Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. London: Vantage, 2000.
Bakhtin, Mikhall. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1984.
Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism.
Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Verson, 1989.
---. One-Way Street and Other Writings. London: Verso, 1992.
Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V.
Erdman. New York and London: Anchor, 1988.
Bloom, Clive. Violent London. London: Pan, 2004.
Foucault, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1987.
Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
Gilloch, Graeme. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. Cambridge:
Polity, 1996.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1999.
Heffernan, James A.W.“Wordsworth's London: The Imperial Monster.”Studies in Romanticism 37.3(1998): 421-43.
Hunt, Leigh. A Saunter Through the West End. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1861.
---. Selected Essays by Leigh Hunt. Ed. J.B. Priestley. Dent, 1929.
---. Leigh Hunt's Political and Occasional Essays. Ed. Houtchens. New York:
Columbia UP, 1962.
Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.”Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.
Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988. 347-57.
---. “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso, 1992. 1-54.
Joyce, Simon. Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London.
Charlottesville and London: U of Virginia P, 2003.
Johnston, Kenneth R. The Hidden Wordsworth. New York and London: Norton, 2001.
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1960.
Lamb, Charles. The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb. New York:
Modern Library, 1935.
Meyer, Michael. “Theatrical Spectacles and the Spectators' Positions in Wordsworth's London.”Literary London (March 2003)1.1
<http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/london-journal/march2003/meyer.html#14> Oct 16, 2004.
Sharpe, William Chapman. Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1999.
Simmel, Georg. On Individuality and Social Forms. Ed. Donald Levine. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1971.
Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975.
Wordsworth, William. Preface. Lyrical Ballads. Ed. Michael Mason. London and New York: Longman, 1992. 55-87.
---. The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850). Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth.
London: Penguin, 1995.
Representation of China in Alicia Little’s In the Land of the Blue Gown
In recent studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travel writings about the East, one finds a noticeable tension between what might be called a
“rhetoric of celebration”and a “rhetoric of blame.” The former reaffirms the Western traveler’s heroism in surmounting difficulties and the lasting value of his or her civilizing mission, while the latter is obsessed with postcolonial blame, trying to uncover the traveler’s complicity with imperial expansion or colonial desire.18 In the case of a Western woman traveler, however, very often neither of the two perspectives is entirely valid on its own. Indefatigable “lady-travelers”like Isabella Bird were remarkable for their incredible prowess and resourcefulness. They were certainly no fierce critics of empire. Besides, it must be noted that European women’s mobility in the East in that age had to rely on an imperial infrastructure maintained by overseas traders, officials, missionaries, an aggressively expanding transportation network, and the native country’s military power as well as economic and political influences.
Nonetheless, feminist critics have convincingly argued that European women travelers, belonging to the so-called “second sex”at home, have often been friendlier
to Oriental people and can better appreciate indigenous cultures.18
Sara Mills’interesting study of Mary Kingston’s Journeys to West Africa has highlighted the co-existence of and clashes between two conflicting kinds of discourses. Associated with Western adventurers and colonizers’heroic deeds of exploration or conquest, “colonial discourses”are aggressive in nature and seen by Mills as “masculine.” “Feminine discourses,”on the contrary, are characterized by meekness, self-deprecating humor, and a generally more open attitude toward alien peoples and cultures. For Mills, feminine discourses soften and even undermine masculine discourses in travel writings. Her study may be considered a remedy for postcolonial criticism of the crudest kind, which compulsively returns to scenarios of imperial aggressions and historical traumas. Methodologically speaking, Mills seems to have assumed that the two kinds of discourses are sharply demarcated and easily identifiable. However, in my experience reading Western women travelers’
writings, sometimes what we can find are only ambivalences, ambiguities, or indeterminacy. In fact, the text could be rather illusive or “cunning.” With regard to the representation of the East involved, sometimes the reader will not find it easy to determine which part of a text is appreciative of or sympathetic to the East, and which part is unmistakably attacking, demonizing or “othering”it. If we focus on the clearest statements and simply take the words for granted, we risk over-generalizations. A more fruitful way is to explore how different discourses or rhetorical devices interact with one another. Such textual complexities question the validity of any simplistic, indiscriminate postcolonial critique of empire in travel writing scholarship. The English writer Alicia Little’s (Mrs. Archibald Little) travel book In the Land of the Blue Gown, first published in 1901, is an interesting case in point.
