Maiden Voyages (2 page)

These women—and many of the women in this volume—are the exceptions. I find it revealing that the metal bindings in women’s corsets were called “stays.” Someone who wore “stays” wouldn’t be going far. Nor would a woman with bound feet. While cloaked under the guise of the aesthetics of their times and cultures, the corseting in stays in the West and the binding of feet in the Orient were essentially ways of restricting women’s freedom of movement.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a woman writer who went to Turkey with her husband in 1716 and is best known for her letters, offered an interesting anecdote about stays. Upon visiting a Turkish bath in Sophia in which the women implored her to undress, Lady Montagu writes: “I was forced at last to open my shirt and shew them my stays; which satisfied them very well for, I saw, they believed I was so locked up in that machine that it was not in my power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband.”

It has been said that women don’t have what Baudelaire referred to as the “gout du gouffre,” the taste for the abyss. Even Louise Bogan has written that women have no wilderness in them. And Elizabeth Bishop in her poem “Questions of Travel” addresses the ambivalence about travel when she speaks about going “there,” to another place, while yearning to be “here,” or home. Surely such musings don’t indicate a serious impetus for travel or for serious travel writing by women.

Yet there have been many women who have traveled extensively and written seriously about their journeys. Their voices have not always been recognized and heard.

* * *

I began thinking about travel literature a number of years ago. In the mid-1980s the
New York Times Sunday Book Review
published a special summer issue on travel books. It reviewed some twenty-five or thirty recent volumes, virtually all written by men. It seemed strange to me that that issue had mentioned so few books by women.

I wondered why it was that the women who certainly traveled (I had traveled with many myself) weren’t writing about their journeys. Perhaps they didn’t travel as men did or perhaps they did not feel their experiences were comparable to those of men. Or perhaps they did write about them, but they were not finding their audience.

Women, I have come to feel, move through the world differently than men. The constraints and perils, the perceptions and complex emotions women journey with are different from those of men. The fear of rape, for example, whether crossing the Sahara or, as Robin Morgan writes in her excerpt here from
Demon Lover
, just crossing a city street at night, most dramatically affects the ways women move through the world. But there are other subtler forms of harassment. Christina Dodwell has to pretend she has fleas when a militiaman refuses to leave her campsite at night. In rural Japan a woman should hang her husband’s washing on a separate clothesline from her own impure clothing, which we see in Leila Philip’s account.

As I read through the literature of male travel writers in the 1980s, I found that their experiences did not correspond to or validate my own. Most explored a world that is essentially external and revealed only glimpses of who and what they are, whom they long for, whom they miss. The writers’ own inner workings in most cases (with marvelous exceptions such as Peter Matthiessen in
The Snow Leopard
, Henry Miller in
The Colossus of Maroussi
, and Colin Thubron in his travel books on China and Russia) are obscured.

Lawrence Durrell, describing Freya Stark, wrote, “A great traveller is a kind of introspective as she covers the ground outwardly, so she advances inwardly.” And indeed, for many women, the inner landscape is as important as the outer, the beholder as significant as the beheld. The landscape is shaped by the consciousness of the person who crosses
it. There is a dialogue between what is happening within and without. The presence of a loved one such as Isabella Bird’s “Jim” in the excerpt from A
Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains
or the ache of a painful absence in the case of Mary Wollstonecraft’s poignant longing for her daughter as she journeys through Scandinavia are all part of a woman’s experience. What is it like to fall in love or have to talk your way out of a difficult, sexually threatening situation. Often they bear witness to the experiences of women in different cultures; for instance, Mrs. Bridges sympathizes with the plight of Mormon women, and Anna Leonowens recounts the abuse endured by the women of the harem in Siam.

“I am a connoisseur of roads,” the actor River Phoenix says in the film
My Own Private Idaho
. But for women perhaps the roads are different. The reality of a woman on the road is often a personal reality. This does not mean that the woman traveler is not politically aware, historically astute, or in touch with the customs and language of the place. But it does mean that a woman cannot travel and not be aware of her body and the limitations her sex presents. Isabelle Eberhardt, as well as Sarah Hobson, traveled incognito, disguised as men. Eliza Farnham, crossing the American frontier in 1852, put her trunk and body against her door to keep a man out of the room in which she was bathing. And Kali (Gwendolyn MacEwen) in “The Holyland Buffet” tells a contemporary story of being stoned by Arab boys who think she is a sabra and not “a female tourist traveling alone.”

Gender often forms a bond between women travelers. Women confide in other women. They tell one another the secrets of their cycles, their children, their husbands, their lovers, the difficulties of their lives. They do this in bathrooms, on airplanes, and on the road, often with perfect strangers. In this, they are secret sharers. They may not hunt or fish together, but they can talk about a miscarriage and a miserable life as the Iranian woman does to Sarah Hobson when she realizes Hobson is a young woman, not a young man.

Our goal in making the selections gathered here was to find the best writing about travel by women. Perhaps there are women who have
scaled greater heights, delved deeper into jungles, or were more renowned, but our main concerns were the quality of the writing and the vision behind that writing. At the same time, we wanted to assemble a significant body of work, representative of women and their journeys and providing examples of early and recent feminist travel literature.

Some of these women are observers of the world in which they wander. Their writings are rich in description, remarkable in detail. Mary McCarthy conveys the vitality of Florence while Willa Cather’s essay on Lavandou foreshadows her descriptions of the French countryside in later novels. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s excerpt about the spiritual village of San Gimignano is a virtual love song. In M.F.K. Fisher’s sensual portrayal of Dijon one can literally smell the mustard in the street. Others are more active as participants in the culture they are visiting, such as Leila Philip, as she harvests rice with chiding Japanese women, or Emily Carr, as she wins the respect and trust of the female chieftain of an Indian village in northern Canada where she has gone to do paintings of the unique totem poles of the region.

