‘For I am always classed with the buckherd’: constructing gendered identities in

Edith Durham’s travel writing, 1904-1909

Since the 1990s there has been a consistent academic interest in the study of Victorian

and Edwardian women’s travel writing that had been buried under the ‘Western

cultural truism that Penelope waits while Odysseus voyages’ (Lawrence, 1994, p. xi).

Much of this scholarship has been informed by feminist theory and examines the

ways in which mobility abroad offered women ways of ‘becoming someone who did

not exist at home’ (Bassnett, 2002, p. 234). Studies informed by postcolonial and

postmodern feminism demonstrate that Western women held a more ambiguous

relationship to colonialism than their male counterparts as they were ‘colonised by

gender but colonisers by race’ (Ghose, 1998, p. 5). As Sara Mills (1991) argues, the

complex position of Western women vis-à-vis colonialism prevents them from

adopting colonial discourses as easily as their male counterparts. As a result, their

travel writing is comprised of discourses of conflict with contradictory articulations of

race, class and gender producing fragmented and unstable narrative personas.

Postcolonial and postmodern feminism have unsurprisingly directed their

attention towards travel writing about countries that experienced Western colonial

administration. However, as this paper will argue, the same fragmented narrative

personas can be found in the travel books written by Edith Durham about the Balkans

during the Edwardian period, namely Through the Lands of the Serb (1904), The

Burden of the Balkans (1905) and High Albania (1909).

Image 1.
Durham was born in 1863 into an upper middle-class family in Mayfair and first

travelled to the Balkans in 1900 as an escape from a life of domesticity. As she later

wrote, during her years of domesticity ‘the future stretched before me as endless years

of grey monotony, and escape seemed hopeless’ (1920, p. 9). In her travel writing it

appears that Durham was attracted to the Balkans as the peninsula’s remoteness,

dangerous reputation and subtle exoticism was antithetical to the home and hearth of

domesticity. Her journeys in the region, then, can be read as an attempt to reject the

values of bourgeois female interiority.

This is most evident in the androcentric narratorial position she adopts. One

way she does so is by insistently reaffirming her position as an authentic and

individualistic traveller as opposed to the superficial tourist. By the early twentieth

century the appellation of ‘tourist’ had become distinctly feminised. It was associated

with the domesticated travel offered by ocean liners and trains, which were

understood as ‘catering to the disabling characteristics of dependent femininity’

(Smith, 2001, p. 25). Durham establishes an authoritative and individualistic narrative

persona within the opening pages of Through the Lands of the Serb. As she puts it,

Dalmatia has ‘its charms, but tourists swarm here and the picturesque corners are

being rapidly pulled down to provide suitable accommodation’ (1904, p. 3),

suggesting that dehumanised masses of tourists are dulling the colourful otherness

that makes for an authentic travelling experience. Evidently worried that allowing her

text to linger in touristic Dalmatia might undermine her claims to authority she adds,

‘Let us pass on, then, nor pause until we have … landed on the quay at Cattaro’

(1904, p. 3) so as to quickly progress the narrative onto Montenegro which was

further beyond the beaten track. Indeed, it is only in more remote locations that she is
able to foreground her individualism and authority and where her status as a Western

woman meant that she was ‘classed with the buck-herd’ (1909, p. 64).

Durham’s construction of a narratorial persona that positions her antithetically

to tourists can be interpreted as an attempt to integrate herself within conventionally

masculine traditions of exploration. Her travel narratives are regularly driven by her

attempts to claim what Dea Birkett calls a ‘first’ (1991, p. 125), such as being the first

Western European to travel to a remote location. This theme is especially prominent

in High Albania in which she describes her determination to reach remote Muslim

villages. These villages are described as ‘the Lhassa [sic] of Europe’ (1909, p. 131),

suggesting that she understood her journey to the remote reaches of Albania as

paralleling the Younghusband expedition that opened Tibet to the British just a few

years before. After reaching the villages she is pleased to find that she is ‘said to be

the first foreign female … and the first foreigner of any sort’ (1909, p. 138) that had

visited. By stressing her achievements, Durham clearly attempts to elevate her

narratorial position into the ranks of authoritative and masculine explorers who

throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries filled in the remaining blank

spaces on Britain’s map of the world.

