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Women's Place in Travel Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Mary Suzanne Schriber
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Extract

In the 19th Century, white American women of the middle and upper classes began to travel abroad in significant numbers for the first time in history. Prior to the 19th Century, and with the exception of such women as Abigail Adams and Martha Bayard, who accompanied their parents or husbands on diplomatic missions, American women as a rule traveled only about the countryside or to frontier settlements. Beginning in the 1820s, however, and escalating after the Civil War, the prototypes of Henry James's Isabel Archer and Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg set out by the hundreds to see the world, from Europe to the Middle East and from Africa to Japan and China. The greatest number of them visited the British Isles and continental Europe. As early as 1835, according to Paul R. Baker, some fifty American women visited Rome during Holy Week. Many women were among the fifty thousand Americans who, in 1866 alone, traveled to Europe. According to Mrs. John Sherwood in 1890, there were “more than eleven thousand virgins who semi-yearly migrate[d] from America to the shores of England and France.” Women found their way to virtually all parts of the world, as the book-length travel accounts of women (far fewer than the numbers of women who traveled) show. Women published accounts of twenty journeys to China, seventeen to Palestine, eleven to India, twenty-two to Egypt, two to the East Indies, twenty to Greece, three to Arabia, six to Algeria, and four to Africa, as well as travel in Central and South America, Cuba, the Yucatan, and Jamaica.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 20 , October 1995 , pp. 161 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

NOTES

1. From James, Henry, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)Google Scholar; and Wharton, Edith, The Custom of the Country (1913).Google Scholar

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6. See Mills, Sara, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. See my Telling Travels: Selections from the Writings of Nineteenth-Century American Women Abroad (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Caesar, Terry, “‘Counting the Cats in Zanzibar’: American Travel Abroad in American Travel Writing to 1914,” in Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, ed. Salzman, Jack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 13:95–134.Google Scholar

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19. Baker, , Fortunate Pilgrims, 215.Google Scholar

20. There are curious differences between Twain's travel letters and Innocents on the subject of women. For example, the “ash cat[s]” of Innocents, the women's “cubs,” scratch themselves in their filth, but are omitted from the letters, where “all the people scratch” (Clemens, Samuel, Traveling with the Innocents Abroad: Mark Twain's Original Reports from Europe and the Holy Land, ed. McKeithan, Daniel Morley [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958], 72Google Scholar). The letters include a lengthy passage about a girl in a park in Genoa:

She was very beautiful, and she had a cold in the head. She blew her nose continually, and the more she blew it the more lovely she seemed to me. I would ask no other happiness on this earth could I always be with that girl and see her blow her nose. I followed her about the Park for an hour, trying to summon courage enough, but I could not do it. I wanted to ask her to let me blow her nose for her once. Only just once. If I could have blown her nose only just one time, I could have been contented and cheerful all the days of my life. But I was too modest. Modesty has always kept me down in the world, and always will, I suppose. (Clemens, , Traveling 42)Google Scholar

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