American road narratives: reimagining mobility in literature and film 9780813937243, 9780813937502, 9780813937519

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgements (page ix)
Introduction (page 1)
1. Early Road Narratives and the "Voyage into Democracy" (page 17)
2. Post-World War II Reorientations of Racialized Masculinity (page 53)
3. Troubling Scale in Women's Road Narratives of the 1980s and 1990s (page 106)
4. Agitating Space and Stories: Late Twentieth-Century Native American Road Narratives (page 151)
5. Reviving (Re)Productivity: Post-9/11 Stories of Mobility in the Homeland (page 187)
Epilogue: Postrecession Mobility, Placing Mythology (page 225)
Notes (page 231)
Works Cited (page 241)
Index (page 253)

Citation preview

AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

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REIMAGINING LITERATURE ROAD MOBILITY IN

AND FILM

University of Virginia Press Charlottesville & London

University of Virginia Press © 2015 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2015

987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brigham, Ann, 1962—

American road narratives : reimagining mobility in literature and film / Ann Brigham. pages cm.—(Cultural frames, framing culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8139-3724-3 (cloth : acid-free paper) ISBN 978-0-8139-3750-2 (pbk. : acid-free paper) ISBN 978-0-8139-3751-9 (e-book)

1. American literature— History and criticism. 2. Travel in literature. 3. Travelers’ writings, American— History and criticism. I. Title. PS169.T74B75 2015

810.9'355 — dc23 2014038234

For Tom

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 1x

Introduction 1 1 Early Road Narratives and the “Voyage into Democracy” 17 ? Post—World War IT Reorientations of Racialized Masculinity 53

3 Troubling Scale in Women’s Road Narratives of the 1980s and 1990s _ 106

4 Agitating Space and Stories: Late Twentieth-Century Native American Road Narratives 151 5 Reviving (Re)Productivity: Post-g/11 Stories of Mobility in the Homeland 187 Epilogue: Postrecession Mobility, Placing Mythology 225

Notes 231 Works Cited 241 Index 253

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Two weeks before I submitted the final manuscript of this book, our trusty Volvo wagon died. ““The Glide” was just shy of 200,000 miles. Although the timing was bad, I could not have planned a better metaphor. Retiring The Glide deepened my reflection on the miles traveled over the course of developing this project. This book is a milestone achieved because of the support, effort, and company of many people. It is a pleasure to thank them here. Although it seems painfully obvious, it is still worth saying that writing is hard work. So many teachers, mentors, and colleagues have encouraged and challenged me, and I am grateful for their guidance and companionship. A special thank-you to Susan Hardy Aiken, Jennifer Andrews, Meg Lota Brown, Gina Buccola, Jeff Edwards, Bonnie Gunzenhauser, Larry Howe, Sallie Marston, Ellen O’Brien, Rachel Rooney, Lynn Weiner, Susan Weininger, Janet Wondra, and, especially, Lynda Zwinger. ‘Thank you also to my students at Roosevelt University, who energize me with their engagement, insight, and effort, and who confirm the essential importance of teaching the humanities.

I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for the support of a Summer Stipend in 2005 and to John Cox for his continued interest in my work. I am also grateful to Roosevelt University for two research leaves and two summer grants. Thank you to the staffs at the Roosevelt University Library, The Newberry library, and the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village Research Center, and to ‘Tara Gregg for her excellent research assistance. Portions of chapter I were previously published as an essay in American Road Literature, and I thank EBSCO Publishing for permission to reprint. At the University of Virginia Press, thank you to Cathie Brettschneider for incisive editorial direction and Ellen Satrom for expert guidance. ‘Thank you also to the anonymous readers for their comprehensive and crucial commentary. A very warm thank-you to Marjorie Jolles, whose capacious intelligence, scrupulous commentary, and passion for rigorous cultural analysis have made me a better thinker, and this a better book. What a pleasure to hear her voice in my head as I worked. An ideal reader, she has been exceptionally generous with her time, support, feedback, and friendship.

x Acknowledgments

I also want to thank those who have been in this with me over the long haul.

I have enjoyed and benefited from Ruthe Thompson’s brightness of spirit, intellect, and wit. During countless hours, Lisa Coscino has helped me articulate and tackle the big questions, reminding me what really matters. Anne Champagne has provided immeasurable guidance and tremendous company with a graciousness I appreciate and admire. Margie Rung has always been there to pick up the “red phone,” advising me with integrity and much-needed humor. I am so fortunate to be the recipient of such boundless goodwill and friendship. My mother and late father have always made me feel both complete and full

of endless possibility. This book owes much to models they have provided: my father’s intent focus and aesthetic precision and my mother’s imaginative curiosity and love of research. More recently, | am grateful for my mother’s wide-ranging support and encouragement. My brothers, Neil and Paul, have imparted the joys, and vital necessity, of the creative life. Neil, Paul, and my sisters-in-law, Marcia Howard and Logan Wood, inspire me with their artistry and buoy me with their belief. Thanks, too, to Neil and Marcia for sharing their home, warmth, and humor during the final stretch. Tom Williams, my partner on the road and in life, sustains me in ways that I am still discovering. Over the course of this project, he has provided invaluable insight and equanimity as well as really good food. Every day, he shows me the contours of a life and a love well lived. And so it is with a full heart and

immense happiness that I express my greatest gratitude to Tom. Here’s to the next 200,000 miles.

Portions of chapter 1 were originally published in “Sinclair Lewis’s Free Air and the ‘Voyage into Democracy,” in Critical Insights: American Road Literature, edited by Ronald Primeau, 1o1-21, Salem Press, 2013; used by permission of EBSCO Information Services, Ipswich, Massachusetts.

Introduction

n the year following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, RV sales and rentals in the United States soared. The Recreational Vehicle Industry Association reported “a record surge” in its American business (Wille). Beginning in the fourth quarter of 2001 and continuing through 2002, RV rentals rose by 30 percent (Sloan), while RV sales in the first five months of 2002 jumped more than 20 percent compared with 2001 (“High Rollers”). This RV trend was even more notable because, against the backdrop of a contracting economy, it continued to expand. In 2002 domestic shipments of RVs “rose 21 percent .. . while sales of other kinds were still in a slump” (Pollick). By 2003 “almost 7 million households” owned an RV (Wille), and by 2011 the economist Richard Curtin, the director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan, reported ownership at “a new peak of 8.9 million households,” a figure that translates to about one in nine American households (qtd. “RV Ownership’’). Significantly, these new RV owners were not retirees but baby boomers. In 2002 boomers represented the “fastest-growing segment of the RV market” (“High Rollers”). By the end of the following year, more RVs were owned by baby boomers than by any other group (Hertenstein). Boomers also fueled the increases 1n rentals, and their newfound attraction to the RV epitomized a larger trend: after 9/11, Americans were “hitting the road in record numbers” (Sloan). Reservations at RV campgrounds in the summer of 2002 saw double-digit increases (Roberts), while visits to historic cities and patriotic sites like national parks increased exponentially as travelers set out with their families to tour American landmarks. Paula Crouch Thrasher reported a 22 percent increase 1n visiting patriotic sites 1n 2002, which translates to an increase of roughly 63 million visitors. In 2003 the reporter Barbara Hertenstein observed, “Families— especially after 9/11 —are discovering or rediscovering the pleasures of seeing America.”

2 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

The turn to domestic road travel was not, however, inspired only by a bad economy or fear of flying. The “pleasures of seeing America” articulated a deeper affective desire: to reconnect to what mattered. In 2002 Suzanne Cook, senior vice president of research for the Travel Industry Association of America, identified “a growing interest in travel experiences that provide connections — connections to family, connections to the natural environment

and connections to America itself” (qtd. Thrasher). The road trip proved doubly connective. It united Americans with the greater nation, and it did so in a particular way: through up-close and intimate experiences with back roads, small towns, campgrounds, and the family atmosphere of the RV. Road travel, in effect, merged scales: it made the national local, and the local national. Joining individual with country, it also sited the intrinsic qualities of the nation. This post-9/11 trend is reminiscent of the See America First campaign from the early twentieth century. During World War I, the devastation of the European continent and fear of overseas travel turned American travelers homeward. From 1912 to 1931, marketing campaigns, aided by tour books like Julian Street’s 1914 book Abroad at Home (Jakle 31), encouraged Americans to embrace their own country as a tourist destination, not so much to signal a rejection of Europe as to conduct a “search for uniquely American values” (Belasco 93). Travel literature from this period promoted automobile tourism as the way to make manifest the country’s identity as a national space, rather than a series of regions. As Marguerite S. Shaffer argues, during the See America First campaign, motor travel emerged as a “ritual of American citizenship”: “In teaching tourists what to see and how to see it, promoters invented and mapped an idealized American history and tradition across the American landscape, defining an organic nationalism that linked national identity to a shared territory and history” (4). Writing for the popular Motor Camper & Tourist magazine in 1924, Mrs. C. G. Elmore, one of a growing class of motor camping enthusiasts, frankly assessed the impact of “Seeing America First”: ““The automobile is making more patriots for America today than all the silver-tongued orators in the land” (183). The desire to undertake this project—to see America and thus become American—reappears in the post-9/11 period as both an individual and an institutional response to that tragedy. Picking up on the sense that, in travel executive Judi Lages’s words, people were “looking for all things American to embrace” (qtd. Watson), the Department of Transportation joined with The

Introduction 3

Travel Industry Association of America (TIA) to create the See America’s Byways Campaign. In June 2002 TIA President and CEO William S. Norman unveiled the project with Secretary of ‘Transportation Norman Mineta, announcing, “We will encourage Americans to reconnect with their country and experience the heart and soul of America through its byways” (Travel Industry 11). Echoing the twentieth-century See America First campaign, the initiative resulted from research indicating not only that Americans were driving more than flying but that they were “looking for an ‘authentic’ American experience” (“See America’s Byways’). Significantly, this experience occurs not just through but as driving. The road trip 1s not merely the means but the actual manifestation of an authentic American experience. Deemed a democratic undertaking, it both directs and projects an experience of Americanness. Connecting American travelers to family and country, the road trip enacts a reassertion of subjectivity across different scales. Most importantly, it reasserts the American as a mobile subject. And it reasserts mobility as an American subject. In this book, I examine how the American, or perhaps more accurately, the Euro-American, national imaginary has been profoundly shaped by the promise of mobility: the freedom to go anywhere and become anyone. The road trip epitomizes the linkage between the two: spatial mobility — the movement between places or across space — has often been understood as a way to achieve a range of other mobilities, from the social and economic to the psychological and sexual. The promise of mobility has taken shape in a century’s worth of road films, novels, and nonfiction accounts that have popularized the road trip as a quintessential

expression of Americanness. In the following chapters, I analyze how road narratives produced over the last hundred years illuminate the shifting meanings and purposes of mobility. Sidonie Smith has shown the importance of discerning how different “technologies of motion” create distinct social relations, social spaces, and “narrative intentions” (26) in women’s travel narratives. While she analyzes travel by rail, air, motor, and foot, my book focuses exclusively on road narratives in order to provide a fuller analysis of the genre’s deep associations with the American mythology of mobility. My project is aligned with the work of scholars like Caren Kaplan, whose analysis of the powerful metaphor of displacement stems from a “profound skepticism toward the terms in which travel is described” (x). In this study, to be skeptical means to question the ways that we privilege mobility as a cultural mythology. It means to examine

4 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

how mobility, another powerful metaphor, has been “made meaningful in historically and culturally specific ways” (103). Finally, it means attending to the power of representation. Challenging the idea that road narratives simply illustrate mobility, I demonstrate how they participate in imagining, recreating, and interrogating the term and terms of mobility.

Rethinking Mobility From pioneer trails to the latest car commercial, the “open road” has continually been perceived as a mythic space of possibility. In the vast United States, and in our vaster imaginations, the road offers new horizons to an individual liberated from the confines of home and society. But from the earliest examples published in the 1910s to its most recognized representatives like On the Road and Thelma & Louise, to lesser-known texts such as This [s My Country Too, and to recent offerings like the film 7ransamerica, road narratives

construct much more situated stories that bring this mythology into view. Because of its ubiquity in American culture, we think we know how mobility is foundational to an understanding of American identity. It means freedom, rebellion, or reinvention; there exists the promise of escape. This mythology provides the starting point for my analysis, and it remains a powerful context for the road texts discussed herein. But the recreation of road travel is about

re-creation. Road narratives undo prevalent assumptions about mobility with enactments of different mobilities shaped by their time and place and expressive of rifts around class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, culture, geography, and American identity. ‘Thus, this book uniquely insists that mobility 1s not a method of freeing oneself from space, society, or identity but instead the opposite —a mode of engagement. Indeed, this genre’s significance emerges in its demonstration of the ways mobility both thrives on and tries to manage points of cultural and social conflict.’ As an expression of mobility that counters the immobilizing effects of 9/11 by reconnecting Americans to a national identity, post-9g/11 road travel alerts us to such situated conflicts. In the early twenty-first century, mobility has been at the center of deliberations about Americanness. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, acts and ideas of mobility have been used both to justify practices of surveillance and to challenge the culture of containment such surveillance has created. The establishment of the Department of Homeland Security defined the mission of “Preserving Our Freedoms” as one of “secur[ing] the

Introduction 5 nation” through buttressing borders and regulating all kinds of movements — physical and virtual as well as political and ideological (“About Homeland”’). The issue of immigration once again became a national obsession, rising up in the post-9/11 era and exemplifying a shoring up of Americanness through an anxiety around mobility. Underlying these phenomena was a larger question

about how a nation defined itself: Was it through an openness, a commitment to access and mobility that allowed, for instance, any individual to rise up—the self-made American as it were? Or, was it through the establishment of fortified borders that resolidified the nation space as inviolable and protected citizens from an encroaching otherness, a vision that scaled the nationstate as decidedly not global? ‘The retrenchment into a vision of a hermetically

sealed nation as the epitome of Americanness was illustrated by presidential candidate Mike Huckabee’s 2011 incendiary remarks about his opponent Barack Obama’s biography. In short, Huckabee questioned Obama’s ability not only to lead America but also to be American. For Huckabee, Obama was difficult for most Americans to relate to because his upbringing involved so much

time in foreign places, shaped by untranslatable experiences: “Most of us,” said Huckabee in an interview, “grew up going to Boy Scout meetings and, you know, our communities were filled with Rotary Clubs, not madrassas” (qtd. Hananoki). Obama’s seemingly “global” upbringing effectively disqualified him from being American; to Huckabee, the scales of global and national were fundamentally antithetical. Highlighting the ways that the figure of the president collapses the national body with the individual one, Obama’s racial identity also became a point of contention. The idea that he could not be easily categorized in relation to race (is he black? white? too black? too white?) points to an anxiety around racial and bodily mobility that registers an anxiety about an inability to literally place subjects at the scales of the body and nation. In this post-9/11 moment, the national and global scales became more antagonistic, while those of the body and the nation became synonymous. In the early twenty-first-century United States, then, it seems that mobility is at a crossroads. In the years following the 9/11 attacks, the country experienced an upsurge in domestic mobility and xenophobia. The American road trip took hold as a significant form of enacting national citizenship and unity. But how that national identity is realized seems less clear. Is it through the embrace of the country’s vastness, or does “looking for an ‘authentic’ American

experience” entail an act of shrinking? With imperatives to curtail mobility and embrace it, mobility in this era signifies a mode of expansion, which can

6 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

result in an afhrming or disconcerting heterogeneity, and constriction, in the sense that it serves to demarcate the lineaments of the nation. This ambivalence is the focus of this book. Mobility is tension filled because it 1s a mode of engaging with tensions. This reading stands in contrast to the dominant conceptualization of mobility as the escape of tensions, whereby going on the road signifies a total liberation or flight from that which constrains us—society, self, the family, the past, or the familiar. Over the last century, a range of road scholars and audiences have celebrated the road as an unanchored space. Primarily viewed as a space outside of social order, the road has been overwhelmingly understood in relation to an undifferentiated openness, movement, freedom, and escape. Ronald Primeau’s important foundational book, for instance, develops from the idea that the road narrative represents “a time of reveling in a free-floating state beyond ordinary spatiotemporal bounds” that offers commentary on “the cultural and social order” only when the traveler reenters the place of origin (6). In his astutely comprehensive study of road movies, David Laderman characterizes going on the road as “a literal venturing outside of society” (2). These formulations define the road in terms of absolute detachment — it is beyond and outside society. Similarly, descriptions of mobility have remained “free-floating.” For instance, Katie Mills, in her insightful book on road rebels, describes road stories “‘as vehicles for Americans’ sense of the self as autonomous and mobile” (3). In his study of the road as the new picaresque, Roland Sherrill acknowledges the “primacy of spatial mobility” (231) but, like many others, understands mobility as the “American drive to move unfettered through space” (221). Somewhat ironically, then, mobility has often been treated as a fixed concept; its definition has been assumed to be self-evident (most often as unconstrained movement), or its meaning has been portrayed as unchanging and universal, understood only and always as rebellion, for instance. But as my earlier discussion of post-9/11 road trips illustrates, mobility is motivated by and expressive of shifting desires and objectives. It 1s always under construction. My examination of mobility proceeds from the geographer Tim Cresswell’s groundbreaking work, in which he contends that the meaning of mobility is not one-dimensional, ahistorical, or fixed. “Mobility,” he argues, “bears a number of meanings that circulate in the modern Western world. Mobility as

Introduction 7

progress, as freedom, as opportunity, and as modernity sit side by side with mobility as shiftlessness, as deviance, and as resistance” (On the Move 1-2). Particularly important for my investigation of road narratives 1s his discussion of these conflicting definitions in a specifically American context, which begins with his explanation of the primary role that mobility has had in the construction of an American national identity and imaginary. Pointing to a history created by Euro-Americans, he explains: “Mobility has often been portrayed as the central geographical fact of American life, one that distinguishes EuroAmericans from their European ancestors. ... While Europe had developed through time and in a limited space and had thus become overcrowded and despotic, America could simply keep expanding west” (7ramp in America 10).

In short, “The United States was different from Europe, it was claimed, because its people were less rooted in space and time” (19). The result is that a “new American spirit was forged in the movement of people from other parts of the world and within the emerging nation” (20). Occurring at intra- and international scales, mobility came to epitomize “a uniquely American geographical and historical experience guaranteeing freedom, opportunity and independence” (21). At the same time that mobility was championed as the expression of a people ‘less rooted in space and time” (19), it was defined as a threat to the “rooted and moral existence of place” (21). “In general terms,” Cresswell asserts, “place, in its ideal form, is seen as a moral world, as an ensurer of authentic existence and as a centre of meaning for people” (14). From this viewpoint, figures such as tramps, gypsies, (im)migrants, and undocumented workers threaten “to undo the cosy familiarity of place-based communities and neighborhoods” (14). In

the texts of this study, this threat appears in the form of intrusions by those deemed inappropriately, excessively, or unpredictably — that is, too —mobile. For example, as Huckabee’s remarks about Obama’s “global” upbringing suggest, persons considered racially, ethnically, and gender mobile, such as mixed

race and transgender individuals, threaten “moral worlds.” In determining them to be out of place, remarks such as Huckabee’s also create a spatial model that differentiates between kinds of places. Place is no longer understood as a moral world existing in clear-cut opposition to immoral mobility. Instead, certain spaces —1in this case, the global—are perceived as dangerously mobile, capable of infiltrating other spaces like the nation-state and thus threatening an “authentic” national identity.

8 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

Mobility: A Process of Engagement and Incorporation Cresswell’s theorization of American mobility as both foundational and constructed, as both opportunity and threat, serves as a launching point for this book. The idea of a contradictory mobility 1s especially important for the study of road narratives, because this genre has primarily been read in terms of familiar binaries: home/away, domesticity/mobility, conformity/rebellion, stasis/movement, confinement/liberation. As one example, Laderman analyzes road films as representing a conflict between the rebellion symbolized by the road and the conformity represented by the culture that the road movie “takes flight from” (20). But representations of mobility defy such dualisms. Indeed, the road represents not a flight from opposition but a meeting place of clashing or contradictory elements. ‘To begin with, the different constructions of mobilities in given texts always exist in tension with the dominant mythology of American mobility. This tensile quality of mobility cues us to its larger significance. Mobility does not function as an exit from society/home/the familiar, but instead emerges as a dynamic process for engaging with social conflicts. This makes sense because road stories themselves are plotted around unsettling processes: the crossing of borders, the courting and conquering of distance, the reinvention of identity, and the access, negotiation, and disruption of spaces. The road introduces an otherness that is both spatial and social, and so mobility becomes a process for working out the fact of difference. Road narratives show how mobility is continually invoked and rermagined as a process for transforming subjectivity and space in the wake of larger conflicts. Because it is a process of engagement—rather than escape—its tensions can be understood as taking place around issues of zncorporation, that 1s, around the joining or merging of one thing to, with, or into another. Crossing borders, pursuing distance, navigating new spaces, and reinventing oneself — these are all about incorporating subjects and spaces. The traveler seeks to be incorporated with a new corpus, be it spatial, social, or personal. Recall the post-9/1I imperative to join the traveler with both family and nation; that incorporation functioned as a transformative response, for both individual and nation-state, in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Incorporation gives expression to acts of, and conflicts around, joining with an entity larger than the self. That entity might be a community, place, or something less tangible, like the elusive “IT” sought by Sal and Dean in On the Road. ‘The idea of incorporation is also central to the dynamic transformations concerning space.

Introduction 9

Road narratives often bring into focus the process of joining specific places into “America.” Furthermore, they show how such projects articulate tensions around definitions of incorporable identities. ‘That is, how does the trip across the country reveal the fault lines of inclusion and exclusion for various travelers? Finally, incorporation has an additional meaning: to give substance or material form to. As a mode of response to social tensions, mobility holds the promise of providing a new perspective or location, which will result in giving form to something that could not be perceived at the start. These meanings of incorporation frequently work together. ‘The post-g/11 road travel trend, for instance, performs an expression of freedom through the process of incorporating oneself into the country. And this move simultaneously gives shape to America. Because the idea of “America” is also always a projection of an ideal, road narratives reveal the ways that abstract ideas (Americanness) and physical places (America) are in constant need of having their “shape” substantiated.

Incorporation offers an analytical approach that counters understandings of mobility as an “either/or” proposition. The idea of joining to, with, or into another challenges the fixed opposition of home and away, in which mobility functions as a form of wholesale detachment from whatever is left behind. Although it represents the activity of joining, incorporation 1s not synonymous with seamless reattachment or reintegration into a preexisting world. Instead incorporation 1s used to define a search for new spaces and options for subjectivity that will propel the traveler to a different location — whether that be

spatial, intellectual, cultural, social, personal, or some combination thereof. That is, incorporation describes a dynamic process of engagement. To be clear, | am not arguing that road narratives are not about breaking away or subversion. But we need to be skeptical of the valuation of these movements. The understanding of mobility as transgression 1s particularly import-

ant to examine, in part because so many road scholars understand mobility as an inherently positive and liberating form of transgression that subverts and transcends social order. Indeed, transgression, or for that matter transcendence, often functions as a form of incorporation that allows a particular traveler the privilege of dictating the experience and meaning of his or her movements. We need to ask, for instance, how the assignations of mobility as unfettered and free-floating work to incorporate and substantiate an expansive power for certain individuals, in part because such descriptors make invisible the politics of border crossing. The so-called freedom often associated with mobility always occurs in relation to conflicts around the introduction

I0 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

of spatial and social otherness. We must consider how a traveler’s liberation occurs through a process of incorporating otherness or consolidating identity through the shoring up of sameness and exclusion of difference. And we must see how other travelers critique such processes by making them visible with their own movements.

Productions and Politics of Geographic Scale The tensions of incorporation, that is, the joining of, to, or with another, are expressed spatially with the movement between and across scales. Road narrative protagonists leave home, cross state lines, and search for America. Often their journeys develop as a change 1n the scale of identification. ‘The See America First and See America’s Byways campaigns, for instance, encouraged private individuals to immerse themselves in a national space, engendering their incorporation as national citizens. And car travel made that possible. The road makes transitions between scales explicit; thus, its importance derives from its connection to, not detachment from, various scales such as the home, region, nation, even the body. Indeed, the road is even productive of scales, functioning, for instance, to bring “America” into view. My focus on geographic scale intervenes in the cultural romanticization of the road. As I have mentioned, the road, as an iconic American experience and symbol, has been continually perceived as an unscripted landscape, a site outside the bounds of spatial structuring that accommodates and produces a free-floating individual detached from any spatiotemporal context. Paying attention to movements between and across scales challenges the cultural “fetishization of spatial openness” (Marston, Jones, and Woodward 423); it exposes the apparatuses that support understandings of the road and mobility as unanchored freedom of movement. In short, my intent is to scale mobility. Additionally, road narratives bring awareness of the meanings and identities attached to different scales, revealing whose interests they represent and how they are related to each other. As scholars in human geography have explained, scale represents a way to “divide and order space” (Marston, “Social Construction” 222) by establishing “bounded spaces of differing size, such as the local, regional, national, and global” (Delaney and Leitner 93). Furthermore, the geographer Neil Smith has argued, scale operates as the “criterion of difference not so much between places as between different kinds of places”

Introduction 11 (“Homeless/Global” 99). Its range includes the human body, household, neighbor-

hood, city, metropolitan area, province/state, nation-state, continent, and globe (McMaster and Sheppard 4). Though many scholars focus on scale’s impor-

tance in relation to economic and political structuring, Smith stresses that this process of spatial differentiation shapes and organizes our social and cultural worlds as well. His theorization of scale emphasizes the “personal” scales of body and home as part of “‘a connected configuration that highlights

the relevance of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and disease” (Marston, Jones, and Woodward 418). Smith contends that scale “defines the boundaries and bounds the identities around which control is exerted and contested” (“Homeless/Global” tor). In other words, scale affects the possible forms that identity and social interaction may take, and these forms can enforce or challenge the status quo. In discerning the cultural impact of scale, it is important to realize, as the geographer Sallie Marston clarifies, that scale is not “a pre-existing category waiting to be applied” (“Long Way” 173). Rather, it “is made by and through social processes” and represents an active method of “framing conceptions of reality” (172, 173). Long-standing debates over the gendered separation of spheres, as well as Huckabee’s articulation of the global as basically “unAmerican,” exemplify the constructed nature of scale. Scales like the home and the nation are never neutral descriptors; rather, scales are claimed, categorized, and deployed to perform particular cultural work and effect specific outcomes. Thus, as Smith argues, our analyses must focus on “the production of geographical scale” (qtd. Marston, “Long Way” 173, emphasis added) and attend to the politics of scale. Marston, John Paul Jones III, and Keith Woodward call for a version of the politics of scale that 1s particularly relevant for my study: “the need to expose and denaturalize scale’s discursive power” (420). The geographer Katherine T. Jones also stresses the importance of viewing scale as “a representational trope” used by individuals, like politicians for instance, who define “their position as global or local to enhance their standing” (27). Perhaps tapping into post-9g/11 xenophobia, Huckabee’s rhetorical move of locating Obama at the global scale reveals “scale’s discursive power’, it serves to remind people of what and who counts as American. Using scale representationally to enhance his own standing, Huckabee claims the national for himself, which in this case —as the invocation of the Boy Scouts suggests — 1s also local. His rhetorical formulation has further consequences: it produces a

I2 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

definition of the nation as familiar and known as opposed to diverse and wideranging, thus endorsing homogeneity over heterogeneity as the definition of the United States. In the chapters that follow, I analyze the politics of scale by examining how mobility is one of the processes whereby scale “is made, reorganized, and transformed” (Marston, “Long Way” 172). My analysis primarily focuses on scale’s discursive power, especially in relation to claims of particular scalar identities brought about through mobility. For instance, when Frederic F. Van de

Water announces in his 1927 road narrative that he and his traveling companions “were no longer New Yorkers, but Americans” (5), he identifies his cross-country movement as a method of incorporation that results in a new, nationalized identity. His encounters with a variety of people across the country further result in a celebratory understanding of the nation as representative of a heterogeneous diversity. In post-g/11 road narratives, cross-country travel also functions to locate the nation as a primary scale of identity. But this move is interlocked with a response to a threatened nation. As I will discuss in chapter 5, the imperative to assuage anxiety changes the meaning of the nation, especially in relation to questions of heterogeneity. In road narratives, travel across scales exposes the production and cultural work of various scalar iterations. In addition, mobility serves to trouble scale. If social order is produced and sustained, in part, through specific structurings of geographical scale, then troubling scale serves to challenge the social order that scales support. For example, when a group of feminists began to argue that the “personal is political,’ they exposed and protested a division of space that deemed so-called women’s issues “personal” and therefore irrelevant at the

“public” scales of the city, state, and nation. The women’s road narratives discussed in chapter 3 problematize this personal/public model with mobility that creates turbulence around the boundaries that separate scales. ‘These disruptions produce an instance of what Neil Smith calls “scale bending,” a particular politics of scale whereby “entrenched assumptions about what kinds of social activities fit properly at which scales are being systematically challenged and upset” (“Scale Bending” 193). In these and other road texts in this study, mobility troubles the scaling of space and performs a “restructuring of scale” in efforts that “rework the landscape of empowerment and disempowerment for different classes, races, and genders of people” (193). Overall, my attention to scale construction insists that mobility 1s not the escape from space or scale,

Introduction 13

but rather, one method by which both spaces and scales are constituted and challenged.

