Views on Europe: Gender Historical and Postcolonial Perspectives on Journeys 9783110738780, 9783110734966, 9783110735529

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Views on Europe

Studies in the History of Education and Culture

Edited by Meike Sophia Baader, Elke Kleinau, and Karin Priem

Volume 1

Views on Europe

Gender Historical and Postcolonial Perspectives on Journeys Edited by Lilli Riettiens and Elke Kleinau

ISBN 978-3-11-073878-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-073496-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-073552-9 ISSN 2748-9531 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951797 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: perets / E+ / Getty Images Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Lilli Riettiens & Elke Kleinau Introduction: Views on Europe. Gender Historical and Postcolonial Perspectives on Journeys 1 Claudia Opitz-Belakhal Fictional and Real Travellers from Asia in Enlightenment Europe: Describing 11 European Habits and Culture Béatrice Hendrich Suat Derviş, Journalist, Novelist and Feminist: Texts Written in Germany and 29 Texts about Germany Nishant K. Narayanan “This Demolished Church was Equally the Face of Contemporary Europe” – Configurations and Representations of Twentieth Century Europe by Three 59 Indian Travellers Florian Grafl The Empire Writes Back. Views on Europe from Hispanic America in the 71 Middle of the Nineteenth Century Meritxell Simon-Martin The Inverted Mirror: Brazilian Hybridity and European Picturesqueness in 83 Nísia Floresta’s Travel Writing Cecilia Morgan The Minister, the Bride and the School Girl: English Canadians in Europe, 1860s – 1880s 113 Leila Gómez Family Album and Failure in Louise Bryant’s and Martha Gellhorn’s Travel Accounts in Russia 129 Miruna Bacali Beyond Geography: Europe as a Journey in Dumitru Tsepeneag’s Hotel Europa 147 List of authors

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Introduction: Views on Europe. Gender Historical and Postcolonial Perspectives on Journeys Until the 1980s, the history of travel was constructed and described almost exclusively as a history of “European,” male mobility, without, however, explicitly making the gender and whiteness ¹ of the travellers a topic. The focus was on the reconstruction of a history of white men – as a history of pioneers, explorers and “discoverers,” of missionaries, traders and officers. In German-language discourse, it was primarily feminist literary scholars, but also women’s and gender studies scholars from the fields of history and ethnology, who first addressed the topic of travel and gender and unearthed a considerable amount of travel texts,² primarily texts by white European women. In the early days of feminist travel literature research, an emancipation discourse dominated in which women travellers were stylised as “adventurers,” as “heroines,” and their journeys were interpreted as an act of liberation from narrow gender-specific limitations and as an unprejudiced openness towards “other” cultures or members of “other” cultures. The female travellers were said to have a “different” view of the country, the people and especially of gender relations on the ground, whereby the “different” view was often perceived as the “truer,” the more “authentic” view. In her critical reflection on feminist travel literature research, the ethnologist Ulla Siebert starts from the thesis that the desire for historical pioneers and the projection of one’s own wishes and longings onto the travelling women were partly responsible for

 White remains unmarked in hegemonic discourse compared to Black, which functions as a political self-designation in African American discourse and is therefore capitalised (see Adibeli Nduka-Agwu and Wendy Sutherland, “Schwarze, Schwarze Deutsche,” in Rassismus auf gut Deutsch. Ein kritisches Nachschlagewerk zu rassistischen Sprachhandlungen, ed. Adebeli Nduka-Agwu and Antje Lann Hornscheidt (Frankfurt a. M.: Brandes & Apsel, 2013), 85 – 90). This is to make clear that it is not an attribute. The italicisation of white is intended to point to the constructional character and privileged status of whiteness.  Wolfgang Griep and Annegret Pelz have identified 631 texts by and about travelling women for the period from 1700 to 1810. See Wolfgang Griep and Annegret Pelz, eds., Frauen reisen. Ein bibliographisches Verzeichnis deutschsprachiger Frauenreisen 1700 bis 1810 (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1995). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110734966-001

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these interpretations.³ The intentions that women associated with their travels were manifold: there were educational travellers, labour migrants, adventure seekers, even colonial enthusiasts who by no means concealed their racialising view of the country and its people.⁴ Early feminist travel literature research thus has numerous “blind spots”: it did not raise either the educated bourgeois or the Eurocentric and racialising view of the travellers to a critically reflected object of study. The Anglo-American discourse on women travellers was oriented earlier than the German discourse towards postcolonial studies,⁵ which in the last third of the twentieth century began to critically examine the “expansion of Europe” and its consequences and to develop readings that deconstructed the hierarchising categorisations of “the Rest” by European conquerors, travellers and emigrants.⁶ This research provided the impetus to uncover the mechanisms for the production and systematisation of “the West” and “the Rest”: categorisations of people, countries, bodies and spaces thus became legible as products of ongoing production processes that can be traced in their (historical) development. Until well into the twentieth century, the historiography of the “west,” which originated in Europe, defined the “other.” The declared aim of postcolonial studies is to break open this monopoly on the production of knowledge about those who are marked as “other,” “non-white,” “non-European,” and to clarify the significance of the “others” excluded in the discourse of power as a constitutive component of the “self.”⁷ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was the first to attempt to give voice to the marginalised “others.”⁸

 See Ulla Siebert, “Frauenreiseforschung als Kulturkritik,” in “Und tät das Reisen wählen!” Frauenreisen – Reisefrauen, ed. Doris Jedamski, Hiltgund Jehle and Ulla Siebert (Zürich, Dortmund: eFeF, 1994), 154.  See among others Wolfgang Gippert and Elke Kleinau, Bildungsreisende und Arbeitsmigrantinnen. Lehrerinnen zwischen nationaler und internationaler Orientierung 1850 – 1920 (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2014).  See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1992/2007); Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 1993).  See Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Formations of Modernity, ed. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 275 – 320; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).  See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Johannes Fabian, “Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (1990): 753 – 772; Trinh T. Minh, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

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Thus, postcolonial studies, as well as cultural and gender historical perspectives, have had and continue to have an enormous influence on questions of historiography or on historiography itself. Following critiques of Eurocentric perspectives, a shift emerged in disciplines working in history to no longer understand history as starting from a centre, but to tell instead of “one history […] many histories,” namely of all those “that fall outside of universal history because they do not have the power to create historical meaning.”⁹ Here, travelogues play(ed) a central role. As media of knowledge production, their effect on historiography, among other things, can hardly be underestimated, since they have and had the particular aim of guaranteeing the reading public a reading “in the ‘truth mode.’”¹⁰ It is and was their claim “to be read as an empirical, reality-based document, as narratio vera” – a claim that the genre has “not given up” to this day.¹¹ Despite different readings and added perspectives, it is clear that the literature on European travellers and their accounts still predominates and has become almost unmanageable. The question of “[w]hat is Europe?”¹² is also addressed, whereby Tabish Khair identifies two central levels: on the one hand, “‘Europe’ as seen from ‘within,’” on the other hand, “‘Europe’ as seen from ‘without,’”¹³ whereby the concepts of “within” and “without” can be specified again in our opinion. With a view to questions about and negotiations of (non‐)belonging as well as forms of re-presentation and processes of othering, a symbolic understanding of “Europe”¹⁴ becomes visible that transcends an exclusively geo-

 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 66 – 111.  Elke Kleinau, “Von der klassischen Sozialgeschichte zur ‘Sozialgeschichte in der Erweiterung’,” in Handbuch Gender und Erziehungswissenschaft, ed. Edith Glaser, Dorle Klika and Annedore Prengel (Bad Heilbrunn: Julius Klinkhardt, 2004), 287; emphasis in original.  Wolfgang Neuber, “Zur Gattungspoetik des Reiseberichts. Skizze einer historischen Grundlegung im Horizont von Rhetorik und Topik,” in Der Reisebericht. Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur, ed. Peter Brenner (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989) quoted in Tillmann Fischer, Reiseziel England. Ein Beitrag zur Poetik der Reisebeschreibung und zur Topik der Moderne (1830 – 1870) (Berlin: ESV, 2004), 38; see also Lilli Riettiens, Doing Journeys. Transatlantische Reisen von Lateinamerika nach Europa schreiben, 1839 – 1910 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2021).  Ottmar Ette, Literatur in Bewegung. Raum und Dynamik grenzüberschreitenden Schreibens in Europa und Amerika (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2001), 43; emphasis in original.  Tabish Khair, “A Multiplicity of Mirrors: Europe and Modernity in Travel Writing from Asia and Africa,” Indian Literature 52, no. 6 (2008): 211– 222.  Ibidem.  We put “Europe” as well as “non-European” in double inverted commas at the respective places in our introduction to mark that we also think of the symbolic meaning here.

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graphical meaning. Regions can be geographically part of Europe, but because Europe is often associated with “modernity,” “civilisation” and “the West,”¹⁵ they are not necessarily considered “within” on a symbolic level.¹⁶ Parallels are thus emerging with what Stuart Hall already noted about “the west” in the 1990s: “Europe” is (also) an idea, a concept. Similar to “the West,” “Europe” also “allows to categorise and classify societies into different categories. […] It is a tool to think with.”¹⁷ In the process, “Europe” also becomes “an image, or set of images. It condenses a number of characteristics into one picture. It calls up in our mind’s eye – it represents in verbal and visual language – composite picture of what different societies, cultures, peoples, and places are like.”¹⁸ In this context, travel movements to Europe, in which “non-European” travellers cast their view on Europe and formed their own image of “Europe,” appear particularly revealing. However, these still represent a research desideratum: little attention has been paid to the questions with which attributes these travellers endowed “Europe” and its people, which similarities and differences they observed and which idea(s) of “Europe” they produced.¹⁹ These questions

 See Hall, “The West and the Rest.”  See Bacali in this volume.  Hall, “The West and the Rest,” 186.  Ibidem.  With regard to “geographically non-European travellers,” see among others: Lilli Riettiens, Doing Journeys; David B. MacDonald and Mary-Michelle DeCoste, eds., Europe in Its Own Eyes, Europe in the Eyes of the Other (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014); Maghmeh Sohrabi, Taken for wonder: nineteenth century travel writing from Iran to Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Bekim Agai and Zita Á. Pataki, eds., Orientalische Reisende in Europa. Europäische Reisende im Nahen Osten: Bilder vom Selbst und Imaginationen des Anderen (Berlin: EB Verlag, 2010); Tabish Khair, “A Multiplicity of Mirrors,” 211– 222; Tabish Khair, Other Routes. 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing (Oxford: Signal Books in collaboration with Indiana University Press, 2005/2006); Sandra Ponzanesi and Habed Adriano José, eds., Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe: Critics, Artists, Movements, and their Publics (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018); Nabil Matar, “Europe through Eighteenth-Century Moroccan Eyes,” Journal of Comparative Poetics 26, Wanderlust: Travel Literature of Egypt and the Middle East (2006): 200 – 219; Michael Harbsmeier, “Schauspiel Europa. Die außereuropäische Entdeckung Europas im 19. Jahrhundert am Beispiel afrikanischer Texte,” Historische Anthropologie: Kultur, Gesellschaft, Alltag 2 (1994), 331– 350. With regard to “symbolically non-European travellers,” see among others: Oana Fotache Dubălaru, “Postcards from Europe: Representations of (Western) Europe in Romanian Travel Writing, 1960 – 2010,” in Europe in Its Own Eyes, Europe in the Eyes of the Other, ed. David B. MacDonald and Mary-Michelle DeCoste (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014), 175 – 186; Wendy Bracewell, ed., Orientations: An Anthology of East European Travel Writing on Europe, ca. 1550 – 2000 (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2009); Wendy Brace-

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therefore guide the reader through this anthology. The focus is once again on “Europe,” but not as the starting point for conquests or journeys. Rather, we are interested in how “Europe” was seen by “non-European” travellers and what it was compared to. Their views of “Europe” thus also and above all contribute to a contextualisation of the idea of “Europe.” Following postcolonial theories, the focus in the following will therefore firstly be on questions and negotiations of (non‐)belonging as well as forms of re-presentation and processes of othering, whereby a symbolic understanding of “Europe” will also become visible. Secondly, from a gender-historical or gender-theoretical perspective, the significance of the category of gender is examined both at the level of content and at the level of the travellers. While some travellers – primarily women – addressed their own gender or gender relations in “Europe,” some of the contributions to this volume also deal with the influence of gender and genre on what is written.

About this Anthology and its Contributions The present anthology opens up a cross-disciplinary “view on Europe” and thus juxtaposes the (self‐)re-presentations of Europe with diverse perspectives that move in a field of tension between agreement, contradiction and oscillation. The contributions trace processes of negotiation that are characterised by ambiguity rather than unambiguity. The fictional Persian Letters of the French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu are the starting point of historian Claudia Opitz-Belakhal’s contribution. In these letters, Montesquieu describes how two Persian travellers finally arrive in Paris via various stopovers and from there write letters to friends and family members about the strange customs and social conditions in Europe, or rather France. This construction of the “foreign gaze” was quite a common procedure in the Enlightenment for expressing criticism of state and social grievances without falling prey to royal censorship. Opitz-Belakhal compares the Persian Letters with the report of the real traveller Mirza Abu Taleb Khan from India or Hindustan, which appeared about 60 years later. She explores the questions of what the author wanted to convey to his Indian reading public about the differ-

well and Alex Drace-Francis, eds., Under Eastern Eyes. A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe, 1550 – 2000 (Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2008).

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ent ways of life and state and social institutions of various European countries, and how he dealt with the growing “Orientalism” of the Enlightenment in Europe. Last but not least, she asks whether Mirza Abu Taleb Khan provided a different view than Montesquieu on gender relations in Europe and Hindustan. The focus of the contribution by the cultural scientist Béatrice Hendrich is the examination of the life and work of the Turkish journalist, novelist and feminist Suat Derviş. Having grown up in an educated and initially wealthy Ottoman family, Suat Derviş stayed in Berlin several times in the 1920s and 1930s. She recorded – both entertainingly and critically – her impressions of the city and its inhabitants and published them in Turkish and German magazines and newspapers. The chronological analysis of the writings of this author, who is little known outside Turkey today, shows her constant oscillation between Turkish and German stereotypes of gender relations and the demands of the respective newspaper editors. German readers will probably find her documentary novel Frauen des Sultans. Lebensbeichte eines Eunuchs mainly out of a voyeuristic interest in the “exotic” institution of the harem, while the majority of Turkish readers probably understood the text as a reckoning with the supposed political and “moral decay” of the Ottoman Empire. Based on the assumption that travel is essentially “a mode of seeing,” the literary scholar and linguist Nishant K. Narayanan examines three travelogues by Indian authors who travelled through Germany after the Second World War. According to their different linguistic, social and cultural backgrounds, the travelogues of the three authors – M. T. Vasudevan Nair, Usha Rajagopalan and Sachchinandanda Vatsyayan – are very different in what they describe to their readers. What they have in common, however, according to Narayanan, is their nonessentialised view of the “other.” They do not attribute places or people to their “otherness,” but use the journey to expand their own knowledge. Both Nair and Vatsyayan were forced to rethink and revise their attitudes towards the war and its consequences during their stay in divided Germany. The majority of Latin American travellers were drawn to France. As the capital of a republican, Catholic state, Paris exerted an enormous attraction on the descendants of Spanish colonists whose states had gradually gained independence in the nineteenth century. In his article, the historian Florian Grafl examines several literary journals from former Spanish colonies, the so-called cuadros de costumbres, to see how a certain national self-image was created on the basis of the perception of the “European other.” The focus of the article is on the representations of urban socio-economic life and gender relations in Europe and Latin America. Grafl explores the question of how Hispano-American authors saw “Europe” and to what extent their view of “Europe” had an influence

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on their assessment of social and cultural developments in the newly emerged Latin American nations. The fact that there is a historically special relationship between Europe and Latin America due to profound negotiation processes about supremacy, national identities and (in‐)dependencies is also taken up by the historian of education Meritxell Simon-Martin in her contribution on the traveller Nísia Floresta, who came from Brazil. Using postcolonial theories of hybridity, Simon-Martin looks at two travelogues written by Floresta in the nineteenth century and draws a picture of a hybrid cultural identity that oscillated between self-representations and representations of the “European other.” The concepts of criollismo, creolisation and intersectionality serve Simon-Martin to trace an identity position that was the product of hybrid enculturation(s) within colonial power structures, characterised by a re-production of discrimination and privilege. In addition to ethnic (non‑)affiliations, the categories of gender and class also come into focus. With the contribution of social and cultural historian Cecilia Morgan, the focus shifts to travellers from North America. Morgan compares the travelogue of the English-Canadian Methodist pastor and writer William H. Withrow with that of the Canadian honeymooner Lucy Harris and with the travel letters of Lucy’s daughter Amelia “Millie” Archange Harris. All three had travelled from Canada to Europe at different times in the nineteenth century and had written different forms of accounts from different social positions, resulting in an image of “Europe” that can be placed in a larger context around a supposed cultural “superiority of Europe.” At the same time, nuances of this discourse become clear, which can be determined both by the form of the writing – whether published travelogue or unpublished travel letters – and by the divergent subject positions. With the letters of Millie Harris, the perspective of a child is added to the views on Europe, which are hardly ever found in the already rare literature. Based on the assumption that “even the most elementary journey cannot do without things,”²⁰ the examination of travel literature productions and other materialities of travel, such as souvenirs, photographs or means of transport, come into the focus of travel literature research. In her contribution, the literary scholar Leila Gómez contrasts two travelogues by women and devotes particular attention to the significance of artefacts such as photographs or the mutual exchange of gifts. The women’s rights activist Louise Bryant travelled to Russia in 1917, at the beginning of the October Revolution; the writer and journalist Mar Philip Bracher, Florian Hertweck and Stefan Schröder, “Dinge in Bewegung. Reiseliteraturforschung und Material Culture Studies,” in Materialität auf Reisen. Zur kulturellen Transformation der Dinge, ed. Philip Bracher, Florian Hertweck and Stefan Schröder (Münster, Berlin: LIT, 2006), 10.

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tha Gellhorn in 1972. Both women worked as war correspondents, came from the white middle class and were pioneers in the fight for women’s rights in the USA. In her examination of two different perspectives on Russia, Gómez problematises the homogeneous image of Europe in US culture from a gendered perspective and elaborates contradictory feelings of admiration and condemnation in relation to Russia as part of Europe. In her contribution, the literary scholar Miruna Bacali focuses on the novel Hotel Europa (1996), which is enriched with autobiographical elements, by the Romanian-born writer Dumitru Tsepeneag, who lives in France. Along the narrative, dynamics of postcolonial mobility emerge on different levels, as the described encounters of different fictional actors on their journeys through Western Europe function as representations of encountering positions of power and inequality. In the novel, the “West” or Western Europe as the epistemic and economic centre of power encounters Romania as its “incomplete self,” whereby the symbolic and metaphorical meaning of “Europe” becomes apparent. Accordingly, the article opens up a view of the question “how ‘Europe’ is constructed and experienced within and through literature”²¹ on both a textual and meta-literary level and in this way invites reflection on the questions of “within” and “without” already addressed above. The work on the present anthology has also inspired us to such intensive reflection. Although we had distributed the call for abstracts widely through various social networks, our volume has some gaps with regard to the geographical composition of the travel narratives. We would have liked to include reports from African or other Asian travellers, but despite targeted enquiries with colleagues working in this field, we were unfortunately unsuccessful in this regard: time, resources and the pandemic played a role in the rejections, as did the fact that some colleagues had turned to other research topics in the meantime. The cooperation with authors from different scientific disciplines and systems was both an enrichment and a challenge for us. It is part of working across disciplines that different theoretical and methodological traditions collide, and while some colleagues work in a more theory-driven way, others place more emphasis on developing a coherent narrative. Views on Europe can thus be read as the result of lived research, as a form of doing research,²² which is why we would like to thank all our authors for engaging with our insistent questions and for critically examining them. The reviewers also played a central role in this. There-

 Quote from the article.  Sandra Hofhues and Konstanze Schütze, eds., Doing Research. Wissenschaftspraktiken zwischen Positionierung und Suchanfrage (Bielefeld: transcript, 2022/in press).

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fore, we would also like to thank all our colleagues who reviewed the manuscripts with their expertise and critically scrutinised them. Finally, we would like to thank Dania van Olfen for her competent support in making enquiries and in formally standardising the manuscripts.

Literature Agai, Bekim, and Zita Á. Pataki, eds. Orientalische Reisende in Europa. Europäische Reisende im Nahen Osten: Bilder vom Selbst und Imaginationen des Anderen. Berlin: EB Verlag, 2010. Bracewell, Wendy, ed. Orientations: An Anthology of East European Travel Writing on Europe, ca. 1550 – 2000. Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2009. Bracewell, Wendy, and Alex Drace-Francis, eds. Under Eastern Eyes. A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe, 1550 – 2000. Budapest, New York: Central European University Press, 2008. Bracher, Philip, Florian Hertweck and Stefan Schröder. “Dinge in Bewegung. Reiseliteraturforschung und Material Culture Studies.” In Materialität auf Reisen. Zur kulturellen Transformation der Dinge, edited by Philip Bracher, Florian Hertweck and Stefan Schröder, 9 – 24. Münster, Berlin: LIT, 2006. Dubălaru, Oana Fotache. “Postcards from Europe: Representations of (Western) Europe in Romanian Travel Writing, 1960 – 2010.” In Europe in Its Own Eyes, Europe in the Eyes of the Other, edited by David B. MacDonald and Mary-Michelle DeCoste, 175 – 186. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014. Ette, Ottmar. Literatur in Bewegung. Raum und Dynamik grenzüberschreitenden Schreibens in Europa und Amerika. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2001. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fabian, Johannes. “Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing.” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (1990): 753 – 772. Fischer, Tillmann. Reiseziel England. Ein Beitrag zur Poetik der Reisebeschreibung und zur Topik der Moderne (1830 – 1870). Berlin: ESV, 2004. Gippert, Wolfgang, and Elke Kleinau. Bildungsreisende und Arbeitsmigrantinnen. Deutsche Lehrerinnen zwischen nationaler und internationaler Orientierung 1850 – 1920. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 2014. Griep, Wolfgang, and Annegret Pelz, eds. Frauen reisen. Ein bibliographisches Verzeichnis deutschsprachiger Frauenreisen 1700 bis 1810. Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1995. Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Formations of Modernity, edited by Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben, 275 – 320. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Harbsmeier, Michael. “Schauspiel Europa. Die außereuropäische Entdeckung Europas im 19. Jahrhundert am Beispiel afrikanischer Texte.” Historische Anthropologie: Kultur, Gesellschaft, Alltag 2 (1994): 331 – 350. Hofhues, Sandra, and Konstanze Schütze, eds. Doing Research. Wissenschaftspraktiken zwischen Positionierung und Suchanfrage. Bielefeld: transcript, 2022/in press.

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Khair, Tabish. “A Multiplicity of Mirrors: Europe and Modernity in Travel Writing from Asia and Africa.” Indian Literature 52, no. 6 (2008): 211 – 222. Khair, Tabish. Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing. Oxford: Signal Books in collaboration with Indiana University Press, 2005/2006. Kleinau, Elke. “Von der klassischen Sozialgeschichte zur ‘Sozialgeschichte in der Erweiterung’.” In Handbuch Gender und Erziehungswissenschaft, edited by Edith Glaser, Dorle Klika and Annedore Prengel, 287 – 302. Bad Heilbrunn: Julius Klinkhardt, 2004. Kunhikrishnan, K. “Ode to the West Wind by Sisir Kumar Das. Review.” Indian Literature 47, no. 2 (2013): 214 – 217. MacDonald, David B., and Mary-Michelle DeCoste, eds. Europe in Its Own Eyes, Europe in the Eyes of the Other. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014. Matar, Nabil. “Europe through Eighteenth-Century Moroccan Eyes.” Journal of Comparative Poetics 26, Wanderlust: Travel Literature of Egypt and the Middle East (2006): 200 – 219. Mills, Sara. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism. New York: Routledge, 1993. Minh Ha, T. Trinh. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Nduka-Agwu, Adibeli, and Wendy Sutherland. “Schwarze, Schwarze Deutsche.” In Rassismus auf gut Deutsch. Ein kritisches Nachschlagewerk zu rassistischen Sprachhandlungen, edited by Adebeli Nduka-Agwu and Antje Lann Hornscheidt, 85 – 90. Frankfurt a. M.: Brandes & Apsel, 2013. Ponzanesi, Sandra, and Adriano José Habed, eds. Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe: Critics, Artists, Movements, and their Publics. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge, 1992/2007. Riettiens, Lilli. Doing Journeys. Transatlantische Reisen von Lateinamerika nach Europa schreiben, 1839 – 1910. Bielefeld: transcript, 2021. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Siebert, Ulla. “Frauenreiseforschung als Kulturkritik.” In “Und tät das Reisen wählen!” Frauenreisen – Reisefrauen, edited by Doris Jedamski, Hiltgund Jehle and Ulla Siebert, 148 – 173. Zürich, Dortmund: eFeF, 1994. Sohrabi, Maghmeh. Taken for wonder: nineteenth century travel writing from Iran to Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 66 – 111. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

Claudia Opitz-Belakhal

Fictional and Real Travellers from Asia in Enlightenment Europe: Describing European Habits and Culture In his early and best-selling epistolary novel Les Lettres Persanes, published for the first time in 1721 and then translated into several languages, the French author Montesquieu (1689 – 1755) imagined two exiled Persians who travelled through half of Europe and told their curious and sometimes funny experiences and comments in letters to their family and friends back in Isfahan. Montesquieu’s idea to describe Europe from a foreigner’s view was so successful that it created a new literary genre: fake travel accounts from “outsiders” of all kinds of geographical areas.¹ The foreigner’s view allowed uttering critical comments on any kind of authorities and habits of the European, in Montesquieu’s Persian letters mostly French authorities, like the French king, the Catholic church, or other institutions such as marriage and family life as well as the famous “gallantry” of French women and their admirers. Some 60 years later, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan (1752– 1805/06), a real traveller from India or Hindustan, as he called it, described his experiences in Europe during a four years travel and stay in England, Ireland, France and Italy in a partly similar way to how Montesquieu’s Persian travellers had done. Still, he was not a fictional character invented by a European mind – although a person who had to leave his country for political reasons quite as the Persians in Montesquieu’s Persian letters were. And he did not write letters back home (at least we do not know about it) but he wrote down his experiences in the form of a travelogue. In what follows I will compare the two sorts of travel narratives. My aim is to show the common points as well as the differences in describing European countries, politics and culture and the interdependence of both sorts of travel writing. Since the real traveller Mirza Abu Taleb Khan wrote in his Persian mother tongue, I would like to answer the following questions: what did Mirza Abu Taleb want to let his Indian reading public know about the different habits  See e. g. the Lettres juives (1738) and Lettres chinoises (1739) by Boyer d’Argens, Lettres d’une Turque à Paris, écrites à sa sœur (1730) by Poullain de Saint-Foix (published several times in conjunction with Lettres persanes), and perhaps especially Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110734966-002

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and institutions of several European countries?² And (how) did he confront the growing “Orientalism” of Enlightenment in Europe to which Montesquieu’s Persian Letters were an important contribution? And did he present a different perspective on the gender relations in Europe and in Hindustan which are at the very centre of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters?

Usbek and Rica – Two Persian Travellers and their Persian Letters from Europe (about 1721) In Montesquieu’s letter-novel Les Lettres Persanes a Persian noble named Usbek leaves his home or seraglio in Isfahan in 1711 to take the long journey to France accompanied by his young friend Rica, fleeing from the cruelty of the Persian Shah. During the trip to and their long stay in Paris (1712– 1720), both travellers comment, in letters exchanged with each other as well as with friends and relatives back home, on numerous aspects of European and this means Christian society, in particular on French society and politics, on absolute kingship and religious oppression, sometimes in a naïve and more often in a satirical way. Usbek had left behind five wives (Zachi, Zéphis, Fatmé, Zélis and Roxane) in the care and power of several eunuchs, the head of whom is the sadistic Black First Eunuch. Over time, various disorders and (mostly erotic) scandals happen back in the seraglio, and, beginning in 1717 (Letter 139) the situation there rapidly unravels. Finally, a revolt brings about the flight or even death of his wives and their women slaves, including the vengeful suicide of his favourite, Roxane, and the death of at least some of the eunuchs. This plot has seemingly been influenced by the novel stories of the 1001 Nights-collection, which had been translated some years earlier by the French orientalist Antoine Galland from a Persian manuscript into French and published in 12 volumes from 1704 to 1717. Another important source had been Jean Chardin’s Voyages en Perse – Montesquieu owned the two-volume edition

 Mirza Abu Taleb Khan wrote his travel narrative for a learned Indian public as he underlined in the first pages of the text. He wrote it in Persian which was the offical language in Mughal Hindustan and the language of the learned Muslim upper class. But back in India, he gave copies of it to British as well as to Indian friends and might have planned to let it translate into English to offer it to a British reading public, too, which happened only later in 1810, after his untimely death in 1805 or 1806 (for the history of the translation and publication of the travelogue see Translator’s Preface in The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, ed. Daniel O’Quinn (Ontario 2009), 57; for the author’s intention to write for an Indian/Hindustan reading public see ibid., 59).

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of 1687 and purchased the extended edition in 10 volumes in 1720 –, as well as the Voyages of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a French gem merchant who had travelled to Persia and India six times between 1630 and 1668, and had published a travel account in six volumes.³ Besides the “seraglio revolt” which was certainly the most important reason for the success of the book which instantly became a best-seller and had to be reprinted twice in 1722, it was the weird descriptions of the French and their habits as well as the disrespectful comments of the two Persians on institutions and rules sacred to the French monarchy or the Catholic church. Consequently, the book was put on the index by the Catholic Church and forbidden by the royal censure – which did, after all, not prevent the editor to print it and the “monde” in Paris to read it more or less secretly. Paris and “the Parisian way of life” was in fact a most important theme in the letters of the two Persians. While Usbek, the more experienced and introverted of both travellers, asked himself and his readers many questions, Rica, the younger and extroverted character, was more attracted by Parisian life – but both retained a satirical tone, as for example in Rica’s Letter 72: I found myself recently in a company where I met a man very well satisfied with himself. In a quarter of an hour, he decided three questions in morals, four historical problems, and five points in physics. I have never seen so universal a decider; his mind was not once troubled with the least doubt. We left science and talked of the current news: he decided upon the current news. I wished to catch him, so I said to myself, ‘I must get to my strong point; I will betake me to my own country.’ I spoke to him of Persia; but hardly had I opened my mouth, when he contradicted me twice, basing his objections upon the authority of Tavernier and Chardin. ‘Ah! Good heavens!’ said I to myself, ‘what kind of man is this? He will know next all the streets in Ispahan better than I do!’ I soon knew what part to play – to be silent and let him talk; and he is still laying down the law.⁴

Both described a vivid sociability and culture, where even the presence of two Persians quickly become a popular phenomenon, thanks to the proliferation of newspapers. And they commented on everything from important social institutions or practices, like the sciences and the university, the academies and the press, the court life and the opera, the luxury consummation and the prostitution

 Les Six Voyages de Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Ecuyer, Baron d’Aubonne en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes (Paris: Gervais Clouzier, 1676), first edition; Montesquieu used the re-edition in six volumes of 1717.  I cite after the English translation by John Davidson, published by London: Gibbings 1899, available on Wikisource: “Persian Letters/Letter 72,” accessed January 25, 2021, https://en.wiki source.org/wiki/Persian_Letters/Letter_72.

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in the Palais Royal, up to strange or vicious individuals like greedy merchants and unhappy opera singers, curious court ladies and devious monks, filthy old hags and ambitious officers. This, of course, was quite entertaining for the reading public – but the novel added on top of that to an already growing “Oriental fashion” in the Parisian high society and helped to lay the ground for a growing “Orientalism” even among Enlightenment thinkers. Since Montesquieu not only showed the fancies and weaknesses of his contemporaries and the French institutions in an original and most entertaining way but, at the same time, gave such a vivid and seemingly “authentic” idea of the tyrannical and unfree Persian (family) life, that from then on he as well as many of his readers firmly believed in an “Oriental despotism” deeply anchored not only in public institutions but in private customs, too.⁵ The Persians in his letter-novel became prototypes of foreign but enlightened critics of “Occidental” religion and society, but at the same time – especially the protagonist Usbek who after all clang to the “Oriental” traditions of his Persian home – a prototype of the “Oriental despot” and his tyrannical rule Montesquieu described at large some 25 years later in his famous book on laws, society and liberty called De l′Esprit des Lois (“The Spirit of Laws”) published in 1748.⁶

Mirza Abu Taleb Khan‘s Travel to London and Back (1799–1803) Mirza Abu Taleb Khan was an Indian tax-collector and administrator of Persian stock from a Persian father and a Hindustan Muslim mother and a most learned man who became notable for the account he wrote in the Persian language on his travels in Britain, Europe and Asia Minor between circa 1799 and 1805, the Masir Talib fi Bilad Afranji. The book was immediately translated into English by a British friend of his and published first in 1810 in India, then 1814 in Britain – with several appendices – as Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe. Doubtlessly, it is one of the earliest accounts by an Indian travel

 See Diana J. Schaub, Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995) and Céline Spector, Montesquieu, “Lettres persanes”, de l’anthropologie à la politique (Paris: PUF, 1997).  See Claudia Opitz-Belakhal, Im Reich der Leidenschaften. Montesquieus politische Anthropologie (Frankfurt; New York: Campus, 2021), esp. chapter 5, 116 – 162.

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writer about the West and has been described as “perhaps the most significant ‘reverse travelogue’ published in Europe during the Romantic era.”⁷ Mirza Abu Taleb Khan was not inexperienced in writing – he had published a collection of biographies and historiographies some years before he left India – and he was a traveller eager to learn from any kind of experience – lived or read, from people or books or any other. Although he was known as “The Persian Prince” during his stay in London, he insisted on his Hindustani background in spite of the fact that he spoke and wrote in the Persian language, and he felt – via his connections to British noble officers in India and England – already quite close to British manners and society. This was one of the reasons he decided to accompany his Scottish friend David Thomas Richardson to England in 1799. Another reason was his desperate political as well as personal situation at that time for he had lost his employment at the East India Company in 1795 and could not get it back, neither did he obtain a position as a tax collector in his native town Lucknow because of political disturbances. So he had to flee to Calcutta and leave his family and possessions behind. Left without any income or professional perspective in Calcutta, he was more than ready to follow his friend Richardson to England.⁸ Abu Taleb Khan and Richardson departed Calcutta on February 7, 1799 by ship, making it as far as Cape Town in South Africa where they had to wait for another ship to England. In late September the same year, they arrived in Ireland. In Dublin he met Sake Dean Mahomed, a Bengali living in Ireland who had in 1794 published The Travels of Dean Mahomet, which perhaps served as a model for Abu Taleb Khan’s work.⁹ He then proceeded to London, arriving on January 21, 1800, where he stayed for two and a half years and was presented to King George III and Queen Charlotte and became a sought-after social celebrity, whose movements and meetings were reported by newspapers. He departed England on June 7, 1802, visiting Paris in France, where he met with two famous orientalists, Antoine de Sarcy and Louis-Mathieu Langlès (both largely discussed with their writings in Said’s book on Orientalism¹⁰), and received invitations to visit Talleyrand and Napoleon Bonaparte. From France he proceeded to Istanbul,

 For the life and travels of Mirza Abu Taleb see Daniel O’Quinn’s introduction to Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the years 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802 and 1803, trans. Charles Stewart, ed. Daniel O’Quinn (Toronto: Broadview Press 2009), 9 – 48.  For the desperate political and economic situation of Mirza Abou Taleb Khan see Amrit Sen, “The Persian Prince in London”: Autoethnography and Positionality in Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan,” Asiatic Research 2, no. 1 (June 2008): 58 – 68, esp. 59 – 60.  Ibidem.  Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

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via Italy and Malta, meeting with Sultan Selim III (whom he calls “the Turkish Emperor”) and from there overland through Kurdistan and Persia, visiting the Shia shrines of Karbala and Najaf, before returning to Calcutta in August 1803. Travel writing was not uncommon in Muslim tradition although the publication of such a travelogue was fairly new.¹¹ The Persian title of the book is a play on words, as Gita Hashemi has shown, employing “talib” – one who learns – to contrast with (Abu) Taleb as a name, which connotes the book’s title as “(Abu) Taleb/Talib’s trajectory” or “quest” and encompasses its dual functions as a travel guide and as a discussion of the spiritual purpose of travelling.¹² In its preface, Abu Taleb Khan sets out his purpose in writing the book namely, to describe, for the benefit of his countrymen, the “curiosities and wonders he saw,” noting that many of the “customs, inventions, sciences and ordinances of Europe” might be used to good effect in Asia, too. To this end, the book both chronicles his travels, but also provides chapters on the subject-matter of interest to him, including “the arts and sciences, mechanical inventions, the lifestyles of the different classes, the system of government, the East India Company, the judiciary, the financial system, the defects of character and the virtues of the English etc.”.¹³ Although Abu Taleb Khan did not write letters with satirical comments as Montesquieu’s Persians did, he still was not reluctant to criticise European and even British institutions and habits – though he was fascinated by European printing, engineering and building; he described admiringly factories, bridges and shipyards, and understood very well the link between England’s prosperity and its industrial revolution.¹⁴ He praised the industry and efficiency of English people, and their sense of honour and relative learning. At the same time, he criticised the English lack of faith and a whole range of deplorable character flaws, such as their pride, insolence and excessive fondness for wealth and luxury, and sometimes even greed. Other countries and their habits are harshly criticised, too – for example he considered meals in France disgusting and completely incomparable to English or Indian food or the guest houses in Italy unclean

 See Michael H. Fisher, “From India to England and Back: Early Indian Travel Narratives for Indian Readers,” Huntington Library Quarterly 70, no. 1 (March 2007): 153 – 172.  Gita Hashemi, “Mirza Abu Talib Khan: notes and sources,” Passages – Gita Hashemi blog, June 12, 2014, accessed January 25, 2021, https://passages.subversivepress.org/mirza-abu-talibkhan-notes-and-sources/.  Amrit Sen, “The Persian Prince in London,” 61.  See e. g. The Travels, chapter XIII, 165 – 168.

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and noisy or – even worse – the post hostels in Istanbul badly entertained and still too expensive.¹⁵ One of the most striking differences to the Persian Letters is in fact the “practical” dimension of travelling in Abu Taleb’s account: the problems to obtain a boat, a ship, a coach, or fresh horses, and to find a place for the night and decent meals along the way. And, most important: he discusses the costs of it all – and the sometimes difficult ways to organise (cash) money – which is part and parcel of European travel accounts of the time, too. On top of that, there is no allusion to his Indian family and the wife (or wives) he left behind – although he explained in the preface in some length the story of his father who died fairly young and of his mother’s difficulties as a young widow to make her living and to let him have an excellent education.¹⁶ Still, as during his travels he had met an important number of women of all social strata, the female sex was not at all absent to his narration: in the way he mentions them, praising their warmth, the pleasant conversation with them, their beauty, and charms, he presents himself as a perfect gentleman who masters gallantry and the “commerce” between the sexes in any possible way. By this, he resembles the young and enthusiastic Persian traveller Rica much more than the thoughtful Usbek to whom he was biographically much closer with his almost 50 years of age but who turned out, in the end, as a perfect Oriental despot.

The Case of the Freedom of Oriental Women Abu Taleb Khan’s travel account, in contrast lacking almost any erotic allusion or family romance narrative, was obviously much less entertaining for European readers than Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. The latter were already well known in London at the time of Abu Taleb Khans’s arrival and seemingly the main reason why the Hindustan traveller was called The Persian Prince.¹⁷ Abu Taleb Khan himself seems to have known the novel too, as he mentions in one of the appendices to the British edition of his book a conversation he had with “an English lady” who, “addressing herself to me, observed, that the women of Asia have

 See The Travels, chapters XXIII, XXVI and XXVIII.  See ibid., 61– 67.  Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes had been translated into English for the first time by John Ozell and published under the Title The Persian Letters in London already in 1722 and then re-translated by Thomas Floyd and reprinted several times during the first half of the eighteenth century (see The Travels, Appendix D, 435)

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no liberty at all, but live like slaves, without honour and authority, in the houses of their husbands.”¹⁸ This scene was quite obviously inspired by a scene from Letter 141 of the Persian Letters where Rica reports a conversation with a court lady to his friend Usbek: She asked me a thousand questions about the customs and lifestyles of the Persians, and the style of life led by the Persian women. The life of the seraglio did not appear to her taste, and she displayed repugnance at the idea of one man being shared among ten or a dozen women. She could not think of the men’s happiness without envy, nor of the condition of the women without compassion.¹⁹

Indeed, at least since the Persian Letters had appeared in print and more decisively since Montesquieu had published his book on the Spirit of Laws the question of female liberty and the (oppressive) way of life in oriental seraglios became the centre stage of the Enlightenment discussion on “oriental despotism” and Muslim polygamy.²⁰ This seems to have been unacceptable to the Indian traveller – at least when the British edition of the Spirit of Laws was published in 1810, the publisher felt obliged not only to add to Abu Taleb Khan’s insightful and informative travel account his “Ode to London” (Appendix A) – a polite gesture towards the capital of England – but in Appendix D a “tract” “on the Liberties of the Asiatic Women” which he had written “during his residence in England and was translated by his friend and shipmate Capitain David Richardson” and which had been published for the first time “by the intelligent author and compiler, Mr. Dundas Campbell, in the Asiatic Annual Register of the year 1801.”²¹ “One day,” Abu Taleb Khan writes at the very beginning of his tract, “in a certain company, the conversation turned upon Liberty, in respect of which the English consider their own customs the most perfect in the world.” In fact, it is the women’s situation that is first highlighted when the question of freedom is discussed. For he continues:

 This Appendix is not reprinted in the re-edition of 2009, so I quote from the second edition under the same title (London: Longman etc., 1814, vol. 3). I quote it here as “Appendix D,” 259.  “Persian Letters/Letter141,” accessed January 25, 2021, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Per sian_Letters/Letter_141. See for that letter and the subjects treated here my book chapter on “Orientalismus und Querelle des femmes in Montesquieus Roman ‚Die Perserbriefe‘ (1721),” in Claudia Opitz-Belakhal, Streit um die Frauen (Roßdorf bei Darmstadt: Ulrike Helmer, 2020), 165 – 182.  See Opitz-Belakhal, Im Reich der Leidenschaften, chapters 6 – 8.  Montesquieu Appendix, 258.

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An English Lady, addressing herself to me, observed, that the women of Asia have no liberty at all, but live like slaves, without honour and authority, in the houses of their husbands; and she censured the men for their unkindness, and the women, for submitting to be so undervalued. However much I attempted, by various ways, to undeceive her (and in truth, said I, the European women do not possess so much power) yet it did not bring conviction to her mind.²² “Since the same wrong opinion is deeply rooted in the minds of all other Europeans,” Abu Taleb Khan continues, “and has frequently before this held forth, I considered it necessary to write a few lines concerning the privileges of the female sex, as established both by law and custom, in Asia and Europe; omitting whatever was common to both, and noticing what is principally peculiar to each, in the manner of comparison, that the distinction may be the more easily made, and the real state of the case become evident to those capable of discernment.”²³

Abu Taleb Khan then names six “things which make the liberty of the Asiatic women appear less than that of the Europeans” and tries to explain them by different climates, social structure, or personal choice – namely the first and chief of them all: “The little intercourse with men, and concealment from view” which is not caused by their husbands who “keep them shut and set guards over the door,” but because the Asiatic women are not inclined to go out and walk around. This would not only help to prevent “all the evils arising from the admittance of strangers,” but to save time for work and useful employments – and on top of that, even the English (especially in London) would usually keep the doors of the houses shut, as would the Dutch at Cape Town and other Europeans. Another reason is that the costs of all things in England were so much higher than in India. So, English couples couldn’t afford to eat and sleep separately with their personal servants serving them but had to do everything together in the same rooms or chambers. So, Abu Taleb Khan summarises, Asian wives were not obliged “to make their time and convenience suit that of their husbands; and they do not desire their husband’s company for several days but send his victuals to him in the murdannah (or male apartments).”²⁴ Another cause for the close everyday life of English couples would be the cold climate, forcing them to go out and walk at day and to sleep in the same bed at night – which would allegedly not be necessary for Asian married couples who could choose freely to spend the night all alone in their respective apartments, when for example under distress and affliction of mind, they would pre-

 Ibid., 259. The Appendix in fact re-discussed a topic that had already been treated by the author in chapter XIV of his travelogue (see The Travels, 173 – 174).  Ibid., 259 – 260.  Ibid., 263.

