Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"West Africa on Stage: Travel Writing as Performance in Richard Burton's Two Trips to Gorilla Land and Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa"
Rike Brisson
Department of Comparative Literature
Pennsylvania State University
uab1@psu.edu
"Whoever journeys has stories to tell" states the eighteenth-century German poet Matthias Claudius. However, who may tell the stories and how they are told is determined by multiple factors, of which gender is one. Using Richard Bauman 's model of verbal art as performance (Verbal Art as Performance, repr.1984), I analyze the prefaces of two Victorian travel writers who journey to the coast of West Africa: Richard Burton's Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo (1876) and Mary Kingsley's Travels to West Africa (1897). The comparison between Richard Burton's and Mary Kingsley's travel writings shall thus serve as an example of how gender differences continued to play a role even though women travelers had entered the traditionally male realm of the public by their acts of traveling and of writing. Bauman considers performance "as situated behavior, situated within and rendered meaningful with reference to relevant contexts" (27). If travel writing is taken as an act of performance, then we need to consider who is allowed to perform and how the audience's expectations influence the performance. These factors in turn reflect the wider contexts of the performance paradigms such as extant discourses of the nineteenth century associated with British imperialism, race, white superiority, and constructs of gender. According to Benedicte Monicat (Itineraires de l'ecriture au feminin,1996), the preface is a rhetorical act which launches the textual journey. It establishes the relationship between the author, the text, and the reader. It reveals the gender specificity of the travel narrative at the same time, because this rhetorical act cannot be considered as separate from the literary history of men's and women's nineteenth-century writings. I will hence try to locate the gender-specific rhetorical structures which both authors employ in their prefaces. The preface is also the space that authors use to justify their writings. The justifications are determined by the authors' assumptions on the potential readerships and their own images as "storytellers." How then does Richard Burton's membership in the Royal Geographical Society and his position as a consul in West Africa and Mary Kingsley's private role determine how they perceive themselves as performers and how they justify their journeys to West Africa? By using Bauman's performance model, I hope to elucidate how travel writings not only reflect the travelers' memories of journeys to foreign lands but are strongly influenced by the discourses and expectations of the home "audiences." Focusing on prefaces, I interrogate how travel writers are tied to specific "performing constraints," which are reflected in how they see themselves in relation to their works and the reading public.
Rike Brisson
Department of Comparative Literature
311 Burrowes Bldg.
University Park, PA 16802
email: uab1@psu.edu
phone: 814-865-1168 (work)
814-234-2169 (home)
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