Abstract

Sara Mills’ influential Foucauldian study of women’s travel writing, Discourses of Difference, heralded a turn from the consideration of individual female travellers as exceptions towards an analysis of the discursive pressures similarly exerted on all of them, through the awareness of normative expectations regarding the production and the reception of their writings. This article revisits panopticism in the genre by showing how travel writing reveals the intersection between the material plane and the discursive process. Through the parallel analysis of three travel narratives, Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, and Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa, I show how their clothing and behaviour are enacted as signs of femininity for the benefit of their contemporaries, in texts whose diaristic form articulates the writing of the self and its exhibition to the public. I thus analyse how these travel narratives illustrate the intersection of the individual and the social in power relations and self-fashioning, and how their authors negotiate surveillance in gender performance.