SOURCE: “Scolding Lady Mary Wortley Montagu? The Problematics of Sisterhood in Feminist Criticism,” in Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds: Feminism and the Problem of Sisterhood, edited by Susan Ostrov Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner, New York University Press, 1994, pp. 44-61.

[In the essay below, Looser evaluates Montagu's reputation as a progressive and a proto-feminist.]

As with many women writers “found” by second-wave feminisms, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu has been held up as an exemplary model of womanhood. Montagu is frequently taught alongside her eighteenth-century British “sisters,” Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, and Mary Wollstonecraft, all of whom carved significant spaces outside of traditional feminine roles in their lives and writings. Montagu has not lacked a contemporary audience, her letters garnering space in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women as well as The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The ways we read Montagu, however, have become increasingly complicated as of late. In recent years Montagu has served as a site of facile co-optation, critical angst, and feminist struggle. The locus of these struggles, I believe, is the applicability of the labels “feminist” and “progressive.” Is Montagu a feminist? Is she progressive? Both? Neither? These questions and their resulting conflicts challenge us—not merely to take sides—but to take stock of our critical practices. An overview of Montagu's changing reputations as a “feminist” provides a case study of how women writers have been recuperated and institutionalized and compels us to rethink our feminist authorial models.

It is no revelation that much of second-wave feminist criticism—including criticism on Montagu—was celebratory to a troubling degree. In the majority of feminist scholarship produced in the last two decades, Montagu is congratulated for her gender politics. In 1978, Pat Rogers described Montagu as “a brave spirit who challenged the male domination of the literary world by writing moving letters and ladylike epistles.”¹ Montagu was dubbed “a staunch advocate of feminism” in Dale Spender's Women of Ideas (1982).² In 1978, Alice Anderson Hufstader wrote about Montagu in a chapter titled “The Rebel.” For Hufstader, Montagu “had far more in common with the feminists of today and yesterday than had her gentler successors. It was to remain her cast-iron conviction that life is a bad bargain, and that women have the worst of it.”³ In this body of criticism, praise and appreciation covertly become the most allowable critical functions—the only functions, in fact, that are in line with feminist sisterhood.

We might now justifiably ask what it is that we have celebrated and how we have constituted our sisterhood. In the last five years, this project has begun in earnest as some feminist criticism on Montagu has eschewed uncomplicated praise. Recent Montagu scholars, including Cynthia Lowenthal, Lisa Lowe, and Joseph Lew, have read Montagu's letters with an eye to Orientalism, as outlined by Edward Said.⁴ Said himself doesn't mention Montagu in Orientalism (1978), and considerations of Montagu's Orientalism have only now begun to circulate widely. Of course, not all recent scholarship on Montagu has moved away from easy praise. John McVeagh's English Literature and the Wider World (1990) deems Montagu “full of appreciation of the exotic cultures she encountered.”⁵ Even the scholarship published on Montagu and Orientalism leaves us with unanswered questions about the correlation of “progressive” gender politics to those of race, class, and nation. Especially in regard to Montagu's Turkish Embassy letters, the verdict is not yet in.

What we know as the Turkish Embassy letters (written from 1716 to 1718 while Montagu's husband was ambassador to Turkey) were originally published in 1763, a year after Montagu's death. This manuscript, Letters of the Right Honorable Lady M … y W … y M … e: written during her travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, was read by Montagu's contemporaries among whom it circulated during her lifetime. In 1724 Montagu's friend Mary Astell wrote a preface to the letters, calling for their publication and detailing how they should be read and received. Astell argued along with Montagu that these letters contained more true representations of Turkey than had been previously available to readers.

