Les Désenchantées — Roman des harems Turcs contemporains by Pierre Loti.
Les Désenchantées par Pierre Loti. READ (in French)IN HTML o in PDF
A la chère et vénérée et angoissante mémoire de LEYLA-AZIZÉ-AÏCHÉ Hanum, fille de Mehmed Bey J… Z… et de Esma Hanum D…, née le 16 Rébi-ul- ahir 1297 à T… (Asie-Mineure), morte le 28 Chebâl 1323 (17 décembre 1905) à Ch… Z… (Stamboul).
"...O Djénane-Feridé-Azâdé, que le rahmet d'Allah descende sur toi! Que la paix soit à ton âme fière et blanche! Et puissent tes soeurs de Turquie, à mon appel, pendant quelques années encore avant l'oubli, redire ton cher nom, le soir dans leurs prières!…"
Loti’s attempt to disguise the identity of his protagonists was soon uncovered. Before the publication of Disenchanted, fearing the imperial axe, the two Turkish sisters Melek and Zeyneb flee to Europe from their harem with the hope of finding ‘freedom’ in the West. 4 “What prompted their escape to Europe was the sister’s engagement”5 with a lady. This third woman is known to be a French journalist and translator who was visiting Turkey when Loti arrived in Constantinople. Her name was Madame Léra.[2]
SEE ALSO: GRACE ELLISON: AN ENGLISHWOMAN IN A TURKISH HAREM BY Füsun ÇOBAN DÖŞKAYA
Abstract : Though to varying degrees prominent and successful in her day, today, Grace Ellison, is largely unknown to Western readers and she is not too familiar to readers in Turkey and little is known about the details of her life. The idea/possibility of English journalist/writer Grace Ellison’s being French journalist Madame Léra (Marie Léra, who wrote under the name of Marc Hélys) is the main argument of this article. In addition to this, this study concentrates on Grace Ellison and one of her neglected historical records called, “An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem (1915)” to explore the literary forgery in which she is involved.
Pierre Loti.
Pierre Loti was one of the most popular French writers of his time. Born on this day in 1850 as Julien Viaud (the pseudonym came later), Loti travelled extensively both as a naval officer and as a civilian, his wanderings and romantic episodes frequently turning up thinly disguised in his novels.One such work was Les Désenchantées, written in 1906. In the foreword, Loti claims “this is an entirely imagined story. It would be a waste of time trying to give real names to Djénane, to Zeyneb[1], to Mélek or to André, because they never existed.”
Its origins lay in one of the stranger episodes in Loti’s eventful life, which took place while he was in command of a French ship based in Constantinople. In 1904 the author received what was essentially a fan letter from a Turkish woman, in which she daringly suggested — in defiance of all social convention — a meeting, to which she wished to bring two other equally unaccompanied female friends.
The meeting took place, the women heavily veiled, the author cautious yet intrigued. There were subsequent encounters, ever bolder, in which the women unburdened their hearts, bemoaning the fate of woman in Ottoman Turkey, entombed in the harem, their passions denied. Similarly disarmed, Loti took them to the grave of his great love Hakidjé, who as Aziyadé had been the subject of his first novel.
Relations deepened. One of the trio, Leyla, took a keen, romantic interest in Loti but her suspicious family sent her away to their country house, where, distraught, she took her own life. Loti was devastated.Returning to France in 1905, Loti was surprised when the remaining two of the trio, having escaped their harem, turned up at his sumptuous Orientalist fantasia of a house in Rochefort, begging to be taken in. They proved to be less than ideal house guests, “sluttish, lazy and mischief-making” according to Lesley Blanch in her biography of Loti. But the author was sufficiently inspired by their presence to write Les Désenchantées, in which he recalled the Constantinople encounters, styling himself André and Leyla as Djénane.
The book was a huge success. SOURCE
[1] Zeyneb Hanım
She was born in 1883. Her real name is Hatice Zennur. Her father, Nuri Bey had an important position at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the reign of Abdülhamit II. Her grandfather, Reşat Bey was the French Nobleman Marquis de Blosset Chateauneuf, who had come to the country during the Crimean War as an officer of the Sultan and fallen in love with an Ottoman woman of Circassian origin and converted to Islam. Similar to the elite Ottoman women of the time, Zeyneb Hanım and her sister Nuriye Hanım, who was using the pen name Melek Hanım, received both an eastern and a western education. They were trained to be in command of five languages. The generation of their mother preceding them is one that had begun thinking about how the eastern women could improve their own conditions. Covering themselves head to foot at the age of twelve, something that their grandmother had accepted with submission, was not a ritual of transforming from being a child to being a woman, but a traumatising experience for them.
