Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America : European Women Pilgrims 9781611485080, 9781611485073

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Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

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THE BUCKNELL STUDIES IN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THEORY Series Editor: Aníbal González, Yale University Dealing with far-reaching questions of history and modernity, language and selfhood, and power and ethics, Latin American literature sheds light on the many-faceted nature of Latin American life, as well as on the human condition as a whole. This series of books provides a forum for some of the best criticism on Latin American literature in a wide range of critical approaches, with an emphasis on works that productively combine scholarship with theory. Acknowledging the historical links and cultural affinities between Latin American and Iberian literatures, the series welcomes a consideration of Spanish and Portuguese texts and topics, while also providing a space of convergence for scholars working in Romance studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and literary theory.

Titles in Series Mark A Hernández, Figural Conquistadors: Rewriting the New World’s Discovery and Conquest in Mexican and River Place Novels of the 1980s and 1990s Gabriel Riera, Littoral of the Letter: Saer’s Art of Narration Dianne Marie Zandstra, Embodying Resistance: Griselda Gambaro and the Grotesque Amanda Holmes, City Fictions: Language, Body, and Spanish American Urban Space Gail Bulman, Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theater Anne Lambright, Creating the Hybrid Intellectual: Subject, Space, and the Feminine in the Narrative of José Mariá Arguedas Dara E. Goldman, Out of Bounds: Islands and the Demarcation of Identity in the Hispanic Caribbean Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe, The End of the Word as They Knew It: Writing Experiences of the Argentine South Raúl Marrero-Fente, Epic, Empire, and Community in the Atlantic World: Silvestre de Balboa’s Espejo de paciencia Sharon Magnarelli, Home Is Where the (He)art Is: The Family Romance in Late Twentieth-Century Mexican and Argentine Theater Yolanda Martínez- San Miguel, From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse Julia Cuervo Hewitt, Voices Out of Africa in Twentieth-Century Spanish Caribbean Literature Juan Carolos González Espita, On the Dark Side of the Archive: Nation and Literature in Spanish America at the Turn of the Century Carlos Alberto González Sánchaez, New World Literacy: Writing and Culture Across the Atlantic, 1500–1700 Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela, Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones: Illuminating Gender and Nation Andrew R. Reynolds, The Spanish American Crónica Modernista, Temporality, and Material Culture Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims

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Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America European Women Pilgrims Adriana Méndez Rodenas

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Published by Bucknell University Press Copublished with Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2014 by Adriana Méndez Rodenas Excerpts from “Bondage in Paradise”: Adriana Méndez Rodenas, “Bondage in Paradise: Frederika Bremer’s Travels to Cuba and the Inscape of National Identity,” in Cuba–The Elusive Nation, ed. Damián J. Fernández and Madeline Camara, 2000, pp. 220-223. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Méndez Rodenas, Adriana. Transatlantic travels in nineteenth-century Latin America : European women pilgrims / Adriana Méndez Rodenas. pages cm. — (The Bucknell studies in Latin American literature and theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61148-507-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61148-508-0 (electronic : alk. paper) 1. Women travelers—Latin America—History—19th century. 2. Women— Europe—Travel—Latin America—History—19th century. 3. Latin America—Social conditions—19th century. 4. Latin America—Social life and customs—19th century. I. Title. G156.5.W66M46 2014 918.04'3108909—dc23 2013033029 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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I dedicate this book to my mother, Norma Méndez, who traveled by steamboat from New York City to Havana at eighteen, and to my daughter Juliana, who is about to embark on her travels

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments xiii 1 Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims

1

2 Mapping the Unknown: European Women’s Travels and the Gaze of Enchantment

31

3 Romancing the Nation: European Women’s Travels in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

83

4 Face-to-Face with the Other: Women Travelers as Ethnographers

139

Coda, At Home in the Heights

207

Bibliography 215 Index 227 About the Author

235

vii

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Illustrations

Figure 2.1.  Maria Graham, “Traveling in Spanish America,” Frontispiece, Journal of a Residence in Chile During the Year 1822. And a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (1824). 32 Figure 2.2.  Humboldt, “Le Dragonnier de l’Oratava,” Planche [plate] 69, Atlas Pittoresque du Voyage—Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (1810; facsimile ed. 1972).

37

Figure 2.3.  Maria Graham, “Great Dragon Tree of Oratava,” Plate II, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (1824).

38

Figure 2.4.  Alexander von Humboldt, “Ponts naturels d’Icononzo,” Planche [plate] 4, Atlas Pittoresque du Voyage. 39 Figure 2.5.  Adela Breton, “San Andrés Chalchicomula,” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894), Ea 8401. Courtesy of Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.

40

Figure 2.6.  Humboldt, “Vue du Cajambé,” Planche [plate] 42, Atlas Pittoresque du Voyage. 41 Figure 2.7.  Fredrika Bremer, St. Amelia Inhegno [sic], fol. 30r, Sketchbook of a Journey in the New World, 1850–1851. Courtesy of Uppsala University Library, Sweden.

44

Figure 2.8.  Maria Graham, “Larangeiros,” Plate V, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During a Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (163).

48

ix

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x

Illustrations

Figure 2.9.  Maria Graham, “View from Rio from Gloria Hill,” Plate VII, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (1824). 50 Figure 2.10.  Maria Graham, “Gamella Tree at Bahia,” Plate IV, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (1824), 135.

51

Figure 2.11.  Adela Breton, “Jalapa.” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894), Adela Breton, Sketchbook of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894).

56

Figure 2.12.  Adela Breton, “Puebla.” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894), Ea 8399. Courtesy of Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.

59

Figure 2.13.  Fredrika Bremer, Fol. 18r, “Valle de Yumurí,” Sketchbook of a Journey in the New World, 1850–1851. 60 Figure 2.14.  Adela Breton, “Ixtaccihuátl,” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894), EA 8396. Courtesy of Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.

63

Figure 2.15.  Adela Breton, “Glacier Between El Fraile and Main Cone-Popocatépetl,” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894). Courtesy of Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.

65

Figure 2.16.  Adela Breton, “Popocatépetl,” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894). Courtesy of Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.

66

Figure 2.17.  Adela Breton, “Middle Glacier—Ixtaccihuátl,” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894).

67

Figure 2.18.  Fredrika Bremer, “Palm Under a Night Sky,” Sketchbook of a Journey in the New World, 1850–1851. 69 Figure 2.19.  Maria Graham, front cover illustration, Frontispiece, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (1824). 71 Figure 4.1.  Maria Graham, Plate III, “View of Valparaíso Bay from My House,” Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822. And a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1824), face title page, 146.

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145

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Illustrations xi

Figure 4.2.  Maria Graham, Vignette, “Great Ovens for baking the Wine Jars, &c. on the Plain of Millipilla [sic],” Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1824), 262.

148

Figure 4.3.  Maria Graham, “Costume of Chile.” Plate X, Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1824), 262.

149

Figure 4.4.  Augustus Earle, “View of Count Maurice’s Gate at Pernambuco, with the Slave Market,” Plate III, Maria Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1824), 106–7.

154

Figure 4.5.  Fredrika Bremer, “Carlo Congo,” Sketchbook of a Journey to the New World, 1850–1851, fol. 31.

163

Figure 4.6.  Flora Tristan, “Portrait.”

171

Figure 4.7.  Maria Graham, “Salta [sic] de Agua,” Plate VI, Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1824), 213.

181

Figure 4.8.  Maria Graham, Plate XIV, “Cacique with his Troops advancing to meet Carrera,” Plate XIV, Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1824), 419.

192

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Acknowledgments

Much like the travelers treated in this study, this book has shaped itself as a life journey. Begun when I first arrived in Iowa City in fall, 1985, it gradually evolved into two books, when a monograph on la Comtesse Merlin, a criolla from the Cuban sugar aristocracy who lived most of her life in France, absorbed most of my time until its publication in 1998. An invitation to speak at the University of Minnesota’s “Gender and the Technologies and Narratives of Travel” conference in May, 1999 provided one of the first opportunities to test this book’s underlying premise. Archival research, generously supported by International Programs at the University of Iowa and an NEH Summer Fellowship, led me to various sites in Europe: the British Library in London, la Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, and the Royal Library in Stockholm. A Fellowship for University Teachers from the National Endowment for the Humanities supported a year’s research in 2002–2003. In spring, 2003, I was Resident Scholar at the then Columbia Institute for Scholars in Paris, located in Reid Hall, a rambling mansion tucked away in Rue de Chevreuse, off Boulevard Montparnasse. Afternoon teas, hosted by its gracious Director, Danielle Haase-Dubosc, provided the perfect setting for scholarly conversation and exchange. When autumn leaves started rustling down the ivycovered courtyard, I gave my first presentation on Flora Tristan. Research Coordinator Mihaela Bacou was always on hand to offer useful bibliography, and suggested I visit the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, where I found the series on “Lettres de Bolívar” as well as other documents pertinent to Tristan’s travels. Mihaela Bacou also facilitated contact with Professor François Moureau whose seminars on travel writing at the Centre de Recherche sur la Littérature des Voyages at the Sorbonne provided a new angle on the genre. My colleagues at CIS, particularly Abigail C. Cohn, professor of xiii

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xiv

Acknowledgments

Linguistics at Cornell University, my alma mater, and Jeremy Jennings, a British political scientist, gave intelligent feedback as well as valuable historical context. Then, Paris blooming in late spring, I attended the launch of Mario Vargas Llosa’s El Paraíso en la otra esquina (2003) at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine, an event which also made it into the pages of this book. I credit my residency at Reid Hall for prompting an alternative approach to the genre of travel writing, an approach which emphasizes the travelers’ subjectivity, their impressions of natural history, and their decisive ring in registering the turmoils leading to Latin American Independence. It is the aesthetic quality of these works, the many intertextual echoes which turn women’s travel journals into richly evocative texts, which I accent in this book. At a still later stage, I was fortunate to have been selected Fulbright Distinguished Chair of American Studies at Uppsala University during academic year 2008-2009. Walking uphill on Drottingattan to the modern Center for the Humanities, I spent my days in a wonderfully supportive academic setting, the Department of English at Uppsala. With fellow Americanist colleagues, historian Dag Blanck and political scientist Erik Åsard, always on hand to answer my many questions on Swedish-American relations, I worked on Fredrika Bremer’s travelogues at the Swedish Institute for American Studies (SINAS). At Uppsala I received unstinting help from the librarians at Carolina Rediviva, who regaled me with my first Santa Lucia celebration in early December, 2008. Among them, Åsa Henningson of the Maps & Prints Department facilitated the set of beautiful images from Bremer’s sketchbook. Sweden, with its sea-side landscape dotted with islands and islets, its rocklined forested coasts, will remain forever part of my internal map. At the University of Iowa, I am grateful to colleagues in the Department of English who generously read individual chapters as well as earlier drafts of this book: Florence Boos, Eric Gidal, and Teresa Mangum. I benefited much from their expertise on Victorian travel writing and what I call the “British critical landscape.” At an earlier stage, Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist from the Department of History invited me to join a Workshop on the Rhetoric of Social History, in whose edited volume, Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays in Social History (1998) my article on Frances Calderón de la Barca first appeared. I am grateful for their insights and to Lydia Crowe of the University of Iowa Press for generously granting me permission to quote from this earlier publication. The late Charles A. Hale, with whom I taught my first class at the University of Iowa in fall, 1985, was definitive in the sections dealing with Madame Calderón and with all topics related to Mexico. His influence is still felt in these pages. From across the Atlantic, Sue Giles, curator at the Bristol City and Art Museum, facilitated the Breton images. In the manner of José Lezama Lima’s oblique poetics, my own “life in Mexico,”

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Acknowledgments xv

where I lived from 1977 to 1985, is weaved into the texture of an otherwise scholarly prose. Kathryn Hudson at Special Collections of the University of Iowa Main Library made available the set of Humboldt volumes and images from his pictorial atlas. Gregory P. Johnson of the Language Media Center of the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures worked his magic in getting the illustrations ready at a crucial final stage. Maria Jose Barbosa in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese provided valuable references on travel writing to Brazil, while Roxanna Curto and Anny Curtius, in French and Italian, went over my translations. I warmly thank Ann Ricketts for a generous publication stipend from the Office of the Vice President for Research. From Cornell University, Aaron Sachs reminded me of Alexander von Humboldt’s American legacy, while Jason Lindquist shared his expertise on Humboldt and gave a detailed and acute reading of chapter 2. The chapter on ethnography benefited from Anke Birkenmeier’s expert reading; I am grateful too for her invitation to the Casa Hispánica at Columbia University. William Luis extended a welcome to give a talk at Vanderbilt University, as did Julia Cuervo Hewitt at Pennsylvania State University, occasions for stimulating scholarly dialogue which enriched the book’s interdisciplinary perspective. Lois Parkinson Zamora invited me to speak on Fredrika Bremer at the University of Houston, and provided much useful advice on the visual archive included in the book. Madelíne Cámara and Damián Fernández solicited the essay on Bremer’s ethnographic poetics for the anthology, Cuba: The Elusive Nation (2000), where I joined a roster of distinguished cubanólogos in search of our own “elusive island.” I am grateful to Claire Dickey at the University Press of Florida for granting permission to quote from this article. Many generous friends and colleagues offered useful bibliography, sharp critical acumen, and, most importantly, constant support; among them, Enrico Mario Santí, who has enthusiastically encouraged my fellow-traveler’s journey. From New York, Raquel Chang Rodríguez and Gustavo Pérez Firmat were instrumental in recommending a volume of Review journal dedicated to “Women Travelers in Latin America.” Review 84, which appeared in May 2012, under the expert editorial eye of Daniel Shapiro, is a companion piece to this book. I am thankful to various key individuals who encouraged this project and brought it into published form: Aníbal González Pérez, editor of the Latin American Literature and Theory Series at Bucknell University Press, who was enthusiastic about the project from the start; Greg Clingham, Director of the Bucknell University Press, for his support and willingness to work with an overly busy schedule; Sam Brawand, for her superb copy-editing; and Jane Mara and Brooke Bures, of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, who overlooked every detail.

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xvi

Acknowledgments

As this page of acknowledgments has by now made clear, the long years of dedication to this book has shaped my own pilgrimage. The distance that Iowa, a land of endless earth, sky, sleet, and ice provided to the tropics of my heart has perhaps sharpened my critical “I”/eye in ways perhaps unpredictable when I first embarked on this journey. I dedicate this book to two important women who frame my life across generations: to my mother, Norma, whose gift of the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen while still a child learning English at St. George’s School in Havana sparked in me her same love of reading, and my daughter, Juliana, who followed my footsteps east to Ithaca, New York, and is now walking her own pilgrim route.

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Chapter One

Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims

During the post-Independence period in Latin America (1825–1860), European travelers made their way into the South American continent in search of material gain. They came to foster trade and commerce, as many of the new governments were eager to contract foreign companies to exploit the continent’s natural resources, particularly in the mining industry.1 The European traveler was also drawn to the allure of the New World, approaching its territory with reverential awe and expressing astonishment before the American landscape, a gaze typical of naturalists and botanists.2 Despite their European privilege, many travelers manifested an awareness of difference when brought face-to-face with the indigenous and mestizo Other. In the Caribbean, foreign visitors, like the scientist Alexander von Humboldt, were among the first to denounce the excesses of slavery. The tale of New World discovery was also written by women travelers, but in a different mode. By coming to the New World, European women hoped to find a purpose beyond strict material gain or scientific curiosity, hence subverting the trope of discovery and exploration set out by male explorers since the Spanish conquest. In spite of gender restrictions and the perils of travel, European women crossed the Atlantic for a variety of reasons, either as wives of diplomats, to revisit a family left behind, or simply to venture into unknown regions. Coming from many corners of Europe, and due to different life circumstances, a wave of pioneering women set out for Mexico, Central America, the Southern Cone, Brazil, and the Caribbean, travels which spanned from the eighteenth and well into the late nineteenth-century. Like their Victorian counterparts who ventured to the far reaches of the empire, female pilgrims to Latin America underwent both the pleasures and pains of travel. They sought to gain legitimacy for a self-in-the-making,3 to inquire into New World societies, and to delight in a landscape of contrasts; their 1

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2

Chapter One

gaze hence joins social with scientific observation, a characteristic of travel writing since the Enlightenment, but which they ply with a signature of their own. Unlike British savants and adventurers,4 European women who crossed the Atlantic tended to make of their new place of residence a home, a permanence-in-transition rather than an exceptional “grand tour.”5 Prolonged residence abroad spurred a desire for stability and engagement, a wish to participate in the “imagined communities” of their respective host countries, attenuating—and, at times, yearning to eliminate—the distinction between outsider and insider, foreign traveler and Creole subject. Besides the geographic focus of travel, women’s longer sojourn in the Americas marks a crucial difference in the type of travel account they produced. Whereas the plethora of Victorian “lady” travelers flung to the exoticized interior of Asia and Africa has been acknowledged as an integral part of nineteenth-century British travel writing,6 female-encoded travels have, for the most part, remained at the margins of the Latin American literary tradition. Reversing this trend, I argue that European women’s travels form part of the foreign language canon of Latin American literature, a tradition that has now become visible in our cultural horizon. In Unhomely Rooms, Roberto Ignacio Díaz reads the “multilingual library” spanning Latin America from the early colonial period to modern times, a “heterolingual” corpus underlying—and often undercutting—the more dominant literary tradition positing Spanish as a unitary language, hence expanding the borders of Spanish American literature.7 Aligned with this multilingual tradition, Transatlantic Travels to Nineteenth-Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims retraces the steps of five intrepid “lady travelers” who ventured into the main geographical regions of the New World—Mexico, the Southern Cone, Brazil, and the Caribbean—at different historical junctures, from the period of political anarchy and civil war following the break from Spain to the rise of modernity at the turn of the century. This book thus spans the period of nation-building in Latin America, from the close of the Wars of Independence (1825), to the emergence of new nations (1830 to roughly 1860), ending with the transition to modernity at the turn of the century. The gallery of women travelers chosen for this book trace a network of connections that textually remap Latin American territory and expand our understanding of the period of nation-formation. As they embark on their respective journeys, we meet them in chronological order: first, Maria Graham (1785–1842), who arrived a widow at the port of Valparaíso, Chile, in April 1822, after her husband, British naval officer Thomas Graham, met an unexpected death while crossing Cape Horn. Graham first traveled to Brazil, where she observed the widening rift between the Brazilians and the Por-

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Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America 3

tuguese; she then traveled to Chile, where she was to stay for nine months. The most riveting part of her travel account was her first-hand account of the South American liberation campaign. Prefacing her book with a historical capsule of Chile from pre-conquest times to the present, Journal of a Residence in Chile . . . praised the military exploits of British commanding officer Lord Cochrane, highlighting his role in helping secure Chilean independence, praising his exploits while downplaying San Martín’s fraught military campaign in Argentina and Chile.8 After landing in Chile, Graham returned to Brazil, where, apparently as a means to assuage her grief, she soon learnt Portuguese. Knowledge of the language facilitated immersion in public affairs, first as a witness—she recorded the installation ceremony of the Portuguese royal heir as Emperor of Brazil, documenting his central role in spearheading Brazilian Independence—and subsequently as participant. Although Graham gained a coveted post as governess of the young Princess, life circumstances prevented her from fulfilling her tutoring role.9 Besides Graham’s life-story, Journey of a Voyage to Brazil . . . also records her adverse reaction to the slave markets of Rio and Bahia, hence linking her journey to Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer, who witnessed similar spectacles in the Southern United States and Cuba. Although Graham left separate accounts of both journeys, Journey of a Voyage to Brazil is the most emotionally charged of the two accounts. Written immediately after Graham’s transition to widowhood, Journal of a Residence in Chile reads as a sequel before and after her Brazilian sojourn. Structurally, the two travel books are linked by the overarching presence of Admiral Cochrane in his double role as protector and male muse; temporally, by the historical sketches which prelude the traveler’s canvas of current events; and by publication date, since both journals appeared in 1824. A fellow Scotswoman, Frances Erskine Inglis (1806–1882), joins in the task of female historian that Graham so masterfully accomplished. Dubbed with the more familiar “Fanny,” she accompanied her husband, Don Angel Calderón de la Barca, in his diplomatic mission as first Spanish ambassador to an independent Mexico. Her prolonged residence in Mexico led to a charming memoir, Life in Mexico: During a Residence of Two Years in That Country (1843), a witty and acute portrayal of post-independence Mexico.10 Rather than presume a pose of demure femininity, Frances Calderón was no passive observer, but an active participant in her husband’s diplomatic mission, as she relegated advice and strategies with which to deal with conflicting political factions. Indeed, the Mexican journal of Madame Calderón (as she was called in Mexican newspapers) reveals a self-assured narrative subject whose ability to shift from private to public sphere absorbs these two dimensions into the texture of the genre. A multi-layered narrative which filters political events and personalities through an authorial voice consciously

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4

Chapter One

aware of her role as historian, Calderón’s Life in Mexico is hailed as “the best Latin American travel account.”11 Though in a different light, the next traveler shares the historical imagination of the previous two, adding to it a sharp gender critique that resonates even today.12 Most importantly, Flora Tristan represents the type of traveler torn between a European birth and a Spanish American origin, an “in-between” writerly voice that, by its linguistic and existential doubling, bridges the transatlantic divide with a new rhetoric.13 French-born Flora Tristan (1803–1844), the illegitimate daughter of a Peruvian Creole, wrote her voyage as an exceptional, and ultimately frustrated, quest for legitimation.14 Tristan’s sojourn begins in Paris, as the natural daughter of Thérèse Laisnay, a Frenchwoman, and Don Mariano Tristan de Moscoso, a Peruvian nobleman and an officer in the Spanish army. Her father’s sudden death in 1807 altered her life circumstances to such an extent that she forged herself as a literary and political heroine: feminist advocate, labor leader, and visionary. Like Calderón de la Barca in England and Mexico, Tristan has gained a place in both the French and Spanish American literary canons. Generations of readers have retold and been inspired by her daunting life story, which assumed many roles, from wife fleeing an abusive husband, to mother seeking custody of her children, to demoiselle, a mask she had to assume before embarking on a transatlantic passage; en route, this was embellished as femme fatale, and, later in Peru, in her desperate attempt to seize political power by means of seduction and marriage. After the loss of Tristan y Moscoso, Flora and her mother were forced to leave the family home. Bereft of any means of subsistence, Tristan was forced to marry her employer, lithographer André Chazal. After bearing him two children, Tristan left her abusive husband, thus transgressing gender restrictions of the time. A brief encounter with one of her father’s relatives convinced her to seek protection from her uncle in Perú, Don Pío de Tristan, a key player of the royalist stronghold in Arequipa.15 Flora sailed on the Mexicain on April 7, 1833, on her 30th birthday: it was the start of an extraordinary journey, a tale of female initiation as well as “an experience of rebirth.”16 Feigning to be single in order to avoid the stigma attached to women separated from their husbands, Tristan surveyed the map of regional Peru and Lima with an incisive, if often tainted, critical perspective. Upon her return to Europe, Tristan’s New World pilgrimage ultimately led her to consciously adopt the role of redemptress for the European working class.17 A classic female odyssey, Tristan’s Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838) crosses linguistic and national boundaries, addressing women’s social condition, the rifts in Spanish American nation-building, and, at a formal level, the construction of female autobiography.18

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Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America 5

Tristan’s idealism is shared by the sole woman adventurer who endured the lonely sea voyage in search of a higher ideal. Curious “to obtain a view of the future of humanity,” Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865) sailed to America in September, 1849, and did not return to Stockholm until 1851.19 Although Bremer’s American tour was preceded by her literary fame, her two-volume travelogue, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America (1853), made her a household word on this side of the Atlantic.20 Written as a series of letters to her younger sister Agathe, Bremer recounts her stay in New York, New England, Washington, and the Southern States, amply documenting the split between North and South over the slavery debate. Bremer’s subsequent sojourn in Cuba, where slavery was “in its worst form,” radicalized her to the point that she became immersed in the Africans’ symbolic universe, documenting their rituals and dances and treading to the heart of sugar-producing country in Matanzas. Not even North American commercial voyagers, keen in investing in Cuba’s prosperous sugar industry, had dared to step far beyond the boundaries of the Spanish colonial center.21 Less well known are the two sketchbooks where Bremer captured the faces of the New World; dated 1850 and 1851, these visual images surface throughout the travel account, leaving a trace of a unique writerly and artistic vocation.22 Besides the two historians mentioned so far—Graham and Calderón de la Barca—Bremer shares with Tristan a sharp analysis of gender roles, albeit with an accommodating tone vis-à-vis ideologies of domesticity lacking in her French precursor. With the exception of Bremer, who traveled to an overseas colony of Spain, women travelers either witnessed the transition to Independence in Latin America, or had first-hand experience with political strifes riddling the recently-forged nations, when the Spanish territories settled into the first phase of political and cultural autonomy. The last traveler, unique in the sense that she left a visual rather than a verbal archive, marks the transition to modernity in Latin America. British traveler-artist, photographer, and archeologist Adela Breton (1849–1923) devoted most of her life to Mayan art and architecture, thus ushering a vision of indigenous cultures that transcends the Self-Other divide. Breton’s art marks the limits of European travel writing, introducing the traveler-artist as yet another type of female pilgrim. The flow of European women arriving in the New World predates the set of travelers included in this book. It is useful, at this point, to briefly survey the tradition of women travelers, as they cumulatively forge what I call “the transatlantic imagination,” a way to envision New World societies, nature, and peoples from a gendered point of view.23 Since the mid-eighteenth century, women have formed part of a tradition of Enlightenment explorers seeking knowledge of the natural world. Maria Sybilla Merian (1647–1717),

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a German scientist, brought her daughter to the shores of Surinam to explore the life cycle of insects, leaving a visual archive of considerable aesthetic and scientific merit. Merian’s art absorbed both dimensions of the eighteenthcentury illustrated account, to conjoin science and art in a minute exploration of physical matter that was meant to unfold the secrets of the universe; in Merian’s case, stage-by-stage iconographic renditions of the life cycle of butterflies, including too idyllic drawings of tropical fruits and flowers, contrast with menacing images of alligators and spiders that allegorize the colonial condition.24 Merian’s legacy continues in the tradition of natural history observation which engage the set of travelers studied here, though in varying degrees and visual rhetoric. After the turn of the century, women’s travels serve as eye-witness accounts to political transitions and upheavals, a shift that continues throughout the long nineteenth-century. Paula Kollonitz (1830–unknown), a Prussian lady-in-waiting to Empress Carlota during her husband Maximiliano’s occupation of Mexico from 1832 to 1867, testified in The Court of Mexico (1868) to contested state-formations in post-Independence societies. Although Kollonitz wrote as a faithful servant to the royal pair, she also nodded to the fated nature of Maximiliano’s reign, torn as it was by divisions between the local oligarchy and nationalistic factions which ultimately doomed his overseas enterprise.25 Likewise, the account of Adèle Toussaint-Simon, A Parisian in Brazil (1833; 1891), gives a glimpse of another idiosyncratic New World empire, the monarchy of Pedro II in Brazil, while documenting the contradictions of plantation society.26 Toward the end of the century, Lady Florence Dixie (1857–1905) ushered the last stage of European women’s travels with her riveting Across Patagonia (1880), a travel book aligned with the tradition of late-Victorian explorers, though without the scientific acumen of Mary Kingsley’s forays into Africa. Her self-fashioning as both adventuress and observer of nature leads to a unique rhetoric of travel which highlights her own female persona while downplaying the import of male scientific travelers who had profiled Patagonia into the map of the world.27 When the geographic focus of travel shifts from Asia and Africa to Latin America, the appraisal of female-authored travelogues has been mostly driven by the “imperial eyes” model. Pratt studies two of the travelers included in this book, Maria Graham and Flora Tristan, rendering them representatives of an abstract “female domestic subject of empire” aligned with the thrust of European capitalism; hence, with the profit-seeking venues of post-Independence commercial explorers, despite the pull of domesticity their travels constantly exhibit.28 While the view that women travelers served as informal agents of the British empire surfaces in most current studies of the genre, I consider that this approach generalizes the British travel experience;

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Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America 7

furthermore, it tends to suppress not only the shaping of the traveling persona, but also the aesthetic appeal of the genre of travel writing. Most compelling for my purposes is Pratt’s use of Marie Claire Hoock Demarle’s category of “femmes enquêtrices,” which singles out women’s faculties for social observation as well as the literary quality of their memoirs.29 Here, I want to retrieve Hoock Demarle’s useful model in order to recuperate the tradition forged by European women to the Americas as an integral part of the Latin American cultural archive. In their role as social observers, amateur ethnographers, and natural history writers, European women forge a distinctive narrative voice, a voice manifesting a spectrum of positions vis-à-vis pre- and post-Independence societies, hence eluding a single category of analysis. By grouping nineteenth-century foreign visitors as transatlantic pilgrims, I emphasize first of all the immediacy of travel, its power for self-transformation, hence capturing the gains of earlier feminist studies which emphasize travel as a quest. Secondly, by focusing on the rhetoric of travel writing, I study the eclecticism implied in the genre to suggest that the various discourses commingling in the travel account turn it into a pliable genre with which women could both assimilate and disperse knowledge about a wide range of topics, turning it into a useful venue for self-affirmation and social commentary. By relaying to readers the singularity of the traveler’s experience, women fashion a transatlantic dialogue between a readerly audience in their respective home countries and those Creole constituencies among which they lived during their residence abroad. Thirdly, there is the crucial issue of language: as foreign observers, nineteenth-century women’s travels registered Latin American society in languages other than Spanish or Portuguese, hence adding to our continent’s “multilingual library.”30 “PILGRIM’S PROGRESS:” TRANSNATIONAL AND INTER-DISCIPLINARY MAPPINGS In a letter to Andrew Downing, dated September, 1848, Fredrika Bremer thanks the American architect for assisting her in planning her “american [sic] pilgrimage.”31 Ten years after her sojourn in America, Bremer used the same term to characterize her Travels in the Holy Land, I and II (1862), suggesting how the traditional march toward a sacred site functioned as trope of her own self-fashioning as Victorian “globe-trotter.”32 The category of “pilgrim” absorbs both the significance which extensive travel had for nineteenth-century women and their sense of gender identity, but it also suggests that pilgrimage is a particularly apt metaphor to describe women’s alternative voyages.

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Since the Middle Ages, women have shaped their life journeys in terms of religious pilgrimage. Beginning with the pioneering French abbess Egeria, who tracked mountains and sea to reach the Holy Land and Egypt early in the third century, women travelers have set out for unknown regions, casting their steps toward a holy site as stages in a spiritual journey. The tradition of female pilgrims spans the medieval and Renaissance periods, shifting during the classical age to include voyages to the fringes of the globe, as in Aphra Behn’s seventeenth-century sailing to Surinam. These early female explorers depict their departure from land as an initiation, where “the launch into a new life takes on the style of a baptism, washing away what had come before and committing them to what lay ahead.”33 During the long nineteenth-century, when the ideology of domestic bliss was at its height, women, particularly those disenfranchised from family and unencumbered by domestic obligations, sought in travel both a refuge and an education.34 Those who traveled for leisure often “[turned] their trips into pilgrimages . . . to improve their spiritual, cultural, or physical health,” as an overseas oasis offered a welcome cure for both body and mind.35 Despite their global destinations, women’s travels imply a deeper quest, a move toward self-knowledge that their immediate surroundings could not facilitate. Although European women’s travels were motivated by their domestic arrangements or the allure of the unknown, their journeys trace an introspective path to a soulful territory within. It is this heightened sense of anticipation, the projection of ideals, dreams, and expectations onto the far-flung territory they visited that converts European traveling women into transatlantic pilgrims. As Dea Birkett eloquently stated, “[t]he more blank a spot on the map, the better a woman’s ideas and ambitions could be projected on to it.”36 Women’s travels track both the actual itinerary traversed as well as the symbolic import of the journey, what lingers behind in their written accounts as trace or trail of religious pilgrimage. This traditional sense of the term surfaces in the religious overtones of Tristan’s Pérégrinations d’une paria, a work which, according to Kathleen Hart, “develops the ‘peregrinatio’ theme of religious autobiography; geographical displacements parallel phases in the autobiographer’s spiritual development.”37 In contrast to traditional “pilgrims’ progress,” Tristan’s wanderings are not shaped as a forward “teleological movement,” a linear route toward spiritual solace, focused on the act of arrival at a shrine, but rather function as a way out from oppressive conditions; in short, as “an act of survival, where the focus is . . . on getting away.”38 Yet Tristan’s pilgrimage to Perú is not merely an escape from the excruciating circumstances forcing her exit from France; it is also a tale of female initiation and identification, whereby the narrator of the memoir sees herself as representative of all abandoned and forsaken women, hence adapting the role of “Woman

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Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America 9

Messiah” called for in Saint Simonian doctrine.39 Given her defiant challenge to prevailing gender ideology, Tristan’s journey counters the “Penelope voyages” that according to Lawrence characterize British travel writing: the mythic wife patiently waiting at home, weaving and unweaving the strands of her tale, constantly deferring the moment of pleasure, being “in two places at once;” “woman as traveller and story-teller.”40 Rather, Tristan’s displacements conform a circular itinerary, a radical estrangement from hearth and home marked not only by her departure from France and subsequent arrival in Perú, but also by a series of arduous inner crossings. To echo Fe Revilla de Moncloa’s apt phrase, Flora Tristan becomes “la paria peregrina,” a homeless pilgrim; she surmounts a series of physical obstacles: a trajectory across desert and dust to reach the town of Arequipa, the solitary road to Lima at the end of her mission, and, upon her return to France, her adoption of a new identity as self-proclaimed pariah/messiah. Hence, the text of Pérégrinations marks the narrator’s conversion to “a different order of experience;” a passage leading to deeper self-knowledge; a threshold or entry “into new territory” by means of a sojourn in a foreign land.41 Anthropological theory has also adapted the trope of pilgrimage to account for the specificity of women’s travel. In Routes, James Clifford expands the notion of pilgrimage to include both a comparative study of travel and a type of journey “closely associated with women’s lives.”42 Likewise, Karen Lawrence describes women’s travels as a kind of pilgrimage, a term implying a “‘liminal’” experience as well as “a threshold space,” concepts that underlie her suggestive epithet of Penelope Voyages to describe a gendered mode of travel. 43 Denegri also associates the female pilgrim with the outcast and the marginal, what underlines her commentary on Flora Tristan’s Pérégrinations; Flora’s defiance of her uncle Pío as representative of political and patriarchal authority structures, in her view, a secular pilgrimage.44 This is the sense of Laura Strumingher’s biography, where Flora Tristan engages in an “intellectual and geographic odyssey” in her quest for legitimacy.45 The set of nineteenth-century travelers represent a wide spectrum of experiences which range from the religious to the secular; hence the need to expand here the concept of female pilgrimage elaborated by Clifford and Lawrence to account for various types of journeys. The focus will be on the hybrid textuality of women’s accounts, the way that their travels depict early forms of ethnographic and historiographical awareness, along with the imprint left by scientific travelers as seen in their observations of nature and natural history illustrations. The concept of pilgrimage thus upsets the neat binary paradigm which classifies European travel writing in terms of either sentiment or science.46 Rather than the linear trajectory implied in the notion of religious pilgrimage—the willful walk towards a pre-determined site

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charged with spiritual meaning—I propose here that women travelers trace a circular itinerary, appearing as pilgrims treading on a route whose end goal may be either deferred or never fully realized. In women’s journeys, it is the walk that counts; in Clifford’s terms, the routes or inroads, the movement toward greater self-awareness, the direction of the quest. The degree to which European women’s journeys shape themselves as either religious or secular pilgrimages, stopping at places in-between, departing from their set itineraries, or forcibly landing back at the original point of the journey, requires a fresh new look at the genre. As seekers in a period of political transition, their journeys reveal not only what each individual writer sought to find in the New World, but also shed light on the period of nation-formation, a highly charged era in Latin American history. Besides the use of anthropological theory, my use of “pilgrimage” is meant to absorb the psychoanalytical dimension of travel; the way displacement in place mirrors a mechanism of the psyche, suggesting both an outward and inner trajectory. In Haunted Journeys, Dennis Porter interprets the classic eighteenth-century Grand Tour, when the British upper crust flocked to Italy in search of ruins and monuments, in terms of the son’s rebellion against the father; ultimately, the father puts an end to the Grand Tour, as the young man in the making capitulates to the father’s desire, returns home, and marries.47 In contrast to this model of development, feminist critics have pointed out the effects of a strong paternal figure in sparking the paradigmatic Victorian adventuress. Both Mary Kingsley and Fredrika Bremer were deeply affected either by the absence of or rigid control of a stern father figure; in both cases, it was the paternal figure who catapulted Kingsley’s and Bremer’s traveling vocations. Hence, women’s travels are ruled by “destination is destiny,” reversing the Freudian dictum that “anatomy is destiny.”48 Historians have cast Flora Tristan’s journey as part of a broader movement of Latin American intellectuals who settled, albeit provisionally, in Europe and the United States, what has been termed a “strange pilgrimage,” prolonging a normative meaning of the term based on its religious connotations.49 Akin to Porter’s “haunted journeys,” this term implies a transatlantic encounter in another direction, a reverse movement from the New World to the Old, a pattern traced in new studies of the genre. By shifting from the Americas to Europe, nineteenth-century Latin American women upset the presumption that “travelers” are, by definition, European and not Latin American, assimilating a dominant paradigm of male-authored travel, while forging their own writerly vocations, a spatial journey that also becomes a temporal one.50 Aligned with these precursors and followers, Tristan’s “strange pilgrimage” also suggests how her prolonged overseas trail (and trial) both absorbs and transgresses the religious connotations of the term.

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Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America 11

The rubric “strange pilgrimages” would thus include those travelers who became veritable “pilgrims at home,” foreigners who identified with the “imagined communities” forged by their Creole hosts yet also sought to maintain their European identity and class privilege.51 Foreign visitors registered, not merely their own “self-definition through contact with an Other,” but also the way their Creole hosts saw themselves.52 The five “intrepid” European women gathered here sparked strong public reaction to their presence in New World territory, what was noted in the local press during or, most frequently, after their journey.53 Given her unflattering portrayal of Don Pío de Tristan and his royalist constituency, Flora Tristan was burned in effigy in the public square of Arequipa. In a curious inverse mirror, the foreign eye refracts, in turn, the “I” or “heightened sense of identity” of the emerging national constituencies of Spanish America.54 Seen in broader perspective, the five transatlantic pilgrims and their journeys form part, then, of that “pilgrimage in search of Latin American historical uniqueness” that informs our literary tradition since its beginning, with the first recorded contact between European and native subjects.55 Women’s travels refashion the colonial encounter by a particular kind of ethnographic gaze, and by the gendered nature of their travels. Coming from different parts of Europe—Great Britain, Scotland, France, and Sweden—the nineteenth-century heroines gathered in this book converge on a series of peak experiences. Emblematized by the image of Maria Graham traveling inside a stagecoach, staring out to greet the Chilean populace, the set of travelogues outlined above evidence, in varying degrees, the reciprocal gaze between the traveler and the people, places, and lands with whom she came in contact.56 In the chapters that follow, I argue that, in their respective pilgrimages, European women enact a two-way transatlantic transit by their acknowledgment of the Other, sensitivity to local customs, and awareness of the historical present. With the notion of transatlantic encounter, I evoke the transformative power of travel. I mean this in a double sense: both the sea changes wrought to individual women’s lives as a result of their journeys, and the impact (even the negative perceptions) they left behind in their trail. Despite their privileged status at home and abroad,57 European women established significant ties in the New World, mostly with other foreign visitors and members of the Creole upper-class, yet they also documented fleeting and, in some cases, even meaningful exchanges with members of autochthonous cultures. In many cases, their active desire to seek out indigenous or non-Western communities (uprooted Africans resettled in the Caribbean, local artisans in Chile and Brazil) results in an inquisitive gaze that, rather than dominate or control, seeks to know and understand the Other, or at least acquire partial knowledge of their societies and lived experience. Whereas

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critics and historians insist on seeing European women travelers merely as “outsiders,”58 my approach complicates the insider/outsider divide to highlight how these nineteenth-century women writers transgress gender expectations by their gesture of approximation towards the culturally Other. It is this complexity that I want to capture here, the moments of discomfort but also those of mutual recognition, even misunderstanding, that underline the pleasures of travel. Thus I reshuffle the notion of “contact zone” imagined mostly as “asymmetrical relations of power” between Self and Other, what reifies these two positions as static categories, not in historical flux, a model which provides little agency to Latin American creole and native constituencies.59 By pointing to ways that the local populace reacted to the presence of European visitors, I want to show the reception of women’s journeys, and how this reciprocal gaze conditions, even influences, at times, the end result of their pilgrimages. TRANSATLANTIC PILGRIMS: TOWARDS A GENDERED MODE OF TRAVEL Given their prolonged residence abroad, European women travelers to the four regions of Latin America engaged in secular pilgrimages, undergoing, at one extreme, a life-lasting transformation or, at the other, subtle shifts in their presumed European identity. Gender identity and pressures to conform to nineteenth-century gender ideology forms an integral part of their journeys. Aligned with a broader tradition of Victorian pioneers, European women residing in pre- and post-Independence Latin America acknowledged the transgression implied in the act of departing from home. At the same time, their accounts reflect varying degrees of anxiety with the need to comply with domestic obligations during their time abroad. In order to legitimize her journey to others (hosts in the new land as well as the anticipated public back home), nineteenth-century women had to tread the limits of gender ideology while striking out on their own individual path.60 Throughout the set of travel accounts, and despite their placement in different regional and historical settings, there runs an unresolved tension between gender expectations and the uncertainties—at times dangers—implied by the experience of travel.61 The traveler’s position in the gender code determines, to a great extent, the construction of the narrative “I” of the four memoirs studied here. Bremer’s confident sense of self as “solitary traveler”—Marz Harper’s apt category for single women who set out to the fringes of the Western world in search of scientific pursuits—is, in the Swedish writer’s example, expanded to include philanthropic, sociological, and ethnographic approaches that compile a fuller

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Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America 13

understanding of New World societies across the continental divide. In the three-tiered prologue that prefaces her Pérégrinations, Tristan launched an exhaustive critique of gender ideology which limited women to a restricted sphere of action. Her self-fashioning throughout the text of the Pérégrinations was a counter-cultural move in defiance of gender conventions: as a married woman forced to separate from an abusive husband, Tristan had to hide her true gender identity and build a masquerade of single womanhood that would enable her to cross the Atlantic safely. At the other extreme, married women like Frances Calderón de la Barca assumed the wifely responsibilities and duties implied in her husband’s diplomatic mission, while managing to assert her own voice in depicting post-independence Mexico, from the cries of street vendors to intrigues at the upper echelons of power. Bridging the two models of female subjectivity, Maria Graham transitioned into widowhood in the midst of her oceanic voyage. In their writings, travel is inextricably tied to a sense of female identity and difference which shifts with displacement in space and the nuances of the transatlantic encounter. At the same time, travel provided an accepted escape valve that permitted nineteenth-century women to break away from the confines of the angel of the hearth paradigm, as they stepped forth to discover, acknowledge, or reinvent their past and present selves in a new setting.62 The tension between compliance with the expected norm of female behavior and the liberating experience of travel surfaces throughout these travel books. Because foreign travel to unknown regions often implied physical hardship, even real danger, these tensions mesh with the act of displacement in space, movement, and sense of temporal discontinuity. The vagaries of travel are monitored physically by references to bodily changes, as the female subject registers her relation to new natural surroundings, “technologies of travel,” and means of transport, as well as the sense of the unexpected arising from conflict with rigid social hierarchies. The impact of nature and culture in shifting the narrator’s sense of gender identity, added to her growing awareness of gender ideologies in the New World, color the underlying tone of these memoirs. As pilgrims on a route, nineteenth-century women benefit from the transatlantic experience to gain a deeper sense of themselves (Bremer), a more authentic mode of a womanly being in the world (Graham and Calderón), or else a momentary liberation from the constrictions of the prevailing gender system (Tristan). “BOOKS OF THE BRAVE”— WOMEN’S TRAVEL AS INITIATION The Penelope Voyages of British women travelers to non-Western regions prove that travel became a legitimate way to seek knowledge and self-validation as

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well as a welcome escape route from the restrictions of the gender code. After tracing the connection between women’s travels and their sense of personal achievement, Frawley affirms the “empowering” effect of travel, since it “conferred on many Victorian women a measure of cultural competence that derived not from education but from experience.”63 Whereas the male traveler sought knowledge as a way to establish a discourse of power, women’s travels used it as a means towards self-validation, while reinforcing their ability to communicate that knowledge through the written word.64 Particularly for those women who trod to unknown and distant places, winning public recognition through travel was a useful strategy in consolidating a writerly career.65 Under the guise of a narrative “I” that sought to bind together the external world passing through the coach window with an inner, private universe, women writers gained knowledge and a kind of “cultural competency” which made them conversant with emergent disciplines, particularly those that would later consolidate into the social sciences. Transatlantic Travels follows this textual maze through its various routes, by analyzing a set of interdisciplinary discourses—natural history, history, and ethnography—drafted into the fabric of each travel book. The interweaving of discourses develops in two interrelated axes or concerns: social scrutiny, geared to the observation of customs and mores, social stratification, marriage and courtship, and the encounter with the natural world. These discourses often cross, as the model of natural history, with its close attention to specimens and affinity toward cataloguing, spills over into the predominant mode of social observation. My main argument is that women’s travelers employ these various rhetorical strategies as a way to ground their narrative authority, using their travel accounts as a parallel mode of access to a heightened self-awareness and discovery—“the pilgrim’s progress”—, while, at the same time, crafting this inner voice as a conscious authorial persona. Since its inception, textual hybridity is perhaps the most salient characteristic of the European travel book. In Myth and Archive, González Echevarría has shown how the Latin American novel has been shaped by a set of disciplinary discourses which, from colonial times to the present, have infused Latin American fiction, resulting in varied narrative registers; mainly, legal documents, scientific travel books, and anthropology.66 In much the same way, a number of “meta-narratives” are imbricated in the discourse of women’s travel. Thus, European women’s travels to Latin America follow the same eclecticism that characterizes British travel writing,67 insofar as their travelogues combine personal memoir, the epistolary format, historical documents, along with poetic reverie and multiple literary allusions. As Roberto Ignacio Díaz has shown in the case of Madame la Comtesse Merlin, the textual hybridity of European women’s travels is composed of distinctive

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Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America 15

features, not the least of which is the rhetorical purpose served by combining a series of dissimilar genres.68 Temporarily adrift from their respective national communities, travelers sought a way to ground themselves in the midst of unfamiliar settings and the strange sounds of a foreign tongue. Beyond the confines of home, travel writing was a pliable genre tactically deployed by “Victorian lady travelers” “to inscribe themselves into history.”69 Women recorded a sense of history partly to offset a displaced subject’s skewed sense of place; in other words, history substituted the home as the beginning point of their narrative.70 The clamor of history was particularly acute by the first quarter of the nineteenth-century, when the collective sense of being distinct from Spain gave rise to the ideal of national sovereignty. In a transitional age, European women’s travels contributed to the founding state of Spanish American nationalism at a crucial stage of its development. Though often their insights are discarded as a mere foreigner’s viewpoint, their accounts offer a fresh look at the Independence movement, and need to be retrieved for the Latin American historical archive. At least three of these travelers were privileged witnesses to the excitement, changes, and tension brought by political autonomy in Spanish America, and left a record of this transition in their travel books: Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico (1843), Flora Tristan’s Pérégrinations d’une paria [Peregrinations of a Pariah] (1838; 1853), and Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile During the Year 1822 (1824). Whereas these three women witnessed the political clashes that riddled the formation of the new nation states in Spanish America, Fredrika Bremer’s The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America (1853) testified to the ravaging effects of the plantation economy and of slavery in the Caribbean, hence providing a scathing, if indirect, critique of Spanish colonial rule. Read as an alternative history of political events, this set of travelogues provide a critical view of the process of nation building in Spanish America. For they not only document the chaotic organization of the new independent states, but often articulate the underlying causes for the failure of Spanish American nationalism: class antagonisms, racial division, ensuing political strife, and, perhaps most importantly, they signal their audiences the rising political phenomenon of caudillismo.71 By registering the most important political upheavals of the post-Independence period, European women shaped the interpretation of Latin American history in significant ways. Whereas historians like June Hahner validate foreign women’s travel as a factual recording of events,72 I look at their status as both literary texts and as historiography; that is, as a sampling of narrative strategies which enabled women to position themselves as historical subjects, as living witnesses in a troubled time.

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Whether seen as eclecticism or as hybridity, European women’s travels to nineteenth-century Latin America range as a spectrum between natural history, history, and narrative ethnography. By referring to this complex set of disciplines, European women travelers sought to validate their textual authority within the dominant “(male) tradition of travel writing;” at the same time that they necessarily had “to stress their differences from that tradition.”73 The contribution of foreign women’s gaze toward New World territory and its impact on the discourses of nation-formation and cultural identity is an aspect not reckoned with in previous studies of the genre. I argue here that traveling women’s relationship to landscape, as well as the historical and anthropological awareness evident in their travel books, makes them an integral part of the Latin American canon. This book strives to prove their contribution to “the uniqueness of Latin America as a cultural, social and political space from which to narrate.”74 TRAVELING PILGRIMS: TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF WOMEN’S TRAVEL European women’s journeys conform a typology that takes into account both the autobiographical motives for their individual journeys as well as the textual organization of their memoirs. In the Latin American tradition, European women travelers have been ostracized both by their gender and foreign status; with notable exceptions, they have been relegated either to the margins of history, or else rejected outright for their presumably foreign outlook. In contrast to Victorian “lady travelers” to Africa and the Orient, who, as the plethora of recent critical studies show, have been assimilated into the British literary canon, these traveling pilgrims have been practically erased from our collective memory or cultural Archive (what González Echevarría aptly defines not just as an accumulated historical record but also as “an archeology of narrative forms”).75 Pratt’s study of Tristan and Graham as “exploratrices sociales” [“social explorers”] situates them wholly within the capitalist boom that took place after Independence,76 an approach that suppresses the difference of female-authored travels within the predominantly male-encoded genre of travel writing. Comparable to the classic journey of Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, which inspired their views of Nature, European women travelers tended to stay in America for long periods of time.77 Unlike their Victorian counterparts, who for the most part made brief forays into Africa and the Orient, prolonged residence in the New World facilitated European women to establish lasting relationships in their respective countries of residence. Often relying on their Creole peers for information on local customs

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and mores, this dependency—and in many cases, vulnerability—shows the unstable subject position constructed in their memoirs, what is elided in the “imperial eyes” model. It was precisely the “reliance on experiences abroad” that formed the basis for the woman traveler’s narrative “authority,” for that experience marked her distance—or “displacement”—both literal and literary—from the dominant tradition of male travel writing and hence endowed her with a distinctive rhetoric or “voice.”78 Dorothy Middleton’s description of “Victorian Lady Travellers” views canonical British authors as fulfilling varied roles, from “globe trotter” to simply “voyagers.”79 Despite being one of the first categorizations of female travel, Middleton’s assessment of the Victorian tradition captured both the spirit and energy of their action and writing in superlative terms: “Fortified by a kind of innocent valour, convinced of the civilizing mission of woman, clothed in long skirts and armed with an umbrella or sunshade . . . , the nineteenth-century woman traveller covered thousands of miles—writing, painting, observing, botanizing, missionizing, collecting, and, lately, photographing.”80 Similar activities surface in the European women traveling in Latin America, with the exception of missionary work. Responding to another stage in feminist criticism, recent classifications of foreign women’s travel emphasize not so much the actions performed, but rather the particularity of the gaze with which they viewed Spanish American territory and its emergent constituencies. Subtler than Mary Louise Pratt’s “imperial eyes” model, but stressing as well the primacy of sight as a category for theorizing travel, Maria Frawley divides Victorian women travelers into two distinct types—either as outside observers or participants. However, Frawley also adds a third or “in-between” stance including those women travelers who sought “to capture the imaginative experience and the appeal of travel,”81 hence allowing for a simultaneously detached and engaged point of view. Whereas Birkett, Middleton, and Frawley underline the uniqueness of women’s journeys as an escape from the confines of home, Karen Lawrence debunks the revisionist thrust of feminist criticism, denying the validity of travel writing in fostering “a wider range” for women’s agency and subjectivity. This critical approach hence undercuts the usefulness of the genre of travel writing as a means of “liberation” for nineteenth-century women, always conscious of the need to negotiate the demands of domesticity with the desire for a separate identity.82 Typical of a post-colonial approach to travel writing, Lawrence uncritically affirms the ideological underpinnings of the genre as a direct expression of the British empire’s colonial interests and those of the dominant merchant class.83 Mocking the rhetoric of “the intrepid Victorian women travellers” voiced by an earlier school of feminist critics,

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Lawrence parodies the female version of the paradigmatic male explorer: “the image of Victorian women travellers striding in long skirts through the bush, stopping to eat manioc, constructs the female counterpart to the British male explorer and empire builder.”84 Yet while Lawrence critiques the adoption of a female exploration trope, she tends to reify the sexual dichotomy banning women from travel, while undercutting its use as a means to gain self-respect, outside recognition, and a truer sense of self, hence countering Middleton, Marz Harper, and Frawley’s positive valorizations.85 It was precisely Mary Kingsley who coined the dominant trope of European women’s travels as “‘the blessings of a good thick skirt,’” derived from a famous episode in Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa in which her billowing skirt saved her from the dangers of a surprise spiked trap in the African jungle. For both Mary Russell and Dorothy Middleton, the mantra-like phrase has become a trope for the female traveler’s self-fashioning, as it dignified the category of female savant and lent credence to both adventure-seekers and lovers of science.86 From Kingsley’s famous passage, Russell envisions two categories of travelers: those engaged in a personal quest, and those transcending the need for either psychological or professional affirmation; in both cases, clothing becomes a means to preserve an identity and a code to ward off the unfamiliar.87 Russell’s use of the clothes metaphor aptly captures the gesture of British women travels as reaching beyond the confines of the self, for her second category includes “those who weave in and out among the lives of people they encounter on the way, picking up, during odyssey, a stitch here and a pattern there so that they return wearing cloaks embroidered with the rainbow of the world.”88 The poetic ring of the “stitching” metaphor links with the type of transatlantic encounter outlined here for foreign women’s travels to Latin America, as if the sense of place conditioned a particular notion of travel which embraced the utopic longing for an alternative universe.89 A similar view is echoed by Lila Marz Harper, when she states that “[h]ow women travel writers negotiated the representation of their dress while engaging in exploratory travel became a complex part of their rhetorical strategies.”90 By downplaying the material aspect of travel, Lawrence’s Penelope Voyages tends to reinforce traditional feminine roles rather than enhance our understanding of what travel meant for women in a different age; her evocation of the pilgrim motif is by far more suggestive, and directly pertinent to this study. Markedly ideological readings of European travel narrative cast Graham and Tristan’s solely as “female domestic subject[s] of empire,” with their books falling squarely within the rubric of “female imperial authority.”91 In contrast to this model, I consider travel a complex genre mediating a European world-view with the distinctiveness of a New World sense of place,

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hence emphasizing the travelers’ ideological unsettledness.92 At the crossroads between gender and genre, travel writing facilitated women to inscribe their views of nature, document their historical experience, and narrate a series of transnational encounters. The pilgrimage trope will lead me to show how travel shapes a transatlantic dialogue that modifies both the individual traveler’s secure sense of self as well as the communities with which they came in contact, an interaction with profound bearing for the discourses of nation-building in Latin America. Organized by the discourses drafted onto the narrative of travel, Transatlantic Travels begins with the privileged gaze over American territory as foundation for future inscapes and explorations. Chapter 2, “Mapping the Unknown: European Women’s Travels and the Gaze of Enchantment,” takes into account both visual and narrative aspects of the journey, studying illustrations and pictorial sketches which accompany the travel books as an integral part of the experience of travel, culminating in the work of traveler-artist Adela Breton. While the critical canon has traced the impact of scientific travelogues in shaping Latin American cultural identity, noting particularly the sense of wonder expressed by male scientific explorers, I trace similar reactions to New World nature and landscape surfacing in women’s travels.93 In almost all of the female pilgrims, the influence of Alexander von Humboldt can be detected in their approach to landscape as both an object of knowledge and an expression of the sublime. In many cases, women travelers consciously tread the path laid out before them by the great Prussian explorer, relishing on their ability to recognize either a site or a species he had previously “rediscovered” in the Americas. Despite the influence of the prevailing scientific model, women’s travels evidence another kind of gaze toward the vast expanse of land and verdant plains which met their eyes: a poetic scrutiny that glosses the minuteness of scientific observation with an emotive or subjective tint, what I call here “the gaze of enchantment.” Their illumined vision of valley, mountain, plain, forest, stars, and seascape register different aesthetic responses which participate in a broader Romantic imagination. Women travelers sought in nature a resting place or substitute moorings, a harmony with nature that would balance their sense of unsettledness as visitors in a strange land. Fey and Racine rightly comment that “the physical environment takes on an outsized importance as the foreign residents attempt to order their new world in a comprehensible manner.”94 Rather than emphasize the “emptiness” of American territory, its potential for economic exploitation and control, transatlantic pilgrims acclaim the landscape, approaching it with reverential awe.95 Whether the traveler describes her vision of nature in terms of natural theology or with more nuanced metaphors, her response to landscape forms an integral part of her journey, to the point that it shapes or guides the steps along her route.

