Slipper Protocol 
Peter Campbell
Imagination must take the strain when facts are few. As information about the domestic life of polygamous Oriental households was fragmentary, 17th, 18th and 19th-century European writers and painters filled gaps with gaudy embroidery. Only the barest descriptions and a little gossip about the seclusion of women were necessary to seed fantasies about sex, submission, jealousy, power and violence, or to encourage the investigation of cooler themes such as secrecy, privacy, sisterhood and security. Imagined seraglios became playgrounds for poets and pornographers, moralists and feminists. They provided theoretical examples for social theory and jurisprudence to take up. They offered painters stimulating subject-matter – the girl in the slave market, the odalisque in a dream of soft compliance – and gave dramatists plots in which naked jealousy tangled with ferocious passion.
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Peter Campbell is the London Review’s resident designer and art critic.
Other articles by this contributor:
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At the Saatchi Gallery · The Triumph of Painting
At Tate Modern · Bruce Nauman’s Raw Materials
At the V&A · fashion photography
At the Saatchi Gallery · London’s new art gallery
At the British Museum · Living, Dying and Enlightenment
In the Park · John Nash stucco and Aussies with frisbees
At the Museum of London · Artists’ studios
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