Writing the Journey: June 1999

"A Woman's Voyage: Female travel narratives in the nineteenth century"

---

Sandra M. Adams, PhD.
University of Macau
fshsma@UMAC.MO

The Victorian woman faced both the prejudices of society and her own inculcated self image of relativity, femininity and propriety. This created an ambivalence difficult to overcome in her representations of experiences abroad. If courage in facing the daunting or perilous was expressed without qualification to belittle such fortitude, she risked denunciation as unfeminine. The veracity of her tale would be called into question and she would be ridiculed for having had the temerity to suggest that a woman could have taken part in such a preposterous adventure. Conversely, if she tended 'towards the discourses of femininity' she would be attacked as trivial. Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference, (London: Routledge, 1993), 118.

Sanders demonstrates that women were similarly forced to trivialise their autobiographies in terms of style and even title. Valerie Sanders, The Private Lives of Victorian Women (NY: St Martin's Press, 1989), 47. My paper postulates that the Victorian traveller, in writing of her experiences was constrained by patriarchal codes to present herself as powerless despite and in contradiction to the sense of empire and racial superiority which she carried with her as the coloniser's prerogative. Whilst seemingly part of a powerful group, the actual position of powerlessness she held in her own society informed and constructed her perceptions both temporally and spatially of her travels and of those whom she encountered.

In support of this thesis I quote directly from original nineteenth and early twentieth century travel accounts by women who travelled in China and compare these with accounts by men. These include Mrs Alicia Little, Isabella (Bird) Bishop, Constance F G Cumming, Mary Ninde Gamewell and Mary Gaunt. The social status, concerns, cultural attitudes and writing style will be addressed with reference to gender and colonial studies/theory.

As Showalter shows, women novelists frequently used male pseudonyms and critics tried to guess whether any novel of dubious authorship had actually been written by a woman, drawing out specious evidence of the feminine. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, (Princeton: Princeton UP., 1977), 58,59. I suggest that such noms de plume were not necessary for female travel writers because their work was noticeably, (properly) 'feminine,' ie. non assertive. For example, Mrs Little informs the reader that if she wants to know about facts or statistics she had better read the work of her husband, Archibald, or that of Sir John Davis. Mrs Alicia Little, Intimate China, (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1889), 4.

The writings examined are in journal or letter form, both fully acceptable as ladies' 'jottings.' To admit that a woman's work was qualitatively comparable with that of males would have been to open the floodgates to all sorts of unwelcome (and frightening) possibilities regarding the intellectual capacity of women and the appropriateness of her relative status; in short, it would bring into question the fact of woman's inferiority to man.

This paper proposes that Victorian female travellers to China were constrained by the enculturation of the home country in their narratives. They were obliged to trivialise their experiences and adventures, utilising perceived feminine discourses in conflict with their necessary fortitude in dealing with the unknown, confining themselves discourses of powerlessness in keeping with their 'proper' sphere.

---

S. M. Adams
University of Macau
fshsma@UMAC.MO

---

RETURN TO CONFERENCE SPEAKERS, TITLES AND PROGRAM

Updated May 23, 1999