ABSTRACT
When referring to her novels, Edith Wharton called herself a “drawing room naturalist.” Her novels are ethnographically oriented studies into the behavior patterns of an elite NYC social class. But she is not just a novelist of manners, since she also wrote several books based on her travels, mostly in Italy and France, which constitute studies of European culture. As part of this interest, she published a book on Morocco in 1919. Wharton’s travelogue is the fi rst guidebook to Morocco in English, written well before the country became independent of colonial rule in 1953. Wharton’s aim in this volume is to evaluate Moroccan ways of life mainly untouched by European infl uence. This isolated position is the reason for Wharton’s main interest: the presence of the past in Morocco, a medieval past that she suspects is soon to be lost through modernization. At the same time, her aim in this alluring book is to draw the very tourists who embody Europeanization into the country.
