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Among the great many freedoms made possible by the automobile then is the liberation of libido from the parental gaze. By the mid nineteen-twenties, as James Flink notes, 'the motor-car [had] undercut parental supervision and authority' and had become a structural component in the life of the American teenager. (Flink: AA :

1 59) But private conveyances had, for a long time earlier, been a convenient, if somewhat uncomfortable, locus for the amorous liaison. Lord Byron's letter to Douglas Kinnard of 26 October 1 8 1 9 is a celebration of the kind of agent act made possible by private transport. 'As to "Don Juan"' Byron writes, ' - confess - confess - you dog - and be candid - that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing - it may be bawdy -. . . but is it not life .. . Could any man have written it - who has not lived in the world? - and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? ... in a court carriage? ... '52 (Byron in Marchand: 232)

One hundred and fifty years earlier, in the pamphlet Coach and Sedan,

a farmer gloats that his coach is his preferred method of conveyance since in it he can be accompanied by his 'maides ... with their Forkes, Rakes, and a bottle or two of good Beere.' (C&S: B3) In the same document a vicar complains that the Coach has been 'these many yeeres a lewd liver, [accompanied by] common Strumpets both of citie and the Countrey ... never caring for the Church. ' (C&S : E3)

Of course, the same complaints were made against the motor­ car. James Flink cites a 1 92 1 special report which commented that 'Numerous complaints have been received of night riders who park their automobiles along country boulevards, douse their lights and indulge in orgies. ' (Flink: AA : 1 59) Similarly, Marsh and Collet cite the case of a Juvenile Court Judge who in the 1 920s called the automobile 'a house of prostitution on wheels ' . They also note that during the same decade the International Reform Society asked Henry

Ford to ' frame legislation that will stop the use of the motor-car for immoral purposes. ' 53 (Marsh & Collet: 1 92 - 1 93) Whilst that legislation was never drawn up, Ford was blamed for doing everything possible to make in car coitus an uncomfortable and hazardous experience and popular belief has it that Ford himself designed the notoriously hard back seat of the 'T'. However, according to one anonymous libertine, Ford 'neglected to reduce the amount of head room in the vehicle thereby encouraging a certain amount of stand-up experimentation. '54

There were, then, those who celebrated the new mobilisation of libido, but proponents were in the minority - except, it would seem, among musicians, manufacturers, poets, and novelists. Gus Edwards' In My Merry 0/dsmobile, for instance, was a particularly popular song of its era. 55 The delightful double entendre of its lyrics easily won over the younger generation who sent it to the top of the charts whilst worried parents frowned in disapproval of the not-so-subliminal sub­ text: ' You can go as far as you like with me in our merry Oldsmobile' . O f course, similar sentiments found expression in other well known songs of the period among which may be numbered: 'On the Back Seat of a Henry Ford', 'Tumble in a Rumble Seat', ' When He Wanted To Love Her He Put Up The Cover', ' Fifteen Kisses To A Gallon Of Gas', and 'In Our Little Love-mobile'.

There is also no doubt that automobile manufacturers were themselves keen to capitalise on suggestions of sexual freedom. For instance, since 1 903 Buick's bonnet symbol has been a silver ring pierced by a projectile and since at least 1 900 W olseley' s radiator icon has been a bulbous head breaking out of a 'V'. Moreover, numerous manufacturers exploited the nude female form - including Rolls Royce with its famous silver figurine. But manufacturers' advertisements were similarly suggestive. Peter Roberts cites a German campaign of the 1 920s in which a fraulein suggestively holds a model of an elongated open tourer to her groin whilst whispering the words ' Mein Benz'56 but the most famous advertisements of the period, inspiring Scott Fitzgerald' s character Jordan Baker, were those promoting the very 'sexy' Jordan Playboy models of the early to late twenties. The first advertisement for the Playboy which appeared in the Saturday

