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Crossing boundaries into a world of scientific discoveries: Maria Graham in nineteenth-century Brazil

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13645145.2012.702957

1755-7550

Michelle Medeiros,

Australian Indigenous Culture and History

Abstract In this article I analyse the British traveller Maria Graham (1785–1842) and her lesser-known travels to Brazil in the early nineteenth century. I argue that Graham attempted to cross boundaries into the masculine world of natural history with the help of a social network composed of several important figures in Brazilian society, including the Empress Maria Leopoldina, who shared her interest in the natural sciences. Graham constructed that network by taking advantage of the fact that in South America her British citizenship allowed her to overcome many of the limitations imposed on her in Europe because of her gender. Graham then created a feminised form of scientific discourse that allowed her to pursue her scientific endeavours without fearing retaliation from the then exclusively male scientific community. This hybrid narrative reveals that Graham's relationships in the Brazilian contact zone took on different levels of complexity as she tried to gain acceptance from the scientists around her. Keywords: Maria Grahamtravel writingcontact zonescientific discoursenatural history Acknowledgements I would like to thank the anonymous referees for their comments, which have been valuable in improving this essay. I would also like to thank Marcia Stephenson for her assistance and contribution in the preparation of this article. Notes 1. This passage describes Maria Graham's visit to the Brazilian Botanical Garden. On this occasion, she was accompanied by Colonel Cunningham, acting British consul-general, and his wife; Mr Hayne, one of the members of the slave trade commission, and his sister Miss Hayne; and by her midshipman, John Langford, who accompanied her on several of her journeys and expeditions. Maria Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil and Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (New York: Praeger, 1969), 160. 2. For more on Alexander von Humboldt, see the special issue on Alexander von Humboldt and America of Studies in Travel Writing 15, no. 1 (2011). 3. Many critics agree that the construction of knowledge propelled by the sciences and travel in the nineteenth century was intimately linked to imperialism and power relations. Mary Louise Pratt argues that science motivated travels to the interior of continents, and at the same time, such travels also led to the development of sciences such as botany, anthropology, and sociology. For Nancy Leys Stepan, what she calls a ‘Passion for the tropics’ came about mainly from the political opportunity of extending European domination; the knowledge produced was more a reflection of what the travellers wanted to see than of what they actually found. The role played by natural history in this context was decisive, as it was a way to impose European authority and knowledge over the ‘ignorance’ of the native people. Therefore, natural history was used as both a pretext and an incentive by travellers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 15–52; Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 33–4. 4. Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3. 5. For example, see Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); ‘Gender and Natural History’, in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 163–7; Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993); The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 6. As Betty Hagglund observes, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, letters and diaries were not considered ‘low-status’ or ‘private’ genres and were widely used not only by women but also by men. Betty Hagglund, Tourists and Travellers: Women's Non-fictional Writing about Scotland, 1770–1830 (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2010), 5–6. 7. Rosamund Brunel Gotch, Maria, Lady Callcott: The Creator of ‘Little Arthur’ (London: John Murray, 1937), 59. 8. Gotch, Lady Callcott, 93. 