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Modeling Modern Man:
American Self-Fashioning in Nineteenth-Century Travel Literature
Jennifer Lambe
The genre of the travel narrative has always represented, with varying degrees of explicitness, a self-reflexive exercise, the (re-)constitution of the Self through its contact with the Other. In the context of the nineteenth century, this conventional wisdom was in its most significant stages of development and articulation, as British and U.S. neocolonialism sparked the movement of a horde of scientifically-minded travelers throughout Latin America, Africa, and other “backwards” areas of the world. Armed with a firm conviction in the values of order, progress, scientific discovery, republicanism, and Protestantism (and occasionally abolitionism), they ideologically confirmed these cultural mainstays through contact with their antipodes: disorder, backwardness, blind religious faith, monarchism, and Catholicism. Thomas Ewbank’s Life in Brazil; or, A journal of a visit to the land of the cocoa and the palm operates within this paradigm. In this text, Ewbank elevates his own values against the backdrop of Brazilian backwardness, constructing himself and the United States through his critique of Brazilian Catholicism and monarchism. Temporally, the Self/Other duality established in his travelogue positions Brazil as the Western civilization’s past, and presents the U.S. as a lofty model for Brazil’s future development. The result is an enhanced U.S. self-understanding through contact with difference and a simultaneous effort to annihilate that difference, perceived as potentially damaging to U.S. interests.
Ewbank’s ideological standpoint derives, to a large degree, from his specific work and experience, in addition to the larger context of nineteenth-century U.S. industrialization and neocolonialism. Trained in the sciences and deeply involved in the development of new technologies, Ewbank was even noted in his day for a widely-read book on hydraulics penned in 1842. Shortly after publishing the account of his travels in Brazil, Ewbank was “honored,” as he deemed it, by a federal appointment to the Commission of Patents; apparently, he even wrote an account of his tenure in the Commission. This spirit of and enthusiasm for scientific development — and the ideology which accompanied it in North America — pervade his observations on his travel in Brazil, especially his explanation of the obstacles to progress in Brazil and other Latin American countries.
He lays out these obstacles in contrast to the United States from the beginning of the text. He starts by addressing the situation of Oregon (and the debate around its founding in the 1840s) and the “evils” that had at various times “polluted” North America, including “monarchy…, hereditary rulers, primogeniture, tithes, and a state priesthood” (17). These “evils,” of course, are some of the same impediments to progress that he identifies in Brazil. Monarchy, with its stultifying effect on intellectual advancement and national development, figures centrally in his account of Brazil’s problems. His description of popular excitement over the birth of a princess, Doña Isabel Christina Leopoldina Augusta Michaela Gabriela Rapaela Gonsago, captures his distaste for the irrational adulation attached to the institution of the monarchy. He praises those “enlightened spirits in Brazil” who “scorn the practice” of hundreds who rush off to “leave salutations” for the infant (406). The monarchy’s repressive influence is also evident in the prayer- book he receives at the British Chapel, “one of those issued ‘by authority,’ polluted with royal mandates, enjoining upon its owner what he is to believe and whom he is to pray for” (392). The thrust of his critique here is centered on the ways in which the monarchy precludes civic engagement and free thinking. Ewbank’s discomfort with the monarchy clearly stems, more than anything, from the limitations it places on rational discourse and critical engagement.
Nevertheless, the institution that Ewbank most faults for Brazil’s general backwardness is the Catholic Church. He notes in his Preface that, in Brazil, “religion, or that which is so called, meets you every where; you can do nothing, observe nothing, without being confronted by it in one shape or another” (vi). The very pervasiveness of the institution (“Romanism”), especially among the “masses,” constitutes, as Ewbank quite explicitly states:
…a barrier to progress, compared to which other obstacles are small…incorporated as it is with the habits and thoughts of the people; transfused, as it were, through their very bones and marrow, unless some Kempis or Fénélon, Luther or Ronge, arise to purify it, generations must pass before the scales drop from their eyes, and they become mentally free. (viii-ix)
He highlights this link between Catholicism and backwardness again in his condemnation of Catholic “idolatry” (“the physical worship of gods and dead men by means of images and their accessories,” 391). Deeming idolatry “out of character with the present times,” he deplores the entrenched ignorance and backwardness which it implies, against which the “communion of the North American Indians with the Great Spirit appears more consistent and refined” (391).
