Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Ecstatic Poetics

"This once was me": Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Ecstatic Poetics
Author(s): Helen Deutsch

Source: The Eighteenth Century , FALL 2012, Vol. 53, No. 3, Essays in Memory of Hans
Turley (FALL 2012), pp. 331-355
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23365016
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"This once was me": Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's
Ecstatic Poetics
Helen Deutsch
University of California, Los Angeles
"My picture went last, wrapp'd up in poetry without Fiction."1 In lieu of a

letter, in December of 1736, the 47-year-old Lady Mary Wortley Montagu sent
her much younger beloved—the charming Italian bisexual Francesco Algarotti,
who had taken London society by storm and left her bereft—a portrait of her
younger self, along with the following love poem:
This once was me, thus my complexion fair,

My cheek thus blooming, and thus curl'd my Hair,
This picture which with Pride I us'd to show
The lost ressemblance but upbraids me now,
Yet all these charms I only would renew
To make a mistrisse less unworthy you.
'Tis said, the Gods by ardent Vows are gain'd,

Iphis her wish (however wild) obtain'd,
Pygmalion warm'd to Life his Ivory maid,
Will no kind power restore my charms decai'd?
With useless Beauty my first Youth was crown'd,

In all my Conquests I no pleasure found,
The croud I shunn'd, nor of Applause was vain
And Felt no pity for a Lover's pain.
The pangs of passion coldly I despise
And view'd with scorn the ravage of my Eyes.
Now that contempt too dearly is repaid,
Th'impetuous Fire does my whole Soul invade.
Ο more than Madness!—with compassion View
A Heart could only be enflam'd by You.
The Eighteenth Century, vol. 53, no. 3 Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

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332 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
In that Lov'd Form there does at once unite
All that can raise Esteem, or give delight,

A Heart like mine is not below your care,
Artless and Honest, tender and sincere,
Where no mean thought has ever found a place
Look on my Heart, and you'll forget my Face.2
What do we make of her assertion that the painting, itself an act of fiction in
the sense of "fashioning or imitating,"3 is "wrapp'd up in poetry without Fic
tion"? "Fiction" here bears its negative connotation of feigning, invention, and
deceit. Most importantly and provocatively, it is defined in implicit opposition
to poetry and to the portrait. Rejecting her former "useless Beauty/' Montagu's
statement makes the poetry of desire synonymous with truth. The poet's voice
gestures toward the silent image in an act of distancing from the objectified
self—"This once was me."
Throughout her correspondence with Algarotti, Montagu marvels at a more

sudden, radical, and invisible form of self-transformation evinced by her pas
sionate abandonment of reason: "The very Idea of seeing you again gave me
a Shock while I read your Letter, which almost made me swoon. What has be
come of that philosophical Indifference that made the Glory and the tranquil
ity of my former days? I have lost it never to find it again, and if that passion
is healed I foresee nothing except mortal ennui."4 This transfigured self often
writes in French, the language of intimacy, but more importantly, she is com
pelled to write in verse: '"Tis with difficulty that I restrain my pen from fall
ing into the extravagancies of Poetry, which indeed are only fit to attempt the
expressing my thoughts of you or to you."5 Poetry might enable her beloved
to see beyond the surface of a body not formed to his inclination to a "con
stancy and an integrity which should take the place of charms and graces."6
"You would be too fortunate if you could find my tastes and my sentiments in
person who would appeal to your Fancy," she tells him.7 "Look on my Heart,"
her poem concludes in a paradoxical attempt to escape the visual by an act of
viewing, "and you'll forget my Face."
Love was an escape for Lady Mary both from the strictures of stoicism and
the bonds of feminine propriety. Love for an effeminate younger man provided
a way out of the confines of a beauty synonymous with feminine identity it
self. Montagu, that most famous of female travelers, was confined throughout
her life, with varying degrees of choice and consent, to portraits both visual
and verbal. We see her frozen in time, a marriageable young beauty posing in
pastoral garb, a cosmopolitan wife resplendent in Turkish dress, an English
visitor exposing her stays to the naked women in the baths of Istanbul, who
rightly surmised that she was imprisoned by a machine invented by men.8 She
graces the pages of Alexander Pope's satire, most memorably his poetic por
trait gallery Epistle to a Lady (1735), as Sappho, the name's allusion to her au

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DEUTSCH—LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU'S ECSTATIC POETICS 333
thorial prowess collapsed into Pope's disgust with the visual contrast between
her diamonds and her greasy smock. Later travel to Italy in pursuit of Algar
otti offered Lady Mary an escape from marriage and English social mores to
what she imagined as the "Elysian Fields,"9 and her friend, rival for Algarotti's
affections, and companion in transgressive desire Lord John Hervey called a
"Mahomet'"s "Paradise Upon Earth" of erotic fulfillment.10
But long before her travels through space, the young Lady Mary—who
taught herself Latin, translated Epictetus in prose, and imitated Ovid, Catul
lus, Horace, Virgil, and Sappho in verse—travelled through time in her father's
library.11 Her long sojourns in ancient Greece and Rome immersed her in a
pastoral landscape that framed her perception of her travels abroad.12 Taking
romance seriously, she supplemented her reading of Sappho's poetry in Anne
Dacier's translation with a happier version of the poet's story in Madeleine de
Scudery's romances. Unlike Ovid's Sappho (imitated by Pope), who hurls her
self to her death upon being abandoned by her younger male lover, Scudery's
Sappho, "well educated by a female cousin, and a wonderful writer in verse
and prose,... dislikes marriage (which, she says, makes men into tyrants) and
gets a judgement from the courts of love to justify her living happily ever after
with Phaon—without marrying him."13
The original Sappho, of course, sang her love songs to women. The long his
tory of the appropriation and transformation of Sappho's poems and persona
by both male and female writers manifests a powerful dialectic of feminism and
misogyny that shapes the imaginary potential and subversive power of classical
literature, its perpetual generation of alternative histories. In the beginning, as
Lady Mary well knew, and as canonical literary and intellectual history often
forgets, was the female poet inspired by love.14 In this essay, I undo Pope's sa
tiric work by portraying Lady Mary as a self-made Sappho, as an innovator and
experimenter in the nonfiction poetry (both lived and written) of female desire.
In another poem addressed to Algarotti that same year, Lady Mary offers
him her own "drafted and re-drafted" version of Sappho's famous poem of
jealousy in which the poet watches her beloved with a man, the original pre
served by Longinus in his treatise on the sublime as an example of the highest
art of ecstatic self-fragmentation reassembled into poetic form:
The Gods are not so blest as she
Whose ravish'd Eyes are fix'd on thee

Who listens to the soothing sounds
Of that soft voice which gently wounds
And sees with more than Human Grace
Sweet smiles adorn thy Angel Face.
But when you tenderly approach

Panting and breathless at your touch

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I can't support with dazled sight

