Women, Aging, and Gossip in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's

Women, Aging, and Gossip in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters of the 1720s
Author(s): Sarah Brophy

Source: The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 45, No. 1 (SPRING 2004), pp. 1-20
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
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Women, Aging, and Gossip in Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu's Letters of the 1720s
Sarah Brophy
McMaster University
Reflecting on her relationship to English court society in the 1720s, Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) professes her preference for remaining in the
relative isolation of her house at Twickenham and remarks somewhat pes-
simistically in a 1725 letter that "I should not fail to amuse my selfe tolerably
enough but for the Damn'd, damn'd Quality of growing older and older every
day, and my present Joys are made imperfect by fears of the Future/'1 Ques-
tions about what aging might mean for upper-class women - ridicule and
exclusion from the social interactions that matter - form a persistent theme in
Montagu's letters, instigating a vacillating, but increasingly cheeky rather
than horrified, array of responses over time. As a young woman she declared
her fears to her friend Philippa Mundy, admitting that "I have a Mortal Aver-
sion to be an old Maid, and a decaid Oak before my Window, leavelesse, half
rotten, and shaking its wither'd Top, puts me in Mind every morning of an
Antiquated Virgin, Bald, with Rotten Teeth, and shaking of the Palsie" (12
December [1711]; 1:112). During the last two decades of her life, living abroad
and apart from her husband, however, Lady Mary seems to have contented
herself with the maxim that, as she writes in her sixties to her daughter, Lady
Bute, "Nature has provided pleasures for every State" (2 March 1751; 2:477).
Acknowledging that "it was formerly a terrifying prospect to me that I should
one day be an Old Woman," she professes that public appearances and social
maneuvering no longer appeal to her and that she is now reconciled to "the
abandoning of Persuits" (2 March 1751; 2:477). Yet Lady Mary's letters of the
1720s - the letters of the transitional period of her early middle age, and the
focus of this essay - testify to a considerable degree of ambivalence and anxi-
ety about the way her own aging might come to exclude her from the field of
sexual desire and desirability, a realm of power relations that she struggled,
through most of her life, to mold to her advantage, despite the limited range of
possibilities available to her.
1
The Eighteenth Century, vol. 45 no. 1 2004 © Texas Tech University Press
2 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
In surveying early moder

W. Banner note that the W
"aging women as exemplar
ceived as moral beings, ag
qualities of . . . high char
idealization of youth," "th
so clear-cut or positive": s
from experience and from
nant" could be construed
The advice of Lady Mary's
paper No. 89 on "Women
time of courtship to an im
myths that adhered to ag
Demurrage" is an "Evil" an
spinsterhood, to childless
great Danger of [a woman
"There is a kind of latter S
turns her into a very odd
and status to squander is a
ed frippery," the inapprop
costume that only enhanc
Wishfort makes the error o
struct her face to again r
menopausal woman's vanit
ed against the plots of sch
of the "Oeconomy of Face"
What would these admon
such a woman as Lady Ma
twentieth-century feminis
ties of Lady Mary's views
with corporeality and sex
structions of gender by se
menopausal and post-men
categorized as the culture
the excluded, and potenti
male self (whose character
delineate its cleanliness an
ing the abject as an essent
tion" as narrative processe
"culture" and argues that
abjection but what disturb
ders, positions, rules."8 L
problematic of aging wom
BROPHY- WOMEN, AGING, AND GOSSIP 3
ifestations of sexual difference (menstru

