The Unlikely Territories of Modernity

One of the earliest accounts of the railway in nineteenth-century American writing is in a journal entry made by Nathaniel Hawthorne in the summer of 1844. Hawthorne writes of his visit to an idyllic rural enclave known as Sleepy Hollow. He sat in a sunny clearing in the woods, and from this ‘lap of bounteous nature’ he could hear the whoosh of crops being scythed and the bells of grazing cows. But his enjoyment was interrupted by a different sort of sound, one that was incongruous with, and unwelcome in, this paradisiacal setting: ‘But hark! There is the whistle of the locomotive …It tells the story of busy men, from the hot street, who have come to spend to spend a day in a country village.’¹ Though the train remains visually absent, its presence was synecdochally felt through the tell-tale sound of the whistle.

Hawthorne’s experience of the railway is often invoked, most prominently by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden (1964), in discussions to do with the literary pastoral. The engine whistle, its ‘long shriek, harsh above all other harshness’, certainly exemplifies the incursion of the industrial and the urban into the rural idyll, but its literary purpose is not simply to lament the bucolic past that has been left behind. As Marx asserts, the machine sets out to ‘expose the pastoral ideal to the pressure of change’.² It was change, a much-anticipated progression to a new continent, that Walt Whitman saw coming with construction of the interstate railroad lines. The lines of connection and communication he described in 1890 as ‘the typical and the most representative things in the United States. No works, no painting, can too strongly depict the fullness and grandeur of these.’³ His 1876 poem ‘To a Locomotive in Winter’ is a paean to the ‘black cylindrical body, golden brass, and silvery steel’ of this new engine. ‘Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!’ pronounces Whitman’s everyman narrator Walt, revelling in the transformative capacity of the expanding American railway network.⁴

Interestingly, though both Hawthorne’s and Whitman’s reflections convey an immediate response to the railway and the train, they both employ aloof observers who are situated outside technology and passively observe its progress across an unsuspecting continent. Hawthorne’s subject is placed in a woodsy clearing adjacent to a bucolic hamlet, and Whitman’s is, of course, a disembodied wanderer, roving over prairies, hills, and lakes; neither, we note, is located within this harbinger of industry and modernity.

In contrast, Hamlin Garland’s 1891 short story ‘Up the Coolly’ describes, again, a train in a rural landscape but from an entirely different perspective. The story begins with the classic symbol of the American pastoral: a railroad stretching between the urban industrial north and a still agricultural west. Howard McLane, the protagonist, is inside the train, gazing out of the window at a landscape that ‘seems vigorous, youthful, and prosperous’: he is a passenger. The greens and fields of grain are imbued with a ‘certain mysterious glamour to him’.⁵ When the train chugs along, McLane’s eyes are drawn to warm, inviting fields: barley is being reaped, fields of hay scythed. Then as the pace quickens, the scene turns physically and emotionally distant. Hills become peaks and ‘curiously carved cliffs’, and torrential rivers surge down impenetrable banks.

What Garland’s narrative describes is not a dramatic encounter between agrarian America and the encroaching machine, nor is it the capitulation of rurality to capitalism and trade. It is, instead, how the subjective experience of the rail journey perceives, determines, and ultimately shapes the rural landscape. The train then seems not so much the ‘counterforce’ – a term coined by Marx to describe the incursion of technology into the pastoral ideal⁶ – as it is an event through which rurality can be read as a geo-social space entangled with, and even complicit...