Travel writers, especially women travel writers, are often considered in terms of their relation to and alteration of existing aesthetics. A tension between pragmatism and aesthetics is embedded in travel narratives by writers of both sexes in the Romantic period and it coincides with the relation to and alteration of the existing landscape or ecosystem. By commenting on literal changes--by roads, deforestation, mining, or other human action--or imagining picturesque "revisions" to a scene, the travel writer as observer/agent enacts and criticizes revision of the landscape on both physical and perceptual levels.
In addition to engaging in the conversation of aesthetics, travel writing provided new terms for writing and understanding autobiography. When travel is a large part of a person's life story, identity is no longer easily defined in terms of a particular place, and the notion of a unique Enlightenment subject becomes overly simplistic. When a traveler shifts from "native" to "foreigner" and crosses class and gender boundaries--frequent occurrences in travel narratives--defining the self in terms of an impermeable individual identity (as the Enlightenment subject) is no longer satisfactory. What I want to call the "Romantic subject" as distinct from the "universal" Enlightenment subject emerges when travel necessitates a new understanding of one's self in relation to native and foreign contexts. Romantic guidebooks shape both literal journeys which readers may follow and relive in the process of their own self-shaping and autobiographies for readers to recognize (or overlook). In her analysis of women's travel writing, Elizabeth Bohls argues that women travel writers appropriated the male-gendered role of aesthetic observer and by doing so, shaped themselves as aesthetic subjects (Bohls 6-7). In an autobiography, the writer is both the subject and the object, in proportions determined by the writer alone. Since the Romantic period, even in guidebooks whose explicit objects of aesthetic observation are the land and other people, the observer within the text has often, reflexively, acted as an object. The complex valences of autobiographical texts require close analysis of the relationship between the author's lived life and the life represented on the page.
My paper explores the role of autobiography in two travel narratives by women: Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1795) and Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles Through Canada (1838). Women were, except in a few exceptional cases, excluded from travel-writing in the earlier period, for a variety of reasons. For example, the travel writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu traveled far beyond the Grand Tour route to Turkey ca. 1716, and recorded the trip in her posthumously published Turkish Letters (1763), but did so because of her husband's employment, not for aesthetic reasons. As Elizabeth Bohls and Sarah Mills have argued, women were traditionally excluded from the role of aesthetic observer, and most often placed in the role of object. Unlike romantic travel writing by men of the Grand Tour class which undermined Enlightenment subjectivity from an assumed position of authority, travel writing by women had an additional subject-establishing role. Women writers had to assert their own authority while also commenting on sights and people encountered on their journeys. As a result of its dual roles, women's travel writing often revealed tensions and struggles not found in travel writing by middle- or upper-class men.
I will read Wollstonecraft's and Jameson's travel narratives, in which they use trips, undertaken without male companionship but on behalf of a husband's or lover's interests, to re-examine their own lives, make political commentary, and assert aesthetic authority. In each case, the writer uses the rhetoric of slavery both to describe her own situation and to distance herself from the people she encounters. Aesthetic authority requires a certain distance from physical danger; one must be able to stand apart from that which is being observed. Because they face constant threat of physical harm, people who are literally enslaved can rarely claim authoritative observer status. When writers claim metaphoric slavery, they allude to similar limitations upon aesthetic authority. Such allusions appear repeatedly in travel writing, especially that of solitary female travelers. In addition to offering an analysis of each text, I will explain the significance of each woman's indefinite and solitary return "home" at the end of each narrative.
Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1797) is an important travel narrative which reveals and conceals the material conditions of travel in the period. In the text itself, the specifically commercial purpose of her trip is not fully explained, nor are the biographical details of her life fully revealed, but her revision of both is very relevant to the material conditions in which she worked. She created her apparently independent subject-position through revision of the facts. The evidence for and implications of material conditions in Wollstonecraft's text are most fully evident with reference to the letters and journals from which she revised the published text. Travel was difficult and potentially dangerous, and Wollstonecraft is one among many travel writers to mention a feeling of confinement or sea-sickness (or, in some cases, fear of imminent drowning) on board ship. A comparison of her landing in Scandinavia as described in her actual letter to Gilbert Imlay (although in the version edited by William Godwin) and in LWS will reveal her revision of her description of material conditions so as to establish herself as a powerful and rational traveler and subject. In her letter written shortly after landing in Scandinavia, she faints and falls on the rocks, commenting that she was fortunate to escape dying on the spot. In LWS, while she acknowledges a feeling of confinement on board ship, and compares the vessel to a slave ship in a metaphor from which she cannot fully escape, she also portrays herself as a powerful agent, persuading the captain to let her disembark. Wollstonecraft's use of sentimental conventions, as Mary Favret has argued, allowed her readers to overlook the author's perilous and scandalous position as a single mother, traveling without a male protector but with her maid and infant, in unfamiliar territory. The shape of the text--as a series of letters from a traveler to an absent beloved--was a familiar one which allowed Wollstonecraft to claim her text had a "desultory" nature. The genre of letters does not assume a narrative coherence as does the novel, for example. Her revision for publication altered her material conditions in two important ways. First, the published text was intended to, and did, sell enough copies to make her financially independent from Gilbert Imlay. Second, it allowed her to reflect upon the role of women, class distinctions, and other aspects of British culture, through reflection on her observations in Scandinavia. For Wollstonecraft, aesthetic authority preceded and precipitated financial authority.
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