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Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism

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In Praise of Art and Literature

Rita Monticelli

Available online: 20 Aug 2006

To cite this article: Rita Monticelli (2005): In Praise of Art and Literature, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, 27:3,
299-312

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 Rita Monticelli

IN PRAISE OF ART AND LITERATURE

Intertextuality, translations and migrations
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of knowledge in Anna Jameson’s travel

writings

Travel literature is a hybrid genre constructed through a process of translations, intertextual

movements, and trans-codifications between different art forms and diverse cultural contexts.
The interplay of several discursive formations such as gender, “race”, ethnicity, class, and sexual
preference informs the process of representation of the self and of “otherness.” The analysis of
representation as a process and the study of the literary hybridizations that characterize travel
writing as a specific genre reveal how travel literature can be interpreted as an oblique
autobiography of the traveler, where his/her meeting with otherness embodies a crucial function
in his/her hermeneutic journey towards self-discovery. In this essay, the travel writings of Anna
Jameson (1794–1860) are read as a tool to deconstruct and reelaborate the identity and
position of women within the social order, as well as to weave an intertextual support network for
female education and emancipation. In her writings, art becomes the traveler’s guide,
connecting the familiar and the unknown, tradition and innovation, individual and collective
identity, in a transnational dimension.

Keywords travel literature; autobiography; Anna Jameson; gender; other-

ness; identity; translation; inter-arts

the trail of the traveler obliges us to supersede the opposition between reading and
writing and to understand in its stead a complex circulation of signs as much
written as read which modifies the traveler as much as he modifies the terrain in an
endless differential positioning, at once the infinite detour of the text and the text
of an infinite detour (Van den Abbeele, 1992: 7 –8).

When women are married, and have children to take care of, they do not often
think of writing poetry. . .. It is most certain that among the women who have been
distinguished in literature, three fourths have been either by nature, or fate, or the
law of society, placed in a painful or a false position; it is also most certain that in
these days when society is becoming every day more artificial and more complex,
and marriage, as the gentlemen assure us, more and more expensive, hazardous,
and inexpedient, women must find means to fill up the void of existence. . .. We

Prose Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 December 2005, pp. 299-312

ISSN 0144-0357 print/ISSN 1743-9426 online q 2005 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/01440350500223875
 300 PROSE STUDIES

have gone away from nature, and we must, - if we can, substitute another nature.
Art, literature and science remain to us (Jameson, 1990: 118).

My study explores travel literature as a genre constructed through a process of

translations and intertextual movements. Within this theoretical framework I will
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choose Anna Jameson’s writings as emblematic of this process, a process that is

directed towards women’s education and emancipation in an international, trans-
European dimension.
Travel literature is generally considered a hybrid genre, that overlaps, for instance,
with autobiography, utopian writing, and the novel. The narrative conventions of the
genre, which were changed over the centuries, the psychological make-up of the
traveler, his/her position within the cultural, social and political context of origin, the
traveler’s complicity in or refusal of the ideological backdrop of the period, as well as the
nexus between the power of patriarchy and imperialism, shape, at the narrative level,
perception, attitude and world-view and inform the traveler’s representations of his/her
experience. The interplay of several discursive formations such as the categories of
gender, “race”, ethnicity, class, sexual preference, inform the process of
representation.1 The analysis of representation as a process and the study of the literary
hybridizations that characterize travel writing as a specific genre, come to involve, at the
methodological level, an overlapping of literary criticism, anthropology, cultural
history, psychoanalysis: an intertextual, interdisciplinary critical effort. Travel literature
has embodied diverse functions according to the different historical periods in which it
was produced, and it has been read within different disciplinary perspectives: as memoir,
philosophical essay, geographical and anthropological document, and historical treatise,
thus showing its hybrid nature. Its conventions, especially codified from the seventeenth
century onwards, and although very mobile across the centuries, nevertheless reflect an
intention which seems to have always accompanied travel literature: to foster the
knowledge of other cultures and habits and to represent the journey as a hermeneutic
process. The interconnection between fictional and factual elements2 in travel literature
emphasizes the high literariness of the representation of the journey, while at the same
time underlying the importance of writing about the traveler’s experience as crucial for
the hermeneutic process of the writer, as well as for the circulation of ideas.3 Indeed,
many of the travel experiences (we may think, above all, of the Romantic period, but of
the Victorian age also) are bookish; people used to travel taking books (that describe the
new places to be visited, but which also help the traveler to mediate between the “old”
and the new, the known and the unknown) with them, write notes along the journey,
rewrite them at home and publish books on their voyage. They seemed to travel in order
to write, since, as Michel Butor suggests, travel is writing, thus epitomizing travel and
writing as interchangeable metaphors, and how the meaning of the journey is
constructed by the act of writing itself:

