Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters in France: Between Ideological Turn and Women’s Writing

This chapter analyzes the French translation of the "Turkish Embassy Letters" of the English traveler Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that followed her husband Edward, ambassador at the Ottoman Court, in 1717. In the period when the Letters were translated in France (the first translation in French was published in 1763), many French travelers had already visited and described the Ottoman Empire but in a much different manner from the Lady’s one. These travelers were used to write about their own discourse object by means of connotation: in fact, their descriptions were often distorted, because of an ideology denying to Turkish people any access to happiness or freedom. Consequently, the translation of the Letters produced a real ideological turn in the French descriptions of the Ottoman Empire. The traditional French travel rhetoric wasn’t absolutely foreign to Lady Mary: her writing was very different from the French travelers’ style. First of all, she learned Turkish language and could speak to some Turkish women in the harem, that’s why she was the first traveler to report the direct speech of Turkish women. After, she used some discourse strategies such as to inaugurate a new rhetorical tradition, characterized by a form of writing that we can define a “female writing”, according to Luce Irigaray’s studies. Finally, she broke down the French travelers’ ideological descriptions by writing utterances in which it was permitted to Turkish people to enjoy. The translation of Lady Mary’s Letters in French produced a real quarrel between the detractors and the supporters of this new rhetoric until the 19th century, when the modern generation of “travelers – writers” took her style as a model.