1991, Dissertation \'Monsters of the Deep\', The Woman Traveller & Later Victorian For Sale

This dissertation considers 19th century travel - the material fact of travel, the discourse surrounding it, and the literature it produces - as a locus for wide-ranging, and often competing, literary, cultural, and scientific discourses. The decidedly masculine ideology of travel incorporated the triumph of tech nology, the advance of scientific study, the desires of empire, and the reward to the middle class of new professional opportunities, knowledge, health, and pleasures. Almost incidentally, it also suggested a practical answer to the question \"What shall we do with our old maids?\" Through travel, the culture could remove its domestic failures while it constituted an alternative sphere in which the redundant woman might yet serve the ideal. Ironically, the woman disqualified from domesticity could be sent out to domesticate the world; The woman defined as socially and developmentally unnatural could contribute to the developmental discourses of ethnography, geography, and the natural sciences.