Clara Bromley: Atlantic Adventuress or Imperial Intruder?

In 1853, Clara Fitzroy Kelly Bromley embarked on a journey that would take her around the Caribbean, North America, Mexico, and South America.

She had recently been widowed. The journey was thus intended to be a healing one, full of adventure and beauty. And these things Clara certainly found - or at least created for her readers. We are left with a text that obscures harsher elements of the Atlantic world - i.e., slavery - and presents a fairy-tale journey filled with adventure and beauty.

Why should we pay attention to such an account, when it centers an already privileged and problematic perspective? And how can digital tools help us unpack such a text?

Not much history has been written on women's travel accounts, even for upper-class women like Clara. Historians who have done this work argue that women writers prioritize their "elite sensibility and subjectivity" to claim authority in the traditionally male space of travel writing. (O'Loughlin, 171) Positioning themselves as arbiters of manners and decorum, they describe the world by the degrees to which it conforms to their standards of civility. The colonial project, intended to "civilize" the Caribbean and Americas, is upheld as a European success. Anything that doesn't conform is the result of personal failing, not European incompetence. By smoothing the rough corners of colonialism, they attempt to present an Atlantic world of exciting adventure and beauty, with political unrest and revolution unwelcome aberrations from the norm.

But the instability of European hegemony, and the withering of colonial systems of power, are still visible in these narratives. Digital tools, as we will see, open up new avenues for entering the text and revealing the writer's lived reality, even when she attempts to sugarcoat her experiences. They reveal patterns potentially lost during a close reading of the text, including which words Clara reflexively relies on to communicate her feelings and quantitative data on the role of sentiment in her writing.

Digital tools allow us to zoom out of the text, viewing the tapestry as a whole. They give us an opportunity to rethink the main themes of the narrative, and provide pathways through which to explore fresh perspectives for interpreting text.

We'll begin by examining some of the most used words in Clara's writing as they've been flagged by the tools Voyant and Orange. From there, we'll be able to begin coming to some conclusions about her priorities and concerns as both a traveler and writer.

Time is, according to both tools utilized for this project, the most repeated word in Clara's narrative. What can we get out of the visuals above? What is time's significance for Clara? Most importantly, how does it function uniquely in an eighteenth-century travel narrative?

Examining words with the highest repetition expands our opportunity to reflect on Clara's priorities as well as the meaning of her stylistic choices. Compare the two examples presented here. The first draws upon the Voyant tool, examining the frequency and location of what it designates as the top seven words in the text. Second, we see a similar output from the program Orange, with slightly different results.

Both programs have the option to pick "stopwords" - words for the processor to ignore. Voyant automatically detects stopwords (though offers the option for customization), while Orange requires users to manually upload their own.

Both interpret the text slightly differently, offering varied levels of customization for what a user may wish to do. Comparing the outcomes of both tools also allows us to see which terms both programs deem important - "time," "morning," and "day."

Tools used for digital humanities can differ in outcomes just as much as the various people who use them. What does it mean that "little" - which will be explored in depth below - is not a term considered important by Orange? And what does it tell us that both programs highlighted the same three words?

Clara is continuously concerned with time, and she does most of her sightseeing and arrivals in the morning. Her usage of "day" alerts her readers to when events happened in relation to the time of her writing (things happened "earlier to-day," or a journey took "a day and part of the night"). We can learn this by feeding these words into the context tool and seeing how they're used. From there, we're able to see clearly how time and travel intersected for someone of Clara's world - someone who didn't measure their journey by hours and minutes, but by days and months.

Clara's persistent use of "little" as a descriptor reflects both language habits of her class and period, and her generally imperialist view of others in the Atlantic context. She comes upon "little" villages, "little" cabins, ruled by "little" governments. Her terminology reflects her views of indigenous cultures as quaint and backwards, lovely relics of an older time but not serious societies worth deeper attention.

Simultaneously isolating this word and observing it in context, as the above tool does, allows us to see that it also is a crutch of sorts of Clara. "Little" is a vital part of her language, occurring 107 times through her text.

The word itself is dynamic, potential evidence of her view towards people of color and their communities, as well as the way Clara may have spoken in real life. This allows us to glimpse Clara the person, rather than the historical figure, imagining how she might speak, and how others like her would react to the novel experiences of the Atlantic.

So how should we interpret the use of "little" in the text? The tool itself does not provide a positive or negative designation. Should we interpret the word as neutral? Is it possible Clara held both paternalistic and appreciative views of indigenous cultures during her travels?

Click on the chart above to further explore and come to your own conclusions.

To test our opinion of Clara's own attitude towards indigenous people and the term "Indian" can be done by feeding the word into the context tool.

The above tool shows us how programs like Voyant can read texts for sentiment (more information on sentiment analysis can be found  at this site ). Here, the word "beautiful" is highlighted in green to indicate a positive connotation and placed into its context. By focusing on one positive word like this, we can see how Clara emphasizes the aesthetics of the Caribbean and South America when, in reality, such places were marred by slavery and colonial violence.

By using tools to focus on negative terms, it becomes clear that Clara tries to avoid speaking about uncomfortable topics. As a result, her writing overlooks crucial aspects of Atlantic politics and culture.

Slavery, for instance, is flagged resolutely as a negative term. And, despite justifications for the system's existence elsewhere in her text, Clara does not touch on such brutal realities as much as she celebrates aesthetic beauty.

One of the few instances in which the term is used is a description of a successful escape attempt at Niagara Falls. Clara narrates the escapee's swim to the Canadian border, concluding that her sympathies are always with the persecuted rather than their persecutors.

