[In the essay below, Bohls declares that the Turkish Embassy Letters“are perhaps most valuable for their apparent aspiration, however partial and intermittent, to actual cultural exchange—a condition of intersubjectivity whose necessary precondition is an acceptance of the ‘other’ as an intelligent, sensitive, acting self.”]

As a woman traveller, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was uniquely privileged. When she went to Turkey in 1716 as the wife of the British Ambassador, she was assured access to the upper echelons of Ottoman society. Her gender, in addition, gained her entry to distinctive institutions of that society which were off limits even to privileged men. Harems and women's bathhouses had already provided topics for prurient speculation by male travel writers, several of whom claimed to have visited them, although as Montagu pointed out, “'Tis no less than Death for a Man to be found in one of these places.”¹ These fabricated portrayals of Turkish women were a key element of early Orientalist discourse.²

Though Edward Said's important study of Orientalism offers no detailed discussion of the phenomenon before Napoleon, late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century British and French accounts of travel to the Ottoman Empire are consistent with Said's delineation of later representations of the Middle East. The Orient is discursively feminized and eroticized; West stands to East in a relation of proto-colonial domination that takes on a seemingly inevitable sexual character.³ Oriental women carry a disproportionate symbolic burden in this discourse. Doubly “other” and doubly exotic, they become a synechdoche for the Orient itself, their supposedly insatiable sexual appeties offering an excuse for the sexualized domination these travelogues reinforce. Montagu was familiar with at least some of these writings. She remarks with characteristic sarcasm:

'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 Genius of the Men, into whose Company they are never admitted, and very often describe Mosques, which they dare not peep into.

(1:368)

But she seems genuinely concerned to correct the falsehoods spread by previous travel writers, especially about the Turkish women whose wit, hospitality and beauty she so enjoyed during her two-year stay.

Sara Suleri has recently expressed concern that much scholarship on travel and colonialism is still structured, like Said's influential book, by a “rhetoric of binarism” taking as its point of departure the fundamental opposition between self and other, West and East. “Even as the other is privileged in all its pluralities, in all its alternative histories, its concept-function remains too embedded in a theoretical duality of margin to center ultimately to allow the cultural decentering that such critical attention surely desires.”⁴ The historian Billie Melman offers one promising means of decentering our discourse, working toward the “productive disordering of binary dichotomies” that Suleri demands: through close scrutiny of representations of external cultural “others” produced by Europe's internal “others,” especially women.⁵ I do not intend to claim that “women's Orients” are necessarily or essentially different from men's. Early male travellers, too, occasionally departed from discourses of domination to cultivate limited intersubjectivity or reciprocity with members of a non-Western culture; one example is Mungo Park's Travels in the Interior District of Africa (1799). I believe, like Melman, that far from presenting a separate, coherent view, women's representations are in a constant and “dynamic interchange” with “hegemonic orientalist culture.”⁶ Montagu's letters are an outstanding example of such an exchange. Her interaction with the women of Turkey unfolds intricate ambiguities. Apparently undertaken, at least to a degree, in pursuit of reciprocity and genuine cultural exchange, the process inevitably reflects back as well on Montagu's own position as a woman in British culture.⁷ As we watch her set out to challenge the male Orientalists of her day, we may succeed in complicating the theoretical paradigms of our own.

Montagu's famous account of her visit to the women's baths carries out a polemic with these earlier travellers, exposing a “diversity of idiom” or Bakhtinian heteroglossia within Orientalist discourse. Attention to this kind of “polyphony” is valuable in helping dispel the impression of Orientalism as monolithic, and hence perhaps unsusceptible to disruption or subversion.⁸ Debunking fantasies so attractive to readers—especially male readers—is Montagu's difficult task: how do you describe a room full of naked Turkish women without perpetuating their double objectification as women and as “Orientals”? One key element of the rhetorical strategy she chooses to meet this challenge is her appeal to the contemporary discourse of aesthetics, strategically pitting it against the offensive idiom of early Orientalism.⁹ By comparing the bathing women to works of European art, she attempts to de-eroticize and de-exoticize them, neutralizing Orientalist stereotypes. To accomplish this, however, she must present herself as someone capable of perceiving and judging aesthetically, itself a bold move in an age that considered taste the prerogative of a few privileged men.

The eighteenth century saw an unprecedented proliferation of discourse on aesthetic topics: taste and sensibility; the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque; the appreciation and evaluation of painting, architecture, gardens and natural scenery.¹⁰ Recent work by Terry Eagleton, Peter DeBolla and others seeks to understand aesthetics' rise to prominence at this moment in British and European history.¹¹ My concern is with women's relation to this prestigious cultural category.¹² Montagu's self-positioning as an aesthetic subject, not just in the women's baths but throughout her travel letters from Europe and Turkey, illuminates the difficulties of this relation.

Defined broadly, aesthetics encompasses the pleasures of sensuous perception, the appreciation of beauty, and the cultivation of judgment or taste. It was just beginning in Montagu's time to emerge as a self-conscious philosophical discipline. Subtly but persistently, Montagu appropriates the aesthetic domain to the woman traveller. The allure of sensuous surfaces and the texture of visual pleasure provide her with fertile ground for cultural criticism, as well as entertaining description. Montagu was well educated for a woman of her day, attuned to the nuances of art, literature and criticism in Augustan England. She was a contemporary of the aesthetic theorists Shaftesbury, Addison (a family friend whose tragedy Cato she critiqued in manuscript), and Pope, with whom she had a notoriously vexed relationship. Her letters prove her sensitive to the play of social power within the relationships of spectator and spectacle, aesthetic subject and aesthetic object: what Addison dubbed “the pleasures of the imagination.”

Addison's 1712 remark, “A Man of a Polite Imagination, is let into a great many Pleasures that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving,” expresses the widely held view that taste distinguishes the “polite” upper classes from the “vulgar” masses.¹³ Archibald Alison in 1790 testifies to the durability of this view, finding “only in the higher stations … or in the liberal professions of life … men either of a delicate or comprehensive taste.”¹⁴ Addison's system of social categories opposes the “Man of a Polite Imagination” to the heterogeneous, ungendered “Vulgar”; it omits the possibility of a woman of polite imagination, a female aesthetic subject. Even an aristocratic woman like Montagu seems excluded from this key privilege of her class. As they formulated key notions like imagination and taste, these early aestheticists incorporated in their conceptual structure the power relationships that structured their society. Judith Butler has posited exclusion as a master mechanism of subject constitution in Western culture. Subjects are discursively constituted, she argues, “through the creation of a domain of deauthorized subjects, presubjects, figures of abjection, populations erased from view”; or, in another formulation, through “acts of differentiation that distinguish the subject from its constitutive outside, a domain of abjected alterity conventionally associated with the feminine, though clearly not exclusively.”¹⁵ Eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse exemplifies this process of empowering one privileged group of subjects by excluding and disempowering others.

