Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is known first to students of the eighteenth century not as the authorial voice heard in her many poems, essays, three volumes of letters, and a play; but as the satiric spectacle conjured in Pope's portraits of her in several of his poems. In his epistle on the characters of women, Pope's Lady Mary, under the name of Sappho, presents the scandalous spectacle of the failed or incoherent construction of a woman's outward beauty:

Rufa, [he declares,] whose eye quick-glancing o'er the
          Park,
Attracts each light gay meteor of a Spark,
Agrees as ill with Rufa studying Locke,
As Sappho's diamonds with her dirty smock,
Or Sappho at her toilet's greazy task,
With Sappho fragrant at an ev'ning Mask:
So morning Insects, that in muck begun,
Shine, buzz, and fly-blow in the setting-sun.(1)

While Belinda's labors at her toilet in The Rape of the Lock are the decking of some kind of “Goddess” with the “glitt'ring spoil” of England's world trade, Lady Mary's labors are a “greazy task,” a descent into the “muck” supporting the shine of self-presentation, and what she achieves—like all the other women of this epistle—is “at best a Contradiction still”: diamonds and a dirty smock. As Louis Landa and Laura Brown have persuasively argued, in the Indian gems, Arabian perfumes, and African ivory with which Belinda adorns herself we see the goods of imperial trade displayed on the body of the “Lady of Fashion,” so that that body becomes an ideologically charged figure for the equivocal morality of imperial trade.² In the first half of the eighteenth century, during the period of what Brown calls the “first major English expansion” and of what Neil McKendrick calls the beginning of England's “consumer revolution,” writers frequently express their responses to this increasing absorption in commercial exchange and world trade—whether responses of enthusiasm, horror, or ambivalence—through their representations of English women, portrayed as the paradigmatic consumers of fashionable goods.³ Thus, as Brown argues, the contradictions, deceptions, and denials involved in female self-presentation become convenient synecdoches for those of imperial trade and commercial exchange.

For example, Pope repeatedly links what he calls the epic “machinery” of The Rape of the Lock, the legion of sylphs who construct and preserve Belinda's beauty, with the economic machinery of the trade in commodities that adorns her; but the agency of both the sylphs and the economic relations that produce Belinda's adornments must remain invisible if the effect of her beauty is to be successfully achieved. In Sappho's “dirty smock” perhaps we see an allusion to the sordid underpinnings of the glittering exterior of a culture based on imperial trade and commercial exchange, again displaced onto the woman—but with the grinding of the machinery of material relations now rendered unflatteringly visible in the evident labors of the woman's material body. Sappho's engagement in the economic and cultural machinery of female beauty only reveals her incoherence as an individual and the extreme ephemerality of her existence, as passing as that of a fly.

The portrait of Sappho in Pope's “Epistle to a Lady” thus takes its lineaments from the established satiric category of the fashionable lady; and it specifically draws into question Sappho's ability to construct herself as a viable individual. The portrait has always been recognized, however, as the depiction of a particular historical woman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, as well as of a satiric type. That woman existed not only as a spectacle but also as a voice, writing vociferously against Pope's depiction of herself, against Swift's depiction of women in general, against the reduction of women to mere spectacle, whether charming or grotesque. In the first section of this essay, I will examine the determining historical machinery of female identity as it appears specifically in the restrictive and coded system of female clothing and bodily appearance, which Lady Mary discusses in several issues of her periodical, The Nonsense of Common-Sense. However, in her Nonsense of Common-Sense essays, Lady Mary also uses the image of a constraining, artificial, or impersonal machinery to describe the production of voice itself: at times she represents herself as entangled in a discursive or specifically literary “machinery” that dictates the terms of gendered identity as deterministically as the required spectacle of female fashion.

When Lady Mary traveled to Turkey as a young woman, she responded enthusiastically to the alternative possibilities for female identity she encountered there in the form of different conventions of dress; but she also applied herself eagerly to learning the Turkish language and studying its literature, as if immersion in another culture might affirm for her ways in which culture itself is not monolithic and therefore cannot thoroughly, or at least straightforwardly, control the content of personal voice. In the second section below, I will consider Lady Mary's letters from Turkey, focusing on her attempts in those letters to use her encounter with cultural difference to figure the historical specificity of eighteenth-century English notions of female identity. In her letters from Turkey, and particularly in the letters that offer a translation of a Turkish love poem and a description of the women's baths, Lady Mary attempts to use her experience of cultural disjunctions to construct a voice that can speak of sexual desire and of aesthetic pleasure—subjects not available to the Belindas or the Sapphos of Pope's poems.

