[Dis]Orientation: The Problem of Representation in European and American Travel Writing on Morocco, 1880-1940

a thesis presented

by

Marie Elizabeth Burks

for the History of Science Department in partial fulfillment of an honors degree in History and Science

Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts March 2006 ABSTRACT

This thesis is an examination of representations of Morocco in European and American travel writing from 1880-1940. Drawing on the scholarship of Edward Said, Mary Louise Pratt, and others, it looks to the works of Charles de Foucauld, Pierre Loti, Edith Wharton, Prosper Ricard, and Wyndham Lewis to ascertain how each author solved the problem of mapping Morocco onto the Western imagination in the colonial context. European political and economic involvement in Morocco, formalized by its annexation by the French in 1912, places each of these writers in the colonial situation. Beginning with eighteenth-century scientific expeditions and ending with American film production in Morocco, this thesis situates these writers in their historical context, tracing the variations and consistencies in Western representations of Morocco over time.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis has evolved over the course of many months as a result of the fruitful and inspiring conversations I have had with the people who have supported me in pursuing this line of thought. I would like to thank my adviser, Daniel Margocsy, for his guidance, his sense of humor, and his patience. I would like to thank Professor Steven Shapin for his insights and his general merriment. I would like to thank Peter Buck for always having his door open. I would like to thank Professors Susan Miller, Marwa Elshakry, Jimena Canales and Tom DeGeorges for their instruction and continued support; parts of this thesis originated in their classrooms.

And, of course, I could not have written this without the love and affection of my family and my friends. I would especially like to thank my mother for listening, even at 3 a.m., and my roommates for keeping me remotely sane. ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Henri Matisse's Landscape Viewed from a Window (1912-1913)

2. "The part of Morocco visited by Mrs. Wharton," from In Morocco (1920).

3. Itineraries and map of Casablanca, from the Blue Guide (1919).

4. "Fez Elbali from the ramparts," photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au Maroc.

5. "Sketch Map," from Filibusters in Barbary (1932).

6. "The French have not attempted to change the native cities of Morocco. Most of the thoroughfares remain as they have been for centuries," from Filibusters in Barbary (1932).

7. "A Kasbah in the Atlas," by Wyndham Lewis.

8. "A Hut of Petrol Tins," by Lewis.

9. Polychrome travel poster depicting Tangier for PLM (1924), from Excursions en Orient.

10. Film still from Casablanca (1942).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page List of illustrations...... i

Introduction: Landscape Viewed from a Window...... 1

1. Pre-Protectorate Interventions, 1883-1904...... 13

2. Dépaysement au Maroc, 1917-1927...... 33

3. Filibusters and 'Double Images,' 1931-1932...... 53

Conclusion: Rick's American Café...... 76

Selected Bibliography...... 83

INTRODUCTION

Landscape Viewed Through a Window

When he traveled to Morocco in 1912 and 1913, the French modernist painter

Henri Matisse lodged at the "somewhat luxurious" Hôtel Villa de France, conveniently perched "on a steep slope on the border between the Europeanized town and the old

Tangier of the Medina and Casbah."1 Matisse liked to paint in Tangier because, although the city "was one of the most domesticated corners of the Orient available to a European artist," the casbah was still rife with scenes of traditional Moroccan life ripe for the painting. Matisse tended to omit the European presence in Tangier from his paintings.

However, Landscape Viewed from a Window (Paysage vu d'une fenêtre) begun during the artist's first trip to Morocco, vividly evokes his presence and his foreignness there

(Fig.1).

Bad weather in the spring of 1912 confined Matisse, reputedly an unadventurous traveler to begin with, to his hotel room.2 The window-and-flower still-life in the foreground of the painting suggests the tentativeness with which Matisse approached the

Moroccan landscape beyond his window. Matisse represents Morocco in a double frame: the edges of the canvas frame the entire composition, and within that the window frames the landscape. This painting represents one solution to the problem of representing the

Orient: putting it in a familiar frame. Matisse forces us to gaze through a hotel window onto the landscape, mediating our view of Morocco.

1 Benjamin, Roger. Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 169-173. 2 Le Maroc de Matisse: Exposition Présentée à l'Institut du Monde Arabe. Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, 1999, 72-3.

Figure 1. Henri Matisse. Landscape Viewed from a Window (Paysage vu de la fenêtre). 1912-1913. Simulating the Exotic in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture

Matisse was certainly not the first Frenchman to envision the Orient through a

Western construct. In the nineteenth century, the French public toured the French empire

through visual displays, including panoramas, dioramas, and facsimile architecture, at

universal expositions. These representations reached a large audience: the 1900 Paris

exposition attracted thirty-nine million people over seven months.3 The displays were

constructed to give the impression of liberated vision that brought the whole world within

the purview of the French gaze. But these mass media were also technologies of

enclosure, circumscribing the spectator's view and determining the object of his or her

gaze. They were carefully fabricated to conceal evidence of their artificiality and to

simulate the visual experience of an actual place. In this way, exotic locales were brought

to Europe. A Parisian could wander through an Algerian casbah (marketplace) on the

banks of the Seine or look out over a Fez landscape inside an exhibition hall (Fig. 2).

Roger Benjamin has written that these "illusionistic technologies ... transported the

spectator to colonial situations with an unrivaled sensory intensity."4

The French government realized how alluring and powerful visual representations

of exotic localities could be and invested in them. The Ministry of Colonies gave significant financial support to the Society of French Orientalist Painters, which was

conceived at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition and functioned as the Ministry's "visual

propaganda wing."5 The Ministry helped fund the society's annual Salons and awarded

scholarships to young French artists to work in the colonies, and in return the society

would contribute easel paintings and panoramic paintings to France's universal and

3 Benjamin, 106. 4 Benjamin, 110. 5 Benjamin, 7. colonial exhibitions. Benjamin describes the way in which material investment in representations of the colonies was productive for the French state: "Dioramas and panoramas mediated colonial imagery for the mass audiences of the great expositions.

The French Ministry of the Colonies commissioned the society's artists and made the

exotic both a paying attraction and a form of propaganda."6

Orientalism

Benjamin describes the Society of French Orientalist Painters as an institution that

generated Orientalism. Edward Said, who coined the term, defines Orientalism as "a

mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery,

doctrines, colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles."7 The Orient is not a figment of the

Western imagination; it is a geopolitical reality, and Western representations of this

reality have broad cultural, social, political, and economic significance. Said speaks to

way in which Orientalism is at once constituted and constitutive: "Continued [material]

investment made Orientalism...an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into

Western consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied...the statements

proliferating out from Orientalism into the general culture."8

The Link between Travel Writing and Colonialism

While colonial exposition displays could feel sensationally real owing to their

visual impact, nineteenth- and twentieth-century travel writing can also evoke a powerful

sense of place. Travel literature constitutes its own world, through intertextuality,

narrative, and described movement through space and time. Travel writing, like visual

culture, can be part of colonial discourse. In her study of the relationship between

6 Benjamin, 7. 7 Said, 2. 8 Said, 6. European imperialism and travel writing, Mary Louis Pratt identifies an imperial rhetoric of verbal painting in which the writer assumes the role of "monarch of all I survey."9

Pratt identifies three rhetorical strategies operating within this genre: aestheticization of the landscape, reading meaning in the landscape, and mastery over the landscape.

Aestheticization refers to the way in which "the sight is seen as a painting" and the aesthetic "pleasure of the sight single-handedly constitutes the value and significance of the journey."10 When the author reads meaning into the landscape, he or she represents it as "rich in material and semantic substance."11 Mastery predicates a viewer-painting relationship between the author and the scene, by which the author-as-viewer sees all there is to see from the correct vantage point and reproduces this view for others. In rendering this reproduction, the author must decide which elements of the scene to include and which to exclude. This gives the writer a great deal of control over the resulting representation of reality.

Overview

This thesis examines European and American travel writing about Morocco written between 1880 and 1932. Beginning with nineteenth-century European economic and political expansion into Morocco (leading up to the French annexation in 1912) and ending with the rise of nationalistic movements after World War I, this is about travel writing in the colonial situation. Chapter One begins with a brief overview of natural historical writing. It continues with Reconnaissance au Maroc (1884), the geographic survey of Charles de Foucauld, who disguises himself as a rabbi to facilitate his travel through Morocco as he maps its geographic coordinates and topographical features. Next,

9 Pratt, 201. 10 Pratt, 204. 11 Ibid. I examine Au Maroc (1890), Pierre Loti's romantic description of his travels in Morocco.

It is useful to read Foucauld and Loti together because Foucauld produces detailed knowledge about the Moroccan landscape because Morocco is geopolitically significant.

As a neighbor of the French colony of Algeria, it lies just beyond the frontier of the

French empire. Loti, on the other hand, travels as much through time as through space,

arresting images of antique Morocco under the veil of Islam before the imminent arrival

of colonial rule and modernization.

Chapter Two focuses on travel writing that promotes tourism in Morocco, where

the traveler's movement on the Moroccan scene is made possible by modern

infrastructure, including new railroads, roads, and hotels. The traveler can see traditional

Moroccan culture while enjoying all the convenience and comfort of modern travel. This subgenre is geared not to the French military or the armchair tourist, but rather to the traveler or tourist on the ground in Morocco. It is the lens or the frame that resolves and composes the foreigner's view of Morocco. Into Morocco (1919) was the product of the

American novelist Edith Wharton's visit to Morocco under the auspices of the French government. She writes on Morocco "between its virtually complete subjection to

European authority, and the fast approaching hour when it is thrown open to all the banalities and promiscuities of modern travel."12 Marshal Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey, the

Resident General of the French Protectorate, personally invited Wharton to visit the

country. She travels with French officials in the northern cities, surveying the new,

rapidly changing territory of the French empire. Wharton's account is meant to be a

record of her impressions, whereas Prosper Ricard's Blue Guide (1919) is intended to be a

practical guide to Morocco for the traveler. Ricard served as Director of the Office of

12 Wharton, 10. Indigenous Arts and, in addition to editing the Blue Guide, wrote several French guides to

North African art and architecture and cultural geography. The Blue Guide seeks to make traditional Morocco comprehensible to the modern traveler.

Chapter Three examines Filibusters in Barbary (1932), the satiric travel narrative

written by the British writer and painter Wyndham Lewis. Unlike Wharton and Ricard, who write about modern travel in a country where tradition remains intact, Lewis

describes the vandalization of the Moroccan scene by modern travel and modernization.

He contends that European political and economic expansion into Morocco has hidden

authenticity, or Moroccan tradition, behind Western representations of the "real"

Morocco.

Mapping Morocco onto the Imagination

The title "[Dis]Orientation" is intended to suggest the ways in which Western

travel writers dealt with the problem of orientation, both as traveler moving through

physical space and as author mediating the imaginary textual space of the travel narrative.

David Spurr has written that in Western representations of non-Western realities, the

Orient has been used "as a space against which the West defines or Orients itself, and as a

source of dazzling, disorienting brilliance."13

Travel writing in the colonial situation is about mastering a novel landscape by

narrating one's navigation of it. It is about the linguistic appropriation of the landscape

executed through verbal descriptions of pictures that the author's eye has resolved or

composed. The manner in which the Western travel writer constructs a coherent narrative

of the Orient is inevitably shaped by and shapes colonial discourse; the processes of

Orientalism, or coming to terms with the Orient, works backward and forward. Said casts

13 Spurr, 142. "Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires - British, French, American - in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced."14 In addition to political concerns, historical, social, and economic forces influence travel writers' modes of representing the Orient. Every travel writer employs a particular way of seeing in mapping Morocco onto literary time and space.

Foucauld is a wayfarer, mapping Morocco as he goes along. He is interested primarily in describing its topographic features. He executes a scientific mapping of the

Moroccan landscape for geopolitical purposes, producing and systematizing knowledge about Morocco that could be useful in its eventual annexation by the French empire.

Foucauld is important in the tradition of travel writing on Morocco because he was able to penetrate further into the country than any European before him without losing his life.

Loti maps the Moroccan past and the romantic picturesque. He paints vivid verbal pictures to create a more experiential mapping of Morocco onto the European mind.

Matisse had read Au Maroc before traveling and painting in Morocco from 1912-13, and one scene in particular impressed itself on his memory. He writes:

I found the landscapes of Morocco just as they had been described in the paintings of Delacroix and in Pierre Loti's novels. One morning in Tangiers I was riding in a meadow: the flowers came up to the horse's muzzle. I wondered where I had already had a similar experience - it was in reading one of Loti's descriptions in his book Into Morocco [Au Maroc]."15

The blurring in Matisse's memory of lived experience and literary imaginative experience exemplifies the power of the written narrative to simulate reality and leave indelible impressions on the reader's mind. This also demonstrates that Western colonial discourse

14 Said, 15. 15 Benjamin, 170. is reflexive in that it makes meaning in the colonial situation by referencing itself. Rather

than experiencing the meadow on its own terms, Matisse links it to Loti's representation

of a similar scene. Said has described the European tendency to engage with Western

representations of the Orient instead of directly engaging with a foreign landscape on its

own terms, unable to escape from the confines of colonial discourse.

When Foucauld traveled in Morocco, he had to do so in disguise to ensure his

personal safety. Colonialism made it possible for artists, writers, and tourists to travel safely undisguised in Morocco. Traveling with French officials in a military jeep, Edith

Wharton enjoys the conqueror's panoramic perspective in her narrative. The photographs included in the original publication of Into Morocco display her bird's eye view and her association with the French Protectorate (the photographs were provided by the Service des Beaux Arts). Wharton arranges literary space in the same way these photographs arrange pictorial space. In the 1927 preface to the new edition of In Morocco, Wharton describes the view from her privileged vantage point, tracking her eye over the landscape

and out onto the horizon:

I stand in a portico hung with gentian-blue ipomeas...and look out on a land of mists and mysteries; a land of trailing silver veils through which domes and minarets, mighty towers and ramparts of flushed stone, hot palm groves and Atlas snows, peer and disappear at the will of the Atlantic cloud-drifts.16

Wharton describes the scene in this way to show how visually rich it remains and that "in

spite of its accessibility and its conveniences, it has kept nearly all the magic and mystery

of forbidden days."17 Wharton does not merely execute an impressionistic aestheticization of the landscape. Her narrative represents colonial control over the

Moroccan scene and the way in which it has become a site of visual pleasure for the

16 Wharton, 15. 17 Ibid. traveler. In situating herself within the tradition of Western colonial discourse on

Morocco and describing the kind of traveler she expects to be interested in her book,

Wharton makes a statement about who exactly has access to privileged panoramic

perspectives in Morocco. She writes: "For the use, therefore, of the happy wanderers who

may be planning a Moroccan journey, I have added to the record of my personal

impressions a slight sketch of the history and art of the country."18 As Roger Benjamin

notes, "the commanding view, the panoramic vista...offers aesthetic pleasure on one

hand, information and authority on the other."19

The Blue Guide represents the opening of Morocco to tourism and colonialism in

the service of tourism. It maps Morocco for the tourist, making meaning out of the

landscape by attaching significance to particular features. Its small size would allow the traveler to carry it along. It is a technology for circumscribing the traveler's view of

Morocco. In following the paths the Blue Guide charts, the modern traveler performs the

Western colonial order, mastering Morocco by seeing all there is to see in an efficient and

omniscient manner.

Wyndham Lewis considers his narrative "more than a mere tourist's guide

book."20 Like Wharton, Lewis's travels in Morocco are made possible by colonialism.