Women's exclusion from the position of the aesthetic subject becomes more comprehensible when we consider the extent to which women were (and are) conceived of as aesthetic objects, spectacles constantly on display—as well as, conversely, the extent to which the aesthetic object was conceptualized as feminine. A passage from Shaftesbury's 1711 dialogue “The Moralists” is striking in this regard. Contemplating the beauty of a natural object, in this case the sea, is contrasted with the urge to use, possess or control it. This is an early occurrence of the idea, central to philosophical aesthetics, that aesthetic perception should be disinterested, devoid of any practical vested interest in the object.¹⁶ We can observe in this dialogue how early and how “naturally” gender enters into aesthetic discourse as Theocles Socratically quizzes his pupil, Philocles: “Imagine then … if being taken with the beauty of the ocean, which you see yonder at a distance, it should come into your head to command it and, like some mighty admiral, ride master of the sea, would not the fancy be a little absurd?”

Philocles replies with a startling logic: “Absurd enough, in conscience. The next thing I should do, 'tis likely, upon this frenzy, would be to hire some bark and go in nuptial ceremony, Venetian-like, to wed the gulf, which I might call perhaps as properly my own.”¹⁷

Shaftesbury is alluding to the traditional “wedding” between the Republic of Venice and the Adriatic in which the Doge sails out in state and drops a ring in the water, a ceremony Montagu witnessed in 1740.¹⁸ In this quaint custom both the object of property ownership (exemplified by marriage) and the aesthetic object are gendered female. The perceiving or possessing subject, on the other hand, is gendered male. Aesthetic contemplation and property ownership, though they are mutually exclusive in Shaftesbury's thought, both appear as aspects of masculine privilege. Clearly, Shaftesbury's influential aesthetics is anything but disinterested. It incorporates a network of gendered assumptions about relationships of socioeconomic and aesthetic power, presenting the aesthetic subject as a well-educated, propertied, white European man whose good taste enhances his prestige.

We may take these assumptions, prevalent in Montagu's culture, as a context for her subversive approach to both travel and aesthetics. Staking out the aesthetic sphere as the special territory of the woman traveller, she occupies a role generally barred to women and claims for herself the social power written into that role—power to which she is entitled by rank, but not by gender. Her encounters with the women of Europe and Turkey reveal the tensions generated by and for a female aesthetic subject when her culture constructs woman overwhelmingly as object, rather than subject, of the aesthetic gaze.¹⁹ This is apparent early in her correspondence during her journey to Turkey.

Writing from Holland in 1716 on her way to Turkey, Montagu compares a Dutch castle to one in Nottingham familiar to her correspondent, Sarah Chiswell. Her remarks suggest a gendered division of labor among travellers: “'Tis true the fortifications make a considerable difference. All the learned in the art of war bestow great Commendations on them. For my part that know nothing of the matter, I shall content my selfe with telling you tis a very pritty walk on the Ramparts, on which there is a Tower very deservedly call'd the Belvidere, where people go to drink Coffee, Tea, etc., and enjoy one of the finest prospects in the World” (1:251-52).

Holland, of course, was a rival military and economic world power. The Grand Tour of Europe, by this time an established institution with a standard itinerary, retained a militaristic dimension from its Tudor origins as preparation for diplomats. The patriotic traveller (presumptively male) was expected to note geography and fortifications, collecting useful information for country and sovereign.²⁰ Leaving militaristic pursuits to “learned” men, Montagu turns instead to pretty walks and fine prospects, the beauty of visible surfaces—in short, to aesthetics. She steps into the position of the aesthetic subject mock-apologetically, using stereotypical feminine ignorance or superficiality as a tongue-in-cheek pretext for suggesting a new perspective.

Her scorn for traditional, masculine modes of travel is more explicit in letters written during her later years. Living in Italy from 1739 until 1761, she was constantly visited by touring teenaged aristocrats, whom she labels “the greatest blockheads in nature” (2:177). Lecturing her daughter, Lady Bute, she decried conventional travel writers as well as Grand Tourists.

I find you have many wrong notions of Italy, which I do not wonder at. You can take your Ideas of it only from Books or Travellers. The first are generally antiquated or confin'd to Trite Observations, and the other yet more superficial. They return no more instructed than they might have been at home by the help of a Map. The Boys only remember where they met with the best Wine or the prettyest Women, and the Governors (I speak of the most learned amongst them) have only remark'd Situations and Distances, or at most Status and Edifices.

(2:494-95)

Men are the truly superficial travellers. The learned tutors' quantitative or monumental approach is on a par with their charges' pursuit of women and wine. Passages like this one suggest that Montagu's aesthetic approach may have been part of a conscious search for an alternative mode of travel.

Touring European capitals and courts on her way to Turkey, Montagu attends persistently to matters of surface display and sensuous pleasure. She regales her correspondents with rich descriptions of dress, food, buildings and furnishings; she records (often with Protestant scorn) the glitter of relics in churches and the curios displayed in noblemen's homes, and is especially stirred by the grand spectacles of theater and opera. She assesses local customs from an aesthetic perspective: in a letter written from Nuremberg she argues in favor of sumptuary laws, citing the “agreable Effect to the Eye of a Stranger” of a visibly ordered society that distinguishes rank by dress (1:255). Connecting aesthetic pleasure to a legally enforced code of social-sartorial hierarchy, Montagu aligns herself with Addison's view of aesthetic pleasure as an upper-class prerogative.

This view from the top continues as she visits the Austrian aristocracy's magnificent Vienna apartments and suburban villas, such as that of Count Schönborn: “the Furniture all rich brocards, so well fancy'd and fited up, nothing can look more Gay and Splendid … through out the whole House a profusion of Gilding, Carving, fine paintings, the most beautifull Porcelane, statues of Alablaster and Ivory, and vast Orange and Lemon Trees in Gilt Pots” (1:261). The Viennese “Fauxbourg” becomes an extravagant, operatic spectacle of glittering “profusion”; the aesthetic sphere emerges as an arena for conspicuous consumption, with the woman traveller's “polite imagination” underwriting this flaunting display of privilege and power.

