Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the hammam: masquerade, womanliness, and Levantinization.

Halsband (Life [note 1], 19.1).

14 Montagu criticizes Addison's distracting foray into romantic subplot, and upholds classical Aristotelian notions concerning the unity of action. She finds Shakespeare's Julius Caesar much better in its compression, and points out that Juba and Syphax are too close to Othello in their characterization. She also recommends stronger libertarian rhetoric throughout the play ("[Critique of Cato Wrote at the Desire of Mr. Wortley, suppress'd at the desire of Mr. Adison" [1713], in Halsband, Essays and Poems, 62-68). In 1710, the young Montagu will defend learned women to Gilbert Burnet:

There is hardly a character in the World more Despicable or more liable to Forth rush the Levant and the Ponent Windes.

- Milton, Paradise Lost (10.704)

Based on a journey to the Ottoman Empire undertaken during the years 1716-18, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's travel letters were first published in their entirety in 1763. The author had died the previous year. Montagu's stay at Constantinople with her husband Edward Wortley who had been appointed Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, provides the central focus of the travel letters. But as her reflections range widely across the culture and geography of the Eastern Mediterranean, a more inclusive title seems appropriate. Amongst various titles given to this collection by editors over the ages, I find that given by J. A. St. John in 1838, Letters from the Levant, During the Embassy to Constantinople, 1716-18, more suggestive than The Turkish Embassy Letters.(1)

"Levant" broadly signifies the Orient (more precisely the Eastern Mediterranean) and its exotic appeal for Europe as the land of the rising sun. On the other hand, "levantinization" is the term islamophobes have sometimes used for the cultural contamination of European values by supposedly degenerate Levantine influences. However, it will be my claim that levantinization is both an investigative tool and a utopian projection of Montagu's that anticipates a positive cultural outcome. Letters from the Levant inaugurates a phantasmatic partial identification with Turkish aristocratic womanhood. The specific fantasy, in this case, is not so much the activity of an already-existing subject, as the performative dispersion of the subject into several identificatory positions. The subject inhabits the position of both desiring subject and object, thereby reconfiguring itself.(2)

Additionally, a title such as Letters from the Levant enables a parallel reading of several calculated intellectual wagers made through the subject's identificatory dispersal. Montagu places and then hedges her cultural bets in a manner that could be reminiscent of eighteenth-century gamesters who "ran a levant," or "threw a levant." To run or throw a levant was to make a bet with the intention of absconding if it was lost.(3) My reading suggests that the aristocratic Montagu uses her ample intellectual "credit" for the purposes of an utopian levantinization. The objective of Montagu's highly speculative intellectual wagers is the task of crosscultural apprehension. By interpreting Montagu's Levantine writings according to a trope that suggests intellectual wagering without accountability, I hope to connect levantinization to the larger processes of dynamic interaction between colonialist and anticolonial figuration that I call tropicalization.(4)