School of Humanities and Social Sciences

American Travel Narratives of the Orient (1830-1870) A Study in Nineteenth Century Latent Orientalism by Cansu Özge Özmen

a Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Field

Literary Studies

Approved Dissertation Committee Name and title of Chair Prof. Thomas Rommel Name and title of Committee Member Prof. Brendan Dooley Name and title of Committee Member Prof. Martin Heusser

Date of Defense: 21.01.2010

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

I declare that this dissertation has been written independently and has not been submitted at another university for the conferral of a Degree.

çekirdek aileme,

Abstract:

This dissertation seeks to examine the rise of interest in American travel narratives and increasing Orientalist representations on direct encounter with the ―Orient‖ within the following six immediately popular and influential narratives: David Porter‘s Constantinople and Its Environs by an American (1835), Nathaniel P. Willis‘ Pencillings by the Way (1836), John Lloyd Stephens‘ Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petræa, and the Holy Land (1837), and Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland (1838), Bayard Taylor‘s The Land of the Saracen; or, Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily and Spain (1854), and Mark Twain‘s Traveling with the Innocents Abroad; or the New Pilgrim’s Progress. The study traces 19th century American exceptionalist discourses in these narratives via categories of latent Orientalism and argue for a by no means uniform but an indigenous 19th century latent American Orientalism prevalent in these six texts. The analysis also draws on the substantial influence of the journey narrative both as a motif and as a genre in the 19th century American literary scene and its historically embedded impact. The work treats the discursive preferences of the authors as conscious strategies or subliminal reflexes in the national identity formation processes that these narratives partake in.

Contents Introduction: ...... 7 Chapter I ...... 18 Vacillating Testimony of the First Minister Resident to the Ottoman Empire: A Traveler in Residence and his Environs ...... 18 I. Savoire-Faire and the Audacity of its Echo ...... 18 II. Business and Pleasure ...... 23 III. Knowledge Management and Taxonomy ...... 29 IV. Porter‘s Strongest Suit ...... 38 Chapter II ...... 44 Beau Monde Tracing Byron: Nathaniel Parker Willis’ Pencillings by the Way ...... 44 I. Where Formal and Commercial Concerns Meet ...... 44 II. Nat Willis ...... 54 III. By the Way ...... 59 IV. A Genteel Reassurance ...... 64 Chapter III...... 72 An Havoc with Pride and Truth in a Discursive Terra Incognita: The Great American Traveler in Turkey, Egypt, Holy Land, and Arabia Petrae& Greece, Russia, Turkey and Poland ...... 72 I. Memory and the Eye ...... 72 II. Holism in a New Perspective ...... 77 III. Sehnsucht ...... 85 IV. Authorial Intent and Reader Reception ...... 89 V. Inheritance vs. Experience ...... 95 Chapter IV ...... 102 The Lands of the Saracen: A Genteel Poet in the Land of the East ...... 102 I. Prelude to Travel Narratives of the Orient ...... 102 II. Bayard Taylor ...... 104 III. Fame and Prominence: Writing for the Future ...... 110 IV. Inspiration and Ambivalence ...... 115 Chapter V ...... 131 Sinners on a Pilgrimage; Innocents on a Literary Quest in Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad ...... 131 I. Sam ...... 131 II. Thematic Scheme and Travel ...... 136 III. Demythologizing the Orient ...... 141

IV. ―Belatedness‖ and Search for Originality ...... 149 Conclusion: ...... 157

Introduction:

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 397 travel accounts that dealt with the Orient, either partially or specifically were published by 314 authors from a wide array of occupational backgrounds as much as a hundred, among which were predominantly missionaries, clergymen, sailors, authors, diplomats, artists, lawyers, and physicians. Only two of these narratives were published in the 18th century which fall into the category of survival literature. One of them is the renown narrative of John Foss, A journal of the captivity and sufferings of John Foss; several years a prisoner at Algiers: together with some account of the treatment of Christian slaves when sick written after captivity in Algiers. The other one is Daniel Saunder‘s A journal of the travels and sufferings of Daniel Saunders, Jun., a mariner on board the ship Commerce, of Boston, Samuel Johnson, Commander, which was cast away near Cape Morebet, on the coast of Arabia, July 10, 1792 published in 1794.

Two historical and commercial events mark the beginning and the end of the period in question (1830-1870.) Although 7 more accounts had been published before 1830, what makes the year memorable is the Treaty of Trade and Navigation that is signed between the Ottoman Porte and the United States.1 Apart from the tributary treaties with Maghreb regencies of Algeria, Tripoli, and Tunisia which were under the Ottoman rule but semi autonomous in their internal and to a certain extent external affairs, the Barbary Wars of 1801-1805 and the Algiers War of 1814-1815, the Treaty of Trade and Navigation is the first bilateral political recognition regarding the United States in the region. The analysis covers the period in which the knowledge production of the Orient was relatively limited to the pens of a few, that is until 1870, when the steamship competition reached its peak and the prices of a transatlantic trip were reduced to the extent that middle class families with a substantial income could afford. Already in the 1840s, with the introduction of transatlantic steamships the overseas travel in numbers of passengers reached from ―a few thousands annually to as many as thirty thousand.‖2 After the Civil War, the

1Mustafa Aydın and Çağrı Erhan, ed., Turkish-American Relations: Past, Present and Future, (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 5. 2Foster Rhea Dulles, ―A Historical View of Americans Abroad,‖ The annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science; Vol. 368, 1966, 11-20, p. 13.

7 appearance of guidebooks of travel and the emergence of Thomas Cook in the 1870s, as well as the advent of the railroad in mid-century, transatlantic voyage cost only 100 dollars.3

During the period on which this study focuses (1830-1870), 176 travel books that included depictions of one or more parts of the Orient were published. (Orient as referred to here is the North African countries that were under the Ottoman Empire rule in the beginning of the nineteenth century; Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya and the Middle East). Out of the 395 accounts published in all of the nineteenth century, 105 of these accounts were written with religious incentives; 23 of them were missionary accounts and 82 of them were written by clergymen who were either missionaries themselves working in a single location or were on missionary tours or they visited the Holy Land and shared their expertise and impressions with the American public. 21 of the books were written by sailors who recounted specific expeditions or excursions or wrote semi-autobiographical accounts of their voyages and the places they visited during the course of their professional duties. 21 of them were written by journalists some of whom like John Russell Young accompanied official expeditions and recorded their impressions during the journey or like Nathaniel Parker Willis sent comprehensive and descriptive letters home to be published in weekly newspapers and upon his return published the collected letters in volumes. 13 of the accounts were penned by soldiers some of whom recorded their personal observations about distant lands without a particular motivation and some of them like Emory Upton wrote extensively on the military customs and personnel in his The armies of Asia and Europe: embracing official reports on the armies of Japan, China, India, Persia, Italy, Russia, Austria, Germany, France, and England, accompanied by letters descriptive of a journey from Japan to the Caucasus published in 1878. Finally there were the occasional businessmen, lawyers, diplomats, doctors, naturalists, educators, travelers, and engineers; the rest are listed as authors by profession.4

Among these 176 narratives, there are more than six books that attained immediate popularity. Since the sales figures (with the notable exception of Mark Twain‘s Innocents Abroad, which sold seventy thousand copies in the first year it was published ―over three times

3 Ibid., p. 14. 4 Harold F. Smith, American Travellers Abroad: a bibliography of accounts published before 1900, (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1999)

8 as many copies in its first year as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer sold in its first year) 5are no longer available for the most part; it is not possible to base the selection on mere popularity of the accounts. Yet as the genre of travel literature developed cumulatively as any other literary genre, the works in question should be considered as samples that epitomize an era, a manner of self-definition via creating, repeating or disseminating discourses on foreign lands. As Melton suggests:

…such writing exhibits a wealth of psychological, sociological, and political complexities, in part because travel writing as a genre is undeniably embedded in a complex historical matrix. In travel writing the relations between "text" and "context" (so central to much recent theory) cry out for analysis. Travel writing provides a particularly effective illustration of the new historicist dictum that every text is also a social act, caught in a complex web of power and authority.6 The six travel narratives that are under scrutiny are prototypes of the genre belonging to the given period, as well as being the ones that reached the widest public audience according to many sources and bibliographies such as David Finnie‘s Pioneers East which is among the most extensive researches on the American Middle Eastern relations and literary productions as a result of the encounters, Marwan M. Obediat‘s American Literature and Orientalism which is a rare and prominent study that surveys the representation of Islam in American literary works. Finally, Harold F. Smith‘s American travelers abroad: a bibliography of accounts published before 1900 provided a list of almost all of the narratives published before 1900. What the selected texts also share in common is the author‘s acknowledged claim to account his travels in a unique American manner, breaking from a tradition of customary representations of the Orient. However, that unique American tone consisted of many elements that the genre of travel or the works entailing a journey narrative made use of since the 16th century. Moreover, they all provide the examples as do many works of the era, required for the second level of this analysis; that is representational patterns that fit in to the three categories that will be explained below. Aside from the popularity aspect, the texts were selected on the bases of particular commonalities that will be explicated in the respective chapters.

Other literature on the American travel narratives of the Orient include works such as Hilton Obenzinger‘s American Palestine, in which he inquires into what he calls the Holy Land

5 Jeffrey Alan Melton, Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement, (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 2002), p. 2. 6http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3708/is_199904/ai_n8836216/

Mania by looking at two works, Mark Twain‘s Innocents Abroad and Herman Melville‘s epic length poem Clarel. His analysis situated these texts within the framework of covenantal-settler colonialism. Larzer Ziff in Return Passages, analyzed the works of major travelers. Malini Johar Schueller‘s U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890; Fuad Sha‘ban‘s Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought: The Roots of Orientalism in America both of which argued for an indigenous American Orientalism endorsed and developed according to American particularities, independent from European Orientalism.

The works under scrutiny are chronologically listed as Constantinople and Its Environs, by an American (1835) by David Porter, Pencillings by the Way (1835) by Nathaniel P. Willis, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837), and Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland (1838) by John L. Stephens, The Land of the Saracen; or, Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily and Spain (1854) by Bayard Taylor, Traveling With the Innocents Abroad; or the New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869) by Mark Twain. As stated above, the works in question were six immediately popular and influential texts published during the given period that represent preoccupation with their peculiar narrative techniques themes that are going to be scrutinized under three latent Orientalism categories; political, sexual, and cultural. These themes can be further defined in the following manners:

1. Orient as a land of despotism, brutality, savagery and ignorance, lacking the progressive dynamics of the West, 2. Orient as an enigmatic haven, filled with treasure, pleasure, joy and phantasmagoric beauties, 3. Orient as a grotesque scene; attractive and repulsive, old and timeless, deserted and overpopulated.

Although they are self-explanatory, it might be useful to explore the categories shortly. The first category encompasses the depiction of political institutions as well as authority in general, particularly in comparison to American institutions, democracy, freedom and reinstatement of American ideals since the foundation of the young republic. The second category deals with the graphic descriptions of the body, both male and female as a passive, non- functional object, only to serve a purpose once described by the non-participant traveler. The last

10 category inquires more into the contradictory nature of the representations of cultural practices such as religious customs or social norms revealing an unconscious impulse along with constant comparison on the traveler‘s part. The chapters of the following study are not structured according to these categories because when they are exemplified by excerpts from the texts it becomes self-evident how they correspond to each other. The study itself is divided into five chapters with each corresponding to one of the authors and it is structured chronologically according to the publication dates of their works as listed above.

Edward Said asserts that ―Americans will not feel quite the same way about the Orient [Middle East and North Africa]‖ as the British and French do and that ―their understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense‖7 because of their lack of a direct hegemonial relationship to the Orient in the 19th century. Granted that arguing for the existence of an American visionary imperialistic discourse over the 19th century would be far-fetched (although one should not neglect Malini Johar Schueller‘s compelling work U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890,) by the same token it is impossible to deny the emergence of an indigenous American Orientalist discourse before World War II. However, this discourse reveals itself as variation of the deeply embedded American exceptionalism intricately linked with the aforementioned categories of latent Orientalism. Said distinguishes between latent and manifest Orientalisms as such:

The distinction I am making is really between an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Orientalism, and the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth, which I shall call manifest Orientalism. Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant.8 Additionally, latent Orientalism is more or less stable compared to manifest Orientalism with manifest Orientalism determined by the changing relationships of power and domination expressed through scholarly disciplines, governments and institutions. Since the variable of power and domination was absent in the equation in question, authors‘ discourses are latent regardless of the determination to break away from a latent tradition. The variables of the manifest discourse can be replaced by the variables of national discourses in the point of origin

7 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 1. 8 Ibid., p. 206

11 of the authors. By shifting the perspective to the United States before 1870, I am exploring the variables of this constant discourse and its domestic framework based on socio-cultural contexts. Said deals with the internal consistencies of the British and French Orientalist discourses; whereas this study deals with the internal ambivalences that signify the inner struggles and anxieties of self-definition and a strong urge for reassurance that America is not only comparable to the rest of the world and is not only able to textually dominate the Orient just like the major culture it is struggling to break away from, but that it is superior to Europe and the Orient for different reasons. Similarly to Said, I don‘t consider the discourse as ―a structure of lies and myth;‖9 therefore, except when it is helpful in analyzing other factors, accuracy of the depictions of the Orient in the selected texts is irrelevant to the aim of the study.

Since accuracy of the accounts, whether their reflection overlapped with the facts of socio-historical context of the 19th century Ottoman Empire, have not been of primary relevance to the study, the selectiveness in the historical data the research provided was limited to the selectiveness of the contextual representations of the authors. Therefore, works such as History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. II: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey by Ezel Kural Shaw and Stanford Shaw, Pioneers East by David Finnie, Turkish-American Relations: past, present, future by Çağrı Erhan, That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence by W. S. Clair, and ―Ottoman Response to the Discovery of America and the New Route to India‖ by Abbas Hamdani were incorporated into the study particularly to expand on the circumstances of David Porter‘s arrival and residence in İstanbul, and his observations of Sultan Mahmoud II. Given the special status Greece enjoyed in the American public imagination in parallel with the authors‘ special treatment of the Greek War of Independence, and the interest expressed in the recognition of the United States overseas, a historical overview of the American-Ottoman relations and the American assistance to Greece during the War of Independence was provided. The intended results of the research was more intricately linked with the socio-cultural and historical circumstances that molded the American readership‘s consciousness than with the ―true‖ nature of the objects of descriptions. Only through this consciousness, can one come close to being informed about the representational preferences of the authors thus avoiding a comparison between the ―true‖ nature of the object

9 Ibid., p. 6.

12 and the nature of the depicted object and settling instead on a comparative approach of the inner consistencies or ambivalences within one text or among the texts which were selected for analysis.

Meyda Yeğenoğlu, in her Colonial Fantasies: towards a feminist reading of Orientalism sets out to explore into the mechanism behind latent Orientalism from a psychoanalytical perspective. She points out the gap in the scholarship of Orientalism by asserting that: ―although Said refers, in passing, to the concept of latent Orientalism as the realm where the unconscious desires, fantasies, and dreams about the Orient reside, he never elaborates its nature nor the processes and mechanisms involved in its working.‖10 By providing comprehensive biographical information and analyzing the selected passages in a comparative manner, I set out to explore the psychosocial driving forces behind the discursive preferences of the authors. The comparisons were limited to American Orientalisms. As the primary purpose is to demonstrate the extent to which American authors have been able to denounce their discursive inheritance from non- American Orientalism, one would have to refer to the non-American authors mentioned by their American counterparts to determine the individual inheritance. Then one would have to apply the comparative approach to individual authors in a case-by-case manner since there is not necessarily an overlap between claimed inheritances. Another possible approach would be to handpick the prominent works of the preceding century. Yet clearly it would be easy to be too selective and manipulate the primary sources and prove either perspective with this method. Thus, it would be as hazardous as the possible reductionism at stake in all studies dealing with national discourses. When Yeğenoğlu points to the binary economy which Said‘s own argument entails she writes that according to Said, Orientalism: ―…is also characterized by synchronic essentialism (making the Orient synonymous with stability and unchanging eternality) and diachronic forms of history (recognition of the possibility of instability which suggests change, growth, decline and movement in the Orient).‖11 It is this very ambivalence that the selected examples demonstrate and that the research is centered around.

Some other befitting and beneficial concepts that I borrowed are from Mary Louise Pratt as defined in her Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Pratt defines contact zones

10 Meyda Yeğenoğlu, ColonialFantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 23 11 Ibid., p. 24

13 as ―social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination –such as colonization and slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today.‖12 Her definition is not inapplicable because although there is no visible imperialistic activity carried out by the United States regarding the Middle East in the centuries in question, there are overt suggestions of Western imperialism over the Orient if not specifically the United States. A literal understanding of this definition is inapplicable but the ―highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination‖ are realized through the signifying practices of these narratives. These signifying practices inform us equally about the culture encountered –regardless of the reliability of the end product- and the evolving perceptions of the self and nationhood. Therefore, I consider it appropriate to define the described territories as contact zones before the fact, yet an era in which the contact that is imaginary was transferred into a non-fictional genre. This formal contradiction also creates representational ambiguities in the content of these narratives. Another term I used in reference to Mark Twain‘s Innocents Abroad is ―anti-conquest‖ by which Pratt refers to ―the strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony.‖13 In Pencillings by the Way by Nathaniel Parker Willis, the ―anti-conquest‖ hero‘s attitude is exemplified by his aloof pretensions to gentility, his ostensibly inborn superiority to his subjects of description. Twain exerts the narrative persona‘s ―innocence‖ by parodying the ignorant and superficial American tourist through reflections on himself. I conclude neither their treatment of the foreign subjects nor the reflexive identity formation becomes a uniform practice by virtue of these commonalities because it is a formative process that is in trial. Thus, it is not a finalized conclusion. It is latent through inheritance, lack of direct interest and through not being determined solely interactively. Yet it becomes organic through domestic concerns and individual necessities.

One last vital term that I decontextualized and reappropriated originates in Homi Bhabha‘s ―Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,‖ which he uses to explicate the tense relationship between the colonized and the colonizer; where the colonizer tries to transform the colonized into a mirror image of himself but during this process fears the semblance and

12Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 7. 13 Ibid., p. 7.

14 considers it threatening. I used the concept of ―ambivalence of mimicry‖ to explore the assumed spiritual connection Bayard Taylor enjoys with the Orient while meanwhile he also tries to keep a safe distance from the Oriental for fear that his fellow Americans would dismiss his accounts as unreliable and that he might not as convincingly assert the reassurance of American cultural superiority. Percy G. Adams‘ Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, one of the most insightful and expansive works on travel literature, has also been a major inspiration for this study, especially pertaining to the composition of fact and fiction in the genre.

Originality in general and Harold Bloom‘s ―anxiety of influence‖ in particular are concepts that have been frequently explored and applied during the course of the study. Whereas Said asserts that, ―...we entertain a mythology of creation, in which it is believed that artistic genius, an original talent, or a powerful intellect can leap beyond the confines of its own time and place in order to put before the world a new work,‖14 there were quite a number of instances where the author(s) consciously defied the contemporary paradigm and jeopardized their appeal to the public by going against the tide of deep-seated sensibilities. These examples were also singled out by taking the ambiguity they contributed to the discursive framework (when contrasted with the information they disseminated and regarded as ―morally neutral and objectively valid‖15 based on ―biological determinism and moral-political admonishment‖) 16into consideration. One cannot disregard the fact that ―Travel writing provides an especially stunning example of the ways genres, conventions, and paradigms condition any view of the world, preventing (i.e., coming-before) any such thing as an ‗innocent eye.‘‖17

Jan Borm argues that: ―it [travel] is not a genre, but a collective term for a variety of texts both predominantly fictional and non-fictional whose main theme is travel.‖18 Although the hybrid nature of travel literature is undeniable (this definition disregards autobiography as the dominant subgenre of travel), I must expand on the former quality of the genre: the fictional quality. Aside from the not entirely but for the most part fictional characters that accompany Mark Twain throughout his journey, regarding travel narratives of the Orient, the fictional

14 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 202. 15 Ibid., p. 205. 16 Ibid., p. 207. 17http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3708/is_199904/ai_n8836216/ 18 Jan Borm, ―Defining Travel: On the Travel Book, Travel Writing and Terminology,‖ in Perspectives on Travel Writing,ed. Hooper, Glenn, Youngs, Tim. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 14.

15 quality of the narratives gradually but purposefully unfolds. As a result of the clash between the preconceptions and reality, the outcome often has elements without the standard intention of fictionalizing the account. The audience who were middle class Americans who mostly could not afford a Grand Tour of Europe and the tour of the Holy Land and hence became enthusiastic armchair travelers and consequently depended on the author‘s observations to form their impressions, has no way of testing the plausibility of the information accounted in the narratives; at least there is no formal sign. Strictly speaking, as there is no authorial intent on fictionalizing the account either, the distorted and invalid information based on prefigurations remains indistinguishable from the objective, and the accurate information. At certain times, the narrative is comparable to the modern day mockumentary when the nature of the film is unbeknownst to the audience.

Therefore, in light of these thematic and theoretical considerations some of the questions posed during the analyses of these six particular texts are: How did the authors formulate this other as a known type by reverberating exceptionalist discourses? How did the author‘s discursive strategies position the U.S. and define the American of the young republic? Aside from direct comparative approaches, how do they reassure the sentiment of reassurance to the American they define and contribute to an indigenous American Orientalism?

Chapter I

Vacillating Testimony of the First Minister Resident to the Ottoman Empire: A Traveler in Residence and his Environs

I. Savoir-Faire and the Audacity of its Echo

Allied naval powers of Britain, France, and Russia, after signing the Treaty of London on July 6, 1827, destroyed almost the whole Ottoman fleet (led by Mahmoud II) and Muhammad Ali Pasha‘s Egyptian fleet at the Battle of Navarino fought as a part of the Greek War of Independence on October 20, 1827. It was a turning point in the war and after eight years of resistance to suppress the Greek struggle, the Ottoman Empire gave in and signed the Treaty of Constantinople in 1832 recognizing the full independent state of Greece. Until the battle of Navarino, the Sublime Porte was not in desperate need to form a new alliance. The defeat became the primary reason for the Ottoman consent to sign a treaty of commerce with the United States which was signed on May 7, 1830 in İstanbul.19 The rationale behind the Sublime Porte‘s consent was articulated in the separate act containing a secret clause to the treaty in addition to its nine articles. The secret article guaranteed that the Sublime Porte, whenever she wishes can make contracts with the American government to buy timber and order war vessels to be built in the United States. This provision bearing the recent defeat and destruction of the Ottoman fleet in mind, foresaw the rebuilding of the Ottoman navy. The secret clause to the treaty was not ratified by the Senate due to Washington‘s still valid dictum of neutrality and Monroe‘s isolationism. Andrew Jackson was aware that unless the secret clause was ratified the Sublime Porte‘s hesitations would overcome the willingness to sign a favorable treaty with the United States and did not want the United States to lose the most favorable nation status that this treaty rendered.

David Porter, the former commander-in-chief of the Mexican navy was appointed as the chargé d‘affaires and made known that his first duty was to put the treaty in effect and deliver

19Hunter Miller, ed., Treaties and Other Acts of the United States of America, Vol. 3, Documents 41-79: 1819-1835, (United States Government Printing Office, Washington: 1931), p. 541.

Andrew Jackson‘s letter to the Sultan explaining the rejection of the separate secret article.20 The letter did not prove to be satisfying enough to avert discontent on the side of the Porte. With diplomatic finesse and savoir-faire, David Porter substituted the secret clause with a letter officially called paper No. 2, which contains his commitment to the Porte‘s wishes:

…I David Porter, Chargé d‘affaires acting for [and]…in conformity with the orders of the President of the United States, and as an Equivalent for the aforesaid rejected Separate Article, hold myself, at all time, ready to give my friendly council and advice, to the Sublime Porte, as to the best manner of obtaining ships of War, wood for their construction, and timber of every description, from the United States, and to obtain all the advantages contemplated by the said separate article, without violating the Laws of the United States, or conflicting with their engagements with other nations.21 Thus started Porter‘s career in Constantinople in 1831, which lasted until his death in the same city in 1843. The unconditional assistance he promised was realized through first William Eckford and then his student Foster Rhodes who helped develop the Turkish fleet almost from scratch by the summer of 1839.22 In 1836, the Sublime Porte requested that American naval officers serve in the Turkish navy which would not be permitted by the American government for the same reasons the secret clause was not ratified. However, at long last, and through years of persistence the United States managed to get the Sublime Porte‘s consent for a treaty and increased its latent influence in the Empire.

David Porter was born on February 1, 1780 in Lyndon, Illinois. His grandfather was a merchant marine and his father, also a David Porter served as a midshipman during the American War of Independence. David Porter, the charge d‘affaires was not going to be the last in the bloodline. His son, David Dixon Porter was to become one of the naval heroes of the Civil War as well as another one of his sons William David Porter, whom he disowned due to financial and personal reasons. In 1799, at 19 years David Porter became a second lieutenant in the Experiment that canvassed the West Indies on which he was later assigned as a first lieutenant.23 During the Barbary Wars, when he was the first lieutenant in USS Philadelphia under the command of Captain William Bainbridge, the frigate that had first served in the Quasi War with France, ran aground on the Tunisian shores during the blockade of Tripoli harbor. Reportedly, a

20Ibid., p. 584. 21Ibid., p. 587. 22 David H. Finnie, Pioneers East: The Early American Experience in the Middle East, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 81. 23 David F. Long, Nothing Too Daring: A Biography of Commodore David Porter, 1780-1843, (Annapolis, Maryland: United States Naval Institute, 1970), p. 12-14.

19 crew of 309 including Bainbridge and Porter were taken captive by the Bashaw of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanlı.24 The Philadelphia was later destroyed in 1803 by Edward Preble to prevent its inclusion in the Tripolitan navy, when Bainbridge and Porter were still being held captive. After nineteen months and three days most of the crew were freed when the Tripolitan War ended.25 Instead of going back to the United States, Porter remained in the Mediterranean on active duty until 1807. In 1808, he married Evalina Anderson with whom he had ten children -first of whom was named William after Captain Bainbridge-.26 Although he remained married until the end of his life he and his wife rarely had a pleasant exchange after the first few years of their marriage.

In 1811, he was given the command of USS Essex. Due to his familial military background, unlike other travel writers, in some respects he was adamantly resentful of Great Britain. In other words, he saw no cultural roots to claim in Europe, nor reminisced with nostalgic sentiments. He overtook HMS Alert, which was the first English ship to surrender during the War of 1812. The same year he was ordered by Bainbridge ―to plague enemy sea lanes to and from Asia, or round Cape Horn to seek British whalers in the Pacific.‖27 The literary consequence of this voyage was Journal of a cruise made to the Pacific Ocean, by Captain David Porter, in the United States frigate Essex, in the years 1812, 1813, and 1814 some parts of which was published by Washington Irving whom Porter was already closely acquainted with, in the Analectic Magazine in 1814. After the journal‘s publication as a whole, Porter was vehemently criticized by English critics, causing him to address his preface to the second edition in 1822, to those criticisms. He wrote: ―…if he occasionally indulged in any remarks derogatory to the character of the enemy, he was not without ample provocation.‖28All in all, he concluded that the animosity his journal aroused in England was a result of the ―mortifying disasters‖ that occurred during the war that broke England‘s confidence in the face of the United States. In the preface he often refers to himself in the third person in which he replies all the attacks directed towards his account by quoting them at length. His cruise to the Pacific was considered successful in contributing to the American war effort and to Porter‘s own financial situation. In 1813, they headed for the Marquesas Islands, and stayed with the Taii tribe who inhabited the

24Ibid., p. 24. 25Ibid., p. 32. 26Ibid., p. 51. 27Ibid., p. 72. 28 David Porter, Journal of a cruise made to the Pacific Ocean, by Captain David Porter, in the United States frigate Essex, in the years 1812, 1813, and 1814, Vol. I, (New York: J. & J. Harper, Printers), 1822, p. v.

20 southern coast of Nukahiva. Porter was full of praise for the beauty and sexual assertiveness of the young women of the tribe which caused him to receive harsh criticism from his reviewers. On November 19, 1813, David Porter declared that he annexed Nukahiva Island, renamed as Madison Island and assured the islanders of his good intentions concerning their future. Neither President Madison nor then Secretary of State James Monroe expressed any interest for Porter‘s self-assigned annexation and his letters.29

The actions he preferred to take with regard to the inter-tribal wars of the island are very revealing of Porter‘s character and disposition. The inter-tribal weaponry was constructed in order to demonstrate power and inflict non-fatal wounds. When the Taiis requested Porter‘s assistance against Taipis, after numerous attempts to discourage them by verbal threats, Porter organized an expedition and burnt down their largest town. In the long run, his skills at self- justification and his opportune arrogance overshadowed his initial apologetic, remorseful disposition. His biographer remarks: ―his influence was baleful and it formed part of one of the great horror stories of modern times: the decimation of the Polynesians and the eradication of their native culture.‖30 After the Marquesas Islands, Porter proceeded to Chile and entered into altercations with the English frigate Phoebe docked near the harbor of Valparaiso. It resulted in the almost total destruction of Essex and Essex Junior, and major casualties on the American side. Porter went back to the States. In 1815, he was selected as a commissioner to the Board of Navy Commissioners of which he was a member until 1822.31 At the end of 1822, he was appointed to the West India Squadron to suppress piracy. Lieutenant Charles Platt of the Beagle 3 landed at Fajardo, Puerto Rico pursuing a pirate, in order to investigate the rumors of stolen property from the American Consul. The authorities, refusing to recognize their titles, detained them for the day. Porter invaded the portal town with two hundred men and threatened the to destroy Foxhardo unless the authorities apologized for the way they had treated the lieutenant. This event marked the beginning of his occupational and personal demise, which he also considered to be intricately linked with the beginning of his personal troubles. When Porter returned to United States, his act was not sanctioned, and upon being court-martialed, he

29 David F. Long, Nothing Too Daring: A Biography of Commodore David Porter, 1780-1843, (Annapolis, Maryland: United States Naval Institute), 1970, p. 124. 30Ibid., p. 135. 31Ibid., p. 175.

21 received a detention of six months with full pay.32 The two charges against him were ―disobedience of orders, and conduct unbecoming an officer,‖ and ―insubordinate conduct.‖33 He pleaded ―not guilty to all and singular the charges and specifications…as designating no offense known to any law enacted for the government of the Navy…‖34 Too proud to acknowledge his responsibility in the chain of events, he resigned from naval service in August, 1826. Although proud of his occupational status and having clung to his strong nationalistic sentiments all his life, his bitterness becomes clear when what he wrote retrospectively of his experiences in the navy in 1832 is taken into consideration: ―During the whole thirty and one years, that I have been in the naval service, I do not recollect having passed one day, I will not say of happiness, but of pleasure.‖35 Yet it should be noted that his retrospective frustration with his occupation did not interfere with his patriotic feelings in the least. Those feelings are visibly prevalent in the account. His son and his biographer Admiral David Dixon Porter reflected on how significant it was for his father to represent his country respectably.

One of the first things he did, after establishing himself at San Stephano, was to erect a tall flagstaff in the centre of the grounds, on which every morning at 8 o‘clock, the American flag was hoisted by the capougee, who went through with as much ceremony on the occasion, as if they were on board a ship of war, the Commodore meanwhile watching them from the portico, to see that the flag he loved was treated with proper respect…36 Meanwhile, Joel R. Poinsett, American minister to Mexico was aware that Guadalupe Victoria was seeking for an admiral for his navy.37 Porter, for want of a better option, accepted to task to oversee the development of the Mexican navy. Frustrated with not gaining a much needed victory over Spain, the loss of his nephew in action and the loss of his son to yellow fever, Porter resorted to his usual boastful aggression and brooding over financial difficulties. His antagonism towards the Mexican government was not one sided. In 1829, he returned to the United States,

32Jack Sweetman, American Naval History: An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775- Present, (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001), p. 38. 33Robert Beale, A Report of the Trial of Commodore David Porter of the Navy of the United States Before a General Court Martial Held at Washington, In July, 1825, Washington, 1825, p. 7. 34Ibid., p. 10. 35David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs in a Series of Letters, Exhibiting the Actual State of the Manners, Customs, and Habits of the Turks, Armenians, Jews, and Greeks as Modified by the Policy of Sultan Mahmoud by an American, Long Resident at Constantinople, Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers), 1835, p. 11. 36 David Dixon Porter, Memoir of Commodore David Porter, Of the United States Navy, (New York: J. Munsell, Publisher), 1875, p. 408. 37 Elmer W. Flaccus, ―Commodore David Porter and the Mexican Navy,‖ The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Aug., 1954), p. 366 pp. 365-373.

22 saving himself from the ―den of devils.‖38 After turning down a number of offers of appointment he accepted the position of Consul-General to the Barbary States. Yet in Port Mahon, Balearic Islands, the news reached him that France had invaded Algiers and his position was rendered obsolete. A year later in 1831, he was sent to Constantinople with his first duty to oversee the resolution of the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation.

II. Business and Pleasure

The ratifications were exchanged on October 3, 1831 during which Porter was present. On Letter IV, published in Constantinople and Its Environs, dated August 3, 1831 (August instead of October because of the temporal difference in the Islamic calendar) he gave a detailed description of the events that took place at Reis Effendi‘s (Foreign Minister) house. Due to the protocol and Porter‘s inferior rank, he could not have a formal audience with the Sultan.39 He remarks that the events were not characterized by ―oriental splendour‖ and that the readers have been long ―gulled by travelers.‖40

The minister and the Efendi had a good deal of conversation about the United States, and particularly about our Indian population, of which he asked many very pertinent questions as to the nature of their government, their relations with the United States, their progress in civilization, their number, the interest the government had in treating with them, making them presents, establishing schools, and promoting their civilization. After the minister had answered all his questions, he asked him this truly Turkish question: "Could not the United States do all this better, and in much shorter time, by sending an armed force?‖ The minister informed him that our system of policy toward them was one of benevolence: that as we had taken from them their country, and as their race became almost extinct, we looked on them as entitled to our charity, and felt ourselves bound to do them all the good in our power. He thought this ―all very kind, but not very politic.41

The exchange of the ratifications took place almost two months after Porter‘s arrival at Constantinople. Diplomacy in inter-personal or political relations had not been his strongest suit thus far. However, during his residency, there were only complaints about him on the American side, rather than on the Ottoman side. His overall manner in his portrayals is not radically different from his Journal of a cruise made to the Pacific Ocean, in that, his lengthy physical descriptions of women, their figure, and attire what those connote about their moral norms; the

38Porter to Joel R. Poinsett, Aug. 19, 1829, Gilpin Collection, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia, Penna. 39 David H. Finnie, Pioneers East: The Early American Experience in the Middle East, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 1967, p. 94. 40David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers), 1835, p. 49. 41Ibid., p. 52.

23 boastful undertones that accompany these depictions, overtones of nationalism and essentialism are extant in both. However, what makes his biographer Long call him ―the first imperialist,‖ those impulses of annexation, invasion, interference in domestic affairs of distant lands are actions and discourses of the past for Porter. In fact, David Long recounts a correspondence between the American consul at Salonika and Porter that took place in 1836. The consul informs porter that Ottoman officials were willing to sell Cyprus to the United States. ―The Commodore advised the Consul to forget that the offer had been made, then fired off to Washington Consul‘s letter along with his own advice that America had already enough land and should avoid the evils of colony grabbing.‖42 He delimits his spirit for entrepreneurism to what directly concerns him: commerce. ―It is astonishing how indifferent our countrymen are to the rich commerce of this great and wonderful empire, as well as that of Black Sea…Is this owing to our indifference, or our ignorance?‖ This barbed comment; as well his frivolous passion to convince Paulding of the pleasantries of the Empire and the Turks coaxed towards his countrymen -if we disregard his bitterness towards those who court-martialed him and turned their backs on him- seems to have been motivated by relatively personal reasons. He was struggling to overturn the image of his career as a failure which was clearly ingrained in his mind as well as in his contemporaries‘.

Throughout his letters from Constantinople he writes consistently with this anti- imperialist notion that he expressed with regard to Cyprus. The geographical distance of Cyprus compared to Nukahiva could be one of the reasons yet one suspects that it is not the only one. However, this anecdote is not reason enough to discard any prospective imperialistic notions Porter might still have enjoyed. In 1835, Paulding had the letters published under the long and self-explanatory title, Constantinople and Its Environs in a Series of Letters, Exhibiting the Actual State of the Manners, Customs, and Habits of the Turks, Armenians, Jews, and Greeks as Modified by the Policy of Sultan Mahmoud by an American, Long Resident at Constantinople. In the first volume, it is evident that Porter did not pen the letters with the intent of publication, at least not an immediate one; although he recurrently expressed insecurity with regards to his literary style and urged Paulding to throw the letters into the fire lest he finds them unworthy of storing.43 In the second volume, he is already conscious of a prospective readership and

42 David F. Long, Nothing Too Daring: A Biography of Commodore David Porter, 1780-1843, (Annapolis, Maryland: United States Naval Institute), 1970, p. 294. 43David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 33.

24 accordingly didactic. Moreover, the second volume is relatively repetitive (or rather singulative); including more or less the same descriptions of the places he visited more than once. His prefacer introduces Porter‘s narrative as fresh and original on the grounds that he had the privilege that other travelers or residents did not enjoy and he ―has not only had the advantage of a residence of several years in Constantinople and its environs, but, in addition to this, occupied a station which gave him opportunities of social intercourse and minute observation rarely presented to Christian travellers in Turkey.‖44 The access he had to social intercourse and the extent to which he made use of it will be explored later in this chapter. He emphasizes what Porter also does throughout the two volumes that the recordings are based on the author‘s observations rather than his preconceptions based on previous reading of accounts on similar regions that are becoming obsolete ―like the black-letter books of the middle ages.‖45The invalidation of former accounts according to the prefacer hinges on a large scale upon the reforms of Sultan Mahmoud II, who receives numerous embellished compliments from Porter as well. The prefacer while referring to the Sultan‘s reformation policies, also sets the discursive tone which is oscillating yet almost always prevalent throughout the narratives. His tone is distinguishable from Porter‘s in that he does not draw a distinction between the adaptiveness of the governmental body epitomized by the Sultan and the subjects of the Empire who are reduced to their ethnic background: ―Since that time [Battle of Navarino] Sultan Mahmoud has proceeded in his reforms as rapidly as Turkish indolence, Turkish pride, and Turkish superstition will permit.‖46

As is clear from the portrayal of the natives of the Marquesas Islands he has a paternalistic approach rather than an outright aggressive one, regardless of the result being one and the same. Therefore, the representation of the Turk, the Armenian, the Jew, or the Greek without sufficient reference to the political conditions of these peoples, the information being accessible to him, does not eliminate the possibility of a political agenda. In any case, he is not forthright about any intentions, moreover, Porter repeatedly praises the ability of the Turk to be adequate in ruling his country.

44Ibid., p. 3. 45Ibid., p. 6. 46Ibid., p. 5.

