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Journal of Historical Geography, 22, 1 (1996) 68–83

Paradise or pandemonium? West Africanlandscapes in the travel accounts ofVictorian women

Cheryl McEwan

Recent attempts to include women in histories of geography have often drawn on thework of women travel writers in the British empire. Research to date has tended tofocus on discourse theory, and the spatial context of the journey has been somewhatneglected. In their efforts to assert that travel writing is an essentially gendered formof representation, several theorists have failed to recognize the complexities in thevarying responses to and depictions of overseas territories by women travellers. Thispaper emphasizes the importance of the regional context of the journey by analysinglandscape descriptions in the narratives of Victorian women travellers in West Africa.It explores how women travel writers contributed to the popular geographies of WestAfrica in Victorian Britain and, more specifically, investigates the extent to which theimages contained in their narratives were informed by, or challenged, Britain’s myth ofthe “Dark Continent” during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It alsoanalyses how the temporal context of the journey, the evolving nature of British imperialculture, and contemporaneous ideas about romanticism, “wilderness” and “sanctuary”,were important factors in the landscape descriptions of West Africa by women travellers.

1996 Academic Press Limited

Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest, particularly in cultural studies andliterary theory, in travel writing.[1] The renewed interest has also captured the attentionof geographers, particularly with regard to imperial travel writing, and several authorshave made the case for interpreting travel writing, both contemporary and historical,as a form of geography.[2]

Increasingly, gender has also become an important concern in analyses of travelnarratives. Much of the research into women travel writers has taken place in disciplinesoutside geography, in particular, anthropology and history, and within discourse theory.[3]

However, feminist geographers have begun to produce theoretical critiques of bothtravel writing and imperialism. Mona Domosh refers to women travel writers in hercontention that historiographies of geography should incorporate feminist approaches.However, by claiming women travel writers in a disciplinary sense she ignores the factthat these women did not consider themselves geographers and fails to address theimperialist implications of both their travels and their narratives. Alison Blunt’sexploration of the narratives of Mary Kingsley addresses this very point. Blunt offersa critical reading of the social, cultural and intellectual context of British imperialismand of the complex relationships between white women travellers and the empire. Herthesis is a persuasive argument about the place of women in historiographies of

680305–7488/96/010068+16 $12.00/0 1996 Academic Press Limited

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geography.[4] Nineteenth-century women travellers cannot be claimed in a disciplinarysense since they did not consider themselves geographers and, ultimately, did notcontribute to the establishment of geography as an academic discipline. However, inpublishing accounts of their travels at a time when travel writing was extremely popular,and also an important medium for the dissemination of “knowledge” about overseasterritories, women travellers were important in the production of popular geographies.The term popular geographies, therefore, refers here to the creation of images of WestAfrica and its peoples outside academic and scientific discourse, but available for masspublic consumption. They were especially important because the vast majority of peoplein Victorian Britain did not have the opportunity to experience overseas territoryfirst-hand. Popular geographies were created through a variety of media, includingadvertising, colonial fiction and travel writing,[5] and women’s contributions to thesepopular geographies merits investigation, particularly in light of recent critical readingsof travel narratives by women.

Early critiques of women travellers and their narratives tended to treat both as amonolithic category from which conclusions about an essential “feminine” genre oftravel writing or experience of empire can be drawn.[6] More recent theoretical critiqueshave sought to address this problem. For example, Alison Blunt confronts issues ofsubjectivity and produces an in-depth reading of one narrative by a single women; SaraMills suggests that travel writing by men and women is not always “fundamentallyand necessarily different”, but that the gendered context of imperialism always makesa difference to the construction and reception of the text; Billie Melman argues thatgender is important as an analytical concept only when it is considered together withother relationships of power such as race and class.[7] It is the contention of this paperthat further studies would benefit from a regional focus, and an analysis of travelnarratives about specific places. Such an approach facilitates the exploration of differ-ences within travelogues written by women, and avoids notions concerning an essentialfeminine experience and description of empire.[8]

The regional focus of this paper is West Africa;[9] the analysis centres on theconstruction of a particularly powerful vision of Africa, focused very much on WestAfrica, during the nineteenth century—the vision of the “Dark Continent”—and howwomen travel writers responded and contributed to this. Several writers have analysedthe creation of this “myth” of Africa and its imperialist connotations through a varietyof sources, including exploration literature, colonial fiction, imperial art and scientifictreatises;[10] this paper explores the vision of the “Dark Continent” in relatively under-researched sources, namely the travel narratives of Victorian women. It focuses par-ticularly on the representation of the physical environments of West Africa in thesenarratives.[11] Imperial strategy was characterized by a tendency to homogenize the“other”,[12] but West Africa was not a homogeneous entity; clearly the location for thenarrative, both spatial and temporal, was an important factor influencing the landscapedescriptions of women travellers. By exploring the differences in their representationsof West African landscapes, it is possible to highlight some of the complexities andcontradictions in nineteenth-century notions of the “Dark Continent”.

All the women of this study drew on references to “the Dark Continent”, “the Landof Death”, and “the White Man’s Grave”, but their landscape descriptions were oftenstrikingly different. The creation of a particular narrative was informed and influencedby the spatial and temporal context of the journey, and by the individual circumstancesof the author concerned. This paper analyses the publications of four women who,together, highlight the complexities of any reading of imperial imagery in West Africa.[13]

Elizabeth Melville was from an aristocratic background.[14] She married a colonial judge

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and lived and travelled with her husband in Sierra Leone between 1840 and 1846. Heraccount of her experiences was entitled A Residence at Sierra Leone (London 1968,first published 1849), and contained a strong anti-slavery message which was typicalof the time. Zelie Colvile was the wife of the Acting Commissioner of Uganda andtravelled in the Oil Rivers area of Nigeria in the early 1890s, immediately prior to theonset of “high imperialism” in West Africa, as part of a coastal journey around thecontinent. Like Melville she had an aristocratic background,[15] and the fact that shetravelled purely as a tourist makes her unique to this study. She published an accountof her journey entitled Round the Black Man’s Garden (Edinburgh 1893). Mary Kingsleywas a traveller/explorer who journeyed throughout tropical West Africa between 1892and 1895 and gained the reputation as being the expert on West Africa.[16] She publishedthree books about West Africa and numerous articles; her major publications wereTravels in West Africa (London 1895) and West African Studies (London 1899).Constance Larymore was the wife of a military administrator who travelled with herhusband in Southern and Northern Nigeria between 1902 and 1908, at the beginningof the colonial phase of Britain’s involvement there. She published A Resident’s Wifein Nigeria (London 1908).[17]

