SOURCE: “The Veil of Romance: Lady Mary's Embassy Letters,” in Eighteenth Century Life, n.s. Vol. 14, No. 1, February 1990, pp. 66-82.

[In the following essay, Lowenthal argues that in the Turkish Embassy Letters Montagu romanticizes and aestheticizes Turkish women. “Such strategies,” the critic observes, “while appreciating Turkish women in ways previous travelers had not, also allow [Montagu] to gloss over and even to erase the genuine pain experienced by some women in Turkey.”]

In August 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu embarked on an extraordinary odyssey. With her infant son in tow, she accompanied her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, newly appointed Ambassador to Turkey, through various eastern European states, before stopping to visit the baths in Adrianople and then settling in Constantinople. Taking advantage of her privileged position as the aristocratic wife of an ambassador, Lady Mary gained access to realms entirely uncharted by earlier male travelers: she secured permission to visit the mosques, received invitations to the homes of prominent Turkish citizens, entered into the luxury of the women's baths, and dined with a high-ranking Sultana. Throughout the two-year embassy, she was treated with great civility and used her time to correspond, to see the Turkish sights (frequently traveling in native Turkish costume), and, she says, to learn the Turkish language.¹ From this unique vantage point, Lady Mary claims to reveal the reality of Turkey to her correspondents by relying, unlike previous travelers, on firsthand observation and information gathered from the best Turkish sources—in her case, from Turkish men and women of rank. Fully aware that she enjoyed opportunities denied to such seventeenth-century writers as Paul Rycaut and George Sandys, Lady Mary scoffs at the inaccurate reports of Jean Dumont:

[He] has writ with equal ignorance and confidence. Tis a particular pleasure to me here to read the voyages to the Levant, which are generally so far remov'd from Truth and so full of Absurditys I am very well diverted with 'em. They never fail giving you an Account of the Women, which 'tis certain they never saw, and talking very wisely of the Genuis of the Men, into whose Company they are never admitted, and very often describe Mosques, which they dare not peep into.

(17 June 1717)²

Lady Mary points specifically to her rank and gender as the reasons for her special access to a Turkish reality never before seen by Westerners. She is different from earlier travelers, who saw themselves as explorer-writers, acting as information gatherers and distancing themselves from the local inhabitants through a process of “othering,” which resulted in the labeling of the natives as inferior and primitive. Later nineteenth-century explorer-writers, according to Mary Louise Pratt, saw as their goal the enumeration of the traits of native inhabitants, especially as these customs differed from the observer's own manners. John Barrow's information gathering, for instance, becomes a form of othering that grows out of an unconscious ideology of colonialism and produces descriptions of people “homogenized into a collective ‘they.’”³ Such distancing and homogenization can be found in many earlier reports from seventeenth-century European travelers to Turkey. For Lady Mary, however, contemporary fiction—specifically the romance—draws her closer to Turkish culture. Her interpretations of Turkish customs, and especially her judgments about the lives of upper-class Turkish women, were most powerfully influenced by seventeeth-century romances which impinged upon and even shaped the ways she perceived life in this new and alien land.

The remote settings, sprawling action, and adventure of romance are ready-made for her in Turkey. She lives in a land that comfortably incorporates both the mundane and the unexpected: her discussions with Turkish women—frequently concerning love, courtship, and marriage—also include tales of love potions and “majic,” stories of lovers' cruelty and widows' constancy. Lady Mary's relatively brief meetings with Turkish women of rank allow her to simplify and idealize their characters, as though they had stepped from the pages of romance. When she rejects the strategy of relying exclusively on European customs as the appropriate judge of proper standards, she joins the group of early Orientalists whose overvaluing of the East resulted, in Edward Said's phrase, in “a salutary dérangement of European habits.”⁴ Lady Mary is herself aware of the intersection between romance and realism. Her most perceptive comment concerning the peculiar position of anyone playing “foreign correspondent” in a land as exotic as Turkey, can be seen in a literary allusion sent to her sister:

Now do I fancy that you imagine I have entertain'd you all this while with a relation that has (at least) receiv'd many Embellishments from my hand. This is but too like (says you) the Arabian tales; these embrodier'd Napkins, and a jewel as large as a Turkey's egg!—You forget, dear Sister, those very tales were writ by an Author of this Country and (excepting the Enchantments) are a real representation of the manners here.

(10 March 1718; 1:385)

A “real representation” of life in Turkey echoes, in fact, the stuff of fiction, an exoticism and beauty that could have been lifted from The Arabian Nights. Perceiving Turkish women through this veil of romance, Lady Mary rejects the prejudices and anti-Turkish biases of some earlier travelers by finding European equivalents for the differences she sees. More importantly, her romance sensibilities allow her to create evocative descriptions that serve to aestheticize Turkish women themselves. Such strategies, while appreciating Turkish women in ways previous travelers had not, also allow her to gloss over and even to erase the genuine pain experienced by some women in Turkey.

The Embassy Letters we have today, fifty-two in all, are not the actual letters Lady Mary sent, but a compilation carefully preserved in her own autograph and copied into two small albums. Lady Mary drew on her actual letters to create the Embassy collection. Robert Halsband reports that among the Wortley Manuscripts is a document, written in Lady Mary's hand and endorsed by Wortley as “Heads of L. M.'s Letters From Turky,” which contains the initials of her correspondents accompanied by brief summaries of the actual letters. Other evidence indicates that Lady Mary “edited” out the personal references and rearranged information: descriptions sent to one correspondent appear in the albums to have been sent to another. Halsband calls the collection “pseudo-letters, dated, and addressed to people either named or nameless,” although he argues that the letters are an accurate record of her experience and observations. As such, the Embassy Letters are Lady Mary's most polished and self-conscious literary performance—a document deliberately shaped and edited, fine-tuned for nuance and subtlety. That she always intended the letters to be published is clear: she carried the albums with her throughout her twenty-two-year self-imposed exile on the Continent and, upon her return to England after Wortley's death, she stopped in Rotterdam and presented the manuscripts to the Reverend Benjamin Sowden, telling him that they were “to be dispos'd of as he [thought] proper.” The letters were published in May 1763 (less than a year after her death) without the family's permission and from an imperfect manuscript copy.⁵

