Cuba for Healthy Respite: North Atlantic Women’s Travel Writing, 1810–50

This paper explores the ubiquitous mentions of climate and health in the corpus of North Atlantic women’s travel writings to the Caribbean and Mexico in the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that in their writings and through their travels, the North Atlantic women contributed to the growth in leisure travel for health in the circum-Caribbean, built on word-of-mouth and centered especially on Cuba. Indeed, many women sent home written images that posited the circum-Caribbean as a region that offered healthy respite for North Atlantic minds and bodies. While doing so, these women also successfully maintained cultural superiority by correlating their own moral behavior to their continued good health. “Cuba for Healthy Respite” historicizes the unpublished travel manuscripts of women such as Margaret Curson, Margaret Morton Quincy Green, Mary Gardner Lowell, and Sophia Amelia Peabody (Hawthorne), reading them alongside contemporary women’s published travelogues. This transnational study indicates that women who wrote amid their travels to the circum-Caribbean in the first half of the nineteenth century traveled broadly, crossed imperial and cultural boundaries, and through their writings complicated North Atlantic perceptions of the “south” as a place which offered only paradise or peril for North Atlantic bodies, especially by the mid-nineteenth century. This is especially evident in colonial Cuba, where women’s travel writings highlight continued inroads of affective and discursive ties that strengthened extant economic connections, thus contributing to lasting imperial consequences, especially for the entangled histories of Cuba and the United States.