A celebratory tradition of reading Montagu, then, began during her lifetime. Astell's preface is a well-known document, often cited by feminist literary critics for its sisterly sentiments. Astell desired that the world would “see to how much better purpose the Ladys Travel than their Lords, and that Whilst [the world] is surfeited with Male Travels, all in the same Tone and stuft with the same Trifles, a Lady has the skill to strike out a New Path and to embellish a worn-out Subject with a variety of fresh and elegant Entertainment” (CL, I:467).⁶ Specifically calling on Montagu's women readers, Astell hoped that they, at least, would read Montagu with sympathy: “In short, let her own Sex at least do her Justice; Lay aside diabolical Envy and its Brother Malice with all their accursed Company, Sly Whispering, cruel backbiting, spiteful detraction, and the rest of that hideous crew, which I hope are very falsely said to attend the Tea Table, being more apt to think they haunt those Public Places where Virtuous Women never come” (CL, I:467). Astell wanted women to rise above “male” backbiting:

Let the Men malign one another, if they think fit, and strive to pul down Merit when they cannot equal it. Let us be better natur'd than to give way to any unkind or disrespectful thought of so bright an Ornament of our Sex, merely because she has better sense. … Rather let us freely own the Superiority of this Sublime Genius as I do in the sincerity of my Soul, pleas'd that a Woman Triumphs, and proud to follow in her Train. Let us offer her the Palm which is justly her due, and if we pretend to any Laurels, lay them willingly at her Feet.

(CL, I:467)

Astell asks women to band together and join in celebrating the achievements of their “sister,” letting only the men criticize each other. Women, the preface suggests, must have only praise for a successful woman. We must therefore join in Montagu's triumph. Or must we? What happens when we do not simply celebrate the “triumphs” of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, as Astell requests? What is the result when we see Montagu's texts as implicated in the less-than-triumphant? Finally, what happens to the category “women” in such an enterprise? To begin to address these questions, it is necessary to recount the critical frames into which Montagu's texts have been received.

Montagu's Turkish Embassy letters have long been read as among the more sympathetic accounts of eighteenth-century Turkish customs—and of Turkish women. In eighteenth-century England, Turkish women were frequently pitied for their status as concubines or heathens. In her Poems on Several Occasions from 1696, Elizabeth Singer Rowe argues that English women have reason and sense and are undervalued by English men. She uses Turkish women as her foil. Rowe writes of “a plain and an open design to render us meer Slaves, perfect Turkish Wives, without Properties, or Sense, or Souls”; she asks her readers “whether these are not notorious Violations on the Liberties of Free-born English Women?”⁷ Rowe bristles at Turkish women's lives but does so primarily to show how unjust it is to exploit English women.

On the other hand, Montagu remarks on parallels between English and Turkish practices in order to claim that both deserve celebration. She likens customs from the two countries by calling them both the “manners of mankind”—a generous claim in an eighteenth-century British context. Montagu's “going native” while in Turkey is well-documented. Montagu often went out veiled, and she delivered her daughter in accordance with local childbearing practices. When she returned to England, Montagu kept her Turkish costumes, and Alexander Pope commissioned Godfrey Kneller to paint her in her Turkish dress in 1720.⁸ Continually correcting the excesses of previous travel writers, Montagu insists that Turks are not so vulgar as the English have been led to think. Most pointedly, Montagu's representations of Turkish women provide an alternative view. Differing with contemporaries such as Rowe, Montagu does not find Turkish women to be “sinners” without souls. The degree to which this view may be seen as “sympathetic” or “progressive,” and the implications of these labels, deserves further investigation.

Montagu's letters have proven interesting to contemporary readers for their descriptions of the differences and the similarities between Turkish and English women's manners. Beauty and disguise—and freedom and confinement—provide the most difficult aspects of these letters. The most famous is perhaps Montagu's visit to the women's bagnios or the Turkish baths, especially because Montagu claims she was the first foreign woman to have gotten inside a Turkish harem and to have spent a good deal of time with Turkish women. On first being observed by these Turkish women, Montagu describes how they interpret her dress and behavior: “I was in my travelling Habit, which is a rideing dress, and certainly appear'd very extraordinary to them, yet there was not one of 'em that shew'd the least surprize or impertinent Curiosity, but receiv'd me with all the obliging civillity possible. I know no European Court where the Ladys would have behav'd them selves in so polite a manner to a stranger” (CL, I:313). Later we discover that an “extraordinary” surprise to the Turkish women were Montagu's stays, which they believed were a contraption fitted by her husband to ensure her fidelity. After this cross-cultural misreading on the part of the Turkish women, Montagu's own (mis)interpretations continue.