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It is particularly the genre of the illustrated travel account which conveys the traveler’s subjective gaze; pictorial images thus convey a deeply personal, often intense, relationship to landscape. Because travel for nineteenth-century women involved both a greater feat of physical endurance as well as a more daring social act, rapport with nature is often tied to their consciousness of treading the unknown. Indeed, Victorian women traveling to remote regions of the world, particularly Africa and Asia but also Latin America, “wrote to capitalize on reputations as adventure-seekers,”96 so that the male-encoded struggle with nature appeared as a transgression of the prevailing gender code. Visual explorations by means of sketchbook, drawing, or lithograph show the extent to which women participated in the discourse of natural history. In the manner of eighteenth-century precursors, European women pilgrims combine science and art, producing in their travelogues imagined mappings of Latin American regions as alternative forms of knowledge. The map of Latin America which they draw is both sensorial and scientific, leading to an enriched perspective from which to view the uniqueness of the New World. European women travelers provide an alternative history of political events—what could rightly be called a gendered history, a history that nevertheless unfolds different perspectives with which to view the historical field, and, consequently, varying tropes for structuring the travel account as historiography—a kind of “metahistory” at the margins. Chapter 3, “Romancing the Nation: European Women’s Travels in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America,” focuses on the “I” of the female historian as well as on the rhetorical strategies with which the historical field is measured and constructed. At one extreme, Graham’s view of the Chilean campaign against Upper Perú in 1817 is written as a privileged insider, for she interviewed Bernardo O’Higgins and the Argentine General San Martin in order to faithfully record the sequence of events.97 At the other, Calderón de la Barca maintains a tone of detached observation in her ironic account of the rise of caudillo figures in Mexico. Tristan’s stance falls between these two positions, since her initial idealism regarding the succession of power in Perú falls prey to disillusionment, provoking a strong critique of Creole nationalism, failed military strategy, and male political leadership. Of all the travel books, her Pérégrinations depicts a passionate involvement, an active engagement with the course of Peruvian nationalism as well as with the fate of the nation with which she so ardently identified. Given her philanthropic bent and deep religious convictions, Bremer, on the other hand, upholds an elevated stance, ultimately constructing a redemptive vision of a degraded social world. Given their class status, most European women had limited contact with the indigenous, mestizo, or slave populations of the New World.98 Despite

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infrequent and often brief encounters with the culturally Other, European women described local customs and mores, often with amorous detail and dedication. At one extreme, their travelogues provide a rudimentary understanding of the autochthonous; at the other, they refashion the colonial encounter by identifying—if fleetingly, during the duration of their stay—with the Other of the Latin American continent. In chapter 4, “Face-to-Face with the Other: Women Travelers as Ethnographers,” I analyze the travelers’ view of indigenous and non-Western civilizations, and the use of narrative ethnography as a means to structure their travel accounts. Of all the transatlantic pilgrims, Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer wields the most consistent “ethnographic authority,” as her attitude toward non-Western cultures is based on an experience in the field and the recording of that experience in both written and visual registers. In a gesture surpassing the limitations of gender and historical period, Bremer visited the slave quarters amidst the sugar-cane fields in Cuba, thus positioning herself as a “participant observer,” and anticipating, albeit in crude fashion, a type of anthropological study that would become normative for the discipline.99 Relevant passages from The Homes of the New World, particularly those dealing with the representation of African dances, are emblematic of an ethnographic approach to non-Western cultures. The second woman who broke the barrier between Self and Other and thus the main postulate of the European travel book is turn-of-the-century British artist Adela Breton. An internationally avid adventure-seeker who traversed the Southern Cone, Canada, and most of Western Europe, Breton fixated her artistic gaze on the volcanoes and rugged cliffs of the Mexican sierras. Through the peaks and valleys of Michoacán, Veracruz, Puebla, and Oaxaca, she was aided by the helpful presence of Pablo Solorio, an Indian from the state of Michoacán who became her constant companion, travel-mate, and assistant. Whereas Solorio aided Breton in unearthing the paintings and statues of the Mayan world; in reciprocal fashion, the Victorian “lady-traveler” enabled him to tap into his own artistic potential. Their life-long collaboration modifies the pattern of dominance characterizing European travel writing. In short, Bremer and Breton’s travels exemplify a practice of female ethnography [ethnographie des femmes] that sheds new light into the marginal cultures of the Americas. European women visitors to nineteenth-century Spanish America also make the social condition of women one of the central concerns of their travels,100 a topic explored in chapter 4. This body of travel writing resists the manner in which male commercial explorers had rendered women almost “invisible” in their accounts of pampa, field, and forest.101 Indeed, “[w]ith respect to the inherently male national and imperial subject,” foreign women’s travelogues prove that “the transculturated Other is a woman.”102 The woman-centered

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perspective evident in European women’s travel writing leads Pratt to conjecture that these texts repeatedly project a series of “feminotopias,” defined as “idealized worlds of female autonomy, empowerment, and pleasure.”103 But rather than idealize the female experience in the New World, our Old World heroines were highly critical of the restricted domestic web in which Creole women spun their lives. They were particularly sensitive to the confinement of upper-class Creole women inside the home, their lack of purposeful activity and education. The notable exception was Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer, who saw the home as the site of a distinct American identity. Their memoirs include extensive comments on marriage mores among the Creole upper-class, along with its illicit counterpart, the seduction scene, as in Tristan’s fascination with the Peruvian women’s saya y manto, a protective garment which permitted subversive erotic encounters by concealing the face of the woman wearing it.104 Other travelers denounced the hateful practice of forced religious vocations among the unwed elite. Tristan offers modernday readers a harrowing account of her cousin Dominga’s escape from the convent, what is echoed as well in Calderón de la Barca’s poignant rendition of an unwilling Mexican novice forced into convent life because of her family’s inability to provide her with a dowry. The same rejection of convent life surfaces in Graham’s description of a Brazilian convent as a “prison.” Despite the often scathing critique of gender arrangements, Creole women, as well as other European women living permanently in the New World, served as “mirrors” for the travelers’ own sense of identity and difference. In their writings, a stern critique of family relations among the Creoles often goes hand-in-hand with a terse acknowledgment of the particular form of oppression suffered by women from the disenfranchised classes and races. This detailed process of observation led European visitors to bolster their own sense of gender solidarity, at the same time that they paradoxically questioned their unconscious assumption of a specific national identity. In contrast to male scientific explorers, who sought to persevere in their European identity, often by extraordinary means, like the Schomburgk brothers who “fire[d] salvos in the midst of the jungle to celebrate the Queen’s birthday,”105 women travelers show relatively little anxiety about their own national affiliations. Tristan, for instance, was quite willing to renounce her French citizenship and swear an oath of loyalty to her father’s country, a gesture denied her by her uncle Pío’s rejection of her claim to be a legitimate heir.106 No wonder, then, that these travelogues have been seen, at best, as tangential to Spanish American literary history, and, at worst, as a kind of counter-canon to the dominant, heroic discourse of Spanish American nationalism. Recent attempts to recuperate the feminine legacy in the constitution of Spanish American nationalism have rightly emphasized the exclusion of women from the

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ideal of polity implied in Spanish American Independence.107 As Pratt claims, “[f]rom the moment they were denied equal political and legal rights, the relation of women to ideologies of the nation and to the imagined fraternal community was sharply differentiated from that of men.” 108 Given their secondary and secluded status within the nation, nineteenth-century Spanish American women writers were forced to establish their author/ity from the margins, “out of the very ambiguity of their citizenship.”109 In the case of European women travelers, however, this ambivalence is double, for it is due, in part, to their necessarily transient condition, and, in part, to their gender. The fact that women’s travel books were written in a foreign language— English, French, and Swedish—has also contributed to their oblivion, for, as Roberto Ignacio Díaz has argued, the discourse of Spanish American nationalism has been limited almost exclusively to works written in Spanish. This is because the notion of “imagined community” already implies the sharing of a common language; particularly in Spanish America, the fraternal ideal of inventing a nation is postulated on a single, homogenous language, which forges “un patrimonio común” [“a shared patrimony”].110 Yet the indictment that “to write in a foreign language is readily interpreted as a sign of disloyalty and lack of solidarity” has fallen more harshly on women writers than on their male counterparts.111 To counter this trend, I argue here that European women’s travel books form part of the Latin American historical archive. As transatlantic pilgrims, these travel writers expand the “multilingual library” interpreting Latin America from across linguistic and geographical frontiers. In what follows, I stake this claim by analyzing how Spanish America has been envisioned across the gender divide; how a parallel process of “engendering the nation” has taken place from the outside, as imagined possibility as well as eye-witness account. NOTES 1.  Jean Franco, “Un viaje poco romántico: viajeros británicos hacia Sudamérica, 1818–1828,” Escritura (Caracus) 4, no. 7 (1979): 130. 2. In his admirable commentary on scientific travelers to nineteenth-century Latin America, González Echevarría points out that “Latin American nature had been a source of wonder to Europeans since the discovery; . . .” the traveler’s awe before the American landscape is expressed in “a rhetoric of amazement” and “a language of the sublime.” Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 105, 132. 3.  Maria H. Frawley, A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1994), 13–14, 17.

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 4. Ibid.  5. For the transition between the classically male-encoded eighteenth-century “grand tour” and the emergence of tourism toward the latter part of the nineteenthcentury, see James Buzard, The Beaten Track. European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).  6. Frawley, A Wider Range, 15.   7.  Roberto Ignacio Díaz, Unhomely Rooms: Foreign Tongues and Spanish American Literature (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press; London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2002), 5, 15, 18. This study is further proof that “writing in another language is not an exceptional occurrence in the Spanish American realm of letters,” 23.  8. Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822; and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, and John Murray, 1824. Journal of a Voyage to Brazil and Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1833. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, and John Murray, 1824.   9.  Jennifer Hayward, ed., “Introduction,” in A Journal of a Residence in Chile: During the Year 1822, and A Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, by Maria Graham (London and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), xx. 10. Frances Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny [sic] Calderón de la Barca (With New Material from the Author’s Private Journals), ed. Howard T. Fisher and Marion Hall Fisher (New York: Doubleday, 1966). 11.  Charles A. Hale, “Review of 1966 edition of Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 47, no. 4 (November 1967): 581. 12.  Magda Portal credits her with the start of Peruvian feminism in Flora Tristan, precursora (Lima: Editorial La Equidad, 1983). 13.  Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba: The Travels of Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlin (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998). 14.  Flora Tristan, Pérégrinations d’une paria, 1833–1834. 2 vols., 1st ed. Paris: Arthus Bertrand, Librairie Éditeur, 1838. 15.  For Tristan’s tragic life story, I draw on the following sources: Denys Cuche, “Le Pérou de Flora Tristan: du rêve a la réalité,” Un fabuleux destin. Actes du premier Colloque international Flora Tristan, ed. Stéphane Michaud (Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 1985), 19–37; Francesca Denegri, “Desde la ventana: Women ‘Pilgrims’ in Nineteenth-Century Latin American Travel Literature,” Modern Language Review 92, no. 2 (April 1997): 348–62; Kathleen R. Hart, “Rêveries des promeneuses solidaires: Flora Tristan and the French Autobiographical Tradition,” French Forum 19, no. 1 (January 1994):133–48, and, by the same author, “An I for an Eye: Flora Tristan and Female Visual Allegory,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 26, nos. 1–2 (Fall-Winter 1997–1998): 52–65. See also Angela Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times: Narratives about Travel to South America, 1780–1849, trans. Dick Cluster (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 105–7. 16.  Hart, “Rêveries des promeneuses solidaires,” 143.

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17.  For an analysis of how Tristan crafted her pariah identity out of her experiences in Peru, see Jill S. Kunheim, “Pariah/Messiah: The Conflictive Social Identity of Flora Tristan,” in Reinterpreting the Spanish American Essay: Women Writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Doris Meyer (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1995), 27–36. Pérez Mejía stresses Tristan’s flight from her oppressive situation in France in A Geography of Hard Times, 109. Tristan’s multiple identities are admirably drawn in Susan Grogan, Flora Tristan—Life Stories (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). 18.  See Laura S. Strumingher’s biography, The Odyssey of Flora Tristan, (New York: Peter Lang, 1988) and Kathleen R. Hart, “Rêveries des promeneuses solidaires,” 133–48. 19.  Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, trans. Mary Botham Howitt (New York: Harper & Harper Publishers, 1854), 1:154. 20.  “Mary Howitt had called her ‘the Jane Austen of Sweden;’ much later, G. Barnett Smith drew a comparison between the two women: ‘Fredrika Bremer has been compared with Jane Austen; but the Swedish writer was the intellectual superior of the English. Though not so great a novelist, her culture was wider, and her thought deeper; she also had a more vigorous imagination. . . .’” Signe Alice Rooth, Seeress of the Northland: Fredrika Bremer’s American Journey, 1849–1851 (Philadelphia: American Scandinavian Historical Foundation, 1955), 12–13. The quote comes from G. Barnett Smith, Women of Renown: Nineteenth-Century Studies (London: 1893), 40–41 and is quoted in Rooth, Seeress of the Northland, 300n24. See also Adolph B. Benson, America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer (New York: The American Scandinavian Foundation; London: Oxford University Press, 1924), xi, xvii and Brita K. Stendahl, The Education of a Self-Made Woman: Fredrika Bremer, 1801–1865 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mullen Press, 1994), 53, 63. 21.  Michèle Guicharnaud-Tollis, Regards sur Cuba au XIXe siècle: Temoignages européens (Paris: Editions d’Harmattan, 1993). 22.  Skissbök från resan i Nya världen 1850–1851 [Sketch Book of a Journey to the New World, 1850–1851]. Uppsala, Sweden: Maps & Prints Department, Uppsala University Library. 23.  See my “Women Travelers in Latin America: The Transatlantic Imagination,” Review 84: Literature and Arts of the Americas 45, no. 1 (May 2012): 5–9. 24.  I draw here on Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), particularly her “Introduction: The Taste for Discovery,” which maps the interdependence between art and science throughout the eighteenth century (1–28) and chap. 1, “The Scientific Gaze,” which expands the idea that “the task of science was to seek truth in the minute elements of the phenomenal world” (31–56). See Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Maria Sybilla Merian: The Dawn of Field Ecology in the Forests of Suriname, 1699–1701,” Review 84 45, no. 1 (May 2012): 10–20. 25.  See Adela Pineda, “Crepuscular Recollections: Paula Kollonitz in the Court of Maximilian I of Mexico.” Review 84: Literature and Arts of the Americas 45, no. 1 (May 2012): 42–49.

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26. June E. Hahner, ed., “Editor’s Introduction,” in A Parisian in Brazil: The Travel Account of a Frenchwoman in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, by Adèle Touissant-Samson (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001), xi–xxvii. 27.  Claire Emile Martin, “‘Shall I Ever Climb the Moors Again?” Lady Florence Dixie’s Across Patagonia (1880),” Review 84: Literature and Arts of the Americas 45, no. 1 (May 2012): 57–63. 28. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Narrative and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 152, 170. 29.  Ibid., 244n39. 30. Díaz, Unhomely Rooms, 5, 15, 18. 31.  Quoted in Laurel Ann Lofsvold, Fredrika Bremer and the Writing of America (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1999), 111. 32. Fredrika Bremer, “Pilgrimage to the Holy Land,” in Ladies on the Loose: Women Travellers of the 18th and 19th Centuries, ed. Leo Hamalian (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1981), 115–33. 33.  Dea Birkett, Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2004), 15–16, 19. 34. Ibid., 22–23, 25. 35. Frawley, A Wider Range, 20. The author makes reference here to John Pemble, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (London: Clarendon Press, 1987), 96, 207n11. 36. Birkett, Off the Beaten Track, 28. 37.  Kathleen R. Hart, “‘There Shall be Earthquakes in Diverse Places’: Volcanic Terror in Flora Tristan’s Pérégrinations d’une paria,” in The Play of Terror in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. John T. Booker and Allan H. Pasco (London and Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 48. 38.  Denegri, “‘Desde la ventana,’” 350. 39.  Hart, “An I for an Eye,. . .” 54. 40.  Karen Lawrence, Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), xiii, 8–10. 41.  Ibid., 19, 22; Guiñazu, “En el nombre del padre,” 7; Denegri, “Desde la ventana,” 349. 42.  James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 32, 39. 43. Lawrence, Penelope Voyages, 22. 44.  Denegri, “Desde la ventana,” 348–62. 45. Strumingher, Odyssey of Flora Tristan, xvii. 46. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 39. 47. Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. 48. Birkett, Off the Beaten Track, 26. 49. Ingrid E. Fey and Karen Racine, eds., “Introduction: National Identity Formation in an International Context,” in Strange Pilgrimages: Exile, Travel, and National Identity in Latin America, 1800–1990s (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly

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Resources, 2000), x. The authors note that the term “strange pilgrimages” was coined by Gabriel García Márquez in a 1993 volume with the same title; ibid., xvii n2. I am indebted to my late colleague Charles A. Hale for bringing this book to my attention. 50.  Stella Maris Scatena Franco, Peregrinas de Outrora. Viajantes latino-americanas no século XIX (Florianópolis: Ed. Mulheres; Santa Cruz do Sol: EDUNISC, 2008, 22–26. Scatena Franco’s study traces this reverse journey in writers as diverse as Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Nisia Floresta, and Eduarda Mansilla, while favoring, as this one, the female-centeredness of their journeys. 51.  “[T]o write for a European public, . . . the traveler had to persevere in his identity, in spite of the lures of the wild.” González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 108. 52.  Frey and Racine, “Introduction,” Strange Pilgrimages, xvii. 53.  I retain this term from an earlier phase of feminist criticism to suggest how these women transgressed the categories of gender for their time, and how they had to negotiate the demands of femininity with their new-found role as travelers, a point discussed later in this chapter. 54.  Frey and Racine, “Introduction,” Strange Pilgrimages, xvii. 55.  González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 96. 56.  Pérez Mejía has analyzed this reciprocal gaze in A Geography of Hard Times, 81–84. 57.  June E. Hahner, ed., “Introduction,” in Women Through Women’s Eyes: Latin American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1998), xv–xvi. 58.  Denegri, 349, 351; Hahner, “Introduction,” in Women Through Women’s Eyes, xvi. 59.  The term “contact zone” is defined spatially as “the space of colonial encounters”; temporally, as a historical time frame where such encounters occur, and pragmatically, to suggest how such encounters lead to a reshuffling of colonial subjectivities. In this definition, Pratt underscores the relational imbalance between colonizer and colonized; hence reinforcing a binary throughout her analysis of the traveling genre. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6–7. 60.  “Part of the interest of [women’s] literature is that it both challenged and accommodated those domestic ideals against which so many Victorian women were measured.” Frawley, A Wider Range, 27. 61.  Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 44, 63, 70, 78. After analyzing in depth the “constraints” (5) placed on women’s travel narrative, and the clash “between masculine and feminine discourses” (44), Mills concludes: “The very fact of being female is considered to be one of the elements which make travel difficult to write about” (84). From a Latin American angle, Scatena Franco discusses similar tensions in Peregrinas de Outrora, 27. 62.  A number of critics have made this claim; see Frawley, A Wider Range, 24. Lawrence seems to argue against it. 63. Frawley, A Wider Range, 24.

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64.  “The European gaze is one; . . . its object is . . . an Other that it depicts, classifies and describes as it creates a discourse of power predicated on the adequation of scientific discourse and an object that it has molded for itself.” González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 113. 65.  “Women writers achieved a degree of public recognition for their travel writing because it was considered to be a nondomestic genre and hence by implication an unusual and risky choice for the woman writer.” Frawley, A Wider Range, 24. Her useful notion of “cultural competency” follows. 66.  González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 10–14. 67. Lawrence, Penelope Voyages, 23. 68.  Roberto Ignacio Díaz, “Merlin’s Foreign House: The Genres of La Havane,” Cuban Studies 24 (1994): 57–82. 69. Frawley, A Wider Range, 42. 70.  Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 71. Later on in the century, other women travelers, most notably, Lina Beck Bernard, wife of a Swiss entrepeneur, narrated her impressions of Argentine society in her memoirs, Cinq années de séjour dans la Confederée Argentine, 1857–1862 (Paris: De Grassart, 1864). See Ana María Ferrini, “Viajera y cronista de Santa Fe: Lina Beck Bernard,” in Mujeres latinoamericanas: Historia y cultura, Siglos XVI al XIX (Havana/Mexico City: Casa de las Américas/Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, 1997), 2:125–26. 72. Hahner, Women Through Women’s Eyes, xviii. 73. Frawley, A Wider Range, 30. 74.  González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 10. 75.  Ibid., 33. 76. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 155–71. 77. Although Hahner points out that women travelers to Latin America were tourists or short-term residents, by far the most interesting travel books are those by women who had a prolonged stay in the New World; Hahner, “Introduction,” Women Through Women’s Eyes, xv. In contrast, scholars of British travel writing—notably, Lawrence, Mills, and Frawley—convey Victorian women’s travel as, for the most part, temporary ventures. 78. Frawley, A Wider Range, 30–31. 79.  Dorothy Middleton, Victorian Lady Travellers (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1965), 4–150. 80.  Ibid., 4. 81. Frawley, A Wider Range, 35–36. 82.  A similar jump is made in the next statement, when “the ideological assumptions in . . . individualistic rhetoric in female travel writing” are seen as the same as “its more contemporary recuperation in feminist criticism,” in Lawrence, Penelope Voyages, 106. 83.  In response to Katherine Frank’s 1986 biography of Mary Kingsley, Lawrence states that the “‘quest for liberation’ [is] itself complicitous in the pattern of British imperialist domination;” Penelope Voyages, 105.

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 84. Lawrence, Penelope Voyages, 126.   85.  “Although it is tempting to see in the topos of travel a route to self-discovery, Kingsley’s hybrid narrative in fact frustrates our attempts to chart the narrator or traveler as a unified psychological ‘self.’” Lawrence, Penelope Voyages, 128.   86.  See Mary Russell, The Blessings of a Good, Thick Skirt: Women Travellers and Their World (London: Collins, 1986), vi, 216; and Middleton, Victorian Lady Travellers.  87. Russell, The Blessings of a Good, Thick Skirt, 211–13.  88. Ibid., 211.   89.  Although I draw from Morgan her useful notion that a particular site or region elicits a particular type of travel writing, I differ from her categorical statement that women’s travel writing is necessarily a form of “female imperial rhetorics,” in Place Matters, 3, 18.   90.  Lila Marz Harper, Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 156.  91. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 170.   92.  I owe this useful concept to my colleague Eric Gidal.  93. González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 102, 104, 132.   94.  Frey and Racine, Strange Pilgrimages, xvi.  95. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 124–27.  96. Frawley, A Wider Range, 104.   97.  Maria Graham, Diario de su residencia en Chile (1822) y de su viaje al Brasil (1823), translated by José Valenzuela D. (Madrid: Ed. América, 1916), 21; David Bushnell, “The Independence of Spanish South America,” in The Independence of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 128–29.  98. Hahner, “Introduction,” Women Through Women’s Eyes, xix.   99.  James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 25, 28, 30–32, 34–37. 100.  Ferrini, “Viajera y cronista de Santa Fe,” 125. 101.  “El sujeto femenino parece ser el límite de la barbarie en muchas descripciones. . . . [E]se sujeto, en la mayoría de los casos, es el lugar de una invisibilidad.” [The female subject appears to mark the frontier of barbarism in many descriptions. In many cases, that subject position marks a space of invisibility] (my translation). Graciela Montaldo, “Invisibilidad y exclusión: el sujeto femenino visto por los viajeros europeos en el siglo XIX,” in Mujeres latinoamericanas: Historia y cultura, Siglos XVI al XIX (Havana/Mexico City: Casa de las Américas/Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, 1997), 2:105. “For Frenchman Gaspar Mollien (Travels in the Republic of Colombia, 1824) . . . the forest is textualized as a site not of density of meaning, but of absence of meaning,” in Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 150. 102.  Mary Louise Pratt, “Criticism in the Contact Zone: Decentering Community and Nation,” in Critical Theory, Cultural Politics, and Latin American Narrative, ed. Steven M. Bell, Albert H. Le May, and Leonard Orr (London and Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1993), 92.

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103. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 166–67. 104. Ibid., 167. 105.  González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 108. 106.  Cuche, “Le Pérou de Flora Tristan,” 19–20. 107.  Mary Louise Pratt, “Las mujeres y el imaginario nacional en el siglo XIX.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 19, no. 38 (1993): 54. 108.  Pratt, “Criticism in the Contact Zone,” 92. 109.  Pratt, “Las mujeres y el imaginario nacional en el siglo XIX,” 54. 110.  “Construir la nación requiere intentar crear lo que es imaginado como una cultura nacional, también compartida horizontal o fraternalmente—un patrimonio común, en suma.” [To build a nation requires creating what is conceived as a national culture, which is shared in terms of a horizontal or fraternal bond—in short, a common patrimony]; (my translation). Pratt, “Las mujeres y el imaginario nacional en el siglo XIX,” 51–52. 111. Díaz, Unhomely Rooms, 8.

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Chapter Two

Mapping the Unknown: European Women’s Travels and the Gaze of Enchantment

At the start of her reading of William Henry Hudson’s The Purple Land (1885), a novel based on a travel account to the protagonist’s native Argentine pampas, Sylvia N. Rosman asks: “What is the topography of a national literature whose texts are written in a foreign language?”1 Localized in space and time, European women’s travels trace a distinct topography of the newly emerging nations, conjoining both written word with visual image to trace an inscape of New World scenery. Charting national territory—the hidden valley of Central Mexico, its majestic volcanoes, the arid desert of Arequipa, the dense forested green of Brazil and Cuba—provides an image of Latin America at a crucial moment in the process of nation-formation. Scoping the territory with different eyes, women’s travelogues serve to promote the cultural autonomy of the region by their uniquely crafted “views of Nature.” The discourse of natural history plays a prominent role in women’s travel narrative, leading to a series of tropes depicting the uniqueness of the New World, a metaphoric approximation enhancing the continent’s sense of cultural uniqueness.2 Providing multiple re-readings of Latin American terrain, the five women travelers selected here are compared in terms of their respective aesthetic response to landscape: their singularity of vision is traced, first, through their reception of Enlightenment science, and, second, by recurrent tropes of nature surfacing in individual travelogues. Imbued by the discourse of nineteenth-century natural history, European women travelers map the unknown with a unique “geographical imagination.”3 These female explorers combined the exultation of Nature with a keen sense of their own physical being, resulting in a raptured attention that revealed both the subjectivity of the spectator as well as a particular type of relationship established with the natural world. At the core of their vision was the inheritance of Enlightment thought; particularly the legacy of the scientific travelogue, emblematized 31

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in Alexander von Humboldt’s voluminous account of his American journey. In her reading, Mary Louise Pratt claims that Humboldt’s five-year trek to the interior of the continent resulted in a “totalizing” view of South American territory, an empty space of nature ripe for future exploitation and domination.4 Yet, in the New World, European travelers found not merely an “empty” landscape into which they could project their own sense of superiority, but rather a space of beauty that surpassed their own categories of understanding. Surfacing in Humboldt’s paradigmatic journey up the Orinoco, the encounter with tropical nature was experienced in terms of excess, a rapture which often unsettled the travelers’ secure European identity.5 In line with the rhetoric of wonder established by the male scientific tradition, in women’s travels, salient landscapes or objects of nature evoke particularly strong responses, moving beyond established tropes to an awareness of the physical act of traveling in a strange geography. This gendered tradition resulted in a complex mix of discourses: at one end, the adoption of Humboldt’s literary legacy; at the other, variations of the “Victorian female sublime,” Gates’ term for a uniquely gendered response to place.6

Figure 2.1.  Maria Graham, “Traveling in Spanish America,” Frontispiece, Journal of a Residence in Chile During the Year 1822. And a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (1824).

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Mapping the Unknown 33

The emblematic image of this tradition is Maria Graham’s frontispiece illustration to her Chile Journal: “Traveling in Spanish America” signified not merely an active engagement with or response to male-authored travel books,7 but a rhetoric of travel in which the writer roamed the world through Humboldt’s eyes, leaving an imprint of her own individuality in the verbal and pictorial configuration of her travels. Whereas Sara Mills argues that the dominantly male tradition of European travel writing imposed a series of textual constraints, it is also true that women in nineteenth-century Latin America negotiated hegemonic discourses by “engendering” their own rhetoric of travel, at times echoing, at times surpassing, the weight of accumulated tradition.8 Part of the century’s broader “romance of natural history,” a popularized form of science covering a wide range of practices—from objective scrutiny, random collection of species, to subjective appreciation—European women’s travels share the accent on the particular characteristic of this tradition.9 Typical of the eclectic practice of Victorian natural science, their gaze falls within the poles of objectivity and subjectivity, arresting the particulars of place with varied rhetoric, including too the use of visual tropes and the art of illustration. European women’s travel also depart from the predominant model in significant ways, for their writings distil a poetic rendition of Nature that I call the gaze of enchantment. By this term I mean, first, the difference of Latin American landscape, the travelers’ sense of “a novel and marvelous realm alien to Europe’s domesticated scenery.”10 This results in a series of tropes depicting the uniqueness of the New World, a metaphoric approximation which, in turn, enhanced the continent’s sense of historical uniqueness.11 It is in this sense that these travelers “detour” for us a distinct profile of New World territory, placing the invention of Nature at the forefront of nationalist discourses. Because of the aesthetic and political importance of their travelogues, Graham, Bremer, Tristan, and Breton’s travelogues hold prominent roles in outlining the contours of nineteenth-century Latin America, hence deserving inclusion within Latin America’s cultural archive. Read in conjunction with the “national romances” written in post-Independence Spanish America— romantic/realist fictions in which class and racial alliances result in erotic and financially productive unions—their travels forge a parallel tradition that open new perspectives on the process of nation-formation.12 Like other nineteenth-century Creoles, mainly Domingo Sarmiento who, in his classic Facundo, filtered the image of the pampa through the lens of scientific discourse, women venturing into the unknown had to reshape their own maps of awakening.13

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ON THE TRAIL WITH HUMBOLDT: EUROPEAN WOMEN TRAVELERS AS READERS It is a commonplace to suggest that the genre of travel writing forms an intricate web of texts in which the individual itinerary conjures writerly paths opened up by previous travelers. Although Pratt has classified European travel writing according to two stylistic categories—the sentimental and the scientific—,14 the genre, as practiced throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, encompassed a wide range of “transdisciplinary” discourses.15 Breaking free of rhetorical restraints, European women travelers renewed the travel account with the same healthy eclecticism which characterized the European travel book.16 The direct precursor of their voyages was the Prussian Alexander von Humboldt, whose relations de voyage, and particularly his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1816) set them on a readerly trail perhaps more arduous than the physical hardships and emotional strain encountered in their journeys. In this chapter, I pursue the extent to which Humboldt’s “grand tour” shaped the course of nineteenth-century European women travelers to the New World. Despite distance in time, under Humboldt’s inspiration, they trekked the plains, pampas, and valleys of the New World, secure in the knowledge he provided but also anxious to establish their own “personal narrative.” It was presumably the lack of formal education which propelled the female travel experience and thus led European women to seek alternative routes to knowledge; in this sense, “[t]ravel enabled many Victorian women . . . to and establish an authority with a part of English culture that had hitherto had evaded them because they lacked the education that decreed cultural authority.”17 Yet European women pilgrims to Latin America evidence a knowledge of scientific travel writing that was used precisely to sustain their “cultural authority” and on which they could build their own rights to authorship. Whether inside a carriage, on horseback, or by foot, the varied journeys of Victorian women travelers are made on the trail of Humboldt, seeing in their illustrious predecessor not merely an abstract model to emulate, but a source of authentication of their varied journeys, an authority needed to construct their own, private forays into unknown territory. With a special permit obtained by King Charles IV, on June 5, 1799, Humboldt embarked for America with French botanist Aimé Bonpland aboard a ship aptly named El Pizarro. Their five-year expedition to discover the source of the Orinoco, through the Magdalena river, up the summit of Mount Chimborazo, and witnessing too the eruption of the Cotopaxi volcano, is emblematic of the scientific journey. On February 1803, Humboldt and Bonpland set sail for Mexico, where they conducted an extensive tour of the

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Mapping the Unknown 35

viceroyalty, particularly the mining region. In March 1804, after five years of intensive exploration, Humboldt and Bonpland sailed from Veracruz to Havana, “never to return.”18 On their trail they carried trunks of native flora and fauna, creating elaborate charts not only of animal and plant species, but also of climactic conditions and geological strata as well as cartes [maps] of the vast territories traced. As the first mappings of previously uncharted regions, Humboldt’s topography of the New World erects itself as a mastertext impacting the formation of regional identities in Latin America. Because “scientific travelers were . . . agents of progress, and . . . their efforts had . . . a revolutionary impact on Latin American societies,” Humboldt’s monumental journey fanned the struggle for Independence among Creole elites.19 In tredding a textual labyrinth, Humboldt consciously followed the trail set by his predecessors. At the start of his Personal Narrative, Humboldt acknowledged that he “read the ancient voyages of the Spaniards” during the long sea passage from La Coruña to Cumaná.20 Hailed the continent’s “second discoverer,” the world-renowned savant refers to Columbus’ inaugural journey, as he claimed to have followed the exact sea route charted by the Almirante, and both Columbus’ text and figure reverberate throughout Humboldt’s voyage.21 In the dramatic passages describing his intent to discover the bifurcation of the Orinoco, the Prussian repeatedly cited Father Gumilla and La Condamine as his most direct textual precursors.22 Like sentinels leading the way, the Jesuit priest and the French explorer mark the steps of Humboldt’s “discovery”; towards the end of the Personal Narrative, when Humboldt refuted existing knowledge regarding the course of the overflowing river, the reader has no choice but to bend to his irrefutable authority.23 Since, as Ottmar Ette reminds us, reading can be viewed as “a kind of traveling,” this criss-crossing of previous journeys foreshadows Humboldt’s own impact on later travelers to the lush jungle interior.24 As both travelers and readers, European women consciously follow Humboldt’s path, so that traces of his Personal Narrative surface on at least three levels in their travel accounts. This influence appears, first, in the perspective of the journey, as the first-person narrator of the travel account is seen as a transparent marker for the actual traveler, a position further theorized as the “‘monarch-of-all-Isurvey,’” a term derived from William Cowper’s verses, and quoted in Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile—“‘I am monarch of all I survey/ My right there is none to dispute,’”—however, in this scene, it is not meant to merely imitate the male explorer’s dominion, but rather echoes the traveler’s loneliness on the eve of her departure from Chile.25 Associated with the “all-knowing I/(eye)” of the European explorer,26 variations of this gaze surface throughout women’s travelogues, but tempered with an important difference: the acknowledgment of the limits of vision, the sense of the viewer’s

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diminished or conflicted status at the sight of varied New World landscapes. Graham’s self-fashioning while standing on a deserted, faraway island shore is exemplary of European women’s rhetoric of travel, which features a set of discreet poses accenting the traveler’s subjectivity. Second, under the influence of Humboldt’s “master-text,” women travelers position themselves in relation both to the space of the journey and to their own bodies—in multiple and highly personal ways. Third, just as it had for Humboldt, the pose assumed by each traveler as she embarked on her journey conditioned the type of narrative persona constructed throughout her travel account, the faces of the pilgrims, the steps leading the way.27 In many passages, when Humboldt visited a site but could not pause to examine it further, he entrusted the task to the next traveler who may intentionally or accidentally stumble on the same spot. This happened often in the Personal Narrative, particularly when pointing out a rare species of plant found only in the tropical zone.28 The absent traveler thus anticipates the reader’s “virtual” journey, in a “hermeneutic movement” in which the real journey tracks its future reception.29 Women travelers seem particularly well suited to fulfill the expectations of Humboldt’s ideal reader. For many of them choose to visit, either deliberately or by chance, sites previously described in Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, imitating the awe expected of the scientific explorer by responding to a particularly striking passage or to the many elaborate digressions encoded in this “master-text” of scientific travel writing.30 This tacit acknowledgment of Humboldt as reliable source often filters the authors’ private encounter with Nature, almost as if it was necessary to tread his previous footsteps in order to fully authenticate their literary wanderings. In a kind of delayed reaction, the contemporary traveler describes the same species or natural phenomena, seeing through Humboldt’s eyes yet adding her own unique emotional or aesthetic response to the object at hand. The most remarkable example of this rhetoric of travel comes from Maria Graham’s journals. A month after boarding the “42 pound frigate” her husband, Captain Thomas Graham, commanded en route to the Southern Cone, Graham steps ashore with “Mr. Dance,” one of “the young midshipmen” aboard the Doris. A few miles out from the coast of Tenerife, she traces the Prussian’s steps, coming upon a site he had previously visited: “We saw the botanical garden so much praised by Humboldt; but it is in sad disorder, having been for some time entirely neglected”.31 The highpoint of the visit was the “Great Dragon Tree of Oratava,” a dragon tree of “enormous magnitude” sighted by Humboldt during his stay in Tenerife and described as “one of the oldest inhabitants of our globe”—precisely the image closing the series of illustrated plates accompanying his Vues de Cordillères.32

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Mapping the Unknown 37

Figure 2.2.  Humboldt, “Le Dragonnier de l’Oratava,” Planche [plate] 69, Atlas Pittoresque du Voyage—Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (1810; facsimile ed. 1972).

At first sight, Graham’s description of the dragon tree echoes Humboldt’s larger-than-life image, for she recalls its centuries-long evolution, “the height and size which it boasted till 1819”; yet her look captures the tree’s subsequent decline rather than its grandeur.33 If for the encyclopedic Prussian the tree symbolized “something solemn and majestic,” for Graham it represented its very opposite—the principle of decaying matter.34 Evoking a Byronic sensibility and an obsession with ruins as a sign of the ravages of time, Graham renders in her sketch only the charred remnants of that ancestral tree, commenting wryly as a caption to her illustration that: “He [Humboldt] saw it in all its greatness; I drew it after it had lost half its top” (Brazil, plate IV, 135). A sentiment echoed in Journal of a Voyage to Brazil: “Humboldt has celebrated this tree in its vigour; it is now a noble ruin.”35

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Figure 2.3.  Maria Graham, “Great Dragon Tree of Oratava,” Plate II, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (1824).

The lithography of the bridge over the Icononzo river included in Vues des Cordillères is another of Humboldt’s images to have an important after-life. Art historian Barbara Maria Stafford qualifies it as “the most frequently described and portrayed” image of the illustrated travel account, attributing its popularity to its “combination of void and solidity of mass.”36 Viewing a similar stone bridge set in a placid country scene in Brazil, Maria Graham voices her regret at not being able to capture the view: “I was sorry I had no means to sketching any part of the beautiful landscape, which, . . . displayed a broad river, over which there is a white stone bridge of several arches . . .”37 Humboldt’s influence in shaping women travelers’ vision of landscape surfaces in the art of Adela Breton, a Victorian woman traveler who re-discovered the Mayan world at the turn of the century. One of Breton’s most precious watercolors, taken near San Andrés Chalchicomula, captures precisely this typically Humboldtian technique: the entrance to Puebla is depicted from the valley below, through a rocky path opening up beneath a stone aqueduct.38 In this image the aqueduct frames the view from a distance in the shape of “a natural arch,” a recurring image in the illustrated travel account used to

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Mapping the Unknown 39

Figure 2.4.  Alexander von Humboldt, “Ponts naturels d’Icononzo,” Planche [plate] 4, Atlas Pittoresque du Voyage.

convey the idea of a “natural masterpiece” or emblem of animated matter.39 Only Breton humanizes the landscape with the pair of indigenous women strolling silently in front—a hint of gender solidarity in their hidden rebozos. UNSEATING HUMBOLDT: WOMEN “TRAVELING IN SPANISH AMERICA” The European traveler’s pose has been codified as a single male explorer positioned from a height above whose gaze absorbs the entire sweep of the land below, surveying it with the objective of economic exploitation, an “emptying out” of landscape where the only salient feature is the unspoken authority of the viewer.40 Humboldt’s famous ascent to Mount Chimborazo becomes

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Figure 2.5.  Adela Breton, “San Andrés Chalchicomula,” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894), Ea 8401. Courtesy of Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.

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Mapping the Unknown 41

the centerpiece of the “imperial eyes” mode of travel writing, for it launched not only his comparative approach to landscape but the abstract construction of a “hypothetical and invisible European traveler.”41 The paradigmatic post-colonial approach is tempered by ecocritical approaches, which turns the dominance implied in a universalized European subject into a more positive valorization. Humboldt’s pose has been described as a “summit-survey,” a viewpoint facilitating the systematic comparison of different landscapes and climates, while, at the same time, downplaying the specificity of a particular terrain or region in favor of a grander “textual atlas” or model of the globe.42 A closer look at Humboldt’s method in his Personal Narrative reveals that

Figure 2.6.  Humboldt, “Vue du Cajambé,” Planche [plate] 42, Atlas Pittoresque du Voyage.

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his comparisons hinged on the contrast between the Old World and the New, when a Latin American landscape recalled its pale, though slightly reminiscent, analogue in Europe.43 Humboldt’s conquest of the peak of the Chimborazo has likewise been interpreted as the climax of his journey; as noted above, the ascent has come to represent the pose of superiority and self-assurance assumed by a generalized and abstract European subject, to which all travelogues must presumably subscribe.44 This reading fails to take into account that, in fact, the explorer’s “summit-survey” actually comes much earlier in his South American odyssey: not atop the mythical Chimborazo, but during an arduous climb to the Silla de Caracas. After recounting the ascent upward, Humboldt ends the scene with a simple understatement: “The eye commanded a vast space of country,”45 thus depersonalizing the event, and bringing closure to one of the climactic scenes composing the continent’s first scientific survey. If we compare this metonymic conclusion to the visual account of Humboldt’s journey, illustrated in his Vues de Cordillères, the climactic arrival at a peak is preceded by a far humbler pose, depicting the contrast between the human figure and the majestic heights of the cordillera. Among other scenes, in Vue de Cajambé a pair of male travelers amble in front of a mountain range with a pair of walking sticks—a convention of the illustrated travel account meant to convey the scale of the drawing—but which also suggests the disparity between the natural and human realms.46 In this image, moreover, the focus of the viewer falls on the pair of walkers down below as they point toward the goal of their expedition—the mountain top—thus signaling both the inaccessibility of the mountain as well as its symbolic status as the object of scientific curiosity. Their posture is, in Stafford’s terms, an example of “willed seeing,” a type of iconography that, by focusing intently on a particular place or terrain, draws out its unique attributes.47 A comparison between Graham’s self-portrait at the outset of her Journal of a Residence in Chile and Humboldt’s depiction while meandering the peaks and valleys of the Orinoco reveals not so much a gender difference as a convergence of point of view before the American landscape. Stafford has noted this simultaneity of vision, as both “Humboldt, scaling the slopes of Chimborazo, and Maria Graham, exploring Chile, stared down upon an ‘arid plain.’”48 In both cases, the traveler is diminished, almost humbled, before the scale and monumental size of the sight. In Humboldt’s painting, he and his traveling companion are dwarfed by the size of the mountain yet proceed on their march in the attempt to reach its heights; whereas, in Graham’s sketch, she appears as a woman facing the unknown, whose fears are heightened by the increased dangers implied in her journey.49 Hence Humboldt conditions, but does not limit, the perspective of the female traveler. Though from differ-

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Mapping the Unknown 43

ent angles of vision, Humboldt and Graham share the comfort (and dis-ease) of inhabiting two worlds at once—what I call here the transatlantic perspective. Journal of a Residence in Chile opens with the image of a female subject in transit, comfortable in two worlds, and inhabiting a transatlantic space. “Traveling in Spanish America” (fig. 2.1) evokes “the subject-centered picturesque,” a technique in which “visible nature is arranged for the spectator in such a way that the lines of the pictorial image converge on the eye of the single and unique beholder and places him or her at the centre.”50 Yet, contrary to the conventions of the picturesque, which focused on the framing of the scene, the spectator’s gaze rivets, first of all, on the carriage, the “technology of travel” carrying the curious European along a deserted road.51 In a mis-en-abîme effect, the traveler inside the stagecoach is also enveloped within the frame of the picture; in this way, the reader’s attention is drawn to the inside of the carriage, and to the female body leaning forward in anticipation, perhaps, of an adventure awaiting her in unknown territory. In this illustration, the traveling subject embraces the world, rather than seeks command of it, a fit counter-image to the canonically inscribed, abstract male explorer. Graham’s piercing gaze outward functions as a prelude to the book, hence seducing the reader, who figures as an inquisitive companion at her side, thus virtually reliving the journey as the stagecoach progresses. Although Maria Graham has been classified as one of the “exploratrices sociales” [social explorers] participating in the rhetoric of European travel writing, her books do not strictly conform to the “imperial eyes” model.52 Instead of a Self/Other dichotomy, Maria Graham’s South American journals exhibit, rather, a reciprocal gaze, a mutual, if unstable, recognition and identity. As Angela Pérez Mejía points out, the “self-reflective pose” of the frontispiece illustration anticipates the gaze conferred on her by the Chilean populace in their attempts to tame the British visitor’s “foreignness.”53 Whereas Pérez Mejía and Soledad Caballero tend to emphasize Graham’s alleged pose of superiority as a British subject, the genteel-looking Graham peering out of a carriage conditions another reading of the Journal: that of a “fellow traveler” who accompanies the narrator on her way.54 Another way to “unseat Humboldt” is by affirming the female traveler’s authority. Fredrika Bremer’s self-portrait, drawn on March 1851, in a country estate near Matanzas offers one of the most striking examples of this pose.55 Here Bremer pictures herself in miniature, standing by a gigantic agave tree, pencil in hand. Clearly, the image affirms the conjunction between the “I” of the female traveler and the scientist’s “eye,” engrossed on the object of study. Though drawn in a non-conventional manner, this image portrays Bremer’s authorial and artistic persona, conveying her multiples roles as scientist, artist,

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Figure 2.7.  Fredrika Bremer, St. Amelia Inhegno [sic], fol. 30r, Sketchbook of a Journey in the New World, 1850–1851. Courtesy of Uppsala University Library, Sweden.

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and writer. But Bremer’s dwarfed pose could be also be interpreted as the visual counterpart of the Romantic strategy whereby women publicly apologized for taking up the pen, a common feature of the British travel tradition. Yet this strategy of “self-effacement” does not align with what Bremer herself announced at the start of The Homes of the New World.56 For the book’s preface reveals a curious writerly paradox: on the one hand, Bremer participates in the apology expected of the woman writer (explaining that she “would not abstain” from publishing her letters), yet, in the next breadth, she validates her writing with a grander mission, a sense of transatlantic solidarity between Sweden and the United States, elegantly phrased as a “knitting together the beautiful bonds of brotherhood between widely-sundered nations.”57 In this set of travelogues, one effective technique for “unseating Humboldt” is to appropriate the trope of discovery which the Prussian, in his world-weary travels, wrestled away from Columbus. At various points in their journeys, European women consciously or unconsciously adapt the pose of female Discoverer, in a gesture meant to convey both their participation in and distance from the dominant rhetoric of conquest and exploration. In a passage resonant of the most famous scene in Columbus’ Diary, when the shipman Rodrigo de Triana calls out at the first sight of land, Tristan invokes the visual imperative of New World territory: Il faut avoir été à la mer pour connaître la puissance d’emotion renfermée dans ce mot: terre! terre! . . . Terre! Terre! Ce mot, après de long mois passés entre le ciel et l’abîme, referme tout pour le navigateur: c’est la vie entière dans ses jouissances, c’est la patrie . . . , l’amour et la liberté . . . O terre! . . . tu leur paraîtres un Eden s’ils avaient habité pendant quelques mois le sein des mers.58 [“You have to have been at sea to understand the powerful emotion contained in the word land. To hear it after long months spent between heaven and ocean means everything to the sailor: his country, the pleasures of society, cool shades and flower-strewn fields, love and liberty. . . . Oh land! You would appear as Eden to those who have lived for a few months in the heart of the high seas.”]59

Tristan’s narrative persona, one of the most complex in the female tradition of travel, encompasses an awareness of the act of traversing the extremities of the physical world. In the Pérégrinations, this culminates in the art of female escape and dissimulation (la fuga femenina). As the Mexicain sails away from Bordeaux, the autobiographical narrator speaks from an intermediate, interstitial space: on the high seas, she is poised “entre le ciel et l’abime” [between heaven and ocean]; while, on the eve of sailing back to Europe, she stands suspended “entre deux immensités, l’eau et le ciel” [between two immensities, the sea and the sky]. In contrast with Graham’s impassioned spectator, this liminal position conveys both Tristan’s vulnerability as well as the loneliness of a solitary sojourn.60

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The pose of female Discoverer glosses the start of Frances Calderón de la Barca’s memoir, when, watching a glowing sunset over the Caribbean, she phrased her experience in terms of the period’s emphasis on natural theology and the transforming power of sight. What Cuban poet José Lezama Lima coined as la noche insular, the experience of nightfall over the glittering ocean, describes the visitor’s transport back to the inaugural moment when Columbus sighted the New World: “we see as in a vision the Discoverer of the World, standing on the deck of his caravel, as it bounded over the unknown and mysterious waste of waters.”61 The same gesture of Discovery is re-enacted in Tristan’s appeal to the sailors at the emotive first glimpse of land. In women’s journeys, the rhetorical “appropriation of the gaze of the Discoverer” is a necessary prelude to self-authentication and validation of the journey to come.62 Writing on the trail of Humboldt, the nineteenth-century female pilgrims gathered here exhibit an array of narrative personas with which to convey their uniquely gendered experience of travel. Humboldt’s influence thus conditions women travelers’ approach to landscape, as they assimilate and, at the same time, subtly modify the rhetorical strategies of the Enlightenment “voyage into substance.” Typical of the shift occurring in nineteenth-century travel books towards “a new style of personal narrative” featuring the use of “affective realism,” where apprehension of the object viewed submits to the viewer’s sentiments and “associative sensibility,” the set of travelogues studied here display an array of aesthetic possibilities with which to view American landscape.63 European women’s travels to nineteenth-century Latin America exhibit a number of recurring tropes; namely, the conjoining of science and art involved in minute observation of natural phenomena; the amazement or wonder provoked by the spectacle of New World nature, and the sensation of the sublime.64 TROPES OF NATURE: VARIATIONS OF THE “FEMALE SUBLIME” Humboldt’s poetic rapture is tinged with anticipation of unknown regions lying beyond, or with hyperbole, as in his ecstatic descriptions of the cataracts flowing from the vast bed of the Orinoco: “We were never weary of the view of this astonishing spectacle, concealed in one of the most remote corners of the earth.”65 His view of the tropics, punctuated by a series of recurrent tropes that emphasize the region’s singularity due to its vegetative excess and radiant verdor, cumulatively convey an image of excess, superabundance, and profusion of forms.66 Ultimately, in the Relation historique, “tropical nature

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threatens to degrade or fully overwhelm the coherence of the European subject.”67 While the experience of the sublime transcends gender, women travel books encode a set of discrete landscapes with their own aesthetic vision. In answer to the grid of classification Humboldt provided, European woman travelers depict a unique image of the New World aligned with what Barbara T. Gates has called “the Victorian female sublime,” an aesthetic approximation of Nature in which the beholder captures both the exuberance sighted as well as the limitation of vision, while acknowledging both the sensuous aspiration—and almost inability—to fully convey the “incommensurability” of Nature displayed. 68 Variations of the “gaze of enchantment,” European women’s travels to Latin America exhibit “a spectrum of attention” combining both the objective scrutiny of the scientific travel book with a more subjective regard towards Nature which is often ciphered in terms of the picturesque.69 In accordance with the eclectic method of Victorian natural history, in these travel books, land and sea figure as privileged tropes of nature, yet natural elements are also colored by the traveler’s disposition and life circumstances.70 As they tour American terrain, and wrestle with the question of how to represent its varied landscapes, Bremer, Breton, Calderón de la Barca, Graham, and Tristan codify (in the sense of interpret, interiorize, and forge a poetic image of) salient features of Nature that maintain their distinct contours. In their travel books, distinct topographies—garden, valley, desert, volcano, and star-lit sky—created either by sketch or verbal art are, in turn, associated with a discrete narrative pose. Taken together, the succeeding images result in an aesthetically-pleasing combination of verbal and visual art, forging as well a cumulative vision of American landscape. Garden In her earlier A Scripture Herbal (1842), Maria Graham exhibits the Victorian trend toward minute observation and collection of species that occupied many amateur followers of natural science in Great Britain.71 Although the quiet sequence of flowers and herbs laid out in this beautiful book evolves out of the Victorian predilection for flowers, it also prefigures the attitude toward Nature revealed in her two South American journals. In line with the period’s “avocation for gardening,” Maria Graham’s pose of placid contemplation features the garden as dominant trope, resulting in a domesticated view of New World Nature, what represents one end of the spectrum of the gendered gaze shared by European women travelers.72 Graham’s depiction of Brazil as an “immense garden” may have originated in her earlier allusion to Humboldt’s depiction of a botanical garden in Tenerife, now in decay. For, contemplating the overflowing cataracts on the Orinoco, Humboldt had concluded that

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“everything here recalls to mind what our gardens and plantations contain most picturesque and lovely.”73 On this same trail, Graham’s description of Brazil as “an entire landscape”—an inscape imprinted in the reader’s eye— effectively uses the picturesque to convey the spectacular aspect of Brazilian scenery, its exuberant forms and verdant color.74 Typical of the garden imagery is her description of a wooden bridge near Pernambuco: “Nothing can be prettier . . . than the fresh green landscape, with its broad river winding through it, . . . and the private houses, most of which have gardens. The verdure is delightful to an English eye . . .,”75 a scene evoking Humboldt’s nostalgic longing for the pastoral landscapes of Europe. Graham’s self-fashioning in both Journals as a “philosophical traveler”76 echoes Humboldt’s characterization of his own pursuits as a “natural philosopher.” Evident in Graham’s outward gaze is Humboldt’s dictum that “the duty of the natural philosopher is to relate all phenomena that Nature displays to him;” that is, to uncover the hidden connection between diverse elements, unleashing the causes behind natural movement and permanence.77 Humboldt’s “philosophical eye” follows the tradition of Enlightenment thought, featuring the primacy of sight directed toward the scrutiny of particular ob-

Figure 2.8.  Maria Graham, “Larangeiros,” Plate V, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During a Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (163).

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jects. In line with this tradition, “the more the beholder observed, the more he saw”; a dictum applicable too to women traveler’s gaze of enchantment.78 Traces of the Personal Narrative surface in Graham’s horseback tours through the Brazilian countryside, particularly in her attention to the thick vegetation typical of the region. Graham’s lingering impression of the Lake of Rodrigo de Freitas, near Rio—“It is impossible to conceive any thing richer than the vegetation down to the very water’s edge around the lake”79—exemplifies Humboldt’s conclusion regarding the effect of vegetation in determining the identity of a particular zone or region. In a well-known quote from his Personal Narrative, “the vegetation determines the character of a landscape and acts upon our imagination by its mass, the contrast of its forms, and the glow of its colours.”80 In similar fashion, the lovely valley of Larangeiros, whose jasmine and rose bushes compose “one thicket of beauty and fragance”—is constructed metonymically as synthesis of Brazilian vegetation.81 Absorbing the Humboldtian legacy of “willed seeing”—attentive vision capturing both the depth and breadth of landscape—Graham’s narrative pose is that of “impassioned spectator.”82 Graham’s vision of Brazil as “an immense garden” also encompasses urban topography, revealed in her first impressions of Bahia. The entry for Wednesday, October17th, reads: “This morning, at day-break, my eyes opened on one of the finest scenes they every beheld. A city, magnificent in appearance from the sea, is placed along the ridge and on the declivity of a very high and steep hill.”83Aligned with picturesque convention, where the objects of nature are naturalized in orderly fashion and consciously arranged to form a picture, the image of Bahia constructs a harmonious whole composed of various contours and terrains: “The landscape here is peculiarly agreeable. The verdure, the wood, the steep banks, and gently sloping lawns, generally opening to the sea or the lake behind the town, have a freshness and amenity that I scarcely remember seeing before.”84 While the emphasis on sight and originality of vision is a recurring trait in Victorian natural history, a horseback tour away from the city unveils the insufficiency of art to fully capture the emotion evoked by a particular setting: “We rode out before breakfast, through landscape so fine, that I wished for a poet or a painter at every step.”85 Graham’s quiet rapture before Brazilian scenery culminates in her first sight of Rio, a rhapsody expressed in the text but subdued in the subtle shades of her “View from Rio from Gloria Hill.”86 The verbal analogue of this image— Nothing that I have ever seen is comparable in beauty to this bay. Naples, the Firth of Forth, Bombay harbour, and Trincomalee, each of which I thought perfect in their beauty, must yield to this, which surpasses each in its different way—

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clearly exhausts the Humboldtian technique of comparison in an effort to represent that vast “incommensurability” of Nature proper of the “female sublime.”87 Graham’s emphasis on the superlative (“the most beautiful scenery in this beautiful country,” [143], evoked by a site near Bahia) grounds her archetypal image of Brazil as a garden.88 In a later scene describing her dawn departure from Bahia, she effectively combines both perspectives—the hyperbolic accent on “[t]he extreme beauty of this country” and its characteristics as “mountainous and picturesque.”89 True to the naturalist’s penchant for singularity, Graham’s gaze hovers over the landscape, only to focus on specific species and objects, meant to reveal the “unique” and “extraordinary” aspects of Nature, the double frame of Victorian natural history.90 Graham’s rendition of the gamella tree both in pictorial and verbal form exhibits the accent on particularity typical of the mid nineteenth-century naturalist, with its focus on objects that have gone unnoticed by previous beholders.91 Yet the discourse of natural history, with its emphasis on both the beauty and extraordinariness of the specimen, is in tension with the use of scientific nomenclature and its accent on classification. At times both discourses are effectively fused, as in Graham’s lively description of tropical fruit trees, noticed as she rode out

Figure 2.9.  Maria Graham, “View from Rio from Gloria Hill,” Plate VII, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (1824).

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Figure 2.10.  Maria Graham, “Gamella Tree at Bahia,” Plate IV, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (1824), 135.

from Pernambuco: “The tamarind, the silk-cotton-tree and the palm shaded us, and a thousand elegant shrubs adorned the garden walls.” This passage effectively combines plant taxonomy with the vernacular, as the silk-cotton tree is identified as Bombex pentandrium,92 what gives the impression of precision and accuracy. Notice how the use of the Latin name is preceded by the more picturesque accent on the plant’s effect on the viewer.93 The tension between scientific and picturesque description surfaces throughout Graham’s travelogue, as the latter mode is better able to capture nature’s effect on the traveler. This technique surfaces in the description of animal species. In a visit to Cocoa-nut Island, Graham detains her gaze on the humming-bird, “here called the beja flor or kiss-flower, with his sapphire wings and ruby crest.”94 Graham’s use of picturesque convention emphasizes the oriental quality of Brazilian landscape, evident both in the social construction of the garden as intimate space (“These gardens are like oriental flower-pots”) as well as in its public use. Strolling through Rio’s botanical gardens, she notes that “This garden was destined by the King for the cultivation of oriental spices and fruits, and, above all, the tea plant . . . obtained from China.”95 In what is perhaps the most “orientalist” rendition of Brazilian landscape, Graham ninth sketch, of the “Palace of San Cristovaõ” emphasizes its “Moresco

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style” architecture as well as its natural setting, qualities captured as well in its description as “a group of great beauty is formed in the bosom of the valley, surrounded by high and picturesque mountains, the chief of which is the Beco de Perroquito.”96 Graham’s view of Brazil gravitates towards the discourse of nation; anthropologist Gilberto Freyre notes that the Orientalist tint was characteristic of Brazilian towns and rural areas, before the turn toward Europeization sparked by the transfer of the Portuguese royal court under João VI.97 The recreation of Brazil as a multi-layered canvas filled by mountains and coastline, dotted by isolated mansions in the midst of a lush vegetation—as in Graham’s sixth sketch, simply titled “View from Count Hoggendorf’s Cottage” reinforces the paradisiacal image of Brazil.98 This culminates in a neodiscoverer’s pose emphasizing novelty and freshness of sight: “here, every thing, nature herself, wears an air of newness”; a phrase resurfacing later as an incantation—“all is new here.”99 Here the entire country is subsumed under an “apotheosis of singularity” or discourse of the exceptional which was part of the Victorian naturalist’s “passion for the new.”100 This scene intensifies the analogy with Humboldt, as Graham’s embrace of the natural world echoes Humboldt’s physical and aesthetic delight upon reaching the brink of the “Great Cataracts,” a climactic moment “when the traveler . . . feels as if he were in a new world; and had overstepped the barriers, which Nature seems to have raised, between the civilized countries of the coast, and the savage and the unknown interior.”101 Whereas Humboldt’s accent is on the sublime, Graham’s more subdued “female sublime” unveils an agrarian pastoral, a tame greenery contrasting with the surge of water over the Orinoco, the icon for Humboldt’s overwhelming tropics. Imagining Brazil as Edenic space, Maria Graham’s South American journals prefigure the garden as a metonymy of nation in later Latin American narratives.102 Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer’s vision of Cuba follows Humboldt’s accent on vegetation as the key to regional identities in Latin America, only with an accent on natural theology. Her gaze constantly draws an analogy between the natural and divine, as in her initial impressions ushered upon her arrival in Havana on February, 1852: “[t]he forms and colors of the vegetation seem to typify a transition from earthly life to a freer and loftier sphere of beauty.”103 At the first glimpse of the island, she evokes the typical sense of ravishment associated with the “exoticism of space” proper of the European traveler: “Sweet child!”—she addresses her sister Agathe—“I am sitting beneath the warm, bright heavens . . . ! The glorious, delicious air, the beautiful palm-trees are paradisiacal . . .104 Along with the drawings included in the 1851 sketchbook, Bremer’s descriptions generate a matrix of images that help reconfigure insular landscape in a new way, anticipating José Lezama Lima’s

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method of poetic inscape: “El paisaje tiene que ser descubierto, comenzante” [the landscape needs to be rediscovered anew, as a beginning].105 Aligned with the postulates of natural theology, Bremer’s vision of the island is joined by a deep experience of nature whose romantic allure is always linked to a sense of transcendence. In contrast to other nineteenth-century travelers, who focused their attention on Havana and for whom the bustling port city became not only the commercial and cultural center of the island, but colored their entire trip,106 Bremer’s travelogue provides a look at the outlying regions not tainted by the domineering “I” of the (male) gaze, but inspired, instead, by the inner “eye,” a deeply spiritual vision-quest. Whereas the majority of European travelers focused on the prosperity of the island and its potential for material gain,107 Bremer’s enraptured view of Matanzas, one of the principal sugar-producing regions, emphasizes its stunning natural beauty. On the first of March, 1851, Bremer’s arrival in Matanzas elicits this dramatic passage: If there be one place on earth where the spirit of life has a separate individual existence, as pure, as pleasant, as full of vitality as when it was first breathed forth by the Lord of life and love, it is—here. The atmosphere here has a kind of vitalizing life, which is a perpetual marvel to me and a perpetual delight. It is especially in the afternoons, after two or three o’clock, that this peculiar, wonderful life arises. It is one constant pleasant wafting, not from any particular distance, but from every where [sic], and from all points, which makes every light and movable thing around you waft, and . . . breathe and live. That indescribable but, at the same time, pleasant and life-giving wafting caresses your brow, your cheek—lightly lifts yours dress, your ribbons—surrounds you, goes through you, . . . bathes you in an atmosphere of salutary, regenerating life.108

Here the narrator is reborn, as it were, in the fresh air surrounding the island, and lets herself be swayed “in both soul and body” by the delicious atmosphere. This is, indeed, “the sublime moment,” which Thomas Weiskel defines as “a metaphorical union with the creator.”109 It recalls too Lezama Lima’s “epifanía en el paisaje” [epiphany before a landscape], the sense of rebirth and splendor elicited by the combination of sea and land at the sight of the Valle de Viñales.110 Bremer’s rapture before the pristine beauty of Matanzas intensifies Graham’s quiet praise of the “newness” of Brazilian greenery. In contrast to Graham’s “impassioned spectatorship,” the Swedish visionary surrenders to landscape, letting it possess her, ravishing her like a lover: “I . . . give myself up to its caresses, and until late at night inhale its salutary life.”111 While male travel writers inscribe “the rhetoric of anticonquest,” meaning a type of self-presentation in which the narrator of the

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travel account asserts his innocence at the same time that he yearns to possess the land surveyed,112 Bremer inscribes an erotics of landscape, going beyond the “Victorian female sublime” to the point of mystical union with the landscape.113 While the male traveler is enthralled by landscape—mystified by it—the woman traveler is, instead, overcome by Nature, and it is rather land, valley or sea which mystifies and enthralls her, drawing out the mystical surge of fusion with the cosmos. The images from the Skissbök [Sketchbook] and The Homes of the New World reinforce the metaphorical association between garden and nation, thus helping to codify a collective sense of identity. Again, Bremer’s gaze fosters, yet, at the same time, deepens Graham’s use of the garden trope in Brazil. While touring Matanzas, she notes: “The whole country looked like an immense garden.”114 While Graham’s picturesque technique metonymically viewed Brazil into a garden, Bremer constructs a synecdoche of Cuba, where the interior of the island is taken to stand for the country as a whole. Influenced perhaps by the incandescent light enveloping the island, as her stay in Cuba proceeds, Bremer records the humanistic import of landscape. As her gaze falls on the subjects of slavery, their silence and oppression transforms her initial view of the island as primeval garden. Echoing José Lezama Lima’s notion of “potens, la posibilidad infinita” [potens, infinite possibility] for spiritual and social transformation, Bremer believed that the glorious beauty of Cuban landscape would one day redeem the accumulated weight of slavery.115 Ultimately, Nature would have the power to break its shackles: “slavery must cease, and the fetters of the slave fall from him; . . . I lived here in the contemplation of this, and a day will come when the slave shall do so too,” a redemption possible only when the geography of the island were to match its essence: “Oh! if the inner life here only corresponded to the outer, how easy it would be to live and to crown one’s self with garlands!” In a later passage, at the close of Bremer’s three-month stay in Cuba, Bremer retakes her initial image of the restorative qualities of insular air, aligning it with her redemptive vision in favor of the blacks: “However oppressive slavery may be to the inhabitants of the bohea [sic], . . . still the wafting breezes of the life of freedom can not be wholly excluded from [it].” Bremer’s last inscape of Cuban landscape includes a prophetic vision in which the blacks will one day rise up to save Cuba: “then the people of the tropics, with their songs and dances, may one day correspond with the mild and beautiful scenery of the tropics.”116 In a typically Humboldtian gesture, echoing his call for a school of painters to follow his trail into “the heart of the jungle,” Bremer’s allegorizing mode conditions a vision of Cuba as “an outer court of Paradise, worthy to be studied by the natural historian, the painter, and the poet.”117

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Valley The allure of the garden gently slopes into valley, a transition marked in Maria Graham’s Chile Journal, when, in a scene imitating Humboldt’s “summitsurvey” yet toning down the scale of the view, she stands “looking down on a fertile valley.” Soon her gaze is interrupted by the sound of a waterfall, which she describes as composed of “a thousand little falls.” The Romantic tone of the scene—a mini-sketch of the female sublime—is overlayed with a Byronian echo derived from “The Corsair.”118 The next two travelers mark a shift in the discourse of natural history, for both Calderón de la Barca and Adela Breton infuse human habitat in their depiction of a New World garden of Eden, thus resisting the expectations of the picturesque. In her study of Women Travelers and the Language of Aesthetics, Elizabeth Bohls points out that picturesque aesthetics plays on the disinteredness of the viewer, as the artist “erases” or dismisses the material use of the land, including all “traces of human habitation, industry, or commerce.”119 Frances Calderón de la Barca’s tour through the tierra caliente region in Mexico puts an accent on human ecology in the midst of physical geography. The garden trope blends subtly with inspiring views of the valley as second privileged landscape in Latin American travel writing. Traveling by stagecoach from the coast of Veracruz to the central valley— where the country’s administrative and cultural center lay—the Spanish consul and his wife stop at General Santa Anna’s Mango del Clavo estate. At first sight, Calderón’s contact with the balmy region of Xalapa repeats many of the rhetorical strategies used by Graham in her rendition of Brazilian landscape: primarily, the accent on vegetation and the recourse to picturesque framing. At length we began to see symptoms of vegetation, occasional palm trees and flowers. . . . By the time we had reached Santa Fe, a small Indian village of huts—. . . , the light had broke in, and we seemed to have been transported, as if by enchantment, from a desert to a garden. It was an altogether picturesque and striking scene . . .120

Like her predecessor in Brazil, and her fellow-traveler in Cuba, Calderón establishes a metaphorical equivalence between garden and nation in Mexico. While traversing the General’s vast lands, Calderón had been struck by the fact that they gently sloped into “a natural garden,” a claim denied, oddly enough, by their proud landowner. Unlike the calm verdor of Brazilian country mansions, where domestic life revolved around oriental-style gardens, the Mexican hacienda seems to lack a cultivated taste for nature. “There are no gardens, but, as [Santa Anna] observed, the whole country, which for twelve leagues square belongs to him, is a garden.”