These praises also extend to his observations of the agricultural habits in Turkey the lack of which might have signified an insinuation that an external assistance or an involvement is necessary. ―Of the latter [onions] may be seen whole and very extensive fields, laid out with great care and neatness, and well irrigated. The people of this country understand this process extremely well, and wherever there is a stream of water, they are sure to turn it to good account.‖47

Here, like in the preface to his Journal, he talks of himself in the third person and narrates the events that succeeded the exchange of the ratifications. As Porter repeatedly acknowledges and passionately desires to convince the addressee of his letters, James Kirke Paulding48, the Ottomans were not as ignorant about the New World as they were assumed to be. The anecdote reveals that Reis Effendi is relatively informed about the domestic affairs of the United States with his ―pertinent questions‖ of the general state of Native Americans. Then he proceeds to concretize his binary opposition of the civilized American treatment of its native population and the cruel and aggressive Ottoman suggestion of military force. The ignorance of the Ottomans that he refutes so fervently does not factor into his portrayals of the people when it comes to awareness of their own history.

…like all the other ruins of the country, whatever may be their antiquity, are said by the Turks to be Genoese. They seem, in fact, to have no idea of a period antecedent to that in which the Genoese were the great traders to this country, where their commercial establishments appear to have been always protected by strong castles. With Mustapha [Mr. Goodell‘s canoss), everything old and curious, was Genoese. Seeing once, a line of enormous rocks which nature had in one of her freaks, placed along the side of a mountain, I asked Mustapha what it meant? Genoese, says he.49

Unlike his contemporaries, Porter does not put forward a Constantinople outside of secular history, or one that lacks the progressive dynamics of the West. Nonetheless, his inclinations oscillate between an intrinsically apt government, a literate people who show significant signs of awareness of the developments on an international level, to a people who are inept at internalizing the knowledge and sensibility that is available to them. Mustapha, William

47David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 206. 48Paulding collaborated with Washington Irving in Salmagundi, which was a 19th century periodical. In 1838, he became the Secretary of Navy. He is the recipient of all the letters that Porter wrote from Constantinople. 49Ibid., p. 208-209.

Goodell‘s50 dragoman is aptly brought into play by Porter to reflect his own anxieties about himself. Mustapha is arrogant, ignorant, and never admits to his mistakes. When Porter‘s own vale de pied is rarely referred to in his letters, Mustapha and his blunders are employed to create a comic effect. Here, he acts as the epitome of the Turk who exhibits complete ignorance of his own historical roots and assigns the artifacts randomly to the Genoese. Not only that, but he lacks the common sense to distinguish natural artifacts from historical remnants and in order to hide his ignorance because of his excessive sense of pride, he also assigns them to the Genoese.

The reductionist portrayal of Mustapha is compelling for another prevalent reason that is the lack of communication between Porter and locals on a meaningful level, which renders him more of a tourist than a resident in the country. As Derek Gregory aptly recapitulates: ―Any intimacy with those other ‗little worlds‘ was always conditional…partly because of difficulties of communication…and partly because the tourist could always terminate any engagement and substitute the languid gaze…most tourists were more or less completely dependent on their dragoman; but this reliance produced an unease [one can imagine much more so for Porter, who had always been in complete control in the chain of order throughout his career] even a distrust that could spill over into outright contempt.‖51 On this particular trip with Goodell, having left the relatively ―cosmopolitan‖ and Europeanized Constantinople, and arriving in Bursa, the first capital of the Ottoman Empire, his frustration turns into embitterment and he associates his surroundings with the worst place and people he had resided in and encountered: Mexico. First he enumerates the likenesses he draws between Mexico and the city of Bursa. He associates the crowds huddling in the narrow streets, the vegetation and the mountains with what he had encountered in Mexico as well as the illusion one has from afar of the land as beautiful. Yet up close, the illusion evaporates. What is more striking is his take on the dissimilarities that pertain to the nature of the culture and people rather than the physical qualities of the surroundings.

Here the mass of the people are honest, to a degree unknown elsewhere, and virtuous too. The Mexicans are a nation of thieves and prostitutes. Murder and robbery here are the rarest occurrences, and there is no country where a person may travel without arms in such perfect

50William Goodell was an influential missionary who actively worked in various places in the Middle East, in 1831 he was in Constantinople starting the mission for Armenians. He spoke Turkish and also translated the Bible into Armeno-Turkish. 51James Duncan, Derek Gregory, ed., Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 122-123.

safety as in this. In Mexico, no man‘s life is safe if he has not good arms, and a good will to depend it. They murder there for the love of blood.52

Porter‘s vindictiveness and embitterment with his experience as commander-in-chief of the Mexican Navy were also infused into his comparative depictions of provincial Turkish cities and towns. His son, Admiral David Dixon Porter wrote in the biography of his father that he wrote in 1875, asserts that ―nothing would have gratified‖ his father ―more than to have lived to see Mexico humbled to the dust by the Americans,‖53 and that liked the Turks instinctively albeit gradually and he ―esteemed them for their honesty, for they would not lie like Europeans, nor steal like Mexicans.‖54 As it is also clear from his son‘s remark, Porter‘s lifelong Anglophobia singles him out among other travel writers of the 19th century. This was naturally an inevitable result of his occupational background. Just as he delimits his depictions to physical traits of people and scenery, he congruently remains on the surface of circumstantial consequences. Aside from his blindly nationalistic sentiments and racist notions, his utter lack of curiosity for his surroundings contributes to his ineffectual delineations. Finnie observes that although Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were within his jurisdiction for almost twelve years he made no attempts at visiting them.55

It is interesting to note that Porter‘s frame of reference is rarely the United States, her political institutions or cultural norms. While many travelers emphasized their deduction of the bliss of civilization‘s unquestionable superiority in the face of its Oriental or in this particular case the Turkish counterpart, for Porter, even the process of this deduction is futile and obsolete. It seems, he takes the result for granted.

While at times he acknowledges the circumstantial adoption of customs and their prevalence, –―They have their customs, we have ours. They conceal their faces; our women expose the parts which modesty should cover‖-56 by exposing his conservative view of female attire which happens to be the singular subject that arouses Porter‘s dedicated interest. On being invited to a Sunday breakfast given the promise of witnessing Turkish women having their keyf

52David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 224. 53 David Dixon Porter, Memoir of Commodore David Porter, Of the United States Navy, (Albany, New York: J. Munsell, Publisher, 1875), p. 395. 54Ibid., p. 405. 55 David H. Finnie, Pioneers East: The Early American Experience in the Middle East, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 93. 56David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 32.

(joy) time, he enthusiastically assents. On the way to breakfast he is already in an elevated mood and delighted with the Bosphorus: ―To say that the scene is magnificent is to say nothing; imagination cannot depict, and words cannot express what it is: to conceive it, it must be seen.‖57 The inexpressible beauty of the Bosphorus is only a prelude to exotic bodies and attire that so fascinate him that on a denotative level he controls that with which he gazes upon by categorizing them.

III. Knowledge Management and Taxonomy

Justin D. Edwards asserts ―the popularity of nineteenth-century travel writing arose partially out of a Victorian compulsion to classify, taxonomize, and control the natural world.‖58 Porter‘s desire for categorization is not limited to flora and fauna; rather it expands itself to people, women in particular. His concerns with gender, ethnicity, and class are rarely extant independent of each other. Physical characteristics denote specific ethnic, economical backgrounds. In addition to denoting the same parameters, colors and ornaments of attires also designate the nature of the occasion and the class the subject belongs to. The members of an ethnic group that constitute the majority in the country in question or the ruling class are almost always more favorable to Porter‘s gaze. In his depictions, he singles out the signifiers of his ethnic parameters and never disregards their possible connotations within the local realm. With almost primordial instincts he actualized a heteropathic narrator who dissects and deciphers the paraphernalia that the object of attention carries on herself. It is similar to what Mieke Bal calls the ―the nonreciprocal gaze‖59 when analyzing Marcel Proust. In a similar vein, the women being gazed upon, as a result of ―modesty,‖ can neither reciprocate his gaze directed towards them nor can they objectify him with the same analytical manner. They are mere images one describes and speculates on with no context available to them and the on-looker.

What struck me most, was their brilliant black eyes, their beautifully arched eyebrows, and their long and glossy black hair almost reaching the ground. The delicate fairness of their skins, is owing to their confinement to their homes: of their figures I could not judge. Some of them have thrown off their clumsy yellow boots, and substituted the silk open work stockings and slippers: handsomer ankles, and smaller and more beautiful feet, I have never seen. When a man buys a

57Ibid., p. 23. 58Justin D. Edwards, Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature 1840-1930, (Hanover and London: University Press of New England), p. 5. 59Mieke Bal, A Mieke Bal Reader, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 83.

wife, if rich, he undoubtedly chooses a handsome one. The Turks are a noble race of men, and the women being generally of Circassian origin, it is not surprising that the daughters of the Turks should be beautiful.60

His focalization on the surface traits, rather than the practices or their reasons for emergence is striking. His gaze is all-encompassing against the odds of the attire that covered most the women‘s bodies. His voyeurism is almost of an interwoven nature of the comprehensive feminine and the penetrating male. After a detailed description of the accessories, their colors and make of fabric, he proceeds to the only exposed part that is readily available to his gaze: the feet, where his wandering gaze concludes its short journey that began with the silk stockings and slippers. All throughout the two volumes, he designates his traverses on the female body and its depiction to a minimal, superficial level. Even on rare occasions, where he actually verbally communicates with a woman, he suffices the description to physical traits. Yet after the breakfast scene, he claims to have discovered a new window into the lives of the Turks, which could only have been attained through his unique experience of distant observation: ―I had got into an entire new world. I had seen the Turkish character in a new point of view, the film had dropped from my eyes, and I saw things with my own optics, not as described by others. The few hours I was among them were worth volumes of the creations of the imagination of book-making travellers.‖61 This minute analysis of the investigative gaze is largely encouraged by the obstruction the veil imposes on the onlooker. Meyda Yeğenoğlu aptly describes the frustration of the Western gaze encountered by the veil as ―Frustrated with the invisibility and inaccessibility of this mysterious, fantasmatic figure, disappointed with the veiled figure‘s refusal to be gazed at, Western gaze subjects this enigmatic, in Copjec‘s terms, ‗sartorial matter,‘ to a relentless investigation.‖62 What the gaze is able to penetrate after meticulous struggle, in Porter‘s case the feet of the women having breakfast; the gaze exhausts with description and almost compensates for the parts that are not accessible to his investigative and descriptive urges. He overcomes this deficiency by informed or uninformed speculation about the general manners and state of women in the Empire. He abandons the most specific of all descriptions and switches to generalizations about their breeding and beauty. The drastic change in his descriptive style can be explained by

60David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 29-30. 61 Ibid., p. 32. 62Meyda Yeğenoğlu, ColonialFantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 39.

30 an escapist attitude towards anxiety that is created by the invisibility of the object of attention. What he cannot access visually, he completes speculatively.

Even with a different imperative on the on-lookers side, Porter arouses the locals' attention with his foreignness. He is partial about allowing access to the local gaze, though. Ali Behdad observes that ―The relationship between the observer (traveller) and the observed (‗Oriental‘) is always one way; he questions the other, yet is not interested in answering; he listens to the other, but does not offer his own tale.‖63 In Porter‘s case, the one-way exception is overruled when the ―observed‖ insures visual and possibly physical pleasure. It still remains one way, but becomes a deal where one of the parties is unaware to having agreed to the deal or what she has to offer on her end of the deal for that matter.

Another intriguing moment occurs when some Turkish ladies, out of curiosity for the customs of Americans and specifically of Elçi Bey (Minister) pay a visit to Porter in his house. Although, usually skeptical and tactful about socializing with the locals, he derives tremendous pleasure from the willingness of the Turkish women‘s expression of interest in him. He narrates the event as such: ―Some of them were very beautiful, particularly the youngest, about seventeen years old…profiting by my character of doctor, (for I practice physic in my neighbourhood), when they asked me to feel their pulses, I desired them to take of their veils, that I might examine their faces, and tongues, which they readily did, and gave me a good opportunity of examining their features, and three of them were certainly very handsome.‖64 While his physical pleasure almost transcends and expands on his former merely visual one, he reinvigorates his own stereotypical vision of Turkish women as ―indolent‖ and ―voluptuous.‖65 As will be exemplified later, this is a rare privilege he endows the Turkish women with. His conservatism regarding the manners of American women does not apply to Turkish women just like it had not applied to the young women of Marquesas Islands who threw themselves at the feet American sailors, including Porter himself. Relying on his credibility in the neighborhood, he gains access to the faces of these women that are commonly disguised under the veil. What is more striking than his impertinent assertiveness is the presumed ―readiness‖ of the women to expose

63, Ali Behdad, ―The Politics of Adventure: Theories of Travel, Discourses of Power,‖ in Julia Kuehn, Paul Smethurst, ed., Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility, (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 88. 64David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 12. 65Ibid., p. 140.

31 themselves to the foreign gaze and even touch of Porter. Once diluted through the filter of his selectiveness, his notational deliberations of women become a tautological specter. Moreover, true to norm, the narrative of women is not dialogic in nature. Their presence is proved by imagery in a rather perverse form; but it is completely silenced, it is merely a sensual presence.

A self-acclaimed connoisseur of female beauty, Porter is not as generous with his compliments with regard to Armenian and Jewish beauty as he is with the Turks‘. However when his two letters ―The Armenians of Constantinople‖ and his letter on Jews that were both published the New York Monthly Magazine are taken into consideration, it becomes self-evident that his descriptions are not only gendered but also ethnicized and racialized. According to Porter, Jews are ―as timid as the Turks are brave; and as lowly as the Turks are proud‖66 and even when gendered do not exhibit the same appeal to his wandering gaze. Jewish women have ―something repulsive and cadaverous about them. I have never seen one who had any pretensions to beauty.‖67 As he considers the Armenian population of Constantinople ―of all the nations of the world, not excepting the Chinese, the most tricky,‖ and ―the most live of all animals,‖68 he is guarded with his compliments.

I have noticed that the children of the Armenians, both male and female are beautiful; I have never seen one otherwise. But the old men, and old women are, without exception, horribly ugly. The face of a miser every body can imagine, and from every pair of Armenian soldiers, after the age of thirty, sprouts a miser‘s head. This is the effect of habit and education, which we all know, do change the human countenance, and I am inclined to believe have lengthened the ears of the Armenians, as they scarcely ever speak above their breath...lest some words be detected that might involve them in difficulty.69 He does not assign an innate physical deficiency to any group yet the negative power he ascribes to the Armenian habitual way of socialization, child rearing and education is equally obliterating of chances of self-sufficiency and betterment. Yet again, the satirically insinuated rationale behind the obstacle against maintaining one‘s beautiful and appealing countenance is their scheming nature that is passed from generation to generation and forces them to ploy treacherous plans and out of the necessity of discreetness cause their ears to grow. It is not clear whether he purports the physical deterioration to be congenital or rather inescapable or a result of nurture rather than nature. Armenians act as a potent site where Porter can enact his prejudices as

66David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 173. 67Ibid., p. 174. 68David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 186. 69 Ibid., p. 39.

32 well as his desires. The latter becomes prevalent in his minute depiction of the ―Armenian eye brow.‖

The eye-brows, by means and assistance of the tweezers and surm, a black colouring matter, are made to assume a crescent-like form drawn with so much delicacy and art, that you are persuaded that nature alone could have made them what they are; the termination on each side of the forehead forming a delicate point, as though drawn with a camel‘s hair pencil by the hand of the most skillful artist, and of a jet black.70 Aijaz Ahmad suggests that every culture created and disseminated a historical process to similar Western Orientalism ―connected with class and gender, ethnicity and religion, xenophobia and bigotry,‖ yet what singles out and renders Orientalism the dominating discourse that is prioritized in analyses and unraveling is the ―power of colonial capitalism.‖71 All travel writers recognize, at times embellish, and dwell on the possible counter discourses of the Oriental about the ―Franks.‖ It is not uncommon for 19th century American travelers to emphasize Muslim prejudice towards the Christians in a resentful manner. Willis, for instance writes that he heard ―dogs of Constantinople knew and hated a Christian.‖72 Porter, interestingly enough contextualizes Muslim prejudices against Christianity, but as his Anglophobia factors in, he circumscribes these notions as directed to Europeans, not Americans who are historically not responsible to have contributed to the contrivance of them.

I am not the apologist of Turkish prejudices, but it cannot be denied, that the barbarous invasion and excesses of the mad crusaders; the persecutions and final expulsion of the Mahometans from Spain; the uniform language of all Christian writers, as well as the uniform conduct of Christian states towards the Ottomites, have all combined to furnish no slight justification of their feelings towards the nations of Europe.73

The cumulative historicization of the Muslim-Christian relations which Porter considers to be repetitive and tautological, lies at the heart of his criticism. But what he is personally more sensitive about is the aggressive countenance of Europe that randomly enacts its barbarism and madness with towards her opponents and what Porter had experienced firsthand. Moreover, he draws a discursive boundary between the ―uniform language of all Christian writers‖ which he insinuates to entail political ambitions under the cloak of religion and his account. His political

70 Ibid., p. 137. 71Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: classes, nations, literatures, (London: Verso, 2000), p. 184. 72 Nathaniel Parker Willis, Pencillings by the Way written during some years of residence and travel in France, Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Turkey, and England, (New York: Morris & Willis, Publishers, 1844), p. 144. 73David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 317-318.

33 and religious neutrality factors in his discourse as an additional source of originality that compensates for the lack of erudition. As an American -to borrow a term from Ali Behdad-, he suffers from ―belatedness,‖ which is much more advanced than the European one temporally. However, there is a flip side to his assertion. The historicized excuse he provides for deeply embedded prejudices which he refrains from owning up to, does not warrant a space for tolerance on the Muslim side that could surmount the historically imbued animosities between the two creeds. The Muslim world is not exempt from the sense of superiority and discourses of exceptionalism that he assigns to Europe. Then again, when his ambivalence about the Muslims merges with his high admiration for Mahmoud II, he asserts: ―Turkish prejudice has heretofore opposed a barrier to research, but the time has arrived, when an enlightened Sultan has removed all obstruction to investigation. The Christian in Constantinople, is now nearly as secure from insult, as in any part of Christendom, and may pursue his inquiries without apprehension of injury, or fear of interruption from any one.‖74 The responsibility for this aura of tolerance and liberal investigation is assigned to Mahmoud II. Yet, it is not clear to which level it has been disseminated, if the periphery has complied with center‘s enlightenment. The freedom with which he satirically feigns to compare religious tolerance in the United States and in the Ottoman Empire displays the tacit allusion to the former‘s evident superiority in this regard. Perchance, superiority does not even define the relative condition of the United States in terms of tolerance as it becomes clear in the following passage in which he inadvertently reverses his reflection on the issue. In fact, there is more toleration in religion in Turkey, than any where else; more even than in the United States, for however Christians may differ among themselves in their creeds, forms of worship, and ceremonies, the Turk looks upon them all as dogs of the same litter, and their barking and growling not worth his notice, provided they keep out of the way of his pipe, and do not upset his coffee.75

After this explication of the rationale behind Turkish tolerance, rather than superior, the state of American tolerance becomes the genuine counterpart of the imposed Turkish one. Even the imposition of the enlightened Sultan is deemed obsolete by the deeply embedded yet passive and demeaning manner of the Turks towards Christians. By satirizing the concepts of tolerance and equality, he reveals a very idealistic view of the United States, her institutions and people.

74 Ibid., p. 99. 75 Ibid., p. 199.

Although at times, critical of the ―niggardly habit of the Franks,‖76 and Americans in the Ottoman Empire, he puts forward a refined, purified view of American past and present. Even the relative intolerance in the United States can be explicated by the lack of sense of superiority and contempt for other denominations. He reformulates equality as a precursor to intolerance. The denominational distinctions do not have significant denotations as long as they do not meddle with Turkish indolence. These irreconcilable oppositions merge in this cleansed platform and contrive the nation that is the epitome of tolerance. Christopher Mulvey gives a fitting diagnosis to this phenomenon of self-criticism via contempt and resentment towards one‘s compatriots: ―The hostility of the traveller to his own kind was to some extent an expression of a curiously displaced sense of territoriality that overtook men outside of their own country…The traveller saw into things…He might criticize, or praise; others might not.‖77 The braggadocio of Porter also stems from his struggle to position himself within the realm of the genre as well as gaining a respectful reputation sustained through appreciation by and a sound communication with the local government. What Porter is ultimately aiming at is a ―critical shift from fantasy to rationality, from exoticism to systematic knowledge.‖78 Yet his discourse is caught in between the transition neither completely becoming one, nor remaining to be the other. He is not the savant with authority nor is he the sentimental traveler that transforms anything that appeals to the eye to phantasmagoria that is not extant in reality. A more straightforward example is a passage from the first volume where he elucidates not the superiority of the end result –the governmental regime, social mobility, equality in the United States now- but of the core values that the end result is so firmly grounded in.

…you see how extremes meet in governments as well as in every thing else. In our Republic, certainly the freest country in the world, distinctions of birth weigh as nothing, and any man may aspire to honours and office. It is the same thing in Turkey, one of the purest despotisms on the face of the earth. The cause, however, of this apparent similarity is as different as day and night. In the United States, this general eligibility to office, is owing to the universal equality recognized in the laws and the constitution: in Turkey, there is the same equality in the eye of the Sultan, who is placed at such an immeasurable distance above the rest of mankind, that they appear to him like the pigmies of the same size and dimension…Here is a cloud of philosophy for you.79

76Ibid., p. 157. 77 Christopher Mulvey, Anglo-American Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 24. 78, Ali Behdad, ―The Politics of Adventure: Theories of Travel, Discourses of Power,‖ in Julia Kuehn, Paul Smethurst, ed., Travel Writing, Form, and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility, (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 80. 79David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 79.

He postulates an idyllic image of the United States, the nation, according to Porter, ―where even the slave is not required to distinguish himself from the freeman by any act of degradation.‖80 In his frame of comparison, slavery does not exist. American equality is blind, non-discriminatory and it is not a consequence, rather the essence of the American system of thought. Correspondingly the ground on which Ottoman equality is framed also lies at the core of the Sultan‘s status and character: a grandiose sense of self, and a habitual derisive nature towards his subjects. Nonetheless, Porter digresses from the mainstream discursive enunciation that considered amelioration in Oriental society infeasible. However, his assertions still do not rule out a congenital inferiority on the part of the common folk since his praises pertain to the reforms enacted by the Sultan. The mainstream preference would side with the people and explicate their inferior state as the result of a brutal oppression stemming from the government.

Sultan Mahmoud has…attempted and is in the daily process of achieving the noble yet difficult task of adapting this government and those institutions in some degree to the progress of intelligence in the rest of the civilized world, and if he succeeds, as I earnestly hope he may, will merit to be ranked with Peter the Great, King Alfred, and the most illustrious benefactors and reformers of every age and country.81

Mahmoud II who according to Porter carries ―a slight air of dandyism about him,‖82 the thirtieth Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, pioneered numerous reforms which aimed at democratizing the laws, abolished the Janissary corps in 1826 and began to organize a modernized Ottoman army, Nizam-I Cedid (New Order,) recognizing that the former institutions of the Empire no longer proved satisfactory for self-sustenance. Stanford J. Shaw, and Ezel Kural Shaw enumerate the hindrances to the concretization of the reformations as the size and the heterogeneity of the Empire; the reformer‘s dependence on Western nations and the latter‘s exploitation of this dependence; the system‘s inability to accommodate the desire for rapid change; the struggles for independence of the minorities supported by Russia and Western Europe, and the ―sporadic terrorism‖ that forced digression from the issues at hand, and the intervention of the European powers in the Ottoman domestic affairs.83 Unfortunately, his

80David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 143. 81Ibid., p. 315. 82 Ibid., p. 10. 83 Stanford J. Shaw, Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. II: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2002), p. Vii.

36 romantic notion of Mahmoud II prevents Porter from scrutinizing these hindrances. The Sultan‘s special interest in Porter‘s occupational background (as he was in the process of rebuilding his navy) and their several informal exchanges was a great source of pride for him. The Sultan‘s sudden death in 1839 and the indifference to the American minister of his young son Abdulmecid I, who was sixteen when he succeeded his father, disappointed Porter. As recourse to a comprehensive report as a result of exploration however, Porter provides the reader with something more valuable, and appealing as well as original, which leads to an introspective protest against European powers. He carries his pleasant intercourse with the Sultan to a higher level by drawing on a reason for solidarity between the United States and the Ottoman Empire simultaneously redirecting the attention to the American condition. Here is a monarch, whom those of Europe are pleased to call a barbarian, bending the energies of a great genius, to reforming his government, and ameliorating as far as circumstances will permit, the condition of his people, while the universal spectacle of civilized Europe is that of Christian monarchs, using every effort of their power and policy, to stem that mighty torrent which rising in the forests of the new world, is now rolling from kingdom to kingdom, and from one quarter of the globe to another, apparently as certain in its consequences, as it is inevitable in its course. And let it be remembered that almost all obstacles to the immediate success of this glorious plan, exist in the prejudices of the subjects of Mahmoud, not of his own.84 Noteworthy of attention, reflections of Porter on the reforms pioneered by Mahmoud II, his partiality towards the Ottoman Empire against the European powers which he openly declares to be the result of nationalistic sentiments, reveals the main determining factor behind his ideological approach to the Ottoman Empire. He echoes John L. O‘Sullivan‘s Manifest Destiny and his formulation of physical and ideological boundaries of the United States by determining its roof as ―the firmament of the star-studded heavens,‖ when he describes the ―torrent‖ that is ―rolling from kingdom to kingdom, and one quarter of the globe to another.‖ The European monarchs who are inept at self-reflexivity and label the ruler of the Empire as ―barbarian‖ are the same ones who are trying to stop the unstoppable, and prevent the inevitable. These holistic sentiments of animosity directed towards the European powers are the result of his nationalistic feelings‘ overshadowing his desire for a cultural history that the ―torrent‖ and the ―monarchs‖ could share. He prefers to draw a similarity and commonality with the Ottoman Empire (via the person of the Sultan) against the common enemy. Yet, at this junction, he suggests the reason behind the obstacle against the immediate enactment of the reforms in the Empire: her subjects. By concentrating all of the virtues and the motivation behind an ideological

84David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers), 1835, p. 319.

37 and sentimental alliance between two countries on one individual, –the present ruler of the Empire- he also designates it in time and renders it temporary. IV. Porter’s Strongest Suit Going back to the prefacer‘s emphasis on the advantage Porter enjoys, his station, the reader‘s aroused expectations are not entirely satisfied. Being a former navy officer and a commander-in-chief, possibly because of his frustration with his former occupation, he does not offer extensive and comprehensive descriptions of either his post or the development of the Ottoman military. In one exceptionally detailed passage, Porter does not enumerate the specific traits of the structure of the military; rather he delineates an isolated scene and draws praiseful conclusions with regard to the diligence of high military officials. I was at the Seraskier's when they arrived, (the commander in chief,) he had them all placed around a large hall; in five minutes they were registered, classed, and distributed. The young and good looking lads of from seven to nineteen or twenty, were placed in one lot, and first disposed of. The lame, defective, and advanced in years, in another…The scarce human negroes were the last despatched. All however appeared to be of use in making up the composition of a great Turkish army. You would think it extraordinary to see our secretary of war, or the commander in chief of our armies, attending to the detail of the examination and distribution of raw recruits; but here they seem to go upon the principle, that that which is worth doing at all, is worthy the attention of the greatest officer of the Empire. It is so in all their details; and I will venture to say, that in no part of the world are the different ramifications of the affairs of government better known to the chief than they are in this empire. The heads of the different departments here have a facility in doing business that is astonishing. They go with rapidity from one subject to another, and their minds appear in no way to be fatigued by the rapid succession of changes throughout the day. They are always ready for business, either at the porte, at their houses, or at their amusements…It would be to one of us a life of incessant and intolerable drudgery.85

At first sight, the passage strikes the reader as a singular example that is incongruent with the rest of his impressions of the Turkish society where Porter construes the core characteristic of the Turk lethargically passive and always on the recipient end of any transaction and interaction. However, what seems to be a contradictory representation actually constitutes the elitist consistency in Porter‘s accounts. The relentless indolence he repeatedly confirms is the defining trait of the Ottoman subjects rather than the people of ruling position. Starting from the peak of the triangle represented by the Sultan, as he goes down on the strata levels, the amount of admiration that is directed towards the group of people by Porter decreases. As individuals who constitute the ―great Turkish army,‖ the Ottomans are worthy merely of a superficial description, and in the case of the blacks, only of racist notions. However, the government officials who

85David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers), 1835, p. 56-57.

38 puppeteer these individuals and render them relatively useful, and valuable by categorizing them –naming them- are mighty enough to deserve comparison with their American counterparts. Yet this distinct hiatus between the rulers and the ruled is portrayed as one sided since the ruling powers are represented as being aware of the ramifications of their actions and by the mere fact that they can classify them. His selectiveness in welcoming the locals‘ attentions becomes prevalent in his travels around the environs of Constantinople on his way to Bursa, in a Turkish village where the residents remind him of the Mexicans for conflicting reasons. Overwhelmed by the locals‘ stares and interest in him and Goodell he exclaims bitterly:

…after our beardless faces and uncouth garbs, had afforded mirth and ridicule to all the little ragged, shaven-headed, bare-legged, and footed urchins of the place, any one of whom was a match for an ourang outang, and in America would have proved as profitable; after, in fact, we had produced wonder among the natives, old and young, and among others, a hunched-backed monster, we proceeded through the plain…86 When his penetrating gaze is turned towards him, Porter‘s self-consciousness lends itself to contempt and aggression. His depiction of physical disability equals Mark Twain‘s crudeness. But more importantly, his ―urchins,‖ ―ourang outangs,‖ and ―hunched-back monsters‖ share a ―discursive space with those one-footed medieval monsters Columbus thought he might encounter on his voyage west to find the East.‖87 By firsthand experience, Porter was familiar with exploring uncharted territory and claiming ownership if only nominally, therefore, his discursive space might intersect with one who explores and names.

Porter‘s incessant concern is to break away from the tradition of relying heavily on history and previous accounts about exhausted regions. He cannot refrain himself for long from quoting Byron and Gibbon, but more frequently he expresses his desire to communicate only what he had seen, not what he had read or had been taught. ―I shall not quote musty old authors long forgot. I shall not scrape up rubbish of antiquity to look for what Constantinople was. I shall show you what it is.‖88 Aspiration for originality is one aspect where Porter‘s narrative is not exceptional. First of all, Porter is not a traveler, a tourist, or nor an explorer in the definitive sense of these concepts. He did not consider himself to be fit for a literary endeavor. His

86 Ibid., p. 236. 87 Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid, (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2007), p. 70. 88Ibid., p. 53.

39 occupational background, his strict military training, positions him ideologically in a position whence he derives conclusions with regard to national politics much more fervently. On a more general note, although the possibility of attaining originality can be questioned, to human vanity, it is initially unacceptable that the text he authors will be a collage of intertextualities. One should furthermore consider the intended audience for such narratives. Is it a friend with whom a more intimate account is suitable and personal recollections of external to the narrative shared experience are presented; is it a periodical, where the readers need to be both intrigued with the new, unexpected, original, and at part have their expectations confirmed, so as not to be alienated and skeptical of the text? In this case, a framework of nation-class shared stereotypes and experiences are alluded to; or possibly the notes are part of one‘s diary where the intended audience is oneself, personally noteworthy details to remember are emphasized, ―dialogue‖ is carried out with one‘s own predispositions, opinions, expectations, both sincere and perchance most unjustified in their actuality due to strong influence of internal, unmediated recollection. In Porter‘s case, formally both categories are applicable.

He ardently criticizes the tautological nature of material published about the Ottoman Empire: ―…if the more modern writers have introduced any thing into their books which may bear the appearance of novelty, or a claim to investigation, it will be found generally, to consist more in a change of words to express the same thing, than an addition of facts or circumstances.‖89 He regards the knowledge production with respect to the Orient as a vicious circle and that the delineations cannot entail any vicissitudes from their predecessors‘. Unlike what he purports the modern depictions to be, his volumes include additional and valuable facts and figures about Ottoman officials, inventory of new publications, and a detailed structure of the Ottoman navy.

The significance of Commodore David Porter not only stems from his being the first charge d‘affaires in Constantinople but also from his misfortune in observing the developments of North African-American relations since the beginning of the 19th century first hand. It is possible to observe the development of American patriotism from the journal he wrote in 1815 Journal of a Cruise to the Pacific Ocean and in his collection of poetry published later. However, his telescopic perspective on Constantinople does not provide the reader with an

89David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 94.

40 insider‘s perspective, which would be expected from a resident. Aside from a few rare examples, his occupational background does not serve him as a privilege when analyzing political developments in the empire. These examples are constituted by the occasional insertion of the biographies of military officials he found impressive for positive or negative reasons.

In the course of his letters, there is no linear transmutation of opinions that might have been enabled by the mere passage of time. This might also be extended to the lack of proliferation in his knowledge of the customs and norms of the people he so comprehensively describes physically. He comments on the people who go to the mosque to pray: ―They seem to be actuated by sudden pious impulses. I do not think they have any regular times to go to the mosques.‖90 This remark, made a year after his arrival at Constantinople reveals that he did not inquire into the religious habits of the people he is surrounded with and discover that practicing Muslims go to the mosque to pray five times a day.

Another significant trait in Porter‘s volumes that is noteworthy of consideration is the lack of the issue of slavery, the discourse of which usually intersects with the discursive strategies directed towards the Orient. It is realized either through the explicit comparison of the institution of slavery in two countries or through racialized categories implemented by the author on encountering Oriental people. It is not difficult to derive his stance on slavery or his view of Africans as well as people of other ethnic backgrounds as long as they do not belong to the ruling or the statistical majority. There is one reference throughout the two volumes to the slave market in Constantinople, which is strictly solemn and factual yet very revealing: ―It is a miserable place, and not worth the time and trouble of visiting it…There is nothing to be seen here, but negroes, ugly white women, and small children of the ages of from eight to ten years, the refuse of other markets, exhibited for sale.‖91 His obsession with beauty also factors into his criteria for the worthiness of places with regard to visitation; the slave market had already been constructed in the public and consequently the tourist‘s consciousness as a sight worthy of the traveler‘s attention, so Porter only confirms it; but does not conceive it. What is tantalizing is the lack of expression of any emotion or opinion with regards to the institution of slavery, the way it is practiced in the Ottoman Empire, or the condition of the slave market except for the ugliness of

90Ibid., p. 179. 91Ibid., p. 55-56.

41 white women. He does not alternatively provide the reader with his defied expectations of what he would have regarded as worth seeing in the slave market. His apathy is congruent with his complete indifference to the condition of black people in the United States, which was quoted earlier.

David Porter‘s Constantinople and Its Environs reveals a self-effaced countenance in his struggle about positioning himself within the genre of travel as well as an all-knowing ―disembodied eye‖92 when it comes to physicality which according to him denotes measurable characteristics that cannot escape his wandering gaze. Once extracted from the author‘s personal frustrations, and ambitions, historically it is a valuable and unique source written by an American who witnessed the first indirect contact between the North African Maghreb regencies and the United States during the Barbary Wars as well as the first reciprocal official contact with the signing of the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation in 1830. Although the account is highly susceptible to criticism in terms of the representations of certain racial and ethnic groups, his elitism towards minorities and the common folk who do not hold high offices in the government, his reductionist depiction of women, and the silencing of the Oriental subject, one can only regret that he had not published another account during the last eight years of his life which would be both beneficial to the researcher of Ottoman history as well as American cultural studies. From the excerpts he inserts into his narrative, the way he represents the American of the day as well as the ideal American of the future by self-reflexive depiction of the Oriental other, to the undertones of the coexistence of personal frustration and a sense of glory, his account is an invaluable source of information.

Although it might seem incongruent with the analyses suggested here, and in my opinion what he himself actualizes in his accounts, it is still fitting to conclude with Porter‘s own conclusion about to put it simply ―ways of the world.‖ After travelling around the world, observing people of various cultures and nations, Porter humbly concluded that: ―I have found that there is not that vast, disparity of wisdom, intelligence and virtue, between the …nations of the earth, which the vanity of every people imagines, while it arrogates to itself the superiority.‖93

92Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 78. 93David Porter, Constantinople and Its Environs, Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 322.

Chapter II

Beau Monde Tracing Byron: Nathaniel Parker Willis’ Pencillings by the Way

I. W here Formal and Commercial Concerns Meet

The formal differentiation of the travel narratives from other genres pose difficulties and every narrative should be evaluated within its own claimed framework. This truism does not mean to suggest an agenericistic approach or a mere historicist reading of the texts. Although the historical circumstances that determine the discursive preferences of the authors cannot be underestimated and the methodological approach Mary Louise Pratt in her work Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation chooses cannot be invalidated: ―important historical transitions alter the way people write, because they alter people‘s experiences and the way people imagine, feel and think about the world they live in. The shifts in writing, then, will tell you something about the nature of these changes.‖94 Judith Adler also aptly observes that ―Since any cultural system is shaped by its own history as well as by extraneous influences, particular travels, travel sites, and institutions must be seen in relation to the historical development of travel traditions and of the travel art as a whole. The possibilities and limitations of even the least self-conscious travels are to a great extent determined by the state of the travel art itself: its norms, technologies, institutional arrangements, and mythologies.‖95 Genre of travel itself is evidently too extensive a study to summarize here, yet it has been undertaken by many scholars either in survey studies or collections of essays. A very comprehensive and inspiring work is Percy G. Adams‘ Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, which explores the interrelations between the genre of travel and novel and clarifies how the tradition of travel as an

94Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 4. 95 Judith Adler, ―Travel as Performed Art‖ The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 94, No. 6. (May, 1989), p. 1371.

44 art determined the public expectations and in return what the authors felt obliged to serve the public. And Nathaniel Parker Willis would specifically be categorized as one of the most self- conscious travelers of the 19th century American literary scene. In addition, biographies are essential tools in analyzing the works of the authors. As self evident as this may seem, the possible injustice when applied in the domain of fiction is rendered obsolete when it comes to the nature of travel as a genre because of the autobiographical elements that are regardless of intentionality always already at play in the narratives. As Brettell asserts: ―Individual travelers are unique and each develops a unique style depending on the time at which he is writing, the place he is writing about, the audience he is addressing, and his own background and motivations. The more we know about the traveler and from other sources, about the reality which the traveler describes, the better we will be able to judge his account.‖96

Naturally, not every traveler, especially the authors of 19th century American travel the narratives of whom had gone out of print at the turn of the century in which they were published left us enough secondary material for us to measure consistencies between the treatment of parallel issues or the development of the author's discursive preferences throughout the course of time in which case we are delimited to base our analysis at times even on a single text. Aside from the historical framework that the work emanates from, one should factor in the individual circumstances which mold shared experiences into unique structures of meaning and how the interdependency between them goes back to determine the former once again. It is a constant, circular, ceaseless relationship that poses many questions about the nature of the travel narrative itself. It is disputable to what extent it is fair to elevate one genre in terms of vivacity and flexibility over others. Percy G. Adams asserts that: "The tension between the personal and the impersonal, the romantic and the realistic, the fanciful and the useful, is as important in the evolution of travel literature as it is in the evolution of the novel, and to study it in one form is to study it in the other."97 As this tension of dichotomies communicates, for want of a better expression, as long as one does not distinguishably overweigh the other, a convenient classification becomes easier for the reader. The balance also denotes validity within the diegesis and the credibility on the part of the author. However, while the romantic and the fanciful would

96 Caroline B. Brettell, ―: Travel Literature, Ethnography, and Ethnohistory,‖ Ethnohistory, Vol. 33, No. 2. (Spring, 1986), p. 134. 97 Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, (University Press of Kentucky, 1983), p. 109. 45 create subgenres in the novel, it would be frowned upon by the 19th century American readership in expectance of an account lenient towards an ethnographical source. Geography or rather geopolitics factors in as a determining constituent in the coalescence of the two genres. Readership expectations, shaped by the precedent travel literature and fiction as well as the heritage passed on the authors who produce the accounts ascertain the division between the fanciful and the useful.