A 1746 engraving, The Lady's Disaster,⁴ graphically depicts some of the stakes attached to female fashion in this period. The little poem below the engraving's picture informs us that the woman at the center of the satiric scene is named Celia, and it refers to the hoop-petticoat she wears as a “wide Machine.” The machine of Celia's fashionable clothing has betrayed her, apparently, catching on what seems to be a window-shutter hook as she snobbishly tossed her skirt in an attempt to avoid the dirty chimney sweep who has fallen at her feet. Celia is thus ironically punished for her snobbery of social class and fashionable appearance by having what underlies that fashionable appearance indecorously revealed to the crowd of common as well as gentle people who have gathered in the street. And the artist of the picture is quite specific about what underlies the machine of her fashionable clothing:

If Fame say true in former Days,
The Fardingale was no disgrace;
But what a Sight is here reveal'd!
Such as oure Mothers ne'er beheld.
A Nymph in an unguarded hour,
(Alas! who can be too secure)
Dire fate has destin'd to be seen,
Entangled in her wide Machine.
While Carmen, Clowns, & Gentle folks
With satisfaction pass their Jokes.
Some view th'enamel'd Scene on high
And some at bottom fix their Eye;
Mark well the Boy with smutty Face,
And wish themselves were in his place:
Whose black distorted features show,
There's something—to be seen below,
And artfull [?] grinning at her Foot
Cries sweep! sweep! Madam for your Soot,
While from his Stall the leering Jew,
Would gladly have a better view.
In moderate bounds had Celia dres't.
She'd ne'er became a publick Jest.

(Drawn from the Fact. Occasion'd by a Lady carelessly tossing her Hoop too high, in going to shun a little Chimney sweeper's Boy who fell down just at her Feet in an artful Surprise, at ye enormous Sight.)

both the materiality of her female body and the materiality of the economic relations that have produced her clothing are here revealed as the repressed content normally hidden under her elegant garments. It is the very extremity with which Celia's skirt alters and conceals the natural shape of her body that has led it to unveil that body unexpectedly; as the picture's poetic caption concludes, “In moderate bounds had Celia dres't, / She'd ne'er became a publick Jest.” When what's under Celia's skirt is exposed to view, the chimney sweep between her legs holds up a little phallic-shaped shovel underneath that skirt, as if to emblematize the crudely sexual nature of the exchange in which her body is destined, finally, to function; and the shape of his shovel is echoed in the various phallic images with which Celia finds herself surrounded—the three bishop's miters on the tavern's sign behind her, the guns held erect by the men standing nearby, and the post at the edge of the road that seems almost to have just forced its way out of the ground in response to her exposure.

More elaborately, the artist has arranged the composition of the picture to suggest that Celia's skirt normally conceals the facts of hard manual labor and of commercial exchange that support or undergird its extravagant compass. Crucial to the picture's brief narrative is the figure of the lowly chimney sweep, who has thrown himself at Celia's feet and caused her thus to reveal herself. The dirty face and twisted limbs of the chimney sweep, the marks of his brutal bodily work, make him a social outcast and a paradigmatic representative of the physical labor that produces the goods the fashionable lady wears, but that must be concealed if those goods are to have their proper effect. The man identified by the caption as a “leering Jew,” with his display tray of goods to be hawked, also hovers under the reach of her skirt, a representative of the relations of exchange that normally remain hidden as well beneath the carefully constructed image of a fashionable lady. The scandalous revelation of these hidden features of Celia's self-presentation amuses all the onlookers on the street; but it is really only the male viewers who can thoroughly appreciate and enjoy the revelation. The three prostitutes in the windows of the tavern take an interest in the accident, but they can savor it only because they have already allowed the purely physical nature of their claims on men to be exposed. The woman with the fan, wearing her own enormous petticoat, thinks she's a knowing onlooker of Celia's humiliation, like the grinning men that surround her, but in fact Celia's disaster is being reproduced, less spectacularly, on her own edge of the picture frame, without her knowing it, as a male dog lifts his leg and urinates on the edge of her brocaded skirt.

The woman at the center of The Lady's Disaster is thus made the satiric butt of the artist's disclosure of the material relations concealed by fashionable appearances; and she shares a name, Celia, with the woman at the center of Swift's “The Lady's Dressing Room,” whose repellant body, as Laura Brown has shown, is made to figure the hidden corruption of the economic order that adorns that body.⁵ The artist of The Lady's Disaster and Swift both work to expose the mystified economic realities of commercial exchange, but they do so specifically by locating the unseemly realities they unveil in the body of a woman. When “The Lady's Dressing Room” was first published, Lady Mary herself responded directly to Swift's portrayal of Celia, sharply questioning the male interests that might determine his fixation on the scandalous image of a decaying female body. In her bitter parody, entitled The Reasons that Induced Dr. Swift to write a Poem call'd the Lady's Dressing Room, published in 1734, Lady Mary defended Celia from Swift's attack by providing an account of why Swift wrote his poem, imagining that he turned against Celia out of frustration at his own impotence and reluctance to pay her money for sexual acts he could not perform.⁶ The analysis of motives, presented in the form of narrative, is telling, if crude; and Lady Mary generalized the analysis several years later in the sixth issue of her anonymously published newspaper, The Nonsense of Common-Sense.

There, she complains that it is men who encourage women to devote themselves to the frivolities of fashion; and she scathingly summarizes some of the economic reasons that men would like to believe that women are contemptible, from their resentment of mothers who hold jointures to their desire to be rid of wives who keep them from remarrying some “great Fortune.”⁷ Both in her parody of Swift and in this essay, Lady Mary thus offers a critique of men's interests in constructing female identity in the specific terms they do. She concludes the Nonsense of Common-Sense essay with a warning to women to resist the terms offered by those male authors “who with the sneer of affected Admiration would throw you below the Dignity of the Human Species,” and with a fantasy of offering her own alternative terms with which to understand and admire women, saying that she hopes to exhibit “a set of Pictures of … meritorious Ladys, where I shall say nothing of the fire of their Eyes or the pureness of their Complexions, but give them such praises as befits a rational sensible Being, Virtues of Choice and not Beautys of Accident” (134). Lady Mary does not, however, ever produce this set of pictures of real female virtue, and she does not even give us a portrait of herself as authoress in these essays—constructing, instead, a masculine persona in which she can appear in print before the public eye.

