Reluctant Adventurers: The Risky Business of Female Travel in Stories by Anglophone Women, 1767-1830

This dissertation examines the images of travel in both fictional and purportedly nonfictional narratives that emerged in early and antebellum American literature alongside the stories that authors created about female adventurers. It argues that these texts appropriate images of women’s involuntary and often reluctant travel as a narratological device that broadens the types of stories available for the expression of women’s experiences. Because of the nature of this material, this dissertation focuses on stories of white women who enjoy relatively elite status in their cultures. Although many of these characters do not participate in leisurely travel—structured and protected bourgeois physical movement—the movements they do make, because they become so rooted to the characters’ sense of self, often direct the trajectories of their lives and the stories they get to tell. In other words, although women are subjected often to forced travel, the female protagonists in this dissertation make the conscious choice to derive interpretative value from their journeys. Finding themselves in unfamiliar and often unwelcoming environments, women are described as developing new competencies that ensure their survival, but also devising diverse manifestations of fundamental knowledge and skills. These stories then explore various incarnations of women’s potential by emphasizing female ingenuity and ways of knowing. They also require novel ways of expressing women’s peculiar experiences that result from their mobility.

Many scholars have explored the ways in which women writers construct counter narratives of their experiences that challenge the conventional scripts of female weakness and dependency. My study of female mobilities adds to this field of scholarship by exploring the ways in which narratives attributed to women writers rely on the trope of travel to concoct imaginary social spaces that expand the narrative possibilities of female experience and encourage their heroines to resist patriarchal dictates that attempt to shape and limit the scope of their lives. These texts thus build frameworks that counter experiences of powerlessness, thereby enabling female protagonists to exert a semblance of control over their lives; the women in these texts discover through their adventures ways in which to become willing participants in a community strengthened by their own personal and mental growth.