L I M I N A
A Sublime Journey to the Barren Plains: Lady
Florence Dixie’s Across Patagonia (1880)
Fernanda Penaloza
Lady Florence Dixie’s Across Patagonia (1880) is the only full account of a
British woman’s journey to the Patagonian region. This paper is an analysis
of the ways in which Florence Dixie uses the landscape as a testing ground
for exploring herself. By doing so, she explicitly exposes the possibilities of
Patagonia as a scenario for the enjoyer of the sublime. Even though Dixie’s
contribution to the tradition of travel writing in Patagonia remains almost
invisible, Across Patagonia sets the basis for a way of contemplating and
experiencing the landscape that continued to be important in later writings
on the region. This marginal travelogue enables the exploration of travel
from a female perspective, raises questions of aesthetics and gender, and sees
how the journey inscribes itself on colonial discourse within the specificities
of the Argentine historical and cultural context.
The landscape, peoples and history of Patagonia entered European
imaginations as early as 1520 with Antonio Pigafetta’s chronicle
of Ferdinand Magellan’s global circumnavigation. From then on,
various accounts from conquerors, adventurers, settlers, exiles,
outlaws, and all kinds of real and imaginary visitors conspired
to transform Patagonia’s never-ending barren plains into an
enigmatic topography. Particularly in the nineteenth century, the
language of aesthetic landscape articulated in the narratives of the
European travellers intensified Patagonia’s metaphoric dimensions.
These travelogues of Patagonia1 combined hopes of discovery,
speculative commercial forays, ethnographic inquisitiveness,
scientific discoveries and missionary dreams with the wish to
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satisfy the public’s curiosity about the ‘unknown’. The experience
of travelling as well as the tradition of publishing accounts of the
journey to Patagonia was in the nineteenth century an almost
entirely male enterprise. These narratives have textualised the
region’s landscape, framing issues of power, knowledge and gender
within Europe’s cultural, political and territorial expansion into the
‘unknown’. Thus, Patagonia’s topographies are an assemblage of
conventionally masculinised tales of heroic travellers attempting to
conquer the uninviting landscape of Patagonia. The barren plains,
the desert and the Cordillera all seem so easily to convey masculine
metaphors of power. However, the hyper-masculine and sublime
scenery of the Patagonian landscape depicted in the male narratives
has a female counterpart in the work by British novelist, poet and
travel writer Lady Florence Dixie.
Across Patagonia2, written by Dixie in 1880, is the only published
book-length account of a nineteenth-century European woman’s
journey to the region.3 Dixie’s travelogue can be enjoyed as did her
contemporary readers: ‘I have done little except … sit by the fire
reading the travels of adventurous ladies’, wrote the Duke of Somerset in a letter to a friend, referring to ‘Lady Florence Dixie, who
nearly starved in Patagonia.’4 Another look at Dixie’s exploration of
her identity invites a more challenging and critical interpretation.
My main argument is that Dixie explicitly exposes the possibilities
of Patagonia as a locus for the enjoyment of the sublime. In her
engagement with the landscape, Dixie meditates on a path of selfexploration which exerts consequences for the formation of identity.
What connects the narrative strategies that Dixie deploys in her text
with the tradition she simultaneously subscribes to and rejects from
within, is her engagement with aesthetics. I use Elizabeth Bohls'
definition of aesthetics: a set of discourses dealing with the categories
and concepts of art, beauty, sublimity, taste and judgement.5
Although Dixie does not deal with aesthetics directly, in her
contemplation of the Patagonian landscape aesthetic categories such
as beauty and taste apply. Most importantly, the aestheticised drive
of Dixie’s narrative revolves around the sublime. The sublime is a
canonical and imaginative construct with its own trajectory and
conventions. Primarily, its force resides in the subject’s diverse
responses to that which arises at the very limits of representation.
The theory of the sublime not only describes the subject’s encounters with excess but – as Dixie’s experience in Patagonia shows – it
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also defines the ways in which excess may impact on the subject’s
own sense of self. Edmund Burke argued, ‘greatness of dimension,
is a powerful cause of the sublime’.6 So is infinity, because it ‘has
a tendency to fill the mind with a sort of delightful horror, which
is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime’.7 It is difficult not to see parallels between the Burkean perspective of the
sublime and the images of vastness and limitlessness that emerge
from Dixie’s experience travelling in Patagonia.
