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This thesis explores the Picturesque as a visual aesthetic that is often self-consciously employed in the travel accounts of British women in India in the first half of the nineteenth century. It addresses how three women - Fanny Parks, Marianne Postans, and Emily Eden - made use of the language of aesthetics, in particular that of the Picturesque (a style deemed especially appropriate for women travellers) in a variety of ways: first, to help them understand and relate to their experiences in this foreign land; second, to convey these experiences to their audiences back home; and, third to carve out what frequently becomes a feminised space within the established (and predominantly masculine) field of travel writing. The approach is largely historicist in order to situate the authors (and artists) within their contemporary cultural, social, and political context. My work builds upon that of literary scholars Elizabeth Bohls, Nigel Leask, and Sara Suleri in its interweaving of historical research and visual aesthetics with a literary analysis of travel writing and colonialism, bringing to bear their insights on authors previously little or not at all addressed in critical literature. Expanding on the notion of the 'Indian picturesque', which Leask begins to shape in his work, I bring Parks, Postans, and Eden into dialogue with the suggestions of Bohls and Suleri that women travel writers adapt the traditionally masculine ideal of the Picturesque aesthetic. After an introduction and two chapters which explore the broader themes concerning the development of the Picturesque and its influence on British artistic representations of India, I briefly summarise how this visual aesthetic came to be applied to written texts about travels in the region, beginning with the texts produced by male travellers, and with a specific focus on the travel narrative of Captain Godfrey Charles Mundy, whose accounts are referenced in Fanny Parks' work. My thesis then offers three case studies considering each writer in order of their arrival in India - starting with Fanny Parks' autobiography of her travels (published in 1850), followed by the published works of Marianne Postans in the 1830s, and through to those of Emily Eden, relating to her travels in the same decade and published in 1866. Aside from drawing on the aesthetics of visual art, the discussion of each author also addresses the importance of other sources to which they allude that enable aesthetic responses to India's landscape and peoples.

This dissertation examines intersections of the development of maps from the Native American-European encounter to the establishment of the New Republic and transatlantic British and American narratives of women’s travel of the long eighteenth century. Early European and American maps that depict the Americas analyzed as parallel “texts” to canonical and lesser-known women’s narratives ranging from 1688 to 1801 reveal further insights into both maps and these narratives otherwise not apparent. I argue that as mapping of the New World developed, this mapping influenced representations of women’s geographic and social mobility and emergent “American” identity in transatlantic narratives. These narratives, like maps of the New World, reveal disjunctures in representation that disseminate deceptive portrayals of the New World. Such discrepancies open a rhetorical gap, or a thirdspace, of inquiry to analyze the gaze at work within these cartographic and women’s narratives. The representations of women’s geographic and social mobility remain constricted within the selected narratives of women’s travel. While the heroines do travel, in most cases they travel as captives or in some form of escape. These narratives include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American (1767), Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1794), and Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), among others. However, these narratives do highlight similarities of an emergent “American” identity as Native American, hybrid, and fluid as represented in contemporaneous maps. Literary Landscapes also addresses the narrativity of maps as auto/biographical and even satirical expressions as related to the women’s narratives analyzed in this study. For, J. B. Harley discusses how a map conveys his own life and contains his memories in his essay “The Map as Biography,” while Roland Barthes argues that mapping is a sensorial experience in his brief essay “No Address.” Furthermore, allegorical maps like Jean de Gourmont’s The Fool’s Cap Map of the World (ca. 1590) and Madeleine de Scudéry’s Carte de tendre (1678) reflect aspects of the human condition such as folly and friendship.