7
Questions of Gender and Sexuality
Homer’s Odyssey, written in the sixth century BCE, is one of the founding texts of Western culture. It recounts the wanderings both of the Greek hero Odysseus, as he struggles to return to his Ithacan home after the Trojan War, and also of his son, Telemachus, as he sets out in search of his missing father. The principal female character in the poem, meanwhile, cuts a far more passive and sedentary figure. Whilst husband and son criss-cross the Eastern Mediterranean, Penelope remains at home, resisting an army of suitors who seek to persuade her that Odysseus is dead. Penelope’s destiny, it seems, is not to roam the world; she is instead the destination and safe haven which Odysseus and Telemachus are striving to reach, and the longed-for terminus to their adventures and misadventures.
This is an allocation of roles that reflects deep-seated assumptions in Western culture, and in many other cultures besides, about the gendering of travel. In many societies, in many periods, restlessness, freedom of movement and a taste for adventure have been attributes and activities conventionally associated with men rather than women. According to the patriarchal ideology of separate spheres, a woman’s proper and preferred location is the home, and women have therefore traditionally been associated with immobility or, as it is sometimes dubbed ‘sessility’, and with domesticity. According to such masculinist notions, moreover, women encountered beyond the domestic sphere are unlikely to be fellow travellers from the hero’s own culture; instead, they are usually alluring natives or dangerous temptresses, highly eroticised fantasy figures liable to distract the male hero from the true purpose of his journey. Thus Odysseus must resist the bewitchments of Circe, whilst in the later Roman epic The Aeneid (c.19 BCE), Aeneas must reject Dido if he is to fulfil his imperial destiny.
To a very great extent, of course, this received wisdom about the gendering of travel is a myth, an ideological construct that simultaneously assumes and promotes the notion of separate spheres for men and women. Insofar as it is not a myth, but has some historical basis, this is largely because the prevalence of this patriarchal ideology has in many periods created the reality it purports to describe, imposing numerous constraints and limitations on any woman who wished to travel. Notwithstanding these constraints, however, women have always travelled more extensively than the masculinist mythology just outlined would suggest. In every period, women at all levels of society have often accompanied their husbands, fathers and brothers on journeys, although the female presence on these ventures has frequently gone unrecorded by contemporary and subsequent commentators. In this way women have been throughout history migrants and settlers; they have formed part of diplomatic and aristocratic retinues; and they have accompanied men to war as camp followers, nurses and sometimes even as soldiers and sailors. In many cultures, meanwhile, women have often availed themselves of the travel opportunities provided by traditions of religious pilgrimage, a form of travel which frequently enabled women to travel independently of men, either individually or in female-only groups (see Morrison 2000). And finally, as tourism became from the late eighteenth century onwards increasingly widespread and popular, so opportunities for women to travel solely for pleasure and recreation steadily increased.
Whilst practices such as pilgrimage have sometimes allowed women to travel without male company, patriarchal societies have generally required women to travel with chaperones. Restrictions in this regard began to be relaxed in the nineteenth century, in Western culture at least, and it became increasingly acceptable, although still not entirely unproblematic, for women to travel on their own. For the most part, however, such independent travel was only possible within the standard, supposedly safe tourist circuit of the day, but as that circuit extended over time, so the travel options available to women became less geographically circumscribed. By the late 1800s, for example, European and American women were able to tour Egypt and the Middle East, as well as the more traditional destinations in Europe and the United States of America. There is also a long and impressive roll-call of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women who travelled independently well beyond the conventional tourist itineraries of their day: examples include Hester Stanhope in the Middle East, Mary Kingsley and May French Sheldon in Africa, and Marianne North and Isabella Bird, whose travels took them all around the world. Far-flung destinations might also be visited in this period by women accompanying their husbands as they travelled in an official or professional capacity. Thus Lady Mary Wortley Montagu visited Istanbul in the early eighteenth century as the wife of the British ambassador there, whilst a century later, Maria Graham, like Jane Austen’s fictional Mrs Croft in Persuasion (1817), accompanied her Naval officer husband on a tour of duty to Latin America.
These travelling women have produced over the centuries a vast body of travel writings. Prior to the late seventeenth century, it is probably fair to say, women travellers were much less likely than men to record their experiences and reflections in writing; this was largely due to the more limited educational opportunities available to women, and the correspondingly lower levels of female literacy in this period. Accounts of female travel from the ancient, medieval and early modern eras do survive, however, by figures such as Egeria and Margery Kempe. Thereafter, as female literacy increased dramatically in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so a growing number of women travellers became also travel writers. Often, however, their accounts of travel occur in forms of writing intended for private rather than public consumption, such as letters and diaries. Celia Fiennes, for example, completed in 1701 a lively travel memoir which recorded a series of journeys around Britain in the late seventeenth century, whilst the diary of Sarah Kemble Knight recounts, in a similarly vivid style, the writer’s arduous journey from Boston to New York in 1704. Both texts, however, were originally intended only for circulation amongst friends and family; in both cases, it was not until the nineteenth century, when the authors were long dead, that these accounts were published.
Where female-authored accounts of travel did find their way into print in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, it was usually in the context of forms like the captivity narrative and the spiritual autobiography, which sit at the margins of the travel writing genre: an example is Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson (1682). It was only in the latter part of the eighteenth century that women such as Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft and Ann Radcliffe began publishing travelogues, although it has been estimated that only about twenty such texts appeared in print before 1800 (Turner 2001: 127). By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the number of published travelogues by women had risen dramatically, and from that date down to the present day, women writers have made an extensive and substantial contribution to the travel writing genre, in all its different modes and forms.
Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have been much concerned to recover and re-evaluate the various forms of travel writing that women have produced historically, and this has been one of the main stimuli to the growth of travel writing studies in recent decades. One aim of the feminist project in this regard has been to counter stereotypical assumptions about travel and travel writing being principally masculine enterprises. As many critics have pointed out, these assumptions are reflected and perpetuated in several influential studies of travel writing, such as Paul Fussell’s Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980), Eric J. Leed’s The Mind of the Traveller (1991) and Larzer Ziff’s Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing, 1780–1910 (2000), all of which largely ignore female travellers. Feminist scholars have accordingly sought to correct this skewed literary history. At the same time, they been greatly interested in the autobiographical aspects of travel writing, using female-authored travelogues to explore the ways in which female subjectivities were formed and articulated in different periods and cultures. Further to this, they have also paid much attention to the differing perspectives that women travellers often provide on the countries and cultures they visit, in comparison with male travellers visiting the same destinations. This in turn has prompted some scholars to ask whether men and women travel in fundamentally different ways, and whether they produce intrinsically different types of travel writing. The travel writer and critic Mary Morris, for example, believes this to be the case, insisting in her introduction to the Virago Book of Women Travellers (first published 1994) that ‘women … move through the world differently than men’ (Morris 2007: 9). Like many editors of anthologies of women’s travel writing, moreover, Morris also seems to take it for granted that female-authored travelogues will usually share distinctively ‘feminine’ characteristics that set them apart from travel accounts produced by men. In this spirit, for example, she suggests that women travel writers are typically more concerned with the ‘inner landscape’, and ‘the writer’s own inner workings’, than their male counterparts (2007: 9). Another anthologist, Jane Robinson, meanwhile, claims that ‘men’s travel accounts are to do with What and Where, and women’s with How and Why’ (1990: xiv).
