INTRODUCTION:
The number of Victorian women travel writers is staggering: dozens of women wrote about their adventures in foreign lands for British and American readers. The travel narratives of Isabella Bird, Mary Kingsley, and Marianne North are among the best examples. These women traveled alone, each proclaiming that companions were a nuisance. These women believed their travel writing contributed to their nation’s understanding of the world; they did not travel for selfish reasons. Bird, Kingsley, and North were not confined by domesticity; in fact, each avoided domestic responsibilities as much as possible. They were brave, even bold, travelers, launching into wilderness with a few guides, climbing mountains, riding horses, camels, and elephants, carrying large packs, wading through swamps. Their concerns were global, not personal.If students have any preconceptions at all about Victorian women writers (and this is extremely doubtful), those preconceptions include that most women stayed at home, writing in a neat parlor, dedicated to family and hemmed by domestic responsibilities. Women wore stiff corsets and long dresses, worried about servants and children, and went to church frequently. Women were to be socially responsible, but primarily within the domestic sphere. Students do not expect Victorian women to travel alone throughout the world or to critique British political, social, and economic world policy.
This essay focuses on two aspects of Bird’s, Kingsley’s, and North’s travel literature: solitude and utility. Each woman needed solitude to do her work. Arguably, each woman’s solitary travel enabled her to maintain "larger" concerns. To allow someone to join them would be tantamount to recreating a social unit, one in which they would have to perform as a "woman" —not a hard-headed observer, scientist, or painter.
Each of these travelers had a mission, a vocation or avocation that contributed, somehow, to society. Isabella Bird spent most of her life traveling. The first woman member of the Royal Geographical Society, she was a discoverer, a precursor to modern anthropologists/sociologists. She complained that her occasional female companions slowed her down. Mary Kingsley began traveling after her father’s death left her with no familial obligations. She traveled to western Africa to do scientific research on fishes, bugs, and native religious practices. A nature painter, North traveled throughout the world in search of previously unknown or rare botanical specimens. Although she usually stayed with British families, she preferred to be left alone.Bird establishes her habit of solitary travel early: in the 1850s, while only in her twenties, she leaves home after a doctor recommends travel as a “cure” for a recurring back problem. For some reason, traveling by boat, train, wagon, and horseback in all weather—including driving blizzards and torrential rain—does not aggravate her back, although she consistently falls sick when she returns home. Even in her own time, family and friends note this contradiction, suggesting that her back problem is triggered by psychological pressures, not physical damage. Clearly, Bird could not survive at home, where she felt smothered by Victorian rules and regulations regarding womanly behavior and plagued by social obligations that she despised.
She protects her solitude and independence carefully when traveling, complaining when she is thrust into uncongenial society. Usually, she travels alone, whether by train, boat, or horseback; she accepts only those companions necessary to her finding her way (occasional guides, almost always men). She particularly avoids women on her travels. When in Estes Park, Colorado, she rides alone in the mountains, except for Jim Nugent, an outlaw mountaineer who takes a shine to her. Determined to see more of Colorado, she sets out by horseback, alone, in the dead of winter, ridding herself of an unpleasant companion: “Solitude is infinitely preferable to uncongeniality. . .” (136). Even her clothing changes as she travels alone: she wears a modified “Hawaiian” outfit, a pair of pantaloons over which she wears a dress—with these, she eschews riding side-saddle yet remains decorously covered.
