Lady Montague Case

Lady Montague

On a superficial level a strong case can be made Lady Montague's Turkish Embassy letters do support Wendy Mercer's argument about the role of gender in shaping travel accounts. The facts of her letters and their perceptions of life in Turkey plus the vague ideas of Mercer can be overlaid to provide some support for Mercer, much like one given set of facts can be used to support two mutually exclusive conclusions. Given a twist and a nudge, Lady Montague's letters could also undermine Mercer's central thesis regarding the role of gender as easily as bolster it.

Mercer views the world through glasses of feminism and colonialism, the ultimate in historical revisionism. In her world, men are colonizers even though the greatest colonial empire ever built was created by Queen Victoria and Her Majesty's Navy. Mercer asserts women should identify with the colonized nations since husbands have colonized their wives using the same techniques and machinations of dominance and submission. This is a naïve and stereotypical view of the relationship between men and women the independent minded Lady Montague would have rejected. Even Mercer's analysis of comparing two accounts of the same voyage to determine the differences between one written by a man and the other by a woman lakes scientific credulity. She asserts the differences between the two accounts are attributable to gender conventions, providing some bizarre justifications for the choice of words made by the authors. "The open admission of her failure (sitting down in the mud and weeping) signals the temporary restoration of the old patriarchal order" is a meaningless statement without evidence or foundation. Over the years I have seen young boys and old men fall down in mud and "weep with rage" just as easily as d'Aunet did near the river in Leerfoss. How is crying after falling down in mud a "temporary restoration" of anything? Even the actions of the coachman are suspect in Mercer's dark vision of the relationship between men and women. He actually helps up a woman from the roadway, clearly one in distress. Mercer characterizes this action as "her resignation to powerlessness and passivity, as if she had abdicated all responsibility for herself", a ludicrous statement since Mercer would have equally condemned the coachman if he left d'Aunet in the mud.

A blind assumption of Mercer's work as fact does lead to some correlation between the opinions of Lady Montegue expressed in her letters and her enthusiastic embrace of some Turkish customs and attitudes consistent with Mercer's projections. She does not view the Turkish people or their customs with derision or contempt, much like a man driven by the need to "colonize" would. For example, her wild and giddy embrace of the Turkish baths with their "coffeehouse"