Embedded Files
Keynote Speaker
Julia Kuehn, Professor of English Literature, The University of Hong Kong
“A Vision for an Artist – a female artist”: Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann and the Traditions of Middle Eastern Travels and Popular Representations of the Harem
In 1906, a young tourist in Constantinople, Virginia Stephen, described her impression of the Hagia Sophia thus in her diary: ‘Here was St. Sophia; here was I, with one brain 2 eyes, legs & arms in proportion, set down to appreciate it’. But, she admits, her experience there is ‘fragmentary & inconsequent; as thus – strange rays of light, octagonal & colourless; windows without stained glass; no screen across the church; & was it a church?’
Two things are striking here: the future Mrs. Woolf’s bodily, disorienting encounter with alterity and the way in which she is trying to translate simple visual impressions into verbal images, which would bring to life something residual in the reader. Here, she amplifies and heightens odd angles and relations which will increasingly, and both in her youthful diary and her future novelistic oeuvre, move away from the object under contemplation and into the metaphorical and abstract. For a writer building up towards a watershed moment she would later locate ‘on or around December 1910’ when human character, allegedly, changed, this move would also be away from reason and realism into the modernist realms of sensation, ambiguity, and artistic experimentation.
This talk may end with Woolf, but it begins with earlier female travellers in Turkey, and their observations. From Mary Montagu, Elisabeth Lady Craven, Emmeline Lott, Julia Pardoe, Mary Lucy Garnett, via E.C.L. Baillie, Fanny Janet Blunt, Emilia Bithynia Hornby, Marianne Young Postans, Frances Minto Eliot, and to Mary Adelaide Walker, Jane Ely, Mary Dawson Damer and Annie Harvey, British women made it not only to Constantinople but also into the harems. The list is long, and Billie Melman did an extraordinary job in Women’s Orients (1992) in excavating and discussing many of their travelogues. Woolf, too, was quite aware that she stood in a long, indeed very long, tradition of women travellers in Constantinople, so much so that she guessed there would ‘no longer [be] any genuine interest’ in the depictions she could provide.
While this talk aims to contextualize the tradition of Victorian women travellers’ Constantinople and harem depictions (with some detours into popular novels), it will primarily focus on a lesser-known traveller and artist, German-Polish-Danish painter Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann (1819-81). I will use Jerichau’s documentation and imaginative renderings of Stamboul and its public and private spaces, as she relates them in her travelogue Brogede Rejsebilleder (Motley Images of Travel, 1881), and her pictorial representations to think about the travelogue’s poetics and to open up a discussion about Victorian and Orientalist popularity, the gendering of travel writing, and recent theoretical moves in travel writing and mobility studies.
Works Cited:
Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918. Sexuality, Religion and Work. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992.
Virginia Woolf. A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909. Ed. Mitchell A. Leaska. San Diego et al: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.
Claudia Capancioni (Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK)
“A ‘dragoman’ of all the languages in the world": Lucie Duff Gordon’s transnational literacy
My contribution investigates how Lucie Duff Gordon’s translational literacy shaped her intercultural life in Southern Egypt, where she relocated in 1862 in search of a warm and dry climate to recover from tuberculosis. By then, she had a distinguished career as a translator. An acute cultural mediator, on the Nile she established an intercultural, multilingual home that challenged both nineteenth-century British and Egyptian attitudes. Her Letters from Egypt (1865) remains remarkable because her writing does not dwell on her difficult health conditions but affirms her ability to communicate and negotiate across languages and cultures. Her correspondence, I argue, brings to light those intellectual and linguistic talents, which often singled her out in the Victorian era and enabled her to embark on original publishing projects built on her perspicacious assessment of her Victorian British readership. By applying translation as “a mode of thinking and seeing the world” (Bertacco and Vallorani 2021, 5), I examine how, in Luxor, Duff Gordon negotiated a new life as an intercultural agent.
