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In Morocco
First published in 1919, this detailed account of the author's journey through Morocco following World War I shares Wharton's observations on local customs and lifestyles, Moroccan history, cities, and more. Reprint.
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1920
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About the author
Edith Wharton
1,459 books5,281 followersEdith Wharton emerged as one of America’s most insightful novelists, deftly exposing the tensions between societal expectation and personal desire through her vivid portrayals of upper-class life. Drawing from her deep familiarity with New York’s privileged “aristocracy,” she offered readers a keenly observed and piercingly honest vision of Gilded Age society.
Her work reached a milestone when she became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence. This novel highlights the constraining rituals of 1870s New York society and remains a defining portrait of elegance laced with regret.
Wharton’s literary achievements span a wide canvas. The House of Mirth presents a tragic, vividly drawn character study of Lily Bart, navigating social expectations and the perils of genteel poverty in 1890s New York. In Ethan Frome, she explores rural hardship and emotional repression, contrasting sharply with her urban social dramas.
Her novella collection Old New York revisits the moral terrain of upper-class society, spanning decades and combining character studies with social commentary. Through these stories, she inevitably points back to themes and settings familiar from The Age of Innocence. Continuing her exploration of class and desire, The Glimpses of the Moon addresses marriage and social mobility in early 20th-century America. And in Summer, Wharton challenges societal norms with its rural setting and themes of sexual awakening and social inequality.
Beyond fiction, Wharton contributed compelling nonfiction and travel writing. The Decoration of Houses reflects her eye for design and architecture; Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort presents a compelling account of her wartime observations. As editor of The Book of the Homeless, she curated a moving, international collaboration in support of war refugees.
Wharton’s influence extended beyond writing. She designed her own country estate, The Mount, a testament to her architectural sensibility and aesthetic vision. The Mount now stands as an educational museum celebrating her legacy.
Throughout her career, Wharton maintained friendships and artistic exchanges with luminaries such as Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Theodore Roosevelt—reflecting her status as a respected and connected cultural figure.
Her literary legacy also includes multiple Nobel Prize nominations, underscoring her international recognition. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature more than once.
In sum, Edith Wharton remains celebrated for her unflinching, elegant prose, her psychological acuity, and her capacity to illuminate the unspoken constraints of society—from the glittering ballrooms of New York to quieter, more remote settings. Her wide-ranging work—novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, travel writing, essays—offers cultural insight, enduring emotional depth, and a piercing critique of the customs she both inhabited and dissected.
Her work reached a milestone when she became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, awarded for The Age of Innocence. This novel highlights the constraining rituals of 1870s New York society and remains a defining portrait of elegance laced with regret.
Wharton’s literary achievements span a wide canvas. The House of Mirth presents a tragic, vividly drawn character study of Lily Bart, navigating social expectations and the perils of genteel poverty in 1890s New York. In Ethan Frome, she explores rural hardship and emotional repression, contrasting sharply with her urban social dramas.
Her novella collection Old New York revisits the moral terrain of upper-class society, spanning decades and combining character studies with social commentary. Through these stories, she inevitably points back to themes and settings familiar from The Age of Innocence. Continuing her exploration of class and desire, The Glimpses of the Moon addresses marriage and social mobility in early 20th-century America. And in Summer, Wharton challenges societal norms with its rural setting and themes of sexual awakening and social inequality.
Beyond fiction, Wharton contributed compelling nonfiction and travel writing. The Decoration of Houses reflects her eye for design and architecture; Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort presents a compelling account of her wartime observations. As editor of The Book of the Homeless, she curated a moving, international collaboration in support of war refugees.
Wharton’s influence extended beyond writing. She designed her own country estate, The Mount, a testament to her architectural sensibility and aesthetic vision. The Mount now stands as an educational museum celebrating her legacy.
Throughout her career, Wharton maintained friendships and artistic exchanges with luminaries such as Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Theodore Roosevelt—reflecting her status as a respected and connected cultural figure.
Her literary legacy also includes multiple Nobel Prize nominations, underscoring her international recognition. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature more than once.
In sum, Edith Wharton remains celebrated for her unflinching, elegant prose, her psychological acuity, and her capacity to illuminate the unspoken constraints of society—from the glittering ballrooms of New York to quieter, more remote settings. Her wide-ranging work—novels, novellas, short stories, poetry, travel writing, essays—offers cultural insight, enduring emotional depth, and a piercing critique of the customs she both inhabited and dissected.
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July 16, 2023
In early-20th-century Morocco, the situation was an anomalous one – fluidity in the desert. France had steadily increased its power and influence in a nation that had long resisted the encroachment of Western powers, and Morocco’s location on the south side of the Straits of Gibraltar had made the country strategically important during the Great War of 1914-18. And for all of these reasons, it is good that American novelist Edith Wharton visited Morocco during the postwar years, and set down her impressions in her 1919 book In Morocco.
Among students of American literature, Wharton is known as a perceptive critic of the manners and mores of New York City’s aristocracy from Gilded Age days, as in her novel The Age of Innocence (1920) – the first book by a woman author to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. But 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; and 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.
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).
I can’t help observing that the Moroccans of that time might have had very different feelings regarding what form of government might give their higher qualities time for fruition. 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.
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)
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).
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)
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)
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).
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.
Among students of American literature, Wharton is known as a perceptive critic of the manners and mores of New York City’s aristocracy from Gilded Age days, as in her novel The Age of Innocence (1920) – the first book by a woman author to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. But 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; and 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.
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).
I can’t help observing that the Moroccans of that time might have had very different feelings regarding what form of government might give their higher qualities time for fruition. 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.
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)
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).
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)
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)
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).
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.
March 4, 2013
I knew going into this book that Edith Wharton traveled to and wrote about Morocco during its French colonial period,after reading the book you learn that her entire trip was made possible by the French colonial government, so I was not expecting a nuanced account of life in Morocco, but I wanted to give her account and experience an open-mind. Her experience in Morocco (though it is an important fact that this book is little more than a travel journal for a one month journey) is one that has been forever lost, mostly because of colonization and now neo-colonial tourism. Her descriptions of the major cities, especially Marrakech, was interesting to read. However, it was hard to get over her paternalistic descriptions, anti-arab/anti-african/anti-islam sentiments and her pro-colonial stance. I read the book quickly, almost entirely in one day, not out of being swept away, but because you can skim through a majority of her racism.
I would not recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Morocco or Moroccans, but it is a good account of European colonial attitudes and French colonial history in North Africa.
I would not recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Morocco or Moroccans, but it is a good account of European colonial attitudes and French colonial history in North Africa.
March 31, 2012
I have been interested in this part of the world for some time...I have always been something of a romantic, devouring the works of Paul Bowles ,long time resident of Morocco.. and following the adventures of intrepid female travellers; Gertrude Bell, Isabelle Eberhardt, Freya Stark. so I was thoroughly prepared to love this book.
In fact it was , to use a sporting cliche,a game of two halves for me. The lush descriptions of the sights and sounds of Morocco were enticing, the historical detail absorbing, and in this respect I was not disappointed.
However I was unable to completely enjoy this book because of my modern -day sensibilities jarring with the terminology and attitudes of the period in which this was written. I felt a little squeamish at the description of people as 'blacks', for example, and also at the idea that the 'natives' were almost like small children to be patted on the head by their colonial masters. I do understand the context in which the writer lived and worked, and so don't blame her for it, but it just took the edge off my enjoyment of the book, which is why I rated it only 3 stars..
In fact it was , to use a sporting cliche,a game of two halves for me. The lush descriptions of the sights and sounds of Morocco were enticing, the historical detail absorbing, and in this respect I was not disappointed.
However I was unable to completely enjoy this book because of my modern -day sensibilities jarring with the terminology and attitudes of the period in which this was written. I felt a little squeamish at the description of people as 'blacks', for example, and also at the idea that the 'natives' were almost like small children to be patted on the head by their colonial masters. I do understand the context in which the writer lived and worked, and so don't blame her for it, but it just took the edge off my enjoyment of the book, which is why I rated it only 3 stars..
June 5, 2015
Some fascinating vignettes, especially her harem visits. Also interesting to see the colonial mindset of the period being reflected in real time, as it were. For each interesting detail, there is a political or racial view that will make the modern reader cringe. (Or I should say this modern reader - the truth is that Wharton's reductive view of the Islamic world is probably not that different than that held by many today).
I read it in Morocco as we visited the same sites that Wharton saw a century before. Could not really recommend it unless under similar circumstances.
I read it in Morocco as we visited the same sites that Wharton saw a century before. Could not really recommend it unless under similar circumstances.
March 9, 2016
4 MAR 2016 - cover love!
This is a better synopsis: In 1917, amid the turmoil of World War I, Edith Wharton, the author of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, travelled to Morocco. A classic of travel writing, In Morocco is her account of this journey through the country's cities and through its deserts.
Free download at Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11104
9 MAR 2016 - review pending.
This is a better synopsis: In 1917, amid the turmoil of World War I, Edith Wharton, the author of The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, travelled to Morocco. A classic of travel writing, In Morocco is her account of this journey through the country's cities and through its deserts.
Free download at Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11104
9 MAR 2016 - review pending.
February 16, 2024
This is only in part a travelogue. In parts it reads textbook. The book only occasionally transmits the very real fascination of North Africas cities, cultures and history. When in travelogue mode, this is excellent, but too often it descends into a fact-fest, and loses all narrative personality.
March 1, 2015
Before I say anything else: yes, it's hopelessly dated, plagued by colonialist trope, and and very much 'of its time.'
That having been said, I gave this five stars because:
1. When I myself am writing, I find myself tending toward opinion first rather than just describing what is there. So art school cliched, but it's good to establish at what precisely we're looking. Wharton does this impeccably and in the process such observation is imbued with her own voice. It's not dry enumerations but a setting of scenes to which she has been privy and our little lens into that.
2. I am always a fan of early proclamations of 'ah, I have seen this place and experienced it, what a shame it has changed already beyond such recognition' which puts this in an interesting place between travel guide and paean to some vision of the land.
3. It seems like Wharton was one of the few women on the trip and her descriptions of not belonging with the wives of the officers, the harem girls, nor wholly the party itself are of particular interest.
Is this an ~incredible work~ in itself? By no means. Did it serve as a good reminder of how to write about these sorts of things and interesting window into Wharton's experience as well as a meta guidebook on guidebooks? Well, yeah!
That having been said, I gave this five stars because:
1. When I myself am writing, I find myself tending toward opinion first rather than just describing what is there. So art school cliched, but it's good to establish at what precisely we're looking. Wharton does this impeccably and in the process such observation is imbued with her own voice. It's not dry enumerations but a setting of scenes to which she has been privy and our little lens into that.
2. I am always a fan of early proclamations of 'ah, I have seen this place and experienced it, what a shame it has changed already beyond such recognition' which puts this in an interesting place between travel guide and paean to some vision of the land.
3. It seems like Wharton was one of the few women on the trip and her descriptions of not belonging with the wives of the officers, the harem girls, nor wholly the party itself are of particular interest.
Is this an ~incredible work~ in itself? By no means. Did it serve as a good reminder of how to write about these sorts of things and interesting window into Wharton's experience as well as a meta guidebook on guidebooks? Well, yeah!
October 3, 2017
I won't lie to you. I didn't enjoy this. I feel like I was supposed to, but I didn't.
Wharton's vocabulary and personal knowledge are positively overwhelming. It's actually ridiculous how much she casually knows about art, history, architecture, genealogy, culture, music, urban planning, religion. Her intense zeal and passion for travel and other cultures is apparent.
...but it's just not interesting to read about her experience. There are a lot of a adjectives and a lot of unexciting observations. Nothing like her fiction.
Wharton's vocabulary and personal knowledge are positively overwhelming. It's actually ridiculous how much she casually knows about art, history, architecture, genealogy, culture, music, urban planning, religion. Her intense zeal and passion for travel and other cultures is apparent.
...but it's just not interesting to read about her experience. There are a lot of a adjectives and a lot of unexciting observations. Nothing like her fiction.
September 15, 2021
Edith Wharton was raised in a different time and had money and social status. Her prose writing is every bit as elegant in this travel book as that found in her novels. This “guide book” was written just before The Age of Innocence, perhaps her best novel.
She had connections in France having lived there during the war (and actually much of her life.) Morocco at that time was a colony divided between France and Spain and was not released to independence until the 1950s. Wharton believed colonialism was beneficial to Morocco. This would not have been unusual for a European/American person of her time. Because of her connections she was allowed to tour this North African country, it seems usually with the French Governor General and his wife. Just before this time her visit would not have been possible, so we are seeing something fresh here.
Her observations are often beautiful, but until nearly the end we don’t really see many people in a meaningful way. She was very interested in landscape and architecture, something she knew about. She does have the prejudices of her age and status.
