Myth, vision, and the harem in French painting, from Fontainebleau through the nineteenth century

Within the French artistic imagination the topos of the harem has stature and a presence unequaled in other western cultures. For more than three centuries, beginning about 1560, French artists created images of life in the palace, or serail, of the Ottoman sultan, and especially of the sultan's women within their household, or harem. Underwriting this project is the thesis that the mythical harem of nineteenth-century artists and writers is an extension of the realm and utility of classical mythology. Well before the Enlightenment, French culture used classical myths of vision and power to investigate and represent the control of dangerous female sexuality. Beginning with the Diana myths depicted at the sixteenth-century royal chateau at Fontainebleau, I explore the thematic and stylistic foundations of nineteenth-century harem imagery. I trace the metamorphoses of these myths and the sexuality of Fontainebleau style into various versions of the serail and harem stories. The sultans and sultanas of eighteenth-century turquerie, who reenacted the lives of the French court and its ambivalence toward women of power, gave way in the nineteenth century to sexualized imagery of "oriental" slaves, bathers, and odalisques, and the power that might be exercised over them. In the academic salon, the symbolic surveillance exercised by the sultan over his realm becomes that of the invisible spectator of the work of art, as well as the art critic. The nineteenth-century cultural resonance of the harem was enhanced by the threat of the Parisian street prostitute and the ways in which she blurred the boundaries of class and the "separate spheres" of public and private. Widespread concern about prostitution invaded the salon as it did Paris, producing a critical discourse that, like the harem imagery itself; participated fully in the cultural understanding of the control of female sexuality. This project ties together art criticism, the social understanding of prostitution, the imagery of harem women and the harem topos, and classical mythology in order to broaden our understanding of the participation of artistic production in the ideas and beliefs that control our lives.