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Calderón’s tour through the tierra caliente accentuates the human dimension of landscape, countering picturesque convention by showing the social division between the natives’ humble abode—“the huts, clean and pretty . . . ”;—and the landowner’s imposing quinta. Prosaic details such as the effects of bad transportation temper the vision of a pastoral paradise, as in this example of narrative irony: Gradually, as in Dante’s Commedia, after leaving Purgatory, typified by Veracruz, we seemed to draw nearer Paradise. The road is difficult, as the approach to Paradise ought to be, and the extraordinary jolts were sufficient to prevent us from being too much enraptured with the beauty of the scenery. . . .121

A similar gaze of enchantment appears in Adela Breton’s watercolor of the tierra caliente region. Succinctly titled “Jalapa,” this watercolor, dated January, 1895, depicts Mexico as a land of contrasts, a blend between two opposing zones, climates, and perspectives—dry and wet, hot and cold, high and low. Breton’s image highlights the row of casitas descending onto a treelined promenade, while accentuating the singularity of the mountain—the Pico de Orizaba—whose solitary peak ascends the heights. This high/low

Figure 2.11.  Adela Breton, “Jalapa.” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894), Adela Breton, Sketch Book of Water Colors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894).

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perspective recalls Humboldt’s “summit-survey,” reflected in his rendering of the same peak as a “solitary, insulated mountain,” what was “a persistent feature of the factual travel account.”122 Meanwhile, as her carriage veered through the treacherous curves leading from Puebla to the ancient city of Tenochtitlán, Calderón de la Barca infuses her view of mountainous terrain with an awareness of social realities which threaten not only the travelers’ reverie, but their physical safety: On leaving Río Frío, the road became more hilly and the scenery more woody. At last we entered the tract known by the name of the Black Forest, a great haunt for banditti, and a beautiful specimen of forest scenery—a succession of lofty oaks, pines, and cedars, with wild flowers lighting up their gloomy green.

Of the set of travelers included here, Calderón de la Barca’s first glimpse of the magnificent valley of central Mexico is aligned with another change in perspective, in evoking a historicized, rather than a naturalized, aesthetic. Painters of the Humboldtian school like Johannes Moritz Rugendas had imprinted a vast Romantic canvas of the valley of Mexico; in similar fashion, Calderón absorbs both the monumental and the historical import of the site.123 Her ecstatic gaze shows a trace of that pre-seeing, particularly of British traveling-artist Daniel Thomas Egerton, whose Views of Mexico (1840) had already honed the wide sweep of the valley and its local types.124 Beyond the established pictorial tradition, the wife of the new Spanish consul imbued her vision of the ancestral valley with fresh historical awareness: But at length we arrived at the heights on which we look down upon the superb valley of Mexico, celebrated in all parts of the world, with its framework of magnificent mountains, its snow-crowned volcanoes, great lakes, and fertile plains—all surrounding the favoured city of Montezuma, the proudest boast of its conqueror, once of Spain’s many diadems the brightest.125

The traveler’s view of pre-Conquest Mexico is conveyed by the factual description of climate—“the day had overcast”—repeating the motif of “murky, anticlimactic weather” previously experienced by Anglo visitors.126 Yet the vision stirs the narrator’s figural sense of history as remote glory: But as we strained our eyes to look at the valley, it all appeared rather like a vision of the Past than the actual breathing Present. The curtain of Time seemed to roll back a few centuries, and to discover to us the great panorama of Mexico that burst upon the eye of Cortés when he first set foot upon these shores . . .

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As in Humboldt’s appropriation of Columbus’ rhetoric of discovery, here the Scottish traveler dons herself a new Cortés, experiencing through his eyes the view of the Aztec ceremonial city: “What a scene to burst upon the first eyes that beheld it!” Calderón resorts here to the same technique as Humboldt—the comparison between the New World and the Old—to inscribe the emotions provoked by The great city of Tenochtitlán, standing in the midst of the five great lakes, upon verdant and flower-covered islands, a western Venice, with thousands of boats gliding swiftly along its streets and its long lines of low houses diversified by the multitude of its pyramidal temples, the teocalli, or houses of [the gods]—canoes covering the mirrored lakes—the lofty trees, the flowers, and the profusion of water now so wanting to the landscape—the whole fertile valley enclosed by its eternal hills and snow-capped volcanoes—what scenes of wonder and of beauty to burst upon the eyes of these wayfaring men!127

In contrast to Humboldt, who discarded the discoverer’s pose by assuming mastery over the scene, Calderón displays the pose of wonder typically associated with the scientific travelogue, yet historicizes it by aligning her vision with that of the conquistador’s. Cabañas reads this passage as perpetuating the rhetoric of the Spanish conquest, but its descriptive power suggests a more subtle interpretation.128 By establishing a historical counterpoint between the nineteenth-century visitor and the fabled Spanish adventurer, the passage effectively sublimates the conquest: on the one hand, it “feminizes” Cortés’ perspective, given the juxtaposition of the two views; on the other, it authorizes—in the sense of authenticating—the Scottish traveler’s allegorizing of the scene. Calderón de la Barca’s tracks into the Valley of Mexico as a densely historicized and populated site finds its echo in the art of Adela Breton, whose subtle watercolors display the valley as a domesticated space. In this placid street scene in Puebla, the local populace carry on their silent duties, while indigenous women blend into the surrounding landscape, in contrast to the church steeple on the right. Here picturesque technique exhibits a broad array of social practices, while the landscape “foregrounds the practical connection between land and its working inhabitants,” a feature that serves as background to human activity.129 Breton’s focus on the inhabitants of the valley below shows how, in this gentle landscape, “the traveler’s gaze is . . . arrested by what it contains rather than by the hiatus it intrinsically is.”130 From the tierra caliente to a Caribbean setting, Fredrika Bremer marks the epitome of the gaze of enchantment in her exalted view of the valley of

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Figure 2.12.  Adela Breton, “Puebla.” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894), Ea 8399. Courtesy of Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.

Yumurí. Bremer’s heightened sense of expectation at the first sight of Yumurí marks a feminizing of natural theology: The valley still lies before us, but its extent is hidden. The bend of the hills closes the view. Now, however, our path suddenly turns to the right, and the valley reveals itself. . . . The valley opens to us like a vast and beautiful palm-grove [. . .]. We still advance for a little distance; the valley becomes broader, with softly undulating ground; and, whichever way we turn, we see only palms—palms. Beneath such trees, such groves, beautiful, immortal beings might wander!131

In Bremer’s The Homes of the New World, the valley evokes an archetypal image of landscape resonating with spiritual meaning. Her pictorial view of the valley, depicted in Fol. 18r of the Skissbök, inscribed and dated by her own hand (“Valle de Yumurí. Cuba. 27 Febr. 1851”) illustrates a tendency

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Figure 2.13.  Fredrika Bremer, Fol. 18r, “Valle de Yumurí,” Sketchbook of a Journey in the New World, 1850–1851.

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in Victorian natural history in which “observation becomes revelation, . . . sight exalted to such a plane that what is seen becomes transcendent.”132 The didactic tone closing the description of the valley signals Bremer’s narrative persona as “altruistic teacher,”133 since in subsequent passages she transfers her devotion from nature to the social realm, voicing her desire to free enslaved Africans from their yoke. Volcano In European travel writing, the focus on the volcano was an outcome of the explorer’s fascination with mountain chains and peaks, thought to encapsulate mineral structures that formed part of the earth’s core and origins.134 Mid-way through his journey, Humboldt exposed his theory of volcanic eruptions, noting the simultaneity of this phenomenon on both sides of the American continent, what for him revealed “the mysterious power residing in the interior of the Earth.”135 Stafford points out the significance of Humboldt’s Relation historique (1810) in discovering the “profound paradox” of the Andean cordillera, since it appears both as a sizable mountain chain and as a series of “isolated peaks.”136 Tristan’s first view of the mountains after an ardous desert-crossing echoes Humboldt’s paradoxical explanation of the cordilleras: Nous gravîmes la dernière montagne; arrivés à son sommet, l’immensité du desert, la chaine des Cordillières et les trois gigantesques volcans d’Arequipa se découvrirent à nos regards. [We climbed the last mountain, and when we reached the summit, the vast chain of the Cordilleras and the three giant volcanoes of Arequipa spread before us].137

In her Chile Journal, Graham mentions Humboldt’s descent into the crater of Pichincha, a feat re-enacted by Lord Cochrane’s secretary, as part of her own fascination with earthquakes.138 Parallel to Bremer’s rapt anticipation at the turn of the road which opened to the magnificent valley of Yumurí, at the first sight of the volcanoes, Tristan’s narrative shifts from the body of the traveler onto the object viewed, in accordance with the naturalist focus on singularity shared by the rest of her peers. Reminiscent of Bremer’s evocation of natural theology before the Yumurí valley, Tristan’s expression of the “female sublime” is rendered in terms of a metaphorical evocation of the summit heights as sign of a divine or “cosmic energy.” This results in an experience of conversion, as the traveler becomes privileged witness to the spectacle of nature-as-art:139 Était-ce le céleste parvis qu’un pouvoir inconnu me faisait contempler, le divin séjour était-il au delà de cette digue de hautes montagnes qui unissent le ciel à la terre, au delà de cet ocean de sable ondoyant dont elles arrêtent le progrès?

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[“Was this the celestial court that an unknown power has having me contemplate, and was eternal paradise beyond this wall of high mountains which unite heaven and earth, beyond this ocean of shifting sand whose progress they impede?”]140

The sight of the mountains’ imposing presence typifies the experience of limits as recurrent motif in the Pérégrinations (the liminality between earth and sky; the poetic equivalence between desert sands and seas). Typical of the use of “affective realism,” not only is the uniqueness of the object drawn out, but, more significantly, the passage centers on the female traveler’s experience. The narrator’s gaze is lifted upward, to the cloud formations drifting across the sky, which lightly touch the summits to signal both the “ephemeral” quality of the volcano as well as its embodiment of the vital principle sustaining the earth.141 Tristan’s awe before the trio of volcanoes encircling Arequipa illustrates how “[b]y dint of being on the spot, travelers contributed to recording nature’s ‘impossible’ effects.;” that is, the “fugitive effects” of a natural world in constant motion:142 Mes yeux erraient sur ces flots argentés, les suivaient jusqu’à ce qu’ils les eussent vus se confondre avec la voût azurée, et se reportaient ensuite sur ces marchepieds des cieux, sur ces hautes montagnes dont la chaîne est sans terme, dont les milliers de cîmes couvertes de neige etincellent en reflets du soleil, et tracent sur le ciel la limite occidentale du desert avec toutes les couleurs du prime. [I let my gaze wonder over the bright billowing sand to the point where it met the azure heavens, then upon the lofty mountains which stretched like an endless ladder to the skies, their thousand snow-capped peaks reflecting the sun rays and marking the western limit of the desert with all the colours of the rainbow].143

Part of the effects conveyed by nature involves not only the object viewed, but also its effect on the seeress. In this passage, the traveler interprets the cloud’s flowing movement as a channel of divine energy, thus situating herself in relation to a wider cosmos, in Humboldtian fashion, but also with a sense of awe before divine design: “L’infini frappait tous mes sens de stupeur: mon ame en était penétrée, et . . . Dieu se manifestait à moi dans toute sa puissance, dans toute sa splendeur.” [“The infinite struck all my senses with astonishment: my soul was penetrated by it, and . . . God showed Himself to me in all His power, in all His splendor.”]144 Echoing Bremer’s revelation at the first sight of Yumurí, Tristan’s enchanted view of the volcanoes testifies to a similar surrender before “the sublime moment.” Hence the peak experience serves to release the narrator from her plight: “A la vue de ce magnifique spectacle, je perdis le sentiment de mes souffrances. . . .” [“At the sight of this magnificent spectacle I forgot my sufferings and lived only to admire”].145 Such profound emotion exemplifies what Stafford calls “willed seeing,” a keen mode of ob-

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servation in which sight and “sublimity” are combined to achieve, on the one hand, the interpenetration of science and art; on the other, the sense of natureas-spectacle.146 While it marks the limits of the “female sublime,” this passage also shifts one of its fundamental tenets: instead of an absence of self which Gates sees as integral to the liminal experience, the scene, rather, affirms an aesthetics of presence.147 Not only is the female spectator fully there, but she grasps the majesty of the volcanoes with her entire physical and psychological being.148 Tristan’s rapture before the Arequipa volcanoes underscores not only the uniqueness of her vision but also the redemptive quality of the sight possessed, so that the transformative power of the volcanoes gives testimony to “the power of nature in a given place.”149 Thus Tristan and Bremer share one end of the spectrum of the gaze of enchantment, aligning their vision with a belief in natural theology and the redemptive power of place, and proving also the transformative effect of sublimity. Another variation of the “Victorian female sublime” surfaces in Adela Breton’s depiction of the twin volcanoes surrounding Mexico’s central valley, one of the forgotten pictorial accomplishments of nineteenth-century traveling artists. Breton’s audacity in “mapping the unknown” has provoked the admiration of Mexican critics, who often describe her as a “female Ama-

Figure 2.14.  Adela Breton, “Ixtaccihuátl,” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894), EA 8396. Courtesy of Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.

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zon” daring to tred where no European had ever stepped before.150 The climax of Breton’s aspiration to height was her view of the forbidden frozen rift in-between the Iztaccihuátl and the Popocatéptl, paintings which amazingly depict the fusion between observation and revelation practiced in Victorian natural history, and unfold as well one of the most riveting scenes of the Mexican national imaginary.151 As a prelude to Breton’s “willed seeing,” it is useful to contrast her views with Frances Calderón de la Barca’s first sight of the volcanoes, particularly the passage in Life in Mexico where she compares their “snowy summits” to “marble domes towering over the sky.”152 This metaphor beautifully captures the paradoxical view of the volcano in the Enlightenment tradition, as symbol of both the “solid and ephemeral,” the combination of massive height with the evanescent quality of smoke after an eruption.153 Breton’s summit exploration begins by emphasizing the volcano’s height and dramatic intensity. As exemplified in this view, the Ixta and the Popo emerge in Adela Breton’s art as one of those “natural masterpieces” predicated by Enlightenment thought.154 In contrast to David Thomas Egerton, who descended on a vertical plane down to the smoldering crater, in an effort to plumb the matrix of earth and penetrate the “heart” of matter, Breton hovers over the brim of the frozen peak, riveted by its absolute purity.155 Projected onto another latitude and place, Breton’s exploration of the intervolcanic ridge suggests the vastness and sublimity that British explorers sought in remote Artic regions.156 Part of the appeal of Artic exploration lay in its personifying of extremes; in these vast, icy solitudes, “Nature was manifested not only at its harshest but also at its most inscrutable.”157 For the legion of manly explorers, the extreme desolation and drastic cold of the Artic zone evoked the following sensation, termed by Loomis as The Natural Sublime, suggesting in its magnitude the immensity of creation, and in its irregularity a natural order that is beyond man’s keen, strains the soul of the observer. Part of him goes out to it in rapture; part of it withdraws from it in fear. It simultaneously reminds him of his own responsive vastness of soul, and of his mortal stillness in the universe.158

Breton’s imaginative response to the glacial tops of Mexican volcanoes manifests a similar experience of the Sublime, only her interpretation reconciles the extremes of terror and rapture which typifies Artic exploration. The reverent gaze conferred on the frozen fiord reveals an intimate, secret space joining the twin heights of the volcanoes, hence adding a mythic dimension to the experience of the sublime.

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Figure 2.15.  Adela Breton, “Glacier Between El Fraile and Main Cone-Popocatépetl,” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894). Courtesy of Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.

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Figure 2.16.  Adela Breton, “Popocatépetl,” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894). Courtesy of Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives.

While the crew of manly British explorers who rigorously and religiously climbed the Swiss Alps, the North Pole, or other icy grounds grouped themselves into Alpinist Clubs and societies, bonding in unbreakable ties of friendship, class status, and influence, Breton scaled the heights alone.159 During her land treks, she was often accompanied by her faithful servant and friend Pablo Solorio, a Tarasca Indian from the state of Michoacán.160 Yet the conquest of the Ixta and the Popo remained a feat of the “solitary traveler,” Marz Harper’s apt term for the host of nineteenth-century women who took up scientific pursuits out of their love of travel and as a means to establish independent identities.161 In contrast to the visual mastery associated with European travel writing, the raptured gaze of the female spectator “resists literary aestheticization” because it consistently provokes a sense of the ineffable in the beholder.162 Tristan’s vivid impressions of “les trois gigantesques volcans d’Arequipa” [the three giant volcanoes of Arequipa] and Breton’s splendid views of the majestic volcanoes in Mexico’s central valley stand out among similar traces of sublimity traced in European travel writing.163 It is fitting to evoke them now, as silent testament to women’s empowerment through art.

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Figure 2.17.  Adela Breton, “Middle Glacier—Ixtaccihuátl,” Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico (1894).

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Star-gazer Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer in Cuba and the blazing Flora Tristan in Peru exemplify the star-gazer mode, defined as travelers who project onto American landscape a utopian ideal: either the philanthropic one of the lone Swedish adventurer, or the sharp social and gender critique voiced by a Parisian in Perú. A Romantic version of Humboldt’s “philosophical traveler,” as transatlantic pilgrims women’s utopian ideal varies according to the site encountered in their respective journeys—these two writers construct an “allegory of redemption” envisioning the liberation of the slaves (Bremer’s prophecy for the future of Cuba), or a yearning for social cohesion through family bonds (Tristan’s disillusionment with her uncle Pío and her extended Creole relatives in Arequipa). As star-gazers, these two female idealists follow Humboldt’s lead, since a remarkable features of his enterprise, and one manifested early on in his journey, was the attention to the different astronomical configurations in New World horizons. Humboldt was impressed by the “beauty of the southern sky [which] opened up new constellations.”164 Reminiscent of this scene, and shortly after her arrival in Cuba, Fredrika Bremer gazes up at the heavens from her country abode in Matanzas. Vexed because she could not discern the disposition of the stars in the southern hemisphere, the philanthropist traveler, in a Humboldtian gesture, announces the discovery of a new constellation: I thus beheld a constellation of incomparable magnificence and brilliancy ascend above the hill of the cocoa palms. Could it be the ship Argo or the constellation Saggitarius? I do not as yet know. I am still ignorant what constellations of the southern hemisphere may be seen here.

Towards dawn, the celestial vault reveals a single shining light: When the blush of morning appeared, . . . I saw the morning star standing above the earth . . . It seemed to me like an eye full of a bright but sorrowful consciousness . . . gazing calmly, . . . down upon earth. That bright star stood above the beautiful island like its clear, accusing conscience.165

The star’s transformation into a symbol of collective awareness follows her earlier allegorical projection onto the insular world. Included in the sketchbook which accompanied Bremer during her two-month stay in the island is a striking watercolor of a single palm tree under a glitter of stars.166 The perfect emblem of the star-gazing mode, “Palm Under a Night Sky” corresponds to a moment of contemplation shortly before her departure from the island, when the sight of the Southern Constellation elicits another cipher of the sublime: “There could not be more beautiful nights in Para-

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Figure 2.18.  Fredrika Bremer, “Palm Under a Night Sky,” Sketchbook of a Journey in the New World, 1850–1851.

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dise.”167 This Edenic projection parallels Graham’s similar reaction before the Brazilian landscape, what becomes a dominant trope in the discourses of nation-formation in their respective host countries. Bremer’s visual and verbal travelogue also suggests that, in women’s journeys, the upward sight towards the heavens often signals the end of the journey, the anticipation of the unexpected. The desire for transcendence—detecting in Nature the imprint of the Creator—formed an integral part of the natural theology prevalent during the first half of the nineteenth century.168 The morning in which Bremer sights the morning star, she experiences the wonder of her surroundings as a sign of spiritual fulfillment: “The beauty of these trees and flowers, and of this air, give me a foretaste of the glory of creation, a fullness of existence in the consciousness of natural life, which exceeds all that I have hitherto imagined.” Describing the island as “a perfected world,” she evokes “the power and afluence of the Creator” in a sustained hymn of joy.169 The luminous urge for absolutes imbues the gaze of enchantment. Sea Faring Consciousness Humboldt and Bonpland’s transatlantic crossing is inspired by what I call la conciencia marina, an awareness of forging a living link between two worlds. While Humboldt’s comparative method results in an abstract profile of the world erasing regional or local specificities,170 the mapping of the globe from a detached perspective seems to occur primarily on land or on the mountain top. Inheriting Humboldt’s literary legacy, women travelers engaged in solitary reverie at sea, an experience shaping the “solitary travelers” sojourn. In between Brazil and Chile, Maria Graham wrote in the style of a nautical log, recording every date according to latitude and longitude and orienting herself, like a sailor, according to the flight patterns of birds.171 Soon after embarking out to sea, Maria Graham evokes “the charms of night in a southern climate,” claiming that only Romantic poets—and particularly Byron—had done justice to its incomparable beauty—yet another instance of the “Victorian female sublime.” This “nautical” style not only evokes Humboldt’s detailed measurements of latitude and longitude throughout the Personal Narrative, but also the symbolic import of his long sea journey, as both the intermediate space where the horizon of knowledge is devised, and the private domain of introspection proper of the philosophical traveler. Sea-faring, la conciencia marina, thus becomes an apt metaphor for the “female travel experience,” an experience mediated by the Humboldtian master-text, as well as by Victorian natural history and the conventions of the picturesque and sublime. Like other Victorian “globe-trotters,” European

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Figure 2.19.  Maria Graham, front cover illustration, Frontispiece, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (1824).

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women travelers crossed the high seas to break out of the confines of domesticity, enduring bodily discomfort and a sense of alienation as a means to access knowledge.172 Although the “Victorian female sublime emphasized . . . a rhetoric based on absence, especially absence of the self,” the endurance of physical trials implied in travel enhanced women’s subjectivities.173 Whereas male explorers experienced transatlantic crossings as a psychic upsetting of categories—what Lindquist calls “an erasure of identity in the tropics”174—the tradition of women’s travel narrative to Latin America suggests an alternative textual space where the female body is discovered anew within an altered geography. Despite the different geographical sites to which they traveled, the authors depict the physical effects of dislocation, discomfort, and fatigue in varied and concrete ways—a topic to which we will return in the coda. What remains of female “personal narratives” to the varied geography of Latin America is the imprint of a landscape at times devoid of history, at other times saturated with it. NOTES 1.  Silvia N. Rosman, “Of Travelers, Foreigners and Nomads: The Nation in Translation,” Latin American Literary Review 26, no. 51 (1998): 17. 2. “The European travelers brought an idea of history that would allow Latin American nature to provide the basis for an autonomous and distinct Latin American being . . . ” Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 106. 3.  I derive this term from Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994). 4.  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Narrative and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 125. 5.  Jason H. Lindquist, “‘Under the Influence of an Exotic Nature . . . Natural Remembrances are Insensibly Effaced:’ Threats to the European Subject in Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent,” delivered at the CUNY conference, “Alexander von Humboldt: From the Americas to the Cosmos,” October 2004. 6.  I draw this term from Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 167–70. 7.  Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822; and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, and John Murray, 1824), frontispiece illustration. Herafter cited Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824).  8. Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 20–21, 39, 69, 73.

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  9.  The term is derived from the title of Philip Henry Gosse’s book, examined in Lynn L. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 13–14, 66. 10.  This resulted in a sense of “natural marvelous” or “palpable enchantment.” Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 379. The resonances with modern theories of Latin America, such as Alejo Carpentier’s “real marvelous,” could not be more striking. 11.  González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 106. 12.  Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 15; and Antonio Benítez Rojo, “The Nineteenth-Century Spanish American Novel,” Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, ed. Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 417–89. 13.  González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 110, 112. 14. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 74–75. 15.  I am indebted to Ottmar Ette’s keynote speech delivered at the “Alexander von Humboldt: From the Americas to the Cosmos” conference, in which he commented on the author’s “transdisciplinary,” rather than merely “interdisciplinary” perspective. 16.  Karen R. Lawrence, Penelope Voyages: Women and Travel in the British Literary Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 17.  Maria H. Frawley, A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1994), 24. 18. This synopsis of Humboldt’s paradigmatic journey is derived from Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, South America Called Them: Explorations of the Great Naturalists (La Condamine, Humboldt, Darwin, Spruce (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), 86–168. 19.  González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 102. See also Angela Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times: Narratives about Travel to South America, 1780–1849, trans. Dick Cluster (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 39–40. For an appraisal of Humboldt’s impact in the Americas, see Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 20.  Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799–1804, trans. Helen Maria Williams (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814), 1:79. 21.  Jean-Paul Duviols and Charles Minguet, Humboldt: Savant Citoyen du Monde (Paris: Découvertes Gallimard, 1994), 25–28. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 2:30. 22. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 5:487. 23. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 5:317–50. Although he based his observations on La Condamine, Humboldt eventually unsettled the French explorer’s interpretation as to the origins of the Orinoco; 328. Humboldt “discovered” that the Orinoco and the Amazon are two separate tributaries. See 482–85, 491–92. For a discussion of

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the significance of this scene, see Dassow Walls, “The Casiquiare Crossing,” in The Passage to Cosmos, 60–84. 24.  Ottmar Ette, Literature on the Move, trans. Katharina Vester (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), 24, 26–28. 25. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 184. 26. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7; Ette, Literature on the Move, 29. 27. I have gained much from the lively discussion of Mary Kingsley’s multifaceted “traveling persona” presented in Frawley, A Wider Range; Lila Marz Harper, Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001); and Gates, Kindred Nature. 28. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 3:28. 29. Ette, Literature on the Move, 40, 50. 30.  González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 108. 31. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, and 1823. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1824), 77, 84 (hereafter cited Journey of a Voyage to Brazil). 32. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 1:142; and Alexander von Humboldt, “Le Dragonnier de l’Orotava,” Planche [plate] 69) Atlas Pittoresque du Voyage: Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique-Planches (Paris: Schoell, 1810; facsimile edition, Amsterdam/New York: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Ltd.: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1972. 33. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 85. According to Stafford, Graham had sighted a similar tree in India, appreciating its “sacred presence” in her previous travel book, Journal of a Residence in India (1812), what makes the comparison to Humboldt’s Dragon Tree more poignant; Voyage into Substance, 176. 34. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 4:117. 35. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 84–85. 36. Humboldt, Planche [plate], 4, Atlas Pittoresque; and Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 73, 80. Stafford comments on Humboldt’s bridge over Icononzo, citing from Researches Concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of the Americas, translated by Helen Maria Williams (1814), 1:plate 4, 53; Voyage into Substance, 509n58. 37. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 117. 38.  Adela Breton, Sketch Book of Watercolours, Notes, & Drawings on Mexico, Breton Collection (Bristol: Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery, 1894), Ea 8401: I am following the numbering system established by the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, where I consulted this pictorial album (hereafter cited Breton, Sketch Book of Watercolours). The view of San Andrés Chalchicomula is reproduced in Adela Breton—una artista británica en México (1894–1908), edited by Mario de la Torre (México: Smurfit Cartón y Papel, 1993), 66, and in The Art of Ruins—Adela Breton and the Temples of Mexico, edited by Sue Giles (Bristol: City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, 1989), Ea 8401, 108. 39. Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 80, 64, 59. 40. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7, 120–25.

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41. Humboldt, “Vue du Chimborazo and du Carguairazo,” Planche [plate] 16, Atlas Pittoresque du Voyage; Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 125–26. Although a fuller account of Humboldtian science falls outside the scope of this book, I follow Aaron Sachs and Laura Dassow Walls who accent Humboldt’s precursor role as scientist as well as his transamerican scope. 42.  Scott Slovic, “Alexander von Humboldt’s Comparative Method of Landscape Description,” Publication for the Society for Literature and Science 5, no. 3 (May 1990): 6, 8; Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 150. 43.  González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 108. 44.  Edward J. Goodman, The Explorers of South America (New York: MacMillan Company, 1972), 258–59; and Aaron Sachs, “The Ultimate ‘Other’: Post-Colonialism and Alexander von Humboldt’s Ecological Relationship with Nature,” History and Theory 42, no. 4 (December 2003): 117, 119, 121. 45. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 3:506; quoted in Slovic, “Alexander von Humboldt’s Comparative Method . . . ,” 6. Pratt paraphrases Humboldt in her reading of Barrow’s African travels: “The eye ‘commands’ what falls within its gaze . . .” (Imperial Eyes, 60) but omits the reference to the Silla de Caracas sequence. Humboldt, “Vue du Silla de Caracas,” Planche [plate] 68, Atlas Pittoresque. 46.  Humboldt, “Vue de Cajambé,” Planche [plate] 42, Atlas Pittoresque; Ochoa, The Uses of Failure,163. 47. Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 254. 48.  Ibid., 150. 49.  The gender restrictions implied in nineteenth-century women’s travels are amply discussed in Frawley, A Wider Range; Mills, Discourses of Difference; and Marz Harper, Solitary Travelers. 50.  Ingrid Kuczynski, “Reading a Landscape: Ann Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany, With a Return Down the Rhine.” In British Romantics as Readers: Intertextualities, Maps of Misreading, Reinterpretations, ed. Michael Gassenmeier, Petra Bridzun, Jens Martin Gurr, and Frank Erik Pointner. (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1998), 247. I am grateful to Jason Howard Lindquist for bringing this article to my attention. 51.  “[T]he frame is always there as the guarantee that it is only a picture, only picturesque, and the observer is safe in another place—outside the frame. . . .” W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 16. 52. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 164. The term was coined by French critic Marie Claire Hoock-Demarle in an article on Flora Tristan; reference in Pratt, 244. 53.  Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 81, 84–85. 54.  Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 90–91; Jennifer Hayward, ed. “‘No Unity of Design:’ Competing Discourses in Graham’s Journal,” in A Journal of a Residence in Chile: During the Year 1822, and A Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, by Maria Graham (London and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 298; M. Soledad Caballero, “‘For the Honour of Our Country’: Maria Dundas Graham and the Romance of Benign Domination,” Studies in Travel Writing 9, no. 2 (2005): 112–13.

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55.  Fredrika Bremer, “St. Amalia Estate. 12 mars 1851. Akvarell,” in Skissbök från resan i Nya världen 1850–1851 [Sketchbook of a Voyage to the New World, 1850–1851]. (Uppsala, Sweden: Maps & Prints Department, Uppsala University Library), fol. 30r. I follow here the numbering system used by the Maps & Prints Department of Uppsala University Library, where I consulted this pictorial album (hereafter cited Bremer, “Sketchbook of a Voyage to the New World”). 56. Gates, Kindred Nature, 83. 57. Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America. Translated by Mary Botham Howitt. 2 Volumes. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1853. 1:v, 1:viii (hereafter cited The Homes of the New World). 58. Flora Tristan, Pérégrinations d’une paria (1833–1834) (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, Libraire-Éditeur, 1838), 1:22; 2:462 (hereafter cited Pérégrinations). 59. Flora Tristan, Peregrinations of a Pariah, 1833–1834. Translated by Jean Hawkes. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986, 9. I translated the last sentence of this passage, missing from this abridged edition (hereafter cited Peregrinations). 60. Tristan, Pérégrinations, 1:22; 2:462; Peregrinations, 307. In her Solitary Travelers, Marz Harper studies the rich tradition of nineteenth-century British women explorers and scientists. 61. Frances Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny [sic] Calderón de la Barca (With New Material from the Author’s Private Journals), ed. Howard T. Fisher and Marion Hall Fisher (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1966), 4 (hereafter cited Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca). 62.  “In Calderón’s narrative, discovery always appears understood in the language of the picturesque, while the conquest is seen in the symbolic language of the Romantic sublime;” Miguel A. Cabañas, “North of Eden: Romance and Conquest in Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico,” Studies in Travel Writing 9, no. 1 (2005): 8. 63. Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘From an Antique Land’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 42. In contrast to objective description, “affective realism” conveys “the passion or affection by which the speaker is possessed of and intends . . . to communicate to the reader.” I use the term “American” in its transnational sense. 64. Stafford Voyage into Substance, 40; González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 108. 65.  Jean-Paul Duviols and Charles Minguet, Humboldt: Savant-Citoyen du Monde (Paris: Découvertes Gallimard, 1994), 27; Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 5:137. 66. Nancy Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 36–37. 67.  Lindquist, “‘Under the Influence . . . ,’” 2. 68. Gates, Kindred Nature, 169. 69. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History, 66. I am indebted to Jason Lindquist for this insight. 70.  For an analysis of the discourse of wonder in travel books to Latin America, see Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 108. Sachs, “The Ultimate ‘Other,’” 123. “[N]aturalists could begin with facts, . . . and still go on to color the facts of nature with their own personality and experience to help shape and hold together the particulars.” Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History, 95.

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71. “Collecting, microscoping, curiosity, wonder, and close vision—those were the hallmarks of natural history.” Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History, 5, and 4–15. Maria Graham, A Scripture Herbal (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1842). 72. Merrill, The Romance of Natural History, 31, 66. 73. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 5:45. 74. Merrill, The Romance of Natural History, 15; Ana Maria de Moraes Belluzzo, O Brasil dos Viajantes (São Paulo: Fundação Odebrecht, Metalivros, 1994), 3: 20–23. Humboldt, “Volcans d’air de Turbaco,” Planche [plate] 21, Atlas Pittoresque. 75. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 104. 76.  Ibid., 89. 77. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 3:519. “Natural history studied appearances; natural philosophy investigated relationships.” Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History, 77. 78. Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 254; 32, 39, 40–41. 79. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 162. 80. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 3:354; “Volcans d’air de Turbaco,” Planche [plate] 21, Atlas Pittoresque. 81. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 162–63. 82. Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 3, 31–40. 83. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 132. 84.  W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 12. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 134. 85. “As a group, Victorian naturalists revered vision, especially surreptitious sights,” Merrill, The Romance of Natural History, 61. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 135. 86. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 169. 87. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 157; Gates, Kindred Nature, 169. 88. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 143. 89.  Ibid., 190. 90.  “Natural history seeks out objects or phenomena that are both unique . . . and extraordinary . . .” Merrill, The Romance of Natural History, 60. 91.  Ibid., 60, 51. 92.  Quote and description of silk-cotton tree in Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 106. 93. “Pleasure in enunciating Latinate species names saturates Victorian natural history. . . . Latin names seemed incontrovertibly scientific.” Merrill, The Romance of Natural History, 46–47. 94. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 124. 95.  Ibid., 162–63. 96.  Ibid, plate 9, 246. 97.  Gilberto Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties: The Making of Modern Brazil, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Knopf, 1963), 4–5, 44. 98. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, plate 6, 170. 99. Ibid., 147; author’s emphasis; 195; plate 8, “View of the Corcovado, from Botofongo, 220.

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100. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History, 51, 87. 101. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 5:166–67. 102. I am grateful to Jason Lindquist for the previous insight. Dulce María Loynaz’s poetic novel Jardín (1951) emblematizes the garden trope in the modern Latin American tradition. See Ileana Rodríguez, House/Garden/Nation: Space, Gender and Ethnicity in Post-Colonial Latin American Literatures by Women, trans. Robert Carr and Ileana Rodriguez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 88–107. 103. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:353. 104. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:252. Michèle Guicharnaud-Tollis has called this “un exotisme de l’espace” [spatial exoticism] to distinguish it from “l’exotisme geographique” [geographic exoticism] typical of the scientific traveler; Regards sur Cuba aux XIXe Siècle: Temoignages européens (Paris: Editions d’Harmattan, 1993), 30, 73. 105. José Lezama Lima, “Epifanía en el paisaje,” in Tratados en La Habana (Habana: Universidad Central de Las Villas, Departamento de Relaciones Culturales, 1958), 129. My translation. 106. Guicharnaud-Tollis, Regards sur Cuba, 30, 51, 65. 107.  “[L’] accent y mis sur la grande prosperité de Cuba à l’époque, sur son impressionante montée démographique, et sur l’accroisement de ses resources, qui a fait d’elle la Perle des Antilles.” [The focus is on Cuba’s prosperity during this period, on its impressive demographic growth, its increased resources, what made [the island] the Pearl of the Antilles] Ibid., 76. My translation. 108. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:300. The quotation that follows is from the same page. 109.  Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 4. 110.  Lezama Lima, Tratados en La Habana, 129. 111. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:300. 112. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7. 113.  The same mystical yearning is evident in la Comtesse Merlin’s first sighting of the shores of Cuba. 114. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:292. 115.  José Lezama Lima, Las eras imaginarias (Madrid: Ed. Fundamentos, 1971), 27–28. 116. Quotes from this paragraph drawn from Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:274; 2:310; 2:339–40; 2:412; 2:353. 117.  “Humboldt . . . urged European and North American artists to follow him to the tropics, to see tropical nature for themselves and to communicate its physiognomy in pictures and words.” Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature, 43. 118.  Maria Graham, A Journal of a Residence in Chile: During the Year 1822, and A Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, Jennifer Hayward, ed. (London and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 11. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 123.

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119.  Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travelers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716– 1818 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 95. 120.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 63; my emphasis. Quote immediately below, 67. 121.  Ibid., 63–64, 67–68. 122.  “Consonant with the formal interest in . . . panoramic views of distant . . . mountain chains was the myopic scrutiny of individual peaks. The solitary, insulated mountain is a persistent fixture of the factual travel account. . . .” Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 105, 109. 123.  Pablo Diener, “Profile of the Traveler-Artist in the Nineteenth-Century,” in European Traveler-Artists in Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Mexico City: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 1996), 73, 77–79, 80–82. 124.  Mario Moya Placencia, “Egerton’s Mexico (1831–1842),” in Diener, European Traveler-Artists, 88–90. 125.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 87. 126.  Nigel Leask, “‘The Ghost in Chapultepec’: Fanny Calderón de la Barca, William Prescott and Nineteenth-Century Mexican Travel Accounts,” in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. Jan Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 197. Adding that the picturesque technique is effectively used to evoke “the historical resonance of the vista,” Leask’s reading points out Calderón’s ambivalence towards the discourse of conquest. 127.  All quotes in this section drawn from Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 88. 128. Cabañas, “North of Eden,” 11–12. He concludes that “Calderón hopes to recreate the chivalrous past of the conquest of the New World” (12). Leask deals squarely with Calderón’s identification with and rejection of Cortés (“Ghost in Chapultepec,” 199); a topic more fully analyzed in chap. 4. 129. Bohls, Women Travelers and the Language of Aesthetics, 119. 130. Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 162. 131. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:296. 132.  Bremer, “Sketchbook of a Voyage to the New World,” folio 18r, “Valle de Yumurí, Cuba, February 27, 1851.” Merrill, The Romance of Natural History, 41; author’s emphasis. 133.  “The role of altruistic teacher . . . was allocated to women for the whole of the nineteenth century.” Gates, Kindred Nature, 51. 134. Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 89. 135. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 4:11, 33–34. 136. Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 93. 137. Tristan, Pérégrinations1:238; Peregrinations, 85. 138.  Graham’s acquaintance with Humboldt and his influence in her subsequent inquiry into volcanoes is noted in Jessica Damián, “‘These Civil Wars of Nature’: Annotating South America’s Natural and Political History in Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824),” in Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic

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Imaginary, ed. Joselyn M. Almeida (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2010), 337–38. 139. Stafford explains how the “upward motion” shaping the volcano was interpreted by Enlightenment explorers as a “hint at a hidden order, a cosmic energy lodged deep within the earth,” Voyage into Substance, 249. 140. Tristan, Pérégrinations 1:238; English translation quoted in Kathleen Hart, “‘There shall be earthquakes in diverse places’: Volcanic Terror in Flora Tristan’s Pérégrinations of a Pariah,” in The Play of Terror in Nineteenth-Century France, edited by John T. Booker and Allan H. Pasco (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997), 48. 141. Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 218. 142. Ibid., 206, 196. 143. Tristan, Pérégrinations 1:238–39; Peregrinations, 85. 144. Tristan, Pérégrinations 1:238–39; my translation. The following quote comes from 238; 85. 145. Tristan, Pérégrinations 1:238; Peregrinations, 85. 146. Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 254. 147.  “[T]he Victorian female sublime emphasized . . . not a rhetoric of presence so much as a rhetoric based in absence, especially absence of the self.” Gates, Kindred Nature, 170. Also quoted in Marz Harper, Solitary Travelers, 66. 148.  “The traveler, better than any other type of direct observer, managed to involve simultaneously his whole bodily and mental being in the process of exploring physical actuality.” Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 206. 149. Gates, Kindred Nature, 170. 150.  “Es admirable el arrojo de la amazona que, bajo el sol guerrerense, se atrevió a recorrer kilómetros de caminos desconocidos en los profundos desfiladeros y las escarpadas montañas de la Sierra Madre del Sur.” [It is admirable to note the courage of the Amazon who, under the bright sun of Guerrero province, dared to tred many kilometers of unknown roads, through the deep ravines, cliffs and sharp-edged mountains of the Sierra Madre del Sur] (my translation). Graciela Romandía de Cantú, “Adela Breton (1849–1923),” in Adela Breton: una artista británica en México, 1894–1908, edited by Mario de la Torre (México, D. F.: Smurfit Cartón y Papel de México, 1993), 52. 151. Merrill, The Romance of Natural History, 41; author’s emphasis. 152.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 87. 153. Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 215, 249. 154.  In these “natural masterpieces,” “the matchless wonder of art becomes supplanted by the prodigy of nature.” Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 60, 65. 155.  Egerton’s descent into the fiery depths is reproduced in European TravelerArtists in Nineteeth-Century Mexico. Romandía de Cantú hints that “es muy posible que Breton haya conocido [las litografías de Egerton] antes de viajar a México,” [it is likely that Breton was already familiar with Egerton’s lithographs before traveling to Mexico] in Breton, Adela Breton, 40; my translation. Stafford explains how mostly

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male travelers were “plunging headlong into earth’s entrails,” in order to “expose the matrix of matter, while . . . embodying the . . . potency of earth’s core.” Voyage into Substance, 112, 124. 156.  “Vaster and more desolate than the Alpine world, the harsh polar environment nevertheless attracted passionate exploration.” Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 272. 157. Chauncey C. Loomis, “The Artic Sublime,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 100. 158.  Ibid., 98. 159. David Robertson, “Mid-Victorians amongst the Alps,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. Knoepflmacher and Tennyson, 120–21, 130–31. 160.  Graciela Romandía de Cantú conjectures that Breton probably hired Solorio during her first trip to Mexico, in 1893 or 1894, and that he served her as “fiel acompañante y amigo” [a faithful travel companion and friend] for nearly ten years; “Adela Breton,” in Adela Breton, edited Mario de la Torre, 37. My translation. 161.  Marz Harper, Solitary Travelers, 17–25. 162. Gates, Kindred Nature, 169. 163. Tristan, Pérégrinations 1:238; Peregrinations, 85. 164. Humboldt, Personal Narrative, 2:30. 165.  Both quotes drawn from Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, trans. Mary Botham Howitt (New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1854), 2:272. Hereafer cited The Homes of the New World. 166. Fredrika Bremer, “Palm under a Night Sky. Midnight. Sunday, April 4th, 1851,” Bremer, “Sketchbook of a Voyage to the New World,” fol. 23v. 167. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:357–58. 168.  Originating in William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802), this philosophy was influential until mid-nineteenth-century. Gates, Kindred Nature, 39, 43. 169.  Both quotes drawn from Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:273. 170.  Slovic, “Alexander von Humboldt’s Comparative Method. . . .” 6, 8. 171. Graham, Journey of a Voyage to Brazil, 204–5. Next quote is from 82. 172.  Marz Harper, Solitary Travelers, 119–10; Frawley, A Wider Range, 24–27. 173. Gates, Kindred Nature, 170; Frawley, A Wider Range, 13–14, 17. 174.  Lindquist, “‘Under the Influence . . . ,’” 8.

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Chapter Three

Romancing the Nation: European Women’s Travels in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

European women who crossed the Atlantic during the first quarter of the century were thrust into the fray of politics, for their travels coincided with a crucial historical transition: the end of the Wars of Independence and the first stage in the formation of autonomous republics in Spanish America. Read as gendered histories, European women’s travelogues show both a commonality of vision in terms of their respective historiographical approaches, while, at the same time, exhibiting individual responses to the particular country, region, or context to which their New World destinies led them. As a viable escape from the confines of domesticity, travel provided nineteenth-century women with a unique opportunity to experience themselves as historical subjects. Latin American historians have tended to read foreign women’s travelogues as valuable documentary sources, filling in the contours of official history with the narrator’s subjective impressions. In her anthology of women’s travel writings to Latin America, Jane E. Hahner appraises them as “first-hand accounts, possessing an immediacy like that of testimonial literature,” yet she also alerts historians to “read against the grain,” voicing the commonly-held assumption that European travelers filter their view of Latin America by their own privilege and foreign status.1 The documentary value of women’s travels lie in their use of engaging detail (the accent on particularity brimming over from their localized views of Nature), their close inspection of domestic arrangements among their Creole peers (what Swedish traveler Fredrika Bremer called “the inner life of the home,”) and their ability to register the class and racial contrasts of post-Independence societies. In this chapter I want to stress not merely the documentary value of European women’s travels but rather their emplotment of historical events. Inspired by Hayden White’s Metahistory, I want to trace the manner in which 83

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each European traveler designs the unfolding of political events in a figurative mode. At one end of the spectrum, Maria Dundas Graham, who traveled to Chile and Brazil in the early 1820s, positions herself as conscious historical witness to the two countries’ transition to Independence. Her Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (1824) writes the romance of Spanish American Independence by means of a triangular plot revolving around Argentine General San Martin, the (soon-to-be-deposed) Chilean Director Bernardo O’Higgins, and Lord Cochrane, the British commander at the head of the Chilean navy, who became Graham’s confidante and interlocutor. At the other end, Parisian-born Flora Tristan, who traveled to Peru in search of family and fortune, depicts the first period of Spanish American independence in terms of satire. Tristan’s Pérégrinations d’une Paria (1838 ) includes a particularly biting account of the contested presidential transition in 1834; her record of the ensuing civil conflict in Arequipa undermines the “grand narrative” of Latin American independence as heroic accomplishment. In-between romance and satire is the irony surfacing in Frances Calderón de la Barca’s witty Life in Mexico, During a Residence of Two Years in that Country (1843), an account registering the author’s impressions as wife of the first Spanish ambassador to an independent Mexico. The historical plot of an otherwise rambling narrative hinges on the 1840 pronunciamiento [revolt] against federalism which shook Mexico City and banished the diplomatic couple to a faraway country estate. Like the naturalist/observer who reaped the results of close observation, these three travel books narrow the historical field by dint of “being on the spot.” In line with the way that “natural history provided the model” for nineteenth-century travel writing, the rhetoric of history in these secular pilgrimages convey both objective and subjective accounts of events.2 When the author saw herself involuntarily involved in one of the many civil wars or political skirmishes that took place after Independence, she carefully recorded the sequence of events, consciously adapting the role of historical witness.3 In the midst of violence and chaos, European women assumed the reflective pose of self-fashioned historian, resulting in historiographical writing cast in a range of subjective poses. Graham peering out a coach window, Tristan from the rooftop of her uncle Pío’s estate, and Calderón tucked inside her rural hideaway—each writer carved out a space from where to fashion herself as a dutiful scribe, not merely recording, but also interpreting, the pageant of pre- and post-Independence history. In turn, the various sites where the historiographical narrative is constructed point to the multiple narrative persona with which each traveler positioned herself vis-à-vis the charged present of the Spanish American republics. Whether they figured as impassioned spectators or as active participants in their host

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country’s transition to nationhood, European women travelers knew themselves to be historians at a crucial time. The period of nation-building created a separatist discourse, primarily of male political actors who used the autobiographical memoir as a means to document their exemplary lives as well as to justify their political agendas. Exemplified in Domingo Sarmiento’s Recuerdos de provincia (1850), “a text endowed with historical and moral significance, an example for posterity and a national testimony,” Spanish American nationalist discourse features a male narrator whose heroic stance makes him proudly figure as “father of the country”; in Sylvia Molloy’s apt phrase, “Sarmiento is not only an exemplary Argentinian but he is Argentina, forming with his country one, inseparable body.”4 The rhetoric of self-aggrandizement characterizes the bulk of nineteenth-century historical prose, a discourse responsible for articulating the bases of Latin American cultural identity and its sense of “historical uniqueness.”5 Poised in different national and temporal contexts—Graham in the thick of the last phase of the Independence struggle; Tristan and Calderón caught in the turmoil of political transition—these three women establish a type of counter-discourse to official histories written mostly “as a pantheon of heroic, exemplary figures.”6 Using a variety of historiographical approaches, European women’s journeys compose an alternative account of Spanish American nationalism, contributing to what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community,” the idea of a nation stemming from a deep sense of bonding that eventually led to a call for sovereignty. By far the most salient feature of the rhetoric of travel writing is the authors’ scathing critique of caudillismo, what they saw as a prime factor (and considerable flaw) of Spanish American Independence. Their point of departure is the critique of despotism and of the institutions forged in the new republics, weakened by factionalism and the abuse of power. By surveying the rise of nationalist movements from a gendered point of view, foreign women’s travelogues reverse the dominant paradigm of heroic male figures in which the self was synonymous with homeland. The equation of Self and Nation prolongs another, more pervasive literary convention, which founds the genre of autobiography itself; that is, “the naive conflation of male subjectivity and human identity,” so that “male experience is identified as the normative human paradigm.”7 European women’s travels resist such universalist claims, pointing, instead, at the narrator’s vulnerable subject position in the midst of political chaos and uncertainty. In parallel fashion, the cumulative historical record inscribed in this set of memoirs reveals subtle transformations of the narrative voice. Women’s experience as historical witnesses, and even, at times, as involuntary agents of Latin American inde-

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pendence, temporarily upset the traveler’s European identity. By tracing here both the plots of political transition as well as each author’s unique “writing of history,” I want to show the effect of transatlantic travel on female subjectivities. In contrast to male “world-historical individuals,” full of self-assurance and pride, these female observers construct their historical agency out of their very marginality and gender difference, as onlookers and (often unwilling) participants in their host country’s post-Independence societies. Given the close affinities between the discourse of natural history and the emergence of early sociology, the energies devoted to acute observation of species spill over the varieties and patterns evidenced by social life. In women’s travels, it is the accent on the particular—the disruptive effect of political events on the flow of daily life, the center of women’s occupations— what provides the key to a gendered historiography. Instead of forging the nation as abstraction based on an idealized, larger-than-life image of a single political leader, women travelers recur to the concrete, to the everyday, and to lived experience as prime categories with which to construct the discourse of the nation. Graham, Tristan, and Calderón de la Barca portray a gallery of nationalist figures identified in official histories as “forgers of the nation” (padres de la patria). Yet, for the most part, these transhistorical individuals are valued, not merely for their public display of power, but rather for their inner resilience or character traits. The rhetoric of history employed in foreign women’s travels springs from a recurrent motif: the authors’ personal contact with nationalist leaders, often from warring political factions. This experience is, in turn, translated into character sketches which highlight the leader’s “heroic” exploits in catapulting the cause of Independence or else assess their role in the process of national consolidation. More often than not, these portraits also give an image of the man of action at home; that is, the particularities of his private life that either reveal the intimate side of his personality or, at times, conflicts with his public persona. Face-to-face contact also conditions the particular “romancing of nation” evidenced in European women travelers. This can range from a literal romance, as in Tristan’s scheme to marry a Spanish officer in order to gain political power, to a portrayal of Romantic heroes by means of military prowess, as in Graham’s close tie with British mercenary officer Lord Cochrane, on which hinges her plot of Chilean Independence. Of all the travelers, Calderón de la Barca evidences the most detached approach, as her meetings with Mexican statesmen were made on an almost equal footing, given her status as wife of a Spanish diplomat. Yet a third mode of “romancing the nation” is the evocation of past glories, embodied in pre-Hispanic civilizations. Whether out of disillusionment with the present (as in Flora Tristan) or else at the first sight of indigenous cities,

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as in Calderón de la Barca’s sublime view of Tenochtitlán, European women frame their accounts of indigenous civilizations in terms of romantic historiography. As if exercising the gift of historical prophecy, these nineteenthcentury savants often envisioned the future of Spanish America in terms of a legendary past. In their respective readings, Miguel Cabañas and M. Soledad Caballero associate this counterpoint approach with a markedly Eurocentric and colonialist bent. While M. Soledad Caballero considers that “[t]he romanticized past is necessary for the historical present of British contact in Latin American and for a British future,” Cabañas’ essays purports to show how “the voice of the (gentle) woman traveller is appropriated by colonialist and imperialist ideology.” Hence their readings emphasize how the erasure of the past is closely tied to a determinism regarding future events, a closing of the historical field due to American and British intervention in Latin America. Whereas M. Soledad Caballero constructs Graham’s travels in terms of a British campaign of “benign domination” in Chile, Cabañas claims that “Calderón’s travel book . . . complement[s] the alleged need to intervene in the region.”8 A closer look at the historical record resists such a dramatic cause-and-effect between the historiographical dimension of nineteenthcentury travelogues, and the actual unfolding of events at the journeys’ end. These arguments counter the opinion of Latin American historians. June Hahner, for one, concludes that, long after the period of anarchy and civil strife depicted in Graham’s Chile Journal, the country enjoyed “a durable and adaptable constitutional order and many years of political stability” and peace.9 Historian Ricardo D. Salvatore offers a more subtle and careful approach to the question of travelers’ complicity with discourses of empire. Nineteenthcentury travelers, he argues, provide a complex web of representations that cumulatively convey a sense of “informal empire,” what affected the way South America was imaginatively portrayed to a U.S. public.10 In ways typical of post-Enlightenment explorers, North Americans tended “to see South America as a land caught in a perpetual state of childhood, unable to reach the political maturity required to sustain stable and democratic governments.”11 While traces of this ideology resonate in these texts, my reading stresses how this analogy is part of a broader gesture; as exemplified in Calderón de la Barca and Graham, the tactic serves to acknowledge the legacy of Spanish colonial rule, its after effects in the formation of the new countries, and the uncertain political future that lay beyond the first stage of Spanish American nationalism. Besides these characteristically ambivalent responses to the pre-conquest era, at the same time, and paradoxically, women writers exhibit a curious identification with indigenous subjects and other non-Western Others, going

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so far as to pay homage to the destruction of ceremonial sites and cultures as a consequence of Spanish conquest. At the start of her South American journals, Maria Graham evokes the ancient caciques [indigenous chiefs], particularly the Araucano chief Lautaro who mounted a fierce resistance against the Spaniards, while Tristan recalls the founding of the city of Arequipa in terms of an ancient Inca legend. The most serious passages in an otherwise witty travelogue are Calderón de la Barca’s retelling of the conquest of Mexico, featuring a particularly sensitive rendering of the defeat of Monteczuma.12 Resisting than “collaps[ing] Spanish and Indigenous history” or erasing “the real Mexico,” I argue in the other direction instead: that the use of romantic historiography at times conditions, at other times diffuses, the appeal—if not the urgency—to record present events.13 European women travelers emplotted the history of Spanish American Independence in both conventional and highly original ways. Taking its cues from other contemporary accounts critical of Spanish American emancipation, European women’s travels establish an alternative historiography that traces the continent’s political and cultural autonomy not as fulfillment, but rather as diminished potential. In the sections that follow, I analyze the way each traveler fashions her role as historian, a position determining both the depiction of the historical field and the assessment of post-Independence nations. Transcending their foreign and dependent status, transatlantic pilgrims influence the emergence of nationalist discourse in their respective host countries by both the power of their images and the poignancy of their individual life stories. Although the image of modern Latin America emerging in these texts resonates with Anglo-American overtones, it does not fully conform to it;14 I argue, rather, that women’s travels show the complexity and hence deepen our understanding of the racial and political conflicts riddling post-Independence societies. Organized by chronological order, the sections depict a particular stage toward political autonomy, starting with Graham’s privileged view of the anti-loyalist campaign in the Andes, then followed by Tristan’s and Calderón’s incisive critique of the first phase of the independent republics. Framed as regional as well as national histories, this set of travelogues unravel not a uniform and consistent account of Spanish American nationalism, but the often schematic and subjective response of a live witness attempting to grasp a history not her own. Anticipating the genre of testimonio [testimonial narrative] by its accent on particularity and the oral transmission of historical knowledge, European women’s travels read as secular pilgrimages in search of an elusive ideal. Rather than fill the gaps in the historical record, my study captures the way these nineteenth-century precursors poised themselves as historical subjects, writing history in patterned but no less effective ways.

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MARIA GRAHAM: FEMALE HISTORICAL AGENCY AS LOYALTY In her introduction to a recent edition of Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile, Jennifer Hayward claims that she “analyzes the genesis of Spanish American Independence movements through Anglo eyes;” furthermore, she argues, “Graham’s solution to the undoubted evils of Spanish colonialism is to let the English step in.” Angela Pérez Mejía shares a similar view: stressing Graham’s upholding of the standard of “Englishness” as a measure of Chilean affairs, she adds that “Graham . . . locates herself, and all the English who intervened, as the people best endowed to understand what is happening, ” then sums up the South American travel book “as an act of economic espionage.” Likewise, for M. Soledad Caballero, “Graham re-imagines the contemporary moment of Latin American independence in the language of romance,” a claim which sustains her argument that Graham’s historical plotting is meant to “create a history of Latin American independence as a British endeavor,” albeit in a “softer,” more feminine mode, one that represents a bland “model of superior cultural infusion,” which, she states, supports an active call for “British intervention” in the region. 15 Historians’ assessments regarding the role Great Britain assumed before and after Spanish American Independence point to a far more complex type of interaction. In an authoritative essay on this period, David Bushnell details Britain’s mediating—and strategically ambivalent—function in fostering trade among the emerging juntas [governing assemblies], while at the same time discouraging Creoles from “severing all ties to the mother country.”16 Whereas the official British position was to maintain strategic neutrality, this neutrality not only does not find an echo in Maria Graham’s journals, but is also quite frontally contested. Based on the work’s subtle documenting of local facts and awareness of history, I argue here for Graham’s avowed support of the patriot cause, a position surfacing early on in the Journal, what results in a different type of “romancing” of Latin America by female travelers. Seduced by the beauty and appeal of their countries of residence, this alternative “romance” is meant to suggest their constant engagement with local elites, the social hierarchies they encountered throughout their journeys, and what import these encounters had in terms of their own secular pilgrimages. For Maria Graham’s account, as well as that of her nineteenth-century pioneers, voiced the underside of Spanish American nationalism. Weaving the historical present into the fabric of their travels, European women took a courageous stance to show how anarchy, political intrigue, and civil strife riddled the constitution of the early republics, failures which, nevertheless,

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did not mitigate their fundamental belief that Spanish America had an inalienable right to autonomy. Though sympathetic certainly to British involvement in the region (through the military exploits of Lord Cochrane), Graham strikes out on her own, voicing an impassioned defense of Chilean Independence early on in her Journal, a position that sparked the entire work. This belief ranges from an emotive passage denouncing “military despotism” as “the greatest curse under which a nation can suffer” to an emphatic statement regarding faith in the will of the people and their innate ability to “shake off the tyranny both of foreign governments and domestic despots.” Graham’s staunch defense of the campaign to free Chile from Spain is further couched in terms of historical prophecy: “never again will the iron sceptre of the mother-country be stretched out over these lands.”17 Among the set of travelers, only Graham provides a “grand narrative” of Spanish American Independence, an appraisal of an emerging nationalism from within the contested battlefield. Hayward’s comparison of Graham’s “rhetoric of travel” to similar accounts authored by male contemporaries sets her apart from her peers’ heavier tomes, which “tend to cluster around economic and military dominance.”18 Despite her alleged “assertion of ‘English’ values and morals,” Graham’s account of the Independence struggle fills in a forgotten chapter of Chilean history, enhancing our understanding of Spanish American nationalism not only by its reversal of official sources, but, more daring from a literary point of view, by unraveling the entangled plot of Independence in terms of melancholy. Maria Graham’s South American journals—Journal of a Residence in Chile and Journal of a Voyage to Brazil—open with a “Sketch” outlining the history of her two host countries from the colonial period to Independence. In each book, the temporality of the historiographical account cedes before the demands of travel writing, for the “Sketches” assess the “time of the nation” immediately preceding the traveler’s arrival. Hence, as the journal progresses, this privileged moment filters the subsequent recording of events. These introductory sketches condition readerly expectations regarding the historical plot about to unfold within the corpus of the travelogue; narrated from a more “detached” perspective, the “Sketch of a History of Chile” is meant to win the reader over to the subjective interpretation of local politics contained in the body of the text. In the prologue to the Journal of a Residence in Chile, Graham had declared her self-proclaimed role as archivist, for the historical “Sketch” is culled from oral testimony from the leading figures in the Independence process. Graham’s riveting account of Bernardo O’Higgins rise and fall as the Director of Chile’s first republic reveals that it was his testimony which supplied the bulk of the opening summary of Chilean history; in her words,

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It was the writer’s good fortune while in Chile, to become acquainted with several persons, who having participated either as actors or spectators in the great event, were kind enough to allow her to write down from their verbal account, the main particulars . . . [drawn from] the clear and spirited narrative of the Supreme Director, O’Higgins . . .

