Literary travel, the woman traveler, and twentieth century constructions of Mexican tourist spaces

Abstract

Twentieth-century American travel narratives have created representations of travel in Mexico that have captured the tourist gaze, inspired travel at various historical moments and to various tourist sites, and anticipated the direction that 20^th century tourism in Mexico has taken. Through the figure of the woman traveler, this dissertation examines the construction of 20^th century Mexico as an "infernal paradise" in the gendered narratives of travel by modernist and postmodern American writers. Imagined places ignite the literary traveler's imagination. Travel narratives ignite the tourist imagination, helping to shape the sites the traveler wishes to visit and the way he or she will enter, inhabit, and leave them. Travel literature and the literary traveler inspire travel circuits, identities, scripts, and performances, all of which are complexly gendered in their effects and their representations.

I explore how male and female travel itineraries, traditions, and representations clash; and how iconic travelers engage in a battle of the sexes that renders visible the gendered politics of literary and touristic travel. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the woman traveler captures the tourist gaze as she enters into and disrupts with her spectacular presence and incisive perspective previously masculinist travel traditions. Beginning with the modernist musings of Katherine Anne Porter and Maria Cristina Mena, I uncover a modernist tradition of women travelers and artists/writers that also takes shape in Mexico and defines its touristic attraction. I then proceed to the exilic and provocatively gendered spaces of Tennessee Williams's The Night of the Iguana (a story and a play), in which the woman traveler once again makes her disruptive presence felt, as Williams redirects the tourist gaze to the beach. I follow with a study of how spectacular place images and touristic after-productions generated by John Huston's production of The Night of the Iguana as a film helped to transform a small Mexican fishing village into a glamorous and eroticised tourist site. I end with the transnational, postmodern imaginings of Ana Castillo and Harriet Doerr, whose novels explore how the tourist becomes cued to a proliferating set of tourist sites, even as they also expose through their experimental poetics, the limitations and dangers of this palimpsestic touristic terrain. Places, travelers, and narratives become entwined in a gendered touristic imagination, and the Mexican tourist industry diversifies as it adapts to seduce the more sophisticated "post-tourist" traveler.

In the course of these literary travels, I demonstrate that the literary traveler's "infernal paradise" construction of Mexico mixes gothic, colonial, modernist, and postmodernist fantasies with a desire for exile from the modern world into a more primitive, and simultaneously rebellious or revolutionary, place. For the North American traveler, "Mexico" also becomes a space where escape from modern unease and restrictive gender politics is possible—even as locals and the Mexican tourist industry rearticulate touristic desire into marketable forms.