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

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