Are de Maupassant’s Stories Realistic?

 

     Having found the total corpus of de Maupassant’s contes beyond my ambition for the present, I here consider evidence from thirty-four stories which are listed with their titles and possible English translations of the titles appended.  In a list appended to this essay I have numbered them in an alphabetical list and I generally refer to the title itself, but on two occasions, when citing a number of examples, I use the numbers I have assigned.

 

     Flaubert is justly called a Realist due to his meticulous and precisely detailed descriptions, sometimes only too full.  Balzac likewise justifies the label with the comprehensive, all-embracing scope of his Comédie Humaine.  Zola deserves the title of Naturalist for his quasi-scientific attention to hitherto neglected realms of life.  Yet Guy de Maupassant, who is often labeled both Realist and Naturalist, though the protégé of Flaubert, has always seemed to me to rely heavily on narrative formulae and conventions, notably in his most popular works, his short stories.  Indeed, his literary artifice is the basis for the popularity of the contes, both in his time and today.

     It is scarcely necessary to document Maupassant’s reputation as a Realist or as a Naturalist.  Thus the normative Cours de Civilisation Française de la Sorbonne titles his section “Portrait of a Master of Literary Realism.” For one critic he possesses “absolute truthfulness, the best test of realism,” while for another he “transcribed reality so objectively, so serenely, and so intensely, that, as Faguet remarks, " le lecteur ne sait pas, quand il lit Maupassant, si c'est de I'art de Maupassant, ou seulement de la réalité qu'il a le goȗt."  For these readers the implication is clear that he accurately records details of the lives of more or less ordinary people.   Yet Maupassant himself rejected the labels, saying to his friend Paul Alexis "Pourquoi se restreindre? . . . Le naturalisme est aussi limité que le fantastique"[1].  

     Of course, no story is ”realistic,” in the literal sense of corresponding to life itself.  A book is black marks on a page, a static artifact that bears only a highly mediated resemblance to anyone’s lived experience.  Yet some narratives are more likely to seem real to readers, a quality called verisimilitude.  Since Realism was first championed by Champfleury the word has been associated with various more specific literary practices – including Naturalism, Verismo, and Socialist Realism – but it has regularly been understood to mean characters who seem ordinary, usually of the middle and lower class and certainly not deities or monarchs.  The events of Realistic stories are mundane, a slice of life, rather than world-shaking or melodramatic.  Realist writers, while perhaps craftsmanlike, have typically adopted a writing style which does not call attention to itself, but rather seems transparent, a straightforward statement of facts.  Their narratives seem to resemble day-to-day lived experience rather than imitating earlier works or conforming to literary conventions.  Chekhov is an author who meets a great part of these specifications.  Joyce’s Dubliners illustrates how Realism need not interfere with a story’s sublimity. 

     Maupassant’s stories do indeed concern people of the middle and lower stations in society, and their language rarely calls attention to itself in the way that Proust’s sentences, which may go for a promenade before finding a conclusion, may do.  Maupassant ultimately developed an interest in the supernatural (a clear example is “The Horla”) but most of his stories are at least plausible.  Still, the great majority of his contes are narratives highly shaped by literary convention. 

      One of his favorite devices, used in nearly a third of the stories in my sample is the framing story [2].  This had originally been meant to enhance verisimilitude, since one may accept that the narrator was told even a fabulous story more readily than that the incidents might in fact have actually occurred.  Yet the frame, known since  antiquity in Egypt (in, for example, the “Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor,” and “The Eloquent Peasant” in the Papyrus Westcar) as well as in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, One Thousand and One Nights, the Decameron, and the Canterbury Tales, became so commonly used that it came to signify literariness rather than documentary truth.  In Maupassant the frames not only imply the character of the speaker; in addition, they generate a genial atmosphere of relaxed recreational social listening that spreads from the page to the solitary reader.

     Most of Maupassant’s stories fall into one of two types, both designed to make a dependable impact with maximum effect in the conclusions.  They conclude with either violence or heavy irony.  These simple appeals are the reason that Maupassant enjoys considerable popular favor even today.  Surely, for many people, “The Necklace” is one classroom assignment that the student relished and remembered.  Yet neither dramatic brutality nor obvious irony is consistent with the Realist story as a sample of everyday life. 

