the hellenes and tribal societies

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The Levant Unveiled: Western Travelers’ Reports on Ottoman Female Bathing CultureMOLLY WEINSTEIN | TUFTS UNIVERSITY

“Best Obtained in Seclusion”: Landscapes of Healing and Pleasure at Marienbad and Baden-Baden, 1820–1880LINNEA KUGLITSCH | MARY BALDWIN COLLEGE

From “the Pride of Baltimore City” to “a Nuisance, an Expense, and an Eyesore”: Public Opinion of the Jones Falls after the Flood of 1868AUNALEAH GELLES | UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE

Imagining the Congo as a ‘Heart of Darkness’: Why the Congo “Is What It Is” for the Western WorldKATIE NOLAN | FORDHAM UNIVERSITY

The Hellenes and Tribal Societies: Hellenism in the Late Archaic and Early Classical PeriodsJOSEPH WILSON | JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY

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Contents

From the Office of the Editor Hannah Arnow 1 Cameron Seitzman

ARTICLES

The Levant Unveiled: Western Travelers’ Reports on Ottoman Female Bathing Culture Molly Weinstein 5

“Best Obtained in Seclusion”: Landscapes of Healing and Pleasure at Marienbad and Baden-Baden, 1820–1880 Linnea Kuglitsch 31

From “the Pride of Baltimore City” to “a Nuisance, an Expense, and an Eyesore”: Public Opinion of the Jones Falls after the Flood of 1868 Aunaleah Gelles 57

Imagining the Congo as a ‘Heart of Darkness’: Why the Congo “Is What It Is” for the Western World Katie Nolan 73

The Hellenes and Tribal Societies: Hellenism in the Late Archaic and Early Classical Periods Joseph Wilson 95

EDITORIAL

The Nation and the Sea: Identity, Ideology, and Imagination in Colonial Bengal Aniket De 105

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5

The Levant Unveiled: Western Travelers’ Reports on Ottoman Female Bathing Culture

MOLLY WEINSTEIN, TUFTS UNIVERSITY

Upon learning of his dear friend and literary contemporary Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s impending voyage to the Ottoman Empire in 1716, esteemed British poet Alexander

Pope wrote her a letter, salaciously warning that, “I shall look upon you no longer as a Christian, when you pass from that charitable Court to the Land of Jealousy, where the unhappy Women converse with none but Eunuchs, and where the very Cucumbers are brought to them Cutt.”1 Pope’s perception was that the repressive nature of the conspicuously non-Christian Ottoman Empire resulted in an amoral, hyper-sexual female populace, thus meriting the societal use of safeguards—such as restricted access to non-sterile males and phallic vegetables—to protect the society against its licentious carnal proclivities. Though his satirical tone is more brash than was typical of the era’s rhetoric, it acutely reflects the pervasive and entrenched image held by western Europeans of Turkish women as libertine and libidinous beings, whose prurient nature turned even the innocuous cucumber into a potential agent of sexual deviance.

Due to a dearth of substantial material on the distant Ottoman Empire, this impression was predominately shaped by the body of travel narratives and letters produced by western travelers to the Levant in the centuries preceding Montagu’s own trip. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, western travelers began venturing to the Ottoman Empire on a more frequent basis.2 This increase in Oriental travel yielded a new collection of travelogues, which were avidly consumed by inquisitive European readers. Nearly every travel writer of the era, after producing a report on the landscape,

1. Alexander Pope, “On Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Portrait’, 1719,” In The Poems of Alexander Pope, edited by J. Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), 177. Found in a letter (10 November 1716) to Montagu during her time abroad.

2. Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), xiii.

6 the tuf ts histor ic al re vie w

architecture, political structure, economic livelihood, and class hierarchy of the Ottoman state, turned next to comment on the Levantine’s social practices, detailing Oriental dressing conventions, courtship and marriage rituals, polygamous relations, and allegedly rampant sodomitic and lesbian tendencies.3 Of particular interest to western traveloguers was the Ottoman institution of the hammam, or bathhouse, and the ostensibly lewd behavior that took place within.

The Ottoman hammam has, for centuries, constituted a vital institution within Turkish religious, social, and political spheres. Among visitors to Turkey, the bathhouse achieved notoriety, and a visit to the Ottoman hammam became routine for early western travelers seeking an ‘authentic’ and complete cultural experience in the Levant. In the resulting accounts, the bathhouse came to carry symbolic weight, epitomizing foreign perceptions of Ottoman culture as full of Oriental despotism, phantasmagoric sensuality, and unlawful sin. Specifically, the behavior of Turkish females within the enclave of their all-female bathing quarters sparked the interest and imagination of the male travelers. The early western reports of this behavior were contrived entirely by hearsay, as the writers were forbidden from entering the strictly female bathhouses. Yet, one recurring theme emerged from the various bathhouse descriptions: all offered an image of female sexual indulgence and “unnatural” behavior. The writers universally detailed rampant lesbian activity within the baths, enforcing an image of Turkish women as hypersexual, “immodest,” and “lascivious”—which helps to explain Pope’s apprehension about the perils of cavorting with such wanton creatures.

This sexualized view of female bathing culture, however, did not go uncontested. The aforementioned Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an early eighteenth-century English traveler to the Ottoman Empire, deliberately contradicted her male predecessors, ostensibly aiming “out of a true female spirit of Contradiction” to correct the “falsehoods” of their eroticized representation of Turkish women.4

3. Valerie Traub, “The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2 (1995), 81–113.

4. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W--y M--e: Written During her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, Vol. 1 (London, 1717), 405.

The Levant Unveiled 7

As an aristocratic female traveler, Montagu was unusually privileged with entrance into not only the upper levels of Levantine society, but also into the exclusively female Turkish institutions. Thus, unlike those of her male counterparts, Montagu’s reports constitute a rare first-hand experience of the all-female baths. Her resulting descriptions transformed the image of the bathhouse as a haven for female sexual “wantonness” into a manifestation of the freedom and agency enjoyed by Ottoman women.

This study surveys the various references to Turkish female bathing culture within western European travel accounts from the mid sixteenth to eighteenth-century. It contends that the conjectural claims of female lesbian bathhouse activity made by the male writers must be viewed within the larger trend of portraying Turkey as a haven of Oriental decadence and sexual vice. The historical context of Western Europe’s longstanding fraught relationship with the Ottoman Empire—which included a perceived existential threat for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—provides an explanation as to why the country was intentionally presented in such a way. The early western accounts reflected a strategic maneuver to reaffirm Christian values and to frame its adversary, Islam, as an amoral and illegitimate alternative; to assert western ethical and, consequentially, political superiority; and to expose domestic readers to a titillating and otherwise taboo subject matter while reinforcing their confidence in the propriety of their own sexual and cultural values and mores. Yet, Lady Montagu’s contradictory reports on bathing culture were equally deliberate. Her carefully crafted image of a modest and dignified female bathing scene fed into her broader idealized claims of Turkish female sovereignty, exposing an oft-overlooked strain of western gender insecurity and female malcontent. In both cases, the collective preoccupation with Turkish bathing ritual and sexual activity is emblematic of a western fascination with the alien and of a willingness to contort and exploit the foreign. The janus-faced portrayal of this singular cultural institution reflects a larger ethnographic trend of deliberately manipulating the ‘other’ and exoticizing the unknown to satisfy domestically rooted demands for cultural reinforcement and political justification.

Current historiography offers a significant amount of scholarship on western European travel writing and ethnographic pursuits


during the Age of Discovery, which provides the contextual clues necessary to infer the possible historical motivations underlying the less-than-truthful nature of the bathing reports.5 Additionally, a number of texts have referenced and analyzed both the early male travel narratives and Montagu’s accounts.6 These works, however, have been largely produced by literary scholars and, therefore, focus more on the rhetorical ploys of the authors than on their historical backdrop or the broader contextual phenomena that grounded their claims. This study thus distinguishes itself in its historical approach to the sources and, further, in its usage of bathing culture as the central lens with which to look at western attitudes towards Ottoman women and, more broadly, towards the Ottoman itself.

5. Mary Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing 400–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Peter Erikson and Clark Hulse, Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race & Empire in Renaissance England, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Kim Hall, Acknowledging Things of Darkness: Economics of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Margaret Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964); Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

6. Richard Bernstein, The East, the West, and Sex: a history of erotic encounters (New York: Knopf, 2009); Elizabeth A. Bohls, “Aesthetics and Orientalism in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 23 (1994), 179–205; Cynthia Lowenthal, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); Bellie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Luis Montrose, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations 33 (1991), 1–41; Felicity A. Nussbaum, “Eighteenth-Century Women’s Autobiographical Commonplaces,” in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock, (Routledge: London, 1988), 177–191; Anna Secor, “Orientalism, gender and class in Lady Mary Worley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters: to persons of distinction, men of letters and c,” Cultural Geographies 6 (Arnold Publishers: 1999), 375–398; Sila Senlen, “Richard Knowlles’ ‘The Generall Historie of the Turkes’ as a Reflection of Christian Historiography”; Valerie Truab, “Sex and gender: The perversion of ‘lesbian’ desire,” History Workshop Journal 41 (1991), 19–49; Valerie Traub, “The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2 (1995), 81–113.


Contextualizing Turkish Bathing Culture: History and RelevanceThe hammam, a cornerstone of Turkish society since at least the fourteenth century, was significant in Ottoman society not merely for its hygienic purpose, but further, because it created a unique forum in which the state’s complex and shifting political, religious, and social forces coalesced. Appropriating the concept of commu-nal bathing from the ancient Greek and Roman public bathhouses and their Byzantine iterations, the Ottomans embraced the tradi-tion of public bathhouses, erecting them en masse in each district of every city in the Empire. Renowned seventeenth-century Otto-man traveler Evliya Çelebi reported an impressive 300 public baths in Constantinople, though more conservative estimates of the time recorded around 150—still a sizeable quantity.7 The majestic struc-tures were architectural marvels, featuring several of the same design elements as the holy mosque, including elaborate domes, calculated lighting, and intricate tile work.8

During the earlier Ottoman centuries, concerns about royal legitimacy spurred the building of numerous hammams; in their monumentality, the bathhouses emblematized sultanic rule and imperial power, both for the domestic Ottoman population and for visiting foreigners.9 Later on, as a result of eighteenth-century modernization and economic decentralization, hammams were generally funded through charitable endowments by notable Turkish public figures and financial stalwarts of the time.10 The construction of a bathhouse was a significant status marker, endowing its benefactor with substantial political stock and a permanent public display of prominence. The usage of the bathhouses in negotiations of power as overt political symbols indicates their centrality to Ottoman society and self-identity.

7. Evliya Celebi, Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1846), 103; Adelson, “Hammami Baths of Turkey,” Mankind: The Magazine of Popular History, 6 (1978), 17.

8. Gerhard, Modern Baths and Bath Houses, 71.9. Ibid., 100.10. Nina Cichocki, “Continuity and Change in Turkish Bathing Culture in

Istanbul: The Life Story of the Cemberlitas Hammam,” Turkish Studies, 6 (2005), 96.


The Ottomans expanded upon the ancient Greco-Roman bathhouse’s predominantly functional and hygienic purpose by converting it into a pertinent religious institution. The Qu’ran cemented the integral role of the bathhouses in Islamic Turkish society by designating bathing as a required religious rite and element of worship.11 General cleanliness was thought to prevent physical and moral degeneration and was incorporated into the central tenants of Islam. Explicitly, ghusl (full-body ablution) was compulsory any time a Muslim adult violated his or her state of complete body cleanliness. Therefore, Turks were required to frequent the baths in order to restore ritual purity (taharat) before habitual prayers, various customary rituals, burial or the embarkment on hajj, as well as after sexual intercourse, orgasmic discharge, the completion of the menstrual cycle or childbirth.12

Since the religious mandates necessitated a copious amount bathing time, the bathhouse naturally grew to be an indispensable part of Ottoman daily social life. The hammams served as a public forum where news was exchanged, social discontent was vented, conflicts were negotiated, and bonds were forged. Ritual bathing soon was compulsory not just for ghusl, but additionally for many social rites of passage such as marriage, recruitment to the army, recovery from an illness, conversion to Islam, circumcision, vestment of new clothes, release from prison, and the fortieth day after the birth of a child.13

The separation of males and females within the bathhouses was consistent with the gender segregation in every dimension of Ottoman society. The hammams not only contained separate quarters for male and female patrons, but also different entrances for men and women. The women entered the hammam not through the elaborate main entrance but through an inconspicuous side door, so as to protect their modesty and invisibility.14 Most historical hammams further guarded against inter-gender interaction at the baths by instituting designated men’s and women’s bathing hours.15

11. Ibid., 99.12. Elif Ekin Aksit, “The women’s quarters in the historical hammam,” Gender,

Place and Gulture 18 (2011), 281.13. Cichocki, “Continuity and Change in Turkish Bathing Culture,” 99.14. Ibid., 96.15. Askit, “The women’s quarters,” 277.


The social and political utility of the bathhouse was arguably enhanced for female Turks. Since the Ottomans’ strict adherence to the Islamic faith ensured that women lived in seclusion, a visit to the hammam constituted one of the few legitimate reasons a woman could leave her house and traverse the city alone. The bathhouses provided Turkish women with an opportunity to socialize with women outside their immediate familial and social circle, and provided them with a forum to engage in politics—negotiating their social position, status, and safety within the protection of the all-female space.16

In travel accounts, Ottoman bathing culture was employed flex-ibly as evidence of foreign visitors’ varying predictions about Ottoman culture—predictions based on the traveler’s own context, curiosities, and motives. As evidenced by the following analysis of early travel nar-ratives produced by the region’s western visitors, the broader cultural milieu of the bathhouses in Ottoman religion, politics, and society was often overlooked, since the historically domestic centrality of the baths was subordinated to the writers’ particular objectives. The important cultural institution was, for the Ottomans, a house of piety, sanctity, and modesty; a space shielded from the outside eye; an enforcer of seg-regation and of the “proper” female customs of humility and reticence. Yet it was exactly this private quality, which, for the ignominy-seeking westerners, converted the hammam into a site of suspicion and a sup-posed haven for rampant and illicit female licentiousness.

Male Travelers’ Reports of Female Sodomy in the Baths

The British and French male travelers whose works this study con-siders were diverse in occupation, time of journey, and incentive to travel. One of the first to document his adventures in the East, French geographer Nicholas de Nicholay, was sent to the Levant in 1551 as envoy and ambassador to the Grand Turk Suleiman the Magnificent. His travel account, “The Navigations, Peregrinations, and Voyages, Made into Turkie” was published in French in 1576 and in English in 1585.17 Shortly thereafter, the British historian

16. Ibid., 279.17. Nicholas de Nicholay, “The Navigations, Peregrinations, and Voyages, Made

Into Turkie . . . 1585,” ed. Thomas Osborne, Collection of Voyages and Travels (London, 1745).


Richard Knolles became renowned for his 1602 account of the Ottoman Empire, the first of its kind written in the English lan-guage.18 Poet George Sandys’ 1610 account of his travels formed yet another substantial contribution to western geography and ethnog-raphy.19 Drawn to the Mediterranean region in 1636 by its exotic plants, French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort documented the Levant’s political and social, as well as ecological, circumstances in Relacion d’un voyage du Levant (published posthumously in 1717 and translated into English in 1741).20 Paul Rycaut, a British dip-lomat regarded in the mid-to-late 1600s as a chief authority on the Oriental world, authored perhaps the most esteemed travel account of his era.21 Later, English dramatist and writer Aaron Hill ventured to the East at the turn of the eighteenth-century in search of cre-ative inspiration.22 However, despite the variance in their motiva-tions to travel and in the dates of their voyages, these men all shared an aristocratic, educated, Christian male identity and a paradig-matic Eurocentric worldview. Furthermore, each was undoubtedly influenced by the normative reports of his predecessors and coevals. Thus, despite the nuanced distinctions among the topics and foci of their reports, notable trends and shared tropes bind these writers’ works into a cohesive genre and collectively construct a unified and enduring image of the alien Ottoman Empire.

Though the men were, by their own admission, banned from entering the exclusively female baths (“. . . it is death for any man to enter when women bath, which hee shall know by a Barre before the doore”), they spoke with feigned authority on the acts that took place behind the closed bathhouse doors, assuring their readers that “deeds of beastly uncleannesse” were habitually committed.23

18. Richard Knolles, “The Generall Historie of the Turks,” ed. Adam Islip, Stationers’ Registers (London: 1602).

19. George Sandys, “A Relation of a Journey begunne, Anno Dom. 1610,” ed. Samuel Purchase, Purchase His Pilgrimes, 2 (London, 1625).

20. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, A Voyage into the Levant (London, 1741).21. Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1665).22. Aaron Hill, A Full and Just Account of the State of the Ottoman Empire (London,

1709).23. de Tournefort, A Voyage into the Levant, 101; Rycaut, The Present State of the

Ottoman Empire, 81.


De Nicholay elaborated on these fabricated deeds by declaring that behind the barred bathhouse door, Turkish women:

do familiarly wash one another, whereby it cometh to pass, that amongst the women of Levant, there is very great amity proceed-ing only thro the frequentation and resort to the baths; yea, and sometimes become so fervently in love the one with the other, as if it were men, in such sort, that perceiving some maiden or woman of excellent beauty, they will not cease until they have found means to bathe with them, and to handle and grope them every where at their pleasures, so full are they of luxuriousness and feminine wantonness.24

De Nicholay’s titilating tale is confirmed by Sandys, who claimed that Turkish juridical proceedings proved the occurrence of the unconfirmed sexual relations: “Much unnaturall and filthie lust is to be committed daily in the remote closets of the darke-some Bannias: yea, women with women; a thing uncredible, if former times had not given thereunto both detection and punishment.”25

The reports of lesbian activity within the hammams were woven into a larger narrative of Turkish women as concupiscent and eroti-cized beings. The amorous, lesbian behavior of the women in the baths served as just another manifestation of their “burning lust” and insuppressible animalistic tendencies.26 In the words of Rycaut, “[T]hey are accounted the most lascivious and immodest of all Women, and excel in the most refined and ingenious Subtilties to steal their pleasures . . . and then let themselves loose to all kind of lascivious-ness and wanton carriage.”27 Hill furthers this image of the female Turk as a lawless sexual aggressor, imagining a situation in which female predators seize upon an unsuspecting male:

So lascivious are their inclinations, that if by the ingenuity of their Contrivances they can procure the Company of some

24. de Nicholay, “Navigations, Peregrinations, and Voyages,” 595.25. The word bannia, is a corruption of the Italian bagno, meaning bath, and was

commonly used in British bathhouse writings (in reference to the Roman origin of the bathhouse institution); Sandys, A Relation of a Journey, 151.

26. de Nicholay, “Navigations, Perigrinations, and Voyages,” 589.27. Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, 153; 71.


Stranger in their Chamber, they claim unanimously an equal share of his Caresses, and proceed by Lots to the Enjoyment of his Person; nor can he be permitted to leave them, till having exerted his utmost Vigor in the Embraces of the whole Com-pany, he becomes incapable of further Service, and is dispatch’d with the thanks and Presents of the oblig’d Family.28

Additionally, the presence of eunuchs in Turkish courts and offices served, for the western travelers, as further evidence of the Turks’ own acknowledgement of “this libidinous flame of depraved Nature,”29 since only the desexualized eunuchs posed no unlawful sexual temp-tation for the insatiable appetites of the Turkish women.30

Several of the travelers deliberately attributed this syndrome to the strict gender relations within the social structure of the Ottoman Empire. The putative “repression” of female Turks was well noted in the travel accounts and used to explain their supposed rebellious violation of sexual norms, allegedly functioning to sharpen women’s desires. Under the guise of unbiased reporting, yet with a clear ethnocentric bias and moral absolutist undertone, the European writers claimed that within the Ottoman social strata, little difference was made between women and slaves.31 De Nicholay, along with his contemporaries, noted the Turkish women’s restricted existence, explaining that they rarely:

have good occasion and honest excuse to go abroad out of their houses, within which they are continually closed up, from the great jealously of their husbands, or rather for the observing of the ancient custom of their ancestors, which after that sort kept their wives and daughters closed up in the backsides of their houses, which they call Ginaises; so that the Turky women being shut up, without permission to go abroad, nor to appear in the streets openly, except it be going to the baths.32

Hill confirmed the extent of their confinement, reporting “Tis but very rarely that they go abroad, and then to no place but the public

28. Hill, A Full and Just Account, 111.29. Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, 64.30. Bernstein, The East, the West, and Sex, 76.31. Sandys, “A Relation of a Journey,” 151. 32. de Nicholay, “Navigations, Perigrinations, and Voyages,” 595.


Bagnio’s, or the Funeral, or Marriage of some near Relation,”33 and afterwards adding a description of their veils, to reinforce his narra-tive of female immuration. De Tournefort attributed the repression of Turkish female sexuality (and resultingly their sexual “wanton-ness”) to the exotic polygamous marriage system of the Turks, deci-sively claiming that

the cause is Polygamy, which makes the husband guiltie of insuf-ficient correspondance and therein fearefull that his wife may seeke a further satisfaction; therefore their women goe muffled all but the eyes, nor are suffered to goe to Church, or so much as looke out at the windowes of their owne houses.34

As explained by these writers, the hammam offered one of the few viable justifications for Ottoman females to leave their protected domestic zone and enter the public sphere.

Once within the shielded territory of the all-female bathhouse, the women were able to shed their veils and, by the logic of the western writers, consequentially, their inhibitions. Though one must be prudent in our post-Freudian age when employing such terms as “repression,” “impulses,” and “urges,” there does seem to be a pre-Freudian application of these concepts within the western travel accounts: the writers drew patent—and conceptually paradoxical—linkages between what they viewed as female repression (manifested in women’s restricted public outings, their requisite modest attire and veiled visages, and gender segregation in religious and social spaces) and the assumed resulting female hyper-sexuality.35

When viewed within the sociopolitical context of the era, it becomes clear that these slanted accounts were more than simple travelogues or thrillingly embellished versions of Turkish reality. Rather, they were reflective of Western Europe’s complex, adver-sarial relationship with the Ottoman Empire. Ever since the Otto-man Turks began their westward extension into Constantinople in 1453, the West regarded them with suspicion—a suspicion that only increased over the centuries. Having always conceived of itself as the

33. Hill, A Full and Just Account, 95.34. de Tournefort, A Voyage into the Levant, 107.35. Bernstein, The East, the West, and Sex, 77.


political, philosophical, and geographic center of the world, West-ern Europe saw the “Ottoman giant to the East”– with its foreign alphabet, dark complexioned people, perplexing religion, political-military aptitude, and expansionist aspirations—as a serious chal-lenge to their hegemonic culture and world order.36 Both threatened and fascinated by this land of difference, Western Europe fostered a dichotomy in its public discourse of the barbaric East and the civi-lized West. By emphasizing divergence and, further, inferiority, the West consigned the Orient to the category of “other,” discrediting it as a viable alternative to Europe and vitiating its sociopolitical might.37 These early travelogues and their treatment of Ottoman bathing culture must thus be viewed within the context of the era’s Orientalist discourse; the writers emphasized the East/West differ-ence through reports of sodomy and female repression, ultimately seeking to assert Christian religious superiority, justify the European imperialist conquest of the “other,” and reaffirm the comparative moral probity of the western model.

In describing and remarking on the Turkish social structure and its corresponding gender norms, the European travelers were implicitly commenting on the Islamic order of the state, as it shaped every element of society—be it political, social or sexual. The western writers, however, went further than tacit religious commentary; they transformed Ottoman sexuality into a synecdoche for the broader immoral Islamic creed, a maneuver that distinguished the morally superior Christianity from its sodomitical and barbarian adversary. Rycaut extensively outlined the distinctions between the two religions, claiming that Christianity established its foothold as a religion by verifying itself legitimately with miracles, signs, and promises of an afterlife of glorified spirituality, whereas Mahometanism:

made his precepts easie and pleasant, and acceptable to the fancy and appetite, as well as to the capacity of the vulgar: represent-ing Heaven to them, not in a spiritual manor . . . but with gross conceptions of the beauty of Women with great Eyes, of the

36. Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4–5.

37. Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 45.


duration of one act of Carnal copulation for the space of sixty years, and of the beastly satisfaction of a gluttonous Palate.38

Therefore, Rycaut contends, it is only logical that this amoral religion would lead to a society of sexual deviance and loose moral codes. A favored strategy for establishing the ‘otherness’ of the Muslims and drawing an incontrovertible divide between Christianity and Islam seems to be reporting (or fabricating) evidence of sodomy among the latter. “These Turks,” wrote British barber surgeon William Davis, “are goodly people of parson, and of a very faire complexion, but very vil-lains in minde, for they are altogether Sodomites, and doe things con-trarie to a Christian.”39 “The Muslims,” concurred Knolles “are much inclined to Venery, and are for the most part all Sodomites.”40 Sodomy was thus deemed Islamic and provided a palpable, corporeal separation between the civilized and the uncivilized.41 One must note the western writers’ equation of the qualities ‘morally astute’ and ‘civilized’ with ‘het-erosexual’ and the ascription of sodomy to the barbaric, uncivilized, and unscrupulous.42 This association reflected the dominant western dis-course regarding sodomitical behavior and became particularly evident when applied in foreign contexts, as it became not just a conceptual cor-relation but a justification: the moral and sexual deviance of the ‘other’ functioned to divinely sanction its conquest by Christianity.43

Even outside of the religious realm, rumors of Turkish sexual deviance were used as a trope to establish western moral and political

38. Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, 195.39. William Davis, A Trve Relation of the Trauailes and most miserable Captiuitie

(London, 1614), B2v. 40. Richard Knolles, “The Generall Historie of the Turks,” 982.41. Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, 115.42. “Homosexuality” is a nineteenth-century concept. In the era, which I am

considering, society considered male-male or female-female intercourse as sodomitic behavior in itself, rather than a categorical identity marker. I would argue, however that in this case, sodomy constituted not just a behavior but a true identity marker, used to categorize the East as wicked and unscrupulous, compared to its straight, “heterosexual” western counterpart. For more on the evolving concept of homosexuality and the connection between sodomitical practices and amorality, reference; Tom Betteridge, Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, ed, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).

43. Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, 115.


superiority over the East and to justify European colonial aspirations. As Kim Hall explains in her extensive study of British travelers’ conceptions of “otherness,” the “chief sign of cultural disorder in the earlier texts is gender, specifically a sense of the instability of gender, thus allowing for an easy slippage between the concerns about the alienness of race and the unruliness of women.”44 Thus, a culture’s adherence to European patriarchal norms constituted the key criterion in its designation as civilized or legitimate. Sodomy, the ultimate breach of the dominant heterosexual model, became the ultimate justification for conquest and possession, serving to distance and dehumanize the Orient and rendering it unworthy of autonomy and cultural self-determination.45 Therefore, it is logical that the western travel writers saw it prudent and politically strategic to bring back from the Orient tales of sodomy and female unruliness, whether substantiated or not.

The accounts of these early travelers were the primary source of public knowledge about the exotic and newly fascinating Otto-man Empire. Therefore, once sodomy became identified with the sensual, erotic East, readers began to expect confirming reports in all subsequent narratives—and the writers complied. As explained by Nabil Matar in his study of Anglo-Islamic social and historical interactions:

. . . sodomy was the sin of the Other and therefore conveniently provided them with a much awaited venue for exploring this taboo . . . There is little doubt that as Renaissance readers turned to a book about the Muslim world, they expected it to titillate them with information about the outrageous, the sensual, and the deviant so they could feel secure in their moral and political spheres.46

Domestic readers in Western Europe not only delighted in reading about forbidden sex, but they also used these reports to reflect upon and reconfirm their own values, norms, and societal mores. A key function and historical imperative of premodern travel writing was

44. Hall, Acknowledging Things of Darkness, 25.45. Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, 109.46. Ibid., 125.


to place Europe in relation with the Orient, distancing and elevating it from its inferior eastern neighbor. British and French consumers of these narratives thus capitalized on the exotic and erotic reports of travelers, quickly moving to contrast the unruly society from their own ordered, upright world.

Jane Sharp, for instance, exemplified the differentiating usage of these reports, writing in her midwifery manual that “In the Indies, and Egypt . . . unnatural use of female genitals are frequent,” but asserting that such unnatural relations occurred exclusively beyond England’s boundaries: “I have never heard but of one in this Country.”47 Sharp’s purposeful distancing of herself and her female compatriots from their eastern counterparts was representative of the larger European strategy of exploiting the exotic to both distinguish and reaffirm European culture and customs. Mary Campbell encapsulated this phenomenon in her survey on exotic European travel writing from late antiquity to the Age of Discovery: “It was almost as if Europe felt the need to scour the map of all that was ‘satanic’—of all the chaotic, fertile, multitudinous splendours it had believed were ‘out there’ and which threatened the hegemony of its conscious values.”48 The reports of the eroticized East, culminated in tales of lesbian behavior—the ultimate breach of Christian, heterosexual morality because it defied rules of both gender and sexuality. It thus served the dual purpose of whetting the appetites of readers hoping to luxuriate in tales of foreign deviance and sexual degeneracy, while simultaneously establishing a clear-cut and safe distance between the reader’s sane world and the lands of wanton decadence expounded on the pages.

Thus, the seemingly illogical pattern of male travel writers reporting on female behavior that they could not possibly have wit-nessed can be better understood within the historical context of their writings. The accounts of female bathhouse behavior fit into a larger narrative being crafted of another land: an irrational place where the contradictory values of orthodoxy and deviancy, repression and rampant sex, sexual frustration and lust, modesty and exposure, all held sway. These contradictions all fed into a crude construction of

47. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book (London, 1671), 45.48. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, 7.


the East as amoral, inferior, and uncivilized—an image which was then contrasted with western society to justify its internal norms, religious beliefs, and political aspirations.

Desexualizing the Hammam: The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley MontaguIn 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu traveled to the Levant with her husband Edward Wortley Montagu, the newly appointed Brit-ish Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of Turkey. Though most widely known for pioneering the smallpox inoculation in the East, Montagu was also well regarded for her writing—both poetry and prose. Montagu’s letters from her peregrination to Turkey have been of particular interest to scholars of various fields for their liter-ary value, ascetic descriptions, early feminist sensibility, and unique historical content. For the purposes of this study, Montagu’s letters constitute a vital source due to their aberrance; her reports on Turkish female bathing practices and, more broadly, on the relative freedom and agency of women in Ottoman society directly and fundamentally contradicted the reports of the earlier western travel writers.

Montagu took pride in her defiance of her predecessors, dispar-aging the “falsehood of a great part of what you find in authors” and relishing in the delegitimization of their reports:

Tis a particular pleasure to me here to read the voyages to the Levant, which are generally so far remov’d from Truth and so full of Absurditys I am very well diverted with ’em. They never fail giving you an Account of the Women, which tis certain they never saw . . . I cannot forbear admiring either the exemplary discretion or extreme Stupidity of all the writers that have given accounts of ’em.49

Montagu’s contradictory proclivity extends to her description of the female hammams. She begins her discussion of the bathhouses by pointedly discrediting the males’ accounts of bathhouse behavior, reiterating that the men could not access the bathhouses since “Tis

49. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W--y M--e: Written During her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, 1 (London, 1717), 405; 368.


no less than Death for a Man to be found in one of these places,” and thus relegating their bathhouse reports to the realm of the imagination.50 By accentuating her own gendered identity, Montagu asserted her superior credibility over the normative masculine voice on the subject.51

After establishing the unprecedented integrity of her own reports, Montagu narrated her own experience within the hammam. Only after setting the scene and reviewing the bathing process, did Montagu’s depiction make the controversial contention that debunked the era’s predominant homoerotic bathhouse discourse: the women were, “in plain English, stark naked, without any Beauty or deffect conceal’d yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest Gesture amongst ’em. They Walk’d and mov’d with the same majestic Grace which Milton describes of our General Mother.” (emphasis mine)52 The female Turks, in Montagu’s eyes, wore their nudity virtuously and gracefully. Despite their complete bodily exposure, their humility and dignity, rather than their sexuality, were their salient traits. No impropriety or deviance took place within the hallowed walls of the bathhouse “and the Turkish Ladys don’t commit one sin the less for not being Christians.”53 Montagu went on to claim that the bathhouse served a social, rather than erotic, function and that the all-female domain paralleled the male Turk’s coffee house—a communal space that fostered a cultured, dynamic, and bonded society. Noting that slaves and aristocratic women bathed side by side, Montagu argued that within the hammam, markings of rank, like clothing, were stripped off—framing the bathhouse as a sort

50. Ibid., 315.51. Aravamudan, Lady Wortley Montagu in the Hammam, 72.52. Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable, 313.53. This assertion is in direct contrast to Pope’s aforementioned teasing

insinuations in his letter to Montagu, where he warned that her close proximity to hedonistic Turkish women might strip her of her own Christian virtue. Though it is impossible to know whether Montagu wrote this comment specifically with Pope’s allegation in mind, it is fair to surmise that she consciously structured her argument to expressly combat such attitudes (and perhaps employed similar language and tropes to make her contradictory stance more overt); Ibid., 327.


of enlightened and classless Eden where women were unbound from conventional societal constraints.54

Through her remarks, Montagu achieved the difficult task of assigning a fresh significance to the bathhouse, in the process defying the expectations and discrediting the erotic fantasies of western readers who were conditioned to perceive of the Orient as inherently sexual. As Srinivas Aravamudan, a scholar of Enlightenment Orientalism, explained, in “squelching the specter of lesbian eroticism,” Montagu articulated a central paradox: “aristocratic Turkish Muslim women [were] naked but not immodest, free but not licentious, languid but not unproductive.”55 According to Montagu, while the Ottoman woman allowed herself to indulge in her body and senses within the bathes, she still maintained the feminine characteristics of modesty and chastity,

54. Social inequality appeared as a broader theme in a number of Montagu’s writings, particularly in relation to gender. In reference to Ottoman Empire, she approvingly notes how social mechanisms such as the hammam or the hijab (veil) functioned to erase class differences by shielding women from outside society, which was rife with gender/class divisions and oppression. According to Montagu, within these protected spheres, women—with their natural “superior morality”—could rise above class distinctions and oppressive social constraints. Although this rhetoric would paint Montagu as an advocate of class equality, she staunchly defends the institution of Turkish slavery, deeming it “no worse than Servitude all over the world”—servitude which she tacitly accepts as an institutionalized part of the natural hierarchical nature of society. Though she never records having spoken with a Turkish slave, she insists that they are “gently treated” and, in light of her claims about the freeing characteristics of the veil and hammam, perhaps able to achieve more respite from their class status than their western equivalents. Montagu does not explicitly reference class inequality in her writings from outside of the Levant, however she is very aware of her own status as an aristocratic woman. Her musings on gender and society as a whole are entirely reflective of her own elite worldview and are consumed primarily with aristocratic concerns. Thus, although Montagu’s prose sometimes seems to endorse mechanisms which allow for a classless, egalitarian existence, this view seems to hold exclusively within these contained realms. In broader Oriental society and in her own British culture, Montagu appears to be quite untroubled, and even abetting, of aristocratic privilege and class subjugation; Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable, 368; Lowenthal, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 10–11; 94; 116; 142; Secor, Orientalism, gender, and class, 391.

55. Aravamudan, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam, 81.


making her a particularly civilized and liberated breed.56 Ironically, as discussed above, it was precisely this guarded characteristic of the bathhouse that aroused the suspicions and assumptions of the male writers; they presumed that when collectively left unsupervised, Ottoman women would dissolve into animalistic, homoerotic sex fiends, whereas she asserted that female isolation allowed women to freely embody their natural feminine sensuality, dignity, and morality in a respectable, genteel manner.

A closer consideration of Montagu’s account reveals that the image of the corporeally liberated, yet desexualized, female Turk directly played into her larger argument about the sovereignty and freedom of Levantine females. Montagu asserted elsewhere in her letters that Turkish women were “freer than any Ladys in the universe, and [were] the only Women in the world that lead a life of unintterrupted pleasure, exempt from cares, their whole time being spent in visiting, bathing, or the agreeable Amusement of spending Money and inventing new fashions.”57 Unlike the earlier “voyage-writers,” Montagu saw the Ottoman social structure as conducive to female empowerment and liberation.58 For instance, the Muslim veil was, to her, not a clear material demonstration of Oriental backwardness and subjugation, but rather an agent of freedom, as it allowed the Ottoman woman to enjoy a “perpetual Masquerade,” to go about her business in complete anonymity and modesty, and to disguise herself so “that there is no distinguishing the great Lady from her Slave.”59 Thus, the sexually segregated milieu of the hammam functioned in the same liberalizing way as the veil: shielding Turkish women from the peremptory gaze of males and providing them with a retreat from patriarchal, class-bound society.

Montagu, like her predecessors, employed a strategically constructed image of the Levantine females to draw parallels with European society. Rather than contribute to the predominant discourse of difference that distinguished the retrograde Orient from western, Christian society, Montagu argued for similarity, claiming

56. Ibid., 69.57. Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable, 328.58. Ibid., 406.59. Ibid., 328.


that the culture of the Ottomans was less different from that of Christian Europe than earlier accounts had indicated (“tis just as ‘tis with you”).60 Rhetorical sleights of hand bolstered her cultural analogy and asserted racial similarity, such as her reference to the “shineingly white” skin of the bathing women, which acutely countered the predominant construction of the dark ‘other.’61 As Lowenthal explains, the ambassadress’ claims “not only contradict earlier travelers’ reports but also function as a means of equating Turkish practices with their European counterparts: her suggestion that Islam is just a version of Western deism serves to level the difference and deflate English superiority.”62 Only once she established the comparability of Oriental and European society, could Montagu make her larger point that the very qualities of patriarchal subordination and restriction that the male writers had assigned to the Orient, were in fact more representative of their own culture.

Montagu tactfully illustrated this contention with an allegory of exposing her stays to the female bathers: “They believ’d I was so lock’d up in that machine that it was not in my own power to open it, which contribance they attributed to my Husband.”63 In contrast to the free nudity of the purportedly “enslaved” Turkish women, Montagu was imprisoned by what was essentially a chastity belt, which the female bathers assumed that her husband, not she, possessed the power to unlock.64 The Ottoman women were “natural” and unrestrained (yet a very different kind of unrestrained than they were previously deemed), making it “very easy to see they have more Liberty than we have,” and that it was the westerners, not the Ottomans, who needed to be released from their oppressive social structure.65 Thus, sheathed within Montagu’s self-declaredly unbiased and reality-bound description of the hammam is a very clear agenda: she aimed, with the same mechanisms of contrast that were employed by her predecessors, to project the trope of oriental female bathhouse conduct onto the state of western society.

60. Ibid., 328.61. Ibid., 313; Secor, Orientalism, Gender, and Class, 391.62. Lowenthal, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 81.63. Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable, 314.64. Lowenthal, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 101.65. Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable, 113.


Although Montagu persistently maintained that Levantine females enjoyed the benefits of a freer, more enlightened existence, her conceptions of what comprised this state of liberation were slightly contradictory, particularly to the modern reader cognizant of contemporary feminist discourse. Though regarded in her day as a harbinger of feminism, Montagu’s views of gender and freedom were far less contingent on a state of equality than those of modern day feminists. While Montagu, in earlier and subsequent texts, advocated fiercely for women’s right to education and to egalitarian marriage, she did not, however, aspire for female equality nor did she threaten to invade the public domain of men: “I do not complain of men for having engross’d the Government. In excluding us from all degrees of power, the preserve us from many Fatigues, many Dangers, and perhaps many Crimes.” In this realm, she was “very well satisfy’d with the state of Subjection we are plac’d in.”66 To Montagu, the utmost marker of female “freedom” was the ability to evade patriarchal scrutiny and to remain concealed and hidden, in a “natural” and unfettered state.

The gender construction that Montagu seemed to condone did not challenge the era’s ascribed female qualities of virtue, humility and passivity, nor did it regard the absence of women in the public sphere as an issue. Rather, Montagu advocated for the enhancement of these conditions, celebrating the institution of the hammam for facilitating female invisibility and urging for the creation of similar opportunities for female privacy in the West. Montagu’s equation of female empowerment with private virtue was consistent with the West’s dominant ideas regarding women’s role in public society during this period. At the time, British and French women’s movements were in the process of shifting their political objectives from “female inclusion to exclusion.”67 As Montagu scholar Cynthia Lowenthal explains, “Women’s public participation had lost its late-seventeenth-century connotation of ‘virtuous visibility,’” and western society “came increasingly to see female participation, female visibility, as equivalent to the obscene,

66. Ibid., 44; 385; 393.67. Lowenthal, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 131.


a form of corruption.”68 A woman’s virtue was defined primarily through her willingness to disappear amiably into the private realm. Therefore, although Montagu fancied herself somewhat of a rebel and subversive figure—and functioned as such by deconstructing several normative concepts and exoticizing tropes set by her predecessors—her ultimate argument for female empowerment was less of an insurgent objective than one might initially perceive; her perception of what constituted female freedom was actually quite aligned with the dominant female narrative of concealment and chastity.69

Though Montagu, given her eyewitness status, was undeniably a more credible source than her travel forerunners, the validity of her reports was still subject to question. The early nineteenth century Turkophile and writer Julia Pardoe—one of Montagu’s most loyal disciples—presented a differing account, confiding that, “I should be unjust did I not declare that I witnessed none of the unnecessary and unwanton exposure described by Lady M. W. Montagu.”70 Later female travel writers who entered the hammam universally reported, like Pardoe, that the Ottoman women were not bare-skinned, but covered with linen-wrappers.71 While it is fairly certain that Montagu did visit the hammam, one cannot conclusively ascertain whether or not she altered the story

68. During the seventeenth-century, according to Lowenthal, it was more accepted and even encouraged for women to wield political power (although admittedly their influence was often linked to their sexuality). However beginning in the eighteenth-century, aristocratic women came to be respected only if they agreed to be excluded from the public sphere (deemed a male domain), and could be regarded as chaste only if they conceded to have no public authority. “Virtuous visibility” is a term coined by Mary Astell, an English feminist writer and a friend of Lady Montagu, in reference to the seventeenth-century phenomena of women in the public sphere garnering respect for their visibility; Lowenthal, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 130.

69. On a side note, Montagu interestingly seems to both endorse and contradict this predominant stance: she deems “modesty” and “invisibility” and to be the ultimate markers of female virtue and freedom, yet seems to contravene this attitude in her own conduct as a highly visible, public female figure.

70. Julia Pardoe, The City of the Sultan, and, Domestic manners of the Turks In 1836 (London: Henry Colburn, 1837), 136–7.

71. Melman, Women’s Orients, 100.


of what she witnessed there. It is possible that, as Pardoe offered, Montagu was present for a particular ceremony or event, which called for female nudity. However, due to the sheer number of reports contradicting Montagu’s claims of nakedness, it is more probable that Montagu exploited the existing narrative of naked bathing to buffer her own argument about women’s freedom. If the women had, as later accounts reported, been lightly clothed in the bathhouse, Montagu’s argument about Levantine women’s modesty would have been bolstered, but she would have ultimately been less successful at deconstructing the fallacies and crude stereotypes set by the earlier male writers. By describing the female bathers as the epitome of sexual restraint and virtue—despite their ostentatious nakedness—Montagu effectively de-eroticized the bathing women and simultaneously reinforced her own argument that if given their freedom, women—eastern or western—would conduct themselves with refinement and humility, in line with expectations of virtuous femininity.

ConclusionWhen the male travelers approached the barred bathhouse doors, they saw repression whereas Montagu fantasized freedom. When they imagined a room full of naked, foreign women, they envisioned inevitable sodomy and moral decay, whereas she conjured a portrait of self-respect and polite restraint. Mary Astell, one of the first to read the manuscript of Lady Montagu’s letters, excitedly empha-sized the fundamental difference between Montagu’s writing and that of her male counterparts:

I confess I am malicious enough to desire that the World shou’d see to how much better purpose the LADYS Travel than their LORDS, and that whilst it is surfeited with Male Travels, all in the same Tone and stuft with the same Trifles, a Lady has the skill to strike out a New Path and to embellish a worn-out Sub-ject with variety of fresh and elegant Entertainment.72

72. Astell, “a particular admirer of Lady Mary’s” was a dear friend of Montagu’s and played a significant role in convincing Montagu to publish her letters; Ruth Perry, “Two Forgotten Wits,” Antioch Review 39 (Fall 1981), 466.


Astell, though valid in her claims that Montagu’s narrative paved a “New Path” within the collection of Ottoman travel narratives, over-looked a key similarity shared by all the travelogues. Both visions—Montagu’s and her male predecessors’—reflected a strong Eurocentric tendency to consider Turkish culture in terms of European equiva-lents. The western travel narratives, whatever their takeaways, all stra-tegically capitalized on the malleability that inherently accompanied the foreignness of Ottoman society to convince their readers (at times more pointedly than others) of truths—not only about the inscrutable East, but also about the familiar conditions at home.

The question we are then left with is one of causality and inten-tionality. Did the western writers purposely construct their narra-tives of sexual decadence and moral decay to reinforce the exist-ing paradigm of Ottoman “otherness”? Were they conscious of the historical backdrop of international competition and insecurity that their works buttressed and of the sociopolitical implications of their reports? Or was the preexisting narrative of Oriental amoral-ity so ingrained within their psyche that they unwittingly skewed their accounts accordingly? Similarly, did Montagu expressly exploit and convert the existing trope of female nudity to further her own agenda? Did she partially concede to the story of female nakedness to appease her expectant readers? Or was she inadvertently influ-enced into overlooking the truth due to the internalization of the image painted by every report that had preceded her? The answers to these questions can only be conjectured, as we can never truly detangle the complex interplay between intention and execution. Most likely, both the male travelers and Montagu were jointly influ-enced by their own conscious objectives as westerners and by the inescapable context of their era and their own national, class, and gendered identities.

What we can assuredly corroborate is the West’s clear fascination with its proximal neighbor. In the sixteenth century alone, a period renowned for Europe’s arrival in the Western Hemisphere, there were more than three times as many books translated from French to English about the Ottoman Turks than about the New World.73 Evi-dently, annals of the Orient—whether required for political, religious,

73. Senlen, “Richard Knowlles’ ‘The Generall Historie of the Turkes’,” 382.


and moral self-justification; whether employed as fuel for a political argument about women in society; or whether simply desired for their tales of taboo acts and seductive exoticism—beguiled and enthralled westerners for centuries. This perennial captivation merits empiri-cal interest and demands further academic investigation, particularly through the lens of emblematic social institutions such as bathing, but with an eye to the broader historical forces that informed and shaped the interpretations of such conventions.

31

“Best Obtained in Seclusion”: Landscapes of Healing and Pleasure at Marienbad and

Baden-Baden, 1820–1880

LINNEA KUGLITSCH, MARY BALDWIN COLLEGE

Throughout the nineteenth century, British invalids and health-seekers flocked to the spas of continental Europe as medical tourists, individuals hoping to recover from the loss

of or to maintain their health. In a century characterized by piece-meal medical advances, the tradition of sending ailing cure-seekers to continental spas represented a popular form of medical treat-ment—yet, the attraction of these spas extended beyond the benefits of their curative waters. For itinerant health-seekers, the act of trav-elling to and sojourning in carefully selected regions with unfamiliar and engaging landscapes represented a form of recuperative therapy. The pleasant atmosphere marketed at spas, often purpose-built and meticulously maintained, distracted visitors from the mental and physical discomforts incited by their industrializing homeland. Traveling beyond British borders distanced invalids from the envi-ronmental conditions that physicians attributed to the collapse of their health, leading to emphasis on providing a healthy, stimulating environment that would facilitate the body and its natural recupera-tive ability—a practice known as naturopathy. This approach proved quite potent in German spas of the nineteenth century, where it gathered great support and appeared in many of the guides that advertised continental spas to British invalids between 1820 and 1880. The treatments advertised at the spas of Baden-Baden and Marienbad emphasized the treatment of their patients both in body and mind, appealing to British medical tourists with its offer to relo-cate them from the industrialized landscape of their homeland to a healthful, picturesque environment that promoted both physical and mental recuperation.

