Self-fashioning and othering: Women’s double strategies of travel writing

Abstract

This essay examines early 20th century travel texts written by two European women: the Catalan journalist Aurora Bertrana (1899-1974) who lived in French Polynesia from 1926 until 1929, and her contemporary, the Dutch journalist Mary Pos (1904-1987), who travelled to the Dutch East Indies in the fall of 1938 and returned early in 1939. Our research is double-focused: on the one hand it examines issues of empire, colonisation, and orientalism, and on the other hand it explores issues of modernity and feminism. The travel texts under study offer personal registrations of self-fashioning strategies that both authors employ, which significantly question gender expectations regarding women’s social and sexual practices, their professional, familial and marital roles, and their opportunities for education. Presenting them as emancipated modern women, however, the accounts are also embedded in an orientalist and colonial discourse and seem to impose their own views of modernity and feminism on other women–despite ardent appeals to intercultural understanding.