All the Romantic voyages are bookish. Lamartine, Gautier, Nerval, Flaubert, and others
correct, complete, vary the theme set by Chateaubriand. In all cases, books are at the
origin of the trip; books read (in particular L’Itinéraire), projected books (starting with Les
Martyrs); the travellers read books during their journeys, they write them, usually
keeping a journal, and they always produce a book upon their return, otherwise we
 IN PRAISE OF ART AND LITERATURE 301

would not talk about them. They travel in order to write, they travel while writing,
because, for them, travel is writing (Butor, 1974: 14, emphasis in the original).

The intertextuality many travelogues display testifies to this analysis of travel literature as a
powerful way to bring different travelers from different cultures into contact and favor
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knowledge of other cultures and human diversities. But it could also embody a seemingly
powerful risk: that is the possible homogenization of knowledge, the reproduction of
stereotypes, and of colonizing movements, erasing difference. Translation and
intertextuality thus describe the quality of the journey and travel writing as a translation
and threshold between reality and perception, perception and representation, and
between experience and writing, but also between various cultures and between the outer
and inner experiences of the traveler-writer. Travel literature can thus be interpreted as a
performative enactment of cross-cultural encounters and hybridizations. Within this
perspective, the great attention paid to this genre by translation studies lies in the potential
of travel writing to be interpreted as “intercultural translation.”
In the nineteenth century, the increasing number of women who traveled meant
that the genre was broadly practiced by women writers, showing that traveling and
travel writing were appropriated both at a popular culture level, by “minority” groups,
while still remaining a very important genre which was highly codified in the dominant
literary canon. The greater flexibility this literary genre acquired in the nineteenth
century, compared to its traditional conventional character, allowed women travellers
to use it as a tool for a deliberate and explicit search for the self in contact with
difference (Fortunati, Monticelli and Ascari, 2001: 11). The function of transmission of
knowledge which travel literature always involved was exploited by women to weave
an intertextual support network for female education and emancipation and to
re-inscribe women’s identity. Intertextuality became both a strategy to reconnect with
a canonical travel tradition and a tool to give increased authority to women’s writing.
Intertextuality was thus appropriated by female authors as a means to achieve a
common goal amongst them, and as a way of reinforcing or contesting the writer’s
ideological position within the social order.
The writings of Anna Jameson (1794 – 1860), which originated from her travel
experiences, can be read as a process of translation and trans-codification between
different art forms and diverse cultural contexts and as a tool to deconstruct and
reelaborate her identity. Traveling, writing, art in its diverse expressions became for
Jameson not only a means to relate her work to the great Enlightenment and romantic
tradition, but also and above all the strongest means to reconnect with a female
tradition in favor of women’s emancipation and education. The function and meaning
of the Grand Tour together with the great romantic ideal of universal
brotherhood/sisterhood and encounter amongst people are both accepted and
revisited by Jameson in the light of her main goal: an evaluation and praise of art
and literature as the most important tools of awareness and education. Translation and
transcodification (among worlds, texts, different art forms), as well as intertextuality
(with other authors), support Jameson’s deconstruction and reconstruction of identity,
so that her writings represent a hermeneutic process. Accordingly, this hermeneutic
process involves an equally important project of the circulation of knowledge.
In this voyage, art and literature become the traveler’s guide, the passage between
the old and the new, tradition and innovation, in very complex ways. As in the case of
 302 PROSE STUDIES

