The Aeronautical “You”: Destabilizing Boundaries in Beryl Markham’s West with the Night

ABSTRACT: Critical examination of Beryl Markham’s 1942 West with the Night has tended to dismiss her aeronautical memoir as reifying a conservative outlook in its masculine and imperial positionings. Scholarly work on Markham’s text, however, has not fully examined the ways in which her writing contains transgressive depictions of flight that resist binary categorization: flying is neither wholly natural nor man-made, both ancient and of the future, both masculine and feminine. This resistance to clear taxonomies is mirrored in her depiction of a narrative “I” that counters unified determination. She creates an autobiographical subjectivity that is porous, fluid, and shifting with her use of a second person “you.” Engaging with theories of women’s autobiography reveals how Markham challenges the unity of what has functioned as the masculine “I” at the center of men’s autobiography, and complicates the “aeronautical ‘we’”, or the “flying pronoun” that permeates Lindbergh’s writing. Revisiting West with the Night with attention given to Markham’s subversion of oppositions and contesting of the traditional autobiographical subject makes visible the role new technologies can play in the strategies women’s memoirs engage to negotiate representations of selfhood.