The present study has two major goals: first it reconstructs the history of travel-literature from the Middle Ages to the 19th century with a special focus on the role of women, second it attempts to analyse and evaluate travel-accounts by women who travelled to the Orient in the 19th century (Engel-Egli, Forneris, Pfeiffer, Hahn-Hahn and Muhlbach). / The reconstruction of the history of travel and travel-literature up to the 18th century shows that it was possible for women to travel with relative freedom. With the polarization of gender-roles in the last third of the 18th century, however, women were declared 'unfit for travel' and confined to their homes. Due to this development, travel-accounts by women travelling to the Orient, that were written in the middle of the 19th century, have to fulfil a special function. Besides representing an attempt to reestablish the tradition of female travellers that had been suppressed from the middle of the 18th century on, travelling to the Orient meant that the female authors in question had access to areas and spaces that were both off limits to their male counterparts (i.e. the harem) and charged with sexually connoted images. Forneris,' Pfeiffer's and Hahn-Hahn's statements can be interpreted as a conscious attempt to criticize European man through the deconstruction of the images of the Oriental femme fatale in two ways: the first criticism is that they present themselves as authorities with regard to the domain of the Oriental woman. The second occurs through consciously creating grotesque anti-images, whereby women turn the "oriental dream" of their male contemporaries into a nightmare. This act of turning the images into their opposite happens without taking into account the culturally different woman. She has been reduced to the status of an object by women travelling to the Orient exactly in the same manner as male colleagues reduced them. / In addition, this analysis gives special consideration to much discussed 19th century elements of racial theories which found their way into the travel accounts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.28872 |
| Date | January 1994 |
| Creators | Ohnesorg, Stefanie |
| Contributors | Goldsmith-Reber, Trudis E. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | ge |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of German Studies.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001460443, proquestno: NN05769, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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