For all their inaccuracies, the letters elicited an overwhelmingly positive response to Lady Mary's literary skills. Smollett, citing the common observation that the grace and elegance of women's correspondence make it infinitely superior to men's, wrote that her letters “were never excelled, we might venture to say, never equalled by any letter-writer of any sex, age, or nation. They are, to say the truth, so bewitchingly entertaining, that we defy the most phlegmatic man upon earth to read one without going through with them.” Voltaire echoed these sentiments, claiming that Lady Mary's letters were superior even to Madame de Sévigné's because they were written for all nations, not simply her own. The only work Dr. Johnson read simply for pleasure, according to Mrs. Piozzi, was Lady Mary's: “I have heard him say he never read but one book, which he did not consider as obligatory, through his whole life (and Lady Mary Wortley's Letters was the book).” Edward Gibbon's praise was particularly positive: “What fire, what ease, what knowledge of Europe and of Asia! Her account of the manners of the Turkish women is indeed different from any thing we have yet seen.”⁶ Her readers recognized that the extraordinary quality of these letters resulted not only from her knowledge of the international scene and her ability to entertain and provide pleasure but also, as Gibbon's perceptive comment reveals, from her presentation of information that was indeed “new”: descriptions of the lives of Turkish women.

In evaluating Turkish customs and manners, Lady Mary rejects some earlier travelers' judgments of the Turks as simple barbarians by drawing parallels, equating and leveling the differences between the Turkish culture and her own, with results that are sometimes less than flattering to the English. Occasionally, Lady Mary's interpretations seem overly enthusiastic, even naive. However, her positive responses to Turkey grow, in part, out of her own surprise. Having read Dumont, Sandys, and Rycaut, Lady Mary is pleased to see high-ranking Turkish women living a life of ease which would be the envy of many of her countrywomen, not locked away in the drudgery of a slavery that their husbands impose on them. More than any other topic, the subject of the seraglio was of the longest-standing fascination for Lady Mary and her friends because this institution, as a historical reality and as a romance convention, saturated popular imagination: Westerners envisioned extraordinarily beautiful women, elevated into privilege and simultaneously bound in servitude to the whim of the Sultan.

Paul Rycaut had described the Sultan's choosing of his bed-partner this way:

When the Grand Signior resolves to choose himself a Bed-fellow, he retires into the Lodging of his Women, where (according to the story in every place reported, when the Turkish Seraglio falls into discourse) the Damsels being ranged in order by the Mother of the Maids, he throws his handkerchief to her, where his eye and fancy best directs, it being a token of her election to his bed. The surprised Virgin snatches at this prize and good fortune with that eagerness, that she is ravished with joy before she is defloured by the Sultan, and kneeling down first kisses the handkerchief, and then puts it in her bosom, when immediately she is congratulated by all the Ladies of the Court, for the great honour and favour she hath received.⁷

Lady Mary gleans most of her information about life in the harem from the high-ranking Sultana Hafise, a real-life resident of the seraglio and the “favourite of the last Emperour Mustapha.”⁸ The Sultana's description, as Lady Mary records it, of the method the Sultan uses to choose his bed-partner does not include such breathless phrases as “surprised Virgin,” “snatches at this prize,” or “ravished with joy.” Instead, the Sultana rejects Rycaut's report, calling the old story “altogether fabulous,” and describes the process as a private, not a public matter:

[T]he manner upon that occasion [is] no other but that he sends the Kuslir Aga to signify to the Lady the honnour he intends her. She is immediately complemented upon it by the others, and led to the bath where she is perfum'd and dress'd in the most magnificent and becoming Manner. The Emperor precedes his visit by a Royal present and then comes into her apartment.

(10 March 1718; 1:383)

The Sultana also specifically denies Western reports that the woman must crawl to the Sultan from the foot of his bed.⁹ Lady Mary refutes Rycaut's report by tempering some of the more titillating aspects of the old story while, at the same time, providing an account from a firsthand participant which appears more authoritative in its eyewitness authenticity, but which is itself not without the drama of selection, bathing, and gift-giving.

When the Sultana admits that the favorite incurs the envy of other women, Lady Mary surmises, “this seem'd to me neither better nor worse than the Circles in most Courts where the Glance of the Monarch is watch'd and every Smile waited for with impatience and envy'd by those that cannot obtain it” (1:383-84). Lady Mary moves to make the Turkish custom seem less alien and, perhaps, less reprehensible to English notions of morality by comparing the Sultan's interest to a European monarch's glance—a similarity her friends would immediately recognize. Such a strategy serves simultaneously to undercut whatever moral superiority her English friends might feel when first presented with such alien customs and to elevate Turkish practices by casting them in a familiar light.

