Abstract
This essay undertakes the analysis of a nineteenth-century woman traveller's book on Mexico. Fanny Calderón de La Barca and her husband, the Spanish Ambassador to Mexico, spent two years living there. The resulting narrative was published in 1843 as Life in Mexico and was endorsed by the historian William H. Prescott. This article analyses the question of gender and travel in this particular case study, focusing on the representation of romance and conquest in Calderón's book. The analysis situates the narrative in terms of the author's biography and the literary history of travel writing on Latin America and it reveals one of the central ambiguities of Calderón's text: on the one hand her critique of patriarchy, on the other, her apparent collusion with colonial discourses and mythologising of the Conquest. Her ethnological construction of Mexican society and her nostalgia for the figure of the outside ‘Conqueror’ prefigure the US ideology of manifest destiny that would bring about the US invasion of Mexico only a few years later.
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