[In the following excerpt, Lowe compares the Turkish Embassy Letters to the “tradition of letters about traveling in Turkey,” and asserts that “Montagu distinctly sets herself apart from that tradition by criticizing the representations of women, marriage, sexuality, and customs” in the travel accounts of her male predecessors.]

Eighteenth-century portraits of the oriental world as an exotic, uncivilized counterpart of Europe were crucial enunciations of the discourses that produced representations of the European world as knowing, stable, and powerful. Travel literature performed these acts of symbolization for French and English culture; by figuring travelers in foreign lands encountering strange and disorienting customs and practices, the trope of travel allegorized the problems of maintaining cultural institutions amidst challenging othernesses, of establishing cultural standards and norms in the context of heterogeneity and difference. In this way not only did the literary theme of travel serve to express the eighteenth-century colonial preoccupation with land and empire, but also travel as a representation of territorial ambition became a predominant discursive means for managing a national culture's concern with internal social differences and change. In England these social challenges to the status quo included religious dissent, growing parliamentary control, budding industry, and a growing working class; in France the ancien régime faced nonaristocratic dissent, republican challenges to the monarchy, and peasant revolts. In other words, the utopian geographic expansion implied by travel literature addressed national anxieties about maintaining hegemony in an age of rapidly changing boundaries and territories. Yet it also regulated the social quarrels besetting the old regimes of the period by transfiguring internal challenges to the social order into fantasies of external otherness.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters (1717-1718) explicitly challenge the received representations of Turkish society furnished by the seventeenth-century travel writers who preceded her. Although she writes in that tradition of letters about traveling in Turkey, Montagu distinctly sets herself apart from that tradition by criticizing the representations of women, marriage, sexuality, and customs in the travel accounts of Robert Withers, George Sandys, John Covel, Jean Dumont, and Aaron Hill. In redressing many of what she insists are the misconceptions and inaccurate representations of Turkish women propagated by these male travel writers, Montagu reports how, as a woman, she is permitted greater access to Turkish female society, and claims that her difference from these earlier writers may in fact be due to her being a woman. In this sense Montagu's position with regard to English travel writing is paradoxical, or multivalent, in a manner that the earlier travelers' accounts are not. On the one hand, some of her descriptions—written as they are from her position as wife of a British ambassador—resonate with traditional occidental imaginings of the Orient as exotic, ornate, and mysterious, imaginary qualities fundamental to eighteenth-century Anglo-Turkish relations. At the same time, unlike the male travel writers before her, she employs comparisons that generally liken the conditions, character, and opportunities of European women to those of Turkish women. Montagu's identification with Turkish female society invokes an emergent feminist discourse that speaks of common experiences among women of different societies; in addition, Montagu's identification with the wives and mistresses of Turkish dignitaries also makes use of the existing discourse of class distinction, and an established identity of aristocratic privilege across cultures. Montagu's representations of Turkey in the Letters thus employ both the rhetoric of identification, most frequently in her descriptions of Turkish court women, and the rhetoric of differentiation with regard to other aspects of Turkish society in general. Indeed, Montagu's observations often invoke the rhetoric of both similarity and difference; that is, in the very act of likening Turkish and English women, Montague relies on and reiterates an established cultural attitude that differentiates Orient and Occident, that constitutes them as opposites.¹ The paradoxes of the British ambassador's wife's relation to Turkish women call our attention to the sense in which in the eighteenth century, English orientalism is not monochromatically figured through an opposition of Occident and Orient but figures itself through a variety of other differentiating discourses. The Turkish Embassy Letters provide a particular example of orientalist representations overlapping with rhetorics of gender and class, and of orientalism generated by differently gender-determined and class-determined positions.² …

“SO MANY BEAUTYS AS ARE UNDER OUR PROTECTION HERE”: THE TURKISH EMBASSY LETTERS

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had the occasion to spend several years in Turkey beginning in 1717, when her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, was called to serve as British ambassador there. Within her own lifetime, her literary and intellectual distinction was recognized by many writers, including Alexander Pope and his circle, and she became quite famous when the Turkish Embassy Letters were published the year after her death in 1763.³ Montagu's other accomplishments include her essays in which she argued persuasively for a change in the treatment of women in English society in favor of recognizing women's social and intellectual virtues, as well as her significant contribution toward introducing the smallpox vaccine into England after her return from Turkey.⁴

The diplomatic presence of the Montagus in Turkey was warranted by a British commercial relationship with the Ottoman court that had begun in the late sixteenth century under Queen Elizabeth I. England imported silks, spices, cotton, soaps, oils, and carpets, while Turkey received armaments and tin. The Levant Company, founded in 1581, was one of England's most important early commercial ventures, established at the time when England was also beginning its longstanding colonial relationships with India and Africa, in the form of the East India Company and the Royal African Company. These merchant companies rose to great prominence during the seventeenth century. As a result of the Navigation Act of 1660, which resulted in England's commercial monopoly of overseas trade and transportation of goods,⁵ and the free trade policies—affecting imported goods, re-exported products, and the slave trade—which followed the Revolution of 1688, exports and imports between England and its foreign markets tripled. By the early eighteenth century, English foreign policy decisions were being made largely to accommodate England's trading and colonial interests.

