Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America (review)

Susan Clair Imbarrato's Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America builds upon the theme of individual subjectivity in early America, the central topic of Declarations of Independency in Eighteenth-Century American Autobiography (1998), Imbarrato's first book on this subject. As did her first volume, this analysis of first-person narratives emphasizes identity—taking further her earlier examination of Elizabeth Ashbridge's and Elizabeth House Trist's female identity as presented through their writing. As Traveling Women's title suggests, its focus includes several individual women's experiences as they journeyed. The volume moves beyond the theme of identity, however, to explore the cultural contexts influencing women's often thoughtful inscriptions, recorded either as they traveled or in later retrospective accounts. And it moves beyond the historical context of the eighteenth century to include prior and later narratives of travel.

The study's cultural contexts extend beyond issues of personal identity that readers might expect: a woman's socioeconomic status and family background, her religious affiliation, or her age at the time of traveling and writing. Imbarrato's volume also includes such details of travel as the conditions of roads and rivers, the availability and roles of maps and road signs, tavern culture, and the costs of room and board at inns. Her sources include secondary studies, such as David Shields's analysis of taverns and tea tables (Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America [1997]), as well as careful reading of primary materials, such as periodical advertisements and broadsides.

Imbarrato successfully manages these numerous cultural contexts and the broad historical scope by organizing the volume by theme rather than by chronology or individual female. The first chapter provides an overview to travel writing, drawing from the now well-grounded scholarship of that arena. Here Imbarrato includes the ideological shifts reflected in the styles of travel writing from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, as travel for leisure and recreation increased in popularity and joined travel necessitated by family and economic concerns. The second chapter, "Ordinary Travel," provides fascinating details of roads, waterways, taverns, and inns, explaining, for example, the quite typical expectation among travelers of sharing rooms with strangers, even those of the opposite sex, and the costs of various food and drink. The third chapter continues the pattern of providing cultural embeddings for female writers' thoughts by focusing specifically on class. In "Writing into the Ohio Frontier," Imbarrato explains that westward migration created "a new kind of woman": "aware of social forces urging them to maintain genteel values, . . . [s]howing admirable fortitude while negotiating challenging terrain, women delineate the cultural and physical infrastructure of early America" (89). These women's perceptions, Imbarrato argues, noticeably leave behind utopian visions and pre-date romanticized, expansionist themes asserted by male writers.

Throughout these first three chapters, Imbarrato includes enough quotes from her subjects to give them life. In the final two chapters, however, the attention to the written word becomes more extensive, as the analysis moves from material surroundings to comparative studies of travel narratives and poetry, novels, and letters. Many of the female authors included overtly acknowledge the literary sources influencing their styles, while others implicitly reflect those influences. Imbarrato compares the 1740 writing of Eliza Lucas, for example, to the language of a sentimental heroine, as she presents her thoughts on two potential suitors. She also boldly claims that travel diaries and letters written while traveling "resist the panoramic view of America" and provide "real time" to readers—perspectives not available in "political pamphlets and promotional rhetoric" put forth by male writers. These characteristics, she argues, indicate that women's travel writing is not a "subgenre" but "central to American literary expression" (168).

Imbarrato's claim is compelling, and the evidence she provides to support it throughout the volume is insightful. Some readers may be disappointed that they do not have the pleasure of becoming familiar with individual female personae, as they would in a volume with a chapter devoted...