SOURCE: Ciolkowski, Laura E. “Traveler's Tales: Empire, Victorian Travel, and the Spectacle of English Womanhood in Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa.” Victorian Literature and Culture 26, no. 2 (1998): 337-66.

[In the following excerpt, Ciolkowski argues that far from undercutting bourgeois womanhood and presenting a story of female liberation, Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa establishes the author's gendered identity.]

I.

Fettered as women are in highly civilized countries by restraints, obligations, and responsibilities, which are too often arbitrary and artificial … it is natural enough that when the opportunity offers, they should hail even a temporary emancipation through travel.

Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century (1883)

If I had sufficient strength of mind I would wear [a Mohammedan hat] myself, but even if I decorated it with cat-tails, or antelope hair, as is usually done, I do not feel I could face Piccadilly in one; and you have no right to go about Africa in things you would be ashamed to be seen in at home.

Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (1897)

Victorian travel has always been about the politics of leaving home. And in a twentieth-century critical universe shaped by some of the fundamental questions about the making of “home” and “away” and the invention of “self” and “other,” the field of Victorian travel has necessarily taken its place at the center of a critical discourse about the sometimes fabulous and often sordid details of the colonial encounter. The Western travelers of such encounters are intriguing figures if simply because, despite the multiple voyagers' mythologies that adhere to them, they do not escape the demands of the Victorian world at home or the intricate structures of power out of which this world is made. Rather, the English adventurers who ostensibly left England behind for the mangrove swamps and cannibal villages of Africa regularly reproduced in their travels some of the very same structures of power from which they were purportedly freed. In leaving home, the English traveler also quite literally rediscovered it.

Yet, in spite of the scrutiny under which virtually all aspects of the British imperial venture have come in recent years, the powerful rhetorics of ideological freedom and sexual liberation persist in shaping the ways in which we think about travel and, perhaps, women's travel in particular. While theorists of travel like Karen Lawrence, Anne McClintock, and Sara Mills, among others, have succeeded in helpfully problematizing the discourse of travel-as-freedom, nineteenth-century women's travel nevertheless is still frequently understood as the means through which the repressed bodies of Victorian angels can leave their English homes and drawing rooms, burst the sexual restraints that define proper ladies, and thereby challenge in their eccentric reinvention of English femininity the ideals and principals of bourgeois womanhood. Mary Kingsley's celebrated voyages to West Africa in the 1890s have been taken up as a prime example of this liberatory plot. Kingsley's first travel book, Travels in West Africa (1897), has been read by Katherine Frank, for example, as a tale of sexual awakening in which the Victorian woman travels to Africa to be freed from her stifling bourgeois feminine identity. Dea Birkett interprets the young Mary Kingsley as a repressed woman who, like Charlotte Brontë's most famous literary prisoner, “sat in the attic rooms [of her home] plotting to escape” (17) before finally liberating herself by fleeing to Africa.

In this article I argue, in contrast, that Mary Kingsley's Travels in West Africa does not endeavor to undercut bourgeois womanhood by dramatically recounting a Victorian lady's spectacular story of female liberation so much as it works to establish it. The female subject of Travels in West Africa is made through the very imperial rituals and African cultural terrains that, ironically, have been celebrated by many readers of Kingsley's text as the determining scene of Kingsley's feminine un-making. Kingsley's identity as a specifically English woman depends not only upon the racial and political dynamics of West Africa that are at work in what Mary Louise Pratt has called “the contact zone,” but also upon the nineteenth-century production of the English female body as, quite literally, a body that is violently threatened by the foreign cultures with which it is for Victorians in Africa so clearly surrounded. Womanhood in Kingsley's text, in short, is not tainted by the “savage darkness” of Victorian Africa; it is, rather, precisely there in the “darkness” of Africa that womanhood is most efficiently created.

What seemed so common-sensical for so long about bourgeois womanhood is now not so easily explained. The very conceptual divisions upon which this woman relies (racial difference and class location, for example) have been spectacularly undone by culture workers like Pratt, Ann Laura Stoler, and Antoinette Burton, who have seen in the copious tales of nineteenth-century European racial and class identity the signs not only of uncertainty but also of border confusion. As Pratt puts it,

While the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the periphery (in the emanating glow of the civilizing mission or the cash flow of development, for example), it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis—beginning, perhaps, with the latter's obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its others continually to itself. Travel writing, among other institutions, is heavily organized in the service of that imperative.

(6)

My investigation of nineteenth-century womanhood in Kingsley's Travels in West Africa is written in the space opened up by such discoveries. It also endeavors to extend some of the more recent critical insights about the complexities of “leaving home,” what Lawrence has described as the “illusory [element] within both the stabilities of domesticity and the freedoms of travel” (xii). The questions I ask about Kingsley's “lady traveler” are heavily contingent upon the notion that imperial travel is productive of class and racial power and that English womanhood is very much a product, rather than simply the origin, of the social and cultural forces that helped to define English subjects in the age of Victoria.

Unlike so many of her traveler contemporaries—“female globetrotters” like Marianne North, Gertrude Bell, Isabella Bird Bishop, and Lady Florence Dixie—Mary Kingsley did not depart from England a proper lady in danger of losing (or, perhaps, determined to compromise) her femininity in the African Continent.¹ Whereas North was the daughter of a distinguished MP, Bell an Oxford educated baronet's granddaughter, Bishop a properly ailing and feeble daughter of a Church of England clergyman, and Dixie a “Lady” whose father was the Marquess of Queensberry and whose son was named for his godfather, the Prince of Wales, Kingsley lived on the margins of respectable English society and struggled with her own ambiguous status. The daughter of George Kingsley and his domestic servant, Mary Bailey, Kingsley was born just four days after her parents were married in October 1862, narrowly escaping illegitimacy.² Moreover, Mary Bailey's working-class origins, her uneducated ways, and her eventual confinement to a wheelchair led her neighbors to label her insane, ensuring her exclusion from polite circles and helping to confirm the suspicion that the George Kingsleys were not fit for the gentle society of people like Kingsley's celebrated uncle, the author/clergyman Charles Kingsley, and his family.³ Kingsley's inheritance of not only her mother's Christian name (Mary) but also her cockney accent further determined the degree to which, like her mother, Kingsley herself would be cast as an outsider who aspired for a legitimacy that her background nevertheless conspired against; Kingsley writes in a letter to Alice Stopford Green, “Do you see the nasty things they say about me at the Women's Writers Dinner for dropping my g's—just as if it were not all I could do to hold on to the h's” (qtd. in Blunt 130).

In the Kingsley family history, written by Mary in the form of a memoir and appended to the published edition of her father's Notes on Sport and Travel (1900), Kingsley reveals her desire to connect herself more securely to the venerable line of Kingsley ancestors to whom her relationship, over the course of her life, often seemed so tenuous.⁴ In spite of her disdain for the snobbish, high-society world which opened up for her after her return from Africa, Kingsley discloses in her memoir her intense pride in the Kingsley family stock and, most importantly, her yearning to be recognized as a legitimate product of it. In West African Studies (1899) she boasts (ignoring the lesser Bailey family in her lofty genealogical reconstruction): “I come of a generation of Danes who when the sun went down on the Wulpensand were the men to make light enough to fight by with their Morning Stars; and who, later on, were soldiers in the Low Countries and slave owners in the West Indies, and I am proud of my ancestors” (313). Kingsley's reputed dislike of high society, “that gateway into which I so strangely wandered—into which I don't care a hairpin if I don't wander again” (qtd. in Gwynn 171), sits uncomfortably beside her often acute longings for the honor, social status, and respect deemed appropriate for a member of a great English family.

While Kingsley's uncertain station ensured that her battle for bourgeois respectability would be a difficult one, it was her attraction to chemistry rather than embroidery and the role of “handy man” rather than Victorian hostess that finally proved that she was somehow unsuited for the sort of female company with which women like North and Bell were so familiar. In an autobiographical sketch Kingsley recalls:

I worked very hard in a time-wasting way at mathematics, seeing I must know something of them for science, and I got enough money to take in that delightful paper The English Mechanic. What The English Mechanic was to me for years I cannot explain. What I should have done without its companionship between sixteen and twenty I do not care to think. We had at this period of my existence moved down into northwest Kent, to a secluded spot where the houses were always in some state of dilapidation, where the residents had to be handy men if they would not lead miserable existences. With the aid of The English Mechanic I became a handy man. During the early stages of my education, I used up a good deal of rag one way and another, and shed a deal of gore of my own. But I got on.