     Five of the stories (17, 19, 24, 25, and 26) depict incidents from the Franco-Prussian War from a nationalist point of view.  In each of these a canny French patriot exacts revenge against the invaders, though in three of the denouements the protagonist is caught and executed.  Here national feelings increase the thrill of the action.

     This motive is absent in other stories which portray gratuitous, almost sensational cruelty.  In “Le Gueux” a beggar dies after a vicious assault by barbaric country people.  Similarly, a fisherman prefers to sacrifice his brother’s arm rather than to lose his catch in “En mer.”  A wolf is cruelly punished in “Le loup.”  The same theme appears in humorous mode as two peasants in “Une vente” nearly kill the wife of one of them trying to measure her volume and in the two silly pranks recounted in “La farce.”  In a milder thriller mode is the ghost of “Apparition” and the elegiac remembrance of the “Miss Harriet” the pious suicide. 

      The violence or threat is compounded with irony in the wreck in “L’épave” in which the teller is rescued only to lose the love of his life, the woman with whom he had been in danger.    Likewise, the man who goes off to Africa after discovering his wife with an old general, run off  as much from chagrin at his wife’s taste as from any more substantial motive in “Une soirée.”  In “Petit soldat” the lover wins the lady only to drown soon after. 

     Whereas these stories tend to conclude with climactic violence (or its threat or a sudden rescue or at least drastic action), in these last three the effect is multiplied by the use of irony. De Maupassant developed the time-honored device of a concluding twist into a specialty, doubtless in large part responsible for his popularity with a general audience both in his own time and today. 

     Sometimes the irony is a simple surprise, as in “Un Lache” in which the accomplished swordsman turns out to be a coward, or in “Clair de lune” the moralistic abbe learns tolerance, while in “Mon oncle Sosthène” an unbeliever acquires a measure of faith and in “Yvette” the courtesan’s daughter turns out to be moral. In “La ficelle” what seems altogether trivial turns out to be life-altering.

     Irony may also occur in comic form as in the inappropriate insurance claim of “Le parapluie.”  In contrast to the implication of “La parure” that concern for the trappings of wealth may bring misery, “Le bonheur” is unusually optimistic in its depiction of a couple who truly find happiness by rejecting the affluence sought by others.  Other twists on the narrative of romance include “Le retour” in which a woman’s first husband, who had been lost at sea, returns looking like a vagabond only to find her remarried and “L’attente” in which a woman spends her life regretting the loss of her son who ran off when he saw her kissing a lover.  In “En voyage” an aristocratic lady saves a refugee who is afterwards devoted to her though apart.   “La Reine Hortense” a dying spinster imagines the joys of family while her own behaves coldly toward her.  In “La Confession” and “Le diable” unlikely unjust acts amounting to murder are admitted by the victims’ apparently loving companions, and in “Aux champs” a son the parents refused to give up for adoption complains that he was thereby mistreated. 

     The distance of plots such as these from Realism is obvious in the fact that each story turns out other than the reader probably expected, that is, other than lived experience would at first suggest.  The surprise generated by the gap between the reader’s usual “reality” and the author’s plan is in fact the source of de Maupassant’s effects.  “Solitude,” a sort of monologue on human separation even in the midst of society, casts doubt on the extent to which experience can be shared with others, while a good many of the other stories imply that things often turn out in surprising ways.  Far from presenting a sort of norm or typical incident, Maupassant deals in the extraordinary, the unexpected, indeed an outcome the very opposite of what the reader would anticipate in everyday life. 

     The stories then depend heavily either on such irony or else on the intrusion of traumatic action, including war and murder, to engage the readers’ interest.  The skillful use of literary devices is in fact the heart of verbal art, and the illusion of Realism is one significant technique.  Yet in his short stories de Maupassant regularly depends on effects other than verisimilitude.  It is the critics using the term Realist who misjudge, not the canny author whose stories have attracted readers for generations.

     If the stories are in this way deemed “artificial” (of course, all art is by definition artificial), this descriptor implies no value judgement.  Aesthetic reactions occur at the point of reception and most readers, even unsophisticated ones, are gratified by Maupassant’s artful manipulation of expectations.  The beauty of a Maupassant story may be often modest, but reading him is a highly reliable pleasure, perhaps even more reliable than if the stories were in fact Realistic.

