Der Orient der Frauen: Reiseberichte deutschsprachiger Auto-rinnen im frühen 19. Jahrhundert by Ulrike Stamm (review)

This is a detailed and thoroughly researched study of thirteen texts by ten German women travel writers from the period 1820–50. Applying both postcolonial and feminist methodology, Ulrike Stamm analyzes how these writers represent both themselves and the ethnic Other from the standpoint of their ambiguous power positions as both European and female. The writers include the relatively well-known Ida Pfeiffer, Ida von Hahn-Hahn, and Therese von Bacheracht. They also include some interesting but lesser-known figures such as the Swiss officer’s wife Regula Engel-Egli and the Prussian baroness Wolfradine Minutoli, who accompanied their husbands to Egypt, and the Austrian nun and teacher Maria Schuber, who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands in 1847–48. Stamm’s corpus comprises the first published reports on extra-European voyages written by German women. The appearance of these texts, mostly in the 1840s, is explained historically by the increasing ease of travel and the relative social acceptability of women’s mobility in the early nineteenth century. According to Stamm, in the aftermath of the failed 1848 revolution, such reports stopped appearing, suggesting that the range of options for women as both travellers and writers became more limited. Thus, her treatment of these texts as a historical cluster seems justified.

As the title indicates, Stamm is specifically interested in women’s reports on their travels to the “Orient.” Fully aware of the controversies surrounding that term since Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), she begins with a discussion of Said and his critics. Here she acknowledges the problems involved in diagnosing colonialism in terms of a reductive understanding of the Orient as a homogeneous cultural Other: it makes it difficult to talk about degrees of openness and the often contradictory ways in which Europeans encountered other ethnicities, especially in the precolonial period. Nevertheless, she finds that her evidence does not fundamentally refute Said’s binary pattern of interpretation. Sadly, most of her writers are indeed shown to represent the “East” in the language of stereotyped alterity. She quotes numerous passages where they comment on what they perceive as the dirtiness of the cities, the dishonesty and indolence of the inhabitants, the physical unattractiveness of the women, and so on. Stamm reflects on her own use of the term “Orient” in a footnote on page 18, where she says she is simply following her authors in using the term to refer to places as diverse as Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, and the Dutch East Indies. I sometimes wished that she had acknowledged more explicitly in her own text the constructedness of the term, perhaps not by putting it in quotation marks all the time, but by at least referring to the actual Palestinians, Egyptians, Tunisians, and so on her writers encountered.

Of course, women who travelled and then published books about it were breaking certain taboos in the period. Using somewhat dated criticism (e.g., Karin Hausen) to support her argument about women’s exclusion from the realm of literature and authorship, Stamm recognizes (as more recent critics have) that female authors like those she studies still found creative ways of legitimating their activities. Two chapters focus on such strategies for representing the self to a judging readership and for authorizing the independence and autonomy that long voyages required. Particularly interesting is the section on the semantics of clothing. Comparing the various authors, Stamm shows how they often adapt for themselves the more practical clothes of European men, but they avoid conceding that this is a gender transgression. At the same time – and in contrast to some male travellers at the time – they never fail to demarcate themselves through their clothing from the local people. Like calling the local women “ugly,” a tendency not generally found in male writers, this seems to be motivated by the desire to legitimate the self by taking a stance of distance and...