This habit of mind, appreciating Turkish culture by viewing it in terms of European equivalents, is partly responsible for the most controversial claim Lady Mary makes in the Embassy Letters: she repeatedly insists that aristocratic Turkish women are “freer than any Ladys in the universe, and are the only Women in the world that lead a life of unintterupted pleasure, exempt from cares, their whole time being spent in visiting, bathing, or the agreable Amusement of spending Money and inventing new fashions” (May 1718; 1:406). Katharine Rogers applauds Lady Mary's insistence on Turkish women's liberty when it “functions as a wicked comment on the Englishman's complacent assumption that England was ‘the paradise of wives.’” Yet Rogers continues, “it is upsetting to note that she defined woman's liberty in terms of spending money and carrying on adulterous affairs with impunity.”¹⁰ It is true that Lady Mary writes of Turkish gentlewomen's adultery with amusement, even enthusiasm. Drawing on a quotation from Aphra Behn's Emperor of the Moon, when the Harlequin states that morality on the moon is no different from morality on earth, Lady Mary makes reference to Turkish “Ladys” sexual behavior only as a means of establishing likeness: “As to their Morality or good Conduct, I can say like Arlequin, 'tis just as 'tis with you, and the Turkish Ladys don't commit one Sin the less for not being Christians” (1 April 1717; 1:327).¹¹

Yet just as she equated the Sultan's choosing of his bed-partner with a Monarch's glance, her pronouncements about freedom for Turkish gentlewomen are, on the one hand, genuine appreciations of the different liberties these women enjoyed, and on the other hand, complaints about English gentlewomen's imprisonment. Lady Mary builds her argument for sexual “freedom” based on what she calls Turkish women's “disguise”—the veils, head coverings, and dresses that do not allow one, she claims, to distinguish a fine Lady from her slave. Such attire creates a “perpetual Masquerade [which] gives them entire Liberty of following their Inclinations without danger of Discovery.” She insists that assignations are easily arranged and that the men themselves rarely discover the identity of their women partners:

The Great Ladys seldom let their Gallants know who they are, and 'tis so difficult to find it out that they can very seldom guess at her name they have corresponded with above halfe a year together. You may easily imagine the number of faithfull Wives very small in a country where they have nothing to fear from their Lovers' Indiscretion, since we see so many that have the courrage to expose them selves to that in this World and all the threaten'd Punishment of the next, which is never preach'd to the Turkish Damsels. Neither have they much to apprehend from the resentment of their Husbands, those Ladys that are rich having all their money in their own hands, which they take with 'em upon a divorce with an addition which he is oblig'd to give 'em.

(1 April 1717; 1:328-29)

Lady Mary cites specific advantages to the Turkish system: unlike their English counterparts, Turkish men are discreet (because they are ignorant of their lover's identity) and, unlike a divorced Englishwoman, a Turkish woman need not surrender a large percentage of her fortune to her husband. Islamic scholar Joseph Schacht confirms Lady Mary's claim about Turkish women's separate property. The Muslim marriage contract, which developed out of the purchase of a bride, required the groom to present a nuptial gift (a mahr) to the bride herself.¹² The mahr was not the Western equivalent of a dowry (or the English “portion”), nor was it akin to English “pin money,” the annual sum paid to a woman from a fund administered by trustees.¹³ Instead, it was exclusively a nuptial gift intended for the bride's personal use (since she, like an English bride, was not obliged to bear any of the expenses of the matrimonial establishment). It was customary for the groom to pay part of the mahr immediately and to postpone payment of the rest. However, the husband was obligated to pay the mahr in full if he repudiated (divorced) his wife after consummation; if the marriage was unconsummated, the groom was still obligated to pay half of the mahr.¹⁴ The “addition” that Lady Mary cites above is very likely the remainder of this payment.

Lady Mary's account of Turkish women's freedom is reinforced by Abūu Tālib Khan, an Indian of Perso-Turkish origin employed by the British as a revenue officer, who traveled to England in the eighteenth century. His account, summarized by historian Bernard Lewis, points to the constraining life of Englishwomen:

[Englishwomen] are kept busy with a variety of employments in shops and elsewhere—a situation which Abū Tālib attributes to the wisdom of English legislators and philosophers in finding the best way to keep women out of mischief—and are further subject to a number of restrictions. For example, they do not go out after dark and do not spend the night in any house other than their own unless accompanied by their husbands. Once married, they have no property rights and are completely at the mercy of their husbands, who may despoil them at will. Muslim women in contrast are far better off. Their legal position and property rights, even against their husbands, are established and defended by laws. … Hidden behind the veil, he notes with some distress, they can indulge in all kinds of mischief and wickedness, the scope for which is very great.¹⁵

Lewis, speculating that Abū Tālib Khan (although he wrote in Persian) may have had his eye on possible English readers, suggests that the account may have been tailored to please an English audience, and Khan's reference to working women does not describe aristocratic Englishwomen. Yet both cultural relativists claim that life for Englishwomen entails greater restrains than does life for Turkish women who enjoy a certain legal and financial security as well as greater personal freedom.

When Lady Mary finds no Western equivalents to celebrate or lament, she most fully exploits the romance of the exotic and remote character of Turkey in her rich and detailed descriptions of Turkish beauty, descriptions that are the clearest instances of the particular kind of “othering” found in the Embassy Letters. On one unusual occasion, Lady Mary was allowed the privilege of visiting the women's baths and, from there, she sent what is probably the first Western description of a place about which male travelers could only speculate. Lady Mary calls her account “a sight as you never saw in your Life and what no book of travells could inform you of,” because “'Tis no less than Death for a Man to be found in one of these places” (1 April 1717; 1:315). The Monthly Review, appreciating the “masculine” character of Lady Mary's prose—“there are no prettynesses, no Ladyisms in these natural, easy familiar Epistles”—goes on to label this letter “one not to be paralleled in the narrative of any male Traveller” (28 [1763]: 385, 392). Lady Mary begins with descriptions of domed rooms, marbled floors, and fountains of running hot and cold water, an example of the “sheer, overpowering, monumental description” Edward Said sees at work in Western reports which strive to make everything entirely visible (Orientalism, p. 162). Yet even though it is Lady Mary's womanhood which allows her to enter the baths, dressed in her Western riding outfit, she is quite clearly an Englishwoman and an outsider. This distance allows her to view not only the magnificent structures of the bath but the two hundred bathers themselves as aesthetic objects:

The first sofas were cover'd with Cushions and rich Carpets, on which sat the Ladys, and on the 2nd their slaves behind 'em, but without any distinction of rank by their dress, all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any Beauty or deffect conceal'd, yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest Gesture amongst 'em. They Walk'd and mov'd with the same majestic Grace which Milton describes of our General Mother. There were many amongst them as exactly proportion'd as ever any Goddess was drawn by the pencil of Guido or Titian, and most of their skins shineingly white, only adorn'd by their Beautifull Hair divided into many tresses hanging on their shoulders, braided either with pearl or riband, perfectly representing the figures of the Graces.