Other feminist critics have been troubled by such generalisations, and by the ‘separatist’ view that women’s and men’s travel writing is in some way fundamentally different. Susan Bassnett, for example, has insisted that ‘the sheer diversity of women’s travel writing resists simple categorisation’ (Bassnett 2002: 239), and so implicitly questions how far it is possible to identify distinctively feminine attributes that are shared by all female-authored travelogues. Shirley Foster and Sara Mills similarly argue for a more nuanced understanding of the role gender plays in the shaping first of a traveller’s identity, and thereafter of their travel account. In both regards, they suggest, gender is only one variable amongst many, interacting constantly with other factors such as ‘race, age, class, and financial position, education, political ideals and historical period’ (Foster and Mills 2002: 1). In many contexts, accordingly, the similarities between male- and female-authored travel accounts greatly outweigh any dissimilarities; and by the same token, there are few tendencies or characteristics in travel writing which are so uniquely feminine that they are never found in male-authored accounts. That said, Foster and Mills also stress that within any given period and society one can usually detect broad patterns of difference between men’s and women’s travel writing (2002: 4). And as Mills elsewhere points out, even when men and women produce more or less identical forms of travel writing, their travelogues will often be received very differently by the reading public, on account of the author’s gender (Mills 1991: 30). Thus a travel writer’s gender may sometimes play a more important role in the reception, rather than the production, of a travel account.
This chapter will tease out in more detail some of the gender codes, and the patterns of expectation, constraint and prejudice, that have historically underpinned and shaped the travel writing produced by both men and women. The chapter will focus chiefly on women’s travel writing, so as to reflect the burgeoning of interest in this topic in recent years. Yet it will begin with some further observations on the gendering of men’s travel writing. This is partly to illustrate the matrix of stereotypical assumptions and expectations against which women have had to define themselves as travellers and travel writers, and partly to make the point that gender norms and expectations affect men, and men’s writing, just as much as women. Usually, of course, those norms and expectations have worked greatly to the advantage of men, yet they have also in some regards constituted a form of constraint, delimiting how a male travel writer may or may not present himself; and as we shall see, this applies especially to the issue of sexuality.
Masculinity, Travel and Travel Writing
As the preceding discussion will have suggested, travel has often been regarded as an important mode or rite of masculine self-fashioning. The journey is thus construed as a test or demonstration of manhood, or in some variants, such as the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, as a rite of passage from boyhood to full, adult masculinity. In these circumstances, one function of any subsequent travel account will usually be to consolidate the traveller’s claim to full or proper masculinity. The precise attributes judged desirable in a man, and the itineraries and types of travel undertaken in order to demonstrate those attributes, have of course varied across different periods and cultures. In their efforts to present an image of exemplary manliness, however, travellers and travel writers have often drawn on a broadly similar stock of motifs, personae and narrative paradigms. It is very common in this context, for example, for male travellers to invoke the tradition and ethos of the quest, thereby drawing on conventions and imagery that stretch at least as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh (c.1000 BCE), but which in the West derive especially from the chivalric romances of the medieval and early modern periods. In this Christian inflection of the quest tradition, the traveller’s ordeal was depicted as a test not only of their physical strength, resourcefulness and guile, but also of their virtue and religious faith. Many male travellers have accordingly laid claim to these desirable attributes by identifying themselves as some form of questing knight. This is a heroic self-fashioning central to many accounts of conquest and crusade, for example, since it implicitly confers a moral legitimacy on what might otherwise be regarded as merely acts of aggression and rapacity. Crusaders and conquistadors, of course, have usually set off with the intention of literally slaying adversaries and acquiring treasure, in direct imitation of the heroes of quest romances. Many other travellers historically, however, have understood themselves to be questing knights in a more metaphorical fashion; they have set out in search of useful knowledge, new trading opportunities or some other goal, and used the imagery of the quest to lend a greater heroism and grandeur to their activities.
The goal travellers and travel writers most commonly set themselves, of course, is to bring back knowledge of other places, and this is an agenda that has often been subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) gendered in a variety of different ways. In the first place, in many periods it has been incumbent on male travellers to demonstrate that they have made some useful contribution to contemporary commercial, intellectual or strategic concerns. Travellers who failed in this requirement were often dismissed by reviewers and commentators as frivolous and trivial, and frivolity and triviality were in turn often construed as feminine attributes, and as the hallmarks of the female rather than the male traveller. The picturesque tourism pioneered by William Gilpin in the late eighteenth century, for example, was often lampooned by contemporary critics as a distinctly feminised form of travel and travel writing, since it encouraged travellers to consider the landscapes through which they moved principally in an aesthetic rather than a practical or scientific light. Satires such as William Combe and Thomas Rowlandson’s The Tour of Dr Syntax (1812) accordingly caricatured male devotees of the picturesque as effeminate, emasculated figures, and this in turn became an accusation that many male picturesque tourists sought to counter or deflect in their travel narratives.
These stereotypical associations between, on the one hand, men’s travel and intellectual seriousness and, on the other, women’s travel and intellectual shallowness or frivolity, have historically operated in a highly normative fashion, influencing both the differing modes of travel writing adopted by men and women, and also the reception that male- and female-authored travelogues received from reviewers and readers. The obstacles thus facing women travel writers who wished to make meaningful contributions to contemporary debates, and the textual stratagems by which they negotiated these obstacles, will be discussed later in this chapter. For men, however, these gender norms and expectations have in many periods constituted both a licence, and also to some degree an obligation, to adopt a range of discourses, postures and styles traditionally marked as masculine. Matters of politics, commerce and science, for example, and the public affairs of both one’s own and other nations, have traditionally been regarded as topics that only men were equipped to discuss, and indeed, that they ought to discuss, if they wished to evince an appropriately masculine seriousness of purpose. Similarly, a pose of dispassionate rational enquiry, and a narrative voice that eschewed excessive emotionalism and introspection in favour of precise, empirical observation, was in many periods held to be both the preserve of the male traveller, and also a requirement of him, if he wished to cut an appropriately masculine figure (see Cohen 1996; Chard 1999). Scientific discourse, equally, has in many periods been strongly marked as a masculine domain, and has consequently been a route to intellectual authority traditionally more available to the men rather than the women.
