Abstract

The paper is an excerpt from a much larger work dealing with the American "wheels of fortune" or, rather, vehicles or means of transport as icons of American cultural experience. Usually, gently put aside, as either not-so-significant 'stage props" of American historical narrative or too easily decoded symbols of the society-on-the-move, they have, in time, slowly surfaced the American cultural mythology. One of the reasons for this probably lies in the fact they have been upstaged in many popular genres as the firm link tying them up to respective epochs of American cultural history. As such, they themselves have been exposed to the two-part process of signification, i. e., they are preserved in static "frozen images" or descriptive narrative texture as well as in the fable or dynamics of narrative line or plot. This proves to be sufficient to provide for their wide-ranging presence not only in voluminous collections of stories, poems, novels or in films, but also on the book cover and many other accompanying "trivia" which as such ensure our remembrance of the stories we once read and loved. Always made to be less or more than they factually are, the "wheels" or means of travel have turned into "vehicles of fortune" if by "fortune" we do not mean whimsical old "fates" of "the days of yore" but a carefully thought-out and even more carefully promoted and carried out ideological program. If so, then the wheels or vehicles, once subjected to textual analysis stressing any aspect of the given work, can prove to have been objects of successful ideologization. An example of successfully effected ideological strategy can be found in the popular Western novel. In this case, it is applied, among many, to the myth of the "covered wagon" which symbolically represents a vehicle, as well as a catalyst of American values, both "old" and "new." The concrete novel under study is of the same title written by Emerson Hough in 1922