As a rule, Barkley speaks from his own experience. However, it is a fact that on some topics widely discussed in England at the time he takes sides without having enough first-hand information to make up his mind impartially. One such topic is the moral portrait of Oriental women and their role in the advancement of the Ottoman society.
The prosperity and greatness of England and other Western countries is doubtless mainly due to the cultivation and refinement of the women, and also to their bodily vigour. The beneficial influence of mothers and sisters acting on young children makes them in after life honourable and upright men, and many a man would turn out a ruffian if it were not for this. Then the same power sheds its influence from the higher to the lower classes, and thus helps to improve all. (Barkley, 91.)
To Barkley' s mind, polygamy was a source of great evil in the Ottoman Empire. As the Englishman takes it, if one man has two or three wives, two or three others have to go without this luxury. And ' as the women are only allowed to see and speak to their nearest male relatives, many a young man never enjoys woman' s society from the time he leaves his father' s harem' (Barkley, 93.).
Reportedly, mothers in Turkey were incapable of cultivating the minds of their off-spring because of their own deficient education -- a failure which is especially obvious to Barkley in implicit comparison with the Victorian idealisation of motherhood and family qualities in general:
[She] has been made to believe she was created solely for the pleasure of man, and that even her hope of a future is owing to the great demand there will be in heaven for houris to minister to the he-angels. (Barkley, 91.)
The last remark is directed at the religious beliefs of the Muslims which, in Barkley' s opinion, deprived a woman of a stimulus to improve her person and culture as they neglected her social role. Simultaneously, the Englishman criticises the lax morals of Turkish men.
Barkley distinguishes between the wives of rich and of poor Turks. The difference does not lie in their wealth but in their labour habits. For the Englishman, it was work that moulded the character and morality of these ladies -- just as with their counterparts.
Women from the Turkish working classes did not have attendants and slaves, so they had to do the housework themselves. This ' little occupation for mind and body' also had a positive influence on the children, who had the possibility of being more with their equals than with ' toadying servants' . The wives of rich Ottomans, by contrast, led a ' lazy, useless, sensual life, doing no sort of work and never opening a book or paper' (Barkley, 92.).
Their days are spent in stuffy-smelling rooms, smoking cigarettes and eating sweetmeats, and the only excitement of the day is paying visits to other women, or stewing in the debilitating bath. (Barkley, 92.)
Again it is indolence which Barkley accuses them of. An eighteenth-century traveller would have explained this feature with the enfeebling effect of a hot climate on the physical properties of women; Barkley explains it with a lack of healthy occupations for mind and body. As travellers who adhered to climatic theories took it, the baths had an effect equivalent to that of a hot climate (Dallaway, 30.). Barkley does not have any first-hand experience on the topic but he seems to agree. ' Debilitating' is the epithet he uses. It appears that he subscribed to the wide-spread idea that the frequent application of hot baths destroyed the ' solids' and deformed minds and bodies.
Beyond the bath matter, indolence not only characterised Turkish women as persons but also shaped their bodies.
From never taking exercise, from being cooped up in close rooms, and from eating so much unwholesome food, they almost lose the use of their limbs, and it is a horrid sight to see them wadding and shuffling along. (Barkley, 92.)
The physical constraints of the Turkish ladies, Barkley insists, led to mental confinement. Their minds and morals paralleled their bodies. They did not have any rational subject of conversation and ' naturally drift[ed] into filthy discussions and obscene stories' . (Barkley, 92.) The Englishman does admit that there was not as much immorality among Oriental ladies as among European ones. Yet this fact was due only to a lack of personal freedom:
[The Turkish women] are good because they have no chance of being the reverse. The are never trusted by fathers and husbands… From what I have been told by Turks, I believe if they had half the liberty enjoyed by European women, Stamboul and all Turkey would be a hell upon earth. (Barkley, 93.)
The quotation reflects the idea that the female sex was so lascivious that men had to invent the institution of the harem as a preventative measure in order to be safe from female molestation in the streets.
' What hope can there be for the sons of such mothers?' -- exclaims Barkley. The decay of the Ottoman Empire thus becomes a consequence of bad methods of upbringing and unsystematic, incomplete education.
Until the boy is ten years old he lives in the harem with the women, and listens all day to their low, ignorant conversation. He is stuffed with unwholesome food, and allowed to do just as he likes; in fact both mind and body are poisoned in the most perfect way. (Barkley, 92.)
The complete lack of control over the child and the emptiness of the life it leads in the harem results in frivolity of character and rebellion against any kind of order. These characteristics become firmly set when the child joins the world of the grown-ups.
He soon learns, if he has not already done so, to use disgusting oaths, … to smoke a pipe, and to kick, cuff, and bully the cringing menials he lives with. (Barkley, 92.)
Turkish children grew up without ever being corrected or snubbed. ' On the contrary they were taught to look on themselves as on very fine fellows, and one of a most superior nation' (Barkley, Danube, 93.). The Oriental upbringing methods were part of the reasons why Barkley saw no hope for improvement in the Ottoman Empire. Even if there was one, the Englishman was sceptical about the rapidity with which the advancement could come:
Even supposing all these were changing and becoming better, which I deny is the case, it would take generations before any improvement could be visible. (Barkley, 94.)
Barkley, Henry C., Between the Danube and the Black Sea or Five Years in Bulgaria (London: Murray, 1877).
Dallaway, James, Constantinople Ancient and Modern, with excursions to the Shores and Islands of the Archipelago, and to the Troad (London: Cadell, 1797).
Last modified 2001