How Not to Be Elizabeth Gilbert [Archive.org URL]

Gilbert has inspired a whole niche of faux travel writing by women. […] In this genre, the focus of attention is the self, and the beautiful locale becomes the backdrop of the real action, which is interior psychodrama.

These writers position themselves against the iconic travel writer who is, of course, male. From Sir Richard Francis Burton to Bruce Chatwin to Paul Theroux, the traveler is an essentially masculine force, driven by the need to conquer, to experience life at its extremes, but most of all to explain. This travel writer not only goes off to see what he can see but also becomes a kind of expert witness who explains the natives to interested parties at home.

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Traditional travel writing surely needed to be infiltrated and broken apart, its masculine tropes challenged. But the popular female travel narrative has overcorrected in a serious way; these writers are experts only on their own selves.

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Women travel writers such as Freya Stark copy the male template in both travel and writing style. That the market has not sustained their work may have more to do with our expectations as readers than with any faults of their writing. We still look to men to tell us about what they do and to women to tell us how they feel.

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That compassion resists both the notion that the people you meet would be happier if they were more like you and the modern impulse to turn these people into daemons helping you on your journey toward enlightenment. The way we deny other people’s humanity might change over time, but it has the same result.

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…the purpose of travel writing has changed as travel itself has changed and become more accessible. Listening is less important when readers no longer rely on written accounts to transport them vicariously to places they would never have the opportunity to see for themselves. Today’s writing is more aspirational. The travel writer sells not only lovely prose and insights into a new land but also the lifestyle of the rootless and adventurous. Yet, when you establish your life and yourself as goals to aspire to, you take yourself out of the world. Every interaction is sculpted for its eventual presentation, and the aim of every presentation is to show how wonderful your life is. Since we seem these days to judge the best life not as one marked by compassion and connection but as a sensual experience of exotic foods, insider knowledge, and Instagram-able landscapes, everything that doesn’t incite the envy of the writer’s followers gets cut out. If your life is an aspiration, you are a beacon, not a human, and you talk rather than listen.

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Any travel writer who deviates from gender-defined roles risks being overlooked. And that is a shame because we do not need men to explain the world’s far-off reaches to us anymore. It turns out the inhabitants of the far-off reaches have voices of their own. Nor do we still need women to tell us it is fine to set up a life outside of marriage and family. What we do need are more writers willing to break free of travel writing’s colonialist tendencies, whether expressed as contempt for backward others or admiration for their “authenticity” and guidance. On the other side of this dehumanization are compassion and the will to listen.