Lady Mary Wortley MontaguBesprekingen

La imagen que Europa compuso en el siglo XVIII de la cultura otomana ya no fue la misma tras esta sorprendente correspondencia. Desmintiendo relatos de otros viajeros, cubierta con el yasmak [asmak], o velo turco, esta inglesa, no solo escribe la crónica de los bazares, las mezquitas, las ceremonias de la corte o la vida en las calles, sino que da noticia de la vacuna sobre la viruela o desvela la intimidad del harén y la voluptuosidad de los hamanes como ningún europeo lo había hecho antes desatando un imaginario que transforma las artes y alienta la estética orientalista. En el siglo de grandes damas e ilustres salonnières, la inteligencia de Lady Montagu asombró a Voltaire que la consideraba por su cosmopolitismo muy superior a madame de Sévigné y sabido es que el pintor Ingres, un siglo después, encontró en sus prolijas descripciones del haremlik inspiración para sus cuadros de odaliscas y escenas de harén. Su energía y humor sutil aún provoca entre nosotros una fascinación intacta como nos recuerda Juan Goytisolo.

Read for my course. These had their moments, but mostly it was like some one describing their holiday snaps to you in excruciating detail.

In 1716, the 27 year old author accompanied her ambassador husband to his posting in Constantinople. In a series of letters to the folks back home, she exclaims over the experienceof their progress through Europe - from the Court at Vienna, , through the snowy plains of Hungary, with their 'vast quantity of wolves' and on to Serbia. She writes of the all-powerful janissaries, under whom the monarch is but a puppet.
They remain for sometime in Adrianople (Edirne) - where the author encounters a 'new world'. As one of the first female visitors, she is able to discover the world of the harem, Turkish baths etc. In order to go about unmarked, she adopts Turkish drress; she observes that Turkish women enjoy more liberty than the English....all veiled up, they now have "entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger of discovery" since "'tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her". This coupled with their significantly greater control over their money than English women, cause her to pronounce them "the only free people in the empire."
Her letters contain all manner of historical treasures- the Turks had invented a king of precursor to smallpox innoculation ("engrafting" ); camels; interior decor; visits to the seraglio; a great parade ...
At last they continue on to Constantinople...an allergic reaction to cosmetic 'balm of Mecca'; the fire risk of the Turkish heating system, the tandir stove,a meeting with the melancholy Sultana Hafise, coerced into remarriage after being widowd; mosques and palaces...
The letters conclude on their return to Dover, some 18 months on.Montague concludes that since, now "I must be contented with out=r scanty allowance of daylight, (may I) forget the enlivening sun of Constantinoiple."
Quite an interesting read.

Lady Mary's personal life was very complicated but her letters draw a veil over all that. She focusses on local colour, decorating details and other topics likely to interest her correspondents, latterly her married daughter. The letters from Constantinople are of course historically important. Otherwise they simply give us a picture of a remarkable woman. I am somewhat reminded of Mehitabel the cat. "Toujours gai, Archy, toujours gai."

The author of this series of letters was a feminist,a traveller and the wife of the ambassador to Constantinople. She travelled there in 1716 with her husband on a not very successful visit. These letters were written from various places on the way,including Vienna,Adrianple and Constantinople itself. They are notable for their descriptive passages and their not always politicly correct comments. In the course of these letters she describes not only the various countries that she passes through,but the people she meets,especially the women of the harem, for whom she admires greatly. The writer constantly tells her corespondents that she is not going to fill her letters with descriptions of buildings and suchlike,neither will she tell of her husbands embassy. She informs them that all this is well known already and that she prefers to write of things fresh and new. In short Lady Mary is a letter writer of the first order.
A marvelous selection by a wonderful writer. I look forward to finding more of her letters in a more complete form elsewhere.½

Adventurous minx that she was, Lady Mary took off from England and spent a year in the Sultan's court with her husband, the new ambassador--or more accurately, she gallivanted around the whole Ottoman Empire while he was doing ambassador stuff. Lots to like here: her generous attitude toward the oriental Other, extending even to "they might actually be doing things a lot better than us in many ways" (inoculations; freedom of womanity--this has obviously changed, but it is certainly worth pointing out to the people who think there is something intrinsically anti-woman about Islam). Also her efforts with the language and poetry, the way she always gets in a dig at the Catholics, and her fulsome descriptions of the ladies she visits,their banquets and joie de vivre. I like all the classical tidbits as well. There is too much talk about clothes and childbearing and not enough about food and politics, but I can't expect everyone to be interested in exactly the things I am.


EDIT: Per my review of Irene, I am copypasting in a little bit of something I write for class that deals with Turkish Embassy Letters in greater detail than my review above.


*****

In aligning Lady Mary with Aaron Hill and David Jones, I just want to suggest that they all had an openness to Ottoman culture that isn’t present in all of their contemporaries. Lady Mary really belongs in a class of her own, both as a person, and in terms of the access and perspective that her being a woman made possible on her trip.


