Carrie Tirado Bramen
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, “the American flirt” was synonymous with the youthful and unmarried woman, epitomized in Henry James’s Daisy Miller. This iconic figure had also become emblematic of the United States, as a way to render the notion of the nation-state into a distinct personality type that was playful, pretty, and young. Rudyard Kipling, who was besotted by the American girl’s self-possession, independence, and charm, observed in his travel narrative about the United States that “it is perfectly impossible to go to war with these people, whatever they may do. They are much too nice.”1 Not everyone shared Kipling’s belief in American niceness. Sigmund Freud for instance in “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” written during the First World War, invoked the simile “like an American flirt” to describe a shallow and insubstantial life in a culture that denies death and therefore denies mourning. Where Kipling valued the American girl for her flirtatious charm, as a figure antithetical to war and violence, Freud considered “the American flirt” a symptom of war, as the neurotic outcome of a culture’s inability to channel grief toward reflection.
The young flirt as representative of the United States illustrates the “uneasy coexistence of nationhood and womanhood,” wherein the female body is both a symbol of national unity and a seductive emblem of trouble.2 This essay explores the female flirt as a contested site of U.S. modernity, which is to say, as a figure of progress, independence, and self-determination on the one hand, and on the other, as a sign of materialistic desire, frivolity, and even neurosis. I want to take this superficial type seriously as a “social hieroglyphic,” to use Marx’s phrase from Capital, that needs to be “deciphered.”3 The American flirt became codified in the late nineteenth century as a national type that was largely articulated by travelers to the United States. The flirt is a form of national branding, wherein the nation acquires a commodified form visible in a system of international symbolic exchange. Rendering a nation through an array of personality traits gave the abstract nation-state a characterological form, which is also a form of interpellation that occurs nationally as well as internationally. In the case of the social hieroglyph of the flirt, it was produced from transnational perceptions of U.S. sociality that became encoded as American typologies.
The pervasiveness of the flirt in travel writing about the United States affords the opportunity to ask methodological questions about the rhetoric of national exceptionalism and its related forms—national distinctiveness, uniqueness, and specialness. One might position oneself as anti-exceptionalist or post-exceptionalist, but scholars still need to engage with the rhetoric of national distinctiveness as a relational process that is articulated in terms of other nations.4 American exceptionalism, as Amy Kaplan has argued, is founded on the paradox of uniqueness and universality; and it has largely been configured in terms of American insularity to underscore how the United States stands apart from the rest of the world through its superiority as a moral beacon of democratic ideals.5
One way in which American exceptionalism has been methodologically challenged is through a hemispheric paradigm that highlights interconnection rather than U.S. insularity. Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman’s notion of an “Americas paradigm,” for instance, emphasizes the “interconnected nature of North and South power relations.”6 Such a paradigm invites scholars to focus on the impact of U.S. imperialism on the region, but also “to reverse the gaze,” to see the multiple ways in which Latin America has affected the United States. Although their approach is largely based on the binary of U.S. exceptionalism versus hemispheric interconnection, I want to expand Shukla and Tinsman’s “Americas paradigm” to demystify U.S. exceptionalism by highlighting its relational formation: to show how Latin American gazes have actively articulated and produced forms of U.S. exceptionalism in the process of articulating their own national forms of uniqueness. All exceptionalisms are relational, even those that claim not to be.
My task is not to dismiss exceptionalism but to analyze it, to see how the rhetoric of national uniqueness is produced and reproduced relationally as a form of national branding that reiterates at the level of typology what the commodity does at the level of the object. Travel writing about the United States is an especially useful genre for studying the relationality of exceptionalisms because it reverses the dominant gaze by showing the United States as the cultural “other” that defines through its otherness, in this case, Argentine nationhood. This reversal has the effect of estrangement, of defamiliarizing the United States by raising the question: What does the United States look like as an object of the Argentine imagination, as a point through which Argentine exceptionalism is formulated?
In “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” Jorge Luis Borges understood this relational quality in terms of “Argentine peculiarity,” which is “a particular way of relating oneself to what was foreign.” Borges’s understanding of Argentine uniqueness has itself a history dating back to the mid–nineteenth century, when the Romantic poet Esteban Echeverría celebrated in 1848 this quality of national introspection through international recognition: “We will always have one eye fixed on the progress of nations and the other focused on the heart of our own society.”7 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, one of the first Argentine chroniclers of the United States, who later became president of Argentina, disparagingly describes this quality as Argentina’s “national vanity,” epitomized in the self-conscious figure of the “coquette” who contemplates herself in the mirror and embodies the arrogance and self-importance historically associated with Buenos Aries.8
The flirt appears repeatedly in late-nineteenth-century Argentine travel writing to the United States, namely in the work of the diplomat and chronicler Vicente Gregorio Quesada (1830–1913) and the novelist and journalist Eduarda Mansilla de García (1838–92). Both were part of the cosmopolitan elite who felt equally at ease in Buenos Aires and Paris. They represent, according to David Viñas, the “genteel tradition” of Argentine travel writing during the 1880s and after, when the traditional trip to Europe was replaced with one to North America.9 I selected these Argentine travel writers in order to expand the discussion of nineteenth-century travel writing from the predominant transatlantic axis to a hemispheric one in order to explore how contested power relations between North America and South America played out in narratives about cultural encounter. How did the issues of national sovereignty, Pan-Americanism, and cultural influence unfold in the trivial details of travel description? Did the apparently innocuous American flirt, which surfaces so saliently in Argentine travel writing, disarm the looming threat of the United States as an emergent global power, or what José Martí calls “the formidable neighbor” and a “monster”? What happens to the “contact zone” when the encounter is not dramatically asymmetrical in terms of Europeans and the indigenous subaltern, but between two settler nations in the Americas?
