Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

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Appropriately, some of the best recent criticism
of travel writing comes from geographers.
Writing Women and Space: Colonial
and Postcolonial Geographies, eds. Alison
Blunt and Gillian Rose (Guilford, n.p.)
includes sections on travel in West Africa
and Australia, and on the "imagined geographies"
of WWII women, as well as theoretical
papers exploring aspects of ecology,
postcolonial positionality, and the interface
between geography and art. William W.
Stowe's Going Abroad: European Travel in
Nineteenth-Century American Culture
(Princeton U, n.p.) is an essentially conventional
if often enjoyable reading of canonical
American writers like Emerson, Fuller,
and Twain spruced up with references to
matters of gender, class, race, and empowerment,
terms which are here rarely developed
beyond somewhat gratuitous clichés.
The book has an annoying tendency to
claim goals quite different from its predecessors
only to confirm their well-known
findings. Karen R. Lawrence's Penelope
Voyages: Women and Travel in the British
Literary Tradition (Cornell U, n.p.) takes a
broad-minded view of its subject both historically
and generically speaking.
Beginning with readings of Margaret
Cavendish and Fanny Burney, Lawrence
also considers Wollstonecraft, Kingsley,
Sarah Lee, Virginia Woolf, Brooke-Rose
and Brophy. Her focus is a variation on
Mary Jacobus's question "Can women
adapt traditionally male dominated modes
of writing and analysis to the articulation
of female oppression and desire?" While
this premise is nothing new, the book at its
best presents careful readings of female
travel narrative, both actual and fictional,
against the grain of conventional male genres.
In so doing, it offers nuanced alternatives
to some feminists' tendency to
homogenize women's travel narratives into
masculinized adventure stories. Despite a
somewhat intrusive handling of existent
criticism, Lawrence tells an eloquent, informative
story, and even her footnotes are
worth studying. Quoting Gilles Deleuze,
Ali Behdad's Belated Travellers: Orientalism
in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Duke U,
n.p.) reads a variety of orientalist texts
(travel-writing, tourist guides, cover illustrations)
from a variety of angles, using
anthropology, literary theory, history, philosophy,
and psychoanalysis as a "'box of
tools' to be used only when they prove useful."
Particularly thought-provoking is
Behdad's reading of Anne and Wilfrid
Blunt's collaborative work. Female notetaker
and male conceptualizer produce a
collusive "shadow-text," in which one discursive
practice lends authority to the
other.
One gets rather tired of the perennially
coy titles gracing studies and anthologies of
women's travel writing. Its title notwithstanding,
many of the excerpts in Anne
Robinson's Unsuitable for Ladies: An
Anthology of Women Travellers (Oxford U,
n.p.) (following Robinson's earlier annotated
bibliography Wayward Women) present
extraordinarily courageous,
resourceful women with not a shred of
dilettantism about them. Like most
anthologies, Writing Away: The PEN
Canada Travel Anthology, ed. Constance
Rooke (McClelland and Stewart, $19.99)
has some very good pieces and some weak
ones. Atwood is as comical as ever; Munro
presents a haunting parable of death
deferred, and Rohinton Mistry describes a
hilarious search for a "wee bust" of Robert
Louis Stevenson in Edinburgh's museums
and souvenir shops. Greatly disappointing
is Nicole Brossard's fuzzy piece on Buenos
Aires; it doesn't help much that she seems
dissatisfied with it herself. A book on
tuberculosis may be a surprising source on
travel writing, but Sheila M. Rothman's
excellent Living in the Shadow of Death:
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