Nineteenth-century European women's travel writings: Female heroes, danger, and death (Flora Tristan, France, Ida von Hahn-Hahn, Ida Pfeiffer, Germany, Mary Kingsley)

This comparative study of four nineteenth-century European women's travel writings pursues two objectives: first, to draw attention to European women's quest for self-empowerment in travel narratives through the strategies of adopting, adapting, or undermining different male hero models; and second, to demonstrate that scenarios associated with danger and death provide them with a context for inventing a heroic persona, because courageous behavior crystallizes most strongly under such liminal circumstances. In applying the comparative approach to the travel narratives of Flora Tristan, Ida von Hahn-Hahn, Ida Pfeiffer, and Mary Kingsley, this study focuses on such scenarios not only as a stage for inventing hero images, but also as a reflection of the authors' conceptions of Self (European societies) and Other (foreign cultures). This reading of nineteenth-century women's travel narratives considers the multiple overlappings of documentary travel writings with fictional representations of lived experiences, which this work has attempted to achieve through its particular approach.; This analysis demonstrates that women travel writers employ different male hero models, such as the romantic hero (Tristan), the adventure hero (Pfeiffer), and the picaresque hero (Kingsley), or choose to have no prominent hero image at all (Hahn-Hahn). The degrees to which these women travel writers revert to the heroic mode depend on their ideas concerning risk and mortality, on the proximity or distance between themselves and the unfamiliar Other, and on their imagined target readerships. Moreover, representations of danger and death in nineteenth-century European travel narratives reveal that perils and mortality are historically contingent. Incidents related to danger and death are presented with stylistic devices that increase sensational effects and thus emphasize the invented heroic self-images, which, in turn, enhance the overall authority of the text. Although gender hinders these women travel writers from fully adopting the heroic mode, modifications of that model allow them to expand concepts of womanhood.