Round the world without a man: feminism and decadence in Sara Jeannette Duncan's A Social Departure.

Hammill, Faye

ABSTRACT

In 1888 the Canadian writer Sara Jeanette Duncan travelled around the world with only another single woman as a companion: an extremely unconventional proceeding. Her fictionalized account of her travels, A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves (1890) is comic but also deliberately provocative. The book does not fit neatly into any of the available categories for discussion of fin de siecle texts, but can be usefully analysed in relation to two literary contexts: first, New Woman fiction and nineteenth century 'feminism'; and second, the literature of aestheticism and decadence.

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'The "usual" thing being precisely the thing which we wish to avoid', Orthodocia said to me, 'I think we won't take the guide.'

(Sara Jeanette Duncan, A Social Departure) (1)

In 1888 the Canadian writer Sara Jeannette Duncan set off on an ambitious round-the-world trip. She was unmarried and aged just twenty-six, and her decision to embark on such a journey with only another young single woman as a companion was extremely unconventional. The title of her fictionalized account of her travels, A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves (1890) is deliberately provocative: it indicates a departure from social convention as well as a departure from home, and emphasizes the two women's quest for novelty and rejection of male supervision.

A Social Departure does not fit neatly into any of the available categories for discussion of fin de siecle texts, but has connections with both New Woman fiction and the literature of aestheticism and decadence. Its affinities with the New Woman novels of the 1880s and 1890s include an engagement with issues of female freedom, a tendency to question the structures of marriage and family, and an endorsement of women's career aspirations. Yet Duncan eschews some of the central themes of New Woman writing, such as the depiction of female desire and sexual transgression; and her heroines retain feminine clothing and manners, which differentiates them from the archetypal New Woman.

Likewise, while decadence is an important literary context for A Social Departure, the book is by no means fully aligned with this ideology. The discourses of aestheticism and decadence surface frequently in Duncan's text, and are particularly evident in her protagonists' fascination with the Orient and their desire for new experiences and sensations. Like the European decadents, Duncan's heroines feel that 'the planet [has] become very commonplace' (p. 218). There is, though, a tone of self-mockery about this and similar comments which reveals Duncan's scepticism about the posturing of fin-de-siecle artists and Orientalists. Also, her celebration of the actual experience of travel contrasts sharply with the decadent desire to reproduce the exotic sensuality of the East through reading and assembling collections of exotica, without actually leaving Europe. As well as responding to the writing of decadent Orientalists, A Social Departure engages with a variety of existing literature about travel and the East, including The Arabian Nights, the travel writing of William Dean Howells, and also the more prosaic accounts offered by the newly popular tourist guidebooks. She is particularly concerned with the intertextual nature of travel literature, and the influence of earlier reading on the 'impressions' formed by the tourist.

In their journey round the world, Sara Jeannette Duncan and her companion Lily Lewis were in search not only of new sensations but also of good copy, since despite their youth, both had already achieved remarkable success in journalism. (2) At the time of their trip, Lewis was the Montreal correspondent of The Week and Duncan a columnist for the Montreal Star, and they despatched regular letters home to these papers. The unusual nature of their undertaking, in combination with their well-known names and the humour and liveliness of their style, won them a large readership in the US and Canada, (3) and A Social Departure is an edited version of Duncan's despatches, unified by the invention of Orthodocia. (4) While the narrator is sometimes referred to by her companion as S. J. D., indicating that the author intends her as a self-portrait, the character of Orthodocia bears little relation to Lily Lewis.

Sara Jeannette Duncan's name is no longer familiar among British readers, but her work is well established in the canon of Canadian literature. Several of her twenty-one books, especially The Imperialist (1904), have received a substantial amount of critical attention in recent decades. Yet A Social Departure, which was her greatest commercial success and which was also highly acclaimed by reviewers upon publication, (5) has subsequently been virtually ignored by critics, with the two exceptions of Thomas E. Tausky and Misao Dean, who have each devoted several pages of discussion to it.

'Matrimony had not befallen her': Conventions of Female Conduct

The intimation of transgressive behaviour in the title of A Social Departure recurs in the book's dedication 'as a slight tribute to the omnipotence of her opinion [...] to Mrs Grundy'. (6) This ironic gesture clearly indicates that Duncan will rebel against bourgeois behavioural standards in her book. In the opening chapter, the narrator (whom I will refer to as S. J. D., in order to distinguish her from the author, Sara Jeannette Duncan), mentions her first encounter with Orthodocia four years before the narrative present of the text. At this time Orthodocia, aged eighteen, had been firmly chaperoned by her aunt. Next comes a description of their meeting at Montreal at the start of their trip:

You will believe that a good deal had happened when you understand that she was quite by herself, and prepared for a trip round the world with a person her relatives had been in the habit of mentioning as 'that American young lady,' which was me. Naturally you will think of matrimony first, which casualty would have enabled Orthodocia to go to the planet Mars alone, I believe, with the full approval of all her friends and acquaintances. But matrimony had not befallen her. [...] Neither had she become an heiress, with nobody to thwart her vagrant fancies. [...] Orthodocia had simply prevailed; but [...] she told me in confidence [...] just how difficult she found it. (p. 10)

Here the narrator invokes the conventional expectations of the presumed reader about the degrees of freedom allowed to married and unmarried women, and exposes those conventions as ridiculous.

