Western perspectives of areas outside of Europe are, more often than not, filtered through the lens of fantasy and imagination. This way of examining the East is known as Orientalism, a word that Edward Said defines as the “constellation of ideas” that presents Eastern lands as exotic and separate from the West (Said). This problematic way of seeing the East creates a false narrative that very few people have attempted to dismantle. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is one of these few people who attempted to achieve this in her works. She is best remembered for her letters that presented Middle Eastern culture in a more enlightened way. Her credible first-hand accounts came from travels and visits to Türkiye often as the wife of a British ambassador (Bohls, 179-205). Lady Montagu's feminist tone was at odds with the invented and male-dominated fantasies of the time. This essay will argue that Montagu's writings humanized the titillated Eastern women because of the special access they had to this realm because of her gender; showed the truth of Harems and Hammams in a humanistic way by emphasizing the cleanliness of Turkish women, their morals and respectful order of their hierarchies, which shows that they actually have more freedom and freedom than Western woman. Lady Mary is, in many respects, correct in her depiction of the steam room and the harem, but nevertheless incorrect in her description of the veil. The veil exists in Islamic cultures because it gives women the opportunity to present a sense of privacy from the surrounding culture, not to deceive men or oppress women, as Lady Mary's letters indicate. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an English aristocrat and poet particularly known for writing historical letters. Being a wealthy ambassador's wife, Lady Montagu's travel experience was exceptionally rare and a rather astonishing feat in and of itself; furthermore, her exposition on Turkish bath society purposely rejected and inverted male fantasy-driven expectations of female life in the Ottoman Empire. He retains a notable legacy for his letters, particularly those of travels in the Ottoman Empire. According to Billie Melman, the letters constituted an early and important example of the secular work that a woman wrote on the Islamic presence in the Turkic East (Melman). Lady Mary's intellectual impact is reflected, for this reason, in later scholarly attempts to demystify the presence of women in the Ottoman Empire from perspectives that deny Orientalism. Lady Mary traveled with her husband to Türkiye, where she wrote her famous letters about Turkish women. , Turkish bath and harem. In her letter she describes her encounter with the culture practiced in Turkey as a decentralizing experience that affects the loss and reconstitution of her thematic position through social interactions with other women. The importance of Lady Montagu's letters lies first and foremost in the overturning of patriarchal and racist stereotypes written up until then by European males. Ruth Barzilai-Lumbroso writes in the article “Turkish Men and the History of Ottoman Women: Studying the History of the Private Sphere of the Ottoman Dynasty through Women's Writings” that “the history of Ottoman women was presented to the Turkish public through mediation of mostly male historians, who were among the first to study Ottoman dynastic history” (Barzilai-Lumbroso, 54). Her letters are revolutionary in and of themselves because she was a rare traveler in an erain which even elite, royal women were discriminated against and prevented from easily traveling, researching, or otherwise educating themselves or others, gender-based difficulties that Sue Rosser discusses in the article “Feminist Scholarship in the Sciences: Where We Are now and when can we expect a turning point? (Rosser, 6). Gaining access to the upper class of Turkish society in 1716 as the wife of the British ambassador, she managed to gain entry into areas of the Ottoman aristocracy that even privileged men would have been forbidden to see. It is important to know the truth presented by Lady Montagu in the "Letters to the Turkish Embassy" about the functions of hamams and harems, Turkish women, and defining their role in society apart from the fantasies presented in Orientalism. During her visit, she was deeply delighted by the splendor of the Ottoman ladies and the dignity of their surroundings, in contrast to the insistence of male writers to emphasize perverse sexuality. Lady Mary's encounter with this feminine realm in a Turkish shower is noteworthy. noteworthy, as one of the experiences he recorded as a particularly funny episode during a gathering of Turkish women during a shower in Sofia (Aravamudan, 69-104). This portrayal of Turkish women as confident agents of their own bodies was contrary to the male-dominated literature of this era. These women were liberated in these circumstances where they were masters of their environment instead of being considered objects of male sexual attention. In the Turkish baths, Lady Mary's sex granted her access to an area of ​​Ottoman culture that no man had previously been able to observe. Due to the prohibition of men from entering this place for women, previous male visitors to the Ottoman Empire documented their findings as a result of speculation and not fact (Barzilai-Lumbroso, 61). These previous attempts to record Ottoman history from a male, Western perspective depicted these