Montagu reports that in the bath she observed about 200 women, arranged according to status, ladies on couches with slaves behind them. She argues, though, that differences were effaced because the women were “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 walked and moved with the same majestic Grace which Milton describes of our General Mother. … To tell you the truth, I had wickedness enough to wish secretly that Mr. Gervase could have been there invisible” (CL, I:313-14). Montagu's wish for a portrait painter is needless. She herself has rendered these “invisible” women visible. She alone claims the right, pointing out that previous European travelers' accounts must not be firsthand ones because it was death for a man to be found in one of these places (CL, I:315).

In conjunction with making them “visible,” Montagu claims that Turkish women are less confined than previously thought. Montagu takes issue with the widespread “myth” that Turkish women were “slaves,” seeing freedom where others saw confinement. In one letter she describes Turkish women's dress to her sister, concluding.

I cannot forbear admiring either the exemplary discretion or extreme Stupidity of all the writers that have given accounts of [Turkish women]. Tis very easy to see that they have more Liberty than we have, no Woman of what rank so ever being permitted to go in the streets without 2 muslins, one that covers her face all but her Eyes and another that hides the whole dress of her head and hangs halfe way down her back. … You may guess how effectually this disguises them, that there is no distinguishing the great Lady from her Slave, and 'tis impossible for the most jealous Husband to know his Wife when he meets her, and no Man dare either touch or follow a Woman in the Street.

(CL, I:328)

Montagu claims that “This perpetual Masquerade gives them entire Liberty of following their Inclinations without danger of Discovery” (CL, I:328). Many Turkish women, Montagu claims, have affairs without letting their “gallants” know who they are. Montagu ends this section with her now famous statement: “Upon the Whole, I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the Empire” (CL, I:329). Because of such remarks, Montagu has long been regarded as “progressive” and as escaping (to some degree) the ethnocentricity of many of her contemporaries.

Where others before her saw mere strangeness to be noted and dismissed, Montagu saw value and exoticism. This “native sympathy” is one of the reasons that Montagu has been written about as an advocate for all women. Some contemporary readers have accepted Montagu's protestations of fairness at face value. Robert Halsband led the way for this reading of the letters in 1960 when he argued, “By virtue of their clear-sighted observation, their expansive tolerance, and their candid sympathy for an alien culture, they are Lady Mary's valid credential for a place in the European ‘Enlightenment’” (CL, I:xiv). As recently as 1983, others concurred; Michele Plaisant concluded of Montagu's written sentiments toward the Turks: “Peut-on imaginer plus belle leçon de tolérance?”⁹

Feminist critics have long read these letters as uncomplicated accounts of Montagu's sincerity or philanthropy. About Montagu's trip to Turkey, Hufstader writes:

Here, as in her campaign for women's intellectual integrity, Lady Mary was in advance of her time. … In her letters from the East, Lady Mary suspended the sarcasm with which she so expertly satirized Western society. As she approached the Ottoman frontier, she addressed herself without mockery to an unknown culture. … It is this tone of sincere inquiry that sets apart her Embassy Letters from her familiarity-breeds-contempt vignettes of London, and makes them more, or less, favored depending upon their readers' tastes.¹⁰

In this version of literary history (again, from 1978), Montagu, like all great women, is able to step out of her historical context as she is “before her time.” Like most good feminists, Montagu has a sense of humor—but only up to a certain political point. Montagu can “get serious” when the situation calls for it.

Even at the time Hufstader and others were making these claims of cross-cultural magnanimity for Montagu, there was disagreement over the extent of the liberty that Montagu wanted to assign to Turkish women. Katharine Rogers wrote that Montagu's statements on Turkish women were mere veilings of her true beliefs and did not see this portion of Montagu's writings as more “sincere.” Rogers found it inconceivable that Montagu “meant” what she said in her anecdotes about the veils of Turkish women providing them with more liberty. In Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (1982), Rogers concluded, “Of course [Montagu] must have realized that this was a frivolous proof of liberty and that Turkish women were even more restricted and less valued than English ones. But this was how she made the point that English women were only supposed to be free.”¹¹ As early as 1979, Rogers asserted that Montagu's “insistence on the happy liberty of Mohammedan Turkish women functions as a wicked comment on the Englishman's complacent assumption that England was ‘the paradise of wives’; but it is upsetting to note that she defined woman's liberty in terms of spending money and carrying on adulterous affairs with impunity. She had radical ideas about women, but evidently felt the need to camouflage them.”¹² For Rogers, Montagu's “feminism is typically veiled in apology or flippancy” and though “Montagu prided herself on being a properly conducted aristocrat and a tough-minded rationalist … she ruthlessly suppressed feminist feelings that seemed to conflict with these ideals.”¹³ The Turkish Embassy letters, then, are not truer but more deceptive accounts of Montagu's views on women, according to this dissenting view.

Whether seen as “actually” representative of Montagu's feminism or as subversive attempts to hide her “true” beliefs, all of these second-wave feminist versions of the Turkish Embassy Letters have, in varying degrees, followed the pleas of Mary Astell. Montagu is only praised for her beliefs and writings, and where she is not praised, she is assigned “understandable” intentions to explain why her writings might be classified to the contrary. Even Rogers, who has problems accepting Montagu's statements at face value, used her critical efforts to “save” Montagu and to put her squarely within the “requirements” of contemporary feminism.

Must Montagu must be held up as a politically progressive figure at all costs? As I mentioned earlier, the criticism linking Montagu to Orientalism has changed the focus of feminist readings in the 1990s from quests for heroic feminism to suggestions of implicit racism. Lowenthal's 1990 article, “The Veil of Romance: Lady Mary's Embassy Letters,” argued that Montagu used European aesthetic models of romance and courtly love that only allowed her to see Turkey through her own cultural mirror—an Orientalist gesture. Although Montagu's letters may seem at first glance to offer a “sisterly” attitude toward Turkish women, this sisterhood is only with upper-class women and only at the expense of alternately aestheticizing or Westernizing their attributes, Lowenthal argued.

This groundbreaking article was followed by Lisa Lowe's Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (1991) and Joseph Lew's “Lady Mary's Portable Seraglio” (1991). Both scholars view Orientalism in Montagu's texts as one of several competing discourses within her letters and her social milieu. These arguments are distinctive in that they simultaneously exonerate Montagu from and implicate her in Orientalist practices. Lowe finds a dual tendency in Montagu's letters, which she calls a rhetoric of identification and a rhetoric of differentiation with Turkish women. The rhetoric of identification is “an emergent feminist discourse” that speaks of common experiences among women of different societies; the rhetoric of differentiation follows in the tradition of Orientalism that Said has outlined—one of “othering.”¹⁴ Joseph Lew, like Lowe, sees a portion of Montagu's writings as “progressive”—as escaping Orientalism because Montagu sometimes speaks in a “women's discourse.” This women's discourse is a language that knows no cultural boundaries—is said, in fact, to be its own culture and language.

The strength of Lowe's, Lew's, and others' work in this vein is its assertion that Montagu's “Orientalist logic and statements often exist in a climate of challenge and contestation.”¹⁵ There is, in other words, no monolithic discourse of “Orientalism” but rather many degrees of adherence and deviation. What we have “gained” through these readings of racial and class politics is an appreciation of the complexity of dominant and marginal Orientalist practices. What we have sometimes lost, however, is the complexity of gender in relation to these practices.

Strangely, in the recent reviews of this scholarship on Montagu and Orientalism, the difficulties involved in dealing simultaneously with gender, ethnicity, class, and colonialism are frequently not the issues taken up. In fact, in some responses to the criticism about Montagu's “Orientalism” what is offered is a defense of Montagu herself—usually in the name of historical veracity. Isobel Grundy's review of Lowe's Critical Terrains (1993) faults that book primarily for its historical inaccuracies, but Grundy's critiques are ultimately more far-reaching. Grundy believes that Lowe has “undeclared baggage: an expectation or a hope that Montagu will conform to twentieth-century feminist, democratic, multicultural positions.”¹⁶ Grundy complains that Montagu is “implicitly blamed” when she allows “identity by class to override identity by gender.”¹⁷ This seems to suggest that we should give Montagu a critical break and read her on eighteenth-century terms. But long before Lowe, feminists read Montagu through contemporary interpretive models. It is equally problematic to claim that dubbing Montagu anything other than a “feminist heroine” is to have “undeclared baggage.” Why is keeping her within the confines of “great woman author” equal to “traveling light”?

