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Horsepower: Animals, Automobiles, and an Ethic of (Car) Care in Early US Road Narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2022

DANIEL BOWMAN
DANIEL BOWMAN*
Affiliation:
School of English, University of Sheffield. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

From the mid-1890s to the present day, cars have been fetishized as animal in US automotive culture. This began with automotive periodical Horseless Age, which, in positing the car as a substitute for the horse, decried the material limitations of the “outdated” animal whilst at the same time seeking to coopt its symbolic value. In the first US road trip novels of the 1910s automobiles are described figuratively as animals, simultaneously evoking the horse while symbolically killing it. Examining the intertwined material and symbolic relations between humans, animals, and machines at the dawn of the motor age elucidates the necropolitical position of animals in automotive culture – of the horse in horsepower.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 613 - 634
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies

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References

1 Condict, G. Herbert, “The Motor Vehicle in Commercial Operation,” Horseless Age, 3, 12 (March 1899), 14–15, 14Google Scholar.

2 Douglas Brinkley, “Introduction: Theodore Dreiser and the Birth of the Road Book,” in Theodore Dreiser, A Hoosier Holiday (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997; first published 1916), 3–12, 4.

3 For further discussion on the role of the See America First advertising campaign see Vogel, Andrew, “‘Change in Fixity’: Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday and the Commitment to American Automobility,” Studies in Travel Writing, 17, 2 (2013), 145–59, 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Brinkley, 3.

5 Ibid., 10.

6 Examples of automotive texts from the period which feature symbolic representations of animals include Thomas and Agnes Wilby's On the Trail to Sunset (1912), in which cars are variously described as “cat-like,” “purring,” and “roaring.” Similarly, Beatrice Larnard Massey's It Might Have Been Worse: A Motor Trip from Coast to Coast (1912) describes an automobile as “snorting,” and at one point as “injured.” Emily Post's By Motor to the Golden Gate (1916), too, features descriptions of cars as “injured” and “puffing and snorting.” Significantly, none of these texts engages with the material consequences of automobility for animals, making no mention of roadkill despite the seeming inevitability of colliding with animals on the road in the early twentieth century (see notes 54, 55 below).

7 Imes Chiu, The Evolution from Horse to Automobile: A Comparative International Study (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2008), 83, 85, 135.

8 Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Terms (Minneapolis aznd London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 20.

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11 OED Online, para. 1 of 1, at www.oed.com/view/Entry/200542?redirectedFrom=theriomorphism&; OED Online, para. 1 of 1, at www.oed.com/view/Entry/200541?redirectedFrom=theriomorphic#eid> (accessed 13 Dec. 2021).

12 Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 108. For further discussion of the differences between theriomorphism and anthropomorphism see Claire Parkinson, Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters (London: Routledge, 2020), esp. 33–35.

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24 Anon., “The American Motor League,” Horseless Age, 1, 3 (Jan. 1896), 15, my emphasis. The meeting was planned to take place several miles outside the city, with “no provisions made for horses.”

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27 The term ‘necropolitics’ is defined by Mbembe as “forms of subjugation of life to the power of death.” For more detailed discussion see Mbembe, Achille, “Necropolitics,” trans. Meintjes, Libby, Public Culture, 15, 1 (2003), 11–40, 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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37 Robert Sloss, The Automobile: Its Selection, Care and Use (New York: Outing Publishing Company, 1910), 66, my emphasis.

38 Harold Whiting, The Gasoline Motor (New York: Outing Publishing Company, 1913), 7.

39 Vogel, “Change in Fixity,” 158, indicates, however, that the Lincoln Highway does not follow the route laid out by Fisher in 1913, but one laid out on a separate trip led by Henry Joy, president of Packard Motors.

40 Theodore Dreiser, A Hoosier Holiday (London: Constable & Co Ltd, 1932; first published 1916), 122. Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text.

41 Louise Closser Hale, We Discover the Old Dominion (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916), 297. Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text.

42 Brinkley, “Introduction,” 10.

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49 Guthrie, 5, claims if we see something as “humanlike, we can try to establish a social relationship.” Whereas if we only animate, rather than anthropomorphize, our options are limited to, for example, “stalk or flee.”

50 See note 45 above.

51 E. P. Ingersoll, “A Word to the Word Coiners,” Horseless Age, 1, 3 (Jan. 1896), 5.

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53 Ibid.

54 Dayton Stoner, cited in Michael L. Berger, The Devil Wagon In God's Country: The Automobile and Social Change in Rural America, 1893–1929 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979), 20.

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64 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 40, emphasis in original.