A Norwegian Abroad: Camilla
Collett’s Travelogues from Berlin
and Paris
Tone Selboe
The Norwegian novelist and essayist Camilla Collett (1813–95) is mainly known for her one but seminal novel, The District Governor’s Daughters (Amtmandens Døttre, 1854–5) – often labelled Norway’s first modern novel, her campaign for women’s rights, and for being the sister of the poet Henrik Wergeland, Norway’s leading romantic poet. However, she is more than a one-novel author, campaigner and sister of a famous poet; she is a leading writer in her own right: six volumes of letters, essays and travelogues appeared between 1864 and 1885, most of them first published in papers and periodicals. Her essays on city life, urban planning, literature and history are striking examples of how a writer from the margins of Europe was in dialogue with what was going on in European life and literature at the time. Camilla Collett is also a major forerunner for ideas on gender and emancipation which came to the forefront with her younger male colleagues, associated with the so-called modern breakthrough in Scandinavian literature, writers such as the critic and literary historian Georg Brandes, the playwright Henrik Ibsen and the novelists Alexander Kielland and Jonas Lie.
Liberal ideas about freedom and equality, an influence from the French Revolution, were important for the family in which Collett grew up; her father was central in the fight for Norway’s independence in 1814, and instrumental in the work for a new constitution, one of the most modern and radical in Europe at the time. For Collett, however, it is the question of freedom and liberty for women, the fight for women’s rights and position in society, which is the main cause. Her travelogues from Europe are motivated by a didactic intention: she compares the young nation Norway to a small boy who still hasn’t learned to behave properly: he has great possibilities, he is bright, but has no Bildung: ‘He has to stop drinking, swearing and making a fuss, just because he is always keen on fighting. He must learn to treat women better than he does’ (III, 158).1
In the following, I will interrogate Collett’s travelogues from Germany and France with a special emphasis on her Paris notes. I will discuss the interaction between urban planning, walking and city life, paying special attention to the relation between centre and periphery, or to be more precise, how a woman from the margins of Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century confronts her impressions of Berlin and Paris with the condition in ‘our own little parvenu’ – the capital of Norway: Christiania or Kristiania (now Oslo). I will venture to show how this indicates a European perspective steeped in what we may call an ambivalent modernity, which in various ways prefigures contemporary debates on urban planning and feminist thinking.
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As a young woman Camilla Collett travelled with her father to Germany and France, and as an ‘older’ widow she returned to Europe and lived for long periods in Berlin, Munich, Paris and Rome. In everything she writes she alludes to French and German writers and historians (she did not read English), and she takes part in the debates at the time. Thus, on the one hand, she was a European from the very start; on the other hand, the national identity had yet to be built: Norway gained its independence from Denmark in 1814 and was part of a union with Sweden until 1905.
In a letter from Berlin dated 30 October 1863, Camilla Collett praises Berlin’s wide, magnificent streets: ‘that ladies can walk alone along the streets . . . without being addressed or offended in any way’ represents a freedom she admires (II, 69). The observation leads her to a comparison with how things are in the poor Norwegian capital, Kristiania. There, Collett argues, men amuse themselves by pestering walking women, and she takes it upon herself to defend the necessity of street walking:
Yes, we will walk. We have to walk. The women who sit in their carriages are bored to death. Those times are gone, when the woman was for the man just an object of luxury, partly a valuable toy, partly a goddess meant to be worshipped. They have themselves pushed us unto the place of action, where we have to work, acquire, fight, and move about, in one word: we have to walk. (III, 158)
Walking thus becomes a metaphor for independence, a synonym for taking part in life on an equal footing with men. The insisting, almost stubborn ‘we will walk’ reads like a sort of manifesto, and the way Collett connects walking with work, struggle and action gives this impression. Walking – walking the city streets alone – becomes a metaphor for independence. Sitting still is seen as synonymous with not taking part in life whereas to walk means to participate in life’s struggles. It may be more convenient to be driven in a carriage, but you risk being bored to death.
