ABSTRACT
Travel accounts by missionary wives form a substantial part of women’s travel writing during the age of empire. Their spiritual role was initially relatively undefined, but the popular image of the pious wife, devoted helpmeet and domestic angel was one that powerfully informed their relationship with the missionary endeavour. This chapter interrogates the trope of missionary ‘heroines of empire’ by focusing on an instance of identity formation and travel in the early 19th century northern Cape frontier zone, a fluctuating melting-pot of conflict and cooperation in which new subjectivities, relationships and hierarchies of power were forged. By examining the life and writings of Mary Moffat, wife of one of the founders of the Kuruman Mission in the northern Cape, this chapter shows how Moffat navigated the geographical and social topographies of her new environment and negotiated the ambiguities of her identity as missionary wife and colonial subject. Moffat’s accounts of travel in South Africa suggest that the limitations imposed on women in colonial cultures are not necessarily insurmountable barriers to self-inscription, but may result in writing whose contours reveal the nature of dominant discourse and in many instances constitute a critique from its margins.
