Women and Journeys
As John Gartner once said, there are only two plots in all of literature, either the main character goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Women have however never been the one going on a journey or a stranger that comes to town. Though women have longed to explore the world, they have always been denied participation in public life. “Women and Journeys” by Mary Morris discusses this problem. Mary Morris describes the differences in acceptability and possibility of travelling for the different genders. Historically it has always been the men who went out explore the world, while women stayed at home. This division continued up through time. Women were limited in order to keep them at home. In the western world women were to wear corsets. Significantly the bindings in the corsets were called “stays”. The corsets kept women from going far and from going fast, since corsets are very tightly bound together. In the eastern world women’s feet were broken repeatedly, in order to bend the toes under the bottom of the feet. This made it completely impossible for women to walk, since it was extremely hurtful. Eventually the women’s feet were caught with gangrene, which caused death. So not only were women psychologically restricted from going anywhere, there were literally restricted physically as well
As a cause of the conditions women only got to experience the part where a stranger comes to town. As the feminist Elaine Showalter said it: ”Emotions rushed in to fill the vacuum of experience.” Women filled the empty space they had with their emotions, which made women’s literature overly romantic, because women showed their emotions through literature. On the opposite site men’s literature is a lot about conquering the world and going on adventures. Also, all the great explorers through time have been men, as an example you could mention Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo. Through time it has also always been the father who went out travelling, while the mother stayed at home with the kids. This is something has happened very close to me, as my father travelled a lot when I was small. He was a business man, and he often went on business trips, while my mother stayed at home with me and my brother. This has probably changed a bit over the last years, as women have started to focus more on career and this have been accepted by the world, which shows how far we have come with equality.
Mary Morris also mentions her own mother as an example of a woman with big dreams, but who also was being held back by her husband who did not want to travel. It’s pretty obvious that Mary Morris thinks that her mother should’ve realized her dreams about travelling the world, instead of just dreaming about it for a lifetime. Her mother only lives out this dream at the Supressed Desire Ball, where she spends weeks on making an amazing costume. The costume is the world, which shows the mother’s big dreams of exploring the world. Although Mary Morris’ mother never got to explore the world, she had a great impact on Mary Morris, and Mary Morris ended up living out her mother’s dreams. She didn’t want to spend her life wasting time dreaming big but not doing anything about those dreams. She didn’t want to become another Penelope, she didn’t to be the kind of woman who waited for her husband to come back, she wanted to be the stranger who comes to town, which she indeed ended up being. She ended up travelling all over the world on great adventures.
And as Mary Morris says in the end of the text; women now have the opportunity to be the stranger who comes to town, which is a big improvement from what conditions women have lived under throughout history. Women and men have become a lot more equal, which have made it possible for women to form their own life and their own destiny, they are no longer as dependent on a man as before. The acceptability in travelling no longer only counts for men, women can go explore the world without being judged as a “bad woman”, and this improvement for women is truly amazing.