Abundance and availability of material may primarily ward off innocuousness of the audience. However, if there is an already extant discursive pattern that abounds in the fanciful circulating as an account of firsthand experiences in distant lands, these might foster each other‘s credibility and conduce to a common yet inadvertently fabricated consciousness. ―...the reliability of narrators in travel literature can be tested when they deal with geography, flora, fauna, and historical facts; but when they arrive at the realm of Terry's [Edward Terry] 'parallel observations and inferences' -as to those travelers who continue to read- one must question their responses just as readers of novels are cautioned about trusting the words, or thoughts, of a fictional narrator.‖98 Yet when the fanciful is the norm rather than the exceptional digression, as was the case with depictions of the Orient; recounts of cultural standards, historical facts and figures, or flora and fauna are not as distinct in terms of the implications they carry. ―Such dehistoricization is emblematic of myriad texts which construct a timeless and changeless Middle East, outside secular history.‖99 Thus, the travelers of the Orient –if not travelers as a whole category- are intrinsically unreliable narrators. Nevertheless, this unreliability might be normalized depending on the presentiments of the reading public as well as the one that produces and disseminates that specific perspective. In the prefaces of most 19th century travel narratives the author voices his/her concern to place him/herself within the wider framework of travel literature. S/he indicates her intentions and positions him/herself in a subgenre of travel literature, –e.g. sentimental literature-. The main incentive behind this explanatory introduction is the inescapable anxiety the author faces as s/he is entering an already exhausted realm of accounts; yet it also provides the reader guidelines to mentally categorize the work in question. Adams points out to the titles as having the same

98 Ibid., p. 178. 99 Bill Melman, ―The Middle East Arabia: The Cradle of Islam,‖ 105-122 in Peter Hulme, Tim Youngs, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 110.

46 function of prefaces: ―...their titles, when not abridged as they often are by modern commentators, reflect not only their factual content but the desire of their authors to attract a prospective reader's attention, and at the same time, place their books in a popular tradition.‖100 Here, the narrative intent determined by the presumed nature of the implied reader becomes an important factor. It is the driving force behind the modes of representation that follows in the depictions of distant lands. As modes of representation and identity formation intersect –both on an individual and a societal level, microcosm of which is the implied reader- needs that breed and foster the formation of that identity inevitably overshadows objectivity. Genre of travel in this context therefore is a doppelganger that establishes selfhood and self within the nationhood at the same time. In Bruner‘s words: ―A self-making narrative is something of a balancing act. It must, on the one hand, create a conviction of autonomy, that one has a will of one‘s own, a certain freedom of choice, a degree of possibility. But it must also relate the self to a world of others –to friends and family, to institutions, to the past, to reference groups.‖101 Nathaniel Parker Willis epitomizes this phenomenon very thoroughly. Although, he is for the most part apolitical, (he advocates the journalist‘s responsibility in the social order however refrains from naming specific political denominations) his struggles with constituting and reinstating an American national character not only against negations of itself but also through the impressions of others of this character. He might refute or affirm the accuracy of these impressions yet he does not discard them without exploring the possible reasons for the formation of such impressions. It would be unfair to speculate upon the subliminal impulses that drove him to prioritize the conclusions about the essence of American character, yet he recurrently claimed to uphold the needs and desires of the American readership when placing value on one observation over the other.

Willis, in addition to the burden of common concerns that are enumerated above, had surrounded himself, unintentionally as he repeatedly reported to be, with unique circumstances that called for a lengthy explication and correction on his side in the preface to Pencillings by the Way. While reporting various anecdotes that were confided to him when he was accepted into

100 Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, (University Press of Kentucky, 1983), p. 111. 101Jerome Bruner, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 78.

47 elite social circles in England, he broke people's confidences allegedly mainly because of underestimating the book's success. "

Having been the Editor, before leaving the United States, of a monthly Review, I found it both profitable and agreeable, to continue my correspondence. Foreign courts, distinguished men, royal entertainments, &c. &c., — matters which were likely to interest American readers more particularly-have been in turn my themes. The distance of America from these countries, and the ephemeral nature and usual obscurity of periodical correspondence, were a sufficient; warrant to my mind, that the descriptions would die (where they first saw the light, and fulfill only the trifling destiny for which they were intended. I indulged myself, therefore, in a freedom of detail and topic which is usual only in posthumous memoirs...102 In fact, he was the first author to have been sponsored by a single periodical for a European tour until 1831 and he strongly hoped for a place in the British literary scene if he had not anticipated it. The controversial nature of his accounts realized his hopes even if this nature was not premeditated.

Along with his constant admiration of English high society, the high regard he expresses for English critics yet also his adamant search for flaws in their society in general and the naturally presumed disinterest of the English readership in his narrative, denotes his struggle in placing the American literati among the wider framework of English literary scene. But as he clearly expresses his intentions in the preface, he does not aim at achieving this end through his publications. As Jeffrey Alan Melton points out in his article ―Tourism,‖ breaking away from the English was easier politically than it was culturally, intellectually or emotionally. Old world epitomized by England was to be filtered in terms of the meaning it carried for the United States; the political past had to be discarded whereas the rich legacy of culture would arouse a sense of pride. The vital conclusion to be derived from these adversary impulses by availing oneself of the usable past was that England with all its political fallacies belonged to the past and it also reinstated the rightfulness of U.S. independence.103 A review of Pencillings by the Way published in the North American Review more overtly reverses the possible claim that he might be afflicted with false modesty. "Even where British criticism is favorable to an American author, its tone is likely to be haughty and insulting; like the language of a condescending city

102 Nathaniel Parker Willis, Pencillings by the Way: written during some years of residence and travel in France, Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Turkey, and England, (New York: Morris & Willis, Publishers, 1844), p. i. 103 "Tourism." American History Through Literature. Ed. Janet Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattelmeyer. Gale Cengage, 2006. eNotes.com. 2006. 5 Aug, 2009

48 gentleman toward some country cousin, whom he is kind enough to honor with this patronage."104 Christof Wegelin in his articles ―The Rise of the International Novel,‖ and ―Social Criticism of Europe in the Fiction of N. P. Willis,‖ discusses in length the treatment of Europe in Willis‘ writings. Willis‘ approach seems contradictory initially; his admiration which borders on fixation for nobility, social circles of the upper classes, soirees is, according to Wegelin misrepresentative of his overall opinion on the matter. After years, when Willis finally sits down to write his one and only novel Paul Fane (1857), which he had been encouraged to write throughout his life, he sounds more judgmental if not bitter towards English society. Wegelin, comments on the majority of Willis‘ fictional works: ―…the hero one of ‗nature‘s nobleman‘ – often a famous wit or an artist or, like Willis himself, a magazine writer- is snubbed by those who thinks themselves as social superiors, although in the end he usually puts their unwarranted pride to shame. The underlying assertion is always that ‗nature‘s nobility‘ is independent of the artificial distinctions of human society.‖105 These opposing attitudes seem to have coexisted in Willis long before Paul Fane was published. One needs not turn solely to fictional accounts to derive this conclusion. Even at the peak of his elated appreciation of being accepted into British society and literati, he wrote in the Pencillings:

Who but Englishmen have robbed Athens, and Egina, and all Greece? Who but Englishmen are watched like thieves in their visits to every place of curiosity in the world? Where is the superb caryatid of the Erechtheion? Stolen, with such barbarous carelessness, too, that the remaining statues and the superb portico they sustained are tumbling to the ground! The insolence of England‘s laying such sins at the door of another nation is insufferable. 106

Ancient Greece had always enjoyed a special place in the American consciousness as it is clear from many accounts of Greece written during the same century that Pencillings was written in. Therefore, one cannot precisely determine whether Willis would have been the fervent defender of ―another nation‖ victimized impertinently in the same way by England. But it reinforces Wegelin‘s argument that Willis was not a blind admirer of the English and he could be selective in the subjects he praises. After all, the subliminal awareness that English stood in contrast to the foundational principles of the United States and the negations of their shortcomings helped define the contrasting character of the American. The mere fact that he takes upon himself to

104The North American Review, Vol. XLIII, No. 93, (Boston: Charles Bowen, 1836), p. 408. 105Christof Wegelin. ―Social Criticism of Europe in the Fiction of N. P. Willis,‖ American Literature, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Nov., 1948), p. 315. 106 Nathaniel Parker Willis, Pencillings by the Way, (New York: Morris & Willis, Publishers, 1844), p. 131.

49 introduce or rather transport after a good deal of editing, the celebrity culture to the United States reveals his belief that America does not only consist of the proverbial country cousin whose only passion is his land and his survival. The country cousin now moved to the city, turned his country home into a retreat –even gave it a name inspired by his favorite novel-, and on his way to his office in his latest fashion four piece suit, he picks up a periodical to catch up with the latest gossip among the Boston literati and reads about how Willis decorates his own editorial office.

When transporting celebrity culture to the United States, (according to Thomas N. Baker, Willis was probably the first American to use the word "celebrity" in print) he inadvertently reinforced the country cousin image of the American journalist/author with his excessive aspirations for gentility and romantic yet pretentious ambition for refinement. Perhaps, rather unfair due to being one dimensional, yet the wittiest criticism to Willis came from Thackeray who also created John Paul Jefferson Jones in Vanity Fair inspired by Willis himself.

…amusement at the immensity of N. P.‘s blunders; amusement at the prodigiousness of his self- esteem; amusement always with or at Willis the poet, Willis the man, Willis the dandy, Willis the lover –now the Broadway Crichton- once the ruler of fashion and heart-enslaver of Bond Street, and the Boulevard, and the Corso, and the Chiaja, and the Constantinople Bazaars…To know a duchess, for instance, is given to very few of us. He sees things that are not given to us to see. We see the duchess pass by in her carriage and gaze with much reverence on the strawberry leaves on panels and her Grace within; whereas the odds are that the lovely duchess has had, at one time or the other, a desperate flirtation with Willis the Conqueror...107 "Foreign courts, distinguished men, royal entertainments," lengthy and comprehensive descriptions of dresses, and physical traits of people, gossips and informed speculations about famous authors and men and women of high society instead of the flora and fauna of the lands he visits are what he presumed that the American readership will primarily respond to.

While certain discursive strategies employed by the author of the text to satisfy or defy the expectations of the readership, these narratives also have a dialogic relationship with the former narratives published that recount observations on similar geographical sites and cultural norms. They may reinstate certain presumptions that are explicitly subjective given the nature of the genre or they may undermine the reliability of their non-fictional quality. ―In a very broad sense, then, the terms reliable and unreliable apply to all authors of fiction and all recits de

107 George Paston, Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century, (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1902), p. 128.

50 voyage, for not only is a writer in either group aware of being involved in an act of narration but that writer intrudes and thus colors the tale.‖108 However, the vital distinction is that fiction comes out intact from this authorial involvement but with regard to recits de voyage the intrusion is self-annihilating. The author of a travel narrative becomes intrinsically unreliable contrary to the reader‘s intuitive tendency to determine the distinction in the course of absorbing the experience. This phenomenon is distinct and unique not only because it alters the perceptions about a formerly published work but also because it might render the narrative obsolete by contesting it formally. Thus, it might rob the narrative of its genre and the implications about the nature of the genre itself which it entails.

Willis himself comments on this phenomenon in the preface of his People I Have Met; or, Pictures of Society and People of Mark, Drawn Under a Thin Veil of Fiction published in 1850, ―The freedom to draw truly, in fiction, gives a fidelity to portraitures in a story, which would be almost impossible even in a literal biography…between what we have seen ourselves, and the same thing verbally described to us by others, often little or no resemblance is perceptible, because, from various influences which do not affect a professedly fictitious description, the describer wavers from the truth.‖109 It would be safe to say that the more the describer wavers from the truth the more varied and fertile the account becomes. Since the places of interest had already been exhausted in the last century by the British and the French, the American readership would be prone to enjoying an account like Willis‘ more, since his descriptions are not interchangeable. There might be other accounts that recount meeting with a certain, prominent poet‘s wife or a dinner at a lady‘s mansion; however these instances are bound to be unique to a larger extent than flora and fauna descriptions will be. Not only because the changing rate will be inescapably slower but also because the level of subjectivity will deem the work more durable even if it does not become a product that entails instructions on how to make the past usable. The financial success of Pencillings is the most convincing proof. As

108Percy G. Adams. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, (The University Press of Kentucky: 1983), p. 179. 109 Nathaniel Parker Willis,People I Have Met; or, Pictures of Society and People of Mark, Drawn Under a Thin Veil of Fiction, (London: Richard Bentley, 1850), p. vi. 51

Adams puts it, ―…the lasting travel accounts are quite subjective, that -within limits- the more subjective they are, the more readable, the more 'valuable' they are.‖110

Willis was revolutionary in terms of contributing to the celebrity culture or even help create it; however his depiction of Europe and Asia Minor –though one can pinpoint parallels in terms of his fascinated approach on sighting the places he had received second hand information about so far- are on a basic level different in that it is clear Asia Minor is not the main province of his interest. Thus the subjectivity as well as the account‘s durability is not equally valid in these two parts of the book that can be geographically categorized. As unsurprising and normative as his depictions of Asia Minor is, because of his entertaining and fanciful style – within limits- makes the account readable. Whatever his object of interest is, he predominantly reveals his public persona and sets a moral framework against which he delivers his opinions about local norms. The striking surplus of superlatives in the account, (the most handsome man; the most beautiful scenery that he has ever laid eyes on) rather than making the account utterly unreliable, makes it into a parody of itself and the author‘s highly romanticized style. The reason that his embellishments are acceptable is that his romantic sensibilities are a result of a self- conscious and premeditated decision, not whims of the moment.

Henry A. Beers, in his biography of Willis published in 1885 notes: "At present [1885] 'realism' has the floor, sentiment is at a discount, and Willis's glittering, high-colored pictures of society, with their easy optimism and their unlikeness to hard fact, have little to say to the readers of Zola and Henry James."111 Fortunately, unlike Bayard Taylor, Willis had no claims or desire for fame after his death. His style gave him the perennial role during the peak of his fame and fortune yet it did not guarantee him durability. Yet with regard to Asia Minor, he neither elevates his romanticized portrayal to a pure fanciful form like Bayard Taylor –he imitates the pure fanciful form; yet it is mere repetition as if written in a state of trance, which is not to say it is of any less consequence in shaping the public outlook. Yet one cannot detect the same overt agenda he bears in mind when he shares his impressions about the rest of Europe- nor is he ever as bitter and crude –relatively speaking- as Mark Twain or David Porter.

110Percy G. Adams. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, (The University Press of Kentucky: 1983), p. 280. 111Henry A. Beers. Nathaniel Parker Willis, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1885), p. 3.

In Willis‘ deduction about fiction and fidelity to truth, the negative trends of events that took place because of his indiscretion of information trusted in him or his interference in private matters of his acquaintances might be the prime mover. Like the divorce case of Edwin and Catherine Forrest during which Edwin Forrest assaulted Willis on the street, following the incident Willis sued Forrest and won the case. Another disquieting incident occurred when a private communication between Willis and Morris where Willis called Captain Marryat‘s works ―gross trash,‖ was inadvertently published by Morris in 1836; Marryat attacked Willis in the pages of Metropolitan, which he was editing. The mutual animosity resulted in a duel that ended without bloodshed thanks to their seconds who resolved the issue. As physically and mentally exhausting as these occurrences were for Willis, it did not affect the sales of his books or the paper he wrote for, if they did not boost them.

It is overtly made clear by many travel writers of the 19th century that there is a constant imagined interaction between the author traveling in the present time and the authors that had traveled and written about the places for centuries before him. This interaction emerges in two opposing levels. On the one hand, the author expresses his pride in following his/her precedent‘s path, yet at the same time through his narrative he struggles to create a depiction of an exhausted site which is both original and also transcends his/her precedent‘s recorded impressions.

An interesting example is a review written by Edgar Allen Poe of John Lloyd Stephens‘ Incidents of Travels in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land published in 1837. Poe measures Stephens‘ brilliance not in relation to his American contemporaries but by its distinctiveness from the French. ―Equally free from the exaggerated sentimentality of Chateaubriand, or the sublimated, the too French enthusiasm of Lamartine on the one hand, and on the other from the degrading spirit of utilitarianism, which sees in mountains and waterfalls only quarries and manufacturing sites, Mr. Stephens writes like a man of good sense and sound feeling.‖112 Willis, on the other hand, can be described by everything Poe praises Stephens as being free of. In fact, despite being social and professional and social acquaintances,113 Poe

112New York Review, Vol. I, (New York: George Dearborn & Co., 1837), p. 367. 113 On January 29, 1845, The Raven was published for the first time in the Evening Mirror where Nathaniel Parker Willis was an editor.

53 wrote of Willis: ―In me, at least, he never excites an emotion.‖114 His naïve enthusiasm about Europe leaves the place to nonchalant and commonplace observations about Constantinople. His manners and the way he depicts his surroundings sound rehearsed and partially makes the reader feel at home with the description since without the Upper Ten Thousand of Europe –a term he coined- his portrayal of Asia Minor is a rehashed and adapted version of preceding narratives. A contrasting example is the generous praise of Pencillings by Beers: ― ...in the crowd and out of doors -whither he gladly escapes- he is always happy, and there are many pictures, scattered here and there through those excellent letters, which for sharpness of line and brightness of color have not been excelled either by Hawthorne, in his 'Note Books,' or by Bayard Taylor, in his numerous views, afoot or otherwise, or by Henry James, in his more penetrating and far more carefully finished studies.‖115 Although Willis does not surpass Taylor‘s enthusiasm about the Asia Minor –he does not travel further East- his mood remains more or less stable as Beers also notes. The reason behind the difference of frame of reference between Beers and Poe is obviously quite practical. There are simply a greater number of American travel accounts published during that half a century that enables comparison.

II. Nat Willis

N. P. Willis, as he himself signed his name, died on his 61st birthday in 1867. When analyzed in retrospect he belonged to the Genteel Tradition, which was a conformist tradition that did not really define him. He was not cutting edge with his poetry but mostly with his public persona that he never refrained from integrating into his writings. If he did not revolutionize the antebellum literary scene, he added a new dimension to it: celebrity culture, ―refined‖ dissemination of information about private lives of writers and commentary on fashion. His obituary could not help but comment on his once unrivalled fame that had now ironically died out before him. Paston explains the loss of interest in Willis and his sketches primarily with the advance of the Civil War: ―One of the minor results of the great Civil War was the extinguishing

114 Arthur Hobson Quinn. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1941), p. 389. 115Henry A. Beers. Nathaniel Parker Willis, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1885), p. 117.

54 of Willis‘s literary reputation; his frothy trifling suddenly became obsolete when men had sterner things to think about than the cut of a coat, or the etiquette of a morning call.‖116

…we may say he was an author for the age in which he wrote. At one time, he was, as a poet, as popular with the mass of American readers as BYRON was in England; his verses were the first found and the most read on the centre tables of polite society, and his prose sketches were deemed models of perfection. They were, indeed, suited to the time, and met and supplied a longing for romance of their kind in the reading world. But that was before philosophy and science invaded the parlor; it was when stories were stories, and romance was romance; before Dickenses and Reades made novels the vehicles of political movements, or Brownings thundered pantheism in rhyme.117

This portrayal of Willis as a representative of belles letters and his ephemeral style in his obituary might be interpreted as accurate. Regardless of the enmity and contempt he aroused in many critics and fellow writers, he was a genuine defender of literature as a profession and he was one of the first writers who supported himself merely by his earnings from his publications and editorial work.

Born in Portland, Maine on January 20, 1806 to a family of men who chose literary profession of letters as their main source of income for two generations, Nathaniel Parker Willis was also named after his father and grandfather. According to the U.S. population census, during his lifetime the population of the United States increased from 5,809,000 in 1800 to 31,443,321 after the single large wave of immigration during the Irish potato famine between the years 1846-1856. Relative to his successors, a stable career in journalism and literature in general was easier to attain by mere reason of lack of competition. Yet without predecessors who sketched the professional path to be taken Willis had to go through a lot of trials and errors before he accomplished long lasting occupational success. His father was the founder of the successful religious newspaper Boston Recorder in 1816 and later The Youth’s Companion118 in 1824 a year after Nat Willis entered Yale College. During his college years, he had struggled to make a compromise between his willingness to live up to the expectations of his father with regard to

116 George Paston, Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century, (New York: Richards E. P. Dutton and Co., 1902), p. 212. 117The New York Times, January 22, 1867.http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive- free/pdf?_r=1&res=9E07E3DA103AEF34BC4A51DFB766838C679FDE 118The weekly paper of The Youth’s Companion was advertised with Nathaniel Willis Jr. in The New Mirror on January 6, 1844; the advertisement on the first page of the periodical read: ―Devoted to Piety, Morality, Brotherly Love –No Secterianism- No Controversy‖ The New Mirror, G.P. Morris, N. P. Willis, eds.,Vol. II, Morris, Willis, & Co., Ann Street, Saturday, Jan. 6, 1844.

55 religion –Willis the elder was nicknamed Deacon Willis- and his youthful admiration for the secular poetry as well as fashion and society that epitomized worldliness. After his graduation in 1829, he published his first volume of poetry Fugitive Poetry, he began to contribute to magazines more frequently, became the editor of Token and founded American Monthly Magazine, but this endeavor was not financially successful enough to be continued for more than two years, and was later absorbed by the New York Mirror.

In 1831, he was sponsored by George Pope Morris to reside and travel in Europe and his impressions were published in the Mirror, as was the norm, in the form of letters and half of them were later collected and published under the name of Pencillings by the Way in 1835. Baker comments on his desire for travel which Bayard Taylor was to share when two decades later, he came to collect recommendation letters for Willis‘ brother who lived in Germany. ―…like many an ambitious American, Willis thought that Europe alone could cap his cultural education. After all, the Old World whispered of moss-covered antiquity and the atmosphere of genius –just the sort of romantic qualities workaday Boston conspired to quash. And so, in the midst of his dissipation, he clung to one dream as an article of faith: the future lay across the sea.‖119

The work was both famous for its elegant, witty and eloquent descriptions of flora and fauna, and people yet it was notorious for his faux pas in incorporating gossip in his narrative. Like Bayard Taylor‘s first travel narrative of Europe Views a-foot which incidentally Willis helped name, and which Taylor was too embarrassed to acknowledge as his own, Willis‘ Pencillings was not transcended by his following works, in terms of either fame or notoriety. The American minister to French legation assigned him the attaché position so that he would have access to distinguished society and travel easier between the countries. Nevertheless, Willis, too was diligent and industrious. A year after Pencillings, his ―Slingby Papers,‖ a vivid and easy depiction of American life and adventure was published as Inklings of Adventure in 1836, the spring of which Willis came back to United States, now married. In 1837, Melanie and Other Poems followed it as Willis‘ second collection of poetry. The Tent Pinch’d and Loiterings of Travel were published successively in 1839 and 1840.

119Thomas N. Baker. Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 39.

In 1843, after a temporary personal fall out in 1838, Willis rejoined Morris in editing The New Mirror. "Reporting taste and refinement became their distinctive stock in trade; as the self- appointed instructors, they had to reassure the public, the instructed, that they as editors were not members of any social elite."120 Meanwhile, Willis, along with T. O. Porter, published The Corsair between 1839-1840 with the subtitle A Gazette of Literature, Art, Dramatic Criticism, Fashion and Novelty. Aside from pirating articles from European newspapers and periodicals, Willis also recruited Thackeray to contribute his travel letters and he also published his own commentary on art, fashion, and literature. Yet after a year financial difficulties he aborted the publication of the periodical. New Mirror was published weekly with the subtitle A Saturday Paper of Literature and the Fine Arts which the two of them continued to edit until the end of their lives. Every number, as promised in the first issue was embellished with a steel engraving, and the subscription was three dollars per year, which was the regular price of an annual subscription to a widely read periodical such as the Graham’s Magazine whereas a women‘s periodical would cost around two dollars or less per annum. The Corsair, for instance, cost five dollars per annum in 1839, which was above average. On the front page of the fourteenth issue, editors noted that the circulation of the periodical was around ten thousand and the subscription list was constantly increasing. Aside from poetry, advertisements, and short stories by American contributors, the editors also included translations from French periodicals.

A number of articles, short stories, and sketches that deal with the Orient as their subject matter had been published in The New Mirror. On the ninth issue, for instance, one unsigned contribution entitled ―Scripture Authority on Beard,‖ which explicated the sacredness and symbolism of Oriental beards was published and was followed by an excerpt from Lea and Blanchard‘s Education of Mothers; or the Civilization of Mankind by Women which contrasts the Eastern and European familial relations: ―Let us cast our eyes over the earth, and observe the two great divisions of the human race –the East and the West; one half of the Old World continues without improvement, and without ideas, beneath the weight of a barbarous civilization; there the women are slaves; the other half progresses towards equality and enlightenment, and we there see women free and honoured.‖121 In addition to his dictum of political neutrality, Willis seems

120 Cortland P. Auser, Nathaniel Parker Willis, (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969), p. 60. 121The New Mirror, G.P. Morris, N. P. Willis, eds., (Office of Publication, Ann Street, New York, Saturday, December 2, 1843, Number 9), p. 142.

57 to have had a democratic view on what was to be included in the periodical. In 1839, when he was the co-editor of The Corsair, he published the translation of a pseudo-historical article from Le Constitutionnel about the origins of the Jews entitled ―Arab Tradition‖ with a short introduction written by one of the editors that is quite critical of the intricate link between the French interest in Algerian historiography and the French political agenda regarding the region. The introduction reads:

The fugitive literature of France, is taking a natural but curious cast from her new possession in Africa. Arab stories, legends and maxims appear in the popular journals, mixed up strangely with French politics, French fashions, and French coffee-house wit. Indifferent as the French are to every thing which does not in some way minister to la glorie de la grande nation, it must be confessed that their spirit of research into the literature, usages, and character of the countries in the path of their armies, has been indefatigable. It is probable that at this moment, the common people of Paris know more of Algiers than of London; and, a year hence, they will know vastly more of Vera Cruz than of New York. In a paper upon the popular prejudices of the Bedouin Arabs, communicated to one of the journals of Paris by a French officer, we find an amusing superstition touching the origin of the Jews.122 This criticism bordering on contempt mixed with fear indicates an overt disapproval of French usage of the press and literature in general to disseminate unfounded mythical stories about the Arab world, if not colonialism as a practice. Willis had made his own significant and widely circulated contribution to stereotypical mythmaking a few years ago by his Pencillings; however, it must have been excusable in his frame of mind as mere literary production without any cloaked political agenda. He did not reinstate prejudices against Bedouin Arabs in his own narrative because he had not traveled farther east than Asia Minor. Nevertheless, he did not refrain himself from recurrently affirming historically embedded cultural stereotypes and prejudices about the Turks accompanied by his easy going and elegant sense of humor. Willis indisputably was frowned upon, overtly criticized and banished from certain social circles because of his indiscretions in Pencillings, however, with regard to his representation of Asia Minor and the Turks he merely repeats second hand impressions that constitute the discourses the public is accustomed to and could recreate by heart. His impressions seem geared towards making the reader feel at home. They are distinctively uncontroversial for the time in which it was published.

122The Corsair, N. P. Willis, T. O. Porter, eds., ―Arab Tradition,‖ (Office in Astor House, No. 8 Barclay Street, New York, Saturday, March 23, 1839. No. 2), p. 27-28.

In 1850, People I Have Met; or, Pictures of Society and People of Mark, Drawn Under a Thin Veil of Fiction was published. It consists of expanded and comprehensive anecdotes that, when unbeknownst to the reader that he drew his material from actual occurrences would be regarded as short fiction. The stories take place in various places in Europe –mostly London-; the implied author is a well traveled observant who has a knack for quick and thorough perception and grasp of the relationships around him just like Willis himself. The narrator presumably collected these stories to share with the reader after the fact. Lords, countesses and ballrooms are indispensable elements of the stories. They entail lengthy private dialogues that earn them their fictional quality. Like most of his short fiction however, stories come to an abrupt end and the denouement is always disproportionately short compared to the rest, which consists of a graphically detailed depiction of people and places. Beers pinpoints to Willis‘ impatience in style as: "His talent was of the kind which discipline does not always improve. It was the expression of his temperament, fresh, fencile, spontaneous, but impatient of continuance. He was best at a dash -a sketch, or a short tale."123 Fittingly many of his titles include expressions such as inklings, dashes, jottings, hurry-graphs, pencillings and the like.

III. By the Way

I came on deck this morning and looked around, and for an hour or two I could scarce realize that it was not a dream. Much as I had watched the sea from our bold promontry in Nahant, as well as I thought I knew its character in storms and calms, the scene which was before me surprised and bewildered me utterly. At the first glance, we were just in the gorge of the sea, and looking over the leeward quarter, I saw, stretching up from the keel, what I can only describe as a hill of dazzling blue, thirty or forty feet in real altitude, but sloped so far away that the white crest seemed to me a cloud, and the space between a sky of the most wonderful beauty and brightness.124

Willis had always been passionate about taking the Grand Tour of Europe like many of his contemporary travelers as well as his followers. With his personal and occupational interest in dilettantism, belles letters, Europe was an obligatory step in the accomplishment of his gentility. Yet that was certainly the least novel of all the impulses he had. As Adams remarks: ―The Grand Tour [Europe] remained popular until the nineteenth century and, in fact, has always existed in one form or another and it has always produced a great body of literature to be read

123Henry A. Beers. Nathaniel Parker Willis, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1885), p. 214. 124Nathaniel Parker Willis, Pencillings by the Way, (New York: Morris & Willis, Publishers, 1844), p. 1.

59 and imitated to be used as a guide and an inspiration, or to be satirized. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, are still thought of, and with reason, as the age of the Grand Tour.‖125 Rather than bliss as it seemed at first impressions it was to prove a challenge for Willis for many reasons. He was to become the sentimental dandy who now had his recommendation letters to endorse his eligibility as a cultural attaché. In the experience itself, there was no novelty, and his impressionistic descriptive style seems to parallel this lack of novelty. Those are his first impressions on the sailing vessel that is bound to cross the Atlantic. The journey guarantees exhaustion, yet the tediousness of the journey could not break Willis‘ enthusiasm. He recounts the landscape with an exhilaration that is not originally his but which he adopts as his own with his occasional wit, and his continued interest in what he had described in an elated manner with overtures of admiration.

Beers remarks on Willis‘ style rather amusingly: ―There is a perpetual twinkle or ripple over his style, like a quaver in music, which sometimes fatigues. Is the man never going to forget himself and say a thing plainly? the reader asks… He had at all times, however, a feminine fondness for italics and exclamations, and his figures had a daintiness which displeased severe critics."126 The self-consciousness in his style becomes customary to the reader and his zealous enthusiasm which Beers in 1885 perceived to be feminine, normative and acceptable by the mere recurrence of them. His sentimentality and almost religious dedication to inclusive delineations are not restricted to portrayal of nature but extends to people, too. As is clear from his impressions of the sea, the clouds, and the blue sky, Willis does not need strong impulses to shape his style. What stimulates him is independent from the end result.

One significant trait that Willis possesses is his ability –although he was severely criticized on many levels during the process- to merge an American celebrity culture, dandyism, internationalism, essentialism, an exceptional American identity through his descriptions of the American through the eyes of the European and secondarily through his depiction of the Orient as the ultimate other. I call the othering of the Orient secondary because it is quite perceptibly only a partial means and a requirement in cultural refinement and through that refinement, exceptionalism. His idea of refinement as I have already tried to demonstrate is not a mere

125Percy G. Adams. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, (The University Press of Kentucky: 1983), p. 66. 126Henry A. Beers. Nathaniel Parker Willis, (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1885), p. 214.

60 imitation of a European, and specifically a British one. Nevertheless, the othering of the Orient and reinstatement of certain stereotypes remain above his filter of requirements and not eliminated as a degenerate practice. In other words, it agrees with the young exceptional America that young Willis comes from.

For instance, he does not assign an incomparable emotional meaning to the Orient like Taylor whom he inspired to travel. The relatively short period between the publications of the two works have undoubtedly some effect on their treatment of Asia Minor in particular. For Willis, it seems that it is temporally too early to claim the Orient as America‘s own other. Nonetheless, his practice is so well integrated to the subliminal master plan that it does not cease to be uniquely American in nature. Here Bruce A. Harvey‘s definition for the other is functional: ―The cultural or psychological service that the non-European renders the U.S. subject by being a projective screen depends upon ‗native‘ particularities, upon the U.S. subject cathecting with (which is not to say desiring) the other, a term that I broadly conceive as encompassing foreign topographies, cultural relics or monuments, social practices, as well as persons or bodies per se.‖127 The native peculiarities establish the pattern of the discursive choices the author is going to make. It might primarily be a result of the domestic anxieties that reflect on these choices and how the author deals with issues that hit close to home. The urgent need, when taken at a face value in Pencillings, seems to be the cultural service the discursive choices renders the author and the reader; however, the psychological service through self-reflexivity and projection lies at the base of the cultural needs as well. In various examples that deal with a similar concept, his interpretations reveal a double standard, which consequently discloses either premeditation or a lack thereof. As an epitomizing example as to how Willis deals with European topography, here is his description of the province of Normandy:

… the heavy gateways and winding avenues and antique structure of the distant and half- hidden chateaux, the perfect cultivation, and, to me, a singular appearance of a whole landscape without a fence or a stone, the absence of all that we define by comfort and neatness, and the presence of all that we have seen in pictures and read of in books, but consider as the representations and descriptions of ages gone by –all seemed to me irrestibly

127 Bruce Harvey, American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865, (California: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 6.

like a dream…-every stone as it was laid in times of worm-eaten history- and looking to my eyes now as they did to the eyes of knights and dames in the days of French chivalry.128

Detaining France in her chivalrous past, reference to second hand knowledge that either is attained from visual or literary sources both reveal a contrasting image to young America which is not a blurry dream ornamented with nostalgic elements partially recollected in the arms of slumber but rather a realized utopia of the present time. Detainment in the past is a common imposition pertained to both Europe and Asia Minor however, Europe is not dehistoricized and is not devoid of the ability to enact its usable past for future political amelioration and it is always positioned within secular history. This distinction is evidently a result of purposefulness regardless of a conscious intentionality. European history partially is although decadently129 extant to be available for historical reference the same way the historical relations between Europe and the Orient are extant to Europe. The United States, without any ideological agenda at this point does not urgently need the Orient to function as its other. This urge is a part of the legacy that remains palpable as a frame of reference yet the fact that Willis‘ narrative reveals an indigenous discourse over Asia Minor and that this urge was inherited are not mutually exclusive.

Bruce Harvey makes an essential distinction between the ideological and the physical itinerary of the travelers: ―Even when a text based upon a cross-cultural encounter deprecates aspects of the homeland, there is no guarantee that it will not hit, whatever the good intentions of its author, a mimetic barrier when it comes to giving an ‗inside‘ view of a non-European world. To the extent that the ideological itinerary of the U.S. traveler remains on American soil, the act

128 Nathaniel Parker Willis, Pencillings by the Way, (New York: Morris & Willis, Publishers, 1844), p. 5. 129 ―It cost, [Versailles] says the guide book, two hundred and fifty millions of dollars; and leaving your fancy to expend that trifle over a residence, which, remember, is but one out of some half dozen, occupied during the year by a single family, I commend the republican moral to your consideration...‖ Ibid. p. 11. Here, European extravagance is portrayed as decadent and is not attached the same dreamlike quality of the chivalrous past the description of Normandy entails. Seemingly, French extravagance is singled out in a similar manner to its Oriental counterpart yet when Oriental lavishness is emphasized it hardly ever receives any criticism stemming from Republican morals. Because, the latter is never questioned, as the Oriental profligacy quite complementary with the author‘s expectations. They both reveal a dreamlike sentiment in the author yet the former is positioned in the past and the latter is a recurring theme and is timeless. ―The women of Constantinople, I am told, almost live on confectionary. They eat incredible quantities. The sultan‘s eight hundred wives and women employ five hundred cooks, and consume two thousand five hundred pounds of sugar daily! It is probably the most expensive item of the seraglio kitchen.‖ Ibid. 145. Here, is a gendered licentiousness that does not deserve the severe criticism that the cost of Versailles does. The first piece of information is relatively –assumedly- reliable since a guidebook is cited as a source whereas in the latter, a mere hear-say is convincing enough to support his evident fanciful account.

62 of depicting non-European lands and their inhabitants becomes an asymmetrical one.‖130 The main referent in this case is the U.S. national identity and Asia Minor is a mere reference point that is interchangeable with other geographies but its expediency renders it an easy target. The self-reflexivity and the struggle with the positioning of the national identity within the international arena in a century that witnessed the Revolutionary War, Indian Wars in the West, and the first Atlantic voyage with the steamship naturalized this inherited urge. These anxieties about the wholeness and stability of U.S. role and identity along with the perceived threat of African-American and Native American presences lie at the heart of the indigenous discourse of American Orientalism.131 Lucy Maddox discusses the impact of Native American removal and presence on the nineteenth century American literature at length. She aptly observes: ―…the American writer was, whether intentionally or not, contributing to the process of constructing a new-nation ideology, a process that both necessitated the removal or supplanting of inappropriate forms of discourse and justified the physical removal and supplanting of the Indians.‖132 In Pencillings the disquietedness about slavery permeates into the flow of the narrative blatantly. ―The captain answered to our hail that he was from Trebizond and his passengers were slaves for the bazaar. How redolent of the east! Were one but a Turk, now, to forestall the market and barter for a pair of those dark eyes while they are still full of surprise and innocence.133 He, in fact, spends quite a long time in the slave market later on to witness the legendary Circassian beauty. Hence, the fact that he does not speculate further on the matter is not a result of his indifference or a lack of direct access to the event. The lack of any hints of criticism on the issue of slavery is easily discernible. However, with a following passage of detailed physical description of an Arab slave girl, it becomes apparent that with regards to Eastern slavery, he would at best pertain to the nation that practices it rather than the institution itself. At the root of his sympathy towards the Arab girl at the slave market merely lies the fact that she is destined to be sold to a ―malignant and a turbaned Turk.‖ Willis‘ best suit, the aptness to spot and articulate on beauty also recurs in this rather unpleasant setting possibly pregnant to many a criticism he

130 Bruce Harvey, American Geographies, (California: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 15. 131 Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, Gender in Literature 1790-1890, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 4. 132 Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth Century American Literature & the Politics of Indian Affairs, (New York, Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 11. 133 Nathaniel Parker Willis, Pencillings by the Way, (New York: Morris & Willis, Publishers, 1844), p. 160.

