Sunday Shares - Week 20

Gender, Age, and Most Things Good

Words that Nudged History

Mary Wortley Montagu was born in London, on May 15th 1689. She was a poet and a woman of letters—and has been referred to as a bluestocking. At the age of 23, she ended an engagement to a man whom she’d never met, by eloping with her lover. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went on to become a central literary and scientific figure of the Enlightenment.

Travelling through Europe in 1716 and settling in Turkey, where her husband was English Ambassador at Constantinople, she recorded her experience in 58 letters in which she discusses, based on her acute observations, subjects ranging from the role of women, religion, oriental philosophy and politics to fashion, dancing girls, eunuchs, Turkish baths. [… S]he claimed that her letters were based on ‘Sources that have been Inaccessible to Other Travellers’, thus staking a claim to the authority of women’s writing.¹

Of the Turkish women, she wrote:

‘Turkish Ladys [sic] don’t commit one sin the less for not being Christians ... 'Tis very easy to see they have more Liberty than we have …’.²

The poet’s younger brother died of smallpox at the age of 20. Lady Montagu herself was infected, but against the odds, survived the disease. While she was living in Turkey she witnessed people performing “engrafting”³, which is a way to inoculate against smallpox. She became a staunch advocate for the practice back home. Her decision to inoculate her own children was met with criticism and controversy, to which she responded with eloquent pamphlets arguing the legitimacy of the practice—75 years before Edward Jenner’s vaccine.

She writes of the disfigurement the disease brings, in her poem “Town Eclogues: Saturday; The Small Pox”

[…] wretched FLAVIA on her couch reclin’d,
Thus breath’d the anguish of a wounded mind ;
A glass revers’d in her right hand she bore,
For now she shun’d the face she sought before.
How am I chang’d ! alas ! how am I grown
A frightful spectre, to myself unknown !
Where’s my Complexion ? where the radiant Bloom,
That promis’d happiness for Years to come ?⁴

With her own complexion marred from the disease, she was sharp in her observations of gendered attitudes pertaining to the disease, and to society in general:

The long poem goes on to satirise the patriarchy of physicians and the society in which women were made to feel that their beauty was the only way they could contribute.⁵

Lady Montagu exchanged witty letters with Alexander Pope while she was in Turkey. But upon returning to London, she was concerned that collaboration with him would result in him receiving credit for all the good writing, and her credit for the rest. Their relationship ended when he confessed his romantic feelings for her, and she rebuffed him.⁶ The literary feud got ugly. You can read more about their cutting, satirical exchanges here. Their falling out led to the diminishment of her reputation as a writer. Lady Montagu died of breast cancer in 1792.⁷ Many of her works were published posthumously.

In the mid 18th century, an obelisk was erected in her honor. (I’m sure I’m not the only one to see an irony in the choice of monument.) It’s status as a national monument was upgraded in 2023, from Grade III to Grade II, in recognition of the lives she saved by promoting inoculation despite the controversy.⁸

Dear Reader,

This week has been gray, and after the previous week of sunshine. It’s been a week of tea-drinking, and reframing what’s ahead. I know summer is coming because the Covid-year strawberries are blossoming again. And the tiny white flowers of the wild strawberries that line the slate patio are also in bloom. And some of the dandelions have already gone to seed. Spring is a painful reminder of how varied and how short a lifetime can be. I think of Seychelles giant tortoises and wonder, since pigeons see the world in slow motion⁹, if the world for tortoises is a sped-up film montage of petals opening, closing, withering, and decaying—to sprout again and again, while they lumber from one century to the next. How do they measure their little arcs of want and satisfaction?

My son and his wife have small tortoises that hibernate much of the winter. After this past year, I’ve thought more about what it is to dig in, and lay still for long periods of time. To have a whole life reduced to breathing in and out. Nothing moves fast-forward: days so passive they fold into one another like dough. Featureless.

Looking into this, I learned that bears don’t really hibernate. They go into a state of torpor. And while hibernation is a choice animals make, torpor isn’t. The environment forces the animal into a deep sleep. Their heart rate and respiration are unchanged, and they can wake if there’s danger. But waking is “expensive” in terms of energy. It pulls on the energy collected in reserve during rest.

I think serious illness resides between torpor and hibernation. I have so little in reserve. And yet, I have a nerve running through my body that is vibrating with an almost frightening intensity: “Do something!”

I saw a post from 5AM StoryTalk about Ethan Hawke, who wrote in a novel:

“When you’re young, everyone tells you to follow your dreams. and when you get older, people get offended if you even try.”

and he also said in an interview:

“The world is not rooting for you. Everybody doesn’t want you to be Hemingway. They actually want to mock you. […] You gotta to be willing to be made fun of.”

Does this ring true for you, too?

It takes so much courage to know that there are limits to our lives, and still want.

And it takes courage to ignore the judgement, and the limitations that other people—people who love you—set for you: “I know you: here is your box”.

Photo: Ren Powell

I want to be brave. I want not to need to recruit cheerleaders to help me wake up.

My Modern Met

I will seek out new role models of all kinds, and remember that life isn’t lived as a story.

And if it is? Well, I’ll mould it into an Aristotelian shape, and have the high point very near the end.

Cecilia Vicuña: “A few years ago, my paintings were being destroyed, even by my family and friends. Nobody cared what I was doing. For more than 40 years. […] All these women in my family […] all of them had large libraries, and these creative powerful women were around me [ever] since I could breathe.”

If I may make a little plug for my new project, and ask you to spread the word:

As always, I hope these sparked some ideas, and I welcome your thoughts.

Have a great week!
Warmly,

Ren Powell’s Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen
Writing against Melodrama by Engaging with the Real World—
taking a cue from Nature, whose matter-of-fact dramas can be seen from shifting points of view & embracing the paradox of acceptance and hope.

Published three times a week:
Sunday Shares, Tuesday’s Process Journal Essays, and Thursday’s Poem.
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1. https://library.chethams.com/blog/a-bluestocking-influencer-lady-mary-wortley-montagu/

2. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/history/people/who-was-lady-mary-wortley-montagu

3. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Lady-Mary-Wortley-Montagu-Campaign-Against-Smallpox/

4. https://library.chethams.com/blog/a-bluestocking-influencer-lady-mary-wortley-montagu/

5. Ibid.

6. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/pope-makes-love-to-lady-mary-wortley-montagu-william-frith/kQESZ68oYk0uOw?hl=en

7. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Lady-Mary-Wortley-Montagu-Campaign-Against-Smallpox/

8. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/05/obelisk-celebrating-pioneering-lady-mary-wortley-montagu-given-highest-listing

9. https://www.birdnote.org/listen/shows/you-could-take-pigeon-movies