The Female Traveler’s Gaze in Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters
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Written during her journey to the Ottoman Empire between 1716 to 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters holds significance for being the first travel account by a European woman about the exclusively female spaces of Turkish women and their everyday culture. Whereas critics have largely focused on feminist and orientalist aspects of The Turkish Embassy Letters, this paper examines the specific ways Montagu deploys visual authority as a female traveler in her negotiation of these overlapping discourses of gender and orientalism in her travel letters. Montagu self-consciously constructs herself as a powerful viewing subject through her appropriation of the traveler’s gaze, depicting Turkish women’s beauty and freedom in ways that contest existing orientalist stereotypes by male travel writers. Montagu’s cross-cultural encounter, however, remains limited and temporary, as she ends up reproducing orientalist discourse and reaffirming her English identity against the other non-Europeans. The Turkish Embassy Letters illustrates how Montagu’s female traveler’s gaze is inseparable from the larger aims of orientalism, which privileges the Western seeing “I” in representing and knowing the East.
Abstract
Written during her journey to the Ottoman Empire between 1716 to 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters holds significance for being the first travel account by a European woman about the exclusively female spaces of Turkish women and their everyday culture. Whereas critics have largely focused on feminist and orientalist aspects of The Turkish Embassy Letters, this paper examines the specific ways Montagu deploys visual authority as a female traveler in her negotiation of these overlapping discourses of gender and orientalism in her travel letters. Montagu self-consciously constructs herself as a powerful viewing subject through her appropriation of the traveler’s gaze, depicting Turkish women’s beauty and freedom in ways that contest existing orientalist stereotypes by male travel writers. Montagu’s cross-cultural encounter, however, remains limited and temporary, as she ends up reproducing orientalist discourse and reaffirming her English identity against the other non-Europeans. The Turkish Embassy Letters illustrates how Montagu’s female traveler’s gaze is inseparable from the larger aims of orientalism, which privileges the Western seeing “I” in representing and knowing the East.
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