural exchange. In this space, assimilation is substituted by negotiation and de-culturation or acculturation by trans-culturation. Hence, the hybridity that Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator exemplifies is grounded on the contested terrain between the two cultural traditions of which she partakes and suggests transcendence as well as fusion of boundaries.

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Demetra Vaka Brown: Portrait Papers of Kenneth Brown, Accession #9732-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

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Kenneth Brown and Demetra Vaka Brown Papers of Kenneth Brown, Accession #9732-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

CHAPTER 2. THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY / THINKING HISTORICALLY: A CHILD OF THE ORIENT, “WITH A HEART FOR ANY FATE,” JOURNALISM [. . .] it seems to me that over every country hovers an atmosphere which emanates from the thoughts of the people. In Greece, the sky, the hills, the plains are clothed in an infinite variety of soft, tender hues. One breathes in the intellectual and artistic achievements of Greece. Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 61

2.1. MOVING THROUGH SPACES, MOVING THROUGH CULTURES: DEMETRA VAKA BROWN AS A SOCIAL AND CULTURAL GEOGRAPHER Demetra Vaka Brown is neither the only, nor the first female immigrant author whose works—written exclusively in English— were celebrated by the American reading public, placing her within American modernism. Anzia Yezierska and Mary Antin, both writing and publishing at roughly the same time as Vaka Brown, are also examples of female immigrant authors whose immigration narratives legitimized their voices within the frame of early American modernism. As Werner Sollors has argued, Yezierska’s and Antin’s cases reveal how an ethnic self-made woman “may negotiate her identity by contrast, by public relations, and by inventing an appropriate age” (The Invention of Ethnicity xviii). Antin’s 1912 The Promised Land ultimately became a school textbook, promoting the ideal of successful assimilation for 55

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immigrants in the United States. Similarly, and as Mary Dearborn has observed, Yezierska’s “romances of intermarriage” represent the goal the author strove for: assimilation and Americanization (105, 109). Vaka Brown shared with Antin and Yezierska a complex understanding of her ethnic American identity. On the one hand, she was aware that her reputation as an author was based on her ethnicity as the discourse employed by her autobiographical narrators illustrates. On the other hand, her marriage to Kenneth Brown can be interpreted as signaling her “marrying into the American family.” The author signed, after all, some of her books—such as Haremlik (1909)—as “Mrs. Kenneth Brown.” However, two important facts differentiate Vaka Brown from the tradition represented by Yezierska and Antin: first, Vaka Brown did not assume the position of self-effacement that Antin assumed only to proclaim proudly her sense of equal entitlement to America as “The Promised Land”; second, Vaka Brown was mostly anthologized among American—rather than ethnic, or GreekAmerican—women writers. Grant Overton’s plea in the 1925 edition of The Women Who Make Our Novels, “Give us romances, Demetra Vaka, give us the East; stay with us, write for us novel after novel” testifies to Vaka Brown’s lionization by the American reading public as a novelistic authority, addressing the Eastern question through the genre of romance (290). As I argue in this chapter, Vaka Brown’s writing career consisted of constant negotiation with her reading public. Subsequently, the multiple, often contradictory, ways in which Vaka Brown sought to resolve the immigrant’s conflict between “consent” and “descent” in American culture—to use Sollors’ term in Beyond Ethnicity (1987)— come under scrutiny in this chapter. The fact that Vaka Brown initially published her works as Mrs. Kenneth Brown obliterated, at first, their ethnic content in the eyes of American readership. Such identification constituted an intentional and, therefore, significant gesture on the part of the author. Rather than allowing her status as a female immigrant writer to place her in the periphery of mainstream American culture, Vaka Brown defied identity boundaries and, as a result, spatial, social, cultural, political and ethnic divides. In fact, she experimented with and manipulated the ambiguity of the “space between” “Vaka” and “Brown”—her maiden name alluding to her

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 57 ethnic background and her married name connoting her assimilation and acculturation within American society. In this way, the author claimed a territory that could include her by avoiding any single specific identification that would exclude the plurality of her Greek, Byzantine, Ottoman, European, or American identifiers, and established herself on the “liminal” space between the two names. In this chapter, I discuss Vaka Brown’s ambiguous identification process by examining her autobiographical writings from the perspective of cultural geography. More specifically, I focus on her autobiography, “With a Heart for Any Fate/Faith,”1 which, shortly after her death, appeared in serialized form in the Greek American magazine Athene.2 Having consulted the Demetrios Michalaros papers3 held at the Special Collections The title under which the autobiography appeared is not consistent. Several sections were entitled “With a Heart for Any Fate,” others “With a Heart for Any Faith.” The fact that Kenneth Brown undertook the initiative for the publication of his wife’s autobiography raises questions as to the editorial and/or other changes he might have made to the original manuscript. 2 According to Moskos, the Athene was an “American Magazine of Hellenic Thought,” which published articles on Greek history and the life of the Greek American community. Moskos judges the magazine “path breaking in that it regarded the culture of the Greeks in the United States as a continuing and dynamic part of the Hellenic tradition” (85). 3 Demetrios Michalaros (1898–1967) was a magazine editor, poet and novelist. Michalaros grew up in the Greek neighborhood of Chicago in the vicinity of Hull-House. He was a frequent visitor to Hull-House and was encouraged in his writing by Jane Addams who wrote the forward to his book of poetry, The Sonnets of an Immigrant. Michalaros published five volumes of poetry and edited Athene: The American Magazine of Hellenic Thought from 1940 to 1967. Throughout his life, he remained an active member of Chicago’s Greek community. The Demetrios Michalaros collection at the library of the University of Illinois at Chicago contains personal papers of Demetrios Michalaros including correspondence, financial records, photographs, journals, radio scripts, poetry, plays and novels. It also contains the working files of the magazine Athene including 1

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division of the University of Illinois at Chicago Library, I am certain that the initiative behind the publication of Vaka Brown’s autobiography can be traced to Kenneth Brown, who not only edited the manuscript but also prefaced the printed text. In his introduction to the text, Kenneth Brown claims that his wife narrated her life-story to him shortly before her death. However, the conditions under which the actual autobiographical text was written as well as the identity of its author are unclear. This is why this critical study of Demetra Vaka Brown also relies on the author’s autobiographical novel, A Child of the Orient (1914), which was one of Vaka Brown’s most popular books during her lifetime. A Child of the Orient overlaps with the autobiography in that it is heavily based on several episodes from Vaka Brown’s life-story: events from the author’s life in Constantinople, Paris and the United States. The reason I employ a cultural geographic perspective in discussing Vaka Brown’s work is that I believe that the ambiguity of the author’s identity, which is rendered problematic in an ethnic, gender studies, or purely historic frame, is resolved if Vaka Brown’s texts are contextualized in space studies. Beyond the constraints of an intellectually hegemonic historiography and an intellectually subordinated geography, Vaka Brown’s work can be read as that of a literary historian/a hybrid social geographer, who viewed and, subsequently, mapped the spaces in which she lived or which she visited in the context of both historical developments and social relations and practices. It is this creative interplay between both the physical and the social spaces—spaces that the author inhabited in life, spaces that her autobiographical narrators map in her writings—that, ultimately, allowed her to embrace and exemplify fluidity of identity: a necessary precondition of the modern tradition within which she operated.

advertising copy, articles, reviews, and promotions for Greek and Greek American politicians. My argument about Kenneth Brown’s possible editing of the original manuscript was formed upon consulting the typed manuscript of Demetra Vaka Brown’s autobiography which is included in this collection.

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 59 Vaka Brown’s experienced and fictionalized travels, in the course of which the author constantly crossed spatial, cultural, political, ethnic, and identity boundaries, record the way in which her autobiographical narrator manipulated spatiality and temporality in a modernist gesture of unifying the world inside her with the world outside her. Through this gesture, Vaka Brown’s narrator emerges as the prototypical modernist subject: a traveling flâneuse who plays the role of a cultural mediator between worlds that appear irreconcilable in the contexts of Orientalism and/or nationalism: the East and the West, the Old World and the New (America), or Greece and the Ottoman Empire. In Vaka Brown’s serialized autobiography, the descriptions of the autobiographical narrator’s first few months in the United States illustrate manipulation of spatiality and temporality and testify to the author’s female, synthetic alternative to the conventional dichotomy between space and time. These months disappoint the young immigrant, who had romantic, idealized preconceptions of the New World. Comparisons with the Old World are unavoidable and intensify her sense of disillusionment: My imagination, inflamed by the words “new world,” had created a city as clean as Athens, with wide avenues and splendid parks, and with dwellings surrounded by gardens, as befitted the greatest city of the new world. The reality—the narrow, dingy streets, the rows and rows of houses with monotonous brownstone steps leading up to the front doors, without a tree in front of them, were unfriendly and uninviting. Thick lace curtains barred the inside, and never did one see a face in the windows. Our apartment was only a few blocks from the Hudson, and by its side we walked [. . .] [b]ut the shores of that beautiful river, instead of being lined with cafés, and laid out in gardens, as they would have been in Europe, were polluted by railroads and dirt. (25)

Apparently, the constant juxtaposition of landscape architecture in Europe with its respective in the New World illustrates the narrator’s need, being in the initial stages of assimilation, to map out spatial landmarks of the home country on the host country. Identification with aspects of the host topography facilitates the transition from one spatial context to another. As Simone Weil has

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argued, in order to ground ourselves as parts of a social community, we need certain things—objects, stories, even rituals— that we can take with us from old homes to new (45). These things represent the link between the past and future that Weil sees as constitutive of grounding—enracinement (45). In the course of the first months of her stay in the United States, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator lacks a foundation for the groundedness of which Weil speaks since the map of her world has been redrawn and the external uncertainty of immigration has undermined the sense of coherence that holds an individual in place within a community. At this early stage, lack of the narrator’s contact with the population—the human element of the city—hinders her acculturation process. During the first months of the autobiographical narrator’s stay in New York, tourist-like visits to The Metropolitan Museum of Art function as escapist outlets that, at the same time, initiate appropriation of the host country’s landscape: One day while walking with the children in the park, I came upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We entered it—and life was changed. Discovering that there were days when one did not have to pay, I used to take the road to it with an anticipation comparable to a lover’s tryst. Nothing could keep me from it on its free days. In the imperishable beauty within its walls I could not forget the outside ugliness of New York. (25)

Interestingly, “although museums are often seen [. . .] as important tools of modernization, as forces of resocialization of traditional peoples, and as reinforcers of modern values,” in the case of Vaka Brown’s narrator, the causal social status of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is weak with respect to her transition from the Old World to the New World (MacCannell 78). The narrator’s confession that while inside the museum she cannot overcome the ugliness of New York outside reveals that The Metropolitan Museum can only house a temporary escape but that it cannot operate as a cultural mediator. As such, these visits only initiate a series of attitude changes, without ultimately sustaining them. This is why, still speaking from a visitor’s perspective, the autobiographical speaker evaluates the environment around her in a purely aesthetic way as references to “beauty inside” and

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 61 “ugliness outside” reveal. As an outsider, she continues to judge the host country’s topography by applying some formal aesthetic criteria that relate to the experience of her homeland. The museum’s ineffectiveness with respect to the autobiographical narrator’s spatial perception becomes obvious when, much later, Vaka Brown’s narrator still looks at the New York harbor “creat[ing] a bond between it and the Sea of Marmora” and wondering “why people of this new world, incapable of creating beauty should contaminate what god gave them” (51). In an insightful excerpt from Vaka Brown’s autobiographical novel A Child of the Orient, the autobiographical narrator confesses to a utopian, feminist dream, in which she invests herself with the power to re-create the displeasing topography of New York: “[. . .] my dream comes back to me, to give trees all along the streets and all along the avenues, and shady open spaces to breathe in” (CoO 270). 4 This vision vents her dissatisfaction with the aesthetic ugliness of the city surrounding her, but testifies to more than an escapist tendency. Her dreaming vision explicitly places the autobiographical narrator in the position of a powerful creator of space; her imagination metamorphoses the surrounding disturbing landscape and creates a new, “soothing,” and personalized imaginative geography. The turning point in the narrator’s appropriation of the host country’s landscape and her assimilation in the New World involves history and politics. Interestingly, her meaningful response to and connection with her spatial context becomes feasible only when she empathizes with the lives and values of U.S. residents. More specifically, politics constitute the catalyst that assists the humanization and socio-cultural metamorphosis of the geographic space around her. In the words of her autobiographical narrator,

I will hereafter be using the abbreviation CoO to refer to the excerpts from A Child of the Orient so as to differentiate them from excerpts from Vaka Brown’s serialized autobiography. Wherever quotes from the serialized autobiography are cited, I have only included the page number—and not the title’s initials—in the parenthetical reference. 4

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Gradually, the bond Vaka Brown’s narrator is able to establish with the space she inhabits, the bond that allows her to visualize herself as part of the material and socio-cultural landscape surrounding her, relies on her comprehension of the country’s history and appreciation of the quality of its human idiosyncrasy. This is not surprising if we consider that, in modern times, when people are dispersed by migration, the correspondence between community and locality and the tight, integral relation between community and local place can no longer be sustained (Massey in Bammer, ed. 110). As a result, considering Vaka Brown’s status as a newcomer and an immigrant in the United States, feelings of commonality, of belonging, of shared heritage and visions do not—and cannot— depend upon strict notions of place and home. Rather, they are engendered by political affiliations and a sense of historical understanding. Further in the narrative, the autobiographical narrator admits that, reading history books such as that by John Fiske and being “the daughter of a race which had suffered recent defeat, [she] felt sympathy for the southern side” (23). The narrator’s discourse of “sympathy” appeals to the notion of a set of common social and historical elements between the American South and Greece under Ottoman rule and represents an intentional and self-conscious effort to establish connections between the Old World, in which she is rooted, and the New World, where she needs to ground

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 63 herself.5 Therefore, regardless of the differences in topography, climate, or aesthetics—differences that had constituted an obstacle to her assimilation process until then—it is the autobiographical narrator’s sympathetic identification with certain aspects of the American social, political, and cultural temperament that “turns her into an American.” Ultimately, the cultural identity of an “American” that Vaka Brown’s narrator assumes is an identity lived out on the continuum between necessity and choice: a necessity arising from the circumstances of her immigration, and a personal choice she makes about how she wishes to define herself and be defined by others. The autobiographical narrator’s drawing of parallels between the socio-historic backgrounds of her race and of her host culture is necessitated by the discourse of assimilation she adopts and echoes a positivist6 approach to history. Such positivist outlook suggests Vaka Brown’s efforts at ideological legitimization as a female ethnic writer who is addressing a mainstream middle-class American audience. In fact, her rhetoric is not only culturally but also politically significant, if one takes into account her position writing for popular mainstream newspapers and magazines in the United States. Undoubtedly, the normative discourse of such publications necessitates connections between the home and host Considering the parallels that the autobiographical narrator draws between the histories of Greece and the United States, one cannot overlook the fact that, in the process of grounding and defining her “Americanness,” she also re-invents “Greekness.” In fact, the “Greekness” the narrator projects is “constructed” in such a way that it can appeal to her American audience. 6 According to Dean MacCannell’s definition in his book, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976), positivism holds that societies everywhere are composed of the same set of elements which combine in varying quantities to form each particular society. History, from the standpoint of the positivist perspective, is a matter of increase or decrease in the amount of a societal element or elements. The causes of development or historical change are usually claimed to be external forces: geography, climate, an infusion of money or ideology, or the good or evil genius of a “great” man (84, 85). 5

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cultures so as to project the idealized concept of a culturally and politically homogeneous American society. As a consequence, Vaka Brown’s positivist reading of history negotiates personal legitimization of the immigrant voice within the host culture of America. Considering the narrator’s positivist approach to history, it is important to note that the notion of accommodating different cultures within a universalist framework, although problematic by post-modern standards, was viewed at the time when Vaka Brown was writing as the ultimate guarantee of “assimilating minorities to holistic and organic notions of cultural value” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 219). This is why social space, on the basis of the similarities the young immigrant narrator draws between the Old and New World societies and histories, appears to motivate a consciousness in her that the physical landscape alone cannot establish. What underlies the narrator’s politically correct ideological positions regarding the common fate of American and Greek people is a non-threatening immigrant self-concept for the assimilative American social, political, and cultural ethos of the time. In Vaka Brown’s imaginative view of a brotherhood of nations, the ineffectiveness of the physical landscape’s causality— stemming from the numerous differences between the Old and New World geographies—is overcome by an imaginative connection to the socio-historic context of the New World. This is not surprising, since, as I have already argued, political affiliations can often engender feelings of commonality and shared heritage, visions and commitments, which cannot be evoked by spatiality. Hence, the homogenizing discourse of the positivist tradition and of cultural syncretism resonating in the narrator’s voice effectively guarantees authorial empowerment through cultural affiliation and subsequent ideological legitimization of narrative discourse. The ambiguous discourse that Vaka Brown’s speaker employs in discussing her immigration and assimilation process following her arrival in New York can also be interpreted along the lines of the theories by Stuart Hall and Edward Said, who view identities as constructed within discourse, emerging within the play of specific modalities of power, and established on the basis of difference. Vaka Brown constructs the identity of her autobiographical narrator within an array of opposites, negatives, and oppositions: the Old and the New World socialities, East and West

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 65 subjectivities, ethnic and national identifications, filiative and affiliative bonds resulting in divided allegiances. The new geography of identity that critics like Hall and Said advocate traces a move from organic notions of identity—bound to ideas of rootedness—to a discourse of spatialized identities that are always on the move just like the autobiographical narrator of Vaka Brown. Indeed, the metaphorics of early twentieth-century modern identification that surface in the author’s work place emphasis on fragmentation of the self as a result of spatialized flux. Thus, identity becomes a series of positionalities, locations and standpoints, a crossroads of multiply situated experiences. For instance, Vaka Brown’s narrated first visit back to Constantinople, six years after her emigration to the United States, reveals the significance of space as a situational marker of identity: [. . .] I was free to start on my pilgrimage; and as I walked up and down the main streets, and in and out of the narrow, crooked dirty lanes, which lead one enticingly onward, —often to nowhere,—I was aware that my pilgrimage had a double aim. First, I wanted to recognize my old haunts; and second, to find that part of myself which had once lived within those quarters. Alas! If the streets were the same, I was not [ . . .] My eyes, Americanized by the progress of the new world, kept seeing things that ought to be done, and were left undone, for no other reason than that they had been left undone for hundreds of years. The saddest of all sad things is when one begins to see the faults and failings of one’s own beloved, be it a person or a country. I hated myself for finding fault with Turkey because she was clad in a poor, unkempt garb. (CoO 288–89)

The autobiographical narrator’s belated view of Turkey solidifies contextualization of geography on the basis of personal history in two ways. First, the word “pilgrimage” that qualifies her tour of the city bears significant connotations. Pilgrimages constitute journeys to sacred places and are acts of devotion usually aiming at spiritual merit. Indeed, the author’s narrated journey back to, and through, the streets of Constantinople is described in terms of a spiritual journey to self-fulfillment. The autobiographical narrator presents herself as seeking to juxtapose her “new” to her “old self” in order to re-discover and connect with the self she has lost to relocating.

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Her journey to self-discovery and fulfillment is a journey through space, as the “two selves” are identified in terms of their geographic roots: her “old self” is associated with the streets of Constantinople, while her “new self” with the streets of New York. Therefore, spatial topography and the history of personal identification are inextricably connected in the narrator’s transient conscience. Secondly, the narrator’s visual perception of Constantinople’s streets is culturally affected. These streets are now described as crooked, dirty, unkempt—all qualifiers that the narrator, prior to her Americanization, had attributed to the streets of New York. The autobiographical narrator’s discourse reveals that she is now thinking of and measuring against specifically American forms of spatiality, just as she was thinking of European forms of spatiality during her first few months in the United States. Obviously, the process of acculturation and assimilation that she has undergone in the United States has afforded the autobiographical narrator a new way of seeing, the standards of which appear reversed: the idealized, nostalgic vision of the home country deteriorates when on a par with the host country’s state of progress, and the concept of the Old World’s (Turkey) superior aesthetics is undermined. Ultimately, it becomes obvious that, in the vision of Vaka Brown’s narrator, spatial and aesthetic qualifiers such as “beauty” and “ugliness” do not have specific referents, but, rather, are socially and culturally constructed on the basis of personal experience. The centrality of the rhetoric of spatiality in Vaka Brown’s narrated journey back to Constantinople is related to her identity politics. The autobiographical narrator’s confession that she undertakes this pilgrimage with the intention of finding “a part of herself” interrelates space and the location of identity within the mapping of a new geography of the self. This new geography figures identity as a historically embedded site, a location, a standpoint. This is illustrated in the narrator’s geographic rhetoric, which emphasizes the situational nature of her perspective. More explicitly, the geographic and cultural context of the United States has altered the way in which Vaka Brown contextualizes space. This is why although the material site of Constantinople has not changed, the way in which she constructs and represents it culturally—from the perspective of an American citizen now—has. Vaka Brown’s practice of location, deterritorialization, and

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 67 boundary making is invested with social agency. More explicitly, the autobiographical narrator’s perspectives of Constantinople before and after her immigration appear contradictory because they incite two completely different spatial responses: emotional connection to the city versus critical distance from it. These emotional responses can be explained as the manifestation of the shifting constituents of her identity. The constituents of the autobiographical narrator’s identity seem to be emerging from a succession of categories: race, ethnicity, class, gender, national origin, cultural affiliation etc. Therefore, to utilize parameters such as “white,” “of Greek descent,” “middle-class,” “female,” or “immigrant” to characterize Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator negates the complicated and multifaceted nature of her identification. Vaka Brown was a white woman, born to a Greek family, initially a subject of the Ottoman Empire, who then traveled to Europe to receive her education at the beginning of modern times. She ultimately immigrated to the United States where she became a writer. Her identity sits at the crossroads of many different formations: social, political, and cultural. These systems are both interdependent and interactional. For example, the fact that she was born and raised in Constantinople affects her internalization of city space in her early writings. At the same time, the fact that she is addressing a middleclass American audience as a traveling correspondent of mainstream publications poses a set of expectations on her literary production. These subject positions may appear contradictory, but in essence contradiction is fundamental to the structure of subjectivity and the experience of identity construction, especially when this is enacted through traveling and in the context of modernity. The autobiographical narrator’s identity mapping does not ground itself on an exclusive claim to “roots,” but rather follows several, often contradictory, “routes.” This is because Vaka Brown’s spatial poetics are shaped by conditions of displacement and loss, of instability and discontinuity. Immigration places the author in a different spatial, social, political, and cultural context, and therefore necessitates her allegiance with an alternative culture: that of the host country. In the host country, identity can no longer be a grounding concept, because it cannot be associated with a sense of rootedness, ancestry, or patronymic filiation. Instead,

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identity construction is re-routed as the map of Vaka Brown’s world is redrawn. Vaka Brown’s discourse of identity depends—materially as well as figuratively—on constant movements through space, from the East to the West and back. This migration through space also materializes a movement through cultures—the Greek, the Ottoman, the European, the American. All these cultures constitute the author’s and her autobiographical narrator’s identity as a product. Significantly, the process through which this product is crafted and subsequently represented is not always smooth: it involves clashing and blending as the narrator’s first impressions of New Work illustrate; it necessitates cultural translation as her sympathy to the American South evidences; it results in divided loyalties, but also in negotiating connections; it cuts through drawing a route, but implicitly lays claim to ancestral roots. This form of displacement, however, is what ultimately causes Vaka Brown’s consciousness as a modern subject to emerge. After all, the experience of rootedness or being tied to a single location, historical experience, and cultural frame acquires significance only in the context of routing or traveling, because it is through routing that the multiple vicissitudes of geography, history, and culture are revealed. Ultimately, Vaka Brown’s modern identity—established on the contested terrain created by the constant juxtaposition among the distinct cultural traditions of which she partakes— suggests transcendence as well as fusion of boundaries and results in the formation of a space between and beyond them: a space which, by allowing these traditions to form and inform each other, can give rise to and legitimize such a multifaceted and highly contradictory identification.