Not only did the merchant companies of the late seventeenth century enjoy the patronage of the government, but these companies, essential instruments in defeating other European trade efforts (such as Spanish, Dutch, and French commerce), were given substantial powers and privileges, including judicial and administrative power over competitors and foreign governments, as well as over the colonies themselves. The English travel accounts that accompanied the deepening of Anglo-Turkish diplomatic and commercial ties in this period form an integral part of the discourse about the colonies that depicted foreign and colonial cultures as possessing exceedingly different—and, by implication, less civilized—customs, religions, and practices from those of European society. These accounts played a leading role in establishing the terms of the relationship between European and colonial cultures. The portraits of Turkish and Middle Eastern culture as alternately violent and barbaric, slovenly and lascivious, or grotesque and incomprehensible supported and permitted an ideology that justified the cultural subordination of the foreign and colonial cultures from which profits were being extracted in the form of materials and goods, labor, and consumer markets. Included in this travel literature are accounts such as Robert Withers, A Description of the Grand Signor's Seraglio (1650); George Sandys, Sandys Travailes (1658); John Covel, Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant (1670); Jean Dumont A New Voyage to the Levant (1696); Aaron Hill, A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1709); as well as Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters. The observations of these writers are not uniform but differ in rhetoric and style of presentation, as well as in the sorts of subjects that are discussed. It is in this tradition of travel writing that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu distinguishes herself, and to this tradition that she addresses many of her criticisms.

Robert Withers's Description of the Grand Signor's Seraglio attempts to establish the traveler's credibility by claiming that he had “procured admittance to the Seraglio, and by continuance many years in those parts, had time and opportunity to perfect his observations.” Later in the text, however, he divulges his lack of authority by stating that “no white man can visit amongst the women.” Despite this lack of experience, Withers's account is filled with the melodramatic caricatures of exotic sexuality and barbarism in the seraglio for which orientalism is so famous: the deprivation and brutalization of the Turkish women, the cruelty of the eunuchs, the ugliness of the slave girls—all of which is pointedly contradicted by Montagu in her letters. For example, Withers details a colorfully mythologized ritual in which the king selects his mistress for the evening from a display of women by dropping a handkerchief into the hand of the selected one. Montagu targets Withers's description of the ritual as an example of “the common Voyage-writers who are very fond of speaking of what they don't know” and refutes it as absolutely fictitious.⁶

Like Withers's account, which contains an admission of his lack of knowledge, Jean Dumont's New Voyage to the Levant is similarly marked: “We went to the Grand Signor's seraglio which I cannot describe exactly, since I was not suffer'd to go further than the Second Court.”⁷ Uninhibited, however, Dumont continues to extrapolate from what he does not know: “The Sultan's wives are lodg'd in a Third Seraglio. … I need not tell you with what severity they are guarded by the white and black Eunuchs, who never permit 'em to enjoy the least Shadow of Liberty” (p. 167). Dumont, too, records more tales of bizarre and exotic rituals, cataloguing the “lazy manner of living,” concubinage, and the persecution of women. Of Turkish men he writes: “Contented with their Lot, they sit whole Days on a Sopha, without any other Occupation than drinking Coffee, smoaking Tobacco, or caressing their wives: So that their whole Life is a continual Revolution of Eating, Drinking and Sleeping, intermixt with some dull Recreations” (p. 262). On the manners and customs of the Turks, he concludes: “I found that what they call Strength of Mind, Constancy or Solidity, is at the bottom nothing else but a pure Insensibility and a Weakness that is altogether inexcusable in any reasonable creature” (p. 261).

One of Dumont's chief condemnations of Turkish men is his claim that they enslave their women.⁸ But his representation of the enslavement of women functions as an emblem for the “uncivilized” practices of the oriental rather than as a critique of social or cultural institutions that subordinate women. This is most evident in Dumont's portrait of Turkish marriage, in which a thinly veiled misogyny is revealed in a supposedly humorous barb against European women: “The men may have four Wives and may have twenty Concubines. … Those who are weary of their Wives may turn 'em away when they please, paying their Dowry. What d'ye think, Sir, of this Custom? Is it not very pleasant and commodious? 'Tis Pity that we have not such a Fashion in Christendom; for if we had, I believe we shou'd see many fatal knot unty'd” (p. 267). Dumont's quip—“Is it not very pleasant and commodious?”—does not merely condemn Turkish men; it also demonstrates a clear wish to subordinate European women. In constructing the enslavement of women as a sign of Turkish barbarism, Dumont differentiates from it the propriety of European marriage, and con-comitantly makes the European woman a sign of “civilized” culture. Dumont's humor is built on an expressed envy of the license to exploit women; the statement suggests that the theme of female enslavement is a male fantasy that emerges from the context of European sexual relations rather than from any knowledge of Turkish arrangements. A third concurrent aspect of Dumont's misogyny is the objectification of Turkish women; in his account they are entirely sexual: “The Turkish Women are the most charming Creatures in the World: they seem to be made for Love; their Actions, Gestures, Discourse and Looks are all Amorous” (p. 273). In this compartmentalization he divides woman-hood into willful European women and willing Turkish women. This opposition reduces women to polar caricatures of male fear and desire, and constructs impediments to a discourse suggesting that some female experiences might be shared even across cultural differences. Montagu decisively refutes this constructed opposition in her Turkish Embassy Letters.