Another type of spectacle, however, moves Montagu to consider from a different perspective the relation between aesthetic pleasure and social power. We can sense throughout her letters an uneasy tension between class and gender as interpenetrating dimensions of her subjectivity. Generally conservative on matters concerning social rank, she can be surprisingly subversive when speaking as a woman rather than, primarily, an aristocrat—an incongruity she shares with other early women writers such as Mary Astell. Travelling through Europe, Montagu takes special note of the culturally varying aesthetics of female appearance, the ways women of different nations produce themselves as objects of the gaze. She caustically lampoons types of artifice she finds degrading, from her hilarious account of Viennese court dress—“more monstrous and contrary to all common sense and reason than tis possible for you to imagine” (1:265)—to her description of the heavily made-up women of Paris, “these grotesque Dawbers” (1:440). Nonetheless Montagu herself participates in the process of feminine self-objectification: she is presented at the Emperor's court, “squeez'd up in a Gown and adorn'd with a Gorget and the other implements thereunto belonging,” presumably with a fashionable hairdo “too large to go into a moderate Tub” (1:265).

In Saxony, female aesthetic subject confronts female object in a kind of distorted mirror as Montagu recounts the misdirected artifice of the Saxon ladies, who “would think it a mortal sin against good breeding if they either spoke or mov'd in a natural manner. They all affect a little soft Lisp and a pritty pitty pat step, which female frailtys ought, however, to be forgiven 'em in favor of their civility and good nature to strangers” (1:282-83).

These remarks are followed, significantly, by testimony to a Saxon woman's strength and determination: the story of the Countess of Cosel, mistress of the Elector of Saxony, who defies her powerful lover until he locks her up (1:283-84). The juxtaposition underscores a recurring tension in the letters: a difficulty reconciling women's objecthood (whether aesthetic or erotic) with their status as independent subjects or agents. The spectacle of women producing themselves as frail, dependent objects triggers, as if in protest, a violent assertion of female agency. The lisping Saxon beauties seem to remind Montagu that her own position as aesthetic subject is a usurped, culturally compromised prerogative.

Montagu's sojourn in Turkey, and her encounters with Turkish women, provide further opportunities to explore the rhetorical potential of her self-positioning as aesthetic perceiver. She uses this position to negotiate her way around the demeaning stereotypes of “Oriental” women prevalent in the travel literature of her day. Portrayals of both male and female Turks in writings by travellers like Robert Withers, Paul Rycaut, Aaron Hill and Jean Dumont (“that worthy author Dumont,” jeers Montagu, “who has writ with equal ignorance and confidence” [1:368]) bear out with remarkable consistency Said's description of a discursively feminized and sexualized Orient.²¹ Turkish men are feminized, as in Dumont's 1705 assertion (reiterated if not plagiarized by Hill in 1709) that the “Turks are opposite us in almost all respects.” They wear long, dress-like habits, in contrast to Westerners' short garments, and “they crouch down to Piss, like Women” (149). They are ignorant, covetous, lazy and sensual, according to Dumont (261 ff.). Rycaut claims they are inclined to sodomy, echoed by Hill who euphemistically terms it “the strange and curs'd pollution of inverted Nature” (80). Rycaut even insinuates that the Prophet shared this “carnal and effeminate inclination” (153).

These male travellers unanimously present Turkish women as hypersexual, “wanton,” “immodest” and “lascivious.” “[T]hey are accounted the most lascivious and immodest of all Women, and excel in the most refined and ingenious Subtilties to steal their pleasures,” summarizes Rycaut (153). The custom of segregating women from men sharpens their desires, he observes. Hill concurs and imagines a gang of these sexual predators getting hold of a hapless man:

So lascivious are their inclinations, that if by the ingenuity of their Contrivances they can procure the Company of some Stranger in their Chamber, they claim unanimously an equal share of his Caresses, and proceed by Lots to the Enjoyment of his Person; nor can he be permitted to leave them, till having exerted his utmost Vigor in the Embraces of the whole Company, he becomes incapable of further Service, and is dispatch'd with the thanks and Presents of the oblig'd Family.

(111)

Dumont tells of a Frenchman who doesn't get off as easily: summoned by a noble lady, he obliges her to near exhaustion, but is forbidden to leave. Her last twenty lovers have been strangled to ensure their silence, confides her maid, who agrees to help him out the chimney if he will sexually service her as well (269). Rycaut bluntly avers that lesbianism is rampant in the harems: “they die with amorous affections one to the other; especially the old Women court the young” (34).²² Withers salaciously hints at other sexual outlets for harem women: “if they have a will to eat radishes, cucumbers, gourds, or such like meats, they are sent in unto them sliced, to deprive them of the means of playing the wantons” (56). These stereotypes were obviously in current circulation. Pope echoes Withers in a letter written to Montagu as she travelled toward Turkey, warning her with salacious wit that she would soon arrive “in the land of Jealousy, where the unhappy Women converse with none but Eunuchs, and where the very Cucumbers are brought to them Cutt.”²³

Another point of consensus among these writers is Turkish women's confinement, even outside the Sultan's palace. According to Dumont, “There is no Slavery equal to that of the Turkish women” (268). “'Tis but very rarely that they go abroad, and then to no place but the public Bagnio's, or the Funeral, or Marriage, of some near Relation,” claims Hill, adding a description of their veils (95). But their strict confinement, the writers agree, does not always keep these wily and insatiable creatures from fulfilling their desires.

Montagu's letter to “Lady _____” dated April 1, 1717, describing the women's baths in Sophia, is a clear response to such crude stereotypes of Turkish women as exclusively, exaggeratedly sexual beings. She carefully counteracts previous travellers' eroticized fabrications with a rhetoric founded on her appropriation of the aesthetic domain to the woman traveller. She presents her first interaction with the bathers in a manner that affirms the women's independent subjectivity and agency while exposing the fallacy of Eurocentric prejudices. Arriving at the baths in her riding habit, she is received with surprising tolerance: “I know no European Court where the Ladys would have behav'd them selves in so polite a manner to a stranger. I beleive [sic] in the whole there were 200 Women and yet none of those disdainfull smiles or satyric whispers that never fail in our assemblys when any body appears that is not dress'd exactly in fashion. They repeated over and over to me, Uzelle, pek uzelle, which is nothing but, charming, very charming” (1:313).

