Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte
Valérie Partoens
From Beat to Bad Connections: Joyce Johnson’s (Feminist) Response to
Kerouac’s On the Road
Masterproef voorgedragen tot het behalen van de graad van Master in de American Studies
2014
Promotor Prof. Isabel Meuret Vakgroep Letterkunde
Expression of thanks
First of all, I would not have been able to complete this dissertation without the time and guidance of my supervisor Isabel Meuret. In addition, I would also like to thank the Master Program of American Studies and its team of professors for giving me the opportunity to gain more knowledge about a field of studies in which I have always been extremely interested. Likewise, I would also want to express my gratitude towards my classmates, of whom many now have become close friends, for their friendship and for their help during this year. Evidently, I would not be able to finish this thesis and this year of higher education without the support of my family and friends, who always believed in me even when I did not. Last but not least, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Joyce Johnson, who took the time to personally discuss her novel Bad Connections and as a result gave me the opportunity to gain a more comprehensive insight into the particular setting of the novel and her life within the Beat movement.
2 Table of Contents EXPRESSION OF THANKS ...... 2 1 INTRODUCTION ...... 4 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK...... 7
2.1 The Beat Generation as a male-centered social and literary movement ...... 7 2.2 Gender during postwar America and during the counterculture ...... 13 2.3 Women Beat writers in the limelight: Joyce Johnson ...... 18 2.4 Bad Connections...... 22 2.5 On the Road...... 26
3 A CRITICAL READING OF THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN ON THE ROAD AND BAD CONNECTIONS ...... 29
3.1 The position of women in American society...... 29 3.2 Male-female relationships and escaping “square” society ...... 33 3.3 Female sexuality...... 39 3.4 Objectification and stereotyping of women in the patriarchal society ...... 43
4 CONCLUSION...... 50
5 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 55
3 1 Introduction
The recent success of films such as Howl (2010), On the Road (2012), and Kill Your Darlings (2013)1 and the rise of the contemporary hipster subculture as a phenomenon that has its roots in the 1930s and 1940s2 has demonstrated that the themes and values of the Beat Generation are still of significance and a source of inspiration for the present generations. Nowadays, the Beat Generation tends to be remembered as a product of and a reaction against the stifling conformity of the Eisenhower presidency of the 1950s, as a group of intellectuals that proclaimed a new notion of social and literary freedoms to counter the political and psychological repressions that characterized the Cold War America of the 1950s3, and as pioneers of the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s.4 Although this male- dominated group of post-World War II writers that is defined as the Beat Generation pushed forward a progressive agenda, their relationship towards women was rather a confirmation of the conservative and subordinate position of females within the “square” post-World War II society.5 Although there exists a wealth of critical resources published over the last decades,6 this dissertation aims to explore the specific field of gender studies with regard to the Beat Generation in order to determine how women were portrayed within this movement. In particular, the objective is to analyze how Jack Kerouac, in his chef-d’oeuvre On the Road, arguably the “hip-pocket bible of the Beat Generation,”7 takes a rather traditional Western view of women and thereby places them in a position of marginal importance and power. Wryly enough, this derogatory attitude of marginalization and objectification by the male Beat writer towards the other sex mirrors the general attitude of the male-dominant Beat culture that adopted patriarchal attitudes towards women and celebrated an idealized defiant
1 For an overview: IMDB, http://www.imdb.com/. 2 D. Fletcher, “Hipsters,” Time, 29 July 2009. Web. 16 April 2014.
4 masculinity.8 According to some anthologies, Beat women writers have often found themselves positioned as women but not read as writers.9 By and large, it is fair to say that the voice of the female Beat has been censored by publishers, historians, scholars and indeed the male Beat, perhaps to serve the larger goal of phallogocentrism.10 In this regard, this dissertation seeks to re-evaluate a narrative work by a female Beat writer in order to compare how the depiction of and attitudes towards women in a work of a woman who herself experienced the gender inequality within the postwar society and Beat milieu contrasts with the work of a key male Beat author. In particular, I will methodically analyze second generation female Beat Joyce Johnson’s Bad Connections in contrast with Kerouac’s On the Road; this again with a focus on the representation of women and their societal position in the American post-World War II society and counterculture. Although Johnson’s work is set in a different social context than Kerouac’s novel, it can be seen as a feminist reaction to the work and values of the male Beats portrayed in On the Road. As a result, this dissertation intends to contribute to the hitherto limited academic research that has been carried out on the canon of female Beat literature. In this way, we found it of particular importance to examine a less well-known work of Joyce Johnson, an author who positioned herself at the center of the Beat Generation,11 and whose earlier works today are out of print or difficult to find.12 In addition, the decision to critically analyze Johnson’s work with regard to Kerouac’s On the Road is of even greater significance considering their two-year romantic relationship.13 Although the Beat Generation was adept at promoting homosocial voices, Johnson was one of the few women at the heart of the Beat Generation who was motivated by Kerouac to write14 and succeeded in publishing novels that –in line with the work of the male Beat – depicted the struggle against conservative American society. Despite the fact that Johnson, like many writers of the movement’s second
8 A. R. Lee, The Beat Generation Writers (London; East Haven, Conn.: Pluto Press, 1996), 201. 9 G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), ix. 10 G. Thomson, “Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats,” Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Vol. 13(1)(2011): 2. 11 G. Thomson, “Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats,” Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Vol. 13(1)(2011): 4. 12 G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 4. 13 G. Thomson, “Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats”, Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Vol. 13(1)(2011): 4. 14 J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
5 generation, undeniably was largely influenced by seminal works of Ginsberg, and Burroughs, and her former lover Kerouac15, she nevertheless decided to move away from the male Beats’ sexist construction of male identity16 and to formulate her own more feminist response to Kerouac’s On the Road. As a result, this analytical reading will allow us to study the position of the woman in a literary work of an iconic male Beat author like Kerouac and a female author who extensively has been guided and influenced by the former, yet who has reinterpreted his teachings and made them her own. In sum, a thematic analysis of both novels will allow us to more fully comprehend the precarious position of the female not only within the “square” American society in the decades following the Second World War, but also within a movement that promoted individual freedom, sexual liberation and the rejection of some white, middle-class values, yet, that in this regard still held women to a different social standard than men17. In this way, Johnson writing herself into the Beat and postwar literary history could be seen as feminist act of subjectivity which connects twentieth-century first- and second-wave feminisms.18 As a result, the evaluation of Johnson’s Bad Connections will allow us to illustrate how, whilst struggling herself with gender inequality promulgated by the Beat Generation as illustrated in On the Road, female Beats such as Johnson attempted to move away from the objectified and flat representation of women by her former lover and sought to present a more multifaceted image of women who were struggling with self-definition in an evolving society.
15 G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 11. 16 R. Bennett, “Teaching the Beat Generation to Generation X,” in The Beat Generation. Critical Essays, ed. K. Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-20. 17 G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 1-50; 189. 18 Ibid., 4.
6 2 Theoretical framework
2.1 The Beat Generation as a male-centered social and literary movement
For more than half a century, writers and critics have been exploring the controversial nature of the concepts “Beat Generation” and “Beat literature”.19 In this way the, Beats are often defined as a “criticism of American complacency under the Ike-Nixon regime, an expression of new forms of prose, and poetry and an exploration of consciousness, which joined the dissent of existing Bohemias [...] to produce a distinct style of literature and living, based on disaffiliation, poverty, anarchic individualism and communal living”, marked by “a relaxation of “square” (puritan, middle-class, respectable) attitudes towards sex, drugs, religion and art”20. Although others at the time often defined the movement in a more colored way and described them for example as a pitiful and passive group of masochistic exhibitionists who questioned the values of society, rejected the American consumer culture, and hated conformity,21 scores of journalists and scholars continually have offered their different interpretations on the Beat movement and its literature.22 Even though the evaluation of the Beat Generation has often been a source of controversy, there has been a general consensus on the raison d’être and scene of emergence of the Beat movement. The Beat Generation took shape within the post-1945 American society, in which a consumer culture that invited conformity alongside restrictive sexual mores and which was transgression-averse prevailed. The America of the mid-1940s was a place of rapid political and cultural transition. The iconic figures of the Beat Generation were children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, grew up to witness America’s involvement in the Second World War, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and came of age with the dawn of the Cold War. Domestically, however, the postwar era brought about a rapid improvement in economic conditions and a re-adoption of a consumer culture that encouraged the standardization of family life and the belief that the United States was entering a golden age in which science would offer increased leisure and luxury for all.
19 A. Charters, foreword to Encyclopedia of Beat Literature, ed. K. Hemmer (New York: Facts On File, 2007), vii. 20 D. Daiches, M. Bradbury and E. Mottram, The Avenel Companion to English and American Literature (New York: Avenel Books: Distributed by Crown Publishers, 1981), 28. 21 P. O’Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around,” LIFE magazine, Vol. 47(22) (1959): 130. 22 A. Charters, “Foreword,” in Encyclopedia of Beat Literature, ed. K. Hemmer. (New York: Facts On File, 2007), viii.
7 Yet, despite the general mood of economic confidence, the Cold War created an atmosphere of fear that was marked by intolerance for even the slightest suspicion of political dissidence. Nevertheless, regardless of the kind of conformity increasingly demanded by state and corporate authority, resistance surfaced in a variety of places. In this way, the 1940s were also an age of great artistic innovation that challenged the orthodoxies of the previous decade (e.g. the birth of Bebop and Abstract Expressionism), which offers an indication of the zeitgeist that would shape the ideology of the early Beat Generation.23 By and large, the Beat Generation was a distinct reaction not only to the reactionary politics, lifestyle of the American ruling class and sections of the middle class, but also to the kind of academic poetry and academic literature that was being pushed as great works by the American establishment.24 Instead, the alternatives they sought to this postwar America were inspired by British Romanticism (e.g. William Blake), American Transcendentalism (e.g. Walt Whitman), earlier twentieth-century American writers such as Henry Miller, and contemporaneous figures in other genres such as Marlon Brando and Jackson Pollock.25 Despite being remembered as a product and reaction against the conformity of the Eisenhower years of the 1950s, it was only after the success of On the Road in 1957-8 that Beat became beatnik and its most prominent figures became nationally and internationally known. More than a decade before, however, the leading figures had met and produced a loose artistic manifesto.26 In this respect, the Beat Generation can be understood as a literary movement that referred to a group of friends who had worked together on poetry, prose and cultural conscience from the mid-1940s until the term gained national attention in the late 1950s. The group originally consisted of pioneers such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, John Clellon Holmes, and Allan Ginsberg.27 The particular phrase “Beat Generation” then arose out of a conversation on the nature of generations between Jack Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, during which Kerouac, while recollecting the glamour of the Lost Generation, described his generation as “nothing but a beat generation”. Later, Kerouac, in an attempt to counteract the abuse of the term in the media, tried to indicate the correct sense of the word by pointing out its connections to words
23 C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 1-24. 24 A. R. Lee, The Beat Generation Writers (London; East Haven, Conn.: Pluto Press, 1996), 163. 25 C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 10-11. 26 Ibid., 25. 27 A. Ginsberg, foreword to The Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation, ed. A. Waldman (Massachusetts: Sambhala Publications, Inc., 1996), xiv.
