In the early 20th century, Morocco presented a unique situation characterized by fluidity in the desert. France had steadily increased its power and influence in a nation that had long resisted the encroachment of Western powers. Morocco's location on the south side of the Straits of Gibraltar made the country strategically important during the Great War of 1914-18. It is fortunate that American novelist Edith Wharton visited Morocco during the postwar years, recording her impressions in her 1919 book, In Morocco.
Wharton is known among students of American literature as a perceptive critic of the manners and mores of New York City’s aristocracy from Gilded Age days, as seen in her novel The Age of Innocence (1920), which was the first book by a woman author to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. She was also an avid traveler who crossed the Atlantic dozens of times, at a time when transatlantic travel was much more difficult than it is nowadays. She put her gifts for sharp observation and graceful phraseology to good effect in a number of travel books, of which In Morocco is a useful example.
A Journey Facilitated by Colonial Influence
Wharton’s postwar visit to Morocco did not happen by accident; she came to the country as the guest of General Hubert Lyautey of the French Army, who by the time of Wharton’s visit had spent almost two decades expanding France’s power and influence in the country - sometimes violently, and often in violation of existing treaties. Lyautey was successful enough in his efforts that by 1912 he was Resident-General of French Morocco, administering a system in which the Moroccan monarchy continued to rule the country, albeit under French colonial supervision. In that context, it makes sense that General Lyautey invited to Morocco an eminent American writer who was also a known Francophile, and that he so generously dedicated his time and his financial resources to making sure that Wharton’s Moroccan journey was a pleasant one.
Wharton, in the book’s dedication, expresses gratitude to General Lyautey, “thanks to whose kindness the journey I had so long dreamed of surpassed what I had dreamed.” And Wharton’s favorable feelings regarding the French colonial system come through when, in the context of her time in Marrakech, she writes that “It may be that the political stability which France is helping [the Moroccans] to acquire will at last give their higher qualities time for fruition” (p. 158).
Yet one sees how canny it was for General Lyautey to invite Wharton to Morocco, take her all over the country, and treat her with such care and gracious hospitality for every moment of her trip. It must be nice - it must be nice - to have Edith Wharton on your side.
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Changing Norms in Travel Writing
Reading In Morocco, one is struck by how much the norms for travel writing have changed over the years. Nowadays, in the work of travel writers like Paul Theroux or Pico Iyer, the expectation is that writers will emphasize human commonality; one will hear about what is different in a new country, to be sure, but the author will bring things round to a salutary reminder that human beings are very much the same all over the world. In 1919, by contrast - when fewer people had the opportunity to travel beyond their own nations’ borders - the expectation seems to have been that a writer would emphasize the “strange” and “exotic.”
In Morocco participates in that tradition of earlier travel writing, as when Wharton writes of Moroccan civilization that “Overripeness is indeed the characteristic of this rich and stagnant civilization. Buildings, people, customs seem all about to crumble and fall of their own weight: the present is a perpetually prolonged past (p. 31) - or that “The whole of civilian Moslem architecture from Persia to Morocco is based on four unchanging conditions: a hot climate, slavery, polygamy, and the segregation of women” (p. 104). Such observations might not pass muster in our more self-consciously multicultural age, but are characteristic of the way in which travel books were written at this point in history.
