Poems by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Biography & Background

• Montagu had small pox
• Brought back small pox vaccine 
• Was a well-concealed aristocrat
• Never published any of her work
• Was beautiful and brilliant in youth
• Her daughter burned most of her diaries/journals
• Was a friend of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift
• Pope and Swift were misogynistic 
• Montagu did not choose her husband and was unhappy
• Montagu travelled to Turkey with her husband, a Turkish ambassador
• A town ecologue is an oxymoron because these are two different forms (it is a satire)
• Ecologue: virgil form; references Greeks and Romans
• Montagu wrote epistolary poems
• Heroic epistle: told in heroic couplets
• Rhymed in couplets
• Rhymed iambic pentameter

Poems

Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband:

• Her husband can travel the world and sleep with other women, but Montagu must remain by her husband's side
• An enlightenment text because it's a change of thought
• Arranged marriages were a pre-enlightenment idea
• Concentration on the self is an enlightenment idea 
• Questions all systems (sciences, marriages, government, etc.)
• Concentrates on divorce and the happiness of the self
• The idea of breaking a marriage contract was a pre-enlightenment idea

Town Ecologues: Monday; Roxana or the Drawing-Room:

• Defoe may have based his novel on this poem
• A kept woman; lady of luxury; attached to aristocrats
• Attacks Roxana's vice and attacks all court's vices
• Roxana represents wealth, sex, beauty, low morals
• Roxana figures are like the Kardashians

Town Ecologues: Saturday; The Small-Pox:

• Flavia is the speaker and she has small-pox
• Small-pox caused fever; you were tied to your bed so you didn't scratch your body
• Small-pox was the stealer of women's beauty
• This poem addresses beauty and materialism 
• Montagu is mourning the "death" of her good looks
• Flavia is now going to hide herself away

A Receipt to Cure the Vapors:

• Hysteria was belief that womb could flow to your head and make you go insane
• Vapors were meant to fix hysteria
• Hysteria was a gender-specific bias
• "fit of the vapors" meant she was about to go crazy