The Problem of Representation in European and American Travel Writing on Morocco, 1880-1940

[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

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