Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Exploring Liminality: The Spatial Politics of Travel and Gender Identity in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters"
Angelia Poon
Brandeis University
poon@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
The term "liminality" literally means "being-on-the-threshold." It is, according to Victor Turner who has written on the notion in relation to theatre, ritual and anthropology, "full of potency and potentiality. It may also be full of experiment and play In it, play's the thing."
In this paper, I examine the ways in which the idea of liminality may be fruitfully applied to the travel experience and writings of the eighteenth-century woman traveller, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Lady Mary journeyed to Turkey in 1716 as the wife of the English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, thus securing her place in history as the first woman from the West to write about the Muslim Orient. In arguing that travel opens up a liminal space for the traveller who journeys to a foreign land and finds herself caught between two cultures, I propose to read the Turkish Embassy Letters as a gendered narrative about space and the organisation of space at a particular historical moment.
More specifically, I am interested in thinking about the process of travel as a liminal practice in gender identity performance and negotiation, a practice informed by the cultural and spatial politics of the "contact zone" or intercultural border. In Lady Mary's case, this is further complicated by the form she chose to write in - the epistolary form, a genre situated in the ambiguous space between the private and the public in the early eighteenth century. As the locus of Lady Mary's various identity performances, the Turkish Embassy Letters also bear the traces of larger discursive struggles in the eighteenth century over the intellectual, moral and social space of women in England. How then, given the discursive constraints she faced as an English woman, does Lady Mary position herself both in her interactions with the Turks she meets as well as in her carefully constructed encounter with the given recipients of her letters? How does she manage within the liminality of travel, her performance of various identities as female, aristocrat, English, scholar and traveller? How does she re-order (if at all) the spatial ordinates of both her individual identity and the larger cultural identity of England through her writing?
Angelia Poon
poon@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
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