(1:313-14)

For all the particular physical details of Turkish women's braided hair and shining skins, the power of this passage lies in its allusions. Lady Mary views these women through layers of art and, as a result, perceives them not as unequal, inferior “others,” but as quintessential examples of ancient womanhood: the Graces and Eve. The allusions locate these women in their proper non-Western geographical setting while simultaneously endowing them with the weight of Western classical culture. Their “otherness” has mythic dimensions: they are original, prelapsarian, beautiful. Painters, too, provide Lady Mary with a frame of reference. The lush oils of Guido Reni and the sensuous portraits of Titian, who was especially famous for his depiction of goddesses in languid repose, communicate some of the essential qualities of this luxurious womanhood, but Lady Mary laments that modern Western painters have lost the ability to paint equally evocatively. Wishing that Jervas (who created a portrait of Lady Mary in a shepherdess's costume) could have been there, invisible, to observe the scene, Lady Mary describes what he could have learned: “I fancy it would have very much improv'd his art to see so many fine Women naked in different postures, some in conversation, some working, others drinking Coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying on their Cushions while their slaves (generally pritty Girls of 17 or 18) were employ'd in braiding their hair in several pritty manners” (1:314).¹⁶

Beauty is embodied for Lady Mary, quite literally, in the physicality of these women. Unused to seeing the flesh of two hundred women—especially considering the veils and the “Ferigée” which completely concealed all but a Turkish woman's eyes—Lady Mary marvels at their nakedness as they crowd together, going about their daily lives. The corporeality of these women, which Lady Mary never actually describes, is so palpable to her that she agrees with those who argue that, if it were the fashion to go naked, the face would be ignored. She judges that “the Ladys with the finest skins and most delicate shapes had the greatest share of my admiration, thô their faces were sometimes less beautifull than those of their companions” (1:314). More telling still is Lady Mary's personal response to the opportunity which would have allowed her not simply to view Turkish women's lives, but to participate in their rituals. When invited to join the Turkish women in their bath—the epitome of her privilege as a female traveler—she refuses, preferring instead to satisfy some part of their curiosity by opening her skirt and revealing her stays. With amusement she notes, “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” (1:314). Here, in an unexpected reversal, “enslaved” Turkish women suppose a European woman imprisoned by her husband in a “modern” chastity belt.

It is her status as onlooker that leads Lady Mary to see these women as objets d'art, and her “othering” lies in the distance of aesthetic appreciation. Mary Louise Pratt uses the word “bodyscapes” to describe travelers' language of this kind, arguing that the particularity and present-tense mode create a normalizing discourse: the observer writes as though the unique “scene/seen” of his or her experience is representative rather than personal. As a result, the native inhabitants observed are situated in a timeless present rather than a particular historical moment (p. 121). Such timelessness certainly exists in the description above, yet it is also the same timelessness that a viewer of a painting might experience. This phenomenon is so apparent that Lady Mary herself not only invokes painters as references but describes her own point of view as that of the observer. These timeless moments became commonplace in postmedieval painting, according to Wendy Steiner, because Renaissance artists reasoned that an atemporal medium should represent atemporal subject matter. Accordingly, these painters participated in a self-conscious shift in aesthetics that resisted and finally rejected the collections of representations that characterize medieval narratives: “In a painting with vanishing-point perspective and chiaroscuro, the assumption is that we are observing a scene through a frame from a fixed vantage point at one moment in time.”¹⁷ Steiner goes further to argue that Renaissance painters rejected unfolding identity, contingency, history, and desire—as they are depicted in the multiple panels of medieval narrative—and concentrated instead on design, atemporality, and the single moment arrested in time, a moment that depicts an eternal essence: “By prohibiting repeated subjects, painting could depict identity as either a single frozen moment or an eternal essence, but not as a continuity constantly modified by time. Thus, the Renaissance system reinforced the distinction between the isolated or transcendent self and the self modified by circumstance” (pp. 2-3).

This distinction between the two kinds of selves can also be found in the literary romance, which is itself composed of “stopped-action scenes” where the heroine is often suspended either in prison or in some other state of immobility. Both pictorial representations and romance narratives emphasize a transcendent moment at the end of a journey from the physical to the spiritual. The romance narrative—which often concentrates on a woman who loses her identity, enters a world of chaos, and emerges with a heightened sense of identity and order—concludes with the heroine arrested at that moment of reemergence into self and transcendence.¹⁸ Lady Mary, too, sees such moments in the lives of Turkish women. The pleasure she finds in the freedoms she interprets as institutionalized for Turkish women grows, in part, out of the enchantment she feels in their company, in the splendor of their homes and costumes, and in the beauty of their bodies. However, she finds most compelling their surprising life stories—romance narratives of adventure and even heroism, which often contain moments of transcendence that mimic contemporary fiction.

When taken to meet Fatima, the wife of the Vizier's second in command, for instance, Lady Mary is introduced to a woman whose history could have been lifted from a seventeenth-century romance. Lady Mary first claims to be rendered speechless by the young woman's beauty and produces a positively enthusiastic description (containing more exclamation marks than any other letter in the correspondence):

That surprizing Harmony of features! that charming result of the whole! that exact proportion of Body! that lovely bloom of Complexion unsully'd by art! the unutterable Enchantment of her Smile! But her Eyes! large and black with all the soft languishment of the bleu! every turn of her face discovering some new charm!

