Increasingly "Imaginative Geographies": Excursions into Otherness, Fantasy, and Modernism in Early Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Writing

Abstract

As W. H. Wynn writes in his introduction to Lucy Yeend Culler's Europe, Through a Woman's Eye (1883), travel literature is treasured "because of the ceaseless delight we have in anything distant from us either in time or space" (vi). Similarly, for the travel writer herself, this journey involves a quest for that which is most "distant": the "Other," the exotic, the "not-me." Travel to remote regions was especially transgressive for many Western women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who sought both escape and pleasure abroad. These women, themselves "Other" to masculine concepts of biology, thought, emotion, and sexuality, found the authority they were denied at home by becoming experts of an exotic area. The Otherness they found served as a vehicle for inscribing something new, even something unspoken about themselves. Writing about foreign bodies in a strange land compelled a woman writer to consider the position of her own body as a foreign object and to make choices about the presentation of that body on paper. Critics endeavoring to pinpoint structural and thematic differences between men's and women's travel writing, concentrating particularly on Victorian texts, have noted how many women concerned themselves with [End Page 357] a smaller mapping of space; often their quests were less about opening new territories for their country and more about opening new spaces for themselves and their readers at home. Among the characteristics that separate women's writings from those of men, scholars note a "confessional nature which permits self-exploration" (Foster 19). Catherine Barnes Stevenson theorizes that men are more likely to structure their works as "quest-romances or tragedies" while women more often produce exploratory "odysseys" centering on "the experience of travel itself" (8). The self is highlighted in these texts more than in works by their male counterparts; Cheryl McEwan even notes that women's texts traditionally were expected to be more "subjective" than men's (87). Certainly, any writer's description of a locale foreign to him or her would be "subjective." Edward Said emphasizes this in Orientalism, discussing how the Orient was endowed with meaning by the European explorer, scholar, and poet. Fact can seldom triumph against the romance of fiction; as Said writes, "space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here" (55). Said terms this "imaginative geography." It is useful to assume that "imaginative geography" may mean not only a preconception of a foreign geographical place but also the reconstruction through narrative of such a place by a visiting outsider. This term creates a bridge between travel writing and fiction; we may consider how any view of a country from an outsider's perspective is a fantasy that a travel writer may either instantiate or reinscribe for his or her readers. If women's narratives are allowed to be more intent on self-exploration, this implies that they also may be more free to investigate "imaginative geographies." Indeed, early twentieth-century women develop further the tendency toward digression and introspection found in the narratives of Victorian women. Their wandering and inward excursions, during a period when these attributes were being explored in fiction, gives them an intriguingly strategic position in the development of modernist writing. In this article, I examine the intersection of self, writing, and Otherness in three travel narratives by British and American women. I consider how the woman traveler constructs her body next to her perception of the Other in narrative and photograph and how she sees herself affected by the encounter. The examples I choose explore increasingly "imaginative geographies," mapping a progression from corporeal study to inward exploration. [End Page 358] In A White Woman in a Black Man's Country (1914) by Nettie Fowler Dietz, the native body...