Without a Guide: Contemporary Women's Travel Adventures Edited by Katherine Govier
Hungry Mind Press, St. Paul, MN, 1996
226 pages, paper, $16
Reviewed by Maryanne Hexberg
Women and travel---not long ago, those two words were an oxymoron, when women were the keepers of the hearth and men were the ones who explored new frontiers. Katherine Govier, editor of Without a Guide: Contemporary Women's Travel Adventures says in her introduction:"Authority is all, in travel writing. And historically, travel writing was predominantly male. This is hardly mysterious. Men had money; a man could leave his home, his children and his responsibilities in the hands of another--usually a wife--and set off in search of botanical specimens or insights into primitive ritual."And happily, women are no longer so encumbered as is evident in this brilliant collection of essays by some of the best-loved, female authors. This anthology takes the reader around the world with American authors E. Annie Proulx, Anne Beattie and Alice Walker, Canadian Margaret Atwood, Australian Robyn Davidson and Finland's Kirsti Simonsuuri to name but a few of the contributors.Today, women travel for the same reasons men have traveled in the past--work, leisure, exploring new places and discovering new facets of themselves in the process. In Without a Guide, Katherine Govier has brought together seventeen diverse women who travel for different purposes, yet in each author's essay, the same insight and sharp attention to detail are present, perhaps because women always have been, and still are to an extent, visitors. Says Govier, "Women are lifelong travelers in a man's world."
And it is a pleasure to travel with these women! In her essay, "Islands of the Mind," Margaret Atwood, who admits to being "not the world's most intrepid traveler," takes the reader on a journey with her parents to the Galapagos Islands. She points out "that if I can make it to the Galapagos and back, almost anyone else can..." Her admission to being a travel wimp is both funny and endearing. Atwood makes the essay more personal when, in the introductory paragraph, she says that this is the last time she traveled with her parents while they were still in good health. This reflection adds a uniquely "feminine" touch to the essay; Atwood goes from adventurer to caretaker before the reader's eyes.
E. Annie Proulx, a writer known for her perverse characters and her knife-edged examinations of the human heart and soul, is "On the Train to Hell and Can't Get Off." Proulx begins with a pessimistic quote that suggests that the light at the end of a tunnel could be the headlight from an oncoming train and ends with a metaphorical journey on "a train staffed by the exhausted, the sly, the cunning, the uncaring." In between these observations, Proulx describes her trip--a book tour--which is beset by bad weather, bad food and plain bad luck.
Alice Walker, acclaimed author of The Color Purple, travels to China and writes in the manner of someone showing you slides or snapshots of a trip. Short two or three paragraph numbered sections begin with "This shows our arrival in Beijing," and "This is a picture of Susan and me at the San Francisco airport en route to China." Her vivid, brief thoughts on different parts of her excursion are, indeed, word pictures that impress themselves on the reader's mind.
Lest one begin to believe that the only truly dangerous terrain explored by women writing about travel consists solely of emotional peaks and valleys, Robyn Davidson's "Alone Across the Outback" describes a journey worthy of the most stalwart male travel writer. Davidson travels across 1700 miles in 195 days across Australia's Outback with four camels and her dog, Diggity, for company. The trip, which took a year to prepare for, including camel training, and involved physical danger "speaks for itself," says the author. Indeed it does.
Each author has her own particular style and individual take on her travel experience. Ann Beattie, in "The Occidental Tourist," writes about seeing her own country through the eyes of a Japanese tourist. Kirsti Simonsuuri writes in "Kamos, The Darkest Time of the Year," of northern Finland in the hypnotic voice of someone mesmerized by the glaring, endless snow that impacts every aspect of her journey.
Seventeen separate voices, seventeen unique destinations, bound together by gender and the ability to observe their surroundings keenly and the need to share what they find with another. Women roaming the earth of their own volition is a truly modern phenomenon worthy of being chronicled by some of the best writers of our time. Katherine Govier, who also has an essay in this collection, understands the need for the woman traveler to be recognized and heard and has selected women of letters from around the world to speak for the long-stifled desire of the "fair sex" to take to the open road, on her own, without a guide.
All contents copyright © 1997, The Blue Moon Review, All Rights Reserved.