An intense preoccupation with health, both mental and physical, typified popular thought in nineteenth-century Britain. This con-cern motivated the massive investments in time and resources that


chasing one’s health to a continental spa required. These anxieties originated in the junction of the prevalence of disease and physical infirmity and the medical community’s inability to treat or manage many of these conditions. Endemic illnesses like consumption and measles affected much of the population. Consumption existed in both acute and chronic varieties, and caused over a fourth of the total deaths recorded in the British population between 1838 and 1840. Measles, in conjunction with whooping cough, killed over fifty thousand people in England and Wales alone. Alongside the physical toll in life and health wrought by less widespread sick-ness, epidemic diseases also kept the Victorian population aware of their tenuous grasp on good health.1 During the first years of the nineteenth century, physicians noted a decrease in epidemic out-breaks; however, this trend reversed in the 1820s, with outbreaks of smallpox and typhus. Sickness proved tenacious, and the period between 1830 and 1850 witnessed a particularly virulent succession of illnesses. In 1831, Asiatic cholera decimated Britain for the first time and claimed 52,000 lives. This, in turn, coincided with two outbreaks of influenza that lasted through 1833. Between 1836 and 1842, typhus, influenza, scarlet fever, and smallpox afflicted the pop-ulation, while intermittent outbreaks of typhus, typhoid, and cholera followed. Both endemic and epidemic diseases, then, represented a fearful reality for all classes of British society.2

The British Industrial movement contributed drastically to the pervasiveness and extent of this concentrated period of epidemic ill-ness. Beginning in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, a combination of technological innovation and a surge in foreign trade culminated in the expansion of commercial and industrial produc-tion. This movement, which intensified in the nineteenth century, witnessed a population shift as rural workers flooded cities and fac-tory towns to locate a new source of income as the enclosure of land eroded the arable landscape that had, until then, supported their

1. Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 4, 6–9; Maria H. Frawley, “In Search of Health: Invalids Abroad,” in Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 50–1.

2. Haley, 7. 9.

“Best Obtained in Seclusion” 33

numbers. By 1835, over half of the English population lived and worked in urban environments and factories, and this rapid popula-tion shift quickly outstripped the abilities of the basic infrastruc-ture in place.3 As a more defined class structure developed, working class families and the poor flooded into cheap and densely populated urban neighborhoods. Crippled by this population influx, many urban neighborhoods crumbled into overcrowded, disease-ridden slums without access to clean water and working sewage disposal. Certain diseases and health problems affected these areas dispro-portionately: cholera, spread through infected water sources, tore through these districts, while malnourishment and physical infir-mity born of long working hours in dangerous conditions, debility, and low pay formed a population particularly susceptible to illness. Other highly transmissible illnesses like influenza and consumption remained unaffected by social stratification, affecting the upper and middle-class citizens with the resources to define medical culture. These exploited populations, then, acted as continual incubators for disease, whence epidemics originated when the economic or social climate permitted its spread.4

The productive success of the industrial revolution generated great national pride, from which the triumphant entrepreneur rose as a national hero. Yet, commercial mass-production and the manu-facturing processes that characterized it produced health compli-cations of their own. Unregulated pollution released smoke and chemicals into the atmosphere and the water supply, and drenched the environs of factories and beyond with harmful pathogens. Even those who avoided direct contact with dangerous substances used in production faced exposure to hazards of health. Many of the prod-ucts these industries marketed carried harmful substances over the threshold and into the most prestigious of homes. Piping, paint, and other furnishings contained mineral toxins, while bottle-stoppers, food packing materials, and even popular medicines incorporated

3. Harold James Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880, (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1969), 2–3, 125, 162; Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 73.

4. Haley, 9, 12.


harmful doses of lead. Similarly, improperly stored and processed foods caused frequent cases of food poisoning. Meat from sick cat-tle, chemically-whitened bread, rancid milk and other harmful food products peppered the market. Thus, under-regulated commercial production tied to industrialization compromised public health.5

Even people who triumphed over these conditions for a time rarely maintained their constitution for long. “Few of us, after thirty, can boast of robust health,” George Henry Lewes, a scientifically-minded writer who headed a selection of popular journals, asserted. “Whoso speaks on health is sure of a large audience; if he speaks well, a grateful one.”6 For Victorian physicians, the causes of many maladies remained unknown, limiting treatment options and reduc-ing the efficacy of preventative measures. Largely uncontrolled, ill-ness ravaged the body and broke one’s health, compromising long-term bodily integrity and contributing to anxieties about preserving one’s health. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, the fathers of contem-porary bacteriology, unveiled the work that grew into germ theory in the third quarter of the decade, and their model infiltrated the

5. Perkin, 441–2; Haley, 12.6. Charles Dickens, In Memoriam. Cut from Cornhill Magazine, Feb. 1864. [36].

(London, 1864), 219, 129; Haley, 9; “Lewes, George Henry (1817–1878),” Rosemary Ashton in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, May 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16562 (accessed November 2, 2013); The events of George Henry Lewes’ life exemplifies the limitations of medical knowledge that characterized the Victorian period, as well as its repercussions. Of the five children Lewes produced with his first wife, Agnes Jarvis, two died within two years of birth. Lewes became editor of Cornhill Magazine after William Thackery died in 1862. Lewes continued with Cornhill through the end of 1864, when his health grew so precarious he was forced to resign. He spent the remaining twelve years of his life attempting to delineate the relationship between psychology and physiology, Problems of Life and Mind. During this period, two of his sons, Thornie and Bertie, predeceased their father. Thornie had contracted spinal tuberculosis in Africa, returning to Lewes and his second partner, Marian Evans, to be cared for in 1869. Thornie died in their home at twenty-five, and Bertie passed away at twenty-nine. After growing increasingly weak from enteritis, Lewes died in 1878 at his country house in Surrey. “Lewes, George Henry (1817–1878),” Rosemary Ashton in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.


greater medical community only in the 1880s.7 Before germ theory, two other models of disease dominated public and medical minds. The contagionist model, which held person-to-person contact responsible for the spread of disease, dominated medicine through the first decades of the century. However, the failure of quarantine to control the spread of cholera in mid-century epidemics discredited contagionist theory. This failure fueled the popularity of an oppos-ing model of disease, known as anticontagionism, which empha-sized the role of one’s surroundings as the root of illness. Derived from the miasmatic model of disease, which reentered medicine in the eighteenth century, the anticontagionist model posited that ill-health stemmed from inhaling noxious fumes created by the decom-position of accumulated waste, a process referred to as pythogenisis.8 These conflicting theories of contagion confused medical practice all the more.

Anticontagionism dominated medical attitudes only until conta-gionist theory regained its standing in the 1860s. However, the pop-ularity of miasmatic theory reflects a trend towards acknowledging the importance of the environment in maintaining one’s health. The concept of filth as a source of contagion held sway among medical practitioners and their patients even as germ theory emerged in the 1880s. Championed by Edwin Chadwick, who connected Britain’s high mortality and disease rates with poor sanitary conditions in his noted work of 1842, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labour-ing Population of Great Britain, the public health movement sought to reduce the dangers attributed to the accumulation of refuse in city streets. Putrid materials, from “organic matter . . . animal refuse [and] human remains” made up the rubbish according to an article in The Illustrated Magazine of Art from 1854.9 All classes of people—even

7. Karl E. Wood, Health and Hazard: Spa Culture and the Social History of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 93.

8. H. Ten. Have, Gerrit K. Kimsma, and Stuart F. Spicker, The Growth of Medical Knowledge (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 26–8; Allen, 8, 10; Haley, 10.

9. Haley, 10; “Chadwick, Sir Edwin (1800–1890),” Peter Mandler in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008,


those who avoided working-class neighborhoods, where the worst of the grime accumulated—then, held some stake in the burgeoning public health movement. Yet, limited advances in medical treatment and the visibility of filth drew cities, factory towns, and other indus-trial settlements into association with ill-health. They became places where population growth outpaced the ability of local infrastructure, drowning city-dwellers in their own waste.10

Just as the environmental conditions tied to industrialization could affect physical health, the chaos of industrial life presented new mental stresses, leading the state of the mind to join the body as a source of medical concern. As the century advanced, the Victorian definition of health came to revolve around the physiological unity of the mind and the body. Healthy function relied on the physical and mental components of the body to work in tandem. When act-ing together, they allowed one to pursue creative and productive ends in a state of comfort; however, when the mind or body conflicted, productive capacity and comfort suffered and one became an invalid. Among a population plagued by invalidism but indebted to produc-tivity, the act of overcoming ill-health gained a positive and admi-rable association.11 The pursuit of health adopted a constructive tone; actively seeking treatment proved preferable to inactive alternatives like enforced convalescence. Because the health of the mind and body were intertwined, treating one aspect meant impacting the other. 12

Much like physical infirmity, Victorian physicians typically cited industrialization as the source of many mental afflictions. Among the middle and upper classes, the complaint of nerves—which physicians attributed to the stresses, anxieties, and instances of overwork brought on by the commercial changes of the industrial revolution—proved especially prevalent. Physicians and patients alike believed that urban life fostered mental complaints and, sub-sequently, weakened bodily health. Spencer Thomas, a medical doctor and author of a guide to British spas entitled Health Resorts

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5013 (accessed November 16, 2013); “Health of Towns,” The Illustrated Magazine of Art, 1854, 286, accessed October 2, 2013, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20538497.

10. Have et al., 29; Allen, 9. 11. Haley, 20–1, 35.12. Haley, 256.


of Britain and How to Profit by Them, described the disheartening effects of city life on the constitution. The chaos of the indus-trial lifestyle fatigued individuals, resulting in “sundry [thoughts] . . . associated with every-day scenes and every-day business; [not] wholesome ideas, or pleasant fancies, [but ones which] cloud [one’s] brows, disturb [one’s] nights, and spoil [one’s] digestion.”13 These symptoms often peaked in mental illness—most notably, neurasthenia, a general complaint characterized by insomnia and an agitated nervous state. This ailment proved especially preva-lent within the crowded confines of the city.14 James Johnson, a physician and surgeon, lived through and witnessed the progress of industrialization from its beginnings in the late eighteenth cen-tury. In a guide to a variety of naturalistic health treatments that he published in 1831, Johnson became the first to articulate the ills of modern life across Britain as a sort of mental and physical chafing that could rapidly devolve into an invalid state:15

[There exists a] condition or state of body and mind, interme-diate between that of sickness and health, but much nearer the former than the latter . . . daily and hourly felt by tens of thou-sands in this metropolis, and throughout the empire . . . It is that wear and tear of the living machine, mental and corporeal, which results from over-strenuous labour or exertion of the intellectual faculties, rather than of the corporeal powers, conducted in anxi-ety of mind and in bad air.16

13. Spencer Thomson, Health Resorts of Britain and How to Profit by Them (London: Ward & Lock, 1860), 4, accessed September 21, 2013, Googlebook.

14. Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 124; Eitan Bar-Yosef, “The ‘Deaf Traveller,’ the ‘Blind Traveller,’ and Constructions of Disability in Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing,” Victorian Review 35, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 121.

15. Haley, 21–2; Wood, 73; Triendl-Zadoff, 73; Frawley, 41.16. James Johnson, Change of Air, Or, The Philosophy of Travelling: Being Autumnal

Excursions through France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and Belgium: With Observations and Reflections on the Moral, Physical, and Medicinal Influence of Travelling-exercise, Change of Scene, Foreign Skies, and Voluntary Expatriation: To Which Is Prefixed, Wear and Tear of Modern Babylon (New-York: Samuel Wood and Sons, 1831), 2, accessed October 26, 2013, Archive.org.


Johnson’s notion of “wear-and-tear” gained rapid recognition within the medical community.17 He compared the new, commercialized state of Britain to “a monstrous animal” with sensory connections spread across the world, each so sensitive that “in the most quiet and domestic circles of life . . . any strong emotion of the mind, will cause the heart to palpitate, the muscles to tremble, the digestive organs to suspend their functions, and the blood to rush in vague and irregular currents through the living machine.”18 Even as Johnson defined the fatiguing elements of high civilization, he noted with pride their origin in the British work ethic, stating that this source of injury also made “[their] fields better cultivated . . . [their] cottons and . . . cutlery better manufactured . . . [their] machinery more effective . . . [their] merchants more rich, and . . . [their] taxes more heavy than in France or Italy.”19 Thus, the problems of industrial life tied into its productive capacity. Removing the causes of ill-health would harm national productivity, leaving individual treatment of medical condi-tions attributed to the industrial landscape as the only viable option.

With their health visibly threatened in the social and environ-mental conditions created and exacerbated by the industrial revolu-tion, the Victorians dedicated great attention and many resources to the maintenance of their physical and mental well-being. Upper and middle class Victorians shaped the image of invalidism and medical care in particular. As the century progressed, these groups challenged the treatments available to them, resisting the discomfort and inadequacy of cures—as Spencer Thomson noted in his medi-cal guide, “physic, generally, is not pleasant.”20 Suspicion regarding the contents of specifics—substances said to alleviate particular ill-nesses and symptoms—sold in apothecaries, the panaceas peddled in the street, and even the pharmaceutical treatments prescribed by doctors reached an apogee by mid-nineteenth century. Many other remedies also came into question. Homeopathy, wherein physi-cians evoked the symptoms that their patient complained of in an attempt at curing them, proved both uncomfortable for the patient

17. Johnson, 2.18. Johnson, 11–12.19. Johnson, 3. 11. 20. Thomson, iv.


and ineffective, if not actively harmful. Meanwhile lengthy periods of bed-rest chafed against Victorian sensibilities, which championed active effort and forward progress. Subsequently, a renegotiation of medical treatment characterized the heart of the nineteenth century, resulting in enthusiasm for more naturalistic styles of treatment.21

In response to the problematic nature of health care a move-ment of “anti-medical flight” emerged among the middle and upper classes, setting the tone for medical treatment across much of the nineteenth century.22 This movement emphasized the value of alter-native medicine, replacing the typical avenues of treatment and with new and often more pleasant options. Appealing to the desires of their patients, Victorian doctors invented and re-popularized a whole arsenal of treatments. Among them, the long-lived practice of taking the water at spas found new footing. Travellers to spas relied on the recuperative powers of the waters or the physical environ-ment, which allowed them, according to Thompson, “to put [other forms of medicine] quietly by for a season, and seek health in more congenial ways.”23 Compared to the more common medical treat-ments available to the Victorians, travelling to a spa provided an attractive medical alternative for invalids.

Throughout their history, which began in Britain as early as Roman occupation, spas served both as social and medical centers; yet, with the progression of the nineteenth century, many spas came emphasize the treatment and prevention of ill-health rather than the pursuit of pleasure and society. Drawing from personal expe-riences with the spa-going population, Spencer Thomson distin-guished the motives of groups of visitors who travelled to these locations. He classed visitors as “those who [betook] themselves to holiday journeyings . . . because they wish to keep illness off . . . [and] to preserve the health they have,” and those who travelled “not to keep health, but to recover it, to whom the going is less of pleasure than necessity.”24 Many of these health-seekers took the “mineral water . . . to be drank, or bathed in” for medical reasons,

21. Haley, 13. 15–6; Bar-Yosef, 141.22. Wood, 8.23. Thomson, iv.24. Frawley, 52; Thomson, 2–3.


while others never touched the waters.25 Various classes of people visited spas, then, but most attended with their health in mind.

The contents of popular spa-guides of the nineteenth century demonstrate that various attractions alongside the water cure, the practice of drinking or bathing in the natural spring or mineral waters, appealed to health-seekers. These guidebooks advertise a wealth of attractions alongside the curative waters and document the relation-ship between pleasure and medicine across the nineteenth century. Invaluable as promotional tools, spa-towns regularly sponsored their publication. The spa practitioners who contributed information to encyclopedia-style guidebooks—manuals which listed the particular strengths and chemical qualities of multiple locations for easy com-parison—often worked at the locations they described, and their accounts reflected the desire to attract visitors and currency to their chosen locations. The editors who wove together a series of accounts stood to benefit from their sales as well. Physicians collected these guides, using them as research tools to assist in making recommen-dations to their patients. Many outside of the medical community undertook similar research, whether out of curiosity or at the behest of their physician. Both types of guides described the locations they detailed in the ideal light, exhibiting an obvious bias. Even so, this glamorized picture of spa-life provides insight into the facilities, treatments, and attractions that appealed to health-seekers.26

Spa guidebooks and their promotional function referenced the growing tourist industry, which produced guides of a similar type for the swelling tourist population all throughout the nineteenth cen-tury. Both markets relied on the British tendency to identify as “a nation of travellers,” an attitude mirrored in the rise of the Murray and Baedeker guidebooks in the 1820s and 1830s.27 The popularity

25. Ibid., 2–3.26. Wood, 5. 51. 45.27. J. Murray, A Handbook for Travellers on the Continent: Being a Guide to

Holland, Belgium, Prussia, Northern Germany, and the Rhine from Holland to Switzerland (London: J. Murray, 1853), x; James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 80; James Buzard, “A Continent of Pictures: Reflections on the “Europe” of Nineteenth-Century Tourists,” PMLA, 108, no. 1 ( January 1993): 31.


of travel to continental spas made this attitude concrete, encouraged by spa guides and the medical community. Edwin Lee, who wrote on spa-towns in England, extolled the virtues of journeying to the con-tinent for treatment. An especially mobile practitioner, Lee advised health-seekers at spas both domestically and abroad. He practiced at spa-towns in Germany, Italy, and France, as well as in English loca-tions, including Brighton, Leamington, and Cheltenham.28 In his work, Lee maintained that travel abroad facilitated recovery, aiding the body in its natural recovery. He stressed that patients “[derived] as much advantage from the change of air, scene, and cessation of active pharmaceutical treatment.” Stubborn dedication to remain-ing in Britain “[prevented] English invalids from deriving as much advantage [from their treatment, while] often requiring the frequent employment of aperient medicines.”29 Clearly, then, physicians attributed substantial benefits to spa treatment and travel abroad.

The practice of sending invalids abroad originated from a British tradition with a longstanding legacy. Prior to 1815, which marked the finish of the Napoleonic Wars and the conclusion of peace with France, the continent had remained closed to British travelers. Its reopening, however, reawakened a dormant tradition of continental tourism. As British tourists flocked to the continent the practice of picturesque tourism—a hobby already popularized by domestic guidebooks—gained footing abroad. As early as the late eighteenth century, the picturesque aesthetic developed in reaction to industri-alization, which had reduced the amount of contact people had with nature. This separation increased Victorian affection for nature, feeding into the Romantic movement of art and literature of which the picturesque was a part. Tourists of the picturesque found pleasure in the pursuit and scrutiny of attractive scenery, typically pastoral or natural landscapes. Many of these scenes referenced the nostalgia and the passage of time, featuring scenes of ruin, antiquity, and pas-toral ideals. These elements often found their way into landscaped

28. Lee, Edwin (d. 1870),” James Bradley in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16279 (accessed November 3, 2013).

29. Lee, Edwin, The Mineral Springs of England, and Their Curative Efficacy: With Remarks on Bathing, and on Artificial Mineral Water (London: Whittaker, 1840), 9–10, accessed September 21, 2013, Googlebook.


gardens, designed to hide visual elements of interest along a walk and evoke curiosity and wonder in passers-by. William Gilpin, one of the foremost figures in the early picturesque movement, asserted that the roots of the picturesque aesthetic existed in simplicity and variety. Picturesque tourists searched out these views for pleasure, which Gilpin asserted they found in.”..pursuit of [their] object—the expectation of new scenes continually opening, and arising to [their] view . . . .the love of novelty is the foundation of this pleasure.”30 The essence of the picturesque, Gilpin argued, rested in feeling rather than sight, requiring one to experience the scenery directly. This cemented the pursuit of the picturesque as a pastime inseparable from travel and tourism. Second-hand experience of scenery diluted its emotional value, since, according to Gilpin, “works of art affect [the viewer] coolly, and allow the eye to criticize at leisure.”31 To gain the full benefit of the landscape, then, one had to travel; art, and later, photography, could not duplicate the experience.

Bolstered by the continental tourist industry, medical (or health) tourism became a common avenue of treatment. The need to seek medical treatment and recover or preserve the state of their health distinguished medical tourism from picturesque and other recre-ational varieties. Even so, one’s status as a health tourist did not preclude the pleasantries of travel; in fact, many physicians felt the recovery of health was best effected in a pleasant environment, rife with the natural beauty and opportunities for mild recreation. These conditions allowed a troubled or pained mind to direct its atten-tion away from its suffering and stop impeding the physical healing

30. William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel and on Sketching Landscape: To Which Is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting (London: Strand, 1792), 47–50, accessed October 8, 2013; “Gilpin, William (1724–1804),” Malcolm Andrews in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, , http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10762 (accessed November 6, 2013).

31. Phyllis M. Hembry, Leonard W. Cowie, and Evelyn E. Cowie, British Spas from 1815 to the Present: A Social History (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 1; Andrews, 39–40, 50; Birmingham, 85; Frawley, 120; Gilpin, 47–8. Carl Woodring, Nature into Art: Cultural Transformations in Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 43; Gilpin, 50.


process. This approach corresponded closely with the concept of naturopathy, a school of medicine that emphasized the recuperative ability of the human body. Naturopathy promoted creating the ideal circumstances for recovery and held a central position in Victorian medicine.32 Yet, in the wake of industrialization, precious little of the natural landscape remained accessible to the greater population. Accordingly, medical practitioners of this school prescribed medi-cal tours abroad with great regularity and consistency, in hopes of catalyzing the healing process at both the physical and mental level. The logic behind sending an invalid patient away to heal originated in the desire to remove them from the conditions that contributed to their deterioration—a practice often known as seeking a change of scene.33 By 1846, according to Sir James Clark, an esteemed British physician and surgeon who explored the effect of climate and loca-tion on disease during his medical training in Edinburgh, “inhabit-ants of [Britain] and more especially of [London were] now becom-ing fully sensible of its value.”34 Thus, medical tourism represented a prominent and choice treatment for those who could spare the time and resources it required.

Mitigating the harmful influence of the industrial landscape represented a common concern for physicians and their patients. Occupational overwork, social stresses, unhealthy conditions, and misasmatic air corrupted the cities and factory towns, causing debil-ity and illness while effectively preventing the recovery of health. Physicians of the naturopathic field promoted the physical removal of the ill from these conditions.35 A shift as simple as relocating from the city to the countryside often created a “marked improve-ment in the health . . . and the great amelioration, and even cure, of

32. Bar-Yosef, 123–4; Oppenheim, 124. 33. Bar-Yosef, 124.34. James Clark, The Sanative Influence of Climate., 4th ed. (London: Murray,

1846), 2, accessed October 26, 2013, Archive.org; “Clark, Sir James, first baronet (1788–1870),” R. A. L. Agnew in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, May 2009, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5463 (accessed November 6, 2013).

35. Bar-Yosef, 124; Oppenheim, 124.


various diseases,” according to Clark.36 Yet, like many medical prac-titioners, Clark encouraged the ailing to travel even further beyond British borders. Travel to the spas of the continent possessed a num-ber of salubrious advantages for invalids, and spa guides like Clark’s held that they better cured a wide range of complaints. Clark simi-larly suggested that through “change of situation” these complaints “[were] often benefited, and not unfrequently cured, after having long resisted medical treatment [by] change of situation; or [were then] found to yield . . . to remedies which previously made little or no impression upon them.37 Thus, while domestic travel benefited invalids, travel abroad was regarded as more potent.

Alongside removal from the dangerously enclosed and miasmatic environment of British settlements, health-seekers benefited from travel to the continent in other ways. The mental re-innervation that travel evoked in medical tourists represented a powerful force in their recovery on every level—physicians hoped to engage their patients with new surroundings. Travel abroad exposed the ailing to new scenery, cultures, and people, while the act itself proved novel. Physicians felt such an excursion into the unfamiliar and foreign environment prompted recovery by momentarily dismissing worry and stress. Like many other physicians, Clark emphasized the role of distraction in recovery, referencing the increasing recognition of the complementary nature of mental and physical health: “New scenes and objects of interest [experienced while abroad] exert a direct and beneficial influence also on the mind . . . assisted, in an indirect man-ner, by the necessary abstraction of the invalid from many causes of care and anxiety.”38 Medical travel relied on the power of distraction attributed to travel and new scenes, which were believed to renew the intellect and, thus, facilitate physical recovery.