She gains health as she rides, even in the coldest, windiest, and snowiest weather:
I cannot describe my feelings on this ride, produced by the utter loneliness, the silence and the dumbness of all things, the snow falling quietly without wind, the obliterated mountains, the darkness, the intense cold, and the unusual and appalling aspect of nature. All life was in a shroud, all work and travel suspended. There was not a foot-mark or wheel-mark. There was nothing to be afraid of; and though I can’t say exactly say that I enjoyed the ride, yet there was the pleasant feeling of gaining health every hour. (142)
“Utter loneliness” allows her to concentrate on observing, reflecting on, and recording what she sees, without intruding or competing ideologies. She translates what she sees, ostensibly for her sister but actually for a wider readership, since she publishes all these letters within a few years of her traveling. In a natural world unplowed or furrowed, she is the explorer, a solitary adventurer. Harsh weather invigorates her, sharpening her senses and mind, and hardening her resolution to continue, even in the face of the worst storm in years.Society provides necessary shelter and companionship, but she remains free to leave. Often she describes the plight of women adrift on the plains, trying to raise families with some semblance of civilization. Usually, their families are failures and the impossible task of raising children kills the women:
Mrs. H. makes all the clothes required for a family of six, and her evenings, when the hard day’s work is done and she is ready to drop from fatigue, are spent in mending and patching. The day is one long grind, without rest or enjoyment, or the pleasure of chance intercourse with cultivated people. (66)
Children are “debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old” (67). Traditional roles are impossible in the world that she observes—the wilderness ruins their chances. Yet the tasks she describes are not unusual for women, even in England, particularly in the lower classes. Although she locates her caustic observations of woman’s sphere in the Colorado wilderness, she comments on the plight of all women in traditional roles. In her travels, women provide islands of domesticity, which she can both enjoy and analyze. Other women are embedded in a location by responsibilities to husband and children; women are not free to travel or critique. Even the missionary wives she encounters in Korea, Malaysia, and Japan are frozen; having once moved, they are committed to the area. These women are circumscribed, locked into a spot, by social roles. In a sense, women are the “other” for Bird, not men; women signify what she has escaped.Kingsley also seeks solitude, freedom from stereotypes of feminine behavior. After the death of her father, Dr. George H. Kingsley, she becomes an ethnologist and naturalist in the most remote place she can find: western Africa. Like Bird, Kingsley launches off alone yet keeps a careful journal of her exploits for the reading public. Unlike Bird, she maintains a humorous edge throughout her book that keeps the reader at arms’ length, so to speak: “. . . as for myself, I am not bent on discoursing on my psychological state, but on the state of things in general in West Africa” (101). Her text is not an exulting narrative of solitary adventuring and transcendent rhapsodies; it is scientific and sympathetic—and humorous and incisive. Hers is an exercise in dissolving the self, but NOT into the family.
Her leave-taking from England is a permanent one, she tells us, fraught with danger: “So with a feeling of foreboding gloom I left London for Liverpool—none the more cheerful for the matter-of-fact manner in which the steamboat agents had informed me that they did not issue return tickets by the West African lines of steamers” (5). West Africa was almost completely native at that time; few white settlers had braved the wilderness. Kingsley’s choice for research places her completely outside of “civilized” company, except for occasional missionaries and government figures. Yet she is blissfully happy.
Like Bird, Kingsley learns to propel herself through the wilderness; she learns to travel alone, even over the most challenging terrains. She teaches herself to solo canoe so she can travel in mangrove swamps in search of rare fish; she climbs mountains, traverses vast stretches of jungle, and risks her life traveling upstream into the back country accompanied only by a few natives. She always maintains a humorous edge, even about her research:
Of course, if you really want a truly safe investment in Fame, and really care about Posterity, and Posterity’s Science, you will jump over into the black batter-like, stinking slime, cheered by the thought of the terrific sensation you will produce 20,000 years hence, and the care you will be taken care of then by your fellow-creatures, in a museum. (89)
Her research is for museums and education: even though she is not plunging into the slime, she is most certainly on it—and fishing in it—for her representatives.She sympathizes with and respects the natives, who allow her to observe their rituals and good-naturedly humor her eccentricities, and she passionately loves the jungle. Of the natives, she writes:
Unless you live alone among the natives, you never get to know them; if you do this you gradually get a light into the true state of their mind-forest. At first you see nothing but a confused stupidity and crime; but when you get to see—well! as in the other forest—you see things worth seeing. (103)
Of the forest, she writes:
Do not imagine it gave rise, in what I am pleased to call my mind, to those complicated, poetical reflections natural beauty seems to bring out in other people's minds. It never works that way with me; I just lose all sense of human individuality, all memory of human life, with its grief and worry and doubt, and become part of the atmosphere. (178)
To her, the natives and forest are one, a natural symbiotic unit, uninhibited by civilization’s trappings. Among them, she loses her individuality, blending into the landscape, in the best of the transcendent tradition. This is what solitude allows her: freedom from her own identity.Marianne North works a bit harder at maintaining a respectable cover for her solitary wanderings; she spends most of her time as guest of missionaries and governmental agents around the world. With their protection and guidance, she finds rare plants to paint and collect. Yet she seeks time away from her hosts, who often just leave her alone in various rough cabins and huts. Further, she begins her wanderings as her father’s companion; she travels alone only after his death (“He was from first to last the one idol and friend of my life, and apart from him I had little pleasure and secrets” (5)). She also acknowledges earlier women travelers who have established the path for solitary adventurers: Lucie Duff Gordon, Caroline Norton, and Isabella Bird are all mentioned as forebears. North follows the then-acceptable route available to financially secure spinster travelers.