Re-creations of Mobility In analyzing mobility as the road narrative genre’s structuring theme and as a national mythology, I do not intend, nor pretend, to survey the vast number of road narratives produced in the last century. Instead, my intent is to reencounter and redirect a road well traveled. In order to delineate and historicize the contradictory shape of mobility, each chapter focuses deeply on a set of texts that demonstrate how “the theme of mobility in the culture of the U.S. has been constantly recreated” (Cresswell, “Mobility” 259) as well as utilized and problematized. Individual chapters illuminate the tensile and changing characterization of mobility. Moreover, they show how the definitions of my framing concepts—mobility, incorporation, and scale—become subject to interrogation. Although Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road has often been heralded as the first American road novel, it had its predecessors. Chapter 1 focuses on the earliest road narratives, produced in the 1910s during the advent of automobile culture and cross-country motoring. A range of magazine articles, travelogues, and novels tout automobility as a unique mode of personal and national unification. Emphasizing encounters with strangers in new landscapes, they express mobility as the forging of intimacies across the yawning gap of social differences. Following the course of star-crossed lovers from different economic and ethnic groups, the novels define differences as also geographical, and so I consider this storyline in relation to larger issues concerning the transformation from regional sectionalism to a unified nation. Analyzing the first transcontinental road novel ever published, Thomas W. Wilby and Agnes A. Wilby’s On the Trail to Sunset (1912), along with Sinclair Lewis’s popular serialized novel Free Air (1919), | examine how the novels’ focus on courtship articulates a prevalent tension between individualism and cultural assimilation in which the ideal and the problem appear to be the same: mobility promises to incorporate the outsider. Chapter 2 focuses on road narratives produced in the post-World War II period, a time of increased popularity for the genre, as evidenced by Kerouac’s On the Road and the TV series Route 66. In addition to On the Road, I

I4 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

examine three texts developed from journalistic projects: John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1961), John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962), and John A. Williams’s This Is My Country Too (1964). Each narrative features a questing, and often alienated, male protagonist in search of something currently elusive— his country, himself, an authentic truth —in a time of social flux created by a growing consumer culture, the cold war and the atomic age, and racial strife. For the three white authors, mobility represents the promise of an unmediated experience free from the structures of contemporary life that circumscribe, inhibit, or falsify the male individual’s experience, rendering him immobile. Emphasizing a gendered rather than geographically situated subjectivity, the road trip acts out the fantasy of a borderless world, which reincorporates and rescales white masculinity as a figure of expansion that obliterates or subsumes other scales and identities. With his text, Williams, an African American writer, critiques this sense of boundlessness and contingency, reconstituting mobility in relation to a quest for bounded spaces at scales from the individual to the nation. The next two chapters are organized around sets of texts featuring a specific group of travelers, a structure that recognizes and represents the identity politics taking hold during the decades of their production. As a form of political activity emerging from “the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, gay rights struggles, and the New Left in the 1960s,” identity politics, in part, protests demeaning characterizations of previously “devalued identities” through “representation, voice, and self-determination” (Carla Kaplan 125). Foregrounding the ways mobility takes shape around who takes to the road, the narrative perspectives of these texts upend the terms of mobility and incorporation. Chapter 3 turns its attention to the reappearance of women, not seen as the protagonists of road narratives since before World War II. While the stories of chapter 2 developed around a gendered identity crisis, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees (1985), Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here (1986), and the film Thelma & Louise (1991), directed by Ridley Scott, introduce a generic identity crisis. That is, in these texts mobility materializes as the movement to and through the very space— the domestic— the road trip was seemingly designed to exclude or escape. The fact that domesticity trails women on the road is both the problem and the point. Women’s mobility functions to bring domesticity out into the open; thus, mobility gains its importance as a mode of revelation that exposes, and then troubles, the ways that scale shapes

Introduction 15

identities and power relations. The troubling of scale occurs in part through the tensile representation of women’s mobility as both an act of and an antidote to abandonment. Female protagonists abandon hometowns, abusive relationships, bad jobs, birth names, and even children. But such acts of abandonment

also emerge as an antidote to larger social wrongs, including the ways that women and others have been disenfranchised at the scales of city, state, and federal jurisdiction. ‘Tying these representations to the specific feminist proclamation that “the personal is political” —itself a politics of both scale and revelation —I analyze women’s mobility as a politicized experience that exploits the profound instability of home in order to undo the structuring of scale that has incorporated particular identities and interests. The idea of going Indian, as Philip J. Deloria has compellingly argued, is an established and integral part of Euro-American identity and history. But the idea of “Indians going” is a much less familiar concept in mainstream Amer-

ican culture.’ In chapter 4, I examine two Native American road narratives, David Seals’s novel The Powwow Highway (1979) and the film Smoke Signals (1998), directed by Chris Eyre with a screenplay by Sherman Alexie. Organized around the retracing of others’ journeys, these texts represent mobility

as a mode of incorporating the personal, communal, and historical past into the present. They critique a mainstream ideology in which mobility represents progress as a moving forward that erases the past, revealing the ways that America’s “mythical imperative to become new” (Deloria, Playing Indian 2) has been repeatedly enacted as a spatial practice. The overlaying of past and present refuses the use of mobility as detachment. Instead, mobility develops through an engagement with the landscape as a mode of agitation rather than one of transcendence or nostalgia. In many road narratives, the landscape provides proof that the traveler is indeed moving, but it is simultaneously represented as immune to the effects of such mobility. By contrast, these texts represent the landscape as a site of struggle, which challenges the history of erasure and containment that has defined Euro-American incorporation. As a mode of agitation, mobility reveals the practices that have incorporated and immobilized Native Americans, including the Euro-American history of representing Natives as petrified stereotypes: the laconic shaman, the dying Indian, the hollering warrior. Unsettling this metaphorical history, Native road narratives create a fuller account of incorporation. Chapter 5 returns to the discussion that opened this book. I analyze the ways that three films, Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers (2005), Duncan ‘Tucker’s

16 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

Transamerica (2005), and Sam Mendes’s Away We Go (2009), along with Cormac McCarthy’s novel 7he Road (2006), construct particular narratives and

meanings of mobility in the aftermath of 9/11. These texts respond to the transgressive mobility of the 9/11 attacks with narratives that reclaim mobility as a way both to address the profound loss caused by those events and to reassert a mobile subject. This reclamation project suggests that mobility itself must undergo reincorporation as an American ideal and practice. The process begins with goal-directed travels across country, a space experienced as the homeland, especially because the purpose of the road trip is to reconcile

an estranged family. The family, then, represents the other to be incorporated, which develops into the pursuit of biological reproduction as a mode of rescue and transformation. I situate this focus on reproduction as part of a larger narrative in which mobility is defined as the resurrection of an ideology of production and productivity. Each road story expresses a larger cultural anxiety that Americans are no longer capable of creating and pursuing directions of their own making, which includes a post-9/11 fear of obsolescence.

Mobility serves to reclaim something lost or about to be lost, including — or especially — the figure of the producer as a primary American identity.

Like space and place, mobility is not “an arena in which social life unfolds”

but “a medium through which social life’—and I would add identity and social order —are “produced and reproduced” (Derek Gregory gtd. Rose 19).

This study explores the role that re-creations of mobility play in the processes and formations of Americanness. Although it is a genre study, this book makes an important contribution to larger discussions about narratives of Americanization. In this post-g/11 era, discussions of national security and spatial containment in the United States are increasingly prevalent. Many of these arguments about space convey particular and often pernicious ideas about “Americanness” and incorporation that derive their power from the (re)scaling of both people and place. Because these claims often invoke and re-create the mythology of mobility this book examines, my analysis of the production, endurance, and revision of mobility as both idea and experience is particularly timely.

ONE

Early Road Narratives and the “Voyage into Democracy”’

1x years before the appearance of her best-selling classic Etzquette, Emily Post authored a road narrative. Appearing in 1916, By Motor to the Golden Gate describes her journey from New York City to the Panama-Pacific

International Exposition in San Francisco taken the previous year with her son and a cousin. On assignment for Co//er’s magazine, Post was, in her editor’s words, “to find out how far you can go pleasurably! When you find it too uncomfortable, come home!” (Post 8). In these early days of cross-country automobiling, discomfort would be determined by the suitability, or even the existence, of roads west of the Mississippi River. But the emphasis on comfort also imparts the rules of the road as those of decorum. Post may be an intrepid divorcee and journalist, but this future queen of manners was, most assuredly, an East Coast, upper-class woman traveling for leisure. So believed her friends, whose comments Post recounts in the book’s opening: “Of course you are sending your servants ahead by train with your luggage and all that sort of thing,” says one. Adds another, “Not at all! The best thing is to put them in another machine directly behind, with a good mechanic. . . . How about your chauffeur? You are sure he is a good one?” (1). Post’s response, that she will take neither servants nor chauffeur, and that her son will serve as driver and mechanic, prompts one friend to exclaim, ““They’ll never get there!”’; they will be “on a Pullman inside of ten days!” (2). With a witty, winking tone, By Motor to the Golden Gate sets up a theme characteristic of the first transcontinental road narratives: geographical distance is measured in increments of ideological as well as physical challenges. Like many of her social set, Post “had driven across Europe again and again” (3). In the meantime, she explains, “our own land, except for the few chapter

18 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

headings that might be read from the windows of Pullman train, was an unopened book” (3). Emphasizing asylum more than access, the insularity of the Pullman mirrors the insularity of the social class that rides it. The perspective of both regards the country as a space of crossing not connection. The transcontinental motor trip, then, reveals the bigger expanse that Post must traverse: the gap between her vantage point as an easterner and her identity as an American. Up until now, her understanding of her cultural and national identity did not extend west beyond New York, and often looks back east to Europe for recognition. For Post and other motor tourists in the IgIos, cross-country auto travel does not enact the free-spirited expression of self, a claim so often made about mobility in all American road narratives. Instead, mobility takes shape as the gradual education of the self, which 1s realized through a series of geographical and social dislocations that function not as a mode of detachment or escape, but rather as a method of entry and incorporation into the larger nation. As the narrator of Sinclair Lewis’s novel Free Air pronounces of its New Yorker protagonist’s incipient and disorienting

travel through middle America: “Thus Claire Boltwood’s first voyage into democracy” (45).

Taking place over the 4,250 miles she travels (242), Post’s education 1s spurred by her wonderment at “the lavish immensity of our own country” (113). Recording the details of this immensity, her road narrative functions, as do the other earliest examples of the genre, to chart unfamiliar territory. By the end of her trip, Post reflects:

When we started, I had an idea that, keen though we were to undertake the journey, we would find it probably difficult, possibly tiring, and surely monotonous— to travel on and on and on over the same American road, through towns that must be more or less replicas, and hearing always the same language and seeing the same types of people doing much the same things. Everyone who had ever taken the trip assured us that our impression in the end would be of an unending sameness. Sameness! Was there ever such variety? (238) Discovering the nation’s defining heterogeneity prompts Post’s own “metamorphosis” (240), the achievement of a sense of self larger than the individual who left home, realized through the connections automobiling enables: “You can’t come in contact with people anywhere, without unconsciously absorbing a few of their habits, a tinge of their point of view, and in even a short while

The “Voyage into Democracy” 19

you find that you have sloughed off the skin of Eastern hidebound dependence upon ease and luxury” (240). Inspired by Post, Beatrice Larned Massey, another female New Yorker, penned her own road narrative four years later. Although she opens /t Might Have Been Worse: A Motor Trip from Coast to Coast by noting how the “motor mind has so grown and changed in a few years” (3), she concludes with a sentiment uncannily similar to Post’s: “If you want to see your country, to get a little of the self-centered, self-satisfied Eastern hide rubbed off, to absorb a little of the fifty-seven (thousand) varieties of people and customs, and the alert, openhearted, big atmosphere of the West, then try a motor trip” (143). In sloughing off their Eastern hides and absorbing the variety of others, these two New Yorkers gain a sense of the self defined by a different scale. In Frederic F. Van de Water’s words, stated pointedly in his 1927 cross-country narrative The Family Flivvers to Frisco, he and his traveling companions “were no longer New Yorkers, but Americans” (5). Early road narratives imbue the newness of cross-country motoring with the powers of “metamorphosis” for

both traveler and landscape, incorporating and transforming both into the national.

Union Making Cross-country motoring was not the first tourist enterprise credited with creating a national citizenry. The idea that “true Americans would emerge through travel to places increasingly coded as ‘national’” (Freeman 147-48) dates to the nineteenth century when writers urged Americans to visit quintessentially American places like Niagara Falls and Yellowstone National Park.' But while these accounts touted exceptional destinations as representatively American, motor travel democratized the process of nationalization, contending that “true Americans,” and thus the “true America,” emerged in ordinary, rather than extraordinary, locales. ‘These ordinary locales further defined the creation of national identity as taking place through encounters with a series of geographical and social “others.” With its ability to access and connect to these locales, motor touring, as Van de Water again succinctly claims, functioned “to drive out sectionalism and to knit the American people into a more cohesive, more sympathetic union” (242). This claim for union making emphasizes the process as the point: it is the joining and incorporation of the parts, not the extolling of one part as representative, that defines national identity.

20 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

The focus on union making appears in the era’s road fiction in decidedly human terms. Published between 1900 and 1920, early road novels develop a similar plot: two incompatible suitors, brought together by the intimacy and unpredictability uniquely created by motor travel, find love and impending marriage. Unlike the auto-racing fiction of the time, which featured dashing young drivers and a cultural fascination with speed (in terms of both quickening physical movement and romantic advances), road novels emphasize automobiling’s ability to cover vast distances and access areas previously unreachable. Like the nonfiction narratives of this period, the novels ultimately represent automobility as the forging of intimacies across the yawning gap of social difference. Focusing on the course of star-crossed lovers from different economic and ethnic groups, their plots develop around encounters with strangers in new landscapes. While other early twentieth-century novels, such as The Virginian (1902) and Tarzan (1914), also feature romances that reached across social differences, these novels emphasize the clash between the civilized and wild. Intersecting with Teddy Roosevelt’s promotion of rugged in-

dividualism and the strenuous life, these stories’ tension revolves around a conflicting desire to tame the wild man and fetishize the virile male body. Road narratives focus much more emphatically on the tensions of coupling. Defined by mobility rather than by place (even one as unsettled as the frontier), they linger on the processes of incorporation into a larger unit. Itself a process of unification, courtship in these novels literally engages the social differences that characterize the nation at the beginning of the twentieth century, differences represented by a growing population of immigrants, increasingly mobile middle and working classes, and the wildness of the West: all of which register as both alluring and not quite incorporable. Figured explicitly as the union of two dissimilar figures, these heterosexual romances personify a story of Americanization as the unification of unlike parties. Furthermore, the prerogatives of incorporation require that this unification, like the nation itself, transcend the sum of its parts.

To examine the tensions around the incorporation of difference, I will largely focus on two novels that chart the pleasures and pitfalls of courtship on the road, especially as they develop into conflicts around the Americanization of subject and space. Thomas W. Wilby and Agnes A. Wilby’s On the Trail

to Sunset (1912), the first transcontinental American road novel, introduces the particularly interesting — and rare— possibility of an interracial road romance.’ This romance symbolizes the friction between, and consolidation of,

The “Voyage into Democracy” 21

regional geographies, drawing our attention to the fraught processes of New Mexico’s statehood and incorporation into the nation. The novel begins by introducing New Englander Winthrop Hammond as he is about to accompany his uncle, aunt, and a chauffeur on a cross-country automobile trip. A newspaperman, Hammond 1s to write about their adventures, specifically advocating the need for a decent road that joins coast to coast. His uncle defines this purpose as a “patriotic duty” (9g), but Winthrop really undertakes the trip as the means to pursue a woman, the charmingly independent Evelyn Deering, a new woman of the twentieth century who has worked in settlement houses in Chicago, but who 1s also devoutly loyal to her home in New Mexico, a place where she cannot imagine not living. The plot is driven by Winthrop’s courtship of Evelyn, whose family (heading home to New Mexico from Chicago) travels alongside them on the road west. But the romance 1s threatened by the alluring Emilio Maria Santos, who, as a passionate “patriot” of New Mexico, introduces a different patriotism of place that challenges both the easterners’ “patriotic duty” and Hammond’s claims on Evelyn. Seven years later, Sinclair Lewis published his novel Free Air (1919), an expansion of his popular serial that ran in the Saturday Evening Post. The story focuses on a cross-class romance between New York socialite Claire Boltwood and midwestern mechanic Milt Daggett, two plucky individuals who undertake independent but intersecting transcontinental auto trips. Taking a road trip with her father as a cure for his nervous exhaustion, Claire represents the increasingly mobile new woman who questions her upcoming marriage and leaves home to find herself.* Ruggedly independent, Milt is introduced as the self-made man. Although he owns his own garage, he also signifies the provincial working class, thus providing the contrast to Claire’s urbanity. Becoming infatuated with Claire when she patronizes his garage, Milt views her as his inspiration to leave home and seek out bigger successes elsewhere. As they travel across the country, their class and regional differences figure as both attraction and deterrent, creating a tension about whether their love match can overcome — or accommodate — their heterogeneity.

Many scholars have argued that road stories feature “the couple as the dominant configuration” in the plot (Cohan and Hark 8). But the representation and role of the couple figure quite differently in pre— World War II than in postwar road narratives. In examples such as On the Road, Easy Rider, and Thelma & Louise, the travelers set out already paired. While the pair

has adventures with others met on the road, the story primarily concerns

22 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

the developing relationship between the original travelers. By contrast, in the first decades of the twentieth century, road novels like those described above, as well as a film like /t Happened One Night (1934), focus on two individuals who are not initially traveling together but whose paths intersect on, and because of, the road. The process of pairing highlights the theme of exposure to difference —to new places, people, and ways of being and belonging. This exposure is paralleled, perhaps even shaped, by the mode of travel. “Open cars, either roadster or touring,’ write Michael Stern and Jane Stern, “were the rule for the first twenty years of the twentieth century” (26). While “go percent of the automobiles manufactured [in 1919] were open roadsters,” just ten years later “approximately 90 percent of all passenger cars were closed sedans” (Casey 49). In contrast to the insulation and protection introduced by closed sedans, the openness of earlier roadsters models the access and interaction that characterizes motor touring of the period. In this process of coupling, or union making, which unfolds as the attraction to, navigation of, and incorporation of difference, marriage performs two

potentially opposite functions. First, it represents a predominant mode of social reproduction in which the right match ensures the continuation of the social order. Second, however, marriage represents a means of social mobility.

As people “marry up” or “marry into” a better situation, the social order changes. The new couple could function as a mode of social repair that accommodates differences, or it could usher in an element of threatening heterogeneity. [The Wilbys’ and Lewis’s road novels navigate this tension. While the attraction of the road might be plotted as the romance of mingling classes, this mixing is plagued by concerns about the proximity between a Euro-American upper (or upper-middle) class and a range of enterprising immigrants, foreigners, vagrants, and working-class folk. Produced at a time when discussions of the processes and very meaning of creating an integrated nation were paramount, the novels’ focus on courtships articulates a prevalent tension between individualism and cultural assimilation in which the ideal and the problem appear to be the same: mobility promises to incorporate the outsider.

Cross-Country Motoring: The Promise of Intimacy To understand how and why cross-country automobile travel became a site for these issues to emerge, I want to examine more closely the infancy of the autotouring phenomenon. Early enthusiasts touted motor travel as offering a different orientation to the country. As the editors of Motor Camper & Tourist declared,

The “Voyage into Democracy” 23

motor travel “allows the owner and his family and friends to go when, where, and how they please” (“Aims”). This customized flexibility creates a new vantage

point. As Massey declares, the motor trip is “the only way to get a first-hand knowledge of our country, its people, [and] the scenery” (foreword). The transcontinental railroad may have achieved nationwide geographical unity in the late nineteenth century, but its perspectival priority was breadth not depth. By contrast, motor travel reveals an inside view of America. Recounting her 1915 trip from the West to the East Coast along the Lincoln Highway, Efhe Price Gladding remarks upon “the intimate knowledge to which the motorist alone can attain” (qtd. Shaffer 228, emphasis added). Van de Water concludes his narrative with the assertion, “We have seen America with an intimacy and a closeness of

contact from which a traveler by train or even motorist who stops at hotels is forever barred” (240, emphasis added). Writing for 7rave/ magazine 1n 1915, Newton A. Fuessle draws out the civic significance of such intimacy. Driving the new Lincoln Highway, America’s ‘““wonder-trail,”’ he gushes, offers travelers “an intimacy with their own Amer-

ica such as has never been vouchsafed them by any other means. One may whirl across the continent a score of times as a railway passenger and never sense the slightest fraction of the feeling of nearness to the States and cities traversed, which the motorist, following the Lincoln Highway, experiences. The Highway affords an incomparable inspirational course in Americanism” (26). Unlike railroads, which focused “solely on the final destination,” motor touring registered “as a process—an experience” (Shaffer 160). ‘The process begins with an unprecedented access, which leads to intimacy and discovery, and culminates in the creation of patriots. As Van de Water puts it, “We know America and Americans as only those who go motor camping can learn to know them. We have discovered a people and a land whose existence the average New Yorker never even suspects” (240). Transformed from a New Yorker

to an American, Van de Water expresses the crucial effect. The intimacy of motoring leads to unification and incorporation that redefines the scale of identity. And a national road creates the literal and symbolic route to this unification. As Fuessle asserts, the Lincoln Highway not only binds disjointed roads but unites formerly disparate elements and produces a newly charged vision of Americanness:

America’s amazing Highway is at once a road to yesterday and a road to to-morrow. Teaching patriotism, sewing up the remaining ragged edges of sectionalism, revealing and interpreting America to its people, giving

24 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

swifter feet to commerce, gathering up the country’s loose ends of desultory and disjointed good roads ardor and binding them into one highly organized, proficient unit of dynamic, result-getting force, electric with zeal, it is quickening American neighborliness, democracy, progress and civilization. (26)

This proclamation proposes transcontinental motor travel as a substantive form of unification 1n a period of disparity caused not only by war and sectionalism but also by urbanization and immigration. The intimate encounters made possible by motor travel counter the “isolating, insulating quality of mass society” (Belasco 24). Enacting an antidote to the anonymity of the city, where proximity to others only enhances estrangement, motoring “through the heart of the nation,’ as Van de Water writes, “brought us to a new definition of what constitutes nationality, a definition which dwellers in great cities with conglomerate populations never have the opportunity to learn” (44-45). Only by traveling through America could one understand “what constitutes nationality,’ and with great reward: motoring could end sectionalism by articulating and championing a national vision that both linked and supplanted the competitive regional interests of the East, West, North, and South.’ Writers repeatedly stress this transformation of scale; mixing with strangers in strange places inspires an associative bond as citizens of a country, which replaces former identifications as residents of a region. As Shaffer points out, early motor-touring narratives describe a “community of the road” that “was a democratic melting pot” (232). Ina period of “unprecedented confrontation of social groups and ways of life” (Marston, “Long Way” 178) produced by large-scale immigration, as well as migration of populations from rural backgrounds to the urban industrial workforce, auto travelers recounted positively encounters with a diverse group of foreign-born, rural, and workingclass Americans. Indeed, such encounters prompted calls for a unifying scale of identity. Traveling ten years after Post, Harriett Geithmann proclaims in Motor Camper & Tourist magazine that automobile travel “is transforming the provincial-minded man into a national-minded one” (433). “Therefore,” she surmised, “it must aid Americanization and the nationalization of the people at large” (433).

Taking people out of cities into the “heart of the nation,” and enabling the transformation from regional to national identity, transcontinental automobility exemplifies the frontier ideology espoused by Frederick Jackson ‘Turner. In

The “Voyage into Democracy” 25

“The Significance of the American Frontier,’ Turner argued that American development did not develop “along a single line,’ but through a generational “return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area.” “In the crucible of the frontier,’ he maintained, “the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race.” ‘Thus, the frontier “promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people” that “worked against the sectionalism of the coast.” “Even the New Englander, who was shut out from the frontier by the Middle region,” Turner explains, “lost the acuteness of his sectionalism on the way” westward. In other words, as Post and Massey realized in their twentiethcentury versions, the traveler has a little of his or her eastern hide rubbed off. Overwhelmingly tracking easterners’ westward journeys, early road narratives reiterate the process of Americanization that Turner theorizes. ‘The poor roads and physical difficulties of cross-country car travel re-create the primitive conditions of the frontier, while the intimacy afforded by the automobile promoted the fusion of strangers into a “mixed race” of Americans. However, as I will discuss, road narratives dampen, or at least test, Turner’s enthusiasm with their ambivalence about such mixings and the feasibility of their outcomes. Concerns about creating a national citizenry intersected with those about developing class fractions. Capitalism represented the economic system of democracy, but the increased focus on consumption —1n which the automobile played a large part—could create serious social rifts that would undermine the principles of a democracy. Woodrow Wilson articulated his apprehension in 1907 as president of Princeton University. The automobile in particular symbolizes “the arrogance of wealth, with all its independence and carelessness” that “spread socialistic feeling” among those of the lower classes who, unable to afford such luxuries, resent such displays of wealth and, as a result, will turn to socialism as a more just political system (qtd. Dulles 313-14). Wilson’s concerns were not unfounded. In 1910 the cheapest car sold for $400 while the average American worker earned about $574 annually (Jakle tor). However, this picture changed rapidly with Henry Ford’s implementation of the moving assembly line in 1913. Reducing manufacturing costs and labor time, mass production ushered in lower prices. By 1916 a Model T cost $360, down from $850 in 1908 (Scharff 56). Installment plans also increased affordability. In 1922 73 percent of all cars were sold on payment plans (Flink 191). While 458,000 cars were privately owned in 1910, that number reached 8 million in 1920 (Flink 191) and 23 million in 1930 (Jakle 121).

26 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

During this period of immense change, the car’s cultural status also changed. With the Model T as its most popular emblem, the automobile came to symbolize the lives, aspirations, and mobility of the “everyman.” Mass production of the Model T also made motor touring, once limited to the upper classes, accessible to members of the middle and even working classes. Although only a dozen or so motorists made the drive across country in 1912, by 1921 “transcontinental motor trips numbered 20,000” (Havlick 20). Motor Camper & Tourist claimed that during 1923 “some 10,000,000 people in over 2,000,000 cars ‘motorcamped’ throughout the United States” (“Aims”). Large numbers of people mingling on the road, and at tourist camps and roadside restaurants, challenged traditional social demarcations. Describing her first motor camp trip in 1925, Norine H. Morton reported, “I have never met more democratic or congenial people than those we meet motor camping today. It is not unusual to see the man with a Packard sitting around with the proud possessor of a Ford” (533). In the same year, Geithmann offers a less idyllic image of diversity: ‘““The lame, the halt, and the blind, the pigeon-toed, bow-legged

and hare-lipped, grizzled grandfathers and dimpled infants were all on the road leading from somewhere to somewhere else. . . . There were rattletraps of ancient times threatening to collapse at a moment’s notice and aluminum palaces, walnut-trimmed and fitted up like Pullman cars” (433). Geithmann’s panoramic scene prompts her to wonder where all these “motoring gypsies” are headed, suggesting that, although motor travel may be “sewing up the remaining ragged edges of sectionalism” (Fuessle 26), the picture 1s not a seamless one. Although a wider range of people gained access to motor travel, their motives for traveling varied. Some wandered leisurely, while others searched for work, moved for health reasons, or sought “fairer fields in which to plant their household goods” (Geithmann 433). And so, at the same time that many travelers lauded the pleasures of campside camaraderie, members of the upper class squirmed uncomfortably camping next to migrant workers at free campgrounds, while the presence of real hoboes belied the elite’s romanticized versions of “roughing it.”’ Less concerned that the automobile might exacerbate inequity between the classes, other commentators feared that the phenomenon of automobility might level class differences in dangerous ways. In particular, mixings that created spatial intimacy between the sexes produced social anxiety. As a new space of privacy free from a chaperone’s eye, the car “might lead to disorderly and dangerous cross-class familiarities, particularly between [female] passenger-owners and their [male] chauffeurs” (Scharff 18).

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Early Road Novels and the Courting of Difference Two very early road novels draw attention to this ambivalence with stories that show automobile culture as forging new social relations that result in the mitigation and enunciation of class, ethnic, and gender differences. In Lloyd Osbourne’s Three Speeds Forward: An Automobile Love Story with One Reverse (1906) and Edward Salisbury Field’s A Six-Cylinder Courtship (1907), the heterosexual romance represents new intimacies created by the automobile, foregrounding ways the country was organized and divided up, both socially and spatially. The scale of the road trip in these two novels is regional not national, a scope reflecting this decade’s poor and unfinished roads, less advanced technology, and limited skill of most drivers. Even within this range, the plots develop around the traversal of great social distances and the unification of contrasting social groups. In Sixv-Cylinder Courtship, the romance stitches up sectionalism by bringing together an easterner and a westerner. Three Speeds Forward culminates with an engagement between old and new money. Most interestingly, the moneyed male protagonist in each novel takes up the position of the automotive expert, thus crossing into territory overwhelmingly occupied by working-class men. In 4A Siv-Cylinder Courtship, this crossover

takes place as a deception. A lovely female stranger enters the garage where New York millionaire William Snowden, grubby from a day’s auto touring, stores his car, and she mistakes him for a chauffeur. Smitten with this woman who wants to hire his car, Snowden goes along with her mistake, introducing himself as Bill Snow and passing on his home number as the “Reliable Garage.” ‘The woman, Marian Standish from San Francisco, calls for his services again, and Snowden drives her around on multiple occasions where they share the privacy of the automobile. The novel follows his charade and the eventual revelation of his true identity. It concludes with Marian’s acceptance of his advances, a pledge that occurs only after Snowden crashes his car, which has been the vehicle of both his courtship and his deceit. Three Speeds Forward begins with the unnamed female protagonist buying a car as consolation after breaking off an engagement to the most available bachelor in her town of Studdingham, a man revealed as a lout. But he publicizes the breakup as his own doing. ‘To save face and soothe herself, she takes long drives in the country. When her car breaks down, she is helped home by a stranger, George Marsden, who turns out to be the new man in town.

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Studdingham residents despise Marsden for buying his way into society on money from a career (Seemingly) stemming from his invention of a popular puzzle. Attracted to this stranger, but fearing a social and familial scandal, the heroine only meets him while driving. Marsden 1s love struck but does not know how to win the favor of the woman’s father, Mr. Tillinghast, who dislikes him because he is not of their social set. Aware that Tillinghast has a car but no mechanical knowledge— something that puts the older man on edge— Marsden also relies on deception to forward his suit. He devises a plot to rig the ‘Tillinghasts’ car so it will break down, thus allowing himself to fix the car, save the day, and win the father’s favor.

Although these novels create unions between two unlike parties, the social scope covered 1s decidedly narrow. Instead of crossing the gap of social differences to create a new democratic order, the romances in these novels repair social divisions by reasserting a clearly delineated social hierarchy. In Six-Cylinder Courtship, this dynamic plays out in the ego/alter ego characterization of Snowden/Snow. Snowden’s adoption of the persona Bill Snow proposes a mobile identity that creates an appreciation for, and flexibility around, different class identifications. Feeling newly industrious as a chauffeur, Snow/ den remarks that it relieves him from being perceived as the passive recipient of a large inheritance. And so the enervated masculinity of the upper class finds a model of rejuvenation 1n the strenuous life represented by the workingclass Bill Snow. But Marian Standish does not, finally, fall in love with Bill Snow. And Snowden’s appreciation for the working-class men who handle his

car is offset by a discomfort with being dependent upon the skilled labor of the working class, a group of recent Irish immigrants who are doubly marked by class and ethnicity as the foreign and ultimately nonassimilable other. That discomfort appears as full-blown anxiety in Three Speeds Forward. Virginia Scharff has shown how, during the early phase of automobility, “the cultural gap between social status and control of technology provoked substantial confusion and concern” (19). Although the hired chauffeur was clearly the social inferior to his employer, the chauffeur knew more than the car’s owner about automobile machinery. Therefore, the employee gained a certain degree of power as a skilled and knowledgeable authority. In Osbourne’s novel, Tillinghast is deathly scared of his car, largely because his chauffeur, Albert, convinces his boss that he (Albert) is the only one with the expertise to drive it. The novel positions the working-class man as having the upper hand, but it also suggests that he gains that authority through deceit. Marsden’s success

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as a suitor comes from the demonstration of his own driving and mechanical abilities, skills that simultaneously discredit Albert’s claims and transform his own act of dishonesty into a strategic plan." In these two novels, then, working-class men might be the professionals, but the upper-class amateurs are revealed to be the genuine article. Reflecting the period’s admiration for the figure of the hard-working, rugged, and thus virile mechanic, the male characters’ know-how with cars creates intimacy with the women they desire. But the novels finally elude the issue of mixings between classes by making the skilled auto man a member of the upper class. They just mix up the conventions of the upper-class romance plot. Readers are not asked to admire, envy, or fantasize about the superiority of class privilege. Instead, readers are invited to see the good-natured male protagonists’ commonalities with everyday folk. These novels represent the differences of the upper class as merely superficial, the result of constraints imposed by social proprieties.'' ‘The mobility provided by the automobile functions to mobilize individuals from rigid social classifications. At the same time, the novels limit the outcome of such mobilization to a vision of the upper class as elastic. Unification means that northeast society expands to include the West, and old money accepts new money into the fold.

Transcontinental Road Novels and National Suitability Osbourne’s and Field’s novels gesture toward the incorporation of social differences in the process of union making. But these road stories introduce social differences only to diffuse them. Dabbling 1n difference may widen one’s circle but ultimately does not challenge social insularity. With On the Trail to

Sunset and Free Air, the transcontinental journey takes things to a different scale. Cross-country motor trips introduce extended forays into unknown terrain, jolting the traveler out of place with their intimate introduction to the nation’s immensity. As they create proximity between strangers and make strangeness alluring, these road trips provoke a desire to couple with something larger than the self: a mate and a country. With their twists and turns, road travel and courtship come together as unifying processes that incorporate disparate parts. Enacting the desire to join with difference, the road trip, along with the romance it engenders, develops into a story about the outsider in America, and the outsider as American. Both novels introduce protagonists that are already social outsiders: On the Trail to Sunset features a Mexican

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national, a new woman, and an orphan; Free Air showcases a new woman as well as an orphaned working-class mechanic. Here, outsiderness signifies individuality, a trait that paves the way for the reconsideration of entrenched ideas and group identity. But how much is the American experience one of incorporating the outsider? In both novels, the male suitor compels questions about national suitability. These road narratives reveal a conflict between two visions of the representative American, exploring whether the individualist American and the assimilated American can ever be synonymous. As the lovers attempt to find a common ground (sometimes quite literally), marriage, as an act both achieved and denied, acts as arbiter of both Americanization and social mobility.

On the Trail to Sunset: Unification as Naturalization The making of romantic and national unions in On the Trail to Sunset turns on the question of whether outsiders can achieve a sense of belonging or whether they encroach upon the very definition of that belonging. Such questions resonated at the beginning of the twentieth century when, as Nancy Cott argues, ‘a post—Civil War generation of leaders intended to consolidate the United

States and make it a power on the world stage, and that required knowing who belonged to the nation and who was welcome to join” (132). Recognizing efforts to end sectionalism, Cott further argues that the “making of both marriages and citizens became pressing” in discussions of national belonging (133). Americans’ marriages to foreigners “had dynamic potential to create new kinds of citizens for the United States, because children born on American soil would be U.S. citizens regardless of their immigrant parents’ own capacity for naturalization” (132). In the unassimilated Southwest of On

the Trail to Sunset, issues of consolidation and belonging emerge through struggles over geography. As the novel’s spatial outsider, New Mexico appears as the site of wilder-

ness in the text’s staging of a battle between the urban East and unbounded Southwest. Published in 1912, the novel appeared the same year New Mexico became the forty-seventh state. In the period that led up to the granting of statehood, the status of New Mexico, and by extension the Southwest as a region, was at the center of a debate about whether it could and should be integrated, legally but especially culturally, into the United States. The courtship of Evelyn Deering becomes enmeshed with the courtship of New Mexico, so that the novel’s romantic unions-in-the-making tell a bigger story about what is at stake in incorporating New Mexico into the United States.

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The novel’s rivalry between two suitors develops around opposing views of New Mexico. For both Hammond and Santos, the region represents geographical and cultural distance from the rest of the United States, but they read this distance differently. ‘To Santos, New Mexico does not represent one region in a larger nation; instead, it stands apart as its own entity, the place of “his people.” Evelyn is attracted to his deep identification with this place, which is anchored by his patriotic vision for its cultivation. Hearing him talk, she feels “under the spell of his Indian love song and of his aspirations for the uplift of his people” (386). Represented as the exotic other, Santos appears as a figure of mystery and romance whose Mexican and Spanish heritage gives him transformative powers over both Evelyn and New Mexico. At first, the novel lauds Santos’s ethnic difference, defining it through his passion, independence, and unselfish commitment to his people. But the story develops through a rather anxious evaluation of the degree and nature of Santos’s difference, and the budding romance charts the novel’s struggle to stabilize the point at which unconventional intimacies with difference become dangerous rather than transformative. The scaling of place and identity is at the center of this struggle. When Evelyn, the former settlement house worker, tells Santos, “I do want to do something for America —for your people” (328), she conflates America and Santos’s people. Yet Santos emphatically does not, repeatedly pronouncing throughout the novel: “For me there is but one country— one 1n the whole world. It is New Mexico...” (116). The novel stresses the ways Santos rescales New Mexico as a country, especially as he defines interstate travel as a much larger border crossing. In the first exchange between Santos and Hammond in Chicago, Santos says, “You are to explore my country in an automobile” (57, emphasis added). Positioned as the outsider, Hammond emphasizes the transient nature of his visit: “We mean to cross the Continent, that’s all” (57). But Santos reiterates, ‘New Mexico is another world,’ one that is “dangerous for the Americano” (60). Rescaling regional and national geography, Santos defamiliarizes identity; as the “Americano,” Hammond has become the trespassing foreigner. But the automobile, and not really Hammond, presents the real challenge to Santos’s version of geography. The car threatens the idea of New Mexico as its own enclosed world by allowing outsiders easy access to the area. In addition, the car supplants New Mexico as the true bounded space, one that Santos cannot access. Santos speaks bitterly of the automobile’s novelty. He claims he can offer Evelyn gold rather than a ride in a motorcar —a comment that unwittingly validates the status of the automobile as a means of wooing

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and intimacy, and by extension, as the currency of modern relations. His concerns are well founded, because with Evelyn and Hammond’s courtship, it is not a shared residency or origin like New Mexico that binds the lovers, but the automobile. They find comfort in each other while stranded in its back

seat during a southwestern dust storm. As both transportation and interior Space, the car emphasizes an access and intimacy that result in connectivity. Its mobility trumps Santos’s demarcated geography by exposing the limits of his place-bound identity. His scaling of New Mexico as an autonomous entity refuses to recognize it as part of a larger union. ‘The inroads made by both the automobile and Hammond frame Santos’s political vision, not as patriotism, but as anti-assimilationism. As I mentioned earlier, New Mexico became a state the same year that this novel was published. New Mexico was originally added to the union in 1850 as a territory, in a configuration that included the present state of Arizona. Although New Mexico and Arizona were declared separate territories in 1863, in 1906 the U.S. Congress merged them again, passing a joint statehood bill for their integration into the nation. According to the bill, reyection of joint statehood by the voters of either territory would prevent both from gaining statehood. In large part because of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave U.S. citizenship to Mexican nationals in ceded territory, roughly 50 percent of New Mexico’s residents in 1906 spoke Spanish as their native language. By comparison, estimates of Arizona’s Indian and Mexican American population ranged from 5 percent to nearly 20 percent (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights). Presented to Congress on February 12, 1906, the “Protest Against Union of Arizona with New Mexico” registered Arizonans’ displeasure about joint statehood. As “the chosen representatives of a loyal American people,” the delegates from Arizona expressed an “earnest and determined

opposition to the proposed union with New Mexico,’ which they believed “violates the very principles of the Constitution” (“Protest” 1). As their third reason for opposing the union, the delegates pointed to “the decided racial differences between the people of Arizona and the large majority of the people of New Mexico, who are not only different in race and largely in language, but have entirely different customs, laws, and ideals and would have but little prospect of successful amalgamation” (1). Not surprisingly, joint statehood won in New Mexico, 26,195 to 14,735, but lost in Arizona by a wide margin, 16,265 to 3,141. In 1910 the Senate Committee on ‘Territories considered separate statehood for Arizona and New Mexico (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights).

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Congress admitted both New Mexico and Arizona as separate states to the Union in 1912. The tensions around statehood are tensions about incorporation, or as the protesting Arizonans phrase it, “successful amalgamation.” In their view, Arizona’s independent merger with the larger United States is a seamless one that

allows them to retain their autonomy. By contrast, joint statehood poses the threat of absorption by a decidedly different other. Ironically, in questioning New Mexico’s prospects for amalgamation, the protesters ultimately doubt the process of Americanization itself, that is, the ability of America to transcend and supplant preexisting ethnic and racial differences. New Mexico presents a spatial and historical example of the paradoxical promise of mobility in which the ideal and the problem appear to be the same: movement toward statehood promises to incorporate the outsider. The novel brings these issues to the scale of the individual by developing its representation of Santos as a geographically

partisan figure, transforming his loyalty to New Mexico into a “decided racial difference” that runs counter to Americanization and ultimately threatens unification.

Once defined by his status as a visionary leader of his people, Santos’s difference 1s increasingly described in less admirable ways: he is strong willed, possessive, and fiercely proud of his identity as a “Spaniard.” Evelyn comes to feel a “certain resentment of his unconventionality — that very unconventionality which had always hitherto attracted her to him so strongly” (386). Here, the novel begins to distinguish between unconventionality and individualism. The former indicates an ideology of self-serving and forceful possessiveness, while the latter represents voluntary allegiance to a larger whole. Exercising “a strange power and fascination” (123) over Evelyn, the unconventionally mesmeric Santos imagines he will woo her successfully by “overmastering” her (318). Evelyn becomes irritated by his “show of intimacy with the minutiae of her home life” because it expresses “proprietorship” (335). When Santos approaches Colonel Deering about marrying Evelyn, Deering balks at his foreign ways: “American fathers were not the arbiters of their daughters’ affairs

of the heart” (121). During the period of large-scale immigration from the 18gos through the 1920s, as Cott argues, “Americans were very much committed to marriage founded on love” (150), not on contracts or coerced pledges. Cott points out that Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd’s renowned work from the 19208, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture, documented Americans’ persistent “demand for romantic love as the only valid basis for

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marriage” (Lynd and Lynd 114). The differences between arranged marriages and the love match came to “stand for the difference between the Old World

and the New, between outdated tradition and modernity, between falsity and truth, tyranny and freedom” (Cott 151). Although Santos’s approach is not quite equivalent to an arranged marriage, it reflects outmoded traditions and tyrannical “proprietorship” (Wilby and Wilby 335) over “affairs of the heart” (121). His actions as a suitor say everything about his suitability for American citizenship. Furthermore, Santos repeatedly enunciates racial difference, referring to himself as “‘a Santos,” “a Spaniard,’ and the “Spanish fire” (67). This difference 1s wedded to a temporal one. Evelyn associates him with the past, a premodern period of “romance and picturesqueness” (122). In sum, his identity represents a model of kinship over citizenry, privileging inherited traits of the group over individual choice and voluntary allegiance. Formerly his admirer, Colonel Deering decides Santos could be capable of murder because his ancestors “had often been mixed up in border raids and Mexican feuds” (435). Violence runs in his “Spanish” blood. This depiction parallels contemporaneous filmic representations of Mexicans. Identifying Hollywood’s fascination with the Mexican Revolution during the 1910s, Margarita de Orellana argues, ‘Innate violence is the Mexican characteristic most often emphasized by North Americans; for them the Mexican is a villain capable of all kinds of criminal excess” (10). Like those New Mexicans the Arizonans claimed were incapable of amalgamation owing to their “decided racial difference,” Santos is defined by an intrinsic and inevitable ancestry that cannot be reconciled with the democratic values of U.S. citizenship. Colonel Deering’s comments about border raids also reasserts the geography of two countries separated by an international border. Such rescaling nullifies Santos’s scaling of New Mexico as its own country, reclaiming it as part of the United States while also making clear that Santos dwells outside the modern nation-state. With marriage representing a notable mode of nationalization during this period, Santos’s courtship becomes the way to test his overall suitability as an American. The two are, in effect, a joint proposal, given the contemporaneous view that “only marriage based on a love match paralleled the voluntary allegiance that would make a nation of immigrants great” (Cott 151). As Cott states, “Just as consent was essential to entering marriage, it had always been considered essential to forming citizenship” (133). In approaching Colonel Deering for Evelyn’s hand and bypassing Evelyn’s decision to choose, Santos

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eschews the ideology of consent that defines Americanness. But the denial of consent extends to another scale. When Evelyn makes an impassioned pledge to help him aid his people, Santos interprets this vow as a simultaneous promise of marriage. Evelyn 1s not so convinced. Desperate to have her, which from his view means keeping her isolated from her “American friends,” Santos has Evelyn kidnapped. Not surprisingly, the automobile, as the symbol of modernity, plays a central role in her recovery. Furthermore, it performs a civic duty, allowing Hammond to reach an isolated desert hideout inaccessible to other forms of transportation. In search of Evelyn, Hammond discovers that Santos is leading a plot to separate “the old-time territories of Mexico from the American Union” (540). Sectionalism reveals itself as sedition. Santos’s patriotic loyalty to New Mexico turns traitorous in its explicit call for immobilization— of place, time, and identity. When he senses that his Mexican comrades might question his loyalty if they knew he wanted to marry the white daughter of a ranch owner, Santos kills the member of his party who finds out. As Deering suspected, he is capable of murder, showing himself to be, first and foremost, the blood descendant of those “mixed up in border raids and Mexican feuds” (435). Mobility enables a patriotic transformation of scale. It is only with the arrival of Hammond, an outsider who represents the East—signifier of both a distinctive region and an incorporated part of the United States—that the boundaries of New Mexico’s scalar identity come into view and under question, and we see it change from its own country to a representative region of the United States that must be defended against the true outsiders. In contrast to Santos, Hammond represents the novel’s version of the distinctly American self-made man. As an orphan, he epitomizes someone not fettered to the past, familial ancestry, or genetic typecasting. Though traveling with relatives, he remains distinct from them in name and career aspirations. As an outsider in New Mexico, he 1s unattached to his new context, and this lack of connection comes to signify his (sometimes reluctant) ability to change, unlike the rigid Santos. For instance, Hammond undergoes a process of reevaluating his views of the country he experiences. At first he appears dismissive, or even derisive, toward the Southwest, claiming that you could call Santa Fe anything “except the United States” (252). But the New Englander starts to feel the Southwest’s “romantic spirit” (280) and a “kinship for the wilderness” (281). As the easterner who crosses the country in promotion of a national highway, Hammond adapts a vision of incorporation, one realized

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through his romance. The “wilderness” of the southwestern desert transforms

him, teaching him a new meaning of union with another: “Love was more than longing for possession; it was comprehension, longing to aid, to enrich, to bless! It was life surrendered and life won—the death of self” (283). Rather than forcing a hostile takeover that results in “possession,” the true lover experiences a transformation in the scale of identity, giving the self over to the greater whole. It is a vision of voluntary allegiance, consent, and unification that represents the democratic challenge to Santos’s ideology of possessiveness, conquest, and sectionalism. It is also an indicator of how the novel defines mobility 1n a very specific way: as adaptability. The two suitors’ understandings of the Southwest —Hammond’s evolves while Santos’s remains

rigid—transform Santos’s individuality into separatism and Hammond’s adaptability into individuality. Hammond’s version of individuality represents a voluntary commitment to moving forward, adapting to and even embracing change. As in Post’s narrative, mobility is experienced as the education of the traveler whose spatial and social dislocations produce a means of entry and incorporation into a larger union. In the end, however, the novel cannot fully resolve its ambivalence toward the Southwest, as shown by its creation of a split image: wilderness as romance and wilderness as lawlessness.'* The region first comes into view as the New Englanders traverse the Raton Pass: “Almost imperceptibly had been wrought the change from the atmosphere of the States to the wild romance and languor of the Southwest” (155). For the easterner, the picturesque and primitive Southwest delights as both fresh and old. Colonel Deering feels that Santa Fe has “‘a more romantic history” than any place else in the United States (249), and he bemoans the way it is becoming “so thoroughly American” (250). In these instances, the Southwest provides an antidote to the settled America. Its wilderness offers freedom from social conventions. Like the frontier celebrated by Turner, New Mexico, along with the budding romance between Evelyn and Santos, represents “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” And at more than five hundred pages, the novel lingers on the problem that both seem to represent. It is, most of all, a romance of the courting and conquering of difference. And so we see that the region’s unconventionality, like Santos’s, also breeds

lawlessness. Hammond senses that he “had entered a country where Nature and Man were laws unto themselves” (178). ‘That is Santos: after committing murder, the outlaw has one final exchange with Evelyn in the desert. He tells

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her they can flee to the Wilderness, for it is “calling them” (513). Evelyn responds that the Wilderness does not want them if their only laws are Force and Death (517). Such differing views make their love match impossible. ‘The novel concludes with Santos escaping to Mexico and Evelyn traveling on to California with Hammond. In developing its story of unification through the love triangle, the novel positions both male suitors as outsiders, but ultimately outsiderness is defined in terms of geography. New Mexico cannot quite be contained, and that is both the appeal and the problem. Culturally and geographically, New Mexico is both inaccessible and permeable, available for incorporation yet (deemed) resistant to it. Finally, it 1s the car, taking Evelyn and Winthrop to California, which tames, or at least turns us away from, this instability and potential threat by offering both access and insulation. The car is a way in and a way out. Mobility enables the experience of new terrains, but it also represents the importance of managing, or at least ferreting out, the deep-rooted threats of difference. As the novel winds to a close, Hammond assumes a position of moral, legal, and geographical superiority and becomes Evelyn’s chosen one. White masculinity is restored through racial control. Or is it? After all, Hammond does not track down Santos and bring him to justice. Rather, hearing of the murder Santos commits “sickened” Hammond (438), and he “trembled” and “shuddered” (439). The New England suitor never matches Santos’s virile masculinity. While the novel repeatedly expresses Evelyn’s desire for Santos, it never counters with her swooning over Hammond’s manliness. The contrast also parallels filmic representations; in battles between warring suitors, de Orellana observes, “the American is invariably sensitive, moral and chaste, while the Mexican is endowed with an uncontrolled sexuality” (13). The desire to establish an opposite to the racialized Santos may explain why Hammond never embodies the role of the lover. At the same time, however, he never actively takes up the role of lawman or moral center either. In the meantime, Santos— kidnapper, murderer, and traitor —does not really pay for his crimes. He simply (and even sympathetically) evaporates from the plot, crossing the border into Mexico. As for Hammond? Safe after the sandstorm and recovering in a Los Angeles hotel, he kisses Evelyn “almost solemnly” (543). Evelyn departs, and the novel’s last line leaves us with this image of its pronounced hero: “Winthrop Hammond slept” (544). The foreign other may have been expelled, but the novel provides no compelling image with which to replace

him. In fact, with its expulsion of Santos and feminization of the retiring

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Hammond, On the Trail to Sunset fails to conclude with a commanding vision of the representative American or unified country.

Free Air: The Romantic Pursuit of Americanization Published seven years after On the Trail to Sunset, Sinclair Lewis’s Free Air continues to raise questions about incorporating the outsider. In Lewis’s novel, the unknown parts of the country and its inhabitants do not primarily present concerns about “foreign” occupation of American soil. Published after World War I, and perhaps shaped in part by the larger rhetoric of unification that characterized American response to the war, Lewis’s novel imbues automobility with the imperatives of domestic unity through assimilation rather than expulsion. Its primary conflict traces not the competition of two suitors’ rivalry but the negotiations of a couple’s courtship. Victory comes not with the acceptance of one suitor and rejection of the other but with the lovers’ resolution and appreciation of their respective differences. Unlike the Wilbys, Lewis portrays neither the landscape nor the male suitor as unequivocally other, incapable of integration. Of course, the novel’s narrative of integration relies on the absence of the explicitly racial other. Here, class mobility shapes the story of integration. In a plot that questions rigid social order and addresses class conflict, the couple symbolizes a consummation of differences that promises transformation into a middle-class ideal.’* Presenting a much more self-conscious story of class issues than the previous road novels, Free Air works from the premise that the superiority of the upper class derives from presumption rather than merit. This story of physical mobility suggests that members of this class must relocate their priorities. The novel focuses on Claire Boltwood as the personification of a feminized upper class that comes under suspicion as too effete. But unlike the men of that class, especially her fiancé Geoffrey Saxton (note the closeness to “Saxon’), Claire shows an awareness of upper-class constraints and deficiencies. She wrangles with the insularity and suffocation that enervate men and women alike remember that her father’s nervous exhaustion instigates her road trip. In On the Trail to Sunset, Hammond puffed out his chest on a couple of occasions, but ultimately showed no ability to move beyond an image of enervation. Like Hammond, Claire resides in the Northeast. Since both of their potential mates are associated with other parts of the country (the Southwest and Midwest, respectively), regional identities contribute to the social differences and processes of unification that the novels explore. As with so many later road

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narratives, these novels follow a westward trajectory, suggesting that, similar to Emily Post and Beatrice Massey, these characters need a bit of that “Eastern hide rubbed off” (Massey 143). In the Wilbys’ novel, Hammond eventually comes to appreciate New Mexico, but overall the book focuses on his antagonistic relation with the Southwest and his efforts to domesticate, expel, and defend against its foreignness. Lewis, however, creates a different relationship between his northeastern protagonist and the country. Representing a twentieth-century female version of ‘Teddy Roosevelt’s strenuous life, Claire takes to the open road with nerve

and determination. In search of different experiences, she is the independent “New Woman,” demonstrating, like the heroines of an early twentiethcentury girls’ automobile series, the “modern virtues the public had come to expect of ‘New Women’: courage, stamina, physical strength, independence, and leadership qualities,” which she exhibits in a variety of “dangerous, alien, and challenging situations” (Romalov 76). This New Woman also looms large over her surroundings (see fig. 1). She cuts an independent figure, sharing the scene only with other figures of mobility —a flock of birds and her automobile. The cover image from Motor magazine and the opening image of Claire Boltwood stuck in the mud both make it clear that the location worth noting is the crossroads. The point is not exactly where each woman 1s, but that she will navigate her own way. More than anything, Claire pursues the rewards of struggle as a personal aspiration. Experiencing early on the “pleasure in being defiantly dirty” (15), she soon “discovered that she again longed to go on—keep going on—see new places, conquer new roads. She didn’t want all good road. She wanted something to struggle against” (45). Lewis’s depictions of Claire point to the ways early motorists were attracted to the pursuit of struggle. In fact, chal-

lenging road conditions usurped national wonders as their topic of choice (Belasco 37), largely because overcoming physical struggles provided an even greater reward, that of turning “difficulty into virtue” (30). In the novel, virtue comes with conquering physical hardships. More importantly, 1t comes with the rejection of a restraining social placement, which cross-country motoring aptly accomplishes. With the woman as the subject on the move, rather than the object of discovery, the novel suggests that the negotiation of geographical and social differences might function to transform not just the individual but also the categorical definitions of gender roles and relations. Automobility allows the novelistic

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eS as bisa pi AE . : Reta, ce thankful that Victor and Thomas have saved her friend, the other car accident survivor, a white woman, tells them, “You guys are heroes, you know? It’s like

you're the Lone Ranger and Tonto.” Now they are the superheroes rather than the Indians who don’t even have one to call. But Thomas does not quite take the bait. “No,” he responds, “it’s more like we’re Tonto and Tonto.” ‘That rewrite may not move outside mainstream cultural narratives, but 1t does make the white person disappear. Similarly, Thomas’s use of the term “nobody” in

the desert monologue to refer to Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman connects back to the young Victor’s use of nobody to identify his “favorite Indian.” Both uses point to the emptiness of stereotypes. Told while Thomas and Victor are in motion, ‘Thomas’s desert story puts many other stories in motion, incorporating them as parts of a larger story. Introducing a different narrative perspective, the story also unfixes social

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relations and cultural history, putting their “truth” in motion as well. The struggles become much more personal when the pair leaves Phoenix in Arnold’s truck. Thomas castigates Victor for doing nothing on the reservation for years and for being worse to his mother than his father was— by leaving her while still living in her house. Offering a different challenge to the binary of home/away, Victor vanished by remaining still, emotionally and otherwise.

He is stuck. Their argument is interrupted by the car accident, a “wreck” that makes clear, contrary to Thomas’s desert comment, that a car won’t save them. ‘They crash into white obstruction, personified by a drunk white driver who has caused the accident and later tries to finger Victor as both the cause and the drunk. But again, this site of struggle propels rather than immobilizes the travelers. Victor runs, not away from something, but toward something, as he goes for help for the injured motorist. Exemplifying the idea of “looking backward and forward with the same glance” (King 112), this scene continues with Victor’s forward movement seamlessly transitioning into a return to the past, a return home that brings back the father who abandoned him. Collapsed

on the side of the road after his long run, Victor has a vision of his father reaching down to help him up. This image is a repeat of one earlier in the movie, when Arnold reached down to a young Thomas with the exact same gesture. Though Victor’s father morphs into a highway worker, the double image shows that Victor has seen his father through another’s eyes. Thus he reenvisions his father —and himself. ““Thomas gives his memories to Victor,” explains the actor Evan Adams. He continues, when Victor “can finally take my memory from me and incorporate it into his own psyche, then that completes the film” (qtd. Gilroy, “A Conversation” 50, emphasis added).

The mobility of the road trip develops into the mobilization of memory. Together, they create a continuity of community, which developed through a series of spatial, temporal, and imaginative infiltrations, and that brings Victor home to a “transpersonal” identity (Bevis 585). Arnold’s leaving (and perhaps his staying, too) immobilized Victor. As a response, Victor immobilized his (memory of his) father, claiming to know the only true or real Arnold Joseph and refusing to recognize or accept anyone else’s version of him. The road trip provokes him to abandon compartmentalization as his method for knowing the world, signified by his sharing of his father’s ashes with Thomas at the film’s end. As this gesture also suggests, his traveling off the reservation does not signify moving beyond or going away. He is already distanced, and so his mobility compels him toward engagement and incorporation.

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Victor and Thomas return to the reservation, but the film does not resolve all of its tensions. Victor’s, and the film’s, story of Arnold remains complex and open-ended. As is Victor’s inheritance, which includes and entangles that of his Native ancestry and the legacy of colonization. Victor and Thomas are not now best buddies. But the unsettling put in play by the road trip got us somewhere. For one, as Leo Zonn and Dick Winchell contend, “The return of father and son here is recognition that tribes never left, which is at the heart of the story of Indian identity” (148). In addition, the agitation continues, as evidenced by Thomas’s storytelling, with its propensity to incorporate everything into the story and to shake up the difference between truth and fiction, between your story and his story. Until the “wreck,” Victor complained that all ‘Thomas’s stories were made up. But as Thomas’s memories join with his own, he changes his perspective. ‘Uhomas’s stories exemplify the film’s larger troubling of what Jhon Warren Gilroy terms “the traditional Western binary of truth and fiction” (“Another Fine Example” 37), offering, as Gilroy further suggests, what might be its most effective representation of a Native American epistemology. Storytelling, Hearne observes, is a way of “performing the past through narrative.” ‘This performance asserts that “indigenous identity resides as much in the imagination as in the blood” (104). It also critiques Euro-American history as the reality. Smoke Signals shows how authenticity is a vexed proposition for contemporary Native Americans. Its two protagonists expose, critique, and counter Hollywood’s version of a “real Indian.”'* The Hollywood version always means a decontextualized Indian, a mishmash of features, as inauthentic as it can get, except as the “authentic” representation of an opposition to white culture. Which brings us back to those binaries that we love. Smoke Signals shows that there is no escape from cultural representation for late twentieth-century Native Americans. Representation is an important realm of incorporation. But the film shows that it, too, can be incorporated into a different story.

FIVE

Reviving (Re)Productivity Post-9/t1 Stories of Mobility in the Homeland

hile the road narratives of the last chapter expanded the realms of incorporation that mobility navigates, the texts in this chapter take the relationship between mobility and incorporation to another scale.

