ABSTRACT
It is two different journeys to Latin America by women travellers of the nineteenth century, made by Flora Tristán to Peru and María Graham to Chile, which form the basis of one of the most important but curiously often overlooked interventions into the topic of travel writing and gender to date, in Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.1 Pratt positions those two European women in counterpoint to their male contemporaries, the so-called capitalist vanguard, who fl ocked to the region following the dissemination in Europe of the work of Alexander von Humboldt. Less interested in nature than their precursor, these travellers adopted what Pratt identifi es as an anti-aesthetic stance and a modernizing, pragmatic, and economistic rhetoric, which relied upon “a goal-directed, linear emplotment of conquest narrative”.2 By contrast, women travellers of the same period followed a distinct narratological and thematic agenda, plotting their travel narratives rather in “centripetal fashion around places of residence”. Notwithstanding, social and political life were central foci of their accounts, which also showed evidence of strong ethnographic interest. Contrary to stereotype, therefore, Pratt contends, “the political dramas of Spanish America show up far more fully in the writing of these women travellers than in those of either the capitalist vanguard or the disciples of Humboldt.” The so-called exploratrices sociales thus fused the political and the personal in the accounts of their quests in Latin America, which were not journeys of transformation or dominance of the societies they visited as much as explorations of self-realisation and “fantasies of social harmony.”3
