Description
In 1867, the author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, undertook a
great pleasure excursion across Europe. Visiting a range of sites, from those associated with the
Christian Cult of Death to the notable cultural heritage attractions of the time, Twain published his
experiences in what would later become one of the world’s best-selling travelogues; The Innocents
Abroad, or the New Pilgrim’s Progress. This essay offers a rereading of Twain’s encounters, proposing
examination of Twain’s encounters as timely and useful in addressing what Seaton identifies as a gap in
data on thanatourism consumption.
International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
Mark Twain and The Innocents Abroad: illuminating the tourist gaze on death
Tony J ohnston
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To cite this document:
Tony J ohnston, (2013),"Mark Twain and The Innocents Abroad: illuminating the tourist gaze on death", International J ournal of Culture,
Tourism and Hospitality Research, Vol. 7 Iss 3 pp. 199 - 213
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Anna Farmaki, (2013),"Dark tourism revisited: a supply/demand conceptualisation", International J ournal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality
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Mark Twain and The Innocents Abroad:
illuminating the tourist gaze on death
Tony Johnston
Abstract
Purpose – In 1867, the author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, undertook a
great pleasure excursion across Europe. Visiting a range of sites, from those associated with the
Christian Cult of Death to the notable cultural heritage attractions of the time, Twain published his
experiences in what would later become one of the world’s best-selling travelogues; The Innocents
Abroad, or the New Pilgrim’s Progress. This essay offers a rereading of Twain’s encounters, proposing
examination of Twain’s encounters as timely and useful in addressing what Seaton identi?es as a gap in
data on thanatourism consumption.
Design/methodology/approach – The essay draws on contemporary thanatourism theoretical
frameworks, including Seaton’s ‘‘Continuum of intensity’’ and ‘‘Thanatourism developmental sketch’’;
Sharpley’s ‘‘Matrix of dark tourism supply and demand’’ and Stone and Sharpley’s ‘‘Dark tourism
consumption framework’’, among others, to explore Twain’s encounters.
Findings – Supplemented by a review of recent theoretical thanatourism research, the essay proposes
three ?ndings. Finding one illustrates that Twain’s encounters, although not always pre-motivated or
purposefully supplied, were emotionally charged and deeply affective experiences, which had the potential
to provoke ontological insecurity. Finding two highlights the potential of the geography of death to stimulate
emotional reactions and con?gure individual and societal interactions with death. Finding three argues a
need for new methodological approaches to understanding the thanatourismexperience; approaches that
are empathetically sensitive to the potentially powerful impact of the thanatourism experience.
Originality/value – The essay draws on a classic travelogue to help address the imbalance in
knowledge of the thanatourism experience. The essay argues that thanatourism is a layered and
complex phenomenon, highly personal and often a potentially powerful and emotionally affective
experience.
Keywords Tourism, Literature, Death, Thanatourism, Dark tourism, Tourist gaze, Thanagazing,
Mark Twain
Paper type Conceptual paper
1. Introduction
In 1867, the American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain,
undertook a great pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land, a route that mixed some
of the classic, aristocratic ‘‘Grand Tour’’ and Western pilgrimage travel routes of the
nineteenth century. Twain documented his travels, ?rst publishing them as a series of letters
in a San Francisco newspaper, The Daily Alta California, and two years later as a full travel
book, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress, hereafter referred to in short
form as ‘‘The Innocents’’. The book would quickly become one of the best-selling accounts
of Old-World travel (Amazon, 2012).
Somewhat surprisingly, The Innocents has not been systematically studied as thanatourism
experiential case material. Many of the sites visited by Twain and his companions, hereafter
referred to as the ‘‘pilgrims’’, were inherently dark attractions, highly valued as important
places to visit in Europe, but featuring death notable in scale, method or celebrity, illustrated in
DOI 10.1108/IJCTHR-05-2012-0036 VOL. 7 NO. 3 2013, pp. 199-213, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1750-6182
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PAGE 199
Tony Johnston is based in
the Department of
Geography, King’s College
London, London, UK.
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Table I. Using a selection of Twain’s encounters, this essay will offer a rereading of The
Innocents, focussing on the complex relationship between tourist and deathscape. The paper
proposes that the complexities of the production and consumption of the geography of death
requires new methodological innovation to better understand the thanatourism phenomenon.
2. Literature review
2.1 Thanatourism: a contested ?eld
The terms ‘‘thanatourism’’ (Seaton, 1996) and ‘‘dark tourism’’ (Foley and Lennon, 1996) were
coined for a special edition of The International Journal of Heritage Studies. Broadly referring
Table I A selection of the thanatourism sites visited by Mark Twain in 1867
Site Site function Twain’s comments
A Parisian morgue Working morgue and tourist attraction ‘‘. . . that horrible receptacle for the dead who die
mysteriously’’ (p. 132)
A cave in Gibraltar Burial cave ‘‘. . . human bones, crusted with a very thick, stony
coating’’ (p. 68).
The buried city of Pompeii Archaeological ruin ‘‘It is a city of hundreds and hundreds of roo?ess
houses, and a tangled maze of streets where one
could easily get lost, without a guide, and have to
sleep in some ghostly palace that had known no living
tenant since that awful November night of eighteen
centuries ago’’ (p. 329)
An assassination attempt site at the
Bois de Boulogne, Paris
Urban park ‘‘It was in this park that that fellow with an
unpronounceable name made the attempt upon the
Russian Czar’s life last spring with a pistol. The bullet
struck a tree. Ferguson showed us the place’’ (p.
139)
Pe` re Lachaise, Paris Working cemetery and tourist attraction ‘‘One of our pleasantest visits was to Pe` re la Chaise,
the national burying-ground of France’’ (p. 139)
The battle?elds of Sebastopol, Crimea
(modern-day Ukraine)
Crimean War battle?eld from the Siege
of Sebastopol, 1854
‘‘Sebastopol is probably the worst battered town in
Russia or anywhere else’’ (p. 381)
Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris Working cathedral ‘‘He [a bishop] was shot dead. They showed us a
cast of his face taken after death, the bullet that killed
him, and the two vertebrae in which it lodged. These
people have a somewhat singular taste in the matter
of relics’’ (p. 131)
The Capuchin Convent, Rome Working convent ‘‘. . .on the wall were elaborate frescoes, whose
curving vines were made of knotted human
vertebrae; whose delicate tendrils were made of
sinews and tendon’’ (p. 298)
A Genoan cemetery Working cemetery ‘‘Our last sight was the cemetery (a burial place
intended to accommodate 60,000 bodies) and we
shall continue to remember it after we shall have
forgotten the palaces’’ (p. 170)
The Castle d’If, France Former prison and tourist attraction ‘‘We saw the damp, dismal cells in which two of
Dumas’ heroes passed their con?nement – heroes of
‘Monte Cristo’’’ (p. 104)
The Coliseum, Rome Former amphitheatre and tourist
attraction
‘‘Weeds and ?owers spring from its massy arches
and its circling seats, and vines hang their fringes
from its lofty walls. An impressive silence broods over
the monstrous structure where such multitudes of
men and women were wont to assemble in other
days’’ (p. 277)
Source: (Twain, 1869)
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to the same phenomenon, thanatourism and dark tourism theorise travel to sites motivated
by a desire to encounter death or disaster, a practice viewed as an increasingly pervasive
feature of the contemporary tourism landscape (Stone, 2006) but having much older origins
(Seaton, 1996). Although the de?nitions are contested (Seaton, 2009a) and theoretically
fragile (Stone and Sharpley, 2008), there is no doubt that the commodi?cation and
consumption of death has captured the imagination of academics and the media alike
(Stone, 2012a; BBC, 2012).
Thanatourism research generally explores three avenues:
1. building conceptual models that theorise the phenomenon through production or
consumption lenses (or both) (for examples, see Seaton, 2009a; Sharpley, 2009; Stone,
2006, 2012b; Stone and Sharpley, 2008);
2. empirical supply side research, which explores site characteristics (e.g. Keil, 2005;
Macdonald, 2006; Strange and Kempa, 2003); and
3. tourist experience research focused on motivations or actual encounters with death (for
example Biran et al., 2011; Dunkley et al., 2011; Hyde and Harman, 2011; Iles, 2008).
Various theoretical lenses and perspectives have been suggested to conceptualise
thanatourism, including:
B postmodernism (for examples, see Lennon and Foley, 2000; Muzaini et al., 2007; Rojek,
1993; Tarlow, 2005)
B orientalism, but as abstracted from its post-colonial interpretation (Seaton, 2009b);
B secularisation;
B sequestration and a resulting quest for new moral spaces (Stone and Sharpley, 2009);
B as existing in congruence with wider societal interest in death (Seaton, 2009a); and
B most recently, application of Foucault’s heterotopia thesis (Stone, 2013).
These conceptualisations have helped to strengthen the theoretical framework used to
understand the commodi?cation and consumption of death as both a tourism phenomenon
and broader human activity.
However, such models and theories are not without their critics. Authors have generally
been careful to position thanatourism as sharing characteristics with postmodernism, for
example, but without examining deeply the development of tourist deathscapes within the
philosophical paradigms of postmodernism itself. This has attracted criticism, with
Casbeard and Booth (2012), for example, disputing the temporal situation of thanatourism
as postmodern, arguing that thanatological travel in nineteenth-century Europe on its own
offers enough historical evidence to render the postmodern perspective redundant. Other
discontents to emerge recently concern the appropriateness of the application of the
subjective label ‘‘dark’’ to tourist behaviour. Recent papers from Biran et al. (2011) and
Bowman and Pezzullo (2009) argue that although a site may be ‘‘dark’’, the sought or
actual experience of the tourist may be a socially ‘‘bright’’ one. Poria and Biran (2012)
further hint that dark tourism is neither a new form of tourism nor appropriate tourism
classi?cation at all, and it is instead simply a form or subset of heritage tourism. However,
this argument could be challenged by consideration of Stone’s (2006) term ‘‘dark fun
factories’’, which may have little or nothing to do with heritage and everything to do with
consuming death.
Other conceptualisations that have been subject to discontent include Stone and Sharpley’s
(2008) sequestration thesis. This thesis proposes that in the modern era death is largely
absent, sequestered to medical professionals – a perspective challenged by Seaton
(2009a), who believes such a situation renders thanatourism a distinctly modern
phenomenon. Instead Seaton proposes a congruence thesis, which argues that modern
death has never been as publicly owned, desired or consumed, evidenced by its dominant
position in mass media.
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Yet postmodernism, congruence and secularisation are but a sample of potential
thanatourism conceptualisations. Hyde and Harman (2011), for example, raise the
possibility of nationalism mediating the thanatourism experience. There are doubtless
many other personal and sociological perspectives, particularly beyond the con?nes of
Western thanatourism research, which has been almost completely situated in Europe and
North America. It seems, therefore, that Seaton’s (2009a) most telling observation in his
appraisal of thanatourism scholarship was a note that the relative absence of experiential
data on thanatourism consumption is to the detriment of theorising the subject. This paper
helps to address this imbalance by offering a new reading of Twain’s The Innocents. It is
proposed that a historical multi-site case study can help negotiate some of the spatial and
temporal discontents associated with the postmodern, sequestration, secularisation and
congruent perspectives.
2.2 Thanatourism and the production of tourist deathscapes
Although early de?nitions of thanatourism and dark tourism discussed experience and
motivation (Seaton, 1996; Foley and Lennon, 1996), much of the work that emerged over the
next decade focussed on theory and site classi?cation. The site classi?cation papers generally
applied the label ‘‘dark’’ to site history and character, as opposed to referencing tourist
motivation to consume. Much thanatourism research has adopted an almost Marxist approach
to the phenomenon, focussing on the production of tourist landscapes of death, exploring the
various commercial and political economies of commodi?ed death and in particular the ethics
of the journey of ‘‘death’’ as the ?nal human act, to its new found position as tourism product.