8 like “beatitude” and “beatific”- the necessary beatness or darkness that precedes opening up to light, egolessness, and giving room for religious illumination.28 Fast-moving as they were, this initially select group of creative individuals were in the vanguard of some sweeping and far-reaching changes in the arts and in the social sphere.29 The fact that many Americans during the 1950s felt a sense of widespread – and often hidden or articulated – alienation helps to explain the transformation of the Beats from a small group of artists working mainly in New York and San Francisco to artists suddenly reaching out to a fully fledged “Generation” that saw works like On the Road and Howl as the articulation of their discontents. As a result, a whole new wave of Beat writers emerged during the late 1950s and early 1960s of whom many were born in the early 1930s. This second generation of Beats, however, was represented by a more diverse group of voices of which some quickly became integral members of the core Beat community, whereas others either worked in other geographical regions, remained relatively unknown or sought acceptance elsewhere. Some of the notable second generation Beats – all male according to most of the reference works – would include writers such as Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Ken Kesey, and more generally, figures such as Bob Dylan.30 What is important in this respect is that their work and activities, together with the work of the original Beats, helped to catalyze what would be called the second phase of the impact of the Beat Generation: the controversial counterculture of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. The influence of the Beats, who were considered the prototypes and mentors of this anti-establishment cultural phenomenon, could be observed in nearly every aspect of the counterculture, such as the rejection of commercial values and of conceptions of status and career, the interest in psychedelic drugs as a mode of spiritual exploration, the fascination with Oriental and spiritual religions, the pacifist-anarchist political orientation, the emphasis on natural and primitive models of community, and the rejection of traditional American society altogether.31 The Beats started challenging the stifling conformity and thereby gave way to various forms of grass-roots activism that since
28 Ibid., xiii-xiv. 29 G. Stephenson, The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 13. 30 Ibid., 13.; C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 119-124. 31 G. Stephenson, The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation. (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 13-15; J. McGeehan and M. Gall, Let’s Review: U.S. History and Government (Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s Educational Series, 2001), 524-525.
9 have challenged and altered many fundamental assumptions about American culture, from gender roles to foreign policy32. However, the enthusiasm for and extending appeal of the Beat Generation was not shared nor appreciated by everyone. While writers who earlier struggled to have their works published were now increasingly enjoying widespread support, conservative critics were more anxious to protect their own version of American culture and therefore labeled anything that challenged that very culture deviant or un-American. While the Beat Generation went to great lengths to explain the spirituality at the heart of their work and sincerity of their vision, the media were rather interested in satirizing a community that they characterized as lazy, inarticulate, and a threat to national stability.33 In a context in which every deviation from the norms of American life was identified as part of a wider communist conspiracy to undermine American values, “beat” soon became “beatnik,” of which the suffix sneered at these young bohemians being as “far out” as Sputnik and associated them with idleness, hoboism, non- patriotism, and, ultimately, communism. Ironically enough, the transformation of “beat” into “beatnik” sparked the commercialization of and capitalization on the rebellious image of the Beats. The beatnik was a caricature stripped bare of the personal idiosyncrasies of the Beats and represented a marketing opportunity for corporations that increasingly became aware of the youth market.34 Despite being “pioneers of what would eventually become the counterculture,”35 Bennett emphasizes that the commercialized and stereotyped images conveyed by the media have led many to develop a rather naïve and romanticized view of countercultural movements. The cultural complexities of the 1950s are often misunderstood and cannot be reduced to a simplistic confrontation between the Beats and the Squares, the latter in this case defined by values such as an all-consuming work ethic, sexual repression, cultural xenophobia, militaristic patriotism, and suburban materialism.36 The “square” and Beat worlds not only crossed and interpenetrated but also enabled and sustained each other in ways that
32 G. Stephenson, The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation. (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 13-15; J. McGeehan and M. Gall, Let’s Review: U.S. History and Government (Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s Educational Series, 2001), 524-525. 33 C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 121. 34 Ibid., 121-122; J. Campbell, This is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 245. 35 D. Halberstam, The fifties (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993), 295. 36 R. Bennett, “Teaching the Beat Generation to Generation X,” in The Beat Generation. Critical Essays, ed. K. Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-20.
10 neither side would readily admit. This implies that the reality of the stereotyped images of “square” America that again and again have been delivered to us by the media was far more painful and complex and marked by more violence, terror or misery than might have appeared at first sight. In like manner, the Beat Generation cannot simply be reduced to a movement that entirely rejected the dominant, white, middle-class, and suburban “square” culture of 1950s America. This suggests that the Beat Generation was not always that “far-out” and “free” as it presented itself.37 One of the repercussions of this oversimplified contemporary perspective on the relationship between the Beats and the traditionalist society is that contemporary America often remembers and celebrates only certain dimensions of the Beat Generation such as its advocacy of recreational drug use and sexual experimentation. Besides the Beat Generation’s often meager contribution to the Civil Rights Movement, one of the crucial elements that has unfortunately been overlooked and has remained uncriticized is its sexist construction of masculine identity.38 Although the Beat Generation denounced the values of conservative America and works like On the Road, Howl, and Naked Lunch challenged a prevailing national climate of racism and homophobia, the Beats depicted women in traditional gender roles.39 Likewise, while the Beats were adept at promoting homosocial (and often homosexual) voices, the construction of a Beat canon has tended to marginalize women.40 In this respect, one could argue that the focus on masculinity and consequent marginalization of women both within their writing and in the movement and the omission of women within the Beat legacy may be due to male dominance among the Beats. Indeed, Lee affirms that the Beats have never been seen as a movement engaging with women or responsive to feminist critique. The discourse, definition and the often punishing lifestyle were set by men, even more than in other literary avant-gardes since the male members tended to live together and support each other actively.41 Ecstasy for these men was to a large degree phallic and
37 Ibid., 1-20; C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 119-126. 38 R. Bennett, “Teaching the Beat Generation to Generation X,” in The Beat Generation. Critical Essays, ed. K. Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-20. 39 A. Charters, foreword to Girls who wore black: women writing the beat generation, ed. R. Johnson and N. G. McCampbell (New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 2002), ix. 40 C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 123. 41 A. R. Lee, The Beat Generation Writers (London; East Haven, Conn.: Pluto Press, 1996), 178-179.
11 associated with the Greek connections between knowledge and sperm.42 As a result, women to a large degree were marginalized from their existence and were relegated to the role of caregivers or sex objects.43 Additionally, given that some of the pivotal figures of the Beat Generation such as Kerouac, Cassady, and Ginsberg all engaged in homosexual relationships,44 one could argue that this excessive celebration of masculinity and disparagement of femininity was a natural effect of their predilection for men. Nevertheless, the omission of female Beats from the Beat canon should by no means imply that we should belittle the contributions of female writers to the legacy of the Beat Generation. Although a considerable number of women writers were part of the scene, but dismissed or overlooked, they did write privately and publicly. As could be expected, several of the women writers of the time rejected the Beat category or resisted their investiture as Beat writers. Many of them refused to be silenced by assumptions about their fitness as subjects and authors of Beat writing, and about their literary strategies.45 In this respect, among the first generation of women Beats were Madeline Gleason, Carolyn Cassady, Ruth Weiss, Carol Bergé, and Helen Adams. The women writers of the second generation, a decade or more younger than the first generation Beats included Joanna McClure, Leonore Kandel, Elise Cowen, Diane di Prima, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Joyce Johnson, Ann Charters, and Brenda Frazer. Interestingly enough, the work of this second generation is marked by a radical critique of traditional literary genres and forms that have been based on women’s subordination to men. The third and last generation of Beat writers was born during World War II and came of age in the 1960s. While the second generation of female Beats anticipated the second wave of feminist activity of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this third generation clarified the Beat movement’s continuity with the hippie counterculture and progressive activist movements.46 Paradoxically, it was the Beat masculinist insistence on individual truth
42 As evidenced in Greek art, homosexuality was widely practiced in Ancient Greece. These behaviors were based on a belief that semen was a source of knowledge and, as such, sexual relations a means of passing on wisdom (Burns and Covington 213). This is a particularly evident theme in much of Ginsberg’s poetry (Swartz 106). 43 O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 17. 44 See Stimpson (1982) for a study of homosexuality among the major writers in Beat culture. 45 G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), ix-xiii. 46 H. Mlakar, Merely being there is not enough: women's roles in autobiographical texts by female Beat writers (Boca Raton: Dissertation.com, 2008, 2007), 17-18; G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 3-34.
12 that included feminism in its reach. In addition, these female writers literally and figuratively wrote themselves into Beat and postwar literary history, which could be seen as a (proto)feminist act of subjectivity that connects twentieth-century first- and second wave feminisms.47 Even though the female Beats have produced a variety of written work, their contribution to the literary canon has often been neglected and insufficiently reflected upon in academic research. The fact the literary works of a prominent female Beat such as Joyce Johnson will be reissued decades after their first publication48 might suggest that there is a revival of interest in these formerly forgotten texts. Therefore, a reexamination of one of her books will help us to better understand the position of the female within this iconic Beat movement and counterculture and will enable us to gain a significant insight into the status and psyche of the female within the considerably paternalistic yet ever-evolving American postwar society and counterculture.
2.2 Gender during postwar America and during the counterculture
While examining a group of writers whose texts and attitudes generally fostered a domineering patriarchal attitude towards women, it is crucial to perceive and comprehend the nature and significance of the consciousness that was operating underneath the texts and that reflected the zeitgeist of postwar America. In this respect, the recognition of the Beat movement as a boy gang implicitly requires us to reflect upon how the cultural discourse of gender affected the real political subject –man, woman. What did it feel like to be a woman at that particular period in time? How did the postwar American society construct and maintain the way the sexes were supposed to define themselves? How did the Beat Generation then responded to the prevailing conception of masculinity and femininity?49 It is vital to explore the position of women and the social construction of gender within post-World War II America and the counterculture in order to better grasp the male Beats’ attitude towards women and “square” society as well as the female struggle against white male supremacist patriarchy.
47 G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), ix-xi, 3-18. 48 J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014. 49 A. R. Lee, The Beat Generation Writers (London; East Haven, Conn.: Pluto Press, 1996), 178-179.
13 The first generation of Beat writers grew up at a time during which most of the adult population was trapped in an intricate edifice of social conformity made of fear, suppressed by hostility and the simple desire to get along. In addition, it was a time when many adult Americans as a result of the post-World War II economic expansion experienced personal prosperity and some degree of affluence for the first time in their lives. As a consequence, the middle class was expanded by many millions who were still well aware of the extreme poverty they had endured during the Great Depression. Most of them had worked hard and waited a long time to finally get were they were. Once comfortably established, they embraced the values and symbols of middle-class life with all the fervor of religious converts.50 Meyerowitz argues that, “for some, this postwar story is a romance steeped in nostalgic longing for an allegedly simpler, happier, and more prosperous time [whereas] for others, it is an ironic story of declension, in which the housewife finds herself trapped in a domestic cage after spreading her wings during World War II.”51 According to Meyerowitz, either perspective reduces the multidimensional complexity of the past to a snapshot of middle-class women in suburban homes. What is often overlooked is that in the years following World War II many women were not white, middle-class, married, and suburban, whereas many of the women who did fit this stereotype in fact were neither wholly domestic nor quiescent.52 Although postwar culture was not as inextricably tied to the domestic ideal as some historians may have pictured, many sources, however, agree that postwar conservatism shaped women’s identities to a certain extent, weakened their limited protests, and contained their activities within traditional bounds. An early and influential formulation of this position appeared in Betty Friedan’s bestselling liberal feminist controversial work The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. In her book, Friedan criticized the conservative ideal promoted by educators, advertisers, and social scientists that damaged American women and trapped them in the suburban home.53 In like manner, Reumann adds that this postwar conservatism also deeply affected the way sexuality was brought into the public arena in the decade following the war. As a result, in the postwar years, political and sexual respectabilities were closely linked and the social and political order that many saw as crucial to national stability was based upon deeply polarized gender roles and a conservative deployment of sexual energy. Taking into account the Cold War ethos, sexual deviance – whether understood as
50 B. Cook, The Beat Generation (New York: Scribner, 1971), 10. 51 J. J. Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 1-12. 52 Ibid., 1-12. 53 Ibid., 1-12.
