Victorian Women and the Economies of Travel, Translation and Culture, 1830–1870

Judith Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317002048
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Both travel and translation involve a type of journey, one with literal and metaphorical dimensions. Judith Johnston brings together these two richly resonant modes of getting from here to there as she explores their impact on culture with respect to the work of Victorian women. Using the metaphor of the published journey, whether it involves actual travel or translation, Johnston focusses particularly on the relationships of various British women with continental Europe. At the same time, she sheds light on the possibility of appropriation and British imperial enhancement that such contact produces. Johnston's book is in part devoted to case studies of women such as Sarah Austin, Mary Busk, Anna Jameson, Charlotte Guest, Jane Sinnett and Mary Howitt who are representative of women travellers, translators and journalists during a period when women became increasingly robust participants in the publishing industry. Whether they wrote about their own travels or translated the foreign language texts of other writers, Johnston shows, women were establishing themselves as actors in the broad business of culture. In widening our understanding of the ways in which gender and modernity functioned in the early decades of the Victorian age, Johnston's book makes a strong case for a greater appreciation of the contributions nineteenth-century women made to what is termed the knowledge empire.

Part I: Historical and Theoretical Background

Chapter 1 Travel, Translation and Culture: Unexpected Neighbourhoods

DOI: 10.4324/9781315548241-2

The term ‘journey’ seems deceptively simple but it contains a plurality of meaning. It is rich in nuances: metaphorical implications, imaginative possibilities, romance, knowledge acquisition, and redolent with anticipation. As a term, the journey is linked semantically to ‘journal’ and ‘journalism’. This book is about a range of journeys undertaken that are always implied in the key terms of my title: travel, translation and culture. The outcome of such journeys, as noted in the ‘Introduction’, is that traveller, translator and reader find themselves arriving in ‘unexpected neighbourhoods’. Canning suggested that steam power would create ‘unexpected neighbourhoods and new combinations of social relation’. However, while the reviewer who quoted Canning's words applied this statement to the function of translation alone, I want to extend its impact yet again by applying it across my three key terms. Physical and intellectual journeys take the traveller, the translator, and the reader who journeys through the pages of a book into new regions that broaden perspective and understanding and contribute to knowledge. Travellers read the topography they traverse and inscribe their readings into travel books. Translators provide maps that offer pathways to new ideas, philosophies, and ways of seeing. Readers take up those books and become companions on the various journeys undertaken.

Indeed readers are often specifically invited by authors to accompany them. Emily Lowe assumes, in Unprotected Females in Norway (1857) that her readers may be prepared ‘to follow us bodily, sharing our hardships and our pleasures’ but acknowledges that others will ‘merely follow us in imagination, and from a comfortable fireside chair’.¹ In a most unusual journey, Investigation; or, Travels in the Boudoir , Caroline Halsted directs her young heroine Agnes, and by implication her readers, to undertake a foreign tour within the confines of her own bedroom by investigating the goods with which it is furnished, noting in the ‘Preface’ ‘that a mere transient survey of the most attractive scenes, will leave little useful impression on minds not previously prepared to comprehend the nature of the things beheld’. The work's didactic thrust is discovered in her assertion that new discoveries in art and science will ‘produce, at the end of a few years, a fresh mass of information important in itself, and desirable to be gained by the young, as enabling them to keep pace with the times in which they live’.² Fredrika Bremer, whose translated travels to America are the subject of the last of the case studies in Part II, lost both mother and sister between journeys, relatives who were the recipients of the letters which became her travel book, The Homes of the New World (1853). In the Preface to Two Years in Switzerland and Italy (1861) titled ‘To My Reader’, Bremer asks, plaintively, ‘To whom should I now write? … My first inquiring glance found – empty space; but my second showed me thee, my R.’ Her reader is thus invited into a very close relationship with the author, taking on the role of relative and confidante. Bremer delivers an encomium praising this reader as kind and encouraging, as the source of her inspiration ‘to write and to learn, and to travel’. She warns that the journey will be long and labels her chapters ‘Stations’, ‘to indicate certain divisions of our travelling-life. I say our – because, are we not all of us travelling through life?’.³

¹ Emily Lowe, Unprotected Females in Norway; or, the Pleasantest Way of Travelling there, passing through Denmark and Sweden (London, 1857), 2. ² Caroline Halsted, Investigation; or, Travels in the Boudoir (London, 1846), ix and ix–x. ³ Fredrika Bremer, Two Years in Switzerland and Italy, trans. Mary Howitt (2 vols; London, 1861), vi and viii. Also titled Life in the Old World; or, Two Years in Switzerland and Italy.

Knowledge acquisition, and education more generally, is always a motivating force in the publishing work of women. Modern languages often formed a part of a young woman's education. Skill in one or more (generally European) languages could, I suggest, be included with piano playing and painting, as a middle-class girl's ‘cultural capital’, as Margaret Beetham puts it.⁴ It is at this point culturally that translation necessarily becomes a vital factor. Some women, to gain a footing in the publishing industry, translated the journeys of Europeans, particularly those who travelled through Britain and subsequently published their impressions. Their translation activities put these women at the forefront of this very modern business of cultural exchange. Beetham has noted of women defining themselves as readers that this produces a ‘different kind of economy than the market, namely the circulation of meanings, ideas and identities’.⁵ In the mandarin quarterlies, the Quarterly and the Edinburgh Review, as well as any number of monthly journals in the 1830–1870 period, review essays based on published travel narratives, both journeys by British travellers and explorers, and the translated travels of Europeans, predominate. Thus women became increasingly participant in what might be considered a forefront publishing industry during these years. They wrote about their own travels or they translated the foreign language texts of other writers, texts that also often included travel books, activity suggestive of their participatory roles in the broad business of culture. Sherry Simon makes the point too, in Gender and Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission, that for women, translating provided an opportunity to discover a public voice and enabled them to express certain political positions in democratic terms.⁶ This is particularly so of the women whose work is the focus of the case studies in Part II.

