Writing home to her mother and sisters from the expedition to Brazil on which she had accompanied her husband in 1865, Elizabeth Agassiz revealed her nascent intention to revise her letters for publication, asking that the letters be circulated to the family and then saved for later use. I will argue in this paper that the letters were already useful, both as a journal for recording and assessing her ongoing experiences, and, when she sent them home at the long intervals when transportation to Boston was available, as a means of maintaining communication with a distant but loving family. They function, I will argue, as autobiography, as a medium for recording and composing a life and a self. And I will argue that their later use--as the basis of the book, A Journey in Brazil, was a second use that did not so much revise the letters as create a second account of the trip. My purpose in this paper is to address the public function of the private letters--their function as autobiography--and also to consider the private function of the published travel book, which endowed Elizabeth Agassiz with an authorial voice that was rare for women of her time.
Elizabeth Agassiz was well aware of the interpolation of public and private functions and discourses in the letter, and, as her request that her letters be saved suggests, in these particular letters. She was well aware of the popularity of expedition and travel narratives, which were conventionally presented in a letter/journal format; indeed, while traveling in Brazil she was reading earlier expedition accounts by Alexander von Humboldt and Henry Walter Bates, and she was certainly aware of Charles Darwin's Beagle journal. She expected the expedition of her popular and charismatic husband, an expedition undertaken at least in part to gather evidence to refute Darwin, to be equally interesting to a broad public. It as not surprising that even at the beginning of her trip, she should think about writing a book about her experiences on the expedition.
My point in this paper, however, is to argue that the letters are not just a private rough draft of a finished piece of writing, a trial run that she would later polish into a public, popular, and finished piece. Instead, I will argue that the letters Elizabeth Agassiz wrote home are autobiographical in a way that the book she was to make from them is not. In order to examine these changes, I will compare her representations of specific scenes and moments in the two narratives; for example, I will examine the different perspectives she takes in each text on a public event like viewing an imperial procession and on a private event, like learning to ride a horse. I will also discuss scenes that she leaves out of the published narrative, particularly scenes of what she considers to be the squalor of Brazil and evidence of sexual immorality. I will consider how these selective inclusions and omissions shape the character of the stories she tells in each version of her travels. In making these comparisons, I will be relying on the archival research on her unpublished letters that I undertook several years ago in the Schlesinger Library.
The move from the letters to the book was a move from autobiography to travel narrative, a move from a narrative that places her experience at the center of the expedition to a narrative that positions her on the periphery. It is a move to a different genre, a different kind of textuality. Her subjectivity is transformed in the travel narrative, as she adopts a stance of public authority. In order to shape the experiences described in the letters into a travel narrative, not only does Elizabeth Agassiz shift her focus away from her consciousness as the writer, showing us instead the writer in the landscape; but she also obscures her role as an active, shaping force on the expedition.
It is tempting to lament the loss of her personal vision and voice in the published book. However, I have come to conceive of this as a positive change, as documenting Elizabeth Agassiz's forging of a public voice and a public identity. In the book, Elizabeth Agassiz becomes a "correspondent" in the sense of a reporter, in addition to the "correspondent" who is a daughter and a sister representing herself as the subject. In the published narrative, Elizabeth Agassiz is a type--very much "Mrs. Louis Agassiz"--and no longer "Your [and her] own Lizzie" of the letters, and this can be seen as a step on the way to her becoming the independent personage she became after the death of her husband. I must finally conclude that this move to the travel narrative should not be viewed as a substitution of an externalized and objectified discourse for a more fully-developed subjectivity or as a mere change in the story; but that it should be understood as the as the creation of a new, co-existing account of the expedition and of a new authority for the writer.
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