Travel Writing and Gender - Susan Bassnett

    Travel Writing and Gender - Susan Bassnett

[alert-success] Travel Writing and Gender

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[alert-primary] Detailed Summary [/alert-primary]

    Adventure in travel has traditionally been written by men, who move more freely in the public sphere. European sagas of knightly questing and seafaring exploration often feature men as protagonists, with women often being the objects of desire or destination points. The idea of man as a heroic risk-taking traveler is central to the narratives of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, there are other types of narratives, some produced by women, such as ethnography and social commentary. In the twentieth century, both male and female travelers have written self-reflexive texts that defy easy categorization as autobiography, memoir, or travel account. British travel writing has a tendency to self-deprecation and irony, with writers like Henry Fielding and Jane Austen as antecedents. Contemporary writers like Redmond O'Hanlon and Eric Newby subvert or satirise the image of the explorer-hero, turning themselves into anti-heroes.

Rediscovering Women Travellers

 The feminist revival of the early 1970s aimed to rediscover what was perceived as male-authored history, particularly an interest in women travelers. By the 1970s, some nineteenth-century women's travel accounts had reached a substantial reading public, and twentieth-century travellers such as Rosita Forbes, Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell, and Rebecca West had a strong following. However, by the 1970s, their work was out of print and respect for their achievements had declined. In Paul Fussell's study of travel writing, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980), women are non-existent.

    The first stages of the revival were to make available works that had all but disappeared and to remind readers of the number of women travelers who had written about their journeys. The UK feminist publishing house, Virago, reprinted classic travel books by women such as Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsley, while a number of anthologies and studies of Victorian women travellers began to appear. Some of these studies reflect a particular way of looking at women travellers, hinting that they are slightly eccentric and introduce a comic note that can easily be interpreted as mocking.

    Women travellers are therefore categorised as doubly different: they differ from other, more orthodox, socially conformist women, and from male travellers who use the journey as a means of discovering more about their own masculinity. The underlying impression gained from these volumes is that the woman traveller was somehow in flight from something, seeking to escape from the constraints of her family or society. Jane Robinson published Wayward Women in 1990, which provides useful bibliographical information and short, potted biographies of women travellers. She also edited an anthology of extracts from travel writing by women, Unsuitable for Ladies, where she endeavours to distinguish how women wrote as opposed to their male counterparts by stressing differences of style and epistemology.

    Sara Mills' pioneering study of women's travel writing and colonialism, Discourses of Difference, similarly notes the stress that women lay on the personal and relationships in general. Both emphasize the wealth of detail in women's travel accounts, along with a tendency to write about relationships, and both contrast this with the more public discourse of male travellers.

    These questions continue to preoccupy feminist scholars and have been made more complex by postcolonial perspectives, which raise issues about the role and status of white women travellers in the age of imperialism. A text like May French-Sheldon's Sultan to Sultan. Adventures Among the Masai and Other Tribes of East Africa (1892) demonstrates the contradictions inherent in some of the books produced by nineteenth-century travellers, both male and female. On the one hand, they moved secure in the knowledge of their own superiority, quick to patronize or mock, yet on the other hand, they were ready to bear witness to what they saw as exploitation and cruelty by fellow Europeans and North Americans.

    It is debatable whether this tendency is more marked in women's travel writing than in texts by men. On balance, the nineteenth-century travel texts by men tend towards a greater scientificity, while much of the women's writing reflects an interest in philanthropic activities, characteristic of early feminism. The extent to which women campaigned actively against twin murder reflects the kind of activism that motivated many European and US female reformers to denounce slavery, exploitative working conditions for women, and children, and human rights abuses generally. 

Diversity of Women's travel Accounts

    Cheryl McEwan's study of Victorian women travellers in East Africa explores the diversity of women travelers and their writing styles. She argues that women's travel writing is more complex than previously suggested and that it is essential to recognize diversity. McEwan highlights that not all women travelers were middle-class or shared the same ideological standpoint, but those who travelled under the British Empire were unconsciously colluding with the colonial enterprise.

    Feminist thinking has evolved over the past thirty years, from conceptualizing women as a single category to acknowledging patterns of diversity reflecting broader social and cultural differences. One consistent line through discussions of women travellers is the notion that they were somehow exceptional, which has been a classic way of marginalizing women's achievements. However, the problem lies in setting a benchmark against which women can be measured. Writers like French-Sheldon exploited the novelty value of the idea of a woman traveller, while others, like Mary Kingsley, were more reticent. Isabella Bird, for example, was concerned about public opinion and credibility with the male-only Royal Geographic Society. 