aging women may be seen as potentially
order." No longer capable of reproduction
ent from men than they did previously,9 p
power; at the same time, they may be see
transforming physiological processes,
dictable bodies to be feared.
In the case of Lady Mary, Isobel Grundy has noted that in Montagu's "Ital-
ian Memoir" of the 1740s a "loss of self-respect" connected to the experience of
growing older (and perhaps more specifically to the experience of menopause,
for Montagu would have been fifty in 1739) can occasionally be glimpsed
through her characteristic bravado.10 In the wake of her five-year-long passion
for Count Algarotti, whom she supplied with money and followed (fruitless-
ly) to Italy, romantic love and sexual desire may have come to seem more like-
ly to produce humiliation than gratification, regardless of the defiance of one's
stance.11 Even later, in her self-consciously aphoristic letters of the 1750s,
bravado must compete strenuously with worries about "decay": "My time is
wholly dedicated to the care of a decaying Body, and endeavoring (as the old
Song says) to grow wiser and better as my Strength wears away" (28 April
1754; 3:50). At times the stoicism seems forced, as when, for example, Mon-
tagu declares to Lady Bute that she avoids confronting her own reflection: "It
is eleven Year since I have seen my Figure in a Glass. The last Ref flection I saw
there was so disagreeable, I resolv'd to spare my selfe such mortifications for
the Future, and shall continue that resolution to my Live' s end" (8 October
[1757]; 3:135).
But Lady Mary's anxiety and ambivalence about aging - readable in the
combination of insistence that she is above feeling the loss of beauty and
renown with trepidation about losing social prestige - are evident much earli-
er than Grundy notes, for they constitute the most significant feature of Mon-
tagu's social-comedy letters of the 1720s, addressed to her sister, Lady Mar. By
pursuing a more explicitly theoretical reading of a selection of her letters from
this period than the interpretations that have been proposed so far (rather
than a summary or survey), I offer a supplement to existing commentaries of
Montagu on aging. Her often self-contradictory response to the misogynistic
displacement of fears about mortality onto women prompts a qualification of
what Grundy has termed Montagu's "self-construction as sage and moral-
ist,"12 as well as a reconsideration of Jill Campbell's optimistic view that for
Montagu "the loss of personal coherence wrought by age also extends the pos-
sibility of a release from the rigid bounds of socially sanctioned identity."13 In
particular, I seek to investigate the relational dimension of Montagu's self-rep-
resentation as an aging woman by examining how her portraits of other
women in the letters of the 1720s contribute to her self-construction as woman
and writer. Simultaneously, by bringing theories of gender performativity to
bear on Lady Mary's explor

applicability of postmodern
an early modern woman, in
rhetoric as well as the ways i
of performativity as a co
attempt to think about gen
you are," Rita Felski, in her
cizes Butler's tendency to
never to explain how the p
der's performative aspects a
rective, Felski "wonders about" the multivalent "connections and lines of
influence between economic structures, popular images and narratives, and
commonsense understandings of gender" that produce the conditions of
agency (101).15 Similarly, but in a more strictly philosophical vein, Pheng
Cheah, in his essay "Mattering," raises questions about Butler's location of
agency in the discursive realism to the neglect of economic forces.16 While
these limits are (not surprisingly) especially evident as we make the leap from
contemporary feminist theory to Montagu's particular lived experience as an
upper-class woman in the early-to-mid-eighteenth century, they are also the
subject of reflection and debate in the work of Butler and her contemporaries,
and accordingly there is much to be gained for refining feminist methodology
by reading these texts concurrently. I am proposing a dialogic reading of But-
ler and Lady Mary, one that - by emphasizing the crucial linking in Butler's
thought of performativity, abjection, and contextualized speech acts - will
demonstrate that Butler's evolving theory of gender and culture by no means
precludes, and, on the contrary, opens the door to, consideration of the crucial
roles of specific social, economic, and historical contexts in determining the
meanings of gender play.
I will preface my remarks on the 1720s letters by citing Lady Mary's proto-
feminist poems of the same decade, a body of verse that puts forward strong-
minded criticisms of the ways in which women's lives were already written by
the reigning ideology of gender, age, sex, and money. Remarkable for the cool-
ness of their exposé of the belief that marriage is preferable to spinsterhood,
these poems effectively raise the main features of Lady Mary's approach to
analyzing gender relations, a process of interrogation and reversal that it is no
stretch to describe as performative. Following Butler, who suggests that we
think of gender "as a practice, and as a signifying practice," I suggest that Mon-
tagu's persona in these poems constitutes a "dramatic and contingent" per-
formance of femininity that marks her dissent from the ideology of marriage
as the sufficient and determining framework for female identity and sexuali-
ty.17 These poems represent marriage as equally risky for women's peace of
mind as remaining unmarried, in large part because of the ways in which
wives and husbands change over time, generally to women's disadvantage.
The "Epistle from Mrs Y[onge] to her Husb

tency of public morality, which condones m
female infidelity (1. 32). 18 The poem also da
passion and criticizes the ways in which it
unjust Distinction grown? / Are we not form
(11. 25-26). Extending her critique of the un
riage, Montagu, in her verses "On the Death
same year, composes a tongue-in-cheek c
Bowes' s release through an early death from
matrimony for women:
Hail happy Bride, for thou art truly blest!

