Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer, 1750–1837 by Johns Alessa

Author:Johns, Alessa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER 4

Travel and Transfer

Anna Jameson and Transnational Spurs to European Reform1

A study of transatlantic travel in this chapter will allow us to view British-German transfer within an even broader geographical scope; movement into the colonial contact zone provided Europeans with ideas for restructuring European society and those notions then became part of intra-European cultural transfer. The New World, imbued for Europeans with boundless possibility, promised models of social improvement, and European travelers took away impressions both positive and negative and developed ideas for reform. Ali Behdad has pointed out how travel in this period “is not just a search for the exotic and the erotic. Rather, it is an instructive activity that not only completes the traveller's formal education, but also benefits the general public by raising awareness of the public's own religion, government, and moral and cultural values…. The more Europe learns about other cultures, the better it understands itself.”2 Thus travel allowed a greater definition of what was specifically European. Behdad emphasizes that such self-understanding implies “self-recognition and self-realization,” with the implication that a greater confidence attends metropolitan subjects upon surveying, knowing, and contrasting themselves with the Other. Such a contrast can, however, also demonstrate European failings and shortcomings. As Steve Clark has pointed out, while postcolonial criticism has usefully drawn attention to travel writing's “racialist and imperialist guises,” bringing this hitherto underappreciated genre into the scholarly limelight, the purposes Page 122 → of travel writing have always been multiple, and it would be an oversimplification to reduce the “cross-cultural encounter to simple relations of domination and subordination.”3 These certainly existed and may well have predominated with many travelers, but they were accompanied by other forms of knowledge, and it is some of these to which I turn in this chapter. More specifically, I will emphasize how a female traveler, Anna Jameson, carried to Canada utopian aspirations gleaned from Enlightenment feminist forebears and was consequently primed to cull New World ideas for reform. In particular First Nations practices concerning gender and economy, witnessed on a visit to the frontier, informed her transnational communications, shaped her political activism, and eventually inspired calls for changes in legislation. Consequently, while postcolonial scholars have probed the impact of travel and exploration on imperial expansion and the transculturation evidenced by colonial subjects, I will consider how the contact zone could furnish to Europeans ideas for social renewal, particularly to those inclined to view society from below.

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