Turkish Embassy Letters

"By mentioning Milton, Guido, and Titian, Montagu carefully invokes the expected figures of male authority to frame her performance. Yet this frame, far from confining her 'painting,' quickly becomes an object of satire that allows her to bar men from the space entirely" (12).

The Turkish Embassy Letters

"The invocation of a 'coffee house' is an important one, as these were important male spaces denied to women in England, where politics, commerce, science, and art were bandied about by the London elite. In the woman's 'coffee house,' sexuality - at least from the male perspective - is absent; the face (and body) is hardly observed, since women do not observe themselves naked" (13).

"The genre of travel letter writing allows her to go beyond merely presenting herself for observation, since she is the active observer. Montagu, in effect, becomes the male gaze that had been previously directed upon her. The act of translation becomes less a view of the Orient than a view of herself and of all women, without male brushstrokes" (10).

"Here was a woman who could not be interpreted as a work of art even by her own husband. She remained sexually anonymous, which offered a promiscuous freedom not even the most aristocratic Englishwoman could enjoy. In short, a woman could flit between classes and roles in society only to return as a dutiful wife for dinner" (12).

"In short, there is no spectacle here; women are simply women, neither performing nor being sold. Nor can their acts seem pornographic, since the women are only seen by other women, the way a lover would behold his or her beloved: naked, rather than nude for a leering audience" (15).

"'Most women have no character at all' (2). Pope eagerly seizes upon this theme to dish up a buffet of coquettes and hypocrites, all of whom are cleverly disguised with Classical sobriquets. Through these portraits Pope makes the claim that painting, which should distinguish each woman as a unique individual, merely paints that same few women over and over again" (6).

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

"Montagu's celebrated life as a Turkish correspondent, to say nothing of her introduction of the smallpox vaccine to England, is overruled in an age of male speculation - that is, the buying and selling of woman's sexuality and identity" (16).

"Ironically, in eschewing the mythological portraits of Arcadia and Pastora, Pope ultimately ends up enshrining Blount as a constellation herself...this metaphor [is] the most astonishing part of the poem, as Pope takes a fundamentally feminine symbol (the moon) and invests it with a male character. In this way Blount is demoted from the Moon to a moon, a mere satellite without defining characteristics of its own. Her mute orbit of the earth (and Sun) inspires and delights, but is clearly compelled by forces beyond her understanding" (9).

"In an age that questioned whether or not women had souls, could any artist see women objectively, as agents with their own characters, ideas, and aesthetics?" (6).

"In publicly outing Martha Blount as a "man-woman," Pope has followed his own advice to "draw the naked." However, she is not merely naked in this instance but truly nude - that is, stripped to her bare essentials for a male aesthetic" (9).

"Pope could paint morality and sensuality, but were forever denied the one true image of women, naked, without the interpretation of an artistic 'middleman"' (13).

"Montagu also wanted to "draw the naked," but was unwilling to paint "man-woman" or a femininity that would flatter the male aesthetic. She wanted women to see themselves 'in private life alone,' a mirror that no room, painting, or poem would reflect" (16).

Question One: "What did it mean to paint a woman as she truly was, without the artificial eye of a man editing, arranging, and satirizing her appearance?" (5). How does an artistic representation of women differ from Montagu and Pope's time to contemporary art? Are women still portrayed by the "artificial eye of a man" and how does this reflect on women and society's view of them?

Question Two: "Why, Montagu asks her readers, should women need their beauty translated by men? Is not feminine beauty written clearly on the face - any face - without the need of chisel or marble?" (14). Montagu celebrates feminine beauty of the physical body rather than some artistic interpretation of it by men. Should we infer that males abandon depicting females in art because they create an ideal image of beauty, or is their perspective valid to understand how the sexes observe one another?

Pope and Montagu use their literary piece as an attempt to paint a woman's character without the veil of society covering them.

