“George Cruikshank s The Railway Dragon reverses over its prey, with steam gauges for eyes and firebox door for ravening mouth. The shape of this locomotive back head precisely recalls Cruikshank s earlier stocking capped and fire-belching Jacobin monster. The front elevation of Turner s locomotive echoes these caricatures accept this similarity and that white splodge [on the smokebox front] becomes the key to Turner s entire painting: the modest space into which a doomed old world must place its head so the Dr. Guillot s machine that epitome of enlightened rationality, invented to suppress the ancien regimes haphazard axework may do its fatal work. Form follows function. This rational machine, this Jacobin machine will, indeed, mean the end of civilization as those who viewed the painting at the 1844 Royal Academy exhibition had known it. No wonder, perhaps that Rain, Steam and Speed disturbed that audience, fifty years after the terror.”
In Rain, Steam and Speed Turner paints a hare running ahead of this Jacobin monster . It does not get run down, and Finley suggests that in doing this he expresses a vigorous metaphor: he has created dialectic between nature and the machine This may be the case but the more interesting question, perhaps, is why Turner does this. Turner has elevated the industrial subject matter of this painting so that it participates in a dialogue about sublime forces. This narrative calls up the struggle between the timeless forces of nature and civilization (the machine mentioned above); between the past and the present-quickly-becoming-future. The subject matter of this painting, so much embedded in its particular historical context and the anxieties of one age passing in the face of another, is literally, with this evocation of the sublime, taken out of time. Thus the narrative obscures the human beings caught up in this struggle (the displaced rural worker, the aristocrat losing power), and becomes about the struggle itself.
This is important to get an understanding of the painting at its deepest level. It is, as was suggested at the beginning of this paper, a visual metaphor for the experience of the modern age . It participates in the discourse about change and progress that arises in the condition of modernity, by calling up the dialectic between the (often devalued) past, and the present becoming future (i.e. change/progress) that defines it. The assertive locomotive, harbinger of the modern world, that charges into the center of this painting make clear the urgency of this, this dark rational machine must tear through the fields of a natural golden age, for this is what it means to be modern. This evocation of the dialectic nature of modernity was at the heart of the colonial project. In an age of imperialism where the dominant discourse was social Darwinism a nation had to become a progressive, civilizing force in order to justify its imperialist/capitalist endeavors (enacted against a less civilized anachronistic other at home and abroad), as well as stave off colonization by a more progressive adversary. Thus, even though this painting embodies, on one level, the contemporary anxieties about new technology, it also participates in a larger discourse about progress, capitalism, colonialism and ultimately the condition of modernity itself.