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fer segregation from company. A third reason why free intercourse with men was unusual in Asia would be the fact that “people of various nations [would] dwell in the same city” whereas in England the people were “all of one kind.”²⁵ This would, in Abu Taleb Khans view, allow for an easier contact between men and women in England than in Hindustan, since in his view there would be a serious “danger of corruption” when men and women of different religious or ethnic groups could meet freely: “To allow the women such a liberty there, where there is such danger of corruption, would be an encroachment upon the liberty of the men, which is […] contrary to justice; and that a corruption of manners must ensure, where various kinds of people mix together, is too evident to require demonstration.”²⁶ Finally, there is “the necessity which the European women have to acquire experience in the affairs of the world, and in learning various arts, on account of the duty that belongs to them to take part in their husband’s business.” According to Khan, this necessity does not exist in Asia, since “the duties of the Asiatic women consisting only in having the custody of the husband’s property, and bringing up the children, they have no occasion for such experience, or for laying aside their own custom of concealment.”²⁷ But there were not only different duties that would keep Asian women from leaving their homes, since they “have many other reasons for preferring privacy” as for example the love of leisure, and repose from the fatigue of motion, “the desire of preserving their honour, by not mixing with the vulgar, nor suffering the insults of the low and rude, who are always passing along the streets.” This love for honour is equally found, so Abu Taleb goes on, in “European noblewomen, who, to preserve their dignity, are never seen walking in the streets; and also with ladies in private life, who when walking out at night, and even in the day, are always attended by a male friend or servant to protect them.”²⁸ With these explanations Abu Taleb Khan comes very close to Usbek, the unhappy and despotic Persian husband in Montesquieu’s letter romance, who declares in more than one of his letters how well ordered the life of Persian wives is in general and explains such in a letter to his friend Ibben at the very beginning of his travels, Letter 34, in particular: That which preserves the beauty of the women in Persia is the regular life they lead: they neither gamble, nor sit up late; they drink no wine, and are never exposed to the air. It must

   

Ibid., 264. Ibidem. Ibid., 261. Ibid., 266.

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indeed be admitted that the life of the seraglio is more conducive to health than to happiness, it is so dull and uniform. Everything turns upon discipline and duty; the very pleasures are solemn, and mirth itself is sad; enjoyment is hardly ever tasted except as an indication of authority and dependence.²⁹

Still, Usbek will find later a desperate farewell letter of his favourite wife Roxane, another fictional character of Montesquieu’s letter romance, who offers a completely different view of the seraglio. She defends her personal choice of love and delight within and outside the seraglio – being it even by means of fraud, violence and a voluntary death: Yes, I have deceived you; I have led away your eunuchs: I have made sport of your jealousy; and I have known how to turn your frightful seraglio into a place of pleasure and delight. I am at the point of death; the poison courses through my veins: for what should I do here, since the only man who bound me to life is no more? I die; but my spirit shall not pass unaccompanied: I have dispatched before me those sacrilegious gaolers who spilt the sweetest blood in the world. How could you think that I was such a weakling as to imagine there was nothing for me in the world but to worship your caprices; that while you indulged all your desires, you should have the right to thwart me in all mine? No: I have lived in slavery, and yet always retained my freedom: I have remodelled your laws upon those of nature; and my mind has always maintained its independence.³⁰

Was Abu Taleb Khan then an oriental despot, too, who did not see the real misery and intrigues of the female sex in the seraglios of Hindustan and other parts of Asia? In his own view, he defended oriental women – as well as men – in their cultural traditions and (albeit less) personal choice: the tract is entitled Vindication of the Liberties of the Asiatic Women and as such pretends at least to speak – as much as the Vindication of the Rights of Woman published by English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft about ten years earlier, in 1793 – in the name of (here: Asian) Women and their liberties, comparing and defending their choices and habits against a decisively “Orientalist” devaluation of them which the Persian Letters offered to a curious and fascinated European public. Obviously, Abu Taleb Khan was not an early Indian feminist but much more a traveller who felt that the ideas European people in general and European women in particular had from Asian (Muslim) culture and traditions were wrong. For this, he underlined the different perspectives one could have on

 “Persian Letters/Letter 34,” accessed January 25, 2021, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Per sian_Letters/Letter_34.  “Persian Letters/Letter 161,” accessed January 25, 2021, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Per sian_Letters/Letter_161.

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the concealment of women, of polygamy and the institution of the seraglio or harem. Polygamy, for example, for him meant a good solution for a burning problem in the life of husband and wife: The privilege of the husband, by law, to marry several wives (seems) to the European women a grievous oppression; and they hold those very cheap who submit to it. But in truth, the cause of this law and custom is the nature of the female sex themselves, which separates them from the husband, the several last month of pregnancy, and time of suckling; and besides these, the Asiatic women have many other times for being separate from their husband.³¹

The liberty for an Asian husband to marry a second wife (and as Abu Taleb Khan underlines there are only a few men who have more than one wife, and rarely more than two) was a privilege for men but a good solution for both sexes – for the Asiatic law, permitting polygamy, does the husband justice, and wrongs not the wife; for the honour of the first and equal wife is not affected by it; those women who submit to marry with a married man not being admitted into the society of ladies, as they are never of wealthy families, no man of honour ever allowing his daughter to make such a marriage.³²

Like English mistresses, he continues his argument, these second wives have houses of their own; and those who have less privilege live in the house of the first wife being her servant, “and the husband at times conveys himself to them in a clandestine manner.” They do never have the same rights as the first, “the equal wives,” as Abu Taleb underlines using again one of the buzzwords of political debate in the aftermath of the French Revolution – “equality.” And although they and their children are by law entitled to inheritance, “since the equal wife never marries without a very large dowry settled upon her, all that the husband leaves goes to the (re‐)payment of this dowry, and nothing remains for his heirs.”³³ But although he puts forward the liberty, rights and privileges of the first and “equal” wife he ends this paragraph with a quite misogynist saying: “[…] from what I know, it is easier to live with two tigresses than two wives.”³⁴

 Appendix, 268.  Ibid., 269.  Ibidem. Emphasis in original.  Ibid., 270. Two other aspects of the seemingly unhappy life of Asian women Abu Taleb Khan discusses are the laws of divorce, privileging entirely the husband, and “the little credit the law attaches to the evidence of women in Asia.” Finally, English Ladies would think (more or less

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Finally, Abu Taleb Khan changes his mode of argumentation and puts largely into question the habits of the Europeans, when it comes to the prejudice, as he feels, of the liberty of European (or at least English) daughters of choosing their husbands. Here he notes that nothing must be said in earnest, “for in Europe this liberty is merely nominal, as, without the will of the father and the mother, the daughter’s choice is of no avail”³⁵ – an observation that is perfectly correct for the time he discussed this topic, although there was a fervent debate already in the educated middle classes in (Northern) Europe about love marriages and the right to choose the marriage partner even for young women. On top of that, he lists, at the end of his tract, eight privileges of Asiatic women compared to the European ones, namely “their power over the property and children of the husband, by custom” while Asian husbands “turn their whole endeavours to the attainment of their various pursuits” and leaving the concerns of their money and their children completely to their wives.³⁶ And when a divorce takes place (which is seldomly the case, as Abu Taleb Khan underlines) then the parents “share in the children by law” which means that the husband keeps the sons and the wife takes the daughters with her. This power of Hindustan women, far from being slaves of their husbands, as the Persian Letters had insinuated, can even bring along a large mischief for the money (and for the husbands who rightfully own it) and even more for the children, as Abu Taleb Khan puts forward in a quite ambiguous or even misogynous comment: And so great is the power they possess, as to the disposal of their children, that frequently they are brought up without any education, or die in childhood; for the women, on account of their little sense, are never pleased to part with their children, by sending them to school, and to acquire experience by travelling; and when they fall sick, they give them improper medicines, by the advice of their own confidants, or, from the softness of heart, indulge them in whatever it is the nature of the sick to take a longing for, and thus they cause their death.³⁷

Finally, Abu Taleb Khan lists the freedom of the Asian women, “from assisting in the business of the husband, or service of his guests” and their freedom to “sleep around” as they feel. European ladies, in contrast “although they can go out of

falsely) that “Asiatic women” lack the possibility to go out to balls and wearing showy dresses which Abu Taleb Khan recognises but puts in a slightly different light.  Ibid., 272.  Ibid., 275. Other privileges which are closely linked to this first and foremost one is the choice of faith of their children and the authority over their servants.  Ibidem.

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doors and discuss with strangers, yet this (sleeping around) is not allowed unless they have a trusty person along with them,” and “sleeping out all night is absolutely denied to them – contrary to the way of the Asian ladies who, when they go to the house of a lady of their acquaintance, […] are not attended by any person”³⁸ no matter whether they stay one night or a whole week at their (female) friend’s or relatives’ houses.³⁹ To sum up: one can understand from these lines that, according to Khan, Asiatic women are far from being enslaved, but it seems that the power and liberty of Asiatic women (or, more precisely, wives) are exaggerated.

An Indian “(Anti‐)Orientalism”? It is obvious that Abu Taleb Khan knew the debates of Enlightenment Europe fairly well, not only concerning (oriental) family life and women’s rights and duties. Quite regularly he used terms as “equality,” “nature” and “vindication of the liberty” in a sometimes surprising but on the whole not unconvincing way. He explained different habits in Europe and Asia (or India) partly with the influence of the climate, partly with other local necessities and traditions very much as Montesquieu did in his Esprit des Lois. On top of that, he pleaded for experience, argumentation and discernment instead of prejudices when he ended his “tract” saying: “Besides these eight, as above noticed, of the superior advantages of the Asiatic women enjoy over the European, there are many others, here omitted for brevity’s sake. What has been said is enough for people of discernment.”⁴⁰ In other words, he certainly was an enlightened thinker and writer from India – and a quite self-confident ambassador of its different cultural traditions. Thereby, he did not lack a critical perspective neither on Asian traditions and customs nor towards the prejudices and evil habits of the Europeans (women

 Ibidem.  It is not clear how Abu Taleb Khan got this idea of a strictly controlled life of English wives. He knew women of all social strata, from noble ladies to prostitutes and must therefore have had a quite vivid impression of British marriage customs and manners. Maybe he addresses here legal rules which saw the community of a man and his wife in living and sleeping together in one household as the basis for a lawful marriage. But he does not explain his observations any further. For the history of marriage in England see Lawrence Stone, Uncertain Unions: The History of English Marriage 1660 – 1753 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530 – 1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).  Montesquieu Appendix, 283.

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as well as men) – although he was certainly not at all an early Asian feminist. On the very contrary, he praised the strict English laws concerning wives and their properties and the English habits to keep the doors shut and the wives in the house as much as possible – all these were reasons for protest and harsh criticism on the part of English feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft. In many ways, Abu Taleb Khan resembles in fact the two Persian travellers in Montesquieu’s letter novel who were equally enlightened observers of their European counterparts – but whereas Abu Taleb Khan decided after his two years stay in London to travel back to India and to his family there, the fictional Persian travellers ended up either as a dishonoured and broken husband like the learned Usbek who could not find the way back to his former life, or a “perfect Frenchman” in clothing, habits and thinking like Rica did. Amrit Sen has discussed issues of autoethnography arising in Abu Taleb Khan’s work, noting the tension between his admiration for, and criticism of, Europe and his use of the coloniser’s language, both to identify with Europeans but also to critique them; and thus lead to ambiguity about Abu Taleb’s “oriental” persona. Sen asserts that it is possible to read Abu Taleb Khan’s book as a series of comparisons praising the virtues of the East above the West: The Muslims of Cape Town are kind and superior; the savages of Andaman are preferable to his European shipmates; Oxford is almost like the ancient Indian temples; the Quazis⁴¹ are superior to the English jury system – which is frightening and often prone to mistakes […] Abu Taleb praises the English ‘equality of all’ before the law and yet proceeds to suggest that this ‘equality is more in appearance than in reality’.⁴²

But then again, this extremely learned and curious traveller adopted European concepts of anthropology and ethnology so well that he constantly used the protoracist and discriminatory climate theory of his days to describe for example the energy and activity of the English compared to the Indian people who in contrast seemed to him passive and sluggish⁴³ – an idea which Montesquieu had put forward in his Esprit des Lois to explain the “natural” basis of Oriental despotism.⁴⁴ In fact, Abu Taleb Khan himself presented the Ottoman Empire as the dark cen-

 Quazis or Quadis are the judges of a Sharia court who also exercise extrajudicial functions, such as mediation, guardianship over orphans and minors, and supervision of public works and administration. “Quadi,” accessed March 18, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qadi.  Amrit Sen, “The Persian Prince in London,” 63.  See e. g. his description of the Irish climate and temper of the people there compared to the Hindustanians in chapter VIII (The Travels, 111– 114).  See Rolando Minuti, Studies on Montesquieu. Mapping political Diversity (Cham: Springer 2018), chapters 1 and 7.

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tre of Oriental despotism,⁴⁵ praising instead – like Montesquieu had done – the liberal and reasonable political system in England where the simple folk could freely criticise the nobles, the riches and the powerful – and where there was plenty of wealth if not for all but for many people. His native country Hindustan, however, he placed somewhere in the middle ground between the liberality of England and the despotism of the Ottoman Empire. So, Abu Taleb Khan managed to re-conceptualise the “Orientalism” of his days – but keeping up, still, with some of its most elementary and dangerous basic assumptions, namely climate theory, the idea of (technical and economic) progress and the dominance of European civilisation in terms of freedom, critical spirit and enlightenment. It is therefore unsurprising that Abu Taleb Khan’s book was noticed and promulgated by India’s English colonisers: a copy of Abu Taleb Khan’s Persian language text found its way to Charles Stewart, who translated it into English and published it in 1810. A second English edition was published in 1814, and its preface recounts – in part by way of seeking to assure readers of the authenticity of the book – that the Bengal government had caused the Persian language original to be published, “convinced of the policy of disseminating such a work amongst the Natives of the British Dominions of the East.”⁴⁶

Bibliography Sources Les Six Voyages de Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Ecuyer, Baron d’Aubonne en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes. Paris: Gervais Clouzier, 1676. Persian Letters, by Montesquieu. Translated by John Davidson, [1721] 1899. Wikisource. “Persian Letters/Letter 72.” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Persian_Letters/Letter_72 and “Persian Letters/Letter 141.” https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Persian_Letters/Letter_141, n.d. Accessed January 25, 2021. Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the years 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802 and 1803, 3rd vol. Translated by Charles Stewart. Esq., M.A.S. London: Longman etc., 1814. The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe during the years 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802 and 1803. Translated by Charles Stewart, edited by Daniel O’Quinn. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2009.

 See The Travels, chapters XXVIII and XXIX, 277– 296.  Ibid., 58.

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Literature Fisher, Michael H. “From India to England and Back: Early Indian Travel Narratives for Indian Readers.” Huntington Library Quarterly 70, no. 1 (March 2007): 153 – 172. Grundy, Isobel. “Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley.” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press, n.d. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/19029. Minuti, Rolando. Studies on Montesquieu. Mapping political Diversity. Cham: Springer, 2018. Opitz-Belakhal, Claudia. Im Reich der Leidenschaften. Montesquieus politische Anthropologie. Frankfurt/New York: Campus, 2021. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Schaub, Diana J. Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995. Sen, Amrit. “The Persian Prince in London: Autoethnography and Positionality in Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan.” Asiatic Research 2, no. 1 (June 2008): 58 – 68. Spector, Céline. Montesquieu, “Lettres persanes”, de l’anthropologie à la politique. Paris: PUF, 1997. Stone, Lawrence. Uncertain Unions: The History of English Marriage 1660 – 1753. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Stone, Lawrence. Road to Divorce: England 1530 – 1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Passages – A work by Gita Hashemi. n.d. Accessed January 25, 2021. https://passages.sub versivepress.org/mirza-abu-talib-khan-notes-and-sources/. Wikipedia. “Qadi.” Accessed March 18, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qadi.

Béatrice Hendrich

Suat Derviş, Journalist, Novelist and Feminist: Texts Written in Germany and Texts about Germany The Turkish journalist, novelist and feminist Suat Derviş¹ (1902– 1972)² was popular in Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s for her melodramatic stories and short novels, and for her entertaining as well as thought-provoking newspaper articles on societal, social and women’s issues. After 1939, she fell from the grace of the government and the mainstream press, since she supported the leftist intellectuals of her time in an increasingly nationalist and anti-communist political environment. Suat Derviş remained faithful to her political friends and convictions until the end, even when she fell into oblivion among the broader public during the later years of her life. At present, she is once more popular, with a certain number of her novels being reprinted, and non-fiction as well as fictionalised works turning her into an early heroine of Turkish feminism and/or leftist social consciousness.³ Together with the new fame comes, however, a certain nonchalance with regard to precise biographical information or thorough analysis. Particularly the early years, and her development from a spoiled Ottoman girl to a hard working journalist, need much more source-based research.

 Suat Derviş was the name she used throughout her life, both as personal and as penname. However, this is not the only name by which we can retrieve her documents and writings. Due to her four marriages and the change of family law in Turkey in 1934 – the use of family names according to the European standard of that time was made obligatory –, her official name changed from time to time. Her last official name was (Hatice) Saadet Baraner, the family name Baraner being that of her last husband. Her frequent use of changing pseudonyms makes it even more difficult to retrieve her biography and literary legacy. For a recent research on her pseudonyms see Serdar Soydan, “Hatice Saadet’in/Suat Derviş’in Takma Adları” (“Hatice Saadet/Suat Derviş’s pseudonyms”), Sanat Kritik, March 2, 2021, http://sanatkritik.com/eski/kul liyat/hatice-saadetin-takma-adlari/.  We do not know her year of birth exactly; in the secondary sources, the data vary from 1901 to 1905. She herself did not like to mention her exact age when she was asked for biographical details.  To name just a few: Liz Behmoaras, Suat Derviş. Efsane bir kadın ve dönemi (“A Legendary Woman”) (Istanbul: Doğan Egmont Yayıncılık, 2017); Osman Balcıgil, İpek sabahlık. Bir Suat Derviş romanı (“A Dressing Gown of Silk”) (Istanbul: Destek Yayınları, 2017); Ayşe Gülen Eyi, “Ein Koffer voller Erinnerungen” (“A suitcase full of memories”), taz, December 3, 2018. https://gazete.taz.de/article/index.html%3Farticle=!5555485.html. Accessed: January 17th 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110734966-003

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From newspaper clippings and autobiographical accounts, we know that Suat Derviş travelled several times to Berlin as a very young woman – between 1921 and 1932 – where she spent many months observing and writing about the unrestrained post-war city and its inhabitants. This article provides a close reading of some of Suat Derviş’s writing of those years. The reading is carried out in chronological order, inquiring at the same time about the relation between the texts of different years, continuity and change of content, and likewise Suat Derviş’ gaze at the world around her. The texts I have chosen for this analysis belong to different time periods between 1921 and 1932 and to different genres, although they were all published for the first time in a newspaper or a journal. The first group of texts was produced in 1921/22, among them the “Berlin Letters,” printed in the Ottoman newspaper Yeni Şark (“The New East”) in Ottoman, that is “Arabic,” letters. A second range of texts belong to the years 1929 – 1932, mostly articles and newspaper serials published in German print media. The final text cluster concerns her Berlin memories, published only in 1939. The memories can be classified as autofiction and show a strong effort to present her younger self as a mature and politically alert person who left Berlin when the National Socialists started to negatively affect everyday life and the political mood of the city. The article’s aim is to present the formative period in the life of this outstanding young woman in relation to her experiences and writings in and on Germany. The sources not only demonstrate her personal maturing but also the way she answers expectations of the newspaper editors and the readership both in Germany and in Turkey. In Germany, exoticising articles, short stories and pictures can be found in every issue of popular newspapers such as Tempo. The allegedly secluded world of the Orient, epitomised by the harem,⁴ serves to attract the German readership, as writings in Tempo or in Die Revue des Monats (“Revue of the Month”) prove.⁵ Turkish clippings and letters to the editors show that the Turkish readership is torn between praise and condemnation of the former military ally and “befriended state” Germany, with both its bureaucratic mentality and technological superiority.

 Karl Ulrich Syndram, “Der erfundene Orient in der europäischen Literatur vom 18. bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Europa und der Orient 800 – 1900, ed. Gereon Sievernich and Hendrik Budde (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, 1989), 324– 341; Karl-Heinz Kohl, “Cherchez la femme d’Orient,” in ibid., 356– 367.  In Tempo, these are in most cases photographs showing people of colour and sensational travel accounts, e. g. “Kismet am Nil” (“Kismet at the Nile”) by Richard Katz, Tempo, January 10, 1929. I will elaborate on that in a later part of this chapter, in “The Oriental Harem.”

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The paper embeds the texts in what is known from the author’s biography and in its historical background. One must be aware that the presented time period includes the major changes in Turkish history: the end of the Ottoman Empire and the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. In its political consequences, not less fundamental are the 1920s and 1930s for the history of Germany: the interwar period results in the National Socialist rule and World War II.

Preparing for a Strenuous Life We do not possess exact biographical knowledge about Suat Derviş’ childhood and private life as a young(er) woman. Some recently published secondary sources based on interviews and memories or a few newspaper clippings endeavour to make up for this lacuna without too much success.⁶ Liz Behmoaras suggests quite convincingly that it was Suat Derviş herself who obscured biographical events or changed dates and details in order to present herself in a positive light.⁷ One could add that she was always interested in authoring a good story, a story agreeable to read, and with a clear structure and plot. Her own life did not always follow this structure, and making sense of it is sometimes unachievable in the face of the biographical reality. Suat Derviş is a personality sui generis; uncategorisable, either in professional or in political terms. Brought up as a pampered girl in an upper-middle class Ottoman household, she dedicated the later decades of her life to her husband and his leftist friends, to Turkish Communism, or more exactly to her own reading of Communism. In the first half of her life, she was also successful in selfmarketing which made her an early example of a highly educated, trend-setting young woman. When we consider her journalistic activities in the early 1920s, we have to admit that she was not only self-assured to the utmost degree but also ambitious and courageous, and last but not least very industrious. She entered the world of male-dominated journalism, both in Germany and in Turkey, she approached distinguished male personalities for an interview, and did not hesitate to fight for her own opinion. She approached publishers and asked them to print her works, to employ her. She would not wait to become discovered. Con Liz Behmoaras has created a biographical story, filling the biographical blanks with literary creativity, often based on Suat Derviş’ novels (Behmoaras, Suat Derviş). Serdar Soydan has published a collection of texts which shed light on Suat Derviş’ biography, such as more or less autobiographical accounts, biographical interviews and family memories (Soydan, Anılar).  Behmoaras, Suat Derviş, 23.

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sidering the dire conditions of travelling the world during her younger age, she was astonishingly mobile, visiting e. g. Russia and Iran, Switzerland and Germany several times. From the texts at hand, it appears that in her younger age, she did not feel restricted by gendered constraints. The family supported the sisters in studying and travelling and joining social activities as much as possible. It took Suat Derviş some time to accept that the relation between her parents was not only romantic and without any conflict, but that her own introverted yet gifted mother had quite classically given up any artistic ambitions after her marriage. From both memories of relatives and acquaintances and her own texts, we can gather that Suat Derviş from her childhood on made her voice heard. She could not and would not behave in a quiet and well-mannered fashion like the Ottoman etiquette would have expected her to do. The establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 came together with the promise of social equality for women. However, not even the literati among the men were ready to suddenly share their dominant position and privileges with women. Suat Derviş must have often come across not only admiration but also raised eyebrows and angry critics once she had entered the newspaper business. From the beginning of her career, she treated the experiences she had as a young female professional as well as her own specific approach to feminism in numberless texts. As a girl brought up in the late Ottoman Empire, her and her sister’s education was exclusive but not very formal. After attending the public primary school for some time, the girls were taught at home in all disciplines of the humanities and sciences and piano by private teachers, in their lavish house in Istanbul. It is not clear if Suat ever received a formal high school diploma.⁸ In any case it would not have been expected in her milieu for her to pursue formal studies or professional training. In 1920, Suat Derviş married Seyfi Cenap, a clerk and a member of the national wrestling team. Their marriage broke up after a very short time,⁹ most probably no later than 1921. In late 1921, she followed her elder sister to Berlin for the purpose of music education at the conservatory¹⁰ (Stern’sches Konservatorium). According to her own accounts, she left the conservatory very soon and

 While Liz Behmoaras doubts it (Behmoaras, Suat Derviş, 40), Suat Derviş herself makes a very concrete statement in an interview from 1967, saying that she attended a university preparation school and attained the needed certificate (Suat Derviş, “Behcet Necatigil’e mektup,” in Soydan, Anılar, 244).  Behmoaras, Suat Derviş, 60.  Suad Derwisch Hanum, “Wie ich Schriftstellerin wurde” (“How I became an author”), Tempo, January 29, 1932, 24.

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spent some time at the university, studying Literature and/or Indo-Arian languages. “However,” she judges her younger self in 1967, “the success of my writings at a very early age had obviously spoiled me. So, I didn’t continue university studies. I didn’t graduate.”¹¹

Berlin 1921 – 1922 – Trans-national Success Suat Derviş Hanımefendi, who has a special significance for readers of fiction, and who introduced her writing skills with her work titled The Black Book, has taken on the task of correspondent from Germany for our newspaper, since she is in Germany for the purpose of education. We are publishing [today] the first text we have received from her. “Behire’s marriage candidates” (“Behire’nin Talipleri”) is a ‘novel’¹² composed of a few short stories. We will publish the others gradually.¹³

This announcement in the Ottoman newspaper The New East (Yeni Şark) of October 1921 offers a few hints on Suat Derviş’ fame as a fiction writer at this early age, at a historical period when Ottoman women writers would still have had a hard time publishing their work, particularly if this was done without a (male) pseudonym.¹⁴ The above-mentioned Black Book (Kara Kitap), published in 1920, is rather a long story than a novel, full of melodrama, tears and fears, but the public and some literary critics were impressed by the young girl’s talent.¹⁵ Likewise, Suat Derviş was already known as a newspaper columnist at that time; her earliest article might be the one on Anatolian women from 1919.¹⁶

 Suat Derviş, “Behcet Necatigil’e mektup,” 244.  The Turkish original uses the term “novel” (roman) in single quotation marks. The use of these marks shows that the writer of this short introduction is aware that a text consisting of “a few short stories” is not exactly a “novel.”  “Edebiyat karileri için hususi bir ehemmiyeti haiz olan ve Kara Kitap unvanlı eseriyle meziyeti kalemiyesini tanıtan Suat Derviş Hanımefendi – elyevm Almanya’da tahsilde bulunmak hasbiyle – gazetemizin Almanya muhabireliğini deruhte etmiştir. Kendilerinden aldığımız ilk yazıyı derç ediyoruz. Behire’nin Talipleri birkaç küçük hikâyeden müteşekkil bir ‘novel’dir. Diğerlerini peyderpey neşredeceğiz.” Suat Derviş, “Behire’nin Talipleri” (“Behire’s marriage candidates”), Yeni Şark, October 24, 1921, 3.  Elif Ikbal Mahir Metinsoy, “The Limits of Feminism in Muslim-Turkish Women Writers of the Armistice Period (1918 – 1923),” in A Social History of Late Ottoman Women. New Perspectives, ed. Duygu Köksal and Anastasia Falierou (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 86 – 87.  Mehmet Rauf, “Suat Derviş Hanımın eserleri” (“The works of Ms. Suat Derviş”), Süs dergisi, June 16, 1923, 10.  Published under the pseudonym Saadet Zihni in the newspaper İleri (Forward), “Anadolulu Kadınlarımız” (Our Anatolian Woman), January 27, 1919, 2. This source is mentioned with a

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The omnipresence of Suat Derviş’ texts in the Yeni Şark of 1921/1922 is impressive. During the time period under consideration in the following paragraphs, October 1921 to March 1922, we come across several issues of “Behire’s marriage candidates,” followed by another narrative text published as a newspaper serial, titled “Crazy” (“Deli”), and the column “Berlin Letters” (“Berlin Mektupları”). Another column titled “Germany Letters” (“Almanya Mektupları”), cannot be completely attributed to the author with absolute certainty. I’ll come back to this matter later. All articles are lengthy texts, covering two to three complete columns of a page. If we take into account her ample use of pseudonyms, there could be even more articles and serials. Before I proceed to introduce Suat Derviş’ articles on Germany of that period, I will provide some historical background information on the political and societal conditions of that time in Turkey and in Germany respectively. I deem this information significant in order to understand why two young women, Suat and her sister Hamiyet, travelled all the way from Istanbul to Berlin in 1921, and on the other hand, what the living conditions were like in Berlin at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties. The (military) ties between Germany and the Ottoman Empire had their roots in the late eighteenth century.¹⁷ From then on, Ottomans and Germans established close contact in military and general education and in trade affairs. Despite the often tense quality of these Ottoman-German relations and the common military defeat of 1918,¹⁸ inter-war Berlin was home to an international community of migrants, including the Turkish community. Berlin’s historic Muslim cemetery, Friedhof am Columbiadamm, where Suat’s father would be interred in 1932, is a material legacy of that period. Germany and the Ottoman Empire had been war allies as members of the Central Powers, and both countries, together with the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, experienced the breakdown of their imperial existence in autumn 1918. Both changed their political system from a dynastic empire to a republic. The difference of the political history of the two in the

wrong date in Bülent İsmail Dervişoğlu, “Mehmed Emin Derviş Paşa, Dervişoğlu Ailesini Kuran Adam” (“The founder of the Dervişoğlu family”) in Soydan, Anılar, 305.  Sultan Selim III. had hired the Prussian colonel von Götze in 1798, yet without a lasting impact on the Ottoman military. The same is true for Helmuth von Moltke’s mission in 1835 – 1839. After 1880, the number of military advisers from Germany in the Ottoman Empire increased continuously (about 800 in 1918) (Marcel Geser, Zwischen Missionierung und “Stärkung des Deutschtums.” Der Deutsche Kindergarten in Konstantinopel von seinen Anfängen bis 1918 [Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2016], 81– 84).  For a critical appraisal of the “German-Turkish friendship” see Sabine Mangold-Will, Begrenzte Freundschaft. Deutschland und die Türkei 1918 – 1933 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013).

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immediate years after the armistice was that Germany’s existence as an independent state was not questioned by the victorious states. Therefore, the German Republic was proclaimed in November 1918, and the first national elections could take place in January 1919. For the (remaining parts of the) Ottoman Empire, however, the situation was completely different: the conditions of the armistice and eventually of the Peace Treaty of 1920¹⁹ were such that there was not more than a truncated rest under “Turkish control,” and even the rights enclosed in the treaties were curtailed gradually by the victors. The Turkish nationalists, politically and militarily united by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, took up their weapons one more time, and against all reasonable expectations, the Turkish troops won their War of Independence. The Sèvres Treaty was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), and in October 1923, the Turkish Republic was proclaimed and immediately acknowledged by the former enemy states. That is also to say that in 1921 the sisters had left an already impoverished country which was once more in a state of war and still one year away from its military victory in the autumn of 1922. Istanbul had to cope with a massive increase of refugees from all over the former empire; the Entente States controlled Istanbul and backed the still existing Ottoman dynasty which ruled as their own political puppet. From the perspective of international law, the Ottoman ruler was still the legal head of the state, and Atatürk and his army a troop of bandits. The political reforms which would lead to the equality of women from the legal perspective would only become implemented from 1924 on.²⁰ For the women of the Ottoman metropolises, the last decades and particularly the war years had brought some societal and even legal changes. Young women working at the so-called home front, in the munitions industry or telephone service, had been allowed to take off their face veils and shorten their skirts a little. After centuries of life in a totally gender-segregated society,²¹ the return of women to public space was of particular importance. One milestone in this change was the speech of the renowned author Halide Edip Adıvar

 As a document of the Paris Peace Conference 1919 – 1920, the Peace Treaty of Sèvres is on the Turkish side the equivalent to the Peace Treaty of Versailles.  For a concise history of the Turkish Republic see Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017). The historical periods relevant here, the war of independence and the early years of the republic, are treated on pp. 123 – 167.  It is important to have in mind that economic, regional and religious differences influenced the living conditions of the women in the Empire drastically. In this article, I am referring to the middle and upper class of the big cities.

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(1884 – 1964) in May 1919, in which she accused the Entente of political injustice and cruelty vis-a-vis 200,000 people.²² The German Republic had a difficult start, endangered by political extremists in an economically disastrous situation. Hunger, hyperinflation and the lack of economic growth characterised those early years. Despite, and partly because of these circumstances, Berlin after the war was the place to be. Life was relatively cheap for foreigners, if their own national currency was stable. People craved the return of (international) art and entertainment: dancing the Charleston and the Shimmy, a tremendous excitement for black artists and all kinds of Jazz, and a wave of radical questioning of traditional gender norms rendered Berlin of the 1920s very attractive for everyone who wanted to forget the hardships of the war and the difficulties of the post-war period all over Europe. This very particular situation has been reflected in fiction and documentary writing numberless times. The Turkish writers, ex-politicians and intellectuals of Berlin contributed their share to this literature.²³ All these roughly presented political conditions and circumstances of daily life are presented in Suat Derviş’ articles, sometimes hidden in brief hints, sometimes rolled out broadly with colourful, entertaining descriptions. While the short stories in “Behire’s marriage candidates” centre on the social life and habits of Ottoman women in the Turkish cities, the “Letters” are explicitly travel literature: lively, often ironic, descriptions and comments on the life in Berlin with a focus on “German Women,” and sudden ponderings and reflections which address the Turkish readership explicitly.

The Military Order One cannot talk with German women more than 20 minutes without entering a conversation on kitchen and potatoes. Even at public places, from whatever class they are, when one hears the chatting of two women – if they aren’t foreigners –, one can understand their conversation is about food and cooking.²⁴

 For a well-balanced biography on this praised as well as criticized novelist and activist see Sefa Kaplan, “Being Hundreds of Birds at Once…,” Bosphorus Review of Books, September 2020.  For some biographies see Ingeborg Böer, Ruth Haerkötter and Petra Kappert, eds., Türken in Berlin 1871 – 1945 (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2002).  “Alman kadınlarıyla insan 20 dakikadan fazla matbaha patata ait bir bahse girmeden konuşamaz. Umumi yerlerde bile, herhangi bir sınıftan olursa olsun, iki kadının muhaverasına dikkat edilince, eğer konuşanlar ecnebi değilse, muhakkak aşa ve aşçılığa dair bir şeyden bahis olunduğu anlaşılır.” Suat Derviş, “Berlin Mektupları 2: Alman Kadınları” (“Berlin-Letters 2: German

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The German women of Berlin do not receive much mercy from the Ottoman lady: they have no taste, no style, all look the same, and they do not even know what it means to be a real housewife: A woman has to keep the house from looking like all the others by decorating it. When someone enters the house of a real housewife, s/he²⁵ faces a personality; that’s what is missing in the German rooms, because a real housewife leaves something of herself, of her soul and thoughts [in the room]. Whereas someone who has seen one house in Berlin, can consider himself to have seen all houses.²⁶

Even the dresses, the balconies and flowerpots all look the same. The answer to this riddle, she concludes, is: “Similar to the way they work and live, in matters of taste also, Germans have a military order.”²⁷ Suat Derviş’ critical observations become more intelligible if they are connected with the author’s strong personal interest in fashion, and with the Ottoman urban fashion she is used to. In Suat Derviş’ fiction, fashion and interior decoration figure prominently. “In my purple velvet dress, with my upturned collar of lace and fine gold chain in my hair, I look like a woman from the Middle Ages.”²⁸ Leaving the literary significance of the female main character’s dresses aside here, lines like these give an impression of the author’s taste and her attention to details. Suat Derviş takes up the issue of fashion and entertainment in another, later letter with a puzzlingly different tone. Before continuing to this text, the “German way of living,” the “military order,” deserves a closer look. As mentioned earlier, the official relations between the Ottoman and the German Empires were dominated by military aspects such as military training conducted by German officers and military alliances. The German army, and particularly the Prussian order, had come to serve as a horizon of comparison. On the Ottoman side, a very popular idea was that once the Prussian order had

Women”), Yeni Şark, November 25, 1921, 3. Unless stated otherwise, all translations from the Turkish originals are mine.  There is no grammarly gender in Turkish; equally, the pronouns do not indicate the gender.  “Bir kadın evini güzel tezyin etmeyle, onu başka evlere benzemekten kurtarmalıdır. Hakiki bir ev kadının evine girince, insan, o oda Alman odalarında bulunmayan şahsiyet bulur. Çünkü, hakiki bir ev kadını evine kendisinden, ruhundan, düşüncelerinden bir şeyi bırakır. Halbuki Berlin’de tek bir ev, hatta bir oda gören bir insan kendini Berlin’in tekmil evlerini görmüş telakki edebilir.” Suat Derviş, “Berlin Mektupları 2.”  “Almanların çalışışlarında, yaşayışlarında olduğu gibi, zevklerinde de askeri bir intizam vardır.” Suat Derviş, “Berlin Mektupları 2.”  Suat Derviş, Ne bir ses ne bir nefes (Not a sound not a breath) (Istanbul: Orhaniye Matbaası, 1922). My translation, here based on the reprint of 2014 (Suat Derviş, Kara Kitap [Istanbul: İthaki, 2014], 23).

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been established in all spheres of the state, and the Prussian mentality had been adopted by the people, all difficulties in their own state would disappear. Read from this perspective, the quoted letter from late November 1921 contains a message far beyond the gossip of a fashion magazine. Each of Suat Derviş’ letters includes small paragraphs where she approaches the Turkish readership directly and provides clues about how to read her descriptive text. At the beginning of the quoted letter, she introduces a meta-discourse on the feasibility and conditions of the “reception and description of foreign realities.”²⁹ Her tool for doing so is a little “childhood memory”: as a child, she writes, she thought that each pair of eyes would see the world differently. If her French governess would once see the world with the child’s eyes, she would understand what fun it was to climb the very high mulberry tree, instead of only seeing the danger of falling from the tree.³⁰ This memory includes the hope that changing the eyes, that is the perspective, would allow one to grasp the other reality. But since it is a childhood memory, the young woman Suat Derviş faces difficulties in sharing the perspective of her Turkish fellows. According to the author, there is nothing as praiseworthy about the Germans as she had been told in Turkey. What makes life beautiful, she concludes, is diversity, not military uniformity: “So I’m longing for my beautiful and unfortunate country despite all its poverty and poorness.”³¹

Nightlife and Nightmare The fourth “Berlin Letter” is titled “Abundance of Foreigners in Berlin.”³² One would wonder why a foreign observer like Suat Derviş would choose this theme instead of continuing her analysis of German society. Does she open up categories such as “good” and “bad” foreigners, herself quite naturally being part of the first one? The following quote demonstrates her ability to touch on separate questions in one paragraph and to take the reader to an unexpected place.

 Tanja Hupfeld, Zur Wahrnehmung und Darstellung des Fremden in ausgewählten französischen Reiseberichten des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts. “Il les faut voir et visiter en leur pays” (Göttingen: Univ.-Verl. Göttingen, 2007), 420.  Suat Derviş, “Berlin Mektupları 2.”  Ibidem.  Suat Derviş, “Berlin Mektupları 4: Berlin’de Ecnebi Bolluğu” (“Berlin Letters 4: Abundance of Foreigners in Berlin”), Yeni Şark, December 16, 1921, 3.

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People of every country whose money is many times greater in value than the German money show up in Berlin’s hotels, in public places such as theatres, cafes and restaurants, with their furs, their jewellery and all their luxury. This situation makes the poor class of Germans who are essentially a little bit angry, completely malicious and aggressive. In the face of the sorrows of life for the locals from day to day, they are both jealous and hesitant seeing the magnificent lives of these foreigners, who come from almost every corner of the world, transported by crowded trains and steamers. This insane luxury – for which the foreigners have only insignificant expenses dazzles the German women. It almost disturbs the comfort of families. […] After the invasion of foreigners, I see an insane eagerness for dressing well in the German woman, who didn’t use to be so keen on adornment and glamour.³³

At the end of this paragraph, Suat Derviş returns again to the dressing habits of the German woman, but not without first mentioning the global economic situation, the immense economic gap between the poor and the rich (who are sometimes only rich due to the difference of the exchange rate), and the social conflict which arises when one’s own economic situation does not match the market’s call for consumption. She seems to contradict her own earlier remarks on the missing love for fashion among the German women, but what she ridicules in the following paragraphs, talking about both the new rich foreigners of Berlin and the Germans, is cheap taste – and the loss of a discernible national style. The criticism of “insane luxury,” equalling “moral corruption” and the disruption of family life, is neither unique to Suat Derviş, nor restricted to this specific historical point in time, as Haris Exertzoglou demonstrates with a focus on the Ottoman Greek-Orthodox community in the nineteenth century.³⁴ Likewise, the reception of the modern city as the epitome of moral decay has a long tradition in travel writing.

 “Paraları Alman parasından birçok kere yüksek olan her memleketin insanları, Berlin’in otellerinde, tiyatro, kahve ve lokanta gibi umumi yerlerinde kürkleri, mücevherleri velhasıl bütün lüküsleri ile boy gösterirler. Bu hal esasen biraz hiddetli ve aksi olan Almanların fakir sınıfını büsbütün titiz ve atak yapıyor. Hayatın, yerliler için, günden güne aldığı elem şekle karşı, dünyanın hemen her bucağından trenler, vapurlar dolusu gelen bu ecnebilerin, kendi memleketlerinde böyle şahane yaşayışlarını görerek hem kıskanıyor hem de çekiniyorlar. Ecnebilerin ehemmiyetsiz bir masrafla yaptıkları, çılgın bir lüküs, Almanların bahusus kadınlarının gözlerini kamaştırıyor. Adeta ailelerin rahatını bozuyor. Eskiden ziynete, süse pek meraklı olmayan Alman kadınında, ecnebilerin istilasından sonra, giyimini için delice bir heves görüyorum.” Suat Derviş, “Berlin Mektupları 4.”  Haris Exertzoglou, “The Cultural Uses of Consumption: Negotiating Class, Gender, and Nation in the Ottoman Urban Centers during the 19th Century,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 35, no. 1 (2003): 81–82.

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The specificity of this case is that the author is writing on the threshold of historical and political change when Turkish nationalism³⁵ is about to take over, and to render obsolete not only the political structures but also the taste and consumption patterns of the (later) Ottoman time. The correlation between the new, almost puritanical, taste and national morality had already been formulated in Halide Edip Adıvar’s political novel Yeni Turan (“New Turan”, 1912). In a similar vein, Suat Derviş demonstrates her decadent Ottoman main character’s change of mind in Not a Sound Not a Breath: I untie the dress I am wearing, this taffeta dress that makes me look like a woman from an earlier era […] my fingers untie the dress with increasing fuss and fear …. I am wearing a thin shirt. I am not that woman who gave Osman [her husband] anxieties anymore. I am now a new woman with a silk shirt and an abundance of curly hair falling off my shoulders. I am a woman of my century. […] I will never dye my hair again.³⁶

In the same “Berlin Letter” from December 1921, Suat Derviş mocks the “success” of the Turkish students in Berlin. What first appears in the title to be praise of Turkish skilfulness (“Turkish students win the first price on the dance floors and attract everybody’s attention”) is a moral criticism of those students who had been sent to Berlin for the purpose of education but waste their poor parents’ money for entertainment and nightlife. There is an intriguing addition to this paragraph: since the film companies in Berlin are producing shoddy, exoticising movies, there is a demand for “eastern types”³⁷ and the young Turks can make a living by playing those roles. Towards the end, the letter criticises the failing endeavour of German women to create their own style: they imitate whatever they see, the “wild gazes of the Italian women” and the “exaggerated makeup of the Russians,” and turn into a “cubist painting” with “a thousand colours and a thousand styles.” The author

 The roots of Turkish nationalism can be traced back to the nineteenth century, even if the term “Turkish” was used only hesitantly at the beginning. Although the First World War was fought in the name of the Ottoman dynasty, the political leaders, the Triumvirat, were outright chauvinist nationalists. For an overview on the beginnings of Turkish nationalism and its turn into the revolution under the lead of Atatürk see Çağlar Keyder, “A History and Geography of Turkish Nationalism,” in Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey, ed. Faruk Birtek and Thalia G. Dragonas (London, New York: Routledge, 2005).  “… beni eski zaman kadınlarına benzeten bu tafta elbisemi çözüyorum. … parmaklarım gitgide artan bir telaş ve korkuyla adeta yırtar gibi elbiseyi çözüyor. … Üzerimde ince bir gömlek var. Artık ben Osman’a evhamlar veren o kadın değilim. Ben artık ipek gömleği ve omuzlarından dökülen kucak kucak saçlarıyla yeni bir kadınım. Asrımın bir kadınıyım … Saçlarımı artık hiç boyamayacağım.” Suat Derviş, Ne bir ses ne bir nefes, 68–69.  Suat Derviş, “Berlin Mektupları 4.”

