A Critique of the Colonial Discourse in Western Women's Travelogues

This research is the analysis of the contact zone and the tensions in western women’s travelogues. Travel writing as a genre has always been marginalized within the domain of literary researches, but travelogues by women have been doubly marginalized due to gender. In patriarchal societies, the literature produced by women has never been received as seriously as that by men. Western women, who were colonizers by race and colonized by gender, cannot use the omniscient point of view revealed in men’s travelogues, nor can they assume the objective pose that man travel writers usually boast of. Women, who had an unsure position between the discourses of colonialism and that of femininity, reveal such tensions in their writing that are mostly absent from men’s travelogues. These tensions and the role they play in the self-fashioning of British women can be traced in the images that they offer of the orient in the 19th century.