Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843 ed. by Misty Krueger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843 ed. by Misty Krueger Alison Tracy Hale (bio) Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843 misty krueger, editor Bucknell University Press, 2021 234 pp. Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843 relocates its peripatetic female subjects from the periphery to the center of our vision in order to expand our generic and geographical horizons. The ten essays assembled here traverse the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth and consider genres from natural science to letters to fiction and regions from Peru to Newfoundland to Calcutta. They address a rich variety of primary sources featuring historical and fictional women whose experiences enlarge our sense of the possibilities transatlantic journeys provided for women's identity, for their interpretations of new cultures and interventions into their own, and for the scope of what might constitute a "feminine" sphere. Several decades in, twenty-first-century literary and historical studies continue to shift away from the kinds of nation-state focused approaches that dominated much of twentieth-century scholarship, embracing transnational texts, figures, and methodologies. Krueger's explicit purpose here is to center transatlantic movement by women, to "trace accounts of women's encounters in environments foreign to them and with people seemingly unlike themselves" (16). Atlantic travels provided space and occasion for new modes of acting in the world; European women's out-sider status in the far-flung locations of empire often served as a vantage point from which to challenge established systems and values. Diana Epelbaum's "'Little Atlas': Global Travel and Local Preservation in Maria Sibylla Merian's The Metamorphoses of the Insects of Surinam" considers the German-born entomologist's illustrations, which emphasize the magnificent fecundity of Surinam's local environments. Her folio-sized volume, [End Page 259] which featured her images and descriptions of Surinam's species, expands the parameters of seventeenth-century natural history practice by deconstructing established distinctions between history, science, and narrative. As Epelbaum notes, The Metamorphosis gained Merian a presence in the Royal Society journals, yet her work challenged the epistemological foundations of the practices the Society espoused. Her "proto-ecological" illustrations of Surinam's flora and fauna enact the tensions of globalization; her insistence on local context resists and reinforces the universalizing tendencies of the masculine, colonial taxonomic project in which she participated. Anna Maria Falconbridge's epistolary narrative Two Voyages to Sierra Leone (1794) similarly stretches generic boundaries, offering "an early model for imagining how climate could function as an instrument of state violence, where environments are used to discipline or control unwanted populations" (50). Falconbridge, an apologist for the necessity of slavery, was moved to sympathy by the sight of suffering Black settlers; her narrative indicts the British bureaucracy whose negligence and incompetence intensified their plight. Not all cultural critiques emanated from women of relative privilege; in "Busty Buccaneers and Sapphic Swashbucklers on the High Seas," Ula Lukszo Klein explores the exploits of eighteenth-century female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, whose trial transcripts served as material for their initial appearance in Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724). Assuming male garb, these women navigated the interstices between piracy and legitimacy and masculinity and femininity. Their highseas transgressions, what Klein calls their "outlaw mobility," allowed them new modes of economic and erotic agency. Alongside discussions of literary texts one might expect to encounter in a volume dedicated to women travelers—Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), Unca Eliza Winkfield's The Female American (1767), Samuel Jackson Pratt's Emma Corbett (1780), Leonora Sansay's The Secret History (1808)—additional essays explore eyewitness travel accounts of Peru and Mexico by Frances ("Fanny") Erskine Inglis Calderón de la Barca and Flora Tristan, respectively, as well as epistolary narratives both autobiographical and fictional. The range of primary sources asserts a larger scope for what might count as "feminine discourse," affirming that women of the transatlantic world occupied themselves with concerns that extended well [End Page 260] beyond their own comfort and domestic and familial situations. As naturalists, political critics, pirates, colonizers, and revolutionaries, the women at the center of these essays unsettle masculine empiricist agendas, seek common...