Documenting the Everyday

    Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a woman traveller, was met with contempt when she traveled to Constantinople in 1716 to join her husband, who had been appointed ambassador to Turkey. Her Letters, written after her return to England and published after her death in 1762, reveal the lively, forthright voice of a woman who described herself as 'a traveller' and who experimented with smallpox vaccination by allowing her children to be immunised in Turkey. However, her Letters challenge the tendency of many European travelers to exoticise the Orient. George Sandys's 1652 account of his travels in the Turkish Empire and Monsieur de Thevenot's Relation d'un voyage fait au Levant (1665) are typical of texts that describe the laziness of oriental women and their supposedly 'natural' tendency to lasciviousness. Montagu gives a very different account of Turkish women in the bath-house and wittily criticizes the stupidity of those writers whose erotic fantasies have led them to distort the more domesticated reality that she finds operating in a community of women. A century later, Lucie Duff Gordon's Letters from Egypt (1865) contested the fantasising of her male contemporaries. Both these aristocratic women travellers wrote about the experiences of the women they encountered, refuting the growing tendency towards eroticisation of the unfamiliar that characterises so many texts by male travelers.

    Some works by women travellers provide serious, detailed social documentation. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake's Letters from the Shores of the Baltic, published in 1842, is another example of the epistolary form popular among women writers especially. Eastlake uses the format of twenty-five letters to give an account of a journey to visit her sister, married to a local aristocrat and living in Reval, now known as Tallinn in Estonia. She provides detailed descriptions of diet, childcare, the education of girls in imperial Russia, and even has a chapter about a smuggling expedition. Although there is a strong authorial presence in this text, there is no desire to reinvent herself as someone else and certainly no desire to see travel as a means of escape from the reality of home.

Searching for a Role

    The history of travel writing is closely connected to the history of mapping and surveying, as well as the natural world. As Europe acquired colonies, maps establishing the precise boundaries between disputed claims became vital. The early history of colonialism was one where new territories were metaphorised as female, virgin lands waiting to be penetrated, ploughed, and husbanded by male explorers. The overt sexualisation of the language of territorial expansion quickly became commonplace, leading to women travelers having to write about their experiences from within a tradition that denied them a role.

    Women did travel in various roles, such as wives, sisters, daughters of missionaries, diplomats, scientists, naturalists, explorers, individuals in search of the unexpected, or leisure or instruction. They chose to write about their experiences in full knowledge of the absence of a tradition into which they could insert themselves with any degree of comfort or familiarity. This breaking-through can be discerned in the clarity of some of the voices that speak from women's texts and the strong emphasis on the personal.

    The discursive presence of women travellers in their texts raises questions about their intellectual insecurity caused by their marginalization in the newly developing field of anthropology. The excessive use of footnotes by writers such as Burton raises the issue of the function of the footnote, particularly in Orientalist texts, where they use footnotes for comments on sexual practices often bordering on the pornographic in their detail.

    The text explores the writings of women travelers in the nineteenth century, focusing on the differences between men and women. Male writers often had publication in mind from the outset, reflecting the social differences between men and women. Some pieces of writing were written as monographs, while others were written in the form of letters, diaries, or sketches and assembled into book form. Isabella Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains is composed of seventeen letters to her sister, prefaced by a note that points out that the letters "as their style indicates, were written without the remotest idea of publication."

    The diaries of Margaret Fountaine, published in 1980, are another example of a text written for private purposes but then made public. Fountaine traveled the world in pursuit of her hobby, butterfly-collecting, keeping a diary from the age of sixteen that recorded not only her travels but also her love affairs. Her diaries were locked in a trunk with a note forbidding anyone to read them until 15 April 1978, exactly 100 years from her first entry.

    Isabella Bird's books show the gradual process whereby a writer moved from amateur to professional writer status. By the time she wrote her accounts of journeys to China, Japan, and Kurdistan, she had a definite reading public in mind. She became the first woman to address a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in 1892 and was elected to a fellowship shortly afterwards. Her reputation as a serious traveller was one that she guarded jealously, furiously refuting suggestions that she might have dressed improperly in mannish clothing.

