“The Finest Production of the Finest Country upon Earth”: Gender and Nationality in the Writings of Nineteenth-century British Women Travelers to Portugal

Abstract

ABSTRACTNineteenth-century British women were influenced by culturally constructed perceptions of their gender limitations that nonetheless allowed them to maintain a sense of relative superiority to people their nation saw as “other.” This essay focuses on a selection of narratives of nineteenth-century British women travelers to Portugal, situating them within the period’s prevailing discourses of gender and nationalism. It argues that in these texts, the representation of Portugal as inferior to England is complicated by the authors’ analogously inferior gender position within their culture, for while Portugal was one of the southern countries constructed as “inferior” by a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Eurocentric discourses, it was also Britain’s closest ally and still an empire. Analogously, while the position of British lady travel writers was constructed as “superior” by discourses of nationality, it was concomitantly constructed as “inferior” within their culture by the prevalent discourses of gender. The writers’ unacknowledged recognition of this shared double subjectivity permeates these narratives, signaling the precariousness of the binary they sought to sustain.