Analyzing Lady Mary’s Turkish Embassy Letters: Gender, Writing, and Identity Victoria Joss College

Identity is an idiosyncratic definition of a person that can be constructed through many variables: race, gender, class and culture, to name but a few. The Turkish Embassy Letters, comes with a pre-constructed, orientalist ideal of the East, where identity is constructed wholly on race and culture. Therefore, it is imperative that this account is from a female perspective. If seen through male eyes, the women that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu interacted with would have been seen as submissive and oppressed by their own culture, embodying the ‘damsel in distress’ trope. Instead, Lady Montagu is able to examine gender as a concept that not only influences identity, but is completely separate from it. It is from this female perspective that Lady Montagu is able to explore gendered oppression as a universal occurrence. An orientalist approach would view the West, and it’s people, as ‘free’, and the East as oppressed by their reserved culture and strict religion. Yet, the English protagonist is able to see that Turkish women may, in reality, be liberated through the anonymity of their veil. Therefore, Lady Montagu is able to re-define ‘liberty’ from this orientalist perspective, and to also liberate the Turks from this label of ‘other’...