West Africa and the myth of the “Dark Continent”

Depictions of the physical environment were important in establishing enduring imagesof West Africa in nineteenth-century Britain. Patrick B. Rantlinger has argued powerfullythat the vision of Africa in the imaginations of many Victorians, which was informedby scientific theory, exploration literature, fiction and art, evolved with the changingnature of British cultural, economic and political imperialism in the region. The anti-slavery supporters at the time of Melville’s travels fostered an image of an Edenic WestAfrica, an unspoilt wilderness that would be perfectly peaceable were it not for theintrusions of the slave trade. However, with the failure to convert West Africans toChristianity, and as a result of the high mortality rate among Europeans travelling toWest Africa, this image was soon transformed into a more negative portrayal. WestAfrica became exotic, unfamiliar and frightening. The harsh climate and prevalence ofdisease were used in arguments in favour of Britain’s abandonment of West Africa,and such portrayals held sway throughout the middle of the nineteenth century. By thetime of the revival of Britain’s interest in West Africa in the 1880s, prior to the journeysof Colvile and Kingsley, the image of West African landscapes had become one ofabsolute pandemonium, sadly lacking the order of “civilization”. This depiction of thephysical environment coincided with Britain’s desire to extend its empire in Africa atthe time of the Berlin Conference, and persisted into the twentieth century whenLarymore travelled in West Africa. Africa became the “Dark Continent”, and WestAfrica was epitomized as the centre of this “Dark Continent”.[18] Of course, Africa wasthe “Dark Continent” only in the tautological sense that many people in Britain definedit as such, the necessary mirror-image confirming the superiority of an enlightened andordered Europe.[19]

The descriptions of the physical environment by women travellers thus need to beframed within this broader picture of British imperialism, and the changing popularimages of West Africa throughout the nineteenth century. As stated previously, mostof these women were influenced by negative images of the physical environment ofWest Africa. Zelie Colvile’s chapter on West Africa was entitled, rather sensationally,“The Land of Death”. Mary Kingsley described how friends had warned her not to

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go there because of the threat of disease, that West Africa was the “white man’s grave”and the “deadliest spot on earth”, but she claimed that she chose to travel there preciselybecause it was coloured black on Scheele’s map of the distribution of disease.[20] Kingsleyalso described the psychological malaise that could affect Europeans in West Africa,and although she felt at home in the forests, she believed that for those who could notidentify with their surroundings, life there was extremely difficult.[21] Elizabeth Melvillewas constantly ill during her years in West Africa, and on her first furlough home toBritain she decided to leave her children rather than take them back to Sierra Leone.Although Melville’s descriptions of the hills outside Freetown perhaps came closest toevoking Edenic images of the landscape consistent with her anti-slavery views, she wasconvinced that disease and death were the price to be paid for the exquisite beauty ofWest Africa.[22] This attitude was consistent with contemporary opinion of Sierra Leoneas “The White Man’s Grave”. The climate of West Africa, which was believed duringthe nineteenth century to be the cause of fever, disease and death, was the one aspectof the physical environment which drew the darkest descriptions from women travellers.However, if one looks more closely at the texts there were differences and complexitiesin the imagery created by these women, and often these images challenged contemporaryvisions of the “Dark Continent”.

British women travellers in West African landscapes

Landscape descriptions by women travellers contributed to Britain’s popular geographiesof West Africa. As a consequence of the lack of available information, such aspublication figures and sizes of lecture audiences, it is difficult to assess the extent ofthe audience to which these women had access,[23] but it can be supposed that, becauseof the popularity of the literature of empire during the nineteenth century, the imagerythat they created could be consumed by potentially large audiences. Colvile broadenedher audience by publishing an article in Blackwood’s Magazine,[24] and she also publicizedher book by giving lectures.[25] As with Melville, her narrative was aimed as light readingfor the general enthusiast, and the potential for these works was considerable. Thereexisted a fascination with empire among various leisured middle- and upper-classwomen in Britain, which was an extension of the desire among many Victorians fortitillation by tales of adventure in far-off, “exotic” locations. The tales of “the daughtersof Albion” establishing little Englands around the world were extremely popular.[26]

There is more evidence regarding the popularity of Mary Kingsley’s work. Heraudience was a varied one, incorporating those interested in travel narratives from theempire, and those engaged in commerce, science and politics. Kingsley’s readership wasalso quite substantial. The first edition of Travels in West Africa ran to 1500 copiesand was reprinted eight times up to 1904, the reprint runs totalling 7500. West AfricanStudies was published in 1899 in an edition of 2000 copies. It sold 1200 copies the weekit was published.[27] It was reprinted in 1901 in an edition of 1500 copies.[28] Both bookswere reviewed very widely by both the national and provincial press, and were alsoreviewed as far afield as France, Australia and the United States. Kingsley also publishedarticles in the influential periodicals of the time (The Spectator, The National Review,The Fortnightly Review, Manchester Chamber of Commerce Monthly Record, BritishEmpire Review, and other learned journals such as the Transactions of the LiverpoolGeographical Society and the Scottish Geographical Magazine). Kingsley broadened heraudience further by embarking upon an exhausting series of lecture tours aroundBritain, addressing most notably the Scottish and the Liverpool Geographical Societies,

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but also various audiences in many locations around Britain. She would often addressover 2000 people at these lectures.[29] Thus the popular geographies created by womentravellers had potentially large audiences, and the expectations of the audience mayhave played a part in shaping the production of these narratives.

