Imperial Spouses and Female Travelees in Central Asia
Résumé
In the 19th century the regions near and around Persia, known now as Iran and Xinjiang, considered as British ‘informal’ empire, were needed to be surveyed and administered to enhance British influence and minimise Russian presence. But even if these landlocked territories were forbidden for ladies, few of them followed their spouses and brothers, British officials and officers of the Raj, and produced diverse accounts about the countries and people crossed. Having little or nothing in common in other respects, these imperial consorts were visiting, inhabiting and describing a space that, while new and foreign, had also been discursively created for them by the subsequent visiting authors and, perhaps most importantly, by the already well-established paradigm of Orientalism and the oriental Other. While women’s travel writing contested a form of gender power for women, the imperial spouses were also spectators of empire building. However, by colluding the myth of women’s non-involvement in colonialism as well as passive victims in all spheres of life, we deny precisely their agency of active shaping of their own lives by travelling and writing. Furthermore, some of them like Ella Sykes, sister of Baluchistan Consul Sir Molesworth Sykes or Lady Catherine Macartney, spouse of Kashgar Consul Sir George Macartney, won’t admit being catalogued like passive companions. What I hope to present is a plurality of imperial female gazes from the position of power to understand the evolution of women’s travel writing in and about Central Asia at the turn of the 19th century.