Beginning with Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s travel narrative written about his first visit to the United States in the 1840s, which serves as an Ur-text of Argentine travel writing to the United States, the American flirt contributes to “the spectacle of liberty in North America.” Sarmiento observes that in cities, “women of all conditions go about the streets and roads alone from the age of twelve: they flirt until the age of fifteen, are then married and travel.”10 This sense of women’s spatial freedom in the city regardless of class is emblematic of democratic freedom more generally, where perambulatory liberty is a sign of mobility in terms of both geographic expansion and social access. In contrast to the highly prescribed lives of young Argentine women of the elite class who in the French tradition stay within the purview of a dueña or guardian, American women are comparatively free of parental restraint. But when we consider the fact that Sarmiento concludes his observation by saying that young American women are “then buried in a new home to raise a family,” he clearly feels that such freedom is short-lived, demarcating a sanctioned period of liberty that is then rescinded when the responsibilities of matrimony and motherhood arrive.11
Sarmiento’s commentary on the young American flirt—a type that is always gendered female—is a point of reference for Quesada and Mansilla. I begin with Quesada’s official recollections, a tradition that he inherits from Sarmiento, to establish the dominant template of Argentine travel writing as a genre of ambassadorship and diplomatic propriety. Recuerdos de mi vida diplomática: Misión en Estados Unidos (1904) recounts Quesada’s years as an ambassador to the United States (1885–92) through his letters to President Julio Roca. Then my chapter moves back eleven years to Quesada’s unofficial account of his time in the United States in Los Estados Unidos y la América del Sur: Los yankees pintados por sí mismos (1893). Written under the pseudonym Domingo de Pantoja, a sort of alter ego, Quesada’s work shows how travel writing can be employed as a vehicle of anti-diplomacy, as a satirical critique of a nation’s policy. This switch from diplomacy to anti-diplomacy radically alters the character of the flirt, who changes from a charming woman to the maligned New Woman refusing to flirt with men. The chapter concludes with Eduarda Mansilla’s Recuerdos de viaje (1882), which was written nearly twenty years after she left the United States and represents the first published travel narrative by an Argentine woman. For Mansilla, the flirt signifies attraction and repulsion, an ambivalent figure whom she ultimately rejects for an alternative type of North American womanhood, namely post-Confederate womanhood. The defeated southern white woman is tragic for Mansilla, because her aristocratic social grace is now reduced to domestic drudgery in the aftermath of the Civil War. For Quesada and Mansilla, the American flirt becomes the trope through which Argentine anti-Americanism and identification are played out in complicated and inconsistent ways.
An intellectual historian of colonial Argentina prior to becoming a political figure, Vicente Gregorio Quesada began his diplomatic career in 1883 during the first presidency of General Julio Roca. He was first sent to Brazil (1883–85) and then to Washington, D.C. (1885–92), when he became ambassador to the United States during the presidencies of Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison. Published in 1904 when Quesada was seventy-four years old, Recuerdos de mi vida diplomática: Misión en Estados Unidos, 1885–1892 focuses on the social life of the United States with anecdotes about the personal lives of politicians. Early on, Quesada introduces the flirt as emblematic of American social life, where he characterizes its hospitality and politeness in gendered terms: “Encontré fácil la vida social, hospitalarias las gentes, corteses é instruidas las damas en general: y muy lindas, muy simpáticas, las señoritas para las que el flirt es un entretenimiento” (I have found the social life easy, the people hospitable, the women in general courteous and educated: and very pretty and very kind, the young women for whom el flirt is entertaining).12
Interestingly, Quesada never translates flirt into the Spanish coqueta or even the French coquette, suggesting its untranslatability. He does, however, give the English word flirt a Spanish inflection by adding the masculine article el for el flirt, but this is complicated by the term’s distinctly feminine cast as inextricably linked to “las damas” and “las señoritas.” Associated with prettiness (“muy lindas, muy simpáticas”), the flirt becomes synymous with an aesthetic language of pleasure, which he describes as entertainment (“entretenimiento”) in recollecting the American girl’s frank manner of speaking and her ability to sustain a lively conversation.
What intrigues Quesada is how this feminine figure can so frankly engage in heterosocial play without fear. Although he acknowledges the flirt’s charm, he is ultimately more fascinated by how the men respond to her. North American men demonstrate politeness without aggression (“la galantería no es una agresión”). El flirt is shown a great deal of male respect, especially if she is young and pretty: “Jamás conocí país donde se tuviese más general respeto por el bello sexo” (I have never known a country where there was so much general respect for the belle sex). He then returns to this point a few pages later: “La libertad que disfrutan las señoritas en los Estados Unidos está perfectamente garantizada por el respeto de los hombres, impuesto por las leyes, la tradición y las costumbres sociales” (The liberty that the young women enjoy in the U.S. is perfectly guaranteed by the men’s respect for them, which is imposed by laws, tradition and social customs) (16). Men, through their respect, grant women their liberty, a sense of “positive responsibility,” which is tacitly enforced through the law: If a man isn’t careful, he can end up in a duel, or where there isn’t a duel, then with a bullet wound. While the flirtatious woman acts without fear, the man, by contrast, behaves because of fear. His gentlemanliness is produced out of the threat of the violence that will come if he fails to regulate his own behavior.
Besides acknowledging that the American flirt’s liberty is predicated on males’ fear of their own impropriety, Quesada offers his readers an intriguing definition of flirtation that further aestheticizes this feminine figure. Attributing the definition to “una amable señorita” (a lovely young woman), Quesada describes flirtation as “attention without intention.” He repeats this definition, both times in English, which is apt given the untranslatability of the term flirt. But how does this definition—attention without intention—result in the flirt’s further aestheticization? During the same period in which Quesada wrote about the American flirt, the German cultural theorist Georg Simmel published an essay on flirtation wherein he aligns the practice with Kant’s definition of art as “purposiveness without purpose.” Whether it is flirtation or art, there is no particular end in sight but rather the sustaining of possibility, an open-endedness that defers decisions. In a similar vein, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has argued that flirtation is “the calculated production of uncertainty, inherently covert and without conclusion.”13 Quesada’s definition of the flirt as “attention without intention” is a deferral of closure as a game without end, in which flirting is not the means to matrimony but a source of pleasure for its own sake. Within the U.S. context, it represents a way for young women to defer marriage; it buys time for the single woman, a way to delay the drudgery of domestic responsibilities, a strategy that Sarmiento observed a generation earlier. Quesada comprehends flirtation less in temporal terms and more as an aesthetic practice, where flirtation is a work of art performed through a woman’s body, a playful performance wherein women possess charismatic power over men. This combination of playfulness and power is what intrigues Quesada about the American flirt, but does his interest in the American flirt ultimately go beyond aesthetic appreciation?