In many cultures, a common yardstick for demonstrating and asserting masculinity in travel has been the degree of danger and discomfort involved in the journey. The greater the risk and the difficulty, obviously, the more manly and heroic a traveller seems; in the quest tradition outlined earlier, moreover, the misadventures and hardships endured by the protagonist are usually construed as a key means by which strength of character and virtue are both formed and tested. Of course, women travellers over the centuries have endured physical and psychological ordeals every bit as harrowing as those endured by male travellers. Yet women have often had to be much more circumspect with regard to how far they subsequently publicised these distressing experiences. In many periods, any hint of sexual molestation or impropriety might be enough to tarnish a woman’s reputation irrevocably, and one reason why it has often been culturally unacceptable for women to travel beyond the standard pilgrimage and tourism circuits of their day has accordingly been the anxiety that they might find themselves in such sexually perilous predicaments. Male travellers, however, have historically been less restricted in this regard, and whilst excessive recklessness has seldom been admired in travellers, a readiness to countenance some degree of danger and discomfort has usually been valorised as a laudable attribute in men.
There has often been a strongly nationalistic and/or imperialistic dimension to this construction of travel as a masculine rite of passage. For many travel writers and commentators, for example, dangerous, difficult journeys in remote regions have been presented as a key means of teaching a nation’s youth important lessons of manliness, and so of countering a perceived decline in national or imperial prowess. Thus Washington Irving, in his Tour on the Prairies (1835), laments that so many young American men are sent abroad ‘to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe’ (1835: 69); he suggests that they should rather be sent west, to the frontier regions of the United States, so as to learn ‘manliness, simplicity and self-dependence’ (1835: 70). Anxieties of this sort, about a supposed crisis in contemporary masculinity, have frequently been put to the service of expansionist ideologies, and thus have often formed a key strand of colonial discourse. Works such as Irving’s Tour on the Prairies, and subsequently Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872), for example, encouraged young men to seek out adventures on the frontier, through their depiction of the ‘Wild West’ as a place where manliness could be demonstrated, and a range of male fantasies fulfilled. In imperial Britain, meanwhile, explorers such as Henry Stanley and Richard Burton, travel writers such as A.W. Kinglake, and writers of adventure fiction such as Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard played a similar role, by depicting the freedoms apparently available to young men in regions such as Africa, India and the Middle East (see Green 1980; Bristow 1991; Phillips 1997). In all these writers, and in Twain and Irving as well, regions at or just beyond the edge of supposed civilisation often seem to represent an escape from a smothering femininity, and from domestic ties and mundane chores. These frontier regions are typically constructed as male-only spaces, where men can form intense, homosocial bonds; and when women do appear in these accounts, they are often depicted in a highly exoticised, and eroticised, fashion. Witness, for example, the fantasy entertained by the narrator of Tennyson’s poem ‘Locksley Hall’ (1842), as he plans an expedition to Africa: ‘I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.’
An imagery of sexual possession has also often been applied by male travellers to the regions that they visit, and to the objects of their quests. Sir Walter Ralegh concludes his Discoverie of Guiana (1596), for example, with the observation that:
Guiana is a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead [that is, virginity], never sackt, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not been torne, nor the virtue of the soyle spent by manurance … It hath never been entered by any armie of strength, and never conquered or possessed by any Christian Prince.
(Whitehead 1997: 196)
This is an especially striking instance of the gendered lexis or imagery used in many male-authored accounts of exploration and discovery, as the traveller depicts himself as successfully penetrating ‘virgin’ territory, and so to some degree taking possession of it, either literally or metaphorically. In this way many male-authored travelogues have displayed a striking convergence of patriarchal and colonialist attitudes. Often their implicit if not explicit narrative is that of the heroic male traveller taking literal or symbolic possession of a feminised Other, which might variously be a landscape, a region, or some specific aspect of the natural world, such as a region’s flora and fauna. In some cases, indeed, it may be a whole culture or ethnic group that is feminised in this way: thus the so-called ‘Orient’ and its inhabitants, Edward Said (1995) has argued, have been routinely depicted as passive, inert and indolent, in comparison with the more vigorous and virile Western traveller. And it is not only in exploration and discovery, which are of course typically constructed as very ‘manly’ forms of travel, that male travellers adopt this imagery and agenda. As we have seen, the picturesque tourism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was often derided by contemporaries as a feminised mode of travel. Even here, however, as Robin Jarvis has pointed out, ‘the over-arching sexual symbolism’ is often that ‘of a desiring male subject chasing the “woodland nymphs” to their “secret haunts”, and “penetrating” the “undiscover’d shade” of a dense and variegated landscape’ (1997: 60).
Not all male travellers have been colonialists, of course, and they have not all universally espoused such a possessive and/or sexually aggressive style of masculinity. There is a long tradition of comic travel writing by men, for example, in which the overtly macho posturing strongly associated with accounts of exploration and adventure is parodied and undermined. Recent exponents of this comic mode include Eric Newby and Redmond O’Hanlon. That said, one should not assume that the bathetic, self-deprecating style of these writers, and their frequent mockery of Victorian notions of manliness, necessarily constitute some sort of radical subversion of traditional masculine codes. Playing down the dangers and discomforts attendant on one’s travelling is of course a well-established rhetorical strategy that can be used to convey more powerfully a traveller’s heroism and courage; and insofar as travellers like O’Hanlon make a joke out of what were clearly genuinely dangerous situations, they arguably continue this tradition.
A more significant subversion of the gender codes conventionally exhibited in men’s travel writing arguably comes from gay travellers, and from the tradition of overtly gay travel writing that begins to emerge in the twentieth century. There were of course homosexual, or bisexual, travellers and travel writers prior to the twentieth century: notable examples include William Beckford, Lord Byron and Roger Casement. Some travellers, indeed, travelled precisely to seek out same-sex liaisons in cultures with more permissive attitudes to sexuality than their own; and this was probably for some an attraction of the homosocial frontier environments depicted in imperialist adventure literature (see Hyam 1990). When these travellers produced accounts of their experiences, however, they had necessarily to elide any reference to homosexuality, or else could only allude to it in a coded fashion. In this way men’s travel writing has traditionally had a strongly heteronormative aspect, assuming and requiring a heterosexual persona from the male writer. This assumption, and some of the masculine stereotypes that often accompany it, have been challenged in the twentieth century by travelogues such as Edmund White’s States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), Tobias Schneebaum’s Where the Spirits Dwell: An Odyssey in the Jungle of New Guinea (1988) and Aldo Busi’s Sodomies in Elevenpoint (1992), and by anthologies such as Raphael Kadushin’s Wonderland: Good Gay Travel Writing (2004). That said, however, gay travelogues are not necessarily exempt from the ‘orientalising’ and exploitative tendencies evident in many other forms of Western travel writing, as Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan demonstrate in their excellent introduction to this branch of the genre (1998: 133–55).