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feels, while sitting in such a restaurant with music and dancing, as if she were in a (bad) dream. But a lady at her table corrects her: “Don’t be surprised, my dear girl. It’s not a dream. It’s Berlin after the revolution.” The author ends her letter with a kind of prayer: “God, don’t let our Istanbul look like Berlin and our ladies from Istanbul whom we are never satisfied with like the woman of Berlin sitting there in the corner. As they say: There is always something that is even worse than something bad.”³⁸ The fear that a revolution which brings about emancipation and the right of women’s suffrage will negatively affect the society and its culture is an issue which Suat Derviş picks up again and again in her early writings. In doing so, she positions herself against a general trend in Turkish feminism. Her antipathy towards political participation of women is the more astonishing as she herself was from the beginning an extroverted personality who wanted to make her voice heard. Her article from January 1922, Germany Letters – On Womanhood, illustrates this contradiction.

On Womanhood A preliminary remark on the column Germany Letters in Yeni Şark has to be made: the Germany Letter from January 1922 carries not only the signature of Suat Derviş, but also includes very personal glimpses of her work in Berlin. So, without any doubt, this “Germany Letter” is authored by herself. However, Serdar Soydan, a literary scholar and specialist on Suat Derviş, has raised the question, whether (all) the Germany Letters published in the said newspaper in 1921/22 can be considered Suat Derviş’ work. The first “Germany Letters” carry the signature “Suat Fuat,” which sounds like one of her numerous pseudonyms. There is a certain coincidence in time and title which would support this assumption, but, according to Soydan, the letters of Suat Fuat do not contain elements that would be characteristic of Suat Derviş’ work.³⁹ I cannot give a final answer to this question either. However, I want to put forward a thesis: at the beginning of her career, she was known and renowned for her fiction and entertaining newspaper articles like the Berlin Letters. But articles on allegedly more

 “‘Şaşırma kızım,’ dedi. ‘Rüya değil. İnkılaptan sonraki Berlin.’ … Allah, her şeyinden şikayet ettiğimiz İstanbul’umuzu Berlin’e ve bir türlü beğenemediğimiz İstanbul hanımları da şu köşede oturan Berlin’li kadına benzemesin. Dünyada beterin beteri vardır, derler.” Suat Derviş, “Berlin Mektupları 4.”  Soydan, “Hatice Saadet’in/Suat Derviş’in Takma Adları.”

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serious issues, such as the deteriorating economy of Germany?⁴⁰ Would the public appreciate articles of that kind written by a young woman? Could it be that with the success of her Berlin Letters, the newspaper editors gained the “courage” to publish a Germany Letter under her real name? Like the other texts, the letter Kadınlık Hakkında (“On Womanhood”) is also a column, though with more elements of reportage. Suat Derviş provides not only detailed descriptions of buildings, rooms and furniture, but also concrete names and the terrible weather conditions of Berlin in winter (“walking outside or waiting for the taxi or tram at minus 8, 9 degree, is no fun”⁴¹). She narrates how she, accompanied by an Italian and a German colleague, visited Erich Dombrowski and Victor Schiff. “Doctor Dombrowski,” as she calls him, was at that time an eminent journalist and deputy chief editor of the Berliner Tageblatt. ⁴² “Herr Schiff,” so in the Ottoman original, was the foreign affairs editor of the Social Democrats’ newspaper, the Vorwärts. It had been her intention to gather the editors’ thoughts and opinions on the new political rights of women and the changing gender conditions in Germany. At that time, Suat Derviş was still opposed to women’s suffrage: “If women are given the right to vote in our country one day – I am sure that we will see that day too, unfortunately – if there is only one woman who will not take advantage of this right, it will be me.”⁴³ While full suffrage and legal equality had been granted to women with the new German constitution, the courts were still a men’s world. Suat Derviş was pleased about the white-haired and intelligent gentleman Dombrowski’s hesitant answers, when she asked him if women as judges would be able to act according to reality and logic, and not according to their emotion: “Our women, who have used the law they have achieved so far fairly well, I hope they will make the right judgment in the court, he said. He didn’t say more.”⁴⁴ Her encounter with Victor Schiff, however, evolved in a much less friendly manner. Instead of talking about the situation of German women, the two unintentionally got into a heated dispute on a different topic: “We maltreated each  Suat Fuat, “Almanya Mektupları: Alman Ticareti” (“Germany Letters: The German Trade”), Yeni Şark, December 26, 1921, 3.  Suat Derviş, “Almanya Mektupları: Kadınlık Hakkında” (“Germany Letters: On Womanhood”), Yeni Şark, January 18, 1922, 3.  It can be considered a typical feature of Suat Derviş’s work that she calls Dombrowski “editor in chief” (baş muharrir) instead of “deputy.”  Suat Derviş, “Alman Kadınlarına Dair” (“On German Women”), Yeni Şark, November 17, 1921, 3.  “Şimdiye kadar elde ettikleri hukuku pek iyi istimal eden kadınlarımız, ümit ediyorum, mahakimde de doğru hüküm edeceklerdir, dedi. Fazla bir şey söylemedi.” Suat Derviş, “Almanya Mektupları: Kadınlık Hakkında.”

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other!” Unfortunately, she does not precisely mention the bone of contention. From the hints and allusions she makes, it must have been related to the territorial integrity of (future) Turkey. She mentions that they quarrelled in front of a map at the office wall, pointing at certain spots and gesticulating, while “Herr Schiff” shuffled in and out of the office, providing further documents to support his view. Obviously, as an editor for foreign affairs and an observer of the Versailles negotiations, Schiff had distinct ideas on Turkey’s future situation which did not at all correspond with her own convictions. At one point they stopped the discussion without result and proceeded to the issue of emancipation. Again, Suat Derviş was not satisfied with his answers. He called German women “ungrateful,” because instead of using their votes in favour of the Social Democrats who had been fighting for this right since the late nineteenth century, they had allegedly voted either for the communists or the nationalists.⁴⁵ Additionally, he criticised the new female representatives of the Reichstag sharply as “apart from a few exceptions, worthless.” Suat Derviş comments on this encounter at the end of the letter as follows: “I learned that even in a socialist newspaper administration in Europe, the old, middle-aged, unchanged musty heads of Europe still dominate [political opinion].”⁴⁶ Unfortunately, she does not say if she was so annoyed by his harsh comments on women and politics, or by his unwillingness to understand Turkey’s rejection of the stipulations of the Sèvres Treaty, or by both.

Berlin 1929 – 1930: The Oriental Harem Despite some efforts during the last few years, we do not possess a systematic and complete catalogue of Suat Derviş’ works.⁴⁷ Neither do we possess reliable biographical documents for the first three decades of her life. For the years following her stay in Germany in winter 1921/22, we can, however, make some educated guesses: she continued writing short novels and long stories, which were

 For a concise overview on women rights between the wars and their voting behavior see Kirsten Heinsohn, “‘Grundsätzlich’ gleichberechtigt. Die Weimarer Republik in frauenhistorischer Perspektive,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 18–20 (2018): 39–45.  “Avrupa’da sosyalist gazete idarehanesinde bile, maatteessüf, hala o eski, o kurunuvusta Avrupa’sının değişmemiş mutaassıp küflü başları hakim olduğunu öğrenmiştim.” Suat Derviş, “Almanya Mektupları: Kadınlık Hakkında”.  Serdar Soydan, “Suat Derviş’in Bütün Romanları” (“All Novels of Suat Derviş”), Sanat Kritik, January 18, 2021, http://sanatkritik.com/eski/kulliyat/suat-dervisin-butun-romanlari/. Accessed: January 17th 2022.

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still melodramatic, and confined to the restricted space of the Ottoman female household. At the same time, she continued writing for Turkish newspapers, while her transnational success of the Berlin period strengthened her position in the world of print media. She is said to have married and divorced a third time in the 1920s/early 1930s.⁴⁸ For Turkey, the 1920s and earlier 1930s are the decisive years of change, reform and revolution, together with the stepwise establishment of the single-party rule of the Republican People’s Party of Atatürk (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP). The Turkish Republic was proclaimed in October 1923, the Muslim institution of the caliphate abolished in spring 1924, and with the introduction of European law from 1926 on, the legal situation of women changed tremendously. Suffrage for women was introduced in 1930 at the local level, and in 1934 full suffrage was granted. An overwhelming majority of intellectuals had supported the war for independence and the establishment of the republic. Nevertheless, with the establishment of single-party rule came the state political and cultural hegemony, and an increasing number of authors and academics had to leave the country or were taken to court and incarcerated. From Winter 1928/29 on, Suat Derviş must have travelled several times to Berlin (and maybe she did so earlier), as from January 1929 on (to 1932) we not only repeatedly come across short notes in Turkish newspapers announcing that she has left on this and that day for this and that purpose to Berlin, but also find an increasing number of articles – articles about her and those written by her – and fiction in German newspapers and magazines. By virtue of the articles about her and written by her, we have the opportunity of following the mutual relations between her own self-representation, the reception of her personality and her writings in Germany, and finally the stereotypical expectations towards a Turkish female writer and her idiosyncratic reaction to these expectations. From time to time, German newspapers published translations of some of her short stories, such as Der Selbstmord (“The Suicide”). In that case, the Vossische Zeitung introduced the author and her piece with the words: “An example of the art of that young and graceful Turkish poet who is currently visiting Berlin.”⁴⁹ In Die literarische Welt Essad Bey⁵⁰ called her a “characteristic personality

 Most probably in 1929, if her own account is correct (Suad Derwisch Hanum, “Wie ich Schriftstellerin wurde”). It would also follow the pattern that she travelled to Germany and was particularly creative after a divorce.  “Eine Probe der Kunst jener jungen und anmutigen türkischen Dichterin, die augenblicklich Berlin besucht.” Suat Derviş, “Der Selbstmord” (“The Suicide”), trans. F.F. Schmidt-Dumont, Unterhaltungsblatt der Vossischen Zeitung, January 5, 1929, no. 4, 1.

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of the new Orient.” While praising her “impressionistic skill” combined with the allegedly typical “melancholic-mystic mood,” he did not forget to stress her modern appearance and everlasting Turkishness: “This blue-eyed Turkish woman is one of the young people who have not retained a single oriental trait on the outside, yet have remained full-blooded Turkish females.”⁵¹ This time, Suat Derviş succeeded in having her texts published in journals and newspapers of different quality and readership. Her more essayistic works, dedicated to modern Turkish literature, were published e. g. in Die Literatur, while her entertaining pieces like Sind Männer erziehbar? Rezepte aus dem Orient ⁵² appeared in Uhu and Tempo. Uhu and Tempo were part of the new Ullstein-project to establish modern print media as a mass product with a new appeal, a fresh design and a different target group, including female urban professionals.⁵³ Suat Derviş as the representative of the new Turkish woman seemed to be a good match for the new German woman of the Weimar Republic. However, from the themes of her texts, it becomes evident that old, Oriental Turkey, or the imaginary features of the same, still occupied the minds of the readers and editors. For this reason, I argue, she added a new facet to her writing on gender issues: that of the Oriental Harem. Suat Derviş was well aware of the German enthusiasm for exoticising films and literature.⁵⁴ “The Orient” was the most favoured of the “exotic” world regions: near enough to be a “real” place in the audience’s imagination, and far (and unfamiliar) enough to serve as the stage for all kinds of (racist and colonial) fantasies.⁵⁵ Suat Derviş’ texts on the harem exhibit a certain volatility in her descriptions and explanations. In Der Querschnitt (“The Cross Section”), the culture magazine  Essad Bey was another colourful personality in inter-war Berlin. Born as Lew Abramowitsch Nussimbaum in Baku in 1905, a novelist and Orient traveller, a Jewish convert to Islam. For a short autobiographic article see Essad Bey, “Lebensläufe. Meine Geschichte” (“Resumes. My Story”), Die literarische Welt 5 (1929): 3–4. Further details in Tom Reiss and Jutta Bretthauer, Der Orientalist. Auf den Spuren von Essad Bey (Berlin: Osburg, 2008).  “Diese blauäugige Türkin ist eine der Jungen, die äußerlich keinen einzigen orientalischen Zug beibehalten haben und doch vollblütige Türkinnen geblieben sind.” Essad Bey, “Die neue türkische Literatur: Gespräch mit Suad Derwisch Hanum” (“The New Turkish Literature: Conversation with Suad Derwisch Hanum”), Die literarische Welt 2 (1929): 1.  Suat Derwisch, “Sind Männer erziehbar? Rezepte aus dem Orient” (“Are Men Educable? Recipes from the Orient”), Uhu 7, no. 12 (1930): 17–22.  Jochen Hung, “Die Zeitung der Zeit,” in “Der ganze Verlag ist einfach eine Bonbonniere”. Ullstein in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. David Oels and Ute Schneider (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 144.  See Susan Lewerenz, Geteilte Welten. Exotisierte Unterhaltung und Artist*innen of Color in Deutschland 1920–1960 (Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2017).  See the article of Claudia Opitz-Belakhal in this anthology.

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of Ullstein publishers, she emphatically rejects all fantasies about lovely singing and dancing slave girls, or any sexual amorality. Harem, she explains, was just the name for that inner part of the house which was forbidden for male non-relatives and where the women spent their life, a kind of a golden cage. It was the space where the one legal wife – despite polygyny being lawful, as a matter of rule just one wife – was waiting for her husband to return home. The wife was dressed in European style, cultivated, enlightened, diverting and physically fit. The husband was the only man she ever got to know throughout her life, and she was his comrade, lover and spouse. All the fantastic ideas about the harem had been caused by the secretiveness of Muslim households, but now, she ends, the Turkish revolutions have torn apart the veil (so fantasies should come to an end).⁵⁶ In Revue des Monats, she talks a little more critically about this Islamic institution: The husbands “quite often” fell in love with beautiful slave girls and married them. The – educated and cultivated – women were not strong enough to fight against this system; once they realised the hopelessness of their situation, they turned into pale, sad and melancholic beings. But today’s women are “terribly busy,” either in their profession as lawyer or teacher, or because they spend their day at the hairdresser’s, the tailor’s and at charity balls. And, obviously, the new Turkish woman loves sports.⁵⁷ The first text in Der Querschnitt reads like a reaction to an article published in the same magazine one year earlier by Graf Alfred Hessenstein, Türkischlevantinische Salons. ⁵⁸ This article consists exclusively of stereotypes, of both the Ottoman and the modern Turkish women, and the social life in Turkey as a whole. According to Hessenstein the harem was a Byzantine tradition and the place of manifold sexual adventures. Now that the new dictatorial rule has ended the old family law, the Turkish women have changed from one extreme to the other, in total seclusion before, now more open than the women of Paris. In any case, “the Oriental woman lets herself be guided more by the inspi-

 Suat Derviş, “Das Märchen vom Harem” (“The tale of the harem”), Der Querschnitt 11 (1931): 773 – 774. On the Ottoman harem see Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem. Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).  Suat Derviş, “Der entzauberte Harem” (“The disenchanted Harem”), Revue des Monats 6, no. 9 (1931): 62– 64 and 86.  Graf Alfred Hessenstein, “Türkisch-levantinische Salons” (“Turkish Levantine Salons”), Der Querschnitt 10 (1930): 175 – 179.

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ration of the imagination than by intellect and good mood. This also explains their tendency to exaggerate.”⁵⁹ It is intriguing to see that firstly the obedient wives Suat Derviş described do not have much in common with herself, or her sister, who had likewise married, separated and travelled even before the end of the Ottoman law. And that secondly, Hessenstein’s ideas on Oriental women were not so different from what she had been formulating in her early articles, and what she had repeated – with tongue in cheek? – in Sind Männer erziehbar? Rezepte aus dem Orient (“Are Men educable? Recipes from the Orient”). Women should not argue in a loud voice, not quarrel with their husbands, not lose their countenance and always dress carefully. Women might be too emotional to make the right choice at the ballot box or as judges. So, we can consider these two articles a mixture of her own conservative ideas on women, an answer to German stereotypes and the demands of the editors. In addition to these short articles, there is a commissioned work from early 1932, a serial in Tempo, titled Frauen des Sultans. Lebensbeichte eines Eunuchs (“Wives of the Sultan. Life Story of an Eunuch”).⁶⁰ With this serial, Suat Derviş established a literary form she would use several times in the coming years: fiction, under the guise of an historical account, complemented with some historical facts, allegedly composed and published with the aim of informing the readers about important events. In the case of Frauen des Sultans, it is told as an autobiographical confession, a very personal memory. Suat Derviş pretends in the introduction to the serial that she relates facts she had learned from her grandmother – who had lived in the Imperial Harem – and from the eunuch himself, “without changing or adding anything.”⁶¹ In a later interview, she would call it a “documentary novel” (“dokümanter roman”).⁶² The story is again melodramatic and without any emotional, intellectual or artistic depth, but the author is a successful and experienced literary craftsperson: the story evolves with high speed: love, sex, violence and treason, not to forget the descriptions

 “Die Orientalin läßt sich mehr von den Eingebungen der Phantasie als durch Verstand und Gemüt leiten. Dadurch erklärt sich auch ihre Neigung zur Übertreibung.” Graf Alfred Hessenstein, “Türkisch-levantinische Salons,” 177.  Suad Derwisch Hanum, “Frauen des Sultans. Lebensbeichte eines Eunuchs” (“Women of the Sultan. Life Confession of a Eunuch”), Tempo, January 29–March 7, 1932.  “Ohne etwas hinzuzufügen und ohne etwas zu ändern” (Suad Derwisch Hanum, “Frauen des Sultans,” January 29, 1932, 7).  Zihni Turgay Anadol, “Fransa’da Yayınlanan İlk Türk Romanı Ankara Mahpusu’nun Yazarı Suat Derviş ile Konuşma” (“A conversation with the author of the first Turkish novel ever published in France The Prisoner of Ankara, Suat Derviş”), Soydan, Anılar, 255.

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of colourful dresses, sparkling jewellery and skilful furnishing in the Imperial Harem which evoke vivid pictures. But the real trick is to have the story told by the eunuch Hayrettin: as a first person narrator, he can add the needed emotional tone to his memories and carries the reader away. However, as a black eunuch in a majority white harem, he is inside and outside at the same time, he can enter literally every room, he knows the women’s secrets and the men’s feelings. He knows, and masters, personal intrigues, and he is at the centre of political intrigues and fights. He is the perfect guide for the German readership through the “strange life and hustle and bustle at the court of the sultan in Constantinople.”⁶³ Frauen des Sultans fits in well with the popular culture of Berlin of those years in a further, unexpected, way: I had mentioned above the enthusiasm for black artists in the 1920s. The figure of the black eunuch, who has been abducted as a small child from his “wild tribe” by a white slave trader, is an exotic but popular image. Articles on black artists and entertainment were published in Tempo as was the case in other newspapers. In one issue, the mutual references between black entertainment and the black eunuch become even visible: a photograph showing three black women, the waitresses of “Germany’s first black bar,” is embedded in the text of “Frauen des Sultans,” in the middle of the page.⁶⁴ For the Turkish readership who would read the more or less identical story in 1933, the text was congruent with the general trend, in both the political area and the cultural production, of bashing the Ottoman Empire morally and politically, and of manifesting an insurmountable cleavage between the Old and the New. For the black eunuch and his misdeeds, there can be no redemption but only death.⁶⁵

“Berlin” One Last Time “I don’t know which month of 1930 it was, but it was a chilly day […].”⁶⁶ This is the opening sentence of Suat Derviş’s serial A Turkish Woman Who Made Three

 “… das seltsame Leben und Treiben am Konstantinopler Sultanshof” (Suad Derwisch Hanum, “Frauen des Sultans,” Tempo, January 30, 1932, 3).  Tempo, February 27, 1932, 5.  Suad Derwisch Hanum, “Frauen des Sultans,” Tempo, March 8, 1932, 7.  “1930 senesinin hangi ayı idi bilmiyorum, fakat serince bir gün…” Suat Derviş, “Berlinde [sic!] Üç Sene Kalemi İle Geçinen bir Türk Kadını” (“A Turkish Woman Who Made Three Years

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Years Living in Berlin with Her Pen, published in 1939 in the Turkish newspaper Son Posta. Pretending to document her life in Berlin between 1930 and 1933, the serial reads like a quintessence of more than 20 years of writing-life and Germany-experience. Being an example of autofiction, it resembles at the same time the serial Frauen des Sultans in its literary strategy: an historical account in the guise of a documentary, with concrete historical data and names, but embedded in the personal story of the first-person-narrator, this time Suat Derviş herself. In my opinion, it is of utmost significance to take the historical and personal background into account, if one is to read and to evaluate this serial. A naïve reading of the text as an autobiographical documentary, which has become very popular since Serdar Soydan republished it in his edited volume, does not do justice to the text. In spring 1939, when the serial was published, not only was the world on the edge of World War II, but also the domestic politics of Turkey, and the political stance of Suat Derviş, had taken new and decisive directions. In the Turkish Republic, the 1930s were the years when the secularisation politics was implemented in its most rigid form, and the single-party-rule left no more space for critical or divergent thoughts. After the death of Atatürk in November 1938, Ismet Inönü took over. Although Inönü was not a copy of Atatürk, neither as a person nor in his political perspectives, he continued the secularist project and what is more important, he had no intention of relaxing the party’s grip on the country. One of the foundations of the political revolution from empire to republic had been Turkish nationalism. The latter included and still includes a broad range of diverse forms. In the 1930s, a both chauvinist and racist nationalism gained strength. Next to the suppression of languages or ethnic identities other than those Turkish, religious minorities such as the Jewish – which had been part of the Anatolian religious landscape since approximately 400 B.C. and had been among the legal religious minorities in the Ottoman Empire – experienced a new quality of populistic threat. Events such as a pogrom against the Jews of Thrace in 1934, and the harassment of Jews in daily-life and by print media in Stürmer-style, heralded an ever-growing antisemitism even if the government rejected the existence of such a thing and praised itself for rescuing Jewish academics from National Socialist Germany.⁶⁷ Moreover, the suppression of (allegedly) socialist/communist ideas and artists also increased. Among many others, the Living in Berlin with Her Pen”), Son Posta, January 25, 1939, 9. The complete serial was reprinted for the first time in Soydan, Anılar.  For the effects of the Turkification project on the Jewish community in those years see Rıfat Bali, Model Citizens of the State. The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-Party Period (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 2– 19.

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already internationally acknowledged poet Nazım Hikmet (1902– 1963), a childhood-friend of Suat Derviş, had been sentenced to 28 years imprisonment in 1938 basically for being a communist.⁶⁸ For Suat Derviş, the 1930s were a period of personal maturing and change: her political perspective had changed to the extent that she ran as a candidate for local elections, immediately after suffrage was granted to women in 1930 for the first time. Her party, the oppositional Free Republican Party (Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası, SCF), however, was banned the same year. In 1932, she lost her father who had been her supporter and polestar. Her mother, the Ottoman lady, had no idea how to make a living, and her only brother was still too young to support the family. Thus, Suat felt obliged to deal with their financial needs. She had intended to continue her stay in Berlin and to gain the needed money, but the political changes in Germany and her own emotional needs made her return to Istanbul in 1933. Back in Turkey, she published for literary journals with a leftist orientation such as Resimli Ay (“Monthly with pictures”)⁶⁹ as well as for a variety of newspapers. As an observer, she attended international events such as the world-conference of the International Alliance of Women in Istanbul in 1935 and the Montreux-Conference in 1936 about the legal future of trade and traffic on the Bosporus. In 1937, she travelled to Moscow and Tehran as a correspondent of the Turkish newspaper Tan. The articles of the new serial speak in a very friendly tone about the state institutions and the Russians (who are so much more civilised and chic than she had thought⁷⁰). In the same year, her novel Bu Roman Olan Şeylerin Romanı (“This is a Novel of Things Which Really Exist”) got published, also in Tan. This novel is usually considered a turning point in her literary work, towards social realism. The poor people of Istanbul, the factory workers and prostitutes, have taken over the places of the Ottoman ladies in their seraglios.⁷¹ While both the serial and the novel were

 Saime Göksu’s Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet (London: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd., revised ed., 2006) treats in a comprehensive way Nazım Hikmet’s poetic oeuvre as well as his political biography.  For the journal Resimli Ay (“Monthly with Pictures”) and its main editor, Sabiha Sertel, see Inci Özkan Keresticioğlu, “Sabiha Sertel,” in Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Francisca DeHaan et al. (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006).  Suat Derviş, “İşte, Artık Moskova’dayım” (“Finally, I’m in Moscow”), Tan, June 19, 1937.  Çimen Günay, “Toplumcu Gerçekçi Türk Edebiyatında Suat Derviş’in Yeri. The Role of Suat Derviş in Turkish Socialist Realism” (MA Thesis, Bilkent University, Ankara, 2001), 48, www. e-kitaphavuzu.com/kitap/cimen-gunay-toplumcu-gercekci-turk-edebiyatinda-suat-dervis-in-yerikitabi-indir.html. Accessed: January 17th 2022.

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published in 1937, it is not evident the extent to which the Russian journey made its imprint on the novel. A Turkish Woman Who Made Three Years Living in Berlin with Her Pen must be read in the light of what has been said in the previous paragraphs. Without a doubt, Suat Derviş was materially dependent on penning commissioned work. Her earlier “documentaries” and travel writing had sold well, and Germany was still an interesting topic, now, that the Spanish, Italian and German fascist governments posed a danger to Turkey which was only just recovering from the damage of the previous war. For the government-critical newspaper Son Posta, it was a tool to tackle the Turkish foreign and domestic politics which were not decisive enough to fight fascism and antisemitism.⁷² The Suat Derviş of the serial arrives in Berlin one chilly day in 1930 and becomes, by virtue of her own stubborn determination to fight for her success, a renowned journalist writing for quality papers. She is treated and paid well by the German publishers, and only fate, in the form of her father’s fatal illness, is able to bring her down. In one sentence, the first person narrator touches on the fact that she had been in Berlin before, but on the whole, the reader gets the impression that after her arrival in 1930, she had to start from scratch: no money, no place to stay, no network, only determination. On her second day, the young lady enters the impressive building of Ullstein Publishers – this chapter is more or less a retake of the scene in Berlin Mektupları from 1921. To her great astonishment, Monty Jacobs (1875 – 1945), editor-in-chief of the feature section of the Vossische Zeitung, welcomes her immediately into his office and treats her with great respect. “You have seen,” he tells her, “that an article about you has already been published in our newspaper.”⁷³ She cannot believe her ears but when Monty Jacobs shows her the article, she gets tears in her eyes and feels very proud because she is famous not for being someone’s wife or daughter but because of her own literary achievements. The original version of the serial in Son Posta includes some pictures which are unfortunately not provided in the reprint of Soydan. In the newspaper version of 1939, included in the article, there is the first half of a clipping from a German newspaper, titled Gespräche mit Suad Derwisch (“Encounters with Suad Derwisch”). This very article, however, had been published in January 1929 in

 For the National Socialists’ enthusiasm for Atatürk and the friendly relations between representatives of Turkey and German fascists see Stefan Ihrig, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).  Suat Derviş, “Berlinde [sic!] Üç Sene Kalemi İle Geçinen bir Türk Kadını,” Son Posta, January 26, 1939, 8.

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Namslauer Stadtblatt,⁷⁴ and not, as the text of Suat Derviş insinuates, only a little prior to her arrival in Berlin in 1930 in Vossische Zeitung. By virtue of these concrete details, it can be seen how Suat Derviş composed her ego-stories and added “authenticity” to the account. On several occasions, it is evident how successfully she used the fame she had gained in one country to boost her fame in the other country. Here and there, Suat Derviş criticises in the serial the insufficient support and respect of the Turkish state towards its (eminent) citizens: when her father died in Berlin in March 1932, neither the Turkish embassy nor the Chamber of Commerce supported the family in any aspect. Only with the help of a generous German newspaper editor did she at least have enough money to bury her father at the Muslim cemetery of Berlin. But there is a deeper layer in this serial which deserves greater attention. In addition to the already-mentioned key topics – her success as an independent female writer and scenes of her private life –, the political situation in Germany covers a prominent space. Her description and analysis of the politics at the end of the Weimar Republic are of a more general kind. However, she reflects on the political climate, how the intellectuals and acquaintances feel and react during this period of the increasingly aggressive power of the NSDAP, the SA and their adherents. She relates and remembers who was imprisoned, abducted or killed, or fled to another country. In some cases, she enters a new account with an anecdote from her personal experience and continues on to the general situation of Jews and foreigners in Germany. She narrates for example how she together with “foreign looking” friends walking in the street had to run and hide from a fascist mob in a restaurant. The very intriguing aspect of this account is that the owners of the restaurant turn out to be Turkish Jews: “This Turkish Jewish man, who is a very corpulent, very big-sized man, rubs both his hands and says, in Turkish, ‘Do you see what they [the mob outside] are doing? Actually, we are Turks – we are Turks, but what if they realise that we are Jewish and raid the shop?’”⁷⁵ The inclusion of this account in the serial makes particular sense if we consider the harsh political and economic conditions of the Turkish Jews in Turkey at that time. It would have been too dangerous to openly accuse the Turkish government or the print-media of chauvinist right-wing antisemitism. But to do the

 Peter Gard, “Gespräche mit Suad Derwisch” (“Encounters with Suad Derwisch”), Namslauer Stadtblatt, January 17, 1929.  “Çok iri, çok şişman bir adam olan bu Türk musevisi, iki ellerini oğuşturarak Türkçe –Görüyor musunuz, diyor neler yapıyorlarlll Vakıa biz Türküz. Türküz amma… Musevi olduğumuzu anlayıp da dükkânı basrlarsa?” Suat Derviş, “Berlinde [sic!] Üç Sene Kalemi İle Geçinen bir Türk Kadını”, Son Posta, February 3, 1939, 10.

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same with reference to Germany was more tolerable. Suat Derviş herself was not free of antisemitic prejudices: She talks about newspapers (in Germany) funded by “the Jewish capital” or by “the German capital.” The Turkish-Jewish restaurant owner is – naturally? – not as courageous as Suat and her sister. However, unlike other Turkish newspapers, Son Posta and Suat Derviş positioned themselves far away from anti-Semitic propaganda and from bullying everyone who did not follow their exclusivist and racist understanding of Turkish citizenship. The serial A Turkish Woman Who Made Three Years Living in Berlin with Her Pen ends with a melancholic farewell to Berlin and to Europe as a whole: “Never again did I have any relations with Europe.” It was of course too early to say this in 1939. In 1941, she married Reşat Fuat Baraner, the general secretary of the Turkish Communist Party. With this marriage, she parted from the majority society, and never again became the glamorous Turkish female journalist she had been for at least 25 years. After some years she or her husband or both had spent in prison, she left Turkey in 1953 for France and returned to Turkey only in 1963.

Suat Derviş – A Transnational Life in the Interwar Period In this article, I have endeavoured to establish a relation between Suat Derviş’ writings on and in Germany of different periods, to illustrate her keen interest in women’s affairs without being one of the early Ottoman feminists, and to show how a young intellectual woman of the late Ottoman Empire matures and leaves the cocoon of her pampered childhood. The 1930s can be considered the time of her greatest public success, while the Berlin Letters from 1921/22 reflect a facet of Berlin and the Turkish community in Berlin shortly after the war, which is too often neglected in historiography. All texts under consideration include at least two textual levels: on the surface, vivid descriptions of “the life” in Turkey or Germany, and below the surface, a critical questioning of the readers’ perspectives, practices and politics. The balance between entertainment and criticism changes in relation to the genre of the piece. Not least, the expectations of readership and editor have to be fulfilled when a living has to be made by writing. While the Letters are still formulated as travel accounts, addressing their readers in Turkey directly via rhetorical devices such as “my Turkish readers might be disappointed to hear that […],” the later docu-fiction serials seem to serve up their content as ordered by the client, and can at the same time be deciphered as a critique in the form of

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a mirror of manners. The deciphering of her columns and letters could be improved by including an analysis of her novels and stories. This was not possible in the given framework of this chapter. A proud announcement in the Turkish newspaper Vakit in 1931 demonstrates Suat Derviş’ prominence at that time in Turkey, enhanced by her fame in Berlin: Suad Derviş Hanım had gone on a study trip to Germany three months ago. […] In Berlin, she gave a lecture about old and new Turkish women upon an invitation by female journalists and writers at the printing house, and after the conference, a feast was held in her honour. Suad Derviş Hanım’s story “Footsteps in the Dark,” which appeared in the Vossische Zeitung, was successful in the German literary world, and many newspapers and magazines requested articles from our esteemed novelist. […] She was also present as a guest at the Berlin Press Ball held last month. […] The success of our female novelist in Germany, who belongs to the generation after the war, is greatly appreciated.⁷⁶

The exact extent of her fame is impossible to estimate. However, the announcement in a prominent place of the page shows that she had a professional idea of publicity and self-marketing, and always wanted her voice to be heard. Yet, the goal of her self-marketing was to convince the audience of her ideas on how to improve the society and the living conditions of the individual. She never shied away from exploiting herself physically for the sake of writing and propagating what she believed in. In the later decades of her life, she paid a high price for defending her own ideas and following her own path. Even her Communist comrades felt from time to time uneasy about this untamable woman who would never relinquish her individual style and perspective.

 “Suat Derviş H. üç ay evvel Almanyada bir tetkik seyahatına çıkmıştı. … Suat Derviş H. Berlin matbuat evinde, kadın gazeteci ve muharrirler tarafından yapılan davet üzerine eski ve yeni Türk kadını, hakkında bir konferans vermiş ve konferanstan sonra şerefine verilen ziyafette bulunmuştur. Suat Derviş H. ın ‘Fosiçe Çaytung’de çıkan ‘Karanlıkta ayak sesleri’ isimli hikâyesi Alman edebiyat âleminde muvaffakıyyet kazanmış, ve kıymetli romancımızdan bir çok gazete ve mecmualar yazılar istemişlerdir… Suat Derviş H. geçen ay verilen Berlin matbuat cemiyeti balosunda da davetli olarak hazır bulunmuştur… Harpten sonraki nesle mensup olan bir kadın romancımızın Almanyadaki bu muvaffakıyeti şayani taktirdir.” “Suat Derviş Hanımın İki Romanı” (“Two Novels of Suat Derviş”), Vakit, February 26, 1931.

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Bibliography Sources Essad Bey [Lew Abramowitsch Nussimbaum]. “Die neue türkische Literatur: Gespräch mit Suad Derwisch Hanum” [“The New Turkish Literature: Conversation with Suad Derwisch Hanum”]. Die literarische Welt 2 (1929): 1.⁷⁷ — “Lebensläufe. Meine Geschichte” [“Resumes. My Story”]. Die literarische Welt 5 (1929): 3 – 4. Hessenstein, Graf Alfred. “Türkisch-levantinische Salons” [“Turkish Levantine Salons”]. Der Querschnitt 10 (1930): 175 – 179. Mehmet Rauf. “Suat Derviş Hanımın eserleri” [“The Works of Ms. Suat Derviş”], Süs dergisi, June 16, 1923, 10. Saadet Zihni. “Anadolulu Kadınlarımız” [“Our Anatolian Woman”]. İleri, January 27, 1919, 2. Suad Derwisch. “Der Selbstmord” [“The Suicide”], transl. by F.F. Schmidt-Dumont. Unterhaltungsblatt der Vossischen Zeitung, January 5, 1929, no. 4, 1. — “Sind Männer erziehbar? Rezepte aus dem Orient” [“Are Men Educable? Recipes from the Orient”]. Uhu 7/12 (1930): 17 – 22. — “Der entzauberte Harem” [“The Disenchanted Harem”]. Revue des Monats 6/9 (1931): 62 – 64 and 86. — “Das Märchen vom Harem” [“The Tale of the Harem”]. Der Querschnitt 11 (1931): 773 – 774. Suad Derwisch Hanum. “Wie ich Schriftstellerin wurde” [“How I Became an Author”]. Tempo, January 29, 1932, 24. — “Frauen des Sultans. Lebensbeichte eines Eunuchs” [“Women of the Sultan. Life Confession of a Eunuch”]. Tempo, January 29, 1932 – March 7, 1932. Suat Derviş. “Behire’nin Talipleri” [“Behire’s Marriage Candidates”]. Yeni Şark. October 24, 1921, 3. — “Alman Kadınlarına Dair” [“On German Women”]. Yeni Şark, November 17, 1921, 3. — “Berlin Mektupları 2: Alman Kadınları” [“Berlin Letters 2: German Women”]. Yeni Şark, November 25, 1921, 3. — “Berlin Mektupları 4: Berlin’de Ecnebi Bolluğu” [“Berlin Letters 4: Abundance of Foreigners in Berlin”]. Yeni Şark, December 16, 1921, 3. — “Almanya Mektupları: Kadınlık Hakkında” [“Germany Letters: On Womanhood”]. Yeni Şark, January 18, 1922, 3. — Ne bir ses ne bir nefes [“Not a Sound not a Breath”]. Istanbul: Orhaniye Matbaası, 1922. — “İstanbul-Moskova-Tahran” [“Istanbul-Moscow-Tehran”]. Tan, June 19, 1937, 7. — Kara Kitap [Black Book]. Istanbul: İthaki, 2014. — “Berlinde [sic!] Üç Sene Kalemi İle Geçinen bir Türk Kadını” [“A Turkish Woman Who Made Three Years Living in Berlin with Her Pen”]. Son Posta, January 25, 1939, 9 – 10.

 The entries are arranged according to the actual name used in each piece. “Suat Derviş” is a penname with no surname in the proper sense. “Hanum” is the Germanised version of the Turkish title “Hanım,” meaning “Ms. or Mrs.,” added after the personal name.

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— “Berlinde [sic!] Üç Sene Kalemi İle Geçinen bir Türk Kadını” [“A Turkish Woman Who Made Three Years Living in Berlin with Her Pen”]. Son Posta, January 26, 1939, 8 and 10. — “Berlinde [sic!] Üç Sene Kalemi İle Geçinen bir Türk Kadını” [“A Turkish Woman Who Made Three Years Living in Berlin with Her Pen”]. Son Posta, February 3, 1939, 8 and 10. — “Behçet Necatigil’e mektup” [“A Letter to Behçet Necatigil”]. In Anılar, paramparça [Memories. All in Bits], edited by Serdar Soydan, 243 – 249. Istanbul: İthaki, 2017. — “Berlin’de Üç Sene Kalemi İle Geçinen bir Türk Kadını” [“A Turkish Woman Who Made Three Years Living in Berlin with Her Pen”]. In Anılar, paramparça [Memories. All in Bits], edited by Serdar Soydan, 53 – 123. Istanbul: İthaki, 2017. Originally published in Son Posta, Januar 25 – February 8, 1939, in 11 instalments. — Bu roman olan şeylerin romanıdır [“This is a Novel of Things Which Really Exist”]. Istanbul: İthaki Yayınları, 2018. Originally published in Tan, March 12 – May 10, 1937. “Suat Derviş Hanımın İki Romanı” [“Two Novels of Suat Derviş”]. Vakit, February 26, 1931, 3. Suat Fuat. “Almanya Mektupları: Alman Ticareti” [“Germany Letters: The German Trade”]. Yeni Şark, December 26, 1921, 3.

Literature Anadol, Zihni Turgay. “Fransa’da Yayınlanan İlk Türk Romanı Ankara Mahpusu’nun Yazarı Suat Derviş ile Konuşma” (“A conversation with the author of the first Turkish novel ever published in France, The Prisoner of Ankara, Suat Derviş”). In Anılar, paramparça (Memories. All in Bits), edited by Serdar Soydan, 251 – 257. Istanbul: İthaki, 2017. Balcigil, Osman. İpek sabahlık. Bir Suat Derviş romanı (“A Dressing Gown of Silk”). Istanbul: Destek Yayınları, 2017. Bali, Rıfat. Model Citizens of the State. The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-Party Period. Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. Behmoaras, Liz. Suat Derviş. Efsane bir Kadın ve Dönemi (“A Legendary Woman”). İstanbul: Doğan Egmont Yayıncılık, 2017. Böer, Ingeborg, Ruth Haerkötter and Petra Kappert, eds. Türken in Berlin 1871 – 1945. Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2002. Dervişoğlu, Bülent İsmail. “Mehmed Emin Derviş Paşa, Dervişoğlu Ailesini Kuran Adam” (“The founder of the Dervişoğlu family”). In Anılar, paramparça (“Memories. All in Bits”), edited by Serdar Soydan, 259 – 334. İstanbul: İthaki, 2017. Exertzoglou, Haris. “The Cultural Uses of Consumption: Negotiating Class, Gender, and Nation in the Ottoman Urban Centers during the 19th Century.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 35, no. 1 (2003), 77 – 101. Geser, Marcel. Zwischen Missionierung und “Stärkung des Deutschtums”. Der Deutsche Kindergarten in Konstantinopel von seinen Anfängen bis 1918. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2016. Göksu, Saime. Romantic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet. London: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd., revised ed., 2006. Gülen Eyi, Ayşe. “Ein Koffer voller Erinnerungen.” taz, December 3, 2018. https://gazete.taz. de/article/index.html%3Farticle=!5555485.html. Accessed: January 17th 2022. Günay, Çimen. “Toplumcu Gerçekçi Türk Edebiyatında Suat Derviş’in Yeri. The Role of Suat Derviş in Turkish Socialist Realism.” MA Thesis, Bilkent University, Ankara, 2001.

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www.e-kitaphavuzu.com/kitap/cimen-gunay-toplumcu-gercekci-turk-edebiyatinda-suat-der vis-in-yeri-kitabi-indir.html. Accessed: January 17th 2022. Heinsohn, Kirsten. “‘Grundsätzlich’ gleichberechtigt. Die Weimarer Republik in frauenhistorischer Perspektive.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 18 – 20 (2018): 39 – 45. Hung, Jochen. “Die Zeitung der Zeit.” In “Der ganze Verlag ist einfach eine Bonbonniere.” Ullstein in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, edited by David Oels and Ute Schneider, 137 – 159. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. Hupfeld, Tanja. Zur Wahrnehmung und Darstellung des Fremden in ausgewählten französischen Reiseberichten des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts. “Il les faut voir et visiter en leur pays.” Göttingen: Univ.-Verl. Göttingen, 2007. Ihrig, Stefan. Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. Kaplan, Sefa. “Being Hundreds of Birds at Once….” Bosphorus Review of Books (September 2020). https://bosphorusreview.com/being-hundreds-of-birds-at-once. Keresticioğlu, Inci Özkan. “Sabiha Sertel.” In Biographical Dictionary of Women’s Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by Francisca DeHaan, Krasimira Daskalova and Anna Loutfi, 494 – 498. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006. Keyder, Çağlar. “A History and Geography of Turkish Nationalism.” In Citizenship and the nation-state in Greece and Turkey, edited by Faruk Birtek and Thalia G. Dragonas, 3 – 17. London, New York: Routledge, 2005. Kohl, Karl-Heinz. “Cherchez la femme d’Orient,” In Europa und der Orient 800 – 1900, edited by Gereon Sievernich and Hendrik Budde, 356 – 367. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, 1989. Lewerenz, Susan. Geteilte Welten. Exotisierte Unterhaltung und Artist*innen of Color in Deutschland 1920 – 1960. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau, 2017. Mangold-Will, Sabine. Begrenzte Freundschaft. Germany and Turkey 1918 – 1933. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013. Metinsoy Mahir, Elif İkbal. “The Limits of Feminism in Muslim-Turkish Women Writers of the Armistice Period (1918 – 1923).” In A Social History of Late Ottoman Women. New Perspectives, edited by Duygu Köksal and Anastasia Falierou, 83 – 108. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Peirce, Leslie P. The Imperial Harem. Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Reiss, Tom, and Jutta Bretthauer. Der Orientalist. Auf den Spuren von Essad Bey. Berlin: Osburg, 2008. Soydan, Serdar, ed. Anılar, paramparça (“Memories. All in Bits”). İstanbul: İthaki, 2017. Soydan, Serdar. “Suat Derviş’in Bütün Romanları” (“All Novels of Suat Derviş”). Sanat Kritik, January 18, 2021. http://sanatkritik.com/eski/kulliyat/suat-dervisin-butun-romanlari/. Soydan, Serdar. “Hatice Saadet’in/Suat Derviş’ in Takma Adları” (“Hatice Saadet/Suat Derviş’ Pseudonyms”). In Sanat Kritik, March 2, 2021. http://sanatkritik.com/eski/kulliyat/ha tice-saadetin-takma-adlari/. Accessed: January 17th 2022. Syndram, Karl Ulrich. “Der erfundene Orient in der europäischen Literatur vom 18. bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts.” In Europa und der Orient 800 – 1900, edited by Gereon Sievernich and Hendrik Budde, 324 – 341. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, 1989. Zürcher, Erik J. Turkey. A Modern History. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017.

