In Search of Health, Freedom & Identity: An Analysis of Isabella Bird's and Margaret Fountaine's Renovation of Self through Travel & Travel Writing

Authors

Mikki L. Stacey, Gettysburg CollegeFollow

Class Year

2017

Document Type

Student Research Paper

Date of Creation

Fall 2016

Department 1

English

Abstract

“An Analysis of Isabella Bird’s and Margaret Fountaine’s Renovation of Self through Travel & Travel Writing” tracks three interdependent facets of identity that become apparent in the travel literature of Victorian ladies Isabella Lucy Bird and Margaret Fountaine. These facets are:

• the socialized self (the identity developed as a result of the society in which one grows up)
• the renovated self (the identity developed through interacting with and adapting to other cultures )
• and the edited self (the identity one creates when she writes about her experiences—for my thesis specifically, the identity the author creates to reconcile her socialized and renovated selves)

Bird’s and Fountaine’s identities developed very similarly, but modern scholars discuss these women in drastically different terms. I argue that they are remembered incongruously due to how their edited selves have been crafted.

Comments

Written as an Honors Thesis in English.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Recommended Citation

Stacey, Mikki L., "In Search of Health, Freedom & Identity: An Analysis of Isabella Bird's and Margaret Fountaine's Renovation of Self through Travel & Travel Writing" (2016). Student Publications. 537.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/student_scholarship/537