‘I write the truth as I see it’: Unsettling the Boundaries of Gender, Travel Writing and Ethnography in Isabella Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan

Abstract

Much has been written in the past two decades on the gendered significance of travel writing by mid- and late nineteenth-century women for a rethinking of their freedoms and constraints within what has been the single main dichotomy motivating feminist scholarship since its very outset, that between public and private spheres. It is certainly not for their rarity that nineteenth-century women’s travels and their writings remain of interest to literary criticism today. Ever since the publication of Shirley Foster’s Across New Worlds (1990) and Sarah Mills’s Discourses of Difference (1991), two groundbreaking analyses of women’s travel writing in the period of high imperialism, various studies have shown how key factors such as Western imperial expansion opened up new opportunities for a growing number of middle-class Western women of some independent means to travel to the remotest parts of the world and write accounts of their experiences. The motivations for this increased mobility, however, included more than just wifely or daughterly duties to husbands or fathers who were colonial officials or officers. Projects such as missionary and philanthropic work, scientific research, the quest for health, or the lure of the foreign and ‘uncivilized’ as a way of escaping the constraints of domesticity at home and searching for a new identity away show that travel was increasingly seen as a source of empowerment by many of those women seeking to expand their horizon of knowledge and arena of agency at a time when institutions of learning and professional independence were still generally closed to them (Blunt 1994: 34–8; Smith 2001: 15–19).