Already, Montagu has reversed the usual relation between traveller and inhabitant; she herself is obviously a curiosity, which the Turkish women inspect with a lively interest modulated by their extremely good manners.²⁴ In refined politeness, the pride of the European courts, these Easterners surpass Western women aristocrats. Their tactful conduct reveals them as intelligent, sensitive selves, with whom the visitor may have some rapport.

Using the male travel writers' own language, Montagu bluntly refutes them. These women, she asserts, do not present themselves erotically. She describes them in the baths,

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)

Likening the beautiful bathers to prestigious European works of art—Milton's Eve, the nude paintings of Guido and Titian, and the frequently painted classical motif of the Three Graces—is the crux of Montagu's ingenious rhetorical strategy. Such comparisons, by invoking contemporary aesthetic thought, in particular the concept of disinterested aesthetic contemplation, reinforce Montagu's claim that these Turkish women are neither “wanton” nor “immodest.” By the early eighteenth century a consensus was beginning to emerge, articulated by British aestheticists like Addison, Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson, that the aesthetic gaze must be sharply distinguished from ways of looking which incorporate what Kant (whose aesthetics owe much to this British tradition) would later call “vested interest”—“practical” needs and desires such as hunger, sexual lust, acquisitiveness, and so on.²⁵ If works of art are, by definition, not objects for prurient regard, then Montagu's aesthetic comparisons should, at least to some extent, de-eroticize her readers' imaginary gaze and block the crassly sexualized representations of Withers and Dumont's lascivious crew.

I am not arguing that this deployment of aesthetic discourse could entirely, unambiguously desexualize the scene, nor that this was what Montagu necessarily hoped. The nineteenth-century reaction to her letters makes clear that they retained the potential to titillate. Victorian women readers were shocked,²⁶ while the French Romantic painter Ingres, based on his reading of Montagu, could re-activate the latent sensuality of the bath tableau, ironically reproducing in Le Bain turc (1862) the Orientalism that had been the original target of Montagu's polemic. Absent from these later readings is the discursive counterweight with which Montagu qualitatively transformed the eroticism of this highly charged scene, lending it a productive ambiguity. Her use of the language of aesthetics does not just mute the baths' erotic appeal, but, more importantly, raises its social tone to a level of refinement commensurate with the dignity of the aristocratic Turkish women. Rather than wholly de-eroticizing the women, this portrayal primarily dignifies and de-exoticizes them. They are recast from oversexed houris playing with cucumbers into Venus, Eve, and the Graces, bringing them closer to upper-class European sensibilities.²⁷ Aesthetic distance helps defuse the degrading potential of the bathers' corporeality within Orientalist discourse (which feeds in turn on other deeply entrenched Western discourses about women's bodies²⁸) to let Montagu present them as human individuals potentially deserving of interest and respect, rather than essentially non-human Others.

This aesthetic strategy, however, is not without its difficulties. Presenting them as works of art may rescue the Turkish women from their representation as exotic sex objects, but such comparisons still tend to cast them as objects, not subjects, of a gaze. The aesthetic gaze may elevate them, in a sense, where a purely erotic regard was taken as denigrating. Both types of gaze, nonetheless, risk leaving the women looked at rather than looking, acted on rather than acting, despite Montagu's initial concern to establish their agency. We have seen the tension in her letters from Europe between women's culturally prescribed status as objects—whether aesthetic or erotic—and their culturally proscribed aspiration to subjecthood, in particular her own claim to the status of aesthetic subject. The art historian John Berger, discussing this gendered imbalance in Western culture manifested in European nude painting, distinguishes between nudity and nakedness: “To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude … Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.”²⁹ Agency makes the difference: nakedness results from a voluntary act of self-revelation, nudity from being acted upon.

In these terms, we might understand Montagu as reaching toward a means of representing the Turkish bathers' undress as a dignified nakedness, and evading, to this end, conventions of representation that would render them as merely nude, merely objects. But Berger's analysis helps us understand the cultural blind spot that hinders her. His thesis—that most (though not all) purportedly aesthetic representations of women actually pander to male desires for a sexualized appropriation—completely breaks down the distinction, so important to Montagu's rhetoric, between the aesthetic and the erotic gaze. It astutely debunks, in other words, the ideology of the autonomous aesthetic sphere. Ironically, among the paintings (the vast majority) that Berger classes as representing nudity, rather than nakedness, are Titian's nudes.

By comparing the bathers to works of art produced by men, representations of women seen through men's eyes, Montagu in effect imports into the all-female enclave of the women's baths the imaginary eyes of Milton, Guido, and Titian. She repeats this move more explicitly with the popular London portrait painter Charles Jervas: “To tell you the truth, I had wickedness enough to wish secretly that Mr. Gervase could have been there invisible. 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 … In short, tis the Women's coffee house, where all the news of the Town is told, Scandal invented, etc.” (1:314).

This bit of “wickedness” highlights the persistent ambiguity in Montagu's presentation of her aestheticized bathers, the titillating charge the images still retain. But another possibility lurks beneath her risqué wit. Might these imaginary male gazers be surrogates onto whom Montagu displaces a submerged homoerotic attraction to the beautiful bathers? This possibility raises interesting questions about the gender dynamics of aesthetic experience, not easy to answer for this historical period.³⁰ If at this time its primary discursive-ideological structure between a masculine subject and a feminine object is one of erotic appropriation, how might that change with a feminine subject and a same-sex eroticism? But turning from the speculative back to the empirical, we are reminded that in practice the painters of Montagu's day were virtually all men. The privilege of looking and representing aesthetically—that is, the position of aesthetic subject in the fullest sense of the term—was gender-restricted, just as those who were looked at and represented in the European tradition of nude painting were (as Berger points out) practically all women.

The allusion to coffee houses calls attention, rather wistfully, to another privilege reserved to men in Montagu's England: the privilege of a gender-specific public space. London's coffee houses, sites of political, economic and cultural ferment during the early eighteenth century, were off limits to genteel women; there existed no equivalent type of all-female public space.³¹ Women's exclusion from the discursive position of the aesthetic subject is clearly linked to the absence of institutions supporting their participation in public cultural exchange. The idea of a women's coffee house must have been profoundly empowering for an Englishwoman, hinting at a society where women might occupy space and possess power in the public realm. Part of the harem's ambivalent fascination for Western men no doubt lay in its threat of untrammeled free association between women.³² By bringing in symbolic masculine surveillance, however, Montagu undercuts this momentary vision of power, recalling the actual gendered power imbalance in cultural production, as in other areas of British public life.