the great romantic travellers, Jameson travels bringing books with her (she especially
likes Shakespeare, Schiller, and Wordsworth), which support her along the journey. In
particular she brings German books that deal with Italian art (for instance Correggio, by
Adam Oehlenschläger) or German books she considers especially important for the
discussion of aesthetics in relation to the social and political context of creation and
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reception (she often refers to Gespräche mit Goethe by Johann Eckermann in her book
Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada). She pays great attention to the artistic and
historical context of creation and is aware of the need to know the language and the
cultural tradition in which the work of art is created. She also investigates the life of the
artist, as a source of creativity. The interplay of diverse forms of art and cultural
contexts, to be translated into English, progressively “contaminates” Anna’s
interpretation of the new worlds she inhabits (European visual art and other artistic
forms in Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad, 1834; Canada, England, Germany and
Italy in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, 1838; European art and Italy in the
Legends of the Madonna, 1852), and influences her world-view. Vicariously, the readers
(namely women, since her texts are openly addressed to them) experience new
knowledge and progressively should, in Jameson’s intent, gain awareness about the
world (a great Enlightenment ideal still alive in her) and also find support for their
emancipation. In this view, the contact with the native Canadian, the Chippewa, opens
up space for Jameson to discuss the role of women in Europe and inaugurates an
intertextual exchange with other authors about sexism and racism in Europe and in the
new worlds. Quotations from other female writers, reinforced by quotations from
German literature and Italian art, support her final goal in Winter Studies and Summer
Rambles in Canada. In The Diary of an Ennuyée (1826) the hybrid genre she produces
deploys Italian art and nature as supports to her travel experience and to the fictional
heroine she creates. In Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad the interplay of German,
Italian, and English art, especially paintings and architectural masterpieces, throw
differences into relief while providing a critical comparison amongst them, in a play of
reciprocal influences and contrasts. References to great artists and painters, poets and
authors support her analysis. Jameson’s reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s heroines
(Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical, 1832) is a reelaboration of
Shakespeare’s female protagonists directed towards women’s education and, above all,
their value in society. Her writings embody this influence: quoting Goethe, she wants
to reproduce in words the emotions and creative effort undergone by painters and
visual artists, she wants to translate visual perception and insight into verbal art:

What Goethe says of poets, must needs be applicable to painters. He says, “If we
look only at the principal productions of a poet, and neglect to study himself, his
character, and the circumstances with which he had to contend, we fall into a sort
of atheism, which forgets the Creator in his creation” (Jameson, 1839, 2: 25).

Since, for Jameson, “The theory of religion belongs to poetry, and its practice to
painting” (1839, 2: 4), and “Beyond both, is sculpture, the noblest, the least illusive,
the most enduring of the imitative arts, because it charms us not by what it seems to
be, but by what it is;. . . because it is. . . the abstract idea of power, beauty, sentiment,
made visible in the cold, pure, impassive, and almost eternal marble” (1839, 2: 39 –40).
The association of the work of art with the artist’s biography, while drawing on the
 IN PRAISE OF ART AND LITERATURE 303

aesthetics and ideological romantic tradition, underlines the importance of identity and
cultural formation of the artist for Jameson. The importance of the biographical data also
mirrors the continuous oscillation in Jameson’s travel writing between objective
description and personal narratives, while the representation of the countries visited is
also a registration of the effects they produce on the author. Thus eighteenth-century
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narrative conventions of travel literature, that express the ideal of objectivity in the
representation of the worlds visited as well as in the transmission of knowledge, are
intermingled with a need to express the self, and with a pedagogical intent especially
assumed by those female writers engaged in women’s emancipation. Transformed by the
crucial presence of the narrative I with its emotions, comments, and personal
adventures,4 nineteenth-century narrative conventions allow women to focus overtly on
the self as the filter of representation. In this respect, intertextuality is not only a way to
connect to a literary tradition – a strategy to make women’s writings more authoritative
– but it also embodies a covert intention to reinforce women’s cultural ideology. The
continuous trans-codification between diverse artistic media reflects the (romantic) faith
in art as capable of expressing and transforming life, and in the artist as the intermediary
between imagination and the material world, morality and social deeds, God and human
beings.
Visual art inspires Jameson’s verbal art, while nature induces Jameson both to
write and to paint, as shown in her Canadian sketches depicting some of her adventures
in the wilderness. Along the same lines, her cult of art and language encourages her to
learn other languages, including German, some Italian, and the Chippewa, the language
of the natives she visited in her Canadian summer rambles, and to emphasize in her
books how language influences perceptions and emotions:

I know no better way of coming at the truth, than by observing and recording
faithfully the impressions made by objects and characters on my own mind. . .
shadowed by the clouds which pass over its horizon, taking each tincture of its
varying mood - until they emerge into light, to be corrected, or at least modified,
by observation and comparison. . .. So I shall write on (Jameson, 1990: 16).

Her philosophical background supports the translation of pictorial imagery into language.
Jameson’s romantic ideal of art and the artist stresses emotions and creativity, but also
expertise and work. References are made to music and other artistic forms. Amongst
them, folklore, legends, oral culture, also have an important space in her works.5
Art is for Jameson the great mother that transgresses boundaries. Thus the work
of art emerges as one of the most important means of translating diverse artistic forms
and different cultures. In this light, she expresses an ideal of European circulation of
knowledge and aesthetic values which should reinforce solidarity and foster women’s
sisterhood and emancipation. Within this perspective Jameson reinterprets the
meaning and function of the Grand Tour in the light of the romantic sensitivity at the
rise of Queen Victoria’s imperial age.
I would like to provide some examples of spaces of translation and trans-
codification in Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1834) and in Winter Studies and
Summer Rambles in Canada (1838). In the first volume, Jameson, who is both a traveler
in search of the new and an art historian with a cosmopolitan mind, visits Germany and
reflects on the diverse ways of conceiving art not only in Germany but all over Europe.
 304 PROSE STUDIES

