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

Abstract

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Horseless Age, which, in positing the car as a substitute for the horse, decried the material limitations of the “outdated” animal whilst at the same time seeking to coopt its symbolic value.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