Turning Train Travel to Account: Locomotion, Femininity, and Diary-Writing in the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff

This essay draws on the enduring nature of Maurice Barrès's canonization of Marie Bashkirtseff as 'Notre-Dame du sleeping-car' in 1890 as the basis for an investigation into the configuration of genre, gender, and train travel in Marie Bashkirtseff's Journal. It argues that by following through the allusions to scandal that were deleted from the 1887 edition of the Journal, a link emerges between Bashkirtseff's precarious social status and her constant geographical mobility. Bashkirtseff's exclusion from those social sites that were constitutive of feminine gentility resulted in a pattern of train travel and diary-writing that unravelled both the logic of return underpinning the journal de voyage, and the protocols of femininity that propelled Bashkirtseff into diary-writing in the first place. It is argued that Bashkirtseff's simultaneous locomotive travel and assiduous diarizing makes her diary not just a source of data on train travel, but rather the point of intersection of two nineteenth-century technologies: the journal de jeune fille as the means by which young girls in the late nineteenth century whiled away the long years before marriage, and locomotion, as a means of shifting the subject through the landscape, more directly and far faster than before. Bashkirtseff draws on each in order to 'fill in' the other—diarizing as a means of whiling away the time she spends in the train, and train travel as the stuff of her diary entries.