Gender, Science, and Authority in Women’s Travel Writing

Reviewed by: Gender, Science, and Authority in Women’s Travel Writing: Literary Perspectives on the Discourse of Natural History by Michelle Medeiros Rosario De Swanson Medeiros, Michelle. Gender, Science, and Authority in Women’s Travel Writing: Literary Perspectives on the Discourse of Natural History. Lexington, 2019. Pp. 213. ISBN 978-1-49857-975-9. Building on Mary Louise Pratt’s ground breaking work on travel writing, and on recent studies on women travelers by Nina Gerassi Navarro and Adriana Méndez Rodenas among others, Michelle Medeiros’s Gender, Science, and Authority in Women’s Travel Writing: Literary Perspectives on the Discourse of Natural History is a thickly layered study of authority, gender, and the discourse of natural history in travel narratives penned by women in the nineteenth century. The book examines the writings of four women: the British botanist Maria Graham, the Cuban-Spanish author Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, the Brazilian writer and educator Nísia Floresta, and the American naturalist Doris Cochran. The core of Medeiros’s argument is that, given that in the nineteenth-century scientific knowledge was strictly under male control, travel allowed these women to circumvent the restrictions imposed on them by their gender, and ultimately participate and even contribute to the production of knowledge. However, although Medeiros acknowledges that these four women travelers used their race and class status to assert their authority as imperialist subjects, these factors did not in and of themselves constitute the basis of their authority. Instead, she contends, their authority was owed to the establishment of a transatlantic subjectivity; which she defines as a discursive position, a complex set of negotiations performed within the written page. Transatlantic subjectivity is achieved through the fulfillment of two seemingly contradictory conditions: mobility and presence, both necessary to convey the idea of inhabiting two worlds at once. Here, mobility is understood in a geographical sense but also as a discursive practice, as the set of strategies these women travelers deployed to uphold, circumvent, and challenge gender limitations and assumptions. Furthermore, as previous travel narratives were written by male authors, they engaged with the tropes employed by their famous predecessors, only to subvert and challenge them, often feminizing the masculine models, creating a space for themselves as travel narrators and as producers of knowledge. The connections women travelers made in person and through their writings is an important factor in the ways in which gender impacts the social production of knowledge. Chapter 1 examines the British botanist Maria Graham’s travel diaries and some unpublished manuscripts pertaining to her voyages to Brazil between 1821 and 1823. By positioning herself as an imperialist subject, she established herself as superior vis-à-vis the Brazilian other. However, this maneuver is only a means to transcend gender in order to penetrate the masculine world of natural history given her scientific aspirations. Medeiros shows how Graham skillfully used female genres to discuss scientific topics related to the Brazilian world. And yet, though she was able to publish some of her findings, Scripture Herbal (1835), her contributions to the field of botany, were not properly acknowledged. Chapter 2 focuses on the Cuban writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s travel narratives and on her periodical Álbum cubano de lo bueno y lo bello (1860). Through a comparative analysis of two of her trips, one to Europe and a later trip to Spain and France, and the descriptions of the European landscape she employs in her magazine, the author finds that Avellaneda returns the European gaze that Cuba and Latin America often received from European travelers. In this way, Gómez de Avellaneda positioned herself as a writer in both Europe and Latin America, a position of power only possible due to the authority she derived as a transatlantic subject. The European travel narratives by Brazilian educator and writer Nísia Floresta are the subject of chapter 3. Floresta, like Avellaneda, also traveled to Europe, but as Floresta was an educator, her travel narratives become the means whereby she proposes an educational model for girls. Floresta modeled her travels and narrative in the tradition of the Grand European Tour popularized primarily by male travelers. However, she counters the masculine armature of

Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Epistemology · Humanities · Literary criticism · Literature · Narrative · Natural (archaeology) · Naturalism · Sociology · Travel writing · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Gender Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine · History of Science and Natural History · Philosophy