63 would otherwise not miss to ponder on. But as there is an object that deserves his full concentration, Willis prioritizes the ―Barbary shape that the old poets talk of.‖

The same dusky lips which give the males of her race a look of ghastliness, either by contrast with a row of dazzlingly white teeth, or from their round and perfect chiseling, seemed in her almost a beauty...At last she slowly raised her little symmetrical figure (the ‗Barbary shape‘ the old poets talk of), and slipping forward to reach the latch, I observed that she was chained by one of her ankles to a ring in the floor. To think that only a ‗malignant and a turbaned Turk‘ may possess such a Hebe! Beautiful creature!134

Willis recurrently defines, amends, and enriches the American identity as opposed to decadent Europe and the timeless Asia Minor. There are three –out of many- striking examples where Willis either enumerates American characteristics as opposed to European or through the impressions of Europeans. During his travels in Asia Minor, American superiority is so self- evident that the Orient does not stand on equal footing to be compared with regard to any of the traits in their American counterparts, which he presumes to belong to her.

In Willis, the lack of this comparative approach with regard to Asia Minor–although the recording of his observations is as meticulous and comprehensive as it is in Europe- is quite revealing as to the core of his anxiety. ―…it is the independent, self-possessed bearing of a man unused to look up to any one as his superior in rank, united to the inquisitive, sensitive, communicative expression which is the index to our national character. The first is seldom possessed in England but by a man of decided rank, and the latter is never possessed by an Englishman at all. The two are united in no other nation.‖135

III. A Genteel Reassurance

When emphasizing the importance of recounting observations of the American landscape to formulate the American national character in the 1820s and 1830s, John F. Sears points out the artificial nature of cultural identity that was created through travel.136 Articulation at home, through periodicals is bound to be less convincing to the reading public. But when an author who resides in Europe for several years shares his insights into the core of the English character and

134Ibid. 151. 135 Ibid. p. 8. 136 John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), p. 4.

64 how inferior it is to the American character, and in fact the American character is unique on a global level on enclosing the two characteristics he enumerated, he becomes a compelling source. The third passage is taken from his accounts in Germany on meeting a group of German students traveling to Egypt. ―The enthusiasm when they were told I was an American quite thrilled me. They closed about me and looked into my eyes, as if they expected to read the spirit of freedom in them. I was taken by the arms at last and almost forced into a beer-shop. The large tankards were filled, each touched mine and the others and ‗America‘ was drank with a grave earnestness of manner that moved my heart within me.‖137138 According to his account of the incident, he seems eager to demonstrate that America is not only known of, as in, European nations aside from the British and the French are aware of her existence as an independent nation but not only as the scarcely populated New World, but it is also known for her spirit of freedom. There is an aura of fervor in celebrating American freedom in Europe that might be unbeknownst to the American reader. In this case, the idyllic nature of American freedom is not directly reaffirmed by the American author himself but rendered credible by the random course of events that seemingly the author had no power to stage.

The core quality of Taylor‘s narrative, ambivalence towards the Orient reveals itself in a much more incongruous manner in Pencilings. He acknowledges, ponders on and conveys all three of the latent Orientalist categories. However, the averred spiritual attachment is absent. He builds on the myths he discovered through literature and although he sounds essentially baffled by the contradicting norms, and traits he encounters, he does not concede that each of his succeeding observations negates the former. Zweder von Martels avows that as human nature is innately protective of itself against new influences, thus the readership is in urgent need of confirmation of old values under the cloak of a certain amount of novelty. This forces the travel

137 Nathaniel Parker Willis, Pencillings by the Way, (New York: Morris & Willis, Publishers, 1844), p. 108. 138 ―Our Gratz merchant was surprised at the light color of the officers he had seen, and doubted if they were not Englishmen in the American service. He had always heard Americans were black. ‗They are so,‘ said the soldier- apothecary; ‗I saw the real Americans yesterday in a boat, quite black.‘ (One of the cutters of the Constellation has a negro crew, which he had probably seen at the pier.) The assertion seemed to satisfy the doubts of all parties. They had wondered how such beautiful ships could come from a savage country. It was now explained. ‗They were bought from the English, and officered by Englishmen.‘ I was too much amused with their speculations to undeceive them...‖ Ibid. 108. Now this incident, recounted right before the one quoted above seem in contradiction but he does not find this striking enough to speculate on. While German students celebrated the American independence and freedom with gusto, to the Gratz merchant America is still a land of savagery inhabited by black people; whatever is worthy of them is engineered and led by the English. Yet Willis is consistent in expressing his confidence; he does not retort with a defensive explication to correct the faulty impressions yet he is merely amused by the ignorance.

65 writer to linger between conservatism and unorthodoxy, which for the modern eye seems contradictory at best.139 Schueller explicates this contradiction by the distinction she makes between European and American Orientalisms. Rather than the simply unchanging European discourse, American Orientalism is discrete, U.S. literary writings entail historicity about various Orients; although admittedly, it does not convey national or cultural distinctions between Middle Eastern nations on the surface.140 As nationalism and imperialism, in other words, American and European political agenda cannot be considered identical; it would not be safe to assume that Americans would adopt the same repetitive Orientalist tradition.141 Therefore, despite the unquestionable existence of indigenousness, one can categorize latent Orientalist discursive strategies but not discuss uniformity within a single narrative as well as among a number of them, –regardless of the numerous instances of intertextuality.

Here Willis expresses his ambivalent notion about Constantinople or rather Eastern reform and progress in general by recounting his observations about the Ottoman military. It is not only the mental clash of his preconceptions and what he actually encounters that constitutes his ambivalent manner. His general superficial demeanor also reflects on his observations. Aside from the discrepancy he assigns to be extant between the European military paraphernalia and Oriental mentality, he switches to his airy style and reveals no information about the technical capabilities or self-sufficiency of the reformed military.

The sultan, I think unwisely, has introduced the European uniform into his army. With the exception of the Tunisian cap, which is substituted for the thick and handsome turban, the dress is such as is worn by the soldiers of the French army. Their tailors are of course bad, and their figures, accustomed only to the loose and graceful costume of the east, are awkward and constrained. I never saw so uncouth a set of fellows as the five thousand mussulmans in this army of the Dardanelles; and yet in their Turkish trowsers and turban, with the belt stuck full of arms, and their long mustache, they would be as martial-looking as ever followes a banner.142

In his airy mode, his manner is almost adaptive to the observations of a ballroom full of elegantly dressed men who instead of adopting the latest trends of Parisian fashion would have been more attractive only if they had remained loyal to their traditional costumes. I will proceed to analyze

139Zweder von Martels, ed., Travel Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly Discovery and Observation in Travel Writing, (Leiden, New York, Köln: E. J. Brill, 1994), p. xvii. 140 Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, Gender in Literature 1790-1890, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 6. 141 Ibid. p. 9. 142 Nathaniel Parker Willis, Pencillings by the Way, (New York: Morris & Willis, Publishers, 1844), p. 141.

66 four passages from Pencillings that exemplify the phenomenon that I pinpointed earlier in the chapter, subject matters of all of which pertain to Constantinople as a city that epitomizes the Orient.

I approached the mistress of the east with different feelings from that which had inspired me in entering the older cities of Europe. The interest of the latter sprang from the past. Rome, Florence, Athens, were delightful from the store of history and poetry I brought with me and had accumulated in my youth…Constantinople, on the contrary, is the still the gem of the Orient –still the home of the superb Turk, and the resort of many nations of the east- still all that fires curiosity and excites the imagination in the descriptions of the traveller. I was coming to a living city, full of strange people and strange costumes, language, and manners. It was, to the places I had seen, like the warm and breathing woman perfect in life, to the interesting but lifeless and mutilated statue.143

The first impression he records of Constantinople is the self-proclaimed disparity between his presuppositions about the European cities and Constantinople. He declares merely the former to be a presupposition based on his accumulated second hand knowledge however; it is evident that the source for the latter is no different. Old European cities are interlinked in his conjecture with historicity and being a member of the literati, poetry, yet Constantinople does not incite formerly acquired knowledge but rather excites the fanciful imagination. As Melman suggests: ―Such de-historicization is emblematic of myriad texts which construct a timeless and changeless Middle East, outside secular history.‖144 However, as we will observe, his perplexity in the following passages when he witnesses the undeniable disparity between his premises and anticipations and his first hand observations will not enable him to allow his observations to permeate his presuppositions permanently. As there will be no Turkish critic to reinstate or defy his accuracy and consequently whose review his fame and reputation will impinge on, he refrains from undertaking a full-fledged revision of mythical presumptions recorded as objective observations. Another evident aspect is that Constantinople is gendered female true to norm whereas European cities are only labeled as dead as opposed to the living Orient. This impression, too is soon to be revised in the following page of the same letter as: ―Constantinople is a living city but somehow stabilized by being the gem of the orient.‖145 Through its mere fate to be belonging to a constructed geographical region, Constantinople is branded as stable; the

143 Ibid., 143. 144 Bill Melman, ―Middle East Arabia: The Cradle of Islam‖ 105-122 in Peter Hulme, Tim Youngs, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 110. 145 Nathaniel Parker Willis, Pencillings by the Way, (New York: Morris & Willis, Publishers, 1844), p. 144.

67 eternally unchanging subject that is prone to be speculated upon. Aside from his remark ―There is no word in Turkish for faster...‖ 146 he does not clarify the reasons behind the stable nature of Constantinople but his impressions of fascination gradually leads the way to disillusionment. The rest of the account that is written about Constantinople is a struggle to form a compromise between the preconceived images he had carried with himself and the impressions he attained through experience.

The second passage is one of the examples where Willis cannot hide his bitter disenchantment with his realization of the changeability of the East, in this case embodied by Constantinople. Instead of isolating Constantinople as an insular city and excluding it from the holistic understanding of the East which entails no differentiation among cultures and nations, he might have attested to his original response to East without laying eyes on her. However, even temporarily, he divulges the defiance of his expectations by objective observation. ―The east is losing its picturesqueness. Dress, habits, character, everything seems to be undergoing a gradual change, and when, as the Turks themselves predict, the moslem is driven into Asia, this splendid capital will become another Paris, and with the improvements in travel, a summer in Constantinople will be as little thought of as a tour in Italy.‖147 Nonetheless, a few pages later he continues: ―These are your opium-eaters who smoke even in their sleep, and would not touch wine if it were handed them by houris! These are your fatalists, who could scarce take the trouble to get out of the way of a lion, and who are as certain of a miracle of Mohammed‘s coffin as of the length of the pipe, or of the quality of the tobacco of Shiraz!‖148

His oscillating perspective is so recurrent that it becomes even predictable throughout the narrative. He constantly reverses his own recorded impressions which are highly romanticized versions of an observation that he later on recounts as decadent or highly unappealing. This ambivalence is by no means unique to Willis yet it is more visible and striking in his account because of his rehearsed determination to repeat and reaffirm sentimentalized accounts about Constantinople.

146Ibid. 151. 147Ibid. 151. 148Ibid. 154.

Another recurring and common feature in Willis is the reassurance directed towards the American reader. Yet when this reassurance is most commonly realized through direct comparison between the Oriental land and scenery with their American counterparts, in Willis‘ account his admiration for European refinement factors in. He presents the two poles in his comparative framework not as touristic sites or places for temporary visit and pleasure but rather sets them in opposition as places to live.

I certainly would not live in the east; and when I sum up its inconveniences and the deprivations to which the traveller from Europe, with his refined wants, is subjected, I marvel at the heart-ache with which I turn my back upon it, and the deep die it had infused in my imagination. Its few peculiar luxuries do not compensate for the total absence of comfort; its lovely scenery cannot reconcile you to wretched lodgings; its picturesque costumes and poetical people, and golden sky, fine food for a summer‘s fancy as they are, cannot make you forget the civilized pleasures you abandon for them –the fresh literature, the arts and music, the refined society, the elegant pursuits, and the stirring intellectual collision of the cities of Europe.149

Wilis insinuates more than once that he is not the adventurous explorer to undergo arduous circumstances to become the pioneer on a virgin land. His outlook suggests a much more pragmatic and utilitarian perspective where after a certain degree of sustenance and education one‘s needs shift to more refined ones. In the evaluation by European standards ―refinement,‖ ―elegance,‖ ―civilized pleasures‖ the ephemeral poetic inspirational qualities of Constantinople –to Willis emblematic of the East- does not stand in competition. All its characteristics are sensual; it appeals to the eye or to the touch yet it does not penetrate beyond sight or taste. It is also exemplified by Willis‘ most frequently quoted passage on Constantinople. Yet when other passages are taken into consideration it becomes evident that analyses realized on isolated and decontextualized textual segments will inevitably be reductionist ones.

Yet the world contains nothing like Constantinople! If we could compel all our senses into one, and live by the pleasures of the eye, it were a paradise untranscended. The Bosphorus – the superb, peculiar, incomparable Bosphorus! The dream-like, fairy-built seraglio! The sights within the city so richly strange, and the valleys and streams around it so exquisitely fair! The voluptuous softness of the dark eyes haunting your every step on shore, and the spirit-like swiftness and elegance of your darting caique upon the waters! In what land is the priceless sight such a treasure? Where is the fancy so delicately and divinely pampered?150

149 Ibid., p. 165. 150Ibid., p. 165.

Chapter III.

An Havoc with Pride and Truth in a Discursive Terra Incognita: The Great American Traveler in Turkey, Egypt, Holy Land, and Arabia Petraea& Greece, Russia, Turkey and Poland I. Memory and the Eye

The interdisciplinary nature of travel writing made it accessible to various disciplines as an object of scrutiny. Disciplines such as literature, anthropology, history, sociology, and cultural studies have contributed their methods to analyze travel writing and filter the material that is pertinent to their respective fields. The experience of sightseeing –discovery in 15th century terms, ground survey in 18th century American terms; pleasure and acculturation in the following one- and the act of its recording have always been intricately linked. Whether it is through immediate documentation or experience ―recollected in tranquility‖ to misuse Wordsworth‘s definition, memory of the accumulated knowledge about what is being witnessed and the sensation of the actual sight mingles into a contrivance to be consumed also by sight. Pertaining to the 16th century travel tradition Adler remarks: ―Books played a prominent part in the preparation for a journey and their purchase was one of its objects. The aristocratic traveler who was addressed, often by his tutor, in early manuals of advice, went abroad for discourse rather than for picturesque views or scenes…Both senses [seeing, and hearing] are given equal weight, but, far more tellingly, sight is exclusively equated with reading, or at best with the confirmation of classical texts.‖151 Therefore, from day one, sight, the notorious Western gaze, if you will, was not the primary receptor in the way we interpret it today. One cannot adamantly argue that 19th century American travelers did not entertain the construction of ―a‖ or circulation of ―the‖ discourse as an unheeding purpose during their travels to the East. The books that accompanied John Lloyd Stephens during his travels in Egypt were Modern Traveller in Egypt, Volney‘s Travels, as well as Italian Grammar and dictionary. Incidentally, Napoleon Bonaparte used Volney‘s Travels as a reliable source on politics and geography during the Egypto-Syrian

151Judith Adler, ―Origins of Sightseeing‖ Annals of Tourism Research 16 (1989): 7–29, p. 8.

72 campaign of 1798.152 Stephens, along with other sources that he incorporated into his account after his return to the United States, despite his usual skeptical nature, relied on heavily for confirmation or a mere source for numbers and descriptions on various historical accounts. Therefore, the preparation process Adler accentuates leaks into the journey itself and in Stephens‘ case also dominates the aftermath. It is a dialogic recommencement of both Stephens‘ credibility as well as that of his predecessors.

Decidedly, the discourse in the case of the latter does stem from or derives its impetus from the ―picturesque views and scenes‖ rather than countermand them. Books or the classical texts that constitute the significant part of the mental preparation are clearly the source of the accumulated knowledge mentioned above. Thus, if the documentation is more or less simultaneous with the experience of sight, in this case, through the ménage à trois of the factual memory, the palpable sensation, and the end result; it is determined whether the response is an augmentation or a backlash. Naturally, this cannot be a contingency to the author. Better yet, the author ideally should not be surprised at the effect he creates on the reader by his documentation. However, when the consequences of the way in which the subject matter is treated does not exclusively implicate the subject matter itself but when this treatment is a reflexive process in which the author inadvertently concocts an identity that the readers of the contrivance will associate with, although the purpose of the author may remain stable, the end result, which shaped the author‘s style no longer exist, the discourse may sound ambivalent and contradictory when analyzed after the circumstances.

John Lloyd Stephens was born on November 28, 1805 in Shrewsbury, New Jersey. A year after he was born his family moved to New York. He graduated from Columbia University in 1822 as the valedictorian of his class. He attended law school in Litchfield, Connecticut between 1822-1824 but later did not choose to practice law and traveled throughout the United States for a year. He was a fervent Jacksonian and an exquisite orator in his favor which is why he is said to have contracted a disease of the throat after which his doctor prescribed him to travel as was the norm at the time. Following his doctor‘s advice he embarked on a tour of England, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Russia and Poland in 1834, returning home in 1836. His

152 Christopher John Murray, ed., The Encyclopedia of the romantic era, 1760-1850, (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), p. 1195.

73 later trips to Egypt and the Holy Land were initially not planned. He changed his course by embarking on a steamer at Marseilles bound for Egypt. Egypt was not as familiar to the American reading public through American eyes as Asia Minor was. The first American born U.S. consul arrived in Egypt only in 1848.153

Both of his volumes were instant successes in America but surprisingly in England as well. Before the end of the decade the volumes were published in Incidents of Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837) went through ten editions; 21.000 copies earned him 25.000 dollars in two years. Incidents of Travel in Turkey, Russia, and Poland (1838) was in its seventh edition in 1839.154 That year he was commissioned as Special Ambassador to Central America. Along with fellow traveler, architect, and artist Frederick Catherwood, they came across the Mayan ruins in Copán, a city in Western Honduras also led by the written descriptions of the ruins of Juan Galindo in 1814. Until then, the Mayan ruins were believed to have been created by the tribes of Israel or Egyptians. Stephens, with an entrepreneurial spirit bought Copán for 50 dollars. As a result of their travels in the region and later in Yucatan, two books were published in 1841 and 1843 accompanied by Catherwood‘s exquisite sketches: Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, -two volumes each- were groundbreaking and received enormous attention. In 1849, the Panama Railroad Company incorporated him first as the vice president and later the president. After a mule accident, he was taken back to New York where he continued to work for a while for the railroad company. He died in 1852. His headstone in New York City reads: ―Beneath this vault lie buried the remains of John Lloyd Stephens/ 1805—1852/Traveller and Author/Pioneer in the Study of the Mayan civilization of Central America. Projector and builder of the Panama Railroad."155

Stephens, also known as ―the great American traveler‖ among his countrymen during his lifetime, unlike most of his fellow travelers did not set out on his journey with an advance from a periodical to send back his letters of observation for weekly publication. The letters that he wrote to a friend when he was in Smyrna (İzmir) were published by Charles Fenno Hoffman in

153David H. Finnie, Pioneers East: The Early American Experience in the Middle East, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 137. 154James Schramer and Donald Ross, Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 183, (Columbia: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1997), p. 299. 155http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1998/spring/omara-american-traveller/

American Monthly Magazine without his knowledge. When he returned, he was convinced to gather his notes and share all of his observations with the public as well as his letters to his friend. These letters are much livelier due to the immediate recording of his observations yet are also unfiltered from explicit expressions of prejudices. His accounts were published in four thick volumes: Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land was published in 1837 in two volumes in New York and in London the following year Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland also in two volumes was first published in New York in 1838 and again in London the following year under the title: Incidents of Travel in the Russian and Turkish Empires. The distinct style of Stephens becomes obvious to the reader soon enough, even without the awareness of the time lapse between the experience itself and the recording of it. It is not because he was not able to maintain his level of excitement and curiosity enough to transmit the same sentiment to the reader; he does. Nevertheless, he strives to validate his observations with frequent references and quotations from experts of the day and regardless of the accuracy of some historical events he recounts, the effect of his style in the reader is that the information he gives is well researched. This time lapse has other ramifications as well.

When enumerating the possible reasons behind the contradictions with regard to the content in travel accounts Zweder von Martels comments on time lapse: ―Often the author is not aware that in his memory the sequence of events is confused, or that his depiction is colored by his particular likes or dislikes or his wish to emphasize the role he himself played.‖156 The possible confusion of the sequence of events at times results in the distortion of the evaluation of the rationale behind certain events on the part of the author. However, Stephens‘ memory seemed to have been meticulous and his zest for detail is remarkable. He transformed his notes into a prose narrative that is eclectic with regard to content because of the frequent insertion of historical information, and comprehensive physical descriptions of monuments. These additions contradict with the nature of the rest of his account, which predominantly relies on his personal observations, insights into the people around him, his deductions about the culture via his firsthand experience with those people and private conversations that take place between him and them. Whether he emphasized the role he played in the course of events is a precarious issue.

156Zweder von Martels, ed., Travel Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly Discovery and Observation in Travel Writing, (Leiden, New York, Köln: E. J. Brill, 1994), p. xvii.

It is a self-professed fact that the time lapse between the experience and the recording of it had an effect on his outlook on the events. He recurrently stated that the drudgery, destitution and danger he faced in his journeys seemed far way to him, and not only temporally or spatially. He voices his constant awareness of being far from home during his travels, yet it is not discomforting for him to participate in the Eastern way of life temporarily. ―...I embarked; and with a fair wind, and ―the star-spangled banner‖ (made by an Arab tailor) floating above me, I commenced my journey on the Nile. It is necessary here for every stranger to place himself under the flag of his country; else his boat and men are liable to be taken at any moment by the officers of the pacha. It was the first time I had myself ever raised the banner of my country, and I felt a peculiar pride in the consciousness that it could protect me so far from home.‖157

We are familiar from Willis‘ account that there were instances in the early 19th century where Europeans, let alone Arabs, were not intimately acquainted with the United States as an independent nation. For North Africa, the case was different because of the Barbary Wars of 1801-1805 and 1815, which eventually ended in U.S. victory and U.S. exemption from paying tributes to the Barbary powers of North Africa. Stephens‘ pride might at first seem a romantic hyperbole. However, the accounts vary. A curious event of 1800 is disclosed by Edward Daniel Clark, in his narrative Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa published in 1817, where he recounts his observations during an American ship‘s first visit to İstanbul in 1800. Admiral William Bainbridge, in command of the U.S. frigate Washington was assigned to deliver the naval stores to the Dey of Algiers as partial requirement for the 1795 tributary treaty. He was forced to carry an Algerian ambassador along with presents to the Sultan in İstanbul. Under normal circumstances, an armed foreign vessel needs a firman [an official permission] to pass through the Straits. However, Bainbridge who did not possess one enters the harbor safely, astonishing all the foreign ambassadors residing in İstanbul at the time, after the fort returns his eight-gun salute.

When the frigate came to anchor, and a message went to the Porte that an American ship was in the harbour, the Turks were altogether unable to comprehend where the country was situate whose flag they were to salute. A great deal of time was therefore lost in settling this important point, and in considering how to receive the stranger. In the meantime, we went on board to visit the captain. We were sitting with him in his cabin, when messenger came from the Turkish Government

157 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 53.

whether America were not otherwise called the New World; and, being answered in the affirmative, assured the captain that he was welcome, and that he would be treated with the utmost cordiality and respect.158 Even if it is not an official account of the event, this anecdote, indicated that the Ottoman government was not very much aware of the existence of the United States in the beginning of the 19th century. However, on the contrary, even in the 16th century, Ottoman Empire was not only aware of the discovery of the continent; but also very much interested in the process. Despite having exploration vessels and the necessary equipment, the Empire could not dominate and take Morocco under control and therefore had to remain a spectator to Spain and Portugal. Other regional and inner conflicts in the Empire also obstructed the government from participating in the developments. The most important proof of this interest that was not realized is the map dated 1513 that Piri Reis mentions in his diary called Bahriye, the source of which is specified as ―Colonbo‘s map‖ and named the New World‘s Antilia Province. Christopher Columbus‘ map is considered to have been acquired from a Spanish sailor captured along with seven Spanish ships.159

These two antithetical reports, Willis‘ and Clark‘s, that both belong to the first quarter of the same century enable us to interpret the passage from Stephens in a different light. Moreover, the Ottoman interest in the New World rather than opposing these two rather reinforces them. The economical or geographical interest of the Sublime Porte in the New World does not signify curiosity about the new colonies in the region. Once it is claimed, it ceases to enjoy its special place in the Ottoman imaginary. The fact that Stephens emphasizes his proud awareness that the American flag possesses a protective power across the Atlantic manifests a deep-rooted anxiety about the place of the United States in the international arena. The power the American flag holds is not considered as a common attribute that is granted to all nations, yet is a blessed privilege. The anxiety motive intertwined with pride is a frequent motif in both of Stephens‘ accounts.

II. Holism in a New Perspective

158 E. D. Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa, (London, 1817) s. 11, in David H. Finnie, Pioneers East: The Early American Experience in the Middle East, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967) p. 49. 159Abbas Hamdani, ―Ottoman Response to the Discovery of America and the New Route to India‖, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 101, No. 3. (Jul. – Sep., 1981), p. 329.

Travel narrators of the Orient are commonly frowned upon for their treatment of the Oriental –Egyptian, Turkish, Algerian, etc.- cultures as disassociated from a linear, secular history. It is clearly conducive to the author regardless of his positioning of the culture he is portraying, to establish an ahistorical course of representational style to muffle reductionist depictions. Out of many alternatives of subgenres, or rather constitutive subgenres that comprise the genre of travel –ethnographical, sentimental, anthropological or pseudo-scientific- the author is obliged to prioritize one or many, therefore cannot be disparaged for not effectuating an all- encompassing, encyclopedic narrative. He is rightfully expected to be delimited by his specific socialization process, national and ideological background, profession, receptiveness, etc. Thus, he is rendered unable to treat the object of interest as emergent and pertaining to all its constituents, whether they are complementary or contradictory in nature. However, this process is deemed problematic and complicated by a unique trait. The genre of travel in 19th century American literature is epiphenomenal in that, it derives secondarily from the fears, anxieties, needs, and desires of a society in the midst of fostering a distinct national identity. However, this epiphenomenal genre can also interact with its primary cause and effect the formative process of this national identity; it can sooth the fears, comfort the anxieties, cater to the needs and quench the desires. The undertones of historicity in Stephens are prevalent in his treatment of the Greeks, and Greek Independence set against the barbarous Turks and Muslim yoke. But to get a sense of the general aura of the relations between the Ottoman Empire and the United States and fathom the particular happenstances that dominate the time Stephens visited the region, it is useful to tend to a brief historical survey of the trends that prevail over the era.

Omitting the Barbary Wars, which is not referred to in Stephens‘ account, the first unofficial contact with the ―mainland‖ Empire started with missionary activities. After the Second Great Awakening, various denominations of the Protestant church founded the American Board of Commissioners in Foreign Missions in 1810.160 As far back as 1802, because of the growing trade between the Empire and the United States, Thomas Jefferson had appointed a consul to Smyrna (İzmir). However; the Sublime Porte did not deem it necessary to accredit the consul. In 1813, the first missionaries were sent to India. Between 1819 and 1824, 60 missionaries were sent to the Middle East one third of whom died due to various diseases. In

160 Nurdan Şafak, Osmanlı-Amerikan İlişkileri, (İstanbul: Osmanlı Araştırmaları Vakfı, 2003), p. 61.

1829, the Board decided to canalize its resources for a missionary activity targeting the Armenians and William Goodell was assigned for the purpose. In 1836, the number of missionaries in the Ottoman Empire had reached 41. Although at first skeptical of American missionary activity in the Empire, Stephens finds the best acquaintances among them during his journey. Since there was no bilateral recognition via a treaty between the Empire and the United States until 1830, the American missionaries performed their activities under Great Britain‘s protection.161

In Greece I had been struck with the fact that the only schools of instruction were those established by American missionaries, and supported by the liberality of American citizens; that our young republic was thus, in part, discharging the debt which the world owes to the ancient mistress of science and the arts, by sending forth her sons to bestow the elements of knowledge upon the descendants of Homer and Pericles, Plato and Aristotle…162 Stephens exemplifies a rare, ardent and ambitious assertion about the role of the young republic not against its own subjects, and not only on her own behalf. Politically it is quite a premature presumption of the manifest discourses that we are very familiar with today. While most of his contemporary counterparts are too intimidated by the colonizer European powers to conjecture a sole American responsibility for the less advantaged people of Greece, North Africa, or the Middle East, Stephens does not refrain himself from avouching this self-assigned American mission that fulfills a task the whole civilized world is responsible for. There is another very striking example to this self-assigned act of chivalry, the presumptuous role of the protector of civilization, this time embodied by Stephens himself. It is a rather lengthy passage but it is prototypical in the culmination of the example of Stephens‘ assertive American self who finds in himself to even rightfully ―destroy to preserve.‖

It is strange how the organ of mischief develops itself when it has something to work upon. I sat down on the sculptured fragments of a column, which perhaps at this moment forms the abutment of some bridge, and, looking at the wreck around me, even while admiring and almost reverencing the noble ruin, began breaking off the beautifully chiselled figure of a hawk, and, perhaps in ten minutes, had demolished the work of a year. I felt that I was doing wrong, but excused myself by the plea that I was destroying to preserve, and saving that precious fragment from the ruin to which it was doomed, to show at home as a specimen of the skill of the Old World. So far I did

161Çağrı Erhan, Turkish-American Relations: past, present, future, (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 12. 162 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land, Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 159.

well enough, but I went farther…I fired: the shot went smack into the beautifully sculptured face of the goddess, and put one of her eyes out…163 [emphasis mine]

This ―incident of travel‖ takes place in the Temple of Dendera in Dendera, Egypt. Voicing his bitterness at the gradual destruction of the temple by the ―barbarous hands of man‖ which was built by the ―skillful and industrious Egyptian artist‖ in the name of modernization impelled by the Mohammad Ali Pasha of Egypt, he once again accentuates the hiatus between the nature of Egyptian men today and his Ancient skillful ancestors. When articulating on the traditional school of Orientalism on the level of the problematic Anuar Abdel Marek asserts that the Oriental subject, ―is the alienated being, philosophically, that is, other than itself in relationship to itself, posed, understood, defined –and acted- by others.‖164 Additionally, with regard to methods of study and research of the same school he aptly concludes that ―the past of Oriental nations and cultures quite naturally constitutes the preferred field of study: in ‗admitting implicitly that the most brilliant periods of the Orient belongs to the past,‘ one admits, by the same token, ‗that their decadence is ineluctable.‘‖165 Regarding both interpretations this school of traditional Orientalism seems to mirror Stephens‘ discursive preferences in his treatment of the Oriental subject as well the paraphernalia that belongs to the Oriental past which is represented as belonging to a different world altogether. ―The organ of mischief‖ that initially seems to stem from idleness and an object to reflect that idleness on suddenly transforms into a mission to preserve the Egyptian monuments of the past from the Egyptian subjects of the present. Just like the American missionaries in Greece are embracing the world‘s debt to Ancient Greece, Stephens owns up to Egyptian heritage. Yet rather than education as a means to disseminate the American virtues on behalf of the rest of the civilized world, in this case, he instead gallantly chooses destruction. This symbolic antagonism towards ancient history and its signifiers can also be interpreted as deep set envy for a shared historical consciousness emblematized by ancient monuments. After all, as he divulges with an undertone of regret and irony: ―we have no old monuments, no classical associations; and our history hardly goes beyond the memory of that venerable personage ‗the oldest inhabitant.‘‖166 In Smyrna, (İzmir) he is also

163 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land, Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 85. 164Anouar Abdel-Malek, ―Orientalism in Crisis,‖ in Orientalism: a reader, (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 50. 165Ibid., p. 51. 166John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Greece, Russia, Turkey, and Poland, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1844), p. 47.

80 exceptionally suggestive of American investment in the Orient. He remarks: ―…in my opinion, the Old World is in process of regeneration, and at this moment offers greater opportunities for enterprise than the New.‖167 This suggestion insinuates a sufficient level of American maturity and readiness for foreign enterprise and fosters the ideals of Manifest destiny. Richard O‘Mara observes that Stephens was apt in setting a balance between his entrepreneurial spirit and an underlying empathy for the people of distant lands that called for initiation and exploration. ―Fused within him were some of the most contradictory impulses: he personified the brusque and sometimes brutal triumphalism of American Manifest Destiny, yet this was ameliorated by a governing humaneness.‖168

Apart from the constantly improving trade relations and the missionary activities that were carried out in a more or less peaceful fashion, there were also what Çağrı Erhan calls ―negative trends in Ottoman-American relations.‖ Of these many, but rather exceptional cases that comprise the negative trends, the first is pertinent to the discussion of Stephens‘ accounts. That singularly effective trend in shaping American perceptions of the Ottoman Empire on a societal level and which required expansive diplomatic attempts in its aftermath on America‘s part in order to ameliorate the political relations was the individually sponsored American aid to Greece during the Greek War of Independence. Like their British counterparts, the American philhellenes when the word started to be used for the first time169 either went to Greece to fight for the Greek Revolution or collected aid in New York, Boston, New Orleans, Salem, and Pittsburgh and then shipped it to Greece.170 Besides the fresh memory of the American Revolution, the rationales behind sympathy for the Greek were manifold.

Republicans were aroused on behalf of a Greek nation which aspired to establish liberal and representative institutions. Christians applauded the rising of Christian Greeks against Moslem Turks...none of them adequately explains American interest in the Greek cause. The uprising of the Serbians against the Turks between 1807 and 1817 had created hardly a ripple…All educated men in America had sat in reverence at the feet of the ancient Greeks…the modern Greeks were entitled to the aid of all Western civilization, which owed to their Hellenic forefathers much of what they it cherished…171

167 Ibid., p. 209. 168http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1998/spring/omara-american-traveller/ 169William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence, (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2008), p. xv. 170Çağrı Erhan, Turkish-American Relations: past, present, future, (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 11. 171 Edward Meade Earle, ―American Interest in the Greek Cause, 1821-1827,‖ The American Historical Review, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Oct., 1927), p. 44-45.

Greece had been independent for merely seven years when Stephens visited the country. If need be, the lack of accuracy in his recounting of historical events could be tied to the insufficient amount of time between the event itself and the reflexive recording of it. The point of criticism here can hardly be related to accuracy per se. His account is highly valuable as a source of information about the public consciousness that is fresh after the incident –which also furthers feeds into it. Yet he becomes complicit in this manifest discourse, which nonetheless is an individual reproduction with meanings attached to religion and, form of government by imploring a direct mirroring of artificial concepts to cores and natures of human character allegedly solely determined by cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The Greek character however is sectioned from this conjunction of the reductionist recoding process and invoked as an emergent. Greece is located within secular history and transgressions can be excused by external circumstances that force some exceptions to the Greek national character.

For myself, different in this respect from most other travelers, I liked the Greeks. Travelers and strangers condemn the whole people as dishonest, because they are cheated by their boatmen and muleteers, without ever thinking of their four centuries of bitter servitude; but when I remembered of their long oppression and galling chains, instead of wondering that they were so bad, I wondered that they were not worse.172 After pertaining to many an authors‘ disappointment in noting distinctions between the Ancient Greeks that form the basis of their cultural education and the Modern Greeks under the yoke of the Muslim Turks, Stephens exempts himself from this frustration unlike his displeasure and inability to recognize any form of connection between the Modern Egyptians and those people who built the pyramids. He observes: ―He [traveller] might, indeed, as he wandered around the miserable village, find, half buried in the earth, the broken fragments of a colossal statue; and, looking from the shattered relic to the half-savage Arabs around him, he might say to himself, ‗This is the work of other men and other times, and how comes it here?‘‖173 He applies heuristic methods in deducing the reasons behind the circumstantial Greek character; he even goes further and assigns them more space for transgression from their natural selves because of their ―four hundred years of bitter servitude.‖ Needless to say, the Bedouin Arabs, with similar misdemeanors assigned to them do not receive the same methods of analysis on Stephens‘ part.

172 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 212. 173 Ibid., p. 153.

Rather, they arouse his bitter resentment and he has no elaborate answer as to ―how comes it here?‖

Another question that arises is from which point of view the spatial distance is judged. Is it his personal distance from his country; his country‘s distance from Egypt, or is it Egypt‘s phenomenological, political and geographical distance from the United States? In any case, when he goes back home and starts writing down his experiences memories of the East strike him a figment of his own imagination. The journey as an ordeal shouldered in the name of novelty and adventure which is not likely to be repeated. ―I now look back upon this, and many other scenes, as strange, of which I thought nothing at the time, when all around was in conformity.‖174 Although he acquiesces to the romantic view of the East embedded in the consciousness of so many generations including his, in his own account, he rarely oscillates between the sentimental notions attached to certain regions his path crosses and his dispassionate response. Distance from home and distance from the traveled lands after the fact also have opposing effects on Stephens. Whereas distance from home could make a man a born again nationalist if you will, according to his comment, distance from the traveled lands renders them unreal.

A man must be long and far from home to feel how dearly he loves his country, how his eye brightens and his heart beats when he hears her praises from the lips of strangers; and when the paper was given me, with congratulations and compliments on the successful and honourable issue affair with France, my feelings grew prouder and prouder as I read, until, when I had finished the last line, I threw up my cap in the old city of Cairo, and shouted the old gathering cry, ―Hurrah for Jackson!‖175

While Andrew Jackson was to be severely criticized by future generations with regard to his handling of domestic affairs, he earned a reputation for his rebellious diplomatic attitude against the French in the 1830s. The long lasting controversy about the spoliation claims dating from the Napoleonic era was resolved via a diplomatic battle and was considered a triumph of the United States in Europe. Especially after reading Stephens‘ volumes, it becomes easy to single out this passage as an unusual outburst of exhilaration and pride on Stephens‘ part. With all his keenness for adventure and, desire to explore uncharted territory, his style is both comprehensive and callous. Another particularity is worth consideration. Identity formation

174 Ibid., p. 115. 175 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 160.

83 during travel is not only possible through setting oneself or one‘s nation against the other via negation. American identity in the 1830s was in desperate need of European recognition. Although, Stephens recurrently cites praises from the mouths of accomplished and refined Europeans, there is not one instance when he resorts to valuing the Oriental opinion on the United States. Lips of Egyptians for instance do not belong to his category of the ―lips of strangers‖ that make him drunk with joy and pride.