As the anonymous author of The Nonsense of Common-Sense, Lady Mary thus conceals her sex as well as her name, apparently assuming that a woman cannot publicly present her opinions on the political and economic matters she addresses in these essays. In the first two issues of the paper, Lady Mary not only fails to identify herself as a woman writer but also seems to take on a distinctively male point of view, repeating familiar masculine complaints that place what she calls “the Fair Sex” at the center of England's most basic economic and moral problems. Referring to the “present pressure of national debts” and urging her readers to purchase English rather than foreign goods, she focuses her argument in these essays on the image of the fashionable lady, dressed in expensive imported cloth; and she decries that “Fantastic mimicry of our Ladys, who are so accustom'd to shiver in Silks” that they prefer them to good English wool (107-11). In both issues she thus suggests that it is a female habit of mimickry that drives excessive consumption; and her sympathy for women appears only in her exhortation to them to model themselves on something other than mechanically imitative principles. However, although she introduces her first issue of the newspaper with a promise that she will find things to praise in its pages rather than things to satirize or blame, she is unable to body forth the more admirable possibilities for women in anything but negative form. She begins, indeed, by praising the manner in which women are presently dressed, but she explains that they are dressed in sensible fashion only because they have been required by government order to appear in mourning clothes. For the moment, the mechanisms of direct government control have over-riden the pervasive mechanisms of imitative female consumption, but the only alternative to the existing norm of the “Fantastic mimicry of our Ladys” conceived in this essay is the negatively defined black dress of mourning, of deprivation and loss. Suggestively, the mourning clothes Lady Mary approves in this essay have been donned to commemorate the death of Queen Caroline: perhaps women can escape the dictates of imitative and conventional identity only under the sign of the cancellation or demise of one representative female figure.

To the extent that Lady Mary provides any depiction of herself as a speaking female subject in these essays, it also appears only negatively, in various forms of indirect references to, or images of, the fragmentary or distorted nature of her voice there. The fifth issue of the paper focuses on the problem of a censorship of views that is the effect not of government restrictions but of commercial interests. Lady Mary tells the story of her difficulty in getting the newspaper published—one printer rejects it because it is not written against the ministry, another because it is not directly commissioned by the ministry, and one man prints it but tampers with its words, removing some of its sting against male readers and adding gratuitous sexual innuendoes that alter its force. “I am convinc'd,” Lady Mary concludes, “that the Liberty of the press is as much block'd up, by the combination of the Booksellers, printers, pamphlet sellers, Authors etc. or perhaps more, than it would be by an Act of Parliament; and that … 'tis as impossible for a man to express his thoughts to the public as it would be for one honest Fishmonger to retail Turbots in a plentiful season below the price fix'd on them by the Company” (129). This essay never mentions the author's sex as a source of difficulty in having her thoughts published; it here laments the impossibility, specifically, of a man expressing his thoughts to the public, and the references to the author's masculine persona are much more overt and insistent throughout this essay than in any of the others. However, this very insistence, the pointedness of the essay's denial of its writer's sex, seems to speak for an unmentioned means by which the hegemony of commercial powers that Lady Mary refers to in this essay—what she calls “the Company”—either silences her or mediates and revises her words. The system of commercial exchange that she here treats as monolithic not only excludes her from the realm of rational discourse but also shapes what it means to be a woman, or to speak as one.

In this issue of her newspaper, then, the figure of Lady Mary as disguised female author is glimpsed only in the essay's general references to what is systematically excluded from commercial forums of expression. In an earlier issue of the paper, Lady Mary provides a more concretely embodied though oddly refracted image, for her own compromised voicing of identity in the essay's pages. Lady Mary devotes the third issue of the paper to a letter from an imaginary correspondent about that endless subject of satire in this period, the Italian castrato singers in the London opera. The correspondent, who signs his name Balducci, introduces himself as an expert artisan in statuary and machinery and proposes to replace the highly paid castrati with mechanical substitutes, saying that he has “found out a Method of making a Statue imitate so exactly the Voice of any Singer that ever did, or ever can appear upon the Stage, that I'll defy the ravished Hearer to distinguish the one from the other” (115). Balducci describes himself as one whose “chief Principle of Action” is “to serve those by whom [he] can get the most money,” and he dwells on the reflex of “mimickry” that creates fashions among audiences and consumers (114-15). The mechanical singers he imagines creating, with their mimickry of life, embody, then, something mechanical both about the profit-seeker and the avid consumer, and Balducci implies that his proposal only literalizes a process already begun by which objects expropriate human relations in a commodity culture: “this Statue,” he says, “shall sing any Opera Air the Audience pleases to call for, and shall chant it over again and again, as long as they please to cry, Ancora, which is an Honour, I presume, they will as often confer upon my artificial Machines, as ever they did upon any of the natural Machines of Italy” (115).