The flirt is a sign of both pleasure and deep anxiety stemming from women’s authority over men. Where the coqueta emerges from the highly stratified society of aristocratic Europe, the flirt is a product of a democratic society, or so Quesada suggests, where conventional social hierarchies based on class and gender distinctions diffuse into a disorderly world of role reversals. As Quesada writes later in Recuerdos, “Se dice que the presiding lady of the Executive Mansion is the first lady of the land, porque en esta democracia las señoras tienen el rango del marido, y se llaman la generala, etc.” (It is said that the presiding lady of the White House is the first lady of the land, because in this democracy the women have usurped the husband’s rank and are called the general) (123). He adds a footnote attributing this rather controversial claim that American men are hen-pecked, including the president, to another travelogue entitled Los Estados Unidos y la América del Sur: Los yankees pintados por sí mismos (1893). Quesada amusingly uses the formalities of academic citation to refer to his own disguised work, which is written under the pseudonym of Domingo de Pantoja.
In contrast to his diplomatically written memoir Recuerdos, his pseudonymously written account, Los Estados Unidos, is an outspoken critique of U.S. dominance in the hemisphere, published soon after Quesada returned to Buenos Aires after serving six years as ambassador in Washington, D.C. Scholars have dismissed this book for being superficial and inaccurate. North American historians such as David Pletcher have described this “scathing memoir” as evidence of Quesada’s anti-Americanism, which Pletcher attributes to “European propaganda.”14 Argentine historian Alicia Vidaurreta discredits the book for its errors and prejudices (although she does not elaborate on the nature of these alleged errors), arguing that it is a far less reliable historical source than Quesada’s more authoritative and official account, written in 1904.15 But the fact that Quesada cites this earlier work in his formal account of his diplomatic years suggests that these texts are not as distinct as Vidaurreta suggests. Pantoja’s outrageous and opinionated voice surfaces obliquely in the official account in the form of a footnote, which is to say, that it appears paratextually, as the return of the ambassadorial repressed.
When taken together, Quesada/Pantoja is an intriguing, bifurcated figure. On the one hand, Quesada is an erudite anti-modern in the vein of his contemporary Henry Adams. His Recuerdos represents a well-behaved text written by a former ambassador that abides by the conventions of diplomatic propriety. On the other hand, Quesada’s alter ego, Domingo de Pantoja, resembles a sarcastic and irreverent Mark Twain who scoffs at the very propriety that Quesada, the ambassador, has mastered. Even his first name, “Domingo,” playfully invokes the former president of Argentina who wrote about his travels to the United States in 1847—Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Where Sarmiento’s travel narrative diplomatically praises the United States as a model for Argentine democracy, Pantoja’s Los Estados Unidos refuses to coat its critique of U.S. power dynamics in tactful diplomatic prose. Instead it offers a travel narrative that is unapologetically opinionated and critical. The fact that Quesada wrote his irreverent account first suggests that the polite official version could be written only once Pantoja had spoken: that Quesada’s respectability and self-control are predicated on Pantoja’s outrageous impertinence.
Pantoja’s narrative provides a fascinating study of how travel writing establishes a discursive space from which to critique U.S. hegemony. Los Estados Unidos is a vitriolic condemnation of the romanticized language of Pan-Americanism with its motto, “America for the Americas,” which Pantoja translates as “America for the Yankees.” Despite the vision of hemispheric unity apparently encoded in Pan-Americanism, Pantoja argues that the Yankees are ignorant of those they want to dominate, perceiving South Americans as “algo semi-salvaje” (something semi-wild).16
Published in the same year as the Chicago World’s Fair, a point that appears in the book’s opening advertisement, Los Estados Unidos reverses the U.S. gaze that characterizes the 1893 Fair, and that reduces cultural others to curiosities along the Midway. Now, the United States is the object of curiosity. Pantoja’s version commences with an Argentinian, Victor Gálvez, a close friend of Pantoja’s and himself the author of a travelogue, attesting to the authenticity of the narrative. But this verifying figure happens to be another one of Quesada’s fictitious characters. Gálvez, nonetheless, tells the story of Pantoja’s life with such detail that it seems entirely plausible. Beginning with Pantoja’s migration from Spain to Argentina after the death of his father, Gálvez attests to Pantoja’s identification not with Europe but with Argentina, an identification underscored through the source of Pantoja’s wealth, which derives organically from Argentine soil, namely through real estate deals. He is, in other words, a “self-made man” (EU xv).
Given his wealth, Pantoja had no interest in publishing this narrative but did so at the urging of his friend. According to Gálvez, Pantoja wrote the document solely to “combatir la monomanía yankee, las tendencias yankees y la imitación á lo que es yankee” (combat the Yankee monomania, Yankee tendencies and the imitation of all that is Yankee) (EU xiii). Pantoja lays claim to the term American by stating in the opening page: “I am as American as they are.” Pantoja’s consternation at the audacity of the U.S. inhabitants referring to themselves as Americans and thereby excluding the rest of the hemisphere is a recurring tension throughout the narrative. This gesture of naming a nation after a hemisphere is symptomatic of the imperial practices that characterize the United States, which for Pantoja take on a pathological hue as a sign of monomania linked to power and egotism (EU 10). Pantoja’s response to this pathology is to claim the term America for Argentina and the rest of the Americas.
Despite Pantoja’s assertiveness and the sharpness of his critique, his narrative is more diagnostic than curative, with the hope only of containing the United States’ psychological pathology within its borders rather than allowing it to spread. The imperial boundlessness of Manifest Destiny, for instance, needs to be countered with the language of limits, which means, at one level, to particularize Americans as Yankees by establishing clearly, to quote Gálvez, “cuál es el límite geográfico del yankee” (that which is the geographic limit of the Yankee) (EU xiii). Or to use Gálvez’s blunt way of describing Pantoja’s objective: “para mostrar los lunares y las verrugas de Uncle Sam ó de Jonathan” (to show the moles and warts of Uncle Sam or Brother Jonathan) (EU xiii). Here, political critique takes on an individualized cast, wherein Pantoja converts inter-American issues into interpersonal conflicts, and the language of diplomacy is reduced to a typological discourse of national character.
