Carmen Andraş

Romania in British Travel Literature

Discursive Geography and Strategies for Liminal Space

Abstract: The paper focusses on the image of Romania in British Travel Literature of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Keywords: Romania, English Travel Literature, Eastern Europe, imagology

Motto: “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing”. (Martin Heidegger, Building, Dwelling, Thinking)

“Journeys are the midwives of thought”: I would have liked so much to start my study with Alain de Botton’s inspiring words from his philosophical insight into the art of travel.[1] But, hélas, English travel literature in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, having as settings spaces other than Western ones, was not (and is more often than not) evoking “introspective recollections … helped by the flow of the landscape”.[2] It is not an introspective, but rather a prospective voyage, which stresses the insistence of political power and cultural authority. Almost nothing is spontaneous and innocent in the discursive representation of non-Western spaces. Power is omnipresent even if difference is glossed over, and scientific interests, or innocent curiosity, are invoked in a rhetorical decorum. One may certainly argue for the value of a pleasurable cognitive emotion that induces the suspension of mastery and certainty in any encounter with other people and other places. But what if the traveller herself relegates cognitive pleasure to the trivial or sentimental sidelines of life’s serious business, or if she uses knowledge and understanding as rhetorical masking for the deflection of the humanitarian purposes of her travel? For, once again, knowledge is power, and knowledge of human beings is power over human beings, and knowledge of distant places is power over distant places. We do not have to resort to Michel Foucault’s theory on the relationship between subject – knowledge – discourse – power, we can trace the same idea back to Francis Bacon, the philosopher who laid the theoretical foundation of empiricism in close connection to imperialism: “And so those twin objects, human Knowledge and human Power, do really meet in one, and it is from ignorance of causes that operation fails”.[3]

If the philosophers built the geography of power on the symbolic maps of the world, the 18^th and 19^th century travellers were actually experiencing this geography on the very spot. Not only philosophers, but also ethnographers, anthropologists and historians offered arguments for the discursive geography and strategies. Travellers were contributing with the raw material in support of the same veiled political justifications. The reduction of experience to facts was becoming a form of imaginary — and potentially practical — power and control. Francis Bacon made the clearly expressed equation between empire and empirical knowledge in his New Atlantis, when a governor of his utopian technocracy explains a prototype of the Royal Society to the traveller/narrator: “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of human empire, the effecting of all things possible”.[4]

The traveller/narrator was supposed to experience the difference between the stages of human development in various societies, to compare the data of practice with his previous knowledge, and, eventually, to envisage a potential implantation of the benefits of human progress in those remote places. And when such a spatially and temporally remote world as Eastern Europe escaped any classification and definition, travellers deemed their experience inconsequential because of the puzzling condition of these borderlands, not entirely different and not entirely the same as “civilized” Europe. In fact as Mary Baine Campbell concludes: “The distance that is so inherently pleasurable to a reader of voyages, is the distance from oneself, with all that implies of gaps one might (or might not) close, differences one might absorb, spaces one might annex”.[5]

Paraphrasing Homi Bhabha’s rhetorical question from the Introduction to Nation and Narration[6] and taking into account the “ambivalent nation-space”, we might ask ourselves: What kind of a cultural space is Eastern Europe with its transgressive boundaries and its “interruptive” interiority? It is a liminal space, “in-between the designations of identity”,[7] whose interstitial condition perplexes the foreign observer.

In Steven Totosy’s words, Central and East Europe “are located in in-between peripherality where strategies of polyvalence conventions mediate the center’s impact into cultural self-referentiality”.[8] The paradigms of center/periphery and center/margin are established concepts in postcolonial studies (colonialism of the imagination included), and the concept of “in-between peripherality” has its origins in border writing (see, for example, Paul Jay[9]), Amin Malak’s ambivalent affiliations and in-betweenness,[10] Homi Bhabha’s third space and notion of hybridity in The Location of Culture, and Anna Klobucka’s notion of semi-periphery[11] (based on the notions of world system and semi-periphery initially proposed by Christopher Chase-Dunn[12] and Immanuel Wallerstein[13]), among others.

The notion of in-between peripherality can be applied not only to Central and East European culture but also to such concepts as image or representation, whose status of liminality determines the border status of the imagological texts. In-between peripherality is a border, an intermediate space where the margins related to different centers meet, coexist, and influence each other, nevertheless keeping their individuality. It is a place where differences interfere, not giving way to oppositions.