Evening Post of 23 June 1 923 created quite a stir and made literary history. Whilst Jordan's copy had always been up-beat, mildly suggestive, and slanted to a female target audience, the 1 923 campaign, with its W estem overtones, word compounding, and striking alliteration was the apotheosis of the advertiser's art. The entire text is Jordan Baker - a connection that is more or less made for us by Nick Carraway when he says that ' she looked like a good illustration ... '57 (Fitzgerald:

GG: 1 68)

Scott Fitzgerald then was certainly conscious of the romantic possibilities afforded by the automobile - a theme that finds its way into a good number of his short stories. For example, Matthew Bruccoli notes Keats' influence on Fitzgerald's romantic sensibilities in 'Love in the Night' where lines from the former' s ' Eve of St. Agnes' are given a modem context and highly anticipatory undertone:

The hare limp' d trembling through the frozen grass, ...

The limousine crawled crackling down the pebbled drive ... '

(in Bruccoli: 73)

But the best examples come from an earlier period. In Fitzgerald's

short fiction 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair' ( 1 920), the narrator informs us

that the more adventurous girls will 'park' in automobiles whilst ' ... the more popular, more dangerous, girls will sometimes be kissed in the

parked limousines of unsuspecting dowagers. ' (Fitzgerald: SS: 26)

Later in the same tale an altercation between Bemice and Marj orie is interrupted by the 'riotous honking' of car horns outside the house. (4 1 ) These horns, it transpires, are operated by two young men vying for the sisters' attention. Even the most sceptical of Freud's critics would have to read the sounding horns as being emblematic of their operators' sexual appetites.

But not all advances are welcome and so in 'The Ice Palace',

Harry' s calculated moves on southern belle Sally in the back seat of his

no conquest here either, the automobile nonetheless highlights primal drives. Of course, particular parts of automobiles do lend themselves to risque puns and innuendo and here, the breathless, sultry demand of Nancy Lamar for Jim to 'turn on the gasoline' exhibits a double entendre not uncommon in Fitzgerald's fiction. Indeed, the entire episode, in which Nancy lures Jim Powell into the parking lot in order that they might steal petroleum for the purpose of removing some chewing-gum from her shoe, is a metonym for the sexual act. As the fuel drips from the chosen motor-car's fuel-spout, Nancy calls for ' [m]ore' and when drip turns to flow she releases a contented 'Ah'

followed by the demand: 'let it all out' . (Fitzgerald: SS: 1 50) Thus the

automobile gives voice to Nancy's straining passion and to Jim's inarticulate desire.

However, the discrete liaison, made more practicable by the closed private car, is also in evidence in Fitzgerald's novels. In his first of these, This Side of Paradise, a young and romantically inclined Amory Blaine rides in the back seat of a Packard with Myra St. Claire - a girl whose bobbing party he is late for. She is 'jolted against him, their hands touch' and, seeing their destination loom through the window, Amory seizes his opportunity and clumsily clutches her thumb. (22) The youth's not so subtle legerdemain in the automobile does however precipitate a consummatory kiss in the country club and so the motor-car, like its predecessor the closed coach, literally becomes a vehicle for the pleasures of the flesh.

This Side Of Paradise then explores the way in which the automobile afforded unprecedented agency to American youth. In a section of the novel suitably entitled 'The Supercilious Sacrifice ' , Amory i s invited to j oin his friend Alec, who is chauffeuring a 'vermilion-lipped blonde' , in a ' low racing car' . (232) The hero agrees and the machine is driven across state lines and parked in deep shadows.

Alluding to the 1 9 1 0 Mann Act which outlawed the movements of

women from state to state for the purposes of prostitution, Fitzgerald here also foregrounds the automobile's role as a mechanism to facilitate

Earlier in the text we learn that the romantic egoist is in receipt of billet doux, the better ones from women who own automobiles: 'There's Marylyn De Witt - she's pretty, got a car of her own and that's damned convenient.. . ' declares Amory when cataloguing his potential conquests to his Princeton friends. 59 (56) It is worthy of note that, whilst at Princeton, Fitzgerald himself corresponded extensively with Midwestern girls. Some of the letters have been preserved and one young woman wrote, with breathless anticipation, of the romances that would be made possible should her father purchase for her a new J effries sports runabout - as he had promised to do.

