10.13125/2039-6597/3531
Travel literature is by nature a genre characterized by a high degree of hybridity, difficult to place within rigid or predefined categories: it weaves together numerous issues related to the historical moment, to the socio-cultural origin of the author, to the destination, to the literary influences, to the objectives of the journey.
application/pdf
2039-6597
3531
16
it
Claudia Cao
Between
Silvia Antosa, <i>Frances Elliot and Italy. Writing Travel, Writing the Self</i>
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
8
Between the Texts/Reviews: Ed. Giulio Iacoli, Beatrice Seligardi, Claudia Cao
2018-12-12
2018-12-11
2018-12-02
2018-12-12
1
Claudia Cao
2018/12/12
10.13125/2039-6597/3531
2039-6597
16
en
Silvia Antosa, <i>Frances Elliot and Italy. Writing Travel, Writing the Self</i>
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/3531/3121
8
                 Silvia Antosa
            Frances Elliot and Italy.
         Writing Travel, Writing the Self
              Milano-Udine, Mimesis, 2018, 153 pp.
      Travel literature is by nature a genre characterized by a high degree
of hybridity, difficult to place within rigid or predefined categories: it
weaves together numerous issues related to the historical moment, to
the socio-cultural origin of the author, to the destination, to the literary
influences, to the objectives of the journey. The same subject who writes
during or after the experience of the travel is at the centre of a field of
tensions in contact with the culture, the places, the history, and the
populations of the destination country. All of these factors modify the
focus, the style, and the choice of literary references.
      Framing the travel production of Frances Elliot (1820-1898) means,
first of all, addressing this set of issues actualised by the experience both
of the journey and of its writing. The dialectic between these two poles,
as seen in the subtitle – Writing Travel, Writing the Self – is central to this
volume, which insists on the two-fold value of Elliot’s work: her
writings were meant not only as an instrument of exploration and
discovery of the Italian reality, but, at the same time, as an instrument of
liberation and empowerment for herself and her readers, in particular
women.
      The key thesis of Antosa’s book is the idea of the construction, by
means of travel writing, of «new ‘orientation devices’ with which Elliot
can forge new ways of narrating, perceiving and constructing an
empowered identity for herself» (87).
      A rich heiress of the British upper class, divorced after a long trial
for mistreatment, remarried and mother of four daughters, Elliot had



Between, vol. VIII, n. 16 (Novembre/November 2018)
Silvia Antosa, Frances Elliot and Italy. Writing Travel, Writing the Self (Claudia Cao)



experienced different forms of «“misalignment”» (19): using the
definition offered by Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology (2006), Antosa
describes the condition of the author before and during her travels in
Italy as «the feeling of uncomfortable disorientation experienced and
narrated by queer subjectivities in a heteronormative system» (ibid.).
Even if for most women of the upper class, travels in Europe were in fact
devoid of cultural and professional purposes, it is in this experience of
misalignment that it is possible to find one of the central motivations of
Elliot’s journey and stay in Italy. Her works express her search for a
personal space of representation, free from social constraints. This is
especially the case for the writings concerning the most unsettling and
unusual destination for a woman: Sicily, for its contradictions – the
contemporary social and cultural degradation and its fascinating past–,
for the monstrous beauty of Mount Etna difficult for her to define, is the
place where she had «the opportunity to explore the liberating potential
offered by writing» (129).
      Antosa focuses on Elliot’s writings on Italy, as it is here that Elliot
spent most of her life, and approaches them through a multiplicity of
questions and analytical perspectives. Antosa prefaces her analysis with
a rich introduction that frames her works both with respect to the genre
of travel literature, and within the critical-theoretical debate.
Particularly central to Antosa’s methodological approach is the concept
of a «contact zone» (13) elaborated by Mary Louise Pratt (1991; 1992)
which allows Antosa to reconcile the two tracks on which this study
moves: writing travel and writing the identity.
      Another focal point in the first part of the book is that of women
writing travel. After tracing a history of travel narrative, the creation of
cultural memory around Italy, and the ways in which Southern Italy in
particular has been «conceptualized in relation to the “web of
intertextual references and allusions” left by the British over the
centuries»(26), the scholar offers an overview of Elliot’s women
predecessors, emphasizing, too, the way in which her approach to travel
and writing is detached from these models.
      Elliot’s early work, even before her travel writing, was marked by
a polemical and anti-Catholic thread as well as an ironic tone and a sense


2
                                Between, vol. VIII, n. 16 (Novembre/November 2018)



of disenchantment. This returns in her writings on Italy, along with the
recurrent motif of disappointment with respect to expectations. Here,
for instance, the visit to Rome confirms the sense of performativity of
the Catholic Church’s rituals, aimed at attracting the masses. The critical
attitude towards the hypocrisy of the surrounding society is the same
that she adopts also in relation to the literary models of reference, often
parodied.
      The narrative strategies highlighted over the course of this study
corroborate Antosa’s basic thesis, which claims that writing and
research for a new identity are closely interrelated in Elliot’s work,
aimed at building a mobile self and overcoming trauma and stigma. It is
in fact with the writings on Italy and from Italy that the Victorian author
manages to complete the process of reinvention and reorientation of her
“misaligned” self. Despite Elliot’s ambivalent relationship with Italy – a
relationship encompassing both detached judgment and ecstatic
admiration – the journeys through Tuscany, Rome and Sicily represent
for the Victorian author the opening of «a different space and temporal
zone» (120) in which she is free to follow desires and ambitions, in
contrast with the Victorian social norm.
      This path through Elliot’s writings on Italy – travelogues, social
stories, and articles – is at the same time a path of development towards
a new self-awareness: «through writing» – Antosa affirms – «she started
to transform her embodied feelings of uncomfortable ‘disorientation’
and ‘misalignment’ with the sociocultural context in which she lived […]
in order to pave the way for different […] forms of inhabitance» (77).
      Silvia Antosa’s book certainly has the merit of being the first book
to offer a critical analysis of Elliot’s work: her archival work brings to
light an author very well-known in her own time but forgotten during
the twentieth century, and who with her writing has not only offered a
cross-section of Italian society of the second half of the nineteenth
century, but has also enriched contemporary gender studies on
Victorian women writing.




                                                                                3
Silvia Antosa, Frances Elliot and Italy. Writing Travel, Writing the Self (Claudia Cao)




                                       The author
Claudia Cao

       Claudia Cao worked as a Research Fellow on the research project
“Sisters and sisterhood in literature and other arts”, publishing the book
Sorellanze nella narrativa inglese tra le due guerre (Morellini 2018). During
her PhD she worked on rewritings of Great Expectations, also publishing
the book Le riscritture di Great Expectations. Sei letture del classico
dickensiano (Mimesis 2016). She is editorial supervisor of Between.

        Email: cao.claudiac@gmail.com



                                       The review
Date sent: 15/10/2018
Date accepted: 30/10/2018
Date published: 30/11/2018



                           How to quote this review
Cao, Claudia, “Silvia Antosa, Frances Elliot and Italy. Writing Travel,
Writing the Self”, Schermi. Rappresentazioni, immagini, transmedialità, Eds.
F. Agamennoni, M. Rima, S. Tani, Between, VIII.16 (2018),
http://www.betweenjournal.it




4