Near the book’s end she is invited, with the Governor General’s wife to visit what she calls harems—parts of houses and a palace or two set aside for the women of certain men of status. She is allowed, usually with the help of a brother of the family, to ask a few polite questions. Her guarded comments are very interesting. I think it’s clear she sees connections between these sheltered women and the Euro American women in her novels. Both belong to a social system that is pretty rigid and confining for the women.
She had connections in France having lived there during the war (and actually much of her life.) Morocco at that time was a colony divided between France and Spain and was not released to independence until the 1950s. Wharton believed colonialism was beneficial to Morocco. This would not have been unusual for a European/American person of her time. Because of her connections she was allowed to tour this North African country, it seems usually with the French Governor General and his wife. Just before this time her visit would not have been possible, so we are seeing something fresh here.
Her observations are often beautiful, but until nearly the end we don’t really see many people in a meaningful way. She was very interested in landscape and architecture, something she knew about. She does have the prejudices of her age and status.
Near the book’s end she is invited, with the Governor General’s wife to visit what she calls harems—parts of houses and a palace or two set aside for the women of certain men of status. She is allowed, usually with the help of a brother of the family, to ask a few polite questions. Her guarded comments are very interesting. I think it’s clear she sees connections between these sheltered women and the Euro American women in her novels. Both belong to a social system that is pretty rigid and confining for the women.
July 16, 2016
Edith Wharton wrote 22 novels, many groups of short stories, some poetry, and several works of non-fiction on interior design, architecture, and travel guide books. In Morocco falls into the travel catagory as it documents her 1917 trip through parts of Morroco, traveling with a French General in a motorcar. There are some good things to be said about this book, and some not so good. Edith Wharton's wonderful writing skill, and her ability to capture the finest detail, paint interesting and beautiful views of the ports and cities that she visited. She focused her descriptions on the people, the architecture, and the history of each region. She also voices her dislike for the history of slave usage in the past, and the presence of harems and concubines in the culture. Wharton's preference for French Colonial rule is obvious.
February 21, 2022
If you can get past your 21st Century sensibilities and ignore the racism, colonialism and outdated history you might get a little something out of this book, as I did. Morocco, to me was simply the place where the hippies went to get good hashish and then died in their prisons when I was a kid.
Then it showed up in my mom's Ancestry DNA. Say WHAT?
Now, I can't get enough of it.
This book, written by Wharton in 1919 is mostly dry and boring. The narration by Anna Fields matches. I would give it two stars, but every now and again it caught my ear. Wharton was invited to visit the ruins of a Saadian mausoleum in Marrakech that had just been turned over to the French in hopes they would restore it. Note from 2022: They did, and it is one of the biggest tourist attractions in that city now. She visits two harems. It is not a spoiler to say they are boring.
I am glad I listened to this book. If you are out to read everything you can by Edith Wharton, go ahead. Me? I am just going to go to Morocco myself.
Then it showed up in my mom's Ancestry DNA. Say WHAT?
Now, I can't get enough of it.
This book, written by Wharton in 1919 is mostly dry and boring. The narration by Anna Fields matches. I would give it two stars, but every now and again it caught my ear. Wharton was invited to visit the ruins of a Saadian mausoleum in Marrakech that had just been turned over to the French in hopes they would restore it. Note from 2022: They did, and it is one of the biggest tourist attractions in that city now. She visits two harems. It is not a spoiler to say they are boring.
I am glad I listened to this book. If you are out to read everything you can by Edith Wharton, go ahead. Me? I am just going to go to Morocco myself.
April 26, 2020
Edith Wharton travels to Morocco--a place without a published travel guide--in 1917. She describes her travels, providing background for sites visited and adding colorful bits of Moroccan life. She mentions remarks by guides at several sites. At the close of the book she provides a brief history of Morocco and notes on its architecture. She provides a list of works consulted in preparing her work. While it would not live up to a twenty-first century standard of a travel guide, it works well as a travel narrative. Wharton's well-written descriptions make this short volume a worthwhile read.
May 3, 2019
“What thoughts, what speculations, one wonders, go on under the narrow veiled brows of the little creatures destined to the high honour of marriage or concubinage in Moroccan palaces?”
I regret to say that my opinion of Edith Wharton – who is one of my favorite writers – went down a good notch after this book. It’s as if she lost her incisiveness, compassion and understanding as soon as she ventured outside her own social and cultural sphere. I realize that she was, as we all are, a product of her times, and might not have been able to overcome certain prejudices and stereotypical ways of thinking – I do realize that. But some things she says in this book are downright stunning, and not in a good way. For example, this passage about a slave girl she encounters in a wealthy Moroccan’s residence:
“Yet when I looked at the tiny creature watching him with those anxious joyless eyes I felt once more the abyss that slavery and the seraglio put between the most Europeanized Mahometan and the western conception of life. The Caïd’s little black slaves are well-known in Morocco, and behind the sad child leaning in the archway stood all the shadowy evils of the social system that hangs like a millstone about the neck of Islam.”
About the neck of Islam my ass! The ox has forgotten he was a calf once!
But it would be disingenuous of me not to admit that I wanted to read this book for the 19th- and early 20th-century colonialist and imperialist attitudes. It more than delivered in this respect. The writing is sublime, as usual, and the book is full of terribly well-phrased Orientalist descriptions. My favorite phrase is the one where she says that silk is worn in Morocco only by “musicians, boy-dancers and other hermaphrodite fry.” By the way, Hubert Lyautey, the Resident-General of the French Morocco, who showed Mrs. Wharton the country and of whom she sings such paeans in her book, was said to like hot climates and young officers, and to have been the model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus. There is an anecdote according to which Lyautey’s wife once told a group of her husband’s young officers: “I have the pleasure of informing you that last night I made you all cuckolds”. Can’t make this stuff up!
I regret to say that my opinion of Edith Wharton – who is one of my favorite writers – went down a good notch after this book. It’s as if she lost her incisiveness, compassion and understanding as soon as she ventured outside her own social and cultural sphere. I realize that she was, as we all are, a product of her times, and might not have been able to overcome certain prejudices and stereotypical ways of thinking – I do realize that. But some things she says in this book are downright stunning, and not in a good way. For example, this passage about a slave girl she encounters in a wealthy Moroccan’s residence:
“Yet when I looked at the tiny creature watching him with those anxious joyless eyes I felt once more the abyss that slavery and the seraglio put between the most Europeanized Mahometan and the western conception of life. The Caïd’s little black slaves are well-known in Morocco, and behind the sad child leaning in the archway stood all the shadowy evils of the social system that hangs like a millstone about the neck of Islam.”
About the neck of Islam my ass! The ox has forgotten he was a calf once!
