Collapsing the Cartographies of Gender and Nationality: Howe’s Transatlantic Explorations in The Hermaphrodite and From the Oak to the Olive

Abstract

Like many nineteenth-century American writers, Julia Ward Howe found that the expanding culture of transatlantic travel offered her the liberty to explore, study, and work. In this article, the author examines Howe’s novel, The Hermaphrodite, which is set in England, Germany, and Rome, in conjunction with her chapter on Rome in her travel book From the Oak to the Olive. Reading these texts through the lens of cultural geography and transatlantic studies, the author suggests that our understanding of The Hermaphrodite should be broadened to see the novel as a type of travel narrative in which the intersex protagonist Laurence journeys across a picturesque Europe, identifying at times as male, female, and nonbinary within different spaces. In both The Hermaphrodite and From Oak to Olive, Howe seeks to write literary narratives of the transatlantic world, and though one is fiction and one is autobiographical, they are both imaginative constructions of the relationships between space, gender, and national identity.