As the balance of power shifts from the Ottoman Empire to Europe following the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, despite the similarities in the subordinate positions of women in the East and West, the veiled woman becomes one of the most powerful symbols of the "irrationality" of Islam. The burgeoning industry of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel literature, which satisfied the desire for tales of the "exotic" East, revelled in stories of the oppressed veiled woman. These often "imaginary" accounts (men had no access to women's quarters) of the women of the Orient found expression in such works as Aaron Hill's A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire, Jean Dumont's A New Voyage to the Levant, John Covel's Early Travels in the Levant, and Robert Heywood's A Journey to the Levant. At once voyeuristic and indignant, these travel narratives distracted attention from the gender inequities at home, presented the Orient as a place in need of rescue and secured the idea of Europe as free, fair and civilized, supporting the role of the Empire. These narratives also allowed the male reader to vicariously experience the role of hero while satisfying his fantasies of penetration and domination.
However, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, one of the first female travellers in the Ottoman Empire, challenged these voyeuristic tales about Turkish women and their enslavement by insisting on the liberty of veiled women. In her Turkish Embassy Letters, she disrupts the pervasive orientalist discourse and the East/West divide by throwing into confusion the rhetoric of Western modernity and reason and Eastern barbarism and irrationality, at least as it is secured by the figure of the (un)veiled woman. In her famous description of her trip to the hamman, for instance, she complicates the desire to "unveil" and liberate Eastern women in the name of Western reason. Surrounded by naked Turkish women who encourage her to join them, she strips off just enough clothes to reveal her own constricted body: "The lady that seemed the most considerable amongst them entreated me to sit by her and fain would have undressed me for the bath. I excused myself with some difficulty, they being however all so earnest in persuading me, I was a[t] last forced to open my shirt, and show them my stays, which satisfied them very well, for I saw they believed I was so locked up in that machine, that it was not in my own power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband" (59-60). In this description, Montagu invokes the tradition of eighteenth-century travel narratives that delight in imaginative descriptions of the abuse and enslavement of the oriental woman and "lament on the miserable confinement of the Turkish ladies" (134) but then shifts the gaze to her own imprisoned body. Teasingly opening her shirt and inviting rescue, she forces attention on the English social order and complicates the role of the heroic colonialist reader. This undressing or unveiling does not naively assume an unfettered freedom but rather displays a gendered social order that underlies the very rhetoric of reason.
Montagu's writing about Turkey counters the prevalent orientalist assumptions in the travel accounts of her day, which support empire building, and opens up a space where colonialist impulses are subject to critique.
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