The Motor Car and Popular Culture in the Twentieth Century

David Thoms, Len Holden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781859284612
• eBook ISBN: 9781351885461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This is a multidisciplinary analysis of the relationship between the motor car and popular culture in the 20th century, which brings together original essays by academics in the UK, North America and Australia. The contributors write from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including semiotics, social history, literary and film criticism, and musicology. Three main themes are addressed: the car as a cultural image; its impact on leisure and entertainment; and the cultural significance of the processes of manufacturing and selling cars.

Part Two

ENTERTAINMENT AND LEISURE

6

Poop, poop! – An Early Case of Joy-Riding by an Upper Class Amphibian

Kathleen Bell

So far as I can tell, no cultural critic or tabloid journalist has yet ascribed recent spates of joy-riding to the malign influence of a popular work of children’s literature and its off-shoots.¹ Indeed, although borrowing and driving fast and expensive motor cars has become a more popular pastime, eventually requiring specific legislation to criminalize this activity,² parents have continued to permit their children to read and see dramatisations and adaptations of a classic tale³ in which a joy-rider eludes the clutches of the law, aided and abetted by friends and acquaintances. The frequency with which the story has been subjected to new adaptations and continuations can point only to the attraction children and adults alike share in observing the prowess of a single, reckless amphibian.

Obviously it would be foolish to exaggerate the influence of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows⁴ on the generations of children who have read it or, more frequently, seen one of the numerous successful adaptations. However its interest in the motor car as the principle instrument of Toad’s lawlessness may suggest ambivalence about cars felt not only by the author but also by readers and other audiences from 1908 to the present day. While Grahame’s personal concerns about the effects of road-building are absent from the text, the anxieties he does express, clustered around cars, class and crime, persist.⁵ This leads to occasional oddities: for instance the road-less Wild Wood with its proletarian inhabitants is presented as far more terrifying than the public highways which are the scene of Toad’s manic driving. Nonetheless the motor car becomes a convenient focus for concerns about society, hierarchy and masculinity. These are perhaps demonstrated most clearly in Grahame’s treatment of the law, which has formed one of the key areas of difficulty for adapters of the text. Adaptations tend either to deflect attention from Grahame’s socio-political views by convenient adjustments to the text or to meet them head on and incorporate direct criticism of Edwardian social hierarchies.

The focus on the motor car in The Wind in the Willows seems to indicate a shift in popular anxieties about modes of transport. Mid nineteenth-century works had demonstrated all kinds of concern about the arrival of the railway,⁶ as indicated in a wide range of works including Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son, Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne and Emil Zola’s Le Baité Humaine. However, by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, this anxiety was diminishing. In the 1892 story Silver Blaze, Holmes and Watson travelled happily ‘in a first class carriage, flying along’,⁷ sufficiently secure in their chosen mode of transport to spend most of the journey discussing the case. By 1906, the train appears almost entirely as a force for good in E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children. Here the by now stock danger of the railway crash can be averted by the simple expedient of turning two red flannel petticoats into flags (Nesbit, 1906, 95–108).

It is not surprising, therefore, that while railway transport is employed in The Wind in the Willows, it is one of the least adventurous modes of transport available. Admittedly the engine driver himself has a redeeming streak of lawlessness, regarding the police as enemies rather than friends, but the railway system itself is chiefly functional, the means by which conventional journeys are made, be it the slow train back to Toad Hall after Toad’s first encounter with a motor car or the early train by which Toad makes his journey to town for the purpose of buying a car of his own. (Grahame, 1908, 28). Even in the original letters which were a major source for Grahame in writing The Wind in the Willows, the excitement the toad (not yet Toad) experiences in his escape by train is closely allied first to his delight at his imminent return home: ‘soon they were puffing and rattling through the country, ever so fast, and the toad was jumping up and down with sheer delight, to think that soon he would be home again’ (Grahame & Goodeson, 1988, 37), and then to the hot pursuit of policemen ‘all brandishing revolvers’ (39). It is worth noting that in neither the letters nor the book does Toad, passionate though he is about so many vehicles, ask to drive a railway engine. Only in relatively recent adaptations (notably Alan Bennett’s) does the train become as attractive and exciting as the car. For the contemporary audience, of course, the car is no longer a modern danger but a ‘veteran,’ combined with the steam train to conjure up a nostalgic past.⁸

It is additionally evident from a close reading of The Wind in the Willows that many of the distinctive excitements of motor car travel would not be achieved by a train journey. Train drivers require expertise and Toad never claims that he can drive a train, although, in his own opinion, he is able to row a boat, steer a barge, ride a horse and drive a gypsy caravan. In Grahame’s day driving remained a pastime permitted to amateurs; the driving test was not introduced until 1934, suggesting a belief on the part of legislators that anyone sufficiently wealthy to purchase a car or impressing an employer as able to drive and care for a vehicle, would have no difficulty in acquiring the necessary skills.

A class distinction may operate here. Railway travel, in Edwardian England as now, was a microcosm of the social hierarchies with travellers separated by income, rank and social role (and, if they wished, by gender). They were served by employees and could expect appropriate deference. The driver, although a vital employee, remained a servant of the railway company and thus of the passengers. By contrast, the motor car was the property of a single individual who would select its occupants and choose whether or not to be driven by a chauffeur. While members of the upper classes on a train journey depended on servants and fellow travellers for a position which reflected their social role, the driver of a motor car was cut off from society and the interactions and obligations which defined class position. Toad’s car journeys are particularly suspect because they are solitary adventures in which he surrenders his class position to become ‘Lord of the lone trail’.⁹ In its solitariness, Toad’s driving distinguishes itself from Toad’s other social fads which lead him to interact with his friends.

