Renegotiation of Narrative Space in Robyn Davidson’s Tracks and Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognita: Travels In Antarctica

Abstract

This thesis is founded on the premise that the genre of travel writing has historically been seen as a masculine genre closely bound to the ideals of mobility, conquest, and exploration that marginalises and excludes women from participation due to socially imposed expectations of domesticity and immobility. Thus, this androcentric framing or a genre based on a masculine ideology generates anxiety for women travel writers, as travel writing produced by women has often been and continues to be sidelined in travel writing scholarship. Struggling with such anxieties and insecurities, women travel writers have constantly been on the lookout for strategies and unique narrative techniques to combat the established societal norms. This study explores two late twentieth-century women travel writers and their navigation of genre and gender expectations: Robyn Davidson's Tracks (1980) and Sara Wheeler's Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica (1996). The study thus argues that both writers through their travel narrative engage in a renegotiation of narrative space that exhibits how gendered anxieties complicate the boundaries of the travel writing genre. Both authors enter territories—the Australian desert and Antarctica— traditionally constructed as masculine domains of conquest within travel writing. Drawing on theoretical insights from Mary Gerhart, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, I analyse how Davidson and Wheeler employ personal narrative, self- reflexivity, and genre hybridity to establish authority within a tradition emphasising male-coded values of objectivity and detachment. This thesis thus through Tracks and Terra Incognita, explores the complexities that female travel writers like Davidson and Wheeler face, and reveals how their work destabilises the traditional tropes of exploration and redefines the boundaries of the genre of travel writing.