Between Painting and Writing: The Orient in Women’s Travel Writing and Sackville West’s <i>Passenger to Teheran</i>
10.13125/2039-6597/307
Il principale obiettivo di questo saggio &egrave; illustrare le rappresentazioni dell&rsquo;Oriente nella letteratura del viaggio delle donne nel XIX e XX secolo. Da una parte, il saggio si focalizza sulle considerazioni estetiche della relazione fra letteratura, arte e realt&agrave; che sono caratteristiche della maggior parte dei resoconti di viaggio; dall&rsquo;altra parte, su Passenger to Teheran (1927) di Vita Sackville-West quale eloquente esempio di scrittura di viaggio delle donne e delle difficolt&agrave; di avvicinarsi e di raffigurare l&rsquo;Oriente.  Confrontati ai limiti del linguaggio e alla mancanza delle parole, i viaggiatori-scrittori attingono agli strumenti della pittura, facendo spesso ricorso a riferimenti metaletterari.  Sackville-West descrive la difficolt&agrave; di ricordare in modo accurato e descrivere luoghi conosciuti e visti nel passato. Apre il suo resoconto con una riflessione metatestuale sulle principali questioni che riguardano la relazione fra arte e realt&agrave;, ma al tempo stesso propone interpretazioni innovative e non convenzionali sulle caratteristiche e il valore della letteratura di viaggio. Data l&rsquo;ampiezza del tema scelto, il presente saggio fornisce solo pochi esempi e un quadro preliminare di questioni pi&ugrave; complesse. 
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Federica Frediani
Between
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Between Painting and Writing: The Orient in Women’s Travel Writing and Sackville West’s <i>Passenger to Teheran</i>
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
1
Metamorphosis of the Imaginary
2011-11-26
2011-11-26
2011-11-23
2011-11-26
1
Federica Frediani
2011/11/26
10.13125/2039-6597/307
Istituto Studi Mediterranei dell’Università della Svizzera italiana
2039-6597
2
Sackville-West
it
Between Painting and Writing: The Orient in Women’s Travel Writing and Sackville West’s <i>Passenger to Teheran</i>
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/307/286
1
         Between Painting and Writing:
         The Orient in Women’s Travel
          Writing and Sackville West’s
              Passenger to Teheran
                            Federica Frediani


      During the 19th and the early 20th centuries, literary travel
writers show an almost obsessive desire to overcome the discrepancy
between the landscape they observed and their writing so as to fully
depict an authentic reality. The effort dedicated to capturing images as
well as examining aesthetic considerations on the relationship between
literature, art and reality are both features of most travel accounts.
Those who traveled to the East seem to be caught up in the urgency to
translate their vision into words written down on paper; as writers,
they are bewildered by the novelty and elusiveness of the very subject
they wish to portray: the Orient1.
      The Orient, as Eugène Fromentin writes in his work Une année
dans le Sahel (1859), reveals a kind of beauty unprecedented in Western

     1
         The Orient of journeys and travelers analyzed in this paper refers to
the Middle East although, as is known, when speaking of ‗the Orient‘ the
actual topography overlaps with an imaginary one whose shifting uncertain
borders don‘t always coincide with places geographically in the East.
Extensive studies from literary criticism regarding geographical political and
ideological conceptions of the Orient have amply covered this topic;
therefore, we shall limit ourselves to citing Edward Said, Billie Melman, and
Jean-Claude Berchet. In Italy two important volumes have been published:
Innocenti - Amalfitano 2007 and, more specifically on travels to the Orient,
Brilli: 2009.


Between, vol. I, n. 2 (Novembre/ November 2011)
Federica Frediani, Between Painting and Writing: The Orient in Women’s Travel Writing and
Sakville West’s Passenger to Teheran


models of art and literature, to the point that Western aesthetic canons
are disrupted.

          Même quand [l’Orient] est très-beau, il conserve je ne sais quoi
      d’entier, d’exagéré, de violent, qui le rend excessif, et c’est un
      ordre de beauté qui, ne rencontrant pas de précédents ni dans la
      littérature ancienne ni dans l’art, a pour premier effet de paraître
      bizarre. […] Il échappe aux conventions, il est hors de tout
      conventions, il est hors de toute discipline, il transpose, il
      intervertit tout; il renverse les harmonies dont le paysage a vécu
      depuis de siècles. […] C’est le pays par excellence du grand dans
      les lignes fuyantes, du clair et de l’immobile, - des terrains
      enflammés sous un ciel bleu, c'est-à-dire plus clairs que le ciel, ce
      qui amène, notez-le bien, a tout moment des tableaux renversés; -
      pas de centre, car la lumière afflue par tout; pas d’ombres mobiles.
      (Fromentin 1859: 262, 266-267).