The objections to the projected trip raised by Orthodocia's relatives are based simply on its unconventional nature and not on any solid reasoning, yet these relatives represent the voice of social and patriarchal authority, which the two women require considerable wit and determination to resist:

It was Japan that gave rise to the most contumacy. Go to Japan without any man whatever--absurd! Answering which we brought down statistics relating to the surplus female population of the globe which proved beyond doubt that to many ladies resident in Chuguibamba, Bin-Thuang-Din, and Massachusetts, the object under discussion was a luxury, and no necessity in any sense. But it was the height of impropriety. We argued that impropriety was entirely relative, and that naturally impropriety in North America would be quite the correct thing in the antipodes. [...] It was unheard of that two young women should go wandering aimlessly off to the other side of the globe! Whereupon the intention of these present articles was disclosed. (p. 18)

Despite the flippancy of S. J. D.'s tone, she is articulating a serious argument about the socially constructed nature of Western ideals of femininity, and the culturally relative status of norms of female conduct. She also makes a striking assertion of independence by dismissing the need for male protection, and affirms the importance of women's professional goals--the reference to 'these present articles' identifies the two travellers as writers, who intend to publish accounts of their experiences.

It gradually becomes clear, however, that only S. J. D. will develop into a true feminist and a professional woman. Orthodocia, while very fond of her own way, is in fact rather conformist, and frequently adopts conventional opinions. The characterization of S. J. D. as a writer, actively setting her own story down on paper, is sustained throughout the text, but Orthodocia gets no further than jotting assorted remarks in a notebook. The crucial difference between the two heroines is that S. J. D. is a modern North American woman based on a 'real-life' model, while Miss Orthodocia Love is a character from an old-world romance, as her improbable name, in combination with her residence at 'St-Eve's-in-the-Garden, Wigginton, Devon', makes abundantly clear. Appropriately enough, at the end of the book S. J. D. remains single, while Orthodocia succumbs to the romantic pursuit of her Canadian cousin. Initially, she refuses his proposal because he expresses disapproval of 'the tendencies of the age', and she comments indignantly: 'And if he didn't mean the tendency of girls to travel by themselves, why [...] did he think proper to start round the world the other way to meet us, and help us out of imaginary difficulties, and protect us from imaginary dangers?' (p. 399). But this self-assertion is of very brief duration, and she soon accepts him, thus conforming to the traditional romance plot that S. J. D. refuses for herself. In actual fact, it was Duncan and not her companion who met her future husband on the Indian leg of their journey. The ongoing professional and spinster status she assigns to her alter ego at the end of A Social Departure does not, then, map out the future she expects for herself, but rather enacts a fantasy of freedom from male authority and domestic life. (7)

Duncan resisted the unfavourable depictions of independent women in texts by her male contemporaries. As Cecelia Tichi points out: 'Such writers as William Dean Howells, Jack London, and even Henry James engaged the figure of the new woman, but they portrayed her [...] as an upstart or rebel who would be brought to heel by male authority and by her own susceptibility to fashion, frippery, and, above all, social convention.' (8) An example is Henrietta Stackpole, the American journalist visiting Europe in James's Portrait of a Lady (1881), who, although good-natured and 'brave', is 'wanting in distinction', and is associated with a future that will be increasingly raw, crude, and unsophisticated: 'Henrietta [...] does smell of the Future--it almost knocks one down!' (9) Howells and James were among the writers most admired by Duncan, but she reacts against this particular aspect of their writing by creating her own travelling journalists, who are independent and courageous, yet considerate, discriminating, and refined.