2.2. MAPPING HISTORY ONTO TOPOGRAPHY: THE FLÂNEUSE IN VAKA BROWN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS In her life, as well as in her writings, Vaka Brown constantly travels, crossing spatial, cultural, political, ethnic, and identity boundaries. However, her narrated journeys often seem to lack a specific destination or purpose as would have been the case with a typical tourist; rather, her autobiographical narrator often appears to stroll for strolling’s sake and allows herself to be seized by the

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 69 unexpected as a typical flâneuse. In literature, the flâneur was typically represented as an archetypal occupant and observer of the public sphere in the rapidly changing and growing cities of nineteenth-century Europe. He embodied an utterly modern kind of public persona, wandering, watching, and browsing at ease. Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator appropriates the tradition of the flâneur and feminizes it: she transcends the domestic sphere, populates public spaces, and undertakes the role of a social geographer, mapping history on topography. Traveling in the guise of a flâneuse, the autobiographical narrator “not only [feeds] on the sensory data taking shape before [her eyes]” as social travelers or tourists do, but is possessed by “that anamnestic intoxication of abstract knowledge [. . .] something experienced and lived through” that Walter Benjamin views as the essence of flânerie (Benjamin 417). In this way, Vaka Brown’s mode of traveling becomes a liberating force that facilitates her entertaining several questions and ambiguities—among them, the ambiguity of her identity. The idea that modern identities are not static but fluid and involve relocation rather than grounding has been extensively discussed in studies of modernity. For example, Marshall Berman’s “broader and more inclusive idea of modernism” (5) in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1988), contextualizes Marx’s thought within the modernist tradition and deems that: [. . .] in order for people, whatever their class, to survive in modern society, their personalities must take on the fluid and open form of this society. Modern men and women must learn to yearn for change: not merely to be open to changes in their personal and social lives, but positively to demand them, actively to seek them out and carry them through. They must learn not to long nostalgically for the “fixed, fast frozen relationships” of the real or fantasized past, but to delight in mobility, to thrive on renewal, to look forward to future developments in their conditions of life and their relations with their fellow men. (95–6)

Berman describes mobility in physical space as the essence of modernist experience. He associates movement with renewal and believes this regeneration to be ignited by the connections the individual is able to establish with his/her social space despite the discontinuity inherent in relocation. He further contends that the

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necessary precondition for these spatial and social connections to be established is fluidity of identity expressed through the modern individual’s yearning for change. Berman’s historical analysis of modernity and modernism, building as it does on the political, social, and economic conditions that underlay the great modernist breakthroughs of the period from 1890 to 1920, provides an interesting context in which to discuss Vaka Brown’s narrative identification. Vaka Brown responds to the experience born out of modernization, but her modern vision also suggests an alternative analysis of “the dialectics of modernization and modernism” (Berman 16). More specifically, Vaka Brown overtly embraces modernism because it gives her “the power to change the world that is changing [her]” and because its liberating force “makes [her] the subject as well as the object of modernization” (Berman 5, emphasis added). As a modernist Vaka Brown not only manages to “grasp” or “confront the world that modernization makes,” but also “strive[s] to make [that world] her own” (Berman 348). Vaka Brown’s modern(ist) gesture of actively pursuing change is mirrored in her eagerness to travel. At the age of ten, her father sent her to spend some time with one of her aunts in the Crimea, thinking that the favorable climate there would help his daughter recuperate from a severe case of typhoid fever. In Vaka Brown’s autobiography “With a Heart for Any Faith/Fate,” the autobiographical narrator remembers: My regret at being separated from my father was mitigated by the anticipation of seeing Sebastopol, where Artemis had taken Iphigenia, after snatching her from the sacrificial altar, and substituting a doe for her. My father told me that Catherine the Great in enlarging the harbor had destroyed the temple, but the site was still there. As we approached the Crimea the sky became cloudless, the air soft and caressing, the sea a dark blue mirror. [. . .] My eyes were fastened on the spot where the temple ought to have been. And there, between the beautiful marble columns, I could almost see Iphigenia, a fillet on her head, wearing a bright-colored tunic, and waving her hand to me. (14–5)

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 71 Interestingly, the narrator is not intimidated by the idea of traveling at such a young age, even though she does admit to some sorrow at being separated from her family. Instead, she delights in this opportunity to relocate, and is able to immediately establish an organic connection with the place she visits. To do this, she does not simply observe the site she sees as the average traveler would, but, instead, frames the space she visits within her ethnic history by being conducted into what Benjamin terms “a vanished time” (416). Eventually, it is this movement back in time—evoked by a mythological character out of the autobiographical narrator’s ethnic history—that facilitates her journey in space. The autobiographical narrator’s ethnic history is represented by the vision of Iphigenia who is personalized and narrativized on the speaker’s terms. The mythological figure is humanized and becomes the agent who allows Vaka Brown’s narrator to experience the present—spatial as well as temporal—by relating it to the past. What surfaces in the description of the author’s arrival in Sebastopol is her autobiographical narrator’s active and generative process of framing the space she visits in a personalized, socio-historic context. Even aboard the ship, Vaka Brown’s narrator does not simply observe the material space surrounding her, but imaginatively projects an aspect of classical Greek mythology on the visited site. As a result of this imaginative projection, topography becomes a mediating cultural representation, a force of effective reterritorialization that allows the autobiographical narrator to situate herself in a new spatiality. What is important to note is that this connection to the past— effected as it is through the exchange with Iphigenia—does not constitute a nostalgic inclination to something that is lost, or an escapist tendency from the present. Quite the contrary, the narrator’s fantasized projection illustrates her engagement with the surrounding spatial context and her representation of space in the context of both history and culture. This active engagement and form of representation allows the narrator to connect interactively to the surrounding space and time. In other words, for Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator, establishment of a connection with the past is not important per se, but for the function it performs with respect to her autobiographical speaker’s forceful modern move in a spatial and temporal direction.

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The way the autobiographical narrator evokes geographical imagination in her perception of space is extremely significant because it involves a process of social and cultural construction of space that implicates both geography and history. More specifically, the narrator’s vision of Iphigenia signifies more than a childish fantasy and functions as a cultural mediator that facilitates her simultaneous movement both in space and in time. Arriving in Sebastopol, Vaka Brown’s narrator reaches a spatial destination, the Crimea, and at the same time she is able to connect with her social setting experientially. However, her exchange with Iphigenia also moves the autobiographical narrator in a temporal dimension by means of connecting her to her ethnic past. As argued above, this journey to the past does not constitute a nostalgic regression, but ultimately takes the narrator back to the present moment. This temporal move testifies to the organic connection between the historical past and present that Vaka Brown’s narrator maintains. This connection, in turn, performs an important function: once established, it facilitates the autobiographical narrator’s geographic journey by materializing and solidifying her social relation to the space she visits. In other words, spatiality and temporality are intertwined in Vaka Brown’s modern geographic thought. For this reason, the author’s writing is about experiencing time not as a historical abstraction, but as a specific social and cultural history expressed in spatial terms. The inadequacy of social history alone as a motivating force shaping human positionality is manifested early on in Vaka Brown’s autobiography. While in high school, the narrator admits to the need of contextualizing the academic knowledge of history afforded to her by Zappeion7 and her readings. Thus, she sets out on a series of Saturday afternoon walks around Constantinople, The “Zappeion” was one of the most esteemed public schools in Constantinople, open only to females, established and running on the “Zappas endowment.” However, because of the high tuition that the school charged—at a time when education was not free—upper-middle and high-class students mostly attended it. I acknowledge my friend and colleague Katerina Dalakoura for the information she has provided on the “Zappeion.” 7

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 73 during which the events of one thousand years of Byzantine Greek history come alive, as they acquire spatial dimensions and are associated with specific landmarks that function as historic referents: There was one great pleasure afforded me by “The Great School of the Race,” as the men’s college is called [. . .] The professors of that college, for the sheer joy of writing, since there was no monetary compensation, wrote monographs on the various aspects of the Byzantine Empire. The college published them very cheaply, to enable their students to study the history of the one thousand years, during which the Byzantine Greeks preserved civilization for Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. These monographs I read carefully, and on Saturday afternoons would go over to Stamboul and seek out the places described in them. And it was a delight to find the crumbling walls of the palaces that once had housed the men of my race when they were the greatest power in Europe. It brought history so close. (18)

The autobiographical narrator’s closing statement echoes Walter Benjamin’s definition of streets as “the dwelling place of the collective” (423). It is in the streets, rather than on the pages of historical books alone, that the narrator seeks social history records. In Vaka Brown’s narrative, physical landscape is not reduced to mere location, but emerges as a palimpsest recording history and socio-cultural meaning, by making concrete the experiences and aspirations of the people who live in it and internalize it. Walking through the streets of Stamboul, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical speaker becomes involved in the city through flânerie. Her strolling allows her to collect not only the signs of the spatial but also those of the social, as the peripatetic imagery she collects is associated with and contextualized in historical events. Vaka Brown’s narrator poses as a flâneuse consistently throughout the autobiography. When a student in Paris, she experiences the city in a peripatetic way as she did in Constantinople:

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In Paris, her study of space is informed by the visual referents of buildings and monuments, but also by the human input the interaction with her social network offers her. Reference to “monuments,” “theaters,” “museums,” and “libraries” materializes and actualizes space. More importantly, social interaction places map and society in dialogue. The narrator’s claim that she receives a form of education in the streets of Paris sets up flânerie as a formative experience, one that upholds the spatial as context for the social. Obviously, Vaka Brown’s synthetic vision interweaves landscape with human agency and implies that history takes the form of socio-spatial relations. Considering that the activities of the autobiographical narrator are codified into the spaces she maps, Vaka Brown’s narrated tours of Constantinople and Paris can be discussed in the context of Michél de Certeau’s spatial discourse, illustrated in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). More specifically, the author’s peripatetic vision illustrates de Certeau’s suggestion that the actualization of space is associated with the discourse of the modern urban experience of pedestrian movements (118). De Certeau argues that there is an enormous difference between the discourse of the nineteenth-century realist tradition that identifies places by listing where sites are located and the discourse of modernist narratives whereby the map is replaced by the tour. He further argues that the realist novel’s map is a stable concept in which location is described through a series of fixed points. Conversely, the experience of modernity dictates that human agents experience space through a set of actions and inter-actions; they produce space through vast tour itineraries. Indeed, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator’s references to streets and buildings do not function as mere place identifiers “of an immobile and stone-like order” because they signify more than point to specific locations (de Certeau 118). Rather, to use de Certeau’s terms, the place descriptions cited above enact an “actualization”

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 75 of the “spaces” of Constantinople and Paris (118). Thus, the autobiographical narrator’s perambulations through the two cities constitute meaningful itineraries since the exterior places she encounters ultimately serve as sites for the construction of Vaka Brown’s spatial life-story. Or, as de Certeau notes, “the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers” (117). The organic connection between spatiality and temporality, geography and history, is repeatedly traced as Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator records her journeys in space. The connection again becomes obvious in the section involving Vaka Brown’s departure from France and return to Constantinople. As the narrator is under intense emotional strain because of having to interrupt her studies, another classical Greek figure appears, in a scene where a connection with the history of Vaka Brown’s ethnic past becomes the ticket to her autobiographical speaker’s journey back to Constantinople and ultimate move to the future: Since there was to be no next year for me, in the world’s greatest intellectual capital, I lingered a few weeks to revisit some favorite museums, and to bid good-bye to all the things worth living for. The day before leaving Paris I bade farewell to my compatriot, the Venus of Milo, in the Louvre. Speaking to her in our language I told her of my sorrow that I might never see her again. Was she never homesick for her own Attic skies? Long I gazed at her until the marble seemed to come to life, and I thought I heard her reply: “Do not despair. In life the unpredictable happens.” Vaguely comforted I went from her to the Oriental Express and out of civilization. A few days later, at sun-rise, the train deposited me in Constantinople. From a near-by mosque a young muezzin was calling the faithful to prayer [. . .] The East was greeting me, and in spite of the western thought that had molded me these many months, I listened with pleasure to the plaintive call. (20)

In a scene that mirrors the narrator’s vision of Iphigenia in Sebastopol, the humanized statue of Venus replies to the narrator’s plea and testifies to the “everlasting uncertainty and agitation” of life—forces that Berman sees as strengthening modern society (95). The discourse employed by Venus reveals the narrator’s experience

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of modernity as an experience of temporal disruption and discontinuity. The personified statue’s presentation of life as a series of “unpredictable” events illustrates the politics of modernity as a politics of spatial and temporal transformation. As Berman has argued, to be modern is to feel at ease in a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. Considering this, it is not surprising that Vaka Brown’s narrator has to come to terms with the fact that the experience of modernity is an experience of mobility in physical space. Nevertheless, once the narrator is able to establish some form of connection with the social space in which she finds herself—as the surrealist dialogue with Venus’s statue showcases— the discontinuity and disruption involved in relocation are overcome. Consequently, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator is ready again to move in two directions: toward the East—the spatial—and toward her future—the temporal. Flânerie marks the most significant transitional stages in Vaka Brown’s narrated life: studying in Constantinople and Paris, immigrating to the United States, returning to Constantinople, as well as working as a U.S. correspondent in Greece. Constantly strolling, the autobiographical narrator succeeds in collecting and subsequently amalgamating the signs of the spatial with those of the social—architectural landmarks or cultural artifacts, and the human environment respectively. The author’s experience of immigrating to the United States is narrated in her autobiographical work, A Child of the Orient. There, in recording her first impressions of New York, the autobiographical narrator recalls: That year away from school enabled me to poke around a lot, in all sorts of corners and by-corners of New York [. . .] I also spent one entire night in the streets of New York [. . .] The time between half-past eleven and five in the morning I spent in walking on Broadway and on Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Avenues. I took the elevated train to the Battery, then up to Harlem, and down again by another line. New York at night is very different from New York in the daytime. It seemed to me that even the types which inhabited it were different, and I saw a great deal which was not pleasant to see. (CoO 280)

The autobiographical narrator’s bold gesture of appropriating the space around her through walking is utterly modern, as she familiarizes herself with New York by means of strolling. Through

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 77 her engagement in strolling, the narrator illustrates social and cultural theories defining the flâneur as “the modern hero, able to travel, to arrive, to gaze, to move on, to be anonymous, to be in a liminal zone” (Urry 138). Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator moves through New York aimlessly, merging with the crowd but also maintaining the distance necessitated by her perspective of observation. Thus, she experiences New York as a city of many surfaces; a city without limitations or boundaries, since she spends an entire night in the streets alone; a city where she is free to “poke around” all corners as a stranger among strangers. What is controversial in the discourse of the theorists of flânerie—Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, even John Urry today—is that they perceive it as an essentially male phenomenon. For example, Urry asserts that “[t]he flâneur was invariably male and this rendered invisible the different ways in which women were both more restricted to the private sphere and at the same time were coming to colonise other emerging public spheres in the late nineteenth century, especially the department store” (138, emphasis added). Seen against this theoretical frame, Vaka Brown’s modern flânerie acquires significant dimensions if interpreted as a female gesture colonizing the traditionally male public sphere. Of note, in none of her books does she describe a visit to a department store, which, according to Urry, is the female space of fascination. Undoubtedly, her psychology as a newcomer to the United States could justify a relative interest in that space, totally unknown to Old World women. Nevertheless, the spaces in which Vaka Brown contextualizes her strolling are not the ones considered appropriate8 for female strollers by the male critics theorizing flânerie. What is equally surprising is that discussions of flânerie even from a feminist perspective have stressed that the female flâneuse was invisible and that flânerie is a gendered concept since the

The shopping centers and parks. Consider John Urry’s The Modern Tourist (1991) and Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations (1999) on public spaces selectively accessible to females. 8

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flâneur’s freedom to wander at will is a masculine freedom.9 Critic Griselda Pollock has specified that middle-class women were denied access to the spaces of the city on the pretext of female virtue and respectability.10 Furthermore, Janet Wolff argues that simply because women were wholly excluded from the public sphere they had to wait until the end of the nineteenth century and the rise of consumer society to be consigned to a place like the department store. This space, to Wolff, constituted the only legitimate public sphere of participation for women.11 Even Elizabeth Wilson, who in “The Invisible Flâneur” undertakes to deconstruct Wolff’s and Pollock’s argument in order to make a case for the male flâneur being invisible within the turbulent industrial city, ultimately concedes that the few female authors and journalists who appeared as flâneuses were forced to take on a male identity, often writing under a pseudonym such as George Sand. If that is the case, then what is the context out of which Vaka Brown operates? Does she revolutionize female appropriation of public space within a modernist context? The relationship of women to space in the modernist tradition is fraught with difficulty. The intensification of the public/private distinction in the industrial period further problematized the presence of women in the streets, thus causing ambivalence about the gendered division of space. In particular, the pre-modern association of women with strict notions of spatial and social control, evoked by their confinement in the private sphere, remains predominant in modernity. Doreen Massey, in discussing the dualisms the terms of which are aligned with time and space, castigates the fact that “where time is dynamism, dislocation and History, and space is stasis, space is coded feminine and denigrated” (“Politics and Space/Time” 149). Massey’s observation unmasks the condescending context in which space was feminized Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity,” Theory Culture and Society, special issue on “The Fate of Modernity,” vol. 2, no. 3, 1985. 10 Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in her book Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. 11 See Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse.” 9

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 79 by males and attached negative connotations. Furthermore, Elizabeth Wilson, in her book The Sphinx in the City (1991), qualifies the same dualism with respect to modernism, and explains that the notion of stasis associated both with space and women is not the only attribute that has justified patriarchal feminization of the concept of spatiality. Wilson reveals how notions of chaos and disorder have been associated with modern space and women and, consequently, presents the notion of city culture as evolving around men, with women posing a threat, given their freedom in a modern city context: “There is fear of the city as a realm of uncontrolled and chaotic sexual license, and the rigid control of women in cities has been felt necessary to avert this danger” (157). Indeed, Vaka Brown’s contemporary male modernist writers of the early twentieth century who saw city-space as threatening and, therefore, fearfully portrayed city-street scenes would have painted the female author’s late night stroll in New York in the darkest colors.12 Attaching too much weight to theories upholding the gendered divisions of space causes us to lose sight of specific women’s resistance to and reworkings of these systems of thought. In fact, it would be unwise to generalize about modern spatial representations of and by women unless we understand and are willing to incorporate a whole range of inconsistencies and contradictions within the canon. After all, social categorizations of gendered spaces have been put into question by theoretical developments in urban and social studies questioning rigid spatial structures. The sociology of separate spheres for men and women and of exclusive association of females with static and limiting notions of spatiality oversimplifies alternative options for women in the city. In the case of Vaka Brown, her autobiographical narrator’s late-night wandering in the streets of New York defies exclusive spatializations of women within contained areas. The author’s autobiographical narrator emerges as a modern city dweller and frames herself within the urban environment. Hence, she defies the privatization of female personality within the domestic sphere, and Marshall Berman extensively discusses such reactions by male modernist authors in All That Is Solid, pp. 159 and on. 12

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constructs female spatial presence as careful anonymity and withdrawal, but in the public sphere. In contrast to modernist male views of post-industrial city landscape, involving fear of its “moving chaos” (Berman 159) and subsequent attempts toward its exclusive appropriation and demarcation, Vaka Brown joins the tradition of modernist feminist writers, such as Virginia Wolf, who exult in the city’s infinite potential. Her references to “public privacy” testify to her experience of modernity as the experience of life in the public arena. Ultimately, the autobiographical narrator’s descriptions of walking around Constantinople, Paris, and New York deconstruct exclusive male claims to flânerie and disprove theories aligning space and the feminine with immobility, lack of temporality and chaos, or lack of control.

2.3. GEOPOLITICAL ORIENTATION VERSUS IDEOLOGICAL SELF-LOCATION IN VAKA BROWN’S ASIA ARTICLES In the 1920s and 1930s, Vaka Brown was considered an authority on the politics, culture, domestic and social life in Turkey, and was highly esteemed as an American journalist and novelist. Her unique role as a female Orientalist—both a spokeswoman for her ethnic communities of Greece and Ottoman Turkey and a prominent American journalist and author specializing in matters relating to the Orient—is revealed by the fact that her by-line appeared under articles in the leading literary magazines alongside such names as Henry James, Mark Twain and Jack London. This chapter section discusses the articles Vaka Brown wrote for the monthly Asia: The American Magazine on the Orient13 in the period between March 1921 and March 1924. These articles paint a vivid picture of the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the modern Turkish Asia included travel and commentary on Asia, while it ran fiction occasionally in the 20's—it was the journal where Pearl Buck’s first “Chinese” stories and some of W. Somerset Maugham’s “South Pacific Tales” appeared. In 1947 Asia merged with Free World (Oct-1941–Dec1946) and Inter-American (May-1942–Nov-1946) to form United Nations World. 13

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 81 Republic by combining personal reportage with socio-cultural analysis. Vaka Brown’s articles published in Asia exemplify the connections and intersections between travel writing, journalism, ethnography, and cultural history. Carefully balancing personal response, extensive interviews of historical figures, historical and cultural research, and vivid topographical descriptions, Vaka Brown “crisscrosses the Atlantic” and writes about her “home country”— Turkey—for her “host country”—America. In the course of this narrated “crossing,” the author’s geo-political orientation problematizes her ideological self-location. More specifically, Vaka Brown’s identification as an American reporter of ethnic background complies with the ideological expectations of her middle-class American audience, while it illustrates multiple determinators behind narrative self-fashioning: mainly, the author’s assumption of an American point of view that is fabricated in such a way as to convincingly tie disparate histories and cultures together within a modern Western(ized) frame. In the period between 1921 and 1924, Vaka Brown contributed eight articles to Asia. On the one hand, the five articles that were published between 1921 and 1923—entitled “The Lady of the Stars,” “Within the Porte Called Sublime,” “Conversations with a Kemalist,” “Mohammed—Her Conqueror,” and “The Unveiled Women of Stamboul”—present the political and social situation in Turkey under the Kemalist regime,14 but mostly focus on the changes in the life of Turkish women since the harem has become a thing of the past. On the other hand, the three articles that appeared between January and March 1924—entitled “An Imperial Enemy of Turkish Despotism,” “Prince Sabaheddine as a Free-Lance Liberal,” and “Prince Sabaheddine in the Hour of the Kemalist Ideology (“Atatürkçü Düşünce”), also known as Kemalism (“Kemalizm” or “Atatürkçülük”) and Six Arrows, was based on Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's six principles (Altı Ok) during the Turkish national movement: Republicanism, Populism, Secularism, Revolutionalism, Nationalism, Statism. The principles were not defined as an ideology during the life of Atatürk, but formulated later on. Kemalist ideology constituted the ground rules for state nationalism in Turkey. 14

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Kemalists”—paint the portrait of an important political figure in the history of modern Turkey, Prince Sabaheddine,15 but mostly promote what I consider Vaka Brown’s “cosmopolitan universalism.” As those eight articles illustrate, in performing her role as a travelling correspondent for Asia, Vaka Brown assumes a complex position with respect to her material. More explicitly, her pieces are not just about everything that she sees, lives, or is told while in Turkey. Rather, the Asia articles reveal multiple considerations underlying Vaka Brown’s imperative to tell: on the one hand, meeting audience expectations and managing marketability issues, while on the other being aligned with the U.S. foreign policy in the Near East while proposing a possible resolution to the Greco-Turkish conflict. Vaka Brown’s journey back to her home country as a U.S. travelling correspondent afforded the author both a reencounter with and a removal from the larger political climate of the day in the Balkans. On the one hand, revisiting her homeland Vaka Brown witnessed first-hand the enormous changes occurring after the collapse of the Ottoman world at the outset of the twentieth century. Following the period from the mid–1870s to the constitutional revolution of 1908, during which the palace tried to suppress nationalist and liberal ideologies and consolidate the Islamic heritage of the Empire, a number of competing ideologies and political programmes aiming at a revival of the Empire emerged in the period from 1908 to 1913.16 When Vaka contributed her first articles to Asia in 1922, the Young Turks—“a group of modern educated bureaucrats and officers who became active in the 1890s and organized the constitutional revolution of 1908” (Zürcher 4)—had re-established their rule through a successful war of independence. By 1926, which in Erik Zürcher’s view marks the beginning of “the heyday of Kemalism,” the structure of the Turkish state had changed dramatically: the onePrince Sabaheddine was the nephew of Sultan Abdul Hamid and the leader of the Liberal party. 16 The periodization of modern Turkish history that I am following here is the one proposed by Erik Zürcher in his book, Turkey: A Modern History (2003). 15