Nishant K. Narayanan

“This Demolished Church was Equally the Face of Contemporary Europe” – Configurations and Representations of Twentieth Century Europe by Three Indian Travellers Travelling and travel accounts have always been a syncretic activity, where the traveller as the subject and the travelled place as the object develop a constellation of relationships, symbiotic, antagonistic or traumatic or merely aesthetic. These constellations of travelling as an engaging, immersive activity and travel accounts as epistemic ventures are underlined by a constant interaction between the traveller’s perspectives about the “Other” and the role of the “Other” as a site of knowledge acquisition. As a syncretic enterprise, Florian Krobb and Dorit Müller observe that “[t]ravel and its dynamics provide a structure for any attempt at knowledge transfer, which is particularly important when it comes to the communication of phenomena (sights, experiences).”¹ While expanding the notion of travel in a communication as an epistemic engagement with the visual and experiential, it is equally important to underline the fact that the traveller views the “Other” and describes the “Unfamiliar” as not only objects but also subjects and sites of knowledge. Especially in the context of literary figures turning into travel writers and their description of the “Other” in verbal and visual form involving a range of intermediary steps, like “notations of observations, experiences, and insights are made on the spot, in others they are made retrospectively; mostly, however, the stages of notation and evaluation overlap and combine.”² These may evoke an ethnographic field work strategy employed by an author, which nevertheless also rests upon a pivotal aspect, gaze, which acts as the articulatory medium for the auctorial traveller to develop various strategies for configuring and representing their impressions, i. e. the “[i]tinerant knowledge.”³

 Florian Krobb and Dorit Müller, “Special Section on Travel Writing and Knowledge Transfer: Itinerant Knowledge Production in European Travel Writing – Introduction,” Transfers 6, no. 3 (2016): 43, doi:10.3167/TRANS.2016.060304.  Ibidem.  Ibid., 41. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110734966-004

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Giorgia Alù and Sarah Patricia Hill describe the travellers’ gaze as “a narrative space from which narrator and reader scrutinise, judge and categorise the varied cultures and societies they explore through writing and reading.”⁴ The notion of gaze came into the forefront by Mary Louise Pratt in her work Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), which explores the gaze as medium of interaction between the traveller and the “travelee” as Pratt refers to the countries and people, to whom one travels: “To travel is to see – travel is essentially a way of seeing, a mode of seeing: it is grounded in the eye, in our visual capacity.”⁵ This dictum by Bernard McGrane is an all-encompassing aspect of various Indian authors and their travel accounts on Europe, especially Germany, which are discussed in the following sections. Based on these assumptions, this chapter looks into these construction strategies of epistemic dimension by analysing the configurations and representations of images of Europe by these authors in their travelogues.

Berlin as the “Nerve Centre of Europe” – Three Indian Travellers in Twentieth Century Germany [T]he definitions of history which we have revered till now have been rewritten there. Human being, what a dangerous animal!⁶ Even while we admire the elaborate paintings that adorn the walls, the grand chandeliers, rich oak wood carvings and majestic columns, the guide tells us about the “Mad King of Bavaria.”⁷

The first statement belongs to the renowned Malayalam author Madath Thekkepaattu Vasudevan Nair, also known as M.T. Vasudevan Nair who expressed his anguish and agony after visiting the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1962. His travelogues are compiled in a collection called M.T. yude Yathrakal (“MT’s journeys”) and were published in 2010. They tell about his journey to Germany that took place in 1962 as part of a pan European journey. He was one of the del-

 Giorgia Alù and Sarah Patricia Hill, “The travelling eye: reading the visual in travel narratives,” Studies in Travel Writing 22, no. 1 (2018): 1, doi:10.1080/13645145.2018.1470073.  Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 116, quoted in Alù and Hill, “The travelling eye,” 1.  M.T. Vasudevan Nair, M.T. Yude Yathrakal. (Thrissur: H&C Publishing House, 2010), 12. All translations from Hindi, Malayalam and German into English are my translations.  Usha Rajagopalan, “Neuschwanstein: The Dream Castle,” Indian Literature 47, no. 6 (2003): 142, accessed July 25, 2021, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23341076.

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egates chosen by the government of India to accompany a team to participate in the world youth festival held in Helsinki in 1962. Apart from spending time in Tashkent in the erstwhile Soviet Union and in Helsinki, Nair decided to visit East and West Germany. Especially in East Germany, he decided to visit Buchenwald, Gera, Erfurt and Weimar. Nair’s resolution to visit Buchenwald’s concentration camp, where he saw the holocaust tragedy in materialistic forms, came out of his urge to historically contextualise his visit to Germany, which for him in 1962 served as reminder of the brutality of history and also of his own decision to discard the notions of history, which hitherto has been taught and propagated as the history of peace. The second statement is by the English and Kannada⁸ author Usha Rajagopalan, who visited the famed Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria and was captivated by the opulence and charm of the overwhelming structure. Published in 2003 under the title Neuschwanstein – The Dream Castle, Rajagopalan takes the reader on a descriptive and precise eyewitness account about the minute details of the iconic tourist destination in Germany, combining her narrative with the unfortunate fate of the extravagant ruler King Ludwig II who was declared insane and deposed. Unlike Rajagopalan, the encounter with Germany’s popular monuments in the form of ruins becomes an important aspect for Hindi writer, Sachchidananda Vatsyayan, popularly known by his pen name Agyeya. After his visit to Europe in 1955, his travelogue in Hindi Ek Boond Sahasa Uchchali discusses Berlin as the central place of Europe, while looking at the ruins of the Gedächtniskirche, which created an image in him of an aesthetic yet restless Europe, a dichotomy which is trying to come out of its brutal past. Describing Berlin as the “nerve centre of Europe”⁹ he says: [t]his demolished church was, equally the face of contemporary Europe – beautiful, broken, torn apart between life and destruction, and therefore withdrawn inwards; merged and disturbed by the conflicting influences of an aversion towards the stronghold of faith on the one hand, and on the other hand a fascination with one’s own zeal for work; and even at night it is still illuminated by such glaring light that it cannot be concealed…¹⁰

 Kannada is a regional language which belongs to the Dravidian language family. It is spoken in the state of Karnataka in India and it is also the official language of the state of Karnataka.  Sachchidananda Vatsyayan, Ek Boond Sahasa Uchchali, 6th ed. (New Delhi: Bharatiya Jnanpith, [1960] 2008), 203, Europe ka snayu Kendra – Berlin.  Vibha Surana, “Ein Vergleich von Reiseliteratur der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum und aus Indien,” in Germanistentreffen Tagungsbeiträge, ed. Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) (Bonn: Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), 2000), 140.

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Rajagopalan, on the one hand, and Nair as well as Vatsyayan, on the other hand, contemporaries till now and well known literary figures, combine a different approach towards the foreign land in which they were guided by their respective hosts. Whereas Nair and Vatsyayan talked about the brutalities of Holocaust and the aftermaths of war during their journey to Europe, Rajagopalan sidestepped these issues and focused solely on the aesthetic aspect of the palace. For instance, she mentioned a key aspect in German history in the following passage: Yet another grand room in the castle is the Singer’s Hall. Like the others here too the walls carry large paintings from Wagner’s operas. The tall candle stands which are placed along the walls and the many chandeliers ensure that there is sufficient light in the Hall. Sadly though, the Singer’s Hall was never used in the life time of King Ludwig II. In 1933 concerts were arranged here for the first time to mark the 50th death anniversary of Richard Wagner. Even now concerts are held in this Hall every September.¹¹

Rajagopalan mentioned the year 1933 in the above statement while connecting it with grandeur of the palace and the reverence accorded to Wagner, without mentioning the year 1933 as a paradigm in Germany’s history when Hitler came to power after winning the elections. The historical consciousness which was exemplified by Nair and Vatsyayan is surprisingly missing in Rajagopalan’s travel account and reduces her travel narrative to a merely fact and anecdote based depiction about a popular destination.

Seeing the Travellee – Representations of the “Other” The Indian authors, whose itinerary included here the European countries, however, approached them in a diverse manner. Whereas Nair and Vatsyayan were interested in the historical approach and the lessons which the history of Germany can teach the mankind, Rajagopalan seemed to be interested in a more mainstream meeting with the “Other” which is non-immersive, as the “Other” is presented as a finished aesthetic object, devoid of any deficits and embellished with a lot of factual information for the consumption of tourists. These diverse strategies of gazing at Europe are to be understood in the paradigm of how the travellee is seen by the traveller. Whereas John Berger perceives gaze as a relational aspect aided by vision and tries to make associations between the viewer and the

 Rajagopalan, “Neuschwanstein,” 144.

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viewed “constituting what is present to us as we are,”¹² Bourdieu attaches a more intimate and ontological relationship to gaze by the viewer, thereby making the gaze a sensorial and equally an associative process, in which “the relation to the world is a relation of presence in the world, of being in the world, in the sense of belonging to the world.”¹³ Combining gaze with the location of the traveller, it becomes imperative to analyse how the traveller and the travellee are set up on an orbit of encounter, which involves the identity of both these mutual elements. While discussing the notion of location, Lata Mani points out the notion of identity, as described by Stuart Hall as a dynamic entity, as “[i]dentity is neither continuous nor continuously interrupted but constantly framed between the simultaneous vectors of similarity, continuity and difference.”¹⁴ Stuart’s formulation of identity is evident in how Nair, Rajagopalan and Vatsyayan viewed Europe. Whereas Nair and Vatsyayan were immersed in history and language of Germany, Rajagopalan seemed to be unaffected by the historical aspect of the travellee, i. e. Germany. For Nair and Vatsyayan, their holistic view about Europe was constantly influenced by their visits to various parts of the country, especially cities like Berlin, Gera, Erfurt and Weimar, which played a key role in Germany’s cultural, social and political history. For instance, while returning from the Buchenwald concentration camp, which covered a substantial part of his travel experiences in Germany, Nair was filled with remorse and guilt. Nair took stock of the entire panorama, especially the barbed wires, and he talked about the Buchenwald concentration camp as a site of crime, suffered by the victims, and guilt which is being felt by the Germans in the present day. Nair also felt that he was complicit in this crime, when he remembered the awe which he had as a child for Hitler, whom he saw as a war hero, and when he reminisced about his childhood days about the media’s portrayal of Hitler as a heroic and cult figure who transcended the borders and became also popular in India. The popularity of Hitler in India could be ascribed to the fact that the colonised believed they had found a solidary figure in  John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), 9, quoted in Alù and Hill, “The travelling eye,” 2.  Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 114, quoted in Alù and Hill, “The travelling eye,” 3; see also Tony Schirato and Jen Webb, Reading the visual (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2004).  Stuart Hall, “Speaking for the subject” (lecture delivered at University of California, Santa Barbara, May 26, 1989) quoted in Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, “Crosscurrents, crosstalk: Race, ‘Postcoloniality’ and the politics of location,” Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (1993): 295, doi:10.1080/09502389300490181; also quoted in Rosa L. Fregoso and Angie Chabram, “Chicana/o cultural representations: Reframing alternative critical discourses,” Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (1990): 205, doi:10.4324/9780203988459.

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the struggle against the British colonial system. This widespread popularity of Hitler also influenced Nair. He developed reverence for Hitler during his childhood, despite lacking in knowledge about the war and its intricacies. Nair used the term “hero-worship”¹⁵ to reflect on his image about Hitler which he had cultivated over the years. However, this got demolished after his visit to Buchenwald. He winded up his departure from Buchenwald by summarising: “So, this is called war.”¹⁶ Interestingly, all the three author-travellers stayed away from essentialising Europe. Instead of assessing the foreign countries with their prior perspectives, Nair and Vatsyayan positioned themselves as historical and cultural subjects who as witnesses of the Second World War, the end of the Nationalist-Socialist regime and by experiencing a post-war Germany did not indulge in Occidentalism as a strategy to textualise and verbalise their travel experiences. Rajagopalan also tended to stay in the same category, but veered towards a more touristic and exotic representation of one of Germany’s iconic tourist spots, combined with general facts and anecdotes as a tourist. For instance, Nair described the city of Gera, its population, the various industries, two movie halls closed due to the summer vacation. Moreover, he told the readers that from the fact that Gera was a production site for machine tools during the war, it suffered heavily due to bombing. The machine tools factory was also heavily damaged. Nair, while taking stock of the new industries which had emerged from the destruction caused by the war, also pointed out the big piles of rubble and debris still lying around the city as a reminder of the past, which according to him, was the price one pays for the war.¹⁷ Vatsyayan, drawing a stark contrast between East and West Berlin, described the decorated shops in West Berlin which were brimming with diverse products and a lot of customers, whereas in East Berlin, customers and enthusiasm were lacking in market places due to the paucity of products. Whereas West Berlin was a vibrant city for Vatsyayan, he described East Berlin as a city “with scepticism, as if the entire city takes its each step filled with fear. For an outsider this schism is evident as a result of war and defeat, which has given the West a renewed courage and confidence, whereas in East, the war and defeat have given way to an ambience of terror and fear.”¹⁸ As travelling and travelogues are often about the various dimensions of travellee vis-à-vis the traveller in order to find a tertium comparationis, all three aforementioned authors subscribed diversely to this position. All of them    

Nair, M.T. Yude Yathrakal, 74, Veeraradhana. Ibidem. Ibid., 51. Vatsyayan, Ek Boond Sahsa Uchli, 206.

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placed themselves in different historical, social and political contexts as travellers, which interestingly created a spectrum of diverse observations emerging about the “Other.” Whereas Nair was constantly searching for possibilities to explore Germany’s historical and cultural history, Vatsyayan was immersed in the exploration of Berlin and aesthetic description about his travel which he articulates by composing poetry in the memory of German poet Friedrich Hölderlin and his memories from visits to Germany.¹⁹ Rajagopalan was awe struck by the grandeur of the Neuschwanstein palace and, identifying herself as a tourist, she said: Now we, mere tourists admire the paintings on the walls depicting scenes from the Bible and walk over the carpet like stone work on the floor which features animals and plants and go on to the balcony. From here we get a splendid view of the Bavarian Alps. Germany’s share of the Alpine region is very small compared to that of its neighboring countries but no one can deny the beauty of the snow covered peaks that loom not so far away.²⁰

Nair and Vatsyanan travelled to Europe as travellers who were eager to explore a hitherto unknown country and its diverse aspects instead of sustaining on an Indian colonial identity influence. Nair and Vatsyayan were more curious about the “Other” and their gaze and the description of the “Other,” especially in Germany, where the language was also foreign to them. This is revealed in precise descriptions about people, places, history and culture, and by occasional interactions with locals, that provided them a more nuanced understanding about the fate of a country that was liberated by Allied powers and was divided into two separate countries. Though Germany got its liberation from a repressive fascist rule, similar to India, which became independent after long years of colonial rule, there was a deep sense of anguish and agony which comes to the forefront. For instance, Nair observed a heavy military presence of Russian soldiers during his visit to Gera, which somewhat unsettled him as he came across limited social life in Gera. He said, “the usual scenes of couples strolling hand-in-hand is hardly to be seen here.”²¹ Not only the lack of a social life and the presence of military personnel was observed by Nair, but he also noted the German approach towards the division of Germany. Here, in a conversation with his tourist guide Paul Hart, Nair reflected on fatalism, when Paul Hart said that Germans are a

 See Vibha Surana, “Vergleich von Reiseliteratur der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” 140.  Usha Rajagopalan, “Neuschwanstein,” 143.  Nair, M.T. Yude Yathrakal, 53.

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cursed lot.²² These observations did not only serve as an eye-opener for the traveller, but also moulded their historical reception about the “Other” in a contemporary manner. As a traveller to a divided nation, Nair’s prior view about Germany underwent a transformation from “liminal knowledge”²³ to an expanded, extensive, nuanced image of a divided nation, an insight which he acquired during his travel. That travel and sensorial experience can generate a deeper perspective about a foreign culture is the result of human mobility across diverse cultures, which according to Krobb and Müller, entails a lot of aesthetic, cultural and epistemic dimension.²⁴ The initial liminal knowledge and the expanded knowledge gained through an engaged and committed mobility with which the authors reached Europe and assessed their historical and cultural reception of post-war Germany demonstrates that they did not fit into the conventional traveller mould with prior perceptions about the travellee, but also that they did not indulge in any radical criticism of the West and extolling the virtues of the East. Instead they were motivated by their inquisitiveness and intrigue in exploring the travellee and simultaneously enriched and expanded their liminal knowledge, thus contributing to their epistemic and aesthetic sensibilities. Rather than obscuring the “voice of the Other,”²⁵ the “Other” is amplified and contextualised in a larger canvas of framework without any reductionist strategies. Thus, the travelogues by Nair, Vatsyayan and Rajagopalan, as authentic verbal articulations of the gaze on the Other, “are not only products but also producers of knowledge, as they have the potential to alter the conditions of how knowledge is framed and absorbed by the public.”²⁶ This aspect is especially evi Talking about the divided Germany, Nair talks about his notion of fatalism which he comes across his guide Paul Hart. Paul Hart says that: “From my home to the border, its 15 kms. My world ends there.” According to Nair, Paul Hart is not against Communism, nor is he cursing the Germans living on the other side of the border. The fatal observation that Germans are a cursed lot is a conclusion which, according to Nair, would eventually come from Paul Hart. Ibid., 56.  Krobb and Müller, “Special Section on Travel Writing and Knowledge Transfer,” 45.  “[N]amely, the question of how human mobility gains epistemic significance, what demands are made and forms of knowledge forged, how these are expressed in literature of fictitious and factual varieties, and what that means for the cultural and intellectual horizons of the actors involved (producers and recipients alike). Such an undertaking requires both theoretical and historical expertise as well as deployment of methodologies commensurate with the specific cultural, textual, medial, and epistemological qualities of the materials. Finally, this approach demands intercultural awareness, in particular an understanding of the specific form and substance of the cultural contexts of the knowledge that informs the travel texts in question.” Ibid., 46.  Ibid., 43.  Ibidem.

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dent in the case of Nair, with a constellation of past, present and memory. During his visit to Buchenwald, Nair remembered the Nuremberg trials and subsequently reflects on the Eichmann trial, which took place in 1962, the year Nair visited Germany. These incidents became for him a moment of historical reconciliation, when he said that “he is forced to remember a lot of things which he had forgotten”²⁷ after visiting the camp and referring to the news about the Eichmann trial. Mary Louise Pratt talks about the “arrival scenes” in the context of colonialism, where the traveller is for the first time confronted with the travellee and these encounters become “potent sites for framing relations of contact and setting the terms of its representation.”²⁸ However, in the case of Indian authors, the hierarchy between the coloniser and the colonised is not there. Instead, it is the relationship between the curiosity and awe, coupled with interest in knowing the “Other” as closely as possible to realise the “Self,” or as Pramod Nayar puts it, “informed enchantment.”²⁹ This is not being completely awe-struck with the visual palette of the “Other,” but rather a “rationalization of the enchantment”³⁰ which has got to do with the cosmopolitan and liberal outlook of the traveller towards the travellee. Thus, moving away from ethnocentric evaluations of the “Other” in a normative manner, the travellee becomes a site of knowledge expansion and at the same time a medium of aesthetic pleasure and sensorial experience. In this context, the example given by Giorgia Alù and Sarah Patricia Hill about Richard Payne Knight is worth mentioning in the context of pastoral landscape as he described an observer who is both the observed and the observer: The spectator, having his mind enriched with the embellishments of the painter and the poet, applies them, by the spontaneous association of ideas, to the natural objects presented to his eye, which thus acquire ideal and imaginary beauties; that is beauties, which are not felt by the organic sense of vision; but by the intellect and imagination through that sense.³¹

Indian author Nirmal Verma talks about the aspect of journey as a key to know the “Self.” That the path to the “self” leads through the “other” is articulated by

 Nair, M.T. Yude Yathrakal, 59.  Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 79 – 80, quoted in Alù and Hill, “The travelling eye,” 3.  Pramod K. Nayar, “Colonial Subjects and Aesthetic Understanding: Indian Travel Literature about England, 1870 – 1900,” South Asian Review 33, no. 1 (2012): 31.  Ibidem.  Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (London: T. Payne and J. White, 1806), 54, quoted in Alù and Hill, “The travelling eye,” 7; see also Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque. Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), quoted in Alù and Hill, “The travelling eye,” 7.

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Verma as “a very long journey, during which we would have to cross the mountainous landscape of European culture, so that eventually we reach our intended destination.”³² Nair’s guilt ridden admission of hero-worshipping Hitler on witnessing the destruction and after visiting Buchenwald is shared by Vatsyayan, who while roaming around the streets of Berlin came across the war debris, which for Vatsyayan did not represent any architectural value, instead seeing them as reminders of conflict. This co-existence of inhabitants of Berlin with the remnants of war was surprising for Vatsyayan, when the “poor city of Berlin has not only accepted the modern landscape of the post-war city but also its prewar legacy in the form of debris and rubble.”³³ Both Nair and Vatsyayan were compelled to rethink the larger magnitude of humanity in the context of war, depravation and false beliefs. Like Vatsyayan questioned during his stay in Berlin, when he was required to show his passport to the authorities in East Berlin while in a restaurant: “What is good? – To be a slave in one’s own country or to be an orphan among the others.”³⁴ Moreover, these travel impressions are reinforced strongly by certain overwhelming emotions, like awe, guilt, shame, trauma and reverence which flow into their strategies to read the “Other,” to absorb the “Unfamiliar” and to describe the “Unknown.” Despite coming from diverse linguistic, social and cultural locations, what binds the three authors together is their non-reductive gaze of the “Other,” despite being specific about their descriptions and thereby expanding their own knowledge and reflecting on its relevance for their own understanding of the world which they have observed in a matter of few days. Vatsyayan summed up this mutual enrichment during his conversation with the travel guide, who called Indians naïve due to their colonial past. This loss of naivety, according to Vatsyayan, is a matter of luck for Indians and they are not compelled to give it up unlike countries like divided Germany. Due to this naivety, Vatsyayan said, “India can at least support Europe in its crisis, even if it can’t resolve the crisis for Europe, which it is facing.”³⁵ Vatsyayan’s conviction of a mutual solidarity and keenness to explore and help the “Other,” thereby looking into one’s own “Self” and its inherent qualities as a positive outcome of this interaction, is the intended destination of the “Self,” having been enriched by the “Other,” as Verma puts it.

 Vineet Gill, “An Indian writer discovers Europe,” Eurozine, April 22, 2020, accessed July 30, 2021, https://www.eurozine.com/an-indian-writer-discovers-europe/.  Vatsyayan, Ek Boond Sahsa Uchli, 210 – 211.  Ibid., 202.  Ibidem.

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Bibliography Sources Nair, M.T. Vasudevan. M.T.Yude Yathrakal. Thrissur: H&C Publishing House, 2010. Rajagopalan, Usha. “Neuschwanstein: The Dream Castle.” Indian Literature 47, no. 6 (2003): 142 – 145. Accessed July 25, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23341076. Vatsyayan, Sachchinandanda. Ek Boond Sahsa Uchli. 6th Edition. New Delhi: Bharatiya Jnanpith, [1960] 2008.

Literature Alù, Giorgia, and Sarah Patricia Hill. “The travelling eye: reading the visual in travel narratives.” Studies in Travel Writing 22, no. 1 (2018): 1 – 15. doi:10.1080/13645145.2018.1470073. Englert, Birgit, and Sandra Vlasta. “Travel Writing: On the Interplay Between Text and the Visual. Reisebilder – Bilderreisen: Zum Zusammenspiel von Text und Bild im Reisebericht.” Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 (2020): 7 – 20. Accessed July 25, 2021. https://unipub.uni-graz.at/download/pdf/6012295?name=Englert%20Birgit% 20Vlasta%20Sandra%20Travel%20Writing%20On%20the%20interplay%20between% 20text%20and%20th. Frankenberg, Ruth, and Lata Mani. “Crosscurrents, crosstalk: Race, ‘Postcoloniality’ and the politics of location.” Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (1993): 292 – 310. doi:10.1080/09502389300490181. Gill, Vineet. “An Indian writer discovers Europe.” Eurozine, April 22, 2020. Accessed July 30, 2021. https://www.eurozine.com/an-indian-writer-discovers-europe/. Krobb, Florian, and Dorit Müller. “Special Section on Travel Writing and Knowledge Transfer: Itinerant Knowledge Production in European Travel Writing—Introduction.” Transfers 6, no. 3 (2016): 41 – 48. doi:10.3167/TRANS.2016.060304. Nayar, Pramod K. “Colonial Subjects and Aesthetic Understanding: Indian Travel Literature about England, 1870 – 1900.” South Asian Review 33, no. 1 (2012): 31 – 52. Surana, Vibha. “Ein Vergleich von Reiseliteratur der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum und aus Indien.” In Germanistentreffen Tagungsbeiträge, edited by Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), 135 – 150. Bonn: Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), 2000.

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The Empire Writes Back. Views on Europe from Hispanic America in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century The Mexican journal El Museo Mexicano published a two-part travelogue by an anonymous author who reported on a journey to France in 1841. Whereas the first part describes a stay in Bordeaux, the second, concluding part praises the Parisian kitchen for the quick preparation of meals, its cleanliness, and variety: I should have started with brunch, or more precisely with …, no, no, I was going to say breakfast, but breakfast doesn’t exist here, neither the after-lunch talk, as it would disturb digestion. Having brunch is really a curious thing in France and has no equivalent in our Hispanic simplicity. Eggs and coffee from Vera Cruz and Xalapa, dried meat from the South coasts, pork from Guanajuanto, beefsteak or tea from our Englishmen, and one or another slight modification is all we know in our privileged classes, and for the poor: tortilla, chili and atole, pambazo and chiguirito. But here, a wonderful variety is offered to us. Paris hosts people from many parts of the world. They are able to prepare their native food, producing such a diversity in the French kitchen.¹

The cited text indicates that this part of the travelogue not only provides detailed insight into the gastronomic culture of nineteenth century France. It is also very meaningful from a postcolonial perspective. The cited Mexican author distinguishes dishes and drinks people were used to in their home-country at that time. In doing so, urban life, social differences and cultural practices are viewed by a non-European traveller. El Museo Mexicano was a weekly magazine published from 1843 to 1845 in Mexico City. Being classified as a literary journal, it mainly focused on poems and other fictional texts. Based on their principal objective, “to enlighten the Mexican population,” the editors also discussed topics from natural and social sciences. Consequently, scholars have analysed these texts regarding their im-

 All quotations in Spanish have been translated to English by the author of this paper. A compilation of all issues of El Museo Mexicano was published in several volumes, to which this paper refers. Anonymous, “Cocina Francesa. Continua el viaje a Europa en 1841,” in El Museo Mexicano, ó miscelanea pintoresca de amenidades curisosas e instructivas, vol. 2, ed. Ignacio Cumplido (Mexico City: Ignacio Cumplido, 1843), 400. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110734966-005

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pact on the history of various scientific disciplines like geography or archaeology.² This paper examines literary journals not only in Mexico but also in other former Spanish colonies, focusing on the representation of urban life, economy, society and gender both in Europe as well as Hispanic America.³ Unfortunately, many authors remained unknown. Because of that, this paper focuses exclusively on the texts themselves. This research questions how the Hispanic authors viewed Europe and in which way this influenced their evaluation of the social and cultural developments in their new emerging nations. Altogether, this paper aims to extend the focus on the history of knowledge which is still very much restricted to Europe at least concerning the nineteenth century.

Social Sketches and the Circulation of Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Europe In the nineteenth century, social sketches turned into one of the most important media for the circulation of sociographic knowledge. Mariano José de Larra published a review of Ramón Mesonero Romanos’ book Panorama matritense. Cuadros de costumbres de la capital observados y descritos (“The panorama of Madrid. Social Sketches of the capital observed and described”) in the periodical El Español on June 19, 1836. The text is not only notable because one of the most influential Spanish costumbrista writers is commenting on the work of another, but also because it gives a detailed overview on the evolution of social sketches as a transnational literary genre: The first in England to set an example with admirable profoundness and acumen was Addison in The Spectator. Although nobody was able to excel him, he left many promising imitators. Later in France, a country which closely followed England in this great journey of mankind, transitions, partly political, left the people emancipated. The modern society was made up of the components which for a long time should distinguish it and new cultural practices were established. When the modern Frenchmen succeeded ancient France, authors were born, determined to paint the faces which the society began to represent:

 See Rodrigo Antonio Vega y Ortega Báez, “La colección territorial sobre la República Mexicana de El Museo Mexicano (1843 – 1846),” Revista de El Colegio de San Luis 8 (2014): 96 – 127. Adam Sellen, “Giving shape to the past. Pre-columbia in nineteenth-century Mexican literary journals,” Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas 12, no. 2 (2017).  The analysis presented here is a first set of results from an early research project, whereby the worldwide Corona pandemic has significantly complicated the transnational work, especially on the sources.

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Painters of the French society. […] This genre could only become so dominant because of the benefits of the great literary movement implemented by the perfection of arts. Their production became possible due to the rapidity of the publication process. The authors of these short social sketches, whose merit mainly consists in having established this genre, made good use of the periodicals. Mercier gave a sharp picture of Paris. Under the pseudonym L’Hermite de la Chaussée d’Antin, Joey projected a voluminous piece of art, which was published as weekly articles as part of a larger project.⁴

By means of the metaphor of a painter, de Larra defines social sketches as an entirely “modern” text format which aimed to portray society in the most realistic and detailed way. The citation proves that the contemporaries already understood social sketches as a transnational phenomenon. Furthermore, the importance of the periodical press within this process is highlighted. Although social sketches became most popular as cuadros de costumbres in Spain and its colonies, de Larra is definitely correct in tracing back its roots to England and France. Joseph Addison had already written texts with similarities to social sketches at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He published his writings in the journals The Tatler (1709 – 1711) and The Spectator (1711– 1712) which he co-edited with this friend Richard Steele.⁵ Louis Sébastian Mercier wrote short texts describing citizens of Paris. In 1776, he began to publish his articles in various journals and later turned them into the book Tableau de Paris. His fellow countryman Victor-Joseph Étienne de Jouy wrote various books not only portraying French costumes, but also foreign manners at the beginning of the nineteenth century.⁶ Many of his texts were illustrated by wood engravings, a technique of visual arts, which had been imported to France by two Englishmen shortly before.⁷ According to English media historian Peter Burke, journals and newspapers became the most important media formats to satisfy the needs for information in Early Modern times. The first scientific journals had been published in London and Paris in the 1660s. However, these periodicals rather focused on epitaphs of famous scholars or reviews of new books than on academic knowledge.⁸

 Mariano José de Larra, “Literatura,” El Español, June 19, 1836, 7.  Manuel Losada, “Costumbrismo in Spanish Literature and its European Analogues,” in Nonficional Romantic Prose. Expanding Borders, ed. Steven Sondrup et al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2004), 337.  Karlheinz Stierle, Der Mythos von Paris. Zeichen und Bewußtsein in der Stadt (Munich: Hanser, 1993), 173 – 174.  Remi Blachon, La Gravure sur bois au XIXe siècle (Paris: Les Editions de l’amateur, 2001), 49.  Peter Burke, Papier und Marktgeschrei. Die Geburt der Wissensgesellschaft (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 2014), 157– 158.

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The desire for knowledge intensified in the following decades. Especially in the natural sciences, as well as in geography and history, a large body of knowledge was produced.⁹ The invention of the steam-driven high-speed printing machine and the production of cheap paper initiated the beginning of the modern mass communication. Due to the short-termed publication rates, newspapers were mainly obliged to distribute pure information. Instead, most journals appeared weekly or monthly and focused on the circulation of rather elaborated knowledge.¹⁰ The press became a significant factor of public life in nineteenth century Spain as well. In Madrid, 65 newspapers were founded in the first three decades.¹¹ Consequently, the authors of the cuadros de costumbres made good use of the periodical press to publish their texts. The careers of both Mesonero Romanos and de Larra were closely interrelated with print journalism. Mesonero Romanos published the first part of his sketch collection Panorama Matritense (“Panorama of Madrid”) in various newspapers and the second part in the weekly El Semanario pintoresco español (“The Spanish picturesque weekly”) founded by himself in 1836. De Larra published more than 200 articles in various newspapers and made various attempts to launch his own periodical as well.¹² Neither the sketches of manners in England nor the esquisses de moeurs in France had a big impact on the long run.¹³ In Spain, however, this literary genre gained such an importance that it shaped a whole era of the Spanish history of literature, which became known as costumbrismo. It was not restricted to the Iberian Peninsula, but also became a determined factor of cultural life in almost all regions of Hispanic America.

Transatlantic Connections within the Production of cuadros de costumbres In 1852, the national sketch collection Los Cubanos pintados por sí mismos (“The Cubans painted by themselves”) was published in Havana. In the introduction,  Peter Burke, Die Explosion des Wissens. Von der Encyclopédie bis Wikipedia (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 2014), 21.  Ibid., 117.  Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer, “Das 19. Jahrhundert,” in Spanische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2006), 259 – 260.  Losada, “Costumbrismo,” 334– 336.  Karlheinz Stierle, “Baudelaire and the Tradition of the Tableaux de Paris,” New Literary History 11 (1980): 345.

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editor José Agustín Millán, outlined the idea behind this project highlighting transatlantic connections to similar works which previously had been published in Europe: The French, for example, were painted poorly if one would just copy the habits and cultural practices of the English or the Spanish or portray general dispositions and appearances which apply for all human beings and not for one nation in particular. The truth is that these general phenomena take on an individual character in every person. Because of this, it is curious and of great philosophical interest to explore if the Cuban “Coqueta” is similar to other “Coquetas” or if the Cuban type of this character has any peculiarities. […] Because of the same reasons as the French and the Spanish mentioned before, the Cuban people desired to paint themselves expressing their distinctive positive and negative characteristics.¹⁴

The title of the Cuban sketch collection was a direct reference to Los españoles pintados por sí mismos which had been published in 1844. In 1854, it was also adapted by Mexican authors in their national sketch collection Los mexicanos pintados por si mismos (“The Mexicans painted by themselves”). All three works aimed to describe both societal and regional types in order to illustrate the specific character of one nation’s society.¹⁵ Its predecessors were the English sketch collection Heads of the People; or, Portraits of the English (1840 – 1841) and the French sketch collection Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (“The French painted by themselves”; 1840 – 1841), which were also imitated in other European countries such as Belgium (Les Belges peints par eux-mêmes [1840]), the Netherlands (Nederlanders door Nederlanders geschetst [1842]) and even in the Russian Empire (Nashi, spisannye s natury russkimi [1841]).¹⁶ Although many former Spanish colonies had already become independent, the main reason for the quick adaption of this text genre in Hispanic America in the middle of the nineteenth century was that the cultural connections to Spain were still significant. Furthermore, due to the innovations in the field of transport and communication, the circulation of people and ideas between Europe and the “New World” became faster and much more frequent. Ventura Pascal Ferrer (1772– 1851) grew up in La Havana, but moved to Madrid at the age  José Agustín Millán, “Introducción,” in Los Cubanos pintados por sí mismos. Colección de tipos cubanos, vol. 1, ed. José Agustín Millán (Havana: Bareina, 1852), 3 – 4.  The transatlantic connections within these three national sketch collections are highlighted in Mary Coffey, “El imperio pintado por sí mismo. El costumbrismo transatlántico,” in Hispanismos del mundo. Diálogos y debates en (y desde) el Sur, ed. Leonardo Funes (Buenos Aires: Miño y Davila, 2016).  Leonor Kuik, Knitting the Nation. A comparative analysis of national type collections in Europe around 1840 (Ghent: Ghent, 2018), 85 – 87.

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of 22. After having returned to Cuba many years later, he edited the journal El Regañon General (“The General Grumbler”; 1812), in which he published literary texts similar to cuadros to costumbres. As a result of his pioneer works, José Victoriano Bentancourt and other authors were able to establish the costumbrismo as a literary genre in Cuba two decades later. Bentancourt published various cuadros de costumbres in the periodical La Cartera Cubana (“The Cuban Portfolio”; 1839 – 1840) and became one of the writers who contributed to the before-mentioned Los Cubanos pintados por sí mismos. ¹⁷ On the American continent, the influence of the Spanish culture was especially strong in Mexico. Mexico City had been the capital of the first Spanish viceroyalty in the “New World.” Consequently, many cultural transfers from Europe to Hispanic America were realised via Mexico. For example, La Gazeta de México (“The Gazette of Mexico”; 1722) became the first newspaper ever published in Latin America. Although Mexico had already become independent in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the publication of Los mexicanos pintados por sí mismos illustrated that cultural connections nevertheless remained intact for the time being. El Mosaico Mexicano (1837– 1842) was the first long-lasting literary journal published in Mexico. However, due to lack of Mexican authors, it mainly reprinted literary texts from Spain, England and France. El Museo Mexicano (1843 – 1845) as well as its sequels El Álbum Mexicano (“The Mexican Album”; 1849 – 1850) and La ilustración mexicana (“The Mexican Illustration”; 1851– 1854) favoured both fictional and non-fictional texts of native authors. All journals were edited by Ignacio Cumplido. He shaped the literary circles and the knowledge production in Mexico for almost two decades. Apart from his engagement as publisher and editor, Cumplido made a career as a politician and became a delegate of the Mexican congress in 1842. Later in his life, he also travelled to Europe.¹⁸ Another influential literary journal in Mexico at that period was La Revista Cientifíca y Literaria de México (“The scientific and literary magazine of Mexico”; 1845 – 1846). The content of the journal was dominated by travelogues in which the authors reported from their own travel experiences. Concerning the description of cultural practices in their homeland, most of the articles focused on rural

 Roberta Day Corbitt, “A Survey of Cuban Costumbrismo,” Hispania 33 (1950): 41– 43.  For Cumplido’s biography and his influence on cultural and political life in Mexico, see Irma Lombardo García, El siglo de Cumplido (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2002).

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costumes and manners, for example local festivities in regions far away from the capital Mexico City to consolidate the coherence of the young nation.¹⁹ Cuadros de costumbres also became popular in South America. In Argentina, Esteban Echevarría (1805 – 1851) became the mentor of an avant-garde of writers after having returned from his journey to Europe. His scholars gathered in the reading rooms of Buenos Aires to absorb books and journals from Europe.²⁰ In November 1837 the first issue of La Moda (“The Fashion”) was published. The journal’s subtitle indicated that, apart from music, poetry and literature, the editors also intended to write on costumes. However, analysing its content, it turns out that most of the literature published in the journal were translations of popular European writers, whose texts should be made approachable for the readers.²¹ In Peru, the first issue of El Espejo de mi tierra (“The Mirror of my Home Country”) was published in 1840. Its editor, Felipe Pardo y Aliaga (1806 – 1868) wrote on costumes and habits in the Peruvian capital Lima. Pardo descended from a Peruvian upper-class family and was raised in Spain like many of the American-born Spanish speaking upper class citizens. He was educated in Madrid’s literary circles. In his texts, he not only referred to Mariano José de Larra, but also to Joseph Addison and Victor-Joseph Ètienne de Jouy.²² In Columbia, books were almost exclusively imported from Europe until the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, periodicals became essential for the distribution of texts.²³ In Bogotá, the first literary journal was published in 1837. Like in other former Spanish colonies, the cultural influence of Spain was still very strong. El Duende (“The Goblin”; 1846 – 1847), a journal edited by José Caicedo Rojas, for example, was inspired by Mariano José de Larra’s El Duende Satírico (“The Satiric Goblin”; 1828).²⁴ Columbia faced serious political and economic turmoil similar to many other former Spanish colonies in the first decades after the declaration of independence. Most of the periodicals in Hispanic America at that

 Maria Esther Pérez Salas, “La Revista científica y literaria. Una propuesta editorial novedosa,” Estudios. Revita de investigaciones literarias y culturales 18 (2010): 399 – 408.  Guillermina Guillamon, “Todo se dice en música: La presencia de la estética romántica en la prensa porteña,” Revista humanidades 6 (2016): 5 – 6.  Two of these popular European writers were, for example, Madame de Staël and Lord Byron. See Luis Marcelo Martino, “Traducciones culturales de un semenario argentino del siglo XIX,” Estudios filológicos 45 (2010): 61.  Jorge Cornejo Polar, “Relaciones entre el costumbrismo peruano y el español,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 539 (1995), 65 – 69.  Andrés Gordillo Retrepo, “El Mosaico (1858 – 1872): nacionalismo, elites y cultura en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX,” Fronteras de la Historia 8 (2003): 34.  Gordillo Retrepo, “Mosaico,” 48 – 50.

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time did not last long or were only published irregularly. Because of that, they are not suitable for a detailed examination regarding their views on urban life, economy, society and gender in Europe and other parts of the world. In the following section El Museo Mexicano (“The Mexican Museum”) is compared to the Columbian literary journal El Mosaico (“The Mosaic”), although its first issue appeared only in 1859, about 15 years later than the first issue of the former.

Views on Europe in El Museo Mexicano (1843 – 1845) and El Mosaico (1858 – 1872) Although published in different decades and countries, El Museo Mexicano and El Mosaico had many things in common. The name El Museo Mexicano could be interpreted in the way that the publication was meant to be a mediator between common knowledge and an educated audience.²⁵ Its editorial staff included some of the most renowned Mexican writers.²⁶ On average, 1,500 copies of every issue were sold. Given the fact that Mexico at that time had about eight million inhabitants of whom up to 90 per cent were illiterate in the rural areas, it seems that the readership of El Museo Mexicano mainly consisted of a small, privileged part of the urban upper class.²⁷ The name El Mosaico referred to an association of Columbian academics from Bogotà’s educated upper class.²⁸ In 1860, the journal had about 400 subscribers from which nearly a third resided in Bogotá. This implicates that it was not only read in the capital, but also in other parts of Columbia. Although these figures hardly allow any concrete conclusions concerning the real number of readers, it seems likely that similar to El Museo Mexicano, both the writers contributing to the journal as well as the readers came from a rather small, privileged circle.²⁹ In El Museo Mexicano, the travelogue on France cited in the introduction of this chapter makes the most comprehensive view on Europe. The second part gives a detailed description of the gastronomic culture of Paris, whose citizens

 Carla Yanni, Nature′s Museums. Victorians Science and the Architecture of Display (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), 1.  Miguel Á. Castro and Guadalupe Curiel, Publicaciones periódicas mexicanas del siglo XIX: 1822 – 1855 (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2000), 277– 278.  Sellen, “Shape,” 362.  Gordillo Retrepo, “Mosaico,” 28.  Ibid. 43.

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are labelled as the biggest gourmets in the world. The first part recounts a stay in Bordeaux. Following the local habits, the author went to the theatre. The building is described explicitly, highlighting the differences to theatres in Mexico. As the unknown author is not happy with the performance, he or she leaves early. Bordeaux makes an impressive sight at night, because the shops are open and illuminated until late. The author ends the report with a similar detailed description of the hotel room.³⁰ Two other texts give a view on Europe. The first one is titled A la Polka and accompanied by an illustration depicting two persons performing the dance. The dance is described as a transnational phenomenon which had its origin in Prague and then spread from Vienna across Europe. The impression arises that the Polka dance served as a kind of metaphor for a national spirit, which according to the author is missing in Mexico.³¹ An Englishmen is a parody of the British Empire. The protagonist eats typical English roast-beef every day while reading newspapers from India and America. Travelling around the globe, he meets a Mexican who assures him that the women of Guadalajara are the most beautiful in the world because of their small feet. Curious to find out, the Englishmen takes a boat to Veracruz. But when he finally arrives in Guadalajara, to his great disappointment, he only meets women with big feet. Back in London, he visits a theatre to see a performance of Fanny Eißler, a famous dancer at that time, and meets friends in saloons at Piccadilly. The next morning, he wakes up at ten and shoots himself with a pistol after drinking a cup of tea.³² The Columbian literary journal El Mosaico only had eight pages compared to 25 pages in El Museo Mexicano. Consequently, the content of El Mosaico in general is not as complex. After two years, the publication of El Mosaico had to be suspended until January 1864 because of the outbreak of the Civil War in Columbia. From then on, the journal appeared only sporadically due to lack of money and materials needed for its publication. The publication of El Mosaico was finally ceased after the death of its main editor José María Vergera (1831– 1872). At the end, the journal had turned into a woman’s magazine in which the number of

 Anonymous, “Fragmentos de un viaje a Europa en 1841,” in El Museo Mexicano, ó miscelanea pintoresca de amenidades curisosas e instructivas, vol. 2, ed. Ignacio Cumplido (Mexico City: Ignacio Cumplido, 1843), 217– 218.  Anonymous, “A la Polka,” In El Museo Mexicano, ó miscelanea pintoresca de amenidades curisosas e instructivas, vol. 5, ed. Ignacio Cumplido (Mexico City: Ignacio Cumplido, 1845), 14– 15.  Anonymous, “Un ingles,” in El Museo Mexicano, ó miscelanea pintoresca de amenidades curisosas e instructivas, vol. 2, ed. Ignacio Cumplido (Mexico City: Ignacio Cumplido, 1843), 23 – 24.

