Here the word "ironically" encapsulates a key deficiency in most late twentieth-century critical evaluations of Victorian and Edwardian women travelers. Many critics lament, but do not attempt seriously to analyze or explain, the contradiction that exists between some women travelers' feminism and their (usually) racist collusion with British imperial practices. When seen through the prism of a 1960s and 1970s essentialist feminism that believes women always side with the oppressed, this contradiction can only be considered evidence of women travelers' misguided emulation of male behavior. The suggestion that women travelers only posed as masculine imperial authority figures, however, avoids the unsettling possibility that women travelers' frequent callousness toward indigenous peoples and their participation in the imperial project actually contributed greatly to the success of a fin-de-siècle Western feminism that directed its energies toward manifesting women's and men's sameness rather than difference. Focusing on women's "nonfiction" travel narratives concerning Africa, the site of particularly aggressive European imperial expansion in the 1880s and 1890s, my paper argues that turn-of-the-century women travel writers' willingness both to imagine and to employ physical violence against indigenous peoples was integral to the construction and success of a feminist movement that constantly worked to redraw what had previously been viewed as rigid boundaries between masculine and feminine traits.
When read in the context of fin-de-siècle feminism, then, the narratives suggest that the rarity of women's involvement in violence back in the metropolis results not so much from their lack of violent desires but from a need to conform to strict gender-based codes of social behavior. Just as late nineteenth-century women students' success on university exams demonstrated that intelligence did not belong solely to men, and women's increased participation in sports from soccer to cycling showed that women's and men's bodies were more similar than was usually thought, women's travel narratives invited the perception that women shared with men a will to violence that came to fruition only where European and Euroamerican social codes were not in full effect. I argue that travel--and its subsequent transformation into narrative--provides a space for women writers to break down boundaries between men's and women's characteristics by reinforcing the racial distinctions that had come predominate in Western social and scientific thought. By practicing violence against peoples they define as inferior to Europeans, women writers widen racial gaps in order to narrow gender gaps.
Three travel narratives serve as the basis of my critique: Cornelia Speedy's My Wanderings in the Soudan (1884), which depicts her touristic travels with her husband in northeast Africa; Sultan to Sultan (1892), American traveler and "ardent suffragist" (Birkett164) May French-Sheldon's chronicle of her experiences as head of a caravan in east Africa; and Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa (1897), a hugely popular narrative of small-scale exploration. Inorder to demonstrate travel narratives' importance within sameness-oriented feminism, I examine not only the rhetoric within specific scenes of imagined and realized violence, but also the reception afforded these books and their authors in England and the United States.
I consider a study of women travelers' violence crucial to our understanding not only of travel narratives but also of temporally-diverse feminist movements. For, in a paradox similar to that evinced in nineteenth-century American suffragists' claim that the U.S. should grant women suffrage so as to save the nation from evil working-class foreign immigrants, women's travel narratives build a case for women's equal political and social rights precisely by depicting as natural their desire to use violence against indigenous peoples.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and
employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997.