ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the key themes of gender, freedom, danger, risk, and fear in their narratives to invest the narrator with qualities of heroism and stoicism. Western media reports have consistently built-in elements of fear and danger to characterize Iran, and this discussion explores how women travel writers have capitalized on the elements to authorize their voices. The women writers venture into the political wilderness of the West and engage twentieth-century cosmopolitical discourses to navigate their journeys. Four very different narrator-characters emerged from the texts and the authorial roles are characterized as Adventurer Explorer, Cultural Detective, Sympathetic Friend, and Investigative Journalist. Shields claims that metaphorical expression operates as trope because they “have a potent connotative kick which alludes to the emotional importance of entire systems of spatial images which function as frameworks of cultural order.” Wearing was on a journey to release fear, an inherently heroic task, although she plays the anti-hero by framing herself as a humanist.
