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LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU IN THE HAMMAM:
MASQUERADE, WOMANLINESS, AND
LEVANTINIZATION
BY SRINIVAS ARAVAMUDAN
Srinivas Aravamudan 71
frequently generalized in a freefloating fashion by post-Lacanian
psychoanalytical feminists, who partly overlook the involvement of
atavistic racist fantasies with more modern professionalist contexts in
the original analysand's psychic structure. Riviere characterizes her
analysand's masquerade as "the 'double-action' of an obsessive act"
that involves the fantasy of aggression and deference to two kinds of
threats: academic father-figures in the real world and phantasmatic
"negro" attackers in the imagined one. Montagu's racial typing of the
North African women she meets, juxtaposed with the pre-
professionalized rivalries with travel writers that inflect her views on
Turkish women that I will discuss, similarly bring out the "double-
action" of her obsessive authorial masquerade. Riviere compares the
disingenuousness of the masquerading woman to "a thief who will
turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not
the stolen goods." We will see that Montagu's actions in the hammam,
policing herself scrupulously, even as she titillates her male readers,
suggest such a conscious disavowal.7 In what follows, I will concen-
trate on the implications of Montagu's levantinization of Ottoman
aristocratic womanhood and her multiple uses of masquerade, and
conclude with some remarks about classicist recuperation, which I
interpret as symbolic inoculation.
FEMALE TRAVELERS AND CULTURAL RELATIVISM
Srinivas Aravamudan 73
female spirit of Contradiction, to tell you the falsehood of a great
part of what you find in authors" (L, 405). Montagu claims to possess
anthropological skills of cultural decipherment far superior to those
of her predecessors.
In this confident vein, Montagu often casually reveals an excellent
grasp of the already extant travel writing in French and English on
Turkey. She could, if she wanted, "with little trouble, turn over
Knolles and Sir Paul Rycaut to give you a list of Turkish Emperours"
(L, 405).1o However, she is more inclined to demystify others' errors.
Montagu will sneer at descriptions of Turkey that come from
ignorant merchants and travelers who
pick up some confus'd informationswhich are generally false, and
they can give no better an Account of the ways here than a
French refugee lodging in a Garretin Greek street, could write of
the Court of England. (L, 316)
She is especially scathing about the unmerited success of Aaron
Hill's book on Turkey, sardonically dismissing his information as
"reveal'd to him in Vision during his wonderfull stay in the Egyptian
Catacombs" (406)." In the same vein, Montagu uses her high-placed
informant, Sultana Hafise, to refute the fabulous but persistent
assertion perpetuated by many travelers that the Sultan selected an
odalisque for the night by throwing a handkerchief at her (L, 383).
Similarly, Montagu deplores the ignorance of a state-sponsored
French traveler called Dumont, who mistakenly described the Greeks
as chattel slaves rather than as political subjects of Ottoman rule (L,
368).12 The incompetence of previous writers on Turkey-all of them
male-is a result of their lack of access to the information they
pretend to have garnered, and their naive repetition of second-hand
fantastical accounts received from unreliable informants. Montagu's
criticisms are obviously intended to demonstrate her superior erudi-
tion, contemporaneity, and novelty. Along with the emphasis laid on
this being a first-hand female account, it is not difficult to discern a
healthy tone of oneupwomanship.'3
Montagu's early erudition-translating the Stoic philosophy of
Epictetus's Enchiridion from the Latin version for Bishop Burnet of
Salisbury, and writing a trenchant critique of Joseph Addison's Cato
before its completion at Wortley's request-already gave her a
significant profile in intellectual circles as an unpublished female
wit.14As Lisa Lowe suggests, Montagu's self-conscious protofeminism
ought to be contextualized by the aristocratic signature that under-
Srinivas Aravamudan 75
have as much occassion to write upon their backs, This is a
Woman, for the information of Travellers, as ever sign post
painter had to write, This is a bear. (L, 280-81)
Conventions of female beauty undergo a bizarre transmogrification
when imitated at a distance. Translating across cultural codes,
mapping Prague onto Exeter and Vienna onto London, Lady Mary is
also alluding to a celebrated anecdote from The Tatler, and to yet
another from Addison in The Spectator about the "daily Absurdities"
resulting from the unstandardized arbitrariness of London shop
signs.18 Even sympathetic imitation, when conducted from a dis-
tance, collapses into irresponsible and incongruous mimicry.19 How-
ever, while Montagu's remark appears to chide these women, she
never clarifies what alternative they might have. In her rush to
condemnation, the narrator has herself resorted to caricature, thus
momentarily transgressing the realist code she otherwise favors. Her
mildly excessive response is consistent with the transgression of her
own expectations concerning femininity. If we take her phrase at face
value, the women she met were almost unrecognizable as women
without denotative placards of designation, especially as she finds
that "'tis not easy to describe what extrodinary [sic] figures they
make" (L, 281). Her grammatical construction suspends the imagi-
nary umbrella of a potentially excessive fictionality above the women's
strange attire, much like a deictic signpost. Montagu's rhetoric here
signals that more complicated feints concerning the excessive
fictionality and potential veracity of gender-construction will develop
as she proceeds.
