7.01 Grand Tours Pt 1: The Postcard Illusion

 

Field Notes & Trailhead

Just about one year ago, June 2025 as I record this, my fiance and I crossed a long but much-used bridge from the Canadian province of New Brunswick onto Prince Edward Island, known affectionately—or maybe just expeditiously—as PEI. Now, when I say the bridge is long, I mean about 8 miles or nearly 13 kilometers. It rises high over the water on massive concrete pillars, rolling up and down in enormous and curved hills, between 40 and 60 meters, or 130 to 200 feet, above the water below. Or the ice below. Or the void below if you are crossing on a foggy day. Maybe we should say that if you are not a fan of bridges, perhaps you should come to the island’s southeastern shore by ferry, instead. Since the bridge is only about 30 years old now, that was how most people came, anyway, for centuries.

It was certainly how Lucy Maud Montgomery’s ancestors came to the island, from the 1770s through the 1830s—that is, by boats from England and Scotland. The Mi’kmaq First Nations people had somehow navigated this icy Northumberland Strait in birchbark canoes before that; in deeper winter, they added long wooden runners to their canoes to stretch and slide across the ice packs. It was an idea that the European immigrants learned to adopt themselves, first with the Royal Mail Iceboats which carried letters and often passengers. They were charged a “push fee” for the service; any able-bodied male was required to step out into the winter wind and ice to help push the boat across the shifting packs of frozen sea. If you were a woman, child, or elderly traveler, of course you didn’t have to push—you just had to pay a double fee. So, yeah, that bridge wobbling over the sea 150 feet up is pretty scary, but I’ll choose it over iceboat pushing or even birchbark, though now the Mi’kmaqs are long ago displaced.

And no, for the record, the current bridge doesn’t actually wobble. That was more likely my foot on the brake or my hands on the steering wheel. Don’t be my passenger. I don’t know how long it took hand-pushed iceboats to cross the strait, but the bridge trip was about ten minutes of my fiance hiding below the dashboard.

Montgomery never saw the modern bridge or the massive car ferries that followed her; she was born in 1874 and left the island for Ontario in 1911. 

So we crossed the long bridge across the Northumberland strait, and if I had begun the crossing when I started talking about it today, I’d be about ⅓ of the way. Really, though: why was I going here, and who was this Lucy Maud Montgomery I keep talking about? I admit she is part of the reason, of course. Because while PEI is a beautiful Canadian island province I had never visited, and while a cousin of mine lived here with her husband, the other reason I had come to PEI was what greeted us as our first island sighting as we began to roll downhill off the bridge onto land again. It was an island Welcome Center, of course, a kind of complex of parking lot and restaurant and gift shop and more parking lot and pedestrian fairways and more shops and parking lot. And the largest building, it seemed, was completely themed with the main character of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s children’s book series, Anne of Green Gables.

We had arrived early in the tourist season, but it was immediately clear the power of this space built recently for visitors to a remote country island. It was a place of candies and raspberry cordials and hats and china plates and shelf decor and quilts and red pigtails and dolls and books and just about every imaginable bit of bling which could be branded with the childhood character of Anne onto it. No matter what, PEI was going to capitalize on this character in the biggest ways it could. My tourist dollars would be spent here, and the island would breach no argument about it. 

We hadn’t even crossed the island to see Anne’s home town, birthplace, and the replica villages built for the fans. But here, crossing an enormous bridge into a new and sunny island space, we had entered at last a fantasy world of Anne, perhaps even the mind of Lucy Maud that haunted this space. At least, that’s how the island was presenting it. Just as Anne fans wanted it.

 

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and this season we’re going to become skeptical literary pilgrims, those with a dose of dubitation.

 

Montgomery and Two Worlds

Now let’s get this out of the way early, okay? I did not grow up reading the eight or eleven Anne books, and I had not watched the 1980s movies, the 2016 movies, or the Netflix series Anne with an E. I hadn’t even read the books until planning for this trip. So I was not drooling for the opportunity to see some young actor in a red wig try to charge for selfies with me. 

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne’s creator and perhaps alter ego, lived here and the stories were based here, a late-Victorian era rural nostalgia fantasy of nature and innocence and simple-humored wholesomeness. The world was turning darker, perhaps: at least writers like Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy were telling us so, and defense pacts like the Triple Entente and Triple Alliance seemed to concur. 