(18 April 1717; 1:350)

Fatima, like the Sultana Hafise, is a privileged member of Turkish society, and Lady Mary revels in the splendor and luxury afforded her on the visit: Fatima's “fair Maids” sing and dance while Lady Mary drinks coffee from fine china; other young women perfume the air with “Amber, Aloes woods, and other rich Scents.” Lady Mary is most fascinated, however, by Fatima's life story, which emerges when the Greek interpreter accompanying Lady Mary whispers that she cannot believe Fatima—whose graceful manner and air of cultivated civility—could be Turkish by birth. Lady Mary is loath to repeat the remark—fearing that “[Fatima] would have been no better pleas'd with the Complement than one of our Court Beautys to be told she had the air of a Turk” (10 March 1718; 1:386). However, the young woman, charmed by the comment, explains her cross-cultural heritage with a life story that could have been lifted from fiction: “My Mother was a Poloneze taken at the Seige of Caminiec, and my father us'd to rally me, saying he beleiv'd his Christian Wife had found some Christian Gallant, for I had not the Air of a Turkish Girl” (1:386-87). The most beautiful woman Lady Mary encounters in the entire course of her travels turns out to be a product of the spoils of war.

Stories of women being captured and sold into Turkish servitude were staples of the romance, of course, but Lady Mary's descriptions of Fatima also identify her with another conventional romance figure: the native as naturalized European aristocrat. Lady Mary's heroine, with her extraordinary beauty and personal grace—a woman half-European by birth and comfortably Western in deportment—stands as a living symbol of the confluence of Turkish reality and romance convention. That Fatima offers the same aesthetic pleasure as the Turkish bathers Lady Mary acknowledges, “I am not asham'd to own I took more pleasure in looking on the beauteous Fatima than the finest piece of Sculpture could have given me” (1:351). Yet it is the young woman's life history, coupled with her high-ranking social position, which allows Lady Mary to focus not on difference or “otherness,” but on similarity and shared values. This likeness is an instance of leveling different from Lady Mary's claims for Turkish women's freedom in that Fatima validates Lady Mary's own Western standards of courtesy and civility.

Such difference (Fatima's beauty) and likeness (a graceful union of Turkish and European cultures) are here held in tension. But one particular letter, composed as Lady Mary was about to leave Turkey in May 1718, moves beyond this balance and reveals that romance conventions actively shape Lady Mary's positive perceptions to such a degree that she downplays the harsher reality she has indeed seen by concentrating on the elements of romance. Opening with a complaint about male travel writers, Knolles and Rycaut specifically, “I am more enclin'd, out of a true female spirit of Contradiction, to tell you the falsehood of a great part of what you find in authors” (1:405), and reiterating her familiar claim that Turkish women are freer than other women, Lady Mary shifts to Turkish truth-telling and generosity; she ends with a complaint about the Christian Armenians and their marriage customs. Embedded in the heart of this long letter is a three-part discussion of women which, proceeding according to a logic of association, moves in continuous paragraphs from a description of a Turkish bride to two instances of violence. Filtered through the conventions of romance, such violence is diluted and comes ultimately to serve in the cause of female power.

The first event concerns the premarriage ceremonies for a Turkish bride. Dazzled by the occasion considered the most significant in any Turkish woman's life, Lady Mary again sees literary precedents, for she likens this bride and her activities to the epithalamium for Helen by Theocritus. After the Turkish women meet at the bagnio and all two hundred arrange themselves on marble sofas, the virgins throw off their clothes, meet the bride at the door, and proceed to present the young woman to her mother:

[The bride] was a Beautifull Maid of about 17, very richly drest and shineing with Jewells, but was presently reduce'd by them to the state of nature. 2 others fill'd silver gilt pots with perfume and begun the procession, the rest following in pairs to the number of 30. The Leaders sung an Epithilamium answer'd by the others in chorus, and the 2 last led the fair Bride, her Eyes fix'd on the ground with a charming affectation of Modesty. In this order they march'd round the 3 large rooms of the bagnio.

(1:407)

Here, too, Lady Mary is the nonparticipating outsider who views the innocence inscribed on the bodies of these young women. However, the charming sweetness of the scene—the nakedness, the modesty, and the vulnerability of the bride—leads Lady Mary to remember an incident involving a less fortunate young woman.

The second description opens with Lady Mary's comment that the wit, civility, and liberty of Turkish women, which give them an opportunity to gratify “their evil Inclinations (if they have any),” also places them “very fully in the power of their Husbands to revenge them if they are discover'd” (1:407).¹⁹ The recent death of a young woman, described in graphic detail, proves the point:

About 2 months ago there was found at day break not very far from my House the bleeding body of a young woman, naked, only wrapp'd in a coarse sheet, with 2 wounds with a knife, one in her side and another in her Breast. She was not yet quite cold, and so surprizingly Beautifull that there were very few men in Pera that did not go to look upon her, but it was not possible for any body to know her, no woman's face being known. She was suppos'd to be brought in dead of night from the Constantinople side and laid there. Very little enquiry was made about the Murderer, and the corps privately bury'd without noise. Murder is never persu'd by the King's officers as with us. Tis the busyness of the next Relations to revenge the dead Person; and if they like better to compound the matter for Money (as they generally do) there is no more said of it. One would imagine this deffect in their Government should make such Tragedys very frequent, yet they are extreamly rare, which is enough to prove the people not naturally cruel, neither do I think in many other particulars they deserve the barbarous character we give them.