Her memories of the countries visited, recollected in tranquillity, together with a

pedagogical intent, are influenced by the aesthetics and the conventions of the Grand
Tour as well as by the romantic ideals. Given the great attention she pays to
Renaissance paintings and sculpture, Italy is one of the most prominent European
countries in her text. Moreover, recollections from her visits to Italy are intermingled
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with the narration of her staying in Germany. Significantly, Madonnas and Magdalens
are Jameson’s favourite topics, in art history as well as in literature, since they have
traditionally provided women with a moral role model to follow and attain. In the
far-famed gallery in Dresden, Jameson is especially attracted by Raphael’s and
Correggio’s Madonnas, describing them as “grand pieces of lyrical and sacred poetry,”
and she admires Correggio’s Magdalene and the Notte (nativity), where the painter
“has converted the literal representation of a circumstance in sacred history, into a
divine piece of poetry” (Jameson, 1839, 2: 123 –24). Painting, poetry and common
women, connected and contained within the feeling of the sublime the traveler
experiences in front of the Madonnas, provide Jameson with a background to discuss
paintings made by female artists.
The appreciation of their works gives the author the opportunity to celebrate
women’s artistic creativity and ability, as well as to educate her female reading
audience:

Rosalba Carriera, perhaps the finest crayon painter who ever existed . . . was an
admirable creature in every respect, possessing many accomplishments, besides
the beautiful art in which she excelled . . .. Thinking of Rosalba, reminds me that
there are some pretty stories told of women, who have excelled as professed
artists . . .. The daughter of Tintoretto . . . refused to leave her father, . . . Violante
Siries of Florence, gave a similar proof of filial affection. . . When Henrietta
Walters, the famous Dutch miniature painter, was invited by Peter the Great and
Frederic, to their respective courts, with magnificent promises of favour and
patronage, she steadily refused . . . Maria von Osterwyck, one of the most
admirable flower painters, had a lover, to whom she was a little partial, but his
idleness and dissipation distressed her . . . She refused to be his wife, . . . She was a
wise woman, as the event showed, not a heartless one. She died unmarried, though
surrounded by suitors (Jameson, 1839, 2: 127 –31).

It was the fate of Elisabeth Sirani, one of the most beautiful women, as well as one
of the most exquisite painters of her time, to live in the midst of those deadly feuds
between the pupils of Guido and those of Domenichino, and she was poisoned at
the age of twenty-six. She left behind her one hundred and fifty pictures.
Madonnas and Magdalens were her favourite subjects. Sofonisba Angusciola had
two sisters, Lucia and Europa, almost as gifted, though not quite so celebrated as
herself; these three “virtuous gentlewomen” as Vasari calls them, lived together in
the most delightful sisterly union. They were all accomplished women . . . We have
proofs. . . undeniable in her own most lovely works – glowing like those of Titian;
and in the testimony of Vandyke, who said of her in her later years, that “he had
learned more from one old blind woman in Italy than from all the masters of his
art” (Jameson, 1839, 2: 131 –32).
 IN PRAISE OF ART AND LITERATURE 305

Crossing boundaries between nations and diverse cultural contexts, embracing the ideal of
a transnational sisterhood, Jameson states women’s ability to be professional artists
without betraying their role as good mothers, devoted daughters (or even honest
spinsters!), expressing their creativity without renouncing their morality. Between the
lines, Jameson condemns her society that prevents women from expressing both. As a
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textual strategy, the author weaves her narrative together with references to other
important male artists and scholars. References to famous painters and art critics as well as
inter-arts motifs, while providing “authority” and a solid background to the art historian,
support the traveler’s final goal: to transmit knowledge to women and forcibly support
their education. Much like Mary Wollstonecraft, women’s cultural liberation must be
accompanied by a reinforcement of women’s morality and ethics: “If then women are not a
swarm of ephemeron triflers, why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious
name of innocence?” (Wollstonecraft, 1982: 100 ).6 The same emphasis on women’s
morality combined with artistic talent informs Jameson’s travel book on Canada, where
her pedagogical intent is supported by quotation from important female writers engaged in
women’s education:

there is no salvation for women but in ourselves: in self-knowledge, self-reliance,

self-respect, and in mutual help and pity; no good is done by a smiling abuse of the
“wicked courses” of men, while we trample into irrecoverable perdition the weak
and erring of our own sex (Jameson, 1838, 1: 118).

