WESTERN WOMEN’S TRAVEL WRITING ABOUT THE PACIFIC ISLANDS

Authors

Claudia Knapman, James Cook University of North Queensland

Abstract

Although there has been a revival of interest in nineteenth-century women’s travel writing, this is a neglected area of Pacific scholarship. Though the work of Western women travelers who wrote about the Pacific Islands has been drawn upon by some researchers, this literature has not received attention as a genre, as a body of source material, or as the focus of academic research questions. This article, while neither a detailed analysis of particular writers and their works nor an attempt to delineate the field, uses three categorizations--the realist, the protofeminist, and the orientalist--derived from analyses of women’s travel writing elsewhere as a means of raising some of the major issues relating to such texts. The article argues that, while employing categories based on binary oppositions enables us to ask interesting questions and unmasks the complexity of these works and their authors, reductionist interpretations of this kind fail to provide adequate theoretical frameworks for understanding. Particular attention is drawn to the ambiguities and contradictions of the intersecting gender and “race” positions revealed through women’s travel writing. It is suggested that this area is rich, largely untouched, and deserves further exploration.

Recommended Citation

Knapman, Claudia (1997) "WESTERN WOMEN’S TRAVEL WRITING ABOUT THE PACIFIC ISLANDS," Pacific Studies Journal: Vol. 20: No. 2, Article 5.
Available at: https://digitalcollections.byuh.edu/pacific-studies-journal/vol20/iss2/5