They were probably funny but rebellious. Why the Circassian Lady as the title for this particular type of circus performer? Titillation should not be confused with illumination. Slow down please, and enjoy the info. [22] In the United States, the girls disguised as "Circassians" exhibited by Phineas T. Barnum were in fact Catholic Irish girls from Lower Manhattan. Already in his 1775 text, Blumenbach specifically identified the Circassian women among the peoples of the Caucasus as the single most beautiful representatives of this pure and primordial Caucasian type: Take, of all who bear the name of man, a man and a woman most widely different from each other; let the one be a most beautiful Circassian woman and the other an African born in Guinea, as black and ugly as possible (Blumenbach, Anthropological Treatises, 363). Near him, and reclining upon cushions, are two European Circassian women, whom also dressed in the extremity of Egyptian Oriental taste of Cairo On the right is seen a tall Nubian eunuch, who removes from the shoulders of an African Black slave the shawl by which she had been covered, in order to show her to the master of the harem; this figure with her high shoulders and the characteristics of her features, is a most successful national impersonation. Who bade on till the hundreds reached the eleven, Powers insisted that the nakedness depicted was not offensive but rather elevating, that it was no incitement to lust but rather an instance of what he called an ideal type, a form that transcends the human body and symbolizes pure principles of human virtue. Thomas Jefferson himself had sired children with his slave Sally Hemings, herself the child of an enslaved mother and a white masterand the half sister of Jeffersons deceased wife. Thomas Benyshe (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865). You readEdmund Morgans workand actually see racism being inscribed in the law and the country changing as a result. As a name for whiteness, Caucasian is among the most pernicious because of its role as a label for the purest, most original race. Your email address will not be published. A similar yet smaller literature also exists for Circassian men, who were thought to be especially handsome. Circassian beauties - The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia Greece was on the publics mind at the time, especially the minds of romantics and idealists, for the country had fought a successful war of independence from the Ottoman Empire from 1821 to 1830. It is all the more remarkable then that for nearly a century before their conquest and dispersal, the Circassians had been an object of European fascination. This hair style was a sort of exhibit's trademark and was achieved by washing the hair of women in beer, drying it and then teasing it. The Circassians became major news during the Caucasian War, in which Russia conquered the North Caucasus, displacing large numbers of Circassians southwards. The Concubine, the Princess, and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem. The "golden age" of the Circassian beauty may be considered to be between the 1770s, when the Russian Empire seized the Crimean Khanate and cut off their slave trade, which increased the demand for Circassian women in Near Eastern harems; and the 1860s, when the Russians massacred thousands of Circassians and conquered Circassia. "So even if you don't know that a word highlighted like this _____ denotes sarcasm, the context should have given it away. Victorian postmortem photos did exist, no one denies that, however, they were never taken in a standing pose using a stand. And yet, at the same time, because the Circassian was thought to be the purest, most primordial exemplar of the white race, that may have led the white viewer to yet another thought: that the sexual fate and the sexual proclivities of the Circassian Lady (no true lady by Victorian standards because of these very proclivities) might just as well be those of any given American Lady, who must be, after all, the racial descendant of the woman on exhibit. Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, and Hunter, John, On the Natural Variety of Mankind inThe Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, trans. John Frederick Lewis's The Harem portrays Circassians as the dominant mistresses of the harem, who look down on other women, as implied in the review of the painting in The Art Journal, which described it as follows: It represents the interior of a harem and slaves at Cairo, wherein is seated in luxurious ease a young man, attired in the excess of Moslem fashion. What might be particularly striking to the modern viewer, again, is the big hair, which looks so much like the Afro of the late 1960s and 1970s, then as much symbol of Black Power as a fashion statement. Wrap in several ways, or wear down. Check out the first comment. [37] Actual Circassian hairstyles bore no resemblance to Barnum's fantasy. Originally published in German in 1775. In the 1860s the showman P.T. The supposedly scientifically established purity of the Circassian Ladies whiteness played on a white audiences need for reassurance about its identity in a world where octoroons like Zoe might dare to cross the color line. Francis Davis Millet depicted Circassian women during his 1877 coverage of the Russo-Turkish war, specifying local costume and hairstyle. 'Twas for the Sultan, and at once withdrew. From there, the viewerprimarily the white male viewercould contemplate a further question: whether the sideshow depicts an erotic truth that is or ought to be more than a sideshow in ordinary domestic life. Long before this Diaspora, and for some time after it, these Circassians occupied an unusual place in the collective imagination of Europeans, Americans and Turks. Appear in advertisements on Turkish TV, in the theater. A sovereign remedy for surfeits, scorching from the heat of the sun, freckles, blights from cold and chills of winter, scorbutic, pimples or eruptions of the face and skin, however violent or disfigured, animalcula generated under the cuticle or outer skin, prickley heat, shingles, ring worms, redness of the nose and chin, obstinate cutaneous diseases, and for every impurity or unnatural appearance with which the skin may be affected; to be used as a common wash for clearing and improving the complexion, and in a