Jameson underlines a need for women to achieve and construct their own emancipation
without imitating men’s “wicked courses.” To support her argument she quotes in a
note a passage taken from a travel diary of the famous writer Harriet Martineau:

In the present case, the course to be pursued is to exalt the aims and to strengthen the
self discipline of the whole society by each one being as good as he can make himself,
and relying on his own efforts after self-perfection, rather than on any fortunate
arrangements of outward social circumstances. Women, especially, should be
allowed the free use of whatever strength their Maker has seen fit to give them; it is
essential to the virtue of society that they should be allowed the freest moral action,
unfettered by ignorance and unintimidated by authority: for it is an unquestioned and
unquestionable fact, that if women were not weak, men would not be wicked; that if women were
bravely pure, there must be an end to the dastardly tyranny of licentiousness—Society in
America (Jameson, 1838, 1: 118 – 19, emphasis in the original).

The appropriation and interpretation of Martineau’s quest, based on the role of women
as functional to men’s morality (or immorality), is revisited by Jameson who instead
stresses the need for solidarity between women and the strength of women’s character:

Coleridge, who has said and written the most beautiful, the most tender, the most
reverential things of women – who understands better than any man, any poet, what I
will call the metaphysics of love – Coleridge, as you will remember, has asserted that
the perfection of a woman’s character is to be characterless. “Every man,” said he,
“would like to have an Ophelia or a Desdemona for his wife”. . . No doubt; the
sentiment is truly a masculine one: and what was their fate?. . . No, no; women need in
 306 PROSE STUDIES

these times character beyond anything else; the qualities which will enable them to
endure and to resist evil; the self-governed, the cultivated, active mind, to protect and
to maintain ourselves” (Jameson, 1990, 119, emphasis in the original).

She sees art (generated by a “cultivated, active mind”) as a means to connect aesthetics
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to social ideals and aims:

Lavinia Fontana threw a look of sensibility into her most masculine heads –. . . The
Sofonisba had most dignity,. . . Gentileschi has most power. . . All those whom I have
mentioned were women of undoubted genius;. . . all, except Gentileschi, were
feminine painters. They succeeded best in feminine portraits, and when they painted
history they were only admirable in that class of subject which came within the
province of their sex. . . You must change the physical organization of the race of
women before we produce a Rubens or a Michael Angelo. Then, on the other hand, I
fancy, no man could paint like Louisa Sharpe, any more than write like Mrs. Hemans.
Louisa Sharpe, and her sister, are in paintings, just what Mrs. Hemans is in poetry; we
see in their works the same characteristics – no feebleness, no littleness of design or
manner, nothing vapid, trivial, or affected, – and nothing masculine; all is
supereminently, essentially feminine, in style, subject, and sentiment. I wish to
combat in every way that oft-repeated, but most false compliment unthinkingly paid
to women, that genius is of no sex; there may be equality of power, but in its quality
and application there will and must be difference and distinction. If men would
remember this truth, they would cease to treat with ridicule and jealousy the
attainments and aspiration of women, knowing that there never could be real
competition or rivalry (Jameson, 1839, 2: 133–35, emphasis in the original).

In the works of art, the presence of power, felt rather than perceived, and kept
subordinated to the sentiment of grace, should mark the female mind and hand. . ..
The idea, however, is taken from the Spectator. . .. But Louisa Sharp can also create
(Jameson, Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad, 1839, 2: 135 –36, my emphasis).

Jameson does not conceive art as androgynous, instead she recognizes and advocates a
distinctiveness in women’s and men’s artistic expressions. If progress is, for Jameson,
knowledge and its circulation, civilization resides for her in equality between men and
women, “equal in reason and in freedom” and diverse in their roles and individual
qualities. Her scope is also to address both the high class and the working classes,
lamenting and condemning the inhuman conditions in which children and women are
forced to live and work to earn their living. Intellectual power, decision of character and
promptitude are the qualities that she highlights, for instance, in many portraits of the
Madonna as an: “example of intellectual, tender, simple, and heroic woman, the perfect
type of womanhood” (Jameson, 1853: 23). By playing on the traditional feminine values
embodied by the Madonna, Jameson is able to add intellectual power to the traditional
power attributed to the Virgin as an intermediary between God and humankind/-
humanity. The perfect kind of womanhood is not only a function of the divine, but a
creator herself, possessing both the power of the Logos and the graces of the “feminine”
sensitiveness. Playing on the importance that the figure of Maria Magdalen had in early-
and mid-Victorian culture, Jameson’s image of the Magdalen is that of an already
 IN PRAISE OF ART AND LITERATURE 307

