Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Writing

283 Pages·2001·3.62 MB·English

by  Sidonie Smith

Moving Lives
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Moving Lives
Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing
Sidonie Smith
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
To Julia, with whom I’ve traveled distances
Copyright 2001 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
A longer version of a section in chapter 2 appeared as “Isabelle Eberhardt Travelling ‘Other’/wise:
The ‘European’ Subject in ‘Oriental’ Identity,” in Encountering the Other(s): Studies in Literature,
History, and Culture, edited by Gisela Brinker-Gabler (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1995), 295–318; copyright 1995, State University of New York, all rights reserved; reprinted by
permission of State University of New York Press. A longer version of a section in chapter 3 appeared
as “The Other Woman and the Racial Politics of Gender: Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham in
Kenya,” in De/Colonizing the Subject, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 410–35. Parts of chapter 3 also appeared in “Virtually Modern
Amelia: Mobility, Flight, and the Discontents of Identity,” in Virtual Gender: Fantasies of Subjectivity
and Embodiment, edited by Mary Ann O’Farrell and Lynne Vallone (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1999), 11-36; reprinted by permission of the University of Michigan Press.
The lyrics at the beginning of the Introduction are from the song “Vehicle,” words and music by
Jim Peterik, copyright 1970 Bald Medusa Musa ASCAP. Reprinted by permission of Jim Peterik.
All reasonable efforts have been made to obtain permission for illustrations included in this book. If
any proper acknowledgment has not been made, we encourage copyright holders to notify the
University of Minnesota Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Sidonie.
Moving lives : twentieth-century women’s travel writing / Sidonie Smith
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-2874-2 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-2875-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Travelers’ writings. 2. Women travelers—History—20th century.
I. Title.
G465 .S627 2001
910′.82—dc21 00-011804
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Vehicular Gender ix
1. The Logic of Travel and Technologies
of Motion 1
2. On Foot: Gender at Ground Level 29
3. In the Air: Aerial Gender and the
Familiarity of Flight 73
4. By Rail: Trains, Tracks, and the
Derailments of Identity 121
5. On the Road: (Auto)Mobility and
Gendered Detours 167
Coda: Electronic Transport in Cyberspace 203
Notes 209
Works Cited 219
Index 231
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Acknowledgments
When I began this exploration of women’s travel narratives and technol-
ogies of motion in the early 1990s, the number of books and articles on
the gendering of travel and on women’s travel narratives more particu-
larly was relatively modest. But in the early 1990s, books and articles
began appearing regularly; and now the field is robust with work. Thus,
I am indebted to scholars whose work has provided the basis upon which
this study builds, among them Eric J. Leed, Mary Louise Pratt, Georges
Van Den Abbeele, Dennis Porter, Chris Bongie, Sara Mills, Caren Kaplan,
and Frances Bartkowski. And I am indebted to those scholars of technol-
ogy and culture whose work prompted me to focus on modes of mobility
and narrative practices, among them Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Virginia
Scharff, Robert Wohl, Wolfgang Sachs, and Gerald Silk.
The staff of the Clements Library and the Labadie Special Collec-
tions of the University of Michigan libraries provided invaluable support
in locating visual materials for inclusion in this book. I wish to thank
specifically John Dann, director of the Clements Library, for facilitating
my search of the early-twentieth-century archives, and James Fox at the
Labadie for helping me peruse the remarkable Transportation History
Collection. I thank Frances Bartkowski for referring me to the work of
Tamara de Lempicka and to the cover image.
The editorial staff at the University of Minnesota Press has main-
tained enthusiasm for this project through many changes in personnel. I
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VIII – ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
thank particularly Biodun Iginla and William Murphy, both of whom are
no longer at the press, and Doug Armato. Here at the University of Mich-
igan I owe special appreciation to Sherri Joyner and Caryn Burtt, whose
research assistance proved invaluable in the last stages of preparation.
Several sections of this book have derived from previously pub-
lished articles. Thus, I express my gratitude to the University of Minne-
sota Press, the University of Michigan Press, and the State University of
New York Press for permission to reprint versions of those articles. I also
express my gratitude to Jim Peterik, who wrote the words and music for
“Vehicle,” performed by the Ides of March, for permission to cite lyrics
from the song.
Finally, I thank Gregory Grieco for his unflagging support and his
willingness to keep traveling, and Tony Smith-Grieco for traveling in
bookstores and finding me fascinating studies of such road phenomena as
service-station maps.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Vehicular Gender
I’m your vehicle, baby.
I’ll take you anywhere you wanna go.
I’m your vehicle woman.
By now I’m sure you know.
—“Vehicle,” performed by the Ides of March (1970)
The anthropologist Victor Turner claims that the journey—as event,
personal experience, and cultural symbol—accumulates all kinds of com-
munal meanings. Prominent in the repertoire of meanings identified
with journeying in the West have been the meanings attached to itiner-
ant masculinity. The historian Eric J. Leed acknowledges the constitutive
masculinity of travel when he argues that, “from the time of Gilgamesh,”
journeying has served as “the medium of traditional male immortali-
ties,” enabling men to imagine escape from death by the “crossing” of
space and the “record[ing]” of adventures “in bricks, books, and stories.”
He even labels this travel, which provides men the opportunity to achieve
notable distinction through self-defining experience far from home,
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“spermatic” travel (286).
Ever in the process of becoming “men,” travelers affirm their mas-
culinity through purposes, activities, behaviors, dispositions, perspectives,
and bodily movements displayed on the road, and through the narratives
of travel that they return home to the sending culture. Thus, travel func-
tions as a defining arena of agency. We cannot imagine Odysseus without
his travels, or Aeneas, or the knights of the Round Table, or Colum-
bus, Captain Cook, Boswell, Byron, or Loti, or, closer to our own times,
Jack Kerouac. Nor can we imagine them without their travel narratives.
These narratives of travel can be read as journey myths “project[ing],” as
Richard Slotkin suggests of myths generally, “models of good and heroic
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