Gendered Eyewitness in Narration: Imagining Morocco in British Women Travel-Inspired Narratives in Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The nineteenth century gave unprecedented travel opportunities to Europeans to visit and write about the “Orient”. The growing imperial expansion and subsequent imperial consciousness among British travelers found ample justification in various literary forms and discursive manifestations that enhanced a zealous desire towards empire building and the construction of a British identity that grappled with its otherness in “highly asymmetrical relations of subordination.” This offered many Victorian women travelers the chance to travel beyond borders while subverting the conventional image of domesticity associated with them, just as it enabled them to embrace freedom from the compelling institutions of patriarchy at home. Studying Victorian female travel narratives to the “Orient” provides inexhaustible grounds to rethink the intricate relationship between travel, overt nationalism, gendered constructions of identity and Orientalist ideology. This paper is concerned with the traveling experiences of Amelia Perrier through her 'A Winter in Morocco' (1873), and Frances Macnab’s 'A Ride in Morocco among Traders and Believers' (1902). With a postcolonially-inflected consciousness, it attempts to investigate how these travel narratives reproduce the strategies characteristic of Orientalist discourse in its inscription of self and Other power relations, fueled up by a will to knowledge and control over new territories. I shall argue that late nineteenth century British women travel writers operated not only in the power structures of gender but also within the larger structures of empire, class categorization, and race dynamics.

Keywords

• travel writing
• orientalism
• gender
• imperialism
• morocco