A Social Departure retains, however, a lightness of tone more conducive to Duncan's primary purpose of entertaining her reader than to sustained commentary on gender issues; although she did take the opportunity to compare the position of women within different cultures. As western tourists, she and her companion were apparently never expected to conform to local practices regarding female behaviour, but she frequently observes and protests against the restrictions placed on eastern women. She says of Japanese wives:

Their little lives had been arranged for them by their parents, they might or might not have seen their donna sans [husbands] before their marriages; perhaps none of them held a matrimonial monopoly, and any one of them could be divorced if she talked too much! [...] They knew that a mother should obey her eldest son. (pp. 130-31)

In this example, Duncan's pride in the more advanced state of western gender economies is evident, but at other points she suggests that there is still much progress to be made in both west and east:

'The "woman question" appears to have made progress in China', remarked my friend, who is not a suffragist, disapprovingly; and I observed that our sampan was manned by the grandmother, daughter, aunt and female cousin of the establishment, who rowed us lustily with much perspiration. We were disabused of this idea, however, when we noticed that the small moon-faced object that stood in the stern and gave orders which the women obeyed with promptness and unanimity, was a boy. He was a full-blown tyrant, at the age of seven. (p. 210)

Here, the narrator's dismay at the enforced obedience of Oriental females is clear, but her views on female suffrage are left implicit and can be discerned only through the assumption that they diverge from Orthodocia's. This obliqueness contrasts markedly with the explicit, vigorous approach Duncan takes in her political journalism: she was, indeed, one of the first Canadian women to call for the vote in print. (10) Even in the newspaper reports of Duncan's round-the-world voyage, feminist issues are given much greater emphasis than they are in the book version. As Thomas Tausky points out, several 'sober' discussions of the status of married women in different cultures which appeared in the Star were omitted from A Social Departure, and he comments that they 'would have seemed quite out of place in the book, with its emphasis on gaily told personal experiences' (pp. 58-59).

Duncan may also have been influenced by her awareness of the conservatism of the fiction-reading public, particularly in Canada. In her journalism she could be outspoken, but she knew that too much rebelliousness could damage sales of her novels. Carole Gerson, in a discussion of Duncan's A Daughter of To-Day (1894), which is certainly a New Woman novel, suggests that she was 'reluctant to offend Canadian propriety' and that her most unconventional female characters were therefore American. (11) Gerson says of Elfrida, heroine of A Daughter of To-Day: 'The source of Elfrida's wildness is the uncompromising ambition that drives her to commit major social transgressions. [...] Duncan could not attribute such extremity to a Canadian character. She can allow a young Canadian woman to travel freely in a comic novel (A Social Departure ...) but not to test her independence more seriously at home' (p. 65).

The comic dimension of A Social Departure tends to distance it from the majority of New Woman novels, despite its numerous thematic connections with them. The similarities and differences can be examined further using Misao Dean's account of the Canadian New Woman novel in her book Practising Femininity:

By the 1880s, the issue of social and political equality for women was gaining a prominent place in public discourse in Canada. The increasing visibility of violence against women within the family, a new 'scientific' discourse which located sexual desire in the female body, and the shift to women working outside the home in an industrial economy were among the factors which led women and men to question the logic of the 'sexual contract'. [...] The New Woman as depicted in [Canadian] texts defied society by engaging in unconventional relations with men, claiming independence of movement and action, and affecting masculine dress and manners. [...] She is often described as conveying discontent and restlessness in each gesture and expression, markedly contrasting the self-control and patience of the domestic ideal. (12)

A Social Departure never depicts violence against women, but the narrator protests against the subordination of wives within Oriental families and the limited sphere of activity permitted to the western woman. Although the novel does not explore unconventional sexual relationships, its heroines do claim an extraordinary degree of 'independence of movement and action'. S. J. D. and Orthodocia remain entirely feminine in dress and manners, yet their journey is motivated by restlessness and also professional ambition and a desire for experience of the world beyond the home, and they are certainly not characterized by self-control and patience.

This account may seem to suggest that A Social Departure is less radical than the books that can be unambiguously designated as New Woman novels. But there is another way of considering this. The narrative resolutions of many Canadian New Woman novels in fact involve romantic developments, which effect an uneasy reconciliation between women's new demands and aspirations and their traditional desire for a husband and children. As Dean points out, this contradiction in ideological perspective is not acknowledged: 'Instead of "reflecting" or "mirroring" a split between personal autonomy, and maternal self-sacrifice, these novels undertake to overcome that split, to explain it and render it invisible', and as a result, she adds, 'these texts are deeply and fundamentally conservative' (p. 60). In her division of her protagonist into two women, only one of whom forfeits her new-found independence in order to marry, Duncan may be said to go a certain way towards mirroring the split identified by Dean. Dean comments, further, that many New Woman writers (including Duncan herself in A Daughter of To-Day) responded to the imperative to 'explain and justify feminine difference' (p. 61), thus reinserting themselves in the hierarchy of gender. But A Social Departure, rather than explaining women in relation to men, or justifying women to men, instead asserts the value of women's independent experience and female friendship. Duncan creates a gendered textual space by relegating all male characters to the extreme sidelines, and explicitly addressing a woman reader. (13) She closes her anti-romantic narrative by representing marriage as a much riskier enterprise than an unchaperoned round-the-world voyage:

'Do you think,' said [Orthodocia's mother], 'as the result of all your experiences, that it is entirely safe and wise for young ladies to travel by themselves?'

