Imagination must take the strain when facts are few. As information about the domestic life of polygamous Oriental households was fragmentary, 17th, 18th and 19th-century European writers and painters filled gaps with gaudy embroidery. Only the barest descriptions and a little gossip about the seclusion of women were necessary to seed fantasies about sex, submission, jealousy, power and violence, or to encourage the investigation of cooler themes such as secrecy, privacy, sisterhood and security. Imagined seraglios became playgrounds for poets and pornographers, moralists and feminists. They provided theoretical examples for social theory and jurisprudence to take up. They offered painters stimulating subject-matter - the girl in the slave market, the odalisque in a dream of soft compliance - and gave dramatists plots in which naked jealousy tangled with ferocious passion.

LRB 10 May 2001 | PDF Download