Even though the increased efficacy of the continental health regime owed much to the influence of physical distance and travel, more played into the healing process. Clark advised in his manual on medical travel and spa-going that, “neither travelling nor cli-mate, nor their combined influence, will produce much permanent

36. Clark, 2. 37. Ibid., 2.38. Clark, 10.


benefit, unless aided by proper regimen.”39 According to Johnson, this regimen involved the “change of scene and air, combined with almost uninterrupted exercise.”40 Many medical practitioners rec-ommended physical engagement as an aid to recuperation, and the infrastructure that characterized many spas reflected this attitude. The use of walking as a medical tool predated the popular explo-sion of sportsmanship in Britain, and proved especially beneficial for cases of nerves and depression. Physicians at spas recommended mild outdoor exertion on a daily basis. Walking paths, promenades, and gardens offered safe and pleasant locations to undertake gentle exercise. Clark identified the physiological benefits of undertaking a mild regimen of exercise:41

exercise . . . gives tone to the nervous system, improves the gen-eral health, and relieves the affected organs . . . [by] promoting and maintaining . . . circulation; the constitution, thus invigo-rated, may be enabled to overcome a disease under which it would have sunk in less favorable circumstances.42

Riding, fishing, and similar activities also proved popular among both general and medical tourists. The medical community found these activities as useful in preventing boredom, which many phy-sicians like James Johnson felt slowed patients’ recovery. To avoid tedium, a union between entertainment and treatment developed at spas. The natural landscape provided the perfect channel to dis-tract invalids, curbing their worries while promoting the mild physi-cal regimen prescribed by spa physicians. Consequently, spa-towns embraced the growing tradition of picturesque tourism, developing their landscapes and infrastructure to encourage exercise in care-fully curated visual environments accented with elements of the picturesque. Viewing picturesque scenery represented an intellec-tual recreation—a perspective exemplified by a movement to create artificial gardens and parks embodying the picturesque aesthetic.43

39. Ibid., 9. 40. Johnson, 22.41. Wood, 28–31. 33.42. Clark, 9.43. Andrews, 40.


These landscapes aimed to induce curiosity and emotion in those that experienced them, drawing their visitors through a succession of scenes without revealing them at the outset of the walk. The sen-sations evoked by picturesque imagery mirrored the distraction and suspension of thought that physicians sought in hopes of dismissing any worries impeding the healing process. It induced delight and suspended thought, according to Gilpin, so that “. . . when some grand scene . . . strikes us beyond the power of thought . . . every mental operation is suspended.”44 Thus, the exploration of the pic-turesque provided the perfect occupation for visiting invalids, facili-tating their recovery by distracting them from worry and discomfort with pleasant scenery in a healthy environment while drawing them into a regimen of mild exercise.

Gifted with visually-stunning surroundings, Bohemia’s Marien-bad and Germany’s Baden-Baden—two spa-towns tucked into the hilly landscape of the continent (see Appendix)—arose at the height of the romantic movement and exemplified the role of the spa as a location of healing, providing them with the aesthetic neces-sary to exploit their landscapes as a recuperative aid. Baden-Baden appeared in the early part of the nineteenth century, but by 1853, a visiting population of English travelers had adopted the location, so that according to a Murray guide, “[the] place assumes the appear-ance of a settlement of our countrymen.”45 Under the direction of Margrave Karl Friedrich of Baden, the district gained a Bäderkomis-sion, a group charged with developing and promoting the spa-town, holding full authority over all issues of spa policy and development. Following its establishment in 1805, the physical development of the spa infrastructure began immediately. By the time structural improvements to Baden-Baden ended in 1830, the town had trans-formed into a small, hygienic city, stitched into a stunning natural landscape that physicians believed would facilitate the recovery of the invalids that sojourned there. During the prime of its develop-mental period, the Bäderkomission updated many facilities devoted to

44. Clark, 7; Woodring, 43; Andrews, 39–40; Gilpin, 47–49.45. A Handbook for Travellers on the Continent: Being a Guide to Holland, Belgium,

Prussia, Northern Germany, and the Rhine from Holland to Switzerland. (London: J. Murray, 1853), 542.


the health-care. At the opening of the spa-town a wooden structure, built in 1795, served as the central gathering place for cure-seekers and guests; its central room and symmetrical wings quickly grew insufficient, leading to a succession of temporary solutions. The con-struction of a gargantuan Conversationhaus (or conversation house, the leisure center of spa life) in 1822, fronted with a neoclassical edifice designed by Friedrich Weinbrenner, became its final form. The Trinkhalle (or pump room, where cure-takers drank spa-water twice a day) underwent similar improvements, receiving another of Weinbrenner’s shining white neoclassical facades to replace an ear-lier building from 1804. These bright buildings proved highly visible from the path-covered hills, while their architectural style reinforced the tenets of the picturesque. Their emphasis on classicism and the passage of time appealed in particular to health-seekers of British nationality, a people that held great pride in what they perceived as their shared ancestry with the Romans.46

Tucked into the valley of the Oos, Baden-Baden and its envi-rons experienced minimal development prior to the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Flanked by rolling hills with a lush, dark covering of pines and bisected by the Rhine, the natural beauty that

46. Weinbrenner, born in Karlsruhe—a German town not far from Baden-Baden—travelled to Berlin to further his architectural vocation just as romantic neoclassicism began to overlay the palladian, baroque, and rococo styles that characterized the seventeenth century. The five years he spent studying in Italy gave him great insight into neoclassical architecture, which his work in Baden-Baden exemplifies. His work at Baden-Baden referenced the classical heritage of the area, which the spa town exploited—as early as 1804, the Trinkhalle (pump room) displayed Roman relics, while Temple-style buildings were erected to shelter the mineral springs. Thus, Baden-Baden drew upon its Roman roots to appeal to guests; Friedrich Weinbrenner and David Bruce; Brownlee, Friedrich Weinbrenner, Architect of Karlsruhe: A Catalogue of the Drawings in the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 4–5; Wood, 34, 32; Susan C. Anderson and Bruce H. Tabb, Water, Leisure and Culture: European Historical Perspectives (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002), 10; John Murray, Handbook for North Germany from the Baltic to the Black Forest, and the Rhine from Holland to Basle; including the Hartz, Thüringerwald, Saxon Switzerland, Rügen, the Giant Mountains, Tauhus, Odenwald, Elsass, and Lothringen., 9th ed. (London: John Murray, 1867), 542.


characterized Baden-Baden presented an attraction all on its own. According to the ninth edition of Murray’s Handbook for North Ger-many, these surroundings “afforded almost endless gratification in the beauty of its prospects and the number and variety of the rides and walks, cut for miles in every direction through the forests and up the surrounding hills.”47

Upwards of twenty paths allowed guests to stroll through the environs of the spa, leading them to sheltered locations away from any inkling of human habitation, “where [a man] may enjoy solitude so complete that he may fancy himself far from the haunts of men.”48 Visitors walked along these paths, or rented donkeys to carry them up the hillsides to the vistas, views, and landmarks that peppered them. Walks and paths led into the heavily forested hillsides, tempt-ing guests into motion with picturesque attractions and vistas. This complex network of twining paths extended throughout the spa-town and the surrounding forest, threading themselves through-out the landscape and leading to attractions in every direction.49 In exploring beyond the apparent borders of the spa-town, cure-takers symbolically distanced themselves even further from the developed world and its adverse physical and mental influences.50

On of the many attractions dotting the hillsides, the Alte Schloss—a ruined castle perched on the hillside over the town—proved popu-lar among British visitors, exemplifying the experience of the pic-turesque with its aesthetic and powers of amusement. Proponents of the picturesque preferred the attention-diverting effects of true ruins over fake ruins and buildings, lauding their ability to show the passage of time.51 With a lengthy history to draw its visitors, the Alte Schloss represented an ideal picturesque spectacle to persuade invalid visitors into motion and distract them from their worries. Paths ushered guests up the hillside and to the ruined castle, then wound through the ruins, granting visitors an intimate experience of the visual landscape. Multiple visual sources, from guidebooks

47. Murray, Handbook for North Germany from the Baltic to the Black Forest, 54248. Ibid., 542.49. Ground Plan of Baden-Baden and its Environs. 1875–9. In Encyclopedia

Brittanica, ed. 9 (London).50. Wood, 27.51. Trollope, 178; Woodring, 43.


to postcards, document the Alte Schloss as destination for guests at Baden-Baden. Gently framed and idealized in a picturesque style. One particular image documents the accessibility of the Alte Schloss to ambling visitors, emphasizing the picturesque details of the scen-ery; several groups of people stroll through the scene, leaning on walls, admiring the view, or chatting together along a winding path-way that winds throughout the ruins, up gentle inclines, past low walls, and through ruined doorways hemmed in by rustically curated coniferous bushes and forests that lend the scene a sense of wild-ness. A ruined archway frames the entire scene, which proves replete with interest for interested onlookers. John Ruskin, a prominent social and art critic, emphasized the prevalence of “super-induced and accidental beauty” in picturesque scenery, which he found best sought “. . . in ruin, and supposed to consist in decay.”52 The 1867 edition of the Murray Handbook for North Germany describes the old castle in a decidedly picturesque light:

The Alte Schloss was the earliest residence of the ancestors of the reigning house of Baden . . . The view which the galleries round its mouldering battlements afford is the most pleasing and exten-sive in the neighborhood of Baden. On one side are seen the dark hills of the Black Forest, luxuriantly clothed with the woods from which they get their name, contrasting with the verdure of the valleys they enclose, while the town of Baden at our feet, number-less villages, church spires, convents, and mills, clustering on the borders of winding streams, fill the foreground.53

Many travel narratives—or popular accounts produced by visitors to these locations—also attest to the importance of landscape at Baden-Baden and help contextualize the experiences of its visitors. In many such narratives, description of the paths leading into the surrounding hilly countryside and the experience of the natural landscape received great attention. Frances Trollope, writing of her travels, advised pro-spective visitors of a landscape, “sombre, wild, and grand in scenery,” in which she found it delightful “[to] wander but half a mile from the

52. Woodring, 43; John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Smith, Elder, &, 1849), 178, accessed October 6, 2013, Archive.org.

53. Murray, Handbook for North Germany from the Baltic to the Black Forest, 545.


town, and . . . be lost amid the dark valleys, that wind through the pine-covered mountains, which form the out-works of the Black Forest.”54 Trollope suffered intermittent bouts of illness throughout her later life, so Baden-Baden proved an attractive destination for her—par-ticularly after a battle with malaria shook her constitution in 1832.55 Her writings abound with excursions on the paths and roads run-ning through the countryside surrounding Baden-Baden. Visiting the Alte Schloss, Trollope wrote of the scene with the detail and emotion expected of the picturesque tourist: “[The] mere walls of [the castle] would hardly repay the labor of reaching them; but the spot on which they stand is . . . so magnificent from the immense landscape over which it hangs . . . none would shrink from the toil who were capable of performing it.”56 The beauty of the scenery sublimated Trollope’s efforts, prompting mild physical exertion in a healthy environment while busying the mind with vivid scenery—thus, creating the perfect recuperative conditions.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley—renowned author of Franken-stein, and one of the foremost figures in the Romantic Movement—also visited Baden-Baden in her later years. Troubled by a chronic, violent cough, Shelley took a medical tour of the continent in 1840

54. Frances Milton Trollope, Belgium and Western Germany in 1833; including Visits to Baden-Baden, Wiesbaden, Cassel, Hanover, the Harz Mountains, & C &c. (London: J. Murray, 1834), 176, accessed October 9, 2013.

55. Frances Trollope’s experiences exemplify the Victorian experience of health and medicine. She lost her mother at an early age, marrying Thomas Anthony Trollope at 29. Ill-health plagued her family. She lost her first of six children at birth. Her husband died of premature age, driven thence by the stress of his law practice and the condition of his son, Thomas Anthony, who had deteriorated mentally after taking the mercury-based drug, calomel, as treatment for chronic migraines. She lost three children to tuberculosis, including her youngest son, Arthur, her son Henry, and her daughter, Celia. Trollope suffered from bouts of illness until her death in 1863. Frances Eleanor. Trollope, Frances Trollope: Her Life and Literary Work from George III. to Victoria by Her Daughter-in-law Frances Eleanor Trollope. In 2 Volumes., vol. 1 (London: Bentley, 1895), 124; “Trollope, Frances (1779–1863),” Pamela Neville-Sington in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, May 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27751 (accessed November 18, 2013).

56. Trollope, 18.


with her son, Percy Florence, and several of his friends. When her illness prevented her from travelling to Italy by sea, the group went by land instead, punctuating their travels with stays at spa-towns like Baden-Baden. During her visit, Shelley availed herself of the scenery: “I could steal away . . . [and] find solitude at will on the mountain tops amidst their woody ravines.”57 While she tried the private baths offered within the spa-town, she devoted most of her attention to the forested scenery of Baden-Baden. Like many Brit-ish visitors, the scenery provided Shelley with relief from Britain’s industrialized landscape.58

Not far from Baden-Baden, the smaller and more periph-eral Bohemian spa of Marienbad accumulated a sizable British clientele by the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the most distinguished visitors of the nineteenth century, Brit-ish Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, visited Marienbad with his wife, Janet, for nearly thirty consecutive years. Janet suffered from diabetes, an untreatable condition before the development of insulin. Campbell-Bannerman also attended to relieve his chronic heart disease. Though he rarely took the mineral waters of the spa, according to a biography released in The Living Age, Campbell-Bannerman exercised and socialized alongside the other guests every morning, making use of the intricate tangle of paths that typified Marienbad. The Campbell-Bannermans’ patronage followed years of infrastruc-tural growth, both within Marienbad and beyond. An 1868 edi-tion of Baedeker’s handbook, Southern Germany and the Aus-trian Empire, estimated that over 5,000 annual visitors graced Marienbad, and by 1883 that figure had doubled. This rise in attendance coincides with the installation of a rail junction that connected Marienbad with the extant Kaiser Franz Josef rail-way in 1872. Prior to this, access to the town of Marienbad was

57. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy: In 1840, 1842 and 1843, vol. 1 (London: E. Moxon, 1844), 30, 37, accessed October 13, 2013; Shelley, 37.

58. “Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797–1851),” Betty T. Bennett in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, September 2012, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25311 (accessed November 6, 2013).


by coach, an uncomfortable means of travel for invalids already discomforted by their poor health.59

Despite this eventual linkage, Marienbad’s distance from the chaos of the industrial world served as a key marketing point. Spa-physicians touted Marienbad’s physical and mental detachment from greater civilization as a recuperative aid. The beautiful coun-tryside surrounding the spa-town buffered it from urban influences, as Victor Jagielski’s 1873 medical guide to Marienbad notes. In addition to offering a beneficial environment and mineral waters suited to “local complaints,” anemia, and nervous diseases, Jagielski claimed that “no inhabitant has . . . been attacked by cholera.”60 This apparent absence of disease cemented Marienbad’s claim to envi-ronmental health for many, but proved especially poignant for Brit-ish visitors, who lived in the wake of copious mid-century cholera epidemics. Marienbad articulated its healing role and environment, but also the value of its geographical location. A pastoral landscape that “retained the character and simplicity of country life” insulated the spa-town from the industrial world, as Jagielski reports:

Marienbad . . . is a lovely and enchanting retreat for invalids, which, like almost all the principal Spas . . . offers to suffering humanity, in a sequestered valley, a safe, certain, and prodigal

59. Ian C. Bradley, Water Music: Music Making in the Spas of Europe and North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 124;Harold Spender, “Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman,” The Living Age 258 (1908): 13; “Bannerman, Sir Henry Campbell (1836–1908),” A. J. A. Morris in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32275 (accessed November 24, 2013); Roy Hattersley, Campbell-Bannerman (London: Haus, 2006), 13; Southern Germany and Austria, including Hungary and Transylvania. Handbook for Travellers, (Leipzig: K. Baedeker, 1883), 292, accessed September 28, 2013; Apollinaris Victor. Jagielski, On Marienbad Spa, and the Diseases Curable by Its Waters and Baths. (London: Trübner, 1873), 2, accessed September 29, 2013; Mirjam Triendl-Zadoff, Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 3. 38–9.

60. Augustus Bozzi Granville, The Spas of Germany, by the Author of “St Petersburgh” [A. B. Granville]., vol. 2 (Paris: Baudry, 1839), 142, accessed October 13, 2013, Google Books;


source of relief, away from the bustle and din of cities; as if nature pointed out to us, that health is best obtained in seclusion.61

Like Baden-Baden, Marienbad gained fame as a center of healing in the early years of the nineteenth century, when most of its struc-tural foundation was laid. These developments culminated in a town surrounded by evergreen-covered hills and characterized by “mag-nificent parks, delightful pleasure walks and drives . . . interspersed among the gentle slopes and hills,” and manicured to “[cheer] the impressionable and feeling heart.”62 The land that Marienbad devel-oped upon belonged to the Teplá Monastery. The first Kurhaus (cure-house) in Marienbad opened in 1805, prompted by the work of Doctor Jan Josef Nehr, who studied the curative properties of the local mineral springs. That same year, the first paths and prom-enades were laid. Nehr publicized the effects of Marienbad’s mineral waters throughout Europe in 1813. These efforts, coupled with the attraction of the countryside and curative waters drew a wealth of British invalids to Marienbad.63

Even after the major curative buildings appeared, the town continued to develop gardens and walks to attract cure-seekers. Between 1817 and 1823, Abbot Karel Kašpar Reitenberger of the Teplá Monestary funded and oversaw a massive project to improve the immediate landscape to suit better its role as a healing landscape. Reitenberger commissioned three residents to transform the marshy landscape into an attractive recreational center for visitors. Horticul-turist Václav Skalník, architect Jirí Fischer, and builder Anton Turner collaborated under Reitenberger’s guidance. Their joint efforts pro-duced an extensive park in the center of the city, veined with paths that led past neoclassical structures, pavilions, colonnades, and per-golas—artificial structures enhancing the picturesque landscape and the visual experience of their viewers. These aesthetic scenes occu-pied guests after the ritual imbibing of cure-water. Likenesses of

61. Anderson et. al., 26; Jagielski, 6, 3.62. Jagielski, 2.63. “The History of Mariánské Lazné,” The History of Mariánské Lazné, 2013,

accessed October 21, 2013, http://www.marianskelazne.cz/en/marianske-lazne/the-history-of-marianske-lazne/a-glimpse-into-the-colourful-history-of-marianske-lazne; Jagielski, 49, 52.


Marienbad emphasized the landscape in the spa-town, contributing to its renown as the garden-spa of Bohemia. One such image depicts the tree-lined hillside just beyond the pristine, neoclassical frontage of the Kreutzbrunnen, or Cross Spring, the earliest pump room con-structed in Marienbad to distribute cure-water to guests.64 This and similar depictions infused the image of the spa with a sense of the proximity to the natural world, strengthening its appeal as a recu-perative location. Thus, the infrastructure at Marienbad encouraged physical and mental engagement with a carefully-curated, pictur-esque landscape at every opportunity.65

Beyond the spa-center, opportunities for exercise and entertain-ment abounded. The rolling, forested countryside cradled pathways which improved the curative program, as noted by an anonymous physician in the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal who lauded Marienbad for its extensive network of paths and their role as an aid in recuperation.66 Rolling hills and dark forests hemmed the spa-town and its facilities, which dissolved into the surrounding land-scape and neutralized the visual boundaries between human devel-opment and the natural world. Signs marking the hillside gradients allowed spa-physicians to prescribe exercise of a specific quality to particular patients, merging into a more manicured landscape as they converged in the spa-towns center. Picturesque additions, from pavilions to lookout towers, continued to punctuate this network of exterior paths, enticing visiting invalids into the “healthy exhalations of the surrounding forests.”67 This network of paths proved exten-sive, as documented in an 1847 map of Marienbad.68

64. Granville. “Kreutzbrunnen at Marienbad,” 1839. In The Spas of Germany, (London: H Coleberg), 280.

65. Triendl-Zadoff, 17–9; The History of Mariánské Lazné, 2013; Granville, 107; Murray, Handbook for North Germany from the Baltic to the Black Forest, 493; Woodring, 43.

66. An Eminent Physician, “The Watering Places of Germany. Marienbad (Continued),” Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal (1840–1842) 1, no. 14 ( January 2, 1841): 238, accessed November 21, 2013.

67. Jagielski, 3.68. Danzer, Eduard. “Map of Marienbad Spa in Bohemia,” 1847. In Topographie

von Marienbad (Leipzig), 247. This image illustrates the extensive pathways and the lay out of the 1847 spa at Marienbad.


Much like the gardens centered in the spa-town, the carefully-arranged hillside attractions promoted curiosity, distracting inva-lids from their worries and discomforts and drawing their interest to convince them to visit the sights in person. Vistas, landmarks, and cafes like the Bellvue and the Brettersäge peppered the hillsides. These attractions offered visitors a pleasant view of the spa-town and its neighborhood and encouraged guests to spend more time experiencing Marienbad’s landscape. Many images document the practice among health-seekers of roaming the hillsides and visiting monuments and vistas, as evidenced by many mid-century images of Marienbad, which immortalize scenic vistas and the visitors who frequented them. Jagielski articulated the picturesque elements of the landscape, noting that the “well-tended flower beds [and] neat snow-white cottages combine to form a landscape so overpower-ing with charms” that visitors “[were] thrown into a blissful ecstasy, which [banished] . . . bodily and mental ailments and troubles.”69 Many guidebooks, such as Murray’s 1867 edition of the Handbook to North Germany, listed recommended walks. For those unable to walk these distances, trips by carriage also provided visitors with a pleasant diversion.70 Thus, Marienbad paired an infrastructure dedi-cated to mild exercise and picturesque distraction with the water-cure facilities that defined it as a spa, culminating in an appealing, naturalistic environment that facilitated the recovery of health.

Travel to and treatment at the spas of continental Europe rep-resented one of the most desirable avenues of medical treatment for invalids in Victorian Britain. In the wake of industrialization and its social and environmental effects, maintaining one’s health and bodily integrity presented a great challenge. Consequently, the Victorian population devoted substantial energy and resources to this endeavor, providing the incentive for many invalids to pursue their health across the English Channel once the opportunity arose. The distance that travel placed between invalids and their homeland formed a meaningful aspect of this medical treatment. By remov-ing invalids, body and mind, from the deleterious conditions that

69. Ibid., 1–2.70. Murray, Handbook for North Germany from the Baltic to the Black Forest, 493–4;

The History of Mariánské Lazné, 2013. Triendl-Zadoff, 17–8; Jagielski, 3.


characterized the industrial landscape and the lifestyle that accom-panied it, continental spas sought to facilitate the healing process. The atmosphere created and maintained at the spas of Marien-bad and Baden-Baden, referenced in personal travel accounts and promotional guides to spa-towns, appealed to this naturopathic approach to medicine. This emphasis on the recuperative ability inherent to the human body advocated the removal of patients to a healthier environment, facilitating natural recovery processes. Many spa-towns, Marienbad and Baden-Baden among them, encouraged visiting invalids to engage in a regime of mild exercise in the sur-rounding countryside, while simultaneously distracting them from discomfort and worry by conducting them through an emotionally engaging landscape. Thus, Marienbad and Baden-Baden catered to the changing social and physical environment of the nineteenth cen-tury, exploiting and improving on the picturesque aspects of their surroundings while appealing to British health-seekers with their comparatively pleasant approach to health care.

57

From “the Pride of Baltimore City” to “a Nuisance, an Expense, and an Eyesore”: Public

Opinion of the Jones Falls after the Flood of 1868

AUNALEAH GELLES, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE

For more than 350 years, the city of Baltimore has been cen-tered around a stream known as the Jones Falls. Although the water flowing through the falls has changed in quality and the

landscape around it has completely urbanized, Baltimoreans have connected with the Jones Falls through the centuries. This rela-tionship, however, has not remained static. City residents have not always appreciated the channel that they depended upon, but it has nonetheless shaped city politics and urban development in countless ways. The Black Friday Flood of 1868 was a turning point in public opinion of the waterway through the heart of the city: what was once a prized resource became a danger of utmost concern. “Improv-ing” the Jones Falls was the topic of endless discussion among city leaders and residents in the years following the flood, well into the twentieth century.