    Mrs Alec-Tweedie (Ethel Brilliana) is another kind of woman travel writer who wrote for the growing tourist public at the turn of the nineteenth century, providing chatty accounts of journeys all over the world. One of her most interesting books is her account of a journey across Russia, Siberia, and China, undertaken in the early 1920s when the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917 was at its height. She wrote a polemic against Bolshevism, combining descriptions of squalid hotels, inadequate public transport, uneatable food, and desperate poverty with rants about the hellishness of life in Russia and Siberia.
    The text also provides insight into another problematic area of debate about women's travel writing: the relationship between narratives of travel and some of the women travellers' search for identity.

Inventing an Identity

    Many studies of women travelers focus on the difference between their lives at home and life on the road. Women travellers are often presented as breaking free from the constraints of contemporary society, realizing their potential once outside the boundaries of a restrictive social order. This reading proposes that women who chafed at the constraints of domesticity could find escape through travel.

    Isabella Bird, Mary Kingsley, Lady Hester Stanhope, and others have all experienced hardships during their travels, often redefining themselves and becoming someone who did not exist at home. Sara Mills questions this interpretation and questions how feminists read women's travel writing. She points out that some of these women may be seen as 'proto-feminists' or precursors, and that the texts can be read to provide examples of strong role models. However, she warns against rationalized readings in which assumptions are made that the texts are simply autobiographical.

    Many of the works by women travellers are self-conscious fictions, with the persona emerging from the pages being as much a character as a woman in a novel. Isabella Bird, for example, stresses the hardships she endures during her travels, reinforcing the difference between Isabella the semi-invalid at home and Miss Bird the intrepid explorer who is able to endure hardships that other women cannot.

    Isabella Bird's accounts of uncomfortable, dangerous situations run throughout her writings, with a tone of slightly ironic boastfulness established in her American book. She recounts how, in the company of her admirer, Rocky Mountain Jim, she narrowly missed death on a mountain path overhanging a precipice, transforming herself into a heroine capable of extraordinary physical feats.

    Despite her eventual recognition by the Royal Geographical Society, Bird's writings show how carefully she invented a new persona for herself. Many travel writers, men and women, have reinvented themselves in similar ways, always claiming to be writing in a spirit of 'authenticity' yet fictionalising their experiences by writing themselves as a character into the account of their travels.

Fictionlising Process

    In the twentieth century, there has been a shift in the construction of travel narratives, with the increasing use of dialogue in travel writing closing the gap between travel account and fiction. The protagonist engages in conversations that introduce a range of other characters into the narrative, and the reader is expected to believe that such conversations are recorded rather than invented. Rosita Forbes, a highly successful but now forgotten travel writer, offers a clear example of this tension between claims to offer an objective account of her travels and relentless self-dramatization.

    Forbes rechristened herself 'Rosita', abandoning her given name, the more banal 'Joan'. Her books and articles were extremely popular during the inter-war years, and she produced several colorfully titled accounts of her journeys. She established herself as a travel writer with The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara (1921), an account of a journey through the Libyan desert to the forbidden city of Kufara. Forbes struck a chord with readers increasingly fascinated with images of the desert as a place of mystery, sensuality, and freedom.

    As the vogue for desert books waned, Forbes turned her attention to another popular myth, that of the glamorous gypsy, publishing the first volume of her autobiography, Gypsy in the Sun, in 1944. She cultivated her gypsy image by changing her name to the more exotic Rosita and devising a multi-cultural family history, claiming to be related to Royalist aristocrats and Peruvian dancers.

    Forbes's image is marked in contrast to that of her contemporaries, Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, who were fascinated with the Arab world. Gertrude Bell was the first woman to obtain a first-class degree in history from Oxford in 1888 and worked as an archaeologist, learning both Arabic and Persian. By the time of her death in 1926, she had acquired a reputation as a serious figure in Middle Eastern politics.

    Freya Stark was a far more prolific writer than Gertrude Bell, and her books such as The Southern Gates of Arabia: A Journey in the Hadhramat (1934), Letters from Syria (1942), and Riding to the Tigris (1959) reflect a wealth of scholarly knowledge, combined with a keen eye for detail, a great deal of empathy, and an ability to write beautiful, often lyrical descriptive prose.  