Performing Femininity on the Page: Women’s Travel Writing in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
If the female traveller contravenes the patriarchal ideology of separate spheres by quitting her home and venturing out into the world, the female travel writer, or at least, the woman who publishes a travel account, contravenes that ideology twice over. Not only does she travel, she then positions herself a second time in the public sphere, as an author; and a reluctance to take up the latter role is a further reason why there are so few published travelogues by women prior to 1800. Even in the nineteenth century, when female authorship generally had become more acceptable, it remained common for women travel writers to adopt an epistolary or diary format, and by this means to suggest that their observations were never originally intended for publication. Thus Harriet Beecher Stowe announces in the preface to Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1845) that ‘the following letters were written by Mrs Stowe for her own personal friends, particularly the members of her own family’ (Stowe 1845: 1.xi). This is highly disingenuous. The letters in Sunny Memories, each of which is conveniently the length of a book-chapter, have clearly been carefully crafted by Stowe, and reveal great expertise in the use of dialogue and other literary devices. Like many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women travel writers, however, Stowe maintains the pretence that these are essentially private communications made public, so as to forestall the criticisms liable to be levelled at women who trespassed too conspicuously on a supposedly masculine domain.
Disclaimers of this sort, and the use of forms such as the letter or diary, are of course also found in male-authored travelogues in this period. Yet they are a more common feature of women’s travel writing, and reflect the problems faced by women travel writers in patriarchal cultures, as they try to reconcile their travelling with highly restrictive norms of femininity. In the first wave of the feminist rediscovery of women’s travel writing, there was perhaps a desire to see all earlier women travellers as protofeminists who set out deliberately to flout convention, and who were accordingly unconcerned if they scandalised contemporary sensibilities. More recent scholarship has suggested, however, that this is too simplistic a view (see Mills 1991: 29; Foster and Mills 2002). Whilst women’s travel may always have represented an implicit challenge to patriarchal attitudes, most female travellers and travel writers historically have sought to negotiate the gender norms of their day, rather than confront them head on. Nor was every woman traveller and travel writer necessarily feminist, or proto-feminist, in their declared beliefs and political allegiances. Whilst some women travellers, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Flora Tristan, have espoused overtly feminist attitudes, others have set themselves squarely against contemporary movements for female emancipation and equality. Mary Kingsley and Gertrude Bell, for example, sought strenuously to disassociate themselves from the contemporary ‘New Woman’ movement, and did not support the campaign for women’s suffrage.
In the case of Kingsley and Bell, one senses almost an over-compensation, and a psychological need to balance the implicit transgressiveness of their remarkable travel achievements with an ostentatious display of conventionally ‘feminine’ attitudes. And for a great many women travel writers, there has certainly been a rhetorical need to balance the fact of their travelling with the adoption of an appropriately feminine persona on the page. Some sort of rapprochement in this regard was usually necessary, on the one hand, simply to get published in the first place and, on the other, to avoid hostile criticism from reviewers and commentators. To this end, accordingly, women writers were usually keen to stress the extent to which they conformed to contemporary codes of female propriety in the course of their travels. Hence the reluctance of many female travellers to abandon the often highly restrictive clothing prescribed for American and European women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hence also a recurrent need to explain how female ‘modesty’ was maintained even in the most unusual or irregular settings and situations. Notions of female modesty, equally, also often required women to downplay any dangers, and especially any threat of sexual attack, that they may have faced during their journeys.
This need to demonstrate femininity on the page influenced both the topics a woman travel writer might discuss, and the style and tone she could adopt in discussing them. As outlined earlier, some subject areas were strongly marked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as masculine domains. Sex was of course ‘a taboo subject for middle-class Western women’ (Foster and Mills 2002: 17), whilst issues relating to politics, economics and public affairs were generally regarded by reviewers and commentators as more properly the preserve of men rather than women. Discussing Fanny Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), for example, her son Anthony noted that whilst his mother had highlighted ‘with a woman’s keen eye’ what she perceived as the ‘social defects and absurdities’ of the American way of life, she had not felt it appropriate ‘to dilate on the nature and operation of those political arrangements which had produced the social absurdities which she saw’ (Trollope 1987: vol. 1, 2). This was a topic, Anthony suggested, ‘fitter for a man than for a woman’. Mindful of such gender demarcations, and the censure that might follow if they contravened them, many women travel writers either avoided these topics, or else attributed reflections on these themes to husbands and other male companions. Ann Radcliffe, for example, prefaced her 1796 account of a European tour with the disclaimer that ‘where the oeconomical and political conditions of countries are touched upon [ … ], the remarks are less her own than elsewhere’ (1796: v). The implication is that these parts of her narrative derive instead from her husband, with whom she undertook the tour.
Science was another subject area and discourse that women travel writers were well advised to approach with caution. What was frequently at issue here, it should be stressed, was not so much the thematic content of the female-authored travelogue, as its style, tone and register. For example, an amateur enthusiasm for plants, which might encompass the collecting and sketching of plant species together with some degree of technical botanical knowledge about those species, was a wholly acceptable pastime for female travellers (see Shteir 1999; George 2007). It was more problematic, however, for a woman to lay claim in print to a specialised, expert knowledge of contemporary botanical science, or to present herself as engaged in any form of rigorous scientific enquiry and debate. Yet there were certainly women travellers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who made significant contributions to the scientific debates of their day. For the most part, however, these women were careful, when fashioning their ‘on-page’ persona, to play down the extent of their expertise. Technical, scientific terminology is often used sparingly, whilst passages that address scientific themes in any detail are often hedged cautiously with disclaimers as to the author’s lack of competence in the field. In her Journal of a Short Residence in Chile (1824), for example, Maria Graham issues the following apology when describing the most interesting plant species she encountered in Chile:
I am sorry I know so little of botany, because I am really fond of plants. But I love to see their habits, and to know their countries and their uses; and it appears to me that the nomenclature of botany is contrived to keep people at a distance from any real acquaintance with one of the most beautiful classes of objects in nature. What have harsh hundred syllabled names to do with such lovely things as roses, jasmines, and violets?
