How I Learned to Drive

Peck’s power over Li’l Bit is suggested early in the play when Peck, during Mother’s description of the day Li’l Bit was born, says, “I held you, one day old, right in this hand” (12-13). Though Peck often tries to make Li’l Bit believe she holds the power in their relationship, his holding Li’l Bit in his hand from the day she was born represents that he, in fact, is in control. Peck’s control is rooted not only in the power structure in which women are objectified but also in his being older and a family member. His authority over Li’l Bit makes it harder for her to object to his sexual advances, despite his insistence that he’s “not gonna do anything” Li’l doesn’t want (11). We are offered a glimpse of Peck’s authority during a driving lesson in which Peck, “with surprising firmness” (33), orders her to turn off the radio, to which Li’l Bit responds obediently, “Yes, sir” (33). Li’l Bit begins to understand the lure of exercising one’s power when she has sex with an underage boy she meets on the bus. She notes that “this is the allure. Being older. Being the first. Being the translator, the teacher, the epicure, the already jaded” (29).  

Peck frequently manipulates Li’l Bit into giving him what he asks for. In the first scene, he asks if he “get[s] a reward” (11) for not drinking all week, then suggests she let him undo her bra so he can feel her breasts. When Li’l Bit is uncomfortable with his sending her photos to Playboy, Peck reminds her that he has “loved [her] every day since the day [she was] born” (43), inspiring her to reluctantly unbutton her shirt. His encouraging her to drink alcohol at a romantic dinner to celebrate getting her drivers’ license and his comment that “[g]irls turn into women long before boys turn into men” (41) appear attempts to make her feel older than she is and thus more likely to satisfy his desires. 

Peck’s telling Li’l Bit that he wants to teach her “to drive like a man” (34) illustrates men’s power over women. Men, he says, “are taught to drive with confidence” (34), whereas women are “polite” and hesitant; because “the road belongs to” men, Li’l Bit has “to be ready for them” (34). Driving, he says, is “[a] power,” one he seeks to teach her to wield. Ironically, Li’l Bit ultimately uses this power to leave him. She says she “understand[s] all too well” (49) why he’s been counting down to her eighteenth birthday because he’s taught “Defensive Driving 101” (49). Peck’s giving Li’l Bit the power to reject him shows not only how Li’l Bit matures but also the complexity of relationships that exist within this power structure. 

The imperfect people in How I Learned to Drive often have been damaged by traumas in their pasts. The most blatant example is Peck, whom at the end of the play Li’l Bit suggests became a pedophile because he himself was molested: “Who did it to you, Uncle Peck? How old were you? Were you eleven?” (54). Peck also alludes to his difficult past. He becomes reticent when Li’l Bit asks him about his time serving in the Pacific Theater during World War II; he also says he doesn’t like to go home to South Carolina because he’s a “disappointment” (20) to his mother. Though she blames Li’l Bit for her husband’s behavior, Aunt Mary confirms that Peck may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder when she tells the audience that she “can feel him just fighting the trouble” (44) and that “men who fought World War II didn’t have ‘rap sessions’ to talk about their feelings” (44).   

Mother, too, shows herself to be affected by her past. Mother and Grandmother argue over Mother’s getting pregnant by a man whose absence is almost a tangible presence in the play; at the end of the play, Li’l Bit yells at her mother for forbidding her to go on a road trip with Peck, crying, “Just because you’ve gone through a bad time with my father—you think every man is evil!” (55). Grandmother herself indicates that her old-fashioned beliefs about women and sex are the product of her own past. When Mother accuses her of failing to teach her “something about the facts of life” (31), Grandmother replies, “I told you what my mother told me! A girl with her skirt up can outrun a man with his pants down!” (31).  

The play, of course, is primarily about Li’l Bit’s past and why she is the person she is today. The day that Peck first molested her at age 11 was “the last day [she] lived in [her] body” (57). Deeply affected by the unsolicited attention she received as a teenager, she still avoids jogging and dancing, activities that make her “jiggle[]” (57). Just as Peck lives with “a fire in [his] heart” (46), Li’l Bit lives with “the ‘fire’ in [her] head” (57), and both drink to numb the pain. Like Peck, she enjoys the power she feels in sexual relations with a minor. However, Li’l Bit also inherits from Peck her love of driving; she states that “[t]he nearest sensation I feel—of flight in the body—I guess I feel when I’m driving” (57). Despite the pain he caused her, in the final scene, Li’l Bit welcomes his spirit in the backseat of her car. Her driving away at the end of the play seems to suggest that she is finally at peace, that she is moving on. In How I Learned to Drive, characters cannot outrun their pasts, but they have the power to mold their own identities by incorporating their past experiences. Whereas Peck internalizes his past and wanders like “a kind of Flying Dutchman” (55), Li’l Bit refuses to let hers define her. Rather, she uses her experiences to grow stronger, stating, “I know I’m lucky” (57).