Nature in this narrative appears magnificently vast and incommensurable; it exerts its force on the traveller’s sensibility. The sublime makes its incursions into the traveller’s awareness of his or her
role as contemplator, one that is overpowered by the grandiosity of
landscape. Yet according to Dixie’s narrative, she depicts her identity
emerging enhanced as a result of overcoming such an unsettling
experience. Thus, nature itself is transformed into a self-affirmative experience, signalling the influence of the sublime in creating
Patagonia as a territory of powerful aesthetic quests.
Dixie’s largely neglected text dramatises an aesthetic experience
which expanded the possibilities of seeing the Patagonian landscape
as a suitable setting for the awe-inspiring effect of the sublime. Her
experience of the sublime is an unrecognised contribution to the
auto-reflexive contemplation of the Patagonian landscape which
later authors, particularly William Henry Hudson, reshaped in
their narratives on Patagonia. The aesthetic standards of the time
provided Dixie with categories that shaped her contemplative experience and which transformed the Patagonian geography into a
bleak yet fascinating landscape. In turn, the evocation of an overpowering nature obscured the historical and cultural grounds of the
appropriative power of colonial discourse. Aided by her aesthetic
sensibility, Dixie turns Patagonia into an empty space, devoid of
‘civilisation’, resulting in a narrative without historical reference to
the political or economic context of her journey. In this sense, this
travelogue is central to the articulation of aesthetics and gender in
the age of imperialism.
Dixie visited Patagonia in 1879 only two months after giving birth
to her second child at the age of 21. For six months, Dixie travelled
from Punta Arenas (Chile) to Río Coyle (Argentina) with her husband, her two brothers8, a servant, and Julius Beerbohm. Beerbohm
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was an engineer whose book Wanderings in Patagonia had just been
published when they started the journey9; he was hired by Dixie
to serve as the party’s lead guide. Although her travelogue on Patagonia and her books on South Africa10 are her most well-known
works, Florence Dixie started her prolific writing career at the age
of ten, when her first book of poetry was published. According to
Brian Roberts, Dixie’s experience in South Africa turned her imperialist fervour into passionate liberalism.11 As field correspondent
reporting from South Africa for London’s Morning Post, Dixie wrote
favourably about Cetshwayo, the exiled Zulu king, and became a
supporter of his cause. Her controversial position as defender of Cetshwayo’s ambitions for reinstating his rule inaugurated a trajectory
of committed political activism. She advocated equality between the
sexes; among her causes were parliamentary reforms of divorce law,
primogeniture in royal succession and birth control. Even though
she was a good shot and enjoyed her game hunting experience in
Patagonia, later in life she turned against such activities and became
a wildlife protectionist. Around twenty books are published in her
name, including plays, poems, essays, and novels12, which taken
together reflect her strong views on the oppression of women.
Across Patagonia has not attracted very much critical attention.
Some passages have been included in travel writing compilations,
with a brief introduction reproducing in some way the heroic portrait of female autonomy Dixie depicts in her text.13 An exception is
Monica Szurmuk’s Women in Argentina: Early Travel Narratives. The
author rightly observes that by the time Dixie was visiting Patagonia,
General Julio Argentino Roca was carrying out his Campaign of the
Desert.14 This military mission opened land access to Patagonia and
protected the estancias by means of killing and imprisoning a large
number of the indigenous population.15 According to Szurmuk,
Dixie’s failure to mention Roca’s campaign results in ‘romanticised descriptions of Indian life’ whose importance she dismisses
because they ‘do nothing else than grant [Dixie] a space from which
to narrate her own self’.16 In the nineteenth century the European
model of civilisation that considered native Latin American peoples racially inferior was widely accepted in Argentina and Chile.
The élite Creoles cannot be considered colonial subjects since they
were a privileged group benefiting from European values. However,
lacking protection from the Argentine and Chilean governments,
the indigenous peoples of Patagonia were exposed to all the con84
Fernanda Penaloza
sequences of colonial rule: appropriation of material resources, exploitation of labour, and interference with their political, cultural
and social structures.
Regarding the historical realities that Dixie manages to avoid, it is
important to outline the relationship between Argentina and Great
Britain. British explorations in the area were linked with trade, missionary expeditions, and the establishment of sheep farming. Two
major colonial issues were the large settlement of Welsh immigrants,
and the conflict over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands (Islas
Malvinas). In the early nineteenth century, Britain experienced a
sharp decline in overseas trade owing to the Napoleonic system
closing European markets to British goods. As a result, mercantile
and financial interests in London viewed Buenos Aires as the next
most suitable port for their commercial endeavours. It could serve
as a trade base, complete with an extensive, prosperous hinterland.
