What the traveller saw: fact, fiction and the gendered text in fin de siècle China travel narratives

Abstract

This study examines a number of travel narratives from nineteenth and early twentieth century male and female writers, offering direct sources to demonstrate that writers were both obliged and even willing to create gendered texts as responses to their travel experiences. This paper postulates that the Victorian woman traveller, in writing of her experiences was constrained by patriarchal codes to present herself as powerless despite, and in contradiction to, the sense of empire and racial superiority which she carried with her as the coloniser’s prerogative. Conversely, her male counterpart was free to indulge in a discourse of his choice be that factual and scientific or the heroic adventure of  boys’ own fiction.