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  • Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road: American Mobilities
  • Mary Bortnyk Rigsby (bio)
Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road: American Mobilities, by Susan L. Roberson. New York: Routledge, 2010. 191 pp. $125.00.

In her introduction to Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road: American Mobilities, Susan L. Roberson prepares her readers for an [End Page 178] expanded understanding of the “geo-progressive narrative” that underlies the conventional understanding of America’s westward expansion and national identity (p. 1). She reminds us that our antebellum male-authored narratives of travel repeatedly celebrate movement, illustrate self-reliance and independence, and showcase creative new constructions of place and individuality. These qualities have been celebrated and preserved in our literary studies, exemplified by such writers as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. Roberson, however, in the eight chapters that follow, brings our attention to a broad and varied set of women’s “narratives of movement” from which she describes the complex ways women, too, engaged America’s ideological, as well as geographical, freedoms (p. 7). Roberson argues that, in their writing, women can be seen to resist and redefine the rhetoric of domesticity that otherwise worked to contain them in prescribed roles and interior spaces. Roberson, thus, challenges our understanding of the antebellum gender dichotomy, which encourages anglo-masculine privileges of mobility but insists on feminine passivity and compliance. Roberson’s project is ambitious in its range of women’s texts studied as well as in its aggregation of theoretical insights.

Key to her analysis is her conceptual shift from the term “travel” to “mobility” (p. 7). Roberson has gathered a broad array of texts authored by women that she notes are all “informed by travel” but are not all “travel narratives” (p. 7). With a shift in perspective from travel to mobility, Roberson argues that we gain a new “organizing principle” for focusing our attention on these texts and can look at “travel” (now referred to as “mobility”) in writing not previously identified as travel writing (p. 8). Her analysis produces what she calls “a politics of relocation and a politics of mobility” with a corresponding “kinetic remapping of the self” (pp. 8, 10). This conceptual framework naturally sheds light on the memoirs, ledgers, letters, diaries, and “touristic writing” by women who did, indeed, travel either as part of the westward movement or for sightseeing. Roberson’s volume includes writing by Sarah Beavis, Algeline Ashley, Sarah Wisner, Agnes Stewart, Helen Carpenter, Elizabeth Goltra, Mary Ackley, Elizabeth Gunn, Esther Lynn, Phoebe Judson, Sarah Raymond, Mary Jane Hayden, Sarah Olds, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Lydia Sigourney, but her volume also includes analysis of women’s political writing, slave narratives, and domestic novels, with attention to texts by Margaret Fuller, Jane Cazneau, Maria W. Stewart, Jarena Lee, Louisa Picquet, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Maria Susanna Cummins, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Augusta Jane Evans. Roberson asserts, “As traveling women see new sights, meet new people, and manage the exigencies of travel by train, wagon train, foot, or boat, their sense of self changes. They are not the same person [sic] who left home; even fictional characters . . . are shaped [End Page 179] by the experiences of the road as they brave the unexpected hardships of travel or the freedom it presents” (pp. 10–11). Roberson remarks, “Too often men have been seen as the explorers, the journeyers, the adventurers. But women . . . have also been along for the ride,” and she goes on to say, “Juxtaposing the varying travel stories of women from different backgrounds in one text, we can hear more fully women’s place in the nation’s mobilities and definitions of self and community” (pp. 169–70).

Roberson’s archival work does a service in bringing forward a substantial set of texts that are not well known. Her first two chapters, particularly, provide valuable introductions to courageous women who left fascinating records of their travels on the Mississippi and points west. She also does an admirable job of bringing together relevant and compatible theoretical perspectives to reinforce her use of “mobility” as a lens for reading. Overall, however, the...

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