Penelope Aubin on Turkey
The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil and His Family (1721)
Selim III
Page contents:
Introduction
The lustful Turk
The violent Turk
Introduction
As John R. Richetti has written, “very little is known about Penelope Aubin” (Backscheider and Richetti 113; all information in this introduction taken from this page). She was born in London to French parents circa 1658, dying in 1731. She published numerous fictional works throughout the 1720s, and her literary output also included poetry, translations, and a play. Richetti reads the publication of a collected edition of her novels in 1739 as evidence that these works were “very popular.”
However, critics have paid her work little attention. Perhaps it is because of their didactic moralism, which is certainly evident in The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil and his Family (1721), or because of their repetitive nature. In this page, I explore the way that The Strange Adventures portrays Turks, especially Turkish men, and how these portrayals provide a background against which Western Christianity can be seen as the religion of a free and rational civilization. More than in Lady Mary's letters, issues of gender relations and sexuality drive the characterizations of East and West, and "prove" the superiority of the West. As Daniel states, Sexuality and violence were the characteristic marks of Islam" in the imagination of Westerners, and both of these qualities are heightened in Aubin's novel (Daniel 145).
Linda Colley has asserted that “There are few more effective ways of bonding together a highly disparate people than by encouraging it to unite against its own and other outsiders” (Colley 53). In this novel, the Western religion represented is Catholicism, proving that, in the face of the larger religious threat of Islam, Europeans willingly put aside the religious differences between Protestants and Catholics that usually contributed to strife, oppression, and the creation of national identities. Books like Aubin's participate in definitions larger than those of mere countries' boundaries: they define the identities of empires and civilizations.
The lustful Turk
The Strange Adventures presents a common 18th-century Western stereotype of the Turkish male, especially one from upper class of Turkish society. His main qualities are uncontrolled will, leading him to administer arbitrary commands that remove any obstacle to having his way. Thus, he can give free reign to his lust and to his propensity to violence. As Heffernan points out, Western writers claimed reason as a Western trait, and one way of doing this was to portray Western religion and polity against the backdrop of barbarism presented by the East: “For most of the modern era, Islam, whether condemned or celebrated, is overwhelmingly associated with the other of reason and secularism” (Heffernan 207).
In The Strange Adventures, we see the main Muslim character, Mahomet, exhibits all of these traits in order to present, as Aubin writes in her Preface, “a story where Divine Providence manifests itself in every transaction, where virtue is tried with misfortunes, and rewarded with blessings. In fine, where men behave themselves like Christians, and women are really virtuous, and such as we ought to imitate” (Aubin 114). Her moral purpose is unhidden, though modern readers find her need to celebrate Christianity by demonizing Islam troubling, yet expected.
Aubin sets the stage for Mahomet’s entrance into the story by isolating her main characters, Count Vinevil, his daughter Ardelisa, and her betrothed, Longueville, in Constantinople, where the Count has gone to improve his fortunes through trade. Their situation seems dangerous from the start, though Constantinople at the time was home to many Europeans, especially merchants and their representatives. The sense of threat is present within the first few paragraphs, in which Longueville talks to Ardelisa about their arrival in that city that had previously been capital of the Byzantine Christian empire, describing "odious mosques, where the vile imposter's name [Mohammed] is echoed through the empty choirs and vaults, where cursed Mahometans profane the sacred piles once consecrate to our Redeemer.” In this environment, Ardelisa’s European beauty is a liability, and Longueville implores her to remain in her room, lest some "lustful Turk, mighty in slaves and power, once see that lovely face," and then "what human power could secure you from his impious arms and me from death!" She replies, "should my father’s new undertakings, his tradings, occasion your absence from me, what must I do? Or who shall protect me from the infidels' insolence?" (Aubin 118).
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These brief quotations give us not only a foreshadowing of what will come to pass, but they show Europeans’ preconceived notions of Turkish men: Aubin has not yet described—in fact, she never describes—any contact between her French characters and Turkish society or individuals. Their only contact with Turks is with those who fit this preconceived notion of what a “real” Turk is like: profligate, dangerous, and completely irrational in their attractions. The helpful characters in the rest of the story, as Ardelisa is separated from her father and Longueville, are Chrisitans, usually masquerading as Muslims to avoid persecution. |
Mahomet’s hypersexuality is again evident when he raids Vinevil’s house. When Vinevil confronts him, Mahomet “enraged, cried, ‘Slaves! go search the chambers and bring her naked from her bed that I may ravish her before the dotard’s face and then send his soul to hell’ ” (Aubin 123). Later in the novel, Ardelisa (dressed as a man) meets the "great Turkish general names Osmin," who like Mahomet is instantly smitten with desire, and so he "clasped her in his arms and rudely opening her breast discovered that she was of the soft sex" and then promises soon to "sleep within those lovely arms"—even though he recognizes that she is the woman who has escaped from his "friend" Mahomet (Aubin 130-31). Lust even breaks through the ties of male friendship.