But it would be disingenuous of me not to admit that I wanted to read this book for the 19th- and early 20th-century colonialist and imperialist attitudes. It more than delivered in this respect. The writing is sublime, as usual, and the book is full of terribly well-phrased Orientalist descriptions. My favorite phrase is the one where she says that silk is worn in Morocco only by “musicians, boy-dancers and other hermaphrodite fry.” By the way, Hubert Lyautey, the Resident-General of the French Morocco, who showed Mrs. Wharton the country and of whom she sings such paeans in her book, was said to like hot climates and young officers, and to have been the model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus. There is an anecdote according to which Lyautey’s wife once told a group of her husband’s young officers: “I have the pleasure of informing you that last night I made you all cuckolds”. Can’t make this stuff up!
July 8, 2017
I love Edith Wharton. I want to make that clear. But this...this is not good. While it claims to be the very first travel guide to Morocco, it more resembles a book-length justification for French colonial rule. Wharton spent a whopping four weeks (which, given the transit infrastructure at the time, allowed her to see less than I saw in two weeks. And I would hardly consider that enough for me to write a book about) in Morocco and was at all times under the watchful eye of French guides provided by the colonial government, seemed to engage in virtually no interaction with actual Moroccans and essentially gleefully repeated everything she was told by her hosts about the country. You will find many demeaning and condescending descriptions of the locals she did not talk with, mixed with page after page of praise for the great work being done by the colonial rulers. And yet she speaks with authority for the entire country and its history!
"Ah, but," you may say, "this was simply the attitude of the time. The real issue here is the writing and the way she brings the country to life." And here's the problem. Already I'd argue that her one-sided presentation of the country is a blow against her ability to do this, but she fails on other accounts too. Firstly, her description of the country is mind-numbingly shallow. For example: "...but the dun-colored crowds moving through its checkered twilight, the lack of carved shop-fronts and gaily adorned coffee-houses, and the absence of the painted coffers and vivid embroideries of Tunis, remind one that Morocco is a melancholy country, and Fez a profoundly melancholy city." Brilliant! Because it's not as brightly-color as Tunisia, it MUST be a sad place! That's the kind of pathetic excuse for insight that this volume is full of. And Wharton is normally exceptional at prose writing (I would put her with the all-time greats), but here her writing seem perfunctory and lifeless.
So unless you're a professional apologist for colonial rule, I would suggest skipping this. The most banal travel blog will give you more insight into the country than this.
"Ah, but," you may say, "this was simply the attitude of the time. The real issue here is the writing and the way she brings the country to life." And here's the problem. Already I'd argue that her one-sided presentation of the country is a blow against her ability to do this, but she fails on other accounts too. Firstly, her description of the country is mind-numbingly shallow. For example: "...but the dun-colored crowds moving through its checkered twilight, the lack of carved shop-fronts and gaily adorned coffee-houses, and the absence of the painted coffers and vivid embroideries of Tunis, remind one that Morocco is a melancholy country, and Fez a profoundly melancholy city." Brilliant! Because it's not as brightly-color as Tunisia, it MUST be a sad place! That's the kind of pathetic excuse for insight that this volume is full of. And Wharton is normally exceptional at prose writing (I would put her with the all-time greats), but here her writing seem perfunctory and lifeless.
So unless you're a professional apologist for colonial rule, I would suggest skipping this. The most banal travel blog will give you more insight into the country than this.
June 21, 2012
If six months seemed like a long time a year seems like eternity, and a whole goddamned year is how long it will be before I'm allowed to travel. So what did I do? I started reading about Edith Wharton's trip to Morocco, or rather, what I thought would be an account of Edith Wharton's trip to Morocco. And ostensibly I guess that's what this is, but mostly it's a mere snapshot of an exotic country in the midst of colonialism, the Cliff's Notes version of the Cliff Notes for the country's long and complicated history. (Rendered beautifully in Wharton's prose, of course.)
Meh, it wasn't really personal enough to overcome its datedness (is there an actual word that means this? My words have been leaving me, one by one).
Meh, it wasn't really personal enough to overcome its datedness (is there an actual word that means this? My words have been leaving me, one by one).
September 25, 2023
The travel journal part of this book was predominantly why I read this book. After recently visiting Morocco I was interested to understand how it may have appeared to early 20 th century (western) travellers. Wharton was successful in transmitting this image and I was able to recognise many of the vistas she described. Her descriptions of landscape and daily life were fascinating.
The second half of the book, which promotes the French administration, was less interesting to me (and it is likely biased and opinionated in a way that is probably considered dated now). I guess that is history and it just needs to be appreciated as a part of the story.
The second half of the book, which promotes the French administration, was less interesting to me (and it is likely biased and opinionated in a way that is probably considered dated now). I guess that is history and it just needs to be appreciated as a part of the story.
March 22, 2012
I had forgotten that Edith Wharton was an interior designer. The most interesting parts of this book describe her impressions of the Moroccan design aesthetic, in clothing, architecture furnishings, etc. her political and social "insights" are as poisonous as one might expect from a provincial white lady of great privilege in the early 20th century. The rest is blah. Blah.
October 23, 2025
Wow, I really hate Edith's travel writing. Like her book on France, this is somehow both filled to the gill with stereotypes but also devoid of interesting characters. She spends endless paragraphs describing colors of tiles but only brief sentences on people, and those more on types than individuals (though I did enjoy her cutting description of the overfed merchants "plunging their fat white hands to the wrist into huge mounds of saffron and rice"). But her reeling off of unnuanced stereotypes is not only cringeworthy from today's vantagepoint but also boring in its lack of insight. In spite of pages of history (which, oddly, she inserts at the end), she makes zero attempt to understand where these customs and attitudes come from.
A couple of the passages do evoke a lively sense of place in spite of their racial epithets, but this is the exception rather than the rule:
“All these many threads of the native life, woven of greed and lust, of fetichism and fear and blind hate of the stranger, form, in the souks, a thick network in which at times one's feet seem literally to stumble. Fanatics in sheepskins glowering from the guarded thresholds of the mosques, fierce tribesmen with inlaid arms in their belts and the fighters' tufts of wiry hair escaping from camel's-hair turbans, mad negroes standing stark naked in niches of the walls and pouring down Soudanese incantations upon the fascinated crowd, consumptive Jews with pathos and cunning in their large eyes and smiling lips, lusty slave-girls with earthen oil-jars resting against swaying hips, almond-eyed boys leading fat merchants by the hand, and bare-legged Berber women, tattooed and insolently gay, trading their striped blankets, or bags of dried roses and irises, for sugar, tea or Manchester cottons—from all these hundreds of unknown and unknowable people, bound together by secret affinities, or intriguing against each other with secret hate, there emanates an atmosphere of mystery and menace more stifling than the smell of camels and spices and black bodies and smoking fry which hangs like a fog under the close roofing of the souks.”
