| The subject of this dissertation---non-fictional travel writing by Canadian women---has been thrice marginalized by scholarly criticism. As an interdisciplinary genre that is difficult to categorize, travel writing was long excluded from literary analysis. In time, some renegade critics turned their attention to travel writing, pointing out the genre's value as an aesthetic, historical, cultural, and autobiographical document. However, since they tended to ignore its significance as a gendered document, they articulated a gender-blind tradition of the genre that either excluded women travel writers or glossed over the gender-related difference of their texts. In response, feminist critics began identifying a distinct tradition of women's travel writing. However, they usually limited their analysis to nineteenth-century texts, thereby excluding travel writing by Canadian women, which is largely a twentieth-century product. Thus, travel writing by Canadian women has been marginalized on the level of genre, gender, and nation. This dissertation works on and through these levels in an effort to achieve a comprehensive, contextualized analysis of Canadian women's travel writing.;Since travel and travel writing are thoroughly gender-inflected cultural practices, a substantial portion of the female travel writer's subjectivity is constructed by gendered discourse. In Canadian women's travel writing, woman-identified, feminine, and feminist discourses pervade the travel writers' inscriptions of their subjectivity. Chapter One of this study explores one manifestation of this gendered subjectivity: the feminist ethnographic discourse in texts by Margaret MacLean, Agnes Deans Cameron, Karen Connelly, and Bronwyn Drainie. In Chapter Two, travel books by Bharati Mukherkee, Daphne Marlatt, Rona Murray, and Myrna Kostash are analysed as feminine matrocentric discourses, wherein each author retrieves maternal memories and messages as she returns to an ancestral homeland. The travel books examined in Chapter Three are composed by incorporated travelling wives: women who accompany their husbands on their work-related journeys. In texts by Ella Manning, Philomena Orford, P. K. Page, Margaret Laurence, and Carlotta Hacker, we find feminine discourses of domestic support or public assistance in a husband's career, as well as feminist discourses of resistance to this incorporation and discourses of self-fulfilling travel experiences beyond wifely incorporation. |