Britain attempted to take over Buenos Aires in 1806 and 1807 and
although unsuccessful, both landings left enough Britons behind
to start vast and profitable commercial enterprises. By the 1820s,
the considerable British capital investment began to yield fruit. In
the second half of the nineteenth century, British interests were
mainly in the railway system, banking, meat and land companies,
and estates. Alongside trading and investment came immigration
and British institutions – from sport clubs to schools – that became
widespread in Argentina. Though relatively few in number, their
privileged position in the Argentine society turned the British into
one of the most influential groups of immigrants in the country.
Particularly in Patagonia, their role was pivotal, as most of the estancieros were British settlers who developed a strong sheep-farming
industry that remained the backbone of the regional economy for
many years. It is within this British commercial network that we
need to situate Dixie’s text, and therefore to consider Patagonia as
a quasi-colonial setting.17
Accompanied by an aristocratic party and her illustrator, and
despite the warnings of friends who, according to her book, exclaimed, ‘PATAGONIA! Who would ever think of going to such
a place? Why, you will be eaten up by cannibals!’18 Lady Florence
Dixie sailed from Liverpool on the ‘Britannia’ on 11 December 1878.
Unlike most women travellers of this period, Dixie did not venture
to Africa or India; her destination was off the beaten track for nineteenth-century British women travellers. After leaving Liverpool, the
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Britannia followed a much-frequented route, making the traditional
stops (Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo) before anchoring
on the Patagonian coast. After making her way through a ‘crowd
of negroes, who jabbered and grinned and gesticulated like so
many monkeys’, saving her life from a snake ‘whose bite is almost
instantaneously fatal’, nearly missing the ship due to ‘Brazilian
coachmanship’, and enjoying scenery of ‘unsurpassed loveliness’,
Florence Dixie headed for Punta Arenas (Sandy Point) in southern
Chile. Before reaching the port that served as a strategic gateway
for nineteenth-century travellers, the Britannia crossed the Magellan
Straits. Dixie’s account echoes that of her predecessor, Ferdinand
Magellan, and like the Portuguese explorer who arrived there in
1520, the first European woman traveller to publish her journey to
Patagonia never set foot on Tierra del Fuego. Seen at a distance from
the Straits of Magellan, the shore of the ‘Land of Fire’ fills Dixie’s
text with one of the earliest myths of the Patagonian landscape:
All along the beach, carried there by the sea from the
opposite side, I noticed great quantities of the cooked
shells of crayfish, the remains of many a Fuegian-Indian
meal. The Tierra del Fuego itself was distinctly visible
opposite, and at different points we could see tall
columns of smoke rising up into the still air, denoting
the presence of native encampments, just as Magellan
had seen them four hundred years before, giving to the
island, on that account, the name it still bears.19
Dixie reiterates the myth of the uninviting and feared territory
that inspired visions of hell in the sixteenth century. The southernmost tip of Patagonia was thought to be ‘an Anti-Earth, a place
where everything was upside down, back to the front and inside
out’.20 As Joy Logan remarked, Patagonia ‘is a land locked into the
fiction of its existence’.21 It is as if the ‘reality’ of Patagonia can only
be understood by travellers through a process of fictionalisation.
The map that guides the scientist, the adventurer or the missionary is a web of intertextual references. Furthermore, Logan states
that ‘this mixture of reality, textual glosses, and prefigured images
[informs] us more about the authors themselves and their opinion
of the world than about Patagonian reality’.22 In common with the
male writers, Patagonia’s ‘reality’ has little to do with Dixie; then
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again, intertextuality has little to do with her experience. In Across
Patagonia intertextuality does occur but it is subtle; so much so that
a reader unfamiliar with the Patagonian travel tradition could easily believe that apart from Magellan, Musters and Lady Florence
Dixie, no one had written about Patagonia before. The male-authored texts published before and after Across Patagonia explore the
possibilities of confirming ‘an intertextual dialogue with the classics
and with other travel-literature of Patagonia’.23 By contrast, Dixie
cannily omits such references, and as a result her journey becomes
a self-exploratory exercise. Thus, she contemplates Patagonia’s overwhelming landscape, obviating the need for any other guidance
except for her aesthetic sensibility. Consequently, her journey has
to do with a highly metaphorical landscape that she tries constantly
to reshape. Dixie portrays herself as a heroine who is tracing a map
for a territory yet to be discovered and written:
Scenes of infinite beauty and grandeur might be lying
hidden in the Silent solitude of the mountains which
bound the barren plains of the Pampas, into whose
mysterious recesses no one as yet had ever ventured.
