THE TRAVELLER'S EYE: The Place of Male and Female Narratives in Nineteenth-Century Travelogues: the Imperialistic Scribes, the Franklins in Van Diemen's Land.
Lindsay Simpson
School of Humanities , James Cook University , Townsville , Australia
Abstract
The narratives of Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin are parallel accounts occupying the same and different gendered spaces. A woman of privileged class, Lady Franklin was both the observed and the observer, inhabiting a space that was public and private while her husband, fulfilling the myth of the heroic explorer, moved within the public sphere, mapping the colony in a patriarchal fashion. This paper compares and contrasts the Franklins ' reading of Van Diemen's Land and examines their individual contributions to British imperialism as privileged scribes, fulfilling the role of energising the myth of Empire.
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