Where Quesada in Recuerdos uses the aesthetic language of flirtation to describe U.S. sociality, he (as Pantoja) invokes the anti-aesthetic in Los Estados Unidos to demystify the United States as a hemispheric ideal—as the model of Pan-American mimesis—and to emphasize instead its abject qualities. Pantoja describes his method as “realism,” and he takes his reader through a litany of taboo topics, such as the suicides of young people, back-street abortions, and urban prostitution, which he describes by quoting long passages from the sensationalist newspaper the New York Herald. But what shocks Pantoja more than these sensational topics is the U.S. style of flirtation, a topic that he addresses at the start of his book. Like Winterbourne in Henry James’s Daisy Miller, Pantoja wonders whether flirtation is a sign of promiscuity or innocence. “I arrived at the belief,” writes Pantoja, “that ‘la flirtation’ was the most innocent entertainment,” the equivalent of German men kissing each other as a sign of friendship (EU 29). But this German analogy does not in any way make the custom of flirting more comprehensible: “Me creía, lo confieso, en una tierra extraña” (I confess, I thought I was in a strange land) (EU 29). He admits that flirtation, wherein men exercise heroic virtue by restraining their own libidinal desires, must have altered the animal instincts of human beings (EU 29). How else can he explain this strange custom? As in Recuerdos, Quesada’s discussion of flirting focuses on his admiration of male restraint, where playfulness remains playful rather than turning into lustful aggression. Quesada finds this unsettling because it signifies a behavior without an outcome, a playfulness for playfulness’ sake, a point that Simmel makes matter-of-factly, where there is no clear trajectory toward marriage.
But as Pantoja’s critique of U.S. arrogance and egotism develops and intensifies, his discussion of the flirt changes. Toward the latter third of the book, when he describes the experience of traveling by train and carriage and then staying in hotels, Pantoja observes the absence of flirting. In the highly social spaces of hotel lobbies, for instance, or in crowded cars on the train, young women traveling alone simply read novels or newspapers, an act that he perceives as a form of anti-sociality.
Se ha juzgado siempre que en sociedad no es permitida la lectura, porque es una demostración de desdén por los que estan presentes; y si ese desdén existe en el hogar y en sociedad−cuál es el resultado? El ensimismamiento que caracteriza al yankee, y en cuanto á la mujer, la ansiedad de la flirtation para escaparse del abrumador aislamiento del libro como pretesto, del silencio como resultado y de la frivolidad egoista como medium. (199)
I have always considered that in society, one should not be permitted to read because it demonstrates disdain for the others who are present; and if that disdain exists in the home and in society, then what is the result? The absorption that characterizes the yankee, and as regards the woman, the anxiety of flirtation that leads one to escape from the overwhelming isolation of the book as an excuse, from its resulting silence, and from its shallow egotism that is its medium.
Although he admits that in some cases the woman may be genuinely absorbed in her reading, in the majority of instances, however, women use the book or the newspaper as a shield, as a way to isolate themselves from those around them. He finds such a scene unnatural, going against the innate sociability of human beings. Where the flirt in Recuerdos exhibits a type of fearlessness, the anti-flirt traveling alone with a book as a companion is a pathological figure, one whose social anxiety forces her to withdraw into her own artificial cocoon. What is lost in this anti-social gesture? For Pantoja, it is “las mil agradables incidencias de la vida social” (the thousand agreeable incidents of social life) (EU 198). Sounding like a therapist analyzing a patient, Pantoja outlines the traits of this pathology as a form of self-absorption and egotism, a behavior that rejects those neighboring individuals seated around her wanting to converse by pushing them away with her silence.
This scene, which Pantoja describes as a “ridiculous painting” (198), illustrates a nonrelation or a failed encounter, wherein the book or the newspaper is used as a tactic of isolation rather than as a mode of communication. For Pantoja, the woman reading in public is a metaphor of U.S. foreign policy in the Americas, based on isolationism and taking the form of protectionist policies in curtailing the trading options of “the little republics.” The U.S. woman as anti-flirt also signifies for Pantoja the egotism behind such national ideologies as Manifest Destiny, which has its corollary in the nomenclature of the nation.
At one level, the anti-flirt is emblematic of U.S. arrogance and imperial policies, wherein individual anti-social behavior represents national monomania. At another level, however, Pantoja’s critique of the American woman who reads rather than talks can be seen as a sign of his own sexism. Pantoja presents sociability as a female mandate, implying that in hotel lobbies or on trains, women have to make themselves socially available to men; their social function is to please and to entertain. Another way to interpret the anti-flirt would be to see the reading woman as a defiant type, one who asserts her own desire for silence over her social role of feminine niceness. Why should she converse with a stranger? Why must she flirt? In this case, one needs to reverse the gaze again and interpret Pantoja symptomatically: The reading woman emasculates the Latin man, creating a non-encounter that is experienced as rejection, which is then projected back onto the anti-flirt as a sign of American egotism and anti-sociality.17 Women are typically seen in relation to others primarily in terms of familial ties, so the figure of the woman traveling alone threatens Pantoja, because she is at once available and unavailable, a potential relation that turns out to be a nonrelation.
For Eduarda Mansilla, the American flirt is “la rubia coqueta” (the blonde flirt) who is young, playful, and excessive, particularly in terms of fashion, whether it is wearing too much makeup or too much jewelry. The blonde flirt represents a national type that is synonymous with “Yankeeland,” wherein particular personality traits become emblematic of the nation. In contrast to Quesada, whose narrative emerges from years of diplomatic work, Mansilla, the wife of a diplomat, travels with a large entourage of children, a nanny, maids, and a chaperone, in addition to close friends. One account reports that she even traveled at some points with a cow in case her children wanted fresh milk.18 Mansilla frames her perspective from the vantage point of a tourist, despite the fact that she lived in the United States for five years. She does not recount, for instance, the daily life of Washington, D.C., but rather focuses on her experiences touring Saratoga Springs, Niagara Falls, and New York City. The phrase “como touriste” appears throughout her travel account, which has led Mónica Szurmuk to conclude that Mansilla’s Recuerdos is the first example of leisure travel writing from Argentina.19
In structuring the touristic account of the United States around the figure of the flirt, Mansilla’s narrative raises the question of whether tourism is itself a form of flirtation, a playful and pleasurable engagement with a place without a firm commitment to residency. The elusiveness of the flirt translates into the transience of the traveler, and both are opposed to a teleological notion of outcomes, whether it takes the form of permanence or destiny. Furthermore, the flirt and the tourist both operate within a semiotic system of types, wherein they observe and participate in cultural practices as spectacles, as symbolic acts that translate particularities into representative forms. Mansilla, as a tourist who casts the blonde flirt as a national hieroglyphic, is not herself immune from the social gaze. Mansilla is fully aware that while she observes the American girls she herself is the object of their gaze. She is both the surveyor and the surveyed: “Las muchachas inmóviles y parleras, sólo interrumpian su charla para mirarme de arriba abajo y decirme con su mirar frio é inquisitorial: Baja como puedas” (The young girls stationary and talking, only interrupt their chit-chat to gaze at me up and down and to say to me with a cold and curious look: Go down as you can).20 This exchange of gazes represents a site of inter-American encounter, of hemispheric interpellation, where the Argentine traveler in imagining the Yankee as a female type is also constructing a model of Argentine nationhood.
