Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and The Fabrications of Orientalism

Western perspectives of areas outside of Europe are, more often than not, filtered through a lens of fantasy and imagination. This manner of examining the east is known as Orientalism, a word that Edward Said defines as the “constellation of ideas” that present eastern lands as exotic, and separate from the west (Said). This problematic way of viewing the east creates a false narrative that very few people have attempted to take apart. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is one of these few individuals who attempted to accomplish that in her works. She is remembered most for her letters that presented Middle Eastern culture in a more enlightened way. Her credible first-hand accounts came from traveling to and visiting Turkey often as the wife of a British ambassador (Bohls, 179-205). Lady Montagu’s feministic tone stood in contrast to the fabricated male-dominated fantasies of the time period. This essay will argue that Montagu’s writings humanized the tantalized Orient women because of the special access that she had to this realm because of her gender; she showed the truth of the Harems and Hammams in a humanistic way by emphasizing the cleanliness of the Turkish women, their morals and the respectful order of their hierarchies, which presents a case that they actually have more freedoms and liberties than the Western woman. Lady Mary is, in many ways, correct in her depictions of the Turkish bath and harem, but nonetheless incorrect in her description of the veil. The veil exists in Islamic cultures because it gives women the option to present a sense of privacy from the surrounding culture, not to deceive men or to oppress women, as Lady Mary’s letters indicate.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an English aristocrat and poet who is particularly known for writing historical letters. As a wealthy wife of an Ambassador, Lady Montagu’s travel experience was exceptionally rare and a rather astounding feat in and of itself; furthermore, her exposé on Turkish bath society quite purposely rejected and reversed the male fantasy-driven expectations of female life in the Ottoman Empire. She holds a remarkable legacy for her letters, especially those from the travels to the Ottoman Empire. According to Billie Melman, the letters were an initial and important example of the secular work that a woman wrote on the Islamic presence in the Turkish Orient (Melman). Lady Mary’s intellectual impact is, because of this, reflected in later scholars’ attempts to demystify the presence of women in the Ottoman Empire from perspectives that deny Orientalism.

Lady Mary travelled with her husband to Turkey, where she wrote her famous letters about Turkish women, Turkish bath and Harem. In her letter, she describes her encounter with the culture practiced in Turkey as a decentering experience affecting the loss and the reconstitution of her topic position via the social interactions with other women. The importance of lady Montagu’s letters is first and foremost its reversal of the patriarchal and racist stereotypes written up until then by European males. Ruth Barzilai-Lumbroso writes in article “Turkish Men and the History of Ottoman Women: Studying the History of the Ottoman Dynasty's Private Sphere Through Women's Writings” that, “Ottoman women’s history was presented to the Turkish public through the mediation of mostly male historians, who were among the first to study Ottoman dynastic history” (Barzilai-Lumbroso, 54). Her letters are revolutionary in and of themselves because she was a rare female traveler in a time when even royal and elite-standing women were discriminated against and prevented from easily traveling, researching, or otherwise educating themselves or others, gender-based difficulties which Sue Rosser discusses in the article “Feminist Scholarship in the Sciences: Where Are We Now and When Can We Expect a Breakthrough?” (Rosser, 6). Gaining access to the upper class of Turkish society in 1716 as the wife of British Ambassador, she was able to gain entry into areas of Ottoman aristocracy that even privileged men would have been forbidden to see. It is important to know the truth presented by Lady Montagu in ‘Turkish Embassy letters’, about the functions of Hamams and Harem, Turkish women, and the definition of their role in society apart from the fantasies presented in Orientalism. During her visit, she was deeply delighted by the splendor of the Ottoman ladies and the dignity of their surroundings, in contrast to the male writers’ insistence of emphasizing the perverse sexuality.