(Hayward 2003: 35)
Graham thus positions herself as a hobbyist, as someone who simply relishes the beauty of plants rather than taking a rigorous scientific interest in them. Once again, however, this is a woman travel writer being disingenuous in the way she presents herself in print. An attentive reading of the passage in which this disclaimer appears makes it clear that Graham actually has a far more sophisticated and advanced knowledge of botany than she admits. In her descriptions of plants, for example, Graham uses those ‘harsh hundred syllabled names’, by which she means the binomial classificatory system developed by Linnaeus, on enough occasions to show that she is thoroughly conversant and comfortable with them: thus the plant known locally as ‘mayu’ is identified as belonging ‘to Linaeus’s natural order, Lomentacea’ (Hayward 2003: 35). Referenced in her footnotes, meanwhile, are texts such as James Smith’s Introduction to Physiological and Systematical Botany (1814), which as the title suggests was a fairly technical contemporary treatise on the topic. Further to this, Graham was also engaged, during her time in Chile and Brazil, in assiduously collecting, drying and sketching plant and seed specimens, although she only makes a few passing allusions to these activities in her published narratives. The specimens she accumulated were subsequently sent to leading figures in the botanical world such as Sir William Hooker, director of the Botanical Gardens at Glasgow University (and later director of Kew Gardens in London). Much like the male explorers of her day, then, Graham supplied vital information to some of the key centres of calculation driving contemporary scientific enquiry. This information would in due course be cited in specialist scientific texts such as Hooker’s Exotic Flora (1822–27) and Carl von Martius’s Flora Brasiliensis (1840), both of which pay tribute to Graham’s diligence and expertise as a plant collector (see Hagglund 2011).
There was thus a serious scientific dimension to Graham’s travelling in Latin America which is barely evident from the persona she fashions for herself in her published travelogue. Graham’s reticence in this regard, it should be noted, is symptomatic of a more general problem facing women travel writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: namely, how to establish any sort of narrative authority in their texts. Science was by no means the only subject area or discourse in which it was risky for a woman to adopt an authoritative persona, or to intervene too assertively in ongoing public debates. It was widely assumed that women were not equipped to make meaningful observations on a broad range of topics, this dismissive attitude being partly a consequence of the fact that it was seldom possible, prior to the twentieth century, for women to receive the academic and/or professional training that marked one out as a properly accredited expert in any given discipline. Simultaneously, for a woman travel writer to become too magisterial in her opinions, or too coldly logical, or indeed too strident and impassioned, was to risk censure from critics, reviewers and readers for being ‘unfeminine’. As a consequence, there is a marked tendency in women travel writers, even when they are discussing topics in which they clearly have considerable expertise, to advance observations and opinions cautiously, in a provisional, conjectural manner. By the same token, there has also been a strong tendency historically for women travellers to address topics, and to adopt modes of travel and travel writing, in which a personal, subjective response is prioritised over a more intellectual and ostensibly ‘objective’ attitude. This is one reason for the popularity of picturesque and so-called sentimental travel amongst women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since in both cases, what the journey and any subsequent account of that journey required from the traveller was not so much academic or factual knowledge, but rather an intensity of personal response. By this means, the female travel writer can claim for herself a sort of ‘subjective’ authority; at issue in her text, it seems, is not so much the accuracy or otherwise of her observations about the external world, but rather the strength and appropriateness of her own feelings.
It is for this reason that women travel writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often favour modes of travel writing which prioritise feeling over intellect, and subjectivism over objectivism. In the picturesque or sentimental travelogue, for example, the writing style is usually more emotive and impressionistic than in other types of travel writing where the principal agenda is to relay factual information accurately and efficiently. The narrative form may also be more disjointed and fragmentary, as in the case of Fanny Parks’s A Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque (1850), which jumps from one topic to another, without following any clear organising thread. It has sometimes been suggested that this emotive register and digressive, fragmentary tendency are the hallmarks of a distinctively feminine approach to travel writing, and indeed, to writing in general. Yet one should exercise caution before making such a generalising, and essentialising, assumption. As Shirley Foster and Sara Mills suggest, we need always to keep in mind that:
nineteenth-century critical opinion created a set of criteria for ‘appropriately’ feminine writing, which included emotional and moral directives about ‘feeling’ and ‘women’s sensibility’ as well as confining women’s writing within certain prescribed areas. Representations which might be considered typically female, then, may be the result of strategic policy – especially if the writers wanted to get published – rather than a specifically gendered orientation. ‘Womanly’ subject matter must not be used as proof of gender specificity nor must it be seen as solely biologically derived.
(2002: 11)
One must also remember that such ‘feminine’ tendencies and topics in travel writing are sometimes found in travelogues written by men. From Laurence Sterne and William Gilpin onwards, for example, there were many male travellers who adopted the sentimental and/or picturesque modes in travel writing, even though this brought with it the risk of being dismissed as ‘unmanly’ by reviewers.
One must keep these caveats in mind, therefore, before assuming that any particular subject matter or style is intrinsically or essentially feminine. That said, however, one can identify some general tendencies which are highly characteristic of women’s travel writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As many critics have remarked, for example, there is a greater tendency for women travellers to concern themselves with domestic details, and with the minutiae of everyday living arrangements such as food preparation, child care and the laundering of clothes (see Russell 1986; Romero 1992; Foster and Mills 2002: 95). This narrative focus is often closely bound up with a keen interest in the conditions of life for women in the cultures that they visit, an interest which can embrace topics ranging from the fashions adopted by foreign women through to the social roles they must perform, and their legal and political status. These interests may from one perspective be construed as compliance with the prevailing ideology of separate spheres, since they seemingly confirm the expectation that a woman’s special area of insight and expertise will be the domestic sphere. Yet they were also often an important means by which women could claim an authority unavailable to men. These were areas of foreign cultural life that men generally did not comment on, or even, in some cases, that they were prohibited from observing. This was especially the case with certain female-only practices and/or spaces, the most famous example here being perhaps the harem or ‘zenana’. These terms refer to the custom, amongst some Middle Eastern and South Asian elites, of reserving some areas of the household for women only. This was of course a practice that greatly fascinated Western travellers, becoming emblematic of so-called ‘Oriental’ culture and giving rise, amongst men especially, to some highly eroticised imaginings. Unlike their male counterparts, however, women travellers from Mary Wortley Montagu onwards were able to actually visit harems, and to report upon them. Their reports, unsurprisingly, generally puncture the lurid fantasies of Western male commentators, painting a much more mundane picture of life in this seemingly exotic setting (see Foster and Mills 2002: 14–18; and also Melman 1991; Lewis 1996; Grewal 1996).