 

 

1.  For the Cours, see https://www.ccfs-sorbonne.fr/en/guy-de-maupassant-portrait-of-a-master-of-literary-realism/.   The critics quoted are (in order) Charles Henry Conrad Wright in A History of French Literature, Kathleen Theresa Butler’s A History of French Literature, and Janneke van de Stadt, “Seeing “Amiss” or Misreading ‘A Miss’: Imperfect Vision in Maupassant's ‘Les Tombales,’” Dalhousie French Studies, Vol. 51 (Summer 2000).

 

2. In stories numbered 1, 2, 3, 10, 16, 20, 29, 30, 33, and 34.

Stories included in the study:

1   “Apparition” (“A Ghost”)

2   “L’attente” (“The Waiting”) 

3   “Le bonheur” (“Happiness”) 

4   “Aux champs”(“In the Country”) 

5   “Clair de Lune” (“Moonlight”) 

6   “La Confession” (“The Confession”) 

7   “Deux amis” (“Two Friends”) 

8   “Le diable” (“The Devil”) 

9   “Un duel” (“A Duel”) 

10   “Lépave” (“The Wreck”) 

11   “La farce” (“The Joke”)  

12   “La Ficelle” (“The Piece of String”) 

13   “Le Gueux” (“The Beggar”) 

14   “L’ivrogne” (“The Drunk”) 

15   “Un Lache” (“A Coward”) 

16   “Le Loup” (“The Wolf”) 

17   “Mademoiselle Fifi” (“Miss Fifi”) 

18   “En mer” (“At Sea”) 

19   “La Mère Sauvage” (“The Savage Mother”) 

20   “Miss Harriet” (“Miss Harriet”) 

21   “Mon oncle Sosthène” (“My Uncle Sosthenes”) 

22   “Le parapluie” (“The Umbrella”) 

23   “La Parure” (“The Necklace”) 

24   “Le père Milon” (“ Father Milon”) 

25   “Petit Soldat” (“Little Soldier”) 

26   “Les prisonniers” (“The Prisoners”) 

27   “La Reine Hortense” (“Queen Hortense”) 

28   “Le retour” (“The Return”) 

29   “Une ruse” (“A Ruse”) 

30   “Une soirée” (“One Evening”) 

31   “Solitude” (“Solitude”) 

32   “Une vente” (“A Sale”) 

33   “En voyage” (“On the Way”) 

34   “Yvette” (“Yvette”)

A Lesson from McGuffey

 

      When Noah Webster began teaching as a young man during the Revolutionary War, his students used the Bibles from their homes to practice reading.  Anticipating the nationalistic principles that were to underlie his dictionary, Webster wrote a series of "Blue-Backed Spellers," followed by grammars and readers that proved immensely popular for decades [1], superseded only by the publication of the McGuffey’s Readers in 1840 which were to sell even more copies, putting them “in the same category as the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary” [2].  In 1930 the first of editor Zerna Sharp’s readers featuring Dick, Jane, and Sally appeared, putting McGuffey’s in eclipse though the old texts have never gone out of print and continue to sell tens of thousands of copies a year, remaining popular among some homeschoolers [3].  A glance at McGuffey’s Sixth Eclectic Reader indicates cultural shifts of the last century and a half, most prominently a loss of focus on the subtleties of the spoken and the written word.

     While each textbook series became progressively less pious, received ideas were regularly promoted over critical thinking.  As textbooks are specifically designed to transmit ideas to a new generation, this is only natural.  Thus McGuffey included such patriotic selections as Joseph Rodman Drake’s “The American Flag” (“Majestic monarch of the cloud!”) [4] and Washington Irving’s encomium on Columbus which describes him as a great and pious “genius” possessing “magnanimity of spirit” who took a benevolent view of America’s indigenous people [5].  “The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers” by F. W. P. Greenwood finds “not a single community of men to be compared with them, in the respect of deep religious impressions and an exact performance of moral duty” [6].  These words were doubtless studied in classrooms displaying American flags and portraits of a founding father or two. 