Grundy's views are not anomalous. In 1992 Susan Groag Bell used tropes similar to Grundy's to rescue Montagu. Bell takes issue with the charge of “Orientalism” because “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in common with both men and women of her time, took her situation as an aristocrat for granted.”¹⁸ Bell believes that “to scold Lady Mary for not objecting to the Turkish lady lying naked on her cushioned marble bench among the two hundred in the women's bath—and having her own naked servant standing behind her in 1717—is to misunderstand the mentality of the eighteenth century. It is as anachronistic as it would be to expect every medieval peasant to have a private bedroom and bath ensuite.”¹⁹ Responses like Bell's and Grundy's miss the critical point of Orientalisms, and ultimately, of many historically attuned feminisms. Bell suggests that critical tactics involving “scolding” imply that Montagu herself needed to correct her behavior. To make these demands of Montagu would, I agree, be anachronistic as well as pointless. Who could expect Montagu to “rise above” her class, her gender, her race, and her historical moment to some “transcendent truth” about life for all times and places?

The critical “scolding” I would rather do is directed toward those who would only praise “feminist” authors for being role models and heroines. Any emphasis on reading Montagu's texts through her own eyes and intentions, through Mary Astell's, or through some hopelessly universalizing eighteenth-century mentality, is therefore problematic. To hold up Montagu as a feminist model of strength and independence—without concomitantly holding her up as a model of how women are implicated in Orientalist and elitist practices against other women—is to repeat the eighteenth-century context as appropriate for our own. Bell, for one, does just that. She ironically suggests that if we had only adhered to Lady Mary's “feminist” ways, we might not even need a women's movement today. Bell claims, “Perhaps we should rather have wished that the middle class accepted Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's aristocratic family values of women's independence within marriage. Had this happened instead of the domestic middle-class values that raged through the Victorian period—the need for what Juliet Mitchell called The Longest Revolution, i.e., the women's revolution, might also have been obviated.”²⁰ This kind of critical practice—claiming halcyon lost origins—makes it difficult to read Montagu with anything but feminist nostalgia.

How else might we read? Those who implicate Montagu in Orientalisms often exonerate her by suggesting that she was doing her best with the cultural and linguistic tools she was given; she was stating something so new that it precluded her ability to reach anything but hostile audiences. But even if we grant her this, to what extent should we use a word like “sympathetic” or “progressive” to describe Montagu's texts? To whom is she “progressive” or, rather, whom does her “progressiveness” serve or not serve? Assumed “political progressiveness” in Montagu's letters, as well as in the twentieth-century literary-critical work that attends to her letters, creates problems that must be reconsidered.

Feminist models for women's authorship have sometimes assumed a progressive woman masquerading in one of three guises: (1) repression (Rogers's version—a veiling of true beliefs in the woman's writings), (2) suppression (women as historically silenced and unauthorized to write, though we have now unearthed some of these secreted documents), or (3) oppression (women's history and authorship as rare to nonexistent). Early British women writers may then be seen as overcoming the “patriarchal powers” to be able to liberate themselves—to partially undo their shackles. It is often tacitly overlooked—and sometimes downplayed—that these women's texts not only challenge dominations but themselves repress, suppress, or oppress other marginalized groups. Attempting to sort out the contradictions of race, class, and gender at work in Montagu's letters, however, points up the dangers in unqualifiedly dubbing any one of the categories—or any one author—“politically progressive.” To do so will involve glossing over “othering” in different categories.

