A Room with a View- Tourist vs. Traveler

In the movie A room with a view, based on a book by E M Foster, I found that it showed perfectly the example of a person being a tourist or a traveler.  In the movie we can see three women, Lucy, Ms. Bartlett and Ms. Lavish who went to Florence as a vacation trip.  It was evident that they went with a tourist mind and that situation can be seen in different aspects like the fact that Lucy didn't care of really knowing Florence and she just wanted a view of that magnificent place or either she fought for her view so she could actually study and comprehend Florence more as a traveler.  On the other hand, George Emerson is a traveler because he experiences interest in getting to know the people of Florence and England while he was staying there. He got out to explore and talk to people, trying to learning from the place where he was staying.

           

One quote that presents the idea of a tourist and a traveler is when Lucy explains that she went to Italy as a tourist and Mr. Eager replies: "We residents sometimes pity you poor tourists not a little. Handed about like a parcel of goods from Venice to Florence, Florence to Rome, quite unconscious of anything outside Baedeker. Their one anxiety to get done and flew and go on elsewhere else." This is a perfect explanation on how tourists do not really interact with the culture of the place they are visiting because in many cases they just visit certain places, take pictures and leave. Maybe they pity that the tourists are losing the opportunity of enjoying a wonderful experience that they can have as a traveler. I agree with this point of view because I also think that you can enjoy better when you visit another country if you go having in mind that you are going to be a traveler, ready to see the real life in that country and not being encapsulated in a bubble like many people do by staying on the hotels all the time. This coincides with the opinion of Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place, where she criticizes the people (tourists) who only see the good in one place and do not see the reality of people living there.

Another quote is when Ms. Lavish said “one doesn’t come to Italy for niceness, one comes for life.” This is an example of an important internal journey, because we all go through experiences that shape us as a person, but traveling to other places gives us an opportunity to realize that there are other cultures, other ideas and values different to ours. We also can see the perspective of a tourist when Ms. Lavish said to Ms. Bartlett “two lone females in an unknown city, now that’s what I call an adventure”.  They saw it as an adventure but to really be an adventure you should first get a little knowledge of the place because you don't know if where you are walking is the most dangerous part of that place. This is a perfect example of the ignorant part of a tourist that Jamaica Kincaid talks about in her essays, which are resembled as persons living in a dream, thinking that they wont get hurt or that everything is going to turn out to be wonderful.

I think that Kincaid would respond to the British women, saying that they think that they are really living the experience of being in Italy but actually they have seen almost nothing. For a tourist to really live that experience the place has to make sure they have the materials (native people to guide them) and knowledge to do it.  The movie worked perfectly to show that comparison studied in class.  A tourist and a traveler may seem to be the same thing but it’s much more than that, it all falls in the way you think and the decisions you make when talking about visiting a new place.

Here is a trailer of the movie if you want to watch it!