redeemed woman, chosen as the first penitent to become, as Judith Johnston rightly
argues, “a faithful, independent, self-motivated, strong woman of action outside the
house” (1997: 184, emphasis in the original).7 Exceeding the sexless, passive,
domesticated angel confined in the house, as well as the aggressive, carnal prostitute, the
representation of woman is for Jameson a place of cultural contestation.8
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Her reinterpretation of sexual difference aims to explore men’s and women’s subject
positions and to covertly criticize the structures of the social order. The quotation above is
not so much a statement of essential difference between men and women as a negotiation
between the existing society and the quest for women’s individual and social rights. The
interplay of art criticism and moral evaluation is directed towards a female audience that,
according to Jameson, must intertwine private and public spheres. Her being bold, but not
too bold, as the opening words of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, taken from
Spenser’s The Fairie Queen, suggest: “Be bold, Be bold. . . Be not too bold” (in Jameson,
1990: 14) represents Jameson’s literary strategy as well as a way to negotiate her creed
within the dominant discourse of her society.
Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada is like a palimpsest where Jameson’s previous
experiences support her journey in a more hostile and unknown land.9 The spaces she
represents for her readers are England, Canada, the new land, and Germany, since Jameson
continues to read German art and literature during her journey and intends to translate some
of these works into English.10 In her travelogue, Jameson “translates” these lands for her
readers and, more significantly, for her female audience. The first part of the book is
modulated by considerations about and interpretations of German and English art and
literature, while the second part is more specifically about the life of the Indians. The natives
are represented not only through the description of their habits and customs, but also, and with
a deep effort to know and learn on the side of the author, through an analysis and depiction of
their artistic expressions, language, rites, and cultural artifacts. The common traits which unify
the two sections of the book are the role of women in both cultures, as well as the constant
presence of the Canadian landscape and its metamorphoses, which mediate between diverse
kinds of “translations.” Reading and interpreting German art and literature for the public
support Jameson’s passage through a (still) hostile Canadian land, immersed in a cold and
impenetrable winter; thus translating literature represents an existential link between the
familiar and the unknown, an essential medium in the traveler’s hermeneutic process. At the
same time, however, it is the Canadian wilderness which provides new interpretative motifs
for European art. Jameson’s representation of the Canadian landscape, still unknown and so
different from European nature, is informed by the knowledge acquired not only during other
trips in Europe, but also through the art and literature of the old continent.11 At the same time,
the emotive impact of the wilderness on Jameson’s intellectual and aesthetic experiences
seems to subtly penetrate the memories of the writer and to color her view of the landscape
and European art:

Those who have travelled through the forests of Catholic Germany and Italy, must
often have seen a Madonna, or a Magdalen, in a rude frame, shrined against the
knotted trunk of an old oak overshadowing the path; the green grass waving round,
a votive wreath of wild flowers hung upon the rude shrine, and in front a little
space worn bare by the knees of travellers who have turned aside from their
journeys to rest in the cool shade, and put up an Ave Maria or an Ora Pro Nobis. I
well remember once coming on such a Madonna in a wild woodland path near
 308 PROSE STUDIES

