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Abstract Benson spent most of her adult life abroad and in this paper I propose

Abstract Benson spent most of her adult life abroad and in this paper I propose to use the tex- tual material of her travel books, The Little World (1925) and Worlds Within Worlds (1928), collections of the sketches she wrote during her time in America, Hong Kong and China, to focus on Benson’s personal politics of location in exile. These two books very clearly demonstrate Trinh Minh-ha’s concept of identity as a «product of articulation», where «[Identity] lies at the intersection of dwelling and travelling» (Trinh Minh-ha, 1994: 14). Benson’s travel sketches exemplify an enabling concept of travel and exile, where ‘home- lessness’ is a state or space that embodies creative and utopian potentiality. Keywords: travel, ex-centric, exile, home, homelessness. Résumé Mondes dans des mondes: La recherche excentré de Stella Benson d’une maison Benson est dépensée la plupart de sa vie d’adulte à l’étranger. Dans cet article je pro- pose l’utilisation du matériel textuel de ses livres de voyage, The Little World (1925) et Worlds Within Worlds (1928), des collections d’essaies qu’elle a écrits pendant le temps vécu en Amérique, Hong Kong et Chine, pour focaliser sur la politique personnelle de Benson envers sa situation dans l’exil. Ces deux livres démontrent clairement le concept de Trinh Minh-ha de l’identité comme « un produit d’articulation », où « [l’identité] existe dans l’in- tersection entre habiter et voyager» (Trinh Minh-ha, 1994: 14). Les essaies de voyage de Benson exemplifient un concept de possibilité pour le voyage et l’exil, où le «homelessness» devient un état ou un espace qui incarne une potentialité créative et utopique. Mots-clés: voyage, excentré, exil, maison, homelessness. Resumo Mundos dentro de Mundos: A busca excentrada de Stella Benson de uma casa Benson passou a maior parte da sua vida adulta no estrangeiro. Neste artigo propo- nho utilizar o material textual dos seus livros de escrita de viagem, The Little World (1925) e Worlds Within Worlds (1928), colecções de ensaios que ela escreveu durante o seu tempo de vivência na América, Hong Kong e China, para focalizar a sua politica pessoal face à sua situação no exílio. Estes dois livros demonstram claramente o conceito de Trinh Minh- -ha da identidade como um «produto de articulação» onde «[a identidade] reside na inter- cepção entre habitar e viajar» (Trinh Minh-ha, 1994: 14). Os ensaios de viagem de Benson exemplificam um conceito possibilitador de viagem e exílio, onde «homelessness» é um estado ou espaço que incorpora um potencial criativo e utópico. Palavras-chave: viagem, ex-centrada, exílio, casa, homelessness. Worlds Within Worlds: Stella Benson’s ex-centric search for home Rebecca Harwood Universidade do Minho ex æquo, n.º 24, 2011, pp. 123-137 Living Alone Stella Benson’s untimely death from pneumonia at the age of forty-one moved Virginia Woolf to write in her diary, «How mournful the afternoon seems… A very fine steady mind: much suffering; suppressed… A curious fee- ling: when a writer like SB dies, that one’s response is diminished; Here and Now won’t be lit up by her: it’s life lessened»1. By her own admission, however, Benson never felt she properly belonged to any coterie in the adult world. She makes fre- quent reference in her diaries2 to her sense of ‘homelessness’ in the real world and like her protagonist, Sarah Brown, in the novel Living Alone (1919), seemed «to move through a world in which she neither feels she is a citizen nor desires to be one» (Benson, 1919: 55). There is a pervasive preoccupation with what Meredith Bedell identifies as «the essential isolation of the human condition» (Bedell, 1983: 21) in all Benson’s work (novels, poetry, essays and travel writing), and a particu- lar focus on the situation of women in society, specifically their discontent with their political and social position. Benson’s return, again and again, to the themes of loneliness and aloneness in her writing trace her personal attempts to construct stability in the instability of the borderlands – a perilous space, but one that also affords possibilities of empowerment and belonging. As Caren Kaplan writes in her book on postmodern discourses of travel, «each metaphor of displacement includes referentially a concept of placement, dwelling, location, or position. Thus exile is always already a mode of dwelling at a distance from a point of origin.» (Kaplan, 1996: 143). Benson’s own particular ‘mode of dwelling’ is powerfully voiced in the quirky beauty and humanity of the sketches comprising her two travel writing collections, The Little World (1925) and Worlds Within Worlds (1928). Read together, these two books chart a