9. In fact, the material was never published by Graham. However, part of her writings and letters was acquired by the National Library of Rio de Janeiro in 1938. The material was compiled and translated by Américo Jacobina and published in 1940. The volume is entitled Correspondência entre Maria Graham e a Imperatriz Dona Leopoldina e Cartas Anexas and presents the correspondence between Graham and the Brazilian Empress Maria Leopoldina, some additional letters, and also a short biography of Dom Pedro written by Graham. In 2011 Jennifer Hayward and Maria Soledad Caballero published a new edition of Maria Graham's journal in which they included the entire manuscript ‘Life of D. Pedro’ among other archival findings. Jennifer Hayward and Maria Soledad Caballero, Maria Graham's Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (Anderson: Parlor Press, 2011). 10. Gotch, Lady Callcott, 296. 11. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 6. 12. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7. 13. Humboldt himself never made an expedition to Brazil. 14. Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 51. 15. Although Mills writes about women travellers at the end of the century in a more general sense, I believe her model is useful, when employed with caution, to discuss Graham's strategies in elaborating her own ‘discourse of difference’. Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991), 44. 16. Ruth Watts, Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History (London: Routledge, 2007), 75. 17. Although Graham's nationality was her main tool to overcome her gender limitations, Jennifer Hayward observes that she essentially tried to portray herself as a person who was beyond gender using many techniques. In addition to her nationality, Graham also used her class or age for that purpose, although she never explicitly spoke of herself as masculine (as Mary Kingsley did). Jennifer Hayward, ‘No Unity of Design: Competing Discourses in Graham's Journal of a Residence in Chile’, in Journal of a Residence in Chile During the Year 1822, and a Voyage to Brazil en 1823, by Maria Graham (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 301. 18. Ángela Pérez-Mejia, A Geography of Hard Times: Narratives about Travel to South America, 1780–1849, trans. Dick Cluster (New York: University of New York Press), 78. 19. Graham, Brazil, 147. 20. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 169. 21. Graham, Brazil, 181. Prince and Princess refer to D. Pedro I and D. Maria Leopoldina before the independence of Brazil. 22. Graham, Brazil, 184. 23. Evidently, Graham established a very strong network in Brazil. This network that she carefully built and maintained in the contact zone was fundamental for her to achieve the status of a professional traveller. Waldemar Valente observes that the social networks established by Graham in the Portuguese court in Rio de Janeiro were made up of important people. Among others, he lists: the Empress Maria Leopoldina, the Andrada brothers (José Bonifácio, Martin Francisco, and Antônio Carlos). Among the distinguished families cited by Valente are: the family of Viscount of Rio Seco, the family of Madam Lisboa, wife of the counsellor José Antônio Lisboa, and the family of the Viscount of Cachoeira. Among the English families is the family of the British consul Henry Chamberlain. Additionally, Graham maintained a strong friendship with the Baron of Mareschal, Rear Admiral Grivel (chief of the French station in Brazil), and with the consul of the United States. Waldemar Valente, Antecipação De Pernambuco No Movimento Da Independência (Recife: MEC, 1974), 103. 24. Graham, Brazil, 248. 25. Maria Margaret Lopes, O Brasil Descobre a Pesquisa Científica: Os Museus E as Ciências Naturais No Século XIX (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1997), 41. My translation. 26. Lopes, Museus, 41. 27. Maria Leopoldina to Graham, October 10, 1824, in ‘Life of D. Pedro’ (Manuscript), 111, Archives of the National Library of Rio de Janeiro. 28. Pratt uses the term ‘social exploratresses’ (exploratrices sociales), coined by Hoock-Demarle, to refer to women travellers who were interested mostly in the social and political aspects of the places they visited. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 160. 29. For another approach which also challenges Pratt's perspective of Graham as a social explorer, see Adriana Méndez Rodenas, ‘Mapping the Unknown: European Women Travelers in Humboldt's New World’, Interdisciplinary Conference, ‘Alexander von Humboldt: From the Americas to the Cosmos’, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, 2004, 175. 30. Graham, Brazil, 274. 31. Graham, Brazil, 283. 32. An engenho was a sugar cane plantation common especially in the northeast of Brazil until the nineteenth century. The mills where slave labour was used to transform sugar cane into sugar were deemed engenhos. 33. Graham, Brazil, 276. 34. Graham, Brazil, 276. 