baths in an overly sexual manner; this corrupted the genuine nature of these bathhouses as places where women could gather in the privacy of their own gender without prying eyes. They could simply behave as they would among other women without interference. This article will argue that three topics from Lady Mary Montagu's Turkish embassy letters – those of the Turkish bath (or hammam), the harem, and the veil – destroyed previous conceptions of these aspects of the Ottoman woman's identity. He corrected many misinterpretations by male travelers of the past, including the sensationalist accounts recorded about religion, convention, and the treatment of women in the Ottoman Empire. Her gender and class status allowed her entry into exclusive feminine universes where she could provide precise details on customs and refined clothing (Secor). On the other hand, while her writings contradict male writers and their misconceptions, she is like them in her description of the veil and in her accusations of female morality in that she, as a Christian, still finds some customs of the Islamic religion strange or “oriental” society. Because she is an upper-class woman, Montagu's encounters with Turkish women in domestic settings are sometimes met with misunderstandings due to the dramatic differences between the cultures, such as particular greeting customs and the relationship between the host and the host of home (Anchore, 89). There is an Arabic proverb which means that the people of a place are the best at knowing its hidden paths. Thus, even as Lady Mary entered the female space of this society, she was a foreign witness to some female practices in the hammam and harem. She couldn't understandfully understand the Muslim vision of the veil as a significant component of the identity of a Muslim woman. The hammam and harem may refer specifically to identities associated with the Ottoman Empire, but the veil is a symbol for all of Islam, which is optional and not obligatory; women wear it based on their individual choices and beliefs about what it means to express personal modesty as a follower of Islam while allowing themselves the ability to preserve privacy from the world around them. Lady Montagu was fascinated by the freedom of Turkish women and their lives, which was in stark contrast to the lives of women in England. The concept of women's freedom has been something that has been discussed for many years. The era in which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu lived coincided with that of the Enlightenment, a period of intense intellectual discussion in European history. Women, during this period, began to accept different roles in this changing society. In the article “Feminism and the Enlightenment 1650-1850,” Barbara Taylor discusses how this era reevaluated the relationship between women, intellectuals, and philosophical thought in general. Taylor writes: “Histories of feminism in England have generally linked its appearance there to the revolution in political ideas that occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries, and in particular to the impact of John Locke's ideas... His ferocious attack on the patriarchal model of political authority may not have intended to encourage criticism of patriarchal power in the family” (Taylor, 265). The feminist rejection of patriarchal models draws, ironically, from the works of John Locke, a man. Lady Montagu's writings are indicative of Enlightenment trends that highlight a rejection of previous models while exploring new ways in which to engage in thought. Subsequent feminist intellectual movements can trace their roots to the era of Enlightenment writers, such as Montagu, who examined society from the female perspective. Coinciding with the influences of contemporary Enlightenment thought, many of Lady Mary's observations stem from the culture shocks she experienced while living in the Ottoman Empire, an empire that functioned on Islamic as opposed to Christian values. enduring empires in world history and center of the Islamic caliphate. The Turkic tribes that would become the Ottoman Empire conquered the Byzantine Empire in 1200, ending Greco-Roman rule in the Middle East in an empire that would last until World War I (Shaw). The Ottoman Empire established an Islamic society in Istanbul, which was once Constantinople and one of the largest cities in the world. The empire expanded into the Balkans, bringing its influence and Islam to the West while maintaining its own distinct identity, which was often seen as incredibly alien to the peoples of European nations. Ottoman influences still exist today through the prevalence of Islam in nations such as Albania, Serbia, and Kosovo; this shows the extent to which Ottoman influences were capable of impressing society over the hundreds of years that the empire lasted. Ruth Barlizai-Lumbroso writes on the role of women in the Ottoman Empire commenting: "Stories focusing on the daily lives of Ottoman women have allowed historians to reconstruct representations of Ottoman women not only as submissive and submissive but also as having control over their lives ". ; not just as passive spectators, but as powerful and active participants in their society.” (Barlizai-Lumbroso, 76-77). Women were not simply objects of male sexuality, but were instead agents of their own lives. The dominance of Islam as the primary religion in the Ottoman kingdoms created a society in which Muslim values ​​were the