Harem: The World Behind the Veil

by Alev Lytle Croutier (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $4.23

  This book offers an insight into the harem and harem life, focusing on the famed Seraglio of Topkapi Palace. The author uses her first-hand experience to describe the absolute rule of the sultans, the slave markets and the eunuchs. The book is illustrated with paintings by Delacroix, Ingres and Renoir, Turkish woodcuts, Persian miniatures, photographs and film stills. Croutier investigates the middle class harems, looking at the polygamous life of ordinary Middle Eastern households, including marital customs, child rearing, medical practices, superstitions and the expression of desire and jealousy. Harem shows how this Eastern institution invaded the Victorian imagination, in the form of decorating, costume and art and how Western ideas, in turn, eroded a system which had seemed to be absolutely powerful.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1989

  $30.61

  This book explores harems all over the world, focusing on the celebrated Seraglio of Turkey's Topkapi Palace as a paradigm for all. We are shown the slave market and boudoirs of sultans, the daily routines of the odalisques - their baths, clothes and appetites - and the peculiar lives of the eunuchs who guarded and controlled them; all this alongside the splendour and depravity of the sultans, masters of the harem, whose rule was absolute. The author also looks at the polygamous households of ordinary Middle Eastern families. She looks at their marital customs, child-rearing, medical practices, superstitions and the expression of desire and jealousy. Finally, the book portrays how this Eastern institution invaded the Victorian imagination in the form of decoration, costume and art, and how Western ideas, in turn, came to erode a system that seemed all-powerful. The text is illustrated with Orientalist paintings, Turkish woodcuts and miniatures.