This book echoes the “spaces” book I received earlier in this review set, both are from Cambridge; it had a section on travel and also sections on interiors, whereas this book is about travel writing among a single genre in a span of three decades; hopefully, Ingrid Horrocks will commence by explaining why the subject was narrowed thus, as there is no logical reason I can think of that travel writing was uniquely different in this span. “In the last days of the Scandinavian journey that would become the basis of her great post-Revolutionary travel book, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, ‘I am weary of travelling—yet seem to have no home—no resting place to look to—I am strangely cast off’. From this starting point, Ingrid Horrocks reveals the significance of representations of women wanderers in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, particularly in the work of women writers.” Summaries infrequently include entire sentences of quoted matter because it has to contribute significantly to summarizing the book, and this typically is not likely to be found in any quote from another writer’s book, especially if it is not similar in genre and structure to the book being summarized. In this case, this quote only repeats the travel theme in contrast with staying indoors, without adding any explanation as to how or why it is being studied. The editor then comments that the quote is revealing of “significance” of the subject, but if such significance has been revealed it is not apparent from the general observation or from this restatement that there is significance present without this needed bit of direct explanation. “She follows gendered, frequently reluctant wanderers beyond travel narratives into poetry, gothic romances, and sentimental novels, and places them within a long history of uses of the more traditional literary figure of the male wanderer.” Researchers too often wander into other genres when they fail to find sufficient evidence in the primary genre they have chosen. In this case, there were too few canonical travel narratives written in this narrow time and space by women, whereas there were more gothic romances about travel and bits about travel can be found scattered across nearly all poetry collections. More troublingly, the author assumes the “male wanderer” has been “more traditional” without showing statistical proof of this assumption. Horrocks and her readers might hold this gendered assumption because female wanderer stories have been excluded from the canon, and the assumption that they are uncommon in the canon might have contributed to increasing this belief. “Drawing out the relationship between mobility and affect, and illuminating textual forms of wandering, Horrocks shows how paying attention to the figure of the woman wanderer sheds new light on women and travel, and alters assumptions about mobility’s connection with freedom.” The last portion is a curious field of inquiry: the assumption has been that women have been more limited in terms of travel because chauvinism has kept them from the liberties held by men, but if women have spent the last few hundred years being refused work for their gender, and half of them were in the middle class or better, then women would have had more free time for travel than their husbands, who had to work to pay for the family’s expenses. Thus, statistics on how common male versus female travel was in the period in question would start this conversation from a truthful perspective.
In the interior, only one chapter addresses non-fiction travel writing, the one about Wollstonecraft. The others are about changes of scene in poetry, depressing sonnets about travel, the formula of gothic narrative travel, and digressive travels in the novel. The “Introduction” repeats the Wollstonecraft quote, elaborating that the book’s goal is to cover women who dreaded or were terrified of travel, as well as those who enjoyed or had a positive outlook on it; these two extremes pretty much cover all possible emotional responses to travel, so they cancel each other out, making it unnecessary to specify this duality. Then Horrocks stresses the book is about wanderers rather than travelers not simply to avoid using the common genre-defining term, but because she is interested in “digression” in travel rather than purposeful travel because this type of travel is likely to cause the female to become lost and lonely (1). The rest of the book repeats synonyms of loneliness, lost, alone, sad, depressed and the like on nearly every page. These almost seem intended to create a gothic gloom for readers, or to put them in a trance of sadness. Depression really should not be the subject of literary studies without some research into clinical depression or diagnosis of the conditions in scientific terms. Literature is split into tragedies and comedies, and tragedies are supposed to instill a sense of sadness, loneliness and the like on readers: this depressive task of half of world’s literature is innate in the generic structure designed in Greco-Roman times. Critics like Horrocks tend to confuse this job of imparting sadness onto characters and readers as betraying these feelings in the author, but especially in fiction, the emotions displayed are falsehoods and cannot be taken as proof of the character of average female travelers, just as the nature of monarchs should not be extrapolated from the murderous monarchs in Shakespeare. Repeating to the fact characters are sad regarding their wandering across a scholarly book is an exercise that fails to deliver useful research for readers. Horrocks had to step back to explain the sadness is a trope to inspire sympathy through tragedy, but instead she is wallowing in these feelings along side casual readers of these fictions.
Further in the book, problems accumulate. For example, she offers a long quote from one of Charlotte Smith’s sonnets, The Emigrants: “Charged deep with death, upon the waves, far seen,/ Move the war-freighted ships; and fierce and red,/ Flash their destructive fire—The mangled dead…” Emigrants are dying on ships here: while the events are exaggerated: any tragedy is in the facts of the bad conditions of the sea that appears to be swallowing up their lives. Instead of addressing these realities, Horrocks chooses to see the culprit in “wandering”, which in this case is a stand-in for migration, as “endless and meaningless motion”; the text in question demonstrates a definitive end in death for some of these migrants, and they are emigrating for a reason and not meaninglessly. Horrocks’ interpretation seems to be more a reflection of modern anti-immigrant sentiments rather than the message in the sonnet. Perhaps because this interpretation lacks sense, Horrocks then digresses further into meaninglessness: “The ‘I’ inhabited by her wanderer is forever fractured by being separated from its former self, and forever stuck in the singular solitariness of its being in the present moment.” There is no “I” in the quote in question. Horrocks is stretching the “I” of the poet or Smith to apply it to the narrator, assuming that Smith finds these wanderings to be clueless about herself and lonely. There is no proof of this lack of control or identity on the part of the poet in the text, so Horrocks is insulting the author when she calls her depressed and confused without understanding the point of Smith’s narrative (105-7).
Dozens of people are thanked in the acknowledgements for having helped Horrocks edit this book. None of them pointed the problems out that I am stressing? I have attempted to find a reviewer for my de-attribution project and because my research fights against established assumptions, I have not found a single person among hundreds of scholars willing to offer a critique without breaking into insults. Maybe critics are driven to encourage mistakes in fellow critics to make their own research appear better in comparison. Or perhaps Horrocks’ Ivy League degrees have welcomed her into fellowships and mentorships denied to anybody outside this upper club? Whatever the reasons might be for the success of books like Horrocks in finding mentors and publishers, they are just poorly researched, poorly written, and lacking in coherent sense.