More telling is that the text’s documentary value is proclaimed by Graham’s own hand: in the “Preface” she claims its value as the only surviving account of the first phase of Chilean Independence, from the defeat of patriot forces at Rancagua to their subsequent retreat through the Andes.19 As if anticipating the task of future historians, Graham envisions that her Journal will serve as a crucial documentary source on this period: not only is it meant to replace the local archives burnt in 1814, but she also boasts that it is destined to fill a significant gap in the historical record, until 1817, a self-appraisal shared by José Valenzuela D., translator of a modern Chilean edition, who praises its merit as historical document.20 Added to the distinction of being the only written testimony of a conflictive period, Graham further notes that her Journal offers a corrective vision of the second stage of Chilean emancipation, particularly between 1820 and 1821, when General San Martín, at the head of the Peruvian campaign, and Lord Cochrane, British naval officer in charge of the Chilean navy, clashed on the grand stage of Spanish American independence.21 The opening “Sketch” reveals the author’s familiarity with naval strategy, fostering the driving force of the plot which is to justify Cochrane’s “redemptive” mission in Chile. Besides the focus on military history (Rancagua, Chacabuco, Maipú), Graham’s Chile Journal offers a riveting account of naval history, centered around the hagiography of Lord Cochrane, an attitude partly justified by the fact that Graham’s husband, Captain Thomas Graham, had served under Cochrane’s command.22 The narrative account of protracted battles serves as justification for Cochrane’s presence in Chile. Graham carefully documented the manner in which the new Chilean government had recruited him in a last-ditch effort to crush the remaining royalist stronghold in Perú. Anticipating her depiction of Cochrane as Romantic hero, Graham goes so far as to claim that Chilean government agents “were fortunate enough to find Lord Cochrane at liberty to devote himself entirely to the cause of South American independence.”23 By means of detailed descriptions of military sieges and battles, Graham establishes Cochrane’s supremacist role as chief naval commander, prefiguring his larger-than-life image drawn in the main body of the travelogue. Graham’s plotting of Chilean Independence hinges on the fierce competition between Argentine General San Martín and Cochrane over the lead of

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this last phase of the war. In the opening “Sketch,” the conflict between Cochrane and San Martín revolves around questions of military strategy, while, in the Journal, Graham takes up Cochrane’s impassioned defense against San Martín’s accusations; in both cases, she displays her conscious role as selfstyled historian. The clash in the protagonists’ personalities ensues from the status of the Chilean squadron under Lord Cochrane’s command. Its mission was to wrestle Peru from the Spaniards by gaining control of the maritime passage through Valparaíso, in order to weaken the last Spanish stronghold in South America. Adopting a “masculinist” discourse, Graham details Cochrane’s military strategy: to set sail to the port of Callao and take the Spanish army by surprise.24 An earlier historical subplot anticipates the axis of the conflict between these two “world-historical individuals” (Lukács’ term). For Graham structures her historical “Sketch” in terms of a duel between another set of opposing factions; that is, her capsule but no less riveting account of the first phase of Chilean Independence, to which she claims privileged access as “insider.” Here the reckless José Miguel Carrera, portrayed as Romantic hero— “uneducated and wild”—is pitted against Bernando O’Higgins, who assumed the role of Director in this crucial first moment of nation-building. Though all four leaders of the Chilean movement resonate with romantic overtones, José Miguel Carrera stands out as its emblematic hero: His person was remarkably handsome, and his countenance beautiful and prepossessing. I have heard that his eyes seemed even to possess a power of fascination over those he addressed. Among all who have arisen to notice in the struggle for South American Independence, he was undoubtedly the most amiable; his genius was versatile, his imagination lively, and his powers great . . .

Although both figures loom large over the first phase of Chilean independence, O’Higgins’ moderation and good judgment ultimately prevail over Carrera’s scintillating charism. Moreover, O’Higgins’ calm and security, and perhaps his Irish ancestry, captured the writer’s sympathy as well as her ear, since he is credited as main source for the richly textured story of Chilean Independence composed in the “Sketch.”25 With accuracy and an eye for detail, Graham recapitulates the first phase of Chilean independence. In the ensuing account, O’Higgins, who acquires both a human face and military fame through various battles, is poised opposite San Martín, who is systematically debunked from the “grand narrative” of Spanish American Independence. This negative portrayal of the Argentine, continued in the main body of the Journal, is bolstered in the “Sketch” with the detailed account of the cruelty with which San Martín executed the Carreras at Mendoza, events setting the stage for her subsequent idealization of

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Lord Cochrane. After the battle of Rancagua, and the exit of patriot troops to Buenos Aires, Graham shifts to the motive propelling the historical plot.26 Displaying travel writing’s penchant for moral judgment, Graham depicts Cochrane as “a man of prudence as well as courage,” whereas, with San Martín, “courage . . . is more than doubtful”; a hero/villain motif intrinsic to the fashioning of an “imperial romance.”27 Beyond its nationalist overtones, the rift between the two heroes serves to construct a historical allegory: an epic struggle between good and evil. Displaying a characteristic trait of gendered historiography, in the Journal a minor event dramatizes the conflict and rivalry between the two military men. On January 15, 1819, Cochrane’s squadron sails off on its mission, with great expectation from the Chilean populace, who marked its departure from the port of Valparaíso as “the first time they had dared attack the enemy in his own strong-hold.” National sentiment is figured by synecdoche, as every ship hails the name of a nationalist leader (O’Higgins, Lautaro, Chacabuco, San Martín). Thus the conflation of ship and hero becomes a convenient shorthand for highlighting the nationalist cause. In Graham’s rendering of the Peruvian campaign, San Martín’s supremacist aspirations run counter to Cochrane’s lofty ambitions and altruistic drive; a clash surfacing in two climactic scenes—the take-over of Pisco and Callao and the subsequent seizure of the Spanish ship Esmeralda, depicted as the highpoint of Cochrane’s military strategy.28 At this point, Graham’s “grand narrative” of Spanish American Independence breaks down, and a shift in the text signals the detour from History in a figurative mode to a “tale of two ships” and two commanding officers. The turning point, and what most eloquently portrays the critique of despotism in foreign women’s travels, is the moment when a boastful San Martín proclaimed himself Protector of Perú “with an authority absolute and undivided.” The last section of the opening “Sketch” zeroes in on the rift between Cochrane and San Martín: while the former intended to use public monies obtained from the Peruvian government to pay the sailors in his squadron, the latter misused it as ploy to entice Cochrane’s men to switch under his command. In Graham’s retelling, San Martin not only refused to pay Cochrane’s squadron, but he also accused Cochrane of high treason: “It was hard to imagine on what ground a report was spread, . . . that when Lord Cochrane sailed in pursuit of the enemy’s frigates, . . . he would never return to Chile.” Structuring her account as a “Manichean allegory,” towards the end of the “Sketch,” the roles of the two leaders are reversed, for it is San Martín (the “native” and self-appointed hero) who is depicted as mercenary (“the instigator of two attempts to assassinate the admiral”), while Lord Cochrane attains heroic status by displaying a “firmness and humanity which had as yet been wanting in the noble struggle for freedom.”29

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The plot of Chilean Independence detailed in the “Sketch” carries over to the main body of the Journal, which centers on the fate of Cochrane’s ship and its unpaid sailors as a means to highlight the continuing rift between two military leaders. The conflict of legitimacy hinges not only on their rival status as native versus foreigner (San Martín and Cochrane), but also to their opposing dispositions and political ambitions. Ultimately, their rivalry points to divergent strategies toward achieving the same goal: separation from Spain and the end of colonial rule. In line with a gendered rhetoric of travel, Graham constructs an image of General San Martín as a self-styled “world-historical-individual” dominated by ambition and the will to power. Indeed, “San Martín’s behavior embodies the tyranny of local Latin American leaders,” thus linking his character portrait to the broader plot of South American Independence.30 Resisting the selfaggrandizing mode of Sarmiento and his peers, the heroism associated with the Argentine commander is debunked early on in the Journal, a tactic whose cumulative effect is to portray the main political flaw in Spanish American Independence: “military despotism is the greatest curse under which a nation can suffer.” San Martín’s portrait as “an opium-eater” and as a man wrecked by fitful “starts of passion” is meant to underscore this political allegory, as well as an earlier anecdote recounting how he swindled the lands and fortune of a rich South American merchant. The accent on the general’s moral inferiority climaxes later on in the narrative, when, after an unexpected landing in Valparaíso in late September, 1822, the Argentine grants Graham a personal interview a fortnight later. Both sides seem aware of the import of their meeting, hence heightening the historical plot constructed in the Journal. While the General painstakingly tries to impress his British (and female) interlocutor, as if to ensure that a positive image be handed down for posterity, the author dismisses their communication as a mere “display” of a public persona.31 What transpired exactly between the dashing hero of Spanish American Independence (as embellished by official historiography) and the (apparently neutral) Victorian visitor? More crucial than their factual dialogue is the position from which they viewed each other: Graham, a quiet widow and pro-Cochrane advocate, and San Martín, on the first leg of his retreat from power after the fateful encounter with Bolívar months before in Guayaquil (a definitive battle fought on July, 1822), to whom he abdicated leadership of the Peruvian campaign, and, consequently, of the liberation movement.32 As recounted in the Journal, the Argentine saw the meeting with Graham as a unique opportunity to promote his vision of an autonomous Spanish America, surely with a European readership in mind; hence as an opportunity to set his version of events for posterity. Yet this part of the discussion is resumed only in a cryptic “We spoke of government” phrase, followed by Graham’s sharp

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judgment as to the limitations of his leadership style. Depicting San Martín in highly ambivalent terms—he wished for both “the reputation of a liberator” and “the will to be a tyrant,” Graham reduces the General to a near-caricature of himself. This unflattering portrait is prefaced with her echoing Cochrane’s unabashedly low opinion of him “as a traitor to Chile and a dishonest man,” a view meant to provoke a negative readerly reception while gaining credibility for Cochrane, who had magnanimously refused to arrest him.33 Despite the subjective tint of these memoirs, their value as historiographical documents cannot be contested. The Chile Journal reveals one of the paradoxes of Spanish American Independence, the moment when San Martín explains his motivations for his sudden withdrawal from Lima: in this version, he had reached absolute certainty that the Peruvians “were now happy enough to do without him.” It is also the only moment in this cogent exchange when San Martín “was [truly] himself,” a subjective opinion meant to persuade both a local and a European audience. In other women travelers of the period—notably, Calderón de la Barca’s meeting with a handful of Mexican statesmen who had also rescinded into obscurity—the same pattern emerges, almost as if the transition to political autonomy in Spanish America forced either an agotamiento [exhaustion] with the demands of public service, or a more generalized malaise which struck both O’Higgins and Cochrane. To illustrate the principle of faded glory, San Martín’s farewell letter to the Peruvians is incorporated a few pages later as documentary source, a tactic also used by Tristan and Calderón de la Barca to record current events. In Chile, Graham’s portrait of San Martín has been hailed as both historically accurate and psychologically perceptive, a reception that shows the extent to which foreign women’s travelogues contributed to the discourse of nationhood in Spanish America.34 Graham’s farewell snapshot of the Argentine, defrocked of military uniform—“in a ball-room he has few superiors”—effectively dashes his absolutist ambitions (as well as those of other Spanish American liberators), thus pointing to the excess of power as the doom of postindependence nations. As meta-history, Graham’s capsule view of a defeated general illustrates one of the recurring principles of female historiography; the necessary retreat from the public arena, here succinctly expressed as the Argentine general’s “sacrifice of his political existence in order to save his natural life.”35 The portrait of a stricken San Martín serves to aggrandize Lord Cochrane, as the two rivals embody diametrically opposite political aims: “If San Martín is unfortunate, and forced to fly his dominion, His Lordship’s conduct is magnanimous.” Hayward has noted that the most problematic aspect of Graham’s account is her hagiographic praise of British mercenary Lord Cochrane, whom she credits as “the crucial factor in Chile’s independence,”36

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for motives ranging from the personal to the political. Likewise, Pérez Mejía sees their relationship almost as an emotional dependence suspiciously close to illicit romance, what is echoed too in Soledad Caballero’s emphasis on Cochrane’s “extraordinary rescue” as an act in keeping with the British code of civility.37 Female historical agency is here deployed as a sense of personal loyalty, as Graham subsumes the Chilean nation’s coming-to-birth for the sake of her close tie to Lord Cochrane. As we have seen, Graham’s impassioned defense of Lord Cochrane redeems him from San Martin’s accusations regarding the former’s alleged misconduct. While this conflict permeates the historical narrative, its function in the text is not merely to voice a seamless pro-British stance, but, more importantly, to highlight a recurrent motif in Spanish American independence: the rise and fall of charismatic figures, either due to intestine conflict, to a sort of “inbred” ingratitude on the part of a liberated people; or, in many cases, to both.38 In the Chile Journal, the dilemma between personal ambitions and collective will is illustrated, first, by the Carrera-O’Higgins clash, and, once the latter assumed power, by the ascendancy which his rival, Freire, was rapidly gaining in the national front. In a perfect illustration of this historical law, Freire’s rise eventually caused O’Higgins fall, as the latter withdrew from public office in late January 1823.39 This event, clearly marked in the Journal, was, significantly, followed by the author’s and Cochrane quiet exit from the country.40 The triangular plotting among the three men—Cochrane’s loyalty to O’Higgins and devotion to Spanish American Independence, contrasted to the grandiose aims of General San Martín—revolves around a micro-event—the stalled payment of the Chilean navy, attributed to Cochrane’s mishandling of funds. Yet this seemingly secondary plot has repercussions for the dominant one, as its outcome brought the country to the brink of civil war. The climax of the action comes when Graham visits O’Higgins, a scene contrasting with her earlier encounter with the Argentine. Female agency reveals the untenable position in which the Chilean Director is placed when he learns of San Martín’s accusations. For O’Higgins is caught between siding with another Creole leader (in an effort to salvage the republic) or honoring the loyal services of the British commander. Conscious that her text will serve to dispel Cochrane’s image for posterity, Graham casts O’Higgins in a negative light, hence defusing the earlier romanticized view of the Chilean commander. Apparently out of fear that San Martín would seize the Admiral and hold him hostage (what eventually happened, though not in as dramatic a light, toward the end of the journey), she anticipates O’Higgins demise, voicing a deep sense of disappointment at his failed leadership: “I am grieved that the Director should lend himself to such a purpose.”41 If, on the verge of San Martín’s

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departure from Chile, “[t]he narrative voice has now given itself over entirely to the details of political conflict,”42 she also expresses relief “from hearing of the politics of Chile.” As female spectator, Graham uses the three male actors in the conflict to illustrate her own views regarding both the concrete process leading to Chilean Independence and more abstract laws of historical causality. If later Flora Tristan will turn from factual recorder of events into active participant, here Graham consciously crafts her role as historical agent, carefully positioning herself as a detached mediator, while projecting a more active mediating strategy onto the Chilean Director himself. Toward the latter part of the Journal, the density of Graham’s historical narrative is interrupted by a natural force: the earthquake that shook Chile from November to December, 1822. The violence of the natural world mirrors political turmoil in a way resonant also in Tristan’s Pérégrinations.43 “[A]s Graham shifts her focus from surveying the landscape to surviving in it,” she records the “sublime terror” brought on by the disturbance of Nature, and the near-miracle that her house had been spared. The mirroring between historical upheavals and the sudden instability of nature results in a formal shift, breaking up the narrative sequence in favor of short diary entries which faithfully record the exact locale and time of each shock.44 Yet the historical narrative intersperses with the geological, forming a counterpoint that lasts until the end of the journey. After momentarily suspending the political tensions, Graham explains how the squadron crisis was finally resolved, with the first payment coinciding “on the very day of the earthquake.” Toward the end of the Chile Journal, history and nature converge to force a similar play of destinies, leveling all the actors on the historical field as well as the female narrator/scribe. First, Graham is forced to flee her Valparaíso home due to English intruders who sought refuge in her safe moorings from the devastation falling around them; then, she is forced to lead a semi-nomadic existence, pitching a tent outside Cochrane’s estate at Quintero. Here verses from Lord Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” counterpoint the tale of natural terror and political intrigue unfolding in Chile with a lyrical description of the same epic conjoining of forces but in a mythical past.45 When Graham discloses San Martín’s injurious attacks on Cochrane as well as O’Higgins’ mediating role in the conflict, the political plot unravels in the midst of powerful convulsions from the earthly matrix.46 As historical witness, Graham’s staunch defense of Lord Cochrane stems from the peculiar nature of their bond—forged by affinity, close friendship, and nationality, but bolstered too by the fact that they both occupy the same ambivalent position as “outsider/insiders” in Chile. The most sobering reflection on Spanish American Independence movements—and what makes the Journal a prime document of Latin American historiography—is not merely

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the thick plot surrounding San Martin, O’Higgins, and Cochrane, but its effects on both leaders and followers as the plot draws to a close. For, on the aftermath of the earthquake, the two protagonists of Chilean Independence— O’Higgins and Cochrane—are involuntarily ousted: “Earthquake under me, civil war around me; . . . and my kind friend, my only friend here indeed, certainly going to leave the country.” On a stroll shortly before their final departure, Graham and Cochrane examine “the effects of the earthquake among the rocks”; on the cragged shore they stumble on “cracks” that “are sharp and new.”47 These physical marks effectively mirror the fissures in national unity, as Freire’s oppositional movement gathers momentum, what is amply recorded in the November 26th, December 4th, and December 31st, 1822 entries. Like her compatriot Cochrane, who “had adopted Chile as his country,” the widowed Graham feels the pull to leave a country “where, in spite of much suffering, I have also enjoyed much pleasure.” The mournful last pages of the Journal depict the narrator’s awareness of her own paradoxical position—“the fatality which had brought me, an Englishwoman, whose very characteristic is to be the most domestic of creatures, almost to the antipodes, and placed me among all the commotions of nature and of society.” The paradox between permanence and exile is bolstered by the recurrent ship imagery used throughout the Journal as a code for the vicissitudes of history. If in an earlier, lofty passage in the “Sketch,” the ships which had sailed off during Cochrane’s “finest hour” anticipated nationalist victory, here the synecdoche between ship and nation marks, rather, acceptance of defeat. The ship Montezuma which is about to carry two British subjects away from the coasts of Chile forever ironically conveys their soon-to-be demoored condition, while an equally ironic tint follows by the fact that an anonymous Chilean family is forced aboard the “O’Higgins,” named after the defeated nationalist leader (an irony reinforced by the fact that Cochrane had been held captive there due to San Martín’s machinations).48 The after-shocks of Spanish American Independence result in foreigner and native alike sharing the same nomadic (or near-exiled) condition. O’Higgins’ forced retreat from the historical stage in order to save his people from bloodshed, poignantly narrated in the “Post-script,” turned him into an outcast.49 Signed by four Chilean patriots, the “Post-script” is an important document as it reveals a tone of urgency in the nation-building process, expressed in the Chilean government’s proclamation, that, after O’Higgins’ abdication, “Chile was never in a more dangerous state.” This final segment ends the historiographical narrative with a terse acknowledgment of the drawbacks of Spanish American independence: “Perhaps we have been mistaken; perhaps error may have presided over many of our deliberations—. . . pardon, Fathers of the country! Pardon faults which certainly have been committed

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without tainting the general disinterestedness and patriotism on which we pride ourselves.”50 That Graham reproduced and even possibly translated these woeful conclusions into her memoir shows the extent of her commitment to the patriot cause. Much like the outcast O’Higgins, in the last pages of her Journal, the narrator likewise fashions herself as a drifter or wanderer as she watches the retreating Chilean coastline from a deserted island off the Pacific. From a distance where Robinson Crusoe once roamed, and which had served as a prisoners’ colony, the female narrator underlines her nomadic condition as well as that of her “motley company.” By identifying with the lost souls left behind on the “Juan Fernández,” Graham reaches the last stage of her pilgrim’s journey, “a lonely spot, where no trace of man could be seen,” a contemplative solitude on a quiet shore.51 Instead of unity and a sense of collective destiny, in these nineteenth-century travel books, the transition to Independence is fraught with rivalry and the naked pursuit of power. While the historical plot structured in Journal of a Residence in Chile starts out as romance, it ends in irony; likewise, Graham’s narrative role shifts from impassioned observer to near-exile. In a rhetorical last defense of Cochrane, Graham prints the admiral’s farewell letter to his “countrymen,” the collective to whom he holds allegiance, which are not the British, but, significantly, “the inhabitants of Chile”—yet this public proclamation echoes as well a deeper, private grief. On the eve of their final departure, Graham sighs at noting that Cochrane was not “at home!”, showing the extent to which she—and her protector and peer—considered themselves identified with their adopted country. Her final lament—“I do grieve for Chile”—is evoked too by other nineteenth-century travelers who had hoped to remain in South America, as in Flora Tristan’s exodus from her father’s patria. Written as a palliative to widowhood, Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile traces, like Tristan’s testament, a circular itinerary.52 Torn from home and domestic bliss; carried shipboard across a transatlantic passage; close to land, the experience sorrow and bereavement, Graham’s pilgrimage traverses the tensions of the political moment, only to end at unstable and unpredictable (de)moorings. If travel has been conceived as original loss and yearning for a fixed point of departure,53 Graham’s South American journals cipher the female pilgrim’s melancholy at an ever-elusive point of return. FLORA TRISTAN AND THE PLOTTING OF NATION Of all the nineteenth-century travelogues, the one more clearly designed to plot a nation is Flora Tristan’s much commented Pérégrinations d’une

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paria: 1833–1834 (1838). A little-known but important piece published in the Journal des Débats, “Lettres de Bolívar,” draws a portrait of the General that parallels Graham’s depiction of a defeated San Martín, marking Tristan’s contribution to Spanish American Independence, a recurrent feature in nineteenth-century travel accounts. Evoking her childhood as daughter of the Peruvian Tristan y Moscoso as well as the past of the famous Liberator, Tristan recalls the times when Simón Bolívar visited the family home, apparently due to his affectionate link to her mother, Thérèse Laisnay. With a certain tint of nostalgia, Tristan depicts Bolívar as a Romantic hero who takes refuge in Paris not as future leader of a defiant Spanish America, but as a lover plunged into melancholy by the untimely death of a beautiful Creole he had recently wedded. Although Tristan’s biographical snapshot of the young Bolívar depicts his transformation into a “world historical individual,” at the end of the sketch, she appraises the results of the Independence movement as anarchy, a prelude to the scathing views of Spanish American nationalism developed more fully in Pérégrinations. In line with the character sketch artfully deployed as part of the rhetoric of history in nineteenth-century women’s travels, Tristan traces a portrait of the dashing young creole, beginning with his frugal apprenticeship under Don Rodríguez, who earnestly tried to lead his pupil to a life devoted to science. When his tutor revealed to Bolívar the extent of his personal fortune, Bolívar was instantly drawn (in this retelling) by personal ambition and the allure of fame: “[L]la gloire eût été mon seul culte, l’unique but de ma vie” [“glory has been my only religion, the ultimate goal of my life”].54 The “Lettres . . .” depict this as the first of various political transformations that Bolívar will undergo before assuming his role as future Liberator: his self-definition as an “ardent républicain” [an advocate for the French republic] influenced by Enlightenment ideals. Besides “a portrait of a hero as a young man,” Tristan’s “Lettres . . .” establish a subtle connection between Bolívar and his female biographer, since the essay was published after her return from Perú, a result of dashed expectations at the end of her pilgrimage. Tristan’s “Lettres de Bolívar” projects onto the biographical subject the public persona the author assumed in favor of the European proletariat, hence suggesting an identification between the hero of Latin American Independence and her own subject position. Like Flora herself sailing between “two inmensities: the sky and the sea” on the eve of embarking back to Europe, the “Lettres . . .” turn Bolívar into a wandering nomad: “Quant au present, il n’existe pas pour moi; . . . [c]e sera le désert de ma vie.” [“As for the present, it has no taste for me whatsoever; . . . my life is a total desert.”] The “Lettres” also foster Tristan’s views regarding Spanish American nationalism, a topic amply developed in her Pérégrinations. At a gathering in Paris, Bolívar launched a tirade against the Church, criticizing

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Napoleon for his “instinct du despotisme” [“tendency toward despotism”], the defining trait of the later caudillo Bolívar would become. Echoing Maria Graham’s impressions of a volatile San Martín, Tristan depicts the young Bolívar as a Romantic hero, an irascible force much like Graham’s impetous Carrera. The effect of the “Lettres . . .” is to taint Bolívar’s actions as leader of Spanish American independence, debunking him from the pedestal of the nation-building rhetoric. The initial identification between biographer and subject is betrayed by including a fragment of Bolívar’s farewell letter to her mother. There the tired leader confesses his desire to return to America, where he hoped to lead a Rousseau-inspired life as a “noble savage.” This sentimental portrait softens the earlier, relentless account of Bolívar’s political shortcomings. The future liberator, in this rendition, lacks the ability to design a rational program for change: “tout, chez moi, est spontané, que je ne forme pas de projets. La vie du sauvage aurait pour moi des charmes” [“everything is spontaneous with me, because I do not harbor any plans. The life of a wild man would be extremely appealing to me”]. By depicting the future General’s intolerance, ideological excess, even his rage, Tristan prefigures her own critique of Spanish American nationalism. The “Lettres de Bolívar” concludes with an appraisal of three famous revolutionaries—Bonaparte, Washington, and Bolívar—who reconfigured the map of the world. Weighing the latter’s mission as a descent into anarchy—“l’anarchie a succédé à Bolívar” [“anarchy has followed Bolívar’s trail”]—Tristan anticipates the later critique of post-Independence nations exposed in the Pérégrinations.55 This early text conditions Tristan’s view of Bolívar’s legacy in the constitution of the Spanish American republics, signaling too the evolution of her own praxis as leader of the workers’ movement in France. Because the motive of her journey fails—to gain legitimacy as Tristan y Moscoso’s daughter and a place in the intimate family circle commanded by her loyalist uncle Pío—Tristan turns to politics as a last refuge to escape her pariah condition. With Pío’s denial of his niece’s claim, Tristan’s individual drama spills over onto the collective destinies of the nation. This is marked by the temporal proximity of the two events:56 “Mon oncle était revenu à Arequipa le 3 janvier, et, le 23 du même mois, on y apprit la révolution de Lima.” [“My uncle had returned to Arequipa on 3 January, and on 23 January news reached us of the revolution in Lima.”]57After bitter exchanges with Pío over her right to share in her father’s wealth, the unfortunate Flora is forced to acquiesce to her uncle’s pleas to remain in the family home, what shows not only her shrewdness to negotiate between public and private realms, but also her ability to rise above her immediate circumstances.58 Though outraged by Pío’s miserly offer, Tristan chooses to remain in his home; in accord with gender expectations of the period, she

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sought to avoid a scandal that would have compromised her own precarious situation, appraising correctly the extent of his influence in Arequipa. In fact, the impending political turmoil played an important factor in this decision. Tristan’s detailed account of the civil war emerges not as an afterthought but rather out of her profound sense of dispossession at having been stripped of her rights to her father’s name and share of his inheritance.59 By dint of female historical agency and the “writing of history,” Tristan’s relation de voyage [travel account] attempts to script (register as well as reorder) what has been already and irrevocably lost. In ways similar but at the same time different from Graham, whose loss was of another nature, Tristan’s journeys illustrate the motivation for travel in terms of an original loss, the erasure of origins, or a fixed departure point.60 Sharing the spotlight on the stage of Latin American Independence with Maria Graham as a privileged witness to the emergent Spanish American republics, Tristan finds herself in a unique position with which to view Peruvian affairs. Chapter 10, “The Republic and the Three Presidents” narrates the revolution “which broke out in Lima in January 1834 and of the civil wars which followed,” a conflict which hinged on the succession of President Gamarra, who had served office from 1829 to 1833.61 Tristan’s recording of this event as chaos contrasts sharply with the order imposed by contemporary historians, who see it as a political clash based on class difference: “In January, 1834, Gamarra staged a coup against his successor, José Luis de Orbegoso, . . . and Arequipa’s broad [popular] alliance emerged in open rebellion.”62 When the first news of the revolution breaks out, Tristan at first shows amazement at the fact that there are no fewer than three contenders for the presidency: Orbegoso, whose stronghold in Arequipa was guaranteed by the monk Valdivia and his military right-hand-man, Nieto; Orbegoso’s contender, Bermúdez, who had initially been thrust into power by a scheme hatched by the formidable Gamarra’s, and the outsted President Gamarra, whose commander San Roman later takes the town by storm. At the close of the chapter, and after assessing the bungled military maneuvers of both bands, Tristan concludes that such a situation would be “incroyable pour un Européen” [“incredible to a European”].63 At first glance, this judgment against the criollos [creoles or local constituencies] sustains the alleged position of “superiority” associated with European travelers, which, for the most part, has tended to downplay Tristan’s impassioned rhetoric in the Pérégrinations.64 But signs of “political instability and economic depression” in post-Independence Perú would likely be viewed in a similar light by fellow Europeans.65 In her biography, Susan K. Grogan concludes that “Peregrinations provided a largely accurate account of the Civil War.”66 Joining feminist historians in a positive assessment of

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Tristan’s travel account, I show her bold stance in daring to criticize the failed leadership and turmoil of the early republics, what adds to the antiauthoritarian stance assumed by her peers, and to women travelers’ critical outlook on post-Independence transitions. The chapter on the civil revolt in 1834 tells a complicated tale of political intrigue, set against the backdrop of Tristan’s acknowledgment of her uncle Pío’s strong royalist adherence. Hence the chapter highlights the role played by Perú in the independence struggle as “the principal base of loyalist strength in Spanish America,” what adds to its value as a piece of contemporary historiography.67 Given the tale of family rejection which haunts Tristan’s sojourn in Perú, it is ironic that, during the 1834 skirmish, she assumed the role of political advisor to her uncle and other members of her family. Struck by the sudden turn of events, the powerful Pío relies on his niece for practical advice regarding military tactics, political maneuvering, and survival strategy. In these passages, the failed quest for recognition saturates the narrative of historical events, as Tristan relishes giving Pío advice on the exact sum of money he should give to the rebels. Besides revealing the hypocrisy of a man who failed to honor his niece’s request yet was willing to pay handsomely for his own rescue—“l’argent qui l’iniquité me refuse, la violence le ravit;” [“the money refused me by iniquity is seized by force”]—Tristan’s unflattering depiction of Uncle Pío reads as a powerful indictment of the creoles.68 Pío’s actions point to a fundamental ambivalence among the oligarchy towards nationalist allegiance, since they seemed more concerned with their own private interests than with nationbuilding or a viable form of government.69 Tristan’s detailed exposé of the rebels’ exploitative tactics, who ransacked the coffers of the rich with the excuse of political mobilization, stems directly from Bolívar—and hence is linked to the negative assessment of his leadership exposed in the “Lettres. . . .” This critique is voiced in the laments of foreign-born cousin Althaus: “Bolivar donnait aussi à ses exactions le nom de prêt. Et qui donc m’a rendu ou songé a me render les 25,000 piastres que l’illustre libertador m’a prises lorqui’il est venu ici?” [“Bolívar called his exactions loans as well, yet who has ever thought to repay the twenty-thousand piastres the illustrious Liberator took from me when he came here?”]. To prove these excesses, the next scene shows how the rich men of the village paraded their wealth and possessions to appease the rebels, what sparks Tristan’s “repugnance” before the spectacle of human greed. It also illustrates “the stinginess of the ruling class,” a result of the rigid class hierarchy inherited from colonial times, since a handful of individuals controlled all of the country’s resources.70 The rebels’ shameless pursuit of wealth mirrors the corruption of the Creole oligarchy, who saw the transition to Independence

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in strictly financial terms. While reluctantly handing over ransom money to the rebels, Don Juan de Goyeneche complains: Songe à ce que nous a coûté chaque apparition d’un nouveau gouvernement: le libertador Bolivar a enlevé à notre maison 40,000 piastres, le général Sucre, 30,000, San Martin, tout ce que mon frère Mariano possédait à Lima, et maintenant voilà Nieto et Baldivia qui ont pris à tâche de nous ruiner. [Think of what each new government has cost us: that’s thirty-one thousand gone from our fortune at a single stroke! To say nothing of the forty thousand that went to Bolivar and the thirty thousand that went to General Sucre. Ah! Florita, then San Martin, everything that our brother Mariano owned in Lima, and now Nieto and Baldivia who are bent on seeing us ruined].

The blantant opportunism of the creole ruling class leads to Tristan’s “ingredient conclusion,” where she assesses the price at which political autonomy was achieved: “Ah! Messieurs les bourgeois, vous voulez de la république! Bien, bien, mes amis, nous allons vous montrer ce que cela coûte une république!” [“Ha! all you good citizens, so you wanted a republic! All right, my friends, now you are going to see how much it costs!”]. 71 By mocking the tone of her Peruvian counterparts, Tristan aptly assumes the role of political commentator, sidestepping the demure feminine role by smart political rhetoric, a transgression of boundaries for which the creole oligarchy never quite forgave her. Tristan’s willingness to serve as political advisor also shows uncle Pío’s— and, by extension, the creole oligarchy’s—ability to manipulate the subaltern members of society, including members of his immediate family—to which Tristan inadvertedly belongs. For Cristina Guiñazú, Tristan’s mediating role among opposing political factions is part of a strategy of vindication against those family members who had initially harmed her; Pérez Mejía, on the other hand, sees it differently, as a complicity “overlooking [Pío’s] denial of her inheritance which earlier had left her grievously hurt.”72 An example of the way that Tristan negotiates her political savvy to strike back against her uncle is seen in a lively dialogue with her cousin Althaus. To his pointed question, she shrewdly answers: “Florita, je ne sais que faire. Pour lequel de ces trois gredins de présidents dois-je prendre parti?—Cousin, vous n’avez pas le choix. Puis-qu’ici on reconnaît Orbegoso, il vous faut marcher sous ses bannières et le commandement de Nieto. . .” [“‘Florita, I do not know what to do. Which of these rascally presidents should I support?’ ‘Cousin, you have no choice. Since Orbegoso is recognized here, you must march under his flag and take your orders from Nieto.’”] 73 In short, Tristan “engages deeply with the crisis in her account, portraying herself as offering advice to all sides, remaining calm in the crisis, visiting military encampments, and heroically climbing to

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the rooftop to survey the battlefield.”74 In a way similar to Maria Graham, Tristan consciously adopts the pose of impartial observer as a self-styled female historian eager to grasp the complications of the nation-building process. Along with her peers, whose voyages to Latin America transformed them into political commentators, Tristan uses her powers of observation to evaluate the allegiances and alliances forged between local leaders and their loyal constituencies. In Tristan’s account of the Peruvian civil war, the venerable uncle Pío embodies the rampant political opportunism riddling the transition to autonomy in Spanish America. When approached by Coronel Escudero on behalf of the winning party of Gamarristas, whether he would assume a military post as second in command, uncle Pío immediately refuses, responding with Maquiavellian logic: Florita, il est fort heureux, pour vous, que vous ne soyez pas un personage politique; votre dévouement vous perdrait; loin d’aller offrir mes services à ces ignorants, je veux les laisser s’engouffrer dans les embarrass et les difficultés; plus ils en auront, plus ils sentiront le besoin de m’avoir; je les verrai venire me prier, me supplier, et leur ferai mes conditions. [“Florita, it is very lucky for you that you are not a politician, your devotion would be your ruin; far from offering my services to these amateurs, I want to let them be overwhelmed by troubles and difficulties; the more they have, the more they will need me; they will come begging, and then I shall be able to make my own terms.”]75

Following the example of the caste in command, the Peruvian populace, who unabashedly sold themselves to the highest bidder, propels a gripping conclusion as to the fate of the post-Independence nations: Je ne pus m’empêcher de déplorer les malheurs de cette Amérique espagnole où, en aucun lieu, un gouvernement protecteur des personnes et des propriétés ne s’est encore établi d’une manière stable; . . . Arrivera enfin le jour fixé par la Providence où ses peuples seront unis sous la bannière du travail. Puissent-ils alors, au souvenir des calamités pássées, prendre en une sainte horreur les hommes de sang et de rapine! [“I could not help pitying the plight of Spanish America. In no part of it has there yet been established a government sufficiently stable to protect the persons and property of its citizens. . . . But the day ordained by Providence will arrive at last, and these peoples will be united beneath the banner of labour. Then, remembering the calamities of the past, let them execrate the men of blood and pillage!”]76

In the private space of her travel journal, Tristan reveals the underside of nationalistic rhetoric, bemoaning the fate of the “poor Peruvians!” again and

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again. Tristan’s cynical appraisal regarding the leading actors in the 1834 skirmish in turn conditions the wry observation that “[l]Le grand évènement de l’indépendance a trompé toutes les prévisions” [“For Independence, that historic achievement, has not lived up to expectations.”]. As synoptic judgment, Tristan even suggests that the Spanish American independence movement failed because the drive for political autonomy was motivated neither by “the love of political freedom . . . nor the wish for economic independence,” but, on the contrary, by strong class antagonism, sparked by “hatred nurtured by the sight of the preferential treatment which the Spaniards received.” As she expressed,” Le sentiment qu’on a exploité pour exciter ces peuples à secouer le joug de l’Espagne n’a pas été l’amour d’une liberté politique, . . . ni d’une indépendance commerciale . . . On a mis en jeu contre les Espagnoles la haine qu’alimentaient les préférences dont ceux-ci étaient l’objet.” In her view, the break with the peninsula, though successful insofar as it achieved the goal of separation, nevertheless corrupted to the core the leadership potential of the Creoles [local constituencies], what is seen in her biting description of Baldivia’s military career and organizational skills.77 Nowhere is this failure more evident than in the chapter dedicated to the “Battle of Cangallo.” From atop the Tristan family home, which functions “as a strategic meeting place when the conflict leads to a battle in Arequipa itself,”78 the visitor positions herself in a privileged vantage-point from which to observe the political arena. With “a big red umbrella to protect [her] from the sun, and, armed with a telescope,” Tristan comfortably surveys the battlefield, taking in the “double spectacle” afforded by street and window. The salient note in her account is the detailed (and nearly comic) view of the bungled military tactics exhibited by the two leading contenders, San Román and Nieto, who pursued one another in a near parody of civil war.79 After San Román withdrew to Cangallo for lack of supplies, Nieto charged after him with his army; however, soon: les munitions leur manquant, l’alarme se mit parmi eux. Lorsque San-Roman vit ses soldats à la débandade, il crut la bataille perdue, et pensa qu’il ne luis restait rien de mieux à faire que de fuir aussi; . . . il s’éloigna de toute la vitesse de son cheval. Ainsi chacun de ces deux valeureux champions, épouvantés l’un de l’autre, s’enfuyait de son côte; ils coururent sans s’arrêter pendant un jour et une nuit, mettant entre eux un espace de quatre-vingts lieues. (“they began to run out of ammunition, and then there was panic. When SanRoman saw his soldiers in confusion he thought the battle was lost and that the best thing for him was to flee as well, so . . . he went off as fast as his horse could carry him. So these two valorous champions [Nieto and San Román], each afraid of the other, each fled the field in his turn; they went without stopping for a day and a night, putting a distance of two hundred miles between them!”)

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The same cowardice is reflected too in the laissez-faire attitude of the Arequipans, who, huddled inside the convents for safety, expressed their sympathy first toward one and then toward the second military leader, a loyalty dependent on which way the winds of victory were blowing: Si un soldat blessé . . . disait que les Aréquipéniens avaient perdu la bataille, il s’élevait aussitôt dans la salle une rumeur des plus burlesques; on se récriait contre le lâche, le coquin, l’imbécille Nieto, et l’on exaltait le digne, le brave, le glorieux San-Roman. [If a wounded soldier . . . reported that the Arequipans had lost the battle, there immediately arose throughout the room a chorus of recrimination against that coward, that scoundrel, that imbecile Nieto, and loud praise for the worthy, the brave, the glorious San Román.]

In the last analysis, recounts our traveler, the people of Arequipa sided with Orbegoso for opportunistic reasons, and not out of any “concern for the public good.” Their political leaders—in this case, the fleeing generals Nieto and San Román—were motivated not by “conviction” but rather by “the opportunity to seize power and make a fortune.” Echoing her earlier negative assessment of the Independence movement, Tristan concludes that “[Q]uel que fût l’évènement, le pays était perdu; que les succès de Nieto ameneraient, aussi inévitablement que ceux de San-Roman, l’exigence de contributions énormes, la spoliation des propriétés et le pillage sous toutes ses formes.” [“whatever the outcome [of the war], the country was lost: whether Nieto or San-Roman were triumphant, extortion, ruin and pillage would ensue”]. This pivotal scene marks the value of Pérégrinations as a text inscribing the anti-heroic, the image of Spanish American nationalism as failed possibility, rather than as historical potential.80 European women travelers take as the primary object of historiographical inquiry not male historical actors engaged in the field of battle, but rather the invisible masses of women who figure as silent victims of their husbands’, lovers’ and sons’ heroic exploits. A silent trope emerges in this corpus of travelogues which could rightly be called a focus on female heroism, best exemplified in Flora Tristan’s account of the intrepid Peruvian rabonas who accompanied their men into the battlefield.81 Besides their inherent valor, the narrator admires their freedom from gender restrictions, particularly marriage, yet idealizes their obligation to perform domestic duties and submission to the men in battle. Tristan’s idealization of indigenous women counters her negative assessment of the limeña, whose life of luxury contrasts with the rugged existence of the Indian fighters. Establishing a clear gender contrast, Tristan remarks how their male counterparts resist the military life, while indigenous women seem to prefer a nomadic existence as nineteenth-century

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“guerrillas.” Despite her positive valorization of the rabonas’ courage (“leur féroce courage”), Tristan depicts these women as an invisible mass, a silent (and silenced) collectivity—a rhetorical gesture meant to convey “la supériorité de la femme” [“the superiority of woman], an attribute which, ultimately, bolsters her own narrative authority.82 Unlike other European travelers, who maintained their position as discrete spectators in local politics, Tristan’s desire for inclusion intensifies to the point that she actively seeks participation in the public arena. To a great extent, this desire functions as a wish-fulfillment—a kind of symbolic compensation—for being denied a place within the Peruvian “imagined community.” While pondering her fate as a social outcast, Tristan cherished the ambition to marry one of Peru’s contenders for the presidency, just like the ex-First Lady had done: “J’avais sous les yeux, pour m’encourager, l’exemple de la señora Gamarra, qui était devenue l’arbitre de la république.” [“I had the example of Señora Gamarra to encourage me: the fate of the republic was in her hands.”] Still tied to André Chazal, the father of her children, by an implacable law, and with all hopes of personal fulfillment shattered, Tristan turns to political ambition as the only means to escape her pariah status. Je me résolus, moi aussi, d’ entrer dans la lutte sociale, et après avoir été longtemps dupe de la societé et des ses préjuges, d’ essayer de l’exploiter à mon tour. . . . Je suis au milieu d’une société en révolution, me dis-je; voyons par quel moyen je pourrais y jouer un rôle, quels sont les instruments dont il me serait possible de me servir. . . . [J]e me promis d’entrer dans les intrigues de l’ambition, de rivaliser d’audace et d’astuce avec le moine [Valdivia], d’être, comme lui, persévérante, comme lui, sans pitié. [“I resolved that I too would enter the arena, and having been for so long the dupe of society and its prejudices, I would try to exploit it in my turn. I am in the midst of a society in revolution, I told myself: let us see what role I can play, what instruments I can use . . . I resolved to join the other ambitious intriguers, to rival the monk Valdivia in his boldness and cunning, to be as single-minded and ruthless as he was.”]

At first, Tristan finds no suitable match for her grandiose plans. However, the plot resurfaces in her compelling attraction for Coronel Escudero, a Spaniard who had served as advisor under Gamarra’s presidency.83 This literal romance—to plot a marital alliance with a public servant with the sole objective of seizing power—has been cast as proof of Tristan’s detachment regarding Peruvian affairs, even as a lack of solidarity with the popular factions she aspired to represent.84 Yet let us look more closely at the contradictions this gesture entailed. In a moment of personal crisis that matched the ensuing civil

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conflict, the French expatriate ponders her fate as a social outcast as well as her growing sense of desolation at being doomed to live a loveless life (2:98–99). Projecting her desire onto the dashing Spanish officer, and faced with “la plus forte [tentation] que j’aie éprouvée dans ma vie,” [“the strongest temptation I have ever felt in my life”], she soon dismisses the possibility of a profitable match with Escudero. A refusal predicated by the realization that union with the Spaniard would have meant pitting herself against her uncle: “Je craignis de devenir dure, despote, criminelle même à l’égal de ceux qui en étaient en possession. Je tremblai de participer à la puissance dans un pays où vivait mon oncle . . .” [“I feared to become hard, despotic—a criminal, even—like those who were now in power. I trembled to think in participating in the government of a country where my uncle lived”].85 Pío’s example of ruthless survival in the face of obstacles, along with the cynicism of his disavowal, provokes ambivalence regarding assuming a public role. The same ambivalence surfaces in Tristan’s identification with her adopted homeland. During her last meeting with Coronel San Román, she charts Perú’s economic future, outlining as well a program of social progress and reform based on education. An example of a pedagogic discourse of the nation, here she voices her sense of national pride and adherence to a European ideal of progress: “—Oh! Je ne crois pas oublier dans cette circonstance que je suis de famille péruvienne. Je désire ardemment voir prospérer cette nation.” [“At a time like this I am not likely to forget that I come from a Peruvian family. I ardently desire to see this nation prosper.”] A recurring trope in the texts by women travelers, Tristan thrusts her work in the hands of the national community whose interests it was intended to serve. In her opening dedication to “the people of Perú,” Tristan identifies herself with the fate of the Peruvians, painfully acknowledging the two-tiered society inherited from Spanish colonial rule.86 Denied inclusion within the Arequipan “imagined community,” Tristan nevertheless signs herself as daughter of the land: “your fellow countryman [sic] and friend, Flora Tristan.” This gesture of inclusion—“Aux Péruviens.” “Votre compatriote et amie, Flora Tristan”—, is made more poignant by the tale of family rejection which reaches here its definitive end. Tristan’s involvement in Peruvian affairs is twinged by an utopian projection onto the New World: she wishes that Perú regain its former status as “le pays le plus avancé en civilization” [“the most advanced civilization in all of America”], thus echoing the romantic idealization of the country’s indigenous past.87 Similar projections of post-Independence ideals onto a legendary past recurs in the trio of transatlantic pilgrims, surfacing as well in Graham’s Chile and Calderón de la Barca’s Mexico. European women travelers base their mode of historical discourse on femaleinspired models of leadership and political astuteness; a woman-centered

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identification and lineage. Upon her departure from Perú, Tristan meets the unfortunate Señora Gamarra, widow of president Agustín Gamarra, who had ruled the country from 1829 to 1833.88 During the 1834 civil outbreak, Tristan had considered seizing political power based on Gamarra’s model of a womanin-action.89 Harboring the dream of wielding political power once again, and aligning herself as heir to Bolívar, in this final scene, she “ultimately rejected Gamarra’s style as flawed,” as it imitated the male model of military might.90 The pathos of the scene is further noted in that Gamarra’s fate as an exile strangely echoes Tristan’s own. The meeting with Doña Pancha not only fosters Tristan’s own sense of marginality and exile, but, more importantly, propels her decision to give up the claim to fatherland and home, for “[i]t is only when Tristan comes face to face with her potential role model, the only woman who seems to have succeeded in making the patriarchal order her own, that Tristan finally renounces the possibility that she will ever find a place in Peru.”91 The memoir ends with Tristan’s return to Paris, to embark on her future mission in favor of the European proletariat. “Perú has made her a pariah,” since it was the denial to partake in the Peruvian “imagined community” what propelled both her quest for utopian socialism and conversion into social activism upon her return to France.92 The radical sense of marginality inscripted at the beginning of the journal converges at the end on the body of the traveler, who sees herself “alone, completely alone, suspended between two immensities: the sea and the sky.”93 This sense of radical aloneness, at one extreme, and, at the other, the opposite pull of bonding with the world, makes of Tristan’s journey the most eloquent testament to “the disruptive liminality women are represented as occupying” in European travel writing.94 Much like Maria Graham, reduced to “utter loneliness” in her sojourn on the isle of “Juan Fernández,” this renunciation of patria marks Tristan’s transformation into a homeless pariah, with “no fixed home to return to, but rather one [traveling] from place to place in pursuit of a goal.”95 Although Tristan’s Pérégrinations has been interpreted as a “female allegory” setting “the limits and possibilities of female agency in a given historical moment,” it is perhaps more significantly allegorical of the course of Spanish American nationalism itself, caught as it was between the conflictive demands of political autonomy, on the one hand, and, on the other, the absolutism inherited from colonial rule.96 Tristan’s Pérégrinations reads today as a part of the “transnational cultural mediation” carried out by nineteenth-century women writers in Spanish America,97 balancing as it does multiple gender roles (separated yet still married status, feigned singlehood, orphaned daughter and solitary traveler) as well as the clash between ideals and political realities. Like la Comtesse Merlin in Cuba, Flora Tristan’s life story mediates the inevitable rift between French and Peruvian societies. Her vision of Peruvian

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nationalism shares the same anti-absolutist thrust evidenced in European women’s travelogues. Despite the virulent rejection sparked shortly after the publication of her memoir—the book was banned in Lima and its author shamefully burnt in effigy—Tristan’s courageous first-person account has gained her inclusion into a Peruvian imaginary and sense of collective identity.98 Particularly in feminist circles, she is considered a precursor of the Peruvian women’s movement and stands as its most eloquent symbol.99 “QUIET AFTER THE CANNONADING”: CALDERÓN DE LA BARCA’S MEXICO Hailed by historians as “the best Latin American travel account,”100 Frances Erskine Inglis’s Life in Mexico, first published in 1843, contains her recorded impressions of Mexican life and mores during the two-year period when her husband, Don Angel Calderón de la Barca, served as the first Spanish ambassador to an independent Mexico (late 1839 to early 1842). While in Mexico, Madame Calderón (her most authoritative editors refer to her as “Fanny”) was witness to a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions that shook the political life of the Mexican republic shortly after independence. Hugh Thomas explains with his usual dry humor that having been born in Edinburgh of a wholly Scottish family, she was well prepared to survive the many hair-raising experiences which she and her husband encountered on their extensive travels. She survived a revolution in Mexico City, escaped bandits, crossed swollen rivers in remote gorges, and even received a visit from the entire Mexican Cabinet who came to beg her not to wear a certain, as they supposed [,] indelicate gown at a fancy-dress ball.101

These scenes, depicting the Calderóns’ journey from the port city of Veracruz to the capital, makes of Life in Mexico an intimate record of a European woman’s encounter with the New World. Her anecdote referring to the lifelike wax statues that a Mexican sent to Count de Tepa in Spain has bearing on the meaning of her memoir as a whole: whereas the dozen statues represents “a little history of Mexico in wax” for the distant Spanish addressee, her own text has a similar effect on the reader, only now it is “a little history of Mexico” in print.102 For in its pages we glean an ironic glimpse of Mexican politics and the shaping events of Mexican nationalism. In her role as historical witness, Calderón de la Barca not only offers valuable insights into a turbulent period, but also marks her travelogue with a gender difference. If for her observations of Mexican society Frances Calderón relied on her own intuitive understanding, for interpretations of current events she drew

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heavily on Lorenzo de Zavala’s Ensayo histórico de las revoluciones de Mégico [sic] (1831), a book that figured in her husband’s library as an authoritative source of Mexican history.103 This knowledge is revealed in her famed character snapshots of political figures, such as her amusing portrait of General Santa Anna after he reassumed power with much pomp and circumstance in 1841. Calderón de la Barca’s dependence on and departure from previous historical sources, particularly Alexander von Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (English translation, 1814) and Francisco Javier Clavijero’s Historia antigua de México (1826), along with her reliance on the texts of other foreign travelers,104 result in a hybrid history of revolution in Mexico as well as in a gendered vision of Mexican social history. From von Humboldt’s influential Political Essay, she inherits the institutionalized subtext of the scientific voyage—what is effectively mixed with an intimate perspective conditioned by the author’s everyday immersion into social life. The narrative of travel is thus hybridized by the blend of factual documentation with lived experience, keen observation with perceived insight, at times grafting the historical subtext onto the autobiography, at times reversing this movement. In line with Tristan’s acute assessment of Peruvian nationalism, Life in Mexico debunks the “grand narrative” of Latin American historiography designed to forge a nation. Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico consciously en(gender)s “an alternative women’s history,” a different reading of the discourse of Spanish American nationalism than that provided by official or canonized accounts.105 European women travelers have been grouped under the category of “exploratrices sociales” (social explorers); here I stress their role as acute social observers, what facilitated a sophisticated critique of post-independence societies.14 Moreover, I argue that it was precisely their foreignness and gender identity that allowed European women travelers like Madame Calderón their own distinctive view of an emerging Spanish American nationalism.106 Since women have for the most part been excluded from the terrain of (male) monumental history, their contribution to the field, at least in the Latin American tradition, has been largely through “private” genres like letters, intimate portraits, memoirs, and travel accounts. The difference lies, however, in the reception of women’s histories, which are, at best, relegated to the margins or, at worst, excluded from most accounts of Latin American nationalism. In this light, it is interesting to note that Life in Mexico reached the public eye only by the inspiration of Sir Walter Prescott, a longtime friend of the Calderóns’ who encouraged Frances to publish her letters, as stated in his preface to the original edition.107 And it is ironic indeed that Prescott then “made appreciative use . . . of [Calderón’s] descriptions of the country he himself never saw” in his own History of the

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Conquest of Mexico (1843), a classic text of Romantic historiography.108 Hence, while Prescott achieved instant notoriety (his book was widely circulated in Mexico and was even the source of vigorous polemics), Calderón de la Barca’s memoirs not only raised suspicion but nearly provoked a diplomatic breach between France and Mexico.109 The resistance against Calderon’s frank treatment of national affairs came both from the Mexican press and from Spaniards living in Mexico. Whereas the first simply discarded the book as “a collection of despicable trivia,” the second saw it as “a poisonous satire against Mexicans” that seriously compromised the person of the ambassador and the Spanish government. The press also claimed that Frances Calderón had “betrayed the generous hospitality which she and her husband had been shown by Mexicans.”110 Other reviews, particularly those published in her native Scotland, address the “double bind” between domesticity and travel which female nineteenth-century travelers typically had to maneuver.111 Despite the ambivalent reception in her host country, Calderón de la Barca maintains a tone of detached objectivity in her descriptions of the many political intrigues, plots, and counterplots hatched in the Palace of Government during her two-year stay in Mexico.112 Since the start of her journey, Frances Calderón had shown a vivid interest in Mexican politics, sprinkling her account with character sketches of generals and presidents, such as her contrast of General Santa Anna, Anastasio Bustamante, and General Victoria in terms of political personalities, strategies, and motivations, what is included in the chapter that the Fishers title “Distinguished Men of Mexico.” Given her public role as wife of the Spanish ambassador, Calderón de la Barca carefully avoids giving any possible cause for rumor as she repeatedly underlines in her memoirs the assumed position of detached observer, best represented in the cryptic declaration: “I [am] not interfering in Mexican politics.”113 Throughout Life in Mexico, Frances Erskine Inglis showed keen interest in the constitution of the Mexican state, its political organization, and the fissures emerging during its crucial first phase of national consolidation. Life in Mexico documents perhaps the key issue in the constitution of Spanish American nationalism: the contest between liberals and conservatives over the organization of the early republics—in Mexico, the on-going dispute between centralists and federalists spanned the first quarter of the post-Independence period.114 That Frances Calderón positioned herself as self-styled observer of Mexican politics is shown in her detailed account of the 1841 federalist uprising against President Anastasio Bustamante. After much “roaring of cannon,” this event eventually led to the reinstatement of General Santa Anna as provisional president in October 1841. Documented in consecutive letters of Life in Mexico, and interpersed with travels to the sugar country and news of the end of Calderón’s mission, the pronunciamiento [revolt] passages

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reveal the state of Mexican government “as one of disorder and anarchy,” hence registering the turbulent transition to Spanish American Independence in terms aligned with what Pedro Henríquez Ureña has dubbed as “the age of anarchy,” to cipher the period’s political instability.115 On the morning of July 15, 1840, Frances Calderón de la Barca recorded in her diary the first in a series of violent outbreaks caused by the federalist/centralist split in nineteenth-century Mexico. The federalist revolt led by Gómez Farias is narrated in Letter 24, dated Wednesday, July 15, 1840, and Letter 25, Tuesday, July 28, 1840, respectively. The chapter headings included by the Fishers read, for the first Letter, “The President Seized ìn His Bed” and, for the second, “Quiet after the Cannonading.”116 (Titles like these suggest that the editors, despite their avowed reliance on Calderón’s manuscripts, also fictionalized the account.) In Graham and Tristan’s memoirs, the anti-heroic is the cornerstone of a gendered history that debunks the elevated “grand narrative” of nineteenthcentury nationalist discourse in Latin America; Calderón fosters this tradition by adding her own nuanced rhetoric of history. Her reenactment of the 1841 revolt draws a clearly articulated historical plot; mainly, the reconfiguration of the event itself, the questioning of the truth claims of historiography, and the demystification of male historical actors, with a consequent focus on female agency, strategies ultimately subsumed in the author’s persistent and subversive ironic stance. In my reading of this episode, I contrast the ironic account of the 1841 revolt and its aftermath with Calderón’s later analysis of Mexican politics and her consequent appraisal of the post-independence nation; what constitutes her final “synoptic judgment.”117 Although the discourse of history in Life in Mexico proceeds from the particular to the general, from concrete documentation to a synthesizing statement, the abstractions and generalizations proper to the historian’s task are reached by a more circuitous route. In this text, rational thinking and the historian’s “ingredient conclusions” (Mink’s term) are complemented by subjective impressions deriving from the subject’s lived experience. The passages pertaining to civil strife in Mexico effectively hybridize what can be classified as “male” and “female” discourses, thus constructing a historical text that reads more as a continuum or discursive blend than as an outright “clash” of competing discourses.118 Dated July 15, 1840, Letter XXIV of Calderón’s Life in Mexico starts with a dramatic phrase: “Revolution in Mexico!—or pronunciamiento, as they call it”—a strategy which immediately signals the significance of the event. Assuming a tone of factual reporting, Calderón supplies the reader with both background information and an update of current events. First, she detailed Valentin Gómez Farias’s uprising against President Anastasio Bustamante, who was furtively taken captive in the night:

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The storm, which has for some time been brewing, has burst forth at last. Don Valentin Gómez Farias and the banished General Urrea have “pronounced” for federalism. At two this morning, joined by the fifth batallion and the regiment of comercio, they took up arms, set off for the palace, surprised the President in his bed, and took him prisoner.