Alicia Little’s husband, Archibald John Little, an enterprising merchant and explorer, was the first man who successfully sailed up to Szechuan, Western China, by a steamer via the great Yang-tse River. His book Through the Yang-tse Gorges (1888) recounts his courageous journey upstream in 1883, supposedly an enormous achievement of defeating the Chinese conservative policy and opening up a huge market for “British manufacturing interests”(Through the Yang-Tse Gorges x), an achievement made possible by the opening of the Yang-tse river to foreign trade since 1860, which, in turn, was the direct result of China’s humiliating defeats in the Opium War (1840-42) and the Arrow War (1856-60). To accompany her adventurous husband, Alicia Little came to China in 1887, and had visited such famous cities as Peking, Shanghai, and many remoter places along the Yang-tse River. In her writings about the Chinese experience, one naturally finds what might be considered racism and various forms of English pride and prejudice. And yet, compared with
her husband’s works, Alicia Little’s writings exhibit a much greater sensitivity toward and empathy with Chinese people and culture. Susan Schoenbauer Thurin contends that Little’s writings in general “[mix] feminine, feminist, racist, imperialist, and humanitarian perspectives that alternately indict and support institutionalized orientalism,”and that “her books of travel and description is a blending of arrogance toward and sympathy for the Chinese”(173). It would be interesting to look into how such contradictory tendencies work in some subtle ways with reference to In the Land of the Blue Gown.
This paper deals with four of the most important parts in Alicia Little’s book, namely, her visit to Peking, her life on a Szechuan farmstead, the anti-foreign riots in Western China, and her anti-footbinding tours. Chapter 1, titled “My First Visit to Peking: Before the Siege,”nicely captures Little’s ambiguities regarding Chinese and English cultures in relation to the question of modernity. The longest chapter named
“Life on a Farmstead: Fifteen Hundred Miles inside China,”on the other hand, provides excellent materials for a close study of the descriptions of her aesthetic experience as well as her more “mundane”concerns, and of the curious interactions between these two different kinds of discourses. Finally, the last two chapters about her anti-footbinding campaigns in China show us her ambivalences toward her feminist “civilizing mission,”and might be read along side two earlier chapters on anti-foreign riots in Western China.
“My First Visit to Peking”gives us Little’s impressions of China on her first trip to the capital. The beginning of this chapter expresses a sense of delight, as the weary traveler returns to Tientsin after the Peking journey and sees the “then newly-arrived Thevenet steam engine and rails,” “shrilly whistling” steamers, workmen hammering and sailors “encouraging their donkeys and ponies along the Bund in true English style”(1). To these unmistakable signs of modernity and Western influence is added the image of “the fair White Ensign floating from a real, live, modern man-of-war,”indicating the presence of British naval power (1). This picture of the hustle and bustle of the modernizing Tientsin is then contrasted with
“tawny camels”which the author must rely on to travel from Peking to Tientsin and with the unpleasant smell of Peking. Back in the old city, Little reminds us, “every whiff of air we breathed assured us we were in the pre-Sanitary Period, when not only sewers had not begun troubling, but every other thing of the kind was unknown except that last modern development, the sewage farm”(1-2). This familiar portrait of Western cultural superiority versus Oriental backwardness, however, quickly gives way to a series of ambiguous and at times humorous cultural comparisons.
In regard to the motive of her trip, Little tells us that she was “wearied of London,”and “somewhat overladen with the cant of the day, aesthetic, hygienic, and
social-economic,”and that is why a sojourn in Peking worked like a “tonic”for her sufferings. Yet she tells us that, not unlike “quinine,”her Peking experience is
“bitter in the taking”(2). Interestingly, right after she mentions the negative word
“bitter,”she offers the reader some extraordinarily lively or pleasing descriptions of the city which are hardly “bitter”at all –for example, “those yellow-tiled imperial pavilions, glittering in the sun [….],”“the entrance pavilions […] –deepest blue, bright green, bright vermilion, harmonized by golden dragons, imperially taking their ease,”and “an atmosphere whose transparency makes even a mud wall beautiful”(2).
The vivid images, parallel syntactic structure and light rhythm convey a sense of excitement, negating the sense of bitterness she has expressed earlier on. This serves as a relatively simple example concerning how contradictory meanings might work at a subtle textual level. More complicated instances have yet to be discussed.
