Travelers are always outsiders, and travel writers, no matter how sensitive, can never fully enter the worlds they describe. Nevertheless, a travel book must always be an insider's narrative--one traveler's personal experience shared with an armchair companion. Herein lies the inevitable tension between experience and the written expression of it. In this context, we may wish to believe in precise, clear distinctions between the romantic grace of the traveler and the feeble-minded clumsiness of the tourist, but the separation is, at best, forced, and, at worst, self-deceiving and elitist. When moving through a 'foreign' context--whether accompanied by backpack and Byron or camcorder and VISA--we all seek to consume cultures. We take what we can stomach comfortably, discard the rest and call the process 'experience.' Still, the power of perceived distinctions between the "traveler" and the "tourist" shows no signs of abating, even though, as Paul Fussell has argued, we are all--despite our protestations--tourists. There is no turning back.
In this essay, I examine how 19th-century American travel writers addressed the issues inherent in the growing tide of tourism. Although the travelers of the mid-century were by no means the first to grapple with identity in their narratives, they were part of an explosion of tourism like none other in history, and the resulting changes inevitably influenced their work. The democratization of travel provoked substantial response in a variety of media, but perhaps travel writing itself provides for modern readers the most interesting forum for debate. By examining several popular travel writers (including Mark Twain, Bayard Taylor, and J. Ross Browne) we can, I hope, gain a better understanding of not only how various travelers responded to the culture wars but also how they struggled with competing impulses within their narratives: to promote travel (by selling travel books) and to preserve its romantic allure (at least for their readers). Specifically, I will consider how writers commented, directly and indirectly, on the phenomenon of tourism through their observations of others as well as through their manipulation of narrative personas. In turn, I will seek to understand how writers transferred the cultural debate into their narratives and, ultimately, how they worked with commonly-held assumptions to enhance the vicarious experience of their readers.
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