American Road Narratives

Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film

Ann Brigham

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813937519
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The freedom to go anywhere and become anyone has profoundly shaped our national psyche. Transforming our sense of place and identity--whether in terms of social and economic status, or race and ethnicity, or gender and sexuality—American mobility is perhaps nowhere more vividly captured than in the image of the open road. From pioneer trails to the latest car commercial, the road looms large as a form of expansiveness and opportunity.

Too often it is the celebratory idea of the road as a free-floating zone moving the traveler beyond the typical concerns of space and time that dominates the discussion. Rather than thinking of mobility as an escape from cultural tensions, however, Ann Brigham proposes that we understand mobility as a mode of engagement with them. She explores the genre of road narratives to show how mobility both thrives on and attempts to manage shifting conflicts about space and society in the United States.

From the earliest transcontinental automobile narratives from the 1910s, through classics like Jack Kerouac's On the Road and the film Thelma & Louise, up to post-9/11 narratives, Brigham traces the ways in which mobility has been imagined, created, and interrogated over the past century and shows how mobility promises, and threatens, to incorporate the outsider and to blur boundaries. Bringing together textual and cultural analysis, theories of spatiality, and sociohistorical frameworks, this book offers an invigoratingly different view of mobility and a new understanding of the road narrative's importance in American culture.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title from American Library Association

ONE

Early Road Narratives
and the “Voyage into Democracy”

Six years before the appearance of her best-selling classic Etiquette, Emily Post authored a road narrative. Appearing in 1916, By Motor to the Golden Gate describes her journey from New York City to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco taken the previous year with her son and a cousin. On assignment for Collier’s magazine, Post was, in her editor’s words, “to find out how far you can go pleasurably! When you find it too uncomfortable, come home!” (Post 8). In these early days of cross-country automobiling, discomfort would be determined by the suitability, or even the existence, of roads west of the Mississippi River. But the emphasis on comfort also imparts the rules of the road as those of decorum. Post may be an intrepid divorcee and journalist, but this future queen of manners was, most assuredly, an East Coast, upper-class woman traveling for leisure. So believed her friends, whose comments Post recounts in the book’s opening: “Of course you are sending your servants ahead by train with your luggage and all that sort of thing,” says one. Adds another, “Not at all! The best thing is to put them in another machine directly behind, with a good mechanic. . . . How about your chauffeur? You are sure he is a good one?” (1). Post’s response, that she will take neither servants nor chauffeur, and that her son will serve as driver and mechanic, prompts one friend to exclaim, “They’ll never get there!”; they will be “on a Pullman inside of ten days!” (2).

With a witty, winking tone, By Motor to the Golden Gate sets up a theme characteristic of the first transcontinental road narratives: geographical distance is measured in increments of ideological as well as physical challenges. Like many of her social set, Post “had driven across Europe again and again” (3). In the meantime, she explains, “our own land, except for the few chapter headings that might be read from the windows of Pullman train, was an unopened book” (3). Emphasizing asylum more than access, the insularity of the Pullman mirrors the insularity of the social class that rides it. The perspective of both regards the country as a space of crossing not connection.

The transcontinental motor trip, then, reveals the bigger expanse that Post must traverse: the gap between her vantage point as an easterner and her identity as an American. Up until now, her understanding of her cultural and national identity did not extend west beyond New York, and often looks back east to Europe for recognition. For Post and other motor tourists in the 1910s, cross-country auto travel does not enact the free-spirited expression of self, a claim so often made about mobility in all American road narratives. Instead, mobility takes shape as the gradual education of the self, which is realized through a series of geographical and social dislocations that function not as a mode of detachment or escape, but rather as a method of entry and incorporation into the larger nation. As the narrator of Sinclair Lewis’s novel Free Air pronounces of its New Yorker protagonist’s incipient and disorienting travel through middle America: “Thus Claire Boltwood’s first voyage into democracy” (45).

Taking place over the 4,250 miles she travels (242), Post’s education is spurred by her wonderment at “the lavish immensity of our own country” (113). Recording the details of this immensity, her road narrative functions, as do the other earliest examples of the genre, to chart unfamiliar territory. By the end of her trip, Post reflects:

When we started, I had an idea that, keen though we were to undertake the journey, we would find it probably difficult, possibly tiring, and surely monotonous — to travel on and on and on over the same American road, through towns that must be more or less replicas, and hearing always the same language and seeing the same types of people doing much the same things. Everyone who had ever taken the trip assured us that our impression in the end would be of an unending sameness. Sameness! Was there ever such variety? (238)

Discovering the nation’s defining heterogeneity prompts Post’s own “metamorphosis” (240), the achievement of a sense of self larger than the individual who left home, realized through the connections automobiling enables: “You can’t come in contact with people anywhere, without unconsciously absorbing a few of their habits, a tinge of their point of view, and in even a short while you find that you have sloughed off the skin of Eastern hidebound dependence upon ease and luxury” (240).

Inspired by Post, Beatrice Larned Massey, another female New Yorker, penned her own road narrative four years later. Although she opens It Might Have Been Worse: A Motor Trip from Coast to Coast by noting how the “motor mind has so grown and changed in a few years” (3), she concludes with a sentiment uncannily similar to Post’s: “If you want to see your country, to get a little of the self-centered, self-satisfied Eastern hide rubbed off, to absorb a little of the fifty-seven (thousand) varieties of people and customs, and the alert, open-hearted, big atmosphere of the West, then try a motor trip” (143).

In sloughing off their Eastern hides and absorbing the variety of others, these two New Yorkers gain a sense of the self defined by a different scale. In Frederic F. Van de Water’s words, stated pointedly in his 1927 cross-country narrative The Family Flivvers to Frisco, he and his traveling companions “were no longer New Yorkers, but Americans” (5). Early road narratives imbue the newness of cross-country motoring with the powers of “metamorphosis” for both traveler and landscape, incorporating and transforming both into the national.

Union Making

Cross-country motoring was not the first tourist enterprise credited with creating a national citizenry. The idea that “true Americans would emerge through travel to places increasingly coded as ‘national’” (Freeman 147 – 48) dates to the nineteenth century when writers urged Americans to visit quintessentially American places like Niagara Falls and Yellowstone National Park.¹ But while these accounts touted exceptional destinations as representatively American, motor travel democratized the process of nationalization, contending that “true Americans,” and thus the “true America,” emerged in ordinary, rather than extraordinary, locales. These ordinary locales further defined the creation of national identity as taking place through encounters with a series of geographical and social “others.” With its ability to access and connect to these locales, motor touring, as Van de Water again succinctly claims, functioned “to drive out sectionalism and to knit the American people into a more cohesive, more sympathetic union” (242). This claim for union making emphasizes the process as the point: it is the joining and incorporation of the parts, not the extolling of one part as representative, that defines national identity.

The focus on union making appears in the era’s road fiction in decidedly human terms. Published between 1900 and 1920, early road novels develop a similar plot: two incompatible suitors, brought together by the intimacy and unpredictability uniquely created by motor travel, find love and impending marriage. Unlike the auto-racing fiction of the time, which featured dashing young drivers and a cultural fascination with speed (in terms of both quickening physical movement and romantic advances), road novels emphasize automobiling’s ability to cover vast distances and access areas previously unreachable. Like the nonfiction narratives of this period, the novels ultimately represent automobility as the forging of intimacies across the yawning gap of social difference. Focusing on the course of star-crossed lovers from different economic and ethnic groups, their plots develop around encounters with strangers in new landscapes. While other early twentieth-century novels, such as The Virginian (1902) and Tarzan (1914), also feature romances that reached across social differences, these novels emphasize the clash between the civilized and wild. Intersecting with Teddy Roosevelt’s promotion of rugged individualism and the strenuous life, these stories’ tension revolves around a conflicting desire to tame the wild man and fetishize the virile male body.

Road narratives focus much more emphatically on the tensions of coupling. Defined by mobility rather than by place (even one as unsettled as the frontier), they linger on the processes of incorporation into a larger unit. Itself a process of unification, courtship in these novels literally engages the social differences that characterize the nation at the beginning of the twentieth century, differences represented by a growing population of immigrants, increasingly mobile middle and working classes, and the wildness of the West: all of which register as both alluring and not quite incorporable. Figured explicitly as the union of two dissimilar figures, these heterosexual romances personify a story of Americanization as the unification of unlike parties. Furthermore, the prerogatives of incorporation require that this unification, like the nation itself, transcend the sum of its parts.

