“A frightful spectre, to myself unknown”: The Speckled Monster and “Pox’d” Women in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Smallpox, an endemic famously dubbed the “speckled monster” because it left scarring and pigmentation on the skin, pervaded the literary imagination of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. In 1716, a year after she recovered from smallpox, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote “Satturday: The Smallpox” as part of a series of Town Eclogues that probe the cultural condition of fashionable women. This paper attends to Montagu’s response to eighteenth-century “poxed” women whose diseased and disfigured bodies allegedly serve as a measure of the nation state’s physical and moral health. Specifically, I read the “poxed” woman not just as a victim of smallpox but an agent, author, and literary subject who channels that fatal disease as a means of self-recognition and self-fashioning. Montagu charges against accusations that smallpox produces a less than desirable female body. Rather, by giving the diseased body a poetic voice, she dissects the male gaze, a proto-Foucauldian “medical gaze” if you will, that posits dysfunctional women as the locus of public scrutiny and national fear. Through “Satturday,” Montagu presents Flavia, a fictional smallpox victim, as a discursive agent who posits the “poxed” woman as a site of transfiguration rather than disfigurement. The poem responds to smallpox not as a clinical illness but a cultural pathology that mirrors England’s toxic obsession with sanitizing the female body. Montagu thus deploys the smallpox discourse as a traumatic moment of self-estrangement that enables women to articulate their negotiation of interior and exterior self.