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Abstract

European travel to the Orient dates back to thousands of years, but fascination with the region flourished by the nineteenth century, the century of "harem literature" and Orientalist art par excellence. A number of developments made the trip to the Orient easier, safer and cheaper at the time. However, harem doors remained closed to male travellers who were left to imagine their own desirable details that mostly projected fantasies of exoticism, eroticism and despotism. Women travellers, on the other hand, took advantage of their gender-privileged access to the Oriental women's segregated spaces to shed light upon several obscured aspects of Oriental culture, to claim authenticity of their accounts and paintings, and to challenge male fantasies of harem life. These women provided an alternative ethnographic view of the harem. However, this does not solve the problem of harem representation. After analysing a set of late- eighteenth-century and mid-nineteenth-century European female travel narratives and paintings of the Ottoman Empire, I came to the conclusion that fiction and authenticity are not related to having access or not to the harem as much as they are related to the higher discourse within which they operate, Orientalism, and to the European woman's struggle with two opposing discourses, the discourse of femininity and the discourse of imperialism.

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