Maps of Difference: Canada, Women, and Travel (review)

Paul Fussell's 1987 anthology of travel writing included fifty-two men but only four women as most women failed to meet his criteria for the genre. The fields of postcolonialism and women's studies, however, have been quick to address this imbalance and a number of influential works have appeared that have considered the differences in the reasons for and modes of women's travel. An important contribution to this growing field is Wendy Roy's Maps of Difference, which explores the intersections of race, gender, and imperialism in the works of three writers.

The first, Anna Brownell Jameson, travelled to Canada from England to reconcile with her estranged husband, who had accepted a post in Toronto with the government of Upper Canada. When the marriage failed, she set off on a nine-month trip, as she says, 'to see with my own eyes, the condition of women in savage life.' Her three-volume Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) considers politics and education in Upper Canada; describes trips to such places as Niagara Falls and Manitoulin Island; documents her encounters with First Nations, particularly Anishinaabe women; and includes sketches of people and landscapes. The second writer, Mina Hubbard, a white middle-class Canadian, travelled through Labrador in 1905 with four male (Métis, Cree, and Inuit) guides. Her husband's own failed voyage to Labrador, which had resulted in his death from starvation two years earlier, prompted Hubbard's trip. In A Woman's Way through Unknown Labrador: An Account of the Exploration of the Nascaupee and George Rivers (1908), she writes of the Innu people she encountered and includes photographs and maps of her travels. In keeping with colonial practice, she assumed the North to be a blank space and named places, many of which remain today, effacing Inuit names. The third writer is Margaret Laurence, who travelled to the British Somaliland Protectorate in the early 1950s and wrote about the experience in The Prophet's Camel Bell. Accompanying her husband, who was an engineer working for the British colonial government and was in charge of reservoirs, Laurence lived in a Bedford truck in the desert and wrote about her unwanted but inescapable complicity in imperialism, her difficulties in negotiating a feminist position in the context of cultural differences (such as child brides, genital excision, and veiling), and her interest in Somali literature.

Roy's attentive and thorough study of these works notes the difficulties for women travellers who must self-consciously perform for an audience that expects of them proper feminine behaviour even in the wilds; who must negotiate their second-class status as women even as their white skin and class position them as superior; and who are necessarily complicit in even as they are resistant to the colonial project, transformed as they are by their travels. The strongest aspect of Roy's book is its consistent attentiveness to these complicated positionings and performances. Her excellent discussions of the use of photography, maps, and sketches refuse any reading of them as authentic. As with all travel narrative, the worlds encountered in these ones are always to some extent textual, whether acknowledged or not. Her comparison of private letters, journals, and accounts of the same events by others that often contradict the official version continually foregrounds the ways in which the final publication is reflexively crafted. Resisting the simplistic readings of travel literature as an 'objective' account, she thus focuses on mapping in both its literal and figurative sense.

The theoretical material is not always as thoroughly worked through in her book, and quotes from secondary sources sometimes seem to be dropped in unnecessarily and at random. Moreover, the distinctions between, for instance, the different stakes involved in the representation of First Nations in the 1830s and the early 1900s might have been more carefully historicized, and the distinction between postcolonial and Native studies could have been more sharply delineated. In making grand theoretical claims, Roy sometimes misses nuances as when...