Lady Mary’s encountering of this realm for women in a Turkish shower is worthy of note, as one of the experiences she recorded as an especially diverting episode during a gathering of Turkish ladies at a shower in Sofia (Aravamudan, 69-104). This depiction of Turkish women as confident agents of their own bodies was contrary to the male dominated literature from this era. These women were liberated in these circumstances where they were the masters of their own environments instead of being looked upon as objects of male sexual attention. In the Turkish baths, Lady Mary’s gender granted her access to an area of Ottoman culture that no man had previously been able to observe. Because of how men were forbidden from entering this place for women, previous male visitors to the Ottoman Empire documented their findings as the result of speculation and not fact (Barzilai-Lumbroso, 61). These previous attempts to record Ottoman history from the male, western perspective portrayed these baths in an overly sexual manner; this corrupted the genuine nature of these bathhouses as places for women to gather in the privacy of their own gender without prying eyes. They could simply behave as they would among other women without interference.

This paper will argue that three topics from Lady Mary Montagu's Turkish Embassy letters — those of the Turkish bath (or hammam), the harem, and the veil — shattered previous conceptions of these aspects of the Ottoman woman's identity. She corrected many misinterpretations of past male voyagers, including the sensationalized tales recorded about the religion, conventions and the treatment of ladies in the Ottoman Empire. Her gender and class status gave her entrance to exclusive female universes where she could give precise detail on customs and fine attire (Secor). On the other hand, while her writings contradict male writers and their misconceptions, she is like them in her description of the veil and her accusations of women's morals due to the fact that she, as a Christian, still finds some of the customs of Islamic society strange or “Oriental.” Because she is a woman from the upper classes, Montagu's meetings with in the home environments of Turkish women are sometimes met with misunderstanding as a result of the dramatic differences between cultures, such as particular greeting customs and the relationship between the guest and the host (Still, 89). There is an Arabic proverb that means people of a place are the best to know its hidden pathways. So, even though Lady Mary entered the female space in this society, she was a foreign witness of some female practices in hammam and harem. She failed to fully understand Muslim views of the veil as a significant component of the identity of a Muslim woman. The Turkish bath and harem may relate specifically to identities associated with the Ottoman Empire, but the veil is a symbol for all of Islam, which is optional not obligated; women wear it according to their individual choices and beliefs about what it means to express personal modesty as a follower of Islam while allowing oneself the option to preserve privacy from the surrounding world.

Lady Montagu was fascinated by the liberty of the Turkish women and their lives, which was in stark contrast to the lives of women in England. The concept of women's liberty was something that was discussed for many years. The time in which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu lived coincided with that of the Enlightenment, a period of intense intellectual discussions in European history. Women, during this time period, began to accept different roles in this changing society. In the article “Feminism and the Enlightenment 1650-1850,” Barbara Taylor discusses how this era reevaluated the relationship between women, intellectuals, and philosophical thought in general. Taylor writes “Histories of feminism in England have generally linked its emergence there to the revolution in political ideas which occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in particular to the impact of John Locke's ideas… His fierce attack on the patriarchal model of political authority may not have meant to encourage criticism of patriarchal power in the family” (Taylor, 265). Feminist rejection of patriarchal models trace, ironically, from the works of John Locke, a man. Lady Montagu’s writings are indicative of Enlightenment trends that highlight a rejection of previous models while exploring new ways in which to engage in thought. Later feminist intellectual movements can trace their roots into the era of female writers from the Enlightenment, like Montagu, who examined society from female perspectives. In conjunction with the influences from contemporary Enlightenment thought, many of Lady Mary’s observations derived from the culture shocks she experienced while she lived in the Ottoman Empire, an empire which functioned upon Islamic as opposed to Christian values.