Why is lustfulness such a persistent trait, both in this story and in the characterization of Turkish men? In part, it can be traced to women’s separate lives in Turkish society; the same elements that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu feels she must explain and defend from Western misinterpretations. The reasoning goes that, if women must be kept separate, it must be to protect them from the sexual predators that are Turkish men. Polygamy and the myths of the harem also bolster these arguments, since they seem also to be evidence of the need of the Turkish male sexual appetite for more than the Christianity-sanctioned one wife. (Not that this isn't also a point of envy in some Western accounts of Turkish sexual relations: see du Mont.)
Aubin’s solution to Ardelisa’s dilemma of being a beautiful Western woman among the lustful Turks who will take any opportunity to deflower her is one that reinforces not only the appropriate treatment of Turkish women (like Ardelisa, they need to be locked up for their own protection), but it also emphasizes conventional Christian gender roles of male-as-protector and woman-as-helpless.
Yet other parts of this novel militate against this helplessness: the story follows Ardelisa in her escape from Constantinople and her escape from yet another lustful Turk’s household by having her servant instigate a fire, and then through shipwreck on a deserted island. When not within the confines of the standard Christian relationships, Aubin invests Ardelisa with agency. However, once she returns to France and finds Longueville, and thus is returned to Christian normalcy, the narrative—and her agency—ends. Because of her piousness and her determination to prefer death to rape by a Turk, Ardelisa is given by Providence strength and ingenuity enough to overcome adversity and return to the patriarchal structures that are her reward.
Thus the depiction of the lustful Turk allows Aubin to create more sympathy for her endangered characters, to provoke the frisson of sexual threat to the innocent heroine, and to privilege European religion and the hierarchical social structures it supports.
The violent Turk
Not only is Mahomet lustful, but he is also violent; in fact, he uses violence as a means by which to satisfy his lust. Aubin devotes a long passage to describing how Mahomet plots his invasion of the Count de Vinevil’s residence, and his devious motivations for choosing this methods of gaining his desires: he does not want to “occasion a quarrel between his Emperor and France; or what was more certain lose his own life by the bow-string if justice were required by the French ambassador.” So, “to prevent all which fatal consequences, he determined to kill the old Lord and servants, carry off the lady, and leave none in the house to betray him” (Aubin 122). He succeeds only in the first and third goals. The “cruel Turk” stabs the Count, who “fell, crying, ‘Mercy, my Savior!’ The slaves soon dispatched the innocent servants, who in vain implored their pity. Then they proceeded to plunder the house” (Aubin 123).
Lack of civilizing Christianity seems to loosen the bounds of restraint that maintain social boundaries and private property. Turks were often characterized as randomly violent, the pashas and Janissaries asserting their power over a passive populace. A Paul Rycaut wrote in 1675, “certainly Turks of all the Nations of the world, are the most apt to crush and trample on those that lie under their feet” (Rycaut 162). Even Lady Mary saw some of this on the road, when she asked for pigeons for dinner, and the Janissary traveling with her imprisoned a town's chief officer because he could not provide them (she calls this one of the "good qualitys" of the Janissary corps; Montagu 324).
The general, Osmin, who waylays Ardelisa, is himself a victim of arbitrary Turkish royal power. After delivering an unwelcome message to the Sultan, the Sultan shows his displeasure: “according to the barbarous customs of that nation, he wrecked his rage upon the luckless Osmin, commanding him a prisoner in the Seven Towers, where chained we leave him to curse his false prophet and his destiny” (Aubin 132). Aubin stresses the irrationality of this system of arbitrary punishment by showing the unfounded rage of the ruler that causes him to oppress the great nobles beneath him, who in turn assert their arbitrary power over those still further beneath, as Rycaut suggests.
Rycault also points out the lesson of this to his English reader:
If (Reader) …the Tyranny, Oppressions, ad Cruelty of that State, wherein Reason stands in no competition with the pride and lust of an unreasonable Minister, seem strange to they Liberty and Happiness, thank God that thou art born in a Country the most free and just in all the World, and a Subject to the most Indulgent, the most Gracious of all the Princes in the Universe … (Rycaut A4r).
Linda Colley has shown how Britain defined its national identity against the French and against Catholics, especially by appealing to British liberty in the face of Catholic tyranny (Colley 17); we see in passages such as this the way in which writers also set England against the oppressive governments of the East, which were as threatening to English trade expansion and prosperity as France. By characterizing Turks as tyrants, writers like Rycaut and Aubin not only celebrate Western “liberty,” but also communicate to their readers the necessity of gratitude, because, even if things are bad, they could be much worse.
Source of Selim III image: Kinross 163.
Source of image of man's profile: http://frank.pleasants.free.fr/turk.htm
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