Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Going All the Way: Love and Sex in Contemporary Women's Travel Narratives"
Susan L. Blake
Department of English, Lafayette College
blakes@lafayette.edu
Sexual encounter, as the dramatic expression of intimacy and reciprocity, has been an implicit, and increasingly acknowledged, end of travel since the beginning of the sentimental travel tradition in the 18th century. In Imperial Eyes , Mary Louise Pratt identifies the "trans-racial erotics" in 18th and 19th century experiential travel narratives about Africa and the Caribbean. In the 1920s, British women authors of properly distanced travel narratives about Africa wrote complementary travel romances that flirt with miscegenation. In the 1980s, the diaries of two turn-of-the-century European women travelers who had life-long liaisons with Arab men, Margaret Fountaine and Isabelle Eberhardt, were published or republished, and several contemporary English and American women travelers published narratives that focused, in whole or in part, on their relationships with men perceived as racial others in culturally remote and recently decolonized or neo-colonial countries. In 1998, sexual encounter in travel has become the focus of two anthologies brought out by publishers of travel guides, with the implicit goal of validating or fulfilling readers' fantasies.
Pratt reads the "trans-racial erotics" of 18th and 19th century male narrators as an expression of the colonial imperative to cast contact between Europe and economically colonized or enslaved others as exchange rather than exploitation. In this paper I consider whether we might read the recent narratives of women travelers -- particularly Sarah Lloyd in India, Joana McIntyre Varawa in Fiji, and Dea Birkett on Pitcairn Island -- against a similar postcolonial imperative. Pratt identifies Mungo Park, Francois Le Vaillant and John Stedman as "non heroes" of their own narratives, engaged in "anti-conquest." How do concepts of heroism, conquest, and reciprocity function in the narratives of independent, affluent, professional, Western women who take up, for the long term or short, roles of girlfriend, wife, and daughter-in-law in relatively impoverished, uneducated, gender-rigid communities? What do these narratives represent as the benefit to each partner in the love affair? What assumptions do they make about individual and cultural exchange in conditions of unequal wealth, education, and freedom? I focus on women travel narrators because, for western women, the gender assumptions of both their own cultures and those they adopt work against the power imbalance between citizens of rich and poor countries. Women travelers have a chance, if anyone does, to pull off "anti-conquest."
Susan L. Blake
Department of English
Lafayette College
blakes@lafayette.edu
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