The reference to the North American Indians is, in fact, quite in line with Ewbank’s overall characterization of Catholicism and, therefore, the Brazilian nation as backwards and primitive. He considers the “Romanism” of the Brazilian people to be “almost as purely heathen as before the advent of Christ,” a “living and luminous exponent of pagan and ceremonies” (vii). This trope of primitivism and classicism (i.e. alignment with the Romans and other pre-Christian peoples) is deployed constantly throughout his narrative, ushered in to characterize primarily religious festivals. He aligns these celebrations with the “pomps of Isis and Cybele…festivals celebrated in honor of the gods and goddesses of Egypt, Assyria, Asia Minor, Carthage, Greece, and Old Rome” or, in the interesting, Orientalizing case of the Intrudo, with the “Hohlee of Hindostan” (viii, 102). So prevalent is this association between Catholic and “primitive” religious festivals, celebrations, and practices that it becomes almost unremarkable in the text.
Ewbank also utilizes a classicist-primitivist lens while in Rio de Janeiro in his gaze upon a group of lavandeiras (washing women), African (slave-)women who, in his romanticizing view, become “bevies of African nymphs” (74). Identified with figures from classical mythology (Alcinous and her maids), the lavandeiras are divorced from the context of their (forced?) labor and reconstituted as objects of Ewbank’s reproachful, yet lustful gaze:
…there are a half dozen negroes in that pool in petticoats alone, and those distressingly curtailed. Except one, who has thrown a towel over her shoulders, the whole group is nude above the waist…As we passed on, variations in the scene occurred that spoiled the poetry of the picture. Of natural or acquired delicacy these Rio washerwomen exhibit none. Their manners, more than their garments, want purifying. (74-5, my italics).
Ewbank’s ambivalence at this moment is quite telling. He is simultaneously attracted to the “poetry,” as he deems it, of the classical resonances of the lavandeiras, their labor, and their nudity, yet repulsed by their lack of delicacy and manners, offensive to his bourgeois, Western, and “progressive” sensibilities. This ambivalence toward the “past” of humanity which the washerwomen and Brazil as a whole represent for him encapsulates the prevailing paradox in the relationship of the Westerner to the Other — an attraction to the difference which corresponds (ideologically, if not actually) to the Westerner’s “past,” and a discomfort with the implications and proximity of this primitivism to the progress-oriented Westerner of the nineteenth century.
Of course, this classical/primitive scene is the past that lurks behind the progressive surface of Ewbank’s United States. Though unwilling to entirely confront the reality of these antecedents and influences, Ewbank demonstrates their omnipresence in subtle, indirect ways. For example, his praise of Houden’s statue of Washington, “in citizen’s dress, and a walking- cane in his hand — a perfect picture in marble of a Virginian gentleman of the eighteenth century,” manifests this anxiety over the potential past primitivism of the United States through its contrast with another Washington statue, a “half nude Roman figure at Washington” (19). This statue, unlike Houden’s gentlemanly, clothed citizen-Washington, does not convey the “correct idea of the Father of his Country” to “posterity” (19). That is, it does not adequately construct the past to provide comfort and ease of mind in the present.
Ewbank evinces his uneasiness over other elements of his — read, Western civilization’s (especially the United States’) — past when he suggests that the “South American superstitions were once common, and that their rejection by our ancestors is of no remote date” (vii). If Ewbank channels some of his anxiety over the specter of primitivism through the dangerous and sexualized (yet classically delineated) bodies of the Afro-Brazilian lavandeiras, he primarily manifests it throughout the narrative (and in this particular moment) through the “Romanish,” understood as Catholic but constructed as pagan and classical, antecedents of his own culture. That such “South American superstitions” once polluted the minds of Ewbank’s predecessors suggests that they could come to do so again. Therefore, he must build epistemological and textual barriers to the acknowledgment and re-infiltration of “Romanist” tendencies in his modern nation.