Ten or eleven years before Anne was born to the page, Montgomery waited out a dark winter on PEI in her twenties. And while we’ll get into the details later, in part she wrote: “The world is a hard place to live in if one has a soul that can feel.”

There are rifts here. Frictions, disconnects, ironies if you wish, but perhaps tragic ones. Most children know little about these when reading the Anne books, today or then. Her world is a delicious place, one of cascading flowers and elfin streams, mishaps with black currant wines and miscues with young love. We readers are drawn to the lush scenes and daydreams of Anne and PEI both. We expect them, perhaps, from our visit to Anne’s demesne. And Prince Edward Island will deliver. But on visiting we also find the unusual circumstance of a literary place laid atop a historical reality: we can’t visit here and find Anne but not Maud. 

We already know that the iceboats were cold, dangerous, even harrowing, as people struggled to cross the Northumberland Strait in winter. But somehow, Anne manages to describe them in the fifth book, Anne’s House of Dreams, as a “wild glorious spin.”  There’s a tensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More here, if we care to look, between the literary tale and the actual facts, between the public face and the private reality. I don’t want to spend more time this season’s Journey exploring the moral basements in Le Guin stories; but I do want to acknowledge that what draws us to spaces of literary fantasy may not be altogether . . . honest. Call it, if you wish, the space between the literary world and the one we inhabit.

In his 1970s book on tourism, Dean MacCannell talks about it this way, that the modern tourist is a contemporary pilgrim searching for an “authentic” experience, but that this authenticity is itself a kind of performance, staged and thus sold for this purpose. Maybe the most popular literary worlds work the same way as tourist venues do, or even in partnership: to offer us a world apart from the one we experience. I mean, I’m definitely going to visit PEI or The Wizarding World of Harry Potter before I choose to visit a theme park based on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. 

Which world would I rather live in? I can buy and read the books; but then I can also buy and live in a scene created for me to look and feel like the books. The key ingredient: that these spaces not look and feel like the world I came from. And now that enormous bridge far above the ocean strait feels exactly like the crossing into that new world I want. 

 

The Grand Tour and the Invention of the Gaze

No wonder we’ve always wanted to cross bridges into new worlds.  My crossing is little different from those millenia before me. We’re nothing new, we tourists, we wanderers to distant literary spaces. Tourism, in one form or another, has been with us for at least 2000 years. Last season we spent some time with the StoicPoorly understood as being without emotion, the stoic philos... More philosopher Seneca on one of his reveries to the Italian coast to escape Roman politics. But there is enough evidence to suggest that pleasure travel began far earlier than this, maybe as far back as Egypt in 1500 BCE. Later, of course, we get the religious pilgrimages of the middle ages, from around 400 to 1500, and this is what created travel networks, extensive road systems, the famous roadside pub or inn. Tolkien’s The Prancing Pony; Stevenson’s Admiral Benbow Inn in Treasure Island; the Tabard Inn in Canterbury Tales. 

By the time those road systems were set up, all of Europe and the surrounding lands became—for the aristocratic class, obviously—more accessible. In fact, for the British wealthy, traveling these roads for a year or more, city to city, became kind of an educational rite of passage. Again, for the upper class of leisure, for people of wealth, and for young men. Think, perhaps, of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park characters, Lord Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, or the characters in Wharton’s Age of Innocence, constantly escaping the US for Europe. 

But really, the Grand Tour historically was promoted as a way to complete a gentleman’s classical education. He could take in the art and architecture and polite society of the Old World traditions. Sometimes the young men would travel with a tutor or chaperone, but as often this was a way to test themselves as adults beyond parental control. It was a chance, you know, to experience the high life—maybe low life—of sensual pleasure, drinking, gambling, and–well, sowing their wild oats. Afterwards, like responsible adults, they would then return home to marriage and proper maturity.

Oh, there’s a lot to say about such ventures, but let’s keep us on the tourist track for now. Imagine crossing the English Channel to France, spending time in Paris to learn propriety and take lessons in fencing and riding, even dancing. Then we cross the Alps for Italy: Florence for art and Venice for its, um, society, and then Rome for antiquity. As time and money permitted, we could visit elsewhere, of course, or we could loop back through the German states, Austria, Denmark, etcetera, on the way home. 

