“Sentimental Plots” in Women’s Travelogues of the First Half of the 19th Century

This article examines the process of fictionalization of documentary material in various forms of women’s travelogue (travel diaries, letters and travel essays). The study of individual modifications of “sentimental plots” reveals the specifics of the narrative structure and the ways of expressing the author’s personality. We explored three representative but little-studied women’s documentary travelogues of the first half of the 19th century: “Ekaterina Sverbeeva’s Diary for 1833”, an anonymous travelogue “Excerpts from letters of a lady about Revel”, published in two issues of the magazine “Son of the Fatherland” in 1828, and “Essays on Southern France and Nice. From the travel notes of 1840 and 1842” by M. Zhukova. The results obtained show that the “sentimental plots” in women’s travelogues of the first half of the 19th century perform various functions. On the one hand, fictionalization, namely orientation to the “sentimental canon” of travelogue, lets the female traveler focus on describing the “life of the soul”, on self-presentation. It allows correlating her condition and impression with the stereotypical worldview of a “sensitive heroine” in sentimental stories. The central image is always a female with a tragic fate (as a variant of the plot situation “seduced and abandoned”), which causes sympathy, depicts the position of women in society, induces speculation on the “women’s issue” and induces philosophical evaluation of the fate of women in general. On the other hand, various modifications of the “sentimental plots” reflect the specifics of the author’s position in the narrative structure of the traveler’s text. In earlier texts, attempts to draw an analogy with one’s own fate, to see oneself as the heroine of a sentimental plot, or to describe one’s life according to a traditional “sensitive scheme” are more common. In the period of the 1840s and 1850s, the travelogue demonstrates the irony and self-irony of the traveler, the desire to deliberately distance herself from the template, evaluate her individuality, and understand the inconsistency of the canon in a new cultural paradigm.