Geadered Discourse and Subjectiviîy in Travel Writing by Canadian Women
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Geadered Discourse and Subjectiviîy in Travel Writing by Canadian Women Denise Adele Heaps A tbesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctomte Graduate Department of English University of Toronto O Copyright by Denise Adele Heaps, 2ûûû National Library Bibliothèque nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services services bibliographiques 395 Weilicigtm Street 395. rue Wdlirrgtori Ottawa ON K1A ON4 OrtawaON K1AW Canada CaMda The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la fome de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiorn it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. ABSTRACT DENISE ADELE HEAPS Ph.D 2000 DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO GRADUATE STUDlES Gendrred Discourse and Subjectivity in Tnvel Writing by Canadian Women The subject of this dissertation - non-fictionai travel writing by Canadian women - has ken thrice marginaiized by scholarly criticism. As an interdisciplinary genre that is difficult to categorize. travel writing was long excluded fiom litemy analysis. In time, some renegade critics turned their attention to travel writing, pointing out the genre's value as an aesthetic. historical, culturai. and autobiographicai document. However, since they tended to ignore its significance as a gendered document, they articulated a gender-blind tradition of the genre that either excluded women travel witers or glossed over the gender-related difference of their texts. In response, feminist critics began identifjring a distinct tradition of women's travel writing. However, they usually limited their analysis to nineteenth-century texts. thereby excluding travel writing by Canadian women, which is largely a twentieth-century product. Thus, travel writing by Canadian women has ken marginalized on the level of genre, gender, and nation. This dissertation works on and through these levels in an effort to achieve a comprehensive, contextualized analysis of Canadian women's travel witing. Since travel and travel writing are thoroughly gender-inflected cultural practices. a substantial portion of the female uavel writer's subjectivity is constructed by gendered discourse. In Canadian women's travel wnting. wornan-identifieci, ferninine, and feminist discourses pervade the travel writers' inscriptions of their subjectivity. Chapter One of this study explores one manifestation of this gendered subjectivity: the feminist ethnographie discourse in texts by Margaret MacLean, Agnes Deans Carneron. Karen Comelly, and Bronwyn Drainie. In Chapter Two, travel books by Bharati Mukherkee, Daphne Marlatt, Rona Murray, and Myma Kostash are analyseci as feminine matrocentric discourses, wherein each author retrieves matemal mernories and messages as she retums to an ancestral homeland. The travel books exarnined in Chapter Three are composed by incorporated travelling wives: women who accompany their husbands on their work-related joumeys. In texts by EIla Manning, Philomena Orford, P.K. Page, Margaret Laurence, and Carlotta Hac ker, we find feminine discourses of domestic support or public assistance in a husband's career, as well as feminist discourses of resistance to this incorporation and discourses of self-ful filling travel expenences be yond wifely incorporation. Table of Contents Introduction: . Gendered Discourse and Subjectivity in Travel Writing by Canadian Women . -1-34 Chapfer One: . Feminist Ethnographie Discourse . .35-88 Clrapfer Two: . Travelling Daughters and Materna1 Messages . 89-1 59 Chapter Three: . .Travelling Wives' Tales . - . 160-2 17 . Chapter Fouc . Conclusion . .21 8-223 WorksConsulted: .................................................. 224-240 Introduction: Gendereà Discourse and Subjectiviîy in Travel Writing by Canadian Women The theory of women's travel writing articulated in this analysis evolves out of a persona1 register, that king my own experiences of travel, of writing travel. and of reading travel. When returning to Japan through the journal 1 wrote while residing and teaching there, 1 am fascinated by the subjectivity 1 fmd inscribed- Teresa de Lauretis defines subjectivity as "patterns by which experiential and emotional contents. feelings. images. and memories are organized to form one's self-image. one's sense of self and others. and of out possibilities of existence" (5). My subjectivity betrayed, among other things. my culturally-disonented consciousness: "1 feel as though 1 am hanging upside- down in suction-cupped shoes and wonder, if 1 remove my shoes to enter Japan, as is custom here, will 1 fdl downwards into the sky?" This question presented itself several weeks after my arrival as the last train of the evening shunted me fiom central Tokyo to my new apurtu in the suburb of Suginami Ku. The most salient. compelling feature of my Japan journal. however, is the pervasiveness of a gendered subjectivity. By this 1 mean my experience travelling as a woman as well as my interest in the experiences of the women fiom my host culture and how notions of gender shape our lives. The terrn 'gender' as 1 use it here and throughout this study refers to the social, political, and cultural meanings grafied ont0 biological sex. an interpretation inforrned by feminist poststructwalist theorists such as Chris Weedon. In Feminist Practice and Poststmcturalisr Theory, Weedon views gender as a product of discourse: ways of thinking and king in the world that circulate through language. and that seek to govem the conscious and unconscious mind and emotional life of their subjects (Weedon 1 OS). Subjectivity is conveyed through discourse, but it is also sculpted by discourse. The discourses of gender of which Weedon speaks have influenced women's subjectivity - their sense of themselves as women as well as their possi bi hies of existence as women - for centuries.' In my Japan journal, 1 wrote of my curiosity about Japanese women and the gendered contours of their lives, and rny text incorporates the voices of female fnends and students. like Yoko, a cornputer engineer, and Miss Takeuchi, a secretary, both of whom were young, working, single women like myself. Unlike myself. my fiends anticipated the day when they would marry, quit their jobs. and become fU11-time homemakers, wives, and mothers, a normative cycle in a Japanese woman's life during the time of my sojourn. Moreover, my journal contains sketches of women 1 saw. yet who remained voiceless and unknown to me: the preoccupied housewives whimng by on bicycles on their way to market, the hunched-over e!deriy women in public baths scrubbing each other' s backs, the ubiquitous milk-toothed poster-girls who adomed banks and telephone booths, and the child star of the pom flick "Littie Lips," who splayed her gartered legs to my gaze in a subway poster. My gendered subjectivity also manifested itself in lengthy considerations of my reception in Japan as a young, gaoin (foreign) woman. In pants, cornfortable shues, and short haïr, 1 was received as a stereotype of the liberated Western wornan. which apparently co~oteda yeaming for promiscuous casual sex. To my initial astonishment. efforts at tolerant amusement, and ultimate distress. this sanctioned improper propositions and questions, myriad subway gropings. and even more invasive 'hands-on' experiences by Japanese men as well as by the gaijin men 1 met who revelled in the testosterone-charged atmosphere of Japan. Interestingly, these were frequently the same gaijin who objected to my gendered critiques of Japan. ïhey self- righteously tossed out terms like cultural relativism and the politics of representation of cultural others - important concepts 1 myself was struggling with in a way my gaijin male counterparts could avoid. With my Japan journal in rnind, 1 began reading non-fictional, book-length, English-language travel accounts by other Canadian women to see if, to what degree. and in what ways the inscribed subjectivities were inflected by gender. In fanning out fiom my own experiences and writings to those of other wornen, I am directed by feminist cultural cri tic Elspeth Probyn. In Sexing the Sev Gendered Positions in Cuitural Sltidies. Probyn reinstalls the critical methodology of personal experience in feminist studies. making the "very basic point" that the "expenential is part of the cntical enterprise itself," that it is necessarily "imbricated within a critical stance," and that the feminist critic is "directed by and to the experience of king gendered" (23). It is with Probyn in mind that I commence this study of Canadian women's travel writing with a "discursive striptease" (1 2), with a description of my experience travelling and travel writing. However, 1 offer my story not as an authoritative account of the travel-writing woman, but as a segue into a broader analysis. My desire is to engage a methodology that "stretch[es] my experience beyond