Travelers' Tales: Empire, Victorian Travel, and the Spectacle of English Womanhood in Mary Kingsley'sTravels in West Africa

Abstract

Victorian travel has always been about the politics of leaving home. And in a twentieth-century critical universe shaped by some of the fundamental questions about the making of “home” and “away” and the invention of “self” and “other,” the field of Victorian travel has necessarily taken its place at the center of a critical discourse about the sometimes fabulous and often sordid details of the colonial encounter. The Western travelers of such encounters are intriguing figures if simply because, despite the multiple voyagers' mythologies that adhere to them, they do not escape the demands of the Victorian world at home or the intricate structures of power out of which this world is made. Rather, the English adventurers who ostensibly left England behind for the mangrove swamps and cannibal villages of Africa regularly reproduced in their travels some of the very same structures of power from which they were purportedly freed. In leaving home, the English traveler also quite literally rediscovered it.