Voyaging Captains' Wives: Feminine Aesthetics and the Uses of Domesticity in the Travel Narratives of Abby Jane Morrell and Mary Wallis

Abby Jane Morrell. Frontispiece to Morrell's Narrative of a Voyage to the Ethiopic and South Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Chinese Sea, North and South Pacific Ocean, in the Years 1829, 1830, 1831 (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1833).

Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

For a captain's wife, according to Lisa Norling's Captain Ahab Had a Wife, going to sea was "more daring—but ultimately more conservative" than staying at home.¹ Norling's point is that women who remained on shore had more opportunity, born of economic necessity, to engage in the public life of the community. They were entrepreneurs, financial managers, and investors, in addition to mothers, sisters, and daughters with domestic duties. Conversely, while the idea of going to sea evokes the unbounded freedom of the ocean, for the hundreds of nineteenth-century captains' wives who accompanied their husbands, the experience was often more constraining than liberating.² They were confined to their berths during rough weather, with intermittent opportunities for walking on deck in calmer seas. They occupied themselves with sewing, reading, and writing—or in caring for a baby. The gender divide on board was perhaps even more pronounced than in the supposed separate spheres of Victorian female domesticity and male commerce on land. The social status of these women generally precluded them from interacting with the crew, and much of the time their husbands were occupied with ship's business. "On board the male-dominated workplace of the ship," voyaging captains' wives "valiantly tried to gain control over their lives by attempting to carve out a small feminized space," a home, "and to extend a small measure of female influence."³

Norling's scholarship on the women who stayed home contributes to the growing body of work that challenges the ideology of separate spheres as an imagined construction that has shaped the way historians view Victorian society and literature and the influence of women in public life. What has been missing is an approach that recognizes the limitations of the separate-spheres model for understanding the experiences and writing of the women who went to sea. Although the decision to embark on a long voyage reinforced the domestic ideals of marital love and duty, it also opened a world of experience that, despite the restricted mobility for women on board the ship, presented new ways for them to imagine themselves outside the domestic sphere. My essay intends to contribute to recent scholarship on the metaphor of separate spheres by analyzing the language of domesticity in the narratives of two captains' wives that both reinforced and undercut the domestic ideals that shaped them.⁴

Many wives kept intimate diaries, intended for a readership of close family and friends. But some voyaging women imagined a more public forum for their writing. The travel journals of two captains' wives—Abby Jane Morrell's Narrative of a Voyage, 1829-1831 and Mary Wallis's Life in Feejee: Five Years among the Cannibals, 1844-1849—are addressed to a larger readership beyond intimate circles of family and friends; in fact, both were published almost immediately upon the authors' return home. Morrell's and Wallis's publications transport the author's voice from the domestic arena into the political. Both call for the expansion of Christian missions in the South Pacific: the dual project of religious conversion and "civilization" of the natives. Morrell's call for philanthropy encompasses improved conditions for the sailor through religious and moral education (anticipating the argument of Richard Henry Dana's conclusion to Two Years Before the Mast, published seven years later). These writers are part of the larger reform movements of their time, such as temperance and abolition, in which women writers extend the moral values of home and hearth to influence public policy. What sets these women apart from their land-based contemporaries is that their physical realm of domesticity actually travels into international...