Cumming, Constance

Abstract

Constance Cumming’s life and travel writing manifested key issues: gender (the female traveler), class (the aristocrat), history (belated traveling in an explored world), biography and context (traveling not solo but within support systems), ideology and institutionalization (travel writing’s “use” factor), and aesthetics (the travelogues’ varied nature and popularity). One must understand the appeal of Cumming’s travelogues in relation to her art and primarily the picturesque, as well as that her travelogues are ideologically conservative, racialist, and often orientalist. They signal the shift from traveler to tourist and are detached from local life, despite the habitual celebration of missionary work. Yet her descriptions are lively, detailed, forceful, and/or “indiscriminate” and “purposeless”’ – which Eastlake saw as characteristic of female travel writing (99–100).