Eduarda Mansilla’s Recuerdos de Viaje participates in this national discourse of Argentine exceptionalism—a national obsession about its own identity that is deeply influenced by what others think—and projects it onto the American flirt. She sustains the tensions between having and not-having, between accessibility and inaccessibility. On the one hand, the American flirt is a distinctly Yankee phenomenon, yet she is also familiar, embodying the very paradoxes and tensions that characterize late-nineteenth-century Argentina. She is a sign of attraction and repulsion, and in Mansilla’s work, the “American flirt” acquires a hemispheric inflection, as an analogical figure of identification. Where Quesada’s two travel narratives underscore Argentina’s distance from its northern counterpart through the strangeness of American flirtation, Mansilla finds the United States strangely familiar. Similarly, the trains resemble those in Argentina, and both diverge from those seen in Europe. This recognition of New World likeness both represents an important moment of sympathy and identification and reflects the growing similarities between the two countries.21
Mansilla introduces the flirt not through a description of the American girl but through the architectural feature of the bow-window, which she associates with Anglo American domesticity. “Flores en vistosos jarrones y lujosas macetas, mesitas con libros y chucherías, adornan aquel misterioso buen retiro de la Americana flirtation, tan grata cuanto peligrosa” (17) (Flowers in bright vases and luxurious flower pots, small tables with books and trinkets adorn that mysterious quiet place of American flirtation, as pleasant as it is dangerous). With its large windows that create a niche above the street, the bow-window allows sunlight into the home, while also breaking with the monotony of the rectangular shape of the walls. Veiled with tulle and muslin curtains in the summer, the bow-window represents through the contrived display of various objects a scene of domestic order and beauty. One is invited to peep into the American home and catch a glimpse of this aesthetic display of domestic coziness. American flirtation, epitomized through the bow-window, is both an invitation and a refusal, an inaccessible accessibility, wherein one is invited to glance in the window for a fleeting moment as a passer-by.
As a mother traveling with children, Mansilla, however, enjoyed privileged access into the domestic interiors of American homes. She offered her largely female readers detailed descriptions of American domesticity, while also teasing her readers with only a cryptic portrayal of the bedroom.22 Although this peek into the home is presented as a privileged position, Eduarda Mansilla’s travels were highly circumscribed by what was considered proper for a woman of her class. Though far more financially secure than her British counterpart Fanny Trollope, in many ways Mansilla has more in common with her than with her fellow countryman Vicente Quesada, who writes in the style of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, by venturing into the crowded tenements of Mulberry Street. By contrast, Mansilla was limited to sanctioned tourist sites such as Saratoga Springs and Niagara Falls.
If Mansilla’s own ability to travel was limited, so was the act of translation, as Mansilla herself acknowledges. Although she translates the American flirt into Spanish as “la rubia coqueta,” at other points in her narrative she admits to the difficulty of translating the word flirt into either French or Spanish. She contemplates translating it into the French coquette, but this word “es considerado en Yankeeland como algo de muy duro y severo” (110) (is considered in Yankeeland as something very hard and severe). Implied in this comment is the sense that the American flirt is innocent, playful, and girlish, when compared with the French coquette with its connotations of severity, hardness, and experience. She also defines flirt to her Latin American readers as both a verb and a noun. She admits that the word is untranslatable: “no me ocurre cómo traducirlo” (110) (it doesn’t occur to me how to translate it), and she ultimately follows the model of the French playwright Victorien Sardou, who keeps the word flirt. Although Mansilla was known for her translating skills and despite the fact that she wrote one novel in French, she admits to the challenge of translating the flirt accurately into any other language. The problematic nature of national comparison finds its parallel in the dilemma of translation, a dilemma that dramatizes the paradoxical nature of the flirt as both accessible and inaccessible, visible but elusive. Mansilla’s own inconsistent use of the “flirt–coqueta” distinction is itself another layer of this paradox.
The difficulty of translating the word flirt underscores the distinctiveness of this Yankee type, yet there is something about the act of flirtation that characterizes women across national boundaries. Juana Manso, who is considered to be Argentina’s first nineteenth-century radical feminist, commented that flirting is an instinct, inherent to all women to such an extent that “one cannot be a woman without also being a flirt.”23 For a feminist like Manso, the feminine, the feminist, and the flirtatious were inextricably bound together. But the flirt also has a distinctly Yankee cast for Manso, which anticipates Freud’s dismissal of this type as shallow and superficial. In her own travel account to the United States in 1845, Manso describes the distinct attributes of the U.S. flirt: “Las mujeres todas son coquetas, remilgadas y sin sentimientos; su amor lo reparten entre el dinero y el tocador” (The women are all flirts, fussy and finicky and without feelings; their love is divided between money and the boudoir).24 Manso’s notion of the U.S. flirt may have served as an antecedent to Mansilla’s account. But Mansilla is far less dismissive of the U.S. flirt, because she finds her excess familiar, a characteristic of New World women more generally.
The American flirt, defined as a hemispheric type, takes the styles of Paris and exaggerates them, a tendency that “ocurre siempre en el exterior” (109) (occurs always in the periphery). In using the term el exterior (periphery), Mansilla seems to be drawing a comparison here between settler nations such as Argentina and the United States vis-à-vis their relations to Europe. Mansilla is poking fun at the colonial mimicry that takes place among the bourgeoisie of the “exterior” in imitating the high fashion of Paris, because their imitation is so excessive that it acquires a vulgar valence, whether it is in the extreme amount of tulle, a fabric produced in the nineteenth century from Tulle, France, or in the abundant display of jewelry: “las Yankees tienen muchas alhajas” (109) (The Yankee girls have a lot of jewels). This same tendency toward excess is also evident in the U.S. woman’s use of cosmetics from perfumes and elixirs to face powders in every shade of white. The supreme symbol of this love of cosmetics is the blonde hair-dye that is used abundantly among “la mujer Yankee,” when dark hair mysteriously changes after a few hours into “una trenza en hilos de oro” (77) (a braid made from threads of gold). Artificial blondes constitute a style that “passed from the U.S. to Paris,” an example of the “exterior” influencing the metropolitan center, a detail that Mansilla includes to demonstrate the transatlantic dynamics of women’s fashion. By drawing these sorts of comparisons within the “exterior”—as the New World periphery to Europe’s metropolitan center—Mansilla is using travel writing to draw analogies rather than distinctions. Where Quesada underscores the differences between Argentina and the United States, Mansilla accentuates the points of comparison, most notably in the excessive fashion of the female flirt.