The conventions of the time exercised some influence on the language employed inlandscape descriptions by women travellers. For the most part, they did not employ inthese descriptions the sexual metaphors often found in travel accounts by men at thistime;[30] the language of penetration, conquest and domination was a language generallynot employed by women, although not exclusive of them. Instead they consideredthemselves to be observing and describing the physical environment, rather thanconfronting and doing battle with their surroundings in an effort to establish dominionover them. However, the very acts of observing and describing have implications forthe relative positions of power attained by white women abroad; observation anddescription were also means of mastering and appropriating the landscapes of WestAfrica.[31]

Romanticism was a common factor in the women’s responses to the natural en-vironment of West Africa, and this had its roots in the wider philosophical trend takingplace in Victorian Britain. As suggested, within nineteenth-century exploration literaturenot only were the landscapes of West Africa depicted as wild and chaotic in oppositionto the ordered and controlled landscapes of Europe, they were also among the fewplaces that could still be referred to as “the country” in contrast to an increasinglyurbanized Europe.[32] However, it was in the works of Mary Kingsley that this ro-manticism was most strongly represented. Kingsley’s beliefs were more akin to aneighteenth-century romanticism, which was characterized by “the delight in, and wonderat, the beauty and beneficence of nature”, and “the ascendence of emotion and intuitiveperception over reason”,[33] than they were to late-Victorian romanticism. Her responsesto the landscapes were on a deeply personal and aesthetic level. Her claims of objectiveobservation of West Africa were undermined by the subjectivity of her responses.[34]

However, as Alison Blunt argues, Kingsley “claims subjective authority by stressingthe individuality of her response”.[35] She allowed the landscapes to exercise their almostmagical powers over her rather than seek to impose herself upon her surroundings.Kingsley located herself within the forests and attempted to blend with them insteadof “mastering” them. She was emotionally connected to the landscapes through whichshe travelled, and insisted, “I am more comfortable there than in England”.[36] Althoughraised by agnostics, her experiences in West Africa had instilled within her a deepprivate faith in pantheism, and she derived her spiritual beliefs from the works ofSpinoza.[37] For Kingsley, as with Spinoza, God was the immanent, not the transcendent,cause of all things; God was not the creator of things, but the things themselves.[38]

After her journeys, Kingsley identified these beliefs as “firm African”, and she maintainedthat she was happiest when among the “non-human things” of nature. She wrote ofthe Ogowe rapids (present-day Gabon):

The majesty of the scene fascinated me, and I stood leaning with my back against arock pinnacle watching it. Do not imagine it gave rise, in what I am pleased to call mymind, to those complicated, poetical reflections natural beauty seems to bring out inother people’s minds. It never works that way with me; I just lose all sense of humanindividuality, all memory of human life, with its grief and worry and doubt, and becomepart of the atmosphere. If I have a heaven, that will be mine.[39]

As Alison Blunt argues, Kingsley’s descriptions were less likely to “establish thelandscape as a stage for the exercise of the imperial viewers’ power” than they were to

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prompt self-questioning, “further highlighting her personal and reflexive sensitivity tolandscape”.[40] For example, Kingsley wrote that while she was sat on her verandahoverlooking Victoria and taking in the scenery beneath her, she thought, “Why did Icome to Africa? . . . Why! who would not come to its twin brother hell itself for all thebeauty and charm of it”[41] The extent to which she identified with the landscapes ofWest Africa was revealed in a letter written shortly before she died, where she wrote:

I am no more a human being than a gust of wind . . . My people are mangroves,swamps, rivers, and the sea and so on—we understand each other. They never give methe dazzles with their goings on, like human beings do by theirs repeatedly.[42]

In contrast, a sense of dislocation from the physical environment is evident inLarymore’s narrative. She emphasized her position as the first white women to travelfrom the southern forests to the deserts in the north, and thus was able to depict herselfas discover/explorer. In this guise, the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” trope, which MaryLouise Pratt suggests is an essentially masculine genre of travel writing,[43] becameaccessible to Larymore. The context for her journey was crucial to her attitude; as partof a military expedition to suppress indigenous populations and delineate the boundariesof British territory, she was also aware of her relative position of authority withinNigeria. Her sense of her own superiority and of her presence on the imperial frontierare apparent in her landscape descriptions. For example, she described the view atEgga:

I had a glorious and uninterrupted view of mile upon mile of grassland, flanked in thedistance by the curious flat-topped hills at Padda. The distance was marked only bythe “wire road”, the telegraph line leaving Egga and disappearing into the pearlyiridescent Harmattan mists in an ever diminishing perspective—the one link withcivilization.[44]

Pratt argues that within the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” trope three conventions can beidentified which create qualitative and quantitative value for the explorer’s achievement.These conventions are recognizable in Larymore’s landscape descriptions. Firstly, thelandscape is “aestheticized”, the view is seen as a painting and the description is orderedin terms of background and foreground, perspective and colouration. Secondly, “densityof meaning” is sought, particularly through the modification of nouns. Larymore’s“pearly” mists [and on other occasions, “pearly blue haze” (p. 71), and “emerald green”plains (p. 112)] tie the landscape to her home culture, “sprinkling it with little bits ofEngland”. Finally, the metaphor of the painting is important in terms of Larymore’s“mastery” of the scene. Larymore became a verbal painter reproducing a scene forothers; what she saw was all there was. The landscape was ordered with reference toher vantage point. The “ever-diminishing perspective” to which she referred privilegedher position as observer. As Pratt argues, the observer has the power “if not to possess,at least to evaluate this scene”.[45] These conventions are repeated throughout Larymore’snarrative. The panorama was a device for seeing the country as a future colonisedcountry, and thus by including panoramic scenes Larymore arrogated to herself thepower of the colonizer.[46] This was very different to the response of Kingsley who,although an imperialist, was anti-colonialist and travelled in southern Nigeria beforethe implementation of Lugard’s colonial policies. Unlike the savanna lands of the north,the panoramic view was almost impossible in the southern forests.

Despite Larymore’s adoption of a colonial “gaze”, there is a certain tension withinher landscape descriptions; she was obviously captivated by the landscapes throughwhich she travelled, but she struggled simultaneously to maintain objective, even

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scientific, rationality in her descriptions. As Gillian Rose (1992) argues, many explorersand travellers, in their quest to produce geographical knowledge, had to resist whatJ. K. Wright referred to as “the sirens of terrae incognitae”.[47] Taking pleasure inviewing the landscape was often seen as a threat to the scientific validity of theobservations contained in the narrative. This tension is apparent in Larymore’s landscapedescriptions. For example, she wrote:

autumn is almost the best time of the year to “see the country”; in the farms the guinea-corn was just beginning to ripen and droop its massive plumes of grain, . . . and we gotmagnificent views of miles of wooded hill and plain unrolling themselves into the dimblue distance.[48]

Here, Larymore provided knowledge on when to acquire the best view of the landscape,and detail on the nature of the landscapes of Northern Nigeria, but she succumbed tothe inherent pleasures of gazing upon the landscape. In the colonial context, Larymore’sposition as author-colonizer allowed her to adopt this “gaze”, which both Rose andPratt argue is essentially a masculine gaze, and her descriptions thus contain the sametensions found in exploration literature between scientific narrative and the sense ofalmost voyeuristic pleasure the observer has in viewing the landscape.

