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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
A sexual history of the Grand Tour reveals the fleshly temptations proper young Englishmen and women found -- and succumbed to -- in all those exotic lands.
May 31, 2002 | What's travel without the promise of sex? The roast without the gravy, the vodka martini without the twist, the ice cream without the chocolate sauce. Whether we go with an S.O. or by ourselves, and whether we admit it or not, the possibility of sex is always in the back of our minds when we travel for pleasure. Like good food, exotic locales, plush accommodations, and new clothes, sex forms part of our vacation fantasies of relaxing and being pampered. The appeal of the best James Bond movies was, among other things, that they were the sexiest travel brochures imaginable. See sunny Rio (or Tokyo, or Jamaica, or Geneva, or Biarritz)! Outwit evil geniuses! Kill their henchmen! Seduce their women! You'll never meet a woman named Pussy Galore back home.
Sex as an inherent lure of travel is the heart and loins of "Sultry Climates," Ian Littlewood's scholarly divertissement of a book. Littlewood's subject is the Grand Tour, the tradition that began in the 18th century of yearlong Continental sojourns undertaken by young Englishmen as part of their education and seasoning. The official accounts have stressed the Anglo traveler being introduced to foreign customs, foods, manners. And maybe because sex -- or, more to the point, pleasure -- was (and is) thought too frivolous a subject for serious intellectual consideration, the sexual pursuits of these English travelers have been relegated to journals and letters while art and culture take preeminence in the histories and guidebooks.
Drawing on those journals, Littlewood has attempted to rectify the imbalance. He divides his subjects into three categories: the Connoisseur, the traveler who was essentially on a cultural shopping spree for artifacts as well as manners; the Pilgrim, a type that emerged in the 19th century, who was on a voyage of self-discovery and fulfillment; and the Rebel, who undertook to leave behind the sexual restrictions imposed at home. The last two models, Littlewood argues, were crucial for gays and women looking for outlets for their sexuality.
It was inevitable that the Tour, which at first strove to maintain an essential Englishness in the tourists despite their exposure to Continental culture (the young men were often chaperoned by tutors) would give way to freer, easier encounters, ones in which Britishness was not presumed to be superior. Littlewood charts the rise of tourists who "like servants of empire dressing for dinner in the jungle ... detect a landscape that is hostile to their values and can only be held at bay by close attention to form."
One of the travelers Littlewood identifies as a Pilgrim, E.M. Forster, captured the type in the character of the Rev. Eager from "A Room With a View." "Italian in the mouths of Italians," Forster writes, "is a deep-voiced stream, with unexpected cataracts and boulders to preserve it from monotony. In Mr. Eager's mouth it resembled nothing so much as an acid whistling fountain which played ever higher and higher, and quicker and quicker, and more and more shrilly, till abruptly it was turned off with a click." (We can presume that the name of Forster's heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, combining as it does the sensual and the sacred, was meant as both an expression and a consecration of the sexual nature of the Pilgrim's quest.)