     This strangeness is both a natural and a cultural phenomena; even
the usual time-space coordinates are inadequate to describe a
landscape with no center or moving shadows, nor any of the
traditional landmarks of European landscape artists. The framework of
Western art and the rigid formal patterns of landscape painting (e.g.
Rosa, Poussin, Hackert), established in the 18th century, are unable to
capture or contain the anomalies of the Orient and its surrounding
landscape. The interpretive models of what is ‗picturesque‘ or
‗sublime‘, deeply ingrained in the perception of the traveler-observer,
are shattered when confronted with this new ‗order of beauty‘: Eugène
Fromentin even doubts that the Orient can be interpreted since the
interpretive processes itself, with its inadequate categories, may result
in the destruction of the Orient itself (cfr. ibid.: 261).
     In capturing the images and transposing them into painting or
writing, one strays into slippery and deceptive territory as Roger
Benjamin points out when he speaks of an «Oriental mirage»
(Benjamin 1997: 7). Photographers and painters, strongly conditioned
by their Eurocentric and ethnographically oriented vision, suddenly
find themselves faced with depicting something that is elusive and
evanescent. The Orient is unquestionably a concentration of mirages



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and therefore represents what is the driving force behind every
journey; what Melville calls «the image of the ungraspable phantom of
life» (Melville 1994: 39).
      To approach and portray Oriental scenes, the traveler-painters are
obliged, exactly like ethnographers, to strip themselves of their culture
of origin and not be confused or overwhelmed by the shimmer of the
Orient, fleeting by definition. Nurtured by European culture, hazy
images move against the background of these illusory visions–images
of a place of seduction, fascination and perdition.
      As is common to all the arts, the desire to replicate what is ‗real‘
must face the difficulty of finding elements that are comprehensible
and recognizable to potential European readers. Once again Fromentin,
in the pages of his diary Un année dans le Sahel, wonders how it is
possible to arouse the interest of the European public for these
unknown places and, above all, how it is possible to achieve a
plausible, sensitive and intelligible ‗tableau‘ of such a unique country,
and render acceptable the most unconventional images through the
usual means of expression (cfr. Fromentin 1859: 266).
      Faced with the limits of language and a lack of words, the writer-
travelers draw upon the tools of painting, often making use of meta-
literary references. Painting gives the best reflection of reality and of
the images focused on the retina. For this very reason, it becomes
common practice to refer to, and sometimes even rely on, the works of
Orientalist landscape painters when words fail to express the writer‘s
impressions. This device is strategically adopted in order to make
unusual people and places seem realistic and familiar to the public.
This in turn leads to an exchange of references and citations that, in
some cases, also contribute to the spread of stereotyped images.
      Women travelers – who, for the sake of conventional norms,
describe their writing as private, occasional and amateur – resort to
this device even more frequently. One case in point is who, in Asie
Mineure et Syrie: Souvenirs de Voyages, regrets not being Decamps so
that she could portray the ‗wild‘ and ‗proud‘ figure of a horseman
(Trivulzio di Belgiojoso 1858)2. Later, in describing one of the riders of
his escort, she recalls the Arab portraits of Horace Vernet. Another

     2
       Gabriel-Alexandre Decamps (1803-1860) visited Syria and Asia Minor
in 1828.


                                                                               3
Federica Frediani, Between Painting and Writing: The Orient in Women’s Travel Writing and
Sakville West’s Passenger to Teheran


