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Isabella Bird
and the Poetics of Female Travel Writing
University of Tokyo, Hongo Campus, June 26-27th 2015
Abstracts
Gigi Adair, “The Feringhi Hakim: The Role of Medicine in Bird’s Career”
In the latter part of Bird’s travelling and writing career, medicine assumed an
important role in motivating and structuring her travels. Whilst still in Britain, she spoke and
wrote often of the importance of medical missionary work; after the death of her sister and
husband, and receiving some medical / nursing training, Bird travelled to India to found two
hospitals in their memory. She also visited medical missions and travelled for part of the
journey as a medical woman herself (sponsored by Henry Wellcome). This extended trip
yielded two travel narratives. Among the Tibetans, and Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan.
This paper considers the meaning and role of medicine in Bird’s writing over her career, from
her first trip to America and Canada, her travels in Japan, to her epic journeys through Tibet,
Persia and Kurdistan. It traces the changing relationship of medicine to health and illness in
Bird’s understanding (as well as her changing diagnoses of diseases and their causes) and the
way in which medicine becomes a means for her to occupy and at times negotiate gendered
and colonial power structures.
Steve Clark, “Women who Rode Away: Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan and
Davidson’s Tracks”
Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks (1880) and Davidson’s Tracks (1980) may look to have
little in common apart from their titles. Yet both involve grueling journeys across perilous
terrain (1200 miles from Tokyo to Hokkaido; 1700 miles from Alice Springs to the Indian
Ocean) in order to discard a past self identified with sickness and constraint, and develop a
new identity more defined by animal than human companionship, respectively horses and
camels. These protracted ordeals appear equally unmotivated, willfully self-imposed. This
paper will attempt to interpret these quest-romances in terms of the generic template
established by D.H. Lawrence’s The Woman who Rode Away, whose date of composition
(1928) neatly falls halfway between Bird and Davidson. An unnamed female narrator
chooses to abandon her family in order to encounter the ancient gods of the Indians, to which
she voluntarily sacrifices herself. The novella has prompted fervent denunciation for both
hyperbolic female masochism and atavistic racial mysticism. Yet Bird also ventures into a
mysterious interior realm and participates in sacrificial rites with the Aino in their annual
slaying a bear-cub and Davidson’s text is haunted by the temptation of suicide, climaxing
with her shooting her canine companion. The presentation of the aboriginal peoples in both
writers is simultaneously idealizing and defeatist; attempted valorization of a supposedly
more authentic life-world simultaneously confirms the determinist hypothesis of a dying race.
All three texts are preoccupied by death, whether in narratological terms, as appeasing an
original absence through cessation of wandering, or psychoanalytically, as the return to a
state of equilibrium when the primal imperative of the death-instinct overcomes the detours
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of the pleasure-principle. This may be corroborated by the way in which abridged versions of
Unbeaten Tracks truncate Bird’s narrative immediately after her encounter with the savage
race, and the final immersion in the ocean in Tracks implies erasure of Davidson’s
travel-narrator.
Andrew Elliott, Doshisha Women’s College, “Retracing Unbeaten Tracks in
Japan”
Like many contemporaries who also travelled and wrote about Japan, Isabella Bird’s
name is arguably more familiar here than anywhere else in the world. There are multiple
translations of Unbeaten Tracks, popular and scholarly publications, at least three novels, the
bulk of global online searches, heritage sites, TV and radio shows, and a number of recent
books which follow her route through Tohoku and Hokkaido: Izabera Bādo o aruku (2009),
“Nihon okuchi kikō” o aruku (2009), and Izabera Bādo no Tōhoku ryokō (2014). Liberally
quoting from Bird’s original travelogue, and containing modern colour photographs and
maps, these texts provide both a convenient means of following (whether from the armchair
or in actuality) Bird’s journey and a way of making sense, in their own words, of the gap
between the industrialised, westernised Japan of today and that of early Meiji. This paper will
examine the reception of Bird in Japan more generally, before turning to some of the
questions raised by this retracing of Unbeaten Tracks, especially in terms of struggles over
national identity in Japan: what does it mean to approach “traditional” Japan through the gaze
of a foreign traveller, though one whose perspective is ‘close to our own’? Is this use of
Unbeaten Tracks as a lens to view one’s past a nostalgic and nationalistic exercise? Or, in
contrast to museum representations of Lafcadio Hearn (Kido Askew, 2007), does Bird’s often
critical perspective on Japan—the ‘sharp gaze’ [surudoi kansatsu] openly acknowledged by
many of these texts—suggest an alternative politics?
