Writing the Journey: June 1999

"The Landscape of Identity: Gender, Class and the "Other" in the Travel Writing of Edith Wharton"

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Valerie Smith
University of Connecticut
VAM95001@UCONNNVM.UCONN.EDU

This paper will discuss Edith Wharton's construction of the "Other" in her belletristic travel writing through a multifaceted lens of gender, class, and national affiliation. It will address passages from Italian Backgrounds, A Motor-Flight Through France, Fighting France, French Ways and Their Meaning, and In Morocco in examining the complexities of the geographics of self-identity in constructing visions of the Other; a project often oversimplified in terms of valuing one articulation of identity over all others. It will discuss the norms, values, and beliefs of the social sphere into which Edith Wharton was born in America in 1862 and the ways in which they shaped her consciousness of Others.

Cultural narratives that fix us in relation to our roles in society are powerful forces that determine our perception of truth, reality, the natural. Wharton obviously recognizes the power of narrative in relation to perceived cultural value as she notes in Italian Backgrounds, one of her earliest travel books, with "there is a sharp line of demarcation between the guide-book city and its background. In some cases, the latter is composed mainly of objects at which the guide-book tourist has been taught to look askance, or rather which he has been counselled to pass by without a look" (180). Thus it is narrative rather than nature or innate value that determines merit. Wharton was intimately aware of the cultural narrative that undervalued the role of intelligent women. It is this awareness that keeps her from succumbing to the type of nostalgic longing male travel writers, such as Henry James, often reveal for a more "authentic" past, a past whose rules they understood as more "natural"; i.e., more in keeping with the ideology (and their privileged position within that ideology) from which they benefited. Edith Wharton rejects this type of nostalgic narrative in her travel writing since it is to her advantage, as a woman, to challenge such cultural absolutism.

Edith Wharton, as a member of the privileged classes experienced early on and firsthand her culture's marginalization of women and especially intellectual women. Wharton's awareness of her own marginalized position within the terms of her culture, as evidenced in her autobiography, A Backward Glance, her fiction (see Ammons), and as illustrated in her autobiographical persona throughout her travel writings, allows her the critical consciousness to challenge the absolutism of particular cultural narratives in relation to gender. On the other hand, her unquestioning acceptance of particular cultural narratives in relation to class and race, also illustrated in her travel writing, exposes the limits of her critical consciousness as artifacts of her class affiliation as evidenced, in particular, in In Morocco.

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Valerie Smith
VAM95001@UCONNNVM.UCONN.EDU

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