The postmodern re-evaluation of difference has influenced the way we define those concepts that are founded on difference itself and its hypostases (duality or ambiguity, closeness or remoteness, contact or separation, conflict or coexistence), such as representation, image, discourse, liminality, border or frontier space. The accent falls upon their arbitrary, conventional, polysemic, differential, and often non-referential character, as for any social, linguistic, or cultural fact approached by the new representational and rhetorical critique. Their status of cultural, rhetorical or linguistic constructs, demonstrated by the horizontal analysis of the text, of the discourse or the representation of the Other, is in fact a transparent mask for their historical content. At the same time, an approach focused either on the individual or on the social, either on the imaginary or on the ideological, on the conscious or on the unconscious, is partial and one-sided.

1. I consider the representation of the Other as a complex, open, nonlinear, multi-referential and pluricentral system, consisting of a net of interactions, which does not allow the establishment of antinomic difference, favouring in exchange the co-presence specific to the border or in-between peripheral space. I am not concerned as much with the scientific or academic representations of the Other, but rather with such representations that are characterized by in-betweenness and liminality: they are at the same time individual and social phenomena, perceptual images and narratives, a net of images and ideas, cultural and imaginary or ideological constructs, metaphors, but also all comprising schemes meant to reflect the world and justify its strategies, negotiations, and transactions.

2. The liminality, or in-betweenness, of the representation of the Other determines the border status of the imagotypical texts, where social-historical and documentary actuality meets self-referentiality, where photographical reality meets fiction. It is a space of borderline tension between the referential and reflexive, between the factual and fictional, between memory and imagination, political or ethical and historical, ideological and imaginary.

3. At this junction, an image or representation study is no longer about the way external reality or subjective mood are reflected, but an exploitation of the manner in which foreign images or self-images are constructed, as well as the way we construct our subjectivity and sensivity.[14] The idea of liminality, understood as a complex, dynamic, pluricentral and open system, is currently related to border studies, and justifies the preference for border literary genres. So, by their interdisciplinary and intertextual openness, imagology and image studies in general bring uncanonical literary genres from marginal zones into the more complex space of the border. Here, their marginality is attenuated by their new intermediate position. Travel accounts, memoirs, and reportages become sources as important to foreign image studies as literary fiction or scientific documents. Image studies have themselves a border status, not only because they prefer border cultural spaces as objects of analysis, but also because one can meet on their territory investigations coming from a multitude of directions: comparative literature, comparative cultural studies, post-colonial and intercultural studies, cultural anthropology and ethnology, psycho-sociology, cognitive science and neuroscience, communication sciences, philosophy of mind, literary history, history of the mentalities and the imaginary, history of ideas and of intellectual trends, etc.

The premise of a study regarding the representations of the Other, understood as complex, nonlinear and multi-referential systems, is not that of truthfulness or falseness (even if we do not disregard their truth kernel). They “reflect” objects and phenomena in their absence, and they rely on the creative and ordering force of the imagination and on the selective conservation capacity of memory — an individual and a collective, cultural memory, too, which contains themes, values, schemes, stereotypes, common places, ideologemes, intertextual links taken over from the others and from tradition. One can add to these, personal artistic qualities (talent, sensitivity, taste), mental states (intentionality, motivation, finality), personal dispositions, phobias and sympathies, etc. The analysis of the representations and discourses on the Other is not meant to accuse or blame (in our case, the West, in order to conveniently victimize the East), but to reveal those ideologies that exclude and marginalize the Other, in order to create new premises for an intercultural dialogue on equal terms. It is an attempt to denaturalize some dominant features of the way we perceive reality, and to show that those entities considered by us “natural” or “essential”, are in fact cultural constructs, fabricated by us, and not given to us. The critique of the discourse on the Other has, undoubtedly, political and ethical implications, taking into consideration that the representations of the Other — images and fiction — cannot be neutral, even if metaphorically veiled in literary texts.

