Crossing Over: Gender and Empire in Fanny Calderón de la Barca's The Attaché in Madrid

Unlike her successful Life in Mexico (1843), which enjoyed the patronage of the American historian William Hickling Prescott, Frances Calderón de la Barca's The Attaché in Madrid (1856) has received little critical attention. Published anonymously in New York as the work of a young German diplomat, Calderón's travel book on Spain sheds new light on her transatlantic writing career. This study examines the dynamics of self-revelation and containment in The Attaché, foregrounding Calderón's imbrication in the politics of empire and her experimentation with literary gender crossing. In The Attaché, Calderón deploys maleness not only as a cover, but also to contest nineteenth-century US discourse on Spanish decadence and to counter rhetorical strategies of domination common to male-authored accounts of Spain.