Is It Strange to Say the New York Times Magazine Did Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Dirty?
On September 22, 2020 renowned eighteenth-century travel writer and early anti antivaxxer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu made her latest public appearance since her death in 1762—in the New York Times Magazine. In “Is It Strange to Say I Miss the Bodies of Strangers?” Leslie Jamison bookends a quote hand-selected from Montagu’s historic letter-book between these two sentences: “When the hammam arrived in the Western imagination, largely by way of 18th-century European travel narratives, it was a breathlessly described, Orientalist fantasy — a seductive, elusive cloister, a sexualized sanctum of intimacy and indulgence” and “Of course the Western fantasy of Turkish baths was always underwritten by racism disguised as veneration.” The first sentence/bookend preps one for a “breathless” and “Orientalist” “fantasy” that is “seductive,” “sexualized”—etc. The second sentence/bookend reminds the reader that Lady Mary’s travel writing began a tradition of “Western fantasy” that was “always underwritten by racism disguised as veneration.” While Lady Mary was called a Saphho by some of her contemporaries due to her intense relationships with women, and while her travel-letters contain poetic descriptions of women (not just in Turkey), the quote Jamison furnishes leaves more to the imagination than Lady Mary herself: baths “are resorted to both for diversion and health,” contain “sofas of marble” and women “all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed.”
“Being in the state of nature … stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed” hardly live up to the buildup of a “breathless” “Orientalist” “fantasy”; these words are about as “seductive” and “sexualized” as a shocked aunt exclaiming “naked as the day she was born!” Lady Mary’s description of the objects that can be found within the baths and the purpose for the baths borders on the asexual. This being said, the letters do contain more “sapphic” descriptions of women’s bodies including, most strikingly, that of the Austrian empress whom she visits en route to Turkey (and which reminds me of the sexually charged relationship between Margaret Cavendish and the empress in her Blazing World; Cavendish and Lady Mary both serving as high-class scribes writing on even higher-class subjects).
Elsewhere, Jamison treats Lady Mary’s Turkish Embassy letters as functioning “as a protected social space for women” then quotes Lady Mary: “In short, it is the women’s coffeehouse, where all the news of the town is told, scandal invented, etc. She was a foreigner describing intimacies she had no access to — spoken in a language she could not speak, fitted into narratives of her own design. What she was describing in her letters wasn’t so much the culture itself but her own fantasy of a certain kind of intimacy and female society” (Jamison). Lady Mary was in fact a foreigner but she was not “describing intimacies she had no access to”—she was the first European woman to “have access to” these and other shared spaces with Turkish women.
In a 5,000 word magazine article centering on Turkish baths and furnished with photographs of Turkish women bathing, Lady Mary is an easy target for the backward gaze to assume because she was an early-modern woman, her writing therefore must “always” have been “underwritten with racism disguised with veneration.” But Lady Mary explicitly writes against male travel narratives and this includes those that sexualized the erotic fantasy of the hammam and of the supposed harem in which sultans would have their pick. Lady Mary Writes, “Now, that I am a little acquainted with their ways, I cannot forbear admiring, either the exemplary discretion, or extreme stupidity of all the writers that have given accounts of them. ‘Tis very easy to see, they have in reality more liberty than we have” (letter xxix, 29.3-4). She also writes to a woman of the Turkish women’s exclaiming at her “stays” that they were torturous-looking, thus negating the preconceived notion, painted by male travel-writers, of English women’s supposed liberty above and beyond what Turkish or other contemporaneous women enjoyed.
Much more sexualized and “veneration” a description than Lady Mary’s early 1700s “marble couches” or proto-feminist gathering-spaces/coffee-houses is the 2020 magazine article that describes “…crowded aisles lined with cases full of sugar-dusted Turkish delight and amber perfume bottles. Often built near mosques to allow for ablutions before prayer, hammams have deep roots in holy traditions, and the central chamber at Cemberlitas itself felt like a place of worship: an octagonal marble slab under a stone dome that showed the sky through round portals. Lying across that marble slab, my skin striped by the wavering shafts of sunlight, I felt less like a worshiping supplicant and more like an offering laid across an altar” (Jamison).
“The baths distill the dream at the core of inhabiting a city: to feel connected to something larger than yourself,” Jamison writes. Not only did Lady Mary provide a feminine antidote to the toxic masculinity of early-modern travel-writing; she also—again, not with idealized veneration couched in “racism” but with grounded practicality and respect for other cultures’ customs—those “older women, who make it their business to perform the operation, every month of September” to inoculate children and families from the small-pox. She trusts the wisdom of elder women in Turkey to the extent that she writes “I am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son. I am a patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England; and I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it …” (31.3). This is not the sexualized writing of a woman writing as “Western fantasy” that was “always underwritten by racism disguised as veneration.” The language is professional in tone from terms like “useful invention,” “safety,” mixed with pathos of “dear little son” and invoking her own patriotism—I am “patriot enough”—which was called into question during her campaign of writing to doctors to bring this custom to England.
Lady Mary’s travel writing is not a sexual-enough topic to afford her an appearance in the New York Times Magazine on her own terms. However, her historic writing “should” engage us all on two fronts: namely, humans’ longing to travel freely and without fear of contracting a deadly virus. Lady Mary addresses the shadow-topic of this modern-day travel-writing, “Is It Strange to Say I Miss the Bodies of Strangers?” She writes: “I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue, for the good of mankind. But that distemper is too beneficial to them, not to expose to all their resentment the hardy wight that should undertake to put an end to it.”
Works Cited
Jamison, Leslie. “Is It Strange to Say I Miss the Bodies of Strangers?” The New York Times Magazine, The Voyages Issue,22 September 2020.
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763).
