Neverwas Haul & The Victorian Mindset
I just ran across this interesting Victorian house on wheels over at the Neverwas Times and thought it had a number of interesting steampunk implications … with an emphasis on the political punk.
The image called to my mind China Mieveille’s novel Iron Council, in which a perpetual train becomes the base for a nomadic culture in which its denizens constantly build a track in front of it and tear out the track behind it as it travels; it also made me consider that the invention of the motorcar has often been considered a key component of urban sprawl and the development of suburban communities, and a factor in both the increase of social isolationism and the development of new, interest-based rather than community-based subcultures.
It’s not too hard to imagine an alternative history in which the Victorian’s ideological enthusiasm toward progress, forward motion, and expansionism might have embraced a mobile house such as this one.
Imagine what might have happened if wealthy Victorians, instead of building train lines to promote their imperialist interests in other countries, build roads for such vehicles, instead? Would these simply have become more comfortable mobile campgrounds, or perhaps wheeled brothels, for the use of men exploiting other countries’ resources, or would such houses have encouraged more domestic settle-and-farm thoughts in travelers, prompting them to consider long-term appropriation, rather than short-term exploitation, of land?
One important factor to consider, of course, would be that these mobile houses would inevitably have been accompanied by their own domestic angels — the wives and mothers and sisters who traditionally stayed at home keeping house as their menfolk conducted business or fought battles or explored different countries. How would such a shift in the role of the domestic angel have affected women’s social, political, and economic power? Part of the oppression middle- and upper-class women experienced in the Victorian period was due to their confinement within the home — but what if women could “spread their wings” and take flight by simply powering up the steam engine and rumbling off across the country? Imagine an entire mobile neighborhood of houses moving down the street, festooned with “Votes for Women” banners. Or an unfaithful husband coming home to find an empty lot where his house had been. Or a wayward young women driving the house off with her boyfriend while her parents are away….
Of course, such houses could as easily become mobile fortresses, as well, with highwaymen (-women?) hanging from the doors and windows and crouching on the balcony, shooting at travelers. Or mobile inns, a bit slower but infinitely more comfortable than taking a stagecoach from town to town. Or entire mobile villages of laborers, following seasonal work and wielding far more social power than, perhaps, they could claim when they were settled in one place and at the mercy of a single group of local industrial owners. Would they become mobile ghettos full of disenfranchised minorities, unwelcome in any city and forced to stay on the move? Or perhaps factories could be built on wheels and moved from city to city, much as sports teams are moved today, in a constant hunt for better tax breaks or business deals….
What do you think? How would a Victorian “car culture” have affected the culture?
(Photo shamelessly but respectfully ripped off from LynxPics’s Flickr site.)
drupagliassotti @ November 11, 2009