The discovery of inimitability forms part of the inevitably self-
authenticating logic behind much travel writing. Montagu bears
personal witness to a constantly shifting and transcendental cultural
reality. The discourse of eye-witness self-authentication is neverthe-
less wedded to a radical scepticism for Montagu; the intention is to
elicit the reader's belief in her more sophisticated and self-doubting
reliability. Chiding an unnamed lady for her uninformed skepticism
(unlike the informed interrogation to which she frequently implies
she can subject the local culture) Montagu writes from Vienna about
the temporary prohibition of masquerade in Viennese carnival:
You may tell all the Worldin my Name that they are never so well
inform'dof my affairsas I am my selfe, and that I am very positive
I am at this time at Vienna, where the Carnivalis begun and all
sort of diversions in perpetual practise except that of masqueing,
which is never permitted during a Warwith the Turks. (L, 291)
Srinivas Aravamudan 77
tem of communication cannot be comprehended through a naturalis-
tically derived logic: the deciphering techniques are hit-and-miss
when a code is based on rhyming free association that motivates
grammar, not according to a rule-bound lexicon, but according to the
desires and moods of the participants. While the code coincidentally
resembles Cockney slang, its objectives are romantically rather than
commercially oriented.22
The phenomenon of masquerade is again at stake here. This erotic
practice of using psychic mechanisms such as rebuses (perhaps the
rudiments of a proto-psychoanalysis centered on the genre of ro-
mance) has a rich tradition in Turkish erotic poetry. Its supposedly
unmarked gender status could also masquerade, according to Anne-
Marie Moulin and Pierre Chuvin, as a crypto-lesbian mode of
communication when circulating in the harem or the bathhouse.
Montagu's quotation of the selam also combines with a poetic form
known as mdna, used only between women.23
When indulging in the citation of these erotic norms and conven-
tions, Montagu addresses the same unnamed lady she will also write
concerning the famous scene at the hammam. This unidentified
correspondent appears as a fictive device of self-reflexivity on the
letter-writer's part: "I have got for you, as you desire, a Turkish Love-
letter, which I have put in a little Box" (L, 388). Such a formulation
makes this erotic letter function ironically, as it is written to Montagu's
unidentified correspondent in ostensible reply to a request for the
secrets. A more fanciful reader may well hear the rumblings of
aggression towards an unidentified rival, lesbian desire, autoeroticism,
or even professional caution. This obvious mystification of the
letter's performative status means that the citation of the letter
within the letter connotes more than it denotes. It involves an
epistolary mask that takes the very trope of concealment as its
unmasked meaning. In the context of a series of letters that are all
addressed to identifiable correspondents "in the world," the single
unidentified and mysterious addressee becomes a metafictional
referent that collapses author, reader, and mode. The subject,
Montagu, addresses her object, womanliness, through a mise en
abime that reduces womanliness to masquerade. As in Fanny Burney's
diaries addressed to "Nobody," anonymity, fictionality, and realism
concerning female interiority coincide.24
Masquerade will come to be the "perpetual practise" that suggests
a model of female subjectivity for Montagu, one that will come to be
structurally related to a kind of freedom that suspends truth. It is this
Srinivas Aravamudan 79
erty of following their Inclinations without danger of Discovery" (L,
328). The idea of emancipatory female subjectivity commences with
her celebrated letter on the nudity of the women in the bathhouses
at Sophia, and is sustained throughout her stay in Turkey by the
impressions she receives upon making courtesy calls to the resi-
dences of a few aristocratic Turkish women. The use of the veil in
public, she thinks, enables a radical freedom from interpellation:
"'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" (L, 328). According to her, these women are even
magically exempt from the gradations of class within female identity:
"You may guess how effectually this disguises them, that there is no
distinguishing the great Lady from her Slave" (L, 328). Montagu
levantinizes female subjectivity existing without subjection, sexual
agency occurring without concomitant object-status, and the seem-
ingly generalized public privileges of women abiding with few
corresponding obligations. This position structurally reverses the
condemnation of the German beauties' empty artificiality I discussed
in the previous section. The compulsory "disguise" that women wear
in the primary public sphere, a restriction that keeps their participa-
tion within it to an unindividuated minimum, paradoxically enhances
their unfettered psychological agency.
It is no surprise that the passage celebrating "perpetual Masquer-
ade" is part of a letter written to Lady Mar in which Montagu writes
proudly to her sister about the intimate details of her Turkish outfit
and the honorary status she possesses as a result. Her portrait in
lavish Turkish costume was subsequently painted by Charles Philips.
By formally placing herself in this clothing, Montagu signals the
fantasy elaboration of levantinization: "I am now in my Turkish habit,
th6 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" (L, 326). Montagu proceeds to paint a pen portrait of
herself in this fancy-dress identity. Wearing these clothes herself, she
is full of praise for the Turkish aristocratic women she encounters.
She visits the widow of the previous Grand Vizier, subsequently
identified as Hafise Kadinefendi, and is suitably impressed by her
continued mourning. Montagu is even more rapturous about the
beauty of Fatima, "the Kahya's lady" (L, 349). "Fatima" may well be
a composite fiction idealizing Turkish femininity, created with the
explicit purpose of seducing the reader with levantinized accounts of
Turkish womanhood and the fascination its costumes held for
Srinivas Aravamudan 81
modernity as a vital innovation that created a public sphere of free
political discussion that led to the invention of liberal democracy.
