Travelling Trifles: The Souvenirs of Late Eighteenth-Century Female British Tourists
thesis
posted on 2017-01-04, 22:33 authored by Emma GleadhillFemale
British tourists of the late eighteenth century eagerly collected souvenirs
during a period when rising incomes, cheaper and more reliable transport, and
changes to the political landscape made travel and its objects increasingly
accessible to women. However, both travel and the associated practice of
collecting (always sources of knowledge and power) were culturally constructed
as exclusively masculine pursuits. Genteel British women were restricted to a
polite female education directed towards accomplishments. Moreover, it was
widely held that they were incapable of the objective analysis and abstract
thought required to grasp the Grand Tourist’s classical connoisseurship, or the
Enlightened Explorer’s appreciation of natural history and civilisation.
Nonetheless, this dissertation (drawing from Susan Stewart’s theory of the souvenir as a nostalgic memento) shows that some late eighteenth-century female British tourists were able to subtly subvert this exclusion by manipulating their souvenirs into a natural extension of polite sociability and domesticity that excused their claims to the authority of travelling subject. In so doing they were able to pursue a range of activities and assume a set of responsibilities within British society from which they would normally have been excluded. All late eighteenth-century female British tourists used their souvenirs to perform acts of remembrance in front of others, by which they shaped and reshaped their memories of the empowering experience of travel and their own subjectivities. Some women used their souvenir artworks and antiquities within the polite female context of the salon to establish personae as worldly hostesses and so insert themselves into an exclusively masculine classical cultural heritage. Others collected souvenir natural specimens and documented their eyewitness observations to form personae as cultural interpreters, scientists, and explorers, so staking their own claims on knowledge practice and creation. Still others gave female friends and family souvenirs as a form of relationship currency that supported female sodality and agency.
By giving the souvenir a historical and temporal dimension, Travelling Trifles thus expands our awareness of genteel British women’s active participation in the Grand Tour and Domestic Tour. This extends previous scholarship on women’s travel writing and the gendered experience of travel and makes an important contribution to our scholarly understanding of the gendering of collecting and material culture.
Nonetheless, this dissertation (drawing from Susan Stewart’s theory of the souvenir as a nostalgic memento) shows that some late eighteenth-century female British tourists were able to subtly subvert this exclusion by manipulating their souvenirs into a natural extension of polite sociability and domesticity that excused their claims to the authority of travelling subject. In so doing they were able to pursue a range of activities and assume a set of responsibilities within British society from which they would normally have been excluded. All late eighteenth-century female British tourists used their souvenirs to perform acts of remembrance in front of others, by which they shaped and reshaped their memories of the empowering experience of travel and their own subjectivities. Some women used their souvenir artworks and antiquities within the polite female context of the salon to establish personae as worldly hostesses and so insert themselves into an exclusively masculine classical cultural heritage. Others collected souvenir natural specimens and documented their eyewitness observations to form personae as cultural interpreters, scientists, and explorers, so staking their own claims on knowledge practice and creation. Still others gave female friends and family souvenirs as a form of relationship currency that supported female sodality and agency.
By giving the souvenir a historical and temporal dimension, Travelling Trifles thus expands our awareness of genteel British women’s active participation in the Grand Tour and Domestic Tour. This extends previous scholarship on women’s travel writing and the gendered experience of travel and makes an important contribution to our scholarly understanding of the gendering of collecting and material culture.