In addition to her adoption of the colonial gaze, Larymore also used other conventionsof exploration narrative which, because of the nature of social relations at the time,were perhaps not as readily available to those women who travelled in the nineteenthcentury. She described herself surmounting geographical barriers such as the rapids onthe Upper Niger:

At the worst point, where the whole face of the river appeared to be barred with a rushof falling waters, and no smallest passage was visible amidst the tumbling foam, thecanoes were hauled under the steep bank, and their entire contents bundled out thereon,we, the passengers, clambering, by the aid of roots and branches, to a place of somesecurity, where we sat on the warm sand and watched the manoeuvres down below.[49]

Here Larymore confronted the landscape, the rapids were obstacles which she mustovercome in order to progress on her journey. On other occasions, she described herselfas “marching” into the towns of Northern Nigeria, identifying herself with the Britishmilitary expedition that had facilitated her travels. Furthermore, whilst in Kabba shewrote, “Outside the town, there is a little stretch of forest belt, and, as no one has everdisputed its possession with me, I am pleased to consider it exclusively my ownproperty”.[50] She referred to this forest as “my ‘kingdom’”. Significantly, Larymore“claimed” this land not for Britain but for herself; she claimed it not for its potentialwealth, but because of the beauties of both flora and fauna that were contained withinthe forest. Thus the convention of laying claim to territory, which Pratt views as amasculine convention, was tempered by her delight in the physical environment; herdesire to possess was rooted in the aesthetic beauty of the landscape she encountered.However, this metaphorical claiming of land indicated how Larymore placed herself ina position of power and authority in relation to the landscapes that she described, andis not found in the narratives of those women travelling before the end of the nineteenthcentury.

The imperial strategies contained in Larymore’s narrative seem contrary to Kingsley’spersonal identification with the landscapes of West Africa, and whereas the formerprivileged vision, Kingsley’s descriptions included other sensual responses such as sound.However, in common with most colonial texts, there is a certain amount of ambivalencein both narratives.[51] For example, despite her emotional connection to the landscapes

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of West Africa, Kingsley sought a panoramic view in her ascent of Mungo Mah Lobeh.However, her ability to identify with the imperialist trope of the panoramic view wasundermined by the vista being obscured by mist.[52] Disappointed with the lack of viewfrom the top, Kingsley nonetheless appreciated the aesthetic effects of the mist whichwas “exceedingly becoming to the forest’s beauty”.[53] The landscape was feminized,“but its attraction lay in it being veiled rather than being unveiled”.[54] Similarly, despitethe presence of imperial strategies in Larymore’s narrative, she also wrote:

Picture to yourself a green—truly emerald green—plain, holding an area of, roughly,ten square miles, dotted with palm trees, their tall slender stems crowned with crests ofgraceful drooping plumes, and bearing a respectable fortune in the palm-oil containedin the closely clustering bunches of nuts on each tree. Hundreds of acres are undercultivation . . . Away, beyond, rise the blue hills, in a huge circle, jealously shutting inthis little green paradise from the tiresome world of restless white folks, who wouldtake count of time, make roads, try to introduce sanitation and otherwise employthemselves in fruitless and unnecessary works to the dire discomfort of the peacefuldenizens of peaceful places![55]

Larymore’s ambivalence is clear in passages such as this. As the wife of a militaryadministrator in Nigeria she acquired freedoms and a degree of authority that wouldnot have been available to her in Britain, yet she expressed her worries about theimpact of British economic and cultural imperialism, and the colonial administrationher husband was helping to impose, upon the very landscapes and peoples she wasobserving. Larymore was clearly a romantic and wished to see the landscapes sheencountered remain unchanged, yet she realized that British imperialism, in which sheplayed a part, would have a drastic effect upon the pace of life in Nigeria.

Confronting “chaotic” West Africa

A major feature of landscape descriptions by British women in West Africa was theirrecognition of order in the natural environment, and this is particularly evident in thenarratives of Mary Kingsley. For Kingsley, West Africa was not a homogeneousconfusion of nature, but a series of ordered physical environments—coastal, riverine,montane and forest. The horizontal bands of colour in the landscape when viewedfrom the coast—the blue of the sea, the white of the surf upon the yellow of the sand,the brown and green of the mangroves, the deep green of the rainforest, and the purpleof the distant mountains—were evidence of natural order rather than of pandemonium.Other women travellers remarked upon these bands of colour which formed their firstimpressions of West Africa from the Atlantic Ocean, and, although bereft of thepoeticism of Kingsley’s descriptions, still conveyed the impression of order. Colvilenoticed the “long low line of palms, the strip of sand, and the fringe of breakers whichare characteristic of this part of the African coast”,[56] Larymore described the “sunshine,sapphire water, the fringe of low grey coast-line . . . [T]he huge swell swept shorewards,to break in its thundering surf, away by the grey palm-trees and the yellow sand”.[57]

The common perception was of order rather than chaos.It seems that it was the natural order and organization of the physical environment

that Kingsley found most alluring about West Africa, and it could thus be argued thatshe employed a scientific, ecological “trope” in her landscape descriptions. This can beobserved in her descriptions of Corisco Island, off the coast of Angola. For Kingsley,Corisco Island was an exquisitely ordered physical environment. She wrote:

[Leaving the beach] we clamber up the bank and turn inland, still ankle deep in sand,and go through this museum of physical geography. First, a specimen of grassland,

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then along a lane of thickly pleached bush, then down into a wood with a little (atpresent) nearly dried up swamp in its recesses; then up out onto an open heath whichhas recently been burnt and is covered with dead bracken and scorched oil palms . . .There is such an elaborate completeness about this museum, and we have not evencommenced the glacier or river departments.[58]

Similar descriptions are found in the narratives of other women travellers. AlthoughMelville’s landscape descriptions frequently alluded to “wilderness”, and she sometimesfound the physical environment of West Africa threatening, she portrayed the landscapesaround Sierra Leone as inherently ordered. She wrote:

There are three distinct phases of landscape here. The first is hill and dale, clothed inall their original exuberance of stately forest, and appearing in their primeval grandeur,as it were, fresh from the hands of their Maker; the second is the first denuded andlaid waste by fire and hatchet . . . and that is the scenery I would gladly see changed;the third is the second rich in partial cultivation, and which, with the first, constitutesthe peculiar beauty of the tropics, and in it I certainly desire no variety.[59]

Melville perceived those landscapes that remained in their natural state, and those thatwere only partially cultivated, as the most aesthetically pleasing; those landscapes whichremained untouched, or “wildernesses”, were equally ordered as those under cultivation.