This Turkish bagnio perhaps simulates the Habermasian sphere of
the development of communicative freedom. The alternative Turkish
women's public sphere possesses a hedonistic atmosphere within
which slaves enable their mistresses' desultory enjoyment of quasi-
erotic pleasures: "Braiding their [ladies'] hair in several pritty man-
ners." Montagu visualizes an inclusive women's sphere at the bath, a
gynaecium of unselfconscious but interactive female nudity that she
may be contrasting implicitly with the exclusionary masculine pre-
serve of the Greek gymnasium, whose masculine participants were
also naked while demonstrating their athletic prowess. However, this
women's world is not devoted to the efficiency-oriented syntax of
muscular masculinity, but the expanded time of productive leisure
(witness the parataxis of the simultaneous activities: conversing,
working, drinking, lying down, braiding).
Montagu's language mimics the traditional masculine gesture of
voyeuristic penetration with the gaze, as does Ingres' famous tableau
reminiscent of a keyhole voyeur, Le bain turc (1862), heavily influ-
enced as it is by Montagu's account of the hammam.29 Montagu
suggests that the total nudity of the women displaces the signs of
their psychic readability from the face down to the entire body: "I
was here convinc'd of the Truth of a Refflexion that I had often
made, that if twas the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly
observ'd" (L, 314). And she observes that the heat had been
bothering her, making it "impossible to stay there with one's Cloths
on" (L, 313). Lady Mary nonetheless claims to remain doubly
unreadable, demure in her "travelling Habit, which is a rideing
dress" (L, 313). At this point, she has not yet reached Constantinople
and acquired the new Turkish costume that she speaks of delightedly
to Lady Mar.
Her demure behavior in the riding dress appears bizarre to her
hosts. The narrator's overdressing does not easily undo the social
conventions of hospitality that are already in force. No one is
surprised at her deviance from the expected protocols: "There was
not one of 'em that shew'd the least surprize or impertinent Curios-
ity, but receiv'd me with all the obliging civillity possible" (L, 313).
This curiosity will soon take the form of solicitude.
The narrator in this letter is aware of her anomalous position even
before she vicariously adopts "Jervas's"male gaze, an irony that many
readers have missed. It must be remembered that by desisting from
There are several contrivances in this passage other than the one
Montagu attributes to her husband. Lady Mary contrives not to be
undressed for her English audience. In continuing to maintain
herself in full dress, she appears both dignified and ridiculous,
imprisoned by her own culture. She has pulled off a brilliant
improvisation, successfully negotiating the Scylla of offending her
Turkish hosts and the Charybdis of scandalizing her English readers.
By banking on Turkish cultural misapprehension, she narrowly
escapes the sacrifice of her English virtue. However, doubly bound
as her body is by her lingerie, she is also in a fictional double bind.
Srinivas Aravamudan 83
She is masquerading in the same costume for two audiences simulta-
neously. For the Turkish women, her English stays are an infernal
machine, a straitjacket imposed upon her by a jealous husband. She
encourages the perception of this theatricalized cruelty, soliciting
the concomitant commiseration she will receive from her hosts. Yet,
she has exposed herself, ever so slightly, to the English gaze by
revealing a glimpse of her underwear. The tantalizing unavailability
of her straitjacketed body to the Turkish ladies is all too readable
within this fictionalized scenario, providing a further contrast with
the enigmatic and wide-open unreadability of the characters amidst
their exultant freedom in the hammam. The focus shifts to her: she is
the fetish for the female gaze at the bath, and for the mixed gaze
back in England. Having represented the voyeuristic aspects of the
scopophiliac complex, Montagu now takes a quick turn toward
exhibitionism. Both the viewing Turks and the reading English are
led on to fantasize medieval chastity belts on Montagu, if not quite
whips, chains, and handcuffs. Suddenly, it is Montagu who is the
object of pity as well as of a phantasmagorical bondage scenario: her
constraining clothing is misapprehended as her husband's handi-
work. By extension, this constriction restricts access to her clothes-
bound body. However, the subtle effects of this masquerade rebound
upon those who are taken in by it. For the English readers, the
bondage scene will probably suggest itself as a fictional by-product of
the steamy bathhouse atmosphere, and will then be readily associ-
ated with the English pornographic fantasy concerning the oversexed
Turkish milieu that confuses harem with hammam. In this sexual
traffic, the autobiographer invents a script, plays a role, and peddles
an effect, all the while silently disclaiming her moral liability.
Montagu flaunts her virtue as the truth behind the imaginary mask of
her chastity belt.
Perhaps it is not so remarkable a coincidence that during the same
time, Alexander Pope's erotic focus on Montagu involves his imagin-
ing various long-distance liberties with underwear:
Let us be like modest people, who when they are close together
keep all decorums, but if they step a little aside, or get to the
other end of a room, can untie garters or take off Shifts without
scruple.31
Could the bathhouse letter-published much later-also be a com-
plex response to the initial erotic attentions of Pope and his subse-
quent vilifications? Many of the misogynistic smears by Pope and
Horace Walpole concerning the purported lack of physical cleanli-
Srinivas Aravamudan 85
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" (L,
313). This ambiguous state of nature cannot be the Hobbesian one
that Montagu highlights when discussing the wartime devastations of
the Austrians and the Ottomans.36 Rather, it appears prelapsarian.
The starkness of the object demands a plain English, wedded to a
heavy-duty Biblical and epic forebear: "They Walk'd and mov'd with
the same majestic Grace which Milton describes of our General
Mother" (L, 313-14).37 The exact proportions of these latter-day Eves
remind Lady Mary of naked goddesses "drawn by the pencil of
Guido or Titian," or even more conventionally for her eighteenth-
century eye, the well-coiffed "figures of the Graces." Despite the
overlay of Christian iconography, this is not European court society.