     On the topic of Native Americans, the reader includes an excerpt from a speech by Charles Sprague which declares that America’s aborigines have all “passed away,” Europeans having arrived “bearing the seeds of life and death.”  According to Sprague time has “blotted forever from [the American continent] a whole, peculiar people.”  “As a race, they have withered from the land,” he says, and “read their doom in the setting sun,”  With a sentimental tear, he reflects on a future when they will “be remembered “only in the songs and chronicles of their exterminators” [7].  

     Though the role of religion in education was already beginning its steady decline, McGuffey included a number of religious readings such as “God is Everywhere” by Joseph Hutton, an early nineteenth century poet [8] now obscure, and the Thirty-Seventh Psalm [9].  There are in addition a good many more vaguely spiritual readings, meant for students’ moral improvement.  Many selections required considerable historical background, such as Charles James Fox’s “A Political Pause,” an impassioned fragment from  a polemic about the war with France [10] or the exchange between Walpole and Pitt [11], included more as show-pieces of oratory than for the specific issues involved.

     The verbal sophistication of many literary selections, though, must be for a modern reader the most striking aspect of McGuffey’s book.  Eleven-year-olds were given great chunks of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Dryden, Thomson, and Cowper as well as American authors like Longfellow, Bryant, and Emerson without simplification or even the explanatory notes an undergraduate textbook would include today.  Children (and even teachers) may not have wholly understood everything they read, but they would certainly improve their reading skills with such challenging selections.  At any rate, all the texts in McGuffey’s are adult literature while in contrast, a survey of novels recommended for sixth graders by teachers’ groups and publishers today reveals that virtually all readings are now written specifically for children.  There are only a very few exceptions.  A Jack London story made one list, and many have highly regarded young adult titles, such as Anne Frank’s diary and works by Judy Blume and Scott O’Dell, but the editors seem to think that writers like Poe, Mark Twain, and de Maupassant would be too difficult or perhaps too irrelevant for today’s students. 

     Declamation, both speech-making and reading literary selections aloud, though virtually absent from today’s curricula, is a significant concern of McGuffey’s.  As a preparation for the readings, the first sixty pages of the book cover viva voce articulation, inflection, accent and emphasis.  Indeed the introductory notes mention “elocutionary value” as one of the standards by which readings were selected.  This is all but the last gasp of the ancient rhetorical rhetorician’s education set forth in Cicero, Quintilian, and the Rhetorica ad Herennium.  As late as the middle twentieth century, many college-bound students enhanced their resumés with Debate Club and Moot Court.  In my high school’s talent show during the early ‘sixties, one boy, a talented actor, thought it appropriate to recite Oliver Wendell Holmes’ comic “One-Hoss Shay,” for his schoolmates.  I doubt that many would consider such a performance today.

     In the nineteenth century the general population read poems aloud in their parlors as a form of home entertainment.  They also relished fine oratory from clergymen and politicians.  In addition they often purchased subscriptions to courses of evening lectures on a variety of topics.  The thrill our ancestors felt at hearing soaring rhetoric is today a specialized taste; more Americans are excited today by watching cars crash through windows in action movies than by verbal pyrotechnics.  Thus leaders’ statements on the news are soundbites rather than speeches and, when readers encounter high-flown language, they are more likely to lose the thread of discourse than to admire the author’s virtuosity.  The pedagogues of writing now stress clarity and brevity at the expense of beauty and emotional force.

     This abandonment of training in speaking or reading aloud marks a major change in the teaching of English.  The aesthetic and affective potential of artful writing is likely to be more prominent in the spoken word, but it has been discounted in favor of the mere delivery of information.  By ignoring writers of the past in favor of those that more directly reflect the lives of the students, educators have abandoned the opportunity to widen readers’ perspectives while incidentally developing their taste.  In a curious way, in verbal art, both spoken and written, thanks to McGuffey my Midwestern ancestors in their one-room schools may have been more sophisticated than today’s teen whose eyes rarely leave his phone.  Having taught English 101 a good many times, I can testify that many students reach college with abysmal verbal skills.  In today’s educational initiatives STEM subjects have an unquestioned lead.  Those who care about the English language might feel a bit nostalgic for the these quaint old readers.   