Three Months of Rapture crown' d with en
You had not yet the fatal Change deplor'd
The tender Lover, for th'imperious Lord,
Nor felt the Pangs that jealous Fondness b
Nor wept the Coldness from Possession sp
The unequal state of affairs becomes painful

grow by turns "imperious" and neglectful.
interestingly, the blame for changeability is
to the female, whose expectations of marri
(even if they are shown to be naive in this c
reversal of binary terms - she sees promises
formance (thus blurring the distinction b
feminine inconstancy) - recasts marriage as
resists any more sentimental, naturalized vi
Read together with the 1720s poems, Mont
the 1720s betray a cast of embitterment that
tive, yet impassioned, analysis that the poem
age-sensitive marketplace of love.20 The goss
Lady Mar, who was in exile in Paris durin
attempt to cheer up her frequently depresse
complex and contradictory than is evident u
we hear, from a more personal point of view
for Montagu fears of "Dullness and wrinkle
could be "10 years younger" (2:44, 52). In par
uted to the mixture of public and private au
enjoyed: while ostensibly written in sisterly
also certainly shared with others around the
opposed to the relatively more public poems
ly public persona rather than speaking as "h
fliction of Lady Mary's attitude toward her
"sexual disqualification" tha

ly allay.22 Writing for a gr
defines her identity and po
through her portraits of o
actual state of mind seems
larger issues that were trou
tion with the sense that she
tinguish between women w
that she has to some degree
older women - widowed,
irrelevant and at worst mo
difficulty disengaging hers
ties of social discourse in he
role as travel writer in The E
Although she claims, in he
every State," Montagu bas
unhappy who will not be c
through her Laws by affect
little desirable at present as
Infancy" (2:477). Here, in
method that is Montagu's c
in the letters of the 1720s.
gendered behavior suggests
grotesque as it would be fo
instead of attending to her
misplaced performances of
attitude of loathing charac
Generally, when Montagu re
ridicule of older women's v
to their state shifts suddenl
Describing the Duchess of C
letter composed in April 17
poem:
The God of Love, enrag'd to see

The Nymph despise his Flame,
At Dice and cards mispend her Nights
And slight a nobler Game;
For the Neglect of offers past

And Pride in days of yore,
He kindles up a Fire at last
That burns her at threescore.
A polish' d white is smoothly spread

Where whilom wrinkles lay,
And glowing with an artfull red
She ogles at the Play.
Along the Mall she softly sails

In White and Silver drest,
Her neck expos' d to eastern Gales,
And Jewells on her breast.
Her children banish'd, Age forgot,

Lord Sidney is her care,
And, what is much a happier lot,
Has hopes to be her Heir.
(2:74-75)
According to Montagu, keeping a "toy-boy"

an older woman. Corroborating, it seems, A
Spring" that "gets into the blood of an old W
threatens to "burn," to make the woman int
sighted and caked with makeup, shows hers
with an inappropriately lusty eye.24 Clearly
most disturbs Lady Mary: "There never was
sion. Lady Stafford says, nothing was ever l
(2:75). As in The Way of the World , not only
things is under threat, since the young man
aging woman's heir threatens the property r
ter's concluding comment - "Lord ha' mercy
come to!" - is conflicted, suggesting identif
demnation on the other (2:75). In this crucia
participate in the dynamic of ridicule agains
to recognize rationally these foibles, is, i
avoiding them.25
The ambivalent effect of the parodie dyna
can be illuminated with further reference to
formative effect. Montagu's vacillating inter
provide just the sort of limit case that neces
theory, for here it seems clear that Montag
promised by her own performative underst
masculinity and femininity as codes that we
not stand outside the discourses of gender an
time and social circle. Of most interest for m
redefinition of abjection, a turn that attemp
limits or conditions exist to

from suggesting that becau
realm of free play, Butler
underpins identity formatio
and social efficacy on the c
discredited others who, as r
in effect work to define the
or negation of all that is no
inition of abjection mention
process of "heterogeneous f
my own because the Other, h
through loathing,"27 Butler
zone that defines the limits
and of its intelligibility. Fict
out of a variety of "tacit cru
ulated by an uneasy disgu
ambivalence about the impl
"abasement."28
Drawing on this theory of self-construction as at once performative and

relational (and therefore contingent), I suggest that we can account for Mon-
tagu's apprehensive rhetoric about women and aging in her gossipy letters of
the 1720s by considering the role played by the domain of abasement that the
letters set up in their efforts to create a sense of self. Regarding the Duchess of
Cleveland, then, although Montagu's apparent purpose is to warn against the
false motives of the young suitor, by offering up this example of "Age forgot,"
she also attempts to establish that she herself will not come to such a pass.
Thus, while her epistolary negotiations of gender, gossip, and aging some-
times provoke a subversive "expansion" of the norms governing upper-class
women's comportment by asserting the individual prerogative to adopt an
urbane eccentricity, just as often she excludes other women, such as the
Duchess, by defining them as excessive and foolish in order to bolster her own
position.29 In the process of disavowing the inappropriate behavior of other
aging upper-class women, though, Montagu celebrates their public visibili-
ty - and in connection with this, their independent power and sexuality - dis-
tributing slightly but significantly different emphases in her interpretations of
aging women than are evident in the less equivocal criticisms of Addison and
Congreve.
Gossip is the particular discourse in which Lady Mary participates in these
letters, and postmodern theories of gender, performativity, and abjection can
help to situate this mode of communication in a newly meaningful light. Per-
haps because of the heterogeneous, serial form of the letters to Lady Mar and
their presumably trivial, even nasty, subject matter, this series of letters has
received relatively little attention from critics.30 This relative neglect may be
attributable to the fact that gossip, as Patric