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cuadros de costumbres was significantly reduced.³³ Nevertheless, Europe and other parts of the world are viewed in several articles. An extensive travelogue on a journey through Switzerland was published partly in various issues of El Mosaico. As it seems, the author was mainly impressed by nature. The descriptions of the Swiss landscapes make up the most part of the report by far. Only two cities and its inhabitants are depicted more closely. In the first article of this series, published on October 1, 1859, the author describes the begin of this travel to Switzerland. In Geneva, he or she preferred the new hotels to the old town. Women in Geneva are portrayed as being not attractive. They are described as usually wearing big straw hats like Italian women. Only upper-class ladies would wear caps as they are used to in Paris. Bern is the other city depicted in more detail in an article published on November 19, 1859. The author stays three days but according to him one day would suffice to visit the city. He emphasises that the women of Bern would be the most elegant dressed in Switzerland. Apart from the description of Swiss landscapes and cities, the report also offers interesting insights on travellers from other European countries which are also described in the first part of the travelogue. According to the author, most of the foreigners travelling to Switzerland would be Englishmen, which could be classified in two categories: the rich, being proud that they could afford everything, and the poor, who the author calls “a real plague,” as they would even steal from museums. French travellers were also described as making fun of the English. The author only met one Spanish man and his sister. He reasons that Spaniards would only leave their country to visit Paris.

Conclusion In the first part of the paper, it was argued that journals turned into an important media for the circulation of common knowledge in nineteenth century Europe due to the modifications of printing. Literary journals also played an important role within this process. They published social sketches, i. e. short, fictional, but allegedly scientific essays which focused on cultural practices or social conditions. Initially known as sketches of manners in London and esquisses de moeurs in Paris, this new text genre reached its highest popularity by far in Spain as cuadros de costumbres.

 Gilberto Loaiza Cano, “La búsqueda de autonomía del campo literario. El Mosaico, Bogotá, 1858 – 1872,” Boletín Culutral y Bibliográfico 67 (2004): 14.

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The second part of the paper highlighted the transatlantic connections within the production of cuadros de costumbres. Hispanic authors educated in Europe began to write social sketches after returning to their home countries. Respect to their influence cuadros de costumbres became the most important text genre in Hispanic America to describe both local as well as foreign cultural practices. The third part of this paper analysed travelogues and cuadros de costumbres on Europe and other parts of the world by Hispanic authors from different areas. Due to the political and economic turmoil that former Spanish colonies faced in the first decades of their independence, many periodicals did not manage to last very long. The Mexican literary journal El Museo Mexicano (1843 – 1845) and the Columbian weekly magazine El Mosaico (1858 – 1872) were two of the very few exceptions. Although the publication of the latter began about 15 years later, it appears to be the best approach to draw a transnational comparison. The analysis of the text samples revealed a complex view on Europe. It was shaped by examinations of Hispanic travellers and writers. They used to compare personal impressions with both the experiences in their home countries as well as with common knowledge of other European regions. In general, Europe is portrayed as the origin of culture.

Bibliography Sources Anonymous. “Un ingles.” In El Museo Mexicano, ó miscelanea pintoresca de amenidades curisosas e instructivas. Volume 2, edited by Ignacio Cumplido, 23 – 24. Mexico City: Ignacio Cumplido, 1843. Anonymous. “Fragmentos de un viaje a Europa en 1841.” In El Museo Mexicano, ó miscelanea pintoresca de amenidades curisosas e instructivas. Volume 2, edited by Ignacio Cumplido, 217 – 218. Mexico City: Ignacio Cumplido, 1843. Anonymous. “Cocina Francesa. Continua el viaje a Europa en 1841.” In El Museo Mexicano, ó miscelanea pintoresca de amenidades curisosas e instructivas. Volume 2, edited by Ignacio Cumplido, 399 – 402. Mexico City: Ignacio Cumplido, 1843. Anonymous. “A la Polka.” In El Museo Mexicano, ó miscelanea pintoresca de amenidades curisosas e instructivas. Volume 5, edited by Ignacio Cumplido, 14 – 15. Mexico City: Ignacio Cumplido, 1845.

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Literature Blachon, Remi. La Gravure sur bois au XIXe siècle. Paris: Les Èditions de l’amateur, 2001. Burke, Peter. Papier und Marktgeschrei. Die Geburt der Wissensgesellschaft. Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 2014. Burke, Peter. Die Explosion des Wissens. Von der Encyclopédie bis Wikipedia. Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach 2014. Castro, Miguel Á., and Guadalupe Curiel. Publicaciones periódicas mexicanas del siglo XIX: 1822 – 1855. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2000. Coffey, Mary. “El imperio pintado por sí mismo. El costumbrismo transatlántico.” In Hispanismos del mundo. Diálogos y debates en (y desde) el Sur, edited by Leonardo Funes, 139 – 150. Buenos Aires: Miño y Davila, 2016. Cornejo Polar, Jorge. “Relaciones entre el costumbrismo peruano y el español.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 539 (1995): 59 – 77. Day Corbitt, Roberta. “A Survey of Cuban Costumbrismo.” Hispania 33 (1950): 41 – 45. Gordillo Retrepo, Andrés. “El Mosaico (1858 – 1872): nacionalismo, elites y cultura en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX.” Fronteras de la Historia 8 (2003): 19 – 63. Guillamon, Guillermina. “Todo se dice en música: La presencia de la estética romántica en la prensa porteña.” Revista humanidades 6 (2016): 1 – 40. Kuik, Leonor. Knitting the Nation. A comparative analysis of national type collections in Europe around 1840. Ghent: Ghent University Press, 2018. Loaiza Cano, Gilberto. “La búsqueda de autonomía del campo literario. El Mosaico, Bogotá, 1858 – 1872.” Boletín Culutral y Bibliográfico 67 (2004): 3 – 20. Lombardo García, Irma. El siglo de Cumplido. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2002. Losada, Manuel. “Costumbrismo in Spanish Literature and its European Analogues.” In Nonficional Romantic Prose. Expanding Borders, edited by Steven Sondrup and Virgil Nemoianu, 333 – 346. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2004. Marcelo Martino, Luis. “Traducciones culturales de un semenario argentino del siglo XIX.” Estudios filológicos 45 (2010): 57 – 66. Millán, José Agustín. “Introducción.” In Los Cubanos pintados por sí mismos. Colección de tipos cubanos. Volume 1, edited by José Agustín Millán, 3 – 5. Havana: Bareina, 1852. Neuschäfer, Hans-Jörg. “Das 19. Jahrhundert.” In Spanische Literaturgeschichte, edited by Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer, 231 – 314. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2006. Pérez Salas, Maria Esther. “La Revista científica y literaria. Una propuesta editorial novedosa.” Estudios. Revita de investigaciones literarias y culturales 18 (2010): 394 – 415. Sellen, Adam. “Giving shape to the past. Pre-Columbia in nineteenth-century Mexican literary journals.” Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas 12, no. 2 (2017): 359 – 375. Stierle, Karlheinz. “Baudelaire and the Tradition of the Tableaux de Paris.” New Literary History 11 (1980): 345 – 361. Stierle, Karlheinz. Der Mythos von Paris. Zeichen und Bewußtsein in der Stadt. Munich: Hanser, 1993. Vega Y Ortega Báez, Rodrigo Antonio. “La colección territorial sobre la República Mexicana de El Museo Mexicano (1843 – 1846).” Revista de El Colegio de San Luis 8 (2014): 96– 127. Yanni, Carla. Nature′s Museums. Victorians Science and the Architecture of Display. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.

Meritxell Simon-Martin

The Inverted Mirror: Brazilian Hybridity and European Picturesqueness in Nísia Floresta’s Travel Writing Brussels, 26th August 1856 Dear child and brothers of my heart, The month of August, which you know is so fatal to my happiness by the triple loss¹ it has marked in my life, began for me this year sadder and more painful than ever. With a heavy heart, my mind still crushed by the heart-breaking memory of the death of the best mother, I saw approaching the first anniversary of the day that removed her from my affection. You thought Paris would exercise its ordinary magic on me: well! I saw the city again with indifference, and it became monotonous and almost unbearable to me as this sad anniversary drew near. […] I had to travel to new countries, to draw new impressions from a wider horizon, in a freer atmosphere, and hence more in line with my tastes. I had to see, in the end, a typical land [Germany] whose serious and grave aspect impressed my mind by the richness of its nature, its grandiose past and the still patriarchal customs of its people.²

In August 1856, Brazilian-born Nísia Floresta embarked on a trip to Germany with her 26-year-old daughter, Lívia – her lifelong travel companion and translator of some of her works. Departing from Paris, where they had moved in from Rio de Janeiro almost a year before, together they travelled for a month across Brussels, Liège, Spa, Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, Bonn, Koblenz, Mainz, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Baden-Baden, Mulhouse and Strasbourg, among other small towns and villages. Floresta justified her need to travel in terms of emotional well-being: the first anniversary of the death of her mother was approaching and she sought for a change of scene. Nísia Floresta – pseudonym of Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto (1810 – 1885) – led indeed a rather itinerant life.³ Born into a comfortably-off family, her father was a Portuguese lawyer, her mother a Brazilian land-owner, most probably of European origin. Floresta spent the first years of her childhood in the family fazenda in Rio Grande do Norte but, due to her father’s Portuguese origin and political

 Most probably the losses of her father, husband and mother.  Nísia Floresta, Itinéraire d’un voyage en Allemagne (Paris: Fermin Didot Frères, 1857), 1. All translations are mine.  All biographical data is taken from Constância Lima Duarte, Nísia Floresta: vida e obra (Natal: UFRN, 1995). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110734966-006

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sympathies, she moved in to different places in Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Sul and Rio de Janeiro during and after the anti-Lusitanian revolts in the north east, which killed her father and eventually led to the independence of the country in 1822. As a child, Floresta received an European-style bourgeois education and was married to a wealthy landowner at the age of 13. Fleeing from an abusive marriage, she returned to her family, then living in Olinda.⁴ There she met law-student Manoel Augusto de Faria Rocha, with whom she had two children (Lívia and Augusto Américo) and moved to Porto Alegre. It is at this time Floresta published her first writings: press articles on the condition of women in the journal Espelho das Brasileiras (“The mirror of Brazilian women”) in 1831 and her first book-length publication Direito das mulheres e injustiça dos homens (“Women’s rights and men’s injustice”; 1832), which has earned her the title of the first feminist in Brazilian history for publishing a commented “free translation” of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).⁵ Although, as we will see, her “feminism” was framed within a very traditional understanding of the female “nature” and its corresponding gender roles. Losing her companion at the age of 23, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she funded and ran a pioneering school for girls: Colégio Augusto. In her school she projected the sort of western canonical literary, philosophical and scientific knowledge she was acquainted with and the values she encapsulated in the didactic-moralist works she published at that time: Conselhos à minha filha (“Advice to my daughter”; 1842), Daciz ou a jovem completa (“Daciz or the young complete girl; 1847), Fanny ou o modelo das donzelas (“Fanny or the model of maidens”; 1847) and Discurso que às suas educandas dirigiu Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta (“Speech that Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta addressed to her students”; 1847). In line with the educational travels bourgeois young men (and some women too) undertook at that time, Floresta widened her westernised formation during the three years she spent in France, Portugal and England in the company of her two children (1849 – 1852). This first European experience was underpinned by renewed liberal, positivist and hygienist discourses she reflected upon and incorporated into her thinking in her educational treatise for girls Opúsculo humanitário, published back in Rio in 1853. Leaving her son in Brazil, three years later Floresta embarked on her second European voyage, which included the above Biographical date is not conclusive but it would seem Floresta managed to secure a de facto matrimonial separation.  See for example Constância Lima Duarte, “Feminismo e literatura no Brasil,” Estudos Avançados 17, no. 49 (2003): 151– 172.

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mentioned trip across Belgium and Germany as well as long stays in France, Italy and Greece. Her second European residence would last until her death in Rouen in 1885, visiting her home country only once (1872– 1875). During her second European residence, Floresta would write accounts of her encounter with the “Old World” in two travel-writing publications: Itinéraire d’un voyage en Allemagne (“Itinerary of a trip to Germany”, Itinéraire hereafter; 1857) and Trois ans en Italie suivis d’un voyage en Grèce (“Three years in Italy, followed by a trip to Greece”, Trois ans hereafter; Vol. I 1864–Vol. II 1872).⁶ Written in the form of epistolary diaries addressed to her family in Brazil, she penned them in French, a language she was fluent in already since her young adulthood in Brazil. In her travel writing Floresta recorded, drawing on Romantic tropes, the minutiae of her travelling, the impressions that the monuments, castles, cemeteries and ruins evoked in her, the glorious historical events associated to canonical sites and the topos-like longing for relatives and her homeland they conjured up in her – as the opening quote illustrates. These two travel writing works stand for Floresta’s making sense of her international and intercultural encounters in European soil. As such, they convey her self-projection as a Brazilian female traveller as well as her representation of the Other – which here takes the form of European picturesqueness and a concomitant redefined understanding of her own home country. Seeking to tease out her transnational transfer of knowledge, in this article I unpack this twofold construction – of identity and alterity – with a view to assessing the dialogue Floresta managed to engage in between Brazilian and European ideas about people, culture and nature. To do so, I examine her travel writing through the lens of postcolonial hybridity theory which, from an inverted perspective, permits studying how her travelling at the intersection of two continents was translated into a two-sided construction: her hybrid cultural identity and her understanding of the Other – here European picturesqueness and exoticised Brazil.

A Hybrid Cultural Identity In her travel writing Nísia Floresta articulated a hybrid cultural identity as a north-eastern Brazilian born into a white criollo ⁷ (Creole) family – an European

 For this paper I have only analysed the first volume of Nísia Floresta, Trois ans en Italie suivis d’un voyage en Grèce, vol. 1 (Paris: E. Dentu, 1864).  In the nineteenth century, the Spanish terms criollo/criolla referred to the descendants of Europeans born in former Spanish territories of America. In colonial Brazil the terms crioul/crioula

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origin she dove into during her residence in the “Old Continent,” which, in turn, forced her to redefine her Latin-American roots. Hybrid is here understood as “cultural mixings and crossovers,” of a routine and normative/transgressive nature, which “juxtapose and fuse objects, languages and signifying practices” within liminal spaces in colonial and postcolonial settings, including “in the context of [current] globalising trends.”⁸ In turn, extrapolating Mikhail Bakhtin’s distinction between linguistic unconscious, “organic” hybridity and conscious, intentional hybridity,⁹ Floresta’s hybrid cultural identity is here read as the result of both “unreflective borrowings, mimetic appropriations, exchanges and inventions” and “deliberate, intended fusions” of ideas, values and practices.¹⁰ Floresta was indeed an ambiguously hybrid figure that vividly illustrates the concepts of intersectionality, criollismo and creolisation. By intersectionality I mean the analytical framework, initially developed by African-American feminists, that accounts for the intertwined nature of social categorisations – e. g. race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, body/cognitive ability, age, religion, world region – and how these categorisations – embodied by individuals and groups – produce overlapping and interconnected dynamics of discrimination and exclusion.¹¹ The Spanish term criollismo designates “an ideology of exclusion” that, by the early twentieth century, had defined an understanding of citizenship based on perceived “insiders and outsiders” to the developing LatinAmerican nations. This exclusionary distinction served “to demarcate supposedly ‘non-Creole’ collective identities and exclude them from citizenship rights, as was the case for the indigenous and African heritage populations.”¹² Creolisation refers to the unceasing process of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic contact and exchange that has historically taken place in the (post)colonial Caribbean within asymmetries of power. In Édouard Glissant’s early work,¹³

referred to slaves born in Brazil as opposed to those born in Africa. In this paper I am using the term criollo in the Spanish sense.  Pnina Werbner, introduction to Debating Cultural Hybridity. Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism, by Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood, eds. (London: Zed Books, 1997), 1– 2.  Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Hosquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).  Werbner, “Introduction,” 4– 5.  See for example Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bildge, Intersectionality (Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2016); Patrick R. Grzanka, Intersectionality: A Foundations and Frontiers Reader (Boulder: Westview Press, 2014).  Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Shirley Anne Tate, Introduction to Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations, by Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Shirley Anne Tate, eds. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 3 – 4.  Édouard Glissant, Le Discours Antillais (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981).

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the term is understood to be inextricably bound up with the emergence and development of Caribbeanness and it is ascribed the potential of “break[ing] the established normative order of the governance of diversity.”¹⁴ In Glissant’s theoretical project, creolisation moves away from roots to focus on the possibilities of interrelation. It is “an ongoing process which always leads to unknown consequences that cannot be foreseen.”¹⁵ In his later work, the concept is extended to include the world as inexorably inscribed in the dynamics of creolisation and its decolonial potential.¹⁶ These three analytical tools aid us to comprehend how Floresta’s identity location was the result of an agentic hybrid enculturation situated within colonial power structures that reproduced discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality and criollismo permit accounting for Floresta’s excluded yet elite white Creole location. For despite suffering from the discriminations of the patriarchal society she fiercely denounced in her publications, she was a privileged citizen in her homeland vis-à-vis African-descent and Amerindian subjects owing to her class, linguistic, cultural, religious and ethnic background. In turn, Floresta’s Brazilian-European narrative self-projection illustrates her creolisation – not only as a criolla in her home country but also as a Brazilian long resident in Europe. As a criolla, Floresta’s profile as a citizen embodied the sort of modifications vis-à-vis “Old World forms of life” that criollos were perceived to undergo “upon becoming ‘native’ to the Américas,” creating “a differentiation between the ‘creolized population’ and the first-generation European colonizers.”¹⁷ To Europeans, Floresta was creolised since, having been born in Brazilian soil out of descendants of white Europeans, she had undergone some forms of “acclimatization, seasoning, indigenization, adaptation and loss.”¹⁸ As a Brazilian long resident in Europe, her creolisation took the form of her embracing certain European discourses and practices she got acquainted with there and which she incorporated into her self-fashioning with a Brazilian touch. As she expressed in her travel writing, she felt profoundly Brazilian: “A woman with tropical imagination,”¹⁹ with “an American spirit, [and] a Brazilian heart.”²⁰ Her nom de plume was precisely Nísia Floresta Augusta Brasileira

 Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Tate, Introduction, 6.  Ibid., 7.  Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-monde. Poétique IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).  Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Tate, Introduction, 3.  Charles Stewart, “Creolization, Hybridity, Syncretism, Mixture,” Portuguese Studies 27, no. 1 (2011): 51.  Floresta, Trois Ans, 31.  Ibid., 37.

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(Brazilian). Identifying (and exoticising) herself as a foreigner observer, she signed Itinéraire as “Mme Brasileira” and Trois ans as “A Brazilian, author of several literary and moral works, published in Rio de Janeiro, Florence, and Paris” – a choice of signature which, according to Ludmila de Souza Maia, reveals the idea of the author (or the editor) to emphasise her mobility and cosmopolitanism.²¹ In addition to being “native to Brazil,”²² Floresta had also a great liking and admiration for Europe. France was “a second home land” to her;²³ and Germany the best country of residence.²⁴ Floresta put into play her “in betweenness” in her travel writing. This bouncing back and forth cultural identification and differentiation, what feminist Susan Stanford Friedman calls intercultural fort/da ²⁵ (“the interactive oscillations between alterity and mimesis”²⁶) – stands for an illustrative example of what in postcolonial hybridity theory is understood to be the intrinsically interlocking (virtually always unbalanced) nature of centre and periphery within a contact zone.²⁷ Her travel writing spotlights both “the visibility of everyday real-

 Ludmila de Souza Maia, “Recolher as âncoras em busca da liberdade: Gênero e viagem em Nísia Floresta (Europa, 1856 – 1885),” Varia Historia 34, no. 64 (2018): 178.  Floresta, Itinéraire, 188.  Ibid., 40.  Ibid., 98.  In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Sigmund Freud used the German words fort/da to explain the movement of back and forth of compulsion episodes in cases of traumatic neuroses. In The Location of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha draws on this German couplet to account for the back-and-forth movements of dis/identification in contexts of cultural hybridity. In Mappings (1998), Susan Friedman takes on the notion of fort/da to illustrate how in narratives of encounter liminal subjects negotiate “between identity’s fixity and changeability, borders and borderlands, and difference and hybridity” (Friedman, Mappings. Feminism and the Cultural Geographies, 167) – a nuance I discuss at the end of this chapter.  Friedman, Mappings, 144.  See for example Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (Spring 1984): 125 – 133; Homi K. Bhabha, “Sly Civility,” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 71– 80; Homi K. Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” New Formations 5 (Summer 1988): 5 – 23; Homi K. Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, psyche, and the Colonial Condition,” reprinted in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaft, 1993), 112– 123; Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Peter Childs and Patrick Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (Harlow: Longman, 1997); Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings. Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood, eds., Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism (London: ZED Books, 1997); Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).

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ities of intercultural mixing” and “the utopic longing for connection” between communities underscored by Friedman²⁸ – her intercultural interaction acting as the fuel that drives the engine of her travel writing stories.²⁹ As I illustrate in the following section, her narrative verbalises a dialogic between the two sides of identity: mimesis and alterity. For, as Friedman reminds us: Identity is constructed relationally through difference from the other; identification with a group based on gender, race, or sexuality, for example, depends mostly on binary systems of “us” versus “them,” where difference from the other defines the group to which one belongs. Conversely, identity also suggests sameness, as in the word identical; an identity affirms some form of commonality, some shared ground.³⁰

On that account, in her travel writing Floresta moved “hither and thither, back and forth”³¹ between difference (as a Brazilian) and sameness (as a white citizen of European origin). In the process, within her privileged liminal interstice as a criolla of means in voluntary exile, she simultaneously reinforced and disrupted the epistemic Eurocentrism that underpinned nineteenth-century colonial discourse. For, as a white Brazilian, Floresta was not, strictly speaking, the object of colonial discourse. Rather, both in her homeland and in Europe she was more of an eager vehicle for European ideas, beliefs and practices. As a criolla, her speaking standpoint was that of a subject permeated by Eurocentric parameters, including definitional binarisms such as nature/culture, agrarian/industrialised, backwardness/progress, Brazil/Europe, Self/Other. In addition, operating within a context of criollismo, she acknowledged African-descent and Indigenous populations merely as objects of knowledge, worthy of evoking, as I will show, the ultimately epistemological pernicious emotions of contempt, romanticised admiration, sympathy and pity. Notwithstanding, despite this strong European imbuement, Floresta was nonetheless perceived, at least according to her travel narratives, as an exotic Other in the eyes of her European counterparts owing to her Latin-American origin. Drawing on a vernacular understanding of the term subaltern,³² and giving a slight twist to Homi Bhabha’s concepts of colonial mimicry and ambivalence,³³

 Friedman, Mappings, 103.  Ibid., 11.  Ibid., 19. Emphasis in original.  Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1.  In this paper I use the term subaltern in the sense of inferior, secondary, lower rank.  Ambivalence is the attitude the coloniser has vis-à-vis the colonised: of desire, repulsion, identification and disavowal. In Bhabha’s theoretical project, “this [ambivalence] is representative of the colonial subject’s attitude towards the Other, which is not a simple rejection of differ-

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as I further explain in the following section, my suggestion is that Floresta, a criolla in her home country, was in Europe “subalternised.” She was perceived as an ambivalent imitation – the object both of desire and dismissal. As Ligià Fonseca Ferreira explains: “Coming from an ‘exotic’ and ‘peripheric’ nation like Brazil, the ethnocentric slippages of Others were observable wherever she went in Europe.”³⁴ In Padua, for example, Floresta was called by a customs employee to meet his superior in his office. Having stamped their visas, she reported him saying that he wanted to “satisfy [his] curiosity to see the natives of a country whose most beautiful descriptions [he] [had] read.” Interrupting him immediately, she replicated: “And the most grotesque of its natives, right? […] You expected to see two good savages, picturesquely dressed in feathers, and even without this garment, as your ancestors found them in America.” Portraying him as surprised and embarrassed, she reported him saying: “Alas! madam, you are so right, and I owe you an apology for being disappointed by the great mistake in which I have grown old. I thank you very much for your kindness” – concluding her story by explaining they parted “old Europe surprised at its own ignorance, the young America indulgent with its detractors.”³⁵ As this anecdote illustrates, outside Brazil Floresta was perceived as subalternised subject – an exotic hence imperfect and inferior version of Europeanness. Notwithstanding (or perhaps stimulated by?) this exocitised perception, as a writing author with social, economic and cultural capital, she maintained, as a creolised subject (a Brazilian long resident in Europe), a peripheral speaking standpoint as a publishing author. Echoing the transgressive potential Bhabha attributes to colonial mimicry,³⁶ her double consciousness³⁷ as a Brazilian citi-

ence but a recognition and a disavowal of an otherness that holds an attraction and poses a threat,” Childs and Williams, An Introduction, 124– 125. Colonial mimicry refers to the process by which the colonised imitate the coloniser’s ideas, tastes, habits, appearance, institutions and beliefs becoming “Almost the same but not quite,” Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 130. As Peter Childs and Patrick Williams summarise, “mimicry is a strategy of colonial power/ knowledge emblematic of a desire for an approved, revised Other (it is also a strategy of exclusion through inclusion that purports to accept the ‘good native’ all the better to exclude and denounce the majority ‘bad natives’),” Childs and Williams, An Introduction, 129. In Bhabha’s work, “Mimicry is another ambivalent (re)assertion of similarity and difference and it therefore poses a challenge to normalised knowledges of colonised and coloniser; not least by making one an imitation of the other while preserving differences of, for example, liberty, status, and rights,” Childs and Williams, An Introduction, 131.  Ligià Fonseca Ferreira, “Itinéraire d’une voyageuse en Europe: Nísia Floresta (1810 – 1885),” Cahiers du Brésil Contemporain 12 (1990): 8.  Floresta, Trois Ans, 352– 353.  See footnote 33.

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zen ambivalently mimicking (in the eyes of her interlocutors) “Europeanness” was translated into a confident criticism of certain European views that, as we will see, ultimately took the shape of a (partially) menacing cultural difference. Parallel to the outlook on Europe she verbalised in her travel writing, her hybridity – her creolisation – was also translated into an agentic itinerant lifestyle. In the following sections I explore this ambiguous twofold outcome of hybridity.

Views of Europe: Cultural Dis/Identification Turning the colonial observing gaze upside down, as a subalternised onlooker in European soil, in her travel writing Floresta judgementally expressed her identification and disavowal vis-à-vis continental ideas, practices, landscapes and people. That is, echoing Bhabha’s notions of colonial mimicry and ambivalence, as a creolised Other in European territory, Floresta represented “a difference that is almost the same, but not quite”³⁸ – an “exotic” European. For, as Bhabha explains, there is inevitably a mismatching tension between “Western sign and its colonial signification.”³⁹ In Floresta’s case, this miscorrelation was between her European input as a member of the white cultural elite and her own understanding of it: between her “European” Brazil – a willing “Brazilianised” version of “Europeanness” – and the agentic way she experienced her “Europeanness” and the opinion she had of “Europe.” From her peripheral speaking standpoint,⁴⁰ she articulated this inevitable cultural difference in her travel writing, which acted as a platform that permitted her to verbalise her embodied “Europeanness” and the simultaneously praising and critical opinions that “Europe” evoked in her. Her unfolding outlook is expressed by means of a narrating “I” that carefully crafted the image of a wise, virtuous and trustworthy woman traveller and female writer. Thus, for example, Germany symbolised, together with England, the perfect example of affable, hospitable, loyal, honest, modest, serious, orderly, active and industrious people.⁴¹ Germany was indeed “the worthy home land of Leibniz

 Meaning “the split awareness of the minority or marginalized writer,” Childs and Williams, An Introduction, 80.  Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 130.  Bhabha, “Sly Civility,” 95, quoted in Childs and Williams, An Introduction, 136.  Peripheral in the sense that, as a culturally hybrid subject, in the eyes of her European interlocutors she did not represent “pure” “Europeanness” – either as a criolla or as an exoticised Brazilian resident in Europe – and hence was perceived as the Other.  Floresta, Itinéraire, IX, 40, 41, 95, 98, 99.

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and Kant”⁴² – a “country of poetry, reverie and love, as much as of the marvels of human labour and genius”⁴³; its people “not gallant” but “polite, frank, obliging and sincere”⁴⁴; its homes “interesting” and “pleasant to see,” where “a comfortable and elegant simplicity enhance the well-being and the family spirit, and offer to the stranger who has the chance of being admitted there a really attractive picture of order, of respectful and tender affection that is very difficult to find elsewhere.”⁴⁵ Floresta appreciated of the Germans their respect for Sunday as the day of “rest” and “spiritual salvation,” as “commanded by the Lord,”⁴⁶ “especially in towns and in the countryside further away from contact with foreigners.”⁴⁷ Concerned about her security, she also prized that “[t]heir good manners, like those of the English, allow the woman who travels alone to venture safely on distant excursions through towns, countryside, and lonely ruins. This security was a great charm for me, who travelled alone with my daughter in these countries.”⁴⁸ Her sense of security came for example from observing that “[h]ere and there we meet some blonde miss who draws, either a landscape, or a side of the dilapidated castle, or a few young girls who walk in complete safety, having as sole guardian the good manners of this people.”⁴⁹ “Everything in Germany seems to me a new poetry”⁵⁰ and “an advanced civilisation,”⁵¹ she concluded. If Germany signified simplicity and diligence, the gatekeepers of history and traditions, France, especially mundane and frivolous Paris, symbolised the opposite to a German Sunday (“an unbearable bore to a Parisian”⁵²). The French capital was synonymous for “the innumerable and brilliant cafes, the balls of all the seasons, the (too free) reunions of certain classes under the indulgent eyes of the excessive civilization of Paris” and its characteristic “thirst for gain and its pleasures.”⁵³ Its Gare du Nord encapsulated “modernity” and cosmopolitanism: “a true Babylon of travellers coming and going from all directions in

           

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 162. Floresta, Trois Ans, IX. Floresta, Itinéraire, 132. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 108. Ibid., 108.

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France and abroad!”⁵⁴ As for their character, Floresta offered a graphic portrait when she compared the French to the Florentines in Italy: […] in their lifestyle, the male Florentines are very much like the Parisians, from whom they have inherited a polite finesse, an articulate language, often stilted, le bon ton and a taste for pleasure, although less exaggerated. Many of them represent in miniature the pervasive picture of the flâneurs of Paris; decent young men, literate or not, who frequent the cafes and mill around like dandies in Florence’s favourite promenade, the Casino; only they do not appear here as in Paris with certain companies of which the Italians would still blush, whatever the dissolution of morals one attributes to them. I have not met in Italy, walking in the evening in its cities, these degraded women who presented themselves to me for the first time on the pavements of Paris.⁵⁵

As for the female Florentines, according to Floresta, they were: […] in general, kind and insinuating women; while participating in what is called wit among French women, they retain much more of the naturalness in their manners and in their conversation. They really like pleasure and luxury, which they get at much less expense, though, because, in general, their taste for expensive toiletries is not yet as developed as among the Parisiennes; the latter often deprive themselves of the comfortable in its interior and sometimes even of a decent food in order to have real dentelle and other accessories so as not to go unnoticed.⁵⁶

This image of gracious and balanced Florentines contrasts with the image of Italy elsewhere. As she expressed in her Preface to Trois ans en Italie, in line with the by then established tradition of the Grand Tour, she decided to embark on this trip because “[n]o history of people had ever interested me as much as that of the Greeks and Romans, and one of my most beautiful dreams of youth had always been to visit these regions, the most famous and the most poetic of all Europe, and to reflect on their ruins.”⁵⁷ And she did visit thoroughly Italy (and Greece) and praised “this Classic land, its poetry, its grandiose souvenirs, and its climate.”⁵⁸ Yet, she also contrasted what she regarded as its glorious past with its decadent present: “Here [in Genova] nature, like art, displays its richness alongside a people in decadence, some of whom, dragging themselves into poverty, presents a singular contrast with the profusion of precious things –

    

Ibid., 3. Floresta, Trois Ans, 296. Ibid., 295 – 296. Ibid., IX. Ibid., IX.

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splendid masterpieces contained in its buildings.”⁵⁹ She also found fault with certain traits of Italians. In Rome, for example, she visited a “hospital house” where poor women “exhausted by poverty” were being fed by well-off ladies: The place, too small to comfortably accommodate so many people, was impregnated with the exhalations of these unfortunate women, who seemed very hungry while they waited for the supper they were expecting to receive for a while. They extended their hand to the visitors, asking them for alms and showing them the rags that covered them. […] How, I asked myself, can these poor creatures need anything these days, when charitable princesses and great Roman ladies watch over them? And I pointed out to one of the ladies who were with us a poor old woman who seemed too hungry to wait for the supper which those who had dined very well were preparing so slowly. Ladies came and went in the rooms, where it was difficult to move around in the midst of the great competition of women, the only ones admitted to witness this act of pompous charity that passed before my eyes. The illustrious protectors of the pilgrims were graciously dressed in a costume adopted by the establishment, and attracted all eyes, carrying ostensibly various dishes themselves; then they went one after the other to look for the poor woman whom they placed at table, and whom they seemed to serve, all preoccupied as they were with the world around them, and to whom their eyes seemed to tell: “Contemplate in us the worthy compatriots of the famous child nicknamed the Roman charity for having fed with milk the father condemned to die of hunger in his prison. This was fulfilling a duty imposed by nature; we do more than that, we go down to our inferiors, to practice, as you see, charity.⁶⁰

Floresta made a similar condemning statement of mores vis-à-vis Belgium. She condemned, in line with the “debauchery” of Parisian life, the laxity of mores in certain spa towns. For, paradoxically, as de Souza Maia underscores, throughout her narrative, “while highlighting her high standard as a traveller and tourist, she also condemned luxury and refused the elegant life of frivolities.”⁶¹ Indeed, despite booking the best hotels with the best room views, the fastest and most comfortable trains, and eating in the most fashionable table d’hôtes, Floresta “reveal[ed] to her audience her reputable and austere side by refusing the luxury, futility, [and] carnal love that she so much liked to condemn.”⁶² She did not fail to mention to her readers the “multitude of barons, counts, marquises she got acquainted with and who invited her to dinners and walks, or who courted her or her daughter.”⁶³ But she reassured her audience making straightforwardly clear she turned their invitations down. As her friend, Eugénie Pelserf,     

Ibid., 37. Ibid., 52– 53. de Souza Maia, “Recolher as âncoras,” 186 – 187. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 185.

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wrote in the preface, Floresta dedicated her life to “live for others”⁶⁴ – an image the author herself projected throughout, “renounce[ing] love in order to live for others, for her children and for her family, since her husband and elect of heart died.”⁶⁵ It is within this prudent and cautious heartfelt and/or narrativised respectability that the city of Spa (like Baden Baden in Germany) was for her a deplorable place of gambling frenzy. As she described apparently naively and reprovingly: Another spectacle, quite new to me, awaited me at the large and rich gambling house (the only one allowed in Belgium), where our pleasant walking companions took us to show it to us. A large gathering of men and women seated around huge tables covered with stacks of gold, money and banknotes, engaged in the disastrous spin-off of the game, which has ruined so many families! We had before our eyes a man who had just lost 100,000 francs. These beings, whose hearts withered, their eyes tired from constant vigil in the middle of this infernal abyss, their gloomy or greedy gaze, according to good or bad luck, aroused my deep pity, among the frantic luxury which surrounded them. The women, those creatures destined to delight the happiness of the home, so moved around these tables, joined the men in the fury of the game! Disgusted with such a spectacle, I left the gambling halls.⁶⁶

Floresta’s peripheric consciousness as a Brazilian citizen also emerges in her assessment of the zoo in Brussels. As Cláudia Luna points out, the zoo became the object of Floresta’s criticism for its encaged nature (as opposed to presumably natural freedom in Brazil). But her critique is underpinned by an Eurocentric description of natural picturesqueness that gives away the sort of problematic paradigmatic binarism I discuss in the final section of this chapter⁶⁷: Located on the outskirts of the city, in a beautiful and very picturesque exhibition, [it] contains fountains and poetic little groves, in the middle of which you can see, in cages, a large number of birds and animals from different countries. […] The singing of the birds of our country, here reduced to the condition of prisoners to serve as distraction and pleasure to a foreign population for a franc per person touched my ears with melancholy and awakened in my spirit the memory of the most peaceful landscapes that I have travelled in in older days under our beautiful sky.⁶⁸

 Floresta, Itinéraire, vij.  de Souza Maia, “Recolher as âncoras,” 186 – 187.  Floresta, Itinéraire, 36.  Cláudia Luna, “Nísia Floresta: una viajera brasileña en el viejo mundo,” in Viajeras entre dos mundos, ed. Sara Beatriz Guardia (Dourados: UFGC, 2012), 398.  Floresta, Itinéraire, 18.

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As the opening quote and these excerpts illustrate, addressing simultaneously to her family back in Brazil and her French readership (most probably potential female travellers), in her travel writing Floresta gave voice to her hybrid cultural identity by means of a strategically crafted narrating persona as a knowledgeable, sensible and respectable lady – bouncing back and forth between identification and differentiation, between blending and clashing. Hence, sympathising with certain European traits, she embraced Germans’ industriousness, French people’s articulate use of the language and Italians’ glorious past. Moving away from those alleged European characteristics of which she disapproved, she denounced Parisian licence, luxury and vanity, Roman catholic pompous piety and the encaged nature she witnessed at Brussels’ zoo. In the process, Floresta simultaneously projected her understanding of Europe – alterity in relation to her speaking position – and her own self-image as an Europeanised Brazilian – alterity in relation to her readers’ standpoint. Ultimately, as I now move on to discuss, Floresta’s hybrid cultural difference, here guardedly framed within an informed, sensible and morally irreproachable narrating persona, had personal and discursive implications.

Agentic Hybridity At a personal level, in the process of travelling freely between her intercultural fort/da, Floresta turned her privileged locational liminality – i. e., her hybridity, her cultural difference – into a personal agentic itinerant lifestyle. As many prior and contemporary female travellers, she managed to set out on a journey after having accomplished her “feminine” duties. She set off on her first European travelling (1849 – 1852) years after the death of her companion, taking her teenage children with her; and headed out her second European stay (1856 – 1885) a year after the death of her mother. From then onward, Floresta chose to follow the contemporary bourgeois fashion of leisured and educational travelling and realised her wish to discover new countries by making it her modus vivendi. This nomadic pattern was free from her former domestic duties and (at least to a certain extent) unrestricted by the policing gendered norms of both European and Brazilian (bourgeois) society – a comfortable existence made possible due to her uprootedness and affluence since, as de Souza Maia fitly highlights, “Nísia had enough purchasing power to finance her travels and enjoy her free time to devote herself to writing.”⁶⁹

 de Souza Maia, “Recolher as âncoras,” 186 – 187.

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In Brazil, Floresta would publish moralising texts addressed to young girls and their mothers. As Luma Pinheiro Dias explains, in her Opúsculo humanitário (1853) for example, she defended “women’s education as a transforming element of society – a regenerator of moral values and an instrument for the progress of humanity.”⁷⁰ It is through this enhanced education that women, in Floresta’s eyes, would be best equipped to carry out the social roles they were destined for as daughters, mothers and wives. As a daughter, she owed her parents obedience, as did the character of Fanny in her novel Fanny ou o modelo das donzelas (1847); as a mother, she should serve as an example, awakening virtues in her children and taking care of their upbringing; as a wife, it would be her job to look after the home, emotionally support her husband, nurture her family and awaken virtuous feelings in her partner.⁷¹ This prescriptive image of the dutiful daughter, wife and mother stands in stark contrast to the kind of eventful and rather lavish itinerant lifestyle Floresta narrativised in her travel writing, with breathtaking landscapes, exciting experiences, thought-provoking encounters and rubbing shoulders with other distinguished foreign travellers. As de Souza Maia highlights, Floresta’s search for knowledge and a cure for her soul pain camouflaged indeed the search for freedom, autonomy and personal fulfilment outside of the social expectations that women of her social status, being white and part of a proprietary class, suffered. Only in the itinerant life she built in Europe, far from the patriarchal bonds of family and nineteenth-century Brazilian society and, in a way, oblivious to the patriarchal rules of European societies, did Nísia Floresta manage to give meaning to her existence and quench her intellectual yearnings. […] this search for freedom was carefully arranged under the rhetoric of longing for the family, the surveillance of honour, and with an effort to incorporate domesticity into her writings so that her readers would not confuse her craving for freedom and search for knowledge with infamous debauchery.⁷²

In order to reconcile her exciting day-to-day reality with the self-image she wanted to project and the prescriptive literature she published, Floresta skilfully carved out a narrative persona. The self-projection I discussed in the previous section – as an informed, sensible, virtuous and trustworthy woman traveller and female writer – takes here the form of “a zealous mother, a devout daughter,

 Luma Pinheiro Dias, “A trajetória de Nísia Floresta em defesa da educação feminina nos oitocentos,” Revista do Departamento de História e do Programa de Pós-graduação em História do Brasil da UFPI Teresina 8, no. 1 (2019): 341.  Pinheiro Dias, “A trajetória,” 341– 343.  de Souza Maia, “Recolher as âncoras,” 170 – 171.

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and a wife dedicated to her companion’s memory”⁷³ attempting to incorporate domesticity into her itinerant life.⁷⁴ For, as de Souza Maia points out, despite her exhilarating freedom, Floresta, like other female travellers of her time, avoided “breaking her relationship with her family or forgetting her ‘feminine’ obligations to the home and relatives, or to her honour.”⁷⁵ She hence presented herself “inexorably as linked to the family,”⁷⁶ and “the rhetorical images of longing for family, son and homeland” that accompanied this self-image conveyed the idea that being apart from them “prevented her from enjoying the trip and its pleasures.”⁷⁷ Floresta performed thus her family duties in pen. Drawing on (gender) normative, travelling and Romantic tropes (e. g., respectable ladylikeness, feminine maternal/filial/domestic duty, interest for foreign lands and customs, and melancholy inspired by nature, the past and its traditions), Floresta managed to weave together her freedom and exciting existence and her distance parenting and caring. Thus, for example, writing from Frankfurt, she recognised having enjoyed her trip to Germany (a rare acknowledgement of her having pleasure). Still, her expression of joy is quickly shadowed by the memory of her missed son: Travelling, I repeat, is the surest way to relieve the weight of a great pain that is slowly plaguing me. Since I left Paris to visit Belgium and Germany, the days don’t seem to me as slow as to be killing me. The haste that we must put in so as not to miss this or that train, the beauty of the sites we cross, the interest that the monuments and the various establishments that we visit inspire in us, the study of local customs, all of this quickly makes me pass the time […] However, since this new existence, my dreams are more frequent and more deeply imbued with sadness; […] Those whom I love and who are absent then present themselves more vividly to my mind; and first of all the image of my son fills my soul with tenderness and concern! … What is going on there? Oh my God! … […] I have strayed from our native beaches without you, oh my child! Why didn’t I take you with me!⁷⁸

As de Souza Maia concludes, “[t]he longing Floresta felt and/or rehearsed did not prevent her from living 16 years in Europe apart from her family and home.”⁷⁹ Her saudade ⁸⁰ precluded her neither from “travel[ling] to new countries,” “draw[ing] new impressions from a wider horizon, in a freer atmosphere” to suit her “tastes,”

       

Ibid., 177. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 177. Floresta, Itinéraire, 109 – 110. de Souza Maia, “Recolher as âncoras,” 177– 178. Saudade is a melancholic and nostalgic feeling of longing, especially for one’s homeland.

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nor participating (at least as an observer) in “the innumerable and brilliant cafes, the balls of all the seasons” of Parisian life and “the large and rich gambling house[s]” in Spa, and in Baden Baden. She managed to do so because in her travel writing she narrativised her attempt to reconciliate the thrilling lifestyle that her liminal interstice hybridity as a Brazilian in European soil was offering her – i.e., her creolisation as a resident – with her mourning for her father, husband and mother, her missing of her son and family, and her longing for her beloved country. In this sense, her cultural hybridity – her ambivalent mimicry as an “exotic” Brazilian in the continent – acted as personally transgressive and liberating in terms of European and Brazilian white bourgeois discursive gendered normativity, making of Floresta a “hybrid dissident”⁸¹ at a personal level. Floresta’s cultural hybridity takes here the form of agency – surely facilitated by her social, economic and cultural capital – and shows the intrinsic interlocking nature of transculturation within a contact zone and the blurring of periphery and centre – incarnated in Floresta as an agentic subalternised subject. Floresta’s hybridity could take other discursive resonances though, as I now move on to discuss.

Menacing Cultural Difference At a discursive level, in the process of moving between her intercultural fort/da Floresta also turned her liminality – i. e., her cultural difference, her hybridity – into a personal outlook that stands for a counter-hegemonic discourse on Europe. Earlier we saw how she hesitated neither (1) to offer her critical views on the continent – i. e., she condemned Parisian opulence and conceit, Roman catholic ostentatious charitable devotion and encaged nature in zoos; (2) to rectify what she perceived as Europeans’ distorted portrait of Brazil – epitomised by the Paduan customs agent, who is reported as having imagined her home country as a land of “savages, picturesquely dressed in feathers” –; nor (3) to patronisingly rebuke “old Europe” for “its own ignorance.” Indeed, Floresta’s judgemental take on European landscapes, monuments and more run parallel to a condemnation of what she deemed as Europeans’ distorted knowledge of the South-American continent. This reproof, in turn, went hand in hand with a resolute self-belief in her home country as the future of an improved humanity, as we will see in the final section. Writing from Venice she proudly and boldly declared:

 Friedman, Mappings, 90.

