ABSTRACT
Sights – descriptions of landscapes, sceneries, and places worth seeing – are a staple element in travel writing, and it is not surprising that they can also be found in women's travel writing about the American frontier. Indeed, as much a geographical space as a mythical region inspiring projections and fantasies of all sorts, the frontier is particularly rich in such sights. However, rather than focusing on the views of the landscape, this chapter analyzes the ways in which bodies, particularly the bodies of the so-called ‘others’, are portrayed as sights. Looking at travel narratives by Eliza Farnham, Caroline Kirkland, Susanna Moodie, and Susan Shelby Magoffin, Nicole Maruo-Schröder argues that the travel writers stage spectacles of otherness, a narrative display of the others’ bodies that seeks to impress upon readers the dangers freedom can have for bodies that need disciplining. Maruo-Schröder concentrates on class-based perceptions of otherness and analyzes how such ‘deviant’ bodies threaten to ‘contaminate’ the frontier in these narratives, sometimes even the writers themselves, a contamination that is especially expressed by the sensual experience (vision, smell, touch) and bodily response of the travelers encountering ‘the other’.