Or this observation, which could have been developed into a reflection on the Western need for delineation: “The performance, like all things Oriental, like the life, the patterns, the stories, seemed to have no beginning and no end: it just went monotonously and indefatigably on till fate snipped its thread by calling us away to dinner.”
But then she makes bizarre claims as if they're fact and completely fails to support them:
“Such questions inevitably bring one back to the central riddle of the mysterious North African civilization: the perpetual flux and the immovable stability, the barbarous customs and sensuous refinements, the absence of artistic originality and the gift for regrouping borrowed motives, the patient and exquisite workmanship and the immediate neglect and degradation of the thing once made.”
Sometimes I can't even tell if she knows she's being mean. She doesn't seem to have anything against the Berbers until this comes out, but then she brings out her left jab and goes for the Muslims. Whew! Watch out for Edith's poison pen!
“The crude idolatrous wealth-loving Berbers apparently dominated, but whenever there was a new uprising or a new invasion it was based on the religious discontent perpetually stirred up by Mahometan agents. The longing for a Mahdi, a Saviour, the craving for purification combined with an opportunity to murder and rob, always gave the Moslem apostle a ready opening; and the downfall of the Merinids was the result of a long series of religious movements to which the European invasion gave an object and a war-cry.”
Of course, being able to glimpse through Edith's eyes this particular time period is worth something. Our guide had woven some fairytale for us about how Muslims and Jews got along beautifully back in the day, living side by side in harmony, and it was only because all the Jews left for Israel that there were none left in Morocco. My bullshit radar went off hard at that, so my ears perked up at Edith's take:
“It was our first sight of a typical Jewish quarter in Africa. The Mellah of Fez was almost entirely destroyed during the massacres of 1912 (which incidentally included a pogrom), and its distinctive character, happily for the inhabitants, has disappeared in the rebuilding. North African Jews are still compelled to live in ghettos, into which they are locked at night, as in France and Germany in the Middle Ages, and until lately the men have been compelled to go unarmed, to wear black gabardines and black slippers, to take off their shoes when they passed near a mosque or a saint's tomb, and in various other ways to manifest their subjection to the ruling race. Nowhere else do they live in conditions of such demoralizing promiscuity as in some of the cities of Morocco. They have so long been subject to unrestricted extortion on the part of the Moslems that even the wealthy Jews (who are numerous) have sunk to the habits and appearance of the poorest; and Sefrou, which has come so recently under French control, offers a good specimen of a Mellah before foreign sanitation has lighted up its dark places.”
FEZ
"Fez is, in fact, the oldest city in Morocco without a Phenician or a Roman past, and has preserved more traces than any other of its architectural flowering-time; yet it would be truer to say of it, as of all Moroccan cities, that it has no age, since its seemingly immutable shape is forever crumbling and being renewed on the old lines."
"The distances in Fez are so great and the streets so narrow, and in some quarters so crowded, that all but saints or humble folk go about on mule-back."
WOMEN
“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. The filles de joie and dancing-girls whose brilliant dresses enliven certain streets of the Algerian and Tunisian towns are invisible, or at least unnoticeable, in Morocco, where life, on the whole, seems so much less gay and brightly-tinted; and the women of the richer classes, mercantile or aristocratic, never leave their harems except to be married or buried.”
“After a brief exchange of compliments silence fell. Conversing through interpreters is a benumbing process, and there 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. These languid women on their muslin cushions toil not, neither do they spin. The Moroccan lady knows little of cooking, needlework or any household arts. When her child is ill she can only hang it with amulets and wail over it, the great lady of the Fazi palace is as ignorant of hygiene as the peasant-woman of the bled. And all these colourless eventless lives depend on the favour of one fat tyrannical man, bloated with good living and authority, himself almost as inert and sedentary as his women, and accustomed to impose his whims on them ever since he ran about the same patio as a little short-smocked boy.”
“My companions had told me that the Caïd's harem was recruited from Georgia, and that the ladies receiving us had been brought up in the relative freedom of life in Constantinople; and it was easy to read in their wistfully smiling eyes memories of a life unknown to the passive daughters of Morocco.”
A couple of the passages do evoke a lively sense of place in spite of their racial epithets, but this is the exception rather than the rule:
“All these many threads of the native life, woven of greed and lust, of fetichism and fear and blind hate of the stranger, form, in the souks, a thick network in which at times one's feet seem literally to stumble. Fanatics in sheepskins glowering from the guarded thresholds of the mosques, fierce tribesmen with inlaid arms in their belts and the fighters' tufts of wiry hair escaping from camel's-hair turbans, mad negroes standing stark naked in niches of the walls and pouring down Soudanese incantations upon the fascinated crowd, consumptive Jews with pathos and cunning in their large eyes and smiling lips, lusty slave-girls with earthen oil-jars resting against swaying hips, almond-eyed boys leading fat merchants by the hand, and bare-legged Berber women, tattooed and insolently gay, trading their striped blankets, or bags of dried roses and irises, for sugar, tea or Manchester cottons—from all these hundreds of unknown and unknowable people, bound together by secret affinities, or intriguing against each other with secret hate, there emanates an atmosphere of mystery and menace more stifling than the smell of camels and spices and black bodies and smoking fry which hangs like a fog under the close roofing of the souks.”
Or this observation, which could have been developed into a reflection on the Western need for delineation: “The performance, like all things Oriental, like the life, the patterns, the stories, seemed to have no beginning and no end: it just went monotonously and indefatigably on till fate snipped its thread by calling us away to dinner.”
But then she makes bizarre claims as if they're fact and completely fails to support them:
“Such questions inevitably bring one back to the central riddle of the mysterious North African civilization: the perpetual flux and the immovable stability, the barbarous customs and sensuous refinements, the absence of artistic originality and the gift for regrouping borrowed motives, the patient and exquisite workmanship and the immediate neglect and degradation of the thing once made.”
Sometimes I can't even tell if she knows she's being mean. She doesn't seem to have anything against the Berbers until this comes out, but then she brings out her left jab and goes for the Muslims. Whew! Watch out for Edith's poison pen!
