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Writing the Journey: June 1999

Establishing a Woman's Voice in Anglo-American Narratives:
Fanny Calderon de la Barca's Life in Mexico


Miguel A. Cabanas
Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies
University of Connecticut
mac95001@uconnvm.uconn.edu

In the nineteenth century, travel was not generally accessible to women. Though travel writing belonged almost exclusively to men, some wealthy and middle class women did write travel narratives. As Mary Suzanne Schriber has pointed out, this "genre...offered an arena in which women could practice a public voice." Traveling for women in the nineteenth century constituted an escape, an adventure, and it provided them with geographical and imaged spaces where new possibilities were available, but these new travelers had also to respect the rules of travel discourse. The discursive "practices" of travel literature provide explorative possibilities for avoiding the constraints of gender, yet at the same time, they confine the women traveler to a "fixed" role toward "modernity." The often sovereign claims over the discourses of race, gender, and modernity function in tandem with the growth of the nineteenth-century Anglo-American travel writing to embody complex attitudes toward modernity (with its utopian notions of progress, economic and technological advancement, and liberation from European stagnation), racial and national identity, and economic and political transformation, attitudes which are in part idealistic and in part pragmatically exploitative.

My presentation will theorize Anglo-American women traveling to Spanish America in the first half of the nineteenth century in the context of Calderon's famous book Life in Mexico (1843). Frances Calderon de la Barca, wife of a Spanish diplomat, traveled from New York to Mexico and tried to provide a comprehensive description of Mexican society, making general assertions about both nature and culture. I am particularly interested in Calderon's formulation of Mexico through her representation of issues of race, class, and especially gender. In her writing, there is a metaphoric projection of colonial discourse which finds an ally in gendered language. Travel narratives of the United States such as Calderon's explore nature and culture in Latin America and by doing so, incorporate it in their self-definitions of nationhood; this hegemonic discursive practice represents a political "Manifest Destiny" project.

My paper will provide context for exploring the relationship between languge and the construction/naturalization of cultural myths in the Americas at both the national and international levels. The ideological contradictions embedded in travel literature find expression in a contradictory representational language which is sometimes mythopoeic, sometimes realist. While different tropes mythologize the "unknown," the realist language of natural and human history or geographical description attempts to pin down reality. The contradictions of this mode of writing are often evident in the fictionalization of the real to represent "unmapped" American reality. In Life in Mexico, Calderon's representation preserves North American myths and fictions of the era and projects them into the different communities in Latin America. These issues will be mined for additional significant theoretical qustions. Travel narratives become an instrument for establishing/rethinking gender roles. But how is gender incorporated into modernity? Is the voice of a woman traveler different from that of a man? What discursive restrictions does a woman traveler have? How is her voice incorporated in travel discourse, and what value does it have for society? How are the categories of "race" and "gender" played out against one another? In travel narrative, how are these categories incorporated in the capitalist system?


Miguel A. Cabanas
Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies
University of Connecticut
337 Mansfield Road, U-57
Storrs, Connecticut 06269
mac95001@uconnvm.uconn.edu

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Updated May 23, 1999