ABSTRACT

The interwar was a period of emergent travel narratives by women, though masculinity still permeated the genre: books like Isherwood and Auden’s Journey to a War (1939) or Evelyn Waugh’s Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) were met by books like Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), as increasingly mobile women writers met men in a field from which they had been excluded. The self-othering of the travel experience also enabled new ways of allegorizing the experiences of otherness experienced by queer writers amidst social and political repression. This essay argues Kate O’Brien, the author of Farewell Spain (1937), wields the form of a collaborative travel narrative to challenge heteronormative patriarchy’s control over both queer bodies and identities, but also to inspire new forms of political engagement. While so much of interwar prose was motivated by political commitment and activism, in Farewell Spain O’Brien advocates for an alternative form of political intervention distinct from the “struggle and hustle” promoted by the era’s most prolific writers, aligning instead with a philosophy of pleasure and “easy” to counter the rhetorical. Farewell Spain presents us with a queer approach to the travel narrative that bolsters and embodies anti-fascism, even if the methods themselves are, purposefully and self-consciously, nonproductive.

摘要

两次世界大战之间是女性新兴旅行叙事的时期，尽管男性气质仍然渗透到这一类型中：像伊舍伍德和奥登的战争之旅（1939）或伊夫林沃的阿比西尼亚的沃（1936）这样的书遇到了丽贝卡韦斯特的黑羊和Grey Falcon (1941)，随着越来越多的女性作家在她们被排除在外的领域遇到男性。旅行经历的自我他化也使我们能够以新的方式来寓言酷儿作家在社会和政治压制中所经历的他者的经历。这篇文章论证了告别西班牙的作者凯特·奥布莱恩 (Kate O'Brien)(1937)，运用合作旅行叙事的形式来挑战异性恋父权制对酷儿身体和身份的控制，同时也激发新的政治参与形式。虽然如此多的两次世界大战之间的散文都是出于政治承诺和行动主义，但在告别西班牙，奥布莱恩提倡另一种形式的政治干预，有别于那个时代最多产的作家所提倡的“斗争和喧嚣”，而是与一种哲学保持一致愉悦与“轻松”的修辞反击。告别西班牙向我们展示了一种支持和体现反法西斯主义的旅行叙事的奇怪方法，即使这些方法本身是有目的和自觉的非生产性的。