She’s Leaving Home: Mapping Nineteenth-Century Women and the Visual Arts

Augustus Egg’s 1862 painting The Travelling Companions (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery) depicts two almost identically clad young women—sisters, perhaps—seated facing one another in a railway carriage traveling along the Italian coastline. We view the women as if we are surreptitiously gazing into their private compartment or passing by them as we make our way to our own seats, pausing a moment to dwell on both the idyllic scenery framed by the exterior window and the women’s splendid gray silk costumes and finely wrought profiles. Here, we are made aware of the voyeurism and gendered power dynamics of encounter; our objectification of both places and people as we travel to locales new to us. The composition emphasizes symmetry and the harmonious balance of forms, contradicting the rupture of routine life associated with travel and the arduous nature of such long journeys during the Victorian period, although a drapery tassel sways in front of the central window of the cabin in response to the rocking movement of the train, reminding us that we are in motion. Susan Casteras categorizes Egg’s canvas as a “problem picture,” suggesting that viewers “must . . . interpret the meaning of the journey that the sisters have embarked upon. Are they tourists and is the scenery real or imagined by them? Neither sister bothers to look out at the magnificent Italian hillside and water glimpsed through the train window, and together the pair has managed to create quite a snug ‘portable parlor’ to shield them from the dangers—and the beauty and the challenge—of the beckoning view.”¹ The Travelling Companions ultimately asks more questions than it answers about women, travel, visual culture, and mobility (both physical and societal) in the nineteenth century, yet each of the art historical texts discussed in this review is animated by the rich set of interpretive possibilities offered by works like Egg’s and Casteras’s imperative for us to analyze the act of travel and its representations from a feminist standpoint.

Of the four texts reviewed here, only McVicker’s and Pomeroy’s position women artists and travel, in the most literal sense of embarking on a planned trip, as their primary subjects. While many recent texts have analyzed discourses of nineteenth-century travel through the examination of women’s travel writing, McVicker and Pomeroy successfully integrate women’s visual records and interpretations of travel into the discussion.² I have opted to define “travel” in a broader, more symbolic manner that implies movement from one space to another so as to centralize the concept of female agency and position travel and mobility as productive discursive features of some current feminist thought, summarized in Cherry and Helland’s anthology by Kristina Huneault: “As a motif that brings person and place together, travel has figured prominently within this spatialized sensibility, and scholars have turned their attention to the role of travel in the construction and deconstruction of gender. . . . The mobility of travel has appealed to feminists as a trajectory of self-actualization and discovery. Travel embodies the possibility of liberty. . . . Yet, Western ideas of travel are linked to the masculine sphere on an Odyssean scale. . . . Then, too, the historical inequities of imperial power relations have cast a shadow on the liberating potential of female travel: at whose cost comes the empowerment of the white, Western woman away from home?” (179) This more capacious definition allows me to include two texts (Cherry and Helland’s...