As news leaked out the next morning that the president had managed to escape, Frances Inglis attempted to record the ensuing political chaos, only to be interrupted by “the cannon are roaring . . . and the sound is anything but agreeable” (300). The focus of her account rapidly shifts to an assessment of the effects of ensuing political chaos both on the population at large and on her own immediate and privileged circle—diplomats, foreign visitors, and aristocratic acquaintances. Clustered around phrases like “The firing has begun!” and “The cannon are roaring now” are vivid images of Mexicans either scrambling to safety (“The Indians are hurrying back to their villages in double-quick trot”) or standing eagerly in expectation of what is to come (“All along the street people are standing on the balconies, looking anxiously in the direction of the palace”).119 By representing the 1841 revolt as an event or rupture in the Mexican social fabric, Calderón de la Barca acquiesces to what Michel de Certeau calls the “topos of intelligibility” of historical discourse, a radical discontinuity in the temporal and social order that beckons interpretation (historiographical writing).120 By interpersing factual statements pertaining to the sequence of events with more personal observations, however, she leans towards a more contemporary notion of history as a relational series rather than as a set of facts or a single event.121 The counterpoint between documentation and intuitive understanding is rhetorically marked as interruptions to the writing of the travel journal. This meta-narrative is particularly effective in the scene recounting President Bustamante’s mysterious flight from captivity: “A roar of cannon from the palace . . . made the house shake and the windows rattle, and caused me to throw a blot over the President’s good name.” Whether her irony here was a direct response to discordant versions of the president’s fate lends itself to speculation.122 By drawing attention to the writing of the memoirs, however, Frances Calderón debunks one of the founding assumptions of historiographical writing—that fact and record are never simultaneous, that a gap is needed between past and present in order for the historian to fill in the void with her reconstruction of events and particular form of knowledge.123 Rather than adopting the historian’s pose, Frances Irskine introduces her own “particular form of knowledge,” drawing upon the conventions of the travel book to represent a traveler faithfully transcribing experiences at the same time that she is “on the spot.” This rhetorical tactic effectively diffuses the historical

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plot while highlighting the tenuous link between record and event. If the root paradigm of historiographical writing is the implicit connection “between two antinomic terms—the real and discourse,” Calderón de la Barca reveals the inadequacies of this convention.124 When confronted with the “real,” the historian notes the effect of “the roaring of cannon” upon the general populace and the frightful hour-by-hour experience of the 1841 revolt. Historical discourse in Life in Mexico adapts the convention of the “laminated text,” in which another set of references—”chronicle, archive, document”—is grafted onto the ongoing, referential narrative. By means of this intertextual technique, “historiographical discourse is constructed as knowledge of the other.”125 Adapting the “laminated” convention to her purposes, Calderón interperses documents from the two opposing camps in order to present both sides of the event, a “knowledge of the other” fully absorbing both warring political camps. A full understanding of historical context, what the Fishers provide in their summary of the 1841 uprising, helps the reader appreciate this technique: In theory the basic issue involved in this revolution was federalism versus centralism—Mexican names for the opposing viewpoints between liberals and conservatives. . . . The more liberal federalists, dominant for a while after the overthrow of Emperor Iturbide and at other periods since, were out of power at this time. In general they wanted as the embodiment of national policy a document similar to the supplanted constitution of 1824, under which Mexican state governments wielded strong influence. . . . The more conservative centralists, whose principles were embodied in the constitution of 1836, believed in a more authoritarian and centralized national government. Their constitution at this time was the law of the land, and Mexico was administered under departments rather than states, with each department headed by a military governor.

For the representation of the 1841 revolt alternates between official government bulletins signed by President Bustamante and Valentin Gómez Farías’s counteracting claims, including the latter’s accusations that the former was guilty of “breaking his solemnly pledged word” to the Mexican nation (297–99).126 By incorporating sources and quotations into the body of her text, Calderón de la Barca effectively accredits her account as a factual one, thereby sustaining the “verisimilitude of narrative” and asserting herself as “a locus of authority.”127 It is this careful documentation that frees her from Prescott’s presumed role as a master-text, so that, indeed, “Prescott reads Calderón’s book as a history in the making.”128 Having determined the reliability and truth claim of her account, Calderón de la Barca adopted a gendered stance in her ironic commentary on the rebels’ political rhetoric, whose grandiose claims far exceed reality. Like Tristan

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in her Pérégrinations, Calderón de la Barca mocks the inflated tone used by male political actors: We see anarchy raising his rascally head above the water (most likely adorned with a liberty cap), and the brave soldiers instantly driving it down again. We behold Gómez Farias and Urrea rushing up a ladder of dead bodies. And then the Lucrezia Borgia kind of scene that follows!—alluring their victims with bitter fruit (or perhaps with sour grapes), drinking blood, and singing horridly out of tune . . . ! The teeth of humanity are set on edge only by reading it.

By representing “two sides to every story,” Calderón effectively dons the mask of “objective” historian; yet, by adopting the ironic stance of literary critic, she simultaneously undermines this authorial position.129 The questioning of official government rhetoric is further bolstered by the fact that, like Graham’s reliance on O’Higgins’ personal testimony, Calderón seems to privilege oral sources over written records. Women’s histories thus seem to contest the primacy of archival interpretations of history:130 “As a clever Mexican, the Marquis of Apartado, says: ‘Some years ago we gave forth cries ( gritos)—that was the infancy of our independence. Now we begin to pronounce (pronunciamos). Heaven knows when we shall be old enough to speak plain, so that people may know what we mean!’”131 By humorously questioning the concept of pronunciamiento itself, Life in Mexico deflates the “I, the state” rhetoric of nineteenth-century Latin American political prose as the dominant discourse of power. Despite her boldness, Frances Calderón exhibits the nineteenth-century female author’s characteristic ambivalence when confronted with the need to justify her daring incursion into the masculine domain of historiography. At the end of chapter twenty-four, which detailed the first phase of the revolt, she consciously adopts the “discourses of femininity,” thus resorting to the traditional apology used by women who dare to write themselves into history: I shall close this long letter, merely observing in apology—as Madame de Staël said in answer to the remark that “women have nothing to do with politics”—That may be, but when a woman’s head is about to be cut off, it is natural she should ask: “Why?” So it appears to me that when bullets are whizzing about our ears, and shells falling within a few yards of us, it ought to be considered extremely natural, and quite feminine, to inquire into the cause of such phenomena.132

Later, when recounting the sequel to the 1841 uprising in a subsequent chapter, Calderón overturns this traditional feminine apology for entry into the historiographical terrain. The letters included in the section “Revolution Again: Santa Anna Returns” detail a second pronunciamiento, led by

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General Valencia in late August 1841 against President Bustamante, which provoked General Santa Anna to usurp the presidency in October of that same year.133 As the political plot thickens with the rambunctious entry of General Santa Anna on the scene, Calderón describes the movements of the four principal actors—Santa Anna, Paredes, Valencia, and Bustamante—as “a game of chess, in which kings, castles, knights, and bishops are making different moves, while the pawns are looking on or taking no part whatever,” a metaphor that effectively mocks the notion of male military might. Soon after this, the Calderóns are forced to leave Mexico City, since the government confiscated their house, intending it as a gathering place for arms. Personally affected by the turn of events, Calderón de la Barca abandons the feminine discourse of apology in favor an active engagement in Mexican politics: “I make no further excuses for talking about politics. We talk and think of little else.”134 Like her contemporary Flora Tristan, who watched an ensuing civil war from the rooftop of her uncle’s house, Madame Calderón’s vantage point is a country hideaway at the hacienda of San Xavier, from where she keeps careful watch on the unfolding drama. As the principal actors pass by Tlanepantla, Frances Inglis again alternates “the discourses of femininity” with the discourse of history, solving the apparent conflict in favor of the latter yet maintaining a tone of genuine concern. While her husband, the auspicious Calderón, goes out to greet President Bustamante, who was on his way to settle accounts with General Paredes, Frances Calderón deviates from the official script of history to witness the arrival of Paredes and his troops. In contrast to Tristan’s comic focus on a pair of military men who escape out of the fray, Calderón’s attention is not on strategists and commanders, but rather on ordinary men forced into combat as fodder for individual ambitions and the lust for power: “Cavalry, infantry, carriages, cannons, &c., are all passing through the village. These are the pronunciados, with General Paredes, following to Mexico. Feminine curiosity induces me to stop here, and to join the party who are going down to the village to see them pass.”135 From this point on, Calderón heightens the political drama with her ironic style. Santa Anna’s march into Mexico City, Bustamante’s astuteness in facilitating a meeting of three opposing generals, the record of resolutions reached at Tacubaya, and, in a surprising reversal, Bustamante’s counterpronunciamiento (the Fishers’ term to describe Bustamante’s retreat) in favor of federalism, all succeed each other to craft a seamless historiographical account. As in Graham’s carefully crafted counterpoint between “the tale of two ships” and the grander plot of Chilean Independence, these pivotal events are significantly linked to a dominant motif in Mexican history: General Santa Anna’s notorious rise to power. The climax of the narrative, marked

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by Bustamante’s resignation and uncertainty as to Santa Anna’s true motives, combines the documentary script—ciphered by the sentence “Everything is in a state of perfect anarchy and confusion”—with more-conclusive statements that reveal Calderon’s gendered stance.136 In these passages, the image of the roaring cannon is expanded rhetorically to reflect on erratic political ambitions and the abuse of power: The sound is horrible! There is something appalling, yet humbling, in these manifestations of man’s wrath and man’s power, when he seems to usurp his Maker’s attributes, and to mimick His thunder. The divine spark kindled within him has taught him how to draw these materials from earth’s bosom; how to combine these simple materials, so as to produce with them an effect as terrible as the thunderbolts of heaven. His earthly passions have prompted him so to wield these instruments of destruction as to deface God’s image in his fellow men. The power is so divine—the causes that impel him to use that power are so paltry! The intellect that creates these messengers of death is so near akin to divinity—the motives that put them in action are so poor, so degrading even to humanity!

By means of extended metaphor, Calderón subverts the discourse of power and of military might that characterized the centralist counterrevolution of 1841, thus critiquing as well the course of Mexican nationalism as a constant bickering of factions.137 By equating “the roaring of cannon” with “man’s power” and “man’s wrath,” and by consequently showing up the illusion of power as originating from a heroic master subject, Calderón effectively undermines the assumptions of masculinist his/stories. The tradition of caudillismo with its consequent abuse of power is personified, with all pomp and circumstance, in Santa Anna and his new cabinet.138 In contrast to the presumptuous General, Calderón sides with the ousted President Bustamante, valuing “his constant and earnest desire to spare human life,” and deflating, again, the myth of Spanish American proto-heroism. Aligned with Flora Tristan’s account of the Peruvian rabonas, Calderón de la Barca’s version of the 1841 revolt focuses, instead, on female heroism, a more silent, yet no less valiant, form of historical agency. In contrast to Santa Anna’s ploys and maneuvers, the Mexican underclass, along with women, are depicted as victims of their country’s never-ending political strife. Life in Mexico casts women in the double role of wives and mothers, thus drawing on traditional “discourses of femininity” to illustrate two salient examples: Señora Marran, concerned for her husband’s safety in the midst of the roaring cannon, and Señora Barbachano, who rushed to shelter at the Calderóns’ only when her baby was at risk. In the chapter assessing the aftermath of the revolution, Calderón de la Barca praises women for using wits instead of

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bullets, thus validating their role as marginal witnesses and/or fugitives from the scene of the firing: “Ladies and children escaped, in many instances, by the azoteas, going along the street from one roof to another, not being able to pass where the cannon was planted. The Señora___________, with her six beautiful boys, escaped in that way to her brother’s house, in the evening and in the very thick of the firing.” These fleeting episodes nevertheless construct an image of women as historical subjects, an image that counters the one deployed in the documentary sources, where women figure only as passive pawns of the political struggle. Contrast Calderon’s representations with the poignant example included in Gómez Farias’s bulletin of a pregnant woman who had been “killed as she was passing the palace gates under the belief that . . . the firing would be suspended, as in fact it was on our side.”139 Indeed, the presence of women amid the roaring cannon puts into question the methods and motives of the warring factions, thus casting a skeptical shadow over the entire event. Calderon’s gendered perspective surfaces in her ironic commentary on the bizarre strategies of the Mexican military: “It seems also a novel plan to keep up a continual cannonading by night and to rest during a great part of the day,” an observation followed by a healthy dose of female logic: “One would think that were the guns brought closer to the palace, the whole affair would be sooner over.” Like Tristan’s silent mass of rabonas, women are represented at the fringes of the historical spectacle, yet they paradoxically play a vital role in it, serving to underscore the futility of violence.140 Signs of an alternative historiography go beyond the focus on female heroism, for in these passages on civil war Calderón writes herself as an empathic witness to the plight of the poor, a position that duplicates her own stance as historical witness. Calderón de la Barca ends the account of the 1841 revolt with the following “ingredient conclusion:” The tranquillity of the sovereign people during all this period is astonishing. In what other city in the world would they not have taken part with one or other side? Shops shut, workmen out of employment, thousands of idle people subsisting heaven knows how—yet no riot, no confusion, apparently no impatience. Groups of people collect on the streets, or stand talking before their doors, and speculate upon probabilities—but await the decision of their military chiefs as if it were a judgment from heaven from which it were useless and impious to appeal.141

By identifying in this manner with the silent masses of Mexicans, Calderón de la Barca subverts the detached stance of the male historian in favor of a more empathic position, hence reversing the fundamental “historiographical operation,” which posits distance from the past as a prerequisite of historical

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writing. Rather than reenacting the ghosts of the past, Calderón de la Barca focuses on the living, not “so [they] can exist elsewhere” but rather “so they may be able to inhabit (inherit) their own social space and time.”142 Life in Mexico thus debunks many of the founding premises of the “grand narrative” of nineteenth-century Latin American historiography. We have seen how grand historical events are minimized in favor of the mundane and the everyday. The effective mix of documentary sources with ironic asides provide closure to the episode, as an official bulletin announces the restitution of order and centralist rule.143 When the cannons finally quiet down, Calderón de la Barca ironically informs an invisible interlocutor that “the arrival of the English packet, which brings all these nouveautés, is about the most interesting event that occurs here.” There is no trace here of a presumed British superiority, a recurrent leitmotif in current criticism of traveling genres; rather, this wry comment ironically diminishes the art of political wrangling, asserting, instead, the value of the everyday. The use of humor surfaces in the following address to the same unknown interlocutor: “I write more to occupy my thoughts than in hopes of interesting you, for I am afraid that you will almost be tired of this revolutionary letter.” By conflating the addressee of the letters with the implied reader, Calderón relegates the task of imparting a final “synoptic judgment” on Mexican politics to the reader of the memoirs.144 As the ironic highlight on the word “revolutionary” suggests, the 1841 federalist revolt is depicted not as an event with far-reaching consequences for Mexico’s future but as a farcical and repeated “tale of two parties” contending for power, of which struggle the only perceptible outcome was “a change in ministry.”145 Hence the stature of the historical text is subverted. In a lengthy but significant passage, the author appears skeptical of any hope for change, whether by peaceful or violent means: [The Mexicans] have seen the revolution of Dolores of 1810, with continuations and variations by Morelos, and paralyzation of 1819; the revolution of Iturbide in 1821; the Cry of Liberty (Grito de Libertad) given by those generals, “beneméritos de la patria,” Santa Anna and Victoria in 1822; the establishment of the federal system in 1824; the horrible revolution of the Acordada, in which Mexico was pillaged, in 1828; the adoption of the central system in 1836; and the last revolution of the federalists in 1840. Another is predicted for next month, as if it were an eclipse of the sun.

At first glance, Calderón’s ironic assessment of the 1841 revolt aligns itself with an “informal empire” view of Spanish America, with its paternalistic hint regarding Mexicans’ seeming inability to build a nation by peaceful means. While Miguel Cabañas claims that Calderón’s memoir paves the way for North American intervention, Kaplan and Gerassi Navarro, likewise,

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assess the Scotswoman’s penchant for the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, asserting her adherence to “the new empire overtak[ing] the dream of Mexican independence.”146 Hence the accent, in these various interpretations, on melancholy as the organizing trope which figures the traveling persona’s relationship to Mexico.147 Yet, I argue, the primary trope in Calderón de la Barca’s memoir, what propels its status as meta-history, is irony. What resonates in this long passage is the need to “erase” violence from the historical field altogether: “Another [pronunciamiento] is predicted for next month, as if it were an eclipse of the sun.”148 The many repetitions, reversals, and violent outbreaks which surfaced during the crucial first stage of Mexican nationalism work to effect a virtual “disappearance” or fading of the concept of revolution or pronunciamiento as a mainstay in Mexican historiography. Irony hence works to push violence to the margins of cultural memory. Given her affectionate link to the criollos as a ruling elite, the astute Scotswoman may have wanted to prod national constituencies to heed republican reform. As meta-history, Life in Mexico ultimately moves away from a totalizing concept of history and toward a sense of history written as and with a critical difference: an ironic stance that allows for a simultaneously detached and engaged perspective.149 In the last analysis—she seems to be telling us—Mexicans, and only Mexicans, are responsible for their national destiny. Sara Mills’ understanding of travel writing as a genre balancing “male” and “female” discourses serves us well in assessing Calderón de la Barca’s rhetoric of history; particularly, her final judgment on Mexican politics, included in the chapter “Distinguished Men of Mexico.” Addressed to her brother, Henry Inglis, this letter reads as a capitulation of sorts, as a past review of Calderon’s own involvement with the key actors in Mexican public life and as a sobering reflection on the country’s destinies. She begins with a classification of historical actors—“soldiers, statesmen and literary men”— all of which exemplify Lukács’s ideal of a “historical type” embodying the underlying forces and tensions of a particular era.150 Her appraisal, that “there is not one amongst those I have mentioned who, if he were to write merely his personal history, would not by so doing write the history of these civil wars,” is aligned with the Latin American autobiographical tradition in which first-person memoirs are read as historiographical acts, a tradition bolstered, in turn, by male autobiographers/leaders who equate their own selves with the state.151 The author then passes review of those leaders with whom she has been intimately acquainted during her stay in the country, now presented to the reader as padres de la patria, forgers of Mexican nationalism: “Bustamante as an honest man and brave soldier; Santa Anna as an acute general, active and aspiring . . . ; General Victoria, a plain, uneducated, well-intentioned

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man, brave and enduring.” Yet the men who ultimately capture her attention are not the chosen three, but, rather, other statesmen and literary figures who played a less dramatic role in the nation-building process, clearly a shift from the “grand narrative” of Latin America built on a pageon of legendary figures. Many of these statesmen were either personal friends of the couple (such as Don Francisco Tagle or relatives of close acquaintances, Señor Fagoaga, presumably the brother of the marquis of Apartado).152 Not only is Calderón de la Barca’s gendered vision evident in her highly subjective choice of public servants, but also her descriptions underscore salient features of those “famous lives” not usually recorded in official histories—most noticeably, their “good fortune” in choosing “women who are either their equals or superiors—if not in education, [then] in goodness, elevation of sentiment and natural talent.” Similar to Graham’s picture of a defeated San Martín who withdrew into selfimposed exile, Calderón notes how Mexican statesmen make a forced retreat from the vagaries of public life: “[I]t is very much the case, in Mexico at present, that the most distinguished men are those who live most retired—those who have played their part on the arena of public life, have seen the inutility of their efforts in favor of their country, and have now retreated into the bosom of their families, where they endeavor to forget public evils in domestic retirement and literary occupation.”

By privileging a feminized, domestic space over the male drive for mastery, Calderón de la Barca translates the liberal /conservative split in post-independence Mexico in terms of gender. Thus long-standing hostilities and disputes can be settled by ties forged even among opposing members of the same “imagined community:” “[I]f [Santa Anna and Bustamante] met by chance in a drawing room, they would give each other as cordial an abrazo (embrace), Mexican fashion, as if nothing had happened.” Irony cedes, then, before a conciliatory view of Mexican politics, where the public sphere is ultimately subsided by the private urge to privilege peace over war.153 Life in Mexico shares a similar rhetoric of history evident in other femaleauthored travelogues to the Americas. Like Tristan and Graham in Perú and Chile, Calderón’s account fulfills a similar function in shaping Spanish American identity and nationality, illustrating how “[h]istorical discourse makes a social identity explicit, not so much in the way it is ‘given’ or held as stable, as ìn the ways it is differentiated from a former period or another society.”154 This is why Rosario Castellanos aptly dubbed Calderón de la Barca “partera de almas”—midwife of the soul—an epithet that beautifully captures her ability to represent the “underside” of Spanish American nationalism.155 Then and now, Frances Calderón and Flora Tristan serve as both inspiration and point of departure for contemporary women writers’ revisions of nation.

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The image of Spanish American nationalism that emerges in these texts is equally corrosive, and centers on the critique of despotism emerging in postIndependence nations. European women’s memoirs “romanced” the nation with a decidedly anti-authoritarian ring. It could be argued that their vision was not new, as “[e]ver since independence, North Americans perceived South America as a land of caudillos, incessant civil warfare, banditry, and political fragmentation,”156 precisely the image conveyed in these accounts. From a literary perspective, the cumulative effect of European women’s travels results in what Antonio Benítez Rojo has called “the paradox of Nationness, a contradictory longing for national identity and modernity”; tradition and change.157 By inscribing their own sense of historical agency, European women wanted to erase their perceived “foreignness”; even replace their nomadic and uncertain existences with the unfulfilled longing to remain in the Americas. Tristan’s divided allegiance between Perú and France, Graham’s final melancholy upon leaving a country “where, in spite of much suffering, I have also enjoyed much pleasure,” Calderón de la Barca’s pining for the tierra caliente region are signs of such a desire for nation.158 Despite their transient status, long periods of residence conditioned all three to want to be counted either as full-fledged national subjects, permanent “fellow travelers,” or spokesperson for their host country’s national interests. As both outsiders and insiders, impassioned spectators and participants, during their stay in the New World, European women were caught in their own paradoxical relationship to post-Independence societies, what made them wish to belong to that New World, and to project their notion of Utopia upon the societies encountered there. While local reactions to their works were often controversial and tinged with resentment—the legend of Tristan burnt in effigy for her betrayal of loyalist uncle Pío is well known, while Calderón garnered the Mexican elite’s accusations of a similar sense of betrayal—they reveal more than a hint of patriarchal control. By contrast, British travelers in Argentina received a more positive reception, and are even credited for fostering images of a nation-inthe-making that, in turn, created “models of self-understanding for the new republics.”159 What the Spanish American elites could not assimilate was that their semblances in these travelogues appeared not in a heroic light, but a realistic one. While exaggeration and hyperbole could perhaps be dismissed in the case of male travelers, the criollos could hardly forgive a foreign woman for daring to intrude upon their ranks, depicting weaknesses and foibles instead of heroic exploits, hence countering their sense of self-importance on the historical stage. Instead of demure submission, transatlantic pilgrims showed determination and daring in taking up the historian’s task. Hence their travelogues deserve being read today not only as documentary sources,

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but as integral to “the configuration and consolidation of [Latin American] national identity.”160 Like other nineteenth-century travel accounts, these works form an integral part of the Spanish American archive, filling in a forgotten chapter in Latin American history. NOTES  1. June E. Hahner, “Introduction,” in Women Through Women’s Eyes: Latin American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1998), xx, xxi–xxii.  2. Ricardo Cicerchia, Journey, Rediscovery and Narrative: British Travel Accounts of Argentina (1800–1850) (London: University of London, Institute of Latin American Studies, 1998), 4.  3. “[Graham and Tristan] were spellbound and astute witnesses to the South American Independence struggles and the political and military upheavals that followed.” Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 156.  4. Sylvia Molloy, At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 146–48.   5.  Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 7–9.  6. Molloy, At Face Value, 8.  7. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 17, 12. Thus woman is relegated to “the margins of critical discourse,” outside the Symbolic realm.  8. M. Soledad Caballero, “‘For the Honour of Our Country’: Maria Dundas Graham and the Romance of Benign Domination,” Studies in Travel Writing 9, no. 2 (2005): 113–15, 117–19; and Miguel A. Cabañas, “North of Eden: Romance and Conquest in Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico,” Studies in Travel Writing 9, no. 1 (2205): 2–3, 4–5, 7.   9.  “[Graham] structures her identity in Latin America as a representative of the British nation.” Caballero, “‘For the Honour, . . .’” 112, 117, 119. Hahner, “Introduction,” in Women Through Women’s Eyes, 3. 10.  Ricardo D. Salvatore, “The Enterprises of Knowledge: Representational Machines of Informal Empire,” in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the History of U.S.-Latin American Relations, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 71. Based on Hahner’s summary view of travel writing to Latin America, Caballero, in, “‘For the Honour, . . .’” argues that “Graham provides a peculiar perspective on Britain’s informal empire in the region” (116). Despite its popularity, this term is imprecise and does not really help us gain much useful insight into post-Independence societies. 11.  Salvatore, “The Enterprises of Knowledge,” 83.

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12.  Maria Graham, “Sketch of the History of Chile,” in Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orne, Brown, and Green: 1824), 1–111 (hereafter cited Journal of a Residence in Chile 1824). Flora Tristan, Mémoires et Péregrinations d’une paria, 1833–1834, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librairie Historique, de l’Advocat et Compagnie, 1838), 118 (hereafter cited Mémoires et Péregrinations). Frances Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, (With New material from the Author’s Private Journals), ed. Howard T. Fisher and Marion Hall Fisher (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1966), 161–63, 196, 488–89 (hereafter cited Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca). 13.  Caballero, “‘For the Honour…,” 118; Cabañas, “North of Eden,” 12. 14.  Salvatore, “The Enterprises of Knowledge,” 83. 15.  Given their similarities, the three viewpoints contained in this paragraph are referenced together. Jennifer Hayward, ed. “‘No Unity of Design:’ Competing Discourses in Graham’s Journal,” in A Journal of a Residence in Chile: During the Year 1822, and A Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, by Maria Graham (London and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 299; author’s emphasis. Angela Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times: Narratives about Travel to South America, 1780–1849, trans. Dick Cluster (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 99; 90–91. Caballero, “‘For the Honour, . . .’” 117, 113–14, 120. 16.  David Bushnell, “The Independence of Spanish South America,” in The Independence of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 107. 17. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile, 171, 326–27; Maria Graham, A Journal of a Residence in Chile: During the Year 1822, and A Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, Jennifer Hayward, ed. (London and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 47, 165. Hayward’s edition (hereafter cited as Chile [2003]); both the original and modern edition cited each time. 18.  In her introduction, Jennifer Hayward compares Graham to the accounts written by Basil Hall, Alexander Caldcleugh and John Miers; in “‘No Unity of Design,’” 295, 299, 302–5. Quote below is Hayward, “‘No Unity of Design,’” xxii. 19. Above quote and all references to “Preface” in this paragraph drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), i–iv, 238; Chile (2003), 97–98. The author’s “Preface” is missing from Jennifer Hayward’s Chile, 2003 edition. 20.  “[E]l libro tiene todo el mérito de un documento histórico; . . . habrá de servir para estudiar la historia bajo un aspecto que no ofrecen los documentos y comunicaciones de carácter oficial, que han sido la fuente de los estudios históricos hechos hasta ahora.” [“The book is valuable as a historical document. . . . It will serve to study history with a perspective not offered by documents and oficial communications, which have been the primary source of historical studies up to now.”] My translation. José Valenzuela D., translator’s prologue to Maria Graham, Diario de su residencia en Chile (1822) y de su viaje al Brasil (1823) (Madrid: Ed. América, 1916), 16. A point elaborated on by Hayward in her introduction: “Graham was fully conscious of the importance of her work even at the time of writing it. She clearly

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intends the journal as a historical document and notes the scarcity of other firsthand accounts. . . .” Hayward, “‘No Unity of Design,’” xvii.” 21.  Simon Collier and William F. Sater, A History of Chile, 1808–1994 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 39. 22.  “Graham aligns herself with the navy’s power, first as a captain’s wife and then after her husband unexpectedly dies, as Cochrane’s advocate . . .” Caballero, “For the Honour, . . .” 114. 23. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 39–40; Chile (2003), 215. Bushnell, “The Independence of Spanish South America,” 129. 24. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 29, 44; Chile (2003), 208, 218–19. Sater, A History of Chile, 38. 25.  All references included in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824) 19, 95, 19–27; Chile (2003), 201, 256, 201–7. “Writers were later to depict Carrera as the great romantic hero of the creole revolution.” Sater, A History of Chile, 34. 26.  All references included in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 34–36, 39, 42; Chile (2003), 208, 212–13, 215, 217). 27.  “[T]he travelers makes moral judgments and the anthropologist makes moral assessments.” Valerie Wheeler, “Travelers’ Tales: Observations on the Travel Book and Ethnography,” Anthropological Quarterly 59, no. 2 (1986): 57. Caballero, “For the Honour, . . .” 121. 28.  All references included in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 44, 53, 66–74; Chile (2003), 218, 225, 235–40). 29.  All references included in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 83, 88–90, 84–85, 98, 109, 111; Chile (2003), 247, 252, 248–49, 258, 265, 267. 30.  Caballero, “‘For the Honour, . . .’” 125. The author stresses Graham’s unflattering depiction of San Martín as dependent on British “humanizing” values, hence missing a crucial turning-point in the Independence struggle, discussed below. 31.  All references included in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 171, 279, 284; Chile (2003), 47, 130, 134. 32.  Bushnell, “The Independence of Spanish South America,” 134. 33.  All references included in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 281, 279–80; Chile (2003), 132, 131. 34.  “Hay un retrato de San Martín . . . que es una obra maestra de observación y de factura . . . [;] piensa que ese hombre locuaz y amanerado estaría mejor en un sarao que no al frente de los Estados incipientes, que tiene la ambición de dominar como jefe absoluto.” [There is a portrait of San Martín that is a masterpiece of observation and craftsmanship; . . . she thinks that that locacious and affected man would be better off at a soirée than at the head of those newly-formed States which he aspired to govern as absolute ruler.] My translation. trans. Valenzuela D. in Graham, Diario, 15–16. 35.  All references included in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 283, 285–86; Chile (2003), 133–35. 36.  Hayward, “`No Unity of Design,’” 303.

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37.  Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 98–99; Hayward, on the other hand, thinks there is no proof that Graham and Cochrane shared more than a friendship (“‘No Unity of Design,’” Chile, 303). Soledad Caballero, “For the Honour, . . .” 127. 38.  All references included in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 286, 273–74; Chile (2003), 135, 126–27. 39.  Bushnell, “The Independence of Spanish South America,” 130. 40. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 277; Chile (2003), 129. 41.  All references included in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 297–98, Chile (2003), 144–45. 42.  Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 99. 43.  Kathleen R. Hart, “‘There Shall be Earthquakes in Diverse Places’: Volcanic Terror in Flora Tristan’s Pérégrinations d’une paria,” in The Play of Terror in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. John T. Booker and Allan H. Pasco (London and Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 45–57. 44.  Previous quote is from Jessica Damián, “‘These Civil Wars of Nature’: Annotating South America’s Natural and Political History in Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824),” in Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary, ed. Joselyn M. Almeida (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2010), 334–35. Damián’s essay incisively reviews Graham’s geological speculations, what gained her a place in scientific circles as well as considerable criticism (336–338). 45.  All references included in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 306–06, 315–16, 323, 331–32; Chile, (2003), 150–51, 157–58, 163, 169. The reference to Byron is given in Graham, Chile (2003), ed. Hayward, 163; Pérez Mejía erroneously refers to this passage as deriving from “a travel narrator of 1625,” in A Geography of Hard Times, 100. 46.  Damián reached the same conclusion in her statement that “[u]ltimately, … Graham equates the unstable land masses of the continent to the unstable political climate in Chile,” in ‘These Civil Wars of Nature,’ 338. 47.  A passage also analyzed in Damián, 327, 335–36, who stresses Graham’s status as “‘unprotected widow’” as the cause of her departure from Chile (339). 48.  All references included in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 334, 329, 318–19, 327–28, 334, 347, 346, 334, 345, 338; Chile (2003), 170, 167, 159–60, 165–66, 170, 174–75, 180, 179, 171, 178, 173–74. 49.  Graham, “Post-script,” Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 357–70. This is followed by an “Appendix” which includes an ethnographic essay on the first Independence leader Miguel Carrera and the Araucanians, written by a Mr. Yates. These two sections are not included in Hayward’s Chile, 2003 edition. 50. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 359–60, 370. 51.  All references included in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 357–58, 347–48, 351, 339, 352; Chile (2003), 180, 174, 183. 52.  All references included in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 342–43; Chile (2003), 176–77, 179, 166. 53.  A variation, then, of Georges Van Den Abbeele’s theories in his Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

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Press, 1992). Pérez Mejía argues that Graham’s book fits more with Inderpal Grewal’s refutation of this model; A Geography of Hard Times, 108–9. 54.  All quotes are from Flora Tristan, “Lettres de Bolívar,” Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires (July 14, 1838): 1–3. My translation, (hereafter cited “Lettres de Bolívar”). 55.  Ibid, 2–3. My translation. 56.  Kathleen R. Hart, “An I for an Eye: Flora Tristan and Female Visual Allegory,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 26, nos. 1–2 (Fall-Winter 1997–1998): 51. 57.  Flora Tristan, Mémoires et Pérégrinations d’une Paria, 1833–1834, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librairie Historique de L’advocat et Compagnie, 1838), 2:32–33 (hereafter cited Mémoires et Pérégrinations). I have also consulted the first edition held at the Bibliothèque Nationale: Pérégrinations d’une Paria, 1833–1834 (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1838). Flora Tristan, Peregrinations of a Pariah, 1833–1834, rev. ed., translated Jean Hawkes. (London: Virago, 1986), 148 (hereafter cited Peregrinations). 58.  “Her uncle’s rejection implies the end of an effort in which Flora has risked everything and placed all her hopes, yet she rises ennobled from the ashes.” Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 111. 59.  “The alienated romantic subject . . . begins to observe Peru. On the next page, the narrator comments heatedly on the civil war that is engulfing the region, which until this moment had not occupied her attention.” Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 111. 60.  Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor, xxiv. 61.  Peregrinations, 152. Flora Tristan, Utopian Feminist: Her Travel Diaries and Personal Crusade, ed. and trans. Doris Beik and Paul Beik (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 1 (hereafter cited Flora Tristan, Utopian Feminist). 62.  Sarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 225. 63.  Mémoires et Pérégrinations, 2: 39–40, 135. Peregrinations, 185. 64.  Cristina Guiñazú, “En el nombre del padre: Las Peregrinaciones de una paria de Flora Tristan,” Ciberletras 5 (August 2001): n.p.; Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 108, 111, 113. 65. Hahner, “Introduction to Peregrinations of a Self-Proclaimed Pariah,” in Women Through Women’s Eyes, 22. 66.  Susan K. Grogan, Flora Tristan: Life Stories (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 157. 67.  Bushnell, “The Independence of Spanish South America,” 130. “Tristan witnessed a period of civil war following a coup d’êtat in 1834, heavily involving her royalist uncle Pio,” Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 166. 68.  Mémoires et Pérégrinations, 2:42–43, 2:50. Peregrinations, 157. 69.  Denys Cuche, “Le Pérou de Flora Tristan: du rêve a la réalité,” Colloque international Flora Tristan. Un fabuleux destin. Actes du premier Colloque international Flora Tristan, ed. Stéphane Michaud (Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 1985), 28. 70.  Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 112.

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71.  All references and quotes in this paragraph drawn from Mémoires et Pérégrinations, 2:49, 2:52–59, 2:67, 2:60, 2:63, 2:79. Peregrinations, 156, 162, 168. Translation of quoted passage slightly modified. 72.  Guiñazú, “En el nombre del padre.” Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 112. 73.  Mémoires et Pérégrinations, 2: 72, 2: 45. Peregrinations, 154. 74. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 166. 75.  Mémoires et Pérégrinations, 2:249. Peregrinations, 228. 76.  Mémoires et Pérégrinations, 2:47. Peregrinations, 156. 77.  Mémoires et Pérégrinations, 2:134, 2:80–81, 2:83–85, 2:90. Peregrinations, 228, 168. 78. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 166. 79.  Jill S. Kuhnheim says she “watches the war like theater from the top of her uncle’s house . . . but she does not remain an observer,” in “Pariah/Messiah: The Conflictive Social Identity of Flora Tristan,” in Reinterpreting the Spanish American Essay: Women Writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Doris Meyer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 29; while Francesca Denegri highlights two different vantage points, “the drawing-room window and the roof top in her uncle’s house,” comparing them to the perspective of a modern film spectator, in Francesca Denegri, “Desde la ventana: Women ‘Pilgrims’ in Nineteenth-Century Latin American Travel Literature,” Modern Language Review 92, no. 2 (April 1997): 360. 80.  All references and quotes in this paragraph drawn from Mémoires et Pérégrinations, 2:251–52, 2:209, 2:132; author’s emphasis. Peregrinations, 206, 229, 211, 169–70, 184; emphasis in text. 81. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 166. Vanesa Miseres further elaborates this topic in “On a Republic in Ruins: Flora Tristan’s Peregrinations of a Pariah and the Role of the Rabonas in Nineteenth-Century Peru,” Review 84 45, no. 1 (May 2012): 29–36. 82.  All references and quotes in this paragraph drawn from Mémoires et Pérégrinations, 2:121, 2:122–23; Peregrinations, 180. 83. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 166. 84. Fernando Carballo. “La miraculée de la rue du Bac, Histoire d’une double malentendu,” unpublished manuscript. Presented as “Le double regard: Flora Tristan, analyste de la société péruvienne” at the colloquium “De Flora Tristan à Mario Vargas Llosa: deux siècles de relations littéraires Europe latine-Amérique latine,” Maison de l’Amérique latine, Paris, June 13–14, 2003. 85.  All references and quotes in this paragraph drawn from Mémoires et Pérégrinations, 2:106, 2:171–72, 2:103, 2:105, 2:98–99, 2:258; Peregrinations, 174, 171–72, 173–74, 176, 180, 232. 86.  “Peru would remain a deeply divided nation, with an oppressed Indian majority concentrated in the Andean highlands and a Spanish-speaking minority living largely in the coast.” Hahner, “Introduction to Peregrinations, . . .” in Women Through Women’s Eyes, 22. 87.  All references and quotes in this paragraph drawn from Mémoires et Pérégrinations, 2:272–73, 2:237, 1:ix, 1:vij, 1:xj, 1:x; Peregrinations, 237; Flora Tristan, Utopian Feminist, 10–11.

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  88.  Hahner, “Introduction to Peregrinations, . . .” in Women Through Women’s Eyes, 23.   89.  Hart, “An I for an Eye,” 54.  90. Grogan, Flora Tristan, 159–60.   91.  Mary Rice-De Fosse, “Reconsidering Flora Tristan’s Narrative Art.” Women in French Studies 3, no. 4 (Fall 1995): 45–54. “Her identification with this powerful woman presages Tristan’s role as a social heroine, a part she will play more overtly in London Journal” (Kuhnheim, “Pariah/Messiah,” 30).  92. Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 121–22. Kuhnheim, “Pariah/ Messiah,” 33. “Tristan’s particular contribution, in her life and her writings, was to bridge the chasm between the spiritually charged precepts of utopian socialism and the organized workers’ movement,” Margaret Talbot, “An Emancipated Voice: Flora Tristan and Utopian Allegory.” Feminist Studies 17, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 219–39. Claire Goldberg Moses and Leslie Wahl Rabine refute this judgment, however, in Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 346n54.  93. Tristan, Peregrinations, 307.   94.  Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor, xxvi.  95. Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 352; Chile (2003), 184. Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 122.   96.  Hart, “An I for an Eye,” 62.   97.  Mary Louise Pratt, “Criticism in the Contact Zone: Decentering Community and Nation,” in Critical Theory, Cultural Politics, and Latin American Narrative, ed. Steven M. Bell, Albert H. Le May, and Leonard Orr (London and Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 94.   98.  “La société péruvienne mettra longtemps à reconnaître Flora Tristan comme une de ses grandes figures nationales. Son analyse . . . des pratiques de l’oligarchie créole lui vaudra, à l’apparition au Pérou des Pérégrinations, dont la vente et la reproduction seront interdites, d’être brulée en effigie au théâtre de Lima et sur la Place d’Armes d’Arequipa.” [Peruvian society took a long time to recognize Flora Tristan as one of its great national figures. Her analysis . . . of the social practices of the creole oligarchy earned her, after the publication in Peru of her Peregrinations, where the book’s sale and distribution were soon banned, to be burnt in effigy at the main theater in Lima and in the Plaza de Armas of Arequipa.”] Cuche, “Le Pérou de Flora Tristan,” 35–36.   99.  See, for instance, Magda Portal, Flora Tristan, precursora (Lima: Editorial La Equidad, 1983). 100.  Charles A. Hale, “Review of 1966 edition of Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 47, no. 4 (November 1967): 582. Hale rightly points out that this is the most updated edition since it incorporates additional material that did not get into print. 101.  Hugh Thomas, “Visits to Mexico,” Encounter 73, no. 5 (December 1989): 34. The “indelicate gown” was a folkloric dress typical of the china poblana or Indian women from Puebla, who traditionally wore colorful, wide-skirted costumes. Hale, “Review of 1966 edition . . . ,” 582.

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102.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 286. 103. “Fanny [sic] quotes or paraphrases from it [Zavala’s Ensayo histórico] on several occasions—particularly from chap. 8 of the first volume, rich in characterizations of important Mexicans” (editors’ note, ibid., 678). Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 295. 104.  The Fishers’ identify these authors and their works as likely sources in certain key passages of Life in Mexico During a Residence of Two Years in That Country. Calderón makes constant references to Henry George Ward’s Mexico in 1827, a book that she admired mainly on account of Mrs. Ward’s sketches of Mexican life, which she considered the pictorial equivalent of her own narrative descriptions. See Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 678n7. 105.  Sara Mills questions inserting travel narrative within “the larger project concerned with the construction of an alternative women’s history” in her Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 28–29. In this chapter I affirm that women’s travels elucidate an alternative view of Latin American history. 106. For another view of Madame Calderón’s authorial voice, which stresses her Scottish origin, ambivalence regarding British identity, and emigré status in the U.S., see Amy Kaplan and Nina Gerassi Navarro, “Between Empires: Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico,” in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 9, no. 1 (April 2005): 5–6, a topic also discussed in M. Soledad Caballero and Jennifer Hayward, “Narrating Nationalism in F. Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico,” in Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary, edited by Joselyn M. Almeida (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010), 299–302. While these two essays trace the author’s self-fashioning as an “English traveler,” my focus here is on her relationship to Mexico, and her depiction of crucial episodes in Mexican history. 107.  Editors’ introduction, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, p. xxii. Michael P. Costeloe claims, however, that “[Sra. Calderón] began the process of seeking a publisher and . . . turned to Prescott for help,” at which point Prescott procured a publisher for the American edition and actively sought out a British edition. See Costeloe, “Prescott’s History of the Conquest and Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico: Mexican Reaction, 1843–1844,” The Americas 47, no. 3 (January 1991): 343. These are the first sources that trace Calderón’s debt to Prescott, as cited in my “‘The Cannon are Roaring: Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico as Gendered History,” in Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist, Contesting the Master Narrative—Essays in Social History (Iowa City: The University of Iowa Press, 1998), 50–68. Other critics have elaborated on their authorial connection; for Miguel A. Cabañas, Prescott bolsters the female traveler’s narrative authority; see “North of Eden: Romance and Conquest in Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico,” Studies in Travel Writing 2 (2005): 2, 7. Yet, as I showed in my earlier essay, theirs was a reciprocal understanding, as Prescott used Madame Calderón as source for his own romantic historiography of the country. Kaplan and Gerassi Navarro, in turn, stress Prescott’s valorization of “her female perspective,” then compare their respective views of U.S. expansionism (“Between Empires, . . .” 8, 19–20).

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108.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, xxii. Thomas documents the amazing fact that Prescott was blind and could never have seen the famed sights described in his History; Hugh Thomas, “Visits to Mexico,” Encounter 73, no. 5 (December 1989): 30. Cited in Méndez Rodenas, “‘The Cannon are Roaring,’” 53. Caballero and Hayward later affirm this same fact: “[Prescott] relied on her descriptions of the natural world, as he never traveled to Mexico and became blind in the course of his work on this monumental book” (“Narrating Nationalism, . . .” 314). 109.  Costeloe describes how the Mexican press compared her unfavorably with an unwelcome French diplomat (“Prescott’s History,” 344). Though this author explains the different reactions to Prescott and Calderón in terms of the Mexicans’ need to bolster a positive national image (347), it was also the result of gender difference and the prevailing resistance to women authors. 110.  Ibid., 344–45. It was Costeloe who first documented the breach of hospitality that propelled the adverse reaction to La vida en México in the Mexican press. Based on Costeloe, I introduced the topic in my 1998 essay, cited above. Kaplan and Gerassi Navarro discuss the same controversy in “Between Empires, . . .” 8–9, as so do Caballero and Hayward, “Narrating Nationalism, . . .” 321–22. 111.  See Kaplan and Gerassi Navarro, “Between Empires, . . .” 7–9, for a capsule view of the work’s reception in London, in her native Scotland, and in Mexico, a point also addressed in M. Soledad Caballero and Hayward, 321–323. 112.  According to Costeloe, “Sra. Calderón appears to have been quite unaware of the controversy [her book] aroused in Mexico and of the bitter criticism of herself and her husband” (“Prescott’s History,” 345–46). 113.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 418, 284. 114.  Jan Bazant, “Mexico, From Independence to 1867,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America. Vol. 3, From Independence to c. 1870, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3:438–39. 115.  Kaplan and Gerassi Navarro briefly recapitulate this period of transition (Kaplan and Gerassi Navarro, “Between Empires, . . .” 10). Cabañas, in turn, considers that “Like many northeners, Calderón describes the state of the Mexican Republic as one of disorder and anarchy” (“North of Eden,” 14). As a leading Latin American intellectual, Henríquez Ureña’s by now classic appraisal explains why the transition to Independence was viewed as a period of anarchy. 116.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 295–323. 117.  Louis Mink, Historical Understanding, ed. Brian Fay, Eugene O. Galob, and Richard T. Vann (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 77–79, 81–82. Further references to Mink are drawn from these same pages. 118.  I draw here on Sara Mills’s thesis that women’s travel writing effectively shows a tension between the “discourses of femininity,” which have molded women into traditional roles, and the discourse of colonialism, inherited from the predominantly male paradigm of the European travel book. This tension is manifested not in terms of a “simple binary opposition” but rather as an expanding and contracting

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textual circuit. Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference, 18, 44–45. In a new version of this binary, M. Soledad Caballero and Hayward claim that the narrator in Life in Mexico establishes “a dichotomy between ‘English’ cultural civilization and Mexican primitivism,” thus revealing “a fundamental divide between the land and people of Mexico and her own European experience” (“Narrating Nationalism,” 302, 304). As a Latin Americanist, I consider “primitivism” a term loaded with cultural stereotypes, not to be conflated with a critical perspective. Kaplan and Gerassi Navarro analyze Frances Inglis’ conflicting allegiances with both Great Britain and the United States (“Between Empires, . . . 5). Cabañas broaches the question of the female traveler’s narrative authority, tending to read her Mexican journal as a direct reflection of colonialist ideology (“North of Eden,” 3–4). All three essays hold as interpretive frame of reference the narrative subject’s relation to a dominantly Anglo-American empire. I will come back to their conclusions at the end of this chapter; for now, my focus is on the extent to which the traveling persona establishes a connection to Mexico through the writing of history. 119. All quotes from this paragraph drawn from Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 293, 295, 300, 295–96. 120.  “[D]epending upon the periods of historiography, it is the event, or it is the continuous series, which is the point of departure and the definition of the intelligible”; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 48. 121.  De Certeau, The Writing of History, 81. 122. Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca: “The revolutionaries or pronunciados insisted that the President had not escaped, but had been allowed to depart from the palace with the understanding that he bore definite terms of peace from the insurgents and would work for agreement between factions” (editors’ note, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 734n7). 123.  Tom Conley, “Translation’s Introduction: For a Literary Historiography,” in De Certeau, The Writing of History, viii. See also discussion at 36–37. 124.  “Historiography bears within its own name a paradox—almost an oxymoron—of the relationship between two antinomic terms—between the real and discourse. Its task is connecting them (or) working as if two were being joined” (ibid., xxvii).33. 125.  De Certeau, The Writing of History, 94; author’s emphasis. 126.  Editor’s note, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca,, 733n1; 297–99. 127.  De Certeau, The Writing of History, 94. 128.  Cabañas, “North of Eden,” 7. 129.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 307, 298. 130. Cf. de Certeau’s notion that “archival endeavors are always fragmentary” (Conley, “Translation’s Introduction: For a Literary Historiography,” in De Certeau, The Writing of History, p. ix). This demystifying move reverses the trend in Latin

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American literature toward a grand Archive of Books as depository of (forbidden) knowledge; González Echevarría Myth and Archive, 31. 131.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 304. 132.  Ibid, 315. On 736n4, the Fishers’ note that “it was not Mme de Staël, but an unnamed lady whom she cited (in 1797, after the Reign of Terror). Napoleon said: “Madame, I don’t like women to mix in politics.” The lady retorted: “You are right, general, but in a country where heads are cut off, it is natural that women should like to know why,” (Considerations sur les principaux événements de la revolution française, 2:201, edition of 1818). 133.  Though the Fishers’ include in this section a final chapter titled “The Warmth of Mexican Charity,” which recounts Calderon de la Barca’s visit to hospitals and foundling homes (Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 528–43), the historical narrative is displayed only in the first three chapters. See “Manifestoes and the Roaring of Cannon,” “Refuge in the Country,” and “Back to the Capital” (Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 495–527). Historian Jan Bazant describes how the Mexican Congress was forced to draft a new constitution to moderate Santa Anna’s near despotic rule. Finally, “when Santa Anna’s fiscal extortions became unbearable, General Paredes, known for his honesty in financial matters, rebelled in Guadalajara. . . . Santa Anna was overthrown at the end of 1844, imprisoned and then exiled for life” (“Mexico: From Independence to 1867,” 3:440–41). 134. All quotes from this paragraph drawn from Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 497, 503, 508. 135.  Ibid, 511. 136.  Editors’ note, Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 738n18; 511–17, 515. 137.  The alliance formed between Generals Valencia, Paredes, and the ubiquitous Santa Anna is described as “a centralist revolt against centralism.” Bazant, “Mexico: From Independence to 1867,” 3:439. 138.  “Santa Anna’s government became increasingly reactionary and autocratic. He loved the pageantry and pomp of office but despised the daily work of administration.” Ibid., 3:451. Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 515, 517. 139.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 517, 300, 321. According to the norms of the period, the author omits the mother’s last name and uses only an underscore to denote her status. Francis Inglis ends the last story ends on this poignant note: “This government, informed of the misfortune, sent for the husband of the deceased, and ordered twenty-five dollars to be given him; but the unfortunate man, though plunged in grief, declared that twelve were sufficient to supply his wants” (Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 299). 140.  Ibid, 300. 141.  Ibid., 314.

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142.  According to de Certeau, The Writing of History, “[h]istoriography . . . represents the dead along a narrative itinerary,”100. Hence, it is “a burial rite” that simultaneously exorcises and honors the dead from previous historical periods (99–102). In his formulation, the gap between past and present, marked by historical writing in terms of the divide of death, allows the living to fully participate in or fulfill the present time (101). Nigel Leask’s article, “‘The Ghost in Chapultepec’: Fanny Calderón de la Barca, William Prescott and Nineteenth-Century Mexican Travel Accounts,” in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. Jaś Elsner and JoanPau Rubiés (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 184–209, 313–16, delves into these ghostly presences as a way to cipher indigenous history. 143.  Cf. Bazant, “Mexico from Independence to 1867,” 3:438. 144.  De Certeau privileges the reader as the source of historical knowledge; The Writing of History, 95. 145.  Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 323, 304, 321. The Fishers make a similar point: “In practice, pronunciamientos often lacked the simplicity of a struggle based on clear-cut principles. What complicated them, and sometimes rendered them intellectually and economically meaningless, was the cynical opportunism of some of the high-ranking military figures of the day” (Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 733n1). Hence their title to chap. 25—”Quiet after the Cannonading” (Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 316–23)—and their cynical view of the whole affair: “nothing was accomplished” (Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 736n1). 146.  After examining Frances Calderón’s role in fostering “Anglo-Saxon . . . expansion,” Cabañas claims that her narrative “opens up the possibility of U.S. intervention in Mexico, and foreshadows the Mexican War of 1846–48.” (“North of Eden,” 2, 14–15); Kaplan and Gerassi Navarro, “Between Empires, . . .” 5, 23–24. Along similar lines, see also Caballero and Hayward, “Narrating Nationalism,” 300, 308. In my view, these overarching conclusions are not sufficiently documented. 147.  Kaplan and Gerassi Navarro, “Between Empires, . . .” 22, 24; Caballero and Hayward, “Narrating Nationalism, . . . 306; 307–8. 148.  Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 423. 149.  De Certeau, The Writing of History, 99. 150. Lukács, The Historical Novel. 151.  “In the nineteenth-century, autobiography is usually validated as history, and, as such, justified for its documentary value. . . .” Molloy, At Face Value, 141. 152.  In both of these cases, the “distinguished men” had also been the Calderóns’ hosts. During the September 1841 episode, the couple had taken refuge at the Fagoagas’ country estate of San Xavier (editors’ note, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 766n1; 506); they had previously visited the Tagles’ hacienda in San Angel and “will shortly return to it again,” (editors’ note, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 767n23). Hence the gesture of including them among Mexico’s luminaries could be interpreted more as an appreciative token of respect than as a “truth claim” on Mexican nationalism.

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153.  All quotes and references from this paragraph drawn from Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 418–24, 762n1, 418, 421, 423, 421–22 (my emphasis), 522. 154.  “Historical discourse makes a social identity explicit, not so much in the way it is “given” or held as stable, as ìn the ways it is differentiated from a former period or another society,” in De Certeau, The Writing of History, 45; author’s emphasis. 155.  Rosario Castellanos, “La mujer mexicana en el siglo XIX,” in Mujer que sabe latín (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1979), 160; originally cited in my essay, “’The Cannon are Roaring, . . .’” in Contesting the Master Narrative. Cabañas alludes to Castellanos’s appraisal as an afterword in his “North of Eden,” 18n16. 156.  Salvatore, “The Enterprises of Knowledge,” 83. 157.  Antonio Benítez Rojo, “The Nineteenth-Century Spanish American Novel,” in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, Vol. 1, Discovery and Modernism. ed. Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 423. Kuhnheim, “Pariah/Messiah,” 27–28. 158.  Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile, 346; Chile, 179. 159.  “Between 1800 and 1850, British travelers printed the first Argentine images; they sketched a geography, conceived a national character. . . .” Cicerchia, Journey, Rediscovery and Narrative, . . .” 26–27. 160.  Ibid., 27.

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Chapter Four

Face-to-Face with the Other: Women Travelers as Ethnographers

After 1825, once Independence was accomplished in the Spanish American mainland, a flurry of commercial explorers, mining enthusiasts, diplomats, single adventurers, and even mercenary soldiers who roamed the continent from Mexico to the Southern Cone was fostered by the interest in trade of newly-minted governments. The explosion of travel books at mid nineteenthcentury recorded the European’s first impressions of unknown regions by means of multiple registers. In South America, the “boom” in commercial travelers that followed the transition to Independence went hand-in-hand with cultural contacts with non-Europeans; mostly, upper-class Creoles who often served as hosts for foreign diplomats, businessmen, and eccentric savants. Despite their privileged status, many Europeans had at least limited contact with the autochthonous peoples of Latin America, so that travel to “the other America” necessarily implied some form of cross-cultural dialogue. Although contact with indigenous and African populations was certainly less frequent, it was precisely the fleetingness of the encounter that produced a clash of values, upsetting the traveler’s comfortable position while at the same time giving a glimpse of the broader social fabric weaved in postIndependence Latin America. Sailing from different parts of Europe, nineteenth-century women traveled to Latin America for motives ranging from the personal to the philanthropic. Their often unwieldy travelogues register similarly fleeting, though not superfluous, approaches to the indigenous, mestizo, and African populations in the New World. As Pérez Mejía has rightly noted, “an ethnographic discourse about America motivated by the concerns of nineteenth century realism makes its first appearance on the pages of these female travel writers.”1 Despite their literary and historical import, contemporary critique of European travel writing tends to address only the presumed pose of “superiority” which 139

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the foreign visitor presumably displayed before the radical difference represented by members of non-European groups. This categorical assumption not only dismisses the intrinsic value of travel writing, but also fails to distinguish the varieties of cultural contact established between European observers and “native” populations of various social classes. The types of cross-cultural contact ranged from engagement with a particular community (artisans in Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile and Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico; slaves in colonial Cuba in Fredrika Bremer’s The Homes of the New World), to interaction with a single individual (the Lucumí dancer who entices the afore-named Swedish traveler; Frances Calderón’s dismissal of a lépero shortly after her arrival in Mexico City). While emphasizing European dominance, readers inevitably come to grips with the fact that women’s travels provide more than a cursory understanding of the culturally Other.2 As we shall glean from Bremer’s letters from Cuba, Graham’s South American Journals, and Tristan’s Pérégrinations, women’s travelogues provide a more complex ethnographic gaze than the “irritating ethnocentrism” leveled at Scotswoman Maria Graham for viewing Chilean customs and character with an English model in mind.3 The set of transatlantic pilgrims studied here illustrate the way in which travel writing legitimized women’s literary vocation. Particularly during the Victorian era, travel afforded women an expansion of mind and spirit as well as a safe vehicle for knowledge of world and of self.4 Since gender and genre are inextricably linked, travel writing served as a popular vehicle for sociological observation; many nineteenth-century writers, like Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer and Harriet Martineau, earned their reputation by long residences in North America, considered a space of utopian projection and a prime laboratory for the observation of customs and mores.5 This type of socially aware traveler elicited Marie-Claire Hoock-Demarle’s term “femmes enquêtrices”; translating the term as “exploratrices sociales,” Pratt adapts the term to her own purposes, while downplaying women’s role as social observers.6 Here I argue, rather, that, due to their exquisite eye for detail and inquisitive gaze, nineteenth-century women anticipated the methods of both sociology and anthropology, disciplines emerging approximately at the same time as their travels, in unique and highly creative ways. Whereas their skills at sociological observation were honed in daily interactions with members of their own class—Creole politicians, ladies of the aristocracy, other European residents abroad, mestizo constituencies—their role as budding ethnographers was strengthened by their attention to native subjects, from domestic servants to indigenous women in the market place to African slaves. The travelers featured here were all, in varying degrees, anthropologists avant la lettre, what

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is evidenced, most of all, in the positioning of the female travel writer; that is, in her unique voice as narrator of the account.7 With similar curiosity yet each with their own unique accent, Graham, Calderón de la Barca, Tristan, and Bremer’s accounts evidence close attention to local habitat, peoples, and mores, an empathy filtered through the creation of a complex literary persona. Though at times incurring a tone of exoticism or even outright rejection of the culturally Other, European women were, as a general rule, sensitive observers of a society whose rigid class and racial boundaries upset their accepted set of values. Despite marked individual differences—what Geertz calls the signature or distinctive way in which each woman writer constructs a “writerly identity”—they achieved one of the most difficult challenges of ethnographic writing—a balance between subjective impressions and empirical observation.8 By blending their own personal response with objective and multi-layered descriptions of public spaces, rituals, and practices, nineteenth-century women managed the art of “how to sound like a pilgrim and a cartographer at the same time.”9 Whether this could be construed as a uniquely female trait or a dilemma shared by all ethnographers, the fact is that transatlantic pilgrims en(gendered) a unique kind of anthropological knowledge. Adapting to our purposes what one French critic has called an “ethnographie des femmes”—a type of ethnographic practice centering on women’s social roles, authored by women, yet reaching out to recreate a visual, cognitive, and emotive map of a new social landscape—this genre clearly draws on an unique set of rhetorical properties. Three interrelated factors combine to forge an “ethnographie des femmes”: the methods of inquiry, the object of study, and the cultural site or circumstance to (and in) which the foreign traveler bonded. Inspired by the findings of contemporary ethnography, in this chapter I show, first, how European women reconstruct the culturally Other in “our America” by codified methods of “participant-observation;” mainly, “thick description” and a “customs-and-manners” approach. Women’s travels produce what I call “ethnographic sketches,” privileged if at times summary glimpses at the non-European populations of the New World. These sketches reveal, in turn, a spectrum of approaches toward the Other, which range from radical ambivalence, to a desire for close contact, to exclusion, attitudes which, in turn, influence the type of ethnographic discourse prevalent in the travel account. The set of travel books studied here deploy at least two types of anthropological knowledge: one derived from the presumed authority of a traveling observer and the unraveling of that authority by face-to-face interactions which thrust the foreign visitor into the universe of the Other. Yet a third type of anthropological knowledge results when European women come in contact with their own peers; mainly, upper-class Creole

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women cloistered within the space of the home or convent.10 When dealing with their own sex, nineteenth-century travelogues construct yet another variant of an “ethnographie des femmes” where the female Other functions as mirror to the (observing but often self-absorbed) narrative voice (of the traveling subject).11 This dual recognition and differentiation filters the traveling experience, resulting in a self-transformation into the world of the Other, or a vision of the female Self as Other. Before delving into the practice of an “ethnographie des femmes,” it is instructive to trace the impact of nineteenth-century modes of travel on the emergence of modern anthropology. As James Clifford and Clifford Geertz have shown, ethnographic discourse implied a written account of field work in remote places of the globe, much in line with the long-standing genre of exploration and travel, which provided a verifiable account of the journey. Yet since this text about a culture at the margins of Europe was produced after the ethnographer’s return to the West, the pattern of a “traveling text” asserts itself in both disciplines. From Enlightenment scientists like Alexander von Humboldt to the four women studied here, travelers to the New World crafted an authorial persona, paralleling the invention of the “authoritative” anthropologist steeped in field-work, who emerged as “an omnipresent, knowledgeable exegete and spokesman” for the host culture.12 At mid twentieth-century, the emphasis shifted: “[a]s anthropologists came to acquire their own data through intensive fieldwork, they sought disassociation from the unscientific traveler who was an amateur, a dilettante, and even a novelist.”13 Gradually, anthropology became distinct from travel, as the discipline centered on the practice of “participant observation” carried out by a dedicated on-looker, whose prolonged experience in the field validated the interpretation of culture.14 In late-twentieth century, the two roles converge once more, as anthropologists eagerly incorporate “fictional devices” and become more aware of the literary quality of their writing in their attempt to capture, not merely the “essence” of the host culture, but the experience of “being there,” an experience that must be forcibly and persuasively conveyed to the reader. The new meta-ethnography also strives to be not merely a synchronic account of a faraway place and community, but, rather, the end result of a two-way discursive exchange with members of the host culture.15 This dynamic exchange implies at least a partial transformation of the ethnographer’s world view, parallels which lead to Clifford’s refashioning of modern anthropology as a “travel encounter,” a combination of moving away and staying at home, suggesting a new persona for the ethnologist as post-modern nomad or world citizen.16 Shifting back in time, this notion of a “travel encounter” fits European women’s travels, since they carved out a meaningful portion of their lives in Latin America by extended periods of residence

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abroad and the forging of intimate family ties. Rather than brief forays into the unknown, as was the case with “intrepid” Victorians to Africa, European women in the new continent sought to transcend their foreign status, yearning to make a permanent mark on their adapted countries. The tension between domesticity and foreignness, attachment and detachment, belonging and alienation, runs through the set of travelogues studied here. Another rift is the rhetorical divide between the ethnographer’s public persona and his private self, who must come “home” at the end of his field work. In “‘From the Native’s Point of View,’” Geertz reflects on the fissure running through Malinowski’s Diary, as he admits to a sense of discomfort when venturing in strange locales and places, effectively debunking the illusion of “chameleon fieldworker” he had single-handedly projected in his classic anthropological studies.17 Tucked inside the folds of their traveling journals, European women travelers show a similar kind of ambivalence when confronted by New World realities, though their self-reflection is simultaneous to first-hand observation, and not an a posteriori revelation. Using similar strategies to account for their “signature” or “authorial presence within a text”—according to Geertz, one of the most pressing riddles in ethnographic writing—women travelers either suppress this voice in an apologetic pose for making their accounts public (Bremer in the prologue to The Homes of the New World) or else project their autobiographical “I” into multiple guises in order to textually perform their authorial persona (Tristan’s critique of the prevailing gender system in the Pérégrinations).18 The rhetoric of European women’s travels unsettles the Self/Other divide, revealing multiple mediations based on the interactions and contact between Europeans and the emerging national constituencies of Latin America. These travelogues exemplify what I call a female-encoded ethnography where the persona of the traveler seeks out yet at the same time shuns the Other with whom she comes in contact; in both cases, the traveling subject’s position within the prevalent gender system plays a role in her respective ethnographic commentary. Situated at the “detached” end of the spectrum, Maria Graham’s South American journals construct a complex ethnographic gaze fostering the traveler’s self-transformation, emblematized in the frontispiece illustration of Journal of a Residence in Chile. “Travelling in Spanish America” suggests a narrator who is journeying in; the portrait suggests “a self-reflexive pose” in which the traveling subject is aware of herself “in the act of observing,” an act of introspection which becomes integral to her traveling persona.19 In a parallel gesture, Graham’s piercing gaze outward functions as a prelude to the book, anticipating her desire “to explore Chile in all its facets”; hence signaling, from the start, a strong ethnographic impulse tempered both by her own life circumstances and the political turmoil leading to Chilean independence.

