BİROL, Ceyda İstanbul Aydın Üniversitesi - Yabancı Diller Yüksekokulu, Turkey

THE REPRESENTATION of TURKISH WOMEN in ENGLISH TRAVEL WRITING and TURKISH WOMAN as THE JUSTIFIED ‘OTHER’ in TURKISH EMBASSY LETTERS

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In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said states that the studies about the Middle East have been dominated by masculinism 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, 1993, p.XXİV). In my study, I showcase the certain complicity between Orientalism’s imperialist functions and Western feminism. The “simulation of sovereign masculine discourse” by Western women reflect the very feminist, orientalist, and imperialist tendencies (Yeğenoglu, 1998, p. 107). Although seventeenth and eighteenth century writers like Evans, Chevers and Wollstonecraft happen to be the repetitive voice of their male counterparts and of previous generations with their biased portrait of the East, other women writers, like Lady Mary Montagu and Manley Delarivier stress the significance of the likeness between cultures and 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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Orientalism , Feminist Orientalism , Deconstruction , Muslim women , Lady Mary Montagu , Edward Said

Cumhuriyet Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi

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