As a woman, Montagu was invited into Turkish female society, and as a result she was in a particularly good position to contradict the statements of her predecessors. Her letters feature, among other observations about the local culture, descriptions of pleasant occasions when she called on the wives of Turkish dignitaries or was invited to dine at the Turkish court. One particular letter to her sister (to Lady Mar, April 1, 1717) contains an elaborate representation and analysis of life among Turkish women. It is worth giving some attention to this letter, for it illustrates most aptly the ways in which Montagu's attitudes toward Turkish women opposed those of the seventeenth-century male travel writers, and also underscores what I described earlier as Montagu's multivalent position as an aristocratic English woman.

The paradoxes of Montagu's position are borne out in her modes of comparison, which simultaneously employ the rhetorics of identification and of differentiation in relation to Turkish women. The identification that Montagu articulates between herself and Turkish women is established primarily by means of an analogy of gender, but it is also supported by an implicit rhetoric that is based on, and enunciates, an identity of social class. Montagu's comparisons with Turkish women are confined to women of only the very highest social class in Adrianople. Her use of identities of gender and class serve different purposes, and intersect with the discourse of orientalism in unlike ways. Montagu's rhetorical assertions of identity among women are both discursively antagonistic to, and supportive of, the differentiating rhetorics of culture that characterize orientalism; even the rhetoric that invokes a class identity is, at the same time, built on a structure of class opposition that distinguishes aristocrats and commoners, a rhetoric of differentiation that often overlaps with and reinforces the oppositional rhetorics of orientalism.

Montagu's letter to Lady Mar begins with a detailed account of her current practice of dressing in the Turkish mode, stating that the purpose of her “full and true Relation of the Noveltys of this Place” is to awaken the “gratitude” of Lady Mar in order to urge her to write more news about England—to “let me into more particulars” about “your side of the Globe.” Thus, the letter's opening establishes England and Turkey as being separated by time, distance, and culture, and this opposition is continually both posited and effaced throughout the letter. Montagu writes to Lady Mar:

I am now in my Turkish Habit, thô I beleive you would be of my Opinion that 'tis admirably becoming. I intend to send you my Picture; in the mean time accept of it here.

The first peice of my dresse is a pair of drawers, very full, that reach to my shoes and conceal the legs more modestly than your Petticoats. They are of a thin rose colour damask brocaded with silver flowers, my shoes of white kid Leather embroider'd with Gold. Over this hangs my Smock of fine white silk Gause edg'd with Embroidery. … The Curdée is a loose Robe they throw off or put on according to the Weather, being of rich Brocade (mine is green and Gold) either lin'd with Ermine or Sables. […] On the other side of the head the Hair is laid flat, and here the Ladys are at Liberty to shew their fancys, some putting Flowers, others a plume of Heron's feathers, and in short, what they please, but the most general fashion is a large Bouquet of Jewels.

(Complete Letters, pp. 326-27)

The long passage describing her Turkish garments expresses two apparently, though not necessarily, contradictory impulses. On the one hand, Montagu provides an inventory of the fabrics, embroideries, brocades, and precious stones that she has become accustomed to wearing; the long description and analysis exhibits her familiarity with and knowledge of the Turkish female style, and the use of possessives—“my shoes,” “my Smock”—rhetorically identifies her position with that of Turkish women. Indeed, the “Picture” of herself in Turkish dress to which she refers in the letter is an emblem of her high degree of assimilation into Turkish culture—a representation of a desired virtual synonymy or identity between herself and Turkish women—of which she is apparently quite proud.⁹ On the other hand, phrases punctuated by the comparative possessive your refer to English women's customs: “your side of the Globe,” “more modestly than your Petticoats.” These phrases rhetorically reinforce Montagu's Turkish context and her distance from English culture. A similar separation and opposition of location is stated in the distinction between “here” and “there”: “and here the Ladys are at Liberty to shew their fancys.” In other words, the rhetoric of similitude through which Montagu displays her intimate identification with Turkish women's culture relies simultaneously on stated and implied differentiations; the rhetorical act of likening herself to Turkish women ironically recalls an established separation of Occident and Orient.