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THE RITUAL OF MOURNING: TAKING THE OTHER IN Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile opens on a note of mourning, as its first scene recounts the solemn transfer of Captain Thomas Graham’s corpse ashore and his subsequent burial. Though the event of his death is elided in the text, the perspective of widowhood frames the entire narrative, so that journal writing unfolds as a recourse with which Maria Graham fashions herself into a new (and solitary) mode of existence: “I cannot forget that I am a widow, unprotected, and in a foreign land, separated from all my natural friends by distant and dangerous ways, whether I return by sea or land!”20 As “solitary traveler,” Maria Graham ultimately sought solace in the pleasures of travel, while at the same time experiencing its pains: besides the loss of her husband, the illness of her seaside relative, Glennie, and, always, the turbulent sea.21 Graham’s transition to widowhood conditions her ethnographic gaze, resulting in her particular use of “thick description” to situate the traveler in her new surroundings and reconstruct a provisional sense of home. Conditioned by the personal circumstances which caused her to stay in the country, the start of the Chile Journal traces an economy of travel based on loss and gain, the physical and emotional transfer between point of departure and destination, with domicile as central point of a narrower compass.22 Gone is the optimistic sense of a grand transatlantic passage, as the narrator poignantly tells of her need for bearings in response to the recent experience of loss and bereavement. Van Den Abbeele’s assertion that “[t]he concept of a home is needed . . . only after the home has already been left behind” is particularly relevant to Graham’s initial gesture of appropriating Chile—and the port city of Valparaíso—as a substitute home.23 Her poignant phrase at crossing the threshold—“I took possession of my cottage at Valparaiso [sic] and felt indescribable relief in being quiet and alone” sparks a circular itinerary in which the written text of the journey “brings back what was lost in the voyage.”24 In these opening scenes, the word home is highlighted as the privileged point of departure and return for temporary forays into surrounding territory, a narrow comfort zone beyond which Graham, despite her long sea journeys, could not bear to stray.25 Like Flora Tristan, Graham inscribes the “indoor world” as “the seat of the self”; both authors explore their external surroundings in terms of the private domain, so that “the familiar and enclosed” space of the home functions as both release and refuge from the pressures of history.26 This circuit between domestic enclosure and the public sphere is a constant in women’s travel writing, recalling too Clifford’s notion of a secular pilgrimage as an apt metaphor for women’s travels.27

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Figure 4.1.  Maria Graham, Plate III, “View of Valparaíso Bay from My House,” Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822. And a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1824), face title page, 146.

Graham’s rhetoric of travel absorbs the ethnographic dimension within this discrete sphere of access, while gradually expanding outward to recount the tale of Spanish American Independence. Pérez Mejía has rightly assessed Graham’s difference vis-à-vis commercial explorers to the Southern Cone at mid nineteenth-century: her keen observation of ethnic groups, along with her “consciousness of herself as a white foreigner” situate her account as a precursor text of modern anthropology.28 The accent on the domestic, shared too by Fredrika Bremer’s 1853 account, The Homes of the New World, marks European women’s contribution to the emerging discipline of ethnography. Of all the pages in her South American journals, the opening sketches of village life in Valparaíso focus on the topography of the seaside town, noting habitat and domestic architecture primarily as outward signs of family life practiced indoors. Teasing readerly expectations regarding her own substitute home, Graham offers, instead, a close-up look at the home of her neighbor, a revered “old lady” fortunate to have “two of the most beautiful boys I ever saw.” Only after accounting for the Other does Graham allow the reader to step into the cottage serving her as shelter and a respite from grief.29

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Contrasting to the urban household is Graham’s rendition of the Chilean rancho, which she sees as “so far back with regard to the conveniences and improvements of civilised life.” For Pérez Mejía, this judgment proves not only the author’s sustained pose of superiority but also her characteristic mix of “irritating ethnocentrism” with an eye for detail and cultural difference.30 Since genre expectations dictate that “the traveler makes moral judgments and the anthropologist makes moral assessments,” Graham’s assessment demarcates the difference between travel writing and ethnography.31 While her description of urban and rural habitat in Chile conforms to the practice of “participant-observation,” her sensitivity to local mores and norms of “civilised life,” as she calls it, is tempered by faith in a European notion of progress prevalent at the time.32 Having traced the topography of Valparaíso, Graham’s ethnographic eye sweeps the most public of urban spaces: the market-place, in all its bustling variety and flavors. The delightful account of meat, fish, fruit and vegetable markets, side-by-side with stalls selling numerous “articles of ordinary consumption” typifies the penchant for social observation typical of the nineteenth-century travel book. As Maria Frawley has shown, socially-aware women observers like Harriet Martineau and Fredrika Bremer inaugurated this type of travel account, which was centered primarily in North America, “widely seen as an experimental society ripe for investigation.”33 Travelers to Latin America often establish their ethnographic authority and penchant for social observation by reference to their country of origin, such as Graham’s ironic commentary, elicited at her first ramble through the streets of Valparaíso: “England, with all thy faults, I love thee still, Cowper said at home, and Lord Byron in Calais. For my part, I believe if they had either of them been in Valparaiso, they would have forgotten that there were any faults at all in England.” Typical of the “moral assessment” associated with the ethnographic encounter, it is important to note the context of these at first glance derogatory comments: during a visit to a local apothecary shop, the English traveler was astonished to find jars of preserved animal parts and skins scattered alongside medicinal herbs and ointments. Like her earlier appraisal of the Chilean rancho, Graham’s subsequent comparison with “a labourer’s hut in Scotland” reveals her allegiance to a European standard of progress.34 Yet it also “presents the effect of the experience upon [her]self,” given the “ego-centric” focus of the travel account, with the voyager as organizing principle.35 Passages like these not only show the tension between ethnography and travel, the “being there” as opposed to the “getting there,” but it also illustrates the way in which self-styled ethnographers managed to convey both an “intimate” portrait of a people as well as a “cool assessment” of the other.36 By striking a delicate balance between detachment and engagement,

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Graham’s travelogue reads as healthy antidotes to Rousseau-inspired idealizations of semi-tropical zones and their inhabitants, and thus as a corrosive view of European exoticism of Latin American (and other colonial) Others. Graham’s depiction of an artisan’s village in Rincona stands out as the most salient example of the ambivalent “ethnographic authority” constructed throughout the Chile Journal. By means of “thick description,” she conveys the stark living conditions, unstable gender arrangements, and strict division of labor prevalent among the artesanos [artisans]. Graham’s perception of the Chilean under-class is historically accurate, as it shows the way that rigid class hierarchies were preserved from the colonial period to the new republic.37 Aligned with Fredrika Bremer’s look at “the inner life of the home,” the term she coined for the private sphere in her 1853 travelogue to the Americas, Graham’s sketch conforms to Clifford Geertz’s criteria for “a piece of anthropological interpretation,” in so far as it “trac[es] the curve of social discourse, fixing it into inspectable form.”38 A sympathetic look at the deplorable living conditions inside “the potter’s cottages,” where there was hardly any furniture, and infants slept in hammocks, reveals the type of empathy associated with twentieth-century ethnography.39 The English traveler next turns to the family forced to inhabit such a tight space. Besides physical habitat, it is the domestic arrangement which most strikes the foreign visitor, showing that the focus “on particular institutions” meant, for the female ethnographer, mostly family and marital mores.40 In her glance inward Graham notes that the paternal figure was visibly lacking, leaving the children with “neither father nor man of any kind to own or protect them.” This elicits a contrast between two similar social groups in differing locales, where the “natural gentleness and goodness of nature of the people of Chile” surpasses the “effrontery” of its European counterpart. This contrast between the Old World and the New follows Clifford’s method of “‘participant observation’”: “on the one hand, grasping the sense of specific occurrences and gestures empathetically, on the other [sic] stepping back to situate these meanings in wider contexts.”41 According to the first step in this method, Graham notes the sharp gender differentiation evident among Chilean artisans, for pottery-making is presented as primarily a “female industry.”42 Graham’s look at the unfavorable living conditions of the Chilean underclass reveals, in this scene, not a rampant “ethnocentrism,” but rather the manner in which ethnographic discourse “dissolves the opacity” of the people presented, in all their weakness and foibles, by the scrutinizing eye of the social observer.43 Graham’s ethnographic gaze is composed of both minute observation of local customs and mores, albeit tainted by her own normative values, and an effort to engage the culturally Other. As part of this recurrent ambivalence evident in foreign women’s travels, in her concluding remarks, Graham acknowledges the limits of empathy and of female solidarity, as she

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bemoans the restraints imposed on even the most well-meaning of travelers: “If I cannot better their condition, why awaken them to a sense of its miseries?”44 At certain key passages and peak experiences, then, European women travelers are forced to acknowledge the limitations of their vision, and, consequently, turn their gaze inward. A later scene in the town of Melipilla gives a “customs-and-manners” description of its pottery, whose superior quality is due to the “black clay” from which the jars are made. Inspired by the artistry of these wares, Graham gives a detailed description of the furnace, making an analogy between the semi-buried oven and “antique tombs.” In contrast to the earlier “picturesque” description, Graham next anticipates the commercial expansion of the craft into a full-fledged industry. Contrary to her stance in Brazil, where she favored tradition over modernity, in Chile Graham fosters the goal of progress and prosperity, which she envisioned for her adoptive country. Here ethnographic discourse spills over into the pro-commercial stance associated with European travelers. Although not directly tied to any economic venture, Graham is labeled as part of the “capitalist vanguard,” and her tour of craftsmen’s villages is seen as foster-

Figure 4.2.  Maria Graham, Vignette, “Great Ovens for baking the Wine Jars, &c. on the Plain of Millipilla [sic],” Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1824), 262.

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ing a grand “Civilizing Mission” with a European standard in mind.45 Yet the import of these passages is necessarily aligned with a broader attention to modernity and a keen awareness—almost a melancholy—at the loss of traditional values. The female art of pottery-making appears as a type of “local knowledge” resistant to commercialization. Much like the protagonist of Borges’ “El etnógrafo,” when the Scotswoman finally gleans the secret of the Chilean artisans, this is an initiation, however tentative, into the world of the Other.46 The unconscious urge to suspend the “I/ Other” divide provides a subtle undertone in European women’s travels. This is illustrated in Figure 4.3. when the traveler notes how the difference between indigenous mores in “language, habits, or dress” and those of “other Chilenos” (criollos and mestizos) has been erased. Like other European women, Graham hints here at a partial, and yet unfinished, process of transculturation: while the indigenous peoples have mostly assimilated to the Creoles, the latter have also “borrowed many of their usages.” Standing at the side of the road, Graham constructs a self-aware ethnographic gaze that, while attuned to the class conflicts of post-Independence nations, strives to harmonize racial ambiguities.47

Figure 4.3.  Maria Graham, “Costume of Chile.” Plate X, Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1824), 262.

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TEA-TIME IN RIO DE JANEIRO: MARIA GRAHAM’S SOUTH AMERICAN JOURNALS AND THE PLEASURES OF TRAVEL On a balmy evening in April 28, 1823, Maria Graham sat down to tea at a country mansion on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Meant as a birthday celebration for Dona Ana, wife of a prominent member of the Brazilian Creole elite, Graham noticed a resemblance with the afternoon teas she had enjoyed back in England: “Soon after all the company was assembled, . . . the ceremony of tea-drinking commenced, and was conducted pretty much as in England.” Despite the re-enactment of the same ritual, there were noticeable differences between the Brazilian version of the traditional English ceremony and the Old World one: it was an evening rather than an afternoon tea; moreover, “instead of standing with cups in our hands,” Graham added, “we all sat and took our refreshments at leisure,” after which the party of both foreign and native guests “adjourned to the music-room.”48 This play of sameness and difference emblematizes the relationship between Foreign traveler and local subject prevalent in nineteenth-century travel writing to Latin America. During the evening tea at the Carvalho e Mello’s “country-house at Botafogo,” the English visitor noted both its solid construction and its luxurious French decor.49 Both architecture and social ritual reflect what sociologist Gilberto Freyre has called the “re-Europeanization” of Brazilian society during the late eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth-century, a refashioning resulting from the transfer of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro in 1807.50 With the arrival of King Dom João VI and his exiled nobles, came “‘a most admired tea pot that made the best tea in the world’”;51 although considered a novelty, tea marked a shift in social customs in nineteenth-century Brazil: the privileging of European norms in fashion, architecture, and other details of social life, even to children’s dress.52 This shift paralleled another crucial transition in Brazilian society: the decline of the rural plantation, with its patriarchal mode of organization, and the concurrent rise of the city, characterized by a sharply contrasting urban topography between the spacious residences of the rich and the shanties of the poor. Thus, the elegant country abode visited by Graham represented an old-style countryside mansion associated with an earlier plantation economy, while at the same time exhibiting the characteristics of the new urban dwelling, decorated according to French interior design.53 In Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, Graham constructs an “ethnographic authority” not as detached “participant observer,” the pose adopted in the Chile Journal, but rather through an intense gaze fused with direct involvement in daily rituals, what Michel de Certeau calls “the practice of everyday life.”54

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Thus Graham inserts herself in the daily life of her Brazilian hosts in an effort to gain a fuller understanding of their society and forms of life, a gesture reflected in her rhetoric of travel, structured as “a record of daily happenings.”55 As with the tea-ceremony, Graham documents the upper-class aspirations to mimic European mores, typical of the Brazilian elite’s transition to a more urban, and hence modern, life-style.56 Less salient, perhaps, than in the Chile Journal is Graham’s strong identity as a British subject—perhaps because, according to Gilberto Freyre, Brazilians projected onto Europeans—particularly the British—the role of “superior being,” willing to please “‘the eyes of foreigners’” as part of their own identity formation.57 In line with the gaze of curiosity traced in “Traveling in Spanish America” (the opening illustration in the Chile Journal), Graham graciously returns the look, turning herself into an “insider/outsider,” precisely the pose that conveys the sense of “‘I was there’” of the ethnographer as insider and participant.”58 Graham’s nuanced ethnographic gaze incorporates two opposing class and racial registers: at one extreme, her participation in the phenomenon of “reEuropeanization,” surfacing mainly in the descriptions of celebrations such as the masked ball, and, at the other, her encounter with the abject condition of slavery. In between these two groups, a middle stratum, composed of free artisans, musicians, and craftsmen, balance out the socio-economic extremes of “masters and slaves” to furnish a social history of nineteenth-century Brazil. By weaving snapshots of these groups into the fabric of her Brazilian Journal, Graham anticipates Clifford Geertz’s privileging of “thick description” as not only the defining trait of ethnography, but also as its most urgent task.59 Partially modeled after European festivities, masked balls were considered “innovations” in nineteenth-century Brazil, as they shared characteristics of both public and private domains, upstaging traditional festivities even though they were held during carnival time, either in public theaters or in “‘country residences.”60At these balls, Graham observed minute details, from the French-styled dances to children’s subdued behavior. Moreover, the balls offered the opportunity to garner discrete data on Brazilian family arrangements, perhaps to tamper her mostly derogatory view of Creole women, whom she described in unflattering terms after an unannounced visit in Bahia.61 Graham’s presence at these balls was not only a frivolous social occasion but also documented a political process unique to nineteenthcentury Brazil: the achievement of independence by means of a transplanted Portuguese empire. En route to the ship that would carry her back to England, Graham witnessed “the entrance of the first Brazilian guard into the palace, while the last Portuguese marched out”; in the midst of chaos, Graham offered her cabin to the royal couple, while the British, hoping to impress their guests, planned a masked ball on board. In the Brazil journal, the masked

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ball attests to the European impact in shaping Brazilian cultural identity, and shows too how local subjects adapted these foreign practices to suit their own emerging sense of nationality.62 Yet Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil also contains many references to local rituals and customs still untainted by the European eye. In his study of nineteenth-century Brazil, Freyre describes how African rituals, dances, and carnival celebrations were disdained by urban Creoles in their attempts to reshape themselves as governing elites.63 Graham’s “ethnographic authority” attests to the authenticity of these rituals, which tended either to disappear completely or else move toward a transcultural blend mixed with European patterns. Like Fredrika Bremer in Cuba, Graham’s Journal preserves a form of cultural memory lost by the onslaught of modernity. Her description of musical forms and instruments such as the marimba, the gourd, the twostringed guitar and the African drum, testifies to an “ethnographic authority” sensitive to the uniqueness (and fragility) of local culture. In a parallel scene to her close look at the potters’ village in Chile, Graham shows a preference for local artisans, dialogues with a black carpenter, and later praises the artistic and technical abilities of mulatto artisans and artists, scenes which confirm the predominant role played by mulattos in post-independence Brazil.64 These sketches attest to the survival of Afro-Brazilian culture, while contributing a valuable sociological dimension to Graham’s travel account. The focus on craftsmanship contrasts with Graham’s critique of commercialism. As in the Chile Journal, in Brazil she had strong words for the impact of British commercial interests: noting “the apathy of British shopkeepers,” this quality did not prevent its paradoxical effect insofar as “the streets are lined with English goods.” In contrast to the commercial exploits of her countrymen, she then singled out a prosperous mulatto boatman who had bought his freedom and managed to produce a small fortune; his story would be exemplary for other local subjects to emulate. Though clearly aligned with an ideology of progress, Graham presents herself univocally as a preserver of local culture before the transition to modernity ushers the impact of crass materialism.65 The Brazil Journal thus rings in a critique of modernity as Graham registered the rivalry between native artisans and foreign merchants, a conflict escalating toward the latter part of the nineteenth-century, when the rush toward modernization was at its height.66 Concluding that “everything is gaining an European air,” Graham’s Journal perceptively glimpses the tension between tradition and modernity. Graham’s campaign for local agriculture—at a banquet, she noted that “the oldest inhabitants of Brazil praised most what came from afar; while we all gave the preference to the productions of the country” is yet another gesture in defense of local culture and tradition.67

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Nowhere is Graham’s “ethnographic authority” more contested than in the scenes when she confronts the institution of slavery for the first time. In the Journal of a Voyage to Brazil the gaze is turned outward, to the impact caused by a society based on slave labor. Unlike Bremer, whose choice to live near slave quarters during her two-month stay in Cuba enabled her to single out individual informants forced to live under an oppressive system, Graham’s constructs a composite, face-less mass to depict the sufferings of slavery. Hence the contrast between Bremer’s concrete view of slavery and Graham’s more abstract one. In contrast to the Chile Journal, which opens with Graham’s self-conscious pose as traveler, the frontispiece illustration of the Journal of a Voyage to Brazil depicts the slave market at Rio, an emblem of Graham’s initial shock at finding herself in a slave-holding country.68 At “the first sight of a slave-market,” Graham echoes a similar rejection of slavery as voiced by most European travelers, yet her gendered stance surfaces clearly in terms of empathy, as in this poignant passage describing the conditions of the slaves:69 [W]hen imagination pictures slavery, they are nothing compared to the staggering sight of a slave-market. . . . [A]bout fifty young creatures, boys and girls, with all the appearance of disease and famine consequent upon scanty food and long confinement in unwholesome places, were sitting and lying about among the filthiest animals in the streets.

In plantation society, the slave market marked the transitional site where slaves arrived after the middle transit and also a crucial point of departure before subjected to the humiliating transaction of the sale. As a public space, the slave market was emblematic of two sets of opposing discourses regulating the institution of slavery in nineteenth-century century Brazil: on the one hand, the attempt by colonial officials to “police” what they considered “disorderly” conduct on the part of slaves; on the other, the slave-owners’ denial of slavery under the guise of “paternal authority.” This attitude, in turn, formed part of the Creole élite’s efforts to align themselves with the crown’s reconstruction of Rio de Janeiro as a modern city.70 The shock registered in Graham’s gaze, as well as the contradictions with which the dominant creole society viewed (and tolerated) slavery, are projected onto a second illustration of the slave-market in Pernambuco. Here the clash between European surveillance and the racial conflicts prevalent in Brazilian society is sharply depicted with the presence of soldiers blocking the enslaved group with bayonets. Graham’s image captures the fundamental contradiction between colony and “metropolization” while revealing as well her own instinctive rejection of the abject institution.71 Whereas “Val Longo” had elicited an ethical condemnation of slavery—“The sight sent us home to the ship with the heartache: and resolution, . . . that nothing in our power should be considered too

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Figure 4.4.  Augustus Earle, “View of Count Maurice’s Gate at Pernambuco, with the Slave Market,” Plate III, Maria Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1824), 106–7.

little, or too great, that can tend to abolish or to alleviate slavery,” the same indignation is voiced toward the end of her Journal, when she returns again to “the slave-market of Rio.” Though Graham initially kept her distance with an abstract condemnation of slavery, on visiting the market a second time she has a threshold experience at the view of the suffering body. After describing the faces and bodies of the “new negroes” brought into the market, she “approached them,” noting that “something about me attracted their attention.” More hesitant than Fredrika Bremer in her direct involvement with blacks in Cuba, Graham hovers here on the brink of the Self-Other divide: “I went and stood near them, and though certainly more disposed to weep, I forced myself to smile at them, and look cheerfully, and kissed my hand to them, with all which they seemed delighted, and jumped about and danced, as if returning my civilities.” Voicing the same restraint with which she ended her visit to the Chilean artisans (“I would not, if I could, shorten their moments of glee, by awakening them to a sense of the sad things of slavery”), Graham, like Bremer was to do in Cuba, concludes with an energetic and resolute “appeal to the masters” to eliminate “the evils of slavery.” Unlike Bremer’s impassioned defense in favor of Cuba’s enslaved population, Graham shows

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the limits of empathy by her consistent depiction of the slaves as “whole” or “‘absolute subjects,’” consequently lacking historical agency.72 Despite self-imposed limits to the practice of “participant-observation,” Graham’s repeatedly documented the hardships and habits of Brazilian slaves. One of the most salient is her representation of capoeira, an African-Brazilian martial art considered a form of “violent disobedience” and consequently one of the most cruelly repressed manifestations of local culture.73 Particularly in her forays to the rural areas of Brazil, Graham observed the conditions of the slaves, noting their diet, living conditions, health, marriage mores, and social organization.74 Though at first Graham’s critique of slavery is limited to the expression of her own personal discomfort with the effects of the abhorred institution, her use of a “customs-and-manners” description, along with the ethical rejection of the “odious commerce” both in Rio and beyond, align her with the ideological thrust of British abolitionism. As a companion volume to a Journal of a Residence in Chile, Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil manifests a wide range of ethnographic responses, from initial ambivalence, to partial identification with non-Western Others, to a mature stance of detached observation that marks the limit of the Self-Other encounter. AT HOME IN THE FIELDS: A SWEDE IN THE SUGAR PLANTATION European women travelers’ insight into the world of the Other is, in part, a result of their marginal position within the prevalent gender system, which tended to make them more sympathetic to the plight of marginal populations who occupied the symbolic space of Otherness in the European imagination. Yet the early (and sometimes crude) form of ethnographic awareness prevalent in these nineteenth-century travelogues does not automatically imply a genderspecific capacity for empathy. Clifford Geertz convincingly argues that the anthropologist’s ability to “speak for the native” is not an inbred psychological trait (which Geertz assumes to be gender-neutral), the result of “an extraordinary sensibility” which would allow the observer to “think, feel, and perceive like a native,” but rather stems from the capacity for close observation. Based on his own practice of cultural anthropology in Java, Bali, and Morocco, Geertz concludes that the most complete form of anthropological knowledge implies “searching out and analyzing the [Other’s] symbolic forms—words, images, institutions, behaviors—in terms of which, in each place, people actually represented themselves to themselves and to one another.”75 This is precisely what Swedish novelist, philanthropist, and devout globe-trotter Frederika Bremer accomplished during her two-month stay in Cuba from February to March, 1851.

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When Fredrika Bremer arrived on the shores of Cuba in late January, 1851, she had already experienced slavery first-hand in her trajectory through the American South. Before coming to America, Bremer was perceived as “an ally of the abolitionist cause”; indeed, the topic of slavery figures prominently in The Homes of the New World, taking up nearly the entire first volume and a significant portion of the second.76 Despite the fact that a society ruled by the master-slave relationship was contrary to Bremer’s philanthropic and Christian world-view, The Homes of the New World reveals a fundamental rift between Bremer’s ideals and her face-to-face encounter with the subjects of slavery. Addressed to her sister Agathe, who remained at the family estate in Årsta, the letters composing The Homes of the New World read more as an inner dialogue, as Bremer attempted to come to grips with a world which threatened to shatter her utopian projection that in America “the future of humanity” loomed near.77 Bremer’s declared empathy for the Other is riddled by many contradictions, some deriving from the actual debate on slavery, and others stemming from Bremer’s own incapacity to come to terms with a degraded social world.78 Hence, Lofsvold argues that the Swede’s conciliatory position vis-à-vis slavery may have been due to her inbred idealism, her need “to order reality according to an ideal.”79 For “Bremer sought a peaceful, median way out of the slavery dilemma; this “conciliatory middle way” to the pressing issue of emancipation fitted neither the Southern pro-slavery stance nor the committed posture of ardent abolitionists from the North.80 Like Maria Graham, Bremer shares the ambivalent stance of the European observer, for her “middle way” echoed the opinion of other foreign travelers to plantation economies, including women, who adopted a reformist stance regarding slavery. Seen from a contemporary vantage point, Bremer may not have gone far enough, yet her measured approach to the slavery debate was in conformity with the international thrust of female participation in reform movements throughout the nineteenth century.81 Historian Margaret McFadden claims that “Bremer truly came to know the other with loving perception.”82 Within this context, Fredrika Bremer’s transamerican sojourn exemplifies a female practice of “ethnographic authority” given her intense “participantobserver” mode while approaching a culture different from her own.83 Bremer’s positioning was by no means new; Victorian women travelers to North America adopted the methods of social science, particularly sociology, geography, and ethnography, in their efforts to record “the native voice.”84 The Swedish novelist’s interest in the autochthonous peoples of the Americas surfaces mid-way through her journey; first, in the American South, where she has frequent contact with members of the abolitionist movement, and where she (sometimes naïvely) appraises the conditions of slaves populated

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in “villages”; in the prairies of the heartland, she intrudes into the lives of indigenous communities in her crossing of Minnesota frontier settlements.85 At various points in her narrative, Bremer compares the American “negroes” with the Indians, tending to favor the first group, particularly for their deep spirituality manifested in music and song.86 Despite voicing a type of racial stereotyping, Bremer shows a heightened sensitivity to the plight of nonWestern peoples in the New World, representing a more engaged perspective than her more detached British peers. Entering the Southern United States by way of Charleston, South Carolina, Bremer’s first impressions of slavery are flawed by a fundamental contradiction: while adamantly denouncing slavery in one breath, in the other she persistently disbelieves the cruel treatment of slaves. This ideological dissonance, along with her irritating conformity with the “benevolent” view of slavery voiced by Southern plantation owners, could be explained by the fact that she stayed at the homes of European plantation owners or members of the planters’ class, hence owing them an implicit ideological allegiance.87 In contrast to her Southern tour, where she only made itinerant excursions to slave villages, in Cuba, Bremer sets up dwelling in the midst of the sugarcane field. Much like the anthropologist for whom “the field is a home away from home,”88 this privileged site enabled her to visit slave barracks, the homesteads of free blacks, and the many Boheah [sic] [bohíos] or thatchedroof dwellings which dot the Cuban countryside. Unlike other women travelers for whom “[h]ome is both the literal and metaphorical point of departure,” in Bremer’s case, she is, literally, at home in the field.89 This choice marks not only a shift in the established tradition of the European travel book, but also the unique place which Fredrika Bremer carved out among other transatlantic pilgrims. More than any other author, Bremer exemplifies the problematic between travel and indwelling at the heart of the ethnographer’s condition. Bremer’s look at Cuban slave society exemplifies the contemporary practice of ethnographic fieldwork not as a distinct site, but rather as a “travel encounter,” a combination of “dwelling” and traveling, moving away and staying at home.90 During her two-month stay in Cuba, the Swedish visitor installs herself at different country abodes—first at “the little rural village, or small town of Serro, two miles from Havana [sic, El Cerro],” then at the “Ariadne Inhegno” [sic] [Ariadne Plantation] in Matanzas, a relatively small sugar estate where she stays from March 7th to March 21st; from March 23rd to the end of the month she moves on to the bigger “St. Amelia Inhegno” [St. Amelia Plantation], a typical factoría where she keenly observes a more elaborate process of sugar production. Prolonging her stay over a week or more at each of these varying sites, Bremer thus transforms herself into an indweller rather than a

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traveler, a “participant-observer” immersed in the daily life of the plantation rather than an occasional visitor.91 In early April she also visits the “Caffetal L’Industrie,” a coffee estate owned by an American family, a visit which coincides with “the commencement of spring in Sweden” and which inspires her sketches of the flying “cuculios” [cocuyos or fireflies]. This is the last of her country abodes, as a week later she is back at Matanzas, in Havana by mid-month, where she walks the heart of the colonial city over a ten-day stay; then, after a brief trip to San Antonio de los Bagnos [sic] [San Antonio de los Baños] and a tour of nearby Caffetal la Concordia, she takes her “last great view of Cuba” the morning of May 8th.92 Parallel to a conversion experience in the South, where, aboard a steamship bound for Savannah, Georgia, she finally realizes the full import of the physical harm inflicted on the slaves, Bremer’s position vis-à-vis slavery shifts again. At the Ariadne Plantation in Matanzas, she has an opportunity to witness, first-hand, the material conditions of a large-scale sugar mill. There Bremer deepened her sensitivity to the underside of slavery: I have now been here for more than a week in the very lap of slavery, and during the first few days of my visit I was so depressed that I was not able to do much. Close before my window . . . I could not avoid seeing the whole day a group of negro women under the whip, the cracking of which (in the air, however) above their heads, and the driver’s (a negro) impatiently-repeated cry of “Arrea! Arrea!” be quick! get on! kept them working on without any intermission. And through the night—the whole night—I heard their weary footsteps . . . outside my window . . . the crushed sugar-cane which they carried from the sugar mill.

This passage effectively combines empathy toward the Other with an awareness of the mechanics of sugar production in a Spanish Caribbean colony. Noting with minute detail the harsh working conditions at the mill—the slaves’ work-day, their constant threat of physical punishment, the incessant nature of the sugar harvest—she cannot “reconcile” herself to the monotony of forced labor. When she sees the slaves’ “good, pleasant, and even joyous appearance,” this face-to-face encounter motivates, in the subsequent scene, her decision to embark on ethnographic field-work by taking up residence near the slave quarters.93 From her first contact with the subjects of slavery, Bremer exhibits a keen interest in the slaves’ habitat and social mores. Her description of the slave quarters unfolds a symbolic reading of the abode of slavery as a prison-house: I have several times visited the Negro-Slaves’ Bohea [sic], which is a kind of fortress-like wall, built on the four sides of a large, square court-yard. . . . The slaves’ dwellings are within the wall—one room for each family—and open up

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into the court. Nothing is to be seen on the outside of the wall but a row of small openings, secured with iron bars, one to each room, and so high in the wall that the slaves can not look out from within.

Focusing next on the daily eating ritual, she provides a detailed account of the meagerly rations allowed the slaves (“calabash bowls of snow-white rice,” . . . “salt fish and smoked meat,”. . . “bunches of bananas and tomatoes” noting too how the planter evades the law obliging him to provide full provision for all workers. Her dialogue with one of the slaves regarding the quality and quantity of food (spoken in a kind of Italianized Spanish due perhaps to Mary Howitt’s translation), confirms, nevertheless, her distorted view of “contented” slaves in the American South.94 Despite these inconsistencies, Bremer’s travel account registers the type of “local knowledge” predicated by Geertz in his “‘From the Native’s Point of View.’” Whereas other European travelers depended on their hosts for technical information regarding the process of sugar production,95 on her first visit to the Ariadne Plantation, Bremer acquires from her French host another type of knowledge: the characteristics of the different African tribes thrust together in Cuban soil mainly, physical attributes and other “characteristic features” which differentiate each nation or ethnic group.96 Unlike other European and American visitors to the island, who circumscribed their visit to Havana and its environs, and whose views were conditioned by their immediate commercial interests, Bremer is keenly interested in the communities of Africans nations forcibly transplanted to Cuba, even attempting a crude approximation of their countries of origin.97 Though this gesture could be perceived as essentializing blackness, it also manifests the Swedish traveler’s keen ethnographic insight, what is manifested as a professed interest in African cultural expressions. Fulfilling one of her stated objectives in the American South, Bremer’s letters from Cuba reveal the most salient feature of her account: the detailed observation of African dances and rituals. The description of Afro-Cuban ceremonies—tainted as they are by a European sensibility—nevertheless provide valuable insight into the survival of African cultural practices under oppressive conditions. The imprint of African ritual in Bremer’s travel account support Antonio Benítez Rojo’s thesis that the degree of Africanization was a direct result of the late adaptation of the plantation system, what allowed the survival of African cultures in Cuba, in contrast to Anglophone colonies, like Jamaica, where the plantation entered in full swing much earlier.98 Bremer’s first description of the African dance comes early on in her visit, during her stay at the village of “el Serro” [sic] [el Cerro]. These initial impressions betray a certain surprise, part of the tactic of distancing proper

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of anthropological practice:99 “I saw these negroes naked to the waist, wild, energetic figures and countenances, who were beating drums with energetic animation.” Here the traveler assumes the pose of a “redemptive ethnography,” in which “[t]he recorder and interpreter of fragile custom is custodian of an essence, unimpeachable witness to an authenticity.”100 In Bremer’s account, this desire for authenticity is manifest in a particular kind of gaze, which sees the dance as “a perfected natural art [;] they drummed as bees hum and beavers build.” At this stage in her journey, the appeal of the African dance hinges on the nature/culture divide, as she sees the dances as a manifestation of vital instincts rather than as a collective cultural practice. Bremer’s descriptions of “these African dances, with their peculiar wild life . . .” echoes Rousseau-inspired equivalences between autochthonous cultures and the realm of nature; at the same time, they anticipate Fernando Ortiz’s classic study of African dance and music: “El baile para el negro es siempre en su esencia una función vital. Esa funcionalidad del baile afrocubano es la que lo caracteriza por su esencial y espontánea sinceridad.” [Dancing for the black always plays a vital role. The functional aspect of Afro-Cuban dance is what gives it its spontaneous and genuine appeal.]101 In later passages, the initial “naturalizing” of the African dance evolves into a “custom-and-manners” description, meant to reach an understanding, however tentative, of “various African nations—Congoes, Mandingoes, Luccomées [sic], Caraballis” commingling in Cuban soil.102 The elaborate description of dance and ritual shows a writerly Bremer grappling with the opposite term of the nature/culture dichotomy. As “an ensemble of characteristic behaviors, ceremonies or gestures susceptible to recording and explanation by a trained onlooker,” Afro-Cuban rituals conform to current anthropological definitions of “culture.”103 At this point in the travelogue, Bremer’s appreciation of African rituals manifests into a keen curiosity to know the Other, a distinctively anthropological type of knowledge geared to make “humanly comprehensible” a different behavior and way of life.104 At the Ariadne sugar-mill Bremer records first the structural similarities of the African dance and second its variations by ethnic groups, noting too its syncopated rhythms, its intricate figures, even “the quiverings, the twirlings” of the dancers. By means of “thick description,” Bremer constructs an “allegory of salvage” based on the founding premise of ethnography: “Every description or interpretation that conceives itself as ‘bringing a culture into writing,’ moving from oral-discursive experience (the ‘native’s,’ the fieldworker’s) to a written version of that experience (the ethnographic text) is enacting the structure of ‘salvage.’”105 Showing herself to be “an interpreter of fragile custom,” Bremer records the precise pattern of the dance, which “has no distinct divisions, no development, no distinct termination, but appears

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to be continuous variations of one and the same theme improvised, . . . but comprised within a very circumscribed sphere . . .” The similarity with Ortiz’s description of Afro-Cuban, specifically yoruba, rituals, is striking, particularly of those dances organized in a circle:106 Ortiz explains how “verso, canto, poesía, y danza” form an inseparable unity sustaining African rituals, what he calls “cantos-actuantes,” translating Lastrade’s “action-songs” to signify the manner in which ritualistic chant is not merely accompanied by drum-beat and dance, but forms one artistic whole combining song, rhythm, and movement.107 This is precisely the impression conveyed to her reader of The Homes of the New World. The description of the dance is likewise marked by gender difference, and its erotic character underlined: The dance always requires a man and a woman, and always represents a series of courtship and coquetry; during which the lover expresses his feelings, partly by tremor in all his joints, so that he seems ready to fall to pieces as he turns round and round his fair one, like the planet around its sun, and partly by wonderful leaps and evolutions, often enfolding the lady with both his arms, but without touching her . . . The dancing of the women always expresses a kind of bashfulness, mingled with a desire to charm, while, with downcast eyes, . . . she half drives away from her the advancing lover and half entices him to her. . . .

Though Bremer marks the seductive character of the dance, she stops short of understanding its erotic charge, which, according to Ortiz, was originally linked with atavistic rituals of fecundity.108 The metaphor of the tree to describe the passage of cultural forms from Africa to the Caribbean anticipates Fernando Ortiz’s theory of transculturation: “The wild African apple-tree has, when transplanted into American soil, ennobled both its nature and its fruit.” The narrator of the memoirs seems to purposely cancel the required distance between anthropologist and “native,” subject and object, in her final enthusiastic shout: “Long live the African dance!”109 The dance as celebration (of the slaves’ transient breaking free) acquires rhetorical force as a projected image of a (future) Cuban nationality in which the slaves will be permanently released from bondage, transforming the “allegory of salvage” into a “redemptive allegory.”110 The allegorical thrust of the dance hence serves as a counterpoint to the descriptions of nature, which project a similar structure of redemption. In Bremer’s text, the description of the African dance does not remain static, but is rather deepened by the narrator’s awareness of local history. At the Ariadne sugar-mill, Bremer identifies the subversive potential of the African dance: “a loud crack of the whip” interrupts the dance, signaling that

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“[s]ugar-grinding and boiling must begin again.” In later passages, she accurately pinpoints the reason for the decline of African rituals, and the historic import of this fact: The slave disturbances of 1846 are still fresh in the minds of people, and they originated in this part of the island. These disturbances, which gave rise to such cruel proceedings on the part of the Spanish government, have also caused severe restrictions . . . Formerly, . . . might be heard every evening and night, both afar and near, the joyous sound of the African drum, as it was beaten at the negro dances. When, however, it was discovered that these dancing assemblies had been made use of for the organization of the disturbances which afterward took place, their liberty became very much circumscribed.111

Though Bremer gives the date as 1846, this passage clearly alludes to the Conspiración de la Escalera or Ladder Conspiracy, the repression of an alleged rebellion of freed blacks and slaves which had taken place in the Matanzas province scarcely two years earlier.112 The reference to a concrete historical event links the anthropological subtext with the historiographical, a dimension less salient in terms of Caribbean history but certainly more so in terms of North America (whose pre-civil war struggles were amply recorded in the main body of the travelogue). At the St. Amelia sugar-mill, Bremer describes a dance performed by “an elderly Congo negro” aptly named “Carlo Congo,” a scene evoking Ortiz’s description of Congo dances, sometimes performed by solo dancers with a specific magical intent: “En los ritos de magia de los congos de Cuba, a veces el tata-nganga baila él solo, pero esto no es lo común” [In Congolese magic rituals in Cuba, sometimes the tata-nganga dances alone, but that is not the usual practice].113 Here Bremer’s intention is not so much to preserve the authenticity of the dance, but rather to show the way in which the institution of slavery has eroded African traditions. For the relentless regime imposed on the body of the slave breaks down the physical endurance of the dancer: “This was the Congo dance, but Carlo Congo could not execute it in its full perfection; wearied for four months labor, day and night, his limbs were evidently deficient in the needful power; he was obliged to pause many times to rest . . . ” The description of his dress—“he wore a cotton cap on his head, and a necklace of blue glass beads around his throat”—recalls a similar portrait engraved during her travels in the South. During her stay in Charleston, Bremer had met a wise man named Romeo, “who lives in a little house in a garden near,” and whose simple garb bluntly ironizes the romantic connotations of his name. Like his Cuban counterpart, Romeo “is dressed in his slave garments, gray clothes, and knitted woolen cap,” what earns him a portrait

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in Bremer’s 1850 sketchbook, a companion volume featuring, among other faces and landscapes, the contours of her American itinerary. In contrast to the submissive pose of the Southern Romeo, in the 1850–1851 Cuba album Bremer draws Carlo Congo in full command of the surrounding landscape, a demeanor well captured in the narrative: “His countenance had that expression of power and sensibility. . . . the upper portion of his body and the muscular arms were bare; and their form, and the development of the muscles, during the dance, were worthy the study of a sculptor.” As two contrasting yet parallel images, the portrait of a proud Carlo Congo mirrors her earlier sketch of the elderly slave in Charleston, hence reflecting two crucial stages in a slave’s life, from a youthful pose of rebellion to the resigned passivity of old age. Whereas it was difficult to capture Romeo’s countenance—“I have his portrait in my album, but he laughed and was so shame-faced while I made the sketch, that it was difficult for me to catch the

Figure 4.5.  Fredrika Bremer, “Carlo Congo,” Sketchbook of a Journey to the New World, 1850–1851, fol. 31.

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likeness”—Congo’s face lights up the countryside, anticipating the black’s role in configuring Cuban nationality.114 In a reversal of the neutral stance of contemporary ethnography, Bremer’s travel account exhibits an awareness of the oppressive context of slavery in which the African dances take place. More than any other traveler, Bremer accurately describes the powerful psychological function which the performance served for the blacks as momentary release from bondage. For the others who refused to join in, the dance at St. Amelia was a poignant reminder of “the darkest night-life of slavery.”115 The liberatory (compensatory) function of the African dance is dramatically illustrated during her last days in Havana, when Bremer attends a Yoruba celebration at a cabildo situated near the edge of the city.116 The description of the head dancer’s “serpentine movements” suggests one of many yoruba rituals in which the dancers move forward in “snake-like folds.” Ortiz gives a precise description of these circular or line dances, each of which had ritualistic function: En esos bailes . . . a veces cada danzante va . . . marchando a paso brevísimo y arrastrando los pies, de la manera que los cubanos decimos ‘arrollando,’ bien en esa forma de rueda giratoria o formando una larga teoría o línea de danzadores que avanzan lenta y sinuosamente como en un rito procesional que imita las ondulaciones de la serpiente. [In those dances . . . each dancer . . . drags his feet while marching in step, according to what the Cubans call “arrollando,” either as a revolving circle or else as a larger line or corpus of dancers who move forward slowly and sinously, as a processional rite imitating serpent-like undulations].117

Most striking, however, is the face-to-face encounter with the leader or headdancer of the Luccomées [sic] (Lucumíes), who approaches the traveler to express his admiration; in response, Bremer slips a silver coin in his hand. Though the dancer’s “scarlet hat” and “scarlet skirts” recalls Changó, he does not carry the hatchet traditionally associated with this deity as god of virility and thunder; it may be that Bremer is describing here a member of the abakuá cult, given the “number of glittering beads around his neck, arms and body” and the skirts made out of vegetable fiber.118 This passage marks a threshold in Bremer’s descriptions, the limit beyond which she cannot go without fear of losing her European identity. More significantly, it also signals her deepening insight into the world of the Other, expressed in terms of her recognition of the Yoruba or Lucumí “countenance.” A similar face-to-face encounter happens when Bremer next visits the Cabido de Gangas; the fact that she was invited to the “Cabildo de Señora Santa Barbara de la nacion Lucumi Alagua” [sic] (Arará or Elegguá?)” shows the extent to which she was ac-

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cepted by the communities of slaves.119 More pronounced than in the faceless masses outside the slave market at Rio who hold the British visitor in their hold, here the native subject stares back at the European visitor in a moment of incommensurability and mutual recognition. From a contemporary perspective, Bremer’s representation may seem tinged by a European allegorizing of the Other. From another point of view, Bremer intuitively grasped the role of the dance in the symbolic orbit of the black. Fernando Ortiz was the first to point out the specific social function played by Afro-Cuban ritual: “El danzante no baila para el que lo mira. Es que sus bailes tienen una función social más compleja. . . .Y por esto, la investigación y el aprecio de la música negra requieren el conocimiento de sus funciones en la integridad de la cultura a que pertenece.”120 [The dancer does not simply dance for the spectator. That is because his dance has a more complex social function. . . . Hence anthropological research about and appreciation for black music require knowledge of its functions within the whole of the culture to which it belongs.] Bremer’s comparison of the Congo dance with “a ballet of the Paris opera” recalls Ortiz’s classification of Afro-Cuban ritual in terms of an “ópera bailada, en la cual a la belleza de la figura . . . ha de unirse el sentido íntimo y vital de la presentación.”121 [an opera in dance form, so that its beauty . . . combines with the intimacy and vitality of the performance]. The Homes of the New World not only fulfills Geertz’s dictum regarding how anthropological knowledge is attained by understanding the Other’s symbolic universe, but it also shows a striking similarity of approaches between a self-styled female ethnographer and her twentieth-century avatar. Bremer’s descriptions of African dances also point to a broader historical awareness at work in the European travel book. The Cuban travelogue inserted in The Homes of the New World manifests “ethnography’s allegorical appeal: the simultaneous reconstruction of a culture and a knowing self, a double ‘coming of age’ in [Cuba].”122 As Bremer’s discovery of the island unfolds, so too does her inscription/inscape of insular scenery and of social institutions, contributing to the production of Cuban national identity from a gendered point of view. Yet the process of poetic unveiling implies as well a transformation of the detached stance of the foreign traveler. For in Bremer’s tropical itinerary, the pilgrim is transformed, instead, into an outcast, an experience captured in the poignant last phrase of her letters from Cuba: “I have inhaled new life in Cuba; but I could not live there. I could only live where a life of freedom exists.”123 The pilgrimage as initiation culminates, then, in the impossibility of remaining in “the homes of the new World.”124 Besides exemplifying a practice of ethnography that sheds new light onto the marginal cultures of the Americas, Bremer’s “ethnographic authority” imagines the home as a threshold that cannot be crossed. In contrast to Graham, the closest

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Bremer came to arriving at “the homes of the New World” was a transient residence; at the opposite end of the spectrum from Tristan in her privileging of the domestic sphere, Bremer finds herself an outcast from the blissful life of domus as she boards the ship carrying her back to the deep South.

SELF-AS-OTHER: FLORA TRISTAN’S “ETHNOGRAPHIE DES FEMMES” Like other nineteenth-century women, Flora Tristan shared the inquisitive attitude imbuing the genre of travel writing with the social observer’s investigative approach. French and British travelers to North America were engrossed with detailed observation of its social and democratic institutions, often weaving journalistic and oral accounts into the fabric of their tales and registering their impressions with a vigor that not only reflected the early concerns of the budding science of sociology, but also forged a shift in the European travel book.125 Similar tactics surface in Pérégrinations d’une paria, a work depicting Perú’s social, religious, and cultural life during the formative years of its nascent republic. Yet the sharp social critique manifest particularly in the chapter “Lima et ses moeurs” springs from a far different site than the admiration with which Victorian “lady” travelers greeted a land which, in their view, facilitated female autonomy. In contrast to foreign travelers to North America, Tristan’s skills at social observation stem from her sense of exclusion and disappointment at not being accepted into the Creole family romance. Moreover, uncle Pío’s rejection of her claim thwarted her expectations for acquiring independent status. Her sense of “being there” is thus acutely driven almost by its very opposite: a nostalgic yet painful awareness of the impossibility of settling permanently in Spanish America. Like the widowed Graham, Tristan first dons the mask of social observer during her visit to the Chilean city of Valparaíso: Affranchie entièrement de toute preoccupation intérieure, je pus me livrer à mon rôle d’observatrice: ce fut alors que je parcourous la ville dans tous les sens; pour dépeindre une ville, pour peu qu’elle soit importante, il faut y faire un séjour prolongé, converser avec toutes les classes de ses habitants; voir les campagnes qui l’alimentent; ce n’est pas en y passant seulement qu’on peut en apprécier les moeurs et usages, en connaître la vie intime. [As I was now entirely free from any inner preocuppation I could devote myself to the role of observer, and I explored the town in every direction. To get to know a town, as unimportant as it may be, one must enjoy a prolonged stay there, strike up conversation with all types of people; see the countryside which

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nourishes them; it is not simply in passing that one can appreciate a place’s customs and mores, and get to know its intimate life.]126 .

In this passage, the role of social observer contrasts with Tristan’s masquerade of single womanhood, best dramatized in her decision to defer and ultimately reject Captain Chabrié’s offer of marriage, a turn of events which prompts her imminent departure for Arequipa. Although feminist critics have chastised the author for her manipulation of Chabrié and his love plot, I read this episode in another light, given Tristan’s need to free herself of emotional constraints in order to pursue her voyage. In this sense, singlehood offered access to the type of anthropological knowledge prescribed by Geertz; in contrast to her cohorts, Tristan’s ethnographical commentary is linked to her own life story at crucial points in the memoir. True to her intention to capture “the intimate life of a people,” Tristan’s sociological snapshots assimilate an eclectic mix of discourses rather than a systematic exposé of “the ‘facts’ . . . observed.”127 The chapter “Lima et ses moeurs” is tucked toward the end of volume two, as if to show how the narrator’s failed pilgrimage had facilitated her position as social observer. “Lima et ses moeurs” repeats many of the recurrent topoi of European travel writing; beginning with a Humboldtian gesture of the foreigner’s first glimpse of a port city. Parallel to Maria Graham’s description of Valparaíso, the narrator’s description of urban topography—where the houses of Lima appear “unfinished”—sustains the pose of experienced traveler which the author, not always successfully, sustains throughout the travel account.128 Tristan’s subsequent description of Lima’s cathedral not only recurs to the common-place (“magnifique”; “d’un travail exquis”) [“magnificent;” “of exquisite workmanship;”] but reveals her lack of knowledge of the Barroco de Indias: “Les deux tours, la façade . . . sont admirables et d’un grandiose rare dans notre vieille Europe, et auquel on ne s’attendrait pas dans une ville du Nouveau-Monde” [“The two towers, the façade . . . are of a grandeur rare in our old Europe and certainly unexpected in a city of the New World.”]. These fleeting images of the city close with an apt statement regarding the symbolic import of New World architecture: “le même défaut d’harmonie doit exister dans l’organisation de ce people” [the same lack of harmony should be evident in the people’s social organization], a rejoinder of Tristan’s view of Peruvian political institutions.129 Aligned with the central concern of an “ethnographie des femmes,” the ethnographic dimension of Pérégrinations d’une paria puts the accent on women’s social condition, a recurring trope of European women’s travels.130 Tristan’s view of indigenous and African peoples in the New World is filtered by her passionate look at the particular forms of women’s oppression. More attuned to gender, race, and class among those social groups outside the immediate circle of

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upper-class Creoles, Tristan constructs an “ethnographic authority” centered on the complex status of women as members of a disenfranchised social group.131 Typical in this regard is Tristan’s much-commented view of the rabonas, Amazon-like women who accompanied their men onto the battlefields. Included amidst the detailed account of civil war raging in Arequipa between the Gamarrista and Obregoso factions, Tristan’s view of the Peruvian rabonas contrasts their daring entry into the battlefield with her subsequent description of the cowardice of upper-class men and women who scattered for shelter inside the convent walls in a mad rush to secure life and property. In a previous scene, Tristan had incorporated into the historical record a statistical list of the number of officers included in each military regiment, clearly intended to give a semblance of verisimilitude to her version of the Arequipan revolution. In contrast to this type of factual reporting, the description of the Peruvian rabonas is narrated, not in the manner of an ethnographic “thick description,” but rather as a projection of the narrator’s constructed self-identity as a pariah. Thus Tristan’s “ethnographie des femmes” absorbs within the same glance both her previous encounters with upper-class Creole peers and this fleeting but poignant portrait of a female and indigenous under-class. Unlike the verbal portraits of her cousins Carmen and the ex-nun Dominga, centered on their personal struggles against the patriarchy, the passage dedicated to the rabonas emphasizes their collective identity as a group, a form of female solidarity bolstered by race and class. Whereas the men are depicted as bungled soldiers fearful of bearing arms, the rabonas are armed; moreover, they assume the “manly” courage involved in fighting a war. These formidable females carry out not only domestic tasks, like setting up camp, foraging provisions, and caring for the children, but, most significantly, the Peruvian soldaderas play a crucial role in military strategy, scooping out the territory ahead and helping determine the most advantageous battleground.132 Echoing an opinion voiced earlier in the chapter by the German mercenary Althaus on the Peruvians’ lack of aptitude for war, Tristan points out the difference between the indigenous soldiers and their female assistants: “Il est digne de remarque que, tandis que l’Indien préfère se tuer que d’être soldat, les femmes indiennes embrassent cette vie volontairement et en supportent les fatigues, en affrontent les dangers avec un courage dont sont incapables les hommes de leur race.” [“It is worth observing that whereas the Indian would rather kill himself than be a soldier, the Indian women embrace this life voluntarily, bearing its fatigues and confronting its dangers with a courage of which the men of their race are incapable.”] Here, historical agency is determined by gender, as the male soldiers refuse to do without their female “front-guard”: “Ils n’avaient pas assez de confiance dans l’administration militaire qui eût pourvou à leurs besoins pour qu’on pût leur persuader de renoncer aux rava-

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nas.” [“They are not at all sure that the military administration would be able to provide for their needs, and that is why they refuse to give the rabonas up.”] While their male partners resist military life, indigenous women prefer a nomadic existence as nineteenth-century “guerrillas,” their very marginality a condition of their paradoxical role within the nation. Whereas Fredrika Bremer constructed a racial imaginary in nineteenth-century Cuba, Flora Tristan establishes a clear gender dichotomy emphasizing the superiority of the female, what bolsters the narrator’s assertion of her own “superior will” in contrast to key family members in Perú who willingly excluded her from their “imagined community.”133 The idealization of the rabonas as women on the move, transient and rootless, re-enacts Tristan’s assumption of a pilgrimage traced without a route. Earlier in the chapter, after her resolve to enter the public arena by plotting marriage to the Spaniard Escudero, Tristan had expressed her own sense of aimlessness and wandering: “Je ne savais où fuir ni que devenir!” [“I did not know where to fly or what would become of me.”]134 The rabona’s hurried yet purposeful uprooting—from camp to camp, battle to battle, fire to fire—is a projection of a (self’s) nomadic existence onto the Other. Hence Tristan’s depiction of indigenous women’s unique social organization as a “‘feminotopia’”— an ideal society based on female physical prowess, solidarity, mutual accord— projects the narrator’s wish-fulfillment in finding a society more attuned to her own needs for realization.135 In this sense, the rabonas’ primitive socialism anticipates Tristan’s later visionary alliance between the workers’ and the women’s movement. By venturing into “el Perú profundo” through the Imaginary of indigenous women, Tristan stakes out her own need to belong. Despite her positive valorization of the rabonas, Tristan depicts these women as an invisible mass, a silent (and silenced) collectivity. In line with Graham and Calderón de la Barca’s idealization of authochtonous peoples, the women are mythologized by comparison to their Inca ancestors. These women engage in a type of sun-worship prevalent during the ancient Inca dynasties, but convert it into a practice devoid of religious overtones: “Les ravanas adorent le soleil, mais n’observent aucune practique religieuse” [“The rabonas adore the sun but do not observe any religious practices.”]136 Despite these limitations, the rabonas’ repeat the accent on female heroism echoed as well in Calderón’s description of Mexican women under fire, and serves to exemplify a broader “ethnographie des femmes” which gathers everyday practices of women from both ends of the social scale.137 Tristan’s idealization of the rabonas counters her critical assessment of the limeña, whose life of luxury contrasts with the rugged existence of the intrepid Andean fighters. The chapter on “Lima et ses moeurs,” one of the central ones in Pérégrinations, had appeared earlier in the Revue de Paris

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under the title of “Les femmes de Lima.”138 A comparison shows only slight stylistic variations between early and final versions; however, one linguistic detail involving the description of the limeñas’ “national costume” should not be overlooked. Whereas in the final version Tristan dubs the upper portion of the fabled saya y manto with the appropriate Spanish word, in the Revue de Paris article she referred to it in French, menton. The linguistic awareness manifest in the use of the Spanish term adds an exotic touch, highlighting the limeña’s seductive arts while wearing the native costume. The saya y manto is, in turn, elaboratedly described in all its constituent parts: a body garment enticingly covering the contours of the female body, complemented by a black mantle drawn over the head; its distinctive feature, the complete coverage of the face so that only a desiring glance gleams through. Claiming that only a person born in Lima has the ability to tailor it perfectly, the narrator nevertheless makes a publicity statement by adding practical instructions on how to confect a nearly-perfect sample (a footnote presumably geared to a Parisian reader, but which reads as a wish-fulfillment of her own desire to seductively parade decked with a similar outfit).139 In her reading, Mary Louise Pratt has highlighted the Orientalism of the “saya y manto” passage, suggesting that it must have been inspired by Lady Mary Montagu, an eighteenth-century British traveler famous for describing the exotic allure of the veil in her travels to Turkey; both travelers pinpoint the extent of freedom which the disguise granted women, most useful as a respite from a jealous husband’s vigilance.140 Yet a comparison between the initial draft included in Revue de Paris and the final version adds another twist to Tristan’s Orientalist tone. For the detailed description of the saya y manto is prefaced by a didactic passage clearly addressed as a warning to those European men who may fall into the limeñas’ seductive trap. In men’s eyes, the limeñas, donned in their intriguing guise, appear as “prêtesses”; the final version adds, “où plutôt, réalisant le paradis de Mahomet” [priestesses; “or, [t]hey fancied they had landed in Mahomet’s paradise”]. Despite Peruvian women’s “beauty of form” (“la beauté des formes”), the Pérégrinations version highlights the dissonance between outward appearance and emptiness of mind. Written as a warning to foreign men drawn to the limeñas’ exceptional beauty, this passage argues how their sway over a man may eventually fail given their unattractive lack of education and industry. The limeñas’ considerable charms, Tristan continues to argue, are second to their interest in money; hence, following traditional gender lines, they continually prove their lover’s interest by how much he is willing to give them. Whereas woman’s inherent superiority is based on her greater affinity to love, only her intelligence, and not her physical charms, can guarantee her ability to maintain her position, what must be joined with a clear awareness of her altruistic “mis-

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sion:” “être le guide, le génie inspirateur de l’homme; . . . ” [his moral guide, “the inspiration of man”]. Meant to counterbalance an ideal of femininity between the Old World and the New, the sketch plays a clear didactic purpose in the text. By comparing the women of Lima to the French, Tristan projects her own self-identification with these alternative “Others,” since the “superior” talents of providential womanhood reflect her own writerly mask.141 There is a more poignant dimension to this by now classic description of the Peruvian saya y manto. Pratt takes at face value Tristan’s description of

Figure 4.6.  Flora Tristan, “Portrait.”