14 homosexual activity, promiscuity, interracial sex, or any other arrangement that violated the prescribed path of monogamous sexual expression within marriage – was coupled rhetorically with political subversion.54 As could be expected, the postwar prescriptive literature targeted women in particular. Not only unwed mothers, but also women who sought or performed abortions, prostitutes, and lesbians challenged the dominant sexual order.55 At the same time, however, the marital bond and the sexual satisfaction identified with it were viewed as cornerstones of family happiness and – as a consequence – national stability.56 Nevertheless, as mentioned above, there were plenty of women that did not fit the conservative stereotyped image often portrayed to have been prevalent during postwar America. Meyerowitz emphasizes that despite the conservatism of the era the activism of postwar women was wide- ranging. Women of varied background, for instance, participated in trade unions, the peace movement, and civic reform. Yet it should be noted that – as in earlier eras – they rarely achieved positions of leadership in organizations in which they worked alongside men.57 A particular group that self-consciously challenged the middle-class culture was the Beat generation bohemians. While the movement was largely dominated by men young women were attracted to it too. In this respect, white middle-class women bohemians expressed strong objection against the restrictions of the domestic ideal and pursued “authenticity” in the Beat culture, even though they not openly attacked its sexist attitudes towards women.58 As a result, their works represented women asserting autonomy from the 1950s gender roles, as well as from the Beat Generation’s male-defined requirements and domination, by appropriating, transforming, or correcting Beat discourses to inscribe their own subjectivity.59 In this respect, the work of the second-generation women Beat writers in particular was marked by a radical critique on the narrative subordination of women and by the rejection of the 1950s “feminine mystique,” which has been interpreted as a significant move towards the emergence of the second-wave women’s movement. Betty Friedan, however, saw the Beat generation as another product of American culture’s iniquitous sexism
54 M. G. Reumann, American sexual character: sex, gender, and national identity in the Kinsey reports (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1-16. 55 J. J. Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 9. 56 M. G. Reumann, American sexual character: sex, gender, and national identity in the Kinsey reports (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1-16. 57 J. J. Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 1-12. 58 Ibid., 1-12. 59 G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 21.
15 and the act of joining the movement as a defeat of 1950s woman by patriarchal culture.60 Although not all female Beats read The Feminine Mystique when it came out, they disproved the author’s skepticism, for they saw and rejected the repressive gender codes she documented in her book, and their dissent against the traditional values women were to conform to helped to seed the second-wave feminism.61 As a result, the radical questioning of gender roles that was initially being carried out by isolated scholars and marginalized groups such as the female Beats eventually received national attention and coincided with the emergence of political movements that came into being in the 1960s.62 Whereas first wave feminists were inspired by the abolition movement, their great-granddaughters were swept into feminism by the civil rights movement, the attendant discussion of principles such as equality and justice, and the revolutionary ferment caused by protests against the Vietnam War.63 In addition, the fact that women were educated during the 1960s at a higher rate than ever before, together with the start of a sexual revolution aided by the birth control pill and later by Roe v Wade (1973)64 increased women’s sexual independence and professional career options.65 Further, others argue that the seeds of women’s liberation that was prevalent during this counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s were also sown during the first several years of the John F. Kennedy’s presidency (1961- 1963), which in part influenced the politically based women’s movement.66 Although women during the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s achieved great leaps of liberation, they were
60 Ibid., 13-14; B. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), 74. 61 G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 12-15; J. J. Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1994); W. Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon, 1992). 62 L. J. Nicholson, The second wave feminism reader: a reader in feminist theory (London: Routledge, 1997), 1-5. 63 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “feminism,” accessed April 26, 2014, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/724633/feminism. 64 A Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion (Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “Roe v. Wade,” accessed May 23, 2014, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/506705/Roe-v-Wade.) 65 J. Holt, “The Ideal Woman,” California State University Stanislaus. Web. 26 April 2014, 2,
16 still bound by the oppression of the domestic ideal of the previous decade.67 From the moment this new feminism emerged it met immediate resistance by both men and women. In this way, the rise of the counterculture also reinvigorated a coalition of American conservatives often referred to as the New Right. Many sympathizers of this conservative wing were frustrated with a perceived decline in morality during the 1960s and 1970s, including rampant drug use and more open and public displays of sexuality. Because of this reactionary backlash, it comes as no surprise that many of the women who rejected these conservative notions still struggled with the dilemma of how to achieve greater power and fulfillment within a culture that was (and still is) dominated by men.68 Likewise, women such as Kate Millet (and many other women affiliated to the emergent radical feminism of the late 1960s) in her work Sexual Politics (1969) denounced the fact that the counterculture’s advocacy of resistance to hegemonic norms did not preclude its complicity with mainstream imposition of patriarchal authority. Indeed, Millet rightly so hinted at women’s discontent with countercultural, as well as hegemonic, norms.69 Whereas Betty Friedan had written about the problem that had no name, Kate Millett named it, illustrated it, exposed it and analyzed it70. Millett showed that sexual practice was constructed out of patriarchal power relations and both reflected and served to uphold male domination. She wrote from within a feminist movement in the US developing out of the left with outrage at the way that women were treated by the left, particularly as objects for sexual use71. It can thus be argued the position of women within the counterculture tends to be oversimplified. On the one hand women were fighting for and gaining new levels of freedom; on the other hand, they had to face a renewed wave of conservatism that immediately denounced these newly gained privileges and experienced that the left was not always as liberal as they presented themselves. As a result, it seems quite
67 J. Holt, “The Ideal Woman,” California State University Stanislaus. Web. 26 April 2014, 2.
17 plausible that women in the midst of this counterculture and “counter counterculture” must have felt quite torn between the dilemma of whether to rebel against “square” society or to conform to traditional values.
1.3 Women Beat writers in the limelight: Joyce Johnson
Although the work of female Beat writers has often been overlooked or been lost from the record, some of these women have attempted to (re)tell Beat generation life by using the genre of the memoir, a narrative discourse in which they are the Beat subjects and yet still women colonized by the norms of Beat culture. Considering the public’s over-interest in biographical aspects of the Beat Generation, these women’s self-inscription in their memoirs ironically has been a means of placing themselves in the limelight. One of the women who is generally seen as a key member of the second generation of Beat writers and who has used the literary genre of the memoir to tell Beat tales to her own ends is Joyce Johnson.72 Although Johnson in the past claimed to have been an observer rather than an active member within the Beat movement73, her two-year relationship with key Beat figure Jack Kerouac and her fiction and non-fiction writing have undeniably enabled her to foreground herself as one of the prominent women of the Beat Generation. This vantage point allows us to get a more nuanced view of the male-dominated Beat Generation and the women associated with it. With the 1983 publication of Johnson’s ironically titled Minor Characters, a memoir of her experiences as young writer coming up in the nascent Beat scene in New York City, women associated with the movement became visible.74 In her story, Johnson shows what it was like to be a young woman coming of age in the tumultuous and transitional 1950s, as the youth of postwar America chafed against the constraints of a buttoned-up, conservative society.75
72 G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 3-41. 73 G. Thomson, “Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats”, Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Vol. 13(1)(2011): 4. 74 G. N. McCampbell, and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 181; G. Thomson, “Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats”, Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Vol. 13(1)(2011): 4; G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004). 75 B. Knight, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, And Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (Berkeley, Calif.: Conari Press, 1996), 167.
18 Strangely enough, Joyce Johnson (b. 1935) – born as Joyce Glassman – grew up on West 116th street just around the corner from the apartment salon of William and Joan Vollmer Adams Burroughs where key Beat figures such as Kerouac and Ginsberg were frequent visitors during the late 1940s. Born into a hardworking, rather conformist Jewish family, she devoted her adolescence to theatre and the piano, after which she quit her composition studies and decided to write. She left Barnard College in 1954 one course short of the degree requirements, found a job in publishing, and began to focus on becoming a novelist. Through her Barnard classmate Elise Cowen, who was in a relationship with Allan Ginsberg, Johnson became romantically involved with Jack Kerouac from 1957 to 1958 and found her way to the heart of the Beat scene.76 Although recent anthologies such as McCampbell and Johnson’s Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (2002) and Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (2004) have tried to reevaluate the literary works of female Beats, Johnson emphasizes that it seems to be rather hard for the present generation to understand women’s relationships with the Beats.77 She argues that not just within the Beat Generation, but in general, there “was a pervasively bad attitude towards women at [that] time […] throughout the culture as there still is today in America.”78 According to Johnson, women were to conform to the traditionalist ideals, since “the Depression decade, when millions of the hungry, homeless, and unemployed had roamed the U.S. landscape, hopped freight, slept in open fields, was still grimly, unnostalgically alive in people’s memories” and the “status and security [that] had been so recently won […] [therefore] still seemed tenuously held.”79 Not surprisingly, nonconformity, in this dissertation defined as a rejection of the all- consuming work ethic, sexual repression, cultural xenophobia, militaristic patriotism, and suburban materialism that marked postwar society, was not easy80. To be unmarried, a poet, an artist, to go on the road was doubly shocking for women, and social condemnation was
76 J. Johnson, Minor Characters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983); B. Knight, Women of the Beat generation: the writers, artists, and muses at the heart of a revolution (Berkeley, Calif.: Conari Press, 1996), 167-168; G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 181. 77 Joyce Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014. 78 Ibid. 79 J. Johnson, Minor Characters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 25. 80 R. Bennett, “Teaching the Beat Generation to Generation X,” in The Beat Generation. Critical Essays, ed. K. Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-20.
19 high.81 Johnson, too, confirms that women who followed a different path than the one prescribed by traditionalist society often faced cultural barriers caused by gender. In this respect, she experienced it to be “very difficult for women to be writers, just in general in those days.”82 Personally, Johnson got her biggest discouragement about being a writer while being in college. Going to an all women’s college, she solely had male professors who instructed the female students in writing, yet at the same time discouraged them from ever thinking about pursuing the idea of becoming a writer. According to these male scholars, the things women wrote about were of no interest.83 Taking into account the derogatory attitudes of men towards their (literary) capacities these women had to deal with on a regular basis, it does not surprise that female writers such as Elise Cowen, Hettie Jones, and at some times even Joyce Johnson, often did not really talk much about their writing and instead preferred to keep it to themselves. As she explains, they, as women writers, all went to reading after reading, yet only male writers got up the stage and read.84 Contrary to what is done in the few works published upon the issue of gender within the Beat scene, Johnson deems it rather unjust to draw a generalized and destructive conclusion from what is often considered the patriarchal and sexist attitude of male Beat writers towards women. According to her, it is of crucial importance to take into consideration the atmosphere of repression and conformity that was so prevalent at the time. Women’s relationships with the Beats were not – as some of the anthologies seem to suggest – entirely negative, but had their positive aspects too. The message to liberate oneself from conformity as is so often repeated in a fundamental Beat work like On the Road was not just directed to men, but also to women.85 Along these lines, Johnson urges to abstain from reducing all male Beats to the same simplistic macho caricature. She therefore stresses that not all male Beats shared the same disparaging attitude towards women. To her, Jack Kerouac, in this respect was different from the other Beats. According to Johnson, “he was very encouraging and urging me to give myself over to the writing more, […] to create more space to write, […] [and even] to quit my job. […] He read what I wrote and said good things about it.”86 Nevertheless, Johnson acknowledges that other Beats simply were not interested in her literary work or that of other
81 B. Knight, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (Berkeley, Calif.: Conari Press, 1996), 4. 82 Joyce Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid.
20 women writers. A key figure within the Beat Generation such as Allen Ginsberg, for example, cancelled out women in general, something which according to Johnson must have had much to do with his homosexuality and consequent predilection for men. In addition, she argues that this general lack of interest of male Beats in the work of women writers and the fact that these women often have been overlooked could be explained by their coming of age at a relatively late stage. Whereas the prominent figures of the Beat scene had been writing for quite a while, Johnson argues that she and her female contemporaries at the time just were in a different place with their writing. In this respect, she attributes this lack of attention to their work simply to the fact that writers like herself and Hettie Jones only developed into mature writers in their late forties, years after the publication of some of the most-celebrated Beat novels.87 For the simple reason that Joyce Johnson was so closely connected with the Beat scene and comprehended the zeitgeist of the moment, she seems to be able to put things more in perspective and therefore has a more nuanced view of the portrayal of gender roles by the Beats. As a result, unlike most feminists (and most probably unlike most readers today) who consider a pivotal Beat novel like On the Road to be a specimen product of male hegemony, Johnson is able to make an appraisal of it that is more generous and somehow more maturely balanced. In this way, she makes a point of drawing attention to the social context in which the book was written and to the sense of prophecy it pioneered.88 Yet, this does not imply that she minimizes the difficulties she and other women who aspired to write had to face. In this way, it took Johnson quite a while to produce another novel after her first work Come and Join the Dance89 (1962)90–generally considered to be the first Beat novel by a woman- for the simple reason that she, as a woman, just got swamped by the demands on her, such as taking care of a small child and having a demanding job, without any household help.91 Even as a writer during the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, generally considered being a time in which ideas of liberation were more widely embraced92 she argues that, “it was much harder to do what you wanted than what you had to do.”93 In this case, Johnson goes even further by arguing that to her the “sixties […] seemed anticlimactic, for all their fireworks”. She saw the
87 Ibid. 88 R. Rogoveanu, “Reconsidering Margins – The Women of the Beat Generation,” Annals of Ovidius University Constanta - Philology, No. 16 (2005): 364. 89 Published under the name Joyce Glassman. 90 G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 181. 91 J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014. 92 C. Gair, The American Counterculture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 93 J. Johnson, Minor Characters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 175.
21 “hippies replace beatniks” and “observed the emergence of a ‘lifestyle’.” To her, “the old intensities were blanding out into ‘Do your own thing’,” which she saw as “the commandment of a freedom excised of struggle,” as a “revolution [that] was in the wind, but [that] [would] never [come][…].”94
2.4 Bad Connections
As one of few the women who found her way through the heart of the Beat movement,95 Joyce Johnson succeeded in sharing some of her experiences of being a woman who strayed from the path of conventionality in her literary works. Although being more generally known for her more recent memoirs Minor Characters (1983), Missing Men (2004), and The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (2012)96, Johnson stood out from other Beat women as she got a book contract at a rather young age and consequently was able to publish three novels.97 In this way, she published her first novel Come and Join the Dance at the age of twenty-six. Her second novel, Bad Connections, came out in 1978 after a hiatus from writing during which she was widowed, then remarried and had a child, and began her editorial career. Her third novel, In the Night Café, a portion of which won the O’Henry Prize for short fiction, was published in 1987. All three New York novels map key cultural and gender discourses of their eras, portraying adventurous middle-class white women in the 1950s and 1960s.98 Although Johnson is well known for her famous literary connections, it should be noted that her works are of even greater significance since they dissipate the silence generally attributed to the female character in postwar literature.99 While Johnson made history by publishing the first Beat Generation novel by and about a Beat woman, all three novels have
94 Ibid., 276. 95 B. Knight, Women of the Beat generation: the writers, artists, and muses at the heart of a revolution (Berkeley, Calif.: Conari Press, 1996), 167-168. 96 “About the Author,” Joyce Johnson Books. Web. 02 May 2014.
22 been out of print for many years and have been largely invisible in discussions of postwar American women writers, and even to feminist critics who have begun to identify and assess works by women Beat writers.100 Although McCampbell and Johnson were one of the few scholars to critically analyze Johnson’s Come and Join the Dance and its pivotal emendations of the Beat field and its signification of a feminist movement in the 1950s,101 it should be noted that in particular her second work Bad Connections has generally been largely overlooked in critical evaluation within the academic field. In this case, it is quite self-evident that the general unavailability of the novel in part accounts for the lack of critical academic attention it has received, yet the particular sociopolitical context in which the book was written and in which the story is set would undeniably offer valuable insights in the zeitgeist of the counterculture and the mind of one the few women who was at the center of the Beat movement. Unlike Johnson’s first novel, which is considered to be rather a proto-feminist novel,102 her second work seems to have a more outspoken feminist agenda. Indeed, Bad Connections is a novel that is set within the counterculture and is to a certain degree based upon the author’s own experiences.103 Just like her two other (semi)fictional works, Bad Connections features a female bohemian who is struggling with the newly gained, yet still controversial position of women within the context of the American counterculture of which nearly every aspect is marked by the influence of the Beat Generation.104 In this way, the main character Molly leaves her unhappy and destructive, yet very traditional marriage. Nevertheless, after she finally found the courage to liberate herself, she would quickly find herself trapped in another unhealthy relationship with her bohemian lover Conrad. What’s more is that in this story we do not only witness the female character struggling with her newly gained freedom within the context of a counterculture inspired by the Beats,105 even men such as the left-wing activist Conrad or the university professor Malcolm seem to have difficulties with the discrepancy between life as a non-conformist and leading a life according to the norms of
100 Ibid., 69-71; L. Barton, “I never met anyone else like Jack Kerouac,” The Guardian, 12 October 2007. Web. 02 May 2014.
23 traditional conformity. According to Joyce Johnson, “this was an experience that women [and apparently men too in some cases] had, because they would liberate themselves, but they would still want to have men in their lives. And then they would find that the male-female relationship had still a long way to go.”106 After – literally and figuratively – a long journey, Molly seems to have come to terms with herself and has had an emotional breakthrough, after which she decides to leave both her lovers behind in the hope of living a “life uncomplicated by longings” together with her son Matthew.107 According to Smårs, the author of one of the only sources that to a certain degree includes Bad Connections, “the novel tells the story of complicated relationships, of ordinary society mixing with the external part of the normative community. The progressive academic, represented by Conrad, is put next to feminism, bohemia, and other things [that] can be regarded as commonplace.”108 Although Bad Connections is set within the American counterculture, the story in multiple respects reminds of Kerouac’s pivotal road tale of the Beat Generation. In a similar fashion as the male main characters in On the Road struggle with straying from the path of 1950s conformity, the female protagonist in Johnson’s Bad Connections, too, is faced with the difficulties of liberating herself from the life that traditionally is laid out for women. In addition, despite the fact that Johnson argues that she did not feel consciously influenced by Kerouac in this novel,109 there are various other thematic elements to be found in the book that remind us of Kerouac’s road narrative. Not only does Johnson create a female protagonist whose journey leads her to San Francisco and Mexico, some of the places that played a crucial role in On the Road, she also incorporates the Beat Generation into the novel through allusions to “some of the best minds of her generation”110111 and to authors like Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway, whose work exerted an influence on Beat authors like Kerouac.112 Taking into consideration the fact that Bad Connections is loosely based upon
106 J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014. 107 J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978): 223. 108 L. Smårs, “Female Conditions: Social Distancing and Beatnik Culture in Joyce Johnson's Come and Join the Dance, Bad Connections and In the Night Café,” Dissertation in Literature – Department of Literature at Uppsala University Page. 2012. Web. 02 May 2014, 5.
24 Johnson’s own experiences after some years after her first encounter with the Beats113, analyzing the novel in terms of the portrayal of women sheds a light on how a woman, imbued with the ideas of this particular movement, portrays a female protagonist in large part on the margin of the rapidly evolving American society. Considering the fact that Johnson’s point of view on life was undeniably influenced by Kerouac and the Beats, and their societal attitudes towards women, it is worth examining how Johnson in this respect (whether deliberately or not) decides to foreground a woman and consequently moves away from the flat and superficial representation of women by a male Beat like Kerouac. Ironically, although most of Johnson’s non-fiction work recounts her experiences as one of the few women within the Beat Generation and her relationship with Kerouac114, all of her fictional prose narratives seem to be a (proto)feminist reaction to the patriarchal and sexist construction of women depicted in the work of a male Beat like Jack Kerouac115. Her hipster protagonist in Bad Connections reconfigures the dominant Beat discourse and intervenes in reactionary Beat culture as well as the establishment culture constructions of female inferiority and marginality, thereby enlarging Beat movement radicalism116. As a result, Bad Connections could be regarded as a female response to Kerouac’s On the Road, yet this time depicting the confusion and controversy accosting the white, middle-class protagonist in a still patriarchal sixties context as she struggles to maintain a home for her child and participate in the liberation movements of her day with a free sex life and enlightened political and spiritual consciousness117. The spiritual journey of Johnson’s female protagonist could then be compared to the journey of the male protagonists in On the Road, yet, unlike Kerouac, Johnson takes a political stance towards the attitude towards women in a society – as mentioned earlier – heavily influenced by the philosophy of the Beat Generation as promoted in On the Road.
113 J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014. 114 “Joyce Johnson Books,” Joyce Johnson Books. Web. 02 May 2014.
25 2.5 On the Road
Arguably, Jack Kerouac was the central visionary and spokesperson of the Beats. Willingly or unwillingly, since the publication of what is considered to be the counterculture bible, Kerouac became a cultural “hero” who gave spirit to an age and an identity to those resisters who struggled against the forces of postwar conformity that can be defined by values such as an all-consuming work ethic, sexual repression, cultural xenophobia, militaristic patriotism and suburban materialism.118 Born in Lowell, MA, in 1922 as the son of French Canadian immigrants and consequently distanced from the “norms” of American life by a combination of language, religion and custom, Kerouac had always found himself to be on the margins of dominant US culture.119 Yet, it was his enrollment at Columbia University – where he was recruited to play football – that would remain one of the most decisive events in his life, for it was there that he was exposed to the excitement and lure of New York City and to men and women of the criminal underclass – figures such as William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, Hal Chase and Allan Ginsberg – whom he would romanticize in many of his novels. Together with Burroughs and Ginsberg, Kerouac belonged to a larger collection of men and women, in major cities throughout the United States, which had an informal network of liaisons and influence. Picking up on this small but highly visible subculture in the United States, the media, using Kerouac’s cue, identified it as the “Beat Generation.” In the decade following his departure from university, Kerouac wrote novels and rambled through the United States and Mexico, following his friends and getting his “kicks” where he could. Although his travels had brought him through the armed services and marriage, neither of which kept his attention for long, he made a career out of being a wanderer and a hobo, all the while recording his thoughts and sights in his journals.120 Having published earlier works that were not necessarily well received, the eventual 1957 publication and success of On the Road
118 J. Tytell, Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 30; O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 3-14; Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), s.v. “Counterculture” (by Morris Dickstein),
26 surprised Kerouac, who was very shy, and left him with a reputation that turned increasingly hostile. Later, many of the books that he had been hoarding all the years while on the road were published in rapid succession, as well as a few new ones. However, within a few years, the pressures of his fame and celebrity, along with his accelerated use of alcohol and drugs, exacted their toll. He died a sick and broken man in 1969.121 The overwhelming attention paid to On the Road, Kerouac’s masterpiece, has tended to deflect attention from his other writings. While most are now in print (which was not the case in the years immediately following his death), they remain relatively unknown. As a result, the full range of Kerouac’s formal experimentations is not apparent to readers familiar solely with the published version of On the Road. In this way, Kerouac’s books are written in distinct, often very different styles, designed to capture the “sounds” of whatever subject matter –Bebop, the road, childhood dreams, etc. – is represented in the narrative.122 Despite this variety of styles, Kerouac’s work nevertheless is characterized by a nostalgic yearning for the prewar days. Most of his narrators look back to an age of innocence, of “not knowing” the horrors that they believed confronted the modern world, but can only do so as a kind of symbolic compensation for their own knowledge that America has unleashed the atom bomb, is living through the “Plastic Fifties”123 and has bred what his narrators perceive as the “illiterate generation” of the 1960s.124 Kerouac lamented that he could no longer recognize Americans “as people any more”,125 loathed cars and television, “with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time”.126127 Nevertheless, with the 1957 publication of On the Road, a vision of social revolt was named and became identified as a national movement. More specifically, On the Road is a thinly veiled travel diary that chronicles Kerouac’s experiences during the years 1946 to 1950. This “road book” captures the adventures and lifestyles of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, the fictional counterparts to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. Kerouac traveled together with Cassady, lived with him and – in order to understand the depths of his euphoric existence –
121 Ibid., 15-26; Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “Jack Kerouac,” accessed May 4, 2014, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/315512/Jack-Kerouac. 122 C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 78-80; O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 77-78. 123 J. Kerouac, Maggie Cassidy (St Albans, England: Granada, 1982), 9, 48. 124 C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 78. 125 J. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46 (New York, N.Y.: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1968), 9. 126 J. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (St Albans, England: Granada, 1982), 31. 127 C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 78-80.
