The Travels of Nellie Bly and Emma Vely in the Context of Women’s Movement, Colonialism and Female Identity
Date
2020-07-06
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Abstract
This project focuses on the transcultural analysis of travel writings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the North American journalist Nellie Bly and the German author Emma Vely. It will examine displayed female identity and creations of “Otherness” in their travel writings through the lens of the authors’ positions on women’s rights matters. It sheds light on the question if the women’s movement positively influenced the interaction of western female travelers with “Others” in colonial settings and if they showed greater awareness of unequal power dynamics, especially in their display of non-western women in colonized countries that they visited. Bly and Vely both supported the women’s rights movement in the United States and in Germany and offer an excellent base for a transcultural comparative analysis as they share similarities in their perspective on women’s rights, their travel routes and the time period that they traveled in, during the 1880s and 90s. The analysis also determines if the findings reflect the varying historical background of the women’s movement in Germany, where Vely was born, and in the U.S, where Bly originated from. The findings of this project show that Bly and Vely’s support for women’s equality only applied to white women and, even though they were interested in their living conditions, they did not perceive non-white women as equal, as their racist and derogatory statements show. Their display of female alterity shows surprisingly few variations despite their varying background and the different history of the women’s movement in both countries.
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women’s travel literature, women’s rights movement, nineteenth-century, transcultural literature studies, post-colonialism
Citation
Gilgen, A. (2020). The Travels of Nellie Bly and Emma Vely in the Context of Women’s Movement, Colonialism and Female Identity (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.