In these road stories, produced in the years following the 9/11 attacks, mobility itself undergoes reincorporation as a mode of identity formation. More specifically, Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers (2005), Duncan ‘Tucker’s Transamerica (2005), Sam Mendes’s Amay We Go (2009), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) enact a response to the transgressive mobility

of the 9/11 attacks with narratives that reclaim mobility as a way to address the profound loss caused by those events and to reassert a particular type of mobile subject. In short, they produce a mobility of the homeland. Emphasizing personal loss, the recuperation of mobility emerges as a story about reconstructing or reconciling a fractured family. Broken Flowers and Transamerica both focus on main characters that learn they may have fathered a son in their youth. In Jarmusch’s film, Don Johnston (Bill Murray) is an aging bachelor who receives an anonymous note saying he has a son, and so he attempts to find him by undertaking a road trip in which he visits past lovers. The mystery of the son’s identity entwines itself with the mystifying directions

the past has taken. In Transamerica, Bree Osbourne (Felicity Huffman) is a transwoman who finds out she has a seventeen-year-old son named ‘Toby who is looking for his father. Required by her therapist to meet him, Bree ends up traveling cross-country with him while attempting to conceal their biological relationship. Unlike these two films, Aay We Go is future directed, focusing

on an expectant couple, Verona De Tessant and Burt Farlander (Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski), who are shocked when Burt’s parents decide to

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move to Antwerp rather than stick around to be grandparents. Feeling abandoned and adrift, they take to the road, traveling to various locations across the United States and Canada in search of their true family home. Finally, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road meshes past and future, locating the fractured family in a postapocalyptic nightmare. Constantly under threat of attack, familial reconstruction 1s relentlessly ongoing, focused on mere survival. In all these cases, the road trip enacts and enables the possibility of familial reconciliations across space and time. As Katie Mills has shown, however, using the mobility of the road to reunite and reconcile families is not a new story. Mills discusses a range of road films produced during the Reagan era in which “the road goes to the past,” and “the automobile is a tool used to uncover some family problem that must be put right.” “Instead of looking ahead,” Mills explains, “these 1980s films looked backward,” so that the road genre’s “dream of something better is harnessed instead to the past” (171). In other words, she states, ““The subliminal message in the 1980s was, if you don’t like the present — don’t rebel, rewind!” (160). ‘This rewind rejects the territory of the new in order to play back something already known. Mills finds that “in

these stories, it is the familiar that is sought— the family of the past —rather than some mysterious adventure outside our imagination” (163). In films such as Back to the Future, the rebel “is the one who works toward family unity rather than hitting the road in search of an elusive truth” (165). Three decades later what has changed is that now the family zs the elusive truth. Rather than opposing a “mysterious adventure” on the road, the return to the family becomes the “mysterious adventure” of the road. The familial embodies the unfamiliar, making these not just fractured families but lost families. This is true even in Amway We Go, in which the story of impending childbirth develops, on the road, into a story about Verona’s relationship to her deceased, that is, lost, parents. Appearing like an apparition, the family becomes a representational image that eerily conveys the loss and incomprehensibility defining the events of g/11 and their aftermath. This spectral presence shapes and haunts mobility, and the family itself emerges as the uncanny other to be incorporated. And yet, this return of/to the family functions as the sign of loss and the mode of rescue from that loss. In all these texts, a child initiates a parental road trip. Unlike 1980s road stories such as Back to the Future, post-9/11 road narratives do not feature children returning to their parents’ pasts. Instead, children (even unknown ones) induce adults to take up the role of parent.

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Heterosexual biological reproduction, especially perhaps the belated knowl-

edge of it, comes to represent a “return home” that is about reclamation, transformation, and perhaps most importantly, the recognition of something lost. It becomes a mode of rescue, which 1s particularly interesting in light of the post-9/11 cultural fascination with unfounded stories that the devastation of 9/11 led to a baby boom in the United States. Keeping this phenomenon in mind, in what follows I discuss the texts’ shared focus on biological reproduction as part of a larger narrative in which mobility denotes the resurrection of an ideology of production and productivity. Each road narrative engages with a larger post-9/1I anxiety that we are no longer producers, that we are no longer capable of creating and pursuing directions of our own making. This anxiety includes a fear of obsolescence, not just of the self but also, in the wake of such incomprehensible devastation, of a commitment to something meaningful and productive (think, for instance, of the despair of another travel story from this period, the 2009 film Up in the Air). The road trip performs the reclamation of something lost or about to be lost, including —or especially —the figure of the producer as a primary identity. And this recovery takes us back to the scenario I examined in this book’s introduction.

Mobility and 9/11 After September 11, road travel in the United States signified and produced a process of reclamation. Reflecting on the road trip’s resurging popularity, one observer speculated that the events of 9/11 “may have awakened a sense of patriotism in us especially at a time when the country is so vulnerable” (Robert Archibald qtd. Kee). As fragility created a surge of renewed commitment, the road trip provided a concrete form for the practice of this newfound sentiment. Its attractiveness reflected some Americans’ hesitancy about other forms of travel, but the post-9/11 trend, like the one in the early twentieth century, registered more than just fear. Avid RVer Barb Hofmeister told the New York Times in 2002, “People have fallen in love with this country after 9/11” (qtd. Brock). Road travel enabled travelers to claim, or reclaim, a sense of Americanness by making tangible the country’s territory and history, stitching together people and places in times of devastating fragmentation.

Most importantly, road travel represented a patriotic response specific to the historical catastrophe. It explicitly countered a very different kind of mobility — the legally and morally transgressive attacks on American soil—

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with movement that reunited mobility with Americanness. Echoing the democratic sensibility of early twentieth-century automobility, post-9/11 road tripping offered a form of recreation accessible to all while making all of the country accessible. Furthermore, as Americans (re)discovered their country on its back roads and byways, they embraced the freedom of movement endemic to cross-country car travel. It is not that forms of place-based patriotic activity did not occur. But the groundswell of domestic road travel effected a particular kind of recovery that defines this specific mode of mobility not only as central to the experience of America but also as the American experience. The road trip performs the reassertion of the American as a mobile subject. And with this reassertion, it reincorporates the very idea of mobility into the American national imaginary. The road trip, then, performs a double incorporation. It joins individual citizens with their country, and it rejoins national identity with a defining feature of that identity, one that has been co-opted and compromised. Thus the process of resecuring mobility reproduces the country as a nation-state. It is not surprising that the road narrative also experiences a particular resurgence in the years following 9/11. If the 9/11 attacks defined mobility as an unlawful and unspeakable intrusion on American soil, one cultural response

has been to tell stories of the American mobile subject as the guardian of democracy. Some road texts accomplish this with narratives that reafirm the power and virtue of individualism. In stories like 7he Road and the film The Book of El (2010), a concern about the devastation of the national landscape not only serves as a cautionary tale but also prompts sacrificial actions by individuals who represent the perseverance of qualities deemed quintessentially American. These texts reclaim mobility as the province of the striving

individual (rather than the dangerous group), thus presenting a particular kind of hero—the male individualist whose sense of ethics, sacrifice, and commitment makes him exceptional. This assertion of mobility in the name of emancipation and morality opposes, defeats, and replaces the version of mobility that is a threat to spatial, and sometimes bodily, borders. Regenerating American mobility, then, is about border making. More explicitly, it is about redefining scale. The geographer Jennifer Hyndman explains that the 9/11 attacks ended “the already precarious distinction between domestic space, that within a sovereign state, and more global space.” She elaborates: “Acts of violence perpetrated by people who entered the country legally from states outside the US, using domestic aircraft... . exposed the

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limitations of ‘domestic’ space, somehow bounded and separated from the processes and politics of economic, cultural, and political integration” (1). In other words, the attacks violated the scale of the nation-state as a contained scale. Writing just months after the attack, Neil Smith identified “the manufacturing of a national scale of response” that responded to the permeability of the United States with a “hardening of national geographies and identities” (“Editorial” 632). “Less than two hours after the first plane hit,’ Smith recounts, “the US began sealing itself hermetically from the world. The Mexican-US border was unilaterally closed, quickly followed by the Canadian border; all US airports were closed and all incoming international flights were diverted north or south or back to their origins” (632). In the post-9/11 climate of fear, government actions were bolstered, as Hyndman explains, through public consent, which was “mobilized to reconstitute the country as a bounded area that can be fortified against outsiders and other global influences” (2).

Hyndman explicates how this response creates a shift in the scalar identity of the United States: “In this imagining of nation, the US ceases to be a constellation of local, national, international, and global relations, experiences, and meanings that coalesce in places like New York City and Washington DC: rather, it is increasingly defined by a ‘security perimeter’ and the strict surveillance of borders” (2). The post-9/11 creation of the Department of Homeland Security offers just one example of how the scale of the nation is not defined by global connectivity but by a unitary, homogenous, and oppositional “homeland.” The September 11 attacks create an anxiety about the penetration of borders, producing a response focused on the reestablishment of borders that emphasize containment, antifluidity, rigidity —in other words, immobility. Furthermore, the production of the “homeland” distracts from any negative connotations around immobilization with its reassertion of the nation, not asa “constellation” with unclear boundaries, but as a domicile, a place you occupy and inhabit, or a place you are clearly outside of. This scalar redefinition implements a powerful response to the transgressive mobility that defined the attacks. Think again of Cresswell’s argument that while mobility represents a uniquely American experience “guaranteeing freedom, opportunity and independence,” it also can characterize a threat to the “rooted and moral existence of place” (Jramp 21). The 9/11 attacks propel an increased and institutionalized attention to dangers surrounding “intrusions” by those deemed inappropriately, excessively, or unpredictably — that

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is, aa —mobile. The perception that these figures are threatening and out of place extends to a concern that they are spatially elusive: everywhere and nowhere, moving through different kinds of spaces. In relation to 9/11, the terrorists increase the mobile threat because, as Hyndman points out, they entered the United States legally and used domestic airplanes. ‘Their intrusion was not easily discernible. In addition, the terrorists were not easy to place, geographically or otherwise. Smith identifies a discursive moment that both exposes and attempts to rectify this excessive mobility: “On September 12 New York news stations reported that several ‘Arab nationals’ had been detained. Cultural hermeticism fuels global ignorance: there is of course no such thing as an ‘Arab national’” (“Editorial 633). ““The significant point,’ he continues, is to match the American nationalist response with the collapse of “other forms of social difference into national difference” (633). And so the detainees are symbolically relocated, made residents of a (false) nation in a move that denies them global mobility (moving legally into the U.S.) and incorporates them as another nation that is definitively antithetical to the “rooted and moral existence” of the United States.

The rescaling of the United States, as a geographical and imagined nation, then, takes place through a primary and persistent attention to acts and ideas of mobility. The mobility of certain figures manifests a larger cultural anxiety about an inability to place subjects. As the designation of “Arab nationals” suggests, those concerns are directed at the scales of both body and nation, often collapsing the two. One of the most widespread repercussions of the September 11 attacks is the transformation of U.S. concerns about violations of national borders into a renewed and vigilant attention to bodily borders, the marking out of specific bodies as too mobile, at airports, in personal and legal relationships, and as Huckabee’s comments about Barack Obama’s global upbringing illustrate, in national leaders. Governmental and cultural responses to individuals and groups deemed out of place produced the heightened desire for, and implementation of, hermetically sealed places with controlled access and circulation. But this imagining of nation is largely a defensive and reactive maneuver. An assertion of might, this vision may also project an image of a nation immobilized, defined by its very vulnerability. And so we return to the importance of the reclamation of mobility as an affirmation of American vigor and spirit. The mobile American is one of agency, 1n active pursuit of individual dreams and goals.

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But the lingering shadow of excessive mobility creates a tension about how to negotiate the twinned desires for containment and mobility. Is the nation incorporated, that 1s, given shape, as a space of containment or as one of mobility? Can those two visions be reconciled? In many ways, the post-9g/1I era can be described as the rebounding of the nation in both senses of that word: it is the coming back from devastation and the cordoning off of the national space. Any potential tension is managed with a definition of mobility as the search for scales that will bound us. ‘Thus we arrive at the homeland. As I discussed in this book’s introduction, road travel after 9/11 enacted and satisfied a desire for connection. Clearly, American citizens could reroot themselves in their home communities as a way of fulfilling their yearning for connection. But the difference made by seeking connections on the road addresses the tension described above. Recall the travel industry executive’s comment that after 9/11 Americans expressed “‘a growing interest in travel experiences that provide connections— connections to family, connections to the natural environment and connections to America itself” (qtd. Thrasher). Road travel merges all three as an instrument of connection to the nation as homeland. It emphasizes the familiar, bringing America into view as a native country. The upswing 1n vacations to historic cities and patriotic landmarks foregrounds a definition of America as a place with a long-standing history of residency. Increased visits to national parks after 9/11 further cement this vision, as those places signify a nation defined by an “untouched” natural landscape, which symbolizes an unchanging and enduring past. But most of all, perhaps, the homeland is the place of the family. Remember this is the period in which baby boomers surpass all other groups in RV ownership. Hyndman’s enumeration of the imperative to define the nation as a domestic space after 9/11, that 1s, as a space within a sovereign state, takes shape through the designation of the country as the space of families. The nation is doubly domestic. ‘Travelers and travel experts alike emphasize that the connections made are those among fellow passengers— think about the family atmosphere of the RV—and not necessarily with strangers met on the road. Of his purchase of five RVs after 9/11, baby boomer traveler Lou Holtmann of St. Louis said, “We just wanted to stay closer as a family” (“High

Rollers”). Another boomer, Shelly Couey of Washington State, joined the RV craze in 2002, hitting the road with her husband and two children. “It’s our home on wheels,” she reports (Roberts). “Motorhome Madness,” as writer

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C. R. Roberts labels it, defines mobility as the populating of the nation with a series of residences. The road of the family and the baby boomer is not the same as that of the young individual lighting out for the territory. Seamlessly incorporating mobility with habitation, RV travel creates a reconnection with the familial that is simultaneously a reconnection with the familiar. This rebonding with the familiar/familial is subsequently linked to the past. As one RV company spokesman explains, baby boomers “are very big on nostalgia,” and “they can remember the earlier days [of | growing up and camping” (John Ables gtd. “High Rollers”). After September 11, the road trip both stimulates and feeds nostalgia for earlier times, thus becoming a mode of incorporating the self with the national and familial past. Considering the fear that seems to have produced this nostalgia, such sentiments suggest that this 1s an anxious longing, one seeking an idealized, “simpler” past and a fantastical homogeneity, a time and space less invaded by otherness. The road trip, then, thrives on and manages anxieties about difference. In the wake of the splintering attacks, road travel emerges as a way to rejuvenate the self through the reconnection with the nation as a primary scale of identity. But in order for that travel to offer a respite and sanctuary from the horrors and devastation of the 9/11 attacks, it requires the exploration of the nation as home. Post-9/11 imperatives to both curtail mobility and embrace it articulate the tensions surrounding incorporation. The period demands a renewed incorporation, in terms of both giving concrete shape to the nation and creating citizens’ connection to it. But that nation seems to be both a space of containment, fortified against an encroaching otherness, and a champion of openness, committed to heterogeneity and free-ranging mobility. The road narratives of this chapter reveal and manage this tension in a specific way: evoking the sense of loss and nostalgia of post-g/11 road travel, these stories position mobility as a “return home” that complicates ideas of reconnection by locating the family as the other to be incorporated. Unlike the RVers, these are not stories about taking the family, and the family home, on the road. In these road narratives, the nation as homeland emerges quite literally as a network of familial residences. Taking protagonists to the homes of the past, present, and future, mobility is a mode of rebounding —a quest for scales that bound. The nation and the domestic are mutually constitutive, pointing to the centrality of the domestic in the post-9/1I national story.

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The National Domestic In her incisive book The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi sets out to “understand the mythic underpinnings of our response to 9/11” (19) and uncovers a story in which the national drama is relocated to the domestic scale. Puzzled by the overwhelming U.S. media focus on female victims, especially when the fatalities from that day were overwhelmingly male (6), Faludi discovers a widespread fixation on restoring “national male strength” through female peril (343). Evident in a wide array of cultural narratives, this story both exposes and attempts to cover up the country’s fear that “the entire edifice of American security had failed to provide a shield” (15). That recognition comes with shock, fear, ignominy, and shame, which are displaced and reburied with an elaborate, multifaceted narrative. The result is a national fantasy consumed with restoring “invincible manhood” (16) through the persistent performance of a “rescue drama” (56) in which manly men save vulnerable girls, women, and eventually, feminized countries like Afghanistan and Iraq (57). This response, which saturated popular media, political platforms, and news discourse, represents a widespread process of mythmaking: the “restoration of that larger American myth of invulnerability” (209), which “required the mirage of womanly dependency, the illusion of a helpless family circle in need of protection from a menacing world” (186). Faludi traces this myth back to a Euro-American “foundational drama,” a story of white society exposed to “homeland incursions” by dark, that 1s, Indian, “savages,” epitomized by the seizure of the white maiden against her will (271). But Faludi exposes this chronicle as a compensatory drama in which “the maiden’s rescue, fantasized or real, became our reigning redemption tale” (277). It functioned to cover up the original shame of men failing to protect society from “enemy penetration” (271). Faludi tracks this drama from the time of contact up through the cold war and the virile masculinity of John Wayne. In this framework, the post-g/11 process of national mythmaking functions to convert “actual terror into an illusion of security” (281). This explains, for Faludi, why a terrorist assault on the urban workplace was quickly and emphatically displaced to the domestic realm. ‘The compensatory myth of invincibility required the vision of “a nesting America shielded by the virile and vigilant guardians of its frontier” (186—87). And so the first phase of mythmaking was “to recast a martial attack as a domestic drama, attended by the disappearance

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and even demonization of independent female voices” (281). A problem of national security, then, is redefined as “a problem between the sexes, in which the American man and the nation’s vigor were sapped by female influence”

(281). That story allows—indeed, calls for—the restoration of national and male virility, which takes place through the repeated documentation of male rescue of vulnerable females (epitomized by the Jessica Lynch story, which Faludi debunks). “What mattered” in this cultural response “was restoring the illusion of a mythic America where women needed men’s protection and men succeeded in providing it” (151). As Faludi’s analysis suggests, the American cultural response to 9/11 emphasizes the (re)definition of the nation as a homeland, performing this quite

explicitly with the relocation of the national threat to the domestic hearth. This symbolic displacement functions to demonize and deflate political movements (such as feminism and antiwar protests). It also concretizes space and the social order in terms of the seemingly straightforward binary of the domestic and the foreign, thus producing a much “neater” symbolic division of the world that counters the heterogeneity of the city — or nation. This displacement to the domestic realm also relocates citizenship, moving the scale of responsibility from the public to private sphere. Recall the

presidential and media instruction to demonstrate American patriotism by shopping. Other forms of national loyalty were also being touted. ‘Tracking the vigorous redomestication of women by the post-g/11 media, Faludi uncovers

the promotion, rather than the factual documentation, of a trend to “settle down.” New York magazine, for instance, urged women to add “baby-making to your list of patriotic duties” (qtd. Faludi 162). The national body takes shape as a “showing” one. Multiple as well as bounded, the pregnant body 1s the perfect synecdoche for the post-9/11 nation as homeland. More than one subject, it is also domesticated; with its secure perimeter, it is the quintessential image of contained mobility.

Directing Mobility The imperative to make babies leads me to another myth undergoing restoration. Faludi’s analysis uncovers a widespread cultural anxiety about vulnerability and masculinity that develops into the enactment of “protection fantasies” (195). In what follows, I explore how the post-9g/11 response articulates a further anxiety about us as producers. In the context of unfathomable loss,

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home- and baby making may represent the impulse to reflect on one’s priorities and respond to loss by bringing something else into being. On a larger scale, the cultural focus on baby making, including erroneous media reports of a post-9/11 “baby boom,” extends the “restoration of that larger American myth of invulnerability” (Faludi 209) with the suggestion that issues of national security can be overcome with the (re)production of good Americans.’ Baby making denotes forward progress. Reorienting a devastated country, forward progress functions to restore Americans’ capabilities as producers. In effect, it reproduces the nation as (re)productive. Road travel is not the only American spatial practice that has performed the revival of production. In previous scholarship, I examined the phenomenon of behind-the-scenes tourism, arguing that its transport of visitors to backstage Spaces came with the promise that paying tourists would not just passively consume but actively produce their experiences.*? Updating MacCannell’s analysis of the way that early twentieth-century backstage tourism responded to anxieties caused by modernity, my work focused on anxieties particular to the millennial moment. ‘The backstage tours’ display of modes of production symbolized a larger desire to showcase an ideology of production, one facing obsolescence in a post-Fordist, globalized world driven by an ideology of conSumption. Perhaps the most interesting example of this touristic trend was the opening of the Ford Rouge Factory behind-the-scenes tour in 2005. The company’s challenge was to laud Fordism in a post-Fordist age, to offer a tour of an auto assembly plant that created an identification with production that was not just a return to the alienating effects of mass production. They did this with a backstage tour that shifted emphasis away from the exploitative labor practices of mass production, replacing it with a history that defined the producer as an individual figure, not a cog in the industrial machine. That 1s, they touted visions of workers as creators and inventors, representing an 1deology, not of mass production, but of individual productivity. These behindthe-scenes tours both articulated and allayed larger cultural anxieties about the obsolescence of the identity of the producer. While the road narratives of this chapter share this concern with reviving productivity and the producer, they differ from millennial behind-the-scenes tourism in significant ways. First, the productivity and fear of obsolescence is tied to a particular, and devastating, loss. Second, the road trip is a different type of spatial form and process. Indeed, mobility seems to be a puzzling form for the restoration of production when it comes by way of biological reproduc-

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tion. To put it another way: Faludi identifies a post-g/11 retreat to the domestic sphere, but road narratives enact a going out. Why are these characters on the move if the national imperative is to settle down?

To answer this, I want to return to my framing argument about how the post-9/t1 road trip performs the reassertion of the American as a mobile subject. More specifically, these road narratives reinstate mobility as explicitly goal directed. These are not the speculative road trips of chapters 1 and 2, for instance, where individuals choose the road precisely because it represents

unscripted knowledge. In those texts, knowing the nation required experiencing the country as it revealed itself to you in your impromptu wanderings. But the road narratives of this chapter are decidedly purposeful: the couple in Away We Go is in search of a place to call home once the baby arrives. The protagonists of Broken Flowers and Transamerica take to the road to achieve resolution concerning an unknown son. And the trip southward in The Road is directed toward a destination of survival for the father and son.

In all these cases, mobility exemplifies and serves productivity. It directly opposes nomadism or migrancy, versions of mobility emblematic of a rootlessness dangerous to social order. But it is not just rootlessness. In the post-9/11 era, the particular danger is that mobile subjects are untraceable, moving from place to place within and outside the United States, slipping across borders at will. Not only do such mobile figures elude surveillance measures, they travel undetected into communities and through social institutions. Remember Smith’s attention to the misnomer “Arab nationals.” Not only does this designation create an imaginary nation that provides an antagonistic counterpart to the United States but, perhaps unintentionally, it renders individuals placeless. Steinbeck’s designation of the American as a restless spirit has been replaced with a fear that “they” walk among us. These texts, especially as they locate individuals within the family, and indeed sometimes track family relations, emphasize mobility as a method of placement. Goal-directed mobility also functions to reestablish the nation as a domestic, rather than a global, space—as evidenced by their location of the family, or the family home, somewhere “out there.” The specter of the lost family beckons, and even guides, the protagonists. Thus these texts position the domestic as the new frontier: it is both under attack and the place of new adventure. Inverting a classic American story, these characters light out for the domestic territory. In sum, mobility portrays not an inward retreat to the

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domestic sphere but an outward search for the domestic, which becomes the active—and often, miraculous— production of it. Depending on the text, either the cause or revelation of this search revolves around the appearance of the family as the unfamiliar. As the road trip develops into a search for a domestic that has been lost, it becomes a way to incorporate that loss, and that incorporation takes place, in part, as a return to the past. In Amay We Go, Verona’s impending motherhood returns her to the loss of her parents. In Broken Flowers and Transamerica, an adult son returns out of the past to an unknowing father. In 7he Road, the travelers trudge through a landscape that is only and always a remnant of the past. As protagonists struggle to incorporate past losses into their present and future lives, biological reproduction materializes as their mode of rescue. It is both recuperative and transformative because it looks backward, as an acknowledgment of something lost, and forward, as a form of meaningful and active production. Biological reproduction ultimately offers a way to produce the past differently, rewriting it as productive rather than all consuming, pointless, or immobilizing. Coupled with mobility, it reminds us that Americans are subjects that move not only across space but also forward into the future. Like the road narratives of chapter 4, these stories undertake mobility as a return home, which includes the retelling of the past in order to incorporate it into the present and future. But while the Native American road narratives defined that return in terms of interconnectedness, emphasizing the dynamism of social relations and space, the road trips of this chapter venture outward in order to turn inward. In the end, they are concerned with the (re)production of the self. Notably, the majority of these texts feature white protagonists. Mobility does not create connections at the scale of the community or nation. Quite unlike the road narratives in chapter 1, which also responded to tensions around social difference, these stories do not portray a search for meaningful connections with strangers. Indeed, those encounters are often antagonistic and even dangerous. There are the abusive stepfather and thieving hitchhiker in Transamerica, the ex-girlfriend’s henchmen in Broken Flowers, the offensive acquaintances in Away We Go, and the marauders, that is, pretty much everyone, in 7he Road. Interactions with others seem to justify the sequestering of the self/nuclear family unit. Perhaps such plotlines can be read in relation to the hovering fear of obsolescence; that fear prompts the search for a meaningful existence, which must

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begin with the self. But that story is undercut by a persistent lack of agency in these narratives of self-invention. That is, things happen to these protagonists, forcing them to react. Road trips occur because sons unknowingly fathered come out of the past; in-laws move away, abandoning an expectant couple, and an apocalyptic catastrophe shatters lives. ‘These post-9/11 road narratives express the particular fear of the 9/11 moment: we are done to, rather than doing for ourselves. The response is to revive the figure of the producer, but it is an anxious undertaking.

Away We Go, Away We Return The road trip in Amway We Go is productive by design. Its itinerary is on a schedule because the goal is deadline driven. Burt and Vanessa are searching for a new home in time for the arrival of their first child. Living in rural Colorado, the couple had not planned on moving. In fact, they hadn’t even planned on getting pregnant. It just happened to them. And this unplanned occurrence puts in motion a series of destabilizing incidents caused by the unfamiliar character of the familial. Most obviously, the unborn baby represents the unfamiliar family, a looming unknown that has Burt obsessing with ways to give his kid a “Huck Finny” childhood. Burt’s parents also prove unfamiliar. Living nearby, they abruptly and gleefully announce they are moving to Antwerp, even though this means they will miss the first two years of their grandchild’s life. Finally, the pregnancy defamiliarizes the couple, making them anxious about the mental and physical solidity of their lives. “Are we fuck ups?” Verona asks Burt. “We’re 33,” she continues, “we don’t have the basics figured out .. . how to live. ... we have a cardboard window.” ‘They don’t know anything about how to be a family, or parents. And so the road trip takes shape around a causal relation: Verona and Burt seek geographical stability to ensure identarian stability. In short, establishing a true family home will mean that “we aren’t fuck ups.” Mobility is goal directed in another way as well. They cannot just move anywhere. In the airport, Verona recites the logic behind their chosen pos-

sibilities: “We both agree we need to be around some kind of family... friends .. . some connection.” That desire for connection is founded 1n loss, as Verona struggles to work through the absence of her parents, who died when she was in college. Now that Burt’s parents are severing the familial connection, the couple feels adrift, but not in the celebratory free-floating way often

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associated with road protagonists. Verona’s contention that “we’re completely untethered .. . this is a dream scenario” is anxiously delivered to and received by Burt. Cutting loose is inseparable from being cut loose. It registers as something done to them, not by them. And that causes anxiety. Thus the film defines mobility as the longing for spaces that will bound them. Burt and Verona’s road trip is not one of expansiveness, in which they embrace the vastness of the country. There 1s no desire to change the scale of identity. Indeed, the film does not even consider such a motivation. This is not a country defined by regional or national scales. Instead, it 1s quite explicitly mapped out as a sequence of discrete and unrelated private residences. There

is no hipster version of the networked Powwow Highway either, in which places are unified by a communal familiarity. In fact, there is very little of the actual road. As Burt and Verona drive from Phoenix to Tucson early in the film, the camera tracks the iconic, unpopulated southwestern landscape that I analyzed in chapter 4. But this landscape is hardly even a backdrop. Unlike Thelma & Louise, for instance, there are no personal epiphanies 1n the desert. We do not see Verona and Burt on the road. Presenting only long-distance

shots of a tiny car making its way along an empty road, the film creates a landscape of dissociation. Leaving Arizona, they take a train to Wisconsin, but that trip 1s reduced to a short scene in the couple’s sleeper car. The train appears more as a rolling residence than a heterogeneous form of transportation. The film is not interested in the road per se. Indeed, it presents more scenes located in hotel rooms than on the road. Significantly, the only real footage of the couple on the road occurs at the film’s beginning and end, and both scenes track them driving to their respective parents’ homes. Framing the story, these road scenes bound mobility with purposeful direction, leading the travelers to the parental home. In between, the couple does travel to Arizona, Madison, Wisconsin, Mon-

treal, and Miami. However, their trip is not the “voyage into democracy” undertaken by Free Azr’s Claire Boltwood. ‘The desire and search for connection exist, yet the cross-country encounters do not take place with strangers. Instead, Burt and Verona visit a succession of friends and family. Like Claire, however, the couple does undergo an education, but it is not to discover that strangers turn out to be “just like us.” In fact, the complete opposite happens: they reconnect with familiars and discover them to be strangers. This strangeness follows a theme. Every family the travelers visit turns out to be a broken family, some because of loss and others because of appalling

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parenting. The latter category includes Verona’s ex-boss Lily (Allison Janney),

first on the couple’s whistle-stop tour. Lily crudely and loudly belittles her husband and children, who linger blankly on the sidelines. New to Phoenix, Lily desperately wants to fit in and shares her puzzlement over her golf club rejection with Verona and Burt. But this admission of vulnerability cannot erase her obnoxious badgering. It functions instead, the reviewer Ryan Gilbey contends, as the filmmakers’ invitation “to take the side of the elite against her.” ‘This opportunity for derision is quickly followed up by an even more egregious model of parenting, as the couple visits Burt’s childhood friend named LN (Maggie Gyllenhaal), an over-the-top New Age devotee, who “is not so much a character as a list of traits despised by the screenwriters” (Gilbey). Invited to disdain these parents, viewers join the search for the “authentic” family. Balancing out these horrific parents are families devastated by loss. They visit old college friends who have created a beautifully cacophonous multicultural family of adopted children, but who have also suffered five miscarriages. Burt and Verona leave this Montreal couple because of a call from Burt’s brother, whose wife has just abandoned him and their young daughter in Miami. As this range of examples shows, Aimay We Go relentlessly defines the road trip and the scale of identity in terms of the nuclear family. But rather than reconstitute or reclaim these families, the film shifts to and isolates an idealized one— the biologically nuclear one as represented by Verona and Burt. ‘Their road trip may reveal their familiars’ strangeness, but there is no engagement or attempts to bridge differences. Instead, the film sets up these families as a series of threats to the ideal family. As Gilbey puts it, “bad people get children they don’t deserve while good people suffer unforeseeable trauma.” Verona

and Burt’s mobility responds to this situation with a turn inward. The more they travel, the more they define themselves as a nuclear family unit on its own, separate from those others. There is, however, one exception: the nuclear family represented by the specter of Verona’s parents. At the film’s beginning, when Verona complains that her in-laws’ move to Antwerp “takes selfishness to a whole new level,” Burt mumbles, “It’s not like your parents are doing anything.” “My parents are dead,’ she responds. It’s a disconcerting exchange, but what the film proves is that Verona’s parents are, in fact, doing something. From the haunting past,

they are producing the ideal family to discover. When Burt says he wants his daughter to have a “Huck Finny” childhood, Verona wistfully responds,

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“Yeah, I had that.” Ultimately, their road trip leads them back to Verona’s childhood home, which is where they decide to live. Thus the future is produced through a return to the past. Or, more precisely, the film produces the future as an exact replica of the past. By having a baby, Verona’s sister Grace tells her, “Youre bringing them [their parents] back, you know, in a little way.” Biological reproduction rescues Verona from grief because it reproduces

her family. In doing so, it creates a particular image of the self as producer/ productive: the only way to give my child the childhood I had 1s to give her my childhood. In other words, I bestow myself/my life on you.

