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Circassian Beauty
- 48 statements
- 7 feature instances
- 12 referencing feature instances
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The term Circassian Beauty refers to the romanticized portrayal of women from The Caucasus: breathtakingly beautiful and feminine, slender-waisted and pale-skinned, with rosy cheeks and lustrous, big blue eyes. She embodies ideals of womanly purity and virtue, but also sexuality; she is alluringly exotic, yet familiar. A mainstay of Orientalism, the Circassian Beauty not only signified an idealized representation of womanhood in the European imagination but — more significantly — a device through which ideas about the Near East were projected. In western literature and art, the Circassian Beauty will typically be a nubile slave girl on the auction block, ultimately destined for the sultan's harem; she will likely be portrayed as the most beautiful girl in the palace, who nevertheless dreams of someday escaping her Gilded Cage. Some theorists have suggested that the image of the enslaved Circassian played into transgressive fantasies of a white-passing woman as a sexual object, subjected to the whims of her master. Her predicament would simultaneously disgust, horrify, fascinate and titillate the audience, who could safely experience the thrill of the situation by projecting onto an eroticized Other. The trope takes a somewhat different (though no less orientalist) form in Russian Literature, where the Caucasus is more likely to feature as a setting. In the romantic imagination, the Caucasus was an untamed land on the edge of civilization, where men could find adventure and freedom (think of it as equivalent to the American Wild West); it was a perilously enticing frontier, home to exotic customs, fierce mountain clans, marauding raiders, and of course, bewitchingly beautiful women. In these stories, the Circassian Beauty appears as a member of a rugged yet noble mountaineer clan, and often the protagonist's ill-fated Love Interest. The allure of the Circassian Beauty reached far beyond popular literature, however; it too exerted its influence on the Enlightenment-era "science" of racial classification. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, one of the most influential taxonomists of the period, first used "Caucasian" to describe the "white" variety of man. Blumenbach declared the peoples of the Caucasus (specifically Georgians) as the "most beautiful of mankind" and theorized they were the most primordial, uncorrupted form of the human race, from which the lesser, more degenerate races derived. In the latter half of the 19th century, so-called "Circassian Beauties" would become a staple of sideshow attractions across the United States — local performers billed as Sex Slaves freed from the eastern markets and the purest form of the white race, identifiable by their "exotic" Afro-like hairstyles which in truth bore little resemblance to anything out of the Caucasus. In a cruel twist of irony, this coincided with the very real oppression of actual Circassians, who were massacred and forcibly exiled by Tsarist Russia in a genocide beginning in 1864.note Many Circassians thus ended up in the Arab World, and today live as semi-Arabized minorities in various countries. They are particularly prominent in Jordan, where their women married into the upper classes and their men won places in the government and military through loyal service to the House of Hashem. Beyond these falsehoods, fantasies, and fabrications, there is a degree of truth behind the Circassian mystique. Caucasians were targeted as a prized commodity in the eastern slave trade, where they were sold into the harems of Sultans, Shahs, and other wealthy men. Many notable consorts of Ottoman Sultans had their roots in the Caucasus, including several valide sultans (queen mothers). Today, the Circassian Beauty is largely a discredited, Forgotten Trope — the product of bygone orientalist fantasies and refuted scientific theories. Nevertheless, the legacy of the trope persists through racial terminology, which despite discreditation by modern science, has not faded from popular usage. Note that in context of the trope, "Circassian" may refer either to the people also known as the Adyghe, or more broadly, to indigenous Caucasian highlanders. This latter category includes the Adyghe, as well as peoples such as Georgians, Chechens, Ossets, and Avars. In English, "Circassian" was originally a catch-all term for "mountaineer" or "highlander" (equivalent to Russian gorets), a definition that did not begin to narrow until around the mid-19th century. Additionally, although the trope is almost Always Female, Circassian men have also been subject to the stereotype. |
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| Circassian Beauty / int_4bea6084 | type |
Circassian Beauty | |
| Circassian Beauty / int_4bea6084 | comment |
Circassia in Europa Universalis IV has a national idea called "Adyghe Beauty", which decreases prestige decay for the country. | |
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| Circassian Beauty / int_4caa83f4 | type |
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A Hero of Our Time: Bela is a Circassian princess and the target of affections of both the main character, Pechorin, and a brooding Circassian daredevil named Kazbich. Their rivalry over her eventually costs Bela her life. | |
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Three Thousand Years of Longing has several scenes in historical Ottoman courts, which feature several beautiful Turkish women as Fanservice Extras (as concubines, servants in baths, and the like). Most of them are fair-skinned, dark-eyed beauties. The antagonist of Gülten's story, Hurrem, (not Circassian herself but a romanticized empress nonetheless) is Suleiman's favorite concubine and later wife, extolled as a great beauty with red hair and milky skin dressed to the nines in Ottoman fashion. | |
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"The Shadow of the Vulture" by Robert E. Howard features Roxelana, the wife of Suleiman the Magnificent and empress of the Ottoman Empire (see Real Life below), her sister, the equally fiery-haired and beautiful Red Soyna of Rogatino. | |
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| Circassian Beauty / int_a9d17c55 | type |
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| Circassian Beauty / int_a9d17c55 | comment |
Magnificent Century: Kösem: Rasa Hatun, later called Mahfiruze, is described by another character as a "Circassian beauty". As the actual origin of her historical basis is unknown, her Circassian roots are an invention of the series, albeit a believable one considering harem demographics. | |
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| Circassian Beauty / int_b1058237 | type |
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Temeraire: In Black Powder War, Captain Laurence, Temeraire, and their crew are treated to a banquet by a vizier of the Ottoman Empire, with scantily-clad Circassian belly dancers for entertainment. Laurence is annoyed rather than captivated because he's an uptight British gentleman, and also because he's there to check on an important deal Britain made with the Ottomans (which the latter seem to have reneged on), and knows this is a blatant attempt to distract him from pursuing the issue. Temeraire, being a huge dragon, is more interested in their jewelry than their bodies. | |
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| Circassian Beauty / int_be3bd6 | type |
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Invoked in Lawrence of Arabia, when Lawrence is taken captive by Ottoman forces and interrogated by the sadistic Turkish bey. "You have blue eyes... Are you Circassian?" asks the bey in one of the film's most infamous scenes. The significance of this question is likely to be missed by most modern audiences, but as scholar Charles E. King observes, "it points unmistakably toward the homoerotic" and subtly sets up Lawrence's rape while imprisoned, noting that "the bey's question concerning his captive's ethnic origins follows a well-worn cultural groove — the equation of Circassians, and often Caucasus peoples in general, with sex." | |
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.
| Circassian Beauty | processingCategory2 |
Always Female | |
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Discredited Trope | |
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Love Interests | |
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Race Tropes | |
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The Beautiful Tropes | |
| Lawrence of Arabia / int_4a87d78d | type |
Circassian Beauty | |
| Three Thousand Years of Longing / int_4a87d78d | type |
Circassian Beauty | |
| Don Juan / int_4a87d78d | type |
Circassian Beauty | |
| Gemmalie / int_4a87d78d | type |
Circassian Beauty | |
| The Shadow of the Vulture / int_4a87d78d | type |
Circassian Beauty | |
| Eurovision Song Contest / int_4a87d78d | type |
Circassian Beauty | |
| Europa Universalis (Video Game) / int_4a87d78d | type |
Circassian Beauty |
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