Travel, Discovery, Transformation

Gabriel R. Ricci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351301145
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This latest volume in the Culture & Civilization series gathers interdisciplinary voices to present a collection of essays on travel and travel narratives. The essays span a range of topics from iconic ancient travel stories to modern tourism. They discuss travel in the ancient world, modern heroic travels, the literary culture of missionary travel, the intersection of fiction and travel narratives, modern literary traditions and visions of Greece, personal identity, and expatriation. Essays also address travel memoirs, the re-imagining of worlds through travel, transformed landscapes and animals in travel narratives, diplomacy, English women travel writers, and pilgrimage and health in the medieval world.

The history of travel writing takes in multiple pursuits: exploration and conquest, religious pilgrimage and missionary work, educational tourism and diplomacy, scientific and personal discovery, and natural history and oral history. As a literary genre, it has enhanced a wide range of disciplines, including geography, ethnography, anthropology, and linguistics. Moreover, twenty-first-century interests in travel and travel writing have produced a global framework that promises to expand travel's theoretical reach into the depths of the Internet, thus challenging our conventional concept of what it means to travel.

The fact that travel and travel writing have a prehistory that is embedded in foundational religious texts and ancient narratives of journey, like the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, makes both travel and travel writing fundamental and essential expressions of humanity. Travel encourages writing, particularly as epistolary and poetic chronicling. This is clearly a history and tradition that began with human communication and which has kept pace with our collective development.

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Women’s Voices

5

A Protestant in Foreign Catholic and Muslim Spaces: The Turkish Embassy Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Precious McKenzie

LADY MARY WORTLEY Montagu (1689–1762) is best remembered for her Embassy Letters (1763), epistles composed during her yearlong residence in the Ottoman Empire. Her letters, published only after her death and then against the wishes of her daughter, reveal the political preoccupations of a notable, aristocratic woman and expand upon our own framework of eighteenth-century politics and power. Many scholars have read Montagu’s letters through the lens of eighteenth-century gender dynamics. This article however reexamines Montagu’s letters and expands the context of her writing. I argue Montagu navigates a continent ravished by war and that she confronts deep-rooted European fears about the Muslim Other. Such an analysis is significant in that the battles and redrawn boundaries of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires—of which Montagu travels—would continue to have a long-lasting impact on the peace and stability of the region. Historians have argued the events that caused World War I had their genesis in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Battles in the region included the War of Spanish Succession (1700–1715), the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748, known in England as “King George’s War”), the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) and the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). When Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated by Serbian forces (June 1914), the numerous battles and long-standing tangled alliances between the European nations were tested and caused the outbreak of World War I. Montagu’s political position and her observations about the region during the eighteenth century foreshadow growing tension in the region; tension that her husband, traveling to the Ottoman Empire as a diplomat, could not successfully mend.

Montagu’s Early Years

When Mary Pierrepont (later Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) was just fourteen years old, her father, Lord Dorchester, introduced her to the Kit-Cat Club, a club composed of men of wit who were aligned with the Whig Party. There the members toasted to her beauty and intelligence.¹ She began to circulate in society and make intimate friendships with writers, politicians, and members of royalty. Her most notable early friendships include Addison and Steele. More than just a celebrated beauty, young Lady Mary spent hours reading books in her father’s library. By the time she was toasted by the Kit-Cat Club, she had already read “Dryden, Fletcher, Congreve, Molière, and Corneille” and French romances.² She taught herself Latin and Greek. She enjoyed writing. Before her marriage to Edward Wortley Montagu, she wrote many pieces which she circulated amongst her friends. Emulating the English and French romance traditions, her earliest works dealt with young women and marriage.³ Throughout her works, Isobel Grundy notes, Montagu’s “working model of female goodness is one of honour and heroism, not of submissiveness and conformity.”⁴

In 1703 or 1704, fourteen-year-old Lady Mary began a correspondence with a man eleven years her senior, Edward Wortley Montagu, under the guise that she was writing to Wortley’s sister. Their correspondence, which she did her best to hide from her father, lasted until their marriage in 1712.⁵ She eloped with Wortley, and because of this, was shunned by her father, and Wortley was denied a dowry for his new bride. Her father did not believe that Wortley was up to par with his own family’s fortunes. Wortley did, however, travel in impressive circles. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge. He was close friends with Addison and Steele and acted, with Addison, as godfather to Steele’s daughter.⁶ Wortley was also a Whig and a Member of Parliament. He was hardworking, prudent with his money, and somber.

In July 1716, King George I appointed Wortley as “His Majesty’s Ambassador at the Ottoman Porte.”⁷ But, before this appointment, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was already a published author. In 1714, one of her essays appeared in the Spectator.⁸ Then in 1716, shortly before she left for the Ottoman Empire, several of her poems were published, although she did not authorize publication. The Town Eclogues, written with Pope and Gay, was published in 1716, and placed her in “first-rate literary company” and earned her the reputation of a female wit.⁹ But she is best remembered for her Embassy Letters, which chronicle her experiences far from England.

