The Memory of Architecture in Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing

Historic monuments were recast as national heritage in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, just as Edith Wharton began her forty-plus-year career as a writer. Modern inventions (steamships, railways, and eventually motorcars) and new ways of building (concrete, macadamized roads, and the T bolt) changed the built environment, especially in urban centers. Technological transformations, when combined with the ideological needs of nation-states in Europe, including the new Italian state (1871), led to public and private efforts to save noteworthy landmarks.Some restored old buildings to their former glory, while others believed evidence of time’s passage made old buildings more authentic. In this, Wharton sided with those who preserved, not restored. Thus, her poem on Chartres describes the cathedral’s “prayer worn floor,” while a description of Italy derided “the scrubbing of fountains and statues to ‘preternatural whiteness’” (“Chartres”).1“Cultural continuity,” writes Àgnes Zsófia Kovács, was the prism and the purpose of Wharton’s assessment of buildings and curated landscapes (203). In The Memory of Architecture in Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing, Kovács delves into how Wharton described and interpreted buildings and their curated grounds in observational accounts of Europe and North Africa. Kovács’s premise is that “Wharton’s architectural vision of the past appears in her travel writing in a very palpable way” (1). Kovács examines how Wharton challenged nineteenth-century sentimentality in her travel writings, producing scientific and content-laden accounts of Mediterranean sites. In an era of urban modernization, Wharton “uses the study of architectural and natural topography to produce an aesthetic effect, an affect in the viewers that connects them to the past” (203).This book relies primarily on published and unpublished travel accounts produced by Wharton between 1888 and 1928. Place—more so than time—explains the organization of this monograph. Chapters 1 and 2 trace Wharton’s responses to the buildings and curated grounds of Italy, where she regularly traveled in the 1890s. Chapters 3 and 4 assess her accounts of France before, during, and after World War I. Chapter 5 focuses on Wharton’s travels to North Africa: Tunisia and Algeria before the war, Morocco at the height of the war, and a brief stay in Egypt after the war. Chapter 6 reviews her responses to the Aegean islands and littoral, which she visited in 1888 on the Vanadis and in 1926 on the Osprey. In the final chapter, Kovács considers Wharton’s writings on Spain, where she made a final trip sixty years after an early childhood visit to the Alhambra.Kovács presents readers with what she calls the “Wharton Map” (2). Kovács includes a series of useful maps tracing Wharton’s pathways in Europe, but the Wharton Map also signifies Kovács’s intent to trace the distinctive and innovative ways that Wharton approached the study of historic sites in her travels. Kovács effectively locates Wharton amid the travel publications produced by her contemporaries. Wharton’s appreciation for other professional writers—Charles Elliott Norton, Paul Bourget, André Chevrillon, Henry Adams, and others—did not mean that she embraced the sentimentality with which they described historic sites. Wharton instead premised her firsthand accounts of ancient buildings on a scientific approach that allowed new technologies, like photography and measured floor plans, to enrich understanding of the past (43–45).Kovács shows that the ideas and approaches of John Ruskin informed Wharton’s interest in the relationship between people and buildings (110). As summarized by Kovács, Ruskin believed “the stories that architectural buildings tell their viewers are written in stone” (42). Wharton proved open to expanding on the stylistic periods that Ruskin valued, moving from his exclusive study of buildings of the Italian Renaissance to the Baroque styles of the preceding centuries. Such decisions reveal Wharton’s intellectual confidence and an intentional claim of expertise.Yet Wharton did not subvert all the conceits of her contemporaries. After all, she focused her interests on monumental works that embodied power and wealth, like Ruskin or her contemporaries, only glancing at the buildings used by ordinary people. In this way, Wharton perpetuated Ruskin’s class-based assumptions when identifying buildings that mattered.Although Kovács does not ignore the fact of this class-based architectural vision, much of it is subsumed in footnotes. Kovács provides, for example, an interesting discussion of Carol J. Singley’s study of Wharton’s engagement with Ernest Renan, and I would have liked to see this incorporated into Kovács’s main text (59n6). I especially wonder what Kovács makes of Renan’s 1882 claim that “[g]etting history wrong is part of being a nation” (cited in Gelvin 8). What did Wharton identify in her various travels as “wrong,” an architectural disruption of continuity, and what did such a moment reveal about Wharton’s worldview or, perhaps more broadly, the assumptions of her era?Wharton was not shy in identifying disruptions in In Morocco (1920). Since I have published extensively on historic preservation in colonial Morocco, I read Kovács’s fifth chapter with particular interest. “The present is a perpetually prolonged past,” Wharton wrote of Morocco, evidence of the cultural continuity that is central to the thesis of Kovács’s study. In Morocco exhibits Wharton’s heightened awareness of time, and she portrays “a Medieval past, that she suspects is soon to be lost through modernization” (141). In all Moroccan cities, Wharton condemns warehouses, cafés, movie theaters, shops, and trams, mistakenly attributing all modern facilities to European colonizers. Wharton attributes modern buildings in Moroccan cities to “the corruption of European bad taste” (x).However, Wharton fears the modern city will replace historic sites everywhere, not just in Morocco. She denigrates modern urbanism in Greece (factories on Makronisos), Italy (new hotels and cheap villas in Varallo), and France (the sprawl of Paris).2 So when Kovács states that “colonial stereotyping can be interpreted as part of Wharton’s architectural vision” in In Morocco (142), I am left wondering about the correlation to Wharton’s critique of modern architecture in Europe.Kovács admittedly did not set out to contribute to Moroccan history, but disentangling Wharton’s beliefs about Morocco, often false, from information and interpretations of twenty-first-century historians could have strengthened her focus on cultural continuity. Wharton may have written that Moroccan Jews live “under dire conditions in unwelcoming ghettos,” but historian Emily Gottreich shows how the French imposed their understanding of the lot of Jews in Europe (Kovács 147). Wharton may have cast Moroccan women as “locked away in harems”—harem being a term that does not exist in Moroccan Arabic—but historian Etty Terem shows how a Moroccan jurist of Wharton’s time “invokes an interpretation [of legal codes] that promotes women’s empowerment” (Kovács 148). Wharton wrote that Moroccans built in “the same 1000-year old layout,” but my own research shows that colonial regulations prohibited innovative building designs (Kovács 154).3 Anchoring Morocco and other countries discussed by Kovács to Wharton’s time via the work of twenty-first-century historians can reveal when and how her interpretations of continuity were exaggerated.The primary task of Kovács, however, is to contribute to literary studies, especially to those interested in Wharton as a writer and influential cultural figure. Kovács cites a vast number of books and articles by Wharton scholars, meticulously engaging their ideas. Kovács ultimately concludes, “While [Wharton’s] thematic interest in an idealized past appears to be a rejection of the reality of modern twentieth-century-Europe, her focus on the workings of the imagination that produces impressions of continuities with the past seems highly, even idiosyncratically, sensitive and markedly twentieth century” (209). For readers of the Edith Wharton Review, this book offers a thoughtful new contribution to conversations about Wharton’s travel writings while raising new questions about Wharton’s participation in the place of historical buildings in the evolution of the modern city.