Oriental paraphernalia or the sentiments she arouses in the author, Oriental life-worlds are predisposed to lack a certain quality of mobility. This might be because of a lack of inborn proclivity on the author‘s part to do so or simply because there is not much worth making mobile. However civilization, or the memory of it never leaves one, once infected into the system. ―…let me tell the reader, that though a man may take a certain degree of pleasure in travelling in strange and out-of-the-way places, he cannot forget the world he has left behind him. In a land of comparative savages, he hails the citizen of any civilized country as his brother; and when on the bank of the river I was accosted in my native tongue by a strapping fellow in a Turkish dress, though in the broken accents of a Sicilian servant, I thought it the purest English I had ever heard.‖176

He intentionally tries not to pay heed to the exoticized accounts yet the imaginary Orient caught up with him eventually. The criterion of intimacy is also striking. Although Stephens is in close contact with many people during his ordeals, the nostalgic notion of what he left behind overweighs his personal relationships. This viewpoint may also be the result of a lack of long lasting familiarity between the region and the American public. With regard to European travel, Desforges remarks that: ―The increasing familiarity Europeans have with their neighboring countries means that such places are no longer an other around which oppositional identities can be articulated. They are replaced with a feeling of being at home in Europe, which in turn becomes viewed as a place around which common notions of citizenship can be formulated.‖177 The main incentive for attraction towards the uncharted territory is also the reason behind author‘s disenchantment with the region. The congenital solidarity based on civilization cannot

176 Ibid., p. 87. 177 Luke Desforges, ―Traveling the World: Identity and Travel Biography‖ Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 27, No. 4, 2000, p. 928.

84 be superseded by excessive exposure to or abundant participation in the life-world of another culture of ―comparative savages.‖

III. Sehnsucht

The relative unfamiliarity evinced with the constant voicing of yearning for home aggrandizes the discursive space for othering. Here othering functions rather implicitly. It is not actualized through constrained disassociation of the Orient from either secular history or civilization per se but it is through the comprisal of what represents the assumed negation. It is not achieved through exclusion but of the inclusion of the rest, a category to which the Orient does not belong. Here is another passage preceding his declaration of solidarity with any signifier of civilization he encounters: ―A single boat was lying along the bank; a single flag, the red cross of England, was drooping lazily against the mast; and though it be death to my reputation as a sentimental traveller, at that moment I hailed the sight of that with more interest than the ruined city. Since I left Cairo, I had seen nothing but Arabs…‖178 Here I find his fear that his reputation as a sentimental traveler will be damaged as well-founded. The moment he spots the red cross flag is also the moment of his arrival at the ancient city of Thebes in Egypt. He proceeds to meet the English on the boat and they form an acquaintance that according to Stephens neither of the parties will ever forget. This is one of many instances of an encounter between Stephens and various English gentlemen traveling in the same remote land and their mutual admiration for each other. Stephens, in this respect was perhaps an ingenuous rarity among travelers of the 19th century. Aside from the dichotomy he portrays he also does not neglect to single out the United States as the pinnacle of desire by initially apologizing for his essentialism.

…I hope I may be pardoned a burst of national feeling, and be allowed to say, without meaning any disrespect to any other country, that I would rather travel under the name of an American than under any other known in Europe. Every American abroad meets a general prepossession in favour of his country, and it is an agreeable truth that the impression made by our countrymen abroad generally sustains the prepossession.179 Benefiting from the neoteric nature of the newly independent colonies, he reveals polysemic connotations about the ―American.‖ The American does not desecrate the names of

178 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 92. 179Ibid. 92.

85 other nations, is respectful in his demeanor and actions and, holds them on equal footing. Nonetheless, there is an axiomatic consensus one discerns abroad that the America as an idea and individual travelers as attaches to the nation are desirable and undeniably superior. He was conscientious about prioritizing his interests and did not pay heed to the common sentimentalities of the day by excessive hyperboles –or maybe merely paying heed to a different kind. Not everyone Stephens met throughout his journey was praiseful of America nor did all of them arouse pride in his chest. There were instances where Stephens‘ sense of superiority and his self-positioning was challenged and his preconceptions were disoriented.

In Europe, and even in England, I had often found extreme ignorance of my own country; but here I was astonished to find, among men so familiar with all parts of the Old World, such total lack of information about the New. A gentleman opposite me, wearing the uniform of the King of Bavaria asked me if I had ever been in America. I told him that I was born and as they say in Kentucky raised there. He begged my pardon but doubtfully suggested, ―You are not black?‖ and I was obliged to explain to him that in our section of America the Indian had almost entirely disappeared, and that his place was occupied by the descendants of the Gaul and the Briton.180

This sudden turn of tide is visibly frustrating to Stephens. This conversation after all, took place around a table occupied during a dinner in Greece with men whom Stephens respected enough to call ―citizens of the world.‖ The men being knowledgeable enough to have taken interest in Eastern politics repudiated the possibility of them being so ignorant as to not acknowledge the existence of civilization in the New World. When Willis encountered the same reaction to the New World he declared it to be an amusing case and felt it required to correction on his side. However, Stephens, with the frustration of his naïve enthusiasm to bring up topics about America being overturned into bitterness, starts reflecting on their baffled expressions, which he does not perceive to be utterly credulous. According to his partial perspective shaped by his disheartened mood, the man sitting opposite him at the table, ―…seemed to be constantly watching for the breaking out of the cannibal spirit, as if expecting to see me bite my neighbour.‖181 Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis explores how American writers and speakers from 1820 on, sought to create and enhance the ―American character and the life worth living‖182 in the writings of authors such as Whitman, Holmes, Hawthorne, and Melville. Stephens also

180John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Greece, Russia, Turkey, and Poland, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1844), p. 72. 181Ibid. p. 72. 182R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 3.

86 symbolizes this collective affair of mythmaking, not so much affirming a life worth living in the present but rather positions the American outside of the shackles of history and all the national and religious failures it entails. It is pertinent to the decisions of the past, disposing of claimable ancestry, ―disappearance of Indians,‖ ―the Revolutionary War.‖ This collective affair bears upon an assurance. At the end of the chapter, Stephens manages to reverse the Old World perspective of the New World by claiming it and making it his. ―At first I had felt myself rather a small affair but, before separating, l’Americain, or le sauvage, or finally, le cannibal found himself something of a lion.‖183

A writer of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature in a four page article published a year after Stephens‘ death comments on his unaffected style: Perhaps there never lived a writer less ambitious of producing an impression by the mere graces of ―style‖, or one more willfully and blissfully ignorant of the petty artificial devices, the little tricks of literary composition, by which small writers sometimes contrive to make a shallow rivulet of thought meander over a large field of letters.‖184 His style is by no means unsophisticated compared to the literary men who also published travel narratives, yet more informative –regardless of the degree of accuracy- and candid. Edgar Allen Poe, although he finds the work deficient in some respects that he does not specify, he concurs with the anonymous writer of Putnam: ―The volumes are written in general with a freedom, a frankness, and an utter absence of pretension, which will secure them the respect and good-will of all parties.‖185 The praise that unpretentiousness begets is an indication of the expectancy of the readership. Highly stylized modes of representation with hyperrealist elements require a challenge that Stephens, to a limited extent, can provide the reader with.

Caren Kaplan asserts that the authors whatever profession they may belong to, are not always able to measure the effect of their backgrounds on their discursive choices. ―…the occidental ethnographer, the modern expatriate poet, the writer of popular travel accounts, and the tourist may all participate in the mythologized narrativizations of displacement without

183John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Greece, Russia, Turkey, and Poland, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1844), p. 72. 184Putnam's Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art Volume 0001 Issue 1 (January 1853), G. P. Putnam & Co., “The late John L. Stephens‖, p. 66. 185 Edgar Allan Poe, "Review of Stephens' Arabia Petraea," in The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. IV, (New York: Redfield , 1856), p. 371.

87 questioning the cultural, political, and economic grounds of their different professions, privileges, means, and limitations.‖186 This is not to suggest a cultural solipsism on the author‘s part. Stephens makes extensive use of his observations and whatever preconceptions he arrived at the Orient with, he tries to overturn. The level of his success might hinge upon cultural essentialism but not solipsism. The acknowledgement of the latter on the modern day reader‘s part would be reductionist and would lead to a repetitive discussion about binary oppositions that the Western gaze intrinsically entails and travels to confirm and reinforce. By all means, there are instances of discursive choices that the authors make that inescapably call for this mode of analysis.

The nature of the text, whether it is fictional or documentary, is fluid by the virtue of its perception, inescapably accompanying formation of the meaning. While a text denoted as fiction is willingly handling itself to the playful fantasies of the reader, only at times subjected to its metaphorical parallels, nonfictional narratives, like travel notes, documents, biographies ―force‖ the reader to build parallels to his or her personal surrounding, memories, identities and cultural values. This process vitalizes and reconstructs every read text in the reader‘s mind, at the same time reconstructing the mind itself, potentially changing the reader‘s own perspective on his or her surrounding reality and culture. Although a now out of fashion, yet a recurring claim to ―the death of the author‖ has some validity to it, one can clearly witness the danger such perspective poses in the cases where ―documentary‖ narratives skillfully crafted by these very dead authors, intentionally or not, misrepresent and obscure events, places and peoples. This way such curious ―life‖ of a ―documentary‖ text engulfs trusting, or even skeptical reader in a veil of fictional reality instated to represent actual places, events and peoples, the reader will likely never see, but will form an opinion on, be it one in agreement or in opposition with the text. As a second layer of influence, a response in perception of own reality, evaluation of own place in history, nation, culture is bound to be formed, which can be both empowering and subduing. One should consider, however, that the complexity of such an influence often goes far beyond the question of intercultural and political power struggle, due to ambivalence of individual points of view and experience of the authors, their explicit and implicit goals, where sensational controversial information might be more within author‘s interest than confirmation of established paradigms.

186Caren Kaplan, Questions of travel: postmodern discourses of displacement, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 2.

IV. Authorial Intent and Reader Reception

Another aspect commonly neglected in the analyses of travel accounts is the reader perception and how it destabilizes the text throughout time. Non-fictional traits that a travel account may or not entail are at the forefront of discussion but it is intricately linked to reader reception: ―…the non-fiction dominant of the travelogue consists in readers presupposing that the text they are reading is predominantly non-fiction. Having said this, it has to be stressed that the degree to which readers presuppose the author of a travelogue to be writing non-fiction varies throughout the history of the genre.‖187 That information can only be derived from the reviews and the prefaces; I find the latter to be the most valuable source of information that conjoins authorial intention with presumed readership expectations. Yet when we talk about the molding of public consciousness via representational preferences, we have to allude to the dialogic relationship between the reader and the author with a degree of didacticism on the latter‘s part. The preferences are directly shaped by and addressed to the reader. ―As the reader uses the various perspectives offered him by the text in order to relate the patterns and the ‗schematized views‘ to one another, he sets the work in motion, and this very process results ultimately in the awakening responses within himself.‖188

It would be negligent to assume this process functions on a merely formal level when the genre in question is travel. While the text prospectively struggles to endure the test of time with the level of forethought embedded in it, the reader‘s task especially with regard to the analyses of the text requires both hindsight and an acute sensibility and ability to separate contemporary tools of judgment from his/her reading of the text. As Aram Veeser enumerates as one of the assumptions of New Historicism: ―…every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes.‖189 This process becomes even more dynamic when the case in point is a travel narrative since the narrator is literally on the move and invites the reader to follow him with his/her imagination. Yet the imaginations he calls for is bred through a collective consciousness which hinges on historical, and social codes that are accorded temporarily and spatially. Since most sites are textually exhausted, and there is a

187Glenn Hooper, Tim Youngs, Perspectives on Travel Writing, (London: Ashgate, 2004), p. 17-18. 188Wolfgang Iser, ―The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach‖New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 2, (Winter, 1972), p. 280. 189 H. Aram Veeser, ed. The New Historicism, (London: Routledge, 1989), p. xi.

89 surmised conception between the reader and the author about this textual legacy, even when there are explicit references to precedents of the author, this exhaustion facilitates an all- encompassing intertextuality in the narratives.

Stephens is unequivocal about not wanting to present himself as an expert on antiquity. Therefore, he safely quotes from experts such as Giovanni Battista Belzoni, also known as the Great Belzoni, a Venetian expert on Egyptian antiquities. Alternatively, Stephens also demonstrates intertextuality to denunciate his precedents to obliterate incessant representational volitions. He displays a perpetual awareness of the public perception of the Orient. He does not take on himself an idealist responsibility to provide the reader with relative accuracy when his general demeanor is taken into consideration; he seems to at times advertently or inadvertently enunciate these representational preferences. Yet one senses an undertone of general disconcertion. One example of his enunciation is his commentary on Scott‘s Tales of the Crusaders on his encounter with the Nubians in Upper Egypt whose figure he perceives to be ―graceful, possessing, what would be called in civilized life an uncommon degree of gentility.”190 Nonetheless, lest the reader deduces an unmerited affinity between a member of the ―civilized life‖ and Nubians, he props Scott‘s depiction:

…I remember to have thought when reading Sir Walter Scott‘s Crusaders, that the metamorphosis of Kenneth into a Nubian was strained and improbable, as I did not then understand the shades of difference in the features and complexion of the inhabitants of Africa; but observation has shown me that it was my own ignorance that deceived me; and in this, as in other descriptions of Eastern scenes, I have been forced to admire the great and intimate knowledge of details possessed by the unequalled novelist , and his truth and liveliness of description.191 As writing, on a certain level is always rewriting,192 the author recodes his immediate experience interwoven with the already decoded one of his precursors. The recoding process is a two-fold paradox that cannot be overcome. The rudimentary incentive of the author‘s travel, whatever his specific goals might be, is the textual prefiguration that exists and portents to a degree of worthiness to its primary purpose. Therefore, his original inducement is the main impediment against authenticity. This undeniable awareness that breeds anxiety that either compels the author into modesty, as is the usual case with American travel writers of the

190 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land By, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 113. 191 Ibid. p. 113-114. 192 Roger Sanjek, ed., Fieldnotes: the Makings of Anthropology, James Clifford ―Notes on (Field)notes‖ 47-71, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 54.

90 designated period of the 19th century, or restricts their discourse to a mere echo of their precursors or in rare cases like Twain‘s Innocents Abroad emerges as a parody of both the form and the content of the genre of travel writing.

The struggle 19th century American travelers had is concentrated relatively more on originality rather than objectivity. The enthusiasm and pride with which Stephens remarks on land that is not hackneyed by fellow travelers is telling in that regard: ―Europe, Asia, and even the sands of Africa, have been overrun and trodden down by the feet of travelers; but in the land of Idumea, the oldest country in the world, the aspect of everything is new and strange, and the very sands you tread on have never been trodden by the civilized human beings. The Bedouin roams over them like the Indian on our native prairies.‖193 If invisible is an overstatement, the Bedouins of the desert are truly inefficacious. Despite having grown up far away from the center of conflict between Native Americans and his countrymen, he either adopts the ―civilization-or- extinction194‖ argument and renders them impalpable like in this passage, or he espouses a paternalistic approach and debases Native American nature. Interestingly, there are degrees to this debasement. This is no more a simple us vs. them discourse but it is enriched by a new dimension: our savages vs. their savages: ―The fact is, from the beginning I had been completely mistaken in my opinion touching the character of the chief of a powerful tribe of Bedouins. I had imagined him like the chief of a tribe of our own Indians, wild, savage, and lawless, but generous and true when he had once offered his protection; one who might rob or even murder, but would never descent to the meanness of trickery and falsehood.‖195 Ineluctably, this analogy is not the regular remark on the attraction and repulsion of the noble savage the American readership would be accustomed to receive as the representation of the Bedouin of the desert and the Indian of the plains. By drawing this hyperbolic homology his primary purpose, as is clear from his frequent lamentations regarding the chief of the Bedouin, –whom Stephens does not flicker about confronting when faced with injustice and eventually teaches him his lesson- is to highlight the incontestable lack of redeeming qualities regarding the Bedouin chief. However, he ends up portraying the Native American as a murderer of the honest kind. Temporally, his narrative

193 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land, Vol. 2, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 85. 194Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature & the Politics of Indian Affairs, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 15. 195 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land, Vol. 2, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 88.

91 coincides with the romantic literary tradition in the United States when Indians became ―more noble and less savage.‖196

In addition to the comparative discourse of savages, he, like many of his contemporaries cannot turn a blind eye or a pen to the issue of slavery. Whereas Willis was chasing a Circassian slave girl to catch a glimpse of the legendary Circassian beauty, Stephens does not take the topic lightly. He begins with mere descriptive information without revealing any opinion or sentiment on the issue; only indicating the distinguishing traits of the institution of slavery in the East.

In the East slavery exists now precisely as it did in the days of the patriarchs. The slave is received into the family of a Turk in a relation more confidential and respectable than that of an ordinary domestic; and, when liberated, which very often happens, stands upon the same footing with a free man. The curse does not rest upon him for ever; he may sit at the same board, dip his hand in the same dish, and, if there are no other impediments, may marry his master‘s daughter.197 His observations after visiting a slave market in Upper Egypt denote a critical and sentimental approach to slavery. The possibility of social mobility that the Eastern slave is remarked upon, yet a comparative approach is not explicitly applied to the issue of slavery. Whereas his usual response to capital punishment, treachery, or violence forthright and followed by either a historical discussion or a comparative overview, the frame of reference of which is the United States, with regard to slavery he circumscribes the matter to a lengthy physical description on ―gradations of men descending to a brute‖ and a disapproving remark on ―a trade which once stained the annals of our own country, and the fatal effects of which we still continue to experience.‖198 However, none of these observations pertain to race. His main target of criticism becomes clear after his visit to another slave ―bazaar‖ in Turkey. ―Bad, horrible as this traffic is under any circumstances, to my habits and feelings it loses a shade of its horror when confined to blacks; but here whites and blacks were exposed together in the same bazar.‖199Explicitly, though with an air of resoluteness, Stephens takes his reader into his confidence whom he assumes to share the same ―habitual‖ and ―sentimental‖ outlook on the racial connotations of slavery yet who sympathize with abolitionism not for the sake of the victims of slavery but to avert the possible afflictions the young republic might suffer as a result

196Edna C. Sorber, ―The Noble Eloquent Savage‖, Ethohistory, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Summer, 1972), p. 229. 197 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 77. 198 Ibid., p. 76. 199199John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Greece, Russia, Turkey, and Poland, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1844), p. 237.

92 of carrying on this practice. He did not frown upon the enslavement of the ―Circassian beauty,‖ who epitomizes the pinnacle of exoticized Oriental elegance and allurement. However, the coexistence of white and black slaves in the same market, not gendered, not exoticized, calls to his mind the different ―shades of horror‖ slavery denotes.

The quest for originality stumbled upon its savior in embracing a perspective centered around and emanating from the individual. This outlook would be both pioneering and courageous yet at the same time escapist since the personal perspective would not undertake responsibility for accuracy. The most common phrase one encounters in the prefaces is ―as they appeared to the author.‖ Here is a similarly constructed passage from Stephens‘ Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land:

He has presented things as they struck his mind, without perplexing himself with any deep speculations upon the rise and fall of the empires; nor has he gone much into detail in regard to ruins. His object, has been, principally, as the title of the book imports, to a give a narrative of the every-day incidents that occur to a traveller in the East, and to present to his countrymen, in the midst of a hurry, and bustle, and life, and energy, and daily-developing strength and resources of the New, a picture of the widely-different scenes that are now passing in the faded and worn-out kingdoms of the Old World.200 The rationale behind this humble insertion, which also insinuates an American modesty against European literary output, is not unfounded. The bestselling books, fiction or non-fiction were rarely American books in the nineteenth century. Scott‘s Waverley novels were rivaled by James Fennimore Cooper with his intelligent adaptations of Scott into his own literature.201 Sydney Smith –in retrospect ironically- commented on American culture in Literature in an essay published in Edinburgh Review in January, 1820. Smith was an English clergyman and writer as well as one of the founders of the periodical. ―In so far as we know, there is no such parallel to be produced from the whole annals of this self-adulating race. In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?‖202 Seventeen years later Stephens was to prove him wrong, neither for the first nor for the last time. This example is archetypal in the sense that it restricts its audience to the American readership, to ―his countrymen.‖ This restriction renders these primary sources much more valuable than if they were targeted for a larger audience. It reveals the conjecture of the expectations of the readership or the ―implied reader‖ to use Iser‘s

200 Ibid., p. v. 201 John Sutherland, Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 44. 202http://www.usgennet.org/usa/topic/preservation/epochs/vol5/pg144.htm

93 phrase, and this conjecture is either warranted by proof of sales figures –as in Stephens‘ case- or invalidated. In the form of a cliché, it might be said that his travel accounts are written by an American (when Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land was published for the first time, it was published anonymously, instead of his name it was inscribed under the title: ―by an American‖) for the Americans (―for his countrymen‖) and of the Americans, because it successfully integrated the notion of American citizenship, nationalism and emerging national identity in his accounts.

There is an evident selfless aspect to travel writing, at least derivable from the claims of the authors, most commonly in the prefaces. The traveler, aside from being driven by his adventurous streak and curiosity for cultural education abroad, once his account is published, assumedly, has a desire to share his experiences with the public. Travel accounts are not accounts of repentance. They are invitations by their nature to the public to follow in the author‘s footsteps, being inspired by this collection of experiences that was worthy to be published. Stephens‘ accounts lack this invitational quality to a certain extent.

Firstly, his staccato voice is interrupted with sudden insertions of encyclopedic information that is free from embellished romanticism, which as distorted an image as it provides is a false welcoming quality. Secondly, he recites the encounters with the locals in an exceptionally negative light. Looking back on leaving Cairo he writes: ―I was sick of Cairo, and in a right humor to bid farewell to cities, with all their artificial laws, their crimes and punishments, and all the varied shades of inhumanity from man to man…‖203 All throughout his journey, as long as he is accompanied by locals whether as helpers or protectors during the crossing of the desert, a dominating anxiety is also present. This anxiety, although the accounts were written after his return to the United States, divulges into the aura of all of the volumes, keeping the reader on edge in a positive sense but also gives a sense of uneasiness. He has a rightful reason for his discomfort, that is, being already physically feeble; he suffers from sporadic bouts of diseases.

Albeit without a visible trace of purposefulness, his narrative gradually matures into a survival story. His near death experiences, lack of proper medication and doctors, desiccation in

203John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 177.

94 general, all contribute to this demur and remonstration towards nature on the way to the Holy Land. Bruce Harvey, when he enunciates Stephens‘ obsession with Arab physicality and death draws a parallel between Stephens‘ own condition and the Bedouins accompanying him: ―At key junctures, diseased Arabs and desiccated landscapes remind him of his own bodily infirmity, evoking fears that he might fail to survive his (according to Scripture204) impious sojourn through Edom‘s cursed terrain, and thus replay, as legend had it, the story of his predecessor, Johannes Burckhardt205…‖206 Stephens survives to write his accounts as we now know and remarks half with pride tinted with irony: ―I was now upon the borders of Edom; and, in the despondency of sickness, I looked upon myself as rash and impious in undertaking what might be considered a defiance of the prophetic denunciations inspired by God himself.‖207 However, this tension created by bouts of weaknesses and hardships catalyzes the story and his Holy Land trip becomes ―a heroic test of his own virility.‖208 As the framework of the masculine world is normative for Stephens‘ narrative, his test could only be evaluated within the degrees of virility. Stephens is quite disconcerted with the relative liberation of women in the United States and perceives it as a sign of degeneration, calls his readers to ponder upon the current situation in the United States and the disadvantages it brought about, but this is the province of an altogether different analysis.

V. Inheritance vs. Experience

Sharon Rogers Brown points out to one paradox that the early travel narratives published in the United States accommodated: ―As common denominators, the narrators of early-American travel narratives possess perseverance, optimism, and concern for the community while at the same time exhibiting a strong sense of independence and individuality. Indeed, the early- American travel narrative is the first form that exemplifies and embodies a paradox that has

204Isaiah 34, Verse 10 reads: ―It shall not be quenched night nor day; her smoke shall go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever” and Stephens quotes the verse many times during his crossing. 205 Johann Ludwig Burckhart is a Swiss explorer, Orientalist and traveler, who traveled to Holy Land through the Nubian Desert and then by way of Jidda. On his return, he died of dysentery in 1817 in Cairo. Stephens refers to him and the idea of dying alone in a foreign land quite frequently. 206Bruce Harvey, American Geographics, (California: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 108. 207John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land, Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 28. 208Bruce Harvey, American Geographics, (California: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 108.

95 always existed in the American character…‖209 Brown does not acknowledge or believe that the colonial travel writing was need-driven and simply catered to the demands of the times. Yet she concludes towards the end of her work: ―Clearly the genre followed literary trends and played its part in fulfilling the call for a national literature during the nineteenth century.‖210 19th century American travel writing, with its manifold motivations and concerns, hardly can be said to merely mirror the American national character, especially when it is a character in the making. Even then, the selectiveness of the author with regard to the traits of that character shaped by circumstances of the day would reveal intentionality as to which of these traits would be more beneficial in his opinion to endure. This selectiveness in turn contributes to the national discourse of myth making through travel and discovery. Foster Rhea Dulles alternatively expresses the process of this unique phenomenon of Americans traveling abroad: ―They returned with broadened horizons and a deeper appreciation of their European heritage. But they also returned –sometimes expressing a renewed and rather smug provincialism- with the conviction that America‘s greater liberty more than compensated for her cultural deficiencies.‖211 The genre is bred by the clash of this rejection of cultural insularity and the urge for the compensation for cultural as well as historical deficiencies; therefore they inadvertently carry a historiographical trait. Even if they do not rewrite the nation‘s history, they entail an undercurrent of predilection that struggle simultaneously to claim and devalue the deficiencies.

Another idiosyncratic attribute in Stephens‘ accounts is his deconstructionist intent towards the textual legacy about the Orient through his own text, by either negating stereotypical portrayals and postulating that they were never extant to begin with or by amending these portrayals by ―updating‖ and superseding them with his own. Willis had also touched on this perspective in his Pencillings but did not emphasize it enough to insist on it. In Stephens‘ account this is a recurring theme. He oscillates between nostalgic sentiments towards the Orient that has now gone extinct while at the same time doubting the inherited representational discourses. One attempt at a compromise between the image he inherited and the image he encounters in Constantinople is that of the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mahmoud II whose

209Sharon Rogers Brown, American Travel Narratives as a Literary Genre from 1542 to 1832: The Art of a Perpetual Journey, (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993), p. 5-6. 210Ibid. 127. 211Foster Rhea Dulles, ―A Historical View of Americans Abroad,‖ The annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science; Vol. 368, 1966, p. 15.

96 program ―provided the backbone and model for the Tanzimat reform era that followed.‖212 He does fleetingly refer to the reformation of the Ottoman Empire. He relates the reasons for attempts at progress by the emergence and spread of steam navigation. According to Stephens, Turks who have an invincible sense of superiority and peacock pride, when granted the opportunity to observe other nations and compare those with their own, could no longer turn a blind eye to the developments taking place elsewhere.213 The image that does not corroborate the information he received is of Mahmoud II‘s. As opposed to embodying the ―wholesale murderer, who had more blood on his hands than any man living‖214 phantasm Stephens anticipated, Mahmoud is plain, meek and by his appearance does not complement the constructed mental picture. He concludes that Mahmoud must have been a victim of his fate and by his appearance it is impossible to deduce that he drives a sadistic pleasure from the blood he sheds. It is ironic that Stephens succumbs to the fatalist approach that he so frequently was discomforted by in the Orient. ―If we did not reach the point we were aiming at, God willed it; if it rained, God willed it; and I suppose that, if they happened to lay their black hands upon my throat, and stripped me of everything I possessed, they would have piously raised their eyes to heaven, and cried, ‗God willed it.‘‖215

His distrustful disposition is emblematic of his journey through the Nubian Desert sustained by his constant irritation by the organizational matters and their dependence on his protectors, the Bedouins. The loss of control, which he cyclically compensated for by threatening the Bedouin chief of not making the promised payment or through mere rebellious acts perturbed him immensely. However, in his impressions of the Sultan, whose characteristics naturally do not explicitly implicate him, he incorporates fatalism while explicating the Sultan‘s actions. ―I had already seen enough to convince me that the days of Eastern magnificence had gone by, or that the gorgeous scenes which my imagination had always connected with the East had never existed; but still I could not divest myself of the lingering idea of the power and splendour of the

212Stanford J. Shaw, Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, Vol. 2, Reform, Revolution and Republic, The Rise of Modern Turkey 1808-1975, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 35. 213John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Greece, Russia, Turkey, and Poland, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1844), p. 208. 214Ibid., p. 227. 215 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land By an American in 2 volumes, Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 81.

97 sultan…‖216 Not only Eastern customs and characteristics are backward, but even the construction that locked the Orient into the past became a thing of the past. What aroused entrancement in the East is in danger of becoming eradicated by modern progressive attempts. His desire becomes prevalent when although he refuses to reinstate the discursive preferences of the romanticized East he contributes to it by declaring his protest against progress that will in his opinion, once and for all dismantle the image of the Oriental. He speculates that if steam engine spreads to Eastern lands and the railroad was to be constructed in Egypt: ―…all will be reduced to the systematic tameness of a cotton-factory, and the wild Arab will retire farther into the heart of the desert, shunning, like, our Native Indians, the faces of strangers, and following for ever the footsteps of his wandering ancestors. Blessed be my fortune, improvement had not yet actually begun its march.‖217 This regretful burst of sentiments seems to be more closely tied to the Native American predicament rather than the possible Arab one. Yet it is interesting to note that the ―fortune‖ is ―his‖ rather than the Arab‘s for being able to preserve the nomadic, wild life he is accustomed to pursue. His pursuance of a life complementary with preconceptions of the author is fortunate for the author since he can derive the satisfaction of confirming his presumptions rather than have them defied and forcefully modified.

Aside from the occasional references to the liberation of the soul from domestic responsibilities and norms via traveling in distant lands inhabited by comparative savages Stephens‘ is not a self-actualization story. He does not construct a Bildungsheld character. As Harvey pointed out, his journey through the desert accompanied by various diseases and physical feebleness suggests a test of masculinity. However, he stands in striking contrast to his company of the Bedouin tribe, whose physicality and bodily perseverance and strength is emphasized many times. A more straightforward but a more pertinent interpretation would be that facing the camel-like Bedouins of the desert (durable, subservient, unrefined) he emblematizes the man polished by civilization, overcoming the physical obstacles not by treachery or brute force but determination. Both of Stephens‘ accounts are meticulously written, valuable sources of information not only of the representational preferences of the American traveler, flora and fauna, or ancient relics but also a candid ambition and curiosity for receiving and proliferating

216John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Greece, Russia, Turkey, and Poland, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1844), p. 227. 217 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land, Vol. I, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 181.

98 knowledge. I will end this chapter with a passage from the second volume of Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land where he elaborately expresses his gradual disillusionment with Eastern life, scenery, and customs.

One by one I had seen the many illusions of my waking dreams fade away; the gorgeous pictures of the Oriental scenes melt into nothing; but I still had clung to the primitive simplicity and purity of the children of the desert, their temperance and abstinence, their contended poverty and contempt for luxuries, as approaching the true nobility of man‘s nature, and sustaining the poetry of the ―land of the East.‖ But my last dream was broken; and I never saw among the wanderers of the desert any traits of character or any habits of life which did not make me prize and value the more the privileges of civilization.218

218 John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petrae, and the Holy Land, Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838), p. 124.

100

101

Chapter IV

The Lands of the Saracen: A Genteel Poet in the Land of the East

I. Prelude to Travel Narratives of the Orient

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening, (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)219

-from Song of Myself

―Song of Myself‖ was first published in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a year after Bayard Taylor‘s The Lands of the Saracen was published. At the time it was not even titled as we know it now, but rather was known as ―Poem of Walt Whitman, an American.‖ Beginning in medias res, crudely put, the poem celebrated diversity within America. And even contradiction was vocalized as transformed into the virtue of multitudes. On hearing the multiple voices, one entertains the nominal dilemma between the conceptualization of the narrative voices: contradiction vs. multitudes. This is one of the idiosyncratic traits of Taylor‘s work that will be explored in detail throughout this chapter.

The significance of the act and recording of travel cannot be overestimated in the literary and cultural history of the United States from very early on. Regardless of the primary purpose of the explorer or the conscious viewpoint of the recorder, the accounts served to reiterate a paradigm that has been constantly transforming itself during the first few centuries of the republic. The narratives, sermons and diaries of the early settlement identified the new land sometimes as a religious sanctuary, a new haven, a new Eden or wilderness and nature with its bountifulness calling for adventurous exploration. Slotkin bluntly yet accurately describes this

219 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, (Radford: Wilder Publications, 2007), p. 58.

102 process: ―…suffering hardship and Indian warfare for the sake of a sacred mission or a simple desire for land; and the Indians themselves, both as they were and as they appeared to the settlers, for whom they were the special demonic personification of the American wilderness.‖220 Captivity narratives embracing spiritual melodramas gave the way to the secular traveler overcoming physical challenges becoming a resident in the new world, territory around him becoming gradually familiarized by his resourcefulness and experience. From 17th century onwards, texts such as John Winthrop‘s A Modell of Christian Charity, Mary White Rowlandson‘s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, William Byrd II‘s The History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina to reports of the Lewis and Clark expedition, John O. Sullivan‘s Manifest Destiny, Frederick Jackson Turner‘s The Significance of the Frontier in American History served as expressions of an identity with an impulse towards creating a memory. Aside from fulfilling the prerequisite of national mythmaking, the United States or the colonies had to compensate for the lack of centuries long common experience by emphasizing ideals that the nation is based on and the reasons behind the ―journey‖ to the New World itself. Myth-making, a ―simultaneously psychological and a social activity,‖221 as a result has an impact on the individual literary products and the social reception of this product. In texts like Sullivan‘s and Turner‘s, the exceptional nature of a restless character was emphasized during a time of urgent need of stories or ideas of a communal identity.

The journey has been a pervasive thematic concern in the American literary tradition, not only as the ―national genre‖ but also as an element characterizing this tradition. As every literary tradition reflects its historical context, American literature expressed that its history began with voyages. Whether grounded in factual accounts or in fiction, journey narrative derived its framework of values that can be related to movement, escape, exploration, pioneering, and exceptionalism from its history. As the impulse of the exploration of the surroundings, and the other becomes the exploration of the self; the outer world becomes the correlative of the self. In the same vein, travelers of the Orient are the reflexive explorers of the unknown, or at least not directly encountered, using the same descriptive techniques such as allusions, metaphors, and imagery as other contemporary works of poetry, fiction, and political prose.

220Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860, (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2000), p. 4. 221Ibid., p. 8.

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All throughout the nineteenth century travel writing enjoyed a large audience despite scholars‘ neglect of it during the following centuries. Although the nineteenth century also witnessed female writers producing three-fourths of all published novels in America, most notable travel writers were men, and female travel writers only started sharing the market after the Civil War. With increasing educational opportunities, 91 percent of the white adult whites of a population of 7 million were literate by 1810. Therefore, travel narratives had the possibility of being read by a vast majority of the white population, thus they could shape the perceptions of the people. As Sarah Wadsworth asserts: ―…feature of American culture in the nineteenth century was the awareness that the literary marketplace consisted not of a single, unified, relatively homogenous reading public (‗the great public‘) but rather of many disparate, overlapping reading communities differentiated by interests, class, and level of education as well as by gender and stage of life.‖222 In the nineteenth century there were very few proponents of ―art for art‘s sake‖; literature was a means to mold the consciousness of the audience. These authors had a significant role in shaping American cultural awareness about the Middle East or Levant or the Orient during the 19th century while at the same time revealing an American identity.

II. Bayard Taylor

The work under scrutiny in this chapter is The Lands of the Saracen by Bayard Taylor, the second volume of a trilogy that encompasses the author‘s travels through the Middle East, Africa, and Far East published in 1854. Although mainly criticized for unoriginality and dullness by later critics both with regard to his travel writing, poetry and fictional works, Taylor‘s significance not only stems from the wide popularity he enjoyed in his day but also from the predominant struggle he has with defining American past and identity as opposed to the cultures he encounters along his way.

The sentiments of reassurance are always more obvious in European travels, just as Taylor‘s patriotism and preference of everything American over European is more so in his Views a-foot or Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff which sold six editions in its first year since after all the circumstances surrounding his travels were uniquely American. ―His

222 Sarah Wadsworth, In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in Nineteenth-Century America, (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), p. 14.

104 observations may not be original; the places he visited may have been the usual ones, he may have seen things only through a conventional haze; but the spectacle of a young American who left for Europe with such supreme confidence and without much money showed the superiority of the American fiber. In its way, Taylor‘s is a version of the success story; and this quality may have been one chief reason for the book‘s popularity.‖223 Nathaniel Parker Willis, who provides Bayard Taylor with letters of recommendation and spiritual support before his journey travel to the Old World later writes in the preface of Views A-Foot or Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff –a title that they decided on together that Taylor at first dismissed and later accepted. ―The book which records the difficulties and struggles of a printer‘s apprentice achieving this must be interesting to Americans. The pride of the country is in its self-made man.‖224

These, of course, indicate more about the reception of his first travel book by the public than it does about Taylor‘s original intentions. Still, the irony here is that a unique American trait serves for his obsession to see the Old World225 only to reassure the reader of the decadence of the actual past and the alternative future constituted by the Old World. As the Old World is presented as the non-preferable alternative, the Orient acts as the proper other. The redefinition of the American character becomes more aggressive when reflected against the Oriental, yet strangely enough more ambivalent. Although, a comparison of the treatment of the East and Europe would require a different framework and a different study, it is useful to point out certain transgressions from specific discourses when the object changes from European to Eastern or Oriental. It becomes clear in the course of analyses of representational techniques employed to two objects that they do not stand in equal footing even before the transatlantic voyage. The desire to break away from Europe politically yet cling to the cultural heritage, created a dilemma for authors dealing with England in particular. Yet Taylor‘s specific interest was focalized in Germany and German culture more than other European nations. When it comes to the distinguishing factors in the way the authors deal with Europe and the Orient, the most striking differentiation they make in their approach is their level of generalization and explication of

223Paul C. Wermuth, Bayard Taylor, (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1973), p. 37. 224 Bayard Taylor, Views a Foot Or Europe Seen With Knapsack and Staff, (Middlesex: Echo Library, 2006), p. 4. 225In a letter to Rufus W. Griswold dated January 24 1844, who printed Taylor‘s poems in Graham’s Magazine and Saturday Evening Post he wrote of this wish: ―The principal and in fact, almost the only object I have in view, is to raise a sum sufficient to buy the remainder of my time from my employer, as my situation is by no means an agreeable one. In publishing it, [Ximena] I act contrary to the advice of many of my friends, but I find by doing so I can accomplish the object desired. The dream of my early years, and the strongest desire I now have, is to visit the Old World, and I can never rest until I have done so.‖

105 these generalizations. This differentiation will be explored further later in the chapter. Yet one example is how he freely expresses the existence of German traits without sacrificing the reassurance that ―free states are far, far‖ better than any other nation in the world. When he disparages the provincial attitude and insularity he points to certain European traits America should look up to. He writes in a letter from Frankfurt to Hannah M. Darlington dated 1845:

It is a false idea altogether that one can learn nothing by going abroad, and that we can better serve our country by having an ―American education.‖ As one can learn more of the English language by learning another, so one can learn more of his own country by living a while in another. There is nothing like comparison. Many things which at home do not strike us from their familiarity, strike us very forcibly here. And I must say, that with us, as with all Americans who go abroad, every day but proves that the free States are far, far beyond any other nation in the world, though it is foolish to suppose we can learn nothing from others. On the contrary, there are many important points in which the Germans excel us.‖226

He goes on by enumerating certain German traits that finds admirable and considers lacking in American culture such as social and musical feeling and emphasizes the importance of assimilating oneself into the culture in order to comprehend the gist of it. He employs the same strategy in the Orient –adopting the habits entirely-. However, main function the Orient serves the author proves to be quite different as he articulates in another letter written from Constantinople on July 17, 1852 to Grace Greenwood: ―Believe me, Europe, fresh and inspiring as it will be to your eyes, has nothing to compare with the gorgeous life of the East. Here is the true Lotus-land. I came to bury myself in its heart, to escape from everything that could remind me of the toil and confusion of the bewildering world, and I have found rest and peace far more tranquil and enduring than I ever hoped.‖227 The Orient is not dissected into its characteristics one can adopt but rather, it is portrayed as a process the Western traveler goes through. Europe is to engage in whereas the Orient is to escape from those engagements. A further explanation to this differentiation can also be provided with the marketing strategy of Taylor himself and his accounts aside from his admiration for the Orient. ―The most popular pictures of Taylor presented him in Oriental garb. The first ‗Putnam‘s‘ had him in Arab burnoose and turban, and

226John Richie Schultz ed., The Unpublished Letters of Bayard Taylor in the Huntington Library, (California: The Plantin Press, 1937), p. 11. 227Ibid. p. 31.