(1:407-08)

Lady Mary's ambivalence is apparent, even if she does not fully recognize it. She intends the incident to stand as refutation to the argument that the Turks are “naturally cruel” and “barbarous” in their treatment of women.²⁰ However, her juxtaposition of the splendid description of the bride, nakedly displayed for all her women friends to see, with the naked body of an equally beautiful dead woman—who has become the object of male examination—actually serves as a dreadful comment on the position of women in Turkey. Even more lamentable is the anonymity of the dead woman. That Lady Mary ends the paragraph claiming that such incidents are rare does not overcome the powerful visual impact: the figure of the dead woman is inevitably superimposed on the image of the innocent bride. The freedom to engage in adultery, which Lady Mary had earlier delighted in, comes to this end, seemingly without specific comment from her. Yet this description of death and burial is followed by a much longer narrative about a Spanish woman of quality with whom Lady Mary was acquainted. Her decision to place this story last in the trio is a means of overpowering the images of violence and vulnerability with the real-life history of a woman whom Lady Mary paints as creating triumph out of seeming tragedy.

The Spanish woman's troubles began when she and her party were attacked, boarded, and taken by a Turkish Admiral. Lady Mary asks, “how shall I modestly tell you the rest of her Adventure? The same Accident happen'd to her that happen'd to the fair Lucretia so many Years before her, but she was too good a Christian to kill her selfe as that heathenish Roman did” (1:408). Lady Mary's comment echoes Augustine's complaint that Lucretia, in choosing suicide, failed to join the ranks of the feminae Christianae who chose to live with their shame,²¹ and she goes on to confer upon her heroine a heroic stature surpassing that of a classical martyr: the Spanish woman's decision involves a fight for the kind of female honor which Mark Bannister sees at work in French heroic novels—the heroine must maintain her vertu in order to create moral independence²²—and she finds a solution that will allow her to live, but honorably.

As the events unfold, it appears that the Spanish woman will be saved from making such a decision because the Admiral, charmed by her beauty and long suffering, immediately released the Spanish woman's brother who later sent £4,000 sterling as ransom for his sister. The Admiral then granted the young woman her freedom and returned the money to her as well. Liberty was not, however, without its price:

[T]he Lady very discreetly weigh'd the different treatment she was likely to find in her native Country. Her Catholic Relations, as the kindest thing they could do for her in her present Circumstances, would certainly confine her to a Nunnery for the rest of her Days. Her Infidel Lover was very handsome, very tender, fond of her, and lavish'd at her feet all the Turkish Magnificence. She answer'd him very resolutely that her Liberty was not so precious to her as her Honnour, that he could no way restore that but by marrying her.

(1:408-09)

Lady Mary contrasts an honorable married life in an aristocratic Turkish household with an equally honorable but cloistered life in a Western nunnery: the Spanish woman would be forever lost if she returned home, whereas marriage to a Turkish Admiral protects her moral independence. It gives her, Lady Mary reports, “the satisfaction of knowing no Man could boast of her favours without being her Husband” (1:409).

That the Spanish woman made the proper choice, by Lady Mary's standards, is reinforced in the conclusion of the story. As her final reward, when she offered the money as her portion, the Admiral refused it, saying that he was “too happy in her Possession” (1:409). After the marriage, the Admiral never took another wife and left the Spanish woman, at his death, one of the richest widows in Constantinople. Of course, a happy ending for such a story is one of the most important elements of romance because, as Gillian Beer has argued, the romance makes “apparent the hidden dreams of that world” and fulfills desires which cannot find “controlled expression within a society.”²³ Lady Mary and her correspondents were probably relieved (perhaps even pleased) to see the Spanish woman rewarded with an “Infidel Lover” transformed into a handsome, tender, generous, faithful, loving, and rich husband. The Spanish woman is the perfect object of sympathetic identification for Lady Mary and her correspondents: she is the European woman who turns danger, humiliation, and pain into vast wealth, independence, and female triumph. But the events, because they mimic the plots of contemporary fiction, are also controlled through emotional distance: the very real terror the Spanish woman must have felt is subsumed in a structure which—if fiction holds true—points to a happy ending.²⁴ One familiar moral objection to the romance is that, in uncovering the “hidden dreams of the world,” it changes a reader's perception of reality so that the quotidian character of everyday life becomes dissatisfying and, more seriously, the genuine dangers of the world are muted and become even greater real-life threats. Lady Mary reads the Spanish woman's story through the power of this fictional construct: the violence is essentially erased, and a dangerous and powerful man is transformed into a means of female triumph.

Lady Mary does not end the narrative focused on a fantasy. Instead, she concludes with a moral lesson about female values illustrated by her heroine's motives: “I am afraid you'l think that my Freind fell in love with her Ravisher, but I am willing to take her word for it that she acted wholly on principles of Honnour, thô I think she might be reasonably touch'd at his Generosity, which is very often found amongst the Turks of Rank” (1:409). Lady Mary rejects the sentimentalizing of love and instead situates the Spanish woman's choice entirely in the aristocratic realm of honor, which is rewarded with the generosity of Turkish rank. An avid reader of romances, Lady Mary is eager to see Turkey in just these positive terms: while women may be vulnerable, even murdered, they are finally saved by heroic virtue and acts of will that secure them moral independence. The events of this story have not been lifted from The Arabian Nights or seventeenth-century French fiction. Lady Mary claims an acquaintance with the Spanish woman and insists on the “truth” of the account. But life in Turkey, as Lady Mary interprets it, holds a mirror up to fiction, and this becomes the reality Lady Mary sees most clearly.

