Travelling in Different Skins: Gender Identity in European Women’s Oriental Travelogues, 1850–1950 by Dúnlaith Bird, and: British Women’s Travel to Greece, 1840–1914: Travels in the Palimpsest by Churnjeet Mahn (review)

That analysis of women’s travel writing has matured is evident in Dúnlaith Bird’s inventive book, Travelling in Different Skins: Gender Identity in European Women’s Oriental Travelogues, 1850–1950. Postmodern theories of sex and gender breathe fresh air into the study of women and travel as Bird examines the ramifications of vagabondage, defined as “the search for identity through motion” (3). Bird’s book traces, quite expertly, the ways in which vagabondage “coalesces from a historical phenomenon with a marginal literary element into a textual exploration of identity construction by women travel writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (236). She combines analysis of six women’s popular travel narratives about the East with exploration of the writers’ lived experiences as women who often clashed with binary gender systems at home and abroad. These are indeed women on the outskirts (if I may extend Bird’s use of the skirt as metaphor in both chapter 6, “Selling the Skirt,” and chapter 7, “Skirting the Issue”) both geographically and personally: women whose lives and books probed the boundaries of law and convention.

Bird excels at distilling a great deal of historical, biographical, and theoretical information into manageable pieces, a quality that is especially necessary in a book that ranges so widely in geographical, cultural, linguistic, and temporal senses. She moves seamlessly between French and British women’s travel narratives, neither eliding differences between the two nations’ traditions of travel to—and writing about—the Orient, nor forgetting the significant overlapping between the two traditions. She also deftly works with postmodern theories about gender, particularly the work of Judith Butler, as well as the now-classic formulations of orientalism by Edward Said and Homi Bhabha and recent smaller-scale work in the field. Her introductory chapter offers a helpful genealogy of vagabondage and an introduction to her six women subjects—Olympe Audouard, Gertrude Bell, Isabella Bird, Alexandra David-Neel, Jane Dieulafoy, and Isabelle Eberhardt. Deeper investigation of vagabondage in women’s Eastern travels happens in chapters 2 and 3, where Bird looks specifically at these travelers’ stress on spontaneity, personal transformation, and autonomy as well as their awareness of—and often welcome acceptance of—personal danger as a structuring part of their experiences. Bird weaves together a history of laws against vagabonding and restrictions that were often placed (sometimes informally, sometimes formally) on white women’s movements in the East with striking images of boundary-challenging in the women’s narratives to produce an intriguing reading of their negotiations with the law and social mores.

The titles of chapters 4 through 7 utilize metaphors as ways of organizing Bird’s discussion of performativity and gender in the narratives. Fortunately, the content of the chapters is more solid than their playful (perhaps even gimmicky) titles would suggest. The concept of “The Inky Body” governs—though a bit tenuously—chapter 4, in which Bird argues that traditional female “forms [within Orientalist writing and painting] are contested and even dismembered in the vagabondage travelogue” (91). There she offers provocative readings of visual and written depictions of female bodies in the narratives of Audouard, Bird, and Eberhardt, zeroing in on these writers’ challenges to prevailing beliefs about women and sexuality. The carnivalesque and disruptive potential of cross-dressing is the focus of chapter 5, “Bearded Queens and Amazons.” Chapters 6 and 7 elegantly examine the reception of these texts and the complex negotiations that occurred between vagabonding women and the societies that they simultaneously had to embrace—for the purposes of selling books—and push beyond to...