Resisting Transculturation: The European Woman in English Travel Writing

272 Pages·2013·2.85 MB·English

Resisting Transculturation: The European

Woman in English Travel Writing

by

Alexis McQuigge

A thesis

presented to the University of Waterloo
in fulfillment of the
thesis requirement for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy
in
English

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2013

©Alexis McQuigge 2013
AUT H OR 'S D EC LAR AT ION

I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including
any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners.
I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public.

ii
Abst r a c t

Comprised of four separate case studies – one on the Eastern novels of Penelope Aubin and
Eliza Haywood written in the 1720’s, one on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy
Letters, one that features female castaway narratives of the later eighteenth century, and a fourth on
Isabel Burton’s public mediation of her husband’s writing and the transgressions of her own life –
this work argues that discursive constructions of female travel were frequently challenged by
women writers and female travelers themselves. Engaging with critics like Amanda Vickery, Robert
Shoemaker, and Alison Conway, who wish to call our totalizing, homogenous views of the
restrictions placed on women’s lives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into question, this
dissertation argues that despite the prevalence of works arguing against female travel because it was
either too dangerous or too sexually liberating, many women conceived of themselves as not only
able to travel but to do so while remaining loyal to British notions of civility and cultural purity. At
the same time, the texts studied here demonstrate that, once freed from the restrictive confines of
British society, English women were able to make important contributions to Britain’s imperial and
mercantile goals overseas that men were unable to make.

In this work I examine the ways in which domestic and sexual violence at home prompted
the construction of travel as an escape to a fantasy of easy female circulation in less-restrictive public
spaces where women could manage their own fates, or indeed spaces in which they were free from
the seemingly constant fear of sexual assault at the hands of European men. Travel – in the case of
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Isabel Burton – offered women an opportunity to transform
notions of femininity into ways of making particular and unique claims to knowledge because they
had access to information male travelers could not gain. Rather than descending into lust or various
forms of cultural degeneration, traveling women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries opened
up a space for women after them to make significant contributions to scientific and ethnographic
discourse.

The work on fictional female captives and castaways in the first and third chapters of this
dissertation indicates that the supposedly corrupting qualities of the “torrid zones” were ones easily
fended off by English women, who were thus able to demonstrate that female interactions with so-
called ‘male’ spheres of mercantile exchange, seafaring, and captivity abroad could result in greater
freedom for women to travel. These texts also highlight the important contributions women could
make to public life in England as a result of the knowledge gained during their periods overseas. In
every chapter, this work examines the way that violence against women – and the powerlessness of
women to counteract it – was a seemingly constant concern during the period

Finally, my conclusion gestures toward the possible continuities between ideas about female
travel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the twenty-first century. Though much more
work is required, I conclude that, from the very brief research I have conducted on the subject, it
appears that the inroads made by Aubin, Haywood, Montagu, Burton and others have largely been
destroyed by a continual concern with the safety and sexual propriety of the Western woman
overseas.

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Ac kn o w l e d ge m e n t s

I wish to begin by acknowledging the financial support of the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program, and the
University of Waterloo, especially the Faculty of Arts and the Department of English.

Academic work flourishes in a world in which we can collaborate and hypothesize freely
and without reservation. I owe a great deal to those who have collaborated with me, and who have
graciously allowed me to collaborate with them. To my supervisor, Professor Fraser Easton, I wish
to extend my thanks for your expertise, your guidance, and, most especially, your patience. I also
owe much to Professor Rebecca Tierney-Hynes for her input and advice on any number of subjects,
especially in the midst of a particularly busy year, and for striving (unsuccessfully, but through no
fault of her own) to make me seem a lot more tactful than I really am. I also want to offer my
deepest thanks to Professor Tristanne Connolly, who stepped into this project full tilt and with a
great enthusiasm in its latter stages. Your advice has been invaluable, and has led this project down
some intriguing paths I would not have explored without your input. I also want to thank
Professor Kate Lawson for the time she spent with the third – then the first – chapter of this
dissertation. Your advice on that chapter has guided much of the rest of this project, and I hope my
early missteps were not intolerable. My thanks go also to Professor Joan Coutou from the
department of Fine Arts at Waterloo for acting as an internal examiner, and for her fine input and
valuable questions. I also thank Professor Daniel O’Quinn of the Department of English and
Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph for serving as external examine. I am sure that this is
no easy task, and I thank you for your time, your input, and your support.