Th'impetuous torrent of Delight,
My Heart beats thick, my senses fail,
Disorder'd, blushing, cold, and pale,
I sink beneath the powerfull Joy,
I faint, I tremble and I dye.15
Montagu begins by reversing the gender of the lover of Sappho'

beloved, only partially implying—"soft voice" and "Angel Face
femininity—that the object of her desire is male. But her most radica
tion is the second stanza's collapse of the triangulation of Sappho's s
in which the speaker's ecstasy is inspired by jealousy, into a fantasy
transports of erotic union itself. The emphasis on vision and strict de
of gendered positions inherent in Sappho's voyeuristic position disap
can't support with dazled sight") into the self-dissolution, provoked b
loved's touch, of fulfilled desire.
The classics thus gave Lady Mary a world elsewhere rich with raw
als for self-fashioning, rooted in the past and alive in the present. In
Ovidian, and Horatian fashion, vacillating between and ultimately cha
the gendered oppositions of poetry and philosophy, ecstasy and restra
Mary brings herself to life as a desiring subject by escaping herself, ad
a beloved who is as feminine as he is masculine, rendering the aesthet
male object that was her younger self, for whom any desire was taboo
of longing, love, and above all truthful speech.
In Stanzas, Giorgio Agamben articulates the divide between poetry
losophy without recognizing its gendered nature when he writes,
poetry possesses its object without knowing it while philosophy knows its o
without possessing it. In the West, the word is thus divided between a word
is unaware, as if fallen from the sky, and enjoys the object of knowledge by r
senting it in beautiful form, and a word that has all seriousness and conscio
for itself but does not enjoy its object because it does not know how to repr
it. . . . What is thus overlooked is the fact that every authentic poetic pro
directed toward knowledge, just as every authentic act of philosophy is alw
directed towards joy.16
Agamben's project is to argue for the "urgency, for our culture, of r

ing the unity of our own fragmented word,"17 and to reconstruct the
tradition of love poetry (one that includes Petrarch and the troubadou
by which, "through the dense textual entrebescamen (interlacing, inter
of phantasm, desire, and word, poetry constructed its own authority b
ing, itself, the stanza offered to the endless joy ... of erotic experience
tagu passionately participates in this tradition with a uniquely femini

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The woman who could imitate Sappho's famous poem of jealousy on one side
of the page while writing a plea for stoic indifference on the other, through the
Ovidian magic of "This once was me" articulates a desire which enjoys without
violence, which rather than staining or immobilizing its object, knows its object
by offering and transforming itself.1"
"ONE THING IS ANOTHER"
We might better understand what it means for a poet to travel in time

tour through history ourselves to consider the poet Joseph Brodsky's
Horace," written shortly before his death in 1996. Here Brodsky, an e
sian poet who wrote in English, enters into intimate conversation in m
than one with the Roman poet (and indirectly with the English poetic
of which Lady Mary, herself a well-known master of the epistolary mod
since Brodsky believes Horace to have been reincarnated as Auden). "E
I've written is, technically, addressed to you:.. . Because when one wri
one's most immediate audience is not one's own contemporaries, let
terity, but one's predecessors. Those who gave one a language, those w
one forms. Frankly, you know that far better than I."20 More intimate
Roman forbears than with his contemporaries, Brodsky recognizes a
spirit in Horace's attempts to imitate Greek meters in Latin. Poetry for
(as it is for Montagu and any lyric poet) is a looking backward, an emb
versation with the maker of one's voice, a look in language's mirror.
Recollecting Suetonius's portrait of Horace as a hedonist whose be
was lined with mirrors, Brodsky recounts a dream in which he is tra
back to Rome and an affair with an old flame. Envisioned in the sepia
vintage photos, Brodsky describes a night of vigorous lovemaking in
book-lined room with a genderless body whose face he can't see. The
ible face is his own, reflected in the mirror tenuously propped on the
ing the bed that enables him, like a comic blend of Narcissus and Orp
look back at himself in the throes of passion. Brodsky's epistolary ess
out from that erotic dream, which he interprets as representative of
edly queer love affair with the body of Latin poetry. While Brodsky
coincidence that "in Latin, poetry is feminine [is] good for allegory, a
good for allegory is good for the subconscious.... What is Latin poetry
if not a great offering?," it's important to note here that the object of
exertions could be male: "its high cheekbones could just as well rese
gil's, regardless of his own sexual preferences."21 Throughout the ess
sky struggles unsuccessfully, in a literalization of the trope of prosopope
a visible face on the Latin poetry that has given him voice, and that
Horace, in a carnal version of a monument more lasting than brass, "a
rable body than the one he acquired at birth."22 He addresses Horace
ticular intimacy because his experiments in meter make him the leas

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of his peers—"to me, your reality is practically greater than that o

memory."23 But it's his passionate admiration for the imaginative p
protean Ovid that most clearly illuminates Brodsky's affinity with
Ovid, Brodsky argues, is the master poet of the inhuman:
Naso insists that in this world one thing is another. That, in the final
reality is one large rhetorical figure and you are lucky if it is just a polypt
a chiasmus. With him a man evolves into an object and vice versa, wit
manent logic of grammar, like a statement sprouting a subordinate cla
him the world was the language: one thing was another, and as to which
real, it was a toss-up. In any case, if one thing was palpable, the other w
to be also.24
What does Brodsky mean by "one thing is another"? If grammar st

relationship between the human and the inhuman in Ovid's poetr
poetry as real as things themselves,25 the underlying principle of
game is the identity of all things, the sameness beneath difference:
[Ovid's ] game was morphology, and his take was metamorphosis. When
substance attains a different form. The main thing is the sameness of s
And, unlike the rest of you, he managed to grasp the simple truth of us
composed of the stuff the world is made of. Since we are of this world.
contain water, quartz, hydrogen, fiber, et cetera, albeit in different pro
Which can be reshuffled. Which already have been shuffled into that gi
wonder she becomes a tree. Just a shift in her cellular makeup. Anyhow,
species, shifting from the animate to the inanimate is the trend. You know
mean, being where you are.26
This recognition of common substance and perpetually changing f

Lucretius (whose philosophy was revived in Montagu's recent
write philosophy as poetry, to imagine the atoms that inform the
letters in the alphabet. Ovid puts Lucretius into imaginative and
tice. In the Metamorphoses, poetry enables an opening of the self int
world beyond the boundaries of the human body and, as Montag
to Ovid will show, beyond gender. While Brodsky's allusion to th
Apollo and Daphne, and his association of the feminine with allego
the origins of lyric's self-monumentalization in masculine violence
"This once was me" combines allusions to the Iphis and Pygmalio
order to undo the gendered oppositions of subject and object, po
lover and beloved. This return to the Utopian moments in the Met
when desire's prayers are answered enables Montagu to write lyric
a literal escape from the boundaries of the individual self, implicitl
her own letter to Horace's audience and foremother, Sappho.

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Barbara Johnson, in her essay "They Urn It," analyzes what Brodsky takes
for granted, namely the cultural association of femininity with allegory and
thus with thingness, the construction of "woman as bearer of something more
significant than herself," that informs Montagu's life as subject of portraiture.
Noting that in aesthetic philosophy, "it is . . . not forbidden to treat women as
things and to 'possess' them as one would a thing," Johnson outlines the his
tory of "woman as mere container, as vehicle," that determines the Western
poetic canon. "As Wordsworth put it, Ά slumber did my spirit seal / duhduh
duhduh / She seemed a thing.' Women make good things; things make good
women. They don't offer the inconvenience of competition."27 Turning a blind
eye to the queer lyrics of Horace, and William Shakespeare, Johnson defines
the object of Western poetry's pursuit, epitomized by John Keats's Grecian urn,
as almost always feminine: "How feminine is the urn? The Western canon's
convention, if not reality, requires that the pursuing poet is male, the beloved
object is female. This convention colors all Western poetry written by men."28
The myth that founds this convention is the same story to which Brodsky
alludes, that of Apollo and Daphne. The god's frustrated pursuit of the nymph,
as is well known, results in her transformation into a laurel tree and the creation
of the laurel wreath as symbolic of lyric poetry's parity with epic, instituting
the equation of love with war that distinguished Roman elegy and love poetry
ever after. The laurel, Ovid claims—in a passage that Johnson notes is ignored
by critics such as Peter Sacks who equate the myth with the emergence of all
poetry out of a genderless loss—will crown not poets "but military and civic
leaders." The myth thereby "mak[es] a place within literature for love poetry"
by articulating "the seriousness and power of desire as opposed to strength."29
This endeavor, Johnson argues, "was more possible if it was troped on the story
of Apollo and Daphne, male pursuer and female prey, male lover and female
object. That is, the seriousness of lyric in comparison with epic was won by
making the sexual roles similar to those of conqueror and conquered. The la
ment of the male lover bewailing his lady's escape installed the heterosexuality
and unrequitedness of canonical love."30 Ovid's innovation, I would argue, is
not the equation of lyric with epic through the deployment of martial meta
phors (which are evident throughout the love elegy he himself wrote, as well as
in the poetry of Propertius, Tibullus, and Horace). Rather, what distinguishes
the Apollo and Daphne myth is the rendering of the gendered opposition be
tween conqueror and conquered as one between desiring human subject and
unattainable inhuman object. It is this distinction that Montagu's writing to
Algarotti challenges, articulating an embodied desire that is neither homo- nor
hetero-sexual, nor agonistic, but rather fluid and fulfilled through the writing
of the poem.

