Maiden Voyages

Read Maiden Voyages Online

Authors: Mary Morris

ALSO BY MARY MORRIS

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

A VINTAGE DEPARTURES ORIGINAL, OCTOBER 1993
FIRST EDITION

Introduction and compilation copyright © 1993 by Mary Morris

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House
of Canada Limited, Toronto.

A portion of the introduction was published in different form in
Ms. magazine in June 1992.

this page

this page
constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maiden voyages: writings of women travelers / edited and with an introduction by Mary Morris, in collaboration with Larry O’Connor. — 1st ed.
p.  cm.—(Vintage departures)
“A Vintage departures original”—T.p. verso.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76647-2
1. Voyages and travels. 2. Women travelers. I. Morris, Mary, 1947–
II. O’Connor, Larry.
G465.M336 1993
910.4—dc20 93-10059

v3.1

to Kate,
our fellow traveler

CONTENTS
 

“One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere, and holds fast to the days …”


WILLA CATHER

INTRODUCTION

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.

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