Ross Conway (University of Birmingham, UK)
Harriet Martineau: Eastern Life: Present and Past. Hair, heads and keepsakes
Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), now best known for her role in the development of sociology as an academic field, experimented in Egyptology on a trip to Egypt, Palestine and Syria between November 1846 and June 1847. On this trip, financed by her friends and companions, Mr and Mrs Yates, Martineau developed her anti-religious philosophy and recorded what she saw in her journal, which she published as a travelogue in 1848. The travelogue, Eastern Life: Present and Past, was written to appeal to those who were unfamiliar with or were unable to afford the luxury of travelling to Egypt themselves. Martineau supported the protection of Egypt’s ancient heritage while simultaneously taking part in the disturbance and desecration of ancient Egyptian bodies. Travelling and writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Martineau is contributing to a culture of orientalism and fetishization of the ancient East, particularly with her interest in hair. As a woman with hearing and olfactory impairments travelling to Egypt, Martineau relied on her other senses – especially haptic and visual – to engage with the East. This tactile engagement led her to describe ancient Egyptian bodies in terms of their texture, and this intimacy resulted in her removing part of the Egyptian body to England and gifting it to her young nephew in 1871. Throughout the rest of her life, Martineau maintains an interest in ancient Egypt for both its complex and enlightening mythology as well as for Egypt as a commodity. The ancient East became increasingly accessible to people who would not have been able to travel otherwise (literally or though fiction and museums). Bitesize pieces of ancient Egyptian heritage were packaged away, shipped to Britain and were kept in museums and private collections: the world of ancient Egypt was sculpted and reimagined by travellers throughout the nineteenth century.
Helena Esser (Independent Scholar, Germany)
Weirdly Beautiful: Mary Crawford Fraser’s Japan
In the Western Oriental imagination, Japan held a special position as both an unsullied, medieval-esque fairyland and an Other Empire mirroring Victorian values and social hierarchies. It was constructed as ‘an aestheticized exception to various taxonomies of race, gender, nation, ethnicity, modernity and culture’ (Lavery 2019: x). As a space present in the Victorian popular imagination through quaintly exquisite aesthetics — eccentric, yet safely similar — and with no dangerous terrain, hostile fauna or ‘savage’ population to contend with, it was thus deemed benign and accepting especially for female travellers (Sterry 2009: 13). Female travel-writers such as Mary Crawford Fraser (also Mrs Hugh Fraser), wife of the head of the British Legation in Tokyo from 1889 to 1894, were therefore uniquely placed to observe British-Japanese relations, Japanese high society, and Meiji politics from a position of authority and authenticity. This paper examines how Fraser negotiates her position as female writer and witness to a rapidly modernising nation entering the global playing field and ultimately on the rise towards imperial power of its own. In A Diplomat’s Wife in Japan (1899), Fraser’s entertaining, vivid narrative voice caters to an aesthetic Victorian popular imaginary of Japan as supremely beautiful yet unintelligible and at once deeply cultured and ahistorical, but she also skilfully leverages that perception in order to speak with authority about both social and political concerns. Her travelogue discusses such complex matters as treaty negotiations, official ceremony, and nationalist hostilities as well as sympathetically portrays more female-aligned topics, like Japanese gender roles, life at court, childcare, charity, or domestic organisation, thus delivering important historical insights into Meiji politics from a unique, female perspective — all of which complicate a simplistic Orientalist imaginary of Japan.
Silvia Granata (University of Pavia, Italy)
Dangerous Encounters:
Women Travellers and Unwanted Proximity in Late Nineteenth-Century China
After the progressive opening of China which followed the two Opium Wars, a growing number of British travellers could visit, explore and describe a place that had long been considered as the ultimate mystery – a picturesque, fascinating and immensely vast country with a millenarian (if still somewhat elusive) culture. Victorian imaginings of China pivoted on two focal points, strictly related to each other: it was often seen as a ‘sleeping giant’ still stuck in the past (and thus in need of the ‘modernization’ Westerners could bring), but also as a site of endless commercial opportunities, a potential dreamland for British merchants and traders. Yet, the opening of China, and the means used to achieve it, caused heated debates in Parliament and in the popular press, a debate in which travelogues participated by providing different views of the country itself, its culture and inhabitants, for the benefit and instruction of readers at home. Descriptions of the Chinese often exploited stereotypes – travellers characterised them as a sober, serious, hard-working people, remarkably indifferent to fatigue and pain – which could encourage those who wanted to invest in the country. On the other hand, however, in some areas of China anti-foreigner feelings grew very strong, generating unwanted attentions and even physical threats, as described by both Isabella Bird in The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899) and Alicia Little in Intimate China (1899). These incidents were highly sensational – a woman attacked by a mob could not fail to impress readers and provide an exciting counterpoint to more descriptive passages – but also quite problematic to relate and to explain: my paper will explore how the two writers, who had remarkably different outlooks, sensibilities and political agendas, depicted these episodes within their texts, and how they tried to make sense of them.