Question 1: Considering the fact that Lady Montagu hailed from an aristocratic society, do you think her experiences documented within The Turkish Embassy Letters would have read differently if she had born into a lower social class?

“Montagu’s letters reproduce dominant discourses, which naturalize class ieqnuality, even, and especially in moments when they subvert Orientalist or gendered expectations.”

"'To Draw The Naked': Paintings of Female Character in Pope's An Epistle to a Lady and Montagu's The Turkish Embassy Letters"

By Joshua Grasso

Question 2: What reasons may have Lady Montagu had to become so enamored with the Turkish culture? Do you think that the reasons are purely based on the fact of the change in scenery from England or some other reason all together?

“Montagu constructs her notion of liberty, as signified in part by what she construes as the liberty of the Turkish woman; and it also through this interplay that Montagu both reinforces and disrupts gendered notions of Orientalism through a class centered construction of difference.”

"This discourse of tolerance can also be found in her letters about Turkish customs and religion, but more often she suggests that in fact what she perceives as the Oriental ways are superior to those of her own culture."

"In such instances, the letters challenge the value judgements implicit in Orientalist discourses of difference while simultaneously reproducing European myths of the Orient. The trope of the sensual, hedonistic Orient, for example, is employed not to condemn the Turks but rather to praise them."

"The predominant tropes of the Oriental tale can be found in her many opulent descriptions: the rich interiors, the ‘boundless wealth’ of the indolent Orientals, and the ‘violence of passion’ of the Turkish language – to which, she claims, English translation cannot do justice."

The Turkish Embassy Letters lift the fog between European Orientalist ideals and the reality of the Turkish culture; specifically highlighting European misconceptions of how Turkish people live, love and socialize.

"The statement begins with a rejection of the ‘discourse of savagery’;59 the idea that Turkish people are ‘unpolish’d’ (with the term’s class-based connotations) in comparison to Europeans is immediately addressed and negated. What follows, how- ever, asserts the veracity of another Orientalist trope: (they) have an ignorant, sensual, hedonistic ‘notion of Life’."

"Class mediates Montagu’s frequent critiques of what others have said or assumed about the Turks: she refutes the accounts of other travel writers who assert the superiority of Christian or Western ways by arguing that both the Orientalists themselves and the people of whom they write are of the lower classes, and therefore not able to authentically represent or be representative of Oriental culture."

"Montagu repeatedly remarks that previous travellers remained ignorant of Oriental civilization because they had not come in contact with the strata of society she so easily moved as the ambassador’s wife."

"Drawing a parallel between class-based speech differences in Turkey and England, Montagu implies not only that it is as absurd to imagine a classless Oriental society as it is to imagine a classless British society, but that the negativity of the Orientalist discourse circulating in her society has arisen from exposure to those classes which, similarly to their British equivalents, should not in her view be taken to represent the culture of the society as a whole."

"Montagu sees European ideas of the pastoral as being actualized in the Turkish agricultural landscape, which not only provides food for the cities but also a setting within which the wealthy (‘most considerable’) Turks may amuse themselves in the evening. The gardeners who tend the crops, the women at their looms, the lounging landowners and the singing slave – they are all of a piece, part of a naturally ordered world which is, primarily, beautiful."

"Montagu contests popular Orientalist myths of promiscuity and associated polygamy. Montagu asserts that the morality which governs marriage in the East is no different than in Europe, both in the standard ideals of the institution and the liberties taken within it."

"ORIENTALISM, GENDER AND CLASS IN LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU’S TURKISH EMBASSY LETTERS: TO PERSONS

OF DISTINCTION, MEN OF LETTERS &C."

Anna Secor

"Montagu highlights the good breeding of the Turks with whom she consorts as evidence of the value of Oriental culture. At other times, she highlights the differences between Turks of the most elite class and other Turks to discredit negative Orientalist sterotypes; that is to say, some (of them) are more ‘different’ than others, and the most high-class are the furthest from the negative Orientalist tropes."