In a field dominated by white Western men, it is instructive to be reminded that not all modern desert writers answer to that description and indeed, white Western women in particular have a distinguished, if under-represented, place in the anglophone canon of Arab desert literature. While fewer in number, several modern female writers continue to engage with the subject. This chapter analyses their work to see if a different character either of the travelling self (the subject of chapter one) or of the Arab other (the subject of chapter two) is illuminated in the texts and whether their work occupies a liminal space in relation to male-gendered discourse. Through reference to feminist and postcolonial theory, this chapter also probes the work of male travellers as they write about Arab women to test the third research area proposed in the introduction of this thesis, namely the extent to which texts of modern desert-going writers provide commentary as much about the land left behind as the land of their destination. The chapter concludes with a discussion about the way in which the very taxonomy of desert encounter (the categories employed, the vocabulary used and labels imposed) reflects an inbuilt gender bias that reveals much about the continuing construction of East-West binaries and that these binaries prove stubbornly resistant to postcolonial attempts to champion the liminal and the in-between.
In the first chapter of The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands (1998), Nicholas Clapp places his wife, Kay, right beside him – not just on the plane to Muscat ‘her face pressed to the window’, looking out on a destination in which they are both about to invest equal time and energies, but also in his narrative of the expedition to find the lost city of Ubar.1 This is in contrast to Clapp’s fellow expeditioner, Ranulph Fiennes, whose own wife Ginnie is given the proverbial back seat. In Atlantis of the Sands, the minimisation of Ginnie Fiennes’s role in her husband’s account reflects no lack of interest, aptitude or involvement in the expedition (she is after all involved in the original idea (p.91), early planning (p.94) and on-site logistics (p.215)), and she at length emerges from obscurity in an apparently grudging paragraph where Fiennes notes that she was the first woman to receive the Polar Medal. The same paragraph reveals that Ginnie Fiennes was also the first woman permitted into ‘the hallowed male portals of the Antarctic
1 Nicholas Clapp, The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands [1998] (London: Souvenir Press,
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Club’.2 This information comes as a surprise to the reader as she is barely acknowledged in the rest of the account of their travels, despite the attested closeness of their relationship.3 If there are reasons why Ginnie is not brought to the fore in Fiennes’s text these are not given and her own successes as an explorer receive only one other mention: the reader learns that she was to be honoured for her achievements as an explorer at the Antarctic Club’s annual dinner but Fiennes admits: ‘I managed to make a dreadful mix up in my diary and we failed to attend’ (p.135).
This dispiriting passage in Atlantis of the Sands begins to suggest the extent to which women are often erased from the text in the male-dominated accounts of wilderness exploration in general and in the genre of Arabian desert travel in particular. It is as if their inclusion in some way undermines the inherent authenticity of the endeavour and blunts its ‘competitive edge’.4 As shown by the accounts of modern footstep travellers in the region, such as those of Charles Blackmore, Bruce Kirkby and Adrian Hayes, while they may make a mention in passing of women travellers among the distinguished sequence of explorers in which their own travels are contextualised, they do not dwell on the exploits of women travellers as if to do so may cast doubt on the difficulty of their own endeavour. There are good historical reasons for this, as Carl Thompson points out: ‘a common yardstick for demonstrating and asserting masculinity in travel has been the degree of danger and discomfort involved in the journey. The greater the risk and the difficulty, obviously, the more manly and heroic a traveller seems’.5 By extension, place a woman in the arena of extreme experience and all the attendant challenges become lesser benchmarks of endurance. As will be shown in this chapter, the absence of women from desert literature is no newly observed phenomenon: Colin Thubron, reviewing Michael Asher’s biography of Wilfred Thesiger, spells it out: ‘This is a warrior's arena. Women are absent from it’,6 and Roslynn Haynes, in a more recent cultural work on deserts calls it ‘a highly gendered space’ where women ‘are absent, or hardly even referred to’.7 Where women do appear in male desert texts, they are generally present not
2 Ranulph Fiennes, Atlantis of the Sands: The Search for the Lost City of Ubar [1992] (London: Signet,
1993), p.135.
