Ina von Binzer offers a rare glimpse of Brazil during its Second Empire in The Joys and Disappointments of a German Governess in Imperial Brazil. Linda Lewin further adds to this primary source by expertly introducing and contextualizing von Binzer’s letters, showing how they provide needed insight into “the world the slaveholders made,” as well as serve as a female travel narrative in a genre dominated by men. In the following guest post, Lewin elaborates further on what makes this historic document so unique.
Ina von Binzer’s letters, spanning 1881–1883 and written to her best friend in Germany, chronicle her experiences and observations as a governess engaged by three very different, wealthy planter families during the twilight years of African slavery in Brazil. Rare for offering a woman’s perspective, her book represents a unique format in the travel literature on Brazil, given that it rests wholly on correspondence. Implicitly confidential, her letters project a frankness and supply valuable critical commentary, often laced with self-deprecating humor, allowing her to comes across as genuine despite the passage of nearly a century and a half. Von Binzer’s observations cover an enormous range, from the interior world of household, family, childrearing, and domestic slavery, to the external domains of plantation organization, allocation of slave labor, deployment of migrant labor from the Brazilian Northeast, and a ubiquity of German-speaking emigrants in town and countryside. Above all, the consistent thread running through throughout her letters turns on the impending approach of abolition, as both a nascent movement and a future event soon to climax. She leaves a unique testimony assessing attitudes belonging to prominent planters whose coffee estates lay in either Brazil’s “old” coffee zone in the Paraíba Valley or the new frontier of the Paulista West. Balancing her observations about the world the slaveholders made, von Binzer recounts intimate vignettes describing encounters with individual slaves, juxtaposed against opinions held by her slaveowning employers gleaned from her private conversations with them. Throughout, she punctuates her letters with irrepressible humor, a welcome leavening for a heady commentary that critically assesses everything Brazilian. The range of her observations is remarkable, encompassing social arrangements, linguistic patterns, naming customs, habitual culinary preferences, and mostly forgotten folkloric celebrations that enlivened the dreariness of plantation routine.
Easily comprehensible to a wide range of readers, Ina von Binzer’s letters benefit from a historical introduction that sets out both the political context of the 1880s and the social patterns that testified to slavery’s long survival in Brazil. I introduce both the German governess and her three slaveholding employers, placing them in biographical step with the letters that detail their actions and words. Besides providing important new details about the German governess, I pierce the anonymity that von Binzer’s letters conventionally imposed on the planter families with whom she lived. Readers learn who they were as real actors—their actual names and elevated social status—while their rural properties are stripped of fictitious nomenclature and laid bare, pinpointing their actual locations in real space. Von Binzer’s occasionally ambiguous references to Brazilian customs, names, or the legal regulation of slavery, together with her periodic allusions to German literature that might confound readers, receive careful parsing, thanks to helpful notes throughout. A set of two dozen photographs contemporary with the 1880s, mostly by Marc Ferrez, Brazil’s premier photographer, offers splendid visual documentation of Ina’s world. I supply a list of suggestions for further reading, rounding out the scholarly resources for appreciating Ina von Binzer’s uniquely informative and entertaining commentary.