(qtd. in Gwynn 17)

If Kingsley nursed her ailing mother like the dutiful daughter she earnestly wanted others to believe her to be—as the story of her life became more polished the number of years she spent as her mother's nurse steadily grew from five to ten to fifteen (Birkett 61)—she typically performed her duties not with the Bible or with Woman's Mission in front of her but, rather, with a copy of The English Mechanic in her hands.⁵ Her fascination with chemical processes and household plumbing as well as her habit of making pets of fighting cocks with names like “Atilla” and “Ostrogoth” (Notes 195) rather than tending for the requisite dogs, cats, or birds familiar to the Victorian domestic scene finally guaranteed that the woman who left England for West Africa for the first time in 1893 was not so much a Victorian lady seeking freedom. Instead, she was an unwomanly woman whose spectacular African travels would help to establish abroad the bourgeois womanhood that proved so elusive to her at home. According to Catherine Barnes Stevenson, Kingsley “longed to be considered feminine … [feeling] deeply her early exclusion from the female world of courting, emotional intrigue, fashion, and love” (Victorian Travel 95). She confesses, I felt myself “out of place at the few parties I ever had the chance of going to, and I deservedly was unpopular with my own generation, for I knew nothing of play and such things” (qtd. in Gwynn 16). Kingsley's adventures consequently emerge in Travels in West Africa as the site of a series of female subject-making narratives in which the elements of bourgeois womanhood that Kingsley so clearly lacks are daringly and deliberately realized.

Travels in West Africa is, like all travel narratives, part fiction, part ethnography, part English conduct manual, part imperial romance. Kingsley's text remains interested in the tribal culture of the Fans and the flora and fauna of the Ogowé River region, for example, even as it relentlessly works to reproduce the contradictory figure of the naturally refined English lady who will travel around the country and describe them. By insistently noting the conventions of gender that organize Victorian bodies in space, Kingsley remakes herself in the Travels in the image of the Victorian woman she routinely failed to be. In short, as Elizabeth Joyce has observed, Kingsley “continually reminds the reader that she is a woman” (113); she repeatedly “dramati[zes] herself as female” (110). Her subject-making endeavors produce and sustain an English femininity that reveals some of the tensions between authenticity and performance, feminine innocence and the cultivation of proper behavior; the dual worship and mockery of Victorian womanhood in the Travels marks virtually the whole of Kingsley's life and work. Upon her arrival at Buea in the Cameroons, Kingsley writes:

I receive a most kindly welcome from a fair, grey-eyed German gentleman, only unfortunately I see [that] my efforts to appear before him clean and tidy have been quite unavailing, for he views my appearance with unmixed horror, and suggests an instant hot bath. I decline. Men can be trying! How in the world is any one going to take a bath in a house with no doors, and only very sketchy wooden window-shutters?

(563)

Eager to draw attention to her ladylike modesty, Kingsley meticulously assembles and promptly lays claim to the familiar elements of a cultivated English womanhood. If her indelicate manners while living at Highgate or Mortimer Road in England frequently aroused the wrath of those around her, most particularly the wrath of her father (Notes 200), they are proudly rewritten in the Travels to accommodate not only a European gentleman in the Cameroons but also, among other things, the African wildlife whom Kingsley ever so politely encounters.

The heavy musky smell [the crocodiles] give off is most repulsive, but we do not rise up and make a row about this, because we feel hopelessly in the wrong in intruding into these family scenes uninvited, and so apologetically pole ourselves along rapidly, not even singing.

(244)

Kingsley's custom of dwelling upon her own behavior in the Travels succeeds in establishing the female explorer of the text as an English lady who does not like to intrude where she is uninvited or disturb others when they are at rest, in spite of the fact that her own travels are frequently interrupted by wild animals “who had not learnt manners” (90) or who simply are in the habit of running about loose in a “disgracefully dangerous way” (544). Like a late-Victorian Alice-in-Wonderland who lays out her own claim to English womanhood by travelling to foreign climes and commenting upon the bad manners of the “natives,” Kingsley never misses an opportunity to compare the feminine refinement she puts on display to the savage behavior of the African human and animal life who, quite predictably, are unable to measure up to her high standards.

Yet neither does she miss an opportunity to compare herself to the manly scientists, surveyors, and sportsmen who make their way through the African continent. Proudly paling in comparison to the “men from Cambridge,” Kingsley concedes, “I am always getting myself mixed over this kind of thing in my attempts ‘to contemplate phenomena from a scientific standpoint,’ as Cambridge ordered me to do” (141).⁶ And, sure enough, the episode with the family of crocodiles ends without the proper scientific measurements taken (“I have mislaid my yard measure,” 245); an encounter with a gorilla is resolved without either measurements or gorilla successfully acquired (“we returned, as I usually returned from a sporting adventure, without measurements or the body,” 268); and, often, even when Kingsley does succeed in collecting a rare or important specimen, she admits with mock embarrassment, “I got two, but I am ashamed to say I lost them” (325). Such tales of “feminine” adventures in science are merrily recounted in Travels in West Africa whereas the successful acquisition of three formerly “unknown” species of fish, subsequently named after Kingsley, appropriately go unmentioned.⁷

Kingsley's efforts to realize English femininity in Travels in West Africa consequently extend beyond simply the adoption of the womanly costume for which she is most famous—Kingsley remarks, “I hasten to assure you I never even wear a masculine collar and tie, and as for encasing the more earthward extremities of my anatomy in—you know what I mean—well, I would rather perish on a public scaffold” (502). Kingsley's traveling lady is actually molded out of the wide-ranging collection of gendered customs and practices that fashion her relations with people and carefully structure her African travels. When coming upon a leopard in the forest, for example, Kingsley's decision to “sink in my tracks and keep an eye on it, hoping that it will go away soon” (544) rather than to get out her shotgun playfully references the conduct book formula for a lady traveler's proper behavior in the face of danger. Under the section titled “accidents” in Lilias Campbell Davidson's Hints to Lady Travellers at Home and Abroad (1889), Davidson instructs her readers:

As a broad general principle, a woman's place in the moment of danger is to keep still and be ready for action. It is so much an instinct with the stronger sex to protect and look after the weaker, that in all cases of the sort, if there is a man at the head of affairs, he had better be left to manage matters without the hampering interference of feminine physical weakness. If there is no man, the woman will have to act for herself, but even then she will find it the best plan to keep still till the decisive moment arrives.

(qtd. in Blunt 69)

The lady traveler of Kingsley's text is defined by her “feminine” sensibilities in times of danger (“I am habitually kind to animals, and besides I do not think it is ladylike to go shooting things with a gun,” 545) just as much as she is by her dress, her modesty, and her English good manners. Even the ambiguous class status with which Kingsley struggles as a sub-standard Kingsley back in England is swiftly resolved upon the same colonial terrains that promised to rehabilitate English second sons and to remake children of the working classes.

Colonial society regularly rescued such people by integrating them, if simply by virtue of their skin color and national origin, into the social and cultural fabrics of British rule. As a white woman in Africa, Kingsley could be absorbed into the circle of titled Europeans, including Lady MacDonald, the wife of the Commissioner and Consul General of the Niger Coast Protectorate, whom Kingsley chaperoned out to West Africa on her second voyage in 1895: “Going on shore at Accra with Lady MacDonald,” Kingsley writes,

gave me opportunities and advantages I should not otherwise have enjoyed, such as the hospitality of the Governor, luxurious transport from the landing place to Christiansborg Castle, a thorough inspection of the cathedral in course of erection, and the strange and highly interesting function of going to a tea-party at a police station to meet a king. … On landing I was taken in charge by an Assistant Inspector of Police [and together we] got into a'rickshaw, locally called a go-cart. It was pulled in front by two government negroes and pushed behind by another pair, all neatly attired in white jackets and knee breeches, and crimson cummerbunds yards long, bound round their middles.