But unlike Wharton, he does not like how it's changing Morocco. Where Wharton saw

the successful embedment of roads, railroads, and hotels, Lewis saw tottering imitations

of reality. He finds staged representations of authenticity that get in the way of his

aesthetic appreciation of Morocco. Modern technologies such as the railroad, the camera,

and cinema are disorienting. To illustrate this point, he parodies the modern traveler and

18 Wharton, 12. 19 Spurr, 15. 20 Lewis in Fox, xvi. the way in which the Western experience of a foreign country is circumscribed by

colonial discourse. In the following anecdote, the disoriented train traveler mistakes a

Moroccan shantytown for a village in equatorial Africa because the shantytown looks more like typical representations of sub-Saharan Africa than representations of Morocco:

Drawing into the station of Fedhalla, which is a small port between Rabat and Casa, upon the Rabat side, the traveler finds himself in the midst of an enormous nouala-village of this sort; and, with its cactus hedges and the naked squalor of its dusky infants, he would not have to be very fanciful to suppose himself in Guinea or the Congo, rather than a North African nomad town....Coming from Fez or Tangier the traveler will have seen nothing of the sort...and he certainly could be excused for jumping to the conclusion that...the activities of the Colonial exhibition had shuffled the African colonies in some manner (was not this perhaps an equatorial village bodily on its way to Paris, which got left behind, or settled down en route, finding itself too late?)"21

In this case, technologies that are supposed to make the Orient comprehensible actually

make it more confusing if you are able to see what is being obfuscated. Lewis re-orients

himself to the Morocco Wharton describes in 1927, where "from the vantage-ground of

the new Morocco, the tourist may still peep down at ease into the old."22 This is a

Morocco of double images in which it is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, even for

as discerning an eye as Lewis's.

Foucauld, Loti, Wharton, Ricard, and Lewis are each dealing with the problem of

how to represent Morocco in the colonial situation in their travel writing. Each writer has

a different set of solutions that integrate aesthetic and political concerns. It is difficult to

consider aesthetic production in the colonies without also considering colonial

governance. Benjamin writes in corroboration of Said: "The links between colonial

governance and aesthetic production were more than just benign and circumstantial...they

21 Ibid, 85-6. The nouala is "a cylindrical mud hut, with a conical thatched roof." 22 Wharton, 15. were constitutive in fundamental ways."23 This thesis is about travel writing as point of intersection between colonialism, modernity, and modes of vision.

23 Benjamin, 5. CHAPTER ONE

Pre-Protectorate Interventions: French Travel Writing on Morocco, 1883-1904

When Seeing Became Knowing

Awaiting the entourage that will escort his party to Fez at the Place du Grand-

Marché under the magnificent Moroccan noonday sun, the Frenchman recalls the

charming Arab music he heard at this very spot when he first arrived in Tangier a little

over a week ago. He is anxious to move further into the country, far away from the

Mediterranean and visions of banal Europe. There is so much to take in: hundreds of

camels asleep on their knees in the dust; a crowd of peasants swathed in grey and brown

fabrics, tangled among the camels; and green minarets poking out from the blanched

cityscape. He bids farewell to the bluish mountains of Andalusia - to Europe - across the

Mediterranean, about to disappear from view.24

The popular French novelist Pierre Loti traveled the world in the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries, prolifically painting from memory word-pictures of the

countries he visited, including Morocco, Turkey, Algeria, Japan, Tahiti, and Senegal. In

1889, he participated in a French ambassadorial mission to the court of Sultan Moulay

Hassan of Morocco. Although he dedicated his book to the French Minister in Morocco, in the preface to Au Maroc Loti turns away readers looking for an analysis of Moroccan politics, offering instead vibrant, descriptive observations of Moroccan life. Despite his deeply felt admiration for an antique, eternal Morocco still unscarred by modernity, Loti assumes a posture of superiority, empowering him to produce knowledge about Morocco through the simple acts of seeing and describing. He presents it as a picturesque

24 Loti, Pierre. Au Maroc. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1890, 2. dreamscape for the European in flight from modernity, as a sight for the exploration of

his own interiority and fantasy life. Loti refuses to divulge the secrets of the Moroccan

"government, the harems and the court" (le gouvernement, les harems, et la cour) with

which the locals have entrusted him, wanting instead to keep them for himself "in his

heart of hearts" (dans mon for intérieur).25

Beginning with European economic and political expansion in the eighteenth

century, representations of the non-Western world served an imperialist agenda, positing

the superiority of the West. European interests in Africa, Asia, and South America

created new spaces for exploration and discovery, introspection and imagination, and

adventure. Artists and writers painted images of distant lands enabling people to travel

vicariously through their documented impressions. Sometimes these were places they had

actually visited, and other times they were places they could only imagine. These

accounts, which combined elements of science and aesthetics, along with colonial

displays (i.e. museum and universal exhibitions), conditioned a particular way of seeing

and a specific conception of reality in European audiences. Representations of "exotic"

people and places reflected and shaped the way Western Europe thought about its

relationship to the rest of the world as a benevolent patriarch bearing the gifts of

civilization and order.

The aim of this chapter is to illustrate the relationship between travel, travel

writing, and imperialism in the context of French economic and political expansion in

Morocco, beginning in the late nineteenth century. It will trace the evolution of French

travel literature on Morocco, mapping themes and rhetorical modes onto a timeline of

French involvement in Morocco. The travel narrative is an account of an individual's

25 Ibid. 5-6. experience of place and movement through space; it can reconstitute space, displacing it

from its geographic reality and moving it into the realm of the imagination. Travel

writing paints pictures with words, populating the reader's imagination with particular

visions of space, which were understood to constitute knowledge about the world. This

chapter will examine the kinds of knowledge produced by French travelers about

Morocco and modernity. It is about the dialogue between these traveler-writers and

French political and economic investment in Morocco.

Observation and classification work to order the natural world and to create

knowledge about it, thereby facilitating its eventual mastery. Turn-of-the-century

geographic surveys and impressionistic travel writing alike operated under the

assumption that to see Morocco was to know Morocco. These media can be seen as

correctives for the disorientation that Europeans experienced abroad without such

navigational tools. Generally speaking, geographic surveys tended to be put to practical

use, such as the advancement of science or military control, while travel writing was

targeted to the armchair tourist, simultaneously piquing and feeding their curiosity about

certain destinations with colorful written and visual snapshots of the exotic. However,

there was overlap between the two genres. Geographers probably brought particular

expectations to their practice and particular literary conventions to their reports based on popular travel literature they had read, and travel writers often included historical and

geographic information culled from reconnaissance reports. And both forms certainly

influenced and were influenced by the contemporary European cultural climate that

valued worldliness.

The Travel Narrative and the Expansion of Empire

Travel writing has a long history as a tool of empire. In her analysis of travel

writing and imperialism entitled Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt writes about the

relationship between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travel writing and the

colonial encounter. She describes the fruition of a European "planetary consciousness,"

beginning in 1735 with the publication of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae (The System

of Nature) and the sending off of Europe's first major international scientific expedition

led by the French physicist Maupertius to Lapland to ascertain the shape of the earth.

Linnaeus's system of description of the natural world popularized the practice of natural

history, and the international expedition shifted the traveling scientist's focus from the

coast to inland terrain. Natural historical description and interior exploration, then, were

the technologies of this emerging global awareness. Both became standard features of

eighteenth-century travel writing, which "produced other parts of the world for the

imaginations of Europeans."26

Although it may seem that imagined productions of the world would be of little

actual geopolitical significance, it turns out that literary representations of place can play

an important role in the configuration of international power structures. Pratt writes: "The

systematic surface mapping of the globe correlates with an expanding search for

commercially exploitable resources, markets, and lands to colonize....Natural history

conceived of the world as a chaos out of which the scientist produced an order."27 In his analysis of eighteenth-century natural history as "a description of the visible," Michel

26 Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992, 19. 27 Ibid. 30. Foucault discusses the ways in which language orders the natural world.28 According to

Foucault, the description of the visible seeks to bridge the gap between language and

things "so as to bring language as close as possible to the observing gaze, and the things

observed as close as possible to the observing words."29 In other words, the scientific

observer ascribes a visual order to the space he surveys, privileging his own perspective.

This represents a passive mastery of the land, achieved through the acts of seeing and

describing.

Modern European Spheres of Influence in Morocco and French Pacific Penetration

The literary conquest of Morocco began in the second half of the nineteenth

century, when the French were jockeying with other European nations to expand their

sphere of influence in Morocco. But Morocco was no stranger to European meddling: since the eighteenth century, Moroccans had been entering into business relationships with Europeans. This commercial arrangement was known as "protection."30 Hugo C.M.

Wendel dates the modern system of protection to the bombardment of Moroccan pirates

by a French naval expedition in 1765. This led to a treaty between Louis XV and Sultan

Sidi Mouley-Mohammed granting freedom from taxation by the sultan to natives

employed by French consuls and merchants. Protection, still the primary mode of

international commerce in Morocco in the mid-nineteenth century, gained international

recognition after the war between Spain and Morocco (1859-1860), and the Regulation of

Tangier of 1863 established uniform regulations for the system. However, it effectively

28 Michel Foucault. The Order of Things. New York: Pantheon, 1970, as quoted in Pratt, 28. 29 Ibid. 30 M. de Freycinet, the French minister of foreign affairs, described the system of protection in 1879: "'Protection, which the European Powers grant to certain natives in the Cherifian Empire, is based on a system of conventional right, which is traditionally admitted as alone able to assure to foreigners in Mussulman countries the means necessary for entering into relations with the local populations,'" as quoted in Hugo C.M. Wendel. "The Protege System in Morocco." The Journal of Modern History 2(1) (1930): 48- 60. undermined the sultan's sovereignty by making certain Moroccans exempt from his

jurisdiction. The effective usurpation of the sultan's power combined with the decreasing

market share of domestic products and local producers to set the stage for French

annexation. Wendel writes: "The possibilities of using the system for what has been

euphemistically called 'pacific penetration' can hardly be missed."31

The "pacific penetration" of Morocco was not peaceful but militant. It was the

logical next step in the expansion of the French empire in North Africa. The French had

colonized Algeria in 1830, and demarcated "purposely-vague" borders in 1854 that allowed for a slow process of westward expansion into Morocco.32 While the French

Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé favored a gradual annexation of Morocco, other

French bureaucrats argued for a stronger French military presence in southern Algeria to police its border with Morocco. Eugène Etienne, Deputy from Oran and leader of

France's influential Parti Colonial, and Colonel Hubert Lyautey were major proponents of the aggressive annexation of Morocco. Etienne, who had a hand in the founding of the

Comité de l'Afrique française and in the Parti Colonial, was instrumental in garnering popular and state support for annexation, and formed the Comité du Maroc in 1904 to force the government into action. By 1903, when Lyautey assumed command of the Ain

Sefra garrison in Southern Oran Province, "the stage was set for a massive imperial effort to bring Morocco into the French empire."33 Although Delcassé, the Foreign Minister,

wanted to wait for England, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the United States to acknowledge

French predominance in Morocco, the colonialists made annexation into an urgent issue

31 Ibid. 32 Cooke, James J. "Lyautey and Etienne: The Soldier and the Politician in the Penetration of Morocco, 1904-1906." Military Affairs 36 (1972): 14-18. 33 Ibid. on which French interests in Algeria supposedly hinged. By exaggerating the insecurity

of the border between Algeria and Morocco, Lyautey, Etienne, and the colonialists

justified continued military action in northwestern Algeria. In colonialist discourse,

Morocco became instrumental to the success of the French empire, and France eventually

won control of the contested border as well as the right - shared with Spain - to control

the eight open ports and their surrounding areas by the 1906 Treaty of Algeciras.34 The

Treaty of Fez, signed in 1912, established Morocco as a French protectorate.

Getting to Know the Lay of the Land: Geographical Surveys of Morocco

Science, empire, and travel come together in the history of French reconnaissance

expeditions in Morocco of the late 1800s and early 1900s. In 1883, Charles de Foucauld,

who had been a French Army officer in Algeria since 1881, embarked on a scientific voyage in Morocco. 35 Disguised as a rabbi, Foucauld set out - without funding from the

French government - to map Moroccan roads and geographic coordinates.36 He

published his written account in 1886, and in it he makes explicit reference to French

colonialism. He acknowledges M.O. MacCarthy, president of the Société de Géographie

d'Alger, whom he praises as the "born protector of anyone who works for science or for

the grandeur of our colony." Foucauld's characterization of MacCarthy highlights the way in which science and colonialism were viewed as compatible pursuits. Foucauld also

34 Taking advantage of the weakening position of Delcassé, Etienne wrote in the Bulletin, the monthly journal of the Comité de l'Afrique française and the Comité du Maroc: "'…Nothing is more important to our national destiny than the future of Morocco. That nation is very vital to our colonial domination,'" as cited by James Cook. 35 Foucauld, Charles de. Reconnaissance au Maroc, 1883-1884. Paris, Challamel et CIE, Editeurs, Librairie Coloniale, Paris, 1888, ix. 36 According to the geographer Henri Duveyrier, if Foucauld had posed as a Muslim among Muslims he would have had more difficulty maintaining his cover. Duveyrier writes: "the veil that protects the Jew during his prayer served to hide the barometer and the sextant of M. Foucauld!" in Duveyrier, Henri. "Rapport fait à la Société de Géographie de Paris, dans la séance générale du 24 avril 1885, sur le voyage de M. le Vicomte Charles de Foucauld au Maroc" in Foucauld, Reconnaissance au Maroc, ix. thanks his Moroccan guides, Hadj Bou Rhim and Bel Qasem el Hamouzi, who were crucial to his successful navigation of the country. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

travelers commonly relied on native guides and local knowledge to help them "discover"

remarkable natural and built landmarks. According to Pratt, this kind of imperial science

converted "local knowledges (discourses) into European national and continental

knowledges associated with European forms and relations of power."37

Foucauld's geographic study of Morocco follows this model. In his introductory

remarks before the Société de Géographie de Paris at its general meeting on April 24,

1875, the French geographer Henri Duveyrier describes Foucauld's project as a politically

necessary inquiry into an unfamiliar land. "There is a state," Duveyrier writes, "bordered

by a French territory (limitrophe d'un département français), where the European traveler

in general, and the French traveler in particular, were never very well received (n'a

jamais été très bien vu). This state is Morocco."38 By Duveyrier's logic, European access

to and knowledge about Morocco became important because the country shares a border

with Algeria, which had been a French colony since 1830. In other words, French

territorial expansion in North Africa brought French interests geographically closer to

Morocco. Duveyrier lauds Foucauld for "revealing to us that which touches our doors."39

The desire to know Morocco by mapping its roads and geographical coordinates

represents an attempt to define its spatial parameters and render its terrain navigable to

future expeditions, especially military ones. In fact, Foucauld learned his methods of

observation at an Ecole de guerre (college of war).