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The present civilization of Brazil, I repeat, is still very little known in a large part of Europe, where the writings of some so-called critics of the mores and customs of this vast empire do little more than keep Europeans in complete ignorance of its progress, and we should not be surprised at the astonishment we produce on those who only know Brazil through these writings or engravings representing aboriginal communities. How many times, during my first stay in Paris, where people believe themselves superior to all the peoples of the earth and who, in truth, know everything except for what it would suit them more to know in order to put to profit their great intelligence and their incontestable progress in all the sciences and in all the arts; how many times, I say, have I had the opportunity to witness this ignorance which shocks some of my compatriots and which, on the contrary, amuses me a lot! Among the literate classes of this old Europe, they often make big mistakes when they talk about the peoples beyond the Atlantic. […] If this ignorance was a misfortune, I could say, like the French proverb: “It is a necessary evil” because it has offered us more than once, both among the people of the North and in Italy, a rather gracious welcome, and, aside from all vanity, we are very often happy to be able to give to those who come across us an opinion more worthy of our Brazil than most of the writings that have been published on it in Europe.⁸²

As this quotation exemplifies,⁸³ Floresta’s counter-hegemonic discourse – her peripheric knowledge – represents a “menace”⁸⁴ to Europe’s confident self-image. In Bhabha’s theoretical project, colonial mimicry is intrinsically partial in any contact zone. For, as noted, there is a mismatch between colonial discourse and its imitation – “a difference that is almost the same, but not quite,”⁸⁵ “an appropriation” and “a sign of the inappropriate.”⁸⁶ As Peter Childs and Patrick Williams explain: “Every concept the colonizer brings to the colonized will itself be reborn, renewed, reinterpreted in the light of the Other’s culture.”⁸⁷ In other words, as Mary Louise Pratt expounds: “While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what the dominant culture visits upon them, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, how they use it, and what they make it mean.”⁸⁸ In the process of carrying out/undergoing this intrinsically imperfect colonial mimicry, “the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed.”⁸⁹ This partial

 Floresta, Trois ans, 362– 363.  Also the examples quoted in the previous sections where Floresta offers a self-confident criticism of Europe and Europeanness.  Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 130.  Ibidem.  Childs and Williams, An Introduction, 131.  Ibid., 136.  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge 1992, reprinted 2008), 7.  Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 129.

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and incomplete mimicry and this observer being observed eventually “disturbs the power and difference on which that [colonial] authority is based.”⁹⁰ Consequently, it becomes a menace, “precisely because the observer’s ‘essence’ and ‘authenticity’ are alienated: the surveilling look is returned as the gaze of the partial imitator and alternative knowledges of the norms of colonialism are produced.”⁹¹ Ultimately, “[h]ybridity shifts power, questions discursive authority, and suggests, contrary to the implication of [Edward] Said’s concept of Orientalism, that the colonial discourse is never wholly in the control of the colonizer.”⁹² On that account, in Floresta’s travel writing this “menace,” embodied in her agentic “exotic” creolised lifestyle, takes the form of a confident criticism of certain European traits: be it Parisian licentiousness, Roman catholic ostensible philanthropy, tamed nature or, as we have seen in this section, Europeans’ “ignorance” on peripheral regions of the world – a viewpoint she articulates within a self-projection as a well acquainted and confident insider. In the process, she turned European people, places, customs and beliefs into the observed Other. Her menacing cultural difference takes place in what Bhabha calls the “Third Space” of enunciation – “a place of agency and intervention” where “cultural signs [are] appropriated, rehistoricized, translated, and reread,” forming a counter-authority produced in the margins from the perspective of the minority.⁹³ In Bhabha’s early theoretical project, mimicry is not a conscious form of resistance nor an “intentional agency” but a constitutive part of the colonial process.⁹⁴ In his later work,⁹⁵ mimicry is ascribed more of a Bakhtinian deliberate hybrid resistance. Accordingly, Floresta’s potential “menace” represents an un/deliberate threat, an un/conscious by-product of her creolisation – the result of her hybridity being part and parcel of her agentic assertiveness in her “double vision”⁹⁶ as both an insider and an outsider. In my reading of her travel writing, Floresta’s “menacing” cultural difference is accentuated owing to her privileged liminal location as a bourgeois foreigner settled in continental Europe – the location of an advantaged subalternised subject –, which somehow neutralised the discrimination she might have experi-

 Childs and Williams, An Introduction, 131.  Ibid., 131– 132, emphasis MSM.  Ibid., 136.  As explained in ibid., 142.  Ibid., 130.  Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817,” in Francis Barker et al., eds., Europe and its Others, vol. 1 (Colchester: University of Essex 1985).  Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man,” 129.

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enced as a peripheral national in her contact zone. This privileged liminality ultimately provided her the space for personal freedom (as we saw in the previous section) and a certain intellectual recognition that guaranteed her publishing her works in France, Italy and England. In this sense, here Floresta is acting as a “hybrid dissident” at a discursive level that incarnates the movement from the periphery to the centre highlighted in Bhabha’s theoretical project and illustrated in Pratt’s idea of transculturation from the colonies to the metropolis.⁹⁷ For, as this author underscores, “While the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the periphery (in that emanating glow of the civilizing mission or the cash flow of development, for example), it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis” – turning the dominant culture into a hybridised by-product of transculturation.⁹⁸ Notwithstanding, as I now move on to explain in the last section, Floresta’s confident un/conscious and un/intentional menacing counter-hegemonic discourse on Europe is only partial – as her Eurocentric description of the Belgian zoo’s natural picturesqueness hinted. For it is underpinned by cultural and national binarisms that reinscribe rather than contest Eurocentric notions of centre and periphery.

Reinforcing Binarisms As noted, as a criolla Floresta was not the object of colonial discourse but an enthusiastic vehicle of Europeanness. Still, as a creolised and subalternised onlooker in European soil, in her travel writing she conveyed her cultural hybridity – her redefined understanding of Europeanness, now turned into the Other from her speaking standpoint – by means of a narrating persona as a self-assured insider/outsider. As mentioned, her censuring opinions on certain European traits run side by side with a critique of what she held to be continental misapprehensions of Brazil. Her intention was not to question the European epistemic paradigm though. On the contrary, her objective was to translate an improved version of Europe into Brazil – a country where “people do not know misery, and, in the dawn of modern civilization, they walk with all their virginal inspirations towards the great future promised to them by the innumerable resources with which Providence has so prodigiously endowed them.”⁹⁹ To do so, Floresta re-

 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7– 8.  Ibid., 6, quoted in Friedman, Mappings, 91. Friedman quotes from a 1992 edition of Pratts’ book.  Floresta, Trois Ans, 5.

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sorted to a series of national and cultural binarisms that stand in apparent contradiction to the fort/da fluidity she embodied as a culturally hybrid traveller. Indeed, as noted, in Bhabha’s theoretical project, the transgressive potential of hybridity is attributed to colonised subjects who, from the “Third Space” of their enunciation and by means of their colonial mimicry, are capable of posing a challenge to “normalised knowledges of colonised and coloniser.”¹⁰⁰ Likewise, in Glissant’s view, creolisation has the potential of destabilising the post/colonial order. On that account, as we have seen so far, by dint of her creolisation as a Brazilian long resident in Europe and by means of her ambivalent mimicry, Floresta, as a subalternised subject, managed to translate her hybridity into an agentic lifestyle and a confident outlook on Europe that turned the colonial observing gaze upside down in the form of praising/critical views on Europe, including its “ignorance.” Notwithstanding, postcolonial hybridity theory has also highlighted the potentially normative underpinnings of hybrid identities.¹⁰¹ As Stuart Hall reminds us, creolisation/hybridity “always entails inequality, hierarchization, issues of domination and subalternity, mastery and servitude, control and resistance.”¹⁰² Floresta encapsulates the normative/transgressive potential of hybridity. On the one hand, she embodies a cultural hybridity that, as a subalternised subject, takes the shape of an agentic itinerant lifestyle and a peripheral speaking stand-

 Childs and Williams, An Introduction, 131 (see footnote 31).  An illustrate example is Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka’s study of Mexican mestizaje (here understood as racial and cultural hybridity), Mónica Moreno Figueroa and Emiko Saldívar Tanaka, “Comics, Dolls and the Disavowal of Racism: Learning from Mexican Mestizaje,” in Creolizing Europe, ed. Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Tate (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 175. The authors highlight the exclusionary outcomes of the “process of racial miscegenation, cultural transformation and nation-building” in Mexico. As they explain, throughout Mexican history, “Mestizaje has moved beyond the realm of linguistics, culture and identity of creolization, to include a top-down official political dimension that has rewritten national histories in order to cohere nation states in Latin America,” Moreno Figueroa and Saldívar Tanaka, “Comics,” 175. Racial and cultural hybridity is here “a response to dealing with difference and a way of imposing a homogenizing sense of nation to diverse groups” in the name of modernity and progress – “an emerging institutionalization of ideas around cultural diversity that conceal social, political and economic inequality,” ibid., 177. For, in the process, the problematic “raceless” underpinnings of Mexican understandings of mestizaje have been translated into “simultaneous logics of inclusion and exclusion operating under the ideal of national conviviality” to the detriment of Indigenous and African-descent populations as well as other migrant groups, ibid., 177– 178.  Stuart Hall, “Creolité and the Process of Creolization,” in Okwui Enwezor et al., ed., Créolité and Creolization: Documenta 11 Platform 3 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003), 31, quoted in Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Tate, Introduction, 4.

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point capable of confidently putting into question certain European beliefs, jolting Europe’s ontological and epistemological self-confidence. On the other hand, as I will now illustrate, her liminality as a criolla is nonetheless imbued with ingrained Eurocentric ideas, values and worldviews. In her depictions of Europe and Brazil, these Eurocentrism is underpinned by a series of problematic binarisms: nature/culture, agrarian/industrialised, backwardness/progress, Brazil/Europe, self/other. Furthermore, her Eurocentrism emerges in the form of a representation of African-descent and Indigenous populations as objects of emotions (e. g., contempt, ambiguous romanticised admiration, sympathy and pity). This problematic representation of the subaltern – read here in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s sense¹⁰³ – goes side by side with the absence in her travel writing of an acknowledgment, embrace and incorporation of alternative coetaneous Amerindian and African-descent systems of knowledge. As mentioned, Brazil was for Floresta her “motherland.”¹⁰⁴ And, as the Paduan and Venice excerpts attest, she was simultaneously vexed and amused by the “ignorance” about Brazil among the “the literate classes of this old Europe” and by the “big mistakes” they made when speaking about “the peoples beyond the Atlantic.”¹⁰⁵ In her travel writing she sought to correct Europeans’ unfamiliarity with her homeland by contrasting, for example, their landscapes. Floresta was certainly impressed by certain natural spots and phenomena, like the Vesuvius, the Mediterranean and the Rhine. However, as Stella Maris Scatena Franco claims: What haunts her much more frequently are the marks of human presence, art and history, emerging from the ruins and the most diverse constructions, which, for the author, were embedded in nature itself. Even the impatient Vesuvius, with its natural and exuberant strength, is permeated by history, with its ancient cities Pompeii and Herculaneum buried by the volcano. In different parts of Europe, in the surroundings of several cities, she narrates scenes in which nature, art and history are mixed. Castles, villas, houses and ruins are found here and there as an expansion of the landscape and always refer to the human presence throughout the history of mankind. Thus, when she describes European nature, it is never treated as simple “nature”, but rather the “natural” and artistic beauties.¹⁰⁶

 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).  Floresta, Trois Ans, 43.  Ibid., 363.  Stella Maris Scatena Franco, “El Nuevo y el Viejo Mundo en la visión de una brasileña en Europa: los relatos de viaje de Nísia Floresta,” in Escritoras del Siglo XIX en América Latina, ed. Sara Beatriz Guardia (San Martín de Porres: Centro de Estudios La Mujer la Mujer en América Latina, 2012) 235 – 243, quoting Trois ans, 1864, 201– 202.

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Indeed, Europe’s nature did not impress Floresta that much in terms of its size and exuberance. What caught her attention was the action of men – in terms of technical and historical achievements. As she explained in reference to the Rhine, what she appreciated is not the beauty of the river itself, I have seen more beautiful ones in our dear Brazil; but it is this animation, this crowd of travellers, and above all these historical memories of so many different peoples; those legends that are attached to the ruins of the castles that we see from here; it is these millions of shadows from innumerable generations of the past that the spirit represents, crossing the waters of this famous Rhine for thirty centuries to defend or overwhelm humanity.¹⁰⁷

Likewise, from Heidelberg she commented: “But here the countryside is even more beautiful because the hand of man, far from separating it, as [in Brazil], from its most charming attractions, brings it new charms by offering walkers all the amenities one could desire in these delicious sites.¹⁰⁸ Hence, as Franco concludes, “the description of the European landscape” is systematically associated to “the marks of human presence, of the past, of history and of the ruins in the midst of nature.”¹⁰⁹ Unlike Europe, Floresta’s Brazilian landscape was immense, intact, dramatic and bountiful. Thus, for example, in Marseille the awe-inspiring sight of the Mediterranean Sea conjured up in her the image of the exuberant nature of Brazil: A short distance from Marseille, the spectacle of the Mediterranean unfolded in my eyes and awakened in my soul the great emotions that the sight of the sea always made me feel. I was in the presence of this sea which once crossed so many warlike and glorious nations, swept by the centuries from the face of the earth, and my spirit wandered in these worlds of great extinct ambitions […] But, returning immediately from the past to the present, I thought of that other larger and more majestic sea, on the shore of which I was born, I grew up and I was inspired by the distant murmur of the waves and under the heights of mixed palm trees, gigantic mango trees, bushy jackfruit trees, agitated by the evening breeze which intoxicated me with the delicious perfume brought by groves of orange trees, cinnamon trees and so many other trees and fragrant flowers which perpetually crown the soil of my dear Brazil.¹¹⁰

   

Floresta, Itinéraire, 62. Ibid., 131– 132. Franco, “El Nuevo y el Viejo Mundo,” 239. Floresta, Trois Ans, XI.

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As Floresta synthesised and concluded: “There [in Brazil], there is simple nature; here [in Europe], nature is aided by the efforts of art, displaying its most beautiful, most majestic charms.”¹¹¹ In her Eden-like image of Brazilian landscape and in her association of Europe with “civilisation” Floresta was intertextually dialoguing with “different literary traditions,”¹¹² “appropriat[ing] images, readings and interpretations that circulated in European travellers’ stories, transforming and giving them new meanings,”¹¹³ and mixing “her own opinions” with “the conventions and stereotypes present in the imaginary.”¹¹⁴ Indeed, as Franco postulates, this association, Brazil/nature – Europe/civilization, was “the same one that circulated in the texts of various travellers who visited America in the nineteenth century, and constituted one of the bases of the European discourse, by which it sought to register the centrality of Europe and the marginal position of America, enclosed in a nature untouched and distant from the civilized world.”¹¹⁵ Notwithstanding, as Franco continues: Despite adhering to this discourse, the author senses in it a strong contemptuous charge, the result of which is the characterization of Brazil as a country that had not left an initial level of development, alien to civilization and submerged in primitivism. This intuition makes her sometimes make an effort to break the dichotomy between civilisation (associated with Europe) and nature (linked to Brazil), although at various times she herself ends up reproducing this discourse. Thus, at the same time that she exalts the natural qualities attributed to Brazil, she seeks, at certain times, to show elements that indicate the existence in the country of an incipient civilisation, which she places in history, commerce, arts and science.¹¹⁶

This is precisely what Floresta did in her travel writing: to claim her Eden-like Brazil, its immense intact resources, as the new place where an improved Europe could be transported and flourish. Taking Germany as the emblem of “civilised” perfection, she commented: Between the advanced civilisation of this country and that of ours, I find some points of connection in certain things that attach me more to this land: the frankness, sincerity, sympathetic affection, hospitality – natural qualities of the Brazilian people, which a civilisation badly transplanted from Europe, and even more badly cultivated, tends every day to

     

Floresta, Itinéraire, 70. Franco, “El Nuevo y el Viejo Mundo,” 237. Ibid., 235. Ibid., 237. Ibid., 239. Ibid., 240.

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degenerate – are to be found among the German people, and reign there through all the transformations through which this people has passed for so many centuries!¹¹⁷

The “civilisation badly transplanted from Europe” she was referring to was epitomised by slavery – “the greatest shame of Christian peoples!” that, “despite the admirable progress of their enterprising and progressive genius,” was “transmitted to the happy beaches of free America” by “the despotic spirit of the old world.”¹¹⁸ Hoping to redress this “badly transplanted” “civilisation” by bringing Germany’s savoir-faire to her homeland, she envisaged this man-made understanding of progress: From Verviers to here [Aix-la-Chapelle], the road is filled with tunnels; passing under these dark vaults, I thought of those which will one day cross from one end to the other the soil of our dear Brazil, this rich soil which would be so worthy of belonging to a laborious and industrial people like this one… And, thinking through the centuries to come, I saw new generations happier than ours, and several others who will succeed one another, hurrying everywhere as here, enjoying all over the fruits of labour and the genius of this weak atom of humanity called man.¹¹⁹

As these excerpts bear out, despite her criticisms of Europe – e. g., its “ignorance” of Brazil, its domesticated nature, Roman catholic conspicuous charity, or Parisian vain idleness –, Floresta’s discourse remained within a European epistemic paradigm that she sought to further import to her homeland. In the process, she drew on the binary stereotypical templates that made up her contextual European cultural imaginary: nature/culture, agrarian/industrialized, backwardness/progress, Brazil/Europe, self/other. As a result, in line with the plausible normative underpinnings of hybridity abovementioned, by virtue of her status as a criolla, this narrative phenomenon consolidated rather than disputed the Eurocentric notions of centre and periphery that made up European epistemologies. The surveilling tools of judgemental des/identification she applied to Europe as a privileged creolised and subalternised onlooker ended up reifying national and cultural difference. Ultimately, Floresta can be assessed as contributing to what in post- and decolonial theory Spivak has termed “epistemic violence”¹²⁰ and Boaventura de

 Floresta, Itinéraire, 162.  Floresta, Trois Ans, 14– 15.  Floresta, Itinéraire, 39.  In her study of how knowledge intersects with power in colonial settings, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak defines epistemic violence as the historiographical/scientific representation of “truths” that place the coloniser at the centre of the narrative, subalternising colonised com-

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Sousa has referred to as “epistemicide.”¹²¹ For in her association of Europe – an old continent – to history, technology and progress, and of Brazil – a young country – to intact nature, abundant resources and emerging potential, she seems to be ignoring the presence of subaltern populations, e. g., native Americans and people of African origin – their history, culture, techniques, spiritualities and knowledges – as well as their contribution to the development of Brazil as a country. She did, however, write in their defence. In her poem A lágrima de um Caeté [“The tear of a Caeté”] (1849), she braved intellectual censorship and personal ostracism by denouncing, within the Indianist Romantic tradition, the brutal colonial power inflicted upon native Americans.¹²² As Constância Lima Duarte points out, unlike the Indianist Romantic tradition though, “the poem brings us not the vision of the Indian hero who fights, present in most of the known Indianist texts, but the point of view of the defeated, […] conscious and not satisfied with the oppression of their race by the invading white.” In this poem we do not find hence “the epithets of the innocent and pure Indian, bearer of that ‘natural goodness’, idealised in European philosophical theories and adopted by other Brazilian writers.”¹²³ Instead, Floresta calls our attention to the Indians’ awareness of their own irreversible demise owing to the loss of their distinct identity – a dimension of their exploitation Romantic writers overlooked.¹²⁴ And, in the case of enslaved people, referring to them as “these unfortunate victims,¹²⁵ Floresta sought to “transform slavery into domesticity” so they can “serve you, not as bullies, but as free and devoted men.”¹²⁶ Notwithstanding,

munities in the process and undermining their ability to speak and be heard, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1988); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Womens Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in “Race”, Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).  In Boaventura de Souza Santos’s work, epistemicide refers to the destruction of marginal forms of knowledge-production that European Modernity has entailed. Epistemicide is supported by the scientific method as the guarantor of objectivity and as the only validator of “truth.” In order to work towards global social justice, de Souza calls for a development of what he names Epistemologies of the South – a transformative project that involves cognitive and epistemological recognition of non-Western cosmovisions, Boaventura de Souza Santos, Epistemologies of the South. Justice Against Epistemicide (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016).  Pinheiro Dias, “A trajetória,” 338 – 340.  Constância Lima Duarte, “Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta: Pioneira do Feminismo Brasileiro – séc. XIX,” Revista Mulheres e Literatura 1, no. 1 (1997): n.p., accessed March 08, 2022, https://litcult.net/2012/07/06/nisia-floresta-brasileira-augusta-pioneira-do-feminismo-brasileirosec-xix/.  Ibidem.  Floresta, Trois Ans, 15.  Ibid., 16.

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Floresta wrote about Natives and enslaved Africans within a Europeanised mindset that, taking for granted the western framework as the future for Brazil, described them (“they”) as objects of knowledge and emotions (“us”), not as subjects of their own epistemic systems. All in all, the binarisms that underpin Floresta’s partial counter-hegemonic discourse on Europe stand in apparent opposition to the fort/da oscillation she embodied as a culturally hybrid traveller and the back and forth dis/identification that triggered her redefined views of Europe and which, ultimately, made of her a “hybrid dissident” at a personal and discursive level. In this sense, the figure of Floresta epitomises the complex interlocking and relational fluctuation between centre and periphery within a contact zone highlighted in postcolonial hybridity theory, and her travel writing is testimony to the ambiguous potential of this literary genre to promote truly intercultural and interepistemic dialogues. Floresta’s travel writing stands indeed for a narrative version of the “unknown consequences that cannot be foreseen” of the process of creolisation underscored by Glissant. Yet the ultimately twofold outcome – an agentic lifestyle/ confident critical outlook on Europe on the one hand and an entrenched European ethnocentrism on the other – vividly illustrates Hall’s idea that creolisation always arises within unbalanced power relations. Hence, the apparent antagonism between Floresta’s lived/narrativised liminal hybridity on the one hand and the binarisms that underpin her outlook on the other stands for an illustration of the potentially simultaneously normative/transgressive nature of hybridity. In this sense, Friedman’s understanding of hybridity as an intercultural fort/ da movement is insightful. For it brings a nuance to the movement of back and forth bouncing between cultural identification and differentiation that underscores the way in which “narratives of encounter in the contact zone often exhibit a contradictory oscillation between the establishment of firm boundaries between self and other on the one hand and the transgression of fixed borders on the other.”¹²⁷ As she expounds, in narratives of encounter liminal subjects negotiate “the bipolar pull between the erection of borders delineating difference and the dissolution of those boundaries in the formation of permeable borderlands of exchange, blending, and transformations.”¹²⁸ Within her normative/ transgressive cultural difference, Floresta’s binarisms would exemplify Friedman’s intercultural fort/da.

 Friedman, Mappings, 154.  Ibidem.

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Bibliography Sources Floresta, Nísia. Direito das mulheres e injustiça dos homens. Recife: Typographia Fidedigma, 1832. Floresta, Nísia. Conselhos à minha filha. Rio de Janeiro: Typographia de J.S. Cabral, 1842. Floresta, Nísia. Daciz ou a jovem complete. Rio de Janeiro: Typographia de F. de Paula Brito, 1847. Floresta, Nísia. Fanny ou o modelo das donzelas. Rio de Janeiro: Edição do Colégio Augusto, 1847. Floresta, Nísia. Discurso que às suas educandas dirigiu Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta. Rio de Janeiro: Typographia de F. de Paula Brito, 1847. Floresta, Nísia. A Lágrima de um Caeté. Rio de Janeiro: Typographia de L.A.F. Menezes, 1849. Floresta, Nísia. Opúsculo humanitário. Rio de Janeiro: Typographia de M.A. da Silva Lima, 1853. Floresta, Nísia. Itinéraire d’un voyage en Allemagne. Paris: Fermin Didot Frères, 1857. Floresta, Nísia. Trois ans en Italie suivis d’un voyage en Grèce. Vol. I. Paris: E. Dentu, 1864. Floresta, Nísia. Trois ans en Italie suivis d’un voyage en Grèce. Vol. II. Paris: E. Dentu, 1872.

Literature Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Hosquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bhabha, Homi K. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28 (Spring 1984): 125 – 133. Bhabha, Homi K. “Sly Civility.” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 71 – 80. Bhabha, Homi K. “The Commitment to Theory.” New Formations 5 (Summer 1988): 5 – 23. Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Bhabha, Homi K. “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition.” In Black Skins, White Masks, by Franz Fanon, translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press, 1986, reprinted in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 112 – 123. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaft, 1993. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Childs, Peter, and Williams, Patrick. An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory. Harlow: Longman, 1997. Duarte, Constância Lima. “Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta: Pioneira do Feminismo Brasileiro – séc. XIX.” Revista Mulheres e Literatura 1, no. 1 (1997): n.p., accessed March 08, 2022, https://litcult.net/2012/07/06/nisia-floresta-brasileira-augusta-pioneira-do-femi nismo-brasileiro-sec-xix/. Duarte, Constância Lima. “Feminismo e literatura no Brasil.” Estudos Avançados 17, no. 49 (2003): 151 – 172. Duarte, Constância Lima. Nísia Floresta: vida e obra. Natal: UFRN, 1995.

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Fonseca Ferreira, Ligià. “Itinéraire d’une voyageuse en Europe: Nísia Floresta (1810 – 1885).” Cahiers du Brésil Contemporain 12 (1990): 1 – 20. Franco, Stella Maris Scatena. “El Nuevo y el Viejo Mundo en la visión de una brasileña en Europa: los relatos de viaje de Nísia Floresta.” In Escritoras del Siglo XIX en América Latina, edited by Sara Beatriz Guardia, 235 – 243. San Martín de Porres: Centro de Estudios La Mujer la Mujer en América Latina, 2012. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Mappings. Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Encarnación, and Shirley Anne Tate, eds. Introduction to Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations, by Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Shirley Anne Tate, 1 – 11. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. Luna, Cláudia. “Nísia Floresta: una viajera brasileña en el viejo mundo.” In Viajeras entre dos mundos, edited by Sara Beatriz Guardia, 391 – 405. Dourados: UFGC, 2012. Pinheiro Dias, Luma. “A trajetória de Nísia Floresta em defesa da educação feminina nos oitocentos.” Revista do Departamento de História e do Programa de Pós-graduação em História do Brasil da UFPI Teresina 8, no. 1 (2019): 329 – 351. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992, reprinted 2008. Souza Maia, Ludmila de. “Recolher as âncoras em busca da liberdade. Gênero e viagem em Nísia Floresta (Europa, 1856 – 1885).” Varia Historia, Belo Horizonte 34, no. 64 (2018): 165 – 191. Souza Santos, Boaventura de. Epistemologies of the South. Justice Against Epistemicide. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty- “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Routledge, 1988. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Womens Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” In “Race”, Writing and Difference, edited by Henry Louis Gates, 262 – 280. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Stewart, Charles. “Creolization, Hybridity, Syncretism, Mixture.” Portuguese Studies 27, no. 1 (2011): 48 – 55. Werbner, Pnina, and Tariq Modood, eds. Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism. London: ZED Books, 1997. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: J. Johnson, 1792. Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

Cecilia Morgan

The Minister, the Bride and the School Girl: English Canadians in Europe, 1860s – 1880s “A visit to Europe has been for years the dream of my life,” were the opening words of English Canadian Methodist minister and writer William H. Withrow in his 1881 travelogue, A Canadian in Europe. ¹ “To a denizen of this new continent,” he continued, “the monuments and institutions of the past, as seen in the Old World, possess a fascinating interest… one beholds a crystallized history which thrills the soul with a presence and a power before unimagined.”² Although his fellow-Canadian Lucy Ronalds Harris confined her thoughts about her time overseas to the pages of letters written to her mother at home in Chatham, Ontario, she too believed there was much to appreciate and admire in Paris, Brussels and Rotterdam, sites that Lucy toured during the course of her honeymoon in 1867. A taste for travel, both overseas and elsewhere, ran in the Harris family: sent to a boarding-school in England in 1881, Lucy’s daughter, Amelia Archange Harris, wrote to her mother, describing her travels with her father, Edward, around England and Scotland in 1884. What do these accounts of Europe tell us about middle-class English Canadians’ conceptions of Britain and the continent? Equally importantly, why did their authors feel it important to commit their impressions of overseas travel to paper? For one, Withrow and the Harris family represented a growing interest on the part of middle-class English Canadians with transatlantic tourism, one mediated by a print culture (travelogues, periodicals and newspaper articles) in which middle-class English Canadians were instructed about Europe’s cultural and social significance. Published travel writing gave them a vocabulary and framework through which “Europe” might be constructed; it constituted a type of pedagogy that set out which sites were worth seeing and why, guiding the new

 Withrow would go on to become a member of the Royal Society of Canada and to hold other noted positions in Canadian higher education and religious institutions. See William H. Withrow, A Canadian in Europe; Being Sketches of Travel in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Holland and Belgium, Great Britain and Ireland (Toronto: Rose Belford, 1881), 137– 138. See also G.S. French, “Withrow, William Henry,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003, accessed January 19, 2021, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/with row_william_henry_13E.html.  Withrow, A Canadian in Europe, 17. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110734966-007

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visitor and confirming that they had made the right choices.³ Although by the mid-nineteenth century Canadians were becoming tourists in their own country – visiting Niagara Falls, touring the St. Lawrence, and venturing into wilderness sites in central and western Canada, for example – these places were sought for their natural beauty.⁴ A visit to Europe, in contrast, would expose the Canadian visitor to the best that Western society had to offer, particularly its art, history, and religion; even the natural landscapes of Europe were replete with important cultural and historical associations. Such knowledge, these writers told their Canadian audiences, was important cultural capital that allowed middle-class men and women to claim the taste and discernment needed to be a “genteel” member of society.⁵ Moreover, a trip overseas was an important means of affirming both national and imperial identities, ones that, in the wake of 1867’s Confederation of Canada and the growth of an English-Canadian nationalism that frequently was intertwined with British imperialism, were becoming increasingly central to middle-class English Canadians’ sense of self. Even if one lacked the time and funds for a tour of the continent and could only visit Britain, such a trip would provide a strong connection to British culture, history and society, thus confirming one’s membership in the Empire as a white settler Dominion that helped constitute the backbone of the British Empire.⁶ The “Europe” constructed and experienced by William Withrow, Lucy Ronalds Harri and Amelia Harris thus shared many things, both with each other and with these larger cultural and social discourses about Europe’s cultural “superiority.” Seeing and writing about Europe involved experiencing multiple sensory and aesthetic delights; representations of history tinged with thrills both

 More detailed discussions of Canadians travel overseas can be found in Eva-Marie Kröller, Canadian Travellers in Europe, 1851 – 1900 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987); Cecilia Morgan, “A Happy Holiday”: English-Canadians and Transatlantic Tourism, 1870 – 1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Steamship travel meant that a transatlantic voyage took less time than sailing; second-class tickets on those ships, coupled with services such as Thomas Cook’s guided tours, also made overseas travel more affordable. For American developments, see Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France. From Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Wendy Martin, “North American Travel Writing,” in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Nass and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 252– 266, 257– 160.  Patricia Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture and Tourism in Ontario, 1790 – 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); Karen Dubinsky, The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1999).  Morgan, “A Happy Holiday,” 363 – 364.  Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867 – 1914, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).

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pleasurable and horrific; and the spectacle of other tourists, whose appearances might further a traveller’s sense of being exposed to cosmopolitan and transnational spectacles while also confirming English-Canadians’ own national identities. It might affirm a middle-class tourist’s belief that, while European history and culture had much to offer, aspects of its contemporary society needed improvement, particularly in comparison with Canadian progress. Yet there were distinctions between their versions. Lucy Harris was awed by Paris and revelled in many of its displays of Catholicism, while Withrow was more selective in his appreciation of the city and much more ambivalent about the latter. In turn, Lucy had little interest in ruminating upon the “lack of progress” evinced by European peasant society or, indeed, contemplating questions of “modernity” in general. Nor, unlike Withrow, was she compelled to dwell on the horrors of the past. Millie Harris’ letters offer perspectives on Europe seen through a child’s eyes, ones rarely found in travel writings. For Millie, tragic histories (and the pleasure she took in her father’s company), not beautiful scenery, were the most fascinating aspects of her time abroad. While some of these differences may seem subtle, they remind us that despite the influence of dominant discourses, tourists engaged with those constructions of Europe according to their own predilections and social locations.

William Withrow’s “Europe” Withrow’s travelogue bears many of the hallmarks of the authoritative voice of the white male traveller who, in Mary Louise Pratt’s well-known characterisation, was accustomed to move about a landscape with ease and confidence, dispensing judgments on the landscape and people he encountered.⁷ It also was one of several such texts from the Toronto-based Methodist publisher William Briggs, books that emphasised the pernicious nature of Catholicism, stressed the difficulties faced by many European societies, particularly in their urban centres, and, in general, depicted Europe as a place of past glories, its present “modernity” notable only for its problems. In many ways Withrow’s book confirmed to these conventions.⁸ For one, his dislike of certain past and contemporary Catholic practices permeates his text, particularly those which involved Mariolatry. At the Church of La Consalata in Genoa, the paintings in honour of the Virgin were

 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).  Kröller, Canadian Travellers in Europe, 7.

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“wretched daubs… coarse, mercenary, and degrading the last degree,”⁹ while in Naples Withrow witnessed the most “abject Mariolatry” in Europe.¹⁰ He also was disgusted by the bones preserved under St. Ursula’s church in Cologne, describing them as “degrading, unclean,” and (in the histories they purported to represent) “fraudulent.”¹¹ Withrow’s text also echoes his contemporaries’ concerns about the temptations and excesses of “modern” society. Withrow was troubled by French attempts to make divorce easier: the family, he affirmed, was the foundation of the state.¹² At times his travelogue slips into an anti-modernist stance, one not uncommon in travel writing of this period, in which emblems of nineteenth-century modernity – the railroad, or Paris’ new boulevards, for example – are jarring, spoil historic sites, or are just tedious (he noted approvingly, though, that the latter gave the city’s population few materials for making barricades: Withrow saw the Commune as having led to as much terror as the French Revolution).¹³ Yet Withrow was not immune from “modernity’s” pleasures and benefits; a detailed exploration of his travelogue suggests his attitudes on the subject were complicated. While Liverpool had little in the way of “antiquity” and resembled New York or Chicago, it also presented scenes of “commercial greatness,” and the great number of visitors to the city’s Walker Art Gallery was proof of the salutary effects of a widespread education in aesthetics on the city’s population.¹⁴ The new streetscapes of Paris might in themselves be uninspired: however, at night they glittered with gas light and the illumination of goods in shop windows. In the daylight the public squares were alive with the movement of Parisians and the rich colours of their clothing; he also was taken with the beauty of the “ladies” in the Luxembourg Palace grounds.¹⁵ Moreover, although Withrow realised that his readers expected to hear about the artistic richness of Europe’s cathedrals, palaces, museums and galleries – not least because other travelogues informed them that such places contained the zenith of Western culture – he confessed to a preference for modern art. True, the Louvre was majestic, but his own tastes ran towards paintings by living artists, such as those displayed in Paris’ Palais de l’Industrie.¹⁶

 Withrow, A Canadian in Europe, 62.  Ibid., 118.  Ibid., 285.  Ibid., 56.  Ibid., 41, 52, 71, 192.  Ibid., 24– 25.  Ibid., 41– 42, 53.  Ibid., 44.

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Furthermore, the sight of women employed in agricultural labour struck Withrow as one of the most pernicious manifestations of older, less enlightened features of European societies, Catholic or Protestant. Women toiled in the Sicilian countryside, he wrote, with only a “slight indication” of the classical beauty of the Italian peasantry that he had expected to find. Near Pompeii they performed hard labour in full view of the public’s gaze, appearing so much like animalistic beasts of burden that he was moved to tears of pity.¹⁷ Even in Switzerland, a country that generally won his approval because of its history of Protestantism, social progress and beauty, Withrow was disturbed to see peasant women engaged in field work, carrying loads of hay on their heads, wearing coarse clothing, living in squalid cabins and eating poor and meagre food: “their rude life left its reflex on their rude and unintelligent features.”¹⁸ Withrow was by no means alone in feeling uneasy about seeing women engaged in field labour. Many of his English-Canadian contemporaries saw it as evidence of a “lack of progress,” confirmation of their suspicions that certain aspects of European societies did not live up to middle-class gendered norms in which women’s work took place in the household.¹⁹ Yet despite the many problematic features of European society, it also held a great aesthetic and sensory appeal. Withrow was drawn to certain configurations of colour and shape in the European landscape. The ride from Genoa to Pisa took Withrow through 80 tunnels, providing a wild, romantic and rugged set of views that he greatly enjoyed.²⁰ His ascent to the crest of the Männlichen in the Alps, while arduous, was amply rewarded by the “sublimity” of the view: “The FinsterAarhorn towers 13,230 feet in air […] suggesting thoughts of the great white throne of the Jungfrau – the Virgin Queen of the Bernese Oberland – [and] is a revelation to the soul. In her immortal liveliness and inviolable purity she is like the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven – adorned as a bride for her husband.”²¹ Once at the mountain’s crest, “there burst upon my sight a view unequalled elsewhere in Europe.”²² Although the Alps were the most visible reminders of “God’s handiwork,” he was greatly moved by other sights. The view from Venice’s St. Mark’s campanile at sunset inspired Withrow: “the burning sunset turns all the sky to pearl, all the churches to pearl, all the sea to crimson and gold. The distant mountains glow like lines of lapis lazuli washed with

     

Ibid., 116, 140. Ibid., 228. Morgan, “A Happy Holiday,” 294– 296. Withrow, A Canadian in Europe, 66. Ibid., 211. Ibidem.

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gold; the islands are bowers of greenery, springing from the bloom of the purple waves.”²³ Lakes Como, Lugano and Maggiore in Italy, while “less sublime in their environment than that of Switzerland,” were more beautiful, being of a deep, transparent hue, surrounded by rich-coloured foliage under a sunny blue sky.²⁴ At the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Bellagio, Withrow gazed out the window on “one of the loveliest views I ever beheld,” then embarked on a twilight sail around the lake, as “softly crept the purple shadows over wave and shore.” The entire experience was made even more appealing by the boatman’s singing, followed by the peals of bells announcing Benediction from the shore, “the liquid notes floating over the waves like the music of the spheres.”²⁵ Despite his ambivalence about Catholicism, Withrow was not immune to the auditory delights that church bells, organ music and male choirs could provide. His appreciation of aesthetics also extended to the people he saw. While Withrow enjoyed the “manliness” of German soldiers,²⁶ he was particularly interested in women’s dress and facial features. The daughters of an Italian family who worked as artists’ models, decked in their “picturesque national costumes,” were of a decidedly refined appearance.²⁷ The women of Venice, with their “very regular features and fine classic profiles” (which he attributed to them being of Greek descent), dressed in their “graceful mantillas,” scarlet kerchiefs, yellow skirts and blue aprons, struck Withrow as quite attractive, their massed appearance “a bright symphony of colour that would delight an artist’s eyes.”²⁸ There was, though, a class-based dimension to his enjoyment of European women’s appearance. Unlike other travel writers, who found traditional clothing, particularly that of women, reassuring reminders of the persistence of “folkways” and the deep-rooted values that underpinned them, Withrow was just as likely to see it as unappealing. A crowd of Dutch people in a Rotterdam market, made up “largely of peasants in their gala dress,” included women wearing “a broad gold band across the forehead with spiral pendants in their ears,” jewelry that he conceded must be valuable but was also “singular and ugly.”²⁹ What’s more, overseas travel exposed one to a host of many influences. Travel, Withrow insisted, introduced the traveller to a range of tourists from other lands. Withrow experienced that phenomenon directly since, while riding

      

Ibid., 166. Ibid., 177– 178. Ibid., 179. Ibidem. Ibid., 105 – 106. Ibid., 161. Ibid., 285 – 286.

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on an omnibus in Paris, he met a young man from New York State who then became his month-long companion as he toured Italy.³⁰ At his hotel in the Bernese Alps Withrow observed people from England, France, Germany, Russia and the United States, and “a perfect Babel of language was heard” around the dinner table.³¹ Although Venice’s glory days as an entrepôt for goods from the Middle East and South Asia were over, its cosmopolitan nature lived on in St. Mark’s Piazza, “crowded in the evening by a well-dressed throng of diverse nationalities, many of them in picturesque foreign costumes […] jet-black Tunisians with their snowy robes; Turks with their fez and embroidered vests,” and others from Albania, Greece, Russia, Armenia, England, France, Germany, Austria and the United States.³² Travel, in Withrow’s account, had multiple transnational dimensions. It also, though, might intensify national pride. Withrow’s travelogue invariably compares the landscapes and people of Europe to those of Canada. Although he felt that Canada had much to learn from Geneva’s art school,³³ in general he was an unabashed Canadian nationalist who, despite the wonders that Europe offered, did not lose sight of those of his homeland. Italian olive groves were unimpressive, being very unlike the rich colours offered by a Canadian forest, while the Falls of Rhine at Schaffhausen (Europe’s largest, he noted), despite being “picturesque and beautiful,” could not be compared to the wonders of Niagara.³⁴ Withrow enjoyed his boat trip on the Rhine, both because of the views it offered and the opportunity to observe tourists of other countries, but the river could not compete in size and grandeur with the St. Lawrence.³⁵ Moreover, while Withrow appreciated the comeliness of certain European women, he was decidedly disappointed in the “maidens of Bruges.” Celebrated for their beauty, Withrow instead felt they had “unintelligent expressions” that were “less attractive than the bright looks of our quick-witted Canadian girls” (the fact that Bruges had “an air of blight and mildew,” which he put down to “Romish superstition,” may well have prejudiced him against his womenfolk).³⁶ Withrow looked more favourably on Britain, the “birthplace of liberty,” and was openly relieved to hear the English language and see “English faces” once again

      

Ibid., 58 – 59. Ibid., 194. Ibid., 161. Ibid., 230 – 231. Ibid., 115, 242. Ibid., 270. Ibid., 296.

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after his tour of the continent ended.³⁷ Yet Britain, magnificent as much of it was to him, also presented evidence of social problems that other Canadian writers noted: pretended widespread drunkenness in England, the “hideous deformity” of the suburbs he viewed en route from London to Windsor, and the poverty, vice, wretchedness and dirty-faced men he saw in Glasgow’s Trongate area.³⁸ Furthermore, Withrow’s narrative was informed by Europe’s grim histories. The past in a number of countries was replete with memories of Catholicism’s tyrannical persecution of Protestants or those who, such as Fra Savonarola, the fifteenth-century Florentine monk burned at the stake for heresy, Withrow saw as precursors of Protestantism.³⁹ Like many other English-Canadian Protestants who visited the Netherlands, Withrow thought of the country’s history of Catholic Spanish cruelty towards its Protestant population; in the city of Haarlem a “cruel siege” by the former resulted in the deaths of 10,000 people and the execution of Protestant clergy.⁴⁰ Even England, the place where Withrow felt most at home, was not immune from such terrible events. His trip to Oxford included time spent at the Martyrs’ Memorial, which evoked the words of Archbishops Cramner, Latimer and Ridley as they were burned alive by Mary Tudor’s government.⁴¹ And although some of his observations of contemporary Jewish communities were replete with anti-Semitic tropes and stereotypes,⁴² his text also includes reflections on the persecution and deaths of Jews in ancient Rome and the indignities that the Jewish community in Frankfurt had suffered.⁴³ Not surprisingly, given his own profession, religious history played a great part in his travelogue; however, more secular histories of other places evoked a past that should make his readers shudder. Although Paris’ Palais Royale had been a site of great dissolution and depravity, part of the ancien regime’s corruption and tyranny, that did not excuse the terrible violence enacted in both the city and Versailles in 1789 (let alone, as we have seen, during the Commune).⁴⁴ While Florence was replete with “historic, literary, and artistic attractions,” it also was a reminder of tragedy, oppression and death: the burning of Savonarola and the imprisonments and executions witnessed by the gloomy prison once in the Palazzo del Poesta, especially “the spot in the courtyard below where one of

       

Ibid., 17, 296. Ibid., 300, 314, 371. Ibid., 144, 149. Ibid., 288 – 289, also 276, 298. Ibid., 342. Ibid., 290. Ibid., 259, 277. Ibid., 45 – 49.

