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The Unlikely Territories of Modernity

ONE OF THE EARLIEST ACCOUNTS of the railway in nineteenth-century American writing is in a journal entry made by Nathaniel Hawthorne in the summer of 1844. Hawthorne writes of his visit to an idyllic rural enclave known as Sleepy Hollow. He sat in a sunny clearing in the woods, and from this ‘lap of bounteous nature’ he could hear the whoosh of crops being scythed and the bells of grazing cows. But his enjoyment was interrupted by a different sort of sound, one that was incongruous with, and unwelcome in, this paradisiacal setting: ‘But hark! There is the whistle of the locomotive ... It tells the story of busy men, from the hot street, who have come to spend to spend a day in a country village.’ Though the train remains visually absent, its presence was synecdochally felt through the tell-tale sound of the whistle. Hawthorne’s experience of the railway is often invoked, most prominently by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden (1964), in discussions to do with the literary pastoral. The engine whistle, its ‘long shriek, harsh above all other harshness’, certainly exemplifies the incursion of the industrial and the urban into the rural idyll, but its literary purpose is not simply to lament the bucolic past that has been left behind. As Marx asserts, the machine sets out to ‘expose the pastoral ideal to the pressure of change’. It was change, a much-anticipated progression to a new continent, that Walt Whitman saw coming with construction of the interstate railroad lines. The lines of connection and communication he described in 1890 as ‘the typical and the most representative things in the United States. No works, no painting, can too strongly depict the fullness and grandeur of these.’ His 1876 poem ‘To a Locomotive in Winter’ is a paean to the ‘black cylindrical body, golden brass, and silvery steel’ of this new engine. ‘Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!’ pronounces Whitman’s