37 Pratt, 203. 38 Duveyrier in Foucauld, vii. 39 Ibid. ix. In 1904, when Lyautey and his colonial cohort were orchestrating the colonization of Morocco, geologist Paul Lemoine delivered a report on Morocco to the newly formed

Comité du Maroc. In this report, Lemoine centers his narrative on a study of the

Moroccan population, geology, and geography. He motivates his mission with an appeal to Eugène Etienne's insistence on Morocco as the next item on the agenda of French

"progress" in Africa. Lemoine defines his role in effecting the "penetration pacifique": "If we want to direct our efforts judiciously, we must have as exact a knowledge as possible of the country we propose to penetrate."40 Inherent in this reasoning is the French belief

that they could master Morocco scientifically and politically. Lemoine writes:

Tangier has been described everywhere. It is a curious city, very Arab in aspect and character with its narrow, winding, and steep streets; by contrast, the Europeans have organized themselves with a grand luxury and a grand comfort. There is, in this city, a strange mixture of refined European civilization and of Muslim simplicity. The sanitation of the streets is maintained by an International European Commission of Hygiene.41

In this passage, Lemoine acknowledges a kind of unofficial European penetration of

Morocco. Because Tangier has already been described extensively, presumably by

European travelers and French officials, it has won a place in the European literary

imagination. A convoluted network of streets characterizes this imagined Tangier. But

Tangier is not only confined to the imagination; Europeans have also established

themselves in the city. Lemoine makes a qualitative distinction between Europe and the

Muslim world in terms of cultural evolution, opposing "refined European civilization" to

"Muslim simplicity." He uses decidedly negative adjectives to describe the "Arab aspect"

40 Lemoine, Paul. Mission dans le Maroc occidental: Rapport au Comité du Maroc. Paris: Comité du Maroc, 1905, 1. 41 Ibid. 9. of the city and decidedly positive ones to describe its European elements.42 Lemoine's

word choice creates a vivid division - underscored by their simultaneity - between the

pre-modern (Muslim) and the modern (European). European civilization is at once peaceably coexisting with Muslim simplicity and establishing a modern infrastructure

(i.e. hygienic control), suggesting the successful penetration of Tangier.

Pierre Loti's Into Morocco: Anti-Science, Anti-Conquest, and Anti-Modern

Lemoine writes as though his voyage is antecedent to Morocco's penetration,

which he defines narrowly as a militant colonial enterprise. However, as we have already

seen, European travelers had already been touring and writing on Morocco for centuries.

Travel writers such as Pierre Loti were links between the French government and the

representation of Morocco in the French imagination. Loti dedicates his book to Jules

Patenôtre, the French Minister to Morocco, offering it as a "tribute of affectionate

gratitude" (hommage d'affectueuse reconnaissance) and demonstrating an alliance with

the state and its colonial designs. Reconnaissance could have a double meaning here, because in French it can mean either gratitude or survey, as in Foucauld's geographic survey Reconnaissance au Maroc. But Loti's narrative was not about science; in fact, the author, in his admiration of the sultan and his adherence to Islam, expresses his preference for faith. He is enchanted by quaint aspects of Arab culture, romanticizing the past and waxing nostalgic for the pre-modern. In the preface to his narrative, he appeals to imaginative readers enchanted, like him, by what Lemoine referred to as "Muslim simplicity":

42 The English translations of Lemoine's negative adjectives are as follows: étroit: narrow, tight; sinuex: winding; escarpé: steep. When read literally, these words have a neutral affective valence. However, the figurative connotations of étroit (cramped) and sinueux (tortuous) are negative. Let those alone, then, accompany me in my travels who have sometime at evening felt a thrill pass through them at the first plaintive notes of the little Arab flutes accompanying the drums….Let them mount with me my broad-chested brown horse with flying mane and tail…I will conduct them under the fierce sun to the very depths of this immemorial country.43

With this characterization of Morocco, Loti portrays the ideal armchair tourist as one who does not concern himself with the country's "political condition" but rather with its picturesque charm. Loti expresses a particular romantic affinity for this part of the world, describing how the sound of African flutes and tam-tams and the sight of whitewashed walls resonates with his "half-Arab soul" (l'âme à moitié arabe).44 Loti's pleas for

preservation were a response to the French colonial assimilation policy that guided

colonial administration in the 19th century. The objectives of assimilation were to

achieve French cultural dominance via the civilizing mission and to demonstrate military

might through the destruction of indigenous cities.

Unlike Lemoine's narrative, which is concerned with the acquisition of knowledge about Moroccan people and land, Loti's tale is intended as an aid to his reader's imagination, as a conduit by which the reader can take a virtual tour of a land frozen in time. Mark Mazower describes Loti's work as romantic fantasy, which takes as its subject the European interior self and as its object the emasculated landscape and the veiled

Muslim woman.45 Loti instantiates his erotics at the beginning of his narrative when he

describes his anticipation of the act of penetration he is about to commit:

For a moment I feel a strange pleasure in reflecting that as yet I am only on the sill, at the gateway that has been profaned by the footsteps of the world, of this empire of the Moghreb into which I am soon to penetrate; that Fez, our destination, lies far away beneath the consuming sun, deep-buried in the bosom of

43 Loti. Into Morocco, 8. 44 Ibid. 6. 45 Mazower, Mark. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430-1950. New York: Knopf, 2005, 173-191. the inanimate, close-walled country, where life is now the same as it was a thousand years ago.46

Loti derives pleasure from fantasizing about his eventual penetration, pointing to the way

in which travel in the Middle East becomes about the exploration of one’s own

subjectivity and the fulfillment of desire. In The Rhetoric of Empire, David Spurr

describes this tendency to write the Orient as "a region of the visionary imagination, a

series of dreamlike sensations whose rapid succession releases [one] from the weight of

historical and material reality."47 This passage suggests that the site of the traveler's

pleasure is actually the European imagination, which enables him to cope with the

unexpected elements of the Orient.48

On Travel in the European Imagination

Mazower comments on the relationship between travel, modern subjectivity, and

the European imagination:

Tourists…were seeing very much what they had come to see. Their own culturally determined appetites demanded to be satisfied…inspired by a romanticism which valued new landscapes for the states of mind they induced….The concrete realities and economic possibilities of the place no longer really interested them….Instead the East was now an aesthetic construct.49

Edward Said links this aesthetic or imaginative construction of the Orient to

configurations of power, arguing that it is part of a larger colonial discourse.50 Timothy

Mitchell, who has written on European representations and rearrangements of North

Africa, provides a theoretical framework for understanding how the representation of the

46 Ibid. 19. 47 Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, 142. 48 For more on the colonialist gaze in the context of colonial representations of Algerian women, see Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Translated by Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 49 Mazower, 173-191. 50 Said. Orientalism, 1-28. Orient in the European imagination did political work in the era of high imperialism. He

calls this framework “world-as-exhibition,” which refers to the ordering of the world into

pictorial representations of reality. This process entailed the condensation of the real

world into an object-world rendered up for the imperial gaze. It was a technology of

temporal and spatial displacement whereby the object-world could be “viewed,

investigated, and experienced.”51 The politics lay in the initial arrangement, the

knowledge this arrangement represented and produced, and the imagining it encouraged.

Representations were designed to look realistic, to mirror the world onto a plane of

compressed time and space so that the viewer could take it all in with a single glimpse.52

However, because it was displaced in time and space and because the viewer could not penetrate its surface, the representation "always remained distinguishable from the reality it was trying to represent."53 In this exhibitionary complex, the observer is separate from

the representation, as his "gaze [is] surrounded by and yet excluded from the exhibition's

careful order."54 Although the modern subject is at the center of this display of the world,

he cannot penetrate its surfaces because they are mere representations hinting at a further

reality. From the perspective of the modern observer, the displayed world was objective

and edifying insofar as it represented and produced an “imperial truth” about the colonial

order. But it could only gesture toward deeper realities. It was up to the European mind to

imagine these realities.

51 Mitchell, Timothy. “The World as Exhibition.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989): 217-236. 52 For an explanation of how this imperative developed with the organization of museums from the mid- nineteenth century, see Tony Bennett. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995. 53 Ibid. 223. 54 Ibid. The world-as-exhibition was a technology of distance and desire that interacted very closely with Orientalism. In rendering up a picture of the East for the imperial gaze, it created at once a distance between viewer and object and a desire in the viewer to penetrate beyond the representation. This erotic fantasy led to a preoccupation with Arab interiors, articulated in L’histoire de l’habitation street at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. The French architect Garner designed a non-specific Arab dwelling for the exhibit, implying the negligibility of the exterior architecture (soon to be modernized by the French). Garner left the structure incomplete so as to expose the “Oriental life” flowing “softly and voluptuously, behind these walls burning in the sun.”55 Exhibits like this one and others that attempted more faithful or accurate representations all shared the tendency to abstract particular local cultural forms into the picturesque. This had the effect of locating vibrant contemporary cultures outside of historical time, freezing them and locking them into a perpetual repetition of their past. Referring to nineteenth-century museum practices, Tony Bennett explains: "The artifacts of presently existing peoples can be read back into the past where they can serve to back-fill the present…because they are construed as traces of earlier stages of human development."56 In other words,

metropolitan societies fit peripheral ones into an historical conception of time that invited

colonizers to come in and set the clock in motion again.

Zeynep Celik, who writes on material representations of the Orient, posits that universal expositions began to have less of a popular impact by the turn of the century, largely due to advances in travel and communication that facilitated other kinds of seeing and understanding. But the politics of seeing established and rehearsed at the exhibition

55 Celik, Zeynep. Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. 56 Bennett, 196. carried over into the European experience of foreign lands. For example, the tendency to portray Muslim cultures as unchanging and incapable of unaided advancement extended far beyond the museum and the exposition into the photographic and discursive technologies of the European imagination, both of which reproduced a particular picture of the East that served imperial interests. Even though he performs a romantic valorization of a premodern society on the cusp of civilization, Pierre Loti sets static

Morocco in contradistinction to industrializing Europe. Despite the fact that he acknowledges its proximity to Europe - "the mail-boats reach it in three or four hours" -

Loti advances a timeless vision of the port city:

I feel somehow as if I had taken a step backward through past centuries. How remote we are, all at once, from Spain, where we were only this morning; from the railroad, from the speedy and comfortable steamboat, from the very time in which we had thought we were living! Something like a winding sheet seems to have been dropped behind us, deadening the sounds of elsewhere, checking the currents of modern life; the old, old winding sheet of Islam.57

Representations like this one were used to justify the assimilation policies and the civilizing mission favored by the French colonial government during the nineteenth century. This was possible because travel literature played a large role in the constitution of knowledge about the Middle East in the public imagination, especially before the advent of commercialized photography and mass tourism. Celik identifies Loti and his contemporaries as instrumental in shaping the Swiss architect Le Corbusier's imagined picture of the East. In fact, Celik claims, Le Corbusier was disappointed when his experience of Istanbul did not match his imagined picture of it.

Timothy Mitchell labels this "Oriental dismay." It is what happens to the

European observer who leaves the exhibition in search of a direct experience of the "real"

57 Loti. Into Morocco, 14. world, "a desire for direct and physical contact with the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic."58 Mitchell describes the European traveler's experience in the East as one of visual disorientation, "that is a chaos of color and detail, which refuses to compose itself as a picture."59 In order to make sense of this world, writers and photographers sought vantage points from which they could observe the East without being seen. Not only did this install them to a position of power and separate them from the world, but also it preserved the fantasy of the Orient as land untainted by modernity and the European presence. Pierre Loti displays this self-effacing imperative when he notes his discomfort in "inflicting a blemish upon this immemorial picture, which, were it not for me, might be dated back to the year 1000 or 1200."60

Technologies of Travel and the Beginning of Mass Tourism

However, it appears that Loti was not the only "blemish" on this picture of

Morocco. Loti documents the presence of other European tourists in Tangier as well as services catering to them:

Despite the tourists who disembarked with me, despite the several French signs that are spread out here and there in front of hotels and markets, - in setting foot on land today on this wharf of Tangier in the beautiful midday sun, - I have the sense that I have stepped suddenly backwards to an earlier time.61

Although the tourists' presence does not seem to detract from Loti's affective experience of Tangier, Loti does register their increasing and undesirable presence in the city:

Tangier is very close to our Europe...positioned like a star on the northernmost point of Africa; in three or four hours, the steamships go there, and a large number of tourists come each winter. Tangier is very commonplace today.62

58 Mitchell, 217-236. 59 Ibid. 60 Loti, 76. 61 Ibid. 1. 62 Ibid. 1. Mediterranean travel got easier in the second half of the nineteenth century. The allure of the exotic reached a kind of apotheosis as improved technologies helped transform the colonies from imaginary spaces of adventure, pleasure, and conquest into places that could actually be visited. In the 1860s, medical advances made African travel safer for

Europeans.63 The steamship and then - to a much greater extent, the railroad - gave

Europeans and Americans much easier access to other parts of the world.

Tourism was inextricably linked to the expansion of the railroad, which facilitated the movement of large numbers of people over long distances. But it was also motivated by a number of other less tangible factors. Its history dates back to the eighteenth century

French concept of the Grand Tour. The French word "tour" was used simply to refer to a voyage, but the English co-opted it and employed it in a more specific sense to describe an educational journey in Western Europe undertaken by young aristocrats and the wealthy. France and Italy were the principal destinations, and the voyage could sometimes last for longer than one year. The notion of the Grand Tour in Great Britain was linked closely to Enlightenment ideals about the perfectibility of the human being and the importance of empirical observation. These young travelers - who were called

"tourists" - were supposed to have their eyes opened. It was reserved for the elite, and represented the harmonious marriage of culture and pleasure. In nineteenth-century

France, the word took on a pejorative connotation, and was used in reference to people whose travels abroad were motivated by pure curiosity and idleness.

We can see the beginnings of this in the advent of commercial tourism in leisure society at the end of the nineteenth century. The end of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-

1871) ushered in over four decades of peace, making leisure travel safe and affordable. A

63 Pratt, 208. tourism industry infrastructure was evolving. Tourism agencies, of which Thomas Cook had created the first in Great Britain, emerged. The impetus to travel was connected to the Romantic movement, which celebrated the originality of regional and national cultures, and cultivated a thirst for adventure and the exotic as highlighted in the tour guide. It was also connected to notions of health, in the sense that winters spent by the seashore were reputedly therapeutic and could cure certain ailments such as anemia.

In the nineteenth century, the winter trip to the Mediterranean coast was the most common kind of vacation.

The scale of tourism increased dramatically at the end of the nineteenth century with the rising popularity of serious travel, tourism, and holy site pilgrimages.64 Rapid real estate development began in the eighteenth century and boomed in 1880, creating lodging (hotels, furnished apartments, holiday residences, and railroad company hotels) and other tourist attractions such as casinos. The polychrome travel poster aided in the making of mass tourism. Paris-Lyon-Méditerrannée (PLM) produced the first French travel posters in the 1890s to attract both visitors and colonial settlers to the Middle East.

Other tourism agencies and transport companies also produced their own posters and commissioned famous artists living in North Africa to design them in the Art Déco style.

Travel posters were not widely disseminated, however, until after World War I.

Pierre Loti described Tangier's popularity among winter travelers in the late nineteenth century:

It is very close to our Europe, this first Moroccan city....In three or four hours, steamships arrive there, and a great number of tourists come every winter. Today

64 Badr. Excursions en Orient : 24 reproductions d’affiches de tourisme et de voyage. Lebanon: al-Layali, 2000. it has become banal (elle est très banalisée aujourd'hui), and the sultan of Morocco has made a point of half abandoning it to foreign visitors.65

But the tourism industry infrastructure in Morocco would not be fully developed until

several years after Morocco's annexation by the French in 1912. A Baedeker travel guide

indicates that in 1911, the year the book was published, travelers arriving in the port of

Tangier still had to be "conveyed to the pier in small boats" from the steamships that took

them across the Mediterranean.66 The guide covered only coastal Morocco, and services

to coordinate traveler's excursions to other cities, such as the Geographical Society of

Morocco, the Automobile Club of Morocco, and the Office of Tourism, did not exist

before the establishment of the Protectorate.67

The geographic survey and the romantic narrative are two very different genres of

travel writing. And Charles de Foucauld and Pierre Loti set out on two very different missions: Foucauld to map Morocco because it lay adjacent to the French empire and

Loti to preserve traditional Moroccan life in the pages of his book. On one hand,

Foucauld, if a bit vainglorious upon his return to France, is self-effacing in his writing,

disguised as a rabbi so that he can travel deep into Morocco to chart its contours. He is

directly engaged with the landscape. On the other hand, Loti writes himself and his "half-

Arab soul" prominently into Au Maroc, creating an ironic situation in which his own

presence is a harbinger of the modernization of Morocco he seems to be writing against.