The letter's next rhetorical turn develops the role reversal with which the letter began. Again, Montagu is the spectacle that the Turkish women inspect and, this time, comically misconstrue.

The Lady that seem'd the most considerable amongst them entreated me to sit by her and would fain have undress'd me for the bath. I excus'd my selfe with some difficulty, they being all so earnest in perswading me. I was at last forc'd to open my skirt and shew them my stays, which satisfy'd 'em very well, for I saw they beleiv'd I was so lock'd up in that machine that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my Husband.

(1:314)

The corset/chastity belt, an everyday object suddenly made strange, functions in this much-quoted passage as a witty allegory for Montagu's own oppression as an English woman. Earlier travel writers' clichés about Turkish women's slavery are neatly overturned. In the process, however, she calls attention to her own ambiguous position in relation to the women whose dignity and agency her rhetoric seems to aim at recuperating. The scene is reminiscent (to turn again to painting) of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, in which the picnicking men are formally clad with top hat and tie, the women nude, in a blatant juxtaposition of social power and sexual vulnerability. As the bathers inspect her underwear, Montagu becomes a spectacle, turning our attention to her lack of social power in her home milieu. Through most of the bath sequence, however, she is the privileged spectator, observing other women's unclothed bodies while her own remains concealed, possessing the considerable power of being the only clothed person in a room full of people with their clothes off.³³ Her rhetorical skill may block their objectification; for herself, she prefers to keep her clothes on. In these letters a woman boldly occupies the privileged position of the aesthetic subject, a position culturally inscribed as male. This move appears less daring to the degree that it preserves the power dynamics of masculine aesthetic discourse, importing them into the all-female preserve of the women's baths. Though we may view this partly as a defense against homoerotic attraction, another, sharper anxiety seems also to underlie Montagu's witty turn about her corset. As the women urge her to undress, she is on the brink of the peculiarly vulnerable condition of female nudity—a vulnerability of which her rhetoric shows her well aware.

Keeping her clothes on, Montagu is preserving the distance between herself and a group of people who are women, but also “Orientals,” members of a culture long subject to discursive degradation by Europeans. Clearly, the culturally gendered relation of aesthetic contemplation is not the only axis of unequal power distribution in this scene. Though Montagu's rhetoric, as I have shown, takes aim at the most scurrilous Orientalist stereotypes, her solidarity with the targets of these libels reaches its limit when they invite her to mingle naked, to “go native.” Her clothing, a multivalent symbol, defends her as a woman, but also maintains her Occidental privilege. The image of Montagu sweating in her riding habit amid the Turkish bathers poignantly epitomizes Western women's conflicted, multiply determined relation to the women of non-Western cultures.

The letter draws to a close by re-emphasizing the ambiguity of Montagu's speaking position. Inside the baths, in relation to the Turkish bathers, she may possess the power of the aesthetic spectator. Outside this all-female zone, however, she is subordinated to her husband's commands.

I was charm'd with their Civillity and Beauty and should have been very glad to pass more time with them, but Mr. W[ortley] resolving to persue his Journey the next morning early, I was in haste to see the ruins of Justinian's church, which did not afford me so agreable a prospect as I had left, being little more than a heap of stones.

Adeiu, Madam. I am sure I have now entertaind you with an Account of such a sight as you never saw in your Life and what no book of travells could inform you of. 'Tis no less than Death for a Man to be found in one of these places.

(1:315)

The mention of Wortley, holder of the key to Montagu's “machine,” signals her departure from the Utopian enclave of the baths. At the same time, though, she reasserts her privilege as a Western woman traveller, with access to aesthetic pleasures—notably the Turkish women's beauty—more rewarding than the standard tourist's sterile pursuit of “heaps of stones.”

Montagu's subsequent encounters with Turkish women recapitulate the discursive dynamics of the baths letter, in particular its self-conscious use of aesthetics to counter sexualized stereotypes. In a tone less distanced and controlled (indeed almost unbearably effusive) she recounts to her sister, the Countess of Mar, her two visits to the beautiful Fatima, wife of the Kahya, the second-in-command to the Grand Vizier:

I have seen all that has been call'd lovely either in England or Germany, and must own that I never saw any thing so gloriously Beautifull, nor can I recollect a face that would have been taken notice of near hers. … I was so struck with Admiration that I could not for some time speak to her, being wholly taken up in gazing. 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!

(1:349-50)

The erotic undertones of her pleasure in Turkish women's beauty rise closer to the surface here. Describing a dance by Fatima's maids, she comments, “I am very possitive the coldest and most rigid Prude upon Earth could not have look'd upon them without thinking of something not to be spoke of” (1:351).

Nonetheless, Montagu's description of Fatima herself explicitly disclaims prurient interest with the language of disinterested aesthetic perception. The aesthetic terms “harmony” and “proportion” prominent in her comment are amplified: “I think I have read somewhere that Women allways speak in rapture when they speak of Beauty, but I can't imagine why they should not be allow'd to do so. I rather think it Virtue to be able to admire without any Mixture of desire or Envy (1:350-51).” As we have seen, Shaftesbury, Addison and others defined aesthetic contemplation precisely as a regard for beauty without such a sordid practical admixture. Montagu goes on to compare Fatima to a work of high art, repeating the rhetorical tactic of her baths letter: “The Gravest Writers have spoke with great warmth of some celebrated Pictures and Statues. The Workmanship of Heaven certainly excells all our weak Imitations … 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). As in the earlier letter, the apparent effort to de-eroticize the representation of a Turkish woman puts Montagu in the position of aesthetic subject against Fatima as the exquisite aesthetic object.

This impression is modified, however, if we compare this first visit with their second meeting almost a year later. Here Montagu, having meanwhile learned more Turkish, eschews further description of Fatima's beauty to emphasize instead her “politeness and good breeding”: “now I understand her Language, I find her Wit as engaging as her Beauty” (1:386). Taken together, the two letters sketch an ambiguity in Montagu's relation to Fatima, similar to the ambiguity we saw in the baths letter. Her concern to accord the “Oriental” women a subjectivity of equal stature with Europeans is partially undercut by a strategy that counters their culturally determined portrayal as erotic objects but renders them another kind of object—aesthetic objects to Montagu's aesthetic subject. It is as if she hesitates to put herself on the same level with these doubly objectified, doubly vulnerable beings.

