A Young Man’s Fancy Turns to “Love”?: The Traveler’s Eye and the Narration of Women in Ottoman Space (or The European Male ‘Meets’ the Ottoman Female, 16th-18th Centuries)

Abstract

This essay focuses on early modern European male travelers to the Ottoman Empire and their narration of the females they encounter within that space. Such narrators present a variety of male-female encounters as part of their ‘mapping’ of Ottoman domains. In order to illustrate some of the narrative possibilities the essay examines the accounts of three travelers, all of whom set out on their journeys before the age of thirty: Wenceslas Wratislaw (b. 1576) an adolescent Bohemian squire; John Sanderson (b. 1560) an English merchant and agent of the British Levant Company; and John B. S. Morritt (b. 1771), a re- cent Cambridge graduate and member of the English landed class. It presents a typology of how these authors construct women’s place, identity, voice, behavior, and associations. And because sexuality and romance have often been associated with European representations of Ottoman space, it assesses whether or not ‘love’ plays a role in these constructions and, if so, how. Experiences, expectations, personality, audience, and exposure to confidants all play a role in the ways in which these narrators characterize Ottoman women. Wratislaw is most inclined to normalize them, Sanderson to present them in contexts of violence, and Morritt to focus on dress and cultural mores to entertain the female relatives to whom his letters are addressed. For each of these narrators, as for other travelers, the female is a separate category of societal analysis.