Many interpretations of modern travel technology have insisted that speedy, mechanized modes of transport transformed travelers into tightly-packed commodities, and ruined the more traditional pace of travel on foot or horseback. However, the rise of transatlantic steamship travel after the Civil War offered American travelers something quite different. As the safety and comfort of the steamship improved during the last third of the nineteenth century, these travelers could look forward to trips with good food, good company, and comfortable quarters. During the days or weeks it took to complete their journeys, men and women aboard ship entered a unique area where their daily routines and surroundings changed completely as they progressed slowly across the Atlantic. Ultimately, these transatlantic voyages provided travelers such as Charles Eliot Norton with what might be called a "liminal" area or space. According to the anthropologist Victor Turner, a liminal area is an "in-between" social arena in which social hierarchies are temporarily leveled. This leveling opens up the potential for self-assessment andre-creation. In Turner's words, being in a liminal space invites "not only transition but also potentiality, not only 'going to be' but also 'what maybe.'"
One of the most striking examples of the transforming power of travel occurred in May, 1873 when Charles Eliot Norton and Ralph Waldo Emerson met in Liverpool to board the Olympus, the ship that would take them home to America. After spending almost five years in Europe, Norton returned to America unsure of his future vocation and without the support of his beloved wife who died two years earlier in Dresden. Norton's journal records his anticipation of sharing the long journey with Emerson who perhaps could give some guidance to the disoriented Norton on the "fit conduct" of life. Norton soon found to his surprise that Emerson's insights into life were almost entirely unsatisfactory because of his "optimistic fatalism." In fact, Norton's deep disappointment with the thoughts of America's most famous intellectual became the basis of his critique of American culture in general: "But such inveterate and persistent optimism, though it may show only its pleasant side in such a character as Emerson's[,] is dangerous doctrine for a people. It degenerates into fatalistic indifference to moral considerations, and to personal responsibilities; it is at the root of much of the irrational sentimentalism in our American politics, of much of our national disregard of honour in our public men, of much of our unwillingness to accept hard truths, and of much of the common tendency to disregard the distinctions between right and wrong, and to excuse guilt on the plea of good intentions or good nature."
Analyzing Norton's account of this voyage provides us with a record of the transition from Emerson's Transcendentalism to Norton's less sanguine Cosmopolitan view based on his reading of the European past. Soon after the journey, Norton would have the opportunity to combat Emerson's "fatalism" by dedicating himself to offering Harvard students "Lectures on Modern Morals as Illustrated by the Art of the Ancients." In essence, Norton's remarkable career as the first American professor of art history could be seen as his attempt to supplement and strengthen the interactions between European and American culture that were, for him, first tentatively tied by his ocean travels.
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