'Dear Mrs Love!' I equivocated, 'I am afraid the wisdom of it must always depend upon the young ladies themselves; and as to the danger--you see what befell Orthodocia!' (p. 476)

'One grows extremely nice about one's new sensations': The Discourse of Decadence

The New Woman is intimately connected with another important figure of the fin de siecle: the decadent. Decadent male artists tended, in fact, to be resistant to the ideas and behaviour of New Women and feminists; (14) nevertheless, as Linda Dowling comments: 'To most late Victorians the decadent was new and the New Woman decadent', and 'both raised [...] profound fears for the future of sex, class, and race.' (15) Crucially, both decadents and writers who took the New Woman as their subject were in search of new literary territory, as Misao Dean argues: 'The culture of the fin de siecle was held to be exhausted, and artists at a loss for material, searching out the extreme and the exotic as the only subject matter left unappropriated by previous generations. This search [... encompassed] exotic foreign lands [and] the unknown interior life of woman' (Practising Femininity, p. 61). As an aspiring writer, Duncan had learned, as she remarks in an account of her early career, that 'she must have some unworn incident, some fiber of novelty or current interest to give value to her work'. (16) This is one of the primary objects of her round-the-world trip, and S. J. D. and Orthodocia express the purpose of their journey using the key terms of decadence: 'We wanted as many novel and original experiences and sensations as possible, the planet having become very commonplace' (p. 218). This echoes the philosophy of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, who 'searches for sensations that would be at once new and delightful', and it also recalls Walter Pater's aim of 'getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time'. (17) Misao Dean confirms this connection, saying of Duncan's protagonists: 'Following the lead of the decadents, for whom European culture had become "commonplace", they choose to try anything that seems novel in each "Oriental" locale they visit.' (18)

Decadents were also characterized by a pose of ennui and satiety (evident, for example, in the continual yawning of Dorian Gray) and desired exotic sensations as an escape from the monotony of ordinary existence. Similarly, S. J. D. and Orthodocia confessedly travel the world 'chiefly to be amused' (p. 107), and in embracing this decadent philosophy, they liberate themselves from the confinements of Victorian ideology in two respects. First, they escape from their 'proper' sphere--the home--and from their assigned roles as household managers, carers, and guardians of family morality. Secondly, they dismiss the bourgeois ideals of self-improvement and accumulation of knowledge espoused by their relatives. They promise to send home 'long letters full of valuable, nutritive, and interesting information' (p. 201), but these never materialize. The aestheticist ideal of art for art's sake rejects the concept of language as a vessel for useful knowledge, and accordingly, S. J. D. concentrates on sensations and impressions in her narrative, and refuses to include any informative or moral passages. She considers factual detail irrelevant to the experience of travel: 'For statistics about the temples, their heights, and breadths, and dates [...] I believe a thoroughly reliable volume has been written by one Dr Dresser, and have much pleasure in referring you to it. [...] The book was recommended to Orthodocia and me [...] and we carried it all the way to Nikko and back again' (p. 197). She focuses instead on tracing the precise contours of her individual response to new sensations, and this is in accordance with Pater's definition of the first step in aesthetic criticism, 'to know one's impression as it really is' and consider: 'What effect does it really produce on me?' (pp. xix-xx).

Duncan's preference for travel narratives that privilege personal impressions is evident in her various reviews of the travel writing of William Dean Howells. She says of his Tuscan Cities (1885):

The first thing it is not is a guide-book, which the average tourist may [...] consign to his portmanteau in the blissful anticipation of realizing its contents. The tourist may stand where Howells stood [...] and yet find the Howells sensation elusive. [...] We gaze upon 'Tuscan Cities' through the glamor of a susceptibility which is a peculiar property of the author's vision, and which cannot readily be duplicated by the most conscientiously emotional of those who yearly join the European exodus. (19)

This demonstrates her awareness that the 'novelty' of travel literature derives as much from the sensibilities of the individual observer as from the unfamiliarity of the physical and cultural landscape. It is also a clear expression of one component of the ideology of aestheticism, according to which external places and objects are significant only in the effects they produce on the individual consciousness. The technique Duncan uses in A Social Departure of engaging the reader by means of recreating her own personality in the narrative owes much to Howells, who became one of her literary mentors. (20) Her aim is precisely the opposite of that of a guidebook. Mary Beard says of the tourist guides published throughout the nineteenth century by John Murray: 'The rhetoric of these Handbooks is designed to submerge the individual hand of the writer, in favour of the brand name Murray.' (21)

