American Women Readers Encounter Turkey in the Shadow of Popular Romance

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 9 (1999) : 71-82. American Women Readers Encounter Turkey in the Shadow of Popular Romance Kathlene Postma Demetra Vaka's In the Shadow of Islam, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1911, depicts Millicent Grey, a recent Radcliffe graduate bent on improving the world through her naïve attempts at international philanthropy. The athletic, blonde American heiress arrives in İstanbul with little more than the vaguest of good intentions and soon finds herself in a passionate struggle with a threatening, desperate, and dark-complexioned Ottoman lover. At first glance, Vaka appears to have created a popular romance novel, a New Woman variation on F. Marion Crawford’s love stories, then the rage with women readers, in which heroes and heroines, separated largely by their race, ethnicity, or social class, pursue and flee each other across sensational locations. In the Shadow of Islam’s setting seems to capitalize on the Western hunger for the exotic, specifically the Oriental, that would inspire silent films such as The Sheik (1921), the paintings of Gustav Klimt, and the architecture, decor, and clothing fashion of the 1920s. However, an accurate assessment of the novel’s agenda as well as its reception requires a closer examination of the other historical and social forces influencing Vaka and her audience. These include a vigorous American expansionism, the growing population of educated women and the role of the feminist movement in the United States, American philanthropic involvement with Christian minorities living in the Ottoman Empire, and Vaka’s own Greek-American background, particularly her concerns for Greeks in the Empire during the politically tumultuous time before World War I. A closer analysis of this narrative reveals that embedded in Vaka’s improvisation on the contemporary fascination with all things Oriental is propaganda meant to inflame and reaffirm Western fears of an Ottoman Empire and Islamicism that had for centuries been constructed by the west as spiritually corrupted, sexually enticing, and politically aggressive. Vaka was born in 1877 on Büyük Ada (Prinkipo Island) in the sea of Marmara, an over the water suburb of İstanbul, and grew up in that city. She was raised to be conscious of her Greek heritage, including her responsibilities to the “Great Idea” (Megalo Idea in Greek), the belief that all the lands once of the Byzantine Empire should be returned to Greece. However, she broke with some of her Greek community’s expectations early on by forming strong friendships with Turkish girls and leaving her family at the age of seventeen to emigrate to the United States (Note 1), in part to avoid an arranged marriage (Overton 286). During her lifetime, she wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, Colliers and other magazines, and produced twelve books of fiction and non-fiction. Vaka, often identified by scholars as Vaka Brown (her American husband’s last name) or Mrs. Kenneth Brown (the principal name she used on her earlier publications), is the first Greek-American woman recognized as an author of reputation (Kalogeras 107). With In the Shadow of Islam, Vaka manipulates the literary conventions of the popular love story, the form of publishable writing most available to women readers and women writers in the early twentieth century, to create a narrative that by its conclusion replaces romantic love with a sexualized nationalism, American as well as Greek. One of her goals is to revise radically the romance genre’s longestablished Victorian imperatives to glorify a woman’s position as adoring wife and mother and to affirm her place in the home and community as the literal and figurative bearer of civilized culture. In answer to the needs of a female population struggling to move beyond traditional roles, Vaka extends a woman's duties as moral guardian of the home to moral guardian of the world, replaces marriage to man with marriage to a political ideal, and turns devotion to female morality and sexual purity into a fervent nationalism. The emotionally-charged language of conflicted love is echoed and eventually overcome by the hyperbolic rhetoric of political action. By the end of the novel, the conventional “Reader, I married him” is replaced by “Reader I embraced the cause of furthering the aims of my country.” Houghton Mifflin aided the narrative’s cause through the exterior and interior design of the book. The cloth cover of the first edition features a red star and crescent superimposed upon a white cross, itself framed by a square blue background, suggesting to the informed reader and potential buyer of 1911 that a potent Islamic symbol has eclipsed the Greek flag. An American Christian reader unfamiliar with the Greek flag might at least be disturbed by the white Christian cross pinned under the red star of Islam. Another reader might see a positive fusion of the two symbols. Placed at regular intervals within the text are four illustrations by E. PollackOttendorf, all in black and white. The first, printed alongside the title page, reveals that this is indeed a popular romance. The illustration depicts a man wearing a fez and dressed in black, his face cast in shadow. He leans toward a reticent, lighthaired woman draped in an angelic white, filmy fabric. The man’s oppressive position is intensified by his flaring dark jacket, which magnifies his size, and his dark eyebrows and wide black moustache, which cover any facial expression except the intensity of his eyes. His hand clasps the woman’s limp fingers. The caption, “Did I Frighten You?” is enhanced by the background, which includes a forest and mosques. The forest looms and the minarets jut dagger-like into the white sky. The message is complete when the eye lights on the adjoining page and sees printed in bold: In the Shadow of Islam. Beneath the title is a smaller graphic repeating the cover design, showing the star and crescent this time in black and appearing to grasp the cross, which is white. (See Figure 1) The woman and the cross are visually in the same threatened position, and her fragile lightness connects with the pale sky at the top of the illustration, suggesting that she is of the same substance as the airy lightness above. It is this intimidated, angelic image of the woman that the female reader’s eye will return to as a point of identification for herself, so that the question, “Did I frighten you?” is directed to the viewer as well as the character. The viewer would be expected to be enticed by the titillating scene. Will he rape her? Will he attack and kill her? Will her whiteness and Christianity be defiled? Does she wish to be overcome by him, as the reader might want to be while reading the book? If her imagination is captured, the reader will flip through the remaining pages to find three more illustrations all with the similar murky, impressionistic use of shadows and light, showing a sensual clinging or touching between character (...truncated)