Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America (review)
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With the introduction of the automobile came new opportunities for Americans to redefine their relationships to technology and public space. Users articulated the meanings of automobility through a tremendous outpouring of published writing, and, from the beginning, women writers contributed to the literary landscape of automobility. In the past few years, a number of scholars have explored gender and automobility, including Kevin Borg, Auto Mechanics: Technology and Expertise in Twentieth Century America (2007), Kathleen Franz, Tinkering: American Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile (2005), Catherine Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (2004), and Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (2001). Now, with Driving Women, Deborah Clarke joins the discussion, exploring women's place within automobile culture through the productive lens of fiction.
By bringing her expertise in literature and women's studies to bear on automobility, Clarke adds to our understanding of both the lived reality and the imaginary potential of the automobile in women's lives. Women have used the car to blur the boundaries of private and public space and to disrupt conventional definitions of maternity, domesticity, and sexuality. Clarke tells how women writers debunked dominant discourses that portrayed women as passive consumers or dangerous drivers or, worse, that conflated the female body with the machine. She contends that the car is "not a simple extension of individual power and control; rather, it functions [End Page 277] as a contested site in which the very notion of femininity is challenged and ultimately reformulated." And, further, Clarke writes that "As cars become more and more enmeshed into our lives, their influence becomes increasingly complicated, destabilizing conventional ideology surrounding the home, gender, race, ethnicity, and 'Americanness'" (p. 4).
The promise of Clarke's scholarship lies in her explorations of women's complex constructions of automobility through close readings of contemporary fiction. Clarke calls on readers to pay particular attention to the role of women novelists in shaping the cultural meanings of technology. The novel can give us a new perspective because it "allows for a richly nuanced presentation of the range of meanings associated with the car" (p. 6). Clarke examines a diverse range of twenty-five female novelists. All of them rework female subjectivity in relation to the automobile, from the earliest serial fiction writers to contemporary authors such as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, Joan Didion, and Erika Lopez. These novelists have created intriguing characters, from a ghostly Native American mother who drives a blue Firebird to lesbian biker chicks who wrest the genre of the road trip firmly from the grip of male authors. But female empowerment is not the only theme pursued by women writers. Many of their stories explore the circumscribed nature of women's mobility, their unfair share of domestic responsibility, and the physical and sexual dangers of car culture.
Driving Women has a thematic structure, with chapters devoted to modernism and race, automotive maternity and the cyborg, road trips, mobile homelessness, and automotive citizenship. In each chapter, Clarke contextualizes fiction in two ways to map the construction of the automobile as a gendered icon. To think about gender difference, she sets women's fiction against that written by men. To provide cultural context, she relies heavily on advertising, along with selected memoirs, magazine literature, scripts for television shows, and statistics. Historians may find the broader context rather thin, but Clarke's interrogation of the literature provides fertile ground for understanding gender and technological agency.
Most intriguing is Clarke's exploration of what she calls automotive citizenship, a phrase that captures the ways in which the automobile has unmoored citizenship from place and legal constructs, creating an "extralegal space" within the realm of culture (p. 168). Automotive citizenship denotes "a condition in which one's sense of belonging rests largely on the car, both literally and symbolically" (p. 166). Clarke's inclusion of subaltern subjects deepens our understanding of the critical cultural role of the car...
