Responsables de l’atelier
Julie GAY (Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale )
Claire MCKEOWN (Université de Lorraine )
Juliette PECHELU (Université Bordeaux Montaigne)
Atem Florent, Université de la Polynésie Française, florentatem@gmail.com
Henry Adams, Ariitaimai and the South Pacific Travelogues: From Reinvention to Emancipation.
Overwhelmed by the untimely passing of his wife and still shaken by the tragic loss of his elder sister a few years earlier, it was a profoundly distressed Henry Adams that set out on a Pacific journey in late 1890. Along with his dear friend, painter John La Farge, the American historian left San Francisco in an attempt to escape from himself, hoping the removal from the civilized sphere might contribute to the triggering of a long-overdue healing process. In addition to the personal challenges that defined what might arguably be regarded as the darkest phase of his life, the colossal writing effort which had just led to the completion of his nine volume History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison seemed to finally be taking its toll. The great-grandson and grandson of American Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, the Boston Brahmin also sought to appease his troubled mind, constantly bothered by the profound sense of failure due to his inability to follow in the footsteps of his two illustrious family members. While the time had come to do nothing and think of nothing, the Massachusetts scholar would soon find out that the voyage across the infinite oceanic vastness in no way amounted to running away from history, as the Pacific odyssey, ironically enough, would lead him on the path to selfdiscovery, through his various encounters with otherness in all its forms. Thoroughly documented in his diary letters from the South Seas, Adams’s Pacific travels would take him to Hawai‘i and Sāmoa, before the pivotal experience among the Tahitian natives. Greeted by some of the most influential local figures, he and La Farge were soon introduced to Ariitaimai, the last “ari’i nui”—or chiefess—of the Teva clan, the most powerful and prestigious federation of pre-European Tahiti. Through the venerable lady’s enthralling stories of ancient Polynesia and equally fascinating accounts of more recent developments, it did not take long for the Bostonian dynast to realize that beyond island intrigues, on a deeper level, lay a more fundamental pattern—that of a specific people’s destiny actually echoing the transcultural tale of world history.
By crossing the ethnic and cultural divides, through the dualities of “before” and “after,” Adams reinvents himself along the transpacific voyage, eventually allowing for both cross-cultural realizations and personal epiphany. In transcribing the oral revelations of the indigenous leader, published in different versions and under two titles, reflecting his gradual professional evolution—from 1893’s Memoirs of Marau Ta’aroa, Last Queen of Tahiti to the 1901 edition of the Memoirs of Ariitaimai—, the historian emancipates himself from the confines of contemporary history and historiographical methodology. Finally, under the pen of the American historian but through the eyes of the insider witness, Adams, through the dualities of “inside” and “outside,” redefines the image of the Pacific woman as the nucleus of social and political life, resulting in the emancipation of the female figure from the shackles of Western standards.
Bernard Nathalie, Aix-Marseille Université, nathalie.bernard@univ-amu.fr
From hostess to author: Hester Lynch Piozzi’s travels through Italy in the 1780s as emancipation.
In 1784, Hester Piozzi embarked on a two-and-a-half-year journey through the Continent. It was not her first time across the Channel, but it was nonetheless a new beginning for her at the age of 43. This was a break from her previous life with her late husband Henry Thrale, a wealthy London-based brewer: before his death in April 1781, she had divided her time between her duties as a mother and wife and her role as the hostess of a literary salon frequented by the great names of her time, including Samuel Johnson, who lived with the Thrales for 16 years. Hester’s journey, most of which took place in Italy, was the direct consequence of her second marriage, based on love, to Italian singer and composer Gabriel Piozzi. Her union with a Catholic foreigner of lower social position was strongly condemned by her daughters and by most of her friends – foremost among them Johnson himself. Both a honeymoon and a temporary exile, Hester Piozzi’s journey was above all an opportunity to fulfil her personal aspirations and to start her career as an author. During her stay in Italy, she wrote and published her biography of Samuel Johnson and her correspondence with him, and recorded the remarks that were the basis for Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey Through France, Italy, and Germany (1789), which is often regarded as her most accomplished published work.
Bird Dúnlaith, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, dbirdoxon@gmail.com
‘Shall I ever get away?’: Emancipation and Immobility in Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).
In her 1879 travelogue, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, Victorian traveller Isabella Bird appears to revel in the freedom of the American “Wild West”. The plains roll forward all around, ‘one could gallop all over them’ (33), and the Rockies themselves offer unexpected joys, ‘each morning new’ (135). Yet woven through this geography of joy is a counternarrative of immobilisation and oppression, of women trapped by in sickness and in matrimony in frontier towns fraught with violence, of camps of displaced Native Americans forced further west by encroaching settlers. Bird’s sense of privilege as a white British traveller is counterbalanced by her depictions of gendered and racialised bodies on the American frontier, and by an uneasy consciousness of the fragility of her own freedom, not least because of the chronic pain she suffered from during her journey. This paper will question the models of mobility available to Bird as a traveller and the threat of sessility that haunts her travelogue, as she repeatedly questions her ability to ‘get away’.
Delangle Alexandre, Université Versailles Saint-Quentin, alexandre.delangle@fulbrightmail.org
North to Anywhere, geographical emancipation in aerial narratives of the (sub)Arctic.
