The Glamour of Exotica and Erotica: The Travel Writing of Isabella Stewart Gardner

Abstract

This article explores the travel writing of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924), a Boston socialite who, over the course of nearly thirty years (1867–1895), toured the world and documented her trips through journals, albums and extensive correspondence with confidants such as novelist Henry James. It argues that because of its transgressive elements, specifically its depiction of nineteenth-century taboos such as the exotic, erotic and macabre, Gardner’s travel writing provides significant, yet complex, insight into the art collector’s life, even though like her museum, it is carefully curated. Moreover, this article underscores how, on one hand, such travel writing served as a counternarrative to rigid Victorian social and cultural codes, while on the other, it provided women like Gardner with a problematic discursive space to negotiate orientalist and imperialist authority and power.