Encounters with the Self: Women’s Travel Experience in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild

Małgorzata Rutkowska

doi:10.18290/rh216911-7

Małgorzata Rutkowska Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7962-3320

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh216911-7

Keywords: women’s travel, spiritual pilgrimage, travel writing, generic conventions, self-help memoirs, Elizabeth Gilbert, Cheryl Strayed

Abstract

This article examines representations of women’s travel experience in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia (2007) and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. A Journey from Lost to Found (2012). Both authors rely on and, at the same time, subvert generic conventions of masculine and feminine traveling while creating their narrative personas. Alluding to pre-modern cultural meanings of travel and adopting the roles of spiritual pilgrims, the authors renounce their former lives, examine their past mistakes, undergo a transformation and finally regain control of their lives. Paradoxically, though going on a journey is a prerequisite for self-redemption, travel is no longer represented in these texts as an encounter and confrontation with the outer world but rather as a solipsistic practice.

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