The historian Eric J. Leed acknowledges the constitutive masculinity of travel when he argues that, 'from the time of Gilgamesh,' journeying has served as 'the medium of traditional male immortalities,' enabling men to imagine escape from death by the 'crossing' of space and the 'record[ing]' of adventures 'in bricks, books, and stories.' He even labels this travel, which provides men the opportunity to achieve notable distinction through self-defining experience far from home, 'spermatic' travel.
Ever in the process of becoming 'men,' travellers affirm their masculinity through purposes, activities, behaviors, dispositions, perspectives, and bodily movements displayed on the road, and through the narratives of travel that they return home to the sending culture. Thus, travel functions as a defining area of agency. We cannot imagine Odysseus without his travels, or Aeneas, or the knights of the Round Table, or Columbus, Captain Cook, Boswell, Byron, or Loti, or, closer to our own times, Jack Kerouac. Nor can we imagine them without their travel narratives. These narratives of travel can be read as journey myths 'project[ing],' as Richard Slotkin suggests of myths generally, 'models of good and heroic behavior that reinforce the values of ideology, and affirm as good the distribution of authority and power that ideology rationalizes.'
Leed contrasts the masculine logic of mobility with the logic of 'sessility'. To be 'sessile,' in botanical terms, is to be permanently planted, tenaciously fixed, utterly immobile. It is, in a sense, to remain always 'at home,' which has been the traditional locale assigned to women. What Judith Butler describes as 'the domain of socially instituted norms,' through which gender identity and gendered relationships get reiterated in everyday occasions, secures the domestication of a woman through protocols of proper femininity that tether her to home and thus to a requisite sessility. But she is not just resident in the home. As Karen R. Lawrence observes in Penelope Voyages, 'She in effect is home itself, for the female body is traditionally associated with earth, shelter, enclosure.' Whatever particular women may be doing in their everyday lives, the idea of woman as 'earth, shelter, enclosure,' as 'home,' persists, anchoring femininity, weighing it down, fixing it as a compass point [my note: an idea that is deeply - and depressingly - entrenched in Japanese culture and language]. Moreover, the 'home' that is identified as feminine, feminized, and equated with woman becomes that which must be left behind in the pursuit of agency. This 'stifling home,' Meaghan Morris observes so tellingly, has been precisely 'the place from which the voyage begins and to which, in the end, it returns.'
Yet, even though travel has generally been associated with men and masculine prerogatives, even though it has functioned as a domain of constitutive masculinity, women have always been and continue to be on the move. They climb aboard sailing vessels, or pull themselves onto horses, or grab a walking stick and set out along rutted paths, or rush to make a train. If traveling, being on the road, makes a man a man - and makes masculinity and its power visible - what does it make a woman, who is at once subject as home and subject at home? What does it make for a particular woman to gain access to this defining arena of agency in the West?
--Sidonie Smith, Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women's Travel Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. ix-x.
The journey continues...
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Image: Isabella L. Bird, the intrepid Victorian traveller, in Tibet at the end of the 19th century.
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