Jenny Holt, “Distressed Micropsia: Size Distortion and Psychological Disturbance in
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan”
Isabella Bird’s travel writing is statistically rigorous to a fault – and understandably
so, since statistical accuracy was prized by the Victorians as a hallmark of scientific
objectivity and one of the qualities which distinguished professional travel writing from
amateur tourist ramblings. However, an exception to Bird’s usual rigour occurs in her
descriptions of physical size. Even though she strove to give accurate numerical estimates of
the height of the individuals she encountered, her pejorative comments about size –
describing, for example, a mobile restaurant as looking “as if it were made by and for dolls”
and its owner as a “mannikin ... not five feet high” – give an impression of Bird towering
above Japan and what seems to be an exceptionally diminutive populace. It comes as
something as a surprise after reading this to discover that Bird was 4'11", and that, far from
looming above the Japanese, she was able to move amongst them unnoticed while wearing
Japanese clothes.
In her descriptions of size, therefore, Bird performs something of a literary optical
illusion, for all her devotion to accuracy. However, she was not the only writer to do this. The
deliberate distortion of physical size was a common phenomenon in nineteenth century
writing about Japan, and writers as diverse as Pierre Loti, Lafcadio Hearn and Rudyard
Kipling all produced narratives in which the relative sizes of people, and also of buildings
and objects, fluctuate wildly, Alice-in-Wonderland fashion, one moment representing
Europeans and Japanese as roughly the same size, and the next depicting Europeans as
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monstrously large and barbarically clumsy, and the Japanese as assuming delicate, fairy-like
proportions.
In this paper, I will consider why Bird, like the authors above, had such a troubled
relationship to physical size. I will suggest that episodes of micropsia and macropsia in travel
narratives were used to signal acute psychological distress, in particular that arising from
culture shock, from the pressures of modernity (which many writers were traveling to
escape), and from their own guilt about the westernization process which Japan was
undergoing.
Anna Johnston, “‘Shifting Scenes from East to West”: Women’s Travel
Writing and the late Nineteenth-century Pacific Rim.”
Isabella Bird is perhaps the best known of a number of British women who traversed
the Pacific Rim in the late nineteenth century, travelling a variable circuit that could include
Australia and New Zealand, Hong Kong, Japan, Hawaii, and the US. The British Empire
offered travellers mobility through well-established shipping routes, and many Britons
travelled out to the antipodean settler colonies and back through exotic Asian locations.
Women accompanied their husbands on overseas postings; they migrated with their own
families or, for working women, as governesses and companions; and they went as
independent travellers.
Yet new itineraries were also possible: transcolonial travel, for example, between
India, New Zealand, and Australia, by both Anglo-Indians and elite Muslims. Routes
expanded along “webs of empire” and new geopolitical connections were explored. Advances
in transport opened up the world to an early form of the globalised travel culture we now take
for granted. Recent Victorian Studies scholarship sees the mid- to late-nineteenth century as
providing the roots of contemporary globalisation (see Hanley and Kucich), and in this the
Pacific Rim plays an important role as both the logical extension, and limit case, of white
settler affiliations. This paper considers Bird’s writing about Australia and Japan in the
context of other texts by travelling British, American, and Australian women, such as Alice
Frere’s The Antipodes and Round the World (1870), Katherine Bates’ Kaleidoscope: Shifting
Scenes from East to West (1889), Jessie Ackermann’s The World through a Woman's Eyes
(1896), and Catherine Bond’s Goldfields and Chrysanthemums: Notes of Travel in Australia
& Japan (1898). These travel texts reveal the transnational and globalising imperative of late
nineteenth-century travel, and the ways in which print culture opened up the Pacific Rim for
armchair travellers in Britain, Australia, and beyond.
