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STEWART Thesis submitted to the University of St. Andrews in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Ph.D. MAY 1996 AU NI V, ABSTRACT Perspectives of the River Plate around the time of Rosas: An analysis based upon the personal correspondence, private memoirs and published accounts of British settlers, as well as literary works by creole authors lain A. D. Stewart Thesis for the Degree of Ph. D., University of St. Andrews This thesis draws inspiration from the emergence of cultural studies as an academic pursuit, in addition to the current renewal of interest in the relationship between literary works and their socio-cultural milieux, to bring together an assortment of textual traces pertaining to the River Plate around the era of Juan Manuel de Rosas, governor of Buenos Aires and de facto dictator of Argentina for most of the period 1829-1852. The main texts analysed range from private documents relating to two Scottish settler families, through accounts published by British citizens with first- hand knowledge of the region (Un ingl6s, Cinco ahos en Buenos Aires and Beaumont, Travels in Buenos Ayres and the Aqlaceni 1'rovinces), to three influential pieces of early Argentinian literature (Echeverria's El inaladero, Mdrmol's Anialia and Sarrmento's Facundo). One justification of this apparently eclectic approach lies in the prominence accorded to the incorner in the thought of liberal Platme intellectuals, a concern evinced in their literary production. The methodology involves examining the representation of certain fundamental topics acrossthis rangeof written artefacts, observing frequent points of thematic convergenceamongst the various texts. In this fashion, I construct an image of the River Plate region around the Rosasperiod, whilst also appraising the degree to which early British settlers matchedthe idealized notion of the immigrant present in liberal creole writings. fhe study is divided into four main chapters, supplemented by an introduction, conclusion and appendix. The first chapter summarizes the historical context of the young Platme republics; the second deals with the themes of society, community and family, the third focuses upon religion; the fourth considers perspectives of politics, dictatorship and civil war. The appendix consists of an unpublished settler autobiography, a remarkable account of the tribulations faced on a daily basis in the developing Argentina. CONTENTS Declaration I Statement of Date of Admission 11 Supervisor's Statement III Copyright Declaration IV Acknowledgements V INTRODUCTION 1. THE HISTORICAL AND INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT 20 2. SOCIETY, COMMUNITY AND FAMILY 64 RELIGION 125 4. POLITICS, DICTATORSHIP AND CIVIL WAR 159 CONCLUSIONS 215 APPENDIX - VAIIH HARD 77?IED: Jane Robson's Autobiography 221 Bibliogaphy 265 Index 279 DECLARATION On submitting this thesis to the University of St. Andrews, 1, the candidate, declare that: 1) the thesis has been composed by the candidate 2) the work of which it is a record has been done by the candidate 3) it has not been accepted in any previous application for any degree. SIGNATURE fain A. D. Stewart DATE May 1996 STATEMENT OF DATE OF ADMISSION The candidate was first admitted to the University of St. Andrews as a research student in the Department of Spanishat the commencementof session 1992-9-3,that is, October 1992. V ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my gratitude to all those who have provided assistance and support during the research and preparation of this thesis. The following deserve individual acknowledgement: firstly, my supervisor, Gustavo San Rorndn, in recognition of his encouragement and friendly criticism-, Professor Alan Paterson, for much beneficial advice, Muriel Stewart, for her patience and enduring interest in my work. I am most grateful to all friends and contacts in Argentina and Uruguay, who have made visits to South America a great pleasure and have supplied invaluable material for this project. Special thanks are due to May and Hilda Dodds for providing the biography of Jane Robson (which is reproduced as an appendix to this thesis) and to Luis Bonner Ponce de Le6n and Martin Ponce de Le6n for their friendship and generous hospitality during my stay in Montevideo. I am also most grateful to the judges of the 1995 Gray Prize for St. Leonard's College (University of St. Andrews) for the faith they demonstrated in my research into the Gibson family. Last, but by no means least, I thank the institutions which have provided indispensable financial assistance, especially the Carnegie Trust, the Douglas Gifford Travel Scholarship, the School of Modem Languages of the University of St. Andrews and the Stewart Society. Famosamente infame su nombre fue desolaciönen las casas, idolätrico amor en el gauchaje y horror del tai .o en la garganta. Jorge Luis Borges, 'Rosas' Fervor de Buenos Aires INTRODUCTION Some preliminary remarks110 The rise of the cultural studies approach in recent years has opened a gamut of new possibilities for the researcher interested in the relationship between textual representations and the social, political and cultural circumstances of their 1 production. As studies of an interdisciplinary nature have gradually infiltrated the academic world, the parallel analysis of outwardly diverse and separate forms of discourse, with the purpose of perceiving their mutual illumination, has steadily gained acceptance, to some extent eroding the privileged status of the literary canon and moving towards a more egalitarian treatment of the multifarious communicative practices of human society. Many exponents of this new method emphasize its ambitious, indefatigable radicalism, translating the ethos of innovation into a quasi- political stance. Fred Inglis, for example, makes the following programmatic statement: Cultural Studies aspire to the perfect balancing of spontaneity with seriousness, and of both with an energetic solidarity towards what is done to all those people, and the quotidian expression of their lives, who have suffered under political oppression, academic insolence, and the customary pains of historical indifference. 2 Whilst not wishing to adopt the conceptual framework of cultural studies wholesale, especially not insofar as any ideological commitment is concerned, I hope to draw The renewed enthusiasm for contextualizing the literary work was most clearly articulated, albeit with a disparaging tone, by J. Hillis Miller in his now famous Presidential Address to the IIALA: 'Literary study in the past few years has undergone a sudden, almost universal turn away from theory in the sense of an orientation toward language as such and has made a corresponding turn toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context, the material base'. 'Presidential Address 1986. The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base', PULA 102 (1987), 281-91 (p. 283)- 2 Fred Inglis, Cullural Studies (Oxfor& Blackwell, 1993), p. 18 upon its liberating possibilities, its capacity to dissolve the boundaries which conventionally demarcate the intellectual field. The term 'culture', described by Raymond Williams as 'one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language, has itself undergone a reappraisal, no longer denoting the intellectual and artistic activity of a talented and frequently dominant minority, but often now deployed to represent any practice or product ascribed to humankind, particularly those arising from some appreciable creative endeavour. 3 The present study espouses this broad definition, focusing upon very different types of roughly contemporary writing without consciously privileging one form above another. To a certain degree, the project coincides With the currently modish technique of new historicism, an approach which adroitly combines the issues of context and expression, offering the rapprochement of literature and history as an antidote to the hegemony of linguistically-oriented criticiSM. 4 According to Greenblatt, a pioneer of new historicism, or the 'poetics of culture' as he prefers to call his practice, the central value of this critical method is'an intensified willingness to read all of the textual traces of the past with the attention traditionally conferred onIV on literary texts'. 5 Few statements better encapsulate the project of this thesis. The texts to be analysed throughout this study all ostensibly portray social, community or personal 'reality'. However, this does not mean to say that we can accept any one of these accounts as authoritative or objective, nor even that any stable, absolute truth can be reached by fashioning a collage