The Lustful Turk (1828)
Set in Georgian England, the epistolary novel The Lustful Turk tells the story of two English gentlewomen who become sex slaves in a harem in northern Africa. Writing to her friend Sylvia, Emily Barlow describes how Arab pirates kidnapped her during her journey to India in 1814. After Ali, the dey of Algiers, buys her, he brings her to his harem as his sex slave; after her encounter with Ali, Emily finds that his rough treatment of her awakens her sexuality.
Emily embraces her newfound lust, which offends Sylvia; Ali steals one of Emily’s letters, and he orchestrates the kidnapping of Sylvia herself. He arrives at the slave market, impersonating a Frenchman, deceiving her into marriage to save her from sexual slavery. They get married, and Ali returns to the harem with Sylvia, and he has sex with both Sylvia and Emily together. A new arrival castrates Ali before killing herself. Ali then has his missing parts preserved in wine and presents them as gifts to Emily and Sylvia before sending them back to England.
The story may seem far-fetched to us now, but the idea of being kidnapped by Arab pirates was eerily familiar to nineteenth-century British audiences. Even though the practice was in decline, Arab Barbary pirates had been attacking British ships and coastal towns for hundreds of years, making slaves of the people they captured. The idea of “white slavery” was well-known, and it instilled fear in everyone who lived on the English coast or sailed on the open sea because capture was always a possibility.
The fear of Arab pirates made its way into the literature of the time; non-Western settings in Georgian and Victorian novels became places that were the opposite of contemporary British values. Non-Western people, in particular, were characterized brutally, the opposite of civilized society. Literary scholars have analyzed the setting of the harem in Georgian and Victorian literature as a place of unrestrained morals and open sexuality, making the audience appreciate the refined British society in which they lived.