Going mobile: The body at work in Black and White women's travel narratives, 1841-1857.
Item
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Title
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Going mobile: The body at work in Black and White women's travel narratives, 1841-1857.
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Identifier
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AAI9618067
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identifier
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9618067
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Creator
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Fish, Cheryl J.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Jane Marcus
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Date
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1996
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | American Studies | Women's Studies | Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies
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Abstract
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Nancy Prince, Mary Seacole and Margaret Fuller published accounts of their travels as forms of social critique in the 1840s and 50s (Prince, The West Indies, Being A Description of the Islands... (1841) and A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (1850); Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857); and Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844)). Through what I am calling a "mobile subjectivity," a fluid and provisional epistemology that depends on shifting relationships to persons, forms of labor, and locations, these women used the vehicle of the travelogue to call for expanded notions of enlightenment democracy and citizenship. This study, which extends Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic paradigm to include black women, underscores the fact that there is no essential woman traveller's or black woman writer's resistant voice. These texts by free-born blacks create a dialectic between slavery and freedom; Prince and Seacole, despite facing danger, devised various interventions that expanded national and racial identities between the Americas and Europe. All three women often displaced their working bodies through the use of synecdoche to divert the reader from the political threat their critique signified; each incorporated other, dialogic voices to authenticate her place as an ethical, resistant truth teller. Prince relies on biblical allegory to call for political action in the U.S. and Jamaica; her arms become symbols of empowered vigilance and corporeal weakness. Mary Seacole adapts the voice of a picara, a kind of rogue heroine, to parody Englishness. She pays excessive homage to English values in order to convince readers to support her right to heal the wounded in the Crimea after Florence Nightingale had refused her services. Margaret Fuller interrupts her own narrative with texts by other travellers, and she displaces the headaches from which she suffered on to stories of hybrid, grotesque foreign women who share commonalities with herself and the defeated Native Americans and frontier women she met in Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin. By juxtaposing travelogues written by black and white women, I am presenting three different, complex strategies in which a hybrid travel narrative is the vehicle for visions of personal and social transformation.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
