American Women Readers Encounter Turkey in the Shadow of Popular Romance

Year 1999, Issue: 9, 71 - 82, 01.04.1999

Kathlene Postma

Abstract

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.

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