Associate Dean Linda Warley and Professor Randy Harris, Graduate Chair of the
Department of English, have offered much kind input and patient advice in the late stages of this
thesis, and I offer my thanks to Professor John North for his advice on teaching, Professor Peter
Sabor of McGill University for his continued support, and Professor Alison Conway at the
University of Western Ontario for her advice and comments on chapter one.

I thank my colleagues and friends in the department for their support and encouragement,
especially Danila Sokolov and his wife, Masha, and Jessica Antonio and Christine Horton for being
ever-reliable office mates and friends. I also wish to offer my thanks to my colleagues, especially at
CSECS, who have offered advice on any number of issues and ideas and who have made being an
eighteenth-centuryist in Canada a great deal of fun; it has been a pleasure to work with you all.

My debts are deeper than perhaps I realize, but among the deepest are the ones I owe to my
close friends and family. This thesis, and possibly my life, would be a deranged mess were it not for
the support, love, and friendship of Cheryl and Dave Burwash; Rebekka King; Carol Upton and
Dave Wilson; Kate Shay, Kristy McGill, Alex Den Broeder, and everyone else who has offered a
kind word, a pep talk, or a much-needed glass of wine along the way. I also want to thank the Matte
and McGrath families for frequently giving into my irrational demands for cheesecake. As always,
and with great humility and gratitude, I thank my parents for their years of support, love, and
encouragement. You have both done more to make this project possible than you realize.

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De di c a t i o n

To my mom, Lynda:

Every day I realize how very easy my life has been because you’ve been in it. Thank you for pushing
me to become someone a woman like you could be proud of, and thank you for your love and
friendship: they are the greatest things you’ve given me.

And to my dad, Jack:

You’ve taught me many things, not the least of which is the value of the hard work it took to get
here. Thank you for being an example of what could be, and what it would take to make it happen.

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Ta bl e o f C o n te n ts

Author's Declaration ..................................................................................................................................... ii

 Abstract
...........................................................................................................................................................iii

 Acknowledgements....................................................................................................................................... iv

 Dedication ....................................................................................................................................................... v

 Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................................... vi
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 1

 Chapter 1: Women in Eastern Captivity: Rethinking Fiction ..........................................................22

 Chapter 2: 'A Pox on Thee': Lady Mary and Inoculation ...................................................................83

 Chapter 3: Conceptualizing Female Castaway Narratives .............................................................. 133

 Chapter 4: Isabel Burton and the Art of Mediating Adventure ..................................................... 187
Conclusion.................................................................................................................................................. 241

Works Cited............................................................................................................................................... 251

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Introduction

In which the author explains her motivations, her terms, and her love of discursive subtitles

In the spring of 1874, Caroline Perrett, eight-year-old daughter of a farmer in New
Zealand, was kidnapped by a “roving band of Maoris” in an act of retribution against her father.
Working as a contractor for the Government of New Zealand, and despite protests from the
tribe, Mr. Perrett was charged with clearing land for a railway line that would pass right through
a sacred Maori burial ground. Sent to bring in her family’s herd of cows at dusk, the young girl
disappeared for more than fifty years. In 1929, Perrett was recognized on the streets of
Whakatane by a niece who, despite the woman’s protestations that she was a Maori known as
Mrs. Ngoungou, declared, “you are a white woman. What are you doing with the Maoris?”
(Bentley 231). In the days and weeks that followed this revelation, much conjecture circulated
about how Caroline Perrett, a European woman, could be married to a Maori man, digging
gum and trading for necessities. After the discovery, Ngoungou announced that there was “too
much romance being made” of her life, and criticized those who were spreading rumors that she
could remember her life before the kidnapping, and should have known she was of European
descent. Ngoungou – like so many captives before her – wanted to correct these myths about
her behavior, and told Mr. Sheehan, reporter for a local paper, that “those who talk of my
memories of my kidnapping are not speaking the truth” (231). In the presence of an old family
friend, Ngoungou confessed that: “in my mind, I am Maori. I think as they think, just as I have
always lived their life outwardly. All my interests and my friends are Maori, and my children
also” (232). Stating that her life with the Maoris was “happy,” Ngoungou then confirmed what