At the conclusion of her journey, as she travels through Genoa on the way back to England, Lady Mary is again presented with a vision of a woman who endured violence but emerged in triumph. When visiting the Doria family palaces, Lady Mary celebrates not only the perfection of the architecture and the magnificence of the furniture but the extensive art collection: “I am charm'd with nothing so much as the Collection of Pictures by the Pencils of Raphael, Paulo Veronese, Titian, Carache [Carracci], Michael Angelo, Guido [Reni], and Corregio, which 2 I mention last as my particular favourites” (28 August 1718; 1:431). Her appreciation of these particular painters, however, is less dependent on the excellence of painterly technique than on the way these great artists represent suffering:

I own I can find no pleasure in objects of Horror, and in my Opinion the more naturaly a Crucifix is represented the more disagreable it is. These, my beloved Painters, shew nature and shew it in the most charming Light. I was particularly pleas'd with a Lucretia in the House of Balbi. The expressive Beauty of that Face and Bosome gives all the passion of Pity and admiration that could be rais'd in the Soul by the finest poem on that Subject. A Cleopatra of the same hand deserves to be mention'd, and I should say more of her if Lucretia had not first engag'd my Eyes.

(1:431)

Lady Mary rejects the brutality of the “naturaly” represented crucifix, preferring the “charming Light” of Reni's interpretation of Lucretia's suicide. This “charming Light” produces in Lady Mary, not a direct response to a visceral physicality or a sympathetic identification with those emotions which are personally threatening—horror and powerlessness—but a means to transform pain into a more distant, controlled, shaped, and delimited aesthetic context. This is precisely the veil of romance she brings to the Embassy Letters. In Turkey, as in her response to this painting, Lady Mary views the body of a woman in an aesthetic context; uncovered and sensuous, it is an object worthy of painterly attention. Yet in the very act of uncovering, the body is exposed to danger, subject to violence, and vulnerable. The implicit threat in making visible what was once hidden must be muted, and so Lady Mary veils the danger with recourse to literature: Lucretia's story, like the Spanish woman's, “gives all the passion of Pity and admiration that could be rais'd in the Soul by the finest poem on the Subject.” It does not result in horror because Lady Mary imposes on her observations the “charming Light” of fictive structures, romance narratives where women can be lifted out of danger and rewarded with a happy ending. This strategy allows her to argue for the autonomy and freedom the female heroic promises, while glossing the pain some women experience in Turkey. More importantly, it leads her to interpret her heroines as forever triumphant in moments of female transcendence.

Notes

1. For more biographical information about Lady Mary's life in Turkey, see Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), pp. 59-93.

2. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965-67), 1:368. Subsequent letters refer to this edn.

3. “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 120.

4. Orientalism (N.Y.: Vintage, 1979), p. 150.

5. Halsband, “Introduction,” Complete Letters, 1:xiv-xvii. For further discussion of the history of the letters, see Halsband's Life, pp. 278-79, 287-89.

6. Smollett, Critical Review 15 (1793): 426; Voltaire, The Complete Works of Voltaire, 110 (Oxfordshire: The Voltaire Foundation, 1975), p. 410; Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson, ed. S. C. Roberts (N.Y.: Arno, 1980), p. 166; and Gibbon, The Private Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1896), 1:3.

7. The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1668), p. 39.

8. Lady Mary's calling the Sultana (born c. 1683 and a resident of Mustapha II's harem) a “favourite” is not as accurate as it could be, for women who bore daughters to the Sultan were called “Haseki Kadin” or “Lady Favourite” and those who bore sons were called “Haseki Sultan” or “Princess Favourite.” As a “favourite,” the Sultana Hafise would have been out-ranked in the harem hierarchy only by the “Valide Sultan,” or “Princess Mother,” a woman whose son ascended the throne. For further details of harem life, see A. D. Alderson, The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty (rep. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982), pp. 77-84.

9. Alderson confirms the Sultana's account: “The old story of the sultan dropping his handkerchief at the feet of the favoured girl is largely discredited” (p. 80n.). N. M. Penzer, however, disputes Lady Mary's remarks about the handkerchief custom and the woman's crawling into the Sultan's bed. He claims that Lady Mary's data refer only to the 18th c., and he cites Lady Mary's limited source (the lack of such customs could have been “the whim of a solitary Sultan,” Penzer speculates). Penzer does, however, provide a fascinating piece of information not mentioned by Lady Mary: “Now this ‘creeping up the bed’ was obligatory in Constantinople on a man who had been married to one of the Sultanas. … He timidly enters, kisses the coverlet, and creeps towards his wife by the same ‘sliding scale’” (The Harem [London: Spring Books, 1936], pp. 179-80). Fanny Davis also cites this story; however, she cautions that such “palace gossip necessarily passed through many people before it reached the Western observer and may have undergone many alterations in the process” (The Ottoman Lady [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1986], pp. 19, 29).

10. “Introduction,” Before Their Time: Six Women Writers of the Eighteenth Century (N.Y.: Frederick Unger, 1979), p. x.

11. Emperor of the Moon (1687), act 3, scene 1; quoted by Halsband, Complete Letters, 1:327n.

12. Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), pp. 161ff.

13. Susan Staves, citing that the English concept of “pin money” was being legally codified from 1690-1834, argues that courts hoped to maximize the protective and maintenance functions of pin money (insuring that a woman and her children would not be left destitute if the husband proved a scoundrel or a miser) while minimizing the possibility that a woman might use such funds as capital (and thus insuring traditional control over women). As a result, the idiosyncratic rule of no arrears beyond a year was formed (a woman could sue her husband for pin money for a given year, but she could not collect for his failure to provide in years past). Ultimately, the courts ruled that pin money was to be used to dress and adorn the wife in keeping with the dignity and rank of the husband, but was not to be used for the accumulation of a fund. Thus Englishwomen of rank lived with restrictions on their use of this form of married women's separate property. See Staves, “Pin Money,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. O. M. Brack, vol. 14 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin, 1985), pp. 47-77.