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"SHE SEEMED A THING"
The thingification of the feminine in the Western lyric canon p

Johnson throughout her career, and has preoccupied me since I f
Johnson lecture around 1990 on the rhetorical trope of apostrophe
of speech by which a first-person speaker addresses an absent, dea
mate being. Johnson began by reciting the famous first lines (clearly
that haunted her throughout her literary life) of one of William W
"Lucy" poems:
A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing.
She ended there. Her point in truncating the line was to shock the audience
into an understanding of the ways in which apostrophe serves as a means for
the male poet to bring himself to life by contemplating an inanimate female
object.31
The poem, however, continues:
She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.32
Wordsworth's "she" is an earthly thing in relation to which he can reanimate

himself as living subject. Seemingly immortal and eternally youthful, she trans
fixes him in a sleep not unlike death; dead, she renders him the lone perceiving
human subject in a moving world of mute and fixed objects—rocks, and stones,
and trees.
Johnson's meditation on the gendered dynamics of speaking subject and

aestheticized object in Romantic lyric prompts a different question: what hap
pens when the mute female object—both mortal thing and aesthetic icon—
speaks for itself? Desire, for the 47-year-old Montagu, was not only improper
but profoundly untimely. As a young woman, Montagu had written to her fu
ture husband:
But you would have me say I am violently in Love. That is, finding you think bet
ter of me than you desire, you would have me give you a just cause to contemn me.
I doubt much whither there is a creature in the world humble enough to do that.
I should not think you more unreasonable if you was in love with my Face and

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ask'd me to disfigure it to make you easy. I have heard of some Nuns that make
use of that Expedient to secure their own happynesse, but amongst all the popish
Saints and Martyrs I have never read of one whose charity was sublime enough to
make themselves deformd or ridiculous to restore their Lovers to peace and quiet
nesse. In short, If nothing can content you but despiseing me heartily, I am Afraid
I shall be allwaies so barbarous to wish you may esteem me as long [as] you live.33
To declare her love would be to lose the battle of courtship, and to give her
suitor "just cause to contemn me." Tellingly, Mary Pierrepont immediately
translates this emotional exchange into the register of the visual, equating the
admission of passion with self-disfigurement. The analogy begs the question:
does Edward Montagu love her for anything more than her face? Would her ad
mission of love—of a feeling heart beneath the beautiful surface—do anything
other than lower his esteem?
Philosophy for the young Lady Mary was a self-fortification against both plea
sure and disappointment, staging the battle with her suitor within. Her transla
tion of Epictetus (himself a slave), written in 1710, the same year in which she
wrote this letter to Edward Montagu, enjoins a disengagement from the object
world from which she herself can't escape. For this prime commodity on the mar
riage market to consider herself the addressee of the following lines is to effect
a gender reversal: "all things which are pursued serve either to use, or pleasure.
Remember to consider what nature they are, beginning from the very least of thy
wishes. If you love a vase, love it as a vase, and if it is broke, do not disturb your
self; if a little son or a wife, love it as a human thing, for then if it dies you will not
be troubled."34 Easier to absorb would be the following injunction:
If the image of any pleasure strikes upon your mind, moderate your desires, and
suffer them not to hurry you away, but, examine the thing, and allow yourself time
for consideration. Remember every time when you enjoyed your wishes, and how
you have afterwards found reason of grief, by those very pleasures, and you will
chide your hasty desires, and compare this wish with those that have gone before
it. If you deny yourself, by abstinence, you will one day rejoice at the conquest,
and praise yourself, within yourself. When therefore at any time pleasure shews
itself to you, have a care of being vanquished by its blandishments, sweetnesses,
and its enchantments, but oppose to it, the joy you will receive from the conscious
ness of a victory over your passions.35
To choose philosophy at this point in Montagu's life meant to resolve upon bat
tle with herself in the name of reason. Joy comes not from union with another
but from the successful resistance of desire that makes one a true philosopher:
Remember, the choice is to be now made, the combat is now beginning, neither is
it permitted you to defer it; one hour of neglect will make all your virtue perish,

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or one firm resolution retain it for ever. So Socrates became what he was; in all
things he carried himself agreeable to reason, and never hearkened to any other
counselor; and though as yet you are no Socrates, yet, if you are willing to become
one, you must live in that manner.36
The martial metaphors of love poetry are deployed here in the name of a mas
culine self-possession that Montagu's later work will resist in the name of
surrender.
"LOOK ON MY HEART"
In middle age, Montagu's body was no longer the source and symbol o
value, having become instead a sign of the abjection of having lived past
and beauty.37 If women have borne the burden of mortality in literature b
while the ideal of female beauty has been a way to forestall mortality i
same literature—think again of Keats's "still unravish'd bride of quiet
the Grecian urn's cold pastoral of truth and beauty, an aestheticized ide
version of Epictetus's vase—Montagu draws upon experiences of embo
beyond such visual objectification. She expresses the estrangement of th
from its image, while articulating the possibility of different forms of
and relationship. Montagu's letters and poems to Algarotti, spoken by an
female body conscious of itself as both subject and object, tell a differen
of truth about being human by speaking physical objectification, indee
tification, as embodied desire.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Montagu, an aging woman disf
by smallpox, suffered a kind of stigmatization and social death akin t
her frenemy Pope—whom she and Lord Hervey had cruelly brand
semblance and Disgrace" of the human norm—experienced as a result
curved spine. Distinguishing between the physical fact of impairment a
social construction of disability, Lennard Davis has defined disability as
lem of perception, a "disruption in the sensory field of the observer."3
attributes an earlier version of this insight to William Hay, arguably t
person to claim disability as an identity in print in his 1754 "Deform
Essay." Hay begins his text with the statement, "Bodily Deformity is vi
every Eye; but the effects of it are known to very few," and concludes b
ing his curved spine to William Hogarth's undulating line of beauty. W
nod to Hay, Davis's "sensory field" has become the "visual field" and, as
linkage of himself to Hogarth's ideal S-curve of beauty demonstrates, s
emphasis on the visible seems to have as much to do with the construct
femininity as with disability.39 While the critical association of disabilit
visibility has rightly been contested—there are many disabilities that
visible, and the rhetoric of passing and coming out circulates in the d
community—this definition of the disabled body as aberrantly visible

