Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Feminist Epistemologies? Feminist Ethnographies? Maud Parrish, Box Car Bertha, and the Nomadic Woman's Residual Passion for the Politics of Patriarchy"
Shealeen Meaney
SUNY Albany
shealeen@worldnet.att.net
The travel narratives of American women like Maud Parrish and Box Car Bertha provide amazing counter-texts to the tradition of the American road novel, and they can arguably be read as self-consciously feminist in their presentation of alternative life patterns for women in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Their blatant disregard for cultural traditions of domesticity and geographic stability are coupled with amusing and inspiring tales of marital resistance and passionate affairs. And yet, these very same narratives expose the limits of their radical politics, for troubling anecdotes of abusive relationships, virulent homophobia, and implicit imperialism are woven throughout these texts.
Reading these texts in light of contemporary work in postmodern geographies and theories of travel, interesting questions about the transformative potential of travel and the American valorization of the road emerge. Caren Kaplan's critiques of the Western association of travel with knowledge -- the assumption that contact with difference is always broadening -- are central to my thinking about the tensions and limits of these particular texts. The multiple reworkings of Adrienne Rich's theories toward a politics of location are also important here, as both Parrish and Bertha frame much of their travel as ethnographic research.
Bertha even theorizes her time as a sex worker as merely a part of her intellectual research into why other women become sex workers and support the pimps they love with their wages. Meanwhile, she proclaims devotion to the people to impress Socialist intellectual Malinetti (whom she adores), tags along after intellectual men via box cars, and makes pathologizing observations about lesbians for their anti-social behavior. Never, despite her upbringing in a free-love, socialist community, her family's tradition of involvement with abolitionist and women's movements, and her own lessons in hobo colleges, does she independently theorize the privileges of her own situation with respect to those around her on the road and the rails. Her thinking is confined within the male knowledges dominant in own subculture, and in multiple ways, she is complicit with the sexism and homophobia of those knowledges: never does she step outside to critique them, despite the stories she collects from the struggling women in the missions and flophouses.
Similarly, Maud Parrish's international wandering brings her in contact with various subaltern identities, and her need to work to make her own way forces her to commodify her petite, white, female body in many ways; yet her discussions of the oppression and prejudice she encounters are never self-reflexive. She never questions her own privilege as a white westerner mixing business and pleasure in colonized territories (China, Africa, the middle east etc.). While her narrative repeatedly contests accepted notions of white western womanhood and the constraints placed upon it, her cultural critique seldom extends beyond the dimensions of self-interest. Her fury at being turned away from Peshawar by a British guard never queries the conditions that would demand such security measures be in place.
It is the tension between the fascinating political observations and feminist positionings of these narratives and their complicity with hegemonic patriarchal values and knowledges which forms the focus of inquiry for this project. This work engages contemporary theories of feminist standpoint epistemology, location politics, nomadic subjectivity, and post-colonial travel theory in order to theorize the constitutive limits of these texts and the material cultures which produced them.
Shealeen Meaney
404 Manning Blvd.,
Albany, NY 12206
shealeen@worldnet.att.net
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