Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s

Chapter 4: Rebecca West

Name /V1921/V1921_CH04 09/11/01 06:10AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 80 # 1 4 R E B E C C A W E S T R E B E C C A W E S T burst on the scene of Britain’s political life in 1911 and she soon commanded a good deal of respect as a socialist feminist with an awesome rhetorical talent. Her polemical articles, written during the 1910s for the Freewoman and for the socialist Clarion , called for the inclusion of all social classes in the fight for woman’s suffrage and pleaded for higher pay and better working conditions on behalf of the working classes.1 There is, however, a critical consensus that West modified her youthful radicalism as she grew older. Janet Montefiore associates West’s political stance during the 1930s with ‘‘the perspective of English left-liberalism’’ (189), while Victoria Glendinning, because of West’s anticommunist, pro-Labour sentiments at the end of World War II, defines her mature political position as that of a ‘‘democratic socialist’’ (165). This agrees with Carl Rollyson ’s analysis: ‘‘As the defender of true liberalism, she stood squarely between the Communists and the Right’’ (255). To me, however, she was primarily a confirmed liberationist, and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), West’s only published travel book, confirms this finding. Indeed, her journeys in the Balkans furnished her with a host of arguments against every kind of oppression, in the public as well as in the private spheres. Consequently, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a monument to the ideologies of national self-rule, antiimperialism,and feminism. To begin with feminism: this dimension of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon declares itself on almost every page. For instance, upon observ- Name /V1921/V1921_CH04 09/11/01 06:10AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 81 # 2 ing a woman in Prishtina who was ‘‘carrying on her back the better part of a plough . . . while [her husband] went free’’ (894–95), West is gripped by what she had earlier called ‘‘feminist rage’’ (488). She expostulates that ‘‘any area of unrestricted masculinism, where the women are made to do all the work and are refused the right to use their wills, is in fact disgusting’’ (895). In addition to such overt manifestations of her feminist commitment, other aspects of a gendered sensibility surface in West’s travel book. For instance, Carl Rollyson states that ‘‘it is Rebecca’s contention that what occurs on the world stage is connected with the private heart’’ and that ‘‘history must be brought home’’ (211). This view is consistent with Mary Louis Pratt’s claim that ‘‘domestic settings have much more prominent presence in the women’s travel accounts than in men’s. . . . From these private seats of selfhood, [female travelers] depict themselves emerging to explore the world in circular expeditions that take them out into the public and new, then back to the familiar and enclosed’’ (159–60). Moreover , West’s dialogic inclusion of her husband’s opinions could be considered further evidence of a female approach to travel writing, one that contrasts with the masculine ethos of individual heroism, selfreliance , and monologue. Indeed, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene wrote travel books that virtually ignored the presence of their female travel partners.2 However, as I have indicated in my discussion of Barbara Greene’s travel book, a feminized form of travel writing need not imply a divergent or subversive ideological stance compared with the male discourse of travel. What gives a woman’s travel account a disruptive, radical edge is not so much the gendered nature of her writing as the actual politics that motivate it, a politics based on specific views about social class, nationalism, and comparative anthropology. In the case of Rebecca West, Karen Lawrence’s argument that ‘‘women writers of travel have tended to mistrust the rhetoric of mastery , conquest, and quest that has funded a good deal of male fictional and nonfictional travel’’ (20) does not hold. West’s discourse displays any number of ‘‘male’’ traits, specifically the ‘‘mastery’’ of foreign societies by appeal to discourses of history, politics, and anthropology, as well as an orientalist bias that could pass as a symptom of masculine cultural arrogance. In addition, West is not mistrustful of the quest motif at all. In fact, she is herself embarked on a significant quest; namely, the search for ultimate knowledge about what prompts man R E B E C C A W...