Maiden Voyages

A Mother’s Love

Wall to Wall:
From Beijing to Berlin by Rail

The Waiting Room

Nothing to Declare:
Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone

The Bus of Dreams

Crossroads

Vanishing Animals and Other Stories

The late John Gardner once said that there are only two plots in all of literature. You go on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Since women, for so many years, were denied the journey, they were left with only one plot in their lives—to await the stranger. Indeed, there is essentially no picaresque tradition among women novelists. While the latter part of the twentieth century has seen a change of tendency, women’s literature from Austen to Woolf is by and large a literature about waiting, usually for love.

Denied the freedom to roam outside of themselves, women turned inward, into their emotions and their private, often amorous but chaste relations. Elaine Showalter comments on this phenomenon in her critical volume, A
Literature of Her Own
: “Denied participation in public life, women were forced to cultivate their feelings and to overvalue romance.… Emotions rushed in to fill the vacuum of experience.”

For centuries it was frowned upon for women to travel without escort, chaperon, or husband. To journey was to put oneself at risk, not only physically but morally as well. A little freedom could be a dangerous thing. Erica Jong chose well when she picked the metaphor of “fear of flying” to represent the tremulous onset of a woman’s sexual awakening. The language of sexual initiation is oddly similar to the language of travel. We speak of sexual “exploits” or “adventures.” Both the body and the globe are objects for exploration and the great “explorers,” whether Marco Polo or Don Juan, have been men.

Gulliver begins his famous travels after the death of his “good Master Bates” (much obvious discussion surrounds this phrase), with whom he has apprenticed. Facing a failing business as well, he consults his “Wife” and determines “to go again to Sea.” Flights and evasion, the need to escape domestic constraints and routine, to get away and at the same time to conquer—this form of flight from the home is more typical of the male experience.

Yet at the turn of the century Maud Parrish was not unlike Gulliver
as she set off to the Yukon. “So I ran away. I hurried more than if lions had chased me. Without telling him. Without telling my mother or father. There wasn’t any liberty in San Francisco for ordinary women. But I found some. No jobs for girls in offices like there are now. You got married, were an old maid, or went to hell. Take your pick.” Similarly, Flora Tristan, at great social and financial risk, left her marriage and, as a “pariah,” traveled up and down Peru. And Margaret Fountaine journeyed the world ostensibly in search of butterflies, but really in pursuit of amorous adventures.