WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
literature of the West. Some of the Turkish ladies eagerly imbibe the new social ideas.
Pierre Loti's romance is not merely a pathetic story. It is a contribution to the sociology of the Near East. The heroine voices the aspirations of the new woman of Turkey. She cries out for light, for liberty in the supreme matter of choice in love, and for contact with the great world outside of the seraglio. The novel describes faithfully the narrow environment in which harem women live. Loti shows how the disenchanted yearn for love. The heroine of the story says:—
"She has achieved the sort of duality of identity which is common to many Turkish women of her age and rank, who say: 'My person is delivered over by contract to an unknown man, and I devote it to him because I am an honest woman; but my soul, which was not consulted, is still my own, and I keep it with jealous reserve for an ideal lover whom I may never meet with, and who in any case will never know anything about it.'"
The heroine of Loti's romance refers to the loneliness of seraglio life:—
"The sense of emptiness which is produced in our life by the necessity of never talking to any but women, of living always among ourselves, our fellow-women. Our friends? but, mercy; they are as weak and as weary as we are! In our harems weakness—so many weaknesses rather, combined and huddled together, are sick at heart, suffer the more from being what they are, and cry out for strength."
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