Throughout A Social Departure, Duncan is concerned with the influence on a traveller's perceptions of impressions received from others. She suggests that such second-hand ideas can lead to cliched modes of seeing and writing: 'As we [...] looked out at the great amphitheatre [...] we remembered that we should see mountains with towers and minarets--mountains like churches, like fortifications, like cities, like clouds' (p. 56). S. J. D.'s narrative continually engages and negotiates with prior textualizations of the places she visits, such as guidebooks, literary travelogues, and the tales of other tourists. She is aware that the influence of these earlier accounts is inescapable, though she contradicts or modifies them in an attempt to establish an unmediated, personal response. The writing of decadent Orientalists, for example, shapes her expectations of India, but she soon perceives the gap between the pleasure expected (on the basis of her reading) and the actual experience:

The syce invited us to descend but we felt several degrees more comfortable in our gharri in that multitude. So, as we would not go to the nautch, the nautch came to us. The crowd parted, and a slender girl came through, with slow steps and passes. [...] Her face was painted, and [...] there was a look of unutterable depravity in her round eyes, bold through their softness. We showed her a rupee and she began to dance for us.

The famous nautch! Orthodocia and I watched it begin with all the qualms and thrills that accompany a deliberate impropriety of behaviour; for many times we had heard of its iniquity, and now to witness it, alone--impromptu! But the qualms and thrills departed, one by one, leaving our consciences reprieved. For her performance was nothing more extraordinary than a succession of wrigglings and contortions, of putting one foot before and the other behind, of crossing her arms on her breast, or locking her fingers above her head. The crowd watched breathlessly, apparently with intense enjoyment, but our sense of the grace of motion was not cultivated to stand more than a very little of it, with the heat and the noise and the smells. (p. 383)

This passage is certainly continuous with the discourse of decadence, since the pursuit of a new sensation requires the abandonment of conventional structures of morality and propriety. Terry Eagleton says of the Victorian fin de siecle: 'For this above all is the age of artistic slumming, in which some raw, fascinating but fearful underworld lurks beneath the paper-thin structure of civilization, and in which destructive element you must immerse in the name of authenticity.' (22) In the nautch scene, S. J. D. and Orthodocia do at first experience a combination of fear and fascination. Their refusal to 'descend' from the coach demonstrates their apprehension of being absorbed into the crowd (or perhaps contaminated by it), yet they are sufficiently fascinated by the reputed 'iniquity' of the dance to acquiesce in the performance. The description of the nautch initially conforms to the contemporary tendency to represent the racial other as alluring and licentious, but this is undermined by the banality of the woman's dance. The literal performance of her sexuality actually reduces its power, since it awakens no 'sensation' in the Western spectators. The belittling vocabulary S. J. D. uses ('wrigglings', 'contortions') indicates her disdain for those who do admire the dance, and her sense of her own and Orthodocia's superior taste is imaged by their separate, elevated location in the coach.

In the next paragraph, Duncan engages further with the expectations set up by exposure to the written and oral accounts of other travellers: 'We would not go to see the Taj, we decided [...] until the starlight of the early evening with the prospect of the moon at nine o'clock. After a certain point in a trip round the world, one grows extremely nice about one's new sensations, most particular as to the circumstances one obtains them under' (p. 383). Again, the two women are constructed as cultivated travellers with educated perceptions, but the tone here is slightly self-mocking. The narrator adds: 'We felt [...] that the Taj demanded [...] some preparation of the emotions. Orthodocia suggested dieting, but I thought it would do to abstain from any violent form of sight-seeing during the day' (pp. 383-84). This comic detail adds an edge of ridicule to Duncan's depiction of the aesthetically conscious tourist in India. She is clearly aware of the possible extremes and paradoxes of Western decadence in its effort to combine indulgence in the sensuous possibilities of the Orient with a rigorous discipline and selectivity. This dual commitment is explored in detail in one of the central texts of literary decadence, J.-K. Huysmans's A Rebours (1884), and can also be seen, as Terry Eagleton points out, in the decadent writing of George Moore, 'lurching as he does from a pagan emancipation of the senses to an austere self-disciplining which will sublime them into something rich and rare' (p. 19).

Despite her ironic build-up, Duncan's protagonists do indeed find the Taj Mahal to be the supreme experience of their trip, and the account of it is one of the most beautiful passages in the book. But while the narrator reaffirms the judgements of previous tourists, who have placed the Taj at the top of the hierarchy of eastern 'sights', the muted and subtle qualities of her description constitute a deliberate strategy to counter the stylistic excesses of orientalism. She remarks: 'And we knew that the Taj was the crown and glory of India, that [...] it had been the source of more extravagance of language in the people we had met who were going round the world the other way than anything else the guidebooks had provided them with' (p. 383).

