THE SUBVERTED GAZE: HAWTHORNE, HOWELLS, JAMES AND THE DISCOURSE OF TRAVEL

Abstract

The stereotype is the word repeated without any magic, any enthusiasm, as though it were natural, as though by some miracle this recurring word were adequate on each occasion. . . . Nietzsche has observed that "truth" is only the solidification of old metaphors. So in this regard the stereotype is the present path of "truth, " the palpable feature which shifts the invented ornament to the canonical, constraining form of the signified. 1 Roland Barthes We need a critical theory of guidebooks.2 Paul Fussell I American representations of European travel in the latter half of the nineteenth century reveal a problematic tension between pleasure and anxiety. While the inscription of travel originates in the pleasures of visual engagement with an old and richly suggestive culture, the descriptive focus on "place" is often disrupted or postponed by a dilatory articulation of generic constraints which preclude a prompt, original or accurate rendering of the object of the touristic gaze. Traditionally, the travel sketch has been regarded as a leisurely, amateurish mode of discourse intended to "involve the mind in the eye's delights," and which "served as a critical exercise that activated and sharpened the discriminating eye."3 While Thomas A. Pauly correctly insists that the literary sketch privileges "a calculated incompleteness" and "a tentative mode of perception," critical inquiry into this complex genre needs to go further in examining travel writers' anxious awareness of the limits of, and obstacles to, representation.4