Abstract
The paper aims to provide a comprehensive view of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s famous Turkish bathhouse scene in the Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) by considering a bundle of letters she also sent on the same day of April 1st, 1717. By revisiting the debates on her orientalism, as centered on the bathhouse episode, I take up an aspect of the critical vacuum that evades most of her critics and analyze the epistolary strategies she employs. I argue that one can find within these letters an ingenious reinvention of the epistolary techniques that had long been a hallmark of the Enlightenment, notably the frequent use of fragments and enclosure, to facilitate her advancement of female enlightenment. Using Janet Altman’s idea of “epistolarity,” I posit that her “narrative in the form of the letter,” as Robert Halsband calls her letters, is never an immediate reflection of her journey; rather she uses this carefully crafted and edited contribution to this medium to express her sense of heterogeneous identity. It also calls our attention to how she responds to different gender expectations when she writes to men such as Abbot Conti and Alexander Pope. The re-examination of her Letters can thus serve as a point of departure for the study of eighteenth century female epistolary writers, both real-life and fictional.