This work has variously focussed on tour guides (Macdonald, 2006), museum interpretation
(Miles, 2002), guidebooks (Siegenthaler, 2002), sites of incarceration (Wilson, 2008; Strange
and Kempa, 2003) and national geopolitics (Bigley et al., 2010), among exploration of many
other organic and autonomous production agents. Drawing fromthis body of research, various
theoretical papers emerged to locate the diversity of supply, including Stone’s typology of
thanatourism sites, which proposed a ‘‘spectrum of supply’’ (Stone, 2006, p. 157), locating
sites on a framework relating to their ‘‘shade’’ of darkness. Other models fromAshworth (2004),
Dunkley (2007), Dann (1998), Sharpley (2005) and Tarlow (2005) proposed frameworks for
exploring motivations and site characteristics independently.
It could be argued that the production of thanatourism exists in what geographers term
‘‘deathscapes’’. Although the suf?x ‘‘-scape’’ is perhaps now over-used, Appadurai (1990)
proposes its use as a means of understanding contemporary social processes. Thus, a
deathscape could be de?ned as a space or place where interaction between society, death
and bereavement is intensi?ed. Such sites have the capacity to create particular spatial
geographies of the dead for the living, which, Maddrell and Sidaway (2010) note, can be
emotionally fraught, heavily contested, both socially and politically, and potentially places
where public and private emotions can intersect. Exploring the production and investment of
meaning at such sites provides a better understanding of how tourists and society negotiate
mortality and ontological security.
2.3 Thanatourism and consumption of death
While arguably less work has been carried out on the thanatourist experience, this has been
addressed in recent years with motivational and experiential work from Biran et al. (2011) on
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dunkley et al. (2011) and Iles (2008) on First World War landscapes,
and Hyde and Harman (2011) on Gallipoli. However, the risk with work that focuses on
individual sites or events is that although the polysemic nature of one site may be explored in
depth, the multiple understandings of death across society remains unknown.
Sharpley (2009) proposes that a matrix of supply and demand exists in dark tourism, with
purposeful supply and dark demand representing the darkest form of thanatourism, and
accidental supply and pale demand/low motivations representing the paler form. Recent
work from Stone (2012b) proposes that dark tourism consumption can be categorised into
narrative, educational, entertainment, haunting, memorialisation or memento mori functions,
which incorporates some of the supply and demand phenomena. However, as Seaton
(2009a) notes, whether thanatourism should be seen as a primarily demand or a supply side
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concept is not yet resolved and that challenges remain in integrating the two. He therefore
resolves that thanatourism is an appropriate term to avoid the pejorative association with the
label ‘‘dark’’. Whatever the resolution to the supply-demand question, and thus in many
ways the labelling issue, dark tourism, or thanatourism, as is preferred for this paper, is
clearly a signi?cant institution for the mediation of death.
The adapted de?nition carried forward to interpret Twain’s experiences, therefore, is that
thanatourism arises from a movement of people to sites at which encountering death
becomes a signi?cant experience. Recent research focus has been on the motivations of
tourists to visit such sites, but this paper argues that thanatourism research should be
equally concerned with the actual experience of consuming death and what the tourist does
with this experience, considering that the encounter may not have been pre-motivated
anyway. This is not to state that motivations are without importance, as motivations ultimately
play a role in constructing the experience. However, the focus on motivation should not be to
the detriment of understanding subsequent behaviour and emotional experience.
3. Methodology and rationale
Three phenomena in The Innocents make it an appropriate thanatourism case study. These
include:
1. the diversity of thanatourism experience sought by Twain;
2. his subsequent representation of the experience in his travelogue; and
3. his empathetic approach in documenting the encounters.
Firstly, Twain was by no means unusual in terms of being a great literary author interested in
thanatourism; contemporaries such as Dickens, Beckford and Waugh (Seaton, 2009a)
described many similar examples of the dark side of travel. Twain’s work is particularly relevant
today due to his illustration of the continuum of intensity proposed by Seaton (1996). His
knowledge of the sites he visits varies; at some he demonstrates great interest and describes
his long-held desire to visit, yet at other sites his motivation is low and he exhibits little
knowledge or interest. While Twain is but one traveller, and a nineteenth-century traveller at
that, positioning his encounters on the various thanatourism models can help us understand
the potential experiential outcomes when faced with particular motivations and supply.
Secondly, The Innocents is chosen for its potential to refocus thanatourismresearch on to the
experiential and away from the motivational. Although the motivational question formed a
key component of the original de?nitions (Foley and Lennon, 1996; Seaton, 1996), recent
perspectives, such as those offered by Walter (2009) and Stone (2009), have since called for
wider engagement with the relationship between the living, the dead and the spaces they
co-inhabit. This shifts the emphasis towards the thanatourism experience. Twain’s
observations on how he consumes death, contemplates mortality and understands his
own life is presented herein, with an argument that there is greater need for thanatourism
researchers to understand the emotional impact potential of sites of death and disaster.
While it is unlikely that any one study could encapsulate a full range of thanatourism
encounters, the breadth offered by Twain goes at least part of the way towards addressing
this. At various points he is fascinated by the sites he encounters, yet at others he is
disinterested, amused, frustrated and even deeply uncomfortable. At others again, his
encounters are, as Lennon and Foley (2000) would put it, serendipitous in nature.
Finally, Twain’s writing presents thanatourism as a clear and distinct form of encounter to a
heritage tourism experience. Although Twain comments regularly on his and the pilgrims’
interaction with heritage, he frequently privileges discussion of death, but does so in a very
personal and humanistic manner. He considers the ?nal moments of many of the dead he
gazes upon, contemplating their mortality, his own and the beyond, a contemplation for
Romantic travellers that represented an encounter with the ‘‘greatest ‘Other’ of all’’ (Seaton,
2009a, p. 531). For Seaton, the Romantic period afforded travellers the opportunity to
re-engage with individual subjectivity, and Twain used The Innocents as a vehicle to express
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this subjectivity, exploring his own personal contemplations of death, particularly at sites
where the death was present and raw, but also at the temporally distant Pompeii.
It is the use of these spaces where the encounter differs from a simple heritage experience;
Twain’s contemplation of the dead becomes his outlet for considering his own mortality. His
interest extends beyond the history and heritage of death, to a contemplation of death itself.
At many of the sites he visits he grows emotional, displaying compassion for the dead, and it
is this empathetic style and reverence that makes his work relevant today. Too often in
thanatourism literature the dead and mortality itself are neglected, considered as static
objects, devoid of any human qualities. They are simply an object for a tourist to consume.
For Twain, the dead were not simply a number, a newspaper headline or a line in a
guidebook. They were real people; fathers, mothers, siblings, friends and enemies.
Analysis of The Innocents was conducted by reviewing Twain’s encounters within the
frameworks of contemporary thanatourism theories and models. A full analysis of Twain’s
thanatourism experiences was conducted, with samples chosen for illustrative purposes in
this paper. Table I illustrates a sample of the sites Twain visits, but it is not an exhaustive list,
given the volume of sites visited by the pilgrims and the breadth of interpretation possible on
what constitutes an encounter with death. The samples analysed were chosen to either
challenge or af?rm existing thanatourism scholarship, because of the eloquence of the
passage, depth or the breadth of discussion afforded to the experience by Twain, or
because of the relevance of some of the sites to twenty-?rst century thanatourism
encounters, including sites visited by Twain that remain popular today.
The following section describes Twain’s experiences at sites encountered by the pilgrims.
4. Twain’s encounters
4.1 Relics, cadavers and The Christian Cult of Death
Seaton’s (2009a) thanatourism development sketch situates the in?uence of Christianity as a
major contributor to Western consumption of death; through symbolism and the display of
relics, and the prominence of death in the liturgy itself, the Christian Church kept death at the
forefront of everyday life. While secularisation in contemporary society has reduced
exposure to death (Stone, 2009), the history of the Christian Cult of Death is recognised as
playing a role in constructing contemporary thanatourism practices (Seaton, 2009a). In The
Innocents, Twain regularly comments on the prominent position of death on the pilgrims’
excursions, including encounters with death through architecture, symbols and occasionally
the liturgy. The focus of their gaze lies on the representations of death in relics and artefacts.
Early in the trip, Twain pauses to re?ect on his experience in Paris:
But isn’t this relic matter a littler overdone. We ?nd a piece of the true cross in every church we go
into, and some of the nails that held it together. I would not like to be positive, but I think we have
seen as much as a keg of these nails. Then there is the crown of thorns; they have part of one in
Saint Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one also in Notre Dame. And as for bones of St Denis, I feel
certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary (Twain, 1869, p. 165).
Death inhabited the majority of Christian sites encountered by the pilgrims, with bones, body
parts, pieces of the cruci?x and crown of thorns presented for their perusal alongside
painted artwork and sculptures. In Italy, Twain describes a tour of the cathedral in Milan,
embellished with relics of death:
The priests showed us two of St Paul’s ?ngers, and one of St Peter’s; a bone of Judas Iscariot, (it
was black), and also bones of all the other disciples; a handkerchief in which the Saviour had left
the impression of his face. Among the most precious of the relics were a stone from the Holy
Sepulchre, part of the crown of thorns (they have a whole one at Notre Dame), a fragment of the
purple robe worn by the Saviour, a nail from the Cross, and a picture of the Virgin and Child
painted by the veritable hand of St Luke. This is the second of St Luke’s Virgins we have seen.
Once a year all these holy relics are carried in procession through the streets of Milan (Twain,
1869, p. 180).
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Seaton (2009a, p. 527) wryly observes that Christianity is the only world religion to utilise
death in its branding, with the cruci?x as its ‘‘corporate logo’’. While such memento mori are
relatively sequestered from contemporary society (Stone, 2009), they remained visible in
nineteenth-century Europe. Indeed, less than 100 years earlier, death was prominent in the
urban landscape of Paris, a result of hundreds of years of incorporating such symbols into
public space (Etlin, 1984). The earliest example of the danse macabre, the late-medieval
allegory on death, originated in Paris, appearing in 1424 on Rue de la Ferronnerie (Etlin,
1984, p. 3). This allegory, usually presented as a gothic painting on cemetery walls, included
people fromall ranks of society and vibrantly illustrated the fragility of life. Although the city’s
deathscapes had evolved by Twain’s 1867 visit, death remained a feature in Parisian tourism
(Schwartz, 1995, 1998, MacCannell, 1989).
While in Paris, Twain visits a morgue, cemetery and assassination location. Gazing upon
these sites, he comments on the geography and sociology of death. Discussing a tree on the
Bois De Boulogne for example, he comments on the ecological challenges faced by the
preservation of dark sites:
The cross marks the spot where a troubled troubadour was waylaid and murdered in the
fourteenth century. It was in this park that that fellow with an unpronounceable name made the
attempt on the Russian Czar’s life last spring with a pistol. The bullet struck a tree. Ferguson
showed us the place. Now in America that interesting tree would be chopped down or forgotten
within the next ?ve years, but it will be treasured here. The guides will point it out to visitors for the
next eight hundred years, and when it decays and falls down they will put another up there and go
on with the same old story just the same (Twain, 1869, p. 88).
