Thirty Years in the Harem: New Introduction by Irvin C. Schick 9781463210779

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CULTURES IN DIALOGUE

Series Editors: Teresa Heffernan and Reina Lewis SERIES ONE ORIENTALISM, OCCIDENTALISM, AND WOMEN'S WRITING

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Melek Hanoum, Thirty Years in the Harem (1872). New Introduction by Irvin Schick. Demetra Vaka Brown, Haremlik (1909). New Introduction by Yiorgos Kalogeras. Zeyneb Hanoum, Turkish Woman's European Impressions. Edited by Grace Ellison (1913). New Introduction by Reina Lewis. Halide Adivar Edib, Memoirs of Halide Edib (1926). New Introduction by Hiilya Adak. Selma Ekrem, Unveiled (1930). New Introduction by Carolyn Goffman. Musbah Haidar, Arabesque (1944). New Introduction by Elizabeth Frierson. Lady Annie Brassey, Sunshine and Storm in the East, or Cruises to Cyprus and Constantinople (1880). New Introduction by Scott A. Leonard. Hester Donaldson Jenkins, Behind Turkish Eattices: The Story of a Turkish Woman's Eife (1911). New Introduction by Carolyn Goffman. Anna Bowman Dodd, In the Valcwes of the Sultan (1903). New Introduction by Teresa Heffernan. Lucy M. Garnett, The Women of Turkey and their Folklore, 2 vols. (1890-91). Grace Ellison, An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem (1915). New Introduction by Reina Lewis and Teresa Heffernan. Ruth Frances Woodsmall, Moslem Women Enter a New World (1936). New Introduction by Nicole van Os. Demetra Vaka Brown, The Unveiled Eadies of Stamboul (1923). New Introduction by Yiorgos Kalogeras.

CULTURES I N D I A L O G U E SERIES O N E

Volume O n e

Thirty Years in the H a r e m

Melek Hanxm

Thirty Years in the Harem

MELEK

HANIM

( W I F E OF H . H . K I B R I Z L I - M E H E M E T - P A S H A )

GORGIAS PRESS 2005

First Gorgias Press Edition, 2005. The special contents of this edition are copyright © 2005 by Gorgias Press LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Gorgias Press LLC, New Jersey. This edition is a facsimile reprint of the original edition published by Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square, New York, 1872. ISBN 1-59333-208-4

GORGIAS PRESS

46 Orris Ave., Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA www.gorgiaspress.com

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

CULTURES IN DIALOGUE Series Editors: Teresa Heffernan and Reina Lewis Cultures in Dialogue returns to active circulation out of print sources by women writers from the East and the West. Tracing crosscultural and intra-cultural exchanges over three centuries, this project brings to light women's engagement with discourses of gender emancipation, imperialism, nationalism, Islam, and modernity. While the figure of Woman—Orientalized and Occidentalized—has been a central and fought over symbol in the construction of an East/West divide, women's own texts have been marginalized. Focusing on dialogue instead of divide, Cultures in Dialogue uses women's varied and contestatory contributions to reconsider the historical tensions between Eastern and Western cultures, offering a nuanced understanding of their current manifestations. SERIES O N E : ORIENTALISM, OCCIDENTALISM, AND WOMEN'S WRITING

Series One of Cultures in Dialogue, consisting of a mix of memoir, travelogue, ethnography, and political commentary, considers the exchanges between and amongst Ottoman and British and American women from the 1880s up to the 1940s. The seismic shift in the understanding of identity as the Ottoman Empire was rapidly being displaced at the end of the nineteenth-century opened up a space for discussions about female liberty and its relationship to Islamic, Turkish, and Western nationalism, about the gendering of private and public spheres, about rural/urban tensions and questions of class mobility, about the status of the harem, and about colonial and imperial interests. In the nineteenth-century the i*

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cosmopolitan Islamic Ottoman Empire began to shift from a concept of citizenship based on belief to one based on place of birth, culminating in an independent Turkey and radically altering the relationship of women to the nation. In this complicated exchange, some elite Ottoman women, who refused Orientalist portrayals of themselves as enslaved, asserted an agency and nostalgically invested in this disappearing culture whilst others rejected the old ways in favor of modernizing the nation. So too, some Western women, enjoying the status and luxuries Ottoman culture afforded, replicated even as they challenged Orientalist tropes. Further there were Western women promoting the force of empire, in the name of civilization. Where some bound feminism to imperialism and modernity, other Eastern and Western women interrupted this collusion, opening up other avenues and other models of feminism. The twelve volumes in Series One trace the range of opinion found among Western and Ottoman women in this period, offering a chance to see how their dialogue influenced and defined each others' views. They also illustrate the challenges of writing about Ottoman female life when the harem featured both as a desirable cultural commodity in Western harem literature and as the socializing spatial relations that both facilitated discussions of female emancipation and were the subject of debate in the Islamic and Western world. For some women, the release from veiling and seclusion promised personal and political liberty, crucial to the reform of the imperial sultanic regime. Other women viewed the shift to the modern nation with more ambivalence, understanding it as a surrendering of a long-standing agency available to elite Ottoman women. The British author Grace Ellison, for instance, was a reluctant suffragist whose repeated visits to Turkey convinced her that the luxury and protection enjoyed by elite Ottoman women should not be too quickly abandoned for Western models of female independence. Zeyneb Hanoum, on the other hand, was a Muslim Ottoman who initially longed to escape from the restrictions of the harem, dreaming of Western freedom and actively resisting the racialized portrayals of Ottoman women as passive odalisques. However she was sorely disappointed when, during her travels in Europe, she came to understand Western women as differently but as equally confined. Both writers ii*

