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Article Excerpt
Thus far, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's writings about slavery have only been examined in a very limited way. In recent critical work on Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, scholars frequently argue that her text represents a feminist departure from previous male writings that are suffused with Orientalist tropes and lascivious assertions about the enslavement of Turkish women. (1) Montagu challenges this Orientalist tradition by representing elite Ottoman women as "the only free people in the Empire" (2) because of their control over property, their autonomy in specifically female spaces like the bathhouse and the harem, and the anonymity and concomitant sexual liberty offered to them by the wearing of veils. Responding to these aspects of the text, Srinivas Aravamudan asserts that Montagu "inaugurates a phantasmatic identification with Turkish aristocratic womanhood." (3) In his reading of the well-known letter depicting the Turkish bath, he also argues that Montagu constructs a scene in which "the European aristocratic woman is momentarily rendered the slave, while the object of her reflection, Turkish ladies of quality, are seen as completely unfettered. Female subjectivity is divided down the middle, revealing agency all on one side and subjection all on the other.' (4) Aravamudan astutely demonstrates how Montagu's feminist project hangs upon idealized representations of her elite Ottoman counterparts, which she uses to contrast with her own relative--and metaphoric--enslavement within her marriage and, more generally, within the confines of oppressive English laws and customs.
While scholars have consistently noted the extent to which Montagu's feminism is bound and limited by her investments in class hierarchy, they have not generally devoted much attention to the substantial portions of her text that depict actual slaves in the Ottoman Empire. In these passages, Montagu consistently represents herself as an authority on and admirer of Ottoman slave institutions. Scholars have generally overlooked how much Montagu's idealized vision of her elite Ottoman counterparts hinges upon her appreciation for the way they select, maintain, and control large retinues of mostly female slaves. For this reason, I propose that Montagu's work is in need of a rigorous post-colonial critique that is willing to confront the enormous human tragedies spawned by Ottoman slave institutions, to which Montagu and, for the most part, her critics, simply turn a blind eye.
By taking account of slavery in the Ottoman world, we can reappraise Montagu's texts on Turkey with the understanding that they describe contact zones in which female elites from two very different and powerful slave-holding empires encounter each other. In this way, we can delineate Montagu's admiration for Turkish slave institutions without losing sight of the fact that Montagu herself traveled as part of a diplomatic entourage representing a British nation that was itself heavily invested in its own particular system of enslavement. While Montagu's views on British slavery are much less developed in her writings, they strike, as I will demonstrate at the end of this essay, a similar chord to her depictions of bondage in the Ottoman world. In the end, Montagu's work should be read against a global context that includes the Ottoman and British empires, the voracious slave systems of each, and the enormous destruction they simultaneously unleashed upon the early modern world. When viewed within such a reconstituted post-colonial paradigm, the progressive and critical potential of Montagu's feminism appears to be even more limited than most critics have recognized. (5)
I begin with Montagu's neglected poem "Constantinople, To--" (1720), which provides a fairly clear key to understanding her representations of slavery in the Ottoman Empire. In the poeta, Montagu begins with a paean to her beautiful rural retreat outside Istanbul before moving to an extended section on the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the transformation of the city's magnificent churches into mosques, and the now ironic meaning behind the "Labour'd Pillars" that were erected by its emperors to celebrate their military triumphs. (6) In the following transitional lines, Montagu suddenly turns her attention from the vagaries of historical change to the aesthetics of imperial Ottoman splendor:
Griev'd at a view which strikes upon my Mind The short-liv'd Vanity of Humankind, In Gaudy Objects I indulge my Sight And turn where Eastern Pomp gives Gay Delight. See; the vast Train in Various Habits drest, By the bright Scimetar and sable vest, The Vizier proud, distinguish'd o're the rest. Six slaves in gay Attire his Bridle hold, His Bridle rich with Gems, his stirrups Gold, His snowy Steed adorn'd with Lavish Pride, Whole troops of Soldiers mounted by his Side, These toss the Plumy Crest, Arabian Coursers guide. (76-87)
If the term "Gaudy" reveals a slight unease at the pageantry of the Vizier's public display of power, the ambivalence quickly gives way to an exceedingly complimentary portrayal. The six finely dressed slaves holding the Vizier's bridle are an index of his wealth and his power over human bodies, which is all the more fascinating given that the Vizier himself was also a slave.
In his magisterial comparative work on slavery, Orlando Patterson warns us not to view elite slaves in a different analytical light than we do those bondsmen who labor in less elevated circumstances. Rather, he argues that ah elite slave like an Ottoman Vizier inhabits the same structural position as "the most miserable of field slaves. He was always structurally marginal, whether economically or socially, politically or culturally. His marginality made it possible for him to be used in ways that were not possible with a person who truly belonged." (7) Montagu seems unaware of the Vizier's complex and liminal position within the Ottoman ruling class or at least uninterested in exploring it in her poem. As we will see, Montagu often simplifies and misinterprets many aspects of Turkish slave institutions, especially those that involve the use of elite slaves. In this case, she does attend to the abject position of the Vizier's attendant slaves, but only to render them as impressive and aesthetically pleasing superfluities. After all, it does not take six men to control a horse, nor do enslaved stable-hands typically wear "gay Attire"--to such excesses, Montagu responds with an untroubled "Gay Delight" that dispels the gloomy philosophical reflections found in the previous section of the poeta.
Given a spate of recent critical work, primarily from Renaissance studies, we are now aware that Montagu was not necessarily unique in her positive representations of the Ottoman Empire. Gerald MacLean argues that, alongside the expected demonizing of Turkish power in the early-modern period, "there was also enormous admiration and great envy of the magnificent courtliness, immense wealth and exquisite splendour of Ottoman culture." (8) Whatever their ultimate position, all English writers of the period had to contend with the Turks' wealth and military might and their penchant for exhibiting both in staged public spectacles like the one Montagu describes in her poem. As Richmond Barbour has demonstrated, English authors sometimes dismissed Ottoman displays of power in public or diplomatic settings as "deceptive, effeminate, and debasing. They proved not the strength or authority of persons presumably honored by such display but rather a pervasive extravagance and rapacity, and they demonstrated the slackness of rulers who, by means of massive shows, disguised their unfitness to hold seats of power." (9) When measured against this ambivalent tradition, Montagu's work surprises because of the depth and consistency of her positive assessments of Ottoman imperial culture.
Unlike the men studied by Barbour, Montagu demonstrates in "Constantinople, To--" little desire to gain ironic or critical distance from the spectacle offered by the Vizier. Rather, both in this poem and throughout The Turkish Embassy Letters, Montagu stages herself as the ideal spectator of Ottoman spectacles, one who finds endless delight in their magnificent displays of wealth and power, which far outstrip anything she has seen in the most powerful European courts. At one point in The Turkish Embassy Letters, Montagu explicitly suggests that Ottoman imperial aesthetics are potentially superior to those of Europe: "Tis true their Magnificence is of a different taste from ours, and perhaps of a better" (414-15). We can view the many paintings of Montagu in Turkish dress as substantial evidence of her seriousness in making such assertions.
Traditional post-colonial paradigms are not able to account for such moments of contact and exchange between elite members of different imperial systems. (10) Montagu clearly esteems Turkish imperial culture and slave holding practices, in part, because they offer so much luxury and autonomy to slave-owning elite women, of whom Montagu declares: "They are Queens of their slaves" (329). Critics have been more apt to discuss Montagu's representations of the sexual freedoms of privileged Turkish women than her continual emphasis on the power and status that...
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