Jones Town and Early Baltimore, 1661–1868The Jones Falls have, since Baltimore’s earliest days, been at the very heart of the city—both geographically and metaphorically.1 A Quaker named David Jones was the first resident on the north side of what was then known as Cole’s Harbor (known today as the Inner Harbor) in the 1660s, joining only a handful of other settlers in this part of Baltimore County, which had been established in 1659.2 He

1. While the stream was spelled “Jones’s” in the 17th and 18th centuries, by the 19th century the stream was usually known as “Jones’ falls.” By the 20th century, it was spelled “Jones Falls.” I will use the contemporary spelling throughout this paper.

2. H.E. Shepherd, ed., History of Baltimore, Maryland, From its Founding as a Town to the Current Year, 1729–1898 (Uniontown, PA: S.B. Nelson, 1898), 10.


gave his name to the “pacific brook” upon which he built his house as well as the settlement that sprang up around it, Jones Town.3 The junction of the Jones Falls and an old Susquehannock Indian trail that connected to Philadelphia attracted many to the area. Industri-ous residents soon discovered that the power of the Jones Falls could be harnessed to operate mills in and around the city, as Jonathan Hanson had when he built his stone mill at the corner of Holliday and Bath Streets in 1711.4 By 1726, the banks of the Jones Falls were home to a gristmill, tobacco houses, a store, and several homes.5 The falls also supplied residents with fresh drinking water. In addition to its practical purposes, inhabitants appreciated the social and aes-thetic value of the Jones Falls. “For many decades it was the pride of Baltimore city and the envy of other cities. It was famous then as a fragrant and beautiful stream. [. . .] At one time the stream was pure and undefiled and was the scene of many baptisms.”6 Baltimore novelist and Whig politician John Pendleton Kennedy recalled the Jones Falls as “a pretty rural stream that meandered through mead-ows garnished with shrubbery and filled with browsing cattle, mak-ing a pleasant landscape.”7

Throughout the early part of the 18th century, residents of Jones Town lived and worked separately from the communities of Fell’s Point and Baltimore Town. A series of expansions took place from 1745 to 1773, eventually merging the three villages under the name Baltimore Town.8 As Baltimore transformed from a sleepy town to a thriving industrial city, the area around Jones Falls became more densely populated and heavily used. The city experienced unprec-edented commercial expansion in the late 18th and early 19th

3. J. Thomas Scharf, History of Maryland from the Earliest Period to Modern Day, Volume II (Baltimore: John D. Piet, 1879), 419.

4. Clayton Colman Hall, ed., Baltimore: Its History and Its People, Volume I (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1912), 63.

5. Maryland Writers’ Project, Maryland: A Guide to the Old Line State (New York: Oxford Publishing Company, 1940), 199.

6. Wilbur Street, The history and development of Jones’ Falls in Baltimore (Publisher unlisted: 1926), 2.

7. Quoted in Henry Theodore Tuckerman, The Life of John Pendleton Kennedy (New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1871), 92.

8. Shepherd, History of Baltimore, 13.

From “the Pride of Baltimore City” to “a Nuisance, an Expense, and an Eyesore” 59

century due to three factors: the falls, the harbor, and the roads. As local farmers began to transition their land from tobacco to grains—and the demand for bread and flour exploded in Europe and the West Indies—Baltimore became a natural hub for trade. Wheat and other grains thrived in the fertile soil of the Patapsco region, and farmers could transport their crops to Baltimore’s mills using turn-pike roads from York, Reisterstown, and Frederick. Of the 50 mills that had been built within 18 miles of the city by the early 19th century, twelve were along the Jones Falls.9 The proximity of the falls to the harbor meant that the milled flour could then easily be loaded onto ships and exported abroad. With this flurry of activ-ity, Baltimore soon eclipsed Boston and Charleston to become the third largest commercial port in the United States, following New York and Philadelphia.10 The character of Jones Town had changed substantially during this period, and those who lived by the falls in the mid-19th century could barely imagine it as a quaint pasto-ral stream. Before his death in 1870, John P. Kennedy explained, “People wonder to hear that the Jones’ Falls ever rippled over the bed now laden with rows of comfortable dwellings and that cows once browsed upon a meadow that now produces steam engines, soap and candles and lager beer.”11

Another major change that coincided with Baltimore’s rapid growth was its approval by the state legislature to become a self-gov-erning municipality. Baltimore Town became the City of Baltimore in 1796 and with the new charter came a bicameral system of govern-ment. Modeled after the young nation’s constitution, the city would be governed by a two-branch legislature (city council) and an inde-pendent executive (mayor). The first branch or lower chamber of the city council would be made up of two representatives for each of the eight wards through popular elections held every year. The second branch or upper chamber, however, was made of up the city’s social and political elite. Both the second branch and the mayor would be appointed every other year by a council of electors, who themselves were selected by their ward. At this time, only “men of means” could

9. Clayton Colman Hall, Baltimore: Its History and Its People, 82.10. Hall, Baltimore: Its History and Its People, 63.11. Tuckerman, The Life of John Pendleton Kennedy, 92.


vote or hold office. Members of the first branch had to own $1,000 worth of property, while the mayor and second branch councilors were expected to own at least $2,000 of property.12 When universal white manhood suffrage was instituted in 1808, all white men earned the right to popularly elect the second branch of city council as well; the first popular election for mayor was held in 1833.13

In early 19th century Baltimore, many services—such as water, education, and fire protection—were handled privately. It wasn’t until the 1840s, with a “revolution in rising expectations” from the well-traveled middle and upper classes, that the city began providing what we would consider standard services today.14 The city’s “spotty and amateurish approach” to the municipal water supply was under intense pressure as thousands of European immigrants and rural migrants dramatically increased the city’s population in the decades leading up to the Civil War.15 It was clear that the Jones Falls could not accommodate the swelling population in its present state. Ross Winans, a prominent inventor and engineer with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, was selected to chair the city’s water commission in 1852. Winans recommended purchasing the privately-owned Bal-timore Water Company for $1.3 million and undertaking “a major expansion of its works along the Jones Falls sufficient to supply all the needs of the existing city while providing enough extra capac-ity to allow for future urban growth.”16 This plan was approved by city voters and led to the construction of an extensive system of dams and reservoirs through the next decade, including the cre-ation of Lake Roland by damming the Jones Falls seven miles north of the city. While only one out of every four homes had access to water in 1850, by 1865, almost every single dwelling and commer-cial structure had piped water and fire hydrants could be found in

12. William LeFurgy, Susan Wertheimer David and Richard Cox, “History of the Mayor and City Council,” Governing Baltimore: A Guide to the Records of the Mayor and City Council at the Baltimore City Archives (Baltimore: Baltimore City Archives and Records Management Office, 1981), 1.

13. Hall, Baltimore: Its History and Its People, 64.14. Joseph Arnold, “Growth of City Services,” 5. Unpublished manuscript. 2000.

Series I, Box 7, Folder 9. University of Maryland, Baltimore County.15. Joseph Arnold, “Growth in City Services,” 1.16. Arnold, “Growth in City Services,” 35.


every ward.17 Although the Gunpowder Falls in northern Baltimore County would soon supplement the municipal water supply, the Jones Falls remained hugely valuable to city residents until the Civil War as a water source. The falls also served as a landmark guiding the geography of Baltimore: the Jones Falls was the boundary divid-ing the eastern and western portions of the city until 1886, when the designation moved to Charles Street.18 The Jones Falls was central to life in Baltimore from the late 17th century through the mid-19th century. The falls attracted early settlers to the area, powered the mills that made the city into a bustling port of industry, and continued to serve an always increasing number of Baltimoreans as a source of water for washing, drinking and fire protection. All of this would change with the Black Friday Flood of 1868.

The Black Friday Flood of 1868Although the Jones Falls had flooded twice in the early 19th cen-tury—memorably in 1817 and even more dramatically in 1837—it was not until the Black Friday Flood of 1868 that city leaders and residents alike became obsessed with controlling the falls. For over five years after the flood, discussion in the streets, at city hall, and in the newspapers centered around “improving” the Jones Falls. City leaders grappled with an onslaught of opinions on the matter, from both engineers and amateurs. Although an official plan was adopted in 1870, it was not popularly received or easily funded, and it was eventually abandoned in 1874. Major construction around the falls didn’t take place until another flood hit the city in 1904, ushering in the era of paving over the falls to build a highway.

Baltimore began experiencing trouble with flooding in the early 19th century. On August 9, 1817, the Jones Falls first exhibited its destructive power “so serious and extensive as to create well-founded alarm for the future.”19 Well-known civil engineer and architect Benjamin H. Latrobe was commissioned to create a strategy for

17. Arnold, “Growth in City Services,” 37.18. Wilbur Street, The history and development of Jones’ Falls in Baltimore, 1.19. Report of the Board of engineers upon changing the course of Jones’ Falls, with

a view to prevent inundations, to the mayor and City council of Baltimore (Baltimore: City Council Joint Committee on Jones’ Falls, 1868), 4.


preventing future flood damage. He suggested diverting the Jones Falls into Herring Run, several miles east, thus removing it from the city entirely. The expense was simply too great to be carried out and the plan was never implemented. Yet another “great and disastrous” inundation hit the city on June 17, 1837, with the Jones Falls rising 20 feet at Centre Street. Stone bridges at Baltimore and Pratt Street were destroyed, and 17 individuals perished.20 In light of this calam-ity, Isaac Ridgeway Trimble and Ross Winans, both prominent engineers with ties to the B & O Railroad, suggested straightening the falls at Centre Street. Again, no action was taken to put this plan into motion.21 Between 1817 and 1868, partial floods caused minor damage to property owners every three to five years, but pub-lic attention on the subject generally waned.

On the morning of July 24, 1868, a heavy summer storm began pounding the city with rain and thunder. Although inconvenient for commuters walking to work, this sort of rain was not uncommon. When a south wind began to push an unusually high tide from the harbor in the direction of the Jones Falls, however, crisis ensued. The two bodies of water converged on the city and the raging freshet “washed away telegraph poles and smashed horse-drawn cars against buildings as terrified passengers and horses scrambled for their lives. Dislodged houses and bridges swirled toward the harbor, and the city’s water supply and gas system were rendered useless.”22 Baltimore’s streets were bombarded with all types of unimaginable wreckage. “Trees, fences, portions of houses, wagons, timber, barrels, household furniture, and various other sorts of debris were swept through the streets and piled up against the buildings in the path of the flood.”23 The infrastructural damage wasn’t the only unbelievable part of the deluge—some citizens’ behavior was as well. According to an article in the Sunday Sun magazine in 1957, “men and women reveled in semi-nudity, catching the waifs and strays borne down by the tide. Barrels of flour and whiskey, articles of household furniture

20. Ibid., 5.21. Sherry Olson, Baltimore: The Building of an American City (Baltimore: The

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 133.22. Fred Rasmussen, “Summer storm rained disaster on the city Flood,” Baltimore

Sun, May 4, 1997.23. Hall, Baltimore: Its History and Its People, 223.


and all other imaginable stuff was captured.”24 Clearly, memories of the mighty flood remained strong for many city residents for decades after. In 1937, 94-year-old Josephine McPhail recalled: “I can still see in my mind’s eye the color of that raging torrent, the mad rush of debris and the rats. Above all, the rats.”25

The damage was extensive: 50 individuals were killed, 2,000 homes were damaged, and 4,000 were put out of work by the disas-ter; seven of the bridges spanning the Jones Falls—that is, all but the Eager Street bridge—were destroyed.26 The following days presented quite a challenge to cleanliness as well as public health: “downtown Baltimore was littered with debris, and mud was, in places, 6 to 8 inches deep. An awful stench arose over the city from the carcasses of dead animals that baked in the July heat. There was soon an out-break of typhoid fever.”27 In one day, the Jones Falls had transformed from a great asset to a huge liability—permanently altering Balti-moreans’ relationship with the stream the city had been built upon.

Improving the Jones Falls, 1868–1874Immediately following the flood, the city council formed a joint spe-cial committee on the Jones Falls and appointed a commission to assess the value of the property in the area and develop a plan to improve the falls. The commissioners selected were all members of the city’s elite, each well-respected engineers who had been or were currently employed by the B & O Railroad: Isaac Ridgeway Trim-ble, John H. Tegmeyer, and Benjamin H. Latrobe, Jr.28 By fall of 1869, Tegmeyer had been replaced by former police marshal George

24. Quoted in Rasmussen, “Summer storm rained disaster on the city Flood,” Baltimore Sun, May 4, 1997.

25. Ibid.26. Report of the Board of engineers upon changing the course of Jones’ Falls, with

a view to prevent inundations, to the mayor and City council of Baltimore (Baltimore: City Council Joint Committee on Jones’ Falls, 1868), 1.

27. Rasmussen, “Summer storm rained disaster on the city Flood,” Baltimore Sun, May 4, 1997.

28. James Dilts, The Great Road: The Building of the Baltimore and Ohio, the Nation’s First Railroad, 1828–1853 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993): 79–80.


P. Kane.29 Later in the summer of 1868, the city council voted to provide $50,000 for the relief of the 8,083 “persons of small means” whose homes were damaged or destroyed.30 This short-term hand-out, however, did not quell the concerns of Jones Falls residents. “The people who live along the Jones’s falls do not spend a night in peace and quietude, but live in constant fear of another flood. Their lives, property and fortunes were all suspended upon a storm.”31 Despite their devastating losses, a group of property owners and residents formed the Association for the Improvement of Jones’s Falls to dis-cuss the future of the area and agreed that the falls “can be made an avenue of wealth and ornament, instead of, as now, one of disaster and unsightliness.”32 The association called upon Henry Tyson, “one of our most esteemed citizens and competent engineers,”33 also affili-ated with the B & O Railroad and a long-time rival of Ross Winans, to create a plan for preventing future floods. The Tyson Plan called for widening and straightening the channel and enclosing it with water-tight masonry. He also suggested constructing wide avenues on either side of the falls and placing sewers beneath them. Finally, he recommended building 12 new iron bridges. The estimated cost of the Tyson Plan would be $3,250,000 (or $2,400,000 without the avenues) with an 18-month completion date.34

The Tyson Plan was extensive, with various maps and charts illustrating details of the construction, but it was not the only option. John D. Stewart, Esq. published his own report claiming that the “only safe and effectual remedy” was to condemn the entire flooded

29. It is interesting to note than many of the men involved in the Jones Falls Commission and other related projects of civic interested sided with the Confederates during the Civil War. Ross Winans was arrested by General Benjamin Butler twice for his suspected Confederate sympathies; Police marshal Kane was arrested after the Baltimore Riot of 1861 and imprisoned for 14 months; Isaac R. Trimble was a Confederate general who led Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.

30. Hall, Baltimore: Its History and Its People, 223.31. Baltimore Sun, January 22, 1869.32. Baltimore Sun, February 5, 1869.33. Baltimore Sun, April 5, 187034. Henry Tyson, The plan for the improvement of the channel of Jones’ Falls, and

drainage of the adjacent portions of the city with the working drawings and specifications (Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co., 1871).


district, raze all of the buildings, and “in the slang parlance of the day, fill it up.”35 He also called upon the “competent” city council to select a plan of improvement themselves, urging “not [to] submit to the people at large.”36 Of course, the city could have also entertained the flood prevention plans laid out by Benjamin Latrobe in 1817 and Trimble and Winans in 1837, which had long since been dis-carded due to cost. However, in March 1869, the city council invited Tyson to present his proposal before both branches; they formally adopted the Tyson Plan on April 8, 1869 with ordinance number 101.37 Despite its formal adoption, the joint standing commit-tee sought the opinion of two outside consultants, hiring Sylvester Chesbrough of Chicago and Colonel George W. Hughes of the U.S. Army corps of engineers to examine the situation in December of 1869. Although Hughes and Chesbrough didn’t support the Tyson plan entirely, they advised the city to adopt it over diversion or other suggestions.38 Around the same time, in December 1869, Tyson joined Kane and Trimble as one of the three commissioners, while Latrobe was named chief engineer for the project. The debate then shifted to funding this massive undertaking. One consideration was to tax the residents of the flooded district to pay for the work. While this was certainly favored by residents in other parts of the city, one city councilman declared this plan “unjust in the extreme.” Explain-ing that the Jones Falls was valuable to every citizen of Baltimore, he believed everyone should help pay for improvements. Echoing the rhetoric most common in Baltimore after the flood, he viewed the Jones Falls as a source of fear and suffering. The city, he argued, was to blame for not taking action to harness the Jones Falls earlier and causing the panic that now seized area residents:

For more than fifty years the city had been derelict in its perfor-mance of an obligation, which underlies the city government, and hundreds of lives have paid the forfeit of neglect, whilst hundreds have been hopelessly bankrupted by it, and thousands

35. John D. Stewart, Report on the improvement of Jones’ falls to prevent overflows (Baltimore: self-published, 1869), 3.

36. Ibid., 6.37. Tyson, The plan for the improvement of the channel of Jones’ Falls.38. Baltimore Sun, December 15, 1869.


have suffered far beyond their ability to bear. [. . .] The residents on these low grounds each night retire with waking fears and now, after long years of neglect, when the city is awakened to the alarming necessity of doing something for the relief of this neglected district, the effort is made to pile upon it a mountain of taxation.39

By January 1870, both branches of the city council had approved an ordinance to authorize $2,500,000 in city bonds for Jones Falls improvements. Voters approved the measure on April 7, 1870, with 8,989 votes for and 7,393 against.40 While not everyone was pleased with the Tyson Plan, most Baltimoreans agreed on “the necessity of adopting some plan of protecting the city from the overflowing of the falls. [. . .] Something should be done, and done at once.” The flood had instilled such fear into city leaders and residents that excessive costs were no longer an obstacle to implementing engi-neering improvements, as was the case in 1817 and again in 1837.

Unfortunately, construction did not begin on the Tyson Plan as the fearful populace had hoped. A series of letters between the com-missioners Kane, Trimble and Tyson, as well as joint standing com-mittee chair Bernard Carter offer insights into their disagreements. The main concern was that Henry Tyson had difficulty relinquishing his role as author of the plan and sharing the work with his fellow commissioners. As Trimble wrote to Carter, “A careful consideration of the interests of the city and the past experiences in the management of her public works demonstrates [that the improvements] should not be put in the hands of one man. [. . .] In what part of the ordinance Mr. Tyson finds that he is held to a greater responsibility than any one of his colleagues, as he seems to suppose, I have yet to be informed.”41 Their bickering finally led to Kane42 resigning from the commission in January 1871, with the prediction that the Tyson Plan “will be ruinous

39. Baltimore Sun, January 12, 1870.40. Baltimore Sun, April 8, 1870.41. Report of the joint standing committee on Jones’ Falls, to the first branch of the City

council of Baltimore on October 7, 1870. Together with the ordinance as adopted January 31, 1870 (Baltimore: City Council Joint Committee on Jones’ Falls, 1870), 140–142.

42. Kane went on to become Mayor of Baltimore in 1877–1878.


to the interests of the bulk of small property holders on the line. [. . .] So far as business men in that vicinity are concerned, it will be as if a death pall was spread in their affairs of trade.”43

The disorder among the commissioners was apparent, causing citizens to grow concerned. Two hundred residents—including the prosperous mill owners in the Hampden-Woodberry area of the Jones Falls—presented a petition against the Tyson Plan to city council, and alternative plans came streaming in.44 Outrage erupted when city council members announced,

The petitions against [the Tyson Plan] were numerous, but on an examination it would appear that the objections were not sus-tained, and were presented under an evident misapprehension of the plan. [. . .] It is useless to expect upon such a subject as this any uniformity of opinion; no matter what the plan should be adopted, there will always be a large number of persons who will contend that just the wrong plan has been adopted.45

Almost three years after the flood, many residents’ fear of the falls was diminishing and their concern now lay more with the poli-tics surrounding the issue. The Baltimore Sun featured many edi-torials on this topic, both anonymous and from leading citizens of the day. A “Property Owner Within the Flooded District” wrote in with outrage at the council’s decision to continue with the Tyson Plan, asking, “It is not better to do nothing than to make bad worse, as those thousands of petitioners fully believe will be the case if the Tyson plan is executed?”46 Ross Winans, the B & O engineer who publicly feuded with Henry Tyson in the 1850s—and who submit-ted a proposal to the city after the 1837 flood—published a scathing critique of the situation in his three books on the matter. Disagree-ment among the commissioners, on the city council joint commit-tee, and in the city streets dragged on for years. Two additional con-sultants, Major W. P. Craighill of the U.S. corps of engineers and Strickland Kneass of Philadelphia, were hired in 1871 with similar

43. Baltimore Sun, February 1, 1871.44. Baltimore Sun, February 7, 1871.45. Baltimore Sun, March 3, 1871.46. Baltimore Sun, March 4, 1871.


results as the previous outside experts. They did not agree that the Tyson Plan was ideal, but the city nevertheless took their lukewarm assessment as a resounding endorsement. In 1873, city leaders real-ized the original $2,500,000 would not fund the project entirely, and estimated the new cost to be $3,250,000.

By this point, residents’ fear of the flood had turned into dis-gust of the entire situation surrounding the Jones Falls. No longer a place of beauty and peace, it was considered an obstacle to the city’s progress. Some citizens expressed their concern by writing letters to the editor, such as the “Spectator” whose feelings on additional funding for the Tyson Plan were plainly negative: “We the people, the tax payers, the house renters, what do we get? We get a nasty, noisome ditch which fills the town with malaria, as a permanent fixture in the heart of the town, obstructing business, cutting the city in two. [. . .] Oh my dearly beloved brethren, don’t, don’t, don’t spend five millions to widen a nasty ditch.”47 Area newspapers could only publish a small selection of letters, so others took a more creative approach. Sam Devere sang this tune at the Front Street Theater in April 1874:

For years this foul and stagnant pool/Has been the city’s curse/And delays to fix it only tend/To make matters worse. [. . .] ’Tis everybody’s interest/The rich, as well as the poor/To start this great improvement/Though it takes two millions more/To the many honest idle poor/’Twill be a friend indeed/’Twill prove a perfect God send/In their present hour of need. [. . .] Then hur-rah for the improvement/That’s the ticket. Boys, to vote.48

While he favored the ballot measure and starting the construction, his opinion of the Jones Falls was similar to the “Spectator”—the falls had made a mess of the city and must be contained. The ordi-nance for an additional $1,500,000 was defeated in an election held in April 1874. Finally, after almost six years of debate and disap-pointment, the city council approved ordinance number 131 and abandoned the Tyson Plan. Improving the Jones Falls no longer meant widening, deepening, straightening, or adding ornamental

47. Baltimore Sun, April 21, 1874.48. Ibid.


boulevards. As Baltimore entered the 20th century, the key to the “improvement” of the Jones Falls would be making it disappear.

Jones Falls as Roadway, 1874–presentAlthough the controversy over the Tyson Plan faded after 1874, a shift in public opinion had nonetheless taken root in Baltimore. Citizens and city leaders viewed the Jones Falls as an annoyance, and sought new methods for controlling it. A smaller-scale engineering effort was carried out in the 1880s, erecting retaining walls and replacing bridges. After yet another flood in 1904, the city moved forward with a plan to enclose the falls once and for all. It took several years to create the Fallsway viaduct, but upon its completion in 1914, Baltimore had for-saken its once attractive waterway in favor of an elevated roadway—a pattern still in practice today on the Jones Falls Expressway.