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the greatest Doges of Florence fell beneath the headsman’s axe.”⁴⁵ Despite being a city of great beauty, Venice too had its own “gloomy prison of the doges, haunted with the spectres of their murdered victims.” Descending through the tiers of dungeons, Withrow’s guide “showed the instruments of torture, the hideous apparatus of murder, the channels made for the flowing blood, the secret opening by which bodies of the victims were conveyed to the canal.”⁴⁶ Even his beloved London had its own brutish histories told within the walls of the Tower, a place replete with stories of wrongs, cruelty, oppression and criminal deeds committed both by those confined there and their jailers.⁴⁷ In detailing these histories of bodies tortured, burnt and decapitated, Withrow was not alone: many other tourist accounts, published and unpublished, from Canadians and beyond, provided similar narratives and imagery.⁴⁸ Such descriptions of the past were undoubtedly shaped by the visual cultures of historical representation that, as Billie Melman has argued, depended on sensations that “hinged on ‘horror’ […] a concept and a new label, which acquired a set of new meanings that were associated with a historically specific sense of the past in its relation to modernity.”⁴⁹ “Horror” was a “compound notion which denoted a number of sensations,” ones that included “dread and repugnance, as well as disgust and anxiety related to the proximity of the dead.” But it also included “an array of pleasure,” ones that included thrill and excitement.⁵⁰ While these emotions can be seen quite clearly in Withrow’s reactions to these sites, it is likely they also were sparked by feelings of national pride. His readers (and Withrow himself) may have made implicit comparisons between Europe’s past and that of Canada, seeing the latter as shaped by British benevolence, humanitarianism and the rule of law.⁵¹ Just as viewing other tourists could reinforce national identity, dwelling on another country’s terrible pasts might reassure Canadians that theirs’ was a far more peaceful and reassuring national story, one that promised them a better, more prosperous and stable future. Yet such a perspective ignored bleaker realities such as warfare between Indigenous nations and

 Ibid., 151.  Ibid., 107.  Ibid., 299 – 300.  Morgan, “A Happy Holiday,” 67– 68, 168 – 171, 237– 240.  Billie Melman, “Horror and Pleasure: Visual Histories, Sensationalism and Modernity in Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 37 (Jan.–Mar. 2011): 31.  Ibid., 38.  Withrow travelled overseas during a period of growing interest in Canadian history within middle-class circles. See Brook M. Taylor, Promoters, Patriots, and Partisans: Historiography Nineteenth-Century English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989).

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Europeans, the history of slavery in British North America and the establishment of settler colonialism through political, legal and economic structures, policies and practices, thereby perpetuating the false notion of a “New World” untainted by the violence, cruelty and oppression of the Old.

Writing Home: The Harris Women For every writer who had the social status and contacts that led to publication, there were many other Canadians whose accounts of Europe remained confined to the travel diary or letter home. While not as comprehensive as Withrow’s account purported to be, diaries and epistolatory writings provide perspectives that overlap with those of travelogues while at times offering either different perspectives or providing more nuance to commonly held ones. Moreover, taking a close look at both intimate accounts of travel and those who wrote them allows us to understand the role that individual subjectivities and circumstances played in such accounts. Lucy Ronalds Harris’ honeymoon shaped her trip to England and the continent in 1867. Family obligations were never far from her thoughts, both the need to pay several visits to her own relatives and those of her husband George in England and her concerns about being separated from her mother, to whom she wrote faithfully. The newly-married couple began their wedding tour at Niagara Falls, continuing up the St. Lawrence River to Montreal and then Quebec, where they visited the Citadel, the Plains of Abraham, Government House and Montmorency Falls.⁵² Although Lucy would have much preferred travelling on to Paris once her ship docked in England, she felt it necessary to see her relatives, as her cousin was a trustee of an estate that Lucy – and her husband’s family – hoped she would inherit.⁵³ Familial responsibilities discharged (at least for the time being), the couple made their way to Paris, a place that Lucy wished her mother could see. “Nothing can exceed the beauty of the place,” she enthused. Having travelled overnight, they saw nothing of the French countryside, but that did not seem to bother Lucy, whose excitement about the city and its cultural

 Lucy Ronalds Harris to Mary Frances Archange Ronalds, September 6, 9, 12 and 14, 1867, Lucy Harris Papers 1867 (Sept.–Dec.), AFC 48 – 12/3, Harris Family Papers, Western University Archives.  Harris to Ronalds, October 2, 1867. Lucy eventually inherited the estate, which consisted of considerable real estate in southern Ontario amassed by her great-grandfather. Robin S. Harris and Terry G. Harris, eds., The Eldon House Diaries: Five Women’s Views of the 19th Century (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1994), 420.

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riches is palpable in her letters.⁵⁴ For Lucy, Paris offered many beautiful churches, with Saint Chappelle being deemed “the best.” Lucy and George also spent two very full days at the International Exhibition, viewing the greatest collection of pictures and statues that Lucy could imagine: “it would take up pages to describe” it all. During their day trip to Versailles, she and George saw numerous pictures, including those of monarchs “who have been famous in their day either for good or ill, makes not the slightest difference when one is dead.” Although Lucy told her mother about Marie Antoinette’s bedroom at the palace, the terrors of the Revolution and the monarch’s fate did not seem to haunt her as they did Withrow or other travel writers. Instead, she thought the galleries “the most magnificent in the world and laid out in perfect taste,” enjoyed the way that the lines of trees made walking through them “like fairy land,” and was delighted by the palace fountains. In a similar vein, Joan of Arc’s statue made her think not of Joan’s terrible death at the stake but, rather, the fact that it had been constructed by the Princess Marie. Thereby she considered it as “very fine,” its provenance making it “more admired than it should otherwise be I suppose.” Her tone was more sombre when telling her mother, Mary Frances Ronald, about Père Lachaise Cemetery; with its tombs, sentry box at the entrance, marble altars, crosses, and candles, “the place is laid out in regular street and reminds one of a city of the dead.”⁵⁵ Because of time and, most likely, financial, constraints, Lucy’s trip to the continent was shorter and far less wide ranging than Withrow’s. From Paris the couple went to Belgium and then to Holland. Brussels, she wrote, was “delightful,” as it resembled a smaller-scale Paris. She saw the site of the Duchess of Richmond’s “famous ball,” given on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo, and toured the battlefield itself, a “farmers’ field where the fate of Europe was decided.” They then moved on to Antwerp, where at the Cathedral she saw Rubens’ “celebrated pictures” Ascent and Descent of the Cross and Death of Christ, “the most beautiful things I have seen.” Antwerp was followed by Rotterdam, “the quaintest of towns,” with its canal in the middle of the street and stone houses.⁵⁶ Once back in England, much of Lucy’s correspondence with her mother concerned family matters on both sides of the Atlantic.⁵⁷ Yet Lucy’s experiences clearly had left an impression. In early November, while staying with George in Taunton, she told her aunt about “the churches on the continent some are very beautiful and so old the pictures by old Masters are even more than worthy of the praise    

Harris to Ronalds, October 2, 1867. Ibid., October 7, 1867. Ibid., October 27, 1867. Ibid., November 12 and 16, 1867.

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that has been bestowed upon them.” She also described in some detail the church in Cologne “built by the Jesuits entirely,” with its altar rail of white marble, “so beautifully carved that it looks like lace” and brass ornaments that had been donated by “the French general” Talleyrand. Not all religious sites awed Lucy, though. The 1,100 virgins buried with their skulls displayed in glass cases in the Church of St. Ursula made her “feel quite ill to look at them.”⁵⁸ Although she shared Withrow’s queasiness about the skulls, Lucy’s letters lack his strident anti-Catholicism; no doubt the fact that her mother was Catholic accounts for the difference.⁵⁹ Nor, as pointed out above, did she reflect on the terrors and horrors of the European past; the “Europe” she constructed for her mother and aunt back home in Canada was one of beautiful art and inspiring places of worship. Like Withrow, though, she noted the presence of other tourists, telling her mother that “there are ever so many pretty Ladies here they are nearly all American”⁶⁰ (17 years later Lucy’s daughter, Millie, also was struck by the presence of other tourists. “Scotland is crowded with Americans and English” people, not to mention fellow-Canadians, she told Lucy⁶¹). Although she could bring a skeptical eye to that which seemed overblown or failed to live up to its publicity – witness her tart comment about the Joan of Arc statue – overall Lucy Harris seemed to appreciate her time on the continent and, most likely, would have wished for a longer stay than the month she spent there.⁶² Unlike her mother, Lucy’s daughter Amelia (Millie) Archange Harris was initially ambivalent about spending time in England. Sent in 1881 by her parents to live with her parental aunt in Torquay and attend school there, Millie’s first reaction was to sob inconsolably once she was left alone.⁶³ By the following year Millie was happier, no doubt because she was living with her mother and siblings in London’s Bayswater, close to Kensington Gardens. Millie’s London was that of a young middle-class girl of her time: trips to the Army and Navy Store, the Zoo (where her younger brother was startled by an elephant’s trumpeting but enjoyed feeding the monkeys), window shopping with her mother in Re Harris to “my dear aunt” (most likely Jane Askin Murray), November 1, 1867. Lucy may have been referring to St. Peter’s Church in Cologne.  Lucy may have been brought up as a Roman Catholic; however, her husband’s family belonged to the Anglican Church and she worshipped with them.  Harris to Ronalds, October 2, 1867.  Ibid., August 7, 1884.  In the late 1880s and ‘90s she did just that, returning to Europe to spend time at the spas in Karlsbad and extending her travels to the Middle East (Lucy to George Harris, August 24, 1895, Lucy Harris AFC 48 – 12– 8, Harris Family Papers).  Amelia (Millie) Archange Harris to Lucy and George Harris, May 21, 1882, AFC–48 – 9/12, Harris Family Papers.

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gent’s Street and the view from St. Paul’s “golden gallery 120 steps. I am very glad I have seen London from such a height because I never intend to see it again from there.”⁶⁴ One year later Millie was in Yorkshire with her father, telling her mother they were enjoying themselves trying to solve the mysteries of England’s railroad schedules and visiting the city’s cathedral. One of the oldest in England, York Cathedral housed Catherine of Aragon’s body and, for 18 years, that of Mary Stuart. Millie was particularly attracted to the carvings on a door post that depicted demons tormenting a sinner in purgatory “but as one demon is not doing his work properly, Satan with a snake is punishing him (one demon lost his head in the Civil War).” She also noted the tomb of a woman, dead at 38, who had left 24 children “to mourn her,” but then moved on briskly to tell her own mother, “I am enjoying myself immensely and only wish that you were here.”⁶⁵ From Yorkshire Millie and George travelled to Durham, its cathedral being the “best so far” in her eyes, and then to Scotland.⁶⁶ Here Millie relished her tour of Holyrood Castle, telling her mother in some detail about the grim deeds enacted within its walls; she also appreciated Edinburgh Castle, with its displays of jewels and the cannon, Mons Meg, and the beautiful view from Arthur’s Seat.⁶⁷ Roslin Castle had a thrilling history, as Millie told her brother Ronald that Mary Stuart took refuge in its ruins for three weeks and then escaped through its subterranean passages.⁶⁸ Millie and her father also went through the Trossachs, took a boat trip on Loch Lomond and the train to Glasgow. Although other English-Canadian tourists often rhapsodised about Scotland’s scenic delights, coupled with its romantic histories,⁶⁹ she had far more reservations about its attractions. “The scenery is very fine but not so grand as the St. Lawrence were it not for the historical associations it would not have the name it has,” she told her mother, echoing Withrow’s opinion of the Canadian river’s grandeur. Although expected to visit Glencoe, they decided against going, “for we have read so many accounts of the scenery which ‘crack’ it up so much that taking our experience into account we deducted one half of the praise and ‘concluded that we had seen it’!!!”⁷⁰ What’s more, on their way to Oban via the Caledonian Canal, Millie thought

      

Millie Harris to George Harris, September 18, 1883. Millie Harris to Lucy Harris, August 4, 1884. Ibid., August 6, 1884. Ibid., August 16, 1884. Millie Harris to Ronald Harris, August 18, 1884. Morgan, “A Happy Holiday,” 59 – 78 Ibid., August 12, 1884.

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the view quite good but still preferred the scenery of the St. Lawrence or even Hudson Rivers. “Papa and I both agree in thinking that the grandeur has been overwritten, but one does not go to Scotland for the scenery as much for the associations with history which is connected with them.” To be sure, both preferred visiting towns to looking at landscapes, “very bad taste I suppose,” she admitted jokingly.⁷¹ Overall, this young Canadian tourist recorded far more critical impressions of Scotland than her contemporaries and those who would follow her. The house at Perth where Walter Scott’s “fair maid” lived disgusted her: “it is such a hole.”⁷² Back in Edinburgh, the fact that the Duke of Gordon’s house was over 300 years old meant little to her: “a miserably dirty small place,” she wrote.⁷³ Glasgow was “not very interesting. The streets are crowded with children, barefooted, dirty and speaking a mixture of Scotch and sometimes Gaelic.” What’s more, just as Withrow had noted the city’s poverty, on an evening walk Millie had counted eight Salvation Armies in a dozen streets, a sign of the city’s poverty and poor social conditions.⁷⁴ In Edinburgh, a boys’ band at the Forestry Exhibition was the worst she had heard, “every man played for all he was worth and succeeded in making a terrific din,” she complained, and the young pipers “played out of tune and as loud as they could – so – we got as far away from the music as possible.”⁷⁵ To make matter worse, Scottish food was neither plentiful nor attractively served. In Linlithgow Millie and her father had lunch in a “‘primitive’ (very!) tavern (we washed out hands in a sort of kitchen in a tin pan or basin),” while a lunch in Edinburgh consisted of a “very small piece of Scotch bread […] four prunes and a glass of tooth water” (albeit Millie found it better than the tavern fare of two buns, one biscuit and a glass of beer).⁷⁶ Millie’s time as a tourist was shaped by decisions made by adults, who determined both what she would see and the amount of time she would spend doing so. Yet although she could not exercise the amount of agency enjoyed by Withrow or even by her mother – whose enjoyment, to be sure, was mediated by her husband’s tastes, familial obligations and finances – nevertheless Millie’s views of Europe did not unthinkingly reflect the cultural lessons that the print culture of travel abroad might impart. For one, she was not overawed by the places she visited; there is little sense that – at least as a child – Millie automatically

     

Ibid., August 10, 1884. Emphasis in the original. Ibid., August 15, 1884. Ibidem. Ibidem. Millie Harris to Lucy Harris, August 16, 1884. Ibid., August 15 and 16, 1884. Emphasis in the original.

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believed that Europe was superior. Moreover, if there was romance in Millie’s “Europe,” it was not the views of Highland landscape that so inspired others: instead, it was the figure of the alluring – albeit doomed – Mary Stuart that fascinated this young Canadian girl. In all likelihood Millie’s attraction to this particular aspect of Europe’s grim history had been sparked by her education, formal and informal; in a settler Dominion such as Canada, “history” for middleclass English-Canadian children often contained tales of the British monarchy, a group that included queens as well as kings.⁷⁷ Such a curriculum provided opportunities for white, middle-class girls to identify with prominent female figures of the past. The type of comparison that was a subtext for travelogues such as Withrow’s, in which Canada’s past was deemed clean of Europe’s horror and tragedy, appears to have been more common in the writings of adults. Unlike published texts, private letters allowed their authors to provide counterpoints to dominant discourses.

Conclusion Withrow’s account was likely the most influential of these three; not only was he seen as an expert on European travel, his work was published and disseminated to a wider audience than the Harris family’s letters. Moreover, the list of places he visited and the importance he ascribed to them were echoed in other Canadian authors’ travelogues. However, unpublished writings also provide us with important insights into the way that such concepts of “Europe” were received and reshaped. While European travel and the knowledge of “Europe” it produced was meant to be “the hallmark of a discerning, cultured, liberal subjectivity,”⁷⁸ such a subjectivity was the result of the interplay between dominant discourses and individuals’ own backgrounds, experiences and proclivities. Far from being ciphers, Canadian tourists used both the genre of the travelogue and, in particular, that of the epistolatory form to exercise considerable amounts of agency in determining their own conceptions of Europe.

 More attention has been paid to the teaching of Canadian history in Canada’s schools. See Cecilia Morgan, Commemorating Canada: History, Heritage, and Memory 1850s–1990s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), esp. chapter 7, “Teaching the Nation Its History: Schoolchildren and the Canadian Past.”  Morgan, “A Happy Holiday,” 363.

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Bibliography Sources Harris Family Papers, Western University Archives. Withrow, William H. A Canadian in Europe; Being Sketches of Travel in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Holland and Belgium, Great Britain and Ireland. Toronto: Rose Belford, 1881.

Literature Berger, Carl. The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867 – 1914, 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Dubinsky, Karen. The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls. Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1999. French, G.S. “Withrow, William Henry,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Volume 13. University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003. Accessed January 19, 2021. http://www.biog raphi.ca/en/bio/withrow_william_henry_13E.html. Harris, Robin S., and Terry G. Harris, eds. The Eldon House Diaries: Five Women’s Views of the 19th Century. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1994. Jasen, Patricia. Wild Things: Nature, Culture and Tourism in Ontario, 1790 – 1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Kröller, Eva-Marie. Canadian Travellers in Europe, 1851 – 1900. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987. Levenstein, Harvey. Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France; From Jefferson the Jazz Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Martin, Wendy. “North American Travel Writing.” In The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, edited by Nandini Das and Tim Youngs, 252 – 266. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Melman, Billie. “Horror and Pleasure: Visual Histories, Sensationalism and Modernity in Britain in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 37 (Jan. – Mar. 2011): 26 – 46. Morgan, Cecilia.“A Happy Holiday”: English-Canadians and Transatlantic Tourism, 1870 – 1930. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Morgan, Cecilia. Commemorating Canada: History, Heritage, and Memory 1850s–1990s. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Taylor, Brook M. Promoters, Patriots, and Partisans: Historiography in Nineteenth-Century English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989.

Leila Gómez

Family Album and Failure in Louise Bryant’s and Martha Gellhorn’s Travel Accounts in Russia This article studies two accounts by female travellers in Russia during different moments in the twentieth century. The suffragette Louise Bryant went to Russia at the beginning of the October Revolution of 1917; the writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn arrived in 1972. Both were married to famous writers, John Reed and Ernest Hemingway, respectively, and both were war correspondents, middleclass white women and pioneers in the struggle for women’s rights in the West. They travelled during different periods in the history of both the Soviet Union and the United States, and therefore their accounts reflect differences that represent the cultural changes in the United States that derived from the country’s history of war, from World War I to Vietnam. By exploring these female views of Russia my goal is to problematise from a gendered perspective the homogeneous image of Europe in US-American culture and to reveal contradictory feelings of admiration and condemnation in regard to Russia “as part of Europe,” particularly in culture and politics. Russia occupies a complex position in relation to both Europe and the United States. Although 77 per cent of Russian Federation is in Asia, 40 per cent of Europe is Russian territory. The cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, for example, in the European side of the country, are manifestations of the Russian historical integration to the “West”. According to Russell Bova, the concept of the “West” is what makes the integration more complex. During the Cold War years (approximately 1948 to 1989), the concept of “the West” was most commonly applied to the United States and its European allies, as opposed to the communist “East” (the Soviet Union, China and their allies). But this Cold War definition of the “ideological West” “could not survive the collapse of Soviet and East European communism and the resulting end of the Cold War. In its place, the idea of “the West” as a cultural entity has now reemerged.¹ This notion presupposes that Europeans are not only people residing in a certain geographical region but also possessing a certain way of thinking, mentality, life-

 Russell Bova, Russia and Western Civilization: Cultural and Historical Encounters (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2003). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110734966-008

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style and type of culture.² However, this idea of “the West” could not exist without its relation with “the non-West,” as Alexander Tchoubarian argues: Russia has always been an inexhaustible commodity market and supplier of natural resources, attracting travellers and merchants. In the nineteenth century Russia served as a source of spiritual inspiration for Europe, through the ideas and genius of Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy, and in the twentieth century this mission was carried on in literature and the arts by writers such as Bulgakov, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, artists like Shagal and Kandinsky and composers such as Shostakovich and Prokofiev.³

My methodology entails analysing Bryant’s Six Red Months in Russia (1918) and Gellhorn’s One Look at Mother Russia (1972) with special attention to the material objects that both writers describe and use during their travels. The objects are revealed as quasi-subject agents that generate reactions and attitudes in the characters that interact in the contact zone. Objects provide the possibility of

 Ibid., 11.  Alexander Tchoubarian, The European Idea in History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Routledge, 2013), 3 – 4. Following Bova, I briefly summarise here the historical relationship between Russia and Europe. In the thirteenth century, according to legend, Prince Vladimir of Kiev sent emissaries to examine the religions of the Muslims, the Western Christians and the Eastern Orthodox. Impressed with the beauty of its churches and services, he chose the latter. By choosing the Orthodox tradition, Vladimir chose at the same time a religion that was both familiar and foreign to Western Europeans – a Christian religion separated from the Church of Rome. After that, for almost two centuries, from 1240 to 1480, the Mongols invaded and controlled the Rus territory and strengthened the difference from the West. This was subverted by the time that Peter the Great began his reign (1696 – 1725) as sole leader of Russia, for his main priority was the economic, political and cultural modernisation of Russia, which for Peter equated to “Westernisation”. Among his reforms was an effort to bring the Orthodox Church under state control, the reorganisation of state and local government and the tax system, and his move of the capital from insular Moscow to St. Petersburg located on the Baltic Sea. St. Petersburg was to be Russia’s “window on the West”. In the nineteenth century, there were attempts to eliminate serfdom and autocratic monarchy, but they prevailed long after the ideas of the Enlightenment had led to the modification or replacement of absolutist monarchies in much of Western Europe. In the twentieth century, the Marxist ideology that sparked and guided the Russian revolution in 1917 was itself a Western import. Under Stalin, and later during the Cold War, the separation of Russia and “the West” was symbolised in metaphors such as the “iron curtain”. A more concrete symbol of this East West divide was provided by the Berlin Wall, erected by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 to keep residents of communist East Berlin from escaping to the West. The eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorvachev (1985 – 1991) initiated the transition toward a democratisation of the country and held a pivotal role in ending the Cold War and the “iron curtain” that separated the East Bloc and the West. See Bova, Russia and Western Civilization, 3 – 20.

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looking at less-controlled aspects of the narrative that are sometimes unintentionally invisible. The humanist tradition has hidden the agency of objects in social relations by promoting the hierarchical view of the subject’s dominion over the object.⁴ However, the relationship with the material object reveals performances of gender, class, race and nationality. My focus on the objects corresponds to a decolonial perspective in cultural studies.⁵ My reading of objects in travel writing involves searching within the texts for that which deauthorises and, at the same time, confirms the traveller’s point of reference or locus of enunciation. This place is their “home”, or the oikos, and its economy, which spring from the points of departure and arrival in order to measures its gains. In his classic study, Travel as Metaphor (1992), Georges Van Den Abbeele notes that all travel requires an oikos (Greek for “home”) “in relation to which any wandering can be comprehended (enclosed as well as understood).”⁶ Van Den Abbeele explains: The positing of an oikos, or domus (the Latin translation of oikos), is what domesticates the voyage by ascribing certain limits to it […] That point then acts as a transcendental point of reference that organizes and domesticates a given area by defining all other points in relation to itself. Such an act of referral makes of all travel a circular voyage insofar as that privileged point of oikos is posited as the absolute origin and absolute end of any movement at all.⁷

In this essay, I propose to read this oikos economy against the grain, thinking of the trajectory per se – the itinerary – as a place of encounter for multiple possible economies. I will do it by looking at the trajectory of the objects inserted in the narrative whose presence and quasi agency reveal that the oikos is contested by the different economies and values along the journey.

 Bruno Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses?,” in The Object Reader, ed. Fiona Candlin und Raitford Guins (London; New York: Routledge, 2009).  Martin F. Manalansan IV, “Stuff of the Archives: Mess, Migration, and Queer Lives,” Radical History Review 120 (2014): 94– 107.  Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xvii.  Ibid., xviii.

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Family Photo Album in Louis Bryant’s Six Red Months in Russia (1918) Louise Bryant (1885 – 1936) left her husband Paul Trullinger to follow the radical political activist John Reed after meeting him in Portland, Oregon in 1915. A poet, playwright and society columnist, Bryant was part of Portland’s bohemia. While on the West Coast, she worked as an illustrator for the Oregon Spectator and wrote articles and plays for leftist publications such as The Masses. Before meeting Reed, a well-known journalist for his reports on wars, revolution and labour, Bryant was active in the women’s suffrage movement, travelling with other activists on lecture tours. Bryant’s life took an abrupt turn when she left her husband to follow Reed to New York after he briefly visited his mother in Portland. They married in 1916. The couple travelled to Russia in 1917 to cover the revolution and both published on the event. Bryant’s major work was Six Months in Red Russia, a report that was serialised in the Oregonian in 1918. Reed published Ten Days that Shook the World a year later because his manuscript was confiscated. Most people learned about Bryant’s life with Reed from the romantic depiction in the Academy Award winning film Reds (1981). Six Red Months in Russia (1918) and Ten Days that Shook the World (1919) deal with the same subject, but while both books create a favourable image of revolutionary Russia for an international audience, Ten Days is an epic. As such, it is at times distant from its reader. In Reed’s account, Lenin, Stalin, the Bolshevik party are flawless, unquestionable. Six Red Months, by contrast, is a travel account featuring day-to-day aspects of the revolution as well as transcripts of intimate dialogues with the women of the revolution. Proximity to the reader in Bryant’s account is achieved by the inclusion of photographs, of which I will talk more below, but also by the transcription of direct dialogues with female leaders and soldiers. This dialogic narrative serves the purpose of introducing multiple perspectives. Unlike Reed, Bryant was able to give space in her narrative to voices unheard in official history. Bryant seemed to sympathise with all of them, especially when it came to women and girls, as proved by her friendship with the Russian Women’s Battalion. These young women were caught in the middle of the class party war in Russia. The Women’s Batallion was originally formed to fight the German army invading Russia, but the aristocratic party and the Cossacks convinced some of them to fight against the Bolsheviks after the upbringing of the Soviet revolution. As a result, the Bolsheviks disarmed them and the young women went on living in extreme poverty. In her transcription of her dialogue with the Batallion’s women, Bryant attempted to clear their

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name and establish that only a few of them joined the Cossacks’ ideology. An image that survives from that account is that of a barefoot young teenager standing in the snow outside the Winter Palace in Petrograd, with a rifle on her shoulder: “When I think of her back now,” Bryant wrote, “she personifies Russia to me, Russia hungry and cold and barefoot – forgetting it all – planning new battles, new roads to freedom.”⁸ Bryant was not afraid of contrasting views and giving visibility to the unnoticed women and children. She also described the main representatives of the revolution, many of whom were women. In fact, Bryant included many more women protagonists of the revolution than Reed. The contrast she drew between Countess Panina and Alexandra Kollontai is significant. Both women served as the Minister of Welfare and were confined in the Peter and Paul Fortress for crimes against the government. Bryant visited Panina when the countess was under arrest for disobeying orders from the new Bolshevik government, which appointed Kollontai to replace Panina in the Ministry. Panina had refused to hand over 90,000 rubles of state funds in her possession when the Bolsheviks came into power. Earlier, Kollontai had been imprisoned and exiled for her contempt toward the Tsarist government. Belonging to different political parties and social classes (Panina to the bourgeoisie and the Cadets party⁹; and Kollontai, to the proletariat and the Bolsheviks), both women came to occupy one of the most important government positions in Russia. Bryant was clearly on the ideological side of Kollontai. However, of Panina, she wrote: And yet there are fine things about Panina. As a liberal she did much for struggling Russia in the time of the Tsar. Her Norodny Dom-People’s House – was the only Norodny Dom in Russia where good concerts were cheap enough for the masses to attend. She was never afraid to undertake new and hard tasks. It was she who introduced popular lectures and adult schools. If all the members of her party (Cadets) had been put up to her standard, they would never have fallen into their present disrepute. Lenin in one of his pamphlets calls her ‘one of the cleverest defenders of the capitalistic system’.¹⁰

Recognition and criticism intersect ambivalently here. But, significantly, there is recognition despite the censorship of dissent. As a journalist, Bryant must give an “objective” tint to the reporting of events, but it is interesting to note here the admiration for women who held political positions in Russia aroused  Louise Bryant, Six Red Months (s.l.: Dodo Press, 2008), 150.  In her report on political parties, Bryant describes the Cadets as members of the landowner class, unconditionally hostile to the Bolsheviks and in support of the Allies in World War I (Bryant, Six Red Months, 25 – 26).  Ibid., 77.

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in Bryant the suffragette, whose country had not yet fully recognised the political rights of women. The chapter includes a photo of Kollontai with an inscription that reads: “To dear comrade Louise Bryant from her friend Alexandra Kollontai, Petrograd 9/1/ 18.” Bryant’s book includes these types of photographs in multiple instances. The later chapter dedicated to Marie Spirodonova, leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionist Party, also includes a portrait and a caption: “This is the only photograph she ever gave to anyone. She tore it off her passport the day I left Russia.”¹¹ Spirodonova’s is a travelling photograph, both a photograph of a travelling document – a passport – and also an object that once given to Bryant would reach many places. At least it will reach in its itinerary the US readers. As a photograph, it has the potential of reproducing the original in multiple private and public ways. Its reduced scale and malleability are ideal for travelling, circulation and reprinting in different places and times. As Bruno Latour has pointed out, photographs (as well as other travelling objects like maps or samples, for example) are stable and mobile objects and as such can act at distance on unfamiliar places. Latour explains: How to act at distance on unfamiliar events, places and people: Answer: by somehow bringing home these events, places and people. How can this be achieved, since they are distant? By inventing means that a) render them mobile so that they can be brought back; b) keep them stable so that they can be moved back and forth without additional distortion, corruption or decay; and c) are combinable so that, whatever stuff they are made of, they can be cumulated, aggregated, or shuffled like a pack of cards.¹²

Moreover, in addition to illustrative photographs, Bryant’s book includes personal inscriptions and dedications to the author. These captions give an extra layer of meaning to these photographs, as they are presented as gifts, but not disinterested gifts. To Kollontai’s photograph, Bryant added: Kollontai spoke to me about American assistance only two days before I left Russia. She hoped, she said, that trained people interested in her work would come to her aid. There is such a pitiful lack of everything in Russia today. Surgical dressings for example, have to be used over and over again and good doctors are almost impossible to find.¹³

Photography is more than a memory; it serves as a call, a request, to which an image or portrait is added to bring the audience closer to the person making

 Ibid., 112.  Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 223.  Bryant, Six Red Months, 87.

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such request. In Latour’s terms, then, we can see how these travelling photographs seek to “act” in unfamiliar places. Spirodonova’s photograph is also an official document, her passport, a document to travel, now transformed by virtue of being gifted. Spirodonova travels symbolically by Bryant’s hand. The photo will arrive in the United States with the message of the communist revolution in hopes of opening political paths of support. As the critic Elizabeth Edwards has noted: In order to see what the photograph is we must first suppress our consciousness of what the photograph is in material terms. What things are made of, how they are materially presented – relates directly to their social, economic, and political discourses. The appropriateness of their material form is central to their meaning.¹⁴

The emotional relationship and the consequence of things dialogically associated with this photo-object are conditioned by the materiality of the object itself and by the importance of the venue and frame in which it is presented.¹⁵ By examining the materiality of the object, we can understand the economy of its transfer, as well as its importance, and the subtle manifestations of the relationships that assign a particular value to the object. The document that authorises a trip that Spirodonova will not make is transformed and rendered mobile when its photograph is torn out and given to a traveller who will carry out the objective of the document by spreading the entrusted political message. In the immediacy of its publication, Six Red Months in Russia sought to be persuasive, a book to mobilise meaning and create alliances with the US readers. However, read a century after its publication, the book takes a clearer form as a family photo album, an altar and a tribute to revolutionary women. The creation of a family photo album, albeit a female political family, was another mark of gender that differentiates Bryant’s book from Reed’s, since keeping family photo albums is more commonly a female practice.¹⁶ It is this gendered practice, translated into a book, that made Six Months in Russia more a piece of literature than a historical essay. It serves as a place of memory and devotion, in sum, a place for contemplation. Talking about the collection and exhibition of photographs in the family environment, Edwards highlights that: The exhibitions of framed collections, on top of televisions, side-boards, pianos or mantlepieces, similarly have shrine-like qualities. They are spatially differentiated in their posi-

 Elizabeth Edwards, “Photography as Objects of Memory,” in The Object Reader, ed. Fiona Candlin und Raitford Guins (London; New York: Routledge, 2009), 332.  Ibid., 339.  Ibidem.

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tioning and in their formats. The focus on the image is created through framing or matting, concentrating the eye on that image, lending it gravitas. The selection and care of these living-room shrines are gendered. The family archivist, controlling the overlap of history and fantasy, and the domestic spaces dedicated to the articulation of this function, is usually female. Such spaces, as shrines, become public statements of group achievement and assurance; private statements of devotion, past and present, spaces where public and private memory and evocation overlap. They are as much an instance of the presence of the living as a memory of the dead. The longevity of exchange-objects assimilates them to the person in the sense that parting with them is unthinkable. Such collections of images – as Baker suggests – reach out through their exchange-relations to establish a group cohesion through the act of exchange and display.¹⁷

Considering the photographs of the female protagonists of the revolution, Six Red Months in Russia can be read as a family altar. Significantly, the first photograph is of Catherine Breshkovsky, known as the grandmother of the revolution. The inscription reads: “The old Breshkovsky who wishes to be ever a friend of you.” Breshkovsky (1844– 1934) was not only a revolutionary but also the first known female political prisoner, having spent several decades in Siberia for her opposition to Tsarism. After joining the Narodnik (or Populist) revolutionary group in the 1870s, she was arrested and exiled to Siberia from 1874 to 1896. In 1901, her involvement in the organisation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party again led to her arrest and exile to Siberia (1910 – 1917). Though she became known as the “little grandmother of the Revolution,” she opposed the Bolsheviks after their 1917 victory and emigrated to Prague. The inclusion of a photograph of Breshkovsky with her dedication is another instance in which Bryant negotiated the multiple and contradictory voices of the revolution. Although an oppositional figure to the Bolsheviks and a supporter of the Kerensky government (pre-Bolsheviks) who supported continuing the war with Germany, Breshkovsky leads the first page of Bryant’s book. In this family book-album, she assumes a privileged place of the matriarch. Although Bryant’s solidarity to the revolutionary women is evident, the author nonetheless expresses her disagreement to some of the leaders’ positions regarding feminism (understood as gender equality) as she presents a vision of American female suffragism that departs from the “Russian versions”: We talked about women and I wanted to know why more of them did not hold public office since Russia is the only place in the world where there is absolute sex equality. Spiridonova smiled at my question: ‘I am afraid I will sound like a feminist,’ she confessed, ‘but I will tell you my theory. You will remember that before the revolution as many women as men

 Ibidem.

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went to Siberia; some years there were even more women […] Now that was all a very different matter from holding public office. It needs temperament and not training to be a martyr. Politicians are usually not very fine, they accept political positions when they are elected to them, not because they are especially fitted for them. I think women are more conscientious. Men are used to overlooking their consciences – women are not’ […] I wish I could believe it, but I can never see any spiritual difference between men and women inside or outside of politics. They act and react very much alike; they certainly did in the Russian revolution. It is one of the best arguments I know in favour of equal suffrage.¹⁸

For Bryant, the argument for women’s political equality was fundamental to access to suffrage. Therefore, she couldn’t adhere to the vision of a radical difference between men and women. However, her admiration persisted because Russian women had access to public office, something that was still under discussion in the United States.

Travels and Failure in Martha Gellhorn’s One Look at Mother Russia (1972) Of his four marriages, Martha Gellhorn (1908 – 1998) was the only woman who asked Hemingway for divorce. A wealthy woman from Saint Louis, Missouri, Gellhorn was a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. Although her social position allowed her to go far, she suffered discrimination. She was once fired from the United Press in Paris after reporting a man who sexually harassed her. Gellhorn not only risked her life as a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, World War II and Vietnam; she also questioned bourgeois conventions and US foreign policy. She adopted a child and raised him by herself. She lived in Mexico, Africa and Europe and committed suicide at the age of 89, when there were no palliatives for her cancer and she was almost completely blind. One Look at Mother Russia is an account included in her book Travels with Myself and Another (1972).¹⁹ Significantly, the latter starts with the account of her

 Bryant, Six Red Months, 113.  After their marriage, Gellhorn asked Hemingway to accompany her to China for their honeymoon. She had decided to cover the war with Japan as a correspondent for Collier’s. Hemingway agreed, reluctantly. In her account, published 30 years later in Travels with Myself and Another, she gave him the pseudonym “Unwilling Companion”. UC is, nonetheless, the best travel companion. As the writer recognised by all, he was invited to give talks, to attend dinners and government meetings. Gellhorn describes him as an Atlas, victorious in the rituals of alcohol competition, careful to the extreme of not spilling a single drop of rum amid the turbulence of the

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trip to China and ends with the trip to Russia as these countries are connected in the historical sino-soviet conflictive relations, that reverberated during the Vietnam war, happening at the time of Gellhorn’s trip to Russia. In Martha Gellhorn’s account, a half-century apart from Six Red Months in Russia, the description of Moscow includes a female bond similar to that established between Bryant and her Russian comrades. However, Gellhorn’s alliance is not with revolutionaries but with a woman writer and her dissident friends. In fact, although Gellhorn had a favourable “literary” idea of Russia before, for authors like Dostoyevsky or Chekhov, she had decided never to visit Communist Russia. For her, “improving the quality of life inside the democracies seems to me of far greater strategic value than counting Soviet tanks and surmising on Soviet threats.”²⁰ She was not in favour of the admiration for Russia shown by copious visitors. “I could not exist in any dictatorship and detest the kind of people who are outraged only by Communist dictatorships,” Gellhorn declared. “When I thought of Russia, which was by no means often, I pitied the citizens of the Soviet Union, who haven’t had a square deal in their recorded history, and my ardent desire never to go there grew more ardent.”²¹ However, after reading a book by the Russian female author, Mrs. M., with whom Gellhorn began a friendly correspondence, she travelled to Moscow to visit her: How then did I get into this fix? By chance, through a book in Harrod’s Lending Library. It was a fat book and not fiction, two strikes against it as I read anything written by a Russian woman so I took the fat book home and began it to lukewarm curiosity. And was electrified and read it straight through, pausing for food and sleep. Nothing before had shown me exactly how it was to live, day by hunted and haunted day, in the terror of a dictatorship. There was so much to admire in this book that I didn’t know where to start. The woman’s courage? The power of her memory of her? The fast clean prose that she said without effort what she intended to say?²²

Before travelling, Gellhorn sent some books to Russia, especially detective books, among other requests from her friend, though she refused to “lower her standards with hard thrillers and pornography.”²³ When she decided to travel, she took several orders from her friend for medicine to perfume, luxurious items amid the precariousness of Russian society. Carrying gifts in a suitcase caused plane that nearly collapses on their return trip. They may well die, but the rum would not be wasted.  Martha Gellhorn, “One look at Mother Russia,” in Travels with Myself and Another (London: Allen Lane, 1978), 235.  Ibidem.  Ibid., 236.  Ibid., 237.

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her anxiety, for she feared questioning by the KGB. However, the gifts, a show of affection towards her friend, were transformed objects of disenchantment together with her subsequent frustration. This invites to reflect on exchange and reciprocity in the encounter with the other: When at last I decided I had to go, we got down to cases: what I should actually bring. I left for Moscow on 3 July 1972, bearing the biggest suitcase I own, loaded to bursting with the following: six of Yehudi Menuhin’s records, three jars of orange marmalade, six blocks of good writing paper and envelopes, a dozen Biros, fourteen pairs of Nylon stockings, three bottles of pills, a Dutch medicine (incredible efforts by my doctor and me to find it) for her seasonal ulcer, winter dresses and sweaters (mine) for her friends to use or sell, a cashmere shawl for her, Arpège eau de toilette by Lanvin, twelve paperback detective stories, and a large manila envelope form her publisher, stuffed with clippings, reviews of her book which had become internationally famous. She was now considered one of the great modern Russian writers but the news hadn’t reached her.²⁴

In Gifts and Obligation to Return Gifts ([1925] 2009), a study of the social phenomenon in Polynesia and elsewhere, Marcel Mauss speaks of the obligatory bond created in the transfer of a possession. In these instances, a series of rights and duties related to consuming and repaying exists side by side with rights and duties related to giving and receiving. The pattern of symmetrical and reciprocal rights is not difficult to understand by realising that it is foremost a pattern of spiritual bonds between things that are, to some extent, parts of persons and groups.²⁵ Mauss’ study suggests that an obligation underlies the exchange of gifts marked by a spiritual bond between the giver and the recipient. The object itself is part of the person who owns and gives it away. The object, identified with the person who grants it, is part of the person. It has agency and life: it is a personification of its owner. Cultural differences notwithstanding, something similar seems to be at stake in Gellhorn’s gifts to Mrs. M. For Gellhorn, these objects signify access to reciprocity, which means good food, friendship, conversation, perhaps enough material to write another book and gratitude expressed through hospitality and comfort. Yet none of this happens as Gellhorn expected and her resentment escalates into insults and estrangement. According to Mauss, one gives away a part of one’s nature and substance. But to receive a part of the giver’s spiritual essence is dangerous.

 Ibid., 238.  Marcel Mauss, “Gifts and the Obligation to Return Gifts,” in The Object Reader, ed. Fiona Candlin und Raitford Guins (London; New York: Routledge, 2009), 24.

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For Gellhorn, her Russian friends did not fulfil the expected reciprocity, which, according to her, had also to entail shared criticism not only of a totalitarian system but also of US foreign policies. Gellhorn could no longer accept the differences that separated her from the Russians (none of them activists or involved in politics; they are dissidents) who supported the Vietnam War, believing it would combat the spread of communism. This is clearly seen in Gellhorn’s reporting on Vietnam amid the Russian tertulia: Somehow Vietnam came up and led to a parting of the ways. I had been in South Vietnam and that war had obsessed and tormented me for six years by then and paralyzed my life; nothing seemed worthwhile except ending this evil. They sat around the table and gave me the Nixon party line and I erupted like a volcano. I told them they were inhuman, they could not imagine or feel any suffering except their own. They were as immoral as their government if they believed that ends justified means. We were destroying a country and a whole innocent peasant population while proclaiming that we were saving them from Communism. Had they any idea how children looked and sounded when half flayed by napalm? Could they picture an old woman screaming uprooted and made into refugees millions of helpless people by unopposed bombing of their villages. We were hated in Vietnam and rightly; we had prevented free elections and were not better than the Nazis and Fascists helping Franco win the Spanish Civil War. This war was the greatest disgrace in American history and a denial of every moral value America was meant to stand for. It was ruining the Americans themselves in Vietnam and darkening their own land. South Vietnam was a corrupt police state and finally their talk made me sick and I was revolted to listen to them.²⁶

According to Randall Wood, the US government had fully accepted the “domino theory,” whereby it was assumed that the fall of one government in a particular region threatened by communism would lead to the fall of all noncommunist governments in the area. As the nation was forced to become more active in world affairs, many took the position that if the United States could not preserve its “splendid isolation,” then it must spread the blessings of its civilisation to the less fortunate peoples of the world.²⁷ That was “the Nixon party line” that Gellhorn’s dissidents friends gave her. Gellhorn travelled to Vietnam amid the rage of war under Nixon. Like many female war correspondents at the time, she reported on how the war affected people outside the field of action: hospitals with wounded, schools, women and their children, etc. There was, as Gayatri Spivak says, the imperative of eth-

 Gellhorn, “Mother Russia,” 263.  Randall Wood, ed., Vietnam and the American Political Tradition; The politics of Dissident (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4.

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ical intervention.²⁸ Gellhorn had earlier reported on the Spanish Civil War. Of the 1,500 war correspondents accredited by the US War department during World War II, fewer than 10 per cent were women. Female war correspondents faced discrimination and roadblocks on all sides, but they also found allies in the military and among male correspondents.²⁹ Studying Gellhorn and other female correspondents during the Spanish Civil War, Isabelle Meuret explores how they used journalistic style and emotional substance to advance their readers’ understanding of the conflict and to push their political agenda, not as personal crusades. Spivak’s views on activism elucidate how these women were using their journalism for “ethical intervention” at a global level. “They were not only drawing attention to the burning issues in Spain but were also connecting the Spanish tragedy to transnational concerns.”³⁰ Following Meuret and Spivak’s argument, we can infer the importance of this trip to Russia some decades later for a war correspondent like Gellhorn. Reporting on Vietnam intended to make connections with transnational concerns, which involved the Soviet military support of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and the United States. Thus, Gellhorn’s trip was to Russia but its implication was global “ethical intervention.” She did not seek to describe Russia per se but to explain the Soviet-Vietnamese association in a transnational war. It is no coincidence that Gellhorn travelled to Moscow the same year as Nixon. Moreover, the Soviet-Vietnamese association during the Vietnam War was complicated by the continuing Sino-Soviet dispute, which Gellhorn also addressed in her talks with the Russian dissidents. The USSR, as a superpower, had national interests everywhere, one of which was to diminish the power of China in Indonesia and within the Communist bloc. This could be achieved by maintaining a more prominent alliance with North Vietnam than the Chinese. Knowing the Sino-Soviet rivalry, North Vietnam strategically sought out support from both countries (China and Russia), pressuring one against the other to find the military help needed to achieve the goal of reunification with South Vietnam under a Communist government. That is another reason why Gellhorn’s dissidents friends supported the Vietnam war and the US intervention. They wanted the US victory to undermine the Soviet communism but also the Chinese. In their dialogue, however, they seemed to imply that Russian involvement with Vietnam should continue as they commented:  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 9, 99 – 111.  See Melissa Marsh, “The Women’s Angle,” America in WWII 12, no. 5 (Feb. 2017): 33.  Isabelle Meuret, “Rebels with a Cause: Women Reporting the Spanish Civil War,” Literary Journalism Studies 7, no. 1 (2015): 81.