Duncan's narrator here expresses a mild scorn for these other tourists, who circumnavigate the globe in the usual eastward direction. She implies that most travellers, instead of actively discovering anything for themselves, passively rely on guidebooks to 'provide' them with an itinerary, a prescribed set of sensations to be consumed in a particular order. This prescription is eschewed by S. J. D. and Orthodocia:

Orthodocia and I did what struck a great many people as a singular thing in the arrangement of our trip so far as India was concerned. We went to Ceylon first, then up to the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta, then down to Ceylon again, touching at Madras, then up to Bombay, and from Bombay up country to Agra and back again. Anybody who consults [...] Cook's tourist guide-books, or any other indisputable authority, will discover that this was a most irrational tour; that the proper thing on the very face of it was to take rail from Calcutta across to Bombay, and so see 'Benares and all those places'. This was the unceasing [...] cry of our fellow planetpilgrims [...] 'Benares and all those places!' 'Darjiling and the Snows!' [...] 'You are going to miss all that?' (p. 345)

The sarcasm of the reference to 'indisputable authority' enacts a rejection of the pre-packaged impressions of India offered by the newly successful travel companies. Indeed, throughout the book the two women emphasize their ability to choose the most exquisite places and devote their time to them, rather than attempting to see all the well-known sights recommended in guidebooks. In Japan, the 'consummate charm' of Tokyo disinclines them for travel to other cities, since 'we agreed upon Orthodocia's theory, that once you get an Impression you ought to keep it inviolate' (p. 187). China is rejected entirely after a few hours spent contemplating the 'hideousness' (p. 213) of Hong Kong: 'We had no Baedeker or any such thing--Orthodocia wouldn't hear of buying one, for fear it would beguile us into staying' (p. 214). At Agra, they spend all their time at the Taj: 'in flat disobedience to Murray's "Handbook," we bestowed no thought or care upon Futtehpur Sikri, the deserted city, or Sikandarah with its sculptures, or the tomb of Itimud Dowlah [...] but jealously gave all the few hours we had left in Agra to Shah Jahan and Arjamand' (p. 400).

These examples indicate Duncan's desire to express her individuality and her taste through discriminating choice, and this reveals her close affinities with the European aesthetes of the late nineteenth century. Regenia Gagnier has recently explored the significance of choice in the theories of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and others. She describes the 'economizing aesthete' who is Pater's ideal, a person distinguished by an ability to choose amid a surplus of possible sensations, diversions, commodities, ornaments, and so forth. Similarly, she comments, Wilde's criticism testifies 'to his concern with taste, tact, style, subjectivism, and individualism. [...] Like the connoisseur Des Esseintes [in A Rebours] consuming the exotica of the world outside the West, Wilde was sensitive to the revelation of personality through choice and preference'. (23) The exercise of taste and choice requires wealth and involves commercial transactions, and Gagnier argues that 'virtually all the middle to late-Victorian aesthetes [...] were only too conscious of their own implication within consumer, or commodity, culture. [...] Economic man and aesthetic man converge in Pater's discriminating consumer of the art object' (p. 298). They converge likewise in Huysmans's Des Esseintes, and also the hero of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), who are conspicuous consumers of Oriental products and artworks (Gagnier, p. 302).

Duncan, too, was 'consuming the exotica of the world outside the West', both metaphorically in her search for new sensations, and literally in her many purchases in the curio shops and markets of Japan, India, and Egypt. In Japan, S. J. D. and Orthodocia spend much time in 'the marvellous, whimsical, quaint little shops' (p. 159), attracted more by the shops themselves than the goods they contain. In the bazaars of Cairo, their literal consumption of goods is explicitly related to their quest for impressions and 'authentic' Oriental experience:

The only merchants in the world live in the Khan el Khaleel. [...] There is somewhat about themselves of a subtler essence of barter, and somewhat about their goods, which are not gorgeous or wonderful, but full of quaint colour and conscious charm, that makes the only true merchandise of them. [...] Though as Orthodocia says, it may be only an after-glow of 'The Arabian Nights'.

'But one can see it all in Regent Street!' No, dear lady. Not the piles and piles of pointed Turkish sandals, red and yellow, flaming out against the shadows where one mysterious vista twists into another. Not the pale embroidered stuffs that age has withered into fancies more exquisite than any modern loom could imagine. [...] And if you can by chance buy a koran-holder, a set of doyleys [...] a brass lamp studded with coloured glass in London, what is it? You miss the profusion, the people, the bargaining, the delicious sense of making a tiny bit of all that picturesqueness your own. (pp. 436-37)

The reference to The Arabian Nights shows S. J. D. once again considering the influence of literary impressions previously received, while her dialogue with an imaginary, unadventurous reader values the atmospheric and aesthetic qualities of the bazaar above the actual goods acquired. This attitude diverges sharply from the ideals of more famous fictional collectors of Oriental goods. Huysmans's Des Esseintes and Wilde's Dorian Gray simply order their priceless exotica to be delivered to their homes, and Des Esseintes explicitly rejects the authentic experience of travel in favour of an imagined voyage: 'Travel, indeed, struck him as being a waste of time, since he believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience.' (24) Comparisons such as this reveal that although Duncan adopted the vocabulary and acknowledged the influence of the key decadent authors, her values and priorities were, ultimately, very far removed from theirs.

