CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES of BRAZIL, PATAGONIA, and the U.S., 1859-79 Natalia Fontes De Oliveira Purdue University
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Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Open Access Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1-1-2015 THREE TRAVELING WOMEN WRITERS: CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES OF BRAZIL, PATAGONIA, AND THE U.S., 1859-79 Natalia Fontes de Oliveira Purdue University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations Recommended Citation Fontes de Oliveira, Natalia, "THREE TRAVELING WOMEN WRITERS: CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES OF BRAZIL, PATAGONIA, AND THE U.S., 1859-79" (2015). Open Access Dissertations. 1495. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/1495 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. i THREE TRAVELING WOMEN WRITERS: CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES OF BRAZIL, PATAGONIA, AND THE U.S., 1859-79 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University by Natália Fontes de Oliveira In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy i May 2015 Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana ii For my mother. ii iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have the deepest gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Charles Ross, who believed in my potential and gave me the opportunity to fulfill the biggest achievement of my academic career. Thank you for the guidance, the several office meetings, the inspirational discussions, and the willingness to help me excel. I am extremely thankful for my committee members, Dr. Paul Dixon, Dr. Angelica Duran, and Dr. Marcia Stephenson for their support, feedback, and insightful contributions. You have made my journey a constant learning process. A sincere thank you to the Comparative Literature Program for accepting me as an international interdisciplinary student. I thank the professors and staff members who were a constant reminder of the excellence of the program. I am also thankful for the School of Languages and Cultures for the opportunity to be a Teaching Assistant. I thank the Purdue Research Grant Foundation for the summer and yearlong grants. Both forms of financial assistance made my research possible. iii A warm thank you to Joyce Detzner for the thoughtfulness. To Joni Hipsher for all the cherrfulness. Thank you to Delayne Graham for the consideration. To Daleth Assad who welcomed me into her home; thank you for your friendship. iv I thank all my friends, in special, Christina Weiller, Monica O’neil, and Buffy Turner, friends, officemates, colleagues; for the lunches, skype calls, soccer games, potlucks, candies, and CD’s. I also thank my dear friends Nina, Nico, Katie and Ben for the talks, the ongoing messages, the dinners, the volleyball games, and the hugs I so needed along the way. To Michelle Medeiros; I am lucky to work with you and to call you friend. I see you as a sister. I am grateful to all my family, my roots, my safe harbor. I appreciate the understanding and the determination to never let go of me, even when my only focus was the dissertation. In special, my brother and my best friend, Humberto, thank you for standing by my side when times get rough and for making me laugh out loud. I thank my father for all the life lessons. I feel blessed to have a mother, my role model and friend, who has always encouraged me to pursue my goals and helped me along the way. Thank you for the unconditional love. iv v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES ...........................................................................................................vi ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................vii INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: A BRITISH LADY IN PATAGONIA ................................................20 CHAPTER TWO: AN ARGENTINEAN SOCIALITE IN THE U.S. .............................72 CHAPTER THREE: AN AMERICAN SCIENTIST IN BRAZIL .................................125 CONCLUSION ...............................................................................................................174 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..........................................................................................................179 VITA ...............................................................................................................................185 v vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure ............................................................................................................................. Page Figure 1 – The Lady …………………………………………………………………... 23 Figure 2 – Lady Florence Dixie ………………………………………………………... 25 Figure 3 – We Were Here First ………………………………………………………... 32 Figure 4 – Indians Camp ……………………………………………………………….. 44 Figure 5 – Eduarda Mansilla ……………………………………………………….........75 Figure 6 – Eduarda Mansilla García …………………………………………………….76 Figure 7 – Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz ……………………………………………………128 Figure 8 – Mina Negress ……………………………………………………………… 166 Figure 9 – Mina Negress and Child ……………………………………………………167 Figure 10 – Head of Alexandrina ………………………………………………………170 vi vii ABSTRACT Fontes de Oliveira, Natália. Ph.D., Purdue University, May 2015. Three Travelling Women Writers: Cross-Cultural Perspectives of Brazil, Patagonia, and the U.S., 1859-79. Major Professor: Charles Ross. The technological progress of the nineteenth century made travelling across the seas and the publishing of travel narratives both possible and desirable. Women used this as an opportunity to gain greater freedom of mobility and authorship. Instead of focusing on solitary travelers, this dissertation brings to the forefront the elaborate rhetoric and discourse strategies married women travel writers used in their narrative to transcend their husband’s shadow. The British Lady Florence Dixie (1855-1905), the Argentine Eduarda Mansilla de García (1834-1892), and the American Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz (1822-1907) are pionner women that accompany their husbands on travels to foreign lands and assert their independence by writing and publishing travel narratives. I analyze Dixie’s Across Patagonia (1880), Mansilla’s Recuerdos de viaje [Memories from Travels] (1882), and Agassiz’s A Journey in Brazil (1868) to propose that the three traveling vii women writers created an elaborate rhetoric, based on aspects of religion, literature, politics, and science, which shaped the dissemination of knowledge in the nineteenth century. Dixie traveled from England to Patagonia in search of adventure. In the narrative, she defends women’s equal abilities in outdoor sports and women’s smart attire. viii Mansilla traveled from Argentina to the United States. One of the few women travelers with children, she used a discourse of motherhood to establish her point of view: the superiority of Argentina. However, there is a narrative shift in Mansilla’s work because after a few years living in the U.S. she begins to admire American women and the cities’ architecture. Agassiz traveled from the U.S. to Brazil with the Thayer Expedition from 1865 to 1866. Her travel narrative is structured as a scientific account informed by natural history discourse. In her work, Agassiz innovates by including aspects of social organization, an anthropologic view, to her arguments. With travel narratives, Florence Dixie, Eduarda Mansilla, and Elizabeth Agassiz found a way to use their sex and marital status to transcend their husbands’ career and shape the dissemination of knowledge in the nineteenth century. viii 1 INTRODUCTION If steam-powered boats, ships, and trains made traveling accessible in the nineteenth century, print culture made it desirable. Traveling women writers took the opportunity to make the genre of travel writing a textual space of their own. In unprecedented numbers, women writers travelled across the globe and published travel narratives. They became the observers, the voices of authority, and the wielders of the pen. Some pioneer women who undertook the challenge of travelling and publishing their work include British Lady Florence Dixie (1855-1905), Argentine Eduarda Mansilla de García (1834-1892), and the American Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz (1822-1907).1 They are the first women from their respective countries to write a travel narrative about their chosen destinations—Patagonia, the U.S., and Brazil, respectively. Despite their different nationalities, the three authors share a privileged bourgeois identity that enables them to travel abroad and publish their travel narratives. The three women authors are neither fearless transgressors, nor saints or simple feminists. Rather, they add their voices to the predominantly male discourses of the century. Instead of focusing on solitary travelers, 1 this dissertation brings to the forefront the elaborate rhetoric and discourse strategies 1 Utilizing the terminology used during the period under study, I use “American” when referring to the citizens and products of the United States of America, although I understand the fraught nature of the term. 2 married women travel writers used in their narratives to transcend their husband’s shadow. I focus on Florence Dixie’s Across Patagonia (1880), Eduarda Mansilla’s Recuerdos de viaje [Memories from Travels] (1882), and Elizabeth Agassiz’s A Journey to Brazil (1868) to illustrate their elaborate rhetoric, based on scientific, religious, political, and literary discourse, which shaped the dissemination of knowledge in the nineteenth century. The three authors find a way to use their sex to add a different