4. The concept of “travel” is related to the categories of liminality, in-betweenness, or marginality too. It is a transitional phenomenon that implies transgression and communication sometimes, differentiation and opposition other times. The Westerner’s travel in the East is the “voyage in” to the 2^nd world’s interior, across a liminal space (a threshold, a bridge or a crossroad) between the 1^st and the 2^nd worlds. It is the overstep between two symbolic geographies, between different civilizations, cultures, religions, and races, or between divergent ideologies and political systems. In other ideal situations, the voyage is an opportunity for mutual knowledge and understanding between the traveller and the foreigner she is observing.[15]

5. Of the genres West mentions, Amanda Gilroy considers that travel writing in the Enlightenment and Romantic period emerges as perhaps “the most capacious cultural holdall”, a hybrid discourse that traversed the disciplinary boundaries of politics, letter-writing, education, ethnography, anthropology, natural history, medicine, aesthetics, and economics. The archaeological and anthropological research that was part of Britain’s colonial project found its form in travel writing. Such genre crossings are acknowledged in the preface to naturalist Anders Sparrman’s accounts of Cook’s second voyage: “every authentic and well-written book of voyages and travels is, in fact, a treatise of experimental philosophy”.[16] Travellers often sought, as Amanda Gilroy observes, “to cross more than national boundaries. Sometimes the circulating discourses of travel secured self-identity and reaffirmed existing convictions of cultural superiority for the authors and readers of travel accounts, but the experience of geographic displacement also helped Romantic-era writers to renegotiate the cultural verities of “home”. The disturbances of travel could destabilize the boundaries of national, racial, gender and class affiliation, thus enacting the disciplinary miscegenation that defined the mapping of geographical space”.[17]

6. This type of approach enables us to put into discussion not the geographical borderlines, but the mental borderlines drawn on the symbolic map of Europe between the West and the East, or the Orient, between nations and cultures, which are much more stable than the political ones. We can consider as a prolongation of these cultural borderlines the ones Western observers drew inside the Eastern countries perceived as a space of incompatible differences, and not as a node of cultural interference. In exchange, the “imagologist” would not consider the same borderline as a place of confronting differences, a space of rigid polarizations, but as a space of transgression and communication, where dichotomous terms can change places anytime, and antinomic difference has no chance to survive.

Romania, and the other countries of the past communist bloc, can be described in terms of “in-between peripherality” and post-colonialism. In a binary Europe, in-between peripherality is a space of cultural interference between the West and the East and does not suppose a marginality related to a dominant center as in post-colonial context, but as many marginalities as there were cultural centers dominating the symbolic map of this European region.[18] The history of this space is therefore semi-peripheral and semi-colonial, half-European and half-Oriental or Balkan (perceived as non-European entities), oscillating between imperial or ideological dominance and hegemony. It is situated at the border of cultural influences and political control originated in old Ottoman or Oriental imperial antagonist centers, such as Greek and Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman, Tsarist and Ottoman; or Central European Empires (the Habsburg Monarchy) on the one hand, and the recent communist imperialism on the other, all of these interfering with local national and cultural self-referentiality.[19]

The history of this space also records the clash of political and economic interests between Western imperialism and Eastern or Oriental ones, which were confronting each other on this very spot. It is also situated at the border of real physical imperialisms (medieval or modern) and the metaphorical, literary, textual or narrative colonizations, also known as the imperialism of representation, the imperialism of the imagination and knowledge. By referring to this space in terms of Balkanism, Vesna Goldsworthy draws a comparison between real imperialism and the imaginary one:

As a ‘colonised’ region, the Balkans offer a mirror image to the more traditional fields of post-colonial inquiry with their focus on textual practices in the framework of the physical exploitation of an area by a Western power. The take-over of the intellectual domain, the exploitation of the raw resources of history, can be similarly lucrative…. Although the physical colonisation of large parts of the Balkans by the Ottoman Empire provides a reverse example of traditional colonial patterns (a portion of Europe dominated by an Eastern, alien and non-Christian empire), this ‘textual colonisation’ has provided the industries of the imagination with easy, unchallenged access to raw material.[20]

In the framework of the new European construction, Romania is represented either as a Central-Eastern European country, on the structure of the Habsburg monarchy, somewhere between the West and the East, or more often, as a Southeastern or Balkan country, on the structure of the Ottoman Empire, somewhere between Europe and the Orient, or on the border space of the Iron Curtain, between Western civilization and Eastern backwardness, between democracy and dictatorship. These last two symbolic locations are prevalent in British representations about Romania, where different influences are perceived in a manner that implies a strange “hybridity” and not cultural interference. That is why I will refer to this space as Eastern Europe, not because I am subscribing to the notion, but because it belongs to the British discourse on us. Insofar as Romanian self-representations are concerned, they reflect the ambivalence of the foreign representations about them, and it is a question of decision which direction of development will be taken by Romania, a Central European or a Balkan one.