Montagu finds "none of those disdainfull smiles or satyric whispers
that never fail in our assemblys when any body appears that is not
dress'd exactly in fashion" (L, 313). Of course, nudity in a hammam
is tenuously related to the ephemeral notion of fashion; the concern
here is with an eternal undress, the perdurability of the classical
female body rather than the historical variability of clothing.
There is a dreamlike quality to this perception of the hammam,
one that will be repeated when, before she leaves, Montagu attends
an epithalamium amongst the bathhouse women at Constantinople
who welcome a young bride in their midst, giving her rich gifts even
while maintaining their own nakedness. While strictly sexually segre-
gated, the Turkish baths allowed women to bring with them pre-
adolescent children of both sexes, who could thus participate in the
general nudity and exchange of gazes. In a brilliant if somewhat
idealized anthropological analysis of the history of Levantine Muslim
sexuality, Abdelwahab Bouhdiba has argued that the baths provided
a liminal space where the demarcation between public and private
spheres was ritually suspended.38 Bouhdiba demonstrates the struc-
tural interplay of oppositions in the activity of the hammam, between
hot and cold water, soft towels and hard scrubs, male and female
schedules, dirt and cleanliness, purity and impurity, interiority and
exteriority, self and other, angels and demons. In his analysis, the
hammam becomes the privileged locus for the release of social and
political tensions, as well as the site where a certain Levantine
unconscious is constructed. In addition to the inevitable develop-
mental role the hammam would have played in answering childhood
curiosity about the body, it also performed the quotidian function of
ritual purification, as a propaedeutic, as well as a conclusion, to the
Srinivas Aravamudan 87
Adeiu, Madam. I am sure I have now entertaind you with an
Account of such a sight as you never saw in your Life and what no
book of travells could inform you of. 'Tis no less than Death for a
Man to be found in one of these places. (L, 315)
The narrator is instrumentalizing the encounter, marketing it aggres-
sively for vicarious consumption. These are novelties that only a
woman can sell: here we have phantasmagorical desires titillated in
the face of death, and natural beauty hawked in lieu of artifice. As a
transitional figure, and a cultural translator, Montagu claims to have
observed more than she has participated in, even as she tantalizes
her readers with the taste of forbidden fruit. She has crossed and
recrossed a ritual threshold, participated in a liminal situation. Yet,
the power of her narrative is that of its liminoid extrapolation for
herself and her readers.
The narrator enforces the closure of the fictional parentheses that
opened with this episode by insisting on her English femininity kept
apart from that of the Ottoman women. Ultimately, the English lady
in Montagu cannot justify a crossover that involves undress. The
narrator has nonetheless created an opening for the fantasy projec-
tions and partial identifications of levantinization. If this was not
quite "a room of her own" when she entered the bathhouse,
Montagu at least makes sure to emphasize that she went literally
where "no Man" had gone before. She entered women's space as an
honorary Turkish woman, even as she maintained her Englishness.
Montagu has shown that, by enforcing sexual segregation, the mas-
culine desire for exclusive possession has also ended up dispossess-
ing itself. More importantly, the passages describing various female
interiors are often written to the unnamed lady, a blank addressee, or
a social equal, the Countess of Bristol, both of whom may well be
mirror-images of Montagu herself. The descriptions are memoranda
to herself, indicative of an autoeroticism that will be made fully
public just after her death. Montagu wants to defer her self-exposure
rather than deny it. She can perish, and then publish. Trying to keep
her clothes on in the sweltering atmosphere, Lady Mary calculatedly
runs out of steam while still trying to undo her stays.
Some readers think that Montagu is locked in that infernal
machine called orientalism. As I suggested earlier, however, she has
run or thrown a levant in the manner of an eighteenth-century
gamester. Montagu writes her travels from a place with no fixed
address and makes sure to indicate that she is a visitor, ready to bolt
or steal away. She may also be doing the equivalent of the Spanish
Srinivas Aravamudan 89
were induced to undergo the inoculation by the promise of a
reprieve if they survived.43
As the one obvious practical benefit gained from her travels, the
betterment of the health of English children through smallpox
inoculation seems an anomalous by-product of Letters from the
Levant. The technique was still dangerous as the inoculation was
performed with a live culture rather than the safer innovation using
a vaccine (which contains dead bacteria) popularized by Edward
Jenner in 1798. However, the travels themselves serve a cultural
function that resembles, at a symbolic level, the homeopathic act of
inoculation, one that stalls a disease by subjecting the body to a
weaker version of it. Travel narrative, after flirting with cultural
crossover, becomes a complicated acknowledgement of the superior-
ity of the return home. Montagu's return with the actual technique of
inoculation represents a masterstroke, since it coincidentally pro-
vides a symbolic model for English cultural retrenchment.