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explored the double-edged sword of modernity as they nostalgically invested in an already vanishing model of Ottoman femininity. Veiling, following the tradition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the eighteenth century, was sometimes read by Western writers subversively as permitting sexual agency and also, as was the case with Ellison, as offering the possibility of passing as "other." So too, for Eastern women veiling and seclusion were not necessarily about lack of power; rather, for elite women, such as Melek Hanoum, within the different Ottoman conceptualization of the public, the segregated household guaranteed their access to power. Unlike Ellison, however, there were Western women who traveled to the Orient with a less complicated and more typically Orientalist and colonialist mission of "liberating" Turkish women from their slavery. Lady Annie Brassey, for example, was opposed to women getting the vote in England, which renders suspect her desire to "free" the veiled woman and exposes her imperialist interests. Privileged Ottoman women, nevertheless, as suggested in the accounts of women such as Musbah Haidar, enjoyed as much freedom to travel and were as educated as Western women like Brassey, further challenging Western stereotypes. Yet there were also Ottoman women, such as Halide Adivar Edib, who rejected the nostalgic investment in Ottoman identity in favor of a Turkish nationalist discourse of progress and modernization. This shift toward nationalism, however, threatened the cosmopolitan nature of Ottoman society. The new model provoked writers like Demetra Vaka Brown, a Greek Christian who was able to claim allegiance to an Ottoman Empire but who was necessarily excluded from a Turkish nation, to protest the imposition of national boundaries even as writers like Lucy Garnett promoted, in her obsessive attempt to categorize the women of Turkey, a racialized understanding of nationalism. But not all Western writers were as oblivious to the impact of the increasingly segregated Empire. Anna Bowman Dodd protested the presence of American missionaries who actively fermented dissent amongst Armenian Christians by teaching them they were "better" than Muslims. Selma Ekrem, from a renowned and progressive Muslim family, also discussed the negative impact of the model of racialized nationalism on what had been an inclusive and multi-ethnic empire. If understandings of the nation, of private and public spaces, and of liberty differed across the East/West divide, so too did the iii*

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understanding of class. The Ottoman system was not based primarily on lineage and blood and allowed for considerable social mobility, as was the case with Melek Hanoum, who married into the Muslim bureaucratic elite from relatively humble Greek/Armenian Christian origins. Given that literacy and foreign languages were for most of this period the preserve of the educated elite, it is no surprise that all the Eastern writers in this series came from this predominantly urban sector, many of them hailing from prominent families. Despite the social positions of the authors, still, traces of non-elite women's lives feature as integral to the social relations witnessed in Ottoman women's accounts. The investigations of Western writers, such as Hester Donaldson Jenkins, also touch specifically on the lives of subaltern women. Although these authors focus on cosmopolitan centers, such as Istanbul, provincial and rural life is also covered, particularly in the work of the American author Ruth Frances Woodsmall, who like many traveled widely in the region.

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By Irvin Cemil Schick We live in an age deeply distrustful of truth claims. Textual practices once considered dispassionate, objective, even scientific (such as historiography and ethnography) are now acknowledged to be subject to the laws of rhetoric. Whatever links they have to the world "out there" are deemed profoundly, some say irretrievably, mediated by the "situated-ness" of their authors within the various collectivities (class, race, gender, ethnicity, region, religion, generation, sexuality) to which they belong. Under these circumstances, a biography is considered not a revelation of the truths of a given person's life, but a literary emplotment of disparate facts into a coherent logic that can only exist a posteriori. Add to that the truism that one can never be neutral about oneself, and the inescapable conclusion follows that the «»/»biographical genre is, even in the best of cases, nothing more than the choreographed performance of a self. Even so, an autobiography bears the indelible mark of the historical and geographical context within which it was produced, and in the case of Melek Hanim's Thirty Years in the Harem (1872),1 that is an extraordinarily complex context indeed. An old cliché has it that the nineteenth century was "the longest century," because the beginning of the processes that gave it its identity can be traced well into the eighteenth century, and their end, well into the twentieth. For the Ottomans also, the nineteenth century was the Empire's longest because so many momentous events were compressed into it. Just the fifty-nine years of Melek Hanim's life, from her birth in 1814, to her suicide in 1873, saw many of the tumultuous changes that took place. The Greek liberation struggle began in 1821, witnessed the uprisings and massacres of Chios in 1822 and Missolonghi in 1826, as well as the catastrophic naval battle of Navarino in 1827, and ended with the establishment of an

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independent state in 1830. The Ottomans fought against Persia in 1821, Russia in 1828-29 and 1853-56 (the Crimean War), the forces of Mehmed Ali Paga, the rogue Viceroy of Egypt, in 1831— 32 and 1839-40, and Montenegro in 1862. Algeria was occupied by France in 1830. A major uprising took place in Crete in 1866, and disturbances occurred elsewhere almost daily, notably in Jiddah in 1858, the Lebanon in 1860, and Belgrade in 1862. Serbia was granted autonomy in 1830, while Wallachia and Moldavia were lost in 1864. Meanwhile, the Ottomans attempted to regain control of their destiny by instituting various reforms, notably the abolition of the Janissary corps in 1826, the Imperial Rescript of Gulhane (the Tan^imat reforms) in 1839, and the Islahat reforms in 1856, which granted equal citizenship to all subjects of the empire. The autobiography of Melek Hamm is the story of both the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, and of an extended family, the actions of whose members were guided not only by external factors, but also, in some cases, by untamed inner demons. (Inevitably, this Introduction presupposes a certain familiarity with the book, which many readers will not yet have. For details of the events described herein, please see the Chronology on pp. xxxiii*— xl.) In addition to the narrator herself—who was born Marie Dejean, to a Greek mother named Constance and a French father named Charles Dejean—the story touches on her first husband, Dr. Julius Michael Millingen, a physician who enjoyed the distinction of having ministered to Lord Byron at his deathbed and the son of James Millingen, an eminent English Protestant archeologist, and Elizabeth Millingen, a zealous convert to Catholicism, who had separated from her husband. 2 The narrative also draws in two children from her first marriage—Evelyn Millingen, who married Almoro Pisani, became a Countess, and settled in Venice, and Frederick Millingen (a.k.a. Osman Bey, Osman-Seify Bey, Kibnslizàde Osman Bey, and Vladimir Andrejevich), an adventurer who, by all indications, was quite insane. Another key player is her second husband, Kibnsli ("the Cypriot") Mehmed Emin Paga,3 a government official who rose up in the ranks and eventually served three terms as Grand Vezir, though not before divorcing her. There were three children from her second marriage—a daughter named Ay§e Sidika, whose welfare was one of the forces that animated some of Melek Hanim's worst misadventures, and two sons, Muharrem and vi*

