Journal of a Residence in Chile During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823

In the preface to her Journal’s original 1824 edition, Maria Graham expressed a vision of Chile’s future. “There is so much good in that country, so much in the character of the people and the excellence of the soil and climate, that there can be no doubt of the ultimate success of their endeavours.” Just a year earlier, however, an uprising overthrew “supreme director” Bernardo O’Higgins and sharply divided the country. Distressed by this event, she fervently hoped that her journal might “contribute directly or indirectly . . . to smooth those difficulties.”Maria Graham would never have guessed of Chile’s fate 180 years later, nor the enduring value of her own acute observations. This new publication of Graham’s Journal—with its landscapes, Santiago tertulias, and political proclamations—offers this work to a new generation. We are indebted to editor Jennifer Hayward, who includes her own assessment of Graham’s work, two reviews from 1824, and a useful index. Hayward chose to delete six long appendixes and (recognizing the dated nature of Graham’s “Sketch of the History of Chile”) reversed the original order, placing the diary first and the historical sketch second.As an English professor, Jennifer Hayward brings a new perspective to the study of Graham’s diary. She is less interested in the work’s historical content than in Graham’s role in the development of female writers. Hayward compares her to Mary Wollstone-craft and Charlotte Brontë as she discusses Graham’s challenge in creating a narrative persona. Hayward observes that when Graham discusses economics and politics, she uses a masculine narrative persona, but when she discusses personalities and living spaces, she uses a female one. It is this latter persona, which describes human relations and daily life, that gives lasting value to her work. Whereas four contemporary British males’ travel narratives of Chile are no longer in print, Hayward remarks, Graham’s narrative keeps being reissued.In addition to the feminine characteristics that define Graham, Hayward also emphasizes her nationalism and class status. In a nod to postcolonial theorists, Hayward states that “travel narratives became increasingly relevant as colonization became central to British nationalist and industrial ambitions” (p. 291). From this theoretical perspective, Graham’s legacy is similar to that of the British merchants who established prominent commercial houses in Valparaiso. To document Graham’s upper-class bias, Hayward points to the author’s statements about the superiority of English morals over “Spanish corruption and Chilean primitiveness.”In this deconstruction of Maria Graham and her work, Hayward does not evaluate the author’s contribution to Chilean history. She fails to recognize Graham’s unique insights about Chile’s transition from colony to nation. For social historians, Graham’s sketches are like the images of a documentary filmmaker. Her education, as well as her values, shape her observations. Her interpretations of prominent figures such as José Miguel Carrera, Bernardo O’Higgins, José de San Martín, and Lord Cochrane influence historians today. Though Graham is an upper-class British woman, her class, nationality, and gender do not delimit her work. Chileans find her generous, discriminating portraits credible and authentic. They have never erected a statue to her, but perhaps they should consider doing so. Not only did she record their country’s past, but she helped shape its future

Art · Art history · Craft · Excellence · Humanities · Literature · Narrative · Order (exchange) · Persona · Political science · Politics · Portrait · Residence · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · Classics · Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America · Demography · History · Law

• The Childhood Shows the Man”

  Open Access•Karen Racine•The Americas A Quarterly Review…•2015

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