That was the general idea, anyway, and as you might already surmise, not strictly followed. Let’s translate those wild oats and gentlemanly education into some slightly more dangerous pastimes. For instance, in some cases, the Grand Tour helped build an identity of masculinity, or even the aggressiveness of the masculine. The boys might choose riskier activities to prove their courage and honor. Some even pursued a kind of military curriculum, studying fortresses, following foreign troops, even looking for active war zones to fight in the ranks as volunteers. A strange sort of tourism: but we’ll see far stranger before we’re done.

For now, let’s recognize some of the results. Suddenly across the world we have the new publishing of guidebooks and journals, and we have new markets for souvenirs and foreign antiques, even large urban landscape paintings, because people started to return from the Grand Tour with more and exotic objects to display for status and bragging rights. 

By the mid-1800s, though, the aristocratic idea of the Grand Tour dropped away, because soon steamships and trains made travel available to (ew) just about anyone. The idea had been planted; and mass tourism was born. And, of course, once you start putting people on the waves and roads and trails, pubs and inns become resorts, and distant cities become “destinations” awaiting our cash. 

Now we all can imagine that there are tons of reasons people tour, are tourists, set their sights on destinations. And we’re not going to spend time talking about the endless sub-genres of modern travel—from luxury shopping runs to wellness retreats. I even created my own Bigfoot Tourist Hunt adventure up and down the US West coast a few years back. Gotta have a theme, right? 

But we are going to explore and talk about the tourism that you and I share in common: literary tourism, a niche sort of adventure which itself has several variations. It’s the tourism that brought me to PEI last year, the one that might have taken you to the birthplace of Tennessee Williams or the grave of Poe, the theme park of Pinocchio Park or Dickens World. (Well, Dickens World went under some 10 years ago. My guess is that the children’s factory ride wasn’t what folks had hoped for.) But we also tour vicariously, can’t we? If we have neither the time or cash to get to the Mad Tea Party Ride in California or the Don Quixote Ferris Wheel in Japan, we can at least still read about such places, can’t we? And, of course, this too, is an entire literary genre of journals and travelogues: reading about the travels we might only imagine: it might be Twain’s Innocents Abroad or Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love. 

And it should surprise no one who’s listened to this podcast that I will have my own particular spin on this. 

 

Tourist Gazing

A couple of years back, I heard about a new book coming out by Nicola MacLeod, called Literary Fiction Tourism, and I said to myself, “Self? (That’s what I call myself, ‘Self.’) “Self?” I said, this book was written for me. I will own it.” And so I waited for its publishing. 

200 pages. Hardcover price? $150. EBook? $65.  Nope and nope. Library copy? Far too niche for most to carry it. Finally, a single college library a few hours drive for me had database access to a single copy that I could read there. The problem? Without a college ID I was limited to 30 minutes of access. And so, one fine summer day, I drove there, and with a Guest Pass (and with the help of a too-patient librarian), I logged in over and over and over through the afternoon to read and take notes for all of us. 

I tell you all of this for one key reason. I want you to appreciate the lengths I go to bringing you researched ideas for this podcast. Totally selfish there. And I also want to spare you a few bucks along the way. But the book also has some secrets to share.

Here’s the first, but something that was already understood by 19th century guidebooks by folks like John Murray in England or Karl Baedeker in Germany: there is something we must call the “tourist gaze.” We’ve all probably heard of the “male gaze,” that perverse erotic eye used by filmmakers, artists, and writers, who all presume that heterosexual men are the audience and therefore objectifying and sexualizing women is somehow a given. The “tourist gaze” works on a similar principle, except that the literary destinations we travel to are more than ready to design their places based upon what they suppose we expect to find. If I want to go to PEI, I expect to see raspberry cordials that Anne loves. Therefore, the tourist folks there make them. 

To put it bluntly, no matter what the reality of the space might be, the concept of the tourist gaze suggests that it will be transformed into easily consumed (and maybe stereotypical) commodities. It’s quite possible (and by this I mean it is absolutely certain) that a single candy company will brand one chocolate bar with an Anne of Green Gables wrapper, a Sasquatch wrapper and a Wednesday of the Addams family wrapper, depending on its destination. And it’s absolutely possible that I have encountered all three in my travels, the last in the mountains of Transylvania, Romania, where the historical Cantacuzino Castle is now decorated with the Wednesday Addams signage everywhere because it was used as the set for Nevermore Academy on the shore.