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seems particularly and oppressively germane to the construction of dis

femininity, a stigma that is imposed upon Montagu regardless of her co
"How fortunate you are then to be gone!/' Hervey wrote to Algarotti in
over the discovery that he had spent his last evening in London with Mon
and in an echo of comments friends had made when she lost her perfect b
to smallpox years before, "the absence that brings sadness to every other
will fulfill your Happiness, for she will speak to your Eyes & not appea
fore them; she will not destroy with her countenance the impression sh
make by her mind."40 In a society obsessed with vision, spectacle, and bo
display—think, for example of Belinda, the heroine of Pope's The Rape o
Lock, the most beautiful of objects in a commodified world, to whom Mon
"This once was me" also alludes—the visibly disfigured female body is do
other, necessarily abject in relation to a "normal" femininity which is itse
poor imitation or monstrous other of a masculine ideal.
Femininity and disability have been inextricably intertwined since Aris
defined women as deformed or mutilated males, and this definition of w
as monstrous versions of men continued throughout the eighteenth centu
Pope, the most concise and ingenious poet of femininity's paradoxes du
this period and a powerful influence on women writers, praises women, w
characters can only be considered as "contradistinguished from the other
as "Fine by defect, and delicately weak"42—a characterization that Mary
stonecraft nearly 60 years later, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (
cites as a realistic description of women whose bodies and minds are vi
and deformed by lack of exercise and education.43 As both the physica
formed Pope, who lived his own version of such paradoxes of objectifica
and the embattled critic and heroine of sensibility Wollstonecraft make
the lines between moral defect and physical weakness, between beauty
deformity, and between ideology and embodiment, have historically been
ficult to draw.
How can Montagu's lyric give us insight into what it means to experience
oneself subjectively as an object, a universal human experience that the brand
ing of women as by nature defective is meant to ward off? How does the act of
narrating in time a self whose grounding in an image has been radically altered,
rebel against the tyranny of the visual? The film scholar Vivian Sobchack, work
ing within the philosophical tradition of existential phenomenology, puts this
well: "in a culture like ours, so preoccupied with images of bodies and bodies of
images, we tend to forget that both our bodies and our vision have lived dimen
sions that are not reducible to the merely visible."44 By resisting such reduction
to the merely visible, Wordsworth's "she seemed a thing that could not feel"
becomes an eloquently sentient subject rooted in time. Such speech, even after
physical death, brings the speaker to life. (Much as, it occurs to me now, my
remembering of Johnson's spoken lecture rather than her written work from
which that lecture drew, is at once an act of mourning and a revivification.)

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Montagu's "This once was me" violates the eighteenth-century code

dered propriety in two major ways: first, as a woman who speaks as
subject, pursuing an (ambiguously) masculine object of desire; second
equally radically, as a woman well past her youth who dares to assert h
to erotic connection. Inviting her love object to view her lost image, M
also asks him to look beyond it, to be aware of the passing of time in
between the voice speaking from the page and the static image of an earl
The second couplet—"This picture which with Pride I us'd to show
lost ressemblance but upbraids me now"—is a direct quotation of
Montagu had written twenty years earlier upon surviving a bout of s
leaving her "without eyelashes and with a deeply pitted skin." This e
poem, "Satturday: The Smallpox," the deathly conclusion of a series
mock-eclogues, as Montagu told her granddaughter, "expressed . . . w
own sensations were while slowly recovering under the apprehension
totally disfigured."45 The satire in "Satturday" takes an ironic distanc
the speaker's histrionic equation of her lost beauty with the loss of so
economic power, and ultimately with identity itself. It begins with its
"the wretched Flavia" reclining on her couch in anguish: "A Glass re
her right hand she bore / For now she shunn'd the Face she sought be
Flavia's lament makes it clear that she who had reigned as the suprem
of male desire had desire only for herself, a self equated (in the stand
rency of eighteenth-century femininity) with a beautiful face:
How am I chang'd! Alas, how am I grown

A frightfull Spectre to my selfe unknown!
Where's my Complexion, where the radiant bloom
That promis'd Happyness for Years to come?
Then, with what pleasure I this Face survey'd!
To look once more, my Visits oft delay'd!
Charmed with the veiw, a fresher red would rise,
And a new Life shot sparkling from my Eyes.

Oh Faithless Glass, my wonted bloom restore!
Alas, I rave! That bloom is now no more!47
The image of the woman worshipping herself in the mirror was of

common one in eighteenth-century satire, as this passage's allusion t
mous scene in Pope's Rape of the Lock of Belinda at her dressing table
we would do well to recall is also a depiction of a warrior arming hers
battle), worshipping the "Cosmetic Pow'rs" as she "sees by Degrees a
Blush arise," makes clear.48 Flavia, who had blushed with pleasure at h
beauty, now accuses the mirror of "faithlessness," shunning, like a s
lover, the face she sought before by reversing the glass. Her respon
"picture which with Pride I us'd to show" is to reject it (the echoes of

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ter to Wortley quoted earlier are significant): "Far from my Sight that killing
Picture bear, / The Face disfigure, or the Canvas tear!"49 The only way that
Flavia can acknowledge her loss of beauty is by an act of violence against the
image of her former face, a face still so identified with herself that she can only
partially acknowledge the artifice of its image. "Satturday" ends with Flavia's
embrace of social death by voluntary exile to the country, where in an ironic
echo of Adam's despair after the fall in Paradise Lost, as tragicomic, excessive,
and moving as the poem's tone throughout, she plans to "hide in shades this
lost Inglorious Face."50
It is not an exaggeration to say that in "This once was me," Montagu speaks
as if from the dead when she resurrects her lost beauty as something distinct
from herself and in the service of her own desire. For as "Satturday" and many
other texts from the period made clear, for eighteenth-century society, a woman
who lived beyond her youthful bloom, whether disfigured by smallpox or de
formed by old age, was socially dead, inhabiting an afterlife which rendered
her at best invisible, at worst monstrous. Jill Campbell has persuasively ar
gued that the popular image of the woman almost instantaneously disfigured
by smallpox denies the gradual temporal process of aging that all human be
ings must undergo; as Campbell puts it, the tableau of female disfigurement
"renders what is inherently a diachronic process [aging] as a synchronic, vi
sual image, and it does so by metaphorically equating women themselves with
their appearance."51 Pope—whose own physical disability marked him out as
a monster to his critics, and whose social disenfranchisement as a Catholic,
depriving him of the right to vote or own land, gave him a special affinity with
women—described the plight of aging beauties who will not quit the world of
social display with the cruelest of sympathy:
As Hags hold Sabbaths, less for joy than spight,

So these their merry, miserable Night;
Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide,
And haunt the places where their Honour dy'd.52
In "This once was me," Montagu rewrites the ghostly feminine afterlife after
the death of beauty and "Honour" (the latter encapsulating Pope's concise ob
jectification and stigmatization of female desire) as a space of potential meta
morphosis and mutual recognition. The gap between her past youthful image
and her present speaking self is thereby transformed into the possibility of
connection between the poet and her young beloved. Likening herself in the
second stanza to Ovid's Iphis, a mythical girl brought up as a boy, who was
transformed to a man by the strength of her desire for another woman, and to
Pygmalion, who falls in love with the marble statue of a perfect woman and
brings her to life by his longing, Montagu activates, to use Campbell's word,
a "dizzying" sequence of magical gendered transformations that testify to the

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animating power of desire, each of which blurs the distinctions betwee

and her addressee. Who, for example, is the "Ivory maid"—Montagu's
self, whose "charms decaid" she wishes to restore to life, or the andro
Algarotti, whom she wishes to warm with her verses? Our dizziness
crease when we consider Valerie Traub's brilliant reading of the preva
the Iphis story in early modern English literature as emblematic of t
sibility of lesbian desire.53 Montagu by contrast inverts Ovid's hete
tive conclusion, hoping rather for a transformation that by rendering
would make her more desirable to the effeminate Algarotti. "You mus
that you possess in me the most perfect friend and the most passionat
she wrote in French to Algarotti earlier that same year, "I should have
lighted if nature permitted me to limit myself to the first title; I am en
having been formed to wear skirts." She continues, breaking into Engl
Why was my haughty Soul to Woman joyn'd?