She would have been 28 when she arrived in Constantinople; significant events in her life up till that point included eloping with her husband, becoming a great hit in society when she moved to the city to join him, starting a poetic career as well as a career of relationships of various degrees of scandalousness with several notable men, including Alexander Pope (and one of the very interesting things in Turkish Embassy Letters that I think doesn’t have much to do with the “Oriental Other” is how her tone shifts from reader to reader—casual with her sister, contentious with the Abbe Conti, cagey and eager to impress with Pope). She had given birth to a son and had smallpox, which had somewhat marred her famous looks.


Her letters were first published after her death in 1762 as Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e written during her travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, to persons of distinction, men of letters, &c., in different parts of Europe. Which contain, among other curious relations, accounts of the policy and manners of the Turks, drawn from sources that have been inaccessible to other travelers. Marketed on the basis of this “access,” they were a literary phenomenon. Lady Mary herself was well aware that access was her selling point; she reflects on it in her early letter about the hamam or “bagnio,” noting that “’tis no less than death for a man to be found in one of these places” (60).


The bagnio scene also introduces two related recurrent themes of Lady Mary’s. The first is the divide between what freedoms are permitted to women in Turkey and in England. (This seems like a good place to note here that for the most part Lady Mary only discusses the people she comes into contact with—mostly upper-class women and their slaves.) In Lady Mary’s analysis, Turkish women, in their circumscribed world, have great freedom compared to Englishwomen—freedom from the male gaze and unwanted male attention, as she makes explicit on page 71 with her discussion of the ferace and veil, saying: “’tis impossible for the most jealous husband to know his wife when he meets her, and no man dare either touch or follow a woman in the street.” But also freedom from the injunction to productive activity, be that work or the social life of a society lady in London. She repeatedly paints Turkey as a Lotus Land, concluding (142) that with a “sensual declaration” that she would rather be “a rich effendi with all his ignorance than Sir Isaac Newton with all his knowledge.”


The second major theme introduced in the bagnio is the corporeality or bodilyness of the Turks, and especially the Turkish women. Lady Mary’s observation that “if it was the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observed” (59), besides being hilarious, effaces the Turk’s pretension to civilized behaviour in a European context where civilization is still predicated on the disciplining and secreting of the body—as foregrounded by the Turkish women’s assumption that Lady Mary’s complicated undergarments must be put on her by her husband to control her. Ultimately Turkish women underwrite their freedoms with their bodies, as Lady Mary discusses on page 107, by remaining pregnant all the time—in sharp contrast to the Catholic sacralizing of virginity, as she needles Abbe Conti about.


There is a wistfulness in Lady Mary’s presentation of the unbound Turkish female body that not only recalls her own strictures as an English lady and her attempts to escape them with adventures, eccentricities or affairs. She romanticizes the lot of Turkish women in a way that seems to shade into spurious exoticism, as with her discussion of anonymous assignations between ladies and their lovers at Jewish shops on page 71—an activity that cannot have been as routine as she describes it. Lady Mary’s focus on women’s sexuality in her letters, combined with her bohemian lifestyle, caused her to be maligned in her later years as sexually insatiable and a lesbian—Pope attacked her viciously in print as “Sappho” after a falling out between them. Later women travel writers in the Ottoman Empire were at pains to distance themselves from Lady Mary’s sensuality—one, Julia Pardoe, in 1839 wrote, “I saw none of that unnecessary and wanton exposure described by Lady Mary Montagu. Either the fair Ambassadress was present at a peculiar ceremony, or the Turkish ladies have become more delicate and fastidious in their ideas of propriety.”


Lady Mary does have her own ideas of English propriety, expressing only guarded approval of Turkish food, music, and poetry. Her Whiggishness seems fully compatible with engaging in slavery apologetics, although on a kind of anti-hypocrisy ticket, saying women “are bought and sold as publicly and infamously in all our Christian great cities” (130). Still, her enthusiasm for all things Turkish (including smallpox inoculations), is muted or at least modulated by her perpetuation of the Othering stereotypes of torpor, sensuality, brutality (as in her descripton of the mutilated minister on p. 66), and exoticism (shading into commodity fetishism, as in her descriptions of the Turkish ladies outfits on e.g. 90).


What is not evident in Lady Mary’s letters is any concern with the heretical Turk. On p. 62, and again, she compares the religion of the Turkish effendis to respectable Whiggish deism, and the “Zeidi, Kudi, Jabari, etc,” sects to “the Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist.” The only place we get a feeling that a foreign element is trespassing on sacred ground is when she enters the Aegean Sea and gets angry contemplating the impossibility of visiting Sappho on Lesbos in the Morning and Homer on Chios in the afternoon. It’s unclear what relationship this nostalgia for the lost Classical world is intended to have with Lady Mary’s admiration for Ottoman culture, or her description on p. 109of Greek priests as “the greatest scoundrels in the universe,” but it is a thread that is extended in a more polemical way in Irene.½

Lady Mary W. Montagu, qui avait épousé son mari à condition quil la fasse voyager, écrit cette lettre pendant son voyage daller à Istanbul où lord Montagu vient dêtre nommé ambassadeur.

