In 1822, the well-known travel writer Maria Graham journeys to Chile with her naval captain husband, but he dies just offshore. (1) Anglo-American captains immediately rally round, offering her immediate passage back to England; she refuses, finds herself a house in Valparaiso, and becomes unusually independent of the colony. She stays with Chilean families rather than English and spends a day with Chilean artisans to be instructed in the art of pottery-making. By contrast, she rarely mentions the British residents of Chile, telling us, "I say nothing of the English here, because I do not know them except as very civil vulgar people, with one or two exceptions ... " (234).
These border-crossing activities are almost unique in travel literature of the time, and are particularly striking in a woman's narrative. In this essay, I demonstrate that Graham's Journal enables and excuses her independence and close contact with the Chilean Other by appropriating, narrative techniques developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth century sentimental novel, romantic poetry, and gothic novel. By drawing on literary tropes and techniques in crafting her journal, Graham contributes to a narrative about British and American involvement in Chile that gives female colonists powerful moral work to do in the country. What's more, Graham uses the strong female literary movement of the time to negotiate a more autonomous female identity without alienating her readership.
Writing up her experiences after her return, Graham works for authenticity and immediacy by crafting her narrative as a first-person, present-tense journal; and she manages to combine a wide range of subject positions and modes of discourse. Her opening passage, for example, departs startlingly from travel-narrative norms.(2) After providing us with a 100-page political and historical Introduction to Chile (in itself an unusual move for a female narrator),(3) she opens the journal proper with this scene:
His Majesty's ship Doris, Valparaiso harbour, Sunday night, April 28th, 1822. --Many days have passed, and I have been unable and unwilling to resume my journal. Today the newness of the place, and all the other circumstances of our arrival, have drawn my thought to take some interest in the things around me. I can conceive nothing more glorious than the sight of the Andes this morning on approaching the land at daybreak....
Graham then declines an American Commodore's offer of passage back to England, saying, "I feel that I have neither health nor spirits for such a voyage just yet" (I 14). And she continues to emphasize her distraught mental state, telling us that though she left the ship on which her husband had died,
I hardly know how I left it, or how I passed over the deck where one little year ago I had been welcomed with such different prospects and feelings ... my mind has bowed before him in whose hand are the issues of life and death. And I know that I cannot stay long behind, though my life were lengthened to the utmost bounds of human being.
The heightened discourse and syntax of these sentences signals the influence of literary forms, especially the Gothic novel and Romantic poetry, both emphasizing sublime or liminal states of mind. Graham's characterization of herself also draws on literary convention. By opening her narrative with a woman alone and in despair over the death of her beloved, Graham invites us into the world of the Gothic heroine, usually a woman removed from the rank and file of humanity not only by more refined sensibilities but also by deep sorrow.
Graham appropriates such conventions to enable her own self-scripting as Gothic heroine. The Gothic journey often results in increased independence for its heroine, just as Graham's sojourn in South America results not only in vastly increased autonomy but also, ultimately, in her employment as governess to the Portuguese Princess of Brazil. As Kate Ellis puts it, Radcliffe's heroines are virtuous, but they also "respond to difficulties with rationality and, most important, independent initiative, opening the sphere of virtuous endeavor but without appearing to do so (Ellis 99- 100).(4) Gothic conventions work, then, to justify a space for the heroine to take such initiative without being branded as unwomanly. Graham draws on the Gothic to establish her husband's death and her own consequent illness as events which excuse the narrative to follow, in which she lives and travels alone in a foreign land. Alone, unprotected, and with no "womanly duty" in the country after the death of her husband--by the code of her time Graham ought to have accepted the American captain's offer of passage, and returned instantly to the protection of her family. Graham's Journal also appropriates elements of the discourses of femininity. For example, she uses sentimental discourse as well as literary echoes in her description of the wildness, helplessness, and sweet voices of Auracanian orphan girls and her praise of Chile's leader Bernardo O'Higgins' appropriately paternalistic response to them. Other examples include the veiled references to her own suffering (she was seriously ill while in Chile) and the many images of herself as devoted nurse to her young, deathly ill cousin Glennie.(5) These conventionally "feminine" elements are subverted, however, by Graham's appropriation of Gothic tropes which work to covertly challenge the sentimental heroine's passivity and inability to determine her own history.
In addition to drawing on literary conventions, Graham provides explicit literary references to help us enter her sensibility. These not only tell us which narratives have shaped her perspective--and therefore help us to see why she may highlight particular elements of this new world, while ignoring others--but also offer interpretative frameworks for her experience in Chile. Authors discussed include Byron, Burney, and Austin; she uses these references as touchstones for her descriptions of landscape, emotions, and class relations, among other things.
