A Journey To The Self:a Study Of Gilbert’s Travel In Eat,Pyay,Love

With the advent of greater freedom and mobility for women at the turn of the new millennium, women’s travel memoirs are increasing in both volume and readership, which can be evidenced in the global popularity of Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestseller Eat, Pray, Love published in 2006. As a travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love chronicles Gilbert’s year long travel through Italy, India and Indonesia in search for self-actualization. However, as a promising contemporary American female writer, Elizabeth Gilbert has not garnered sufficient academic attention. Nor has there been enough critical study of Eat, Pray, Love. By probing into the narrative, this thesis seeks to examine the configuration of space, gender and identity in Eat, Pray Love, so as to unscramble how Gilbert negotiates, performs and reconstructs her female identity through travel.This thesis is divided into five parts. The Introduction first introduces Elizabeth Gilbert and Eat, Pray, Love, and then outlines the characteristics of contemporary American women’s travel memoirs, which serve as the background of analysis for this research. This part also includes a literature review on the study of Eat, Pray, Love in China and abroad. The main body of this thesis contains three chapters concerning the travel motivation, process and outcome in Gilbert’s travel narrative. Chapter One begins with a scrutiny of Gilbert’s travel motivation and illustrates how feelings of confinement and attachment in the domestic sphere cause her identity crisis, precipitating her departure from home. Chapter Two then moves on to elucidate the process of her year-long journey, which takes her travel trajectory as the central thread to expound on eating in Italy, praying in India and loving in Indonesia respectively. This part aims to reveal Gilbert’s progressively evolving consciousness of the self and beyond the self against the backdrop of different cultures. Chapter Three proposes that Gilbert craves yet another journey of perpetual motion rather than a return home at the end of her travel, and this chapter therefore expounds on the ultimate significance of eternal movement in relation to Gilbert’s self-actualization. The final part is the Conclusion, which summarizes the arguments in the previous chapters, and concludes that Gilbert has achieved self-actualization and formed a holistic and cohesive female identity through her travel.As embodied movement through time and space, travel symbolizes self-exploration beyond domestic limitations, which bears a particular significance for women. As a contemporary American woman, Elizabeth Gilbert strives to be actively involved in the process of continual negotiation and construction of her female identity by traversing borders both physically and psychologically.