Akiko Kawasaki, “Homesickness at Home: Charlotte Brontë in Britain and
Belgium.”
Isabella Bird’s paradoxical status as dependent invalid at home and indomitable
voyager abroad opens up broader issues of the relation of gender, sickness and travel in the
Victorian period. In this paper, I wish to examine how these factors interact in the career of
another clergyman’s daughter, and reconsider Charlotte Brontë’s two-year-long stay at a
boarding school in Brussels by examining her health condition from her childhood to the
period of her return home. It attempts to bring more nuanced interpretations of her foreign
residence and illuminate relations between experience and its fictionalisation and between
home and homesickness. Firstly, she was less negative about Belgium in her real life than in
her fiction. The overall image of Brontë as a harsh critic of Belgian culture largely comes
from certain descriptions in her two novels set in the capital, The Professor and Villette. The
two protagonists’ different experience in similar situations, however, indicates Brontë’s
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large-scale fictionalization and thwarts our attempt to accurately define her first-hand
Brussels experience from the texts. Secondly, her mental morbidity on the Continent was
caused not exactly by literal homesickness intensified by xenophobic discomfort but by her
longing for her idea of “home”, an ideal space which would secure her friendship,
independence, and free literary exploration. Therefore, she felt “homesick” not only at
Brussels but also back home in Yorkshire after the continental sojourn because she felt
frustrated to obtain any such place. Her relative neutrality towards Belgian culture and
hypochondriac tendencies in different places may imply that she could have been “homesick”
and her “home” could have been anywhere around Britain and Belgium.
Tomoe Kumojima, “Identity Destabilised: Isabella Bird in a Contact Zone.”
Jean-Luc Nancy, in The Inoperative Community argues for an ontological
understanding of community as ‘compearance of finitude’ as opposed to conventional
Western conception of community as fusional ‘unity’. This Nancian community of finite
beings existent fundamentally in sharing, which he formulate simply as ‘you shares me (“toi
partage moi”)’, is an ethical community which resists a totalitarian desire for self-sameness
and the exclusion of others.
This paper examines the textual manifestations of community of compearance
between Isabella Bird and Japanese people she encounters. Unbeaten Tracks in Japan
presents rare instances of a fleeting community which emerges across multiple
differences—differences in nationality, race, culture, and language—in a contact zone the
traveller creates as she travels. Moreover, her records of a few mixed villages of Ainu people
and Japanese people in Hokkaidō exemplify the impossibility of secure racial segregation,
thereby revealing our communal existence in sharing and defying political aspiration for
racial purity.
What distinguishes Bird from her contemporary female travellers to Japan is her
ambitious inland journey beyond the established contact zone which culminated in an
ethnographic achievement underpinned by close interaction with the local people and their
culture. Her ethnographic travelogue successfully records early examples of cross-racial
relationships in rural Japan and proclaims the fragility of racial-national boundaries which the
imperialist logic seeks to establish.
Kamilla Pawlikowska, “Unsteady Minds: Changing Responses to Isabella
Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan and Other Travelogues.”
One thing that cannot be said about Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks is that it passed
unnoticed among the British cultural circles. A number of literary and social critics responded
to her travelogue about Japan enthusiastically, praising her courage, her impartiality of
observation, accuracy of information and even the book’s commercial value. At the same
time, others questioned and manipulated information provided by Bird in order to create
particular images of Japan, and, indirectly, of Britain. One author of The Edinburgh Review
(July 1881) initially challenges Bird’s juxtaposition of the indigenous Ainu and the Japanese,
but gradually comes to affirming this contrast by filling in the ‘gaps’ in Bird’s discourse.
