Western Places, American Myths: How We Think About The West

8 | Narrating Imperial Adventure Isabella Bird’s Travels in the Nineteenth-Century American West

Feminist historical geographies of the American West are just beginning to come into their own.1 Although Western women’s historians have been producing feminist scholarship about the region since the 1970s,2 only in the last decade or so have feminist historical geographers of the West begun producing a distinctive body of work. Their interests overlap those of other critical and “radical” geographies of the West, particularly in their critique of labor practices and relations,3 as well as complement the traditional arenas of the historical geography of the region—exploration and frontier expansion, settlement patterns and sequence, environmental change, and emerging urban and economic integration. Feminist topics of interest range widely,4 but one significant area of critique concerns tourism development in the region. Such works principally examine the ways that gendered differences situate women in feminized job categories at tourist sites and the ways that sociospatial forces position women materially and discursively as particular kinds of consumers of tourist sites and as producers of cultural knowledge about them, especially via written texts.5 Simply writing women’s experiences into historical geography remains of primary concern to many scholars, whereas others demonstrate a more fundamental interest in the production of gender differences themselves and how they work within and through economic, political, cultural, and sexual differences in the creation of past geographies. This chapter is concerned with both of the important agendas appearing in new feminist work of the West—the need to vigilantly continue incorporating women’s voices, views, 204 8 | Narrating Imperial Adventure Isabella Bird’s Travels in the Nineteenth-Century American West karen m. morin and activities into the past and the need to examine the ways in which gendered differences were produced within and through particular historical landscapes, places, and spatialities.6 To these ends, in this chapter I consider the ways in which the renowned explorer Isabella L. Bird wrote about herself and her mountaineering experiences in the Colorado Rockies in her extraordinary volume, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).7 My purpose is to show how Victorian gender relations and imperial geographies—both British and American—worked together to produce many “subject positions” in Bird’s writing about the American West, a place with very different historical exigencies than the colonial contexts under which much nineteenth-century British women’s travel literature was produced. I want to highlight the ways in which conventional as well as more transgressive discourses of Victorian womanhood worked with (but also occasionally against) imperialist, nationalist, and class discourses in Bird’s text, to examine their links and interconnections. Bird negotiated place, “empire,” and womanhood in a range of ways in the Rocky Mountain environs, resulting in many complex subject positionings. Isabella L. Bird (1831–1904) (Figure 8.1) needs little introduction to historiographers of Anglophone travel writing. She was the first woman elected to the prestigious Royal Geographical Society in London, in 1892, largely on the basis of her travels to India, the Middle East, and Tibet. Later she traveled to and wrote about Korea, Japan, Malaysia, and China, producing nine travel books in the course of her career. Bird is one of the most popularized of all British Victorian women travelers, and, with two books on the subject, she is certainly among the best-known and most studied of women travelers to North America. Born in Yorkshire to an Anglican clergyman and a clergyman’s daughter, Bird had the background of a deeply religious, well-educated, and well-to-do Englishwoman.8 She first took up travel at age twenty-three, when she came to the United States at the recommendation of her doctor for her recurring back problems. From this journey Bird produced An Englishwoman in America (1856). She spent most of her early adult life caring for her parents. After their deaths she took her first solo trip abroad in 1871–1873, at age forty, to Hawaii (the Sandwich Islands) via Australia. She traveled through the United States on her return home, and it was during this trip that Bird explored the Estes Park region of Colorado for four months in the autumn and early winter of 1873 and produced A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. This volume was originally written as letters to her sister, then appeared serially as “Letters from the Rocky Mountains” in the genteel English weekly Leisure narrating imperial adventure | 205 Hour...