| Tourism is a form of performance that defines individual and collective identity through a complex process of differentiation and affiliation. Touring became a customary formative experience for increasingly large numbers of influential men and women after 1660. Because of this trend, the power of tourism's ritualized experimentation and border-crossing to reinforce or transform identity and culture fascinated and often alarmed contemporary novelists. I have concentrated on novels in which tourism and women of the host region are linked to explore alternative sexual and gender relations, utopian social organization, morality, and political choice. I pay close attention to the reciprocity between non-literary practices and the literary form of the novel, and to how gender difference is used to reflect other types of difference, or to posit alternatives to contemporary normative power relationships.; After an overview of tourist culture and the theoretical issues involved, I address the Maria episodes in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, trace their influence on subsequent tourist culture, and finish by discussing the Maid of Buttermere and William Wordsworth's use of her in Book VII of The Prelude. In the first section of Chapter 3, I examine Thomas Amory's John Buncle narratives and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall for the way the male tourist acts as a protected witness of all-female communities, and to address the reasons both writers produced sequels giving the life stories of the tourists themselves. In the second section of this chapter, I discuss a little known anti-woman satire, The Travels and Adventures of Mademoiselle de Richelieu. This work is narrated by a woman who cross-dresses as a man to tour Europe and engage amorously with the women of each country. It is particularly interesting for its ambivalent treatment of both sexuality and gender. In the final chapter, I address Samuel Richardson's fascination with the influence and importance of tourism in the lives of the governing elite, especially in Sir Charles Grandison. |
