Anti-Tourism vs. Tourism

In E.M. Forster’s “Room With a View,” the character of Miss Lavish exhibits the characteristics of the quintessential anti-tourist. While she herself is, in fact, a tourist, she simultaneously looks down her nose at both tourists and the tourist industry and searches for the “real” Italy, rather than simply making the rounds of the usual tourist sites. As she herself states, “Tut, tut! Miss Lucy! I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker. He does but touch the surface of things. As to the true Italy—he does not even dream of it. The true Italy is only to be found by patient observation” (32). Through this statement, Miss Lavish at once both demonstrates her disdain for tourism, while trying to make herself appear more knowledgeable than she truly is. The irony of her statement is reflected back at her when, rather than “patiently observing,” she simply wanders through the streets of Florence with Lucy, discussing English politics, missing everything along the way.

An anti-tourist is a person who considers themselves a “traveler” rather than a “tourist”, who comes to a country to “experience the real” country, rather than simply to see the major sights and get out, and all of this describes Miss Lavish to a tee. She shows interest only in unconventional aspects of Florence. For example, when Lucy stops to look at some statues, “Lucy thought she had never seen anything more beautiful; but Miss Lavish, with a shriek of dismay, dragged her forward, declaring that they were out of their path now by at least a mile” (36). Similarly, when they approach Santa Croce, one of the almost required spots to visit in Florence, Miss Lavish shows no interest in it, but instead “disappeared down a side street…gesticulating largely” (38) with her “local-colour box” (38). So in essence, while searching for the “real Florence” she in fact misses out on something that makes it what it is.

Another mark of the anti-tourist displayed by Miss Lavish is that, while she delights in Prato, a “place [which] is too sweetly squalid for words” (19) she feels no actual sympathy to the people living in squalor there. She pretends to see and understand the unpleasant conditions of the people, the reality of the situation, when in fact she clearly feels no true sympathy for their plight and, because she is completely caught up in the romanticism of what she likely deems the picturesqueness of the situation, she fails to see the true reality of the circumstances surrounding her.

However, even while Miss Lavish would surely refer to herself as an anti-tourist, she has clear moments that display her as a tourist, as well. For instance, her attitude towards Italians themselves is a quite elitist tourist attitude. Not only is she patronizing in referring to conditions of poverty as “sweetly squalid”, she also talks down to, or down about, Italians whom they pass. One such example is when a wine-cart passes them and she tells Lucy to “look at that adorable wine-cart! How the driver stares at us, dear, simple soul” (33). She then goes farther, only a few sentences later, by instructing Lucy to “take the word of an old woman, Miss Lucy: you will never repent of a little civility to your inferiors” (34). Perhaps coming from another character, such as Mr. Emerson or Mr. Beebe, this would seem less offensive, but coming as it does from Miss Lavish, it is the attitude behind the words that is more insulting than what she actually says. Despite all her talk about wishing to experience the “real” Italy, Miss Lavish is truly just there to be impressed with herself. She has built up in her mind a simulacral version of herself as she appears in Italy, as much as she has built up a simulacral impression of Italy itself. She believes that by leaving the what now could be called Disneyland version of Italy, she will experience the true country and see the people as they truly are, but because of her mindset, she is never able to leave the hetertopic Italy. She is trying so hard not to be a tourist that she fails completely and becomes an even more obnoxious one.

The difficulty with the anti-tourist is that she is so negative to the tourist and to the tourism industry in general that she fails to see that she herself is, in fact, still a tourist. She refers to herself instead as a “traveler” and believes that because she approaches things from an academic standpoint, this frees her from the “tourist” term. However, though looking at things from an academic standpoint may provide a fuller and richer experience of a city, because there will, to a degree, be a greater understanding and therefore appreciation of what one is seeing, the academic “travelers”, the anti-tourists, temporarily in a city are still in essence tourists. They just come to see different sights. They may sneer at the typical tourist sites and refuse to purchase souvenirs from the numerous small shops and stands, but they are still just as much a tourist as those who do engage in those activities. Miss Lavish, for example, though she seems to scorn a number of the sites that most people come to Florence to see, is still doing her own brand of sight-seeing. She may be an anti-tourist in that she scorns tourism and prefers to search out the “real” Italy, but she is still a tourist in that she is touring the more “sweetly squalid” areas, rather than the more common churches and museums.

In the end, although Forster sets forth Miss Lavish as the archetypal anti-tourist, at the root of her character, she is still simply a tourist; she’s just admiring different sites.