Roland Barthes defines symbolic inoculation as follows:
And, after having seen part of Asia and Africa, and allmost made
the tour of Europe, I think the honest English Squire more happy
who verily beleives the Greek wines less delicious than March
beer, that the African fruits have not so fine a flavour as golden
Pipins, and the Becifiguas of Italy are not so well tasted as a
rump of Beef, and that, in short, there is no perfect Enjoyment of
this Life out of Old England. I pray God I may think so for the
rest of my Life; and since I must be contented with our scanty
allowance of Daylight, that I may forget the enlivening Sun of
Constantinople. (L, 444)
Srinivas Aravamudan 91
private ones, such as the code of flowers, masking, and so on) and the
multifarious ethnicities of her servants and ambassadorial retinue,
Montagu fears that the natives of Constantinople end up being
astonishingly multilingual and cosmopolitan, but correspondingly,
woefully illiterate "in the perpetual hearing of this medley of
Sounds" (L, 390). Montagu oscillates between a scathing dismissal of
the monolingual and parochial uniformity of English society where
"Ladys [who] set up for such extrodinary Geniuses upon the credit of
some superficial knowledge of French and Italian," and the equally
worrisome contemporary prospect of the loss of that very identity:
"As I prefer English to all the rest, I am extremely mortify'd at the
daily decay of it in my head, where I'll assure you (with greife of
heart) it is reduce'd to such a small number of Words" (L, 390-91).47
Linguistic alienation, as a matter of course, is one of the first signs
of the culture shock from which Montagu wishes to cushion herself,
even as she wants to exacerbate the shock to increase its heuristic
value for what she often implies is a jaded, provincial, and compla-
cent English society and its attitudes. Her cautious celebration of
heterogeneity is tempered by a fear of the loss of English identity,
which she still wants to keep as a prima inter pares. At the end of her
travels, Montagu turns to an archaeological stance of classicism and
cultural antiquarianism as a compromise strategy for mediation
between differences, after encountering an Ottoman empire that
tolerated the social mixture of multinational, multiethnic, and
multireligious populations in a manner that would have bewildered
the still provincial English.
Montagu's critically engaging misprision is a function of the
unfreedom of English women and the different agency that Turkish
upper-class women may have possessed within the differing cultural
constraints of the society both groups inhabited. Such an approach to
Montagu could lead us to appreciate the nuanced nature of her
contemporaneity, and can allow us reappropriate her with newer
countercultural genealogies that do not simply pigeonhole her as
either a symptom of her class and nationality, or an unthinking
practitioner of oppressive aestheticization.
Rather than belabor Montagu's writings with the blunt accusation
of orientalism, or naively celebrate it as twentieth-century feminism,
as one recent reading has done, I have attempted here to reinterpret
her ideological levantinization of the Levant-produced by her text's
unsteady mixture of whiggism and neoclassicism, which can be read
as proto-feminist or proto-orientalist by different readers.48 Montagu's
NOTES
I would like to thank RanjanaKhanna, Karen Lawrence, Tom Stillinger, Kathryn
Stockton, and BarryWeller for their help with earlier versions of this essay.
1 For a facsimile reprint of the St. John edition, see The Eastern Europe
Collection series (Arno Press and the New YorkTimes, 1971). Fifty-two letters form
the corpus of Letters from the Levant, and these letters have been deemed an
Srinivas Aravamudan 93
autonomous literary piece within the larger context of Montagu's complete letters
(as they were kept separately in albums commemorating her Levantine travels). The
finished letters are most likely pseudo-letters recomposed from earlier heads of
letters that Montagu had also kept. For the most detailed account of the manuscript
sources and the anecdotal history of the eventual publication of the work, see
Robert Halsband, The Life of Mary Wortley Montagu (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1960). For earlier biographies, see George Paston, Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu and Her Times (New York: Putnam, 1907); Lewis Melville, Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu: Her Life and Letters (London: Hutchinson, 1925); and Iris Barry,
Portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (London: Ernest Benn, 1928). The most
reliable scholarly edition of the letters is that by Robert Halsband, ed., The
Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon,
1965). Unless otherwise specified, all citations will follow the first volume of the
Halsband edition of The Complete Letters; page numbers will be cited parentheti-
cally in the text and abbreviated L. Two editions currently in print are Selected
Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1986), and Letters, introduction Clare Brant (London: Everyman, 1992).
The Penguin edition unfortunately does not contain all the Turkish letters, whereas
the more complete reprint of the 1906 Everyman edition occasionally contains some
spurious text from corrupt editions. For a recent lavishly-illustrated edition, see
Embassy to Constantinople: The Travels of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed.
Christopher Pick (London: Century Hutchinson, 1988). For the remainder of
Montagu's collected writings, see Essays and Poems and Simplicity A Comedy, ed.
Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).
2 I take my definition of fantasy from Jean Laplanche and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis,
"Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality," Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin,
James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (New York: Methuen, 1986), 5-34. For a lucid
discussion of this definition, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York: Routledge, 1993), 267-68.
3 The OED's examples of this usage come from Vanbrugh and Gibber's The
Provincial Husband, and Fielding's The Lottery, as well as Tom Jones.
