Abstract:Victorian travel has always been about the politics of leaving home. And in a twentieth-century critical universe shaped by some of the fundamental questions about the making of “home” and “away” and the invention of “self” and “other,” the field of Victorian travel has necessarily taken its place at the center of a critical discourse about the sometimes fabulous and often sordid details of the colonial encounter. The Western travelers of such encounters are intriguing figures if simply because, despite the mu… Show more
“…In fact, Kingsley's narrative does more than showing a feminine body, it performs and creates it, at the intersection of femininity and social class. Laura Ciolkowski convincingly argues that Kingsley 'remakes herself in her Travels in the image of the Victorian woman she routinely failed to be [in England]' 36 and that 'it is, rather, precisely there in the 'darkness' of Africa that womanhood is most efficiently created' 37 Before embarking on her African journey, Kingsley, who was the daughter of George Kingsley and his domestic servant, had held a precarious position in society. Her travel narrative fashions her into the lady she never was at home.…”
Section: Performing Femininity: (Un)covering the Travelling Bodymentioning
“…In fact, Kingsley's narrative does more than showing a feminine body, it performs and creates it, at the intersection of femininity and social class. Laura Ciolkowski convincingly argues that Kingsley 'remakes herself in her Travels in the image of the Victorian woman she routinely failed to be [in England]' 36 and that 'it is, rather, precisely there in the 'darkness' of Africa that womanhood is most efficiently created' 37 Before embarking on her African journey, Kingsley, who was the daughter of George Kingsley and his domestic servant, had held a precarious position in society. Her travel narrative fashions her into the lady she never was at home.…”
Section: Performing Femininity: (Un)covering the Travelling Bodymentioning
“…Her opposition to women's suffrage and female membership of the RGS could co‐exist with her more radical insights into the anthropology of West Africa, leading Maddrell to conclude that ‘Ambiguity best describes Kingsley's own attitude to her work and status, and her writing is riddled throughout with contradictory relationships between gender and colonialism’ (2009, 84). However, Ciolkowski () suggests that such gender ambiguities render Kingsley the model English woman, which she carefully cultivated over the course of her travels in Africa. Indeed she claimsThe female traveler of Kingsley's text is a modern Britannia who, as ‘invincible global civilizing agent,’ links symbolically the seemingly incompatible values of masculine strength and feminine moral leadership in the service of British imperial power.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Indeed she claimsThe female traveler of Kingsley's text is a modern Britannia who, as ‘invincible global civilizing agent,’ links symbolically the seemingly incompatible values of masculine strength and feminine moral leadership in the service of British imperial power. (Ciolkowski , 349)…”
In April 1922 Charlotte Wheeler‐Cuffe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. This honour was in recognition of her contribution to plant hunting and exploration, botanical illustration and anthropological knowledge accumulated about Burma during the quarter of a century (1897–1922) she spent there with her husband as part of the colonial service. While historical geographers have acknowledged that the colonies, in particular, often afforded women the space for practising science, the work of female naturalists in the field has received limited detailed scholarly attention. For Charlotte Wheeler‐Cuffe, her plant‐hunting expeditions across Burma allow us to extend the epistemic reach of a spatial perspective developed by geographers and to demonstrate how the web of connections she developed in the colonies enabled her to circulate scientific knowledge across the globe. By focusing on a major expedition to Mount Victoria undertaken by Wheeler‐Cuffe, this paper unravels the complexity of the practice of natural history within a global imperial framework through an examination of the private correspondence and pictorial archive maintained during her time in Burma.
While addressing the Royal African Society, founded in honor of Mary Henrietta Kingsley, Edward Wilmot Blyden reflected on one of his more memorable experiences in Victorian England:
During a visit to Blackpool many years ago, I went with some hospitable friends to the Winter Garden where there were several wild animals on exhibition. I noticed that a nurse having two children with her, could not keep her eyes from the spot where I stood, looking at first with a sort of suspicious, if not terrified curiosity. After a while she heard me speak to one of the gentlemen who were with me. Apparently surprised and reassured by this evidence of a genuine humanity, she called to the children who were interested in examining a leopard, “Look, look, there is a black man and he speaks English.” (Blyden, “West” 363)
Blyden, a West Indian-born citizen of Liberia and resident of Sierra Leone, assures his audience that such scenes were not unique for the African abroad, even at the turn of the twentieth century; seen as “an unapproachable mystery,” an African traveler like himself was “at once ‘spotted’ as a peculiar being – sui generis” who, as if by nature, “produce[d] the peculiar feelings of the foreigner at the first sight of him” (Blyden, “West” 362, 363). Keenly aware of how non-Europeans were displayed at metropolitan zoos, fairs, and exhibitions throughout the nineteenth century, Blyden puns on the leopard's spots in order to highlight his experience of being marked as an object of curiosity. Indeed, the nurse's anxious wavering between curiosity and terror dissipates not because Blyden ceases to appear marked, or “spotted,” but because the taxonomic crisis he arouses by not standing on the other side of the fence has been temporarily contained: she distances the threat of Blyden's difference as “a black man” while evading the equally threatening possibility of recognizing his sameness as one who “speaks English.” The nurse, to borrow the words of Homi Bhabha in describing the fetishism of such colonial “scenes of subjectification” (Bhabha 81), constructs the man before her as “at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible” in a way that attempts to “fix” Blyden's identity and the Victorian categories his appearance unsettles (Bhabha 70–71), while making the relation between differences and their appended significance appear natural (Bhabha 67). If, by expressing himself in his characteristically impeccable English in order to vindicate his “genuine humanity” (Blyden, “West” 363), Blyden appears to be “putting on the white world” at the expense of his autonomy (Fanon 36), he simultaneously wages battle in this world at the level of signification in ways that anticipate the work of the later African nationalist and West Indian emigrant, Frantz Fanon. An extensive reader and ordained minister who recognized the politics of exegesis as well as semiosis, Blyden implicitly asks his audience, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” (Jeremiah 13, 23). Posing a rhetorical question that argues rather than asks, that brandishes the very texts often used against him, Blyden subtly deploys this passage typically associated with the intransience of human character in order to defy attempts at determining him entirely from without. Serving as a kind of object lesson demonstrating the need for less objectifying knowledge about Africans and their cultures, Blyden's anecdote challenged his contemporaries to further the lessons he and Mary Kingsley offered through their writing.
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