example can be found with the Countess of Gasparin who, when
traveling near Alexandria, describes the landscape as a «tableau à la
Claude Lorrain» (Comtesse de Gasparin 1850: 26).
      These citations indicate a significant shift in that both writers free
themselves from the position of being the subject of aesthetic
observation, thereby becoming critical observers themselves3. In so-
called Orientalist art, but not only that genre, women are depicted in
moments of intimacy such as the bath or in the harem, as illustrated in
the paintings of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres,
Etienne Liotard that are tinged with the colors of A Thousand and One
Nights4.
      Vita Sackville-West opens her account of a trip to the East,
Passenger to Teheran (1926), with a reflection on the failure of aesthetic
language when faced with reality, on the sense of the journey, and on
the literature and its forms that give an account of travel. She
introduces her book with a meta-textual reflection on the fundamental
issues regarding the relationship between art and reality, but she also
poses innovative and unconventional questions about the
characteristics and the value of travel literature.
      In 1926, Sackville-West left on her first trip to Persia, which lasted
about four months. It was apparently a ―traditional‖ journey in the
sense that the writer was joining her husband Harold Nicholson, the
British consul in Teheran. However, her purpose for traveling differed
greatly from the accepted norms; Vita Sackville-West refused to
establish her residence in Teheran simply as ―the consul‘s wife‖, thus
refusing the role of ‗the wife who follows her husband‘, for centuries
one of the only types of travel permitted to women – a fate shared by
many aristocratic women who had travelled and written of the Orient.
Among them Lady Mary Montagu stands out as a model for women
travel writers who visited that part of the world now known as the
Middle East. Her Turkish Embassy Letters (1717) significantly influenced
orientalist painting to the point that Ingres, the most well known of the
orientalistes en chambre, drew inspiration from it for his famous
paintings Le Bain turc and La grande Odalisque. Ingres, who never

      3
        Women approached art and aesthetics only marginally, as non-
professionals. Cfr. Bolhs 1995.
     4
       Cfr. Thornton 1993.


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                                      Between, vol. I, n. 2 (Novembre/November 2011)



travelled in the Orient, was moved by Lady Mary Montagu‘s letters to
depict the harem and the hammam – quintessentially private inner
rooms – absolutely forbidden to men.
      The beginning of Passenger to Teheran is particularly significant:
«Travel is the most private of pleasures» (Sackville-West 2007: 25).
With this statement, the author seems to have reached full awareness
of the position expressed by Sterne in Sentimental Journey where, for the
first time, the utterly personal nature of the experience of travel is
posited as well as the existence of various types of travelers. In this
way, Sackville-West distances herself from eighteenth century canons,
which prescribed ‗objective‘ descriptions of reality. Soon after in the
text, she explicitly describes her idea of travel:

        One must concede then, and sadly, that travel is a private
     pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen, -
     of sensations received and impressions visually enjoyed […].
     Travel is simply a taste, not be logically defended; nor standing in
     any need of defence, since it cannot be argued away, but remains
     there like a good concrete fact. (Ibid.: 29)

      She writes of travel as a familiar experience, a personal pleasure
that comes down to impressions that are seen or heard. Even in its
tangibility, the travel experience is made up of fleeting images and
sensations that are intensely private and essentially cannot be disclosed
to others. It is this creative tension that allows the writer to restore the
distinct atmosphere and spirit of a place, that genius loci, that pervades
a site; the perceptible, yet intangible presence that has inspired writers
and travelers and to which Vernon Lee dedicates an entire work5.
      Vita Sackville-West accumulates adjectives that refer to the
impossible, the impalpable, the elusive—«so subtle», «so tenuous», «so
swiftly dispelled» (ibid.: 26).
      The scenario of the journey, imagined with the help of readings
and paintings, does not coincide with the real landscape:

        It is a fine and delicate form of mental exercise to reconstruct a
     landscape, to capture so subtle a thing as the atmospheric

     5
         Vernon Lee 1899.


                                                                                  5
Federica Frediani, Between Painting and Writing: The Orient in Women’s Travel Writing and
Sakville West’s Passenger to Teheran


      significance of a place, from the indications given; rather,
      reconstruction and capture are words too gross for the lovelier
      unreality that emerges, a country wholly of the invention, like
      those roseate landscapes of romantic Italian painters, but it is an
      art in itself, a luxury for the idle and speculative, repaid – with a
      freakish twist – when later on we tread with our mortal feet that
      place which for so long served as the imaginary country of our
      wanderings. (Ibid.)

      Sackville-West continues to illustrate the difficulty of accurately
recalling and describing places that one has known and seen in the
past; what one remembers does not correspond to what one actually
sees. Furthermore, she intertwines her views on the difference between
art and reality with those regarding the limitations of letter-writing,
one of the main forms of travel literature. She judges letters to be
―intrinsically wrong‖ because they lack immediacy and require the
active participation of the recipient, who must have a close relationship
with the sender, to be able to visualize the descriptions of places;
nevertheless, she holds that letters are worthy to be considered good
literature. Vita Sackville-West quotes the letters of Lady Mary Montagu
and Beckford, and limits her correspondence with Virginia Woolf to a
private domain. Indeed, from Vita Sackville-West‘s travel to the Orient,
in addition to Passenger to Teheran, there remains a collection of Persian
letters addressed to Virginia Woolf6. Several passages and anecdotes
are recognizable as having ‗migrated‘ from the private correspondence
to the published book. It is precisely this transfer from one form to the
other that is a traditional feature of travel writing.
      Vita Fortunati, in her essay ―The Metamorphosis of the ‗Travel
Book‘ in Vita Sackville-West‘s A Passenger to Teheran‖, identifies the
innovative elements introduced by Vita Sackville-West in her travel
book7. The changes mostly concern the lessening of both the
autobiographical and ethnographic aspects. While places, people and
landscapes are described, practical information and ethnographic
curiosities, traditional features of travel accounts and especially, of
women‘s travel writing, give way to sensations and a flow of