27 even tape-recorded their conversations. Kerouac, as represented by Sal Paradise, was bitten by the bug of Dean’s madness and joined him in his quest for experience and freedom, and eventually in his search for his father. In On the Road, Sal and Dean embark on an exhausting foray that brings them through places like New York, San Francisco, and Mexico while exploring the bohemian underworld of vice, sex, drugs, and nonconformity.128 Not surprisingly considering the sociopolitical context in which it was written, the publication of the novel was followed by the appearance of a generation of converts who, like Kerouac and his alter ego Sal Paradise, became enraptured by Cassady’s embodiment of movement and freedom over the limitations of societal constraints, and followed with their own imitations. As a result, the social movements that Kerouac later was identified with, calling for reform, freedom, sexual liberation, and a new and less materialistic cultural outlook, were powerful enough to make a permanent mark on US culture and to promote a lifestyle so at odds with 1950s traditional values.129 Although Kerouac’s On the Road is often seen as a celebration of freedom and praised for it redefining the norms of sexuality in 1950s America, it should be noted that this sexual freedom also implies the promotion of a male privilege of sexual conquest.130 Whereas Johnson argued that the Beats conveyed a message of personal liberation for both men and women,131 Kerouac’s vision of sexuality in On the Road could rather be summarized as “abusive, sexist, and degenerative” towards women.132 In this respect, Swartz argues that, “to a large extent, Kerouac’s perspective is an act of extreme social and moral irresponsibility, free license and fallacious justification for the acquaintance rape and sexual abuse that has been committed in the name of sexual freedom.”133 Ironically, one cannot but take note of how the aforementioned objectification and marginalization of women in On the Road implies that the Beats’ idea of social deviance in large part was only a message intended for men. Although a female Beat writer such as Johnson might indicate that this narrative is to be better understood within the particular societal context,134 one cannot deny that this particular road
128 O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 3-26. 129 Ibid., 3-26. 130 Ibid., 78. 131 Joyce Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014. 132 O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 1-26, 61-81. 133 Ibid., 74-81. 134 J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
28 tale could be seen as a product of a macho culture that – despite the Beats’ attempts to stray from the path laid out by 1950s America – still had a large influence on men.
3 A critical reading of the representation of women in On the
Road and Bad Connections
3.1 The position of women in American society
As both On the Road and Bad Connections are set within a time of tumultuous change in American society, the two stories accurately illustrate the standard of behavior prescribed by the traditional society at the time. What strikes in this respect is that both stories subtly succeed in conveying to what degree the main characters’ behavioral patterns and philosophy contrast with the traditional social expectations of men and women within the postwar American society. In particular, both novels provide the reader with clear clues about the position of women within crucial moments in the evolving society. In this way, both stories implicitly (Bad Connections in this case more explicitly) speak out against a society that is characterized by the incongruity between the traditionalist modus vivendi and the alternative way of life promoted and inspired by the Beat Generation. One of the predominant rhetorical visions laid out in Kerouac’s On the Road is his vision of Social Deviance. Nevertheless, the immediate postwar America in which the novel is set was a culture in which any form of deviance from the social norm was considered moral deviance and was deemed a threat to the American nation. Not surprisingly, American propaganda constantly maintained that the American way of life was about to end, that it was menaced on multiple fronts, and that plurality itself was its greatest threat. In order to guard the established order and institutions that were held as the cornerstones of society, like marriage, formal education, and the military, agents of the status quo policed the socio- cultural realm. As a response to these traditionalist societal pressures, On the Road was a call for social and cultural pluralism and a direct rejection of this culture of suspicion and control. To the alienated youth of America, Kerouac provided an alternative way of life within his book. In this way, the reader witnesses how Sal Paradise, the main character, clearly desires
29 to be outside of the institutions that forced their hold on him and struggles for a new life.135 Nevertheless, Sal and Dean’s rejection of the conservative societal standards of postwar society and their pursuit of an alternative way of life requires a direct acknowledgement of the social conditions they were rebelling against. If Sal stresses that all of his York friends “were […] putting down society,”136 this implies that in order to transmit a message to liberate oneself from society’s constraints, Kerouac overtly had to delineate the American society and the position of men and women within it. In this way, life on the road is presented as a mode of escape from the spiritual poverty of traditional American life, from the world of work, marriage, school, the military, capitalism, and repressive social control.137 Sal’s initial attempts to escape the traditional value system, however, were ill-fated.138 At the beginning of the novel, Sal lives a rather static existence according to the norms of traditionalist America. Not only had he – as many other Americans – served in the American forces during World War II, but he had also begun going to school on the GI Bill of Rights when living with his aunt again.139 Sal’s road trip could then be seen as an effort to escape the traditional and stable life his aunt was living in Patterson, NJ. In this respect, his aunt can be identified as the embodiment of small town and conformist America. In addition, the traditional role that was assigned to this female character might be indicative of the particular conservative expectations for women created by postwar society. Indeed, the character of Sal’s aunt is largely defined by her role as caregiver. She does not approve of Sal’s exuberant travels and Dean’s unruly behavior, yet continues to take care of Sal without much complaining whenever he returns from his travels.140 In addition, the qualities ascribed to this female character only seem to be related to housework traditionally done by women, illustrated by a passage like:
Dean had come to my house, slept several nights there waiting for me; spent afternoons talking to my aunt as she worked on a great rag rug woven of all the clothes
135 O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 61-81. 136 J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959), 7. 137 O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 61-73. 138 Ibid., 61-73. 139 J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959). 140 Ibid., 63.
30 in my family for years, which was now finished and spread on my bedroom floor, as complex and as rich as the passage of time itself.141
Further, as Dean and Sal have their own vision upon the institution of marriage, On the Road illustrates that women in this case were not held to the same standard as men. Whereas Sal and his friends on a regular basis flout the bounds of heteronormative marriage, women seem to be forced to stick to their husbands in even the most abusive relationships. By way of illustration, Terry, the Mexican girl Sal fell in love with, is judged by her family for being a whore because, “she’d left her no-good husband and gone to LA.”142 Although Kerouac throughout the story does not take an actively political stance towards the unequal treatment of women at the time, he does acknowledge the challenges women are faced with. According to Holton, Kerouac purposely chooses not to explore in depth the difficulties and insecurities the female characters in the novel were struggling with, because this would call into question his own complex and fragile relationship to women, including not only wives and lovers but also his mother (from whom he never managed to separate) and daughter (whom he refused to acknowledge). As a result, gender and sexuality seem to exist in the author’s life and work as a site of fear and confusion and his resort to stereotypes may in many instances appear as an attempt to ease those fears and reduce those complexities.143 Yet, very sporadically Kerouac sheds some light of what he thinks is beneath the surface of the female character in an attempt to understand the female psyche; as he does when Sal meets a girl on the bus to Detroit:
Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done –whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was. […] She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.144
By and large, the portrayal of women in On the Road confirms the gender differences prevalent during the immediate postwar American society. Whereas it seems to be more accepted for men to stray from the path of conformity, women are more likely to be portrayed in accordance with the traditionalist family roles. Yet, the fact that in some rare cases,
141 Ibid., 63. 142 Ibid., 58. 143 R. Holton, “Kerouac Among the Fellahim: On The Road To The Postmodern,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 41(2) (1995): 275. 144 J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959), 141.
31 Kerouac depicts them as victims of patriarch society might indicate that the author in this respect did not fully approve of the gender inequality of the time. In contrast to the marginal role assigned to women in On the Road, the female appears to be the central focus within Bad Connections. In her novel, Johnson explicitly spotlights the role taken up by women within the period of the counterculture. Although Johnson portrays women who are more independent, they still seem to struggle with the great changes promoted by the New Left. In the novel, the main character Molly – like several of the female characters in the book – had a job, but still found herself to be stuck in an abuse marriage. Even though she finds the courage to leave her husband, she admits to feel under pressure to assert the new found (sexual) freedom women had been fighting for:
Sometimes I asked myself what I wanted – which I knew wasn’t the same as what I was supposed to want. I was supposed to want freedom. The runaway wife was the new cultural phenomenon. […] Now I was free – free to have as many lovers as I wanted of whichever sex or to live with a vibrator in celibacy […].145
Nevertheless, despite the changes brought about by the new wave of feminism that marked the counterculture,146 Molly – as presumably many of her female contemporaries – was “still wrestling with the double standard”.147 In this way, Molly recognizes the difficulties women faced within the counterculture:
There is such a think line for women between adventure and misadventure. It is still hard for us to be heroes in the active, external sense of, say, climbing mountains, hopping freights. We tend to be heroes of our own imaginations.148
In like manner, Molly describes how women at the time were supposed to be “swept along by the Sexual Revolution,”149 yet at the same time she still sees the STD she got as a result of her more adventurous sex life as an “act of civil disobedience.”150 Not only Molly, but also even
145 J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 51. 146 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “United States,” accessed May 24, 2014, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/616563/United-States. 147 J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 40. 148 Ibid., 39. 149 Ibid., 38. 150 Ibid., 73.
32 her most sexually liberated friend and coworker Felicia, who, too, had to deal with sexually transmitted infections in the past, still sees them as a form of “sexual punishment.”151 This implies that for women there were still puritanical or even religious restrictions associated with the notion of casual sex. What’s more in this case is that even men who claim to be part of the great social movement and who present themselves as progressive to a certain extent cannot but uphold the traditional gender differences:
Even in Conrad’s realm of theoretical freedom, there were boundaries as well as a definite hierarchy. Conrad was on top, of course. Just below him there was Roberta and sometimes me-our positions kept fluctuating.152
Female main character Molly attributes this general struggle with the – apparently surface – changes of gender roles to what appears to be the prevailing “restlessness” that marks the period of the counterculture.153 Although Bad Connections is set in a later period of American history than On the Road, and this counterculture is generally seen as a period marked by the sexual revolution and the start of the second-wave feminism,154 the female characters in Bad Connections to a degree are still held – and hold themselves – to the same conservative standards prevalent for women in the immediate postwar society as portrayed in On the Road. As a result, women – despite having gained more liberties – seem unsure how to deal with these newly prescribed norms of behavior, while they undoubtedly consciously or unconsciously still felt pressure to conform to what only recently by the New Left had been rejected as the traditional societal standards.
3.2 Male-female relationships and escaping “square” society
One of the main themes emerging throughout both On the Road and Bad Connections is the conflict between conformity to the conservative society and individual freedom. In both novels, male and female characters come to the conclusion that conforming to non-conformity
151 Ibid., 70. 152 Ibid., 81. 153 Ibid., 132. 154 “United States.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 01 May. 2014.
33 is harder to achieve in practice than it was in theory. As a result, this apparent incompatibility between “going along” versus “going alone” in On the Road as well as Bad Connections is marked by the pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships. In this way, both stories are characterized by relationships that still – despite the stories being set in different significant periods of American history – reinforce social privilege for men and subjection of women. Although On the Road is a clear reaction to and rejection of the negative culture of suspicion and control that permeated postwar America, the two protagonists Sal and Deal to a degree relentlessly struggle to completely leave behind the responsibilities and expectations of the systematic world.155 As the road trip in the novel can be interpreted as a metaphor for the spiritual journey of liberation of Dean and Sal, it should be noted that it is Dean Moriarty who was the catalyst of Sal’s salvation.156 Whereas Sal had been living a life consigned to predictable conformity before the trip, Dean had always led an existence on the margins of society. Nevertheless, despite their desire to break from conservative American society, both men had been bonded in the institution of marriage. In this way, Sal had been married and split up with his wife not long before first meeting Dean, whereas Dean was trying to divorce Marylou, while at the same time being engaged in a relationship with Camille.157 What strikes in this respect is that Sal and Dean lament men for being trapped in the traditional institution of marriage and thereby feeling morally compelled to stay faithful – as illustrated in the following passage –
Poor Victor, all this time he stood on the brass rail of the bar with his back to the counter and jumped up and down gladly to see his three American friends cavort. […] His eyes gleamed for a woman but he wouldn’t accept any, being faithful to his wife.158 yet at the same time realize that this legal union might be the only cure for their restlessness:
I want to marry a girl,” [Sal] told them, “so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. This can’t go on all the time-all this franticness and jumping around. We’ve
155 O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 61-73. 156 Ibid., 65. 157 J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959). 158 Ibid., 167.
