This thesis examines representations of animals and technology in American literature and culture at the dawn of the motor age, 1895-1935, with particular emphasis on horses and automobiles—the transition from literal to mechanical horsepower. Early proponents of the automobile hailed it as a direct substitute for the horse, and while there were many practical reasons to replace these animals with machines, the influence of the horse in the United States (and on human understandings of civilisation as a concept) extended far beyond the animals’ physical attributes. It is through the literature of this period that we can most effectively trace the cultural impact of replacing horses with automobiles, and this study focuses on a group of American authors whose works represent both animals and automobiles in both material and symbolic senses. Each of the literary texts featured also speaks to one of the four main intersections I have identified between Progressive attitudes towards animality and automobility—waste, care, war, and national identity—which converge to tell a story about the changing material and metaphorical relationships between humans, animals, and machines in modernity.
Using the publication of the first automotive periodical in the United States (and the English language)—The Horseless Age—as a jumping off point, this thesis takes a literary-historical approach to the question of the animal in modernity, considering animal metaphors as they appear in early automotive culture and these symbolic animals’ material counterparts as they appear in a variety of literary and non-literary historical sources. The aims of this project are to demonstrate that the horseless carriage not only changed the way humans travel, but also how we conceived of and related to nonhuman animals and machines. While the Progressive ideal of a horseless age may have further separated humanity from animals on one level, it also served to emphasise our nostalgic need to maintain some bond, however slight, with civilisation’s animal origin. This thesis addresses a number of questions pertinent to the fields of Animal, Automobility, and American studies, as well as the Environmental
Humanities more broadly, including: What does it mean to “substitute” an animal for a machine? To what extent has the automobile replaced the horse as a vehicle for qualities of human civilisation? And how did this symbolic shift mask the material impact of automobility on animal life? The answers to these questions, I propose, lie not only in material history, but also in the American literary imagination.
With this in mind, my research engages with a group of seemingly disparate well-known and unknown American authors, whose works share a common feature of representing animals and automobiles on material and symbolic levels, on the subject of either waste, care, war, or national identity. The primary texts studied include: muckraker Upton Sinclair’s explorations of dirt, waste, and civilisation in The Jungle (1906) and Oil! (1927); several of the earliest examples of the “road-trip” narrative such as Theodore Dreiser’s A Hoosier Holiday (1916), Louise Closser Hale’s We Discover the Old Dominion (1916), and Sinclair Lewis’s Free Air (1919); two forgotten autobiographical accounts from Americans who volunteered to drive motorised ambulances in the dehumanising conditions of the First World War—Robert Whitney Imbrie’s Behind the Wheel of a War Ambulance (1918) and William Yorke Stevenson’s At the Front in a Flivver (1917); and the only novel by Osage writer John Joseph Mathews—Sundown (1934)—which highlights the interconnectivity of animals and technology in the construction of American national identities.
In sum, my analysis of these literary engagements with animals and automobiles seeks to locate those nonhumans simultaneously venerated, harmed, and obscured in automotive culture—I am looking for the horse in horsepower.
