Brontë Charlotte - Freuds couch, Scotts buttocks, Brontës grave

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Great thanks to my traveling companions, who also read the draft chapters, David and Helen Stone and Daniel Eilon.

Deep thanks also to my colleagues in the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group, Clare Pettitt and Peter Mandler, who read and made helpful comments on the manuscript, as did Miriam Leonard, as ever. I discussed it all with Helen Morales, who is on a pilgrimage of her own. The readers for the University of Chicago Press were exceptional for the understanding they evinced in their reports and the trouble they took in reading with such care.

Most profound thanks to my wife, for traveling, reading, and putting up with the whole project. She found several new ways to articulate Reader, I married him during the composition of this book.

THE GOLDEN TICKET

I HAVE NEVER STOPPED being slightly anxious about the premise of this book. Make a pilgrimage, proposed my editor over a grilled tuna salad. Go anywhere and write about it. It sounds at first like a golden ticket. A set of destinations rose like a sunrise in my mind. The romance of the dusty open road, or at very least a Kerouac fantasy, is part of the adolescent mind of everyone of my generation. The mysterious traveler who blows into town, the life- changing encounter with a stranger, never forgotten, never recovered, the slow climb that reveals the breathtaking viewwe all share these cultural myths, as we trudge to work or sit halfheartedly at the desk.

The trouble is that any really serious pilgrim travels alone. You are meant to make a journey where the very traveling leads you to explore yourself, your relation to God, or your life or your past. The endpoint is somehow only a small part of the process of inward transformation. This sort of pilgrimage started with the early Christians. A woman called Egeria left France and went to the Holy Land in the fourth century. It is boggling to imagine how hard it must have been, even with the securities of the Roman Empire and its straight roads and military checkpoints, for a woman to travel alone, as a Christian when Christianity was still a precarious institution, across such a distance and in such conditions. But not only did she make it there and back, she also wrote an account for her fellow sisters of the Church, telling of her tearful, overwhelmed response to the sites of the Passion, and of the services and worship she saw. It is one of the very first bits of prose we have written by a woman, and it now survives just in fragments, a tattered glimpse of her journey across deserts and darkness toward her enlightenment. I have a soft spot too for Prudentius, the fourth- century Christian Latin poet from Spain, who describes stopping in a church on his solitary trip to Rome, where he lay on the ground in front of the picture of a saint, weeping and wailing all afternoon at the image of martyrdom. Thats how pilgrims do iton bloodied knees, crawling toward an epiphany of self-awareness.

But I dont like being on my own. Although I am an academic who loves to spend all day in the library, and I get very jumpy if I dont get those long reading hours, nonetheless I dont like to eat alone, drink alone, sleep alone, walk alone, or even be silent for long. (I am not necessarily the person you want to sit next to in the library.) But if you go on a pilgrimage with a bunch of mates, I thought to myself, it is bound to turn into a comedy. You end up with Three Men in a Boat (and Montmorency the dog). Or Chaucers pilgrimsa bawdy, sexy, drunken crew who started from a pub for a good time out together, telling stories all the way. Even Robert Louis Stevenson, an intense and self-absorbed young man, found that his journey of self-discovery veered into comedy the moment he decided to travel with a donkey (called Modestine, and the real star of his Travels with a Donkey). When you are no longer alone, instead of the Kerouac moment on the open road, its Cliff Richard singing, Were all going on a summer holiday, or Little Miss Sunshine. I had no desire to go there. Travel with a group might just be able to escape comedy, I supposed, but only at the expense of something worse: I knew the shuffling lines at Lourdes, the coach parties in Jerusalem, intently following the upheld umbrella toward the photo op of spirituality. I had no desire to go there either.

My first attempt to find some middle ground between lonely, despairing self-analysis and group pranks involved me sidling up to my wife, the lawyer. She is used to cutting through the desperate prose of her opponents hopeful arguments. You want me to be the straight woman to your pilgrim wit, she sniffed. Or you want me to be the dumb American, while you expound on the history of places older than my country. Unattractive invitation. Im not taking time off work for that. (Lawyers do not think of time like you or I do. There is no place for pleasure, let alone a journey of self-discovery. Time is divided simply into billable hours and nonbillable hours.) As I further reflectedaloud, stupidly enoughthat a pilgrimage with ones wife would mean a journey of discovery into the complexities of marriage, a portrait of ones soul mate, so the prospect of a road trip for two