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must have been her family’s worst fears: she would acknowledge her European roots, but she
would not return to European society. She told Sheehan that:
here in Poroporo I think I shall finish my life. I have lived here so long and with age
the desire to change becomes less until it finally dies out. I have been asked by
many of my relatives to go and stay with them, but I cannot bring myself to leave
my home and family. And then, again, I might feel out of place among the Pakehas
[the Maori word for Europeans], for their ways are not my ways and it is too late to
change my habits now. (232)
That Ngoungou not only knew that she was European and decided to remain with her Maori
family, but also believed that she would no longer fit in with white society, highlights the
ambiguous relationship all transculturated women share with their ‘homeland.’ In this
dissertation I examine social and political engagement with the possibility of the
transculturated woman in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, arguing that despite the
examples of women like Perrett who lived overseas and ‘went native,’ female authors and
travelers were imagining travel not as a dangerous undertaking for women, but as one that
would give them freedoms and privileges they were not allowed at home. By exploring fictional
representations of female travel, along with letters, diaries and guidebooks that treat travel as
their main theme, I trace the ways that interaction with the other in a foreign space was
conceived of by those who entertained the possibility of a traveling eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century woman. Contrary to the ideas of male ‘experts’ of the time – doctors, scholars, religious
leaders and philosophers – who believed that travel could have negative effects on female
morality, sexual purity, national identity and ‘civility,’ the texts examined here construct female

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travel as a practice that not only granted women the ability to circulate outside of England, but
the ability to do so safely and with their virtue intact when they returned home.
Ngoungou’s narrative serves as a foil to the texts studied in this work. While Ngoungou
claims that her life – including her very way of thinking – has been subsumed by Maori culture,
the women in the texts studied here very clearly maintain their allegiances to European ways of
life. Her tale provides a late representation of anxieties surrounding the figure of the traveling
woman when she makes it clear that, European roots or not, Ngoungou could not “bring
[herself] to leave” the family and life she knew as a Maori to resume her “proper” identity as a
white woman. Ngoungou’s desire to stay with her Maori family even after the truth of her
European ancestry came to light echoes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourse that
posited travel and life abroad as dangerous not only to Englishwomen themselves, but to the
European (and especially British) ideals of racial purity and sexual morality delineated by Linda
Colley, Joe Snader, Anne McClintock and others. By engaging in what Joane Nagel has called
an “ethnosexual” relationship that she finds fulfilling, Ngoungou embodies long-held anxieties
about the potential for the white woman traveler to ‘go native’ once she leaves the presumed
safety of metropolitan England.
Trevor Bentley has written that, for white women like Ngoungou who were originally
kidnapped from their homes in New Zealand, “what is startling…is the rapidity with which
some white women and girls acculturated as Maori” (15). Though Bentley provides several
examples of white women who transculturated and lived in ethnosexual relationships with
foreign men, this work argues that women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

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conceived of themselves as unable to imagine a life wherein they might come to think as

‘savages’ think.

Bentley’s work on Mrs. Ngoungou and the other women who “went native” with the
Maori offers us some key insight into what was considered (and as I will argue briefly in the
conclusion to this work, what is still considered) the problem of female travel overseas. Bentley
notes that “images of captive white women…fuelled aggressive European retaliation and
expansionism as colonial officials and military expeditions responded to public hysteria and
stereotypes of potent, lustful, dark men and sexually vulnerable white women” (19). The
hysteria he outlines plays a key role in discussions of white female travel throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but this dissertation argues that the “sexually vulnerable
white woman” who travels to distant lands and gives up her European identity in favor of life
and sexual relationships with the ‘savage’ is a construction aimed to limit the white woman’s
freedom to travel. My focus, rather than being on how this captivity may have allowed women
to strike back against white, male oppression in the guise of allegiance to a colonized group of
people, is on the ways in which transculturation as a phenomenon was viewed by the very
women who were believed to be most in danger of succumbing to it.
In this work, I examine captivity narratives by Penelope Aubin and Eliza Haywood,
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, three female castaway narratives
spanning the mid- to late-eighteenth century, including one written by a man that indicates
that it was not only women who were resisting dominant discourses, and the life and writing of
Isabel Burton, wife of famous explorer Richard Burton, in order to trace the way each text
works first to remove the element of fear from female travel and then, secondly, to posit travel

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