Strangers in Every Port: Stereotypes of Victorian Women Travellers

Abstract

Stereotypes of the female tourist circulated in Victorian travel literature, popular fiction, and reviews in the periodical press, and continue to appear in contemporary biographical accounts of nineteenth-century women travellers.1 Two separate but related stereotypes ? The Spinster Abroad and the Memsahib ? dominate descriptions of European women travellers1 experience. In what follows, I will take up the travel documents of two Victorian writers, Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake and Harriet Martineau, but not to show how they fit the stereotype. Rather, I want to demonstrate how conventional categories of identity for women which circulated in the 1840s conditioned their particular textual and tourist gazes upon others. That is, the reader's recognition of the Stereotypie representations of others in Eastlake's and Martineau's texts depends, in part, upon a received notion of Victorian women's sexual and racial identities as domestic travellers in the colonial context of Victorian tourism. Travel does not represent a middle-class woman's from the gendered and colonial ideologies of the political and social order in which she is located, although part of her authority may rest upon a notion of escape which allows her the illusory possibility of seeing others as they really are. I argue that the English woman traveller's identity abroad is continually reshaped and reassessed in discourse to preserve her tenuous position both within and outside of dominant ideologies about women's proper sphere of activity. By examining stereotypes and chains of stereotypes in colonial discourse, it is possible to conceive of the colonial and sexual categories of identity available to Victorian women who, through their writings, play out those categories in a network of available versions of both the