Borrowing authority from the precursors of racist anthropology such as Johann Caspar
Lavater, Peter Camper and George Combe, he goes much further than Bird when he uses
their scale for the grading of ethnic groups to present the Japanese as ‘racially inferior’ and
Ainu as bearers of Greek beauty and Anglo-Saxon heroism.
The modernization of Meiji Japan took the British by surprise. As much as it
impressed them, it also awoke anxiety and fear. In 1874 a contributor to Blackwood’s
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Edinburgh Magazine complained that the Japanese modernised themselves too quickly and
too easily, and warned that “minds so mobile” may not be conducive to forming a stable
national power. In this paper, I suggest that “instability” is, in a fact, a feature of the British
responses to Unbeaten Tracks and other travelogues about Japan; that the fluctuating patterns
of the British reactions evidence that their authors sought – no less ardently than the Japanese
– the most effective ways to affirm their status as a “modern nation”.
Tadakazu Suzuki, “Beaten Tracks in Life-Narrative: Crossovers between Life
Writing and Travel Writing.”
“I see it – the past – as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions,”
so writes Virginia Woolf in her memoir “A Sketch of the Past.” This passage, which
envisions the act of remembering as a retracing of the life-course one has beaten up to the
present moment, prompts us to think about the possible crossovers between travel- and
life-writing. In my presentation, therefore, I would like to consider one example of it. Using
Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past,” her 1905 diary entry, and Hermione Lee’s 1996
Virginia Woolf, I will point out how travel-writing can be useful for biographers and
autobiographers to embark upon the voyages into their subjects or selves. Woolf’s
avant-gardism may seem to be a far cry from Bird’s travelogues which are robustly empirical
and staunchly patriotic. However, not only has her feminist resistance to late Victorian male
discourses much in common with Bird’s subversive accounts of explorations, a significant
part of her writings can be seen to revolve around a travel destination: the Stephens’ summer
house in St Ives, Cornwall. Moreover, throughout her lifetime, she was not only a keen reader
and reviewer, but also a chronic writer, of various life-narratives. So, the texts I will consider
can be good samples to illustrate the approximation to, or the use of, travel narrative on the
part of life-writing, and can hopefully be a detour which may expand the scope of current
scholarship on Bird. (240 words)
David Taylor, “‘No Place for a Man’; Isabella Bird and Lafcadio Hearn on
Japan.”
Bird and Hearn may seem diametrically opposed in their respective modes of
travelogue on Japan. As first female member of the Royal Geographical Society, Bird prides
herself on empirical efficiency and expertise in compiling catalogues of data, always
prepared to check and verify, whereas Hearn prefers soft-focus historical generalisations
supported by a repetitive and highly stylised palette of vocabulary. (In ‘The Dream of a
Summer’s Day’, ‘all was steeped in blue’ (the symbolist ‘azure’) including roofs, sky, sea,
and shaved head of a novice). Hearn’s traveler-narrator takes on a curious fin-de-siecle
androgyny in its passive and eroticized acquiescence in heightened sensation, accentuated by
hints of masochistic submission. In her travels across northern Japan, Bird was repeatedly
mistaken for a man and was highly sensitive to charges of lack of femininity, even
threatening legal action against a Times reviewer who commented that she had ‘donned
masculine habiliments for her greater convenience’. Yet her impressive capacity for physical
endurance presupposes a prior imposition of ascetic constraint involving a blurring, if not
erasure, of any more familiar gender role. As has frequently been noted, Bird and Hearn share
an underlying misgiving that their own presence as avatars of modernity accelerates the loss
of a traditional culture; this paper wishes to examine a parallel process whereby late
nineteenth century definitions of sexuality undergo a comparable process of reformulation as
Japan turns out to be, as Bird famously commented, is ‘no place for a man’.
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Angus Whitehead, “The less-than-Golden Chersonese: Isabella Bird and Emily
Innes on the Malaysia Peninsula.”
