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Travels with an Outcast
The life of Flora Tristan, 1803 - 1844
by Lara McKinley
Excerpts:
In the early 1830s, French feminist Flora Tristan traveled to Peru, where she stayed for nine months with her aristocratic family. When the book of her experiences, Peregrinations of a Pariah, was released, her outraged uncle burned copies in the pubic square. More than a century would pass before the Spanish translation was released in Peru, and even then it was heavily edited.
When she arrived in Arequipa, the site of the familial home, Flora was welcomed warmly into the privileged circle of upper class Peruvian society and heard every scandal imaginable. From the tale of the nun who used a dead body to cover her escape from the convent to the intimate financial arrangements of her family, Flora told all in her book. Her Uncle Pio was exposed as a greedy miser, her aunt a beautiful but shallow woman, their children ignorant and vain. Her cousin Manuela, of whom Flora was very fond, had a “love of spending nothing short of reckless.”
Arequipan society faired little better. The food was barbarous, the religious figures corrupt, the leaders hopelessly incompetent and the inhabitants hypochondriacs.
Flora in fact felt a great fondness for Peru and the Peruvians she ridiculed, particularly Don Pio. She even dedicated her book to them. But she bridled at the indolence of the upper classes, whose poor education and lack of intellectual curiosity thwarted Peruvian development. She felt it her duty expose it . . .