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Mustafa Cihad, of whom the former died in infancy, and the latter survived against the odds, being of a sickly disposition. (He eventually drowned in the Nile under mysterious circumstances.) Also featured are Kibnsli's second wife, Feride, for whom Melek Hanim's hatred is apparent throughout her memoirs; and Feride's son from her first marriage, §evket, who was for a time married to Ay ? e. It seems neither Melek Hamm, nor other members of her family, could conceive of any way of dealing with interpersonal problems short of prosecuting them in the open court of public opinion. For example, Julius Millingen sought to reclaim his children from his mother, who lived on a papal pension in Rome, by publishing a pamphlet entitled Arbitrary Detention bj the Inquisition at Rome of Three Protestant Children, in Defiance of the Claim of their Father (1842). Incidentally, the number "three" in the title is quite surprising, as Melek Hamm only mentions two children from her first marriage, Evelyn and Frederick. In this pamphlet, Julius writes of "my youngest son James," whom he sent to Rome in 1840 to prevent his falling into the hands of his ex-wife Melek Hamm and the Ottoman authorities he presumes would have favored her— since she was now a Muslim and married to Mehmed Pa§a (37). He adds that James "was her favourite," which makes it all the more surprising that she does not mention him at all. Since he apparently did not return to Istanbul with his siblings in 1849, it may be assumed that he died young. Melek Hanim's son, Frederick Millingen, penned numerous books and pamphlets even as he sank deeper and deeper into what we might diagnose today as paranoid psychosis, including Les Anglais en Orient, 1830—1876: Vraie version du livre 'Trente ans au harem" (1877) [The English in the Orient, 1830-1876: True version of the book Thirty Years in the Harem\,A a positively frantic attempt to rewrite his family history to the point of claiming an unrelated man's paternity as his own. Her daughter, Ay§e, wrote—or perhaps Frederick did on her behalf—a pamphlet entitled Tes malheurs et la fuite de Aisse Chanum Effendi, fille de son altesse Kibri^li-Mehemet, Pacha et Grand Vi^ir, de 1852 a 1869 [1870; The misfortunes and escape of Ay§e Hamm Efendi, daughter of His Highness Kibnsli Mehmed, Pa§a and Grand Vezir, from 1852 to 1869], in which she sought redress for injustices suffered at the hands of her father and stepmother. Melek Hamm herself was involved—in what capacity, vii*

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it is frankly not entirely clear—in the writing and publication not only of Thirty Years in the Harem, but also of Six Years in Europe: Sequel to Thirty Years in the Harem, both of which are extraordinary in their single-minded, absolutely obsessive preoccupation with interminable family feuds and persecutions by sundry "rivals" and "enemies." How much of this dizzying corpus is factual? How much of it is composed of deliberate falsifications calculated to accrue social and/or political capital in some real or imagined internecine war? And how much is just the haphazard divagations of a deranged mind—indeed, of several deranged minds? It is impossible to answer these questions without, at the very least, surveying the daily press of the several countries in which these individuals traveled, and preferably conducting some rigorous archival research as well, for example, in police records. For the purposes of this Introduction, I will content myself with offering a general assessment of the popular work reprinted here, and of its author and her family, in the context of other published writings by family members, as well as the historical backdrop against which the narrative unfolds. While the present volume only reprints the full text of Thirty Years in the Harem, the other books mentioned above provide a good deal of useful background information, upon which I will draw as needed. AUTHORSHIP AND AUTHORITY

It is worth noting at the outset that even the authorship of Thirty Years in the Harem is in some question. There are two accounts of its genesis which, though structurally similar, differ in their particulars. According to the account given by Melek Hamm in Six Years in Europe, the idea of writing her memoirs was suggested by an acquaintance named Decourdemanche as a good way of earning the money she desperately needed. However, her "inability to write any European language" rendered this task impossible. Thus, she says, "I commenced the dictation of my memoirs, ... the eldest son of M. Decourdemanche—whom I shall call Monsieur Alphonse— acting as amanuensis" (292—3). On the other hand, according to the account given by Frederick Millingen in Ees Anglais en Orient, the idea came from a Mrs. Ralph, who had befriended his mother with nefarious purposes. Since, he claims, Melek Hamm was "an illiterate old viii*

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woman" who "had forgotten how to read and write," it was necessary to obtain the services of a ghostwriter. In an effort to distract Frederick from his own politically explosive revelations, he says, the publisher suggested that she summon him back from Vienna to transcribe her memoirs. Once back in London, Frederick "agreed to write the book on my mother's behalf." After a long delay, the memoirs were finally published, only to be destroyed wholesale because of the damaging exposé they contained about Julius Millingen and his acolytes in the Disraeli government. Only after it had been fully sanitized did they allow the book to reach the public. At least this is what Frederick claims (167—70). In short, although the author of Thirty Years in the Harem remains uncertain, the two accounts of its genesis do agree that Melek Hanim's role was limited at most to a verbal narration. This fact significantly complicates our reception of the book—it destabilizes any attempt we may make to assess its value as documentary evidence and to interpret the many freedoms which it indubitably takes with the facts. Is the narrative unreliable because Melek Hanim was ignorant? Because she was a liar? Because she was mentally deranged? Or simply because multiple voices have gone into its production, making it complicated and even sometimes inconsistent? If the book is an intertextual amalgamation of several voices, juxtaposing meanings infused into it by multiple authors having different life experiences and, perhaps more importantly, different agendas, then Melek Hanim's voice is likely mediated or interpreted by the author(s) and/or editor(s) who actually produced the text before us. To make sense of what I read, I shall assume a certain coherence to the authorial voice, a logical unity that will allow me to comprehend and to judge, and, yes, to be critical of "the author" as a "singular" individual. However, at least at the present time, whether or not such a singular author actually existed is not a question I can answer. It is interesting to note, incidentally, that the title page of Six Years in Europe states explicitly that it was "edited by L. A. Chamerovzow." This is significant not only because it shows that the final product was, once again, not Melek Hanim's, but also because of the editor's identity: Louis Alexis Chamerovzow was Secretary of William Wilberforce's celebrated Anti-Slavery Society, as well as editor of the Anti-Slavery Reporter and of the famous abolitionist narrative Slave Ufe in Georgia: a 'Narrative of the Ufe, ix*