If we accept the idea of “imaginary”, “metaphorical”, or “literary imperialism” as the basis of the British representations regarding Romania, and as an extension of post-colonialism in this space, the use of such peculiar concepts as “contact zone”, “colonial”, or “imperial border”, “colonial” or “imperial literature”, or “hybridity” requires some specification connected to the historical and geographical characteristics.

The syntagm “contact zone”, which Mary Louise Pratt took over from linguistics, denotes those social spaces where distinct cultures meet, establishing asymmetrical relations of subordination and domination, similar to the colonial ones. In this context, Western travel literature would become an “imperial literature” meant to explain and justify imperialism, to naturalize it, and to promote its ideology.[21] In contrast with geographical borders, which accentuate difference, “contact zones” favour, in the author’s opinion, co-presence, interaction, mutual understanding and cooperation, which are possible only when knowledge has been “decolonized”, thus unveiling the relationship with the dominant power and the mechanisms of “transculturation” and “hybridization”.

Such a solution is viable from a methodological and conceptual point of view in the analysis of British representations concerning Romania, as far as they justify the policy of “civilizing” influence in the zone and not a proper imperialist one. The 18^th and 19^th century British travellers only perceived the phenomena of transculturation or hybridization in this space and were not the imperial agents. That is, they were not the representatives of that dominant power, which imposed a one-sided taking-over of cultural models through an effective presence. Romania, as with the entire Eastern European space, is situated at the borderline of old past empires, which couldn’t have the perspectives of efficient British imperialism, whose traces nonetheless were to be identifiable in the cultural and ethnical mosaic of the region.[22]

These “archaic traces” are represented by the British in contrast with the well-defined features of “civilization”, the differences of nuance being determined by the conflicts of political and economic interests characteristic to the borderline space. They are not prepared, or they do not have the interest to perceive this cultural space as a junction between Europe and the Orient or between Western and Eastern Europe. In exchange, they would construct a hybrid, incongruous, ambiguous space, made of disparate elements, but homogenized by analogy, whenever the demonstration required differentiation from the West. They do not analyze, for example, the Phanariot influence in the Principalities as a phenomenon of transculturation (“the acquisition of a new code without losing the old one”[23]), as a temporary occasional acquisition, but as a passive, unfiltered assimilation unadapted to the Romanians’ own interests and cultural codes. British travellers are not “guilty” for the outcomes of an imperial policy in the space. Nevertheless, they are not impartial witnesses either. They exploit the enigmatic and often misleading liminality of the region in the sense that was imposed by the requirements of the argumentation.

I think that by describing and, at the same time, by denouncing the border tensions of this intermediate liminal space, as they show themselves in the British representations of Romania too, by following their evolution in a cultural and political borderline space, we could reconstruct a new “contact zone” freed from prejudices. It would be a zone of cultural interaction, which my study modestly aspires to be.

Even if my study was first intended to analyze British representations of Romania over the 18^th century and the first half of the 19^th century, the restriction between these temporal limits, for methodological reasons, is artificial. The natural development of the representations follows the necessary stages that precede or succeed these limits. The British representations of the Romanians were already beginning to appear in the 16^th and 17^th centuries; they crystallize in the 18^th century, take the way of the stereotypes in the following century, and culminate at the crossing of the 19^th and 20^th centuries in mythical, demonical representations. Present-day perception continues this evolution. The borderlines of the British representations are arbitrary as well. In fact, Romania is integrated into the generalized and homogenized image of Eastern Europe, enjoying the same treatment as the other neighboring countries. British perspective is not unique either, because, for example, French or German representations of Romania, and, implicitly, of Eastern Europe, reflect similar attitudes.