4See Srinivas Aravamudan, "Trop(icaliz)ing the Enlightenment," Diacritics 23.3
(Fall 1993): 48-68. As part of the conceptual apparatus of my forthcoming book
entitled Tropical Figures: Colonialist Representation and Anticolonial Agency,
1688-1804, "levantinization" is a process allied with the more general mechanism of
"tropicalization." Tropicalization enables postcolonial readers to reappropriate
colonialist metropolitan discourses and practices through a genealogy that attends to
resistance as well as oppression. If colonialism rendered the colonized as so many
tropical figures of epistemological and political subjection, a postcolonial reading
tropicalizes these figures, finding extant instances of resistance, and creatively
exploring them as alternative reading strategies. The ethical imperative of anticolo-
nial/postcolonial reading, therefore, is to articulate the agency of the colonized,
rather than merely theorize from the position of the colonizer. In this respect, I ally
myself with the sociopolitical turn in cultural and literary studies that is concerned
with understanding culture from the standpoint of its consumers and its epistemo-
logical objects rather than merely from the mechanisms of power or authority that
are deemed to generate it. "Tropicalization," as I define it, bears a family resem-
blance to the term "transculturation" that Mary Louise Pratt adopts from the work
of Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz and Uruguayan critic Angel Rama. See Mary
Srinivas Aravamudan 95
Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 50-54. Butler addresses race substantially in Bodies that Matter
(note 2), with readings of Passing and Paris is Burning. However, attending to the
racial complication at the heart of Riviere's article could make its proposed theory
of gender more than just an application to contexts of race.
8 Those who read eighteenth-century travel narratives without reference to the
generic experimentation in travel writing since antiquity do so at the peril of massive
simplification. One of the recent attempts to provide a longer literary-historical
perspective to travel narrative in the Western tradition has been Mary B. Campbell,
The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-1600
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988). Campbell demonstrates that early travel writing
is a fluid and all-inclusive origin for the developments that led to the genres of
historiography, spiritual autobiography, and the novel. For more exhaustive treat-
ments of the volume of travel writing especially in the eighteenth century, see Percy
G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800 (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1962); Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: Univ.
Press of Kentucky, 1983); and Charles L. Batten, Jr., Pleasurable Instruction: Form
and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of Cali-
fornia Press, 1978).
9 Thus, her account is cultural-relativist in a manner that presents us with a
dialogical rather than the dialectical relationship between the categories of "ro-
mance idealism," "naive empiricism" and "extreme skepticism" suggested by Michael
McKeon as formative of novelistic discourse. While the categories generated by
McKeon are pedagogically very useful, I am inclined to disagree with his character-
ization of "naive empiricism" as the content of a "progressive" ideology of eigh-
teenth-century travel writing. Such a hypothesis relies on an idealization of the
intentions of readers and writers of this genre. It is more plausible that idealism,
empiricism, and skepticism-associated by McKeon as equivalent to aristocratic,
progressive, and conservative eighteenth-century ideologies-are dialogically re-
lated to each other at microtextual moments in the reading process of the genre of
travel narrative. After all, travel narrative was the idiom of the moment, appropri-
ated by readers and writers of all ideological persuasions. McKeon's macrotextual
neo-Hegelian Marxism, in its emphasis of a will-to-abstraction and search for the
animating ideological essences behind putatively discrete literary genres, can be
applied more usefully in a scaled-down dialogical fashion to specific texts. See
Michael McKeon, Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 103-13.
10 Montagu's joint reference to Knolles and Rycaut makes it likely that she was
familiar with the sixth edition of Richard Knolles, The Turkish History, from the
Original of that Nation, to the Growth of the Ottoman Empire ... (London, 1687).
Sir Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire Containing the Maxims of
the Turkish Polity (London, 1686), was appended to this folio edition. Some other
well-known travels to Turkey before Montagu's are Sir Henry Blount, Voyage into
the Levant (London, 1634); and George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey begun AD
1610, containing a description of the Turkish Empire (London, 1615). For a brief
description of seventeenth-century travelers to Turkey, see Robin Fedden, English
Travellers in the Near East (London: Longman, 1958).
" See Aaron Hill, A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman
I do not believe all the unreasonable Malice of Mankind can give a Pretence
why I should have been constant to the Memory of any of the deceased, or
have spent much time in grieving for an insolent, insignificant, negligent,
extravagant, splenetick, or covetous Husband; my first insulted me, my
second was nothing to me, my third disgusted me, the fourth would have
ruined me, the fifth tormented me, and the sixth would have starved me
(Halsband, Essays and Poems [note 1], 74).
Another protofeminist piece, "An Essay on the Mischief of Giving Fortunes with
Women in Marriage," published in Curll's Miscellanea, is credited to her by
Halsband (Life [note 1], 121).
14 Montagu criticizes Addison's distracting foray into romantic subplot, and
upholds classical Aristotelian notions concerning the unity of action. She finds
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar much better in its compression, and points out that
Juba and Syphax are too close to Othello in their characterization. She also
recommends stronger libertarian rhetoric throughout the play ("[Critique of Cato]
Srinivas Aravamudan 97
Wrote at the Desire of Mr. Wortley, suppress'd at the desire of Mr. Adison" [1713],
in Halsband, Essays and Poems, 62-68). In 1710, the young Montagu will defend
learned women to Gilbert Burnet:
Montagu's intellectual profile seems, in some ways, closer to the reassured aristo-
cratic cadences of Margaret Cavendish than to the precarious commercially-
influenced improvisations of Aphra Behn. Montagu had also maintained friendships
with women such as Mary Astell, who wrote an autograph preface to Letters from
the Levant that was eventually published with the 1763 edition. Astell, who died in
1731, wrote commendatory verses that read, "Let the Male-Authors with an envious
eye / Praise coldly, that they may the more decry / Women ... I read with transport,
and with Joy I greet / A genius so Sublime and so Complete, / And gladly lay my
Laurels at her Feet" (L, 466). Astell endorses Montagu with a feminist riposte:
I confess I am malicious enough to desire that the World shou'd see to how
much better purpose the LADYS Travel than their LORDS, and that whilst it
is surfeited with Male Travels, all in the same Tone and stuft with the same
Trifles, a Lady has the skill to strike out a New Path and to embellish a worn-
out Subject with variety of fresh and elegant Entertainment ... in short, let
her own Sex at least do her Justice; ... Let the Men malign one another. (L,
467)
For an account of the admiration the two women had for each other, see Ruth Perry,
The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1986), 270-71.
15 See Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 51. Montagu's self-validation against male travel writers
is also discussed here (35-52). For a careful historical account of Montagu's
authorship, see Isobel Grundy, "The Politics of Female Authorship: Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu's Reaction to the Printing of Her Poems," The Book Collector 31
(1982): 19-37.
16 Despite their empiricist investments, one of the persistent antirealist effects
sought out by seemingly realist travel accounts, both authentic and bogus, was the
possibility of endless decontextualization that rendered the strange familiar, as does
the celebrated example of Gulliver's Travels (1726), or the familiar strange, as did
Montesquieu's satire structured as a collection of pseudo-letters, The Persian
Letters (1721). Pseudo-letters involving foreign topoi would end up as a dominant
eighteenth-century mode, as exemplified by Lord Lyttelton's Persian Letters (1735),
Horace Walpole's Letter from Xo-Ho (1757) and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World
(1762).
17 See Spectator 28 (2 April 1711), and 31 (5 April 1711) (S, 1:117, 129).
1s See Tatler 18 (21 May 1709), in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1987), 1: 144-47; and Spectator 28 (2 April 1711) (S, 1:115-19).
19 Later, Montagu will write in favor of economic nationalism and an anti-
Such a reorientation of dress will honor the country and benefit the nation, leading
to a sympathetic link between the bodies of the gentry and the tenants, "covered
with the warm Produce of our native Sheep." See Montagu, Nonsense (note 13), 2,
3.
20 A sudden rage for this technique developed subsequently in England, appar-
ently as a result of Montagu's popularization. See Alev Lytle Croutier, Harems: Le
Monde Derriere le Voile (Paris: Editions Belfond, 1989), 53. For an account of
eighteenth-century masquerade in terms of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, see Terry
Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century
English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1986).
21 Montagu may have had the prior benefit of a full-length study of this Turkish
code by Du Vignau, an otherwise obscure French author. She focuses on the great
difficulty of deciphering rebuses (mischaracterized by Du Vignau as hieroglyphs).
In 1688, Du Vignau published Le secrdtaire turc contenant l'art d'exprimer ses
pensees sans se voir, se parler, et sans s'ecrire [The Turkish writing-desk, containing
the art of expressing one's thoughts without seeing, talking or writing to one
another] (Paris, 1688). After having examined one of the few extant copies of this
book, I have come to the conclusion that Montagu had at least some independent
knowledge of the selam techniques, given that she describes some symbolic
equivalents that do not exist in Du Vignau's text. Le secrdtaire turc is, nonetheless,
a comprehensive dictionary with long narrative examples, and hence a useful
reference tool to understand the code Montagu encountered. Du Vignau notes that
"flowers, fruits, woods, resins, silks, gold, silver, colors, fabrics, and almost anything
else that is used in daily commercial transactions, enters into the Turks' transactions
concerning Love" (6). He says, "It is reasonable to believe that this [language]
derives from the ancient means of communicating through numbers/ciphers [chiffres]
and figures, as were the hieroglyphs for the Egyptians before the alphabet was
invented" (10-11). Alain Grosrichard rightly points out that the selam is closer to the
rebus than the hieroglyph. See Structures du Serail (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 213-20.
22 The secret nature of the selam, and its tangential reworking of desire according
to a free-floating technique of composition is astonishingly similar to Cockney slang,
despite its very different commercial origins. Both codes use a two-step rhyming
displacement to disguise a concept. Such codes become formal models for the
contingent figuration-or the utopian levantinization-at the heart of cultural
representation that has been this article's focus. For instance, the Cockney term
"loaf" stands for "head" through a two-step displacement: "head" rhymes with
"bread," that is converted to the collective noun for "bread," "loaf." As can be seen
Srinivas Aravamudan 99
in the celebrated misogynist examples from My Fair Lady, a proliferation of
synonyms can result: a cant term for "wife" can be "the Duchess" (via "the Duchess
of Fife") or "trouble" (via "trouble and strife"). These designations are conventional;
however, the poetic possibility exists that substitutions could work according to
idiosyncratic desires and private equivalences. See Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of
Slang and Unconventional English, ed. Paul Beale (London: Routledge, 1984). The
classic example from Du Vignau (note 21) is as follows: "A cube of sugar, known in
Turkish as Cheker, will signify seni medem scheker, which means, my inside attracts
you, my heart yearns passionately for you" (12). The first syllable will suggest an
association: sending the color "blue," [mevi], will mean "I'm in love" [Meiloldum]
(13). The Picardian tradition of the rebus was a significant genre in France and
Italy, but not so much in England. See Jean Ceard and Jean-Claude Margolin, Rdbus
de la Renaissance: Des Images Qui Parlent (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986).
Perhaps the English work that dealt most extensively with the concept was
Camden's Remaines (1605), which Addison borrows from for a few comments on the
rebus. See William Camden, "Name-devises," in Remaines of a greater work,
concerning Britaine, the inhabitants thereof, their languages, names, surnames,
impreses, wisespeeches, poesis, and epitaphes (London, 1614), 164-67; and E.