(31-32)

The spirited ecclesiastical erection Kingsley witnesses here is, of course, an appropriately revealing initiation to European power that, perhaps, can only be outdone in its imperial showmanship by a friendly visit to that other scene of European authority: the police station. In these early episodes Kingsley takes her rightful place beside Lady MacDonald in a society that is, among other things, tightly organized by race. If Kingsley is addressed as “sir” by many of the Africans with whom she comes into contact, it is less in this instance because she is acting like a man, as some readers have argued, than it is because she is white and, therefore, necessarily occupies a position of gender-coded authority.

The authority Kingsley exhibits here is also strikingly evident in the ethnographic descriptions of African women in the Travels. While Kingsley is far more interested in recording her dealings with Fan chiefs and Kru-boys, she does address, at least in a small handful of places in the text, the appearance and disposition of native women. She writes:

[The Igalwa ladies are] the comeliest ladies I have ever seen on the Coast. Very black they are, blacker than many of their neighbours, always blacker than the Fans, and although their skin lacks that velvety pile of the true negro, it is not too shiny, but it is fine and usually unblemished, and their figures are charmingly rounded, their hands and feet small, almost as small as a high-class Calabar woman's, and their eyes large, lustrous, soft and brown, and their teeth as white as the sea surf and undisfigured by filing.

(223)

And, later, of the women of Corisco:

Mighty pretty pictures they make with their soft dusky skins, lithe, rounded figures, pretty brown eyes, and surf-white teeth showing between their laughing lips as they dance before me; and I cannot help thinking what a comfort they would be to a shipwrecked mariner and how he would enjoy it all.

(391)

Kingsley's detailed catalogue of the relative merits and charms of African women is not simply an expression of an English woman's unsanctioned exercise of the gender-coded visual power from which she is traditionally excluded; it is, in fact, one of the generic requirements of Western ethnographic descriptions of foreign peoples. Celebrated female travelers, including Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Julia Pardoe, for example, regularly employed such sexualized descriptions in their work. In her two-volume travelogue, The City of the Sultan and the Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1836, Pardoe writes:

How shall I describe the beautiful Heymine Hanoum [sic]? How paint the soft, sweet, sleepy loveliness of the Pasha's daughter? … Her slight, willow-like figure—her dark deep eyes, long and lustrous, with lashes edging like silken fringes, their snowy and vein-traced lids—her luxuriant hair, black as the wing of the raven—her white and dazzling teeth—and the sweet but firm expression of her beautifully formed mouth.

(qtd. in Melman 115)

Like Kingsley's vision of African women in Travels in West Africa, Pardoe's Orientalist assessment of the Pasha's daughter unselfconsciously displays the racial privilege with which Pardoe is invested to describe her culture's “others.” Kingsley's assumption of such a privilege is one of the perquisites of her travels to Africa and, I would argue, one of the ways in which she labors to secure her place in an English culture that, back in England, did not immediately recognize her as one of its own.

By capitalizing on the racial politics of the European presence in West Africa, Kingsley's Travels draws attention to the ways in which English subjects are made. So, when Kingsley, a white traveler, arrives unexpectedly at Cape Esterias on her way to Gaboon, the native inhabitants immediately install her in the country's only “ostentatiously European plank-built house” (419); Kingsley explains, “on account of its European planks the ostentatious house is regarded by these kindly people as ipso facto my fit and proper dwelling for the time I may think good to stay at Cape Esterias” (420). That, at close range, this “fit and proper dwelling” is, in fact, no more than an empty shell, however, emphasizes the dramatics involved in the subject-making spectacle with which Kingsley is concerned. Travels in West Africa frequently betrays the emptiness lurking beneath the familiar signs of European power and English subjectivity. Englishness in the Travels is, like the house in Cape Esterias, a highly ritualized performance that all subjects must learn to master. Kingsley's English woman is very much a posture, carefully sculpted over the course of her travels, that is made always with reference to the conventions of English womanhood in the nineteenth century. Her mocking tone and humorous asides, moreover, prevent the text from getting too serious about the English ladies it invents. While stopping over at a village on her voyage down the Rembwé River, Kingsley makes this fundamental commonplace even more clear:

… I received a considerable shock by hearing a well-modulated evidently educated voice saying in most perfect English:

“Most diverting spectacle, madam, is it not?”

Now you do not expect to hear things called “diverting spectacles” on the Rembwé; so I turned round and saw standing on the bank against which our canoe was moored, what appeared to me to be an English gentleman who had from some misfortune gone black all over and lost his trousers and been compelled to replace them with a highly ornamental table-cloth. The rest of his wardrobe was in exquisite condition, with the usual white jean coat, white shirt and collar, very neat tie, and felt hat affected by white gentlemen out here. Taking a large and powerful cigar from his lips with one hand, he raised his hat gracefully with the other and said:

“Pray excuse me, madam.”

I said, “Oh, please go on smoking.”

“May I?” he said, offering me a cigar-case.

“Oh, no thank you,” I replied.

“Many ladies do now,” he said, and asked me whether I “preferred Liverpool, London, or Paris.”

I said, “Paris; but there were nice things in both the other cities.”

“Indeed that is so,” he said; “they have got many very decent works of art in the St. George's Hall.”

I agreed, but said I thought the National Gallery preferable because there you got such fine representative series of works of the early Italian schools.

(340)

Aside from the baldly imperialist drama of manners at work here in which an African man who smokes a cigar and talks about art can only be cast as a self-deluded fool or a court jester fitted with a “highly ornamental table-cloth,” this scene is important for the ways in which it reveals Kingsley's acute interest in the performative aspect of the English womanhood she embraces. The “diverting spectacle” in this episode is not just the “cultured” African but the “cultured” Mary Kingsley as well. The play they perform finally involves nothing less than the fabulous confrontation between an African man impersonating a European gentleman and a provincial woman with a cockney accent impersonating a cultured European lady.⁸ Kingsley's text is everywhere marked by such complex ontological dramas, disclosing in the process the intricate border politics of English subject-making and the lie of a European domestic ideology that locates the “Dark Continent” as the site of the collapse of English womanhood.⁹

II.

“And Captain Boler's other great aphorism was: ‘Never be afraid of a black man.’ ‘What if I can't help it?’ said I. ‘Don't show it,’ said he. To these precepts I humbly add another: ‘Never lose your head.’”

“No, my friend, I will not tell you any cannibal stories.”

Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa

If Travels in West Africa labors to invent English womanhood, often with a wonderfully satirical edge, by attaching to Kingsley the multiple and various conventions of bourgeois femininity, it finally guarantees this femininity by tapping into the late-Victorian languages of bodily violation that most clearly defined English womanhood in the nineteenth century. In an English imperial arena that remained spellbound by the peculiar horrors of “interracial rape” and the terrifying tales of the defilement of the bodies of chaste English women, female subjects were quite literally reduced, as Jenny Sharpe has put it, to “the vulnerability of their sex” (68). The specter of cannibalism, bodily dismemberment, and physical fragmentation that haunts Kingsley's Travels in West Africa and insistently recasts the traveler at its center as a body that is always in danger of violation, consequently also helps to secure the basic outline of the English female subject whom, I have argued, the text works so hard to realize. In the 1890s, when Kingsley makes her way down from England to the African continent, the dangerous “sexual threat” of indigenous men to European women—a racist fear of native molestation popularly dubbed the “Black Peril”—fully occupied colonial administrators concerned about the protection of white women as well as about the powerful threat to European rule posed by such native insurgency. Long after the 1857 Mutiny in India and the Ilbert Bill controversies had passed (if not out of mind or even out of recent historical memory then certainly at least off the front pages of the British newspapers), the juridical construction of the European woman remained, in Rosemary Hennessey and Rajeswari Mohan's phrase, “as a sexualized body to be protected” (138).¹⁰ In response to the fear most obviously of rape but perhaps even more subtly of the numerous border violations such crimes introduced, European governments all over the Empire drafted legislation designed to protect the bodies of the purportedly helpless European woman at risk. In 1907, according to Margaret Strobel, the Associated Women's Organizations of the Transvaal “requested the government to enact segregation as a protection against assaults on (European) women” (379). And, even later in the century in Southern Rhodesia and Kenya, as Ann Laura Stoler observes,

preoccupations with the “Black Peril” gave rise to the creation of citizens' militias, ladies' riflery clubs, and investigations as to whether African female domestic servants would not be safer to employ than men. In New Guinea alleged attempted assaults on European women by Papuan men prompted the passage of the White Women's Protection Ordinance of 1926, which provided “the death penalty for any person convicted for the crime of rape or attempted rape upon a European woman or girl.” … And in the Solomon Islands authorities introduced public flogging in 1934 as punishment for “criminal assaults on [white] females.”