Nowadays, when tourism is such a vital part of the Moroccan economy, we might find it strange to contemplate a time when it was such a rare thing for a Westerner like Wharton to visit Morocco. Evidence of the extent to which a Moroccan tourism infrastructure was, in 1919, very much a thing of the future, comes early in the book when the car carrying Wharton’s traveling party breaks down on the road from El-Ksar to Rabat. Wharton observes that “If one loses one’s way in Morocco, civilization vanishes as though it were a magic carpet rolled up by a Djinn” (p. 4). But then she waxes philosophical regarding the ways in which such a setback can actually enhance a Westerner’s visit to this part of North Africa:
It is a good thing to begin with such a mishap, not only because it develops the fatalism necessary to the enjoyment of Africa, but because it lets one at once into the mysterious heart of the country, a country so deeply conditioned by its miles and miles of uncitied wilderness that until one has known the wilderness one cannot begin to understand the cities. (p. 4)
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Descriptive Writing and Observations
Wharton’s talent for descriptive writing comes through in passages like one where she juxtaposes Salé and nearby Rabat: “Salé the white and Rabat the red frown at each other over the foaming bar of the Bou-Regreg, each walled, terraced, minareted, and presenting a singularly complete picture of the two types of Moroccan town, the snowy and the tawny” (p. 5). She seems at once amused and fascinated by the literary associations of “Salé, the fierce old pirate town, where Robinson Crusoe was so long a slave” (p. 4). Once inside Rabat, she sees how the vaulted entrance passage into the walled city turns at right angles, so that one can never quite see where one is going, and suggests that “This bending of passages, so characteristic a device of the Moroccan builder, is like an architectural expression of the tortuous secret soul of the land” (p. 6).
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Indeed, Wharton’s gift for mellifluous description comes through so strongly in passages like this one that the reader stops thinking about issues like the French colonial administration of Morocco, or changing norms for travel writing, or what General Lyautey might have been thinking:
Dawn is the romantic hour in Africa. Dirt and dilapidation disappear under a pearly haze, and a breeze from the sea blows away the memory of fetid markets and sordid heaps of humanity. At that hour the old Moroccan cities look like ivory citadels in a Persian miniature, and the fat shopkeepers riding out to their vegetable-gardens like Princes sallying forth to rescue captive maidens….The light had the preternatural purity which gives a foretaste of mirage: it was the light in which magic becomes real, and which helps one to understand how, to people living in such an atmosphere, the boundary between fact and dream perpetually fluctuates. (pp. 13-14)
Insights into the Lives of Moroccan Women
As Wharton wrote so eloquently about the precarious situation of women in male-dominated societies, as with her depiction of the predicament of Countess Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence, it should be no surprise that some of the most resonant passages of In Morocco relate to the lives of women in Morocco, as when she writes that “It is rare, in Morocco, to see in the streets or the bazaars any women except of the humblest classes, household slaves, servants, peasants from the country, or small tradesmen’s wives; and even they (with the exception of the unveiled Berber women) are wrapped in the prevailing grave-clothes” (p. 51). The use of the term “grave-clothes” makes clear enough how she feels about the restrictions upon the daily lives of Moroccan women. And the way she makes a point of excepting the Berbers from her declaration reminds me of the number of times that ordinary Moroccans, when I visited the country in 2012, made a point of telling me, “I am not Arab. I am Berber.”
One of the most moving passages of In Morocco comes when Wharton observes an enslaved girl in the household of a Caïd or feudal commander in Marrakech, while she and the Caïd’s other guests are being served tea:
Like most of the Moroccan slaves, even in the greatest households, she was shabbily, almost raggedly, dressed. A dirty gandourah of striped muslin covered her faded caftan, and a cheap kerchief was wound above her grave and precocious little face. With preternatural vigilance she watched each movement of the Caïd, who never spoke to her, looked at her, or made her the slightest perceptible sign, but whose least wish she instantly divined, refilling his tea-cup, passing the plates of sweets, or removing our empty glasses, in obedience to some secret telegraphy on which her whole being hung. (pp. 199-200)
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Slavery remained legal in French Morocco until 1925; whatever the benefits that Wharton felt French administration had brought to Morocco, freedom for enslaved people was not - at that time - among them. It may not have been one of General Lyautey’s favorite moments from In Morocco when Wharton wrote of the Caïd’s slave girl, “the tiny creature watching [the Caïd] with those anxious joyless eyes”, an embodiment of “the abyss” of slavery, and added that “behind the sad child leaning in the archway stood all the shadowy evils of the social system” (pp. 200-01).
Wharton's Encounters with Harems
The harems were of particular interest to Wharton, leading to some of the book’s most extraordinary passages. Indeed, Wharton charted new territory by entering into these female spaces. Her first visit to a harem occurred while attending a ceremony at the palace of Sultan Yusef ben Hassan in Rabat.