Bird's early travel texts - The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875) A Lady's Life in the Rocky
Mountains (1879) Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) - stress her vigorous independence as a
traveller, underscored by strenuous and demanding modes of transportation, contrasting with
her status in Britain as sedentary invalid. Her return journey from Japan, stopping off at
Hong Kong, Canton, Saigon, Singapore and the Malaysian Peninsula, recorded in The Golden
Chersonese and the way thither (1883) was more of a luxury tour, hosted and feted by colonial
adminstrators. Though her original correspondence, reprinted in Letters to Henrietta (ed. Kay
Chubbuck 2003) are often candidly unillusioned about the system of British residence and
covert expansionist ambitions, the published texts tone down any criticism that would
destablise the dominant conventions of tropical pastoral. Emily Innes, in The Chersonese with
the Gilding Off (1885), writes as wife of junior colonial administrator, refreshingly
embittered and adversarial in its view of both imperial politics and gender hierarchies. In this
paper I wish to examine points of convergence and antagonism in Bird's and Innes's accounts,
and assess whether both texts can be contained within a common poetics of late Victorian
travel writing.
Laurence Williams “‘Like the Ladies of Europe’”: Victorian Women Writers
on the Lives of Japanese Women, 1840–80
This paper explores representations of the social status and legal rights of Japanese
women by Victorian women writers in the years before and after the “opening” of Japan to
Western trade (1840–80). Although little information about the lives of Japanese women had
been provided by eighteenth-century Dutch travel accounts, the idea that they enjoyed
freedoms which were superior to other Asian nations, and comparable to the status of women
in Europe, had first been proposed by early nineteenth-century male writers, including
Stamford Raffles and Francis Egerton. From the late 1830s, this idea is taken up and
developed by a series of female travellers and journalists, including Mary Busk, Anna
D’Almeida, Fanny L. Rains, and Isabella Bird, whose writings on Japan include, for the first
time, detailed discussions of the social, marital, and economic lives of Japanese women.
Although their representations are invariably inflected by cultural assumptions and class
positions, they typically avoid either naive cultural idealizations or stereotypical
denunciations of “Eastern slavery”. Instead, I will argue that, through explorations of issues
confronting both Japanese and Victorian women (including marriage and divorce rights,
social mores, women’s employment, and prostitution laws), these writers draw provocative
parallels with—or implicit critiques of—the status of women in Victorian society.
My discussion will focus on three texts that collectively illustrate the range of
perspectives on Japanese women possible during this period. I begin with the first book on
Japan to be written by a British woman: Manners and Customs of the Japanese (1841), by the
journalist Mary Busk. Although Busk is dependent on information from previous male
writers, she departs from her sources in the prominence she gives to “the condition of the
female sex in Japan”: particularly notable is her focus on divorce rights, a topic of debate in
England following the cause célèbre of Caroline Norton in 1836. Next, I turn to two accounts
by Victorian travellers, showing how travel narrative could provide a vehicle for more
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nuanced and ambivalent reflections on points of identification and difference with Japanese
women. Anna D’Almeida’s A Lady’s Visit to Manilla and Japan (1863) is a study of
“companionship” in Japanese marital life, based on observations of the domestic lives of
merchant families in the treaty port of Nagasaki. Finally, I turn to Isabella Bird’s views of
Japanese women in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1881, written 1878), based partly on
observation of the wives of the Japanese political elite in Tokyo, but also (perhaps more
significantly) on encounters with the rural female workforce employed in the key Meiji
industries of cotton and silk production. Bird’s account displays moral anxiety about the
behaviour of rural women (particularly with regard to drunkenness, public nudity, and mixed
bathing), but also a sense of the relative agency of women in village life, and an ambivalence
about Japanese government attempts to regulate “public morals”.
I end by differentiating these representations from more familiar literary tropes
(found particularly in the work of Victorian male writers) of Japanese women as childlike and
passive, inhabiting an aestheticised and timeless “fairyland” of beauty and luxury. These
texts, by contrast, show how Victorian women could achieve a more realistic and historically
reflexive understanding of the lives of Japanese women under industrialization and
modernization, and how they could make these experiences relevant to the lives of women
readers in Europe.