Ce petit volume (il ne contient quune sélection de lettres) tient dans la poche intérieure d'une veste. Il est intitulé LIslam au coeur, ce qui est un peu trompeur: lady Montagu s'occupe fort peu de théologie mais surtout de moeurs et de son propre enchantement. Fin, intelligent, délicieux.

I just love this book - one of my treasures. Lady M, an indefatigable 18th century "lady traveller' (in the days when The Grand Tour was pretty much an upper class male pursuit), lived in Constantinople with her husband, the British Ambassador to the Sultan's court. This is a collection of letters she wrote, but it is much more. It provides an utterly unique insight into a culture long gone, but it reads with contemporary insight. That she was a woman enables a different perspective on things such as the Harem (which she visited) and Turkish baths. Being a woman didn;t stop our intrepid explorer from dressing as a man to get a look inside Aya Sofya!

Includes an introductory essay by Dervla Murphy, herself a great traveller.

Highly recommended.

The author was a librarian, polyglot, poet, traveler, painter, gardiner, architect, observer, politician, introduced inoculation to England 80 years before Jenner, married (eloped) for love, formed the first feminist brigades, and raised fine children. Her letters are meaty and often amorous.

This volume is a selection of letters written over a half century from her girlhood and 2-year courtship (1708 passim)

Travelling through the wartorn Balkans with her husband on what proved to be a wholly useless diplomatic mission to Constantinople, Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) left a vivid, informative, clever account of her adventures in the mysterious, sophisticated culture of Ottoman palaces, bathing places and courts which - even as her husband's career was falling apart - she could not have enjoyed more.

The Turkish Embassy Letters is a gem. I think I learned of them through something that Michael Dirda wrote. The letters were written over two years, between 1716-1718 when Lady Mary was the wife of the British Ambassador to Turkey; they cover her trips to and from Turkey and the period she lived there. The original assignment should have been for five years, but her husband was recalled for being too sympathetic to the Turks in trying to mediate peace between the Turks and the Austrians. Lady Mary spends no time on politics, but rather turns a very discerning eye to Turkish society, architecture, life styles and mores, almost always to the benefit of the Turks in comparison to the British.

Lady Mary was an interesting person. She pretty well educated herself; was very well read by fourteen; and taught herself Latin so that she could read Ovid. She was very much of the aristocracy, and was engaged to the Honourable Clotworthy Skeffington (what a name!), whom she threw over to elope with Wortley. She and Wortely did marry, but it seems that the passion of the romance did not carry over to the marriage and they had a rather indifferent relationship. In one letter she upbraids him for never asking how his son is doing.

Anita Desai wrote the introduction to this edition of the Letters, and makes the point that it would be a mistake to see Lady Mary as a 20th-century career woman born too early into a restrictive society. She was a contradictory character, summed up by one acquaintance as, "one of the most extraordinary shining characters in the world; but she shines like a comet; she is all irregular and always wandering. She is the most wise, most imprudent; loveliest, disagreeablest; best natured, cruellest woman in the world".

She did, however, have an eye for detail, an adventurous spirit, and an ability to write. She could also be very forward-looking: in Turkey she learned of the practice of inoculation for smallpox, had her children inoculated, and argued for it when she returned to England. Her description of one of her friends would apply equally to herself: "She is very curious after the manners of other countries and has not that partiality for her own so common to little minds."

I find it interesting to reach back, almost 300 years, to read these letters and to see the echoes of human relations and concerns that are still with us today. Lady Mary, for instance, on fashion:

When one considers impartially the merit of a rich suit of clothes in most places, the respect and the smiles of favour it procures, not to speak of the envy and the signs that it occasions (which is very often the principal charm to the wearer), one is forced to confess that there is need of an uncommon understanding to resist the temptation of pleasing friends and mortifying rivals, and that it is natural to young people to fall into a folly which betrays them to that want of money which the source of a thousand basenesses.

Things have not changed a whole lot with school kids having to have $100 designer T-shirts for school!

It is also amusing to watch Lady Mary skirt around the accepted language of her day in trying to describe some aspects of Turkish life. For instance, a dance put on in her honour which was:

...very different from what I had seen before. Nothing could be more artful or more proper to raise certain ideas; the tunes so soft, the motions so languishing, accompanied with pauses and dying eyes, half falling back and the recovering themselves in so artful a manner that I am very positive the coldest and most rigid prude upon earth could not have looked upon them without thinking of something not to be spoke of.

A very enjoyable book.

NA