Proceeding from the description of her own hair styled in the Turkish manner, Montagu goes on to admire the beautiful hair, complexion, and eyes of the Turkish women. The juxtaposition of the description of the “Turkish Ladys” with Montagu's description of herself in Turkish dress creates a structural equivalence between her position and that of Turkish women that reiterates Montagu's initial gesture of identification. This gesture implies not only an equivalence of gender but also an equivalence between the two court societies, stressing the similarity between these women's social rank and her own. Montagu rhetorically substitutes herself for a Turkish woman; the posited interchangeability enunciates an equivalence of both gender and class status. Although English and Turkish women are presented as structurally interchangeable in the juxtaposition, however, the language of the passage about hair contains superlatives that elevate the beauty of Turkish women with regard to English beauty. She writes: “I never saw in my Life so many fine heads of hair … every Beauty is more common here than with us. 'Tiz surprizing to see a young Woman that is not very handsome. … I can assure you with great Truth that the Court of England (thô I beleive it the fairest in Christendom) cannot shew so many Beautys as are under our Protection here” (p. 327). Here it is as if Montagu employs a rhetoric of differentiation—“Beauty is more common here than with us”—in order to convey a parity or equality between English and Turkish women. That is, an assertion of Turkish women's superiority in the area of physical beauty serves as an intervention that targets and challenges the implicit orientalist subordination of the Turkish to the English. Thus, in the phrase “under our Protection here,” Montagu cannot avoid referring to the subordinating colonial arrangements that locate and justify her presence as part of a British diplomatic entourage in Turkey.

In the next section of the letter the argument for the advantage or superiority of Turkish women with regard to English women is even more explicitly utilized as an intervention against traditional orientalism. In these passages Montagu directly refutes the earlier travel writers' constructed accusation that Turkish women are enslaved:

As to their Morality or Good Conduct … 'tis just as 'tis with you, and the Turkish Ladys don't commit one Sin the less for not being Christians. Now I am a little acquainted with their ways, I cannot forbear admiring either the exemplary discretion or extreme Stupidity of all the writers that have given accounts of 'em. Tis very easy to see they have more Liberty than we have, no Woman of what rank so ever being permitted to go in the streets without 2 muslims, one that covers her face all but her Eyes and another that hides the whole dress of her head. …

This perpetual Masquerade gives them entire Liberty of following their Inclinations without danger of Discovery. … Neither have they much to apprehend from the resentment of their Husbands, those Ladys that are rich having all their money in their own hands, which they take with 'em upon a divorce with an addition which he is oblig'd to give 'em. Upon the Whole, I look upon the Turkish Women as the only free people in the Empire. …

'Tis true their Law permits them 4 Wives, but there is no Instance of a Man of Quality that makes use of this Liberty, or of a Woman of Rank that would suffer it. When a Husband happens to be inconstant (as those things will happen) he keeps his mistrisse in a House apart and visits her as privately as he can, just as 'tis with you.

(pp. 327-329; emphasis added)

Montagu cites the same cultural customs mentioned by the travel writers—that women go veiled in public, that they are guarded by servants—to support an entirely opposite argument. Rather than contending that Turkish women are enslaved, Montagu asserts that, owing to being veiled, they are able to enjoy even more liberties than English women. Montagu's statement that “Upon the Whole, I look upon the Turkish Women as the only free people in the Empire” is significant because of the ways in which it challenges several discourses that inform seventeenth-century male travel writing. In one respect, her statement forcefully intervenes in the orientalist discourse that proposes the enslavement of Turkish women as a sign for oriental barbarism. Her claim further implies that Turkish women are freer than English women, a statement that directly contradicts the antifemale discourse that is equally present in the travel writing, a discourse typified by Dumont's comment on the alleged Turkish custom of enslaving women (“Is it not very pleasant and commodious? 'Tis Pity that we have not such a Fashion in Christendom”). Dumont's colonialist trope of the enslaved Turkish woman is not only an orientalist construction used to condemn Turkish society as uncivilized, but also a displacement of European misogyny which disguises its European character by figuring women's subjugation in an oriental context. Montagu's assertion of the freedom of Turkish women heartily objects to the construction of women in orientalist myths, and simultaneously contradicts the exaggeration of European women's freedoms implied by Dumont's account. It is Montagu's opinion elsewhere in her writings that women in European society must be accorded more respect, more opportunities, and greater financial independence before they can even be considered as beginning to enjoy equality with men. Montagu's idealization of the liberty of Turkish women, however, which targets and challenges the male orientalist attack on European women, must also be scrutinized for its bias; her claim that Turkish women are “the only free people in the Empire” misrepresents and appropriates Turkish female experience for the purpose of defending English feminism.

