Moving Lives: Twentieth Century Women's Travel Writing. By Sidonie Smith. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. xviii, 240pp.

Reviewed by Mary Paniccia Carden

I confess to a certain partiality for Moving Lives: Twentieth Century
Women's Travel Writing. In the early 1990s, I did graduate work with Sidonie Smith as she was formulating aspects of the book's argument; it is a pleasure to see such a rewarding outcome. Favoritism aside, however, I expect that scholars working in fields including autobiography studies, travel narrative, modernism, narrative theory, and gender and women's studies will share my pleasure in a book that gracefully synthesizes multiple lines of analysis, proposes exciting avenues for future study, and demonstrates fruitful connections between areas of contemporary inquiry. Readers of this journal will be especially interested in Smith's delineations of "the logic of travel" and the logistics of representing gendered identities. Focusing on the complexities of traveling women's self-expression (while also attending to traditions and expectations related to male travelers and their texts), Smith provides a creative and stimulating theoretical framework for engaging readings of individual narratives.

She organizes Moving Lives around the "new machines" that "transformed space, time, and the subjects of travel" (xi). "Vehicles of motion," she argues, "are vehicles of perception and meaning" (22). Travel by different vehicles produces different experiences and different narratives because "modes of motion organize the entire sensorium differently and thus affect the conditions, the focalizing range, and the position of the perceiving subject, differentially connecting and disconnecting her to and from the terrain of travel, differentially organizing her ways of negotiating unfamiliar territory, and differentially affecting systems of behavior" (23). Therefore, modes of motion "become the literal and figurative vehicles through which the traveler uses mobility to alter the terms of identity" (25). And the identities negotiated in and through travel are necessarily gendered; Smith notes that "the technologies, the social world transformed by them, and the logic of travel itself remain saturated with defining protocols of masculinity and femininity" (25). Women who travel leave the home--the space that identifies them and that they are identified with--for an elsewhere where expectations and experiences of femininity are both the same and different. Smith begins her study by asking "if traveling, being on the road, makes a man a man--and makes masculinity and power vis-

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

ible--what does it make of a woman, who is at once a subject as home and a subject at home?" (x).

The first chapter of Moving Lives fleshes out interrelations between the logic of travel, modes of travel, narratives of travel, and the gendered identities materialized in travel. It begins with a concise and lively review of the Western masculinized travel undertaken by scholars, crusaders, pilgrims, adventurers, explorers, conquerors, scientists, and missionaries--travelers who "returned with narratives that link mobilities to textual representations and in turn textual representations to identities" (10). Smith tracks the relation of modes of travel to specifically "masculine competencies" through modern Western ideologies and practices of progress (20), with their attendant consequences in the production of gender, race, and class in social spaces and individualized places. Her overview of women's travel narratives explores the roles that women assume as travelers and their complex and often conflicted negotiations of modernity and tradition, home and away, dependence and authority in self-expression. Traveling women's autobiographical expressions are, of course, mediated by awareness of convention--narrative and behavioral. Mindful of the gendered proprieties of "narrative address, justification, and topical preoccupation" as well as of the "implications of narrative itinerary" (19), women manage nevertheless to "reimagine themselves away from the spectacles of femininity constraining them at home" (20).

Noting that "the technology of motion that the traveler chooses to carry her away from home affects the repertoire of identities available to her" (26), Smith explores the ways in which "modes of mobility generate specific narrative intentions" and the strategies that the female narrator uses to convey "what she comes to know on the road, how she comes to know it, and how she returns home" (26). These strategies also make visible the play of "identities in transit" and "degree of investment in or resistance to the masculinist logic of travel" (27). Smith's formulation of the link between the gendered connotations of modes of travel and of narrative production is especially interesting and productive and is well supported and investigated in chapters that evaluate narratives written by women traveling by foot, air, train, and auto. Chapters entitled "On Foot: Gender at Ground Level," "In the Air: Aerial Gender and the Familiarity of Flight," "By Rail: Trains, Tracks, and the Derailments of Identity," and "On the Road: (Auto)Mobility and Gendered Detours" provide detailed explorations of the relation of modes of travel to Western modernity and performances of gender in culture, history, and narrative before moving on to readings of the central texts.

For example, the chapter on air travel begins with an assessment of the ideologies of progress and mechanization that construct the avia-

3

tor as "a new type of hero--thoroughly modern and modernist man" (75). This "potent answer to the crisis of masculinity below" (75) appears in a "new genre of aviation narrative" (78) with a set of conventions supporting its model of empowered masculinity. But women also became pilots, "avatars of the modern woman, comfortable with powerful and dangerous machinery" and, "whatever their expressed political views," Smith argues, "theirs was a tacit motorized feminism" (81). She goes on to examine images of "the aviatrix" as "at once an active agent of aerial modernity and the commodified carrier of a more conservative script of domesticated femininity" in popular culture (86). Her analysis of two 1930s aviatrix films demonstrates the ease with which she moves between different media, drawing convincing lines that connect all areas of culture to the culture of travel; these webs of connection form the foundation of each chapter and highlight the value of Moving Lives for multiple scholarly areas. Smith's subsequent readings of flight narratives by Amelia Earhart, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Beryl Markham examine "the figure of the woman in flight" as "a site around which modernist themes and the ambivalences of modernism circulated" (115). In her discussion, we witness women working to reconcile "normative repertoires of `girl' femininity" with a freedom, boldness, authority, and technological mastery coded male (89), striving to write a modern and mobile female "I" intelligible and acceptable to readers and to stretch autobiographical possibilities for women to accommodate the traveling woman's experience. "Their narratives reveal how complex a woman's relationship to aerial subjectivity was when she was no longer flying in the skies but putting herself on the page" (116).

Smith similarly weaves together theoretical, historical, literary, visual, and cultural scenes of travel in the chapters addressing women traveling by foot (Isabelle Eberhardt, Alexandra David-Neel, and Robyn Davidson), by rail (Mary Morris, Linda Niemann, and Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland), and by car and bus (Beverly Donofrio and Irma Kurtz). These chapters, too, include rich and incisive material on the gendered dynamics of identity construction, social relations, narrative production, and Western mechanized modernity. The Coda offers a provocative take on "the kinds of travel narratives that might emerge as women become more involved in traveling along the electronic highway," suggesting that "in thinking about the condition of travel in cyberspace and the relationship of time to space, and space to identity, and identity to body, and body to imagination in motion, we may come to appreciate how this newest technology of travel might be used by mobile women to undefining effect" (203).

Smith's fluency in all of the various fields she combines in Moving Lives makes for a rewarding and thought-provoking book that makes

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

important contributions to a cross-section of contemporary scholarship. As she notes, however, her work is limited to narratives written by white women "for whom new technologies have been generally accessible and financially available, or for whom, despite the lack of familial means, effects of technological modernity have been at once defining and troubling" (xiv). Moving Lives invites "further theorizing about cultures of travel, technologies of motion, and ethnic identity formation" (xv). Exploring the book's insights in relation to Western and non-Western women of color, whose travel and self-representation are infused with further conditions, questions, ideologies, and social and political valences, would add productive complexities to this line of inquiry. With engaging, deft prose and a rigorous yet accessible argument, Smith extends the parameters of autobiographical theorizing in an age when we must all identify ourselves as travelers in one mechanized mode or another.

Edinboro University of Pennsylvania