It was a large room, enclosed on all sides by a balcony glazed with panes of brightly-coloured glass. On a gaudy modern Rabat carpet stood gilt armchairs of florid design and a table bearing a commercial bronze of the ‘art goods’ variety. A dozen women immediately surrounded Wharton and Inès Lyautey, the resident-general’s wife.
Because of the ceremony and their visit, the women had donned their finest gowns, creating a sea of gold and silver silk brocade. Wharton was not impressed with the women themselves until the arrival of the sultan’s mother. “From the newcomer’s round ruddy face, her short round body, the round hands emerging from her round wrists, an inexplicable majesty emanated; and though she too was less richly arrayed than the favourites she carried her headdress of striped gauze like a crown.”
As the sultan’s mother spoke with Lyautey through an interpreter, Wharton felt as if she had finally met a Moroccan woman of substance, one above the intrigues and gossips of the harem. Wharton visited another household while in Rabat, this one belonging to a “high government official, a Moroccan dignitary of the old school.” The women of this harem wore “sober dresses, in keeping with the simplicity of the house” that reminded her of a professor’s family playing dress up. During their conversation, which was translated by the host’s brother-in-law, the women were shocked to learn that Wharton didn’t have any children. One woman noted that in Moroccan society a childless woman was “considered the most unhappy being in the world.”
In Fès, Wharton visited the harem of a chief Moroccan dignitary. As they waited for their much-delayed tea, Wharton received an introduction to the women of the harem. The younger ones were daughters, daughters-in-law, and concubines. “The latter word evokes to occidental ears images of sensual seduction which the Moroccan harem seldom realizes,” she wrote. “All the ladies of this dignified official household wore the same look of melancholy respectability. Once again, conversation was awkward. “[T]here are few points of contact between the open-air occidental mind and beings imprisoned in a conception of sexual and domestic life based on slave-service and incessant espionage.”
Impact and Legacy
I first found In Morocco as a free book available for Kindle download on my tablet; I then sought out the Ecco Press reprinting of the book from 1996, so that I could see the photographs and illustrations that the Kindle edition does not provide. It was fascinating, for me, to read and see Wharton’s impressions of Morocco, and to compare them with my own impressions from when I visited Marrakech and Essaouira a decade ago. For students of Wharton’s work, or for readers with an interest in Moroccan history and culture, Wharton’s In Morocco is a most interesting journey.
The cities were curiously empty when Wharton and company arrived. Following the sound of drums and men’s voices, they were led to the main marketplace, which was bursting with the inhabitants of the city. In its centre an inspired-looking creature whirled about on his axis, the black ringlets standing out in snaky spirals from his haggard head, his cheek-muscles convulsively twitching.
As Wharton watched the dancers, she noticed the sun catching flashes of red on the bodies and the ground. From Fès, they made the desolate journey to Marrakech, which had not yet become a tourist magnet and progenitor of hashish dreams. “The road traverses no villages, and not even a ring of nomad tents is visible in the distance on the wide stretches of arable land.” Finally, glimpses of violet appeared far ahead, as the Atlas Mountains beckoned. “Mysteriously, from the heart of the palms, a tower shot up, as if alone in the wilderness, behind it stood the sun-streaked cliffs of the Atlas, with snow summits appearing and vanishing through the storm.”
Even as Wharton draws on the New York of her youth, it’s hard not to see some of her Moroccan experience in the novel. The restrictive drawing rooms, opera boxes, and carriages echo the confines of the harem. When women do leave home, they are constantly cautioned about venturing into the wrong space or speaking with the wrong person lest it ruin their reputation. The pecking order of New York society and the intrigues that keep it afloat have much in common with the pecking order of the harems.
In October 1920, The Age of Innocence appeared on bookshelves alongside the book version of In Morocco. “Both of these books add security to their author’s position as one of the foremost contemporary writers of English prose. The one reveals her at her best as a constructive novelist; the other proves once more her exceptional power in translating color, line and form into their perfect verbal equivalents,” wrote the reviewer in the New York Times. While In Morocco remains one of her lesser-known works, the trip and its writing provided Wharton with the space to recharge her soul and grow a masterpiece. It would also encourage a generation of Americans and Britons to travel to Morocco.
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