The Roving Eye : Gender and Sexuality in the Travel Narratives of Bayard Taylor, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Henry James

Abstract

The thesis is about texts of travel produced by Americans in the Victorian period. Bayard Taylor wrote travel books where he supposedly reported the facts of his journeys in Africa and the Mediterranean countries. Charles Warren Stoddard wrote exotic short stories from the Pacific.Henry James wrote realist novels set in Europe. The travel narrative was a creative way to find new openings to be able to discuss difficult topics and taboos concerned with race, gender, and sexuality. I have chosen postcolonial theory as an approach to these texts because postcolonialism focuses on the conflicting ideas of Western men who go to exotic locales looking for Other or otherness in an attempt to discover or construct the Self. My focus is on how the exotic locales provided the American writers with a possibility to test alternative lifestyles that were generally unacceptable in Victorian America. My study shows how travel, race, gender, and sexuality are linked together and how these issues were dealt with in these various texts that are part of the colonial discourse.