Foucauld produces detailed maps and drawings of the Moroccan landscape because

Morocco is geopolitically significant, situated along the Algerian frontier of the French

65 Loti, 1. 66 Baedeker, Karl. The Mediterranean: Seaports and Sea Routes including Madeira, the Canary Islands, the Coast of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Handbook for Travellers. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911, 98. 67 Ricard, Prosper, ed., Le Guide Bleu, Maroc. Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1919, 33. empire. Loti, on the other hand, travels through space and imaginary time and reconstitutes both in his text. The tensions between these two works, one a piece of scientific writing and the other a romantic portrayal of a picturesque dreamscape, hint at the problem of representing the Orient that Edith Wharton, Prosper Ricard, and

Wyndham Lewis will face in the first half of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER TWO

Dépaysement au Maroc: Edith Wharton and the Modern Western Traveler in the Protectorate Era, 1917-1927

Introduction: Moroccan Holiday

In 1917, the American novelist Edith Wharton embarked on a month-long sight- seeing tour of Morocco. During World War I, Wharton did relief work with the French

Red Cross and wrote a series of magazine articles about her experiences at the front.

From 1914 to 1918, she had only one "real holiday"; in 1917, General Lyautey invited her to Rabat to visit an industrial exhibition there.68 Wharton's eager anticipation is

evident in her personal correspondence with friends written before she embarked on her

trip. Her excitement appears to have stemmed from an imaginary Morocco, shaped

largely by French writers and travelers, and from her own travel in Algeria, Tunisia, and

Turkey in 1914.

In a letter to André Gide dated August 10, 1917, Wharton thanks the French

author for sending her a copy of his 1902 novel L'Immoraliste, in which a young, wealthy

archaeologist spends his convalescence from a serious illness in Biskra, Algeria. She

acknowledges the timeliness of the gift, which arrives as she is preparing for her trip to

Morocco. She writes: "Your beautiful evocation of the desert that I have loved so much,

instead of re-awakening my nostalgia, will give me an advance-taste of what is waiting for me there."69 Here Wharton draws a distinction between nostalgia, or yearning for a remembered (or imagined) past, and travel. Nostalgia is displacement in time, and travel

68 Edith Wharton. A Backward Glance. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933, 357. Lyautey had organized one of these exhibitions in a different Moroccan city each year since 1914, to demonstrate the continued might of France's administrative capacities despite being engaged in war. 69 R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis, eds. The Letters of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988, 397. is displacement in space. For Wharton, literature can influence both; it can work forward

or backward. Gide's depiction of the desert resonates with Wharton's own recollection of

it and gives her a new set of memories and images that will inform her own experience of

Morocco. She expects Gide's literary description to translate into her actual experience.

This is the story of the shift from armchair travel to international tourism. It is the

story of the American/European experience of Morocco as a geographic locality, heavily

mediated by imaginings produced by literary representations as well as the corrective

lenses (i.e. Western forms of knowledge about history and culture, the guide book, and a

tourism infrastructure) applied to this unfamiliar and disorienting territory. It is the story

of colonial conquest, by the installation of roads, railroads, and hotels and an army of

tourists wielding cameras and guide books. This conquest transforms cities into "tourist centers" (Fig. 2).70 It objectifies all of Morocco for the tourist gaze. Despite its tangible

material reality, Morocco becomes a site of fantasy for the Westerner on vacation from

the demands of modern life. Wharton writes: "To touch the past with one's hands is

realised only in dreams; and in Morocco the dream feeling envelopes one at every step."

Morocco-as-dream is an apt simile, because it suggests that one's experience of Morocco

is bounded by one's own subjectivity, but that this experience can be intensely

disorienting and pleasurable. It also depicts Morocco as a figment of the Western

imagination, which is close to how it functions in Wharton's narrative.

70 Edith Wharton. In Morocco. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2004, 6. Most of the cities represented on a map of "the part of Morocco visited by Wharton" are labeled as "tourist centers," indicated by a circle with a black dot at its center.

Figure 2. "The part of Morocco visited by Mrs. Wharton," from In Morocco (1920).

Edith Wharton and the Cult of Privileged Travel: Algeria and Tunisia, 1914

On March 29, 1914, Wharton sailed from Marseilles to Algiers on the S.S.

Timgad. In a letter to the American journalist William Morton Fullerton dated April 9,

Wharton expresses the exhilaration she felt as a privileged traveler in North Africa:

"After hesitating whether we should start at dawn today for a gazelle hunt in the

mountains of Alabaster we decided, instead, to go to the Red Village of the Oasis of El

Kantara. Such are the opportunities that strew our path in this magic land!"71 Wharton

experiences Algeria as a site of adventure, thrills, and exotic sights. She characterizes it

as a kind of amusement park, with attractions set up for her personal enjoyment. As a

fantasy land, it is an antidote to the mundane reality of life in the Western world. She writes letters to friends recounting her cavorting, encouraging them to join her in North

Africa in the future by tapping into a class-specific collective consciousness that values the exotic, in both imaginary and material terms. For example, in a letter dated April 23,

1914 she describes to Gaillard Lapsley, an historian of medieval history, the impressive collection of gifts she is bringing home for him: "I have acquired for you in the bazaars here a precious phial of essence of sandalwood & sycamore....We spent a morning bargaining with a perfumer for jasmine, attar of roses & sandalwood essence, & came away so empoverished that I daren't go back into that 'Scrikh'!"72

In another instance of this shared fascination with the exotic and its

commodification for the consumption of wealthy Europeans and Americans, Wharton appeals to art historian Bernard Berenson by suggesting that he too could act out his imagined concept of the Middle East through travel. She describes Tunis, as a stand-in

71 Lewis, Nancy and R.B. Lewis, eds. The Letters of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988, 315. 72 Ibid. 320. for the larger non-specific Arab world: "One can't take two steps in the native quarter, the

amazing, unbelievable bazaars, without feeling one's self in an unexpurgated page of the

Arabian Nights! You must see & do it all with me soon!"73 For Wharton and her wealthy

intellectual friends, a tour of North Africa was practically a cultural imperative; it was a

necessary escape from the ennui and alienation of modern life. Wharton describes the contrast between the exoticism of the Maghreb and the unsightly industrialism of Europe in terms of her return trip across the Mediterranean from Tunis: "After our spicy days in the desert & the oasis, where everything is fragrant & balmy, it was a sudden plunge back into the good old European grime."74

Wharton speaks to the way in which one can become disoriented in one's own

familiar environment upon returning from a vacation: "I'm so dépaysee & lost in this

grimacing European crowd....Seriously, you can't think how depressing it is instinctively

to look away from people in the streets, instead of gloating on them as we've been doing for this last month."75 By contrasting the way in which she gazed upon North Africa as a pageant to the alienation she felt in Paris, Wharton presents travel in North Africa as a refreshing respite from European urban anomie. She describes her transition from the realm of the imaginary ("We have been passing through all the stage properties of the romantics") to the "reality" of the oasis of Ben Saada:

There we saw a sort of epitome of it all - the caravans of camels, the nomads, the wonderful white figures in the silent sun-baked streets, the brilliant violet-&-rose- &-orange women washing in the "oued," the Ouled-Naïls dancing ventriloquently on a white roof-terrace in the moonlight, their hands fluttering like tied birds - & all the rest of it. Then we tried to cross La Grande Kabylie, but there was snow on the passes & we had to turn back to Bougie. From there we motored yesterday across a kind of pre-desert, a high plateau, solemn & bare & caravan-seamed, to

73 Ibid. 318, in a letter to Bernard Berenson, dated April 16, 1914. 74 Ibid. 322, in a letter to Bernard Berenson, dated May 1, 1914. 75 Ibid. the red gorge of El Kantara, the gates of the Sahara. We slept there in an inn in the very neck of the ravine, between the scarlet cliffs & the yellow torrent, with a white moon hanging between the twin peaks, & the Mountains of Alabaster, flushed with sunset, to the south. - Then we came here, across them, this morning, into the real authentic desert heat. Everything quivers with it, & closed shutters & a tiled bath room seem better than love & glory - if one were offered that alternative!76

Travel becomes a cultural pilgrimage, marked by an arduous journey and by the

veneration of exotic people and dramatic geographic features. This is a rehearsed form of

worship, conditioned, in the case of North Africa, by European literary representations.

Wharton describes beautiful sights, casting them as exemplars in her Moroccan

production. She does not even need to describe the entire scene because the reader

already knows what to expect. A simple "& all the rest of it" suffices to portray the

picturesque, which effectively equates that which the reader is prompted to imagine without Wharton's description to that which would be conjured up by Wharton's vibrant word-pictures.

The Development of Tourism in Morocco

At least rhetorically, the French colonial association policy of the opening decades of the twentieth century re-prioritized the position of local culture in the protectorate. Lyautey writes: "In Morocco, and it is to our honor, we conserve. I would go a step further, we rescue."77 Nevertheless, the protectorate-era tourist continued to

follow scripted enframing procedures meant to interpret local culture in terms of

European expectations, updated to fit with the new rhetoric of the colonialists. Tourism was actually a major consideration in the plans for the expansion of the Moroccan cities.

76 Ibid. 316. 77 Hubert Lyautey, as quoted in Celik, Zeynep. "Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism," Assemblage 17 (April 1992):58-77. Lyautey recognized the lost opportunity to capitalize on tourism in Algeria when local

structures were demolished:

Nothing has been more deadly for the originality and charm of the Algerian cities, of so many oriental cities, than their penetration by modern European installations….Since the development of tourism on a large scale, the preservation of the beauty of the country has taken on an economic interest of the first order.78

Therefore, it was in the best interest of the French not to disturb the medinas so that their

"quaint charm" would attract tourists in search of the picturesque in Morocco.79 This

preservation imperative appears in the 1919 edition of Le Guide Bleu, Maroc, a travel

guide jointly sponsored by the Touring Club of France, the National Office of Tourism,

and the Alpine Club of France. Prosper Ricard, editor of the Blue Guide and Director of

the Office of Indigenous Arts, writes:

It follows that all of that which constitutes the local color of this country is conserved. And this local color is of an intensity and a charm that one searches for in vain elsewhere.80

He also highlights Morocco's unique combination of tradition (customs, monuments, etc.)

and modernity, specifically the blossoming of the villes nouvelles. This, Ricard writes, "is

the unforgettable and grand spectacle that Morocco offers to its surprised visitors." 81 The

"blossoming" of the new French cities did become a tourist attraction, as is evident in the case of the Bousbir quarter of Casablanca. The French began renovating this neighborhood, known for its brothels, or maisons closes, in 1923. They were aiming to

"suppress the debauchery" (supprimer la débauche), and rebuilt the area through the

78Hubert Lyautey, as quoted in Janet Abu-Lughod. Rabat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, 143. 79 The French excluded Moroccans from colonial capital and maintained control of the economy. Jean- François Clément, "Morocco's Bourgeoisie: Monarchy, State and Owning Class," MERIP Middle East Report 142 (Sep. - Oct. 1986): 13-17. 80 Prosper Ricard, ed. Le Guide Bleu, Maroc. Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1919, 28. 81 Ibid. "picturesque manipulation of traditional forms."82 Believed to represent "a vision of the

Oriental world...rendered in all its inegrity," Bousbir attracted tourists and writers alike as

a successful example of French improvements to Moroccan cities.

Morocco is presented as an awe-inspiring spectacle for surprised visitors, who could not have imagined its splendor from even the most sophisticated of literary

representations. The Blue Guide's message is that one must go to Morocco to find the

carefully conserved picturesque and a colorful ancient aesthetic intensified or thrown into

relief by the magnificent modernity embodied in the villes nouvelles. Ricard

congratulates the administration on its foresight and wisdom in managing to preserve the

traditional while installing modern technologies. The itineraries for each city develop this

gesture toward the valorization of the past: the ville indigene is a standard sight to see in

each of the major cities.

The French protectorate administration began promoting tourism actively in

Morocco after World War I. When Wharton made the trip across the Mediterranean in

1917, she encountered a number of difficulties as a result of "the temporary obstacles

which the war has everywhere put in the way of travel."83 In the original preface to In

Morocco, she writes: "Owing to the watchfulness of German submarines in the Straits

and along the north-west coast of Africa, the trip by sea from Marseilles to Casablanca,

ordinarily so easy, was not to be made without much discomfort and loss of time."84

Despite the installation of an extensive network of roads and railroads, Wharton explains that the war-time travel restrictions prevent "the tourist from instantly taking ship at

82 Jean-Louis Cohen and Monique Eleb. Casablanca: Mythes et figures d'une aventure urbaine. Paris: Hazan, 1998, 211. 83 Wharton. In Morocco, 23. 84 Ibid. Bordeaux or Algeciras and letting loose his motor on this new world."85 Wharton herself

only gained access "by favour of the Resident-General."86

However, after the war Morocco became increasingly accessible and comfortable for the tourist as an infrastructure grew up to accommodate the increasing number of

European and American travelers in the country. The Blue Guide identifies services

geared toward the traveler, including the Geographic Society of Morocco, which

organized excursions to the interior of the country, and the Office of Tourism in Rabat. It also mentions several Paris-based travel agencies that organized guided individual and

group excursions. The existence of these institutions marks the rise of organized

Mediterranean travel, which Wharton highlights in the preface to the 1927 edition of In

Morocco: "In the interval since my visit this guide-book-less and almost roadless empire

has become one of the most popular and customary scenes of winter travel - travel by rail

and motor."87 This was quite a remarkable development in the space of only a few years.

Like the French Romantic writers who had written on Morocco before her,

Wharton laments the growing presence of European tourists. Wharton casts herself as a

kind of historian, recording a pivotal moment in Moroccan history,

the brief moment of transition between its virtually complete subjection to European authority, and the fast approaching when it is thrown open to all the banalities and promiscuities of modern travel….Once that deluge is let loose, no eye will ever again see Moulay Idriss and Fez and Marrakech as I saw them (Fig. 3).88

85Ibid. 86 Ibid. Travel in Morocco was not as safe as Wharton claims, even after World War I. The French were still trying to pacify many regions of the country. They faced Berber resistance, including Abd el-Krim, who initiated a resistance movement against the Spanish and the French from 1917 to 1926, calling for an independent Berber nation. 87 Ibid, 15. 88 Ibid, 10. Wharton predicts that the advent of tourism in Morocco will forever change the character

of Morocco, and she takes it upon herself to archive what she perceives to be fragile

elements of the picturesque. Wharton demonstrates a particular disdain for the tourist as

opposed to the traveler; she considers the tourist to be a vulgarized, rapacious degeneration of the traveler who will exploit Morocco’s aesthetic fertility. She anticipates the imminent ruination of Morocco’s charm, and conveys this sense of urgency in a letter

to Bernard Berenson: "No one knows - yet - what North Africa is, & you must come &

find out before the Teuton hordes do. They are here in their might now, Achgotting over

everything, & in the museum I heard a beefy bridegroom point out a Silenius to his

Gretchen."89 For Wharton, the German tourists represent the vulgarization of travel,

which she perceives as a threat to her own wanderlust and its playground.

