Writing the Journey: June 1999 | Department of English

"Accidents in Context"

Stephanie Palmer
The University of Michigan
scpalmer@umich.edu

Can critical distance from the damaging effects of Euro-American travel and imperialism be found in the texts written by Euro-American travelers? If so, where in the field of travel literature has critical distance generally been located: in texts by women writers? in texts by struggling journalist writers? in texts by political dissidents? What rhetorical forms has critical distance taken in travel writing? This paper will examine the possibility that the topos of unwelcome, chance occurrences, or "accidents," served as one means of conveying dissatisfaction with the existing social order for nineteenth-century European and American travelers traveling within the United States. It provides an overview of references to accidents in genteel magazines and books in order to understand the degree to which the topos of accident served as a latent form of social critique.

The late twentieth-century popular imagination associates travel accident with a Romantic dissolution of the Self into the Other. But twentieth-century readers need to maintain an open mind when reading late nineteenth-century representations of travel accidents. For the Euro-American traveling middle- and upper classes, the traveler ideal was not an immersion into exotic cultures or a foray into bodily fragility but the maintenance of composure in the face of the unforseen. This ideal resembles the male-centered travel ideal that James Clifford describes as "the security and privilege to move about in relatively unconstrained ways" ("Traveling Cultures" 107). Such an ideal expressed faith in Euro-American and technological progress. Before the sinking of the Titanic and World War I, such progress had been considered contingent or dangerous only by technical experts (Wolfgang Schivelbusch) or cultural critics like Rebecca Harding Davis and Mark Twain.

The resonance of any particular travel accident in travel literature would change radically depending on how accidents typically appeared in genteel reading: did they appear so often that readers would subconsciously recognize them as a hackneyed attempt for selling text, or so infrequently that they might signal transgression? Were writers fascinated or disturbed by the possibility of violence? This paper summarizes the results of a survey of the textual appearances of accidents and unforseen events in the three most successful "quality" magazines of the American reading public -- the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Monthly, and the Century -- and in the book-length travel guides and travel accounts held by the University of Michigan library. I looked for unplanned occurrences in which the traveler is acted upon by people or the natural environment. Rather than focus exclusively on representations of physical danger, I looked for incidents that challenged the traveler ideal of calm and assured mobility.

I found that the topos of accident was fairly common in nineteenth-century travel writing -- in the form of references to actual catastrophies, folklore of actual catastrophies told at spatial or temporal distance, and events that were experienced. Yet the topos did not occur in every monthly issue or even every 12-month volume of the quality magazines, and there is some evidence that the occurrence of injurious accidents was censored in the press and in travel writing. The writers most likely to represent the experience of calamitous accidents were either independent women travelers or male journalists traveling and writing to earn a living. This pattern suggests to me that the possibility and experience of physical accidents were not easily or utterly incorporated into the ideal of travel. That is, although subject to elite conventions, representations of accidents were not merely conventional.

The remainder of the paper will briefly discuss 1) official travel guides (in which accidents are not even mentioned), 2) travel guides written by writers who express faith in Anglo-American progress (in which accidents are portrayed as a remnant of a barbaric past), and 3) travel guides by writers who position themselves in a partially oppositional mode (in which accidents serve as one means of critiquing a traveler establishment). Although detailed analysis of individual texts will not be practical, key texts might include Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) and E. Catherine Bates' A Year in the Great Republic (1887).

Stephanie Palmer
The University of Michigan
scpalmer@umich.edu
985 Northwood St. #8
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
(734) 769-1132

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Updated May 23, 1999