The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women’s Circuit, 1876–1910 by Ronald Briggs (review)

In the burgeoning field of hemispheric studies, scholars posit that an intellectual perspective that looks beyond national boundaries across the Americas provides a “disruptive potential” capable of “questioning the boundaries and structures” upon which research has been previously conducted (10). In an intellectual history of turn-of-the-century Lima, Ronald Briggs offers an example of precisely how such a disruptive approach might be realized. Briggs, whose second book focuses on the literary and pedagogical concerns of a group of intellectuals based in Lima, argues that the “transnational print networks” of this group sought to “expose the contingency of the nation-state” as well as “generate a positive corrective of its own, articulating a particular American aesthetic that would synthesize what they saw as the unrealized promises of independence” (10–11). The Moral Electricity of Print demonstrates that this aesthetic, or “ideological Americanism” (147), was comprised of “shared concerns” that often transcended “regional differences and particularities of place” (149). While tempting to call this approach another stab at transnationalism, Briggs demonstrates an incredible grasp of the circuits of knowledge concerning literature and pedagogy that coursed through the hemisphere and across the Atlantic and, in the process, offers a wholly original perspective on turn-of-the-century American concerns.

Specifically, Briggs grounds his study in an intellectual circuit of Lima women who gathered around Juana Manuela Gorriti and her regular veladas literarias between 1876 and 1877. While their presence hovers in the background of book, the foreground is covered with the specific texts – biographies, social novels, and pedagogical texts – that circulated through Lima and provided fodder for the intellectual discussion of the day. Those discussions, Briggs argues, were considerably occupied with the idea of “moral electricity” and the transmission of moral and social imperatives, particularly via literature, that might create more cosmopolitan and intellectually-engaged reader-citizens. In five chapters Briggs looks at individual and collective biographies, the trope of the heroic autodidact, pedagogical texts, and social novels to demonstrate how the intellectual circuit sought to instill these lessons. He is as interested in the texts themselves as how they were received, processed, and reimagined by Lima’s intellectual elite. While the central cog in this project was the idea of the “book as a project capable of shaping the future,” his detailed analysis of the most prominent selections demonstrates how members of the intellectual elite of Lima cited, engaged, used, and reused such ideal texts that were circulating across the hemisphere and beyond (45).

As the title suggests, many of the literary elite examined in The Moral Electricity of Print are women writers. Beginning with Gorriti and her literary coterie, Briggs highlights the work of Clorinda Matto de Turner, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, Soledad Acosta de Samper, Emilia Serrano, and Teresa González de Fanning, among others. While historian readers may be left salivating for more detail on these women’s lives and activism, Briggs dives meticulously into the writings that distinguished them as part of Lima’s literary elite. The book engages with the debates on female emancipation embedded in a number of these texts, particularly in the last three chapters, and the ways in which women writers sought to create “a tool for legitimizing education and letters as professional fields in which [women could] locate themselves” (76). For example, in presenting Clorinda Matto’s Elementos de literatura Briggs argues it was “both a literary textbook and an argument for why such a textbook was necessary” to create better female readers; in another section he disentangles a broad swath of female publications to understand their “vision of the social force of female readers” to contribute to the “community’s narrative of progress” (114; 145). Although readers looking to understand how this vision might have translated into concrete action for feminist agendas will need to look elsewhere, Briggs provides an essential analysis of the texts...