Lady Falkland's travel album: Negotiating colonial and feminine discourses

During the nineteenth century travellers to British colonies recorded their impressions in journals and often produced pictorial representations of colonized peoples and landscapes. Their personal representations have been added to the numerous official documents that defined colonial relationships between white colonizers and First Nations peoples. More recently women's visual and textual representations of the colonies have been brought into scholarly discussions. Many amateur women artists assembled travel albums or scrapbooks including drawings, watercolours and paintings of their travels. This thesis provides an analysis of one such album that was constructed by Lady Amelia Falkland (1807--1858). The album contains images of colonial Nova Scotia, India and the Middle East as well as those of her homeland Great Britain. Among the Nova Scotia images painted by Lady Falkland herself and two local amateur women artists are a significant number of representations of Mi'kmaq individuals. This thesis investigates these representations in order to assess how women negotiated the often contradictory discursive frameworks of colonialism and femininity, both of which entered into their representations.