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the total freedom enjoyed by the limeñas in their nightly wanderings through the city, since the costume allowed them illicit rendez-vous with idle passersby, or simply the ability to come and go as they wished. More than a cover-up for “liasions dangereux,” the national costume expanded a woman’s sense of self: “sous la saya, la Liménienne est libre; . . . [l]a femme de Lima . . . est toujours elle; . . .” [“the women of Lima are free; . . .” “in every situation the woman of Lima is always herself ”].142 Both the erotic possibilities and sense of autonomy attributed to the Other are, in the last analysis, vital aspects of the self which have been denied the traveling pariah. Tristan claims in one of her letters that her ultimate wish is to have the luxury to be who she is: “Je ne veux être l’apôtre de personne. Je veux être moi.” [I do not want to be anyone’s apostle. I want to be me].143 Tristan’s tale of sexual repression recounted throughout the Pérégrinations adds an autobiographical layer to the ethnographic sketch, for, confined within the strictures of the prevailing gender system, her most ardent desire was to imitate the wandering limeña’s freedom to roam in the dark; a range of erotic possibilities that allowed her to be, as she so poignantly expressed, fully herself. The Peruvian under her mysterious mantle is precisely the reverse of Tristan’s masquerade of single womanhood assumed at the start of her transatlantic passage, and carried through to the very end of her pilgrimage. In a letter addressed to the Ministre d’Instruction Publique in July, 1841, written in response to a French governmental initiative to fund socially relevant writers, Tristan claimed to know more about Peruvian customs and mores than any other European of her time.144 Yet Tristan’s depiction of Lima’s folkways is tainted, in many cases, by constant comparisons to a continental standard, a mainstay of European travel writing. For instance, Tristan describes the Peruvian bullfight as a bloody farce, a sharp contrast to the Andalusian spectacle it was meant to imitate.145 Post-colonial mimickry, in this passage, highlights the paleness of the imitation, what serves to depict Spanish American cultural practices as “weaker” than peninsular ones, a gesture echoed too Frances Calderón de la Barca’s biting satire regarding Mexican bullfights. In short, Tristan’s ethnographic gaze shows a tension between the rhetorical effects of verisimilitude and the narrator’s empathy toward subjects surveyed by a sharp sociological eye. A tension only partially resolved by the narrator’s assumption of the pose of “voyageuse consciencieuse” or “femme enquêtrice.”146 In Pérégrinations d’une paria, 1833–1834, the bonds of reciprocity established between traveler and “informant” show that only when “face-to-face with the Other” could the voyageuse gain full acceptance of her-Self. Certainly, “[t]ravel was to facilitate [Tristan’s] development into a social investigator and socialist,” yet this transformation sprung most intimately from the writer’s inner quest, her need to break free from a marital

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bond that was no longer valid, her desire to belong to a Peruvian “imagined community” that remained unfulfilled.147 THE FEMALE PARIAH OR AN ETHNOLOGY OF “MOI-MÊME” A central motif in women’s travel writing was how to negotiate the sense of adventure implied in displacement to distant lands with the demands of domesticity.148 Flora Tristan’s pilgrimage to Peru evidences similar tensions, but adds a sharper gender awareness than was the norm for the European travel book. Besides a critical look at Peruvian social practices, Tristan’s Pérégrinations d’une paria dramatizes the effects of domestic arrangements on women’s lives, what constitutes a form of “civil or legal feminism, i.e. demands for measures to protect women from particular kinds of oppression at the hands of men.”149 Tristan’s makes explicit her radical stance from the start of the memoir, as, in a three-tiered prologue to the book, Tristan establishes her narrative authority as well her subsequent self-fashioning. Cristina Guiñazu has analyzed these preliminary texts quite lucidly: Los tres textos que preceden el relato de viaje: la dedicatoria, el prefacio y el prólogo, responden a un cuidadoso montaje de autorepresentación y justificación por parte de la autora. Escritos después de terminado el relato, presentan la imagen pública que Tristán quiere para sí.150 [The three short texts which precede the travel account: dedication, preface, and prologue, result in a careful staging of the author’s self-fashioning. Written after the travel account was completed, they present the public image that Tristan wished to construct for herself.] (my translation).

Following the “peregrinatio” trope of confessional narrative, the travel experience is structured as a conversion of self.151 Hence, the “Avant-propos” and introduction function not only as justification for Tristan’s sense of gender identity, but also connects the tale of her travels to a broader collective identity, the destiny of women under patriarchy, what adds a universal dimension to the practice of an “ethnographie des femmes.” The text of Pérégrinations begins with the author’s declaration of her providential mission, what signals the debt owed to the Saint-Simonians who entrusted society’s salvation to a “femme-Messieh.”152 Tristan’s declaration of her divinely-endowed aim, what launches the writing of her memoirs, is tied to her commitment to a social cause: to promote the advancement of women as both sex and class. Máire Cross and Tim Cross

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consider this Tristan’s “most developed and extensive form” of feminism, given that it “explore(s) the systematic unfairness of the treatment of women in modern society . . .”153 The argument protesting women’s degraded status conforms to the belief that “le degré de civilisation auquel les diverses societés humaines sont parvenues a toujours été proportionné au degré d’indépendance dont y ont joui les femmes,” [the degree of civilization achieved by diverse human societies is proportional to the degree of independence enjoyed by women], a view shared by Fredrika Bremer and other nineteenth-century visionaries.154 While the term “pariah” was deployed in French revolutionary rhetoric to describe the condition of the working class, its resonance among the Saint-Simonians implied a faith in the social vindication of the poor and oppressed.155 As Michaud rightly notes, Tristan’s appropriation of the term addresses the silencing of women among utopian socialist movements, uncovering the “tissue of lies” with which women had to contend with in their attempts to fit into a repressive social structure. For Tristan identifies “une classe de PARIAS” [a class composed of pariahs], first in abstract terms, absorbing its usage by other Romantics to refer to any ties of bondage and oppression. Further in the prologue, a pariah identity is more closely circumscribed when referring to those women denied a legal right to divorce. In Tristan’s feminist thought, the term pariah captures the invisibility of woman’s condition (“La femme est invisible: sa place est au foyer”) [woman is rendered invisible: her place is in the home]156 as well as the abject position assigned to women in a maledominated socio-symbolic order. Although the pariah status serves to justify the tale of Flora’s own marital separation (narrated in the third prologue), it also suggests the place of a woman who has no place in the prevailing gender system.157 Jules Janin, a contemporary, ironically commented on Tristan’s “zero degree” term: Naturellement, comme elle ne savit où aller, la fille des Incas s’en fût du côté de soleil. Sur le seuil détésté de la maison conjugale, la malheureuse avait laissé, haïssant même le nom de son mari. Elle n’avait plus d’état, elle n’avait plus de nom, elle n’était ni demoiselle, ni une femme, ni une veuve, elle était quelque chose de flottant et d’incertain,—une déclaration vivante! [Naturally, as she did not know where to go, the Incas’ daughter went the way of the sun. Upon the hated doorstep of her marital home, the unfortunate woman had left everythings, hating even her husband’s name. She no longer had a state, nor a name, she was neither a maiden, nor a wife, nor a widow, she was something floating and uncertain—a living declaration!]158

Women’s lack of place in the social hierarchy implies, then, a void in the Symbolic order. Although masculinist critics tends to hold the view that

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“[h]er condition as an outcast became a position that she chose to assume as much as a position that was forced on her,”159 Tristan’s self-identification as a pariah was a result of social pressure rather than personal choice. When the outcast status shifts from the personal to the collective—as “pariah” comes to mean all women suffering under patriarchy—, it symbolizes the limits of gender, the ultimate threshold space.160 In Tristan’s account, it is the body of the traveler which crosses this threshold, the body as locus of perception and feeling, a physical border zone delimiting the passage into a new geography as well as the interior map of a psyque explored as the journey progresses. Aligned with the social awareness evidenced by her peers Bremer and Graham, Tristan sees woman’s condition as another form of slavery, comparing a universal female subject to a slave hunted down by greedy masters (“la femme est en servitude”) [woman is under submission], a recurring trope throughout the text of the Pérégrinations. Indeed, women’s degraded state is equivalent to that of the most abject of beings in the social hierarchy: the runaway slave. The same metaphorical equivalence recurs in female-authored anti-slavery narrative; in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841), the noble protagonist compares the voluntary yoke assumed by married women with the slaves’ involuntary submission, declaring the first type of oppression as worse than the second. Compare this to Tristan, whose narrower definition of a pariah to include women unable to free the yoke of an abusive marriage hinges, precisely, on the equivalence between pariah and slave.161 As Guiñazú has shown, the three-tiered prologue sets the stage for the writing of the memoirs, as Tristan refutes the truth claim of male-authored memoirs and their inflated, hence false, self-presentation.162 Resisting a memorialist tradition which consecrates the subject as a hero, Tristan’s autobiographical act hinges on the experience of suffering: “C’est l’homme qui a lutté contre l’adversité, qui, dans l’infortune, . . . dont les mémoires . . . feraient connaître les hommes tels qu’ils sont.” [It has always been man who has fought against adversity, who, when faced with misfortune, [wrote] memoirs to make known what mankind is really like]. As Hart has shown, Tristan subverts the mastertexts of French autobiography, focused primarily on “mastery of the self,” forging instead “a relational form of subjectivity.”163 Given women’s degraded status in the socio-symbolic order—the obscured place assigned her in Western patriarchy—female-authors en(gender) a “new autobiography” that would describe the contours of a life set against a set of restrictive social rules, a genre sustained by a performance of femininity, negotiating a tacit acceptance of those norms as well as a resistance to them; in other words, a search for a more authentic self-hood.164 In Tristan’s account, this “new autobiography” takes the form of martyrdom, a shared condition of suffering shared by both a collective—“il faut encore avoir souffert et beaucoup souffert” [one must have suffered and suffered greatly]—and a private self—“il faut enfin avoir dans

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le coeur la foi du martyr” [in short, one must have in one’s heart a martyr’s faith].165 Although Tristan’s writing has been interpreted as a powerful form of female liberation, the Pérégrinations emerges as a powerful confessional narrative, a via crucis or expiation.166 The shift in focus to a personal “I” anticipates, in turn, the story of dispossession and flight narrated in the “Avant-propos,” a rhetorical interlude casting the narrative of travel as a personal odyssey.167 At various points in the text, the autobiographical narrator stresses the indissoluble link between a universal female condition and a repressed self-in-the making: “Dans le cours de ma narration, je parle souvent de moi” [Throughout this tale, I often speak about myself]—a gesture meant to signal the empathic dimension of Tristan’s writing: Ce n’est donc pas sur moi personnellement que j’ai voulu attirer l’attention, mais bien sur toutes les femmes qui se trouvent dans la même position, et dont le nombre augmente journellement. Elles éprouvent des tribulations, des souffrances de même nature que les miennes, sont préoccupées du même ordre d’idées et ressentent les mêmes affections. [It is not upon myself that I wish to draw attention, but rather on all women who find themselves in the same position, and whose numbers increase day by day. They have all experienced similar troubles, similar sufferings as mine, they think along the same lines, and feel similar affections].

Although certainly the prologue to the Pérégrinations stakes out a “new biography,” it also composes a mode of female auto-ethnography out of two strategic rhetorical strategies: slavery as poignant metaphor to describe women’s generalized condition of oppression, and the experience of individual and collective suffering bonding all women under patriarchy.168 In the section that follows, I analyze Tristan’s practice of a female auto-ethnography or the construction of the Self as Other through stories of Creole women of her own class. THE WOMEN OF PERÚ, OR THE SHATTERED SELF-IMAGE In her reading of Flora Tristan’s travels, Cristina Guiñazú perceptively notes how the author’s pariah status is projected onto women of her immediate family circle or class.169 Tristan’s relationship with her cousin Carmen, who is depicted as a prototype of upper-class Peruvian women, exemplifies the practice of an “ethnographie des femmes” based on gender solidarity. In telling Carmen’s story, Tristan projects herself onto her Peruvian double, as

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if rewriting the autobiographical portrait contained in the “Avant-propos” from a New World perspective. Beyond the obvious family connection, the two women share the same orphaned and pariah condition, since they both endured an arranged marriage at an early age, a union prompted by economic rather than sentimental interest. These autobiographical parallels do not quite explain the contrasts in their respective life-stories, partly due to the gap in prevailing gender systems between Europe and the Spanish-speaking Americas. Whereas Tristan affirms, at every turn, her dedication to productive endeavors, Carmen’s lack of purposeful activity is seen as intrinsic to the norm of upper-class creole women: “Quand j’arrivai à Arequipa, il y avait douze ans qu’elle était veuve, et douze ans qu’elle végétait, cachant sa misère réelle sous les dehors de l’opulence.” [“When I arrived in Arequipa, she had been a widow for twelve years, leading an uneventful life and hiding her real poverty behind an appearance of opulence.”] Faced with either marriage or the convent, Doña Carmen married a dissolute Creole whose scandalous affairs were socially accepted as compensation for his wife’s homeliness. Ten years later, Carmen’s husband returned, feigning repentance for dissipating her fortune and carrying the social stigma of venereal disease. Patiently fulfilling “la mujer abnegada” [self-sacrificing wife] role, the unfortunate Carmen nursed her husband until death, a pattern fitting the martyr archetype Tristan had prescribed in the prologue. Aligned with the narrator’s self-portrait as a woman of superior strength, here Carmen’s abject status is seen as “une vengeance noble” [a noble revenge] proving her moral superiority over her wayward husband, drawing the parallel between narrator and subject even closer, and repeating a similar observation regarding the former’s self-fashioning throughout the section on the women of Lima.170 The story of Carmen’s disastrous marriage also highlights a fundamental difference in their respective responses to oppressive conditions: while Carmen is depicted as a societal victim who quietly withdrew after attempting a feeble and ultimately futile protest, the narrator stresses confidence in her ability to free herself from the shackles imposed on her. While, as in the rabonas’ passage, the text emphasizes female solidarity, it also points out the gap between two selves who mirror each other, yet project onto the other a distorted self-image. To Carmen’s abnegation and passive acceptance of a martyr role, Tristan reinforces the “superior” woman’s will as catalyst for change: Que la liberté n’existe réellement que dans la volonté. Ceux qui ont reçu de Dieu cette volonté forte qui fait surmonter tout obstacle sont libres; tandis que ceux don’t le faible vouloir se laisse ou cède devant les contrariétés sont esclaves, et le seraient lors même que la bizarre fortune les placerait sur le trône.

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[“That freedom is never really a matter of will. Those to whom God has given a free will strong enough to overcome every obstacle are free, whereas those whose will is weak and yields to opposition are slaves and would still be slaves even if some freak of fortune placed them on a throne.”]

Likewise, Carmen projects onto Flora the image of a liberated woman, freed from the sting of social prejudice. As in the previous reflection on the pariah status, this assertion voices a generalized belief in women’s power; indeed, “Tristan recommended that women who possessed exceptional qualities of spirit and self-reliance should seek their own liberation by breaking out of the sexist constraints of society.”171 If, during the sea-crossing on the Mexicain, Tristan had sailed assuming her pariah status, here she voices the collective destiny of the female sex in terms of a grieved femininity along both sides of the Atlantic: “En Europe, comme ici, les femmes sont asservies aux hommes et on encore plus à souffrir de leur tyrannie” [“In Europe women are men’s slaves just as they are here, and have to suffer even more from men’s tyranny], a position echoing Carmen’s previous statement that “le mariage est le seul enfer que je reconnaisse” [“marriage is the only hell I acknowledge”]. By linking the two women in a common predicament, this “narrative doubling” cancels out the distance between “outsider” and “insider,”172 reinforcing as well common ties of sisterhood across the transatlantic divide. When, in a later scene, an earthquake interrupts the impassioned dialogue among the cousins, the unleashing of fear dramatizes how, ultimately, “oppression,— particularly the oppression of women, is . . . the true source of geological and political terror.”173 A recurrent trope in women’s travel is, then, the analogy between geological and political cataclysm, as in Graham’s account, or, as in Tristan, between destructive forces of nature and the social violence instituted by patriarchy. Tristan’s “ethnographie des femmes” represents women as subjects confined in space, a symbol of psycho-sexual repression. No episode dramatizes this better than the story of Flora’s cousin Dominga, who dared to flee from religious enclosure. Tucked within chapter 3 of the second volume, “Les Couvents d’Arequipa,” Dominga’s story unfolds as Tristan’s prototype of “superior” womanhood, her tale sharply contrasting with that of longsuffering Carmen. An early disappointment in love had forced the adolescent Dominga to shut herself up in a convent against the wishes and supplications of her family. After years of unhappiness as a cloistered nun, Dominga invents a plan to free herself, a plan sparked, ironically, by an episode from the Spanish mystic Saint Theresa, leader of the Reformed Carmelites. Just as in the scripted passage, Dominga orders her black slave to find a corpse; after dragging it inside her cell, the reluctant nun sets fire to it, making it appear as if she had died in the flames.174 While the daring flight from Santa Rosa ex-

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emplifies one of those “personal acts of will by individual oppressed women to escape their own particular nightmare,”175 Dominga’s story also exemplifies Tristan’s auto-ethnography, in the sense that her cousin’s drama is retold as a foil to the narrator’s own transatlantic escape. Dominga’s episode also reveals the characteristic circular frame of Tristan’s “narrative art;”176 more significantly for my argument here, the use of a male narrator to more forcibly convey a feminist message. For Dominga’s ordeal is told by Tristan’s cousin Althaus, and is inserted in the midst of two chapters narrating the contested presidency and its aftermath; hence, the tale of political intrigue frames both previous and subsequent chapters (chapter 2, “La république et les trois presidents” and chapter 4, “Le Bataille de Cangallo”). Dominga’s story links local politics with a gender critique not only structurally within the text but also thematically and historically “outside” it, for the bishop had prohibited laypeople’s entry inside the cloister after the ex-Carmelite’s scandalous escape. Only when the civil war raging among the two rival factions drives the people of Arequipa to seek shelter inside the convent walls is this prohibition lifted. Thus the axis of the story comes at a historical juncture, when news of San Roman’s impending arrival in Arequipa threatens the town’s security.177 Whereas Tristan effectively deploys a male narrator to tell Dominga’s story, its denouement is directed to three nuns from Santa-Cathalina: Margarita, Rosita, and Manuelita, “trois femmes . . . trop belles et trop aimables pour vivre dans un couvent” [“‘Those three women are too beautiful and too lovable to be live in a convent.’”]. As privileged interlocutors, the trio is anxious to hear about their peer’s whereabouts and destiny. The Santa Rosa and Santa-Cathalina convents are depicted in terms of baroque excess—whereas the first is austere and somber, the second is portrayed as lavish and decadent—a contrast that reinforces the sense of repressive enclosure in which Dominga lived. The nuns’ narrow tombeau [tomb] in Santa Rosa, with its vaulted ceilings, narrow bed, and spare furnishings, counters with the lavish quarters inside Santa-Cathalina, where the bed was so plush that the traveler almost wishes she could stay there! “Cette nuit-là, j’eus presque le désir de me faire religieuse” [“That night I almost wished to become a nun.”]. Poised “sur le dôme de notre maison” [“on the roof of our house”]; that is, in a position of narrative authority, Tristan ends her impressions of Peruvian convent life with the promise to send Rossini’s music to the mischievous trio at Santa Cathalina.178 In a way similar to Frances Erskine Inglis’ powerful depiction of convent life in Mexico, the narrator eventually distances herself from her protagonist’s fate, thus increasing the pedagogical impact of the tale, and engaging the reader’s sympathies by registering its reception among three female shut-ins. Tristan’s writing of her (shattered) self among the faces and lives of Peruvian women evidences the practice of female auto-ethnography,

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a variant of an “ethnographie des femmes,” motivated by the need to break down the self-other divide, and by the awareness of female solidarity. Later in the memoir, Tristan retakes Dominga’s story, mentioning it at the end of chapter 5, “Une tentation” [“A Temptation”] juxtaposed to her own tale of renunciation and loss, after she gave up the dream of conquering power by means of marriage to the Spaniard Escudero. Dominga is the first person to know of Tristan’s imminent departure for Lima and, consequently, of her return to Europe. Now living in complete isolation, and after her heroic attempt at regaining her freedom, the young and still beautiful Dominga is shunned by all, what provokes Tristan’s ire as well as her identification with yet another victim of social prejudice. In a scene paralleling Tristan’s dialogue with Carmen, here each woman projects onto the other her own repressed wishes: Dominga, longing to be free from being “toujours la monja de Santa Rosa!” (2:278, 280) [“‘I shall always be a nun!’”]; Flora, unable to transcend her shackled status: “—Et moi, répétai tous bas, toujours mariée . . . [“‘And I, I muttered under my breath, I shall always be married!”]. Dominga’s example illustrates one of the central arguments made earlier in the “Prologue”: that women banished from the social order are subsumed under the pariah status. In contrast to the superfluous limeñas, Dominga’s ravishing beauty contrasts with her extreme melancholy: “sa belle physionomie avait une teinte de mélancholie et de souffrance, qui répandait sur toute sa personne un charme indéfinissable” [“her lovely face was tinged with melancholy and suffering which lent her whole person an indefinable charm”], making the contradiction between body and psyche emblematic of a broader social dissonance with respect to the female subject.179 Although the “visual image of a strong woman performing courageous acts . . . haunts the scene of Tristan’s writing,”180 Dominga’s silent and silenced presence embodies a far more evocative and powerful image of a woman without a place in the existing gender system, pushed to the edge of the socio-symbolic order. By telling the story of an (Other) in a similar predicament as her own, Tristan effectively “took up the mantle of the main pariah of modern society—the female.”181 Hence the traveler enacts a bold act of defiance to open up the gates of her own prison-cell by looking into the lives of others. FRANCES ERSKINE INGLES: ETHNOGRAPHY AS “WAKING DREAM” One of the most salient scenes in Journal of a Residence in Chile is the moment when Graham, at the foot of the Salta waterfall, views the high Andes, and is suddenly gripped by a fleeting vision:

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Figure 4.7.  Maria Graham, “Salta [sic] de Agua,” Plate VI, Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1824), 213.

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I could, in the spirit of Ossian, have believed, that the soul of some old Cacique had flitted by; and, if he regretted his name and nation were no longer supreme here, was not ungratified at the sight of the smiling cultivated plain his labours had tended to render fruitful; nor, it may be, of me , as one of the white children of the East, whence freedom to the sons of the Indians was once more to raise.182

While, on the one hand, the passage clearly signals Graham’s acknowledgement of the loss suffered by indigenous peoples, on the other, the poignant phrase, “one of the white children of the East,” has been perceptively read as “an allegory of her situation as an English traveler in Chilean territory.”183 The allegory also functions to construct a two-way ethnographic authority that takes into account both the place assigned to the culturally Other as well as the self-styled female ethnographer. Moreover, the final vision—“whence freedom to the sons of the Indians was once more to raise”—suggests that it is a “redemptive allegory” geared to adjust, if only symbolically, the grievances of the conquered. By positioning herself eye-to-eye with the old Cacique, Graham assumes the pose of “recorder and interpreter of fragile custom”; fashioning herself as “custodian of an essence;” an essence irredimeably lost under the violence of the conquest.184 Though less intense than Bremer’s conscious choice to record African rituals in Cuba, Graham poses for a moment, identifying herself with the old Cacique in recognition of his group’s past losses and in anticipation of present gains. Graham’s South American journals attest that European women travelers reveal the same mythologizing impulse when approaching the culturally Other, at the same time that they represent-in diverse ways—the class fissures of post-Independence societies. In Mexico, Frances Erskine Ingles, who wrote as Madame Calderón de la Barca, had sustained contact with “the still vibrant viceregal aristocracy of Mexico City”; her acute observations of diverse social strata—Indian women in the marketplace, clergy, nuns, domestic servants, the customs and manners of upper-class Mexicans—form a social history of nineteenth-century Mexico.185 Comparable to Flora Tristan in the all-encompassing sweep of her gaze, Calderón’s biting sociological commentary serves to distance the viewer and blocks an empathic sensibility associated with a gendered mode of travel. Like Graham in Valparaíso, Calderón’s stroll through the zócalo discloses the contours and corners of a city still haunted by its Aztec splendor. In comparison to her transatlantic peers, the peculiarity of Calderón’s ethnographic vision lies in the riveting counterpoint established between Mexico’s preHispanic past and its present republic; here, ethnographic discourse appears either as an antidote to history or as veiled historical archive. This counterpoint technique climaxes in a scene atop Chapultepec castle, where, like Graham’s viewing of the old Cacique, the traveler “sees” the ghost of Montezuma beck-

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oning to her through the ages, hence establishing a sympathetic bond with the defeated Aztec emperor that runs through her entire residence in Mexico.186 In spite of this imaginary allegiance, Calderón de la Barca has been simultaneously labeled a pro- and anti-Conquest advocate, an ambivalence borne out of her marital ties to a Spaniard and official representative of the metropolis. Calderón’s views of indigenous civilization, framed according to her Golden Age forebear as a “waking dream,” merits, however, greater consideration, for it has led to two symmetrically opposed interpretations: either the author subverts the rhetoric of conquest, or, alternatively, she reinforces it by a willful mystification of the past.187 Since the early conquest and at different historical junctures, travelers from far and wide have determined that their first glimpse of the ancient city of Tenochtitlán from along the curved road leading from Río Frío was their true point of entry into Mexico, a threshold event establishing the tradition of travel writing to the country.188 At that inaugural moment when she viewed the valley of Mexico from the heights, Frances seems to imitate the conquistador’s gesture of appropriation in a near reenactment of the scene of the conquest:189 As we strained our eyes to look into the valley, it appeared . . . rather like a vision of the Past than the actual breathing Present. The curtain of Time seemed to roll back a few centuries, and to discover us the great panorama of Mexico that burst upon the eyes of Cortés when he first set foot upon these shores . . .

Whereas for Cabañas, “this vision [proves] that Calderón participates in Cortés heroic self and becomes a legatee of his civilizing mission,” for Leask it “ultimately serves to question rather than legitimize Cortés’s conquistador gaze.”190 It is undoubtedly true that the Scotswoman condemns the Spanish colonizing mission and its aftermath, putting the blame squarely on Cortés and even speaking on behalf of the Aztecs: “He is blamed for cruelty—for injustice—but the first cruelty and the first injustice consisted in his entering these unknown lands, and disturbing an inoffensive people.” It is also significant that this passage was struck out of the first published version, and was only retrieved in the Fishers’ expanded 1966 edition (which, as they claim, includes supplementary material from the author’s private diaries). Going beyond the two prevailing judgments, I offer a third reading: the Scotswoman’s visionary dream shows that she understood the defeat of the Aztec empire as a collective trauma. Aligned with the conflicted tone of other European voyagers, Calderón modifies her initial claim by seemingly justifying Cortés’ mission as historical imperative: “Once considering it his duty to God and his King to subdue them [the Aztecs], where was his alternative?” This historical allusion then merges with a sober reflection on the female traveler’s sojourn: “And how forcibly [these pictures] return to the

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mind now when, after a lapse of three centuries, we behold for the first time the city of palaces raised upon the ruins of the Indian capital.”191 The traveler thus sustains the image of the conquest in her mind as a form of imaginative reenactment, a witnessing, rather than a corrective, of the past. Throughout Life in Mexico, the emotive first sight of ancient Tenochtitlán conditions Calderón’s view of the country’s indigenous past, and even its present-day dwellers. In a later passage describing the Mexican cathedral, Frances Calderón mistakes Mexico’s massive religious architecture and the central feature of its zócalo as “Gothic” and “in very bad taste,” thus revealing the same kind of “colonialist error” as her predecessors (Flora Tristan’s distaste for Lima’s baroque architecture).192 In a gesture typical of Calderón’s romanticizing of the past, the main interest of the Mexican cathedral lies, not in its ornamentation, but rather in the ruins of its ancestral temple. Impressed by the Aztec Calendar stone and the Stone of Sacrifices, here her defense of the conquistador stems from a moral judgment inspired by the sight of the Aztec “pyramidal temple” and dread of ceremonial sacrifices ritually carried out at that very spot: [L]et the memory of Cortés be sacred. While on one side he exterminated with the sword, on the other, with the cross, he stopped the shedding of innocent blood that flowed from human victims; planted the cathedral on the ruins of the temple which had so often resounded with human groans; and in the place of their huge blood-smeared idols enshrined the mild form of the Virgin.193

As in the eloquent Chapultepec passage, Calderón’s counterpoint technique enables the reader to relive the past, while at the same time embuing the scene with a strong ethical ring. As Nigel Leask has shown, the mix of figural rhetoric—where the notion of the beautiful substitutes both “the aesthetics of ruin” and “the sublime and the picturesque”—suggests, instead, “a historical and cultural recovery of the indigenous past.”194 Michel de Certeau warns us that the writing of history is enacted on the dead toll of the past. This equivalence surfaces in a subsequent passage narrating a visit to the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon at San Juan Teotihuacán, built neither by Aztecs nor Toltecs but by a far more ancient civilization. Here the use of “thick description” shows a seasoned ethnographer describing Aztec practices in dramatic detail, thus effectively conveying to the reader the sense of “being there:” “Fragments of obsidian, in the forms of knives and arrows, with which the priests opened the breasts of their human victims, are still to be found here . . .” In a passage meant to persuade against the Spanish “leyenda negra,” the author leaves an imprint of the site, shifting the focus away from the horror of human sacrifice to a more abstract reflection:

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The whole plain on which these great pyramids stand was formerly called Micaotli, or Pathway of the Dead; and the hundreds of smaller pyramids which surround the larger ones . . . are symmetrically disposed in wide streets, forming a great burial plain, composed perhaps of dust of their ancient warriors—an Aztec or Toltec Père Lachaise, or rather a roofless Westminster Abbey.195

This poignant image of pre-conquest Mexico echoes Michel de Certeau’s formulation that “[d]iscourse about the past has the status of being the discourse of the dead.”196 Historical romance—the allegorizing of the past in terms of a future plot—functions as the limits of ethnography, concerned, not with living beings and communities, but with manifold “ghosts of an unresolved indigenous past.”197 Ultimately, Calderón’s intial evocation of the conqueror gradually gives way to a sympathetic portrait of Montezuma as leader of the conquered. At the gates, the Calderóns’ “entry into the city of Montezuma” acknowledges a sense of “historical continuity between pre- and post-conquest Mexico,” and, albeit indirectly, the right of pertenencia of the country’s indigenous population.198 Frances’ first visit to Chapultepec, where Montezuma had his court, evokes his ghostly presence underneath the cypress trees: “There has the last of the Aztec emperors wandered with his dark-eyed harem. Under the shade of these gigantic trees he has rested, . . . and fallen to sleep, his dreams unhaunted by visions of the stern traveller from the far east . . . .” Parallel to Maria Graham’s self-fashioning as “one of the white children of the East,” Calderón structures her commentary as a “waking dream” to signal her own primary role as ethnographic interpreter; like her British peer, an Orientalist reference cloaks her own presence as foreign visitor, while, at the same time, it serves to weave herself obliquely into the fabric of the tale.199 Calderón’s travel account presents the link between past and present as an uneven exchange, an ambivalence, and, at times, outright rejection, of living subjects. Like Fredrika Bremer’s first confrontation with the enslaved in the American South, Calderón’s empathy breaks down when dealing with descendants of the ancient Aztecs. If, as Leask claims, all foreign travelers to Mexico had to negotiate “[t]he relationship between the contemporary indígena and the Aztec past,”200 the self-assured ambassador resolves this representational dilemma by recourse to picturesque description—“bronze colour and nearly naked” men and women donned “with the invariable rebozo.” Here “thick description” works to freeze the Other as static, subdued, and silent masses, hieratic under her gaze. Like Bremer’s categorical adoption of the false “good vs. bad master” dichotomy, Calderón constructs a “Manichean allegory” at the root of her ethnographic subtext: whereas victims of a cruel dynasty are exalted, members of indigenous groups are depicted in a

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degraded state. Aligned with her “Protestant, capitalist work ethic,” the only Mexicans who elicit her sympathies are those engaged in productive activity; otherwise, the masses crowding the alleys of the old viceroyalty are described pejoratively, what clouds the luster of an otherwise witty account.201 Contrast the difference between her praise for the pregoneros selling their wares on Mexican streets and the disdain with which she dismisses a beggar soon after her arrival in Mexico City. Whereas the first conforms a local color sketch conveying the sensory appeal of the pregoneros’ chants and cries—down to the detail of adding a musical notation to better imitate the seller of gorditas or “[l]ittle fat cakes”—the second depicts an archetypal fear of the Other and the refusal to approach a radical Other perceived as a threat to the traveler’s security.202 As a last, sobering conclusion on post-colonial society (at the beginning of autonomous rule), Calderón ponders the meaning of a street named “The Sad Indian” (Calle del Indio Triste). Located precisely at the palace of Axayacatl, the last emperor’s father, the forlorn statue marking the fork in the road represents either “a rich cacique” who had served as a spy for the viceroy, or a statue built by defeated Aztecs to commemorate “the death of Montezuma.” In either case, the statue figures in stone that abject condition to which the indigenous population has been reduced in the historical present. “The Sad Indian’s” look of dejection immediately strikes the visitor: “It is a melancholy-looking statue, whomsoever it may represent, of an Indian in a sitting posture, with a most dejected and forlorn air and countenance.”203 In contrast to the initial grandeur glimpsed at Tenochtitlán, where the misty shrouding of the scene honored the legacy of its original founders, here it is the homeliness of the Indian—and his “forsaken” state—that fixes the culturally Other, turning him into a petrified ruin much like the ancient monuments left behind. MEXICAN FIESTAS AND CONVENTS: GENDER ON DISPLAY Fashion and dress mark both the traveler’s gender as well as her perceptions of women’s social rank in New World societies. As in Maria Graham’s Brazilian sojourn, the masked ball appears as a staple of nineteenth-century European culture in Latin America, allowing women to maintain their moorings much like the earnest European scientists who endeavored to keep their composure in the wild with the help of taxonomy.204 For the female traveler, participation at a masked ball marked a compulsory ritual of passage into local society; shortly after her arrival in Mexico City, and at her husband’s suggestion, Fanny makes elaborate plans to confect a china poblana costume

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to wear at a charity ball early in 1839. The Scottish ambassador was intrigued about “the dress of the Poblana peasants,” which she describes with a note of pride, noting in minute detail all of its constituent parts: “white muslin chemise . . . trimmed with lace and embroidery; . . . a petticoat . . . divided into two colors . . . with a satin vest . . . brochéed with gold or silver;” the skirt held by a “long, broad, coloured sash,” with a “small coloured handkerchief” in front “crossing over the neck”; with “a coloured rebozo” as a final touch.205 Since the start of the voyage, Madame de la Barca was fascinated by the beauty and color of the poblana dress, and sought to imitate it as part of a gesture of inclusion; there is no hint of “primitivism” in her description.206 Parallel to Tristan’s account of the limeña’s favorite robe, the desire to imitate local fashion is a way to validate a new norm of femininity, as well as a gesture of inclusion with both members of her own sex and the broader community she was there to serve. In what she saw as a “compliment to the Mexicans,” to resemble and hence pay homage to indigenous subjects, the new ambassador’s wife ordered a “superb” Poblana dress from the wife of a Mexican general (“a petticoat of maroon-coloured marino”), seeking also well-meant advice from a pair of delegates on how to plait her hair. Much to her dismay, Frances soon discovered that her china poblana dress had the opposite effect among local constituencies, given the Mexicans’ ambivalence regarding their indigenous heritage and sense of mixed cultural identity. Her choice of dress soon became an affair of state, as the president himself, along with most of his cabinet, made a surprise visit to the Spanish ambassador’s home in order to persuade Frances not to wear the costume in public. Her appearance at the ball would be sure to cause a scandal, they warned, since “all Poblanas were femmes de rien.” Caballero and Hayward insist that, for the Mexicans, “the ‘China Poblana’ represents servitude and is therefore to be shunned,” missing the fact that their objection was due to gender and race.207 For, clearly, the Mexicans objected to a woman of high standing wearing a costume that signified a transgression of the prevailing gender code (“femmes de rien:” akin to prostitution). Not only did the president, among other dignitaries, voice his strong objections, but he was followed by an unofficial delegation composed of “the chief ladies of Mexico” to further drive home the fact that such an act would have been perceived as blatant given the wearer’s diplomatic role in their country. As prime example of how women travelers were forced to conform to dominant discourses of femininity (Mills), this joint effort dissuaded Fanny from wearing the local costume. The night of the ball she dutifully gave up the local dress in favor of a discreet Roman toga, presumably, out of respect for Don Angel’s diplomatic mission. Yet Fanny cunningly got her revenge by wearing a headdress which resembled a folded flat-cloth head-cover typically used by indigenous women, a subtle

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yet nevertheless firm hint of resistance to upper-class Mexicans’ categorical denial of their past.208 Besides a most effective probe at Mexicans’ prejudiced attitudes, subtle irony bolsters Calderón de la Barca’s ethnographic authority, while her conscious mimicry of local mores suggests an inversion of post-colonial paradigms. If mimicry serves the colonized as a subversive move with which to grasp the colonizer’s power, here Frances side-steps the prohibition to imitate the Other by flaunting the limitations imposed by an inflexible social code. The desire to be(come) the Other takes many forms in European women’s travelogues; in both Tristan and Calderón, dress, fashion, and masquerade, the trappings of external appearance, shape the mimetic urge, with the effect of blurring the class and racial boundaries of post-Independence societies. Calderón’s ethnographic eye records not only the elaborate fashion rituals of the Mexican aristocracy but also the widespread rebozo used by popular classes, suggesting that fashion functions as female local knowledge. Much like her French peer, Calderón constructs an “ethnographie des femmes” based on her perceptions of Mexican women, which are not limited to race alone, as they range from negative appraisals on the mestizas’ lack of physical graces to positive valorizations of the “extraordinary beauty” achieved by Indian women such as Doña Marina or La Güera Rodríguez, whom Humboldt greatly admired.209 Unlike Tristan, who wrote out of disillusionment at not being able to settle in Peru, Calderón’s ethnography marks the distance separating her from other female subjects under scrutiny. Despite her keen interest in “the condition of Mexican women of all classes and stations,” what makes her appear “not a traveler so much as an emigrant,”210 Calderón’s satirical bent reinforces the gap between observer and observed. The exception is Calderón’s gripping account of young women from the Mexican upper-classes trapped inside convent walls, one of the most poignant expressions of gender solidarity in Western travel writing. In a letter dated April 27, 1840, the author introduces the inner life of La Encarnación—a convent compared to “a palace” given its luxurious setting and the leisurely lifestyle of the sisters. In a subsequent letter (dated June 12, 1840), Calderón indicates that she was already familiar with the ceremony, since she had witnessed “three nuns take the veil,” what prepares the reader for subsequent descriptions of the vow-taking ceremony, described as “the saddest event that can occur in this nether sphere.” Although this letter is placed out-of-sequence in the Fishers’ edition, it anticipates a series of vignettes detailing the taking-of-the-veil of three young women barely out of adolescence, a sequence beginning in the section “‘Last Look of This Wicked World,’” headed by a letter dated June 4, 1840. Whereas at La Encarnación Calderón had pitied novices as “poor little entrapped things!” who naïvely believed that they would soon be released from

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bondage, at Santa Teresa the notion of female entrapment is forcibly conveyed by heart-wrenching descriptions of the solemnities.211 The nun who had befriended the foreign visitor at the convent of Santa Teresa invites Frances Erskine to witness her first initiation ceremony. Although the first young victim remains anonymous, the drama of involuntary confinement is forcibly conveyed by the Gothic enveloping of the scene in black (twenty-five faceless “black nuns” surround the girl; a solemn black curtain falls at each stage of the ceremony; at a climactic point, the novice “prostrate on the floor . . . and covered with black cloth,” is declared “dead to the world.”) The impersonality of the description clashes with the narrator’s stream-of-consciousness narration of the scene of female immolation, eliciting the reader’s sympathy as well as rejection of the religious ritual: “The heroine of the day came forward, and stood before the grating to take her last look at this wicked world. Down fell the black curtain.” A second brief interlude refers to a girl “sacrificed in a similar manner” at the wealthy convent of La Encarnación, but with a crucial difference: while the first gave herself over to religious life due to lack of attributes for marriage, the second “was received without a dowry, on account of the exceeding fineness of her voice.”212 In her study of convent life in eighteenth-century Mexico, Lavrin explains that a solemn profession required a dowry of “four thousand pesos from the 1730s onward,” an obstacle to non-enfranchised classes and an indicator of the way convent life reproduced the social, racial, and economic hierarchy of Mexican society.213 Even though Erskine Ingles’s account is highly critical of a system where women function as objects of exchange, it does record a common practice of allowing women with specific talents into religious life, expanding what was clearly an elitist institution limited to the upper-classes.214 The focus on female victimization downplays the social role which Catholic convents played in colonial Mexico as a “shelter for unprotected women” who were unable to marry, or as a way out of unequal matches that would put the female party and their families at a social and economic disadvantage.215 Without pondering the factors that may have motivated the families to entrust their daughters to religious life, even without a true calling, Calderón filters the girls’ tragedy by means of her own privileged role as spectator. In a classic example of ethnographic empathy, she notes the spot where she is seated at the church as well as her participation in the pre-nuptial banquet— tactics which serve to detach the viewer from the scene, thus garnering readers’ sympathies for these anonymous victims of an oppressive gender system.216 The gap between European observer and local subject is subtly underscored, a distance which only serves to heighten the pathos of the scene. The third episode, by far the most dramatic of the series, hones in on Calderón’s anti-clericalism and her sense of gender justice. After having vowed “to

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see no more such scenes,” she receives an invitation from a Mexican acquaintance to be present at her daughter’s solemn profession. Here the drama is forcibly conveyed by a focus on a mother and a daughter forced to separate by sheer caprice of a father-confessor. The third and last novice’s pushed inside the convent walls underscores a tension between maternal angst and daughterly dread; in one of her most forceful uses of “thick description,” the narrator conveys the drama of forced interment by depicting how it severed that most primal of bonds: The most terrible thing to witness was the last, straining, anxious look which the mother gave her daughter through the grating. She had seen her child pressed to the arms of strangers, and welcomed to her new home. She was no longer hers. All the sweet ties of nature had been rudely severed, and she had been forced to consign her, in the very bloom of youth and beauty, . . . to a living tomb.

The author’s moral indignation and outrage is so visibly voiced—“I expressed my horror at the sacrifice of a girl so young, that she could not possibly have known her own mind”—that feminist interpretations which see the fate of these unfortunate shut-ins as an “empowered . . . life choice” would seem to contradict the strong emotional charge of this and previous scenes.217 Feminist colonial historiography tempers the extremes shown in Life in Mexico by showing the main social function of the convent in post-Independence societies: to foster women’s education. With the support of a powerful merchant class who served the nuns as patrons, convents functioned as “a haven for the unprotected, a resting place for the weary, a safe and holy asylum;” Lavrin concludes that “[n]unneries were created to protect and fulfill that part of the female elite which was not to become married.”218 Although applicable in the case of the first novice, the wife of the Spanish ambassador offers, in contrast, a powerful indictment when she warns that “it is not in the flower of youth that the warm heart should be consigned to the cold cloister.”219 Frances Calderón’s portrayal of convent life in Mexico belies historiographical assumptions which present a more positive view of the institution, hence balancing the ethical concerns of the foreign travelogue with contemporary historical approaches. Echoing Tristan’s tone of moral indignation upon hearing Dominga’s story, here Frances Calderón’s impassioned “ethnographie des femmes” leaves no doubt that she sees convents as a tragic fate, particularly for young women sheltered against their will. Compared to other passages of Life in Mexico which address pre-Hispanic civilization, women figure as “the dead [,] the objective figure of an exchange among the living,”220 parallel to the thousands of silent victims stoned atop the Aztec pyramid. Frances Calderón’s travel account is thus a call-to-action to stop a practice detrimental to women; indeed, the Scottish visitor saw the convent

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“as a symbol of the oppression of women by a patriarchal and religious society.”221 Since, at a later point in her life, a widowed Frances converted to Catholicism, we can only speculate whether these moving scenes lend support to the Spanish leyenda negra [black legend], or, rather, whether they rise from the spirit of reform shared by other nineteenth-century pilgrims. FACE-TO-FACE WITH THE OTHER: TOWARDS AN “ETHNOGRAPHIE DES FEMMES” Calderón’s Life in Mexico repeats similar strategies and themes touched on by other traveling ethnographers; for instance, her comparison between Mexican bullfights and “the magnificence of the Madrid arena” recalls Flora Tristan’s unfavorable contrast between the peninsular ritual and its gory Peruvian counterpart; both travelers concur in their negative assessment of a degraded New World “spectacle.” Likewise, Calderón’s impressions of the slovenliness of upper-class Mexican women evokes Maria Graham’s unflattering description of Brazilian hostesses in an equal state of deshabillé. Both example suggest the pose of superiority attributed to European travelers; certainly, Calderón’s uncensored opinions regarding the Mexicans’ “universal indolence” or her unwelcome assertion that “dirtiness” is “a quality too inherent in la gentuza mexicana” aligns her with the prevailing European dominance label.222 Yet, alongside these excessive judgments (typical, as Wheeler has taught us, of the travel account) are glimpses of what Geertz has called the most valid form of anthropological knowledge—an understanding, however fleeting, of the symbolic world of the Other. Calderón’s appreciation of Mexican craftsmen who magically forge miniature sculptures out of wax parallels Graham’s delight at grasping the secret of the Chilean artesanos. The two English travelers coincide in their aesthetic appreciation of their respective New World settings in terms of the superlative: “Everything is on a grand scale, and everything is picturesque.”223 Though rudimentary by modern standards, European women travelers fostered an eclectic ethnography through a gendered gaze. As precursors of modern anthropology, perhaps their greatest gain was achieving a subtle balance between empirical observation and subjective impression, although their ethnographic sketches often tipped toward the latter end of the scale. Women’s travel accounts led to many productive exchanges between male and female intellectuals (most noticeably, Prescott’s “borrowing” of Life in Mexico as a prime source for his own voluminous history).224 The moral, prescriptive tone of their memoirs aligns itself with the discourse of early feminist reform, an intellectual movement emerging as nineteenth-century women came to play

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Figure 4.8.  Maria Graham, Plate XIV, “Cacique with his Troops advancing to meet Carrera,” Plate XIV, Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green: 1824), 419.

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the role of mediators between private and public spheres. Travel writing hence fostered fruitful dialogues among Victorian “globe-trotters,” facilitating the “golden cables of sympathy” girding nineteenth-century feminism.225 From a contemporary vantage point, our late Romantic precursors were, at least, sensitive to the impact of colonization, and, at best, sympathetic to resistance efforts by indigenous leaders. Graham’s image of a mythologized cacique leading a charge against Carrera’s troops illustrates the limits—and gains—of foreign women’s traveling ethnography. As social observers, Graham, Tristan, and Bremer exemplify the “ethnographic picturesque,” an approximation to indigenous and African cultures “which emphasized living continuity rather than absence of the past,” and which lent non-Western others “a sense of classical grandeur,” while rendering them “objects of pathos” in the present.226 For many of their readers, ensconced in parlors and dining-rooms, their accounts provided an escape from the confines of domesticity, and a summary preview onto the world of the Other. Anticipating the complex relationship between anthropology and state-making forged during the twentieth-century, nineteenth-century women effectively played the role of mediators, seeking to understand yet, at the same time, constricting by their riveting gaze the social practice of non-Western peoples in the Americas.227 At the limit of conversion into (an) Other, or on the verge of self-discovery, transatlantic pilgrims find, at the end of their journeys, a subject whose marginalization mirrors their own. NOTES 1.  Angela Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times: Narratives about Travel to South America, 1790–1849, trans. Dick Cluster (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 78. 2.  Referring to Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822; and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (1824), Pérez Mejía sees it as “a treasure trove of ethnographic observations . . . not only about Chile but about Victorian society and British-Chilean relations.” A Geography of Hard Times, 84. 3.  Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 88. This critic basically claims that “Graham appeals to the superiority conferred by her social class to reaffirm the authority of her narrative subject” (91). 4.  Maria H. Frawley, A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1994), 39. 5. Ibid. 6.  Marie-Claire Hoock-Demarle’s essay, “Le langage littéraire des femmes enquêtrices,” appeared in Colloque international Flora Tristan. Un fabuleux destin. Actes

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du premier Colloque international Flora Tristan, ed. Stéphane Michaud (Dijon: Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 1985), 95–106. Despite her adoption of the term, Mary Louise Pratt argues that “social reformism . . . constitute[s] a form of female imperial intervention in the contact zone,” Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 161, 155.  7. Ottmar Ette stresses that the first-person of the travel account is not to be conflated with the persona of the traveler, in Literature on the Move, trans. Katharina Vester (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), a distinction particularly well suited to female travel writing. I am indebted to Anke Birkenmaier for her insightful comments on this chapter.   8.  “Finding somewhere to stand in a text that is supposed to be at one and the same time an intimate view and a cool assessment is as much of a challenge as gaining the view and making the assessment in the first place.” Clifford Geertz, “Being There: Anthropology and the Scene of Writing,” in Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 9–10. The following reflection owes much to this passage.  9. Ibid., 10. 10.  Clifford Geertz, “‘From The Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” in his Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 56. 11.  June Hahner has noted that most foreign travelers limited their experience to members of their own privileged class, “Introduction,” Women Through Women’s Eyes: Latin American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1998), xv–xvi. 12.  “[T]he persona of the fieldworker was validated . . .” James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 30, 39–40. 13. Valerie Wheeler, “Travelers’ Tales: Observations on the Travel Book and Ethnography,” Anthropological Quarterly 59, no. 2 (1986): 54. 14.  Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 32–35. 15.  While Wheeler beautifully documents the literary quality of twentieth-century anthropological classics (“Travelers’ Tales,” 54–56; 58), James Clifford examines the post-structuralist change in register that sees contemporary ethnography in terms of textuality and discourse in The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 38–44. 16.  James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2–3; 67. See also his seminal essay “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 113. 17.  Geertz, “‘From the Native’s Point of View,’” 56. 18.  Geertz, “Being There,” 9. I have drawn here on Susan K. Grogan’s “‘Playing the Princess’: Flora Tristan, Performance, and Female Moral Authority During the July Monarchy,” in The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Cen-

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tury France, ed. Jo Burr Margadant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 72–98; and Cristina Guiñazu, “En el nombre del padre: Las peregrinaciones de una paria de Flora Tristan,” Ciberletras 5 (August 2001): n.p. 19.  Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822, And a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, ed. Jennifer Hayward (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 300. Pérez Mejía analyzes the portrait in A Geography of Hard Times, 81, 84. 20.  Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822, And a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, and John Murray, 1824), 129, 115. Revised edition, Journal of a Residence in Chile, ed. Jennifer Hayward (2003), 4, 15. Hereafter cited Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824) or Chile (2003). “[S]he sets up her travels as a cure for her own melancholy following her husband’s death,” Hayward, editor’s note, Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile, 3n1. 21.  Maria Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil and Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1833 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, and John Murray, 1824), 205 (hereafter cited Journal of a Voyage to Brazil). Lila Marz Harper developed the notion of “solitary traveler” to describe Victorian women engaged in scientific inquiry in Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001). 22.  Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xvi–xix. 23.  Ibid., xviii. 24.  Ibid., xx. The conflation of text and voyage is explained as follows: “the transgression of losing or leaving the home is mediated by a movement that attempts to fill the gap of that loss through a spatialization of time”; ibid., xix. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 115 and Chile (2003), 5. 25.  “Travel can only be conceptualized in terms of the points of departure and destination and of the (spatial and temporal) distance between them. A traveler thinks of his or her journey in terms either of the destination or of the point of departure,” ibid., xviii. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 117 and Chile (2003), 6. 26.  “From these private seats of selfhood, Graham and Tristan depict themselves emerging to explore the world in circular expeditions that take them out into the public and new, then back to the familiar and enclosed,” a movement which results in “a personal, room-sized empire.” Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 160. In this book, I argue that the travelers’ accent on domesticity does not necessarily equate them as subjects of empire. 27. Clifford, Routes, 32. 28.  “Until the time of Graham’s voyage, the geographic discourse about America had not dwelled on either interiors or domestic customs.” Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 90, 78. 29. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 118–19, 124 and Chile (2003), 8, 12. 30.  Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 88, 90–91, 96, 101. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 125, and Chile (2003), 12.

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31.  Wheeler, “Travelers’ Tales,” 57. 32. Both Pérez Mejía (A Geography of Hard Times, 86, 90, 92) and Hayward emphasize Graham’s imposing of an English standard in her rendition of Chilean society (Graham, Chile [2003], xxii); M. Soledad Caballero claims that “she is not only invested in Spanish American Independence but in civilising Latin America along British lines,” in “‘For the Honour of Our Country’: Maria Dundas Graham and the Romance of Benign Domination,” Studies in Travel Writing 9, no. 2 (2005): 117. My argument here is that these contradictions are inherent to the traveler’s ethnographic gaze. 33. Frawley, A Wider Range, 39. 34.  All quotes in this paragraph are drawn from Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 130–34, and Chile (2003), 16–19. 35.  Wheeler, “Travelers’ Tales,” 57. “Fieldwork was centered on the experience of the participant-observing scholar;” Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 34. 36.  Geertz, “Being There,” 10. 37.  Simon Collier and William F. Sater, A History of Chile, 1808–1994 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 41–42. 38.  Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 18. 39.  Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 35. The author explains in a footnote that the German term Verstehen, although “readily associated with intuition or empathy . . . properly involves a critique of empathetic experience,” 35n6. 40.  Ibid., 31. 41.  Ibid., 34. 42. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 143 and Chile (2003), 25–26. 43.  Pérez Mejía stresses Graham’s ethnocentric perspective throughout A Geography of Hard Times, 88; Geertz, “Thick Description,” 14. 44. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 144 and Chile (2003), 26. 45. This is the thrust of Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, 155, 163, 171; Pérez Mejía’s A Geography of Hard Times, 92, 94, 101; and Caballero’s “For the Honour of Our Country,” readings. 46.  Wheeler, “Travelers’ Tales,” 58. 47. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 262, 266 and Chile (2003), 117, 120. 48. Graham, Journey of a Voyage to Brazil, 224. A similar scene is depicted on Sunday, August 3, 1822, at the Baronesa de Campos’ (Brazil, 266). 49. Graham, Journey of a Voyage to Brazil, 224. 50.  Gilberto Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties, trans. Harriet de Onís (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 204–5. 51.  Quoted in Kirsten Schultz, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 69. 52. Freyre The Mansions and the Shanties, 198; 45, 84, 207. 53. Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties, 102, 44, 26, 138, 154–55.

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54.  James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 32–35. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 15–28. 55.  Jennifer Hayward, ed. “‘No Unity of Design’: Competing Discourses in Graham’s Journal,” in A Journal of a Residence in Chile: During the Year 1822, and A Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, by Maria Graham (London and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 309. 56. Freyre, The Mansion and the Shanties, 45. 57.  Ibid., 203, 275. 58.  Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 34–35. 59.  Geertz, “Thick Description,” 16. 60. Freyre, The Mansion and the Shanties, 87. 61. Hahner justifies Graham’s scathing portrait of the Brazilian elite: “But the women she depicted as slovenly and unkempt had been surprised by Graham and a British friend at an hour far earlier than the accustomed time for social visits in Bahia,” “Introduction,” Women Through Women’s Eyes, 4. 62. Freyre, The Mansion and the Shanties, 218–19. All quotes in this paragraph drawn from Graham, Journey of a Voyage to Brazil, 273, 226, 166–68, 186–87, 185–86. 63. Ibid., 263–64. Freyre notes that local ordinances passed in 1831 and 1844 outlawed many of these festivities, part of the government’s “policy of coercion and violent repression” of African rituals, 265. 64.  Ibid., 373, 376, 386–88. Graham, Journey of a Voyage to Brazil, 199, 196–97. 65.  For another view, see Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 91–94. 66. Freyre, The Mansion and the Shanties, 203. 67.  Ibid., 206. Graham, Journey of a Voyage to Brazil, 189, 197–98, 273, 165; author’s emphasis. 68.  Maria Graham, “Val Longo, or Slave Market at Rio.” plate 1, frontispiece; Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 105. 69.  Ana Maria De Moraes Belluzzo, O Brasil dos Viajantes (São Paulo, Brazil: Fundação Odebrecht; Metalivros, 2000), 3:101. 70. Schultz, Tropical Versailles, 126–27. 71. Ibid., 127. 72. All quotes in this paragraph drawn from Graham, Journey of a Voyage to Brazil, 105, 227–28. 73. Schultz, Tropical Versailles, 125. 74. Graham, Journey of a Voyage to Brazil, 144, 197–98. 75.  Geertz, “From the Native’s Point of View,” 58. I am grateful to my colleague Enrico Mario Santí for bringing Geertz’s essay to my attention. 76.  “All but eight of the 43 letters that comprise Hemmen i den nya verlden mention slavery and/or writers known for their work on the subject.” Laurel Ann Lofsvold, Fredrika Bremer and the Writing of America (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1999), 179, 197, 203, 219. She adds in a footnote: “Four of the remaining eight, letters 24–27 [in volume 2 of The Homes of the New World], have sections dealing with Native Americans” (179). 77.  After classifying “Bremer’s . . . treatment of slavery” as “anything but systematic,” Lofsvold considers that, on this crucial topic, “[s]he engages . . . in an ongoing

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conversation, with Agathe and the other addressees, . . . but mainly with herself.” Ibid., 241. 78.  Lofsvold concludes that the most important aspect of Bremer’s treatment of slavery is what it reveals about its author, and considers her views as literary description rather than as factual analysis. Ibid., 241–42. 79.  Ibid., 241. 80. Ibid., 178, 241. 81.  According to McFadden, “Reform is perhaps the most obvious of the various categories of women’s internationality. . . . Abolition was the oldest and best-known of the specific reform movements.” Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 108–9. Yet Lofsvold is of the opinion that Bremer “marginalizes the sufferings of African Africans,” a disappointment shared by the contemporaneous “ardent abolitionist” Lydia Maria Child; Lofsvold, Fredrika Bremer, 213. 195. 82. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy, 161. 83.  Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” The Predicament of Culture, . . . 32–35. 84. Frawley, A Wider Range, 163–64. 85.  Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, trans. Mary Howitt, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853), letters 13–17, 1:268–397. The second volume opens with letter 26, a capsule account of the conquest of the Mississippi by Marquette and Joliet, followed by an introduction to the Sioux tribe; Letter 27 offers a mostly sympathetic and detailed view of Sioux marriage customs, beliefs, and community rituals like the medicine-dance and pipe-smoking. An analysis of the representation of Native American communities lies outside the scope of this study. Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1854), 2:3–24; 24–63 (hereafter cited The Homes of the New World). 86. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 1:309–11; 2:156–58. 87. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 1:275–76. 88. Clifford, Routes, 22. 89.  Bonnie Frederick, and Susan H. McLeod, eds. Women and the Journey: The Female Travel Experience (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1993), xix. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:312. 90. Clifford, Routes, 67; author’s emphasis. 91.  Ibid., 21. 92.  All quotes from this paragraph drawn from Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:271, 2:311, 2:347–53, 2:356–57, 2:364, 2:373, 2:388–89, 2:419. 93.  All quotes from this paragraph drawn from Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:184–93, 2:311, 2:312–13. 94. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:312–13. 95.  Michèle Guicharnaud-Tollis, Regards sur Cuba au XIXe siècle: Temoignages européens (Paris: Editions d’Harmattan, 1993), 87. 96.  The contemporaneity of Bremer’s account can be attested by comparing her descriptions to Esteban Montejo’s in Miguel Barnet and Esteban Montejo, Biografía de un cimarrón. ed. William Rowlandson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

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 97. Guicharnaud Tollis, Regards sur Cuba, has amply commented on how foreign travelers to Cuba limited their tours to Havana and to its neighboring regions during the heyday of the sugar industry. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:313–14, 325.   98.  Antonio Benítez Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the PostModern Perspective, trans. by James Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 68–71.   99.  “[I]mages of distance, rather than of interconnection and contact, have tended to naturalize the field as an other place.” Clifford, Routes, 67–68; author’s emphasis. 100. Clifford, Writing Culture, 113. 101.  Fernando Ortiz, Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1985), 203. (All translations from Ortiz are my own.) Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:275. 102. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:325. 103. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 31. 104. Clifford, Writing Culture, 101. 105.  Ibid., 113. 106.  “En las danzas circulares se baila alrededor de una persona, . . . en torno a un tambor o de un ídolo, o de ambos; y hombres y mujeres se unen sin orden en rueda unos tras otros, moviéndose, cantando y a veces palmeando con sus manos.” [In circular dances, they danced around one person . . . surrounding a drum or an idol; men and women were united haphazardly in a single line one following the other, moving, singing, and, sometimes, clapping]. Ortiz, Los bailes y el teatro, . . . 210. 107. Ibid., 175–76; author’s emphasis. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:325–27. 108.  “[S]u originario propósito fue sólo la mimesis ritual de los movimientos del coito para promover mágicamente la fecundidad, el crecimiento, y la vida” [Its original purpose was to ritually imitate erotic coupling in order to magically invoke fecundity, life, and growth]. Ibid., 248. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:326–27. 109. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2: 327–28. 110.  James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, 98–121. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Clifford defines this as follows: “The recorder and interpreter of fragile custom is the custodian of an essence, unimpeachable witness to an authenticity” (113). Although for Clifford “salvage, or redemptive, ethnography” are the same, I distinguish here between the two, in order to underscore how Bremer wishes for a redemptive liberation of all blacks in Cuba (Ibid). 111. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:346; previous quote, 2:328. 112. For a discussion of Bremer’s view of slavery, see René Vázquez Díaz, “Fredrika Bremer y la Cuba del siglo XIX (Testimonio americano de una novelista sueca),” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 502 (1992), 98–99, 103–4. 113. Ortiz, Los bailes y el teatro, . . . 221; author’s emphasis. 114. Here I compare two portraits of slaves drawn in Cuba and the American South who are also mentioned in each of the two volumes of her travel itinerary. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:348, 1:394, 2:348, 1:394. 115. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:349.

