Orientalism, gender and class in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters: To persons of distinction, men of letters & c

Ecumene (continues as Cultural Geographies)

Volumn 6, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 375-398

  Secor, Anna ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84992863110     PISSN: 09674608     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/096746089900600401     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. To Lady Mar, 1 Apr. 1717, in M. W. Montagu, The complete letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu I: 1708-1720, ed. R. Halsband (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 327–8.
2. To Lady Bute, 23 Jan. 1755, in M. W. Montagu, The complete letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu III: 1752-1762, ed. R. Halsband (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 80.
3. M. L. Pratt, Imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation (London, Routledge, 1992).
4. I. Grewal, Home and harem: nation, gender, empire and the cultures of travel (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1996); T. Nicholas, Colonialism's culture: anthropology, travel and government (Priceton, Princeton University Press, 1994); M. Yegenoglu, Colonial fantasies: towards a feminist reading of orientalism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998).
5. S. Mills, Discourses of difference: an analysis of women's travel writing and colonialism (London, Routledge, 1991); A. Blunt, ‘Mapping authorship and authority: reading Mary Kingsley's landscape descriptions’, in A. Blunt and G. Rose, eds, Writing women and space: colonial and postcolonial geographies (New York, Guilford Press, 1994), pp. 1–28; A. Blunt, Travel, gender and imperialism: Mary Kingsley in West Africa (New York, Guilford Press, 1994).
6. F. Nussbaum, Torrid zones: maternity, sexuality and empire in eighteenth-century English narratives (Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); A. Grosrichard, The sultan's court: European fantasies of the East (London and New York, Verso, 1998); B. Melman, Women's Orients: English women and the Middle East, 1718-1918: sexuality, religion and work (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995); R. Kabbani, Europe's myths of Orient (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986).
7. R. Halsband, The life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 2–3.
8. See letters to Lady Bute, 28 Jan. and 6 Mar. 1753, in Montagu, The complete letters III, pp. 20, 25.
9. Halsband, The life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, pp. 10–28, 236-62.
10. To Lady Bute, 28 Jan. 1753, in Montagu, The complete letters III, p. 24.
11. Not only did Montagu produce her best-known writing during this time, but she also made her contribution to medicine, bringing back with her from Turkey a serum for inoculation against smallpox which she had discovered from her conversations with Turkish women; see Halsband, The life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, pp. 80–1.
12. D. Murphy, Embassy to Constantinople: the travels of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (New York, New Amsterdam Books, 1988), p. 29.
13. To Lady Bute, 23 July 1753, in Montagu, The complete letters III, p. 36.
14. Grewal, Home and harem.
15. To Lady Bute, 1 Oct. 1752, in Montagu, The complete letters III, p. 19.
16. Halsband, The life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, p. 255.
17. Mills, Discourses of difference.
18. F. Nussbaum, The autobiographical subject: gender and ideology in eighteenth-century England (Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
19. M. W. Montagu, The nonsense of common sense, 1737-1738, ed. R. Halsband (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1947).
20. Halsband, The life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, p. 254.
21. Quoted in Nussbaum, The autobiographical subject, pp. 150–1.
22. To Sir James Steuart, 5 Sept. 1758, in Montagu, The complete letters III, pp. 171–2.
23. A. Hasall, The balance of power 1715-1789 (New York, Macmillan, 1903).
24. L. Brown, Ends of empire: women and ideology in early eighteenth-century English literature (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1993).