14. Muslim divorce was easily accomplished, for it required only a triple repudiation (talāk), an act which could be revocable (withdrawn during a waiting period) or definite (with immediate effect). In some cases, the husband and wife could agree to a mutual waiving of any financial obligations or, in the case of khul‘, the wife could redeem herself from the marriage for a consideration. Joseph Schacht admits that under a system of polygamy, concubinage, and repudiation, the legal position of the wife is “obviously less favourable than that of the husband,” but a woman retains the possibility of divorce and her situation is financially improved by the effects of the mahr. For further discussion of both the nuptial gift and Muslim divorce practices, see Schacht, p. 165. Lady Mary's concern about the inequitable English divorce laws, and the punitive treatment a woman might endure, can be seen in her “Epistle from Mrs. Y[onge] to her Husband” (1724). The poem concerns the scandal of the divorce of Mary Yonge (daughter and heiress of Samuel Heathcote) from the notorious William Yonge, from whom she had been separated. While Yonge was not opposed to extramarital affairs for himself, he would not tolerate his wife's relationship with another man. He successfully sued his wife's lover (and recovered damages) and, after winning a parliamentary divorce, he gained control of his wife's considerable fortune as well; she was awarded an allowance. Lady Mary's complaint, in the form of a monologue in the voice of Mrs. Yonge, cites the sexual double standard, “Are we not form'd with Passions like your own? / Nature with equal Fire our Souls endu'd” (ll. 26-27), and the lack of legal remedies, “For Wives ill us'd no remedy remains, / To daily Racks condemn'd and to eternal Chains” (ll. 23-24). See Essays and Poems, and Simplicity, A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband & Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), pp. 230-32.

15. The Muslim Discovery of Europe (N.Y.: Norton, 1982), pp. 289, 131. Lewis paraphrases Masīir-i Tālibī ya Sefarnāma-i Mīrzā Abū Tālib Khān, ed. H. Khadīv-Jam (Tehran, 1974), pp. 225-26, and cites C. Stewart's English translation, Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (London, 1814), 2:27-31.

16. Jervas was not present, but later Ingres was so moved by Lady Mary's description that he copied into his notebook several passages from this letter (using his copy of a French translation of the 1805 edn.), and it is generally agreed that her influence shows up in his painting “Le Bain Turc.” See Norman Schlenoff, Ingres, ses sources littéraires (1956), pp. 281-83 (cited in Complete Letters, 1:313n.). Marilyn Brown provides a revealing and ironic aside: Ingres did not copy Lady Mary's remark about fellow painter Jervas into the notebooks (“The Harem Dehistoricized: Ingres' Turkish Bath,” Arts Magazine [Summer 1987]: 67n.).

17. Pictures of Romance: Form Against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1988), p. 23.

18. Steiner, p. 3. See chap. 2 for an extended discussion of the tension in romance narrative as defined by Hayden White, Michail Bakhtin, Eugene Vinaver, and Paul Ricoeur who all agree “on the connection between the self-sameness of the subject and the ‘artificial’ narrative cohesion found in romance” (p. 52).

19. Lady Mary is not altogether correct in citing the husband as the instrument of revenge. Traditionally, a Muslim woman's adultery was considered a blot on the honor of her family, not her husband's. As Sandra Mackey, studying the modern Saudis, puts it, “[The husband] escapes the burden of shame because society considers it demeaning for him to admit that a wife's frailty could move him to any emotion warmer than contempt” (p. 139). Accordingly, punishment generally came from the woman's family relations. See Mackey, The Saudis: Inside the Desert Kingdom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

20. Lady Mary is correct in citing “blood-money,” a system instituted by Muhammad as a means of limiting the scope of blood feuds. Islamic law limits retaliation to the offender himself (excluding other members of the family and tribe) and only if the offender is fully responsible and has acted with clear intent. Islamic law also recommends waiving retaliation—“either gratuitously or by settlement, and [the next-of-kin] receives the blood-money or may waive his claim to it” (Schacht, p. 184). Lady Mary's description of the dead woman, however, is problematic in the context she sets up. For anyone found guilty of adultery, there were severe punishments. One category of criminal act in Islamic penal laws, the Hudud (or crimes against God whose punishments are specified in the Koran and Sunna), includes both adultery and fornication. The charge of adultery requires 4 witnesses or a confession, and the punishment for the married person is stoning to death: the convict is taken to a barren site and stones are thrown first by the witnesses, then by the qadi, and finally by the community. If the convict is a woman, a grave is dug for the body. An unmarried person is sentenced to 100 lashes. That the young woman Lady Mary describes died from stab wounds seems to indicate that she was not judged guilty of adultery in any formal proceeding. For more information on the Hudud, see Matthew Lippman, Sean McConville, and Mordechai Yerushalmi, Islamic Criminal Law and Procedure: An Introduction (N.Y.: Praeger, 1988), pp. 37-58; see esp. p. 42.

21. See Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ., 1989), for additional discussion of the Lucretia narrative as literary topos.

22. Privileged Mortals: The French Heroic Novel, 1630-1660 (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1983), p. 79.

23. The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 12-13.

24. The conclusion to the Spanish woman's story, however, is anything but typical of women taken hostage in the 18th c.: most such women remained life-long captives, not seemingly contented and wealthy wives. Bernard Lewis writes that during the 15th and 16th centuries, the Ottoman jihād brought a steady stream of Albanian, Slavonic, Wallachian, Hungarian, and other Christian slaves. By the 18th c., the Tatar khans of the Crimea, an autonomous Muslim dynasty, captured slaves from Russia, Poland, and the Ukraine who were then sold and shipped to Turkey. He further cites historical instances of women taken captive because of their beauty, some of whom were retained as concubines and others were sent—by sale or as gifts—to the harems of the Middle East. Lewis says that the “choicest often found their final destinations in the Imperial Seraglio in Istanbul as concubines of the sultans or other dignitaries. … Most [of the mothers of the Ottoman Sultans] were slaves of the harem whose identities, origins, and even names are hidden from history by the discreet reticence of the Muslim household” (pp. 185-94).

I am grateful to Tulane University's Committee on Research for its support in this project.