At several points in the letter, with broad winks at his reader, Balducci implicitly explains the status of the castrati as “natural Machines” specifically in terms of their sexual incapacity, or their inability to reproduce, but he locates them throughout the essay in a world of new commercial phenomena. The construction of a human idol through animating fetishized commodities might remind us of Belinda, whose adorning objects take on a kind of human agency while her heart becomes a “moving Toyshop,” as C. E. Nicholson has shown.⁸ The emasculated male singer, here imagined as easily replaced with a purely artificial, well-marketed construction, might then represent also the woman who is only a site for the display of accumulated objects in her culture, deprived of any but mechanical voice and repeatedly accused of operating only on principles of imitation. Indeed, in what she calls an “Autobiographical Romance,” when Lady Mary describes her own courtship with Wortley, she imagines him seeing her as the kind of miraculously performing effigy that Balducci designs: at their first meeting, she says (referring to herself as Laetitia), “Tea came in before cards; and a new play being then acted, it was the first thing mention'd on which Laetitia took occasion to criticise in a manner so just and so knowing, he was as much amaz'd as if he had heard a piece of Waxwork talk on that subject.”⁹ In a culture in which the phallus serves as the guarantor of individual identity, the woman and the castrato share a position below human agency, reduced equally to living waxworks or “natural Machines,” although the woman is born into that position, the castrato violently thrust into it.

More subtly, however, the mutilation of the castrato's sexual identity might be said to mirror Lady Mary's own loss of sexual self in these essays—not her original lack of a phallus but her suppression of some defining organ of female identity—what she imagines she must give up to aspire to voice on a public stage. The conclusion of the essay detaches its fantasy about mechanical voice from the specific satiric object of the castrati, as Balducci proposes that, were the Pope to outlaw the practice of castration, he might create mechanical simulacra of other famous singers—even Orpheus might be brought upon the stage by his art, he boasts. Unlike the castrati, Orpheus, the mythic singer who could animate the very rocks and trees, seems a figure very far from any specter of the mechanical production of voice. Does Lady Mary's momentary fantasy of a performing Orpheus-machine cast suspicion on the authenticity of privileged male expression itself? Or does it serve, rather, as an image of her own necessarily mechanical, because female, imitation in these essays of masculine powers of voice?

Writing to Alexander Pope from Adrianople, Turkey, in 1717, twenty years before the publication of The Nonsense of Common-Sense, Lady Mary opened her letter with the speculation, “I dare say You expect at least something very new in this Letter after I have gone a Journey not undertaken by any Christian of some 100 years.” “The most remarkable Accident that happen'd to me,” she reports, “was my being very near overturn'd into the Hebrus.” In itself, this accident seems neither “something very new” nor so newsworthy—it is, after all, only a near event. But the particular site of Lady Mary's near-overturning is what makes it the most remarkable accident that has happened to her: “if I had much regard for the Glorys that one's Name enjoys after Death, I should certainly be sorry for having miss'd the romantic conclusion of swimming down the same River in which the Musical Head of Orpheus repeated verses so many ages since.” She then provides Pope with the Latin lines from Virgil's Georgics, which describe the passage of Orpheus's head down the Hebrus, the voice of that severed head still calling upon his lost love—“Eurydice! Eurydice!”—as it floats. And she concludes, “Who knows but some of your bright Wits might have found it a subject affording many poetical Turns, and have told the World in a Heroic Elegy that As equal were our Souls, so equal were our fates?”¹⁰

Though Lady Mary might have “near overturn'd” into an English river, that event could not have provided her with an opportunity to assert the equality of her soul with Orpheus's. As the accident has occurred in a distant and classical landscape, it provides an occasion to show off her wit and her learning to Pope—and, more profoundly, as she construes that accident, it becomes an occasion to lay claims for herself both to poetry and to passion equal to those of a famous male singer and lover. Were she to assume either the poetic power of Orpheus, or the strength of his passion for a lover—and perhaps, even specifically, the strength of his passion for a female lover—were she to imagine herself floating down the Hebrus, calling out a woman's name in a passion that survives death—now, that would be “something very new,” something “remarkable” indeed. Lady Mary's fantasy of a fusion between her own feminine identity and Orpheus's masculine one evokes the possibility of an “overturning” of gender categories perhaps more threatening than the near overturning of the boat itself in this excursion on the Hebrus. But we should not pass over the element of danger and violence in the narrative episode with which Lady Mary evokes this possibility: she embeds her assertion that “equal were our Souls” within the hypothetical situation of her own death, suggesting that her death might make her the subject for someone else's poetic inspiration, and she imagines her story coinciding with Orpheus's only when the poet has been both killed and dismembered. Perhaps Lady Mary would need to figure herself as a severed head, parted from her own female body, were she really to imagine herself as attaining Orpheus's poetic inspiration or his erotic passion, both of which are denied to the alternative insubstantiality or bathetic, commercialized materiality of the female body.