The letter from Berlin is just one of many Collett wrote in her almost forty years of travelling – letters which can be read as contemporary comments on the cities she is visiting – Copenhagen, Munich, Berlin, Rome, Paris. From 1851, when her husband Jonas Collett dies, and until her death in 1895, she has no real or stable home, but spends her life travelling Europe, visiting various European cities. Streets, parks and simple rooms in hotels and guest houses become her ‘home’; travelling and writing her way of living. In Copenhagen she is run over, in Paris she is stuck in a lift and as a result has to be hospitalised, in Rome she loses money – but nothing stops her. ‘The eternal Jew could hardly lead a life more like a vagabond’, her son Oscar comments in a letter (qtd in Steen 1954: 213).
It has been pointed out how Collett’s travelling life, without a safe home to return to, in significant ways differs from the lives of her younger male contemporaries – the writers of the Scandinavian modern breakthrough with Ibsen as a leading figure – who despite their attack on the bourgeois marriage made sure they themselves had a stable family life (Steinfeld 1996: 80). In fact, Collett’s writing could as well be located in the European salons of the nineteenth century as within a biographical and national context. As a young woman she is introduced to the finer circles of both Kristiania and abroad – she visits Hamburg and Paris – but she is also critical of a European culture which implies a certain superficial way of socialising. Thus, when Collett starts her travelling life as a mature woman, she shies away from the established social culture. Consequently, there is a great difference between her young self who goes to parties and balls and is celebrated as ‘the Nordic Beauty’, and her later, solitary self. When abroad as an older woman, she refuses most invitations to social events, and even though she keeps in touch with Ibsen in Munich and in Rome, and from time to time receives visitors (like the young writer, Alexander Kielland), she doesn’t really get involved with other writers and artists – many of whom she admires and reviews. It is the solitary drifting, the distance from the established social life, that becomes her trademark. She chooses to be at the margins and speak from the margins.
Collett is nevertheless well aware of the fact that her travelogues, her ‘letters home’, are part of a tradition and a genre. The letters are public rather than private, written for and to a Norwegian public, for national papers and magazines. Her texts defy a conventional definition of genre: like many of the important writers at the time, she moved between genres, wrote various forms of fiction and ‘faction’, without always making sharp distinctions between them.
The stylistic modus of the letter cum travelogue is the digression – the departure from the straight line of thought – and from the straight road of walking. The various sights on offer in the city are countered by the thematic and stylistic shifts in the text – from argumentative paragraphs on the battle between the sexes to amusing details about people on the bus or angry remarks on the development of the city. This elegant way of combining wandering and thought, movement and change of view, characteristic of the essay genre, makes it possible for the writer to situate herself in an ironic position in relation to the topics she explores. She places herself as part of a larger Norwegian ‘we’ while at the same time distancing herself from the ordinary home-grown traveller: ‘We Norwegians don’t understand about travelling as a way of letting go of ourselves’, she claims (II, 167), subtly indicating her difference from these ‘Norwegians’ by taking the reader for an amusing walk on Unter den Linden, on the Champs-Élysées or in the Tuileries Garden, instead of the expected visits to museums and monuments. Her slightly coquettish insistence on never experiencing much when out walking succeeds in pointing to the fact that her essays are full of witty and bizarre observations on daily life in the cities she visits.