The letters' treatment of Turkish women is thoroughly ambivalent, doubtless tangled up with Montagu's ambivalence about women's status in her own culture. Her assertions at various points in the letters approach outright self-contradiction. Women are “the only free people in the Empire,” she declares (1:329), directly denying previous travellers' reports of Turkish women's confinement. “They go abroad when and where they please” (1:406), clad in the all-concealing costume of the veil and baggy cloak (ferigée), a “perpetual Masquerade” (1:328). These identity-concealing coverings free Turkish women on the street from the masculine gaze.”³⁴ Among the advantages of this outfit, Montagu fantasizes, is control over one's sexuality: “entire Liberty of following their Inclinations without danger of Discovery” (1:328). Turkish women's other freedoms, she points out, include married women's right to own property (a right not granted English women until 1857) and to absolute privacy within their apartments, or harem.³⁵

This connection between the privilege of being the gazer, rather than gazed upon, and controlling one's own property and space is also, not coincidentally, at the heart of early British aesthetic theory. Addison's “Man of a Polite Imagination” is clearly a member of the propertied classes. His aesthetic privilege both depends on the class and gender privilege of property ownership, and mimics it: disinterested contemplation emerges as a kind of visual appropriation. Upper-class Turkish women's privileges match those of Addison's and Shaftesbury's aesthetic subject, exceeding the cultural limits of British womanhood.

But elsewhere Montagu reports that Turkish culture compels women to be baby factories (1:372). According to Muslim doctrine, she writes, “the End of the Creation of Woman is to encrease and Multiply, and she is only properly employ'd in the Works of her calling when she is bringing children or takeing care of'em, which are all the Virtues that God expects from her; and indeed their way of Life, which shuts them out of all public commerce, does not permit them any other” (1:363). Turkish women's vaunted freedom is on balance merely negative, a freedom from, rather than freedom to. The veiled woman in the street moves about in a kind of portable harem, a sacred space exempt from harassment, but also effectively isolated from “public commerce,” in Montagu's resonant phrase.

According to Ian C. Dengler, although eighteenth-century Turkish women probably did enjoy the relative freedom of movement Montagu observes, they were certainly shut out of the public economic, political and cultural life of the Empire. “Turkish women … lived within a system of restrictions that made it improbable they would have either the need or the ability to interact with males outside the network of kin, family and household unit.”³⁶ This is the gist of Montagu's sociological observation when she comments on a Turkish graveyard: “They set up a pillar with a carv'd Turbant on the Top of it to the memory of a Man, and as the Turbants by their different shapes shew the Quality or profession, tis in a manner putting up the arms of the deceas'd. … The Ladys have a simple Pillar without other Ornament, except those that dye unmarry'd, who have a Rose on the Top of it” (1:362-63).

Men are memorialized by the public attribute of rank or profession, while women are categorized by the private one of marital status. English women, though they could interact socially with men in public, were excluded just as certainly as Turkish women from the really significant “public commerce”—the transactions that created and sustained the res publica, including the cultural production to which Montagu's own talents were ideally suited.

At several points during her residence in Turkey, Montagu dons Turkish women's clothing for her own personal masquerade. She takes advantage of the public anonymity (if not the sexual license) afforded by asmak and ferigée to visit bazaars and mosques and cross the straits to Pera unmolested (1:354, 358, 397). “The asmak, or Turkish vail, is become not only very easy but agreeable to me,” she declares (1:397). Claiming the freedom to see the city without being gazed on in turn, parallels Montagu's bold rhetorical tactic of assuming the privileged position of the aesthetic subject. The other Turkish costume she puts on, however, and in which she later had herself painted more than once, seems to gratify a different impulse. In the ornate indoor dress of an upper-class Turkish woman, described in lovingly exhaustive detail in a letter to her sister, she is the consummate spectacle. She declares complacently, “I beleive [sic] you would be of my Opinion that 'tis admirably becoming” (1:326). The two costumes emblemize the contradictory impulses that traverse these letters: woman as spectacle, object of the aesthetic-erotic gaze, eagerly cooperating with the cultural imperative to feminine self-display; and woman as subject, evading the burden of the gaze to become herself a gazer. But even Montagu's description of her magnificent indoor outfit uses language whose transvestite overtones (“drawers” instead of a petticoat, a “wastcoat” instead of a gown) hint at a social status beyond that of ordinary women (1:326).³⁷ Does she manage to glimpse hitherto unimagined ways of being a female subject precisely by decentering herself as a British subject? Dressing up in Turkish costume is certainly a safer, more culturally sanctioned means to this end than undressing in the steamy atmosphere of the baths.

Montagu's later letters from Italy provide a retrospective gloss on her ambivalent treatment of Turkish women. Relieved to be past the age of self-display, the aging expatriate reaffirms her relish for public anonymity. She likes the Venetian custom of wearing masks in public, commenting, “[I] am not sorry to have it in my power to hear an Opera without the Mortification of shewing a wrinkled face” (2:159, 3:194). One of the joys of her country retirement near Brescia is freedom from critical eyes, in this case those of other women:

I have had this morning as much delight in a Walk in the Sun as ever I felt formerly in the crouded Mall even when I imagin'd I had my share of the admiration of the place, which was generally sour'd before I slept by the Informations of my female Friends, who seldom fail'd to tell me it was observ'd I had show'd an inch above my shoe heels, or some other criticism of equal weight, which was construe'd affectation, and utterly destroy'd all the Satisfaction my vanity had given me.

(2:446-47)

In another eloquent juxtaposition, she moves from one kind of attention, which she has escaped, to another kind that continues to evade her: “I have now no other but in my little Huswifery, which is easily gratify'd in this Country, where (by the help of my receipt Book) I make a very shineing Figure amongst my Neighbors by the Introduction of Custards, Cheesecakes and minc'd Pies, which were entirely unknown in these Parts, and are receiv'd with universal applause, and I have reason to beleive [sic] will preserve my Memory even to future ages” (2:447).

These late letters abound with joking allusions to Montagu's suppressed lifelong aspiration to literary fame—an ambition frustrated by cultural codes discouraging both aristocrats and women from publication. Her play Simplicity remained unproduced and unpublished, along with much of her early poetry and, during her lifetime, her letters.³⁸ Evoking the classical topos of reputation, her wit is charged with an underlying pathos. “A shining figure,” “universal applause,” “preserve my memory to future ages”: witty burlesques of the classical trappings of fame displace a conventionally masculine ambition onto the comically humble feminine pursuits of “huswifery,” cooking and gardening, in a manner compulsively repeated throughout the Italian letters. “I am realy as fond of my Garden as a young Author of his first play when it has been well receiv'd by the Town” (2:407). “I expect Immortality from the Science of Butter makeing” (2:485), which she has taught to her Italian neighbors. No longer an aesthetic object on constant display, the aging writer still cannot be an aesthetic subject in the fullest sense of the word, with the culturally sanctioned privilege of circulating her aesthetic productions like an Addison or a Pope. Beneath their witty veneer these late letters express an embittered acquiescence to the pressures excluding women from the “public commerce” of British culture.