Often they are storytellers, weaving tales about the people they encounter. We find ourselves moved by the stories they told which we felt grew out of their sensibilities as women: Flora Tristan’s story of the lovelorn ship’s commander (a Marquezian character if there ever was one), separated from his beloved wife for years at a time as a result of a prenuptial promise exacted by his father-in-law; Mildred Cable and Francesca French’s anecdote about the dissident Chinese fugitive in Mongolia who surreptitiously makes inquiries after his family; and Anna Leonowens’s (best known as Anna from
The King and I
) tale of a child scorned and a mother flogged, despite the child’s pleas, under the authoritarian rule of the King of Siam.

In some cases gender is transcended, as in the remarkable story of Alexandra David-Neel who saves herself and her adopted son from freezing to death on a wintry Tibetan plain by raising her body temperature through the
thumo reskiang
practice, in the acerbic wit of Freya Stark, and in the raw courage of Dervla Murphy or Christina Dodwell. In some cases these women assumed leadership roles traditionally attributed to men. In 1894 Isabella Bird became the first female
member of the Royal Geographical Society. Mary Kingsley and Kate Marsden would follow. Gertrude Bell became the leading Middle East expert, with T. E. Lawrence, in Baghdad for the British Empire.

Perhaps they went as free spirits, as Maud Parrish went with banjo to Alaska. Perhaps the goal was to gaze into Persian gardens as it was for Vita Sackville-West, or to ride the boxcars, hoboing it across America as Box-Car Bertha did. But in each of these selections, a mosaic of the experiences of women on the road is revealed. In each case, the vision is personal and unique.

Each of these women had a reason for going. Some, such as the Lady Travelers, Mary Kingsley and Isabella Bird, went as Mabel Sharman Crawford says in her extremely progressive “Plea for Lady Tourists,” because they were “women of independent means and without domestic ties.” Some, such as Lady Montagu or Isak Dinesen, were accompanying their husbands; others, such as Maud Parrish, were running away from domestic entanglements. Kate Marsden, Mildred Cable, and Francesca French went as missionaries.

Others seem to be fleeing: Isabella Bird was told that travel would help her back troubles and she never stopped moving after that while Isabelle Eberhardt fled an unhappy aristocratic home even to the point of relinquishing her birthright. Both Mary Kingsley and Dervla Murphy set out upon their journeys after the death of their ailing parents whom they had nursed for years. After suffering extreme personal loss (the death of her husband and sons), Ethel Tweedie began to travel and write. Whether it is curiosity about the world or escape from personal tragedy, the women here approach their journeys with wit, intelligence, compassion, and empathy for the lives of others.

For some of these writers, the experience of writing from “away” seems to have produced their greatest masterpieces. Lady Montagu was a prolific writer of prose and poetry (she is the only English-language woman poet of the eighteenth century who has a critical biography written about her), yet the book of hers that has remained in print since it was written is the collection of her letters from Turkey. When Mary Shelley (the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft) and her husband, the Romantic poet, Percy Shelley, went to Italy, they took with them one book—Mary Wollstonecraft’s travels in Scandinavia.
Though Isak Dinesen and Rebecca West were famous writers of fiction in their own time, the books that are considered their masterworks are their writings on Africa and Yugoslavia, respectively. We have also chosen writers who wouldn’t be considered travel writers per se—Annie Dillard and Joan Didion, for example—but whose sense of place serves as a catalyst to broader musings about the world.

Most of the women in this volume represent what as I have said above Crawford refers to as a “woman of independent means and without domestic ties.” The early women travelers were women of the upper classes in European society, invariably white and privileged. This trend has not shifted greatly in the past two hundred years as we are left with the legacy of colonialism. Travel literature by both men and women awaits its full range of multicultural voices and perspectives. Yet as feminists the writers gathered here hold surprisingly progressive views considering the times in which they wrote and lived. It is hard not to be amazed by Lady Montagu’s sense that the Turkish woman is the freest in the world because she can hide behind her veil and move about as she wishes, including anonymous rendezvous with her lover. Or Mrs. Tweedie’s plea for the elimination of the sidesaddle on the grounds that it is a preposterous invention, bad for women’s health and ill-suited for serious riding. Or Mrs. Bridges’ indignation at polygamy in America.

We have tried to assemble a diverse body of work that charts feminism, over close to three hundred years, through women and their journeys. In some cases—Maud Parrish and Vivienne DeWatteville, for example—the only traces of themselves these women left behind was their travel writing and it was difficult, therefore, to provide biographical information about them. For various reasons, we decided not to include involuntary travel. It would have seemed casual—disrespectful, even—to juxtapose slave narratives, pioneer literature, and war stories of flight and displacement with accounts of deserts crossed, swamps forded, and mountains climbed by choice.

Our criteria were very specific and in some cases we opted not to include writers who are well known for their travel writing because their views or experiences did not seem appropriate to the goal of this anthology. We regret the absence of more multicultural voices. It is our
hope that in the future both the gender and racial gaps will be bridged, but for now the voices we present are those we found.

Since all travel is about return as well as departure, I go back to the beginning and John Gardner’s premise that there are only two plots in literature. From Penelope to the present, women have waited—for a phone call, a proposal, or the return of the prodigal man from sea or war or a business trip. To wait like patients for a doctor, commuters for buses, prisoners for parole, is in a sense to be powerless. It is our hope that this volume will make it clear that both plots are available to women. If we grow weary of waiting, we can go on a journey. We can be the stranger who comes to town.

Mary Morris

(1689–1762)