Caught up in the whirlwind of emotion, this passage makes it clear that Clara understands the inhumanity of slavery. Viewed directly alongside other uses of the term, however, it becomes clear that throughout the few other times she mentions slavery, she is attempting to justify its continued existence to herself and her readers to assuage their consciences.

The enslaved people Clara encounters on plantations are written about very differently. They are described as happy, with light workloads. They eat bread and treacle, and in fact have enough food that they offer their extras to Clara.

Like the contrasting images above, Clara's portrayal of slavery is intended to reassure a European audience's anxieties about the institution as a whole. If enslaved workers are well-treated and happy, what moral obligation is there to pursue abolition? Clara's depiction reflects the Romantic sensibilities of her time, which puts a gloss of aesthetic beauty over harsher realities.

But we know slavery was a resolutely inhumane system, and resulted in conflicts between self-emancipated communities and European authorities, as seen in the story of Cudjoe's Town, depicted above. By using sentiment analysis tools, we can investigate Clara's use of "negative" terms and quantitatively understand how often they occur in her text, as well as how often "positive" terms pop up. From there, we are able to better understand how her writings seek to present an idealized image of a colonial system even as it falls apart.

Examine the graph below. What patterns of sentiment can we extract about Clara's text from its visual portrayal? What political purpose(s) do her emphases on beauty and positivity serve?

Digital tools may be helpful in bringing to our attention details that might otherwise have slipped past. In the above chart, we can see "Eleanor" as one of the entities most often referred to by Clara. Even with careful reading of the text, we are influenced by our own backgrounds, goals, and ideas. In focusing on important topics like slavery and politics, the role of Eleanor - Clara's servant and companion - is easily (perhaps even justifiably) lost.

By using tools like the RezoViz above, however, we can see relationships between people, places and organizations mentioned by Clara. Eleanor plays a large role in Clara's narrative, although she is often mentioned in passing and obscured by bigger issues. The RezoViz tool allows us to reconsider what entities are most important to the writer versus those that stand out to us, and take those discrepancies into account when critically engaging with the text.

For example, once alerted to Eleanor's importance, we can reexamine the text in both traditional and tool-based ways. We could reread with an eye to the flitting references to servants, or feed "Eleanor" into a tool showing the context of the term. Both methods allow us deeper engagement with the text than can be achieved without the "perspective" provided by tools like Voyant or Orange.

Silences can often tell us just as much about our subjects as the words written by and about them. In Clara's case, the silences surrounding slavery and colonial oppression actually reveal her own discomfort with imperialism, despite her internalized racism. Engaging with her writings, even as they reflect centuries of imbalanced power and privilege and focus our attention on the voices of the oppressor rather than the oppressed, can still provide valuable information on the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and the experiences of those Clara views as "other."

Digital tools like Voyant and Orange allow us to better engage with reading against the grain. We can isolate word usage, easily comparing the different moments in the text Clara speaks on concepts like slavery and indigenous culture. We can view the most mentioned entities and words, clarifying Clara's own agenda. Visualizations also grant the opportunity to take an alternate perspective on the text and its themes. As a result, new kinds of macro- and micro-level engagement are achievable.

Perhaps digital tools - at least as they've been used in this project - don't accomplish anything that technically couldn't be accomplished by a particularly dedicated researcher. And voices like Clara's are certainly uncomfortable, often exasperating, to engage with.

But digital tools allow us to interrogate texts and sources in new ways that provide counterpoints to our own initial readings. Just as it's important to avoid reactionary approaches that may dismiss Clara out of hand for her obvious racism and classism, instead focusing on the important themes of imperialism, gender, race, and class that her text reveals despite itself, we should be cognizant that digital tools do work that would otherwise be quite difficult. They introduce themes and patterns that could be overlooked. And they provide different ways to present information to an audience, moving beyond just the classic text-based analysis to incorporate more interactive and visual-based elements.

Imagine taking a hundred narratives like Clara's, combining them, and utilizing tools to examine them in conversation with each other. What could we learn by doing this that traditional research wouldn't be able to accomplish?

What new understandings of our world could be achieved by incorporating digital tools into research, and what fresh perspectives on imperialism can we gain by studying privileged women's travel narratives?

Digital:

• Ketchley, Sarah. "Gale Digital Scholar Lab: Understanding Sentiment Analysis." Gale Training, November 10, 2023.  https://support.gale.com/doc/DSLsa-acad-webinar 
• Milner, Matthew, Stephen Wittek, and Stéfan Sinclair. "Introducing DREaM (Distant Reading Early Modernity)." Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no. 4 (2017):  http://digitalhumanities.org:8081/dhq/vol/11/4/000313/000313.html 
• Vanchena, Lorie A. "Reading German Culture, 1789–1918 (Conference Proceedings of: Distant Readings/Descriptive Turns: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century. 21st St. Louis Symposium on German Literature & Culture, Washington University in St. Louis, March 29–31, 2012.)" Journal of Literary Theory Online (2012).  https://www.jltonline.de/index.php/conferences/article/view/502/1306  
• Yeates, Robert. "Voyant Tools." Post-Apocalyptic Cities, May 2, 2013.  https://postapocalypticcities.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/voyanttools/ 
• "Lincoln Logarithms: Finding Meaning in Sermons." Emory University.  https://lincolnlogs.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/voyant/ 

Historiography:

• Fish, Cheryl J. Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004.
• Imbarrato, Susan C. Traveling Women: Narrative Visions of Early America. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006.
• Kaplan, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” American Literature 70, no. 3 (Sep. 1998): 581-606.
• O’Loughlin, Katrina. Women, Writing, and Travel in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, and Ivette Romero-Cesareo, eds. Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
• Prieto, Laura R., and Stephen R. Berry, eds. Crossings and Encounters: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Atlantic World. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2020.