Ewbank accomplishes this through the emphasis he places on the necessity of Brazilian — and worldwide — progress, thereby deflecting the potential of American regression. He introduces the topos of human progress at the very beginning of the Preface with his depiction of man’s “metamorphosis” from his beginnings as an “aspiring insect” through the acquisition of flight (v). Specifically aligned with this human progress is the technological progress that a scientifically-minded gentleman like Ewbank clearly associates with general development; he is impossibly, yet interestingly, clairvoyant in describing this human process as an “age of locomotion, and the prelude to one of flight” (v). Brazil, for this particular American, constitutes a “region of butterflies and flowers,” a common but telling epithet that corresponds both to the generic conventions of the travel narrative and to the metaphor he has laid out of human progress as a metamorphosis from a larval state (vi). The bright future awaiting Brazil depends, of course, on its throwing off the shackles of Catholicism, monarchism, and intellectual (tropical) backwardness.
The true motion of the narrative, however, lies in the exposition of Ewbank’s own position in Brazil’s development — and, on a larger scale, the role of the United States and other “modern” nations in facilitating progress in the rest of the world. There is no doubt that Ewbank’s impulse to “cast off for a season the instincts of home” correspond to a common epistemological scheme in the nineteenth-century Western world (vi). This paradigm emphasized the construction of Self through contact with the Other (as explicated by Nancy Armstrong in Fiction in the Age of Photography) and the notion that the United States and Western Europe would and ought to transmit progress to the “uncivilized” world. Ewbank presents this belief in an aside about the beneficial effects of young Brazilian men studying in Europe and the United States. He suggests that these men’s “increased intercourse with foreigners” constitutes “the means ordained by Divine Providence for human improvement” (436, my italics — this presumed sanctification of Western man’s travel through the “uncivilized” world is a constant theme in the narrative). Of course, this contact with foreigners implies the interaction between a less “civilized” and a more “civilized” nation. The underlying belief is that “civilization” is something that can be transferred from one nation to another — the progressive, liberal, secular (Protestant), scientific, republican values thereby supplanting entrenched backwardness, conservatism, Catholicism, dogmatism, and monarchism in Brazil.
Less important for Ewbank, however, are the perceived benefits of contact with the United States for Brazil than its implied consequences for him, the traveler. Ewbank is most vehement in denouncing the restriction of his own mobility (he experienced some bureaucratic difficulty in acquiring a passport) because of the “barbarism that in the Old World prevents man from traversing the earth and communing with his species at his pleasure” (19). This so-called “communion” corresponds to the nineteenth-century Western desire to know, and especially to see, all places and peoples, with a view to expanding one’s worldview and therefore augmenting one’s self-understanding. Ewbank returns to the theme of divinely-sanctioned travel in his passionate tribute to the desire for world knowledge:
The ostensibly warm human feeling that moves Ewbank to travel in Brazil — and his
suspicious insistence on his respect for human diversity — mask a less than benevolent and open-
minded program for Brazilian progress along the United States model. It would be unfair to
suggest that Ewbank himself does not in fact believe in this human communion which he extols
(and the abolitionism which he manifests) in his text. Ideology is by no means simply a tool
instrumentalized by all citizens of the United States for domination, as its effectiveness lies in its
ability to convince parties on both sides of the continental divide. Nevertheless, textually and
historically, the rhetoric of human communion and contact is inseparable in the nineteenth
century from neocolonial efforts to export American technology, businesses, and values to Latin
America, and the eagerness of some Latin American elites to absorb these North American
“gifts.” Ewbank’s exploration of Brazilian “difference” in the context of his narrative thus
constitutes an effort to both construct a “progressive” American self-understanding through the
contrast with Brazilian backwardness and, simultaneously and paradoxically, to take steps to
dissolve this very difference, experienced as a psychological, political, and economic threat to
United States interests.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
Dobyns, Kenneth. The Patent Office Pony: A History of the Early Patent Office. Washington,
D.C.: Sergeant Kirkland's, 1994. http://www.myoutbox.net/popstart.htm (accessed 22 October 2005)
Ewbank, Thomas. Life in Brazil; or, A journal of a visit to the land of the cocoa and the palm. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856.