To the New Belsen

241 Sometime in the Victorian era a shift occurs in the repatriation of the idea of Europe into British literature, hitherto dominated by representations of named continental individuals interacting in foreign places. Increasingly Europe is conjured as a distinctive, beautiful, historically rich and geologically meaningful but essentially unpopulated site, into which the British will journey in order to have signifi cant experiences of their own. In the twentieth century, infl uenced by Henry James, this literary construction of Europe becomes dominant. Confi ning the discussion here to male novelists, whose treatment of the subject manifests a marked interlinkage of characteristics and obsessions, beginning with the Edwardians and necessarily simplifying considerably (a book-length study would be required to tease out all the variations and evolutions of this narrative form), two types of twentieth-century British fi ction of continental European travel can be isolated. In the fi rst, a young, bourgeois, cultured, repressed, leisured and curious traveller is confronted with the cultural, spiritual, emotional and sexual challenges of the continent. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and A Room with a View (1908) are archetypal versions of a therapy narrative in which this traveller is awoken, even ‘cured’ of her/ his psychological inhibitions by exposure to the sun, freedom and art of the continent, a healing which is costly, even traumatic, but presented as vital. In the second version of this narrative, much the same kind of traveller is, instead, menaced or engulfed by continental authoritarianism and the frighteningly anti-democratic. In fi ctions such as Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1903) and Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) the British traveller is confronted with the violence and threat of the looming European despotic or the incipient or actual war imposed by the despotic; he or she will seek to resist, fi ght or fl ee the shadow of fascism and cruelty, but more often fi nds him/herself morally compromised by it

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