Abstract
This essay draws on the enduring nature of Maurice Barres's canonization of Marie Bashkirtseff as 'Notre-Dame du sleeping-car' in 1890 as the basis for an investigation into the configuration of genre, gender, and train travel in Marie Bashkirtseff's Journal . It argues that by following through the allusions to scandal that were deleted from the 1887 edition of the Journal , a link emerges between Bashkirtseff's precarious social status and her constant geographical mobility. Bashkirtseff's exclusion from those social sites that were constitutive of feminine gentility resulted in a pattern of train travel and diary-writing that unravelled both the logic of return underpinning the journal de voyage , and the protocols of femininity that propelled Bashkirtseff into diary-writing in the first place. It is argued that Bashkirtseff's simultaneous locomotive travel and assiduous diarizing makes her diary not just a source of data on train travel, but rather the point of intersection of two nineteenth-century technologies: the journal de jeune fille as the means by which young girls in the late nineteenth century whiled away the long years before marriage, and locomotion, as a means of shifting the subject through the landscape, more directly and far faster than before. Bashkirtseff draws on each in order to 'fill in' the other—diarizing as a means of whiling away the time she spends in the train, and train travel as the stuff of her diary entries.
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