ABSTRACT
At a time when Margaret Fuller was spending the summer touring the Great Lakes and then going to Italy to report the news, when numbers of Native American women were being relocated with their tribes or engaged in seasonal migrations, when perhaps up to 25,000 African American women were escaping from bondage and untold numbers were traffi cked in the slave trade, when approximately 45,0000 women were going west on the Overland Trail, heroines of domestic, sentimental novels of the mid-nineteenth century were also taking to the road. Contrary to any notions we may have that only men were out on the road in antebellum America, women not only were out in number, but in novels by Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Warner, Maria Susanna Cummins, E.D.E.N. Southworth, and Augusta Jane Evans they were claiming the road and mobility as part of their domain, deconstructing and complicating ideologies of separate spheres and woman’s place as they did so. In novels that Susan K. Harris labels “exploratory,” heroines are out on the road for a variety of purposes. While many fi nd themselves cast out of homes through travel, more interestingly they also use travel to bring families together and to claim the public road as an extension of the domestic.1