Mansilla’s emphasis on the artificiality of the American flirt’s blonde hair suggests another point of identification between the elite porteña and her U.S. counterpart, that of race.25 The artifice of the U.S. flirt creates a New World space for embracing artifice over authenticity, which for Mansilla takes the form of artificial whiteness. The trope of whiteness in Argentina is itself a sign of unease and anxiety, particularly in the context of turn-of-the-century race science that privileged Anglo-Saxons and Nordics over the “Latin” races. “Argentine governments since the 1850s,” according to the historian Julia Rodríguez, “had advocated increased immigration from northern European countries because they believed that such an infusion would bring ‘healthy’ traits to the population and thereby rid Argentina of its inferior Latin, Indian, and African racial character. The elites convinced themselves that they were a European nation, and hence racially superior to the rest of Latin America.”26 Mansilla shared Sarmiento’s ideal of engineering modern Argentina by recruiting northern European immigrants, and thus eradicating the indigenous element and diluting the southern European presence.27 But 80 percent of the immigrants in the 1880s came from Italy and Spain, thus preventing Argentina from aspiring to a northern European racial ideal. Although derived from the swarthier hues of European whiteness, Argentine exceptionalism historically emerged from this sense of racial superiority over the rest of Latin America. For the philosopher Enrique Dussell, a transplanted Argentine who lives in Mexico, “Argentina pretended to be white, forgetting that the mestizaje there is simply tremendous.”28 According to the cultural theorist Néstor García Canclini, another Argentine intellectual now living in Mexico, Argentine whiteness is simulated whiteness, a fantasy of racial purity.29 This racial fantasy is largely based on defining Argentine whiteness against what Dussell calls the “indigene” of Latin America.
What Mansilla finds in the artificial blondes of North America is this same yearning for a Nordic ideal that has to be manufactured in order to be achieved. The fin-de-siècle beauty myth is racially encoded in ways that complement the “race” science of the time. Furthermore, the artificial blondes of North America legitimate Argentina’s own aspirations to artificial whiteness. If authenticity is the bastion of Europe, then at least New World nations like the United States and Argentina can positively acknowledge their inauthenticity, in the sense that their postcolonial mimicry is unapologetically excessive. Where the older Juana Manso, who was Sarmiento’s contemporary, found the U.S. flirt to be vulgar, Mansilla finds in this vulgarity a certain refreshing defiance of European mores in the very act of imitating them. Where Argentines of her class mimicked the French elite with such exactitude that the French couldn’t believe that Mansilla wasn’t French, the Yankee form of mimicry does not aim for accuracy. This indicates a certain Anglo American confidence, including the racial confidence of the U.S. elite, in their own whiteness that the Argentines lacked. Argentine mimicry of Parisian manners was compensatory, demonstrating a need for validation that tried to conceal artifice rather than to flaunt it. Despite this difference, Mansilla nevertheless finds in the U.S. flirt a playful form of mimicry that provides a refreshing counter-example to the far more serious and anxiety-ridden modes of Argentine mimicry of European mores.
Just as the flirt playfully encourages uncertainty, so the response to her is equally ambivalent. On the one hand, Mansilla takes pleasure in this figure’s ambiguity and unpredictability; but on the other hand, she finds her vulgarity to be deeply unsettling. This is most apparent when Mansilla describes the American flirt’s eating habits. Where Pantoja sees the anti-flirt as a metaphor of American anti-sociality, Mansilla interprets the flirt as a model of U.S. sociality, but a form of sociality that can have repulsive aspects. Mansilla satirically captures the scene of a Yankee girl eating voraciously at a hotel:
Las preciosas niñas yankees de delicadísma tez y delgada cintura, se alimentan especialmente de ostras, cangrejos y langostas. Nunca podré olvidar el asombro que me causó en mi primera comida, en el hotel de Nueva York, ver devorar á una elegante muchacha de dieciocho años, la mitad de una langosta, chupando hasta las antenas, con una delicia, que con elocuente expresión se trasparentaba en su bellísimo semblante. (23)
The precious yankee girls of such a delicate complexion and slim waist seem to live on especially oysters, crabs and lobsters. Never will I ever forget my surprise at my first meal at a New York hotel, when I saw an elegant young lady who was eighteen years old devour half a lobster, sucking even the antennas with such pleasure that her beautiful face had such an eloquent expression.
This scene, which Mansilla describes as a spectacle akin to the realism of Zola, combines innocence with carnality, where frilly flirts become not only desiring objects but also devouring subjects taking pleasure in satisfying their voracious appetites. Mansilla betrays her own prudish notions of femininity in her abject description of female appetite. But Mansilla is also fascinated by this vulgar spectacle, wherein a delicate woman ravenously ingests a lobster rather than carefully and self-consciously eating it in small morsels. This uninhibited scene of dining is both sensuous and disgusting, a juxtaposition that highlights the blonde flirt as a dichotomous sign of attraction and repulsion.
