Patagonia and its People from a Victorian Perspective: a response to Lady Florence Dixie’s Across Patagonia (1881)
By Austin Cole

In 1878, with an urge to be as far removed from “civilization” as possible, Lady Florence Dixie traveled to Patagonia with her husband and two of her brothers. Upon returning to her native England, she wrote a book entitled Across Patagonia about her travels in the Patagonia. Though her log resembles a diary, she wrote it with an audience in mind—an audience mostly composed of curious Victorian-era English men and women who wanted to be astounded by tales of a “primitive” land. Accordingly, Dixie documents her adventures more like a novel than a travelogue with numerous passages in which she simply catalogues the day’s activities or briefly details a monotonous trek. But within these accounts lie sequences of action, portraits of landscapes, and interactions with Patagonians narrated behind a lens of prejudice and elitism. Though certainly not the prototypical late nineteenth century lady, Dixie looks to define Patagonia as the archetypal ‘other,’ and paint an image of a vast, almost mythical land.

This attitude surfaces far before Dixie reaches the Argentine Pampas, for upon her arrival in Rio de Janeiro, she notes the “peculiar ugliness” of the buildings (17). Despite this judgmental assessment of the city’s man-made structures, she marvels at its natural beauty: “nestling amidst oceans of green, [Rio] presents a most pleasing appearance” (16). To further solidify this dichotomy, when leaving Rio de Janeiro she remarks that the only thing capable of matching the coastal town’s incredible beauty and wildlife is its tragic pestilence and filth, which she partly blames not on the tropical climate, but on the ignorance of the locals and government (27-28). This pattern, of appreciating the intrinsic beauty of South American lands while disparaging its people and infrastructure, continues and escalates after Dixie departs from Brazil.

Although Dixie tends to describe Rio de Janeiro in glowingly positive terms, the tone shifts greatly when she first eyes Patagonia. She compares “the glow and exuberance of tropical life at Rio” to the “desolate and dreary….huge barren solitudes” of Patagonia (29). However unenthusiastic her initial descriptions may be, Dixie seems to encourage her audience to visit the Southern Cone, if they are as inclined to “roughing it” as she (34). Though not a ringing endorsement, Dixie’s renditions of Patagonia appear to match perfectly with the escape from her monotonous Victorian homeland that she so desired. In her mind, Patagonia provides the ideal respite from this monotony as the oddity, history, and possibility in the wild expanses of this strange country seem the antithesis of England. One of Dixie’s main goals in writing Across Patagonia is to inform her audience about this far off land, but she also desires to entertain and intrigue those who will never see this place with their own eyes. By casting Patagonia in an almost mythical light, Dixie accomplishes both of her main goals—she intimately describes the “different character” of the land, and simultaneously appeals to her audience’s curiosity by alluding to rumors of cannibalism and cursed forests, disseminating these and other such mythical tales about Patagonia that abound.

To further engage her audience and feed their curiosities, Dixie recalls fascinating encounters with native Patagonians. Staying true to her Victorian notions, Dixie reveals Patagonia’s native peoples as strange and primitive to her eyes, just as she had portrayed the land as a strange, alien locale. Her tone discloses the subhuman class to which she believes they belong. She refers to the first native she sees as “a real Patagonian Indian,” as if he were representative of a rare species of animal being discovered by a biologist (63).

However, upon traveling to the native’s village, a tonal shift in the travelogue occurs. Dixie begins to describe the people in almost scientific terms, even claiming that they are an endangered species. Rather than refer to specific natives, she constantly refers to them as a singularity, and often stereotypes the entire population. Even when she seems to compliment the natives, she subconsciously demeans them: “The Tehuelche…he is all smiles and chatter” (69). Though this is a positive characteristic that she attributes to the Tehuelche people, the manner in and frequency with which she groups them together diminishes their humanity. Even when she notes the mild attractiveness of the Tehuelche men, she does so in a bored tone: “The pure-bred Tehuelche are extremely regular, and by no means unpleasant to look at. The nose is generally aquiline, the mouth well shaped,” (66). This scientific detail of the native people reads more like Darwinian notes than the awe-inspiring accounts that Dixie has provided her audience before. However, she does refer to the Tehuelche men as ‘regular,’ and though this description is casual, it marks one of the few times that she portrays anything in Patagonia as normal or similar to “civilization.” When Dixie does choose to reflect on specific natives or their interactions, it is rarely to praise them. The first Tehuelche man that she meets causes her to hope that he is “an unfavorable specimen of [his race]” (63). Once in the village, she gives an indication of what will be her nod towards feminism by describing the men as “extremely lazy” because they do not go out to hunt every day, while the “indefatigably industrious” women maintain the household (68).

More than any other sections of Dixie’s travels, her contact with the natives display the prejudices and misconceptions that the British had about Latin America and its people, especially its indigenous populations. Not only does Dixie speak in a generally unfavorable tone about the Tehuelche, she also becomes greatly perturbed when a group of them ride up to her camp. Ironically, she describes the native group as trespassing on her and her fellow travelers territory, and believes that they will pilfer her belongings (82-83). Dixie and her compatriots’ imperial attitudes no doubt fostered feelings of self-importance and a justification for the right to be in any land that they pleased. Britain was at this time expanding its already massive Empire, and many travelogues and records of expeditions to Latin America were likely filled with the same entitled sentiments as Dixie’s.

For all its disparaging remarks and elitism, Dixie’s Across Patagonia treats the people and places of South America far more sympathetically than many of her contemporary travelers do in their writings. Near the end of her travelogue, Dixie begins to develop an affinity for Patagonia and even becomes nostalgic on her return trip, as she realizes that she will never see these places again. However, many travelers did not have the same sympathetic feelings about Latin America. Such writers were far more solidified in their imperialist-thinking ways; they saw South America as a backwards region, inhabited by subordinate people. Taking this imperial perspective into account, it becomes easy to see how Europeans throughout the 19th century relegated Latin Americans, especially natives, to nearly subhuman status. Although travelogues like Dixie’s provided outsiders with unique insights into life and culture in post-colonial Latin America and helped to dispel some outlandish rumors, the perspectives aired in these publications resulted in a greatly skewed view of the continent. Such travelogues influenced the public’s understanding as well as European government relations with the newly independent countries of the the former Spanish empire. As Europeans and Americans read about what they considered “uncivilized” people and practices, they saw the neocolonial subjugation of Latin America as justified. Although Dixie helped, in part, to foster respect for the lands and beauty of Latin America, her prejudicial tone certainly promoted the continuation of neocolonial power relations between Europe, and the United States, and Latin America.

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Bibliography:

Anderson, Monica. Women and the Politics of Travel, 1870-1914. (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh           Dickinson, 2006), 122-123.

Dixie, Lady Florence. Across Patagonia. New York: R. Worthington, 1881