Familiarizing “exotic” landscapes

A further method employed by women travellers to dispel the myth of pandemoniumwas their attempt to acquaint their readers with unfamiliar landscapes. This was by nomeans exclusive to women writers, but it is a theme that seems to run through manyof the narratives by women travellers in West Africa. They alluded to familiar aspectsof Western art and literature in creating their imagery. For example, Kingsley wroteof the scenery of the forest of the Ogowe: “It is as full of life and beauty as anysymphony Beethoven ever wrote; the parts changing, interweaving and returning”.[60]

Her publications and lectures abounded with such descriptions of the forest, “a vast,seemingly limitless cathedral with its countless columns covered, nay, composed of themost exquisite dark-green, large-fronded moss, with here and there a delicate fernembedded in it as an extra decoration”.[61] Here climbing plants became “coverlets”spread over the forest to keep it dry; bush-ropes and lianas became “some Homericbattle of serpents that at its height had been fixed forever by some magic spell”;[62]

sunshine lit up the red sand-banks which then glowed like “Nibelungen gold” and thesun played with the mist in a vision of “Turneresque” beauty.[63] These frequent literaryand artistic allusions provided a frame of reference through which her readers couldfamiliarize themselves with the landscapes of West Africa. Kingsley referred to popularauthors of the time (Dickens, Twain, Dr Johnson, Stevenson, Goethe, Kipling), andmade unfamiliar landscapes recognizable by comparing them to the works of Turnerand the Pre-Raphaelites, re-emphasizing her own romanticism. She also compared thesounds of the forest to symphonies by Beethoven and Handel.

Similarly, Melville compared the “soft quiet beauty” of the beach landscape topaintings by Claude and Poussin,[54] and an approaching tornado was described as“great fleecy clouds rising above Mount Oriel; their curled outlines forming many aHogarth-like portrait against the sky”.[65] As with Kingsley, Melville sought to familiarizethe sounds of the forest to her readers. Not all of the associations were pleasant orpastoral: “When darkness sets in, the hum of millions of insects arose—and a veryunsentimental memory it brought along with it, being exactly like the noise of a large

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manufactory where spinning machines are constantly in motion”.[66] Women travellersalso used the technique of drawing analogies between British and West Africanenvironments in order to render them more familiar. Melville compared the deforestedhills around Sierra Leone to those in Scotland, “where green herbage, heather, andfurze appear in alternate patches”.[67] Colvile described a scene approaching BonnyTown in a similar manner: “Two minute’s walk brought us to the margin of a deeppool surrounded by gigantic cotton trees, whose heavy shade and buttressed rootswould almost have made one imagine one’s self in some early English cloister”.[68]

Larymore described a scene at Jebba in Northern Nigeria which:

. . . changed abruptly from low-lying grassy marsh land and warm sand-banks, wherethe wild duck and geese were wont to gather, to great beetling cliffs and walls of rock,which rose sheer from the still water, seemingly shutting in the river altogether, andgiving the impression of one end of a highland loch.[69]

By painting their more familiar pictures of West African landscapes and makingthem recognizable to their readers, women travellers challenged the image of the exoticand frightening pandemonium which characterized many descriptions of West Africaduring the nineteenth century. The landscapes in the narratives of these women wereordered and, to some extent, demystified.

The pastoral myth and West Africa as “garden”

If there were some similarities in the ways in which women travellers represented thephysical environments of West Africa as ordered and familiar, there were also greatdifferences in their designs upon their immediate surroundings. Kingsley attempted toblend in with the surrounding landscapes, and related to them in a personal andsubjective way. In contrast, Melville and Larymore perceived West Africa as a potentialgarden that must be cultivated. In Victorian Britain suburbs were developing rapidly,and gardens came to be perceived as refuges amidst the enormity of urban sprawl,“bowers and oases in a desert of brick and mortar”.[70] In West Africa, the garden wasa retreat from the surrounding “wilderness”, a small area of “civilization” on theimperial frontier. If the urban gardens of England could only be imagined in relationto the city, which shaped and defined them by surrounding and threatening them, thenthe gardens in West Africa could only be imagined in relation to the surrounding“wilderness”. Both survived under siege, “a passive persistence emphasized and sym-bolized, here, by closure and concentration”.[71] Furthermore, to quote Helen Callaway,“The garden served as a rich metaphorical link; English order and productivity amidthe tropical chaos of overgrown jungle or scrubby savannah”.[72] Sections within thenarratives of Larymore and Melville were illustrative of attempts by white women toimpose their own personalities as well as British order upon the landscapes of WestAfrica. They were both impressed by the creation of gardens and farmland in theforests of West Africa, and remarked upon the contrast between these ordered featuresand the surrounding wilderness. Melville created a vision of West African landscapeswhich was consistent with anti-slavery depictions of an earthly paradise. She particularlydelighted at the gardens in Freetown which, despite her exoticism of them, remindedher of home:

I was enchanted by the luxuriance of the trees . . . Innumerable blossoms shone in alldirections; one resembling a branch of red coral; another still more gorgeous, with itsfestoons of orange and scarlet, reminded me of the feathers of the bird of Paradise;while the pale lilac colours of a third recalled the image of more northern gardens, and

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claimed a kindly remembrance of old familiar flowers, although the perfume of orangeand lime trees was all around us.[73]

