Efterpi Mitsi

I am so angry with myself that I will pass by all the other islands with this general reflection, that ’tis impossible to imagine anything more agreeable than this journey would have been between two or three thousand years since, when, after drinking a dish of tea with Sapho, I might have gone, the same evening, to visit the temple of Homer in Chios, and passed this voyage in taking plans of magnificent temples, delineating the miracles of statuaries, and conversing with the most polite and most gay of mankind. Alas! Art is extinct here, the wonders of nature alone remain.

(Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters)

The first woman traveler to Greece never set foot there;¹ seen from the sea, the shore of Greece fills Lady Wortley Montagu’s letter of July 31, 1718 with desire, nostalgia, and loss. Montagu sailed through Ottoman-held Greece on her way to England from Constantinople, where her husband had briefly served as an ambassador. However, she did not visit the mainland, despite her desire to read ancient Greek literature in its "authentic" locations, anticipating the archaeological attitude in the study of ancient literature. After her insightful observations of Turkey and its women, whether subverting or epitomizing Orientalist discourse², Montagu was afraid to disturb the ideal, the imaginary landscape of classical antiquity by experiencing contemporary reality. Montagu regretted not landing "on the famed Peloponessus" since "instead of demi-gods and heroes I was credibly informed ‘tis now overrun by robbers, and that I should run a great risk of falling into their hands by undertaking such a journey through a desert country" (147-48). Her ambivalence about the (deferred) Greek journey reflects the ambiguous position of Greece itself; situated at the threshold between East and West, Greece not only questions the travelers’ binary opposition between Europe and Orient, but is also divided against itself, between its idealized timeless image and its current decline.³ Montagu’s journey into the past by effacing the present represents the paradox of women’s travel writing on Greece: in order to encounter and claim the past (the reputed origin of Western civilization), the present is other-ed , seen as alien, primitive and degenerate.

In the eighteenth century, Greece was still considered a dangerous and remote place to visit, especially for women who "did not fit the traveler’s image as heroic explorer, scientist, or authoritative cultural interpreter" (Bohls 17). Besides Montagu, only the travel writer Lady Craven visited Greece in 1786, accompanied by Count Choiseul Gouffier, the French ambassador to the Porte and a collector of Greek antiquities.⁴ Most eighteenth-century British visitors to Greece were antiquarians and scholars, busy sketching monuments and acquiring antiquities, roles that excluded women. Similarly, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the "Levant Lunatics", the Romantic and adventurous young men longing for ruins and exotic experiences could not be encumbered by female companions.

It is the Victorian and Edwardian women who first traveled alone to Greece (although some accompanied their husbands who were diplomats or scientists), writing accounts of their travels, works published and read at the time of publication but never reprinted.⁵ Despite claims that "women travelers have not written as frequently about Greece as they have about more exotic…locales" and that there is a "lack of good work by…women in the literature of Greek travel" ("Eisner 2, 228), I suggest that there is a diverse and remarkable body of travel writing on Greece by women from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the period of "high imperialism", in which Britain saw itself as an imperial nation.⁶ Contrary to stereotypes about Victorian middle-class women confined at home, women travelers to Greece (who were mostly middle-class⁷) did not simply escape from the restrictions of the domestic life, imposed by their class and gender, but also formed a political discourse, negotiating different genres (travel writing, autobiography, adventure) and identities : the resourceful and strong female narrator juxtaposed with traditional gender roles, the imperial and colonial voice countering feminism and philhellenism.

Until recently a neglected area of research, women’s travel literature reconstructs an alternative women’s history, challenging stereotypes and showing that women travelers were not oddities and freaks but usually average women⁸, who armed with Murray’s and Baedeker’s guidebooks and gladstone bags claimed their own view of Greece, often disproving the accounts of male travelers. It would be, however, too simplistic to read those travelogues as feminist texts. Any discussion of women travel writers should avoid being essentialist about gender, but aware "of the dark side of travel itself" (Grewal 10), as a Eurocentric form of "planetary consciousness" and "bourgeois authority" (Pratt 9-10). As "no work on travel can exclude the important matter of subject formation, ideology, and imperialism" (Grewal 2), the analysis of women’s travel writing on Greece cannot ignore the writers’ complicity with imperialist operations which constitute modern Greece as the Orient, while appropriating its classical past.

