“My lot is cast in with my sex and country”: Generic Conventions, Gender Anxieties and American Identity in Emma Hart Willard’s and Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Travel Letters

The article analyses generic conventions, gender constraints and authorial self-defi nition in two ante-bellum American travel accounts – Emma Hart Willard’s Journal and Letters, from France and Great Britain (1833) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841). Emma Hart Willard, a pioneer in women’s higher education and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, an author of sentimental novels, were infl uential fi gures of the Early Republic, active in the literary public sphere. Narrative personas adopted in their travel letters have been shaped by the authors’ national identity on the one hand and by ideals of republican motherhood, which they propagated, on the other. Both travelogues are preceded with apologies fi lled with self-deprecating rhetoric, typical for women’s travel writing in the early 19th century and both are intended to instruct the American reader. Other conventional features of American antebellum travel writing include comparisons between British and American government and society with a view of extolling the latter as well as avid interest in social status and public activities of European women. Willard and Sedgwick deal with possible gender anxieties of their upper middle-class female readers by assuring them that following one’s literary or educational vocation in the public sphere does necessarily mean compromising ideals of true womanhood in private life. Discussing social changes which had aff ected women’s status in the United States since the 1840’s, Henry Adams thus commented on the ubiquity of female travellers: “The woman has been set free. [...] One had but to pass a week in Florida, or on any of a hundred huge ocean steamers, or to walk through the Place Vendome, or join a part of Cook’s tourists to Jerusalem, to see that the woman had been set free” (362). Once they were “set free,” many American middle-class women went mainly – though not exclusively – to Europe in order to see its cultural treasures, to study its customs and institutions or to shop in Paris and visit fashionable resorts. Some of these visitors wrote letters home or sent them to local papers, 52 Małgorzata Rutkowska presenting themselves as well-informed and competent travelers – an image which ran counter to cultural expectations regarding women at that time. Though classifying women’s travel writing in opposition to men’s travel books is an oversimplifi cation, it is true that “gender inevitably aff ects genre” (Siegel 5). For all their thematic and generic similarities to men’s travelogues, women’s travel narratives reveal certain inherent tensions since they were “constructed in the process of interaction of colonial textual constraints and constraints of gender” (Mills 40). While women travelers were rarely openly opposed to imperialism or colonization, they were often critical of the abuses engendered by the system and felt more sympathy for subjugated native people. Constraints of gender are visible in the ways women travelers negotiated discourses of femininity in their books. Theirs was a precarious position. On the one hand, traveling middle-class women needed to act with decorum and maintain respectability if they wished to have their books published and read – thus, for example, so much emphasis was put on the proper dress code and feminine behaviour during the journey. On the other hand, the very act of leaving one’s home, of venturing, usually alone, to foreign, exotic, or even uncivilized lands certainly meant transgressing the boundaries of femininity: “in addition to presenting themselves as subjects, in traveling, women literally had to inhabit and negotiate the public sphere” (Siegel 5). It is interesting to note that white, middle class travelers were doubly constrained: by their gender roles and by their class. In contrast to them, black women who often had no means to travel nevertheless “experienced greater freedom and mobility because their skin color automatically excluded them from the rigid expectations of feminine behavior and limitations to solely domestic space that often affl icted white women” (Steadman 7). Travel writing had become an important medium for 19th century American women authors, as the increasing number of published books manifests: 27 books of foreign travel by women were published before the Civil War and 168 after it (Schriber xxi). Some authors did not point to their gender in the title while others played on the concept of the “female gaze” for their benefi t. For instance, in conclusion of her Europe Through a Woman’s Eye (1883) Lucy Yeend Culler wrote: “If any of my readers wonder why I have said so little concerning the agriculture, manufactures, commerce, customs and habits of the people and political aff airs of the countries we visited, please remember that this is EUROPE THROUGH A WOMAN’S EYE” (225). The titles emphasizing a feminine point of view helped to promote books on a market already overfl owing with numerous travel accounts by men (Schriber xxvi–xxvii). The present paper looks at two ante-bellum American travel accounts – Emma Hart Willard’s Journal and Letters, from France and Great Britain (1833) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841) – with a view of analysing narrative personas shaped by the authors’ national identity on the one hand and by ideals of republican motherhood on the other. Both “My lot is cast in with my sex and country”... 