Constance Larymore had a different attitude which was reflective of her presence inNigeria at the beginning of the colonial period. She took the theme of the garden astep further than Melville, insisting that it was the duty of every Englishwoman residentin Africa to attempt to grow a garden as a constant reminder of England amid this“wilderness”. She wrote at Lokoja, “I then and there took to heart the lesson which Ihave tried to practise ever since—the absolute duty of planting trees everywhere forthe benefit of one’s successors”.[74] Larymore attempted to create a “sanctuary for anidealized domesticity” on the imperial frontier of Nigeria.[75] She devoted an entiresection of her book to advising her readers how to grow a flower garden, a verandahgarden, a vegetable garden, a lawn, and trees and shrubs in West Africa. The impositionof English order upon the physical environment appealed to Larymore. Her intentionwas to create “little Englands” wherever she went in Nigeria, and believed it was theduty of the wife of the Resident to ensure that this task was undertaken, both for theincreased comfort of their husbands, and for the wider benefit to British imperialismin Africa. She perceived the garden to be an extension of the domestic sphere, a privatesanctuary to be managed and maintained by the wife for the good of the household.[76]

In her chapter on creating a lawn, she wrote:

It is said to be very dear to the heart of every Englishman to own a lawn, and itcertainly should be doubly so to John Bull in exile; in a tropical country well-kept turfis much to be desired, there is nothing as cool and refreshing to tired eyes dazzled withthe glare of the sunshine and baked earth, and perhaps, nothing that gives such a home-like and cared-for look to a West African compound.[77]

Such responses to the landscape were in marked contrast to the more harmoniousrelationships sought by Kingsley. Although both responses were imperialist they werevery different, and they highlight both the complexities within imperialist responses toWest Africa and the importance of the spatial and temporal context of the journey.

Conclusion

White women travellers were exposed to images of the “Dark Continent” before theytravelled to West Africa through various media, including colonial fiction, explorationliterature, late-nineteenth century photography, imperial art and scientific treatises, andthese often informed their descriptions of the physical environments of West Africa.This is particularly evident in their comments on climatic conditions, and the supposedlinks between climate and disease. However, their visions of West Africa were complex.This paper has illustrated that various literary traditions in Victorian Britain influencedthe ways in which women travellers wrote about the physical environment of WestAfrica. Victorian romanticism, ideas about the imperial frontier, and notions of the“wilderness” and “sanctuary” all exerted powerful influences upon the narratives ofthese women, and it could be argued that these were standard ways of representing thephysical environment in travel literature at the time. The ambivalence apparent in thesenarratives was common to many colonial texts. However, to a certain extent thedescriptions of the physical environment by the women in this study were differentfrom standard Victorian travel texts. Their romanticism was overtly expressed becausethey were constrained to emphasize their landscape descriptions rather than to engagein scientific observations or political comments. As Sara Mills suggests, the scientific

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narrator figure was not unavailable to women travel writers, but was constantlyundermined by other elements within their texts.[78] Nineteenth-century convention heldthat women’s travel narratives were not supposed to be “scientific” and authoritative,but, rather, supposed to be amateurish. It is for this reason that travel narratives bywomen were often prefaced with disclaimers which denied “any scientific, academic,literary or other merit”.[79] Furthermore, an emphasis on landscape description was ameans of maintaining this amateurish style. This is recognizable as a common char-acteristic in travel literature by women travellers in West Africa, as are their attemptsto familiarize landscapes rather than exoticize them.

This paper has suggested that the spatial and temporal context of the journey,particularly with regard to contemporary British imperial culture and popular imagesof West Africa, was an important influence on the landscape descriptions of womentravellers. The differences in their descriptions are revealing of the women’s differingattitudes towards British imperialism in West Africa. Elizabeth Melville’s attitudewas typical of the 1840s, and her landscape descriptions were heavily influenced byphilanthropic perspectives on West Africa, anti-slavery concerns, and the anti-co-lonialism in Britain at the time. She portrayed West Africa as almost Edenic; it was aland of gardens and cultivation, of flowers, blossoms and perfumes. However, it was notEurope’s Eden, but Africa’s. She believed West Africa unfit for European colonization,primarily because of climatic conditions; the presence of Britons would be unnecessaryonce the slave trade had been abolished. Abolishing slavery would ensure that WestAfricans could be left to live peaceably in their own paradise. Constance Larymore’sdescriptions of Nigerian landscapes were rather different. Larymore was unique amongthe women of this study in that she adopted the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” position todescribe the landscapes she encountered. She claimed territory as her own in herwritings. She was able to do so because, unlike the other women, she travelled througha part of West Africa which had been conquered by the British and which had beenformally incorporated into the British empire. In effect, she was surveying aestheticallyterritories that were about to be colonized and surveyed for military and economicpurposes. Mary Kingsley’s landscape descriptions were also unique, not only in theirgreat abundance and poeticism, but also because they challenged many of the imagesof West Africa which prevailed during the 1890s, defying the conventions of the time.Unlike Zelie Colvile, who portrayed West Africa as the “Land of Death”, Kingsleydrew on earlier romantic depictions in order to challenge negative visions of WestAfrica, and to raise interest in the possibilities for British imperialism there. She believedthat if she could convince the British public that West Africa was not a land of darkness,it would encourage the Government to increase Britain’s trading interests in the region.

Despite their misgivings about the climate, very often the visions of West Africacreated by women travellers offered up challenges to the image of the “Dark Continent”.For example, the depiction of West Africa as a “garden” in travel texts written after1840 was unique to women travellers such as Melville, for by mid-century West Africahad come to be popularly perceived within Britain, and particularly by explorers,travellers and the formulators of imperial policy, as the heart of a dark and dangerouscontinent. While the vagaries of the climate steered women travellers away fromArcadian visions of West Africa, they also tended to avoid depictions of West Africa aspandemonium, and relied more upon evoking the intricate beauties of their surroundings.However, in the words of Annette Kolodny, although they “shied away from paradisalprojection, they nonetheless seemed eager to tend the garden”.[80] Therefore, althoughthey often portrayed West African landscapes in standard ways, white women travellersmade important contributions to the popular geographies of West Africa. Their

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narratives are revealing of the complexities inherent in the metaphor of the “DarkContinent”, and provide an important archive which helps elucidate the complexitiesin Britain’s response to, and perception of, West Africa during the nineteenth century.

