Epistolary Strategies in Lady Mary Montagu's Turkish ＂Embassy Letters＂: Revisiting the Turkish Bathhouse Debate

孟塔古夫人《土耳其使節書簡》的書信策略：重探土耳其浴場的論辯

10.6271/fd.2015.24.2.05

陳皇華(Huang-Hua Chen)

孟塔古夫人 ； 《土耳其使節書簡》 ； 書信體例 ； 啟蒙 ； 東方主義 ； Lady Mary Montagu ； ＂Turkish Embassy Letters＂ ； epistolarity ； enlightenment ； orientalism

小說與戲劇

24卷2期（2015 / 06 / 01）

111 - 140

英文

學界討論孟塔古夫人（Lady Mary Wortley Montagu）的《土耳其使節書簡》，多半聚焦在她於1717年4月1日所撰寫一封有關土耳其貴族女子在浴場的見聞書信，並藉以論證「東方主義」與性別之間的關聯性。其實在同一時間，孟塔古夫人又寄出數封書札，有關的主題也頗多雷同，這點卻往往不在討論之列。在這些書信中，孟塔古夫人展露了她的文采與博學，其中尤以手書中對於斷簡殘篇以及附件的運用，足以令人一窺她提升女性啟蒙地位的書信策略。藉由「書信體例」的概念，我們可以更進一步發現，這幾封信件展露了她在書信中的各色演出，比如說，我們可以觀察到她如何透過不同的面具與不同的收信人交流，尤其是與男性文人亞歷山大•波普（Alexander Pope）。這些信件或長或短，有時戲謔有時嚴肅，卻也因此提供了我們對於土耳其浴場，乃至於他在《土耳其使節書簡》中對於書寫與認同的虛構性質之論證契機。最終，我們亦可藉此重探十八世紀中，不管是真實乃至於虛構的女性書信作家，在面對不同性別期望時寫作策略。

The paper aims to provide a comprehensive view of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's famous Turkish bathhouse scene in the ＂Turkish Embassy Letters＂ (1763) by considering a bundle of letters she also sent on the same day of April 1st, 1717. By revisiting the debates on her orientalism, as centered on the bathhouse episode, I take up an aspect of the critical vacuum that evades most of her critics and analyze the epistolary strategies she employs. I argue that one can find within these letters an ingenious reinvention of the epistolary techniques that had long been a hallmark of the Enlightenment, notably the frequent use of fragments and enclosure, to facilitate her advancement of female enlightenment. Using Janet Altman's idea of ＂epistolarity,＂ I posit that her ＂narrative in the form of the letter,＂ as Robert Halsband calls her letters, is never an immediate reflection of her journey; rather she uses this carefully crafted and edited contribution to this medium to express her sense of heterogeneous identity. It also calls our attention to how she responds to different gender expectations when she writes to men such as Abbot Conti and Alexander Pope. The re-examination of her ＂Letters＂ can thus serve as a point of departure for the study of eighteenth century female epistolary writers, both real-life and fictional.

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