I mentioned Murray and Baedeker from the 1800s. They basically invented the tourist guidebook, a product that tells us what to visit and what to feel about what we visit. Before them, we were reading the excitable and romantic journals from the Grand Tour, mostly. But now we had prepared routes, recommendations for stays and restaurants, all packaged in a handy guide to make our tour . . . more predictable. 

Murray’s guides would warn us about the Greeks, for instance, how they are overly eager, insincere, and are motivated by the “love of money.” Since Murray also was publishing books of Lord Byron’s poetry, he would often slip some of Byron into the guidebooks for extra flavor. Poetry became a marketing tool. And I don’t want to describe the early Baedeker’s works from Germany as overly nationalistic and perhaps displaying prejudice against the Balkan peoples, so I’ll just leave that comment here and move on. After all, those guidebooks are still printed today.

All this to say that the publishing world is intimately connected with the tourism work around the books we love. More, though, books like these determine what kind of traveler we are. Are you a lover of Frommer or Fodor, a Rick Steves or Lonely Planet, a Michelin or Let’s Go? Each has a particular kind of traveler (and traveler gaze) in mind. And if you travel at all like I do, you’re guilty of the same sort of imagined classism towards other travelers. 

Critic James Buzard recognized that even our Grand Tour aristocrats were in this zone. There were the “vulgar” passive tourists who were carted around from place to place, and then of course the “superior” traveler who supposedly gets off the beaten track, is able to travel closer to ground, to meet the culture, to touch the reality. Hikers do this, the backcountry folk try not to sneer at those of us on the prepared boardwalks. And even those on cruise ships can look askance at those “below decks.” 

I try to travel as close to the ground as I can. I want my money supporting locals, not national or international companies. I want to know what the world is like, not what the tourist traps create for me. What I don’t seem to realize is that this is its own kind of “tourist gaze,” just one that appeals to my prejudice against, you know, “common” travelers. Not to put too fine a point on this, but basically, I saw myself on PEI last year as a bit “above” the common fans of Green Gables. After all, I had come to do research for my podcast. Hmmph! All these others? Mere squanderers and dupes to the tourist industry! And, of course, my own anti–tourist snobbery here is ironic and sad because the industry ingratiates itself to me by supporting this attitude; and all the while I’m participating in the exact same kinds of activities that everyone else is.

Now don’t worry. I’m not trying to say that you are this kind of tourist. You may be far more equitable and magnanimous than me. And I’m not trying to suggest that tourism is a completely terrible thing. There is no simple good/bad here; that’s a binary, an opposition that listeners by now know I am highly skeptical of. Our travel attitudes of fandom, our recreational dreaming, our enjoying the prepared events and spaces of the industry aren’t any kind of moral cowardice. What we are stepping into, though, is a complex, legitimate, and maybe necessary imaginative question which will help us make sense of the journey ahead of us. We can be pilgrims to literary spaces: but let’s be skeptical pilgrims.

 

Skeptic Pilgrim Challenges

Hanging over the workbench in my garage is a Sasquatch air freshener. Now I don’t want to tell you that my garage otherwise smells worse than the proverbial stench of a bigfoot, so I’ll just say the kitchy little souvenir from a northern California tourist trap is a welcome addition. It’s not as nice as the “Frodo Lives” button on the Waywords Studio wall, but how could it be? Tolkien rulz.  Look around your own spaces. What do you have of your literary ventures besides books?

As in previous seasons, I want to offer us a few opportunities to reflect on the ideas we’re talking about together. But this time, let’s get a little more experimental.

Here’s one idea right away that we’ll call the Gift Shop DeconstructionJacques Derrida is a founding voice. Since there is no knowl... More Challenge.

Look around your house, your living room or bedroom. See if you can find three objects that you have out which are there purely to perform an identity for visitors. You know what I mean: the book on a coffee table, maybe, a certain piece of art, a souvenir. You don’t need them. You keep them just in case someone walks in. Take a moment. Write a few sentences, just a few, about the truth of these objects, how perhaps they work as your personal museum brand, maybe what messy part of your actual daily life they are disguising.  It’s one way we use physical objects as a buffer from the world itself. As my students sometimes asked me, “What’s your brand?” Savvy kids, those.

Want to try some others? Something easier or even more adventurous? Check out my links in the Show Notes for four different small challenges you can try. 

And why do these? I suspect you know. I want us to reflect on that tourist gaze a bit, to think about our expectations and how we build them for others. How they’ve been built for us. 