The Ottoman Empire was one of the most enduring empires in the history of the world and the center of the Islamic caliphate. The Turkic tribes that would become the Ottoman Empire conquered the Byzantine Empire in the 1200s, ending Greco-Roman rule in the Middle East in an empire that would last until the First World War (Shaw). The Ottoman Empire established an Islamic society in Istanbul, which was at one time Constantinople and one of the largest cities in the world. The empire expanded into the Balkans, bringing its influence and Islam into the West while still retaining a distinct identity of its own, which was often seen as incredibly foreign to peoples from European nations. Ottoman influences still exist today through the prevalence of Islam in nations such as Albania, Serbia, and Kosovo; this demonstrates how far Ottoman influences were capable of impressing upon society in the hundreds of years that the empire lasted. Ruth Barlizai-Lumbroso writes on the role of the woman in the Ottoman Empire in commenting, “Stories centered on the everyday lives of Ottoman women enabled historians to reconstruct representations of Ottoman women not only as subjected and submissive but also as possessing control over their lives; not only as passive bystanders, but as powerful and active participants in their society.” (Barlizai-Lumbroso, 76-77). Women were not merely the objects of male sexuality, but were instead agents of their own lives. The dominance of Islam as the primary religion in the Ottoman realms created a society in which Muslim values were the standard by which all others were judged, a fundamental difference from the Western societies founded upon their individual perceptions of Christianity (Shaw, 95). These values were dramatically different from those that the Western sources typically perceived, however, as expressed in Montagu's letters, which is perhaps the grounds for her confusion when it comes to the topic of a woman’s choice to adopt the veil.

Followers of Islam within the Ottoman Empire expressed modesty as a personal choice to signify them as followers of Islam while in public and to give themselves the option of maintaining a sense of privacy outside of their own homes; on this note, the private lives of female followers of Islam were not as repressive as Western, Orientalist conceptions would have one to believe. Instead of the erotic, romanticized views of the Ottoman Empire as a land of nude women and perverse men that was expresses in much of the literature from the times of the empire, the people were instead more pious, but expressed more liberation than commonly believed in Western depictions (Said). Montagu's letters help to deconstruct these orientalist views of the Ottoman Empire through depicting its woman as actual people, not sexualized objects in a book. These earlier observations parallel later scholarly works, such as those of Said’s writings on Orientalism, which truly shows how groundbreaking Lady Montagu’s ideas were in her letters. For a woman from the 18th century, her ideas were genuinely revolutionary during a time of shifting social order all over the world, these thoughts previously mentioned as an extension of the Enlightenment. These dramatic social changes eventually appeared in a fully realized form in the French Revolution later in that same century. The 18th century is, in this light, the defining century in how the modern world and the intellectual perceptions that have allowed its creation came into being.

She wrote about Turkish Hammam and the truth of it in her letter XXVII. She states in the first lines of her letter, “I am now got into a new world, where everything I see appears to me a change of scene." In the 18th century, the East was a strange and different realm to the Europeans. Their conceptions based on the letters that written by male writers. Said called them as Orientalists. The writers who writes about their voyages and specialist in Orientalism. Lady Mary entered the Hammam and she expected to see homosexuality as the male writers described but she found another scene:

all being in the state of nature, that is in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect conceal'd, yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest Gesture amongst 'em. They walked and moved with the same majestic Grace which Milton describes of our General Mother. There were many amongst them as exactly pro- portioned as ever any Goddess was drawn by the pencil of Guido [Reni] or Titian, and most of their skins shiningly white, only adorned by their Beautiful Hair divided into many tresses hanging on their shoulder, braided either with pearl or riband, perfectly representing the figures of the Graces (Montagu, Letter XXVI).

The Turkish bath serves an important role in the social environments for Turkish Muslims because they provide an environment in which people of each gender can interact in an environment without interference from the other gender. Lady Montagu was able to have the privilege as a foreigner to experience this aspect of Turkish culture that was so dramatically different from her own upon the grounds of her gender and social class, the second of which allowed her the mobility that other women from the West lacked (Rosser, 7-8). She was, because of this, able to observe Muslim women in an environment without the presence of men, which is the key factor of what made her observations so much different than those of male travelers who came before her.

Arthur J. Weitzman’s article named “Voyeurism and Aesthetics in the Turkish Bath: Lady Mary's School of Female Beauty,” gives a deeper insight into Lady Montagu’s experience while at the Turkish baths. These experiences were, for Lady Montagu, a form of liberation that she had never experienced before.