And I was to be the first to behold them – an egotistical
pleasure, it is true; but the idea had a great charm for
me, as it has had for many others.24
Dixie is conscious of how many other travellers have shared the
same need to satisfy their curiosity; her ‘egotistical pleasure’ had
a ‘great charm’ for her ‘as it has had for many others.’ Szurmuk
suggests that Dixie ‘challenges the conventions’ of the travel writing tradition in Patagonia by not quoting the greatest protagonists
of this tradition.25 I suspect that the articulation of her narrative
in light of the abundant material that precedes her journey is not
achieved solely through the omission of sources. The way in which
she challenges male-authored texts is a more complex discursive
mechanism than simply omitting mention of other existing accounts.
Dixie is clearly afraid of disrupting the ideal, imaginary landscape
of unexplored territories by referring to contemporary travelogues.
Tellingly, she refrains from disturbing such idealism, as if through
chronicling the reality of events, slowly but firmly transforming the
ostensibly pristine wilderness of Patagonia, she is colluding with
the forces of change. The result is a trip which, for example, studi87
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ously avoids travelling alongside the Atlantic Coast. By the time
Dixie reached the region, the Welsh settlers had been established
for 15 years, and some other European immigrants were beginning to transform the landscape and the social organisation of the
indigenous inhabitants. It appears that the journey was planned in
order to match her desire to ‘penetrate into vast wilds, virgin as yet
to the foot of man’.26 This passage flags the interesting usage of a
significantly masculinised language of territorial expansion which
complicates Dixie’s travelogue. The female figure as a metaphor for
the Patagonian territory highlights an example of how the colonising gaze of male accounts made it difficult for women travellers to
insert themselves in the travel writing tradition with a language
of their own. Owing to or despite the fact that her writing comes
from the margins of a long tradition that precedes her, we see the
ambivalence of her narrative voice; images of female emancipation
alongside phallic metaphors.
The resourceful and strong female narrator she constructs is juxtaposed with a tradition she neither reveres nor openly rejects but
which remains unavoidable. Dixie’s journey into the past, into the
very roots of the fascination with the mythical Patagonia, is achieved
by effacing the present. I have already quoted the paragraph where
Dixie says that she has seen the smoky columns, ‘just as Magellan
had seen them four hundred years before’. She implies that Patagonia remains unchanged. Furthermore, even though it has been over
three hundred years since the first circumnavigation of the globe,
Patagonia also remains ‘unwritten’. Here we have the most clear
image of a series of metaphors that constructs a mostly ‘barbaric’,
‘wild’, ‘untouched’, and most importantly, un-textualised Patagonia.
At the beginning of her book, Dixie explains her motivations for
going to Patagonia by saying that ‘palled for the moment with civilisation and its surroundings, I wanted to escape somewhere, where I
might be as far removed from them as possible’.27 Patagonia, a place
she had obviously read about, enables her to construct a narrative
that challenges the Patagonian travel writing tradition, not only
because she is the first European woman to write about a journey
there, or because she refuses to reveal her sources. She challenges
tradition because she does not identify with any of the previous
narratives. Her main concern is with the experience of being away,
of being alone, of exploring herself. No other writer on Patagonia
had ever stated so overtly the reasons for going there (avoiding
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intertextuality) and in so doing articulated a narrative centred on
the possibilities of the landscape as means of self-exploration.
Dixie’s unconventional heroic femininity is to be found in her
quest for the authentic, for the original, for a sense of freedom. Nineteenth-century Englishwomen venturing to destinations under British rule articulated in their writings discursive dynamics of power
inscribed in colonial discourse practices. In other words, as Sara Mills
observed, women travellers enable us to explore ‘the problematic
relation of the texts to colonial discourse’.28 Within the context of
specific colonial relations, the narratives deploy the interactions and
negotiations of the travellers in the discursive space of the colony, or
using Mary Louise Pratt’s term, in the ‘contact zone’.29 In the case of
Patagonia, the space of the colony is evasive. Patagonia is a region
that is marginal to both the traditions of Victorian women’s travel
writing and to the British Empire. Dixie’s exploration is possible
because by articulating her own narrative she produces an aesthetisation of the ‘contact zone’. Her narrative reflects an attempt to bridge
past and present through the language of aesthetics. Otherness and
selfhood, real and imaginary encounters, will be perceived through
a journey of self-discovery via a female aesthetic gaze.
