Travel and the Self in Maggie Shipstead's The Great Circle
Abstract
This article presents travel as the nexus between the two protagonists of Maggie Shipstead’s The Great Circle (2021): aviator Marian Graves, whose passion for flight and physical travels double as, and intensify, an inner journey of self-discovery, and Hadley Baxter, a contemporary Hollywood actress who interprets Marian in a biopic and, through this experience, identifies with her, expanding her consciousness and constructing herself as woman. Marian and Hadley have similar, tragic family histories and, despite living a century apart, are both subject to the violence and constraints of a patriarchal society that deprives women of agency and condemns the transgression of gender roles. Consequently, the novel deploys multiple forms of travel and travel writing to ask what it means to be a woman in the United States and explore the contribution of physical and metaphorical journey to the discovery of the self, other people and the world. While close in scope to canonical male travel narratives, I argue that The Great Circle juxtaposes different stories (Marian’s logbook, a novel and a biography based on it, and Hadley’s movie) and, therefore, different accounts of Marian’s life, to raise questions about the very possibility of knowing anything or anybody. The novel simultaneously denounces women’s objectification by presenting both Marian and Hadley as public figures constructed by others: Marian’s logbook is fictionalised and published without her consent, while Hadley exists only in the characters that she plays and the image that the tabloids project of her. Shipstead’s ambiguous use of the symbolism of the circle further complicates the novel’s epistemological inquiry by betraying expectations about continuity and closure. All circles and journeys in the novel remain open-ended and merge with one another, connecting people and experiences across space and time.
Keywords
travel in American fiction; The Great Circle; travel as self-discovery; women and travel writing
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University of Glasgow United Kingdom
https://orcid.org/0009-0007-2011-6202
Elisa Pesce (she/her) is completing her PhD in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her project investigates the reasons underlying the omission of women from maximalist models by assessing the scope and implications of this narrative mode in the framework of contemporary cultural production in the United States. She is therefore interested in the interrelation between standards of genre formation and literary merit and questions of power. Elisa is Early Career Fellow of the International American Studies Association. She has presented her research outputs at various international conferences and published in international journals such as JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy) and the European Journal of American Studies. In addition to academic research, she also works as an independent translator and EFL teacher.
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