The characterization of Turkish women's comportment as a “Masquerade” also assimilates Turkish culture to English terms and modes of cultural expression. The term has a particular meaning in the eighteenth-century British social and moral context. As Terry Castle explains, the masquerade was directly associated with carnivalesque practices that overturned traditional social structures, and these socially sanctioned disguises connoted sexual license as well as defiance of social and class hierarchies.¹⁰ In the English concept of masquerade, disguises afforded an anonymity that permitted sexual and social promiscuity: masked ladies could take lovers, courtiers could pretend to be peasants, or an aristocratic lady might disguise herself as a servant girl to take a young lover from a more common class. For Montagu to call the Turkish woman's veil a masquerade is to transfer these specifically English associations to Turkish women's society, to interpret the Turkish context by means of an ideologically charged English classification, and to attribute to Turkish women a powerful ability to subvert the traditional cultural systems of sexuality and class relations. In this sense the use of the term masquerade does not merely confirm Montagu's identification with Turkish women; it also involves some appropriation of their position for the purpose of intervening in the male tradition of travel writing about the Orient. Implying that Turkish women are the site of a variety of subversive actions, that veiled they are protected by an anonymity that allows them sexual and social license, Montagu makes of Turkish women a sign of liberty and freedom in a manner not unlike Dumont's earlier rendering of Turkish women as a sign of enslavement and barbarism.

Montagu's paradoxical use of the rhetoric of likeness and difference challenges the established logic of orientalist travel writing in a variety of ways. Her letter to Lady Mar ends with explicit criticisms directed at the “voyage Writers” who had previously written about Turkey: “Thus you see, dear Sister, the manners of Mankind doe not differ so widely as our voyage Writers would make us beleive” (p. 330; emphasis added). Montagu notes, as I have remarked in the brief discussion of Withers and Dumont, that the seventeenth-century travel writers privileged a logic of differentiation in their figurations of Turkey, and that, in particular, their construction of the Orient as “different” hinged on an invention of Turkish customs regarding women as dramatically opposing English ones. Thus, when Montagu repeatedly likens English and Turkish women, her rhetoric of similitude directly contradicts the logic of difference that characterizes the observations of the male travel writers. At the same time, to a certain degree the rhetoric of identification through which Montagu displays her knowledge of Turkish women's culture inevitably restates an orientalist topos of differentiation in order to target it, ironically recalling the established separation of Occident and Orient. In this sense, on the level of rhetoric Montagu's text employes competing and fluctuating logics of similarity and difference. The use of the rhetoric of difference places Montagu's text in relation to a discourse of orientalism, whereas the rhetoric of identification expresses the critical distance of the text from orientalism, marking it as heterogeneous, divergent, and dissenting.

Other letters, such as to Lady———, April 1, 1717, describing a visit to the women's baths,¹¹ echo the praise of Turkish women's beauty, and extends the description of their excellence to the areas of poise, manners, and etiquette.

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 themselves in so polite a manner to a stranger. …

The first sofas were cover'd with Cushions and rich Carpets, on which sat the Ladys, and on the 2nd their slaves behind 'em, but without any distinction of rank by their dress, all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any Beauty or deffect conceal'd, yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest Gesture among 'em. They Walk'd and mov'd with the same majestic Grace which Milton describes of our General Mother.

(Complete Letters, p. 313)

Montagu compares the manners of the “Ladys” at the Turkish court and the European courts to emphasize the “civility” of the Turkish women. Again, there is a rhetorically established equivalence between the two groups that is based not solely on gender but also on social rank. At the same time, I cannot help but remark on a lack of parity in the physical arrangements of the scene that Montagu describes. Standing in her riding habit, thoroughly covered from her jacket to her boots, she viewed the many Turkish ladies and their slaves, who reclined against pillows and sofas, indistinguishable in their nudity. Not only is there an evident contrast between Montagu's clothed, erect singularity and the reclining, generalized nudity of the Turkish women, but also Montagu is clearly the unassimilated viewer-writer of this scene. The subjective position she occupies is not unlike that of male poets who eulogize the body of the female muse or beloved, regarding her and enumerating her many beauties: “exactly proportioned,” “their skins shineingly white,” “their Beautiful Hair divided into many tresses hanging on their shoulders, braided either with pearl or riband, perfectly representing the figures of the Graces” (p. 324). Indeed, Montagu's reference to Milton's poetic descriptions identifies her through analogy as having powers and authorities that resemble those of the poet of Paradise Lost.

In another letter to Lady Mar, April 18, 1717, Montagu extravagantly praises the Kahya's lady, Fatima. Fatima becomes a good friend of Montagu's, and their visits are further described in other letters.

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! … A behaviour so full of Grace and sweetness, such easy motions, with an Air so majestic yet free from Stiffness or affectation that I am perswaded could she be suddenly transported upon the most polite Throne of Europe, nobody would think her other than born and bred to be a Queen, thô educated in a Country we call barbarous. To say all in a Word, our most celebrated English Beautys would vanish near her.

(p. 350)

Rhetorics of comparison are continued in this eulogy, for Fatima is said to be like a European queen, but she is also distinguished as being quite unlike European women in that her beauty far surpasses any European beauty: “Our most celebrated English Beautys would vanish near her.” These comparisons that equate the European and Turkish court women may be understood as Montagu's further interventions in the male tradition of orientalism. If orientalism builds on and colludes with a discourse about women that divides and alienates different cultural groups of women from one another, Montagu's eulogy to Fatima's beauty represents a firm refusal to comply with this separation of occidental and oriental women.

