Mary Wortley Montagu Analysis

A fundamental facet of empire is conflict, and throughout the early modern period, the Ottoman Empire of the Turks was in continual conflict with its European neighbors. In 1716, as part of an effort to protect British economic and political assets from this conflict in this trans-imperial borderland, Sir Edward Wortley Montagu was dispatched as ambassador to Istanbul. Accompanying him on the journey was his wife Mary, who would eventually become one of the most influential women in 18th century Europe. Montagu is a divisive figure due to her commentary on such polarizing subjects as early feminist theory and her role as a potential boundary-crosser; she aspired to be both a part of and apart from the cultures she experienced. The collected personal correspondence of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu …show more content…
The power of empire has long rested on the cultural and political Othering (i.e. systematic alienation and/or exclusion) of subordinate groups by dominating imperial forces, and the Romantic aesthetic of beauty necessarily reflects the larger ideological framework of Orientalism and the exotic Other. As first outlined in Edward Said’s seminal 1978 work Orientalism, European conceptions of ‘the East’ have been largely constructed. For example, “Islam and Muslims came to [symbolize an Other] that could be used to mobilize support for territorial conquest, and to redirect intra-European conflict outward” since the British Crusades and the Fall of Constantinople; a sentiment clearly reflected by the depictions of gender in the canon of Romantic Oriental art. Accordingly, early Romantic understandings of feminine beauty deeply reflect an aesthetic of imperialism; depictions of the sublime in the context of Orientalism reveal a deep correlation between the exotic and the erotic. Lady Mary’s work offers an unparalleled perspective on Oriental beauty from a British imperial viewpoint through the feminine