It was under the guidance of Ferdinand C. Latrobe, who served seven terms as mayor of Baltimore from 1875 to 1893—and made up the third generation of Latrobe men to be involved in the Jones Falls debate—that engineering projects were put into place to pre-vent flood damage. In his annual report of 1880, Latrobe explained that the falls were dredged from the city dock to Baltimore Street, retaining walls were put in place along the corridor, and six sturdy new bridges were already built or under construction, all to the tune of $1,400,000; three additional bridges would be added for an additional $307,000.49 In the 1880s, the city’s water supply had been extended beyond the Jones Falls. Latrobe tapped the Gun-powder Falls reservoir in Baltimore County and tunneled the supply to the city through new reservoirs at Loch Raven, Lake Clifton, and Lake Montebello—a huge undertaking that required 2,000 laborers working day and night to complete.50 In 1897, the sewerage commission reported that the Jones Falls continued to serve as “the most important of numerous lines of natural drain-age to the harbor,” although they complained that it had “for long years been a source of continued nuisance and expense, due to the

49. Ferdinand Claiborne Latrobe, Special message of mayor Latrobe on the Jones’ falls improvement, April 6th, 1880 (Baltimore: Baltimore City Hall, 1880), 6.

50. Sherry Olson, Baltimore: The Building of an American City (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 165.


collection of offensive matter in its open channel, to the necessity for keeping the channel unobstructed for the passage of floods, and to the difficulty of dredging it.”51 The falls had quite literally become an open sewer, a hazard to public health to the residents around it and commuters who walked by it. The Jones Falls were very much still in use by Baltimoreans at the end of the 19th cen-tury, but their physical connection with the stream would lessen as the city entered the 20th century.

Under the direction of Mayor James H. Preston in the first two decades of the 20th century, the city buried the Jones Falls under a viaduct and reclaimed the space as usable and once again, pleasant. Baltimoreans would no longer be bothered by the stench or mos-quitoes emanating from the sewerage sitting in the Jones Falls. City leaders and residents alike were enthused by project. Mayor Preston, who had served as president of the Jones Falls Improvement Asso-ciation, “agitated the covering of that stream”52 and in 1910 received funding from the state legislature to do so. What had become a dan-gerous and threatening burden to Baltimoreans in 1868 transformed into a cutting-edge marvel of modern engineering by 1914. Calvin Hendrick, the chief engineer of the sewerage commission, explained that the Fallsway viaduct was “a most important link between the upper section of the city and the lower business section, affording a smooth highway through the Jones Falls valley, which heretofore has been a great gap in the city, practically useless, an eyesore and a det-riment to health and property.”53 His further extolled the virtues of the Jones Falls as a waterway no longer: “the elimination of this use-less stream running through the heart of the city and the redemption of nearly 600,000 square feet of land [. . .] means the converting of a great nuisance into a valuable public asset.”54 Similar praise for the Fallsway was repeated some ten years later by civil engineer Wilbur Street, who described the viaduct as “one of the most far-reaching

51. Report of the Sewerage Commission of the City of Baltimore (Baltimore: The Friedenwald Company, 1897), 11–12.

52. Wilbur Coyle, Mayors of Baltimore (Baltimore: Baltimore Municipal Journal, 1919), 221.

53. Calvin Hendrick, “Transforming a Nuisance into a Public Asset: The Jones Falls Improvement in Baltimore,” The American City 12 (1915): 192.

54. Ibid., 193.


and best paying improvements the city of Baltimore ever undertook. What was for more than a century a nuisance, an expense, and an eyesore was not only removed but the city reclaimed a strip of land . . . which has become a broad smooth roadway.”55 The same senti-ment led local lawmakers to push for the creation of the Jones Falls Expressway, an elevated highway following the Fallsway route, in the mid-1950s. Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr. broke ground on the project in 1956, leading city crews to tear down the bridges con-structed during the aftermath of the Black Friday in the 1870s.56

The 1961 Jones Falls Valley Plan developed by the Greater Bal-timore Committee Planning Council echoes this attitude as well. Acknowledging the role that the Jones Falls have played in Bal-timore’s history, the report emphasizes the highway’s potential to redevelop the corridor in light of the falls-powered mills that had ceased operation: “For the past three hundred years the activity of Baltimore has centered about Jones Falls and its Valley. [. . .] The Jones Falls Valley can become a tremendous asset to Baltimore. The great expressway opens up new possibilities for the Valley’s highest and best development. [. . .] Shall the Jones Falls Valley continue to be a rubbish heap—an object of catch-as-catch-can speculation and abuse? Will we travel on the Jones Falls Expressway, past der-elict factories with bricked-up windows?”57 The vision of 1961 has become a reality in 2013. Almost every one of the mighty mills built along the Jones Falls in the 19th century have been rehabilitated and redeveloped into high-end shopping, office space, and apartments or condominiums. A pedestrian and bike route has been designated along the stream itself—which drivers on the highway may never even notice—and Baltimoreans are once again interacting with the natural beauty of the falls.58 The Mill Valley corridor has indeed become a vibrant hub of activity in a once-dormant industrial zone.

55. Wilbur Street, The history and development of Jones’ Falls in Baltimore (Publisher unlisted: 1926), 10.

56. Jacques Kelly, “JFX is a long stretch of history,” Baltimore Sun, February 7, 2009.57. Greater Baltimore Committee, Inc. Planning Council. The Jones Falls Valley

Plan (Baltimore: Greater Baltimore Committee, Inc. Planning Council, 1961), 16, 27, 30.

58. “Jones Falls Trail,” Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks, http://bcrp.baltimorecity.gov/ParksTrails/Trails/JonesFallsTrail.aspx.


Withstanding a variety of uses—including as a water source, a sewerage system, and the foundation of a highway—and enduring a changing landscape as it has developed from a sleepy hamlet in the late 17th century into the buzzing, crowded industrial city of the 19th century and finally into the 21st century as a reclaimed urban greenway, the city of Baltimore continues to center around the Jones Falls. While the nature of Baltimoreans’ relationship to the falls has not remained constant during this 350-year span, the relationship has nevertheless persisted.

73

Imagining the Congo as a ‘Heart of Darkness’: Why the Congo “Is What It Is” for the

Western World

KATIE NOLAN, FORDHAM UNIVERSITY

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

—V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

Since Henry Morton Stanley published Through the Dark Con-tinent: Or, The Sources of the Nile around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa, and down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic

Ocean in 1879, the way Westerners imagine and discuss the Congo has stagnated. The Congo has been, and continues to be, viewed as a history-less and backwards place that is unable to change and simply “is what it is.” Much of the logic behind this stance can be attributed to how the Congo is imagined in writing. The Congo can be described for Westerners in one phrase: a heart of darkness, which is defined by negative concepts of nature, images of chaos and “backwardness,” and fear of moral corruption. This representation started at the genesis of the Congo as a single political body and has continued up to the present day. This paper seeks to trace and analyze the recurring image of the Congo through three influential texts: Henry M. Stanley’s travel memoir Through the Dark Conti-nent, Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, and V. S. Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River.

Stanley is the first white man to follow the Congo River to its source. His book on the Congo is also the first to associate the Congo with darkness and the title of the book can be seen as the source of the metaphor. Stanley’s book is also crucial to understanding how Westerners perceive the Congo, because Stanley is the first person to describe the tribes of Central Africa. He did so in a way that reinforces and develops racist theories of the time as well as concepts about commerce and civilization. Conrad is the author most associ-ated with the trope. With Conrad, the metaphor has in many ways


outgrown the novella and been simplified by other authors. This paper will discuss the image that is associated with Conrad as well as his actual writing and weigh in on the discussion of whether or not his writing is racist. It will also consider how he deals with ques-tions of commerce and civilization. Finally, this paper will explore a modern manifestation of the trope in A Bend in the River. Nai-paul is an extremely controversial post-colonial author, and the way he uses Conrad’s image has been a subject of contention that mer-its further discussion. What is perhaps most surprising about the “heart of darkness” trope is that it has not changed much throughout the course of history. Almost every book, article, or journalist piece about topics related to the Congo reference a “heart of darkness” or makes an allusion to Conrad in some way. This paper deals with each work and the controversies surrounding it individually, but it is important to recognize a startling commonality between a book written in 1879 and a book written in 1979.

Henry M. Stanley was born in Wales as John Rowlands; he was a bastard child and grew up in a workhouse. He immigrated to the United States at fifteen where he soon adopted the name Stanley. After immigrating, he fought in the Civil War, and actually switched from the Confederate side to the Union side during the war. Stanley worked as a journalist covering the Indian Wars. He is most famous for his mission from the New York Herald to find Dr. Livingstone in Central Africa. His real legacy in Africa, however, came after this ini-tial success as an explorer. The New York Herald and the Daily Tele-graph funded an expedition to trace the source of the Congo River; Stanley led the voyage of 356 men, women, and children across Africa and Through the Dark Continent is his record of the trip.1 During the initial phase of the journey, while he was able to send back telegraphs, the Aborigines Protection Society and Anti-Slavery Society were up in arms over his killing of natives he considered hostile; one man, however, was inspired by his expedition.2 King Leopold was one of the first people to reach out to Stanley on his return to Europe. Stanley and Leopold began meeting in 1878 and quickly drew up a contract

1. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 49.

2. Ibid., 50.

Imagining the Congo as a ‘Heart of Darkness’ 75

for Stanley to return to the Congo and start building infrastructure, such as a road around the rapids in the river.3 Stanley also went into the Congo to buy land from village chiefs and to harvest ivory. Leopold hid his actions behind two fake committees known as the Committee for Studies of the Upper Congo and the International Association of the Congo.4 It was during this period that Stanley acquired the nick-name “Bula Matadi” or “Breaker of Rocks” from the natives in refer-ence to how hard he drove the natives to build roads and stations.5 By all accounts, Stanley was a harsh taskmaster to both Europeans and Africans; and he was primarily responsible for “buying” land from the native chiefs in Leopold’s name during this second trip.6 He tricked the village chiefs into signing away their tribal lands for cloth and gin.7 He is perhaps the major party accountable for Leopold’s ability to enslave the Congo.

In Through the Dark Continent, Stanley used several key themes to characterize the Congo, themes that continue to have an impact on how the Congo is understood by Westerners. Stanley divided the natives he met into “noble savages” and “sub-humans.” Through these descriptions, he parroted and gave credence to standard race theory of the time. The noble savages in the book are usually natives that wear clothes and show what Stanley perceived as a susceptibil-ity to conversion to Christianity. They also are open to trade and capitalism as an economic system. The people Stanley character-ized as sub-human usually had appearances that did not conform to Western standards of beauty and are described as hostile, unwilling to trade, and engaging in cannibalism. His depictions of cannibal-ism will remain a powerful image in Western minds in the coming decades; Conrad referenced cannibalism in Heart of Darkness, and Western journalists sensationalized accounts of cannibalism as late as the Ituri conflict in 2003. Stanley was also careful to display him-self in the best possible light, leading scholars and readers to ques-tion the reliability of his narrative.

3. Ibid., 16. 4. Ibid., 65. 5. Ibid., 68.6. Ibid., 72.7. Ibid., 71.


In the first half of his expedition, during which he explored the area around Lake Victoria, most of Stanley’s interactions with natives were peaceful, and his account depicts the natives as “noble savages.” Trade and commerce are extraordinarily important in how Stanley characterized the natives, particularly the ones around Lake Victoria. Before he even entered the interior he wrote: “. . . if the missionary can show the poor materialist that religion is allied with substantial benefits and improvement of his degraded condition, the task to which he is about to devote himself will be rendered compar-atively easy.”8 When Stanley discussed commerce, it seems that he was drawing on a slogan of Christianity and commerce that Brian Stanley wrote about in his article “Commerce and Christianity: Providence Theory, the Missionary Movement, and the Imperialism of Free Trade.” According to Brian Stanley, David Livingstone, as well as other missionaries, thought commerce with new lands would lead to communication and a spread of the Good News.9 Commerce and Christianity were tied to a sort of teleological view of the world that connected God’s grand design with a sort of Manifest Destiny on the part of capitalist, Christian nations.10 The idea is that capi-talism and Christianity would be introduced hand in hand in new territories like the Congo. In a section of Through the Dark Conti-nent called “A Dream for the Future,” Stanley exhibits this theory on Christianity and commerce: “Oh for the hour when a band of philanthropic capitalists shall vow to rescue these beautiful lands, and supply the means to enable the Gospel messengers to come and quench the murderous hate with which man beholds man in the beautiful lands around Lake Victoria!”11 Much of Stanley’s writing on the subject seems political in nature; he was, after all, appealing to a European audience concerned with the “civilizing mission” in jus-tification for the imperialist scramble for Africa. Looking forward to

8. Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent: Or, The Sources of the Nile around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa, and down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean, vol. 1, (New York: Harper, 1878), 80.

9. Brian Stanley, “‘Commerce and Christianity’: Providence Theory, the Missionary Movement, and the Imperialism of Free Trade, 1842–1860.” The Historical Journal 26, no. 1, (1983), 75.

10. Ibid., 73.11. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, vol. 1, 223.


the atrocities committed in the Congo during Leopold’s exploitive reign clearly demonstrates that the utopia of commerce and Christi-anity that Livingstone imagined was far from reality.

In addition to Stanley’s emphasis on conversion and commerce, his depiction of the natives he meet is preoccupied with physical appearance and dress. Stanley meticulously recorded information about the native people he encountered in his two-volume work. The book is full of carefully rendered illustrations of everything from houses to hairstyles to the native women’s breasts. Physical appearance also seems to be an indicator of “good” natives versus “bad” natives. Alfred Wallace emphasized the “capacity of clothing himself ” as important evidence that man is civilized since cloth-ing shows men claiming control over nature to stop the process of natural selection over the body and start the process of natural selec-tion over the mind.12 Clothing is therefore an indicator of a smarter, more evolved society and Stanley used clothing as a key indicator to whether or not natives would be open to other Western mak-ers of civilization. When describing the Kopi of Uganda Stanley said, “discard from your mind the inebriated, maudlin, filthy negro surrounded by fat wives and a family of abdominous brats.”13 The Kopi wear clothes and therefore have “due respect for decency.”14 Conversely, some tribes, particularly those tribes that do not wear clothes, are described in quite different terms. Of one tribe called the Uhombo Stanley wrote, “I saw before me over a hundred being of the most degraded, unpresentable type it is possible to conceive, and though I knew quite well that some thousands of years ago the beginning of this wretched humanity and myself were one and the same, a sneaking disinclination to believe it possessed me strongly.”15 A lack of clothes actually relegated the Uhombo to the realm of sub-humanity for Stanley. When meeting the Wanongi farther down the river he said, “There was no one feature about them that even extravagant charity could indicate as elevating them into the

12. Alfred Russel Wallace, “Are Human Races One Race or Many?,” in Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul Armstrong (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 220.

13. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, vol. 1, 382. 14. Ibid.15. Ibid., 73.


category of noble savage . . . they were intolerably ugly.”16 As Kevin Dunn put it in Imagining the Congo, “Clothing served as a marker for that journey: the fewer the clothes, the more primitive.”17 These sentiments are often tied to trade as well; natives near the lakes were willing to trade supplies for beads and cloth, as Stanley traveled far-ther he found it more and more difficult to get supplies because the natives were unwilling to trade with him.

Much of Stanley’s sentiments on the natives seem to be echoes of standard race theory such as those put forward by Charles Dar-win and other scientists. Darwin and his contemporaries were acutely concerned with the question of whether or not man was one species or many. The two sides of the debate were either belief in monogenesis, descent from one species, or belief in polygenesis, descent from multi-ple species.18 Darwin finally argued that all men are of one species, but due to differences in environment, they may have developed different characteristics; after Darwin, monogenesis became the generally held belief.19 Darwin’s views are still racist, however, and he wrote, “With civilized nations, the reduced size of the jaw from lessened use—the habitual play of different muscles serving to express different emo-tions—and the increased size of the brain from greater intellectual activity, have together produced a considerable effect on their general appearance when compared with savages.”20 While monogenesis was often used to support an abolitionist agenda, ethnological societies still viewed relations between the races in a master-slave framework, and some thought that slavery was a way to “improve” black races by introducing civilization.21 G. W. F Hegel took racist depictions of Africans even farther. He depicted them as “the natural man in his

16. Ibid., 212.17. Kevin C. Dunn, Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of Identity,

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 32. 18. Douglas Lorimer, “Theoretical Racism in Late-Victorian Anthropology,

1870–1900.” Victorian Studies 31, no. 3 (1988), 405.19. Ibid.20. Charles Darwin, “On the Races of Man,” in Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul

Armstrong (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 217.21. Seymour Drescher, “The Ending of the Slave Trade and the Evolution of

European Scientific Racism,” Social Science History 14, no. 5 (1990): 415–450, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1171358 (accessed April 24, 2013).


completely wild and untamed state . . . there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character.”22 While he was a supporter of monogenesis, monogenesis does not imply equality for Hegel because of the lack of perceived civilization. Hegel portrayed Africans as completely unfeeling; he “supported” this claim by refer-encing acts of cannibalism, polygamy, and sorcery. For Hegel, these cultural practices indicated that Africans lacked basic human senti-ments and were sub-human. Stanley outlined these cultural practices, particularly cannibalism in great detail. Darwin, Hegel, and their contemporaries all published before Stanley went down the Congo River and may have influenced Stanley’s record of the tribes he met. He showed sympathy with natives and agreed with monogenesis, yet his depictions are paternalistic, negative, and confident of European superiority. Perhaps what is most startling about early race theory is the casual belief that the “superiority” of one race over another will, by Darwinian principles, naturally lead to ethnic cleansing. There is a fatalistic sentiment that expects “lesser” races to eventually become extinct through interaction with Western civilization.

A commonality in both Stanley’s and Hegel’s writing is a pre-occupation with ritual cannibalism. Once Stanley left Lake Victo-ria and entered the river, he described most of the tribes he met as cannibalistic. He hired cannibals as guides and described tribes calling the expedition “meat” and attacking them for the purpose of eating them.23 Stanley and his men fight cannibals many times in the second volume of the book, to the point which Stanley says, “It is a murderous world, and we felt for the first time that we hate the filthy, vulturous ghouls who inhabit it.”24 Cannibalism is simul-taneously everywhere and nowhere in Through the Dark Continent; although Stanley claims it took place, he never included an eyewit-ness account of it. Cannibalism in the Congo Basin probably did take place in the areas Stanley was exploring, but it became a point of fixation for Westerners, and Stanley likely over exaggerated the frequency of cannibalism. As Hochschild points out, Europeans are

22. G. W. F. Hegel, “The African Character,” in Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul Armstrong (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 209.

23. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, vol. 2, 200–201.24. Ibid., 272.


obsessed with African cannibalism (and Africans perpetuated simi-lar myths about Europeans during the height of the slave trade).25 Cannibalism has become a common cliché applied to the Congo, and has been sensationalized as late as 2003 by Western journalists. Allegations of cannibalism continue to circulate, as The Atlantic ran a story in April of 2012 about a Congolese woman who had her arm cut off and eaten by soldiers. The article explains that cannibalism is a way for soldiers to gain strength and terrorize their enemies.26 Johan Pottier astutely pointed out in an article entitled “Rights Violations, Rumor, and Rhetoric: making sense of cannibalism in Mambasa, Ituri (Democratic Republic of the Congo)” that accounts of canni-balism were seized by Western news sources and even human rights organizations without proper confirmation of the incidents. Also, she concluded that the Western news sources sensationalized these accounts, gave them precedent over other accounts of atrocities, and failed to exhibit the skepticism that Congolese journalist greeted the accounts with.27 Although, Pottier did acknowledge that it is possible cannibalism did take place during this conflict.28 Reports of cannibalism throughout the Congo’s history continue to be difficult to prove and are often perpetuated without strong factual evidence and books that mention cannibalism during Stanley’s time often rely heavily on Stanley’s text itself, for example.

Although Stanley was the first person to attribute darkness to the Congo, Conrad is the person that made the representation famous in Heart of Darkness. Conrad spent just over six months in the Congo ( June 12 to December 4, 1890) as a steamboat captain for a Belgian company, but he left permanently changed.29 He was filled

25. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 16. 26. Max Fisher, “A Congo Mother Survives Cannibalism to Save Her Children:

Why Her Photo Matters,” Atlantic, April 26, 2012. 27. Johan Pottier, “Rights Violation, Rumor, and Rhetoric: Making Sense of

Cannibalism in Mambasa, Ituri (Democratic Republic of Congo),” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 13 ( December 2007): 840, SocINDEX, (accessed April 20, 2013).

28. Ibid. 29. Zdzisław Najder, “Introduction to ‘The Congo Diary’ and the ‘Up-River

Book,’” in Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul Armstrong (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 250.


with enthusiasm to go to the Congo and believed that good work was being done there. After his stay, however, he was filled with a disillusionment and cynicism that Heart of Darkness captures.30 Dur-ing his time in the Congo, he met Roger Casement, an Irishman who worked with E. D. Morel to demand reform to the human rights abuses inflicted on the Congo. Conrad was very affected by Casement’s stories; the two visited each other once they returned to Europe as well.31 Heart of Darkness and Conrad’s experience dur-ing his time in the Congo has become most Western readers’ first entry point into the Congo. As Rob Nixon wrote in London Call-ing, “Heart of Darkness has exerted a centripetal pull over Western representations of Africa unequaled in this century by the sway of any other text over the portrayal of any single continent.”32 Because of Heart of Darkness, the trope of the Congo as a “heart of darkness” develops a specific connotation that was only hinted at in Through the Dark Continent. Additionally, scholarship and reporting on the Congo almost inevitably bring in images from Heart of Darkness even when discussing modern history of the Congo. This means that the trope is used out of context on a regular basis, so Conrad’s work is often credited with attitudes not supported by the text. Scholarship on Heart of Darkness must deal with the way Conrad represented the Congo and its negative associations, so scholars normally must choose a side in the debate on whether Heart of Darkness is racist and pro-imperialist or reformist and anti-imperialist.

Conrad’s title, Heart of Darkness, refers to the landscape of the Congo and the corrupting power it has over Kurtz, the central char-acter of the novel. Stanley described the jungles of the Congo as well, but his concerns were mostly practical, such as the issues he had with his shoes dissolving as he marched through the forest. Conrad, in contrast, characterized and personified the landscape to develop strong visual imagery as a literary device. For example, Marlow, the narrator, describes the forest as “The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs,

30. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 141–142.31. Ibid., 196–197. 32. Rob Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin, (New York:

Oxford University, 1992), 90.


festoons motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life . . . ready to topple over the creek to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence.”33 This sinister landscape is like-wise characterized by an ancient or primeval quality. Marlow says, “Going up the river was like traveling back to the earliest begin-nings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were king.”34 This is an important aspect of the trope, and fur-ther manifestations of it, including A Bend in the River, characterize the people and political situation of the Congo as “backwards” and “primitive.” Finally, this dark landscape in the heart of Africa cor-rupts Kurtz’s heart: “The wilderness had patted him on the head . . . and −lo! −he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own . . . ”35 Kurtz was, by all accounts, a great man who was corrupted by the landscape to engage in “unspeakable rites.” Conrad justi-fied Kurtz’s corruption by describing the landscape as the agent that corrupted Kurtz. The mainstays of Conrad’s “heart of dark-ness” trope have had a powerful effect on Western thought about the Congo. It is a central reference point for discussing everything from politics to conflicts to landscape in the area. Since Conrad’s depictions are negative in nature, most Westerners implicitly asso-ciate the Congo with the backwards, sinister, and corrupting land-scape that Conrad envisions.

There is an alternative cause to Kurtz’s corruption, however: commerce. Looking back to how early missionaries and Stanley portrayed commerce, Christianity, and civilization as some sort of giant gift that the West would deliver to “uncivilized” land is an ironic experience at best. Reading about the extreme cruelty that one group of humans inflicted on another group of humans as part of this “civilizing” mission is chilling. One could argue that Conrad put this irony on display by showing how the mission to civilize these areas with commerce leads to a horrifying corruption. Kurtz is, after all, out in the jungle on a capitalist enterprise. The Company’s chief

33. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul Armstrong, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 30.

34. Ibid., 33.35. Ibid., 48.


accountant is perhaps an even better and clearer example for how commerce corrupts people in Heart of Darkness. In the beginning of the novella, a sick man has been placed in the accountant’s office and he says, “the groans of this sick person distract my attention. And without that it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors in this climate.”36 It is clear that his fixation on making money has blinded him to the suffering of his fellow man, even his fellow man of the same race. By critiquing commerce and the civilizing mis-sion, Conrad puts the onus for corruption on the Europeans, not the landscape exclusively.

