Edith Wharton called herself a drawing room naturalist when she referred to her novels. 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 as she also wrote several books on her travels, mostly about Italy and France, studying European culture. As part of this interest, she came out with a book on Morocco in 1919. Wharton’s travelogue is the first 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 measure up Moroccan ways of life mainly untouched by European influence. This isolated position is the reason for Wharton’s main interest: the presence of the past in Morocco, the presence of a Medieval past that she suspects is soon to be lost through modernization. At the same time, her account is to draw the very tourists who embody Europeanization into the country through her alluring book.
I wish to look into the problem of how Wharton tries to preserve the work of the past and also to produce an attractive report about a Morocco of Oriental mysteries. My main question is how she manages both to describe and sensationalize matters Moroccan. My idea is that she uses two discourses in her travelogue to achieve her aim. On the one hand, the discourse of history is concerned with the loss of the past. On the other hand, the discourse of tales from Arabian Nights is concerned with the dreamlike quality apparent in most instances of Moroccan life. I claim that in her book the discourse of history and the discourse of tales interact and construct a knowledge of Morocco that is both ethnographically oriented but at the same time relies on a strong premise of the Orient as a dreamlike, ambiguous space embedded in the past (Said 27), a cultural position to be improved by French colonial influence. So I think that while she claims to write in order to preserve bits of Moroccan culture from effects of Europeanization in the first place, she in fact supports colonization and produces a Europeanized body of knowledge about Morocco as a place of mystic and Medieval life to be enlightened and improved. The main challenge lies in showing the way she produces this account. I think that although she constructs a conscious interplay of discourses, she does not manage to criticize her premises of the Orient through this deceptively self-conscious rhetoric.