Lalit Kumar (University of Delhi, India)
Dilemma of Private v/s Public, and Feminism v/s Femininity: Gendered Roles of a ‘Helpmeet’ in Isabella Fane’s Miss Fane in India
The manifold hinges of the power relations exercised through the social, political and cultural exchanges, populate the narratives written or maintained by Victorian women in colonial India. The writings of white women were not always approached as writings for the strengthening of the Empire, owing to their limited and private scope. However, a revised assessment of these writings enables us to learn about the contact between the colonisers and the inhabitants of the colonies, on numerous fronts. Isabella Fane stayed in India as a ‘helpmeet’ to her father, in pre-mutiny colonial India, a collection of her letters, composed in the late 1830s, has been published by John Pemble, titled Miss Fane in India (1985). As her letters escaped the then contemporary censorship vis-a-vis gender constraint in Colonial India, we find mentions of the multidirectional gaze that looks inward into the Colonisers household and outward into the colonised native. In descriptions of her daily routine and of occasional gatherings, the conflicted coupling of imperial authority and subordinate gender is visible. The paper studies the apparent and constant tussle between the feminine expectations from a ‘helpmeet’ and Fane who, through a private realm of her personal letters, is unapologetic and takes up an agency and belies the expectations of Victorian femininity in her writings. The personally shared exaltation in her counter-narrative is juxtaposed with the guilt-conscience, which revolves around the transgression she practises in the letters. The existence of conflictual discourses of race, gender and class builds many micro-narratives under the bigger epoch of colonialism and hints at the constitutive contradictions at play. Fane’s letters also reinforce the value of the archives and indicate new findings to be made in Colonial women writing.
Efterpi Mitsi (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece)
Women Writers and the Marketing of Modern Greece in Victorian Periodicals
In the late nineteenth century, stories about Greece abound in Victorian popular literature, in fiction, essays and travelogues. Many of these stories are published by women authors in popular periodicals addressing women readers like Women’s Penny Paper, Woman’s World and The Girl’s Own Paper. Elizabeth Mayhew Edmonds (the travel writer, poet and translator of Modern Greek literature with over thirty publications on Greek themes), the novelist and suffragist Isabella Mayo, and the folklorist Lucy Garnett, all of whom travelled to Greece, not only feature contemporary Greek women in their writing but also highlight the role of women in the Greek War of Independence of the 1820s, relating the achievements of Greek heroines to the ‘woman question’ and to Victorian debates on femininity. Edmonds and Mayo return to the Greek War of Independence as an access point to the country’s modernity and reflect on the legacy of its women warriors, while Garnett explores women’s lives, customs, and social roles at the threshold between East and West, tradition and modernity, a project culminating with her ethnographic and folklore books on Modern Greeks at the turn of the century. Moreover, their perspective on the country challenges the problematic position of Modern Greece divided between its “classical” past and “oriental” present in the discourses of Victorian Hellenism, showing their larger engagement with gender, national and imperial politics. Focusing on representative short essays by Edmonds, Mayo, and Garnett appearing in the popular press from the late 1880s to the 1890s, this paper argues that by publishing their views on Greek women in the cheaper form of magazines and journals, these Victorian authors introduced the country to a new audience, popularizing and marketing Greece.