Their extensive shopping, it emerges, is one of the reasons for the unconventionality of Orthodocia and S. J. D.'s route around India. To one of the women urging her to see 'Benares, and all those places', Orthodocia replies: 'Madam, has it ever occurred to you that possibly we might not have enough money?' and S. J. D. adds: 'It never had--the notion that anybody could start on a journey round the world not financially equipped to explore every part of it was impossible to her. [...] Nothing is more discouraging to human curiosity than the revelation of penury, and the curio shops up to date had left us in possession of more penury than anything else' (p. 346). The limitation of their funds, together with their commonsensical outlook, saves them from the fate of the aristocratic decadents of European literature, whose excessive consumption leaves them with what Wilde calls 'that terrible taedium vitae that comes on those to whom life denies nothing' (p. 157). S. J. D. and Orthodocia, by contrast, cannot afford more than a tiny proportion of the goods they desire, and they also return from their trip without having become jaded by travel. Yet they have engendered in themselves a dissatisfaction with ordinary life, and this is precisely the malaise that motivates the central figures of European decadence in their extravagant pursuit of pleasure, sensation, and exoticism. 'After all', comments Duncan's narrator, 'there is no end; once go round the world and you are a fated traveller. Life condenses itself ever after into a desire to go again' (p. 347).

The main concerns of this essay may be drawn together in a brief analysis of one final passage from A Social Departure:

One day [the English language newspaper] told us of a bazaar to be given in aid of a hospital charity by 'the ladies of Tokio'. Orthodocia read this aloud in a displeased manner; then, in spite of the lingering Japanese idea in the garments of Mr Takayanagi's garden party and the indisputably Japanese flavour of the entremets at Mrs Jokichi Tomita's dinner, she made the following statements:

'We are too late for Japan!' she said bitterly. 'The island that once existed on this side of Asia has invented a new process of lacquer, with European designs, and disappeared under it. The 'ladies of Tokio!'--who ought to be playing their dear little samisens and sitting on their dear little heels--where are they? Molesting unprotected young Japanese gentlemen with entreaties to buy a lottery ticket for a handpainted pincushion.' [... Therefore] I advise you, if you want to see the Land of the Rising Sun in anything like pristine simplicity, to travel eastward soon, for already she is girt about with a petticoat, and presently she will want to vote. (p. 139)

The relationship between the two heroines, and the narrative function of Orthodocia, emerge with particular clarity here. Orthodocia is, as ever, faintly ridiculed for her exaggeration and melodrama, and yet the truth of her observation is admitted by her companion. The opinion is attributed to Orthodocia because it would compromise the tenacious, if low-key, feminism of her friend: she is, after all, treating Japanese women simply as picturesque objects. Orthodocia privileges her own desire for authentic impressions and is disappointed by encountering familiar patterns of female behaviour in an exotic location. But S. J. D., while sharing Orthodocia's regret to some extent, is equally concerned with the plight of Japanese wives, and therefore covertly criticizes her friend's attitude by emphasizing her blatantly patronizing vocabulary ('sitting on their dear little heels').

The accumulated metaphors in S. J. D.'s last sentence identify Japan itself as a feminine space, virginal ('pristine simplicity'), and eternally nascent ('Rising Sun'). The infantilization and feminization of non-western countries in orientalist mythology is here paralleled with the infantilization of women in patriarchal discourse. S. J. D.'s critique of the gender norms of Victorian Canada is amplified through the comparisons she draws between her own situation and that of women in the foreign countries she visits--as a Western woman, she shares the disenfranchized condition of 'the ladies of Tokio', and admires their new-found activity in the public sphere, represented in their work on behalf of the 'hospital charity'. She sees value in the advances towards social conscience and gender equality in Japan, but also laments over it as a culture in decay, because the beauty of its traditional lifestyle is being destroyed by the encroachment of the homogenizing capitalist and democratic structures of the West. In this passage, as so often in A Social Departure, there is a negotiation between feminist concerns and aesthetic concerns, that is, between sympathy for the repressed condition of Japanese women (and indeed women in general) on the one hand, and on the other, a desire to see 'the real Japan' and experience it as fully Oriental and uncontaminated by the cultural influence of Europe.

I would like to thank Sean Purchase for his wise comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

(1) A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World By Ourselves (London and New York: Nelson, n.d.), p. 83. Further references are given in the text.