Strangely, this “glossing over” is true of the scholarship that explicitly deals with Montagu's own “othering” as well. As this criticism has shown, Montagu's views on veiling practices provide examples of the limited kind of “sympathy” and “sisterhood” her texts offer. Nonwestern understandings of the veil illustrate the necessity of investigating Montagu's “perpetual masquerade” views, as Lew argues:

In the novelistic tradition, women (the Clarissas, Emily St. Auberts, Catherine Morlands, and Evelinas) enter the sexual arena as prey when they leave the shelter of the Father's House. But in the Muslim East … the superficial similarity of the immurement of females performs a precisely opposite function: it protects men. This opposite function indicates an alternative view of female sexuality. … The double veils (murlins) … are designed to protect men from the women's contagious sexuality.²¹

This distinction is important for its recognition that masquerade need not translate into freedom in all historical and cultural contexts. Lew was not, of course, the first to make these arguments about Turkish veiling. He points to the work of Lila Abu-Lughod and Fatima Mernissi, to which also might be added the work of Leila Ahmed, Nikki Keddie and Beth Baron, and Judy Mabro, among others. Strangely, however, Lew uses this information about the complexity of veiling practices to reassert their subversiveness. For Lew, Montagu does in fact recognize the intricacies of these cultural interpretations of veiling. He reasserts with her the veil's subversive potential.

To “credit” Montagu with stepping out of her own cultural lens and seeing both the oppressive and the subversive potentials of veiling for Turkish women may grant Montagu too much. Lowe, too, implicitly gives Montagu undue credit when she calls Orientalism a “male tradition.”²² We must question whether women somehow subvert “the Orientalist tradition” by virtue of their sex. Isn't it possible that women writers are as implicated in Orientalisms as their male counterparts? “Sympathy” for “other” women does not necessarily steer Montagu clear—even partially—of biases. She grafts her own cultural wishes and expectations onto the lives of Turkish women. If we move away from the “feminist/not a feminist” or “progressive/not progressive” dichotomy in regard to Montagu, are we left with a critical vacuum? Rather than working to castigate or exonerate Montagu more thoroughly, a turn to generic, historical, and disciplinary questions—to difficult matters of historicizing—may prove a way to deal with these either/or feminist options.

An investigation of Montagu's positionings of texts, authors, and masquerade is one way to proceed. Montagu's status is as an all-knowing onlooker or ethnographer, and in her gaze, Turkish women become objets d'art—or as Lowenthal puts it, “bodyscapes” situated in a timeless present.²³ Perhaps rather than seeing Turkish women as situated in a timeless present, though, one might posit that Montagu presents them as part of a timeless past. In the course of her letters, Montagu herself is inserted into history: she is the “first” to see a Turkish harem. The Turkish women are drawn as if in a landscape—like characters on a Keatsian urn. In claiming herself as the first to “make visible” the Turkish women in all of their naked and noble splendor, Montagu puts herself in “history” and dehistoricizes her subjects.

Returning to the difficult issues of Montagu and veiling, similar problems of “history” can be explored. Terry Castle's Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction may provide a helpful historicizing corrective. Although recent critical writings on Montagu cite Castle, none seem to take seriously her points about English masquerade, politics, and history in regard to Montagu's Letters. Castle herself strangely misconstrues Montagu's discussion of masquerade, claiming: “Mary Wortley Montagu, always a devotee of disguise and masquerade, wrote of the congeniality of the Mediterranean carnival season, and the freedom it offered, particularly for women.”²⁴ Castle's mysterious creation of a “Mediterranean carnival season” is itself an unfortunately Orientalist appropriation of veiling practices. Despite these questionable conclusions, Castle's work remains important in other respects.

Issues of ahistoricity and gendered Orientalisms are brought to the fore in Castle's discussion of masquerade. Castle concludes that masquerade was seen as a hybrid form of English and non-Englishness that intermixed all classes.²⁵ Unescorted English women were allowed at masquerades as in no other spaces, and the mask was seen as allowing these women to speak more freely.²⁶ All of these claims make Montagu's interpretation of veiling that much more clear. Masquerade was seen in England as a classless, freeing, and, finally, a foreign practice: “Masquerades were persistently associated with diabolical foreign influence, imported corruption, the dangerous breach of national boundaries, contamination from without.”²⁷ Montagu identifies in Turkey a similar classlessness (belied by her other statements about rank) and a high level of freedom for women. In valorizing masquerade, Montagu essentially takes those things for which masquerade had been denounced in England, naturalizes them in a foreign context, and argues for their being right and good.