Dixie’s text narrates the journey of a traveller who is apparently
uneasy with the privileges she assumed as a Westerner. In the act
of writing Patagonia, her persona is directly related to the narrative: her travel invites her to think differently, to see anew, and this
awakening to selfhood engages a new understanding of the gender
roles to which she subscribed. Writing her journey is an exploratory
experience in a geographical context which she perceives as being
in some respects personally liberating. Dixie’s perception of the
landscape encapsulates the possibility of reaching the ‘authentic’
with the same sense of wonder – the authentic sense of discovery
– that the first European explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, felt upon his
encounter with the Tehuelche. The value of the authentic discovery
is the one she privileges over any other experience she could gain
from her journey and she becomes the single sightseer of her story.
She refuses to contaminate her search for the authentic with the
enormous amount of information to which she could at that time
have referred. Therefore she did not expect to see what she had been
told it was, but what she thought it was.
Patagonia’s emptiness became the setting for exploiting the possibility of accessing the authentic by means of embracing her own
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‘travellers’ faith’. Thus her narrative is incapable of integrating the
experience of contemplation with the historical and political context
in which the text is produced. In her text she exposes her desire to
aestheticise her exploration, in other words, to place herself as a
subject of contemplation. Freeing Patagonia from its historical and
political contexts, Dixie expands the possibilities of the deeply rooted
metaphor of the unattainable. Thus, whereas most of the story of
the travelling about Patagonia is constructed from a male gaze, her
eyewitness account of the Patagonian landscape is a rarity because
it is one in which women matter. Her narrative illuminates the active role women played in building a new language of aesthetics
when confronting uninviting landscapes. Patagonia is constructed
as a landscape in which boundaries cannot be set, and in which the
traveller’s gaze encounters the sense of repetition, the infinitude:
While we were threading the intricate passage of the
Rist Narrows, which are not more than two miles
broad, I scanned with interest the land I had come
so many thousand miles to see – Patagonia at last!
Desolate and dreary enough it looked, a succession of
bare plateaus, not a tree nor a shrub visible anywhere;
a grey, shadowy country, which seemed hardly of this
world; such a landscape, in fact, as one might expect
to find on reaching some other planet. Much as I had
been astonished by the glow and exuberance of tropical
life at Rio, the impression it had made on my mind
had to yield in intensity to the vague feelings of awe
and wonder produced by the sight of the huge barren
solitudes now before me.30
Edmund Burke defined the sublime as follows:
The passion caused by the great and sublime in
nature, when those causes operate most powerfully,
is Astonishment; and astonishment is the state of the
soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with
some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so
entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain
any other, nor by consequence reason on that object
which employs it.31
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Burke’s definition of the sublime implicitly enters Across Patagonia.
Within Burke’s scheme there is a dichotomy between the beautiful
and the sublime; whereas the sublime enables the aesthetic subject
to experience auto-reflexive and self-absorbed contemplation, the
beautiful implies satisfaction in the contemplation of the object,
thereby inciting sociable emotions. In the Burkean doctrine of
aesthetics there are some elements in the language of landscape
aesthetics which incline the subject to experience the effect of the
sublime, such as Vastness, Infinity and Magnificence. Authenticity,
then, is not comprised in a specific place, legitimating or discrediting previous narratives, nor even in fulfilling the expectations of
meeting the ‘giants’. The search for the authentic resides in Dixie’s
particular view of the landscape as a metaphor of her own selfhood.
The barren terrain of Patagonia is territory of self-reflection for it
echoes Burkean ‘astonishment’. The Patagonian landscape becomes,
in Dixie’s text, a blended, unsettled, borderland promising nothing
but astonishment. These sites of intractable wilderness were often
perceived as remarkably unyielding and indifferent to human enterprise. Dixie reinforces that perception by avoiding any reference to
human efforts to control nature. The particular bareness, potential
harshness and implacability of the weather, desolate plains and
desert were ideal scenarios for mapping her selfhood.