Why this soft sex impos'd upon my Mind?
Even this extravagance which now I send
Were meritorious in the name of Freind.54
Ambiguously articulating a self divided between "haughty" masculine mind

and soul and "soft" female "Sex" and body, and thus between perfect masculine
friendship and painful female passion, Montagu's lament here is reminiscent of
many implicitly gendered moments in her letters to Algarotti in which she in
vokes her stoically constant heart in contrast to the fickle variability of his desire.55
Her earlier epistle (written circa 1725) to Lord Bathurst—in implicit critique
of Pope's claim, spoken by his friend Martha Blount in Epistle to a Lady, that
" 'Most Women have no Characters at all' / Matter too soft a lasting mark to
bear"56—had concluded with a similarly gender-reversed contrast:
Thus on the Sands of Affric's burning plains

However deeply made no long Impress remains,
The lightest Leaf can leave its figure there,
The strongest Form is scatter'd by the Air,
So yeilding the Warm temper of your Mind,
So touch'd by every Eye; so toss'd by every Wind,
Ο how unlike has Heaven my Soul design'd!
Unseen, unheard, the Throng around me move,
Not wishing Praise, insensible of Love,
No Whispers soften, nor no Beautys Fire,
Careless I see the Dance, and coldly hear the Lyre.
So numerous Herds are driven o're the Rock,
No print is left of all the passing Flock,
So sings the Wind around the solid stone,

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So vainly beats the Waves with fruitless moan,

Tedious the Toil, and great the Workman's care
Who dare attempt to fix Impressions there.
But should some Swain more skillfull than the rest
Engrave his Name on this cold Marble Breast

Not rolling ages could deface that Name—
Through all the storms of Life tis still the same,
Tho length of Years with moss may shade the Ground
Deep tho unseen remains the secret wound.57
Montagu's "secret wound" paradoxically turns her into stone, unyielding as

Pygmalion's statue to all external impressions but that left by the beloved.
But the opposition between firm masculine soul/mind and fickle feminine
sensibility is complicated further by Montagu's envy in her letter to Algarotti
of an emotional extravagance that would be condoned "in the name of Freind."
Here Montagu evokes a classical model of eroticized masculine friendship be
tween an older and younger man immortalized by Plato in The Symposium, in
which love and friendship, along with body and mind, unite in the pursuit of
wisdom otherwise known as philosophy. This is the model Voltaire mocked
when he described Algarotti and his younger French lover in 1740 as "Socrates
fastened / Onto the rump of Alcibiades,"58 and it was also available to her rival
and friend, Lord Hervey, who despite his rivalry with Montagu for Algarotti's
affections, counseled her throughout the affair, sympathizing with her enough
to send her what we might call a poem of un-jealousy:
May all the Transports jealous Minds suggest

Are tasted in a happy Rival's Breast,
And all the Envious fancy we enjoy,
Gild ev'ry Scene, & ev'ry Sense employ;
May ev'ry Hour in gay Succession move,
Your Days all Luxury, your Nights all Love.59
At the height of her passion for Algarotti, Montagu praised Hervey for
The generous Heart that knows to be a Freind,

Can view my weakness with indulgent Eyes
And sooth a Folly which you must despise.
Offering him her "artless thanks," she regrets that she can give him nothing
that he doesn't already have:
But you, of every Grace, and Good, possess'd,

Can feel no want, nor be (like me) distress'd.

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Ο let me learn the happy courtly Art

To please my Eyes, and not engage my Heart—
Too late, alas! is made this fond request,
The Fatal Form too deeply is impress'd.
This Youth (Delightfull Vision of a day!)
Has snatch'd my reason, and my Soul away.60
"This once was me" rejects the self-control and self-sufficiency

please the eyes while leaving the heart untouched in the service of
sionate desire on display. Montagu's remarkable friendship with
based in part on a mutual recognition of the need for erotic pleasu
nection in age. When, disappointed by Algarotti, Montagu wrote t
1741 asking him whether she should give up her quest for happines
to England, he responded:
As to your present Situation, on which you say you would ask my A

I was nearer, and follow it, it is impossible on [?] Subject you mean that
and Socrates together could give you any so good as what you may give y
In the [?] where People's Pleasure and Interest clash foreign counsel m
great use, but on the present Occasion as you have nothing but your Pl
consider, your own Breast must be your best Cabinet-Council, your Pas
fections and Inclinations must compose it, and your Heart must be the P
of it. But as for its not being material because late in your Life, I am so
saying what you suppose I would say, that I think it the more material
one has left the more industrious one should be to manage and improve
I knew I was to dye at eight a Clock and lay uneasy, I would get up and
Bed made at half an hour seven. Adieu, and for your Oh where is now the
answer from Ovid.
Intrat amor mentes Usu; dediscitur Usu [.. ..]

Successore novo vincitur omnis Amor.
[By practice love comes into the mind, by practice love is unlearnt; all love is van
quished by a succeeding love.]61
In an echo of these sentiments she had written to him days earlier:
Beleive me, Freind (for such indeed are you,

Dear to my Heart and to my Int'rest true),
Too much already have you thrown away,
Too long sustain'd the labour of the Day.
Enjoy the Remnant of declineing Light,
Nor wait for Rest, till overwhelm'd in Night.
By present Pleasure, pay the Pains are past,
Forget all Systems, and indulge your Taste.62

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"Taste" here takes on a queer resonance as each friend urges the other to pur
sue whatever object pleases not in spite of but rather because of encroaching
age.
In her final emphasis on "Freind" in her lines to Algarotti, Montagu col
lapses the gendered oppositions of masculine friendship and feminine passion
in a queer evocation of the classical tradition of philosophical friendship be
tween men, in which each sees the other as an "alter idem" or "another him
self," which had initially conflated the two. Michel de Montaigne (with great
ambivalence) had described this Platonic "love ending in friendship" in his
essay "Of Friendship," quoting Cicero, as a unique form of desire: "love is the
attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty."63 In her yearning to be freed
from the constraints of female form, the once-beautiful Montagu transforms
her relationship to the beautiful Algarotti, imagining their ideal relationship as
the perfect amicitia or philosophical mirroring of two male friends. When Alga
rotti looks at Montagu's heart, rather than her face, in multiple ways—both in
the desired image of her true masculine self and in her unchanging desire for
him—he will see himself.
The Iphis story takes on added resonance for Montagu if we consider its
anomalous status in the Metamorphoses—a text which usually equates de
sire with masculine violence and female loss—as a tale of answered female
prayers.64 It begins with a mother's prayer to Isis for her unborn child, after
having been told by her husband that since the family can't afford a dowry, if
"you should be delivered of a girl, / unwillingly I order this, and beg / par
don for my impiety—But let it die."65 The husband remains unmoved by his
wife's pleas, but the goddess Isis appears to her in a dream and promises her
that she will "have no reason to complain / that honors you have paid me
were in vain."66 The child is born a girl, raised as a boy, named Iphis "for its
grandfather . . . since this name / was given men and women both ... its face
was such / that whether boy or girl, it was a beauty."67 Iphis falls in love with
Ianthe, to whom her father has arranged a marriage, for affinities described as
near-identities: "the two were similar in age and looks, / and had been taught
together from the first."68 When the wedding day approaches, Iphis complains:
"my father wishes for me what I wish, / she and her father both would have
it be; / but Nature, much more powerful than they are, / wishes it not—sole
source of all my woe!"69 It is her mother's prayer, answered by Isis, that saves
the day, as Iphis walks behind her mother from Isis's altar, transformed into a
boy. This happiest of endings—parents and children equally pleased—is one of
complete union of the divine and mortal worlds:
The next day's sun revealed the great wide world

with Venus, Juno, and Hymen all together
gathered beneath the smoking nuptial torches,
and Iphis in possession of Ianthe.70