Montagu's self-contradictory alternation between freedom and oppression, privilege and exclusion, as she represents the women of Turkey obviously projects her ambivalence about her own situation, bearing out James Clifford's dictum that “every version of an ‘other’ … is also the construction of a ‘self.’”³⁹ Her special preoccupation with the language of aesthetics, playing a series of changes on the gendered power relationships codified within aesthetic discourse, conveys a mounting frustration with British culture for denying women the power and prestige of the aesthetic perceiver, and a fortiori of the aesthetic producer. Thus understood, this oblique commentary on aesthetics reads as even more oblique political commentary. The most painful, deeply suppressed, inarticulate and virtually inarticulable longings of eighteenth-century British women were, I believe, not sexual but political. In the course of her life Montagu's bold claim to the privilege of the aesthetic subject came to seem increasingly quixotic, but her insight and intellectual daring broke ground for later British women aspiring to share in the cultural power of the aesthetic domain.

If I were to rest content, however, with reading Montagu's representation of Turkey as mere veiled self-exploration, I would risk lapsing into the kind of unbridgeable self-other binarism that I have attempted to move beyond. These letters are perhaps most valuable for their apparent aspiration, however partial and intermittent, to actual cultural exchange—a condition of intersubjectivity whose necessary precondition is an acceptance of the “other” as an intelligent, sensitive acting self. Montagu's polemic against earlier travellers' degrading portrayals of Turkish women is clearly a conscious intervention. Post-colonial critics like Gayatri Spivak and Aihwa Ong warn us to approach with suspicion attempts by Westerners to rescue non-Western women from their own culture or from other Westerners. Believing that feminist goodwill alone can adequately bridge the cross-cultural abyss would be either naively essentialist or disingenuous; Spivak elsewhere targets the fallacy of assuming an automatic congruence between feminism and anti-imperialism.⁴⁰ Montagu is at least as vulnerable as later Western feminists to this type of critique. We have noted the way she substitutes for the crass power differential of Orientalism the subtler inequalities of aesthetic discourse.

Nonetheless, reading this early feminist intervention can help us interrupt Orientalist binaries if we attend with care to the complicated interplay of the categories—class, gender and sexuality as well as ethnicity—that affect Montagu's shifting relation to her Turkish counterparts. Experimentally aligning herself with them, donning the veil or her embroidered “wastcoat” and “drawers,” she re-carves more than one categorial boundary at a time. Her experience helps us understand the constitution of human subjects as an ongoing, never-ending process that is not only multiply determined, but also “intersubjectively decentered and inherently relational.”⁴¹ The bathing women's first tactful, then amused regard, gazing back at their Western guest, realigns her perception of herself and her society. Montagu's decision not to undress, to preserve a certain distance between herself and them, is a gesture susceptible to more than one interpretation. Distance, as Aihwa Ong points out, can sometimes connote respect, recognizing a difference that it may not be either possible or desirable to alter.⁴² Only on the basis of such a recognition can a tentative, necessarily partial mutuality be built.

Notes

1. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Complete Letters, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:315. Parenthetical references in the text will be to this edition by volume and page.

2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978).

3. Ibid, esp. 6, 186-88, 206. Said's “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Francis Barker et al., eds., Europe and Its Others: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), 23, elaborates the connection between Orientalism and patriarchy as paradigms of domination.

4. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 3, 1. Suleri points to Abdul JanMohamed's Manichean Aesthetics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983) as one example of such binarism.

5. Suleri, Rhetoric, 4; Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 1-3.

6. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 69-85; Melman, Women's Orients, 10.

7. Montagu has this in common with many nineteenth- and twentieth-century women travellers to the Middle East. Melman summarizes, “Observation of women's life in another culture brought on a re-evaluation, by Western women, of their own position as individuals and as a marginalized group in patriarchal culture,” Women's Orients, 308.

8. “Diversity of idiom” and “polyphony” are Melman's terms. Both she and Pratt are concerned, as I am, to highlight the internal diversity of imperial discourse; ibid., 18; Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 141. Also see Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259-422.

9. Many of the letters I cite, most notably that describing the women's baths, are addressed to women. However, Montagu revised the Embassy letters after her return, I assume with an eye towards publication, and thus an audience comprising both sexes. Though she did not publish them in her lifetime, she seems to have ensured they would be published soon after her death. Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 278-79, 287-88. See also Melman, Women's Orients, 78-81, and Joseph W. Lew, “Lady Mary's Portable Seraglio,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (1991): 436.

10. John W. Draper, Eighteenth-Century English Aesthetics: A Bibliography (New York: Octagon Books, 1968) contains over 1200 items. Peter DeBolla claims to have seen a bibliography of over 6000 items: The Discourse of the Sublime (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 29.

11. DeBolla, Discourse of the Sublime; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Michael McKeon, “Politics of Discourses and the Rise of the Aesthetic in Seventeenth-Century England,” Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 35-51; Paul Mattick, Jr., ed., Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

12. I discuss the gendering of the eighteenth-century aesthetic subject more fully in “Disinterestedness and Denial of the Particular: Locke, Adam Smith, and the Subject of Aesthetics,” in Mattick, Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics, 16-51. Previous discussion of this issue is scarce; see Mattick, “Beautiful and Sub-lime: Gender Totemism in the Constitution of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (1990): 293-303, and Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1987).

13. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 411, (June 21, 1712), ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965), 3:538. Pierre Bourdieu develops an analysis along these lines in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

14. Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) (Hildesheim: George Olms, 1968), 62.

15. “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992), 12-13.

16. Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Origins of Aesthetic Disinterestedness,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (1961-62): 131-43.

17. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Etc., ed. John M. Robertson (1900; reprint Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), 2:126-27.

