Paper Requirements
•7-10 pages double-spaced
•Catchy & original title
•Citations from at least 4-5 scholarly/peer-reviewed articles
•Times or Times New Roman 12 pt. font
•1-inch margins
•Citations must be formatted using MLA style
•Works Cited page
For my essay, I will discuss the notion of travel narrativesusingWollstonecraft’sLetters from Swedenas the primary text. From my research, I was intrigued to learn that the genre of travel narrative stories has for centuries been male dominate; in other words, mostly men have written travel narratives to this day. I will assert the subject on how and why travel writing has always been dominated by men and how there should be more women in the genre.
1.Boe,Ana de Freitas(2011) “I CALL BEAUTY A SOCIAL QUALITY”: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND HANNAH MORE'S REJOINDER TO EDMUND BURKE'S BODY POLITIC OF THE BEAUTIFUL,Women'sWriting, 18:3, 348-366.
Wollstonecraft and More questioned whether the fair sex or society really benefited from the valorization of the exterior of women's bodies. Both female writers-Wollstonecraft and More-pointed out the antisocial consequences of the fetishizing of women's beauty. Discussing how laws of property corrupt modern marriages,Boenotes that the emphasis placed on women's beauty obstructs domesticity. More's passage isanimplicit reference to the Enquiry's claim that women's weakness is one of the sources of their beauty. While the result of More's educational exercises is to put women in their place, Wollstonecraft argues that women's intellectual exertions can render them men's equals. Even as such theories ofbeauty seem to make women fundamental to society, Wollstonecraft and More knew they did so only by referring women's social value to their bodies and not their minds.
2.Carl Thompson (2017) Journeys to Authority: Reassessing Women's Early Travel Writing, 1763–1862, Women's Writing, 24:2, 131-150.
Since 2000, books and articles on women's travel writing have thrived with scholars spreading the views established by the 1990s scholarship to different branches of the genre. While few scholars recognize important differences between male and female travel writers, most acknowledge that cultural constraints exercised a powerful influence on women's accounts and justifying some consideration of women's travel writing as a distinct element within the genre. Feminist scholars had begun the process of rescuing women travel writers from unfair obscurity-yet even feminist recovery research runs the risk of dismissing their influence if it approaches women's travel writing with outdated assumptions about both the genre and the intellectual culture in which it distributed. The articles in this issue address in diverse ways women's travel writing and the authority the genre could discuss.
3.Falconer, E. 2009. Telling tales: a feminist interpretation of women’s travel narratives. Enquire. 2 (1), pp. 21-40.
Falconer illustrates how an analysis of women's accounts of traveling experiences reveals tensions between how the participants construct their gender identities and the identity of the global traveler, often resulting in fragmented and conflicting narrative. Teresa deLauretiswarns against privileging travel narratives as a form of liberating women from cultural silences. Bloom further argues that we must be aware as socially constructed beings, women's narratives will attempt to unconsciously maintain gendered social relations.Women's narratives therefore show a repeated negotiation and development of female identity and expose the multiple ways such narratives function through gendered relations in everyday life. Therefore, the concept of the ideological 'master script' is useful for interpreting both gendered narratives and narratives of traveling.
4.Hinnant, Charles. “Shaftesbury, Burke, and Wollstonecraft: Permutations on the Sublime and the Beautiful.” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 46, no. 1, 2005, pp. 17–35.
Hinnant’sarticle touches onBurke's portrait of the besieged Marie Antoinette and the noble, suffering heroines of French romance.Burke's new preferencewas acknowledgedfor the heroic heroine over theappealingfigures of amatory fiction and painting.Burke uses the term "Revolting" to describe a Jacobin meeting as if it were a painting of hell. At the same time, when Burke speaks at one point of "The sublime principles that ought to be infused into persons of exalted situations, and religious establishments provided that may continually enforce them", he is referring to feminized principles that must betaughtif they are to become sublime. In the theater state, the polarization of a sublime associated with a masculine terror and a beautiful linked to a feminized eroticself-indulgenceis replaced by a realignment of beauty with the feminized virtues of honor.
5.Murphy,Patrick D.An Ecological Feminist Revisioning of the Masculinist Sublime. Journal of Jiangsu University,Social Science Editi, 2011, 13(3): 25-32.
Murphy’s ecofeminist analysis of the sublime argues that from Longinus through Burke and Kant, a concept of the sublime is established that is both masculinist and hierarchical, emphasizing domination over nature. The element of terror as a feature defining the sublime experience in contrast to feeling the wonder of beauty is clearly at work in many of Americannaturalist John Muir's essays. Anne K. Mellor in her 1993 study, Romanticism and Gender, distinguishes two types of women writers' responses to male representations "of the sublime as a masculinized experience of empowerment" and "the beautiful as a feminized experience of nurturing and sensuous love" in the Romantic period. Kirwan concludes his study by recognizing that the sublime exists only within the human mind and is not a quality of objects. An ecofeminist critique of the sublime is needed for us to continue our re-evaluation of environmental writing and to continue to critique the limitations that was developed based on privileging two types of male-dominated writing: nonfiction nature essays and Romantic poetry.