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Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, now in England (1855). Although Chamerovzow also published some historical romances, it seems likely that his efforts on Melek Hamm's memoirs were motivated less by pecuniary considerations than by the conviction, common to Europeans of his day, that harem women were, by definition, slaves in need of emancipation. Indeed, in all likelihood, it is this very conviction that must be credited for the popularity of Melek Hamm's book, despite its many flaws and shortcomings. Melek Hanim has an unfortunate tendency to generalize (as in "all Turkish women without exception"—247) and to base her seemingly authoritative claims on pure hearsay. This reduces the usefulness of her memoirs as a historical source. Yet, it is still possible to learn a good deal from Thirty Years in the Harem and its sequel: by reading between the lines and focusing not on specifics, but rather on the big picture that emerges from her narrative, one can begin to understand the life of a woman who could not be satisfied with genuflecting to male power, nor to the oppressive social conventions surrounding her. If truth be told, this book could not have been written by anyone but a woman, for the fundamental tension upon which it rests is the inability of an unmarried upper-class woman to provide for herself and ensure her own subsistence without being subjected to the authority of a man, nor abjectly dependent upon the good will of others. If Melek Hanim reveals herself to be a horrible manipulator and selfish exploiter, if she lives off others no matter the cost to them, if she exhibits a truly bizarre combination of towering pride and total lack of self-respect, it is in part because her options were so severely limited. Without education, without independent means, her only chance for a reasonably comfortable existence would have been as a docile housewife. Whatever her reasons, this was not an acceptable alternative for Melek Hanim; hence, the pathos of her memoirs. Melek Hanim plots and schemes endlessly, seemingly confirming one of the oldest orientalist stereotypes: that the harem is a "den of intrigues." From Michel Baudier's Histoire generalle du serrail, et de la Cour du Grand Seigneur Empereur des Turcs (1624) [General history of the seraglio, and of the court of the Grand Signor, Emperor of the Turks] to Malebranche's Intrigues du serail: Histoire turque en deux parties (1739) [Intrigues of the seraglio:

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Turkish tale in two parts] and Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur's Te Sérail, ou Histoire des intrigues secrettes et amoureuses des femmes du Grand Seigneur (1796) [The seraglio, or history of the secret and amorous intrigues of the women of the Grand Signor], numerous works richly embroidered upon this theme. Melek Hamm's Thirty Years in the Harem certainly provides loud and clear confirmation of the stereotype, as we read of the endless sequence of conspiracies and stratagems in which so many of the women she mentions indulge—herself most of all. One might ask, "If it is a 'stereotype,' does this mean that it is all false?" and the answer would be, "No." Yes, harem women did sometimes engage in intrigues, indeed, perhaps more so than the men to whom they were bound. The question to pose is "Why?" In societies where women are deprived of direct power, they will turn, of necessity to strategies which are likely to be viewed by men—who do not lack direct power—as devious. To be sure, Melek Hamm's behavior is outrageous, and there can be no justification for all the terrible things she does; yet, by doing those things, in a sense she holds up the mirror to a society that deprives women of the wherewithal that would enable them to be mistresses of their own fate. It is true that she paints a very incomplete picture: many, after all, were the Ottoman women who were educated, acquired skills, and engaged in social, economic, political, or cultural activities—she mentions one herself, the "muscular" businesswoman "Aish-Bey" (175). So one cannot let Melek Hamm off the hook so easily. If half the energy she had expended trying to exact vengeance from her former husbands had been devoted toward bettering herself and investing in her own future; if she had not wasted the large sums of money that came her way several times on a never-ending quest for more, always more; if she had been content when handed a fortune perhaps not as vast as she thought she deserved, but still many orders of magnitude larger than what most people would earn in a lifetime, her existence would surely have been different. At the same time, there is no way around the fact that her life would likewise have been different in a society not rent apart into such grossly unequal portions by lopsided gender relations. Melek Hamm is both a perpetrator and a victim—not in equal parts, admittedly, but she is both; it is important not to lose sight of either persona when reading Thirty Years in the Harem. xi*

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MINDSETS AND PERSONALITY TRAITS

Frederick Millingen's account of the writing of Thirty Years in the Harem, in which he describes all sorts of evildoers and conspiracies, clearly reflects the paranoia that increasingly took hold of him— and this inevitably brings to the fore the question of his mental state, as well as those of Melek Hanim and Ay§e. Contrary to what one might at first suspect, focusing on this issue is not tantamount to indulging in gratuitous voyeurism. In the domain of art one may argue that the artwork itself is more important than the mindset of the artist, but in works that present themselves as documentary, it is impossible to set aside the intellectual and psychological, not to mention the potentially psychiatric, aspects of their creation. And on that count, there is a good deal to be said even from a distance of nearly a century and a half. One of the most salient personality traits of Melek Hanim, at least as reflected in what purport to be her own words, is a neartotal inability to distinguish right from wrong—not immorality so much as «morality. For example, when invited to a banquet at the Belgrade residence of the princess of Serbia, she "orders" some of the Turkish ladies of the town to join her, and once there, she has absolutely no qualms about tricking them into eating pork and drinking champagne, knowing full well that they would have been mortified if they knew they were violating important religious tenets: "I partook with indifference of the various dishes on the table," she recalls; "the other ladies imitated my example, thinking that I would never eat pork" (117—8). Far be it from her to caution them! During her exile in Konya, she is generously invited by a local notable to live in his home. One of his wives somehow fancies that she is skilled at making charms and talismans, and Melek Hanim only makes a half-hearted attempt to disabuse her of that notion: "Accordingly, next day, I took some powdered sugar, mixed with it some salt, and put the whole into a small bag of silk, fastened with string tied into sundry very complicated knots." Thereupon her host's other wives also ask for charms, and having satisfied their wishes too, she observes: "All these women were thus thoroughly convinced of my profound knowledge of the occult sciences, to my great amusement." Indeed, it was not just amusement she derived from this charade, but a great deal of personal attention and service as well. Most tellingly, she notes only a few lines later that such beliefs being widespread among women xii*

