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c h a p t e r t w o Letters from a Female Deist Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Muslim Women, and Freethinking Feminism I doubt not I shall be told (when I come to follow you thro’ those Countries) in how pretty a manner you accommodated yourself to the Customs of the True Believers. At this Town they will say, she practiced to sit on the Sofa; at this village she learnt to fold the Turban ; here she was bathed and anointed; and there she parted with her black Fullbottome. . . . Lastly I shall hear how the very first Night you lay in Pera, you had a Vision of Mahomet’s Paradise, and happily awaked without a soul. From which blessed instance the beautiful Body was left at full liberty to perform all the agreeable functions it was made for. Alexander Pope’s letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Nov. 10, 1716 Written between 1717 and 1718 while traveling to the Levant with her husband,the English ambassador Edward Wortley, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) is usually read as a feminist text obsessed with one emblematic episode: her eroticized encounter with the Turkish women of the hammam (private bathhouses off-limits to men) as described in an April 1717 letter. Ignoring interrelated questions about gender, sexuality, and genre, most critics read this letter in isolation, taking her “private” letter-writing for granted and remaining silent about her radical Protestant approach to elite Muslim women ’s sexual and sociopolitical agency.1 But this lopsided view fails to recognize in Montagu the “female deist” who appropriates the deist epistolary genre to redefine Anglican citizenship in the gender-inclusive language of Islamic virtue, rather than in the gender-exclusive language of contractual rights.2 Her writings thus belong to two divergent yet overlapping traditions: the lingering deist debates of the late seventeenth century as embodied in John Toland’s controversial Letters from a Female Deist   61 works (see chapter 1) and an early modern feminism as articulated by Tory freethinkers Mary Astell and Delarivier Manley. In a November 1716 letter addressed to Lady Montagu, Alexander Pope satirizes his correspondent as a libertine feminist who, while traveling across the Continent, gradually converts to Islam by discarding her“black fullbottome”wig (part of her English traveling attire) for a life of sexual promiscuity, Oriental luxury, and female enslavement. This insidious parody of her journey to the Ottoman world is an example of patriarchal Orientalism at work: the mistaken Western assumption that Muslim women are essentially oppressed and that they have no souls according to the Qur’an. For Pope, this doctrine allows Montagu to enjoy bodily pleasure without worrying about carnal sins. Anticipating the scurrilous remarks he would hurl at her years later, Pope’s bawdy sarcasm targets the libertinism that undergirds her feminist fascination with Islam.3 He wants to scandalize her eagerness to adopt the dress, customs, and sexual practices of “the true Believers” while forfeiting her national identity as a “freeborn” Englishwoman . Pope’s satire suggests that her letters contain a buried critique of English sexual politics. But rather than reading her letters as a private expression of feminine desire, I read them as an ethnographic account of the socioeconomic agency that defines Muslim women’s “feminotopia,” an idealized female autonomy that contests a male social and sexual economy.4 Montagu’s feminotopia criticizes contract theory’s false universals, which include democratic terms such as“freeborn Englishmen”that falsely include both genders when in practice women were excluded.5 Montagu’s appropriation of the deist epistolary letter as an effective genre for criticizing false universals enables this complex discursive. Building on the work of Bernadette Andrea, I foreground Montagu’s deist fascination with Islam in order to expand the genealogy of a British feminism that contested the terms of a hegemonic (predominately male) anti-Islamic discourse duringtheearlyeighteenthcentury.6 Iinterpretheroften-quotedproclamation— “I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the empire” (72)—in two complementary senses: first as a feminist motto that emerged earlier in the century among freethinkers who criticized England’s false universals, and second as an imperialist idealization that refers only to slave/property-owning, “whiteskinned ” female citizens.7 As Felicity A. Nussbaum and Kathleen Wilson have argued, Montagu’s feminotopias offer alternative female pleasures that resist “the emerging national imperative to control women’s sexuality and maternity.” Indeed, Montagu’s freethinking philosophy accords with Mary Astell’s and Delarivier Manley...

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