When claiming that the Peking citizens are “most democratic, and yet without one touch of Radicalism, always ready to make way for Acknowledged Merit in the person of a mandarin with eight bearers, and a crowd of retainers on horseback”(3), Little might be laughing at the people’s submissiveness and the society’s very lack of democracy. Nevertheless, the overall effect is more of light humor than “bitter”
verbal irony. For readers well aware of the violence of the Boxer Uprising of 1900, the expression “without one touch of Radicalism”must have been intended as a sincere compliment rather than sarcasm. But this benign portrait of the Peking people might also be considered an idealizing trope, betraying a certain nostalgic longing for the Chinese’s harmlessness “before the siege”of foreign legations there by discontented peasants during the Boxer Uprising (note that the chapter’s subtitle is precisely “before the siege”).
As a tourist having an eye for exotic customs, Little seems to have been a little disappointed for not being able to see much of religious activities in China, claiming that there is no evidenceofreligiousservice“beyond thetemplesand theimages”(4).
She associates the Chinese’s alleged lack of religious fervor to their “wonderful […]
neglect of ordinances”(5) and claims even the Romans were more pagan than the Chinese. She agrees that “The Chinese have done more to heathenise the English than the English with all their missions to Christianise them”(4). But, rather than condemning the Chinese’s stubborn paganism, she attributes the failure of the missionaries to Chinese people’s laxity. When she tries to explain why the Europeans in China might go to a picnic on Sunday instead of going to the church, she contends that such “neglect of ordinances”is “congenial […] to the human heart”
(5). In this way, she has in effect considerably downplayed the significance of cultural or religious difference and stressed a common humanity shared by the Chinese and the Europeans. While some Westerners might say that the Chinese are
simply too practical-minded, that they “care for nothing but money, talk of nothing but money”(6), Little retorts that she cannot “make out that it [is] anything else the Europeans [want] to get out of the Chinese”(6). This statement is one of the few examples of her explicit critique of imperialism. Another example can be found in her book Intimate China, in which she tries to defend indigenous cultures and asks:
“Why should we insist upon the Chinese swallowing our ugly clothes and ugly houses before they receive our beautiful gospel of glad tidings, I never can understand, except by reminding myself that that gospel never came from Shanghai or New York, but from that very Asia where still truth and beauty seem to Asiatics synonymous and interchangeable”(244).
In the rest of the chapter Little mentions the “charming nursery gardens at Peking”and comments that “[s]een from the walls, Peking looks rather like a park than a populous city”(6). She admires the grand city plan and acknowledges that in this respect the Mongols “appears to have excelled in what the English are exceptionally deficient in”(7). At the same time, she regrets that the Peking streets are full of rowdies and the rich seldom care for the poor. Observing how the Chinese poor struggle to drag their carts and wheelbarrows along the stone road running from the capital to Tung-chow, a “Ming masterpiece”then in a sad state of disrepair, her admiration and regret turn into an “indignant pity”(8), she blames the government for not repairing the roads and causing the sheer waste of manual labor.
What is most paradoxical here is that, in spite of the emotional intensity suggested by the strong word “indignant,”throughout this chapter Little never mingles with the Chinese but remains an outsider observing from a distance, unlikely to be emotionally attached to any single person she ought to feel pity for in accordance with her humanitarian morals. She does try to be impartial when making cultural comparisons. Having pointed out the general backwardness of Peking and criticized the Chinese government, for example, she reminds the reader that England herself is troubled by the problem of pollutions and a Chinese might well lament the English people’s “apparent indifference to the deterioration of property.” Admirably, she concludes this chapter warning us that: “Each nation gets accustomed to its own short-comings, and has wide-open eyes for its neighbours.”(12) However, her repeated attempts to judge the Chinese fairly, despite her good will, have a noticeably detached and rationalist flavor to it.