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in the Orient, many people "live by this means on the credulity of their fellow-creatures" (166—8). That she is engaged in doing just that never seems to cross her mind. Nor is this all that Melek Hamm does. During her stay in Palestine, on a day when her husband Kibnsli Mehmed Pa§a is absent, a disturbance erupts among locals because of a new duty imposed upon merchandise brought into town. She lies to them about the reasons for the tax, and assures them that the capital has been contacted about lifting it. They happily disperse, but on the following day, she has all the leaders of the protest arrested and exiled; "it may be that some among them were innocent," she admits nonchalantly (82—4). Seeing that her husband is unwilling to accept bribes, she decides to do so in his stead—arranging for jobs in exchange for money, and noting that "in two years I disposed in this manner of more than fifteen important posts in favor of persons whom I had never even set eyes on" (70). If she ever thought that this may have been a less than honorable practice, she certainly does not share that with the reader. Rather, she extorts money left and right, lining her pockets and apparently not giving any of it a second thought: "The steward of our household," she says, "a man who knew the secret of extracting money from people's pockets, came one day to say that, if I pleased, he would find the means of getting me far more from the Jews than I had obtained from all the others. 'Do whatever you think fit,' I replied." This little conspiracy nets her "a beautiful casket, containing several pearl necklaces, and 10,000 francs in gold" (61—2). When she engages in commerce, "a thing expressly forbidden to Pashas," she once again victimizes the population: My agents demanded of the peasants, on my behalf, their beasts of burden; and they fearing lest, by a refusal, they should draw upon themselves the anger of the Pasha, lent the animals, which were employed in conveying from Jaffa the corn I had purchased there. This was sold at Jerusalem at a considerable profit, although it was offered at a somewhat lower price than that asked by the merchants, who were obliged to defray the heavy expenses of transport. (70—1)

Having thus undersold local merchants by abusing her husband's status to conscript beasts of burden from hapless peasants, Melek Hanim exhibits a remarkable detachment from the petty evil in xiii*

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which she daily engages—and this, in a book the avowed purpose of which is to advocate her case against her "enemies"! Some pages later, having noted that all the bribery "took place unknown to the governor [her husband]" (63)—which agrees with most accounts, according to which Mehmed Pa§a was quite incorruptible (e.g., Inal, 1:83—100)—she recalls that he was dismissed shortly thereafter. "The chief complaints lodged against us," she says, "were that Mehemet-Pasha proceeded with too great severity against the Arabs... and that I was too greedy for money and presents" (103). Once again, nary a cloud of self-doubt seems to dot the clear skies of her conscience. Quite to the contrary: when they go to Belgrade for her husband's next assignment, "the want of a garden distressed me so much," she relates, "that I resolved to have one." Not only does she use convicts—to whom she refers as "my galley-slaves"—to fashion her garden, but she has them use "shrubs and plants, which I had demanded from the Turkish inhabitants" (112—3). There is no doubt that behavior animated by narcissism of such gargantuan proportions is bound to border on the sociopathic; but there is much, much more. Melek Hanim—and this is a quality she shared with her son Frederick—had a vastly inflated sense of her own importance, and this colors nearly everything she says. Thus, not only does she refuse to see how her behavior temporarily derailed her husband's administrative career, she actually repeatedly claims that in fact he owes his career to her: "Without me," she writes regarding her husband's enemies, "Mehemet-Pasha was a half-disabled foe, for it was well known what a part I had had in his promotion" (153). If she does, sometimes, acknowledge that his difficulties may have had something to do with herself, it is only in the context of bemoaning the evil machinations of her rivals. For example, after his dismissal in 1843—before his appointment to Palestine—she claims to have told Riza Pa§a, the Minister of War: It is in vain for you to conceal from me the true cause of my husband's disgrace. His enemies are enemies to me; filled with hatred, they wished to destroy us because they saw us happy. It is on my account that my husband is persecuted, and for no other reason. (52—3)

The absurdity of this notion is evident from several facts. First, this was a chaotic period in Ottoman history during which bureaucrats at all levels were appointed, promoted, and dismissed at the drop xiv*

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of a hat: during the fifty-nine years of Melek Hamm's life, twentysix men served forty-seven separate terms as Grand Vezir, some as many as five or six times each! Melek Hamm's lack of influence can also be seen conversely in that her husband's professional stability did not improve after the two were divorced. Second, Mehmed Papa's short temper, confrontational nature, and direct, undiplomatic style are well-documented, and he surely did not require her help in making political enemies. Indeed, the biographer Ibniilemin Mahmud Kemal Inal relates that Mehmed Papa's second stint as Grand Vezir having lasted only sixty-six days, one of his contemporaries marked it with the satirical chronogram pek deli ("quite mad" in Turkish): when the numerical values of its letters are added up, the sum is precisely sixty-six! (1:99) And third, it is exceedingly unlikely that any woman—perhaps short of the mother, consort, or daughter of a sultan—might have exercised such influence in the running of affairs of state in the Ottoman Empire. When her daughter, Ay§e, flees from her home, Melek Hamm says that the news "produced great sensation among the Mussulman world" (268). When she and her daughter return to Istanbul from exile, she claims that "our arrival did not fail to produce a certain effect on the mass of the populace of Constantinople" (313). In Six Years in Europe, she claims that she and her daughter "were the centre towards which all eyes turned. The balcony of our apartments overlooked the great square, crowded by the population... When we came out upon the balcony, a new excitement seemed to pervade the crowd" (14). To explain the persecution that she imagined herself suffering, she writes: As the wife of the first minister of the empire, I knew facts bearing upon and illustrative of the whole system of its policy, home and foreign. I had myself personal knowledge as a ruler; for it was notorious that MelekHanum Kibrizli enjoyed the fullest confidence of her husband, and that her counsels guided him in his administration of public affairs. (236)

