Abstract
In recent decades, there has been a significant body of work in the category of women’s nonfiction travel narratives, yet women’s travel fiction is an area far less explored. This thesis focuses on the value of fictional texts exploring women’s travel narratives. Comprised of a novel and an exegesis, the critical component examines novels by contemporary women fiction writers which explore ‘questions of travel’ in the context of gender, specifically the ways in which women negotiate their sense of physical and emotional vulnerability as they see and interact with ‘others’. I argue that women’s travel fiction reveals an ambivalence that results from the author being both woman and traveller, a ‘double consciousness’ in which the traveller is intensely aware not only of what she is seeing, but of how she is being seen. Further, I argue that this ambivalence creates an in-between space for re-imagining of both self and other, from which new forms of writing and expression can and do emerge.The exegesis focuses on a close critical reading of two novels: Vendela Vida’s The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty (2015) and Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm (1982). Both texts explore questions of shifting identity, and use literary devices that challenge traditional narrative structures and points of view. By examining the ways in which the protagonists of these novels engage (or fail to engage) with aspects of the ‘foreign’, I investigate strategies of self in relation to travel, and how travel influences issues of women’s identity, escape and trauma. In addition, I explore issues of physical vulnerability and bodily experience. Ultimately, I argue that women’s travel fiction presents not the triumphalist ‘Western’ gaze so often associated with travel texts, but something more nuanced, and interconnected: a more ambivalent response, that raises as many questions as it seeks to answer.
In the accompanying fictional component, Once Upon a Time in Buenos Aires, I test these concepts in a novel about an Australian woman travelling in Latin America. Born of my own experiences living in Argentina in 2005—2006, where I worked as an English teacher and freelance journalist, I wanted to include ideas that I felt unable to express through non-fiction travel writing, due in part to the conventions of the reporting genre, publication demands, and what I found to be the limits of fact-based ‘truth-telling’. The novel is about Amy Lalor, an Australian travel writer who is sent to Buenos Aires on a junket to write about tango, and finds herself increasingly involved and implicated in the unrest that occurs there during the summer of 2001—2002. It is an exploration of the haunting encounters of travel that find expression in more abstract ways, via fiction and the imagination.
| Date of Award | 2020 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Gail Jones (Supervisor) |