Image 2.

In remote locations Durham foregrounds the qualities of strength and fortitude in the

face of adversity typically embodied by masculine protagonists in the colonial travel

literature. Durham positions herself as willing to risk her life in order to undertake the

journey – ‘I was ready to “see Gusinje or die”’ – and she recounts overcoming near-

insurmountable physical obstacles, including plunging cliffs, snow fields, mountains

that ‘looked like a wall at the end of the world’, and boulders that ‘crashed down from

… above’ (1909, pp. 132-134). Her narrative persona also displays a quick wittedness

for she outwits potentially hostile indigenous peoples by concealing her Western

belongings and posing as the sister-in-law of her guide. The narratorial position of the

disguised Westerner penetrating ‘forbidden’ Islamic cultures is one of immense

textual power for it at once demonstrates great knowledge of a foreign culture to the

home audience and asserts authority over indigenous peoples for they are represented

as being tricked by disguise. Durham’s gender, however, complicates her

conventionally masculine narratorial position as her experiment in disguise sees her

adopt the position of an indigenous woman. This puts her in the curious situation of

being able to access the remote Muslim villages but constantly having to ‘remember

that I was in a Moslem land, and hold my tongue’ (1909, p. 137) with her gender,

then, undercutting her position of textual authority.

Durham’s travel writing is replete with fissures that reveal the difficulty she

has in adopting an exploring narratorial persona, a masculine point of enunciation that

clashes with discourses of femininity that sought to make the propriety and interiority

associated with the role of the Angel of the House appear ‘natural’ for bourgeois

women. At times Durham mitigates against her narratorial position by subordinating

her writing to the authoritative and masculine knowledge of ‘the diplomat, the

geographer, the archaeologist’ who she cannot ‘pretend to be able to teach’ (1905, p.

viii). At other moments she writes that ‘the West arose in me and would not be

gainsaid’ (1905, p. 131) and then seeks to reaffirm feminine respectability by

stressing conformance to Western conceptions of women’s dress and decorum. These

gender performances are also by extension the performative consumption of

‘civilisation’ and are a means by which Durham highlights her distance from and

superiority over the Balkan other.

Image 3.

Most interestingly is when Durham deflates her adventuring persona through humour.

After arriving at Lake Shköder Durham is rowed across the lake on a canoe with

‘chairs arranged … as a sort of throne at one end’. Parodying scenes where the

colonial explorer is carried on a litter or rowed upstream ceremoniously by ‘natives’,

Durham uses humour to undercut her straightforwardly masculine narratorial position.

Unlike the omniscient imperial male who swiftly penetrates foreign lands, Durham

makes ‘wobbly progress’ before being ‘catapulted’ into the lake: ‘a vision of grey

skirts, a splash!’. This comical scene ends with her arriving ashore ‘dripping and

streaming’ and improvising new clothing to ensure her propriety (1904, pp.72-73). In

this instance, Durham uses self-deprecating humour to show both the textual and

literal difficulty faced by women trying to adopt the guise of the masculine

adventuring hero with her apparently feminine fallibility destabilising the

authoritative colonial statements and positions she enunciates.

Durham’s travel writing, then, can be read as both a feminist rejection of the

values of female interiority through travel and as a set of texts that regularly reaffirm

conservative concepts of respectable femininity. In this way, her writings clearly

display the same fractured narratorial personas that are regularly present in Western

women’s travel writing on colonial contexts and as such must be treated as sites of

discursive indecipherability.
Bibliography

Bassnett, Susan, ‘Travel Writing and Gender’, in (eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs),
The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), pp. 225-241.

Birkett, Dea, Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers (London: Victor Gollancz,
1991).

Durham, M. Edith, Through the Lands of the Serb (London: Edward Arnold, 1904).

_______________, The Burden of the Balkans (London: Edward Arnold, 1905).

_______________, High Albania (London: Edward Arnold, 1909).

_______________, Twenty Years of the Balkan Tangle (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1920).

Ghose, Indira, Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Lawrence, Karen R., Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the Literary Tradition
(Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1994).

Mills, Sara, Discourses of Difference: An analysis of women’s travel writing and

colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991).

Images:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photography_Collection_of_Edith_Du
rham.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Edith_Durham.