Tourists, according to Henry James, were "vulgar, vulgar, vulgar." While he may have despised tourists and the tourist industry in general, this aversion never stopped James from visiting foreign countries. In fact, by the time of his death in 1916, he had published numerous travel books--Portrait of Places (1883), A Little Tour in France (1884), English Hours (1905), Italian Hours (1909)--which chronicled his trips throughout Europe and America. James's disgust with "vulgar" tourists, combined with his own touristic forays, suggests a seemingly contradictory position. That is, James often took on the identity of the tourist which he so despised, while concurrently attempting to distinguish himself from the mob of his fellow travellers. The boundary that James attempted to construct separating himself (as travel writer) from other tourists was employed by numerous authors. Edith Wharton, for example, claimed that she disliked travelling during the summer months, for "it was not easy, in the height of the season, to light on a nook neglected by the tourist." Moreover, during her stay in Italy, Margaret Fuller advised American parents to "keep their sons and daughters at home...and let the French and the Italian alone."
This paper will try to make sense of James's seemingly contradictory position regarding tourism by placing him in relation/opposition to the popular American tourist industry of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Using the travel writing on New York collected in The American Scene, I will contend that James's comments on tourism function similar to what Homi Bhabha has referred to as a "strategy of disavowel," whereby "the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different." This paper, then, suggests that James's repeated strategy to distinguish himself from other tourists does not exempt him from reinscribing contemporaneous discourses of American tourism which tried to disclose the "secrets of America." James's "touristic denial," in other words, calls attention to his position as M.L. Pratt's "seeing-man" whose gaze "passively look[s] out and possess[es]" the sites of New York City. As a result, this paper examines how James's travel writing utilizes the discourses established by the American tourist industry and illustrates James's participation in (and contribution to) the very industry that he claimed to despise.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and
employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997.