Despite many travelers' awareness of a new role for women, their accounts share features with male-authored texts about Greece: they both construct the culture they experience not only according to their gender, but also to nationality and class. Although, as Sara Mills argues, "women travel writers were unable to adopt the imperialist voice with the ease male writers did" (3), their accounts should be seen in relation to men’s travel writing about Greece in the same period as they were produced and received in the same context. On the one hand, British women are more interested in modern Greece and its people than male travelers; on the other hand, they share a patronizing attitude, and even their positive images of Greeks cannot shatter the power of Orientalism involved in the "translation of the cultural other" (Yegenoglu 84).⁹ They also share the recurrent theme in all travelogues on Greece, the inevitable contrast between past glory and present decline, idealized antiquity and contemporary reality: "The modern Greece is so flimsy and fragile, that it goes to pieces entirely when it is confronted with the roughest fragment of the old," pronounces the young Virginia Woolf in 1906 (220-1).

Women’s travel writings on Greece are cultural documents, showing the reasoning and the criteria the British used to judge another culture, a culture, however, whose relics were viewed as part of their own intellectual heritage. By visiting and writing about Greece, nineteenth-century women claimed that heritage, asserting the right to a classical education (from which they had been excluded): their narratives are interspersed with quotes from ancient Greek texts, showing their pride of their command of Greek literature and language. The Scottish scholar Agnes Lewis Smith, who later discovered and deciphered the Sinai Palimpsest, learnt modern Greek as well, viewing the Greek language as a bridge between past and present. Women’s travel writing is characterized by a citationary nature, not only citations of ancient author(itie)s, a tradition in travel literature on Greece since the early seventeenth century, but also a reworking or repetition of earlier descriptions. Said’s definition of the citationary nature of Orientalism, of the Orient as "less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seem to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work…" (177), could also apply to Greece: the scholars’, poets’ and travelers’ Greece is less a place than a topos, a literary and political construct, an ideal ultimately embodied by England.¹⁰

In the attempt to appropriate antiquity and to inscribe themselves in the male genre of travelogue, women travelers, starting with Montagu, cite both ancient (Homer, Aeschulus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Pausanias, and Strabo) and modern sources. For example, both Craven and Elisabeth Grosvenor view the ruins of Delos through the description of the French eighteenth-century traveler Tournefort. The text has often more authority than the experience of the site: Grosvenor avoids describing the Acropolis in Athens, referring the reader to William Leake’s and Christopher Wordsworth’s travel books. Similarly, Isabel Armstrong refuses to provide an impression of the monuments of Athens, as "it can be found in Murray and Baedeker" (100), preferring instead to explore areas not included in the usual tour of Greece in the late nineteenth century, such as Thessaly, a decision which could be interpreted as emancipating. In the monastery of Osios Lukas, Mabel Moore, after lecturing the monks against fasting, refers to Spon and Wheler’s description of the site after their 1676 visit, and then quotes Chandler’s Travels in Greece (1776). Even Lewis, usually critical of male travel writers, guidebooks and their prejudices, considers Wordsworth’s book "indispensable when visiting the Acropolis" (19). No "original", "innocent" view of Greece is possible; women travelers are scripted in the tradition of the search for antiquity, which is connected with Britain’s political advance to the East.