(2) Duncan had experience as an editorial writer for the Washington Post and at twenty-five she had become the first woman to obtain a staff position on the Toronto Globe.

(3) Their articles were reprinted by several American editors. The Montreal Star (3 September 1888) reported the departure of Duncan and Lewis, noting that Duncan's 'letters will appear in Canada exclusively in the STAR. The right of publication in the United States has been secured by several important papers, including the New York World.

(4) For comments on differences between A Social Departure and the original newspaper articles, see Thomas E. Tausky, Sara Jeannette Duncan: Novelist of Empire (Port Credit, Ontario: Meany, 1980), pp. 58-60, 64. For the publication history of the book, see Marian Fowler, Redney: A Life of Sara Jeannette Duncan (1983; Markham, Ontario: Penguin, 1985), p. 186. A Social Departure was initially serialized in The Ladies' Pictorial before being published in volume form in London (Chatto & Windus) and New York (Appleton) in May 1890. Chatto & Windus were unable to sell the rights to a Canadian edition.

(5) Tausky notes that by 1903 it had sold 16,000 copies in the US alone (p. 54). William H. Butt, in an article that mentions A Social Departure in passing, notes that Duncan became, with this book, 'the first [...] writer to develop a large audience for Canadians' travel books' ('Canada's Mental Travellers Abroad', World Literature Written in English, 28.2 (1988), 287-307 (p. 289)). Tausky describes A Social Departure as 'an outstanding success' in terms of the reviews it received (p. 266), and Fowler comments, 'London spring reviews and Canadian summer ones were very enthusiastic' (p. 186). The endpaper of Duncan's An American Girl in London (2nd British edn) quotes seventeen favourable reviews of A Social Departure.

(6) Mrs Grundy is a prudish character mentioned, although never appearing, in Thomas Morton's play Speed the Plough (1798). Her neighbours are afraid of her censorious comments, and in the nineteenth century her name became synonymous with moralistic disapproval.

(7) It should be noted, however, that Duncan retained an unusual amount of autonomy as a married woman: she pursued her career, had very few domestic and no maternal responsibilities, and often lived for long stretches alone in England for professional reasons while her husband remained in India.

(8) 'Women Writers and the New Woman', in Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. by Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 589-606 (p. 593).

(9) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 95, 98.

(10) This was in her Toronto Globe columns of 1885 to 1887. See Misao Dean, A Different Point of View: Sara Jeannette Duncan (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), p. 17.

(11) Carole Gerson, 'Wild Colonial Girls: New Women of the Empire, 1883-1901', Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, 3.1 (Fall 1995), 61-77 (p. 65).

(12) Practising Femininity: Domestic Realism and the Performance of Gender in Early Canadian Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 57-58.

(13) She uses similar strategies in her two other novels about a pair of women living and travelling alone, Two Girls on a Barge (1891), and Two in a Flat (1908). The authorship of these two books was for some time in doubt, as they were published under pseudonyms--possibly because Duncan considered them inferior to her other work.

(14) Some of the men associated with aestheticism and decadence were also, as French critic Jean Pierrot points out, convinced of women's 'profound incapacity to achieve access to spiritual and artistic realms' (Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination 1800-1900, trans. by Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 126).

(15) 'The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890's', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 33.4 (March 1979), 434-53 (p. 436). Elaine Showalter similarly comments that their contemporaries 'saw connections between New Women and decadent men, as members of an avant garde attacking marriage and reproduction' in the introduction to Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siecle, ed. by Elaine Showalter (London: Virago, 1993), vii-xx (p. ix).

(16) 'How an American Girl Became A Journalist', repr. in Sara Jeannette Duncan: Selected Journalism, ed. by Thomas E. Tausky (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1978), pp. 6-12 (p. 9). Tausky found the article in Stirling Library, Yale University, but its date is unknown.

(17) Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; New York: New American Library, 1983), p. 145; Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 190.

(18) 'The Paintbrush and the Scalpel: Sara Jeannette Duncan Representing India', Canadian Literature, 132 (Spring 1992), 82-93 (p. 83).

(19) Washington Post, 15 November 1885 (quoted in Ramsay, p. 54).

(20) Howells asked to meet Duncan after reading one of her columns about him in 1886.

(21) '"Have You Packed the Porter?"', The Times Higher Education Supplement (12 July 2002), p. 17.

(22) 'The Flight to the Real', in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siecle, ed. by Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 11-21 (p. 14).

(23) Regenia Gagnier, 'Is Market Society the Fin of History?', in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siecle, pp. 290-310 (pp.301, 302). Pater's 'economizing aesthete' is described in his Essay on Style in Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (1889; Oxford: Blackwell, 1973).

(24) J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. by Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), p. 35.

FAYE HAMMILL

University of Cardiff