Tourist Love: The Erotics of Travel in James’s Early Fiction

Abstract

In “Tourist Love,” I argue that the international theme in James’s early career has a unique erotic structure set apart from any simple identification of the author’s sexual orientation. In early works like Roderick Hudson and “Daisy Miller,” James offers us erotically charged encounters between an informed tour guide and a “virginal” tourist. These tales defuse the tension between the values of the tourist and the traveler, a growing preoccupation in the nineteenth-century imagination. In doing so, James crafted the first modern tourist love stories—and later American authors would follow his cues in crafting their own love stories abroad.