To examine the tensions around the incorporation of difference, I will largely focus on two novels that chart the pleasures and pitfalls of courtship on the road, especially as they develop into conflicts around the Americanization of subject and space. Thomas W. Wilby and Agnes A. Wilby’s On the Trail to Sunset (1912), the first transcontinental American road novel, introduces the particularly interesting — and rare — possibility of an interracial road romance.² This romance symbolizes the friction between, and consolidation of, regional geographies, drawing our attention to the fraught processes of New Mexico’s statehood and incorporation into the nation. The novel begins by introducing New Englander Winthrop Hammond as he is about to accompany his uncle, aunt, and a chauffeur on a cross-country automobile trip. A newspaperman, Hammond is to write about their adventures, specifically advocating the need for a decent road that joins coast to coast. His uncle defines this purpose as a “patriotic duty” (9), but Winthrop really undertakes the trip as the means to pursue a woman, the charmingly independent Evelyn Deering, a new woman of the twentieth century who has worked in settlement houses in Chicago, but who is also devoutly loyal to her home in New Mexico, a place where she cannot imagine not living. The plot is driven by Winthrop’s courtship of Evelyn, whose family (heading home to New Mexico from Chicago) travels alongside them on the road west. But the romance is threatened by the alluring Emilio Maria Santos, who, as a passionate “patriot” of New Mexico, introduces a different patriotism of place that challenges both the easterners’ “patriotic duty” and Hammond’s claims on Evelyn.

Seven years later, Sinclair Lewis published his novel Free Air (1919), an expansion of his popular serial that ran in the Saturday Evening Post.³ The story focuses on a cross-class romance between New York socialite Claire Boltwood and midwestern mechanic Milt Daggett, two plucky individuals who undertake independent but intersecting transcontinental auto trips. Taking a road trip with her father as a cure for his nervous exhaustion, Claire represents the increasingly mobile new woman who questions her upcoming marriage and leaves home to find herself.⁴ Ruggedly independent, Milt is introduced as the self-made man. Although he owns his own garage, he also signifies the provincial working class, thus providing the contrast to Claire’s urbanity. Becoming infatuated with Claire when she patronizes his garage, Milt views her as his inspiration to leave home and seek out bigger successes elsewhere. As they travel across the country, their class and regional differences figure as both attraction and deterrent, creating a tension about whether their love match can overcome — or accommodate — their heterogeneity.

Many scholars have argued that road stories feature “the couple as the dominant configuration” in the plot (Cohan and Hark 8). But the representation and role of the couple figure quite differently in pre – World War II than in postwar road narratives. In examples such as On the Road, Easy Rider, and Thelma & Louise, the travelers set out already paired. While the pair has adventures with others met on the road, the story primarily concerns the developing relationship between the original travelers. By contrast, in the first decades of the twentieth century, road novels like those described above, as well as a film like It Happened One Night (1934), focus on two individuals who are not initially traveling together but whose paths intersect on, and because of, the road. The process of pairing highlights the theme of exposure to difference — to new places, people, and ways of being and belonging. This exposure is paralleled, perhaps even shaped, by the mode of travel. “Open cars, either roadster or touring,” write Michael Stern and Jane Stern, “were the rule for the first twenty years of the twentieth century” (26). While “90 percent of the automobiles manufactured [in 1919] were open roadsters,” just ten years later “approximately 90 percent of all passenger cars were closed sedans” (Casey 49). In contrast to the insulation and protection introduced by closed sedans, the openness of earlier roadsters models the access and interaction that characterizes motor touring of the period.

In this process of coupling, or union making, which unfolds as the attraction to, navigation of, and incorporation of difference, marriage performs two potentially opposite functions. First, it represents a predominant mode of social reproduction in which the right match ensures the continuation of the social order. Second, however, marriage represents a means of social mobility. As people “marry up” or “marry into” a better situation, the social order changes. The new couple could function as a mode of social repair that accommodates differences, or it could usher in an element of threatening heterogeneity. The Wilbys’ and Lewis’s road novels navigate this tension. While the attraction of the road might be plotted as the romance of mingling classes, this mixing is plagued by concerns about the proximity between a Euro-American upper (or upper-middle) class and a range of enterprising immigrants, foreigners, vagrants, and working-class folk. Produced at a time when discussions of the processes and very meaning of creating an integrated nation were paramount, the novels’ focus on courtships articulates a prevalent tension between individualism and cultural assimilation in which the ideal and the problem appear to be the same: mobility promises to incorporate the outsider.

