"The history of every one of us": A gender study of America's antebellum travel writers

Laura Anne Day, Purdue University

Abstract

During the first half of the nineteenth century, travel accounts about America were one of the most popular forms of American literature. Those authored by American males are well-documented, but present-day scholars have virtually ignored the fact that American females also wrote accounts of their native land. This study compares how male and female travel writers described four dominant antebellum American concerns: religion, nature, the status of slaves and Indians, and the role of women. It seeks to establish, within the context of opportunities open to the sexes at the time, what if any role gender played in shaping travelers' responses and what if any implications this has for a twentieth-century understanding of that culture. The study concludes that while gender sometimes played a role in influencing travel writers' descriptions of America, any differences of viewpoint are more often than not differences of emphasis, not of basic belief, differences linked to females' varying opportunities for contact with whom or what they described. Critics who ignore female travel accounts, however, obscure an important part of American literary history. Not only were female writers among the most widely-read authors of the era, but as practitioners of the travel writing genre, they also influenced the development of some of America's finest romantic fiction. Moreover, since the native American travel account constituted a genre not only different from European accounts of America but unique to much of antebellum American literature as well, critics who ignore female travel accounts deny the major role female travel writers played in the development of a uniquely American literature.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Oreovicz, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American studies|American history

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