The traveller’s eye. The place of male and female narratives in nineteenth-century travelogues: the Franklins in Van Diemen’s Land

Abstract

The narratives of Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin are parallel accounts occupying the same and different gendered spaces. A woman of privileged class, Lady Jane Franklin was both the observed and the observer, inhabiting a space that was public and private while her husband, fulfilling the myth of the heroic explorer, moved within the public sphere, mapping the colony in a patriarchal fashion. This paper compares and contrasts the Franklins' reading of Van Diemen's Land and examines their individual contributions to British imperialism as privileged scribes, fulfilling the role of energising the myth of Empire.