Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Turkish Embassy Lettersborn in the year of the Glorious Revolution, 168889. In 1717, Lady Mary Pierrepont journeyed to the Ottoman Empire with her husband, Edward Wortley, who had been appointed British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte but had failed miserably as a diplomat and was recalled after only 15 months. brief sojourn, he attempted to negotiate peace between the Ottomans and Austrians & to safeguard British commercial and naval interests in the Levant; she kept a JOURNAL and wrote LETTERS on Turkish culture and habits. A strong sense of propriety led her, as a woman and an aristocrat, not to publish any of her writings under her own name. upon returning to England produced an edited and polished epistolary account of her travels based on these records. - her daughter Lady Bute burnt the journal and tried to prevent the publication of the lettersthe travel narrative was finally published in 1763, a year after Lady Mary's death. Embassy Letters - immediately popular and reprinted often to meet the demand; posthumously published letters of 1763, Written, during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, To Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, &c. in different Parts of Europe. Which Contain, Among other Curious Relations, Accounts of the Policy and Manners of the Turks, established her reputation as a woman of letters, since people from Samuel Johnson to Lord Byron read and praised themforging of a national and imperial identity that would become disseminated around the globe woman who had popularized the Ottoman practice of inoculation against smallpox in England by inoculating her own childrenTurkish Embassy Letters ??? rubric of colonial discourse and Orientalism, within the terms described by Edward Said the imperial observer, not the colonized, or more subtly, the unheard or repressed Oriental other within the texts of western imperialism

Srinivas Aravamudan: Levantinization - mechanism by which Montagu attempts to escape from pure Englishness into Turkishness, but failsfantasy of assimilation to Ottoman culture, fantasy of going Levantineletters of ambassadorial travel close with a definite return home to Englishness. Montagus celebration of cultural difference during her stay in the Ottoman empirewe should not underestimate the effect of Montagus positioning within a system of Orientalist representations, however much she might have wished to celebrate the differences between Turkish and English culture.

Feminism Against the East/West Divide:Lady Mary's Turkish Embassy Lettersquestion whether Lady Mary's letters participated in or resisted the orientalism of her day the related issue - to what extent her narrative can be read as feminist. 1. Lowe's readingEDWARD SAID'S theory of orientalism does not take into account the heterogeneity of works on the East, Lady Mary's work - a specifically gendered text - an emergent feminist discourse to resist the standard orientalist tropes about Eastern women - the works of male travel writers such as ROBERT WITHERS, GEORGE SANDY, JOHN COVEL, JEAN DUMONT, & AARON HILL. Despite her own lapses into the orientalist "rhetoric of difference" that characterizes male travel writing and that produces the Occident/Orient divide, Lady Mary - dissents from this dominant discourse by deploying a "rhetoric of likeness" - encourages an identification with Turkish women. 2. Meyda YegenogluLady Mary's work, rather than disrupting the monolithic narrative of orientalism, instead foregrounds the complicity between orientalism and Western feminism. In her travels, - Lady Mary assumes a masculine role (a role unavailable to her in the "masculine" West), - penetrates a "feminized" East, complements rather than challenges the work of the male colonist. many of the male travelers to the Orient - frustrated by their lack of access to the space of the Eastern woman, the metonymic heart of the Orient, Lady Mary, in good colonial fashion, exposes its inner workings, satisfies the desire for the "truth" of the other solidifies the position of the West as the knowing subject. 3. Srinivas AravamudanLady Mary maintains a "partial identification" with aristocratic Turkish women, possibility of a "positive orientalist ideal" = both "progressive and inclusionary."

self-conscious and sceptical practitioner of the genre of TRAVELOGUE, Montagu deplores the biased and inconsistent expectations of its readership: We Travellers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and we have observ'd nothing. If we tell any thing new, we are laugh'd at as fabulous and Romantic, not allowing for the difference of ranks, which afford difference of company, more Curiosity, or the changes of customs that happen every 20 year in every Country. But people judge of Travellers exactly with the same Candour, good Nature, and impartiallity, they judge of their Neighbours upon all Occasions. Travel writing is obliged to produce novelty, but also expected to fulfill pre-existing stereotypes. exasperated at the calcified expectations of readers who refuse to acknowledge historical change elsewhere Such a critical edge is typical of Montagu's discourse. strong scepticist commitment to demystification

THE LIMINALITY OF THE HAMMAM

relatively unconcerned in her letters with the multiple constructions of masculinity, or with the long descriptions of Turkish street culture that some other authors provide. Rather, - describe the "secret" female interiors of the harem and the bathhousethe BATHHOUSE = the Turkish woman's riposte to the Englishman's coffee house. baths provided a liminal space where the demarcation between public and private spheres was ritually suspendedstructural interplay of oppositions in the activity of the HAMMAM, hot and cold water, soft towels and hard scrubs, male and female schedules, dirt and cleanliness, purity and impurity, interiority and exteriority, self and other, angels and demons

Englishwomen could not themselves come up with an alternative to the coffee house's resolutely masculine monopoly of sociopolitical space. The exclusively male preserve of the coffee houses has been identified by historians of modernity as a vital innovation that created a public sphere of free political discussion that led to the invention of liberal democracy. alternative Turkish women's public sphere possesses a hedonistic atmosphere shifts the traditional masculine European focus from the Turkish harem to the rather different HAMMAM inversion of the voyeuristic position - an embarassing reverse fetishization: The Lady that seem'd the most considerable amongst them entreated me to sit by her and would fain have undress'd me for the bath. I excus'd my selfe with some difficulty, they being all so earnest in perswading me. I was at last forc'd to open my skirt and shew them my stays, which satisfy'd 'em very well, for I saw they beleiv'd I was so lock'd up in that machine that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my Husband.

INOCULATIONS: MEDICAL, SYMBOLIC, AND CRITICAL BATHHOUSE - the same female environment in which Montagu learned the major medical innovation with which she is credited: popularizing the technique of smallpox inoculation in England after observing its widespread use in Turkey. bathhouse, as a site for multiple hygienic and aesthetic functions, was also a place where therapeutic practices - female herbalists, magicians, and medical practitioners. Montagu reports in one of the letters that the disease is rendered "entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting... a set of old Women... make it their business to perform the Operation" After describing the process in detail, she claims to be "Patriot enough to take pains to bring this usefull invention into fashion in England" Montagu's own face - scarred after a life-threatening attack of smallpox in 1715, the year before leaving for Turkey. Her pioneering dissemination of this technique of inoculation occurred at considerable personal risk. Montagu inoculated her son, and subsequently her daughter, convinced Queen Caroline, then Princess of Wales, to inoculate her daughters. public experiment in 1721, whereby six condemned prisoners at Newgate - undergo the inoculation by the promise of a reprieve if they survived

Travel narrative, after flirting with cultural crossover, becomes a complicated acknowledgement of the superiority of the return home. ROLAND BARTHES defines symbolic inoculation She will symbolically inoculate herself against the temptation of cultural passing. following comment in her penultimate letter of the series, addressed to the Abb Conti, -conscious reidentification with Englishness, And, after having seen part of Asia and Africa, and allmost made the tour of Europe, I think the honest English Squire more happy who verily beleives the Greek wines less delicious than March beer, that the African fruits have not so fine a flavour as golden Pipins, and the Becfiguas of Italy are not so well tasted as a rump of Beef, and that, in short, there is no perfect Enjoyment of this Life out of Old England. I pray God I may think so for the rest of my Life; and since I must be contented with our scanty allowance of Daylight, that I may forget the enlivening Sun of Constantinople. The last third of her letters will increasingly highlight this wistful step backwards into a mythic past that may hold the possibility of reunification under the cultural rubric of a dead Roman and Greek civilization, rather than the immediate justifications of a burgeoning one under the British. narrator - reflect on the cultural advantages and perils of linguistic multiplicity. territorial metaphor with political implications, her anxiety about losing the mother tongue: I am allmost falln into the misfortune so common to the Ambitious: while they are employ'd on distant, insignificant Conquests abroad, a Rebellion starts up at home. I am in great danger of loseing my English. LINGUISTIC ALIENATION, - one of the first signs of the CULTURE SHOCK from which Montagu wishes to cushion herself, Her cautious celebration of heterogeneity - tempered by a fear of the loss of English identity

Selected Sources: Said, Edward (1979) Orientalism New York: Vintage Books (pp. 49-53; 73-77)Kietzman, Mary Jo Montagu's 'Turkish Embassy Letters' and cultural dislocation in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 Vol. 38 3/1998Uphaus, Robert W. & Gretchen M. Foster (eds) (1991) The "Other" Eighteenth Century: English Women of Letters 1660-1800 East Lansing: Colleagues Press (pp. 247-248; 1-16) SrinivasAravamudan Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam Masquerade, Womanliness, and Levantinization in ELH, Vol. 62, No. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 69-104. Teresa Heffernan Feminism Against the East-West Divide Lady Mary's Turkish Embassy Letters - in Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 33, no. 2 (1990-00), pp. 201-215