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Hick‘s painting of him in Eastern dress and with Persian pipe was instantly recognized by everyone who had read (and who had not read?) ‗The Lands of the Saracen.‘‖228

It should be mentioned that an event with a lasting impact in Taylor‘s life took place before embarking on the journey that the letter quoted from above was written: the death of his first wife Mary Agnew of tuberculosis in December, 1850. His grief and dispiritedness partially accounts for the escape motif in his narrative, yet the motif is more prevalent –and an exhausted one- when dealing with the Orient. There are two main distinguishing factors at play in this disparity: one is that European nations are singled out when a characteristic is commented on and that the characteristic serves a practical purpose that can be concretely enacted at home and the consequences can be enjoyed, whereas the East is referred to as a whole, disregarding regional and national differences. The only diversity acknowledged is based on ethnicity and that is externally imposed by the author even when the government does not recognize its subjects based on ethnicity but by religious denominations. An Oriental trait is either not singled out to begin with or it is extraneous to the effusively elaborated observation. In other words, you cannot take the Orient home, for one reason or another; if you do it would cease to be the Orient as it had been presented thus far. The Orient intrinsically cannot be dissected into its characteristics; it is subservient and adaptable to the author‘s needs –at play either at a conscious or subliminal level- as a process to undergo. The Orient is timeless, yet its effects are ephemeral. The East is without exception portrayed as a whole, regardless of the different nations this constructed geography consists of. In the author‘s portrayals there are no borders within the Orient. It is not even spatially defined but rather presented to the reader as a sentiment; a mental state of trance where there are no earthly distractions that belong to the civilized life. What is distinguished is, as I have already mentioned, are different races and ethnicities. One suspects that the traces of racial discourses back home affect Taylor‘s judgments of other lands. The first two that come to mind are the striking representations of the Jews and Circassians, which are on the extreme opposite sides from each other. Both representations entail superficial physical descriptions but Taylor does not leave it at that and speculates on reasons for this or the signs of physical traits. For instance, the Jews are vulgarly ugly because of enduring persecution229 or with regard to Circassians he says, ―It may be received as a general rule that the physical development of the

228Albert H. Smyth, Bayard Taylor, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1896), p. 88. 229 Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen, (New York: Putnam, 1855), p. 81.

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European is superior to that of the Oriental, with the exception of Circassians and Georgians, whose beauty well entitles them to the distinction of giving their name to our race.‖230 His discourse on races is indisputably and inescapably shaped by discourses about slavery and Native Americans back home. Therefore it is useful at this point to learn more about his opinions of different races that shape American diversity and inner conflicts, such as the rapid Westward expansion (Native Americans) and the rise of abolitionism (African Americans). Even when there are no explicit references to these issues, it is possible to trace similar nuances in discourses regarding the Orient. Malini Johar Schueller articulates this phenomenon in U.S. Orientalisms:

For many travel writers, Oriental travel writing was both a foray into another culture and a site where disturbing racial issues at home came to the surface. Even more than the Native American, the African always entered the Oriental landscape questioning the rhetoric of freedom and liberty and drawing attention to the racial discourses that comprised ideas of empire overseas and of colonization within the country.231

Born on January 11, 1825 in Kenneth Square, Pennsylvania to Quaker parents, (both grandmothers were German) Bayard Taylor published his first poem ―Soliloquy of a Young Poet‖ in The Saturday Evening Post when he was 16. Paul Wermuth nicely summarizes the sociopolitical circumstances surrounding his early and adult life. ―Bayard Taylor was born into an exciting time. His career spanned the middle years of the nineteenth century, a period of rapid change, of growth and consolidation, of western expansion. He was ‗present at the creation‘ of the railroads, the change from sail to steam on the seas, the gold rush, the opening of Japan, the Civil War, the laying of the transatlantic cable, the growth of the big cities, the Indian wars in the west.‖232 He inescapably owes his stylistic tools and formation of his narrative discourses to these very circumstances. Wermuth continues: ―In many ways Taylor embodied the American dream, for he was a poor farm boy who rose through his own hard work, ambition, and talent to become one of the most famous Americans of his time, one who ultimately hobnobbed with kings and princes, presidents and politicians, and who knew all the literary men of his day.‖233 In 1842, he was apprenticed to a West Chester printer, published Views Afoot in 1846 after two years of travels and bought a local newspaper in Pennsylvania, which he left to move to New

230 Ibid. p. 155. 231 Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, Gender in Literature 1790-1890, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 32. 232 Paul C. Wermuth, Selected Letters of Bayard Taylor, (New Jersey, London, and Ontario: Associated University Press, 1997), p. 18. 233Ibid., p. 17

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York the following year. Some of his other travel works include, chronologically, Eldorado, or, Adventures in the Path of Empire (1850), A Journey to Central Africa, or Life and Landscapes from Egypt to the Negro Kingdoms of the White Nile (1854), The Lands of the Saracen; or Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily and Spain (1854), and A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 1853 (1855) which was written as a result of Taylor‘s accompanying Commodore Perry‘s expedition to Japan, and By-Ways of Europe (1869). In addition to his travel works, he published several volumes of poetry such as Ximena, or The Battle of the Sierra Morena, and Other Poems (1844), Poems of the Orient (1854), considered by his biographer Albert Smyth as ―the highest expression of Taylor‘s delight in the world. It contains the best of his lyrical genius, and the most brilliant of his purely sensuous verse.‖234 The Poet’s Journal (1862), The Picture of St. John (1866), Lars: A Pastoral of Norway (1873), and The Prophet: A Tragedy (1874), a few novels among which are Hannah Thurston: A Story of American Life (1863), John Godfrey’s Fortunes: Related by Himself (1864), and A Story of Kenneth (1866). In Hannah Thurston and A Story of Kenneth Taylor criticizes and depicts ―the social world of Quaker Pennsylvania.‖235 He also wrote plays, and made the translation of Goethe‘s Faust, which he rightfully took a lot of pride in. He got married for the second time to a German woman, Marie Hansen, daughter of a German astronomer, in 1857, embarked on a lecture tour in California in 1859. He lectured on German literature at Cornell University in 1870. In 1878, he was appointed minister to Germany, a post he more than willingly accepted. A few months after he arrived, he died on December 19, 1878, of what was diagnosed as a liver ailment at the time. Paul C. Wermuth comments: ―…his success is clearly due to several factors. One was a powerful ambition and drive; no man could have done all the things he did, or written the books that he wrote, without enormous energy and a thirst for fame. In a sense, it is remarkable that he lived for fifty-three years.‖236 As derived from his works and letters, Taylor has always been very fond of popularity, appreciation, and approval of fellow writers. Even in his very first poem he wrote:

High hopes spring up within; Hopes of the future –thoughts of glory –fame Which prompt my mind to toil, and bid me win

234Albert H. Smyth, Bayard Taylor, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1896), p. 218. 235 Charles L. Cohen, Paul S. Boyer, eds., Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America, (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), p. 55. 236Paul C. Wermuth, Bayard Taylor (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1973) p. 177.

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That dream –a deathless name.237

III. Fame and Prominence: Writing for the Future

Although his popularity derived mostly from his travel writing, he made what he wanted to be known as every chance he got, at times expressing false modesty resulting from his feeling of lack of appreciation. ―I had a charming letter from Lowell to-day about ‗St. John.‘ He considers it ‗an honest and beautiful work‘ and an entire success, and will review it in the N. A. [The North American Review.] From other letters which I receive and from newspaper indications, I think I have at last a tolerably firm block under my feet. I don‘t believe (never did) that the book will be popular, but it will achieve for me what I am thirsting for –recognition as a real poet, not a sentimental amateur.‖238 Or in 1876 he wrote: ―If I live, I shall yet do my best work in Poetry.‖239 Biographers have touched upon his unceasing desire for approval sympathetically, yet it has been made clear that he had been seeking them in vain. In fact, his only failure is not against the test of time but it is the failure to live up to his own standards. He was quite conscious of what is required of a poet, what is open to dispute is his ability to enact what he already knew probably better than most of his contemporaries. He enjoyed the exaltation to a great extent, yet all of his declared satisfactions with his own work were followed by a strong desire to create something better and more enduring. His expressive nature and the thousands of letters he wrote (a biographer‘s dream) that were mostly preserved make it much easier to understand the processes he underwent. If you knew how many years I have steadily worked, devoted to a high ideal which no one seemed to recognize, and sneered at by cheap critics as a mere interloper in literature, you would understand how incredible this charge seems to me. The great comfort is this –I was right in my instinct: the world does appreciate earnest endeavor in the end. I have always had faith, and I have learned to overlook opposition, disparagement, misconception of my best work, believing that the day of justification would come. But what now comes to me seems too much: I can only accept it as a balance against me, to be met by still better work in the future.240

237 Sherwin Cody, Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor, A Book For Young Americans, (Middlesex: Echo Library, 2006), p. 78. 238John Richie Schultz ed., The Unpublished Letters of Bayard Taylor in the Huntington Library, (California: The Plantin Press, 1937), p. 94. 239 Ibid. p. 193. 240 James Grant Wilson, Bryant and His Friends, (New York: Fords, Howard, Sr Hulbert, 1886), p. 373.

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Although significantly dependent on criticism, he was an optimist regarding his work in general. During the creation process, he regarded most his poetry works –travel as an act was a source of inspiration for him yet the products of his travels in the form of travel narratives were never his intellectual or literary priority- his best thus far and sought for the appreciation of his fellow writers. Fame he enjoyed nationwide as a travel writer could never match the value of a positive criticism his poetry received. ―All other efforts and aspirations were subordinated to this absorbing passion. No praise of his miscellaneous achievements, when he was winning and wearing proud distinction in statecraft, in scholarship, and in letters, could reconcile him to the slightest sense of failure in poetic endeavor.‖241

Better known and more widely read than most of his fellow writers, Taylor was never satisfied with the criticism his works received, and chances are would not be satisfied with being known as the travel writer who had a thirst for recognition as a real poet in the following centuries. He wrote: ―For I am not insensible that nine-tenths of my literary success (in a publishing view) springs from those very ‗Views A-foot,‘ which I now blush to read –I am known to the public not as a poet, the only title I covet, but as one who succeeded in seeing Europe with little money, and the chief merits accorded to me are not passion or imagination, but strong legs and economical habits. Now this is truly humiliating.‖242 Unfortunately, his travel narratives are still the focus of attention after two hundred years, although he is literary historians and critics mostly neglect him. The special value poetry had for him as a sign of social respectability was also related to the Genteel Tradition he was acquainted with along with Richard Henry Stoddard, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich. They were mostly inspired by earlier English romantics Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Their articles of faith according to Richard Cary were: ―belief in the primacy of the beautiful and the spiritual, contrivance and virtuosity in versification, free use of myth and legend, disdain of literal scientific truth, preference for the picturesque and the sensuous, scrupulous regard for good manners, geographic and historic remoteness in themes, and studious rejection of the unpleasant.‖243 The strictly abided articles of faith also made their way into the descriptions of

241 Albert H. Smyth, Bayard Taylor, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1896), p. 211. 242 Paul C. Wermuth, Selected Letters of Bayard Taylor, (New Jersey, London, and Ontario: Associated University Press, 1997), p. 95. 243Richard Cary, The Genteel Circle: Bayard Taylor and His New York Friends, ((New York: Cornell University Press, 1952), p. 3.

111 distant lands in Taylor‘s travel literature some more than the others. The different treatment of the Oriental subject in the genres of poetry and travel will be analyzed in depth in the last part of this chapter.

One thing that cannot be denied about Taylor was that he was diligent, meticulous and insurmountably productive all throughout his life. Another occupation he felt irresolute about was lecturing. Just like Mark Twain commented on the sales of his travel work Innocents Abroad saying it was selling ―right along just like the Bible,‖244 Taylor remarked in a letter to his mother: ―the Tribune comes next to the Bible all through the West.‖ Thus the public, after having read his letters published in the Tribune was anxious to hear him lecture as well, his simple and direct manner of speaking stabilized his fame as a messenger from distant lands. His attitude towards lecturing fluctuates as derived from his remarks in his published letters. For the most part, he did it to sustain himself in order to concentrate more on his poetry. One lecture he gave that was published in the New York Times on October 23, 1874 entitled ―Ancient Egypt‖ with the subtitle ―The Recent Discoveries, Result of the Researches of Champollion and Others, Sketch of Ancient Egyptian Civilization and Its Effects‖ is especially interesting in terms of its comprehensiveness and informative quality. In the lecture he gave in The Academy of Music which was published in the New York Times on October 23, 1874, after surveying the discoveries made in Egypt he expresses his high regard for the Egyptian civilization: ―It is impossible to look upon the statues of that period, and not feel what a high degree of culture was fairly claimed by the race.‖245

According to Thorp, when it comes to the standard pattern of European travel writing by Americans the essential question is ―What shall I, as an American do about Europe?‖246American travel writers‘ deep set insecurity about describing his roots, naming where his name derives from owning up to his history while simultaneously defining the point of break determines his attitude towards Europe. But another pertinent question that seemingly entails fewer complications is ―What shall he, as an American do about the Orient?‖ Should he conveniently imitate European discursive inheritance, which would be impugning given the

244 William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms (New York: Harper, 1910), p. 8. 245http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9C01EFDD153BEF34BC4B51DFB667838F669FDE 246 Robert E. Spiller et. al. ed., Literary History of the United States, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1975), p. 834.

112 primary concern of the portrayal of Europe? The dilemma about the treatment of Europe also reflects on how authors deal with the Orient. The inherited discursive strategies merge with the quest for originality. The representation of the Orient consequently constitutes an eclectic discourse, determined in a case-by-case manner. There is one exceptional domain that is worth attention. What distinguishes Taylor from the majority of travel writers is his alleged spiritual connection to the Orient. In 1852 in his ―Poet in the East‖ he wrote:

The Poet came to the Land of the East, When Spring was in the air: The earth was dressed for a wedding feast, So young she seemed, and fair; And the poet knew the Land of the East – His soul was native there.247

This poem, like many others in his volume of poetry called The Poems of the Orient makes extensive use of Oriental imagery and his subjects such as the nightingale who sings about the ―Rose‖ that the poet kisses; and the ―rose‖ in turn stands as a metaphor for ―Sultana.‖ What is more pertinent than his hyperbolic reductionist treatment of Oriental paraphernalia is his bold acknowledgement of spiritual familiarity with the land (of the East). His reductionism in poetry as well as his prose extends to geography without exception. He eliminates all national boundaries; only makes use of local paraphernalia to enhance the authenticity effect.

Now all cruelty, ugliness, tyranny, filth, resentment, disgust, belittlement, disparagement, fanaticism, primitiveness, ignorance, degradation come to an halt at the end of dirty and narrow Oriental streets filled with savages as long as the eye can see, and Eastern channels of pestilence with children stricken with poverty playing on its side. The expressions on Oriental faces signify not inadequateness but pride and strength. Desert is a source of inspiration, women are beautiful and so are all horses, the Oriental as a byword for glamour and pleasure finds its way into Taylor‘s poetry more than his travel narratives. The qualities that are disavowed previously are delineated in great detail. The imagination ceases to be intangible and surmounts the facts without a need for justification. Another aspect that is integrated into his poetry but is refrained from in his narratives as Beatty observes is a more liberal attitude regarding traditional values such as prudence. ―Certainly he did find a release of a sort. Lovers actually have mistresses in these poems; there are flaming consummations, pagan abandonments, rapturous immoralities

247 Bayard Taylor, Poems of the Orient, (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854), p. 19.

113 which declare that, for once, the pall of New England did not weigh upon his imagination.‖248 He is at ease with his imagination in more ways than one.

Better than Stamboul‘s courts of gold, Whose harems the Georgian girls infold, Whiter than snow, but not so cold;

Better than Baghdad‘s garden bowers, Or fountains that play among Persian flowers; Better than all delights and powers,

The deed God‘s justice will abide--- The stern atonement, long denied, That righteous Vengeance gives to Pride.249

―Arab Prayer,‖ also included in Poems of the Orient exemplifies a broad generalization of various cultures that Taylor had encountered during his travels. He borrows subjects from several cultures and mingles them into one narrative. Protagonist, also the narrator of this poem is a nameless Arab who dedicated his life to avenge upon his adversary to clear his honor which he values more than all the earthly pleasures enumerated above. He is destined to wander aimlessly until ―his blood will clean [his] sabre‘s stain,‖250 and his pride is restored. Similar to the manner in which he adopts the Oriental garb during his travels, his poems about the Orient are mostly written with an insider‘s perspective; the protagonist is an Oriental. It is either a common Arab man seeking vengeance or an Oriental king like the narrator in ―El Khalil.‖ If his main subject is not a common man or a king, it is a concept that he associated with the Orient more than any place else; ―Ode to Indolence‖ from the same volume is one striking example. The lazy guardsman who would demand the baksheesh he did not deserve251 in his prose is clearly assessed in a new light in his poetry. Indolence ceases to be a physical trait that reflects on the Oriental‘s morality but is elevated to a spiritual level where it gives birth to wisdom.252 Most of the poems in this volume seem to be products of ardent struggle to merge independent concepts and random, emblematic Oriental paraphernalia to each other. Smyth remarks in a similar vein:

248Richmond Croom Beatty, Bayard Taylor: Laureate of the Gilded Age, (Norman: University of Oklohama Press, 1936), p. 178. 249 Bayard Taylor, Poems of the Orient, (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854), p. 42-43. 250Ibid., p. 42. 251Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen, (New York: Putnam, 1855), p. 298. 252Bayard Taylor, Poems of the Orient, (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854), p. 48.

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―Taylor‘s chief defect seems to me to be a lack of spontaneity. His poetry is all intended. It is carefully built up by the intellect. The reader searches in vain for an escape from the intellectual; Taylor never gives the reign to the spirit.‖253

IV. Inspiration and Ambivalence

The Lands of the Saracens is dedicated to Washington Irving for introducing Bayard Taylor to those brilliant people and land, the Orient, and the Orientals whose brilliance moved along a scale dependent on an unknown variable throughout the book. He promises the reader, in a similar vein to Mark Twain for giving ―correct pictures of Oriental life and scenery leaving antiquarian research and speculation to abler hands.‖254 Taylor frequently voiced the dilemma of not having the scientific training to undertake a thorough anthropological research, yet he did not think travel writing was the proper platform to exhibit his interest in poetry itself. Either way he thought the genre was not tailored for him, yet the feeling was not mutual.

As it is the second volume of his two and a half years of travels, the excitements of the ocean voyage is amiss, instead the account starts with the quarantine in Beirut. The ocean voyage is an indispensable part of the travel narratives that the author employs to build up expectations of the places to be visited.

The author must begin with the excitements of the ocean voyage itself and devote at least a portion of a chapter to the thrill, so long anticipated, of setting foot on foreign soil. From this point on he should mix architecture and scenery with comment on philanthropies, skillfully work in a little history cribbed from Murray‘s guides, taking care to add a touch of sentiment or eloquence when the occasion permitted. If the essay or book required a little padding, it was always possible to retell an old legend or slip in an account of dangers surmounted in crossing the Alps.255

Taylor follows the formula, although the content is a bit more varied; instead of the dangers that befell the traveler crossing the Alps is Mount Etna‘s eruption, Ramadan celebrations in Constantinople with pages and pages of detailed physical descriptions of the government officials, and customs. He also provides the reader with such fantastic stories about certain traditions that even a local would be amazed at hearing them.

253Albert H. Smyth, Bayard Taylor, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1896), p. 268. 254Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen, (New York: Putnam, 1855), p. vi. 255 Robert E. Spiller et. al. ed., Literary History of the United States, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1975), p. 831.

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On the second day of the quarantine, he sends a dragoman to buy him a Bible, as it is Sunday, and Bible will be indispensable to him during his tour of the Holy Land later on. Here his ambivalence about Muslims shows its first signs:

Seeing the holy man of Timbuctoo praying with his face towards Mecca, I went down to him, and we conversed for a long time on religious matters. He is tolerable well informed, having read the Books of Moses and the Psalms of David, but like all Mahommedans, his ideas of religion consist mainly of forms, and its reward is a sensual paradise. The more intelligent of the Moslems, give a spiritual interpretation to the nature of the Heaven promised by the Prophet, and I have heard several openly confess their disbelief in the seventy houries and the palaces of pearl and emerald.256 The sensuality he demeans here becomes the source of many praiseful remarks by him, regardless of its imaginative imposition rather than actual existence. More than once, he identifies the civilized world with confinement: ―We are no longer happy nomads, masquerading in Moslem garb. We shall soon become prosaic Christians, and meekly hold our wrists for the handcuffs of civilization.‖257 Furthermore, it is this very trait that also finds its essential place in the Genteel Tradition that lets the imagination of the author run free and enables speculation that is too abstract to be tested by reason, which is exactly what the public has been used to receiving as the perception of the Orient. By the same token, it leads to recurrent inconsistencies in the text which is penned by a seemingly confused observer and introduces us to the idiosyncratic trait of the 19th century American depictions of the Orient: ambivalence. This ambivalence begins with his observations of religious paraphernalia (people, customs, and monuments), extends to physical descriptions of Oriental people, streets, scenery, physical comparisons of the United States and the Orient, reflections on the government and ends with Western imperialism. This ambivalence not only becomes clear within the confines of this singular text but becomes clear on a wider scale when his other works and letters are taken into consideration. This concept of ambivalence can be examined on two distinct levels. The first and more obvious one is that the lucid, precise statements about the Oriental paraphernalia –when positive- is appropriated while reversed in a similar subsequent instance, when negative, vice versa. Brian Yothers, with regard to Taylor‘s work, articulated this phenomenon as such:

On the one hand, Taylor can be seen here to be unquestionably tolerant and open-minded when compared with compatriots such as Orime, Thomson, Barclay, and Robinson.

256Ibid. p. 23-24. 257 Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen, (New York: Putnam, 1855), p. 310.

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Nonetheless, the appropriation that Taylor makes when he identifies this young man258 with the founder of the Christian religion surely also shows the same sort of incomprehension of the possibility of a coherent faith that differs from his own that marks Clorinda Minor259 as she marches off to the Holy Land in search of converts. For Taylor, the romance of the Holy Land remains a distinctly Christian, Protestant romance, and his text thus falls short of the complexity and sympathetic insight that Melville is later able to establish in Clarel.260

The second level can be understood –and that is exclusive to Taylor- by making use of Homi Bhabha‘s idea of ambivalence of mimicry, which he formulates to describe the state of the colonized subject imposed by the authority of the colonial discourse. It stems from the desire of the colonizer to reform the colonized subject and eventually make it resemble the self as a sign of the fulfillment of colonization. Yet this phenomenon also calls for the urge to maintain superiority over the colonized subject, the close resemblance of the subject to the colonizer is perceived as a threat. Mimicry at once becomes ―resemblance and threat.‖261 In a similar manner, yet in a reversed context that is devoid of colonial connotations, Taylor dresses in Arab costume, mimics local habits; but almost feels threatened by his own transformation and mimicry that he delimits this change. Thus, the subject is ―almost the same, but not quite.‖262 Although not contextually, this phenomenon similarly reveals itself in Taylor‘s attitude towards the Orient of all the places he visits. He tries to learn the language, adopts the traditional clothing, lets facial hair grow similarly to the locals, and is proud to be confused as one by the natives of the land.

I wear the tarboosh, smoke the Persian pipe, and drop cross-legged on the floor with the ease of any tailor whatever. When I went into my banker‘s they addressed me in Turkish. The other day, at Brousa (Bursa), my fellow-Mussulmen indignantly denounced me as damned, because I broke the fast of the Ramazan by taking a drink of water in the bazaar. I have gone into the holiest mosques in Asia Minor with perfect impunity. I determined

258 Refers to Taylor‘s anecdote -which strikingly stands out given his other impressions about the Holy Land- on his brief encounter with a Jewish man who resembles Jesus. ―On the evening of my arrival in the city, as I set out to walk through the bazaars, I encountered a native Jew, whose face will haunt me for the rest of my life. I was sauntering slowly along, asking myself, ―Is this Jerusalem?‖ when, lifting my eyes, they met those of Christ! It was the very face which Raphael has painted –the traditional features of the Saviour, as they are recognized and accepted by Christendom…As the dusk gathered in the deep streets, I could see nothing but the ineffable sweetness and benignity of that countenance, and my friend was not a little astonished, if not shocked, when I said to him, with the earnestness of belief, on my return, ―I have just seen Christ.‖ 259 An American woman from Philadelphia, who moved to Palestine in 1851 and took to converting Jews to Christianity. 260Brian Yothers. The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790-1876, (Burlington, VT and Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), p. 74. 261Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 122. 262Ibid., p. 122

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to taste the Orient as it was, in reality, not as a mere outside looker-on, and so picked up the Arabic tongue, put on the wide trowsers, and adopted as many Eastern customs as was becoming to a good Christian. Now, however, all is over. Yesterday, alas! I crammed my unwilling legs into a pair of narrow pantaloons, elevated a straight collar about my neck...263

Once again, we see that the author does not distinguish between regional –very basic- characteristics, such as language or garb. He smokes the Persian pipe, is addressed in Turkish in Bursa, and picks up Arabic, thus becomes a true Oriental. Although here he does not distinguish between different regions Taylor has a precise idea about what the true Orient is: ―…Constantinople is not the true Orient, which is to be found rather in Cairo, in Aleppo, and rightest and most vital, in Damascus. Here we tread European soil; the Franks are fast crowding out the followers of the Prophet, and Stamboul itself, were its and mosques and Seraglio removed, would differ little in outward appearance from a third-rate Italian town.‖264 What‘s more important is his concern about the degree to which adopting Oriental customs would be becoming to a good Christian and similarly on arriving Constantinople observing that the majority of people are dressed in ―Frank costume‖, his longing to change back into his Christian self. That is the point when the mimicry becomes a menace and on recognizing the familiarity of civilization he abandons his temporary Oriental self. Therefore, Taylor becomes one of the other natives of the ―Eastern lands‖ (almost the same), becomes all of them at once, keeping his reserve for their judgment at the same time and his circumstantial adoption of Oriental customs can be dismissed with ease (but not quite). ―…the ambivalence of mimicry (almost the same, but not quite) does not merely ‗rupture‘ the discourse, but becomes transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a ‗partial‘ presence. By ‗partial‘ I mean both ‗incomplete‘ and ‗virtual‘‖.265His romantic aspirations to gain a sense of innate belonging to the ―land of the East‖ and benefit from its manifold inspirational qualities are repudiated by his predilection towards justifying his experience by delimiting it to a degree that is ―becoming to a Christian.‖ Therefore, he also confines his presence to a ―partial‖ state. His presence is rendered also virtual and even imaginary; since his presence is not acknowledged by the Oriental through any form of communication.

263 Marie Hansen Taylor, Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, Vol I., (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1884), p. 232. 264 Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen, (New York: Putnam, 1855), p. 344. 265 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 123.

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The rupture that occurs in Taylor‘s latent Orientalist discourse unfolds as ambivalence in judgment and representation; his judgment fluctuates between his first hand observations and the legacy he emulated from his reputable predecessors. Both the Oriental subject and the traveler become incomplete and virtual; the subject due to faulty representation and because of being mute; the traveler due to his alleged but not realized assimilation into the culture he is observing. The muteness of the Oriental deserves some elaboration. In certain instances, this muteness is not literal. Even if the Oriental expresses an opinion, it functions to emphasize its negation, a specific American particularity that stands at the opposite end of the spectrum with regard to the Oriental one. That makes the existence of the Oriental even more virtual if not a figment of the traveler‘s imagination. The muteness and the purposeful insertion of an Oriental‘s expression become equally important. Additionally, the expression is always dependent on the counter- expression of the American which does not necessarily challenge various characteristics of the Oriental in the definition of latent Orientalism, such as mute and passive. Fuad Sha‘ban, the author of Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought articulates the reason for this ambivalence by bringing to light the fact that the 19th century was the transitional period regarding the perception of Islam. He focuses on the missionary narratives. Certain characteristics as a continuation of the zeal into the wilderness of missionary fervor are also prevalent in Taylor‘s narrative, yet to no concrete end. Islam moreover, cannot be conceptualized as the sole determinant in the discourse of American latent Orientalism. In many 19th century American travel narratives and in Taylor‘s as well, we see the disparaging attitude towards Christians living in the Orient as well as the Muslims. Justin T. Edwards, in his Exotic Journeys, points out to another possible interpretation of this ambivalence:

Discourses are not monolithic: they frequently include tensions and contradictions that must be taken together in order to fully understand the functions of particular discursive structures. Travel discourses for instance, are often fraught with gaps, contradictions, and inconsistencies that destabilize the unified modes of representation presented by travelers. Many American travel writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced discourses of travel that were both related to and in conflict with dominant discursive strategies.266

266 Justin D. Edwards, Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature, 1840-1930, (New Hampshire: University Press of New England), p. 11.

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The tensions, and contradictions he mentions are more distinctively detectable in narratives such as Mark Twain‘s Innocents Abroad where stylistic elements such as irony, and humor further widens the gap between two different observations on similar instances. Whereas a more minute analysis of the text is required to notice the meandering style in a narrative such as Taylor‘s The Lands of the Saracen. The author is stuck between the immense hiatus of the dominant paradigms and discourses and the first hand observation; the fair treatment of the encountered places, objects and the expectations of the 19th century reading public; his memory that is not immaculate and the new experiences involving similar emotional reactions; his own ideas that are products of a socialization period and that socialization period in retrospect on comparison with distant lands and ways of life. Therefore, socio-historical circumstances, literary tradition, and the legacy of precedent discursive strategies factor in the making of this prevalent byproduct of American latent Orientalism: ambivalence. To contrast the previous argument on Islam, this ambivalence is easiest to detect with regard to representation of Islam because it is the most general and superficial of all the observations in the narrative. There are definitely both subliminal and conscious reasons for this. The first example is one of Taylor‘s critical and tolerant observations about Andalusia.

…in place of lands richly cultivated and teeming with plenty, we now have barren and almost depopulated wastes –in place of education, industry and the cultivation of the arts and sciences, an enslaved, ignorant and degenerate race. Andalusia would be far more prosperous at this day, had she remained in Muslim hands. True, she would not have received that Faith which is yet destined to be the redemption of the world, but the doctrines of Mahomet are more acceptable to God, and more beneficial to Man than those of the Inquisition, which in Spain alone, has shed ten times as much Christian blood as all the Moslem races together for the last six centuries.267

Aside from the assertion of Christianity being the redemption of the world, which one suspects is included in the observation to please the American middle class audience, or to redeem the rest of the critical observation, his judgment is quite visionary when compared with his contemporaries, including some of his own remarks. Critics have largely neglected his sound judgments of history as such while emphasizing more his literary defects. The degree of objectivity that he is able to achieve at certain points in his narrative is unique and remarkably so. Aside from his lack of effort to get to the root of things at times, he writes indignantly about

267 Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen, (New York: Putnam, 1855), p. 426.

120 injustice when he believes there to be one. His fair attitude succeeds in surpassing his indolence in more than once occasion. Unfortunately, his indignation may strike the reader as indiscriminate and the randomness makes it impossible to measure the standards of his selectiveness. His humane attitude might be perceived as more humdrum; the exact style that Mark Twain will ridicule thirty-five years later. The second example, while contrasting the first one, in essence also includes contradictions in itself. This interesting example epitomizes the concept of ambivalence that has been explained in detail above.

But the mosque –that blossom of Oriental architecture, with its crowning domes, like the inverted bells of the lotus, and its reed-like minarets, its fountains and marble courts –can only perish with the faith it typifies. I, for one, rejoice that, so long as the religion of Islam exists (and yet, may its time be short!), no Christian model can shape its houses of worship. The minaret must still lift its airy tower for the muezzin; the dome must rise like a gilded heaven above the prayers of the Faithful, with its starry lamps and emblazoned phrases; the fountain must continue to pour its waters of purification. A reformation of the Moslem faith is impossible. When it begins to give way, the whole fabric must fall.268

The frequent use of metaphors indicates that he could not evade aesthetic concerns in his prose as opposed to his claim. His style hardly ever gives the impression of being extemporaneous, yet the essence is always well thought of. In this example, the poetic descriptions full of imagery are disrupted by a short remark to soothe the audience so that the author will not come across as unbecoming for a Christian. Nevertheless, the imagery continues to dominate the prose until it is once more disrupted and deemed eclectic with an abrupt insertion of an opinion on the nature of Muslim faith. The author oscillates between his admiration for Oriental architecture and the societal pressure to express contemptuous sentiments about the religion of Islam itself. His pendulous depiction seems trapped between his aesthetic sensibilities and moral obligations towards the American readership. Eventually, he fulfills these obligations by eliminating the aptness of Islam for progress and finalizes his depiction. This example indicates very well why the discourse on the Orient cannot be monolithic in nature. It is not a matter of dealing with different issues in a single culture in various manners; the views are not contingent upon each other which ruptures any continuity or consistence that may come about in the discourse. It usually gives the feeling that a revolutionary fervor subliminally succumbs to the needs of the present day. The romantic fervor,

268 Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen, (New York: Putnam, 1855), p. 345.

121 the ideal of beauty and other tenets of the Genteel tradition –even if they seem forced- subordinate his critical observations that emerge upon the encounter of distant lands and their people. Islamic paraphernalia, with their fairytale-like idiosyncrasies, are an intrinsic part of the descriptions, as long as the nature of the faith itself does not a pose a threat to middle-class American Protestants. These descriptions are acceptable as long as it fixes Islam as static eternally (reformation of Islam is impossible); the metaphors vary, Islam if it attempts at a change, falls altogether. Islam, not prone to the constant change and forward moving dynamics of the 19th century United States, is doomed to fall. It is not only a matter of proving superiority of Protestantism over Islam; it is further eradicating any possibility that the latter could stand as competition. This is one of the significant differences between the nature of the disparaging criticisms between Western Europe and the Orient. Western Europe discursively speaking still stands a chance at competition whereas the Orient never has been, and never would be able to.

He provides the reader with far more extensive and comprehensive descriptions of agriculture, vegetation, landscape and architecture than his contemporaries, although he is often times intimidated by his predecessors whom he repeatedly refers to –Von Hammer, Lamartine, Willis, Miss Pardoe, Albert Smith, Thackeray,269- and refrains himself from describing scenes highly frequented in the past. His interest in vegetation enables him to comment on the climate and the ability of the people from the distant lands to make use of their terrains. When he sees an opportunity, to scorn the locals for not attending sufficiently to make their resources worthwhile, he seizes it. He is especially fascinated by the Greek past in Asia Minor and refers to places he travels through by their ancient names: ―We had now passed through the ancient provinces of Cilicia, Cappadocia, and Lycaonia, and reached the confines of Phrygia –a rude mountain region, which was never wholly penetrated by the light of Grecian civilization.‖270 Although he does not tend to give historical anecdotes about the Ottoman Empire his interest in the Greek past seems interminable throughout his narrative. ―There is an inscription in Greek running up one side, but it is of a later date than the work itself. On one of the tombs there is an inscription: ‗To King Midas.‘ These relics are supposed to date from the period of the Gordian Dynasty, about seven centuries before Christ.‖271 However, the way he distinguishes between the ancient Greeks and

269 Ibid., p. 344. 270 Ibid., p. 274. 271 Ibid., p. 281.

122 the modern Greeks makes it clear whom he takes home as an example. Wermuth, talking about another narrative of Taylor‘s observes: ―The Greek half of Travels in Greece and Russia is dominated by two themes: the racial decadence of Modern Greeks; and the visible remnants of the great ages.‖272 Throughout his journey, the insinuation that he is reclaiming the Western past word-by-word would be more explicit only if he had not lacked the boldness in his prose that critics often pinpointed. By the same token, the ancient civilizations become something to take home to lecture on and fill in the deep sense of a lack of traditions and customs. Justin Edwards remarks: ―…the popular genre of travel writing was linked to the strong conscious need for a national identity. Given that nineteenth century Americans possessed a short historical past, tradition and culture had to be developed in relation to other places.‖273 In relation to the Orient it formed a negation; in relation to civilizations such as the Greek, a deep sense of envy set an example. James L. Gray similarly comments: ―He is less eager to worship at the feet of culture except when that culture is clearly part of his own Western European background.‖274 Taylor observes: ―Our Saxon race can supply the athlete but not the Apollo.‖275 Therefore, a sense of inferiority can be admitted with regard to the distant past, but never in the present tense. The contemporary Greeks are too decadent to value their ancient past fairly; the Christians in the Holy Land are too ignorant to make the best of their history. But when removed from their historical and spatial contexts, the ancient values and traits can set an example to the New World, far from decadence. In one of his lectures as quoted in his biography, The Laureate of the Gilded Age, he has a clear stratification of races of the world in mind. ―The important conclusions follow from these facts. The first one, immensely flattering, is ‗that every important triumph which man has achieved since his creation belongs to the Caucassian race. Our mental and moral superiority is self evident.‖276 This idea at the forefront of his discourse on other races heralds a new understanding of the ways of representation he employs in his narratives. His ideas on the issue of race are not always as conspicuous as it is in this particular lecture. His representational

272Paul C. Wermuth, Bayard Taylor, (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1973), p. 56. 273 Justin D. Edwards, Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature, 1840-1930, (New Hampshire: University Press of New England), p. 6. 274 Donald Ross and James J. Schramer, Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Travel Writers, 1850-1915, (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1998), p. 326. 275Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen, (New York: Putnam, 1855), p. 154. 276Richmond Croom Beatty, Bayard Taylor: Laureate of the Gilded Age, (Norman: University of Oklohama Press, 1936), p. 153.