25. L. Lowe, Critical terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1991).
26. J. T. Bent, Early voyages and travels in the Levant (New York, Burt Franklin, 1893), p. xxxvii.
27. Halsband, The life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, p. 77.
28. Kabbani, Europe's myths of Orient; N. Daniel, Islam and the West: the making of an image (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1958).
29. E. Said, Orientalism (New York, Vintage, 1978).
30. To the Abbé Conti, 1 Apr. 1717, in Montagu, The complete letters I, pp. 318–19.
31. C. Knipp, ‘Types of Orientalism in eighteenth-century England’ (PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 1974).
32. See e.g. Nussbaum, Torrid zones; Melman, Women's Orients; and Grosrichard, The sultan's court.
33. Nussbaum, Torrid zones, p. 1.
34. Kabbani, Europe's myths of Orient, p. 28.
35. Knipp, Types of Orientalism, p. 32.
36. J. Mabro, Veiled half-truths: Western travelers’ perceptions of Middle Eastern women, selected and introduced by J. Mabro (London and New York, I. B. Tauris, 1996), p. 28.
37. Knipp, Types of Orientalism, p. 289.
38. To Lady Mar, 10 Mar. 1718, in Montagu, The complete letters I, p. 385.
39. A. Desai, ‘Introduction’, in M. W. Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters (Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1993), p. xxxii.
40. R. B. Mowat, The age of reason: the continent of Europe in the eighteenth century (London, Harrap, 1934), p. 19.
41. To Lady Rich, 20 Sept. 1716, in Montagu, The complete letters I, p. 272.
42. This term is from P. Hulme, Colonial encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London, Methuen, 1986).
43. To Lady Bristol, 1 Apr. 1717, in Montagu, The complete letters I, p. 325.
44. Pratt, Imperial eyes, p. 157.
45. Mills, Discourses of difference.
46. To Her Royal Highness Princess of Wales, 1 Apr. 1717, in Montagu, The complete letters I, pp. 310–11.
47. Grewal, Home and harem.
48. Yegenoglu, Colonial fantasies, p. 80.
49. To Lady --, 17 June 1717, in Montagu, The complete letters I, p. 368.
50. See Melman, Women's Orients, for a discussion.
51. G. Sandys, Sandys Travails (London, 1652); excerpted in Mabro, Veiled half-truths, p. 137.
52. Baudier, Histoire générale du sérail et de la cour du Grand Seigneur, empereur des Turcs, 1623, 2nd edn, 1626, ch. 15, pp. 159–60; quoted in Grosrichard, The sultan's court, p. 170.
53. To Lady --, 1 Apr. 1717, in Montagu, The complete letters I, pp. 313–14.
54. Nussbaum uses this term, coined by M. Pratt, in her discussion of Oriental women's spaces in the accounts of Montagu, Elizabeth Craven and Sarah Scott in Torrid zones, pp. 135–62.
55. M. de Thevenot, Relation d'un voyage fait au Levant (Paris, Thomas Jolly, 1665); excerpted in Mabro, Veiled half-truths, p. 138.
56. According to Halsband, this letter appears to have been a genuine piece of correspondence, not included in the original manuscript of the Turkish Embassy Letters, but later inserted into the volume. Halsband prints the French original in his edition of The complete letters; the translation quoted here is to the Abbé Conti, Feb. 1718, in Desai, ed, Montagu, Turkish Embassy letters, pp. 109–110.
57. To Lady Mar, 1 Apr. 1717, in Montagu, The complete letters I, pp. 328–9.
58. Lowe, Critical terrains, p. 51.
59. Yegenoglu, Colonial fantasies, pp. 81–2.
60. For examples of such critiques and extensions of Said's work see B. Robbins, ‘Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism: a symposium’, Social Text 40 (1994), pp. 1–10; P. Hulme, Colonial encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London, Methuen, 1986) and A. Behdad, Belated travelers: Orientalism in the days of colonial dissolution, (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1994).
61. E. Kroller, ‘First impressions: rhetorical strategies in travel writing by Victorian women’, Ariel 21 (1990), pp. 87–99; C. McEwan, ‘Encounters with West African women: textual representations of difference by white women abroad’, in Blunt and Rose, Writing women and space, pp. 73–100.
62. For an analysis which includes class but views class difference as replacing racial discourses, see S. Blake, ‘A woman's trek: what difference does gender make?’, Women's Studies International Forum 13 (1990), pp. 347–55.