Montagu's affectionate—and homoerotic—praise of Fatima's beauty also intervenes in the male discourse of heterosexuality that constructs divisions and hierarchies among women. In this letter and the letter about visiting the baths, Montagu's frank admiration for the physical beauty of the Turkish women underscores both situations as taking place in exclusively female society. Montagu's continual thematizing of the all-female context ironically invokes the orientalist topos of the female harem, and the specter of what Malek Alloula calls “oriental sapphism.”¹² In orientalism, the female harem, forbidden to male spectators and travelers, is invented as the site of limitless possibilities for sexual practices among women. But the harem is not merely an orientalist voyeur's fantasy of imagined female sexuality; it is also the possibility of an erotic universe in which there are no men, a site of social and sexual practices that are not organized around the phallus or a central male authority. Montagu invokes, in this sense, the topos of the female harem by means of her own homoeroticism as a powerful intervention in the male discourse of orientalism. As in the letter about the visit to the baths, however, it appears that Montagu is able to articulate her affection for Fatima only by means of the established literary tradition that exists for the praise and regard of female beauty, a male tradition of courtly love poetry exemplified by the sonnets of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser. Following this literary convention, Montagu takes up a posture toward Fatima that still expresses love by means of an aestheticizing and anatomizing gaze. The viewer is taken by “that exact proportion of Body,” and proceeds to praise the beloved's skin, mouth, and eyes, as Petrarch would evoke the unsurpassable beauty of Laura's features. Thus, Montagu's writings about Fatima and Turkish women are ironically divided and heterogeneous. On the one hand, Montagu frames the praise of Turkish women's beauty, independence, and manners as an intervention and a challenge to the male voyage writers' subordination of Turkish women. On the other hand, occasionally, and perhaps inevitably for the eighteenth century, Montagu articulates these interventions of praise by means of male literary and rhetorical models, such as courtly love poetry, which are not without their own methods of female objectification and subordination.

It is striking that Montagu's greatest divergences from the earlier tradition of travel writing consist of letters that describe Turkish women's society and the Turkish customs surrounding and affecting women, for in other letters her perceptions regarding Turkish culture are still not far from those of her male predecessors. For example, the letter to Anne Thistlethwayte (April 1, 1717) contains many statements that coincide with the predominant British colonial discourse about foreign subjects.¹³ Here “London” and “this part of the World” are explicitly distanced and separated in a manner that is left uncontested throughout the letter. In addition, Montagu frames the descriptions of Turkish life as if they were theatrical entertainment for her English reader. She writes, “A Letter out of Turkey that has nothing extraordinary in it would be as great a Disapointment as my visitors will receive at London if I return thither without any raritys to shew them” (p. 340). She then proceeds to inventory in detail the bizarre and unusual animals found in Adrianople, including camels, asses, and buffaloes. The camels are described as “never thoroughly tamed”; the asses are “to me very ugly Creatures, their heads being ill form'd and disproportion'd to their bodys”; and the buffaloes are “all black with very short hair on their Hides and extreme little white Eyes that make them look like Devils” (pp. 340-41). The qualities of these “beasts,” used for plowing, carrying, and caravaning, are contrasted with the swiftness and spirited elegance of horses, which “are not put here to any Laborious Work, nor are they at all fit for it” (p. 341). Indeed, Montagu characterizes the camels, asses, and buffaloes as lower species than the horse, and more physically suited to difficult labor.

I have a little white favourite that I would not part with on any terms. He prances under me with so much fire you would think that I had a great deal of courrage to dare Mount him, yet I'll assure you I never rid a Horse in my life so much at my command. My Side Saddle is the first was ever seen in this part of the World and gaz'd at with as much wonder as the ship of Columbus was in America. Here are some birds held in a sort of religious Reverence and for that reason Multiply prodigiously: Turtles on the Account of the Innocency, and Storks because they are suppos'd to make every Winter the Pilgrimage to Mecha. To say the truth, they are the happiest Subjects under the Turkish Government, and are so sensible of their priveleges they walk the streets without fear and gennerally build in the low parts of Houses. Happy are those that are so distinguish'd; the vulgar Turks are perfectly perswaded that they will not be that year either attack'd by Fire or Pestilence. I have the happyness of one of their Sacred nests just under my chamber Window.

