Werbanowska 1

Marta Werbanowska
Dr. Emily Kugler
ENGG-206
8 February 2017

Nineteenth Century Womens Travel Writing in England A Response

The theoretical and critical essays on womens travel writing in Britain included in the
Cambridge Companion volumes provide a kind of taxonomy of the body of literature in
question, providing an overview and a typology of modes and genres of womens travel writing.
However, while these pieces present the reader with genres, styles and types of womens travel
writing of the nineteenth centuries, as well as with some of the strategies their authors used to
navigate their gender in the predominantly male world of travelers and writers, all three seem to
be concerned with a relatively exclusive definition of a British woman, which does not
accommodate for non-white subjects of the British empire born outside of Europe.
This absence, in turn, complicates the basic typological distinction between the two
modes of author self-presentation present in womens travel writing. According to Elizabeth A.
Fay, women travel writers of that time could be roughly divided into those who strove to
conventionalize their travel literature and those who promoted self-fashioned
unconventionality (78); Tamara S. Wagner further specifies this two tendencies in authors auto-
creation by defining them as an image of preserved femininity and the figure of the eccentric
female explorer (175). This binary distinction, although it does allow some room for what
Harriet Guest refers to the writers fluctuating identity (208), seems to be caught within the
spectrum of performances of femininity that had been socially prescribed for white, properly
British (i.e. born in the British Isles) women. None of the three essays mention travel narratives
by authors such as the Jamaican-born, mixed-race Mary Seacole, even though her Wonderful
Adventures were available in the British literary market at the time. Seacoles self-fashioning
does not neatly fit into any of the two major categories identified by Fay and Wagner,
presumably because, as a Black woman, she was not allowed to perform femininity in the same
way and had to negotiate her gender differently in order to gain social acceptability for both
herself and her narrative.
This omission of race from the discussion of nineteenth century womens travel writing
in Britain constitutes an academic blind spot of all three essays. The inclusion of authors such as
Seacole would necessitate Fay, Wagner, and Guest to complicate their typology of femininity as
performed by women travel writers by introducing modes of self-fashioning available to and
acceptable for non-white women. Such complication would allow for a much richer analysis of
the understanding, performance, and reception not only of womanhood, but also nationality,
citizenship, and race/ethnicity in the nineteenth century British Empire, and ultimately contribute
to the creation of a much broader picture of the literary market and popular imagination of that
time and place.
 Werbanowska 2

Works cited:
Guest, Harriet. Travel Writing. The Cambridge Companion to Womens Writing in
Britain, 16601789. Edited by Catherine Ingrassia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015.
Fay, Elizabeth A. Travel Writing. The Cambridge Companion to Womens Writing in
the Romantic Period. Edited by Devoney Looser. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015.
Wagner, Tamara S. Travel Writing. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Womens
Writing. Edited by Linda H. Peterson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015.

Discussion questions:

1. What may be the reasons for the exclusion of writers such as Seacole from these critical
texts? If, for example, the criterion for the authors selection was being strictly English (none
of the essays mention the Scottish Janet Schaw, for that matter), can such narrowing of the
methodological framework be considered productive/beneficial for the sake of analysis, or
does it still fall into the category of academic hegemony that, at best, considers writers of
color as an afterthought/appendix to the main body of literature?
2. What paradigms, other than the binary modes of performance of femininity (either
conservatively proper or eccentric and manlike), might be complicated by the inclusion of
non-white, not necessarily England-born writers into the analyses presented by Fay, Wagner,
and Guest? Think about the division between the domestic and public sphere, or the
assumption that gender is the primary factor that might have undermined the authors
credibility/validity.