Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America

6. Automotive Citizenship: Car as Origin

Automotive Citizenship Car as Origin Cars define one’s place in America; the car you drive reflects not just wealth or status but also something fundamental about your identity: new or used; American or foreign; sporty or utilitarian; SUV or hybrid. Even more than determining a sense of personal identity, however, the car functions as a marker of political and cultural belonging. As Daniel J. Boorstin has observed, “The automobile has been the great vehicle of American civilization in the twentieth century” (vii). Back in 1921, President Warren G. Harding remarked that “the motorcar has become an indispensable instrument in our political, social, and industrial life” (qtd. in Flink, Car 140). While it may have lost some of the allure it used to carry, as more people take the car for granted,it continues to serve as an “indispensable” icon of American identity.“It’s the ’49 Ford by a landslide,” declared a Ford ad in a sly dig at the presidential election of 1948, nearly a dead heat between Truman and Dewey. The Ford embodies the triumph of the American political system more thoroughly than President Harry Truman ’s narrow victory. By the 1950s you could “see the USA in your Chevrolet,” and in the 1960s we were reminded of the litany of what defines basic American values: “baseball, hotdogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.” Joyce Carol Oates, in her 1969 novel them, also illustrates the hold the automobile has on American identity through her protagonist, Jules: “So long as he owned his own car he could always be in control of his fate—he was fated to nothing. He was a true American. His car was like a shell he could maneuver around, at impressive speeds; he was second generation to no one. He was his own ancestors” (335). Jules overestimates the car’s ability to allow him to control his fate, but his sense of himself as a “true American,” his “own ancestors,” reflects a very American belief that our originary American identity stems from the car. This dependence on the car comes, of course, at the cost of other values. As Lewis Mumford lamented in 1963, “The current American way of life is founded not just on c h a p t e r s i x motor transportation but on the religion of the motor car” (234). Roland Barthes’s famous comparison of the car to Gothic cathedrals acknowledges the same point: “I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object” (88). Indeed, in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, as Jack Gladney watches his sleeping daughter, she mutters, “Toyota Celica.” “The utterance ,” marvels Jack, “was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform” (155). The higher power that guides contemporary culture derives as much from the automobile as from any supreme being. Even in the early twenty-first century, with religion becoming an ever more signi- ficant force in American public life, cars retain their reverential status. Denise Roy, searching for the time and space for faith in an increasingly hectic and mobile life, declares ,in My Monastery Is a Minivan, “A minivan might not be as good as a monastery for finding peace and quiet, but it is precisely the place where I find the face of God” (15). We may have lost some of our initial enthusiasm for the automobile, and most of us probably view it in a more secular light than Roy, but its time is far from over. Examining the “decline” of the auto-industrial age in the early 1970s, Emma Rothschild nevertheless admits that “automobiles still serve as a focus of national emotions ” (74). Clearly, the death of the automobile, claimed by John Jerome in 1972, has been grossly exaggerated. As Jean Baudrillard observed in the 1980s, by driving in America, “you learn more about this society than all academia could ever tell you.” American cars and drivers, he goes on, reflect American identity (54). Cars do more than reflect American identity. Cars can determine a kind of American citizenship. Particularly for those perceived as outside of the mainstream based on race, class, gender, and ethnicity...