In 1845, five years after her European tour, the American writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick published a tale about touring Italy in Graham's Magazine. "An Incident at Rome" recapitulates a myth in nineteenth-century culture about the interaction of North and South, one that reveals the anxious underside of the northern tourist's visual and economic domination of southern Europe: the myth of Italy's seduction and emasculation of the northern male traveller. The female American narrator hears the story from an English aristocrat--a lady--as they make a day trip outside Rome. A middle-class English widow encourages her son in "the study of antiquities" until his obsession turns him away from wholesome present interests, such as sex and money; his mercantile uncle wants him to marry his daughter, inherit his money, and take up a "manly career," but Murray Bathurst wants six months in Italy instead. During the trip Italy comes to feel like his "lover," Bathurst loses his sanity in a fever, disappears into the Italian landscape, and wanders as a beggar. His mother finds him "groping" among the ruins; the shock of recognition restores him to rationality. The tale ends with his return to England, his marriage to his cousin, "a more fitting mistress than Italy," and his restoration to healthful striving in the world of the present.
This tale is about the function of tourism as a part of the process of producing the modern national subject. Successful tourism entailed an excavation of and libidinal engagement with nationally suppressed traits in the self that were experienced as inhering in foreign scenes; this engagement functioned as a pleasurable disciplining of the self, a subordinating of "othered" aspects of human experience through their aesthetic embrace. "An Incident at Rome" associates Bathurst's antiquarian impulses with the excavation of unEnglish characteristics in himself; his temporary succumbing to these characteristics, rather than completing the ritual of subordination and integration, signal the touristic enterprise gone awry and the risk (usually treated comically in travel books) of a reversal in power relations, of the subordinated icon and its associated traits overwhelming the spectator.
Sedgwick cast her travel book, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841) in the form of letters to her brother Charles. Like many such accounts, the book is informed by the tension between the pleasurable visual submission to the foreign scene and the need to put the "spectacle" of otherness into the service of American ideology. Sedgwick says she will miss most the explicitly aesthetic experience of Europe, and especially Italy, when she leaves and that this experience constitutes the chief risk to Americans: "I would advise no American to come to Italy who has not strong domestic affections and close domestic ties, or some absorbing and worthy pursuit at home." Otherwise, one might feel on returning home "as one does who attempts to read a treatise on political economy after being lost in the interest of a captivating romance" (Letters, II 193).
Her language here, with its opposition of domesticity, commerce, and politics, on the one hand, to "romance," on the other, and its half-humorous warnings of being "lost" in a captivity of the senses has connections with the oppositions that structure her historical romance of the Massachusetts frontier, Hope Leslie. As Jenny Franchot argues, Americans of her era were engaged with two problematic sites of national identity: the American frontier, with its possibly "contaminat[ing]" native cultures, and an aesthetically imagined but "tainted" European--and especially Catholic--past (Roads to Rome 19). Like such contemporaries as James Fenimore Cooper, Caroline Kirkland, and Grace Greenwood, Sedgwick wrote both historical fiction about the incipiently national community on the frontier and travel books on Europe; these two characteristic and popular genres of the period worked to imagine and stabilize a normative middle- to upper-class American identity.
If Bathurst's immersion into his delusional world of wandering and ruin-hunting parodies the tourist's proper cultivation of interiority, Sedgwick pursues that cultivation through a more sophisticated encounter with the positions of subjugation and dominance that tourists assumed. Her framing ofthe story is a strategy that, in effect, shapes the travel book as well. The American narrator and the English teller of the story form a compact of elite women who, themselves apparently immune to Italy's dangers, preside over the extreme version of tourism Bathurst represents. By implication, they extend this compact to the readers of Graham's Magazine. This interpretive community is asked to consider the problem of tourism as simultaneously a formative influence on a governing/managing elite and a threat to the self-possession of the members of this elite. The promise and threat of Italy involve the whole complex of Anglo-American middle-class and national identity. While Italy threatens manliness, defined as the ability to act decisively in the public sphere, it also threatens domesticity. By the same token, Italy is able to enrich the private, interior life of the tourist by showing how one brings marginalized values into the service of dominant ones--the spectacle of the senses into the sphere of the rational and domestic self. This paper will examine Sedgwick's travel book in the light of the antebellum tourist's gaze, a gaze that consolidated national identity in terms of the spectacle of an "othered" scene.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and
employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997.