[Lady Montagu indulged in these exotic experiences] in part by removing her outer garments to reveal her "stays," which she writes, "satisfied 'em very well, for I saw they believed I was so locked up in that machine that it was not in my power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband." Srinivas Aravamudan, notwithstanding Lady Mary's disavowal of sexual content in her description of the Bath, argues perversely that "the letter from the bathhouse turns into one immense metaphor for the very thing it was trying to skirt around: "sexual impropriety." Even though he admits she "squelches the specter of lesbian eroticism," the description "is nonetheless suggestive of lesbian possibilities" (Weitzman, 353).

The liberation that Lady Montagu experienced during her visits to the Turkish baths is a native component of the Islamic culture that came to be in the Ottoman Empire. Muslim women, in this situations, expressed behaviors that would have been considered perverse in the West, but they were entirely tolerated in the Ottoman sense of modesty. This reality shows how prudish western society was when compared with the relatively free society that existed within these safe spaces dedicated to women. However, male dominated viewpoints from the west eroticized these typical scenes from the Ottoman woman's life into perverted depictions of orientalist storylines of how life existed in the Orient.

Because of the descriptions about Turkish women in these bathhouses, all the typical pictures of Oriental women are nude in the western imagination. This depiction of sexualized Ottoman women is a false portrayal that this paper seeks to undermine. In the article "Aesthetics and Orientalism in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters,” Elizabeth A. Bohls argues that the west sees the oriental women naked erotic, sexual objects because of these depictions of Turkish society from the western male perspective. It was men who had before this time defined historical narratives and perspectives, which is why it was so important that Lady Montagu’s letters exist in the historical records (Bohls, 191-192). Her writings were foundational in shifting perspectives into a more realistic vision of Islamic society and the roles of women in the Ottoman orient. They are sources that modern scholars have used in order to determine the genuine roles that women had within this society as opposed to the more fictional and sexual accounts that men had made before her.

Women, in this society, possessed roles that extended far beyond the stereotype of sexual objects for the eyes of male travelers. In the article “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem,” author Leila Ahmed discusses the topic of the harem in the context of its relationship to western views of Ottoman Society. Ahmed writes “The Orientalist’s picture of a harem is one of rich surroundings that are loaded with excellent and mysterious ladies whose sole obligation is to delight one man’s every pleasure. This myth may have been based on the royal harem of the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth century” (Ahmed, p. 521). Western male travelers first presented this picture, and we can still see artwork today based on romantic imaginings. Sadly, this picture is based an inadequate understanding of Muslim culture, traditions and the role of the Harem in the country. The field of Orientalism was born out of combination of imagination and ignorance. The contributions of male explorers, travelers, and artists are full of fantasies that resemble fairytales. Heather Madar, in the article “Before the Odalisque: Renaissance Representations of Elite Ottoman Women,” argues that many of these depictions were reiterated through the lens of Renaissance artists, who passed on these myths surrounding the Ottoman harem as reality. Jean-Baptiste Vanmour emerges as one of these travelers whose portrayals of the Ottoman harem was fundamentally incorrect, representing it as a location of sexuality (Madar, 31). Lady Montagu's accounts are vital in tearing apart these myths of what constitutes the Muslim identity in the field of women's roles in society during the Ottoman Empire.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s accounts of the Ottoman harem depict a space restricted to women, not a private brothel for a man of power. Judith Still writes in “Hospitable Harems? A European Woman and Oriental Spaces in the Enlightenment,” that “Montagu's experiences in Turkey seem to belie this cliché - she herself travels and is received in the harem (as in many other places) which becomes not a prison but simply the women's domain… Montagu's letters to her sister concerning the occasions when she was entertained by noble ladies in the women's quarters of the house do much to dispel any myths about 'harems'” (Still, 97-98). The harem was, contrary to male accounts of the women’s place in an Islamic household, a place for women to be themselves without the interference of men. It was a place where men were generally not allowed to interfere. As Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote, this place was not a prison for these women, but instead a space dedicated to allowing them to exist in luxury, which defied Western expectations of what existed in this space. It is for this reason that Lady Mary’s writings on the harem are important documents in establishing a historical perspective on how the sexualized harem in the European imagination was a figment of fiction as opposed to the dwelling place of noblewomen that it was in reality.