“The crude idolatrous wealth-loving Berbers apparently dominated, but whenever there was a new uprising or a new invasion it was based on the religious discontent perpetually stirred up by Mahometan agents. The longing for a Mahdi, a Saviour, the craving for purification combined with an opportunity to murder and rob, always gave the Moslem apostle a ready opening; and the downfall of the Merinids was the result of a long series of religious movements to which the European invasion gave an object and a war-cry.”
Of course, being able to glimpse through Edith's eyes this particular time period is worth something. Our guide had woven some fairytale for us about how Muslims and Jews got along beautifully back in the day, living side by side in harmony, and it was only because all the Jews left for Israel that there were none left in Morocco. My bullshit radar went off hard at that, so my ears perked up at Edith's take:
“It was our first sight of a typical Jewish quarter in Africa. The Mellah of Fez was almost entirely destroyed during the massacres of 1912 (which incidentally included a pogrom), and its distinctive character, happily for the inhabitants, has disappeared in the rebuilding. North African Jews are still compelled to live in ghettos, into which they are locked at night, as in France and Germany in the Middle Ages, and until lately the men have been compelled to go unarmed, to wear black gabardines and black slippers, to take off their shoes when they passed near a mosque or a saint's tomb, and in various other ways to manifest their subjection to the ruling race. Nowhere else do they live in conditions of such demoralizing promiscuity as in some of the cities of Morocco. They have so long been subject to unrestricted extortion on the part of the Moslems that even the wealthy Jews (who are numerous) have sunk to the habits and appearance of the poorest; and Sefrou, which has come so recently under French control, offers a good specimen of a Mellah before foreign sanitation has lighted up its dark places.”
FEZ
"Fez is, in fact, the oldest city in Morocco without a Phenician or a Roman past, and has preserved more traces than any other of its architectural flowering-time; yet it would be truer to say of it, as of all Moroccan cities, that it has no age, since its seemingly immutable shape is forever crumbling and being renewed on the old lines."
"The distances in Fez are so great and the streets so narrow, and in some quarters so crowded, that all but saints or humble folk go about on mule-back."
WOMEN
“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. The filles de joie and dancing-girls whose brilliant dresses enliven certain streets of the Algerian and Tunisian towns are invisible, or at least unnoticeable, in Morocco, where life, on the whole, seems so much less gay and brightly-tinted; and the women of the richer classes, mercantile or aristocratic, never leave their harems except to be married or buried.”
“After a brief exchange of compliments silence fell. Conversing through interpreters is a benumbing process, and there 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. These languid women on their muslin cushions toil not, neither do they spin. The Moroccan lady knows little of cooking, needlework or any household arts. When her child is ill she can only hang it with amulets and wail over it, the great lady of the Fazi palace is as ignorant of hygiene as the peasant-woman of the bled. And all these colourless eventless lives depend on the favour of one fat tyrannical man, bloated with good living and authority, himself almost as inert and sedentary as his women, and accustomed to impose his whims on them ever since he ran about the same patio as a little short-smocked boy.”
“My companions had told me that the Caïd's harem was recruited from Georgia, and that the ladies receiving us had been brought up in the relative freedom of life in Constantinople; and it was easy to read in their wistfully smiling eyes memories of a life unknown to the passive daughters of Morocco.”
March 7, 2020
This book has problems. Not least being the fact that Wharton couldn’t speak Arabic and appears to have travelled at times without a translator or Moroccan guide. Take the episode in chapter two where they visit the village of black people and come up with a theory about their origins. Why not just ask them? Well, she can’t, and apparently neither can anyone else in her party. On the other hand, in the space of one paragraph Wharton uses five animal metaphors to describe the inhabitants before finally settling on referring to the children as “jolly pickaninnies”. Oh but wait... the inhabitants had already given them directions so they could understand other. Here’s an out-there theory. Perhaps she felt that speaking to them was beneath her or that they couldn’t be trusted to know their own origins. This lack of interest in people extends to her travelling companions. She’s shy of telling us who she’s with so we’re largely denied to pleasure of those little portraits that make travel writing so enjoyable.
The purpose of the book appears to be propagandistic. Eleven pages out of one hundred and twenty-nine are devoted to the work of the colonial administrator. I suspect her tour and book were arranged as war-work to shore up support for the new Protectorate. Compare her comments on the Spanish zone.
But it’s not all bad. The scenes in the harems are particularly interesting, when she’s forced by circumstance to talk to people. She doesn’t seem inclined to join one. Also, she does a good job of parlaying her brief impressions of places into an actual book. You might find some of her descriptions a little florid, but I rather liked the welter of impressions which create a dream-like state.
The purpose of the book appears to be propagandistic. Eleven pages out of one hundred and twenty-nine are devoted to the work of the colonial administrator. I suspect her tour and book were arranged as war-work to shore up support for the new Protectorate. Compare her comments on the Spanish zone.
But it’s not all bad. The scenes in the harems are particularly interesting, when she’s forced by circumstance to talk to people. She doesn’t seem inclined to join one. Also, she does a good job of parlaying her brief impressions of places into an actual book. You might find some of her descriptions a little florid, but I rather liked the welter of impressions which create a dream-like state.
September 24, 2012
This is the true experiences of author Edith Wharton's expedition to French Morocco in the early days of WWI. At the time, there was little travel to this country.
Ms Wharton had an extraordinary view of Morocco. She was the personal guest of General and Madame Lyautey. He was the French Resident-General (head administrative honcho in Morocco). As a result she was provided unparalleled access to areas of the country, particularly to the Sultan's palace and mosques, which were typically off limits to unbelievers. Needless to say, there is a chapter on General Lyautey's accomplishments including number of roads built, jetties built, etc. He could have done more if France was not fighting the Germans in WWI.
Do you remember reading Ethan Frome in school? That was also written by Edith Wharton. I wasn't a fan of Ethan Frome and it took me quite some time to feel at home reading this travelogue. First of all, when reading a travelogue, I like to look at a map of the area and maybe a few pictures. None in this book. Second, I found Ms Wharton's writing a bit racist and with a bit of Western superiority. For example, she writes of "negresses" and "negroid lips". She also says of the medersa (Islamic school) that they teach theology and "other branches of strange learning." Granted, this book was written and published around 1920 but the wording still did not "sit well" with me.
There was also a sketch of Moroccan history. A couple of their cities, Sale and Larache, were built by the Phoenicians which was before the Roman conquest. It's best understood by taking notes.
Ms Wharton had an extraordinary view of Morocco. She was the personal guest of General and Madame Lyautey. He was the French Resident-General (head administrative honcho in Morocco). As a result she was provided unparalleled access to areas of the country, particularly to the Sultan's palace and mosques, which were typically off limits to unbelievers. Needless to say, there is a chapter on General Lyautey's accomplishments including number of roads built, jetties built, etc. He could have done more if France was not fighting the Germans in WWI.