Across Patagonia illustrates how a landscape that seems the very
embodiment of the unattainable provides the opportunity to explore
and articulate what Dixie most values: her awakening to selfhood
and with it, her own understanding of gender roles inscribed in the
deep social transformations of her epoch. The overwhelming experience of the Patagonian landscape invites Dixie to trace her narrative
along with the aesthetic experience of the sublime, a category that a
more inviting landscape would not easily summon. Dixie chooses
the language of aesthetics in her struggle to appropriate the textualised Patagonian landscape, and by doing so expands the possibilities
of self-exploration that her journey involves. When Dixie confronts
the landscape, she positions herself as an observer who, above all,
privileges the challenging effects of an overpowering landscape:
For a long time after complete darkness had fallen
over everything, I stood alone, giving myself up to the
influence of the emotions the scene described awoke
in me, and endeavouring, though vainly, to analyse
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the feeling which the majestic loneliness of Patagonian
scenery always produced in my mind – a feeling which
I can only compare – for it would be impossible for
me to seize on any definite feature of the many vague
sensations which compose it – to those called up by
one of Beethoven’s grand, severe, yet mysteriously
soft sonatas.32
The kind of pleasure she finds in Patagonia can only be compared
to hearing Beethoven’s sonatas. In the text, Beethoven’s music functions as mark of her aristocratic taste, a reference to the ‘civilised’
world to which Dixie belongs. The mechanism underlying her use
of this discursive intervention suggests that the pleasure the experience of the landscape awakes in Dixie is framed by categories and
concepts associated with the privileges of her social class. She may
not identify herself with the perception of the Patagonian landscape
textually constructed by a male viewer, but she values her aristocratic identity which is what has enabled her particular access to and
use of aesthetic discourse. Dixie is reaching the Andes and the scene
before her dramatises the menacing feeling from the magnificence
of the mountains:
There, seemingly not a mile away, rose up, compact
and dark, not the huddled clump of peaks we had
seen two days ago, but a mighty mountain chain,
which lost itself westward in the gathering dusk of
evening – standing like a mysterious barrier between
the strange country we had just crossed and a possibly
still stranger country beyond.33
There is no comfort, no safe feeling in the uninviting landscape
of Patagonia. Perhaps Dixie looks at her social class preferences in
order to seek some protection from the alien scenery that transforms
her into the powerless contemplative subject of Burke. Even though
Beethoven only increases the feeling of isolation, he belongs to her
world, and does not let her senses deceive her completely. In this
sense, Kant’s aesthetic doctrine adds another dimension to the experience of the sublime that helps us to integrate Dixie’s narrative
with her use of the aesthetic discourse. Since the aesthetic estimation
of the sublime is based on a feeling of inhibition of the vital forces,
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the Kantian sublime is, as it is for Burke, opposed to the beautiful.
However in the Kantian sublime this inhibition is only momentary.
In the perceiver’s ability to judge, and in spite of the feeling of physical impotence which arises from the contemplation of the sublime,
the subject immediately experiences superiority over nature. The
judging of the sublime is based on the expansion of the imagination
itself, enabling the subject to discover in the act of contemplation the
ability to resist nature’s apparent omnipotence. That which excites
the sublime can never be as powerful as the reasoning capacity of
the mind:
In the immeasurableness of nature and the incompetence
of our faculty for adopting a standard proportionate to
the aesthetic estimation of the magnitude of its realm,
we found our own limitation. But with this we also
found in our rational faculty another non-sensuous
standard, one which has that infinity itself under it
as unit, and in comparison with which everything in
nature is small.34
The sublime is not what nature displays, but rather a faculty
which resides in the subject when aesthetically estimating an object
in nature that exceeds the imagination’s ability to comprehend it. Yet
this power that surpasses the senses is followed immediately by an
outpouring of a feeling of superiority which reasserts the subject’s
ego. In the following passage we can see how the Patagonian landscape that torments Dixie becomes something distinctly terrifying
and depressing, but at the same time gives means of affirming her
position as a legitimate perceiver:
This day’s ride, and it was a long one, was by far more
monotonous and dreary than any of the preceding
ones. The immense plateau over which we rode for
six or seven hours was remarkable for its gloom and
barrenness, even in a region where all is sterility and
dreariness. There was no sun, and the sky, lowering
and dark, formed a fit counterpart to the plain, which
stretched flatly away to the indistinct horizon, grey,
mournful, and silent. We could not help being affected
by the aspect of the scenery around us, and I do not
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remember ever to have felt anything to equal the
depression of spirits to which I, in common with all
our party, fell a prey, and to whose influence even the
guides succumbed.35
Dixie includes in this description of the landscape her party and
her guides. The implicit use of a collective subject is quite intriguing.
