Women, Travel Writing, and Truth

Clare Broome Saunders, Clare Broome Saunders

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317690245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour les femmes auteures

The issue of truth has been one of the most constant, complex, and contentious in the cultural history of travel writing. Whether the travel was undertaken in the name of exploration, pilgrimage, science, inspiration, self-discovery, or a combination of these elements, questions of veracity and authenticity inevitably arise.

Women, Travel, and Truth is a collection of twelve essays that explore the manifold ways in which travel and truth interact in women's travel writing. Essays range in date from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the eighteenth century to Jamaica Kincaid in the twenty-first, across such regions as India, Italy, Norway, Siberia, Austria, the Orient, the Caribbean, China and Mexico. Topics explored include blurred distinctions of fiction and non-fiction; travel writing and politics; subjectivity; displacement, and exile. Students and academics with interests in literary studies, history, geography, history of art, and modern languages will find this book an important reference.

1 Introduction

Clare Broome Saunders

DOI: 10.4324/9781315776361-1

At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.¹

This volume, Women, Travel Writing, and Truth, combines three slippery and permeable subject areas. The debate into the accuracy of the diverse terms used to define different types of travel writing is well-known and continually developing. Travel writing, as Jan Borm, suggests, can perhaps best be judged not as a genre but as “a collective term for a variety of texts both predominantly fictional and non-fictional whose main theme is travel”.² These diverse texts include “memoirs, journals, and ships’ logs as well as narratives of adventure, exploration, journey, and escape”.³ Borm further suggests a distinction between the assumed non-fictional “travel book” or “travelogue” and “travel writing” or “travel literature”, terms which can be used “as an overall heading for texts whose main theme is travel”,⁴ whether purportedly fiction or non-fiction. “Travel writing” is, therefore, the most helpful term to use in the context of this volume, in which every chapter demonstrates the diverse range of textual forms that combine under this heading: travelogues, journalistic reports, autobiographies, diaries, letters, novels, short stories, and guidebooks. Truth is at the heart of all these generic distinctions: the assumed authenticity and greater honesty of a personal diary or correspondence which records personal experiences, when in fact these forms can easily be manipulated with omissions and elisions to meet the agenda of the writer; the veil of untruth that covers the “fictional” literature of travel, which often reports actual facts and events, disguised as fiction to suit the author’s purpose.

Just as travel writing cannot easily be compartmentalised, “women” is not a unitary category, comprising instead a wide variety of experiences, derived from differences of social class, age, religion, historical context, and geographical position: “the sheer diversity of women’s travel writing defies simple categorisation”.⁵ Women’s travel writing is, therefore, a complex, varied, and fluid area. Women were not necessarily associated with truth or realism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when women first started to produce travel texts on a large scale: as Mills notes, “Far more women’s texts were accused of falsehood than men’s”.⁶ Drawing on Mills’s key ideas on travel and gender, this volume does not make simple comparisons between travel writing by men and women, but instead explores the social and commercial pressures and expectations that women writers historically have had to negotiate, which are often different from those experienced by their male contemporaries:

women’s travel texts are produced and received within a context which shares similarities with the discursive construction and reception of male texts, whilst at the same time, because of the discursive frameworks which exert pressure on female writers, there may be negotiations in women’s texts which result in differences which seem to be due to gender. (p. 6)

In Travelers and Travel Liars, Percy Adams elucidates the complexities of the concept of truth telling and lying in the context of travel writing, and the flexibility and range of the terms. Travel liars can come from a broad spectrum, from those who “tell few or insignificant lies and extending to those that tell many or very intentional ones”.⁷ The degree to which readers believe the truth of a non-fiction travelogue has varied throughout history. In The English Gentleman (1630), Richard Brathwaite famously declares, “Travellers, poets and liars are three words all of one signification”. In the same year, “Captain John Smith felt obliged to modify the word Travels with the word True when he published The True Travels, Adventures and Observations of Captain John Smith”, as Fussell notes; a century later, Swift satirises the lying traveller in Gulliver’s Travels (1726).⁸ Adams suggests that from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, the form and content of travel writing are influenced by market demand. Driven to lie through prejudice—religious, political, or racial—, quest for commercial gain, or to improve personal reputation, travel writers found a winning formula by stretching, moulding, or disguising facts: “so the authors of travel lies filled their pockets, pleased the public, and satisfied their own biases and vanity”.⁹ Bassnett develops Adams’s discussion:

Many travel writers, men and women, have reinvented themselves in similar ways, always claiming to be writing in a spirit of “authenticity” yet fictionalising their experiences by writing themselves as a character into the account of their travels. There is an evident tension between this process of self-fictionalising and the travel writer’s claim to veracity.¹⁰

The chapters in this volume consider the interplay between women’s travel writing and other areas of literary creativity, such as life-writing, academic scholarship/connoisseurship, and novels/short story writing. A consistent theme throughout all the travel texts discussed is the central importance of narrative form, particularly with regard to what that form suggests about the truth, authenticity, and reliability of the accounts presented. Travel writing’s close connection with texts associated with the private, domestic sphere—diaries, memoirs, autobiography, letters, and photograph albums—“allowed women entry into the travel genre”.¹¹ “Truth” in travel writing appears, paradoxically, as both an assertion of “masculine” objective rhetoric, and the apparently “authentic” utterance of such “feminine”, domestic, private literature. This volume is divided into four parts, which elucidate some of its thematic concerns. However, these divisions, like the “fluid and adaptable genre” of travel writing itself,¹² are permeable: connections and continuities can be drawn through all the chapters in their focus on the significant relationship between narrative form and truth.