The film concludes by incorporating the familial with the unfamiliar as Burt and Verona produce something: a new discovery. As they approach the estate of Verona’s parents, Burt asks, “Is this starting to look familiar?” “I think so, I want it to,’ replies Verona. “But I want it to be new for us, you know what I mean? I want it to feel like we found it—does that make sense?” This

conversation perfectly captures the idea of the road trip as articulating and assuaging tensions around mobility. They are intrepid explorers who discover what was already theirs. And what is this home that they have produced? A vision of the pastoral, it comes into view as an old home on a big river. Could it be Mark ‘Twain’s Mississippi? There are no cities, no “problem” families, just the refuge of the rural familial home. In this post-g/11 film, to be in the middle of nowhere is to be left alone. Insulated from devastating events and trauma, the destination also insulates the family from social differences. Early in the film Burt’s mother asks Verona, who appears to be multiracial, how black she thought the baby would be. The question seems out of place, both obnoxious and irrelevant. But as the film concludes with an image of the nuclear family in its own world, we see that the question established the film’s scope of concern about difference. The mixed-race couple stands as the sole representative for any engagement with difference. Verona and Burt achieve incorporation into adultand parenthood through disconnection from otherness. Indeed, their anxiety about parenting disappears (rather than escalates) with their realization that parenthood is their whole world: “All we can do is be good to this one baby. We don’t have control over much else.” Protecting and serving one’s family dictates the removal from larger scales and responsibilities. In other words, the move outward becomes a mode for turning inward. Their goal-directed mobility makes this reductively personal outcome appear to be an expansive gesture as they commit themselves to the future (of their baby). Exploring the

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continent only to make a nostalgic return to the home-before-loss, mobility produces a prelapsarian past for both nation and family with its “Huck Finny” regeneration of an idyllic homeland.

Broken Flowers: Nothing Begets Something Broken Flowers could not seem more different from Amay We Go. Unlike that

film’s questing parents, Don Johnston is neither restless nor troubled. Emotionally and physically passive, he exists in a motionless state. In the opening scene, he stands aside as his girlfriend Sherry (Julie Delpy) leaves him. “T just don’t think I want to be with an over-the-hill Don Juan anymore,” she tells him, “Don’t you ever want to have a family?” Representing a depleted image of aging white middle-class masculinity, Don seems to be missing something, especially something to show for himself—or as himself. He cannot even answer her question about family except by echoing it back to her: “Well, is that what you want?” Unable to express any desires of his own, Don is disconnected from Sherry, himself, and, it seems, any sense of what connection is. His home tells the story. Prefacing this scene, the film’s opening consists of the camera following a postal worker walking through Don’s neighborhood. First, she approaches the house of Don’s neighbor Winston (Jeffrey Wright), a place alive with the chaos of family life. Kids run around outside, music plays, toys are everywhere, and the front door is open. This active and colorful scene provides a striking contrast to Don’s house, which comes into view as the camera travels across the high hedge that separates the two residences. Suddenly, everything becomes quiet and contained. Framed by a tidily manicured lawn,

Don’s stone house is drained of color. Fortress-like in stature, its front door is closed in the middle of the day, shutting out noise, light, and life. Moving inside, the camera stops panning to center on Don, sitting listlessly on the couch. Merging seamlessly with his setting, he is both insulated and isolated. The visual juxtaposition of these homes, coupled with Sherry’s question, sets up the film’s inquiry into whether or not Don can ever “open up.” The question develops around two versions of masculinity symbolized by the two domiciles. Devoid of life, Don’s house, though nicely kept up, is an image of contained stasis. Sherry’s departure takes place as an indictment of Don as an outdated model of virility. Perhaps this “Don Juan’s” history of excessive sexual mobility — apparently, he has never had trouble getting girls —

has immobilized him. Staring at the television, glued to the couch, never

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changing out of his tracksuit, Don lacks drive. ‘Though he has made money in computers, he does not even own one, depriving him of one kind of connectivity. Laconic and disengaged, he is not committed to anything meaningful.

When Winston says that he is sorry Sherry left, Don replies, “Me too... I think.” Adrift and disconnected, Don shows no interest in pursuing directions of his own making. In contrast to Don’s anti-aspirational persona, Winston exemplifies the relentless go-getter. Worker at three jobs, father of five kids, and inspired amateur detective, he perfectly melds production, reproduction, and productivity. He also epitomizes the striving immigrant, updating that American figure of mobility for the post-Fordist, globalized age with his embodiment of a flexible, service-oriented, and entrepreneurial orientation to life, and to his friendship

with Don. Unlike Don, he views everything as a potential opportunity; the Internet, for instance, provides “a whole world of information” waiting to be put to use. Not surprisingly, then, Winston sees only promising possibilities when Don shows him a letter that arrives the day Sherry departs. Written on pink stationery, the letter is from an anonymous ex-lover who informs Don that he fathered a son who is now almost nineteen years old and may be looking for him. “Congratulations! You’re a father,’ Winston says, regarding the letter as the production of a son, rather than an unsettling intrusion from the past or a cruel hoax. Telling Don he needs to treat the letter as “a sign about the direction of your life,’ Winston insists they solve the mystery. He is an enthusiastic assistant, but his jovial demeanor cannot fully mask the emphasis on self-improvement and self-management. ‘To Winston, Don needs to figure out what to do with his life. That is, he needs to make something of it. A plotter and a planner, Winston represents an ideology of productivity defined by unyielding desire and initiative. In application, that drive functions to make things tangible, find answers, and produce results. Detecting clues — pink stationery, handwriting, a particular typewriter — Winston masterminds a plan for Don to visit his former girlfriends to find out who might be the potential mother. In short, he produces Don’s road trip. Unlike Amway We Go, this film seems to critique the sequestered life, since

it moves Don out of his physical and emotional fortress. The road trip puts Don back in circulation, and it does that by putting his past in circulation, which is made clear by the film’s first road trip: the journey of the pink letter shown during the opening credits. Crossing space, the letter also crosses time, representing a past that travels into the present.’ Yet the letter shows

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that communication 1s deceiving: it is not a connection as much as evidence of a rift. “Thoughts rearrange, familiar now strange,” sings Holly Golightly in the soundtrack that plays during this sequence. Like Amay We Go, the road trip is a return journey, with visits to people once familiar, now strange. Also like that film, the trip is carefully planned in advance. Winston supplies Don with a detailed itinerary and maps, as well as airplane, rental car, and hotel reservations. Nothing is left to chance. Here, too, mobility takes shape as the travel to a series of discrete residences belonging to people from the protagonist’s past. These homes create a jagged landscape of disconnected destinations. Although there are shots of Don driving, we never know where we are on a larger map. The setting is as anonymous as the letter writer. Defined with detail and personality that contrast sharply with the larger landscape, each residence defines a former lover, as Don travels to an established middle-class suburb, a posh new development of prefab designer homes, a countryside retreat, and a backwoods farm. Repeating the same routine with every woman, each visit becomes a little less welcoming to the point where interactions become antagonistic. Don first visits Laura (Sharon Stone), who blithely invites him in for dinner and then welcomes him into her bed. On his next stop, Don’s “understated anxiety” (Segal, “Something Missing”’) starts to show during a silent dinner he shares with Dora (Frances Conroy) and Ron (Christopher McDonald), Dora’s husband and real estate partner. Ron jokes about the similarity between his and Don’s names. The

past and present merge (Don-Ron) but both are estranged. Don is an “ex” but so is Dora, for Ron describes his current wife in terms of the past, an “exhippie chick.” Don’s next visit, with the animal communicator Dr. Carmen Markowski (Jessica Lange), fares no better. Dodging his attempts to extend their visit, the doctor matches Don’s lack of engagement. ‘Things get prickly

when her assistant comes out to the parking lot to return the flowers Don brought. That snub, however, is nothing compared to the black eye he gets on his next visit. Driving out to a backwoods farm, Don finds Penny (Tilda Swinton), who greets him with a question of her own. “So, what the fuck do you want, Donny?” she yells, pushing him. Not waiting around for the answer, she slams the door in his face, leaving him to deal with her biker friends, and the black eye one of them gives him. In contrast to Smoke Signals, or even Away We Go, Broken Flowers does not represent mobility as a mode of incorporating the losses of the past. The return does not even allow for the incorporation of newfound knowledge. ‘The

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heaviness of awkward disconnection defines these scenes. Don’s journey suggests that there is no going back to the past even if we don’t know what it 1s we had. It doesn’t hold or offer anything. In fact, it seems odd to talk about an ideology of productivity and production in relation to a film in which, as several reviewers point out, nothing happens. Although Don retraces his own past, he is still not pursuing directions of his own making, because Winston masterminded the trip. Throughout his travels, Don also does nothing; things just happen to him. Even the driving shots create a feeling of stasis. ‘The views outside the car window are often beautiful but arbitrary, showing us nothing

specific in terms of place or plot. We are nowhere. Don and the audience make no forward progress. The road trip does not produce anything, generating no clues about Don’s possible paternity. And it is Bill Murray’s deadpan performance that most persistently opposes productivity. ‘he personification

of disengagement and impassivity, Don is never really shaken out of what the film reviewer Nick Roddick calls “his non-reactive state,’ a state “which one can read as self-absorption, self-pity, relative contentment or almost any inward-turned emotion.” Indeed, the film’s engagement with the theme of productivity might be the way it points out—1in order to critique— our investment in its narrative. If only we work hard enough (productivity) to read clues and put them together, we will produce an answer, solve a mystery, make a son materialize. But goaldirected mobility leads nowhere. Don’s life may seem empty, but on the road it doesn’t seem nearly as empty as, for instance, what the reviewer Victoria Segal calls the “sterile domesticity” (“Something Missing”) of Dora’s life. The film makes us wonder whether the aspirational success story or intimate personal relationships just represent other forms of alienation. What produces the knowledge of someone else, the evidence of a meaningful life? Why are those worthy pursuits? Mobility functioned to put Don back in circulation, but he might have stayed on his couch. Broken Flowers seems a deadpan parody of masculinity-as-crisis because it refuses even to grant the crisis. “Win-

ston is determined that there is an answer to the riddle, and that it lies in the colour pink, the wording of the letter, the handwriting,’ writes Roddick, but “Don—and Jarmusch— are equally determined that it does not.” Don’s lack of forward progress, and his disinterest in that narrative, press viewers to question their investment — and their propelling desire to invest—1n narratives of engagement and productivity. And yet, Don’s road trip does do, or produce, something. His encounters

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with the past do not produce any reconnections, but they prompt him to view the past as lost/loss, which results in him opening up to the present. Arriving home from his trip, he eyes a young man hanging out at the airport. Seeing “the Kid” (Mark Webber) again outside the restaurant where he meets Winston, Don follows him outside. Asking the Kid if he’s on a road trip, Don offers to buy him a sandwich. As he eats, the Kid asks if Don has any philosophical tips for a guy on a road trip. “The past is gone, I know that,” Don replies. He continues, “The future isn’t here yet whatever it’s going to be, so all there is, is this, the present.” Perhaps taking his own advice as a cue, Don, sounding like a believer, grabs the moment and moves boldly on, adding, “I know that you think ’m your father.” Accusing Don of being “fucked up,” the Kid takes flight, his departure suggesting another critique of reading the random as signs, making the incidental produce meaning. But this time, Don responds. He gives chase, running after the Kid with a purpose and speed unprecedented in the film. In other words, he moves, pursuing a goal. The Kid is gone, leaving Don standing in the street. A car drives by, and Don locks eyes with another young man in the passenger seat. Could this be Don’s son? Maybe. Maybe not. Well, sort of. The actor is Homer Murray, Bill Murray’s twenty-three-year-old son (Roddick). Could this image of the father-son bond be another trick? Like other dead-end clues, this sighting might serve to remind viewers of their desire for narratives that produce something — certainty, closure, a son. That said, the film seems to undermine its own narrative of detachment. While perhaps largely “non-reactive” with the women, Don is actively interested in engaging with the Kid, and the young man after him. The road trip ultimately distinguishes heterosexual relationships from parental ones. Relationships with women define the past, but (potential) fatherhood defines the present. At the same time, the return of the past is regenerative, as this hasbeen Don Juan’s depleted masculinity 1s reinvigorated through the possibility of fatherhood, not sexual seduction. The film critic Liese Spencer observes, ‘“He’s confused, and therefore alive in a way he wasn’t at the film’s start.” In other words, the potential of biological reproduction produces a different Don. The film ends with a 360—degree pan of Don in the middle of the street. In sharp contrast to the film’s beginning, he is outside, open to his surroundings, with the camera moving around him rather than staying motionless. Contrary to conventional bachelorhood wisdom, fatherhood does not signify

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containment. Prompting him to act, to pursue a direction of his own making, these potential sons open him up. Perhaps it is true that nothing happens. And that, at the end of the movie, Don has nothing to show for his efforts. But that sounds a lot like paternity. While the pregnant female body 1s proof of maternity, the male body bears no comparable sign of paternity. Fatherhood produces no tangible bodily evidence, but it exists. Maybe then, nothing is something.

Transamerica: The National Body as a “Work in Progress” Like Broken Flowers, Transamerica opens with a son returning from the past to an unknowing father. The timing is particularly bad in this case because the father is Bree Osborne, a transwoman just days away from her final gender reassignment surgery. Forced by her therapist to deal with this nineteenyear-old son, Toby (Kevin Zegers), who is currently in a New York juvenile detention center, Bree ends up driving across country with him, cultivating a bond while trying (unsuccessfully) to keep the truths of her identity secret. In her review of the film, Victoria Segal defines it as being “as much about America as it 1s about gender, examining what it is like to live in a place where a man can become anything he wants— even a woman” (“Agenda Bending’). Or— even a father. Indeed, in this film, the production of America, a transwoman, and fatherhood work together in a story wherein mobility engages with “homonormative nationalism.” With this concept, Jasbir K. Puar complicates the heteronormative character of American nationalism by identifying “an uneasy yet urging folding in of homosexuality into the ‘us’ of the ‘us-versus-them’ nationalist rhetoric” (70). The production of post-9/11 patriotism includes the incorporation of “aspects of queer subjectivity into the body of the normalized nation” (71) when that subjectivity is defined within a neoliberalist framework that emphasizes a “privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (Lisa Duggan gtd. Puar 68).° As I have claimed throughout this chapter, post-9g/11 American road travel and narratives enact a response

to the transgressive mobility of the terrorist attacks. Their reclamation of mobility performs a particular kind of (re)productive patriotism that reconstitutes the nation as homeland. In the post-9/t1 era, as Puar makes clear, geopolitics are mapped onto specific bodies, and specific bodies are used to

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further political agendas. Bree’s travels across the country navigate the tensions around homo-nationalism as 7ransamerica draws attention to the multiple ways that a gender-mobile body is a body in motion. So far in this chapter, biological reproduction appears as the great homogenizer. It incorporates a heterogeneous population that includes the young heterosexual mixed-race hipster couple, the aging single male baby boomer, and the white transwoman. As in Away We Go, Transamerica’s story of biological reproduction reincorporates a goal-directed mobility, while disclosing tensions around the production of a heterogeneous nation versus a demarcation of us and them. Focused on the early twentieth century, Cresswell’s discussion of a rootless, threatening mobility centered on nomadic figures such as tramps, gypsies, and migrant workers. In this historical moment, this threat is mapped onto figures deemed racially and gender mobile, mixed-race and transgender individuals, for instance. With its gender and geographically mobile main character, 7ransamerica’s story of mobility can be read as pushing back against a conservative, transphobic culture of containment and surveil-

lance. Yet that culture becomes a spectral presence in the film. One conservative response to transgressive acts of mobility has been to extend the net — to search for and expose other transgressive mobilities that need containment (think here of the Patriot Act, Proposition 8, gender policing at airports). In this context, 7ransamerica’s story of a transwoman’s biological reproduction exacerbates and distracts from suspicions of an individual being “too mobile.” It seems both a critique and a mode of “straightening.” Bree’s fathering functions as an inclusionary gesture that incorporates, that is, substantiates, the post-9/11 United States as a heterogeneous nation open to difference. At the Same time, biological reproduction functions to normalize Bree 1n relation to heteronormative imperatives. My point is not that Bree should not want to have a boyfriend or to parent a son. Rather I want to draw attention to how the film redirects the narrative of a transwoman’s journey of gender mobility into a story about producing incorporable identities. Bree’s comment that her body is a “work in progress” comes to signify the tensions of incorporation at every scale, with mobility functioning to guide that project to a purposeful conclusion.

The issue of incorporable identities structures the film. At the beginning, the man conducting Bree’s pre-op interview tells her, “You look very authentic.” Bree responds, “I try to blend in, keep a low profile. I believe the slang terminology is ‘living stealth.” In other words, Bree strives to incorporate

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herself seamlessly into the larger heteronormative community. But the news of ‘Toby forces her to return to her former identity as Stanley Schupak. In this film, not only is the family unfamiliar, but its appearance functions to defamiliarize the protagonist. No more living stealth. Hearing about her son, Bree’s therapist, Margaret (Elizabeth Pena), tells her, “Stanley’s life is your life... . This [your son] is a part of your body that cannot be discarded.” In other words, you are Stanley; Toby is you. Bree is not mentioned, except as a vessel for others’ production. Margaret will not sign the surgery papers until Bree deals with ‘Toby, so Bree heads to New York. But why does the film tell the story of father-son revelation and reconcillation as a road story? Why not have Toby show up in LA, especially since he was headed there anyway? Replacing the story of bodily mobility with one of mobile bodies, the cross-country narrative leaves behind Bree’s M-I-F transformation to track instead a transformation from femaleness/femininity to fatherhood, from weak woman to (re)productive man. Recall Faludi’s articulation of a post-g/11 fantasy of rescue in which strong men rescue weak women, reflecting “a culture-wide desire to measure national male strength by female peril” (343). 7ransamerica relocates this fantasy to the scale of the body. Bree’s gender mobility becomes both a sign of the heterogeneity of the national body and the recuperation of heteronormativity as the trans body maps the imperative to discern the male/female, familiar/strange, us/them. This story can be read in the representation of Bree’s femininity. In the film’s visual logic, viewers recognize Bree as transgender through her portrayal of failed femininity. This is the appeal of the film for some: the honesty about Bree’s transition, the revelation of “how all-consuming ‘living stealth’ is —the dependence on hormone pills and make-up bags, the sudden risk of revelation” (Segal, “Agenda Bending”). Like me, however, the film reviewer Nicole V. Gagne questions the film’s opening scenes, “where Bree has been made to look as ugly as possible. This lame attempt to extract laughs reduces her to someone trying to be something she 1s not. In real life, when a trans woman wears bad makeup, she inevitably appears overpainted, with mismatching colors and effects. She doesn’t seem aged and cadaverous, which 1s the Karloff-like effect drawn onto Huffman. Bree may be an insecure tranny, but she isn’t blind. ... Her character would never walk out the door looking so grotesque” (57).’

This failed femininity leaves Bree’s former identity, the biologically male Stanley, as the genuine article. In addition, Stanley has produced something

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authentic—a son. By contrast, Bree cannot quite produce an authentic passing female (at least for the audience) for most of the film. In fact, the film depends upon Bree’s inauthenticity because its real narrative investment centers on when Toby will detect her lies, that is, her bodily truths. The film continues to define the trans body in terms of hierarchical gender taxonomies. Bree’s femininity is stereotypically demure and defenseless (she’s afraid of snakes and other wildlife, for instance), setting her up as a woman needing rescue. And she is rescued by a man; that man is her past self. It is only by returning to and retrieving her identity as Stanley that Bree can reach the state of “truth” her therapist requires 1n order to sign her surgery papers. Ultimately, Stanley’s reappearance from the past produces Bree’s future. Bree’s mobility functions as a rescue story in another way. The road trip rescues her from “freakishness,” normalizing the transwoman through the quintessential American form of the road trip. Procuring a station wagon that looks like Chevy Chase’s in National Lampoon, Bree and Toby repeat the classic road trip, driving east to west, from New York through the iconic southwestern desert, on their way to the promised land of California. But unlike Amay We Go and Broken Flowers, Bree’s road trip emphasizes unscripted meetings with strangers. These interactions, however, do not create affiliations. Instead, the encounters normalize Bree, presenting strangers who are all represented as more “other” than she 1s: ‘Toby’s abusive stepfather, the house full of trans people in Oklahoma, the Navajo Calvin ManyGoats, and finally, her own parents in Arizona. Even her son ‘Toby, the gay hustler, could be added to this list. In these encounters Bree performs middle-class femininity, holding herself a bit aloof with a combination of propriety, modesty, and intellectualism, a posture perhaps best exemplified by her apology to Toby for what she calls the “ersatz” trans women, a comment that also requires her to define ersatz for him. Calvin (Graham Greene), Bree’s romantic interest on the road, alerts us to the film’s conservative understanding of incorporable identities. He exemplifies the Native American who represents authenticity, which is then bestowed on the white traveler. Calvin recognizes Bree as an authentic woman and confers that authenticity through heterosexual desire. Thus the encounter reiterates racial and sexual hierarchies. In addition, as the “mystic Indian” who can see others’ real selves, Calvin is made to indulge the tiresome white-asIndian fantasy. Before they meet Calvin, Toby tells Bree, “My real dad’s part Indian. He never told me but I just know. It’s an Indian thing.” But this 1s a lie

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because we know that Bree is his father. Regardless, as Calvin, Bree, and ‘Toby are driving to Phoenix, Calvin, sensing ‘Toby’s sullenness toward Bree, turns his attention to the teenager and performs another recognition: “You got that Cherokee look about you — proud people, those Cherokee.” It is, it seems, “an Indian thing.” In addition to authenticating Bree’s and Toby’s “true” selves, Calvin channels the enigmatic Indian, telling ‘Toby that “every woman has the right to a little mystery.’ His refusal to probe, or even discern, Bree’s secrets may validate her passing, but still contributes to his positioning as the Hollywood Indian who serves “as a foil against which Euro-American culture could be defined, justified, or critiqued” (Arnold 348). His discernment of Bree’s and Toby’s authenticity plays as a sympathetic acceptance of the wounded white

subject, functioning as a (liberal) critique of a transphobic mainstream culture. Continuing the tradition of the Hollywood Indian discussed in chapter 4, Calvin validates the identity and incorporation of the white traveler while vanishing from the film. Calvin may see Bree as an individual woman, but the film presents her familial identity as the most important recognition. As seen throughout this book, the road trip promises a mode of reinvention and transformation. But Bree was already undergoing a process of reinvention and transformation in Los Angeles. Her sex reassignment, as her therapist says, will be a “metamorphosis.” ‘This change of form, however, cannot compete with another transfiguration. Although Bree tells the medical interviewer, “My family is dead,” the cross-country trip transforms them back into the living, postponing and replacing Bree’s transition to the future with a return to the past. Bree is forced to reveal their existence to Toby after her money, car, and hormones are stolen, and Calvin drops them off at her parents’ house in Phoenix. ‘This is where Toby finds out Bree is his father. The revelation occurs when Toby comes on to her, and Bree stops him—not by telling him— but by pointing to a picture of Toby’s mom and Stanley, identifying Stanley as “me.” Feeling angry and betrayed, Toby runs away. As ‘Toby’s devastation shows, the family (home) is where the familiar and the strange cannot be sorted. ‘To Bree’s family, Stanley is their familiar. But when Bree’s mother says she misses her son, Bree tells her, “You never had a son.” However, this visit to Arizona ultimately functions to sort and separate the familiar from the strange. Before their rift, Toby and Bree share a moment by the pool. Of her family, Bree says, “I just wish, that once, they’d just look at me and see me. That’s all. Really see me.” Bree does get her wish, achieving a moment of recognition and reconciliation

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with her family. It happens when she has a parental crisis. “You are not my father,’ Toby cries, hitting Bree, and leaving her on the floor. Bree’s mother and sister Sydney rush to her side. Her mother (Fionnula Flanagan) hugs and consoles her: “There, there, he didn’t mean it,’ she murmurs. Her mother continues, “What do you want to do, St—.” “Bree,” Sydney (Carrie Preston) interjects. “Yes,” agrees her mother. Here is the gesture of recognition and acceptance Bree has wished for, but it is one that acknowledges her as a parent who has a lost a son. She loses Toby, and they lose Stanley. After this moment, Bree is transformed. Speaking with a police officer about Toby’s disappearance the next day, Bree, who is presenting as female, is asked what her relationship is to the boy. “I am his father,” she asserts, firmly

and without a hitch. Just as significantly, that fact is heard and recognized without notice by the police offer—no questions, no sideways glance. Her metamorphic incorporation into the family and lawful society is complete. But this incorporation functions as an instance of homonormalization. Bree’s familial and legal legitimacy comes not with her assertion that “I am a woman” but with her proclamation that “I am his father,” thus aligning her with the imperatives of a heteronormative culture. The return to the family produces an acknowledgment of Bree’s identity, but only through a familial lens—as a failed parent. This frame continues to define Bree after she returns to Los Angeles. Visiting Bree after her surgery, Margaret says, “Last week you said this would be the happiest day of your life.” “Last week,” responds Bree, “was a long time ago.” Her failure with Toby hurts, Bree tells Margaret, as she breaks down, sobbing uncontrollably. The surgery doesn’t produce the (ideal) self that Bree wanted just one week ago. Only reuniting with Toby will do that. Siding with her family, Bree finds that becoming a father, not a woman, is the true and miraculous metamorphosis. Bree’s road story ends with a straightening that both incorporates and sequesters her. Her mobility has normalized her in relation to a series of other

“others,” while her return home restores the estranged family in order to reconstruct Bree with a familiar heteronormative identity. Despite its unconventional subject matter and good intentions, the film normalizes not just Bree but also a system of spatial and social marginalization. Gagne suggests an additional way that Calvin’s characterization functions to locate Bree: “Bree’s admirer is someone who himself is an outsider, and that characterization speaks volumes about ‘Tucker’s attitude toward his transsexual protagonist” (57). In

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this film, goal-directed mobility produces the ideal heterogeneous homeland by including Bree just enough to remind us that she is different. That is, in order to accept her, we need to remember her strangeness. ‘Throughout the film, Bree keeps company with other marginal(ized) subjects: she lives in a Mexican-American neighborhood, works at a Mexican restaurant, is attracted to a Native American, and has a gay hustler/porn film actor son. In addition to her spatial and social sequestering, Bree is also sexually sequestered, effectively desexualized. Though the film flirts with the idea of a romance, it dodges the sexual storyline to produce a much more familiar and normalizing one: parenthood. At least one reviewer, Linda Ruth Williams, refers to Bree as “brittlely asexual” (43). And yet she clearly is not asexual. But the film’s specific representation of Bree’s prickly femininity allows for such slippage. Either way, the film moves out of the dangerous territory of a sexualized transwoman. The film concludes with ‘Toby tentatively reconciling with Bree in her home, thus completing and domesticating her transformation into a biological parent. However, the ending includes another transformation: Bree’s transition from a body as work in progress to the aspirational worker in progress. Although Bree begins the film as a telemarketer and dishwasher, she ends it as a waitress with plans to be a teacher. Here, then, is the normalizing story of the striving American worker. Concluding with an image of Bree as the embodiment of an ideology of productivity, the film leaves its viewers with a much more comforting version of the self-made (wo)man.

The Road: The Making of the Maker In the three films I have discussed, biological reproduction surfaces as the ultimate and only form of rescue for a range of protagonists. That story of biological reproduction, however, is located on the road rather than situated in the home. This setting addresses a larger cultural anxiety by presenting mobility as explicitly and productively goal directed. This story performs another kind of rescue by reinventing parenthood as a mode of freedom and opportunity. Parenthood is not a form of containment that adults need to escape, but a form of mobility that connects them to the past and launches them forward. To turn to the novel 7he Road 1s to enter a different world’ In this postapocalyptic universe, there is no “going” on the road because the road 1s all there is. Like the landscape, the family seems little more than ash. McCarthy

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presents his main characters as shells. ‘They are only “the boy” and “the man,”

a father and son traveling south in a torturous effort to survive, torturous because both characters doubt the objective of their task. Their mobility may be goal directed, but that hardly seems comforting, hopeful, or productive. Indeed, it is difficult to tell what being productive might even mean. How does one gauge progress? For one thing, there are no markers to gauge physical progress; scales no longer exist. When the man sets off to find more firewood, he tells the boy, “Pll be in the neighborhood. Okay?” “Where’s the neighborhood?” the boy asks in response (81). “It just means I wont be far,” the man has to explain. In another moment, when the pair reaches the summit of a hill, the man “nodded toward the open country below them” (7). With his binoculars, he sees that “the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste. Nothing to see” (7). No longer the iconic natural landscape, the “open country” comes into view as an urban palimpsest, itself reduced to “nothing to see.” Even my use of the terms “world” and “universe” to describe this postapocalyptic scene seem inapplicable, for when the pair arrives at the coast, the man tells the boy that he doubts there 1s anyone across the sea. Earlier, when the boy talks to him of escaping to Mars, the man tells him that Mars is a dead place. Their existence takes place in undifferentiated and indifferent space. Surprisingly however, the man and the boy cling to a road map. The man shows the boy the plan they are following south:

[the man:] These are our roads, the black lines on the map. The state roads.

[the boy:| Why are they the state roads?

Because they used to belong to the states. What used to be called the States.

But there’s not any more states? No.

What happened to them? I dont know exactly. That’s a good question. But the roads are still there. Yes. For a while. How long a while? I dont know. Maybe quite a while. There’s nothing to uproot them so they should be okay for a while.

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But there wont be any cars or trucks on them. No. Okay.

Are you ready? (36—37)

The states have evaporated. And what of these roads? They are not connectors or throughways, not traditional transportation corridors or contours marking out specific places. No longer the route to some future, they are the shrines to the lost and reminders of the loss to come. Keeper of the past, the road 1s recoded with new landmarks: stone markers, relics, skeletons, and the photograph of the man’s dead wife, which, one day, he lays down on the blacktop before moving on.

