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Gender, imperialism, and the western American landscapes of Victorian women travelers, 1874-1897
Abstract
During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, when trans-Atlantic steamships crossings became more reliable and especially after the transcontinental railroad line was completed from New York to San Francisco, the American West was opened for foreign travel on a wide scale. A group of affluent British women travelers responded, through their published travelogues, to the physical and cultural landscapes of the trans-Mississippi American West during their tours of North America in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. This dissertation investigates the ways in which dominant British social ideologies and discourses operating during Britain's Age of Empire were reproduced in women's travel writing about the American West. Topics discussed by the travelers include train compartments and other accommodations; Mormon polygamy; Anglo-American women's social roles; mountain landscapes in the Rockies and Yosemite; the western farming and ranching frontier; deforestation; and Native Americans, particularly encounters with Native peoples at train stations. The study considers the women travelers' multiple and constantly shifting identities as they uniquely combined in an extra-empire context. The travelers interpolated many competing ideologies and discourses in their texts, including conflicts between femininity and feminism and especially the upper-class emphasis on the English lady; romantic discourse on the beautiful and the sublime; upper-class expressions of superiority, authority, patriarchy, and intellectualism; and Orientalist discourse on the inferiority of other races of peoples. However, these travelers' subjectivities were fundamentally produced by articulating, reinforcing, or challenging dominant or subversive versions of Victorian womanhood. Without the necessity of confronting the issues and debates surrounding British colonial conquest, a textual space was opened up for addressing issues of gender difference. Statements made about "claiming" mountain landscapes, for instance, are best analyzed as mastery over a woman' s self, rather than colonial conquest over place.
Subject Area
Geography|Womens studies|British and Irish literature|Recreation
Recommended Citation
Morin, Karen Marie, "Gender, imperialism, and the western American landscapes of Victorian women travelers, 1874-1897" (1996). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9637074.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9637074