123 treatment of the Asians,277 although not the province of analysis here, is the harshest. Nevertheless, he does not reveal further sentiments about his mental stratification of the races other than Caucasian in his narratives. He might be regarded as superficial regarding his observations of distant lands yet he is certainly a bearer of more than one contradiction about complex issues.

However, he more overtly reveals his sentiments about Western imperialism, be it the English in India, or a disguised ―better hands.‖ Although he confesses that he would have at once converted to Islam if he were to judge by the lifestyles of the professors of each religion in Palestine, in a dissimilar vein in Damascus which he calls ―so perfectly Oriental‖278 he observes: ―The soil is the fattest brown loam, and the harvests are wonderfully rich...Yet the ground is never measured, and the Arab plough scratches up but a few inches of the surface. What a paradise might be out of this country, were it in better hands!‖279 He concludes again with regard to Syria: ―There would be no end to the wealth of Syria were the country in proper hands.‖280

Fitting to the context that is, coming from the United States before the Spanish-American War, he does not specify a name for ―the better hands.‖ Unlike William Shaler, the American consul in Algiers, who suggests the French annexation of Muslim states in North Africa281 in his Esquisse de l’etat d’alger published in 1826, Taylor is more tactful in his assertions. That is one of the reasons why his discourse is latent. He merely repeats an unchanging discursive trait that is the Orient simply would be better off in someone else‘s hands. The rule is tyrannical yet dependent on the West for anything else other than cruelty. He does not even ponder on the possible ways to progress in the hands of the local rulers themselves, presuming they are innately incapable of employing any positive change even when they are in desperate need of one. When they do, they try to adopt the Western ideas, which are also doomed to fail enacted in the hands of Oriental rulers. It is not even a question of how the specified region or condition might be ameliorated; the author is engrossed on the mere change of hands instead. Arab plough can only scratch up the surface; better hands would reach the root of the problem. He was doubtful about

277For further research one may look into A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 1853 by Bayard Taylor published in 1855 as a result of his journey to Near and Far East with Commodore Perry‘s expedition to Japan. 278Ibid. 123. 279Ibid. p. 110. 280Ibid. p. 177. 281Fuad Sha‘ban, Islam and Arabs in Early American Thought: The Roots of Orientalism in America, (Durham, NC: The Acorn Press, 1991) p. 81.

124 the English prejudices about Indians while at the same time he completely admired the English rule in India. This ambivalence can also be interpreted as slothful induction, even when evidence to the contrary is available to the author, he insists on his habitual way of representation. In his mind, the treatment of the people and the land were not necessarily intimately linked. Similarly he observed in the Ottoman Empire that the Ottoman subjects were ameliorable yet followed it with the contradicting remark that the East would be never regenerated in Eastern hands.282 He was not expressively willing to set England as a colonial example to the Unites States; nevertheless he believed in an indigenous American exceptionalism and expansionism. ―We need not envy England the possession of India; for if we were not a people obstinately opposed to acquisition of new territory –if we were not utterly blind to ‗manifest destiny,‘ and regardless of the hints which ‗geography‘ is constantly throwing out to us –we might possess ourselves of Cuba and Mexico and thus outrival her.‖283 His expansionist discourse is justified by the opportunities of geography, and the idea of Manifest Destiny, therefore this discourse fails to encompass the Orient and deems the discourse towards it into a latent stage. His ideology of expansionism is shaped by his tendency towards insularity. Obstinacy to acquire new lands is clearly not a source of pride for Taylor. Although he firmly believed the adoption of Western customs would fail in the Orient, he felt free to provide accounts of the petty admiration of Easterners towards the West. After a fire in Constantinople, he wrote: ―The officers of the United States steamer San Jacinto, and the French frigate Charlemagne, came to the rescue with their men and fire engines, and the flames were finally quelled. The proceedings of the Americans, who cut holes in the roofs and played through them upon the fires within, were watched by the Turks with stupid amazement. ‗Mashallah!‘ said a fat Bimbashi, as he stood sweltering in the heat; ‗The Franks are a wonderful people.‘‖284 Bystanders in their own country, unable to quell a fire in their capital city, the Turks are clearly not self-sufficient. But as we will see later on, according to Taylor, they are also innately incapable of receiving assistance from the West. In short, the problems of the Orient are insolvable; the Orient is doomed for eternity.

Except for a comprehensive and visionary foresight into the fall of the Ottoman Empire which he misses only by fourteen years, his evaluations of the Eastern rulers, governments and

282 Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen (New York: Putnam, 1855) p. 356. 283Richmond Croom Beatty, Bayard Taylor: Laureate of the Gilded Age, (Norman: University of Oklohama Press, 1936), p. 113. 284Ibid. p. 352.

125 customs indicate nothing favorable in the light of the American alternative. But this particular foresight along with some others deserves special attention. Taylor remains ―with surfacy‖285 with regard to most of his observations, yet, because Twain‘s superficiality at times is justified by his humor, it does not seem as conspicuous as Taylor‘s. Regardless of the in/accuracy of his remarks, he provides the reader with historical and political background along with his speculations about the future of the Ottoman Empire. Not all his observations can be categorized as mere exotic Orientalism. That is why his texts are rich in providing examples for all of the three categories of latent Orientalism. We see similar representational treatment of the Ottoman government –although the purposefulness might differ- in David Porter‘s Constantinople and Its Environs, and he had the privilege of having gained insight into the governmental issues of the Ottoman Porte because of his status as the first charge d‘affaires who was recognized by the Sublime Porte in Constantinople.

…they [the Ottoman government] only seek to enrich themselves and their parasites at the expense of the people and the national treasury. When we add to this the conscript system, which is draining the provinces of their best Moslem subjects, to the advantage of the Christians and Jews and the blindness of the Revenue Laws, which impose on domestic manufacturers double the duty levied on foreign products, it will easily be foreseen that the next half-century or less, will completely drain the Turkish Empire of its last lingering energies…Turkey exists only through the jealousy of the European nations. The treaty of Unkar Iskelesi, in 1833 threw her into the hands of Russia, although the influence of England was of late years reigned almost exclusively in her councils. These are the two powers who are lowering at each other…in the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus.286

It is of less significance whether the information given here is hearsay, that he does not provide the source of his facts, than the fact that it is a unique instance when the Oriental and her fate is at the centre of the speculation as opposed to the Christian subjects in the Empire. Compared to other narratives written in the same century, it provides the American reader with invaluable information about the contemporary political developments in a distant land, even when these developments have no political or economical implications whatsoever for the United States. He eventually ends his speculation with a note similar in tone to the ones about Syria quoted previously, recounting that the Turks as a people would be better off in the hands of another and that the fate of the Eastern lands does not look bright if it is going to be ruled by Easterners

285Paul C. Wermuth, Bayard Taylor (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1973), p. 48. 286 Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen, (Middlesex: Echo Library, 2006), p. 195.

126 themselves. Nevertheless, as a whole, the two-page account of his reflections on the future of the Ottoman government can be construed as remarkable for various reasons. Firstly because it is a deviation from the dominant paradigm of 19th century American travel writing about the Orient to center speculations around the Oriental subject when the reflections are not used as comparative tools, or if they do not carry any significant and explicit implications for the United States. Monarchy, of course is at the forefront of the criticism for reasons that may implicate the American government. It indicates and reaffirms the superior nature of the American government and the American subjects who escaped from a monarchy. It seems like a reassurance to the American people rather than a criticism of the Oriental rulers. Not all of his observations of the Eastern rulers are based on facts. At times he affirms the superficiality charges against him. ―Raschid Pasha, the Grand Vizier, is a man of about sixty years of age. He is frequently called Giaour, or Infidel, by the Turks, on account of his liberal policy, which has made him many enemies. The expression of his face denotes intelligence, but lacks the energy to accomplish great reforms.‖287 Similar are his reflections on the Sultan: ―He [Sultan Abdulmecid] is not stern enough to be just, and his subjects are less fortunate under his easy rule than under the rod of his savage father, Mahmoud.‖288 It is habitual for Taylor to judge the characters, not only of acquaintances but also of races of people by their appearance. Here, the Grand Vizier‘s expression is not satisfying enough for him despite his liberal tendencies. His liberal policies make him many enemies in the Orient, yet it does not make him friends with the West either, nor does he earn a positive remark from Taylor. The Oriental ruler is caught in between cultures and cannot pass over to the other side by adopting reform programs. He either remains a cruel fool engrossed in his traditions or becomes a failure at trials of progress while struggling to transfer knowledge and practice from the West to an unfitting people. What determines his potency and success is the expression on his face captured in a single moment. The Sultan obviously epitomizes this phenomenon and is commonly the target of travelers‘ resentment. Sultans change over time; their way of representation remains on either one side of the spectrum or the other. They are either too weak or too tyrannical and it is reaffirmed by their physical traits. His depiction is not more comprehensive than that of King Shahryar in the Arabian Nights, which was frequently reprinted in the United States in the 19th century. ―After this the king got up to

287 Bayard Taylor, The Lands of the Saracen, (New York: Putnam, 1855), p. 335. 288 Ibid. p. 338.

127 perform his official duties, but he did not call upon the vizier to perform the execution. Instead, he went to his assembly hall and began holding court. He judged, appointed and deposed, forbidding this and permitting that, the rest of the day.‖289 The Sultan conforms to hundreds of years of traditions and is unable to deviate from the irrational bureaucratic circle; is unable to break away from the monarchical tendencies; and therefore incapable of amelioration and progress.

Another prevalent quality that deserves attention in his narrative is his essentialist attitude, which ties in well with other discursive traits analyzed above. When this trait is at play, either the subject being represented has no significance at all other than functioning as a reversed mirror which reflects its American counterpart or it unfolds as general remarks that are devoid of context and are not legitimate by themselves; they function the same as propaganda does. They involve a statement that either cannot be proved by further information or would fall apart as arguments if they were provided with more information. It might involve contradictions with the rest of the text however; the purpose it serves subordinates these contradictions and deems them moot. At times, this essentialist way of representation reveals itself with remarks on the Western European roots rather than American such as the Greek as exemplified before. His reflections as such are more prevalent in his letters. In a letter to Hannah M. Taylor written in 1844, he reflects on the function of travel as a reaffirmation of the superiority of American character and institutions: ―I think a little American enterprise can do anything. We often astonish the people by our sentiments and actions; for the Germans, notwithstanding their good heartedness, are an extremely slow people.‖290, ―…our highest expectations have been more than realized; but still that the more we see of other lands the more we love our own.‖291 In 1845 he similarly comments: ―…with us, as with all Americans who go abroad everyday but proves that the free States are far, far beyond any other nation in the world…‖292 These constant excuses he provides in his letter for his travels might be a defensive attitude that results from the common perception of Americans in Europe. After all, this is not a time when America is the epitome of higher civilization. That is why the comparison between European ideals and American character is

289 Jack Zipes ed. The Arabian Nights, (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 34. 290John Richie Schultz ed., The Unpublished Letters of Bayard Taylor in the Huntington Library, (California: The Plantin Press, 1937), p. 9. 291 Ibid. p. 9-10. 292 Ibid. p. 11.

128 highly significant and more explicitly functional than with the Orient. Embracing the pure Enlightenment ideals, America is a fresh version of Europe that is free of decadence. ―How much longer will England be blinded to the knavery of her titled rulers, and the wrongs of her trodden peasantry? And a more brutish, degraded set of beings, than the generality of the lower class here, I have never met with.‖293 There is only one respect where he regards England more highly than America and that has personal implications for him: literary criticism. In a letter, he asserts that the English critics have ―more knowledge and less swagger than the American.‖294 Once again, Wermuth observes it accurately:

…these books flatter the American reader; for they imply that, while the rest of the world may be older, larger, and more various, there are few ways in which it excels America. American institutions are superior; the climate, scenery, people, traditions, and religion are all preferable. There are no smoky opium dens, no unusual sexual practices, no barbaric food like snail or ants, no sleepy bureaucracy battering off the people; in short, there is no place like home.295

This essentialist attitude can easily be singled out yet cannot be limited to a single aspect; it is all encompassing; it refers to anything and everything. That is why even when the motivation behind it is justifiable, it is not provable. As he himself says in his compilation of essays in At Home and Abroad, ―…well satisfied with the land where my lot is cast, without feeling myself bound to say that nothing is better elsewhere.‖296

293 Paul C. Wermuth, Selected Letters of Bayard Taylor, (New Jersey, London, and Ontario: Associated University Press, 1997) p. 56. 294Ibid., p. 395. 295Paul C. Wermuth, Bayard Taylor (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1973) p. 48. 296Bayard Taylor, At Home and Abroad: A Sketch-Book of Life, Scenery and Men, (New York: Putnam, 1859), p. 500.

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Chapter V Sinners on a Pilgrimage; Innocents on a Literary Quest in Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad

I. Sam Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in the Southern United States of America in 1835, in Florida, Missouri and was brought up in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal where his parents moved four years after his birth. During his schooling years, he also worked at his brother Orion‘s newspaper office. After his father‘s death, he was taken from school and started working for Hannibal Courier as printer‘s apprentice. When Orion bought Hannibal Journal, Sam started working for his brother again. When he was sixteen, he published a piece for the first time, for a Boston magazine. Orion‘s business failed, Sam fled to St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, working in various newspapers. Determined to become a riverboat pilot, inspired by Horace E. Bixby and the idea of collecting coca from the Amazon, he learned steam boating in New Orleans and worked as a pilot on the Mississippi River until the Civil War put an end to the traffic. Sam, even as a child, was in awe of the possibility of traveling. Only a very few people got that chance. In his autobiography, he tells how envious he was of a 12 year old who had the opportunity to cross the plains with his gold seeker father. ―We were all on hand to gaze and envy when he returned two years later in unimaginable glory –for he had traveled! None of us had ever been forty miles from home. But he had crossed the continent…We would have sold our souls to Satan for the privilege of trading places with him.‖297 It is important to note that it was not gold that amazed him, but the glory of any place other than home. Thus, writing and the notion of traveling intersected in his life as attractive, both as a consequence of the circumstances and his personal decisions. From 1862 on, he started working as a travel correspondent for various newspapers such as Alta California and Sacramento Union. Innocents Abroad or with its lengthy, and descriptive title true to the norm of the 19th century, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress; Being Some Account of the

297 Mark Twain. Mark Twain's Autobiography, edited as one volume by Charles Neider, (New York: Harper, 1959) p. 38.

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Steamship Quaker City’s Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land: With Descriptions of Countries, Nations, Incidents and Adventures, as They Appeared to the Author, was published with 234 illustrations of people and places, mostly with comic intent and mostly drawn by True Williams. It was Mark Twain‘s best-selling book all throughout his life.298 Throughout his life he had published four other travelogues after Innocents Abroad, namely, Roughing It, (1872) A Tramp Abroad, (1880) Life on the Mississippi, (1883) and lastly, Following the Equator (1897). His fictional appeal at the time, unlike now, was not appreciated by the readership. Compared to the success his travelogues achieved financially, ―the reception of his fiction was feeble at best.‖299 Innocents Abroad sold seventy thousand copies the first year it was published. It was the author‘s second book after his short story collection The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County published in 1867 and started out as series of letters from on board Quaker City initially mostly written for the Alta California. When he heard of the pleasure cruise to be undertaken on board Quaker City, which would leave the United States on June 8, 1867 with Mark Twain on board and that the passengers would be members of the ―elect,‖ Twain could not hide his enthusiasm and paid his advance fee before guaranteeing the deal with his employers. Later he wrote in his first chapter with sincere admiration yet inescapably with a touch of irony: What was there lacking in that programme, to make it perfectly irresistible? Nothing, that any finite mind could discover. Paris, England, Scotland, Switzerland, Italy –Garibaldi! The Grecian archipelago! Vesuvius! Constantinople! Smyrna! The Holy Land! Egypt and ―our friend the Bermudians!‖ People in Europe desiring to join the Excursion –contagious sickness to be avoided –boating at the expense of the ship –physician on board –the circuit of the globe to be made if the passengers unanimously desired it –the company to be rigidly selected by a pitiless ―Committee on Applications‖ –the vessel to be as rigidly selected by as pitiless a ―Committee on Selecting Steamer.‖ Human nature could not withstand these bewildering temptations.300

The elitist disposition of the advertisement did not appeal to Twain yet he must have concluded and would have proved justified that they would inspire side characters to his narrator persona. Editors of the Alta California consented to paying his fare of two thousand dollars in return for fifty letters. The other newspapers he agreed to send letters to were the New York Herald and New York Tribune. Innocents Abroad set a rebellious, critical and fresh tone that

298 Mohammed Raji Zughoul. ―The Emperor and the Sultan in Mark Twain: How Innocent were the ‗Innocents‘?‖ Journal of American Studies. 11(2000), p. 84. 299 Donald Ross, James J. Schramer, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography: Vol. 189, American Travel Writers 1850-1915, (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1998), p. 68. 300 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 23-24.

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Twain would return to when he caught the opportunity and also in times of hardship in his other travel books. His style in Innocents Abroad is rightfully considered as a digression from the representative styles of conventional accounts of Grand tours of Europe and the Tours of the Holy Land. However, as much as he satirized the American tourist in a persona he claimed himself and defied expectations by actually fulfilling them, Twain reassured Americans that they had the best of all worlds.301 What is suggested by the reconciliation of the opposite poles of fulfillment and the defiance of readership expectations is that, Twain created an unsettling aura through his narrator by positioning him at the center of his narrative. Yet he did not impose external characteristics to this narrator; the characteristics that were parodied were often times a mind reading experiment of the readership on Twain‘s part. Besides he was accompanied by other travelers during his voyage and land travels, mostly created or embellished by the figments of his imagination, whom Twain could redirect the attention to in order to release the tension that his self-bitterness could concoct. The narrative persona naturally gains his fictional character by the mere high self-awareness of Twain himself but serves his needs smoothly. He strips himself of the one obstacle travelers considered to be insurmountable against a completely heart-felt reassurance with regard to America having the best of all worlds and that was the cultural dependence on Europe. By playing with the stereotypical notions of American ignorance and provincialism he downgrades the significance of this cultural heritage or rather naturalizes the state of being either ignorant of or indifferent to them. We have seen pictures of martyrs enough, and saints enough, to regenerate the world. I ought not to confess it, but still, since one has no opportunity in America to acquire a critical judgment in art, and since I could not hope to become educated in it in Europe in a few short weeks, I may therefore as well acknowledge with such apologies as may be due, that to me it seemed that when I had seen one of these martyrs I had seen them all.302

Generated by his receptiveness to the core needs of the audience rather than their explicit expectations to obtain speedy refinement, either by reading the accounts of ecstasies over art works that emanated from a culture they partially claim or by traveling themselves for a ―few short weeks,‖ his dismissal of pretension comforts the reader‘s conscience. His casual writing style plays a momentous role in preventing the reader from responding to the text in a defensive

301 Donald Ross, James J. Schramer, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography: Vol. 189, American Travel Writers 1850-1915, (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1998), p. 71. 302 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 237.

133 manner. After all, ―…Twain can momentarily seem windy, excitable, or pompous. Yet in the main, he succeeded in finding a sense of balance, forging a flexible style that conveys subtlety and density of meaning as well as the disarming fluidity of ordinary conventional speech.―303 In addition, the self-reflexive and critical approach emanates from and is directed towards his narrative/autobiographical persona. This persona although being parodied does not exhibit the pretentious dispositions that Twain criticizes. By his innocence, or at times indifference, he averts an identity crisis that all citizens of the young Republic faced on traveling to the Old World. ―[The Innocents Abroad] is about keeping free, psychologically and culturally, under the Pressure of Continental history, artifact and lore, free from all the architectural, artistic, and literary bric-a-brac that threatens not merely to encumber but overwhelm and petrify any American self that too worshipfully comes calling.―304 By undermining the ―overvalued‖ and romanticized representations of Europe and the Holy Land, he frees the American tourist from all the anxieties he could face during his travels that contribute to his identity formation. However, at times he replaces this possible sense of inferiority and fear with a sense of exceptionalism, yet occasionally exposes hypocritical perspectives that are prevalent in the United States. He observes: ―They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however. ―305 After his return, Twain revised his fifty letters thoroughly and prepared the book for publication in 1869. Harold H. Hellwig informs us that the revisions were not limited to the formal level. Aside from improving the transition to foster continuity between the letters, he also polished his treatment of his fellow travelers. After his revision, ―The hostile, even vindictive, attitude toward fellow pilgrims becomes muted in favor of a satirical and self-critical analysis of American egocentric attitudes.‖306 Fellow pilgrims are the passengers of the luxury cruise ship Quaker City among whom Twain ascertains enough idiosyncratic characters to contribute to his comic intent. ―Through the process of traveling on board a ship, he begins to create new

303 Alan Gribben, ―The Importance of Mark Twain‖, American Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1, Special Issue: American Humor (Spring, 1985), p. 32. 304 Bruce Michelson, Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self, (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), p. 47. 305 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 368. 306 Harold H. Hellwig, Mark Twain’s Travel Literature: The Odyssey of a Mind, (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2008), p. 47.

134 identities for them, giving them additional aspects to their stereotypical characters, as well as reimagining them as a collection of societies…‖ He is non-discriminative in his treatment of the passengers. Just like his narrator disguised as the implied author comes to represent the typology of the ―American tourist,‖ rather than Mark Twain the author he robs the ―fellow pilgrims‖ of their individuality and renders them epitomes of what he conceives them to stand for. ―Thus Twain attempts to create the fiction that these different selves have a common purpose, aside from that of traveling to the Mediterranean and the Holy Land, that being the purpose of constructing an American community which will deny the nostalgia felt on leaving America.‖307 After it was published as a book, the volume was sold door to door by agents of the American Publishing Company. It was an inventive marketing strategy for the time, agents provided people with the prospectus of the book containing a table of contents, samples of pictures, prose and illustrations. It displayed 10% of the book itself.308 The cover of the prospectus read: ―Innocents Abroad! Is the book that suits everybody. Ask those who have read it and see if they don‘t say YES!‖309 The publishing company also prepared graphic posters. ―The Most Unique and Spicy Volume in Existence. A distance of over twenty thousand miles by land and sea.‖310 The distance he covered, was of course beyond the comprehension of many readers who then had not left American soil in their lives. Twain‘s journey started from New York on board Quaker City. The route followed Azores, Gibraltar, Marseilles, Paris, Venice, Florence, Rome, Athens, Odessa, Constantinople, Smyrna, Beirut, Magdala, Plain of Abraham, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Tangiers and Bermuda.311 People were allowed to travel further on land and Mark Twain took every opportunity to do so. The book was promoted very successfully and the marketing techniques alone made it distinctive. The quotations used in the reviews and advertisements did focus on his humor and irony but not essentially on his disillusionment. After Mark Twain came back from his long excursion he decided to give a series of lectures in the cities where he had already given lectures before he left on Quaker City. He gave lectures in small cities where he was already familiar with, and the audience gave a very enthusiastic response. The house was almost always sold out. His lectures were based on his book, both because the material was inspiring and he was aware

307Ibid., p. 49-50. 308 http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/innocent/dummyhom.html 309 http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/innocent/dummyhom.html 310 http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/innocent/inn_ad1.html 311 http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/innocent/iamaphp.html

135 that it was part of the advertisement campaign. He organized his speeches the same exact way as he always had and continued to do so afterwards. He would write a text and rehearse it until he could do it by heart, yet on stage, the speech was organic because he edited it impromptu, spontaneously. He called his lectures ―American Vandal Abroad.‖As he readily included himself in his derogatory categories, he managed to hold high the enthusiasm in the house. After satirizing himself –the vandal, he concludes: In conclusion I will observe that even galloping as we did about the world, we learned something. The lesson of the Excursion was a good one. It taught us that foreign countries are excellent to travel in, but that the best country to live in is America, after all. We found no soap in the hotels of Europe, & they charged us for candles we never burned. We saw no ladies anywhere that were as beautiful as our own ladies here at home & especially in this audience. We saw none anywhere that dressed with such excellent taste as do our ladies at home here… We saw no government on the other side like our own – not just like our own.312

Mark Twain‘s receptiveness to the demands or even the urgencies of the audience at times surmounts his urge for the bitter truth which he passes on without hesitation if only temporarily. By the previous passage, he eases the audience into the following observation that he concludes the talk with. ―I am glad the American Vandal goes abroad. It does him good... It liberalizes the Vandal to travel. You never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place ever since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction. So I say, by all means let the American Vandal go on traveling, and let no man discourage him.‖313 He echoes David Porter‘s conclusion of his two volumes albeit in his idiosyncratic style. The ―American Vandal‖ is an accurate description of the narrator of Innocents Abroad who Twain takes on to parody what it typifies and the subgenre of sentimental travel literature itself. What puzzles scholars most about this narrative is what Twain sacrifices to enact this parody. II. Thematic Scheme and Travel The special place Twain‘s Innocents Abroad enjoyed, both with regards to popularity throughout his life and to the scholarly attention his narrative received later on, renders it vital to

312 Mark Twain. Mark Twain's Speeches, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923) p. 80. 313 Milton Meltzer, Mark Twain Himself: A Pictorial Biography, (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2002), p. 103.

136 reiterate the rationale of the narrative‘s inclusion in the research and expand on the potential repercussions it might imply pertaining to the rest of the works in question. Granted that all narratives entail particular challenges when subjected to literary or cultural analyses, Twain‘s peculiarities seem to outweigh his normative preferences. Nevertheless, one core element ties the fates of all the narratives, so to speak, which also pertains to a fundamental criterion in the selection and inclusion processes of all the narratives. That is the ambitious declaration about loyalty to truth. As ―an emergent realist,‖314 Twain reveals his determination on the outset, ―with a strenuous, almost evangelical emphasis on the kind of ‗truth-telling‘ associated with the vernacular narrator and his concern for the original, accurate, and honest rendition of the observed particular…‖315 Truth and objective observation and recording of them are privileged among other motivations, and in Twain this preference reaches its peak. While trying to countermand his precedents, with his objectives, Twain is also concurrent with them in his primary motivations. Furthermore, by countermanding the elements that belong to other subgenres of travel such as sentimental literature, he exhibits extensive familiarity with them and through this familiarity, recognition.

In his literary style, Mark Twain‘s courage is indisputable. Even when he does not set out to defy conventions, his narration is enriched by so many free associations that conventionality does not restrict his prose. He acknowledges that he is not a novelist. So in vain does the reader search for thematic coherence in his prose; his stream of consciousness is not easy to follow without the guideline of a context to which he is referring. Literary intentionality in his works is challenging to analyze. Forrest G. Robinson articulates the challenge as: ―With Mark Twain…we are on much shakier ground. Twain‘s work is notoriously makeshift, fragmentary, and prone to drastic contradictions. His scattered observations on the writer‘s craft tend strongly to confirm our impression that he usually set to work with a few characters and episodes in mind, but with no clear, fully developed formal or thematic schemes.‖316 When this rightful statement is applied to a travel narrative written simultaneously on the journey itself, the obscurity of the thematic scheme intensifies to a great extent in this quasi-autobiographical work, Innocents Abroad. His

314 Philip D. Beidler. ―Realistic Style and the Problem of Context in ‗The Innocents Abroad‘ and ‗Roughing It‘ American Literature, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Mar., 1980) p. 33. 315 Ibid., p. 34. 316 Forrest G. Robinson. ―An ‗Unconscious and Profitable Celebration‘: Mark Twain and Literary Intentionality‖ Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Dec., 1995) p. 362.

137 ideological intentions on the other hand, given the divergent material he received as he traveled are even more vague. Aesthetic preference determines the spontaneity of the content and enables an unrestrained narrative.

Sydney J. Krause is concurrent with Robinson but takes the point further: ―Twain has the reputation for being an erratic craftsman who never subjected his work to careful planning and who disregarded many principles of good structure because he was either oblivious to them or disinclined to bother with rules he could not write by.‖317 His method was chaotic but it was redeemed by the many other merits it came with. He edited and revised his works many times before they were published. He did not lack artistic consciousness yet he did not necessarily abide by the doctrines that his contemporaries did. Although his language is simple and direct, one‘s expectations of a chain of events with a cause and effect relationship is soon defied with the flow of mental associations. After returning from the luxury cruise, he started revising the letters he had sent to Alta California. He was aware that published as they are, the book would exhibit discontinuities in content. He not only rewrote or revised certain parts but also added paragraphs to ease the reader through spatial and temporal passages.318

William Lyon Phelps in a 1907 criticism, comments on Mark Twain‘s travel book humor. ―…we are given the attitude of the typical American Philistine toward the wonders and the sacred relics of the Old World, the whole thing being a gigantic burlesque on the sentimental guide books…he is doubtless sometimes flat, sometimes coarse…‖319 The fact that he is not always at his best has much deeper consequences than his style being flat at times. His form intermingles with the content so excessively that his coarse mood shaped by the circumstances becomes interdependent with what he is downgrading. In other words, the subject he is depicting remains static and frozen in his style and, moreover, more contextual information does not help the subject regain its value unless the style moderates its tone.

His style, no matter how unadulterated or unintentional, demarcates unalterable borders between ideologies. Yet at the same time with his unadulterated style, he makes the reader feel

317 Sydney J. Krause. ―Twain‘s Method and Theory of Composition‖ Modern Philology, Vol. 56, No. 3, (Feb., 1959), p. 167. 318 Leon T. Dickinson, ―Mark Twain‘s Revisions in Writing the Innocents Abroad,‖ American Literature, Vol. 19, No. 2 (May, 1947), pp. 139-157 p. 140. 319 William Lyon Phelps. ―Mark Twain‖ from North American Review, (July 5, 1907), 540-48. ed. by Arthur L. Scott in Mark Twain Selected Criticism (Southern Methodist University Press: Dallas, 1955, 1967), p. 84.

138 that he is confiding in them. Twain is not delicately humorous in Innocents Abroad but downright cynical. Nevertheless, he concurs that his childlike self-indulgence, self-contradictory improvisations serve better to a travel narrative than an organized consistent style.320 Twain is struggling to fulfill a multi-faceted purpose through which he ―had to please the mass audience which his sketches had found him and yet he had to something to frustrate the buffoon implications of his own joking and his public name.‖321

Embittered, self-indulgent impulses reconcile with the suggested naiveté of the ―Innocent‖, the narrator. The narrator also mingles with the traveler, who is not necessarily an autobiographical persona. There are four layers of characterizations: the tourist, the traveler, the narrative persona that merges the former two and the autobiographical persona. The tourist impersonation is revived in various characters in the ship and at times by the narrator himself. The traveler, who is more conscious and less naïve than the tourist; enjoys a more knowing and calm reaction to sights. The narrator is the cynical version of the former two. To a degree his burlesque style is determined by the clashes between the tourist and the traveler. When the perception leans more towards the traveler, the narrator‘s reflection reveals itself as more knowledgeable and mature. When the tourist regains dominance, the realist irony becomes more powerful and the level of the irony gradually comes down to contempt resulting from disillusionment. Mark Twain is omnipresent and consorts the tourist, the traveler and the narrator. His omnipresence acts as an arbitrator between the different characterizations. When we feel we are accepted into his confidence, he had usually discarded the other three and we sneak into the familiar feeling that we get from Mark Twain, the humorist. Overall, throughout the account, the cynical narrator is in power. The narrator derives his power partially from the tourist. Naïve but cruel. Innocent but arrogant. The traveler‘s mere existence enables the tourist to endure the journey. Traveler is in its nature curious, wants to partake; and at that point, the tourist dominates and prevents any kind of participation in and comprehension of foreignness. The narration is connected to home linguistically and culturally whereas the message is one of a different phenomena and orientation. Inner conflict does not stem from two of the characterizations but from within the narrator himself.

320Bruce Michelson. ―Mark Twain the Tourist: The Form of the Innocents Abroad‖ American Literature, Vol. 49, No. 3, (Nov.,1977), p. 391. 321 Ibid., p. 389.

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Commenting on a commercial for The Travel Channel, Jeffrey Alan Melton asserts: ―The subtext of the direct message Don‘t be a tourist] reads: by learning of foreign cultures –by watching television in this case- one can transcend from ‗tourist‘ (a lowly creature) to ‗traveler‘ (an altogether likeable creature).‖322 A lowly creature entails much more than an unfriendly onlooker. The lowly creature is selective in his representation, not knowledgeable and not willing to become so. The traveler is not superficial; he welcomes what is new and does not judge it with his original sensibilities. Conceptually, the transition from a tourist to a traveler is not easy and that intensifies the clashes between the two in Innocents Abroad.

When Daniel Boorstin differentiates between the traveler and the tourist he defines the traveler as active as a participant and the tourist as passive.323 The tourist rejects experience, and extends the scope of sightseeing to personal experiences. But the traveler, just like the American who goes into nature with his technology and transforms it into a habitat, undergoes challenges and tribulations but as a result digests experiences that alter his perspective. That brings us back to the question of the reenactment of the protestant narrative into the Orient. The vast land with abundant resources destined to be taken control of. Yet, the tourist element balances off the narrative preventing it from reaching that extent.

Everett Emerson asserts that: ―In it [Innocents Abroad] Mark Twain presents himself as an iconoclastic critic of all forms of conventionality, from American reverence for things European to its opposite, our national sense of superiority to the decayed civilization of Europe.‖324 On the other hand, Don Florence states: ―But at times, he sounds disillusioned, his humor forced –especially when he is reduced to making jokes about human deformities and the dirt in the mosque of St. Sophia. Like the Turkish boat, his humor here is ‗admirably miscalculated‘ to take him anywhere and he is left rudderless and adrift.‖325 Regarding Innocents Abroad, by claiming that Mark Twain becomes what Everett Emerson believes him to be criticizing and benefiting from the freedom humor provides, one risks a reductionist reading of the text.

322 Jeffrey Alan Melton. ―Keeping the Faith in Mark Twain‘s ‗The Innocents Abroad‘‖, South Atlantic Review, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Spring, 1999), p. 59. 323 Daniel Boorstin. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. (New York: Atheneum, 1985) p. 160. 324 Everett Emerson ―Samuel Langhorne Clemens‖ in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), p. 217. 325Don Florence. Persona and humor in Mark Twain’s early writings (University of Missouri Press: United States of America, 1995), p. 74

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III. Demythologizing the Orient

That habitual reaction of the traveler, the disappointment, the disillusionment, the complete entrusting of one‘s journey in the hands of a travel guide book; was the attitude Mark Twain was highly critical of. After a thorough, literal reading of Innocents Abroad, if it could be possible, a traveler would never be frustrated with any place, event or cultural practice he would encounter. When one searches for intentionality –or by just skimming through the introduction of the book, in the writing process of Innocents Abroad, that specific critical approach is the only one that one can pinpoint without hesitancy or rather that is the only explicit anxiety that underlies the narrative: that there is nothing left to see with fresh eyes and recount with originality.

According to Twain, experience is subjective and the mere reincarnations of the personal experiences of a single guidebook author is futile and blinding to a mind that can derive his own unique feelings if he is willing to be challenged. He exhibits an excessive obsession with originality in his work both with his own digressive style and his direct criticism of authors that preceded him in the lands he was traveling. His disillusionment is concentrated on the promised Oriental splendor that he fails to encounter. Memories of Oriental travel were presented in poetic or theatrical literary forms. Certain prototypes were recurrently used as characters. Comprehensive traits of the characters all pointed to a common impression that the traveler‘s got from the Orient: femininity and the tableau vivant nature of the Orient. Resting the blame on the previous representational discourses, he sets a skeptical tone that cannot be surpassed by any additional information that can be provided to the traveler. ―When I think of how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast. For years and years I have dreamed of the wonders of the Turkish bath…‖326 Once disillusioned he embarks on an ambitious and arduous quest of reversing all the connotations that belong to various Oriental paraphernalia. His disenchantment increases when he tries the ―nargile‖ for the first time: ―The smoke had a vile taste, and the taste of a thousand infidel tongues that remained on that brass mouthpiece was viler still. I was getting discouraged. Whenever, hereafter, I see the cross-legged Grand Turk smoking his narghili, in pretended bliss, on the outside of a paper of Connecticut

326 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 376.

141 tobacco, I shall know him for the shameless humbug he is.‖327 After his sardonic remarks on the bath, he proceeds to the celebrated Turkish coffee, and comments ―Of all the unchristian beverages that ever passed my lips, Turkish coffee is the worst.‖328 One by one, he relates all the preconceptions he is aware the American people to possess and obliterates them by providing the reader with the account of a first-hand experience. The Arab and his mare that were subjected to many sentimental fantasies, that bond that inspired Bayard Taylor to write poems, is not given much credit by Twain. ―If these Arabs be like the other Arabs, their love for their beautiful mares is a fraud…no love for their horses, no sentiment of pity for them, and no knowledge of how to treat them or care for them.‖329 The Bedouin of the desert, commonly represented as the noble savage, also gets his due: ―But I believe the Bedouins to be a fraud, now. I have seen the monster, and I can outrun him. I shall never be afraid of his daring to stand behind his own gun and discharge it.‖330 What seems to be a meticulous goal of deconstructing the systematic inscriptions within the Orientalist discourses is better understood with a comparative analysis between his treatment of the people and institutions before and after Greece. Moreover, his persistent reversal of previous representational preferences inescapably is a constant summoning of the very practices sets out to undermine.

Besides this, there are exceptional instances to the norm of his seemingly ambitious quest. The ambivalence that is relatively more predominant in accounts such as Taylor‘s and Willis‘ also occasionally surfaces in Innocents Abroad. On arriving in Tangier, early on in the voyage, he, along with his fellow travelers is satisfied with the utter ―foreignness‖ he encounters in the city. ―The pictures used to seem exaggerations –they seemed too weird and fanciful for reality. But behold, they were not wild enough –they were not fanciful enough –they have not told the half the story. Tangier is a foreign land if ever there was one; and the true spirit of it can never be found in any book save the Arabian Nights.‖331 Twain almost exhibits a relieved countenance on confirming the image he inherited from literature and art and he does not hesitate to pass on his collaborating evidence to the accurateness of the ―Oriental picture‖ that Tangier reeks of. However later in his journey, when he arrives at Constantinople, he does not display the

327Ibid., p. 379. 328Ibid., p. 380. 329Ibid., p. 477. 330 Ibid., p. 484. 331Ibid., p. 76

142 same enthusiasm for ―foreignness‖ that he and his fellow travelers longed for. Melton explicates this by reminding us of Twain‘s general dislike of the Ottoman Empire, the tourist fatigue he might be under the influence of so far into the voyage, and the lack of novelty ―foreignness‖ can evoke the second time around.332 In other words, once the novelty of the novelty is gone, only then does he embark on his quest to undermine the ―Oriental picture‖ he welcomed at first sight. However, undermining this rationale, Twain incongruently repeats his romantic notion of his ―boyhood fantasies‖ in Smyrna, long after his fascination with ―foreignness‖ in Tangier and soon after his disillusionment with Constantinople.