Throughout The Innocents, Twain notes the rawness of many of the sites the pilgrims
encounter, with death having occurred at several within a recent timeframe. This lends a
rawness to the experience and Twain notes that some sites may eventually drift out of public
consciousness. However, beyond observations of the physical properties of deathscapes,
he additionally notes the temporal proximity to death. Touring Notre Dame, for example, the
pilgrims are afforded the opportunity to inspect artefacts of death. Among the usual
observation of the nails of the cross, they view some bloody robes worn by a recently
murdered archbishop (nine years prior, in 1848), a cast of his corpse, the bullet that killed
him and two vertebrae in which it lodged (Twain, 1869, p. 131). Parisian deathscapes
fascinate and perplex Twain and he notes that ‘‘these people have a somewhat singular
taste in relics’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 131). This exposure to the Christian Cult of Death continues
beyond Paris, however, and is particularly evident in Rome. Announcing his arrival at the
most gruesome site they encounter, Twain proclaims:
From the sanguinary sports of the Holy Inquisition; the slaughter of the Coliseum; and the dismal
tombs of the Catacombs; I naturally pass to the picturesque horrors of a Capuchin Convent. We
stopped a moment in a small chapel in the church to admire a picture of St Michael vanquishing
Satan – a picture which is so beautiful that I can not but think it belongs to the reviled
‘‘Renaissance,’’ notwithstanding I believe they told us one of the ancient old masters painted it –
and then we descended into the vast vault underneath.
Here was a spectacle for sensitive nerves! (Twain, 1869, p. 298).
Constructed and decorated with thousands of human bones taken from 4,000 deceased
monks of the Capuchin order, Twain’s gaze is unavoidably directed towards the convent’s
architecture. The Capuchin Convent was full of ‘‘quaint architectural structures of various
kinds, built of shin bones and the bones of the arm; on the wall were elaborate frescoes,
whose curving vines were made of knotted human vertebrae; whose delicate tendrils were
made of sinews and tendons; whose ?owers were formed of knee-caps and toe-nails’’
(Twain, 1869, p. 298). The pilgrims are guided by an old friar, who Twain notes takes ‘‘high
pride in his curious show’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 299), a pride Twain believes is augmented by a
great degree of interest from the pilgrims. With the bones of the monks stacked everywhere,
nailed to the walls and scattered between different rooms, Twain turns to the friar and
contemplates aloud the potential chaos and confusion on doomsday:
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‘‘Their different parts are well separated – skulls in one room, legs in another, ribs in another –
there would be stirring times here for a while if the last trump should blow. Some of the brethren
might get hold of the wrong leg, in the confusion, and the wrong skull, and ?nd themselves
limping, and looking through eyes that were wider apart or closer together than they were used to.
You can not tell any of these parties apart, I suppose?’’
‘‘Oh, yes, I know many of them.’’
He put his ?nger on a skull. ‘‘This was Brother Anselmo – deadthree hundredyears – a goodman.’’
He touched another. ‘‘This was Brother Alexander – dead two hundred and eighty years. This was
Brother Carlo – dead about as long.’’
Then he took a skull and held it in his hand, and looked re?ectively upon it, after the manner of the
grave-digger when he discourses of Yorick (Twain, 1869, p. 300).
However, despite his humour at this point, Twain appears sombre and even quite upset. He
writes that the monk has a business-like way of illustrating a touching story, and calls his
performance ‘‘grotesque’’ and ‘‘ghastly’’: ‘‘I hardly knew whether to smile or shudder’’
(Twain, 1869, p. 301). He compares the monk’s performance to that of a surgeon, telling of a
recently deceased patient in medical terminology. The monk eventually adopts a more
sombre tone, speaking of his own mortality and desire to be buried in the convent, which
seems to placate Twain:
I asked the monk if all the brethren up stairs expected to be put in this place when they died. He
answered quietly:
‘‘We must all lie here at last.’’
See what one can accustom himself to. – The re?ection that he must some day be taken apart like
an engine or a clock, or like a house whose owner is gone, and workedupinto arches and pyramids
and hideous frescoes, did not distress this monk in the least. I thought he even looked as if he were
thinking, with complacent vanity, that his own skull would look well on top of the heap and his own
ribs add a charm to the frescoes which possibly they lacked at present (Twain, 1869, p. 301).
Continuing around the convent, Twain ?nds one skull that particularly interests him. Lying in
one of the ornamental alcoves is a dead and dried-up monk. The pilgrims examine it closely,
noting the details of its posture. The head is of most interest; with its yellow teeth, sunken
eyes and prominent nostrils, the skull appears to be laughing.
It was the jolliest laugh, but yet the most dreadful, that one can imagine. Surely, I thought, it must
have been a most extraordinary joke this veteran produced with his latest breath, that he has not
got done laughing at it yet. At this moment I saw that the old instinct was strong upon the boys,
and I said we had better hurry to St Peter’s. They were trying to keep from asking, ‘‘Is – is he
dead?’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 302).
Considering present death – temporally, socially and spatially closer in proximity than the
Christian Cult of Death – the pilgrims tour a Parisian morgue. At the time, ‘‘the Morgue served
as a visual auxiliary to the newspaper, staging the recently dead who had been sensationally
detailed by the printed word’’, and attracted as many as 40,000 visitors on big days (Schwartz,
1995, p. 298). Twain does not specify which morgue, and it appears not to be a pre-motivated
visit, or indeed one that he held in any anticipation, but several, such as the morgue situated
on the quai de l’Archeveche behind Notre Dame, but now a memorial (Schwartz, 1998), were
open to the visiting public at the time. Although only afforded a few paragraphs, Twain’s
morgue encounter is one of the most striking thanatourism experiences in The Innocents.
Nineteenth-century Parisian morgues institutionalised the viewing of corpses (Schwartz,
1998), acting as receptacles where those who died unidenti?ed in the city could be exhibited
to the public for identi?cation. Although Twain offers no explanation as to why the pilgrims
visited the morgue, such visits were relatively commonplace for tourists in Paris, particularly
for English visitors who could not easily visit morgues at home (Schwartz, 1998), and sought
an authentic experience in nineteenth-century Paris (MacCannell, 1989). Given that Parisian
morgues featured on established touring routes, appearing in guidebooks alongside
attractions – a slaughterhouse, accommodation and other civic buildings (MacCannell,
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1989) – and that Twain frequently mentions their private guide’s control of their itinerary, it is
possible that the pilgrims’ morgue visit was part of a pre-arranged itinerary.
At the morgue, Twain comments on the poignancy of the encounter, particularly in relation to
the gore and horror of the experience. He uses the adjectives ‘‘horrible’’, ‘‘dismal’’ and
‘‘dread’’, (Twain, 1869, p. 133) among others, to describe the sights of the freshly deceased
corpses. He describes one corpse, recently deceased from drowning:
On a slanting stone lay a drowned man, naked, swollen, purple; clasping the fragment of a broken
bush with a grip which death had so petri?ed that human strength could not unloose it – mute
witness of the last despairing effort to save the life that was doomed beyond all help (Twain, 1869,
p. 133).
Twain makes several further comments on the encounter that posit the morgue as a public
exhibition or spectacle, not dissimilar to today’s touring exhibitions of cadavers (Stone,
2012a). Discussing a recent victim of drowning, Twain imagines a grieving mother and his
language again conjures up thanatoptic imagery:
Wegrewmeditativeandwonderedif, somefortyyearsago, whenthemotherof that ghastlythingwas
dandling it upon her knee, and kissing it and petting it and displaying it with satis?ed pride to the
passers-by, apropheticvisionof thisdreadendingever?ittedthroughherbrain(Twain, 1869, p. 133).
Finally, before leaving the morgue, Twain comments on the scale of the gore sought and
witnessed by the locals. In the morgue, Twain observes some visitors eagerly pressing their
faces against the bars to gaze on the corpses, only to be disappointed with the sight. These
people visit morgues regularly, ‘‘just as other people go to see theatrical spectacles every
night’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 133) and need a really gruesome sight to appease their appetite for
death. He comments on those who view the drowning victim with: ‘‘Now this don’t afford you
any satisfaction – a party with his head shot off is what you need’’, (Twain, 1869, p. 133).
4.2 Archaeology, battle?elds and the geography of death
Despite his discomfort at the actions of others at the morgue, Twain’s personal craving and
desire for spectacle death is equally gruesome, and particularly evident later in the
excursion when the pilgrims visit the Coliseum in Rome. Not content with a simple heritage
encounter, Twain uses his imagination to conjure up brutal scenes of death and dying, in his
usual vivid style. He imagines a ?ctional pamphlet, ‘‘The Roman Daily Battle Ax’’, which he
‘‘?nds’’ in the ruins. The pamphlet describes ‘‘last night’s slaughter’’ in detail, and Twain
gives the ?ctional newsletter some 1,200 words in The Innocents. He breathes life into his
surroundings, imagining the 60,000 people present for the slaughter, the impassable streets
and the royalty and pomp of the ceremony before the main event. He describes howa young
amateur delivered a blow to a gladiator, received ‘‘with a hearty applause’’, before being
killed in front of his regretful sisters. Another prisoner’s mother ‘‘ran screaming, with hair
dishevelled and tears streaming from her eyes, and swooned away just as her hands were
clutching at the railings of the arena’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 274).
He draws the introductory act to a close and introduces the main event, the gladiator
‘‘Marcus Marcellus Valerian (stage name – his real name is Smith)’’, an ‘‘artist of rare merit’’
with wonderful management of the battle axe. This gladiator slays two barbarians in Twain’s
tale, one with a blow to the head and the other by cleaving the barbarian’s body in half to the
wild applause of the audience. Finally, the ‘‘Battle Ax’’ draws events to a close, promising an
afternoon matinee for the young folk.
Later on their itinerary, the pilgrims visit the buried city of Pompeii, one of the best known
thanatourism attractions of the Romantic era (Seaton, 1996). Buried in 79 AD by the nearby
volcano Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii was covered with four to six metres of ash for some 1,800
years (Twain, 1869, p. 327). Although the city was partially rediscovered in 1599, full
excavations did not commence until 1738 (Cooley and Cooley, 2004). Today the ruins are a
major tourist attraction, with UNESCO designation and approximately 2.5 million visitors per
year (UNESCO, 2012). In Twain’s era tourism to Pompeii was very much a feature of the
Grand Tour, allowing aristocratic tourists to wander the streets, gaze upon the excavations
and touch the ruins of the city:
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They pronounce it Pom-pay-e. I always had an idea that you went down into Pompeii with torches,
by way of damp, dark stairways, just as you do in silver mines, and traversed gloomy tunnels with
lava overhead and something on either hand like dilapidated prisons gouged out of the solid
earth, that faintly resembled houses. But you do nothing of the kind (Twain, 1869, p. 327).
It would be easy to situate Victorian consumption of Pompeii as a heritage tourismencounter
– the preserved ruins of the city served (and still serve) a clear function as a link to the past.
During his visit to Pompeii, Twain makes many comments about the ruins of the city in
general and their status as preserved and toured archaeology. There is an undeniable
beauty to ruins, of course, which allows for imaginative interpretation, providing a seductive
emptiness, space for contemplation and in Twain’s case, space for personal re?ection.
Given the environment, and Twain’s vivid imagination, it was easy for him to breathe life back
into his surroundings, as at the Coliseum. As he lounges through the utterly deserted streets,
he imagines ‘‘where thousands and thousands of human beings once bought and sold, and
walked and rode, and made the place resound with the noise and confusion of traf?c and
pleasure’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 331). The desolation of Pompeii’s ruins hold (for Twain) a visual
contrast to the status they once held, whether this was as a simple dwelling place of the
everyday man or a symbol of vibrant market and social life. Yet, Pompeii offered a layered
experience, and Twain uses the space primarily to contemplate dying and death:
In one of these long Pompeiian halls the skeleton of a man was found, with ten pieces of gold in
one hand and a large key in the other. He had seized his money and started towards the door, but
the ?ery tempest caught him at the very threshold, and he sank down and died. One more minute
of precious time would have saved him. I saw the skeletons of a man, a woman, and two young
girls. The woman had her hands spread wide apart, as if in mortal terror, and I imagined I could
still trace upon her shapeless face something of the expression of wild despair that distorted it
when the heavens rained ?re in these streets, so many years ago (Twain, 1869, p. 333).
Twain’s encounters with dying at Pompeii lead himto consider his own mortality – for him, the
ruins act as a portal into the great unknown of death, which he used to contemplate the act of
dying. He ?nishes his visit to Pompeii illustrating the depths of his thanatoptic experience.
Hearing a cry for his return train to Naples, he awakens from a daydream, to be reminded
that he belongs ‘‘in the nineteenth century, and was not a dusty mummy, caked with ash and
cinders, eighteen hundred years old. The transition was startling’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 335).
The spatial organisation of Pompeii plays a major role in constructing Twain’s thanatourism
experience. The geography of death, or deathscape, mediates his gaze; he has the
opportunity to view a corpse that was mummi?ed by a natural event, he can touch the
archaeological ruins of the corpse’s surroundings and consider the dilemma faced by the
owner of the gold coins during the volcanic eruption. For the pilgrims, Pompeii was a
temporally distant, if relatively spatially close event, and required both imagination and
interpretation to provoke consideration of death. But the pilgrims were not limited to
consuming such temporally distant events on their excursion. In an early example of
time-space compression facilitating the availability of battle?eld tourism, the pilgrims visit
Sebastopol; a battle?eld from the recent Crimean War, which took place just over a decade
prior, from 1853 to 1856:
Sebastopol is probably the worst battered town in Russia or anywhere else. [. . .] Ruined Pompeii
is in good condition compared to Sebastopol. Here, you may look in whatsoever direction you
please, and your eye encounters scarcely anything but ruin, ruin, ruin! – fragments of houses,
crumbled walls, torn and ragged hills, devastation everywhere! It is as if a mighty earthquake had
spent all its terrible forces upon this one little spot (Twain, 1869, pp. 381, 382).
In September 1854, allied troops from France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire landed in the
Crimea and besieged the city of Sevastopol. Sebastopol, also called Sevastopol, was home
to the Black Sea Fleet, a navy that threatened the allied forces in the Mediterranean. The
siege became one of the major battles in the Crimean war, lasting from September 1854 to
September 1855. Like the battle of Waterloo (Seaton, 1999), the Siege of Sebastopol was
watched by British tourists even as it happened (Gordon, 1998). Tourism to battle?elds has
long been popular, and Vanderbilt (2002, p. 135) notes the legacy of war usually results in
tourism:
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All wars end in tourism. Battle?elds are rendered as scenic vistas, war heroes are frozen into gray
memorials in urban parks, tanks and other weapons bask outside American Legion posts on
suburban strips.
Twelve years after the siege of Sebastopol, Twain and the pilgrims visited the battle?elds.
Although they spend but a few hours on site, Twain devotes several pages to describing the
experience, mainly detailing the scars of war left by the siege. He describes how‘‘the storms
of war’’ beat down upon the houses, solid stone houses all ploughed through by cannon
balls, smashed, unroofed and with holes driven through the walls:
These fearful ?elds, where such tempests of death used to rage, are peaceful enough now; no
sound is heard, hardly a living thing moves about them, they are lonely and silent – their
desolation is complete (Twain, 1869, p. 384).
With little to see beyond destruction, the group takes to hunting relics. One over-eager
pilgrim riles Twain with his relentless collection of artefacts, taking two full sack loads on
board to add to his collection. ‘‘Cannon balls, broken ramrods, fragments of shell – iron
enough to freight a sloop’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 385) are gathered by the pilgrims, with some
bringing bones, hoping them to be human. Disappointment comes for the looters when told
by the ship’s surgeon that the bones belong to animals. Other fragments are collected from
the battle?eld and mislabelled to increase their value back home. Frustrated with one
companion, Twain challenges him over a mislabelled horse jaw-bone and teeth:
[Twain]: ‘‘Fragment of a Russian General! This is absurd. Are you never going to learn any sense?’’
He [Twain’s companion] only said: ‘‘Go slow – the old woman [his aunt at home] won’t know any
different.’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 385).
Their plunder of the site complete, the pilgrims depart.
5. Discussion
5.1 Motivation, experience and affect
Seaton made clear in his original de?nition that thanatourism comprised travel to sites
motivated by a desire to encounter death, whether death was seen as the principal
motivation or even at all consciously seen as a motivation (Seaton, 2009a, p. 522). Seaton
(1996) acknowledged that thanatourism existed across a continuum of intensity, regulated
by tourist motivations and knowledge of the deceased; the more differentiated a traveller’s
knowledge of the dead, the paler his/her thanatourismexperience would be. Conversely, the
weaker the knowledge of the dead, the stronger the pure thanatourism element.
While we know much already about the reproduction of death for tourist consumption
(e.g. Keil, 2005; Macdonald, 2006; Strange and Kempa, 2003), and increasingly more about
tourist motivations to consume reproduced death (for examples, see Biran et al., 2011; Hyde
and Harman, 2011) there is comparatively less research on the thanatourism experience
(Stone, 2009), and almost none at the purest end of the scale – i.e. purposeful consumption
or deep contemplation of deliberately commodi?ed death. One could posit that little is
known about the psychological impacts of encountering death in a touristic form. Key
questions persist, such as, for example, what do tourists contemplate when facing
commodi?ed death? How do they negotiate the paradox of death as an everyday
occurrence, anthropological constant and tourist attraction, yet also an extraordinary
departure in the lives of those affected? Does the experience impact on the tourist’s psyche?
If so, how? What insights does the encounter offer into the tourist’s own mortality? Is the
encounter carried forward into other parts of the tourist’s life?
The Innocents provides clues to some of these questions. Whilst it is acknowledged that
Twain is a literary icon, a nineteenth-century traveller, and a highly imaginative and often
eccentric individual, the representations of his experiences in The Innocents nonetheless
offer an insight into the power of thanatopsis. In his early thirties at the time of The Innocents,
Twain’s career as an author was at a relatively early stage. Publication of The Innocents in
1869, along with subsequent travelogue Roughing It (1872), helped launch him into
mainstreamAmerican literature. In The Innocents, Twain’s representation of the thanatourism
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experience is eloquent, often sensitive and most importantly, laden with personal re?ection.
Many of the sites visited by Twain offered a very intimate and involved encounter. At
Sebastopol, for example, his compatriots touch the landscape, collecting artefacts from the
soil, holding the bones of whom they believe to be the deceased, an encounter that clearly
upsets Twain. Similarly, in the Capuchin Convent, they are guided by a monk who also
touches the bones of deceased contemporaries, a ‘‘grotesque performance’’ (Twain, 1869,
p. 301) for Twain. But the sensory experience of ‘‘touching’’ death is not the only mediating
in?uence for him, and he comments on his auditory experience at a number of sites. The
silence of the ?elds in Sebastopol and the irreverent whistling of a train in Pompeii are but two
of many examples throughout The Innocents. It could be argued therefore that although
‘‘gaze’’ is used in tourism literature generally as a ‘‘catch all’’, the sensory experience of
consuming death is far greater than a visual encounter. Smell, touch, auditory and taste are
generally absent from thanatourism literature, yet must surely play a role in constructing the
experience. A morbid thought, perhaps, but a potential avenue for future research in
thanatourism consumption, one that would likely require new methodological approaches.
5.2 Methodologies and the geography of thanatourism
Twain’s encounters illustrate the need for an examination of the geography of thanatourism.
Despite the established focus in contemporary literature on the supply of sites (Biran et al.,
2011), the physical properties of deathscapes have received surprisingly less attention
(Charlesworth and Addis, 2002). Tourismis an inherently spatial activity, yet many thanatourism
publications neglect to comment on the ecology, topography, architecture and other physical
attributes of sites. Weathering, new construction, invasive species and other activities at the
sites take their toll on the topography and ecology. Does this impact on the thanatourist
experience? Although few authors have explored the mediating power of deathscapes, or
indeed noted the ?uidity of the geography, work by Charlesworth and Addis (2002) and Iles
(2008) explicitly draws attention to the impact of the physical landscape on the thanatourist.
Further to the ecology and topography, thanatopsis, the gaze on death, or what could be
termed a ‘‘thanagaze’’, is in?uenced by autonomous and organic images. In The Innocents,
Twain comments on his expectations, explicitly noting that they have been precon?gured by
tour guides, guidebooks, signage and popular literature. Semiotics have been studied to
some degree in thanatourism, with Keil (2005) noting the power of signage and
memorialisation in constructing the thanatourism experience at Auschwitz Birkenau.
However, despite an increasing volume of empirical material on the role of signage in
constructing the thanatourism experience and provoking thanatopsis, there has yet to be a
broader conceptual engagement with the semiotics of death and the resulting implications
for management and tourist behaviour.
6. Conclusion
Exploration into the darkest thanatourism experiences will provide a better understanding of
how and why society and individuals contemplate mortality. Walter (2009, p. 55) writes that
‘‘ may be wrong that most dark tourism visits are typically contingent rather than
motivated’’; and that thanatourists do not seek to remedy a demonstrable senses of
detachment from morality by seeking encounters with death. Many of Twain’s visits were
indeed contingent, or serendipitous in nature, yet his contemplation of death would appear
to lie at the darkest end of the spectrum. While he was of course a well-known author and
dramatized his experiences for popular consumption, it is evident that ‘‘The Other’’ of death
was the de?ning feature of many of his experiences. In The Innocents, Twain is variously
disgusted and frustrated by his colleagues’ behaviour and the behaviour of his guides; in
particular, at the lack of empathy and sensitivity they display towards the dead. For Twain
their actions are inappropriate and cold, provoking a great degree of discomfort. However,
the most frequent behaviour Twain exhibits is his humour and he negotiates the paradox of
consuming death with recourse to wit and satire. While this humour in consuming death may
not be widespread beyond Twain, the examples illustrated throughout the paper serve to
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remind that the potential breadth of behaviours when encountering death is much broader
than currently re?ected in the literature, which focuses mostly on empathy.
Twain’s encounters with deathscapes, at both temporally close and temporally distant sites,
provides further evidence that thanatourism has the power to induce anxiety beyond
contemplation of the failings of modernity and contemplation of those who passed within
living memory. This notion is in con?ict with Lennon and Foley’s (2000) and Rojek’s (1993)
work, which situate thanatourismwithin a post-modernity paradigm, by focussing on tourism
at sites associated with the failings of modern institutions. Twain’s contemplation of
temporally distant death, far beyond living memory and exhibiting little in relation to
institutions of modernity, serves to illustrate that theoretical re?ection on thanatourism may
bene?t from looking beyond the postmodern frame of reference.
Finally, in terms of methodological signi?cance, Twain’s experience in The Innocents illustrates
the need for new methodological approaches in thanatourism research. While not all
thanatourists possess Twain’s imaginative prowess or the opportunity to publish their
experiences so conspicuously (travel blogs aside), contemporary tourists will encounter
equally mediated thanatourism experiences. The challenge is to uncover the breadth of
production and consumption in?uences that mediate the gaze on death; while acknowledging
the varying differences in meaning invested by tourists. Recent methodological innovations in
thanatourism research have proposed approaches that are increasingly sympathetic to the
highly personal process of contemplating death. Dunkley et al. (2011) propose a
compassionate oral history approach, Iles (2008) adopts an ethnographic approach,
Seaton (2012) uses guestbook comments as a data source, while Sharpley (2012) draws upon
travel blog research. Such methodological innovations are necessary to overcome the
possible reluctance to discuss death, noted by Biran et al. (2011).
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Journal of Tourism Anthropology, Vol. 1 Nos 3/4, pp. 318-332.
About the author
Tony Johnston is a Lecturer in Development Geography in the Department of Geography,
King’s College London. His research focuses on the cultural geographies and spatial
aspects of deathscapes. His research has a particular focus on the commodi?cation and
consumption of death for tourism purposes. He has previously published on the
commodi?cation of the 1990s con?ict in the Balkans. Tony Johnston can be contacted at:
[email protected]
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doc_199244734.pdf
In 1867, the author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, undertook a
great pleasure excursion across Europe. Visiting a range of sites, from those associated with the
Christian Cult of Death to the notable cultural heritage attractions of the time, Twain published his
experiences in what would later become one of the world’s best-selling travelogues; The Innocents
Abroad, or the New Pilgrim’s Progress. This essay offers a rereading of Twain’s encounters, proposing
examination of Twain’s encounters as timely and useful in addressing what Seaton identifies as a gap in
data on thanatourism consumption.
International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
Mark Twain and The Innocents Abroad: illuminating the tourist gaze on death
Tony J ohnston
Article information:
To cite this document:
Tony J ohnston, (2013),"Mark Twain and The Innocents Abroad: illuminating the tourist gaze on death", International J ournal of Culture,
Tourism and Hospitality Research, Vol. 7 Iss 3 pp. 199 - 213
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Mark Twain and The Innocents Abroad:
illuminating the tourist gaze on death
Tony Johnston
Abstract
Purpose – In 1867, the author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, undertook a
great pleasure excursion across Europe. Visiting a range of sites, from those associated with the
Christian Cult of Death to the notable cultural heritage attractions of the time, Twain published his
experiences in what would later become one of the world’s best-selling travelogues; The Innocents
Abroad, or the New Pilgrim’s Progress. This essay offers a rereading of Twain’s encounters, proposing
examination of Twain’s encounters as timely and useful in addressing what Seaton identi?es as a gap in
data on thanatourism consumption.
Design/methodology/approach – The essay draws on contemporary thanatourism theoretical
frameworks, including Seaton’s ‘‘Continuum of intensity’’ and ‘‘Thanatourism developmental sketch’’;
Sharpley’s ‘‘Matrix of dark tourism supply and demand’’ and Stone and Sharpley’s ‘‘Dark tourism
consumption framework’’, among others, to explore Twain’s encounters.
Findings – Supplemented by a review of recent theoretical thanatourism research, the essay proposes
three ?ndings. Finding one illustrates that Twain’s encounters, although not always pre-motivated or
purposefully supplied, were emotionally charged and deeply affective experiences, which had the potential
to provoke ontological insecurity. Finding two highlights the potential of the geography of death to stimulate
emotional reactions and con?gure individual and societal interactions with death. Finding three argues a
need for new methodological approaches to understanding the thanatourismexperience; approaches that
are empathetically sensitive to the potentially powerful impact of the thanatourism experience.
Originality/value – The essay draws on a classic travelogue to help address the imbalance in
knowledge of the thanatourism experience. The essay argues that thanatourism is a layered and
complex phenomenon, highly personal and often a potentially powerful and emotionally affective
experience.
Keywords Tourism, Literature, Death, Thanatourism, Dark tourism, Tourist gaze, Thanagazing,
Mark Twain
Paper type Conceptual paper
1. Introduction
In 1867, the American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain,
undertook a great pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land, a route that mixed some
of the classic, aristocratic ‘‘Grand Tour’’ and Western pilgrimage travel routes of the
nineteenth century. Twain documented his travels, ?rst publishing them as a series of letters
in a San Francisco newspaper, The Daily Alta California, and two years later as a full travel
book, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress, hereafter referred to in short
form as ‘‘The Innocents’’. The book would quickly become one of the best-selling accounts
of Old-World travel (Amazon, 2012).
Somewhat surprisingly, The Innocents has not been systematically studied as thanatourism
experiential case material. Many of the sites visited by Twain and his companions, hereafter
referred to as the ‘‘pilgrims’’, were inherently dark attractions, highly valued as important
places to visit in Europe, but featuring death notable in scale, method or celebrity, illustrated in
DOI 10.1108/IJCTHR-05-2012-0036 VOL. 7 NO. 3 2013, pp. 199-213, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1750-6182
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PAGE 199
Tony Johnston is based in
the Department of
Geography, King’s College
London, London, UK.
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Table I. Using a selection of Twain’s encounters, this essay will offer a rereading of The
Innocents, focussing on the complex relationship between tourist and deathscape. The paper
proposes that the complexities of the production and consumption of the geography of death
requires new methodological innovation to better understand the thanatourism phenomenon.
2. Literature review
2.1 Thanatourism: a contested ?eld
The terms ‘‘thanatourism’’ (Seaton, 1996) and ‘‘dark tourism’’ (Foley and Lennon, 1996) were
coined for a special edition of The International Journal of Heritage Studies. Broadly referring
Table I A selection of the thanatourism sites visited by Mark Twain in 1867
Site Site function Twain’s comments
A Parisian morgue Working morgue and tourist attraction ‘‘. . . that horrible receptacle for the dead who die
mysteriously’’ (p. 132)
A cave in Gibraltar Burial cave ‘‘. . . human bones, crusted with a very thick, stony
coating’’ (p. 68).
The buried city of Pompeii Archaeological ruin ‘‘It is a city of hundreds and hundreds of roo?ess
houses, and a tangled maze of streets where one
could easily get lost, without a guide, and have to
sleep in some ghostly palace that had known no living
tenant since that awful November night of eighteen
centuries ago’’ (p. 329)
An assassination attempt site at the
Bois de Boulogne, Paris
Urban park ‘‘It was in this park that that fellow with an
unpronounceable name made the attempt upon the
Russian Czar’s life last spring with a pistol. The bullet
struck a tree. Ferguson showed us the place’’ (p.
139)
Pe` re Lachaise, Paris Working cemetery and tourist attraction ‘‘One of our pleasantest visits was to Pe` re la Chaise,
the national burying-ground of France’’ (p. 139)
The battle?elds of Sebastopol, Crimea
(modern-day Ukraine)
Crimean War battle?eld from the Siege
of Sebastopol, 1854
‘‘Sebastopol is probably the worst battered town in
Russia or anywhere else’’ (p. 381)
Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris Working cathedral ‘‘He [a bishop] was shot dead. They showed us a
cast of his face taken after death, the bullet that killed
him, and the two vertebrae in which it lodged. These
people have a somewhat singular taste in the matter
of relics’’ (p. 131)
The Capuchin Convent, Rome Working convent ‘‘. . .on the wall were elaborate frescoes, whose
curving vines were made of knotted human
vertebrae; whose delicate tendrils were made of
sinews and tendon’’ (p. 298)
A Genoan cemetery Working cemetery ‘‘Our last sight was the cemetery (a burial place
intended to accommodate 60,000 bodies) and we
shall continue to remember it after we shall have
forgotten the palaces’’ (p. 170)
The Castle d’If, France Former prison and tourist attraction ‘‘We saw the damp, dismal cells in which two of
Dumas’ heroes passed their con?nement – heroes of
‘Monte Cristo’’’ (p. 104)
The Coliseum, Rome Former amphitheatre and tourist
attraction
‘‘Weeds and ?owers spring from its massy arches
and its circling seats, and vines hang their fringes
from its lofty walls. An impressive silence broods over
the monstrous structure where such multitudes of
men and women were wont to assemble in other
days’’ (p. 277)
Source: (Twain, 1869)
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to the same phenomenon, thanatourism and dark tourism theorise travel to sites motivated
by a desire to encounter death or disaster, a practice viewed as an increasingly pervasive
feature of the contemporary tourism landscape (Stone, 2006) but having much older origins
(Seaton, 1996). Although the de?nitions are contested (Seaton, 2009a) and theoretically
fragile (Stone and Sharpley, 2008), there is no doubt that the commodi?cation and
consumption of death has captured the imagination of academics and the media alike
(Stone, 2012a; BBC, 2012).
Thanatourism research generally explores three avenues:
1. building conceptual models that theorise the phenomenon through production or
consumption lenses (or both) (for examples, see Seaton, 2009a; Sharpley, 2009; Stone,
2006, 2012b; Stone and Sharpley, 2008);
2. empirical supply side research, which explores site characteristics (e.g. Keil, 2005;
Macdonald, 2006; Strange and Kempa, 2003); and
3. tourist experience research focused on motivations or actual encounters with death (for
example Biran et al., 2011; Dunkley et al., 2011; Hyde and Harman, 2011; Iles, 2008).
Various theoretical lenses and perspectives have been suggested to conceptualise
thanatourism, including:
B postmodernism (for examples, see Lennon and Foley, 2000; Muzaini et al., 2007; Rojek,
1993; Tarlow, 2005)
B orientalism, but as abstracted from its post-colonial interpretation (Seaton, 2009b);
B secularisation;
B sequestration and a resulting quest for new moral spaces (Stone and Sharpley, 2009);
B as existing in congruence with wider societal interest in death (Seaton, 2009a); and
B most recently, application of Foucault’s heterotopia thesis (Stone, 2013).
These conceptualisations have helped to strengthen the theoretical framework used to
understand the commodi?cation and consumption of death as both a tourism phenomenon
and broader human activity.
However, such models and theories are not without their critics. Authors have generally
been careful to position thanatourism as sharing characteristics with postmodernism, for
example, but without examining deeply the development of tourist deathscapes within the
philosophical paradigms of postmodernism itself. This has attracted criticism, with
Casbeard and Booth (2012), for example, disputing the temporal situation of thanatourism
as postmodern, arguing that thanatological travel in nineteenth-century Europe on its own
offers enough historical evidence to render the postmodern perspective redundant. Other
discontents to emerge recently concern the appropriateness of the application of the
subjective label ‘‘dark’’ to tourist behaviour. Recent papers from Biran et al. (2011) and
Bowman and Pezzullo (2009) argue that although a site may be ‘‘dark’’, the sought or
actual experience of the tourist may be a socially ‘‘bright’’ one. Poria and Biran (2012)
further hint that dark tourism is neither a new form of tourism nor appropriate tourism
classi?cation at all, and it is instead simply a form or subset of heritage tourism. However,
this argument could be challenged by consideration of Stone’s (2006) term ‘‘dark fun
factories’’, which may have little or nothing to do with heritage and everything to do with
consuming death.
Other conceptualisations that have been subject to discontent include Stone and Sharpley’s
(2008) sequestration thesis. This thesis proposes that in the modern era death is largely
absent, sequestered to medical professionals – a perspective challenged by Seaton
(2009a), who believes such a situation renders thanatourism a distinctly modern
phenomenon. Instead Seaton proposes a congruence thesis, which argues that modern
death has never been as publicly owned, desired or consumed, evidenced by its dominant
position in mass media.
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Yet postmodernism, congruence and secularisation are but a sample of potential
thanatourism conceptualisations. Hyde and Harman (2011), for example, raise the
possibility of nationalism mediating the thanatourism experience. There are doubtless
many other personal and sociological perspectives, particularly beyond the con?nes of
Western thanatourism research, which has been almost completely situated in Europe and
North America. It seems, therefore, that Seaton’s (2009a) most telling observation in his
appraisal of thanatourism scholarship was a note that the relative absence of experiential
data on thanatourism consumption is to the detriment of theorising the subject. This paper
helps to address this imbalance by offering a new reading of Twain’s The Innocents. It is
proposed that a historical multi-site case study can help negotiate some of the spatial and
temporal discontents associated with the postmodern, sequestration, secularisation and
congruent perspectives.
2.2 Thanatourism and the production of tourist deathscapes
Although early de?nitions of thanatourism and dark tourism discussed experience and
motivation (Seaton, 1996; Foley and Lennon, 1996), much of the work that emerged over the
next decade focussed on theory and site classi?cation. The site classi?cation papers generally
applied the label ‘‘dark’’ to site history and character, as opposed to referencing tourist
motivation to consume. Much thanatourism research has adopted an almost Marxist approach
to the phenomenon, focussing on the production of tourist landscapes of death, exploring the
various commercial and political economies of commodi?ed death and in particular the ethics
of the journey of ‘‘death’’ as the ?nal human act, to its new found position as tourism product.
This work has variously focussed on tour guides (Macdonald, 2006), museum interpretation
(Miles, 2002), guidebooks (Siegenthaler, 2002), sites of incarceration (Wilson, 2008; Strange
and Kempa, 2003) and national geopolitics (Bigley et al., 2010), among exploration of many
other organic and autonomous production agents. Drawing fromthis body of research, various
theoretical papers emerged to locate the diversity of supply, including Stone’s typology of
thanatourism sites, which proposed a ‘‘spectrum of supply’’ (Stone, 2006, p. 157), locating
sites on a framework relating to their ‘‘shade’’ of darkness. Other models fromAshworth (2004),
Dunkley (2007), Dann (1998), Sharpley (2005) and Tarlow (2005) proposed frameworks for
exploring motivations and site characteristics independently.
It could be argued that the production of thanatourism exists in what geographers term
‘‘deathscapes’’. Although the suf?x ‘‘-scape’’ is perhaps now over-used, Appadurai (1990)
proposes its use as a means of understanding contemporary social processes. Thus, a
deathscape could be de?ned as a space or place where interaction between society, death
and bereavement is intensi?ed. Such sites have the capacity to create particular spatial
geographies of the dead for the living, which, Maddrell and Sidaway (2010) note, can be
emotionally fraught, heavily contested, both socially and politically, and potentially places
where public and private emotions can intersect. Exploring the production and investment of
meaning at such sites provides a better understanding of how tourists and society negotiate
mortality and ontological security.
2.3 Thanatourism and consumption of death
While arguably less work has been carried out on the thanatourist experience, this has been
addressed in recent years with motivational and experiential work from Biran et al. (2011) on
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dunkley et al. (2011) and Iles (2008) on First World War landscapes,
and Hyde and Harman (2011) on Gallipoli. However, the risk with work that focuses on
individual sites or events is that although the polysemic nature of one site may be explored in
depth, the multiple understandings of death across society remains unknown.
Sharpley (2009) proposes that a matrix of supply and demand exists in dark tourism, with
purposeful supply and dark demand representing the darkest form of thanatourism, and
accidental supply and pale demand/low motivations representing the paler form. Recent
work from Stone (2012b) proposes that dark tourism consumption can be categorised into
narrative, educational, entertainment, haunting, memorialisation or memento mori functions,
which incorporates some of the supply and demand phenomena. However, as Seaton
(2009a) notes, whether thanatourism should be seen as a primarily demand or a supply side
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concept is not yet resolved and that challenges remain in integrating the two. He therefore
resolves that thanatourism is an appropriate term to avoid the pejorative association with the
label ‘‘dark’’. Whatever the resolution to the supply-demand question, and thus in many
ways the labelling issue, dark tourism, or thanatourism, as is preferred for this paper, is
clearly a signi?cant institution for the mediation of death.
The adapted de?nition carried forward to interpret Twain’s experiences, therefore, is that
thanatourism arises from a movement of people to sites at which encountering death
becomes a signi?cant experience. Recent research focus has been on the motivations of
tourists to visit such sites, but this paper argues that thanatourism research should be
equally concerned with the actual experience of consuming death and what the tourist does
with this experience, considering that the encounter may not have been pre-motivated
anyway. This is not to state that motivations are without importance, as motivations ultimately
play a role in constructing the experience. However, the focus on motivation should not be to
the detriment of understanding subsequent behaviour and emotional experience.
3. Methodology and rationale
Three phenomena in The Innocents make it an appropriate thanatourism case study. These
include:
1. the diversity of thanatourism experience sought by Twain;
2. his subsequent representation of the experience in his travelogue; and
3. his empathetic approach in documenting the encounters.
Firstly, Twain was by no means unusual in terms of being a great literary author interested in
thanatourism; contemporaries such as Dickens, Beckford and Waugh (Seaton, 2009a)
described many similar examples of the dark side of travel. Twain’s work is particularly relevant
today due to his illustration of the continuum of intensity proposed by Seaton (1996). His
knowledge of the sites he visits varies; at some he demonstrates great interest and describes
his long-held desire to visit, yet at other sites his motivation is low and he exhibits little
knowledge or interest. While Twain is but one traveller, and a nineteenth-century traveller at
that, positioning his encounters on the various thanatourism models can help us understand
the potential experiential outcomes when faced with particular motivations and supply.
Secondly, The Innocents is chosen for its potential to refocus thanatourismresearch on to the
experiential and away from the motivational. Although the motivational question formed a
key component of the original de?nitions (Foley and Lennon, 1996; Seaton, 1996), recent
perspectives, such as those offered by Walter (2009) and Stone (2009), have since called for
wider engagement with the relationship between the living, the dead and the spaces they
co-inhabit. This shifts the emphasis towards the thanatourism experience. Twain’s
observations on how he consumes death, contemplates mortality and understands his
own life is presented herein, with an argument that there is greater need for thanatourism
researchers to understand the emotional impact potential of sites of death and disaster.
While it is unlikely that any one study could encapsulate a full range of thanatourism
encounters, the breadth offered by Twain goes at least part of the way towards addressing
this. At various points he is fascinated by the sites he encounters, yet at others he is
disinterested, amused, frustrated and even deeply uncomfortable. At others again, his
encounters are, as Lennon and Foley (2000) would put it, serendipitous in nature.
Finally, Twain’s writing presents thanatourism as a clear and distinct form of encounter to a
heritage tourism experience. Although Twain comments regularly on his and the pilgrims’
interaction with heritage, he frequently privileges discussion of death, but does so in a very
personal and humanistic manner. He considers the ?nal moments of many of the dead he
gazes upon, contemplating their mortality, his own and the beyond, a contemplation for
Romantic travellers that represented an encounter with the ‘‘greatest ‘Other’ of all’’ (Seaton,
2009a, p. 531). For Seaton, the Romantic period afforded travellers the opportunity to
re-engage with individual subjectivity, and Twain used The Innocents as a vehicle to express
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this subjectivity, exploring his own personal contemplations of death, particularly at sites
where the death was present and raw, but also at the temporally distant Pompeii.
It is the use of these spaces where the encounter differs from a simple heritage experience;
Twain’s contemplation of the dead becomes his outlet for considering his own mortality. His
interest extends beyond the history and heritage of death, to a contemplation of death itself.
At many of the sites he visits he grows emotional, displaying compassion for the dead, and it
is this empathetic style and reverence that makes his work relevant today. Too often in
thanatourism literature the dead and mortality itself are neglected, considered as static
objects, devoid of any human qualities. They are simply an object for a tourist to consume.
For Twain, the dead were not simply a number, a newspaper headline or a line in a
guidebook. They were real people; fathers, mothers, siblings, friends and enemies.
Analysis of The Innocents was conducted by reviewing Twain’s encounters within the
frameworks of contemporary thanatourism theories and models. A full analysis of Twain’s
thanatourism experiences was conducted, with samples chosen for illustrative purposes in
this paper. Table I illustrates a sample of the sites Twain visits, but it is not an exhaustive list,
given the volume of sites visited by the pilgrims and the breadth of interpretation possible on
what constitutes an encounter with death. The samples analysed were chosen to either
challenge or af?rm existing thanatourism scholarship, because of the eloquence of the
passage, depth or the breadth of discussion afforded to the experience by Twain, or
because of the relevance of some of the sites to twenty-?rst century thanatourism
encounters, including sites visited by Twain that remain popular today.
The following section describes Twain’s experiences at sites encountered by the pilgrims.
4. Twain’s encounters
4.1 Relics, cadavers and The Christian Cult of Death
Seaton’s (2009a) thanatourism development sketch situates the in?uence of Christianity as a
major contributor to Western consumption of death; through symbolism and the display of
relics, and the prominence of death in the liturgy itself, the Christian Church kept death at the
forefront of everyday life. While secularisation in contemporary society has reduced
exposure to death (Stone, 2009), the history of the Christian Cult of Death is recognised as
playing a role in constructing contemporary thanatourism practices (Seaton, 2009a). In The
Innocents, Twain regularly comments on the prominent position of death on the pilgrims’
excursions, including encounters with death through architecture, symbols and occasionally
the liturgy. The focus of their gaze lies on the representations of death in relics and artefacts.
Early in the trip, Twain pauses to re?ect on his experience in Paris:
But isn’t this relic matter a littler overdone. We ?nd a piece of the true cross in every church we go
into, and some of the nails that held it together. I would not like to be positive, but I think we have
seen as much as a keg of these nails. Then there is the crown of thorns; they have part of one in
Saint Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one also in Notre Dame. And as for bones of St Denis, I feel
certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary (Twain, 1869, p. 165).
Death inhabited the majority of Christian sites encountered by the pilgrims, with bones, body
parts, pieces of the cruci?x and crown of thorns presented for their perusal alongside
painted artwork and sculptures. In Italy, Twain describes a tour of the cathedral in Milan,
embellished with relics of death:
The priests showed us two of St Paul’s ?ngers, and one of St Peter’s; a bone of Judas Iscariot, (it
was black), and also bones of all the other disciples; a handkerchief in which the Saviour had left
the impression of his face. Among the most precious of the relics were a stone from the Holy
Sepulchre, part of the crown of thorns (they have a whole one at Notre Dame), a fragment of the
purple robe worn by the Saviour, a nail from the Cross, and a picture of the Virgin and Child
painted by the veritable hand of St Luke. This is the second of St Luke’s Virgins we have seen.
Once a year all these holy relics are carried in procession through the streets of Milan (Twain,
1869, p. 180).
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Seaton (2009a, p. 527) wryly observes that Christianity is the only world religion to utilise
death in its branding, with the cruci?x as its ‘‘corporate logo’’. While such memento mori are
relatively sequestered from contemporary society (Stone, 2009), they remained visible in
nineteenth-century Europe. Indeed, less than 100 years earlier, death was prominent in the
urban landscape of Paris, a result of hundreds of years of incorporating such symbols into
public space (Etlin, 1984). The earliest example of the danse macabre, the late-medieval
allegory on death, originated in Paris, appearing in 1424 on Rue de la Ferronnerie (Etlin,
1984, p. 3). This allegory, usually presented as a gothic painting on cemetery walls, included
people fromall ranks of society and vibrantly illustrated the fragility of life. Although the city’s
deathscapes had evolved by Twain’s 1867 visit, death remained a feature in Parisian tourism
(Schwartz, 1995, 1998, MacCannell, 1989).
While in Paris, Twain visits a morgue, cemetery and assassination location. Gazing upon
these sites, he comments on the geography and sociology of death. Discussing a tree on the
Bois De Boulogne for example, he comments on the ecological challenges faced by the
preservation of dark sites:
The cross marks the spot where a troubled troubadour was waylaid and murdered in the
fourteenth century. It was in this park that that fellow with an unpronounceable name made the
attempt on the Russian Czar’s life last spring with a pistol. The bullet struck a tree. Ferguson
showed us the place. Now in America that interesting tree would be chopped down or forgotten
within the next ?ve years, but it will be treasured here. The guides will point it out to visitors for the
next eight hundred years, and when it decays and falls down they will put another up there and go
on with the same old story just the same (Twain, 1869, p. 88).
Throughout The Innocents, Twain notes the rawness of many of the sites the pilgrims
encounter, with death having occurred at several within a recent timeframe. This lends a
rawness to the experience and Twain notes that some sites may eventually drift out of public
consciousness. However, beyond observations of the physical properties of deathscapes,
he additionally notes the temporal proximity to death. Touring Notre Dame, for example, the
pilgrims are afforded the opportunity to inspect artefacts of death. Among the usual
observation of the nails of the cross, they view some bloody robes worn by a recently
murdered archbishop (nine years prior, in 1848), a cast of his corpse, the bullet that killed
him and two vertebrae in which it lodged (Twain, 1869, p. 131). Parisian deathscapes
fascinate and perplex Twain and he notes that ‘‘these people have a somewhat singular
taste in relics’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 131). This exposure to the Christian Cult of Death continues
beyond Paris, however, and is particularly evident in Rome. Announcing his arrival at the
most gruesome site they encounter, Twain proclaims:
From the sanguinary sports of the Holy Inquisition; the slaughter of the Coliseum; and the dismal
tombs of the Catacombs; I naturally pass to the picturesque horrors of a Capuchin Convent. We
stopped a moment in a small chapel in the church to admire a picture of St Michael vanquishing
Satan – a picture which is so beautiful that I can not but think it belongs to the reviled
‘‘Renaissance,’’ notwithstanding I believe they told us one of the ancient old masters painted it –
and then we descended into the vast vault underneath.
Here was a spectacle for sensitive nerves! (Twain, 1869, p. 298).
Constructed and decorated with thousands of human bones taken from 4,000 deceased
monks of the Capuchin order, Twain’s gaze is unavoidably directed towards the convent’s
architecture. The Capuchin Convent was full of ‘‘quaint architectural structures of various
kinds, built of shin bones and the bones of the arm; on the wall were elaborate frescoes,
whose curving vines were made of knotted human vertebrae; whose delicate tendrils were
made of sinews and tendons; whose ?owers were formed of knee-caps and toe-nails’’
(Twain, 1869, p. 298). The pilgrims are guided by an old friar, who Twain notes takes ‘‘high
pride in his curious show’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 299), a pride Twain believes is augmented by a
great degree of interest from the pilgrims. With the bones of the monks stacked everywhere,
nailed to the walls and scattered between different rooms, Twain turns to the friar and
contemplates aloud the potential chaos and confusion on doomsday:
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‘‘Their different parts are well separated – skulls in one room, legs in another, ribs in another –
there would be stirring times here for a while if the last trump should blow. Some of the brethren
might get hold of the wrong leg, in the confusion, and the wrong skull, and ?nd themselves
limping, and looking through eyes that were wider apart or closer together than they were used to.
You can not tell any of these parties apart, I suppose?’’
‘‘Oh, yes, I know many of them.’’
He put his ?nger on a skull. ‘‘This was Brother Anselmo – deadthree hundredyears – a goodman.’’
He touched another. ‘‘This was Brother Alexander – dead two hundred and eighty years. This was
Brother Carlo – dead about as long.’’
Then he took a skull and held it in his hand, and looked re?ectively upon it, after the manner of the
grave-digger when he discourses of Yorick (Twain, 1869, p. 300).
However, despite his humour at this point, Twain appears sombre and even quite upset. He
writes that the monk has a business-like way of illustrating a touching story, and calls his
performance ‘‘grotesque’’ and ‘‘ghastly’’: ‘‘I hardly knew whether to smile or shudder’’
(Twain, 1869, p. 301). He compares the monk’s performance to that of a surgeon, telling of a
recently deceased patient in medical terminology. The monk eventually adopts a more
sombre tone, speaking of his own mortality and desire to be buried in the convent, which
seems to placate Twain:
I asked the monk if all the brethren up stairs expected to be put in this place when they died. He
answered quietly:
‘‘We must all lie here at last.’’
See what one can accustom himself to. – The re?ection that he must some day be taken apart like
an engine or a clock, or like a house whose owner is gone, and workedupinto arches and pyramids
and hideous frescoes, did not distress this monk in the least. I thought he even looked as if he were
thinking, with complacent vanity, that his own skull would look well on top of the heap and his own
ribs add a charm to the frescoes which possibly they lacked at present (Twain, 1869, p. 301).
Continuing around the convent, Twain ?nds one skull that particularly interests him. Lying in
one of the ornamental alcoves is a dead and dried-up monk. The pilgrims examine it closely,
noting the details of its posture. The head is of most interest; with its yellow teeth, sunken
eyes and prominent nostrils, the skull appears to be laughing.
It was the jolliest laugh, but yet the most dreadful, that one can imagine. Surely, I thought, it must
have been a most extraordinary joke this veteran produced with his latest breath, that he has not
got done laughing at it yet. At this moment I saw that the old instinct was strong upon the boys,
and I said we had better hurry to St Peter’s. They were trying to keep from asking, ‘‘Is – is he
dead?’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 302).
Considering present death – temporally, socially and spatially closer in proximity than the
Christian Cult of Death – the pilgrims tour a Parisian morgue. At the time, ‘‘the Morgue served
as a visual auxiliary to the newspaper, staging the recently dead who had been sensationally
detailed by the printed word’’, and attracted as many as 40,000 visitors on big days (Schwartz,
1995, p. 298). Twain does not specify which morgue, and it appears not to be a pre-motivated
visit, or indeed one that he held in any anticipation, but several, such as the morgue situated
on the quai de l’Archeveche behind Notre Dame, but now a memorial (Schwartz, 1998), were
open to the visiting public at the time. Although only afforded a few paragraphs, Twain’s
morgue encounter is one of the most striking thanatourism experiences in The Innocents.
Nineteenth-century Parisian morgues institutionalised the viewing of corpses (Schwartz,
1998), acting as receptacles where those who died unidenti?ed in the city could be exhibited
to the public for identi?cation. Although Twain offers no explanation as to why the pilgrims
visited the morgue, such visits were relatively commonplace for tourists in Paris, particularly
for English visitors who could not easily visit morgues at home (Schwartz, 1998), and sought
an authentic experience in nineteenth-century Paris (MacCannell, 1989). Given that Parisian
morgues featured on established touring routes, appearing in guidebooks alongside
attractions – a slaughterhouse, accommodation and other civic buildings (MacCannell,
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1989) – and that Twain frequently mentions their private guide’s control of their itinerary, it is
possible that the pilgrims’ morgue visit was part of a pre-arranged itinerary.
At the morgue, Twain comments on the poignancy of the encounter, particularly in relation to
the gore and horror of the experience. He uses the adjectives ‘‘horrible’’, ‘‘dismal’’ and
‘‘dread’’, (Twain, 1869, p. 133) among others, to describe the sights of the freshly deceased
corpses. He describes one corpse, recently deceased from drowning:
On a slanting stone lay a drowned man, naked, swollen, purple; clasping the fragment of a broken
bush with a grip which death had so petri?ed that human strength could not unloose it – mute
witness of the last despairing effort to save the life that was doomed beyond all help (Twain, 1869,
p. 133).
Twain makes several further comments on the encounter that posit the morgue as a public
exhibition or spectacle, not dissimilar to today’s touring exhibitions of cadavers (Stone,
2012a). Discussing a recent victim of drowning, Twain imagines a grieving mother and his
language again conjures up thanatoptic imagery:
Wegrewmeditativeandwonderedif, somefortyyearsago, whenthemotherof that ghastlythingwas
dandling it upon her knee, and kissing it and petting it and displaying it with satis?ed pride to the
passers-by, apropheticvisionof thisdreadendingever?ittedthroughherbrain(Twain, 1869, p. 133).
Finally, before leaving the morgue, Twain comments on the scale of the gore sought and
witnessed by the locals. In the morgue, Twain observes some visitors eagerly pressing their
faces against the bars to gaze on the corpses, only to be disappointed with the sight. These
people visit morgues regularly, ‘‘just as other people go to see theatrical spectacles every
night’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 133) and need a really gruesome sight to appease their appetite for
death. He comments on those who view the drowning victim with: ‘‘Now this don’t afford you
any satisfaction – a party with his head shot off is what you need’’, (Twain, 1869, p. 133).
4.2 Archaeology, battle?elds and the geography of death
Despite his discomfort at the actions of others at the morgue, Twain’s personal craving and
desire for spectacle death is equally gruesome, and particularly evident later in the
excursion when the pilgrims visit the Coliseum in Rome. Not content with a simple heritage
encounter, Twain uses his imagination to conjure up brutal scenes of death and dying, in his
usual vivid style. He imagines a ?ctional pamphlet, ‘‘The Roman Daily Battle Ax’’, which he
‘‘?nds’’ in the ruins. The pamphlet describes ‘‘last night’s slaughter’’ in detail, and Twain
gives the ?ctional newsletter some 1,200 words in The Innocents. He breathes life into his
surroundings, imagining the 60,000 people present for the slaughter, the impassable streets
and the royalty and pomp of the ceremony before the main event. He describes howa young
amateur delivered a blow to a gladiator, received ‘‘with a hearty applause’’, before being
killed in front of his regretful sisters. Another prisoner’s mother ‘‘ran screaming, with hair
dishevelled and tears streaming from her eyes, and swooned away just as her hands were
clutching at the railings of the arena’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 274).
He draws the introductory act to a close and introduces the main event, the gladiator
‘‘Marcus Marcellus Valerian (stage name – his real name is Smith)’’, an ‘‘artist of rare merit’’
with wonderful management of the battle axe. This gladiator slays two barbarians in Twain’s
tale, one with a blow to the head and the other by cleaving the barbarian’s body in half to the
wild applause of the audience. Finally, the ‘‘Battle Ax’’ draws events to a close, promising an
afternoon matinee for the young folk.
Later on their itinerary, the pilgrims visit the buried city of Pompeii, one of the best known
thanatourism attractions of the Romantic era (Seaton, 1996). Buried in 79 AD by the nearby
volcano Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii was covered with four to six metres of ash for some 1,800
years (Twain, 1869, p. 327). Although the city was partially rediscovered in 1599, full
excavations did not commence until 1738 (Cooley and Cooley, 2004). Today the ruins are a
major tourist attraction, with UNESCO designation and approximately 2.5 million visitors per
year (UNESCO, 2012). In Twain’s era tourism to Pompeii was very much a feature of the
Grand Tour, allowing aristocratic tourists to wander the streets, gaze upon the excavations
and touch the ruins of the city:
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They pronounce it Pom-pay-e. I always had an idea that you went down into Pompeii with torches,
by way of damp, dark stairways, just as you do in silver mines, and traversed gloomy tunnels with
lava overhead and something on either hand like dilapidated prisons gouged out of the solid
earth, that faintly resembled houses. But you do nothing of the kind (Twain, 1869, p. 327).
It would be easy to situate Victorian consumption of Pompeii as a heritage tourismencounter
– the preserved ruins of the city served (and still serve) a clear function as a link to the past.
During his visit to Pompeii, Twain makes many comments about the ruins of the city in
general and their status as preserved and toured archaeology. There is an undeniable
beauty to ruins, of course, which allows for imaginative interpretation, providing a seductive
emptiness, space for contemplation and in Twain’s case, space for personal re?ection.
Given the environment, and Twain’s vivid imagination, it was easy for him to breathe life back
into his surroundings, as at the Coliseum. As he lounges through the utterly deserted streets,
he imagines ‘‘where thousands and thousands of human beings once bought and sold, and
walked and rode, and made the place resound with the noise and confusion of traf?c and
pleasure’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 331). The desolation of Pompeii’s ruins hold (for Twain) a visual
contrast to the status they once held, whether this was as a simple dwelling place of the
everyday man or a symbol of vibrant market and social life. Yet, Pompeii offered a layered
experience, and Twain uses the space primarily to contemplate dying and death:
In one of these long Pompeiian halls the skeleton of a man was found, with ten pieces of gold in
one hand and a large key in the other. He had seized his money and started towards the door, but
the ?ery tempest caught him at the very threshold, and he sank down and died. One more minute
of precious time would have saved him. I saw the skeletons of a man, a woman, and two young
girls. The woman had her hands spread wide apart, as if in mortal terror, and I imagined I could
still trace upon her shapeless face something of the expression of wild despair that distorted it
when the heavens rained ?re in these streets, so many years ago (Twain, 1869, p. 333).
Twain’s encounters with dying at Pompeii lead himto consider his own mortality – for him, the
ruins act as a portal into the great unknown of death, which he used to contemplate the act of
dying. He ?nishes his visit to Pompeii illustrating the depths of his thanatoptic experience.
Hearing a cry for his return train to Naples, he awakens from a daydream, to be reminded
that he belongs ‘‘in the nineteenth century, and was not a dusty mummy, caked with ash and
cinders, eighteen hundred years old. The transition was startling’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 335).
The spatial organisation of Pompeii plays a major role in constructing Twain’s thanatourism
experience. The geography of death, or deathscape, mediates his gaze; he has the
opportunity to view a corpse that was mummi?ed by a natural event, he can touch the
archaeological ruins of the corpse’s surroundings and consider the dilemma faced by the
owner of the gold coins during the volcanic eruption. For the pilgrims, Pompeii was a
temporally distant, if relatively spatially close event, and required both imagination and
interpretation to provoke consideration of death. But the pilgrims were not limited to
consuming such temporally distant events on their excursion. In an early example of
time-space compression facilitating the availability of battle?eld tourism, the pilgrims visit
Sebastopol; a battle?eld from the recent Crimean War, which took place just over a decade
prior, from 1853 to 1856:
Sebastopol is probably the worst battered town in Russia or anywhere else. [. . .] Ruined Pompeii
is in good condition compared to Sebastopol. Here, you may look in whatsoever direction you
please, and your eye encounters scarcely anything but ruin, ruin, ruin! – fragments of houses,
crumbled walls, torn and ragged hills, devastation everywhere! It is as if a mighty earthquake had
spent all its terrible forces upon this one little spot (Twain, 1869, pp. 381, 382).
In September 1854, allied troops from France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire landed in the
Crimea and besieged the city of Sevastopol. Sebastopol, also called Sevastopol, was home
to the Black Sea Fleet, a navy that threatened the allied forces in the Mediterranean. The
siege became one of the major battles in the Crimean war, lasting from September 1854 to
September 1855. Like the battle of Waterloo (Seaton, 1999), the Siege of Sebastopol was
watched by British tourists even as it happened (Gordon, 1998). Tourism to battle?elds has
long been popular, and Vanderbilt (2002, p. 135) notes the legacy of war usually results in
tourism:
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All wars end in tourism. Battle?elds are rendered as scenic vistas, war heroes are frozen into gray
memorials in urban parks, tanks and other weapons bask outside American Legion posts on
suburban strips.
Twelve years after the siege of Sebastopol, Twain and the pilgrims visited the battle?elds.
Although they spend but a few hours on site, Twain devotes several pages to describing the
experience, mainly detailing the scars of war left by the siege. He describes how‘‘the storms
of war’’ beat down upon the houses, solid stone houses all ploughed through by cannon
balls, smashed, unroofed and with holes driven through the walls:
These fearful ?elds, where such tempests of death used to rage, are peaceful enough now; no
sound is heard, hardly a living thing moves about them, they are lonely and silent – their
desolation is complete (Twain, 1869, p. 384).
With little to see beyond destruction, the group takes to hunting relics. One over-eager
pilgrim riles Twain with his relentless collection of artefacts, taking two full sack loads on
board to add to his collection. ‘‘Cannon balls, broken ramrods, fragments of shell – iron
enough to freight a sloop’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 385) are gathered by the pilgrims, with some
bringing bones, hoping them to be human. Disappointment comes for the looters when told
by the ship’s surgeon that the bones belong to animals. Other fragments are collected from
the battle?eld and mislabelled to increase their value back home. Frustrated with one
companion, Twain challenges him over a mislabelled horse jaw-bone and teeth:
[Twain]: ‘‘Fragment of a Russian General! This is absurd. Are you never going to learn any sense?’’
He [Twain’s companion] only said: ‘‘Go slow – the old woman [his aunt at home] won’t know any
different.’’ (Twain, 1869, p. 385).
Their plunder of the site complete, the pilgrims depart.
5. Discussion
5.1 Motivation, experience and affect
Seaton made clear in his original de?nition that thanatourism comprised travel to sites
motivated by a desire to encounter death, whether death was seen as the principal
motivation or even at all consciously seen as a motivation (Seaton, 2009a, p. 522). Seaton
(1996) acknowledged that thanatourism existed across a continuum of intensity, regulated
by tourist motivations and knowledge of the deceased; the more differentiated a traveller’s
knowledge of the dead, the paler his/her thanatourismexperience would be. Conversely, the
weaker the knowledge of the dead, the stronger the pure thanatourism element.
While we know much already about the reproduction of death for tourist consumption
(e.g. Keil, 2005; Macdonald, 2006; Strange and Kempa, 2003), and increasingly more about
tourist motivations to consume reproduced death (for examples, see Biran et al., 2011; Hyde
and Harman, 2011) there is comparatively less research on the thanatourism experience
(Stone, 2009), and almost none at the purest end of the scale – i.e. purposeful consumption
or deep contemplation of deliberately commodi?ed death. One could posit that little is
known about the psychological impacts of encountering death in a touristic form. Key
questions persist, such as, for example, what do tourists contemplate when facing
commodi?ed death? How do they negotiate the paradox of death as an everyday
occurrence, anthropological constant and tourist attraction, yet also an extraordinary
departure in the lives of those affected? Does the experience impact on the tourist’s psyche?
If so, how? What insights does the encounter offer into the tourist’s own mortality? Is the
encounter carried forward into other parts of the tourist’s life?
The Innocents provides clues to some of these questions. Whilst it is acknowledged that
Twain is a literary icon, a nineteenth-century traveller, and a highly imaginative and often
eccentric individual, the representations of his experiences in The Innocents nonetheless
offer an insight into the power of thanatopsis. In his early thirties at the time of The Innocents,
Twain’s career as an author was at a relatively early stage. Publication of The Innocents in
1869, along with subsequent travelogue Roughing It (1872), helped launch him into
mainstreamAmerican literature. In The Innocents, Twain’s representation of the thanatourism
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experience is eloquent, often sensitive and most importantly, laden with personal re?ection.
Many of the sites visited by Twain offered a very intimate and involved encounter. At
Sebastopol, for example, his compatriots touch the landscape, collecting artefacts from the
soil, holding the bones of whom they believe to be the deceased, an encounter that clearly
upsets Twain. Similarly, in the Capuchin Convent, they are guided by a monk who also
touches the bones of deceased contemporaries, a ‘‘grotesque performance’’ (Twain, 1869,
p. 301) for Twain. But the sensory experience of ‘‘touching’’ death is not the only mediating
in?uence for him, and he comments on his auditory experience at a number of sites. The
silence of the ?elds in Sebastopol and the irreverent whistling of a train in Pompeii are but two
of many examples throughout The Innocents. It could be argued therefore that although
‘‘gaze’’ is used in tourism literature generally as a ‘‘catch all’’, the sensory experience of
consuming death is far greater than a visual encounter. Smell, touch, auditory and taste are
generally absent from thanatourism literature, yet must surely play a role in constructing the
experience. A morbid thought, perhaps, but a potential avenue for future research in
thanatourism consumption, one that would likely require new methodological approaches.
5.2 Methodologies and the geography of thanatourism
Twain’s encounters illustrate the need for an examination of the geography of thanatourism.
Despite the established focus in contemporary literature on the supply of sites (Biran et al.,
2011), the physical properties of deathscapes have received surprisingly less attention
(Charlesworth and Addis, 2002). Tourismis an inherently spatial activity, yet many thanatourism
publications neglect to comment on the ecology, topography, architecture and other physical
attributes of sites. Weathering, new construction, invasive species and other activities at the
sites take their toll on the topography and ecology. Does this impact on the thanatourist
experience? Although few authors have explored the mediating power of deathscapes, or
indeed noted the ?uidity of the geography, work by Charlesworth and Addis (2002) and Iles
(2008) explicitly draws attention to the impact of the physical landscape on the thanatourist.
Further to the ecology and topography, thanatopsis, the gaze on death, or what could be
termed a ‘‘thanagaze’’, is in?uenced by autonomous and organic images. In The Innocents,
Twain comments on his expectations, explicitly noting that they have been precon?gured by
tour guides, guidebooks, signage and popular literature. Semiotics have been studied to
some degree in thanatourism, with Keil (2005) noting the power of signage and
memorialisation in constructing the thanatourism experience at Auschwitz Birkenau.
However, despite an increasing volume of empirical material on the role of signage in
constructing the thanatourism experience and provoking thanatopsis, there has yet to be a
broader conceptual engagement with the semiotics of death and the resulting implications
for management and tourist behaviour.
6. Conclusion
Exploration into the darkest thanatourism experiences will provide a better understanding of
how and why society and individuals contemplate mortality. Walter (2009, p. 55) writes that
‘‘ may be wrong that most dark tourism visits are typically contingent rather than
motivated’’; and that thanatourists do not seek to remedy a demonstrable senses of
detachment from morality by seeking encounters with death. Many of Twain’s visits were
indeed contingent, or serendipitous in nature, yet his contemplation of death would appear
to lie at the darkest end of the spectrum. While he was of course a well-known author and
dramatized his experiences for popular consumption, it is evident that ‘‘The Other’’ of death
was the de?ning feature of many of his experiences. In The Innocents, Twain is variously
disgusted and frustrated by his colleagues’ behaviour and the behaviour of his guides; in
particular, at the lack of empathy and sensitivity they display towards the dead. For Twain
their actions are inappropriate and cold, provoking a great degree of discomfort. However,
the most frequent behaviour Twain exhibits is his humour and he negotiates the paradox of
consuming death with recourse to wit and satire. While this humour in consuming death may
not be widespread beyond Twain, the examples illustrated throughout the paper serve to
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remind that the potential breadth of behaviours when encountering death is much broader
than currently re?ected in the literature, which focuses mostly on empathy.
Twain’s encounters with deathscapes, at both temporally close and temporally distant sites,
provides further evidence that thanatourism has the power to induce anxiety beyond
contemplation of the failings of modernity and contemplation of those who passed within
living memory. This notion is in con?ict with Lennon and Foley’s (2000) and Rojek’s (1993)
work, which situate thanatourismwithin a post-modernity paradigm, by focussing on tourism
at sites associated with the failings of modern institutions. Twain’s contemplation of
temporally distant death, far beyond living memory and exhibiting little in relation to
institutions of modernity, serves to illustrate that theoretical re?ection on thanatourism may
bene?t from looking beyond the postmodern frame of reference.
Finally, in terms of methodological signi?cance, Twain’s experience in The Innocents illustrates
the need for new methodological approaches in thanatourism research. While not all
thanatourists possess Twain’s imaginative prowess or the opportunity to publish their
experiences so conspicuously (travel blogs aside), contemporary tourists will encounter
equally mediated thanatourism experiences. The challenge is to uncover the breadth of
production and consumption in?uences that mediate the gaze on death; while acknowledging
the varying differences in meaning invested by tourists. Recent methodological innovations in
thanatourism research have proposed approaches that are increasingly sympathetic to the
highly personal process of contemplating death. Dunkley et al. (2011) propose a
compassionate oral history approach, Iles (2008) adopts an ethnographic approach,
Seaton (2012) uses guestbook comments as a data source, while Sharpley (2012) draws upon
travel blog research. Such methodological innovations are necessary to overcome the
possible reluctance to discuss death, noted by Biran et al. (2011).
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About the author
Tony Johnston is a Lecturer in Development Geography in the Department of Geography,
King’s College London. His research focuses on the cultural geographies and spatial
aspects of deathscapes. His research has a particular focus on the commodi?cation and
consumption of death for tourism purposes. He has previously published on the
commodi?cation of the 1990s con?ict in the Balkans. Tony Johnston can be contacted at:
[email protected]
VOL. 7 NO. 3 2013
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