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 83 party state was re-established, and society was modernized on the basis of a positivist and increasingly nationalist set of ideas. As the Asia articles reveal, at the time of Vaka Brown’s visits to Istanbul in the early 1920s, the Ottoman Empire had already given its place to the modern Turkish nation-state that was marked by a shift from the cosmopolitan society of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire to the ethnically based one of the new Turkish Republic. Following eight years of almost continuous warfare and with allied forces threatening Turkish provinces, modern Turkey under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was turning away from imperialist Europe and toward the East, hoping to consolidate its Muslim populations and assume the role of their leader. In his seminal work The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1969), Bernard Lewis explains that while European powers were competing for Turkey’s resources and territory as illustrated by the treaty of Sèvres,17 “a new Turkish state was emerging in Anatolia, led by men who rejected outright the treaty and the principles that underlay it, and condemned as traitors those Turks who had accepted it,” including the Sultan and his ministers (247). Witnessing such historic changes, Vaka Brown adopts a detached journalistic persona that reports on the changes in the form and structure of the Turkish state with particular emphasis on the fate of Turkish women who are emerging from seclusion. Nonetheless, despite Vaka Brown’s detached narrative guise, the fact that developments in the modern Turkish nation-state have an immediate effect on the future of the modern Greek state forces the author to confront the problematic issue of her geopolitical orientation and ideological self-location. The contributors’ list in Asia’s March 1921 issue introduces Vaka Brown as the descendant of “a Greek family that has lived for centuries in Constantinople [whose] childhood on the shores of the The Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920) was the peace treaty that concluded World War I between the Ottoman Empire and the Allied Forces. The treaty ratified the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, in accord with secret agreements among the Allies that sought control over the Empire's finances. The Treaty of Sèvres was annulled in the course of the Turkish War of Independence, upon which the parties involved signed and ratified the superseding Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. 17

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Sea of Marmora and her long residence in the U.S. have made her an able interpreter of Near Eastern life for the Western reader” (Asia March 1921). Such introduction irrefutably authorizes Vaka Brown’s view of modern Turkey on the grounds of the author’s intimate knowledge of Turkish history, society and customs and her deep immersion in the country’s culture. Nevertheless, the editors’ note also stresses Vaka Brown’s “residence in the U.S.” as an equally important parameter legitimizing her interpretation of life in the Near East on the grounds of her rapport with “the Western reader.” In the article that appears in the same issue, Vaka Brown relates the touching story of Djimlah, her childhood friend, from the perspective of a “Turkish subject” who, nonetheless, looks upon her past in Istanbul “with new interest” as a result of her stay in America. Interestingly, in all four articles that appeared in Asia in 1922, Vaka Brown repeatedly refers to her affected perspective on Turkey due to her twenty-year absence in America and associates her return to Istanbul with the purpose of collecting information on the revolutionary changes in the status of Turkish women following the adoption of Western codes of law in Turkey: “I was on no idle sight-seeing trip. For days I had been hunting for Turkish women who looked interesting to talk to. […] after an absence of twenty years I was here to gather fresh material” (“Mohammed—Her Conqueror” 434). The Editor’s Note in the March 1922 issue of Asia explains that, because “[t]he disturbed condition of the Near East demands as much insight and interpretation and international wisdom in [its] settlement as that of the far East[,] Demetra Vaka went to Turkey to investigate the political and social situation and the life of Turkish women under the new regime” (Asia March 1922). As suggested earlier, Vaka Brown’s interest in the Asia articles lies in the effects that the Westernization of the Turkish state had on the lives of Turkish women. Interestingly, despite the fact that the Greco-Turkish war18 is waging at the time that Vaka Brown is The Greco-Turkish war which lasted from 1920 to 1922 concluded with the drawing of new Turkish frontiers that were more favorable to Turkey than those laid down in the treaty of Sèvres. The treaty of Lausanne, signed on July 24th, 1923, re-established complete and 18

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 85 writing the articles, the author does not report or overtly comment on it in her texts. It is my contention that Vaka Brown, in her guise as the travelling correspondent for Asia, skilfully masks her concern for Greek diplomatic interests under a carefully constructed Western discourse that suggests wider social, political, economic and diplomatic concerns. Considering that Asia19 was sponsored by the American Asiatic Association—formed by New York-based merchants in 1898 in response to European and Japanese colonial aggression in China—and that the Association’s aim was to serve the colonial, political, and economic interests of the United States in the East by disseminating information on the situation in Asia, the author’s discourse and self-presentation as well as the editor’s endorsement of the author’s identification are not surprising. What is surprising, however, is the way in which Vaka Brown addresses the conflicted nature of her allegiances in the eight Asia articles by gradually constructing an authorial and narrative identity in the interstices between the East and the West, modernity and tradition, ethnicity and nationalism. At the time that Vaka Brown’s articles were published in Asia, it had become clear that the economic colonial plans of the United States in the East would not be served in the emerging Turkish nation-state. According to Lewis, since the early days of the Kemalist movement, relations between the Turkish and Soviet Republics had been friendly (283). After a temporary estrangement during the Lausanne period, the two countries came again close in 1924–25 when Turkish interests turned away from the West and towards the Soviets, leading to the signature of a Russo-Turkish treaty of friendship on December 17th, 1925. Vaka Brown was aware that the diplomatic friendship with the Soviet Republic had drawn Turkey away from the U.S. area of influence. As a result, the five articles that she published in Asia between 1921 and 1923 and undivided Turkish sovereignty in almost all the territory included in the present-day Turkish Republic. 19 I am here relying on the information Yiorgos Kalogeras provides on Asia in the Introduction to the reprint edition of The Unveiled Ladies of Stamboul (2005): “The Decline of her Oriental Tale: Demetra Vaka Sketches the End of the Ottoman Empire”, p. xi.

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that present the socio-political situation under the Kemalist regime eschew a straightforwardly authoritative or uncontested interpretation of contemporary Turkish socio-historical events and culture from a clearly identifiable U.S. perspective. Although Vaka Brown was an astute cultural critic and a competent political commentator, the 1921–1923 articles merely reproduce certain canonical aspects of the travel narrative genre. More specifically, they constitute nostalgic reminiscences of the Hamidian harem in the Ottoman Empire and realistic depictions of the new Turkish woman in the modern Republic of Turkey. On the contrary, the three articles that appeared between January and March 1924 break out of the travel narrative genre’s predetermined limits and explicitly comment on Turkish politics and policy from a Western perspective. Those articles constitute a study of the profile and career of Prince Sabaheddine who is presented by Vaka Brown as “a citizen of that larger world of the spirit wherein ‘all nations of men’ are ‘of one blood’” (Asia February 1924). This shift in focus, although abrupt on the surface, is, nevertheless, justified. Vaka Brown’s articles move away from the tradition of travel writing when the author’s agenda becomes political. As the author’s reference to the “nations of men” reveals, Vaka Brown attempts to resolve the contradictions inherent in her identification and corresponding narrative stance—as a promoter of American interests in the East and a “child of the Orient”—by regrounding the concept of nationhood in a kind of utopian idealism. In this way, the author’s idea that “all nations of men” are “of one blood” anticipates the theories proposed by such scholars as Ernest Renan, Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhaba who have argued for nationalism as an imagined concept. In his groundbreaking Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson contends that modern nationalism as a concept is both historically determined—originating out of changes that occurred in the eighteenth century—and imagined—“because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most pf their fellowmembers, meet them, or even hear of them” (6). Furthermore, Ernest Renan’s “What Is a Nation?”—a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne almost a century before Anderson’s book was published—also stresses the interiority of nationalism and its roots in the citizen’s individual consciousness. The “soul” of a nation, Renan writes, is constituted by two components that reside in the

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 87 individual: “one is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form” (19). Building on Anderson’s and Renan’s notion of nationalism as an imagined concept and considering Homi Bhabha’s claim that the nation is “a form of narrative” (Nation and Narration 2), I wish to argue that Vaka Brown’s 1924 Asia articles both explicitly and implicitly comment on the political and diplomatic developments of the time, thus participating in the master narrative of nationalism, by laying claim to what Renan termed the “rich legacy of memories.” Despite the fact that on the surface Vaka Brown’s discourse in the 1924 articles seems to endorse a kind of popular national selfdefinition that challenges conventional definitions of “nationhood,” the author does not eschew political engagement. Prince Sabaheddine, whose profile the 1924 articles paint, was the founder of “the League for Private Initiative and Decentralization,” one of the two societies that resulted from the split in the Young Turks Movement.20 The League’s rival was “the Committee of Union and Progress” and the difference between the two parties was that between Ottoman liberalism and Turkish nationalism respectively. As Lewis explains, “[t]e somewhat ponderous name of the League derive[d] from the writings of Edmond Demolins, a French writer by whom Prince Sabaheddine was profoundly influenced” (203). Demolin’s book, À Quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons? had attracted the attention of Muslim reformers, liberals, and modernists like Prince Sabaheddine who were trying to justify the “backwardness” of their own societies (Lewis 204). The Young Turks (Jön Türkler) were a coalition of groups arguing for the necessity of reforming the Ottoman Empire administration. Through the Young Turk Revolution, the Young Turks Movement brought about the second constitutional era. In 1889, the movement, which was initiated among military students, reacted against the monarchy of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Upon establishing the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) in 1906 and gaining the support of the majority of the Young Turks, the movement ultimately changed the course of the intellectual, political and artistic life of the late Ottoman period. 20

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Demolin’s argument that the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon culture was a result of an educational system that promoted individual initiative and development greatly influenced Sabaheddine’s idea of a federalized, decentralized Ottoman state. In the Prince’s view, a constitutional monarchy on British lines would provide a minimum of central government, while the different peoples and communities of the Empire could satisfy their aspirations and safeguard their rights in regional and local government and in a public life emancipated from collective or governmental control (Lewis 204). Prince Sabaheddine’s aspiration to conciliate the diverse nationalities in the Ottoman Empire—among them the Christian Greeks—undoubtedly appealed to Vaka Brown who was deeply concerned about the fate of Greeks living under Ottoman rule as well as about the future of the modern Greek state following the Greco-Turkish war. However, since the author was writing for a publication that advocated the colonial, political, and economic interests of the United States in the East, she could not overtly defend Greek diplomatic interests to her Western audience. Therefore, the historical and topographical complexity that characterizes Vaka Brown’s identification manifests itself in the ideological conflicts inherent in her autobiographical narrator’s discourse on “nationalism” and results in an identity that is susceptible to ideological fashioning. As a result, in the 1924 articles Vaka Brown assumes a complex political stance, that of a “cosmopolitan universalist” on the side of Prince Sabaheddine, which allows her to unproblematically address the tensions inherent in her identification and subsequent narrative perspective. Vaka Brown’s assumption of a “cosmopolitan universalist” stance is grounded on the realization that nationality and citizenship, like race and ethnicity, are unstable categories and contested identities. As the author’s narrative discourse on nationhood suggests, community is not only established on the grounds of birth, territorial attachment, filial kinship, and racial descent, but also as a creation of human communication and familiarity, of social, political, and cultural consent. As Eric Hobsbawm has put it, “[. . .] we cannot assume that for most people national identification [. . .] excludes or is always or ever superior to, the remainder of the set of identifications which constitute the social being. In fact, it is always combined with

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 89 identifications of another kind, even when it is felt to be superior to them” (11). In the Asia 1924 articles, Vaka Brown upholds the alternative concept of a collective consciousness that defies geographical separations, racial distinctions, and ethnic origins and expresses a deep concern for the collective destiny of nations. It is in this context that she aligns herself with Prince Sabaheddine’s political vision of a federalized, decentralized Ottoman state whereby the different communities making up the state are ensured an autonomous self-government. Thus, in Vaka Brown’s narrative discourse, “universality” and “cosmopolitanism” become a cohesive and potent basis for collective identification—an identification that is imaginatively engineered and that contains a political vision that undercuts the idea of an unproblematic “natural” national identity. The “cosmopolitan universalist” “vesture” Vaka Brown puts on essentially constitutes a politically and culturally significant gesture and illustrates what David Hollinger in Postethnic America (1995) has described as the cosmopolitan aim of “voluntary affiliations of wide compass” (81). In Vaka Brown’s case, such “voluntary affiliation” is historically and politically conditioned. As the author explains in the February 1922 article, “although [she] was an American and had lived most of [her] grown-up life in America, [she] was a Greek by blood and was born in Constantinople.” American by marriage and profession, Greek American by immigration, and Greek by birth, Vaka Brown appears pressured by the historical forces surrounding her and posing the urgent question of self-identity. Thus, faced with the challenge of identity enactment, Vaka Brown as the travelling correspondent of Asia primarily identifies as a “cosmopolitan universalist”: one who speaks as an American, yet who believes that the future of global civilization depends on the friendship and understanding between the East and the West. Such a position is best illustrated in the excerpts in which Vaka Brown addresses the Greco-Turkish conflict and the possibility of the imposition of an American mandate on Turkey: “[…] one necessity lies before [the Greeks and the Turks]: they must forget their age-long enmity and be friends if they would avoid the danger of extermination” (“Within the Porte Called Sublime” 87); “Just because I am an American, because I love America and because I believe that the future of our civilization

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depends on the friendship and understanding of the two AngloSaxon commonwealths, I do not wish America to come [to Turkey]” (“Conversations with a Kemalist” 203). Vaka Brown’s discourse illustrates a complex cultural and political attitude that takes down the “scaffoldings” of nationalism and ethnicity and supports the idea of a trans-national community established between countries that are mutually supportive despite their historical, social, political, and cultural differences. In this sense, Vaka Brown demonstrates what Amanda Anderson argues in “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity”; principally, that cosmopolitanism resists “those parochialisms emanating from extreme allegiances to nation, race, and ethnos [. . .] [and] aims to foster reciprocal and transformative encounters between strangers variously construed” (268–69). It is important to note that the notion of accommodating different cultures within a universalist framework, although problematic by post-modern standards, was viewed at the time when Vaka Brown was writing for Asia as the ultimate guarantee of “assimilating minorities to holistic and organic notions of cultural value” (Bhabha, “Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha” 219). This is why the connections Vaka Brown establishes between the future and histories of the United States, Greece and Turkey underlie politically correct ideological positions that project a nonthreatening immigrant self-concept for the assimilative American social, political, and cultural ethos of the time. Hence, Vaka Brown’s imaginative view of a brotherhood of nations guarantees authorial empowerment through cultural affiliation and subsequent ideological legitimization of narrative discourse. The discursive techniques employed in Vaka Brown’s narrative identification question the specific political and cultural contexts and contingencies within which practices such as geography, cultural critique, journalism and travel literature develop. As I have illustrated above, a “mixed agenda” underlies the Asia articles and accounts for Vaka Brown’s contradictory political discourse: namely, the fact that she aligns herself with American diplomacy and foreign policy while at the same time being actively engaged in the cause of promoting Greek and Turkish political and diplomatic interests. Ultimately, caught between the competing narratives of nation emerging from the modern Turkish, Greek and American states, Vaka Brown

THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY/THINKING HISTORICALLY 91 predicates herself on the interstices between the Near East and the United States, modern Greek nationalist aspirations and Westernized critique of the Near East, and ethnic versus cosmopolitan identification.

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Demetra Vaka Brown: Portrait Papers of Kenneth Brown, Accession #9732-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

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Demetra Vaka Brown: Portrait Papers of Kenneth Brown, Accession #9732-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

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Demetra Vaka Brown in New York Papers of Kenneth Brown, Accession #9732-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

Demetra Vaka Brown in New Forest, England, 1924 Papers of Kenneth Brown, Accession #9732-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

CHAPTER 3. WOMEN AND/OF THE ORIENT: DEMETRA VAKA BROWN, HESTER DONALDSON JENKINS, ANNA BOWMAN DODD, HALIDE ADIVAR EDIB Orientalism was like a labyrinth: the more I advanced in it, the more entangled I became. One woman after another was confronting me with a new problem, a new phase of life; and I felt stupid and incapable of understanding them. It hurt my vanity, too, to find how small I was in comparison with them. […] They interested and charmed me: they were so much worth understanding. There was so much of the sublime in them, which is lacking in our European civilization. Vaka Brown, Haremlik 127

3.1. ORIENTALISM “UNVEILED”: DEMETRA VAKA BROWN AND HESTER DONALDSON JENKINS In an insightful article discussing Western representations of the women of Turkey as sexual personae, İrvin Cemil Schick notes that what for centuries has characterized Western attitudes toward Turkey is a “combination of moral outrage and irrepressible concupiscence” emanating from the trope of “Oriental sexuality” (Arat, ed. 83). Schick further explains that “Oriental sexuality” as a theme deployed an array of fictionalized devices such as the harem, the public bath, the slave market, concubines, eunuchs, polygamy and homosexuality. Indeed, one of the ways in which “Orientalist” discourse allowed the West to assert its own identity and define its 95

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place in the world—an identity that was based on an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient and the Occident—was through eroticizing and demonizing the East and its people—especially women. Orientalists stereotyped women of the East as “idle prisoners of harems, grooming themselves and waiting to be called by their masters to satisfy their endless and inconceivable sexual desires” (Arat, ed. 11). Thus, conventional representations of Oriental women in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury literature about the East involved images of allure and sensuality, languor and elegance, seduction and wily manipulation. Following Edward Said’s appropriation of the Foucauldian discourse on power, “Oriental sexuality” has often been interpreted along the lines of a metonymic expression of the West’s imperial desire. Although one of the functions of Orientalist discourse was undoubtedly the justification of the convention of the male/active colonizer penetrating the female/passive territory, we cannot overlook the multiplicity and inconsistency of Orientalist discourses that undermine the convention of the “one single type” of Oriental subject. In this section, I follow the current trend in studies of Orientalism that defies the binary of the Western colonizer and the Eastern colonized. Subsequently, I examine the “culture of women’s Orients” as this is exemplified in Hester Donaldson Jenkins’ Behind Turkish Lattices: The Story of a Turkish Woman’s Life (1911) and Demetra Vaka Brown’s The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul (Stamboul) (1923). My reading of the two novels operates against the assumption that the female experience of the Orient had been subsumed in a hegemonic and homogeneously patriarchal tradition. Rather, I am interested in the ways in which these Western women authors experienced and represented the East— Turkey in particular—in their contacts with the women in the places they visited. More importantly, I focus on the ideological underpinnings of the two authors’ visions of a culture that the dominant culture of the West defined as “different” and “other,” and I illustrate the ways in which the writings by Donaldson Jenkins and Vaka Brown “deconstruct” the conventions of Orientalist discourse. It is important to note that in my discussion of Donaldson Jenkins and Vaka Brown “deconstruction” does not allude to the Derridean concept. To be more precise, my use of the term denotes a process of “breaking down” the singular, monolithic,

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homogeneous “Oriental female subject” to “unveil” the diversity of images that have been used to describe it and the way in which these images have been culturally constructed. More specifically, I contend that a contrapuntal reading of the works by Donaldson Jenkins and Vaka Brown reveals that there have been two stereotypical, ironically opposite but equally simplistic, views of contemporary Turkish women: one that views them as a restricted and indolent mass, oppressed by the harsh patriarchal rules of Islam, but endowed with influential powers in the family and the potential for social progress; and another that perceives them as resilient and defiant, liberated by and living within Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular state. On the surface, Donaldson Jenkins appears to evoke the first image, while Vaka Brown upholds the second view. Considering that the two authors address “the Eastern woman question” within the context of changing political and socio-cultural paradigms—Donaldson Jenkins writes Behind Turkish Lattices in the first flush of optimism that follows the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, while The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul is published in 1923 when Turkey emerges as a monocultural, modern Republic under the auspices of the Kemalist movement—it is not surprising that, initially, the two autobiographical narrators seem to advocate divergent views of “the Turkish woman.” Nevertheless, a more careful reading of Behind Turkish Lattices and The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul illustrates that, ultimately, both Donaldson Jenkins’ and Vaka Brown’s autobiographical speakers apply a strategy of subversion that effectively undermines the dual ideological and cultural construction of “the Turkish woman” by the dominant political forces, external critics, and domestic opposition groups that have presented these constructions as “natural” and “real.” It is this strategic process of subverting the Janus faced image of “the Turkish woman”—simultaneously “pitiful” and “ideal” and looking in opposite directions—that this chapter section aims to explore. Considering the historical context within which the novels by Donaldson Jenkins and Vaka Brown appeared yields important insights into the two autobiographical narrators’ fashioning of “the Turkish woman.” In fact, if the discourses employed by Donaldson Jenkins and Vaka Brown are contextualized chronologically, the ways in which the two narrators represent Turkish women no longer appear contradictory but complementary, forming a historical continuum. Hester Donaldson Jenkins (1869–1941)

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arrives in Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey, after 1923) in the Ottoman Empire in autumn 1900 to teach at the American College for Girls. She resides in the city from 1900 to 1909. During this period, the Ottoman Empire is challenged both internally—by the forces of nationalism, modernization, and Westernization—and externally—by Russia, Britain and France. Faced with such challenges, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 attempts to effect fundamental changes in the Ottoman system by reviving the 1876 Constitution. Interestingly, the main sociopolitical change brought about by the 1908 revolution—the establishment of a constitutional government—significantly affects women’s lives. In the words of Zehra Arat, “[t]he somewhat liberal aura that emerged after the revolution allowed women to enter into public life as professionals, writers, and activists” (8). Jenkins welcomes the Young Turk revolution “not only as a harbinger of increased intellectual and religious freedom, but also as a glorious new beginning for women in Turkey” (Goffman, “Introduction” xi). In the “Foreword” to Behind Turkish Lattices, Jenkins addresses her Ottoman friends—Halideh and Nelufer, Nasly, Meliha, Sabiha and Leila, Hammiet Hanum and Nakieh Hanum—and rejoices over what she calls “the wonderful transformation” of July 1908 for one main reason: in her view, “a free government brings a chance for growth and more abundant life” for the women of Turkey (Jenkins 5). In her extensive attempt to give the American public a real understanding of the life of that exotic, yet redeemable, creature—the Muslim “Oriental” woman— prior to 1908, Jenkins’ autobiographical narrator presents Turkish women as the ultimate victims and evidence of backwardness: Up to now, no education was considered necessary for woman, and her greatest work in life was to be a housewife; no other was found to fit her except to be a nurse. Women were considered to be much lower than men in everything. They were supposed to stay at home, deprived of every advantage in life, while their fathers, brothers, and husbands enjoyed themselves in every way; they were excused for ignorance when there were no schools to develop their minds. (Jenkins 35)

The narrator’s discourse reproduces some of the Orientalist stereotypes held by her Western readers—those of female

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seclusion, subjugation, and ignorance—and identifies lack of education as the underlying cause for the predicament of the Muslim/Turkish woman. The role of education in improving women’s position as well as its effectiveness in social change is a recurrent theme in all twelve chapters of Behind Turkish Lattices. In Chapter Two, “The School Life of a Turkish Girl,” Jenkins remarks on the “curious” features of elementary Turkish schooling—unhygienic conditions, inappropriate teaching material and methods, poor curriculum— and regrets that girls have few options for education. Her view that, as a result of poor education, the “average Turkish lady [remains] as simple and almost as uncontrolled as a little child” (Jenkins 32) echoes two important discourses: Orientalist and missionary. Jenkins’ appropriation of Orientalist discourse is also obvious in the chapter entitled “Babyhood,” where the autobiographical narrator essentializes people of the East by describing them as “heathens” who long to be taught. In the same chapter, reference to religious conversion illustrates the narrator’s appropriation of missionary discourse, when Turkish women are presented as welcoming the Western messengers of “truth”: “American education for women in Turkey has it very much at heart to make good mothers of these loving, ignorant women, the best of whom long to be taught to train their children” following proper, modern methods (Jenkins 17, emphasis added). Perplexing though it may seem, Jenkins’ endorsement of the view that the people of the East are unformed and in need of parental guidance and protection from the West must not be confused with an uncritical burst of Orientalism. The presentation of the Turkish lady as a woman whose “conversation is largely made up of exclamations such as ‘Vai, vai, vai!’ or ‘Allah, Allah!’ which she [mutters] perhaps twenty times in lieu of reasonable discourse” (Jenkins 32–3) testifies more to Jenkins’ self-fashioning than to her outlook on Ottoman women. Jenkins’ appointment while in Constantinople is not simply to serve as a professor of English and Latin at the American College for Girls, but, more importantly, as a “public relations liaison between the College and the American public” (Goffman, “Introduction” v). Therefore, in Behind Turkish Lattices, Jenkins constructs her narrative persona in such a way as to represent the enterprising, reform-minded America coming to the rescue of the Muslim woman who is in need of modern education and increased

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opportunities. We must not also forget that the American College for Girls in Constantinople had grown out of a missionary “home school” founded in 1871 for local girls. Of note, by the time Jenkins arrived in Constantinople, American missionary schools had abandoned their evangelical approach and were geared toward the standards of American secular education. It follows, then, that Jenkins, with her strong academic grounding—she had received a teaching diploma from the Oshkosh State Normal School and a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature from the University of Chicago—and her socially progressive views regarding women, would identify as the modern, post-missionary American educator in the Near East. In view of Jenkins’ status as a turn-of-the-century postmissionary educator, her stereotypical Orientalizing view of Turkish women acquires additional significance. As K. Pelin Başci has argued, women missionaries typified the “Ottoman woman” only to assign themselves the role of the savior, thus justifying their own recent emancipation and increasingly public role (110–11). A case in point is Jenkins’ chapter on “Turkish Housekeeping” in which the autobiographical narrator claims that a Turkish lady’s duties are two: being attractive to her husband and bearing children. Furthermore, in the chapter entitled “How a Turkish Woman Amuses Herself,” Jenkins’ narrator paints an even more indolent picture of Turkish ladies when she claims that they are “seldom intellectual,” “not athletic,” not even “occupied by fancy work” (Jenkins 128). In my view, the negative imagery associated with Ottoman women in the autobiographical narrator’s rhetoric essentially contributes to the discourse of paternalism, authority, and Western self-empowerment that Jenkins’ narrator covertly employs. The question, then, that surfaces is who or what can trigger the spiritual awakening of Ottoman women? Jenkins’ response to the question raised above regarding the future of Turkish/Muslim women is “a composition written [by a Turkish girl] for the junior class of the American College for Girls in Constantinople” (Jenkins 34–5). In it, the student asks herself if women in Turkey are prepared for any other work than their homes, husbands, and children, and replies negatively (Jenkins 36). The only hope she sees for female emancipation lies in “education and good schools” (Jenkins 36). The student’s discourse echoes the missionary belief that education can potentially “unveil” women,

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preparing them for spiritually uplifting and socially gratifying work. For the missionaries, “unveiling,” educating, and modernizing were synonymous, and education was the only indication of improvement and hope in Ottoman Turkey (Başci 110–11). Subsequently, Jenkins’ portrait of Ottoman Muslim women as ignorant, old-fashioned, and backwards, much as it seems to essentialize them by perpetuating deep-seated Orientalist stereotypes of the “Eastern” woman, is fundamentally an ideologically and culturally conditioned gesture. It is my contention that Jenkins appropriates the Orientalizing conventions of depicting Eastern women not because she espouses them, but because she aims at promoting the cultural missionary cause of shaping the self-image and gender identity of Ottoman Muslim students. To this end, the autobiographical narrator repeatedly refers to graduates of the American College—such as, for instance, Halide Adivar Edib—who exemplify the school’s success by functioning as agents of cultural and intellectual conversion. Ultimately, it is these new elite women who, Jenkins envisions, will play the role of social activists and help modernize the country. Zehra F. Arat has made the case that, by using the images of their students, missionaries effectively contributed to the production of the Kemalist discourse on women, since the construction of the “ideal Turkish woman” was an essential component of the Republican elite’s “nation building” project (13). The critic has also noted that there is a striking similarity between the missionary perception of women in the service of a God-loving republic and the official rhetoric of the Turkish Republic which enlisted women in the crusade to modernize the country (13). As K. Pelin Başci has observed, “[b]oth [the missionary and the Republic discourse] demand loyalty from women to their rhetoric and neither willingly acknowledges other voices and definitions of womanhood” (119). In contrast to Jenkins’ missionary discourse, which, echoing the Turkish Republic’s view about ideal womanhood, promotes a uniform and unchangeable profile for Turkish women, Demetra Vaka Brown’s response to the “Eastern woman question” in The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul is evoked through her painting seven extremely diverse female portraits. The portraits Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator paints resist the allhomogenizing category of “the Turkish woman” depicted by Donaldson Jenkins and do not emulate fixed gender roles.

