Peruvian Tales as an Atonement

Thirty nine years after Helen Maria Williams published the poem Peru she returned to it and made rather extensive edits and republished the work as the Peruvian Tales, which was tactful in differences that had been made.  Williams had learned even more about the actual statistical science of Peru after translating Alexander von Humboldt's Personal Narratives of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions.  It gave her better insight than the previous histories she read and she felt the need to correct misconceptions that she had written about in Peru.  In addition, von Humboldt's work that she translated was later blamed for much of the frenzy surrounding the idea of the profits that could be made from mining in South America.  So for Williams, Peruvian Tales was not only a correction of the facts that she got wrong the first time, but it was also trying to distance herself from "the wave of late-colonial publications of the 1820s that thematized European expansionist projects in their writings" (Damian).

It is also important to note the political shift that Williams personally experienced in the period between the publishing of Peru and Peruvian Tales.  During the time of Peru being published, Williams was more liberal.  This publication also coincided with the Peruvian revolution led by Tupac Amaru, which Williams supported openly, but also rather clearly through her writing.  She felt that people of Peru should be able to take some of the main principles from the French Revolution and apply them to their own lives and create positive change.  By the time that the Peruvian Tales were published, Williams had become far less liberal, in part because she and her family had been imprisoned during the Reign of Terror.  After that experience Williams became far less interested in supporting dissent, which is evident in her edit of Peru.

Beginning of the Reign of Terror

The edits of Peru were mainly focused on removing the bulk of the descriptions of the landscape, which she had previously written in such a way that it inspired anger towards the Spanish and supported the idea of revolution.  As Damian points out, Williams used the earth in a way that was symbolic of a suffering human body by having "tears, sighs, groans, and moans, all palpable corollaries of its altered state, foreshadow the enslavement of the landscape" and later she uses less of these kinds of descriptions.  In addition, Williams really stressed the idea that her poem was a story, not the reality of the situation.  She does this by calling it a Peruvian "Tales" instead of just Peru, which seems to assert that everything in her poem was true.  Additionally, Williams focuses much more on human interactions rather than descriptions because the land was what was being exploited and it seems that she felt somewhat responsible for this exploitation.  The more the Western people became interested in South America, the more exploitation it saw.  It seems that Peruvian Tales was a way to try and pacify conflicts and to make South America seem less desirable to the people who wanted to go mine it and take the natural resources.

Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think Williams focused Peruvian Tales less on the landscape scenes than Peru?
2.  Do you think Peruvian Tales is successful at making a person look differently at South America and colonialism than Peru did?