→ Turquerie
As to their morality or good conduct, I can say, like Harlequin, that ’tis just as ’tis with you; and the Turkish ladies don’t commit one sin the less for not being Christians. Now, that I am a little acquainted with their ways, I cannot forbear admiring, either the exemplary discretion, or extreme stupidity of all the writers that have given accounts of them. ’Tis very easy to see, they have in reality more liberty than we have. No woman, of what rank soever, is permitted to go into the streets without two murlins, one that covers her face all but her eyes, and another, that hides the whole dress of her head, and hangs half way down her back. Their shapes are also wholely (sic) concealed, by a thing they call a ferigee, which no woman of any sort appears without; this has strait sleeves, that reach to their fingers-ends, and it laps all round them, not unlike a riding-hood. In winter, ’tis of cloth; and in summer, of plain stuff or silk. You may guess then, how effectually this disguises them, so that there is no distinguishing the great lady from her slave. ’Tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife, when he meets her; and no man dare touch or follow a woman in the street.
This perpetual masquerade gives them entire liberty of following their inclinations, without danger of discovery. The most usual method of intrigue, is, to send an appointment to the lover to meet the lady at a Jew’s shop, which are as notoriously convenient as our Indian-houses; and yet, even those who don’t make use of them, do not scruple to go to buy pennyworths, and tumble over rich goods, which are chiefly to be found amongst that sort of people. The great ladies seldom let their gallants know who they are; and ’tis so difficult to find it out, that they can very seldom guess at her name, whom they have corresponded with for above half a year together. You may easily imagine the number of faithful wives very small in a country where they have nothing to fear from a lover’s indiscretion, since we see so many have the courage to expose themselves to that in this world, and all the threatened punishment of the next, which is never preached to the Turkish damsels. Neither have they much to apprehend from the resentment of their husbands; those ladies that are rich, having all their money in their own hands. Upon the whole, I look upon the Turkish women, as the only free people in the empire….
Mary Wortley Montagu to Frances Pierrepont, March 31, 01717
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Sarah J. Hale (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 01869), 79.
François Hubert Drouais, Portrait of a Woman in Turkish Costume (Anne de Romans?)
01762, oil on canvas, 60.3 × 49.7 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The problem of the burka is not a religious problem, it’s a problem of liberty and women’s dignity. It’s not a religious symbol, but a sign of subservience and debasement. I want to say solemnly, the burka is not welcome in France. In our country, we can’t accept women prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity. That’s not our idea of freedom.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy quoted in Angelique Chrisafis, “Nicolas Sarkozy says Islamic veils are not welcome in France,” guardian.co.uk, June 22, 02009.
→ Played off
[A] code cannot be destroyed, only “played off”
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Macmillan, 01978), 144
Roland Barthes, 01978.
Photo by Sophie Bassouls
→ Paradox in the Rhetoric of Whiteness
In Le Corbusier’s intoxicated rationalism, the rhetoric of order, purity and truth is inscribed in a pure, blinding white surface. So blinding, in fact, that the discourse of modern architecture has almost entirely failed to notice that most of his buildings are actually coloured. This marvellous paradox in the rhetoric of whiteness has been carefully picked apart by Mark Widgley [sic], who has observed, for example, that Le Corbusier’s manifesto building, the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, built in the same year as The Decorative Arts of Today was written, was actually painted in ten different colours: white, black, light grey, dark grey, yellow ochre, pale yellow ochre, burnt sienna, dark burnt sienna and light blue.
Interior view of Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau (01925; reconstructed in Bologna, Italy in 01977)
Photo by Susumu Hirayama
Widgley [sic] has noted that Le Corbusier only ever made one white building. In spite of this, he has argued, there is ‘a self-imposed blindness … shared by almost all of the dominant historiographies … Colour is detached from the master narrative’ of architecture. Once again, it appears that we are not dealing with something as simple as white things and white surfaces, with white as an empirically verifiable fact or as a colour. Rather, we are in the realm of whiteness. White as myth, as an aesthetic fantasy, a fantasy so strong that it summons up negative hallucinations, so intense that it produces a blindness to colour, even when colour is literally in front of your face.
David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 02000), 47
Exterior view of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation (01947-01952) in Marseille, France.
Photo by (the very talented) Paul Soulellis