Artifice and Excess: Travel Narratives and the Representation of Women in Portugal and Brazil

Abstract

This article analyses the images of Brazilian and Portuguese women in the reports of English travelers who visited Portugal and Brazil in the final years of the 18th century and early decades of the 19th century. We seek to investigate the way in which a moral register based on bourgeois values influenced these travelers’ views and interfered in their descriptions of the Luso- Brazilian universe. The connection they made between the ‘civilized’ European world and the regions which were peripheral to the processes of bourgeois capitalism generally involved a double movement of confrontation and negotiation between culturally distinct values and worldviews. Thus, their travel narratives reveal a space of constant negotiation of feelings and perceptions about themselves and the natives.