North, then, is not a discoverer; she traces the footsteps of other travelers, painting what others had overlooked. The natives amuse her, but she has no sympathy with them or their problems; in fact, she describes them as children in need of discipline. Her solitude is an escape into gardens and the edges of wilderness. She frequently slips out at dawn to paint:
I painted all day, going out at daylight and not returning until noon, after which I worked at flowers in the house, as we had heavy rains most afternoons at that season; before sunset it cleared again, and I used to walk up the hill and explore some new path, returning home in the dark. (83)
Her single-minded dedication to painting requires solitude; all social intercourse is subordinated to her driving artistic need. Since she defines her trips clearly as professional, she can avoid much of the British clannishness found in enclaves around the world. She schedules no time for tea, visits, or traditional sight-seeing: her day is full from dawn to nightfall with gathering specimens and plein aire and still life painting.
For each of these travelers, solitude is productive. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf proclaims that women need a room their own, quiet and privacy, to think and create; she adds that what hampers women is lack of experience. Speaking of Charlotte Bronte, Woolf writes, “She knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her” (73). Bird, Kingsley, and North put together Woolf's recipe of solitude, self-sufficiency, and experience; as a result, they produce scientific discoveries, geographical and social analyses, and works of art. Their life styles are extremely productive. Regardless of their initial motivations, each woman contributes to her society.Bird’s initial reason for travel, of course, was health, but travel soon becomes an end in itself. Her books sell well throughout the English-speaking world: she engenders concern for parts of the world previously little known, particularly in her later travels. In The Golden Cheronese and the Way Thither (1883), Bird criticizes British policies: "Surely, as we have practically acquired those states, and are responsible for their good government, we ought to give them the blessing of a simple code of law . . . " (238). She consistently criticizes European governments for their misunderstanding and mishandling of native populations. Through her careful descriptions, she endeavors to spark genuine interest that might lead to better, more responsible governance. She identifies ignorance as the chief evil: “. . . we are grossly ignorant of their inhabitants and their rights . . . . [W]e are likely to remain so, to their great detriment, and not a little . . . to our own” (271). As she gains more experience, Bird becomes an accomplished ethnographer, interpreting various cultures for those back home.
Kingsley also aims at contributing to the greater good of society, both in science and anthropology. She collects both rare fish species and native “ju-ju”—religious fetishes to enlighten the British scientific community as well as the general public. As does Bird, Kingsley notes that Europeans are ruining Africa: “. . . Africa will have us to thank for some smart attacks of famine. . .” (121). She redresses serious misunderstandings about the nature and potential of natives, defending their rights to remain in the jungle unharmed and “unredeemed”—in fact, some of her most biting humor is aimed at good-intentioned Europeans who misunderstand Africans; concerning the “hubbard” dress sent by thousands to clothe "indecently" exposed African women, Kingsley writes: “. . . what idea the pious ladies in England, Germany, Scotland, and France can have of the African figure I cannot think, but evidently part of their opinion is that it is very like a tub” (221). Contradicting common Victorian anthropological wisdom, she insists that Africans are humans, not unlike Europeans, with unique cultures and traditions well worth understanding and preserving: “African culture, I may remark, varied just the same as European in this, that there is as much difference in the manners of life between, say, an Igalwa and a Bubi of Fernando Po, as there is between a Londoner and a Laplander” (220).