Does her gaze find in the invitation of collective contemplation of
the sublime the protection she finds in her social status? Her own
claim as an aesthetic subject breaks down Burke’s male self-absorbed
subject of contemplation. As a woman she enters the aesthetic tradition from the margins, but being such a strong female narrator she
manages to situate herself as the main subject of contemplation.
Even though the members of her party and the guides are men,
they share with her the same experience of sublimity. She positions
herself in the centre of her narrative, and in seeking to reinforce that
positioning, she interprets the male gaze before the sublime object
through her female gaze.
Projecting her anxieties, Dixie privileged images of emptiness,
vastness and solitude, and in doing so, avoided thematisation of the
complex and violent relationship between the Argentine authorities
and the indigenous peoples. The representation of Patagonia as the
‘unattainable’ is incompatible with the idea of possession. Thus,
Patagonia can be aestheticised but never owned. The construction
of Patagonia as the reification of the unattainable refracts the view
of colonial imperatives in a peculiar manner. At the same moment
that Dixie’s self-exploratory journey turned Patagonia into a territory
where desire of possession could not be realised, the Argentine authorities were accomplishing the effective domination of the natives
to secure white settlement. Whereas in Dixie’s travelogue otherness
is erased by aestheticising the contact zone, in the military action
carried out by the Campaign of the Desert – and the government’s
policies that followed – otherness is removed by the articulation
of the language of territorial expansion which justifies the killing,
imprisonment and displacement of the indigenes. The entrance of
women’s voices in the sublimity of Patagonia embodied by Dixie’s
text reflects how Victorian women shaped an aesthetic gendered
discourse within the intricacy of colonial discursive structures. Inspired by the sublime lyricism she created for herself, Lady Florence
Dixie had dreams of female autonomy in the solitude of Patagonia.
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Fernanda Penaloza
Yet, her acute aesthetic gaze failed to see beyond the barren plains,
where, not very far off, the Indians of Patagonia were being subjected
to the forces of ‘progress’ and ‘civilisation’.
Notes
Among the travel books published during the period are Robert FitzRoy’s account
of the Beagle’s voyages published under the title of Narrative of the surveying voyages
of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836 (1839),
Charles Darwin’s journal The Voyage of H.M.S Beagle which first appeared in 1839
as the third volume of FitzRoy’s travelogue; At Home with the Patagonians (1871) the
adventurous tale of George Chaworth Musters, an officer in the English Royal Navy
who travelled through the interior of Patagonia and lived with the Tehuelche; and
Idle Days in Patagonia (1893) by the Anglo-Argentine writer William Henry Hudson,
a narrative that combines literary style with naturalistic enquiry.
2
Across Patagonia was first published in London in 1880, but there are two other
editions: New York (1881), and Leipzig (1882). Dixie’s book has been translated into
Spanish by Cristina Piña and published by Compañía de Tierras Sud Argentino S.A.
in Buenos Aries, 2000. I will be quoting passages from the first London edition. Lady
Florence Caroline Dixie, Across Patagonia, Bentley & Son, London, 1880.
3
There is only one other book-length account of a female journey to Patagonia that
I have come across so far. It is a travelogue written by Welsh Patagonian writer
and educator Eluned Morgan who was brought up in the Welsh Colony of Chubut.
Morgan travelled from the Atlantic Coast to the Andes in Patagonia in 1899 and
published a book in Welsh about her trip, entitled Dringo’r Andes, Southall & Co.,
Casnewydd-ar-Wysg, 1907. I am currently working on Morgan’s account, which has
been printed and translated into Spanish as Hacia los Andes, tr. Irma Hughes de Jones,
El Regional, Rawson, 1982. Eluned Morgan’s father was one of the first settlers to
arrive in 1865 to the Argentine province of Chubut. She was born aboard a Welsh
ship during her parents’ return to Patagonia after an extended stay in England in
1870. See Virginia Haurie, Mujeres en Tierra de Hombres: Historias reales de la Patagonia
Invisible, Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1998, pp.83-84.
4
Quoted in Brian Roberts, Ladies in the Veld, John Murray, London, 1965, p.80.
5
Elizabeth A. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p.5.