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As I will further illustrate, in The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul, Vaka’s departure from a unified Western discourse on “the Eastern woman” does not signify her complete rejection of Orientalist tropes. After all, as Lisa Lowe has succinctly stated, “Orientalism is not a single developmental tradition but is profoundly heterogeneous” (ix). It is true that Vaka Brown’s narrator, by “unveiling” the ladies of Istanbul, challenges Orientalist stereotypes of female subjectivity by highlighting the cultural, social, and political agency of individual, vibrant, Ottoman/Muslim women. However, the autobiographical narrator’s aesthetic strategy of subverting the homogeneous and unified representation of the Oriental female, much as it verges on modern feminism, “veils” a highly political Orientalist discourse. In this sense, despite the fact that Jenkins and Vaka Brown seem to have a disparate style in the production of statements about their “Orients,” they, nonetheless, share some common ground in terms of their discourse on and experience of Turkish women. What is important for the reader of Vaka Brown and Donaldson Jenkins to realize is that the two authors’ figurations of Turkish women are engendered differently as a result of their distinct sociopolitical and literary circumstances. As Yiorgos Kalogeras has argued in his introduction to The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul, Vaka Brown’s position as an Orientalist “was never uncomplicated” (v). Kalogeras identifies the “perennial intellectual tension between Vaka’s status as an insider, ‘a child of the orient,’ and outsider, an American correspondent” as the cause of her ambivalence with respect to her views on Ottoman socio-historical events (v). While I agree with Kalogeras that Vaka Brown’s liminal position—her autobiographical narrator functions in a triple capacity: as an American Orientalist, a native of Istanbul, and a critic of the West—conditions her narrative perspective, I wish to further pursue the argument about Vaka Brown’s ambiguous narrative identification in the context of the profoundly heterogeneous tradition of Orientalism which her autobiographical narrator represents. The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul is the last personal/travel narrative that the author published in book form, and collects the articles that were commissioned by Asia: The American Magazine on the Orient from February to August 1922. Asia commissioned Vaka Brown’s correspondence because of U.S. interest in the

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geographical region of Turkey and the Balkans as a potential area of colonial, political, and economic influence (Kalogeras, “The Decline of her Oriental Tale” xi). However, the fact that the particular sketches of Turkish women appeared in Asia is not the sole factor that can explain Vaka Brown’s experimentation with Orientalism as a tradition of representation. The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul is published in 1923, during the year of the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. 1923 is also the year when the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938). Following the abolishment of the Sultanate in 1922, Ottoman dynastic rule and the multicultural Ottoman Empire gave their place to the monocultural, modern Republic of Turkey. Interestingly, the women’s voices that are heard in The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul all respond to the Kemalist principles of secularism, statism, and Turkish nationalism against Western colonial, cultural, political, and economic intervention in Turkey, but they do so in disparate ways. Contrary to the identical figures in Jenkins’ work all of whom face modernity and modernization in much the same way—expecting to be mobilized by an external stimulus or force—the “unveiled ladies of Istanbul” offer a polyphonic response to those forces. More explicitly, whereas some of them embrace modernity as a liberating force, some others strongly oppose modernization. As a result of these women’s conflicted responses to Turkey’s socio-economic and cultural modernization, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator figures as a chameleon who assumes diverse voices and different masks to convey to her audience different points of view in accordance with the person or character she addresses. The heterogeneity of Vaka Brown’s “Oriental object,” as this is illustrated both in the diversity of the portraits which the autobiographical narrator paints and in the varied narrative stances she assumes, marks precisely the instability of Vaka Brown’s Orientalist discourse which, subsequently, involves contradictions and lack of fixity. In fact, it is the contradictions and noncorrespondences in the discursive situation between the narrator and the Turkish ladies she interviews that ultimately divulge the multi-valenced nature of these women’s fictions. Each woman Vaka Brown’s narrator encounters represents a distinct Orientalist situation, thus denoting a plurality of referents for the Oriental

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female, which are not unified or necessarily related. For example, both Dilara Hanoum and Azzizé Hanoum feature as spokespersons for the women’s movement in Turkey—radically politicized and directly influenced by Atatürk’s nationalist ideals—and voice the Turkish women’s response to the Western invasion of their country. However, whereas Dilara’s discourse is highly political, offering insightful commentary on such issues as postcolonial economic and cultural relations and Western political interventionism, Azzizé’s story is melodramatic as illustrated by the title of the chapter in which she appears, “The Avenger of her Race.” The story of Dilara Hanoum is narrated in the chapter entitled “An Old Lady Speaks Out,” where Dilara is introduced as a representative of the old establishment, one who “hates” the Committee of Union and Progress: “[w]hat she says is the language of the old. What she thinks are the thoughts of the old, who have power” (Vaka Brown, Unveiled 57).1 Dilara engages in a heated conversation with the narrator, during which she voices her opinion not only on the old regime and the position of women in the past, but, more importantly, on the current state of affairs among Turkey, Europe, Asia, and America. Dilara’s discourse is strongly anti-colonial, and she identifies the economic intervention of the Great Powers and America as the first step toward diplomatic and political intervention in Turkey: Well, the difference between Europe and Asia is the way the word “progress” is understood. To Europe progress means only material prosperity—wealth. She wants us to progress solely in order that she may make more money out of us. [. . .] It is efficacious, their progress, I admit. Little by little the Europeans have got their hands on all the land of Asia. [. . .] The Americans came here pretending they only wished to build schools and missions. They were followed by the Near East Relief, and then by banks—and business men. (Vaka Brown, Unveiled 69–71) I will hereafter be using the abbreviation “Unveiled” in all parenthetical references to Vaka Brown’s 2005 edition of The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul. 1

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Dilara’s point that the West—Americans in particular—markets industrial products in Turkey in colonial fashion as a means of making Turkey economically, and, by extension, politically and culturally dependent on the West is not effectively contradicted by the narrator. In fact, when the narrator responds to Dilara’s insistent questions on the future of nations with a vague discourse on “ideals,” she is accused of turning into a “missionary” (Vaka Brown, Unveiled 81). Surprisingly, although the narrator defies the accusation, she, nevertheless, appropriates the secular rhetoric of modern missionaries such as Jenkins: “I tried to argue with her and convince her that the money of the Near East Relief, of the Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A. was given by kind-hearted private persons and not by our Government” (Vaka Brown, Unveiled 76). The discourse that Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator appropriates in responding to Dilara’s argument about the sinister role of the missionaries in the economic and political exploitation of Turkey reveals her view of the country as the ultimate object of a cultural and mental transformation. However, such a perception of modern Turkey is tacitly linked to the Orientalist colonial discourse that created and circulated images of Turkey in a subaltern condition. If the narrator’s response to Dilara’s attitude toward the Western invasion of Turkey reproduces the Orientalist tropes of the modern missionary discourse, her encounter with Azzizé Hanoum simulates Orientalist domination over the Eastern female subject, but then troubles it; counterfeits it only to ironically mock it. Azzizé Hanoum is an upper class Turk who is married to a French officer of the invading army but who hates everything French. During the narrator’s visit to Azzizé’s home, the Oriental fantasy of the harem is acted out in a scene when Azzizé performs the role of the sensuous odalisque who arouses the Western male only to punish him with sexual deprivation: Her eyes narrowed. Her lips quivered. Like an odalisque bringing out the full voluptuousness of her body, she sank back at full length on the settee. Leaning over to the vase on the table, she took from it a spray of hyacinth and brought it to her lips. [. . .] Every motion, every act enhanced her enchantingness. The loose white silk garment, the cascade of gold on her head, the

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The narrator’s description of Armand’s seduction perpetuates the Western stereotype of lasciviousness in the harem and evokes the essentialist topos of the sensual Orient and the mythically exotic orientale. Vaka Brown’s sensationalist account portrays the harem as erotic and exotic and, thus, follows a long tradition of depicting the East—Turkey, in this case—as fantastical and hedonistic. However, the narrator’s realization that Azzizé actually stages the scene of seduction only to revenge herself on Armand—who, in her eyes, personifies Turkey’s colonization by the West— undermines Orientalism’s absolute authority over representation of the East. Paradoxically, in the story of Azzizé, the discourse of Orientalism is not appropriated by the Western narrator, but by the Orientalist subject herself, who uses the stereotype of the passive Ottoman odalisque only to subvert it with the ultimate goal of making a political statement in favor of Turkish nationalism (Kalogeras, “The Decline of her Oriental Tale” xxiii). In the story of Dilara, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator resorts to missionary discourse when confronted with America’s colonial strategy. Conversely, in “The Avenger of her Race,” it is the story’s subject, Azzizé, who manipulates Orientalist modes of representation. Finally, the story of Adileh Hanoum offers yet another perspective on the contradictory nature of Vaka Brown’s Orientalist discourse. The narrator’s portrait of Adileh Hanoum defies the notion that the Orient cannot speak for itself and, therefore, it is spoken of in Western accounts. Ironically, when Adileh Hanoum speaks, Vaka Brown’s narrator is left speechless. Therefore, even to her audience, the narrator fails to appear as a purveyor of knowledge on the East, a cultural interpreter of Turkey, or an agent of power in a structured hierarchical relationship between a hegemonic subject—the Western female

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narrator—and a subordinate “other”—the Eastern female character. Adileh Hanoum, “the Lady of the Mended Glove,” reminds the narrator of the Turkish women she had known “in the old Hamidian days, women who believed that the feminine role was primarily to love men and bear them sons” (Vaka Brown, Unveiled 185). The encounter with Adileh stands out in the narrative, as it is the only case when the narrator’s reliability is overtly discredited. A characteristic scene is the narrator’s joining a congregation at the Souleymanié Mosque. When the service is over, the narrator rejoins her companion who had been waiting outside the mosque: “I wish you had come with me.” “Many women there?” “No, I was the only one.” “Is this the first time you have been at our service?” “The thousandth,” I answered; [. . .] “How many women have you seen in those thousand services?” “Now that you speak of it, I don’t believe I have ever seen any women in those daily services.” “You wouldn’t. Praying, like many other privileges, is reserved for men.” (Vaka Brown, Unveiled 195)

As Kalogeras has accurately observed, in the narrator’s exchange with Adileh, “the narrative tables are reversed and the narrator loses her vantage-point as an observer and bearer of superior knowledge” (“The Decline of her Oriental Tale” xvii). The question to be asked, then, is whether Adileh’s story—or, The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul for that matter—constitutes an incongruous narrative, in which the autobiographical narrator’s ambivalent identification and her experimentation with Orientalist discourse create a dissonant effect. The answer is clearly negative. Considering Lowe’s contention that “[d]iscourses operate in conflict; they overlap and collude; they do not produce fixed or unified objects” (8), I interpret Vaka Brown’s narrative as constituting a site in which the heterogeneity of the Oriental discourse employed defies limiting, dominant Orientalist formations and includes emergent challenges to these formations.

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In my view, Vaka Brown’s Orientalist examples—the literary figures embedded in the narrative of The Unveiled Ladies of Istanbul— much as they feature as an incongruous variety, illustrate Orientalism as a nexus of various modes of representation. The series of observations that Vaka Brown’s narrator makes about women in Turkey resist and challenge the notion of a monolithic Orientalist discourse that has the potential to manage and colonize the “otherness” of the “Eastern lady.” And, if Jenkins’ narrator was able to appropriate such a discourse, embedded as she was in the ideological frame of cultural missionary work, Vaka Brown’s narrator is confronted with a social and historical context—Turkey becoming modernized, Kemalism, Turkish nationalism, feminism—that defies an oversimplified, consistent, univocal Orientalist discourse that dominates, manages, and produces “cultural difference.”

3.2. THE COMPLEXITIES OF “WOMEN’S ORIENTS”: DEMETRA VAKA BROWN AND ANNA BOWMAN DODD In the nineteenth century, the cosmopolitan Islamic Ottoman Empire began to move away from a concept of citizenship centered on religious belief to one based on place of birth, ultimately evolving into an independent Turkey in which the relationship of women to the nation was radically different (Heffernan and Lewis, “Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Women’s Writing” i). At this critical historical juncture, some elite Ottoman women, who defied essentialist Orientalist portrayals of themselves, rejected the “old ways” and wrote in favor of modernizing the nation. A case in point is Halide Adivar Edib (1882–1964) who, in Memoirs, her two volume English language autobiography published in 1926, rejected the nostalgic investment in Ottoman identity and promoted a Turkish nationalist discourse of progress and modernization (Heffernan and Lewis, “Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Women’s Writing” iii). At the same time, several Western women, among them Anna Bowman Dodd and Demetra Vaka Brown, wrote about their travels to the “East,” replicating, even as they challenged, Orientalist tropes. Bowman Dodd’s In the Palaces of the Sultan (1903) and Vaka Brown’s Haremlik: Some Pages from the Life of Turkish Women (1909) both contest and problematize the stereotypes characteristic of Western

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harem literature, by responding ambivalently to dilemmas such as female emancipation, race relations and modernization. In this chapter section I explore the challenges of writing about Ottoman female life by tracing the range of opinion between two Western women writers and illustrating how the dialogue that their works initiate forms and informs each other’s views. Set against the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of modern Turkey, the works of Anna Bowman Dodd and Demetra Vaka Brown move Oriental women from veiling and seclusion to personal and political liberty, crucial to the reform of the imperial sultanic regime. My reading of Bowman Dodd’s In the Palaces of the Sultan and Vaka Brown’s Haremlik probes into the ways in which Western women experienced the East, both in their contacts with the women in the countries they visited as well as in the limits of their vision of the “exotic Orient” and representations of it. Furthermore, my discussion illustrates the ways in which these authors conceptualized and represented the peoples, races, and cultures that the dominant culture of the West defined as “different” and “other.” Bowman Dodd and Vaka Brown form part of the tradition of Western female writers who, in the period between 1840 and 1940, addressed the “Eastern question” in the context of life and travel writing. However, what differentiates these two authors from the canon of female Orientalism is that their works on the one hand catered to the reading market’s fascination with the “Orient,” while on the other they deconstructed its deployment. The autobiographical travel narratives of Vaka Brown and Bowman Dodd, through their contradictory and ambiguous images of Oriental life, illustrate that the West’s concept and representation of the Orient was not unified but polyphonic, suggesting a heterogeneous experience of the East. Ultimately, even though Western culture tried to set up the “Orient” as a monolithic, politically and culturally charged, topos, I believe that the “geography” of the Orient “imagined” by women writers can be mapped only if we trace the plurality of notions and images of the Oriental “other.” Anna Bowman Dodd (1855–1929) was a New York travel writer and journalist, who journeyed to Istanbul with the American ambassador to France, and was entertained by Abdülhamid II at the Yildiz palace in 1901. When the gaieties of the court were

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finished, Bowman Dodd embarked on a detailed account of the city and its people. Since Bowman Dodd was interested in documenting the changes in Turkey brought about by the “embrace” of modernity and progress, In the Palaces of the Sultan includes sections on Turkish women’s rights, harems and marriage, the management of the household, education, slavery, and the Sultan’s reign in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. Bowman Dodd’s visit to Istanbul in 1901 chronologically overlaps with Demetra Vaka Brown’s return to her birthplace after a six-year absence in the U.S. Haremlik is thus based on the author’s impressions from the life of Turkish women at a time when the harem was gradually becoming a thing of the past. Vaka Brown’s reflections on life in the harem reveal the ambiguity of her response to the world of Oriental women. Thus, on the one hand, the autobiographical narrator of Haremlik regrets that modernization transforms Ottoman life, while on the other hand the book’s author upholds Western values and attitudes. Obviously, the two authors’ visits were made in markedly different contexts. Bowman Dodd traveled in exclusively social circles and, because of her intimacy with the Sultan, she had a privileged yet restricted view of the Yildiz court, the Imperial palaces and parks. This is because Adülhamid was notoriously controlling, censorial, and concerned with representing his decaying Empire in a positive light (Heffernan, “The Reflexive Orientalist” ix). On the other hand, Vaka Brown returned to Istanbul as a “Turkish subject” who looked upon her childhood friends “with new interest” and “a mind full of Occidental questioning” as a result of her stay in America. Consequently, Vaka Brown’s travel impressions are more intimate and emotionally charged than Bowman Dodd’s, since she was able “to talk with [Turkish] women, [and] to ask them their thoughts about their lives and their customs” (Vaka Brown, Haremlik 12–13). Nevertheless, despite their diverse contexts, both travel narratives allow some insight into the enormous changes that were occurring as the Ottoman world was collapsing at the outset of the twentieth century. At the time of the two authors’ visits in 1901, the Ottoman Empire was turning away from imperialist Europe and toward the East, hoping to increase its Muslim populations and strengthen its role as their leader (Heffernan, “The Reflexive Orientalist” v, vi). Europe and Russia were competing for its

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resources and territory, and internal nationalist movements were tearing at its seams. From its ruins, a modern nation would emerge, marked by a gradual shift from the cosmopolitan society of the multi-ethnic Empire to the ethnically based one of the new Turkish Republic. From a perspective within the world and culture of the Ottoman Empire, achieved through the narratological conception of a first-person embedded discourse, the autobiographical travel narratives of Bowman Dodd and Vaka Brown reveal how observation provides possibilities for resistance. In my view, the two authors share a complex position with respect to their material: their works are not just about everything that they saw, lived, or were told, but also about what it means to have access to particular people, as well as what it means to be subject to the imperative to tell. This is how Vaka Brown’s narrator explains the motivation behind her narrative: “[…] during my stay in America I heard Turkey spoken of with hatred and scorn, the Turks reviled as despicable, their women as miserable creatures, living in practical slavery for the base desires of men. I had stood bewildered at this talk. Could it possibly be as the Americans said, and I never have known it? […] Now, I was to see for myself” (Vaka Brown, Haremlik 13). Echoing Vaka Brown’s impetus to restore Turkey’s reputation in the West, Bowman Dodd contradicts the stereotype of the “unspeakable” Turk: “[…] when one comes to know him, even a little, the Turk is found to be neither so very terrible nor so hardened in his brutality as we had supposed him” (Bowman Dodd 421–22). Interestingly, what both Vaka Brown and Bowman Dodd suggest is that the West constructed Turkey culturally and historically in such a way as to create a geography of contrasts between itself as “sensitive, benevolent, and philanthropic” and Turkey as “cruel, vindictive, and medieval, in point of barbarism” (Bowman Dodd 421). However, neither Bowman Dodd nor Vaka Brown can be said to employ the imperial Orientalist discourse exclusively and unproblematically, thus defying categorization under a Western hegemonic cultural apparatus. Even though Vaka Brown and Bowman Dodd introduced a new realism into Western accounts of the Orient, I do not wish to argue that these two female observers of and writers on the East were innocent of prejudice. After all, as cultural theorists have argued, “observing” or “seeing” are culturally conditioned activities

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that illustrate various underlying prejudices—most often, religious and racial. However, what is interesting about Vaka Brown and Bowman Dodd is that, while their narratives cater to the American market for Orientalism, the two authors are also reflexive about its employment, both invoking and undercutting Oriental stereotypes. The elaborate descriptions of the excesses and riches of Istanbul in Haremlik and In the Palaces of the Sultan are offered to a Western audience, which was raised on the “magical palaces of the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’” in order to satisfy their Orientalist fantasies of a “dream-city come true” (Bowman Dodd 4). Invoking the Western stereotype of the lascivious in the female bath, Vaka Brown’s narrator describes her visit to a hammam by appropriating the essentialist topos of the sensual Orient and the mythically exotic orientale: We passed in through a human lane of slaves, who relieved us of our pestemals; and thus, […] we entered [the bathing-room], leaving outside all self-consciousness. […] Each lady was in the hands of her slave […] The temperature of these rooms was 170, yet we stayed in them for hours, oblivious of the heat. […] Luncheon over, […] we passed out of the hot rooms into the cooling rooms, where, as we lay on the couches, the slaves covered us with heavy burnouses. […] While we had been bathing, the reclining room had been decorated with leaves and flowers, in the form of numerous arches. Under these we lay on snowy sheets and pillows, wrapped in our silk coverlets, while our hair was taken down and rubbed with rose-petals, before being tied up in soft, absorbent towels. Next came the dyeing of eyebrows, and lashes black, and of fingernails crimson; and, last of all, the flower-bath. (Vaka Brown, Haremlik 239–41 italics in original)

Vaka Brown’s sensationalist account portrays the bathhouse as luxurious and exotic, a women’s public sphere within which slaves enable their mistresses’ desultory enjoyment of quasi-erotic pleasures. In this way, the autobiographical narrator follows a long tradition in travel literature of depicting the East as fantastical and hedonistic. Bowman Dodd, similarly to Vaka Brown, caters to the Western desire to imagine the Orient as a place rife with intrigue and sensuality. The representation of Turkish women as “beautiful,

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enslaved, and yearning for rescue is central to this convention” (Heffernan, “The Reflexive Orientalist” x). What follows is Bowman Dodd’s description of the workings of the harem: A nod from the master to his slave, and the curtain of the harem is lifted. The favorite of the night, of a week, of a month, or of years, swings her beauty forward upon her slippered feet. All her being is in palpitant expectancy for the single hour of life in which she is fully permitted to live. The rare, the perfect moment over, the gift of all her being given, back to her cell-like chambers goes the queen-bee Circassian, there to work out in the darkness of seclusion, of sterile pleasures, of petty, embittering jealousies, the labour of maternity appointed her. (143)

