ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two late twentieth-century literary works that illustrate the “discursive framework” of women’s adventure travel: Mary Morris’s travel memoir, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone, and Audrey Schulman’s novel, The Cage. Women’s adventure travel is the industry’s attempt to create, for women, a form of travel that provides deep connections to the landscape, intimacy with a foreign other, and a transformation of self. However, traveling was more dangerous and less socially sanctioned for women until the advent of the mass tourism industry in the mid-nineteenth century. In Morris’s travel memoir, she herself is the traveler and she describes her own solitary journeys throughout Mexico and Latin America in the late 1970s. As tourism theorists have pointed out, “travel and mobility are central for the development of subjectivity and identity” and may be seen as representing the psychoanalytic journey to identity.