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"Possession" here takes on the socioeconomic resonance that "Satt

materialism also contemplates. But the radical universal merging of al
implied by Ovid's "great wide world" is taken up by Ali Smith in he
romance, Girl Meets Boy, a modern adaptation of the Iphis story betw
women, the boyish cross-dressing Robin and the heroine Anthea, wh
ences with Robin the taking on "of a whole new shape . . . the shape
always supposed to," who realizes "I had not known I could be so mu
than myself," and who performs the ultimate Ovidian truth of "one th
other" in a marriage vow to "truly desire to go beyond ourselves."71 T
of the Iphis story for Smith is the perpetual flux of transformation:
Nothing more than what happens when things come together, when hydro
say, meets oxygen, or a story from then meets a story from now, or stone
water meets girl meets boy meets bird meets hand meets wing meets bone m
light meets dark meets eye meets word meets world meets grain of sand m
thirst meets hunger meets need meets dream meets real meets same meets
ferent meets death meets life meets end meets beginning all over again, the
of nature itself, ever-inventive, making one thing out of another, and one
into another, and nothing lasts, and nothing's lost, and nothing ever perishe
things can always change, because things will always change, and things wi
ways be different, because things can always be different.72
Gender is just one of many forms that can and must be morphed in
thing else in the endless poetry of the union of all things. The musicia
wedding of Anthea's dreams, attended by the gods, who animates in
nature with his song, is of course the poet Orpheus, whose story of th
of poetry inspired by love and loss is the subject of Ovid's next book.
"ALAS FOR WHAT I WAS"
Dismissing the "Beauty," that Flavia had lamented in "Satturday," as "us

Montagu also rejects a femininity as confined to narcissism as it is defi
image, which triumphs by display while remaining immune to feeling.
Montagu thus implies, is based on an experience lived in the flesh. Wh
remembers how her former self "view'd with scorn the ravage of my Eyes
speaks of her eyes, that part of the body that most profoundly links su
ity to objectivity as the material organ of vision, as aesthetic objects th
aged" or destroyed those who succumbed to their beauty. These eyes,
rather than subjects of desire, could only "view" love with scorn. The
self whom she had satirized and identified with in "Satturday" is expos
as isolated and deadened by its beauty, unable to see, as the blind Glou
says so movingly in King Lear, feelingly.
The older and wiser woman concludes by asking the young man she d

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not to repeat her mistake. She demands that he see through the visib
portrait of her younger self, and the diminished beauty of her pre
"view" her heart, which has changed over time but now remains co
"compassion." In her concluding lines, Montagu accomplishes thr
what she wishes to accomplish in reality: the union of herself and
That "Lov'd Form" of line 21 may refer to her heart, or it may refer
himself; through this ambiguity she asks Algarotti to acknowledge
one day, like her, lose his physical beauty but not, should he res
plea, the enlivening power of desire. Her final line "Look on my
you'll forget my Face," rewrites the social regime of the visible in
had triumphed and which smallpox had forced her to flee, as an e
sion based on mutual awareness of vulnerability, passion, and mor
line alludes once again to The Rape of the Lock and Pope's assessm
beautiful Belinda, "If to her share some Female Errors fall, / Look
and you'll forget 'em all."73 Montagu's revision, even while dwel
language of the visible, defies the predominance of beauty over tru
image over lived emotion, of bedazzled forgetting over mutual rec
Through her complex and gender-bending network of allusion
rewrites her particularly feminine experience of aging and disfigu
a human one, transforming the depradations of mortality into des
metamorphoses. I will return to Ovid momentarily, but I want to d
on this poem's debt to Horace's Ode 4.10, to Ligurinus:
Still cruel and still endowed with power to be so,

Gifted as you are with the gifts of Venus,
That moment is coming, when, suddenly, in the glass,
You see beginning the little signs of change,
Downy foreshadowing of the beard to come,
The locks that curl and wanton to the shoulders
All of a sudden looking a little different,

The cream-and-rose complexion beyond the beauty
Of freshest roses now not quite exactly
The way it had been just yesterday morning.
Then you will say, Alas for what I was
When I was younger than I am, Alas
That then I did not know what I know now;
Alas, that now I know what I did not know.74
This poem reminds us that Horace had begun his last book of odes with his
most powerful and personal recusatio (a genre that always conflates the per
sonal with the political), not the usual lyric love poet's refusal of epic, but a
rejection of love lyric itself as inappropriate for a man of his years. Claiming
to be too old to love, he directs Venus to the home of a young political favor

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i te, only to be interrupted by his own passionate outburst, an un

and improper "alas," as he declares his unrequited passion fo
man named Ligurinus. In 4.10 Horace shows Ligurinus not a p
younger self but his own future image in the mirror. Like Mont
performs the impossible feat of merging the static image with th
of the passage of time. David Ferry's translation wittily builds on t
transforming the image of the mirror's reflection into the mirror
the last two lines in which "now" and "then" merge in a way tha
beauty cannot.
This Horatian subtext subtends Montagu's poem in a variety of w
importantly for our purposes in its orchestration of youth and age
object and knowing subject, into a masculine hall of mirrors. By w
self into Horace's poem, Montagu disrupts the Roman ode's endless
of frustrated male desire with the poetic power of gendered meta
Evoking the figure of Pygmalion bringing the statue of the ideal wom
or of Iphis, transformed to a man by the power of her mother's v
Montagu embraces an Ovidian version of desire that has something
with what Sobchack, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has call
sion of the material":
an in-corporation that, through reaching toward or touching the material object

that is other than oneself, seeks to actively grasp both a concrete sense of one's
own self as immanently material and a concrete sense of how some of the world's
objects may also be subjects. . . . Indeed, in being actively devoted to (rather than
passively suffering) the embracing and enfolding of the world's—and one's
own—objectivity, the body-subject experiences not a diminution of subjectivity
but its sensual and sensible expansion—and an enhanced awareness of what it is
to be material.75
If, as Brodsky put it in his "Letter to Horace," Ovid reminds us of "the simple
truth of us all being composed of the stuff the world is made of," making it
clear "that for our species, shifting from the animate to the inanimate is the
trend,"76 Montagu's lyric, in its animation of a speaking voice beyond the static
portrait, reminds us that such shifts also work in the other direction, animat
ing the inanimate by the uniquely human power of desire to speak beyond the
flesh in which it is invested. These are truths made more acute by Montagu's
experience of objectification and subsequent disfigurement and therefore (not
nevertheless) they are central to all poetry: remember that Ovid's poet-hero Or
pheus has the power, through the beauty of his songs of mourning for his lost
wife, to animate rocks, and stones, and trees.
An Orpheus rather than a Eurydice, Montagu not only lives beyond her
younger self but proves her wrong. In 1717 she had written to Pope from
Turkey:

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I dare say You expect at least something very new in this letter after I hav
gone a Journey not undertaken by any Christian of some 100 years. The most
markable Accident that happen'd to me was my being very near overturn'd in
the Hebrus; and if I had much regard for the Glorys that one's Name enjoys aft
Death I should certainly be sorry for having miss'd the romantic conclusion o
swimming down the same River in which the musical Head of Orpheus repeate
verses so many ages since.
Caput a cervice revulsum.