(p. 341)

The world described in this letter is composed of an orderly chain of being ranging upward from beasts of burden, to birds, to horses, to Turks, to Englishmen. Just as the coarse “black” beasts of burden are contrasted with the “white” prancing horse, so, too, does Montagu's letter imply a distinction between the Turks, with their bizarre animal superstitions, and the English, with their more refined, rational tastes. Montagu's text accepts the topos of civilized culture as adherence to natural order and hierarchy; that she rides her horse sidesaddle is an emblem of the English command over and domestication of animals, while in contradistinction the “vulgar Turks” (“vulgar” being presumably a reference to their class as well as their cultural location) honor turtledoves and storks, granting them religious power, improperly elevating animals over humans. Not only does Montagu's portrait of the Turks' “unnatural” worship imply that they are less civilized than the English, but her descriptions of the natural hierarchy of beasts and horses might itself be understood to contain an allegorical defense of the “natural order” of colonialism. The colonial allegory is further dramatized in the image of Montagu's sidesaddle, which is viewed by a group of Turkish observers “with as much wonder as the ship of Columbus was in America.” Finally, the characterization of storks as “the happiest Subjects under the Turkish Government” offers a metaphor of birds and humans that further allegorizes, and moralizes, the necessary and happy subjection of one group to another.

Just as Montagu's Letters occasionally resonate with the dominant British orientalist discourse, so the social context that produces the Turkish Embassy Letters—the diplomatic presence of Montagu's husband, Ambassador Wortley Montagu, in early-eighteenth-century Turkey—locates her text as part of England's colonial discourse about Great Britain's foreign commercial interests and colonies. For this reason it is appropriate to consider Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters as part of the tradition of British travel writing about Turkey. Yet, quite evidently, Montagu's text occupies a dissenting position in the tradition; particularly on the questions of Turkish women's society and the treatment of women in Turkey, Montagu's Letters directly refute the perspectives, rhetorics, and themes of her orientalist predecessors' writing in that tradition. The conflicted relation of the Turkish Embassy Letters to orientalist travel writing—it is within the tradition yet critical of it—illustrates that orientalism does not make up a unified and dominant discourse, and that orientalist logic and statements often exist in a climate of challenge and contestation.

An emergent feminist discourse provides Montagu with the language, arguments, and rhetoric with which to interrogate traditional travel writing about the Orient while furnishing her with a critical position from which to write. Montagu's interventions in the orientalist tradition are primarily articulated in a feminist rhetoric and take place in the moments when her text refutes the constructed topos of the enslavement of Turkish women. In addition, a residual discourse about class and social rank supports Montagu's rhetoric likening Turkish and English court women; indeed, Montagu's praise of the civility, refinement, and politesse of aristocratic Turkish women may make use of this rhetoric of class identification even more than it expresses a belief in solidarity among women of different cultures. What I have characterized as Montagu's shifting of the rhetoric of identification and differentiation is indicative of the location of her text at an intersection of orientalism, feminism, and representations of class and social rank. Montagu employs the rhetoric of identification between women of the Turkish and English courts as a means of intervening in the differentiating rhetoric of orientalism; the shift in rhetoric brings into conflict the figuring apparatus of orientalism and of discourses about gender and class. The contentious relationship between Montagu's text and the earlier travel writings concerning the subject of Turkish women illustrates that orientalism is not exclusively figured through an opposition of Occident and Orient, but figures itself through the formations of gender and class as well. It illustrates that distinct discourses may collude and overlap, but also, more important, that the crucial means for contesting and displacing one discourse may derive from the rhetoric and writing position of other concurrent ones.

Notes

1. It is interesting to note the etymology of the term Orient, for it bears on the discussion of eighteenth-century travel literature, the geographic figuration of otherness, as one of the earlier rhetorical frameworks of orientalist literature. From the Latin oriens, meaning “rising,” “rising sun,” or “east,” the term came to mean largely all that is not the Occident, or occidens—“quarter of the setting sun”—from the infinitive occidere, “to fall down,” “to set.” If the Occident was the location of that geographic place on the horizon where the sun sets, then the Orient was the opposite place where the sun rises. But through a variety of social and historical turns, what began as a geographic topos became an ideological one; or to put this another way, ideological values became figured through a geographic and etymological binary opposition. In this sense, British and French knowledge of the world was represented in terms of this dualistic vision: West or East. Many other categories of definition could then be produced and ascribed according to this binary scheme: the West was the Christian land, the East was the space of infidels, heretics, pagans, and so forth.

2. There are examples of heterogeneity among other women travel writers. In “Victorian Travel Writings,” Genre 22, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 189-207, Susan Morgan examines the travel writings of British women in Southeast Asia; she points out that these women writers are exceptions within the tradition of what has been monolithically termed orientalism. The orientalism of Edward Said, Morgan argues, is predominantly a male tradition, and predominantly about the Middle East. The writings of these British women writers in Southeast Asia are exceptions to this tradition, Morgan observes, and contain very different representations of the Orient, and very marked sympathy, in particular with the female population of these countries.

3. Robert Halsband, editor of the Complete Letters, and coeditor of Essays and Poems, suggests that the manuscript of the Turkish Embassy Letters was composed from copies of letters Lady Mary had written from Turkey, and that they may have been meant for publication as a travel memoir. Halsband writes: “They are not the actual letters she sent to her friends and relations; they are, instead, a compilation of pseudo-letters, dated, and addressed to people either named or nameless. Although they are clearly an accurate record of her experiences and observations during her two-year sojourn abroad, we may still wonder to what extent they are based on real letters. Are they perhaps a travel-memoir in the form of letters (a literary genre popular since the Renaissance)?” Introduction to Complete Letters, pp. xiv-xv.