Rebecca Nesvet (University of Wisconsin, US)
G.W.M. Reynolds’s Women in India: The Case of THE SEPOYS, OR HIGHLAND JESSIE (1858)
Louis James and Anne Humpherys have pointed out the influence of novelist, journalist, and penny press magnate George W.M. Reynolds (1814-79) on Indian fiction, while more recent critics such as Suchata Bhattacharya have examined Reynolds's circulation in the Indian subcontinent in translation. Scholars have also identified internationalist imperatives in Reynolds's radicalism, particularly in the 1850s. My paper complicates these positions by looking at how James Malcolm Rymer (1814-84), a prominent writer of penny "bloods" and "dreadfuls" who wrote for Reynolds's MISCELLANY as "M.J. Errym," writes about women, colonialism, and anti-colonial resistance in the Indian subcontinent. One of "Errym's" more popular REYNOLDS'S MISCELLANY serials, THE SEPOYS, OR, HIGHLAND JESSIE, A TALE OF THE PRESENT INDIAN REVOLT (1858) reinvents the pseudohistorical Scottish colonialist heroine Jessie Brown as a gun-toting, kilt-wearing colonial warrioress, a kind of Victorian Amazon who is able to transgress gender norms in the interests of patriotism, imperialism, and protection of both English and Indian women of considerably less agency. In fact, while in THE SEPOYS Rymer accuses the British nabobs of exploiting plebeian Indians, he also attempts to discredit the Rebellion by depicting British female victims with sublime pathos reminiscent of the arch-conservative Edmund Burke's REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE's portrait of Marie Antoinette, a tactic that makes Rymer’s Jessie's agency all the more extraordinary. Reynolds hired Rymer to write for his MISCELLANY on a regular basis, even advertising "Errym" as "exclusive" to the MISCELLANY. Therefore, Rymer's imperialist fantasies are as significant an expression of Reynolds's values as his own compositions.
Giulia Nonno (G. d’Annunzio University, Italy)
European Women Travellers to the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula
The main theme of this work is the women's travel literature with a focus on stories of travelling to the Middle East, the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula. This study uses an explorative research method, examining travel diaries written by Italian and English women during the XIX century, to analyse their personal impressions and their approach to Arabic language and culture that gave us a new perspective of these lands. Among the travel diaries analysed, which represent the first female testimonies about the Middle East, those of Amalia Nizzoli, Cristina di Belgioioso and Lucie Duff Gordon highlight the condition in which women during XIX lived in the Middle East and their customs and habits are described in detail. On the other hand these themes are marginal or do not appear at all in the stories written by Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark and Vittoria Alliata, in these cases the attention is focused on other aspects of oriental culture, such as socio-political or religious. At the end of the work a particular attention is dedicated to the figure of Agatha Christie, a well-known writer of detective novels, most of them with an exotic setting to prove the love and fascination for the Arabic world. The interesting aspect of the entire work carried out was the interdisciplinary journey. Searching through their lives and analysing their travel reports, as real explorers of Middle Eastern environments, their contribution in the geographical, sociological, political and ethnographic world comes to light. Specifically, the analysis of travel from a female point of view shows that this practice has been fundamental for the woman over time, as it has helped to define her role in today's society.
Muireann O’Cinneide (National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland)
“East and West is the difference”: Epistemological Encounters in Lucie Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt, 1863–1865
My proposed paper centres on the epistemological encounter that takes place between the travel writer Lucie Duff Gordon and the socio-political urban and rural worlds of 1860s Egypt. Lucie Duff Gordon, wife of a baronet, cousin of Harriet Martineau, and a habituée of London’s literary circles, travelled first to South Africa, then to Egypt, trying to stave off consumption. Her Letters from Egypt, 1863–1865 was published in June 1865 and gained considerable popular success with a British reading public eager for insights into an Egypt perceived as a rapidly modernising, rapidly militarising force within the declining Ottoman Empire and its provinces. In her letters, Duff Gordon seeks to carve out a distinctive mode of epistemological authority, rooted in distinguishing her own experientially informed perception from the artificially clouded gazes of other European travellers. “East and West is the difference, not Muslim and Christian. As to that difference I could tell volumes”, she declares confidently (Duff Gordon 177). My paper explores the tensions between Duff Gordon’s epistemological fantasy of the truly inducted Western traveller’s disembodied gaze, and her letters’ exploration of the grounding realities of physical vulnerability. Driven to her Eastern encounters by ill health, Duff Gordon’s letters both deny and foreground her ailing body, and the potentially curative effects of her encounters with Egyptian air, waters, and terrains, as the site of her experiential authority. Ultimately, I argue, Duff Gordon’s claim to epistemological individuality – her access to perceptions about the East implicitly (or explicitly) denied to other travellers – is also a claim to a mode of socio-political influence, as her seemingly intimate familial communications become in their writing, dissemination, and eventual publication a highly politicised call for the consolidation and extension of British control in Egypt.