involves the repetition of scandalous stories
lence, and money.31 But gossip also unsettle
their identities on principles of empathy an
fiting possibility that, as Butler's theory also
tity and authority may proceed by means o
with other women. Interestingly, while i
seems prepared to forgo the "perpetual rou
and seeing the same follies acted over and o
through her introduction to the women's sp
more gratifying and dignified ways for an
time (June 17, 1717; 1:367). Later, when she c
ent life in Italy with the vaunted pleasures o
cles in England, Montagu pinpoints the par
influence of gossip:
I have ever had this morning as much delight in

formerly in the crouded Mall even when I i
admiration of the place, which was generally so
mations of my female Friends, who seldom f
had shew'd an inch above my shoe heels, or
weight, which was construe' d affection, and ut
tion my vanity had given me. (27 November [
With this analysis, Lady Mary seems to be

contemporary view of gossip as a destructive
time as she criticizes how women replay the
appearance in their evaluations of one anoth
er's comportment.32 As Kathryn Shevelow o
The definition of female tattle as a vice stood

accorded to what men said to each other, for
male "idle conversation" was respectable, even
alent was trivial, perhaps vicious. Men met in
"conversed," women tattled.33
The Utopian possibilities of a women's coff

tagu takes great delight in the Embassy Letter
when she returns to London. Instead, the t
and sometimes vicious exchange of infor
with it, is by Montagu's own recognition th
ily available to her as an English noblewo
Pomfret from Italy in 1742, "I desire no othe
tea table chat, which has bee

believe no lady will dispute it
mode of conversation that le
approach to relaying gossip i
does not by any means resign
ing gossip to advantage as a r
and sisterhood, she makes the
"positive" dimensions cannot
ding derogatory mode, for aff
gossip on the derogation of o
stitutive outside" to the self,
Lady Mary's polished, exten
sentations at public events illu
of women and aging in the 17
series addressed to Lady M
ment - the coronation of Geo
men and the women in the cr
female figure to which she fi
But she that drew the greatest

of Orkney. She exposed behind
considerable pair of Bubbys a g
her; add to this the inimitable
good Fortune stood directly u
Delightfull Spectacle. She had e
icence which made her as big
one of the largest things of G
play'd all her Charms that day
Femininity is seen as primari

biological, and the implicatio
body and identity, and so p
prominence. In this connecti
employs the portrait of the C
reverential report of the roy
moment of the coronation it
the Countess of Orkney is ins
and prestige (2:85). Significan
mized by her potent size, con
the exception, for female self
women present themselves in
social identities: "The poor Du
black Snakes playing round
BROPHY- WOMEN, AGING, AND GOSSIP 1 1
away since her dismission from Court) repres

Mummy embroider'd over with Hieroglyphic
age, decrepitude, and size challenge the ass
beauty with power and attractiveness, sugges
magnetism to what Germaine Greer refers to a
nies old age," the possibility that once "liberat
tion [a woman's sexuality] became like a man's
The denaturalization of gender identity that is
is based on a grasp of the surface of the gende
ized by "a regulated process of repetition." Su
of femininity extrapolate on the opportunities
gender for "performative inversions" that re
gender - as well as its contingency."35
But just how much credit does the Coronati
women for the strategic construction of their
remarks, Montagu mockingly asserts the powe
a place for herself in spite of her age: "In Gen
Old were as well pleas'd as the Young, and I (w
than any thing in the World) was overjoy' d
one's Vanity" (2:86). A sense of distaste, vergin
observes, and edging over into self-disgust, t
this letter. With a deft reversal of terms, Lady
dilemma: that neither wisdom (the rationa
accrues to women who accept their own aging)
deluding, but not easily relinquished, belief in
ically to restitute youthful beauty after yout
biguous power. These mixed feelings are antici
Rich from Vienna, which pretends to lament "
English Ladys long since retir 'd to pruderie an
had luckily conducted them hither [to the Vie
the first rank of Beautys" (September 20, [1716]
cal barb is the backwater that is the Vienn
Women," which allows aging women to shi
English "prudes," who retire to the deadening
gossip and sweet liquors (I: 270). Any court "w
objection to makeing new conquests" can h
which to attain standing, and Montagu sugge
insignificant at present in the design of retur
where else," insinuating that she is still young
it matters (I: 270). When the rules governing t
and sexual attractiveness are so lax that such d
ers of performance become worse than valuele
ing the subject of gossip and mockery.
How could she reconcile thi

to this "paradise," particular
rates, that here "getting a Lov
reputation" [1: 270]? The int
ject is linked to the producti
cally the preposterous, failed
tocrats. By assigning the Co
women at the coronation th
certain power to judge and to
own dilemma of disempower
Duchess of Montross with M
in her attempt to reconstruc
the Duchess, like the Counte
choice of the body-displaying
modest sartorial style, constr
form "wisdom"; the result o
tagu's critique, the bizarre ef
cumulative result of the por
that the relatively younger
seem more controlled, object
ing to preserve, through a rh
alized commodity in the mids
rade."36 Here, Montagu's self
impartiality she strives to co
For instance, in her essay
(1737-1738), she suggests that
befitting their capacity to re
Pictures of meritorious Lady
Eyes or the pureness of their
a rational, sensible being" (134
trast with her two proto-fem
other women attempt to for
tially through the abjection o
of admirable control over he
inhabiting a realm, if not exa
bility, a zone that she herse
Ironically enough, Montagu
mon-Sense" having adopted a
from the dispassionate vanta
relatively distanced posture i
mate, even confessional lette
That vanity's assertive, self
and redefined as a vice withi
ference between parodie repetition as critiqu

stereotype can be easily obscured. And in
method of inversion are ambiguous: is she cel
women, or is she mobilizing the "patriarchal
"could reduce any woman," but especially
being"?38 Situated within the intersecting id
and contextualized by this matrix of assump
tions of Lady Mary's letters circulate and en
tain distortions of the script of femininity. T
tance from the contexts within which the let
aging woman is subject to dramatic fluctuatio
interpretive contexts, Butler emphasizes in Ex
ty for a speech act to resignify a prior conte
between the originating context or intention
ed and the effects it produces."39 She argues th
duce a significant change in social discours
acquires and the effects it performs must exc
ed, and the contexts it assumes must not be
originates."40 In Montagu's letters of the 1720
ing context" and her "intention" is notably
entrenches, rather than estranges contem
women, at once judging them as "bawdy" an
about looming old age as "a period of decay i
organism approached death."41 The noblewom
account of the coronation are seen and heard
own terms, but in relation to an ideology of
them as eccentric, monstrous, and ridiculou
reading these letters in the alternative contex
sonal reflections on aging, and the original a
contemporaries, for whom her attempt to n
would have undoubtedly been most resonant
direction: she identifies with the women wh
abject, and this feeling of connection, howev
nonetheless animates her negotiations, produ
between her portraits and the abjection of agi
When Lady Mary contemplates the instituti
an even more acute difficulty in disavowing
targets of her gossip than we see in the more
with an increased desire to accomplish just s
tinctly unable to "insensibly dwindle into a
position of objectivity, as she claims to do in
example, her extended account of the discov
affair with Richard Edgecumbe by one Miss
rank, beauty, and accomplis

When the "tall, musical, silly
the lovers' rendezvous by ar
requests that Miss Leigh play
ily flattered Miss Leigh "ver
her Audience decamp'd to th
lessons to her selfe" (2:79). T
cert, whereupon Miss Leigh
lish the news of their indiscretions.
What is noteworthy about Montagu's version of the story is that the cere-
bral Miss Leigh is made ridiculous, while Montagu takes a particular pleasure
in summing up the fate of "poor Edgcombe," who "met with nothing where
ever he went but compliments about his third Tune, which is reckon'd very
handsome in a Lover past forty" (2:79); in the story's summing up, both Edg-
combe and Titchburne are praised for their "admirable Conduct" (2:80). This
portrait of the abjectly silly, even shrewish, character of Miss Leigh involves a
"repudiation of the feminine" (of a body coded as inferior and inept) that
helps to prepare the way for Montagu to occupy what Butler calls the "posi-
tion of language user."42 If the aging woman who tries to present herself as
sexual is damned (as the Countess of Orkney and Duchess of Montross are),
then so too is the aging woman who is out of the game, who plays piano while
others make love. This is not to say that Montagu shies away exactly from flir-
tation with the possibilities of social transgression. On the contrary, as her
recounting of this episode makes clear, the possibility of extramarital sexual
activity is attractive to Montagu, and narratable for her, but only when it is
managed well. And indeed it is she who gets away with telling this lewd story
at second-hand. Through her entwined strategies of repudiation and praise,
Montagu identifies herself, the narrator of this anecdote, with a pair of lovers
who exemplify the stylish, controlled, and potent execution of sexual trans-
gression, and, in that sense, as Miss Leigh's opposite number.
How might we interpret Lady Mary's bold celebration of Edgecombe's
virility and her simultaneous rejection of Miss Leigh's lack of "penetration"?
Perhaps the ultimate illustration of abjection, Lady Mary's portrait of Miss
Leigh as unwitting accomplice to adultery emphasizes the success of the aging
male as against the ridiculousness of the spinster. If, as Jacqueline N. Zita
argues in her work on the cultural significance of menopause, the older female
body - specifically, in this story, the spinster's "sexually disqualified" body -
"is over determined by imagery signifying shame and disempowerment,"
then it is "easier to live in a male body, drawing on the social graces of age to
seduce more youthful bodies into possession, while pushing old women to the
wayside."43 In Montagu's anecdote, the lovers' finesse in executing their ruse
and her acumen as an observer of their affair are made attractive and safe by
the humor with which Montagu describes Miss Leigh's naïveté and awkward-
BROPH Y- WOMEN, AGING, AND GOSSIP 1 5
ness. If Miss Leigh is an unsophisticated goss

