Kelsey Ross and Dr. Robert McFarland German Department

In October of 2006 I submitted a proposal for an ORCA grant while studying abroad in Berlin, Germany. With the help of a 2006 ORCA Mentored Research Grant, I joined my mentor, Prof. Robert McFarland, as he gathered historical documents for a project on gender and space in early eighteenth century Berlin. While working with him in Berlin at the Staatsbibliothek, which houses the world’s most significant collection of von der Recke’s writing, I gathered travel writings by Elisa von der Recke and other historical and cultural documents that illuminate the discussion of women’s mobility during that period. While still abroad, I completed an initial exploratory paper that became the basis of my research paper. Upon returning to Provo, Prof. McFarland and I analyzed the archivalia that we collected and then completed a review of theoretical literature about travel narratives. Additionally, I am currently enrolled in German 415, which is a seminar class designed to help students finish capstone papers, Honors thesises and ORCA grants. For the semester, I have met weekly with Prof. Michelle James to refine, improve and finalize my research paper. The goals set in this class were to prepare my paper for publication in a scholarly journal, perhaps BYU’s own Sophie Journal, and also to submit my paper to an academic conference.

As a divorced aristocrat, Elisa von der Recke made quite an impact in her time through her writings; however since then, these texts have fallen into obscurity. And two centuries later, her writings have almost no widespread availability to the common reader. They are only offered in their original print form in the original Gothic script from the nineteenth century and on microfiche film kept securely in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Needless to say, these media cannot be accessed from the internet, as they are not available in PDF or HTML format. For this reason, Recke’s travel journals have been deeply understudied, particularly in light of the amount of quality information she provides. Not only are her writings unavailable to the greater part of the public, but her way of balancing her “feminine decency” with her “ indecent” actions has not been analyzed. Of course, women’s travel journals have been investigated in a scholarly manner. However, many of these studies, including Fast Cars and Bad Girls by Deborah Paes de Barros, begin with women’s travel in the twentieth century with the advent of automobile transportation. Such analyses discuss modern nomads and retell anecdotes of women on the paved road, rather than addressing the pioneers in women’s travel, who first began to discover the world. Other works do start earlier, but do not cover Elisa von der Recke’s region. Among these are Kristi Siegel’s Gender, Genre & Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, which focuses on women from England, such as the famed Lady Mary and her writings about Turkey.

I ran into a few difficulties and unexpected changes while conducting my research and writing my paper. First of all it was very difficult to go about researching Elisa von der Recke. Not only did I have to navigate a foreign library system, which was very protective of manuscripts, but I soon found in necessary to take a crash course on the Gothic script, as all of her travel literature is printed in this format. This severely slowed the progress of my research, which in turn affected my information gathering techniques. I no longer had the option of slowly leafing through the pages for quality information, as I had expected, but instead speed reading was absolutely essential. Additionally, at the time of my proposal I also believed that I would be focusing solely on Recke’s travel literature. In the end I realized that it was also important to utilize her memoirs as background information. Because of the many challenges in completing the research for my project, I learned a great deal about the process of scholarly research. I will now be able to use these skills in writing other papers and in other areas of my life as I continue with my education.