Chapter 11), Making the Events That Occur Within the Time and Space Of

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: IN PRAISE OF BABBITTRY. SORT OF. SPATIAL PRACTICES IN SUBURBIA Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontiers, one of the key histories of American suburbia, marshals a fascinating array of evidence from sociology, geography, real estate literature, union membership profiles, the popular press and census information to represent the American suburbs in terms of population density, home-ownership, and residential status. But even as it notes that “nothing over the years has succeeded in gluing this automobile-oriented civilization into any kind of cohesion – save that of individual routine,” Jackson’s comprehensive history under-analyzes one of its four key suburban traits – the journey-to-work.1 It is difficult to account for the paucity of engagements with suburban transportation and everyday experiences like commuting, even in excellent histories like Jackson’s. In 2005, the average American spent slightly more than twenty-five minutes per day commuting, a time investment that, over the course of a year, translates to more time commuting than he or she will likely spend on vacation.2 Highway-dependent suburban sprawl perpetually moves farther across the map in search of cheap available land, often moving away from both traditional central 1 In the introduction, Jackson describes journey-to-work’s place in suburbia with average travel time and distance in opposition to South America (home of siestas) and Europe, asserting that “an easier connection between work and residence is more valued and achieved in other cultures” (10). 2 One 2003 news report calculates the commuting-to-vacation ratio at 5-to-4: “Americans spend more than 100 hours commuting to work each year, according to American Community Survey (ACS) data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. This exceeds the two weeks of vacation time (80 hours) frequently taken by workers over the course of a year” (“Americans Spend”). 1 cities and newer, suburban Edge City nodes. Indeed, the United States Census Bureau now gathers information of “extreme commuters” – those who spend at least ninety minutes per day commuting. The suburban character of the United States – a majority- suburban nation since 1990 – explains in large part how Americans can find extended commutes so common that David Givins, winner of Midas Muffler’s 2005 contest to find America’s longest commute, can express surprise that his 372 mile round trip took the prize.3 Though he is an extreme example, Givins embodies the physical and discursive subjugation of transportation to business and especially housing that the suburbs demand. But suburbs hold more than tract houses and office parks. The post-War pursuit of the American Dream gains its increased suburban house privacy by inflating work time with longer commutes. And while the auto-based journey-to-work is definitively suburban, the suburbs depend on and demand auto-based transportation in general to shore up their everyday life, making the experience of transit a substantial part of the suburban experience of space and time. But exactly what do suburbanites do as they drive through the suburbs every day? The Trouble With All-Consuming Babbittry In this dissertation I argue that the experience of the space and time between origin and destination is never empty or insignificant in its planning or its use, even in goal-oriented realist narratives. In Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Franco Moretti traces travel itineraries in the natural and built environment in 3 Gary Richards’ 4 May 2005 Seattle Times article, “Your Commute Is Bad? Try 186 Miles Each Way” tells Givins’ story. In terms of suburbanization, the US went from 25% suburban in the 1950s to more than a third suburban in the 1960s. 2 Mary Mitford’s work to show that fictional narratives are symptomatic of contemporary conceptions of social morphology.4 In the walks through the countryside that Mitford describes in Our Village, for example, Moretti notes that the “‘rough circle…in which the villagers work and move’ is rewritten as a space of leisure rather than work. Slow easy strolls, thoughtless, happy, in the company of a greyhound called May; all around, a countryside full of picturesque natural views, but where very few people are actually doing anything” (39). In works pitched to relatively comfortable urban middle-class readers of the nineteenth century, the spatial uses and meanings of agricultural lands are re-imagined and colonized for urban leisure. Moretti’s insight that the rural England of Our Village “has been thoroughly gentrified; as if Mitford had traveled forward in time, and discovered what city-dwellers will want to find in the countryside during a brief weekend visit” (42) locates the generation of meaning in the experience of passing through space – not only in terms of the person moving, but also in terms of the shifting identities and uses of the space through which that person moves. Barbara Eckstein’s perceptive reading of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in the introduction to Story and Sustainability locates the ways literary representations of space and the people in it can productively unsettle strategic views of that space. In one compelling sentence she reveals the spatial critique embedded in Ellison’s novel: [the] man with the cart full of blueprints acts as a metonym for the burden borne by the poorest (chronically, minority) urban residents, who disproportionately have carried the weight of all the social reforms and 4 Moretti does so to argue for maps as key to literary studies. My interest in this project is less overtly cartographic. What does interest me is the representation of the experience of space and time between suburban origins and destinations – a space contemporary American maps usually represent as a red or blue line, not as a collection of sensory experiences. 3 urban renewal projects meant to manage their lives, and of all the wasteful economies designed to benefit other people elsewhere. (2) In much the same way that Moretti argues that the lack of visible work in Mitford’s representations of walks figures the rural as leisure rather than work space, Eckstein locates the wages of urban planning within the historical context of early-post-War “renewal” programs in marginalized places like Harlem. Eckstein and Moretti track space by not only reading the first, literal, layer of spatial representation, but also by reading the second layer of representation about space. Mitford describes a rural setting where little work is done: her city readers understand the country as vacation space for them, not agricultural land for farmers. Urban renewal as a systemic failure drives Eckstein’s analysis: A man pushes a shopping cart through Harlem, a cart that holds a discarded version of Harlem in the form of discredited blueprints that did not achieve their desired ends. Imagining a future with a different, non-suburban development pattern – whether it more closely resembles Peter Calthorpe’s transit-oriented development or the New Urbanists5 or some other model – begins with a reconsideration of everyday suburban spatial practices like the experience of transit during the commute.6 5 See Peter Calthorpe’s The Next American Metropolis and Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck’s Suburban Nation, as well as the Congress for New Urbanism’s Charter of the New Urbanism. 6 With Story and Sustainability’s investment in praxis in mind, such attention to community organizing proposal-writing narratives makes sense, especially since a some contributors are not trained in the humanities. However, Eckstein’s reading of Suburban Nation – “Duany et al. have lost me as a conscriptee [to the New Urbanist cause] because I have lived my life in strict avoidance of auto traffic jams. I will walk a mile – two – to work or wait with equanimity for a bus, train, or plane, but I will not take a job, home, or vacation that puts me in an auto traffic jam (32) – trades the force of her symptomatic reading of Invisible Man for smug personal virtue. This unsatisfying argument by anecdote trade-off occurs throughout the collection, which, as I hope this project shows, is unnecessary when American film and literature present such a variety of engagements with the unsustainability of suburbia. 4 I begin with Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt for its consistent interest in representing the emergence and solidification of the suburban-American way of life as discourse and as built environment. Babbitt and Babbittry have become a shorthand for the conformism of thought and consumption that remade the ideological and visual identity of America into a suburban nation. In general, in histories such as Elizabeth Stevenson’s Babbitts and Bohemians: The American 1920s, “the timid likemindedness of Babbittry” represents “a numerous, shallow, widespread type of American businessman, an eager, persistent, and inescapable type” associated with the suburbs (Stevenson 186, 101).7 The majority of histories of the growth of the American suburb deploy Babbitt as a negative example within their critique. Crabgrass Frontiers concludes a section on the growing necessity of private motor cars in the suburbs as early as the 1920s by invoking Babbitt as a definitively suburban literary example (161). John Stilgoe’s Borderlands: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939, maps an especially dim view of suburbia’s car-centered ideology and morphology onto Babbitt, “a long novel ordered about the narrow life of a real estate developer” (287).

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