1. Travel Writing and Gender
Prepared by
Sara Vahabi

2. Contents
• Inventing an Identity
• Fictionalising Processes
• Journeys to Self-awareness
• Conclusion

3. Inventing an Identity
the difference ability to break free
between their lives from the constraints
at home and life on of contemporary
the road society
Women could find
escape through
travel

4. • Isabella Bird
• Mary Kingsley
• Lady Hester Stanhope
Travel for some women, it seems, may have offered a means of
 redefining themselves,
 assuming a different persona and
 becoming someone who did not exist at home.

5. Many travel writers, men and women, have invented
themselves in a way always claiming to be writing in
a spirit of ‘authenticity’ yet fictionalising their
experiences by writing themselves as a character
into the account of their travels.

6. Fictionalising Processes
In the 20th century, evidence of a change in the construction
of travel narratives can clearly be seen in stylistic terms.
Though the I-narrator still occupies a dominant position, the
increasing use of dialogue in travel writing has further
closed the gap between travel account and fiction, making
the travel text resemble the novel much more closely.
The protagonist engages in conversations that introduce a
rang of other characters into the narrative, and the reader
is expected to believe that such conversations which
apparently transcend any language barrier are recorded
rather than invented.

7. • Rosita Forbes
The Secret of Sahara: Kufara (1921)
Gypsy in the Sun (1944)
• Gertrude Bell
• Freya Stark

8. Journeys to Self-awareness
Women’s travel writing in the late 20th century tends to focus
more on the relationship between the individual and the
societies through which she travels.
Ecological questions, world poverty, and the future of the planet
occupy writers such as Dervla Murphy.

9. Powerful and original voices emerged during the 1990s;
Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica
(1997) represents another strand of women’s travel
writing that has grown in importance in the 20th
century: the journey that leads to greater self-
awareness and takes the reader simultaneously on
that journey.

10. • The works of Bell or Stark, reflect personal, social
and political changes, so that the journeys they
recount are both inner and outer journeys, toward
greater self-awareness as well as greater knowledge
gained through experience.
• Sara Wheeler’s book goes a stage further, and
recounts a journey not only in terms of time and
place, but also in terms of gender relation.

11. Jan Morris
The assumptions about travel writing and gender are most seriously challenged in
her works.
Began her writing career as James.
Published successful books between 1956-1972.
In 1972 had sex-change operation.
She did not use the journey as a pretext for reinventing herself or for writing
autobiography.
Her writing challenges the idea of binary opposition- between
Home and other
Present and past
Masculine and feminine.
She focuses on the relationship between the travel writer as individual and the
space in which she moves. Everything else is inessential.

12. Conclusion
The 19th century saw a proliferation of travel accounts
by male writers that overtly sexualised whole areas
of the globe, contrasting the ‘masculine’ northern
regions with the softer, eroticised, feminine Orient.
This distinction is less apparent in women travel
writers.

13. The ambiguous attitudes and complex self-
representation reflected in the works of Isabella
Bird, May French-Sheldon, Mrs Alec-Tweedie and
countless others mirror the difficulties for women
generally of manoeuvring between the public and
private spheres in the age of empire.

14. The search for self-expression and the reformulation of
identity are common elements in the work of many
of the travellers discussed in this presentation.
but
Process of fictionalisation are also common in the work
of many male travel writers.