At the same time, however, Wharton is an active promoter of tourism in Morocco.

Her Romantic sensibility and her allegiance to General Lyautey are in conflict to a certain

degree. Her lyrical descriptions of the picturesque work on her reader's imagination and

present an enticing vision of Morocco as a site of sensory pleasure. In the opening pages

of her narrative, she describes the ease with which one can translocate through time and

space from Europe to North Africa and experience exhilaration:

The sensation is attainable by anyone who will take the trouble to row out into the harbour of Algeciras and scramble on to a little black boat headed across the straits. Hardly has the rock of Gibraltar turned to cloud when one's foot is on the soil of an almost unknown Africa.90

After World War I, travel to the interior became easier, and one could then know

Morocco in a new, ostensibly deeper way. Wharton is a pioneer of the touristic

penetration of Morocco, opening up new areas to her reader's imagination. She highlights

89 Lewis and Lewis. Letters of Edith Wharton, 322. 90 Wharton. In Morocco, 21. the unprecedented scope of her trip, asking: "When one opens the records of Moroccan

travellers written within the last twenty years, how many, even of the most adventurous,

are found to have gone beyond Fez?"91

As Wharton found out in 1917, travel in Morocco was rather arduous prior to the

advent of modern travel after the war. It required considerable preparation and an

entourage of servants, guides, and horses (or a car, in Wharton's case). In other words, a

trip to Morocco was a luxury, necessitating large expenditures of time and money, and as

such was reserved for the very rich or those on official missions. The journey supposedly

became much easier and more comprehensive in 1919, no longer restricted to Atlantic

and Mediterranean coastal cities. Now the traveler could venture deep into the interior of

the country "in absolute security" by rail or automobile.92 The reasons given in the Blue

Guide for visiting Morocco are manifold, ranging along a continuum of specificity from

"its markedly African aspect" to its "indigenous life" to its easy access to Europeans.

Moreover, the traveler can access Moroccan traditional life. The Blue Guide appeals to

this desire: "At the present hour, a new administration, prescient and sage, consolidates

the remnants of the past and makes an inventory of all that which deserves to pass into

posterity."93 Of course, Ricard is referring to Lyautey's social engineering, preservation

of monuments, and museumification of Moroccan arts. But it is important to note that the

Blue Guide itself functions as a kind of index to Morocco's past and present.

Getting One's Bearings

The travel guide can be read as a response to the European traveler's visual

disorientation in unfamiliar territory, because it provides the tourist with instructions for

91 Ibid. 22. 92 Ricard. 29. This statement is misleading in that the Rif War was underway by this time. 93 Ibid. 32. viewing the world. It is a device for corrective vision. It imposes a particular order, mapping out itineraries, giving the traveler walking directions, telling him what to look at and which doors to go through, letting him know what he can expect to see. The travel guide is meant to maximize the tourist's time, and recommends hiring a local tour guide to avoid wasting time. Essentially the Blue Guide instructs the traveler to exploit local knowledge to maximize the productivity of the vacation, highlighting the relationship between the prosperity of the metropole (represented here by leisure time that needs to be managed efficiently in the form of vacation) to indigenous labor in the colonies.

The Blue Guide directs the reader/user through, around, and into Morocco, providing him with maps and written directions. The organization of the text is instrumental in structuring the tourist's enframing experience. In the section on

Casablanca, it instructs the tourist to start at the Place de France, the point of departure for all of the itineraries it sets out (Fig. 3). The first itinerary, la ville indigene, guides the traveler on a walking tour of the medina, mapping streets and monuments. The Guide's user can trace and retrace his steps using these landmarks. Bolded words signify sights of interest, cuing tourist locate these landmarks on the accompanying maps.

Figure 3. Itineraries and map of Casablanca, from the Blue Guide (1919). In contrast to the Blue Guide, In Morocco is a guide for the armchair tourist,

meant to pique one's curiosity and stimulate the imagination. To simulate a virtual reality,

Wharton constantly reorients her reader, as she moves from desert to city, crowded city

street to courtyard to rooftop. She also orients the reader's perspective, allowing the

virtual tourist to look down upon picturesque Morocco from a bird's-eye - or conqueror's

- vantage. She rejoices over the way in which Lyautey has managed to modernize

Morocco without obstructing the tourist's view of its traditional appeal:

So skillfully, in fact, have the 5,000 kilometres of rail and road been insinuated into the folds of the brown hills, so tastefully and tactfully have crumbling Moorish palaces been transformed into luxurious modern hotels, that, from the vantage-ground of the new Morocco, the tourist may still peep down at ease into the old.94

Wharton describes the modernization of Morocco as the construction of a viewing

platform for tourists, facilitating their understanding of Morocco as a totality that can be

understood in a single glimpse (Fig. 4).

Figure 4. "Fez Elbali from the ramparts," photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au Maroc, from In Morocco.

94 Wharton. In Morocco, 15. Wharton does acknowledge the way in which her connections to the French

government allow her to see sights not accessible to the ordinary traveler. For example, in

a letter to Bernard Berenson dated October 2, 1917, Wharton clearly appreciates her

privileged tour of Morocco, explaining that she was allowed to watch a ritual dance in

Moulay Idriss "only because we were with French officers!"95 However, she does not

stray too far from European influence. While in Morocco, she and her party lodge with

Lyautey or his officers, and dine with them every night. She experiences Morocco by motor, from which her impressions are heavily influenced by her elite guides. In a letter to Mary Cadwalader Jones dated September 26, 1917, she writes: "We have simply floated about in Résidence motors, shown the Merimède ruins by the Director of the

Beaux Arts, shown the Exhibition by the General himself, & so on."96 Wharton is not at

all interested in "living as the natives do"; the fact that she and her party will be lodged in

the Resident's palaces "is a fortifying thought after one or two glimpses of Moroccan inns

on the way here!"97

On the other hand, Wharton is interested in glimpsing authentic scenes of traditional Moroccan life. While she rejects the ethnographic method of participating in the everyday lives of local inhabitants, she does want to see behind doors that have been closed to tourists historically. She derives immense satisfaction from her privileged glance into the sacred space of the mosque. She writes:

So far the best thing here has [been] walking around the mosque...at the prayer hour, & finding all the doors open, so that we could look in & see the whole perspective, not only of the courts but of the glorious mosque itself. It seems that they allow this since last year only, & as we had with us the French government

95 Lewis and Lewis. The Letters of Edith Wharton, 402. 96 Ibid. 400. 97 Ibid. 401. architect, whom they allow to go into the mosque to superintend the repairs, it was possible to linger & gaze as much as we wanted."98

Had she been an ordinary tourist, Wharton would not have been allowed into the mosque.

But because she had connections to the French administration, she was allowed to peek

inside.

Morocco in Books and Morocco as Book: the Literary Imagination and the Traveler

Books about travel reflect the cultural biases and established modes of seeing that people bring to their experience of a foreign locale. They anchor the adventurer in familiar, culturally rehearsed ways of looking. European and American tourists, whose minds have been molded by what they have read in books, maintain their grasp on the book, carrying it along to exotic destinations in the form of the travel guide. The guide can be seen as a response to getting lost; it is a way of keeping in touch with civilization; the book itself is an artifact, a consolidation of European forms of knowledge and observational frameworks, a strong symbol of modern travel. Viewing the guidebook as a cultural touchstone, it is easy to understand Wharton's preoccupation with Morocco's lack of guidebook, for how can one possibly come to know a country that has not yet been

"discovered" in European travel writing? Wharton writes: "It's so queer to be going to a country that has next to no books about it!"99

Wharton claims that she would have liked to write a guide to Morocco to fill this

gap, but was limited by time constraints (she had to get back to Tangier before the

November rains) and limited gasoline. Her account is meant to serve as a record of her

impressions of the country. Wharton explains that once the French succeed in making

Morocco safe for travelers, "all that remains is to tell the traveller how to find his way

98 Ibid. 402. 99 Lewis and Lewis. Letters of Edith Wharton, 398. about it."100 This is where the Blue Guide comes in. Wharton recognizes the practical limitations of her work, which she seems to think of as a series of snapshots of Morocco at a particular moment in time. In the 1927 preface, she writes:

It would be useless to try to turn this memory of the old Morocco into a guide to the new. Nor is it necessary. Since my book was written Monsieur Ricard's admirable Blue Guide has done for the traveller's curiosity what the beautiful new 'national' roads have done for his motor wheels.101

Just as the new French roads make Morocco more accessible to the traveler and dictate his or her path, the Blue Guide provides a structure in which the traveler can indulge his or her curiosity in a carefully bounded exploration.

In contrast to Wharton's narrative, which is meant to serve as a record of her impressions, the Blue Guide is meant to be useful. It describes its purpose as follows: "To describe the roads and cities, to indicate the most profitable means of visiting them, to stop the traveler in front of the most remarkable monuments, in providing him with several useful explanations."102 The Blue Guide helps the tourist, who is supposed to be almost passive, interpret the Moroccan scene, focusing his or her gaze on specific sights and explicating them. In this sense, Morocco, as seen through the eyes of the Blue Guide- toting traveler, becomes like a book.

Wharton develops this analogy: “To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines."103 Carrying this simile further, she describes Tangier as “dog-eared,” meaning that it has been written about by many travelers and is well-known in the collective Western imagination. In the book of Morocco, the section on Tangier has been read over and over

100 Wharton. In Morocco, 22. 101 Ibid. 102 Prosper. 32. 103 Wharton. In Morocco, 16. again. Wharton’s characterization of Morocco as an illuminated Persian manuscript

suggests that the content of the book is not nearly as important as its pictures; it is an

aesthetic object to be admired cursorily rather than contemplated. Its preciousness

appeals to Wharton's aesthetic taste.

Conclusion: Reading Morocco in Translation

In 1927 preface Wharton writes: "Morocco has been made comprehensible,

accessible and inviting."104 Implicit in this statement is the notion that Morocco was

previously incomprehensible, incomprehensible to the American or European tourist.

Wharton experienced a version of this inability to make sense of her surroundings when

she toured there in 1917. On the new road built by the French linking Rabat and

Marrakech, she experienced the anxiety of being denied familiar cultural reference

points. Once the Atlantic breakers disappear from her view as the road bends inland, she

remarks, "the sense of the immensity and immobility of Africa descends on one with an

intolerable oppression."105 Implicit in both Wharton's narrative and the Blue Guide is the

idea that if one gets lost in Morocco one will lose oneself forever:

Every detail of our trip from Tangier to Rabat had been carefully planned to keep us in unbroken contact with civilization. We were to 'tub' in one European hotel, and to dine in another, with just enough picnicing in between to give a touch of local colour. But let one little cog slip, and the whole plan falls to bits, and we are alone in the old untamed Moghreb, as remote from Europe as any mediaeval adventurer. If one loses one's way in Morocco, civilization vanishes as though it were a magic carpet rolled up by a djinn. 106

The conceit operating here is that if one gets lost or detached from Western civilization,

one will lose oneself to the immensity of Africa, to the fatality of the desert. This

complete disorientation is what these works are militating against, but also it is what

104 Ibid. 16. 105 Ibid. 103. 106 Wharton. In Morocco, 29. makes the journey so thrilling to begin with. This demonstrates the dialectic relationship

between orientation and disorientation in the modern subject, by which both can be read

as sights of pleasure. Certainly, the Blue Guide presents a carefully scripted Moroccan

itinerary to the European traveler. In fact, it takes its role as mediator of touristic vision

so literally that it advises travelers to bring sunglasses to protect their eyes from "a light

too intense, the glare and the wind full of dust."107

However, a certain degree of disorientation is acceptable, if not desirable. There is

a certain value in getting lost. In The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, Dean

MacCannell asserts that the tourists who "do in fact make inroads into the life of the

society they visit" are the ones who let things happen by accident and leave room for

chance.108 Wharton also saw value in being thrown off course, which can be seen in her

evaluation of the breakdown of her car: "It is a good thing to begin with such a mishap, not only because it develops the fatalism necessary to the enjoyment of Africa, but

because it lets one at once into the mysterious heart of the country."109 Ultimately, then,

the goal of the modern traveler - as prescribed by literature, guidebooks, and the structure

of tourist infrastructures - is demystification. But the grand irony is that in looking at

Morocco, which had been rendered up for the tourist gaze, through a tourist's eyes, so

much is obfuscated and decontextualized. Roland Barthes highlights this problem in his

criticism of the Blue Guide, which he views as a lens that mystifies more than it clarifies.

He writes:

To select only monuments suppresses at one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people, it accounts for nothing of the present, that is, nothing historical, and

107 Prosper, 32. 108 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, 97. 109 Wharton, In Morocco, 29. as a consequence, the monuments themselves become undecipherable....and the Guide becomes, through an operation common to all mystifications, the very opposite of what it advertises, an agent of blindness."110

In the rewriting of Morocco for the tourist, so much is lost in translation.

CHAPTER THREE

Filibusters and 'Double Images': Wyndham Lewis and the Tottering Facade of Western Modernity in Morocco, 1931-1932

Introduction: Wyndham Lewis's Desert Retreat

Seeking relief from the "daily spectacle" of "dying [postwar] European society" in

1931, the British writer and painter Wyndham Lewis decides he needs a vacation: "The sedentary habits of six years of work had begun, I confess, to weary me....The atmosphere of our dying European society is to me profoundly depressing."111 Sick and

tired of "the fumes and fogs of capitalism," Lewis sets out for the "beaten track."112 He puts his books in storage, dispossesses himself of the rest of his belongings, and purchases his tickets, eager to exchange - temporarily - his London life of arts and letters for a nomadic lifestyle in Morocco. He will "go back to the tent for a while."113 The

things he carries with him reflect the needs of the artist, the naturalistic observer, and the adventure traveler: magnifying glass, art supplies, insecticide, Arabic and Berber language instruction books, maps, medicine for treating dysentery, and a Kodak

camera.114 For him, "perhaps nothing short of the greatest desert in the world...would

answer the case. Yes, the Kalahari or the Gobi would be too little!"115 Lewis settled on proximate Morocco, expecting to awaken his senses with majestic views of the Sahara: "I

110 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972, 76.

111 Wyndham Lewis. Filibusters in Barbary. New York: National Travel Club, 1932, x. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. ix. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. x. would go to the highest mountains in Africa and look down upon the mirages of the great electric desert" (Fig. 5). 116

Figure 5. "Sketch Map," from Lewis, Filibusters in Barbary (1932).

116 Ibid. xi. Retreating from the political and economic problems afflicting Europe and

America in 1931, Lewis arrives in Morocco against a backdrop of intensifying Moroccan resistance to French control. In a letter to his London publisher dated February 10, 1934, he expresses his disdain for the Third Republic and its handling of the Moroccan

Protectorate:

The picturesque ridicule that I called upon...to assist me in my antiseptic mission - throwing into the most comic, unromantic and unattractive light possible...the types selected...to show the unsatisfactory operation at a distance of a crooked political system - this picturesque ridicule was...a satiric enterprise.117

For Lewis, satire is a mode of truth-telling that "will only appear 'grotesque,' or

'distorted'...to those accustomed to regard the things of everyday, and everyday persons, through spectacles couleur-de-rose."118 Lewis uses satire to demystify the mirages that have been fabricated to conceal the capitalistic exploitation of Morocco. He attempts to liberate himself from the circumscribed perspective of the European tourist by looking beyond representations of Morocco produced by Orientalist discourse and selecting unconventional focal points. He is searching for authenticity, or the persistence of traditional Moroccan ways of life in the face of expanding networks of capitalism and modernization. This nostalgia situates him firmly in the tradition of Orientalist discourse.