My guess is that we’ll surprise ourselves a bit with these as we move through the next episodes. And our questions will evolve. We’re probing frictionally into some spaces we tend to gloss over, to presume as normal, and when we start digging into our literature this journey, I think these will pay off for us. Being a “skeptical” pilgrim on our journeys isn’t necessarily looking for what’s bad out there: it’s just looking harder at what’s out there.

 

Screens and Modern Escapes

Can’t get to PEI to see Anne? Neither can most. Far easier for fans to catch one of its many film or television incarnations if they want more than the books themselves. In a sense, we travel there again, through screens rather than physically. Such re-visualizing might be seen as a modern tourism, too. Some of the films aren’t Anne, exactly, but re-imaginations of more stories pre-quel and sequel, that Montgomery never anticipated. But always, always, we have the island destination at its center, as beautiful as the images that dominate her books, page after page. 

In her novel The Story Girl, she writes:

Over a valley filled with beech and spruce was a sunset afterglow—creamy yellow and a hue that was not so much red as the dream of red, with a young moon swung low in it. The air was sweet with the breath of mown hayfields where swaths of clover had been steeping in the sun. Wild roses grew pinkly along the fences, and the roadsides were star-dusted with buttercups.

And in Anne of the Island, she says:

The Lake of Shining Waters was blue — blue — blue; not the changeful blue of spring, nor the pale azure of summer, but a clear, steadfast, serene blue, as if the water were past all modes and tenses of emotion and had settled down to a tranquility unbroken by fickle dreams.

The guidebook is there. We want to go, to see it for ourselves. Beauty just like this. It’s what I wanted when I traveled there. It’s what my cousin told me: “Oh, it’s so beautiful.” But while her descriptions didn’t open the island to me like Montgomery’s did, they were enough to convince me to hang on to those ideals. To try and look past the Green Gables licorice and snow globes and Croc charms, to get to the beauty of the island.

I wasn’t as interested in other darker aspects of the modern Grand Tour. The movie The Talented Mr. Ripley, a kind of satire of the 19th century trips, is a pathology of upper-class wealth and performance culture, a grotesque struggle for status based on place and attitude.  Andrew Sean Greer offers us the novel Less, where a writer takes a kind of mid-life crisis Grand Tour through Europe and Asia, using foreign geography and local people as a kind of backdrop or prop for his privileged-class therapy. Or, as a total parody of the entire venture, the hyper-exaggerated almost-comedy movie EuroTrip which laughs at stupid Americans trying the “backpacking through Europe” ritual. Their own narcissism along the way shrinks the entire continent of Europe down into a series of shallow caricatures of different countries, all for their hedonistic adventures. 

We don’t have to be any of this. But to avoid it, we might want to look more carefully at the literature and the experiences we choose around our reading. We begin by refusing to consume landscape as if it was some kind of stage prop or mere Insta post. And then we begin seeking examples of how to do that. 

Maybe I’d find something on PEI that would help me see it all clearly. Maybe the Anne books themselves would do it. Maybe even—though I’m doubting it—that scholarly book by MacLeod. Still more likely, we might begin in 17th century Japan with a thoughtful writer of haiku poetry.

But that’s in Part 2 of our Introduction to this Literary Tourism journey, next time.  It’s an episode we’ll call, “The Bat on the Narrow Road.”  Come for some enlightenment; stay for the reflections. 

And in the meantime, find a trail of your own, and go read something. 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

Bibliography

Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture,” 1800-1918. Oxford UP, 1993.

Dritsas, Margarita. “From Travellers Accounts to Travel Books and Guide Books: The Formation of Greek Tourism Market in the 19th Century.” Tourismos: An International Multidisciplinary Journal of Tourism, vol. 1, no. 1, 2006, pp. 29-54.

Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality: Essays. Translated by William Weaver, Harcourt, 1983.

MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Study of the Leisure Class. 1976. U of California P, 1999.

MacLeod, Nicola E. Literary Fiction Tourism: Understanding the Practice of Fiction-Inspired Travel. Routledge, 2024.

Melton, Jeffrey Alan. Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement. U of Alabama P, 2002.

Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne of Green Gables. Wordsworth Editions, 2018.

Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne of the Island. 1915.

Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne’s House of Dreams. 1917.

Montgomery, Lucy Maud. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery. Edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, Oxford UP, 1985–2004.

Montgomery, Lucy Maud. The Story Girl. 1911.

Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. Sage, 1990.