Elsewhere, Amory fmds himself parked outside the Louisville Country Club in 'someone's' limousine with a 'girl [wearing] green combs'. The girl, whose identity is inconsequential, is frustrated by Amory's academic approach to life and demands that they simply 'go in' if he wants merely to 'analyse' . ( 67) The would-be intellectual quickly comes to his senses and the automobile again becomes the locus for a conquest of sorts. Another girlfriend, we learn, has been with some 'terrible speeds' , a metaphor, no doubt, for the urgency of their advances. These are the sort of boys, we are told, who drive ' alluring red Stutzes' , machines which surely suggest their owners' libidinal capacities. (7 4) At the very least one might say that such cars are signs of sexual desire, if not performance.

Interestingly, and it is very rare in the fiction of the period, we also get a woman's perspective. For Isabella, the automobile is a locus for romance, not merely a mechanism for a sexual encounter:

'The future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm limousines and in low, cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering trees ... ' (76)

It is also ironic that for Isabella 'the boy might change' since for Amory there a sense that 'some girl' or other will do. It is almost as if the opposite sex is merely an optional extra; a kind of accessory to the sublimity of the machine. As if to illustrate this selfish perspective,

sometime later, Amory and new girlfriend Axia Marlowe pile ' intimately' into a taxicab which bears them to Phoebe Column ' s private flat. ( 1 1 6) This girl too, i s soon forgotten and later again he meets Eleanor of Baltimore, a girl who, at the age of seventeen, insists on being a debutante; a girl who has fallen in with a 'rather fast crowd', the drinkers of cocktails and makers of patronising remarks from the safety of their limousines. (23)

In Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned, romantic hero Anthony Patch associates with men like Parker Allison whose 'notion of distinction [consists] in driving a noisy red-and-yellow racing car up Broadway with two glittering hard-eyed girls beside him. ' (363) Fitzgerald undoubtedly seeks to highlight the vacuous, solipsistic, and sybaritic nature of American youth in this novel and the automobile becomes a structural mechanism through which to do just that. However, Fitzgerald also aimed to offer a picture of American values as he saw them and that included the sexual proclivities of his generation.

And so Anthony, whose identity as a romantic hero is redefmed and enhanced by the motor-car, gloats to his friend Maury Noble of his flirtations with an empty-headed usherette in the back of a taxicab, an environment in which he claims to have received ' chaste and fairylike

kisses' on the third night of their acquaintance. ( 4 7) Later in the novel,

when again in a taxi, Anthony puts his arm around the infmitely impressionable Gloria Gilbert, draws her over to him and kisses her. The car then becomes the locus for a romantic encounter in which speed is related to the rise of passion: 'Tell him to turn around,' [Gloria] murmured, 'and drive pretty fast going back. ' (96) Anthony' s conquest o f the girl i s complete when, moments later, h e laughs 'noiselessly and exultantly, turning his face up and away from her, half in an overpowering rush of triumph ... ' (96)

Gloria's diary also contains references to the social transgression made possible by the automobile:

' ... and Stuart Holcome, who had run away with her in his automobile and tried to make her marry him by force. And Larry Fenwick,

whom she had always admired because he told her one night that if she wouldn't kiss him she could get out of his car and walk home. What a list ! '

( 1 32)

Gloria is manifestly proud of her list of conquests. She lives for the vital performance and rejects the measured, careful 'Blockhead' Joseph B loekman who drives so considerately:

'Blockhead came around about ten in his new car and took me out Riverside Drive .. . he's so considerate ... he was quiet all during the ride.'

( 1 33)

But of course it is in Gatsby that the automobile is most persistently represented as a sign of sexual conquest - despite the fact that only one physical liaison takes place in a wheeled conveyance.

