Abstract
Through encounters with “others,” travel can enable the discovery or reconstruction of oneself. Margaret R. Higonnet argues that in response to the American Revolution and the Franco-Prussian War, nineteenth-century fictions for children linked voyages to the shaping of a nation out of disparate regions and social elements. She finds that in Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827, Hope Leslie: Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts. Ed. M. Kelley. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press) and G. Bruno’s Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (1877, Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: Devoir et patrie, livre de lecture courante avec 200 gravures instructives pour leçons de choses. Paris: Belin), historical conflicts and displacements traumatized children at the same time as conditions of violence enabled them to become social actors in a period of nation formation. Threads that run through these texts are the mapping of difference, the memory of the historical past, and the invention of a “national family.” The two women authors project new nations as non-violent imagined communities.
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Notes
- 1.
First published as Le Tour de France par deux enfants: Devoir et patrie; this title changed in 1878 to Le Tour de la France... In dozens of later editions the author, Augustine Tuillerie Fouillée (pseudonym G. Bruno), added new material and secularized her text.
- 2.
I use “orphan” here, as in the Oxford English Dictionary and the UNICEF protocols, to include children who are either fatherless or motherless.
- 3.
- 4.
Her endnotes refer to Governor John Winthrop’s History of New England, 1630–1649, Benjamin Trumbull’s Complete History of Connecticut, and William Hubbard’s Indian Wars, which she read in the 1814 edition.
- 5.
Bradford’s manuscript was drawn on by eighteenth-century historians of the war against the Pequods.
- 6.
Sedgwick used the 1814 edition of Hubbard’s Narrative of the Indian Wars, from which she quotes passages about the deaths of the Pequods as well as Governor Winthrop’s protection of Mononotto’s wife and children (Hubbard 1814, 46–7).
- 7.
The title of the 1884 edition specifies 212 instructive engravings and nineteen maps.
- 8.
Hesba Stretton (pseudonym of Sarah Smith) published a novel, Max Krömer: A Story of the Siege of Strasbourg (1871), about the misery she observed among Alsatian women and children following the Siege of Strasbourg. Marah Gubar (2009) has offered a reading of this novel’s pacifism in the first chapter of her book. While the two works by Stretton and Bruno could be compared, the themes and narrative strategies presented in this chapter are specific to Bruno’s text.
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Higonnet, M.R. (2017). Travel as Construction of Self and Nation. In: O'Sullivan, E., Immel, A. (eds) Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children's Literature. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_12
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