Moore, "An Essay on the Rebus in Art," The Craftsman 5 (1903-1904): 240. The
rebus will take a more satirical form in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
century that may have contributed to Addison's dismissal of the rebus as a species of
false wit, Spectator 59 (8 May 1711) (S, 1:250-51). See also the apology for punning
by John Birch in The Guardian 36 (22 April 1713), in The Guardian, ed. John
Calhoun Stephens (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1982), 147-50.
23 See Anne-Marie Moulin and Pierre Chuvin, L'Islam au Peril des Femmes: Une
Anglaise en Turquie au XVIIIe Siecle (Paris: La Decouverte, 1981), 96. Witness also
Du Vignau, "It must be said that the Turks have no means of indicating gender, and
they say the same words to mean 'a handsome man' and 'a beautiful woman,' and the
same phrases are used for the (male) lover as for the mistress" (18).
24 For instance, Dervla Murphy argues that Montagu's youthful letters to Anne
Wortley were actually coded addresses to her then suitor Edward Wortley. See The
Embassy to Constantinople: The Travels of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (London:
Century Hutchinson, 1988), 13. For a treatment of Montagu's letters in relation to
the techniques of eighteenth-century epistolarity, also see Bruce Redford, The
Converse of the Pen: Acts of Intimacy in the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1986) and Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York:
Knopf, 1985). The manuscript circulation of eighteenth-century letters make them
much closer to the cryptic openness of the postcard, deconstructing the public and
the private, the fictional and the empirical. In this respect, it is also useful to
remember the conceptual pressure put on the philosophical concept of the letter
and the postcard by Jacques Derrida, La Carte Postale: De Socrates a Freud et Au-
deld (Paris: Flammarion, 1980).
25 While "harem," from the opposition in Arabic between h'aldl (pure, permitted,
41 Smollett will write that Montagu's letters were "never equalled by any letter-
writer of any sex, age, or nation." See Critical Review 15 (1763): 426.
42 See Bouhdiba (note 38), 199; and Moulin and Chuvin (note 23), 66.
43 See Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and
France (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1957), 45-69. The Royal Society
knew about smallpox inoculation as early as 1700, through John Lister's experi-
ments, and Aubrey de La Mottraye had observed it in Circassia. However, the
technique was considered too dangerous to practice on human subjects until
Montagu brought back appropriate methods from Turkey. Montagu includes a brief
letter to her husband reporting the inoculation of their son (L, 392). See Montagu's
town eclogue, "Saturday: The Small Pox: Flavia," in which she expressed her
feelings about the disease (Halsband, Essays and Poems [note 1], 182). The most
notorious antifeminist attack on the introduction of the technique was by Wagstaffe:
"Posterity perhaps will scarcely be brought to believe, that an Experiment practiced
only by a few Ignorant Women, amongst an illiterate and unthinking People, shou'd
on a sudden, and upon slender Experience, so far obtain in one of the Politest
Nations in the World, as to be receiv'd into the Royal Palace." See William
Wagstaffe, A Letter to Dr. Freind Shewing the Danger and Uncertainty of Inoculat-
ing the Small Pox (London, 1722), 5. Montagu wrote an unsigned letter in The
Tatler defending the technique, and authored a pseudonymous pamphlet in order to
respond to the attacks made on her. However, she also had her defenders. William
Broome wrote a flattering letter saying he would write a poem celebrating her
discovery, which she showed to Pope, and Princess Caroline's efforts on her behalf
led to the inoculation of orphan children in St. James's Parish. Richard Savage's
Miscellany, dedicated to her, contained a poem from Aaron Hill's The Plain Dealer
on smallpox (for a summary, see Halsband, Life [note 1], 109-11). See also the letter
from "Parthenissa" on the ravages of smallpox (Spectator 306 [20 February, 1712],
S, 3:100-02).
44 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang,
1973), 150.
45Victor and Edith Turner (note 6) describe pilgrimage as "an ordered antistructure
of patrimonial feudal systems" (254).
46 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1988).
47 Du Vignau (note 21) too will have a similar reaction, in relation to the fear of
losing his fluency in French after so much listening to "a mixture of various Turkish
languages, demotic Greek, and Italian" (Preface; translation mine).
subverted order anticipated, by two hundred fifty years the work of feminists such
as Mernissi and Abu-Lughod." Such a claim is dubious and rendered further
problematic by the continuation of transhistoricalorientalist approaches in some of
the feminist criticisms of Islam. Joseph W. Lew, "Lady Mary's Portable Seraglio,"
Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (1991): 433; Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male
Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women's Rights in Islam, trans. Mary J. Lakeland
(New York:Addison Wesley, 1991); and Fatna A. Sabbah, Woman in the Muslim
Unconscious (New York:Pergamon, 1984).
49 As Lisa Lowe (note 15) argues throughout Critical Terrains, heterogeneity and
ambivalence is characteristicof the diverse orientalisms present at different histori-
cal moments.
50 Their posture in siting, the colour of their skin, their lank black Hair
falling on each side their faces, their features and the shape of their
Limbs, differ so little from their own country people, the Baboons, tis
hard to fancy them a distinct race, and I could not help thinking there had
been some ancient alliances between them. (L, 427)
For a discussion of this passage, see Felicity Nussbaum, "The Other Woman:
Polygamy, Pamela, and the Prerogative of Empire," Women, "Race," and Writing in
the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York:
Routledge, 1994), 155-57.