If “My First Trip to Peking”is too abstract and distanced in its representation of China, then “Life on a Farmstead”vividly records how the Littles mingle with the Chinese in rural Szechuan. Unlike the rest of the book, this long chapter is rather loosely organized, consisting of dairy entries, some long and some short. The contents range from the descriptions of weather conditions, domestic routines, social
activities and local customs to the accounts of her short trips to Chungking and in the neighborhood. Of particular interest there is Little’s treatment of her aesthetic experience, and how it interacts with a number of “mundane”concerns. In her book Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, Elizabeth A. Bohls argues that from Lady Montagu to Mary Shelley, many women travel writers “struggled to appropriate the powerful language of aesthetics, written by men from a perspective textually marked as masculine”(3). The three founding assumptions of the modern
“masculine”aesthetics can be summarized as follows. First, aesthetic experience is universal; it is possible to make generalizations about the subject of aesthetic appreciation. Second, as particularly clearly expressed in Immanuel Kant, aesthetic experience is a matter of “disinterested contemplation,”untainted by practicality.
Third, the aesthetic domain is autonomous, separable from “moral, political, or utilitarian concerns and activities”(Bohls 7). I would not claim that Alicia Little consciously appropriates or subverts the so-called “masculine”aesthetic discourse.
However, the piecemeal aesthetic descriptions in her farm dairy do deviate from such norms in some interesting ways. Seldom can we find extended depiction of her solitary trip in nature. Of course, she would, sometimes accompanied by her husband, go outside of the farm to take a delightful walk along the hills, watching the birds or the sunset, “admiring the exquisite cloud effects in the extensive landscape on all sides”(139), enjoying the summer breeze or the flowers’fragrance, or even appreciating the thunderstorms in the distance. Yet Little seldom adopts what Nigel Leask has called the “picturesque modality”of travel writing. According to Leask, this aesthetic mode of writing is anti-utilitarian and anti-georgic. The picturesque eye “could skim over any features which disturbed the composure of aesthetic form, as well as utilitarian traces of industry, improvement, or modernity”(168). The English picturesque tradition rejects “georgic conventions of prosperous husbandry and smiling cornfields for wild, uncultivated ‘shaggy’terrain marked by ‘intricacy’
and ‘variety’”(168).
Although in other chapters of Land of the Blue Gown we can find glimpses of wilder and more sublime landscapes, “Life on a Farmstead”is decidedly “georgic”(in a Virgilian sense) in its presentation of the busy everyday life in a more or less self-sufficient rural community. No doubt farm life has its less pleasing sides.
Little complains that the weavers living in the next room sometimes worked so late into the night and disturbed their sleep. She also mentions that once “all the concrete threshing floor outside [their] windows, that [made] such a good place to sit out on in the moonlight, was taken up with yarn stretched on long frames”(117). But the summer sojourn there amidst such rustic labors was, on the whole, quite pleasant and
“idyllic,”despite a robbery that had almost ruined the tranquil, pastoral atmosphere.
This contrasts markedly with the next two chapters about the Szuchuan anti-foreign riots, which foreshadowed the much more devastating Boxer Uprising in 1900, ending with the burning of the imperial garden by the foreign expedition forces in retaliation.
What is peculiar about aesthetic experience in cross-cultural encounters is that it can unite as well as divide different peoples. Sensibility to natural beauty can often serve as a proof of cultural superiority, an indication of a refined capability to transcend the drudgery of mundane existence. And yet if the universality of aesthetic experience is to be insisted, then even an illiterate Chinese coolie or peasant should, in principle, be able to appreciate natural beauty and be elevated by the experience. Furthermore, the turn to aesthetic contemplation can be a means of escape from the “heavy and the weary weight”of life and afford us “tranquil restoration,”to borrow William Wordsworth’s words (“Tintern Abbey”). Little never emphasizes that the Chinese, at least not the uneducated rural dwellers, can truly enjoy such things as sitting on the top of the house “watching the thunderstorms
What is peculiar about aesthetic experience in cross-cultural encounters is that it can unite as well as divide different peoples. Sensibility to natural beauty can often serve as a proof of cultural superiority, an indication of a refined capability to transcend the drudgery of mundane existence. And yet if the universality of aesthetic experience is to be insisted, then even an illiterate Chinese coolie or peasant should, in principle, be able to appreciate natural beauty and be elevated by the experience. Furthermore, the turn to aesthetic contemplation can be a means of escape from the “heavy and the weary weight”of life and afford us “tranquil restoration,”to borrow William Wordsworth’s words (“Tintern Abbey”). Little never emphasizes that the Chinese, at least not the uneducated rural dwellers, can truly enjoy such things as sitting on the top of the house “watching the thunderstorms