Judith Hamera

Americans in Europe from Henry James to the present

From the decade following the Civil War to the early years of the twenty-first century, American accounts of European travel reflect every conceivable variable of touring style and literary representation. Neither class nor color has effectively offered a bar to this journey; women as well as men, old as well as young, have penetrated every corner of Europe and recorded their experience in a multitude of contexts and narrative forms. Most of this work appears as non-fiction prose but the era also abounds in travel poetry and fiction popularly read as travelogue. In the course of this period the relation of Old to New World continuously evolves: as Europe becomes a field of carnage as well as the site of a museum past, the USA assumes a dominant role on the world stage. In the decades following World War II, Americans circulate as the inadvertent emissaries of a hegemonic power and typically travel en masse. Detaching themselves as they can from the group, writers of the European sojourn tour the cynosures of established pilgrimage but seldom halt there: absenting themselves from the grand boulevard and floodlighted cathedral, they seek a quaint, rural, pre-modern Europe or, alternatively, a contested, ravaged, reinvented Europe beyond the Cold Wars breached partition. If here they find flowers, recipes, old peasant customs, everywhere they may also look misery straight in the eye. For a literature of leisure that traditionally affects to abandon high seriousness in pursuit of holiday pleasure, travel writing in this time frame excels in limning a world of twisted and tragic line.

American travel books about Europe before the Civil War

During the early years of the nation and throughout much of the nineteenth century, patriotic Americans often deplored the idea of foreign travel. Even Washington Irving, who spent much of his adult life abroad and did more than any other author to establish the conventions of American travel writing about Europe, proclaimed in his A Tour on the Prairies (1835): “We send our youth abroad to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe; it appears to me, that a previous tour on the prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness, simplicity, and self-dependence, most in unison with our political institutions.” Yet, Americans were eager to learn about the lands from which they were now separated by a revolution as well as an ocean. As citizens of the new world they were fascinated with what the old one had to offer: the chance to view the monuments to history, to gaze at great works of art, to visit sights associated with great writers, to wander through the graveyards and ruins of the past, and to ponder the meanings inherent in the symbols of other cultures. European travel was thus both attractive and dangerous for Americans throughout the early national period and the years leading up to the Civil War. The contradictory impulses underlying American travel in Europe during this time can be summed up by noting that almost every major American author made a statement condemning, ridiculing, or at least questioning the idea of foreign travel, and almost every one of them produced at least one travel book.