Abstract:

Edward Said says in Culture and Imperialism that the studies about the Middle East have been dominated by masculism and he shows the significance of women’s role in undermining this dominance by demonstrating the “diversity and complexity of experience that works beneath the totalizing discourses of Orientalism and of Middle East (overwhelmingly male) nationalism” (Said, 1979, p. 24). In my study, I showcase the certain complicity between Orientalism’s imperialist functions and Western feminism. The feminist, orientalist, and imperialist tendencies reflect the very Enlightenment idea of Western European women as the “sole signifier of civilization” (Yeğenoglu, 1998, p. 106). Although writers like Wollstonecraft, Evans, and Chevers happen to be the repetitive voice of their male counterparts and of previous generations, other women writers, like Lady Mary Montagu, project their own life experiences into  literature that sheds light on the dark corners of the Orient. Lady Mary Montagu with her Turkish Embassy Letters is one of the most important contributors for the unbiased portrayal of Ottoman life during the imperial era. She fearlessly deconstructs the common assumptions and claims about the oppression of Muslim women in her Ottoman accounts.    

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