Mobilizing Legacies: The Vocational Singlewoman and Nineteenth-Century Travel Memoirs
Kelsey Rall, 2023-24 RPW Center Themed Graduate Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “The Place of Memory.”
Single Ladies
The word “spinster” usually connotes images of older women in dusty houses surrounded by mountains of knitted products, feelings of loneliness and superfluousness, and the derisive language of “old maids,” “shrews,” and “cat ladies.” Behind this image is a history of discomfort with the idea of a woman who refuses the roles of wife and mother, a discomfort that is particularly rooted in the nineteenth century and its codification of heteronormative gender roles.
Travel memoirs were a space for single women to both justify the radical nature of their extrafamilial lives and to craft lasting public legacies beyond the family unit.
As the story goes, the sad spinster was the unfortunate by-product of old-fashioned expectations for women’s lives, especially in the nineteenth century, when a woman’s only acceptable domain was the domestic sphere, when her only possible role was the submissive and pure wife/mother. It is no wonder, then, that some have been quick to argue that the figure of the spinster no longer exists, that she was wiped out by (among other factors) feminism, queerness, and the unyoking of womanhood from marriage and motherhood; while she haunts the literature and history of the past, she slowly disappears throughout the twentieth century, becoming simply a memory from which our current age recoils.
While there are many issues embedded within this narrative, I am the most interested in revising its flattening of the historical single woman into a pathetic “before” image that supports a glorified narrative of social progress. In my dissertation, titled “Seeing Through the Spinster: The Nineteenth-Century Single Woman in Literature and Theory,” I set out to challenge the memory of the disappearing and disempowered spinster by turning to the single women of the nineteenth century – a period in which singleness was a particularly precarious and disruptive position for a woman to occupy – and examining her embodiment of queerness, agency, and subversive power in order to underscore that singleness has always been, and continues to be, a complex and multifaceted position for women.
On the Move
I examine how various “genres” of nineteenth-century single womanhood simultaneously structure and destabilize major literary genres like the marriage plot, travel writing, and narratives of enslavement. While the heart of my dissertation is invested in revising the place and image of nineteenth-century spinsterhood in our cultural memory, my current project delves specifically into the question of how single women self-define in their travel memoirs. In this piece, I argue that travel memoirs were a space for single women to both justify the radical nature of their extrafamilial lives and to craft lasting public legacies beyond the boundaries of the family unit.
In particular, I compare how mobility, geography, and legacy are interconnected in the memoirs of Marianne North, a Victorian botanist and prolific painter, and Mary Seacole, a Jamaican nurse and entrepreneur. I argue that both women use the language of vocation to justify the strangeness of traveling as a single woman in the nineteenth century; as North and Seacole argue, their occupational callings – as scientific artist and nurse, respectively – required them to perform the groundbreaking work of traveling alone across the globe.
The distant places these authors describe in their texts are only part of their place-based legacy-making, however. For North, the places that she details in her memoir, the lands she depicts in her paintings, and the gallery that she designed in Kew Gardens are all pieces of the larger public memory that she built for herself. Seacole’s legacy is also one profoundly connected to contested space, as recent memorials erected in her honor have been criticized by detractors who argue that any inch of public memory dedicated to Seacole must be stolen from her more famous counterpart in the Crimean War – Florence Nightingale.
Who is granted a place in public memory, then, is politicized and debated, and Seacole and North’s authorial investment in carving out such space for their own legacies – especially as single and childless women – is integral to understanding how unmarried women were able to argue for their own value in their nineteenth-century memoirs.
Kelsey Rall is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the English Department. She specializes in nineteenth-century literature, and her research interests include queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, spinsterhood, and genre studies. Her dissertation, titled “Seeing Through the Spinster: The Nineteenth-Century Single Woman in Literature and Theory,” analyzes how single women redefine notions of gender, kinship, and temporality in nineteenth-century texts. In particular, she proposes that various “genres” of nineteenth-century single womanhood simultaneously structure and destabilize the major literary genres in which they appear.