Class, race, and gender clash curiously in Graham's narrative, with class functioning as a virtually impenetrable barrier within her own race but becoming obscured by other differences once she crosses race boundaries, and gender adding yet another twist both in the conventions employed by Graham and in the roles she tends to play. While challenging stereotypes of femininity in many ways, she does tend to restrict herself to the traditional role of an upper-class Englishwoman: she bestows both patronage and presence on the "deserving poor" and on Indians while virtually shunning the middle classes. Equally traditional is her role as moral guide, presumably with the goal of helping Chilean society construct itself. In shaping her journal to reflect the entanglements of race and class and to "reveal" the suitability of the upper classes as moral guides, Graham draws heavily on novelistic convention. To cite an example already mentioned, the scene depicting O'Higgins with the orphan girls he has rescued emphasizes that he saved them from death--or even "a fate worse than". Like a Gothic novelist or like Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, Graham emphasizes O'Higgins' gentleness with these children to prove the "true" goodness hidden beneath the rugged exterior. Throughout the Journal, similarly clear echoes of novelistic tropes and descriptions work to reinforce approved social roles and modes of behavior, while implicitly critiquing behaviors and values that do not fit these models.
As Edward Said has pointed out, "stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world" (xii). The stories told by male travel narrators of the time tend to cluster around economic and military dominance. The role of female colonists in maintaining British presence in colonized countries is, however, less apparent. Although most work on imperial ideologies focuses on the English male, raised on Tennyson and the Rugby playing fields and striding purposefully out into Empire intent on "playing the game," recent theorists have begun investigating the role played by constructions of both masculinity and femininity in shaping colonial relations.(6) In the process of writing her Journal, then, Graham as a female writer not only developed a unique set of narrative strategies, but used these to create a highly crafted literary text able to perform cultural work quite different from that performed by male travel narratives. Ultimately, her techniques enabled her to challenge conventionally feminine subject positions by reworking literary conventions to suit her purpose, and thus create a model for the new female traveler: herself.
ENDNOTES
1. In addition to her Chilean journal, Graham's journals of a
residence in India, in 1812, Italy in 1819, Brazil from 1822 to 1823, and
Chile in 1822 were widely read, and she herself appears as a minor
player in the narratives of several other travel writers.
2. There are two very common strategies used to begin narratives. The first is the gradual entry, which engages the reader in preparations for the trip and lists either the narrator's credentials as an authority or apologizes for the lack of such credentials. The second is the sudden arrival, which plunges the reader immediately into the liminal space, often by means of vivid description of a spectacular view. Graham combines the two while adding elements drawing from literature.
3. As Mary Louise Pratt points out, the two women who wrote well-known accounts of South America just after independence, Flora Tristan and Graham, both refute common stereotypes of female travelers by incorporating astute political commentary into their narratives. Even later in the century, of course there are exceptions to the stereotype of tie apolitical female traveler; perhaps the most famous of these is Mary Kingsley, whose travel writings include a lengthy section detailing her recommendations for rule by proxy in British West Africa.
4. We know that Graham read both Bumey and Jane Austen through the evidence of her narrative; and even if she did not read Radcliffe, the Gothic received so much attention in the early nineteenth century that Graham must have known. at least the plots and general discourse of Radcliffe's novels. through reading Austen, if by no other means.
5. 0n the other hand, Pratt sees Graham as explicitly rejecting both romanticism. and sentimentality (159, 162-3).
6. For example, Trinh T. Minh-ha challenges us to rethink our tendency to normalize the colonist as male and normalize the colonized as Other to be evaluated and studied. Mary Louise Pratt shows us that male and female travel narratives developed quite different narrative structures and tropes, with female travelers as apparently more able than men perceive the inhabitants of colonized countries as relative equals due to a complex nexus of factors. And in her analysis of women's travel writing and colonialism, Sara Mills furthers Pratt's insight by pointing out that nineteenth-century women. travel writers, however diverse their topics of interest, share a problematic status as writers: they are "caught between the conflicting demands of the discourse of femininity and that of imperialism. The discourses of colonialism demand action and intrepid, fearless behavior from the narrator and yet the discourses of femininity demand passivity from the narrator and a concern with relationships" (21-22).
Selected Bibliography
Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: gothic novels and the subversion of domestic ideology. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
Graham, Maria. Journal of Residence in Chile during the year 1822. A voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825; Praeger, 1969.
Mayo, John. British Merchants and Chilean Development, 1851-1886. Boulder: Westview Press, 1987.
Mills, Sara. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism. New York & London: Routledge, 1991.
Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992.
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