However, Lewis is also deeply critical of this discourse and refuses to accept its representations of Morocco at face value. His description of the country stands out for its engagement with the social, political, and economic effects of imperialism on the native population.

117 Lewis, Wyndham. Letter to Grayson and Grayson, Feb. 10, 1934, as quoted in Fox, C.J., ed. Journey into Barbary. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1983, xvi. 118 Lewis, Wyndham. Men Without Art. London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1934, 121. Charles de Foucauld, Pierre Loti, and Edith Wharton are the harbingers of the

imposition of Western modernity on Morocco. Foucauld goes into Morocco undercover

as a rabbi to map its roads and geographic coordinates with a clear understanding of the

geopolitical implications of his work. Loti writes about Morocco on the brink of its

official inclusion in the French empire as a protectorate, and waxes nostalgic about

traditional Islamic society. Wharton, writing once modernization by the French is already

well underway, insists that the traveler can still enjoy picturesque views and traditional

Moroccan culture thanks to Marshal Lyautey's efforts to preserve these elements. By the

time Lewis arrives in Morocco in 1931 Western influences have already become

embedded in the landscape. Lewis comes to Morocco searching for his own idea of

Oriental authenticity: the Sahara desert and its balmy air. To his great satisfaction, he

finds the Berbers and their magnificent casbahs (fortresses) and convoluted souks

(markets or bazaars) as yet uncontaminated by Western civilization.119 Everywhere else

he finds only flimsy Western representations of reality. He sees Morocco as a double

image - different representations of reality superimposed one on top of the other - rather

than as a neatly resolved picture.

Lewis loved to travel; he wrote in 1945: "To be rooted like a tree to one spot, or at

best to be tethered like a goat to one small area, is not a destiny in itself at all desirable. I

am just as much at home, if not more so, in Casablanca as in Kensington."120 According

to biographer Jeffrey Meyers, it was Lewis's habit to travel whenever he finished a book

119 The Berbers are an ethnic group concentrated mostly in Morocco and Algeria. Though stereotyped in the West as a nomadic people, most were actually farmers. Lewis describes them as the "agricultural indigènes" who inhabit the country, or bled. 120 Lewis, Wyndham, as quoted in C.J. Fox. "Lewis as Travel Writer: The Forgotten Filibusters in Barbary," in Jeffrey Meyers, ed. Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1980, 166. and "had either the money or a new commission." 121 In 1931 he was supposed to have

been writing his next book, The Childermass, but he would invest himself instead in his

essays on Morocco, which originally appeared serially in several British periodicals

before being published as a book - Lewis's only one on travel- in 1932.

Lewis considers himself traveler rather than tourist, characterizing himself as

more knowledgeable and adventurous than the mere sightseer. He emphasizes his original

intentions to enter the Sahara from the west, not wanting to tramp through Biskra "with

all the stupefying squalor of Anglo-American tourism about one, poisoning the wells and

casting its Baedekered blight."122 However, Lewis soon realizes that his planned alternate

route is impossible, because "where 'Rio de Oro' begins, and the French Zone ends, no

European can pass without immediate death or capture; and if the latter, there are, it

seems, fantastic ransoms accompanying that."123 This does not stop him from pushing as

close as possible to the Rio de Oro, into southern Morocco, or the Sous, which he describes as "a land so pregnant with plots and so overrun with lawless outsiders as to make a mere tourist's hair stand on end."124 Lewis is writing against a backdrop of increasing political turmoil in Morocco. The political situation that would make travel in this "unpacified" region so perilous is also fodder for Lewis's political commentary.

Marshal Lyautey's failure to prevent an attack by Abd el-Krim, the leader of the

Rif Rebellion (1919-1926), in 1925 on the French Protectorate led him to resign in

September of that year. Lyautey's style of administration was pacification through indirect rule, leaving intact existing social structures and governing through them.

121 Meyers, Jeffrey. The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980, 194. 122 Lewis. Filibusters, xi. 123 Ibid. xii. 124 Ibid. 111. Lyautey's successor was France's former head of armed forces Henri Pétain, who brought

a militant approach to his new post. He replaced Lyautey's model of political action

(small groups of troops in contact with local tribal groups) with military action, deploying

large numbers of troops and heavy artillery to conquer "unpacified" or "dissident"

territory. This attempt at direct control destroyed many of the rural social structures that

Lyautey had worked so hard to preserve, accelerating migration to the cities, where nationalist political movements would eventually foment.125 When Lewis arrived in

Morocco in 1931, there was continuing unrest in the Rif, despite Abd el-Krim's surrender

and exile, and the French were also trying to manage Berber dissidence in southern

Morocco.

Lewis's impulse to travel seems to have been rooted in his own restlessness and

pursuit of pleasure. In his trip from Paris - once the "Mecca of the high-brow

globetrotter" but now "at its last gasp as a pleasure-city" - to Marseilles, he perceives a

change in the sky, and pinpoints Avignon as the place "where traveling south the [blue]

sky can first be seen."126 This novel sight marks the beginning of Lewis's expanding

horizons as he makes his way to his ultimate destination of southern Morocco. He takes a

Mediterranean packet from Marseilles to Alicante in Spain and Oran, Algeria. From

Oran, he rides a passenger train from Tlemcen in western Algeria to Oujda in eastern

Morocco, then into Fez by bus. From Fez he continues to Marrakech via Casablanca, and

from Marrakech to Agadir in the southwest and further into the bled, or semi-wilderness, of the Sous area. Before he even crosses the Mediterranean, Lewis has brought his

125 Rabinow, Paul. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 318. 126 Lewis. Filibusters, 16-17. narrative into conversation with contemporary colonial politics or, in his own words,

"questions of great moment."127

Pierre Loti was unwilling to make this move. He bemoans the expansion of

European economic and political involvement in Morocco, urging the Maghreb to "stay,

for a long while yet, walled, impenetrable to new things, turn your back to Europe and

immobilize yourself in the ways of the past."128 However, he refuses to address

Morocco's political future, choosing instead to portray its threatened traditional culture, rendering static romantic verbal pictures akin to the paintings of Delacroix. His urgent tone seems to function more as a rhetorical strategy to captivate his reader and heighten the drama of his narrative rather than as a convicted anti-colonial call to action. Au Maroc is a begrudging submission to imperialism, not an outspoken resistance to it.

In contrast, Edith Wharton lauds the work of the French in Morocco, endorsing colonialism with what one critic has described as "propagandistic fervor."129 Her bold

stamp of approval was intended to gain support for French colonialism in Morocco,

stimulate its tourism industry, and possibly attract American capital. She seldom

concerns herself with the social and political issues facing Moroccans, waiting instead for

them to wander into their designated places in the picturesque scenes of her imagination:

In such a scene every landmark takes on an extreme value....The solitary tomb [of a saint's grave], alone with its fig-tree...puts a meaning into the waste. The same importance, but intensified, marks the appearance of every human figure. The two white-draped riders passing single file up the red slope to that ring of tents on the ridge have a mysterious and inexplicable importance: one follows their progress with eyes that ache with conjecture.130

127 Lewis in a letter to his London publisher dated February 10, 1934, as quoted in the introduction to Fox, C.J., ed. Journey into Barbary, xv. 128 Loti. Au Maroc, 365. 129 Wegener, Frederick. "'Rabid Imperialist': Edith Wharton and the Obligations of Empire in Modern American Fiction." American Literature 72(4) (December 2000), 783-812. 130 Edith Wharton. In Morocco, 26. Wharton sees in terms of broad landscapes in which objects acquire great significance

and people fade anonymously and mysteriously into the distance. Her project is not to

acquire any new knowledge about Morocco, because she has read extensively on the

subject, and that is enough for her. For Wharton, Morocco is about sensation. Her project

is to produce an artful record of her impressions; all she must do is look. She is interested

in traditional ways of life as they have been preserved by Lyautey. In 1919 she feared

that Morocco's "magic and mystery" would fade once it was "thrown open to all the

banalities and promiscuities of modern travel."131 But she reassures her reader in the

preface to the new edition of her book in 1927 that rails, roads, and hotels have been

tastefully integrated into the Moroccan scene, providing an elevated "vantage-ground of

the new Morocco" from which the "tourist may still peep down at ease into the old."132

Wyndham Lewis does not endorse colonialism, largely because "no 'native' population gets anything out of being a colony."133 Lewis is not certain whether the

colonized population is worse off, "but that he is no better off, but as badly off in another

and more complicated and unreal way, seems quite possible; and his irritation has to be

reckoned with, especially as people are always stirring him up to revolt."134 However, he

writes favorably of Lyautey's administrative style, using this as a point of contrast to the

political situation he observes. He liked Lyautey's "romantic politics":

To leave everything just as he found it - such was the policy of Lyautey....A really incredible scrupulosity has been shown in leaving Souk, Kasbah and village intact - except perhaps for a surreptitious house-drain or two, and numbers painted upon the doors of the houses of the Medina, to guide the postman I suppose.135

131 Ibid. 15. 132 Wharton. 15. 133 Lewis. "The Brothel of Agadir." as quoted in Fox, Journey into Barbary, 119. 134 Lewis. Filibusters, 171. 135 Lewis. "The Brothel of Agadir," as quoted in Fox, 115. Lewis protests the way in which "irresponsible, commercial and capitalistic" interests are trampling traditional culture.136 Lewis's travel narrative, Filibusters in Barbary, stands out for its engagement with these kinds of issues, and Lewis sees this engagement as germane to the integrity of his work. He writes: "Those are in fact the backgrounds - sociologic and political - of any account of Morocco that is more than a mere tourist's guide book."137

For the tourist, Morocco is simply what meets the eye. And the eye, of course, has been culturally conditioned to see in a particular way, to focus on certain elements in the visual field while excluding others. Wharton's eye tracks over the Moroccan scene in a predictable way, homing in on features that are made particularly salient by Western discourse. Her passivity probably would have led Lewis to think of her as an "almost eyeless historian" whose knowledge of European texts on Morocco overtakes her sensory apparatus. Lewis uses a mosque-tower in Marrakech as an example of an architecturally unremarkable structure with an undue amount of historical significance heaped upon it:

"The lyrical flights of fancy regarding it are aberrations merely of history over the eyes in the head."138 Lewis advises the traveler not to waste his or her time with the mosque because,

although you have to take your shoes off, and the place is dark, is of a most puritanical bareness, and thoroughly uninteresting....Not an important interior - though it has to be walked round for the say-so....Never fret because you cannot get inside them (it is forbidden). There is absolutely nothing inside!139

136 Lewis in letter to Grayson and Grayson, as quoted in Fox, xvi. 137 Ibid. Lewis uses the term Barbary to refer to the regions of Morocco inhabited by the Berber, but the term also has a connotation of piracy in Lewis's narrative. He describes the Spanish-held Saharan edge of the High Atlas, which he refers to as either Mauretania or the Rio de Oro, as a territory so perilous that "no Paleface can walk into it and walk out again, without paying a crushing ransom, becoming a slave, or being killed." 138 Lewis. 61. 139 Lewis. 75. Lewis is captivated instead by Berber casbahs and souks. Lewis admired Berber culture, and did not want to see it "capitalized and modernized" in the Machine Age.140

He writes to Naomi Mitchison: "These folks are the Barbarians right enough, and they build the most magnificent castles, upon the tops of cyclopean rocks, in the heart of vast mountains. They have to be seen to be believed....They are as brave as lions." 141 He worries about the threat European political and economic involvement in Morocco poses to Berber art and architecture, anticipating that the casbahs "a century hence, will probably have vanished - in a business-like way, from a charge of military dynamite."142

By focusing on Berber culture, Lewis asserts his new way of seeing Morocco. He

describes how, "in writing a popular account, a little touristic," he felt compelled "to

shake the reader's confidence in his easy asusmption that he knows without being told

who it is lives in Morocco."143 Lewis undertakes a sort of ethnographic study of the

Berbers, characterizing himself as a scientist whose "eye brought into action in this

informal field-work is in the head of a trained observer." He attributes his keen

observational skills to his painter's eye, asserting that "the painter is in a sense the perfect

naturalist." 144 He attempts to establish his credibility in terms of his attention to human

detail in "noting...gestures and expressions, instructively registering all that the most

accurate, 'pin-point sharp,' camera-image would register."145

Lewis considers this observational empirical approach, which hinges on his own

direct experience with his subjects, more legitimate than an historical approach. He

140 Lewis. 294. 141 Lewis. Wyndham. Letter to Naomi Mitchison dated July 11, 1931. Rose, W.K., ed. The Letters of Wyndham Lewis. London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 204. 142 Lewis, Wyndham. "Kasbahs and Souks - A Fortress Mentality." Fox, Journey into Barbary, 228. 143 Lewis, Wyndham. "What Are the Berbers?" Fox, 190. 144 Ibid. 191. 145 Ibid. 191. concludes that, while books may be useful in preparing for a trip, one cannot arrive at a

critical understanding of a place simply by reading about it. You could not really know it

through books. However, this does not stop Lewis from buying books and maps in

preparation for his journey in Morocco:

Before I set foot in the Maghreb I knew more about the inhabitants of, say, the hinterland of Tetouan than they know themselves....As a result of the preliminary preparation, I knew long before I put my legs across its back or had ever clapped eyes on it, that the ass of which the Berbers make such an extensive use is of Egyptian origin....That is the way it interests me to enter a country. I stepped on shore in Algeria better documented than most guides, although I had never so much as seen an Arab before, except in France selling carpets.146

This kind of knowledge is useful, insofar as "you must have a good smattering of the

history of Morocco, or more properly of Maghreb, to be able to breathe its balmy citron-

scented air intelligently" because "it is all meaningless and really rather silly unless you know what it's all about."147 As a reader of European works on Morocco, Lewis was

connected to Western discourse on the country. Beyond providing historical background

to the traveler looking to intellectualize his or her experience of Morocco, these texts did

not afford the sensorial richness of the actual place. In order to demonstrate his autonomy

as a traveler conducting an "unaided investigation with the naked eye," Lewis challenges

a statistic given in the Guide Bleu.148 He contests its demographic breakdown for failing to qualify Marrakech's 3,000 French as "French subjects," since many are not "of French blood."149 This suggested revision simultaneously displays Lewis's familiarity with the

body of literature relevant to the European traveler in Morocco and sets him apart from it.

146 Lewis. Filibusters,16. 147 Lewis. 61. 148 Lewis, as quoted in Fox, 191. 149 Ibid. 44. Lewis's travels in Morocco are characterized by his simultaneous dependence on

Western infrastructure and criticism of it. He relies on his connections in Morocco to get

around the country. For example, he crosses the Mediterranean on a ship "no

international tourists ever go by...it is the route used by officials and officers going on

leave and returning to duty."150 He needed to get permission from the French regimental

officer Captain LaCroix to travel by automobile and mule in the desert of the Anti-Atlas.

