Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century America: European Women Pilgrims

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century America; European Women Pilgrims focuses on the travel accounts of five European women—Maria Graham, Frances Erskine Inglis, Flora Tristan, Fredrica Bremer, and Adela Breton—who traveled to Latin America in the nineteenth century and witnessed the pivotal historic events of the transition to Independence as well as the first phases of the political and cultural autonomy of the newly formed nations in this continent. While encompassing a large period of time—from the end of the Wars of Independence (1825) until the transition to modernity at the end of the century—the book is organized by themes instead of individual authors. It offers invaluable insights into the interdisciplinary discourses of travelogues, which cover gender studies, history, ethnography, and natural history. The author Adriana Méndez Rodenas holds that these women's experience of the transatlantic crossing was to them an opportunity “to gain legitimacy for a self-in-the-making” (1) and to understand that by standing face-to-face with the Other they came to realize their own marginalization. She analyses the contact between the Self and the Other by reconsidering Mary Louise Prat's concept of “contact zone” imagined as “asymmetrical relations to power” (12) in order to successfully address Latin American contexts. She also argues that by tackling the historical issues—naturally from the female point of view—these women anticipated the complex relationship between anthropology and state-making that developed in the twentieth century.While noting “the aesthetic quality of these works, the many intertextual echoes which turn women's travel journals into richly evocative texts” (xiv), the author also emphasizes the immediacy of travel—by grouping the nineteenth-century foreign visitors as transatlantic pilgrims—and its power for self-transformation. She further elaborates on the fact that women travelers modernized the colonial encounter through a particular kind of ethnographic gaze as well as the gendered nature of their travel accounts. These travelogues combine epistolary forms with memoir, historical documents, and various literary allusions and they are permeated throughout by a poetic sensibility. Méndez Rodenas deepens the analyses of the rhetoric of travel writing by elaborating on the eclecticism implied in this genre and the variety of discourses that coexist in travel writing. She maintains that these texts are to be analyzed as both historiography and literary texts.One of the key tropes of the book—also shown in the title—is the pilgrim. While this term can be traced back to Flora Tristan's Peregrinations d'une Paria, Méndez Rodenas approaches this trope through the perspective of such authors as James Clifford and Karen Lawrence, arguing that it is necessary to expand their notion of female pilgrimage to various types of journeys. Besides the anthropological considerations, her use of the pilgrimage also includes the psychoanalytical dimension of travel. Méndez Rodenas also dwells on the hybridity of the texts, on the way early forms of ethnography and historiographic awareness are described in their accounts and on the mark left by previous (scientific) travelers on these women's observations of nature and their illustrations of natural history. She further elaborates on this topic claiming that this approach might trouble the binary paradigms that classify European travel writing as either science or sentiment.Another important argument of Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America is that women travelers are constructors of “the transatlantic imagination,” a term that implies the envisioning of the nature and societies of the New World from a gendered viewpoint The author maintains that being at a juncture point between gender and genre, transatlantic travel writing helps women to show their view of the places they visited. Hence the pilgrim trope helps to understand how travel shapes the transatlantic dialogue; this dialogue influences both the travelers and the places they visited. The author further proposes that these travel accounts anticipate the testimonio genre, that is, the testimonial narrative.Méndez Rodenas rightly holds that the contribution of foreign women's gaze toward Latin America and their impact on the discourse of nation formation and cultural identity is an aspect which hasn't been dealt with sufficiently in previous studies of this genre and her position is that the relationship these women travelers have with the landscape they describe as well as their historical and anthropological awareness is what contributes in making them an integral part of the Latin America canon. Consequently, the author openly and convincingly asserts that these female-encoded travels and accounts have wrongly remained at the margins of Latin America's literary tradition. She also reminds the reader that this is not the case with other Victorian-era women travelers whose travel writings have been already accepted as part of the canon of nineteenth-century British travel writing. She also points out that since these travelogues are written neither in Spanish nor in Portuguese, they therefore add to the “multilingual library” of the continent.Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth-Century Latin America comprises four chapters and a coda. The first chapter sets the theoretical basis and introduces the thesis and main arguments of the book. It also addresses the profile of each woman pilgrim and synthetically summarizes the other three chapters. Focusing on the visual and narrative aspects of the journeys and on the illustrations and pictorial sketches found in the travelogues, Chapter 2, “Mapping the Unknown: European Women's Travels and the Gaze of Enchantment,” elaborates on the “gaze of enchantment,” a concept that refers to the emotive aspect that enriches the texts of the travelogues, going beyond the scientific view that influenced these women, especially the work of A. von Humboldt. Méndez Rodenas elaborates on the different aesthetic response that these women had toward the astonishing nature of the New World. This chapter offers a comparison among their travel accounts, based on the aesthetic response that each one of them had toward the Latin America's landscape, responses that enhance the uniqueness of that continent's landscape. According to the author, these travelogues contribute to placing the invention and experiencing of nature at the front line of these countries' nationalist discourse.In Chapter 3, the author deals with “Romancing the Nation: European Women's Travelers in Nineteenth Century Spanish America.” This chapter dwells on the alternative history offered by the travel accounts of these women pilgrims, which the author rightly considers a gendered history. The rhetorical strategies employed by the women travelers to construct the historic realm as well as the “I” narrator are central to this chapter. The author analyses how these women writers took notice of the local cultures they visited and the historical events, taking into account that they took the position of the privileged insider (Graham), the detached observer (Calderon dela Barca), or the intermediate position (Tristan). Each travel account is characterized by a different tone and the book succeeds in presenting a convincing analysis of their narrative strategies suggesting their role in the rhetoric of nation formation. By shaping their own rhetoric of travel in a gendered way these women pilgrims negotiated the hegemonic discourse in nineteenth-century Latin America. In this respect, Méndez Rodenas stresses both the documentary value of these travel accounts and their emplotment of historical events.In Chapter 4, “Face-to-Face with the Other: Women Travelers as Ethnographers,” the author credibly analyses the travelers' views—expressed as narrative and visual accounts—about these non-Western societies and cultures as well as the ethnographic narratives that are employed in their accounts. Another topic skillfully explored in this chapter is the way these women writers explore the social conditions of Latin American women. The lives of the Creole women, their education, and their marriage mores are at the center of Bremer's and Tristan's accounts. Méndez Rodenas holds that women pilgrims partially achieved one of the most difficult tasks for all ethnographers, the balancing of empirical observation and subjective impression. She also maintains that—although rudimentary and unsophisticated in comparison with modern standards—these European women's travelogues promoted an eclectic ethnography through a gendered gaze and creatively anticipated the methods of both sociology and anthropology.Keeping a lively and insightful dialogue with previous research in this field and with such scholars as Sara Mills, Roberto Ignacio Diaz, Barbara T. Gates, Dennis Porter, Barbara Maria Stafford, Otmar Ette, Derek Gregory, Maria H. Frawuley, Elizabeth A. Bohls, Sidonie Smith, Angela Perez Mejia, June E. Hahner, Gonzalez Echevarria, and so forth, Transatlantic Women Pilgrims represents a distinguished and influential contribution, and offers a very rich perspective for future research in the field of Latin American literary canon and cultural archive, as well as in the travel writing studies. Therefore it significantly adds to the fertile field of research related especially to the (post)independence period in Latin America with focus on political, social, and cultural aspects.I'll conclude by agreeing with the final statement of the Coda, in which Méndez Rodenas refers to women pilgrims as cultural translators “that 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” (212).