The “invention” of Eastern Europe is a project of “half-orientalization” as Larry Wolff concludes.[24] The discursive elements of Orientalism, Balkanism and exoticism are always counterbalanced by those of the European identity that cannot be eluded.[25] As a space of imaginary colonization, Eastern Europe would react against the center by a discourse similar to the post-colonial one (even if less offensive, exclusivist, and intolerant), but directed instead against a center that has colonized only its image (and, implicitly, its self-image).

Half-Oriental and half-European, this in-between peripheral or borderline cultural zone would give birth to a game of images and counter-images, kept in balance in an oxymoronic image, while the West-East relationship would be represented as a Manichean struggle between good and evil, white and black, light and darkness, purity and corruption, etc., with visible political and moral implications (even today, through the ambiguity of the European integration criteria).

Also perceived as a projection of the subconscious, the discourse on Eastern alterity translates into the categories of domination, intellectual superiority, and virile action, the anxieties, incertitudes and identity crises of the West. Transylvania, for example, appears as a projection of Victorian anxieties and taboos. Similarly, women’s “Oriental” lust represents a threat to the Puritan’s moral integrity. Thus, through the psychosocial mechanism of identifying the “scapegoat”, the inoffensive exotic images become hostile images. We temporarily enter the registers of Orientalism and Balkanism, coming then back to that of Europeanism, an oscillation that very much complicates the analysis of the racial, sexual, and social stereotypes regarding the Romanians. When she is a representative of high society, the sensual, lustful woman allures the rational, even-tempered Western male, stirring up the instincts that he had succeeded to control by education. She is the very symbol of the Orient[26]. The same woman, active and smart this time, would be ready to confront every obstacle in order to be in fashion and to follow European life standards. The peasant woman is presented in different ways, according to her age. When she is young, she enjoys the British observers’ mutual (sometime enthusiastic) appreciation: she is nice, hardworking, a devoted mother and wife, etc.

The man belonging to aristocratic circles is mainly Oriental (traditional, backward, cunning, corrupt, and lazy), with the exception of princes and young boyars who acquired a remarkable education abroad. Those of the lower classes borrow alternatively either the physiognomic and behavioral characteristics of the Oriental: primitive, passive, indolent, corrupt, etc., or of the Balkan: barbarian, savage, warrior, etc. Nevertheless, all of them are different from the Westerner because European characteristics are cautiously attributed to them: it is a borrowed, superficial Europeanness, a “pseudo-Europeanness” in the observers’ opinion. The analysis of the Romanian images from British perspectives confronts itself at each level with their complexity. But, if we had to find a common denominator, then it is their intermediate liminal condition, and, in less- elaborated hypostases, their cultural and ethnic (or even racial) ambiguity.

The political, economic and philosophical cartography that was achieved by the Western Enlightenment predicted the European division completed by the Iron Curtain. The Enlightenment philosophical map offered a theoretical support for the political, diplomatic, economic, and military map of Europe, and “real” travellers (“explorers” with authentic diplomatic, religious, and scientific mission or with disguised purposes) came on the spot to experience and confirm European differentiation, which was to be maintained and aggravated in the 19^th century.

Perceived not only as a geographical reality, but also as an imagined, or invented reality, binary Europe is a cultural and political construct, rooted in the century of the Enlightenment and European dilatation (the epoch of epistemological acknowledgements and of colonial expansion as well). Europe (identified with the West) was defining itself by referring to the East: the Enlightenment philosophers characterized civilization as opposed to Eastern barbarity and demonstrated it by historical and anthropological arguments. The philosophical map of polarized Europe almost coincided with the political-military map of the Oriental Question. Nevertheless, the “civilizing” action of colonialism and British influence in “barbarian” spaces were justified in the name of humanism.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, representations of the Romanians in British travel accounts conformed more to the realities in their minds than to actual ones. Out of the dominant images of Eastern Europe and, consequently, of Romania, that of barbarity (as opposed to civilization) would gradually become a nucleus for future stereotypes, which, in their turn, would Orientalize and Balakanize this space through negative attributions. Philosophy, natural sciences (anthropology, biology, ethnology, geography, with their much exploited theories on races and climates), together with history and economic sciences, cooperated to found the discourse of difference (that is, for the naturalization and absolutization of difference). The contribution of these disciplines is to be felt in the organization of the representations of identity, because travellers on their part were experiencing alterity: ethnic origin, psychological features, dress, food, architecture, beliefs, and habits.

