Colonial Geographies, Imperial Romances: Travels in Japan with Ellen Churchill Semple and Fannie Caldwell Macaulay

Abstract

In 1911, geographer Ellen Churchill Semple and novelist Fannie Caldwell Macaulay departed on an eighteen-month tour around the world. Semple was planning to do fieldwork in Japan, where Macaulay had lived from 1902 to 1907. This paper examines the texts that Semple and Macaulay produced as a result of their experiences in Japan: two articles published in geographical journals by Semple and Macaulay's novelsThe Lady of the DecorationandThe Lady and Sada San. Travel and travel writing were one of the key ways in which white women manifested their cultural authority. Although their texts had very different purposes and audiences, Semple and Macaulay both drew upon and contributed to Orientalist discourses. In both cases, the women's authority ultimately derived from their positions as representatives of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant American culture, and their work helped reinforce U.S. power and the legitimacy of imperialism. By producing texts that criticized those aspects of non-Western societies that diverged from Western norms and praising those areas in which they conformed, they affirmed the superiority of Western, and specifically American, culture.