In my presentation, I will discuss current critical work on Victorian women's travel writing and raise some questions about the kinds of approaches this critical work is taking. I will focus on Gertrude Bell's 1907 travel text, The Desert and the Sown, Bell's account of her travels in those areas of the Middle East which are now Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and which were then part of the declining Ottoman empire. Bell's text raises interesting and important questions regarding the genre of travel writing in the context of Said's descriptions of Orientalism and also more specifically regarding current theoretical readings of Victorian women's travel narratives.
Much of the current criticism on Victorian women's travel writing interrogates the connection between travel writing and empire which Said articulates in Orientalism (1987). Critics read Victorian women's texts as an interruption of Said's formulations of Orientalist discourse, suggesting that women's discourse cannot be fit neatly into his model of Orientalist discourse. Critics argue that Victorian women's gendered positioning in relation to Victorian patriarchal pressures led these women to negotiate Orientalist (and imperialist) discourse differently than their male counterparts. Women's discourse is thus seen as "resistant" to Orientalist/imperialist discourse, undermining that discourse in oblique ways which can be traced to women's limited access to an inherently male dominant discourse and women's necessarily different negotiations with the gendered "rules" of the Victorian society in which they lived and wrote.
In my presentation, I will discuss The Desert and the Sown in alliance with these current critics and also against the grain of their readings. Bell is rarely discussed by critics who theorize women's negotiations with the conflicting discourses of patriarchy on the one hand and colonialism/imperialism on the other (systems of power in which women are in the first case disempowered and in the second empowered). And although most critics note that Said does a disservice to women travel writers by only discussing one woman, Gertrude Bell, little attention has been turned to Bell herself or her texts.
Said posits Bell as one of those Victorian writers whose travel texts contributed to the formation and codification of Orientalist discourse. I will offer some examples of how Bell's text both supports and interrupts Said's formulations of Orientalist discourse and suggest ways in which Bell's text also interrupts the critical frameworks in which women's travel texts are currently being read as "resistant" to colonial discourse by virtue of the gendered difference of their authors' discourse. Critics I will discuss include Rana Kabbani, Sara Mills, Alison Blunt, Reina Lewis, and Gayatri Spivak.
My contention is that the ways in which Bell's text "undermines" Orientalist discourse are not accounted for in the critical models which current theorists mobilize in their discussion of Victorian women's travel writing My reading of Bell raises important questions regarding current theoretical discussions of travel writing and women's narrative, imperialist discourse, feminist theory, and critical theoretical work itself. I hope I will be able to illuminate some of those questions in my talk.
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