(67-68)

Like the figure of English womanhood obsessively produced by the Mutiny reports in the 1850s in which “the feminized space of what it means to be rapable also bears the racial inscriptions of what it means to be an English woman” (Sharpe 74), the figure of English womanhood reproduced by Mary Kingsley and her European contemporaries was, in short, that of a physical body always potentially in danger. The belief in such sexualized, physical danger was fundamental to colonial rule insofar as it justified the control of native men; a sexually vulnerable lady, like that brought to life so startlingly by the Mutiny reports and the Anglo-Indian opposition to the Ilbert Bill, for example, must have on her side the power of a legal system that holds in check the native men who purportedly put her in danger. The confusion between this physical danger to English woman and transgressions of social space further implies the degree to which a contact zone like Kingsley's Africa is a key site of female subject-making—Stoler points out that frequently “‘Attempted rapes’ turned out to be ‘incidents’ of a Papuan man ‘discovered’ in the vicinity of a white residence, a Fijian man who entered a European patient's room, a male servant poised at the bedroom door of a European woman asleep or in half-dress” (68-69). In contrast to representations of Africa as a “torrid zone” of European sexual liberation and physical release, Kingsley's Travels insists that what the female traveler actually finds in Africa is not complete and total ideological breakdown so much as the cultural machinery necessary for establishing English racial and gender location. Kingsley's West Africa is not, as Stevenson suggests, a place that is “free from gender-based restrictions [in which] the woman can become what her imagination dictates—in Kingsley's case, that means becoming a man” (“Female Anger” 7). On the contrary, by teasing her way through foreign territories and among numbers of wild animals and seemingly life-threatening African tribes, Kingsley's traveler painstakingly establishes the shape of bourgeois womanhood and the female body-in-danger with which it is associated.

Kingsley's traveler betrays her fascination with this female body-in-danger through, among other things, her obsessive return to the subject of cannibalism and the spectacle of physical fragmentation. The Travels is saturated with images of human limbs lost to sharks, flesh disfigured by crocodiles' teeth, bodies cut up into small pieces, smoked, and eaten. Kingsley's image of her own body “simmering in [a] cooking-pot” (269) returns over the course of the text to introduce in a more or less gruesome fashion the ghastly figure of a female body at risk of being “torn to shreds” (249). In spite of her later, off-hand disclaimer of the real danger to white people of being slaughtered and eaten by Fans, a disclaimer that is buried mid-way through the Travels at the end of a long meditation on bush trade and Fan customs, Kingsley simply cannot stop thinking about the consumption of human flesh and the danger posed to her by the “rapacious savages” with which she is “surrounded” (349).¹¹ As Sara Mills has observed, “it is this threat of violence which serves as a constant source of suspense in Kingsley's text” (163). Entirely unable to get cannibalism out of her mind, Kingsley compulsively records the pungent and unsavory signs of its existence everywhere.

Waking up again I noticed the smell in the hut [in which I was sleeping] was violent, from being shut up I suppose, and it had an unmistakably organic origin. Knocking the ash end off the smouldering bush-light that lay burning on the floor, I investigated, and tracked it to [a bag hanging from the ceiling]. … I shook its contents out in my hat, for fear of losing anything of value. They were a human hand, three big toes, four eyes, two ears, and other portions of the human frame. The hand was fresh, the others only so so, and shrivelled.

(273)

Implicit in every such scene of bodily violation in Travels in West Africa is the reminder that the human pieces Kingsley discovers (or, in other instances, anticipates or imagines) could easily be the fragmented parts of her own English body. And while this threat is, of course, never actually realized, it does serve to incorporate Kingsley more fully within a discourse of English womanhood that thrives upon the presence of such bodily threats.¹²

31st—Start out at 2.30 and walk through the grass country behind Baraka, and suddenly fall down into a strange place.

On sitting up after the shock consequent on an unpremeditated descent of some thirteen feet or so, I find myself in a wild place; before me are two cave-like cavities, with a rough wood seat in each; behind me another similar cavity or chamber; the space I am in is about three feet wide; to the left this is terminated by an earth wall; to the right it goes, as a path, down a cutting or trench which ends in dry grass.

No sign of human habitation. Are these sacrifice places, I wonder, or are they places where those Fans one hears so much about, come and secretly eat human flesh? Clearly they are not vestiges of an older civilisation. In fact, what in the world are they? I investigate and find they are nothing in the world more than markers' pits for a rifle range.

Disgust, followed by alarm, seizes me; those French authorities may take it into their heads to think I am making plans of their military works! Visions of incarceration flash before my eyes, and I fly into more grass and ticks, going westwards.

(117)

This is an extraordinary episode, a moment in the text in which “disgust” is aroused not by Fans who eat human flesh but by a French rifle range hidden in the heart of African grass country. The “wild place” in which European war games are played is, further, mistaken by Kingsley for the secret ritual place of savages, thus effectively linking together the very peoples and practices that, at all costs, must remain apart. Kingsley's disgust here is a powerfully visceral response to this symbolic and literal confusion. Her imagination, always open to the possibility that human flesh-eaters are close by, must restrain itself in the face of the residual signs of this specifically European imperial (bodily) violence. Finally seized by alarm rather than by the hands (or jaws) of African cannibals, Kingsley realizes that her “unpremeditated” travels through French military works look dangerously like an English reconnaissance mission.

Kingsley's fascination with body parts is, consequently, never innocent. It also becomes in the Travels the occasion for revealing the basic interconnectedness between her adventures through a purportedly anthropophagic Africa and the larger enterprise of European imperialism in which all of her travels (as well as the female subject they help to map) are necessarily implicated. The long partnership between travel and Empire, the scientific expedition and the colonial enterprise, geographical “discovery” and the scramble for Africa is, in fact, quite clearly at work in Kingsley's text, despite the persistent critical perception that Kingsley's gender places her somehow above or outside the structures of imperial possession.¹³ Kingsley's African travels and the bourgeois woman they bring to life are an inseparable part of the apparatus of English empire. And not because she gives names to blank spaces on the map (by the 1890s practically all of the African spaces in Conrad's “beloved old atlas” [20] have already been filled in¹⁴) or because she is the first English person to reach the summit of Mount Cameroon from the southeast (595) but because wherever she goes it is as a “representative of England”:

After being in West Africa some little time, particularly if you have been away in the bush, your wardrobe is always in a rarefied state. For example, when in Cameroons I had one dress, and one only, that I regarded as fit to support the dignity of a representative of England, so of course when going to call on the representative of another Power I had to put that dress on, and then go out in open boats to war-ships or for bush walks in it, and equally of course down came tornadoes and rain by the ton. I did not care for the thunder, lightning, or wind. What worried me was the conviction that that precious rain would take the colour out of my costume.

(622)

If Kingsley returns from her travels convinced of her deep, spiritual kinship with the African, she also emerges over the course of the text never more certain of her own English racial location. Kingsley's itinerary in Travels in West Africa largely confines her to French and German territory. Most of the text documents Kingsley's travels through Congo Français and the German controlled Cameroon region. Her interactions with the Europeans there consequently enable her to take up a position as a specifically English female subject. It is, I would argue, no coincidence that the text lingers over these encounters rather than over Kingsley's encounters with the English traders whose cause she embraces upon her return to England or over her ongoing friendships with the English sea captains whom Kingsley calls her great teachers. The text's studied invention of racial identity, moreover, goes beyond the juxtaposition of what Kingsley, an avowed polygenecist, refers to as the higher races (Europeans) and the lower races (Blacks).¹⁵Travels in West Africa also constructs Kingsley's Englishness—English womanhood—out of the distinctions between the English and their European counterparts. While sailing on a ship up the Ogowé River, for example, Kingsley overhears a French official “trying to convince the others that [she is] an English officer in disguise on the spy” (140). Her wryly expressed wish that she “knew French, or how to flirt with that French official so as to dispel the illusion” draws attention to the crucial differences carefully manufactured by the text between the flirtatious Frenchwoman to whom the official is accustomed and the English woman whose natural modesty ensures her ignorance of such conduct. Kingsley observes soon after,

I now salve my pride as an Englishwoman with the knowledge that were a Frenchwoman to travel in any of our West Coast settlements, she would have as warm and helpful a welcome as I get here, and I will be femininely spiteful, and say she would do more harm in the English settlements than ever I did in the French. Think of Mme. Jacot, Mme. Forget, or Mme. Gacon going into Calabar, for example, why there wouldn't be a whole heart left in the place in twenty-four hours!

