Reinventing the Peabody Sisters

Against the Cuba Guide: The “Cuba Journal,” Juanita, and Travel Writing

Sophia Peabody’s “Cuba Journal” (1833–35) and Mary Peabody Mann’s Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago (1887) have inspired contemporary scholars to surmise that if the sisters had published these writings in the antebellum period, readers would have responded with acclaim. T. Walter Herbert proposes that had the “Cuba Journal” been published in 1833, “Sophia Peabody would be numbered among the earliest public exponents of transcendentalist spirituality” (51). In response, Patricia M. Ard suggests, “Similarly, if Mary had completed and published Juanita within a decade of returning from Cuba, she would be considered an important voice of protest in the global antislavery debate ” (xv). In both cases, the unnamed reading public would presumably have situated the writings within religious and political currents. In other words, these texts would have reflected on their writers and helped them fashion a public self: transcendental exponent and antislavery voice. But what if we read the “Cuba Journal” and Juanita not as reflecting their respective writers, but as texts that imagine Cuba, the literal and figurative ground of the texts? Certainly, the nineteenth-century United States offered an entire discourse on Cuba that produced knowledge about the island , particularly in relation to the management of political, military, diplomatic , and economic affairs. U.S. periodicals, newspapers, and books portrayed Cuba in contradictory ways, as a tropical and sensual space, a den of slavery and oppression, a haven for invalids, and as a location in the orbit of U.S. geopolitical interests. And it is in relation to this context of Cuba discourse that I read the remarkable writings by Sophia Peabody and Mary Peabody Mann. Against the Cuba Guide The “Cuba Journal,” Juanita, and Travel Writing rodrigo lazo • 180 • rodrigo lazo • 181 The most immediate genre of relevance to the Peabody texts is what I call the “Cuba guide,” a travel book that combines political observation with practical information on travel. Cuba guides offered a gamut of impressions about accommodations, geography, history, politics, and flora and fauna with additional ruminations on slavery, gender conventions, and Catholicism. One of the earliest known examples is Abiel Abbot’s Letters Written in the Interior of Cuba (1829), a 256-page book by a New England minister and self-described invalid who went to the island five years prior to Mary and Sophia Peabody. Julia Ward Howe and William Cullen Bryant are among notable travelers who published colorful letters detailing everyday life and mores in Havana and Cuba’s countryside and then repackaged their work in books.1 Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s To Cuba and Back: A Vacation Voyage (1859) intertwined details of Dana’s visit with political commentary on ongoing attempts to annex Cuba to the United States. Books such as Cuba for Invalids (1860) and George F. Wurdemann’s Notes on Cuba (1844) offered tips on how to travel to and on the island. These books varied in tone and political positions vis-à-vis U.S.-Cuba relations, but often they rehearsed a trajectory that began with the sighting of Morro Castle from an arriving ship in Havana Harbor and proceeded to the city’s hotels and on to a plantation visit. Sarcastic visitors such as Howe did not paper over the island’s inconveniences or sidestep the politically loaded question of slavery. But other books, such as William Henry Hurlbert’s Gan-Eden; or, Pictures of Cuba (1854), were written so as to attract people to the island. In that vein, Wurdemann writes, “He who seeks only pleasure from travelling, should not fail to visit a country within a week’s journey of his own, where the tropical scenery, bringing to mind all he has read of Oriental lands, and a people preserving all the habits of their parent countries—the polished Spaniard and the rude African barbarian, fresh from his wild forests—will amply repay him for the inconveniences of a short sea voyage” (2). The reference to “Oriental lands” coupled with ethnic people calls to mind Edward Said’s observation that the differences instituted by Orientalism produced anthropological , psychological, and biological distinctions (231). Presumably , a trip to Cuba would mean an encounter with difference not only in a topographical sense but also racially, as travelers from New England came into contact with Spaniards, Africans, and Cuban-born whites, the latter 182 • perspectives from abroad sometimes described as degenerate and hybrid Creoles. Wurdemann’s...