“也許我已說得太多”：瑪麗．華特麗．孟特鳩夫人的《土耳其大使館書信集》與遊者的身份危機

“Perhaps I have Already Said Too Much”: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters and the Traveler’s Identity Crisis

在艾德華、薩依德(Edward Said) (1978)《東方主義》的影響下，旅遊書寫常被視為殖民論述的延伸。近來有關瑪麗、華德麗、孟特古夫人《土耳其大使館書信集》的研究亦多接受或抗拒此論。然而，在跨文化接觸時，瑪麗夫人在她的旅遊書寫中透露對自我文化身份深層的不確定感，其文化身份亦受分裂與擾動的威脅。當跨越國界時，遊者未必將異國文化佔有，反而，遊者在外國所面對的不確定場域，可能會使自我文化認同失去關連性，同時此認同中的價值觀與意識型態亦面臨瓦解。在《土耳其大使館書信集》中，當瑪麗夫人與異文化接觸時，對自我文化身份感到不安，由於異文化並非如想像中較自我文化卑劣，有時似更優越、合理、並使自己的國家相形見絀。此篇論文藉由檢視瑪麗夫人在旅途中所經歷之不安與騷動，提出遊者對文化身份認同感到困惑與不安的解讀。

Given the dominant theoretical influence of Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism, travel writing has since often been regarded as an extension of colonial discourse. Recent scholarship on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters has also attempted to respond to this line of questioning by embracing or rejecting the Orientalist approach. However, upon closer inspection, in her voyage narrative Lady Mary reveals significant signs of profound uncertainty about her own cultural identity and faces fragmentation and destabilization of her Britishness in cross-cultural encounter. Voyaging across borders, the traveler does not necessarily take possession of the alien but rather faces indeterminate places where one’s cultural preferences lose relevance and one’s cultural identity is contested as the values and ideologies entailed in that identity begin to crumble. In The Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Mary feels disturbed about her Britishness when traveling across borders and encountering foreign cultures, which not only do not turn out to be inferior to her own as she was taught to believe but at times seem superior, more sensible, and make her own country appear insufficient by comparison. This study, via examining significant disturbances to Lady Mary’s British identity in her travels, proposes a consideration of the unsettling effects of traveling and the consequential unraveling of cultural identity.