Even working within the highly restrictive parameters prescribed for them, then, women travel writers might claim a degree of authority, and present themselves as making valid contributions to their culture’s knowledge of other cultures. That said, working within these parameters arguably trapped women in a double-bind, since in the eyes of many contemporary commentators, the areas of expertise credited to women were too inconsequential to count as real ‘knowledge’, or as genuinely useful contributions to ongoing debates. Sympathetic commentators, however, suggested that male and female travel accounts complemented each other, producing in combination a more complete picture of the world and its inhabitants. Some writers even suggested that women travellers offered a more perceptive and accurate account of other cultures than many men, by focusing on domestic details and the minutiae of everyday life. Harriet Martineau, for example, makes this claim in her travelogue Society in America (1837), when she insists that ‘the nursery, the boudoir, [and] the kitchen, are all excellent schools in which to learn the morals and manners of a people’ (1837: 1.xiv), whilst simultaneously pointing out that she has a more extensive knowledge of these domestic settings than any male traveller. Writing anonymously in the Quarterly Review in 1845, meanwhile, Elizabeth Rigby asserted that women possessed a
power of observation which, so long as it remains at home counting canvass stitched by the fireside, we are apt to consider no shrewder than our own, but which once removed from the familiar scene, and returned to us in the shape of letters or books, seldom fails to prove its superiority.
(Rigby 1845: 98–99)
Notice, however, Rigby’s use of the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’: it is symptomatic of the gendered assumptions of the time that Rigby had to write this vindication of women’s travel writing not only anonymously, but also posing as a man.
Some women travel writers, then, worked within the parameters prescribed for them by their culture, but turned this restriction into a source of authority and empowerment. Others, meanwhile, flouted the restrictions placed upon them, or else sought subtly to circumvent them. Maria Graham, for example, may have been cautious about displaying her proficiency in science, but she felt no such reticence about proffering her observations and analyses of political and economic affairs in both Chile and Brazil, two nations which had only recently won independence, from Spain and Portugal respectively. This earned her censure from some reviewers, with one insisting that she was ‘unqualified to write political disquisitions’ (quoted in Hayward 2003: xix, emphasis in the original). Elsewhere, meanwhile, Graham as we have seen provides a degree of scientific information to her readers whilst simultaneously surrounding that information with numerous apologies about her own scientific ignorance. At these moments, Graham’s travel writing arguably exhibits a ‘double-voiced’ aspect that is often found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel writing by women. On the one hand, the writer protests her ignorance of a given topic; on the other, she reveals that she does indeed have a highly sophisticated grasp of that topic, and provides useful information and insights in relation to it. By this means, the female travel writer puts a cordon sanitaire around her participation in ongoing cultural and intellectual debates, as expertise is simultaneously demonstrated and disclaimed. A similar rhetorical stratagem is at work in the ironising humour deployed by a writer like Mary Kingsley, in which a recurrent tendency to self-deprecation never entirely masks the fact that the writer is clearly engaged not only in serious scientific research, but also in a decidedly dangerous and arduous mode of travel. And when women travel writers attribute opinions on ‘masculine’ topics to their male companions, as we have seen Ann Radcliffe doing, their protestations in this regard are not necessarily to be taken at face-value: again, this is sometimes another device by which the women writer could circumvent the gendered cultural prescriptions of her day.
One should accordingly not underestimate the extent to which travel and travel writing constituted an important route to self-empowerment and cultural authority for women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, notwithstanding all the constraints they laboured under both when travelling and when writing. Travel certainly enabled some women to escape the dreary and restrictive responsibilities associated with being, in Victorian parlance, the ‘Angel in the House’. For those women who produced accounts of their travels, meanwhile, the travelogue form enabled a further degree of self-fashioning, as the writer crafted and presented to the reading public her own image of herself. Few women travel writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries presented themselves to the reading public as heroic figures engaged in some sort of epic quest, yet the female-authored travelogue might still affirm and demonstrate remarkable instances of female agency and accomplishment. Maria Graham is again a case in point. It should be noted that she had arrived in Chile in 1822 a recently widowed woman, her husband having died at sea during the voyage to Valparaiso. It was assumed she would want to return immediately to Britain, but Graham had other ideas, staying in the country for ten months whilst she gathered the information that would subsequently form the basis of her published travelogue. This travelogue has for the most part a highly objectivist tenor, being principally concerned to communicate useful information about Chilean society: there are comparatively few passages of introspection or self-description. Yet there are enough of the latter passages to ensure that the reader always keeps in mind that Graham is a widow, and to some degree surviving on her own in a foreign country.
Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile becomes in this way implicitly a record of female independence and literary professionalism. There is moreover one climactic episode in which the more heroic self-fashioning implicit in Graham’s narrative becomes briefly, and tantalisingly, explicit. The last pages of her account describe a visit to the island of Juan Fernandez, famous for being the place where Alexander Selkirk had survived alone as a castaway, inspiring Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Signifying self-sufficiency and survival against all odds, Selkirk and Crusoe are figures often invoked in male accounts of heroic travel. Women travel writers, however, were usually more cautious about making such grand comparisons, and Graham is no exception in this regard. Scrambling alone across the mountainous terrain of Juan Fernandez, she describes how she:
reached a lonely spot, where no trace of man could be seen, and whence I seemed to have no communication with any living thing. I had been some hours in this magnificent wilderness; and though at first I might begin with exultation to cry–
I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute,
Yet I very soon felt that utter loneliness is as disagreeable as unnatural; and Cowper’s exquisite lines again served me–
Oh solitude, where are thy charms
That sages have seen in thy face?
Better dwell in the midst of alarms,
Than reign in this horrible place.
And I repeated over and over the whole of the poem, till I saw two of my companions of the morning coming down the hill, when I hurried to meet them, as if I had been really ‘out of humanity’s reach’.
(Hayward 2003: 183–84)
Here Graham cites the poet William Cowper’s famous lines about being ‘monarch of all I survey’ only to reject them, valuing company and community over solitude and self-sufficiency. One might read this apparent renunciation of a heroic, Crusoe-esque self-image as a woman’s deliberate rejection of a hubristic, masculine stereotype; alternatively, one might suggest that it is a rejection required of Graham by the gender norms of her day, for all the reasons outlined earlier. Either way, however, it is important to note that even if the Selkirk/Crusoe comparison is ultimately rejected, it is nevertheless also invoked, and briefly dangled in front of the reader as a heroic self-image this female writer might claim. Here again, we detect the ‘double-voiced’ quality which seems to characterise so much of the travel writing produced by women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a sense that even as Graham works within the prescriptive parameters imposed by her culture, so she simultaneously circumvents and subverts those prescriptions.