⁴ Margaret Beetham, ‘Women and the Consumption of Print’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1800–1900, ed. Joanne Shattock (Cambridge, 2001), 70. ⁵ Beetham, 63. ⁶ Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation. Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London, 1996), 2.

Simon uses the phrase ‘literary exchange’ to describe the impact of translation as connected to a sense of nation and national democratic life. Charlotte Guest's translation of the medieval Welsh ‘Mabinogion’, discussed in Chapter 5, is an interesting example of the way in which ‘exchange’ can be overturned as ‘appropriation’. My work, however, considers the probability that exchange may not be the only outcome. While the subsequent chapters in Part II will explore the possible interchanges which travel and translation brings about, nevertheless, I also want to consider the extent to which translation might prove to be not limited to reciprocity but rather, more likely to produce intellectual impacts through forms of appropriation in which the source language and author disappears altogether, and meanings and ideas become authorized as integral to the target culture's own sense of identity and nationhood, as Venuti argues.⁷ When the translator is a woman, gendered dismissal probably aids such invisibility. Margaret Oliphant said of Sarah Austin that she ‘did not pretend to be an original woman, notwithstanding some able articles in the Edinburgh Review, chiefly on foreign subjects, but she was a translator of singular ability and success’.⁸ Oliphant implies that the practice of translation precludes a woman from producing original work while at the same time she endorses what she interprets as Austin's proper feminine choices to act as handmaiden to the original writings of others because to do so accords with the gender ideology Oliphant herself was so careful to support, even if she did not practise it.

⁷ Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation as cultural politics: regimes of domestication in English’, Textual Practice 7/2 (1993): 212–13; 208–23. See also The Translator's Invisibility. A History of Translation (1995; London, 2008), 64–5. Chapters 2 and 3, while based on this earlier work, have been revised and expanded without abandoning the original premise. ⁸ Quoted in Carol T. Christ, ‘“The Hero as Man of Letters”: Masculinity and Victorian Nonfiction Prose’, in Victorian Sages & Cultural Discourse. Renegotiating Gender and Power, ed. Thaïs Morgan (London, 1990), 25.

James Duncan and Derek Gregory suggest there ‘is a sense in which all travel writing, as a process of inscription and appropriation, spins webs of colonizing power’.⁹ I would want to extend this to include the translation of travel writing as a part of that process. While conscious that this is a concept around which there has been considerable debate, ideas nevertheless warrant interrogation and the best way to undertake this is to think laterally, against the grain even, and as flexibly as the very semantics of the terms travel and translation may allow. The Shorter OED offers among other meanings for the word travel, that it is ‘to journey, through (a country, a district, or a space); to traverse (a road); to follow (a course or path); or to be transmitted’. For the word translation, the dictionary offers the following meanings: ‘the process of turning from one language into another, and its product; a version in a different language; the rendering of something in another medium or form; transference; or transformation, alteration, change or renovation’. All of these meanings infer some kind of encounter, and when travel and translation are brought together, we can locate what Michael Cronin has termed ‘the translation encounter’. As he rightly argues, any range of synonyms (like those I have listed above) is not intended to trivialize translation practices but to highlight the way in which the mediation which translation generates should not be restrictive but open to a range of enquiries, demonstrating translation's ‘interpretive reach and relevance’.¹⁰ The traveller encounters the strange and the new which is interpreted according to his or her own cultural register, only to have that transformation undergo a further ‘translation encounter’ in being rendered into another language and culture altogether, so that the original journey is retraced through language.

⁹ James Duncan and Derek Gregory (eds), ‘Introduction’, Writes of Passage. Reading Travel Writing (London, 1999), 3. ¹⁰ Michael Cronin, Across the Lines. Travel, Language, Translation (Cork, 2000), 17–18.

J. Hillis Miller claims that any words ‘in any language … may be translated … to a different context and be appropriated there for new uses’.¹¹ While his is a discussion about the travelling of literary theory across borders which makes a particular case for literary studies and theory, I am thinking of the even more permeable borders I am claiming for travel and translation. With regard then to such ‘new uses’, it is necessary to ask if the appropriation of ideas and cultural material via translation and travel writing in particular, might not resemble a form of colonization with similar economic and cultural impacts? Although on the surface both recorded and translated travelogues can seem non-violent and non-aggressive (as opposed to acts of invasion associated with colonialism) they may only seem so because the narrative style permits the translator and the woman travel writer to disappear almost completely from sight through the adoption of an objective, reporting voice where both traveller and translator speak always from a liminal position. Certainly non-violence accords with the gender ideology of the period regarding women's role in society. Nevertheless, the resultant transformations have been wrested from source cultures and are, therefore, put to ‘new uses’. Venuti remarks on the violence caused by translation as ‘partly inevitable’, as part of the process, but also as ‘partly potential’ in the production and reception.¹² With these issues in mind I want to address the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors' Preface
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Historical and Theoretical Background
• Part II: Case Studies
• Bibliography
• Index