That connection comes, of course, in chapter four when Nick Carraway makes his move on Jordan Baker as they j ourney through Central Park in a Victoria coach. Earlier on, Nick explains that he likes the 'racy, adventurous' feel of New York and associates this with the semi-erotic ' flicker of men and women and machines .. . ' and the 'throbbing' of idling taxi-cabs. (57) Of course, there is also the story of Daisy and Gatsby' s long drives to 'out-of-the-way places' in the former' s white roadster to consider and Tom Buchanan's conquest of a Santa Barbara chambermaid is facilitated by the automobile. ( 1 45 ) It is worth observing too that Tom' s triumph over Myrtle is achieved via the motor-car but here, rather than offering specific details, Fitzgerald focuses on the imagery of the machine to suggest themes of objectification and the conquest of the body.

The motor-car can be the most extraordinary symbol of primal drives and the male sexual apparatus. Kronhausen and Kronhausen's The Complete Book of Erotic Art features a remarkable eighteenth century work by the Japanese painter Jichosai in which, spurred on by a

pace-maker who claps together large wooden blocks, a sweating team of men is depicted pulling a two-wheeled cart upon which rests the enormous member of an entrant in a phallus contest.60 Represented here, for perhaps the first time, is the speeding penis; a forerunner, as it were, to the next century's slightly more subtle evocations of masculinity as symbolised by motor-car architecture.

No book on the cultural significance of the motor-car then could be considered complete without making reference to the theories of Sigmund Freud. Although Freud's reputation is decidedly on the wane,

his General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis nonetheless has some

common sense and historically verifiable things to say about the relationship between machinery and the male member. 'The imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus', Freud writes, ' lends it to symbolisation by all kinds of complicated and indescribable machinery. '61 (Freud: 508) Certainly, as automobile bonnets stretched

out to accommodate bigger and bigger motors, the connection between automobile architecture and the penis became more obvious, a relationship that artists, photographers, writers, and automobile manufacturers themselves seized on enthusiastically.62

According to Keath Fraser, The Great Gatsby is, among other things, 'a narrative of potency and impotency' . (Fraser i n Bloom: 65)

It is an assessment that the text's narrative details certainly invite. Tom Buchanan, for instance, drives an elongated blue coupe whilst Gatsby's own car is 'swollen here and there in its monstrous length.' (63) It is partly through the symbolism of the motor-car then that Fitzgerald sets up the macho contest between the hero and Tom; a contest all about the 'ownership' of a woman. Tom, whose body seems to take its cues from the motor-car (he leans ' aggressively forward' and is capable of 'enormous leverage), has turned his garage into a stable. Whilst this detail is one of many suggesting the novel's central idea of turning back time, it also signposts Buchanan's function as a notional stud.

Doubtless he is described in phallic terms. In the second chapter he stands, legs apart and dressed in swanky riding clothes, on the steps of his mansion. His movements too are short, automatic, and threatening. For instance, making a 'harsh sound in his throat, and with

a violent thrusting movement. .. ', he forces his way through the crowd which gathers around Myrtle's body. ( 1 32) Tom's driving, moreover, is inextricably bound up with his sexuality since he applies to his relationship with women the same crude philosophy that he applies to the road: dominate and win. Seeing the road as a space for contest, Tom is the novel's ultimate 'take over' man. His Ventura Road accident, the details of which Jordan reports to Nick, appears to have been caused by a careless, drunken effort to overtake a wagon and in the seventh chapter, fearing that both his wife and his mistress are 'slipping precipitately from his control', [i]nstinct makes him step on the accelerator with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving Wilson behind ... ' ( 1 1 9). It is almost as if, as in some childish game,

Tom has convinced himself that prowess on the road equals prowess in life; that if he can win the contest of the cars he can win back his wife too.63

The sexual anarchy of modem America then is emblematised through the motor-car and its associated paraphernalia. Myrtle Wilson's sexual appetites are certainly thus represented. In chapter four Nick catches 'a glimpse of Mrs Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting vitality ... ' and in chapter seven, even at the point of