Journey to self-awarness

    Rosita Forbes, a renowned travel writer, won awards for her work and was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society. She is a different kind of writer from her contemporary, Swiss Ella Maillart, whose books reflect both physical strength and an absence of sentimentality. Maillart produced a series of books, from an account of her travels in Russian Turkestan in 1934 to the much more spiritual The Land of the Sherpas (1955). Her best-known work is Forbidden Journey: From Peking to Kashmir (1937), an account of her journey through the wastes of Chinese Turkestan with the English traveller, Peter Fleming.

    Women's travel writing in the late twentieth century tends to focus more on the relationship between the individual and the societies through which she travels. Writers such as Dervla Murphy, Gertrude Bell, and Freya Stark have written about ecological questions, world poverty, and the future of the planet. Sara Wheeler's Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica (1997) represents another strand of women's travel writing that has grown in importance in the twentieth century: the journey that leads to greater self-awareness and takes the reader simultaneously on that journey.

    Writers like Isabella Bird, Rosita Forbes, and Fanny Bullock have written epic works such as Algerian Memories: A Bicycle Tour over the Atlas to the Sahara (1895) and Through Town and Jungle: Fourteen Thousand Miles A-Wheel Among the Temples and People of the Indian Plain (1904). However, there is very little sense of them growing and developing over the years. The works of Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, on the other hand, reflect personal, social, and political changes, so that the journeys they recount are both inner and outer journeys, towards greater self-awareness and greater knowledge gained through experience.

    Sara Wheeler's book goes a stage further, recounting a journey not only in terms of time and place but also in terms of gender relations. She charts the months she spent as a writer in resistance on different bases in Antarctica, moving between bases staffed by scientists (mostly male) from different countries. In her account, Antarctica, with its history as the site on which men tested their endurance skills to the limit, offers a particular challenge to a woman. With great skill and elegance, Wheeler looks at how different groups stationed on Antarctica reflect the social attitudes of men towards women in different cultures today.

    Wheeler's book balances social comment with lyrical description, combined with an awareness of the history of expeditions to the places through which she travels. It is a similar power to that found in probably the greatest woman travel writer of the twentieth century, Jan Morris. Morris does not use the journey as a pretext for reinventing herself or for writing autobiography. She acknowledges that Venice has altered as the world has changed and questions what role the city will have in the future.

    Morris's writing challenges the idea of binary oppositions – between home and other, present and past, masculine and feminine. She focuses on the spirit, the feel of a place, and the relationship between the travel writer as an individual and the space in which she moves. 

Conclusion

    In the nineteenth century, male travel writers produced accounts that sexualized various regions of the globe, contrasting masculine northern regions with the softer, eroticized, feminine Orient. However, this distinction is less apparent in women travel writers who often asserted femininity through details of clothing, domestic life, or romantic episodes. The ambiguous attitudes and complex self-representation in the works of Isabella Bird, May French-Sheldon, and Mrs. Alec-Tweedie mirror the difficulties for women in maneuvering between public and private spheres in the age of empire.

    Travel writing is always a product of a particular time and culture. Women travelers of the eighteenth century were considered exceptional, reflecting social attitudes towards women's mobility and the need for them to reinvent themselves in a hierarchical society of unequal opportunity. The restlessness of women like Ella Maillart and Gertrude Bell in the more violent decades of the twentieth century mirrors the struggle of modernist women trying to find a way of realizing themselves in a changing world.

    The sheer diversity of women's travel writing resists simple categorization. Patterns can be traced, with epistolary travel accounts giving way to books targeted at specific readerships and lines blurred between autobiographical, anecdotal, and ethnographic. The search for self-expression and the reformulation of identity are common elements in the work of many travelers, but processes of fictionalisation are also common in the work of many male travel writers.

    As travel writing has increased in popularity, distinctive sub-genres have emerged, such as all-action, heroic figures, ironic texts, scholarly detail, superficial anecdotes, casual conversations, spiritual or mystical experiences, and self-questioning and lyricizing works. Sara Wheeler's books and Dervla Murphy's are rooted in everyday experience and offer down-to-earth portraits of how women deal with physical hardship and social conscience.

    Travel writers today are producing texts for an age characterised by increasing interest in concepts of hybridity, where theories of race and ethnicity are starting to crumble under the pressure of millions in movement around the world. The role of women in adjusting perspectives is immense, reflecting the demise of a dominant culture.