Although Lady Montagu's accounts provide details that are contrary to the male-dominated accounts that existed before her times in the Ottoman Empire, her beliefs on the function of the veil are flawed. In her letter XXX to Lady Mar, Lady Montagu describes the Islamic veil in saying “A bride is carried to church, with a cap on her head, in the fashion of a large trencher, and over it a red silken veil, which covers her all over to her feet… but her veil is never lifted up, not even by her husband” (Montague, Letter XXX). This disagrees with the ideas in Islam where the veil is an option for women to demonstrate their devotion to their faith through adopting the veil as a form of chosen modesty which also allows us the choice to keep our own personal privacy hidden from the world, if we desire. The veil is an option for women, not an obligation. In an opinion article, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argues that “All religions cast women as sinners and temptresses… Women have to be sequestered or contained lest they raise male lust and cause public disorder. Some young women argue that veils liberate them from a modern culture that objectifies and sexualizes women” (Alibhai-Brown). Muslim women view the veil as a liberation and an option that we possess in expressing ourselves as followers of our faith while maintaining our own privacy from the world in public. It is for this reason that Lady Montagu was wrong with her observations of the veil as a tool to oppress women in Islamic society when we wear the veil of our own choice in the maintenance of our own privacy from the world.

Lady Mary furthermore argues that the veil exists as a form of deception in Islamic society. She writes that “A husband, in common acceptation, signifies a jealouse brute, a surly tyrant; or, at best, a weak fool who may be made to believe anything. A wife is a domestic termagant, who is destined to deceive or torment the devil of a husband. The conduct of married people, in general, sufficiently justifies these two characters” (Montagu, Letter LVIII). The belief that the relationship between the husband and wife is deceitful, in this regard, is completely incorrect. This is, perhaps, the result of Orientalist beliefs that she maintains despite her experiences with women from the Ottoman Empire. The veil, in Islam, does not signify deception, but rather privacy from the exterior world as the headscarf is a choice that a woman makes for herself. Caryl-Sue writes in “Hijab: Veiled in Controversy” that “Hijab is an Islamic concept of modesty and privacy. This concept is not unique to Islam, but embraced by other religions, such as Judaism (where the concept of modesty is called Tzuniut) and Christianity. The Islamic concept of hijab is most often expressed in women’s clothing” (Caryl-Sue). This separates Lady Mary’s writings on the veil from her other writings which genuinely opened a discourse regarding the actual lives of women in the Ottoman Empire. Her writings on the veil were false, which demonstrate that, although her writings on the Turkish bath and the harem exposed the real lives of Ottoman woman, she still possessed a perspective of Orientalism in her writings that prevented her from seeing the whole picture in regard to her opinions on the veil as an oppressive or deceptive tool in Islamic society.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a foundational feminist writer from the Enlightenment who possessed the unique capacity to demonstrate novel viewpoints of the roles of women in Ottoman Society because of both her gender and her social class while allowed her access to the spaces typically restricted to Ottoman noblewomen. Although her opinions on the topic of the veil in Muslim society were incorrect on the grounds of Orientialist biases, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was revolutionary in her perspectives that depicted women in Ottoman society as more than sexual objects and erotic figures in the gender-exclusive spheres of the Turkish bath and that of the harem. These perspective are contrary to the male-dominated storylines of sexualized harems and lesbian baths that existed both before and after the period through which she wrote her letters. Modern scholars, such as Edward Said, have been able to use her letters as historical snapshots to demonstrate ideas relating to the concept of Orientalism and how these ideas damage the Muslim identity. Misconceptions and untruths about Muslims exist commonly in western society, but it is through the writings of these people that we have begun to look behind the veil at what constitute the genuine Muslim identity in an ocean of fears and prejudices against Islam. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s position in history is one that has made it possible for these historically Orientalist perspectives to be unwound.