The picture lacks nothing. It casts you back at once into your forgotten boyhood, and again you dream over the wonders of the Arabian Nights; again your companions are princes, your lord is the Caliph Haroun Raschid, and your servants are terrific giants and genii that come with smoke and lightning and thunder, and go as a storm goes when they depart!333

When the ―Oriental picture‖ is not visually contaminated by poverty, filth, diseased and disabled human images, he portrays them as images that belong to the present with fantastic elements that belong to the fictional past. Whereas, when he encounters social and economic circumstances that are inferior to Western Europe and the United States, he reverses his portrayal and imposes the fictional past on the land‘s historical past. His transitory perspective is grounded on a strict boundary he imposes between the Oriental land‘s past and the present. The past – regardless of the level of corruptness of the present- undoubtedly entails the Arabian Nights paraphernalia of his boyhood dreams.

Here was a grand Oriental picture which I had worshipped a thousand times in soft, rich steel engravings! But in the engraving there was no desolation; no dirt; no rags; no fleas; no ugly creatures; no sore eyes; no feasting flies; no besotted ignorance in the countenances; no raw places on the donkeys‘ backs; no disagreeable jabbering in unknown tongues; no stench of camels…Oriental scenes look best in steel engravings.334

The present itself carries a longing for the formulated fictional past in a nostalgic manner. He does not register contamination as a mere result of economic deficiency, rather the signs of modernization –which receive rare reference- also confuse his image of the fictional past. ―The idea of a locomotive tearing through such a place as this, and waking the phantoms of its old

332 Jeffrey Alan Melton, Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement, (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 2002), p. 64. 333 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 411. 334Ibid., p. 543-544.

143 days of romance out of their dreams of dead and gone centuries, is curious enough.‖335 He voices a vague concern when the images that are indexed in the American consciousness are at the risk of being deflated in the future. Yet for the most part, this deflation is at the core of his narrative. The reference to the Oriental image, on the steel engraving, that is more conveniently consumed by the recipient end of the transaction can be perceived as his critical examination of the artifacts that endorsed misconceptions about distant lands. His bitterness which at times borders on vulgarity overshadows his original intent and makes it more difficult for the reader to dissect his critical examination of previous representational preferences that have been imbedded in the American consciousness. His disenchanted perspective of Constantinople, which stands in contrast to the ―foreignness‖ he appreciated in Tangier is focalized on the trademarks of the city. After addressing the falsities that guidebooks disseminate, he proceeds with a description of St. Sophia:

Every where was dirt, and dust, and dinginess, and gloom; every where were signs of a hoary antiquity, but with nothing touching or beautiful about it; every where were those groups of fantastic pagans; overhead the gaudy mosaics and the web of lamp-ropes –nowhere was there any thing to win one‘s love or challenge his admiration.336

His portrayals of highly romanticized trademarks the beauties of which were embellished and elevated to a matchless degree are congruent with his core concern of refuting these representational discourses. He enacts the other extreme end of the spectrum of the representational preferences the author subliminally or consciously selects from. Eduard Van de Bilt voices this dichotomy in his article ―Subversive Transference: Mark Twain and the End of Orientalism‖: ―The importance of the Innocents Abroad…lies exactly in Twain‘s awareness and handling of the double bind constituted by the narrator‘s assertion not to impose his own views upon others and his inability to live up to his promise.‖337 Mark Twain achieves half of the quest. He does not reaffirm the exoticism, homoeroticism, semi-mythological representations, mummifying mystifications of the Orient. He does not abide by the expectations of the audience that has long been shaped by the travel books. Nevertheless, he mummifies the Orient with regard to its inaptness for progress, which will be exemplified later on. Van de Bilt continues:

335 Ibid., p. 417. 336Ibid., p. 364. 337 Eduard Van de Bilt. ―Subversive Transference: Mark Twain and the End of Orientalism‖ Conference Speech. (University of Minnesota: 1997) p. 1.

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―Convinced that the notion of the unbiased appraisal is erroneous and that the refusal to indicate how readers ought to digest travel impressions conceals the didactic mediation inherent in the position of author/narrator, Twain not only makes often outrageous value judgments, but also tries to redefine their nature and scope.‖338 In other words, the narrative persona is trapped inside the challenging target the author set for himself. His receptiveness to the audience anticipations along with his struggle to fulfill his role as well as his clandestine purpose, begets a clash that forces the author to push the boundaries of moral concerns interwoven with the process of recording impressions. After all, his goal is to deconstruct a discursive tradition while participating in the very process that leads to its creation: mass tourism for pleasure. When distancing himself from hackneyed recorded impressions of Constantinople, he remarks on the physical disability of the beggars he notices on the streets of the city: ―If you would see a fair average style of assorted cripples, go to Naples, or travel through the Roman states. But if you would see the very heart and home of cripples and human monsters, both, go straight to Constantinople. ―339 His text abounds with such descriptions where the tone is acerbic and caustic towards the object that is being described and Twain focalizes his narrative around physical deformity, mummified corpses, and bone remains that have become sacred relics of the past. Ganzel observes that Twain‘s sentiments are not predominantly ―horror and repulsion, but a certain appetite for the bizarre.‖340 Another form of acerbic reaction that emanates from the narrative persona carries undertones of imperialism that Twain does not claim for his own country, rather like Bayard Taylor‘s ―better hands,‖ he redirects the responsibility to Western European powers as well as Russia. ―How they hate a Christian in Damascus! –and pretty much all over Turkeydom as well. And how they will pay for it when Russia turns her guns upon them again!..I never disliked a Chinaman as I do these degraded Turks and Arabs, and when Russia is ready to war with them again, I hope England and France will not find it good breeding or good judgment to interfere.‖341 The passage is also revealing in terms of giving an insight to Twain‘s strata of racial categories as well as being reflective of a 19th century American one. As a justification for his reaction and suggestion, he conjectures on his perceived xenophobia of ―Turkeydom.‖ He

338 Ibid., p. 1. 339 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 361. 340 Dewey Ganzel, Mark Twain Abroad: The Cruise of the “Quaker City,‖ (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 182. 341 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 463.

145 further suggests with paternalistic sentiments that were already prevalent towards African Americans and Native Americans in the 19th century, that Syrians are innately capable in progress and that ―these people are naturally good-hearted and intelligent, and with education and liberty, would be a happy and contented race. They often appeal to the stranger to know if the great world will not some day come to their relief and save them.―342 Humbly, he makes Syria the subject of European imperialism or a victim of Russian aggression. His plenary conjecture on Syrians encompasses their intrinsic nature, their relation to the outside world, and their admiration of the ―great world‖ as well as their hatred of it. Commenting on contemporary travel literature, specifically on Alberto Moravia‘s West African travelogue, Mary Louise Pratt asserts that the ―monarch-of-all-I-survey‖ notion still prevails. She argues that to get away with dehistoricization of cultures to a degree which entails a state of denial on the author‘s part, one requires ―very persuasive, well-crafted writing.‖343 The same argument is valid for Twain in that he naturalizes sharp contradictions by smooth transitions and digressions which makes the narrative flow and prevents the reader from pinpointing the recurrent inconsistencies in content. The ―anti-conquest‖ figure that Pratt defines as the writers who ―seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony…‘seeing man,‘ an admittedly unfriendly label for the European male subject of European landscape discourse –he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess.‖344 Granted, the same norms of behavior and discursive strategies cannot be applied to the analyses of American texts. However latent Twain‘s imperialist discourse is with regard to Syria, he exhibits similar trends to his European counterparts. In addition to the title that suggests ―innocence,‖ Twain‘s naive and ignorant narrative persona with his sporadic attacks of aggression is suggestive of imperialistic notions while at the same time excluding himself as the executer of these notions and accurately exemplifies the ―anti-conquest‖ hero. What distinguishes his suggestion is his transference of Syria into Russian or European hands. Twain‘s outlook on imperialism changed over time. Later in his life, he came to be critical of Christianizing missionary efforts in China, American interference in the Philippines, and Belgian

342Ibid., p. 444. 343Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 219. 344Ibid., p. 7.

146 presence in Congo.345 The diminishing power and influence of the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century also renders the culture susceptible to more aggressive suggestions such as Twain‘s. As Bryan S. Turner suggests historical and political circumstances are the primary factors in shaping the characteristics of discourses about a nation. While there is good reason to believe that Classical Orientalism created ‗Islam‘ as a changeless essence, oriental discourse itself changes over time. In the early seventeenth century, Muslim culture (‗the Turk‘) was threatening and dominant, because the Ottoman Empire exercised extensive commercial and military control over the Mediterranean.346

With the rise of nationalism and ethnic nationalism of the minorities within the Empire who had been recognized thus far as millets, and significant loss of territory rendered the centralized Ottoman government weak and fragile despite the reformation efforts initiated by Sultan Mahmoud II, and increasingly enacted by his successors. Political fragility also shook the invincible image of the Ottoman Empire and shaped foreign perspectives accordingly. Twain provides us with one revealing example at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867, which was opened to public on April 1, 1867.347 He was quite enthusiastic about the prospect of seeing the Exhibition even before the ship set sail: ―Every body was going to the famous Paris Exposition – I, too, was going to the Paris Exposition.‖348 The United States was also officially invited to the Exposition and had ―five hundred and twenty-four articles on exhibition; yet two hundred and sixty-eight obtained prizes, a greater proportion, I am assured, than was received by the contributors of any other country except France.‖349 Abdulaziz, who ruled over the Ottoman Empire from 1861 to 1876, was the first Sultan to travel in Europe. When Napoleon III, Emperor of France, and Abdulaziz, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire made their appearance at the Exposition along with the military band and cavalry, Twain took position opposite the American minister‘s house to witness the spectacle.350 His first reaction was to the physical contrast they exhibited: ―Was ever such a contrast set up before a multitude till then? Napoleon, in military uniform –a long-bodied, short-legged man, fiercely moustached, old, wrinkled with eyes half closed, and

345 Richard Bridgman, Traveling in Mark Twain Berkeley, Los Angeles, (London: University of California Press, 1987), p. 144. 346 Bryan S. Turner, Early Sources Vol I.: Readings in Orientalism, (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 8. 347James M. Usher, Paris Universal Exhibiton; 1867. With a Full Description of Awards Rendered to the United States Department; and Notes Upon the Same, (Boston: Nation Office, 1868), p. 6. 348Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 27. 349James M. Usher, Paris Universal Exhibiton; 1867. With a Full Description of Awards Rendered to the United States Department; and Notes Upon the Same, (Boston: Nation Office, 1868), p. 7. 350Mohammed Raji Zughoul. ―The Emperor and the Sultan in Mark Twain: How Innocent Were the ‗Innocents‘?‖ Journal of American Studies. 11(2000) : 83-92, http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~jast/Number11/Zughoul.htm

147 such a deep, crafty, scheming expression about them!‖351 Without a subject to contrast him with, Napoleon does not inspire the fervor that follows this description. He is more or less a familiar sight; his appearance is not suggestive of his rule. ―Abdul Aziz, absolute lord of the Ottoman Empire, -clad in dark green European clothes, almost without ornament or insignia of rank; a red Turkish fez on his head –a short, stout, dark man, black-bearded, black-eyed, stupid, unprepossessing –a man whose appearance somehow suggested that if he only had a cleaver on his hand and a white apron on, one would not be at all surprised to hear him say: ‗A mutton roast to-day, or will you have a nice porter-house steak?‘‖352 Twain does not only establish a direct connection between Abdulaziz‘s physical and mental characteristics, but in his frame of reference, these characteristics also point to the class Abdulaziz signifies by his appearance. He continues his comparison of the two rulers: ―Napoleon III, the representative of the highest modern civilization, progress, and refinement; Abdul-Aziz, the representative of a people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, superstitious…Here in brilliant Paris, under this majestic Arch of Triumph, the First Century greets the Nineteenth!‖353 In the passage that follows the physical contrast of the two emperors, he shifts his attention to the people and the culture they represent. He discloses that his portrayal is not configured by the individuals and what they display in the march he witnesses, but the now hackneyed binary opposition he appoints to them. However, Napoleon III, as opposed to Abdulaziz is considered on a conceptual level where he represents ―civilization,‖ ―progress,‖ and ―refinement‖ whereas, Abdulaziz stands for and epitomizes the people he governs over who intrinsically possesses the antitheses of the concepts Napoleon III exemplifies in person. Twain continues his comparison for three more pages by enumerating the emperors‘ failures and successes, not surprisingly in favor of Napoleon III. As Melton observes: ―The European travel experience…helped tourists reconcile opposing impulses: to reject the past by concentrating only on an American present and implied destiny, or to embrace that legacy and the rich associational identity it fostered.‖354 Twain clearly preferred the former at all costs such as inaccuracy and misrepresentation. This stands as one example where he positively claims certain concepts as they are represented. The treatment of Abdulaziz or rather what it stands for, and the parallels

351 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 125. 352Ibid., p. 126. 353Ibid., p. 126-127. 354Jeffrey Alan Melton, Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement, (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2002), p. 20.

148 drawn between economic backwardness and deficiencies in nature, is a recurrent connection Twain exemplifies in his narrative. The exceptions to the rule in this case are the rare examples such as his observations about the Syrians that were quoted above. IV. “Belatedness” and Search for Originality One of the central concerns throughout his narrative is his rampant fixation with originality or rather the anxiety endorsed by the awareness that the ―belated‖ American travelers of the 19th century are simply too belated to claim it. In Rome, he exclaims: ―What is there in Rome for me to see that the others have not seen before me? What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What can I discover? –Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. One charm of travel dies here.‖355 Thus, the disillusionment results from an a priori awareness that disheartens the author just because a city had been exhausted in description before his arrival. Like many 19th century travelers, such as the ones that have been analyzed in this study, he puts forward truth as his form of originality. In his preface, like other travel writers, he positions his narrative in the ocean of many others:

This book is a record of a pleasure-trip. If it were a record of a solemn scientific expedition, it would have about it that gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of that kind, and withal so attractive…it has a purpose, which is, to suggest the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who travelled in those countries before him.356

In his quest for originality he merges his primary purpose, which he does not nominally claim but exemplifies on many occasions: demythologization, with his desire to refute the credibility of former travelers. He insinuates that the travelers to the Old World carry with themselves an inseparable filter which their first hand experiences and observations go through and which comprises of the second hand information they have received thus far. It is similar to the ―curtain‖ that covered David Porter‘s eyes before he witnessed Turkish women having breakfast by the Bosphorus. Therefore, Twain claims to be exempt from this filtering mechanism and that his literary persona –a genericized average American armchair traveler- would transmit only the here and now as a persona who belongs to the here and now.

355Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 267. 356Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (New York: Penguin Group, 1966), p. xvii.

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This claim was by no means unique to Twain. Many travel writers used the nature of the genre to evoke similar claims. ―Invoking the virtue of honesty allowed nineteenth-century travel writers unprecedented latitude in a timid age, a freedom certainly not afforded to other genres. Travel writing‘s status as nonfiction combined with demands for authenticity to give writers an almost automatic integrity as well as virtual freedom to shock and appeal to sensational interests.‖357 It would be safe to claim that Twain at times even abused this ―automatic integrity‖ by not providing the reader with the information that was easily available to him lest it would interfere with his demythologizing process. At times it was a simple matter of not inquiring into factual information and preference of a perfunctory recounting of what is visible on the surface. The didacticism that Twain absolves himself from is instilled in the constitution of the genre and resonant with the expectations of the age and additionally, his name and authority earns the account more credibility than the ones penned by his counterparts.

The attempt at demythologization as well as the proud endeavor to achieve originality corresponds essentially with his descriptions of the Holy Land, the most mythologized of all lands of the Old World. Hilton Obenzinger argues that although superficiality is commonly observed in Holy Land narratives, Twain‘s Innocents Abroad ―is predicated, far more than the usual accounts, on distortion.‖358 Obenzinger explicates the distorted depictions primarily by lack of objective knowledge on the lands he was traveling in. Twain was unaware of ―the collapse of cotton prices in Palestine…locust plagues…religious factional strives…and the dominance of the local lords.‖359 Secondarily, he construes it as a result of Twain‘s distinguishing authorial characteristics. He finds it ironic that such a convinced claim to truth comes from Twain, ―by a confidence-man himself, a shifty narrator who constantly inflates his own illusions in order to puncture them, who repeatedly engages the reader‘s trust by pulling his ‗mark‘ willingly within the tall tale‘s interpretive circle of complicity to discover ‗truth‘ while at the same time destabilizing the certainty of it altogether through laughter…‖360 The destabilizing factor in Innocents Abroad is not restricted to self-mockery or the parody of the other but also an inoffensive form of mockery of the reader who whose responses to the text might not be able to

357Jeffrey Alan Melton, Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement, (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2002), p. 28. 358Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 163. 359 Ibid., p. 164. 360 Ibid., p. 165.

150 catch up with the rapid mode shifts in Twain‘s narration. Hilton Obenzinger rightly observes that ―…it becomes difficult to differentiate between passages that are parodies of clichés and that are actually clichés themselves.‖361 As Twain puppeteers the reader‘s responses to his observations; the reader‘s urge to break free from this authoritarian authorial intent, a comic intent might receive a disdainful retort; or a critical observation might echo a cliché in the reader‘s mind. In one example, where he describes Marseilles by echoing clichéd depictions, he reveals his real intention by adding a comment in brackets after the passage:

Toward nightfall, the next evening, we steamed into the great artificial harbor of this noble city of Marseilles, and saw the dying sunlight gild its clustering spires, and ramparts, and flood its leagues of environing verdure with a mellow radiance that touched with an added charm the white villas that flecked the landscape far and near. [Copyright secured according to Law.]362

With all his claims to originality and expression of contempt for overwrought textuality, he relies too heavily on Murray‘s Handbook of Syria and Palestine by Josias Leslie Porter. ―In both his newspaper letters and IA he had to suggest unique experience, and his borrowing from Porter was so extensive that to have admitted his debt would have been tantamount to revealing, rather specifically, just how conglomerate and derivative many of his ‗letters from the Holy Land‘ actually were.‖363 There was however, at the time a pressing need to write rapidly. In Alexandria, Twain discovered that a third of the letters he wrote had not reached Alta California and he had not made any copies.364 It was almost the end of the cruise and he had to rewrite some of the letters in addition to the ones he had not written before. This might be one reason to consider why Twain had incorporated Porter without due reference. Admittance would undermine his recurrent claims and the primary backbone of the purposefulness in his narrative. While participating in it, he was highly critical of rehearsed guidebook tourism that the ―pilgrims‖ seemed to desire to pursue. Congruently with the Rome example, his willingness to visit a site and recount his observations about it was determined by the level of literary exhaustion the site had been subject to.

I had no desire in the world to go there [ancient warm baths.] This seemed a little strange, and prompted me to try to discover what the cause of this unreasonable indifference was. It turned out

361 Ibid., p. 172. 362 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 93. 363 Dewey Ganzel, Mark Twain Abroad: The Cruise of the “Quaker City” (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 268. 364 Ibid., p. 261.

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to be simply because Pliny mentions them. I have conceived a sort of unwarrantable unfriendliness towards Pliny and St. Paul, because it seems as if I can never ferret out a place that I can have to myself. It always and eternally transpires that St. Paul has been to that place, and Pliny has ‗mentioned‘ it.365

Twain is contending with the insurmountable in that he does not seek to break away from the American travel writing tradition of the Holy Land, which already consists of a significant amount of work, but also from ancient naturalists and missionaries. He expresses, in Harold Bloom‘s words, ―anxiety of influence,‖ yet he does that in his ironic and idiosyncratic way. He is faced with an overwrought textual history while expressing the urges of an explorer. In effect, there is nowhere that Twain can literally ―ferret out.‖ The deep set anxiety that is usually expressed by travel writers in hackneyed sites for fear that they will be unable to contribute to the knowledge of the reader in any authentic way, finds its counterpart as a dismissive attitude with undercurrents of contempt in Twain.

Another manner in which Twain utilizes his observations for demythologization is his skepticism on the attached value or credibility of artifact or historical ruins with biblical connotations. His skepticism is not delimited to the Oriental paraphernalia, as already exemplified; to European artifacts that epitomize a cultural consciousness the narrative persona also responds with distrustfulness at best. The determining aspect that ultimately ascertains the distinctiveness of his treatment of the Oriental paraphernalia is the result of a more racialized and ethnicized perspective. Once Greece was left behind, he ceased to differentiate between people of different ethnic backgrounds. ―He cared no more for the Palestinians than he had for the Syrians, or the Turks- or for that matter, the American Indian, to whom he compared them…These people he thought a lower form of life, and he necessarily found the cause of their damnation in some fault inherent in themselves.‖366 Although the tourist fatigue factors in as a reason for his vacillating opinion of Oriental scenery and people, his conclusions with regard to what he considers as deficiencies are connected to innate inadequacy. Yet when it comes to skepticism, the most common target was the historical remains that have biblical connotations in the Holy Land. ―The proof that this is the genuine spot where Noah was buried can only be doubted by uncommonly incredulous people. The evidence is pretty straight. Shen, the son of

365Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 514. 366 Dewey Ganzel, Mark Twain Abroad: The Cruise of the “Quaker City,” (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 234.

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Noah, was present at the burial, and showed the place to his descendants, who transmitted the knowledge to their descendants, and the lineal descendants of these introduced themselves to us to-day.‖367 The irony might escape the inattentive reader but it is applied to so many places in the vicinity that even when it is missed at first sight, retrospectively, all gain the same meaning in the end: mainly of distrustfulness of the sacred sites. The skepticism is not directed merely towards the authenticity of the sites themselves but more towards the truthful intent behind their representations. He concentrates his full-fledged attack on William Prime (Grimes) who wrote The Tent in the Holy Land and Boat Life in Egypt and Nubia published in 1857 after his visits to Palestine and Egypt, by quoting him extensively. ―I love to quote from Grimes, because he is so dramatic. And because he is so romantic. And because he seems to care but little whether he tells the truth or not, so he scares the reader or excites his envy or his admiration...More exciting things happened to him in Palestine than ever happened to any traveler here or elsewhere since Munchausen died.‖368 Despite having his own tantrums of romanticism, Twain‘s overall reaction to any elevated fits of sentimental reactions to the Holy Land is clear. Disappointed with the Sea of Galilee, he once again shifts the blame to Grimes for distorting the truth solely for his personal satisfaction and his desire for undeserved attention: ―But why should not the truth be spoken of this region? Is the truth harmful? Has it ever needed to hide its face? God made the Sea of Galilee and its surroundings as they are. Is it the province of Mr. Grimes to improve upon the work? ―369 The bitter mockery of Grimes is also a result of Twain‗s reaction to the travelers who cannot break away from the pressure of imitating and therefore confirming the sentiments of authors who provided them with an embellished portrayal of specifically the Holy Land. For fear that they will disappoint the armchair traveler at home and an accurately plain portrayal will equal disrespectful for the sacred and the reverent, they continue to disseminate a distorted picture.

The commonest sagacity warns me that I ought to tell the customary pleasant lie, and say I tore myself reluctantly away from every noted place in Palestine. Every body tells that, but with as little ostentation as I may, I doubt the word of every he who tells it. I could take a dreadful oath that I have never heard any one of our forty pilgrims say any thing of the sort, and they are as worthy and as sincerely devout as any that come here. They will say it when they get home, fast

367 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 443. 368Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 532. 369 Ibid., p. 511.

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enough, but why should they not? They do not wish to array themselves against all the Lamartines and Grimeses in the world.370

Testing the legitimacy of the sacred and questioning values that had been taken granted for centuries, was by no means new to Twain. Twain was an experimentalist in humor. He sought to avoid conventions and invent new ways to make people laugh, risking his reputation as a humorist. He entrusted his career both on his skills as a humorist and on the audience‘s perceptiveness. His punch lines were subtle, layered and unlikely to get a unanimous laugh simultaneously. He played with repetitions of clichés, both reinstating their weariness and making them into born again jokes. He sketched his narrations on the thin line between revoking and revalidating conventions. At times it was his drawback; but mostly his idiosyncrasy. Drawbacks occur, when defying the expectations of the reader, or the audience, he puts forward an insensitive judgment of a value that he does not inquire into but twists and turns into crude humor. David E. E. Sloane articulates it as a matter of Weltanschauung: ―He hated the merely anaemic virtues, and healthy readers can rejoice in his hatred; but in some respects he was disastrously insensitive; and this was in part responsible for his inability to recognize how many things he was incapable of so much as beginning to understand. As long he could see the outsides of things he was inclined to believe that he saw and knew the whole.‖371 He also points out to a circumstantial adaptation of Mark Twain‘s style: ―…in fairness to Mark Twain it should be remembered that he was writing the chapters as travel-letters for a Californian paper, and therefore for a community of average intelligences with no literary or artistic nonsense about them.‖372

A common tool of the cynical narrator for grotesque exaggeration and humor in Innocents Abroad is comparison. The need for comparison in the middle of foreignness is a natural impulse and when Twain‘s targeted audience is taken into consideration, a familiar frame of reference was vital. In his notebook between March 1886 and June 1887, he wrote: ―My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.‖373 For the purposes of transferring a visage by means of writing, comparison is also useful for the familiar

370 Ibid., p. 602. 371 Mark Twain‘s Humor Critical Essays Edited by David E. E. Sloane. (New York London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1993), p. 459. 372 Ibid. p. 460. 373 Robert Pack Browning, Michael B. Frank, Lin Salamo, ed., Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, Vol. III, 1883-1891, (California: University of California Press, 1979), p. 238.

154 object of comparison will trigger the reader‘s imagination for whom the other object is completely unknown and new. However, the comparison as it is used in Innocents Abroad does not merely function as an assistance to the reader‘s mind but to reinstate the superiority of the object in question that belongs to the point of the narrator‘s origin and therefore satisfies the reader‘s expectations. Melton observes: ―It should come as no surprise that most often in any direct comparison, America‘s natural beauty, its democracy, and its dominant Protestantism fared well.‖374 One striking and often quoted example for his propensity towards favoritism of American natural landscape is his comparison of Sea of Galilee and Lake Tahoe.

The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe by a good deal –it is about two-thirds as large. And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow. The dim waters of this pool cannot suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe; these low, shaven, yellow hillocks of rocks and sand, so devoid of perspective, cannot suggest the grand peaks that compass Tahoe like a wall…375

Beginning with this passage, he goes on to provide his American readers with a comprehensive description of Lake Tahoe on a quite sentimental note, which is rare occurrence throughout Innocents Abroad. The concretion of an image in our minds does not occur, only a repetition of a single fact echoes reflecting on every puddle of water. The frame of mind becomes a Foucault pendulum, a constant reminder and reaffirmation of the pivotal message. Through the reaffirmation process every single character through whom the information is filtered are consulted by dialogues and at times monologues. Lest the description falls out of place, Twain postulates an explanation: ―I measure all lakes by Tahoe, partly because I am far more familiar with it than with any other, and partly because I have such a high admiration for it and such a world of pleasant recollections of it, that it is very nearly impossible for me to speak of lakes and not mention it.‖376

He illustrates the similarities, persistently giving the American of the object of comparison a higher quality and importance whereas these a posteriori comparisons are null because the nature of the Oriental object of comparison is not attempted to be comprehended. This is not related to the inner contradictions of the narrator Forrest G. Robinson points to. He

374 Jeffrey Alan Melton, Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement, (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2002), p. 45. 375 Ibid. p. 233. 376Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 532.

155 pertains to the two approaches regarding the oppositional pattern in Innocents Abroad. The first approach highlights the dividedness of the text, which emerges from its highly polarized structure and puts the spot light on Twain for failing to comprise the contradictory perspectives. The second approach grants the fact that there is a binary texture. However, the approach claims that it is purposeful and has a unity in itself. Robinson synthesizes the two approaches, leaning more on the latter, he concludes that existence of contradictions is not necessarily defective and moreover, it serves a purpose. The pattern of consciousness is not a unity but a natural consequence of the journey.377

Whether or not the incongruities are subliminal or purposeful and intentional, Twain‘s account must have been a refreshing and challenging digression from the standards of 19th century American travel writing for the readership at the time. After all he did not digress from one vital purpose: reassurance that Americans were privileged to have achieved their unique position in the world and although everything else was comparable they never really won. Its readability and its entertaining traits with all its sharp edges even today justifies all praises it received despite now being outweighed by criticism by scholars. Twain, in a similar manner to Porter remarks in the conclusion of his account with a note of self-criticism of provincialism and redefines the primary purpose of travel: ―Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow- mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one‘s lifetime.‖378

377 Forrest G. Robinson. ―An ‗Unconscious and Profitable Celebration‘: Mark Twain and Literary Intentionality‖. Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Dec., 1995) p. 360. 378 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, (Connecticut: American Publishing Co., 1869), p. 650.

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Conclusion: Who is it that is addressing you? Since it is not an author, a narrator, or a deus ex machina, it is an I that is both part of the spectacle and part of the audience, an I that, a bit like you, undergoes its own incessant violent reinscription within the arithmetical machinery. An I that functioning as a pure passageway for operations of substitution is not some singular and irreplaceable existence, some subject or life. But only rather moves between life and death, between reality and fiction. An I that is a mere function or phantom. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination 379

In the foregoing chapters, I have gone through forty years (1830-1870) and focused my analyses on six pit stops during the course of this time. These pit stops were until now largely bypassed (I think we might safely exclude Mark Twain‘s Innocents Abroad) not as individual works or authors but as works belonging to a single category that constitute discourses that share a common authorial intentionality, purposefulness and conscious or subliminal preferences. The category was bounded by a temporal limitation as well as a spatial one with regard to the lands the authors traveled to and described. American exceptionalism in 19th century literary tradition, as well as American Orientalism was discussed via various other pit stops if you will. Or the works were included in works that surveyed American foreign travel and how the concept of travel and movement constituted the core trait of American character. The synthetic framework I analyzed the six works with, proved to be harmonious in scope in addition to being unattempted.

The material that was available to me during this research was scarce mostly because of the fact that many of these authors were neglected or not prioritized in the scholarly work that dealt with the 19th century American travel literature. Under these circumstances, the published biographies of the authors as well as their private correspondences were very valuable and useful.

After extensive and minute analyses of six lengthy narratives, admittedly each would require as minute and comprehensive a conclusion. Undoubtedly, each of the six narratives written by five authors, for numerous reasons defied the boundaries of this category. These reasons were mostly molded by the occupational backgrounds of the authors as well as their ideological constitutions; in the cases when they were authors by profession, the literary tradition they belonged to or were trying to break away from predominantly shaped their representational

379 Jacques Derrida. Dissemination, (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 18.

157 style. Therefore the research neither claims that these narratives constitute a literary continuum nor does it suggest any one of them to have had a significant rapturous impact on the linear development of the genre of travel in 19th century United States. This time demarcation which witnessed many major events and junctures such as Second Great Awakening, Indian Removals and Wars in the West, U.S.-Mexican War, laying of the transatlantic cable, Dred Scott v. Sandford, and Harper‘s Ferry. Inescapably, these events molded the public consciousness and contributed to the development of the psyche of the American public, among which were the readers of the narratives that are the province of analysis here.

One of the key guiding questions in the research was how the authors authenticated, and claimed the national genre of travel through the representation of an other (if Orient can in fact be formulated as ―an‖ other; it certainly was not ―the‖ other during the aforementioned years in the 19th century); the otherness of which they inherited to a significant extent. Some other questions posed at the initiation of this research were the following: How did the authors formulate this other as a known type by reverberating exceptionalist discourses? How did the author‘s discursive strategies position the U.S. and define the American of the young republic? Aside from direct comparative approaches, how do they reassure the sentiment of reassurance to the American they define and contribute to an indigenous American Orientalism?

In all of the chapters, I have explored the ―anxiety of influence‖ that the authors experienced as a result of being faced with the thrill and obligation of reinventing metaphors to describe sites that begged not to be described any longer. This quest for originality was ironically the common feature of all five authors and it is by no means limited to them. Another noticeable affinity they have to each other is the fact that whether impulsively, sporadically or as a general rule they sought to demythologize the textually hackneyed sites. This aspiration was focalized on sites such as the Holy Land, which entailed sacred and unquestionable denotations. Bayard Taylor with his devoted and ardently expressed spiritual connection to the Orient; Nathaniel Parker Willis with his genteel pretensions; John Lloyd Stephens with his adventurous, explorer spirit; David Porter with his nationalistic fervor, and Mark Twain with his relentless irony and the desire to demythologize the tourist experience all shared common discursive practices that were mapped out in the foregone chapters. Gendered representative preferences abounded in all of the narratives where masculine beauty, raggedness and feminine fragility with undercurrents

158 of promiscuity or exhibitionism, were the predominant elements. Meyda Yegenoglu aptly observes as ―…latent Orientalism…is precisely the site where the unconscious desires and fantasies of the ‗other‘ and ‗otherness‘ appear as powerful constituents of the so-called autonomous and rational Western subject and expose this position as structurally male.‖380 As distinguished in the introduction from manifest Orientalism, latent Orientalism is prevalent in the narratives in question. American travel literature retains its own indigenous, dynamic, contextually adaptive discourse over the Orient, yet latent Orientalism that is ingrained in its core and occasionally surfaces cannot be denounced. Religious paraphernalia received the most contradictory treatment from the authors. The issue rarely seemed to deserve attention and inquiry; yet its existence and the inherited sentiments of hostility could not be denied. ―Islamic material was not accompanied by accurate representations of Muslim manners, and the image of the Muslims that was formed by many authors of the time is often sternly unflattering, even if weakly grounded in knowledge.‖381 Accuracy, undeniably a determining factor with regards to the credibility of the author and the narrative, was not the primary point of consideration. The ambivalence as explored in the third chapter was the essential manner in which Islam and its paraphernalia were treated. This ambivalence was penetrative in that it did not discriminate against one concept over another and was prevalent in all aspects such as gender, race, and class representation. One singularly interesting aspect was the synchronicity of domestic discourses (slavery, Native American presence and removal) with discourses applied to the Orient and the Orientals. Aside from the presence –even if scarce- of these domestic discourses in all six narratives, there was no conformity in the ways in which the authors dealt with them. Although it can be perceived as the clash of the preconceptions of the Orient and the impressions derived from a first-hand experience of it or between the fictional world and the actual world during which one failed to outweigh the other, essentially it revealed the perceived image of the Orient as a distinct object of scrutiny from which the authors could not derive objective and consistent conclusions from. As an ―object of study,‖ and scrutiny, aside from being on the receiving end of the communication, true to norm, the Oriental did not contribute voluntarily in the definition process of himself. In this involuntary functional relationship between the travel writer and the Oriental, the Oriental became the constant referent. Oriental companions, dragomen and guides

380 Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 11. 381 Marwan M. Obeidat. American Literature and Orientalism, (Berlin: Schwarz, 1998), p. 3.

159 naturally were an inescapable part of the travels. The travelers‘ relationships with their guides or the lack thereof, were also symptomatic of similar representational preferences.

…the Orient and Orientals as an ―object‖ of study, stamped with an otherness…This ―object‖ of study will be, as is customary, passive, non-participating, endowed with a ―historical‖ subjectivity, above all, non-active, non-autonomous, non-sovereign with regard to itself: the only Orient or Oriental or ―subject‖ which could be admitted, at the extreme limit, is the alienated being, philosophically, that is, other than itself in relationship to itself, posed, understood, defined –and acted –by others.382

However, to borrow Ali Behdad‘s term, Americans were even more ―belated‖ as travel writers in the regions if not in the genre. Both their and the American readers‘ familiarity with the genre of travel and the concept of movement and exploration inherent in the historical and cultural constitution of the nation compensated for the lack of canonical precedents. As Jeffrey Alan Melton asserts: ―No other genre of American literature enjoyed a greater popularity or a more enduring prominence in the nineteenth century than travel writing. Essentially, it had been intertwined with the development of America‘s literary identity from its beginnings, as the first European explorers recorded their experiences for readers back home.‖383

This literary identity constantly paralleled and bred the experiences at home. While, Bayard Taylor, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and to a limited extent John Lloyd Stephens, and David Porter communicate similar concerns and make commitments to the readers in line of their counterparts about authenticity, they replicate many discursive trends that the readership has been accustomed to. Twain on a similar note, engages himself in a quest for originality at all costs, yet forfeits accuracy while settling for less informative facts than are available to him. Although a possible categorization of these travel narratives into subgenres of the genre of travel would be possible according to the predominant trends they followed in their works, as they strictly do not claim to belong to any, bounding all of the dimensions they entail in one would be reductionist. McInturff asserts that ―Said insists on the historicity and not the inevitability of discourses and the power relations they support. In this he leaves room for the potential to change those relations of power.‖384 This research has been formulated by particular

382 Anwar Abdel Marek. ―Orientalism in Crisis,‖ Diogenes 44 (Winter 1963), p. 107-8. 383Jeffrey Alan Melton Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement, (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 2002), p. 16. 384 Inge E. Boer. Ed. After Orientalism: Critical Entanglements, Productive Looks, (Rodopi:Amsterdam, 2003), p. 225

160 commonalities of the authors and their texts about the Orient; however, instead of the ―potential to change [the] relations of power‖ of the countries, due to contextual difference, it privileged the potential of divergence by the authors. It sought to indicate how at times these divergences reemerged because of similar primary motivations and how they remained separate by individual idiosyncracies. The texts were grouped under the latent orientalist category and further analyzed under three sub-categories not because they unexceptionally presented the reader with examples proper to that discourse but rather because they reverberated it by reacting to it, undermining it, reiterating it or outright protesting it.

The relevance of the opening passage from Jacques Derrida is not a gateway to a discussion of deconstruction but it stems from the fact that the primary as well as the ultimate resource that at times misleads and at other times guides was the voice of the narrator, the ―I‖ in the accounts. Although Hilton Obenzinger argues that with his narrative persona as the ―surrogate…eyes of the reader,‖ Innocents Abroad was ―more than the typical travel book, utterly fictive,‖385 none of the narratives are claimed to be, perceived as or structured as fictive accounts of a journey. Nonetheless, even when temporary and voluntary, displacement has a destabilizing effect on the ―I‖ that is the narrative persona, not the author by the virtue of being distanced from a sense of belonging and burdened with the responsibility of transferring the foreign into the familiar. As all authors seemed to have come across and were strongly affected by the relative poverty and its visible unpleasant consequences, they all experience what Derrida calls the ―economy of pity.‖

By an unconscious reassurance, the awareness of the suffering that is being witnessed is temporary; they perceive their surroundings as a reproduced image rather than the actual space that includes them. ―Imagination and reflection both connect us to and protect us from pain…The point is that all representation, as the elaboration of symbolic structure that displaces its object, has this mediating and limiting effect on our experience.‖386 Therefore, those surrogate eyes that commit themselves to be truthful are always faced with an insurmountable obstacle, which is the distance that grows in direct proportion to the sentiments of reassurance and

385Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 164. 386 David Spurr, Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration, (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 53.

161 superiority. This commitment at one end of the spectrum and the sense of displacement on the other in their struggle to compromise, force the narrative persona to ―move between life and death,‖ yet as the conscious self, and the urge for reassurance never disappears, the narrative persona never dies, eliminating all possibility for non-fictional representation.

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