decade of tra- vel in the author’s life, first as a young unmarried adventurer, who accepts her loneliness as the condition of her independence, and then later as the wife, in unhappy exile, of an Anglo-Irish officer in the Chinese Customs Service (CCS), who finds her independent identity much diminished. Benson craved personal and poli- tical transformation, and travel, which cannot avoid a transformation of an existing order, provided escape from stagnation. But, she also craved a home, a stable space that would root and empower her. Travel puts ideas and identities on the line; it destabilizes, but can also empower and nourish what Trinh Minh-ha calls «the layers of totality that forms I» (Trinh Minh-ha, 1988). The Little World and Worlds Within Worlds very clearly demonstrate Trinh Minh-ha’s concept of identity as a ‘product of articulation’, where «[Identity] lies at the intersection of dwelling and travelling and is a claim of continuity within discontinuity (and vice-versa)» (Trinh Minh-ha, 1994: 14). Benson’s investigation of Self traces a trajectory of flight from 124 Rebecca Harwood ex æquo, n.º 24, 2011, pp. 123-137 1 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. IV, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Hogarth Press, London, 1982: p.192 (cited in Grant, 1987: xv). 2 The diaries of Stella Benson (1902-1933) are held at Cambridge University Library. the safety of the known but repressive ‘home’ of middle-class English society, tra- velling towards a state of exile or ‘homelessness’, which JanMohammed defines as an enabling concept …associated with …the civil and political space that hegemony cannot suture, a space in which alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project can survive. «Homeless- ness», then, is a situation wherein utopian potentiality can endure3. The perfect traveller Benson was born in 1892 and lived for only forty-one years. She was essen- tially a child of Victorian tradition but her adult life, as a travelling writer, span- ned the period of the interwar years, a time marked by great social and political unrest, and dramatic changes in women’s positions. In her essay, Constructions of Gender and Racial Identities in Inter-war British Women’s Travel Writing, Hsu-Ming Teo notes that «the call for women to return to the domestic sphere, and the new variants of the old ideologies of motherhood, reveal continuing pressure on women between the wars to conform to Victorian norms of femininity.» (Teo, 1999: 125). What was different about the interwar period, however, «was the pro- liferation of many disparate models of femininity resulting in new discourses which could be employed at various times by women travellers to construct their narratorial identities» (Ibidem). Benson’s sense of self-worth was rooted in her ability to make an indepen- dent living from her own writing. As a woman of the modern world, she claimed her right to put her writing first, before her duties as a wife, aunt or daughter, but her travel writing also reveals the inherent tensions of her struggle to recon- cile this position with the Victorian norms of femininity still circulating in the interwar years. Benson was essentially a traveller straddling two ages: as R. Ellis Roberts said of her in his biography, Portrait of Stella Benson, She was herself acutely aware of the period, of her generation – as aware as D.H Lawrence or Aldous Huxley: and she is more representative of that generation because she was, in her bones, more a child of tradition, and so felt violently the huge break in tradition that occurred in her life-time (Roberts, 1939: 325). Furthermore, Ellis continues, The value of her work as a mirror of her generation’s desires and losses and tor- ments consists in the truth that she was essentially ordinary, typically English and therefore eccentric (Idem, 327). WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS 125 ex æquo, n.º 24, 2011, pp. 123-137 3 JanMohamed, Abdul R, Worldliness-Without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of Border Intellectual. University of California, Berkeley, unpublished paper cited in Giroux, Henry, A. (1992). In his essay, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill famously wrote that «the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained»4. In this tradition, to be an eccentric is therefore to be of an original mind. The positioning of women as eccentric, however, is more often fraught with pejorative implications, denoting a deviant position outside polite society, an ex-centric position that is unacceptably outlandish rather than acceptably creative. In the case of women travel writers, this sobriquet is often used uploads/Philosophie/ worlds-within-worlds-stella-benson-x27-s-ex-centric-search-for-home-r-harwood.pdf