Views on Europe

Gender Historical and Postcolonial Perspectives on Journeys

Lilli Riettiens, Elke Kleinau

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110735529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The history of travel has long been constructed and described almost exclusively as a history of "European", male mobility, without, however, explicitly making the gender and whiteness of the travellers a topic. The anthology takes this as an occasion to focus on journeys to Europe that gave "non-Europeans" the opportunity to glance at "Europe" and to draw a picture of it by themselves.

So far, little attention has been paid to the questions with which attributes these travellers endowed "Europe" and its people, which similarities and differences they observed and which idea(s) of "Europe" they produced. The focus is once again on "Europe", but not as the starting point for conquests or journeys. From a postcolonial and gender historical view, the anthology's contributions rather juxtapose (self-)representations of "Europe" with perspectives that move in a field of tension between agreement, contradiction and oscillation.

The Inverted Mirror: Brazilian Hybridity and European Picturesqueness in Nísia Floresta’s Travel Writing

Meritxell Simon-Martin

Brussels, 26^th August 1856

Dear child and brothers of my heart,

The month of August, which you know is so fatal to my happiness by the triple loss¹ it has marked in my life, began for me this year sadder and more painful than ever.

With a heavy heart, my mind still crushed by the heart-breaking memory of the death of the best mother, I saw approaching the first anniversary of the day that removed her from my affection.

You thought Paris would exercise its ordinary magic on me: well! I saw the city again with indifference, and it became monotonous and almost unbearable to me as this sad anniversary drew near. […]

I had to travel to new countries, to draw new impressions from a wider horizon, in a freer atmosphere, and hence more in line with my tastes. I had to see, in the end, a typical land [Germany] whose serious and grave aspect impressed my mind by the richness of its nature, its grandiose past and the still patriarchal customs of its people.²

In August 1856, Brazilian-born Nísia Floresta embarked on a trip to Germany with her 26-year-old daughter, Lívia – her lifelong travel companion and translator of some of her works. Departing from Paris, where they had moved in from Rio de Janeiro almost a year before, together they travelled for a month across Brussels, Liège, Spa, Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, Bonn, Koblenz, Mainz, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Baden-Baden, Mulhouse and Strasbourg, among other small towns and villages. Floresta justified her need to travel in terms of emotional well-being: the first anniversary of the death of her mother was approaching and she sought for a change of scene.

Nísia Floresta – pseudonym of Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto (1810 – 1885) – led indeed a rather itinerant life.³ Born into a comfortably-off family, her father was a Portuguese lawyer, her mother a Brazilian land-owner, most probably of European origin. Floresta spent the first years of her childhood in the family fazenda in Rio Grande do Norte but, due to her father’s Portuguese origin and political sympathies, she moved in to different places in Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Sul and Rio de Janeiro during and after the anti-Lusitanian revolts in the north east, which killed her father and eventually led to the independence of the country in 1822.

As a child, Floresta received an European-style bourgeois education and was married to a wealthy landowner at the age of 13. Fleeing from an abusive marriage, she returned to her family, then living in Olinda.⁴ There she met law-student Manoel Augusto de Faria Rocha, with whom she had two children (Lívia and Augusto Américo) and moved to Porto Alegre. It is at this time Floresta published her first writings: press articles on the condition of women in the journal Espelho das Brasileiras (“The mirror of Brazilian women”) in 1831 and her first book-length publication Direito das mulheres e injustiça dos homens (“Women’s rights and men’s injustice”; 1832), which has earned her the title of the first feminist in Brazilian history for publishing a commented “free translation” of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).⁵ Although, as we will see, her “feminism” was framed within a very traditional understanding of the female “nature” and its corresponding gender roles.

Losing her companion at the age of 23, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she funded and ran a pioneering school for girls: Colégio Augusto. In her school she projected the sort of western canonical literary, philosophical and scientific knowledge she was acquainted with and the values she encapsulated in the didactic-moralist works she published at that time: Conselhos à minha filha (“Advice to my daughter”; 1842), Daciz ou a jovem completa (“Daciz or the young complete girl; 1847), Fanny ou o modelo das donzelas (“Fanny or the model of maidens”; 1847) and Discurso que às suas educandas dirigiu Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta (“Speech that Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta addressed to her students”; 1847).

In line with the educational travels bourgeois young men (and some women too) undertook at that time, Floresta widened her westernised formation during the three years she spent in France, Portugal and England in the company of her two children (1849 – 1852). This first European experience was underpinned by renewed liberal, positivist and hygienist discourses she reflected upon and incorporated into her thinking in her educational treatise for girls Opúsculo humanitário, published back in Rio in 1853. Leaving her son in Brazil, three years later Floresta embarked on her second European voyage, which included the above-mentioned trip across Belgium and Germany as well as long stays in France, Italy and Greece. Her second European residence would last until her death in Rouen in 1885, visiting her home country only once (1872 – 1875).

During her second European residence, Floresta would write accounts of her encounter with the “Old World” in two travel-writing publications: Itinéraire d’un voyage en Allemagne (“Itinerary of a trip to Germany”, Itinéraire hereafter; 1857) and Trois ans en Italie suivis d’un voyage en Grèce (“Three years in Italy, followed by a trip to Greece”, Trois ans hereafter; Vol. I 1864–Vol. II 1872).⁶ Written in the form of epistolary diaries addressed to her family in Brazil, she penned them in French, a language she was fluent in already since her young adulthood in Brazil. In her travel writing Floresta recorded, drawing on Romantic tropes, the minutiae of her travelling, the impressions that the monuments, castles, cemeteries and ruins evoked in her, the glorious historical events associated to canonical sites and the topos-like longing for relatives and her homeland they conjured up in her – as the opening quote illustrates.

These two travel writing works stand for Floresta’s making sense of her international and intercultural encounters in European soil. As such, they convey her self-projection as a Brazilian female traveller as well as her representation of the Other – which here takes the form of European picturesqueness and a concomitant redefined understanding of her own home country. Seeking to tease out her transnational transfer of knowledge, in this article I unpack this twofold construction – of identity and alterity – with a view to assessing the dialogue Floresta managed to engage in between Brazilian and European ideas about people, culture and nature. To do so, I examine her travel writing through the lens of postcolonial hybridity theory which, from an inverted perspective, permits studying how her travelling at the intersection of two continents was translated into a two-sided construction: her hybrid cultural identity and her understanding of the Other – here European picturesqueness and exoticised Brazil.

A Hybrid Cultural Identity

In her travel writing Nísia Floresta articulated a hybrid cultura...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Views on Europe. Gender Historical and Postcolonial Perspectives on Journeys
• Fictional and Real Travellers from Asia in Enlightenment Europe: Describing European Habits and Culture
• Suat Derviş, Journalist, Novelist and Feminist: Texts Written in Germany and Texts about Germany
• “This Demolished Church was Equally the Face of Contemporary Europe” – Configurations and Representations of Twentieth Century Europe by Three Indian Travellers
• The Empire Writes Back. Views on Europe from Hispanic America in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century
• The Inverted Mirror: Brazilian Hybridity and European Picturesqueness in Nísia Floresta’s Travel Writing
• The Minister, the Bride and the School Girl: English Canadians in Europe, 1860s – 1880s
• Family Album and Failure in Louise Bryant’s and Martha Gellhorn’s Travel Accounts in Russia
• Beyond Geography: Europe as a Journey in Dumitru Tsepeneag’s Hotel Europa
• List of authors