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I am grateful to the British Academy and to the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths College, University of London, for funding that enabled me to travel to LASA, and to the following people for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper: Juan Daneri, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Andrea Noble and Jennifer Valko. In addition, I thank David Henn for drawing my attention to the special edition of the Quarterly Review and Samantha Matthews for her guidance on the Victorian period.
Notes
1. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, in Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. from the German and ed. James Strachey, vol. 21, London: Hogarth Press, 1961, pp. 152–7 (156).
2. In her introduction to a recent edition of Maria Graham's Journal of a Residence in Chile, Jennifer Hayward identifies Elizabeth Eastlake as the writer of this review in the Quarterly Review (Graham Citation2003).
3. Inglis met her husband in the United States, after her emigration to that country with her mother and sisters, following the bankruptcy and death of her father in France.
4. In this essay I will be referring to the traveller primarily as Calderón, although in respect of the young woman before her marriage—which seems to me such a crucial context in which to read her Life in Mexico—I shall refer to her as Inglis.
5. This was a series of pronunciamientos in Guadalajara, Ciudadela and Perote, which came to be known the Triangular Revolt (see Fowler 1998:26).
6. In turn, he successfully persuaded another friend, the English author Charles Dickens, to recommend the volume to London publishers Chapman and Hall, who printed the first British edition of the work in 1843 (Little and Brown had published an American edition the previous year).
7. The work received ‘brilliant reviews on both sides of the Atlantic’ and Prescott was subsequently awarded honorary degrees and other marks of distinction in recognition of his achievement, despite some reservations in Mexico about the factual accuracy of his work (Costeloe 1991).
8. Calderón's critical description of national affairs went down badly with the Mexican press and with Spaniards living in the former colony: the press claimed that she had betrayed the generous hospitality she and her husband had been shown during their stay (Rodenas Citation1998:55). The publication of the work even provoked a diplomatic row between Mexico and France (Costeloe 1991:344). Costeloe attributes the reception of both Prescott's and Calderón's books in part to anti-imperialist sentiment in the newly independent Mexico, for despite the favourable reviews of Prescott's history there were, as mentioned in the previous note, doubts raised about its own ‘authenticity’.
9. Miguel Cabañas writes in a recent article: ‘Calderón's text . . . creates a web of knowledge about Mexican (and Spanish American) politics, history and ethnography which can be identified as an “archive” of the knowledge the United States needed to act economically, politically and, later on, militarily with respect to Mexico’ (Cabañas Citation2005:4).
10. Inglis's Scottishness also needs to be taken into account here for it locates her in a position of ‘inside foreignness’ with respect to British identity.
11. As Sara Mills has illustrated in Discourses of Difference, it is possible to be marginalized on account of one's gender while remaining privileged in terms of race, ethnicity and class (Mills 1991). Taking my cue from Mills, I would argue that, in the case of Calderón, scholars have failed to take into account precisely the question of her gender and have overlooked the fact that, as Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan put it, ‘the travelling subject . . . is irreducibly complex: that it is situated firmly but subtly within the race-class-gender nexus; that it shapes, but is also shaped by, wider social, historical, and ideological forces’ (Holland and Huggan Citation2000:132).
12. Calderón herself best clears up the difference noted earlier between the interpretations of Eastlake and Costeloe, at one point in the text, observing: ‘Another bullfight last evening! It is like pulque—one makes wry faces at it at first, and then begins to like it’ (Calderón de la Barca 1982:170). And much later, just before she leaves Mexico, the following: ‘I find, personally, one important change in taste if not in opinion. Vera Cruz cookery which two years ago I thought detestable, now appears to me delicious! What excellent fish! And what incomparable frijoles! Well, this is a trifle, but after all, in trifles as in matters of moment, how necessary for a traveller to compare his judgments at different periods, and to correct them! First impressions are of great importance, if given only as such; but if laid down as decided opinions, how apt they are to be erroneous! It is like judging of individuals by their physiognomy and manners, without having had time to study their character. We all do so more or less, but how frequently we find ourselves deceived!’ (534).
13. See note 10.
14. Cabañas claims that evidence of ‘her change of heart’ in respect of a different example cited in his article ‘affirm[s] her credibility as a travel writer’ (Cabañas 2005:6).
15. Indeed, Calderón is no fan of the cockfight but does inform us instead of the ‘ladies of [the] party [who] wore dresses and bonnets as simple, fresh, and elegant as could be seen in any part of the world’ (Calderón de la Barca 1982:386).
16. Other scholars, such as Marjorie Garber (Citation1992), Peter Stallybrass (1998) and Tim Youngs (Citation1999), have all pointed out how commodities—among them clothes—can throw into relief anxieties about the self and cultural identity.
17. The injunction against her wearing the coveted poblana dress—which, as I have illustrated, recurs with compulsive repetition in her account in different guises—would forcibly remind Calderón of her exclusion, her status as outsider. Calderón's obsession with those particular dresses thus also becomes a symptom of her anxiety to be like the women who don them, women who act freely and naturally, something that she cannot do. Thanks to Eva-Lynn Jagoe for this observation.
18. Though born in Scotland, Inglis never settled there. She emigrated to Normandy after the bankruptcy of her father, and then to the United States soon after his death. The Inglis women opened a ladies’ academy in Boston that was forced to close after a scandal involving a pamphlet written by Inglis. The family then moved to Staten Island where she met Angel Calderón de la Barca in 1835. They were married in 1838 and left Washington, D.C. the following summer for Mexico.
19. Michie writes that ‘if marriage redefined the borders of the female body to include husband and children, it only made more impermeable the boundaries between home and the outside world’ (Michie 1999:420).
20. When Marx fell on hard times, he would pawn his overcoat, for which reason (among others), Stallybrass claims, he would not then visit the British Museum in order to undertake research for Das Capital. It is in that book, however, that Marx wrote about a coat as commodity, ‘as the abstract “cell-form” of capitalism’ (Stallybrass 1998:187).