Performativity and Spectacle in the Oriental Novel: The Harem as Dramatic Space in Sébastien Brémond's The Happy Slave

Abstract

:Some fourteen novels of French origin, set in oriental locations, were published in England with great success in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Many of them chose the exotic territories of Tunis, Morocco or Turkey to situate love intrigues that involved people of high rank. In these idealised spaces, love reigns supreme, and the harem becomes the focus of attention, a hybrid place where the public and the domestic collide. In Sébastien Brémond's oriental tale The Happy Slave, the harem is often a source of spectacle, a dynamic space full of performative potential for both sexes, in which bashaws (bassas) exert their absolute authority, and sultanas, though initially objects of male desire, evade their masters' surveillance, and become agents of their own acts of seduction. In Brémond's novel the harem is portrayed in rich detail, and most probably as the result of his own observations, not merely as a prison and a place of seclusion for women, but most significantly as a space of creativity, performance, and transformation. I argue that in this text Brémond's purpose was twofold: on the one hand, he relied on the function of stories as sources of pleasurable entertainment, whilst on the other, he explored the transnational and performative potential of the form of the oriental tale, and by so doing, he shed light on the exchanges between dramatic action and the new realism that prose fiction was adopting in the early days of the novel.