North’s contribution is less social and more scientific/artistic. She does not particularly like the natives she encounters, noting that they are happiest in slavery; she encourages British tendencies to paternalism and even annihilation of indigenous peoples. Paraphrasing a local magistrate in South Africa, she writes that “white and black could not live together, and that the latter must go sooner or later . . .” (265–66). If we disregard our impatience with her racism—admittedly a difficult task—it is clear that she contributes to her society by reinforcing their strong belief that white men, particularly Europeans, will outlive other races. She grasps the right to comment on large issues, a distinctly unfeminine act, although we might prefer that she had stayed with flower painting. More importantly, however, is her contribution to art and botany. Throughout the world, she paints and collects flora, previously little known or unknown. In Kews Gardens, she endows a special building for her botanical paintings and specimens gathered from every continent. She is a discoverer and educator.
CONCLUSION:
In Women and the Demon, Nina Auerbach identifies a power specific to spinsters: she argues that although old maids were lampooned as shriveled up absurdities, they were also vaguely threatening because of their rejection of societal norms. Writing of Christina Rossetti, Auerbach writes: “his Victorian old maid claims her place among the angels, not in their self-negation, but in their militant and dangerous potential to reverse life's comfortably familiar order”(117). Women were supposed to be angels of the hearth, as John Ruskin, Coventry Patmore, and Sarah Ellis proclaimed, social creatures within the domestic sphere, creating warmth, piety, and security for the family unit. Old maids, those unlucky enough not to have captured eligible men, are to sacrifice their lives to the care of elderly parents or siblings who need free nannies or housekeepers. They are not WANTED.Obviously, these traveling women, solitary and stubborn, require an independence secured for men only, at least according to the stereotypes. Individual efforts for the common good, by definition, are masculine: Carlyle sets up the classic Victorian male traveler in Sartor Resartus. Teufelsdrockh (devil’s dung), a peripatetic philosopher, has no one to love, no family to support, no profession to follow, and no faith in God, so he travels around the world in search of truth, gradually healing and rediscovering God. This characterization is the romantic ideal of the isolated genius, the lone man touching the unknown through his searches. Women are carefully left out of the equation; in fact, Teufelsdrockh runs away from the scene of a broken love affair. His return to society is heralded by the “editor” as good for mankind; Teufelsdrockh brings back accumulated wisdom vital for mankind's regeneration.
Sound familiar? The traveling women follow this romantic pattern, despite all their smokescreens. North, Bird, and Kingsley have no family ties left; they are traveling for their "health" yet through their travels, they teach mankind to understand other cultures, lands, and nature. They return only to disseminate their knowledge; they leave quickly to continue their searches. Ordinary family ties, supposedly vital for women, do not hold them; they evade any that begin to form around them. In fact, they achieve romantic individualism thought impossible for women—and for some reason, their society accepts and rewards their eccentricities.
Works
Cited
Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the
Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge, MA: 1982.
Bird, Isabella L. The Golden
Cheronese and the Way Thither. Intro. Wang Gunwu. Oxford in Asia Historical
Reprints. New York: Oxford UP, 1967.
———-. A Lady's Life in
the Rocky Mountains. 1879. Intro. Daniel J. Boorstin. Norman, OK: U
of Oklahoma P, 1988.
Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus.
1836. In Sartor Resartus; On Heroes and Hero Worship. Intro. W. H. Hudson.
New York: Everyman, 1964.
Kingsley, Mary H. Travels in
West Africa, Congo Francais, Corisco, and Cameroons. 1887. Intro. Elizabeth
Claridge. Boston: Beacon, 1982.
North, Marianne. Recollections
of a Happy Life, Being the Autobiography of Marianne North. Ed. Mrs.
John Addington Symonds. 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan, 1893.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's
Own. 1927. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1957.
Back
to contents page for Winter 2000 Forum