Writing the Journey: June 1999 | Department of English

"The Commerce of Travel: Gender, Genre, and the Eighteenth-Century English Traveller"

Nira Gupta-Casale
Kean University

This paper will be on the relationship of gender to genre, and how travelling Englishwomen in the late eighteenthcentury constructed particular notions of nationalist and commercial identity for England through their travel accounts. I examine the ethnographic style of the travel narrative of a Mrs. N. Kindersley, writing of her travels to the east and west Indies, and contrast it with the personal, anecdotal style of the "letters home" of Eliza Fay, composed during the last years of Warren Hastings' governorship in Calcutta, India, but published only in 1817. My argument is that while the two women travellers chose to publish their accounts in different genres, the discursive effect of their "eyewitness" accounts was similar, ie., Englishwomen travelling abroad used writing as a means of establishing national identity through a recording of cultural differences. I also assert that gender is a crucial category in the assessment of eighteenth-century nationalist ideology, and, as such, neds to be examined, both in conjunction with the commercial/imperialist, as well as domestic/sexual registers. To this effect, I look closely at the letters of Eliza Fay, paying particular attention to the intersection of Anglo-Indian domesticity with the East India Company's commercial and political involvement in mid-to-late-18th century India.

I concentrate on how gender is defined through genre, and how within, what I call the genre of "the letter home," differences of class and race are written up as nationalist tenets. I argue that the ideology of nationalism, which was put into play under the aegis of commerce in the first half of the century, was perpetuated through the feminized genre of the "letter home" in the second half. I find that the 'travelling theories' of James Clifford and the discussion of diasporic mentality in the writings of Homi Bhaba are helpful in situating my discussion of the eighteenth-century travelling Englishwomen, in the context of the English encounters with non-European cultures, and the resultant fears of dissemination and "anxiety of exile." I demonstrate how class differences among the women writers, resulted in different attitudes towards non-European cultures, and by citing Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's famous Turkish Embassy Letters as a primary example of the aristocratic attitude towards "otherness" and comparing it to Fay and Kindersley's bourgeoise, middle class attitude, which attitude becomes the dominating attitude of the English towards the nonEuropeans during the heyday of imperialist activity, I analyse the increasing influence of the commercial mentality of the traveller, over the cosmopolitan one.

Nira Gupta-Casale Dept. of English
nguptaca@turbo.kean.edu
Willlis 305F
Kean University
1000 Morris Avenue
Union, N.J. 07083
Tel. (908) 5272255/ 6297272 (office)
(908) 6877418 (home)

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Updated May 23, 1999