As for the spatial-temporal structure of the British images concerning Romania, their situation in an uncertain space and time is dominant. Romania is thus suspended on the borderline between civilization and barbarity, between modernity and tradition, between Europe and the Orient or the Balkans (on the structure of the Ottoman Empire), between Europe and Asia, on the border that separates empires. It is thus placed in a waiting space for political and military reasons. The decision about the direction this country would take depended (and still depends) on the evolution of the conflicts or the mutual goals of the great powers. Half-civilized and half-barbarian, half-European and half-Oriental, Romania was maintained in this balance on the symbolic map of the Continent through artifices of calculation, emphasizing in a politically correct manner either its Orientalness or its Europeanness.

The discourse of identification would have to take into consideration a natural tendency towards modernity in the first half of the 19^th century. Nevertheless, it was ironically and even maliciously recording the Phanariot-European “mixture” of the Romanian Principalities. In the British observers’ opinion, the count of indictment for the seclusion into Orientalness (as a negative attribute: “Oriental lethargy”, “Oriental despotism”) was the government and its institutions (mostly the Church). To these they added some natural racially and geographically determined dispositions. For the British travellers this imaginary location at the borderline between worlds turned into a horizon of expectancy. It justified their feeling of separating from civilization while entering the world of Oriental tales, which they invoked upon crossing the threshold of the Romanian countries on their way from the West to the East.[27] Few of them perceived this “gate of the Orient” as a barrier against Ottoman expansion and the Romanians’ traditional way of life as a means of defending national and religious identity (as in the Romanians’ self representation).

The presence of British stereotypes regarding Romanians was also caused by the fact that travellers were deliberately guided to aristocratic circles in Transylvania and to Phanariot ones in the Principalities, where they could receive a more convenient hospitality ; their pre-established itineraries also supposed contacts with political and diplomatic personalities and less with cultural ones. Intentionally or not, British travellers would mostly register elements of public or popular culture. Even British translations from Romanian literature would contribute to the folklorization and archaization of Romanian culture. Political and religious sympathies and interests were aiming at Transylvania, at the protestant aristocracy. There were thus drawn ethnic and religious borderlines inside the country, too.

Starting from particular cases, British travellers would generalize their impressions and conclusions for the entire Romanian space, without waiting for their empirical verification and confirmation (contrary to their empirical philosophical tradition).

The evolution of the British representations concerning Romania took an alarming turn in the second half of the 19^th century, when Victorian imperialism was confronting itself with its own dark side, losing much of its splendid self-confidence and authority. At the time, the stigmatized and culpable Eastern alterity (more precisely, the Transylvanian Other) would take demonic proportions in the Anglo-Saxon imaginary, as a release of the much prophesied “reverse imperialism” against the center of the world civilization, which was Great Britain itself. Gothic literature would abundantly exploit this theme. Bram Stoker, for example, built his celebrity on the mythical and political foundation of Transylvanian “vampirism”.

To Great Britain, Eastern Europe was not the target of a real colonization, but rather a space where the great powers’ political, economic, and commercial interests clashed and a necessary stage for the important commercial routes, which permitted access to the Black Sea, the Danube, and the Aegean Sea. From the perspective of the Oriental Question, it also was the virtual empty space left after the withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire (Great Britain’s ally against the Russian expansion), a space that could cause the loss of European balance at the moment when it came out of imperial control. Justifications were prepared for any political option, and cultural geography was greatly adequate to the economic, political, and military cartography. Constantly stressed was the beneficent influence of Western civilization upon this space, which, if left to its barbarity, would become a potential danger for the values of civilization. Nevertheless, by ‘civilizing’, the British did not understand cultural or economic involvement, but mostly a political one. Even the extension into this space of the latest technical achievements (particularly, steam engines — those symbols of civilization) was for quite pragmatic purposes.

British travellers never proposed as a solution Romania’s liberation from Ottoman rule, even if labelled as “Oriental despotism” and severely criticized in its Phanariot hypostasis. Instead, they recommended reforms from the inside, keeping, nevertheless, the same structures, so long as the Ottoman Empire was the convenient ally and represented a symbol of imperial longevity.