Vollbrucken, in Upper Austria. Two little, half naked children, and a gaunt, black
wood-cutter, were kneeling before it; and from afar the songs of some peasants
gathering in the harvest were borne on the air. The Magdalen of Correggio, the
same which is now in the Dresden gallery, and multiplied in prints and copies
through the known worlds, is represented without any violent stretch of
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probability as occupying such a situation: nor are we left in doubt as to the identity
of the picture;. . . (Jameson, 1838, 1: 42 –43).
The Canadian landscape is tamed and made familiar by Jameson’s association with the
paintings of the gallery in Dresden which, in turn, recall the Austrian, Italian and German
Madonnas, and are linked through the word “wild” to German and Italian forests, naked
children, songs of peasants, memories of travellers in German, Austrian and Italian
woodlands. As in Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad, the memory of local folklore is echoed:
I remember that when travelling in the Netherlands, at a time when the people were
celebrating the Fête Dieu, I saw a village carpenter busily employed in erecting a
réposoir for the Madonna, of painted boards and draperies, and wreath of flowers”
(Jameson, 1839, 2: 34).
German and Italian art, and European landscapes are thus “trans-lated” by that still
partially unknown Canadian wilderness that, subtly, penetrates Anna’s memories and
induced the traveler and writer to describe the known world through the unknown. At
the same time, this translation is a tool to get closer to the wilderness, through a more
familiar experience. This movement of translation in two directions has a meaning of a
(partial) hybridization of opposites which exceeds the assimilation of otherness into
sameness. Indeed the new world translates Anna, while it is translated by the voyageur.
The translation between art and the wilderness, therefore, represents the passage, the
threshold which allows different realities to interact.
In addition Jameson is granted the chance to speak of these paintings by the translation of
a tragedy by Oehlenschläger, Correggio, which she especially loved because of the author’s
reflections on the importance of art to influence the human soul and mind. We are present at
an overlapping of texts (literary, visual, physical spaces) which support each other. The
travelogue then continues with a translation of a few lines from the Die Schuld of Adolf
Müllner where, in Jameson’s comment, “the spirit of the North and the Spirit of the South are
brought into beautiful yet fearful contrast” (1990: 39). The passage, translated by Jameson,
that concludes her comments on European art “contaminated”, in her description, by the
Canadian landscape, reads: “Methinks, that North and South should never kiss each other,”
thus unveiling her preoccupation and quest for “connection” as well as her “translation” as a
way to negotiate between displacement and sense of belonging to the new land and to the
unknown parts of the self. Jameson’s text is constructed through contrasts and opposites that
the narrative tries to weave while the author struggles to connect and reelaborate them:

What a slight touch upon an extreme link will send us back sometimes through a
long, long chain of memories and associations! A word, a name, has sent me from
Toronto to Vienna, what a flight! what a contrast! (Jameson, 1990, 39).

Indeed the text itself is the essential part of the voyage towards a possible elaboration of
differences as well as a way to heal the existential anguish and the nostalgia for the familiar.
 IN PRAISE OF ART AND LITERATURE 309

The book continues with an apology for the profession of actress which Jameson
affirms to be compatible with the respect due to women: “As to the idea that acting, as
a profession, is incompatible with female virtue and modesty, it is not merely an insult
to the estimable women who have adorned the stage, but to all womankind; it makes
me blush with indignation” (1990: 40). The connection of nature and art with the
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reflection on the male-female relationship (through another artistic expression and

profession, the theatre) highlights the main interest of the traveler which is to
reelaborate her own identity and her position within the social order. As always in the
text, contrast serves to support Jameson’s investigation into her own self and becomes
an occasion to speak about women, their moral values and their social constraints.
This passage echoes Jameson’s style and the concern she showed in Visits and
Sketches at Home and Abroad, where traveling as an art historian provided her with the
opportunity to rediscuss prominent female characters and served her aim of restoring
women as moral beings and as artists. When Jameson portrays the famous actress Mrs
Siddons she links moral values to creativity, which, she believes, constitute the main
features of art as well as of the truly feminine character:

I wished to impress and illustrate that important truth, that a gifted woman may
pursue a public vocation, yet preserve the purity and maintain the dignity of her sex
– that there is no prejudice which will not shrink away before moral energy, and no
profession which may not be made compatible with the respect due to us women,
the cultivation of every feminine virtue, and the practice of every private duty
(Jameson, 1839, 2: 250).

Mrs. Siddons, as an artist (an actress) presented a singular example of the union of
all the faculties, mental and physical, which constitute excellence in her art,
directed to the end for which they were created. . .. Combination of mental
powers and external graces (Jameson, 1839, 2: 253 –54, emphasis in the original).

Her mind was a perfect mirror of the sublime and beautiful, like a lake that reflected
only the heavens above, or the summit of the mountains around; nothing below a
certain level could appear in it. The ideal was her vital air. She breathed with difficulty
in the atmosphere of this working-day world, and withdrew from it as much as
possible. Hence her moral principles were seldom brought to bear upon the actual and
ordinary concerns of life (Jameson, 1839, 2: 260–61).

The same can be said for Fanny Kemble, performing Juliet:

her success was founded on a power superior. . . in the power of genius superadded to
the moral interest which claimed irresistibly the best sympathies of her audience. . ..
[She] was honourable to herself and to her family. . .. She was herself a poetess; her
mind claimed a natural affinity with all that is feeling, passionate, and imaginative; not
her voice only, but her soul and ear were attuned to the harmony of verse; and hence
she gave forth the poetry of such parts as Juliet and Portia with an intense and familiar
power, as though every line and sentiment in Shakespeare had been early transplanted
into her heart (Jameson, 1839, 2: 296–97).
 310 PROSE STUDIES

