“Tão singular como os olhos é o olhar”: mulheres viajantes no Rio de Janeiro oitocentista, suas visões de civilidade e de educação

Abstract

Women have always traveled, but the 19th century was the period in which many travelers went from being supporting players to becoming protagonists of history and their own history by entering a mostly male field, setting out for distant and unknown lands, challenging the dangers and pre-established standards for the female gender of their time and recording their experiences in letters and diaries. Whether accompanying their husbands, in search of research, adventure or a better standard of living, the majority of female travelers did not neglect their mission to bring "civility" and progress to a country surrounded by beautiful and lavish nature, but culturally "backward" in the eyes of Europeans. In view of the above, the problem of this research is to use these accounts to interrogate the narratives about the context observed in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, especially the educational and civility aspects described by them in their recorded impressions. In this sense, this thesis argues that these writings (by foreign women travelers) contributed to shaping their actions/impressions and movements in terms of civility, characterized as an educational experience. In order to answer this question, the general aim of this study is to search for elements in the accounts of foreign travelers that will enable a historical interpretation of the impressions and experiences left by these women about educational aspects and civility during the Monarchical Period in Rio de Janeiro (1808-1889). On a specific level, the objectives are to analyse the process that involved ocean travel in the 19th century; to highlight the arrival in Rio de Janeiro based on the travellers' first impressions and experiences; to describe their first impressions of the city; to locate the travellers who were in Rio de Janeiro during the study period; to verify approximations and distances between the visions of each of the researchers about the educational context and possible collaborations with the civilizing project of Brazil in the 19th century. The qualitative and historical-documentary research is based on diaries and letters, as well as other travel documents. The framework used as theoretical support dialogues with the work of Roger Chartier (2004) and Jacques Revel (2009), which are fundamental for analyzing the binomial of civility and education; it dialogues with the work of Michelle Perrot (2005; 2019) on the history of women, their struggles and achievements; with the work of Peter Burke (2017) to reflect on the use of images; Cunha (2019) and Mignot, Bastos and Cunha (2000) because diaries are personal archives and fit into the perspective of egodocuments, in addition to the dialogue with academic productions on the subject, after a thorough literature review, among them, the works of Miriam Lifchitz Moreira Leite (1984; 1997), a reference in the study of women travelers. The contribution of the research lies in the fact that by analyzing the intimate diaries of foreign travelers and other documents produced by them, we can see elements that enable a historical interpretation of the impressions and experiences recorded about aspects of education and civility in Brazilian lands, more specifically in Rio de Janeiro.