34 got to go someplace, find something.” “Ah now, man,” said Dean, “I’ve been digging you for years about the home and marriage and all those fine wonderful things about your soul.159
This illustrates that Dean and Sal despite their quest for freedom realize that their journey is finite and that they will eventually have to settle for a static existence. However, the two protagonists are not particularly concerned with marital fidelity. Surprisingly enough, taking into account their endorsement of social deviance,160 any form of sexual promiscuity, and therefore social deviance, seems exclusively reserved for the male counterpart. Whereas Dean sees no harm in him fooling around with Camille while still being married to Marylou, he does not tolerate Marylou getting sexually involved with other men and therefore brands her as a “whore.”161 Therefore, On the Road appears to endorse the institution of marriage and family as the only remedy for the nervousness of the vagabond, yet, at the same time, the novel accurately delineates the act of marriage as a legal union that is marked by male dominance and unrestricted power for the male to act at his own discretion, and female subservience. Kerouac throughout the book conveys the impression that the essential condition for a marriage to be successful is male headship and male sexual freedom, and female subordination and female faithfulness. In this case, the marriage of Walter, a colored guy Dean and Sal met at a bar, is a clear illustration of the protagonists’ definition of a happy marriage. When Walter invites the two for a beer at his home in the middle of the night, his wife “never asked Walter where he’d been, what time it was, nothing”; “Walter’s wife smiled and smiled as [they] repeated the same insane thing all over again. She never said a word.” To Dean, this woman’s behavior constituted a model for other women within the bonds of marriage: “ [Walter] [was] a man, and that [was] his castle.”162 In accordance with this clear vision of what the union between a man and a woman should be, Dean cannot seem to cope with Camille giving him a taste of his own medicine when sleeping with other men. Only when Camille was finally ready to fully comply with his conditions for marriage, Dean could eventually settle “with his most constant, most embittered, and best-knowing wife Camille.”163
159 Ibid., 69. 160 O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 61-73. 161 J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959), 107. 162 Ibid., 118. 163 Ibid., 177.
35 Although many of the women in On the Road find themselves trapped in restrictive relationships in which men have the final word, there are some rare portrayals of women who have found the courage to escape their abusive marriages. Ironically, as these women try to live a life free from societal restrictions, as is the case of the two protagonists, they are often not held to the same standards as men. When Sal meets a young Mexican woman on the bus who told him that she had left her abusive husband, he almost instantly assumes she had to be “a common little hustler.”164 Strangely enough, the prerequisite for an independent woman to be accepted on an equal footing with her male counterparts is to be a “man’s woman.”165 In this way, Frankie, a rather masculine woman they meet during their trip, seems to be one of the only women in the novel who is worthy of men’s respect. Not only is she “always agreeable to anything”166 – as generally expected from women throughout the novel – but also her foul language and alcohol abuse make her the ideal female counterpart of Dean and Sal. In like manner as in On the Road, the restrictive relationship is a prevalent theme throughout Bad Connections. Even though the story is set in a period of time in which traditional codes of sexual behavior were being challenged by the sexual revolution,167 Johnson in her novel decides to foreground the female against the background of the counterculture in order to demonstrate that many of the female characters at the time still felt uncomfortable dealing with the new expectations set for women by the social movement. In this way, female protagonist Molly plucked up the courage to break loose from her confining and abusive marriage with Fred, only to immediately find herself ensnared in a dysfunctional relationship with Conrad. At first, Molly perceived the social activist Conrad as the embodiment of the anti-establishment and their relationship as a means to break free from the restrictions of “square” society. Even though the notion of the counterculture today is often regarded as a period of time in which bohemian adventures were taken up on a mass scale,168 Johnson offers the reader a more nuanced picture by stressing that running away from home was no simple matter for a “thirty-five years old” mother like Molly.169 In this regard, the protagonist’s internal conflict between her desire to free herself from the institution of marriage and the unequal gender dynamics within it, and her romantic nostalgia for the
164 Ibid., 49-50 165 Ibid., 124. 166 Ibid., 124. 167 J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 38. 168 Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), s.v. “Counterculture” (by Morris Dickstein),
36 nuclear traditional family could mirror the struggle with the seemingly incompatible extreme standards of the social spectrum and the gender inequality still prevalent throughout society. Feeling too self-conscious as a woman and unmistakably still dependent on men, Molly “waited for [Conrad] to invite [her] to abandon [her] predictable and sedentary existence”.170 What she then describes as a sort of “restlessness”,171 even after having left her husband, might be understood as the confusion resulting from on the one hand the pressures of the counterculture pushing women to liberate themselves, and on the other hand, from the desire to lead a peaceful and thus stable existence that was still troubled by the patriarchy that marked male-female relationships. Even when having escaped from the restraining bonds of marriage, the female protagonist has to come to the conclusion that even a relationship with a man who claims to incarnate the rejection of conformist America is still complicated by gender inequality and female dependence. In this way, Molly’s relationship with bohemian Conrad was marked by “bad connections – missed appointments, late trains, […] abruptly cut-off phone conversations”172; a relationship in which she was “denied […] existence.”173 In this case, Johnson, too, argues that at the time many women like Molly undertook the struggle to liberate themselves from the restrictive situation their were in, yet learned that while they still needed a male presence in their lives the relationship between women and men still had a long way to go.174 Strikingly, more than a decade after Kerouac put in words the difficulties Sal and Dean faced in their attempt to challenge postwar conformity, Johnson gives the impression that men, too, were still troubled by what turned out to be the mutual exclusiveness of a conservative existence and a life free from the restrictions of this conservative society. In this way, many of the male figures featured in Bad Connections attempt but fail to reconcile the dichotomy between “peace” –in the novel represented by the nuclear family and monogamy, and a sense of “restlessness” – experienced when leading a life of debauchery:175
170 Ibid., 16. 171 Ibid., 132 172 Ibid., 16. 173 Ibid. 208. 174 J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014. 175 J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 132, 157.
37 […] [Malcolm] abhorred the institution of the family and nevertheless had fantasies of moving in with me and Matthew, that he’d actually desired to impregnate me when we’d gone to bed […].176
In like manner, Johnson, by means of the figure of the political activist Conrad, seeks to demonstrate that even the most socially progressive men, when trying to engage in a relationship with a female, fall again into the traditional pattern of patriarchal male supremacy and female dependence. Nevertheless, the significance of Bad Connections in this respect is that, unlike Kerouac in On the Road, Johnson goes further than simply acknowledging and touching upon the issue of gender discrimination and posits a clear feminist agenda. Through the female protagonist Molly, Johnson illustrates how the rhetoric of liberation promulgated by the spirit of the counterculture in large part was aimed exclusively at men and was still lacking efficiency to address and change gender-based social vulnerabilities. In stark contrast with the male and female characters in Bad Connections, it is the female protagonist Molly who succeeds in breaking loose from her the countervailing pressures from society and her constraining relationships with men and therefore achieves self-realization and spiritual maturity without compromising her ideals and gender-specific behaviors. According to Johnson, this does not necessarily mean that she will never have a relationship with a man again, yet the outcome of the whole process is that she has learnt to be less dependent on men.177 Although both On the Road and Bad Connections deal with the sense of restlessness felt when attempting to leave behind the restrictions of conservative America, Bad Connections focuses on the fragile position of the female within a turbulent period of change within American history. Whereas Kerouac foregrounds the male journey away from conformity and therefore only passively acknowledges the issue of gender discrimination without being political, Johnson forthrightly describes and criticizes the difficulties women experienced due to conflicting societal standard they were held to. Unlike Sal and Dean, whose fate and potential self-actualization is left unsettled in the novel, Johnson’s protagonist Molly appears to be the only character who is truly capable of achieving her nirvana and mature female subjectivity. As a result, Bad Connections could be understood as radical critique on a novel like On the Road that maintains and unconsciously promotes the conservative values of the patriarchal society. Whereas the women in Kerouac’s novel remain the muted object of the
176 Ibid., 192. 177 J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
38 male characters’ desires, the female protagonist in Bad Connections takes an active stance against this gender inequality and decides to no longer be dependent upon her male counterparts. In this respect, Johnson offers a radical alternative to the pattern of patriarchal oppression and domination in which women at the time still found themselves constrained by.
3.3 Female sexuality
Extending from the general notion of social deviance, which forms the leitmotiv of On the Road and Bad Connections, is the more specific vision of sexuality.178 Given the particular stormy periods of time in which the two novels are set, sexuality in both books is political and categorized into systems of power. The previous chapters already indicated that women experienced gender discrimination when attempting to follow in the footsteps of the male bohemian. An analysis of the construction of female sexuality in both books displays that female sexual deviance was still a subject of controversy and that the female sexual identity was in large part still troubled by and dependent on complexities of gender. As Swartz explains, “in mid-century America, much human sexuality was considered a form of social deviance, as it is today (although less so), since sexual activity that falls outside of the traditional bounds of Christian morality is a potential threat to many cultural institutions.”179 In this way, the perverted attitudes towards sex of the two male protagonists in On the Road could be evaluated in terms of its implicit threat to the larger social fabric.180 Although the ethos of liberation and celebration of the libido is a central theme in the novel, it should be noted that this sexual energy is regarded as a male privilege and abusive to all the women the protagonists meet.181 In On the Road, Kerouac describes a morality that is at odds with the one experienced by most people in mid-century America, yet, it should be noted that what the male characters in the novel assume to be the appropriate female sexual behavior largely still corresponds to the conservative societal norms for women.182 In line with Kerouac’s general focus on the adventures and experiences of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty and – as mentioned above – the Beats’ general neglect of the female as an active agent, the author hardly gives any insight into the female psyche and the way the
178 O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 74. 179 Ibid., 74. 180 Ibid., 74. 181 Ibid., 76. 182 Ibid., 74-81.
39 female characters perceive attraction and sexuality, but rather portrays these women as the muted object of Sal and Dean’s desire. One of the few instances in which the reader gets an indication of the female stance towards sex is when Sal is introduced to Rita Bettencourt, a “fine chick, slightly hung-up on a few sexual difficulties which [Dean] [has] tried to straighten up […].”183 Besides Rita being “a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex,” she indicates that she does not want anything particular out of life and just wants to “try to get along”184 Sal perceives her fear of sex as a result of her “fears about men,”185 and, given that she is in this case the embodiment of “square” society, this behavior could be read as a result of her being part of that society. Yet, as Sal tries to correct her usefulness, which in this case is severely compromised by her sexual timidity,186 Rita – like most of the women in On the Road – is reduced to a simple victim of the protagonist’ sexual conquest. In contrast with the character of Rita Bettencourt, female figures like Terry, Marylou, and Camille do not seem to have any trouble with sexual intercourse. Nevertheless, despite their intense sexual activity, it should be noted that these women are not yet sexually liberated and rarely seem to be the active agents or fully in control within sexual encounters. In this way, while both Camille and Marylou are engaged in a sexual relationship with Dean, they are still emotionally dependent upon him:
At one sharp he rushes from Marylou to Camille –of course neither one of them knows what’s going on –and bangs her once […]. Marylou’s all for it, but she insists on banging in the interim. She says she loves him –so does Camille.187
In this passage, Kerouac illustrates how both women cannot seem to emotionally detach from the dominant male figure, who does not seem to share their emotional affection, yet only cares about his own sexual satisfaction. Besides being portrayed as sexual objects, the women in On the Road most of the time are reduced to passive attributes that serve the men’s seemingly insatiable sexual hunger.
183 J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959) 29. 184 Ibid., 36. 185 Ibid., 36. 186 O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 78. 187 J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959) 28.