Greta Perletti (University of Trento, Italy)
“Be Still and Listen”: Encountering and Understanding the East in Margaret Harkness’s Writings
This paper aims to argue that encountering and understanding the East prove to be fundamental aspects of Margaret Harkness’s writings. The author of a wide variety of popular fictional as well as of journalistic writings (with the pseudonym “John Law”), Harkness was considered for many years mainly as a socialist writer. However, the considerable scholarly attention that Harkness has received in recent years has uncovered new details about her travels to Australia and India and about her work as a writer there. What seems to be distinctive (and intriguing) about Harkness’s experience with the East is that it begins well before she embarks on a steamer. Living and working in the East-End slums in the late 1880s – the place that Henry Mayhew had defined as an ‘undiscovered country’ – Harkness’s encounter with the heterogenous diversity of the Eastern inhabitants of London results in the fascinating fictional style that dominates her popular slum trilogy (A City Girl, Out of Work, Captain Lobe: A Story of the Salvation Army), with its hybrid combination of fiction and journalism, the strange cast of ‘types’ and the peculiar use of the narrator-‘listener’. Taking its cue from these popular novels, this paper intends to investigate the extent to which the experience with the East of London has had a formative influence on Harkness’s perception of (and writing about) the East that she encounters in India later in her life. In particular, I would like to argue that in the travelogues Glimpses of Hidden India (1909) and Modern Hyderabad (1914) Harkness further explores genre hybridity, sketchy characterization and the narrator’s role as ‘listener’ in order to resist the temptation of mapping and classifying Eastern identities, to criticize imperialist practices and to re-think racial and gender stereotypes. While Lisa Robertson and Flore Janssen rightly point out that Harkness’s adventurous and successful life forces us to revise some of the assumptions about the possibilities open to Victorian unmarried women, her works also demonstrate the centrality of thinking about the East for the development of her radical and innovative writing.
Kathleen Sheppard (Missouri University of Science and Technology, US)
From Taking the Airs to Taking the Artifacts: Egypt as a Health Resort and the History of Egyptology
For centuries, European travelers sailed up the Nile in search of warm, dry air to cure their various ailments, from broken hearts and broken bones, to weak lungs and bad weather. Many of these lung-trippers collected antiquities, and many of them were women. Lucie Duff Gordon’s famous Letters from Egypt were written from 1862 to 1869, while she convalesced in Egypt, trying to ease her tuberculosis symptoms. The letters, first published in 1865, became a best-seller back home in Britain and brought countless visitors to Luxor during and after her life. As a novelist, Amelia Edwards read these letters and was spurred—not just Duff Gordon’s accounts, but also by the rain in France—to go to Egypt and sail up the Nile just four years after Duff Gordon’s death. Edwards’ time in Egypt produced the best-selling travelogue, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, which would shift Egyptology into a new era of excavation and professionalization. Margaret Benson had spent much of her adult life in bed in the cold damp English winters, convalescing from her weak heart, eyes, joints, and lungs. In 1894, she found refuge in Luxor where the hot, dry air meant she could breathe deeply and walk around without pain. Standing on the shoulders of Duff Gordon and Edwards, over the course of three years, Benson excavated the Temple of Mut at Karnak, and produced the truly ground-breaking book The Temple of Mut in Asher, with her partner Janet Gourlay. This paper will discuss these Victorian women writers as they encountered the Egyptian climate as a health resort, so they could take the airs to cure their maladies, while at the same time interacting with ancient and modern Egyptians, taking stories and artifacts home and steering the course of Egyptology for the next 150 years.
