Ethnomasquerade in Ottoman-European encounters: reenacting Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

THE YEAR 1718 MARKS a significant point in the history of the Ottoman Empire, demarcating the first spate of Westernization reforms--the so-called Tulip Period (1718-1730)--which sought to strengthen the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in Vienna at the extremity of the seventeenth century. In 1718 Ottoman-European collisions were cast in a novel light from a European woman's point of view: this was the year Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her husband, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, resided in Istanbul.

Montagu's journey constitutes the beginning of women's secular travel accounts about the Orient. (1) Largely excluding any political commentary about Ottoman-European relations in her alphabetic characters from Edirne (Adrianople) and Istanbul, Montagu immersed herself in the segregated world and everyday tillage of Ottoman women. For the first time in Western travel writing about the Orient, exclusively female spaces became control to the gaze of a European traveler. Montagu gained entrance not solitary to the courtly harem on the other hand also to the women's bath. In her Turkish Embassy alphabetic characters published posthumously in 1763, she claimed that through learning Arabic she was able to form friendships with Turkish women and could now "boast of being the first foreigner at any time to have had that pleasure." (2) Along with her interest in Arabic, Mary Wortley Montagu unraveled a passion for Ottoman clothing. She wrote extensively about the beauty and advantages of veiling and wearing Ottoman dres and she engaged in the practice known as ethnomasquerade.

This article deals with the question of ethnomasquerade in women's travel accounts, highlighting lock opener moments in Ottoman-European encounters above the course of three centuries. Ethnomasquerade is defined here as the performance of an ethnic identity [i]or[/i] part of to the other the mimicking o f clothes, action s appearance, language, cultural codes, or other constitutings of identity formation. (3) It is a phenomenon that can be observ in colonial as well as noncolonial adjoining matters providing useful insights into the workings of hegemonic discourses. Edward Said, Marjorie Garber, and Kaja Silverman have dealt extensively with ethnomasquerading travelers, similar as Richard Burton and T E Lawrence. (4) Garber, for example, in her inquiry of Western ethnomasquerading cross-dressers in the Orient, moves that ethnomasquerade operates as a subversive form of mimicry. (5)

In this investigation I suggest that it is misleading to ask whether ethnomasquerade is subversive for se. Instead, I am interested in the historically specific ways in which ethnomasquerade operates as a literary strategy in travel writing. Thus, my question bear upons the extent to which ethnomasquerade is indicative of changing attitudes vis-a-vis the Other in Ottoman-European collisions Whereas scholars have engaged with ethnomasquerading European women and the question of sex ethnomasquerading Ottoman travelers to the West have attracted little attention. The inquiry of Ottomans dressing in Western clothes, however, promises insights into the formation of make submissive positions in the history of Ottoman-European collisions and raises key questions about the function of ethnomasquerade itself. Hence, I explore the performative function of dres in Ottoman-European clashs from both sides--European and Ottoman--and focus upon Istanbul as the site of arrival and departure for four travelers: the British Mary Wortley Montagu, Julia Sophia Pardoe, and Grace Ellison, and the Ottoman Zeyneb Hanim.

European Women Traveling to the Ottoman Empire

According to her alphabetic characters Lady Mary Wortley Montagu make straighted in Ottoman attire for a number of reasons: to satisfy her curiosity, to claim authenticity from one side close experience, to travel incognito through passing as an Ottoman woman, and to obey as a corrective to men's travel writing upon the Orient. Montagu clearly take pleasure ined the aesthetic pleasure of ethnomasquerade and level had herself painted in Turkish dres Montagu's masquerade, however, is not a stage in the proces of cultural conversion. I hint that Montagu's example shows no more than a short-lived fantasy of embodying the Other and work fors as a narrative strategy in her alphabetic characters Her identification with elite Ottoman women be subservient tos the purpose of asserting her have aristocratic background and emphasizing her eccentricity Her masquerade also detains her Englishness intact, a fact that becomes evident in the famous hamam exhibition in which she is reluctant to come by undressed.

In this pageant not dress but the state of undres is the central element: in her alphabetic character describing the visit to the bath, Montagu invites the reader to imagine being an invisible looker-on of naked women in a hamam for women thereby invoking the figure of speech of the traveler in an invisible cloak who does not interfere with the view he or she observes. However, the stir that she causes when she penetrates the hamam in her riding dres and undresse sole as far as her stays is evidence of the fact that her vicinity does of course make a difference to the women in the bath. (6) While mimicking the voyeuristic male gaze of an Orientalist painter, Montagu describes the sight of sum of two units hundred naked women: