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And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he had not had and will never have.” —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities IN 1839, IN THE CENTRAL PLAZA of the city of Arequipa in southern Peru, Don Pío Tristán set fire to a pile of recently arrived books. They were copies of Les Pérégrinations d’une paria: 1833–1834.1 Don Pío, the paternal uncle of Flora Tristán (1803–1844), was publicly rejecting the image of his family and country presented in his niece’s account of her travels during 1833 and 1834. This episode is rarely mentioned,2 but we may suppose it is true—not only because all of Flora Tristán’s life was equally incendiary, but also because the text does contain an impassioned criticism of the Tristáns, rich creole landlords, and of Peru, which had barely consolidated its existence as an independent country in the midst of tangled civil wars.3 The book is also a valiant indictment of women’s oppression by way of autobiographical confessions which inflamed not only Pío Tristán but others involved in the narrated intrigues. Les Pérégrinations d’une paria: 1833–1834, far from being a casual chronicle of travel observations, is a highly premeditated text with a particular function. In this text, the account of a visited country is almost a pretext for the construction of an exemplary autobiographical subject within a context of political activism. The author precedes her travel narrative with three prologues that attempt to explain her motives and acquit herself in the eyes of the Peruvians, from an ambiguous position which I will discuss below. The text quite evidently has the reader in mind, to a nearly obsessive degree. This 103 chapter four Tristán, or The Incendiary Geography of a Pilgrim Pariah is not the intimate diary of a woman writing to while away long hours of traveling . Rather, it is a meticulous account seeking to tell a convincing story in which the struggles of the autobiographical subject may appear to be the only point. The writer, a feminist and an active socialist, has been completely possessed by the character she has made out of herself. As Silvina Bullrich puts it, “If I were to invent a Flora Tristán, not a single reader would believe she were real. But she did exist, and the novelists of her time did portray women like her” (9). Les Pérégrinations d’une paria: 1833–1834, in spite of being an account of Peru, is the text in which Flora Tristán presents her life and her romantic tragedy. She returns from Peru a “pariah” because she went there in search of family that would recognize her as the legitimate daughter of her late father Mariano Tristán, and she did not succeed. She went there in search of a fortune she never obtained, but instead she learned, among other things, to journey, and journeying became for her a way of life and of literature. Given the complexity of this text, a reading of its subjectivity is risky to say the least. This is a book that deliberately uses autobiography as medium of social criticism, but it also opens with those three prologues, which guide the reader into a way of seeing the speaker who is addressing them. Modern editions of Pérégrinations tend to omit the prologues, but from a literary critic’s point of view, these meta-texts are essential.4 They are essential for any reader who is seeking, more than news from Peru, to understand the situation of the journey and the text. Taking the prologues as a point of departure, I propose to read the voyage to Peru to see how Tristán becomes a “pariah,” how she converts a voyage into a “pilgrimage,” and how the geographic, political, and human realities of Peru are present in this transformation. Flora Tristán’s voyage to Peru offered her the necessary distance from her native Paris to observe her own situation as a woman without material resources in France. The dissection of a social structure other than her own, where she did not find the economic status she expected, gave her the opportunity to take a critical stance toward her own society. Declaring herself a “pariah” became a strategy for expressing her radical political position in defense of women...

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