standard by whichjudged all others, a fundamental difference from Western societies based on their individual perception of Christianity (Shaw, 95). These values ​​were however dramatically different from what Western sources typically perceived as expressed in Montagu's letters, which is perhaps the reason for his confusion when it comes to the topic of a woman's choice to adopt the veil. The Ottoman Empire expressed modesty as a personal choice to mark them as followers of Islam while in public and to give themselves the ability to maintain a sense of privacy outside their homes; In this regard, the private life of female followers of Islam was not as repressive as Western and Orientalist conceptions would have you believe. Instead of the erotic and romantic visions of the Ottoman Empire as a land of naked women and perverse men that were expressed in much of the literature of the empire's times, the people were instead more pious, but expressed more liberation than is commonly believed. Western depictions (Said). Montagu's letters help deconstruct these orientalist views of the Ottoman Empire by describing its women as real people, not sexualized objects in a book. These early observations parallel later scholarly works, such as those of Said's writings on Orientalism, which truly show how revolutionary Lady Montagu's ideas in her letters were. For an 18th century woman, her ideas were truly revolutionary in a time of changing social order around the world, thoughts previously mentioned as an extension of the Enlightenment. These dramatic social changes finally appeared in fully realized form during the French Revolution, later that same century. The 18th century is, in this light, the decisive century in the birth of the modern world and the intellectual perceptions that allowed its creation. He wrote about the Turkish Hammam and its truth in his letter XXVII. In the first lines of her letter she states: "Now I have entered a new world, where everything I see seems to me to be a change of scene." In the 18th century, the East was a strange and different realm for Europeans. Their conceptions were based on letters written by male writers. Said called them orientalists. The writers who write about their travels and specialists in orientalism entered the Hammam and expected to see homosexuality as described by the male writers, but found another scene: everyone was in the state of nature, that is, in simple words, completely naked, without any hidden beauty or flaw, and yet there was not the slightest wanton smile or immodest gesture among them. They walked and moved with the same majestic Grace that Milton describes of our Mother General. There were many of them exactly proportioned as ever a Goddess was drawn by the pencil of Guido [Reni] or Titian, and most of their skin of a shining white, adorned only by their Beauty. The hair divided into many braids hanging on the shoulders, intertwined with pearls or ribbons, perfectly represents the figures of the Graces (Montagu, Letter XXVI). The Turkish bath plays an important role in the social environments of Turkish Muslims because it provides an environment where people of all genders can interact in one environment without interference from the other gender. Lady Montagu had the privilege as a foreigner to experience this aspect of Turkish culture that was so dramatically different from her own for reasons of gender and social class, the latter of which allowed her the mobility that other Western women lacked (Rosser, 7-8 ). For this reason she was able to observe Muslim women in an environment without the presence of men, which is the key factor thatmade her observations so different from those of the male travelers who came before her. Arthur J. Weitzman's article titled "Voyeurism and Aesthetics in the Steam Room: Lady Mary's School of Feminine Beauty," offers a deeper insight into Lady Montagu's experience at the steam room. These experiences were, for Lady Montagu, a form of liberation that she had never experienced before. [Lady Montagu indulged in these exotic experiences] partly by removing her outer garments to reveal her "sojourns," which she writes, "satisfied them." very well, because I saw that they believed that I was so locked up in that car that it was not in my power to open it, a ploy which they attributed to my husband. Srinivas Aravamudan, despite Lady Mary's disavowal of sexual content in her description of the Bath, perversely argues that "the letter from the bathhouse turns into an immense metaphor for the very thing she was trying to get around: 'sexual impropriety.'" Although admits that she “represses the specter of lesbian eroticism,” the description “is nevertheless indicative of lesbian possibilities” (Weitzman, 353) The liberation that Lady Montagu experienced during her visits to the Turkish baths is a native component of Islamic Islam . culture that was formed in the Ottoman Empire. Muslim women, in these situations, expressed behaviors that in the West would have been considered perverse, but were completely tolerated in the Ottoman sense of modesty relatively free society that existed within these safe spaces dedicated to women. However, male-dominated Western views eroticized these typical scenes of Ottoman woman life into perverse depictions of orientalist plots of how life existed in the East. Because of the descriptions of Turkish women in these bathhouses, all typical images of oriental women are naked in the Western