Lewis praises LaCroix for his shelves of books and apparent deep knowledge of

Morocco, but he expresses his distrust in the patron to whom LaCroix introduces him.

This patron, Borzo, is an Italian ex-legionary who owns the Splendide-Astoria Hotel in

the bled. Lewis uses his suspicion of Borzo to challenge the popular Western notion that

"in dealing with 'natives' one must expect...contemptible deceit."151 He uses sarcasm to

point up this false distinction between Occident and Orient and ridicule the loathsome

European filibuster: "All 'Orientals'...are mysteriously obstructive and untruthful! Britons

never! To tell about your adventures among Europeans in the same tone you would use

for adventures among 'Orientals' - that is absurd. - I have offended. I apologize."152

But Lewis is not always so aware of his own Orientalizing tendencies. These tendencies inform his fascination with Berber architecture. He describes the pleasurable sensation of passing from Casablanca into the South,

"into a more definitely African world....You find yourself in that part of the world that is least affected by the European....There in the South are to be found the densest souks, the greatest kasbahs, and a climate, too, which, approaching more to the tropical, brings in the banana and the date-palm as a natural part of the décor - thereby heightening the 'Islamic sensations,' with great novelties for the northern eye."153

150 Lewis. Filibusters, 21. 151 Ibid. 197. 152 Ibid. 198. 153 Ibid. 103-4. Here Lewis opposes north and south in a way that parallels the Orientalist opposition

between West and East. Lewis is enchanted by the souk, "the main feature" of Berber

life. His description of it demonstrates its exotic appeal to the Western traveler and its

place in the Orientalist's imagination:

The combination of lethargy and incessant movement is the first thing that strikes the traveler in these Moroccan bazaars, should he be as I was a novice in the Oriental picturesque. They are narrow cobbled lanes, often steep as well as winding, meandering in all directions, ending in covered markets; or they are open-air workshops doubling upon themselves, disappearing into tunnels or losing themselves within the lofty walls of private gardens. People swarm in them, and winged insects, especially where there are food stalls; mules, camels, and asses, with sacks of salt or flour, pass up and down them, or sometimes a merchant on horseback.154

Evidently Lewis's cynicism does not preclude the occasional Orientalist musing.

However, Lewis doggedly pursues his interest in casbahs and souks with an almost

ethnographic attention to detail that goes beyond the usual scope of Western colonial

discourse. He was convinced that these were such essential features of traditional

Moroccan life that he had intended to publish a separate book on the subject. He tried to

publish part of it as an article in a London-based magazine called The Geographical

Magazine, but the magazine's assistant editor rejected it for being "too learned, historical

and scientific" for their popular readership.155 In this example, Western colonial

discourse actually impinged on Lewis's plans.

There are other ways in which this discourse interfered with Lewis's freedom of

expression, either writing itself into or deconstructing his text regardless of his original

intentions. For example, a British official recognized himself as one of the characters

Lewis ridicules in Filibusters in Barbary and filed a lawsuit in libel. Lewis's publishing

154 Ibid. 63. 155 Lyall, Archibald. Letter to Wyndham Lewis dated February 21, 1935, as quoted in C.J. Fox, ed., Journey into Barbary, 188. firm withdrew the book from circulation. This legal matter did not affect the American

editions of the work. The illustration of the American edition with stock photography

rather than Lewis's own drawings is another example of the imposition of this discourse.

The frontispiece in the edition Filibusters in Barbary published by the National Travel

Club in New York City is a photograph of a street in a Moroccan souk (Fig. 6). The

shadows cast by the thatched covering form a cross-hatched pattern on the unpaved turf,

mimicking the lines of the covering. The anonymous robed figure in mid-step is caught in

the middle of this visual rhyme; the diagonal shadows cast on his garment weave him

into this tapestry of light and shadow. The caption reads: "The French have not attempted

to change the native cities of Morocco. Most of the thoroughfares remain as they have

been for centuries."156 The subject of this image is consistent with Lewis's fascination with casbahs and souks, but it is a much more simplified than the representations Lewis produced.

This photograph begins to set the stage for the tourist in Morocco. The picture's

perspective allows the viewer to adopt the photographer's position on this market street

somewhere in Morocco, about to cross paths with a "native". And the accompanying

caption assures the prospective traveler that he or she will indeed find many such

authentic scenes in Morocco, owing to the French preservation of indigenous culture.

However, it becomes clear early on in Lewis's narrative that none of the photographs in

the book are congruous with the text. For example, the next image, appearing in a chapter

entitled "Arab, Turk, Berber, Black, and Jew," has little to do with Lewis's ethnic

breakdown of the Moroccan population. In this photograph, a group of men lead pack

mules on a palm-tree lined road, presumably to market. The caption reads: "The roadway

156 Lewis. Filibusters, i. to Marrakech is lined with thousands of palm trees which are laden with golden clusters in the fruit season."157 Such images and their accompanying captions appear to have been included in the book not to illustrate Lewis's writing, but to resonate with the reader's idea of Morocco. They use a standard set of icons and a particular aesthetic (i.e. turbaned figures, mules and camels, sand, palm trees, light and shadow) to establish a generic desert setting.

Figure 6. "The French have not attempted to change the native cities of Morocco. Most of the thoroughfares remain as they have been for centuries," from Lewis, Filibusters in Barbary (1932).

157 Ibid. 48. It is ironic that the American edition includes these photographs given Lewis's criticism of photography as a mode of seeing in the colonial context. Lewis brought a

Kodak camera to Morocco, but its sluggish shutter prevented it from rendering clear images. Lewis describes the inefficiency and awkwardness of bringing clunking modern

technologies into the bled:

In Borzo's derelict car we charged across the Crazy Pavement and halted within snapshot of its walls, at my orders. A few tribesmen came up and gazed with awe at Borzo's car - their respect was not diminished by my hitting one in the face with the door, he having approached a little too near to observe me inside through the glass struggling to get out. I shot out, as the door flew open, camera in hand, the tribesmen scattering - except the one that was knocked down. I fiercely snapped the embattled village six times and returned to the car. As, however, I had bought the Kodak at a second-hand shop...the shutter worked on the slow side, and I have a double image of everything in Maghreb in consequence. (My camera was a fit mate for Borzo's car.)158

Lewis's anecdote suggests that modernity distorts vision. Lewis is bumbling through the

bled in this cumbersome car that obscures his view of the landscape. He has to ask his

Berber guide to stop the car whenever he wants to see a sight. And, for the modern traveler, seeing a sight means photographing it. Lewis cleverly comments on the violence of this photographic tendency, couching it in militaristic language ("we charged across the Crazy Pavement and halted within snapshot of its walls, at my orders"). Lewis characterizes his effort to photograph the casbah as a brutal assault. The camera comes between Lewis and the tribesmen, suggesting that this "scientific" way of seeing precludes the kind of naturalistic observation Lewis favors, whereby his painterly eye imprints his observations on his mind with photographic accuracy without the intrusiveness of the camera. The camera and the car also preclude mutual understanding between the tribesmen and Lewis: the man gazing through the window at Lewis gets

158 Ibid. 221. knocked out when Lewis, scrambling to get out to photograph the scene, hits him with

the car door.

Although this scene is meant to parody the modern traveler and his or her

technologies, it also demonstrates Lewis's preoccupation with Berber architecture. In his

eyes, casbahs and souks are some of the few remaining traces of authentic Morocco. He

appreciates their organic qualities, such as the way in which "the Kasbah art is also a part,

essentially, of the scene in which it occurs. The walls of the Kasbah are made of the

surrounding earth. When the is a red Kasbah, the valley in which it stands is a red

valley."159 He favors the "natural" development of the souks, built "in and out and up and

down" and composed of "untried architectural devices, delightful deformities and

structural freaks," to the rationalized approach to urban architecture he sees operating in the West. He writes: "The labyrinths of these ancient souks are far more imaginatively pleasant places to be in than is, say, Hoboken, across the ferry from Manhattan, or (on a small scale) the Casa boulevards)."160 Lewis sees Berber architecture as rivaling modern

Western architectural feats. For example, his casbah sketches illustrate the splendor and

monumentality of the structure, equal to or exceeding that of the Manhattan skyscraper

(Fig. 7).

159 Lewis. "The Kasbahs of the Atlas." Fox. 219. 160 Lewis. Filibusters. 68.

Figure 7. "A Kasbah in the Atlas," by Lewis, from Fox, Journey into Barbary.

Edith Wharton makes a case for French intervention in Morocco and the rebuilding of its cities on the premise that Moroccan civilization, while productive, is unstable and therefore not progressive like the West. She writes: "Elaborating exquisite monuments only to abandon and defile them...these gifted races, perpetually struggling to reach some higher level of culture from which they have always been swept down by a fresh wave of barbarism, are still only a people in the making."161 Lewis parodies this notion that the French are enlightening and fortifying Moroccan civilization, suggesting instead that they are hastily erecting fragile facades. This is what he sees in the

Casablanca that Lyautey has rebuilt. It is like New York, "semi-skyscraping, 'Block'-

161 Wharton. 157-8. built, as modern as modern,"162 but it is covered over with a "French colonial fungus."163

He writes: "The forcing operation whereby Casa has suddenly come to be is, upon all hands, starkly apparent. Its shell, the dazzling balanced plaster walls, what are they, the suspicious traveler asks, but a gigantic architectural confectionary?164 According to

Lewis, these modernization efforts work to create illusion for Western consumption.

Lewis describes the grand Excelsior hotel of Casablanca, built precariously on a river so

that the waste has to be pumped out of the basement everyday. Otherwise "the

subterranean waters would rise and submerge the guests and their Porto Flips in the

American bar" and all of the modern features of the hotel, including luxurious rooms.165

Lewis extends this motif of architectural instability into the sociopolitical realm, focusing on a sight that the tourist could easily overlook: the bidonville (Fig. 8).

Bidonvilles were agglomerations of petroleum-tin huts on the outskirts of Moroccan cities. He draws a parallel between the bidonville and the American Hooverville to illustrate the failure of capitalism in the West and the deleterious effect it is having on

Moroccan civilization. Lewis employs his signature sarcasm to point up the double standard by which the shantytown is considered acceptable for displaced Moroccans but not for unemployed Americans:

It is a parallelism which is, however, in no way dishonorable for the French, for their "Hobo-town" is the creation of born nomads, who are, by choice, the inhabitants of a tent or caboose. No capitalist laws could drive them out of these hovels. It is different in the case of War-debt Drive, in the Hobo-town upon the shores of Lake Michigan. There our White stock is being forced down into a semi-savage sub-world of the down-and-out....It is being thrown back into

162 Lewis. Filibusters. 93. 163 Ibid. 93. 164 Ibid. 95-6. 165 Ibid. 93. Barbary- not invited to issue out of Barbary into the advantageous plane of the civilized European life."166

Lewis's drawing of a bidonville hut, though rendered in the modernist style of painters

such as Matisse, is not merely a study of the interesting aesthetic formed by the circular

petroleum tins. Lewis is making a political statement in choosing to represent the

bidonville at all. Lewis meant for his drawings to complement his text, and so this

illustration would have been contextualized. Art historian Roger Benjamin asserts that

modernist aestheticization might "mollify" the "spirit of the colonialist venture" by

reorganizing "troubling subject matter into a supposedly neutral abstraction." 167 Rather

than abstracting the troubling subject into neutrality, Lewis abstracts it to call attention to

it and recontextualizes it through a verbal description of its sociopolitical significance.

Lewis used the conventions of modernist abstraction to make a commentary on the capitalist exploitation of Morocco by the West.

Figure 8. "A Hut of Petrol Tins," by Lewis, from Fox, Journey into Barbary.

166 Ibid. 91. 167 Ibid. 180. Conclusion: The Reality Effect

Lewis identifies cinema as another technology of the production of a double

reality in Morocco. Film production was "one of the uses to which 'the romantic policy' of Lyautey has been put, and one of the main resources of Morocco."168 In fact, prior to

his resignation in 1925, Lyautey had openly sponsored Franco-Moroccan film productions.169 In Marrakech, Lewis encounters the Irish-born American director Rex

Ingram and his film crew, which he considered "an exceptional opportunity of studying a

"sheik" on the spot, as it were - of observing the sham article in process of manufacture,

out of the raw material of the Real - the film sheik taking shape in contact with hundreds

of authentic sheiks."170

Dean MacCannell has written on the notion of staged authenticity in touristic

contexts. Linking up modernity with an interest in the "real life of others," MacCannell

applies Erving Goffman's model of the division of society into front regions (i.e.

reception offices and parlors) and back regions (i.e. kitchens and boiler rooms) to

tourism.171 He emphasizes how the front regions depend on the back ones: "A back

region, closed to audiences and outsiders, allows concealment of props and activities that

might discredit the performance out front....Sustaining a firm sense of reality requires

some mystification."172 MacCannell argues that, as a result of the division of social space

into these two realms of the staged and the authentic, people will naturally want access to

back regions. More specifically, tourists desire "an authentic and demystified experience

168 Ibid, 136. 169 Slavin, David H. "French Cinema's Other First Wave: Political and Racial Economies of 'Cinema colonial,' 1918-1934." Cinema Journal 37(1) (1997): 23-46. 170 Lewis. Filibusters.125. 171 MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, 97. 172 Ibid. 93. of an aspect of some society or other person."173 However, this desired experience can be

elusive and illusive, because "what is taken to be real might, in fact, be a show that is

based on the structure of reality."174 In Filibusters in Barbary, Wyndham Lewis represents Morocco in the colonial situation where most of what appears to be real is actually staged.

Lewis reveals his way of seeing the Moroccan scene in a riddle. In a tone of mock self-deprecation, he writes: "Politics I know nothing about. But I expect, if one cared to delve under the surface, that a hundred political currents could be found - perhaps even good healthy subterranean rivers."175 Lewis has tapped into these political currents: recall his description of the "subterranean waters" flowing menacingly below the luxury hotel in Casablanca. Lewis knows more about politics than he lets on, and he uses the concept of the double image to comment on the political situation produced by European and

American presences in Morocco. He fears the encroachment of Western processes of modernization on traditional Berber culture, calling for the cessation of military action

against the Berbers.

Lewis demonstrates how the changes that modernity has wrought to the Moroccan

landscape produce multiple representations of reality, with Western imaginaries and

ideals superimposed on existing Moroccan substrata. He is confronted with these double

images and must make sense of them, and he generally does this by exposing their

precarious superficiality. Lyautey's Casablanca is a sham city that will be swallowed up

by its own waste. Film portrayals of Morocco are false and only serve to perpetuate a

particular way of seeing that dates back to the Romantic Orientalists. For example, when

173 Ibid. 94. 174 Ibid. 95. 175 Lewis. Filibusters. 295. Lewis is touring Atlas casbahs with Captain LaCroix, they come across a film shoot,

observing "two armed horsemen approaching, one behind the other, with sweeping cloaks descending upon the backs of their horses....a gallant picture of the romantic heyday, by

Eugène Delacroix."176 For all his criticism of Western projections of reality onto the

Moroccan scene, Lewis occasionally filters the sights he sees through the lens of

Orientalism, using its language to describe casbahs and souks as playgrounds for the

Western imagination. But his preoccupation with Berber architecture also does political

work in suggesting that the Berbers have attained a high level of cultural evolution

independently of Western intervention. He celebrates their architecture as an example of

this cultural sophistication, portraying its organic monumentality as a parallel - if not

superior - achievement to the Manhattan skyscraper.

