Dissonant Discourses: Evelyn Scott and Cyril Kay-Scott’s Experiences in Brazil (1914–1919)

ABSTRACT This article analyses the discourse of individuals who go through the same experience within the context of self-imposed exile. The subjects involved are the American writers Evelyn Scott (née Elsie Dunn, 1893–1963) and Cyril Kay-Scott (né Frederick Kreighton Wellman, 1874–1960). They scandalised their Southern society when, in 1913, they fled Louisiana and eloped to London and then Brazil with little money and no passports. Their experiences were extraordinary. After years of a semi-nomadic existence eking out a living in different parts of Brazil, the Scotts ended up in the country’s arid north-eastern backlands confronting isolation, poverty and near starvation. This work investigates the couple’s perception of the years they shared in the tropics. Carrying with them elite New Orleans values, how did they respond to the hardships of early twentieth-century Brazil? How did gender and emotion affect their daily lives and discourses about the same events? What specific events of their experiences were shared? Given that in different periods they wrote autobiographies about their lives in Brazil, the analysis is based on Evelyn Scott’s Escapade ([1923] 1995) and Cyril Kay-Scott’s Life is too short (1943). Results indicate that their survival in Brazil was unequally challenging, leading them to produce dissonant discourses.