Agnes Strickland-Pajtok (Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Eger, Hungary)
The Orientalist View of Eastern Europe at the End of the Long Nineteenth Century: Baroness Orczy’s Symbolic Geography of Hungary
The concept of Eastern Europe is inseparable from the self-affirmative image of the West. As articulated by Larry Wolff in his fundamental book Inventing of Eastern Europe,“[i]t was Western Europe that invented Eastern Europe as its complementary other half in the eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment” (1994, 4). The main focus of this talk is to reveal a correlative orientalist perspective of Eastern Europe, and especially Hungary displayed in a seminal text of the Hungarian-British popular author, Baroness Emma Orczy. Her narratives set in the Carpathian basin portray Hungary simplistically as a remote country rife with hedonism, superstitions and passion. This perception is especially pronounced in her most personal novel, A Son of the People (1906), whose plot is based on the cataclysmic peasant rebellion which instigated the Orczy family to abandon the Hungarian countryside. The novel is characterised by frequent explicit and implicit comparisons of Eastern and Western Europe. The act of contrasting automatically brings forth a binary description of the east and west, and accentuates the dichotomy of the two cultures: the former is labelled as wild, untamed, conservative, while the latter as sensible, sober, progressive. A “limited vocabulary and imagery” (Said 1977, 173) highlights an orientalist perception of the country. Informed by these assumptions, the main focus is going to be on the following research questions: what are the constituents of Orczy’s symbolic geography? How is her use of symbolic geography connected to her aspirational Britishness and cultural hybridity? What were her motifs to orientalise her homeland? And finally, the talk will also examine the novel’s patriarchal gender modelling and explore whether the subaltern can speak in the realms of this narrative.
Graziella Stringos and Mireille Vila (University of Malta)
Marriage and Female Self-Abnegation and Heroism in Flora Annie Steel’s “Uma Himavutee” (1898)
Flora Annie Steel (1847-1929) spent twenty-two years in India. Her fiction “offers a woman’s perspective on British colonial government and Anglo-Indian relationships” (Juliet Shields). Significantly, it opens windows into the consciousness of women whose life, faith and behaviour were intriguing often perplexing for British readers. The paper focuses on one of her many short stories, ‘Uma Himāvutee’, published in 1898, which introduces a young and beautiful married woman in colonial India. Uma is in love with her husband, Shivo, and is herself much loved by him. Yet, she is childless. Torn between personal happiness and duty by her husband and her family, Uma has to make a difficult decision. Drawing upon studies in psychology, social constructionism and feminism, the paper will address the notions of woman’s affective dependency, sacrificial attitude and mothering as represented in the character of Uma. While Freud’s ideas about sexual identification and development culminate in the Oedipus Complex in males, in females, he viewed sexual development through the Electra complex. According to Gilligan (1982), Freud, after attempting to “fit women into his masculine conception, seeing them as envying that which they missed, he came instead to acknowledge, in the strength and persistence of women’s pre-Oedipal attachments to their mothers, a developmental difference. He considered this difference in women’s development to be responsible for what he saw as women’s developmental failure”. Later, Chodorow (1974) linked differences between men and women to “the reproduction within each generation of certain general and universal differences that characterize masculine and feminine personality and roles”. Chodorow attributed the differences particularly to the fact that universally women are responsible for child care. Thus, for women, the view of the world is relational and her role is that of a giver, one who sacrifices her body and life in the service of others.
Kristine Swenson (Missouri University of Science and Technology, US)
Cheap Trippers and Unprotected Females at the Pyramids
For British women of the Victorian period, a trip to Egypt was meant to be transformative. This proved true for Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale, single women who found in a newly accessible Egypt at mid-century a space of physical and spiritual challenge, and freedom for self-discovery. However, as western tourism to Egypt grew, women travelers often found something less profound—western-style hotels and the reproduction of western social life and conventions. By 1907, Agatha Christie comments in her autobiography, even westerners of moderate means wintered in Cairo, “many of them mothers and daughters” in search of husbands. This paper examines two pieces of fiction that capture how the proliferation of tourism diluted the Egyptian experience, particularly for women seeking escape from western social convention. Inspired by a trip to Egypt in 1858, Anthony Trollope’s short story, “An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids” (1864), recounts the frustrations of Sabrina Dawkins, a woman traveling alone in Egypt who is caught between seeking adventure and seeking a husband. Some thirty years later, Marie Corelli expresses her disdain for “cheap trippers” (and men generally) in her wildly popular novel, Ziska: the Problem of a Wicked Soul (1897), in which an undead ancient Egyptian consort returns to modern Cairo to seek revenge upon her reincarnated lover. Corelli’s anger at the inequities between men and women is on full display, not only through the murderous Ziska but in the portrayal of western women whose experiences in Egypt are superficial and circumscribed by conventionality. The two pieces are remarkably similar in their vitriol for tourists and the limitations placed upon unmarried European women. But the generic shift from Trollope’s characteristic realism to fantasy-romance, allows Corelli, like Ziska herself, to escape the bonds of literary and social convention.