Kristiania apart, Paris is the city Collett comments on most frequently. Walking the metropolis, she observes how people of all classes populate the streets and parks, and the daily life of Paris is compared with the dreariness of Kristiania. While Kristiania fails as a city when it comes to offer its inhabitants entertainment and recreation, this is not the case in Paris:
At the Champs-Élysées it is first and foremost the marionette-theatres that attract people; and again one is surprised on a day like this, in plain Norwegian that means being provoked, by how much time people spend on being amused. (II, 167)
Thus she writes in 1868. The tone is ironical, but there is no mistaking the message: when she substitutes ‘surprised’ for ‘provoked’, it is obvious that she is all in favour of the French worker’s ability to take time off and find entertainment in the middle of a busy city life. The point is one she returns to again and again: a city, in order to earn the name of city – not to mention metropolis and capital – should be able to offer its inhabitants places for recreation. In Paris the streets themselves, and even more importantly, the great parks and gardens, fill this function. In Kristiania, however, there is nowhere a working family can enjoy itself. Consequentially, the Tuileries Garden is a favourite spot; if you walk there on any day of the week, Collett states, you get the impression that Paris is a light and festive city. Everybody will be out on the streets walking and talking; not only those entitled to walk and not work, the flâneurs and idlers of the city, but even ‘those classes, which one at that time of the day imagines being working or slaving away at school’ (II, 165).
In spite of the idealising view on Paris life, typical of the enthusiastic tourist, the argument is consistent with her view on urban planning at large: the city should be structured in a way which engenders a balance between work and play, and even more importantly, between private and public. In Norway, she argues elsewhere, there has been an increasing tendency to privatise public land, and as a consequence, social groups have been increasingly separated. Hence, by referring to Paris, Collett seeks to educate her fellow Norwegians to abolish ‘this difference between behaviour and habitus’ that in Kristiania emphasises rather than abolishes the difference between the classes (III, 203). She even goes as far as pointing to private property as the enemy, herself underlining the words. This does not imply that Collett is some sort of pre-Marxist class warrior; the concept of class itself she finds archaic as well as useless, although she, for lack of a better word, employs it herself. Her point is informed by her liberal-progressive background: she wants all social groups to be able to enjoy the common good on equal terms.
When it comes to class, her attitude is driven by a sense of morality and aesthetics rather than one of economy or politics; she is herself of a different social class from the ones she defends. When it comes to gender, however, her argument is socially and politically motivated: a city which excludes women from its common grounds, for instance by refusing them the right to walk alone – as we saw in the quote from the Berlin letter above – is failing as a city, not to say a modern metropolis. Public spaces should be open to all. Hence, she is also criticising the Norwegian distinction between public and private garden, or between park and garden, the former being public, the latter private:
At home, we are very happy about having something we call our own garden, especially if it has the advantage of one being able to discover, without being seen oneself, what kind of dressing-gown the mistress next door is wearing while walking about in her garden. By this treasure we mean a patch of land between three sides of painted wood, with a bird-house, so protected that not even the sparrows may indiscreetly take a look at the family-tea-drinking-mystery. [. . .] We are all very proud and very happy that we are the owners of such a patch of blessed land. (II, 165)
While the Norwegian first and foremost protects the enclosed, private garden, this is not, according to Collett, the case for the Frenchman. Therefore, she goes on to compare the Norwegian and the Frenchman, and there is no doubt whom she sides with: if you offer a Frenchman such a patch of ground, he will say: no thanks, I have my garden, which costs me neither money nor work and irritations, but has everything I need of entertainment, social life and cultivated nature. In short, the Frenchman needs no other garden than the Tuileries Garden.
And the Frenchman is right, according to Collett: in the public garden he – she! – gets everything one can ask for; an ideal combination of nature and culture – museums, churches, park and garden all in one. City and home are in harmony. In Norway, on the contrary, the very concept of home is anti-urban; it is inextricably linked to having your own house, garden and fence where ‘we’, between three sides of painted fence, can keep the neighbours away.
Behind this rather polished anecdote about the Frenchman and the Norwegian, there is another argument hiding which comes to the surface in later, more polemical essays, namely, that the division between private and public has its gendered side: the more the public space is privatised, the more women are confined to the home. The woman is, in other words, more likely to walk in the private than in the public garden, and in a country with no parks, she is more homebound than in a country which has the public garden, that is, the park, as the family playground.