18. Halsband, Life of Lady M.W.M., 194-95.

19. The construction of the viewing subject or spectator of film, especially Hollywood film, as male, and of woman as the object of his gaze, has been a central and controversial issue within feminist film theory. See for example Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6-18; B. Ruby Rich, Judith Mayne, et al, “Women and Film: A Discussion of Feminist Aesthetics,” New German Critique 13 (1978): 83-107; Teresa DeLauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), and E. Deidre Pribram, ed., Female Spectators (London: Verso, 1988), Introduction.

20. Marie E. McAllister, “Woman on the Journey: Eighteenth-Century British Women's Travel in Fact and Fiction” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1988), 133.

21. Robert Withers, A Description of the Grand Signior's Seraglio, or Turkish Emperor's Court (London, 1653); Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1668); Aaron Hill, A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1709); Jean Dumont, A New Voyage to the Levant, 4th ed. (London, 1705). Parenthetical references in the text will be to these editions.

22. Western observers' persistent fascination with the harem, and the stubbornness of their misconceptions, has been noted by a variety of cultural critics. As Malek Alloula observes, it is an “ancient obsession” conjoining the ideas of sex and power. “In its association of a political notion (despotism) with a sensual vision (the possession of women), the harem sums up the essence of a certain Levant.” See The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 95. The early twentieth-century colonial postcards of Algerian women that Alloula analyzes reiterate Withers and Rycaut's sexualized representation of “Oriental” women and their titillating hints of lesbianism and other “perversions.” Hollywood, too, has perpetuated the quasi-pornographic depiction of the harem, as we see in Ella Shohat's survey of cinematic Orientalism, “Gender and Culture of Empire: Toward a Feminist Ethnography of Cinema,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 13 (1991): esp. 71-74.

23. Alexander Pope, Correspondence, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 1:368, quoted in Rana Kabbani, Europe's Myths of Orient (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), 30. Also see Kabbani, 26 ff., on seventeenth-century stereotypes of Oriental women.

24. Melman, Women's Orients, 91.

25. See Stolnitz, “Origins,” and Bohls, “Disinterestedness.”

26. Melman, Women's Orients, 99, 132. Melman also notes that Victorian women travellers do not represent the bathers as “stark naked,” but modestly cover them with strategic towels, with one exception (Sophia Lane Poole, 1842). This goes along with their manifest disgust for the Turkish women's corporeality, beginning as early as Elizabeth Craven's portrayal of a roomful of sallow-complexioned, obese females in her Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (London, 1785). Melman, Women's Orients, 112, 130-36.

27. This possibility also depends on a relatively tolerant Enlightenment attitude toward sexuality, already on the wane by the later eighteenth century. Montagu's innovation, as Melman points out, is to suggest extending such tolerance to women as well as men (ibid., 96). I disagree with Melman, however, in emphasizing the culturally conditioned conflict and ambiguity that pervades Montagu's representation of Turkish women, in the baths and throughout her letters. In emphasizing the letters' tolerant or “latitudinarian” aspects, especially what she interprets as their advocacy of sexual liberty for women, I think Melman unduly flattens their complexity. This becomes evident when she characterizes Victorian women's representations of the Middle East as more complex than their eighteenth-century predecessors.

28. See Elizabeth Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8 (1982): 109-31.

29. John Berger et al., Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin, 1972), 54.

30. On the difficulties involved in documenting and discussing female homosexuality in the early modern period, see Judith Brown, “Lesbian Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Europe” and James M. Saslow, “Homosexuality in the Renaissance: Behavior, Identity, and Artistic Expression,” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1990), 67-75 and 90-105.

31. On coffee houses see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 32-42; also Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 80-84.

32. See Lew, “Lady Mary's Portable Seraglio,” 445-46. Leila Ahmed points out the crucial ambiguity of the harem: “The harem can be defined as a system that permits males sexual access to more than one female. It can also be defined, and with as much accuracy, as a system whereby the female relatives of a man—wives, sisters, mother, aunts, daughters—share much of their time and their living space, and further, which enables women to have frequent and easy access to other women in their community, vertically, across class lines, as well as horizontally. … [I]t was its second aspect, that of women being freely and continuously together, and the degradation, licentiousness and corruption that must inevitably ensue, which Western men viewed with considerable fascination.” “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem,” Feminist Studies 8 (1982): 524. While Montagu refutes male travellers' gratuitous eroticizing of this all-female space, her comparison to the coffee house calls attention to a potentially more scandalous aspect of the harem—its potential as a site of free political association by women.

33. Lew, “Lady Mary's Portable Seraglio,” 441-43. Lew also gives extended treatment to the cultural significance of Montagu's corset. See also Jill Campbell, “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Historical Machinery of Female Identity,” in History, Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin, forthcoming 1994, University of Georgia Press.

34. Lew, “Lady Mary's Portable Seraglio,” 447-50.

35. On Islamic legal traditions regarding women's property see John L. Esposito, Women in Muslim Family Law (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982), 24, 36 and passim, and Ian C. Dengler, “Turkish Women in the Ottoman Empire,” Women in the Muslim World, ed. Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 237. On privacy see Ahmed “Western Ethnocentrism,” 528-29.

36. Dengler, “Turkish Women,” 230, 231.

37. Campbell, “Lady MWM and the Historical Machinery of Female Identity.”

38. Montagu had published some items anonymously, such as her letter from a “Turkey merchant” defending the Turkish practice of smallpox inoculation and her periodical essays in The Non-sense of Common Sense. Pirated versions of some of her poetry, such as her town eclogues, were also in print.

39. James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 23.

40. I refer to Spivak's well-known formulation, “white men are saving brown women from brown men.” See “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow-Sacrifice,” Wedge 7/8 (1985): 120. See also “Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 243-61, and Aihwa Ong, “Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies,” Inscriptions 3/4 (1988):79-93. Along the same lines, Moira Ferguson's Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992) argues that women's role in the British abolitionist movement, while it contributed to the development of Western feminism, often helped consolidate damaging racial-colonial discourses about African slaves.

41. Amanda Anderson, “Cryptonormativism and Double Gestures: The Politics of Post-Structuralism,” Cultural Critique 21 (1992): 84. I am using “experience” in the sense proposed by Joan W. Scott, as a process that takes place in and through language, in history. Rather than being the consequence of a unitary or unchanging definition of self, experience constantly re-constitutes the subject even as the subject exercises a limited agency within and upon that process. “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 773-97.

42. Ong, “Colonialism and Modernity,” 87.

I am grateful to Marilyn Booth, Ramona Curry, Amy Farmer and Sonya Michel for references and to the Program for the Study of Cultural Values and Ethics at the University of Illinois for fellowship support.