| Twentieth-century American women's nonfiction displays an abiding preoccupation with movement as a strategy for achieving agency and change. “Modes of Motion” traces this preoccupation through the final decades of the travel era to the end of the century, juxtaposing travel narratives produced by Edith Wharton, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Katherine Anne Porter, and Mary McCarthy with contemporary personal essays written by, respectively, Joan Didion, Alice Walker, Dorothy Allison, and Mary Gordon.; Wharton, Fauset, Porter, and McCarthy used travel abroad to insert themselves into a literary tradition that was enormously popular during the early twentieth century. In their travel narratives, they adopt the perspective of the mobile cultural outsider, using it to construct the meaning of foreign places and simultaneously to redefine their relationships to “home.”; The waning popularity of the travel book, the rise of global tourism, and the social and political upheavals of the 1960s have fueled a more direct engagement with U.S. society in contemporary American women's nonfiction. While the earlier writers explore concepts of difference and “otherness” as they relate to foreign landscapes, Didion, Walker, Allison, and Gordon address their experiences of marginalization and alienation within familiar American environments. Like their precursors, they use movement to establish vantage points from which to assess, critique, and redefine their relationships to their societies, yet in place of travel they engage in various alternative modes of motion to achieve their goals.; Chapter I compares Wharton's strategies for acquiring authority in her early travel books with Didion's postmodern textual vacillations in Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album. Chapter II juxtaposes Fauset's search for “home” in her travel essays with Walker's process of internal boundary crossing in In Search of Our Mother's Gardens and Living By the Word. Chapter III explores how Porter positions herself within a geographical and cultural “borderland” in her travel essays and how Allison achieves a similar effect through her metaphorical “excavation” of confining sociopolitical categories in Skin and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. Chapter IV compares McCarthy's development of her authoritative vision through travel in Europe with Gordon's intellectual development in Seeing Through Places. |