35. Maria Graham, ‘Letters to Hooker’, 1824, Directors’ Correspondence XLIII, f.49, f.79 & f.80, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. By kind permission of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 36. Although Leopoldina's interest in natural history was amateur, her personal correspondence reveals that she collected plants, animals, and objects. In several of her letters, she mentioned the Brazilian fauna and flora, and sent specimens to her family members and the Austrian Natural History Cabinet. She also mentioned the fact that she had killed and mounted the animals herself. Graham's friendship with Leopoldina facilitated her expeditions around the country and was instrumental for Graham to remain in Brazil alone after she left the royal palace. At that time, she collected many botanical specimens for Sir William Hooker. In a letter written on March 1, 1825, for example, the Empress mentioned that she sent Graham money from her own assets when she learned Graham was in need. D. Maria Leopoldina, Cartas de uma Imperatriz, ed. Bettina Kann and Patrícia Souza Lima (São Paulo: Editora Estação Liberdade, 2006), 320, 341, 436. 37. In the Archives of the Imperial Museum in Petropolis, Brazil, an unpublished letter from Graham addressed to the Brazilian Emperor D. Pedro I exposes her intentions about the education of the Princess. Graham to D. Pedro I, October 7, 1824, Imperial Museum of Petropolis, Rio de Janeiro. 38. Baron of Mareschal to D. Pedro I, ‘Carta tratando da chegada de Maria Graham que será preceptora da princesa Maria da Glória’, September 18, 1824, National Library of Rio de Janeiro. My translation. 39. Londa Schiebinger, ‘Creating Sustainable Science’, in The Gender and Science Reader, ed. Muriel Lederman and Ingrid Bartsch (New York: Routledge, 2000), 468. 40. Lila Marz Harper discusses the professionalisation of science and the strategies women had to employ as changes took place. She analyses the travel narratives of four women travellers from 1790 to 1890 (Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Isabella Bird Bishop, and Mary Kingsley). Harper emphasises the importance of bringing travel narratives to light in order to uncover women's scientific discoveries: ‘the travel narratives served as means by which women could gain a foothold in a traditionally masculine-dominated field, even as that field became increasingly more restrictive’. Lila Marz Harper, Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women's Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation (Madison, WI: Rosemont Publishing, 2001), 14. 41. Harper, Solitary Travelers, 16. 42. Indeed, Fulford, Lee and Kitson contend that between 1768 and 1833, although science was largely an amateur practice, due to social restrictions, it was performed only by ‘men (and not women) of science’. Bodies of Knowledge, 5. 43. Michael Dettelbach, ‘Humboldtian Science’, in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 288. 44. Méndez Rodenas, ‘Mapping the Unknown’, 176. 45. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 111. 46. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 5. 47. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 119. 48. Graham, Brazil, 84. 49. Alexander von Humboldt, Researches Concerning the Institutions & Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America: With Descriptions and Views of Some of the Most Striking Scenes in the Cordilleras, trans. Helen Maria Williams (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, J. Murray & H. Colburn, 1814), 209. 50. This is not to say that Graham's criticism of Humboldt's observations was gendered, but instead it emphasises the fact that she was attempting to engage in a scientific debate, even if it was not using the standard venues for that purpose. 51. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 163. 52. Graham, Brazil, 88–9. 53. Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799–1804, trans. Thomasina Ross (London: H. G. Bohn, 1852), 240. 54. Regina Akel, Maria Graham: A Literary Biography (New York: Cambria Press, 2009), 98. 55. Aubert du Petit-Thouars (1758–1831) was a prominent French botanist of the nineteenth century. 56. Aubert du Petit-Thouars, Mélanges De Botanique et De Voyage (Paris: A. Bertrand, 1811). 57. Graham, ‘Life of. D. Pedro’, 1835, 186–7, Archives of the National Library of Rio de Janeiro. 58. Hayward, ‘No Unity of Design’, 301. 59. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (London: Yale University Press, 2000), 73. 60. Mary Orr, ‘Pursuing Proper Protocol: Sarah Bowdich's Purview of the Sciences of Exploration’, Victorian Studies 49, no. 2 (2007): 277–85. 