Flora Tristan's peregrinations and promenades: Writing and the politics of change (France)

Flora Tristan takes on a number of tasks in her writing. She recounts her voyage to Peru; creates a narrative that describes various oppressive institutions and possible responses to these institutions; records the impact of industrial capitalism on the English; and lays out her plan for reorganizing the economic and social system of France. All these projects are characterized by a search for ways in which those disempowered by hierarchical systems can be represented, given a voice, effect change, or, in some cases, simply survive. Furthermore, she describes numerous roles played by others carrying out a similar search and attempting different ways of achieving their goal. This study asserts that both this searching and Tristan's movement toward and away from the various positions she describes make the displacement evident in the titles of her works an appropriate metaphor for her political strategy.; The dissertation first places the author and her texts in their historical context and then analyzes her four principal published texts and her posthumously published journal. It examines moments where Tristan rejects traditional modes of both political/economic organization and literary/aesthetic representation as adequate or useful for her purposes, as well as those where she embraces limiting or oppressive systems. Included is an analysis of moments where she creates or finds a space where those marginalized by the systems can assert themselves.; Particular attention is given to Tristan's reactions to and representations of individuals occupying various positions in relation to the dominant structure and how they reflect Tristan's strategy for participating in an oppressive structure. This study also examines episodes of interracial interaction in Tristan's texts in order to signal the social and historical context within which Tristan writes and the impossibility of freeing self and text from the systems in which one lives and writes.