The problem for adult readers of The Wind in the Willows at least is that while Toad is plainly condemned by his friends, he remains the most interesting and attractive character. In her book Not in Front of the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children’s Literature,¹⁰ Alison Lurie declares that Grahame’s sympathies lie with Toad ‘the motor-car snatcher, the prison-breaker, the Toad who always escapes!’ While this may be true of Grahame’s sympathies, for all his declared opposition to motoring, Lurie seems to tell us more about the way in which the book has most frequently been read than the expressed intentions within it. Such development of plot as there is depends on Toad’s continued bad behaviour. However, the plot is a moral one, depending on Toad’s reformation and consequent diminution for its closure. The embattled river-bankers are threatened not only by the revolutionary activities of the dangerous wild wooders but also by their own fantasies and desires for solitary travel. Even Mole’s solitary adventures are punished as he finds himself at the mercy of the sinister Wild Wooders, and in need of the assistance of Rat and Badger.

Toad’s desire for solitary motor-car travel is paralleled by Rat’s desire for travel in the chapter ‘Wayfarers All’. This chapter, with its heightened language which led to its inclusion in Arthur Quiller Couch’s Oxford Book of English Prose, at first seems out of place beside the more ordinary language used to tell of Toad’s adventures in particular. But in fact ‘Wayfarers All’ revisits a number of the themes that have already been touched on in The Wind in the Willows – nature’s parallels with the human environment (especially in the passage about ‘Nature’s Grand Hotel’ (Grahame, 1908, 112); the unsettling effects of change in the environment; the understanding nature of male friendship and, above all, the desire for travel as a means of self-expression which is at odds with social life and its obligations.

In this chapter Rat begins as the defender of home and its values, which is his function for most of the book. He tries to dissuade the swallows from flying south, only to hear the third swallow’s account of the dangers of ‘disobedience’ to nature (Grahame, 1908, 115). For swallows, unrest is something natural that must be obeyed annually as they leave their ‘snug homes’ (114) and fly southwards to their ‘happy holdiay’ (115). This sets off Rat’s own unrest as he begins to long for escape from ‘the great ring of the Downs’ which forms his ‘simple horizon’ (116) and to imagine the world beyond. His meeting with the Sea Rat exacerbates rat’s mood of restlessness, even though the Sea Rat’s tales do not exactly meet the Water Rat’s desire to be ‘out of sight of land’ with his ‘mind communing with the mighty ocean (116.). He ceases to function as an animal but acts mechanically (the word is used twice), ‘like a ‘sleep-walker’ listening to an absent voice, shows ‘dogged fixity of purpose’ with eyes that are ‘glazed and set’ (125–6). He is, we are later told, ‘under a spell’, overcome by ‘glamour’, not just from the Sea Rat’s tales but from ‘haunting sea voices that had sung to him’.

While the narrative’s acknowledged voice of temptation is that of the masculine, story-telling Sea Rat the ‘haunting sea voices’ casting their spell seem familiarly feminine, recalling the sirens that in the Odyssey lured sailors to their doom. Just as Odysseus had to be bound to the mast while his sailors stopped their ears if he was to listen to the sirens’ song and pass unharmed, so Rat has to be saved from his desire for travel by the physical intervention of Mole who throws him to the ground until the fit passes, leaving him significantly prey to the semantically female reaction of ‘an hysterical fit of dry sobbing’. The lure of solitary travel, in Rat’s case at least, is both a desire for masculine adventure and, paradoxically, a feminine danger which would destroy the cosy masculine world Rat shares with his friends. Mole depicts autumn and winter in masculine terms, stressing size, strength and simplicity. His description of winter’s ‘hearty joys’ which emphasises ‘the towering wagons and their straining teams, the growing ricks, and the large moon rising over bare acres dotted with sheaves’ (127) opposes as masculine view of nature to the foreign and feminine south of Rat’s imagination with its ‘purple islands of wine and spice, islands set low in langurous waters!’ (117). The eventual cure for Rat is to be through his poetry, even if this is largely a matter of ‘sucking the top of his pencil’,¹¹ an activity which is sufficiently masculine to be contained within the River-Bankers’ way of life.

To a considerable extent, Toad’s adventures following his theft of the motor car provide a vulgar and lengthy parallel to Rat’s sickness of longing and cure by his friend in ‘Wayfarers All’. After Toad’s first encounter with the car he is found ‘in a sort of trance’, ‘breathing short and staring into vacancy’ and even ‘spellbound’. The arrival of the car even induces hysteria, although this is ascribed to the bird rather than Toad (26–8). Toad’s prolonged illness and recovery causes ‘violent paroxysms’ and ‘painful seizures’ which leave him ‘apparently languid and depressed’ (78), just as Rat’s ‘strange seizure’ leaves him with a ‘listless air’ (126–7). If his recovery is slower that Rat’s, this may be ascribed to his lack of ‘manly’ virtues; by contrast with his friends, he has characteristics which were, in turn of the century debates about women and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• The Car as Image
• Entertainment and Leisure
• Producing and Selling Cars
• Index