Gurgite cum medio portans Oaegrius Hebrus
Volveret, Euridicen vox ipsa, et frigida lingua,
Ah! Miseram Euridicen! Anima fugiente vocabat,
Euridicen toto referebant flumine ripae.
[. . . [while] Oeagrian Hebrus swept and rolled in mid-current that head, plucke
from its [marble] neck, the bare voice and death-cold tongue, with fleeting breath
called Eurydice—ah, hapless Eurydice! "Eurydice" the banks re-echoed, all adow
the stream.]
Who knows but some of your bright Wits might have found it a subject affording
many poetical Turns, and have told the World in a Heroic Elegy that
As equal were our Souls, so equal were our fates?
I dispair of ever having so many fine things said of me as so extrodinary a Death
would have given Occasion for.77
Inspired by this letter, Pope went on to say a good many fine things in his poem
commemorating a female suicide, "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate
Lady" (1717). But Montagu, herself once a fine thing, rather than drowning or
dying for love, escaped that fate forever. Keeping her head and escaping her
face, she lost herself in another and brought herself to life.
NOTES
Thanks to Kathy King for the invitation to participate in this special issue, for her pati
and generosity, and for her excellent editorial work. I owe a great debt to the students
my graduate seminars in spring of 2007 and 2008, as well as spring and fall of 2009
helping me to think about Montagu in general and this poem in particular. Emily A
son, Heather James, Paul Kelleher, Jayne Lewis, Michael Meranze, Will Pritchard,
Christian Thome provided invaluable responses and assistance, while a host of liste
to shorter oral versions of this essay inspired its development.
1. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Francesco Algarotti, [December 1736], The Co

plete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford, 196
2:110.
2. Montagu, Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, ed. Halsband and Isobel
Grundy (Oxford, 1977; repr. 2004), 381. Grundy dates this poem to December 1736. It
was discovered in manuscript and published as Appendix I in Essays and Poems in 1993.

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3. In this regard, the Oxford Eng

ticks praising painting as the highes
4. Montagu to Algarotti, [August
2:103).
5. Montagu to Algarotti, 21 October [1736], Complete Letters, 2:109-10.
6. Montagu to Algarotti, 24 July [1738], Complete Letters, 2:505 (original in French,
2:117).
7. Montagu to Algarotti, 11 July [1738], Complete Letters, 2:504 (original in French,
2:116).
8. Montagu to Lady , 1 April [1717], Complete Letters, 1:314.
9. Montagu to Algarotti, [24 July 1739], Complete Letters, 2:508 (original in French,
2:140).
10. Montagu to Algarotti, 28/17 August 1739, Complete Letters, 2:146.
11. Montagu's accounts of her classical education vary but it's worth noting that she
told Joseph Spence "that her 'stealing the Latin language' began from her admiring Ovid"
(Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu [Oxford, 1999], 15). She imitated Ovid's Heroides in
an epistle from Ovid to Julia when she was twelve.
12. Jill Campbell, in an essay which informs my thinking here, reflects on Montagu's
portraits as indicative of cultural restraints on femininity, and the impossibility for Mon
tagu of expressing female desire at home. Turkey's "ancient" pastoral landscape and cul
tural difference made a different sort of female agency available to Montagu, much as
Italy would later afford a transitional space of freedom to desire ("Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu and the Historical Machinery of Female Identity," History, Gender & Eighteenth
Century Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin [Athens, Ga., 1994], 64-85).
13. Grundy, 18. Grundy also interestingly notes that Montagu and readers of her day
believed Madeleine de Scudery to be a man.
14. On Sappho's disruption of the histories of poetry, philosophy, and sexuality, see
Page duBois's inspiring Sappho is Burning (Chicago, 1995).
15. Montagu, Essays and Poems, 382.
16. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L.
Martinez (Minneapolis, 1993), xvii.
17. Agamben, xvii.
18. Agamben, xviii.
19. In The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2000), Lynn En
terline analyzes Ovid's Metamorphoses in a way that allows us to draw connections to
Sappho's lyric poetics of self-fragmentation and self-collection. An epic of "violated bod
ies," a few of which "elude the grasp of gender and its reductive nominations," the Meta
morphoses was itself, in Quintilian's phrase, an assemblage of "diverse things into 'the
appearance of a unified body'" (1). My account of Montagu's use of Ovid is indebted to
Enterline, while demonstrating that Ovid can provide happier endings than Enterline
would allow. For a brilliant reading of Pygmalion's "staining" of the object of his desire,
and for the analogy between Pygmalion and Orpheus, see Kenneth Gross, The Dream of
the Moving Statue (University Park, Pa., 2006), 69-91. Poetry, in Gross's reading of the
Pygmalion story so important to Montagu, can be "imperious and stonelike," but it "can
also become the most seductively mutable, resilient, and paradoxically humanizing of
materials, provoking ever more subtle explorations of the domain of desire, even as it
suggests by contrast the possible idolatry of any vision that seeks to transcend that do
main and that material" (83-84).
20. Joseph Brodsky, "Letter to Horace," On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York, 1995),
428-58,439.
21. Brodsky, 438-39.
22. Timothy P. Hofmeister, "Joseph Brodsky's Roman Body," International Journal of the
Classical Tradition 12, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 81-93, 84.

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23. Brodsky, 431-32.

24. Brodsky, 452.
25. Compare Enterline's reading of Ovid's Daphne and Apollo story, to w
also alludes here, which stresses how "the form of the body—Daphne's sen
both inspires and eludes the capture of language—Apollo's sense for figur
the bodies in Ovidian narrative take shape under the formative pressure
guage. And yet something about those bodies remains, like Daphne, forever
26. Brodsky, 454-55.
27. Barbara Johnson, "They Urn It," Persons and Things (Cambridge, M
don, 2008), 61-82, 72.
28. Johnson, "They Urn It," 71-72.
29. Johnson, "They Urn It," 77.
30. Johnson, "They Urn It," 78.
31. Johnson's lecture, as well as my essay, drew upon her essay "Apost
tion, and Abortion," in A World of Difference (Baltimore, 1987), 184-99.
32. William Wordsworth, "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" (1799), in The No
ogy of English Literature, 8th ed., vol. D, ed. Jack Stillinger and Deidre Sha
York, 2006), 276-77.
33. Lady Mary Pierrepont to Edward Wortley Montagu, [c. 22 August 17
Letters, 1:55-56. In another letter Pierrepont writes, "If you expect Passio
unacquainted with any. It may be a fault of my temper. Tis a stupidity
justifye, but I do not know I was in my life ever touched with any. I hav
a Transport of Anger, Love, or any other. I here tell you the plain state of
more than I shall ever think it worth my while to tell another. I beleive if
I should please you better, but you must have some Esteem for a Woman
disemble tho' to please"(Lady Mary Pierrepont to Edward Wortley Monta
1710], Complete Letters, 1:53-54). The claim of honesty is the same, but the h
Wortley is unmoved, reflecting nothing but itself.
34. Montagu, "The Enchiridion of Epictetus," The Letters and Works of Lad
ley Montagu, ed. Lord Whamcliffe, 2nd. ed., 3 vols. (London, 1837), 3:297-
35. Montagu, "Enchiridion," 317.
36. Montagu, "Enchiridion," 321.
37. Campbell develops this insight in "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Revers'd" of Female Old Age," "Defects": Engendering the Modern Body, ed.
and Felicity Nussbaum (Ann Arbor, 2000), 213-51, an essay to which this
return and homage.
38. Lennard Davis, "Dr. Johnson, Amelia, and the Discourse of Disability
54-74, 56.
39. William Hay, Deformity: An Essay, in The Works of William Hay, Esq., 2
1794), 1:5; for the comparison to William Hogarth's "Curve Lines" of beau
40. Quoted in Halsband, Lord Heruey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier (Oxford, 19
41. On the history of the intersection of femininity and disability, see
Nussbaum, introduction to "Defects," 1-30.
42. Alexander Pope, Epistle to a Lady (1735), in The Poetry and Prose of A
ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston, 1969), 167,1691. 44.
43. For her misquotation of this sentiment, "Fine by defect, and amiab
to which she returns throughout the text, see Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication
of Woman (1792), ed. Miriam Brody (London, 1985), 153.
44. Vivian Sobchack, "Is Any Body Home? Embodied Imagination an
tions," Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, 2
179.
45. This anecdote is from Montagu's granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart'

Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu, repr. in Essays and Poems, 35.

