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  • Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America
  • Rob Latham
Clarke, Deborah. Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xiv + 225 pp. $25.00 paper.

Driving Women is an intelligent and useful study of American women’s writing in relation to the development of automobile culture over the course of the twentieth century. While it covers some of the same ground traversed in recent studies of contemporary road narratives–e.g., Ronald Primeu’s Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway (Bowling Green, 1996) and Kris Lackey’s Road Frames: The American Highway Narrative (Nebraska, 1997), both of which contain chapters dealing with issues of gender and automobility–it is the first work to canvass a full century of literary production in which the car figures as a potent, iconic presence. (As Primeu’s and Lackey’s subtitles suggest, their books are focused principally on the postwar period of highway travel, a delimitation that also marks Katie Mills’s The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving through Fiction, Film, and Television [Southern Illinois, 2006]). The comprehensiveness of its discussion is one of Driving Women’s key strengths, though its quasi-survey format, with reading piled atop of reading, tends at times to thin out Clarke’s larger analyses.

The book’s unifying argument, to the extent that it has one, is that the automobile has been a vehicle of cultural empowerment for women, a bestower of autonomy and agency, and that this function has been reflected in novels and stories featuring cars and car-bound travel. Clarke focuses primarily on literature written by women, but also pauses to consider important works by male authors, such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). “In providing access to the public sphere–to work, to escape–the car transformed women’s lives as profoundly as suffrage,” Clarke asserts (3). Drawing on historian Virginia Scharff’s study Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (Free Press, 1991), Clarke shows how the advent of the automobile helped to break down Victorian proscriptions on gender roles and behaviors, coming to be seen as “a contested site in which the very notion of femininity is challenged and ultimately reformulated” (4). Over the course of the century, as the car became more thoroughly integrated into everyday life, it continued to function in literary texts as a complex icon, “destabilizing conventional ideology surrounding the home, gender, race, ethnicity, and ‘Americanness’” (4).

This basic if rather diffuse thesis is tracked through six well-researched and effectively-argued chapters focusing on different ideological articulations of the automobile with female lives and identities. Chapter one looks at the early-twentieth-century culture of automobility via advertisements, girls’ books, and the novels of Edith Wharton, focusing on how the car was constructed in relation to issues of gender, social class, and sexuality. Chapter two examines how the discourse surrounding automobiles, within literary and cultural Modernism (e.g., in the work of William Faulkner and Gertrude Stein), intersected with the discourses of masculinity, race, and imperialism, attending especially to the implications for women of the “bridge between bodies and technology” (72) that the car seemed increasingly to offer. Chapter three analyzes how the car came to figure as a symbol of the mechanization of female bodily functions, especially maternity, during the postwar period, offering particularly compelling readings of stories by Flannery O’Connor, Joan Didion, and Toni Morrison. Chapter four looks at the phenomenon of “Women’s Road Trips” in popular works by Bobbie Ann Mason, Barbara Kingsolver, and Erika Lopez, showing how, while “women may exercise agency” through automobiles, they “are always reminded of their vulnerabilities in a technological age” (138). Chapter five considers the car’s “Reconstruction of Home” in a range of contemporary women’s novels and [End Page 258] memoirs, such as Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street (1989), Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992). Finally, Chapter six analyzes the car as a symbol of American citizenship and national community in work especially by ethnic women writers such...

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