In this paper I examine how Katherine Mansfield and Sara Jeannette Duncan put pressure on the term "mother country" and challenge its underlying assumptions: that women are not travelers, that the citizen's relation to the state is natural and transcends gender, and that the colony's relation to the imperial center is natural and necessary for its development. I argue that Mansfield and Duncan use the figures of the female imperial traveler and the imperial mother to denaturalize "mother country" in ways that create and challenge traditional narrative conventions of subjectivity, authorial perspective, and the relationship between self and other. In these texts, gender and geographical positioning within the empire and one's relation to the imperial state determine the structure of narrative. Further, to understand these texts within the context of imperial travel and the mother country is to understand them as modernist.
Because these authors are not "modernist" according to definitions which require innovation on the level of language, yet unsettle narrative convention in ways similar to modernism, they challenge the assumption that many women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were incapable of understanding and deploying prevalent modes in "modernist" ways. I will examine how women's travel and travel writing, in the context of imperial experience, works like the touristic structures theorists such as James Buzard and James Clifford have found constitutive of the modern, becoming the catalyst for self-consciously confronting and reworking the way narrative authority produces and has been produced by historical boundaries, borders and margins that are national, racial, and gendered.
I begin by reading short stories by Katherine Mansfield which draw on her memories of travel in New Zealand. Written from London, the stories, which deal with British women colonists in the back country, throw the concept of "mother country" into confusion. Mansfield's "The Woman at the Store" is not a fantasy about New Zealand but a meditation on Brittania--Mansfield's other "mother"--which had established the colony where Mansfield grew up, and whose claims to centrality and cultural superiority she accepted on many levels even as they peripheralized her. Mansfield exposes the weak underpinnings of the national subjectivity available to women colonials through her exploration of the figure of a female traveller into the back country.
Just as for Mansfield, the "mothering" one can receive and/or participate in as a female citizen of England is contingent on the geographical, social, and economic structures of empire as they are played out in the context of a white settler colony, Sara Jeannette Duncan also confronts--so as to reveal contradictions in--the way "motherhood" and "mother country" are deployed in mutually supporting ways. In her novella "A Mother In India" (1903), the narrator, a mother who separates from her child to continue her life in India and then "puts on" her motherly function after 21 years, finds that narrating her "motherhood" cannot be separated from narrating her relation to England. In denaturalizing and investigating the place of the maternal within the national, Duncan significantly rewrites the way the Victorian woman's romance plot and the conventional women's novel of India constructed the narrating subject.
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