(157)

Kingsley earnestly adopts the rôle of English lady ambassador in Travels in West Africa and fixes her location in an ideology of bourgeois femininity by repeatedly playing out the rituals of respectable English women:

Obanjo went ashore [in Dongila] in the tender, and the holy sister [from the Roman Catholic Mission there] kindly asked me, by him, to come ashore and spend the night; but I was dead tired and felt quite unfit for polite society after the long broiling hot day and getting soaked by water that had washed on board. Moreover I learnt she could not speak English, and I shrank in my condition from attempting to evolve the French language out of my inner consciousness; feeling quite certain I should get much misunderstood by the gentle, clean, tidy lady, and she might put me down as an ordinary specimen of Englishwoman, and so I should bring disgrace on my nation. If I had been able to dress up, ashore I would have gone, but as it was I wrote her a note explaining things and thanking her.

(350-51)

III.

“I am a most lady-like old person …”

“No need for an old coaster like me to look at that sort of thing twice to know what it meant, and feeling it was a situation more suited to Mr. Stanley than myself, I attempted to emulate his methods and addressed my men.”

Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa

Because Kingsley's frequent exhibition of stereotypically English feminine behavior in Travels in West Africa is complemented by moments in the text in which she appears to “act like a man,” there has been considerable critical debate over Kingsley's navigation of “male” and “female” personae in Travels in West Africa. Alison Blunt discusses the gender “ambiguities” (72) of the text; Eva-Marie Kröller admiringly describes Kingsley's “fragmented persona” (98); Stevenson even goes so far as to accuse Kingsley of “sexual schizophrenia” (“Female Anger” 15); and most critics have at least something to say about Kingsley's seemingly contradictory adoption of both masculinized confidence and feminized modesty. But the lady explorer produced by Kingsley's Travels is not the gender misfit she is portrayed to be. Rather, her “masculine” and “feminine” attributes aid in rendering her the model English woman that it is the object of Travels in West Africa to produce. The female traveler of Kingsley's text is a modern Britannia who, as “invincible global civilizing agent,” links together symbolically the seemingly incompatible values of masculine strength and feminine moral leadership in the service of British imperial power.¹⁶Travels in West Africa actually reproduces the ideal form of imperial womanhood that was such a strong influence at the fin de siècle; Kingsley's travel narrative traces the outlines of the daring yet gentle female subject who was celebrated by a British nation still characterized by its pretensions to imperial greatness. At a time in which the ideology of Victorian womanhood was under assault by “New Women” who not only were seen as unwomanly but whose professional rather than domestic aspirations also made them seem distinctly un-English,¹⁷ the British imperial project pulled together the increasingly divergent interests of women and the Nation as a whole.¹⁸ The colonial wife or the English missionary's female helpmate who traveled to places like India, Sierra Leone, or the Transvaal in the 1880s and 1890s commonly exhibited the great strength, resourcefulness, and national spirit with which the British “race” as a whole was symbolically associated. Rather than making these women unwomanly or unsexing them in the eyes of the society of Englishwomen at home, such qualities identified them with the Empire in whose service they were unofficially employed. In her best-selling book, The Englishwoman in India, Maud Diver asks.

What would India be without England, and what would the British Empire be without Englishwomen? To these women are due gratitude not only of their country but of the civilized world. Fearlessly the woman of British birth looks in the eye of danger. Faithfully and with willing sacrifice she upholds the standard of the King-Emperor—the standard of culture and service to humanity.

(qtd. in George 99)

The Englishwoman celebrated in this period was, like Mary Kingsley, a willing servant of her country who is accustomed to living in great danger. And, like Kingsley who “[resolves] to suffer and be strong” (625), the “woman of British birth” is singled out for the way in which she will endure tremendous hardships in order to “uphold the standard of the King-Emperor.”¹⁹ She is, in a sense, both mother and father of a nation in need not only of feminine guidance and healthy women to breed strong English sons, but also leadership and strength in times of trouble. Kingsley's assumption of what she calls her “pater-maternal duty” (605) towards her African charges is a good expression of this British standard. Casting herself on occasion as an “old hen with a brood of chickens to provide for” (168), Kingsley also shows no hesitation in taking up her role as stern leader of the Africans she has in her service: “As they said, I was a Father and a Mother to them, and a very stern though kind set of parents I have been” (604), she writes. If Kingsley vows to “betray no weakness,” claiming for herself a “character which I should describe as a compound of the best parts of those of Cardinal Richelieu, Brutus, Julius Caesar, Prince Metternich” (312), she also makes certain always to act in as ladylike a manner as possible. When in danger of being caught by the tides out in a mangrove swamp, for example, she rallies “my men” to start moving: “‘Boys,’ said I, ‘this beastly hole is tidal, and the tide is coming in’” (298). But when in danger of being overcome by a torrential downpour she “conscientiously attempts to keep dry, by holding up an umbrella, knowing that though hopeless it is the proper thing to do” (554).

The figure of Britannia, a national symbol that, in the age of advertising, was perhaps as widely circulated as the image of Queen Victoria, takes up and extends this image of imperial womanhood and the combination of “feminine” and “masculine” qualities that it endorses. An “armed maiden” modelled in part on Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and war, Britannia wears the customary military helmet yet, in so many of these contemporary representations, she also exhibits the shapely, unarmored body and painted complexion that openly proclaim her femininity. Representations of Britannia in the nineteenth century tend to emphasize this combination of gender-specific attributes—a combination that the adventurer of Travels in West Africa would come quite clearly to embody—by attending to the physical details of the hybrid figure of Britannia as well as to the system of British commodity-culture in whose service she is so eagerly drafted in the 1890s. As a representative of British domestic goods ranging from biscuits to toothpaste, Britannia lends her iconic power to the spoils of a still rapidly expanding exchange economy. …

Britannia also, therefore, necessarily symbolizes colonial rule—an interesting fact given, as Marina Warner points out, that “the allegory of Britannia was first developed to characterize a conquered country” (Britain fallen to Rome) (45). Britannia carries the trident of Neptune who, according to legend, surrendered it to her and thereby initiated the long reign of British naval power, and she appears as early as the 1850s on all postage stamps issued to British colonies (Queen Victoria's profile was to be found on the “penny black” stamps issued in England).²⁰ According to Warner, “It is noteworthy that Britannia appears more frequently on the stamps of subject nations than on the stamps of Great Britain itself, revealing her shift from personification of a free people to symbol of the authority which endorses it” (49). The masthead of West African News and African Mining Review appropriately features Britannia boldly seated upon a two-dimensional map of the African continent while the Britannia at the center of the masthead for West Africa and Trader's Review Illustrated rises majestically out of the commodity offerings introduced by a bare-chested African man on his knees before her. This authority over colonial subjects and the territories they inhabit is jubilantly claimed by the female explorer of Kingsley's text who requires such authority not only because it helps her to move safely through West Africa—Kingsley emphasizes the importance for an English subject of never showing one's fear “of a black man” (329) and explains that “the mainspring of your power in West Africa” (330) is nothing short of self-respect—but also because it is crucial to the English female identity she embraces. In her confrontations with Africans, Kingsley's English traveler resembles the powerful but ladylike Britannia who retains her womanly dress and, by association, her feminine moral and ethical standards even as she manfully asserts her right to rule. In the “African Traders” matchbox label, for example, a Kingsley-era Britannia encounters the scantily clad symbol of savage Africa over the collection of goods that they will exchange, delicately attired in her flowing, feminine gown while grasping the African's hand like a man.

