Travel and Material Culture: Commodity, Currency, and Destabilised Meaning in Women's Home Tour Writing

Abstract

This study explores the influence of material culture on patterns of identity construction within eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century home tour travel writing by women. Considering the ways in which material goods were used to promote and maintain travellers' own identities, and to position the peoples encountered in the spaces of travel, it is nevertheless argued that they frequently complicate and challenge, rather than reinforce, definitive social and cultural hierarchies. The fact that travellers in Britain engage with material culture in much the same way as those abroad—as is evidenced in the discursive similarity between the home tour narratives considered here and the colonial travel texts produced in a later period—raises important questions for the way in which we consider the notion of ‘foreignness’ in relation to travel in this period. Likewise, the examples here challenge traditional views of eighteenth-century women's role in material culture as merely one of consumption, as opposed to the more positive and creative masculine act of production. The shifting meanings of objects in women's home tour travel narratives engender a positive critique of commonly held assumptions regarding the ways in which we read gender, class, national and regional difference through the material.