The cultural exploration of Greece through the process of endless copying is juxtaposed in women’s travel accounts with the interest in the life and customs of modern Greeks. British women attempt to bridge past and present through the language of aesthetics, mainly through descriptions of people’s physique, manners and dances. Cast as objects rather than subjects men, rather than women, are praised for their beauty. Grosvenor finds them "well-looking" and "picturesque", dressed in "the handsomest of national costumes" (160); Armstrong, fifty years later, agrees that "to tall dark men the national dress is particularly becoming (4), concluding that the Greek man’s "face may be characteristic of distrust, but his figure is the embodiment of true art. If such were the models the old Greeks had ever before their eyes, it is no wonder that Greece produced such a succession of sculptors and painters" (6).

On the other hand, the portrayal of peasant women working hard in the fields undermines the typical eroticized representations of Greek women by male travelers.¹¹ Women travelers who, unlike men, can approach and talk to Greek women, find them ugly and oppressed. In Naxos, Craven proclaims that the "maidens dressed in [their] holiday clothes [are] neither decent nor pretty" (245); while in Athens, she dismisses an ancient dance performed for her sake by Athenian girls ("a more stupid performance as a dance I never saw" 263) and sneers at women in the baths : "I never saw so many fat women at once together, nor fat ones as fat as these" (263). Mary Dawson Damer observes that "even the old-looking women are not more than thirty" (24-25), and Armstrong describes them as "walking bundles of dull-coloured rags" (4), assuming that all the beautiful women must have been taken to Turkish harems! Lewis and her companions are constantly shocked by the hard work and unfair life of peasant women, attributing this custom to the pre-Independence era, when Greek men had to hide from the Turks. In a mountain village, "the prettiest girl", called Asemi, speaks to Lewis of "her field-work", saying "it was very strange that in other lands husbands worked for their wives, whilst we… work for the men’" (281). The discursive encounter between British and Greek women, who are perceived as Other, primitive and Oriental, is crucial to the construction of the travelers as feminist subjects. Through this encounter, they emerge emancipated and independent, sorry for, yet critical of, their backward "sisters": Lewis concludes that "the ladies [in Greece] need more liberty" and "more emancipation from Turkish customs" (338). Mabel Moore criticizes the Athenian upper and middle-class women of being completely "dependent and submissive beings’, interested only in "gambling, gossip and dress" (48), emphasizing their difference from British suffragettes. As they finally urge them to "imitate their English sisters by taking to some outdoor sport" (Lewis 340; Moore 209) it becomes clear how nationalism and imperialism "shaped the contexts in which feminist subjects became possible.

On the other hand, the travelers’ "privilege of being the looker rather than looked upon" (Bohls 40) is constantly challenged as the objects of their study return the gaze: Felicia Skene during a visit to a remote area describes "the whole population of villagers assembled [at the door] to gaze at us" (44); Lewis suggests to her guide that "if we were to be looked on in the light of an exhibition, he should at least charge two francs ahead for showing us" (160-1) and Armstrong has to block the door, as an entire village keeps coming to their room to look at them and touch her companion’s loose long hair. The fact that they are traveling without a man excites the rural women’s curiosity. The most common question, repeatedly addressed to all single travelers, concerns their marital status: "Where are your husbands? Aren’t you married?" While Armstrong dreads "the fatal inquiry about our relationship", lying that her friend Edith is married, Lewis sees it as a chance to set an example: "We are all unmarried", she answers to an old woman, who" clasped her hands with astonishment and delight. I felt as if I had driven in the point of a wedge by making her think that it is possible for women to do something on their own account" (202).

Indeed, women travelers feel that they have done something "on their own account": despite warnings, they ventured to Greece, a country which unlike Italy and Egypt was off the track in the nineteenth century. Until the 1890s domestic transport depended on horse power and rural banditry was endemic (Pemble 23). "We flattered ourselves that we had proved that any woman—who did not mind roughing it…could attempt this journey with ease" asserts Armstrong at the end of her book (295). Although the braving of dangers is empowering for these women, it also places their narratives within "the imperial and Romantic structures that defined travel" (Grewal 80). On the one hand, women travel writers wish to contradict stereotypes about the country described, often repudiating accounts by men travelers; on the other, the motifs of the escape from home, the freedom gained from traveling, and the "penetration" of the "terra incognita"¹² follow the tradition of the male Romantic traveler.