168.176.5.118 on Thu, 02 Dec 2021 02:42:42 UTC
46. Montagu, "Satturday: The Sm

48. Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1
tural significance of the lady's dre
as Pope's version of the ekphrasti
signing Women: The Dressing Room
2005), esp. 107-31.
51. Campbell, "Montagu and the
52. Pope, Epistle to a Lady, 11. 23
by Pope's satire, seems to borrow
lived their objectification in the Vi
phatical description of damnation;
with abortive eagerness round th
organs of sense. Yet, to their sens
bility that they obtain present po
53. Valerie Traub, The Renaissance
2002), 283-91.
54. Montagu to Algarotti, [10 September 1736], Complete Letters, 2:106 (English transla
tion on 2:502).
55. For more explicit gender reversals, see Montagu's imitation of Horace's Ode 1.3,
on jealousy, which is sent to Algarotti but addressed to "Lindamira" (Essays and Poems,
296); her feminizing praise of Algarotti's Newton translation for "the pleasing gift to trifle
well" (Essays and Poems, 294); and from her letters to him: "I have a devotion for you
more zealous than any of the adorers of the Virgin has ever had for her," and "I commend
myself to you in all perils like Don Quixote to his Dulcinea, and I have an imagination
no less enflamed than his" (Montagu to Algarotti, [10 September 1736], Complete Letters,
2:501; and Montagu to Algarotti, [c. 6 September 1739], Complete Letters, 2:508; French
originals, 2:104 and 2:147).
56. Pope, Epistle to a Lady, 11. 2-3.
57. Montagu, "Epistle [to Lord Bathurst]" (ca. 1725?), Essays and Poems, 243-44, 11.
61-83.
58. Quoted in Halsband, Lord Hervey, 272.

59. Hervey to Montagu, n.d., quoted in Halsband, Lord Hervey, 249.
60. Montagu, Essays and Poems, 305.
61. Hervey to Montagu, 22/11 June 1741, Complete Letters, 2:240^1. Hervey is quoting
Ovid's Remedia Amoris, 11. 503,462 (Halsband's translation, 2:241n).
62. Montagu to Hervey, [? June] 1741, Complete Letters, 2:239. She continues in an ap
pendix "To the Same":
Where ever Fortune points my Destin'd Way,
If my Capricious Stars ordain my Stay
In Gilded Palace or in Rural Scene;
While Breath shall animate this frail Machine,
My Heart sincere, which never Flatt'ry knew,
Shall consecrate its warmest Sighs to you.
Ultimately Montagu refused a tragic role in relationship to Algarotti, finding a new in
dependent life in Italy. Years after her erotic disappointment she remained his epistolary
friend and intellectual companion. Her final extant letter to him in 1758 expresses the
hope that "If we ever meet, the Memory of Lord Hervey shall be celebrated; his Gentle
shade will be pleas'd in Elysium with our Gratitude. I am insensible to every thing but
the remembrance of those few Friends that have been dear to me" (quoted in Halsband,
"Algarotti as Apollo: His Influence on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu," Friendship's Gar

168.176.5.118 on Thu, 02 Dec 2021 02:42:42 UTC
land: Essays Presented to Mario Praz on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Vittorio
1966], 223-41, 233). For this point I am grateful to Shirley Tung, whose c
tagu in her dissertation in progress, "A Self-Reflexive Journey: Imagining I
Eighteenth-Century Travel Narrative," gave me insight into the final stages
relationship with Algarotti.
63. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. Donald M. Fra
1981), 139.
64. Enterline focuses on the silenced female voice in the Metamorphoses as emblematic
of poetic impossibility. Iphis is one exception to this rule.
65. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York, 2004), 332, 9.979-81. All
further references will be by book and line number.
66. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 9.1013-14.
67. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 9.1025-26,1029-30.
70. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 9.1144^18.
71. Ali Smith, Boy Meets Girl: The Myth of Iphis (Edinburgh, 2007), 81,159.
72. Smith, 160.
73. Pope, The Rape of the Lock, 2:17-18.
74. Horace, Ode 4.10, The Odes of Horace, trans. David Ferry (New York, 1997), 294;
translation on 295.
75. Sobchack, "The Passion of the Material: Toward a Phenomenology of Interobjec
tivity," Carnal Thoughts, 286-318,290.
76. Brodsky, 454-55.
77. Montagu to Pope, 1 April [1717], Complete Letters, 1:330-31. The Latin quotation is
from Virgil, Georgics, 4. 523-27 (Halsband's translation, l:330n).

168.176.5.118 on Thu, 02 Dec 2021 02:42:42 UTC

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu&#39;s Ecstatic Poetics

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"This once was me": Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Ecstatic Poetics

Author(s): Helen Deutsch

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23365016

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"My picture went last, wrapp'd up in poetry without Fiction."1 In lieu of a

This once was me, thus my complexion fair,

'Tis said, the Gods by ardent Vows are gain'd,

With useless Beauty my first Youth was crown'd,

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In that Lov'd Form there does at once unite

All that can raise Esteem, or give delight,

Throughout her correspondence with Algarotti, Montagu marvels at a more

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The Gods are not so blest as she

Whose ravish'd Eyes are fix'd on thee

Sweet smiles adorn thy Angel Face.

But when you tenderly approach

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I can't support with dazled sight

Montagu begins by reversing the gender of the lover of Sappho'

Agamben's project is to argue for the "urgency, for our culture, of r

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"ONE THING IS ANOTHER"

We might better understand what it means for a poet to travel in time

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of his peers—"to me, your reality is practically greater than that o

What does Brodsky mean by "one thing is another"? If grammar st

This recognition of common substance and perpetually changing f

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"SHE SEEMED A THING"

The thingification of the feminine in the Western lyric canon p

A slumber did my spirit seal;

She seemed a thing.

She seemed a thing that could not feel

Wordsworth's "she" is an earthly thing in relation to which he can reanimate

Johnson's meditation on the gendered dynamics of speaking subject and

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seems particularly and oppressively germane to the construction of dis

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Montagu's "This once was me" violates the eighteenth-century code

How am I chang'd! Alas, how am I grown

And a new Life shot sparkling from my Eyes.

The image of the woman worshipping herself in the mirror was of

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As Hags hold Sabbaths, less for joy than spight,

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animating power of desire, each of which blurs the distinctions betwee

Why was my haughty Soul to Woman joyn'd?

Ambiguously articulating a self divided between "haughty" masculine mind

Thus on the Sands of Affric's burning plains

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So vainly beats the Waves with fruitless moan,

Engrave his Name on this cold Marble Breast

Montagu's "secret wound" paradoxically turns her into stone, unyielding as

May all the Transports jealous Minds suggest

The generous Heart that knows to be a Freind,

But you, of every Grace, and Good, possess'd,

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Ο let me learn the happy courtly Art

"This once was me" rejects the self-control and self-sufficiency

As to your present Situation, on which you say you would ask my A

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Ecstatic Poetics

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Ecstatic Poetics