Obviously, both Vaka Brown and Bowman Dodd manipulate the sensual and erotic aspects of the harem system—a system that, because it remained hidden by definition and provoked Western taboos, appealed extremely to Western audiences. Furthermore, the discourse the two autobiographical narrators employ mimics the traditional masculine gesture of voyeuristic penetration by means of the gaze. The passages from Bowman Dodd and Vaka Brown quoted above replicate male Orientalist narratives in many ways; in other ways, they exemplify a new wave of American Orientalism that was popular at the end of the nineteenth century, involving both high and popular culture in painting, music, film, travel, advertising, and prints. As Holly Edwards describes in her book Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America 1870–1930 (2000), a highly sexualized Orient was used to appeal to a particular market shopping for commodities as varied as “Fatima” cigarettes and the high fashion designs of the French couturier Paul Poiret, who used “Oriental” styles inspired by the harem pants to “liberate” women from the corsets of the belle époque. Nonetheless, even as the two authors cater to this emerging consumer market that relies on the commodification of Oriental culture, they do not hesitate to undermine their own exotic discourse, thus suggesting a non-essentialist and self-reflexive use of the tropes of harem literature. Therefore, In the Palaces of the Sultan and Haremlik illustrate that much as the two autobiographical narrators observe and represent the Orient from a Western

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perspective and addressing a Western audience, they are also very much aware of the cultural prejudices within which they operate. A case in point is Bowman Dodd’s discussion of polygamy. Throughout the nineteenth century, the travelers’ overall impression of family life in the East was that of a polygamous urban elite and a monogamous majority. In a hilarious passage, Bowman Dodd ridicules the prevalent notions in the West about Ottoman polygamy in a (probably fictive) dialogue between a vulgar American tourist and a polite, yet exasperated, Ottoman official: To the causal visitor there is an unexpected embarrassment in finding almost all the Turks one meets, in society, merely married to one wife. The singularity of this singleness is as trying, apparently, to the Turk on certain occasions, as it is eminently disappointing to the European. “I do so hope the Minister of —— may grant me the honour of visiting his harem,” an American lady remarked with the charming aplomb characteristic of the American woman. “[…] His excellency has no harem in the sense in which, I presume, most foreigners understand our word”, was the courteous reply of the minor official to whom the remark was addressed. “He has but one wife, as, indeed, we mostly all have.” “Hasn’t any one a harem?” The cry was almost tearful. (Bowman Dodd 431)

Bowman Dodd’s mockery of the stereotypical American woman who has traveled all the way to the Orient to witness a harem and is disappointed to find that most Turkish men marry only one wife undermines the Orientalism and Western narrow mindedness the autobiographical narrator plays up elsewhere. The salience of the representation of the harem in literature about the Orient has received much critical attention, as the West’s particular obsession with the harem cannot only be explained along the lines of the widespread fascination with the East (Melman, Women’s Orients 17). However, what interests me here is not the numerous ways in which the harem system was depicted to generate fantasizing. Rather, I argue that the most important aspect of Bowman Dodd’s and Vaka Brown’s rhetoric is the harem’s partial desexualization. In the nineteenth century, travel narratives by women were turning away from portraying harems as exotic and

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sensual (Boer 43–73). This is because when Western women started to visit harems, something the male writers could never do, they found they had much more in common with Victorian domestic spaces. In Haremlik, Vaka Brown represents the harem as the Oriental female sanctuary, identified with virtue, morality, female agency and camaraderie: […] in my first harem visit I saw nothing but pleasant relations existing between the various women dwelling under the same roof. […] Except for the absence of men I might almost have been visiting an American household. What difference existed was to the advantage of the Turkish girls. They were entirely natural and spontaneous. They did not pretend to be anything that they were not. […] They were good mothers, and made one man blissfully happy. […] They took everything naturally, and enjoyed it naturally. (Vaka Brown, Haremlik 27–8)

Such representations of harem life by women travelers like Bowman Dodd and Vaka Brown domesticate the exotic and undermine the tradition of presenting the Oriental woman as enslaved. No longer a place of jealousy and intrigue, the harem in Vaka Brown’s narrative is a community where women talk of politics, art, and culture. In this way, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator is able to promote images of female agency and camaraderie. In Haremlik and In the Palaces of the Sultan, the two autobiographical narrators engage in extensive commentary on the relations among women in the harem. For example, in contrast to her description of the Turkish woman as “enslaved” and yearning for her freedom, in the final retrospective section of In the Palaces of the Sultan, Bowman Dodd’s autobiographical narrator makes some bold observations about the rights of Turkish women, particularly with respect to divorce and property: It may surprise the woman suffragist to learn that the laws of Mahomet confer upon women a greater degree of legal protection than any code of laws since the middle Roman law. […] Under the Moslem laws the provision for securing to the wife the free and uncontrolled possession of her property is minutely stipulated in the marriage contract. A suitable sum is

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In this and other instances, Bowman Dodd contrasts the paradox of the free Muslim woman to the confined and even imprisoned Western Christian female, thus implicitly juxtaposing the two cultures. Of note, Bowman Dodd’s narrator does not suggest that the “freedom” Ottoman women enjoyed was political. Rather, she presents it as a complex of juridical, customary, and economic freedoms. In an interesting parallel to Bowman Dodd’s commentary on Muslim women’s legal rights, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator questions the rights of wives in the context of polygamy but is contradicted by her friend Djimlah’s interrogation about adultery in the West. More specifically, when Vaka Brown’s narrator defiantly asserts that she would never “be happy with a quarter of a husband,” Djimlah explains that polygamy does not mean sharing a husband and that wives in Ottoman Turkey are entitled to more rights than wives in the West: “But what happens in your countries and with your habits? A man repudiates his first wife, generally with a great deal of scandal, for a second. He gives her little money, and her children lose their father’s companionship. If the man cannot divorce his wife, he leads her the life of a dog, and lives a libertine himself. Or if he loves another woman, and she loves him, and they live together, the woman carries a burden of shame, and the children born out of their great love are outcasts.” (Vaka Brown, Haremlik 77)

Djimlah’s comments on adultery suggest that whereas the married Western woman owned no property of her own and was the victim of the double sexual standard that denied her sexual liberty while condoning promiscuity in men, her Ottoman counterpart enjoyed economic independence and sexual autonomy. Hence, the overall effect of Vaka Brown’s and Bowman Dodd’s presentations of Oriental women avoids the implication that these women are from some exotic world, distant from and alien to the West, but instead discovers a link of commonality and sororal camaraderie. Paradoxically, even if some of Vaka Brown’s and Bowman Dodd’s earlier passages render the Oriental woman as “Other,”

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ultimately both autobiographical narrators reinforce the similarities between women of the harem and Western women. In my view, both Vaka Brown and Bowman Dodd employ the Turkish woman as a cautionary figure to articulate their critique of Western women’s economic precariousness and lack of liberty. Thus, even though we cannot overlook that the two writers often seem to emphasize the desire to see the Orient as exotic by writing a sensationalist account that will sell, at the same time they challenge that desire, exposing it as fantasy. This chapter section has recovered a history of writings about and travels to the Orient out of which emerge a subaltern voice and agency that Edward Said seemed to ignore in his seminal Orientalism. In my view, the texts of Demetra Vaka Brown and Anna Bowman Dodd complicate Western understandings of power over and knowledge of the East and undermine the binary of colonizer and colonized. Considering that both Vaka Brown and Bowman Dodd were colonial agents, their experience of the Orient cannot be subsumed under a monolithic Orientalist discourse. In many instances, it is evident that the two autobiographical narrators exhibit a sense of cultural superiority and certain prejudices that reproduce the Orientalist notion of the “Other.” At the same time, both narrators employ a discourse that defies the dichotomizing of Eastern and Western identities, colonial power and powerlessness. Ultimately, Haremlik and In the Palaces of the Sultan humanize the colonial subject and articulate similarities between the two autobiographical narrators and Oriental women that cut across race and culture.

3.3. SUFFRAGETTES IN THE HAREM: DEMETRA VAKA BROWN AND HALIDE ADIVAR EDIB Since the Tanzimat2 reforms in nineteenth-century Turkey (1839– 1876), the status of Turkish women in general and the harem Tanzimat is the Ottoman term for “reordering” or “reorganization” and refers to a set of modernizing reforms which introduced important changes in the legal, educational and administrative structures of the Ottoman empire. After two centuries of military defeat and territorial 2

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system in particular became a central issue in the debate surrounding the modernization efforts and the subsequent national liberation struggle against the Sultanate (Munshi, ed. 192). The attitudes expressed on the topic of female emancipation varied widely, illustrating the intense factionalism of Turkish politics from the period of the Tanzimat, to the second Constitutional period instigated by the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, to the formation of the Republic. In fact, as Deniz Kandiyoti has observed, the key moments of the transformation of discourses on women in Turkey coincided with critical junctures in the transition from the Ottoman empire to the Turkish republic (“Slave Girls, Temptresses, and Comrades” 35). The gradual change from an Islamic, theocratic, multiethnic empire to a modern, secular nation state made every facet of the social fabric an object of polemic and scrutiny (Kandiyoti, “Slave Girls, Temptresses, and Comrades” 35). The response to female emancipation of intellectuals and politicians of diverse political backgrounds was closely aligned to their attitude toward Westernization and modernization: more specifically, whether it would be accepted, rejected or adapted (Munshi, ed. 192). Therefore, it is crucial to read women’s responses to changes in the life of women in Turkey in relation to this wider intellectual and political context. This chapter section explores the responses that Haremlik (1909) by Demetra Vaka Brown and Memoirs of Halide Edib (1926) articulate to the “woman question” as it gradually emerged in the traditional Ottoman family system at the turn of the century. More specifically, I will discuss how the two writers represented female emancipatory demands in Turkey at the time and illustrate the ways in which the rise of Turkish nationalism complicated the issue of female emancipation by introducing a new term to the debate on women’s rights: that of “nationhood” and cultural integrity. In my retreat, these reforms were carried out by Western-oriented grand viziers acting under the undisguised guidance of Western powers. They had farreaching consequences for Ottoman society, including the rise of a Western-looking, centralized bureaucratic elite and the relative loss of power of the ulema (the religious authorities) who saw their monopoly over the legal and educational systems being gradually eroded.

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view, the “woman question” as this is articulated in the abovementioned works, is problematized by an “uneasy triangle” involving Islam, Westernism, and nationalism (Kandiyoti, “Slave girls, Temptresses, and Comrades” 36). On the one hand, the compelling association of “proper” female conduct and “cultural integrity” with Islam, and on the other hand the conflict between “nationalistic emancipation” and Westernism—denoting looseness and corruption—complicated the emergence of a new identity for the women of Turkey: that of the emancipated yet chaste nationalist heroine. Halide Adivar Edib (1882–1964) is the most prolific Ottoman-Turkish woman writer to date, having published twentyone novels, four short story collections, two dramas, four scholarly works and a two-volume autobiography. Furthermore, she is one of the most politically active Turkish women writers, considering her participation in the Unionist circles in the period between 1908–1918, her membership in the national Army in the next three years, and her opposition to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party between 1923–1925. She also served as a Member of Parliament for one term in 1950. Edib was born to an aristocratic family and, due to her father’s determination, received a multicultural education—both at missionary schools and, when this was not possible,3 at home. She was the first Muslim girl to graduate from the American College for Girls at Üsküdar in 1901. Immediately after graduating from the American College, Halide Edib married her teacher, the famous mathematics professor Salih Zeki Bey. Nine years later, and upon his marrying a second wife, Edib divorced him and devoted herself to education, first as a teacher at the Teacher Training College and Girls Secondary School, and then as inspector for the Girls Schools Trust. She was later sent to Syria to found schools and orphanages for girls, and it was there that she met her second husband, Dr. Adnan Adivar at the meetings of the Committee for Union and Progress. The The imperial decree by Sultan Abdül Hamid prohibited Turkish students from attending missionary schools, thus Edib was confined to the domestic sphere until she resumed her studies at the American College for Girls in 1899. 3

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couple married in 1917. Halide Edib was active in the women's movement prior to the War of Independence, establishing the Society for the Elevation of Women in 1908. She dedicated herself to the improvement of education for Turkish women and to furthering relations between them and European women. Following the occupation of Istanbul by the Allies her life was in danger, and together with her husband Adnan Adivar she fled to Ankara to join Mustafa Kemal and the other nationalists. In Ankara Adnan Adivar became deputy speaker of the nationalist parliament established in 1920, while Halide Edib served on the western front, first as a nurse and later as interpreter, press advisor and secretary to Mustafa Kemal. When, however, Edib became an outspoken advocate of the American mandate in Turkey as the only solution to prevent the Ottoman Empire from further territorial loss, she was estranged from Mustafa Kemal and her proposal to ally Turkey with a power stronger than Europe led to the irrevocable split from him in 1925 (Adak xi). Following their self-imposed exile to the United Kingdom and France, Halide Edib and Adnan Adivar returned to Turkey in 1939, a year after Atatürk's death. Halide Edib became head of the English Language and Literature Department at Istanbul University, and spent the last years of her life writing and translating her works into Turkish. Edib’s Memoirs is the first book in her two-volume autobiography written in English and published in 1926, while she and her second husband were in London having fallen out of favour with the single-party rule of Mustafa Kemal. Memoirs recounts important stages in Edib’s life—her childhood and education, her marriage, confrontation with polygamy and subsequent divorce, and her early political involvement—and provides a vivid record of the period between the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and the demise of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. What is of extreme importance for my argument in this chapter section, though, is Edib’s emphasis on the agency of Ottoman women in their fight for emancipation as well as the intersection between the struggle for gender equality and nationalist politics as this is illustrated by Edib’s philosophy of pacifist nationalism. Furthermore, I am interested in the points of convergence as well as the points of departure between Edib’s and Vaka Brown’s female emancipatory discourses not only because of the development they trace in gender relations in Turkey at the

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turn of the century, but also because of the responses they offer to the dilemmas of nationalism and modernization. In her article entitled “Comparative Modernities: Ottoman Women Writers and Western Feminism,” Reina Lewis has astutely observed that the Turkish woman—whether coded as a guardian of tradition or an emblem of modernity—became increasingly crucial for the projection of a distinctive Turkish national identity, and that the figure of “woman” was central in the socio-political debates of the time as an indicator of change, stability, morality or immorality (Munshi, ed. 192). Indeed, and as Cora Kaplan has noted, “female subjectivity” and its synecdotal reference “female sexuality,” have traditionally functioned as “the displaced and condensed site for the general anxiety about individual behaviour” (165) since women in all societies, Western and Eastern alike, have served as a convenient vehicle for the projection of fears over loss of control. What is important to note, however, is that in the case of the confrontation between Muslim societies and the West, this concern over the patrolling of individual behaviour is more acute because “areas” such as “the family,” “women,” and “the home/harem”4 constituted structures of passive defence as the works under discussion reveal. The concerns about women’s status and rights that the Turkish women in the specific works by Vaka Brown and Edib express document the gradual changes in gender relations in the emerging Turkish republic, reveal a growing self-awareness among women in Turkey at the time, and mark a period of accelerated Although the image of the secluded women of the polygamous harem was central to the fantasy logic of Western Orientalism because of its associations with sexuality, cruelty and excess, we must not forget that the harem was essentially part of a system of spatial segregation within Islamic conceptualizations of space and society that aimed at the protection of the status of the holy (haram). Even Western sources, from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1763 onwards, identified some relative freedoms available to women within this domestic system of segregated living that, in certain cases as in the case of the right to property, outweighed the rights of their Western contemporaries (see Melman in Women’s Orients). 4

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social change. One of the most controversial topics that best illustrates the overall social changes and the changes in women’s attitudes instigated by the decline of the Ottoman Empire is that of polygamy. In Vaka Brown’s Haremlik, an account of the author’s reunion with childhood companions and their circles after her immigration to the U.S., Djimlah, one of the narrator’s friends, fervently supports polygamy as an institution on the grounds of the “nature of men,” and juxtaposes the condition of divorced women in the West with that of women living in the harem: You never share your husband. What a man gives to one woman he never gives to another. What he is to his first wife he never is to his second or third. [. . .] A man by nature is polygamous. His nature must expand: sometimes it is more than one woman that he must love; sometimes he gives himself over to state matters; sometimes it is a career or a profession that he needs. But whatever he does, the love of one woman is not and cannot be enough to occupy him. When a man has a nature to love more than one woman, what happens? According to our sacred laws he may marry them. They are loved and honoured by him, and the children of this second or third love are his children, and share his name as they share his property. (Vaka Brown Haremlik, 76–7)

Although it seems paradoxical, Djimlah supports the license to marry more than once and seek variety with concubines, arguing that polygamy is a successful attempt to deflect desire through a prophylactic approach to sexuality. Djimlah’s discourse and arguments reveal what Kandiyoti has termed the deep commitment to “Ottoman communitarian conservatism” that the Muslim middle-class of the time illustrated (Kandiyoti, Women, Islam & the State 25). Indeed, despite their desire to see the nation Westernized and modernized, women like Djimlah in Haremlik express a tenacious concern with “excessive” Westernization and hope for the moral fabric of Ottoman society to remain intact. As Kandiyoti points out, such individuals desired a synthesis between “Western notions of ‘progress’ and a harmonious Islamic state” (Women, Islam & the State 25). Their ideology was a complex blend of constitutionalism, modernism, Ottoman nationalism, and Islamism. Djimlah’s opinion on the position of women within the traditional polygamous Ottoman family structure not only undermines the

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narrator’s assumptions about the decadent institution of marriage in Turkey, but also illustrates the active concern of Oriental women with their status and their self-conscious positioning against women in the West. Moreover, Djimlah’s response reveals an “interiorized dialogue” through which she valorizes her position as a harem wife, effectively responding to the West’s essentialized image of polygamy (Munshi, ed. 192). As an Oriental female speaking subject, Djimlah is contesting her subordinated position in relation to both Western stereotypes and local gender relations, thus appearing not as an isolated, ignorant plaything inhabiting the harem, but as a critical thinker who is aware of the problematics of feminist discourse. The style of harem femininity which is represented by Djimlah and celebrated in Haremlik was considered as a sign of a decadent ancien régime by Edib. Hence, in contrast to Djimlah’s proud discourse on harem life in Haremlik, Edib’s deeply personal confession about the “distressing results” (Edib 145) of polygamy in Memoirs is powerful: When a woman suffers because of her husband’s secret love affairs, the pain may be keen, but its quality is different. When a second wife enters her home and usurps half her power, she is a public martyr and feels herself an object of curiosity and pity. However humiliating this may be, the position gives a woman in this case an unquestioned prominence and isolation. (Edib 143) Although this dramatic introduction to polygamy may seem to promise the sugared life of harems pictured in the “Haremlik” of Mrs. Kenneth Brown, it was not so in the least. I have heard polygamy discussed as a future possibility in Europe in recent years by sincere and intellectual people of both sexes. “As there is informal polygamy and man is polygamous by nature, why not have the sanction of the law?” they say. Whatever theories people may hold as to what should or should not be the ideal tendencies as regards the family constitution, there remains one irrefutable fact about the human heart, to whichever sex it may belong. It is almost organic in us to suffer when we have to share the object of our love, whether that love be sexual or otherwise. I believe indeed

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However emotional the arguments used in this excerpt may appear on the surface, they, nevertheless, reveal a highly political concern with institutions such as the family, and with the dominant discourses on woman and modernity. More specifically, the emphasis on the metaphor of the “family” as a building block of society foregrounds the family as a sphere through which the authentic and spiritual essence of the nation should be protected. Moreover, since the family was envisioned at the time as the basic unit of the modern Ottoman nation, it was subjected to an intense restructuring. This explains why the traditional polygamous and extended Ottoman family that Vaka Brown’s earlier narrative celebrates is substituted in Edib’s Memoirs with the new model of the bourgeois nuclear family which is based on conjugal companionship. As Partha Chatterjee explains in The Nation and its Fragments (1993), the reasoning behind this revision was that, for nationalists, the inner-domestic sphere had to be reformed in order to adapt “to the requirements of a modern material world without losing its true identity” (120). Hence, women’s social roles had to be redefined along the lines of the literal and metaphorical meanings of the family. In other words, the nationalist reform in the inner sphere automatically necessitated “redefining” feminine roles and “remaking” the images of women. Subsequently, the nationalists believed that this “inner sphere reform” would result in a comprehensive social reform that would usher the nation as a whole into modernity. Throughout Memoirs, Edib associates the cultural tension between modernity and tradition with the political transition from empire to nation-state and the related “woman question.” As she explains, the need to model female citizens who can contribute to the welfare of the new nation and whose image would replace the image of the sensuous languid harem lady to Western consciousness is imperative:

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[My book New Turan] looks forward to a New Turkey where a chastised and matured Union and Progress has taken the reins of power, where women have the vote, and where women work with the qualities of head and heart which characterize the best Turkish women. The simplicity and the austerity of their lives have become different since the magnificent days of the Ottomans, with the unhealthy luxury and parasitic tendencies of a class of women which only a high but degenerate civilization like the Ottoman creates. The highest ideal is work and simplicity. There is not only a Turkey that is nationalized in its culture, but there is also a Turkey that is liberal and democratic in politics. Above all, there is no chauvinism in the administrative system. (Edib 332)

As the above excerpt reveals, Edib’s highly nationalist vision foregrounds women’s equality as an integral part of Turkish cultural mores. Writing in a period of successive waves of modernization and the accompanying cultural tension between “modern” and “traditional,” between rising nationalist movements and intensified attempts to carve out new national identities, Edib uses the “woman question” as a reference point in the ideological debate and argument about “national and cultural integrity.” In fact, she responds to the issue of modernization and the juxtaposition of “indigenous” to “foreign” through her feminist outlook on the “woman question” and the valorization of female agency. Female education was part of the broader project of carving out new female subjectivities. In fact, Edib attributes her feminist views and discourse to her education and, as a result, celebrates the positive impact of female educational reform on women: As a whole, college had a liberating effect upon me, giving me a much greater balance and opening up to me the possibility of a personal life with enjoyments of a much more varied kind. Some of the already strong tendencies of my thought also now found new vistas into wider paths. (Edib 190) In all my writings I had clearly stated my belief in a gradual educational change, in the study and understanding of the difficult social problems of the country, and in the necessity of giving the greatest consideration to educational reform. (Edib 274)

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The increasing popularity of female education within the broader context of the late-Ottoman state’s attempt to forge a “modern” Islamic statecraft and society has extensively been discussed by scholars such as Kandiyoti and Elizabeth Frierson.5 These critics have observed that modernizers such as Edib viewed the condition of women as a symptom of backwardness, and highlighted the significance of the “woman question” for societal transformation pushing for a package of girls’ education, as well as conjugal marriage, unveiling, and an end to seclusion. The main argument expressed by these reformers which also informs Edib’s discourse is that educated women would help the nation develop. Interestingly, in Haremlik, the impact of Western education on Ottoman women is questioned by Vaka Brown’s friend, Djimlah, who received a Western-style education, yet expresses certain views that run contrary to a discourse informed by it. This observation is made by Houlmé, Djimlah’s sister, who says: “True […] my sister is educated as far as speaking European languages goes but she has never been touched by European thought. [She still believes that] her husband is her lord, the giver of her children” (148). Although educated by Western standards, Djimlah stands for an indigenous development over time and responds to the conflict between modernizing expectations and traditional practices by a conservative attitude toward the debatable issue of women’s education and the effect it can have on changing gender roles. Houlmé’s further comments on the internal conflict Western education causes in Ottoman women is also illuminating: It is wrong for women to think—it is wrong, at least, for us women of the East [. . .] They educate us and let us learn to think as you women of the West think, but the course of our lives is to be different. Since they let us share your studies they ought to let us lead your lives, and if this cannot be done, then

See Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam & the State, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), and Frierson, “Unimagined Communities: Women and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909,” Critical Matrix 9:2 (1995). 5

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they ought not to let us study and know other ways but our own. (Vaka Brown, Haremlik 147)