That Mehmed Pa§a only became Grand Vezir several years after their divorce seems to have slipped her mind. As for her son, Frederick, his delusions of grandeur were even more massive. He writes in Les Anglais en Orient that "when Re§id, All, and Fuad Pa§a signed the decree condemning Melek Hamm to xv*

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exile, they did not know that they were in fact signing the document that sealed the destruction of the Ottoman Empire" (116). He states that "one goal alone gave me strength, to avenge my family and destroy the executioners of the Orient and the Treaty of Paris [presumably the Congress of 1856] which they had fashioned" (142). And most memorably, he argues that the reason Britain occupied Cyprus is that Benjamin Disraeli wanted to take revenge from him personally, as "heir to the name Kibnsli" (188— 9). Imperial politics, in other words, could be explained simply in terms of the British Prime Minister's disposition towards his person—never mind that he was four years old when his mother first met Mehmed Pa§a, and that it was therefore entirely out of the question that he should truly be "Kibnslizáde" (i.e., "son of the Cypriot"), as he liked to call himself! In fact, Frederick exhibits an absolutely remarkable capacity to ignore basic realities and hang onto the chimeras spawned by his imagination. Not only does he claim to be the love child of Melek Hanim and Mehmed Pa§a, but he insists that the two had been deeply in love decades after their divorce and exceedingly acrimonious battles over money: "Just as Kibnsli's heart never beat for any woman as it beat for her, so too did Melek Hanim never love any man as much as she loved Kibnsli" (59). His fantasy goes even further, encompassing himself: "After I was born," he writes, "Kibnsli and my mother loved me deeply and never lost hope of one day being reunited with me. They tried many times to take me back, but their enemies did everything in their power to prevent that" (97—8). There is no historical evidence that any of this is even remotely true. While Melek Hanim's delusions were perhaps not quite so extreme, she too reveals herself as unable or unwilling to face facts. According to her, the reason Mehmed Papa's new wife, Feride, tried so hard to prevent her step-daughter, Ay§e, from moving out of the family mansion and into her own home was that Once established, it would become impossible for her father and mother [i.e., Melek Hanim and Mehmed Pa§a] not to meet some time or other. Thus the daughter's house would have been transformed by force of circumstances into a species of rendezvous, where her rival and her husband would be able to meet and indulge in affectionate tète-à-tètes. (270) xvi*

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This, after divorce, lawsuit, physical attack, imprisonment, and exile! In Six Years in Europe, Melek Hamm rewrites the story of the eunuch Bejir's murder, this time emphatically stating that Mehmed Pa§a—who was thousands of miles from her at the time—was fully complicit in her plan to switch babies (275—89). Not only that, she goes so far as to declare that the real misdeed was her rivals': "this fault, which had its source in a feeling of jealousy, very natural in a woman, attained, thanks to the spite of my enemies, the proportions of an infamous crime." As if it was anything less! "They who thirsted for my blood," she adds, "transformed... a simple fault into a crime." ( T h i r t y Years, 147) In fact, it is highly unlikely that Mehmed Pa§a would have been a party to the conspiracy to switch babies, for several reasons: that neither Islamic, nor Ottoman law would have prevented his daughter Ay§e from inheriting his estate; that means were in any case available (e.g., the vakf-i ehli or vakf-t evladiye—the family's or children's pious foundation) to circumvent any existing legal constraints on the beneficiaries of his inheritance; and that he would not have wished someone else's son to inherit his estate in the first place. By contrast, Melek Hamm had every reason to engage in such a plot: as the mother of Mehmed Papa's oldest surviving son (or some simulacrum thereof), she would have enjoyed many privileges both within the family and in the community at large; and in polygamous Ottoman society, Mehmed Pa§a might have otherwise tried his luck at having a male heir with a second wife, an eventuality Melek Hamm would have surely wished to forestall. An aspect of the self-centered, self-righteous attitude exhibited by Melek Hamm is a tremendous sense of entitlement, which is manifest throughout both Thirty Years in the Harem and especially Six Years in Europe. There is a striking passage in the latter, in which she and her daughter move into a furnished apartment in Paris let by a couple of modest means named Vacquet. After several months during which she is housed and fed, but pays them nothing, the landlady comes to request the settlement of their accounts. This demand—though not entirely unexpected— coming in so peremptory a manner, and notwithstanding my host's full knowledge of my straitened circumstances, somewhat startled me. I

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reminded Madame Vacquet that I had concealed nothing from her; that she knew I could only await the result of the steps then being taken by my new friends to obtain my property, and assistance from Constantinople.

After brushing off her landlady several more times, "at last Monsieur Vacquet himself came, and receiving still the same reply, told me if I did not pay him, he should find a means of compelling me to do so. Thus threatened, my indignation was aroused, and a violent scene ensued" (55—56). The entire world, in other words, including the financial solvency of a humble Parisian couple, owed her patience and forbearance until negotiations with her former husband—from whom she had been divorced for no less than seventeen years!—were settled. With only the slightest evidence of reluctance, Melek Hamm uses her aristocratic contacts to slither out of this debt, which, we are told, totals 3,500 francs. Later, she and her daughter are given shelter by the Convent of the Ladies of Charity, which she describes as "a kind of asylum for ladies of small means, or for such as destitution had thrown upon the bounty of their friends"—in short, for women precisely like themselves. Yet, she still finds it in herself to complain: Our life was extremely monotonous... and our diet of the very plainest... At first the rations were absolutely insufficient, but my remonstrances led to an augmentation. The meagre days and fasts were over numerous, and honestly kept. On these occasions the flesh was unquestionably mortified, the corresponding benefit I consider doubtful.