Although Mansilla devotes most of her travel narrative to the Yankee flirt as a playful type that is both fascinating and repulsive and associated with the northern cities, she ends her travel narrative with an alternative model of Anglo American femininity, namely the white southern woman. Recollecting her time in the United States during the Civil War, Mansilla closes her narrative by declaring, “yo era sudista” (I was a southerner). Despite the region’s association with slavery, she writes, the South “monopolized elegance, refinement and culture” (122). Mansilla’s playful tone suddenly changes to one of mourning, particularly for the former Confederate aristocrat whose status has dramatically fallen in the aftermath of the Civil War. In the penultimate paragraph of her travel narrative, she writes:
Cayó vencido, aniquilado ese Sud tan simpático á pesar de sus errores; y sus mujeres más hermosas, más educadas, más opulentas, tuvieron que vivir del trabajo de sus manos. Algunas damas de la mejor sociedad, de Nueva Orleans, se vieron reducidas á ser hasta cocineras. Expiación horrenda! (122)
Conquered and annihilated, that kind South fell, despite its errors. Its most beautiful, educated, and opulent women had to live off the labor of their own hands. Some ladies of the best society, from New Orleans, even saw themselves reduced to cooks. Horrendous atonement!30
Although Mansilla saw herself as a liberal cosmopolitan who was open to the democratizing spirit of the United States, she was still nostalgic for the privileges of the old aristocratic order, as when she bemoans the lack of good servants in the United States as well as in Argentina.31 Sympathy with southern elite women marks another point of identification between Argentina and the United States, an inter-American alliance that depends on keeping the freed slave barely visible. The tragedy of the post–Civil War era is that erstwhile aristocrats must now do the cooking.
This example of inter-American sympathy—wherein an elite porteña sympathizes with elite post-Confederates through the notion of women’s work—provides a way for Mansilla to validate Argentine whiteness.32 “By 1880, Argentina thought of itself as the only great white nation of South America,” writes the historian Thomas McGann, “[t]hus the Argentine upper class conceived a splendid isolation, based not only on its wealth but also on the popular doctrine of the superiority of the white race.”33 The fact that Mansilla specifies an upper-class woman from New Orleans illustrates what Kirsten Silva Gruesz has observed, namely how New Orleans signifies as a “liminal zone between the Anglo and the Latin worlds.”34 The “Latinness” of New Orleans makes it a regional point of identification for an elite porteña, who sees in the Confederacy’s decline the fragility of her own class status in Argentina. Yet the fallen aristocracy of the South offers Mansilla the fantasy not of economic stability but of racial and cultural superiority. The South, she claims, is descended from French nobility (37). In contrast to the artificiality of the New York blondes, southern white women are cast as effortlessly refined. Where the flirt’s excess suggests vulgarity, the Confederate woman’s opulence is seen as good taste.
Although in the concluding moments of her narrative Mansilla identifies unequivocally with the southern white woman, both types—the flirt and the Confederate—constitute a paradoxical notion of modern Argentine identity. According to Amy Kaminsky, “Argentina projects its desired version of itself outward, hoping to recoup that version when it is reflected back in the eyes—and words and images—from elsewhere.”35 The regional conflict in the United States provided two warring feminine types, the urban northern flirt and the southern belle, both of whom allowed Mansilla to imagine the tensions of Argentine nationhood through the language of paradoxical feminine types.36 The artificiality of the American flirt de-naturalizes New World nationality, by disclosing the process of its own construction that Mansilla understands in the Argentine context in racial terms as the production of artificial whiteness. She identifies with this figure as echoing the Argentine mimicry of European standards, but it is an identification that she must disavow. She does so in two ways. First, she underscores the vulgarity of the flirt, which she finds both appealing and repulsive, thus producing her own tone of detachment toward this type. Second, Mansilla disavows the flirt’s artifice by embracing the Confederate woman and with her a fantasy of racial purity, gentility, and refinement that is reflected back onto the elite porteña. If the flirt is a figure of unveiling, then the Confederate woman is the veil; she sustains the illusion of refinement without hair-dyes and perfumes.
Both Vicente Gregorio Quesada and Eduarda Mansilla use travel writing as a way to negotiate Argentina’s rising position within the hemisphere and internationally. But where Quesada uses this genre to articulate the necessity of boundaries, to draw limits for U.S. Pan-Americanism and to resist incorporation, Mansilla transgresses these boundaries by importing a Confederate ideal as a model of feminine refinement. Where the American flirt for Quesada is all about playing with the tensions surrounding the limits of not-having, which includes the self-regulating behavior of American men vis-à-vis the flirt, the American flirt for Mansilla is a mark of limitlessness.
Quesada and Mansilla reveal how exceptionalism is constructed through relationality, whether it is the U.S. or the Argentine versions. For Mansilla, Argentine exceptionalism derives from racial borrowing from southern white womanhood, whereas for Quesada, Argentine exceptionalism is produced out of a refusal to import or borrow from the North. The American flirt creates the discursive space through which these different views of Argentine–U.S. relations are played out. Where Quesada views American flirtation as a distinctly Yankee phenomenon, as an exercise in libidinal restraint that both fascinates and perplexes, Mansilla’s relation to the American flirt resonates with the Freudian uncanny. For Mansilla, the flirt is distinctly “other” particularly in terms of her vulgar eating habits that disgust and intrigue. But as a sign of excess, the flirt is also strangely familiar, accentuating the artificiality of femininity, especially in terms of New World mimicry of European manners and styles. Yet for Domingo de Pantoja, the American flirt does not exist; instead, the U.S. woman is an anti-flirt, a commentary on the absence of sociality that also betrays Pantoja’s own anxieties about women’s expected role of giving men attention without intention. All three narratives use the trope of the flirt in significantly different ways to highlight the challenges, limits, and advantages of inter-American relations. To articulate hemispheric contact through the figure of the flirt suggests how appealing, uncertain, and even potentially dangerous this encounter (and possible non-encounter) can be.
Many thanks to Jean Dickson and Laura Taddeo, research librarians at the University at Buffalo, for directing me to invaluable primary sources. Eva Juarros-Daussà kindly reviewed my translations. I am grateful to David Schmid, Ann Colley, and Carolyn Korsmeyer for comments on earlier drafts, and to Prentiss Clark for her research assistance.
1 Rudyard Kipling, American Notes (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 126.
2 Mary Louise Pratt, “Modernity and Periphery: Toward a Global and Relational Analysis,” in Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalization, ed. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 53.
3 Marx writes that value “does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, one tries to decipher the hieroglyphic.” Just as a commodity like a woman’s dress, to use Marx’s example, appears to be “an extremely obvious, trivial thing,” its analysis reveals that it is actually a “very strange thing.” Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 Trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 167–68.
4 For a discussion of post-exceptionlism, see Donald Pease, “Rethinking American Studies after US Exceptionalism,” American Literary History 21.1 (Spring 2009): 19–27.
5 Amy Kaplan, “The Tenacious Grasp of American Exceptionalism,” Comparative American Studies 2.2 (2004): 153–59.
6 See Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman, “Editor’s Introduction,” Radical History Review 89 (2004): 1–10.
