0.2 National and imperial power in 19th-century u.s. travel fiction

National and imperial power in 19th-century u.s. travel fiction

Non-fiction travel writing emerged within the U.S. as one of the dominant literary genres of the nineteenth century. Masses of readers consumed these travelogues as proxies for journeys that they did not have the means, or perhaps sometimes even the desire, to make personally. It comes as little surprise, then, that fictional counterparts to travel narratives appeared consistently throughout the century as well. [Please see the module entitled “The Experience of the Foreign in 19th-Century U.S. Travel Literature” for a positioning of these themes within non-fiction travel narratives.] After a brief survey of some of the more significant examples of nineteenth-century U.S. travel fiction, we will turn our attention to the connections between these works and George Dunham’s journal A Journey to Brazil (1853) - located in Rice University's Woodson Research Center as part of the larger ‘Our Americas’ Archive Partnership . What we will discover is that Dunham’s travelogue shares with these novels a serious investment in the evolving nature of national and imperial power in the nineteenth century.

Travel played a key role in several of the female-authored sentimental novels that were so central to the reading habits of American women, including Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Cummins’ El Fureidis (1860). Moreover, some of the century’s foremost canonical authors deployed this trope as the core foundation for their texts, none more so than Herman Melville. Melville drew on his own history traveling the world aboard various commercial ships in order to inform such seminal works as Moby-Dick (1851) and "Billy Budd" (1924, published posthumously). Though not as widely read, Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), anticipates in many ways Melville’s early work, predating those publications by nearly a full decade. As Melville would in novels such as Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and Mardi (1849), Poe displayed a keen interest in the emergent political relationship between the U.S. and the South Pacific as well as the power dynamics that typified life aboard a sailing vessel.

How, then, do we productively read Dunham’s Journey to Brazil alongside these classics of American literature? On a purely schematic level, the outline of the action in Dunham’s travelogue resembles to a great extent that found in the novels of Poe and Melville. The early sections of these works all feature their protagonists on board a ship (named the Montpelier in Journey to Brazil ), embarking on a voyage to a foreign territory. The latter portions, then, chronicle the characters’ adventures in these distant lands – Dunham in Brazil, Arthur Gordon Pym on an island in the South Pacific named Tsalal, and Melville’s protagonists from his “South Seas” novels across a variety of South Pacific islands. More interestingly, perhaps, these works share thematic threads that grow out of their similar content. Like Poe and Melville, Dunham transforms the activity of travel into a meditation on the formation, the execution, and the reach of U.S. national power. The experience of characters with life aboard commercial sailing vehicles as well as with foreign countries and peoples prompts an evaluation of both the U.S.’s own internal national formations and its evolving relationship to other locales across the globe. It is quite often through travel literature that commentators articulated the imperialist ambitions of the nineteenth-century U.S., whether forwarding them as a political agenda to be pursued or critiquing them as an affront to republican principles. As Dunham’s journal further demonstrates, nineteenth-century U.S. travel writing, fictional and non-fictional alike, became a discursive staging ground for the negotiation of numerous national and imperial anxieties.