3 Author’s Interview with Nigel Winser, 2 June 2016. See Appendix C. Winser is well acquainted with
Ranulph and Ginnie Fiennes.
4 See ‘A Tradition of Intertextual Referencing’ in chapter one of this study.
5 Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), p.176.
6 Colin Thubron, ‘A lifelong search for just deserts: Thesiger - Michael Asher: Viking, pounds 20'
[online], The Independent (1994), available at: https://www.independent. co.uk/arts- entertainment/book-review-a-lifelong-search-for-just-deserts-thesiger-michael-asher-viking-pounds- 20-1451083.html [accessed 13 July 2019].
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as Western co-expeditioners but as Arab objects of male fantasy, consistent with old Orientalist tropes, or simply glossed over as a subject beyond the scope of the writer’s gaze. Where the first chapter of this thesis explored presentations of self, and the second chapter representations of the Other, this chapter probes several strands of the ‘highly gendered space’ within the genre of desert writing in order not just to pay tribute to women’s travels in the region but also to amplify the wider cultural significance of their contribution.
The first part of this chapter begins by considering, in general terms, how and why women feature so minimally in the subgenre of Arabian desert travel literature and looks at whether the literature that they do write shares the same ‘position of enunciation’ as that written by men.8 While the discussion examines the attempt at reappraisal of a female literary legacy in connection with women’s travels in Arabia, it argues that any differences occurring in women’s texts arise largely as a result of differences in experience rather than on account of any essential gender difference. It considers some of the ways in which modern women travellers present a broader narrative of the region by virtue of their access to the domestic part of Arab culture normally hidden from men but, while their field of vision is guided by the type of experience they encounter, it suggests that this does not necessarily mean that they speak a different language, have a lesser or greater insight or are any the less impacted by the Oriental inheritance articulated by their male travelling counterparts.
The second part of the chapter traces the way Arab women have typically been presented in both male and female travel literature in the region. This precedes an examination of modern travel accounts by women writers who each embrace a distinctly feminocentric project in their writing by virtue of their chosen subject matter. For reasons that will be made clear, there are few works to choose from but each of the women commentators selected for discussion (Adrienne Brady, Jean Sasson, Geraldine Brooks, Marguerite van Geldermalsen and the photographer Helen Couchman) formulate an agenda with which they challenge, document or collude in the traditional perception of the Arabian desert as delineated by their male counterparts. These modern texts, all written in the past two decades, bear little in common with one another, and some stretch the definition of travelogue, but their inclusion in this discussion reveals whether the
8 Shirley Foster and Sara Mills, eds., An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2002), p.7. This was a term used by Foster and Mills in their evaluation of Edward W. Said’s neglect of women’s travel writing in Orientalism. See also Georgine Clarsen, Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008).
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articulation of a counter-discourse based on gender represents a meaningful distinction, if only in terms of desert literature.
Running through many women’s texts that focus on the region is a tension between the heroic and the domestic, the wild and the tame – themes traditionally of masculinity and femininity. In this context, the landscape provides not just a backdrop to the gendered space of desert travel literature but is also included in the act of linguistically gendering that space. To examine to what extent and purpose the desert is anthropomorphised, the discussion concludes by seeking parallels of the wilderness trope among four further women’s desert texts, Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980), Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica (1996), Jay Griffiths’s Wild: An Elemental Journey (2006) and, albeit tangentially, Jo Tatchell’s Diamond in the Desert (2009).