40 Nevertheless, it is of crucial importance to understand that the two protagonists engage in different types of sexual relationships. In this respect, Sal’s relationships are marked by a more clearly prescriptive sexuality, whereas Dean’s liaisons are more extravagant and manifest the ideologies and attitudes of sexuality that would become more popularly identified as the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s – in particular its more abusive, phallocentric, and misogynist tendencies.”188 Consequently, the sexual zeitgeist of Bad Connections, a novel set in a period of time in which Americans were “swept along by the Sexual Revolution,”189 then should be seen as a large-scale realization of the sexually perverted behavior exhibited by Dean Moriarty. Yet, as Johnson’s work already indicated, the cultural complexities of the time could not be reduced to a simple clash between conformity and nonconformity. Bad Connections also illustrates that sexual emancipation was still not a self-evident appropriate cultural norm and to a large degree still rooted in the patriarchal concept of male heterosexuality. As Bad Connections recounts the struggle of female protagonist Molly to break loose from the confining constraints of society, Johnson particularly zooms in on Molly’s unhealthy sexual engagements with different male characters. Strikingly, in spite of the spirit of the sexual revolution, virtually all sexual relationships featured in the novel are of hierarchic and phallocentric order. In this way, Molly’s relationship with Fred, the representation of the “outmoded configuration […] [of] the nuclear family,”190 as well as her relationship with Conrad, a product of the sexual revolution, are both marked by male dominance and violence. During her abusive marriage with conservative Fred, it was she who had to engage in his sexual fantasies; during her rollercoaster affair with liberal Conrad it was again she who had to acquiesce to the particular rules he set for their sexual encounters. In addition, in like manner as On the Road, the novel suggests that despite the wave of feminism that by then had swept the country,191 women were held to a “double standard.”192 In this way, Molly experiences the societal pressures to break away from her abusive marriage, while at the same
188 O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 77. 189 J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 38. 190 Ibid., 53. 191 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “United States,” accessed May 24, 2014, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/616563/United-States. 192 J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 40.
41 time, her unfaithful husband curses her as a “little whore”193when finally leaving him for her lover Conrad. Although most of the sexual affairs in the novel are characterized by a pattern of male dominance and female dependence, it is the woman who is held accountable for the male’s sexual impotence and aggression. In this respect, this aspect of gender inequality maintained support from men all across the social spectrum. Even when Conrad, who at first sight seems to be the most liberal male figure in the story, experienced erectile dysfunction, he lays the blame on Molly and “decided finally the problem was that [she] didn’t know how to be seductive.”194 Not surprisingly, this constant victimization of women for any type of male sexual deficiency keeps women like Molly trapped in a pattern of self-blame:
That, if only combined with the ability to be stimulating to him both sexually and intellectually, would have made me the perfect companion to share his life.195
What’s more, this pattern of scapegoating even extends to the issue of sexual assault. When the female protagonist gets raped by an unscrupulous male intruder, she “[remembered] feeling that [she], too, was some kind of a suspect” since she “didn’t look much like the victim of a rape.”196 The fact that the police even inquired about the particular outfit she was wearing at the moment of the transgression suggests that male power and female victimization remained key concepts within society at the time. In this case, Molly’s friend Tessa reminds her friend of the self-evident inferior position of the female and the extreme violence towards women:
You never could tell, Tessa said –as if rape was something you had to take into account all the time. You kept a gun in the house the way you kept aspirin.197
Taking into consideration Tessa’s sexual independence as displayed in the novel, this previous statement casts doubt upon the legitimacy of her depicting herself as a female product and warrior of the sexual revolution. Although Tessa was “always shedding lovers like outgrown clothes” and had no problem “[turning] [them] loose at the slightest sign of
193 Ibid., 40. 194 Ibid., 133. 195 Ibid., 133. 196 Ibid., 181. 197 Ibid., 183-184.
42 restlessness on either part,”198 the fact that she sees rape as natural fallout of the dysfunctional male-female dynamic could indicate that her constant attempt of being in control and having the upper hand in her relationships is a way to cope with the prevalent gender discrimination. For the most part, On the Road and Bad Connections are similar in that they depict (and – in the case of Bad Connections – actively unveil) the gender imbalance in sexual relationships between men and women in the decades following the Second World War. Whereas On the Road largely focuses on the male sexual conquest and as result constructs female sexuality as transgressive and aberrant, Bad Connections gives a valuable insight into the female psyche and the woman’s struggle with the conflicting attitudes promoted by the sexual revolution and upheld by “square” society. Although Bad Connections is set within the context of the counterculture and therefore second-wave feminism and sexual liberation,199 the gender discrimination that marked sexual relationships in On the Road is still highly prevalent in Bad Connections, even in relationships between the most liberal minds, which echoes Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Johnson’s statement that “the male-female relationship had still a long way to go”.200
3.4 Objectification and stereotyping of women in the patriarchal society
Although one should always take into account the particular zeitgeist in which a particular story is set, it is most likely that the contemporary reader will be struck by what he perceives as the patriarchal and sexist orientation in both On the Road and Bad Connections. Even when both novels are set in a different historical and social arena and are written from a different gender perspective, they depict a social organization in which women are molded to fit the gender stereotypes and reduced to passive objects of the male gaze. According to Swartz, the sexual aggressive behavior of the protagonists in On the Road should not simply be denounced as a form of “machoism” or “phallocentrism”, but rather as a means of transcending the constraints and limitations placed on sexuality by society.201 Nevertheless, Swartz admits that Kerouac’s perspective is an act of extreme social and moral irresponsibility, free license and fallacious justification for the acquaintance rape and sexual
198 Ibid., 172. 199 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “United States,” accessed May 24, 2014, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/616563/United-States. 200 J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014. 201 O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 74.
43 abuse that has been committed in the name of “sexual freedom.”202 In this way, the egocentric and androcentric nature of Sal and Dean’s pursuit of “getting the kicks”203 entails that a woman’s usefulness is reduced to her body and her being an object of the male gaze and virility. As a result, Kerouac does not make a conscious effort to explore the female psyche, but rather presents them as muted sexual commodities. In this way, women only occupy a marginal position in the novel, while their identity mainly is defined by their physical appearance. Strikingly, most female figures featured in the book do not even have a name and are identified by their looks or by their limited intellectual capacities, as demonstrated in the following passage:
We picked up two girls, a pretty young blonde and a fat brunette. They were dumb and sullen, but we wanted to make them.204
Yet, even when the female characters in the novel are given a name, they often are still reduced to commodities and defined by the men they depend upon. In this case, Kerouac particular linguistic and rhetoric choices, such as the use of a construction like “Dean had Rita lined up for you tonight”205 suggests that women are mere objects whose task it is to serve a man’s purposes and pleasures. Besides the act of reducing the female characters to anonymous commodities, another way in which On the Road purposely sexually objectifies women is by depicting them as the passive object of the male gaze. As Fredrickson and Roberts assert, “the male gaze [or visual inspection of the body] [is] the most subtle and deniable way sexualized evaluation is enacted.”206 In this way, the sexual gaze is a form of sexual harassment that is not under women’s control, but is used by men to demonstrate their right to physically and sexually evaluate women.207 Kerouac makes no pretense of portraying the female as an active agent in
202 Ibid., 79-80. 203 “Getting the kicks” is a prevalent theme throughout the novel. 204 J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959), 23. 205 Ibid., 36. 206 B. L. Fredrickson and T. Roberts, “Objectification theory: Toward understanding women’s lived experiences and mental health risks,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21 (1997): 175.; D. M. Szymanski, L. B. Moffitt, and E.R. Carr, “Sexual Objectification of Women: Advances to Theory and Research,” Counseling Psychologist, Vol. 39(1) (2011): 6-38. 207 B. A. Quinn, “Sexual harassment and masculinity: The power and meaning of girl watching,” Gender & Society, 16(3) (2002): 386-402; D. M. Szymanski, L. B. Moffitt, and E.R. Carr, “Sexual Objectification of Women: Advances to Theory and Research,” Counseling Psychologist, Vol. 39(1) (2011): 6-38.
44 the novel, yet instead expressly accentuates the gender inequality by catering the “male gaze” in the visual representation of female characters. As a result, verbs of visual perception to describe the protagonists’ ogling at women are prevalent throughout the text, as illustrated by the following excerpt:
A group of girls walked directly in front of us. […] “Well, let’s go back and pick em up!” I said. […] They were headed for work in the fields; they smiled at us. Dean stared at them with rocky eyes.208
Strikingly enough, Kerouac at the same time unconsciously identifies the risks of this type of objectification. As objectification theory posits, reducing women to the passive object of the male gaze can result in them internalizing this outsider view and beginning to self-objectify by treating themselves as an object to be looked at and evaluated on the basis of appearance.209 In this way, Camille, the young woman Dean has an affair with, does not seem to bother when Dean’s friends show up at the motel where she and Dean were having sex. Instead, she remains lying on the bed in the same sensual way and apparently has no problems being the object of the men’s gaze.210 Besides the objectification and marginalization of women, On the Road reinforces a stereotypical image of the female as hysterical and intellectually inferior to her male counterparts. Not only does Kerouac portray women as too intellectually challenged to understand the way of life and adventures of the male bohemian, but he also tends to dismiss every sort of active female resistance to the male supremacy as “hysteria”. When Camille is crying and making tantrums simply because Dean is getting mad again and is not able to sustain a stable relationship and to be a reliable partner, Dean and Sal can no longer deal with her behavior and decide to leave her alone and to buy beer.211 Likewise, many of the female partners and acquaintances of Sal and Dean and their male friends are associated with words such as “crying,”212 and “squealing,”213 and “hysterical,”214 while their alleged hysterical
208 J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959), 161. 209 B. L. Fredrickson, and T. Roberts, “Objectification theory: Toward understanding women’s lived experiences and mental health risks,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21 (1997): 173-206; D. M. Szymanski, L. B. Moffitt and E.R. Carr, “Sexual Objectification of Women: Advances to Theory and Research,” Counseling Psychologist, Vol. 39(1) (2011): 6- 38. 210 J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959) Web. 28-29. 211 Ibid., 107. 212 E.g. Ibid., 58.
45 behavior does not appear to be terribly unreasonable considering the men’s irresponsible and unpredictable behavior. Other types of non-hysterical reactions to the unreliable conduct of the male partner are often associated with the stereotypical image of the woman as being naïve and ignorant. In this case, Galatea Dunkel’s resort to fortune cards in a response to her husband Ed leaving her again could be perceived as a clear illustration of the female naïveté that seemingly characterizes many of the women in the novel. Apart from being reduced to a stereotyped object, the female characters in On the Road are often portrayed as being a creation that can be molded to meet the male needs. Throughout the novel, men appear to display the pygmalionesque tendency to regard the woman as an unfinished piece of art that still needs to be worked on; or as Dean explains to Sal:
[…] and now in fact you’re ready to hook up with a real great girl if you can only find her and cultivate her and maker her mind your soul as I have tried so hard with these damned women of mine.215
Strikingly enough, as Dean seemingly succeeds in this project and ends up settling “with his most constant, most embittered, and best-knowing wife Camille,”216 it is Ed Dunkel’s wife Galatea who – despite her name being a direct reference to the myth of Pygmalion217– is one of the only female figures to show no intention of allowing herself to be molded to suit the needs of her husband and his friends.218 Although, in contrast to the women featured in On the Road, the female protagonist in Bad Connections eventually succeeds in becoming the active agent of her own destiny, a great share of the denigrating attitudes towards women depicted in On the Road (and indicative of the attitude of the male Beats towards women?) are also present in Johnson’s Bad Connections. Yet, whereas Kerouac only offered the male perspective prevalent within the patriarchal traditionalist postwar society and the Beat movement and aimed to be “subversive
213 E.g. Ibid., 92. 214 Ibid., 122. 215 Ibid., 109. 216 Ibid., 177. 217 Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “Pygmalion,” accessed May 24, 2014, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/484560/Pygmalion. 218 H. Bloom, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004), 153.