The ways in which modernity distorts vision is another major theme in Filibusters

in Barbary. Rather than aiding vision, modern machinery blurs it. Lewis's malfunctioning

camera produces double images. The old car in which he rides through the mountains

obstructs his view of the landscape. The colonial infrastructure that is supposed to orient

the modern traveler in Morocco can actually be disorienting in its presentation of

multiple competing renditions of reality. Lewis's strategy for coping with this new kind

of disorientation is to look to Berber culture, where indigenous tradition is not buried

beneath the garishness of Western capitalism and modernization.

176 Ibid. 233.. CONCLUSION

Rick's American Café

Created for the Paris, Lyon, Mediteranée railroad (PLM) in 1924 by an artist

living in Marrakech, a polychrome poster promoting Tangier tourism presents a selective

view of traditional Moroccan life (Fig. 9). The poster verbally emphasizes the port city's

location and climate, while pictorially it presents a selective view of the old medina,

reposing figures clad in traditional dress, sail boats, and a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables. The European presence is excluded completely. This advertisement sells

Tangier not only as a convenient and balmy vacation destination, but also as a site of

living antiquity. In the history of travel writing about Morocco, representations of the

country begin as focused studies of the contours of the land, transition to colorful

descriptions of tradition untouched by modernity, and finally become double images of

tradition blended with modernity. All three modes work to depict an alluring Tangier in

the travel poster, which is a means of packaging Morocco and displaying it in the West.

Displays of Morocco in the West changed over time, moving from titillating representations of the exotic to what Patricia Morton refers to as "hybrid modernities," or the mingling of traditional Moroccan forms with modern European ones. 177 Colonial

sections first appeared at French universal exhibitions in 1878, and had become fixtures

by the 1920s owing to their vast popularity. Taking their cue from these earlier successes

while also considering the contemporary political climate, the organizers of the 1931

Colonial Exposition wanted to shift the emphasis away from the spectacular and toward

the nationalistic, envisioning an event that would feel less like a carnival and more like an

177 Morton, Pat. "A Study in Hybridity: Madagascar and Morocco at the 1931 Colonial Exposition." Journal of Architectural Education 52(2) (November 1998): 76-86

Figure 9. Polychrome poster for PLM (1924), from Excursions en Orient.

edifying experience. The Exposition was intended to showcase the positive effects of colonization. One of the organizers described the logic behind the new concept:

In 1910, we naturally turned toward exoticism, then in full novelty. We dreamed of renewing, with more brilliance, and also more sincerity, the picturesque ambiance - although quite false and sometimes excessive - that had made the success of the colonial sections at the Expositions of 1878, 1889, and 1900....Why not transport, once again, in a larger setting, this vision of the Orient and the Far East into the middle of Paris?...

The initial conception of an Exposition of Exoticism was enriched, amplified, led toward more elevated goals. It was no longer a matter of artificially reconstituting an exotic ambiance, with architectural pastiches and parades of actors, but of placing an impressive summary of the results of colonization, its present realities, its future, under the eyes of its visitors.178

As Pat Morton argues, while it was necessary to differentiate the pavilions that represented French civilization from the ones that represented the colonies so as to preserve the racial hierarchy underlying the logic of colonialism, it was also imperative to show the partial civilization attained by colonial peoples so as to demonstrate the positive influence of the French. The French devised a clever solution to this problem: the exteriors of the structures in the colonial pavilions would remain "savage and unchanged by colonization," while the interiors would be "partially civilized."179

The history of film representations of Morocco reflects the changing trends in

Western representations of Morocco in travel writing. Popular with French middle-class audiences beginning in the late nineteenth century, actualités, or real-life scenes including documentaries of the colonies, functioned as visual propaganda, teaching the

French public about its overseas empire.180 These films, sometimes referred to as

178 Olivier, Marcel. "Introduction," Rapport général, vol. 1; pp.xi-xiii, as quoted in Morton, "Study in Hybridity," 76. 179 Ibid. 180 Slavin, David H. "French Cinema's Other First Wave: Political and Racial Economies of Cinéma colonial, 1918 to 1934." Cinema Journal 37(1) (Fall 1997): 23-46. geographic films, documented people and their habitats, using the allure of the exotic to

compete with Hollywood productions. What French filmmakers had that Hollywood did

not was easy access to Africa, and this encouraged French directors "to break out of the

studio" and film on location.181 This emphasis on place in early French film parallels the

specificity of place that is germane to Charles de Foucauld's Reconnaissance au Maroc.

Although Foucauld's geographic survey is a serious study of Moroccan topography, it

also contains an element of adventure: Foucauld was disguised as a rabbi, risking his life to map all of Morocco for the French.

With the embedment of a tourism industry infrastructure in Morocco after it became a French Protectorate in 1912, representations of the country in film and in travel writing aestheticize the landscape for the Western gaze and become about touring the place. French film critics praised French colonial films for their sensitive depiction of

Moroccan culture and for their authenticity in contrast to American films about the

Islamic world filmed in Arizona masquerading as the Sahara.182 French films often

promoted tourism by including scenes of passengers disembarking from ocean liners at

modernized North African ports, thereby functioning as "thinly disguised travel posters

for the Compagnie transmediteranée."183 But these films could also convincingly portray

Morocco owing to Lyautey's endorsement of Franco-Moroccan film productions.

Lyautey's native affairs officers helped film crews travel safely in Morocco, scout

locations, and recruit thousands of extras for elaborate battle scenes. They even had

access to the interior spaces of the sultan's palace.

181 Ibid. 182 Ibid. 183 Ibid, 31. Edith Wharton's In Morocco and the Blue Guide also represent Morocco as an aesthetic construct rendered up for the Western traveler's gaze. Wharton uses modernity as a conduit to traditional Moroccan life, in much the same way French films juxtapose footage of passengers disembarking from ocean liners at modernized ports with spectacular battle scenes. Ironically, Wharton depends on the automobile to get to the part of Morocco untouched by Europeans:

Luckily there are other things to think about. At the first turn out of Tangier,

Europe and the European disappear, and as soon as the motor beings to dip and

rise over the arid little hills beyond the last gardens one is sure that every figure

on the road will be picturesque instead of prosaic, every garment graceful instead

of grotesque. One knows, too, that there will be no more omnibuses or trams or

motor-cyclists, but only long lines of camels rising up in brown friezes against the

sky, little black donkeys trotting across the scrub under bulging pack-saddles, and

noble draped figures walking beside them or majestically perching on their

rumps."184

Wharton authors her particular aestheticization to exclude the trappings of modern society, rendering a picturesque image of Morocco. However, her narratorial presence in the scene combined with the fact that she is touring it by car paint a picture of Morocco not as an untouched premodern civilization but as a tourist attraction. The Blue Guide corroborates this vision.

Finally, Western representations of Morocco become about Europeans and

Americans in the place. For Wyndham Lewis, this presence is obtrusive. He wants to get away from the shams manufactured by Europeans and Americans, preferring the pure

184 Wharton, 25. forms of Berber architecture where tradition remains unmolested by colonialism. Lewis

indicts the American film industry, which fabricates double realities by, for example,

putting fake sheiks alongside real ones. However, the film filibusters exploit not

Moroccans but European and American audiences "quietly seated far away, in the

European film theaters and those of the U.S.A. - it is they who absorb all the childish sheikery, the sweet-toothed and soft-brained city-mobs - their minds parched in the

vulgar emptiness of the false-dust."185 The American film Casablanca (1942), directed

by Michael Curtiz, exemplifies the way in which Western representations of Morocco

become about Europeans and Americans in the place rather than the place itself. The film is a love story, between an American expatriate and his former lover in occupied North

Africa. The tagline emphasizes the subordination of Casablanca as a place to the central romance: "They had a date with fate in Casablanca!" The film orients the viewer geographically with a map illustrating Morocco's position as a way station for Europeans fleeing the Germans and seeking refuge in America. Geographic significance already established, its material significance is encapsulated in a studio set that represents the gate, the city, and the airport. These visual cues are enough to tap into the Morocco of the

American mind, a mysterious and sinister backdrop against which "conflict and intrigue"

can play out.186 The specificity of Casablanca is vaguely constituted by a set. Rick's

American Café is the scene of most of the action, the foreground against the transgressive

and ill-defined space of the Moroccan background (Fig. 10). Although the mode of

representation may change, the basic format of Western representations of Morocco

remains fixed: the double frame.

185 Ibid, 134. 186 Cohen, Jean-Louis and Monique Eleb. Casablanca: Mythes et figures d'une aventure urbaine. Paris: Hazan, 262-63. Figure 10. Film still from Casablanca (1942).

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

1.) The travel narratives of Charles de Foucauld, Pierre Loti, Paul Lemoine, Edith Wharton, and Wyndham Lewis follow. The texts of Foucauld and Lemoine are geographic surveys, using a scientific approach to mapping the Moroccan terrain with an awareness of its geopolitical significance. The works of Loti, Wharton, and Lewis are descriptions of the authors' personal experiences and impressions of Morocco without an exclusive, explicit scientific or political purpose. The 1932 Lewis text is the American edition of the collection of essays Lewis intended to publish together, while the version edited by C.J. Fox is a compilation of a variety of texts that Lewis did not necessarily intend to publish together. I include two separate editions of In Morocco as well, because the earlier one contains photographs that are absent from the most recent publication.

Foucauld, Charles de. Reconnaissance au Maroc, 1883-1884. Paris, Challamel et CIE, Editeurs, Librairie Coloniale, Paris, 1888.

Lemoine, Paul. Mission dans le Maroc occidental: Rapport au Comité du Maroc. Paris:Comité du Maroc, 1905.

Lewis, Wyndham. Filibusters in Barbary. New York: National Travel Club, 1932.

Lewis, Wyndham. Journey into Barbary. Ed. C.J. Fox. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1983.

Wharton, Edith. In Morocco. 1920. New York: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2004.

Wharton, Edith. In Morocco. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920.

2.) The personal correspondence of Wharton and Lewis with friends and colleagues was useful in obtaining more information on the circumstances of their travel, their responses to it, and the popularity of such travel among contemporary intellectuals.

Lewis, R.W.B. and Nancy Lewis, eds. The Letters of Edith Wharton. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988, 397.

Rose, W.K., ed. The Letters of Wyndham Lewis. London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 204.

3.) Wharton's autobiography, which contains several references to her travels in Algeria and Morocco, and Lewis's work on modernism, politics, and aesthetics provided biographical information and further context for their travel writing.

Edith Wharton. A Backward Glance. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933.

Lewis, Wyndham. Men Without Art. London: Cassell & Company Limited, 1934. 4.) The following are travel guidebooks. While Baedeker's guide to the Mediterranean includes the Moroccan coast, Ricard's is the first to be written exclusively on Morocco. In addition to practical guidance and advice for travelers including itineraries and maps, both guides provide information on topics such as regional and national history, culture, climate, and economy.

Baedeker, Karl. The Mediterranean: Seaports and Sea Routes including Madeira, the Canary Islands, the Coast of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Handbook for Travellers. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Ricard, Prosper, ed. Les Guides bleus, Maroc. Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1919.

5.) The Harvard University Fine Arts Museum houses a beautiful collection of color travel posters, most dating to the 1920s and promoting tourism in the Arab world. Many of the posters also advertise a particular transportation company, such as the Paris-Lyon- Mediterranée railroad, or mode of transportation. This collection contains two posters promoting travel to Morocco, one of which portrays Tangier and is included in this thesis and the other of which depicts an ocean liner called "Maréchal Lytautey."

Badr. Excursions en Orient : 24 reproductions d’affiches de tourisme et de voyage. Lebanon: al-Layali, 2000.

Secondary Sources

1.) My analysis of travel writing in the colonial situation draws on theoretical work on the Western experience of the non-Western world and the ways in which the non-Western world gets rendered up for the Western gaze. The following texts informed my discussion of nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual culture, with an emphasis on the universal exposition. The Mabire text includes a number of photographs of the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900. Tony Bennett's and Timothy Mitchell's theories about exhibition and its relationship to the viewer were particularly useful to me in formulating parts of Chapter One:

Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge,1995.

Celik, Zeynep. Displaying the Orient: Architecture and Islam at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Mabire, Jean-Christophe. L'Exposition Universelle de 1900. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000.

Mitchell, Timothy. “The World as Exhibition.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (April 1989): 217-236.

2.) The following theoretical texts discuss Western modes of representing the Orient in colonial discourse. The works of Benjamin, Pratt, and Said were most useful to me in identifying these modes of discourse in the travel writing I focus on. Benjamin's work was instructive in many ways, as his approach to the history of European painting in the colonial situation was similar to my approach to travel writing. I drew upon him directly in my discussion of Matisse in the Introduction, and he also helped me situate Wyndham Lewis in the context of modernism. I used Pratt to frame my discussion of eighteenth- century natural history and travel writing in Chapter One. Said continues to be of critical importance to any work on Western representation of the Orient.

Benjamin, Roger. Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880-1930, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

Slavin, David H. "French Cinema's Other First Wave: Political and Racial Economies of Cinéma colonial, 1918 to 1934." Cinema Journal 37(1) (Autumn 1997): 23-46.

Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Morton, Pat. "A Study in Hybridity: Madagascar and Morocco at the 1931 Colonial Exposition." Journal of Architectural Education 52(2) (November 1998): 76- 86.

3.) The following texts offer different approaches to the historical study of tourism. Buzard and, to a certain degree MacCannell, write on issues of tourism and class, which informed my thinking about Edith Wharton and the "cult of privileged travel" I describe in Chapter Two. MacCannell's theory of tourism, in which he posits the division of society into front and back regions, was useful in dealing with the notion of authenticity in the context of travel and tourism. Mazower's book, specifically Chapter 9 entitled "Travelers and the European Imagination," helped launch my inquiry into the ways in which imagination is culturally mediated and how it plays into the traveler's experience of a foreign destination.

Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Devauges, Jean-Denys, ed. Le Voyage en France: Du Maître de Poste au Chef de Gare, 1740-1914. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997.

MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Mazower, Mark. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430-1950. New York: Knopf, 2005.

4.) The following texts were helpful to me in writing my historical background on French colonialism in Morocco. Cohen, Wright, and Rabinow describe Lyautey's association policy (which emphasized the preservation of traditional Moroccan art, architecture, and social structures) in terms of Moroccan cities as laboratories for French urbanism. These texts link up the imperative to preserve tradition with tourism.

Cohen, Jean-Louis and Monique Eleb. Casablanca: Mythes et figures d'une aventure urbaine. Paris: Hazan, 262-63.

Cooke, James J. "Lyautey and Etienne: The Soldier and the Politician in the Penetration of Morocco, 1904-1906." Military Affairs 36 (1972): 14-18.

Hoisington, William A. The Casablanca Connection: French Colonial Policy, 1936 1943. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Rabinow, Paul. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Wendel, Hugo C.M. "The Protege System in Morocco." The Journal of Modern History 2(1) (1930): 48-60.

Wright, Gwendolyn. "Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, 1900-1930." The Journal of Modern History 59 (2): 291-316.

5.) These texts offer criticism of Lewis's and Wharton's travel writing. Contrary to my claim, Meyers argues that Lewis's engagement with Morocco was not political. Wegener traces the imperialist strain in Wharton's In Morocco.

Meyers, Jeffrey, ed. Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1980.

Meyers, Jeffrey. The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

Wegener, Frederick. "'Rabid Imperialist': Edith Wharton and the Obligations of Empire in Modern American Fiction." American Literature 72(4) (2000): 783- 812.