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All of Camilla Collett’s Paris notes between 1864 and 1884 circle around what she calls the old and the new Paris, or Paris before and now. Despite her ‘modern’ way of thinking and looking upon a city, she is a great nostalgic when it comes to the development of Paris. Le vieux Paris changes, and Collett, like so many travellers, favours the city as it was last time she visited. Thus, her complaints are more frequent the older she gets, and on her wanderings around the city she increasingly frets about the growing noise, traffic and dirt. Most of all, she attacks the building of the new city, what is known as the haussmannisation of Paris – the development and building of the boulevards led by Baron Haussmann between 1853 and 1868. Collett’s letters are contemporary comments on this radical restructuring of the French capital. In one of her essays, ‘Farewell’ (first printed 1864), the focus is on how the building of the boulevards destroys the quiet residential areas – the gardens and houses of old Paris. ‘Her’ Paris, what she calls her ‘paradise’, has been invaded by a snake: ‘Paradise doesn’t exist without a snake, and it was not lacking here either, it was called a boulevard, a boulevard on which work is going on’ (II, 131). The point is that this modern monster called the boulevard destroys houses, gardens and narrow winding roads. What Collett terms the aristocratic – the small, narrow road – is being overtaken by the boring normality – the boulevard.
In the years following Haussmann’s restructuring of the French capital, the tone as well as the critique sharpens, and even her beloved Tuileries Garden falls out of favour as she gets older. The quietness of the park is, in her opinion, overtaken by noise. The streets as well as the park become vulgarised beyond recognition. In the 1860s she is still positive to the social life she observes in the city; in the travelogues from 1882 and 1884, on the contrary, the earlier celebration of different groups and classes meeting in the park is absent from her vision – and her texts. The age of the crowd is not looked upon favourably: ‘Every day, when the weather is fine, I walk in the garden, my dear garden, the Tuileries Garden, and I cry about the changes’ (III, 181). The nostalgic tone is nevertheless mixed with one of humour; the trees are being cut in order to build barracks, one of them is placed on the spot once reserved for Marie Antoinette and Lamballe: ‘over the door there is an inscription which – I don’t understand English – sounded something like: Watter closets’ (III, 181). Collett may not understand much English, but she does understand enough in order to make a rhetorical point: the common crowd has taken the place of the aristocracy, the trees are replaced by human nature in its lowest form, so to speak.
One might say that while she embraces the old city – le vieux Paris – she benefits from the new. Thus, she seems to place herself between the pre-modern city of Balzac (whom she both admires and comments on), and the modern city of Haussmann (whom she never mentions by name). She may condemn the development of Paris, but Collett is consistent in neither her praise nor her complaints. Although she is definitely more of an observer than a woman of leisure parading the streets, she also enjoys the freedom of the crowd made possible by the modern boulevard, and she challenges the engrained prejudice that the nineteenth-century woman cannot walk the metropolis alone – unless she is a prostitute, in mourning or disguised as a man. Besides, the ‘anti-haussmannic’ critique of the boulevards appears as a paradoxical parallel to the celebration of the German avenues (written almost at the same time) with which I started, where she embraces the fact that it is precisely the magnificent wide streets that allow women to walk alone. Here they can see, and be seen. Even in her Paris letters, however, she sometimes lets herself go with the flow along the modern boulevard: ‘And thus one can let oneself stroll with the flow of the pedestrians for how long one doesn’t know, one doesn’t walk, one doesn’t recognize that one has feet; one is only eyes’ (II, 169). Here, it is as if Collett forgets her critical perspective and simply enjoys the pleasure of walking with her eyes, in the manner of a true flâneuse. Whether the figure of the flâneur is a useful one to account for this is, however, less self-evident, as the figure is open to such a variety of interpretations – from a distinct late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Parisian type with a mask of pleasurable non-participation, to a metaphor for the perspective of the modern artist in general, the one who goes botanising on the asphalt, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s famous expression. The main point is, however, that although the historical flâneur – the leisurely city walker whose principal aim was to stroll and observe city life – was a man, Camilla Collett’s words confirm that female writers, like their male colleagues, have in fact given their views on the modern city as well as enjoyed walking the metropolitan streets. Her words are thus in line with the feminist appropriation of the term in recent years (cf. Wolff 1989; Parsons 2000).
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Parks, public spaces and promenades are recurrent topics in Collett’s travelogues: Copenhagen has the King’s Garden, London its Hyde Park, Paris has the Champs-Élysées as well as the Tuileries Garden and Bois de Boulogne; in Berlin Unter den Linden and in Rome Monte Pincio provide entertainment for the public – ‘Poor Kristiania!’ has nothing of the kind. Historians have confirmed her view on the nineteenth-century Norwegian capital: after the disastrous fires in 1658 and 1686, where large parts of the city were destroyed, the city was rebuilt in bits and pieces and still, in the late nineteenth century, looked like a sort of untidy patchwork, with no proper parks or public gardens. Thus, when Collett compares Kristiania with cities like Berlin and Paris, it comes as no surprise to find that she regards Kristiania as a great village – ce grand village, she names it – rather than a city.
She might well criticise the development of Paris, but the freedom of the street and the park, the mixing of people regardless of class and background, and first and foremost, the freedom to walk, are nevertheless presented as an ideal when her focus is on Kristiania – ‘this is what Christiania lacks the most, and before something is done about it, it has no right to be called a metropolis’, she writes in 1882 (III, 201). And in her campaign for public parks she is in fact in accordance with one of Haussmann’s major transformations of urban space: the creation and extension of spaces for the public good.
Collett’s strange mixing of conservatism and liberal ideas, her loyalty to king and tradition combined with radical pleas for social and urban change, is part of the essays’ ambiguous pattern. It is criticism and anger that are her fuel and she is often at her best when she is attacking someone or something. And if we now return to the topic we started out with – walking, or more precisely, men’s contempt of women walking alone – we will see that her Berlin letter from 1863 is countered sixteen years later, in 1879, by an another essay concerned with women and walking, or to be more precise, women’s position in Kristiania. She acknowledges that things are better now than back in the 1860s – a woman is no longer openly attacked when walking the streets alone – but the unpleasant feeling of being pursued only because she is on the street by herself remains. Collett calls it ‘roof-dropping-sensations’ (takdrypfornemmelser), that is, the unpleasant sensation which arises when drops of rain, or melting snow, fall from the roofs and down on women walking the streets:
She may walk alone now, without fear. She will, however, only in the rarest of moments avoid bringing back home a feeling as if she had to be protected against nasty drippings from the roofs. Nobody has stopped her, nobody has dared to address her, she has only been reminded of – that she is walking alone. (III, 15)
The point is of course that even though the woman now may walk alone, she is constantly reminded of the price she has to pay in the form of nasty looks or sly remarks – like wet drops falling on her.
Collett brings her impressions from abroad back to the Norwegian capital in order to change ‘our own little parvenu’ and educate the Norwegian people. Her attack on Kristiania connects the right to walk with the right to be, and moving in the city with the question of emancipation. If a city is to earn the right to call itself a city, it must offer its inhabitants––all of its citizens––places where they can move freely, and if a nation is to be regarded as a civilised nation, it must offer its women the right to walk the streets alone.
1.All quotes from Collett are from her collected works, Mindeudgave, vols II–III (1913), and are my translation. This chapter is based on my book Camilla Collett: Engasjerte essays (2013).
WORKS CITED
Collett, Camilla (1913), Samlede verker: Mindeudgave, vols II–III, Kristiania: Gyldendal.
Parsons, Deborah L. (2000), Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Selboe, Tone (2013), Camilla Collett: Engasjerte essays, Oslo: Aschehoug.
Steen, Ellisiv (1954), Den lange strid: Camilla Collett og hennes senere forfatterskap, Oslo: Gyldendal.
Steinfeld, Torill (1996), Den unge Camilla Collett: Et kvinnehjertes historie, Oslo: Gyldendal.
Wolff, Janet (1989), ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Problem of Modernity’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Problem of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, London and New York: Routledge.