Chinua Achebe’s article “An Image for Africa” is probably the most influential work for those critics who consider Heart of Darkness to be racist and pro-imperialist. Achebe argued that Heart of Dark-ness helps Westerners create a conceptualization of Africa as a foil to Europe. 37 He said that natives are not given dialogue and mainly communicate in grunts as evidence of their inferior statue. Mar-low’s display of horror when he acknowledges a common humanity between the natives and himself is proof to Achebe that Conrad was a “thoroughgoing racist.”38 He asserted that Conrad was more con-cerned with the mental landscape of the Westerners, mainly Kurtz, and Africa is solely used as a backdrop to Kurtz’s decay and corrup-tion.39 Achebe wrote, “I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults . . . a story in which the very humanity of black people is called in question.”40 Dunn agreed with this view, adding, “The Africans are presented as beasts, canni-bals, savages, and childlike primates. These primitives and the Afri-can environment they inhabit are what drag Kurtz off the pedestal of civilization.”41 Dunn also expanded on his point to present Conrad and the “Red Rubber” reform movement as pro-British imperial-ism. He argued that E. D. Morel, the major reformer of the Red Rubber movement, presented the Belgians as “illegitimate bearers

36. Ibid., 18. 37. Chinua Achebe, “An Image for Africa” in Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul

Armstrong, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 337.38. Ibid., 342. 39. Ibid., 343.40. Ibid., 346.41. Dunn, Imagining the Congo, 53.


of civilization” in comparison to other Western colonial powers, specifically the British.42 Dunn said, “By decrying Belgian colonial practices, other imperial powers were drawing attention away from their own colonial atrocities.” 43 Hunt Hawkins specifically analyzed Conrad’s relationship to imperialism in Conrad’s Critique of Impe-rialism in “Heart of Darkness” and his book concludes that Conrad distinguished between conquerors and colonists and justified British imperialism by concepts of efficiency and a civilizing mission in jux-taposition with Leopold’s Congo. 44 His argument particularly rests on a quote from the frame story of the novella:

What saves us is efficiency . . . But those chaps [Romans con-quering Britain] were not much account really. They were no colonists . . . They were conquerors . . . It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle darkness . . . What redeems [imperialism] is the idea only . . . and an unselfish belief in that ideal . . .45

Although this quotation references the Romans conquering Britain, it is clear that the passage contains thinly veiled references to the differences between British imperialism and Belgian (or in this case Leopold’s) imperialism. British imperialism is efficient, therefore the British are colonists; Belgium’s imperialism is violent and inef-ficient, therefore the Belgians are conquerors. In conclusion, those that see Conrad’s work as racist and pro-imperialist emphasize his ties to British imperialism and the cultural bias with which Marlow views the natives.

These arguments, while valid, seem to lack a complexity and sophistication to match the text. If Heart of Darkness is simply racist, why does it continue to occupy such a prominent place in West-ern literature? Readers familiar with the text may feel like there is more to it than the repetition of common racist beliefs found in

42. Ibid., 51.43. Ibid., 54.44. Hunt Hawkins, “Conrad’s Critique of Imperialism in Heart of Darkness,”

PMLA 94 no. 2, (1979): 286–299, http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms/jsp. (accessed April 20, 2013).

45. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 6–7.


Stanley’s books. Peter Edgerly Firchow succeeded in acknowledging the nuances of Heart of Darkness without being an imperial apolo-gist. His book points out that calling Conrad a racist is anachronistic since Conrad was living at a time when racism was an accepted part of Western discourse.46 The book also argues that certain passages that Achebe cited as indicative of racism are postured after Stan-ley’s writings. This is particularly evident when Marlow describes the natives and says, “They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity . . . Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest hint of a response.”47 This reflects Stanley’s description of natives as ugly and his questioning of their shared humanity; Fir-chow considered the parallelism here “deliberately self-ironic and culturally relativistic.”48 Like Stanley, Conrad also included descrip-tions of cannibals as the crew on Marlow’s steamboat, but Marlow shows admiration for their self-restraint in not eating the pilgrims when they are no longer able to find food in the forest. Firchow also questioned Achebe’s reading of the frame story. Conrad deliberately established a parallel between the Thames and the Congo River in order to emphasis the similarities, not to, as Achebe suggested, characterize one as “good” and the other as “bad.” In fact, Conrad’s depictions of Europe, particularly Marlow’s time in a city, Brussels, described as the “white sepulcher” is typified with dead and sleep-ing imagery.49 Conrad’s involvement in the Red Rubber movement and friendship with Roger Casement suggests that he was not the “thoroughgoing racist” that Achebe claimed he was Sandya Shetty argued in “‘Heart of Darkness:’ Out of Africa Some New Things Never Come,” that Conrad must have used imperialist language because he was culturally bound, therefore he had to decide between using the established ‘darkness’ trope or a ‘sunlight’ trope, as created in King Solomon’s Mines, to refer to Africa.50 Conrad chose the trope

46. Peter Edgerly Firchow, Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2003), 17.

47. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 36.48. Firchow, Envisioning Africa, 53.49. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 9.50. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 196.


that allowed him to best convey his anti-imperialist message.51 His intentions at least were not overtly racist, even if some of his writing exhibits latent racism.

By this point, Conrad is an accepted part of the Western canon. While there is still debate surrounding imperialist and racist themes, his place is secure as one of the masters of English prose. V. S. Nai-paul’s legacy, however, is still very much open to debate. Naipaul is ethnically Indian but was born in Trinidad and educated in Eng-land. He received the Noble Prize in 2001, the Booker Prize in 1971, and a knighthood for service to literature in 1990. His pedi-gree is impressive to say the least, but the vehement criticism he receives from scholars and laymen alike is equally impressive. Rob Nixon explained that there is a strong divide between Western audi-ences and audiences in the developing world. In developing coun-tries, critics have called him everything from a neo-colonialist to a “Gunga Din.”52 Bruce King, on the other hand, defends Naipaul in his book, V. S. Naipaul. He wrote that Naipaul depicts situations as they are and does not choose sides; he also complained that critics of Naipaul view the world as polarized between the West and the “Third World.”53 One thing that all readers familiar with Naipaul are in agreement on is his affinity for and reliance on Conrad. A Bend in the River parallels Heart of Darkness in overt ways, including some aspects that have retroactively been defined as racist. Nixon perhaps asked the obvious question about Naipaul best: “How has he managed to reproduce the most standard racial and colonial posi-tions while simultaneously presenting himself as a risk taker?”54

First, it may be helpful to sketch what A Bend in the River looks like and how it directly imitates Heart of Darkness. A Bend in the River is set in an unnamed country that is clearly Zaire under President Mobutu Sese Seko. Salim, the protagonist, is an ethnically Indian Muslim from the coast who grew up in a reasonably well-off family

51. Sandya Shetty, “Heart of Darkness: Out of Africa Some New Things Never Come,” Journal of Modern Literature 15, no. 4 (1989), 461–474, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831602, (accessed April 19, 2013).

52. Nixon, London Calling, 4.53. Bruce King, V. S. Naipaul, (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2003), 195.54. Nixon, London Calling, 6.


of traders and kept slaves. He suffers from deep anxiety about his future and his place in the world and is particularly concerned with the country’s lack of history. He decides he must leave the coast and break away from what he sees as a bleak fate. He buys a small store in the interior from a family friend, Nazruddin. Salim then makes the journey into the interior and settles at the town at the bend in the river. He is amazed by his ability to bring products of civilization like razor blades and enamel bowls to the primitive bush. Zabeth, a magician from one of the villages, is one of his most important customers. The town has been mostly destroyed by violence in the interior and is slowly starting to rebuild. Salim says in the town “you felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future.”55 Soon after he arrives, the coast is racked by violence and his family scatters. Ali, one of the slaves from the family compound, is sent to Salim. After Ali arrives in the town, he embraces the nickname “Metty” (mean-ing mixed race). Zabeth also sends her son Ferdinand to Salim and expects Salim to mentor him. The town slowly rebuilds and “the Big Man” (Naipaul’s alias for Mobutu) builds something called the “New Domain” on the outskirts of town. The New Domain is the site of a new polytechnic and also the home of Raymond, “the Big Man’s white man.”56 Raymond is an African scholar; he was very influential to the Big Man, but the Big Man has stopped needing him and sent him away. Raymond’s wife Yevette begins an affair with Salim, which at first invigorates him but then ends with an act of violence. Eventually, the Big Man “radicalizes” and nationalizes all businesses not owned by Africans. Salim must resort to buying and selling ivory. Finally, Metty betrays him to the police because Salim is unable to help Metty escape and Salim is jailed. Salim is taken in front of Ferdinand, now an administrator of the town, and Ferdinand helps Salim escape.

The novel is invoking Conrad in some key ways. To start, the books share an unnamed setting in Africa, the Congo, which Nai-paul personifies in ways similar to Conrad. Salim describes his new surroundings by saying, “But at night, if you were on the river, it was another thing. You felt the land taking you back to something that

55. Ibid., 27.56. Ibid., 125.


was familiar, something that you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there. You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always.”57 The first person narrative and the long and complex sentence structure invoke Conrad on their own, but the descriptions also personify the landscape in the same sinister way that Conrad’s descriptions did. Naipaul introduced the image of the water hyacinth, the “new thing on the river” as a recurring motif.58 The water hyacinth is an invasive species that is clogging up the waterways; the environment in A Bend in the River is literally the “enemy” of progress in Africa. Rob Nixon argued in London Call-ing that Naipaul established an “ethical geography” of “nihilism” to Africa that Conrad also used in reference to Kurtz.59 A Bend in the River additionally depicts the native population as primitive. For example: when describing a rebellion in the town, Salim says, “The rage of the rebels was like a rage against metal, machinery, wires, everything that was not of the forest and Africa.”60 In this quotation, Salim characterizes this primitivism as opposite to all the emblems of Western progress and civilization that Africa has received.

Naipaul’s work also mirrors Conrad’s in that it depicts the set-ting as having a corrupting effect on his characters, particularly the characters that are “outsiders” in the town. The book mainly does this by creating scenes of sexual ambiguity and greed as evidence of moral corruption. For example, in the town at the bend in the river men and women have a casual and free approach to sex and “the sexual casualness was part of the chaos and corruption of the place” for its Indian residents.61 Salim’s affair with Yvette corrupts him, as he exhibits sadist sexual tendencies toward the end of their affair. Salim claims “all my idea of my own worth [was] bound up with the way a woman responded to me” and he feels shame that the affair has affected his “manhood” in this way.62 Salim also gets involved in ivory and helps his friend Mahesh hide ivory, which matches

57. Ibid., 9.58. Ibid., 46.59. Nixon, London Calling, 100.60. Naipaul, A Bend, 81.61. Ibid., 39.62. Ibid., 197.


how Kurtz was corrupted by commerce in Heart of Darkness. Salim is in the interior to make money, but he stresses that he must not become a “bean-counter” and instead must use commerce to achieve an end goal and then move to better things like marrying Nazrud-din’s daughter. By the end of the novel, however, he has forgotten his initial goal and become obsessed with making money during the economic boom; he knows it cannot last and yet he is paralyzed and corrupted until he loses his business in radicalization. Mahesh tells Salim, “it isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.”

Naipaul’s plot also mirrors Conrad’s in that it sets up a com-parison between Europe and Africa. The comparison that the plot creates is starkly different than Conrad’s. When A Bend in the River describes the West, it focuses on immigrants and foreigners. Naz-ruddin describes the immigrant population by saying, “They thought they were part of the West, but really they had become like the rest of us who had run to them for safety. They were like people far away, living on other people’s land and off other people’s brains . . . ”63 While Conrad presented a critical perception of Belgium and sees a kinship between ancient England and the Congo, Naipaul only presented images of the West in order to criticize immigrants to the West. Nixon made the argument that Naipaul often ties colonial-ism to mimicry. He said that Naipaul presents people in the Third World as mimicking Western culture and creativity to the extent that they dehumanize themselves. At the same time, Naipaul does not allow people in the developing world to reject Western values, because even this is portrayed as imitation.64 In effect, Nixon argued that Naipaul sees nothing of value in non-Western societies and delegitimizes their histories to the point that he can claim that these nations do not possess history.

Naipaul acknowledges Conrad’s influence over him, particularly in his article “Conrad’s Darkness.” In the article, he wrote, “He was, I suppose, the first modern writer I was introduced to.”65 Naipaul goes on to discuss how he as translated Conrad’s world vision:

63. Ibid., 237.64. Nixon, London Calling, 131–132.65. V. S. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness” in The Return of Eva Peron (New York:

Knopf, 1980), 207.


And I found that Conrad—sixty years before, in the time of a great peace—had been everywhere before me. Not as a man with a cause, but a man offering . . . a vision of the world’s half-made societies as places which continuously made and unmade them-selves, where there was no goal, and where always ‘something inherent in the necessities of successful action . . . carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.’66

This quotation offers a lot of insight into how Naipaul interpreted and utilized Conrad in A Bend in the River. Naipaul does not ade-quately support his claim that Conrad did not see a goal to imperi-alism; if anything, Conrad’s affinity for British imperialism and his involvement with Roger Casement suggest the opposite. It is also unclear what Naipaul meant by “half-made societies.” In Naipaul’s own writing, “half-made societies” seems to refer to what Nixon considered Naipaul’s obsession with mimicry, but how this concept applies to Conrad is unintelligible. Conrad depicted fully made soci-eties in the Congo; Marlow may not have interpreted those societies in full, but it does not follow that these tribes were “half-made” in any way. It is clear that Naipaul borrowed heavily from Conrad, but it also seems that Naipaul was interpreting Conrad in an unusual way and aligning Conrad to his own world-view. Part of the back-lash that Naipaul receives stems from his use of Conrad; scholars are still debating if Conrad, writing in 1899, was using racist discourse. By repurposing Conrad’s themes, particularly by referring to the region as backwards and without history, Naipaul was also borrow-ing Conrad’s inherently racist discourse. However, while one can say Conrad is a product of his time, and argue that his work transcends the discourse he must use, one cannot say the same of Naipaul, since he is writing in 1979. Naipaul cannot be excused for using recurring images and discourses about the Congo as a heart of darkness that date back to Conrad and even Stanley.

Part of the biggest problem with Naipaul is his inability or unwillingness to contextualize the Congo in its colonial past. This becomes more apparent in Naipaul’s non-fiction about the subject, particularly his article “A New King for the Congo” about Mobutu.

66. Ibid., 216.


Naipaul’s concern with mimicry is also apparent. Of the name Zaire he wrote, “It appears to be a nonsense name, a sixteenth-century Portuguese corruption, some Zairois will tell you, of a local word for ‘river.’ ’’67 He also wrote, “the bush remains the bush, with its own logical life. Away from the mining areas and the decaying towns the land is as the Belgians found it and as the have left it.” 68 It seems that he ignored the fact that the Belgians did not leave things as they found them in the Congo. The Congo Free State and, to a lesser degree, the Belgian Congo were administrations run on the principles of exploitation and slave labor. It seems he associated the Belgians with progress or industry, not atrocities and mass deaths on genocidal proportions. It is hard to reconcile his portrayal with Hochschild’s, for example. He also seemed to ignore the more recent developments in the Congo. Patrice Lumumba was elected prime minister in pre-independence elections in May of 1960.69 Georges Nzolngola-Ntalaja explained in The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History that, “Brussels’ failure to prevent a radical nationalist such as Lumumba from becoming prime minister created a crisis for the imperialist countries, which were determined to have a decolo-nization favourable to their economic and strategic interests with the help of more conservative African leaders.”70 Lumumba was dis-missed from office in a coup on September 5, 1960 and assassinated on February 11, 1961. Belgian officials have been directly tied to the assassination and the U.S. and UN are more tenuously impli-cated. When Naipaul criticized Mobutu, he did it without impli-cating the West, particularly the United States, in propping up his regime. Much of Naipaul’s references to student violence, building projects, the ban of European names and dress, and the radicaliza-tion and nationalization policies in A Bend in the River are in keep-ing with how Nzongola-Ntalaja describes Mobutu’s regime. From his article “A New King for the Congo,” it becomes clear how much of Naipaul’s descriptions about Zaire come from actual experience.

67. V. S. Naipaul, “A New King for the Congo” in The Return of Eva Peron, (New York: Knopf, 1980), 173.

68. Ibid., 187. 69. Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo From Leopold to Kabila, (London: Zed

Books Ltd., 2002), 94.70. Ibid., 95.


Naipaul did not recognize, however, that Mobutu was allowed to stay in power by Western leaders because, as Nzongola-Ntalaja argued, “To protect and promote [their] interests in the turbulent countries of the Third World, policymakers in Washington and other Western capitals could trust only a ‘strongman’ as the ideal ruler.”71 Naipaul seemed to skew colonization in a way that many consider “blaming the victim.”

The obvious question that surfaces when reading Naipaul is: How does he get away with his racist discourse? The answer seems to lie in Naipaul’s background. Kenneth W. Harrow made the argu-ment that Naipaul uses familiar Western stereotypes and an authori-tative narrator to show the “other” to “us.”72 Naipaul also presents himself as a “man without a country,” a “global” man that somehow can be an expert on developing nations throughout the world for Westerners. He is as famous as a travel writer as he is as a novelist because he is able to bring the full force of his authoritative narrative style to bear on places as diverse as Indian and the American South. The way Naipaul postures himself is how he is able to garner praise for his biases and racist depictions by the West.

What is perhaps most shocking about studying the Congo is how little Congolese voices factor into the texts. One can understand why Westerners are drawn to Naipaul’s authoritative, “Third-World” voices; there is a void of such voices when it comes to texts on the Congo. There was not a written language in the Congo before the Belgians, and the region’s colonial history has done little to create a platform for Congolese voices. Therefore, the discourse on the Congo is still dominated by the West recycling the same prejudices and images. When examining Stanley, Conrad, and Naipaul one begins to wonder why they seem to have all the authority to create the his-tory and literary landscape of the Congo. Interestingly enough, all three struggled with identity. Stanley was originally born John Row-lands, and he claimed to be American but was really Welsh. Conrad’s real name was Konrad Korzeniowski, and he was Polish although he

71. Ibid., 143.72. Kenneth W. Harrow, “An African Reading of Naipaul’s A Bend in the River.”

Journal of South Asian Literature 26, no. ½ (1991), 322, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40873257. (Accessed April 19, 2013).


adopted England as a home. Naipaul prides himself on his status as a “man without a country,” but he too has adopted England. While these men struggled with identity themselves, they have unfairly, and perhaps unwittingly, shaped the identity of a nation. They have attempted to refashion identities for themselves and denied their own histories, which parallels how they have denied the Congo its history by portraying it as a backwards and ahistorical place. The Congo’s ascribed identity matters because it, in Dunn’s eyes especially, effects how the international community deals with the Congo. Viewing the Congo through the fatalistic lens of a “heart of darkness” that “is what it is” allows the West to forget its role in shaping the Congo’s history. The Congo’s complex and bloody past of colonial exploitation and genocide cannot and should not be summed up in one phrase coined in the nineteenth century.

95

The Hellenes and Tribal Societies: Hellenism in the Late Archaic and Early Classical Periods

JOSEPH WILSON, JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY

The Hellenes profoundly influenced the tribal societies with whom they interacted in the late Archaic (800 BC–480 BC) and early Classical (480 BC–323 BC) periods. Hel-

lenic mastery of the sea and the deep, navigable rivers of Europe allowed them nearly unfettered access to a variety of resources. Colonies founded as outposts for Mediterranean trade signifi-cantly altered regional politics. Centers of tribal power shifted to promulgate, control, and encourage the influx of new goods. The introduction of wine-drinking and the associated ceremonies affected social stratification. The aristocratic castes of tribal societ-ies used wine as a status symbol that further separated them from those they ruled. Art reflects the close association of the colonists and the indigenous peoples. Artisans married Hellenic skills with tribal tastes to create distinctive pieces. Each ethnic group reacted differently to the arrival of the Hellenes.

BackgroundThe colony of Olbia was founded c. 550 BC by settlers from the Anatolian polis of Miletus.1 Located northwest of the Crimean Peninsula on the northern shore of the Black Sea, the settlement site was chosen for its location at the mouth of the Bug River. Similar settlements were founded nearby as both the Dnieper and Dnies-ter Rivers empty into the Black Sea in the same area. These deep, navigable rivers offered ready access into the hinterland of Eastern Europe. The Scythians dwelled in the adjacent steppe lands that controlled admission to and from the sea. These transhumant horse-men of Central Asian origin grew wealthy from their interaction with the Hellenes.2

1. OCD, s.v. “Olbia.” 2. Ellen Reeder, ed., Scythian Gold, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 15.


Cyrene was settled by colonists from the Cycladic island of Thera c. 630 BC.3 The polis emerged as the metropolis of several poleis and demes founded on the 175 mile long, gently tiered, crescent shaped plateau on the far eastern coast of Libya.4 Rising to more than two-thousand feet above sea level, the Gebel Akhdar (Green Mountain) region still receives the most rainfall of any area of Libya and is additionally watered by a perennially flowing fountain that taps aquifers deep in the limestone of the plateau.5 The first settlers of Cyrene were greeted by “Berberized nomads” who were “willing to share their grazing lands with foreigners, but were not willing to be driven off them.”6

Massalia was situated just to the east of the mouth of the Rhône River in southern Gaul. Founded by colonists from the Anatolian polis of Phocaea c. 600 BC, the Hellenes had purchased the land rights to the settlement from local Ligurians prior to building.7 The Rhône River afforded the Hellenes access into the heart of Gaul and facilitated trade with the Celts. The Celts populated the forests, mountains and marshes of Western and Central Europe. The arrival of the Hellenes and their wares signaled a shift that forever altered the political trajectory of the multitude of Celtic tribes.

TradeTrade was what facilitated cultural exchange between the Hellenes and tribal peoples. The Scythians acted as intermediaries between the Hellenes and the agricultural proto-Slavs that lived further north.8 Though it is unknown whether the Scythians taxed the grain as it

3. OCD, s.v. “Cyrene.” 4. OCD, s.v. “Cyrene”; John Wright, A History of Libya, (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2010), 15; Edwin Yamauchi, ed., Africa & Africans in Antiquity, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press: 2001), 213.

5. John Wright, A History of Libya, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 15–16; Edwin Yamauchi, ed., Africa & Africans in Antiquity, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press: 2001), 218.

6. Edwin Yamauchi, ed., Africa & Africans in Antiquity, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press: 2001), 214; John Wright, A History of Libya, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 16.

7. OCD, s.v. “Massilia.”8. Ellen Reeder, ed., Scythian Gold, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 31.

The Hellenes and Tribal Societies 97

traveled the riverine routes or whether they exacted tribute directly from the settled peoples who grew the grain; the Scythians grew wealthy from the grain trade. Grave goods extracted from kurhany attest to the abundance of golden objects the horse lords acquired due to the Hellenic need for cereals.9 Athens relied heavily on Pon-tic food stuffs during the crises of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars.10 More than just a breadbasket, Olbia provided access to the northern trade route, which allowed for luxuries such as honey, amber, fine leather and furs.11 Undoubtedly, slaves that were born in the forest-steppe band of Eastern Europe were sold to Aegean customers.12 The Scythian ruling class was enriched by this trade in a way that was usually reserved for settled cultures. Their princely burials, mainly along the banks of the Dnieper River, contain a cul-tural mix of native and Hellenic inspired objects to aid them in the next life. Their martial prowess and mobility was sufficient to exert hegemony over the western steppe and beyond.13

The entrepôt of Massalia altered the agricultural face of Gaul. Prior to the arrival of the Hellenes, neither grapes nor olives had been grown in the region.14 These mainstays flourished. Manufac-tured goods were traded for raw materials similar to those provided by the Scythians. Additionally, the Celts traded tin and gold to the Hellenes.15 Celtic chieftains experienced the same boost in status as the Scythians from the importation of luxury items. Their graves attest to a liking of Hellenic wares. The Celts were master metal workers, unlike the Scythians. Golden status symbols, such as torcs, were manufactured locally. The Scythians relied on Hellenic jewel-ers to produce their prized decorations.

