ABSTRACT
Within the later decades of the eighteenth century, critical discourse on travel writing favored the more objective, scientific travelogues over more personal travel narratives. Additionally, eighteenth-century epistemological and aesthetic discourses often removed the acknowledgment of the feeling body: rooted in vision, they created distance between the subject and the object. As a result, the body became distanced from experience, with the body of the traveler erased from the narrative. In her travelogue, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Mary Wollstonecraft, as Elizabeth Zold demonstrates, uses her subject position as a mother traveling with her daughter to demonstrate the connection between the mind and body for authentic travel writing. However, discussing her daughter in the narrative was a risky endeavor: in the eighteenth century, maternal figures were supposed to represent stasis, and mothers who traveled could be accused of negligence. Wollstonecraft utilizes Fanny's presence as a locus for her to explore the relationship between emotion and reason, and how acknowledging her maternal body enhances the truth value of the narrative. Thus, Wollstonecraft's letters, in addition to demonstrating the value of the body within travel narratives, also expand the geographical limits of the maternal body.