Britannia's late-nineteenth-century role as representative to the British colonies, making her way among the “dark” peoples of the earth by trading British goods with them, further mirrors Kingsley's own method of travel through the continent. Like Britannia, Kingsley trades her way through West Africa, politely making friends while forcefully establishing her wealth and authority: “My trading with [the natives] introduced us to each other so that when we met in the course of the long climbing walks I used to take beetle-hunting in the bush behind the mission station, we knew about each other, and did not get much shocked or frightened” (159). Of course, in contrast to the matchbox label's disingenuous depiction of an equal ground on which the goods of England and Africa are honestly exchanged, the relationship established between Kingsley and the “natives” with whom she trades is hardly one of equal power.²¹ Upon hearing how much Kingsley paid for thirty pounds of rubber, for example, an agent of the trading firm, Hatton and Cookson, cries, “Miss Kingsley, that I should ever live to see this day! You've been swindling those poor blacks!” (Victorian Travel 104). In short, Kingsley makes certain in Travels in West Africa that she is always in control, using trade goods to manipulate or to protect herself from the foreign people in her path just as often as she uses such goods to open herself up to purportedly equal relations with them:

[I] find a most amiable old lady sunning herself in the centre of [the village]. Unfortunately, she does not know any English, but I shed a box of lucifer matches on her, wishing to show that I mean well, and knowing that one of the great charms of a white man to a black is this habit of shedding things. It is their custom to hang round one in their native wilds in the hope something will be shed, either intentionally or unintentionally. … I know it is my chief charm to them, and they hang round wondering whether it will be matches, leaf tobacco, pocket-handkerchiefs, or fish-hooks; and when the phenomena flag they bring me various articles for sale to try to get me into working order again.

(391)²²

The “charm” Kingsley employs here is not quite the same as the delightful feminine qualities she puts on display for the German and French officials with whom she comes into contact (“My friend the planter seemed charmed,” 147). It is, instead, a British imperial talisman, a “Formula of British Conquest” like that referred to by popular advertisements and like that boastfully illustrated by Henry Stanley in the often shady dealings with Africans recorded in his travel narrative, In Darkest Africa (1890).²³ The female subject produced by Kingsley's travels is, therefore, heavily invested in (and dependent upon) the nineteenth-century imperial ideologies that reduce the people of Africa to a “lower race” (285) who can be charmed by the magic of civilization and that establish the superior development of the English as a matter of common sense.²⁴

IV.

“The fascination of the African point of view is as sure to linger in your mind as the malaria in your body.”

Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa

Travels in West Africa manufactures a female subject who betrays in her adventures the importance of foreign travel as a site for the making of English womanhood. It does not at the same time, however, license its readers to establish Africa as a passive stage on which the drama of English feminine identity is to be played, despite the Western critical tradition of characterizing Africa as the “theatrical set” for the identity crises, liberatory ventures, and romantic discoveries of Western subjects.²⁵ If Kingsley, the Western shedder of fish-hooks and pocket-handkerchiefs, charms the African natives with her commodity magic, the Africa of Kingsley's Travels has some charms of its own, forcing the Western traveler to “fall under its spell” (102) and shaping, in turn, the English female subject that is finally invented. In West Africa, Kingsley warns, “One's view of life gets quite distorted” (399). The logics of English selfhood and Western power in the Travels are rendered a desperate conceit by the disorienting African universe in which Kingsley tests them out. “West Africa is,” Kingsley concludes, “undoubtedly bad for one's mind” (399).

The African peoples and landscapes of Kingsley's Travels impact upon and regularly escape the theories intended to make sense of them. They are not, therefore, a convenient background for the English subject-making process so much as they are a fundamental part of it.²⁶ Kingsley's West Africa resists the imperialist narratives of Western exploration at every stage of their development, compelling the traveler to reconsider the most basic terms of Europe's relation to Africa. Preparing to exercise the visual power with which the European traveler is typically invested, for example, Kingsley gazes out at the African vista only to discover that, unexpectedly, she is completely unable to master the exotic scene before her:

I sit down under a lamp, prepared to contemplate, until dinner time, the wild beauty of the scene. This idea does not get carried out; in the twinkling of an eye I am stung all round the neck, and recognise there are lots too many mosquitoes and sandflies in the scenery to permit of contemplation of any kind. Never have I seen sandflies and mosquitoes in such appalling quantities. With a wild ping of joy the latter made for me, and I retired promptly into a dark corner of the verandah, swearing horribly, but internally, and fought them.

(131-32)

Failing to capture West Africa by surveying it with her Occidental eye, Kingsley is forced to give up her place in the masterful genre that Pratt has called the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” and fights merely to maintain her severely reduced position in a “dark corner” of the verandah. Such battles between the English traveler and the foreign environments she seeks to map are repeated on numerous occasions in the Travels; if the text seems so determinedly to confirm Kingsley's English dominance and her bourgeois feminine authority, it also everywhere discloses the tremendous human and environmental resistances that are posed to it. Kingsley's grand departure from Liverpool, for example, is first postponed a day and then reduced to a hurried and ordinary parting “owing to the weather” (13). The spectacle of English power put on display by the ship's crew at every port of call is, here, frustrated by the fierce gale that would not permit the ship to “take her powder on board, a loss that nearly broke the carpenter's heart, as it robbed him of the pleasure of making that terrific bang with which a West Coaster salutes her ports of call.” According to Kröller, Travels in West Africa “acknowledges from the first a resistance of the land to be efficiently or thoroughly conquered” (95); it, therefore, unsettles the discourse of English power and identity that depends upon the presence of foreign lands that may be fully possessed.

The effect of this challenge is, perhaps, most evident in one of the more conventional episodes of Victorian exploration that is played out in the Travels. Kingsley's expedition to the peak of Mount Cameroon employs virtually all of the standard devices used to represent the intrepid European explorer. And yet, it ultimately compels Kingsley to revise the tale of personal victory (and the tale of European power with which it is associated) that is this episode's anticipated conclusion. Kingsley's ascension of the mountain is a standard Victorian drama of attrition that performs the racial hierarchies Kingsley elsewhere establishes between “white” and “black.” In other words, if Kingsley's “white race will [never be able to] drag the black up to their own particular summit in the mountain range of civilisation … the African is not keen on mountaineering in the civilisation range. He prefers remaining down below and being comfortable” (680), then it is only natural that the party of African men who are hired to accompany Kingsley up the southeastern face of the mountain will drop off from the expedition, one by one, until Kingsley is left to reach the summit alone. Like H. Rider Haggard, who employs this very plot in King Solomon's Mines (1886) with equal success, Kingsley's expedition is structured so as to locate the European at the apex of civilization and shows by example the relative weakness of the “black” races over whom the European is expected to rule.

Once Kingsley reaches the top, however, the dominance and power she assumes are suddenly less clear. The storm she encounters at the summit prevents her from surveying the country down below and leaves her no alternative but to describe what she might have seen had the weather allowed her a clear view:

I make my way up through [the rain] towards a peak which I soon see through a tear in the mist is not the highest, so I angle off and go up the one to the left, and after a desperate fight reach the cairn—only, alas! to find a hurricane raging and a fog in full possession, and not a ten yards' view to be had in any direction. …

Verily I am no mountaineer, for there is in me no exultation, but only a deep disgust because the weather has robbed me of my main object in coming here, namely to get a good view and an idea of the way the unexplored mountain range behind Calabar trends.

No doubt had the weather been clear I should have been able to do this well, for the whole Omon range must be visible from this great summit of Cameroons, which rises at right angles to it.

(594)

The immense power of the African environment emerges in this passage as a determining force in the subject-making venture depicted by the Travels. And yet, it is actually Kingsley's stubborn desire to record the panoramic scene from the summit, in spite of the fact that she is actually unable to see anything at all, that is the most striking aspect of this oft-quoted example of Kingsley's ostensible “rejection of the tropes of imperial domination” (Pratt 215). Kingsley's abortive attempt to exercise her imperial vision at the top of Mount Cameroon is, after all, preceded by a more successful effort to take visual possession of the territory around her.²⁷ Her disclosure of the ways in which the African landscapes she crosses mold and change the shape of the English subjects who are customarily defined through such journeys is, in short, awkwardly juxtaposed with her frequent appeals to traditional understandings of the English power to see, to define, and to possess; her recognition of African power and influence is, here and elsewhere, strikingly contrasted with her spirited defense of traditional English logics of difference.

