Limits of the Imaginable in the Early Turkish Novel: Non-Muslim Prostitutes and Their Ottoman Muslim Clients

Abstract

In the first Ottoman Turkish novels written during the late nineteenth century, the development of romance between a man and a woman was restricted by certain rules that migrated into fiction from the social sphere. Since unrelated Muslim women and men were hindered from cultivating a romance by various social rules, the problem of representing romance was solved by bringing together an Ottoman Muslim man and a nonMuslim Ottoman woman from the ethnic and religious minority groups in the Ottoman Empire, such as women from Greek, Armenian, or Jewish minorities or from European communities. Therefore, the space of the novel becomes a forum for the ethnic and religious anxieties of the time. Early Turkish novels, in this sense, imaginatively embody the unspoken boundaries between different ethnic and religious groups, allowing the reader to visualize, allegorically, the complicated relationship between the Ottoman Muslim and non-Muslim minorities in the nineteenth century. In these novels, while wives and cariyes (domestic female slaves) in Muslim households represent a sanctioned, domesticated form of sexual conduct, prostitutes and courtesans inhabit a danger zone that is associated with pollution, contamination, and disease. This bifurcated sexual code, when thought of within the complexity of late Ottoman history and culture, presents a cultural metaphor—the threat of sexual contact with prostitutes—through which to read the era’s ethnic vulnerabilities and sensibilities. A critique of Westernization is mixed with the critique of non-Muslim values and traditions, ultimately producing an exaltation of Ottoman Muslim identity and its value system. Drawing on the early Ottoman Turkish novels written by elite men, but especially focusing on Ahmed Mithat Efendi’s novel, Henuz On Yedi