A Sublime Journey to the Barren Plains: Lady Florence Dixie's 'Across Patagonia' (1880)

Abstract

Lady Florence Dixie’s 'Across Patagonia' (1880) is the only full account of a British woman’s journey to the Patagonian region. This paper is an analysis of the ways in which Florence Dixie uses the landscape as a testing ground for exploring herself. By doing so, she explicitly exposes the possibilities of Patagonia as a scenario for the enjoyer of the sublime. Even though Dixie’s contribution to the tradition of travel writing in Patagonia remains almost invisible, 'Across Patagonia' sets the basis for a way of contemplating and experiencing the landscape that continued to be important in later writings on the region. This marginal travelogue enables the exploration of travel from a female perspective, raises questions of aesthetics and gender, and sees how the journey inscribes itself on colonial discourse within the specificities of the Argentine historical and cultural context.

Keywords

• travel writing, patagonia, women travellers, landscape, sublime