Cross-Country Motoring: The Promise of Intimacy

To understand how and why cross-country automobile travel became a site for these issues to emerge, I want to examine more closely the infancy of the auto-touring phenomenon. Early enthusiasts touted motor travel as offering a different orientation to the country. As the editors of Motor Camper & Tourist declared, motor travel “allows the owner and his family and friends to go when, where, and how they please” (“Aims”). This customized flexibility creates a new vantage point. As Massey declares, the motor trip is “the only way to get a first-hand knowledge of our country, its people, [and] the scenery” (foreword). The transcontinental railroad may have achieved nationwide geographical unity in the late nineteenth century, but its perspectival priority was breadth not depth. By contrast, motor travel reveals an inside view of America. Recounting her 1915 trip from the West to the East Coast along the Lincoln Highway, Effie Price Gladding remarks upon “the intimate knowledge to which the motorist alone can attain” (qtd. Shaffer 228, emphasis added).⁵ Van de Water concludes his narrative with the assertion, “We have seen America with an intimacy and a closeness of contact from which a traveler by train or even motorist who stops at hotels is forever barred” (240, emphasis added).⁶

Writing for Travel magazine in 1915, Newton A. Fuessle draws out the civic significance of such intimacy. Driving the new Lincoln Highway, America’s “wonder-trail,” he gushes, offers travelers “an intimacy with their own America such as has never been vouchsafed them by any other means. One may whirl across the continent a score of times as a railway passenger and never sense the slightest fraction of the feeling of nearness to the States and cities traversed, which the motorist, following the Lincoln Highway, experiences. The Highway affords an incomparable inspirational course in Americanism” (26). Unlike railroads, which focused “solely on the final destination,” motor touring registered “as a process — an experience” (Shaffer 160). The process begins with an unprecedented access, which leads to intimacy and discovery, and culminates in the creation of patriots. As Van de Water puts it, “We know America and Americans as only those who go motor camping can learn to know them. We have discovered a people and a land whose existence the average New Yorker never even suspects” (240). Transformed from a New Yorker to an American, Van de Water expresses the crucial effect. The intimacy of motoring leads to unification and incorporation that redefines the scale of identity. And a national road creates the literal and symbolic route to this unification. As Fuessle asserts, the Lincoln Highway not only binds disjointed roads but unites formerly disparate elements and produces a newly charged vision of Americanness:

America’s amazing Highway is at once a road to yesterday and a road to to-morrow. Teaching patriotism, sewing up the remaining ragged edges of sectionalism, revealing and interpreting America to its people, giving swifter feet to commerce, gathering up the country’s loose ends of desultory and disjointed good roads ardor and binding them into one highly organized, proficient unit of dynamic, result-getting force, electric with zeal, it is quickening American neighborliness, democracy, progress and civilization. (26)

This proclamation proposes transcontinental motor travel as a substantive form of unification in a period of disparity caused not only by war and sectionalism but also by urbanization and immigration. The intimate encounters made possible by motor travel counter the “isolating, insulating quality of mass society” (Belasco 24). Enacting an antidote to the anonymity of the city, where proximity to others only enhances estrangement, motoring “through the heart of the nation,” as Van de Water writes, “brought us to a new definition of what constitutes nationality, a definition which dwellers in great cities with conglomerate populations never have the opportunity to learn” (44 – 45). Only by traveling through America could one understand “what constitutes nationality,” and with great reward: motoring could end sectionalism by articulating and championing a national vision that both linked and supplanted the competitive regional interests of the East, West, North, and South.⁷

Writers repeatedly stress this transformation of scale; mixing with strangers in strange places inspires an associative bond as citizens of a country, which replaces former identifications as residents of a region. As Shaffer points out, early motor-touring narratives describe a “community of the road” that “was a democratic melting pot” (232). In a period of “unprecedented confrontation of social groups and ways of life” (Marston, “Long Way” 178) produced by large-scale immigration, as well as migration of populations from rural backgrounds to the urban industrial workforce, auto travelers recounted positively encounters with a diverse group of foreign-born, rural, and working-clas...