A Motor-Flight Through Early Twentieth-Century Consciousness: Capturing the Driving-Event 1905–1935

Abstract

It is thought-provoking to observe the extent to which motoring has long been, and still is, associated with madness. Whilst, today, the psychopathology of car culture may turn upon its environmental insanity and the widely reported tabloid phenomenon, ‘road rage’,¹ a century ago, when motoring was still in its infancy, there was wide concern for how the altered states of consciousness brought about by travelling at speed might constitute, or at least lead to, a kind of madness.² Sometimes this was indexed as a benign ‘motor mania’ (as in Mrs. Kennard’s ‘witty and amusing’ middle-brow novel, The Motor Maniac (1902)); in other texts (fictional and otherwise), however, the ‘mania’ takes a rather more disturbing turn.