Copyright by Jessica Reese Goudeau 2014
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Copyright by Jessica Reese Goudeau 2014 The Dissertation Committee for Jessica Reese Goudeau Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Elizabeth Bishop and Brazil Committee: Kurt Heinzelman, Supervisor Chad Bennet Paulo Henriques Britto Cole Hutchison Jennifer Wilks Elizabeth Bishop and Brazil by Jessica Reese Goudeau, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2014 Dedication To Jonathan, with whom I fell in love in Brazil, thus gaining a country in which I feel at home and a husband who is my home wherever we go in the world. And to Simone (my qualifying exam baby), Gabriella (my prospectus exam baby) and Etta (my dissertation defense baby), who make all of this worthwhile. Acknowledgements I’d like to thank my committee—Kurt Heinzelman, Paulo Henriques Britto, Jennifer Wilks, Chad Bennett and Cole Hutchison—for the conversations, coffees, good critiques, and solid encouragement over the last few years. Kurt and I have worked together for years now—I can’t imagine my graduate career without his guidance and support. Thanks to my friends both in graduate school and out of it, especially to Nyssa and Stephanie for the lifelong friendships we’ve developed over our shared graduate school experience and to Caren, Ann, Amy, Holly, and Christiana. who have been there in every sweet and stressful time of my life. My special writing group has provided me hours of laughter and insight, especially about chickens and monkey business. I’d like to thank my family for their love of education and for teaching me so many valuable things about how to balance life and family well. Most importantly, I’d like to thank my husband Jonathan. I share this accomplishment with him—this is our dissertation—and with our three little girls who have been such a constant source of joy and who make the difficult balance of parenthood and academia so seamless. v Elizabeth Bishop and Brazil Jessica Reese Goudeau, PhD. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: Kurt Heinzelman Elizabeth Bishop’s phenomenal rise in the academic canon is due in large part to the way her writings about Brazil correlate with current critical concerns. However, U.S. scholars have relied on an inchoate understanding of Bishop’s sociohistorical contexts as she performed complicated and at times contradictory Brazil(s). Using Yi-Fu Tuan’s methodology of space and place and James Clifford’s dichotomy of routes/roots, I delineate between four discrete Brazil(s) in Bishop’s texts. Shifts between these Brazil(s) are predicated on changes in Bishop’s relationship with her Brazilian partner, Lota Macedo de Soares. I explore the eleven poems of the “Brazil” section of Questions of Travel and “Crusoe in England,” as well as the introductions and translations she worked on contemporaneously. Bishop’s tourist poems examine the tension between her expectations of the banana-ized Brazil of the popular Carmen Miranda movies, and the reality that she discovered as she moves from a tourist-voyeur to a rooted expatriate. In her Samambaia poems, she writes from the position of insider/partner about the subaltern public sphere that Lota has created at her farm outside of Rio de Janeiro. The volatility of the Brazilian political situation, which Bishop blamed for the dissolution of her relationship with Lota, led Bishop to define the primitive aspects of Brazil that Lota vi disdained. Finally, I argue that her translation strategies as she writes about Brazil after Lota’s death in 1967 are a nostalgic return to her earliest views of Brazil. vii Table of Contents Introduction: On Bishop's Brazil(s) ........................................................................ 2 Routes/Roots .................................................................................................. 9 Space and Place ............................................................................................ 10 Lota .............................................................................................................. 13 Accuracy ...................................................................................................... 14 Bishop's New Yorker/U.S. Audience .............................................................. 20 Bishop Criticism and Her Revival ................................................................ 24 Bishop Criticism and Brazil .......................................................................... 29 Chapter 1--Bishop's Tourist Routes: Defamiliarizing the Space of a Banana-ized Brazil (1945-1960) ....................................................................................... 36 Bishop's Concept-Brazils ............................................................................. 39 The Tourist's "Immodest Demands for a Different World" ......................... 53 The "Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" and Those "Maddening Little Women" 60 The Ethics of Travel: "Where should we be today?" ................................... 75 Chapter 2--Bishop's Domestic Roots: Samambaia as a Place of Shared Subaltern Values (1952-1960) ..................................................................................... 92 Samambaia as a Subaltern Public Sphere .................................................... 93 Antigetulista, the República Velha, and The Diary of "Helena Morley" ....... 105 "Brazil/You're in New York": Lota and Bishop's New Yorker Audience ........................ 120 Samambaia, the Nurturing and Threatened Place ....................................... 136 Chapter 3--Bishop's Primitive Routes: The Search for "Other" Spaces (1958-1964) .................................................................................................................... 152 viii "Indians" as Objects for the Touristic Gaze ................................................................ 165 An "Indian" as a "Noble Savage" Foil to the New Yorker Audience ................................ 170 "Indians" Who Demonstrate Agency. ............................................................ 179 Balthazár, One of the "Backlands People" ................................................. 186 The Semirural Popularion of the "Babylon" Favela ............................................. 197 Chapter 4: Bishop's Nostalgic Return to Roots: Bricolage Translations of Lota and Their Shared Place (1965-1972) ............................................................................. 219 Bishop's Translation and Transformative Interpretation Practices ......................... 220 Crusoe as Editor ......................................................................................... 239 Crusoe in Cambridge .................................................................................. 261 Conclusion: What Is Lost by Not Translating Bishop's Brazil(s) ........................................ 291 Brazil in Geography III .............................................................................. 291 Notes on Bishop's Brazil(s) in the Classroom ..................................................... 294 Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 303 ix List of Illustrations Illustration 1: Paintings by Elizabeth Bishop: “Brazilian Landscape” (1952) and “Interior with Calder Mobile" (date unknown) ............................ 1 Illustration 2: Poster for Week-End in Havana ................................................................. 44 Illustration 3: Image from The Gang's All Here ..................................................... 72 x Illustration 1: “Brazilian Landscape,” 19521 “Interior with Calder Mobile,” date unknown (presumably late 1950s)2 1 Introduction: On Bishop’s Brazil(s) Elizabeth Bishop painted watercolors that she often gave as gifts to her friends and loved ones in a personal representation of scenes from her travels and her life. Two of her paintings from the 1950s represent a complete portrait of the area in Samambaia in which Bishop lived with Lota for the first years of their relationship. In September 1952, less than a year after she arrived in Brazil, Elizabeth Bishop sent a large painting to her friend and doctor Anny Baumann. In the accompanying letter, Bishop downplays the painting, later titled “Brazilian Landscape,” with her usual self-deprecation: “I am not very well pleased with it. I’m afraid, to use an elegant expression, I bit off more than I could chew” (One Art 246). The painting is ambitious among Bishop’s work using watercolor and gouache; the scene is “from Lota’s road, looking down over the land belonging to a florist, just below us—a very nice neighbor to have.” The distance from which Bishop views the florist’s home and the other farms below, as well as the rolling green hills under a blue sky which fill the top half of the painting, give a broad overview of the vast area around Samambaia, the sítio [country home] of Lota Macedo de Soares, Bishop’s partner during her years in Brazil. In contrast to the grand scope of “Brazilian Landscape,” another of Bishop’s paintings provides a more focused portrait of an intimate corner of the home Bishop shared with Lota.3 In “Interior with Calder Mobile,” Bishop depicts old-fashioned aspects of their home; the fire-burning woodstove beside the cozy teakettle and the iron container with logs waiting to be put in the