Despite Abdülhamit’s curfew laws, they would meet up with their friends at home and discuss how to improve their conditions at their “white night meetings.” Even though their mother and father had provided their daughters a western education, essentially, they expected of them to be good wives and mothers. In fact, Nuri Bey married Zeyneb to his secretary and protege, Abdüllatif Safa Bey, who will later become a Minister of Foreign Affairs, without her consent. This forced marriage made the two sisters take action regarding both their own condition and the condition of all their friends.
Zeyneb and Melek contacted Marc Hélys, whose pen name was Marie Léra[2] [3] and who was staying at their place, and Pierre Loti, who had been quite famous with his novel Aziyadé, in order to draw attention to the eastern women who were under oppression. Through the secret correspondence and meetings with Loti, they put together the novel, Les Desenchanées. This novel was published in 1906 in Paris and became a great success. As a result of the novels they had been reading and the education they had received, Zeyneb Hanım believed that women in Europe lived in very good conditions. As she thought that the publication of the novel would be a scandal and wanted to free herself from the regime and the traditions that she was living within, she and her sister secretly ran away to Europe on a train at night with the help of their European woman friends. Melek Hanım married an aristocratic Polish musician and stayed in Europe. Zeyneb Hanım, however, not being able to find the freedom she sought after, returned to her country unhappier after six years of an immigrant's life. She died of tuberculosis on 14 April 1923.
This journey of the novelist and her impressions of Europe became known, when her English feminist journalist friend Grace Ellison edited and published the letters she had sent her from various cities. Grace Ellison published the letters when Zeyneb Hanım returned Istanbul in 1913 in London with Seely Service and Co. Publishers. These letters were translated into Turkish in 2001. The most detailed research on Zeyneb Hanım’s letters were conducted by Reina Lewis in her Rethinking Orientalism. In 2005, the facsimile copies of the letters were published with an introduction by Reina Lewis.
Works
Les Desenchanées (1906)
A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions. Ed. Grace Ellison (1913) (Tr. Özgürlük Peşinde Bir Osmanlı Kadını - 2001)
Bibliography
Lewis, Reina. Oryantalizmi Yeniden Düşünmek. Istanbul: Kapı, 2006.
_________. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem. I.B. Tauris, 2004.
Toros, Taha. Pierre Loti’yi Anarken. http://ekitap.kulturturizm.gov.tr/belge/1-35162/taha-toros.html
[2] Hortense Marie Héliard dite Marie Léra, née le 2 juin 1864 à Saint-Nazaire et décédée en 1956 à Lyon, est une journaliste et une romancière française. Marie Léra est surtout connue pour son ouvrage Le secret des désenchantées publié sous le pseudonyme de Marc Hélys, qui raconte comment le succès littéraire de Pierre Loti Les désenchantées résulte d'une supercherie dont elle fut l'auteur.
Elle s'intéressa au féminisme dans plusieurs pays étrangers. En 1906, elle publia À travers le féminisme en Suède (Paris, Plon-Nourrit). L'un de ses romans traite de la condition féminine en Turquie. Egalement traductrice (de l'italien, anglais, suédois et polonais), elle a aussi utilisé le pseudonyme Jean d'Anin.Ecrivaine, journaliste, voyageuse intrépide, Marie Léra publie en 1908 sous le pseudonyme de Marc Hélys, Le Jardin fermé, recueil de nouvelles sur les harems d'Istanbul. Un livre passionnant, fourmillant d'anecdotes drôles ou poignantes, qui remet en question, avec humour ou compassion, nombre de préjugés sur le harem et la condition des femmes turques dans les dernières années de l'Empire ottoman. En effet, contrairement à beaucoup de voyageurs qui parlent des harems sans jamais y avoir pénétré, Marc Hélys, lors de ses trois séjours à Istanbul en 1901, 1904 et 1905, partage le quotidien de deux jeunes femmes, Nouryé et Zennour et s'introduit par leur entremise dans toutes les demeures de leur entourage. Elle observe, s'extasie ou s'indigne selon les jours, converse avec les femmes ottomanes et met sa plume au service des débats idéologiques qui les animent. Marc Hélys, qui s'était déjà fait l'écho des revendications féminines en fournissant à Pierre Loti le matériau de son roman Les Désenchantées (1906) nous livre, avec Le Jardin fermé, un témoignage exceptionnel sur les "Scènes de la vie féminine en Turquie".
[3] Only after Loti’s death in 1923 did the truth emerge, and from an unlikely source. “Leyla” was not in fact dead, nor even Turkish; she was a French journalist named Marie Léra who published under the pseudonym Marc Hélys. Her book Le secret des “Désenchantées” told the whole sad, sorry tale, of how she and the two other women, daughters of a senior Ottoman official, toyed with Loti for their own amusement, correctly believing that the author, so susceptible to romance and adventure, would find the situation irresistible. Loti never found out the truth.