While Massalia and Olbia provided the Hellenes with access to raw materials, resources from the north, and agricultural goods, Cyrene was wholly an agricultural outpost. All manner of

9. Ibid., 32; Kurhan are burial mounds of Scythian nobles or chieftains.10. Ellen Reeder, ed., Scythian Gold, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 32.11. Ibid.12. Ibid.13. Antony Karasulas, Mounted Archers of the Steppe: 600 BC–AD 1300, (New

York: Osprey, 2004), 12–14. 14. OCD, “Massilia.”15. Simon James, The World of the Celts, (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 24.


Mediterranean staples grew in the region, but Cyrene was notable for high quality apples, saffron and roses.16 Three harvests were made each year. First, the crops closest to the sea were brought in, then those on the middle tiers of the plateau, and finally those at the top. Eight months passed between the first and final harvest, provid-ing fresh food nearly year-round.17 Their pastures produced horses famed for chariot racing as well as certain breeds of Libyan sheep whose fleece was renowned.18 The most important export of Cyrene was silphium. This now extinct plant was used in a variety of ancient medicines and was also a key ingredient for a popular fish flavoring. Silphium was vital to the economy; the state monopolized trade in order to avert shortages.19

The indigenous peoples of Cyrene did not benefit from trade with the Hellenes in an important way. As transhumant herders in a geo-graphically limited area, they were forced to contend with the Hellenic colonists for agricultural space to feed their flocks. The settlements of the area received less local support as more colonists arrived.20

PoliticsTrade with the Hellenes caused a seismic shift in Celtic politics. The Hallstatt C period (800 BC–600 BC) ended with the foundation of Massalia. The opportunities provided by Hellenic trade caused an exodus from Central Europe to Western Europe and heralded the beginning of the Hallstatt D period (600 BC–475 BC). New oppida were carved out at key points along the trade routes.21 The chieftains that ruled over these small kingdoms collected tariffs on the goods traveling overland from the Rhône River to the heads of the vari-ous other rivers in the heart of Gaul. Much like the Scythians, they

16. John Wright, A History of Libya, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 18.

17. Ibid.18. Ibid.19. Ibid., 19.20. OCD, “Cyrene.” 21. Oppida is the plural of oppidum. These were fortifications built by leveling

off the top of a hill and fortifying the perimeter of the newly made plateau; commonly known as hill forts. Sometimes entire villages were founded inside the oppidum.


became exceedingly wealthy by commanding the headwater region. Unlike the Scythians, the Celts made a conscious effort to move into this territory after the arrival of the Hellenes. Had the Hellenes not founded a colony at the mouth of the Rhône River, it is prob-able that interaction with the Celts in the ancient world would have occurred along a different trajectory.

Fittingly, the Scythians and ancient Libyans were not affected politically in as significant a manner. As transhumant societies, they did not stand to gain as much from contact with the Hellenes as did a settled, agrarian culture like the Celts. While the Scythians acquired wealth in the form of gold jewelry and other embellish-ments, the Libyans did not prosper at all. Their role as paid animal herders and silphium collectors diminished as they were gradually displaced from the upland countryside.22

Wine CultureThe Hellenic drinking party known as the symposium was likely imitated by the Celtic nobles of Gaul. Wine from the Hellenes and Etruscans was a primary status symbol. Conspicuous consumption was one way in which the chieftain and his cadre of nobles estab-lished their sovereignty and further separated themselves as an aris-tocratic class. The grave goods of the Hochdorf Chieftain reveal much concerning this practice dated to c. 530 BC, the man was buried lying on an ornate bronze couch, with bronze dinner service for nine as well as nine drinking horns and a krater that was likely manufactured in one of the Hellenic colonies of southern Italy.23 The number and type of eating and drinking implements corre-spond with the symposium. This cannot be a coincidence. For the Hellenes to introduce wine and not also introduce the wine drinking party seems unlikely.

The Scythians eagerly took to wine as well, but there is no evi-dence of their having enjoyed the symposium. Like the Celts, the

22. OCD, s.v. “Cyrene.” And Edwin Yamauchi, ed., Africa & Africans in Antiquity, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press: 2001), 214.

23. Simon James, The World of the Celts, (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 26–27. And a krater is a large vessel used to mix wine with water before drinking.


Scythians used wine as a status symbol. Archeological study indicates that there were wine presses in Olbia to fulfill the eastern demand.24 Their affinity for drinking large quantities of wine became part of Hellenic folklore. The Hellenes observed that the horsemen took their wine undiluted, which gave birth to a phrase that translated roughly as “drinking in the Scythian style.”25 Regarded as a barbaric practice—as undiluted wine was potent—the Hellenes used this phrase to disparage other Hellenes who indulged too voraciously.

ArtThe interaction of tribal cultures with the Hellenes is most tangibly seen in surviving artistic artifacts. The Vix torc was found as part of the burial of a noblewoman in Gaul and dates to c. 500 BC.26 The torc weighs in at roughly one pound of solid gold and the terminals bear the trademark intricate filigree of a Celtic master goldsmith.27 What distinguishes the torc is the addition of winged horses as tiny decorations that mount the filigree. This is a clear allusion to the mythological beast of Hellenic origin, Pegasus. Further, the number of Attic black figure pottery pieces in the grave as well as a bronze Etruscan krater attest to the cultural interaction this noblewoman had with the Hellenes trading up the Rhône via Massalia.28 Though the torc is of native manufacture, the design element was inspired by Hellenic contact.

The marriage of Scythian motifs and Hellenic craftsmanship in jewelry is indicative of close cultural interaction. An excellent exam-ple of this is an artifact known as ‘Necklace with horsehead termi-nals.’ The Scythians, as steppe peoples, had an affinity for the wild creatures of the open steppe: golden eagles, leopards, elk, but above all, horses. This necklace combined the horse symbol so important to the Scythians with the Hellenic artisan’s ability to finely braid gold wire.29 The delicate rosettes are in contrast to the almost grotesque

24. OCD, s.v. “Olbia.”25. Ellen Reeder, ed., Scythian Gold, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 33.26. Simon James, The World of the Celts, (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993),

22–24.27. Ibid.28. Ibid. 29. Ellen Reeder, ed., Scythian Gold, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 274.


styling of the horse heads. A possible explanation for this is more than one craftsmen working on the same piece. To add further intrigue, the artists may have been from separate or mixed back-grounds. Some of the Hellenic settlements near Olbia are known to have been “polyglot urban centers” where Scythians and Hellenes intermarried.30 The offspring from these marriages likely appren-ticed in local workshops and produced many of the pieces found in Scythian kurhan.31 This arrangement is evident when a survey of the entire body of artifacts is taken: the animal motifs of the Scythians appear as often as the mythological motifs of the Hellenes. Herak-les, griffons and the sphinx are as common as moose, bird’s heads and cultic reliefs.

The native Libyans were not beneficiaries of Hellenism. They were gradually driven from their coastal grazing land by Cyrene and her satellite settlements. Having little to offer in trade, they did not profit like the Celts or Scythians. Yet, a transcendent piece of art has lasted the centuries to inform modern humanity of the identity of the ancient herders of the Libyan coast. Dated to the fourth cen-tury BC, the ‘Bust of native Libyan man in bronze’ was unearthed from beneath the mosaic floor of the Temple of Apollo at Cyrene in 1957.32 This life-size piece offers a rare case study of a native North African tribal nomad in antiquity: before Rome, the Vandals, Islam or the Ottomans had altered the cultural landscape in subsequent conquests. That a Hellenic sculptor was inspired to capture a Libyan in his art leads to many questions as to the relationships between Hellenes and tribal peoples that are as of yet unanswered.

ConclusionThe Hellenes both helped and hindered tribal societies in the late Archaic and early Classical periods. Unfortunate geography and lack of arable land forced the Hellenes to the sea in search of colonies, areas with indigenous populations. The Hellenes became masters of the trading galley, sailing them the length and breadth of the

30. Ibid., 50.31. Ibid., 51. 32. Edwin Yamauchi, ed., Africa & Africans in Antiquity, (East Lansing: Michigan

State University Press: 2001), 227.


Mediterranean. Talented and daring merchants learned the riverine routes that carved their way in and out of the heart of Europe. Trade with the Hellenes afforded opportunities for acquiring great wealth between Celtic and Scythian elites. This wealth further cemented their tribal status via luxury goods and wine culture. To facilitate this wealth, the Celts migrated en masse. Sustained contact encour-aged cultural interaction. This interaction is materially visible in art, yet permeates all aspects of contact. Not all tribal peoples benefited from Hellenism. The ancient Libyans were displaced and disaffected by the settlers of Cyrene as they did not have sufficient resources to trade equitably and they were not militarily powerful enough to defend their grazing grounds. The Hellenes gained an agricultural outpost as well as a southern Mediterranean port.

ED I T O R I A L!

105

The Nation and the Sea: Identity, Ideology, and Imagination in Colonial Bengal

ANIKET DE

Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? . . . Epi oinopa ponton. Ah Dedalus, the Greeks!

. . . Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother.—James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)1

The Bay of Bengal, a large triangular bay pointing to the north, separates the eastern coast of modern-day India from “South-East Asian” countries. At the apex of the triangle lies

the erstwhile British province of Bengal. Since at least the seventh century AD, the littorals of the Bay had been closely connected by trade networks of South India, Bengal and the islands of South-east Asia.2 In fin-de-siècle Bengal, the sea was not just a medium for communication; it had a central position in the literature of the time, and had a pivotal role in shaping colonial Bengali subjectivity. During this period, there was a proliferation of Bengali texts that focused directly or indirectly on the Bay of Bengal in all literary genres—poetry, novels, short stories and even fairy tales. From folk tales describing the ancient riches of South East Asia to caste purity between India and Burma, the sea remains pivotal in understanding a number of facets of Bengali personhood in the turn of the century.

Ideas of selfhood among the Bengali bhadralok (educated middle class) in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century were shaped by an active imagination, negotiation and literary construc-tion of the Bay of Bengal. In ways more than one, the sea was a “great sweet mother” for the people living on its rim; the history,

1. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage Books, June 1996), 5 (1.1.78–80). Translations from Greek: Epi oinopa ponton: “upon the wine-dark sea” (Homer). Thalatta! Thalatta! The sea! The sea! (Xenophon).

2. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia” In Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 31.3, ( Jul. 1997), 735–762.


geography, sociology and aesthetics of the sea were necessary to a burgeoning national and cultural consciousness. To be sure, there was no “Bengali” way of imagining the sea; rather, the sea became a signifier of a multiplicity of anti-colonial and national emotions, beliefs and myths. National identities have focused on the land more than anything else; we speak of national identities as “Indian,” “Ben-gali,” “Burmese” or “Indonesian.” Recognizing and studying the role of the sea in constructing nationalism points out yet another role of water in human history: moulding identities of not only “sea-peoples” or sailors, but the larger land-based populations on its rim. As Braudel said, the history of the sea cannot be separated from the histories of the lands surrounding it; the sea remains central in con-structing even land-based national identities3.

The paper analyses and historicizes two Bengali texts from 1866 to 1926: Abanindranath Tagore’s novella Ksirer Putul (1896) (“The Condensed-Milk Doll”) and a section from Saratchandra Chatto-padhyay’s seminal novel Pather Dabi (“The Right of Way” 1926). Ksirer Putul invokes the pre-colonial trade routes in the Bay to sketch a fairy-tale land of rubies, sapphires and pearls for children. An imagination of the ‘ancient’ Bay of Bengal was indispensible to a national imagination in the turn of the century. Pather Dabi begins by showing how upper-caste society constructed discourses of impu-rity and pollution about the lands across the Bay, especially Burma. The people across and beyond the Bay, including the “hill-peoples” of Burma and North-East India, become the ‘other’ in this process of making a national identity. The two texts locate the sea in differ-ent imaginative realms, yet converge in the attempt to delimit and mythologize the nation using the sea.

The bay was named the “Bay of Bengal” in spite of other larger regions bounding it because of the strategic location of Bengal on the apex of the water body. Although the modern name comes from establishment of ‘Bengal’ as a British province in the eighteenth century, the concept of a “sea of Bengal” had been present in the imagination of travellers and tradesmen since the pre-colonial era.

3. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Volume I. Trans. Sian Reynolds. (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976), 17.

The Nation and the Sea 107

Traders from the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean in the west, China in the east, and the “Spice Islands” of South-East Asia crossed each other in the sea ports of Bengal. This complex system of trade routes was at its peak in the thirteenth century, long before Europe-ans actively entered the Indian Ocean trade in the sixteenth and sev-enteenth centuries4. The Portuguese, followed by the Dutch and the English, rushed to the Bay of Bengal to take advantage of this rich system of trade routes. It was not surprising, therefore, that almost all European powers established strongholds at the apex of the bay, in Bengal. The river Hooghly, a distributary of the Ganges that flowed southwards and drained into the bay, provided a convenient inlet into mainland India. From the seventeenth century onwards, the banks of the Hooghly were dotted with numerous European settlements. From 1757, when the British gained control over Ben-gal, Calcutta remained the capital of British India until 1911 and played a crucial role in world history5. The colonial metropolis of Calcutta also became the hub of a rich literary tradition, producing a vast array of Bengali authors. The literature on the sea was pro-duced in an urban context, mediated by a colonial society and politi-cal economy. Such an imagination was most clearly articulated in the fairy tales, a new genre that developed from older forms of oral folk-tales to formal prose in the late nineteenth century.

Sapphires and the Sea: Abanindranath Tagore’s Ksirer Putul (1896)The sea in the Bengali literary imagination entered the realm of children’s literature, and such “fairy tales” were products of active myth-making about the Bay. During the late nineteenth century, countless fairy tales were composed in Bengali and hundreds of folk tales were collected and rewritten. Voyages to unknown lands, often a dominant theme in children’s literature, were translated by Bengali authors to refer specifically to the Bay of Bengal. One of the most loved and famous books of this genre was the 1896 novella Ksirer

4. Janet Abu-Lughod, “The World System in the Thirteenth Century: Dead-End or Precursor?” In Michael Adas, Ed. Islamic & European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Empire (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 199), 76.

5. For an overview of the various phases of colonialism in India, see Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (New York: Routledge, 2004), 38–70, 78–102.


Putul, or “The Condensed-Milk Doll” by the Bengali author and painter Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951).6

In the story, the king sets out on a voyage of thirteen months with an array of ships full of wealth. He sails to the land of gems, then to the land of gold, the land of pearls and finally to the land of the blue jewels. Writing simple sentences with vivid imagery is Tagore’s signature style. He describes the departure of the ships as: “At dusk, the golden ship unfurled its golden sail and sailed like a golden cloud towards the west, through the blue waters of the boundless sea.”7 The voyage continues, and the king travels to the lands of gems, gold and pearls, where everything he sees is made, respectively, of gems, gold and pearls. He collects and trades enough wealth in these three places, and finally arrives at the last port:

There in the princess’ garden, the blue silkworm eats sapphire leaves and builds a blue silk cocoon—fine as water, light as wind, blue as the sky—in a tree of blue gems. The princess sits on the palace roof, and weaves a sari with that silk for the whole night, matching colours with the sky. It takes six months to make one such sari . . . The king bought the sari with seven ships full of gold for his beloved queen, as per her orders.8

The colour blue in this passage, clearly linking to the sea, is a signifier of the riches the sea promised once upon a time. Tagore’s aesthetics of the sea is, in effect, a reinforcement of pre-colonial modes of eco-nomic networks that sustained the Bay of Bengal. The story takes a different turn from this point, as the king returns to his country with expensive gifts for his queens.

Ksirer Putul, like many, many other Bengali fairy tales written in the same period, actively contributes to myths about the Bay of Bengal. The story is based not only on a Romantic fascination with

6. Ksirer Putul is replete with nursery rhymes and folk tales which were popular in rural Bengal, See Sanjay Sircar’s “Shashthi’s Land: Folk Nursery Rhyme in Abanindranath Tagore’s “The Condensed-Milk Doll”” In Asian Folklore Studies, 57.1 (1998), pp. 25–49. The title “The Condensed-Milk Doll” is borrowed from him.

7. AbanƯndranƗtha ৫hƗkura, K܈Ưrera Putula, (KalikƗtƗ: Ananda Publishers, 1986 [1896]), 10.

8. Ibid., 13–4.


the sea, but also on pre-modern forms of exchange of material goods within empires. There is certainly some historical evidence to support such claims; yet, as Roland Barthes would say, the myth acts only as a “second-order semiological system,” in which historical meanings are removed from symbols, and symbols are used and appropriated merely as signifiers in a new bourgeois ideological system.9 The wealth of the king and the seas are not put in historical context, but become signifiers of the richness of the Bay of Bengal in general. It may also be read as an expression of Orientalism: Tagore’s art has a clear and recognizable influence from Oriental sources like Buddhist frescoes of Ajanta caves and the like.10 Such processes of myth-making were indispensible to the Bengali imagination of the sea. Ksirer Putul is therefore a very important text in our selection: it shows a process of myth making, in the most literal sense of the term, for a young audi-ence. The impact of such myth making on children had a great role to play in developing social and national consciousness.

Land of Mlecchas: Caste, Purity and Burma in Pather Dabi (1926)The sea also delimited the national imagination, and created a num-ber of others in the process of making a national identity. Saratchan-dra Chattopadhyay’s Pather Dabi (“The Right of Way”) is one of the most controversial and well-studied works of Bengali literature. The story is about a Brahmin man called Apurba, who travels to Rangoon, Burma and joins a secret anti-colonial military organiza-tion. In Pather Dabi, as in many other works on Burma, the sea is a boundary that protects the purity of the nation from regions across the sea that are considered to be polluted.

Set in the 1910s, the book begins by introducing Apurba. Apurba is presented as a devout Brahmin who follows all the ritualistic

9. Ronald Barthes, Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), 114.

10. Although beyond the scope of this paper, Ksirer Putul can be put in context with Abanindranath’s Orientalism, for the novel very clearly draws on notions of pre-colonial wealth of Oriental kingdoms. See Tapati Guha-Thakurata’s landmark book The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 146–85, for a detailed account of Orientalism in art in the same time and place discussed in this paper.


practices, in spite of being a science graduate. This was exceptional given the popular discourse of the period: western-educated stu-dents, especially science graduates, were considered to be “modern” or “westernized,” and therefore expected to defy traditional, espe-cially religious values. Apurba’s father and two elder brothers are happily westernized: they lived on chicken and bread from English hotels, and welcome Western clothing (all of which may be consid-ered against Brahmanical tradition). This has greatly pained Apur-ba’s mother, a pious housewife who insists on following religious doctrines diligently. Only Apurba understands her pain, conforms to his mother’s beliefs, and defends tradition vigorously.

The text shows how Burma and the Burmese were seen as other in the construction of Bengali selfhood. One day, Apurba comes home and tells his mother that he got a job in Botha Company’s new office in Rangoon. The starting salary was four hundred rupees, and a raise was promised in six months.

After knowing that the job was in Burma, his mother’s face dimmed. She said in an apathetic voice, “Are you crazy, Apu? Do people go to that country in their right minds! Where, as I have heard, there is no caste, birth hierarchy, rituals or customs, how can I send you there? I have no interest in such money.”

Frightened by his mother’s opposition, Apurba said, “You may not be interested, Ma, but I am! On your command, I can remain a beggar all my life—but will I get such an opportunity in my lifetime? . . .”

Ma said, “But I have heard that it is a land of mlecchas (for-eign non-Hindu people who do not follow ritual and scriptural practices).”11

The last line is, of course, a direct reference to his westernized brothers who do not care about purity and pollution. What is most significant in this passage, however, is the creation of a discourse on Burma among upper-caste middle-class Bengali householders. Apurba’s mother has never been to Burma, and has no first-hand knowledge about the land; yet she has “heard,” and she happily believes that Burma is composed of mlecchas. A mother can have a

11. Saratchandra Ca৬৬opƗdhyƗya, Pather DƗbƯ (KalikƗtƗ: Reflect, 1989), 136.


number of fears when her most beloved son wants to travel alone: fears of unknown lands, unscrupulous people or health issues. Yet, what matters to Apurba’s mother—and she repeats it quite a few times—is the fact that the Burmese do not follow caste hence are not ritually pure. Apurba writes it off as an exaggeration, but does not counter it. Rather, he points out that one’s geographical loca-tion cannot absolutely determine his values; after all, his brothers had become mlecchas in spite of being in Bengal. Apurba, too, does not deny that the Burmese are ritually impure; even in Burma, he maintains his caste purity by keeping away from the Burmese in various ways.

By the nineteenth century, Bengali caste society had fashioned its selfhood by fashioning populations across the Bay of Bengal as the other, and the Burmese were most important of such peoples. Bengal accepted many forms of Burmese culture: the loincloth or lungi, of Burmese origin, remains a popular dress for Bengalis. The idea of Burma was very much present in the Bengali worldview. Yet, for many sections of society it was only an idea, as few middle class Brahmins actually left the land. In this respect, the sea was a necessary liminal zone of separation, a purity-pollution boundary. It is not without reason that crossing the sea or kala-pani (“black waters”) was a reproachable sin; the imagination of the sea needs to be understood, as Braudel suggested to us at the outset of this paper, in relation to the lands surrounding it. The “hill peoples” in the mountainous regions of Burma, Chittagong and North-Eastern India-the region that Willem van Schendel and James Scott term ‘Zomia’-were also fashioned as ‘others’ while a bourgeois national consciousness emerged.12 A detailed study of the indigenous in Ben-gali literature has the potential to reveal the difficult relationship of the Bengali selfhood with the “hill-peoples.”

From the perspective of the higher castes, a sea voyage is dan-gerous because of the fear of pollution from touching lower castes

12. Willem van Schendel, “Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: jumping scale in Southeast Asia” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (2002), 647– 668. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).


or foreign races. Saratchandra, himself a Brahmin who crossed the Bay of Bengal, is critical of such dictums. In the one sentence he uses to describe Apurba’s voyage, he highlights the caste issue with a mild scorn: “On board the ship, Apurba chewed dry flattened rice, ate sweetmeats and drank coconut water, thoroughly protected his Brahmin-ness and somehow reached the port of Rangoon, like a half-dead man.”13 Apurba’s example supports Sekhar Bandyopad-hyay’s thesis that “in colonial Bengal . . . Hindu society successfully maintained its structural integrity, ideological discipline and political solidarity by overcoming, co-opting and suppressing basic challenges to its basic power relations.”14 Apurba follows the rules of ritual purity with careful attention. The three things he consumes—flattened rice, sweetmeats, and coconut water—can be stored for days—and do not require cooking or handling by people of other castes.

In this way, Saratchandra sets up Rangoon as an ideal destination for anti-colonial struggle. Burma will be a place where caste rules do not apply, leading to a pan-Indian communitas among Indians from all levels of society to fight the British. The sea, once again becomes pivotal: this time for drawing boundaries and creating distance.

Conclusion: Toward a Maritime Definition of Nationhood?The sea was as important as the land in creating nationhood and difference in colonial Bengal; such ideologies were created by imag-ining the sea as aesthetically pleasing, mythically rich or ritually pol-luting. The Bay of Bengal’s history and geography were of immense importance to an emerging national consciousness in the turn of the nineteenth century. The trope of the nation as a mother was a dominant way to understand land-based nationalisms that rose in the late nineteenth century. The role of the sea was vital and crucial in the same process; the sea was also often a mother, or a “great sweet mother,” as Joyce would have said. If creating otherness is a logical corollary of nationhood, the sea was actively involved in that process as well. We should, therefore, be careful about pushing the motherly metaphor too far; in Pather Dabi, the sea was also used as

13. Saratchandra, Pather DƗbƯ, 137.14. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Dominance in

Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004), 240.


a boundary to define purity and pollution, and create otherness to define selfhood.

The nation had an intricate, if sometimes problematic, relation-ship with the sea. Paradoxically, as Sunil Amrith notes, postcolonial nationalism created fragmented nation-states on the rim of the Bay of Bengal, ignoring the age old connections that existed within South and Southeast Asia through the Bay.15 The construction of a Bengali identity needed an imagination of the Bay of Bengal. Envisioning the sea as an imagined space for negotiating identity and ideology can be a useful tool in exploring various aspects of and nationalism.

15. Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013), 4.

the hellenes and tribal societies

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