Laurence Talairach (Alexandre Koyré Center for the History of Science and Technology/University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France)
“I am beginning to enter the joys of a naturalist”: Anna Forbes’s Explorations of the Malay Archipelago
‘As to my “travels” I cannot bring myself to undertake them yet, & perhaps never shall, unless I should be fortunate enough to get a wife who would incite me thereto & assist me therein, – which is not likely’.[1]
Alfred Russel Wallace, known as the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin, spent eight years exploring the Malay archipelago on his own, as related in his travelogue, The Malay Archipelago (1869), one of the most popular Victorian travel narratives. Celebrated as the first European to have set foot on some areas of East Asia, the naturalist followed in fact in the footsteps of an Austrian lady traveller, Ida Laura Pfeiffer (1797–1858), who had explored the region a few years before him. Indeed, whilst Wallace’s correspondence suggests that women were only useful for motivating and assisting men of science in their research – never to create, discover or invent –, a significant number of them explored unfamiliar and dangerous realms in order to study its flora and fauna, even if their contribution to science remains unacknowledged. Whether as lone travellers or as daughters, wives or sisters of naturalists, many of them contributed, however, to perpetuating the model of woman as unsuited to scientific research, as this paper will argue. Anna Forbes (1855–1922), wife of the ornithologist Henry Ogg Forbes (1851–1932), is a case in point. In her book, Insulinde: Experiences of a Naturalist’s Wife in the Eastern Archipelago (1886), the female traveller advises her readers to turn to her husband’s travelogue should they look for ‘scientific matter’, since hers is a ‘simpler account’.[2] Forbes nonetheless did describe several news species of birds and butterflies and even co-authored a chapter with her husband in British Birds with their Nests and Eggs (vol. VI) – evidencing, if need be, her actual scientific skills. The gendered narrative Forbes proposes reveals many of the conventions of Victorian travel writing, constructing the female traveller as one of these ‘creatures of service’ whose ‘minds should never be taxed because their brainpower was delicate and feeble’,[3] to borrow Amanda Adams’s words. Yet, as this paper will show, many travelling women, confined to subordinate roles and focusing on more on interiors, decoration, clothes or cooking recipes in their travelogues, used their position not simply because it ensured them a bourgeois readership, but also because it allowed them an entry into the scientific world.
[1] Alfred Russel Wallace, 9 St Mark’s Crescent, Regent’s Park, London, N.W. to Charles Robert Darwin, 2 Oct. 1865 (WCP1867.1757).
[2] Anna Forbes, Insulinde. Experiences of a Naturalist’s Wife in the Eastern Archipelago (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1886), p. vii.
[3] Amanda Adams, Ladies of the Field: Early Women Archaeologists and Their Search for Adventure (Vancouver, Toronto, Berkeley: Greystone Books, 2010), p. 16.
Selin Tuzlan Mead (Durham University, UK/Bogazici University, Turkey)
A Feminine Experience of the Ottoman Empire: The Ottoman Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Women’s Travel Literature
The source material for this research is composed of travel literature written and published by two British women travellers, namely Julia Pardoe and Grace Ellison, who travelled to the Ottoman Empire during the 19th-century and early 20th-century in varying contexts. These authors were chosen based on the time period they travelled to the Ottoman Empire and the subjects they chose to involve themselves with which focused on Ottoman women and the domestic sphere. Another reason why these women were chosen was that in various sources they were categorised either as Orientalist or anti-Orientalist travel writers without acknowledging the variety and contextuality of attitudes within their narratives. Moreover, both Pardoe and Ellison had a limited geographic scope which made it easier to explore their narratives with a comparative approach. Even though this analytical work does not strictly fit within a specific theoretical framework, it primarily avails itself of the critical works of Meyda Yeğenoğlu with necessary references to Edward Said. My arguments take Said’s definition of Orientalism ‘as a manner of regularized (or Orientalised) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient’ as a centre.1 Using travel literature to explore the woman question, Orientalism and the transformation of the Oriental gaze within an imperial context, this thesis also refers to Yeğenoğlu’s Colonial Fantasies to better understand the tropology surrounding the veil, the harem and polygamy.
