Tough Travel: The Sufferings of Recent Western Women Travel Writers when Confronted with the East

Abstract

Confessional and romantic travel discourses belong to a tradition that dates back centuries, but until the post-war period, serious women travel writers have tended to play down the details of their private lives in print, in favour of a focus on the people or country visited. Whether the current validation of women’s personal experience above all other discourses in women’s travel writing is the best solution to the problem of writing about the ‘contemporary Orient’ is debatable: ‘sharing’ with us details of the author’s private life has now become an obligatory part of women’s travel writing. Writers such as Robyn Davidson in India or Sara Wheeler in Bangladesh engage with a discourse of “tough travel” in which the focus is on the suffering and hardship of the traveller at the hands of the target culture, rather than an engagement with that culture or an attempt to describe it objectively. We are witnessing a new form of Orientalism, in which the writer expects the reader back home to feel sympathy for their culture shock and homesickness, rather than inquire into the nature of life in other parts of the world, or question the value of the travel writing project.