    

 

 

1.  The speller was published in 1783, a grammar 1784, and a reader in 1785).  The reader was to sell a hundred million copies.  See https://noahwebsterhouse.org/noahwebsterfactsheet/.

2.  These sold 120 million copies. See “William Holmes McGuffey and His Readers,” The Museum Gazette, National Park Service https://web.archive.org/web/20150420113537/https://www.nps.gov/jeff/learn/historyculture/upload/mcguffey.pdf.

3.  Whereas McGuffey’s had taught phonics, The Scott, Foresman Dick, Jane, and Sally books used whole word recognition. 

4.  P. 119.  The author died in 1820 at the age of twenty-fiove.  Antonín Dvořák thought enough of the poem to set it to music.

5.  P. 192.  To Irving he had as well “a poetical temperament,” though he was also “irascible and impetuous.”

6.  P. 223. 

7.  P. 209, from a speech delivered at Boston in observance of the Fourth of July, 1825 titled “The Character and Extirpation of the Indians of New England.”  Charles Ives thought highly enough of his words to set some to music in his 114 Songs.

8.  P. 161.  Hutton was a playwright as well.  The Psalm is on p. 189.

9. P. 67.  Apart from poetry Woodworth wrote operas, plays, hymns, and the first American historical novel The Champions of Freedom, or The Mysterious Chief, A Romance of the Nineteenth Century, Founded on the Events of the War, Between the United States and Great Britain, which Terminated in March, 1815 (1816).  His best-known work, though, is "The Old Oaken Bucket" (1817) which, set to music by George Kiallmark, became a popular song and was recorded in  1899.

10.  P. 102.  The headnote cautions that “his morals were not commendable.” 

11.  P. 151-152.

Wharton’s Morocco and the Conundrums of Travel

                                        Delacroix The Sultan of Morocco

References are to the Century Publishing/Hippocrene edition of 1984.  Page references are in parentheses; numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     People are sometimes curiously self-conscious about being tourists.  In the days before cell  phones, I myself never liked to stroll through foreign squares with a camera around my neck.  Even looking around a new city in the United States, the visitor often strives to “fit in” and pass for a local.  The reason for this wish is not immediately obvious.  After all, the locals are merely going about their quotidian routines, while traveler, like an aristocrat, is not working and has expended money and time in pursuit of pleasure alone (and a little new knowledge can be as pleasurable as a new French sauce).  If anything, one might think the outsider could claim superior prestige.  An additional complication has arisen in recent times with those who criticize some aspects of interest in other societies as psychologically colonialist, “cultural appropriation” [1],  or simply serving the interests of the observer more than a true understanding of the other. 

     Yet since Herodotus’ time, it has been recognized that the traveler is likely to experience benefits more substantial than a view of Mont Blanc or the glow of Gothic stained glass.  The cliché declaring travel to be broadening might be rephrased by saying that the sight of foreign lands provides a kind of heightened awareness of alternatives, a sort of inversion of Dubois’ double consciousness in which the observer is privileged rather than oppressed.  Yet this gain is by no means regularly clear and straightforward.  Very often people project onto the “other” their own psychic contents: medieval monks stewing about how lusty women were or American minstrelsy making comic theater of the oppression of slavery.  Very often such judgements are intuitive and mingle justification of the writer’s own practices with genuine new insights adopted from other points of view. 

     A rhetorical vocabulary has developed in travel writing that embodies a view of the exotic scene not as another equally valid way of being human, but as simultaneously real and unreal, familiar and strange, understood and mysterious.  Edith Wharton’s In Morocco is in many ways an excellent book [2].  Wharton had toured the country in 1917 as the particular guest of the country’s Resident-General Hubert Lyautey, allowing her chauffeured rides and introduction to the traditional rulers.  She describes Morocco as having long been self-isolating after the manner of Japan with very few outsiders allowed to enter.  She obtained rare permission to visit harems and antiquities like the Saadian tombs, moving in a milieu that still included numerous absolute rulers surrounded by slaves and courtesans. 