46 without being political,”219 Johnson goes further into the question of gender inequality and gives an insight into the journey of a woman who suffered from this discrimination, yet eventually succeeded in empowering herself within the gender differentiated society. The objectification and commoditization of women is a recurring thematic element throughout Johnson’s Bad Connections, just as it is in On the Road. Although the woman and the female psyche are central to the novel, it should be noted that the narrative reveals that women still held a rather marginal and vulnerable position in the America of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this way, the different encounters between the female protagonist Molly and the men she was romantically involved with illustrate how women were still frequently reduced to the object of male needs. Not surprisingly, as already indicated in the previous chapters, Molly’s traditional marriage was marked by her selfless submission and various incidents of domestic abuse. Her husband Fred does not seem to respect her as a wife and as the mother of his children, yet rather treats her as a sexual object created to please him and to satisfy his physical needs. The following excerpt, which contains a very explicit sex scene, demonstrates how Molly’s usefulness is completely reduced to her body parts and her functional sexual function:
[…] Directing her in attempting different positions, turning her from one side to the other with varying placements of knees, his orders brusque and impatient. […] Tonight he is very angry with her because her legs are too short. That is the reason they have been having such difficulties. He is convinced that their bodies just don’t fit each other. A cruel trick of fate from him to have ended up with such a short-legged woman!220
Another manner in which the female in Bad Connections is presented as a physical thing deprived of personal qualities or identity is through the implicative power of the male gaze. As the next excerpt illustrates, Molly’s marriage almost seems the prototypical product of the conservative patriarchal society:
219 B. Gifford and L. Lee, Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac (New York: St. Martin's, 1978), 232. 220 J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 11.
47 As I lay sprawled on the floor that morning, with my husband towering above me like a righteous and avenging archangel, I reflected rapidly upon our history […].221
While Bad Connections ingenuously contrasts the traditional institution of marriage and the unconventional and open relationship inspired by the spirit of the time that in return was largely influenced by the values promulgated by male Beats like Kerouac,222 men’s attitude towards the female does not radically differ despite their contrasting sociopolitical view on life. Although leftist Conrad does not refrain from pointing out how his attitude towards women is different than that of Molly’s conservative husband and claims that he never felt like he possessed a woman,223 he nevertheless denies both of his girlfriends’ existences and expects them to devote themselves to his needs and his principles. Eventually, Conrad admits to his own failure of male chauvinism and acknowledges that the fact that it is Molly who always “wants”224 – which consequently would upset the patriarchal pattern of male supremacy in their relationship – is the main reason why their relationship would never work out. In addition to the marginal and objectified position the female is placed in, the novel also portrays how some of the male characters regard women and their struggle in society as a part of a common project for reformist change. In this respect, Conrad, a symbol of the radical counterculture, sees it as his duty to educate the intellectually underdeveloped woman who previously was trapped in a traditional and abusive marriage. In this case, he patronizingly speaks of women in terms of their “development”225 or “restoration.”226 The figure of Conrad in this perspective, as well some of the male figures in On the Road, could be regarded as a modern Pygmalion who aimed to mold women – in particular women who still held “the peculiarly virginal status of a woman just liberated from marriage”227 – to suit his particular idea of what his Galatea should look like, i.e. incarnating the spirit of the social revolution, yet not too emancipated. Further, Johnson demonstrates how the female characters in Bad Connections still suffer from negative stereotyping. As already suggested in the case of On the Road, the
221 Ibid., 38. 222 G. Stephenson, The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 13-15. 223 J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 206. 224 Ibid., 202. 225 Ibid., 206. 226 Ibid., 26. 227 Ibid., 81.
48 molding of women into a generalized and oversimplified conception could be interpreted as a sort of coping mechanism created by the male characters in order to deal with the female trying to upset the conservative gender construction. In this way, it is the figure of Conrad, who finds himself engaged in a sexual affair with Roberta and Molly at the same time, who tries to reduce the female attempt to overthrow gender discrimination to being a product of female hysteria. While it does not seem unnaturally for a woman to no longer want to be denied existence by her male partner, Conrad brands Molly’s attempt to do so as indicative of her “suspicion and anxiety.”228 While Johnson aims to provide the reader with a valuable inside into the mind of women in the midst of the counterculture, she cannot but acknowledge the patriarchal attitude towards women by even the most (self-acclaimed) liberal male figures. Even though the narratives of On the Road and Bad Connections are set in a different social and political context, it should be noted that the general male-female relationship is still marked by a fundamental tension in power and contradicting values. As a result, it appears as if the marginalization and objectification of women is a means of maintaining the patriarchal pattern of male hegemony and female inferiority that characterizes many of the relationships portrayed in both novels. It is Johnson in this respect who creates a female protagonist who succeeds in empowering herself and overcoming gender discrimination.
228 Ibid., 74.
49 4 Conclusion
More than half a decade after the publication of Betty Friedan’s international bestseller The Feminine Mystique, which has been widely praised for igniting the women’s movement of the 1960s, gender discrimination still seems to be a pervasive issue within our modern Western society.229 Although the Beat Generation in this respect is generally credited for challenging the political and psychological repressions that characterized 1950s America and for promulgating notions of freedom that inspired a counterculture of which feminism and the sexual revolution were organized expressions,230 it turns out that the Beat Generation in respect to the issue of gender was not as radical and free as it presented itself.231 As a result, this dissertation aimed to examine the position of the female within the Beat Generation and two literary works of a closely associated male and female Beat writer, and its sexist construction of masculine identity, a crucial aspect that today is often overlooked and unchallenged.232 In this case, laying bare the patriarchal ethos of the Beat Generation implicated shedding a light upon the position of the female within the particular Beat movement. As a result, we sought to provide not only a critical reading of a literary work of key Beat Jack Kerouac, but in order to provide a more comprehensive overview of gender discrimination within the movement we also decided to critically analyze a literary work by one of the female Beats Joyce Johnson. Ironically she was one of the women who was subject to the gender inequality within society and the Beat movement herself, yet, at the same time she has depended on her association with these Beats and her two-year relationship with Kerouac throughout her entire literary career. When providing a comprehensive overview of the history of the Beat Generation and the social context in which it emerged, the aim was to accentuate that the romanticized and rather naïve view of countercultural movements conveyed by the media has led many to
229 E.g. S. Coontz, “Why Gender Equality Stalled,” The New York Times, 16 February 2013. Web.
50 reduce the Beat Generation to a movement that radically rejected all of the traditional values promulgated by the established “square” culture.233 This view was nevertheless nuanced by demonstrating that the Beat movement was a male-centered social and literary movement in which women were often marginalized and relegated to the role of caregivers or sex objects.234 This could be seen as a reassertion of the conservative patriarchal society the Beats sought to challenge. Further, contrasting On the Road, a novel by Beat icon Kerouac, with Bad Connections, a novel by Johnson, was motivated by the fact that Johnson was one of the few women who was not only at the heart of the male-dominated Beat generation, but who was also active as a writer and (un)consciously inspired by the Beat spirit through her two-year relationship with Kerouac235. Although Bad Connections was set in the period of the American counterculture, which followed the heydays of the Beat movement, a critical reading of this novel allowed us to gain an insight into the mind of a female writer who has been part of and unmistakably influenced by figures like Kerouac. Further, contrasting Bad Connections and On the Road provided us with the opportunity to study the position of the female within the American society not only from a different gender perspective, but also within a society that, despite the different historical setting of the novels, was still largely permeated by a gender inequality that characterized “square” pre-World War II society and to a large extent the Beat movement236. What’s more, a personal interview with Joyce Johnson provided invaluable insight into the male-female dynamics within the particular Beat movement and helped us to understand that what we now perceive as the sexist and denigrating attitude of the male Beat towards the female should be nuanced within the particular sociopolitical context237. In order to define to which extent Johnson’s Bad Connections differed from On the Road with respect to the depiction of and societal attitude towards women, a thematic analysis was used for the critical analysis of both narratives. Four thematic criteria were identified to
233 Ibid., 1-19. 234 O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 17. 235 G. Thomson, “Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats”, Clcweb: Comparative Literature And Culture, Vol. 13(1)(2011): 4; G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004). 236 G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004); R. Bennett, “Teaching the Beat Generation to Generation X.” in The Beat Generation. Critical Essays, ed. Kostas Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-19. 237 J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
51 approach the female and the societal conditions that determined the position of women. What stood out in this case was that whereas Kerouac’s On the Road centered on the struggle of two male protagonists with leaving behind square society – and therefore in large part marginalized the female character – Johnson purposely chose to foreground a woman in order to portray the difficulties she was faced with in order to gain a deeper and more comprehensible insight into the female psyche. When critically examining both novels in terms of how they shed a light on the particular position of women within the American society, both narratives revealed how women were still held to an entirely different standard than men and how gender discrimination was a concept that was still prevalent within the American postwar society and counterculture. In addition, both novels laid bare the fundamental conflict between social conformity and individual freedom by which many of the male and female characters were troubled. As a result, the apparent incompatibility between conformity to conservative societal norms and nonconformity appeared to be marked by the pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships. Whereas the male and female protagonists in both narratives denounce (or in case of Bad Connections feel socially pressured to condemn) the traditional institution of marriage, they still seem to see it as a possible cure for their general sense of restlessness. Nevertheless, Johnson’s novel could be perceived as an active platform against the gender discrimination depicted, yet not politically challenged, in On the Road. Unlike Kerouac, Johnson goes further than simply acknowledging the dysfunctional male- female relationship and by means of the self-actualization and emancipation achieved by the female protagonist posits a feminist alternative to the patriarchal construction of women in On the Road. In line with my findings regarding the position of women within the sociopolitical setting of On the Road and Bad Connections, a critical analysis of the concept of female sexuality within both works affirms the presence of a double standard in terms of attitudes and beliefs about gender appropriate conduct. Although On the Road particularly focuses on the concept of the male sexual conquest and both narratives are set in a different period of American history, both novels reveal how the concept of sex was categorized into systems of power in which gender discrimination in terms of sexual interactions was still highly prevalent. Not surprisingly and in line with the phallogocentrism that marked the Beat Generation238, Kerouac’s protagonists view sexual energy as a male privilege that implies the marginalization and subordination of the female character. Strikingly enough, as Bad
238 G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004).
52 Connections is set within the counterculture associated with second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution, the narrative illustrates that the traditional discriminatory construction of sexuality as portrayed in On the Road still has a significant influence on the male-female relationship. Lastly, a critical reading of the narratives of the two Beat authors with an eye on the particular male perspective upon the female character illustrated how both novels include parallel processes of objectification and stereotyping of women. In this case, Kerouac in particular does not make a conscious effort to explore the female psyche and, as a consequence, presents the female as a muted sexual object whose usefulness is determined by her ability to fulfill male (sexual) desires. Ironically enough, despite the spirit of the sexual revolution and freedoms of the counterculture promoted throughout Bad Connections, even the most self-acclaimed progressive male characters seem not able to let go of the patriarchal and conservative pattern of male hegemony and female superiority. In addition, the male characters reduce the female figure to a work of art that should be molded to suit the male needs and an object that can only be brought into existence by her male counterpart. In conclusion, the critical reading of On the Road and Bad Connections illustrates that despite both of the stories being set in a period in American history marked by tumultuous change the male-female relationship was still heavily influenced by the conservative androcentric pattern of male headship and female subservience. Despite being one of the few women at the core of the Beat Generation239, Joyce Johnson’s work offers a feminist alternative to the sexist and objectified construction of the female as presented in On the Road, and could be interpreted as a radical critique on the Beat’s denigrating attitude towards women. By means of writing herself into the canon of Beat and counterculture literature – which also can be seen as an expression of feminism – and foregrounding a female protagonist, Johnson herself actively moves away from the marginalized and objectified image of the female and as a result offers an alternative for the passive female character that is denied existence by the norms of male supremacy. What is unique is that Johnson in Bad Connections allows us to gain an insight into the struggle of the female within a society in which conformity and nonconformity appear to be two incompatible standards of life. Strikingly, it is Johnson’s female protagonist who, unlike the male protagonists in On the Road, succeeds in throwing off the yoke of gender inequality that the patriarchal society placed upon women. Johnson’s protagonist succeeds in reaching self-actualization and emancipation. Ironically enough, as Johnson indicated that the novel in part was inspired
239 G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004).
53 upon her own experiences within the counterculture, the author to a large extent appears to have always remained dependent upon her connection to the Beat Generation in order to define herself as an author. After all these years, Johnson is still extremely dependent upon her past relationship with Kerouac and her association with the Beat milieu, as is indicated by the various memoirs written on this topic. Whether it be for marketing reasons – considering the everlasting cultural fascination with the Beat movement – or not, Johnson, in contrast with her female protagonist in her novel Bad Connections to a certain extent has always had to rely on the men against whose philosophy she initially reacted for self-identity and to establish herself as a well-known writer within the Beat niche.
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