If Lady Mary elsewhere recognizes that the female body exists within the wide and entangling historical machine of fashionable vestments and of cultural in-vestments, in her writings from Turkey she works to imagine her temporary release from that machine by interpreting the culture and landscape around her as outside history, as a place where past and present, the literary and the natural, coexist. In the letter to Pope, she moves on from the story of Orpheus's and of her own fate to describe the countryside surrounding Adrianople as “a place where Truth for once furnishes all the Ideas of Pastorall”; where the customs, dances, musical instruments, and clothing described by Homer are preserved; and where Theocritus's pastorals prove to be merely “a plain image” of the peasants' actual “Way of Life” (331-32). Here and elsewhere in Lady Mary's letters from Turkey, she not only insists that the distinction between art and nature blurs there but also repeatedly participates in that phenomenon observed by anthropologist Johannes Fabian, by which Western travelers deny the contemporaneity of different cultures, coexisting in the same historical moment, and instead imagine the alien cultures they encounter as inhabiting the distant past of their own culture's history or prehistory.¹¹ These techniques of describing cultural difference in terms of time do, as Fabian's model would suggest, serve Lady Mary to distance her from the contemporaries she encounters in other countries, and to define those contemporaries in her own terms; but they also serve her particular needs to register, through observations of cultural difference, the essential historicity of gender roles, and to allow her to manipulate the machinery of those roles in some unexpected ways.

The last half of this same letter to Pope offers one good example of this, when Lady Mary provides Pope with an actual sample of Turkish art—a love poem written by the young sultana's suitor, with translations first by Lady Mary's Turkish acquaintance and then by herself. Commenting on the poem's features, she equates ancient and Turkish culture, reminding Pope of Boileau's observation that “we are never to judge of the Elevation of an Expression in an Ancient Author by the Sound it carrys with us, which may be extremely fine with them, at the same time it looks low or uncouth to us,” and warning him that “you must have the same Indulgence for all Oriental Poetry” (335). In fact, the feature that pleases her most in the poem is one that she feels may look “low or uncouth” to English people specifically because it defies, in the context of a love poem, their categorical sense of gender terms.

As translated by Lady Mary's Turkish acquaintance, the first two stanzas of the poem end with the lines, “Your Eyes are black and Lovely / But wild and disdainfull as those of a Stag,” and its third stanza incorporates the image of this refrain by referring to the sultana as “stag-ey'd.” Lady Mary presents Boileau's excuse for ancient or Oriental poetry after commenting on this image: “The Epithet of Stag-Ey'd (tho the Sound is not very agreable in English) pleases me extremely, and is, I think, a very lively image of the Fire and indifference in his mistrisse's Eyes.” Disagreeable as she feels it sounds in English, Lady Mary preserves the epithet in her own translation, and explains, “I could not forbear retaining the comparison of her Eyes to those of a Stag, tho perhaps the novelty of it may give it a burlesque sound in our Language” (337). What seems to keep Lady Mary circling around this simple epithet in her commentary—what seems to make her fear that it will seem “disagreable” or “low or uncouth” in English, at the same time that it pleases her extremely and forms an irresistible part of the poem's charm—is that the phrase constructs an image of the poet's mistress in terms of her likeness to an unequivocally male (and famously virile) animal, the stag. If the epithet has an unfortunate “burlesque sound” in English, perhaps it is because it might remind English readers of the comic device of cross-dressing employed on the English burlesque stage.

Acknowledging her uncertainties about the epithet in English, Lady Mary ends her letter with an apology and then a boast, both of which express something about what it would mean for her to think of herself as a “stag-eyed” woman. “I cannot determine upon the whole how well I have succeeded in the Translation. Neither do I think our English proper to express such violence of passion, which is very seldom felt among us; and we want those compound words which are very frequent and strong in the Turkish Language.—You see I am pritty far gone in Oriental Learning, and to say truth I study very hard.” Seven years earlier, during Lady Mary and Wortley's long, wrangling courtship in letters, some of their first exchanges had to do with her study of the Latin language, a crucial part of the education of eighteenth-century men but rarely of women, and Wortley had praised her intellect, saying, “Had I you, I should have at one view before me all the Charms of either sex met together” (26). However, Lady Mary's intellectual gifts also made him question the sincerity of her letters, for, he said, “Shoud you write to me it woud not be a great compliment. Every woman wou'd write instead of dressing for any lover …, that coud persuade herselfe she did it halfe so well as you” (52).

To this last suggestion, Lady Mary responded sharply that her accomplishments in writing could never present her in a flattering light. If Wortley's comparison of writing to the female art of dressing were just, she says, she would want to extend it in this way: “perhaps the Spanish dresse would become my face very well, yet the whole Town would condemn me for the highest Extravagance if I went to Court in't, tho' it improv'd me to a Miracle. There are a thousand things not ill in themselves which custom makes unfit to be done” (56). As she had written to Bishop Burnet the month before, “There is hardly a character in the World … more liable to universal ridicule than that of a Learned Woman” (45). While Lady Mary's analogy between a woman's learning or accomplishment in writing and an unfashionable foreign dress suggests that it is something that would be condemned as ridiculous by her own society, the analogy does hold open the possibility that there may be some place where her literary accomplishments would seem to suit her and even “improve” her “to a Miracle.”

