Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Road Vision: The Road and the "Look" of American Culture in Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday"
Gary Totten
Department of English, Ball State University
00gltotten@bsuvc.bsu.edu
Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday (1916) represents an early manifestation of the American road book, and contributes to a vision of American culture, as seen from the road. Specifically, Dreiser's narrative account of the road trip back to his home state of Indiana reveals an anxiety about how recent increases in immigration to the United States will affect the "American scene"; the closer he gets to the Midwest (and thus the farther away from the cosmopolitan east coast) the less anxious his reflections become, for he has managed to visually verify that the melting pot of American culture has bleached away ethnic difference. Dreiser reveals his nationalist agenda through insistent commentary about the cohesion (or chaos) of the American character, and how the visible presence of racial otherness disturbs the cohesive "look" of American culture.
Of immigration to the United States, Dreiser mentions to Franklin Booth, his traveling companion, that he "had been fast coming to believe that America, east, west, north, and south, was being overrun by foreigners who were completely changing the American character, the American facial appearance, the American everything." However, after traveling several hundred miles, he cannot see anything to confirm what he has been reading. He observes that though he and Booth feared the cities might be "overrun by foreigners who were completely changing the American character," small town America seems to reveal that this is not the case.
Dreiser finds comfort by verifying (visually) that the American character is untouched by the immigrant presence. He takes comfort in his observation that immigrants apparently would rather "stand on our street corners," "smoke cigarettes," or "go to the nearest moving pictures," than "throw bombs" or "lower our social level"; indeed, immigrants look and act like Americans. In Scranton, Dreiser observes that "America seemed to . . . be making over the foreigner into its own image and likeness," indicating that the American melting pot has assimilated any visual evidence of otherness. Ultimately, Dreiser's commentary on immigration and its effect on the national "look" reveals the specular mechanism of the road. Within Dreiser's narrative, the visual evidence of immigration is tempered by the romance of the road, revealing that, in Dreiser's case, the travelers gaze sustains a cohesive cultural vision of America.
Gary Totten
Department of English,
Ball State University,
Muncie, IN 47306.
(765) 285-8380
00gltotten@bsuvc.bsu.edu
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