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A striking reduction of the visual: the imaginative and the familial gaze in Maria Wirtemberska’s Niektóre zdarzenia, myśli i uczucia doznane za granicą [Certain events, thoughts and feelings experienced abroad] (1816–1818)

ABSTRACT In July 1816, a Polish aristocrat, Maria Anna Countess von Württemberg-Montbéliard embarked on a journey across Silesia, Bohemia and Austria, to Italy and Switzerland. Her travel account Certain Events, Thoughts and Feelings Experienced Abroad has been branded the first Polish sentimental journey, and records incidents selected by the author on a purely subjective basis. One of the most striking features of the travelogue, hitherto unexplored, is its extremely limited reliance on the visual, which sometimes results in the almost complete exclusion of descriptive passages or mere references to visual sensations. As early as the first couple of pages in her travelogue, Maria Wirtemberska declares that she is not going to indulge in the visual or the descriptive, but will instead follow the lead of her feminine imagination. The tourist gazes, as distinguished by Urry (1995), including the romantic, the collective, the spectatorial and the environmental, do not seem applicable to the case of Wirtemberska’s tour, with the exception perhaps of an occasional anthropological glance. For Certain Events, instead, I would propose using the terms “imaginative gaze” and “familial gaze” to illuminate Countess Wirtemberska’s treatment of the visual.