never matured, or grew sour as she passed
female beauty, the corollary imputation is t
ly, attractively, and safely to relay scandal. T
that Lady Mary repeats in her account of M
mockery, and appropriation quite similar to
challenge, for example, in her epistolary and
well as in the damaging descriptions of her
pole.44
To clarify further the importance of the Miss Leigh episode, I suggest we
glance at the following passage from a letter written the same year, 1725,
which indicates that Montagu's calculation that the development of singular
wit and charm might provide an avenue for her to evade the social script of the
aging woman.
Beauty and money are equally ill bestow' d when a fool has the keeping of
them; they are incapable of Happyness and every blessing turns useless in
their hands. ... In the mean time I divert my selfe passably enough and take
care to improve as much as possible that stock of Vanity and Credulity that
Heaven in its mercy has furnish' d me with, being sensible that to those two
Qualitys (simple as they appear) all the Pleasures of Life are owing. (2:44-45)
By her own account (and this passage indicates again an acute awareness of
the passage of time), she is preoccupied during this period to shore up the
value of the "Vanity" and "Credulity" associated with her gender and class
position (2:45). It is crucial for her to comprehend herself and be understood
by others to be making a "shift" or an accommodation to these difficult and
contradictory circumstances that is more admirable and poised than the per-
formances of her female contemporaries. At the same time, even as Montagu
endeavors to circumvent her fears and frustrations, and to ensure her own
integrity, by the practice of measuring her own "shift" against those of "fools,"
she emphasizes the unnerving necessity of self-deception (credulity) and rais-
es the possibility of finding herself made a fool.
As powerful a rhetorical tool as gossip comes to be for Montagu, it cannot,
in the end, furnish her with a completely confident or sequestered position
from which to survey her changing relationship to her milieu in the 1720s. She
grasps all too painfully the limits of a performative approach to gender and is
sharply aware that a decision to play outside the rules is to risk losing both
social and self-respect. What I have sought to emphasize in my analysis of
selected letters from this period is that her response to this insight is change-
able, and not by any means consistently objective. Despite the intermittent
professions of disinterested rationality in Lady Mary's letters of the 1720s, her
subjectivity remains entangled throughout in the very derogatory script
regarding women and aging

ble dynamic is at work in Th
cross-cultural comparison, t
for female agency, never co
sense of identity and author
solution, but it exacts its ow
wish for a little conversation,
more uneasyness than pleasu
be indulg'd at my Age" (10 J
ways in which the letters to
her own position as a woman
rioration of age, for what m
ing and revealing (as oppos
cover up her own stake in
describes. The colloquy of Bu
tivity underscores, I am con
imply the inability of certain
gically shrewd way, she hers
herself, nor of her ability to
whose portraits her own con
turn, this "theoretical" dialo
ing closely to the subtleties o
tening recognition, highlight
ture of her earlier writings
particular historical, ideolog
which they cannot be diseng
comprehend the particular m
dissent that animates the del
ure as Lady Mary Wortley M
While there may have been
"paradise for old women," t
Mary never ceased to negotia
did poke fun at her own agin
in her sixties, a gloriously c
detractors implied, a witch.
Only Witchcraft," and "You
maxims to make the best o
playing up such hypothetica
pan humor, Montagu expose
and of the ageist and sexist
many witches have done bef
astride upon a black cat" (3:1
lectual, gossipy, independen
the stereotype, feeling empowered to flirt wi

