Lawrence's Female Travellers

In Study of Thomas Hardy, Lawrence rephrases a common trope of the male "venture within the unknown of the female" (STH 104) as an alienating yet fulfilling journey, echoing many representations of travelling by male writers and critics as a phallic thrust forward into the world. As critic Karen R. Lawrence states in Penelope Voyages : Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition, the traveller is conventionally portrayed "as a male who crosses boundaries and penetrates spaces ; the fem...