|
COPYRIGHT 1995 Johns Hopkins University Press
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)
Montagu's embellished letters, purportedly written on several occasions to historical individuals such as Lady Mar, Alexander Pope, the Abbe Conti, and other addressees, synthesize the writer's personal interests with the broader appeal of intellectual commentary. The empiricist epistemology of the traveler interacts with the revisionary and relativist "feminism" of the woman-scholar; the neoclassical antiquarianism of the humanist intersects with remarks on early eighteenth-century fashion from a society lady. One of the primary experiences of the Levant for Montagu came through sustained interactions with the aristocratic women of the Ottoman empire within their sexually segregated milieu. These women's pleasing alterity and seemingly unfettered agency are inferred by Montagu from their spatial autonomy. She interprets the aristocratic women she meets as already free rather than waiting for emancipation like their European counterparts. Therefore, Montagu's guarantee of epistemological veracity is complicated by several risky rhetorical wagers. This complication can be explained by recognizing, as Cynthia Lowenthal points out, that Montagu drew her epistolary models of female experience from the performance-oriented context of the theater rather than the newer bourgeois discourse of female domesticity legitimated by the novel.(5)
This article concentrates on three interlocking stages that structure the interaction between the epistemological and the rhetorical modes in Letters from the Levant. In the first and most easily identifiable step, Montagu visualizes a secular anthropologizing stance towards cultures, similar to many other post-Renaissance appreciations of the arbitrary norms that undergird cultural meaning and identity. Such a perception replaces the existing bias of a simple ethnocentricism in favor of the observer's culture with an eclectic relativism. This phenomenon corresponds to the observer's experience of cultural separation or alienation. Montagu's heuristic levantinizations occasionally unsettle the norms of travel narrative, as her perceptions often problematize the positional fixities of the supererogatory ethnographer and the grounded native. The second stage concerns the observer's figurative idealization of putatively desirable characteristics from the observed cultural phenomena. This rhetorical idealization that threatens to transform the observer can be called the anthropological moment of liminality.(6) The eclectic relativism of the first stage is abandoned for that of (a fantasy of) assimilation to the other, a process that can variously be rendered as "going native," "passing," or "levantinization" - different names for the transformation of identity that occurs when an individual from one culture is psychically and physiologically absorbed into another. The phantasmatic and partial nature of identification should itself suggest that "levantinization" is a function of several related psychological intensities rather than any single qualitative factor that can determine its identificatory effectivity.
In any case, this second stage of liminal identification, developed from an interrogative first phase, proves transitory for Montagu, as a full-fledged cultural passage or romance metamorphosis does not take place, and especially does not in the famous bathhouse scene that will be my focus here. The honorary subjectivity in the guest culture is temporally circumscribed, and there are implicit anxieties and criticisms that do not disappear as a result of this partial identification. Consequently, the observer undergoes a third phase that can be described as a postliminal mode of reaggregation, a romance manque that synthesizes a banal return home rather than a magical metamorphosis. Antiquarian classicism comes to Montagu's rescue as a compromise ideological formation that converts the focus from current identities to past ones, and displaces politics back into history.
Montagu's ambivalence about the masquerade of feminine identification is strikingly reminiscent of Joan Riviere's assertion that "womanliness [ ] could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she [the analysand] was found to possess it." Montagu's self-positioning as a female author competing with male predecessors resembles Riviere's original concept of womanliness as masquerade. Derived from a bisexuality complex, this Kleinian formulation has been frequently generalized in a freefloating fashion by post-Lacanian psychoanalytical feminists, who partly overlook the involvement of atavistic racist fantasies with more modern professionalist contexts in the original analysand's psychic structure. Riviere characterizes her analysand's masquerade as "the 'double-action' of an obsessive act" that involves the fantasy of aggression and deference to two kinds of threats: academic father-figures in the real world and phantasmatic "negro" attackers in the imagined one. Montagu's racial typing of the North African women she meets, juxtaposed with the pre-professionalized rivalries with travel writers that inflect her views on Turkish women that I will discuss, similarly bring out the "double-action" of her obsessive authorial masquerade. Riviere compares the disingenuousness of the masquerading woman to "a thief who will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods." We will see that Montagu's actions in the hammam, policing herself scrupulously, even as she titillates her male readers, suggest such a conscious disavowal.(7) In what follows, I will concentrate on the implications of Montagu's levantinization of Ottoman aristocratic womanhood and her multiple uses of masquerade, and conclude with some remarks about classicist recuperation, which I interpret as symbolic inoculation.
FEMALE TRAVELERS AND CULTURAL RELATIVISM
Montagu's cultural remarks creatively amalgamate several longstanding literary traditions of Western travel narrative. Her travel letters are affiliated to generic precursors that initiated the imaginative geography of orientalism and defined the cultural and political challenge represented by Islam since late antiquity. Working within the multiple prose genres of ethnography, aesthetic criticism, and personal memoirs, Montagu reflects on a variety of cultural topics and geographical locations. Letters from the Levant can be appreciated as an abbreviated sample of European ideological registers that refer to proximate regions such as the Balkans, Asia Minor, and North Africa.(8)
As Montagu builds up to her arrival in Turkey following a stately progress across the Continent, her eclectic modes of cultural perception evolve as her itinerary unfolds. Montagu commences Letters from the Levant with the familiar moral didacticism of some travel narratives, remarking on the cleanliness and industriousness of Dutch maids, and the general affluence and civic orderliness of Rotterdam, the Hague, and Nimeguen (248-52). Such salutary lessons for the English are tempered by the critical scepticism with which she treats the Catholic relics she sees in Cologne and Vienna, and in keeping with her whiggish sympathies, the descriptions of the advantages of republican principalities in Germany over those run by absolutist monarchs (L, 254-55). Montagu remarks upon cultural differences, as all travelers do; at the same time, she contests the normative masculine vision of her Western predecessors, noticing different phenomena, and correcting previous misrepresentations from her perspective as a woman. Montagu reshapes the genre of early travel narrative as a vehicle that simultaneously signals "romance," "science," and "satire"; aspects of "Behn," "Defoe," and "Swift" adhere to the epistemological positions she takes.(9)
A self-conscious and sceptical practitioner of the genre of travelogue, Montagu deplores the biased and inconsistent expectations of its readership:
We Travellers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and we have observ'd nothing. If we tell any thing new, we are laugh'd at as fabulous and Romantic, not allowing for the difference of ranks, which afford difference of company, more Curiosity, or the changes of customs that happen every 20 year in every Country. But people judge of Travellers exactly with the same Candour, good Nature, and impartiallity, they judge of their Neighbours upon all Occasions. (L, 385)
Travel writing is obliged to produce novelty, but also expected to fulfill pre-existing stereotypes. Just as people interpret anything done by their neighbors with the lame cynicism of overdetermined and stubborn prejudices, travel writing is often compelled to produce the same difference. In the above passage to her sister Lady Mar, Montagu is exasperated at the calcified expectations of readers who refuse to acknowledge historical change elsewhere and delude themselves into thinking that their kneejerk reactions are signs of sensitivity.
Such a critical edge is typical of Montagu's discourse. The empiricist impetus behind her world-view is accompanied by a strong scepticist...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
