Rewriting Fairyland: Isabella Bird and the Spectacle of Nineteenth-Century Japan

Abstract

Illustrated papers were not only crucial for imaging women’s bodies and identities but also for depicting other cultures, often through an imperialist lens. As Andrea Kaston Tange notes in this essay, weeklies such as the Illustrated London News responded to the opening up of Japan after 1854 with illustrations ‘that tended to draw more heavily on tropes that depicted a country that was artistically very fine in part because it was simultaneously woefully behind in modern technologies’ (p. 273). To some degree, Isabella Bird (1831‒1904), in her travel narrative Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), reiterates these Orientalist strategies, yet she also, through letterpress descriptions and visual representations, balanced ‘fairyland’ imagery with realist detail that defies stereotypes and self-reflexively draws attention to her own status as a foreign spectacle. Tange’s essay challenges us to view women writers’ relationship to the colonialist discourse of illustrated journalism in complex terms, as a ‘series of layered registers, a palimpsest of meaning’ (p. 273).