ABSTRACT
Helen Maria Williams’s transatlantic epic poem Peru (1784, 1786) depicts the Peruvian landscape as a venous human body. She incorporates the human body as a metaphor for landscape to articulate human bodies and geographic territories as objects of commerce in a transatlantic contest of empires. Douglas Porteous’s term bodyscape conveys the reflexive conflation of human bodies and landscapes to reflect simultaneously the idea of conquest of both people and territory. This metaphor describes an idyllic yet violent relationship between humanity and landscape. This relationship is idyllic in both the Romantic sense of the sublime and Edenic sense of Milton’s Paradise Lost in addition to the sensually provocative feminization of the landscape that harkens back to Donne’s America in his elegy, “To His Mistress Going to Bed.” The bleeding land evokes the violence of Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas. From European and Native American literary edges to the blade edges that lead to this bleeding, these edges of transatlantic commerce intersect with eighteenth-century revolutions: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution. The Potosí silver mine, originally part of Peru, was instrumental in transatlantic commerce and the conflation of human bodies and contested territories.
