Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam : Masquerade, Womanliness, and Levantinization

Aravamudan, Srinivas

doi:10.1353/elh.1995.0002

Cited by 11 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Consequently, he would have been aware of what Srinivas Aruvamudan terms Montagu's "performative dispersion" of 'self' "into several identificatory positions". 60 The carefully choreographed voices performed throughout her essays, poems, and correspondence (as well as numerous spurious letters) reveal Montagu as consciously dramatizing herself, as prefiguring Byronic gestures. Her textual identity is fluid and, in Cynthia Lowenthal's words, "constantly evolving".…”

Section: She Imagines How She Would Have "Pass'd This Voyage In Takei...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Drinking a Dish of Tea With Sapho”: The Sexual Fantasies of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Byron

Winch¹

2013

Women's Writing

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When George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) occupied the Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice, it was widely believed to have been the residence of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) over sixty years earlier. 1 It was when he was residing here that Byron began work on Don Juan, and it was also from here that he discovered the extraordinary letters that Montagu sent a young Venetian scholar, Francesco Algarotti. These letters explain Montagu's exile, and provide a passionate complement to the dry letters detailing her health and expenses which she was simultaneously sending her husband, and which were published in 1803. Her family had been rigorous in their censorship and consequently her published works, as well as her 1803 biography, made no mention of this affair. Fascinated, Byron thought her correspondence "very pretty and passionate" 2 and their "sentiments beautiful". 3 He sent six letters, together with other correspondence, to his publisher, John Murray.The correspondence included some letters by Montagu's friend, Lord Hervey, a rival for Algarotti's attentions. Montagu and Hervey shared an erotic infatuation for the Venetian philosopher whose "tastes were predominantly if not entirely homosexual". 4 Despite some unkindness over this rivalry, Hervey and Montagu were close friends throughout their lives. They even collaborated over verse; their voices circling the feminine scholar's absence. Byron suggested that "a small and pretty popular volume" might be made of their letters, and he promised to "hunt" for more. 5 However, there is no more mention of the letters, and the volume was never published.Byron's admiration of Montagu is an exception in a period when her reputation was still suffering from Alexander Pope's and Horace Walpole's virulent misogyny. The increasingly puritanical climate emerging in England, combined with his own scandalous exile, and his anger against the hypocrisy of English culture, must have warmed Byron to the fluid and creative possibilities that sex and desire inspired in these early eighteenth-century aristocrats. Moreover, the letters that he discovered reveal how Montagu also self-exiled on account of reputation and sexual transgression. Examining Montagu's Orientalist voyeurism and romantic philhellenism, Donna Landry has identified her "phallic seizures", and Felicity Nussbaum notes her "Orientalist Sapphism". 6 In addition, Nussbaum argues that Montagu was unwilling "to be restricted, privately or publicly, to traditional heterosexual activities", but she did not possess a lesbian identity because "sexuality was not the locus of subjectivity in the early eighteenth century". 7 This shift in theoretical paradigms since the academic mainstreaming of queer theory, means that Byron can be productively read through his alliances with earlier, sexually transgressive, literary figures. This article suggests that Montagu's queer ethnomasquerades were influential in Byron's writing of Don Juan, and also in his creation of a Byronic celebrity persona. SexualitiesByron was fascinated by Mo...

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Section: She Imagines How She Would Have "Pass'd This Voyage In Takei...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Drinking a Dish of Tea With Sapho”: The Sexual Fantasies of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Byron

Winch¹

2013

Women's Writing

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“…Contemporary examination of the Turkish Embassy Letters situates them within the discourses of post-colonial studies and it has spurred a lively debate on whether they offer an orientalist gaze or not (Campbell 1994;Aravamudan 1995;Secor 1999;Weitzman 2002;Dadhaboy 2016;Hall et al 2017). Whichever stance one might take in this debate, Montagu's positionality is clearly that of a British woman who mirrors herself upon the "other" in order to structure her own image.…”

