Women writers and the literary journey, 1832-1844.

Abstract

This study explores four literary journeys written by American and British authors: Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes (1844), Harriet Martineau's Retrospect of Western Travel (1838), Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), and Caroline Kirkland's A New Home--Who'll Follow? (1839). In their appropriation of the forms of travel literature in the 1830s and 1840s, American and British women greatly altered its generic expectations. The literary journey, as constructed by these writers, is at once an autobiography, a social commentary, and a work of imagination. Generic heterogeneity operates in these texts as a mode of cultural dialogue, with "sympathy" as a means of bringing together contentious desires within the reader and within the cultural at large, as she perceives it. Cultural politics are self-consciously played out in these texts, as for many texts comprising the American Renaissance, in terms of generic difference. In the hands of these writers, the travel narrative incorporates other literary forms, especially narrative techniques associated with fiction. Travel writing situates the female subject (the "I" of the text) in relation to the social economy. The literary journey allowed women to enter political discourse and still speak specifically as women. These women's engagements with gender in relation to issues of race and class make their texts important for feminist criticism, for the study of the Victorian novel, and for American Studies in general.