Women Adrift

Travel is an enterprise requiring a certain degree of camouflage. Travelers prepare for their encounters and negotiations with other social settings, languages, and physical surroundings, by donning protective lotions and garb, in an attempt to erase or accentuate the distance between Self and Other.2 For women traveling through the Caribbean, this enterprise becomes a complex act, necessitating pretexts, smoke screens, and masks. The discourse of travel, then, whether written or spoken by/about mobile women, is difficult to control and categorize because of the diversity of voices, each imbued with varying strategies and intentions. When writing focuses on singular women travelers—the Nun of Alferez (Catalina de Erauso), pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Josephine and Pauline Bonaparte (wife and sister of Napoleon Bonaparte, respectively), or Adèle Hugo (daughter of Victor Hugo)—each remarkable in her own way—the multiplicity of accounts and interpretations of their trajectories is astoundingly heterogeneous, rendering them legendary as much by hyperbolic renditions as by the impossibility of knowing which of the versions best reflects the circulating bodies behind the texts. These subjects of travel are made to clash with or conform to moral and aesthetic parameters, first provoking titillation, then reassuring that social order has been restored.