Private rituals and public selves: the turkish bath in women's travel writing

• Autores: Efterpi Mitsi
• Localización: Inside out: women negotiating, subverting, appropriating public and private space / coord. por Teresa Gómez Reus, Aránzazu Usandizaga Sáinz, 2008, ISBN 978-90-420-2441-0, págs. 47-63
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This chapter relates the "invisible flâneuse" of the urban space with the invisible women travellers. Facilitated by the rise of tourism, late nineteenth century women travellers could transgress certain gender restrictions and as writers interpret foreign cultures for a middle-class, mostly female, British audience. A central paradigm of the connection between space and power in women's travelogues on the Orient is the Turkish bath, which in ways similar to Benjamin's Passage functions as an emblem, a trope of the Orient itself, becoming at the same time a commodity, a tourist attraction of the oriental journey. Like the Parisian Arcade, a space not only for consuming but also for gazing, the hammam is a public interior, a liminal space, suspending the separations between the public and the private, between social classes and ethnicities. The visit to the hammam has an additional emblematic role for British women travellers, invoking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's famous letter of her visit to the baths at Sofia in 1717, which initiated a discourse informing the representation of the oriental women. A visit to the baths was a necessary stop in the tour of the Levant for travellers from the mid to the late nineteenth century, whose accounts transform Montagu's "feminotopia", a "natural" female naked world, to an oriental tableau, illustrating the connection between space and power.