As the travel literature by these two women will demonstrate, many British travellers portrayed Ottoman women as objects of pity and symbols of oppression in a rhetoric of othering that aimed to articulate the differences between the East and the West. However, within the same narratives, Pardoe and Ellison also problematised the Orientalist overview and blamed the earlier accounts for exoticising and mythicising the Ottoman woman. Through close-reading certain moments in their narratives where the contextuality of notions like gender and imperialism distort the consistency of the vocabulary, tone and imagery they used, I demonstrated the impracticability of fitting them into such restricted categories.
Serena Volpi (LdM Florence/University of Roma Tre, Italy)
Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (1850): An African-American Woman at the Court of Alexander the First
This paper focuses on elements of race, gender, and class in Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (1850) by Nancy Gardner Prince. Prince’s presence as a free African-American woman first in her native Massachusetts, and then in Russia (and Jamaica), complicates the representation of the Black female presence in the United States and its possibilities for freedom and mobility in the Victorian age. In her reading of Prince’s text as an example of utopian literature, Amber Foster has highlighted its hybridity since, far from being a conventional autobiography, it includes elements of “slave, spiritual, and travel narratives.” The dimension of travel, in particular the eastbound journey as an ideal space in which to explore notions of gender, class, and race, will be investigated by considering Prince’s thoughts on the absence of racial prejudice at the court of Emperor Alexander and Empress Elizabeth and her concomitant remarks on gender and class injustice in Russian society, for instance in relation to educational opportunities for girls. At the same time, Prince’s religious activities shed light on the power dynamics inherent in her relationship to the country. The present paper finally offers an interpretation of the life and words of a Black Victorian woman traveller and expat as a counternarrative to that “subculture of blackness… consisting of caricature, exhibition, representation, and scientific racism” which, as noticed by Gretchen Gerzina, was fuelled by the British empire and by Victorian attitudes towards race as a trait in common with American fixation on colour-based hierarchies.
Claudia Zilletti (University of Naples “L’Orientale”, Italy)
“Transported bodily into the Arabian Nights”: The Egyptian Fascination in Janet Ann Ross’s The Fourth Generation: Reminiscences (1912)
Daughter of Lady Lucie Duff Gordon and granddaughter of Sarah Austin - linguist, translator and editor of her daughter’s famous Letters from Egypt 1863-1865 (1865) - Janet Ann Duff Gordon (1842-1927) was only eighteen when she married Henry Ross, an English banker. The next year (1861) the Rosses moved to Alexandria of Egypt, as Henry had become partner of the British bank Briggs and Co. located in Cairo. A detailed account of her stay in Egypt occupies the initial chapters her The Fourth Generation: Reminiscences, published in 1912. Janet Ross travelled extensively in Egypt while cultivating important friendships with the most eminent Egyptian personalities of the time, such as Said Halim Pasha, son of Muhammed Ali of Egypt, the father of modern Egypt. A picturesque character, in 1863 this woman traveller visited Tall al Kabir by camel while dressing in bedouin garb and living in a tent. Her important social connections made her an ideal observer of foreign affairs and she was for a short period the Egyptian correspondent for The Evening Mail. She didn’t fail to visit Denderah, Luxor and Medinet Habu. Being friends with Ferdinand de Lesseps, she also witnessed the early works for the construction of the Suez Canal. Above all, she had the opportunity to depict the living conditions of the Egyptian women of the time, confronting them with the freer (in comparison) Englishwomen’s, while projecting herself into a real Arabian Night atmosphere. In 1867, Janet and her family finally moved to Italy. The ideal sequel to her The Three Generations of English Women (1888), Janet Ross’ Fourth Generation enacts her autobiographical memories reinforcing the embedded tradition of generations of Englishwomen who visited Egypt in the mid-Victorian period narrating places, people and female otherness.
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