When Gertrude Stein’s “Gentle Lena” realizes that her marriage plans have failed, she goes home alone in a streetcar crying, and the conductor and the other passengers empathize with her: “And everybody in the car was sorry for poor Lena.” The conductor kindly promises her, “You’ll get a real man yet, one that will be better for you,” and Lena feels slightly better. Stein may have thwarted the reader’s expectation to express empathy in the brief death scenes of Three Lives, but she did represent the kindness of strangers in the streetcar setting of her modern city of “Bridgepoint.”

Streetcars are a prototypical modern symbol that the reader often encounters in literature of the first half of the twentieth century. Henry James, returning to America in 1904–5 after a very long absence, found in the electric cars that had arrived in New York in 1887 the concentrated presence of new immigrants: “The carful, again and again, is a foreign carful; a row of faces, up and down, testifying, without exception, to alienism unmistakable, alienism undisguised and unashamed,” he writes in The American Scene (1907). Streetcar settings – as well as scenes on subways, trains, buses, and other means of public transportation – may provide local background, may bring friendly, hostile, or indifferent strangers together, may inspire a hero to seek a revelation on the tracks, or may serve as a formal inspiration to convey the sense of movement, speed, or electric power. One only has to think of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/Petals on a wet, black bough.”).