Do you remember reading Ethan Frome in school? That was also written by Edith Wharton. I wasn't a fan of Ethan Frome and it took me quite some time to feel at home reading this travelogue. First of all, when reading a travelogue, I like to look at a map of the area and maybe a few pictures. None in this book. Second, I found Ms Wharton's writing a bit racist and with a bit of Western superiority. For example, she writes of "negresses" and "negroid lips". She also says of the medersa (Islamic school) that they teach theology and "other branches of strange learning." Granted, this book was written and published around 1920 but the wording still did not "sit well" with me.
There was also a sketch of Moroccan history. A couple of their cities, Sale and Larache, were built by the Phoenicians which was before the Roman conquest. It's best understood by taking notes.
March 9, 2016
This is a disconcerting book. The first five chapters tell of the writer’s journey across Morocco in 1917. She travelled in “the next best thing to a Djinn’s carpet” - a military motor - from Tangier to Fez and Marrakech.
Wharton describes, in beautiful prose, the towns and landscapes, the animals and plants, the men and women that she observes in a Morocco as yet untouched by tourism. Barred by language and custom from communications with the bazaar-dwellers, camel-drivers and water-carriers, her guides to local life were her escorts from the French civil service and the military. They presented her to middle-class families, who she describes, with dismay at the plight of the wives, daughters and concubines.
The furthest point of the journey is Marrakech, where the Atlas and Sahara bring Africa within reach. The bazaars are trading places for leather-merchants, armourers and olive-growers. The souks are ‘mere mud lanes roofed with rushes’ It is here that the journey ends, but without a hint to the reader that this is so.
In the fifth chapter, the writer re-visits places on her journey, under the heading of “Harems and Ceremonies”. It is the disjointed nature of the account which makes these five sections unsatisfactory for the reader. The beautiful writing and observation rate five stars, but the structure of the volume, not at all. As for the final four sections, I simply skimmed them. Wharton would be better served by publishing the original texts in an editorial wrapper, filling in the blanks and adding information about the writer in context.
Wharton describes, in beautiful prose, the towns and landscapes, the animals and plants, the men and women that she observes in a Morocco as yet untouched by tourism. Barred by language and custom from communications with the bazaar-dwellers, camel-drivers and water-carriers, her guides to local life were her escorts from the French civil service and the military. They presented her to middle-class families, who she describes, with dismay at the plight of the wives, daughters and concubines.
The furthest point of the journey is Marrakech, where the Atlas and Sahara bring Africa within reach. The bazaars are trading places for leather-merchants, armourers and olive-growers. The souks are ‘mere mud lanes roofed with rushes’ It is here that the journey ends, but without a hint to the reader that this is so.
In the fifth chapter, the writer re-visits places on her journey, under the heading of “Harems and Ceremonies”. It is the disjointed nature of the account which makes these five sections unsatisfactory for the reader. The beautiful writing and observation rate five stars, but the structure of the volume, not at all. As for the final four sections, I simply skimmed them. Wharton would be better served by publishing the original texts in an editorial wrapper, filling in the blanks and adding information about the writer in context.
June 20, 2013
I'm not sure if reading this book while on route/in Morocco made it worse or better. It was definitely interesting to read how different our impressions of the country were and how similar they were at the same time. I also thought a lot about if the differences were caused by the actual place being different, which it certainly is, or if it just a difference of perception.
The writing here is a beautiful, as all of Wharton's is. The flow in the book does seem off, as she doesn't really seem sure what she is trying to do here, claiming a more scholastic text in the introduction than actually comes out in the finished product. So the descriptions of here travels often seem lost in her attempt to get a complete picture of the country across, and her historical parts seem too truncated. Maybe I just haven't read enough travelogues.
On racism: This book certainly sounds very racist coming from a 21st century perspective, but I think a work should be judged relative to the common narrative of the time, and not of ours, and I'm not familiar enough with the narrative of the time to make a judgement.
The writing here is a beautiful, as all of Wharton's is. The flow in the book does seem off, as she doesn't really seem sure what she is trying to do here, claiming a more scholastic text in the introduction than actually comes out in the finished product. So the descriptions of here travels often seem lost in her attempt to get a complete picture of the country across, and her historical parts seem too truncated. Maybe I just haven't read enough travelogues.
On racism: This book certainly sounds very racist coming from a 21st century perspective, but I think a work should be judged relative to the common narrative of the time, and not of ours, and I'm not familiar enough with the narrative of the time to make a judgement.
March 9, 2018
I chose Edith Wharton's In Morocco as part of my Around the World in 80 Books challenge. I am planning to visit Morocco later this year, so was particularly excited to read Wharton's travelogue. In 1917, she travelled around much of the country, reporting her findings of both setting and culture in this relatively short book of essays. Her descriptions are lovely, and the sense of place is certainly the strength within In Morocco. It is very of its time, as one might expect; there is little which is politically correct with regard to her descriptions of the Moroccan people. Good historical context has been woven in, but this occasionally overshadows Wharton's own experiences, and it starts to read like a history book which verges on the dry. In Morocco also gets bogged down in places with excessive and unnecessary quotes, which do not add a great deal to the whole, and could surely have been consolidated. The book does not always feel quite consistent, and whilst it is nicely written, it was not as interesting as I was expecting it to be. It did tend to feel a little repetitive after a while.
Read
March 1, 2013Wharton makes her steady, stately way through Morocco, commenting on Roman ruins, chubby merchants on tiny donkeys, short or long trains of camels, veiled women, dark-eyed children darting through the plazas and bazaars--over bad roads, good roads, or no roads at all. As long as she does all the work, I can't get tired of her remarks. And since I've never been to Morocco, I'll never know if what she writes is at all like the real place. And since she was there a hundred years ago (almost) it might all have changed since then anyway. I'll go along for the ride.
July 1, 2010
This book was dryreading from a writer who I normally love. I know this book is a document of her travels rather than a fictional work, but I still expected a more interesting read.
I gave it three stars, because it did still present a verbal snapshot of what the country of Morocco was like in the early 1900s along with a good historical background on the country.
I was particularly intrigued (and saddened) to read how restricted the women were.
I gave it three stars, because it did still present a verbal snapshot of what the country of Morocco was like in the early 1900s along with a good historical background on the country.
I was particularly intrigued (and saddened) to read how restricted the women were.
