This interview took place between Susan Dunn-Hensley, Sharenda Barlar, and Christine Colón while they walked trails in and around Wheaton, Illinois. This is the second part of a series of interviews that will take place with faculty from Wheaton College as part of Dunn-Hensley and Barlar's 2020 virtual pilgrimage program.
Hereafter, each individual will be referred to with their initials: SD, SB, and CC, respectively. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
SB: Christine, we're so glad you joined us today. Christine Colón is an expert on Dorothy Sayers, but also teaches Romanticism, so that's what we'll be discussing today.
SD: To begin, do you know of any Romantic authors who embarked on a religious pilgrimage, or was their experience limited to their own self-structured experience of nature? How did the idea of sojourning appear in their writing?
CC: What’s interesting about the Romantic period is that for most of that period, continental Europe was embroiled in war, and so most of the travel opportunities for Romantic authors were pretty much stopped. That's one of the reasons why they tend to turn to nature in their own country, exploring their own country. What's interesting is authors did not go on religious pilgrimages, but they tended to see the beauties of nature around them as God speaking to them.
For example, Wordsworth, in his long poem "The Prelude,” actually did get to go to the continent and experience the French Revolution, which was a little disturbing for him, so he does have moments of hiking the alps and things like that. For him the transcendent moment is when he is actually on Mount Snowden in Wales, and he climbs to the top of Mt. Snowden, looks out over this cloud covered valley around him, and the moon shining down on the clouds, and has this moment of God looking down at the world. You find that a lot with romantic authors, where they’re able to really see God in nature. Some of them take that in certain non-orthodox ways, but for a lot of them, there really is that desire to connect and see God in nature. Lots of hiking in nature for a lot of Romantic writers.
Another person I'd love to mention is Dorothy Wordsworth, who we don't talk about a lot. She kept journals and lived with her brother for many, many years, and really saw her journal as a way for her brother William to go back, look at the things that she had written about, and mine those details for poetry. She became really attuned at noticing things around her. One of the things I love is that her journals give us a really good sense of day-to-day life of people who lived in that era. They would walk miles and miles and miles and miles to do simple things, to get the mail, or to go get gingerbread. One of the things that strikes me about Dorothy Wordsworth is that she records the various people who she meets, which becomes this lovely reflection on other travelers, walkers, primarily lower-class individuals. She talks about meeting a mother with her children and noticing that the children's shoes weren't appropriate and hearing the mother's story. There's that element that I love--meeting people on the way, talking through their issues and getting to know them, even if it is just for those little moments as you pass on the road.
SD: That is so much like pilgrimage.
SB: You were saying that most of the continent was in war, and so people would walk just in their areas. That reminded me about when we first went on lockdown because of COVID, and my children would want to walk anywhere, just to go anywhere. Normally they would be like, no, I don’t want to go with you to this or that, but during lockdown, if I were going on a walk, they would go with me. The mundane becomes really important. Susan and I have commented on how many people were out walking recently. Even us--we've discovered all of these trails that we didn't even know about for 20 years, not that we weren't here, but we were just so busy with things, and travel. We've rediscovered our own hometown, in a sense.
SD: That rediscovery happens with pilgrimage in general. Originally the primary pilgrimage was to Jerusalem. Then, because of the Crusades and the Muslims taking the Holy Land, pilgrimage was not a possibility, so pilgrims had to resort to paths in Western Europe. They began a process of recreating Jerusalem and Holy Land in Western Europe. It's really interesting.
SB: And in a way, that’s how the Camino was rediscovered, because after Franco, after the Civil War and then WWII, no one was really traveling. All of these relationships were severed between several countries, and Franco really wanted people to stay in Spain, so he reactivated the Camino. He essentially said, “Santiago is our patron saint, if you're thinking about going on vacation, not so much as a pilgrimage, but if you're going to go on vacation, go on the Camino.” People started visiting the Camino in the car, because he preferred them to stay in the country.
SD: Switching tracks, literature and pilgrimage have been intertwined throughout history, with common pilgrimage stories, miracle narratives, and even religious literature being produced during and after an authors’ pilgrimage experience. Do you think the idea of pilgrimage appears as a trope in literature today, even subconsciously?
CC: I think it does. We have all these examples of the travel narratives, and there's always that need to imbue travel with significance. It's about “here's what we're going to discover,” and I think it connects back to things I was talking about before. In Wordworth's “Prelude”, the climax is that moment when he gets up to Mt. Snowden. It's imbued with significance, not only religious significance, but also national significance, because he finds that moment of sublime transcendence, not on the continent, but in Wales. So he’s discovering, “we can do this in our own world of Great Britain.” That's very much wrapped up in his development as a poet. He needs to figure out what does it mean to be a poet in England, in Wales, in Great Britain, and not be as tied to the continent. It's interesting how you can really work your way into the “Prelude” as kind of his travel narrative, getting to the top of the mountain. It literally became the mountain top experience for him.
It also strikes me: one of the characteristics of Romantic writers that I love is their ability to pay attention to the everyday. I think about Wordworth's poetry, even about Dorothy Wordsworth, who wrote poetry, or even a poet who isn't known as well, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and their ability to notice the everyday. One of the things I do in my Romanticism class is pick out the poems where poets are exploring similar things, and one of the topics that many of them explore is poverty. They notice the poor people around them as they are walking, and so you have different perspectives on the poor people at this time and their work. There are quite a few of various types: abandoned wives and children, fathers who are elderly and have lost their sons to war, etc. This actually leads to an interesting conversation we have in class, which is what does it mean when you take poverty and turn it into poetry. Is it problematic to make poverty poetic?