Houlmé believes that an Ottoman woman educated in a Western fashion cannot be happy in a traditional patriarchal society like Turkey. Considering the time frame of Djimlah’s and Houlmé’s comments—Vaka Brown’s visit took place between 1900 and 1901—their suspicion toward the Westernizing experiment is not surprising; rather, it reveals the time’s moderate mores. Djimlah and her contemporary “Ottoman communitarian conservatives” insist that attempting to make changes in one generation is too fast, and question whether it is possible for women of their generation to grow from a dependent, subservient role in their husbands’ extended kin to become independent critical thinkers and decision makers. As a result, faced with the pressures of Western modernization, they resort to traditional Ottoman values. Djimlah’s conservative voice is not the only female response to social change that readers of Haremlik hear. There are also several strong feminist voices which are heard in the chapter entitled “Suffragettes of the Harem” where Vaka Brown relates her attending a feminist group meeting in Constantinople. These ardent suffragettes want “immediate freedom” and their sense of urgency comes in stark contrast with Djimlah’s moderate attitude to social change. Nevertheless, the sketch the narrator paints of them is blatantly anti-feminist and satiric: she ironically relates how she must go to the meeting wearing a grey “tchitcharf” that symbolizes the dawn these women hope to bring to the Turkish women’s lives, and how she gives a password—“twilight”—to enter the room. She then ridicules the president’s dramatic proposition that six members of the club should be chosen to kill themselves as a protest against the existing order of things. The sarcasm embedded in the narrative discourse is intense: The proposition, which was made in all seriousness, provided, however,—with a naïveté that might have imperilled the gravity of a meeting of American women, —that the president of the club should be exempt from participation in the lotdrawing. (Vaka Brown, Haremlik 165) The first speaker having proved that women were great and were only kept from recognition by the brute force of man, the

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A BRIDGE OVER THE BALKANS second one went ahead to prove that women were capable of doing as good work as men in certain cases, by citing George Sand, George Eliot, and others. A third one asserted that women were mere playthings in the hands of men, and called on them to rouse themselves and show that they were capable of being something better. I was utterly disgusted at the whole meeting. I might just as well have been in one of those silly clubs in New York where women congregate to read their immature compositions. There were totally lacking the sincerity, the spontaneity, and the frankness which usually characterize Turkish women. (Vaka Brown, Haremlik 166–67)

Although the narrator’s assumption of a patriarchal point of view appears problematic on the surface—especially if one considers the life choices of the author herself—it is, nonetheless, meaningful if interpreted as the gesture of a modern Western narrator who critically views the version of the American Dream upheld by these Turkish suffragettes. To the suffragettes, the most notable aspect of women’s life in America is divorce. Subsequently, the women members of this feminist group view American-style divorce as a panacea that could solve all their problems. Hence, the narrator’s scathing depiction of those suffragettes as immature and superficial is justified on the grounds of their false assumptions about the meaning of divorce in America. More importantly, the condescending description of those women activists castigates their shallow engagement with politics and their nascent social consciousness more than it criticizes their feminist principles. As I have illustrated so far, the radical difference in the opinions and attitudes expressed on the topics of female emancipation and gender roles in Haremlik and Memoirs of Halide Edib is justified considering the two works’ historic contexts and the different periods they depict: the early 1900s and the years between the Young Turks Revolution of 1908 and the demise of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 respectively. Indeed, if read contrapuntally, Haremlik and Memoirs trace a progressive distancing from Islam as the only form of legitimate discourse on women’s emancipation in favor of a “cultural nationalism” appropriating such emancipation as an indigenous pattern (Kandiyoti, Women, Islam & the State 23). However, the stark difference in the discourse

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on women in Turkey is also related to the genres the two authors employ: those of the autobiographical romance and autobiography. Indeed, although both Vaka Brown and Edib know that they have a double audience—Western readers who are curious about Turkey as a foreign land and readers in Turkey who are interested in the local debates about the role of women in society (Lewis, Gender Modernity and Liberty 2)—they, nevertheless, address these audiences using different conventions. In Haremlik, Vaka Brown utilizes the discourse of fiction but, wanting to authenticate her narrative as valuable insider knowledge, she presents it as a realistic account based on her life story, essentially responding to the literary market’s growing demands for more objective, social-science model, ethnographic style accounts. The Note to Haremlik bears witness to this need for authentication: The contents of this book are not fictitious, unusual as parts of it may appear to Western readers. There has been some rearranging of facts, to make for compactness—incidents of several days have sometimes been told as of one. Substantially, however, everything is true as told.

What is important to note, however, and which also sheds light on the factors behind Vaka Brown’s caustic representation of the suffragettes in the harem, is the critical distance the narrator of Haremlik struggles to maintain from the female objects of her study. More specifically, at the same time that Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator tries to establish her credibility on the grounds of her intimate view and knowledge of Turkish women’s life, she is also careful not to dismiss her critical perspective that reflects a Western ethos. This is because of the author’s audience awareness and her construction of a modern narrative persona: Vaka Brown knows that her work is read in the U.S. and Europe with certain assumptions about Western women’s appropriate attitudes, as well as with Orientalist expectations about harem life. As a result, there is always a thin line that sets the autobiographical narrator/observer apart form the women she observes. Hence, no matter how positive and/or intimate Vaka Brown’s view of Turkish women is, these women always remain objects of scrutiny as the narrator/observer never fully identifies with them. In contrast to Vaka Brown’s highly fictionalized discourse, the discourse within which Edib is operating is that of autobiography,

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which, as a genre, has traditionally facilitated the expression of Eastern women’s life stories, often allowing them to critique local gender norms as well as engage with Western attitudes and events. Thus, at the same time that Vaka Brown’s fictional paradigm allows her to cater to her Western readers’ expectations by maintaining a critical distance from the Eastern women she observes, Edib’s autobiographical discourse illustrates her effort to authenticate herself through her life story—a story that reveals a heightened self-consciousness and a keen social, political, and cultural awareness. In her analysis of autobiography as a genre, Leigh Gilmore claims that autobiography is a “site of resistance, especially as it engages the politics of looking back and challenges the politics of how the past and present may be known in relation to a particular version of history” (80). Gilmore’s argument sheds light on Edib’s autobiographical discourse as it highlights the woman author’s claim to history and to female agency in the process of history-writing. More specifically, employing the discourse of autobiography, Edib sifts through her life for explanation and understanding, and subsequently historicizes her life experience. In this way, she establishes the cultural continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the new Turkey and legitimizes her writing as an intervention into the formation of public opinion at home and abroad. To conclude, it would be reductive either to dismiss Haremlik as irredeemably Orientalist or to herald Memoirs as unquestionably feminist. The complicated nexus of the two authors’ personal lives, their political and national allegiances, as well as the genre conventions within which they operated certainly complicate any attempts to contextualize these works within a specific tradition— Orientalist, feminist or other. Undoubtedly, the historically specific conditions of Turkish nationalism radically changed the parameters along which the woman question was debated following the overthrow of Abdulhamit’s autocratic rule in 1908 by the Young Turks. As a result, the two texts under discussion in this chapter section respond differently to the debate on the position of women. On the one hand, Haremlik reflects a period when pressures to westernize Turkey instigated a certain degree of selfawareness among women, but during which Islam remained the sole paradigm within which issues pertaining to women could be debated. On the other hand, Memoirs of Halide Edib moves in

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another direction: that of “modernist Islamism,” advocating a link between nationalist discourse and concerns over the condition of Turkish womanhood (Kandiyoti, Women, Islam & the State 43). Nonetheless, despite their different orientation, reading the two works contrapuntally allows for the profile of Turkish feminists to emerge from a complex set of influences at work—nationhood, Islam, modernization, westernism—and establishes the importance of the cultural continuity between the Ottoman Empire and the new Turkey.

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Demetra Vaka Brown: Portrait Papers of Kenneth Brown, Accession #9732-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

WOMEN AND/OF THE ORIENT

Demetra Vaka Brown: Portrait Papers of Kenneth Brown, Accession #9732-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

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Demetra Vaka Brown: Portrait Papers of Kenneth Brown, Accession #9732-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

CHAPTER 4. DEMETRA VAKA BROWN AND THE MODERN GREEK STATE:

THE HEART OF THE BALKANS AND IN THE HEART OF GERMAN INTRIGUE

Six Startling Articles. Each one holds you in a grip of consternation at the perverted politics that for years have kept Europe in a seething state of turmoil. Each explains many questions Americans have been asking themselves— Why did the Kaiser discuss the war six months before war started? Why did Greece break faith with Serbia? Why did Fort Rupel surrender without firing a shot? Why did Bulgaria go in with Germany? Demetra Vaka, a woman inspired with love of country, and an undaunted determination to know the truth, crossed battle-torn Europe to obtain these facts. And her story “In The Heart Of German Intrigue” gives in detail her attempt to unite a divided country and save a king from disgrace. Colliers Advertisement for In the Heart of German Intrigue

4.1. THE POLITICS OF TRAVEL LITERATURE AND LITERARY JOURNALISM In his book The New Journalism (1975), Tom Wolfe astutely observes that the profession of writing for newspapers or magazines has been presented as, at best, a prelude or apprenticeship in the literary procession—“a motel you checked into overnight on the road to the final triumph [the novel]” (“Introduction”). What Wolfe’s ironic use of metaphor reveals is that the “dailiness” of journalism has often worried those with 135

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pretensions to the “higher” forms of art, whether authors or critics. Indeed, despite the recent efforts by theorists and philosophers to move beyond the barriers between fiction and non-fiction, most critics and readers seem to still respect them and hold that journalism simply does not meet the criteria of the “literary”— whatever these may be. What forms the premise of their argument is that journalism is dismissed because of its ephemerality and its “local” interest (Frus 1).1 Furthermore, if “fiction” is used to denote “literary prose,” then journalism cannot obviously qualify as such by nature of its pledge to reporting and factuality as well as its pragmatic function, which is to provide information. If to this elitist hierarchy—valorizing fiction’s imaginative freedom and creativity over journalism’s discursiveness and “objectivity”—a third genre is added—that of travel literature—an uneasy triangle is formed. Indeed, despite the surge of interest in travel writing as a result of the critical study of colonial discourse, “travel literature” was until recently used to refer to texts considered “subliterary,” of mainly archival use for narrative history, or just boring. As Peter Hulme has accurately observed, up until World War II travel writing was not usually seen as the basis of a literary career—with the only exceptions of Lord Byron and Alec Waugh (Hulme and Youngs, eds. 89). Despite the absence within the academy of a tradition of critical attention to the juncture between journalism and travel writing, a body of interdisciplinary criticism has recently emerged as a key theme for the humanities and social sciences. Hence, such academic disciplines as literary studies, history, geography, and anthropology have overcome their reluctance to attend to travel writing and journalism as broad, ever-shifting and intersecting genres, with complex histories that have yet to be studied. Furthermore, considering that personal reportage and sociopolitical and cultural analysis have been important components of Despite the debate on the “unliterariness” of journalism, it must be noted that journalism exposed writers to a vast range of experience that formed the core of their greatest imaginative works. On this, see Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 1

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travel writing since its earliest days, nowadays scholars are concentrating on the connections between travel writing, journalism and cultural history. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) was the first work of contemporary criticism to focus on travel writing as a body of work which offered important insight into the operation of colonial discourses. Orientalism became the single most influential paradigm in studies of travel writing and in colonial cross-cultural exchanges. Said’s work drew on a binary epistemology and an imaginary geography that divides the world into two unequal and hierarchically positioned parts: the West and the East, the Occident and the Orient, Christianity and Islam, rationalism and its absence, progress and stagnation.2 Subsequently, scholars working in the wake of Orientalism have paid close attention to the relationships between culture and power found in the settings, encounters and representations of travel literature. Contemporary scholars such as Ali Behdad, Charles Issawi, Billie Melman and Lisa Lowe have, nevertheless, contested and modified the Saidian paradigm arguing for the heterogeneity of travellers’ representations and the inflections of gender, class and nationality. As a result, scholars today are exploring the association between travel writing, the traveller’s authority, and the politics of colonialism and nationalism. Following this new direction studies on travel writing have taken, this chapter focuses on a pair of highly political works by Demetra Vaka Brown that began as travel narratives and had an interesting publication history. The first one, The Heart of the Balkans (1917), records Vaka Brown’s impressions of the countries in the Balkan Peninsula during a trip on which she accompanied her brother Manos, who was compiling an official report for the Sultan. Interestingly, although the book refers to events that took place in 1895, it was published in 1917—the year that the U.S. entered World War I declaring war on Germany, and the year that the Russian Revolution broke out. Hence, U.S. interest in European affairs was heightened at the time. The second book, In the Heart of German Intrigue, was published one year later, in 1918, An interesting work to consult on this is Rana Kabbani’s Europe’s Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule (London: Macmillan, 1986). 2

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and is a political testimony on Greece’s involvement in World War I that began as a series of articles commissioned by Colliers for which Vaka Brown interviewed numerous politicians, diplomats and public figures—such as Lloyd George, King Constantine of Greece, and Eleftherios Venizelos, who later became the Greek premier but who was then in exile. In the book, which synthesizes the author’s travel correspondences for Colliers, Vaka Brown presents herself as a player in international events, charged with carrying messages from heads of state and trying to broker a union between the Royalists and Venizelists in Greece. As my discussion of the two books will illustrate, despite the two works’ diverse historical contexts and generic categorization, The Heart of the Balkans and In the Heart of German Intrigue must be read contrapuntally because they illustrate the complicated nexus of Vaka Brown’s ideological engagements: most notably, the conflict between her nationalist allegiances and her compliance with the ideological expectations of her middle-class American audience. Due to Vaka Brown’s geo-political orientation, both The Heart of the Balkans and In the Heart of German Intrigue constitute “cultural narratives” with specific ideological functions in the construction of a modern Greek nation-state and national identity. More specifically, the texts under discussion illustrate multiple determinators behind narrative self-fashioning: mainly, the author’s assumption of an American point of view that is fabricated in such a way as to convincingly tie disparate histories and cultures—Greek and American—together within a modern Western(ized) frame. As Sara Mills has accurately observed in her book Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (1993), women’s travel writing has remained relatively unexplored as a topic, with the exception of feminist theorists and historians (4). However, and I agree with Mills on this, reading women’s travel narratives solely as proto-feminist works, with judicious quotation and selective reference to the authors’ lives, is an “easy option” (Mills 4). Instead, it is much more challenging to link such works within larger discursive structures—in the case of Vaka Brown, the two discourses of women’s travel writing and nationalism—and conceptualize them as cultural statements on the construction of national identities. Hence, this chapter serves two purposes: first, it explores the range of discursive practices brought into play in The Heart of the Balkans and In the Heart of German

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Intrigue; second, it illustrates how the “generic crossover” of the two books further complicates the clash of discourses evident in the two texts. The two books by Vaka Brown under discussion here constitute “crossover texts” between travel writing and literary journalism.3 This is not only due to their publication history and the fact that they began as travel instalments, but also because the story they tell is a story that breaks down the separation of journalism and fiction as separate narrative categories, complicating these neat distinctions and questioning their basis. Indeed, Vaka Brown’s writing moves beyond the classification of literature as a purely aesthetic category that deemphasizes politics or history, and toward a conception of journalism as a literary genre. Hence, it is imperative that we approach The Heart of the Balkans and In the Heart of German Intrigue by deconstructing the opposition between politics and aesthetics and considering the two books as records that allow insight into the nature of subjectivity, the positionality and situatedness of knowledge, the authority of the writer as traveller, the truth value of representations, and the difficulty of imagining, translating and representing the “Other.” In my analysis, I associate the “generic crossover” in The Heart of the Balkans and In the Heart of German Intrigue with the discourses at work in the two texts— women’s travel writing and nationalism. In my view, The Heart of the Balkans and In the Heart of German Intrigue cannot simply be read as autobiographic travel narratives and/or literary journalism, but as cultural statements emanating from a range of discourses in conflict. On the one hand, the two texts negotiate the conventions of travel writing that involve “a framework of largely masculine narratorial positions and descriptive patterns” (Mills 86). On the other hand, The Heart of the Balkans and In the Heart of German Intrigue exemplify a range of positions within the discourse of nationalism. Ultimately, the two texts under discussion in this Literary journalism has been defined as “a form of writing that combines the literary devices of fiction with the journalistic techniques of non-fiction. In short, the journalist applies the literary devices of fiction to an actual subject primarily to provide emotional and/or dramatic impact.” (Applegate xi). 3

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chapter are informed by a clash of discourses, neither one of which completely overrides the other. In discussing the textual constraints placed on women’s travel writing, Mills points out that there is a conceptual and textual grid to which all travel books—whether by men or women—essentially respond and that regulates the way travel writers portray members of other nations (73). Indeed, in The Heart of the Balkans, the autobiographical narrator’s travelling vision of Greece is romanticized and follows the conventions of nineteenth-century Romantic Philhellenism, whereas the geographical and cultural account of the rest of the Balkans is condescending in tone toward Serbia, Albania, Montenegro, and Bulgaria which are at the time considered non-Western. In this sense, Vaka Brown’s narrator alludes to a whole tradition of travel writing about the Balkans which serves as a framework for her descriptions and with which her audience is familiar. This close intertextual relation with other travel accounts is not the only convention of travel writing which surfaces in Vaka Brown’s works. The textual feature of the “narrative figure” is another convention the author negotiates. In her article entitled “Scratches on the Face of the Country; Or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” Mary Louise Pratt has argued that there are essentially two types of travel writing, each with their own narrative figure: on the one hand, there is the “manners and customs figure,” which is impersonal and where the narrator is absent; on the other hand, there is the “sentimental figure” where the narrator is foregrounded (123). It is my contention that Vaka Brown’s narrative figure in the two texts discussed here blurs the boundaries between the two categories of narrative figures identified by Pratt in the sense that, when she relates sights/sites, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical speaker functions as a “collective moving eye which registers sites” (Pratt 123), yet at the same time she interacts with the individuals in the countries visited—the indigenous inhabitants—in a manner that foregrounds human engagement and reveals concern rather than detachment. This stress on people from other countries as individuals is in marked contrast to the conventions of men’s travel writing; still, it does not overshadow the narrator’s engagement with patriarchal discourses. In other words, the narrative self Vaka Brown constructs in The Heart of the Balkans and In the Heart of

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German Intrigue both conforms to and transgresses the conventions of male travel texts. The second discourse at work in the two texts by Vaka Brown—that of nationalism—is complicated by the guise of the literary journalist that she assumes which does not manage to mask her underlying political bias as well as the construction of her attitudes and the criticism they lead to, despite the aesthetic strategy of the self-depreciating establishment journalist she adopts on the surface. More specifically, Vaka Brown’s narrative discourse in The Heart of the Balkans and In the Heart of German Intrigue reveals internal tensions inherent in the conflict between her militant modern Greek nationalism that aspires to irredentism and her political affiliation to modern American diplomatic policy. Clearly, a mixed agenda dominates Vaka Brown’s work and accounts for her contradictory political discourse—namely, the fact that she aligns herself with American diplomacy while at the same time being actively engaged in the cause of promoting Greek political and diplomatic interests. Ultimately, caught between the competing narratives of nation emerging from the modern Greek and American states, Vaka Brown predicates herself on the interstices between the Balkans and the United States, nationalist aspirations and Westernized critique, ethnic versus cosmopolitan identification. My discussion of Vaka Brown’s nationalist discourse is informed by an understanding of the concept of the nation not as an organic entity but as an “imagined community” (Anderson 6). Furthermore, my argument about the guise of the literary journalist that Vaka Brown assumes illustrates the internal tensions embedded in the autobiographical narrator’s nationalist discourse and underlines the often discordant political visions that it articulates. A major concern of this chapter is to demonstrate the ways in which Vaka Brown’s writing, by crossing over travel literature and literary journalism, sheds light on the processes through which the modern Greek nation state was imaginatively engineered at the turn of the century. In so doing, my argument underscores the ideological function of Vaka Brown’s texts as cultural narratives in the construction and naturalization of modern Greek national identity. Greek nationalism was articulated within the context of specific socio-political, economic and cultural developments. As

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Robert Shannan Peckham has argued, “the establishment of a Greek nation-state in the 1830s, carved out of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire and sanctioned through claims to the inheritance of ancient Hellas, raises broader issues about the relationship between geographical imaginations and the process of nation formation” (xi). Hence, in the following chapter sections I set out to explore the ideological context of landscape production within a nationalist discourse by underlining the role Vaka Brown’s texts play in the effort to establish Greece’s spatial and historical integrity. The theoretical argument of this chapter has been sharpened through an engagement with the growing body of theoretical orientations that have developed as a result of disciplinary crossings between literary studies, cultural history, geography and social sciences. Such cross-fertilization has contributed significantly to my understanding of the connections between landscape and national identity. As a result, I set out to elucidate the ways in which Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator uses the language and experience of space and travel to articulate her political approach to the process of “national imagining ” (Anderson 6). As I will conclude, the author’s geographical invention of Greece at the turn of the century is contextualized within the Greeks’ foundational role in western civilization and her construction of modern Greece constitutes an inextricable part of the historical processes that saw the terminal decline of the Ottoman Empire and the foundation of the modern Balkan nation states.

4.2. THE HEART OF THE BALKANS: THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN GREEK NATIONALISM AS A TERRITORIAL IDEOLOGY The Heart of the Balkans consists of nine travel sketches of the Balkan countries Demetra Vaka Brown visited at age eighteen. Out of those nine sketches/chapters, two are dedicated to Albania, “Wild Albania” and “Romantic Albania,” while another two focus on Greece, “The Sons of the Hellenes” and “Saloniki, The City of Histories.” There is also a chapter on Montenegro entitled “Through the Lands of the Black Mountaineers,” one on “Servia, the Undaunted,” one on “The Gypsies of the Balkans,” and one on Bulgaria which is tellingly entitled “The Prussia of the Balkans.”

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Following a tradition of travel writing on the Balkans that began with John Morritt’s account of his journey from London and across Europe to Constantinople in 1794, Vaka Brown is drawn to the Balkans because of their multiple marginality: standing at the overlapping edges of several different aspects or points of view, the Balkans in Vaka Brown’s literary imagination constitute the imaginary frontier between East and West, Christendom and Islam, Europe and Asia. One of the most influential factors which seem to have shaped the image of the Balkans in travel accounts of the region is its marginal position with respect to the “Orient.” Of note, the Balkan Peninsula was for a long time, between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries, largely a part of the Ottoman Empire. Hence, if the East has been seen (and represented) as “mysterious,” then the Balkan Peninsula is more so, as it has been seen as peripherally, or incompletely “Oriental”—“Oriental,” but not quite so. A second important aspect of the Balkans’ peripheral position involves its connection to the Classical World. The region and its people have been depicted by travel writers as the heirs to the ancient civilizations—Greek and Roman—upon which Western culture has come to rest. For example, for many visitors to the Balkans the secrets of the region are unlocked by the image of “Illyria”—the Roman name for the lands along the Eastern shore of the Adriatic—while for others there are profound continuities with Hellenic culture. Finally, the inhabitants of the area have been depicted as “peasant peoples,” and their representation has rested on notions of “folk” culture and associated with the virtues which are said to be embodied in a life shaped by tradition and closeness to Nature. In The Heart of the Balkans, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator effectively reproduces these conventions of travel writing, thus illustrating the western appropriation and reductive simplification of the Balkans. Nevertheless, the text’s discursive polyphony problematizes monolithic representations of the Balkans and reveals a specific ideological project underlying Vaka Brown’s narrative. The interplay of discourses in The Heart of the Balkans becomes obvious since the first pages of the book. Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator opens her account with the portrait of “Wild Albania,” focusing on the “serene and enchanting” image of Avlona, “framed by the blue Adriatic at her feet,” and resembling

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“a spoiled, handsome woman, who knew only the beautiful things in life, and refused to hear of distressing things that had taken place behind her back” (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 1). This ahistoric, atemporal and feminized description of Avlona reproduces the conventions of male travel writing. More specifically, Lord Byron was among the first to describe the Albanian lands in a series of Romantic images in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818). Emulating Byron’s Balkan settings, Vaka Brown’s narrator describes Albania as mountainous, enigmatic and beautiful. The canonical depiction of Albanian landscape, is, nevertheless, deceptive in terms of the travel writing tradition to which it alludes, because this first impression of a highly aesthetic, Romantic travel commentary is soon undermined by the narrator’s reference to the uprisings in Albania during which “villages had been burned, men had been killed” and women had been raped (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 1). Subsequently, the narrator specifies that what interests her personally is “the women of Albania” and “the opportunity to study the women of Montenegro, Servia, Rumania, and Bulgaria,” as the political situation in the Balkans “had been the milk, so to speak, on which [she] had been nourished, and [she] had had a little too much of it” (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 3–4). It is important to note that in this excerpt, as in others, the focal concern of the narrator’s statement is social, and she appears to have a vested interest in the female population of the Balkan countries. Indeed, throughout the chapter, the narrator’s emphasis is on the living conditions of people in Albania, especially women, with running commentary on such topics as people’s diet and clothing, housing arrangements, and marriage customs. As Pratt has observed, “manners-andcustoms” travel narratives focus more on landscape presentations and less on human interaction, and their organization is a strange, attenuated kind of narrative that does everything possible to minimize human presence (122–23). In the case of The Heart of the Balkans, although the narrative begins with a descriptive sequence of sights/sites in which the landscape is foregrounded and the narrator/traveler is presented as a collective moving eye that registers the sites, as soon as signs of human presence occur, the narrative focus shifts: the autobiographical narrator becomes greatly involved with people, has a historical view of things, and rejects her previous distanced, self-effaced stance.