During the first decades of the 20th century, the United States developed a passion for aviation. Through novels, pamphlets, movies and music, male and female aviators turned into the pioneers of a new “heavenly frontier” and the main protagonists of a national “spectacle” only indirectly experienced by the masses. Seminal scholars highlighted this American “romance” with aviation where airmail pilots faced one of the highest mortality rates in the country while poetry contests illustrated the urge to fly as a transcendent calling for the country’s progress and modern identity. However, only few studies have highlighted how literary descriptions of the aerial Arctic during the “Golden Age of aviation”, from the 1920s to the 1940s, contributed to the United States’ intellectual emancipation from physical geography. With airplanes and faster traveling methods, pilots’ accounts conveyed a new representation of the northern hemisphere made smaller due to increased accessibility. In these writings, the Arctic regions were progressively no longer depicted as limitless wastelands but strategic locations where comfortable steppingstones allowed Western travelers to shorten their journey to Europe or Asia. Benefiting from the Earth’s curvature, pilots turned the North Atlantic and North Pacific into shortcuts to a larger-scale version of the elusive Northeast and Northwest Passages. The presciently titled narrative of the first American dirigible expeditions beyond the Arctic circle written by journalist Walter Wellman, The Aerial Age (1911), could consequently be seen as among the first attempts to introduce “air-mindedness” to the American society by mobilizing the circumpolar North. Alongside Our Polar Flight (1925) written by Roald Amundsen and Lincoln Ellsworth, Around the World in Eight Days (1926) published by Wiley Post and Harold Gatty or Skyward (1928) written by Richard Evelyn Byrd, aviators’ accounts not only rekindled interest in the Arctic but also made their audience aware of the centrality of the Arctic ocean within the northern hemisphere. If male aviators often emphasized how flying liberated them from terrestrial burdens (such as the dull masses); aviatrixes like Amelia Earhart, and Louise Thaden mobilized aviation as a bridge between continents, a diplomatic tool for world stability, and an opportunity to promote self-accomplishment as well as a catalyst for social change. In North to the Orient (1935), Anne Morrow-Lindbergh illustrated in poetic prose the interconnectedness of northern communities previously inconceivable from a sea level perspective. In her writing, northern air routes became the corridors of compressed distance and magnified cultural difference. This study offers to analyze narratives of the domestication of the skies written by aviators and aviatrixes who flew over the Arctic, the North Atlantic or the North Pacific, and integrated them into a renewed global geography. Additionally, it will highlight shifts in the description of crossed environments and in the self-representations of traveler-writers, who treated these spaces as exclusive and performative territories in which they could incarnate characteristics and values.
Haghshenas Leïla, Université Catholique de l’Ouest, leilahaghshenas@yahoo.com
Vita Sackville-West’s Emancipation through Metamorphosis in Passenger to Teheran (1926) and Twelve Days (1928)
In 1926, Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) travelled to Persia (modern-day Iran) to join her husband, Harold Nicolson, then serving as a British diplomat in Teheran. This journey resulted in Passenger to Teheran (1926), a travelogue that records her first encounter with Persia. Deeply captivated by the country, Sackville-West returned in 1927, a second journey that inspired Twelve Days: An Account of a Journey in the Bakhtiari Mountains of South-Western Persia (1928). Across these texts, Persia emerges as a land of striking paradoxes, splendour and desolation, hospitality and hardship, beauty and poverty mirroring the author’s own inner tensions. This paper argues that Sackville-West’s engagement with Persia functions as a powerful space of emancipation, enabling both physical and psychological liberation. Travel allows her to transgress the gendered constraints imposed on women in early twentieth-century Britain and to claim a degree of freedom traditionally reserved for white male travellers. Through movement, solitude, and immersion in a landscape perceived as vast and untamed, Sackville-West undergoes a process of personal metamorphosis that fosters self-realisation and independence. Persia thus becomes not merely a geographical destination but a catalyst for emancipation, offering a temporary suspension of social norms and hierarchies.
By reading Passenger to Teheran and Twelve Days as narratives of emancipation, this paper highlights the ambivalence of Sackville-West’s position as an aristocratic woman, a cautious feminist, and a subject of the British Empire. Her fascination with Persia reveals both a desire for freedom and the limits of that freedom, shaped by imperial privilege and cultural projection. Ultimately, these travelogues testify to how movement through foreign space enables Sackville-West to renegotiate identity, agency, and autonomy.
Loréal Isabelle, Université Paris Nanterre, 38002297@parisnanterre.fr
A “rioting invasion of soundless life”: Conrad’s unrestrained nature.
“Travellers do not simply record what they see. They travel with a purpose” (Youngs, Travellers in Africa 209). Mary Louise Pratt refers to “the power of naming” (Imperial Eyes 33) to depict how natural scientists catalogued, named and hereby ordered the living world, supported by reports and specimen explorers provided. Conrad’s narrators, Marlow or Dr. Kennedy, as former explorers offer depictions of the surrounding geology, fauna and flora that utilize the tropes of travel writing. However, their portrayals of a vivid, potent nature sometimes verge on the mystical and depart from the notion of the world as a great mechanism, abiding by defined rules. Rather, Conrad’s Gaïa straddles the eponymous Greek myth and Latour’s concept of nature as a chaos of interconnected cells. His travel tales engage with a non anthropocentric approach that reposition humans within, rather than towering over the “more-than-human world” (Alaimo, Bodily Nature 2). As such, Conrad’s view is freed from the sterile dichotomy between a human subject and a reified nature, travel writers contributed to promote through the “power of naming”. His singular and ethically charged representation of the mute but thriving natural world, at grips with global imperialism, ensures his relevance to ecocriticism today.