      6
          Sackville-West 1984.
      7
          Fortunati 2001: 65-73.


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                                       Between, vol. I, n. 2 (Novembre/November 2011)



associations that recall the ‗stream of consciousness‘: an expression that
evokes a world – or even many worlds – together.

        One January morning, then, I set out; not on a very
     adventurous journey, perhaps, but on one that should take me to
     an unexploited country whose very name, printed on my luggage
     labels, seem to distil a faint, a far aroma in the chill air of Victoria
     station: Persia. It was quite unnecessary for me to have had those
     labels printed. They did not help the railway authorities or the
     porters in the least. But I enjoyed seeing my fellow-passengers
     whose destination was Mürren or Cannes, and if I put my bag in
     the rack myself I always managed to let the label dangle, a little
     flag of ostentation. (Sackville-West 1925: 31-32)

      In the opening pages of Passenger to Teheran a vivid and eloquent
image connects the beginning of the text to the end in a sort of iconic
circle – that of a small orange baggage label whose bright color evokes
the colors of Persia against the grey backdrop of Victoria Station. The
name Persia calls to mind, as the adjectives unexploited, faint, and far
suggest, a world that is faraway and shadowy, yet hints at A Thousand
and One Nights. The journey – and the book – end with the same image.
«Was I standing on the platform at Victoria, I who had stood on so
many platforms. The orange labels dangled in the glare of the electric
lamps. Persia, they said; Persia» (ibid.: 155).
      The immediacy of the image and its strongly evocative power
seem to derive from the art of photography even more than from
literary narrative. Besides, as Susan Sontag writes, quotes and
photographs, even as fragments of reality, often seem to be more
authentic than literature8.
      The circular movement that links the beginning to the end,
flowing directly from the stream of consciousness, also reveals a fine
touch with the structure of the text. Sackville-West emphasizes the
difference in speed between the word and the image, as is illustrated in
the passage below:




     8
         Cfr. Sontag 2008.


                                                                                   7
Federica Frediani, Between Painting and Writing: The Orient in Women’s Travel Writing and
Sakville West’s Passenger to Teheran


         It may be that language, that distorted labyrinthine universe,
      was never designed to replace or even to complete the much
      simpler functions of the eye. We look; and thee is the image in its
      entirety, three-dimensional, instantaneous. Language follows, a
      tortoise competing with the velocity of light; and after five pages
      of print succeeds in reproducing but a fraction of the registered
      vision. It reminds one of the Oriental who with engaging naivety
      thought that by photographing the muezzin he would record the
      notes of his call to prayer. The most – but what a most! – that
      language can hope to achieve is suggestion; for the art of word is
      not an exact science. (Ibid.: 27)

       In Sackville-West‘s travel book, one notes a significant reduction in
reference to painters, although the author compares, for example,
Karnak to Piranesi‘s Imaginary Prisons (ibid.: 45) and questions herself
endlessly about the meaning of the work of art. At Karnak she writes:
«What was a work of art if not the deliberate attempt to produce,
artificially, such a harmony, which in nature emerges only by accident,
and with the help of such adventitious advantages as Karnak itself
now enjoyed, as, the moon casting shadows, and familiar constellations
wryly tilted overhead» (ibid.).
      In the text, one notes the paradigm shift that contributed to the
spread of photography, due also to the fact that Sackville-West herself
took photographs. In the travel diaries of the 20th century, the influence
of photography was already evident and this shift, which had already
begun in the second half of the 19th century, gains momentum. In fact,
from 1839, photography contributed to the spread of the constructed
artificial image of the Orient. Painters, including Horace Vernet, Jean-
Léon Gérôme, and Maxime Du Camp used photographs as
preparatory materials for their paintings, replacing the collections of
curiosities. Photo studios also gained popularity, especially in Cairo,
operated by Europeans who provided travelers with catalogues and
sets of photos that could also be made to order. This material –
reconstructions of biblical scenes and daily life, portraits, panoramas of
the city, of archeological sites, of ruins – was ‗touched up‘ and adapted
to the aesthetic taste of European travelers (cfr. Brilli 2009: 178-179).
      The effects of photography on art bring to mind Walter Benjamin
and his famous L'Œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproductibilité technique



