ABSTRACT
Upon her arrival in Havana on an extended visit to the Spanish colony of Cuba in 1869, Louisa Mathilde Woodruff, a sentimental “authoress” from the village of Hudson, New York, whose novel Shiloh had enjoyed moderate success a few years before, declares herself “unprepared to find Havana so thoroughly Oriental,” so “Moorish” in its aspect. She describes it thus: “The same narrow streets, roofed with awnings-the same one-storied houses, built around a court-the same shallow shops, on a level with the pavement, and all open in front, exposing their entire contents to the view-the same long files of cumbrously laden mules, tied together, and with a gaily-dressed muleteer in charge-and the same bright-turbaned, statelystepping negresses, with heavy burdens poised on their heads” (1871, pp. 20-21). The reader may well wonder if Miss Woodruff, “the most harmless and insignificant little woman in the world!,” as she introduces herself, had ever ventured into that part of the world then known as “the Orient” in her travels, or whether the striking orientalism that meets her at every turn in Havana is but a rather conventional writer’s strategy to make sense out of Havana’s foreignness, its otherness, the disharmony between her familiar surroundings in the Hudson Valley and a region that had come to epitomize the exotic. Having placed Havana closer to her experience by equating it with a land more often read about-that of the Arabian Nights as she constantly reminds us-the comparison will permeate her description of the city, becoming the metaphoric translator of exotic and foreign reality onto familiar discourse. On seeing the volantes, a sort of barouche that was the most common mode of transportation in Havana at the time, she will wish that one could be transported to Central Park, where she was sure this conveyance of “barbaric splendor” would create “a greater sensation” than “Cleopatra’s chariot, with the beautiful Egyptian Queen therein” (p. 27). Cleopatra, we can safely assume, she had never met.
