Black and White Women's Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations

Rating:
Summary: Mobile Subjects in a Dynamic Age
Review: With its unassuming title, Cheryl Fish's examination of travel narratives by three mid-nineteenth century women might seem of interest only to specialists. Yet by interweaving historical contextualization, attentive close reading, and theoretical agility, Fish at once reveals the intriguing tensions and assertions to be found in texts that have been dismissed as extraliterary, marginal, or dry. More important, Fish reaches beyond current critical clichés to construct richly textured, nuanced portraits of nineteenth century female identities-- identities that, while circumscribed by economic and ideological limitations, comprised genius, resistance, and astonishing adventures.
The three authors Fish discusses, Nancy Prince, Mary Seacole, and Margaret Fuller, led exceptional lives for their times. Fuller participated in Boston's predominantly masculinized circle of Transcendentalists. Nancy Prince, a Massachusetts-born African American, moved as a newlywed to St. Petersburg, Russia, where she lived for nine years; upon her return to the United States she relocated to Jamaica to establish a mission school. Mary Seacole, the daughter of a Jamaican Creole mother and a Scottish father, traveled as a "doctress"or professional healer to Panama and the Crimea. Yet although these experiences were hardly typical of nineteenth-century women, Fish demonstrates that the juxtapositions and dislocations produced by their unusual mobility and their complex racial and social identities were paradoxically representative, epitomizing "mobile subjectivity"in an era of more general mobility and flux.
In marked contrast to critics who equate literary greatness with anachronism, Fish situates the texts within-not above or beyond-mainstream nineteenth-century discourse. Drawing on a remarkable range of historical sources, Fish traces each author's location amid genres often unappreciated by more recent critics, including the conversion narrative, theological and domestic instructional literature. The narratives participate in and diverge from generic conventions in fascinating ways: Prince's domesticized spiritual memoir "negotiate[s] with the white cult of true womanhood" to legitimize her activity outside the boundaries of the home; Seacole merges the persona of "the picara-heroine," roving the world in search of adventure, with the more socially palatable icon of the "ministering angel" nursing soldiers; the more privileged Fuller incorporates the rapidly gelling tropes of nineteenth-century tourism into her introspective representations of the Great Lakes and Niagara.
Historical contextualization is complemented by Fish's sensitive attention to each author's language, even-perhaps especially-when the text might seem skimpy or inexpressive. Fish single-handedly redeems the sexualized interpretation of feminist critics of the 1980s in her flat-out wonderful analysis of Fuller's description of Niagara Falls, foregrounding Fuller's wild tangle of images connoting both gender and sexuality. But Fish is just as appreciative of Prince's and Seacole's less eroticized narratives, scrupulously noting both their repeated motifs and provocative lacunae to illuminate Prince's haunting evocation of "the body in pain," and Seacole's "witty dialectic between imperial conflict and the power of woman to heal." The recovery of these suppressed voices and their relationship to the dynamic and fascinating age that produced them is a unique gift offered by an insightful and generous literary scholar.