Die Wirklichkeit ist Anders’

For the Austrian traveller Ida Pfeiffer, visiting China in the aftermath of the First Opium War, the tension between East and West jeopardises freedom and safety. In Eine Frauenfahrt um die Welt, she constructs and re‐constructs both the reality of China and her own identity as a traveller. Her construction of the reality of China and of her own situation emerges from the ambivalence of her own position within the discourses of patriarchy, gender, class and colonialism. Although she claims only to be a truthful observer, her narrative shows that she adopts narrative strategies familiar from earlier travel writing, mainly by men. Her experience challenges these strategies and forces her to examine received views of China and the Chinese. Chinese hostility to foreigners, especially to women, shows her that the exotic ‘other’ resists and resents appropriation and this resistance places her in an intense form of the dependency from which women travellers are trying to escape. Although she is inevitably implicated in Western activity in the East, her humane sympathy and scepticism transcend colonialist attitudes. Finally her departure from China allows her to embrace the provisional stance of the traveller whose identity and opinions change with every move

Ambivalence · Appropriation · Art · China · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Sympathy · Gender Studies · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · Law · Linguistic research and analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology