A curious alchemy: revisioning gender identity in travel writing by Edith O'Shaughnessy, P.K. Page, and Karen Connelly
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2008
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Abstract
Travel becomes a catalyst for revisioning gender identity in the work of Edith O'Shaughnessy, P.K. Page, and Karen Connelly, three twentieth-century women travel writers. O'Shaughnessy and Page travel to Mexico and Brazil respectively as diplomats' wives, breaking through gender restrictions and producing narratives that become political and social commentaries foregrounding women' s voices and interests. Connelly travels to Thailand as a teenager, finding her body creates gender tension and anxiety in a patriarchally entrenched society. Each of these three women record not only their physical journeys, but more importantly their psychological transformation as they find themselves needing to revision their idea of a female outside a familiar domestic space, a female residing with a foreign other, and a female who is spurred by travel to discover her artistic talents. Their life-writing narratives, in the form of familiar letters for O' Shaughnessy and journals for Page and Connelly, are testaments to how literature can be juxtaposed with lived experience to produce a new definition of the female, as an active, engaged, and transformative citizen of the world.
Description
Bibliography: p. 106-110
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Citation
Arciniega, M. L. (2008). A curious alchemy: revisioning gender identity in travel writing by Edith O'Shaughnessy, P.K. Page, and Karen Connelly (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/2270