ABSTRACT
Travel writing, while purportedly meant to share the sights and adventures of the journey with readers, can also become an important site for autobiographical reflection and social or political critique. In travelistic autobiography, the journey becomes the organizing factor for the life recounted: the flows of passage-departure, journey, and return or assimilation-shape the life and the story that are told. Emplotted around the journey, the travel narrative also reveals the effects of journeying on the writer who is also the subject of the narrative, a subject who is inevitably transformed by the travel experience. As Eric Leed has pointed out, “Travel is the paradigmatic ‘experience,’ the model of a direct and genuine experience, which transforms the person having it.” The experiences and knowledges gained from travel transform the person traveling and hence bring into question self-identity. And because travel, a dynamic, kinetic activity, inevitably involves border crossings, crossing over boundaries, as it did during the American national period, it also brings into question identities of the nation and the self’s place in a nation with ever-expanding borders.1 For some women, these border crossings are figured as expansive and freeing, implying a desire for more fluid personal and ideological identities. But for some women, like Sarah Beavis, these border crossings are figured as transgressive and threatening, disrupting her sense of belonging and identity. Written during a period of expansion beyond the Atlantic seaboard and across the Appalachian Mountains and at a time when Americans were debating about the constitution of the new nation, Beavis’s narrative questions the opening up of new territories at the cost of stable national and personal identities. Mimicking the contact zone of contestation between different cultural groups, her narrative, in both the manuscript and published versions, becomes itself a site of contestation with male paradigms of nation. A rhetorical space, her manuscript narrative is a gendered location in which she gives voice to her experiences and questions the master narrative of national expansion.2 With the published 1824 version, revised and edited by Joseph Patterson, it also becomes a site of rhetorical contestation as Patterson tames and defuses the voice and political critique of this woman traveler.3