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116.  This fragment is reproduced in Leví Marrero’s Cuba: Economía y sociedad (Madrid: Playor, 1988), 14:176–77. 117. Ortiz, Los bailes y el teatro, . . . 228. 118.  Ibid., 333, 446. I am indebted to María Beatriz Rodríguez Feo for identifying this figure as a ñáñigo. 119. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:380–83, 2:381; author’s emphasis. 120. Ortiz, Los bailes y el teatro, 200. 121.  Ibid., 200. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:348. 122. Clifford, Writing Culture, 108n8. 123. Bremer, The Homes of the New World, 2:420. 124.  I have drawn here on Clifford’s “metaphor of initiation” discussed in The Predicament of Culture, 81, 75–91. My use of the term implies, however, a deeper transformation, a conversion of sorts, into the world of the Other. 125. Frawley, A Wider Range, 163–65. Frawley goes on to explain how America was seen “as a land in which women could create opportunities for themselves unheard of in other countries”; hence, “it served as a testing ground for female independence and enterprise” (165). 126.  Flora Tristan, Pérégrinations d’une paria, 1833–1834 (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1838), 1:182 (hereafter cited Pérégrinations). Flora Tristan, Peregrinations of a Paria, 1833–1834, Jean Hawkes, trans. and ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986, 60. Abridged passages are my own translation (hereafter cited Peregrinations). Quoted in Susan K. Grogan, Flora Tristan: Life Stories (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 80. Grogan points out that this passage exemplifies the author’s “methodology as a social scientist” (Ibid). Next quote is from Pérégrinations, 1:181. 127. Grogan, Flora Tristan, 79. 128. Ibid, 80. “[L]es maisons sont construites en briques, en terre et en bois; peintes en diverses couleurs clairs, . . . elles font l’effet de maisons inachevées.” [“The houses are built of brick, wood and clay and painted in various light colours: . . . but they give the impression of unfinished houses.”] Tristan, Pérégrinations, 2:346. Peregrinations, 260. 129. Tristan, Pérégrinations, 2:346–47; 2:350. Peregrinations, 260–61. 130.  Ana María Ferrini, “Viajera y cronista de Santa Fe: Lina Beck Barnard,” in Mujeres latinoamericanas: Historia y cultura, Siglos XVI al XIX, (Havana and Mexico City: Casa de las Américas/Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, 1997), 2:125. 131.  I derive the useful concept of “Ethnographie des Femmes” from Maïte Albistur’s “Toute la mémoire des femmes, Introduction,” in Catalogue des Archives Marie-Louise Bouglé (Paris: Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, 1982), 2. 132. A point made also in Vanesa Miseres, “On a Republic in Ruins: Flora Tristan’s Peregrinations of a Pariah and the Role of the Rabonas in NineteenthCentury Peru,” Review 84 45, no. 1 (May 2012), 32–33. 133.  All quotes from this paragraph drawn from Pérégrinations, 2: 121–25, 142; 2: 116, 2: 121–22, 2:123, 2: 92, 2: 123 (author’s emphasis), 2: 123–24, 2: 122–23, 2: 101. Peregrinations, 180. 134.  Pérégrinations, 2:101. Peregrinations, 172.

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135. Whereas for Pratt, “‘feminotopias’” are “idealized worlds of female autonomy, empowerment, and pleasure,” she identifies these only in Tristan’s view of upper-class women of Lima but not, significantly enough, in the harmonious society created by a female indigenous under-class. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 166–67. 136.  Pérégrinations, 2:125. Peregrinations, 181. 137. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 166. 138.  Flora Tristan, “Les femmes de Lima,” Revue de Paris 33, no. 2 (September 1836): 209–16 (hereafter cited “Les femmes de Lima”). 139.  All quotes in this paragraph drawn from Tristan, “Les femmes de Lima,” 211; 210, Pérégrinations, 2:368, 2: 366–69. 140. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 167–68. 141.  All quotes in this paragraph drawn from Tristan, “Les femmes de Lima,” 212 Pérégrinations, 2:371, 2:373–74, 2:380–81. Peregrinations, 272. Translation slightly modified. 142.  “Les femmes de Lima,” “213–14; Pérégrinations, 2:276–77, 2:379; Peregrinations, 275. Author’s and translator’s emphasis. 143.  Flora Tristan, À un inconnu,” 1835, in La Pariah et son rêve. Correspondance établie par Stéphane Michaud (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2003), 60. My translation. 144.  Tristan, “À Monsieur le Ministre de l’Instruction publique,” Paris, July 24, 1841, in, La Pariah et son rêve, 135. 145.  Pérégrinations, 2:360–64. 146.  Tristan, “Les femmes de Lima,” 216; Pérégrinations, 2: 383. 147. Grogan, Flora Tristan, 59. 148.  “[T]ravel literature . . . both challenged and accommodated . . . the domestic ideals with which Victorian women were measured.” Frawley, A Wider Range, 27. Sara Mills has described the “constraints” placed on women travelers by the “discourses of femininity” in Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991), 94–107. 149. Máire Cross and Tim Gray, The Feminism of Flora Tristan (Oxford and Providence: Berg, 1992), 14. 150.  Cristina Guiñazú, “En el nombre del padre: Las peregrinaciones de una paria de Flora Tristan,” Ciberletras 5 (August 2001), n.p, at http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ ciberletras/v05/guinazu.html. Translations from this article are my own. 151.  Kathleen R. Hart has studied at length the debt Tristan owes to the tradition of male spiritual autobiography in “Rêveries des promeneuses solidaires: Flora Tristan and the French Autobiographical Tradition,” French Forum 19, no. 1 (January 1994): 133–48. 152. Tristan, Pérégrinations, 1:xiii. Kathleen R. Hart, “An I for an Eye: Flora Tristan and Female Visual Allegory,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 26, nos. 1–2 (Fall-Winter 1997–1998): 54–55. 153.  Cross and Gray, The Feminism of Flora Tristan, 23. 154.  Pérégrinations, xxv. “La autora recurre al argumento de los utopistas sociales para quienes el grado de civilización de un pueblo se mide según el grado de independencia de sus mujeres.” [The author here relies on utopian socialists for whom

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the degree of civilization of a people depends largely on the degree of independence achieved by women]. Guiñazú, “En el nombre del padre,” 3. 155.  Stéphane Michaud, “Se choisir paria: Brève note sur Flora Tristan,” Romantisme 58 (1987): 40–41. I am indebted to Fernando Carvallo for bringing this article to my attention. 156.  Ibid., 41. 157.  I derive this important concept from Lucía Melgar’s analysis of Elena Garro’s “Relectura desde la piedra: ambigüedad, violencia y género en Los recuerdos del porvenir de Elena Garro,” in Pensamiento y crítica: Los discursos de la cultura hoy, ed. Javier Durán, Rosaura Hernández Monroy and Manuel F. Medina (Mexico City: Michigan State University, Louisville University Press, and Casa Lamm, 2000), 58–73. 158. Jules Janin, “Madame Flora Tristan,” La Sylphide 1, 2nd. Ser. (January 1845): 5. Quoted in Mary Rice-DeFosse, “Reconsidering Flora Tristan’s Narrative Art,” Women in French Studies 3, no. 4 (Fall 1995): 50. My translation. 159.  Michaud, “Se choisir paria”; Cross and Gray, The Feminism of Flora Tristan, 24. 160. Tristan, Pérégrinations, 1: xxiij (author’s emphasis), xxix. 161.  Ibid, 1: xxiv, xxij–xxiv, xxvj. 162.  “Los tres textos introductorios tienen por objeto apoyar el derecho de Tristan a narrar con autoridad su viaje al Perú.” [The three introductory texts purposefully support Tristan’s right to narrate with authority her trip to Peru]. Guiñazú, “En el nombre del padre,” 2. 163.  Hart, “Rêveries des promeneuses solidaires,” 135–40. 164.  Cross and Gray, The Feminism of Flora Tristan, 27. I use the term inspired by the critical anthology, Grogan, The New Biography. 165.  Pérégrinations, 1: xvij, xx, xxj, xxij. 166.  “Elle foit de la écriture une formidable moyen d’émancipation.” [She turned writing into a powerful strategy for liberation]. Stéphane Michaud, conference delivered at the round table held at the Mairie du 9e Arrondissement to celebrate the bicentennial of Flora Tristan, March 12, 2003, Paris. See also “Sacerdoce de l’avenir et action sociale: George Sand et Flora Tristan,” in Muse et Madone: Visages de la femme de la Révolution française aux apparitions de Lourdes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985), 171. 167.  Both biographer Laura S. Strumingher and novelist Mario Vargas Llosa have cast Tristan’s voyage in these terms. 168.  Pérégrinations, 1: xxviij, xxix, xxx–xxxiij; author’s emphasis (my translation). 169.  “La noción de ser una paria . . . se fundamenta en el texto con la historia de cada mujer que encuentra en el viaje.” [The pariah identity is sustained throughout the text by the story of each woman she meets during her voyage]. Guiñazú, “En el nombre del padre,” 4. 170.  All quotes in this paragraph drawn from Pérégrinations, 1:282–83, 1:287–88, 1:283–84, 1:285–87, 1:286. Peregrinations, 102. 171.  Cross and Gray, The Feminism of Flora Tristan, 27. 172.  Rice DeFossey, “Reconsidering Flora Tristan’s Narrative Art,” 47.

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173.  Pérégrinations, 1:284, 1:295–97, 1:298. Peregrinations, 105–06. Kathleen R. Hart, “‘There Shall be Earthquakes in Diverse Places’: Volcanic Terror in Flora Tristan’s Pérégrinations d’une paria,” in The Play of Terror in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. John T. Booker and Allan H. Pasco (London and Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 51. Hart offers a riveting account of the earthquake scene as it unfolds in Tristan’s account. 174.  Pérégrinations 2:185–91. 175.  Cross and Gray, The Feminism of Flora Tristan, 27. 176.  Rice DeFossey, “Reconsidering Flora Tristan’s Narrative Art,” 47. 177.  Pérégrinations, 2: 141–42, 2: 154. 178.  Pérégrinations, 2:193, 2:167, 2:142–53, 2:156–67, 2:144–47, 2:159–60, 2:161, 2:137, 2:195. Peregrinations, 203–04, 195, 186. 179.  Pérégrinations 2:277, 2:278, 2:280, 2:277. Peregrinations, 241. 180.  Hart, “An I for an Eye,” 54–55. 181.  Cross and Gray, The Feminism of Flora Tristan, 28. 182. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 213. 183.  Pérez Mejía, A Geography of Hard Times, 85; the above passage is cited in full. 184.  Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” 113. 185.  Charles A. Hale, “Review of 1966 edition of Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 47, no. 4 (November 1967): 581–83. 186.  Frances Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, (With New Material from the Author’s Private Journals), ed. Howard T. Fisher and Marion Hall Fisher (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1966), 114–16 (hereafter cited Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca ). For an analysis of this scene, along with a sobering reflection on how Mexico’s pre-Hispanic legacy shaped Calderón’s memoir, see Nigel Leask, “‘The Ghost in Chapultepec’: Fanny Calderón de la Barca, William Prescott and Nineteenth-Century Mexican Travel Accounts,” in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. Jaś Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 184–209; 313–16. 187.  Leask argues that Calderón’s account subverts the heroism of conquest (“The Ghost in Chapultepec,” 194, 196, 199), whereas Cabañas holds the opposite view. Miguel A. Cabañas, “North of Eden: Romance and Conquest in Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico,” Studies in Travel Writing 9, no. 1 (2005): 11–13. Amy Kaplan and Nina Gerassi Navarro, likewise, see Mexico’s “dream-like state” as a moment before “[w]aking up . . . [to] imperial conquest and annihilation” in “Between Empires: Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico,” Symposium: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 9, no. 1 (April 2005): 23. My approach is closer to Leask’s. 188.  Leask, “‘The Ghost in Chapultepec,’” 197. 189.  Ibid., 198. 190.  Cabañas, “North of Eden, . . .” 11; Leask, “’The Ghost in Chapultepec,’” 198. He quotes the same passage in full, 198–99. 191.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 87–88.

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192.  An error not lost on the Fishers, who correctly identify its style as Churrigueresque, documenting as well as the litany of complaints voiced against it by foreign travelers, including the American Joel R. Poinsett. Editors’ note, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 685n7. 193.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 104, 105, 103. Last passage also quoted in Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe, “‘The Visible Horizon Bounds Their Wishes’: Seclusion and Society in Fanny Calderón de la Barca’s Postcolonial Mexico,” in Imperial Objects: Essay on Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience, ed. Rita S. Kranidis (New York: Twayne Publishers; Prentice Hall International, 1998), 181. 194.  Leask, “’The Ghost in Chapultepec,’” 199. 195.  Fishers’ in Life in Mexico The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 714n4, 218. 196.  Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 46. 197.  Leask, “‘The Ghost in Chapultepec,”“196. 198.  Ibid., 206. Quotes and the Orientalist reference below are drawn from this passage also. 199.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 89, 114. Leask, “‘The Ghost in Chapultepec,”“ 206. For another reading of Mexico under “a dream-like state,” see Kaplan and Gerassi Navarro, Between Empires, . . .” 22–23. 200.  Leask, “‘The Ghost in Chapultepec,’” 190. 201.  Ibid., 189. 202.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 91–92, 109–11, 110, 106. 203.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 488–89. 204.  Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 108. 205.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 82–83. 206.  See my “‘The Cannon are Roaring’: Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico as Gendered History,” in Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays in Social History, ed. Jeffrey Cox and Shelton Stromquist (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), 64. M. Soledad Caballero and Jennifer Hayward interpret the china poblana episode “as a nostalgic, ‘primitive icon’” in “‘An Occasional Trait of Scottish Shrewdness’: Narrating Nationalism in Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico,” in Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary, ed. Joselyn M. Almeida (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010), 318. They reproduce the passage quoted here, using the 1946 edition of Life in Mexico. 207. Ibid. 208.  All other quotes in this paragraph drawn from Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 112, 118, 125–26, 131. 209.  Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 137–38, 256, 154–55, 141.

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210. Leask, “The Ghost in Chapultepec,” 189; Jagoe, “The Visible Horizon Bounds Their Wishes,” 179. 211.  Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 206–08, 258, 207. 212.  Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 262–63. 213.  Asunción Lavrin, “Women in Convents: Their Economic and Social Role in Colonial Mexico,” in Liberating Women’s History. Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. Berenice A. Carroll, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 255–57. I draw on Lavrin to contextualize the following convent scenes. 214.  “In fact, many poor girls learned a musical instrument in the hope of earning their entrance into a convent as musicians, with a lowered dowry or none at all.” Ibid, 259. 215.  Ibid., 255–56. 216.  Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 264–65. 217.  Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 263, 264–65, 266–67. Above passage quoted in Jagoe, “‘The Visible Horizon Bounds Their Wishes,’” 186. Jagoe’s interpretation of these scenes stresses the narrator’s “familial horror” as well as “her bias toward a negative view of the convent” 185–87. 218.  Lavrin, “Women in Convents,” 256, 262–63, 268, 270. 219.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 267. 220.  De Certeau, The Writing of History, 46. 221. Jagoe, “‘The Visible Horizon Bounds Their Wishes,’” 187. On the other hand, Leask compares Calderón’s “horror and fascination with convents as sites of female confinement and autonomy” with British travelers to the Middle East and India; “‘The Ghost in Chapultepec,’” 189. 222.  While Cabañas and Jagoe assert this view, Leask questions her being placed under the rubric of “‘capitalist vanguard’” Ibid., 191). 223.  Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 127, 139, 254–55, 286, 364. This last quote is the starting point for Leask’s insightful analysis of the use of the female picturesque in Life in Mexico; “‘The Ghost in Chapultepec,’” 193. 224.  Leask, “‘The Ghost in Chapultepec,’” Ibid. 225. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy, 2–4. 226.  Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840. “From an Antique Land” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 174. See Leask’s insightful reading of Maria Graham’s Letters from India (1814), which he considers “underwritten by a ‘rational-reformist’ literary background of the female moralist” (206). 227.  Benoît de L’Estoile, Federico Neiburg, and Lygia Sigaud, eds. “Introduction: Anthropology and the Government of ‘Natives’: A Comparative Approach,” in Empires, Nations, and Natives: Anthropology and State Making, ed. Benoît de L’Estoile, Federico Neiburg, and Lygia Sigaud (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 5.

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Coda: At Home in the Heights

During their travels to the New World, European women experienced their transatlantic crossing as a personal quest, a testing of physical and emotional limits. Since “Victorian adventuresses . . . constructed their identities largely on physical achievement,” the ordeal of travel became a way to transgress constricting gender expectations as well as a means to creatively negotiate the domestic ideal.1 Given the inherent difficulties in defining and preserving an autonomous sense of self, traveling women were enabled “to construct and identity and to embrace anonymity, to scrutinize and retreat from the self.”2 Hence, for some nineteenth-century women, travel was a quest, a highly individualized pilgrimage leading toward reward and self-fulfillment; for others, it was a search beyond, a possibility to imagine alternative frontiers and female identities. While male explorers had sought “a self-discovery in which nature and the self would be one,”3 women travelers trod the mountains, valleys, streams of the New World with a heightened awareness of their physical difference. Like other Victorian “globe-trotters,” European women travelers crossed the high seas to break out of the confines of domesticity, enduring bodily discomfort and a sense of alienation as a means to acquire knowledge.4 The endurance of physical trials implied in travel enhanced women’s subjectivities.5 Whereas male explorers experienced transatlantic crossings as a psychic upsetting of categories—what Lindquist calls “an erasure of identity in the tropics”—the tradition of women’s travel narrative to Latin America suggests an alternative textual space situating the female body within an altered geography.6 As we have seen, certain landscapes or objects of nature evoke particularly strong responses, moving beyond the rhetoric of amazement to an awareness of the physical act of moving in a strange geography. Hence women’s travels accentuate the emotional thrust of ttransatlantic 207

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crossing on the female body, deploying bodily metaphors to anticipate the outcome of the journey. Within the Archive of nineteenth-century Latin America, Tristan’s Pérégrinations inscribes the transatlantic journey as an odyssey centered on the female body;7 as the identity of the traveler shifts, so does her body image and physical reaction to the displacement and discomforts of travel. On the Mexicain, the narrator marks physical discomfort as a recurrent trope in travel writing: “Je me sentis prise par le mal de mer une heure après être entrée dans dette maison flottante. Ce mal a été decrit tant de fois par les nombreuses victims qui en ont été torturées que j’évitarai de fatiguer mon lecteur d’une description nouvelle. . . . c’est une agonie permanente, une suspension de vie. . . .” [“I was seasick an hour after I came on board my floating home. I shall spare the reader the tedium of yet another description of this affliction, . . . it is a permanent agony, a suspension of life.”]8

This description recalls the final pose of her travel book as a subject “suspended between two inmensities.” In Pérégrinations, the distance between France and Perú is marked as a site of dispossession and lack; the horizon of azure sea and sky frame both the beginning and the end of the narrator’s transatlantic itinerary. The phrase “je reste seule” [“I remained alone, completely alone”] dramatically conveys the solitude experienced by many women in their travels, more radical than the “solitary traveler” pose which many European heroines consciously adapted to reach their journey’s end and in order to satisfy their scientific curiosity.9 Adela Breton’s explorations of Mayan architecture and her scaling the slopes of the Ixta and Popo volcanoes represent yet another inscription of the female body in Latin American landscapes. Breton left a trace of herself in photographs where she stands besides a pitched tent, tenacious yet bold, with Pablo Solorio at her side, a Platonic companion who sustained her tireless trek across Mexican high sierras.10 The fact that Breton did not represent herself in her art, but, on the contrary, seemed to efface her artistic persona with no other mark than the customary inscription of place and date left in each drawing of her pictorial archive, reveals a turn-of-the-century sensibility. Given the powerful pull of the quest motif in nineteenth-century travel writing, women’s pilgrimages are marked by strong gender identification. Contact and convivencia [co-existence] with female hostesses and European peers provided opportunities to renew, question, and at times uphold prevailing ideologies of gender. The four itinerant women chosen for this

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study exhibit a wide range of proto-feminist discourses, from the visionary thrust toward new gender paradigms in Flora Tristan’s critique of marital arrangements, to the notion of separate spheres lauded in Fredrika Bremer’s American tour. In spite of their differences, transatlantic pilgrims sought to find in the New World a renewal of their feminine identity, understood as an affirmation of a shared female condition, which was either projected outward as socially bonded communities or else as an intensely personal inner quest.11 Through frequent contact with upper-class Creoles and European “fellow-travelers,” along with their transient but no less significant encounters with indigenous and African populations, these writers made the social condition of women the central concern of their travels, resulting in a mutual mirroring of identities.12 At home in the heights or valleys of the New World, European women forged bonds of sisterhood with women in the Americas that either led to shifts in their own gender identity, or to more subtler psychic adjustments as they came to terms with the fate of female shut-ins (nuns and castaways) in post-independence Latin America. The gaze enfolding the Other was accompanied by a look at unfulfilled dreams, goals, and yearnings which each traveler brought along with her on her way, so that the transatlantic pilgrimage functioned as a journey inward, toward greater maturity and consciousness of self. Whether in momentary contact with non-Europeans or through prolonged rapport with their Creole peers, women travelers reshuffled their own identities, taking their pens or sketchbooks to battle-fields and parlors, a creative process which involved crafting a conscious narrative persona. It is in this sense that the act of writing becomes a way to explore the self, while serving the equally useful purpose of recording and documenting events, hence as a powerful means “to inscribe themselves into history.”13 At the close of her Cuban travels, back in the American South, Fredrika Bremer has another revelation aboard the steamboat St. Matthew, only this time it was not in response to the indignity of slavery but rather to her role in the gender hierarchy. Since the steamboat carried three happily married couples—ironically termed “turtle-doves” in numbered series—she comes to terms for the first time with her single state. Attentive to the newfound bliss of a long-separated middle-aged pair, she observed that “They seemed to me the happiest of human beings—excepting—myself, who saw them, and to whom God has given so much enjoyment in the happiness of others.” At a later passage, when crossing the mangrove swamps of southern Florida, she affirms in solitary reverie her unique position as a female subject wholly attuned to Nature and Divinity. The morning scene of dew-dappled moss in

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the Florida wilds awakens a second climactic moment, not of conversion but of transfiguration: The earth was full of fragrance. I kissed the dew from the leaves; I laid them on my eyes, my brow, those fresh morning leaves of the young new earth; I wished to bathe anew in this Urda-fountain; I wept, . . . for I had here indeed drank of the refreshing draught for which I had thirsted during a long pilgrimage in the desert; I had drank—I still drink the fullness of life from the fountains of God’s abundance, and was sustained . . . by the wings He had given me! Who was more free, who was more rich than I?14

Among the set of female savants [scholars] who adopted the mask of “solitary traveler” in order to enjoy (and socially justify) freedom to travel for both scientific and philanthropic purposes, Fredrika Bremer occupies the rightful place of acceptance of her task.15 Instead of the customary apology for venturing into the external world in order to expand her knowledge of distant borders, the Swedish novelist acknowledges that her core identity is, indeed, that of a female pilgrim. By presenting herself as “une femme mediatrix entre Dieu et les hommes” [a female mediator between God and men], Flora Tristan achieves the construction of her autobiographical “I,” endowing her text with both writerly and religious authority.16 Only by turning her act of transgression into a providential mission could Tristan assert a coherent authorial presence while conveying as well as the truth value of her text: “Le règne de Dieu arrive: nous entrons dans une ère de verité . . .” [The kingdom of God is at hand: we are about to enter an epoch of truth]. The pariah is, then, not merely “a social outcast,” but a powerful site of elocution: “Je vais raconter deux années de ma vie: j’aurai le courage de dire tout ce que j’ai souffert” [I will relate two years of my life: I will have the courage to say all that I have suffered].17 Defined as “celle qui n’était pas reconnu” [that which is unknown] in the social-symbolic order, the female pariah acquires a writerly vocation precisely on the basis of that denial: “Celle même a qui l’integration sociale est refusée, en Europe comme dans le Nouveau Monde, . . . se fait une vocation de ce refus. [She who has been denied the right of full participation in society, in Europe as well as in the New World, . . . turns that denial into a vocation].”18 The identity of a transgressive, as well as transatlantic, female pariah, articulated by Tristan during the voyage on the Mexicain, colors the narrative of the Pérégrinations as a pilgrimage marked by the experience of self-transformation. It is also a role assumed as both personal destiny and as literary testament. Michaud has framed this nicely when he states: “le livre est surtout l’histoire du retournement victorieux par lequel l’exclusion se change en conquête d’une identité;” [the book is above all the story of a victorious

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comeback, by which exclusion shifts into identity formation]19 yet the radical conversion of Self into Other—the transgressive awareness of Tristan’s narrative stance—is possible because a woman without a place, thrust upon the waters, has no choice but to navigate a (new) sense of self. Recently arrived at the spot where she was to fulfill her mission as dutiful (but not passive) wife of the first Spanish ambassador to Mexico, Frances Erskine Ingles describes the female travel experience in terms of a “split self.” Far away from familiar moorings and unaccustomed to volcanoes and valleys, her longing for home hearkens, not to the pastoral scenery shared with her immediate family in New England, but further back in time to her ancestors’ homestead: I thought of Christmas in Merrie England, and of our family gatherings in the olden time, and as if one had not travelled enough in the body, began travelling in the mind, away to far different, and distant, and long-gone-by scenes; fell asleep by length with my thoughts in Scotland; and wakened in Mexico!20

Here the traveler, who attempts to get her bearings in her new surroundings, suffers physical and emotional dislocation, expressed as a temporal gap between the “ghosts of Christmases” past and present reality. The pull of an “economy of travel” based on home rivets the female pilgrim. Frances Calderón seems to counter the direction taken by other wandering Victorians, who “shared a need to ground their identity in a place distanced from ‘home’— England—and its associated ideologies of domesticities and gender.”21 For British travelers, the ambivalent connection to home works as a psychic reserve that helps the traveler endure both the alienation of a prolonged stay abroad as well as an uncertain destination. Nowhere is the dilemma of unsure destinies more poignant than in Maria Graham’s departure from Brazil. Spanning the last few days of her stay is the eyewitness account of Dom Pedro, the Emperor’s, birthday celebrations and the anniversary of his coronation. After scintillating descriptions of the Brazilian court, Graham entertains the hope of serving as governess for the royal couple’s youngest daughter; to this end, the Empress instructs her to write directly to the Emperor in order to ratify her request. Once accepted into their service, Graham embarks for England in what was to be a preparatory journey, not a definitive return to that ancestral home. Following the thrust of British women pilgrims—to shape an identity far away from the seat of the empire—Graham’s return voyage was meant as a welcome detour towards a new professional identity. That Brazil is scripted in the traveler’s imaginary as a substitute home is verified by her brief mariner’s entries aboard the packet, where Graham, liberated from gender constraints, is finally free to engage in her writerly vocation—”I am under no restraint, but walk, read, write, and

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draw, as if at home.” As the ship sails past the Azores, the passage is blocked by powerful gales, until one day “the meeting of the two winds broke the sea as high as any ship’s mast-head in a long line,” revealing “the most beautiful yet fearful sight I ever beheld.”22 Although journey’s end is marked by safe arrival in England, a sense of closure and definitive end obscures the hopedfor outcome of Graham’s foreign sojourn. For “after sailing back to Brazil in July 1824 to take up her new post, she left the palace after little more than a month, under mysterious circumstances.”23 Like Flora Tristan, banished from uncle Pío’s family circle in Arequipa, Graham was never to experience the satisfaction of a new chosen abode. Whereas for Tristan this refusal propelled a lifetime dedicated to improve the conditions of the European proletariat, her social commitment implied an endless wandering, particularly poignant in her last tour of France. In contrast, for Graham rejection from the New World marked the end of the road, for “she never traveled again.”24 Though originally written with a European audience in mind (Graham nods to “my English friends, for whom this journal is written,”) in their various “sea-scrawl(s),” women travelers trace a route for their readers to follow.25 As cultural translators, European women’s travels bridge the transatlantic divide not only geographically, but also temporally, allowing today’s readers multiple inroads with which to vicariously imagine our own (post-modern) peregrinations. NOTES 1. Maria H. Frawley, A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994; London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1994), 38–39. 2.  Ibid., 17. 3.  Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 107. 4. Lila Marz Harper, Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 119–20; Frawley, A Wider Range. 5.  Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; 1998), 170; Frawley, A Wider Range, 13–14, 17. 6.  Jason H. Lindquist, “‘Under the Influence of an Exotic Nature. . . . Natural Remembrances are Insensibly Effaced’: Threats to the European Subject in Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent,” Proceedings of the CUNY conference on Humboldt, Universität Potsdam Philosophische Fakultät. Institut für Romanistik fall 2004.

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 7. I am grateful to Danielle Haase-Dubosc, director of Columbia University’s Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall in Paris, for this important insight.  8. Flora Tristan, Mémoires et pérégrinations d’une paria, 1833–1834, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librairie Historique, L’Advocat et Compagnie, 1838), 1:14–15 (hereafter cited Mémoires et pérégrinations). Flora Tristan, Peregrinations of a Paria, 1833–1834, Jean Hawkes, trans. and ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986, 5 (hereafter cited Peregrinations).   9.  Lila Marz Harper has coined the term “solitary traveler” to refer to Victorian women who investigated natural history in foreign lands; Solitary Travelers, 16–18. 10.  Ea 11597, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, reproduced in Mary F. McVicker, Adela Breton-A Victorian Artist Amid Mexico’s Ruins (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 39. 11.  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 166–67. 12.  Ana María Ferrini, “Viajera y cronista de Santa Fe: Lina Beck Bernard.” In Mujeres latinoamericanas: Historia y cultura, Siglos XVI al XIX. (Havana/Mexico City: Casa de las Américas/Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, 1997), 2:121–28. 13. Frawley, A Wider Range, 42. 14.  Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, trans. Mary Botham Howitt (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1854), 2:469; my emphasis. The story of “turtle-doves No. 1,” “No. 2” and “No. 3” appear in 2:467, 472; passage quoted: 2: 474. 15.  “[T]ravel narrative, particularly those written in the solitary voice, . . . allows the woman writer to establish a voice of authority in ways unavailable in any other genre. . . . [T]he solitary narrative position, a position which offers an unusual authoritative voice for women but one which, at the same time, places her in a personally vulnerable role within her writing.” Marz Harper, Solitary Travelers, 16–17. Marz Harper goes on to study the exposé of the perils of women traveling alone in Flora Tristan’s Nécessité de faire un bon accueil aux femmes étrangères (1835). 16.  Michèle Perrot, conference delivered at the round table held at the Mairie du 9e arrondissement to celebrate the bicentennial of Flora Tristan, March 12, 2003, Paris. 17. Flora Tristan, Mémoires et pérégrinations, xxxiij, xxxiv. Kathleen R. Hart, “An I for an Eye: Flora Tristan and Female Visual Allegory,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 26, nos. 1–2 (Fall-Winter 1997–1998): 54. 18.  Perrot, cited above Michaud, “Se choisir paria,” 42. 19.  Stéphane Michaud, “Se choisir paria: Brève note sur Flora Tristan,” Romantisme 58 (1987): 42. 20. Frances Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny [sic] Calderón de la Barca (With New Material from the Author’s Private Journals), ed. Howard T. Fisher and Marion Hall Fisher (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1966), 90 (hereafter cited Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca). Also quoted in Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe, “‘The Visible Horizon Bounds Their Wishes’: Seclusion and Society in Fanny Calderón de la Bara’s Postcolonial Mexico,” in

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Imperial Objects: Essays on Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience, ed. Rita S. Kranidis (New York: Twayne Publishers, Prentice Hall International, 1998), 175. 21. Frawley, A Wider Range, 41. 22.  Maria Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and Residence There, During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, and John Murray, 1824), 317–21, 323–24. Hereafter cited Journal of a Voyage to Brazil. 23.  Jennifer Hayward, ed. “Introduction,” in Journal of a Residence in Chile During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, by Maria Graham (London and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), xx. Hayward explains that palatial intrigues drove Graham from the court (xx). 24. Ibid. 25. Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, 319, and Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny Calderón de la Barca, 51.

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Index

Africa, 6, 16, 20 Asia, 2, 6, 20 Behn, Aphra, 8 Bell, Stephen, 29n102 Bernard, Lina Beck, 28n71; Ferrini, Ana María, 28n71, 29n100 Bethel, Leslie, 29n97 Bonpland, Aimé, 16, 34, 35, 70 Bremer, Fredrika, 3, 5, 13, 15, 20, 25n19, 33, 44–45, 47, 52, 58–59, 61–62, 68, 140; African cabildos, 164; African dance and ritual, 5, 159–162, 164, 165; Agathe, sister, 5, 52, 156; America, views of, 156; As ethnographer, 143, 155–159, 165; As “solitary traveler,” 210; G. Barnett Smith, 25n20; Benson, Adolph B., 25n20; Bernett Smith, 25n20; Carlo Congo, 162–164; Comparison to Maria Graham, 156, 165; Conspiración de la Escalera (Ladder Conspiracy), 162; In Cuba, 3, 31; Discovers new constellation, 68; Downing, Andrew, 7; In Eastern United States, 5; Guicharnaud Tollis, Michéle, 25n21; In Havana, 52; The Homes of the New World, 5,

15, 21, 25n19, 25n20, 45, 54, 59, 140, 155–156, 161, 165; Howitt, Mary, 25n19, 25n20; Hamalian, Leo, 26n32; Lofsvold, Laurel Ann, 26n31; In Matanzas, 5, 43, 53, 157–158, 162; McFadden, Margaret, 156; Ortiz, Fernando, 160–161, 164–165; Travels in the Holy Land, I and II, 7; Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, 26n3; Romeo (black slave), 162– 163; Roothe, Signe Alice, 25n20; Skissbök, 5, 25n22, 44, 54, 59–60, 68–69, 163; Slavery, views of, 156, 158, 209; In the Southern United States, 3, 4–5, 156–158, 162–163, 166, 209; Stendahl, Britta, 25n20; Stockholm, 5; Sweden, 11, 158; In the United States, 5; Yoruba rituals, 164; In Yumurí, valley of, 59–60, 62; In Valle de Viñales, 53. See also Nature. Star-gazer. Breton, Adela, 5, 19, 20, 33, 39, 55–56, 65; As female Amazon, 63–64, 80n150; Comparison to Artic explorers, 64, 66; Egerton, David Thomas, 57, 64; Ixtaccihuátl, view of, 63–64, 66–67, 208; Michoacán, 21; Oaxaca, 21; Puebla, 21, 38, 59;

227

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228

Index

Pico de Orizaba, 56; Popocatépetl, 63–64, 66, 208; San Andrés Chalchicomula, 38, 40; Sketch Book of Watercolors, Notes & Drawings on Mexico, 40, 56, 59, 65; Solorio, Pablo, 21, 66, 81n160, 66, 208; Xalapa, 56 Calderón de la Barca (neé Erskine Inglis), Frances, 3, 13, 15, 20, 22, 24n10, 46–47, 55, 57–58, 111; As ethnographer, 182–186; As historical witness, 3, 84, 87, 95, 113–119; Bustamante, Anastasio, 113–114, 116, 118–119, 122–123; Caballero, M. Soledad, 187; Cabañas, Miguel, 87, 121, 183; Calderón de la Barca, don Angel, 3, 111; Castellanos, Rosario, 123, 137n155; China poblana episode, 131n101, 186; Clavijero, Franciso Javier, 112; Comparison to Fredrika Bremer, 185; Comparison to Maria Graham, 117–118, 182, 184–185, 191; Comparison to Flora Tristan, 109, 116, 118–120, 187, 190; Contact with Mexican statesmen, 113; Cortés, Hernán, 57, 183; Costeloe, Michael P., 132n107, 133n109, 133n110; Egerton, David Thomas, 57, 64; First sight of Tenochtitlán, 57–58, 87, 183–184, 186; Gerassi Navarro, Nina 121, 132n106, 132n107; Gómez Farías, Valentín, 114–117, 120; Hale, Charles A., 24n11, 27n49; Kaplan, Amy, 121, 132n106, 132n107; Hayward, Jennifer, 187; Lavrin, Asunción, 189–190; Leask, Nigel, 184–185; Life in Mexico: During a Residence of Two Years in That Country, 3, 4, 15, 84; Life in Mexico: The Letters of Fanny [sic] Calderón de la Barca, 24n10, 24n11, 140, 190–191; In Mexico, 1,

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2, 3, 6, 31, 34, 40, 57–58, 66, 113, 186; Mexican convents, 188–190; Montezuma, 185–186; Paredes, General, 118; Prescott, Sir Walter, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 112–113, 116, 132n107, 191; Pronunciamiento, 84, 117–118, 122; Santa Anna, General, 55, 113, 118–119, 121–123; Thomas, Hugh, 111; Tierra caliente region, 55, 58, 124; In Veracruz, 21, 55, 111; In Xalapa, 55–56; Valencia, General, 118; Victoria, General, 113, 121– 122; Views of Aztec past, 182–185; Views of Mexican volcanoes, 64; Zavala, Lorenzo de, 112. See also Nature. Tierra caliente. Volcanoes. Canada, 21 Charles IV, King, 34 Columbus, Christopher, 35, 45, 46; Rodrigo de Triana, 45 Díaz, Roberto Ignacio, 2, 14, 23, 24n7, 26n30; Unhomely Rooms, 26n30, 30n111 Dixie, Lady Florence, 6; Across Patagonia, 6; Martin, Claire Emilie, 26n27 Ethnography; Anthropological interpretation, 147; Anthropological knowledge, 141, 155, 165, 191; Auto-ethnography, 142, 176; Clifford, James, 9, 10, 29n99, 142; Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 29n99, 200n124; Clifford, Routes, 9, 26n42; Contact zone, 12, 27n59; Cross-cultural dialogue, 139–140; Cultural Others,, 11–12, 21, 87, 140–141, 145, 147, 149, 155, 165, 172, 182, 186; “Customs-and-manners,” 141, 148, 155, 160; Empathy, 147, 155–156; “Ethnocentrism,” 146–147; Ethnographic approaches,

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Index 229

vision, 12, 180, 182; Ethnographic allegory, 160, 165, 185, 199n110; Ethnographic authority, 146–147, 150, 152–153, 156, 165, 168, 182, 188; Ethnographic awareness, 9, 155; Ethnographie des femmes, 141–143, 166–169, 178, 180, 190, 200n131; Ethnographic gaze, 11, 140, 143–144, 149, 151, 160, 191; Fieldwork, 142, 157–158; Geertz, Clifford, 142–143, 147, 155, 194n8; “Insider/Outsider,” 12, 151, 178; Local knowledge, 149, 159; Participant observation, participant observer, 21, 141, 146–147, 155– 156, 158; “Practice of everyday life,” 150; “Redemptive ethnography,” “redemptive allegory,” 160–161, 199n110; Self-Other divide, 5, 20, 154; Self-Other encounter, 155; “Signature,” 141, 143; “Thick description,” 141, 144, 147, 151, 160, 184; “Transculturated Other,” 21; Transculturation, 149, 160–161; Travel and anthropology, travel and ethnography, “travel encounter,” 142, 146, 157. See also Women Travelers Europe, Western, 11, 21 Garden, 47–54, 55; Garden of Eden, 55; Graham’s view of Brazil as “immense garden,” 47, 49–50; Graham’s view of Brazil as “an entire landscape,” 48; Graham’s rhapsody in Rio, 49; Bremer’s depiction of Cuba as, 54; Calderón’s depiction of Mexican haciendas as, 55 Geography, 32, 54, 72, 207; Geographic discourse, 195n28; “Geographical imagination” 31; Exoticism, 147; “Exoticism of space,” 52; “Geographical exoticism,” 78n104 Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis, 175 González Echevarría, Roberto, 14, 23, 24n13, 27n51, 28n64 28n66, 29n93,

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30n105; Myth and Archive, 14, 23, 24n13, 27n51, 28n64, 28n66, 28n74, 29n93, 30n105, 72n2; Archive, notion of, 16 Graham, Maria, 2, 6, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19, 24n8,, 32, 33, 35, 43, 53, 70–71, 140; As ethnographer, 143–144, 146–148, 150, 152–155; As historical agent, 97; As historical witness, 84, 86–87, 95; Azores, 212; Brazil, 1, 2, 3, 11, 31, 48–52, 148, 152, 211–212; Bahia, 3, 49; Byron, Lord, 55, 70, 97, 146; Cacique, identification with, 182, image of 193; Callao, 93; Carrera, José Miguel, 92, 95; Chacabuco, 93; “Palace of San Cristovaõ,” 51; In Chile, 20, 35, 99; Cochrane, Lord, 3, 61, 84, 86, 90–99; Comparison to Fredrika Bremer, 145, 147, 152, 154; Comparison to Flora Tristan, 102, 109, 144; Cowper, William, 35, 146; Crusoe, Robinson, 99; Diario de su residencia en Chile (1822) y de su viaje al Brazil (1823) 29n97; Earthquake, reaction to, 97; Freyre, Gilberto 52, 96, 150, 152; Graham, Thomas, 2, 91, 144; Great Britain 89, 212; “Great Dragon Tree of Oratava,” 36–38; Hayward, Jennifer, 89–90, 95, 126–7n20; Independence advocate, 90; Independence, Brazil, 151; Independence, Chile 94–95, 97–99, 143; King João VI, 150; Lautaro, 93. See also NineteenthCentury Latin America. See also Humboldt; Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), 3, 15, 24n8, 24n9, 29n97, 32, 35, 42. 43, 55, 84, 90, 95–96, 140, 144, 147, 155, 180; Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824) Frontispiece illustration, “Traveling in Spanish America,” 11, 33, 43, 143, 153; Journal of a Residence in Chile . . . (2003)

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Index

edition, 89; Journal of a Residence in India, 73n33; Journal of Voyage to Brazil, 3, 24n8, 37, 49, 71, 90, 150–153, 155; Journal of Voyage to Brazil, frontispiece illustration, “Val Longo, or the Slave Market at Rio, 153; Journal of Voyage to Brazil, Augustus Earle, “View of Count Maurice’s Gate . . .,”153– 154; Melancholy, 99, 124, 149; O’Higgins, Bernardo, 84, 90, 92–93, 95–99, 117; Pérez Mejía, Angela 89, 96, 145; Peruvian campaign, 93; “Philosophical traveler,” 48; Pisco, 93; Post-script, Chile Journal, 98; Rancagua, Battle of, 93; Rio de Janeiro, 3, 49, 150; San Martin, General, 3, 20, 84, 91–97, 127n34; “Sketch of a History of Chile,” 90–94, 98; A Scripture Herbal, 47; M. Soledad Caballero, 43, 87, 89, 96; Slavery, views of, 3, 153–154; José Valenzuela D., 29n97, 91; Valparaíso, Chile, 2, 94, 97, 145; Widowhood, 3, 99, 144. See also Nature, Garden History, Latin American, 10, 15, 72, 125; Agency, 119, 124, 155, 168; Allegory of, 93; Alternative histories, 15, 88, 120; Anti-heroic rhetoric, 107; Archive, 16, 125; Bolívar, 94; Civil war, Mexico, 114, 116, 121; Civil war, Perú, 102; Chilean, 90–91; Cultural archive, 33; De Certeau, Michel, 115, 134–135n130, 136n142, 137n154, 150, 184–185; Documentary value of travel writing, 83; Female heroism, 119; Gendered history, 20, 86, 112, 116–117, 119, 122; “Grand narrative” of, 92–93, 112, 121–123; Guayaquil, 94; Historiography, 15, 86–88, 97, 113, 115, 117, 120; Historical archive, 23; Historical awareness, 11; Historical

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knowledge, 88; Historical subjects, 88, 120; “Historical type,” 122; Historical uniqueness, 2, 11, 16, 31, 33; “Imagined community,” 2, 85, 108–109, 111, 123; Independence, 83, 85, 88, 91–94, 98–99; “Informal empire,” 87, 121, 125n10; “Ingredient conclusion,” 114, 120; Irony, history plotted as, 99, 122–123; “Laminated text,” 116; Leyenda negra, 184, 191; Liberators, 95; Manifest Destiny, impact of, 122; Masculinist histories, 119; Metahistory, 83, 95, 122; Nature and, 97–98; Padres de la patria, 122; Rhetoric of, 84, 86, 88, 90, 100, 123; Romance, history plotted as, 86, 89, 99; “Sketch of a History of Chile,” 90, 92; “Synoptic judgment,” 121; “World historical individual,” 86, 92, 94. See also Nineteenth-century Latin America. von Humboldt, Alexander, 1, 16, 19, 32, 33, 35, 41, 42, 43, 45–46, 70, 188; Appropriation of Columbus, 58; Ascent to Chimborazo, Mount, 34, 39, 42; Atlas Pittoresque du Voyage, 39; “Vue du Cajambé,” 41–42; “The Casiquiare Crossing,” 73–74n23; Comparative method of landscape description, 58, 70; La Condamine, 35; Cotopaxi, 34; Cumaná, 35; Dassow Walls, Laura, 73n19; Descent into crater, 61; Ette, Otmar, 35; Gunilla, Father, 35; Humboldtian school of painters, 54, 57; Icononzo, 74n36; Influence on women travelers, 19, 32, 34, 36–38, 46, 48–49, 52, 68, 70; Orinoco, 32, 34–35, 46–47, 52; Personal Narrative to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, 34, 35, 36, 41, 49, 70; Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, 112; Relation historique, 46, 61; Pizarro,

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Index 231

El, 34; Rugendas, Johann Moritz, 57; Silla de Caracas, 42; “Summitsurvey,” 41, 55, 57. See also Travel, Scientific travelers; Tenerife, 47; Transamerican scope, 75n41; Vegetation, 49; Volcanic eruptions, 61; Vues des Cordillères, 36, 38, 42; Dragonnier de l’Oratava, Le, 37. See also Nature Hudson, W.H., The Purple Land 31 Indigenous, 1, 20, 185–186 Kingsley, Mary, 18, 28n83; “Traveling persona,” 74n27 Kollonitz, Paula, 6; The Court of Mexico, 6; Pineda, Adela, 25n25 Languages, 23. See also History, Latin American and Nineteenth-Century Latin America Latin American novel, 14; Canon, 16; counter-canon, 22; cultural identity, 19; regional identiies, 52; testimonio (testimonial genre), 88 Lezama Lima, José, 46, 52–54 Mayas, art and architecture, 5 Méndez Rodenas, Adriana, 25n23 Merian, Maria Sybilla, 5, 6; Paravisini Gebert, Lizabeth, 25n24 Merlin, la comtesse, 14, 24n13, 28n68, 78n113, 110 Mestizo, 1, 20 “Multilingual library,” 2, 7, 23 Natural history, 14, 31; As model for social observation, 84; Collecting, 77n71; Illustrations, 9; “Romance of,” 33; Victorian natural history, Victorian natural science, 33, 47, 49–50, 61 Nature, 32, 33; As spectacle, 46, 61–63; Desert, 62; “Gaze of Enchantment,” 11, 19, 33, 47, 49, 58, 70; Harmony with, 19; Landscape, 1, 16, 31,

Rodenas_Epub.indb 231

33, 36, 39, 42, 47–49, 51, 54, 72; Liminality between earth and sky, 45, 62, 208; “Natural masterpieces,” 80n154; Natural philosopher, 48; Natural theology, 19, 52, 59, 61, 70, 81n168; Nature’s effects, 62; La noche insular, 46; Orientalist description of, 51–52; Power of nature, 54, 63; Sea-faring, 70; La conciencia marina, 70; Star-gazer, 68; Tierra caliente, Mexico, 55–56, 58; Topography, 31, 35, 47; Tropical nature, 32, 36, 46–48, 50, 72; Paradisiacal view of, 52, 54–55, 68, 70; Valley, 55–61; Vegetation, 49, 55; Views of, 16, 31; Volcanoes, 61–67. See also Garden New World, 1, 5, 10, 11, 13, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 31, 33, 34, 35–36, 46, 124, 139, 143, 147, 165–167, 210 Nineteenth-century Latin America, 1, 2, 5, 33; Bushnell, David, 89; Caudillismo, caudillos, 15, 20, 85, 119, 124; Civil war, Perú, 102; Creole constituencies, national constituencies, 7, 11, 12, 22, 139; Creole hosts, Creole peers, Creole oligarchy, 11, 16, 103, 140, 168; Despotism, 124; “Grand narrative” of, 92–93, 112, 121–123; Historical uniqueness, 11, 16, 31, 33; Humboldt’s influence, 35; Independence 3, 83–86, 88–93, 95, 97–99, 103, 105, 139, 145; Liberation campaign, South America, 3, 88; Liberators, 95, 100, 104; Military despotism, 94; Nation-building; nation-formation 2, 4, 15, 31, 23, 83–85, 88, 111, 124, 113; National identity, 125; Nationalism, nationalist rhetoric, 15, 22–23, 30n110, 89–90, 105, 110–113, 122–124; National romances,” 33; Nineteenth century Latin American women, 10, 23,

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110; Nineteenth century pioneers, 89; Nineteenth-century women’s travels, 7, 83; Political autonomy, 104; Pronunciamientos, 113–114; Post-Independence nations, 95, 105, 113–114, 149; Republics, 85, 88–90, 166; “Romancing of Nation,” 86, 89, 124; Sarmiento, Domingo, 33, 85, 94 Old World, 21–22, 147 Orient, 16 Picturesque, 47, 55, 57, 70, 79n126; “Ethnographic picturesque,” 193; Humboldt’s use of, 48; Graham’s use of, 49, 50–51; Calderón de la Barca’s use of, 56–58, 185; Pilgrimage, 4, 7, 9, 11, 19, 165, 207–208, 212; Egeria, 8; European women pilgrims, 1, 34, 208–209; Female pilgrims, 1, 7–8, 9, 13, 99, 210–211; Melancholy, 99; Peregrinas de Outrora, 27n50, 27n61; “Peregrinatio” theme, 8, 173 “Pilgrims at home,” 11; Pilgrim’s journey, 99; “Pilgrims’ Progress,” 8, 14; Pilgrimage to Perú, Tristan’s 8, 100, 167, 173; Religious, 9; Secular, 9, 12, 88–89, 99, 144; Self-transformation, 210; “Strange pilgrimage,” 10, 11, 26n49, 27n49, 27n52, 29n94; Pérez Mejía, Angela, 27n56, 43 Post-independence period, 1, 15; Commercial explorers, 6; Postindependence societies, 7 Romantic imagination, 19, 55 Rosman, Sylvia N., 31 Scotland, 11 Slavery, 1, 5; Metaphor for women’s oppression, 176, 178; In the American South, 156–157, 209; In Cuba, 54, 157–159; Slave markets, Rio and Bahia, 3; Slave populations, 20 Spain, Colonial rule, 15

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Spanish America; Caribbean, 1, 2, 11, 15, 58; Cape Horn, 2; Chile, 3, 11; Argentina, 3; Southern Cone, 1, 2; Literary history, 22 Stafford Barbara Maria, 25n24, 42, 62; “Natural marvelous,” 73n10; Artic exploration, 81n156; Voyage into Substance, 25n24; “Willed seeing,” 62, 64. See also Travel and science Stepan, Nancy, 78n Sublime, 46–47, 52, 62–64, 70; Sublimity, 63, 66; “Victorian female sublime,” 32, 46–47, 50, 54, 61, 63, 70, 72; Weiskel, Thomas definition of, 53. See also Nature Surinam, 6, 8 Touissant-Simon, Adèle, 6; A Parisian in Brazil, 6; Hahner, Jane E., 26n26 Transatlantic travels, 1, 4; Atlantic, 5; Transatlantic dialogue, 7, 19; Transatlantic encounter, 10, 11; Transatlantic imagination, 5; Transatlantic passage, 99, crossing, 207–208; Transatlantic pilgrims, 7–8, 19, 21, 23, 68, 88, 124, 193, 209, 211 Travel, 1, 13; As quest, 7, 8, 10, 207; Cross-cultural contact, dialogue, 139–140; Economy of travel, 211; Grand Tour, 2, 10, 24n5; Immediacy of, 7; Journey, 10; Penelope Voyages, 9, 13; Post-colonial approaches, 17; Rhetoric of travel, 35–36, 53, 90, 115, 145, 151; Stagecoach, 55; “Technology of travel,” 43; Transformative power of, 7, 11; Travel books, 13, 14, 16, 47, 11; Traveling persona, 7, 36; “Traveling in Spanish America,” Frontispiece, Journal of a Residence in Chile, 33. See also Women’s travels, Travel and Science. See also Travel writing Travel and science; Artic exploration, 64, 66; Enlightenment science, 80n139; Merian, Maria Sybilla, 5–6; Naturalist’s gaze, 1; Scientific gaze, “I/eye”, 43, 48; Scientific travelers,

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9, 34, 36; Scientific travelogues, 19, 31–32, 34, 47–48, 58, 112; “Summitsurvey” 41, 57; “Solitary traveler”, 12, 66, 70, 144, 208, 210, 213n9, 213n15; Stafford Barbara Maria, 25n24, 42, 62; “Natural marvelous,” 73n10; Artic exploration, 81n156; Voyage into Substance, 25n24; “Willed seeing,” 62, 64; Taxonomy, 51, 77n93. See also Women’s travels. See also Nature Travelers (male); British travelers, 66, 124, 166, 211; Commercial explorers, 6, 53, 139, 145; Enlightenment explorers, 5, 35, 39, 48, 72, 48; European traveler, 35, 41; Franco, Jean, 23n1; Idea of history, 72n2; Male traveler(s), 14, 16, 17, 18, 33, 39, 53; Philosophical traveler, 48, 68; Porter, Dennis, Haunted Journeys, 10, 26n47; Schomburgk brothers, 22 Travel writing, 4, 19, 31, 34, 47, 139, 150, 166; As a form of mapping, 20, 33, 63, 70; British travel writing, 14, 139; Contemporary criticism of, 139–140; Eclecticism, hybridity, 14, 16, 34; Enlightenment travel writing, 2; European travel narrative, European travel writing, 18, 61, 66; “Factual travel account,” 79n122; Gender difference in, 16, 111; Illustrated travel account, 20, 38, 42; Male-authored travel books, 33; Pratt, Mary Louise, 6–7, 17, 23, 32, 34, 170; Imperial Eyes, 17, 26n46, 27n59, 29n91, 29n95, 29n101, 30n103, 41, 43; “Rhetoric of anti-conquest, “ 53–54; Rhetoric of Spanish conquest, 58; Rhetoric of wonder, 32, 62, of amazement, 207; Travel narrative, 18, 99; Typology of genre, 16; Van den Abbele, Travel as Metaphor, 28n70, 144 Tristan, Flora, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 22,25n17, 26n37, 33, 45–47, 62, 68, 102, 140; Allegory, 110;

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Althaus, German cousin, 103, 168, 179; Andes Cordillera, 61; Arequipa, 4, 9, 11, 31, 84, 88, 106, 167, 179, 212; As ethnographer, 168, 178–179; As historical witness, 84, 86, 88, 97, 102; As political advisor, 103; As social observer, 166; As symbol of Peruvian feminism, 111; As utopian socialist, 172; Battle of Cangallo, 106, 179; Bolívar, Simón, 100–101, 103–104; Bonaparte, Napoleon, 101; Burnt in effigy, 11, 111, 131n98; Carmen, cousin, 176–178, 180; Civil war, Perú, 1834, 102–103, 105; Chabrié, Captain 167; Chazal, André, 4, 108; Comparison to Frances Calderón, 172, 179; Comparison to Maria Graham, 166–167; Critique of gender arrangements, 143, 174–175, 180, 211; Cross, Marie and Tim, 173; Cuche, Denys, 24n15, 30n106; Denegri, Francesca, 9, 24n15, 26n38, 26n41, 26n44, 27n58; Dominga, cousin, 178–180; Escudero, Coronel, 108–109, 180; France, 8, 9, 11, 124; Gamarra, Agustín, 102, 110, 168; Gamarra, Señora, 102, 108, 110; Gender roles, 167, 172, 177; Goyeneche, Juan de, 104; Grogan, Susan, 25n17; Guiñazu Cristina, 26n41, 104, 173, 175–176; Hart, Kathleen R., 24n15, 24n16, 25n18, 26n37,26n39; Independence, Spanish America, 106; Janin, Jules, 174; Kunheim, Jill S., 25n17; Laisnay, Thérèse, 4, 100; “Lettres de Bolívar,” 100–101; Lima, views of, 167, 169–170, 172; Limeñas, 107, 169– 172, 180; Liminality, 62, 110, 208; Marginality, exile, 110; Mexicain, 4, 45, 178, 208, 210; Michaud, Stéphane, 24n15, 174, 210; Orbegoso, José Luis de, 102, 104, 107, 168; Nieto, 104, 106–107; Pariah identity, 172–176, 178, 180, 210; Pérez Mejía, Angela, 24n15, 25n17; Pérégrinations d’une paria, 8, 9, 15, 20, 24n14, 45,

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62, 84, 99–101, 166, 169, 172–174, 208, 210; Peregrinations of a Pariah, 4, 9, 13, 15, 24n15; Pilgrimage to Perú, 8, 84, 124, 173, 210; Portal, Magda, 24n12; Rabonas, 107–108, 168–169, 177, 200n132; Revilla de Moncloa, Fe, 9; San Martín, 104; San Román, 106–108; Sight of volcanoes, 61–62, 66; Strumingher, Laura S., 25n18, 26n45; Sucre, General, 104; Tristan y Moscoso, Mariano, 4, 100; Tristan, don Pío de, 4, 11, 101, 103–104, 109; Valdivia, the monk, 102, 104, 106; In Valparaíso, 166; “Woman Messiah”, 8, 173, 210; Washington, George, 101. See also History, Nineteenth-century Latin America. See also Nature Women’s social condition, 4, 20, 167, 209; Creole women, 22, 83; Domestic ideology, domestic arrangements, 5–6, 8, 22, 83, 175–179, 193, 207, 209; Gender solidarity, 209; Initiation, 8, 149, 165, 200n124; Nineteenth-century Latin American women, 10, 209; Women’s autobiography, 4, 175, 179; “Woman Messiah”, 8. See also Tristan, Flora Women travelers, women’s travel, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13–14, 16, 25n23, 31, 33–34, 43, 207; As cultural mediators, 193 as cultural translators, 212; As ethnographers, 7, 16, 21, 139, 140– 142, 155; As ethnographic discourse, 139–140, 145; As historians, as historical witness, 16, 84–85, 88, 113, 117; As form of knowledge, 7, 72; As natural history writers, 7; Birkett, Dea, 8, 17, 26n33, 26n36, 26n48; Body of traveler, 31, 175, 208; Bohls,

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Elizabeth, 55; Documentary value of, 83, 124, 126n20. See also History; Domesticity, 12, 83, 143, 145, 173, 187, 193, 207; Ethnographic gaze, 144, 147; Ethnographie des femmes, 141–142, 166–169, 172–173, 178, 180, 188, 190–191; European Women travelers, women’s travel, 2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 14, 22, 23, 70, 83, 99, 111, 155, 208–209; Female explorers, 18, 31; “Fellow travelers,” 124; Female Discoverer, 45–46, 52; Frawley, Maria, 14, 17, 23n3, 24n6, 26n35, 26n35; 27n60, 27n62, 28n65, 28n42, 28n73, 28n78, 28n81, 29n96, 146; “Globe-trotters,” 7, 17, 70, 207; Hahner, June, Women Through Women’s Eyes, 27n57, 27n58; As historiography, 107, 109, 112, 117; Hoock Demarle, Marie Claire, 7, 140, 193n6; Lawrence, Karen, Penelope Voyages, 9, 17–18; Marz, Harper, Lila, “Solitary traveler”, 12, 18, 66, 70, 144, 195n21, 208, 210, 213n9, 213n15; Middleton, Dorothy, 17, 18, 28n79; Mills, Sara, 33, 122, 133–134n118, 187; Morgan, Place Matters, 29n89; Narrative persona, narrative voice, 7, 14, 17, 43, 45–46, 84, 141, 143, 209; Pérez Mejía, Angela, 139, 193n2; Return to moorings, 212; Russell, Mary, 18, 29n87; Social explorers/femmes enquêtrices/ exploratrices sociales, 7, 112, 140, 172; Subjectivity of female traveler, 29n101, 209–211; Travelerartists, 80n155; Travel encounter, 142; Typology of, 16; Victorian “lady” travelers, Victorian women travelers, 1, 2, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 34, 140, 143, 211; Views of nature, 16, 19. See also Nature

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About the Author

Adriana Méndez Rodenas is a professor of Latin American and Caribbean literatures at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on travel writing, gender, and transatlantic studies. Her first two books center on transnational Cuban literature: Severo Sarduy: el neobarroco de la transgresión (1983), a “Post-Boom” author known for his experimental fictions, and Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba: The Travels of Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlin (1998), a major figure in Spanish American Romanticism who straddled two cultures, Cuba and France. Her edited volume of la Comtesse Merlin’s Les esclaves dans les colonies espagnoles (2005), published by Éditions l’Harmattan, documents the abolitionist debate in Cuba, while her critical edition of Mercedes Merlin’s Viaje a la Habana (2009), presents one of the most riveting of nineteenth-century travel books. Her third book, Cuba en su imagen: Historia e identidad en la literatura cubana (2002), features Cuban literature and art. Her essays on Cuban American Literature have appeared in Negotiating Identities in Art and Literature: Cuban Americans and American Culture (2007) and Cuba: Idea of a Nation Displaced (2007). A Research Fellowship at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies in spring 2012 supported her current project, an ecocritical study of the Caribbean across historical lines and genres.

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