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“The Chinese will take Vietnam when the North Vietnamese win.” “Why? The Vietnamese have been enemies of China since God knows when. That’s why they want Soviet aid, to keep their independence from China.” “The Chinese are terrible. Do you know they cut off the hands of the Chinese pianist who won the Tchailovsky prize here? They executed a Chinese student who was accused of stealing ten rubles.”³¹

In fact, 1972 was the year in which the war increased in intensity and magnitude, inexorably drawing in the USSR military support. It was the year in which the United States mined the waterway channels of North Vietnam and began intensive air strikes on the railways system; and the year of the negotiations that led to the Paris Agreements.³² This was the year that Gellhorn visited Russia. The group of Russian dissidents questioned both her work and her “US American identity.” In the same way that they demonstrated their political estrangement, they failed to repay Gellhorn’s gifts with the hospitality she desired. Following the argument with the dissident friends, Gellhorn declared: After that, at least we could eat the goodies I had brought and I wouldn’t have minded a drop of soothing whiskey. But no, everything was put away in the kitchen cupboard. It was unfair; we ate other people’s contributions. I felt a flicker of that slit-eyed complex which besets the rich; I was being used. And went away hungry and angry and stood with three fingers raised until I got a ride back to the cathedral spires.³³

As Mauss points out, rejection or reluctance to fulfil pacts of reciprocity affects not only objects but also the people of whom they are an extension – in Gellhorn’s case, her political convictions and her belief in her moral superiority.

Conclusion These two cases were presented here more in contrast than in comparison. In Bryant’s case, an US American suffragist became an apprentice to the women of the Russian government. In my interpretation, her narrative works as a family photo album that captures sisterhood and political testimony in terms of gender. Her Six Red Months in Russia was written with the double objective of supporting and disseminating not only the communist revolution in Russia but also the po Gellhorn, “Mother Russia,” 264.  Douglas Pike, Vietnam and the Soviet Union: Anatomy of an Alliance (New York: Routledge, 1987), 91.  Gellhorn, “Mother Russia,” 265.

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litical rights of women. The pictures included in Bryant’s “photo-album” of sisterhood are exemplary of what Bryant perceived as the female political fight for gender equality. Thus, the travelling objects, the photos, had agency; they became quasi-subjects.³⁴ In this commonality of goals between Russian and US American women, female bond is non hierarchical but reciprocal. Gellhorn also began her journey following a bond of gender. However, in her relationship with Mrs. M., the bond of reciprocity and admiration broke, which is expressed in Gellhorn’s perception of the lack of gratitude and hospitality in Russia. Her trip ended in failure, which is why the story is included in Travel with Myself and Another. Gellhorn stated that no travel story is of interest to the public unless it ends in chaos and tragedy.³⁵ Both Bryant and Gellhorn wrote while fighting the shadow of patriarchy, developing their own style and using the opportunities available to them as war correspondents. The job supported their professions as female writers, a profession with a growing reputation among women in the twentieth century. Following Spivak and Meuret, I argued that travel and journalism, particularly for female war correspondents, was a political and ethical intervention of transnational scope. For Bryant, reporting on the Russian revolution was part of the battle for women’s political rights in the world, and for Gellhorn, travelling to meet Russian dissenters was part of the campaign to end the Vietnam war, which was also transnational. In this sense, it is clear that these women travelled to make a contribution to world change, to make it more just, in principle. By looking at how objects were presented and used in their writings, it’s revealed that the above affirmation is not exempted of complexity and ambiguity. Giving and returning gifts is at the centre of the relationship among the women of these stories. Reciprocity is what is offered, expected, received or denied in the exchange of objects. Russia stands as a dialogical – to use a term coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, one great Russian critic³⁶ – example of what Europe represents in the US American imaginary, revealing its inner plurivocality and unvailing the contradictions of “Western modernity.” It is precisely this plurivocality that challenges the oikos’ economy (or the home imaginary), based on which the journey’s trajectory is measured or interpreted in Abbeele’s proposal. In Travel as Metaphor (1992), Abbeele explains

 Bruno Latour, La esperanza de Pandora: Ensayos sobre la realidad de los estudios de la ciencia (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2001), 13 – 37.  Interestingly, the first account includes her trip to China with Hemingway when they were married. That story also ended in failure.  Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

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that the oikos “domesticates” the voyage as the journey’s point of reference, geographically and epistemologically – as the “absolute origin and absolute end of any movement at all.”³⁷ Instead, I considered the itinerary a place of encounter for multiple possible economies. I do so by looking at the trajectory of the objects inserted in the narrative, all of whose presence and quasi-agency reveal that the oikos is contested by different economies and values along the journey.

Bibliography Sources Bryant, Louise. Six Red Months in Russia. S.l.: Dodo Press, 2008 [1918]. Gellhorn, Martha. Travels with Myself and Another. London: Allen Lane, 1978. Reed, John, Ten Days that Shook the World. The Modern library of the world’s best books, 1960 [1919].

Literature Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bova, Russell. Russia and Western Civilization: Cultural and Historical Encounters. New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2003. Edwards, Elizabeth. “Photography as Objects of Memory.” In The Object Reader, edited by Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, 331 – 341. London, New York: Routledge, 2009. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Latour, Bruno. La esperanza de Pandora: Ensayos sobre la realidad de los estudios de la ciencia. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2001. Latour, Bruno. “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” In The Object Reader, edited by Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, 229 – 253. London, New York: Routledge, 2009. Manalansan IV, Martin F. “The ‘Stuff’ of Archives: Mess, Migration, and Queer Lives.” Radical History Review 120 (2014): 94 – 107. Marsh, Melissa. “The Women’s Angle.” America in WWII 12, no. 5 (February 2017): 29 – 33. Mauss, Marcel. “Gifts and the Obligation to Return Gifts.” In The Object Reader, edited by Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, 21 – 30. London; New York: Routledge, 2009. Meuret, Isabelle. “Rebels with a Cause: Women Reporting the Spanish Civil War.” Literary Journalism Studies 7, no. 1 (2015): 76 – 98. Moorhead, Caroline. Martha Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life. New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2004.

 Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor, xviii.

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Pike, Douglas. Vietnam and the Soviet Union: Anatomy of an Alliance. New York: Routledge, 1987. Spence, Jo, and Patricia Holland, eds. Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography. London: Virago Press, 1991. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Tchoubarian, Alexander. The European Idea in History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A View from Moscow. London: Routledge, 2013. Van Den Abbeele, Georges. Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Wood, Randall, ed. Vietnam and the American Political Tradition: The politics of Dissent. Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Miruna Bacali

Beyond Geography: Europe as a Journey in Dumitru Tsepeneag’s Hotel Europa In the South-Eastern European space commonly known as the Balkans, belonging to Europe from a political and cultural point of view is inextricably connected with issues of legitimacy and self-determination. The historical dependency between this region’s states and the Western European powers is essential in this respect. Ample scholarship has been dedicated to colonised societies outside of Europe: the triad Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha¹ played a crucial role in theorising postcolonialism and unequal power structures. When it comes to dependencies within Europe, which are not always related to (direct) colonisation, but nonetheless create colonial dynamics and power structures, Manuela Boatcă, Shalini Randeria and Sebastian Conrad made significant contributions to the field. In this context, for Romania, (Western) Europe is imbued with a strong symbolic signification: it is a model along which competing identity discourses unfold. Since the fall of the Communist dictatorship, such questions and discourses have increasingly been present in the public and literary sphere: Romanian writers, based both in the country and abroad, have elaborated on Europe as a topic of contemporary history in their works.² The novel Hotel Europa (1996)³ by Romanian-French writer Dumitru Tsepeneag revolves around exile and its tragicomic adventures, exemplifying postcolonial mobility dynamics on multiple levels: Romania’s image as “Europe’s incomplete Self”⁴ permeates the entire novel, while “the West”⁵ represents an  See e. g. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003; New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1988); Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).  Adrian Marino, Pentru Europa. Integrarea României – aspecte ideologice şi culturale (For Europe. Romania’s Integration – ideological and cultural aspects) (Iaşi: Polirom, 1995). The Romanian critic understands Europe as Romania’s legitimate place of belonging, as well as “an idea in action.” (Ibid, 107). Also worth mentioning is Mircea Cartarescu’s Europe has the shape of my brain (published in German in 2007), a plea to overcome Europe’s internal divides.  Dumitru Tsepeneag, Hotel Europa (Bucharest: Albatros 1996). Shortly after the publication of this original version, a French translation came out with P.O.L. éditeurs. In the article, the analysis of the novel is based on the German and English translations (Ernest Wichner 2000; Patrick Camiller 2010), while the quotes are taken from the latter for better accessibility to international readers.  Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 18. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110734966-009

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epistemic and economic power centre and continues to do so, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. As Stuart Hall posits, our constructed ideas of “East” and “West” are “not primarily ideas about place and geography,” but instead carry very complex meanings, as they refer to “a type of society or a certain level of development.”⁶ It is in this context that postcolonial thought provides a framework to examine power relations that ultimately shape the development of various countries across Europe, most notably in the semi-peripheral East of the continent. The plot is set in the beginning of the 1990s, moving between Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany and France as spatial, temporal and narrative planes vary. The characters reproduce cognitive and geographical maps and get involved in intense debates over them all through the course of the novel. In this context, it is precisely Romania’s marginal position on Europe’s cognitive map that makes for a fruitful analysis of the novel, as there is a strong discrepancy between Romania’s geographical position in Europe and its ongoing marginalisation through Orientalism⁷ and Balkanisation⁸ – the portrayal as Europe’s “other,” or rather, as Maria Todorova puts it, its “incomplete self”⁹; an exotic space, dominated by backwardness. This creates a tension between geographical and cultural location – while Eastern and Central European countries are certainly situated within Europe’s geographical perimeter, the mere fact that they are not (yet) part of the European Economic Community renders them politically marginal. This tension complicates the dichotomy inside/outside, inviting reflections on how Europe is viewed from a semi-peripheral perspective – not entirely from outside, but from a position that is neither fully within nor without. The overlapping of postcolonial and postsocialist studies, such as in the work of David C. Moore,¹⁰ further calls for an investigation of the relations of power shaping this region of Europe and permeating its literary production. Throughout the novel, multicultural encounters and interactions act as illustrative miniatures, in which characters from different regions represent and reproduce their countries’ positions of power or inferiority. Furthermore, these encounters exemplify Europe’s dimension as journey, and thus as lived experience.

 Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Formations of Modernity, ed. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (Oxford, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 185 – 227.  Ibid., 185.  Said, Orientalism.  Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 3.  Ibid., 18.  David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Towards a Global Postcolonial Critique,” Modern Language Association 116 (2001): 111– 128.

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As a metaphorical hotel, a place of transit and a “never-ending movement,”¹¹ Europe resembles a map traced by a multitude of individual paths. This leads to the following question: in what way is this narrative polyphony connected to Europe from a postcolonial perspective? Drawing on theory from the realm of postcolonial studies and the spatial turn, as well as on applications of these theories in historical studies, the following article aims to investigate, firstly, how literature reproduces extraliterary cognitive maps.¹² To illustrate these questions, the analysis will focus both on the content level (plotlines and action – what happens in the novel) and on the narrative techniques (how are the events constructed and narrated). By looking more closely at the plot and the role of the different characters in Dumitru Tsepeneag’s novel, it seeks to provide insight into how “Europe” is constructed and experienced within and through literature.¹³ Secondly, the final subchapter moves beyond the mere textual level and towards the meta-literary realm in order to connect the discourses present in the novel with social transformation and historical events.

The Journey as “European” Experience Context and Biography As a representative of the so-called “aesthetic oneiricism,” a literary movement drawing inspiration from Western European postmodern literature and “exploring new forms of narration”¹⁴ with the aim of making a statement against the state-imposed socialist realism, Dumitru Tsepeneag (*1937 in Bucharest¹⁵)  Anne Kraume, Das Europa der Literatur. Schriftsteller blicken auf den Kontinent (1815 – 1945) (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 2.  Though the historian Frithjof Benjamin Schenk specifically connects the concept of mental maps to Eastern European spaces, Kevin Lynch theorised cognitive mapping as early as the 1960s in The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). Fredric Jameson, who borrows this term from Lynch, uses cognitive mapping to navigate postcapitalist structures in 1984 in “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53 – 92.  According to Kraume (2010), literary representations of Europe transcend societal and political realities, making it possible to negotiate issues differently than in other media. This understanding builds the base for the term “literary representations of Europe” in the novel.  Christina Vogel, “Rumänische Literatur,” in Herta-Müller-Handbuch, ed. Norbert Otto Eke (Metzler: Stuttgart, 2017), 130 – 136, 131.  Nicolae Bârna, Țepeneag. Introducere într-o lume de hârtie (Introduction into a paper world) (Bucharest: Albatros, 1998), 10.

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weaves an eclectic and strongly fragmented writing style. Within Hotel Europa’s narrative design, these literary techniques manifest in a strong polyphony that makes the novel appear fragmented and mosaic-like. The novel sets off from the narrator’s daily experiences: he is “an exiled writer, getting old fast,”¹⁶ and lives in France with his wife, where he is working on his magnum opus. The autobiographical references are evident: Tsepeneag was forced to emigrate to Paris in the 1980s, in solidarity with a group of dissidents surrounding the writer Paul Goma.¹⁷ Tsepeneag had attempted to publish Goma’s novel in Romania; shortly afterwards, the regime forced him to leave the country. After four years in France, Ceauşescu revoked Tsepeneag’s Romanian citizenship, yet in 1984 he obtained French nationality. It also comes out later that the first-person narrator signs Ed Pastenague, which is an anagram of Tsepeneag’s name. Tsepeneag currently works as a writer and translator, writing both in Romanian and in French. As will be shown in the article, multilingualism, translation and the search for identity also play a role in the novel, as the narrator struggles with an internal conflict between his Romanian origins (respectively his past) and his present life in France – a conflict that shapes the fictional world significantly.

Plotlines and Narrative Techniques The novel consists of two main plotlines respectively narrative planes, the first one focusing on an aging Romanian writer and émigré living in Paris with his wife Marianne and their pet, a Siamese cat that often keeps the writer company in his solitary hours. His worsening health condition and his dull day-to-day life lead him to seek an escape, and so he sets off to create a fictional universe, following a group of Romanian students and their adventures on the way to France. He lives vicariously through his characters: […] how pleasant it is to be leaving; to go out in the morning with a light suitcase in your hand, whistling, without a care in the world, not once turning your head, not once looking around with pity or contempt as you pass all those care-bowed people hurrying off to work.¹⁸

 Tsepeneag, Hotel Europa, 26.  Paul Goma (1935 – 2020) was one of the most important Romanian dissidents in the Ceauşescu era.  Tsepeneag, Hotel Europa, 106.

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However, the writing proves to be a struggle, as depicted in a considerable part of the novel. In order to dedicate the entirety of his time to his work, the writer, who acts as first-person narrator throughout the text, occasionally appearing as a character as well, retires to a house in the French countryside, while his wife remains in Paris. The second plotline focuses on the Romanian students Ion Valea and his friends, Mihai, Ana and Maria, who get entangled in protests on the University Square in Bucharest, in the aftermath of the Romanian revolution of 1989. Trying to make sense of the turmoil and Maria’s disappearance in the crowd, Ion departs to France and travels across the entire continent. Getting involved in all sorts of criminal activities like theft and gambling, and trailed by mysterious characters such as a deep-sea diver in full gear and a dark-haired Bessarabian with a mustache, he ends up in the “Hotel Europa” – a beggar asylum in Strasbourg –, before finally making it to Paris, where he meets Petrişor, a former colleague of his who has forged a new identity as a spy and a thief. Despite numerous dangers, Ion manages to remain unharmed. During this journey from East to West, the narrator contacts him through letters and phone calls, which adds an intriguing meta-narrative element. In his stations in Budapest, Vienna, Munich and Strasbourg, Ion meets people of different nationalities and experiences a multitude of adventures, while his friend Maria is nowhere to be found; it seems as if the journey itself becomes the destination. Far from being clearly divided, the two aforementioned narrative universes intertwine and overlap in multiple instances – so much so that it can be difficult to separate them without constant reorientation. This makes for a challenging, yet intriguing reading experience. Time and again, the narrator will break through the division between narrative planes and turn into a character himself: instead of clean breaks, temporal planes, settings and sceneries all flow into one another. These participative passages combine with self-reflexive observations and considerations related to the construction of the fictional world itself – narration and meta-narration are interwoven. Within the same paragraph, one encounters a multitude of voices and settings; by means of the self-referential mode of narration, the narrator allows the readers a peek into his construction of the second narrative plane within the fictional universe. There are numerous examples for this technique in the text. Self-reflexive insertions reveal the act of narration: before an action happens, the narrator anticipates and announces it, such as “She’ll shout”¹⁹; after the action concludes, he shares impressions on it with the readers: “It’s easier like that, when you imagine

 Ibid., 11.

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it in your head, than in reality.”²⁰ Thus, the reader becomes a companion, following the narrator across space, time and his own imagination. Ideas about the fashioning of the plot (such as: “Her conscious mind is absorbed in a Marguerite Duras novel, it doesn’t matter which, let’s say Le Camion.”²¹) as well as direct addresses to the readers are a recurring motif.²² Oftentimes, rhythmic accents mark the transition between narrative planes, which happens unexpectedly for the reader. For instance, Marianne hammers on the bathroom door while the narrator follows Ion and his friend Mihai on the University Square in Bucharest and imagines the two students meeting; the telephone rings in both worlds, while the narrator and Ion light a cigarette in the same moment. More than that, the narrator makes phone calls to his characters throughout the novel, trying to warn them about circumstances they are getting themselves into. Within the last section of the novel, all narrative threads converge. The mosaique-like and fragmented character of the narration becomes even more evident. The ending is emblematic in this respect: the narrator and the characters all come together in a narrative metalepsis, gathering for a feast in a house on the French countryside. While the guests remain on the ground floor and the narrator hears “[…] groans mixed with growls and grunts, a steady squeaking, roars, persistent crackling […]”²³ from his room, Ana attempts to convince him to join them in their celebration. However, he refuses to partake in the celebration, instead continuing to sit at his desk and write – this superposition is a typical feature of Tsepeneag’s fictional worlds. The noises might be interpreted as the disintegration of the fictional universe – as it turns out, the narrator is struggling to come up with an ending to the novel: My hand forms letters and words in a language that, whatever else may be said of it, is my mother tongue: the one I imbibed with my mother’s milk, then from a nursing bottle, and then from assorted bottles of wine, tuica²⁴, vodka… And no one is to blame – certainly not the language – if I feel that I’m too slow, if the words don’t come fast enough or not at all.²⁵

Here, language is again constructed as a living organ, as the the result of multiple influences. According to this eclectic understanding of language, the mother

     

Ibidem. Ibid., 18. Emphasis in original. E. g. ibid., 9: “your choice!” Ibid., 444. Ţuică = traditional Romanian schnapps. Ibid., 475.

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tongue builds a base on which, in time, various influences accumulate like layers. The fact that the first-person narrator is still familiar with his mother tongue, Romanian, “despite everything,” signals the presence of adversities, but even these adversities cannot destroy such an intimate connection. In a way, the movement of language from thought to paper also connects to belonging, and even that movement is “too slow.” Drawing a parallel to “Europe,” it seems like the arrival at the destination is slowed down by the attachment to the mother tongue – both the arrival at the end of the novel, the struggle to express, and the arrival in (Western) Europe and the European Community, appear unattainable. As he is trying to conclude his novel, the narrator spends a long time searching for the suitable words to put on paper. Finally, inspiration strikes: “Exiles! Exiles on Planet Earth! That’s the expression I’ve been searching for.”²⁶ Fundamentally, human beings are exiled on earth and migrants exiled in the world – both categories personify nomadism and cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, the topic of exile overlaps with the narrator trying to find an exit for the novel, himself and the characters.

Perspectives on “Romanianness” On the level of content and discourse, one can observe a constant positioning with respect to the Romanian people or the attempts to explain its “essence.” This is one of the reasons why looking at the novel from the perspective of Romanian self-positioning is highly productive. The view of Romania constantly oscillates between outside and inside – both when it comes to the speaker’s physical position in space or to his (non‐)belonging to the imagined Romanian community. In group settings, the protagonists debate these characteristics, meant to define “Romanianness” or “the Romanian people.” For instance, Ion does not miss any opportunity to bring national, especially negative traits into the discussion, which becomes evident early in the novel: “It was Ion’s passion to list all characteristics of Romanian identity, naturally beginning with the defects.”²⁷ Predominantly, these attributes are negative, manifesting themselves in (auto‐)ironic and sarcastic remarks. The main characters, as well as the narrator, express criticism towards the “Romanian way,” portraying the people as flawed and Romania as a “sad country, in which people are so fond of jeering at others.”²⁸ This appears especially in the dialogues between the first-person nar-

 Ibid., 447.  Ibid., 12.  Ibid., 103.

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rator and Marianne, while in Paris. In this context, the expression “A heap of mashed potatoes does not explode all of a sudden!”²⁹ is meant to visualise Romanian fatalism. Romanians are a naturally conservative people. They react slowly, and they’re skeptical about things. They’ve seen a lot in their time! They don’t get enthusiastic at the drop of a hat. At most they’ll put on a show. They learned doublespeak in the time of the Turks – then perfected it to a fine art under the communists.³⁰

“Doublespeak,” as quoted by Ion, is a reference to corruption and unscrupulousness – two traits that, according to historians, Romanians had to develop as survival mechanisms during the Turkish occupation, under the rule of the socalled Phanariots³¹ in the eighteenth century. Summarising further alleged national specificities, Ion states: “Humor and transhumance… that’s the genius of the Romanian people. We’re all a bunch of comic nomads.”³² Later on, he mentions “Romanian banter,”³³ an attribute also relating to the Romanian’s national “inferiority complex” as theorised by literary critics such as Adrian Marino.³⁴ Also tying into this othering perspective on Romania is the fact that early on, the first-person narrator titles his manuscript Journey into the East. The news articles on Romania, which he incorporates into his text, are illustrative in this respect. Historical events and journalistic reports, embedded by the narrator into the texture of the novel, also underline this negative image of Romania. For example, one report states that the influx of Romanian refugees after 1989 should be contained, as the Austrian government was not capable of keeping the influx of immigrants and the black market under control.³⁵ In this context, a right-wing Austrian paper portrayed Romanians as “the yids of contemporary Europe.”³⁶ Moreover, after the fall of Ceauşescu, Romanians became “Europe’s plague-carriers,”

 Ibid., 14. Although the English translator opted for mashed potatoes as a dish, the original mentions polenta (Romanian: mămăligă), a staple in traditional Romanian cuisine.  Ibid., 148.  The Phanariots were Greek noblemen originating from the Fener (Phanar) quarter in Istanbul. In the eighteenth century, they were called to occupy important positions in Wallachia and Moldavia, while the region was under Ottoman rule.  Ibid., 122.  Ibid., 335.  See Marino, Pentru Europa, 75 – 76. Among others, Marino mentions a “complex of the Occidental canon.”  Ibid., 233.  Ibid., 234.

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respectively “economic refugees.”³⁷ All this points to the historical events taking place in Romania after the fall of the Communist dictatorship, against the backdrop of which the novel is set. It is a complex transition phase, dominated by economic challenges and political instability, and the disappointment expressed by the characters clearly relates to this transition. Here, the novel shines light on a historical conflict: for centuries, Romanians have perceived themselves as Europeans, yearning to “return” to this homeland after the fall of the Iron Curtain. However, as shown in the quotes above, far from being welcomed into Europe with open arms, Romanians are treated as “the ‘poor’ of Europe,”³⁸ which makes for disillusionment and lost hopes. Similarly to the Romanian people, the Romanian language is described using negative attributes. In the following lines, the first-person narrator’s description manifests self-deprecating traits: […] even after I managed for better or worse to write a couple of novels in her [Marianne’s, MB] language (God have mercy on those misbegotten books, but they’re certainly in French, no one could deny it!), now I’m dropping it all, eh? and reverting to that Danubian dialect, that ragtag and bobtail language, that low slang of bandits and homicidal shepherds …³⁹

This statement contains various references to the formation of the Romanian language, as well as the image of a specific Romanian culture. “Homicidal shepherds” are characters found in the ballad “Mioriţa,” a national Romanian myth.⁴⁰ “Ragtag and bobtail language” contradicts a purported purity of the Romanian language and is, as such, implicitly constructivist. Ion demonstrates a similarly negative attitude during a trip across Germany, when he meets two young women on the train and tries to conceal his origins. When his interlocutors finally ask where he comes from, he hesitates, asking himself if he feels ashamed to be Romanian. In the end, he answers “Transylvania.”⁴¹ During the narrator’s trip with a group, together with French doctor Gachet, the passengers discover a journalist’s dead body, as well as a German passport. This document acts as a symbol of wealth and a high rank within Europe and beyond, which manifests in the protagonists’ reactions: “You see, not even a Ger-

 Ibidem.  Ibid., 233.  Tsepeneag, Hotel Europa, 252.  Mioriţa, considered one of the founding Romanian myths, revolves around a shepherd who becomes aware of an assassination plot against himself. Instead of trying to avoid death, he chooses to accept it as part of his destiny.  Ibid., 329 – 330.

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man passport could save him.”⁴² Notwithstanding the authority that a German passport seems to emanate, it becomes evident that even this authority does not protect a person against death. Various other symbolically charged objects appear throughout the novel: a blue folder with yellow stars, the pro-European magazines Contrapunct, Contemporanul and Ideea Europeană ⁴³ and finally passports (both national symbols and symbols of freedom): “At least we’ve got that: passports!”⁴⁴ The magazines do not circulate extensively, as shown in the following quote: “Actually, I did see Contemporanul/Ideea Europeană there once. There was just one copy, at the corner of the stand. The vendor was amazed when I paid for it – so amazed that he forgot to give me my change!”⁴⁵ The reader is left wondering if pro-European ideas were indeed so rare in the early 1990s.

Mapping “Romania” and “Europe” through (Meta)Narrative Discourse In the novel, Europe – geographically understood as a continent encompassing “East” and “West”, but also as a political body – appears to be highly divided and hierarchised, independently of the revolution and the system change in the former Eastern Bloc states. Contrary to expectations in this part of Europe, the long-awaited reunification does not happen overnight, and Romania remains at the margins of Europe – peeking in, but not quite managing to become an integral part of it. The second element composing the novel’s title, the hotel, symbolises a locus of nomadism, transit and volatility. The description of the building, which is in fact a beggar asylum located in Strasbourg, underlines this association: it has the appearance of a “huge blue and white ship”⁴⁶ – another vehicle for movement, one could think imagining this ship gliding on uncertain waters. The Hotel Europa plays a key role in the plot, serving as a multicultural meeting point, where guests from all over the continent gather and shout symbolically: “Europe belongs to us all!”⁴⁷ Within the fictional universe of Hotel Europa, mobility proves to be a key topic and a dynamic that allows for a deeper exploration

     

Ibid., 42. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 214. Ibid., 383.

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of Europe.⁴⁸ Most of all, “Europe” represents a journey experienced by the characters: whether we talk about travelling from one land to another, different nationalities interacting or even criminal activity spanning the entire continent. In the novel, the protagonists (most notably Ion Valea) are mobile and travel all across the continent, exploring numerous places along the way and envied by the first-person narrator: The truth was that I envied his travels by truck all over Europe; not everyone can handle that kind of nomadic lifestyle. I was walking quite fast now, without hesitation. But I had no clear destination, just wandering wherever chance would take me. I did vaguely think that I would probably end up at home, where I would dump my suitcase, change my clothes and then head out to the doctor’s.⁴⁹

This dynamic prefigures the latter actual mobility respectively freedom of movement on the territory of the European Union – within the novel, the characters encounter considerable practical and bureaucratic difficulties, one can hardly speak about free movement within Europe. With respect to the journey as a physical and symbolic act, Anne Kraume postulates a fundamentally dynamic, mobile conception of Europe as a literary construct: The establishment of Europe’s dynamic does not only concern its spatial dimension. This dynamic reveals itself in the fact that Europe, as conceived by European writers, always functions as a mobile cipher, allowing for the posing and negotiating of manifold questions, topics and issues. Consequently, within literature, Europe is always more than a mere concept. Thus, it will here be understood as movement in a spatial as well as cultural sense, drawing on Ottmar Ette […].⁵⁰

“Europe’s” function as a mobile cipher/code, as theorised by Kraume, is essential in Tsepeneag’s novel, as “Europe” holds manifold significations. On the one hand, for the young migrants Ion and Mihai, “Europe” means freedom, mobility and wealth, drawing them to travel through multiple European countries; on the other hand, from a historical perspective, “Europe” serves as a model of de-

 See Kraume, Das Europa der Literatur.  Tsepeneag, Hotel Europa, 75.  Kraume, Das Europa der Literatur, 10. The original quote in German reads as follows: “Die Feststellung der Dynamik Europas betrifft aber nicht allein seine räumliche Dimension. Diese Dynamik zeigt sich vielmehr auch in dem Umstand, dass das Europa der europäischen Schriftsteller stets auch als eine bewegliche Chiffre fungiert, deren Verwendung es erlaubt, die unterschiedlichsten Fragen, Themen und Probleme aufzuwerfen und zu verhandeln. Europa in der Literatur ist so immer mehr als ein bloßer Begriff. Hier soll es deshalb im Sinne von Ottmar Ette als eine Bewegung im räumlichen ebenso wie im kulturellen Sinne verstanden werden […]”.

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velopment to be adopted by Eastern European states, which is where the postcolonial framework comes in. Finally, in Kraume’s and Ette’s understanding, “Europe” as a literary representation is fundamentally dynamic, a “perpetual motion”⁵¹ – in a physical as well as philosophical sense. Additionally, according to Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of social spaces,⁵² based on Ernst Cassirer’s differentiation of substantial and relational concepts,⁵³ “Europe” can be seen as a relational concept par excellence. The novel’s exploration of Europe underlines this relationality through the narrative techniques employed. The approach to space includes elements of the spatial turn, in which, rather than being seen as a container, space becomes a social process of production, perception and appropriation. Spatial representation happens e. g. through codes, signs and maps, and the entanglements between space and power manifest themselves in “Europe’s” internal divisions and borders – most of them being a result of cognitive mapping rather than geographical, fixed facts.⁵⁴ The Romanian migration wave towards “the West” described in the beginning of this chapter relates to real-life events taking place after the fall of the communist dictatorship, when numerous Romanian nationals left their country in search of a better life. This migration does not have a specific country as its destination, but instead aims to reach one of the countries perceived as progressive and wealthy, which have to be necessarily located west of Romania. The following passage, in which the first-person narrator engages in a dialogue with a Transylvanian liftboy in Hungary, exemplifies this dynamic: He told me that Budapest was full of Romanians. Many had crossed into Hungary intending to get to Austria, and from there to Germany, France or Italy – anywhere, just to be in the famous West, now metonymically baptized “Europe”, as if the countries that didn’t belong to the European Community weren’t Europe at all but Asia, as if Prague and Budapest weren’t right at the heart of Europe. If, like De Gaulle, we reckon that Europe actually stretches from the Atlantic to the Urals, then even poor old Bucharest is closer to the center than to the edge – the eastern edge, I mean.⁵⁵

 Ibid., 11.  Pierre Bourdieu, “Sozialer Raum, symbolischer Raum,” in Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Jörg Dünne and Stephan Günzel (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2006), 354– 370, 355.  See Ernst Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (Darmstadt: WBG [1910] 1994 [reprint of the first edition]).  Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006), 293.  Dumitru Tsepeneag, Hotel Europa, 177.

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The desire to leave Romania or the surrounding countries is thus not motivated by their location in the geographical East of the Continent, but by their position east of “the West”⁵⁶ as a centre of epistemic and economic power. The protagonists do not receive this privilege uncritically, as shown in the following lines: “Here in Strasbourg, in the capital of Greater Europe, Ion was surprised to feel contempt for the consumer society, its ostentatious wealth, its new, superficial, provisional opulence.”⁵⁷ Remarks about different European countries do not only come from the narrator, but also from many of the characters – this polyphonic technique supports the postcolonial perspective that the text carries within. All in all, these voices demonstrate that “Europe’s” cognitive map strongly differs from its geographical dimension; the Western part of Europe acts as a representative for the entire continent, while Europe’s geographical centre moves further towards the margins, notwithstanding important historical events such as the fall of the Iron Curtain or, later on, NATO and EU integration.⁵⁸ Aside from reflections on the features of different peoples and nations, thoughts on the human condition are scattered across the text. For example, when the narrator takes border incidents as an opportunity to philosophise about the similarities of different peoples: “Through a pair of binoculars, a Romanian and a Hungarian sneaking across the border look as alike as brothers.”⁵⁹ This draws attention to humanity as a characteristic far more important than nationality, also relativising the century-long ethnic conflict between Romanians and Hungarians in Transylvania, rooted in both peoples’ historical claims on its territory. The novel also touches upon the topic of belonging and homeland, including the tracing of national specificities. An exchange between Ion and the Hungarian Dr Farkas thematises the so-called “mioritic space,” which according to Lucian Blaga is a mythical space embodying the essence of “Romanian culture.”⁶⁰ In the protagonist’s description, this space suddenly becomes interchangeable through cultural translation: “Have you seen Burgundy, or Bour-

 Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Formations of Modernity, ed. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (Oxford, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).  Dumitru Tsepeneag, Hotel Europa, 361.  See Manuela Boatcă, “Wie weit östlich ist Osteuropa? Die Aushandlung gesellschaftlicher Identitäten im Wettkampf um die Europäisierung,” in Die Natur der Gesellschaft: Verhandlungen des 33. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Kassel 2006, Teilbd. 1. und 2, ed. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2008), 2231– 2239.  Tsepeneag, Hotel Europa, 190.  Lucian Blaga (1895 – 1961) coined this cultural-philosophical term in 1936. By it, he understood a spiritual matrix and a mystical realm coinciding with the Romanian territory, thus embodying its cultural and spiritual essence. Lucian Blaga, Trilogia culturii. 2. Spațiul mioritic (Bucharest: Ed. Oficiul de librarie, 1936).

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gogne, as it’s called in French? That’s a mioritic space alright!”⁶¹ The equation of Burgundy with “mioritic space” suggests that each country possesses its own mythical spaces – while relying on local reference points, their formation and value are comparable. When, as in numerous other passages, a discussion on the frontiers of Europe unfolds, centring on the keywords “geography” and “democracy,”⁶² the incongruence between the two elements becomes evident. It is an incongruence that, as posited by Stuart Hall, defines the discourse around “Europe”: it can refer to a geographical space, but also to a specific form of social or political organisation. Wolfgang Schmale refers to “Europeanness” as “a sum of ideal and material ‘European’ structural elements,”⁶³ condensed in different parts or regions of the world. These regions form so-called “European historical regions” [Geschichtsregionen], which in turn form the base for the European Union.⁶⁴ Although the EU has tried to retain the power of interpretation when it comes to who/what is “European” after the 1970s, Schmale asserts that the mental asymmetry between “East” and “West” can and should be largely deconstructed.⁶⁵ The novel also thematises the year 1989, the Romanian Revolution and its interpretation as a historical event: “It was a revolution, Ion said to himself: stolen, hijacked, but a revolution nonetheless.”⁶⁶ In this context, the characters philosophise on the meaning of freedom as a clear distinction criterion between Western and Eastern Europe. According to Ion, Western European societies had perceived freedom as a natural component of the political order, thus not appreciating it enough, while Romanian society had fought to gain freedom: […] when I met Mihai at the bar of the Hotel Intercontinental, I tried to explain to him that the important thing is not being free but struggling to be free. The road to freedom is more valuable than freedom itself, especially if it’s the kind that gets handed down by previous generations and becomes yours without a fight. Freedom like that […].⁶⁷

 Tsepeneag, Hotel Europa, 180; emphasis in original.  Ibid., 121.  Wolfgang Schmale, “Die Europäizität Ostmitteleuropas,” Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 4 (2003): 191.  Ibid., 192.  Ibid., 213.  Tsepeneag, Hotel Europa, 239.  Ibid., 62.

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According to Ion’s theory, freedom is “a kind of intoxication, almost a mystical state.”⁶⁸ The cultural studies scholar Boris Buden also thematises this aspect of an inherited freedom versus the fight for freedom. Examining the transition phase in the postcommunist states, he departs from an imbalance within Europe. According to Buden, those exact same peoples that had fought for freedom independently and liberated themselves from socialist regimes suddenly became “children” after 1989.⁶⁹ While these states gained their independence from the socialist regimes and thus proven “political maturity,”⁷⁰ Western Europe still treated them as underage children, “repressively infantilising” them as such.⁷¹ Once more, the entrenched divisions and power relations come forth, and one is left wondering if there is a future in which they could be abolished.

Conclusion Focusing on Romania’s semi-peripheral position within Europe, the article reflects on how “Europe” is constructed from this perspective that is neither in nor out. The mapping of Europe’s frontiers, as well as national and cultural differences, is a recurrent motif within the novel, while the journey as a defining European experience comes into focus – Romania as country and Europe as continent are at the centre of lively discussions. From a metaphorical point of view, “Europe” is a hotel – a place of transit, where people come and go. Thus, far from being a static figure, Europe as a literary representation stands for perpetual movement (see Kraume and Ette). Individual experiences all come into play as the characters explore the continent, inevitably coming into contact with its internal divisions and imbalances. The latter manifest in cognitive maps and their reproduction by the characters – even as a certain degree of reflection and questioning happens through their ironical stance. On the level of narration, Tsepeneag’s eclectic and polyphonic style underlines the concept’s symbolic value and relationality, as different reference points bring about different perspectives on “Europe.” All these aspects, especially its symbolic representations of space, render the novel Hotel Europa a multilayered, self-reflexive literary text, in which Europe’s character as a fluid signifier comes into focus.

 Ibid., 65.  Boris Buden, “Als die Freiheit Kinder brauchte,” in Zone des Übergangs. Vom Ende des Postkommunismus, ed. Boris Buden (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2009), 34– 51.  Ibid., 34.  See ibid., 35.

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However, as shown in connection to the postcolonial framework, beyond this literary representation lies an entirely different meaning altogether. Understood in Hall’s terms as the continent’s Western part, holding economic, epistemic and symbolical power, “Europe” can very much be exclusionary. As illustrated by various examples, the coordinates of “Europe’s” representation in the novel are set by the differentiation between “geography” and “culture” – a tension permeating Romanian history, as well as Eastern European history more broadly. In the novel, the Romanian stance towards Western Europe is marked by pessimism: in their dialogues, the protagonists thematise the indifference towards the Romanian population after the fall of the Communist dictatorship, border controls occasionally resulting in a denied crossing, and the treatment of Romanians as second-class Europeans. While Romania certainly belongs to Europe from a geographical point of view, becoming part of the cultural and political European body proves a highly complex endeavour and a process that, to this day, cannot be considered as fully concluded.

Bibliography Sources Tsepeneag, Dumitru. Hotel Europa. Translated by Ernest Wichner. Baden Baden: Suhrkamp, 2001. Tsepeneag, Dumitru. Hotel Europa. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Champaign; London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010.

Literature Bachmann-Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006. Bârna, Nicolae. Țepeneag. Introducere într-o lume de hârtie. Bucharest: Albatros, 1998. Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Blaga, Lucian. Trilogia culturii. 2. Spațiul mioritic. Bucharest: Ed. Oficiul de librarie, 1936. Boatcă, Manuela. “Wie weit östlich ist Osteuropa? Die Aushandlung gesellschaftlicher Identitäten im Wettkampf um die Europäisierung.” In Die Natur der Gesellschaft: Verhandlungen des 33. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Kassel 2006, Teilband 1 und 2, edited by Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, 2231 – 2239. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2008.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. “Sozialer Raum, symbolischer Raum.” In Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Jörg Dünne and Stephan Günzel, 354 – 370. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2006. Buden, Boris. “Als die Freiheit Kinder brauchte.” In Zone des Übergangs. Vom Ende des Postkommunismus, edited by Boris Buden, 34 – 51. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2009. Cassirer, Ernst. Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. Darmstadt: WBG, 1994 [reprint]. Cărtărescu, Mircea. Europa hat die Form meines Gehirns. Translated by Gerhard Csejka, Ernest Wichner, Edward Kanterian and Eva Ruth Wemme. Stuttgart: Edition Solitude, 2007. Ette, Ottmar. “Europa als Bewegung. Zur literarischen Konstruktion eines Faszinosum.” In Europa: Einheit und Vielfalt. Eine interdisziplinäre Betrachtung, edited by Dieter Holtmann, 15 – 44. Münster: Lit, 2001. Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In Formations of Modernity, edited by Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben, 185 – 227. Oxford, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53 – 92. Kraume, Anne. Das Europa der Literatur. Schriftsteller blicken auf den Kontinent (1815 – 1945). Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2010. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. Marino, Adrian. Pentru Europa. Integrarea României – aspecte ideologice şi culturale. Iaşi: Polirom, 1995. Moore, David Chioni. “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Towards a Global Postcolonial Critique.” MLA Association 116 (2001): 111 – 128. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 2003. Reprint, New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Schenk, Frithjof Benjamin. “Mental Maps: Die kognitive Kartierung des Kontinents als Forschungsgegenstand der europäischen Geschichte.” Europäische Geschichte online. Accessed March 1, 2021. http://www.ieg-ego.eu/schenkf-2013-de. Schmale, Wolfgang. “Die Europäizität Ostmitteleuropas.” Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 4 (2003): 189 – 214. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Routledge, 1988. Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Vogel, Christina. “Rumänische Literatur.” In Herta-Müller-Handbuch, edited by Norbert Otto Eke, 130 – 136. Metzler: Stuttgart, 2017.

List of authors Miruna Bacali, PhD, was awarded her PhD at Justus Liebig University Giessen in 2020. Her thesis is situated at the intersection of literary and historical studies, drawing on literary sources to analyse social and historical transformation processes in postcommunist Romania. She is especially interested in postcolonial and decolonial studies, world literature and comparative approaches connecting Eastern Europe and South America. Florian Grafl, PhD, currently works as the scientific coordinator in the project “Cultural Heritage and the Formation of Knowledge” at Heidelberg University. His main research interests are transatlantic connections within the production of knowledge in the nineteenth century and urban violence in Spain. Leila Gómez, PhD, is associate professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she also directs the Latin American Studies Center. Her research focuses on scientific travel writing, gender and indigeneity. She is currently the PI of the US Department of Education Grant IFLE that supports the teaching of Quechua at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Béatrice Hendrich, PhD, is a lecturer for Turkey Studies at the University of Cologne. Her main research areas are the gender history of Turkey with a focus on the early decades of the Turkish Republic, Turkish fiction (Fantasy, SF, Eco Critic and religious topoi) and the religious landscape of Turkey (including Alevis and Non-Muslim communities). Elke Kleinau, PhD, is a Professor for the History of Education and Gender at the University of Cologne. Her main research interests are the history of girls’ and women’s education, childhood history, German colonial history, travel narratives and biographical research. Cecilia Morgan, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research interests are in gender, cultural and nineteenth-century colonial history, with a special focus on Canadians in imperial and transnational worlds. Nishant K. Narayanan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Germanic Studies, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India. His research interests are Didactics of German language and literature, contemporary German literature, representation of India in German literature and thought, representation of Europe in Indian literature and the history of travel literature. Claudia Opitz-Belakhal, PhD, is Professor for Early Modern History at the University of Basle (Switzerland). Her research interests contain the history of the (French) Enlightenment, the history of political thought from the Renaissance to the French Revolution, family, women’s and gender history as well as the history of emotions.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110734966-010

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Lilli Riettiens, PhD, is interim Junior Professor for Media Pedagogy/Media Didactics and Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cologne (Germany). Her research interests are processes of Bildung and subjectification at the intersection of travel, gender and media. She introduced the concept of Doing Journeys into the academic discourse. Meritxell Simon-Martin, PhD, is lecturer in the Department of Pedagogy, University of Lleida (Spain). Her research interests are women’s and gender history, history of education and narrative analysis. She has written numerous articles on mid-Victorian artist Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, where she offers an epistemological problematisation of letters as sources of historical evidence.