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and Roland Barthes‘ La Chambre Claire and even before them,
Baudelaire‘s Salon of 1859.
     Although photographs led to a change in vision and ‗visions‘,
making greater claims to authenticity and realism, the issue of
subjectivity/objectivity of the representation remains the same.
     Photographers are subject to the same cultural limitations as
painters despite the availability of photography‘s technical
innovations. For this reason, the Orient is still a mirage (cfr. Benjamin
1997: 7).




                                                                               9
Federica Frediani, Between Painting and Writing: The Orient in Women’s Travel Writing and
Sakville West’s Passenger to Teheran




                                 Bibliography
Belgiojoso, Cristina Trivulzio di, Asie Mineure et Syrie: Souvenirs de
     Voyages, Paris, Michel Lévy Frères, 1858.
Benjamin, Roger (ed.), Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee, Sidney, The Art
     Gallery of New South Wales, 1997.
Berchet, J. Claude, Le Voyage en Orient: anthologie des voyageurs français
     vers le Levant, Paris, Laffont, 1980.
Bolhs, Elizabeth A., Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics
     1716-1818, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Brilli, Attilio, Il viaggio in Oriente, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2009.
Fortunati, Vita - Monticelli, Rita - Ascari, Maurizio (eds.), Travel writing
     and female imaginary, Bologna, Pàtron Editore, 2001.
Fromentin, Eugéne, Une année dans le Sahel, Paris, Michel Levy Editeur,
     1859.
Gasparin, Valery Boissier, Comtesse de, Journal d’un voyage au Levant,
     Ducloux, Paris,1850.
Innocenti, Loretta - Amalfitano, Paolo (eds.), L’Oriente. Storia di una
     figura nelle arti occidentali, Roma, Bulzoni, 2007.
Lee, Vernon, Genius Loci. Notes on places, Grant Richards, London, 1899.
Melman, Billie, Women’s Orient: English Women and Middle East, 1717-
     1918. Sexuality, Religion and Work, London, MacMillan, 1992.
Melville, Herman, Moby Dick (1851), London, Penguin Books, 1994.
Montagu, Lady Mary, Turkish Embassy Letters (1717), London, Virago
     Press, 1994.
Sackville-West, Vita, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf,
     London, Hutchinson, 1984.
Id., Passenger to Teheran (1926), London-New York, Tauris Parke
     Paperback, 2007.
Said, Edward, Orientalism, New York, Pantheon Books, 1978.
Sontag, Susan, On Photography (1977), London, Penguin, 2008.
Thornton, Lynne, La femme dans la peinture orientaliste, Paris, ACR, 1993.



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                               The author
Federica Frediani

       Dottore di ricerca in Letteratura Comparata e traduzione del
testo letterario (Università degli studi di Siena), è assistente di ricerca
post-doc e docente all’Istituto Studi Mediterranei dell’Università della
Svizzera italiana. Studia la letteratura di viaggio, con particolare
riguardo per la produzione letteraria delle viaggiatrici dell’Ottocento e
del primo Novecento. Si occupa di rappresentazioni e immagini
letterarie del Mediterraneo, di cultural heritage e turismo. È autrice di
articoli, saggi e volumi fra cui: Uscire. La scrittura di viaggio al femminile:
dai paradigmi mitici alle immagini orientaliste (Diabasis, 2007). Con Anna
Omodei Zorini ha curato Ulisse: Variazioni di un mito mediterraneo
(Franco Angeli Editore, 2006); con Maria Teresa Giaveri, Anna Omodei
Zorini, Vincenzo Salerno, Massimo Scotti ha curato Lo sguardo azzurro.
Costanti e varianti dell'immaginario mediterraneo (Mesogea, 2008). Ha
infine curato con Fernanda Gallo Ethos repubblicano e pensiero meridiano
(Diabasis, 2011).

      Email: frediani@unibg.it



                                The paper
Data invio: 30/06/2011
Data accettazione: 30/09/2011
Data pubblicazione: 30/11/2011



                      How to quote this paper
Frediani, Federica, “Between Painting and Writing: The Orient in
Women’s Travel Writing and Sackville West’s Passenger to Teheran”,
Between, I.2 (2011), http://www.Between-journal.it/


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