Indeed. Not only does she whine about conditions in the convent, Melek Hamm and Ay§e also positively refuse to abide by its rules: "We were remiss in our attendances at religious celebrations," she recalls. "We roamed too much about in the gardens; we went out too often, we returned too late, we were, in fact, culpable on every point of the regulations of the establishment" (90—94). At one point, she is fortunate enough to receive a small handout from a Turkish acquaintance, upon which the Lady Superior asks for a contribution to help defray the expenses she and her daughter incurred during their stay. She refuses to pay, and asks that the bill be sent to the Abbé Boré, the clergyman who, out of the goodness of his heart, had arranged for their placement at the convent! (103) xviii*

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Some time later, stuck in Marseilles with no money at all, she appeals to the Bishop, who arranges for her to receive the trifling sum of three francs as charity. She is outraged, and lashes out at the poor nun who remits the money to her: As soon as I had recovered from my first surprise, [I] gave utterance to my feelings without reserve, and in plain, honest language. Sister Josephine made no reply to my severe strictures upon the meanness of the Bishop's procedure, and on her own lack of feeling.

(213) Both Melek Hanim and, particularly, Frederick, suffer from paranoia and view themselves as constantly persecuted. The most overt form this takes is in Frederick's extraordinary hatred of his father, Julius, and especially his fanatical anti-Semitism. Indeed, he is convinced that his father is secredy Jewish and in cahoots with another crypto-Jew, Benjamin Disraeli. He claims that the version of Thirty Years in the Harem that finally appeared, differs from the one he wrote, in that the original villain was Julius, but pressure from the British government resulted in the excision of all references to him, and the demonization of Mehmed Pa§a instead (170—73). His belief in the evil powers of his father and the people around him is such that he actually accuses them of having murdered Sultan Mahmud II, Sultan Abdiilaziz, and Czar Alexander II! (20, 105, 176—7; while Sultan Abdiilaziz may have been murdered, and Czar Alexander II certainly was, Sultan Mahmud II died of natural causes.) He prides himself on having avenged these crimes by personally organizing the expulsion of 300,000 "Judeonihilists" from Russia, and their exile to Siberia {Dreyfus, 36, 38), but he acknowledges that his enemies are powerful and still got the better of him: Disraeli exacted vengeance by eliminating his mother, Melek Hanim, whose "suicide" was announced that very year (11). In the end, the tide of his pamphlet Dreyfus, martyr juif Osman-Bey, martyr des Juifs [1900; Dreyfus, Jewish martyr; Osman Bey, martyr of the Jews] says it all: having dared to expose the universal Jewish conspiracy—having become "the Prophet and Aposde of antisemitism" (32, 39), as he fashions himself— Frederick-Osman Bey is now being persecuted to death: From Tunisia, I leap onto the Alps; from there, I fly on towards the Balkans; everywhere, Jews by the thousands: everywhere, the seed of Abraham jump into

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my eyes, blind me, suffocate m e . . . How do they know me? Decidedly, the Jews have a special telephone: from synagogue to synagogue, from stock exchange to stock exchange. (23)

With all these peregrinations, I cannot resist dubbing Frederick Millingen "the wandering anti-Semite"! HAZARDING A DIAGNOSIS OR T W O

It is, of course, impossible accurately to diagnose a mental illness from afar, and besides, I have no professional qualifications in that domain. Still, to get a general idea of the states of mind of Melek Hanim and Frederick, I think it will be useful briefly to review some of the guidelines in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,5 For example, a diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder requires some of the following symptoms: an exaggerated sense of self-importance; a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love; the subject's belief in himself or herself as "special," one who can be understood by, or should associate with, only other special or highstatus people or institutions (Melek Hamm's constant reiteration of her "rank and quality," despite her modest birth and less than modest current circumstances \Six Years, 29]); a need for excessive admiration (Melek Hamm's description of herself as a star pupil and the dominant child in the household of her childhood [Thirty Years, 14]; her statement that she "was the woman whose intellect was vaunted and admired by every one; she whom all were ready to consult as if she were an oracle!" [146]); a sense of entitlement; a tendency selfishly to take advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends; and a lack of empathy. Clearly, many of these criteria are met by both Melek Hanim and Frederick. A diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder requires some of the following symptoms: frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment (Melek Hamm's desperate quest to remain connected with Mehmed Pa§a, Frederick's fable of his loving parents); a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternations between extremes of idealization and devaluation; identity disturbances and a markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self (Frederick's attempts to reinvent himself first as Turkish and then as Russian, his construction of the fable of Mehmed Papa's paternity); impulsivity xx*