Women Travellers and Colonialism
As discussed in Chapter 6, much European and American travel writing in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was simultaneously enabled by, and worked to enable, colonialist structures of knowledge and power. A key area of debate in the recent feminist recovery of women’s travel writing has accordingly been the relationship of the female traveller, and the female-authored travelogue, to this larger imperial context. And if there was a strong desire in much of the early scholarship on women’s travel writing to regard all women travellers as proto-feminists, so equally was there often an assumption that all women travellers must have opposed empire and its injustices, and that their accounts accordingly constitute a form of counter-discourse which contests the colonial discourse of their day (see, for example, Birkett 1989; Mills 1991). Women travellers, it was pointed out, necessarily stood in an ambiguous relation to the colonial or expansionist projects pursued by their nations, being simultaneously ‘colonized by gender, but colonizers by race’ (Ghose 1998: 5). The familiarity with oppression bred by the former predicament, it was assumed, created an affinity with subaltern peoples; and this affinity, even when it did not manifest itself in overt critiques of colonialism, at least generated a greater openness towards other cultures, and a greater sympathy with the plight of indigenous populations. Thus for Sara Mills, women’s travel narratives are frequently characterised by a greater degree of ‘interaction with members of other nations’, and also by forms of interaction and description whereby the people encountered come to seem ‘not … representatives of the race, as in male-authored accounts, but … individuals’ (1991: 99).
More recent scholarship, however, has sought to emphasise that the woman traveller’s relationship with contemporary structures of power was more complex, and included a broader spectrum of perspectives, than early ‘feminist wishful thinking’ (Korte 2000: 125) would suggest (see, inter alia, Suleri 1991; Morgan 1996; Blunt 1994; Foster and Mills 2002). This spectrum includes many women travellers who endorsed wholeheartedly the imperial order that enabled their travelling, and many who used highly racist or ethnocentric strategies of ‘othering’ in their depiction of other cultures, along the lines discussed in Chapter 6. Thus Janet Schaw, in a journal of a voyage to the Caribbean undertaken in the 1770s, describes the slaves in Antigua as ‘brutes’ (Bohls and Duncan 2005: 325) and their children as ‘monkeys’ (320). She goes on to justify the whippings administered by slave-drivers as a ‘merely corporeal’ punishment which ‘inflicts no pain on [the slave’s] mind’. ‘[Their] natures’, Schaw claims, ‘seem made to bear it, and [their] sufferings are not attended with shame or pain beyond the present moment’ (325). Schaw’s journal was unpublished in her lifetime, yet there were women travellers who adopted similar ideas and imagery in published travelogues, thereby both evincing and contributing to the racist and ethnocentric assumptions of their age. And in this way the female-authored travel account just as much as the male-authored account has sometimes constituted a form of colonial discourse.
Women travel writers could assist the colonialist enterprise in other ways as well. They could not, of course, be explorers or leaders of military expeditions, and so contribute directly to European and US expansionism; these roles were in this period a male preserve, although as discussed earlier, there were women who travelled in a spirit akin to exploration, making significant contributions to the accumulation of Western knowledge. Yet the picturesque and sentimental travel accounts typically produced by women in this period also served an important function in colonial discourse. As Sara Suleri has argued, the depiction of picturesque scenery in both writing and visual art often served an ideological function, insofar as it typically worked to render an alien landscape and its potentially unruly inhabitants more familiar and welcoming (see Suleri 1991: 75–110). As Suleri puts it, ‘a dynamic cultural confrontation’ was thus transfixed ‘into a still life’ (1991: 76) which elided any sense of discord or threat. The aesthetic pleasure this afforded, she suggests, worked to reassure colonial readers and spectators of their safety in a subjugated landscape. Moreover, by suppressing from the view any hint of native discontent or resentment, the picturesque scene also implicitly reassured audiences as to the benevolence and moral legitimacy of the colonial enterprise.
Many women travel writers in the imperial era take up a more conspicuously humanitarian position than their male counterparts, evincing in their travelogues a greater concern with the plight of native peoples, and especially with the plight of native women. Yet these expressions of sympathy with the ‘native’ are not always to be construed as opposition to empire. A greater capacity for feeling, and a greater concern with moral standards, was a key part of an appropriately ‘feminine’ sensibility in this period, and the taking up of humanitarian causes was accordingly one of the few means by which women might acquire a degree of political agency and moral authority. It has been suggested, however, that in claiming to speak for colonial subjects, or in the American context, for black slaves, many middle-class, white women travellers were actually engaged in another, more subtle form of appropriation and exploitation, whereby the suffering of others became a route to self-empowerment (see Morgan 1996: 256). Furthermore, the expressions of sympathy made by women travellers, and the humanitarian campaigns that they launched, were most commonly directed towards the victims of indigenous, ‘native’ practices, such as suttee, polygamy and concubinage. Here female compassion towards the Other is arguably of a piece with what Vron Ware describes as ‘the dominant ideology of imperialism: that it is only through contact with Western civilization that the “natives” had any chance of being delivered from their own tyrannical customs’ (Ware 1992: 147). When women travellers did target injustice and suffering produced specifically by the colonial order, meanwhile, the agenda underpinning these complaints was in many cases not so much the overturning or undermining of that order, as simply an amelioration of its more pernicious consequences.
We should not assume, then, that women travellers from the age of empire will automatically or ‘naturally’ exhibit opposition to colonial power, nor that they will necessarily demonstrate a greater openness and sympathy towards other cultures. That said, the colonial contact zone, and the cross-cultural encounters it inevitably involves, was certainly inflected differently for Western women than for men, by virtue of their subordinate status in their home culture. For example, exposure to other cultures might alert the woman traveller to rights and liberties she lacked at home. Thus Mary Wortley Montagu confuted conventional Orientalist depictions of Turkish women as virtual slaves, pointing out that they had the right to own property, unlike British women at that date. She also suggested that the wearing of veils, so often seen in the West as a symbol of female repression, in fact gave Turkish women great freedom, since it ensured they could meet their lovers without being recognised. Other women travellers, meanwhile, were struck by the unsettling comparisons that could be made between their own social status and the conditions of life for women in supposedly more backward, repressive cultures. Such comparisons, like the contrasts identified by Montagu, often worked to complicate and problematise imperialist assumptions about the moral superiority of the traveller’s culture. In some cases, accordingly, women travellers were indeed provoked to explicit critiques of the imperial project and/or their own culture’s norms. More commonly, however, the situation of being simultaneously ‘colonized by gender but colonizers by race’ (Ghose 1998: 5) seems to have produced in women an unconscious unease, and a psychological anxiety that finds expression in various forms of discursive uncertainty and contradiction in the female-authored travelogue (see Mills 1991; Morgan 1996). Thus Sara Suleri detects in the superficially serene, picturesque depictions of India offered by many women travellers ‘patterns of a hysteria all too secretively aware of the dangers in an unrelenting assumption of cultural and psychic safety’ (Suleri 1991: 76). And insofar as women’s travel writing in the imperial era often manifests such moments of textual and narratorial instability, which in turn ask awkward questions of the imperial project, it often possesses implicitly, if not explicitly, an oppositional aspect, and so constitutes a form of counter-discourse.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, women have continued to make a significant contribution to the travel writing genre, just as they have done since at least the early nineteenth century. Unlike earlier eras, however, there are today few, if any, overt restrictions on the topics that women address in their travelogues, or on the literary styles and narratorial personae that they adopt. As educational and professional opportunities have become more available to women, in the West at least, so women have increasingly been able to travel, and to publish, in the sort of authoritative roles that were once the preserve of men: as scientists and anthropologists, as news reporters, political commentators and economic analysts. Thus Joan Didion’s Salvador (1983) deals explicitly with that nation’s political situation, whilst Christina Dodwell’s Travels with Fortune: an African Adventure (1979) and Travels in Papua New Guinea (1982) provide a blend of adventure and ethnographic discovery that is very much in the tradition of the nineteenth-century male explorer. Writers such as Irma Kurtz and Chelsea Cain, meanwhile, have offered feminised versions of the picaresque ‘road trip’ narratives more usually associated with male writers such as Jack Kerouac (see Smith 2001; Paes de Barros 2004). The traditional taboo on women travellers writing about sexual matters has also been lifted, as evidenced in travelogues such as Dea Birkett’s Serpent in Paradise (1997) and Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s Journeys to the Underworld (1991); in this regard, moreover, it should be noted that many gay women as well as gay men have been able to cast off the heteronormative constraints imposed on earlier travel writers, to produce collections such as Gillian Kendall’s Something to Declare: Good Lesbian Travel Writing (2009).
