Moving beyond France: La traversee feminine and women's travels to the Americas in nineteenth-century French popular literature and art (Adele Hommaire de Hell, Marie Bonaparte-Wyse, Maria de Merlin, Lina Beck-Bernard)

Nineteenth-century French women wrote the transatlantic passage, or traversée féminine, as a potent metaphor of mobility and emanciption in popular literature and travel accounts of the Americas. In the shifting political landscape of the mid-nineteenth-century, Adèle Hommaire de Hell, Marie Bonaparte-Wyse, Maria de Merlin, and Lina Beek-Bernard sought escape from their own peripheral positions in the metropolis, rewriting travel and empire as sources of legitimacy and respectability. In their exotic and travel literature, these French women developed a feminist vision of their own modern freedom in contrast to the servitude of creole women and slaves.