If, as June Hannam suggests, feminism can be taken to mean ‘a set of ideas that recognise in an explicit way that women are subordinate to men and seek to address imbalances of power between the sexes’, then this chapter takes a feminist approach in concurring with much modern criticism that ‘women’s voices should be heard’; in texts where they are not heard, the question is asked as to what this implies of the desert literature under scrutiny.9 The chapter explores some of the resonances between feminism and postcolonialism in which notions of patriarchy (defined by John McLeod as ‘those systems – political, material and imaginative – which invest power in men and marginalise women’) are seen to share common ground and how the discourse regarding patriarchy is problematised by the relationship between first and so-called third world contexts.10
Where are the women? Western women’s travels in Arabia
Even a brief survey of desert literature prompts the question: ‘Where are the women?’ According to Edward Said, an estimated sixty thousand books were written in English about the near East between 1800 and 1950, many of which, including the classics by J.L. Burckhardt, Richard Burton, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Charles M. Doughty, T.E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger, focused specifically on the Arabian Peninsula.11 Many of these
9 June Hannam, Feminism [2007] (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp.2-3.
10 John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism [2000] (Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 2010), p.99.
11 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin-Peregrine, 1978), p.204. Said does not cite a
reference for these figures but he does quote a source for the greater numbers of travellers visiting the Islamic East from Europe in comparison with those travelling in the opposite direction: Ibrahim Abu-
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authors became household names to the reading public of the nineteenth and early twentieth century but, with the notable exception of Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, few Western women appear in these accounts and fewer authored accounts of their own. Indeed, the absence of women in the body of desert literature associated with the region is so pronounced that it has become, according to Haynes, part of ‘desert mythology’.12 But to recognise there have been few women desert-travellers is not to say there have been none. As Carl Thompson notes of travel literature as a whole, ‘women have in fact been prolific producers of travelogues, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’.13 In desert literature their texts were overshadowed by the dominant male discourse until projects like Lesley Blanch’s The Wilder Shores of Love brought a new critical interest to women’s travel writing on the region. First published in 1954, this work established a fashion for group biographies of Eastern-bound women and prefigured the current appetite for a rehabilitation of this group of travellers reflected across the field of global travel literature as a whole. Anthologies such as Mary Morris’s Maiden Voyages (1993), Jane Robinson’s Unsuitable for Ladies (1994), and Dea Birkett’s Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers (2004), which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2004, all include accounts by women of travels through the deserts of the Middle East and, together with Virago’s reprinting of women’s travel literature, have helped champion a greater visibility of women’s contributions to the genre.
As these anthologies show, Western women have been travelling and writing on the region since the fourth to sixth century when Egeria, who numbers among the earliest Western travellers to write of a journey in the Middle East, recorded her pilgrimage to the region’s Christian sites.14 Although it was commonly assumed in subsequent centuries that women could not physically endure the privation of extreme wilderness travel and ‘must be protected from nature and bandits alike’,15 the travails of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the early eighteenth century and Lady Hester Stanhope in the early nineteenth demonstrated that women were more than equal to the task, and the difficulty shifted from
Lughod, Arab Rediscovery of Europe: A Study in Cultural Encounters (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp.75-76.
12 Haynes, Desert, p.165.
13 Thompson, Travel Writing, p.3.
14 Peregrinatio ad terram sanctam, or Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, written somewhere between the fourth
and sixth century was written by a nun, Egeria [Etheria], in a series of letters to the sisters of her religious order. See M.L. McClure and C.L. Feltoe, eds., The Pilgrimage of Etheria (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York: Macmillan, 1919).
