ABSTRACT
Typical of the journals written by women making the overland trek to the West at midcentury, Algeline Ashley’s entry for May 31, 1852, demonstrates the correlation between traveling and writing, the effect that movement, literally and figuratively, has on the text. Ashley readily recognizes the difficulty in producing a legible text for whomever her reader might be, the “you” to whom she alludes, as she tries to balance her diary in her lap while the wind buffets the wagon in which she is sitting. She probably also recognizes that the content of the diary is travel-based, determined by the road, the terrain, and the climate; in fact, like other overland journals Ashley’s is written to record a journey perceived to be of historical value and interest. Moreover, for Ashley and other diarists of the Way West, the autobiographical content of the diary is contingent upon and contiguous with the terrain and their movement across it. In this way, topography (writing about the terrain) and autobiography (writing about the self) merge, demonstrating the “flexible positionality”1 and the fluid identity of the writer. More than determining the content and conditions for writing, as in Ashley’s note, the journey has an effect on the writer, displacing her from the familiar, asking her daily to relocate herself, and in the process effecting some degree of self-concept change that is enacted and inscribed by and on the road and on the ledger of the road. Thus, the ledger of place and journeying becomes a ledger of the self as well, just as Beavis’s narrative is both about travel and self.
