Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by William W. Stowe (review)

156 Canadian Review o( American Studies Cross-Cultural Reckonings is a summary volume that attests in every way to the aptness of that award, but let us hope that it is not the last. David Stouck Simon Fraser University William W. Stowe. Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1994. Pp. xiii + 256. Combining research in non-canonical texts with recent scholarship in the burgeoning field of tourism and travel theory, William W. Stowe's Going Abroad offers a fresh departure from the tradition of descriptive and biographical approaches to Americans in Europe produced until this time. The chief goal of this wide-ranging study, however, is not to recover marginalized authors from critical neglect but to assess the cultural work that European travel and travel writing did in the United States before and after the Civil War. Stowe's great accomplishment isto demonstrate that travelling in and writing about Europe became two extremely successful cultural practices not only because their convention-ridden and easy-to-repeat formulae provided a strong class-bonding ritual to the increasing number of bourgeois Americans going abroad, but also because those practices enabled major and minor travel writers alike to transgress lines of class, race, gender, and nation in their efforts to construct, improve, or challenge their own literary and social status. Stowe begins his analysis by exploring the interrelations between travel and writing in nineteenth-century America. First he examines the cultural and socioeconomic factors contributing to the rise of the standard European tour, among which he lists the need for cultural polish, the consolidation of a visible leisure class, and the continuous improvements in transatlantic transportation. He then accounts for the popularity of travel writing in antebellum and postbellum America. While his discussion perceptively ascribes much of the success of that genre to the widespread readership and the emerging literary professionalism of those years, it does not sufficiently acknowledge, in my view, two important contextual factors. One is the thin boundary existing between travel writing and what William Charvat cata- Book Reviews 157 logued as one of the most popular antebellum genres, history writing. Given the manifest use of historical data in travel books of that period, the connection between both genres surely deserves more attention. The other factor is the lucrative side of nineteenth-century travel writing. Although the study examines particular cases, as Stowe's notice of Bayard Taylor's professional travelling career demonstrates, it does not emphasize enough the broader role played by the marketing practices of editors and publishers eager to capitalize on ready-made images of the Old World. The following three chapters in the study develop Stowe's view of European travel as an important rite of passage that gave many nineteenthcentury Americans "an exhilarating sense of freedom and power" (45). Drawing upon and comparing earlier definitions of ritual by Victor Turner, Thorstein Veblen, and other anthropologists and social theorists, Stowe contends that in a Protestant American scene so strongly influenced by ubiquitous religious values and phraseology, European travel almost inevitably became "a kind of secular ritual, complete with prescribed actions, promised rewards, and a set of quasi-scriptural writings 11 (19). These writings, most accessible and influential in the form of guidebooks, created in fact a "liturgy" of sightseeing and art appreciation that the crowds of middle-class American tourists in Europe followed eagerly. Once they had undergone their rite of passage abroad, these travellers could return home to become cosmopolitan, refined citizens, or, in Stowe's religious analogy, "members of a new clerisy" (27). To illustrate the multiple meanings of European travel in nineteenthcentury American culture, Going Abroad traces the metamorphoses the guidebook suffered. Stowe's analysis ranges from antebellum travel writers like George Putnam and Roswell Park, eager for culture and tradition, to jingoistic and consumption-driven travellers of the postbellum years like Henry Morford and William Hemstreet. With insightful close readings, Stowe accounts for the increasing specialization of the guidebook, which by the turn of the century had begun to incorporate agendas geared, for instance, to the growing number of women travellers. He also pinpoints quite effectively the connections between the guidebook and the emerging culture...