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Popular attractions: Tourism, heterosexuality, and sites of American culture Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Brigham, Ann Elizabeth Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 05/10/2021 09:16:53 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/284560 INFORMATION TO USERS This mamiscript has been reproduced from the microfihn master. UMI films the text directly fiom the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter &ce, i^e others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. 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Contact UMI directly to order. UMI ABell &Hiowell Infbnnatioii Company 300 Noith Zeeb Road. Ann Aibor MI 48106-1346 USA 313^61-4700 800/521-0600 POPULAR ATTRACnONS: TOURISM, HETEROSEXUALITY, AND SITES OF AMERICAN CULTURE by Ann Elizabeth Brigham Copyright © Ann Elizabeth Brigham 1999 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGUSH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 1999 DMJ Ntunber: 9927453 Copyright 1999 by Brigham, Ann Elizabet±i All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9927453 Copyright 1999, by UMI Company. Ail rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Artrar, MI 48103 2 THE DNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA « GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Elizabeth Brigham entitled Popular Attractions: Tourism, Heterosexuality, and Sites of American Culture and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy nger Date Barbara A. Babcock Date 3-- S/ - 9-9 Meg Lota Brown Date S-3''97 Susan ii. Aike Date udith Roof Date Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copy of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. sertAtion Direct ,ynda Zwinger Date 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgement of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation firom or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. 4 Acknowledgements Time is a precious conmiodity, especially when writing a dissertation. I want to thank the University of Arizona Graduate College for awarding me a Dean's Fellowship for the 1997-98 academic year. That time enabled me to finish this project under the best of circumstances. I also want to thank the English Department, especially Marcia Marma, for its support, both in the form of material resources and invaluable advice. Ed Dryden, editor of the Arizona Quarterly, gave me a wonderful job with a generous schedule. Finally, this dissertation benefits immensely from the people who contributed to the shape of its ideas—Lynda Zwinger, Susan Hardy Aiken, Barbara Babcock, Mary Pat Brady, Meg Lota Brown, Sallie Marston, Judith Roof, Ruthe Thompson, and Tom Williams. 5 For my mother, Mary Brigham, and my father, Robert Brigham Who always made me feel both complete and full of endless possibility 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT 7 INTRODUCTION 9 1. TOURING MEMORIAL HALL: CONTENTIOUS CARTOGRAPHY IN HENRY JAMES' THE BOSTONIANS 28 2. UNCANNY TOURS: THE RETURN HOME AS SIGHTSEEING IN THE PRINCESS CASAMASSIMA 61 3. IN PURSUIT OF ROMANCE: THE FREE WOMAN, THE WORKING CLASS, AND ROUTES OF INDEPENDENCE IN SINCLAIR LEWIS' ROAD NOVEL FREE AIR 89 4. GOING BEHIND THE SCENES: PERFORMING PRODUCTION AS A CONSUMING ATTRACTION IN STEPHEN SPIELBERG'S JURASSIC PARK AND AT UNIVERSAL STUDIOS HOLLYWOOD 112 5. SMUGGLING VIOLENCE: TOURISM AND COLONIALIST-CAPITALIST ENTERPRISE IN JAMAICA KINCAID'S A SMALL PLACE AND LESLIE MARMONSILKO*SALAMiVACOF7H£:D£>i£) 157 WORKS CITED 183 7 ABSTRACT "Popular Attractions: Tourism, Heterosexuality, and Sites of American Culture" investigates the serious business of pleasure, analyzing the circuits of desire that link stories of tourism and heterosexuality. I assert that the core impulses of tourism persistently shape American identity. Though the technology changes, the story perseveres: subjects leave the familiar behind in order to find themselves elsewhere. Quite simply, they ground themselves through movement. Tracing protagonists' upward and outward movements, I argue that the preservation of the American myth of mobility requires multiple conquests—geographical, cultural, sexual, ethno-rzicial, and economic. Examining literary narratives and tourist trends from the nineteenth- and twentieth- centuries, I suggest how a changing rhetoric of productivity anchors and threatens the parameters of pleasure. As the erotics of sightseeing dovetail with those of heterosexual romance, a twinned desire for defamiiiarization and domestication emerges. The subject simultaneously yearns for mobility and placement. I conclude that the narrative patterns of fiction, film, and popular tourist sites generate and capitalize on the queasiness produced by this dual desire. As feminist geographer Doreen Massey has noted, social relations "necessarily have a spatial form" (120). The narratives of geographical movement I discuss romance the possibility of new social intimacies with ambivalent results, as indicated by the repeated erasure, revision, and defense of multiple boundaries. In the introduction I analyze Lynne Tillman's novel Motion Sickness to challenge the assumption that the 8 objectives of tourism and heterosexuality are to produce and maintain a self different from an other. Indeed, while sightseeing and heterosexual seduction both promise the pleasures of inhabiting an other's locale, they also expose the impossibility of defining differences between familiar and foreign. Considering these issues in works by Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Spielberg, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Silko, and Lynne Tillman, and the tourist destinations represented in them, succeeding chapters analyze the reassuring and continuous constructions of binaries like home/away, distance/intimacy, and familiar/strange, illuminating their instability by revealing how they become blurred, contradictory, or representative of seemingly disparate concerns. 9 DSTTRODUCnON "PARIS: I am in my hotel room, on the bed, reading The Portrait of A Lady, and nursing an illness I might not have" (Tillman 7). So begins the unnamed narrator of Lynne Tillman's travel novel Motion Sickness. Receiving a call from the Frenchwoman Arlette, the narrator admits the unexpected guest with a manner akin to her illness: "I both feign surprise at her visit and feel surprised, a mixed response for what might be a mixed get-well visit" (7). By the end of the passage, confident that Isabel Archer "has an end that must be worse than mine," the narrator doesn't "feel well enough to leave my hotel room. Except to go down the street for some bread. Or pain, as they call it here" (8). At this point, ushered into a world of indeterminacy and performativity, the reader feels dizzy, part of a rush of falsified images and unreliable impressions, multiple qualifications and hearty irreverence. Hardly the stuff of the conventional travel narrative, a story stamped with purpose, drive, and the vim and vigor of the entrepreneurial discoverer. Here, our (un)trustworthy traveler lies prone, sequestered, head in a novel—and not even a Parisian-authored one at that—only sneaking out for the pleasure of some pain. The unease that settles on the reader stems from the disjointed sense of what is simultaneously a tightly knit narrative. The story seems to start in the middle and stay there. For after the search for bread, the chapter moves to a string of locations: Istanbul, then Agia Galine, then back to Istanbul, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Agia Galine, and finally, London. All the while, the reader can't be quite sure about the order of the visits. The 10 first chapter ends with the narrator meeting an unknown American woman whose English husband has vanished: She begins to describe him and suddenly I know she's talking about Charles whose face rises out of the mist where I last saw him. It now seems appropriate that it was a sewer, if it was. I don't know whether or not to tell her ±at I saw him in Istanbul. I know I will, but this breakfast room, with its impatient waiters, doesn't seem the right place.