In the same letter, when she responds to Wortley's complaints that she has not expressed sufficient partiality to him in their written exchanges, Lady Mary uses a more extreme comparison to visual appearance to register the unacceptability of passion as well as of verbal ability in women. “You would have me say I am violently in Love,” she writes. “That is, finding you think better of me than you desire, you would have me give you a just cause to contemn me. … I should not think you more unreasonable if you was in love with my Face and ask'd me to disfigure it to make you easy. … amongst all the popish Saints and Martyrs I never read of one whose charity was sublime enough to make themselves deformd or ridiculous to restore their Lovers to peace and quietnesse” (56). No wonder Lady Mary repeatedly insists to Wortley in this correspondence that she is unacquainted with passion. For she suggests here that any expression of passion by a woman is so egregious a violation of decorum in her culture that it would be the equivalent not simply of appearing in outlandish clothing, but of making oneself deformed, or permanently disfiguring one's own face. For Lady Mary to cry out longingly, “Wortley! Wortley!”—much less “Eurydice! Eurydice!”—would be for her to mutilate her own face, if not to sever her own head; and she elsewhere equates expressions of erotic passion by women with death (35).

Thus, when she ends her comments to Pope on the Turkish poem by saying that she does not think “our English proper to express such violence of passion, which is very seldom felt amongst us,” her general estimate of English people encompasses a more specific reference to a particularly intractable problem of expression for English women. Though she is uncertain about the success of her translation, the act of rendering the Turkish poem into English, giving voice in her own language to the male suitor's passionate words, gives her temporary access to a passion that, in her own culture, might seem as egregious or paradoxical for a woman as eyes likened to a stag's. Lady Mary feels particularly, she says, the lack within the English language of “those compound words which are very frequent and strong in the Turkish Language”—the Turkish language and culture, apparently, can combine “stag” with “woman” and have it seem “extremely fine” or “elevated,” while in English, a compounding of different terms, as of different categories, can only seem awkward, burlesque, even disfiguring. Significantly, one of the few real alterations Lady Mary makes in her own translation is her replacement of a reference in the original to the Persian legend of the nightingale, known for her passionate love for the rose, with a familiar English literary reference to Philomela—a victim of rape and mutilation, rather than a legendary representative of female erotic passion. The latter figure, it seems, does not appear within the realm of English “cultural literacy”; but Lady Mary's voyage into Turkish learning and Turkish life seems to serve her by disrupting her own familiar oppositions of man and woman, past and present, art and nature, even death and life.

Nonetheless, it is her own culture's vocabulary of sexual roles that Lady Mary draws upon as she translates her experience in Turkey into English, and even when she reconstrues her female identity within what she calls “the other world” of Turkish life, she does so primarily by compounding conventional masculine and feminine roles rather than by reimagining either of them. In several episodes, Lady Mary encounters the beauty and the erotic desirability of Turkish women not as the literary subject of a Turkish love poem but as an immediate physical presence. Even then, Lady Mary seems to formulate her erotic and aesthetic response as a kind of translation from male texts—and a translation from traditional English male texts as well as Turkish ones.

In the most famous of her Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Mary reports her visit to the women's baths in Adrianople.¹² Even before she describes her entrance into the baths, she prepares us for the highly textualized and allusive nature of the experience to follow: at some length, she describes her passage to the baths in a special Turkish coach that is decorated inside with “poetical mottos” and painted flowers, and from which one can look out and see the world while remaining entirely hidden, like a reader gazing upon a text. After brief and businesslike remarks on the design of the baths and the general civility of the women there, when Lady Mary turns to describing the appearance of the women “in the state of nature,” or, as she says, “in plain English, stark naked,” she finds herself turning toward the world of European literature and art.

She begins by projecting the Muslim women in the baths back into Judeo-Christian prehistory, as recounted by a seventeenth-century English man: “They Walk'd and mov'd,” she attests, “with the same majestic Grace which Milton describes of our General Mother” (314). Quickly, however, she relocates the women within the distant past, placing them within the world of classical mythology, as recreated by Renaissance Italian painters rather than by an English writer, as she likens their “exact proportions” to those of the goddesses and Graces depicted by Guido and Titian.¹³ Having represented her experience of the women first by means of this rapid litany of male literary and artistic renderings of women, she pauses to express the pleasure she feels in turning her attention on this occasion from female clothing and female faces, both potentially disfigured by any divergence from custom, to female bodies themselves. “If twas the fashion to go naked,” she says, “the face would be hardly observ'd. I perceiv'd that the Ladys with the finest skins and most delicate shapes had the greatest share of my admiration, thô their faces were sometimes less beautifull than those of their companions.” Whereas, when she identified with Orpheus in his posthumous passage down the Hebrus, Lady Mary evoked a fantasy about being only a head, released from the sexual fate encoded in her body, she here expresses pleasure in the female body as it appears unmediated by any fashion except the “fashion” of “going naked,” and undominated by the status of the face to which it is attached.¹⁴ Once she has acknowledged more directly, in this way, the immediate presence of the female bodies before her, Lady Mary's next allusion to an artistic representation of these bodies brings them up sharply into her own historical moment. “To tell you the truth,” she confesses, “I had wickedness enough to wish secretly that Mr. Gervase [that is, the English portrait painter, her own contemporary] could have been there invisible. I fancy it would have very much improv'd his art to see so many fine Women naked.”¹⁵ Lady Mary's wish not only registers the contemporaneity of the Turkish women and herself but also involves a close identification between their bodies and her own—for the portrait-painter she chooses to wish were present to observe these women is one who had, seven years before, painted Lady Mary herself.