Kingsley's judgment of the African people she meets is a particularly good illustration of this point. Just as Kingsley's expectations about an exotic view fit for contemplation are frustrated by the discovery of an African environment that refuses to cooperate, her expectations about the native peoples of the Victorian “Dark Continent” are disappointed by what she actually finds once she gets there. Kingsley's discovery of “rational natives” succeeds in troubling the discourse of Englishness which depends heavily upon African irrationality to define English difference. “Indeed,” she writes, “when one lives out here and sees the surrounding conditions of this state of culture, the conviction grows on you that, morally speaking, the African is far from being the brutal fiend he is often painted, a creature that loves cruelty and blood for their own sake” (499). In fact, Kingsley concedes that most of the characteristics upon which English racial differences are based are themselves quite unfounded. She argues, “And you cannot associate with [the African people] long before you must recognise that these Africans have often a remarkable mental acuteness and a large share of common sense; that there is nothing really ‘childlike’ in their form of mind at all. Observe them further and you will find they are not a flighty-minded, mystical set of people in the least” (439).

And yet, Kingsley's description, elsewhere in the text, of the West African tribes as “sweet unsophisticated children of nature” (164) and her acknowledgment of her belief that “my friends the Fans” are “utterly indifferent to human life” (329) suggests the pervasive tensions in Travels in West Africa between the text's repeated challenges to and endorsement of familiar nineteenth-century assessments of African racial inferiority. If Kingsley's text seems so determinedly to confirm European authority, it also everywhere discloses the multiple challenges that are posed to it. Travels in West Africa consequently exposes the English female subject both within and outside the text as immensely fragile. Kingsley writes, “[there are] bits of country I have been through where you walk along a narrow line of security with gulfs of murder looming on each side, and where in exactly the same ways [as a mountain climber walking along the edge of a precipice] you are as safe as if you were in your easy chair at home, as long as you get sufficient holding ground” (329). While Kingsley claims to possess such “holding ground” (she believes she has it in her understanding of the “African mind”), Travels in West Africa betrays how excruciatingly flimsy it must be. Kingsley's text ultimately succeeds in doing more than challenging the notion of travel as escape—a dangerous rhetorical tradition because it encourages us to believe that the Western logics of race and of gender obey strictly national boundaries. The text's magnificent reinvention of femininity in the very “heart of darkness” in which femininity is slated to break down reveals the English woman as an always precarious border figure who is made rather than un-made on the imperial divide. Kingsley's text redesigns the image of the proper lady whose exclusively metropolitan origins are supposedly untouched by the logics of “peripheral” subjects and spaces and, finally, dramatically rewrites the multiple subject-making plots of English womanhood.

Notes

1. George Nathanial Curzon used the term “globetrotters” to describe female travelers in a letter to the Times on 31 May 1893 in which he argued, “the genus of professional female globetrotters with which America has lately familiarized us is one of the horrors of the latter end of the nineteenth century.” Curzon's letter was written to express his opposition to the admission of women fellows to the Royal Geographical Society. Eliza Lynn Linton also uses the term to describe the independent woman adventurer (although this designation did not for her include Marianne North, whose work Linton admired) in her notorious article, “The Wild Women: As Social Insurgents,” first appearing in Nineteenth Century (October 1891).

2. Kingsley's parents later endeavored to avoid additional scandal by publicly recording the date of their quick and quiet wedding as 1860, two full years before the actual date of their marriage and the birth of their first child. Kingsley likely discovered their secret after both parents died within months of each other thirty years later. She continued, however, to maintain the distorted family history they had started and thereby to protect the fiction of the respectable birth that remained so important to her.

3. F. H. H. Guillemard described Mrs. Kingsley, for example, as “not quite compos mentis” (qtd. in Stevenson, Victorian Travel Writers in Africa 91).

4. Frank's query regarding Mary's mother, “How could Fanny Kingsley possibly receive a woman incapable of pronouncing her hs?” (19), remained an acute concern for her daughter as well.

5. While the proper reading material for a young English girl was intended to instruct her to perform her feminine duties with distinction and to master the skills necessary for making her household run smoothly, Kingsley's English Mechanic or other favorites like Norman Lockyer's Solar Physics succeeded often in providing her with just the sort of knowledge necessary to render this household a domestic battle zone. In her family memoir, Kingsley recounts a childhood experiment gone bad in which, “desirous of testing the strength of the powder and of also seeing how military mines worked,—affairs which I had been hearing and reading about just then in connection with the Franco-Prussian War,—I inadvertently succeeded in blowing a tub of manure-water over our great spring blanket-wash that was hanging on a clothes-line hard by” (Notes 199).

6. In an earlier chapter Kingsley writes,

   But I am not a geographer. … Taking observations, Surveying, Fixing points, & c., & c. These things I know not how to do. I do not “take lunars”; and I always sympathise with a young friend of mine, who, on hearing that an official had got dreadfully ill from taking them, said, “What do those government men do it for? It kills them all off. I don't hold with knocking yourself to pieces with a lot of doctor's stuff.” I certainly have a dim idea that lunars are not a sort of pill; but I quite agree that they were unwholesome things for a man to take in West Africa.

   (100-01)

7. These successful “acquisitions” are documented only in an appendix to the text.

8. In marked contrast to her claims of urbanity in this scene, Kingsley elsewhere admits: “The whole of my childhood and youth was spent at home, in the house and garden. The living outside world I saw little of, and cared less for” (qtd. in Gwynn 16). Furthermore, in the introduction to her Travels, Kingsley describes her previous life as “an entirely domestic one in a University town” (6). Of course, like so much else Kingsley has claimed about herself and her life, this is not quite the whole story. Although Kingsley does not discuss it, we do know, for example, that she traveled to Paris with Lucy Toulmin Smith in 1888.

9. Kingsley recounts a similar drama involving a man whom she describes as a “Fan gentleman with the manners of a duke and the habits of a dustbin” (264). Kingsley writes:

   Whenever we were sitting down in the forest having one of our nondescript meals, [the Duke] always sat next to me and appropriated the tin. Then he would fill his pipe, and turning to me with the easy grace of aristocracy, would say what may be translated as “My dear Princess, could you favour me with a lucifer?”

   I used to say, “My dear Duke, charmed, I'm sure,” and give him one ready lit.

   (265)

10. The Ilbert Bill, awarding native civil servants the right to file suit against European British subjects living outside their chief presidency towns, was introduced in 1883 but was not passed until 1884, after the Anglo-Indian agitation surrounding the Bill compelled the government to reconceive the original proposal. As Sinha interprets it, objections to the bill dwelled upon the sexual vulnerability of the Anglo-Indian woman; she writes of

    the actual physical threat to white women in India if native civilians were allowed jurisdiction over European British subjects. The Anglo-Indians feared that isolated white women would become the victims of unbridled native lust. The suggestion that Bengali magistrates might intentionally misuse their powers over white women was hinted at frequently in Anglo-Indian letters and meetings against the bill.

    (100)

    Kingsley perhaps unintentionally lends support to this argument when she observes of the new breed of African lawyers in Sierra Leone: “There is no law case that gives the Sierra Leonean that joy that he gets out of summoning a white man, for he can get the white man before a jury of his fellow Sierra Leoneans—what they please to call in that benighted place a jury of his peers—and bully and insult him” (24). See also chapter 4 in Sharpe.

11. The short passage reads: “The cannibalism of the Fans, although a prevalent habit, is no danger, I think, to white people, except as regards the bother it gives one in preventing one's black companions from getting eaten” (330). In a letter to George Macmillan, however, Kingsley describes the details of “my friend MacTaggart who is habitually killed and eaten in West Africa.” She writes: “They cut off the top of his head and grilled it last time I had to nurse him: they had been making sauce out of his blood and we had to give him enough iron to make a roof with before we got a trace of colour in his face, and then, if you please, all the colour went and settled in the top of his nose: he is a most unfortunate man and a great worry to me” (qtd. in Gwynn 41).

12. There has been a great deal of thoughtful scholarship on the question of “cannibalism” and “anthropophagy.” Arens seeks to undermine the belief in the existence of anthropophagy as a custom; he argues that cannibals are never found by travelers but only heard about—they are always to be found “elsewhere”—and that the act of eating human flesh is never actually seen but only hypothesized from the discovery of human remains very much like those discovered by Kingsley in the Travels. In addition to Arens's study, Hulme's work introduces some new questions about an old and intriguing subject. Hulme is explicitly interested in the border politics of cannibalism (“anthropophagy” is, for him, a more “neutral” term with a different ideological history) as “a late manifestation of the contact between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘primitive’” (83). He asks not what is cannibalism, or even, does cannibalism exist (following Arens) but, rather, what is the “part that notions such as ‘cannibalism’ have played within the discourse of European colonialism” (81)? Hulme's endeavor to approach cannibalism as a discursive figure has incited some interesting debate. See, for example, Hulme's exchange with Jehlen in Critical Inquiry.

