X Marks the Spot: Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790–1895 (review)

In X Marks the Spot, Megan A. Norcia examines the relatively unexplored archive of geography primers composed by women during the long nineteenth century. While the writers Norcia examines “penned geographies that marshaled history, religion, economics, and anecdotal evidence to establish the social and cultural supremacy of England” (2), Norcia also identifies “disruptive moments” in which the female authors “express their dissatisfaction with an empire that did not offer them full participation as acting subjects” (4, 5). In analyzing women’s participation in geographical pedagogy and also their expressions of discontent, Norcia provides a useful addition to scholarship on the gender dynamics of the British Empire and to the growing corpus of scholarly works exploring the Victorian production of imperial space.

The first two chapters of X Marks the Spot engage with the domestic metaphors employed by primer writers. Chapter 1, “The Dysfunctional ‘Family of Man’,” concentrates on authors’ use of the “Family of Man” metaphor in primers published during the first half of the nineteenth century. Norcia argues that the “Family of Man” trope stakes out a political position in racial debates, implicitly siding with monogenicists’ arguments for a single origin of the human race. Chapter 2, “Place Settings at the Imperial Dinner Party,” examines Romantic and Victorian geography primers’ preoccupation with consumption. Norcia is particularly interested in the orderly international relations modeled in the mid-century trope of the “imperial dinner party,” a cumulative scene in geography primers in which the child reader is invited to imaginatively participate in selecting the national dishes of other European nations. While interesting, Norcia’s remarks on cannibalism seem merely to recap older arguments. I would have appreciated a more thorough investigation of the possibility that the contrast between orderly dinner parties and horrific cannibalism implicitly valorized the domestic authority of the primer writers.

The next two chapters examine moments in which female authors seem to resist or call into question the imperial project in which they are participating. The strongest chapter of the book, “Terra Incognita,” explores what Norcia terms an “undercurrent of frustration” running beneath the text of many female-authored Victorian primers (25). Norcia’s readings are persuasive, particularly as regards the primers’ registering of the limitations of gender roles through the voice of a frustrated, self-sacrificing mother figure.

In chapter 4, “‘Prisoners in its Spatial Matrix’?,” Norcia argues that female primer writers eschewed the “blank space” trope as the nineteenth century progressed, preferring instead to represent “the world as a palimpsest overwritten by imperial transcription.” As was the case with the disruptive narrative moments described in chapter 3, Norcia sees in primers’ representation of palimpsests and native systems of geography a “source of hope for the reconstitution or reinvention of the world from native points of view” (27). This chapter contains some strong examples of close reading: Norcia’s counterintuitive interpretation of a scene in Priscilla Wakefield’s The Traveller in Africa (1814) convincingly reads the narrator’s dismissal of native geography as expressing a deep-seated unease over the prospect of Africans mapping European space. This chapter also contains several examples of poorly phrased historical and theoretical observations, however: in discussing the impact of gender on one’s ability to travel, Norcia seems to imply that women alone “had to cull passages from a variety of sources and then reconstitute the material in the primers” because of a lack of “firsthand experiences” (148). Given the long tradition of male armchair travel writing, some history, perhaps of the genre of travel-narrative reviews, would have helped buttress Norcia’s otherwise convincing argument. I was also puzzled by Norcia’s attribution of the term “thirdspace” to Henri Lefebvre, since this term comes from Edward Soja’s reading of Lefebvre rather than from Lefebvre himself (27). Moments such as this one made the argument’s theoretical framework appear shaky, and I would have appreciated more clarity regarding...