A Worldly Woman of Words: 'The Turkish Embassy Letters' by Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu
First, then,
a potted history: Born in 1689, Lady Mary was the daughter of the Duke of
Kingston. She eloped with politician Edward Wortley-Montagu in 1712. Aged twenty-six she contracted smallpox, from which she barely survived, a disease to which she
lost her brother. In 1716 her husband was appointed Ambassador to the Ottoman
Empire, and Lady Mary travelled with him to Constantinople. It was in Turkey
that she witnessed inoculation against smallpox via a method called variolation
(basically rubbing material from smallpox pustules into scratches made on the
skin) being carried out by Ottoman women, and was keen to have her children
inoculated. Her son was apparently the first English person to undergo this
treatment. Lady Mary, who publicised the procedure, was heavily criticised at
the time as she was seen as risking her children’s lives. Her efforts regarding
immunisation were later overshadowed when Edward Jenner created a smallpox
vaccine. A writer and poet herself, Lady Mary was actively involved with
eighteenth-century literary circles, including figures such as Alexander Pope,
with whom she later fell out rather spectacularly (possibly because he declared
his love for her and was rebuffed, but no one really knows). Later in life,
Lady Mary became estranged from her husband as she fell for a Venetian thirty
years her junior. Despite the affair ending within a few years, Lady Mary spent
much of the rest of her life in Italy in a kind of self-imposed exile. She
returned to England shortly before her death, aged seventy-three, in 1762.
Aside from
her involvement with encouraging immunisation, Lady Mary is remembered for the letters
she wrote detailing her experiences in Turkey whilst accompanying her husband
on his diplomatic posting. The Turkish Embassy Letters come from two
letter-books copied out by Lady Mary and another, unknown, copyist, and we
cannot assume they are facsimiles of real letters that were actually sent. However,
Lady Mary, in common with many high-ranking individuals of her era, did
maintain regular correspondence with other aristocrats and literary figures. The
Letters we have today are probably revised versions by Lady Mary into
which she injected elements of drama and titillation in order to make certain
points and draw in an unspecified audience, most likely her friends and
contemporaries, at least initially.
This was a
time when The Arabian Nights had just been published in English for the
first time and was hugely popular. There’s a lot one could say about Lady
Mary’s letters, but what are perhaps most interesting, and indeed pertinent to
our own times, are her descriptions of the
real-life East which she used to highlight universalities and, conversely,
gender inequities. Citing the example of a Turkish official who ‘is spoke of as
a libertine…[whose] wife won’t see him’, Lady Mary argues that ‘the manners of
mankind do not differ…widely’. However, her use of (in all senses) rich imagery portrays an exotic
world: a Sultana wears ‘large loops of diamonds’ and an ‘emerald as big as a
turkey egg’, trappings that Lady Mary acknowledges will seem to her reader ‘too
like…the Arabian tales’. Her claim that The Arabian Nights provides ‘a
real representation of the manners’ in the Ottoman Empire seems designed to
tantalise, yet Lady Mary
emphasises the accuracy of her account, writing that ‘nothing seems to me so agreeable as
truth’, as distinct from ‘the falsehood of a great part of what you find in
authors’.
Lady Mary’s
gender granted her, unlike male writers, admittance to the seraglio (harem), allowing
her to compare the lives of Eastern and Western women. She compares the women’s baths to the English,
male domain of the ‘coffee-house’, suggesting commonality between peoples as
well as solidarity between women in such places. On one level, her description of Turkish women ‘lead[ing] a life of
uninterrupted pleasure…bathing…spending money and inventing new fashions’ seems
shallow and determined by international commonalities of upper-class privilege
rather than anything else. However, Lady Mary claims that
Turkish ladies ‘have more liberty’ than Western females, challenging
stereotypes of the harem women arising from The Arabian Nights, and
simultaneously criticising Western cultural norms. Her description of her visit
to a Turkish bath is full of titillating language: the ladies are ‘stark
naked’, the heat in the bagnio makes it ‘impossible to stay there with one’s
clothes on’ and Lady Mary is ‘at last forced to open [her] skirt and show…[her]
stays.’ Confinement of the Turkish ladies in the harem contrasts with the
vision of Lady Mary ‘locked up’ in her underwear, especially in terms of men’s
control of women’s bodies. Nevertheless, Lady Mary asserts that veiled women
enjoy the ‘entire liberty of following their inclinations without danger of
discovery’ and ‘seldom let their gallants know who they are’, resulting in ‘the
number of faithful wives [being] very small’. However, notions of freedom achieved
through the ‘masquerade’ offered by the veil are contradicted as she
acknowledges that ‘their husbands…revenge them if they are discovered’ and
writes about a murder
victim left unidentified due to the practice of veiling. There are obvious paradoxes here: the very
inaccessibility of the veiled woman presents an alluring prospect alongside
the idea of women achieving freedom through concealing their femininity.
Lady Mary’s Letters tantalise
and inform simultaneously. So, is she engaging in what we would today see as a kind of
Orientalist voyeurism and a kind of exploitation, using romantically exciting imagery of a foreign world to provide comparative
instruction regarding East and West? And, rather than expressing solidarity
with Turkish women, is Lady Mary naïvely assuming the identity of the masculine
coloniser observing a feminised East?
It's easy in the present to disapprove of the past
and those who inhabited it. Instinctively we form judgements based on our own
cultural context, too. Maybe Lady Mary did just the same in the 1700s. There’s
universality for you. The very fact that we still wrangle with these questions
of culture and gender makes her exceptional writings all the more valuable. She
can still inform, she can still entertain, and she can still be controversial.
A remarkable woman, indeed.
The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) By Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Author) Daniel O’Quinn (Contributor) Teresa Heffernan (Contributor) ISBN: 9781554810420 / 1554810426
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