Journeying Identities: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Women's Travel Writing in French Colonial Algeria

Abstract

French women travel writers in colonial Algeria occupy an ambiguous place both in the genre of the récit de voyage and in colonial space. Two travel texts written by French women in Algeria in the middle of the nineteenth century, Anaïs Dutertre's Voyage de Vermont-sur-Orne à Constantine-sur-l'oued-Rummel; Setif, Bougie, et Alger par une femme (1866) and Octavie Lagrange's Souvenirs de voyage: Algérie et Tunisie (1868), show that the intersection of visual knowledge and colonial space becomes the site that affords the female travel writer an opportunity to represent herself by means that are at once legitimated by the genre and pregnant with possibility for challenging gender norms. Informed by Foucault's notion of heterotopia and feminist rereadings of the psychoanalytic mirror stage, the author argues that Dutertre's and Lagrange's texts highlight the problematic possibilities of colonial space by questioning prescribed feminine identities in mid-nineteenth-century France.

Keywords:

• Algeria
• colonial space
• feminist
• gender
• mirror stage
• travel writing