The cartography of expatriation: Mapping the American girl abroad in fiction, 1874-1915

The American Girl Abroad emerges as a prominent figure in the fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, embodying the values and ideals of her country by her representation as a product of the myriad enterprises of nineteenth-century America such as geo-political expansionism, industry, travel, and culture. The writers in this study--William Dean Howells, Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Ford Madox Ford, and Edith Wharton--are doubly invested in the experience of displacement through their own expatriation and the subject matter for their novels. These writers, through the character type of the American Girl Abroad, chart the intersections of travel and tourism, of the mapping (both psychological and physical) of Americans in Europe, of expatriation, of images of women, and of national identity during the years 1874 and 1915.;The introduction develops a politics of cartography through a reading of Baedeker handbooks that is a palimpsest of geographical, cultural, psychological, (inter)textual, and authorial connections, all which rest on a grid of expatriation, displacement and exile. Chapter 2 examines the construction of this character type in James's "Daisy Miller" and The Portrait of a Lady along with Howells' A Foregone Conclusion and A Fearful Responsibility. Chapter 3 explores the consequences of female expatriation through a reading of Woolson's life and short stories ("Dorothy," "The Front Yard," and "The Pink Villa"). Chapter 4 situates Burnett's A Fair Barbarian, A Little Princess, and The Shuttle within the context of popular romance fiction and dissemination of imperialist ideology. Chapter 5 considers the problem of marriage and the American Girl Abroad in Wharton's The Custom of the Country and Ford's The Good Soldier. The afterword is an "Envoi to Baedeker" which traces the demise of Baedeker's hegemony and the ending of the economic, political, and cultural conditions that produced the American Girl Abroad.