When Charles Jervas painted the young Lady Mary's portrait in 1710, he portrayed her in quaint pastoral costume and posture, holding a shepherd's staff and attended by a lamb.¹⁶ This depiction released Lady Mary's body from the social framing of contemporary English fashion, but only into the highly conventionalized space of portraiture's pastoral cliches. Lady Mary repeatedly describes her experience in Turkey as an encounter with a pastoral existence that is alive and present rather than purely literary or artistic. However, her rendering of the world of the baths as, simultaneously, a physical world and a textual or an artistic one ultimately works to de-realize her own body, even as she struggles to realize the immediate presence of the bathers. Finding herself in the position of the observer and interpreter of female bodies rather than that of the observed and represented, Lady Mary can only imagine that position as a male one, and she fantasizes herself as replaced in the baths by an invisible male artist. The problem of the sex of her own body comes back suddenly, though, in the final portion of the letter, as the Turkish women invite Lady Mary to undress as well.

This invitation challenges and so destroys the delicate balance Lady Mary has been maintaining in what precedes, the balance created by a female viewer gazing through the lens of masculine literary and artistic tradition. Could her body in any sense reveal her fantasy identification with male artists in this scene, the results would be fatal, for, as she concludes her letter, “'Tis no less than Death for a Man to be found in one of these places.” But if it were to reveal her physical identity with the Turkish women as merely another woman, she would abruptly be reduced to being an object of vision, just like them, rather than a privileged viewer. Lady Mary excuses herself from the invitation to undress “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.”

Abruptly, Lady Mary's female and English body returns to her, and returns to her as most rigidly constructed by English fashion and masculine social imperatives. At the same time, she is catapulted from her fantasy of a place outside history into a sense of urgent present schedules and time: “I … 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.” The sense Lady Mary expresses here of English female dress as a kind of machine, and part of the larger historical machinery of patriarchy, helps explain her great interest in the alternative conventions of female dress that she encountered in Turkey: she speaks with admiration and envy not only of women's freedom from dress in the all-female social gathering of the baths but also of the complete concealment and disguise allowed by the veils and loose draping clothing that Muslim women wear when out in the public world of men (328-29).¹⁷ Lady Mary also expresses great enthusiasm for the Turkish outfit she purchased for herself in Adrianople, which she describes to her sister by combining English terms for articles of both female and male dress, saying that it included “a pair of drawers” and what she refers to as a “wastcoat.”¹⁸ Back in England, however, her Turkish outfit became merely another costume in which she might be represented by male artists within the frame of conventional portraiture, neatly substituting an Orientalist look for the pastoral one in which Jervas had first painted her.¹⁹ This substitution is particularly visible in a 1719-20 portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller that nearly identically reproduces the composition of Jervas's earlier one, but with Lady Mary in Turkish rather than pastoral guise.

The actual Turkish outfit remained, nonetheless, in Lady Mary's own possession, as did her sense of the significance of “the other world” she had encountered while traveling in Turkey. Twenty years later in her life, when Lady Mary left her passionless marriage with Wortley to pursue a bisexual Venetian man, Count Algarotti, into Italy, she would take her Turkish outfit with her into exile, and would formulate the erotic passion she discovered in middle age in terms of the exotic experiences of her youth. Abandoning her early claims that she was incapable of passion, she frequently expressed her love to Algarotti in images of herself as a fervent male lover. Thus, she still could conceive that passion only as it was doubly framed by masculine roles and by the exoticism of foreign lands. Italy (and France), where she was to live for twenty-three years, served her as a kind of mediating port between Eastern and Western realms, and when she moved there, her friend Lord Hervey wrote her that in Italy with Algarotti she might “enjoy [Mahomet's] Paradise upon earth”²⁰—a sensual paradise that, according to eighteenth-century English writers, only the spirits of departed men were permitted to enjoy.

Notes

1. “Moral Epistle II. To a Lady. Of the Characters of Women” (1735), lines 21-28. The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).

2. Louis A. Landa, “Pope's Belinda, The General Emporie of the World, and the Wondrous Worm,” South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (1971): 215-35, and “Of Silkworms and Farthingales and the Will of God,” Studies in the Eighteenth Century 2, ed. R. F. Brissenden (1973): 259-77; Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985).

3. Laura Brown, “Reading Race and Gender: Jonathan Swift,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (1990): 425-43; Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).

4. I am grateful to Mrs. Frank Sussler, curator of prints at the Lewis Walpole Library, for calling this very interesting print to my attention.

5. Brown, “Reading Race and Gender,” 426-34.

6. Robert Halsband made the attribution of this poem to Lady Mary in “‘The Lady's Dressing-Room’ Explicated by a Contemporary,” The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis Landa, ed. Henry Knight Miller, Eric Rothstein, and G. S. Rousseau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 225-31. I have consulted the copy of it held in Yale University's Beinecke Library.

7. The Nonsense of Common-Sense, no. 6, in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 132. Further references to these essays will be provided parenthetically in the text by page number in this edition.

8. C. E. Nicholson, “A World of Artefacts: The Rape of the Lock as Social History,” Literature and History: A New Journal for the Humanities 5 (1979): 183-93.

9. “Autobiographical Romance,” in Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, 78.

10. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:330. Subsequent quotations from letters are cited by page number from this volume of this edition.

11. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

12. In the last three years, this letter has been frequently discussed in a variety of contexts. Joseph W. Lew provides one extended and very interesting reading of it in “Lady Mary's Portable Seraglio,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (1991): 432-50. He argues that Lady Mary's letters from Turkey are instructive because they illustrate “not a monolithic, Saidian Orientalism, but a number of discourses competing for hegemony” (435). Other discussions include: Elizabeth A. Bohls, “Aesthetics and Orientalism in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 23 (forthcoming); Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 312; Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918 (London: Macmillan, 1992), 88-92; Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 152-54; Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “The Woman's Coffee House, the Painter's Harem: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Origins of Ingres' Bain Turc.” I am grateful to Professors Bohls and Yeazell for sharing their work on Lady Mary with me in manuscript.

13. Both Pointon and Bohls discuss Lady Mary's use of these literary and artistic allusions, which Bohls calls “the crux of Montagu's rhetorical strategy,” to describe the women at the baths. They come to quite different conclusions, however, about the effects of the allusions. Bohls argues that the allusions work to “de-eroticize [Montagu's] readers' imaginary gaze,” to associate that gaze with the emerging ideal of disinterested aesthetic contemplation (“Aesthetics and Orientalism”); but Pointon asserts that they serve specifically to sexualize “naked eastern woman,” noting that the reference to Milton invokes one “locus classicus of female sexuality” and that Guido and Titian are “artists renowned for the sensuousness of their handling” (Hanging the Head, 153).

14. Throughout her discussion of visual depictions of Lady Mary, Pointon emphasizes an aspect of Lady Mary's physical experience and appearance that I have neglected here: the severe marking of her face by smallpox in 1715, which was said to have damaged her husband's political career along with her personal pride by making Lady Mary “unsuitable as an object of the … royal gaze” (144). The notion of a society in which “the face would be hardly observed” would have this particular personal meaning for Lady Mary, then, along with more general ones. Pointon argues that Lady Mary employed the refracted image of herself in the “mirror” of “Turkish womanhood” (and specifically, the painted representations of herself in Turkish dress) to “negotiate the relationship between the actual and the idealized female body,” allowing the “scarred (misrecognized) and ego-damaged” subject to re-enter “the public domain, and in triumph” (Hanging the Head, 144, 151).

15. Note Ingres's fulfillment, of a sort, of Lady Mary's wish, over one hundred years later, in Le Bain Turc, based on this passage from her letters. But the position of masculine voyeur constructed by Lady Mary's comments is there greatly heightened, and the women's own erotic and aesthetic responses are reduced to a matter of dazed, sensuous gropings.

    In her subtle and illuminating account of the relation between Ingres's painting and its sources in Lady Mary's letters, Yeazell notes two striking ways that Ingres departs from Lady Mary's account: he radically privatizes a scene that Lady Mary makes clear takes place within a specifically public, though all-female, institution, so that the public space of the baths merges in his version with the private space of a harem; and (relatedly) he eliminates the figure of the Western visitor, Lady Mary, in his rendering of the scene (“The Women's Coffee House”).

16. The 1710 portrait of Lady Mary in shepherdess's dress is attributed, although not definitively assigned, to Charles Jervas by John Kerslake, the editor of Early Georgian Portraits (London: Oxford University Press, 1977). Both the 1710 portrait and the Kneller portrait of 1719-20 mentioned below are reproduced in volume 2 of this work.

17. Lady Mary's interest in the “paradoxically” greater freedom of the Muslim women, in their required veils, has been frequently noted by commentators; see Garber (Vested Interests, 313); Melman (Women's Orients, 85-89); Pointon (Hanging the Head, 151); and Yeazell. Melman and Yeazell disagree, however, about the nature of the freedom claimed by Lady Mary for the Turkish women, and apparently envied and yearned for herself. Melman emphasizes what she sees as the essentially sexual nature of that liberty, whereas Yeazell suggests (more accurately, I think) the importance Lady Mary placed upon mobility and access to public spaces, in themselves and not only as means to pursue sexual aims.

18. Garber has noted this effect, commenting that “this toilette …, though entirely feminine, is also virtually identical to the items worn by men, as Lady Mary's ‘translations’ into an English sartorial lexicon … make clear” (Vested Interests, 312). Aaron Hill suggests that the English in general may have interpreted Turkish dress as less clearly divided by sex than English clothing: in A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1709), he comments that “Their Womens Dress at Home is just the same, in Britches, Slippers, Shirts, and Wastcoats, with the Mens before describ'd” (95). As Bohls has observed, European travelers (such as Jean Dumont and Paul Rycaut) routinely rendered Turkish men as de-masculinized in a variety of ways, from their dress to their sexual habits and their manner of urination (“Aesthetics and Orientalism”).

19. In her chapter-length account of portraits of Lady Mary, Pointon explores the possibility that “Montagu at some level controlled the images of her produced by … established society artists who depicted her as a mature adult,” including the group of at least seven portraits of her in Turkish-style dress. I am sympathetic to Pointon's effort to question critical assumptions that do “not allow any manner of organizing function for woman in the production and deployment of her own image,” although the status of that active, controlling, or “organizing function” finally remains, it seems to me, as equivocal in her analysis of the portraiture and letters of Lady Mary as in mine.

20. Letter of August 17, 1739, quoted in Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 181-82.