For example, Lewis dispels the supposed difficulty and discomfort experienced in Greece by Lord Winsor and Mr. Farrer, the authors of A Tour in Greece, by writing that "[they] must either have had a wretched guide, or must have been deeply imbued with prejudice against the natives" (98). She also mocks Mark Twain, who after paying "a midnight visit to Athens breaking quarantine" arrived at the conclusion that all Greeks are thieves! Lewis, who spent many months in Greece, exposes his prejudice, pointing out that "exaggerations by former travelers are apt to mislead intending ones" (350-1). However, women travel writers employ Orientalist discourse to defend Greeks from such prejudice, blaming the Ottoman occupation of Greece for manners and customs they dislike. Lewis argues, that due to the exaggerated expectations of the British since Byron’s day, the Greek people are seen as "rascals" and "lazy", whereas "their chief faults are those born of slavery, their chief virtues, those of their ancestors" (340). The colonial voice is evident in Grosvenor who finds Greeks "courteous and obliging", "pleased with what is given to them" (191), and in Skene who suggests that "more is just of their ignorance and superstition than is altogether just" , admitting, though, "their simple and childlike faith", "their lively imaginations and quick feelings" (61). Moore also calls them "little children", indifferent to "ethical ideas", "born when the world was very young. What is to be done for you but to love you and continually correct you?" (147), she finally wonders.

The question whether Greeks should be judged "by an European or an Asiatic standard" (Lewis 341) embodies the ambivalence of women’s travel writing on Greece. Travelers wonder where Greece fits in the dichotomy between East and West and whether it can "return" to Europe to claim its past: "The East may remain the East and live, but if the East chooses the advantages of Western life and shirks its pain-giving responsibilities, then it must surely die"(Moore 35 ). As the British in the evaluation of Greece "measured present realities against the achievement of an idealized past" (Augustinos 49), their disappointment was inevitable: "Philhellenism dies a natural death, or at least goes to sleep until such a time as a nobler spirit breathes in the land" (Moore 32). Their dilemma is related to the question whether the Greek nation deserves its antiquities (including those in the British museum), a question that arises as travelers visit the Parthenon and other monuments. Craven, disappointed because she is not allowed to pick up the broken marbles of Parthenon, recommends that the Emperor "should take advantage of the desire of the Porte has to oblige him, in order to collect the fragments of the temple of Minerva" (261-2). Later, women travel writers partly justify Elgin for despoiling the temple, by arguing that he "removed the frieze in order to save the valuable works of art… from destruction by the Turks (Janeway 30). Lewis, the most critical of Elgin, after admitting that "we shall not probably restore to Greece the treasures of our own great museum," urges British millionaires "to supply funds to restore the fragments" and thus "repair any artistic wrong which we may have done the little nation" (23-4).

The notion that Greeks are not worthy of their past is connected also to the belief that they did not achieve their independence from Turkey through their own effort but through the intervention of European powers, especially England. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the conventional attitude to Greece was that no relation exists between modern and ancient Greeks. Virginia Woolf’s journals from the 1906 visit to Greece clearly represent this attitude: "Like a shifting layer these loosely composed tribes of many different people lie across Greece; calling themselves Greek indeed, but bearing the same kind of relation to the old Greek that their tongue does to his…So you must look upon the modern Greeks as a nation of mongrel element and a rustic beside the classic speech of pure bred races…They do not understand Greek of the age of Pericles—when I speak it" (Woolf 210-3). The imperial project connected the British to the ancient Athenians: "We are, in some respects, the modern representatives of these Athenians. We have the same passionate love of freedom, and we have inherited a maritime empire…The power which can command the waves commands the world" (Lewis 15). As source of knowledge and power, the journey to Greece suggested the possibility that England could be Greece reborn.