In effect, she flaunts her ability to mock the
the stereotype - as well as her defiance of t
husbands as Congreve's Mirabel, who woul
day," along with "all Masks for the night, ma
what - Hog's bones, Hare's gall, Pig-water, an
who would disallow, in other words, all of t
feminine self-construction.45 From this we
Mary Wortley Montagu came to possess a lar
ability to negotiate the script of aging that t
ly, emotionally, financially, and intellectually
of the witch, who goes "every night in a pu
cat," vacillates strategically between the pro
(as though to admit or pretend that this cron
teasing embrace of "demonic" sexuality, confi
onciled to the "abandoning of Persuits."
NOTES
This essay has enjoyed the financial support of the Social Sciences and Hu
Research Council of Canada, and it has had the benefit of generous and detailed
from anonymous reviewers, to whom I am grateful.
1. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , Ed. Robert Halsband
(Oxford, 1965) 2: 44. Further references to Montagu's letters will cite the volume a
numbers of this edition, parenthetically, in the essay.
2. Lois W. Banner, In Full Flower: A%in% Women , Power , and Sexuality (New Yo
167, 173-174.
3. Joseph Addison, The Spectator No. 89, Tuesday, June 12, 1711. The Spectator, V
Ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, 1965) 377. Germaine Greer cites this paper in her stud
meanings of menopause in Western culture, but not in direct connection with her c
on Lady Mary (The Change: Women, Aging, and the Menopause [Toronto, 1992] 281-
4. Addison, 1: 377-378.
5. William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700). In The Complete Plays of Wil
greve. Ed. Herbert Davis. (Chicago, 1967. 389^79). III.i.128; IV.i.560.
6. Congreve, III.i.141-2.
7. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Trans. Leon S. Roud
York, 1982) 1-3.
8. Kristeva, 4.
9. Greer, 90.
10. Isobel Grundy, "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 'Italian Memoir.'" In Th
Johnson 6 (1993): 341. For the "Italian Memoir," see Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
Writings, Ed. Isobel Grundy (Oxford, 1996) 81-105.
11. Greer, 287-288.
12. Grundy, "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 'Italian Memoir,"' 321.
13. Jill Campbell, "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the 'Glass Revers'd' o
Old Age." In Defects: Engendering the Early Modern Body, Eds. Helen Deutsch an
Nussbaum (Ann Arbor, 2000) 215. Campbell mentions the 1720s letters, emp
Lady Mary's continuing joie de vivre, but does not undertake a sustained analysi
in connection with the theme of aging, 238-239.
14. Defining performance in e

ior present to others/' Cynthia
teenth-Century Familiar Letter,
(London and Athens, 1994) 10
tends to emphasizes Montagu's
building up of a coherent identi
visional and ambiguous aspect
self.
15. Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York, 2000)
138,72,101.
16. Pheng Cheah, "Mattering." ( Diacritics 26:1 [Spring 19961) 134.
17. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. (New York and
London, 1990) 145, 139-140.
18. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "Epistle from Mrs Y[onge] to her Husband" (wr.
July-December 1724). Essays and Poems , 230-232.
19. "Written ex tempore on the Death of Mrs Bowes" (wr. December 1724). Essays and
Poems, 233.
20. According to Grundy, when the Mrs Bowes poem was published in The Weekly Jour-
nal or Saturday's Post, it drew extensive public criticism "for being positive about pleasure
early on about marriage, which was felt to be disgracefully lewd" ("Editing Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu." In Editing Women, Ed. Ann M. Hutchison [Toronto and Buffalo, 1998]
62-63).
21. Lady Mar (1690-1761) was born Lady Frances Pierrepont and married the 6th Earl
of Mar in 1714. The Earl of Mar was exiled from England in 1720 as a result of his involve-
ment with the Jacobites. Lady Mar joined him in Paris in 1721, where she was to reside for
the next seven years in "dire financial straits"; by 1728 she had "descended into madness,"
partly because of the way she was used as a pawn by her husband in his financial affairs
(Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 266-268).
22. Grundy confirms that in 1725 "with this theme [of aging] comes a note of disillu-
sion or disgust," even "alienation," as Lady Mary ceased by her own account to take part
in the social round {Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 246). The dissatisfaction and discord in
her own marriage, leading to her eventual separation from Edward Wortley Montagu in
the 1730s, also made her own marital status, and thus her social position, ambiguous.
23. Recent critical discussion of The Embassy Letters has explored how Lady Mary's
rhetorical strategies for personal emancipation hinge on the denigration of other women.
Although Montagu ostensibly emphasizes the hypocrisy of English Orientalism (she
implies the greater prevalence of less violent forms of marital cruelty in England, her
downplaying of violence (in the context of relaying stories of rape, for example) elide
other women's suffering (she does not question that in Turkey it is a woman's due to suf-
fer death for infidelity). In order to account for Lady Mary's inconsistent application of her
nascent feminist principles, Elizabeth Böhls links aesthetic discourse and its "process of
empowering one privileged group of [male] subjects by exclusing and disempowering
others" to Judith Butler's argument that subjects are discursively constructed through the
creation of a domain of "deauthorized subjects" (Butler, "Contingent Foundations: Femi-
nism and the Question of Postmodernism" [Feminists Theorize the Political, Eds. Judith
Butler and Joan W. Scott. (New York and London, 1992) 12-13]; qtd in Böhls, "Aesthetics
and Orientalism in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters" [Studies in Eighteent-Century
Culture 23 (1994)]182). The effect of Lady Mary's elisions of women's vulnerability, then, is
to make Montagu's own status as English aristocrat and intellectual appear more secure,
by disavowing her alignment with women's lack of power, as a class, across cultures. For
further discussion, see also: Srinivas Aravamudan, "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the
Hamman: Masquerade, Womanliness, and Levantinization" ( English Literary History 62
[1995]: 69-104); Devoney Looser, "Scolding Lady Mary Wortley Montagu? The Problemat-
ics of Sisterhood in Feminist Criticism/' In Feminist N