     She provides ample information about the country’s history and circumstances including pages recording Gen. Lyautey’s achievements and an essay on Moroccan architecture [3].  Yet her skill is less in historical or political analysis than in description.  After one such detailed passage noting the sights before her eyes, the donkeys and camels, the mourners at a funeral, and an old “philosopher” smoking kif, she reflects on the character of her own vision.

 

One seems to be not in Africa itself, but in the Africa that northern crusaders may have dreamed of in snow-bound castles by colder shores of the same ocean.  This is what Moghreb must have looked like to the confused imagination of the Middle Ages, to Norman knights burning to ransom the Holy Places, of Hansa merchants devising, in steep-roofed towns, of Barbary, and the long caravans bringing apes and gold-powder from the south.  (32)

 

     Though she is in fact in Africa, she acknowledges that her view is subjective and may owe as much to her imagination as to the local scene.  Not only does she suggest the strangeness of life in Rabat by conceding that her view is that of an outsider, she feels motivated to make it stranger yet by referring it to centuries gone by.  After using the now-romantic term Barbary, she concludes the passage with a lovely evocation of something she has not actually seen at all.  (While she did witness camel transport, she was unlikely to have seen apes or gold in their cargoes.)  Thus her reportage is at once precise and specific and oneiric.

     This sort of conceit is woven throughout Wharton’s account.  What she sees before her eyes she regularly describes as unreal.  Morocco is “fantastic” (the word recurs five times in the course of her account), a “dream” (nine passages), where one may witness “wonders” (ten times).  The visitor feels she is living in a work of fiction, an “Oriental fable” (62).   The whole country for her was wrapped in “a blessed air of unreality” such that  “the scene became merely symbolical” (54).  Everything is visible only as though through a foggy “haze” (30) where the very light “gives a foretaste of mirage,” “magic becomes real,” and “the boundary between fact and dream perpetually fluctuates” (44) [4].  In an oddly tangled figure of speech, she says that “If one lose one’s way in Morocco, civilization vanishes as though it were a magic carpet rolled up by a djinn.” (28)  Here, in a strange reversal, the modernity to which the writer is accustomed becomes the fabulous carpet which, when removed, reveals a timeless land beneath.

     Its timelessness comes, however, at a cost.  Morocco to Wharton is moribund and static.  “The performance, like all things Oriental, like the life, the patterns, the stories, seemed to have no beginning and no end, it just went monotonously and indefatigably on till fate snipped its thread.” (121)  The Moroccans practice “supine indifference” that “lets everything crumble back to clay” (77).  They do nothing to maintain their own antiquities and holy places (33) resulting in  ”catastrophic desolation” (64), but, then, “nothing endures in Islam”  (72).  Thus “long animosity against the intruder has ended up by destroying her own life” (37) and  the palace of Moulay Ismael has devolved into “a carcass for his carcass” (70).  Modern Moroccan architecture is a tasteless imitation of Europe (35).

     Her belief in the timelessness and “stagnant domesticity” (152) of North African culture has political implications.  She admired Resident General Lyautey and described herself as a “rabid imperialist” [4].  To her “General Lyautey has twice saved Morocco from destruction” (161) and the general influence of French colonialism is wholly beneficent. 

    Not all tourists, of course, are conscious imperialists.  Yet today even those who explicitly praise another country’s way of life may be accused of “cultural appropriation,” a sin the boundaries of which are far from clear.  Someone from Omaha who relishes an hour enjoying an espresso and cognac at Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain is more likely to be admired for cosmopolitanism than to be criticized for trying to be French.  Ralph T. H. Griffith served in  the British colonial service, yet most would feel that his translation of the Vedas constituted a service to the Indian people and not a theft.       

     Even the most outlandish examples of cultural appropriation seem to be in origin naïve tributes rather than acts of oppression.  Liberals at least can agree that it is unseemly for high school teams to be called Braves, Chiefs, or even Redskins, but what is one to make of the fact that nearly a hundred thousand Germans are members of Indianerclubs?  Members dress as Native Americans and hold pow-wows at which they dance and enact ceremonies, all the while professing great admiration for the people they mimic [5].  While such hobbyists may be accused of racial stereotyping, they are innocent of racist contempt.  In the same way some Americans purchase tattoos of Chinese characters which neither the customer nor the artist can read, sometimes with amusing results.  Yet the reason people wish to have their bodies ornamented with Asian-ness is surely that they associate that part of the world with wisdom and beauty.  Are we to make any distinction between Griffith’s despicable portrayal of Blacks in Birth of a Nation and Al Jolson’s blackface in The Jazz Singer?  The theme, after all, of the first, was the defense of slavery and the Confederacy while the second centered on Jakie Rabinowitz’ love of Black music, a love that estranges him from his own culture and family. 