The Epistolary Tradition

Traveling through Europe and the Ottoman Empire in 1716–1718 as a diplomat’s wife, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu analyzes public and private spaces in relation to her experiences as a woman both in England and abroad.¹⁰ Wortley was sent to the Ottoman Empire with a mission to arrange a peace treaty involving the Ottoman Empire and the European powers, specifically the Habsburgs and the British. While Wortley tended to political business, Montagu visited ancient ruins, gardens, churches, mosques, and the homes of diplomats and royalty. Montagu openly admired life in the Ottoman Empire, and in fact, her husband would later lose his post as ambassador because it was thought that he was too sympathetic to the Ottomans.¹¹ This article argues that in her letters to friends and family members, Montagu weighs the values of Muslim and Christian customs. As she struggles to convince her European readers of the propriety of the Ottoman hammams (Turkish baths), Montagu operates in a periphery realm for she is neither a native nor a colonizer. Montagu, as the civilized Englishwoman, is often uncertain as to the extent to which she should adopt the Ottoman lifestyle, although she admires its women and its traditions.¹² Even in her uncertainty, Montagu provides her contemporaries with valuable cultural commentary on life beyond Protestant England. This is a significant political and cultural contribution that Montagu made. Because of the Turkish Siege of Vienna (1683), Christian Europeans mistrusted Muslim Ottomans. Austria was also trying to reassert itself as a major figure in the region, capable of defending its borders from the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Many Christians perceived the Ottomans as bloodthirsty heathens set out to conquer and destroy all of Christendom. Montagu sets out to understand Ottoman culture and break down prejudice aimed at Muslim Ottomans.

As Montagu travels east from Bohemia and into the Ottoman Empire, the society and politics she encounters affect her rhetoric. While in the Kingdom of Bohemia, she writes to her sister, Lady Mar. Montagu, laments the less than luxurious accommodations, and reports on Bohemia’s natural gifts such as the abundance of delicious wild fowl. Her rhetoric implies that monarchs should protect the land and its people. Montagu finds beauty in the pastoral landscape. Likewise, eighteenth-century European cities she visits are paradoxes of luxuriousness and moral decrepitude. The city space is a public arena where Montagu attends one lavish dinner party after another. Frequently Montagu, as the wife of a diplomat, enters into the most private chambers of the political élite of Europe and the Ottoman Empire. She wittily compares English aristocrats to the foreign aristocrats she encounters on her travels. I argue that Montagu’s insights on public and private spaces are deliberately constructed; Montagu is a skilled author, not simply a friendly, familial correspondent as her genre choice—the letter—might suggest. She utilizes the epistolary genre in order to subtly critique English politics. However, Montagu herself would demurely denounce most of the political implications which appeared in her letters. For example, during a conversation with an old priest who came to visit her, the priest witnessed Montagu folding a rather large letter to her daughter. The priest commented on Montagu’s “great deal of Business.” She coyly replied, “I had done no business at all; I had only wrote to my Daughter on Family affairs or such trifles as make up Women’s Conversation.”¹³

As Montagu no doubt realized, letters precariously occupy both private and public space. Deborah Kaplan acknowledges the letter’s intimate nature which enables a writer to voice, “cultural identifications shared by letter writer and reader.”¹⁴ The transmission of family affairs such as the discussion of land, inheritance, social engagements or marriage agreements is anything but trifling for a powerful aristocratic family such as Montagu’s. She establishes her political affiliation through her letters, thereby positioning herself and her family securely within the English ruling class, as intimates of King George I.¹⁵ Considering that Montagu organized the Turkish Embassy Letters after her return from the Ottoman Empire and that she ordered them published only after her death further suggests she intended a sociopolitical message for her eighteenth-century readers. The posthumous publication of the letters belies Montagu’s anxieties about weakening her status in society or causing public scandal by being ‘unladylike’ because she wrote;¹⁶ it was commonly thought a woman of quality “could have no acquaintance with a bookseller—that is to say, a publisher—except as a purchaser of his wares.”¹⁷

Simone de Beauvoir analyzes the paradox of women’s cultural negotiations which better contextualizes Montagu’s letters in the feminist literary tradition. De Beauvoir maintains that “women band together in order to establish a counter-universe, but they always set it up within the frame of the masculine universe.”¹⁸ Montagu is no exception to de Beauvoir’s theory. In the Embassy collection, twelve of the fifteen recipients are women. Her traveler’s position is influenced by her position as a woman within patriarchal English society. Montagu buries social and political messages in the letters to her “counter-universe” of female readers with humor, scandal, gossip, and other such trifles.¹⁹

If Montagu had anxiety over having her poems or essays published, society perceived letter writing as an appropriate form of writing for an eighteenth-century lady. Groups of female friends and family members often gathered together to read and discuss letters. Letters by ladies were circulated but never published for the general public. The events Montagu reports in her letters and the information in general found in typical eighteenth-century letters were “the means to the social and moral knowledge of others.”²⁰ When Montagu describes her eastern travels she also transmits valuable knowledge about this exotic world to her more confined female readers at home. Letters were seen as the “most direct, sincere, and transparent form of written communication” and as also “the most playful and potentially deceptive of forms.”²¹

Although it is known that Montagu drew on her own, actual letters for the Embassy collection, Cynthia Lowenthal finds that “evidence indicates that she edited out the personal references and rearranged information: descriptions sent to one correspondent, for example, appear in the albums to have been sent to another.”²² Because of this, the Embassy Letters should be analyzed as a “most polished and self-conscious epistolary performance— a document deliberately shaped, edited, and fine-tuned for nuance and subtlety.”²³ The travel letters written to her friends provide “a pretext for distancing” herself from “the social institutions” of which she belongs.²⁴ Montagu assumes the role of reporter or surveyor—with a touch of satirist tossed in for good measure. By participating in such discourse, Montagu advocates for the reformation of European and, more specifically, Catholic political policy regarding England’s foreign alliances. The epistolary form is Montagu’s conscious choice to adhere to her society’s expectations of women as polite letter writers rather than as professional authors or politicians.

Montagu selects her recipients based on the social or political message she wants to discuss. Montagu’s recipients in the Embassy collection, such as Lady Mar, Lady Rich, and Lady Bristol, reflect her aware...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• I The Allure of Ancient Greece
• II Women’s Voices
• III Traveling with God
• IV New Worlds
• V Modern Journeys
• Contributors