Unstable Boundaries

Early women travel writers had to tread a careful course between providing material that was exciting and original enough to warrant an audience, and remaining within the bounds of appropriate behaviour in order to keep that audience. Expressions of veracity could offer the appearance of acceptable femininity: most early travel writing by women began with an apology, an assertion of the humility topos, and a declaration of authenticity. Whereas the terms “fiction” and “non-fiction” may suggest a clear distinction between the imaginary and the true, in travel writing generic boundaries begin to unravel.

In Chapter 2, Baigent considers Kate Marsden’s life and travel writing, which describe her nursing mission through Siberia to aid lepers in Russia’s far east. Marsden was beset with accusations of living and writing lies—that she was, among other things, a thief, a spendthrift, and a closet lesbian. Baigent analyses these accusations, and the attempted rebuttals that raged in the international press and in Marsden’s travel writings. She explores the various strategies each side used to establish the truth of their writings and the integrity of their cause, ultimately asking whether each side wanted truth or “truthiness” to prevail.

Henes’s chapter on Vita Sackville-West’s 1926 travelogue Passenger to Teheran (Chapter 3) demonstrates the hybrid nature of the genre, which swings between objectivity and subjectivity, reality and aesthetics, the world and the individual. Henes explores how truth in Sackville-West’s work is complicated by the porous nature of travel writing, and assesses how her discussion of Persia at the beginning of the twentieth century, and that of other travel writers, was created in direct response to the historical trend for authoritarian, factual works.

Walchester provides another case study of a travelogue that illustrates the genre’s unstable and shape-shifting nature, and its fluid movement between reality and fiction, in Chapter 4. Walchester explores a range of writing by women authors, to assess the rhetorical and narrative means they use to present Norway as a place of magical opportunity and a supernatural space, so that they can articulate the view of the country as a place of possibility and self-development for women, in contrast with industrial Britain.

Subjectivity and Honesty

What travel books are “about” is the interplay between observer and observed, between a traveler’s own philosophical biases and preconceptions and the tests those ideas and prejudices endure as a result of the journey. The reverberations between observer and observed, between self and world, allow the writer to celebrate the local while contemplating the universal.¹³

Such a complex interaction is the focus of the section on subjectivity. “Truth” in travel writing appears, paradoxically, as both an assertion of “masculine”, objective rhetoric, and in “feminine”, subjective, private forms of writing, as Brister articulates in her discussion of women writers’ responses to the male “authority” of guidebook publishing in Chapter 5. Brister’s chapter considers how women writers offer a subversive counter-response to the male authority of the guidebook industry, which attempts to catalogue the world. Analysing the work of a range of writers, including Amelia Edwards, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton, and Lilian Bell, Brister demonstrates how the subjectivity of women’s travel writing, although often criticised as sentimentalism, should instead be read as a strategic means to present their accounts as more truthful and reliable.

In Chapter 6, Agnew considers another aspect of the greater subjectivity of the woman travel writer, in her exploration of Hariot Dufferin’s photographic reportage of life in nineteenth-century India. At a time when the camera was seen as an instrument of scientific authority and evidence, Dufferin comes to doubt its truth-telling powers. Agnew explores the tension between Dufferin’s photographs, which, taken from her perspective as the vicereine, reassert the authority of imperial rule in India, and the anxiety and uncertainty about the assumed “truth” of the images that she betrays in her correspondence. Agnew traces how Dufferin came to realise that the so-called truths revealed by the imperial gaze of her camera were actually subjective and inaccurate representations: that the “truths” were only British perceptions, a fact that leads Dufferin to fear Indian resistance to this unstable imperial authority.

Whereas Dufferin’s images presented a one-sided depiction of India from the imperial viewpoint, many women travellers played a significant role in adjusting perspectives of race and ethnicity. From the early eighteenth century, when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu famously sought to find similarities rather than differences between her society and the customs and manners of the women in the Turkish harem, women travel writers have made a significant contribution to the genre’s multifocal gaze. The ambivalent inheritance that Montagu left to women who follow in her wake is the subject of Chapter 7. Here, Winch examines the complex relationship between Lady Elizabeth Craven’s A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (1789) and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), and suggests that Montagu’s work both legitimates Craven’s authorship and also threatens to render her Journey less authentic. Winch suggests that, in her bid to situate herself as an original female voice, Craven inscribes a poetics of rivalry, accusing her predecessor of lies and deception, both to assert her own authorial authority and to create a public discourse of female passion.

Travel and Reality

Both Capancioni and Harwood consider the ways in which women travel writers exploit the generic possibilities of travel writing to discuss political situations. In Chapter 8, Capancioni considers the political engagement of nineteenth-century British women travel writers in a reunified Italy, showing how, for Janet Ross and Margaret Collier, travel writing is a valuable means to present authentic social investigations and cultural studies, based on personal experience. Capancioni explores Ross’s and Collier’s use of narrative strategies to question ideas of truth, authenticity, and otherness, such as their exploitation of the autobiographical form of their writing to validate their accounts: that their narratives are true because they are based on actual, current, personal experience. In their writing, the picturesque scenes and landscapes that a B...