The romantic discourse would prophetically announce the break of the subjugating chains, but even then in a condescending manner, by appealing to Europe’s maternal benevolence to help her children lost out of history. The caricatural literary representations of the Gothic novel acquire life and color in the Romantic ones.[28] They perceived the Eastern, or Balkan, space either out of history, in the exotic, mysterious, and mythical aura of Byronism (the supreme sacrifice on the golden shrine of Ancient Greece), or with concrete reference to the political controversies connected to the problem of the Balkan peoples’ independence, and, implicitly, to the destiny of the Ottoman Empire. It is in fact a process of half-mythologization of the Balkans (a term that begins to impose itself in the second half of the 19^th century, at the same time as the affirmation of the national states), because despite Byron and Shelley’s attraction toward Greek classical values, their expectations would not be fulfilled. They were disgusted at the contemporary realities in Greece. Thus, the enthusiastic inversion of dichotomic mental patterns was not to resist a long time: neither “purity” would be attached to Greece, nor “corruption” to England, anymore. Things would return to their usual places. The imaginary sins of an Orient extended into the Balkans (sensuality, corruption, primitivism, etc.) would be again opposed to Western “purity”. These oscillations were also reflected in the representations of the Romanians, where the enthusiasm caused by the impression of rediscovering Greek vestiges in women’s classical features and clothes, for example, is tempered by images of an unsatisfactory dull present. For the rest, if the characters met by the British travellers were exotic, unfamiliar, and even hostile, so were the landscapes. They do not remain immune from political intentions, either. The scarcity of uncontrolled emotions and feelings of admiration suggests that we are not totally wrong in our assumption. 

While the synchronic approach of British travel accounts points out their pragmatic purposes of informing about the foreigner, the diachronic approach increases their literarity, multireferentiality, and plurality of significations. Hence a multitude of interpretative perspectives have to be taken into consideration in an image study. Built on Enlightenment mental patterns, Eastern European identity representations, Romania included, would naturalize difference through biological, physiological, and racial features (compared and combined in taxonomies). The Romanians’ identity formula would keep the balance between civilization and barbarity or primitivism, Orientalness and Europeanness, modernity and tradition, whenever the observers raised for discussion the enigmatic ethnical-linguistical identity, autochthonous and Oriental habits, Phanariot and European clothes and dress, hospitality, environment, etc., all of them at the confluence of traditional and foreign codes. The images of the Romanians’ religiosity drew the most severe frontiers between Western Christianity and Eastern religions (that is, between enlighted Protestantism on the one hand, and Orthodox, or even Muslim, traditionalism, on the other). When Orthodoxy and Catholicism were brought together, they were both negatively valued in comparison to Protestantism.

The idea of continuity can justify the drawing of a temporal bridge between Bram Stoker and Alan Brownjohn, an important contemporary British writer, because both of them hold significative positions in the development of British representations of Romania. First, Dracula, Bram Stoker’s novel, marks the evolution from British travel accounts toward fictional literature having Romania as background. On the other hand, Alan Brownjohn’s novel, The Long Shadows,[29] is the first important literary work that offers a possible solution for escaping from the labyrinth of prejudices built by hundreds of travel books and one Victorian novelist full of imagination. Other directions of development, culminating with Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy[30] and Paul Bailey’s Kitty and Virgil,[31] are the subjects of separate studies.

I cannot conclude that British representations about Romania are totally unfounded in reality. But, nevertheless, Romanian realities are intentionally exploited for precise pragmatic reasons. None of the effects of such a literary imperialism is equal to the concrete devastating effects of communist imperialism. Nevertheless, post-communist studies seem less appealing than those concerned with a virtual Western imperialism, which is in fact rather wished than rejected. It is perhaps a way of expressing regrets rather than criticizing the West for still keeping Romania out of the European borderlines.

I will finish my study with Pia Brînzeu’s generous pleading for the transparency of frontiers between cultures and civilizations, which can give way to mutual knowledge and understanding:

New fictionalised versions of both East and West introduce readers to a larger Europe which they were ignorant of before 1989.… Instead of seeking to control or accepting to submit, British and Romanians learn to converse. They replace their imperial arrogance or Balkanic inferiority with an acceptance of dialogue and with the so long suppressed understanding of Otherness. Travel becomes for both sides a process of recognizing and dislodging dominant ideas, assumptions and ideologies.[32]

Notes