6
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Penguin,
London, 1998, p.114.
7
ibid., p.115.
8
One of Florence Dixie’s brothers was Lord Queensberry, the father of Lord Alfred
‘Bosie’ Douglas.
9
Beerbohm is also the illustrator of Dixie’s book.
10
Lady Florence Dixie, A Defence of Zululand and Its King, Chatto & Windus, London,
1882; see also In the Land of Misfortune, London, Bentley, 1882.
11
Roberts, p.172.
12
Ten years after the publication of Across Patagonia she published her most feminist
novel entitled Gloriana; or the Revolution of 1900, whose main character dresses as
a man and becomes Hector D’Estrange in order to infiltrate the masculine world.
The heroine accomplishes her political aims and becomes Prime Minister, achieving
equality for women.
13
See for example María Sonia Cristoff (ed.), Acento Extranjero: Dieciocho Relatos de
1
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Volume 10, 2004
Viajeros en la Argentina, Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 2000, pp.227-238.
Cristoff’s selection is combined with comments written in a literary style. Another
example, belonging to scholarly production, is June E. Hahner’s excellent selection of
texts on women’s travelogues to nineteenth-century Latin America which mentions
Dixie’s text and includes it in a suggested reading list, see June E. Hahner (ed.), Women
Through Women’s Eyes: Latin American Women in Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts,
SR Books, Wilmington, 1998, pp.xv & 170.
14
In its first stage, April-July 1879, the Campaña del Desierto killed 1313 indigenes,
mostly Mapuche and Ranquel. Another 12 839 from various groups were captured
or transferred to other regions. For detailed figures see Carlos Martínez Sarasola,
Nuestros Paisanos los Indios: Vida, Historia y Destino de las Comunidades Indígenas en la
Argentina. Emecé, Buenos Aires, 1993, p.282.
15
Several indigenous groups were living in Patagonia by the time Dixie was
undertaking her journey. In the North West of Patagonia were the Mapuche, and
in the area between the Limay River (North Patagonia) and the Santa Cruz River
(South Patagonia) were the Northern Tehuelche. In Tierra del Fuego there were the
Southern Tehuelche or Aóni-kénk, the Selk’nam who inhabited the centre of Isla
Grande, and the Yamana and the Alakaluf or Kaweskar, who inhabited the extreme
east of Tierra del Fuego, now Chilean territory. Please note that there are many
conflicting interpretations of the ethnic classification of these indigenes, and this brief
description on the main native groups of Patagonia is a rather simple sketch of the
cultural diversity of the indigenous population back in the nineteenth century. For
the most recent anthropological and archaeological study on the subject see Claudia
Briones & José Luis Lanata (eds), Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives on
the Native Peoples of Pampa, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego to the Nineteenth Century,
Bergin & Garvey, Westport, 2002.
16
Monica Szurmuk, Women in Argentina: Early Travel Narratives, University Press of
Florida, Gainesville, 2000, p.77.
17
For an authoritative historical account of the British-Argentine relations see H.
S. Ferns, Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1960. For a more recent analysis on the same issue but also covering the
Latin American region in relation to British Imperialism, see Andrew GrahamYooll, Imperial Skirmishes. War and Gunboat Diplomacy in Latin America, Signal Books,
Oxford, 2002. In this book, Graham-Yool reminds us that ‘dependence on British
administration … as well as the need for foreign immigrants who would inevitably
keep their loyalties to their old countries … became so substantial that Argentina
was to be seen as a form of a colony. More particularly it was to be seen as part of
the British Empire’, p.115.
18
Dixie, p.1.
19
ibid., p.42.
20
Nick Hazlewood, Savage. Survival, Revenge and the Theory of Evolution, Sceptre,
London, 2000, p.5.
21
Joy Longan, ‘Discovering the “Real”: Travels in Patagonia’, Romance Studies, vol.
21, 1992-93, p.67.
22
ibid., p.69.
23
ibid., p.66.
24
Dixie, p.3.
25
Szurmuk, p.69.
26
Dixie, p.3.
27
ibid., p.2.
28
Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and
Colonialism, Routledge, London, 1991, p.20.
29
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Routledge,
96
Fernanda Penaloza
London, 1992, p.7.
30
Dixie, p.29.
31
Burke, p.101.
32
ibid., p.143.
33
ibid., pp.142-143.
34
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, tr. James Creed Meredith, Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1978, p.111.
35
Dixie, pp.138-139.
97