and the Problem of Sisterhood , Eds. Susan Ostrove W
York and London, 1994); and Lowenthal (especially 8
24. Addison, 1: 378.
25. Writing to her daughter in 1755, Montagu reiter
Lady Dalkeith's marriage, stating her view that "No
motives, and where Passion is only on one side every
thought justly, she would know that no Man ever w
the Deluge" (2 November [1755]: 3:98). Lady Mary's o
ing the mid-to-late 1730s forms an ironic counterpo
Cleveland and Lady Dalkeith. Possibly, in writing ab
iety about how others perceived her pursuit of a youn
26. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Lim
1993) 20. See also "Contingent Foundations/'
27. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 10.
28. Butler, Bodies That Matter ; 243n2.
29. Butler, Gender Trouble , 29.
30. As Felicity Nussbaum points out in relation to
diaries and journals, there have been "practical reaso
forms as well as critical assumptions" that have contri
Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eigh
1990] 23). In the case of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's
were published shortly after her death, the letters
form until the early nineteenth century; but even wh
in a "respectable, or scholarly, or bowdlerized" editi
away, who was employed by the Bute family (Grund
tagu" 66-67). Along with Grundy's article, see Rober
tory of editions of Montagu's letters in The Complet
commentators, critical assumptions, such as Bruce Re
teenth-century letters, "fashion a distinctive world at
self-supporting," have tended to work against a cons
which do not present a consistent "self" but engage, o
gender and class ideologies (Bruce Redford, The Conver
Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter. [Chicago, 1986] 9).
31. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip. (New York, 1985)
32. Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture:
the Early Periodical. (London and New York: Routle
33. Shevelow, 97.
34. Greer, 50-51, 90.
35. Butler, Gender Trouble, 145, 136-137.
36. Greer argues that "what women in the climacte
is not femininity, which can always be faked and prob
(52).
37. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "The Nonsense of Common-Sense, Number VI,"
(1737-1738), Essays and Poems, 130-134.
38. Banner, 167.
39. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. (New York and London,
1997) 14.
40. Butler, Excitable Speech, 14.
41. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. (New York,
1977)403.
42. Butler, Gender Trouble, 54.
43. Jacquelyn N. Zita, "Heresy in the Female Body: The Rhetorics of Menopause."
(1993) Rpt in The Other Within Us

Pearsall. (Boulder, 1997) 108.
44. For an illuminating discuss
attempts to resist them, see Cyn
(and without) Lady Mary" ( Philol
45. Congreve, IV.i.248-51.

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Women, Aging, and Gossip in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters of the 1720s

Author(s): Sarah Brophy

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and

In surveying early moder

ifestations of sexual difference (menstru

and writer. Simultaneously, by bringing theories of gender performativity to

bear on Lady Mary's explor

The "Epistle from Mrs Y[onge] to her Husb

Hail happy Bride, for thou art truly blest!

The unequal state of affairs becomes painful

"sexual disqualification" tha

The God of Love, enrag'd to see

For the Neglect of offers past

A polish' d white is smoothly spread

Along the Mall she softly sails

Her children banish'd, Age forgot,

According to Montagu, keeping a "toy-boy"

limits or conditions exist to

Drawing on this theory of self-construction as at once performative and

attributable to the fact that gossip, as Patric

I have ever had this morning as much delight in

With this analysis, Lady Mary seems to be

The definition of female tattle as a vice stood

The Utopian possibilities of a women's coff

tea table chat, which has bee

But she that drew the greatest

Femininity is seen as primari

away since her dismission from Court) repres

How could she reconcile thi

ference between parodie repetition as critiqu

rank, beauty, and accomplis

ness. If Miss Leigh is an unsophisticated goss

regarding women and aging

the stereotype, feeling empowered to flirt wi

14. Defining performance in e

ics of Sisterhood in Feminist Criticism/' In Feminist N

(1993) Rpt in The Other Within Us

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Women, Aging, and Gossip in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's

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