Travel, Ritual, and National Identity

LATE IN THE WINTER OF 1845 FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND A NUMBER OF friends went sightseeing at Eaton Hall, the Liverpool residence of the Marquis of Westminster. In the queue Douglass noticed several of his fellow passengers from the Cunard liner Cambria, among them southerners, who had threatened to toss him overboard during the passage. As be wrote to William Lloyd Garrison, [O]f all the faces, expressive of chagrin, those of the Americans were preeminent. They looked as sour as vinegar, and as bitter as gall, when they found I was to be admitted on equal terms with The relative racial equality that Douglass encountered in the Old World alienated him from the United States. At the same time, the shared characteristics of white Americans, regardless of regional origins, became clear. Douglass did not distinguish the southern planters from the other Americans in the group outside Eaton Hall; he noted that they all regarded him with disdain. Indeed, in the eyes of white southerners as well, European tour had the effect of bridging the political and cultural gaps that increasingly separated them from northerners at home. They did not, unlike Douglass, use the occasion to single out racism as national characteristic, but touring Europe did inspire planters to reflect upon other qualities they shared with privileged folk like themselves. While European travel did not dissolve planters' loyalty to their section, it did intensify their sense of and pride in belonging to national community. (1) A tour of Europe provoked such introspection partly because of the ritual nature of travel. Realizing they were engaged in special enterprise, Americans abroad struggled to find an appropriate voice with which to communicate their experiences. Charles Edward Leverett Jr. articulated this sense of wonder when he wrote his father from the celebrated field of Waterloo, Did you ever think to get line from that spot, & from your own son on that spot? (2) Some rituals, as Steven M. Stowe observes, [heighten] ... ordinary experience, creating sense of being outside normal place and time. Travel to Europe was anything but ordinary, of course. Only the wealthy could afford even brief stint abroad. Yet European travel was simultaneously a highly conventional activity. The literary critic William W. Stowe argues that it should be understood as a kind of secular ritual, complete with prescribed actions, promised rewards, and set of quasi-scriptural writings. (3) Both an exceptional, highly meaningful event and conventionalized practice, travel in Europe simultaneously allowed planters to situate themselves in the English genteel tradition of the Grand Tour, engaged them in secular pilgrimage to quasi-sacred sites of Western culture, and empowered them selectively to differentiate themselves from this tradition in ways that affirmed their own nation's superiority. Travel, moreover, had the potential to reshape individual and group identity. As Victor Turner has argued, rituals do not merely affirm or demonstrate cultural verities. They are also transformative, promoting critical inquiry and personal discovery. European tourism, as quintessentially rule-governed and culturally sanctioned activity, encouraged planting women and men to reflect upon their social and individual identities. Travel often reinforced prior assumptions, such as prejudices about national superiority, but it also led to critical reflection. (4) The introspective effects of travel were less pronounced in the colonial period, when southerners generally crossed the Atlantic to make business connections or for other utilitarian reasons. But planters in the nineteenth century more often traveled for pleasure. (5) If such tour of Europe was in itself ritual act, so were many of its constituent elements, particularly reading and writing, sightseeing, and sociability. Though these practices were highly differentiated, together the rituals of foreign travel prompted southerners to reflect on the relationship between their region and their nation

Aesthetics · Art · Genealogy · Geography · Identity (music · National identity · Political science · Politics · Canadian Identity and History · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Travel Writing and Literature

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