The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790–1876 (review)

The premise of this book is that nineteenth-century American travel writing about the Holy Land is a malleable but coherent literary tradition. Noting the genre’s roots in eighteenth-century tales of Barbary captivity, Yothers devotes most of his energy to describing contrasts and comparisons among motifs and themes in a wide range of nineteenth-century Orientalist writings. He exposes thematic continuities and variations that comprise a web of inter-textual debate carried on by professional scholars and clergymen, missionaries, pilgrims, genteel travel writers, and major literary figures, each of whom sought to produce a distinctive account of the Holy Land.

Yothers mainly offers a literary taxonomy. Occasionally he touches upon wider issues, such as how Holy Land travelers imagined themselves and the United States in ways that went against chauvinistic orthodoxies of American exceptionalism. Or why it is reductionistic to say that travelers to West Asia found only the Holy Land they sought and nothing more. But such explorations into cultural and ideological analysis are few. And they remain undeveloped relative to Yothers’ methodical, somewhat plodding approach to the texts he chose to examine.

The author organizes the material within a framework of cross reference that enables him to discuss similarities and differences among various writers. He treats the “Skeptical Piety of Protestant Pilgrims” (e.g., Edward Robinson, and William Prime) in relation to the less mainstream “Alternative Orthodoxies” (e.g., Clorinda Minor, Orson Hyde, and William Henry Odenheimer); “Skeptical Oriental Romance” (e.g., John Lloyd Stephens, and William Cullen Bryant) more or less in contrast with “Quotidian Pilgrimages,” travel accounts that emphasize farcical elements (e.g., Mark Twain, satirist, and David Dorr, traveler and slave). The book closes with an extended analysis of Herman Melville’s Clarel. This work, which has received renewed critical attention in recent years, seems to have engaged Yothers as no other in the book. Without directly saying so, he depicts Melville as an author of postmodern sensibilities before such a phrase could have been imagined. Yothers believes that to Melville’s fictionalizing imagination, “the Holy Land is a site at which the primacy of interpretation becomes manifest, and thus the Holy Land provides the best conceivable backdrop for his relentless interrogation of the relationship between pluralism and authority, experience and interpretation.” Thus Clarel is “haunted by the idea of truth, and it struggles to achieve a truthful reconstruction of the Holy Land” by using poetry to capture detail and fiction to present conflicting perspectives in such a way that the poem subverts a “one-sided and voyeuristic American gaze on an exoticized Orient” (pp. 110, 111, 116).

In this discussion, Yothers clearly shows that he is aware of various analytical approaches used by today’s cultural historians, many of whom—perhaps Yothers himself—would welcome Melville as a kindred spirit. But even in this chapter, Yothers produces less analysis and less original insight than I hoped to find in support of the claims he makes. That is true for most of the book. In general, the author prefers straightforward comparison and contrast, quote and paraphrase, to critical analysis and explanation. And he chooses not to explore links between literary and visual cultures that would have enriched our understanding of the social and cultural entanglements of the works he studies.

Yothers is primarily a textualist. For the most part, he engages these writings as if they were a body of words and ideas lacking material substance and settings within society and culture. Of course, this is an author’s choice and not a personal failing. But it is a choice with notable consequences: an impoverished understanding of literature, for one, and for another, fewer connections made to socially grounded intellectual history, including feminist, ethnic, colonialist, and postcolonial studies. When Yothers allows himself such reflections, they appear like splashes of color added to introductory remarks and broad summaries. However, there is something to...