The points that may be left out in such a discussion, however, are the political and historical dimensions Castle outlines. She notes: “The frequent refrain in Horace Walpole's correspondence—that ‘balls and masquerades supply the place of politics’ and ‘histories of masquerades’ take up ‘people's thoughts full as much’ as national events—suggest something of the masquerade's intrusive force.”²⁸ It may be tempting to read back on this scene a kind of postmodern malaise—a version of vapid celebrity “news” ignoring the “real issues.” Castle's other remarks make this a difficult conclusion to reach. In discussing newspaper accounts of masquerades, Castle writes that the surrealistic prominence of these accounts jars the modern reader; masquerades are “juxtaposed quite unself-consciously to reports of troop movements, Parliamentary sessions, and other more somber public doings.”²⁹ For Castle, this reinforces that on some level the masquerade was news as much as any other public occasion. She notes, “Indeed, an odd blurring sometimes takes place in the eighteenth century between the masquerade and politics: they absorb similar kinds of public attention.”³⁰ The masquerade, therefore, is “history” and is “politics.”

In her appropriations of Turkish veiling practices, Montagu is not fashioning a “bilingual women's discourse,” nor is she merely making aesthetic objects of Turkish women within a literary model. Her use of the masquerade trope in her Letters inserts her fully into mainstream histories and politics. She cannot be said to simply “rebel” or “progress” in this sense. Furthermore, Castle argues that the masquerade evokes a world of temps perdu: “It tends to elude all but the most nostalgic and distorting forms of recuperation.”³¹ To take this one step further, if the “masquerade” itself was a kind of “history” or a kind of “politics,” it is both more “political” and more “historical” than we recognize it to be today—as well as more “timeless” in its own eighteenth-century British context. By positing masquerade as strictly a women's realm in Turkey, Montagu may effectively politicize and historicize some women in England through an attempt to bring them front and center in the public sphere. She cannot carry out the same project for Turkish women, however. Montagu, political and historical figure, self-fashioned English woman/native/other, becomes the only “appropriate” apex of these contradictions. She rescues herself and places herself prominently within masquerade, news, politics, history, letters (“literature”), and (remembering Astell) women. Just as surely, she erases the historicity and cultural specificity of her intended female Turkish subjects.

What is most ironic is that the negation and erasure I am describing is what today's feminist appropriations of Montagu, seeking to categorize her as a feminist heroine, repeat. At the moment when masquerade was tottering between “history,” “politics,” and “temps perdu,” Montagu's firm alignment of masquerade with women eventually backfires by serving only to distance them further from historical events. Not incidentally, this distancing culminates in the Victorian notion of women as outside of history.³² It also culminates in the scholarship of those like Lew who see women as connected eternally, linguistically, and cross-culturally through a “women's discourse.” Neither version offers a clearly emancipatory “end,” despite their contrary intentions. We must consider the possibility of our own “emancipatory,” celebratory feminisms backfiring. To be sure, when Montagu is first and foremost—or even mostly—a heroine in our feminist scholarship, we are prevented from scolding her for what she could not “control.” However, through this practice, we are also implicated in a prioritizing of “harms” that puts women—in this case, white aristocratic European women—above the fray of other conflicts and discourses.

If discourses of gender, like those of Orientalism, exist in a climate of challenge and contestation, how are we to map out the “common oppressions” and “solidarity” among women on which Astell and some contemporary feminists insist? Wouldn't we also be “glossing over the pain of some women,” as Lowenthal puts it in regard to Montagu? How might we have gendered “solidarity” without grafting our respective cultural wishes and expectations onto the lives of “other” women? Reading Montagu, I think, gives the lie to Orientalism as a “male tradition.” It also gives the lie to a “women's discourse” that crosses centuries or national boundaries. The force of these “lies” must be in theorizing and putting into critical practice ways that will no longer “answer” for feminist scholarship.

