Journal of Narrative Theory

Feminist critics have argued that both the genre and the autonomous subject of autobiography have historically been constructed in such a way as to deny women participation in the genre. Furthermore, as Sedonie Smith argues, the autobiographical act is an entry into the public sphere, where woman "can speak with authority only insofar as she tells a story that her audience will read . . . [S]he looks toward a narrative that will resonate with privileged cultural fictions of male selfhood" (52). One way that women have justified the choice to write about themselves has been to claim authority via direct experience of travel, a mode of being privileged in the domain of masculine selfhood. Yet, like autobiographical narrative, travel itself has historically been a suspect realm for women. In both writing and moving through space, a woman subjects herself to public scrutiny and necessarily transgresses the norms of gender ideology. Travel, then, serves a paradoxical purpose: it justifies the autobiographical act, while at the same time heightening its dangers for a woman's reputation. As Smith notes, "the autobiographer reveals . . . her understanding of the possible reading she will receive from a public that has the power of her reputation in its hands" (49). It is in representing the body that women must be most diligent in their narrative negotiations. [End Page 341]

In the discussion that follows, I consider women travel writers' invocations of the wilderness as an ahistorical space of authenticity, purity, and national identity which resituate the female body in a liminal space the travelers read as "outside" of the normative gender organization of a capitalist society which positions them as consumer subjects, demure virgins, aspiring homemakers, and docile employees. I briefly discuss the physical body as a focus of historically specific gender socialization processes and then consider the texts as representations of young women's temporary resistance to the gender identities prescribed for them. These representations focus on wilderness locales as sites of what I argue to be flirtatious exhibitionism, couched in allusions to a reborn transcendentalist spirituality, Roosevelt-style health and vigor, and the romanticization of Native American "noble savages." Attending to connections between texts, I note the ways that writers engage wilderness differ according to their situations within the complex relationships of race, labor, and sexuality produced within this era of suffrage, the Great Migration, and the emergence of a white female professional class. It is significant that, in the few works of travel writing produced by black women during this era in which black women were often treated as just bodies (as domestic and factory workers, as sexualized primitive "others," and as generally more "animalistic" than their white counterparts), there is a nearly complete erasure of the traveler's textual body. Meanwhile, in white women's travel writing there is an unprecedented foregrounding of the body, particularly the sexualized and active body in the wilderness. Ultimately, the privileges of race, economic situation, and social class determine the latitude afforded the traveler in her negotiations of middle-class femininity. The examples are culled from four travel narratives from the 1920s and 1930s, written by middle-class American women who travel without the protection of male chauffeurs, companions, or chaperones.

The sexuality of the female traveler made her a subject of surveillance, even in the nominally "liberated" decades after World War I. As Neill James' comment in the feminist journal Independent Woman puts it: "'And still not an adventuress?' someone asks with lifted eyebrow. The persistent question irritates me. People find it hard to forget sex and think about women as human beings" (402). In her discussion of the dangerous tendency for critical theorists to read "relocation" as "enlightenment," Sarah Ahmed argues for attention to "the substantive difference it makes [End Page 342] when one is forced to cross borders, or when one cannot return home" (81). While none of the women I consider in this essay are political exiles or desperate migrants, as writers, their self-representations have the potential to produce a situation in which they "cannot return home" to the lives and options...