In 1962, Roland Barthes characterized the 'travel impression' as a genre "to which our society extends the greatest indulgence." In the 1990s, however, both the genre and the indulgence have become subjects of serious critical inquiry; travel literature, it turns out, offers a compelling ground for theory. Travel narratives--deliberately, ambiguously mingling 'fact' and 'fiction'--reveal much about genders and identities, representations of experience, ideologies of empire, and limits and possibilities of familiar narrative genres.
The normative conventions of travel writing are deeply marked by gender, in ways that pose very real challenges to women writing about travel. In the recurring imperial image traced by Mary Louise Pratt, the traveler is rhetorically, ideologically, often sexually, and sometimes politically "master of all I survey"--including landscape, natives, women. His discourse is the authoritative word of one who has 'been there,' seen the authentic, and emerged better from the experience, one whose narrative--even when fantastic--is not open to question. Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of monologic language, coupled with Edward Said's criticism of orientalist vision, offers a pointed critique of conventions such as these in which others remain exotic objects, not subjects for understanding, and in which the traveler is presumed to be male. Bakhtin's notions of novelistic discourse and heteroglossia, joined with Said's sense of narrative and Lisa Lowe's 'heterotopicality,' suggest counter-strategies, ways for reading contemporary travel texts that attempt to challenge and revise these conventions. To write, Bakhtin argues, is to refract one's intentions through language that is never wholly one's own. This is particularly so, one can argue, when the conventions of a literary genre are so profoundly marked by gender.
This paper, part of a larger project on travel writing, will examine the work of contemporary writers whose work challenges--aesthetically, politically, experientially--the conventions of travel literature. In the second half of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that these traditions are challenged on several fronts at once--and that gender is very significant in this process. Contemporary travel narratives by both women and men work out uneasy representations of the (post)modern traveler amidst heteroglossia, walking the borders between monologue and dialogue, colonizer and colonized, self and other. But the differences between them merit serious consideration. As travelers and writers, women such as Robyn Davidson, Mary Morris, and Dervla Murphy invoke, revoke, and subvert discourses about travel that in their very conceptualization are closed to women's voices. They create narratives and fashion selves in a troubled dialogic relation with conventions they cannot recuperate but must nonetheless engage.
Read together, these texts provocatively trace out questions about writing, gender, subjectivity, and postcoloniality for scholars interested in gender, representation, and narrative theory to explore.
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