7 Qtd. in The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela R. Montaldos (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 10.
8 “Buenos Aires se contempló a sí mismo como una coqueta que se mira al espejo,” in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Educar Al Soberano, in Obras de Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, vol. 47 (Buenos Aires, 1900): 185.
9 David Viñas, De Sarmiento a Dios. Viajeros argentinos a USA (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1998), 60. Throughout the nineteenth century, the only way in which one could reach New York City from the southern cone was through Europe, with the two major steamship lines based in Paris and Liverpool. Direct travel from South America to the United States began only in 1906 from Rio de Janeiro to New York City. Through the outspoken persona of Domingo de Pantoja, Vicente Quesada accuses the United States of refusing to establish steamship lines directly between the two countries as a way to control the importation into the U.S. market of Argentine products such as beef and tallow. See Alicia Vidaurreta, “Tres visiones Argentinas de los Estados Unidos,” Revista de Historia de América 111 (Jan.–June, 1991): 80.
10 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Travels: A Selection. Trans. Inés Muñoz (Washington: Pan American Union, 1963), 143.
11 Sarmiento 143.
12 Vicente Gregorio Quesada, Recuerdos de mi vida diplomática: Misión en Estados Unidos, 1885–1892, Vol. VI (Buenos Aires: J. Menéndez, 1904), 11. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
13 Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London: Faber, 1994), xvii. Georg Simmel, “Flirtation,” Georg Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, and Love, trans. Guy Oakes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 133–52.
14 David Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865–1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998).
15 Vidaurreta, “Tres visiones.”
16 Vicente Gregorio Quesada [Domingo de Pantoja], Los Estados Unidos y la América del Sur: Los yankees pintados por sí mismos, ed. Jacobo Peuser (Buenos Aires: Rosario, 1893), 4. Hereafter cited parenthetically as EU.
17 On the concept of “non-encounter,” see Carl Good, “A Chronicle of Poetic Non-Encounter in the Americas,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.1 (2003): 225–55.
18 Bonnie Frederick, “El viajero y la nómada: los recuerdos de viaje de Eduarda Mansilla y Lucio Mansilla,” Mujeres y cultura en la Argentina del siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Feminaria, 1994), 249. Also see María Rosa Lojo, “Eduarda Mansilla: entre la ‘barbarie’ yankee y la utopia de la mujer profesional,” Gramma (Sept. 2003): 14–25. www.salvador.edu.ar/gramma/37/05.pdf.
19 Mónica Szurmuk, Women in Argentina: Early Travel Narratives (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000).
20 Eduarda Mansilla, Recuerdos de Viaje, ed. J. P. Spicer-Escalante (Buenos Aires: Stockcero, 2006), 108. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
21 The 1880s, the period in which Mansilla wrote her travel narrative, was a time of rapid transformation and national consolidation, when Buenos Aires became the capital of the nation and embodied the new Argentina. According to the historian Julia Rodríguez, “the economic boom of the late nineteenth century led to Argentina’s stunning transformation from colonial backwater to an urban, industrial society largely based on exploitation of agricultural resources, in particular, cattle and wheat, and aided by foreign investment, mostly British.” Although the United States possessed greater absolute wealth, Argentina’s rate of expansion surpassed that of the United States in the twenty years before 1914. Julia Rodríguez, Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 21.
22 For a discussion of Mansilla’s flirtatious description of domestic interiors, see Samuel Monder, “De la seducción y otras miradas. La institución del flirt en los recuerdos de viaje de Eduarda Mansilla,” Revista Iberoamericana 71:210 (enero-marzo 2005): 105–17.
23 Juana Manso writes, “Yo creo que hay un instinto de coquetería, inherente a la mujer, y que no se puede ser mujer sin ser coqueta,” Album de señoritas (Buenos Aires, 1854), 79.
24 Juana Manso, Recuerdos de viaje (1846) quoted from María Velasco y Arias, ed. Juana Paula Manso: vida y acción, (Buenos Aires, 1937), accessed on January 15, 2011, from now-defunct website: http://www.juanamanso.org/2010/06/recuerdos-de-viaje.html.
25 Porteña is a woman from the city of Buenos Aires.
26 Julia Rodríguez, Civilizing Argentina, 4.
27 For more on Mansilla’s views on race, see Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe, “Familial Triangles: Eduarda Mansilla, Domingo Sarmiento, and Lucio Mansilla,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 29.3 Primavera 2005: 507–524; Beatriz Urraca, “Quien a Yankeeland se encamina . . .”: The United States and Nineteenth-Century Argentine Imagination,” ciberletras 1:2 (enero 2000).
28 Enrique Dussel with Fernando Gomez- Herrero, “Ethics Is the Original Philosophy; or, The Barbarian Words Coming from the Third World: An Interview with Enrique Dussel,” Boundary 2 28.1 (Spring 2001): 19–73.
29 Qtd. in Amy Kaminsky, Argentina: Stories for a Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 120.
30 Translation from Szurmuk, Women in Argentina, 62.
31 Mansilla writes, “El oficio de sirviente, es más complicado de lo que en las Américas se cree, y tanto nosotros como los Yankees, estamos servidos por aficionados” (original emphasis, 77) (The job of the servant is more complex than what is believed in the Americas. We, as much as the Yankees, are being served by amateurs) (translated by Szurmuk, 62).
32 Mansilla writes, “Pobre Sud! A pesar de sus faltas, del látigo cruento con que azotaba las espaldas de sus negros, era simpático. Lo compadezco y le dedico aquí un latido de mi corazon feminino” (40) (Poor South! Despite their faults stemming from the cruel whip that was used to beat the backs of the negroes, they are still sympathetic. I feel sorry for them and I here dedicate to them a beat of my feminine heart). For a discussion of the post-Confederate, see Neil Schmitz, “Faulkner and the Post-Confederate,” Faulkner in Cultural Context/Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1995, eds. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 241–62.
33 Thomas F. McGann, Argentina, the United States, and the Inter-American System, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 57.
34 Kirsten Silva Gruesz, “The Gulf of Mexico System and the ‘Latinness’ of New Orleans.” American Literary History 18.3 (2006): 469.
35 Kaminsky, Argentina: Stories for a Nation, 57.
36 For more on the southern belle as a postbellum construct, see Nina Baym, Feminism and American Literary Theory: Essays (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), ch. 12.