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in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., Melek Hanim's periodic aggression towards her powerful ex-husband, a contest she always loses; Frederick's frequent rabble-rousing that gets him arrested and deported from every place he visits); recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior (Melek Hamm commits suicide, and Frederick attempts to do so at least twice); affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood; chronic feelings of emptiness; inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (Melek Hanim's attacks on her former husband, Frederick's anti-Semitic rage); transient, stressrelated paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms (both Melek Hamm and especially Frederick interpret everything that befalls them through the prism of plots and conspiracies by their enemies). A diagnosis of Paranoid Personality Disorder requires some of the following symptoms: unfounded suspicion that others are deceiving, exploiting, or harming the subject (Melek Hanim's memoirs are replete with references to enemies and rivals, as are the writings of Frederick); a preoccupation with unjustified doubts as to the loyalty or trustworthiness of associates or friends (Melek Hamm suspects that people around her are agents of the Ottoman government operating on behalf of her former husband; Frederick views the people around him as agents of a massive conspiracy that may be traced, through his father and Disraeli, to "the Jews"); a reluctance to confide in others, due to unwarranted fears that information will be maliciously used against the subject; a perception of hidden, demeaning, or threatening content in ordinary events or comments (e.g., when her coachman gets drunk, Melek Hamm concludes that he has been put up to it by her enemies in order to dishonor her [Thirty Years, 287]); the persistent bearing of grudges; a perception of personal attacks on the subject's own reputation or character, to which he or she responds quickly with anger or counterattacks; unjustified, recurring suspicions about the fidelity of spouse or sexual partner (Melek Hanim's unfounded obsession with the interest she thought Mehmed Pa§a had in a Circassian slave; [84—90]). Other conditions, such as Schizoaffective Disorder and possibly even Paranoid Schizophrenia, also present themselves as plausible diagnoses. It seems highly likely that either by itself or co-morbidly, one or more of the disorders described above, afflicted both mother xxi*

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and son. Whether or not certain psychiatric conditions are hereditary is a subject of some debate, to which I'm afraid I have no original insights to contribute; however, whether the problem here was congenital or behavioral, it is clear that both Melek Hanim and Frederick were severely disturbed individuals. It is worth noting, incidentally, that Melek Hamm's grandfather, a wealthy banker, committed suicide because he thought there was a plot to extort money from him (9). Occasional comments, such as Melek Hamm's claim that her mother-in-law's bad treatment "succeeded in bringing upon me an attack of madness" (21), that during her husband's absence, "it is clear that so retired and uneventful an existence could not but react upon my spirits, and afflict me with a sense of uneasiness which I should find it difficult to describe" (143), and that "many persons may regard me as influenced by a morbid tendency to ascribe evil intentions where none of the kind exist" (Six Years, 260) acquire new meaning in light of the above, as sporadic glimmerings of selfawareness in a woman who evidently suffered from acute mental illness. It is instructive to compare her comment about the "attack of madness" with the description—admittedly far from dispassionate —given by her former husband Julius in Arbitrary Detention bj the Inquisition at Rome: A few months after my wife's arrival at Rome, statements of her misconduct were sent to me by my mother, and for some months, post after post, I continued to receive from the same quarters, and from my brother and sister, additional proofs of her depravity. Notwithstanding all the attempts made by them to induce her to return to the path of virtue, her conduct continued the same. (33)

True, Julius later admits that "whether they [the reports of Melek Hamm's "misconduct"] had any foundation, or arose solely from indiscretion on the part of a young Greek female unaccustomed to move in the gay world, is a point difficult to determine" (38—39). But it would seem that her behavior would have had to be fairly extreme to induce her mother-in-law to contact the authorities and have her forcibly driven out of the city! The "attack of madness" of which Melek Hamm speaks must have been an extreme reaction to her relatives' efforts to impose some sort of discipline—hardly xxii*

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unexpected, given that they lived in Rome at the pleasure of the Church. And what of Ay§e? We know much less about her, since even the pamphlet she ostensibly wrote may be the work of Frederick. Still, in her case too, occasional and seemingly unimportant comments by her mother provide some clues. Melek Hamm repeatedly attributes her poor behavior to her having been "brought up in the grossest general ignorance" (Thirty Years, 211) and been taught "the most absurd doctrines" in the harem (290): The complete isolation to which Aisheh was condemned, and the strict surveillance to which she was subjected, had for their object the prevention of the development of her intellectual faculties, and it was hoped thereby to retain her in a permanent state of mental degradation. (220)

Fearing that she would fall into the claws of her former husband §evket and step-mother Feride, Melek Hamm says Ay§e was "a prey to a consternation which bordered on delirium... her terror was such that the unfortunate girl had lost all control over herself' (317). In Six Years in Europe, she explains the extravagant expenditures in which they indulge as follows: "Ayesha, a woman in years, in many respects one in experience, was nevertheless a complete child in her impulses and in her ignorance of the world and its ways" (102). Later on, Melek Hamm somewhat amends her description: "Ayesha's experience of the world amounted to that of the merest child. She was—I must tell the truth—absolutely stupid in this respect" (181). But she is still certain that Ay§e's shortcomings are all caused by her upbringing: Studying her hourly, from day to day, I came to the conclusion that her moral enervation originated in absolute despair of any immediate remedy for the actual state of things, and isolated as she now was from elevating influences of every kind, I could see and deplore that the want of education, leaving her wholly without mental resources, threw her back upon a nature, blunted to the higher moral sentiments by the debasing associations of her early life. (167)

And, of course, we know from Frederick's Les Anglais en Orient, that Ay§e was eventually committed to an insane asylum, where she may have ended her days. Putting all this together, it is xxiii*

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not a stretch to reach the conclusion that the roots of Ay§e's problem lay not with her lack of formal education, but rather with her mental capacity. THIRTY YEARS AS HISTORICAL DOCUMENT

From what I have written so far, one might get the impression that there is not a single major character in Thirty Years in the Harem of whom one might form a favorable opinion; and, quite frankly, one would be correct. The book does not make for uniformly pleasant reading; still, it is not without merit. For one thing, the social circle in which Melek Hamm and her family moved included some extremely important figures, and her memoirs therefore provide interesting insights into the lives of the people who shaped the Middle East, as well as those who influenced European policies towards it. For example, on her way to Rome, Melek Hamm and her children make a stopover in Malta where "a Mr. Slade, a friend of my husband, prepared for us a charming, well-furnished residence, belonging to one of his friends, who was at the time away" (18). This solitary, fleeting remark belies the importance of the person in question: Sir Adolphus Slade served in both the British and the Ottoman navy, rising to the rank of Admiral. (Lewis, 215—26) Known in Turkey as Miïçavir Ta§a [The Consultant Pasha], he was the author of numerous books including Records of Travels in Turkey, Greece,