Feminism and the Politics of Travel After the Enlightenment by Yaël Schlick (review)

This compelling work on travel and feminism after the Enlightenment firmly plants Yaël Schlick’s scholarship into the recently growing number of scholarly publications that recognize travel and travel writing as forms of political agency. That nobody seems to have made the connections between feminism and travel so explicit before is surprising because Schlick makes them plain to see throughout her book. In three main parts with a series of subsections, she skillfully interweaves chronology and specific themes, fictional texts and documentary travel narratives. Within this framework, she focuses on particular topics such as the relationship between travel and citizenship, travel and domesticity, or travel and education. Schlick justifies her use of documentary travelogues alongside fiction by explaining that these themes occur in both genres. Drawing on works by French and British authors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Germaine de Staël, Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, Frances Burney, Flora Tristan, Suzanne Voilquin, Gustave Flaubert, George Sand, and Mary Kingsley, and more recent travel writers such as Robyn Davidson and Sara Wheeler, Schlick further explores the connection between the utopian aspects of travel and the ideals of feminism, namely, the liberation of the individual.

Feminism and the Politics of Travel is a carefully crafted and well-researched monograph. By going back to archival materials, Schlick contextualizes the authors and their works historically, and simultaneously lends her own arguments depth and credibility. The author also delimits her territory against established travel writing critics (Mary Louise Pratt, Patrick Holland, Graham Huggan, Sara Mills, and Debbie Lisle) by moving beyond the discourses of colonialism and postcolonialism and by critically assessing their traditional use of concepts such as “femininity” or “domesticity” (as oppositional to masculinity or cosmopolitanism). [End Page e-1]

Contrasting Rousseau’s Émile and Social Contract with Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women and Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark as a point of departure in part 1, Schlick traces the contentious Enlightenment issue of whether femininity is biologically determined or socially constructed. Based on these arguments, she focuses on the authors’ take on travel as a particular form of Bildung, and whether travel should be for men only in order to become citizens or also for women for them to gain public presence. With the post–French Revolution works by de Staël, Genlis, and Burney, Schlick reveals in her chapter on the culture of domesticity that exhibiting talent and setting out to travel are not always perceived as commendable, but rather as a risk for women’s virtues. Although de Staël’s fictional protagonist, Corinne, is depicted as mobile and confident about the public display of her talents and as the most independent among the female protagonists of all three authors’ works, she is by no means, in today’s sense, a fully liberated woman. Genlis and Burney are entirely unable to take their characters beyond the “ideology of modesty and propriety” (80).

In the second part, Schlick demonstrates how travel and politics go hand in hand. She exemplifies this relationship by the travel accounts of the nineteenth-century French women travelers Flora Tristan and Suzanne Voilquin. Inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution—Schlick mentions the Marquis de Condorcet and Olympe de Gouge as Revolution feminists—but disappointed by its outcome, Tristan and Voilquin feel driven to take on public roles to improve the conditions of women and of the working class. For both women, according to Schlick, extensive travel and work outside the domestic sphere signify agency. Driven by their own hardships—Voilquin grew up in a working-class family and Tristan tried to support herself and her children after a broken marriage—they turn the private public. In her self-definition as a pariah and driven by destitution, Tristan goes to Peru to claim an inheritance from her uncle. Influenced by the Saint-Simonists, she emerges as a self-staged female Messiah...