L’EUROPE DE ZEYNEB HANOUM : LES DÉSILLUSIONS « OCCIDENTALES » D’UNE RÊVEUSE « ORIENTALE »
ZEYNEB HANOUM'S EUROPE: WESTERN DELUSIONS OF AN ORIENTAL DREAMER

Summary/Abstract: Zeyneb Hanoum (Hanım), one of the muses and also main characters of the novel Les désenchantées by Pierre Loti (1906), whose real name was Hadice Zennur, has fled Turkey in january 1906, before the publication of the above mentioned book, in company with her younger sister, Nuriye Neyrünnisa, better known in the Occident as Melek Hanoum and, later, as Nouriyé Rohozinska, in order to escape Sultan Abdülhamid’s persecution. The two Ottoman ladies, who were partly of French descent and had been given a progressive, liberal education, travelled a while around Europe, visiting and also staying for different intervals of time in France, Switzerland, Italy, London, Brussels, Spain. Unlike her sister, who married in 1908 a Polish aristocrat and composer and adapted herself to Paris lifestyle, Zeyneb Hanoum was greatly disappointed with her Western and, in particular, French experience, all the more so as « her Occident », primarily based on book knowledge, proved to be a distant mirage. Disenchanted with both the « Orient » and the « Occident », she has decided to go back to Turkey six years later, in 1912, and to get on with her life ; she never returned in Europe until her death, in 1923. Our article deals with her « European impressions », published in 1913 in London, with the support of the British journalist Grace Ellison.

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