A frightful spectre, to myself
unknown!’
‘Saturday’ (published 1747)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)
 |
| Portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu by Johnathan Richardson, 1725 (held at Sandon Hall, Stafford). |
If you’ve never heard of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu then
you’ve seriously been missing out – as well as being a talented poet and
writer, she also played a key role in dispelling British suspicion of
inoculation against small-pox and thus ultimately contributed to the
preservation of countless lives. Although her father had wanted her to marry a
wealthy heir called Clotworthy Skeffington, Lady Mary instead eloped with the
lawyer and MP Edward Wortley Montagu in 1712. Later, she accompanied her
husband during his appointment as ambassador to Constantinople at the heart of
what was then the Ottoman Empire, and it was during her time here that she
first learnt of the Turkish practice of inoculation. The subject was of
particular importance to Montagu, for she had herself survived a potentially
fatal case of small pox in 1715.
The poem I’ll be looking at today forms one of Montagu’s Six
Town Eclogues, a series of short poems in which there is one for every day of
the week except Sunday. The series was written around 1715-16 but was not
officially published until 1747 (three of them were pirated by the publisher
Edmund Curll in 1716, but ‘Saturday’ was not one of these). The poem is written
from the perspective of a society lady whose beauty has been affected by small
pox, and so it begins:
The wretched Flavia on her couch
reclined,
Thus breathed the anguish of a wounded
mind.
A glass reversed in her right hand she
bore,
For now she shunned the face she sought
before.
‘How am I changed! alas! how am I grown
A frightful spectre, to myself unknown!
(lines 1-6)
The shift from external narrator to the actual voice of
Flavia here allows Montagu to convey the psychological impact of the physical
scarring. Her appearance irrevocable
altered, Flavia is now ‘to [her]self unknown’, and the rest of the poem is
narrated from her perspective as she is overwhelmed by the loss of self-worth
that she equates with the loss of her beauty.
In particular, this worth is defined through the influence her
good-looks had given her over men from many different walks of life. She lists her former triumphs:
‘For me the patriot has the House [i.e.
the Houses of Parliament] forsook,
And left debates to catch a passing
look;
For me the soldier has soft verses
writ;
For me the beau has aimed to be a
wit.
For me the wit to nonsense was
betrayed;
[…]
The bashful squire, touched with a wish
unknown,
Has dared to speak with spirit not his
own:
Fired by one wish, all did alike adore;
Now beauty’s fled, and lovers are no
more.
(lines 28-32, & lines 37-40)
Remember that the poem’s opening highlighted that
Flavia perceives her appearance as indistinguishable from her identity when it
stated that she is now to ‘[her]self unknown’. The ‘me’ in these lines does not
so much refer to Flavia herself but to her physical features. It is her beauty
which the politician wants ‘to catch a passing look’ of, and it is for her
beauty that ‘the soldier has soft verses writ’.
No hint is given in the poem of Flavia possessing any other qualities
beyond her physical attractiveness. We are told how in the past Flavia has
gazed into her dressing room mirror:
While hours unheeded passed in deep debate,
How curls should fall, or where a patch
to place
(lines
48-49) [just in case you don’t know, the ‘patch’ referred to here is a beauty
patch, usually a small fancy shape in black that was intended to draw attention
to the most attractive feature of the face]
Later in the poem Flavia throws spiteful shade
upon women she deems ‘meaner beauties’ (meaning those less beautiful than she
had been) claiming that ‘Tis to my ruin all your charms ye owe’, and that if
‘pitying heaven’ would return her to her former glory her now successful rivals
‘still might move unthought of and unseen’ (around line 60). But this is
actually the closest the poem comes to allowing Flavia an opportunity to expose
herself to ridicule. Montague’s crucial,
unspoken question here is whether Flavia has allowed herself to be defined by
her appearance, or whether it is the everyday sexism of her time that has caused
her to equate her personal value solely with her physical appearance.
Hints as to the answer to this question are given in various
subtle ways throughout the poem, for example when Flavia begs her servants to
remove the portrait of herself before her illness:
Far from my sight that killing picture
bear,
The face disfigure, or the canvas tear!
That picture, which with pride I used
to show,
The lost resemblance but upbraids me
now.
(lines 43-46)
Perceiving herself to be mocked by the portrait of
her former self, the choice of the term ‘upbraid[ing]’ here indicates Flavia’s
assumption of blame for the situation, as if she herself is somehow at
fault. This is of course totally untrue,
and having suffered an illness like small pox she is genuinely lucky to still
be alive; but the fact that she even unconsciously absorbs blame or fault for
what has happened to her contains within it the implication that it is somehow
a duty or responsibility for her to look beautiful. Her success or failure as an individual, her
whole worth as a person, is defined by her appearance. As the poem draws to its conclusion, the
problem that Flavia now feels she faces is the inability to reclaim a life for
herself in a society that prioritises surface appearance over substance. It is
not just her sense of identity which she has lost, but her capacity to
influence others and be respected as an individual. Flavia exclaims:
But oh, how vain, how wretched is the
boast
Of beauty faded, and of empire lost!
What now is left but weeping to deplore
My beauty fled, and empire now no more?
(lines 61-64)
The syntactic repetition of the clause structure –
‘Of beauty faded […] of empire lost’ – solidifies the link between the two
terms still further. As a woman,
Flavia’s power has been derived from her appearance. It’s especially worth
keeping in mind here that this pessimistic self-expulsion from society is not,
of course, the approach Montagu took in her own life – the very existence of
this poem (written after Montagu’s own experience of small pox) obviously
belies the sense of uselessness that Flavia has fallen prey to here. All that
Flavia believes is left for her is to ‘Forsake mankind, and bid the world
adieu’ since she believes she is now fit only for the mockery of those men who
previously worshipped her beauty. Although
she refers briefly to some visits from male admirers come to console her, she
is painfully conscious of what their eventual attitude towards her will be when
their predictions of her swift recovery and resumption of beauty are not
fulfilled: ‘Men mock the idol of their former vow’, she notes darkly. What
Montagu draws attention to here is actually that Flavia is only worth less because of her illness if the society in which she lives considers her to be so. There is
also an implicit critique of a society in which women like Flavia are made to
feel that physical beauty is the only way in which they can contribute. That
Montagu was able to use her own experience to fuel her passion for promoting
better standards of health-care owed much to the privileged position she
occupied, and to her own determination to use that position to best
effect. As her most recent biographer
Isobel Grundy notes, ‘Lady Mary had more of a life outside her family than most
women of her class’ (p. 261).
You can find this poem:
(Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive – a nice free
copy with added notes and information)
(Poetry Foundation – a nice free copy)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘Saturday’, from Six
Town Eclogues, in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The
New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), pages 143-6(A fantastic collection of poetry, highly
recommended!!)
You can find out more about Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:
(Wikipedia – often a useful first stop for general
information)
(Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive – includes links to many
of Montagu’s poems, and a short biographical note; also details editions of her
poems and writings in case you want to delve further)
Resources used in
writing this blogpost:
Paula Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and their
Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2005)
