|
When the intrepid Lady Mary Wortley Montagu travelled with her husband's embassy to Turkey in 1716, she recorded the minutiae of life on the road and in her 'new world'. . Witty, insatiably curious and remarkably open-minded, her innocent observations inspired Ingres, a century later, to paint some of the greatest erotic masterpieces of the Romantic movement.
http://www.swan.ac.uk/visualanthropology/projects/004_Montagu/cornucopia.htm
She is no typical Turkish lady, but the granddaughter of a
Frenchman, who, to use Mr. Pickthall's coinage, "islamed," and her
upbringing and the political unrest encouraged her inherited
disposition to revolt. She is apparently one of those women who
belong by temperament to the rebels. She detests the suffragists;
yet, but for her high breeding and traditional fastidiousness, she
has the making of one. For, however much she differs from and excels
the average woman of her race, she possesses to the full that
characteristic of clear vision and independent thought which Mr.
Pickthall sets first among the virtues of the harem.
The confusion caused by Zeyneb Hanim's scandalous escape from Istanbul, her critical letters about Europe, and her unsettling return to harem life cannot be resolved, as the reviewer bypasses critical information about the reasons for Zeyneb Harem's return to Istanbul, namely her forced return upon the declaration of war between Italy and the Ottoman Empire. The review empties the letters of their historically specific context and maintains the Orientalist image of the harem.
|