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A case in point illustrating the conflicting discursive practices evident in The Heart of the Balkans is the chapter on Montenegro which, as the autobiographical narrator claims, “in spite of its geographical position, has nothing to do with Europe” (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 78). There, Vaka Brown’s speaker initially adopts a normalizing, generalizing voice that echoes essentialist literary conventions and paints one-dimensional portraits, such as the one on Montenegrin men: “The Montenegrin men, even when they are educated and speak French and Italian,— even when conversing on intellectual topics, —always give me an impression as if I were talking with wild animals, who might spring on me if they took a dislike to me” (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 63–4). The narrator’s scornful representation of the indigenous population of Montenegro as brutal and uncivilized is aligned with the stereotype of the Balkans as primitive and backward compared to the rest of the western world. The cultural condescension of the narrator toward Montenegrin people is also revealed when she relates her experience with Montenegrin women who see the narrator undressing as a spectacle: They all assembled to see me undress, and if we stayed more than one day, on the second night they invited all their outside friends to see me go through the ceremony. To them it was one of the most marvelous sights that they had ever witnessed, to see a woman take off her clothes and put on a night-gown. They would take up my garments, one by one, examine them, pass them from hand to hand, and then, laying them aside, take up my underclothing. And here I may say, for the benefit of those who may contemplate traveling through the Balkans, that underclothing of pongee is the best kind to have. It does not require ironing, and it is distasteful to certain minute Balkan inhabitants, which abound. (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 79–80)

The description of Montenegrin women constitutes an interesting example of conflicting patterns of discourse because of the reversal in roles that it illustrates. More specifically, the tables are reversed when the narrator/traveler momentarily becomes the sight observed and the indigenous population serves as the observer who inspects the sight as “Other.” Considering that the position of a spectator is empowering—since, by viewing the spectacle, the

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spectator contributes to the construction of its identity—we can argue that in the specific incident Vaka Brown’s narrator temporarily suspends the attitude of cultural superiority which she previously assumed and which is a trope in the canon of male travel writing. Nevertheless, even in their position as observers, Montenegrin women are codified and typified as savages who ignore the basic principles of hygiene. Hence, rather than assert their agency as observers which would undermine the normative discourse of canonical travel writing, the whole episode ultimately reinforces Montenegrin women’s cultural backwardness, rendering them once again objects of observation, interpretation and representation. Moreover, the note on which Vaka Brown’s narrator ends the whole incident re-introduces and affirms the discourse of the ethnographic “manners-and-customs” description. Ethnographic knowledge is central to many forms of travel writing and often takes the form of observations resulting from the account of the journey. Such is the case of the piece of advice the traveler/observer in Vaka Brown’s text offers, which testifies to her empiric knowledge and valorizes her experience and perspective. The constant shifts between the subject-centered, experiential discourse and the scientific, informational one Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator interchangeably employs are related to the author’s ideological orientation and nationalist politics. More specifically, what determines the degree of the narrator’s detachment from/attachment to the people observed as well as her attitude of cultural condescension toward specific Balkan countries—which recurs in the course of the narrative, but is expressed differently—is the narrator’s ideological commitment to the concepts of “national character” and “national community.” As Benedict Anderson has aptly noted, nations are “imagined communities,” since communities of people create and sustain narratives about the bases for their existence as distinct collectivities (6). Therefore, “national” identity/character is a deeply problematic “invented” category, founded on the discourse of the “other”—the alien. This logic of alterity becomes the means through which national borders are established, policed and breached. Considering Anderson’s definition of the nation as an imagined political community, it is important to note the kind of nationalist discourse Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator

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employs and her conceptualization of the “nation.” To this effect, an excerpt from the chapter on “Romantic Albania” is illuminating: [Albania] lacks the two great fundamentals which unite a people and make a nation of it—a common language and a common religion. Capable of resisting aggression and of fighting fiercely and stubbornly, the Albanians have never been able—in spite of their great pride in and love for their country—to put aside their family, their tribal, and their religious feuds, in order to form a homogeneous nation. (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 34)

In the excerpt quoted above, the narrator holds that national solidarity is guaranteed by two “fundamentals”: first, language, and second, religion. The narrator’s view is obviously reductionist and includes single-factor “objective” criteria—those of language and religion—for what constitutes a “nation.” Despite the fact that Vaka Brown’s definition of the “nation” ignores other objective criteria—such as those of ethnicity, geography etc.—as well as the subjective criteria of popular self-consciousness, it is, nevertheless, historically significant and specific to the time and region to which Vaka Brown’s narrative refers. As Robert Shannan Peckham has observed, “the notion that there are linguistic communities whose borders define the nation, and that languages are peculiar to particular places, landscapes and peoples, constitutes a set of ideas about culture and the environment which circulated in the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (5). Although writing at a later time than the one Peckham discusses, the discourse on the “nation” that Vaka Brown’s narrator employs in The Heart of the Balkans identifies linguistic affinity and religion as the prerequisites of a national community. The reason behind this anachronism is that, for Greeks, language was historically bound up with definitions of the nation. In the absence of political unity, language as a medium of culture characterized “Greekness” since the eighteenth century. Such Romantic concern with language as the expression of a distinct national character can further be explained by the wide geographical distribution of the Greeks in diasporic communities within the Russian Empire, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, that made language and religion the chief determinants of Greek national identity (Peckham 6). Thus, in grounding her definition of the “nation” on language and religion,

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Vaka Brown’s narrator stresses the notion of a shared “culture”— “a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating”—as a necessary precondition of national identification (Gellner 6). For Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator, the need to define and assert a modern Greek national identity is closely bound up with delineating Greece’s boundaries and demarcating the neighboring nations. Hence, modern Greek foreign policy at the time the book is published—especially in terms of the alliances and conflicts it involves—is very much echoed in the narrative of The Heart of the Balkans, more specifically in the chapters on Serbia and Bulgaria. In the case of the chapter on Serbia, which constitutes Greece’s ally at the time, the portrait of the country is condescending in tone yet positive, thus revealing the narrator’s view of Serbia as a friendly neighbor that does not pose a threat to Greek interests. More specifically, the narrator’s attitude of cultural superiority toward Serbians is mediated by the expression of sympathy toward the country and its inhabitants: Poor little Servia, hard pressed and tired, always preparing for the great struggle that was to come. No wonder her streets were filled with soldiers and officers. No wonder there was the severest conscription, and yet she alone was not dreaming of ascendancy over the other Balkan States, but only of commercial and educational civilization, to fit her to take her place as a European State. (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 123)

The positive overtones in Serbia’s portrait are illustrated by the narrator’s underlining education as a common value between Serbia, Europe, and, by extension, the rest of the western world. The narrator’s reinforcing a sense of shared cultural values and common commercial interests between Serbia and the West is politically significant as it is obvious from the discourse that she does not consider Serbia’s foreign policy a threat against Greek sovereignty. Subsequently, what follows the comment on Serbia not developing an expansionist strategy in the Balkans is a patronizing representation of Serbians as infantile, ape-like caricatures which is juxtaposed with a celebration of Greek intellect and religious faith: “A Servian may look ferocious or gaudy, according to localities, yet when one begins to talk with him one

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finds him a delightful child” (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 129); “The Greeks of the better classes [. . .] take their religion mentally, while the Slavs take theirs emotionally. Being still children in civilization, their God is not a part of their soul, but something grandiose, holy barbaric, and revengeful” (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 128). In order to understand the ideological framework of Vaka Brown’s representation of the Serbians as “emotional” and their comparison with Greeks in terms of their religious attitudes, one must take into consideration two things: on the one hand, the history of Greek-Serbian relations, and on the other hand the history and politics at the time when The Heart of the Balkans was published. Serbian-Greek relations have traditionally been friendly due to shared cultural values and historical circumstances. Primarily, the sense of affinity between the two nations has been reinforced by the strong presence of the Orthodox Christian church. Also, the Serbs and the Greeks alike have traditionally seen themselves as being heirs to the cultural heritage of the Byzantine Empire. These two facts explain the rationale behind Vaka Brown’s comparison of the two peoples on the grounds of their religious beliefs and values. In terms of their history, the Serbs were allies with the Byzantine Greeks in their fight against the Avars in the early 7th century, and Serbia formed part of the Byzantine Empire from the 7th to the 12th century. During the Balkan wars, in 1913, Serbia and Greece signed a defensive pact opposing Bulgaria’s expansionist goals, while in the First World War, which is the historical context for the publication of The Heart of the Balkans, the two countries remained in excellent diplomatic terms. As Dusan T. Batakovic has observed in his article entitled “Serbia and Greece in the First World War: An Overview,” the axis of the Greek-Serbian cooperation relied heavily on mutual understanding between the two countries’ premiers, Nikola Pašić and Eleftherios Venizelos. Feeling confident about the eventual victory of the Allied Forces, both politicians were fully committed to the Serbian-Greek strategic partnership as a main precondition for the long-term Balkan stability. Of note, in the period between 1916 and 1918, the Greek island of Corfu served as a refuge for members of the Serbian army that fled their homeland which was at the time occupied by the Austrians and Bulgarians. Considering this historical framework, the attitude of “sympathetic condescension” that Vaka Brown’s narrator assumes

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toward the Serbians in The Heart of the Balkans becomes meaningful as a manifestation of the author’s alignment with Greek foreign policy which is pro-Serbian at the time. The fact that modern Greek diplomatic history is reflected by Vaka Brown’s narrative stance, combined with the author’s use of a discourse that reverberates modern Greek nationalism, testifies to the text’s ideological function in the construction of a modern Greek nation-state and national identity, but also raises important questions as to the text’s appeal to a middle-class American audience. Publishing The Heart of the Balkans in the context of World War I which, as Eric Hobsbawm has stated, “mobilized nationalism” (91), it is not surprising that Vaka Brown’s narrator implicitly tries to identify with a “people” or “nation”—the emerging nation-state of Greece. However, what is interesting in the sense that it illustrates the “nation” as an ideological construct—is the way in which the narrative constructs the notion of modern Greek nationalism so that it appeals to a middle class American audience. The chapter on Bulgaria offers some important insight into the ways in which Vaka Brown’s discursive practices ultimately resolve the tension between the text’s ideological function and the author’s conflicting allegiances. In contrast to the rest of the chapters where politics remain an under-text, in the case of the chapter on Bulgaria, the narrative discourse is blatantly political: “There was but one desire in [the Bulgarians’] hearts: to fight the Serbs, to fight the Greeks, and to get back the lands they had once before wrested from them” (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 190). The narrator’s comment on Bulgarian imperialism is historically important since in the period between the 1890s and early 1900s territorial disputes between Greece and Bulgaria persisted and led to the countries’ involvement in two wars on opposite camps. Firstly, a dispute over the spoils of the First Balkan War was the cause of the Second Balkan War, when Bulgaria claimed that Serbia occupied more of Macedonia and Thessaloniki than it was stipulated in the prewar agreement. In June 1913, Bulgarian armies attacked Serbian forces in Macedonia and another army advanced into Thessaloniki. Subsequently, Serbian and Greek forces pushed the Bulgarians back into Bulgaria in July. Secondly, Bulgaria’s rivalry with Serbia and Greece determined its participation in World War I. Bulgaria had avoided involvement in the war up until 1915, when it joined

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the Central Powers against Serbia and Greece. Bulgaria’s motivation behind the alliance with the Central Powers was the hope that a victory by the Central Powers would restore Greater Bulgaria. The diplomatic history of Greco-Bulgarian relations up to World War I—which is marked by intense mutual hostility and military conflict—is underlying the suggestive comments made by Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator on Bulgarian “national character”: Bulgaria is, indeed, a remarkable country in many respects. Determined to be the dominant race in the Balkans, under Ferdinand it has neglected no possible means to this end. They are to the rest of the Balkans what Germany is to the rest of Europe. Industrious to the point of stupefaction, utterly subordinating the individual to the State, capable of complete obedience, they become an easy prey to the schemes of the most unscrupulous of rulers. A Bulgarian can only stop working by getting drunk. That is why one sees more drunkenness in Bulgaria than anywhere else in the Balkans. It is the sole means of relaxation. (Vaka Brown, The Heart of the Balkans 194–95)

As the excerpt reveals, Vaka Brown’s portrait of Bulgarians is essentialist and highly critical: despite her superficial admiration of Bulgarian industriousness, the autobiographical narrator castigates the fact that Bulgarian people are easily manipulated by “unscrupulous rulers” because they lack critical thinking. Such an observation, especially since it is addressed to an educated readership—as was the audience of Vaka Brown’s publisher, Houghton and Mifflin—is powerful as an attitude determinant. Hence, the narrator’s expression of antipathy toward Bulgarians— although it is motivated by the territorial antagonism between Greece and Bulgaria—is grounded on a cultural discourse that appeals to her American readers who would probably overlook the narrator’s political bias against Bulgarians, masked as it is behind an educated and critical perspective. Furthermore, the narrator’s comment on alcoholism in Bulgaria is extremely important considering the time’s historical context. As mentioned earlier, The Heart of the Balkans was published in 1917, the year when, under substantial pressure from the temperance movement, the United

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States Senate proposed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on December 18th. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified on January 16th, 1919 and effected on January 16th, 1920 and marked the beginning of the Prohibition Era in the United States, during which the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol for consumption were banned nationally. Vaka Brown’s observation that alcoholism constitutes a serious social problem in Bulgaria, although it is generalizing and essentialist, is strong enough to negatively predispose Vaka Brown’s middle-class American audience toward Bulgarians, especially considering how sensitive the subject of alcoholism in 1920s America is. As Anthony D. Smith has argued, the cultural importance of the “nation,” and hence of nationalism, is profound because of its ability to inspire and resonate among “the people” in ways that only religions had previously been able to do (2). Smith’s observation suggests the need to pay particular attention to the role of symbolic elements in the language and ideology of nationalism (Smith 3) as well as to the multilayered aspects of the discourse of the “nation.” In the case of The Heart of the Balkans, Vaka Brown’s discursive polyphony resolves the tension between the text’s ideological function in the construction of a modern Greek nationstate and national identity and the author’s conflicting allegiances— on the one hand, to Greek nationalism, and on the other to U.S. interest in the Balkans. Hence, at the same time that the text suggests the autobiographical narrator’s consciousness of belonging to the Greek nation and her furthering the goals of Greek nationalist ideology, it also caters to the interests and expectations of her American audience. Thus, carefully disguised as a conventional travel narrative, The Heart of the Balkans ultimately functions as an ideological statement on Vaka Brown striking a balance between conflicting politico-ideological identities and multiple allegiances.

4.3. IN THE HEART OF GERMAN INTRIGUE: MODERN GREEK IRREDENTISM AND AMERICAN DIPLOMATIC POLICY “In the autumn of 1916 Mrs. Kenneth Brown (who is of Greek birth although she has lived in America since she was seventeen)

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set out for Greece, with her husband, ‘to learn the truth.’ What she learned makes an exceedingly interesting book. She talked with prominent men and women on ‘both sides’ in Greece, made strange discoveries, traced plausible untruths” (“German Intrigue”). The New York Times review of Demetra Vaka Brown’s In the Heart of German Intrigue (1918) celebrates the book as a fine example of investigative journalism: accurate, impartial, well researched, exciting, suspenseful. In the Heart of German Intrigue— which was published by Houghton and Mifflin in the U.S. and by Bodley Head in the U.K. under the title Constantine, King & Traitor—synthesizes in the form of a personal narrative the political commentaries Vaka Brown had contributed to Colliers on the topic of Greece’s involvement in World War I. For these commissioned articles the author interviewed the main protagonists, among them Britain’s Prime Minister Lloyd George, King Constantine of Greece, and Eleftherios Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister who was then in exile having been forced to resignation by the King. In the period between 1910 and 1920, Vaka Brown is already established as an authority on the politics and culture of the Orient. She is lionized as a political commentator of the condition in the Ottoman Empire—mainly, the prospect of its division among the European powers—and a social commentator of life in the Orient—domestic and public. In other words, she is a modern, educated, professional woman who is fully aware of the gravity of events surrounding her trip to Greece, and not the young, inexperienced girl, which is the persona she projects in The Heart of the Balkans. An American journal has commissioned the trip itself after the author’s pressuring demands that she be sent to the Balkans to report on Greece’s potential involvement in the First World War and the political condition resulting therein.4 Venizelos Whereas Greece’s involvement in the Balkan Wars was not debatable because Greece had fought for Macedonian territory for over thirty years and the Balkan League alliance clearly was not threatened by Turkey, Greeks were divided about their involvement in World War I. Especially since Bulgaria and Turkey joined the Central Powers, the potential territorial gains or losses became a topic of heated political debates since it was certain that the end of the war would bring major border changes. On 4

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and his government, supported by foreign troops, have occupied Thessaloniki, and Greece is torn in two: the Venizelists, supporting the country’s involvement in the War on the side of the Allies, and the Royalists, advocating Germanophile neutrality. Interestingly, although initially Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator admits to being a Royalist, having complete faith in the King’s decisions and policy, gradually she becomes an ardent Venizelist, disappointed in the King’s duplicitous nature, and fully supportive of Venizelos’ efforts to enter Greece into the final stages of the war on the side of the Entente. The reversal in Vaka Brown’s narrative stance, however contradictory it may seem, is effected by the narrator’s use of specific discursive practices—most notably, her rhetoric on race and assimilation, framed within the discourse of literary journalism. In this chapter section, I discuss In the Heart of German Intrigue, paying particular attention to the modalities and contradictions in Vaka Brown’s discursive practices of “dual citizenship.” As I argue, the autobiographical narrator uses the discourse on race to legitimize her interest in and insight into Greek politics, thus ensuring the text’s authentication, but she grounds her investigative journalism on a purely American assimilationist discourse, hence legitimizing her narrative voice within mainstream American culture. The historical context of In the Heart of German Intrigue involves one of the most turbulent periods in modern Greek history known as “The National Schism” or “The Great Division”—a period that involved the conflict between King Constantine I and Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos over the decision to commit Greece to war. The disagreement between the two men and the subsequent dismissal of Venizelos by the King resulted in Greece’s division in two radically opposed political camps and Venizelos’ controversial establishment of an the one hand, in the case of a victory of the Central Powers, Bulgaria would claim land in Macedonia and Thrace at the expense of Greece. On the other hand, if the Allies won, Bulgaria and especially Turkey would lose territory which would greatly benefit Greece’s irredentist national policy.

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alternative Greek government in Northern Greece. More specifically, when Vaka Brown arrived in Greece in 1916, the country was under naval blockade by the Allies in retaliation for the armed confrontation between Greek reservists and French marines. The blockade lasted 106 days in total, during which time no goods were allowed to enter or leave Greek mainland ports that were under the control of the Athens Royalist government. Hence, the atmosphere that In the Heart of German Intrigue depicts reverberates hate between the country’s two foremost political formations—the Venizelist Liberals and the Royalists—both viewing each other’s actions as treasonous. At the time of Vaka Brown’s arrival in Greece, the U.S. had not yet entered the war: it was on April 2nd, 1917 that Woodrow Wilson asked the Congress to declare war on Germany following unrestricted submarine warfare introduced by the Germans and the sinking of the “Lusitania,” a British cruise/transport ship bound for Britain from New York. Considering the neutrality the U.S. was trying to maintain at the time, it is not surprising that the opening discourse of In the Heart of German Intrigue introduces the author and narrator as an American “in thought, in spirit and in speech,” who is interested in Balkan politics because of the “mere accident of birth” and who generalizes on the lessons to be drawn from World War I: This World War has taught great lessons to all of us, has dissipated some of our false creeds, and has revealed to us verities of which we were oblivious. The most significant lesson it has taught me is that the love of race is the deepest feeling rooted in our being. I came to America almost a child; for what is a seventeenyear-old girl but a child? To America I came, not as many come, lured by the dream of making money and bettering myself in the world, but because America to me was a land where there was liberty of thought and liberty of action. [. . .] I gradually became an American in thought and in spirit as well as in speech. I did not care to go with people of my own race, and my mother tongue grew rusty for want of use. Then I married an American, and began to have a career—one that I owed absolutely to my American husband, to American encouragement, and to the American public.

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A BRIDGE OVER THE BALKANS Years passed, and I considered myself more American even than those who were born here, since they owed their nationality to the mere accident of birth, while I had acquired mine by choice and principle. One thing only remained to me of my own accident of birth: an interest in all that pertained to the Balkan Peninsula. (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 1, 2)

Although Vaka Brown’s autobiographical speaker opens the narrative with the confession that the most important lesson World War I has taught her is the powerful nature of the love for one’s race, the comment is not further elaborated and the emphasis of the opening sequence falls on her identification as an “American.” Such identification is substantiated by specific arguments: her immigration at a young age, her conscious decision to immigrate based on America’s promise of “liberty,” her deep understanding of American culture and commitment to American ideals, her socialization and marriage, and her professional development. Not surprisingly, in an age of racial definitions of U.S. citizenship, Vaka Brown foregrounds her “dual citizenship”—being born in one country but moving by choice to another—to her racial background. She also invokes “America” as an ideal: the land of liberty of thought and action. Vaka Brown’s identification as an “American” is ideologically significant, both in terms of the audience awareness that it illustrates, but also because of the fact that it suggests the text’s discursive practices. More specifically, it must have been particularly troubling for Vaka Brown to assert her identity as an American in the opening pages of a book on Greek politics, and at the same time to legitimize her narrative voice as an expert on Greek history and culture who has such leverage that she is in a position to intervene in matters of national importance and security. The significance of Vaka Brown’s narrative identification lies in the fact that assimilation, a “full American identity, even if claimed unilaterally by declaration of will rather than by American birth or by easy acceptance from old-stock Americans,” legitimizes Vaka Brown’s narrative voice and guarantees her authorial status in the eyes of her mainstream American audience (Sollors, Ethnic Modernism 80). At the same time though, the author’s racial background and the realization brought about by the war that the love for one’s race constitutes a powerful motive to investigate

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matters thoroughly authorizes her political commentary as an incontestable account of Greece’s involvement in World War I. In the first chapter of In the Heart of German Intrigue, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator elaborates on the motivation behind writing the book and describes her undertaking as follows: “[. . .] my plan [was] to go to Greece” in order to “put my country before the world in its true light” (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 7, 8). The narrator describes her plan naively as an idea to “bring together Constantine and Venizelos and in that way save Greece” (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 9). She also states that her hope as she sets out on her journey is to “bring about a reconciliation between Venizelos and the King” and straighten matters out so that Greece comes out with the Allies (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 11). Although the narrator admits that her interest in the neutral attitude of Greece during the break out of World War I was controlled, she confesses that a change took place in her and she “ceased to be academic” and appraise the “events of Greece coolly with [her] brain,” when the Liberal leader, Mr. Venizelos, fell in February 1915, causing her heart to take “the foremost place” (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 3). The narrator’s discourse on the debate between her brain and her heart is clearly emotional and reveals a personal investment in Greek politics, her political bias, as well as the construction of her attitudes and the criticism they lead to. Such discourse could undermine her coverage of events from a selfaware viewpoint and contradict the illusion of “objectivity” she wishes to maintain. Nevertheless, the subsequent comments on her reaction to Greece calling her troops in response to the challenge of Bulgaria’s mobilization reinstate her as an “establishment journalist” in the eyes of her American audience: “I was glad to return to my normal American state of mind, and to view things down there impersonally as had been my wont” (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 3, 4). Despite the autobiographical narrator’s claim that In the Heart of German Intrigue is an attempt to “view things impersonally,” one of the prevailing discourses in the text is that of investigative journalism which, by definition, defies an impersonal approach to news stories. According to David Spark in his book Investigative Reporting: A Study in Techniques, investigative journalism is not impartially balanced between allegation and reply: it is not, and

