ABSTRACT
Image conscious, Emily Pfeiffer and Mary Adelaide Walker experienced travel as a series of splendid surfaces. For Pfeiffer, the sense of déjà vu renders Athens entirely familiar, a home that has been experienced in the texts and images that have, in some way, represented the space of Greece. For Mary Adelaide Walker, sailing into a port in Crete could be reduced to a moving sequence of vignettes that were best enjoyed from a vantage point that afforded the broadest view. This chapter turns to a group of women who were consistently self-conscious of their role as tourists as they travelled in a picture-postcard Greece that was framed by their religious reading of Murray and Baedeker. The anxiety of the woman traveller of the period is explored in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), where the young Lucy Honeychurch is chastised by Miss Lavish, the travel writer and hopeful ethnographer of modern Italian life: ‘[t]ut, tut! Miss Lucy! I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker. He does but touch the surface of things. As to the true Italy – he does not even dream of it. The true Italy is only to be found in patient observation’ (Forster [1908] 1978, 36-7). As James Buzard suggests, ‘[f]or Forster, the “Baedeker Italy” regulates contact between touristic and Italian life’ (Buzard 1993, 310), ‘touristic’ life being regulated by the rhythms of the guidebook rather than the real site of Italy. Unable to penetrate beyond the surface, Lucy laments the inevitability and monotony of her tourist itinerary. However, her journey is interrupted and subsequently becomes haunted by her sight of a brief and brutal murder. Fainting, she drops her postcards of Italy, the act itself symbolizing how those pictures no longer represented her time in Florence. Put another way, her panoramic view of Italy as a series of moving surfaces was disrupted by the intervention of real life, in real time. Rather than skimming across the surfaces of Italy projected by her guidebook, Lucy herself becomes implicated in that scene as the witness to a murder.