The lack of scales represents not just the loss of a system to divide up Space; it signifies the loss of spatiality itself. In the area near where the man’s uncle used to have a farm, the narrator recounts: “In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain” (17). Collapsing space and time, this locution——a long ago near

this place—conveys the postapocalyptic reality. It is not that some places represent the past, it 1s that place itself is the past. Place only signifies the manifestation of loss. The same is true with McCarthy’s austere prose. In the exchange above, even the apostrophe, the marker of possessiveness or omission, has evaporated. At once captivating and estranging, the prose exemplifies loss and puts the reader at a loss.

Though the man may recognize the spatial remnants of a former life, geography is meaningless in the present and to the boy. As Arielle Zibrak points out, “Even the man’s nostalgic connection to place is inconceivable to the boy, whose life has been peripatetic” (108).’ As a result, place is suspect, revealed

again and again to be dangerous, especially when represented by homes. In this novel, the search for the domestic produces only fear and anxiety. The boy never wants to enter homes the pair comes across, even if it might mean finding food. When they find the man’s childhood home, the boy pleads for them to stay outside. They may still be vulnerable out of doors, but at least they will not be trapped. Like the post-g/11 films I have discussed, the landscape here is largely populated with residences, but these are at best shells of devastation, and at worst places of death. ‘They only produce gruesome discoveries, such as the basement full of emaciated humans, held prisoner by unseen marauders,

facing certain and violent deaths. The one “safe” home the pair does find is

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an underground bunker, stocked with food, fuel, and clothing. Too nervous to stay there more than a few days, the man pulls a mattress over the hatch to avoid detection. Sealed inside, their inhabitation resembles being buried alive. Place even shapes the classification of “bad guys” versus “good guys.” In a reversal of conventional spatial politics, the man tells the boy that the bad guys live in communes, while the good guys, like them, are refugees. And so they must keep to the road. But unfortunately, the commune dwellers also patrol the roads. Their threat, like the terrorist one described in the beginning of this chapter, is characterized by their ability to permeate all spaces and scales, turning the domestic into the profoundly foreign. All spaces take shape only as structures of death. For the man and the boy, the perception of a threat is all consuming. All other people, as Zibrak notes, are perceived as “agents of death, when they might be seen as avenues for survival or cultural reunification” (108). ‘The man’s tactic 1s to establish one clear boundary in an otherwise chaotic space: there is us, and there 1s all else. The novel takes the post-9/11 theme of the familiar turned strange to a new level. Humanity itself is unfamiliar —and largely unfamilial. ‘The boy and the man are marked out as different because they are father and son. Marauders do not have children, and pregnant women are identified as breeders for groups, outnumbered by men.

Everything in this novel is a sign of estrangement: the boy and man are estranged from people, the past, and place. Whereas earlier road narratives represented a landscape stitching together people and places, 7he Road offers only a “cauterized terrain” (12), a “tableau of the slain and the devoured” (77). The profound sense of estrangement extends to the relationship between father and son. ‘The father comes to understand “that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed” (129). ‘The boy cannot recognize the man because he cannot place him in time or space. In addition to keeping the pair from dying, the man’s daily struggle includes the constant reproduction of the idea of the family as a known thing. The task of familial reconciliation is distilled to convincing the boy that this entity, now lost, does exist and is meaningful.

What, then, is there? The extinct past and seared present leave only the future as a place to invest meaning. In other words, the boy. Zibrak contends, “The man creates the boy as the figure of the child that gives meaning to his life beyond personal survival.” The child becomes the way “to avoid death.” In him, “the man finds a reason to go on” (109). In the wake of 9/11 especially,

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Zibrak argues, the child is a “sacred object” (104), occupying the center of “our cultural vision of domesticity and innocence — ideals associated with moral good” (109). It is no coincidence, she continues, to find Hollywood embracing “pregnancy and motherhood,” producing films such as Knocked Up, Waitress, and Juno, all released in 2007 (110). And yet, the films Zibrak references barely include a child. More accurately, her examples focus on expectant mothers.

I agree that a particular familial model is symbolically central in the postg/it era, but the narrative and genealogical trajectory are not directed at the production of the sacred child. Indeed, the texts in this chapter (and the ones Zibrak cites) do not represent productions of “domesticity and innocence” as much as they detail anxiety and the weight of decision making. They narrate a different causal relationship between parent and child. It is not the man creating the boy in The Road: instead, the boy creates the man. And he creates him as a father. In the post-g/11 era, the end goal is not the child. The child functions to produce the parent.

The man in 7he Road had a life preexisting this one. In the past, he was many things: a husband, a son, a nephew, a worker. In the last conversation with his wife, the man tries to convince her to stay, not to concede to death. But she scoffs at his claim that they are “survivors.” “We’re the walking dead,” she retorts (47). Before she goes off with the flake of obsidian that will release her from the “horror film” (47) that is their life, she tells the man, ““The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself” (49). It is the boy who makes him survive. In other words, he survives only as a father. ‘This identity is Where meaning 1s located. We know this because his is the only perspective the reader is provided. More significantly, he is given the only genuine, meaningful name in the book: “Papa.” The boy is never called son. Ely, the old man

they meet on the road, admits that his is a fake name. The few others mentioned are named only as categories: the little boy, the cart thief, the woman. Papa is also a referential identity. It alerts us to the fact that the domestic may be the only scale of incorporation left. It is not that the individual joins with a familial identity, but that they are inextricably fused. Familial identity is elemental. It is the only identity that gives representation to the self. Without it, you are nothing. A bad guy. Or dead. In some ways the man is the exceptional male hero, the ethical loner on the road ready to sacrifice for the moral good. But in some ways, he 1s not this loner. He is not John Wayne. Perhaps especially because The Road, like Broken Flowers and Transamerica, largely jettisons women from its story of

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familial reproduction, this story of fatherhood speaks to a working out of the paternalistic drama taking place in the post-9/11 nation-state: is Bush the great father who saves the nation, or is he the failed father who made us vulnerable in the first place? 7he Road conjoins these opposites, cueing us right from the start that a heroic father is one who will also fail his son, that 1s, die. Most of all, the story of this father is the story of the making of the parent. As I have argued throughout this chapter, the attention to biological reproduction 1s not directed at the result of that process—note the lack of stories that include actual children— but its beginning. Thus it is not the object but the act, not the child but biological reproduction, that is monumental, sacred. It is the commitment to (re)production, to the taking up of the role of producer, that is the story to tell. ‘This 1s a crucial distinction because it defines and responds to the specific immobilizing anxiety created by 9/11. That foreign attack on the U.S. homeland, unprecedented in modern history, produces a devastating fear: we are done to, rather than doing for ourselves. This is the fear that makes the wife in 7he Road turn to death as her new lover. She explains to the man, ‘Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They'll rape him. ‘They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it. You'd rather wait for it to happen” (48, emphasis added). The postapocalyptic world 1s one where things only happen to us. Starving, freezing, exhausted, and unceasingly vigilant, the man and the boy trudge south only with the hope that nothing will happen to them. The novel takes to the extreme the anxiety of not being able to pursue directions of our own making. Ultimately, it is not the object of the child, or even the object of the father, that shapes the story. Instead, it is the process of making the man the father of the child. More explicitly, the road story shows us the making of the man as a producer. Although the reader may feel a sense of panic when the man lingers in dangerous places—abandoned homes, grocery stores, and ships—the text takes its time in describing the man’s scouring of his environment. We watch as he meticulously takes things apart and produces something else entirely out of them. Zibrak finds that “much of the sheer pleasure to be found within the novel is the specificity with which McCarthy describes the man’s ingenious survivalism, his manipulation of the tools and goods at hand” (117). Kenneth Lincoln is more practical in his estimation, describing The Road as “a book to be read seriously, if at all, as a survival manual” (gtd. Zibrak 117). Our attention is drawn not so much to what he makes, but to the fact that he makes anything at all. The story we follow is the process of his

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resourcefulness and inventiveness, his keen awareness of potential. In making things, he makes something — survival— happen. Reanimating things, he embodies goal-directed mobility. What the novel saves from being lost 1s the producer in the act of being productive. That, more than the figure of the child, is the key to the future. As the agent of the future, the-man-as-producer fights against being consumed by the (lost) past. But there is another, more aggressive, threat of consumption lurking in the shadows. In The Road, the terroristic transgressive mobility that constitutes a threat to borders has taken over. Groups of marauding “bad guys” capture, torture, and kill “refugees” on the road. That threat targets the scale of the body with acts of rape, torture, murder, and, especially troubling for the boy, cannibalism. While the novel can be read as “a world divided between consumers and consumed” (Zibrak 115), The Road can also be viewed as a horrifically perverse tale of consumers and producers. It presents a monstrous literalization of a neoliberalist economy. ‘The free market of the road transforms humans into the goods and services to be consumed, and the incentives to compete and increase productivity are starkly grim: base survival, avoidance of being eaten. After seeing the people imprisoned in the basement of the house, the boy asks his father about the captives’ fates: [the boy:| They’re going to eat them, arent they? [the man:] Yes. And we couldnt help them because then they’d eat us too. Yes.

And that’s why we couldnt help them. Yes.

Okay. (107)

The boy needs reassurance about the rationale for their decision. It seems selfish and uncaring to him. In the context of a grotesque neoliberalism, the pair’s survivalist acts of self-improvement— that is, their attempts to remain alive —are nearly impossible to distinguish from acts of inhumanity. Among themselves, the boy and the man are also watchful. After the man makes the boy coverings for his feet out of squares from a coat, the boy insists, “Now you, Papa” (84). To take your share of resources, as Zibrak notes, is to involve yourself in a much more complicated moral situation: “The boy becomes angry when the man attempts to give him a better portion [of food] because taking the larger share would directly contribute to the emaciation of

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his father’s body, thereby casting the boy not only as a parasite, but a cannibal” (119). Staying alive 1s a competitive entrepreneurial undertaking, and one that easily slips into disloyalty and betrayal. The Road shows the boy and the man trying to navigate the economy of the road, which means avoiding being consumed by bad guys or, for the man, by the memory, as well as loss, of the past. Somehow in all of this, they work out a tentative, postapocalyptic version of productivity. In one of the novel’s few light moments, the boy asks his father, “What are our long-term goals?” (135). Perhaps not quite sure he heard correctly, his father asks him to repeat it.

[the man:] Where did you hear that? [the boy:] I dont know. No, where did you? You said it? When? A long time ago. What was the answer? I dont know.

Well. I dont either. Come on. It’s getting dark. (135)

A lost expression from the place of the past, the question 1s jarringly out of context in their current world. Who has long-term goals when they might not survive the next bend in the road? But the expression creates a small but important link between the past, present, and future, between where they have been and where they are going. Seemingly inconsequential and inconclusive, the iteration still gives us pause. For the reader, it produces a smile, a glimpse of what a conversation between a father and son might sound like in pre-apocalyptic times. And in the context of goal-directed mobility, a tricky task in this novel, the question relays the significance of the narrative attention to the making of the producer and productivity. Emphasis on the act, rather than the object, stresses the importance of potential— what could happen, what could be made to happen. One thing that does happen is that the story of biological reproduction produces a child different from his parent. As I have discussed, so many postg/1I narratives focused on the family do not include a child. Transamerica, the other road narrative in this chapter that does, cautiously unites Toby and Bree as outsiders. But in The Road, what the man ultimately produces is someone different from himself. ‘The boy, his son, is suspicious of his father’s suspi-

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cions. The novel ends with the boy’s decision, upon his father’s death, to join another group of road travelers, a family. The man’s relentless focus on the family —as the unique thing that bounds the boy and the man, and divides them from all others— becomes the reason the boy turns outward. “Do you have any kids?” (239), he asks the new man before deciding to join them. (Significantly, however, we never see those children, which leaves the man and the boy as the novel’s only family, and could make a reader worry about who the boy has joined up with.) The boy produces a different version of strangers

than his father. The boy will remember his father, conversing with him in his absence, but he will also allow himself to move into an unknown future joined with strangers, in the hopes of making them familiar. In The Road, the idea of the family as unfamiliar extends to include the whole of the human family. The homeland, once familiar, has been made irrevocably strange. Mobility leads, we hope, to some refuge. Regardless of that end, it has led to the long-term goal of reconnecting with humanity. In all of these post-9/11 road narratives, mobility is rencorporated into the national imaginary as a primary mode of identity formation. Indeed, these narratives recast mobility as a defining American experience. As we move forward, our job, or long-term goal, is to continue to examine the specific and changing meanings and purposes of mobility in different cultural moments. That is, we need to take what seems so familiar and make it strange.

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Epilogue Postrecession Mobility, Placing Mythology

he opening sequence of Nebraska, the 2013 road film directed by Alexander Payne, immerses us 1n a landscape of mobilities. The camera holds steady on a long shot of a local route. Traffic streams away from and toward the viewer. To the left of the road, a large sign extends into the air: “Tire Factory.” To the right, a solitary figure walks on a narrow strip of snow-covered ground toward the camera. And on his right, on the other side of a chain-link fence, a freight train sits idle on the tracks. ‘The automobile, the pedestrian, the railroad: they are framed together, but the effect is more eerie than evolutionary. This is hardly an ode to transport or forward progress. Indeed, the distant horizon exists behind the action, not ahead. Parallel lines of roadway, sidewalk, fence, and railroad tracks slice and splice the image, joining at the receding horizon to create an ominous vanishing point. The film cuts to a shot of the man from across the street, framed against the train’s dark body. Then it cuts to some time later; we’re not sure how much later, or how far the man has walked. He now shuffles along in the breakdown lane along a highway, a “Billings City Limits” sign behind his left shoulder. A police car pulls over. The cop jogs after the man, who is old and seemingly unaware of, or uninterested in, the policeman’s presence. “Where you headed?” the cop asks. The man points ahead. ‘The cop tries again: “Where you coming from?” The man points behind him. The shot cuts to black, and the credits begin. In my brief comments here, I want to consider Nebraska in relation to a central idea of this book. The road narratives I have discussed do not just show changes of mobility over time. They also show mobility as placing change. Released in the (post-)recessionary United States, Nebraska makes strange the landscape brought into view by mobility. The opening scene 1s familiar, nondescript even: the sight and sound of cars passing on a commercial strip.

226 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

Yet the view is strange. We begin, literally, in the middle of the road. Smokestacks and factories replace the spires of Monument Valley as the traveler’s landscape. No glossy America here, the film is shot in black and white. Is this a nostalgic choice, conjuring past days of prosperity and home movies? Perhaps, but the choice feels more documentarian. ‘The walking man does not speak, never mind command his space. He moves in the margins of road and city. Sound, picture, and plot are bare bones. There is the road, the solitary man,

the law. But the composition is simultaneously textured, alerting us to the disinvestment in people and places. We know that not only are we watching this scene, we are also watching this scene go unnoticed. This, then, is the cultural landscape of postrecession America. Nebraska follows the journey of the walking man, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, to claim a million dollar sweepstakes prize. Woody has received a letter announcing his winnings, but he is elderly and can no longer drive (perhaps because of his lifelong drinking problem). So, he walks. His wife, Kate (June Squibb), thinks he is crazy. Perhaps he is. Even his son David (Will Forte), who agrees to drive him to Lincoln, knows that his father’s sweepstakes letter is just a ploy to sell magazine subscriptions. The film’s opening puts us on (the) edge: the fence, the breakdown lane, the teetering protagonist. And so it will be with the film’s relationship to the mythologies of mobility. Nebraska walks the line between investing and disinvesting in the mythologies of mobility. It exemplifies the idea that this book investigates: mobility itself is tension-filled, and it thrives off of and attempts to manage larger social tensions. The fallout from the economic recession both deflates and magnifies the promise of mobility. Everyone is down and out, so everyone is grasping at the dream.

When David arrives at the police station to retrieve his father, he hears about the old man’s plan to walk to Nebraska to “get my million dollars.” He tells his father that the sweepstakes 1s a gimmick. “Well, they can’t say it if it’s not true,’ responds Woody. When David goes along, telling Woody to just mail the form, his father turns skeptic: “I’m not trusting the mail with a million dollars.”

Here is the seesawing between belief and distrust. Woody believes in the American myth that everyone can get rich, but does not trust the American ability to deliver. Named for its destination, Nebraska, like Woody, seems relentlessly goal driven. But the film questions, parodies even, the pursuit of

Epilogue 227

goals, the American dream as it were. In fact, the men’s road trip reveals that it is the pursuit rather than the goal itself (1.e., being rich) that defines the American dream. And it keeps tripping them up. Woody is lured by the promise of a million dollars, yet his pursuit materializes as a trip along the seams of a scarred country and life. People are un- or underemployed, family farms have been replaced by agribusiness, extended family and old friends are thieving vultures, and Woody wants the money so he can leave something to his sons. In other words, the mythology of social mobility has passed him, and seemingly everyone else, by. Even going on road is deflating, signifying Woody’s dependence not independence. He cannot drive, so his son must drive him. Rather than an escape

from the domestic home, the road trip just delays his family’s plans to put him in a home. But on the road, beaten down by health, personal injustices, and others’ doubt, Woody pushes on, driven by an indomitable will. Or, is it Alzheimer’s?

As these moments suggest, the film takes down one myth after another — prosperity, independence, self-reliance, reinvention. It’s as if mobility disinvests in its own investments. Consider the reunion of the six Grant brothers

that takes place in Hawthorne, Nebraska, Woody’s hometown. ‘The men sit stone-like in front of the TV. In a moment painfully and beautifully mundane, a staccato exchange about a ’79 Buick owned long ago breaks the silence: ‘They don’t make ’em like that anymore. ‘Those cars will run forever.” “Whatever happened to it?” “Stopped running.” ‘They’ ll do that.” Mobility is an irritant, scratching at the reality of a long past and uncertain

—or is it certain? —future. It aggravates beliefs at every scale of identity: individual, family, town, and car-job-mullionaire-producing nation. But the film presents this idea as neither good nor bad. In a genre that promises the shunning of the past and possibilities of the future, this indifference is itself interesting.

While Woody is generally mute, the landscape is not. It undergoes and registers change. In Hawthorne, the father and son find the garage Woody once co-owned now operated by two Spanish-speaking men; the bar and newspaper are both run by women. White men might be disenfranchised, but Woody’s and David’s response does not enact an appropriative or expansive

228 AMERICAN ROAD NARRATIVES

masculinity. In fact, Woody is decaying. He seems to be going the way of the railroad and Nebraska towns. Pieces of him are strewn across desolate landscapes. The rail yard is now boneyard, only the site where Woody loses and finds his false teeth. The sweepstakes letter, stolen and discarded by Woody’s treacherous nephews, sends father and son searching for this piece of Woody — what David calls Woody’s “something to live for”—1n the dark, deserted streets of downtrodden Hawthorne. Contrary to a film like Amay We Go, in which the protagonists see, judge, and seal themselves off from the country, Nebraska puts us in the landscape. I have shown in this book that the story of mobility is defined by its perspective to, and surveying of, space. This film offers no valorization of distance as the revelatory perspective, and the “scenic” landscape is largely man-made and populated. Consider the pair’s detour to see Mount Rushmore, a colossal monument to American exceptionalism. Woody and David view the monument from the edge of the road, to the side of the park’s entrance booth. Their view is the one you get when you do not pay the entry fee. Their view is also one that locates American mythology as a commercial venture. And perhaps a scamming one at that. Woody’s response to the scene: “It looks unfinished to me. Washington is the only one who has any clothes. Lincoln doesn’t even have an ear.” So much for a transcendent moment. Or a connection with the country. And that is the point. In this film mobility shows that there is no transcendence, including the transcendence offered by nostalgia. ‘There can be reverence or ache for the past but the past’s solidity refuses erasure or sanctuary. We see this when Woody’s family travels to his boyhood home, a farm outside Hawthorne. Another man-made landscape, it was built by Woody’s father. Now it is deserted, dirty, unremarkable. ‘The family helps Woody upstairs and look at the room where Woody’s two-year-old brother died from scarlet fever. “Do you remember that, Dad?” David asks. “I was there,” Woody responds. Nebraska tracks the vulnerability of the lives of people, places, and our connections to them. It seems notable that this film was released amid speculation that American car culture is dying. In 2013 the New York Times reported, ‘Americans are buying fewer cars, driving less and getting fewer licenses as each year goes by” (Rosenthal). We are a long way, but not such a long time, from the post-9/11 surge in RV sales and rentals. Now, environmental concerns, youth’s interest in technology, and urban renewal are signaling a new era, the possible “end of car culture” (Rosenthal). Indeed, from “2007 to 2011,

Epilogue 229

the age group most likely to buy a car shifted from the 35 to 44 group to the 55 to 64 group” (Rosenthal). Car culture is dying. Woody is dying. Hawthorne is dying.

Nebraska seems at once a paean to the automobile and an inquiry into its culpability in the failure of the American dream. Where does our obsession with automobility get us? Other than, as the nephews brag, the 850 miles from Dallas to Nebraska in eight hours? But how does this version of automobility square with the film’s final scene, Woody’s slow-motion ride down Hawthorne’s Main Street? Although Woody’s trip reveals the sweepstakes as a scam, it still ends with the purchase of a truck, which is what Woody would have bought with the money. David buys it, going along with Woody’s belief that the sweepstakes people did. David also puts the title in Woody’s name and lets him drive it down Hawthorne’s main drag. It is a solitary parade of victory and/or heartache, witnessed by a few old friends and many shuttered storefronts, made possible by the loyalty and compassion of the son, and testament to Woody’s (misplaced) faith. The film meditates on the investment and disinvestment in mythologies. Perhaps, it suggests, faith and failure are of a piece.

In presenting a historicized account of the representations and stakes of mobility in American road narratives, my intent in this book has been to debunk an understanding of the road as a free-floating space beyond spatiotemporality. Indeed, my point is that not only do road narratives not fetishize the “open road,” but they offer a critique of that very idea. Clearly, the “gumbo” roads of Free Air, Sal and Dean’s “oyster for us to open,” Adele’s “South of Wilshire,” the southwest route of Thelma & Louise, the Powwow Highway, and the postapocalyptic passage of 7he Road are not the same road. Nebraska offers, as it were, a fitting recessional. American road narratives insistently show us that the road—even as a mythology —1s a place, firmly entrenched 1n its social, cultural, and historical environment.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. There are surprisingly few book-length studies of the American road narrative. Most are wide-ranging surveys or focus on a subset of the genre (e.g., film or women’s narratives). For critical overviews of the scholarship, see my “Critical Meeting Places”; and Larson’s “Literary Criticism’s Road Scholars.” 2. See Deloria’s Playing Indian and, on Indians and automobility, /ndians in Unexpected Places, chap. 4.

1. Early Road Narratives and the “Voyage into Democracy” 1. See both Sears and Shaffer on tourism’s role in the development of national identity.

2.I learned of this novel through Lackey’s RoadFrames. My archival and bibliographic research leads me to identify it as the first published transcontinental road novel. I have not found any information on sales or reception. 3. As a serial, Free Air made a “strong impact, stirring up talk and praise among readers,” who enjoyed its focus on the fad of auto travel, its love story, and celebration of “American values” (Lingeman 124). In a letter to Lewis, Alfred Harcourt wrote, “Do you know Free Air is making a hit? My neighbors and their wives are saying it is one of the most interesting and refreshing things they have seen in the S.E.P. [Saturday Evening Post| for some time” (qtd. 124). The serialization both prompted publication of the book and curtailed its sales (though Lewis received a nice advance), which totaled about 8,000 copies (135). 4. Along with Post’s and Massey’s narratives, Free Air illustrates the frequency of female automobile drivers and writers before World War IT. Lackey notes that women wrote about one-fourth of all nonfiction transcontinental auto narratives produced before the 1940s (28). 5. The Lincoln Highway Association was formed in 1913 in order to “build the county’s first east-west, coast-to-coast highway” (Kaszynski 38). Named in honor of the late president, the highway started in Jersey City, NJ, and ended in San Francisco (38). Taking over two decades to complete and surface, the highway (today’s Route 30) 1s still the country’s longest at 3,385 miles and was often called the “Main Street of America” (39, 40).

232 Notes to Pages 23-43 6. See Belasco for an extensive discussion of the differences between rail and car travel.

7. Primarily used today to describe post—Civil War strife between the North and the South, the term sectionalism was used synonymously with regionalism in the early twentieth century. It emphasized competing “cultural, social, economic, and political interests” among the East, West, North, and South (Teaford). 8. While I stress the frontier thesis’s influence in terms of human interaction, Seiler stresses depopulation, arguing that it informs motorists’ communion with an “uninhabited” America (47) and “emptied land” (48). g. See Belasco on how early auto tourism both inspired democratic sentiment and created a desire for renewed physical and social demarcations. Shaffer argues that auto camps represented a “relatively homogenous community of native-born, upper- and middle-class, urban, white Americans” (233). That said, Geithmann makes note of the diversity of travelers, and Morton suggests at least some kind of interaction. In addition, Post’s and Massey’s narratives show heterogeneous mixings between motorists and residents of places they traveled through. 10. See Scharff on the ways that gender stereotyping masked class anxiety. Women, with their focus on comfort and luxury, were said to be responsible for unmanly frills such as the self-starter and the covered car when in reality the desire for these improvements was probably more class-coded (36), as these fictional texts suggest. Also see Seiler (chap. 2) for a discussion of the gender politics of early twentieth-century automobility. 11. [t Happened One Night, arguably the first American road film, follows this plotline with the courtship of spoiled heiress Ellie Andrews and newspaperman Peter Warne. Warne occupies a lower class position than the heiress and, as with these novels, the film ultimately backs away from its critique of the upper class to present them as “folks just like us” who also retain their positions of wealth. 12. Fourteen years later, that ambivalence was still present. In a 1926 issue of Motor Camper & Tourist, Manuel Carleton concluded: “To be sure, the gringo has opened up New Mexico, and he has saved it from the lawlessness and turmoil of its former affiliations; but for all o’ that it is still atmospherically and linguistically and colorfully Mexican and Indian territory. It remains to be seen whether he will make it a hybrid of Kansas and California, or whether he will be content to leave it something different, the land that ought to be at the end of the old trail” (713-14). 13. F. Scott Fitzgerald also wrote an automobile romance of Americanization. Published in the Saturday Evening Post on November 4, 1933, “The Family Bus” features Dick Henderson as an upper-class protagonist who falls on hard times. He redeems himself as an automotive inventor, a rugged occupation that restores vitality to his deflated family name and sparks a romance with his childhood love, the daughter of Dutch immigrants who worked as servants for his family. 14. In the 1924 nonfiction road narrative Westward Hoboes, Winifred D1xon also encounters the new social mysteries resulting from the automobile’s intimate encounters

Notes to Pages 48-65 233 with strangers. When locals pull her car from the mud, she is confused about whether to treat them as hosts, equals, or hired help. 15. Reflecting the anti-German sentiment of the World War I era, the novel repeatedly casts Germans in the role of foreign other. 16. | adapt this very useful phrasing from Deloria. Discussing the tensions surrounding the term “noble savagery,” he finds a “familiar contradiction” that “both juxtaposes and conflates an urge to idealize and desire Indians and a need to despise and dispossess them” (Playing Indian 4).

2. Post—World War II Reorientations of Racialized Masculinity 1. Griffin’s text was “initially serialized in 1960 as ‘Journey into Shame’ in Sepza, published as a book in 1961, and then produced as a movie in 1964 starring James Mason” (Baldwin 104). By the mid-1ggos the book had “sold more than twelve million copies [and] been translated into fourteen languages”; it even has its own Cliffs Notes (Wald 152).

2. Holiday magazine debuted in May 1946. A glossy, color, picture-filled travel magazine, it quickly sold 400,000 copies, and got a foothold after five years. In the early 1960s circulation reached 939,000 with a gross advertising income of more than $10 million (Peterson 191). John A. Williams recalls the magazine as being “one of the best, if not the best, magazine in the country at that time” (Flashbacks 34). 3. Belgrad argues persuasively that Kerouac and other beat writers “understood themselves as participant-observers within American society, not just rebels against it” (228). Also see Wald’s contention that Black Like Me adopts “the methodology of participant-observation” (156) with Griffin reproducing “himself as both the subject and the object of his anthropological fieldwork” (158). 4. Mickenberg credits James Gilbert’s study Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (2005) with identifying social character studies as a source for representations of imperiled masculinity. 5. see Larson (“Free Ways’’) for a different reading, which argues that Sal’s travels achieve authentic connections with diverse spaces. 6. Current readers recognize the problems with Kerouac’s romanticization of raced and classed others. In 1958 Norman Podhoretz offered a different appraisal, critiquing Kerouac’s “love for Negroes and other dark-skinned groups” as the “worship of primitivism” (151), a tendency he finds problematic only because it acts as a “cover for anti-intellectualism” (152). 7. See Cresswell for a more complex reading of the relationship between the male outsider and mobility. He argues that “mobility is clearly used as a rebellion” but that it simultaneously “reproduces the established American mythology of mobile, male outlaws” (“Mobility” 240). 8. My analysis maintains that Dean and Sal (even with his Italian-American ethnicity) embody the privileges of whiteness in encounters with racialized others. See

234 Notes to Pages 65-76 Nicholls for a discussion of how Kerouac’s Franco-American biography shapes Sal’s marginalization in the novel. g. See Larson for a reading of these encounters as “therapeutic in negotiating modernity” in that they offer Sal a freedom in self-definition “not felt since childhood” (“Free Ways” 41). 10. Wald adapts this idea, which comes from Toni Morrison’s analysis of the “Africanist presence” in American literature, to argue that Griffin’s passing in Black Like Me functions, not as a political strategy, but as “‘a form of introspection and personal freedom” (160). 11. Those analyzing the novel’s gender relations include Cresswell, “Mobility”; Ehrenreich; Martinez; McNeil; and Medovoi. 12. The novel’s men of color do not prompt a corresponding ambivalence or antagonism, perhaps because they are deemed to be outside an aspirational culture. 13. See Larson on the novel’s balance between “containment and promiscuity” (“Free Ways” 38). 14. For exceptions, see Holton’s On the Road and Cresswell’s “Mobility.” 15. Ellis argues that the novel presents an “ironic parody” of the frontier myth (38), exposing how it “has become essentially bankrupted and ideologically deformed” (37). 16. Social mobility is not always synonymous with middle-class ideology. See Nickles on the ways that working-class participation in the mass market of the 1950s functioned to strengthen working-class (political) identity rather than achieve assimilation into middle-class culture. 17. See Martinez’s important critique of the Beats’ countercultural individualism as redomestication: “In rejecting encroaching domesticity or ‘conformity, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and fellow travelers move in order to reestablish a strong patriarchy, create a colony and homestead in a ‘fellaheen’ area for the purposes of establishing a male domestic sphere, itself liminal and ‘freewheeling’” (81). 18. See Seiler’s excellent study, which analyzes the history of American automobility “as evidence of a hegemonic desire to facilitate, expand, and regularize” the ideological experience of freedom (67). He investigates how automobility entails and performs the redefinition of modern liberal subjectivity.

