Encountering the Cultural Other: Virginia Woolf in Constantinople and Katherine Mansfield in the Ureweras‪.‬

Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield were important figures of British literary modernism who shared, among other things, the common goal of making that movement answerable to questions of gender. Significantly, both women also spent time travelling nationally and abroad before making their names as writers. It is my contention that the experience of being forced to confront a people of varied appearance and cultural beliefs had a powerful influence on their development as writers and contributed to the ideas that would catapult these two women to the forefront of the modernist movement. The journey that was to prove pivotal to Mansfield's career as a modernist writer occurred in 1907, when she was nineteen. During this year she embarked on a camping trip with a group of friends that took in the sights of both the central and thermal districts of New Zealand's North Island. This tour was the New Zealand equivalent of the European Grand tour in that it functioned as a rite of passage into the independence of adulthood. Further, it educated Mansfield about the Maori. The route taken by the small group was through an extremely remote and hilly part of the North Island known as the Ureweras--a region inhabited by the Tuhoe people who had retreated there after the Land Wars of the 1860s. Mansfield kept a journal filled with evocative descriptions of the landscape and of Maori, not intended for publication, but rather a space to experiment with her writing style. This journal was later referred to by Mansfield's critics as The Urewera Notebook (Gordon 38). Less than a year before, Virginia Woolf, twenty-four years old and yet to be married, had visited the remote city of Istanbul then known as Constantinople in the company of a female friend and two of her siblings (MacGibbon 33-36). Like Mansfield she recorded her impressions in a journal, and like Mansfield the style she adopted for this exercise did not accord with popular travel writing.