"The barbarous character we give them": White Women Travellers Report on Other Races

"The barbarous character we give them": White Women Travellers Report on Other Races ISOBEL GRUNDY 1 he phrase in my title was applied by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, not to women but to men. She uses it defensively about male Turks, saying they are in general "not naturally cruel," although she has just reported that a young woman was stabbed to death and thrown in the street as penalty for adultery.1 Her words convey her awareness that cultural difference is constructed by the reporting traveller. Their context shows how two strands fuse in her thinking: how her unusual readiness to appreciate Islamic culture, instead of denigrating it, involves her in readiness to accept and defend the exercise of patriarchal power in that culture. It suggests the difficulty of negotiating between construction of gender and construction of class, race, or culture, and the difficulty or impossibility of reporting on the Other from any neutral ground between condemnation and defence. Lady Mary's predecessors in such reporting from Turkey (all of them male) tend to claim the status of women as one of many signs of European superiority over Turkey, or Christian superiority over Islam. The "character" of civilization they give to European culture includes proper masculine chivalry towards inferior women; the "character" of barbarity they give the Other culture includes cruelty towards inferior women; it also includes effeminacy, as critics like Edward Said have shown.2 Lady Mary arguably feminizes Turkish culture; but she does so with an air of 73 74 / GRUNDY ironical approval, as when, addressing the Abbé Conti, she compares the pursuit of cultured pleasure with the pursuit of fame, and proclaims that she would rather be "a rich Effendi with all his ignorance, than Sir Isaac Newton with all his knowledge" (1:415). Not only Lady Mary's predecessors but many later writers (women included) validate the known through criticism of the Other, and particularly of the Other's unsatisfactory gender demarcation. In The Widow of Malabar, 1791, a tragedy adapted from French by Mariana Starke, the Indian widow in question is willing to observe the custom of suttee and follow her late husband dutifully to the grave, although she secretly loves another. She behaves, that is, like an exemplar in an English conduct book; rebellious attitudes are delegated to her Persian maid. Of her male co-religionists, the elder, who starts out eager for her death, ends by killing himself; the younger, who pities her, becomes a Christian convert; she is rewarded by happy marriage to her beloved —an Englishman, who thus (as in Milton's "shee for God in him") plays the role for her that Christianity does for her male peer. English culture, including the sentimental submissiveness of females, swallows up Hindu culture without a ripple.3 Unlike Mariana Starke, Lady Mary when she arrived in Turkey was already a seasoned—even a published—critic of her own society. She takes the not unusual satirist's option of praising the Other in order to expose—in her case from a female and even a feminist angle—the faults of home. She despises previous travel-writers partly for class reasons, but also for their flattery and promotion of the home culture which, both as an intellectual and as a woman, she finds markedly imperfect. She reads Turkish difference in terms of class rather than of race.4 Both in Turkey and later she often voices the Augustan belief that human nature is everywhere the same: I have never, in all my various Travels, seen but two sorts of people (and those very like one another); I mean Men and Women. (To her daughter, 5 Jan. [1748], 2:392) Mankind is every where the same ... the wild naked Negro [and] the fine Figures adorn'd with Coronets and Ribands. (To the same, 22 July [1752]: 3:15) At one point in the Embassy Letters, however, Lady Mary suddenly allows this universalist attitude to slip. She is visiting the ruins of Carthage in north Africa: While I sat here, from the Town of tents not far off many of the women flock'd in to see me and we were equally entertain'd with veiwing one...