In Astell's preface, “solidarity” implies unconditional praise. This is not a forgotten strategy. The sense remains in some feminist circles that you are either with us or against us. “With us” means primarily lauding the female/feminist writers of history, as well as recent feminist critics; “against us” means critiquing historical female subjects or criticizing other feminists' work. Some feminists believe that a deconstruction of the category “women” threatens feminist politics—that this theoretical project can't truly be called “feminist.” To question the category “women,” however, is not to do away with feminist politics or practices—or to be more precise, with talking about gender and its demarcations, limitations, or harms. Does seeing the category “women” as a construction—as something that does not always require solidarity in advance—have to be a threat? Or does seeing “women at odds” also provide a possibility? As Judith Butler has argued, “To deconstruct the subject of feminism is not, then, to censure its usage, but, on the contrary, to release the term into a future of multiple significations, to emancipate it from the maternal or racialist ontologies to which it has been restricted, and to give it play as a site where unanticipated meanings might come to bear.”³³ Preconceiving a unity of “women,” then, is not automatically an act of resistance against dominant discourses.

Through the last several decades of constructing a “women's literary tradition” or a “women's history”—particularly through celebrating women on the basis of their gender politics—we have created much work on which to draw as we continue to assess our earlier critical models. The majority of what has been called “gynocriticism” or “her-story” dealt well with issues of gender, just as it elided questions of ethnicity, class, or nation. Although feminist scholarship has come a good distance from this earlier work, much of our scholarship continues implicitly or explicitly in this tradition. This is the case when we invoke labels such as “subversive” and “progressive,” or when we “uncomplicate” gender to make points about race, class, and nation. Romanticizing “sisterhood” has had critical benefits, to be sure, but it has also had critical costs. This matter deserves, not just our scolding, but a more difficult task: our scrutiny. The feminist protection of—veiling of—the category of “women” is not inherently liberatory. As with Montagu's texts, such a veiling prevents making visible harms that are in collusion with or contradicting those of gender. Montagu's “sisterhood” is not inherently global. Rather than scolding or exonerating her (or any of our predecessors), we might instead move toward more complex tasks of shifting, local theorizing, and examining complicity as thoroughly as we do resistance.³⁴

Notes

1. Pat Rogers, ed., The Eighteenth Century: The Context of English Literature (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), 29.

2. Dale Spender, Women of Ideas: And What Men Have Done to Them (London: Pandora, 1982), 68-69.

3. Alice Anderson Hufstader, Sisters of the Quill (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978), 7.

4. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978). See also Said's “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers From the Essex Conference 1976-84, ed. Francis Barker et al. (London: Methuen, 1986), 210-29.

5. John McVeagh, ed., English Literature and the Wider World. Volume 1: All Before Them: 1660-1780 (London: Ashfield, 1990), 8.

6. Robert Halsband, ed., The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (3 vols.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965). Quotations are cited in the text as CL.

7. Quoted in Vivien Jones, ed., Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 144-45.

8. Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 88, 98-99.

9. Michele Plaisant, “Les Lettres Turques de Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,” Bulletin de la Sociétés d'Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVII et XVIII Siècles 16 (1983): 72.

10. Hufstader, Sisters, 33, 40.

11. Katharine M. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 94.

12. Katharine M. Rogers, Before Their Time: Six Women Writers of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979), x.

13. Rogers, Feminism, 93.

14. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 32.

15. Ibid., 51.

16. Grundy, Isobel, Review of Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, by Lisa Lowe, Eighteenth-Century Studies 26, 3 (1993): 486.

17. Ibid., 486.

18. Susan Groag Bell, “Comment: Letters as Literature in Eighteenth-Century France and England,” Western Association of Women Historians Conference, San Marino, Calif., Huntington Library, 30 May 1992.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Joseph W. Lew, “Lady Mary's Portable Seraglio,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (1991): 449-50.

22. Lowe, Critical, 47.

23. Cynthia Lowenthal, “The Veil of Romance: Lady Mary's Embassy Letters,” Eighteenth-Century Life 14 (1990): 73-74.

24. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 14.

25. Ibid., 24, 28, 33.

26. Ibid., 32, 34.

27. Ibid., 7.

28. Ibid., 3.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., 7.

32. On the Victorian separation of “women” and “history,” see Christina Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and “The Woman Question” (New York: Routledge, 1991).

33. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” Praxis International 11 (1991): 160.

34. For an interesting article on romanticizing resistance and complicating feminist diagnostics of power, see Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17 (1990): 41-55.

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———. “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17 (1990): 41-55.

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Halsband, Robert, ed. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.

———. The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.

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