superior degree to preserve, soften, cleanse and beautify the skin. (Although we must remember that this was a fantasy: the Circassian Ladies were performers playing a part.) One hundred years later, around 1870, this identification of the Circassian and Caucasian as the most perfect representatives of whiteness had taken hold of the public imagination in the United States. Circassian beauties is a term used to refer to an idealized image of the women of the Circassian people of the Northern Caucasus.A fairly extensive literary history suggests that Circassian women were thought to be unusually beautiful, spirited and elegant, and as such were desirable as concubines.This reputation dates back to the Ottoman Empire when Circassian women living in . Galilee Area - portrait. This theme replicated itself in fiction, too. If the interlocking themes of slavery, whiteness, Christianity, and freedom in Powerss Greek Slave resonated so deeply in the United States, it was because it hit home as a kind of portrait in racial negative of the tightening noose of slavery at home. The first thing to consider is the designation Circassian itself. They used a concoction supposedly extracted from a vegetable native to Circassia. Not to be denied his harem slave, Barnum hired a frizzy-haired local woman, put her in a Turkish costume and dubbed her Zalumma Agra, Star of the East . See more ideas about women, crimean tatars, beautiful. What fair one but must yield implicit faith, when she has the honour of the Countess De fairly pledged, that all sepacious [sic] impurities will be at once removed by this wonder-working nostrum. This is not Circassian history, it is American history, and the weird things that went on in the 19th century. Poetic romance-descriptions of Circassian girls appear in Don Juan by Lord Byron (1818-1824), in which the story of a slave auction is related: Some went off dearly; fifteen hundred dollars For one Circassian, a sweet girl, were given, Warranted virgin. Explore. The luxurious palaces of the sultans housed Georgians, Abkhazians and Circassians as concubines and odalisques. We can refuse to use Caucasian to describe people, we can point out its absurdity whenever possible, and we can insist that the government not use it in any official capacity. This resulted in the death of approximately 400,000 Circassians, mostly from epidemics or accidents during the long journey to the Black Sea. The charm was not limited to the Middle East, Cosimo de Medici (ruler of Florence from 1429 to 1464) had an illegitimate son with a slave bought in Venice who was said to be Circassian. In the American context, that meant that human beings seeking to escape from their own form of very real enslavement could expect their liberty to be respected nowhere in the nation, not even in the supposedly free states of the North. Emma Stone. Updated on February 8, 2014, to discuss recent efforts by the Circassian community to protest the Circassian genocide and the hosting, by Russia, of the Olympic Games in Sochi, the site of the Circassians final defeat and mass deportation in 1864. Racial theories of the mid 19th century held that the people living in the Circassian mountains near the Black Sea were examples of the "purest stock" of the Caucasian race. One Circassian woman, favoured with an aristocratic appearance, was avoided and even hated by the chocolate-coloured African women through no fault of hers, but simply because she looked majestic. As a result of this reputation, in Europe and America Circassians were often characterised as ideals of feminine beauty in poetry and art. Uncovering the Truth Behind Barnum's Circassian Beauties Hoax History of Circassian Beauties - YouTube It is history and has to be known. [26], There are not any people, on the old continent, perfectly fair, except those who live in high latitudes, where the westerly winds come from the sea, at no great distance, so tempered as not to be very sharp nor very dry. Included in my top most beautiful female athletes of the world. Many Georgian and Circassian families even encouraged their daughters to enter concubinage for the promise of a life of luxury and comfort, and many Circassians become favorite wives or consorts to the Ottoman sultans. Circassian beauties, or "Moss-haired girls" as they were sometimes known, reflect a curious legacy of racial stereotyping and sexual titillation. The portrayal of a white woman as a rescued slave at the time of the American Civil War played on the racial connotations of slavery at the time. Blumenbach was a specialist in comparative anatomy, and he initiated the division of human beings into five distinct races defined by region and color: the Caucasian or white race, the Mongolian or yellow race, the Malayan or brown race, the Ethiopian or black race, and the American or red race. Circassian Beauties | dcphotoartist That irony has resonance even now. In Blumenbachs racial typology, then, the purest, most original white people came from the Caucasus region. Thomas M. Barrett (1998), "Southern Living (in Captivity): The Caucasus in Russian Popular Culture", Last edited on 27 February 2023, at 12:54, Said bin Sultan, Sultan of Muscat and Oman, The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law, "Chapter 2. Amazing beauty of Circassian women from Kabardino-Balkaria - YouTube What I know now is that the woman depicted here fits the model of a kind of performed personality dubbed the Circassian Lady or the Circassian Beauty in mid-nineteenth-century America. The idea of a woman being at the sexual mercy of her owner was not foreign to the imagination of the white public at the time in the United States, but Powerss statue of a naked white woman alluded only indirectly (and perhaps for that reason in the only way then publicly possible) to the fate of many enslaved black women: it was a well-known but largely unspoken fact that slave owners in the United States often entered into sexual relationships with their enslaved women, relationships that involved a range of coercion, almost all of which we would classify as rape today. This natural superiority was the cause of a good deal of ill-will and envy. It is fun to read and enjoy that people actually believed stuff like this, hence the reason they are no longer out there entertaining people, we got smart, not hate filled like you the first poster.