Section: The Translation Of the Turkish Embassy Lettersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trans-Adriatic Enlightenments: Maria Petrettini’s Italian Translation of the Turkish Embassy Letters

Papalexopoulou

2024

New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800

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In 1838, Maria Petrettini, a Greco-Venetian aristocrat, published a translation of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters from English into Italian. In this paper, taking as a focal point Petrettini’s translation of the Letters, I aim to unravel the story of two parallel texts that challenged religious and political presuppositions. In the work of Petrettini and Montagu, the view of the Turk as a savage is deconstructed through a gendered perspective. The writer and the translator propose that a traveller can know a foreign land only if they are able to penetrate all aspects of public and private life; a feat that only a female scholar can accomplish. Apart from the importance of the Letters and their translation, focusing on a scholar like Maria Petrettini allows us to broaden our gaze to the intellectual possibilities available to high class women in the North-Eastern Mediterranean; the multiple strategies for women’s political representation within an era of Revolutions; the mosaic of religious, political and ethnic affiliations and the ways in which Enlightenment and Romantic ideas merged into each other within the framework of the Greco-Italian intellectual milieu providing us with a transcultural, trans-Adriatic Enlightenment.

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“…Responding to interpretations such as those of Lew, Srinivas Aravamudan issues a call for greater nuance in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam: Masquerade, Womanliness, and Levantinization (), arguing against approaches that either “belabor Montagu's writings with the blunt accusation of orientalism, or naively celebrate it as twentieth‐century feminism” (92–3). Proposing new terminology – “levantinization” – to identify her desired “assimilation to the other” (71), he emphasizes that this assimilation is “fantasy,” culminating only in a “partial identification” with the Turkish women of whom she writes (71).…”

Section: Debating the Veil: Interpreting Montagu's Views On Islammentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lowe notes that while Montagu “relies on and reiterates an established cultural attitude that differentiates Orient and Occident” (32), she also utilizes a discourse of social rank to establish equality between Turkish women and aristocratic English women, creating a rhetoric of identification between them. Not as laudatory as Lowe's reading, Aravamudan's analysis of Montagu's letters in “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam” () contends that they simultaneously participate in feminist and orientalist discourses, which is what allows different scholars to read them as proto‐feminist or proto‐orientalist (93). Aravamudan finds Montagu's letters to be “progressive and inclusionary” (93), arguing that Montagu maintains a “partial identification” with Turkish women (69), but that she is not concerned with presenting a “truth” so much as performing an “authorial masquerade” (72).…”

Section: Depictions Of Turkish Women and The Use Of Masculine Discoursesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and theTurkish Embassy Letters: A Survey of Contemporary Criticism

2017

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Since the publication of Robert Halsband's biography of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1956 and his later edited collection of her letters, modern scholars have been fascinated with the network of critical discourses in Montagu's writing in the Turkish Embassy Letters. Analyzing her work on multiple axes – religious, political, scientific, and gendered – contemporary critics have made this classic text accessible to new generations of readers and thinkers. Yet as scholarship on these letters continues to flourish, certain trends persist, often at the expense of new avenues of inquiry. This article proposes that several recent threads in the scholarly conversation surrounding the Turkish Embassy Letters have the potential to be expanded in three promising new directions to more fully explore Montagu's religious identity and its relationship to her discussions of religious belief and practice; her unique role as a mother while traveling; and her place in the smallpox variolation controversy and its relationship to disability.

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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam : Masquerade, Womanliness, and Levantinization

Cited by 11 publications

References 31 publications

“Drinking a Dish of Tea With Sapho”: The Sexual Fantasies of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Byron

“Drinking a Dish of Tea With Sapho”: The Sexual Fantasies of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Byron

Trans-Adriatic Enlightenments: Maria Petrettini’s Italian Translation of the Turkish Embassy Letters

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and theTurkish Embassy Letters: A Survey of Contemporary Criticism

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