   Before she died, Lady Mary gave a copy of the manuscript to Benjamin Swoden, implying that it had been her wish that they should eventually be published. See “Biographical Anecdotes,” in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 32-33. Halsband concludes in his introduction to the Complete Letters that “it is certain that she intended them to be published, though not in her lifetime” (p. xvii).

4. Montagu articulates her position with regard to the sexes and declares her sympathy with the developing feminist movement in an installment of The Nonsense of Common-Sense, a weekly newspaper. In an essay dated January 24, 1738, Montagu responds to an essay written by Lord Chesterfield in which he advised women on how to resist various temptations, especially that of succumbing to a love affair. Montagu refutes his assumption that women must resist seduction by “filling up their time with all sort of other triffles: in short he recommends to them, Gosiping, Scandal, Lying, and a whole troop of Follys … as the only preservatives for their Virtue” Montagu, Essays and Poems, p. 131. She suggests instead “Reason or Refflection,” as well as treating women “with more dignity” (p. 131).

   See “Letter to Sarah Chiswell” on the subject of innoculation, Complete Letters, pp. 337-40; and “A Plain Account of the Innoculating of the Small Pox by a Turkey Merchant,” Essays, pp. 95-97. Indeed, we might consider the vaccine a metaphor for cross-cultural experience. That is, Lady Mary proposed that “the best sort of the Small Pox” be introduced in small quantity—“the point of the Needle takes as much of the matter as will lye upon it”—in order to inoculate individuals against more serious fatal infection, just as twentieth-century anthropologists would later advocate some virtue in the experience of “going native” to learn more about the cultures they studied.

5. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (New York: Norton, 1961), esp. chaps. 13 and 17, argues that the main point of the Navigation Acts was a “deliberate policy of developing the production, and monopolising the export, of colonial commodities like tobacco, sugar, cotton, dye-woods.” On the labor of the colonists, Hill cites Charles Davenant, On the Plantation Trade, as stating that it was probably six times more profitable than labor at home, owing to slavery. “The Acts created monopoly conditions of trade with the colonies, and so increased the profits of English merchants. They mark a decisive turning-point in England's economic history” (p. 181).

   England's monopolization of the overseas trade marked the transition to a new type of economy. Slaves from West Africa were brought to England and Jamaica by English manufacturers. Refining and finishing industries sprang up in London and elsewhere for the home market and for reexport. Between 1660 and 1700, whereas manufactured goods (other than cloth) exported to England expanded by 18 percent, exports to the colonies expanded by over 200 percent. Hill suggests that nineteenth-century industrialism might well have been impossible without the Navigation Acts. Colonial trade prepared for the industrial revolution, just as the political revolution had made possible the use of full state power for the capture and retention of monopoly colonial trade.

6. Robert Withers, A Description of the Grand Signor's Seraglio or Turkish Emperor's Court (London, 1650), p. 110. For Montagu, see letter to Lady Mar, March 10, 1718, in Complete Letters, p. 383: “The Sultana … assur'd me that the story of the Sultan's throwing a Handkerchief is altogether fabulous.”

7. Jean Dumont, A New Voyage to the Levant (London, 1696), p. 165.

8. “There is no slavery equal to that of the Turkish Women; for a Servant may live twenty years in a Family without seeing the Face of his Mistress,” writes Dumont, A New Voyage, p. 268.

9. Montagu prided herself on her immersion in Turkish culture; she learned the language, and, emblematically, had herself painted in Turkish dress. See this portrait, attributed to Charles Philips, in Complete Letters, pl. 5.

10. See Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilisation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).

11. It is this letter and its descriptions of the Turkish women's baths that is presumed to be the basis for Ingres's painting Le bain turc (1862). Several passages from this letter were found copied in Ingres's notebooks. Norman Schlenoff, Ingres, ses sources littéraires (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1956), pp. 281-83.

12. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), esp. chap. 9, “Oriental Sapphism.”

13. I have chosen not to discuss the entire question of the letters' addressees, their reception, and so on, for this would take me far afield from the focus of the chapter, namely, that orientalism overlaps with discourses of gender and class, and that these concurrent discourses may contest and displace orientalism. It is clear, however, that the different subject matters, as well as the treatment of those matters, in Montagu's letters must also be influenced by the addressees of the letters—their gender, class, occupation, and relation to Montagu. In this sense Montagu's letter to Alexander Pope, April 1, 1717, contains extensive discussion of classical literature, Turkish poetry, and the problems of translation, and the letter to Abbé Conti, May 17, 1717, a comparative discussion of the church and religion; whereas the letters to her sister Lady Mar address none of these subjects, dealing instead, as I have shown, with matters of female society—the customs, behavior, and dress—and the relation of Turkish female society to women in her own English society.