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Abstract
This project explores a new type of woman-authored travel narratives which emerged in Europe toward the mid-nineteenth century in the combined wakes of the social and industrial revolutions and as a result of the ongoing colonial enterprise. Focusing on specifically lower- and middle-class women's travel narratives, this dissertation traces women's positionality abroad and at home as it is represented, questioned, and renegotiated in set scenes of travel in their accounts. Using Pierre Bourdieu's and Jacques Lacan's theories on power structures and identity construction, this project studies women's travel literature as part of a European prose literature, written by the less enfranchised of the West, and directed at improving personal positionality at home.
Toward the mid-century, women authors of fictional and non-fictional travel texts appropriated from earlier patriarchal travel narratives the strategies they had seen work successfully for improving male travellers' socio-political status. Evidence of colonialist and feminist discourses together with women travellers' unequivocal participation in the imperialist agenda of “civilizing” the Other, testify to fictional and non-fictional travel literatures' shared agenda of improving women's gender- and class-based status in the West. Women travellers' renegotiations of identity are thus dominated by images of usefulness which can be back-translated into the West as a “bourgeois” ideal that serves both the government and the Self through providing information for the former and income and prestige for the latter. Through reinventing themselves as members of a new meritocratic social elite based on knowledge and ability—rather than on wealth and title—women travellers succeeded in carving out for themselves a more empowered space on the changing socio-political maps of Europe. Ultimately, this dissertation argues for a greater proximity between the traditionally separated genres of high and low literature, and between the different national language-literatures of Europe during the time known in England as the Victorian age.
