2. Travel writing and gender
Margery Kempe (c. 1373-1438)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)
Victorian lady travelers
Exceptional, determined, less authoritarian,
credible/reliable, the everyday experience,
private vs. public,
3. Rediscovering women travelers
Spinsters Abroad (1989), Ladies on the
Loose: Women Travelers of the 18th and
19th Centuries (1981); The Blessings of A
Good, Thick Skirt (1988)
4. Brief Introduction (The Trio, CIM, The
Gobi Desert)
Femininity Revisited (women travelers,
missionaries)
The Image of the Desert (barren vs. fertile)
Their Journey, Their Home
5. Mildred Cable 蓋群英(1878-1952)
Evangeline French 馮貴珠(1869-1960)
Francesca French 馮貴石(1871-1960)
Through Jade Gate and Central Asia (1927)
A Desert Journal (1934)
The Gobi Desert (1942)
6.
7. Brief Introduction
As they are called, “The Trio”: Mildred
Cable, Francesca and Evangeline French are
probably the most well-known Western
women missionaries in modern times for
their crossing and re-crossing the Gobi
Desert five times between 1923 and 1936.
They were the first Christians in the region
since Nestorians in the sixth century, and
they were the last.
8. How is their femininity manifested
‘In the past, the few women who left their
European or North American homes to
travel to “exotic” and possibly dangerous
places in “foreign lands,” quite frequently
did so to escape the strictures on women in
their own societies.’ (Holcomb 1993: 11)
9. Mildred wrote, ‘Womanhood needed
education, training and emancipation in
every form.’
Women and their predicament in Chinese
society remained the Trio’s chief concern.
10. The Image of the Desert
The Gobi had so lured me on and fascinated
me with its strange charm that I had almost
forgotten its terrors in exploring the unique
beauty of its hidden treasures. Its silence
had rested me, and its spaciousness had
given me a sense of expansion to my spirit,
but now it sternly recalled me to a
realization of the severity which also
formed a part of its discipline’ (p. 84).
11. Once the spirit of the desert had caught us it lured
us on and we became learners in its severe school.
(p.11)
My course would now lie over a sea of sand, and
as the seafaring man stands as the prow of his
vessel and looks across the trackless waste of
waters, so I stood on a small desert eminence and I
looked over the boundless plain. My first feeling
had been a sense of liberation which was
intoxicating. (pp. 288-89)
12. Their Journey, Their Home
Referring to John Banyan’s The Pilgrim’s
Progress, Mildred claimed that she also felt the
same way as he did, ‘I come from the City of
Destruction and am going to the Celestial City.
These were Christian’s focal points; ‘the goal is
definite and must be reached. Plains, deserts,
mountains, small stages, and even large towns, are
but incidental to the main objective of the journey’
(p. 128).
13. Mixture of Marco Polo’s The Travel and
John Banyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress with
a feminist twist.
They adopted a deaf and dumb 7-year-old
child and called her Topsy (蓋愛憐), which
demonstrated their true commitment to God
and Christian virtues.
