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

5. Mobile Homelessness: Cars and the Restructuring of Home

Mobile Homelessness Cars and the Restructuring of Home In 1954 MGM released what would become its highest-grossing comedy to date, The Long, Long Trailer. Undoubtedly, much of the success of the film can be linked to the star power of its two leads, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, then at the height of their popularity, based on the phenomenal success of their TV show, I Love Lucy. The Long, Long Trailer portrays a young newlywed couple, Tracy and Nicholas Collini (with marked similarities to Lucy and Ricky),negotiating the foibles of driving a trailer they have just purchased to serve as their home. In setting up this alternative home, the movie poses some interesting questions regarding what constitutes home in the age of the automobile. The lighthearted presentation of the trials and tribulations of mobile homemaking, however, anticipated some of the more serious issues surrounding the viability of the home that would command public attention in the later part of the twentieth century. With the freestanding, site-built home becoming an increasingly endangered species, the car often superseded the house as a site of domestic identity, as automobility replaced stability. Women’s road trips unsettled whatever assumptions about woman’s place that still lingered in late-twentieth-century American culture. By hitting the road, women challenged the romance of American mobility and the shape of American domesticity . But that domestic space had already been splintered by the presence of the automobile . It is one thing to leave home; one can retain a belief in a home space, even if it is located elsewhere. It is quite another thing, however, to set up home in a car. Women’s road trips may refigure domesticity, but they do not erase the idea of a grounded, situated home. When the car replaces the home, domesticity is not just unsettled: it is undone. Yet Americans are so in love with—and dependent upon— cars that even car homes hold a certain attraction, or at least we try to persuade ourselves that’s so. By romanticizing the idea of the mobile home, we sugarcoat what may more appropriately be termed “mobile homelessness.” Given the very real problem of c h a p t e r f i v e homelessness in the United States,however,the car begins to look more and more like a viable, and even livable, alternative, a situation made possible by the long-standing appeal of the mobile in American culture, even of a house on wheels. James Clifford notes, “Once traveling is foregrounded as a cultural practice then dwelling, too, needs to be reconceived—no longer simply the ground from which traveling departs and to which it returns” (115). I would reformulate his assertion slightly: once automobility is foregrounded as a cultural practice, then dwelling needs to be reconceived. Replacing the house with the car has obvious and, at times, catastrophic effects on women’s lives. Yet most of the fiction that explores the relationship between house and car tends to privilege cars as providing a more flexible space. The gradual chipping away at the home as sanctuary, particularly in women’s fiction, likely stems from many causes, from economics to domestic violence to having a more mobile culture. Kristin Jacobson has recently traced the development of what she terms the “neodomestic novel,” characterized by instability, self-consciousness regarding physical space, and recognition of the exclusionary power of the standard family home.¹ The genre begins, she asserts, in the 1980s with such texts as Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street. Housekeeping opens with the mother committing suicide by driving a car into the lake. Choosing death in a car to life in a house indicates how fragile the home has become, and the novel closes with Ruthie and her aunt Sylvie trying to burn their house down. The young female narrator of Mango Street notes the discrepancy between the image of a large white house with stairs “like the houses on T.V.” and what her family can afford. “But the house on Mango Street is not the way they told it at all” (4). The house may disappoint her, but she is thrilled with her developing female body, her hips “ready and waiting like a new Buick with the keys in the ignition” (49). Unable to find solace in a decrepit house, she turns to her body, indicating its potential by linking it to a car. The car...