February 7, 2018
ummm so i thought this would be a good book? some of the vignettes were really nice but that doesn't excuse the prejudice weaved throughout the book. her anti arab perspective is upsetting, seeing as i am a moroccan myself. i've never been so offended by a book. 10/10 don't recommend.
May 15, 2008
I went. She forgot mention a few very important things.
April 30, 2018
Snooze-fest (with lovely language, though). Bailed 1/4 of the way through.
March 17, 2023
In writing this book, the author, a noted American novelist most famous for works like The Age Of Innocence and the incomplete The Buccaneers, provides a worthwhile service in making an early travelogue for the nation of Morocco. It is striking that while travel to Morocco is by no means unusual at this time, that the area around the country, both in Mauretania and Western Sahara, is still very much off-limits to most travelers, and forbidding because of its political situation. What this book offers is something that was possible for a certain curious and cosmopolitan traveler to offer in the first half of the 20th century but which is not something that would be acceptable today, and that is a work that shows an interest and appreciation for other cultures while maintaining a simultaneous appreciation for one's own cultural background as tourists of American or European backgrounds. This book begins with a dedication from the author to a French colonial official who is praised for his enlightened colonial efforts, demonstrating that the author has a nuanced appreciation of the superiority of benevolent and indirect imperial rule to more oppressive and destructive direct rule. This sort of nuanced appreciation of a wise imperial administrator is not something that is within the capacity of most educated people in the contemporary age, one of the areas that we have declined from even the comparatively recent past of only a century ago.
This book is a short one of less than 150 pages, but it is justly considered a classic of travel writing. The first 75 pages of the book or so are spent in the author's actual travels, given in a rough order of her travels from the north to the south of the French controlled area of the nation. She begins with a discussion of her travels and observations and reflections of Rabat and Sale (1). After that comes a discussion of the Roman ruins at Volubilis, the Moroccan city of Moulay Idriss, and Meknez (2). This is followed by a discussion of Fez (3), and then Marrakesh (4), which leads the author to reflect upon the mixed nature of the Berber population and indeed the Moroccan population as a whole, including some forthright commentary on the slavery that existed within the country at the time. After this the author changes gears, spending a whole chapter talking about an interesting experience where the author spent time visiting a harem (5), and reflected on the limited intellectual horizons of the women who spent their whole lives in seclusion, except for the intelligent queen mother who served as an advisor for her son. After this an entire chapter is spent praising the efforts of one General Lyautey to pacify and rule over Morocco during the period in which the French established their protectorate over the country in the early 1900's, the sort of praise that we would not expect too many people to give today (6). The book then closes with a sketch on Moroccan history (7), looking at its various dynastic periods, as well as some notes on Moroccan architecture (8), and a list of books consulted by the author.
One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is an area that the author does not talk about at all--the city of Casablanca, which is one of the most important cities as far as most travelers to Morocco. In general, this book is written with the self-aware perspective of someone who is writing about a world that is soon to vanish. The author correctly notes that Morocco was at the time just beginning to open up to Western travelers, and that while Western travelers would see more of the country, they would not see it with the fresh perspective and fresh responses that Wharton did as among the earliest Western travelers to the area. There are ways, though, that the author does not predict the Morocco she saw as a vanishing one. One can easily imagine that slavery soon went underground in the face of growing desires on the part of Western nations to encourage the cultural development of areas under its influence. The Jewish community in Morocco that was so vibrant in Wharton's time as a traveler has now vanished along with that of many other communities in the area in the face of ricing Muslim hostility to Judaism. Similarly, while Morocco's fortunes as an independent nation were at a low ebb during this time, Morocco would later become an imperial nation once again as it had been earlier in its history regarding Western Sahara, which is a story for another time, I suppose.
This book is a short one of less than 150 pages, but it is justly considered a classic of travel writing. The first 75 pages of the book or so are spent in the author's actual travels, given in a rough order of her travels from the north to the south of the French controlled area of the nation. She begins with a discussion of her travels and observations and reflections of Rabat and Sale (1). After that comes a discussion of the Roman ruins at Volubilis, the Moroccan city of Moulay Idriss, and Meknez (2). This is followed by a discussion of Fez (3), and then Marrakesh (4), which leads the author to reflect upon the mixed nature of the Berber population and indeed the Moroccan population as a whole, including some forthright commentary on the slavery that existed within the country at the time. After this the author changes gears, spending a whole chapter talking about an interesting experience where the author spent time visiting a harem (5), and reflected on the limited intellectual horizons of the women who spent their whole lives in seclusion, except for the intelligent queen mother who served as an advisor for her son. After this an entire chapter is spent praising the efforts of one General Lyautey to pacify and rule over Morocco during the period in which the French established their protectorate over the country in the early 1900's, the sort of praise that we would not expect too many people to give today (6). The book then closes with a sketch on Moroccan history (7), looking at its various dynastic periods, as well as some notes on Moroccan architecture (8), and a list of books consulted by the author.
One of the most remarkable aspects of this book is an area that the author does not talk about at all--the city of Casablanca, which is one of the most important cities as far as most travelers to Morocco. In general, this book is written with the self-aware perspective of someone who is writing about a world that is soon to vanish. The author correctly notes that Morocco was at the time just beginning to open up to Western travelers, and that while Western travelers would see more of the country, they would not see it with the fresh perspective and fresh responses that Wharton did as among the earliest Western travelers to the area. There are ways, though, that the author does not predict the Morocco she saw as a vanishing one. One can easily imagine that slavery soon went underground in the face of growing desires on the part of Western nations to encourage the cultural development of areas under its influence. The Jewish community in Morocco that was so vibrant in Wharton's time as a traveler has now vanished along with that of many other communities in the area in the face of ricing Muslim hostility to Judaism. Similarly, while Morocco's fortunes as an independent nation were at a low ebb during this time, Morocco would later become an imperial nation once again as it had been earlier in its history regarding Western Sahara, which is a story for another time, I suppose.
January 1, 2024
I love Morocco and found this book fascinating. It is dated and biased to the time period and historical context/situation of Morocco in the early 20th century— if you take into account Wharton’s perspective and purpose of visit, it is truly interesting to read— I mean a woman visiting Morocco in such a crucial time of history for the country and the world— writing with the favored viewpoint of the French who had control— there is much to ponder/challenge and think upon. Wharton’s prose is lovely and telling. Morocco is a beautiful, diverse country with a rich culture and pride. I enjoyed living there for three years and although I did not think Wharton did it justice in the least as far as attributing all the good that is deserved to be praise of the country, I found that this was a good read to experience what she observed as an American woman in the early 1900s visiting as a guest to the French.
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