School of GeographyUniversity of Birmingham

Birmingham B15 2TT

AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Pyrs Gruffudd and Michael Heffernan for the helpful comments on anearlier draft of this paper, and two anonymous referees for their insightful comments. I am alsograteful to the British Academy for funding the original research which forms the basis for thispaper.

Notes[1] For example, James Clifford, ‘Travelling cultures’ in Lawrence Grossberg et al. (Eds) Cultural

Studies (London 1992) 96–116; M. Kowalewski, Temperamental Journeys: Essays on theModern Literature of Travel (Athens, Georgia 1992); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes:Travel Writing and Transculturation (London 1992); George Robertson et al. (Eds), Travellers’Tales. Narratives of Home and Displacement (London 1994)

[2] For example, Trevor Barnes and James Duncan (Eds), Writing Worlds. Discourse, Text andMetaphor in the Representation of Language (London 1992); Peter Bishop, The Myth ofShangri-La (London 1989); Jonathon Crush, Grazing on Apartheid: post-colonial travelnarratives of the Golden City, in Paul Simpson-Housley and Peter Preston (Eds), Writingthe City (London 1994); Derek Gregory, Between the book and the lamp: imaginativegeographies of mid-nineteenth century Egypt Transactions of the Institute of British Geo-graphers 20 (1995). The inspiration for the recognition of both the enduring appeal of travelwriting as a mode of representation, and of the overlaps between geography as a disciplineand travel-writing as an imaginative and sometimes “scientific” genre of literature wasEdward Said’s Orientalism (London 1978); see also Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference. AnAnalysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London 1991); Felix Driver, Geography’sempire: histories of geographical knowledge Environment and Planning D: Society and Space10 (1992) 26; Pratt, ibid. (passim)

[3] See Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire. European Women in Colonial Nigeria(London 1987); Shirley Foster, Across New Worlds: Nineteenth Century Women Travellersand Their Writings (London 1990); Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and theMiddle East 1718–1918 (London 1992); Mills, ibid.; Pratt, ibid.

[4] Mona Domosh, Towards a feminist historiography of geography Transactions of the Instituteof British Geographers 16 (1991) 95–104; Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism (NewYork 1994); see also Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (Eds), Writing Women and Space.Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies (New York 1994)

[5] On popular images of empire see Felix Driver ibid.; John MacKenzie, Propaganda andEmpire (Manchester 1984)

[6] See, for example, Catherine Barnes Stevenson, Victorian Women Travel Writers in Africa(Boston 1982); Foster, ibid.; Susan L. Blake, What difference does gender make? Women’sStudies International Forum 13 (1990) 347–355; Callaway, ibid.

[7] Blunt, Travel, Gender and Imperialism; Sara Mills, Knowledge, gender and empire, in Bluntand Rose, ibid. 30; Melman, ibid.

[8] For examples of recent studies which have adopted this approach, see Cheryl McEwan,How the “seraphic” became “geographic”: women travellers in West Africa, 1840–1915(unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Loughborough University, 1995); Morag Bell, Citizenship notCharity: Violet Markham on nature, society and the state in Britain and South Africa,in Morag Bell, Robin Butlin and Michael Heffernan (Eds), Geography and Imperialism(Manchester 1995, 189–220)

[9] For ease of reference I refer to West Africa in the light of the Victorian delineation of this

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region. The term is certainly reductive and contestable; as illustrated by Kingsley’s narratives,references to “West” Africa during the nineteenth century included areas of equatorialAfrica (modern-day Zaire, Gabon and the Republic of Congo). The spellings of place namesappear in this paper as they do in the original narratives

[10] See, for example, Patrick Brantlinger, Victorians and Africans: the genealogy of the mythof the Dark Continent Critical Inquiry 12 (1985) 166–203; Philip Curtin, The Image ofAfrica. British Ideas and Action 1780–1850 (London 1965); Dorothy Hammond and AltaJablow, The Myth of Africa (New York 1977). Also of relevance is Abdul R. JanMohammed,The economy of Manichean allegory: the function of racial difference in colonialist literatureCritical Inquiry 12 (1985) 59–87

[11] The focus here is on landscapes primarily because of the profusion of landscape descriptionin these narratives. Although political and scientific commentary were not exclusive ofwomen, most chose to devote large sections of their narratives to descriptions of the physicalenvironment. One could also focus upon the depictions of Africans, African cultures andcustoms, and so on, by women travellers (see McEwan op. cit.)

[12] See Said, op. cit.[13] Between the years 1840 and 1915 many British women travelled in West Africa in various

roles, but an exploration of bibliographical and archival sources (for example, the Dictionaryof National Bibliography; Jane Robinson, Wayward Women. A Guide to Women Travellers(London 1991) and the collections on women Members and Fellows at the Royal Geo-graphical Society) has revealed only seven who published accounts of their travels (seeMcEwan op. cit.). The four women who provide the focus of this study were chosen becausetheir travels span the period from the 1840s to the early 1900s and three broad phases ofBritish relationships with West Africa (exploration, anti-colonialism and high imperialism),and because landscape description was prominent in their narratives

[14] Edward Walford, The County Families of the United Kingdom (London 1874) 162[15] Walford, ibid. 704[16] For a comprehensive bibliography of Kingsley, see Deborah Birkett, Mary Kingsley. Imperial

Adventuress (London 1992)[17] In addition to printed books, this paper also draws upon the various journal articles by

Kingsley about West Africa, and her personal correspondence[18] Joseph Conrad popularized this image of tropical Africa in his novel, Heart of Darkness

but, as Brantlinger argues, the “darkening” of West Africa had begun several decades beforethe publication of Conrad’s novel in 1899 (see Brantlinger, Victorians and Africans: thegenealogy of the myth of the Dark Continent Critical Inquiry 12 (1985) 166–203)

[19] There are a number of reasons why the myth of the “Dark Continent” was focused on WestAfrica as opposed to other parts of the continent, including the prevalence of disease, thenon-colonial nature of Britain’s involvement there (in comparison to eastern and southernAfrica, which were considered far more suitable for settlement), the image of the mysterious,impenetrable forest and its strange creatures (the gorilla was “discovered” by du Chailluonly in the 1860s), and stories of cannibalism and strange cultural practices. Obviously, the“darkness” of West Africa was more a product of British ignorance of its geography duringthe nineteenth century than a true reflection of the state of the region