13. Pratt argues, for example,

    Kingsley creates value by decisively and rather fiercely rejecting the textual mechanisms that created value in the discourse of her male predecessors: fantasies of dominance and possession, painting that is simultaneously a material inventory. … Far from taking possession of what she sees, she steals past; far from imagining a civilizing or beautifying intervention, she contemplates only the silly possibility of “damaging Africa” in a collision that would doubtless damage her worse.

    (214)

    Joyce makes a similarly unpersuasive argument about the text when she claims that, “by embracing the white observer of Africa within its comic scope the narrative voice liberates [Kingsley] from racial or cultural superiority” (113).

14. Joseph Conrad, “Geography and Some Explorers.” And, of course, in Heart of Darkness Marlow mourns for an Africa that is “not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness” (12).

15. Kingsley writes.

    I own I regard not only the African, but all coloured races, as inferior—inferior in kind not in degree—to the white races, although I know it is unscientific to lump all Africans together and then generalise over them, because the difference between various tribes is very great. But nevertheless there are certain constant quantities in their character, let the tribe be what it may, that enable us to do this for practical purposes.

    (669)

16. The term is from A. J. Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen (qtd. in Mackay and Thane 204).

17. In response to a Daily Telegraph article that labeled Kingsley a “New Woman,” Kingsley writes: “I do not relish being called a New Woman. I am not one in any sense of the term. Every child I come across tyrannizes over me, and a great deal of time I ought to give to science goes in cooking, &c. I do not think travelling now lays one open to this reproach.” See Daily Telegraph, 3 Dec. 1895:3-4, and Kingsley's response in Daily Telegraph, 5 Dec. 1895:8.

18. The British Empire provided women with a powerful sense of their social mission. Women used the rhetorics of the English civilizing mission to begin to articulate the crucial role they would assume within it and to justify their exercise of power in the imperial arena. According to Burton, “In pageantry, in rhetoric—indeed, in virtually all forms of ideological production—middle-class British feminists of the period invoked the glories of empire in order to ally their cause with its global power and its social mission” (7); Josephine Butler prompts potential lady reformers of prostitution in India, for example, “Have you leisure? Have you strength? If so … there is a career open, a wide field extending to many parts of the world, a far-off cry of distress waiting for response” (qtd. in Burton 8).

19. According to reviewers for The Athenaeum, “the most thrilling” parts of Travels in West Africa are those in which Kingsley demonstrated “her indifference to danger, hardships, and privations” (qtd. in Frawley 110).

20. According to Warner, “Just over a decade after the first postage stamp was issued showing the profile head of the young Queen, the ‘penny black,’ Britannia began to appear on the stamps of the colonies, of Trinidad in 1851, of Barbados in 1852, of Mauritius in 1854, and then spreading through the empire in the 1880s and 1890s” (48).

21. Although she never uses it, Kingsley is at least fully cognizant of the power of life and death that she wields over the African people around her. She jokingly admits that her “chief pride in West Africa is that I have never raised hand nor caused hand to be raised against a native” (503).

22. It is because of the ideological imbalances built into the enterprise of British trade and because of Kingsley's literal and symbolic associations with this enterprise that I take issue with Lawrence's contention regarding Kingsley and African trade. According to Lawrence, the “marketplace offers Kingsley a neutral ground on which to encounter Africans and Africa” (146). Lawrence argues that trade is the great equalizer, placing the African and the English traveler in a relationship in which true cultural exchange can take place. My argument, in contrast, stresses the fundamental inequalities sustained in Kingsley's relations with the Africans whom she encounters.

23. See, for example, Richards's chapter on Africa and commodity culture, “Selling Darkest Africa” in Commodity Culture.

24. Kingsley writes, “The great inferiority of the African to the European lies in the matter of mechanical idea” (669).

25. In Spinsters Abroad, Birkett puts it this way: “Women travellers found in the Dark Continent, the Orient, the Savage Lands, the stage upon which their new experiences as travellers could be realized” (47).

26. Lawrence observes how the cover of the 1988 Virago/Beacon reprint of Kingsley's Travels, a black-and-white photographic bust of Kingsley that is superimposed upon a color painting of an African scene, illustrates the troublesome notion of Africa as the background for Western (self) discovery. She argues: “Here, the white woman individual is foregrounded against what Johannes Fabian has called an ‘ethnographic present’ that effaces history from the African scene and represents instead a timeless, primitive landscape. Africa becomes a generalized setting, even a theatrical set, for the drama of female liberation that a 1980s white Anglo-American feminism seeks to recover” (126).

27. Kingsley writes,

    When I reached the S. W. end, looking westwards I saw the South Atlantic down below, like a plain of frosted silver. Out of it, barely twenty miles away, rose Fernando Po to its 10,190 feet with that majestic grace peculiar to a volcanic island. Immediately below me, some 10,000 feet or so, lay Victoria with the forested foot-hills of Mungo Mah Lobeh encircling it as a diadem, and Ambas Bay gemmed with rocky islands lying before it. On my left away S. E. was the glorious stretch of the Cameroon estuary, with a line of white cloud lying very neatly along the course of Cameroom River.

    (577)

Works Cited

Arens, W. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology & Anthropophagy. New York: Oxford UP, 1979.

Birkett, Dea. Mary Kingsley: Imperial Adventuress. London: Macmillan, 1992.

Blunt, Alison. Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa. New York: Guilford Press, 1994.

Burton, Antoinette. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994.

Conrad, Joseph. “Geography and Some Explorers.” Last Essays. London: Dent, 1926. 1-31.

———. Heart of Darkness. New York: Dover, 1990.

Frank, Katherine. A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.

Frawley, Maria H. A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1994.

George, Rosemary Marangoly. “Homes in the Empire, Empires in the Home.” Cultural Critique (Winter 1993-94): 95-127.

Gwynn, Stephen. The Life of Mary Kingsley. New York: Penguin, 1932.

Hennessey, Rosemary and Rajeswari Mohan. “The Construction of Woman in Three Popular Texts of Empire: Towards a Critique of Materialist Feminism.” Textual Practice 3.3 (Winter 1989): 323-57.

Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797. London: Routledge, 1986.

Hulme, Peter, and Myra Jehlen. Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1993): 179-91.

Joyce, Elizabeth. “White Man's Burden: White Woman's Lark: Mary Kingsley and the Myth of the Explorer Hero.” Trent Papers in Communication 2 (1984): 99-117.

Kingsley, George. Notes on Sport and Travel. London: Macmillan, 1900.

Kingsley, Mary. Travels in West Africa. London: Macmillan, 1897.

———. West African Studies. London: Macmillan, 1899.

———. Daily Telegraph 3 December 1895: 3-4.

———. Daily Telegraph 5 December 1895: 8.

Kröller, Eva-Marie. “First Impressions: Rhetorical Strategies in Travel Writing by Victorian Women.” Ariel 21.4 (October 1990): 87-99.

Lawrence, Karen. Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.

Mackay, Jane, and Pat Thane. “The Englishwoman.” Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920. Ed. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd. London: Croom Helm, 1986.

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Melman, Billie. Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992.

Mills, Sara. Discourses of Difference. London: Routledge, 1991.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.

Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Fiture of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Sinha, Mrinalini. “‘Chathams, Pitts, and Gladstones in Petticoats’: The Politics of Gender and Race in the Ilbert Bill Controversy, 1883-1884.” Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. Ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1992. 98-116.

Stevenson, Catherine Barnes. “Female Anger and African Politics: The Case of Two Victorian ‘Lady Travellers.’” Turn-of-the-Century Woman 2.1 (Summer 1985): 7-17.

———. Victorian Travel Writers in Africa. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Stoler, Ann Laura. “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia.” Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Ed. Micaela di Leonardo. U of California P, 1991. 51-101.

Strobel, Margaret. “Gender and Race in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire.” Becoming Visible: Women in European History. Ed. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, Susan Strand. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 374-96.

Warner, Marina. Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985.