Henrietta Liston and the Discourses of Travel Writing

Situating Liston's journal in relation to critical frameworks derived from the explosion of scholarly interest in travel writing in the 1990s and 2000s is problematic, for several reasons. Firstly, much of this work (like many earlier discussions of travel writing) is based on models which presuppose the context of British imperialism or colonialism. Secondly, many of these studies have tended to use masculinist models to approach the travel-writing genre and are blind to gender issues (Lawrence 1994: 11). Often these first two limitations are found in tandem, as in Steve Clark's collection, Travel Writing and Empire (1999). This devotes only two of thirteen chapters to women writers, and although Katherine Turner sees the collection as a ‘corrective’ to ‘the monolithic model of the imperial nation’ underlying many analyses of travel writing (2001: 6), much of Clark's ‘Introduction’ is either too focused on the imperial context (1999: 7–10) and/or too masculinist (Ibid.: 19–21) to fit Liston or most other women travellers to Ottoman lands. Neither the masculine ‘romance conventions of heroic agency’, nor the idea of the traveller as adventurer, nor the ‘almost irresistible imperative to abandon home, wife, and children’ (Ibid.: 20, 21) applies straightforwardly to them.

Those studies that circumvent one of these limitations frequently fall prey to the other. The usefulness of work on women's travel writing is thus often limited by an unquestioning foregrounding of British imperial concerns. In Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism (1993), Sara Mills criticises the masculinist approach to travel writing analysis, arguing that nineteenth-century women travel writers had to ‘struggle with the discourses of imperialism and femininity, neither of which they could wholeheartedly adopt’ (1993: 3). As a result, she argues, their writings are generally ‘informed by different discursive frameworks and pressures’ from men’s, although she also sees some shared ‘discursive elements’ (Ibid.: 3, 6). However, Mills’ argument that women's texts provide ‘counter-hegemonic voices within colonial discourse’ (Ibid.: 22–3) cannot easily be brought to bear on Liston.