     Inevitably less aware of the nuances of art and customs than a native, the tourist’s appreciation is always based on only partial knowledge.  An outsider’s enthusiasm (or criticism) may be less a reaction to the other than to the visitor’s own.  The Cubists imitated aspects of African art without any attempt to understand it in context and the Imagist poets wrote lyrics based on Chinese models they were, for the most part, unable to read.  Yet the European art that resulted is accepted as beautiful as well as innovative, even if the artist knew little of genuine Yoruba or Tang conventions.  What applies to the reception of art surely may be said as well of the tourist’s view of another society.

     Wharton seems to have taken great pleasure in her Moroccan tour.  If her rhetoric indicates that she is far from an objective camera simply recording facts, that does no more than concede her inescapable limitation.  The reader may turn to anthropologists and historians for information about the country.  If one reads a novelist’s account, it is surely for a different reason. 

     To the art critic what matters about an attitude is what comes of it.  I recently saw the 1939 film of the D’Oyly Carte Company doing The Mikado.  It was an altogether delightful performance; the wardrobes and makeup usually clever, the singing and dancing all first-rate, though it was assuredly not Japan at all, nor was it in fact pretending to be.  The action takes place in a completely fanciful and rather silly realm the ruler of which has a Japanese title, probably as fanciful to most Victorian Englishmen as names like Pooh-Bah and Yum-Yum.  If the costumer consulted authentic Far Eastern fashions at all, it was merely as a starting point from which his fancy might fly.  In the end we have a fine entertainment.  Likewise, if some Dusseldorfer plumber enjoys daubing his face with war paint on weekends, I would be more likely to envy his ability to have fun than to object.

     I recall when I first set foot on Moroccan soil over fifty years ago and was utterly bedazzled.  That first day I may have had less understanding of Moroccan ways than I had gained after a few months there, but my initial ignorance allowed me a measure of wonder as valuable, I think, as knowledge.  We have a fine book by Edith Wharton.  It is about Morocco, but unashamedly expressing Euro-centric notions.  Nonetheless the book is filled with fascinating descriptions, memorable phrases, and curious anecdotes with which one might while away an afternoon.  What more could one ask? 

  

 

1.  The term’s first use according to the OED was in 1945 in an essay on Orientalism by Arthur E. Christy.  The same phenomenon was discussed as "cultural colonialism" in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies (for instance, by Kenneth Coutts‐Smith).  Both phrases imply criticism, an improper and very likely misunderstood use of another’s culture.

2..  The book was completed in 1919 and published in 1920.  Wharton had been living in France and in 1914 had visited Algeria and Tunisia.

3.  She is said to have written the book under contract while in urgent need of income.  Perhaps some of this information was simply padding to meet a publisher’s desires. 

3.  Letter to Sara Norton, March 12, 1901. 

4.  Similar expressions include “cities of ancient mystery” (23), a “vision” (71) as though preserved by “some powerful enchanter” with “a wave of his wand” (73).  The observer has a  “dream-feeling” (77) as though walking into the Arabian Nights (36).  Morocco is to her “fantastic” (58), a “marvel” (61) full of “wonders” (62).  The entire country is for her a “dream” (127) in which “twilight adds to the mystery” (82-3).x

5.  The expression Indianertümelei has been coined on the model of Deutschtümelei (a chauvinistic exaggerated preference for things German).  Such groups have a considerable history.  The first “cowboy club” (which included “Indian” participants) was founded in Munich in 1913.  This phenomenon is neither confined to those outside America nor to the ignorant.  In his great study of the Iroquois Lewis Henry Morgan mythologizes them by likening them to Homeric Greeks and in recent years sweat lodges and the like have become the vogue among some New Agers.