ABSTRACT
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman court, had become famous in England for her correspondences from the Eastern parts of Europe. Drawing on one of the most well-known episodes from Lady Mary's travels, Spence's relation of the hammam experience provides his readers with a second-hand account of the event in which the positions of English traveller and foreign host sit uneasily next to each other and in which gender identity clearly interferes with cultural difference. Daniel Defoe's Roxana's performance in Turkish dress, like Lady Mary's representation, is staged as an offer to a male British gaze. The self-conscious performances of otherness by both Lady Mary and Roxana seem to claim that agency in these societies is always a form of manipulation of appearances and that slavery awaits those who do not take the chance to capitalize on their otherness.