imagination. This portrayal of sexualized Ottoman women is a misrepresentation that this article seeks to undermine. In the article "Aesthetics and Orientalism in the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu", Elizabeth A. Bohls argues that the West views naked Oriental women as erotic and sexual objects because of these depictions of Turkish society from the Western male perspective. It was men who had defined historical narratives and perspectives before then, which is why it was so important for Lady Montagu's letters to exist in historical records (Bohls, 191-192). roles of women in the Ottoman East. They are sources that modern scholars have used to determine the authentic roles that women had within this society as opposed to the more fictional and sexual accounts that men had made before her. Women, in this society. , possessed roles that extended well beyond the stereotype of sexual objects in the eyes of male travelers. In the article “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem,” author Leila Ahmed discusses the topic of the harem in the context of its relationship to Western views. of Ottoman society. Ahmed writes: “The orientalist image of the harem is that of a wealthy environment filled with excellent and mysterious women whose only obligation is to delight a man's every pleasure. This myth may be based on the royal harem of the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (Ahmed, p. 521). Western male travelers first presented this image, and even today we can see artwork based on romantic fantasies. Unfortunately, this framework is based on an inadequate understanding of Muslim culture, traditions and the role of the Harem in the country. The fieldof Orientalism was born from the combination of imagination and ignorance. The contributions of male explorers, travelers and artists are full of fantasies reminiscent of fairy tales. Heather Madar, in the article "Before the Odalisque: Renaissance Representations of Elite Ottoman Women," argues that many of these depictions were reiterated through the lens of Renaissance artists, who conveyed these myths surrounding the Ottoman harem as reality. Jean-Baptiste Vanmour emerges as one such traveler whose representation of the Ottoman harem was fundamentally flawed, representing it as a place of sexuality (Madar, 31). Lady Montagu's accounts are crucial to dispelling these myths about what constitutes Muslim identity in the field of women's roles in society during the Ottoman Empire. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's accounts of the Ottoman harem describe a space limited to women, not a private brothel for women. a man of power. Judith Still writes in “Hospitable Harems? A European Woman and Eastern Spaces in the Enlightenment", that "Montagu's experiences in Turkey seem to disprove this cliché - she herself travels and is welcomed into the harem (as in many other places) which does not become a prison but simply the domain of women …Montagu's letters to his sister concerning the occasions on which she was entertained by noble ladies in the women's quarters of the house do much to dispel any myths about 'harems'” (Still, 97-98). The harem was, contrary to male conceptions of women's place in an Islamic family, a place where women could be themselves without the interference of men. It was a place where men were generally not allowed to interfere. As Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote, this place was not a prison for these women, but rather a space dedicated to allowing them to exist in luxury, which defied Western expectations of what existed in this space. It is for this reason that Lady Mary's writings on the harem are important documents in establishing a historical perspective on how the sexualized harem in the European imagination was an invention of fiction as opposed to the abode of noblewomen it was in reality. Montagu's accounts provide details contrary to the male-dominated accounts that existed before her time in the Ottoman Empire. His beliefs about the function of the veil are wrong. In her letter XXX to Lady Mar, Lady Montagu describes the Islamic veil by saying: “A bride is brought to church, with a cap on her head, in the shape of a large trench coat, and over it a veil of red silk, covering her whole down to her feet... but her veil is never lifted, not even by her husband” (Montague, Letter XXX). This does not agree with the ideas of Islam that the veil is an option for women to demonstrate their devotion to the faith through adopting the veil as a form of chosen modesty which also allows us the choice to maintain the our personal privacy hidden from the world if we wish. For women, the veil is an option, not an obligation. In an opinion piece, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argues that “All religions view women as sinners and temptresses… Women must be seized or restrained to prevent them from inciting male lust and causing public disorder. Some young women argue that the veil frees them from a modern culture that objectifies and sexualizes women” (Alibhai-Brown). Muslim women see the veil as a liberation and an option we possess to express ourselves as followers of our faith while maintaining our privacy from the world in public. It is for this reason that Lady Montagu was wrong with her remarks about the veil as a tool to oppress women in Islamic society when we wear the veil of our choice to maintain our privacy from the world. Lady Mary..