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Sea Travel and Femininity in Gail Jones's Sixty Lights : The Female Global Citizen

Date Published:

7 Jan, 2018

Abstract:

 

 

Lucy Strange, the protagonist of Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights (2004), can be seen as an early example of a global citizen. Travelling between the periphery and the center of the British Empire, Lucy repeatedly makes sea-journeys that last for months — a kind of journey that no longer exists in today’s world. Although this travelling helps shape her identity, it also makes her incapable of calling any one location her home. This article discusses the portrayal of Lucy as a modern 19th-century woman who is simultaneously a 21st century, neo-Victorian creation. It analyzes the links between femininity and voyages in the novel. Lucy’s travels serve to depict the movement of women and mothers across the sea as an inherent part of globalization, writing them into what was often seen as a development led by male adventurers and businessmen. Jones presents Lucy as a young woman at the edge of modernity. Nevertheless, Lucy’s lack of rootedness also questions whether travelling requires different — more modern — constructions of female identity.

January 2018: Daný van Dam obtained her PhD on postcolonial neo-Victorian fiction from Cardiff University, Wales, UK, in 2016. Her next research project engages with foreign-language neo-Victorian fiction and (inter)national cultural memory. Daný is co-editor of a special issue of the online journal Assuming Gender on the subject of “Consuming Gender” (Winter 2017), and she has previously contributed an article on racial and sexual passing to a special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies (“Neo-Victorian Sexploitation,” 2017). Since August 2017, Daný is working as a lecturer in the Comparative Literature Department at Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

 

 

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 04/12/2020