Reviewing Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence in 1920, Katherine Mansfield paints Ellen Olenska as the distillation of European mystery: ‘She is dangerous, fascinating, foreign; Europe clings to her like a troubling perfume; her very fan beats “Venice! Venice!”’ Mansfield, however, remains unstirred: for her, Ellen, and those she disturbs, remain ‘portraits’: ‘human beings arranged for exhibition purposes, framed, glazed, and hung in the perfect light’. When we consider how Edith Wharton herself construes Venice within her broader literary representations of European culture, we find her imagination moving between similar terms. Here, too, figurations of essence, animating spirit, coexist with flatly lifeless scenes: the stiffly arranged human subject, the automaton. In pursuing Wharton's prolonged negotiations with Venice, this chapter will attempt to keep these figures in the foreground.

Such constructions are now familiar in more theoretical models of tourist experience. As John Urry makes clear in The Tourist Gaze, in contemporary debates, while the assignation of relative value to each set of terms fluctuates, questions of ‘authenticity’ remain central: in particular, the line of analysis stimulated by Daniel J. Boorstin's formulation of the ‘pseudo-event’. In Boorstin's schema, tourist experience, mediated through advertising, comes to constitute a ‘closed self-perpetuating’ set of images, generated out of ‘certain approved objects’. Tourists encounter as ‘essence’ of place only prearranged spectacle.