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cannot be, “objective” since it expresses a judgement based on the facts unearthed (2). Considering that In the Heart of German Intrigue concludes with the autobiographical narrator’s opinion on the reason’s behind King Constantine’s unwillingness to side with the Allies and her taking a stance on Venizelos’ conflict with the King, it is hard to overlook the discourse of investigative reporting at operation in the text. As to the techniques employed to “unearth the facts” and form an opinion, they are traditional journalistic techniques and include consultation of diverse sources, crossexamination, and the use of photographs. Spark defines investigative reporting as the attempt to seek and gather facts which someone wants suppressed. As a result, the sources consulted by an investigative reporter are not just the obvious informants who will be uncontroversial, but also the less obvious (Spark 6). Illustrating her role as an investigative reporter, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator states that she did not only wish to document what the Royalists and the Venizelists had to say, but also to interview simple people and hear their opinion: “[. . .] during the five weeks that we were in Athens I made a point of talking not only with the political men, but also with all sorts of people, from the little lustros in the streets up—and your Athenian bootblack discusses politics as glibly as an American bootblack would talk about baseball” (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 211). Spark sees the willingness to listen to non-spokesmen as an essential trait of investigative reporters. Also, as Bruce Page has written, sources of news may be corrupt, so an investigative reporter must be willing to consult various informants and not function simply as a conduit for material shaped by others (qtd. in Spark 3). In Vaka Brown’s case, the diversity of sources consulted accentuates the text’s emphasis on accuracy and unembroidered facts. Furthermore, it foregrounds the role of the investigative reporter who uses the tool of “testimonial interview” as a key to knowledge. In the course of the narrative, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator often engages in meta-narrative, commenting on the investigative reporting techniques she uses and stressing her critical approach to reporting. A case in point is the following excerpt: “To have taken the word of either side against the other would have been partial, and we were striving our utmost to be fair. Whenever there was a discrepancy between the statements of the two sides,

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we always sought for further proofs” (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 84). Cross-examination lies at the heart of the narrative and constitutes an important aspect of the discourse of investigative reporting. This is how Vaka Brown’s narrator describes the time that they spent in Athens conducting the investigation: During the five and a half weeks of our first stay in Athens we worked eight and sometimes ten hours a day. Political men of all hues of opinion and of all stations would often come and stay until midnight talking over the situation from their divers [sic] points of view, until every incident, every bit of by-play became as familiar to us as the faces of actors in a drama. Nor did we limit ourselves to the Greeks; every foreigner— minister, attaché, business or newspaper man—had his side to give, his opinions to unfold. (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 175–76)

As the excerpt reveals, Vaka Brown’s method involved securing testimony and first-hand descriptions of the events from diverse sources that allowed her to get at a “truth” obscured by politics and diplomacy. In addition to cross-examination, the narrative’s claim to veracity and objectivity is also reinforced by the use of photographs and reproduced documents. Commenting on the significance of photographs in reporting, Gavin Mac Fadyen has noted that they constitute a critical element of an investigative report (de Burgh, ed. 139). In the Heart of German Intrigue includes numerous pictures of the people interviewed, location shots of the author at the eastern front, and reproduced historical documents— such as the Kenneth Browns’ travel papers, their visas, government papers authorizing their visit, etc.—that are integral to the text for two reasons: first, because they reinforce a sense of “immediacy” that is an essential trait of reporting; second, because they suggest that there is a “reality” captured in the text. Ultimately, Vaka Brown’s assumption of an objective viewpoint is a correlative of the specific techniques she uses—observation of events, enquiry of sources, and realistic photography. The sense of accuracy and objectivity, which is extremely important in a piece of investigative journalism because it guarantees the reporter a following and establishes his/her status as an expert and a professional, is further reinforced in the text by the

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matter-of-fact tone Vaka Brown’s narrator adopts. This tone is realized by the narrator’s shifting identification. More specifically, throughout the first chapter of the book which is extremely important in setting the tone of the narrative, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator oscillates between speaking as “a Greek and nothing but a Greek,” and confessing that she considers the choice of a place to live more important than the place of birth (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 4). What further complicates her identification is the way she appears in the eyes of those she encounters on her journey to Greece: the narrator reports that common people see her as a Greek patriot and, thus, trust her to pursue the truth (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 13), while King Constantine sees her and her husband as being on an official mission from the American government (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 15). Moreover, the narrator is relieved that in the course of their journey to Greece her American name allows her the benefit of omniscience as she is able to listen to what the French, the British, the Italian, the Serbian and the Russian officers have to say against Greece (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 17), but admits that their insults become unbearable when they “begin insulting Greece’s ancient history” (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 20). The constant shifts and contradictions in Vaka Brown’s narrative identification make it impossible to discuss the narrator in terms of static or fixed identity concepts and specify her allegiances/alliances, but are meaningful in the context of the narrative’s ideological function and necessitated by audience awareness and generic hybridization. More specifically, In the Heart of German Intrigue functions as a political commentary, a piece of investigative journalism, a travel narrative and an autobiographical account all at the same time, thus blurring the boundaries among genres and defying categorization. As a result, the identity of Vaka Brown’s narrator is fashioned in such a way that it follows the conventions of multiple genres. Furthermore, the “generic crossover” evident in the text allows the author to cater to her American readers’ expectations for an objective and accurate account of political conflict and diplomatic manoeuvres in a remote country, but at the same time to “bring home” to America the atmosphere of World War I and raise the audience’s awareness of the War’s repercussions for U.S. citizens, too.

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In addressing her American audience as an “American” who prioritizes her place of residence over her place of birth, Vaka Brown illustrates what Werner Sollors has termed “the widely shared public bias against hereditary privilege” which is expressed by means of the emphasis on “achieved” rather than “ascribed identity” (Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 37). Moreover, by identifying as a “republican in principle” (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 136), the autobiographical narrator claims republican citizenship which is based on “volitional allegiance” (Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 151). Such identification does not of course obscure the narrative’s ethnic discourse, in which ethnicity functions as a construct evocative of blood as exemplified by the discussion of the autobiographical narrator’s race in terms of the “the blood” that “flow[s] in her veins” (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 4). Considering all of the above, it becomes obvious that Vaka Brown’s discourse on race and identity illustrates the process by which, as Sollors has argued, American identity takes the place of a relationship “in law,” while ethnicity fills the place of relationships “by blood,” thus setting up a conflict between “contractual and hereditary, self-made and ancestral” identifications (Beyond Ethnicity 151). Ultimately, although Vaka Brown’s feeling of filiopietism functions as a strong motive for her research, it is her pledging allegiance to the U.S. through “volitional consent” (Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 151) that essentially authorizes her journalistic discourse, hence legitimizing her narrative voice within mainstream American culture. The most illuminating episode that testifies to Vaka Brown’s pledging allegiance to the U.S. is the one in which the autobiographical narrator discusses the future of Greece and the country’s sovereignty with the Chief of the Hellenic Army General Staff and one of the leading Royalists, general Viktor Dousmanis. In the relevant excerpt, Dousmanis fervently supports Greece’s neutrality during the War and rejects the country’s alliance to the “Protecting Powers”—Britain, France, Italy, or the U.S. In response to his arguments, the narrator agrees that Greece needs to move away from the influence of the “Protecting Powers,” but contends that the only way the country can claim her territorial rights is by going into the War. Subsequently, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical speaker explicitly advocates American interventionism in Greece:

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A BRIDGE OVER THE BALKANS “I belong to your party in so far as I should like to eliminate the words ‘Protecting Powers’ from our vocabulary. They rob us of our self-esteem, and give the foreigner the right to intervene in our affairs.” [. . .] “But I am against your policy,” I continued “because I feel that if Greece had gone into this war, and helped with all her might, she could, for the first time, have made her rights felt. They could hardly have cheated her in the end. This is a world war, and every eye will be upon the men who will sit and confer at the end of it; and since I believe that ultimately America will have to come in, and since she has no interest in the partition of territory, she will be fairer to the small nations than the great European Powers.” (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 150–51)

Although the narrator’s suggestion that America, having no interest in the distribution of territories in the Balkans, will support Greece’s territorial claims undermines her previous point on Greece’s self-sovereignty, it must be understood as another instance when Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator carefully balances her “volitional allegiance” to the U.S. with her support of modern Greek irredentism.5 More specifically, the narrator’s argument reveals an effective discourse in operation that idealizes American “benevolent hegemony” as the pole star of American policy, hence promoting American military participation in Europe. In the autobiographical narrator’s view, America is seen as the guarantor of a new world order, promising political independence and territorial integrity to all nations equally, especially the small ones like Greece. In effect, Vaka Brown’s narrative discourse portrays America as a neutral peacekeeper, with nothing but the purest humanitarian motives, and overlooks (or obscures) the various interests (security, economic, or domestic political interests)

Greek irredentism was expressed as “I Megali Idea” [The Great Idea] and envisaged the eventual annexing to the Greek state of all lands that were formerly part of the Byzantine Empire. 5

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a foreign country usually has when intervening in the affairs of another country. The sensationalized war mongering discourse of In the Heart of German Intrigue is effectively targeted at Vaka Brown’s U.S. audience, appealing to their humanitarian spirit that ultimately propelled America into the war. More specifically, Vaka Brown is aware that at the time that she is conducting her investigation in Greece, the U.S. public opinion is divided into three groups: a proAllied, a pro-Central and a pro-Neutral group. The pro-Allied group formed the Lafayette Esquadrille, French Foreign Legion, while the Yanks joined Britain’s Army or French Foreign Legion as ambulance drivers, and many Americans organized relief organizations. Of note, in August 1915, General Leonard Wood opened a “military training camp” near Plattsburg NY, to which civilians paid their own way, bought their own supplies and received training in military techniques. As a result of this awareness, Vaka Brown’s discourse builds on the state of preparedness for war at which the U.S. finds itself at the time of the book’s composition. However paradoxical it may seem, at the same time that Vaka Brown’s discourse on American “benevolent hegemony” endorses American foreign policy during World War I, it also advocates modern Greek irredentism. As the book’s final section illustrates, on the one hand the narrator is fully aligned with Woodrow Wilson’s public rhetoric on the reasons behind the U.S. entering the War and echoes his idealization of World War I as “a war to end all wars,” and a “crusade to make the world safe for democracy.” What must be noted is that the last chapter of the book was written after the U.S. entered the War, asserting its military strength and moving to the center of the world stage as a world power. On the other hand, the arguments Vaka Brown’s autobiographical speaker provides to convince Americans to give Greece “a fair deal” mask an irredentist rhetoric so as to justify and legitimize Greece’s claims internationally: The Greek people have been starved because their friends blockaded them for six whole months and did not allow them to replenish their stores. They have starved because the harvest of Thessaly—their harvest—was first left in the power of a pro-German King (who delivered half of it to Bulgaria), and

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A BRIDGE OVER THE BALKANS subsequently was requisitioned for the Allied Army in Salonica. They have starved because less than a dozen of their own ships were left them to provision themselves with, the rest of their large merchant fleet being requisitioned by the Allies. Let America remember that she went into the war late, after many mistakes had been committed, and let her participation be signalized by repairing one of the earliest and most grieving errors of the Entente. All that is needed is bread, equipment, and friendliness. Greece has not received a fair deal [. . .] [. . .] Greece is not only the last stronghold of the Allies in the Balkans, she is the key to the Balkans, and her maritime position in the Mediterranean renders her of the utmost importance both to Germany and to the Allies. America is influenced by none of the reasons which caused the others to cripple Greece: it is to our interest, as well as to others, to do them justice. We have gone into this war from no other motive than to beat Germany and make democracy safe for our children and for the world. Then let us help every one of our allies, as if we were one front, one nation. For our own sake, for democracy’s sake, for God’s sake, let us help Greece. Let us put her flag among the Allied flags; let us share our wheat with her; let us replenish her stores of ammunition; and above all, let us put confidence into the hearts of her people and show them that we consider them one with us, and their chief our friend and not our pawn. In short, let us commit no more criminal blunders; let us beat Germany; let us win the war! (Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 376–78)

A cursory examination of the book’s closing discourse would dismiss it as an example of sentimentalized rhetoric that employs hackneyed tropes, such as the use of imperatives to highlight urgency, repetition to stress a desired goal, and appeal to emotion and the sense of justice to stir the audience. Nevertheless, Vaka Brown’s plea to America to help Greece—concealed as it is under the humanitarian discourse of offering Greece “bread, equipment and friendliness,” helping her “replenish her stores of ammunition,” putting “confidence into the hearts of her people,” and saving them from starvation—serves a higher strategic goal. As

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Vaka Brown’s narrator reminds her audience, the U.S. joined the Allies “late,” “after many mistakes had been committed.” The narrator suggests that one of the mistakes committed has been the injustice done against Greece, hence she tries to convince her American audience that the U.S. must use its power and leverage to give Greece a “fair deal.” However, nowhere in the text does it become obvious what the “most grieving error of the Entente” has been and Vaka Brown’s narrator does not specify what the U.S. must do—beyond sharing its wheat with Greece—in order to atone for the mistakes committed by the Entente. In my view, such omission is not accidental; rather, it disguises the discourse of the “Great Idea” [Megali Idea] of which Vaka Brown has become an advocate following her stepping on the side of Venizelos. The “Great Idea” was an irredentist concept of Greek nationalism that expressed the goal of establishing a Greek state that would encompass all ethnic Greeks. The “Great Idea” concept that is underlying Vaka Brown’s closing discourse became extremely important prior to World War I as the Ottoman Empire was in decline and the European powers engaged in a power struggle to safeguard their military, strategic and commercial interests in the Ottoman domains. For Greeks, the “Great Idea” suggested the goal of reviving the Byzantine Empire by establishing a Greek state which would encompass the former Byzantine lands from the Ionian Sea to Asia Minor and the Black Sea to the east, from Thrace, Macedonia and Epirus to the north, and from Crete and Cyprus to the south. Importantly, a major proponent of the “Great Idea” was Venizelos, under whose leadership Greek territory was expanded in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, when southern Epirus, Crete, and southern Macedonia were attached to Greece. The author’s fascination with the “Great Idea” discourse is suggested by three references in the closing chapter of the book: first, by the figurative reference to the Allies’ “crippling” Greece; second, by the suggested territorial aggrandizement of Greece which is evoked by the image of the country’s flag waving among the Allied flags; third, by the assertion of Greece’s status as a friend, and not a pawn, of super powers such as the U.S. Obviously, Vaka Brown is actively engaged in the cause of promoting Greek political and diplomatic interests to her American audience. To do that, it is necessary for her narrator to positively

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predispose the American reading public toward the vision of a Greece that can stand on an equal basis with Western countries— mainly, her European allies and the U.S. The author’s intimate knowledge of the power structures underlying the field of the press has sensitized her to the fact that, in order to make her cause sympathetic to her public, she needs to present Greece as an indispensable ally on the side of American interests in the East. For this reason, in the book’s last chapter Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrator makes two important points: first, she equates helping Greece with beating Germany and winning the war; second, she reminds her audience of Greece’s strategic geographical position as “the key to the Balkans” and the Mediterranean. Interestingly, at the same time that the geographic perception of Greece as occupying a strategic frontier region appeals to Vaka Brown’s American audience, it also implicitly supports Greece’s irredentist ambitions which are partly grounded upon a conviction of the nation’s mediating role among the West, the Balkans and the East. Breaking down the boundaries among travel literature, investigative journalism, political exposé, historical as well as autobiographical account, In the Heart of German Intrigue ultimately functions as a “cultural narrative” with specific ideological functions in the construction of a modern Greek nation-state and national identity. Furthermore, the autobiographical narrator’s identification of “double citizenship” illustrates multiple determinators behind narrative self-fashioning: mainly, the author’s assumption of an American point of view that is fabricated in such a way as to appeal to her middle-class American audience by convincingly tying together disparate histories and cultures—Greek and American—within a modern Western(ized) frame. The significance of Vaka Brown’s narrative identification lies in the way in which the autobiographical narrator carefully balances her “volitional allegiance” to the U.S. with her support of modern Greek irredentism. Ultimately, at the same time that the narrator’s identifiable American identity legitimizes Vaka Brown’s narrative voice and guarantees her authorial status in the eyes of her mainstream American audience, the author’s ethnic background authorizes her political commentary as an incontestable account of Greece’s involvement in World War I.

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Demetra Vaka Brown and Kenneth Brown researching In the Heart of German Intrigue Papers of Kenneth Brown, Accession #9732-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

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Demetra Vaka Brown with Greek politicians while researching In the Heart of German Intrigue Papers of Kenneth Brown, Accession #9732-a, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

EPILOGUE Saloniki cannot now be wearing her sleepy expression. Awakened from her historic past, she has become the vital point of the present; for it is also there that the Cretan, Eleutherios Venizelos,—great Greek patriot, or traitor to his King,—presides over his provisional government, while still the Vardar flows, the Aegean never angrily laps the shores, and Olympus and Ossa look down upon the modern hosts as imperturbably as they gazed upon Xerxes when he came to invade Greece. Vaka Brown, In the Heart of German Intrigue 247, 248

As Scott Barbour notes in his “Foreword” to American Modernism (2000), the study of literature has often focused on individual works, with the aim of uncovering their themes, stylistic conventions, and historical relevance (9). Barbour also acknowledges that, in addition to studying a specific work by a single author, it is equally enlightening to examine multiple works by the same author not only to identify similarities and differences among texts, but also to trace the author’s development as an artist (9). Furthermore, I agree with the critic’s comment that, while the study of individual works and authors is instructive, literary research today is moving in another, equally promising, direction: that of examining groups of authors who have shared certain cultural or historical experiences (9). Such a direction, Barbour holds, “adds a further richness to the study of literature” (9). The contribution of this synthetic trend to contemporary literary studies is that it contextualizes the works of certain authors within wider traditions—traditions shaped by historical events as well as social, political, economic, and cultural circumstances. Therefore, by focusing on literary movements rather than on the literary production of an individual author, scholars achieve a greater appreciation of the influence exerted by the complex matrix 169

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of social, economic, political, aesthetic, and cultural forces and ideas that underlie the literature of any one era. Additionally, discussions that examine groups of authors highlight literary trends across time (Barbour 10). In my view, such discussions subsequently illustrate literary production more as a process of evolution and less as a history of distinct and independent literary movements. The works of Demetra Vaka Brown discussed in this book specifically address questions of space, geography, and identity. My aim in this study has been to examine these texts for the different theories of human-place relations that are inherent in their narrative discourses. More specifically, I argue that the development in spatial representation that the author’s works illustrate raises an important set of critical questions related to the concept of cultural identity and the process of self-identification. Vaka Brown’s spatial poetics also enquire into the socio-political stakes involved in the formation of alternative identity positions and the intriguing relationship between place and self. This is because the events in which Vaka Brown was involved—such as the Balkan and First World Wars, the setting of the border between Greece and the Balkan countries, the Eastern question, the Young Turks Revolution of 1908—as well as specific aspects of the history of the formation of the Greek, Balkan and Turkish modern nations have not only had an impact on Vaka Brown’s authorial choices, but also affected the politics and poetics of the female selfidentity she constructed and projected through her writing. Hence, one of the central concerns of this book has been to explore the generative role of place, culture and travel in the formation of Demetra Vaka Brow’s cultural identity. At the same time, my reading of Vaka Brown’s works elucidates the complexities and ambiguities of women travel writers’ imperial positionings at the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. In demonstrating those women’s role in the conceptualization and representation of the “Orient,” this book also traces the cultural history of the relationship between women and Orientalism at the turn of the century. On of my goals in this book has been to chart and interpret the representations of actual spaces in the works of Demetra Vaka Brown in order to draw the map of the modern textual landscapes delineated by the author’s texts. Perhaps the most important

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realization I have made is that “space” in the works of Vaka Brown alludes to more than a physical, geographical location or a topographic reality. Spatiality, as I have suggested throughout this study, is a charged figure for Vaka Brown; it is a powerful vehicle for diverse kinds of cultural experiences—both individual as well as collective. More specifically, the spatial figures in the works of Vaka Brown are strategically fashioned. The author realistically represents actual places—loci—which at the same time allude to figurative grounds and literary commonplaces—topoi. The latter, complex figures allow the multi-layered allusions buried within geographical landscapes to emerge from the texts discussed. In other words, the representations of actual places in the works of Vaka Brown are neither ornamental nor accidental. They are a way to reveal that the creation of space is intertwined with the creation of cultural identity. On the basis of this realization, this book constitutes an attempt to demarcate the boundaries and intersecting realms of topography and subjectivity as they appear in the particular narratives of Vaka Brown. Literary mapping is a distinctive form of spatial representation because it can be interpreted both as visual and/or textual. The landscapes of travel narratives are primarily visual as is suggested by the mimetic aspect of the spatial imagery evoked in literary texts. At the same time however, the landscapes represented in literature are written and read as texts. Hence, the act of reading spaces as texts and texts as spaces highlights the socio-cultural construction of space and the potential for multiple interpretations of landscape signification. By convention, realistic spatial representation is mimetic and assumes that space is “transparent.” Such an assumption implies that the world can be seen—and therefore be written about—as it really is, and that there can be unmediated access to the “truth” of the landscapes that a subject sees. However, as Henri Lefebvre has argued, the notion of spatial transparency is “an illusion” that tends toward homogeneity and denial of difference (28). My reading of Vaka Brown’s works builds on the multiple nuances of the author’s responses to spatiality and rejects the notion of transparency which oversimplifies the complexities, ambiguities, and ambivalences inherent in the author’s spatial representations. Instead, in mapping the politics of Vaka Brown’s literary locations, I un-cover and recover the modern space of her literature: a space that is multi-

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dimensional, fragmented, provisional, and often contradictory; a space that is not only geographic and geometric, but also invented, constructed, interpreted and re-presented. Vaka Brown’s landscape descriptions illustrate her preference for textual and metaphorical, rather than literal or realistic, mapping. The author’s inclination to figuratively construct space is paramount in her landscape descriptions. In fact, the subjectivity of her creative responses to spatial re-presentation is evident in her autobiographical narrators’ intentional manipulation of spatiotemporal dimensions. More specifically, Vaka Brown’s literary geography aligns spatio-geographical relations with social, political, and cultural realities. Ultimately, the author’s works lay claim to subjective authority over spatial representation by stressing the individuality of the autobiographical narrators’ responses to the geographical, social, political, and cultural landscapes in which they appear. The literary mappings of Vaka Brown involve figurative remappings of the material cartographies of Turkey, the Balkans and Greece because they challenge notions of transparent space and, subsequently, reject mimetic representations of geographical space(s). Consequently, the author’s modern geographies allow a more complex—often fragmented, contradictory, and ambiguous—notion of space to emerge. Rather than map space in an unproblematic way, Vaka Brown exposes its social, political, economic, and cultural production and contestation. Thus, because of the author’s multiple mapping strategies, spatiality is aligned with identity construction. Moreover, spatiality reflects subject positionality as invention and reveals the politics of location and the situatedness of knowledge. Within the texts themselves, subject positionality is complicated by the narrative strategy of multiple guises adopted by Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrators. More specifically, the ambivalence of the author’s autobiographical narrators’ subject positionality constitutes a strategic identification. Interestingly, the plurality of narrative voices devised by the author undermines fixed and stable identity concepts. In my view, placing Vaka Brown’s “narrative sway” in the context of space studies points to the fact that the author’s works’ structural and thematic polarization results from the personal oscillation that the author experiences in the course of her journeys. This oscillation is figuratively inscribed in

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Vaka Brown’s narrative voices. More specifically, for Vaka Brown, the plurality of her Greek, Byzantine, Ottoman, European, and American identifiers, as well as her status as a female, immigrant author writing for mainstream American publications determine her intentionally ambiguous narrative stance. Hence, the tensions inherent in the multiplicity of Vaka Brown’s narrative personae highlight her inclination toward spatialization of identity construction—a construction that remains ambivalent and processual rather than fixed in space or in time. Offering an overview of Vaka Brown’s life and career with analytical readings of her major works, this book’s focus has been on the role of the author as cultural agent: at once a white female, an immigrant of Greek descent, and a former citizen of Ottoman Turkey who worked as a journalist and novelist in the United States, writing in English and contributing her work to mainstream publications. In the examination of the works addressed in the course of the book, I have interpreted the identity and spatial politics of Vaka Brown, recovering the discursive techniques employed in her identification processes, and assessing the significance of her cultural agency in the context of the dominant themes and preoccupations of the Orientalist tradition. To this effect, my arguments have suggested that Vaka Brown must be examined as a case study which provides historically informed and cultural perspectives on the complexities and ambiguities of women’s imperial positionings at the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries in the East and West. Figuratively standing “on a bridge over the Balkans,” or “at a gate” between different worlds, Vaka Brown’s autobiographical narrators ultimately bear witness to the female experience of the Orient by resisting a hegemonic and homogeneously constructed patriarchal tradition of Orientalism and by revising conventional conceptualizations of Ottoman and modern Turkey as a unified and monolithic “Oriental topos.”

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