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‘cannot’ to ‘should not’ as the century progressed. Nonetheless there was never a point at which women ‘did not’ travel to the region and the list of Victorian female endeavour in desert lands during the nineteenth century was impressive, resulting in works on archaeology in the Holy Land published in 1846 (Lady Hester Stanhope), convalescence and letter-writing in Egypt in the 1860s (Lady Lucie Duff-Gordon), horse-breeding in the Nejd in the 1880s (Lady Anne Noel), administration as wives to noted Arabists and specialists in their own right (Isabel Burton and Mabel Bent in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, and Violet Dickson and Doreen Ingrams in the first half of the twentieth century), and even butterfly-collection and love-making in the Lebanon at the end of the Victorian era (Margaret Fountaine).16
The achievements of these women can be reckoned not just in terms of their endeavours but in the fact that they made their journeys at all. Travelling beyond Europe, especially ‘without escort, chaperon, or husband’, was perceived, according to Mary Morris, as a dubious activity that put women physically and morally at risk.17 Constrained by the presumed perils of travel and by norms that, as Tim Youngs identifies, associated ‘travel with masculinity’, and ‘stasis and domesticity with the feminine,’ women travellers to Arab lands were in some senses performing an act of trespass into distinctly male territory.18 The few who, like Fountaine, strayed across the threshold of exploration, situated as it is at the far end of the travel continuum, either attracted social opprobrium or feared for their reputations on returning to polite society, sensing that they were engaging in activities that were not wholly ‘proper or befitting to [their] station in life’.19 A ditty in Punch addressed to the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) at the end of the nineteenth century shows their concerns were well-founded:
A Lady an explorer? A traveller in skirts? The notion’s just a trifle too seraphic:
Let them stay and mind the babies, or hem our ragged shirts; But they mustn’t, can’t and shan’t be geographic.20
16 The published texts arising from these travels are listed under ‘Primary Sources’ in the Bibliography of
this study.
17 Mary Morris, ed., Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travellers (New York: Vintage, 1993), p.xv. 18 Tim Youngs, The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), p.135.
19 Margaret Fountaine, Love Among the Butterflies: Travels and Adventures of a Victorian Lady, ed. by
W.F. Cater (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1980), p.155.
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Written in 1893 at around the time the RGS was debating the inclusion of women among its membership (and about the time Fountaine was beginning her considerations on free love as a precursor to the chosen context of her entomological expeditions in Syria a decade later) the verse has a menacing undertone that makes it clear that women are welcome neither in the field as a expeditioner nor in the journals and proceedings as an author. The Times Literary Supplement of 1907 lamented that ‘delicately-nurtured women’ have ceased to be a ‘rara avis’, in traversing ‘sandy deserts’; the same paper later asserted in 1912 that no ‘piece of actual exploration of the first importance has yet been accomplished by a woman’.21 This rejection of female endeavour in a hitherto male enterprise is in contrast to the evidence supplied by the women themselves; Fountaine alone contributed one of the best records of diurnal lepidoptera of the period.22 It is also mirrored in the history of the RGS itself which only finally admitted women in 1913, despite their initially being proposed for membership in 1887, and only after four failed attempts and one reversal of decision, eighty-three years after the society was founded.23
Margaret Fountaine’s Love among the Butterflies makes a significant contribution not only to the field of Lepidoptera but also to the genre of desert travel writing as her book is suggestive of a new kind of female travel in the region. Her journeys are propelled by the hitherto largely masculine goal of science and it is significant that she describes her scientific inclination arising directly from her nature: ‘I was a born naturalist, though all these years for want of anything to excite it, it had lain dormant within me’.24 Fountaine’s various romantic encounters represent an act of editorial selection by her male editor, W.F. Cater, from a diary of ‘well over a million words’. By focusing on these intimacies at the expense of her intellectual output, Cater repositions Fountaine in the more familiar female camp of romance rather than risking her representation in the male camp of geography. Fountaine remained unpublished, in accordance with her wishes, for exactly one hundred years from the date of the diary’s commencement. James Canton posits that the notion of unmarried intimacy between an English woman and an Arab meant that the travelogue was destined to be only ever a ‘distinctly ... personal confession,
21 Dea Birkett, ed., Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers [accompanying 2004
Exhibition] (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2006), p.120.
22 Sophie Waring notes that Fountaine collected 22,000 butterflies and published her findings extensively:
‘Fountaine herself is under-researched’, according to Waring and this article contains a useful ‘account of her entomological career’: Sophie Waring, ‘Margaret Fountaine: A lepidopterist remembered’, Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 69, no.1 (2015), 53-68 (p.53).
23 The first and only female president of the Royal Geographical Society was elected in 2012. 24 Fountaine, Love among the Butterflies, p.55.
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not written for an audience’.25 While it is possible that the one hundred-year embargo