Una mujer viajera: Vita Sackville-West

Abstract

In the 1920s, Vita Sackville-West publishes Passenger to Teheran (1926), which compiles the impressions of the journey Sackville-West took to Teheran. It is not a chronicle of her trip and it does not offer implicit romantic love, considering that the aim of her journey was to encounter her husband, Harold Nicholson, who was at the time in Teheran. It is the tale of a woman traveller who leaves England for an adventure.The richness of this particular work, followed by Twelve Days in Persia: Across the Mountains with the Bakhtiari Tribe (1928), is the diversity of themes it approaches, all of them tinted with irony. It is my aim to analyse Passenger to Teheran from a poststructuralist, postcolonial and new materialist theoretical framework. Sackville-West, as other women travellers of the time, although scarce, uses a particular style not to describe what she sees but to inscribe her impressions of new spaces and people she encounters. The author does not use her white, Eurocentric, upper class identity, but considers herself a woman traveller without labels. Thus, Sackville-West is able to see Eastern countries without colonial eyes. She is able to provide a text which breaks with the hegemonic I/they dichotomy, allowing the reader to see, smell, enjoy, and understand the East.