“Certainly, a man has great advantages in travelling”133 summed up Mrs.
Little’s views on a British woman traveler in China. The social convention for Chinese society was to encourage women to stay in their domestic area and avoid any appearances in public. In western China where only a few foreign men had visited, foreign women or men became a spectacle. They were something Chinese would be curious about.
Once we thought we were going to spend the night, as we always tried to do, at a lovely inn; but there was just a village beyond and the villagers came over, and were rather troublesome in their curiosity. …when we closed the door, all who could rushed up
ladders into the rafters to look down, or on to the loose boards above us, staring down at us…I got so tired of people, I went
outside…Even in the moonlight, however, a growing crowd followed me, staring and giggling, till impatiently I remonstrated. On which a man stepped forward as spokesman “We are nothing but mountain people,” he said, “and anything like you we have never seen before!
So we do just want to look.”134
Being followed by a Chinese crowd was a recurring topic among the Victorian women travel writers. Such descriptions imply two important key
132 Mills, 88.
133 Mrs. Archibald Little, Intimate China ,61
134 Mrs. Archibald Little, Intimate China ,59-60
elements in their travel narratives. First, they were in danger, surrounded by locals. Second, the social conventions which Mrs.Little observed were different from those of the local Chinese. The word choice of “mountain people” is an example. It might be understood that they were in a remote. It might also be attributed from the frustrations of being a British lady. Another good example occurred at Lichuan.
At Lichuan occurred our first mobbing….Our cook had, as we thought, very imprudently engaged rooms for us in an inn outside the walls, and evidently not the best inn…So often we have no windows at all, it seemed particularly unfortunate we should have three there;
for in poured a howling crowd, and the windows were at once a sea of faces. We thought it best to bolt the door of the room, setting our solider-coolie on guard over it….But there were eyes and fingers at every crack—and the room was all cracks—and the people coughed to attract our attention, and called to us to come out; while to judge by the sounds—but one can never do this in China—there seemed to be fierce fighting between some of them and our coolies.
Presently, my husband went out, and tried to reason with them, telling them if it was only himself they should be free to come into his room and see him all the time; but they knew themselves it was not proper to look into a women’s apartment. They seemed too low and rude a crowd for reason…”135
Though Mrs. Little painted a hostile picture of the life in China, in Mrs.
Little’s eyes, China was like a woman who was neither dangerous nor hazardous to the Western world. Mrs. Little stated, “The Chinese are like women in this respect also. They afford an extraordinarily small percentage of criminals to the world’s criminal roll, and of these the most part are for petty
135 Mrs. Archibald Little, Intimate China ,61
theft.”136 From Mrs. Little’s descriptions, the Chinese were more curious than dangerous. It was interesting how Mrs. Little saw China as feminine. Such an image might have come from a European tendency to view the Orient as feminine. Also, considering the political situation during the nineteenth century in which China had signed one after another unfair treaties with the Western world, such an analogy was understandable.
In the nineteenth-century, British women travelers often were in positions which required contact with and exposure to different cultural perspectives.
Their responses were initially limited by the historical and socio-political context of Victorian culture. When British women travelers left the Victorian social expectations; however, they began to experience changes in their responses to situations. As British subjects in Victorian society, women’s identities and behaviors were shaped by a patriarchal culture. Traveling dislodged them from their primary position of subjugation to the Victorian cultural norms and they began to relate to the norms of Chinese culture.
Mrs. Little’s descriptions demonstrated the complex nature of her identity as a British woman in China. First, the fact that Chinese woman could take part in the affairs associated with men in Victorian society surprised. Mrs. Little responded; “doubtless Chinese ladies' speak of many subjects with the freedom of the days of Queen Elizabeth.”137 Chinese women’s deep involvement in all family matters contrasted to Mrs. Little almost invisible involvement in her husband’s business. On the other hand, the silence and acceptance observed by Chinese women with respect to their destiny, family,
136 Mrs. Archibald Little, Intimate China ,205.
137 Mrs. Archibald Little, Intimate China ,169.
and body contrasted with Mrs. Little’s active campaign for promoting women’s rights in both the east and west. These comparisons of social roles and social conventions affected how Mrs. Little viewed British women’s family and social roles. This is apparent in the use by Mrs. Little of a scene in which her Chinese cook articulates the Victorian limitations of women to a Chinese woman. She lets the cook tell the British readers of these limitations more forcefully than she could.
When we first arrived in Chungking, the wife of a formerly very wealthy merchant came at once to see me, begging that some place might be found in my husband's business for her husband, who had unfortunately become impoverished. I promised to mention the matter; but as she proceeded to enter into details, and my
knowledge of Chinese was even less then than it is now, I called for our cook to interpret, and to my amusement presently heard him say,
"I don't know why you trouble my mistress about all this. Foreign ladies are not like our ladies; they don't understand anything about business, and take no part in their husbands' affairs." This he said in a tone as if explaining that we were ignorant, frivolous creatures; and it must be remembered that, like most Chinese who go into foreign employ, he had been uniformly in service with foreigners since his earliest years.138
With the increasing insight Mrs. Little gained as a British subject in China, she could not ignore their cook’s belittling tone toward not only women but also the British Empire.