19. The novel links the protagonists to the auto service industry in several instances. It opens with Dean, the novel’s quintessential figure of mobility, working as a parking lot attendant. He also works at Firestone. Marylou ends up marrying a used car salesman. 20. As I discuss in the next chapter, critical responses to the quintessential female road narrative Thelma & Louise overwhelmingly focus on the scale of the body as the topic of concern. On the Road has received an abundant amount of critical attention, but it rarely addresses the performativity of the male body. 21. The exception is Griffin’s relationship with Sterling Williams, the man who shines shoes in New Orleans. However, Griffin’s relationship with Williams 1s categorically different from those with other black people because he tells Williams that

Notes to Pages 77-99 235 he is white, and their relationship develops around the advice Williams gives him on how to navigate the city as a black man. 22. Along these lines, Wald posits that the book’s popularity owes more to Griffin’s presentation of blackness as raw experience that whites have the ability to interpret than it does to Griffin’s role as “moral crusader” (154). 23. While my analysis focuses on how Griffin’s passing represents an expansiveness of identity, Wald discusses it as a self-division that represents Griffin’s inability to resolve the competing tendencies of “the desire to record his observations (to remain in a position of white mastery), and the desire to become a full ‘participant’ by ditching his notebooks (to relinquish white privilege)” (160). 24. Complementing Demetriou’s definition of an appropriative hegemonic masculinity, Sarvan identifies a “new, more feminized and blackened [American] white masculinity” (37) that develops in the 1970s in response to several social movements. Griffin’s text suggests how a peculiar version of this adaptive masculinity appears almost a decade earlier. 25. By contrast, in a 1977 epilogue Griffin shows new awareness of an alternate perspective, detailing black subjects’ lack of options in America’s white society and their resulting “fragmented individualism”: “What fragmented individualism really meant was what happened to a black man who tried to make it in this society: in order to succeed, he had to become an imitation white man —dress white, talk white, think white, express the values of middle-class white culture (at least when he was in the presence of white men). Implied 1n all this was the hiding, the denial, of his selfhood, his negritude, his culture, as though they were somehow shameful. If he succeeded, he was an alienated marginal man—alienated from the strength of his culture and from fellow black men, and never able, of course, to become that imitation white man because he bore the pigment that made the white man view him as intrinsically other” (184).

26. In 2011 Steigerwald proclaimed that Travels with Charley “was not only heavily fictionalized; 1t was a fraud” (2). Comparing the book to letters and earlier drafts, he reveals many untruths and implausible “facts.” But these findings make Steinbeck’s focus on failure even more intriguing, because they suggest that the narrative emphasis on failure was self-consciously designed. That is, Steinbeck wasn’t just faithfully recording his “real” experience. 27. Steigerwald’s fact-checking finds that Steinbeck stayed with his wife 45 out of 75 days away from home, and more often than not, did not camp, but stayed at motels, trailer courts, truck stops, and friends’ houses (4). 28. See Lackey (chap. 4) for an important analysis of African American road narratives that shows how they critique the transcendentalist foundations of white road narratives.

29. Willis develops this idea in relation to the fantastical creation of multicultural communities of identification in two contemporary road films.

236 Notes to Pages 106-140

3. Troubling Scale in Women’s Road Narratives of the 1980s and 1990s 1. 1 am referring here to the disappearance of texts that develop around the perspectives of female travelers. As Mills has argued, female characters do appear in the 1960s and 1970s, but as largely voiceless, even nameless, companions to male travelers. See her chapter 6. 2. The 1992 film Leaving Normal, directed by Edward Zwick and released soon

after Thelma & Louise, could be added to this list. Featuring Christine Lahti and Meg Tilly as two women who become friends, the film follows them as they leave dead-end situations, hitting the road to start a new life in Alaska. 3. For an important exception, see Sidonie Smith’s book-length delineation of the various and historically contingent forms and meanings of gendered travel. 4. This troubling could be defined as a queering of scale, that is, a deconstructive critique that works to understand “how norms and categories are deployed” (Oswin 96). Although I have not encountered the use of this term in any geographical scholarship, the queering of scale would be one way to address the need, as articulated by Oswin, for a “non-identarian queer critique within geography” (1o1n9). 5. [his characteristic is not one neatly divisible by gender. Pre— World War II road narratives authored by women often included a return home. 6. The same is true for the contemporaneous TV show Route 66: the four-year series ends with ‘Tod Stiles getting married and Linc Case stating he will return home to his family in ‘Texas, after an extended estrangement. An exception would be Easy Rider, a film in which the protagonists meet their deaths on the road. 7. Kingsolver also seemed to realize this thorniness of incorporation in her follow-up novel. Pigs in Heaven (1993) reflects the revelation of her ignorance of “a whole moral area when I wrote about this Native American kid being swept off the reservation and raised by a very loving white mother” (gtd. Ganser 122). In the sequel, ‘Turtle is ultimately reunited with her Cherokee family, and Taylor agrees to joint custody with Turtle’s Cherokee grandfather, although, as Ganser argues, the compromise seems to be about financial security more than cultural awareness. See Ganser for a well-balanced and insightful reading. 8. There is very little literary criticism about Simpson’s novel. See Smyth for a different reading of how Adele’s mobility 1s gendered in relation to consumer culture, which she develops with a psychoanalytic reading of “the conflicted mother in the feminist literature of the eighties” (120).

g. Smyth does assert that “the opposition between the road and the domestic is problematized” by the way that Adele, and other women, remain “in the role of mother” on the road (117). Her reading, however, largely maintains an opposition between mobility and domesticity. 10. Several reviewers argue that the women’s decision to “keep goin’” represents movement beyond patriarchy. Slocum finds that this final opposition to social order

Notes to Pages 140-162 237 “nostalgically assumes an ability to remain outside or beyond that order’s sway” (139). By contrast, Hart presents a Lacanian reading, suggesting that while the canyon may represent “the absent space that signifies ‘woman’” (445) in the masculine symbolic,

the photograph that flies from the car in this last instant “allows us to imagine an elsewhere that resists representation” (446). 11. Mills notes that the male figures are all stock characters, but she questions the general perception that this was a filmic flaw rather than “a smart play on genre” (196). As I think Mills also wants to suggest, the use of stock characters could imply that systemic patriarchy, rather than individual males, is responsible for the women’s situation. 12. See Hart for an incisive reading of the film’s pattern of introducing lesbian desire and then redirecting that desire with scenes that recuperate and confirm the women’s heterosexual desires. 13. See especially Spelman and Minow.

4. Agitating Space and Stories 1. Of the scholarship on The Powwow Highway, the vast majority focuses on the 1989 film adaptation directed by Jonathan Wacks. I focus only on the novel because

it presents a much more rhetorically and politically complex text than the Hollywood adaptation. With its generic and predictable movie plot, Anderson notes the film “washes away the more complicated political entanglements of the novel” (145), but ultimately finds that the film’s “tensions and conflicts between Indian characters” are more productive than not, thus avoiding “stale Hollywood Indian formulas” (149). Arnold, however, incisively critiques the way the film makes the Native American characters into “cowboys, consumers, and patriarchal sexists” (353), thus recapitulating rather than challenging Hollywood Western conventions. Seals’s lampooning of stereotypes, which some may still find problematic, is lacking in the film version. 2. Arnold’s comments draw on and distill two influential studies: Berkhofer’s The White Man’s Indian and Churchill’s Fantasies of the Master Race. 3. Stereotypes of the Hollywood Indian are increasingly well documented. Book-

length studies include those by Berkhofer and by Churchill, as well as the edited collection by Rollins and O’Connor. See also the more recent documentary Ree/ [njun (2009), by the Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond. 4. Deloria discusses the Clason image in /ndians in Unexpected Places. For a more recent version of the lone Indian on the side of the highway, see the 1970s pollution commercial by Keep America Beautiful, Inc., featuring Iron Eyes Cody. 5. Rainwater is writing about Euro-American space in Silko’s novel Ceremony, which she describes as encoded through a beckoning highway of “forever-postponed fulfillment of desire” that urges “the traveler onward to that ‘someday, the next concession, the next place” (112). 6. For discussions of the texts’ appeal to multiple audiences, see, e.g., Cummings;

238 Notes to Pages 163-205

Gilroy, “Another Fine Example”; Hearne; Klopotek; Langen and Shanley; Stromberg; and Zonn and Winchell. 7. The trickster figure is central to many cultures. Babcock and Cox focus explicitly on the Native American trickster, while Jeanne Rosier Smith presents a multicultural analysis.

5. Bevis develops his argument with a focus on six Native American novels in which “an Indian who has been away or could go away comes home and finally finds his identity by staying” (585). g. Laderman contrasts Arnold’s “vanishing” with the representation of vanishing in mainstream road films. Arnold’s is “conceived not as some mystical, nihilistic convergence of speed, but as a direct reaction to the difficulty of working through family dynamics in the shadow of genocide” (229). 10. See Hearne for an extensive analysis of the connotations of “nobody.” Also see her important book-length study, which presents a comprehensive examination and

contextualization of the film, and which insightfully focuses on the metaphor and image of the bridge as a place of both “historical conflict and intercultural gathering” (76).

11. By contrast, Gilroy understands Victor’s persona not as a defensive role but as an “internalized racist self-image” (“Another Fine Example” 28). See Gilroy’s interesting discussion of how the realization that Thomas and Victor have fallen victim to stereotypes creates empathy in the viewer, which is “essential to viewers’ recognition of the power of stereotypes” (28). 12. Hearne observes that the film “seems to insist on its right to combine and recombine ubiquitous and available symbols in a process of innovation” (127).

5. Reviving (Re)Productivity 1. Mills concludes, “The backwards glance that characterizes road films of this decade is part of the genre’s recuperative work, reconciling the imaginary familyscape of vintage T’V reruns with the changing realities of the family in the 1980s” (175). 2. See Faludi, especially chap. 5, “Nesting Nation,” for an analysis of the media’s perpetuation of a homemaking “trend” by young women. While media outlets such as Newsweek declared, nine months after 9/11, that childbirth professionals were bracing for “a nationwide baby boomlet” (qtd. Faludi 167), Faludi reports, “In 2003, the National Center for Health Statistics released its official count of births for 2002: the

birthrate had fallen to the lowest level since national data have been available” (168). 3. The behind-the-scenes phenomenon has extensive range. See my “Consuming Pleasures” and “Behind-the-Scenes Tourism.”

4. A trans character in 7ransamerica, in response to Toby’s comment that he thought the man “was a real dude,” informs him, “We walk among you.” 5. Roddick makes the interesting observation that Broken Flowers was one of three films, along with 4 History of Violence and Where the Truth Lies, in competition

Notes to Pages 209-217 239

at Cannes in 2005 that “deal[t] with the past catching up with and disturbing the present.”

6. Puar argues that this production of patriotism is a twinned process that also depends upon the “quarantining of the terrorists through equating them with the bodies and practices of failed heterosexuality, emasculation, and queered others” (71). 7. Gagné finds this depiction especially unfortunate because Huffman has the voice and body language down, successfully conveying Bree’s attempts to erase the “painful rigidity” that inhibits her gender expression and interpersonal relations (57).

8. A film version of The Road, directed by John Hillcoat and starring Viggo Mortensen as the man, appeared in 2009. Generally considered a respectful adaptation of the novel, the film, which includes an explanatory voiceover, does not fully capture the haunting austerity of McCarthy’s prose or the profound sense of estrangement that style engenders in the reader. g. Much of the scholarship on 7he Road analyzes it in relation to mythological narratives. For a contemporary focus, see Zibrak’s compelling reading of the novel as ‘an alarming and complicated portrait of an American climate of fear and aggression wherein punishment —not love —1s the guiding virtue” (105).

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INDEX

Page references in italics refer to illustrations. automobility, early: anxiety in, 26, 28; class differences in, 26; and experience of freedom,

Adams, Evan, 175, 184, 185 234n18; gender politics of, 232n10; and modern African Americans: as consumers, 94, 99-100, liberal subjectivity, 234n18; New Woman’s, 39,

101; hypervisibility/invisibility of, 99; social gO, 41 mobility of, 95, 103; subjectivity of, 80; witness automobility, postwar: 71; of black travelers, 94;

to racism, 81-82. See a/so masculinity, black; cold war rhetoric of, 71; as remedy for anomie,

mobility, black; travelers, black 58 Alexie, Sherman, 15, 151, 179, 182, 183. See also Away We Go (film), 16, 228; biological reproducSmoke Signals tion in, 203; dissociation in, 201; family in, 188, American Indian Movement (AIM), 153; at 198—203; goal-directed mobility in, 200-201,

Wounded Knee II, 167 203; home in, 200, 203—4; incorporation in, 203; Americanization: 16, 33; in early road narratives, landscape in, 201; nostalgia in, 204; the past in,

20, 25, 38-39, 41-52; marriage and, 30 203; return home in, 200—204; reviews of, 202; Americanness: ideology of consent in, 35; in- road trip in, 187—88, 200; self as producer in, corporation of outsiders, 30; mobility in, 5, 7, 203; strangers in, 201-2 16; post-g/t1, I89—go0, 192; processes of, 16;

whiteness as, 78 Babcock, Barbara, 163, 174, 238n7

Anderson, Gary Eric, 237n1 baby boomers, RV ownership among, 1, 193-94 anxiety: authorial, 85, 86, 92; in automobility, 26, Back to the Future (film), family in, 188 28; concerning mobility, 5, 95; millennial, 197; Beach, Adam, 175, 134 post-9/11, 12, 16, 189, 191, 192, 196, 215, 220; Bean Trees, The (Kingsolver), 106, 236n7; aban-

in road narratives, 16, 131, 201, 217, 219 donment in, 116, 117, 124-25; aspirational travel Anywhere But Here (Simpson), 14, 106, 126-39; in, 116; border regions in, 119-20; domesticity abandonment in, 128, 135; automobile in, 137; in, 115-19; female identity in, 114; home in, 114, belonging in, 131; binaries of, 138; consumerism 115-16; identity in, 115, 122—23; illegal acts in, in, 131-32, 134-35, 137, 138, 236n8; the domes- 113; Incorporation in, 121, 124, 125; involuntary

tic in, 113, 129-30, 137, 236ng; domestic space mobility in, 121; marriage in, 115; mobility in, 126, 130, 135; female subject of, 138-39; in, 123, 124, 126; otherness in, 123; pan-racial home in, 127, 129-30, 131, 132, 137; homemak- identity in, 125, 126; place in, 146; politicization ing in, 129-31, 134; illegal acts in, 113; incor- in, 121-24; racialized others in, 126; rescaling poration in, 129-31, 137-38; landscape in, 127; of identity in, 122—23; resistance to authority literary criticism on, 236n8; loss in, 127; mobil- in, 120; road trips in, 124, 125; scale in, 114-26; ity in, 127, 236ng; place in, 137, 146; politicized sites of empowerment in, 120; social justice in, subject in, 138; public/private space in, 136; the 120, 125; Space in, 119—20; transgressive idenroad in, 131, 229; road trip in, 126, 128; scale in, tity in, 123; whiteness in, 123, 126 127, 128, 130, 136, 137-38; self-improvement in, Beats: consumer culture and, 72; culture of spon-

128; separate spheres in, 132; transformation taneity, 62; individualism of, 65, 234n17; male in, 137; unbelonging in, 130-31; upward mobil- protest of, 71; as participant-observers, 233n3

ity in, 126-39 Belasco, Warren James, 232n6, 232n9

Arizona, statehood of, 32-33 Belgrad, Daniel, 62

Arnold, Ellen J., 154, 237nn1—2, 238ng Berkhofer, Robert F.: The White Man’s Indian,

auto business, pioneers of, 46 237nnI—2

automobiles: affordability of, 25; empowerment Bevis, William, 174, 175, 238n8 through, 1o1; mass production of, 25-26; and Bhabha, Homi, 144 nuclear family, 70-71; open, 22;1n postwar cul- —_ Biemiller, Carl L.: “Our Wonderful Restlessness,”

ture, 58, 71; private space of, 26, 32, 70, 80, 102; 55

as symbol of modernity, 35 binaries: in road narratives, 8, 138, 175, 176, 177, automobility: freedom in, 156, 234n18 183, 186; in Western society, 174

254 Index Black Like Me (Griffin), 14, 53, 54, 102; adaptive communities, place-based: threat of mobility to, 7 masculinity in, 235n24; certainty in, 86; epi- consumer culture, post-World War II, 57, 133; aslogue to, 235n25; estrangement in, 76; exploita- pirational, 130; citizenship and, 133; civil rights

tion of blackness in, 77-78; introspection in, movement and, 57, 94; cold war and, 65, 72, 94; 234n10; language of vision in, 78-79; mobility creation of ideal self, 131-32; mobility and, 132; in, 76, 80, 82, 83, 89; objective of, 75; other in, road travel and, 71-72, 95; shifts in, 133-34 80; publication of, 233n1; racial disunion 1n, Cook, Suzanne, 2 105; racial flexibility in, 74-83; racial loyalty Cope, Megan, 94 in, 77-80; racism in, 77-83, 91; scale in, 76, 80; Cott, Nancy, 30, 33-34, 41

white individuality in, 77; white masculinity Couey, Shelly, 193

in, 76, 81, 82, 87 Cox, Jay, 163, 174, 238n7 blackness: role in white identity, 66, 234n10; white Cresswell, ‘Tim, 6—7, 8, 69, 191, 210, 233n7

interpretation of, 77-78, 83, 235n22 Curtin, Richard, 1 body: as site of black suffering, 81; as site of mobil-

ity, 60-61, 75, 139-50 Dances with Wolves (film), 154 body, female: mobility of, 148; as scale of personal, | Davidoff, Leonore, 107

107-8; transgressive, 147 Davis, Geena, 139, 140, 143 Book of Eli, The (film), 190 Deloria, Philip J., 152, 181, 233n16; on Clason’s border crossing, 8, 61, 93, 90, 102; in early road Touring Atlas, 237n4; on “going Indian,” 15,

narratives, 27, 31, 32; politics of, 9 177; on nostalgia, 155, 156 borderlessness, 62—74; fantasy of, 14; self and Demetriou, Demetrakis Z., 65, 144, 235n24 other in, 65; of white masculinity, 64-65, 66 democracy: early road travel and, 19, 24, 58,

borders, post-9/11, 5, Ig0—g2, 198 232n9g; spatial mobility in, 69

Brady, Mary Pat, 118 De Orellana, Margarita, 34, 37

Broken Flowers (film), 15, 204—9, 238ns; biologi- Dern, Bruce, 226 cal reproduction in, 208—9; disconnection in, Dew, Jason M., 84-85, 86 207, 208; family in, 187, 198, 199; heterosex- Diamond, Neil, 237n3 ual relationships in, 208; home in, 204, 206; dichotomies: private-public, 132, 133; in Western

immigrants in, 205; immobility in, 204-5; society, 174; In women’s road travel, 111-12 incorporation in, 206; masculinity-as-crisis in, difference: abandonment of, 51; accommodation 207; past-as-loss in, 208; productivity in, 205, by class location, 42—43; incorporation of, 20— 207-8; reviews of, 208; road trip in, 205-8; sex- 22; post-g/I1, 192, 210; road encounters with,

ual mobility in, 204; white masculinity in, 204 45; white male consumption of, 89

Butler, Judith, 115, 149 disembodiment: critique of, 74; white privilege of, 79

car culture, end of, 228-29. See a/so automobiles; displacement: modernist discourses of, 59; travel

automobility metaphors for, 3

Carleton, Manuel, 232n12 Dixon, Winifred: Westward Hoboes, 232n14 Churchill, Ward: Fantasies of the Master Race, domesticity: infiltration of, 141; instability of, 113—

237n2 14, 118, 130; and male identity, 114; mobility

civil rights movement: black consumer actions and, 105-7, 132, 141; patriarchal structuring of, in, 57, 94; black masculinity in, 57; politicized I11; as place of revelation, 121; post-9/11, 194,

spatial practices of, 93-94 195-99; postwar male mobility and, 87; privacy

Clarke, Deborah, 107 in, 121; on the road, 136; as scale of incorporaClason’s Touring Allas, 159; “scenic Indian” of, tion, 117; women’s redefinition of, 117-19; in

156, 157, 164, 169, 183, 237n4 women’s road narratives, 14, 105-7, 109, 117-19 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (film), 171 Douglas, Mary, 130

Cody, Iron Eyes, 237n4 drivers: black, 99, 100-101; women, 41, 231n4 Coeur d’Alene Reservation (Idaho), 176 Duncan, Nancy, 110-11; on private space, 120

Cohen, Lizabeth, 57, 94, 133 Dyer, Richard, 66, 98 cold war: automobility and, 71; consumer ideology

of, 65, 72, 94; containment in, 55-56, 68; gender [agleBear Singers, 181 dynamics of, 56; national definition in, 84-85; Eastman, Ruth: “The New Woman,” 39, 40

uncertainty in, 83-84 Easy Rider (film), 236n6; cultural rebellion in, 112 colonialism: effect on identity, 172; legacy of, 178, Ehrenreich, Barbara, 71

186; as spatial practice, 151-52, 171, 183 Ellis ane |2aanis

Index 255

Elmore, Mrs. C. G., 2 Gladding, ['ffie Price, 23 embodiment: politics of, 62; in postwar mobility, Griffin, John Howard: black disguise of, 60, 75,

59-62 114; journalism career of, 54, 74, 82; work for

[Erdoes, Richard, 165-66 Sepia magazine, 75. See also Black Like Me estrangement, as strategy of engagement, 59 Griggers, Cathy, 142, 143 exile, male, 58—59

Eyre, Chris, 15, 151, 175. See also Smoke Signals Hafen, P. Jane, 169 Hanisch, Carol: ‘““The Personal Is Political,”

Faludi, Susan, 198, 211; The Terror Dream, 109-10

195-96, 238n2 Harcourt, Alfred, 231n3

Farmer, Gary, 178 Hart, Lynda, 148—49, 237n1I0, 237n12 feminism: challenge to male supremacy, 110; per- Hearne, Joanna, 180, 182, 198, 238n10, 238n12 sonal is political claim of, 109; on public/private | Hertenstein, Barbara, 1

spheres, 12, 110-11, 132; second wave, I4I heterosexual romance, in narrative, 20, 27, 42, 67,

fiction, Native American: identity in, 238n8; 73. 208, 212 return home in, 175. See a/so road narratives, ITistory of Violence, A (film), 238n5

Native American Hofmeister, Barb, 189

Field, Edward Salisbury: captivity in, 41; A Holiday magazine, 54, 83, 233n2 Six-Cylinder Courtship, 27-29; social differ- Holtmann, Lou, 193

ence in, 27, 28 home: as absence, 127; America as, 63; exposure

films, Hollywood: discursive violence in, 155; to outside world, 134; family, 188, 198; in filmic mobile white identity in, 155; motherhood in, backlash, 141; as hidden, 107; as ideal 127, 132; 219; Native Americans in, 153-55, 164, 178, 181, in opposition to road, 138; as place of estrange-

186, 213, 237NI, 237N3; patriarchy in, 141 ment, 114; private space of, 110-11, 119, 120, Fitzgerald, F. Scott: “The Family Bus,” 232n13 144; as public space, 133; return to, 113-14,

Fleming, Robert I.., 47, 50 176-77, 185, 189, 194, 199, 214, 336nn5—6; as

Ford, Henry, 25 scale of political action, 121; women-identified, Ford Rouge Factory, tour of, 197 118; in women’s mobility, 106

Free Air (Lewis), 13, 88, 229; American foreign- Homeland Security, Department of, 4-5, 191 ness in, 51; Americanization in, 38—39, 41-52; homemaking, 129-31, 134; as civic role, 133;

anti-German sentiment in, 233n15; automo- post-g/1r trend, 238n2 bility in, 38; captivity in, 42; class conflict in, Huckabee, Mike: and the global, 5, 7, 11, 192 42-43; courtship in, 21, 48; democracy in, 201; Huffman, Felicity, 187, 211 domesticity in, 109; female drivers in, 231n4; Hyndman, Jennifer, 190-91, 192 feminized upper class in, 38, 43, 46-47, 4950; identity in, 172; immigrants in, 43, 44-45, identity: heteronormative, 214; incorporable, 210, 48; impact of, 231n3; incorporation in, 18, 41; 212; in Native American fiction, 238n8; placeindividuality in, 47, 48, 50, 51; liberated sexual bound, 31, 32; post-g/II, 190, 223; referential, desire in, 41; masculinity in, 45-46; mobility 219; role of scale in, 11, 133, 191, 192, 227; trans-

in, 42, 43, 44; outsiders in, 30, 38, 49; regional eTessive, 123 identities in, 38, 146; scale in, 43; self-education — identity, American: creation through road travel,

in, 44, 45, 51; self-made man in, 46, 47; social 19, 24; in early road narratives, 59; mobility class in, 38, 39, 42-51; transcontinental travel in, 4-5, 7, 16; in postwar road narratives, 98; in, 29; unification in, 38—39; voyeurism in, provability of, 89—90; role of tourism in, 231n1; 48—50; the West in, 45, 46; women drivers in, 41 scale of, 95, 227

Freedom Rides, 57, 93, 95, 104 identity, Native American: effect of colonialism Fuessle, Newton A., 23-24, 44 on, 172; Euro-American scaling of, 172; formation of, 152-53; Hollywood depiction of, 153,

Gagne, Nicole V., 211, 214, 239N7 181; in hostile culture, 178; and idea of Indian, Ganser, Alexandra, 125, 145, 236n7 179; and return home, 175, 186; white construc-

Geithmann, Harriett, 24, 26 tion of, 179

gender stereotyping, class anxiety and, 232n10 identity, racial: 5; appropriation of, 65, 114, 125;

Gerster, Carole, 166, 173 and mobility, 76, 77, 93, 97, 98; performance Gilbert, James: Men in the Middle, 233n4 of, 101

Gilbey, Ryan, 202 identity politics, 14; Native American, 153 Gilroy, Jhon Warren, 186, 238n11 immigration, post-9/1I, 5

256 Index incorporation: in domesticity, 117; in early road Langen, ‘Toby, 165 narratives, 20; fixedness in, 129; of historical Larson, Lars Erik, 233n5, 234n9 past, 151; of identity, 210, 212; for married Leaving Normal (film), 113, 236n2 women, 117; in mobility, 8—1o, 152-53, 187; in Lewis, John, 104 Native American road narratives, 151, 152, 161; Lewis, Sinclair. See Free Air of other, 16; of outsiders, 51; as political subject, —_ liberation, feminist ambivalence around, 150

121; of postwar masculinity, 54; in postwar mo- Lincoln, Kenneth, 220 bility, 54, 59, 105; and production of identity, Lincoln Highway, 23-24, 231n5 10g; representation as, 186; through road travel, | Lynch, Jessica, 196

Q, 12, 23-24, 190; spatial, 152; temporal, 151, Lynd, Robert and Helen: Middletown, 33-34 152; tensions of, 10; in upward mobility, 128; in Lytle, Mark, 63 white masculinity, 60—61, 82; in women’s road

narratives, 112 MacCannell, Dean, 155, 197; The Tourist, 60 individuality: black, 235n25; and cultural assimila- | March on Washington (1963), 103-4 tion, 13; post-g/II, 190; postwar, 56, 61; uncon- marriage, as mode of nationalization, 34

ventionality and, 33; in whiteness, 77, 81 Marston, Sallie, 11, 132-33, 134 individuation, masculine: of Beats, 72; role of Martinez, Manuel Luis, 65-66, 234n17

mobility in, 93 masculinity: hegemonic, 144; post-g/I1, 195,

invulnerability, American myth of, 195, 197 196-97 It Happened One Night (film), 22, 232n11 masculinity, black: in civil rights movement, 57; It Might Have Been Worse (Massey), 19, 23, 25; inclusion for, 57; social mobility and, 100;

heterogeneity in, 232n9 spatial mobility and, 100

masculinity, postwar: factors inhibiting, 58;

Jarmusch, Jim, 15, 187. See also Broken Flowers immobility and, 56, 68; incorporation of, 54;

Johnson, Barbara, 144 reorientation of, 55-59; response to historical Jones, John Paul, III, 155 uncertainty, 54; restlessness in, 55 Jones, Katherine T., 11 masculinity, white: borderlessness of, 64—65, 66;

consolidation of self in, 82; expansiveness of,

Kaplan, Caren, 3; on male exile, 58—59 61; feminized, 235n24; imperilment of, 61;

Kazin, Alfred, 72 incorporation in, 60—61, 82; interpretive power Keitel, Harvey, 139, 141, 144 of, 87; reproduction of power, 57, 65, 74; selfKerouac, Jack: ambivalence toward social mobil- reproduction of, 65; solidarity of, 79; spatial

ity, 67; body-mind holism of, 62; as partici- mobility of, 82. See a/so whiteness pant-observer, 233n3; romanticization of racial masculinity crisis, postwar, 56-57, 86; immobility

other, 233n6. See also On the Road in, 68; whiteness and, 57, 81

Kimmel, Michael, 57 Massey, Beatrice Larned. See Jt Might Have Been King, Thomas, 161, 176, 182; The Truth about Worse

Stories, 174 Masson, Dominique, 120

Kingsolver, Barbara. See Bean Trees, The May, Elaine Tyler, 55-56

Klopotek, Brian, 154, 178, 179 McCarthy, Cormac. See Road, The

Krasinski, John, 187 McDonald, Christopher, 142, 206

Mendes, Sam, 16, 187. See also Away We Go

Lackey, Kris, 98, 99, 102, 114; Road I’rames, Mexican Revolution, Hollywood depiction of,

231n2, 231n4, 235n28 34

Laderman, David, 6, 8, 139, 143, 145, 238ng9; on Mickenberg, Julia L., 233n4

return home, 176 Mills, Katie, 6, 188, 236n1, 237n11, 238n1

Lages, Judi, 2 Mitchell, Don, 159-60, 180

landscape: as background for white mobility, mobility: abandonment and, 112; accidental, 156, 158; as battleground, 164; in discursive 124; as adaptability, 36; agency in, 192—93; in violence, 160; immobilized, 156, 159; in Native American identity, 4-5, 7, 16, 227; in AmeriAmerican history, 171; in Native American mo- can imagination, 3; bodily, 60—61, 75, 139-50; bility, 159-60; Native American representation borderless fantasy of, 14; conflicting definitions in, 173; representational forms of, 159; in road of, 6—7; cultural meaning of, 4; as detachment, narratives, 15, 156, 159; as site of struggle, 15, 15; dualisms of, 8; effect on social class, 29; 166, 170; as symbol of American reinvention, enacting of citizenship through, 5; engagement

158 with social conflicts and, 8—1o; global, 192;

Index 257 and heterogeneity, 6; incorporation in, 8—10, through, 54; racial identity and, 76, 77; as 152-53, 187; landscape in, 15, 159-60; male ex- rebellion, 233n7; reorientation in, 53, 105; self perience of, 14, 89; management of social ten- in, 54, 59, 64; social mobility and, 57—58; as sions and, 4, 226; as migrancy, 69; as mode of strategy of juxtaposition, 104; threat to boundagitation, 15, 152, 160; as mode of engagement, edness, 98, 191, 192; unmediated experience of, 4; mythology of, 3-4, 13, 16, 69, 111, 128-29, 58-59, 74; white male, 60, 64, 89, 91, 114. See 136-37, 226, 227, 233n7; otherness in, g—10; as also road travel, postwar placing change, 225; post-Fordist, 205; produc- mobility, upward: 67, 68, 103, 127; incorporation tive of identity and social order, 16; rebellion/ in, 128; mythology of, 128, 131, 136; public dis-

conformity in, 6, 8; relation to bounded space, play of, 126-39 14, 69; and response to social tensions, 8; in mobility, women’s, 158; abandonment and, 15; road narratives, 3-7, 160; in scale of identity, bodily, 148; cultural narrative of, 112; domes227; scaling of, 10, 64, 108—9, 190; self-edu- ticity and, 105-7, 141; identity and, 14—15, 108; cation in, 18, 36; and social mobility, 5; social of New Woman, 39, 40, 41-42; personal is porelations in, 180; tensile quality of, 6, 8, 13, 15, litical in, r10—-11; politicized experience of, 15; 226; theatrical dramatization of, 156; theme of, and private space, 111; revelation in, 107, 112; re-created in U.S. culture, 13-16; as threat, 7, scale in, 108—g; tensile representations of, 15.