53 accounts are epistolary in form and can be considered as by-products of European voyages, which is typical for American pre-Civil War travel texts (Schriber xxv). The letters are addressed to family members, friends and, in Willard’s case, also to her students. Looking back to the role such letters played in the 1830’s, Willard’s biographer underscores that “every letter from Europe was a treasure. It passed from hand to hand, from family to family” and the pleasure of reading about European sights and customs was much greater back then “since we had not heard or read so much about them” (Lord 128). This comment reveals that in the fi rst part of the 19th century women’s travels to Europe were still quite rare, so their letters were welcomed as entertaining and reliable fi rst-hand accounts of the Old World. In his study devoted to European travel in 19th century American culture, William Stowe claims that “travel writing was neither a particularly masculine mode nor an exclusively feminine domain [...] but a genial form of narrative that served as a meeting place for various voices, literary styles, levels of speech and kinds of subject” (107). Such “heteroglossia” (to borrow Bakhtin’s term) or polyvocality seems to him a characteristic feature of many 19th century American travel accounts (Stowe 107–108). It has its origins in Washington Irving’s Sketch Book of Geoff rey Crayon, Gent. (1819), the book that has become a model for subsequent American travel writers (Stowe 59). Irving employs a variety of fi ctional and nonfi ctional genres in Sketch Book including short stories, essays, mini-biographies and vignettes of English life and landscapes. The role of Geoff rey Crayon – the persona assumed by the author – is not to dominate over other voices but to allow them to speak for themselves. As a result, the book becomes “a collection of voices assembled for the reader’s pleasure by a genial master of ceremonies” (Stowe 108). Similar generic variety is also to be found in H. W. Longfellow’s Outre Mer (1835) and in L. H. Sigourney’s sentimental Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands (1842). Stowe fi nds evidence for polyvocality in Emma Willard’s Journal and Letters (111–112) and in Margaret Fuller’s reports to the New York Tribune (1846–1850) (118–124). Needless to say, not all American travel authors in the early 19th century followed the Geoff rey Crayon model. James Fenimore Cooper’s Gleanings in Europe, published in several volumes between 1837–1838, are narrated in a homogenous voice as are Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad and Sarah Haight’s Letters from the Old World (1838). Emma Hart Willard and Catharine Maria Sedgwick were infl uential fi gures of the Early Republic, active in the literary public sphere. Willard was a pioneer in women’s education and founder of Troy Seminary, the fi rst institution which off ered higher education for women in the USA, established in 1821. As an author of popular history textbooks which were in print for almost fi fty years, she must have shaped the way many Americans understood national and international history (Baym 4). What is noteworthy, her achievements “demonstrated that the properly educated woman could, at one and the same time, be a successful entrepreneur 54 Małgorzata Rutkowska and serve her country in a way that transcended gender boundaries without overturning sexual diff erence” (Baym 4). Catharine Maria Sedgwick was a writer of fi ction, the author of bestselling Hope Leslie (1827) and other popular sentimental novels. As one of practitioners of “woman’s fi ction,” she did not only adhere to the “cult of true womanhood” but also explored tensions and turbulences caused by women’s subordinate legal and social status in American society (Clements xvii). In her novels Sedgwick portrayed independent, morally strong heroines who, like her female readers, often faced a choice between married and single life, neither of these options being without some inherent perils. A study of nineteenth-century women’s prefaces shows that a tendency to apologize for authority and to belittle one’s achievement was common to authors of both prose and poetry (Howells 131). In these apologies, women writers resorted to such strategies as “presenting the authors humbly, situating the project as communal, and characterizing the writer’s eff orts as un-artful” (Howells 132). All these strategies aimed to legitimize their writing projects and to disarm possible critics by assuring them that the ideals of femininity had