It would be naïve to assume, however, that women travel writers today face no constraints, and that there are no gender expectations which they have to negotiate, either as they travel or as they write. The fear of violence, and especially of sexual violence, arguably remains a more pressing concern for female than for male travellers; as Mary Morris writes, ‘the fear of rape [ … ], whether crossing the Sahara or just crossing a city street at night, most dramatically affects the ways women move through the world’ (2007: 9). The cultures that they visit, equally, will sometimes require different conduct and costume from women. The reception they receive back home may also be significantly different from that received by men. Women mountain climbers who lose their lives on dangerous climbs, for example, are much more likely than their male counterparts to be censured for recklessness by the popular press, especially if they are mothers. Robyn Davidson, meanwhile, found that a thousand-mile camel trek through the Australian outback had transformed her, in the eyes of the media, into ‘the camel lady’, a term she bitterly resented:
[A] myth was being created where I would appear different, exceptional … Had I been a man, I’d be lucky to get a mention in the Wiluna Times, let alone international press coverage. Neither could I imagine them coining the phrase ‘camel gentlemen’. ‘Camel lady’ had that nice patronizing belittling ring to it. Labelling, pigeonholing – what a splendid trick it is.
(1998: 237)
Thus women who undertake major feats of travel are still often depicted, in the Western media and in popular culture, in terms of their exceptionalism and eccentricity, notwithstanding the long tradition of women travellers and travel writers that has been traced in this chapter. The result of these stereotypical media images, Davidson suggests, is that many women come to believe they are not capable of such journeys; taught from an early age to ‘build fences against possibility, daring’, they remain ‘imprisoned inside … notions of self-worthlessness’ (1998: 237).
In this way, women still find themselves confronted with cultural expectations and stereotypes which assume some types of travel and travel writing, and arguably the very notion of travel per se, to be more commonly a masculine rather than a feminine activity. Accordingly, a recurrent theme in much recent women’s travel writing has been the author’s negotiation of this weight of expectation, and her deliberate intrusion into traditions, modes of travel, and geographical and institutional spaces still strongly marked as male. Notable examples include Dea Birkett’s Jella: From Lagos to Liverpool – A Woman at Sea in a Man’s World (1992), which recounts Birkett’s time as the only female member of the crew of an ocean-going cargo vessel, and Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica (1996). The latter offers a female perspective on the long tradition of polar exploration associated with figures like R.F. Scott, Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton. As Wheeler notes, this has historically been a hypermasculine tradition which regarded the Antarctic as ‘a testing ground for men with frozen beards to see how dead they could get’ (1996: 1). And this masculinist legacy lives on in the overwhelmingly male scientific communities that Wheeler encounters on the continent, giving rise to a travelogue that combines penetrating social commentary with a lyrical evocation of the beauty of the Antarctic landscape.
Travellers such as Birkett and Wheeler set out deliberately to contest the gendered expectations that still surround many aspects of travel and travel writing. Many other women travellers, meanwhile, find themselves required to reflect on those expectations, and on their own position specifically as female travellers, by virtue of the reception they receive at home and abroad. Recent women’s travel writing can thus to some extent be distinguished from the travel writing produced by men by the writer’s greater awareness of, and sensitivity to, gender issues. Beyond this, however, it is perhaps more difficult than it has ever been to identify any clear, demonstrable differences between the travel writing produced by men and that produced by women. The argument that gender is the most significant determinant of an individual’s travel and travel writing is also undermined by the career of Jan Morris, whom Susan Bassnett regards as ‘probably the greatest woman travel writer of the twentieth century’ (Bassnett 2002, 238). Yet Morris began her travel writing career as a man, James Morris, before undergoing a sex-change operation in 1972. As Bassnett notes, one can detect no changes in Morris’s travel writing after her gender realignment, ‘other than occasional references to clothing’ (238). It should be acknowledged that Morris writes a distinctly impersonal mode of travel writing, in which the focus is overwhelmingly on the place being visited rather than the narratorial self. That said, however, Morris’s narrative voice, and his/her perspective on the world, seems to be shaped most profoundly not by gender but by class and nationality, working in tandem with the author’s historical moment. Upper middle class, Anglo-Welsh, and born in the 1920s, Morris has watched British imperial power recede in the aftermath of the Second World War; and whilst she is not uncritical of the British Empire, the most recurrent strain in her writing is arguably an elegiac lament for the passing of what she terms the ‘pax Britannica’, a period in which Britain emulated Rome by bringing peace and stability to much of the world.
The example of Jan Morris also confirms Holland and Huggan’s observation that recent ‘women’s travel writing is not insulated from the criticisms levelled at its male counterpart’, and that ‘more specifically, it is not immune from imperialist and ethnocentric nostalgia’ (1998: 20). As in the colonial era, women travel writers today adopt a broad spectrum of perspectives on other cultures. Female-authored travel accounts just as much as male-authored accounts may work, either by design or inadvertently, to foster neo-colonial attitudes in their readers. Yet by the same token many women travel writers have also helped to provide ‘complex concrete images’ of other cultures, and of ‘the relationships of knowledge and power’ that connect communities (Clifford 1983: 119); and as they do so, they continue like their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precursors to use travel writing as a medium in which to affirm some remarkable instances of female agency and authority.