Mrs Siddons and Miss Kemble reminded her of Madame de Staël’s words: “l’inexprimable
est précisement ce qu’un grand acteur nous fait connaı̂tre” (Jameson, 1839: 2: 299).12
References to M.me de Staël provide Jameson’s argument with a stronger authority
while intertwining an intertextual support for the women’s cause and women artists:
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M.me de Staël first made a breach through what Goethe himself called a “Chinese
wall of prejudices”; and we may pass through it surely without trampling upon her
who had the courage to open the way for us (Jameson, 1990: 136).12

Jameson endows a quite common narrative structure among proto-feminist travelers

with a distinctive quality: translation (in its broadest meaning) and trans-codification of art
forms as a tool to connect textual and cultural differences. This migration of knowledge
supports a subtle yet potent inner journey of the traveler directed towards the exploration
of her identity and her relationship with otherness: the contrast north-south is a metaphor
to designate the contrast between man-woman, Europe-Canada, civilization-wilderness,
European cultures and the natives, England, Germany, and Italy. The textual journeys of
Jameson are an attempt to connect these inner and outer opposites, whereby art in its
different forms represents the medium. Art itself is for Jameson not only observation of
nature, nor merely inspiration, but also the expression of a moral and cultural ideology
conveyed through aesthetic forms. Accordingly, her travel stories do not develop along a
linear narrative between departure and arrival, but, rather, they are “a movement
organised (like any spatial story) between both perspective and retrospective mappings of
places and the practices that transform [and translate] them” (Morris, 1988: 38).14

Notes
1. See Mills (1991); Lowe (1991); Melman (1992); Pratt (1992).
2. See, for instance, Adams (1962, 1983); Batten (1978).
3. For a discussion of travel literature within this perspective see Fussell (1980); Culler
(1981, 1989); Urry (1990).
4. Nineteenth-century readers were interested in the impressions of the traveler, his/her
digressions and eccentricities, following the model offered by Laurence Sterne in A
Sentimental Journey Journey Through France and Italy (first published in 1768).
5. In Legends of the Madonna “high” Renaissance culture is intermingled with popular tales
on the Virgin; in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada she translates Indian
folklore for her English readership, and compares her translation of Indian oral culture
with the work of Henry Schoolcraft, the great anthropologist from whom Jameson
learnt Indian traditions and customs before experiencing them directly. For a detailed
study of Anna Jameson’s life and writings see Thomas (1967).
6. Wollstonecraft’s criticism against Edmund Burke’s distinction between respect/mor-
ality/man and love/passion/woman is based upon Burke’s implication of women’s
subordination to men, since in Burke’s aesthetics such a distinction excludes the
woman from the realm of morality. Burke’s aesthetics of the sublime, according to
Wollstonecraft, separates beauty from ethical truth, women from men (see
Wollstonecraft, 1982, 1994, first published respectively in 1792 and 1790). See also
Eagleton (1990: 57).
 IN PRAISE OF ART AND LITERATURE 311

7. At the same time, for Jameson the Magdalen is a symbol of redemption and
reconciliation (Johnston, 1997: 191), as she describes her when she is in front of
Correggio’s Magdalen in Parma (Jameson, 1848: 1: 14).
8. For a discussion of this issue see also Johnston (1997).
9. For an analysis of this text within an autobiographical and hermeneutic perspective see
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Buss (1990, 1993).

10. See also Johnston (128– 29).
11. For a discussion of the specific use of “translation” in Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer
Rambles in Canada see Gerry (1990–1991); Johnston (1997); Monticelli (2000).
12. “that which cannot be expressed, is precisely what a great actor lets us know”.
13. Jameson is here especially referring to de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (see Staël-Holstein,
1991, first published in 1813).
14. A portion of this article appeared in Italian in: Linguae 8 – 1/2002, pp. 3 – 14.

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Rita Monticelli is senior lecturer at the University of Bologna (Italy), where she teaches
English literature, gender studies and theories of culture. She has published essays on
travel literature; utopia and utopianism; critical theories and methodologies of post-
colonial, gender and women’s studies. She is the author of the volume Lo stupore della
differenza: Anna Jameson e la tradizione del racconto di viaggio (2000). She has co-edited
several volumes including: Travel Writing and the Female Imaginary (with Vita Fortunati
and Maurizio Ascari, 2001) and Studi di genere e memoria culturale, Women and Cultural
Memory (with Vita Fortunati and Gilberta Golinelli, 2004). She is a member of the Equal
Opportunities Committee at the University of Bologna.
Address: Università di Bologna, Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Moderne,
via Cartoleria, 5, 40124 Bologna, Italy [email: monticel@lingue.unibo.it]