[20] Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (London 1982) 2–3[21] Kingsley wrote, “A more horrible life than a life in such a region for a man who never

takes to it, it is impossible to conceive . . . [I]t is a living death,” West African Studies 39[22] Elizabeth Melville, A Residence at Sierra Leone (London 1968) 8[23] Melville’s A Residence at Sierra Leone was reprinted in 1968 at around 400–500 copies,

but there is no information for the 1849 edition (Frank Cass Publications, personalcorrespondence). Similarly there are no records of publication figures for the books ofLarymore and Colvile

[24] Zelie Colvile, Ten days on an Oil River Blackwood’s Magazine March (1893) 372–382[25] She wrote, “I have hopes there may be a demand for Round the Black Man’s Garden which

I have been advertising by giving a lecture on Madagascar at Liverpool G. D. Society. Myfirst attempt met with a most enthusiastic reception—and they found my lecture tooshort . . .” (National Library of Scotland, Blackwood Papers 1893–1900, Colvile to Black-wood 16/12/98)

[26] Jane Robinson, ibid. 200[27] Deborah Birkett, ibid. 135

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[28] Information courtesy of Macmillan Publishers Limited. Both books were reissued in the1960s by Cass, and Travels in West Africa was reprinted in 1972, 1982, and 1987, the latteran abridged version

[29] Kingsley to John Holt, 19/11/99, John Holt Papers, Mss. Afr. s. 1525, Box 23, Rhodes HouseLibrary, Oxford

[30] See, for example, Rebecca Stott, The Dark Continent: Africa as female body in RiderHaggard’s adventure fiction Feminist Review 32 (1989) 69–89

[31] Mary Louise Pratt, ibid. 119–143[32] Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London 1973) 281–3[33] Donald Koster, Transcendentalism in America (Boston 1975) 8[34] Alison Blunt, Mapping authorship and authority: reading Mary Kingsley’s landscape

descriptions, in Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (Eds), Writing Women and Space (New York1994) 51–72

[35] Blunt, Travel, Gender and Imperialism, 95[36] Kingsley, Travels in West Africa, xiii. Kingsley never felt comfortable in England. The

circumstances of her birth were partly to blame for this; her father, George, was a memberof the illustrious Kingsley family; her mother, Mary Bailey, was the daughter of an inn-keeper whom George married 4 days before the birth of his daughter (see Deborah Birkett,ibid.). From Kingsley’s correspondence it seems that she was shunned by the Kingsley sideof the family, and her working class mother precluded her involvement in the rounds of politesocializing which occupied the time of other young middle-class women (correspondence withAlice Stopford Green, National Library of Ireland, Dublin). West Africa represented awelcome escape

[37] Mary Kingsley, West Africa from an ethnologist’s point of view Transactions of LiverpoolGeographical Society (1897) 63

[38] On pantheism, see Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford 1969)63

[39] Kingsley, Travels in West Africa 178[40] Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism 97[41] Kingsley, Travels in West Africa 608[42] Kingsley to Matthew Nathan, 12/3/99, Nathan Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford[43] Pratt, Imperial Eyes 213[44] Larymore, ibid. 37–38[45] Pratt, ibid. 204–5[46] See also Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge 1988), for more on the “imperial

gaze”[47] Rose explores the geographer’s “gaze” at nature in terms of the distinction between the

feminisation of the landscape, which requires interpretation, and the masculine, scientificgaze which produces this interpretation (see Gillian Rose, Geography as a Science ofObservation: the Landscape, the Gaze and Masculinity, in Felix Driver and Gillian Rose(Eds), Nature and Science: Essays in the History of Geographical Knowledge (London 1992)8–18

[48] Larymore, ibid. 69[49] Larymore, ibid. 159[50] Larymore, ibid. 118[51] Homi Bhabha argues that ambivalence is a marked feature of many colonial texts (see

Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London 1994), esp. 85 ff ); it was not, therefore, exclusiveto women travel writers

[52] Alison Blunt discusses ambivalence in Kingsley’s narratives. She writes that Kingsley’saccount of her ascent “illustrates the ambiguities of being constructed as inside and outsideand moving between patriarchial and imperial discourses”, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism101

[53] Kingsley, Travels in West Africa 570[54] Blunt, Travel, Gender, and Imperialism 102[55] Larymore, ibid. 112–3[56] Colvile, ibid. 285[57] Larymore, ibid. 4[58] Kingsley, Travels in West Africa 385–6[59] Melville, ibid. 225

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[60] In Cecil Howard, Mary Kingsley (London 1957) 86[61] Kingsley, Travels in West Africa 570[62] Mary Kingsley, The ascent of Cameroons Peak and travels in French Congo Transactions

of the Liverpool Geographical Society (1896) 272[63] Kingsley, Travels in West Africa 239[64] Melville, ibid. 6–7[65] Melville, ibid. 91[66] Melville, ibid. 8[67] Melville, ibid. 6[68] Colvile, ibid. 303[69] Larymore, ibid. 153[70] Andrew Griffin, The interior garden and John Stuart Mill, in V. C. Knoepflmacher and

G. B. Tennyson (Eds), Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkeley 1977) 171[71] Griffin, ibid. 171[72] Callaway, ibid. 178–9[73] Melville, ibid. 8[74] Larymore, ibid. 7[75] Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her. Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontier,

1630–1860 (London 1984) xiii. Certain parallels can be drawn between those women, suchas Larymore, living on the imperial frontier in West Africa and the experiences of womenliving on the North American frontier. Kolodny writes:

“After initial reluctance at finding themselves on the wooded frontiers . . . , women quite literally setabout planting gardens in these wilderness places. Avoiding for a time male assertions of rediscoveredEden, women claimed the frontiers as a potential sanctuary for an idealized domesticity. Massiveexploitation and alteration of the continent do not seem to have been part of women’s fantasies. Theydreamed, more modestly, of locating a home and a familial human community within a cultivatedgarden”

[76] There is an analogy here with the notion of Victorian domesticity and the suburban garden(see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the EnglishMiddle Class 1780–1850 (London 1987) 370–375)

[77] Larymore, ibid. 224[78] Mills, Discourses of Difference 77–8[79] Mills, ibid. 83[80] Kolodny, ibid. 47