Mark Twain wrote about a trip to Europe and the Middle East in his book Innocents Abroad, and in the course of the book he also reveals much that he observes about American foreign policy in the broadest sense. This means not so much about foreign policy as it is thought of with reference to the policies of the American government but more about the source of such policy, meaning the attitudes of the American people toward foreign climes. On the one hand, Twain criticizes certain behavior on the part of his fellow-travelers which shows them to be arrogant toward as well as somewhat ignorant about many of the regions through which they travel. On the other hand, Twain himself shows many of these same traits as he also assumes the superiority of anything American over anything foreign.
The Innocents Abroad is a book that started as a series of letters written by Mark Twain for a newspaper in San Francisco concerning his 1867 trip on the Quaker City. The travelers on this ship were for the most part motivated by a desire to see the Holy Land. Twain's major purpose in making this trip was to see a part of the world he had not yet seen, and his purpose in writing this book was to reveal to others what he had seen with his own eyes, the reality of the world separated from the interferences of pretense and convention. He wanted the account to be both informative and entertaining. The book that resulted is a mixture of irreverence and the promotion of America as an ideal. One of the central themes in the work is the degree to which the reality differs from the expectations of the narrator. The narrator visits not only the Holy Land but most of Europe, and he reacts to such institutions as Paris, the Old Masters in Italy, and Roman Catholicism. Twain also poked fun at the hypocrisies of the religious pilgrims traveling with him and at such other elements common to travelers as guidebooks and hotel rooms.
The trip -- called the great Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land -- was much advertised before Twain joined. Much of the trip is described as structured on one indignity after another, and putting up with the vagaries of travel is what Twain calls being "foreignized":
We are getting foreignized rapidly, and with facility. We are getting reconciled to halls and bed-chambers with unhomelike stone floors, and no carpets -- floors that ring to the tread of one's heels with a sharpness that is death to sentimental musing. We are getting used to tidy, noiseless waiters, who glide hither and thither, and hover about your back and your elbows like butterflies... (Twain 71).
Twain takes note of many of the problems encountered by the traveler. In Genoa, Twain is exposed to the machinations of a guide, and he describes this experience in a way that evokes in the reader memories of other guides who did not serve the needs of their charges:
Perdition catch all the guides. This one said he was the most gifted linguist in Genoa, as far as English was concerned, and that only two persons in the city beside himself could talk the language at all (Twain 126).
In these passages, Twain displays the style that carries throughout this book, a mixture of humor and serious complaint at the same time. Twain writes a conclusion to his book one year after the trip has ended and makes an interesting observation about memory and travel:
Nearly one year has flown since this notable pilgrimage was ended; and as I sit here at home in San Francisco thinking, I am moved to confess that day by day the mass of my memories of the excursion have grown more and more pleasant as the disagreeable incidents of travel which encumbered them flitted one by one of out my mind -- and now, if the Quaker City were weighing her anchor to sail away on the very same cruise again, nothing could gratify me more than to be a passenger. With the same captain and even the same pilgrims, the same sinners (Twain 555).
Twain's description of his journey is detailed and offers some of the history of the different...
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