It's interesting because you're acknowledging the person, giving the person dignity, which is incredibly important, so that you're not walking past and ignoring people, but when does that slip over into, “I am now using this person for my own poetic enjoyment.”
SD: We have such a problem with that in general. I'm thinking of Brian Howell's insightful critique of the problems with short term missions.
SB: --And talking about that idea of dark tourism, too.
CC: And thinking about that idea of “ok, if you are going on pilgrimage, that can be beautiful and lovely,” but it can also be very self-centered, if everything is turned into “How can I benefit from this.”
SD: I also liked when you were describing earlier when poets were trying to find the experience within their own space, because I feel like pilgrimage itself mimics the life journey. It’s not always a heroic journey of transformation -- it can be-- but people try to make it work that way every time. “I walked this way, and then I had this big transformation.” But it also mimics our life journey. We're sojourning in a land that is not our own, and do we see the people around us or not? I think there are a number of levels that you see in literature that explore that idea.
SB: When you think of traditional pilgrimage, you are always going to a particular destination.
CC: A city on a hill.
SB: Exactly. As you were saying, a lot of people travel in their own area. In Wordsworth's case, it was a destination, but in a lot of cases, it was a circular motion, just around where they were. How did Romantic authors do pilgrimage, like we're doing right now, a virtual pilgrimage, where we're really not going anywhere?
SB: Nuns in convents would look at pilgrim narratives and imagine the grounds of their convent replicating those areas.
CC: And also, I love when Dorothy Wordsworth talks about times where she and her brother and Samuel Taylor Coleridge would go walking together in the Lake District. My favorite times are when they would find this beautiful landscape and they would just lie down. And she would talk about the peace as they were soaking in nature, but the community of doing that as well. She could hear her brother breathing, she could hear Coleridge breathing, so it was this lovely moment of community even in the silence of just lying down in a field somewhere.
SD: I love that image!
Kim Phillips states that her article “Travel, Writing, and the Global Middle Ages”
“considers issues of genre, offers a definition of 'medieval travel writing' and proposes the authorial category of the 'writer-traveller'. It examines selected recent trends in study of Christian pilgrimage, European travel writing on the wider world and medieval Islamic and Jewish voyage literature.” How do you see travel writing as impacting literary trends throughout history, and do you think this has impacted authorial identity? We can center this in the 19th and 20th century.
CC: What stands out to me actually is how this question intersects with gender. I think about what Dorothy Wordsworth was doing in the Romantic period, and it’s not what we stereotypically think. She would hike up her skirts and she would go walk this twenty miles. We usually get the sense that women in the past kind of hung out in the house, and they did some cooking, and they took care of the kids, and if they were rich they just you know, sat there and twiddled their thumbs. It strikes me that as we continue through the 19th century, we have women that really take advantage of the opportunity to travel. In my Victorian Literature class, we read a narrative from Mary Kingsley, and she goes by herself to Africa and has this lovely travel narrative. Yes--is it problematic in several ways, in terms of the white British identity going into the “dark continent”? Yes. Yes.
But the way that she approaches things is just amazing. She talks about this accident she has where she falls into a pit that the natives had dug to catch some sort of prey. And there are all these sort of spikes in the bottom of the pit, and she talks about how wonderful that she was dressed in all of her crinolines so she wasn’t hurt at all, she had this nice padding as she fell into the bottom. She just kind of laughs it off and moves along, and it shows this amazing strength and resiliency that we don’t often associate with a Victorian woman. In fact, you have several Victorian women travelers who, while they were home, were seen as sickly and unable to do much, but as soon as they got out and were traveling, were doing things that most men wouldn’t have done. I find it interesting that it’s traveling that gives them that ability to get out of those stereotypes.
SD: That was the same thing with Marjorie Kemp, right? She travels and does all these exciting things, and it's partly being able to get on those pilgrim roads that gives her that freedom. Not that she wasn't quite a character when she was home...
SB: She was also quite a character when she was traveling too...
CC: The other thing that really strikes me is the growth in travel that happens in the time period that I work on. So starting in the Romantic era, the fastest you can get somewhere is on the back of a horse, while at the end of the century, you have people taking steamships and trains, and ending up on the West Coast of the United States.
SB: --And safari was big as well at that time, but do you think that has to do with colonization?
CC: Yes-- it’s wrapped up in colonization, but I think it’s also the Industrial Revolution, and it’s also backed up in this desire to discover and to find out. And that’s what I find fascinating about these writers, everything is mixed up. You have that horrible white British superiority mixed up with that curiosity.
I’ve got a collection of Victorian ads, and one of my favorites depicts these men who are in Africa, looking for business opportunities, it’s presumed. You’ve got elephants and African natives in the back, and the British men stopped to have tea, and they pull out their tables, their chairs, their teapot, and so it very much sends the message that “we are importing British civility into the darkness of Africa.” We clearly have all of those problematic aspects about it, but even with that, there’s that curiosity, and there are those moments of wanting to discover about other people and seeing those people as fully human.
Dr. Christine Colón (Ph.D. University of California at Davis) specializes in nineteenth-century English literature, but occasionally she branches out to explore other authors such as Dorothy L. Sayers or contemporary topics such as singleness in the evangelical church. Her teaching interests also include Women Writers, Latin American Literature, and Methods of Teaching English. Professionally, Dr. Colón has recently spent a good deal of time at the Wade Center (here at Wheaton College) researching Dorothy L. Sayers, and she is beginning a project on postsecular studies and the 19th c. novel. She has also been busy retooling her Jane Austen course for Wheaton's new General Education curriculum. In addition, she is committed to helping our students become excellent secondary school teachers; she spends a significant amount of time supervising and mentoring student teachers. She also frequently directs the English Department’s summer program in England.
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