61. Marina Benjamin, ‘Elbow Room: Women Writers on Science, 1790–1840’, in Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Enquiry, 1780–1945 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 43. 62. Fulford, Lee and Kitson, Bodies of Knowledge, 2. 63. Fulford, Lee and Kitson, Bodies of Knowledge, 2. 64. Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823, ed. Jennifer Hayward (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 153. 65. As Carl Thompson, Betty Hagglund and Esme Coulbert observe in their excellent Maria Graham project at Nottingham Trent University, http://www.ntu.ac.uk/hum/centres/english/the_maria_graham_project.html (accessed June 12, 2012). 66. Maria Graham, ‘An Account of Some Effects of the Late Earthquakes in Chili’, Transactions of the Geological Society, Second Series 1 (1824): 413–15. 67. Thompson, Hagglund and Coulbert, Maria Graham Project. 68. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology: Being an Inquiry How Far the Former Changes of the Earth Surface are Referable to Causes Now in Operation (London: John Murray, 1835), 178. 69. Martina Kölbl-Ebert, ‘Observing Orogeny – Maria Graham's Account of the Earthquake in Chile in 1822’, Episodes 22, no. 1 (1999): 36. 70. The discussion continued for several years and it was only when later papers noted that Graham's reports had been confirmed by male witnesses of the earthquake that her work was accepted as accurate. See Kölbl-Ebert for further details. 71. Dea Birkett, Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2004), 82. 72. Birkett, Off the Beaten Track, 82. 73. Ann B. Shteir, ‘Botany in the Breakfast Room: Women and Early Nineteenth-Century British Plant Study’, in Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789–1979, ed. Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 31–43. 74. Maria Graham, Scripture Herbal (London: Longman,1842), v. 75. Graham, Scripture Herbal, ix. 76. Graham, Scripture Herbal, v. 77. Graham, Scripture Herbal, ix. 78. Graham, Scripture Herbal, 484. 79. Graham, Scripture Herbal, 64. 80. Graham, Scripture Herbal, vii. 81. Shteir, Cultivating, 192. 82. Shteir, Cultivating, 193. 83. Londa Schiebinger, ‘Gender and Natural History’, in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 170. 84. Jennifer Bennett, Lilies of the Hearth: The Historical Relationship between Women & Plants (Ontario: Camden House, 1991), 113. 85. Betty Hagglund, ‘The Botanical Writings of Maria Graham’, Journal of Literature and Science 4, no. 1 (2011): 51. 86. Graham to Hooker, April 11, 1824, f.20, Directors' Correspondence XLIII, f.49, f.79 & f.80, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. By kind permission of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 87. Birkett, Off the Beaten Track, 81. 88. William Jackson Hooker, Botanical Miscellany: Containing Figures and Descriptions of Such Plants as Recommend Themselves by Their Novelty, Rarity, or History, or by the Uses to Which They Are Applied in the Arts, in Medicine, and in Domestic Economy; Together with Occasional Botanical Notices and Information (London: John Murray, 1830), 129. 89. Birkett, Off the Beaten Track, 80. 90. Graham to Hooker, 11 April 1824, f.20, Directors’ Correspondence. By kind permission of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 91. Flora brasiliensis was produced between 1840 and 1906 by the editors Riedrich Philipp von Martius, August Wilhelm Eichler and Ignatz Urban with the help of 65 experts from several countries. It contains taxonomic descriptions of 22,767 species, mostly Brazilian angiosperms, totalling 15 volumes, divided into 40 parts, in total 10,367 pages, http://florabrasiliensis.cria.org.br (accessed June 12, 2012). 92. Rodolfo Garcia, Introduction to Correspondência entre Maria Graham e a Imperatriz Dona Leopoldina e Cartas Anexas by Maria Graham (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1940), 21. 93. Ariane Luna Peixoto and Tarciso de Souza Filgueiras, ‘Maria Graham: anotações sobre a flora do Brasil’, Acta Botânica Brasilica 22, no. 4 (2008): 992–8. 94. Thomas G. Lammers, ‘Phylogeny, Biogeography, and Systematics of the Wahlenbergia fernandeziana Complex’, Systematic Botany 21, no. 3 (1996): 397–415. It is important to observe that Graham's specimen was recognised as the lectotype only in 1996 thanks to Lammer's research. 95. Schiebinger, ‘Creating Sustainable Science’, 475–6. 96. Tim Youngs, ‘Introduction’, Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century: Filling the Blank Spaces, ed. Tim Youngs (London: Anthem Press, 2006), 10. 97. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 50.