98, 191-92, 210; thriving on social tensions, 4, See also road travel, women’s 226; transcendence through, 129, 228; transfor- | Montgomery bus boycott (1955), 94 mation of consciousness, 109g; transgressive, 9, Morrison, Toni, 234n10 16; as vagrancy, 69; Western meaning of, 6—7. Morton, Norine H., 26

See also social mobility Motor Camper & Tourist (magazine), 22—23, 26 mobility, black, 94; assimilation through, 137; motor camping, 2; heterogeneity in, 26; homoas violent, 83; white assumptions concerning, geneity in, 232n9; number of campers, 26 9g—100; white control over, 80-81. See a/so Murray, Bill, 187, 207

travelers, black Murray, Homer, 208

mobility, Euro-American, 15, 151-52, 155, 159; co-

lonialist practices of, 152; restlessness in, 161 Nadel, Alan, 55, 68, 116 mobility, Native American, 15, 151; connection Nast, Heidi J., 155 to past through, 152; and forward progress, nation: as contained scale, 191; as scale of identity,

181, 183; incorporation in, 152; landscape in, 194 159—60; as mode of agitation, 152, 160; restric- nationalism, homonormative, 209 tions on, 160; and returns, 169, 175. See also national security, gendered explanations of, 196

road travel, Native American Native American reservations, as “exploitable mobility, post-9 /11, 4-6, 16, 187-94; American- resource,” 170—7I ness and, 190, 192; borders and, 190, 198; versus — Native Americans: in American nostalgia, 155—

containment, 193; domesticity and, 198—99; 56; as “authentic,” 212; colonialist practices excessive, 192, 193; goal-directed, 198, 200-201, against, 152; communal self of, 152-53; con203, 210, 215, 226—27; habitation and, 194; iden- tainment of, 152; cultural representations of, tity formation and, 223; in national imaginary, 186; dominant narratives of, 155; forced reloca223; and productivity, 198-99; redefining of tion of, 168, 169—70, 171, 180; Hollywood char-

scale in, 190; resecuring of, 190; restoration acterizations of, 153-55, 181, 186, 213, 237n3; in of production and, 197—98; threat of, 191-92; immobilized landscape, 156, 159; immobilizing transgressive, 209-10, 221. See a/so road travel, representations of, 153-59; mainstream nar-

post-9 /1I ratives of, 165, 173; as metaphors, 154; noble

mobility, postwar: for alienated self, 60; anonym- savagery discourse of, 233n16; as other, 158; ity in, 93; body as site of, 60-—61; boundlessness precontact diversity of, 154; protest of strip

in, 61; consumption and, 132; contingency mining, 170-71; reassertion of sensibilities, in, 61, 100; dislocation in, 105; as dissent, 61; 169; return to tradition, 179; as “scenic Indian,” domesticity and, 87, 105, 117-18; as embodied 156; spatio-temporal reality of, 160; stereotypes practice, 59-62; entitlement in, 98; as escape of, 152, 238n11; survival of, 169, 170, 173; vanfrom domesticity, 87; incorporation in, 54, ishing, 178, 181, 183, 238n9; white fantasy of, 59, 105; individual scale in, 92; intentionality 212-13. See also mobility, Native American;

in, 54; male outsiders and, 233n7; masculine road travel, Native American ideology of, 106; as mode of reorientation, 104; Nebraska (film), 225-29; automobile in, 229; and nation and self, 94-95; perspective gained belief in, 226; goal-driven mobility in, 226—27;

258 Index Nebraska (film) (continued) past, the: narrative performance of, 186; in landscape in, 225-26, 227, 228; mythologies of post-g/11 road narratives, 209-15 mobility in, 226, 227, 229; white men of, 227-28 __ patriarchy: abandonment of women, 112, 146;

New Mexico: demographics of, 32; incorporation across scales, 142; ideology of, 147; in films of into nation, 21, 30—33, 35, 37, 232Nn12; incorpo- 1980s, 141; in home, 110-11; power of, 110,

ration of outsiders, 33; rescaling as country, 31, 140, I41, 144-45

32, 34; statehood of, 32-33 patriotic sites, American: post-g/TI visits to, 1, New Woman, 51; mobility of, 39, 40, 41-42 193

Norden, Christopher, 172 patriotism: of place, 21; post-g/11 mobility and, Norman, William S., 3 I—3, 189, 193, 196, 209; queer subjectivity and, 209, 239n6

Obama, Barack: as “too mobile,” 5, 7, 192 Payne, Alexander, 225. See also Nebraska On the Road (Kerouac), 4, 53; auto service indus- personal, the, politicization of, 1og—11, 134,

try in, 72, 234n19; borderlessness in, 62-74; I4I—42, 149, 150 consumer culture in, 72-73; containment Piano, The (film), 144 and promiscuity in, 234n13; diverse spaces Pine Ridge Reservation (South Dakota), 167, in, 233n5; fluidity in, 65, 68; frontier myth in, 170-71 234n15; gender relations in, 67—68, 234n11; Podhoretz, Norman, 233n6 homoeroticism of, 73; imaginative community Post, Emily: By Motor to the Golden Gate, 17-19,

of, 69-70; immediacy in, 63; incorporation 25, 54, 109; heterogeneity in, 232n9; selfin, 8; male rebellion in, 64; manuscript of, 62; education in, 18—19, 36, 44 masculinity crisis in, 71, 74; mobility in, 60, Powwow Highway, The (Seals), 15; agitation in, 89; nuclear family structure of, 70-71; oneness 166; automobile in, 164; buddy narrative of, in, 73; outsiders in, 64, 66; predecessors of, 13; 173; Cheyenne culture in, 166; crossroads in, private space in, 70; racialized other in, 66—67, 174; cultural appropriation in, 174; Euro233n8, 234n12; return home in, 114; road trips American history in, 170; film version of, 165, of, 68—70, 73; scale in, 62, 64, 69, 74; scale of 174, 237n1; Hollywood Western in, 162; humor body in, 74; search in, 105; self and world in, in, 174; identity in, 163, 168, 173; incorporation 63-64, 74; self-definition in, 234n9; social mo- in, 166, 168, 173, 179; interconnectedness in, bility in, 67—68, 71; spatial mobility in, 63, 68, 172-73; landscape in, 159, 164, 167, 171; mobil69; spirituality of, 147; transcendence in, 54; ity in, I51, 152, 168; narrative voice of, 163; Naunmediated experience in, 62—63, 64, 66, 74; tive American survival in, 170; past and present

white masculinity in, 63, 67 in, 160, 165, 168; the political in, 162, 166, 173; On the Trail to Sunset (Wilby), 13; American post-contact past in, 167—70, 171, 174; reinvenforeignness in, 51; automobile in, 31-32, 37; tion in, 173; rescue in, 162; road trip in, 166—67, border crossing in, 31, 32; captivity in, 41; 169, 170, 171; sacred space in, 164-65, 171; courtship in, 20-21, 22, 32, 33-35; difference scholarship on, 237n1; social realities of, 163; in, 22, 31; exotic other in, 31; immobilization in, space in, 163, 164; spiritual awakening in, 166; 35; incorporation in, 35—36, 37; masculinity in, stereotypes in, 173; survival in, 173; temporal 37; mobility in, 35, 36; New Mexico in, 21, 39; incorporation in, 165; time in, 163; trickster outsiders in, 29—30, 31, 35; patriotism of place figure of, 162-74; Vietnam War in, 168 iti, 21; racial difference in, 33,37; scale in, 31, Primeau, Ronald, 6, 70 35; sectionalism in, 36; self-made man of, 35; private sphere: display of, 134, 136; liberation

Southwest in, 30, 35-37, 39; transcontinental from, III; post-g/II, 196 travel in, 29; unification in, 30-38 progress: American mythology of, 181; Euro-

Ortiz, Alfonso, 165—66 American ideal of, 161; westward, 171-72 Osbourne, Lloyd. See Three Speeds Forward Puar, Jasbir K., 209, 239n6

Oswin, Natalie, 236n4 public/private spheres: challenges to, 12, 110-11, other: incorporation of, 16; post-g/II, 194 132, 133; collapse of, 141; as gender-biased spaother, racial, 66—67, 126, 233n6, 233n8; romantici- tial practice, ITI zation of, 233n6

race: as mediating force, 75, 79; unmediated expe-

Paes de Barros, Deborah, 107, 108 rience of, 81 parenthood, as mode of freedom, 215 racism: black witness to, 81-82; mediation of

Park, You-me, 132, 142 experience, 75; postwar protests against, 61; as passivity, male: incarceral narrative of, 56 social norm, 80

Index 259 rail travel: versus car travel, 23, 232n6; insularity 215, 220, 222; family in, 188, 198—g9; nation as

of, 18, 44 homeland in, 194; obsolescence in, 199-200;

Rainwater, Catherine, 160-61, 237n5 parent-child roles in, 188, 219, 220; producReel Injun (documentary), 237n3 tivity in, 197; resurgence of, 190; scale in, 194; reproduction, biological: in post-g/11 road nar- self-invention in, 200; white protagonists of,

ratives, 189, 199, 210, 215, 220, 222; rescue 199

through, 16 road narratives, postwar, 13-14, 53-54; black Riesman, David: The Lonely Cromd, 56, 58, 59 critiques of, 235n28; female characters in, 106, Road, The (McCarthy), 16, 187, 215-23; biological 236n1; guilt at success in, 55; identity in, 98; reproduction in, 220, 222; the domestic in, 217, incorporation of self in, 59; male protagonists

219; estrangement in, 218; family in, 215-16, of, 58, 71; masculinity crisis in, 56; mobile body 218, 223; fatherhood in, 219-20; film version of, in, 60—61; scale in, 59-62, 64, 74, 105; self-as239n8; goal-directed mobility in, 216, 221, 222; other in, 60; white male protagonists of, 60—61,

home in, 217-18; identity in, 219; lack of scale 92-93 in, 217; landscape in, 190, 199, 216, 218; loss road narratives, women’s, 3, 14-15; abandonment in, 217; neoliberalism in, 221; nostalgia in, 217; in, 112-13; the domestic in, 107, 109, 113-14;

past and future in, 188; postapocalyptic world freedom in, 111; gendered identity in, 114; of, 215-17, 220, 222, 229; productivity in, 221, generic identity crisis of, 106; home in, 114; 222; prose of, 217; scale in, 216-17, 219; scholar- identity crises in, 106—7; illegal acts in, 113; ship on, 239n9g; space in, 216; strangers in, 223; incorporation in, 112; lack of options 1n, 113;

survival in, 220; transgressive mobility in, 221 points of view in, III; postwar, 109; pre-World road films: communities of identification in, War II, 106; protagonists of, 111, 146; public/

235n29; of Reagan era, 188, 238n1 private spheres in, 111; revelation in, 112; the road narratives: anxiety in, 16; binaries in, 138, road in, 108; scale in, 105, 107—9, 110, 112, 113;

175, 176, 183; critique of open road, 229; space in, 108; subversion of patriarchy in, 108;

geographic scale in, 10, 12-13; inclusion/ transformation in, 112 exclusion in, 8; landscape in, 15, 156, 159; male roads: early conditions of, 39; postwar improve-

protagonists of, 14, 127-28; mobility in, 3-7, ments to, 58; production of scale, 10; as site of 160; return home in, 113; scholarship on, 231n1; struggle, 48; as spaces of possibility, 4 sense of self in, 6; spatiotemporal bounds in, 6; road travel: as citizenship ritual, 2-3; and creation

subversion in, 9; white male outlaws in, 112 of national identity, 19; escape from modernity road narratives, early, 13, 17-52; assimilation in, in, 155-56; freedom in, 6, 158; as free-floating, 52; coupling in, 29; courtship in, 13, 20, 21-22, 229; goal-directed, 16; incorporation through, 27-29, 48; difference in, 27—29; disorientation Q, 12, 23-24, 190; as masculinist, 107; nostalgia in, 45; incorporation in, 20, 22; intimacies in, in, 155-56; versus rail travel, 23, 232n6; service 20; male characters of, 29; national identity in, industry for, 58, 72, 234n19. See a/so mobility 59; national suitability in, 17-19, 29-38, 40-52; road travel, early, 13; affordability of, 26; associaoutsiders in, 29-30; regional, 27—29; scale in, tive bonds in, 24; creation of national citizenry, 19, 23-24, 64; self-education in, 18—19; self- 19, 25; democratizing aspects of, 19, 232n9; efmade individuals in, 52; social class in, 38, 39, fect on sectionalism, 26; flexibility in, 23; incor43-51; social difference in, 20, 199; social repro- poration through, 23-24; intimacy in, 22—26; duction in, 22; strangers in, 25; transcontinen- in open cars, 22; physical challenge of, 58; protal, 17-19, 29-52; union making in, 19-22, 61; ducer-oriented, 46; road conditions in, 39; role upper class in, 38, 43, 46-47, 49-50; the West in national identity, 24-25; self-refashioning

in, 20-21; westward trajectory of, 39 in, 47-48; social class in, 26; transcontinental, road narratives, Native American, 15; challenges 22-26; transformative, 24; travel literature on, to Euro-American mobility, 161; Hollywood 2; unification through, 23-24, 30-39 conventions in, 162; identity politics in, 153; road travel, Native American: critique of reinvenincorporation in, 151, 152, 161, 187; mobility in, tion of, 171; in mainstream American culture, 160; multiple audiences of, 161-62, 237n6; non- 177. See also mobility, Native American linear development of, 161; past and present in, road travel, post-g/11, I-2, 3, 9; Americanness 152, 160, 161; positionality in, 153; return home in, 189-90; connection to homeland in, 193; in, 199; social relations in, 160; temporality in, incorporation in, 190; mobile subject in, 198,

160; vertical space in, 161 199; nostalgia in, 194; recovery through, 190; in road narratives, post-g/11, 12, 189—go; anxiety in, RVs, 1, 189, 193-94, 228; as spatial form, 197.

200; biological reproduction in, 189, 199, 210, See also mobility, post-9/11

260 Index road travel, postwar: consumerism and, 71-72, 95; reproduction of, 199; transportability of, 100; etiquette of, 87; mass consumption and, 57-58; white male, 82 as political action, 94; private space in, 70; self, masculine: consolidation of, 82; re-creation social belonging in, 95; in suburbanized family of, 54; white, 65, 82 life, 71; unmediated experience of, 58—59, 74, Sepia (magazine): Griffin’s work for, 54, 75

88. See also mobility, postwar September 11 attacks: anxiety following, 189, 194, road travel, women’s: domesticity in, 136; fluid 197, 219, 220; baby boom stories following, 189, identity in, 108; home/road dichotomy and, 197, 238n2; borders following, 191, 192; conIII—12; as masculine, 107; opposition to society tainment following, 16; cultural hermeticism

in, 107. See also mobility, women’s following, 192; cultural narratives of, 195, 196;

Roberts, C. R., 193-94 domesticity following, 194, 195-99; female Roberts, Susan M., 155 victims of, 195; immobilizing effects of, 4, 191; Roddick, Nick, 207, 238n5 incorporation following, 8—9; individualism romantic love, American, 33-35 following, 190; masculinity following, 195, Roosevelt, Teddy: ideal of strenuous life, 20, 39 211; mythmaking following, 195—96; national Route 66 (TV series), 13, 53; return home in, domestic following, 194, 195—96; patriotism

236n6 following, 1, 189, 193, 209; perception of space

Rudolph, Maya, 187 following, 190-91; protection fantasies of,

Rugh, Susan Sessions, 71 196-97; redomestication of women following, 196; representation of family following, 188;

Salt, Waldo, 182 rescue fantasies of, 195, 211; scale and, 190-93, Sarandon, Susan, 139, 140 194, 196; social difference following, 192; Sarvan, David, 235n24 surveillance following, 4—5; violation of scale, scale: bending of, 12, 108; of collective action, 1g1; xenophobia following, 5. See a/so mobility, 120; constructed nature of, 11, 132—33; cul- post-g/11; road narratives, post-9/T1 tural impact of, 11; discursive power of, 11-12; Shaffer, Marguerite S., 2, 24, 232n9; on L’ree Air,

distinctions of space in, 119; in economic/ 47 political structuring, 11; in human geography, Shanley, Kathryn, 165 132; jumping of, 94, 149, 181; as mode of incor- Sherrill, Roland, 6 poration, 109; national versus domestic, 108; Silko, Leslie Marmon, 158—59; Ceremony, 237n5 personal, 11; politics of, 12-13, 110; production Simpson, Mona. See Anywhere But Here of order, 10; queering of, 236n4; restructuring sit-ins, 57, 93-94, 95 of, 12; role in identity, 11, 133, 191, 192, 227; Sloan, Alfred P., 46 September 11 attacks and, 190—93, 194, 196; Slocum, J. David, 109, 141, 236n10 as social category, 105; unstable, 109; as way of Smith, Neil, to—11, 12, 94, 108, 110, 118, 198; on

knowing, 124; in women’s mobility, 1o8—9; in “scale bending,” 12, 108; on September 11 at-

women’s road narratives, 107—9 tacks, 191, 192 scale, bodily, 74, 124, 234n20; female, 107-8 Smith, Sidonie, 3, 72, 112, 236n3; on Native scale, geographic: production of, 10-13, 132-34; American travel, 158

in road narratives, 10, 12-13 Smoke Signals (film), 15, 184; alcoholism in, 178,

Scharff, Virginia, 28, 232n10 179; automobile in, 181-82; binaries in, 176, Scott, Ridley, 14. See also Thelma & Louise 183; body-in-motion of, 179; bridge imagery Seals, David. See Powwow Highway, The of, 238n10; colonialism in, 178; community sectionalism, American: of early twentieth cen- in, 177; contested space in, 180—81; cultural tury, 19, 232n7; effect of road travel on, 19-22, construction in, 180; disconnection in, 180, 181; 24, 26; replacement by unification, 13, 19-22, dispossession in, 183; Hollywood Indian in,

30; as sedition, 35 186; home/away in, 176, 177-78, 185; identity

See America First campaign (1912-31), 2, 3, 10 in, 179; immobilization in, 185; incorporation

See America’s Byways Campaign, 3, 10 in, 177, 179, 185; landscape in, 159, 181, 183;

Segal, Victoria, 207, 209 mobility in, 151, 152, 174-86; mobilization of Seiler, Cotten, 56, 58, 94, 232n8, 232n10, 234n18 memory, 185; mode of agitation, 177; past and self: alienated, 60; in Beat experience, 62; bound- present in, 160; return home in, 175, 177, 186; aries with other, 74; as other, 60; in postwar road trip of, 177, 179-80, 185; scale in, 181; mobility, 54, 59, 64; in postwar road narratives, self-representation in, 178, 238n11; situatedness 59, 64; postwar search for, 54; radicalized, 54; in, 183; social order in, 181, 184-85; social/

Index 261 spatial exile in, 180; space in, 176, 180; super- 146; mobility and, 3, 8, 76; Native American, heroes in, 183-84; temporal movement in, 182, 173; post-9/II, 3; queer, 209 183; transpersonal self in, 176, 185; trickster subjects, mobile, 148; Americans as, 3, 190, 199; of, 177; U.S. bicentennial in, 178; vanishing post-9/11, 16, 187, 190, 198, 199 Indian in, 178, 181, 183, 238n9; walking in, 182— = Supreme Court, U.S.: gag on abortion informa-

83; white culture in, 178; white obstruction in, tion, 141, 148 185

Smyth, Jacqui, 129-30, 131-32, 236nn8—9 Thelma & Louise (film), 4, 14, 106, 109, 140; social class: in early road narratives, 38, 39, 42-51; abandonment in, 113; absent space in, 237n10; effect of mobility on, 29; feminized upper, 38, bodily mobility in, 139-50; bodily scale in, 146,

43, 46-47, 49-50 149, 150, 234n20; body politics of, 141; domes-

social mobility: black, 95, 103; middle-class ide- ticity in, 141, 143; domestic/state scales in, 145; ology of, 71; physical movement as, 104; risk ending of, 139-40, 143-44; gender flexibility in, 98; in the South, 103; and spatial mobility, in, 144—45, 148, 149; home in, 145; incorpo5, 57-58, 95, 159; working-class participation ration in, 145-46, 149; lack of choices in, 145;

in, 234n16 landscape in, 159, 201, 229; jumping of scale in,

South, the, go—91, 93, 97, 101; as alien, 91; black 149; lesbian desire in, 148—49, 237n12; male/ incorporation in, 103; racial conflict in, go—93, state power in, 140-41, 143-44, 145, 146, 147,

97, 101; social mobility of blacks in, 103 149; mobile subjects of, 148; opening sequence Southwest, the: ambivalence toward, 35-36; inte- of, 139; patriarchy in, 140, 141-42, 144, 147-48, eration into U.S., 30; in Native American road 158, 237nI1; “personal is political” in, 141-42, narratives, 159; as wilderness, 36, 37; women’s 149, 150; place in, 146—47; politicized identity

freedom in, 158. See also landscape in, 145-46, 149, 150; politics of scale in, 139; space: domestic, 117-18, 121, 126, 130, 135, 198; private/public sphere in, 141-42; reception global, 7; middle-class, 50; in motion, 180; as of, 139, 147, 149-50; the road in, 143, 145, 150; nonnegotiable, 108; patriarchal privatization of, scale in, 139-43, 145-50, 158; space in, 142-43, 121; performance of, 158; personal/public, 12; 145; transgressive personas of, 147; white fepredetermined definitions of, 108; in represen- male body in, 147, 148; women’s mobility in, tation of mobility, 159; segregated, 99; as site of 140, 142, 148 struggle, 159-62; temporal dimension of, 160; This Is My Country Too (Williams), 4, 14, 53,

transformations concerning, 8 92-105; author’s subjectivity in, 99; automobile space, national: incorporation into, 10 in, 101; black freedom in, 104; black ownerspace, Native American: and agitation, 162; colo- ship in, 101; border crossings in, 61, 93, 102; nialist scaling of, 176; mainstream conceptions bounded identity in, 97, 98; claiming of space, of, 164; and non-Indian self, 160-61; sacred, 57; consumption in, 100; cover of, 95, 96; denial 164-65, 171; as site of struggle, 164, 170; and of service in, 99-100; empowerment in, I0T;

story, 162 incorporation in, 95, 100, 104; individuality in,

space, post-g/11: domestic, 198; foreign-domestic 61; male reorientation in, 95; meaning of drivbinary of, 196; nostalgia and, 194; perceptions ing in, 99; mobility in, 61, 93, 94-95, 100, 103;

of, 190-93 national belonging in, 93; police in, 98; public

space, private: of automobiles, 26, 70, 80, 102; accommodations in, 97; racial inclusion in, 93; in domesticity, 121; empowerment in, 120; risk in, 97—98; scale in, 94—95, 100, 104; sense of homes, 110-11; politicization of, 120; and of self in, 102; social belonging in, 95; the South women’s mobility, 111. See a/so private sphere in, 97, 102; transgression in, 61 spatial politics, racial politics as, 57, 94; in repre- Thrasher, Paula Crouch, 1

sentation of Native Americans, 155 Three Speeds l'ormard (Osbourne), 27—28; captiv-

Spencer, Liese, 208 ity in, 41; female drivers in, 41; social difference Steigerwald, Bill, 235nn26—27 in, 27-29, 43 Steinbeck, John: alias of, 60, 98, 114; “In Quest of Toman, Marshall, 166, 173 America,” 54; journalism career of, 54,74; work — tourism: behind-the-scenes, 197, 238n3; role in with Holiday, 83. See also Travels with Charley American identity, 231n1

Stern, Michael and Jane, 22 Traister, Bryce, 56, 57

Street, Julian: Abroad at Home, 2 Transamerica (film), 4, 15-16, 238n4; authenticity subjectivity: African American, 80; authorial, 89, in, 212-13; biological reproduction in, 210; 99; automobility and, 234n18; female, 112, 115, bodily truth in, 212; failed femininity in, 211;

262 Index Transamerica (film) (continued) unification: through early road travel, 23-24, family in, 198, 213-14, 222; fatherhood in, 211, 30-39; as naturalization, 30—38; replacement 212, 214; femininity in, 215; gender mobility in, of sectionalism, 13, 19—22; of social relations, 210—I1, 212, 213; gender reassignment in, 209; 43-44 goal-directed mobility in, 215; heteronormative United States: homogeneity/heterogeneity in, 12; community of, 211; home 1n, 213-14; ideology as imagined nation, 192; scalar identity of, 191, of productivity, 215; incorporation in, 210-11, 192; westward expansion of, 7, 171 212, 214; past in, 209-15; reviews of, 209; road Up in the Air (film), 189 trip in, 187, 211, 212, 213; scale in, 211; strangers

in, 212; work in progress of, 210, 215 Van de Water, Frederic: The Family Flivvers to transgression: in black travel, 61, 93; of female Frisco, 12, 19, 23, 24 body, 147; as form of incorporation, 9; in violence, discursive, 155 identity, 123; in mobility, 9, 16, go, 187, 189, Vizenor, Gerald, 169 209-10, 221

travelers: consolidation of identity, 10; diversity Wacks, Jonathan, 237n1

among, 232n9; identity politics of, 14; as Wahio (trickster coyote), 166 nuclear family, 70-71; obliteration of self, 73; Wald, Gayle, 66, 81, 132, 142, 233n3, 234nI0,

scale of identity, 109, 227 235nn22—23

travelers, black: anxiety about, 95—96; bodies of, Wayne, John, 181, 195 99; as continuous subjects, 96; denial of service Weiland, Matt, 74 to, 99-100, 102; performance of racial identity, West, the: Americanization in, 25; in early road 101; of postwar era, 94; risk for, 97-98. See also narratives, 20-21; frontier myth of, 234n15.

mobility, black See also landscape

Travelguide (periodical), 97 Where the Truth Lies (film), 238n5 Travel Industry Association of America (TTA), 3 whiteness: as Americanness, 78; assimilable, go;

Travels with Charley (Steinbeck), 14, 53, 54, bounded experiences of, 76; conformity to, 68; 83-92, 146; anxiety in, 85, 86, 92; assimilable enactment of borderlessness, 66; everything/ whiteness in, 90; author’s subjectivity in, 89; nothing quality of, g8—g9; fluidity of, 82; indi-

black traveler of, 101; border crossings in, viduality in, 77, 81; masculinity crisis and, 57, go; cold war in, 86; disorientation in, 85, 88, 81; passing, 81, 82; stability in, 77; unbelonging gO, 92, 104; escape from domesticity in, 87; in, 123. See a/so masculinity, white fictionalized elements of, 235nn26—27; iden- Widmer, Kingsley, 55; on male rebellion, 68; on

tity in, 84—85, 88, 89—9g0, 97; incorporation postwar conformity, 71 in, 92; legitimation crisis in, 85, 87, 92; male Wilby, Thomas W. and Agnes A. See On the Trail

mobility in, 86, 87, 89, 91; masculinity crisis to Sunset in, 86; police in, 92, 98; racial difference in, go; Williams, John A., 96; on Holiday, 233n2; jourrestlessness in, 55, 84, 198; scale in, 88, g1—9g2; nalism career of, 54, 74; in March on Washingself-containment in, 87; sense of failure in, 105; ton, 103-4; mobility of, 93, 103. See also This Is the South in, go—9g1; uncertainty in, 83—84, 85; My Country Too unmediated experience in, 86; white masculin- Williams, Linda Ruth, 215

ity in, 83, 85-86 Willis, Sharon, 99, 149, 235n29 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), 32 Wilson, Alexander, 70

trickster, 238n7; Native American, 163; in The Wilson, Woodrow: on the automobile, 25 Powwow [Highway, 162-74; in Smoke Signals, Winchell, Dick, 186

ig ey Wood, Robin, 141

Trudell, John, 176 Wounded Knee and Wounded Knee II, 167, 170 Tucker, Duncan, 15-16, 187, 214. See also

Transamerica Zibrak, Arielle, 217, 218—19, 220, 221-22, 239n9

Turner, Frederick Jackson: frontier ideology of, Zonn, Leo, 186 24-25, 36, 161; “The Significance of the Ameri- = Zwick, Edward, 236n2 can Frontier,” 25