Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Bc. Magdalena Šedrlová

Representation of Female Characters in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Its Film Adaptations

Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph. D.

2016

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Ph.D., for his guidance, invaluable advice, useful remarks, and, above all, for not giving up on me.

Table of Contents

1) THE BEAT GENERATION ...... 5

2) JACK KEROUAC ...... 9

3) ON THE ROAD ...... 19

3.1 On the Road – plot summary ...... 19

3.2 On the Road – writing and publication ...... 26

3.3 Women in On the Road ...... 29

3.3.1 Marylou...... 30 3.3.2 Camille ...... 38 3.3.3 Lee Ann ...... 41 3.3.4 Rita Bettencourt ...... 43 3.3.5 Terry ...... 44 3.3.6 Lucille ...... 50 3.3.7 Galatea Dunkel ...... 51 3.3.8 Jane ...... 55 3.3.9 Walter’s wife ...... 56 3.3.10 Frankie ...... 57 3.3.11 Inez ...... 58 3.3.12 Laura ...... 60 3.3.13 Sal’s aunt ...... 61 3.3.14 Other women ...... 64 3.3.15 Women in On the Road – common traits ...... 67 3.4 On the Road – The Original Scroll ...... 69

3.5 On the Road (film) ...... 71

3.6 Heart Beat (film) ...... 80

CONCLUSION ...... 84

WORKS CITED ...... 87

INTRODUCTION

I remember very well that evening at Skleněná louka, a damp, dark hole smelling of spilled beer, weed and loaded hoboes (a long time ago, before they redecorated the place); when Jaroslav Erik Frič (local underground poet, founder of Votobia publishing house, and organizer of cultural events and festivals) told my (male) friend that Kerouac was a “men’s business,” suggesting that I, as a girl, had no right or competence to comment on the topic. Although it made me quite upset, I somehow felt that he was right, that it is indeed a men’s business – and On the Road a book that “guys are into”

(Nicosia 245) – but it immediately sparkled a lot of questions, such as: Why is it so? Does that mean that I should not enjoy reading the book? Am I weird if I do? And most importantly: What about the girls, then? Are they present in this male world at all? And how are they treated? I realized that any time I read the book, I naturally identified with the male narrator rather than any female character because none of the girls seemed as cool as the guys. All of these thoughts, questions and ideas led me ultimately to the delimitation of the topic of this thesis.

Jack Kerouac, generally more famous than really understood, is for many people more of a culture figure than merely a writer. Teenagers and young adults still idolize his assumed rebellion, parents take him as a bad role–model for their children, and secondary school literature teachers often dismiss his and the other Beats’ works as mere “sex, drugs, and jazz” (to paraphrase the other infamous trinity “sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll”). Leland sums it up very

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pertinently: “If you want to spot a rebel in a movie […], look for a copy of On the Road on his bookshelf” (5, emphasis added).

This might be because, according to some (e.g. Trudeau 15), an immense part of the research is done on Kerouac’s life rather than on his work, which is consequently not deemed as of a high literary value due to the fact that he supposedly merely recorded his life. As regards On the Road, it is indeed a roman à clef (a narrative technique invented in the 17th century

French literary “salons”), a “text that describes real-life events using the structure of fiction. The names are changed, even the location, but the plot is based in actual events” (Dittman 41).

Recently, a lot of research has been done in the Kerouac field and new approaches are starting to emerge. Among other topics, focus has been directed towards the representation of gender and women in his works, e.g.

Eftychia Mikelli’s A Postcolonial Beat – Projections of Race and Gender in Jack

Kerouac’s The Subterraneans (2010), Nancy McCampbell Grace’s A white man in love: A study of race, gender, class, and ethnicity in Jack Kerouac's Maggie

Cassidy, The Subterraneans and Tristessa (2000), and there are two theses defended in 2014, that I incidentally stumbled upon, dealing with the role of women in On the Road: Aster Dieleman’s bachelor’s thesis (Utrecht University) and Valerie Partoens’s master thesis (Univesity of Gent). Both of them, however, treat the subject from a different perspective than I intend to.

Dieleman focuses more on the theoretical framework of patriarchy, the male gaze and sexual objectification of woman, and the analysis of the novel itself is rather sketchy and serves as an illustration of those concepts in practice.

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Partoens, on the other hand, provides an excellent comparison of female characters in On the Road and Joyce Johnson’s (Kerouac’s girlfriend’s) Bad

Connections, but since she deals with two novels, the space allocated to each of them is limited.

The aim of this thesis is to carry out a deep close-reading analysis of all female characters in the novel in order to assess the way each of them is portrayed, to examine their role in the narrative and to establish how they interact with the male protagonists. Since the novel is indubitably modeled on

Kerouac’s journal entries; for instance David Sterritt claims that “a journal entry for August 1949, […] contains many passages that are virtually identical to a section of On the Road, which was largely composed during his famous typing marathon in April 1951” (70), biographical information will be employed to show to what extent the author altered real events and how he rendered actual people, and to emphasize the role of women in On the Road not only as fictional characters, but also as real women within the Beat movement. Unless stated otherwise, biographical details come from Gifford and Lee’s Jack’s book.

The thesis will also discuss the approach of filmmakers to the Beat topic and to the representation of women in two feature films, Heat Beat (1980) directed by John Byrum and On the Road (2012) directed by Walter Salles, dealing with the same subject matter as Kerouac’s On the Road.

Before the analysis of the novel as such, the Beat Generation as a literary and cultural movement will be introduced, with emphasis on the “male friendship,” for which, according to Leland, On the Road remains a primer (45).

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1) THE BEAT GENERATION

The term “Beat Generation” now comprises authors writing in approximately two decades spanning from the mid-1940´s to the 1960´s. The original nucleus was no more than three men who befriended each other in the early 1940´s New York: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S.

Burroughs. At that time, Kerouac was an aspiring conventional novelist, whose literary hero that he was trying to emulate was Thomas Wolfe; Ginsberg was still too young to envisage a career of a poet; and Burroughs, although extremely well-read in comparison to his roughly ten years younger friends, was not interested in writing very much either.

It is not, thus, too much of a bold claim to say that had it not been for

Neal Cassady – very simply put a Denver criminal – there would have been no

“Beat Generation.” He was the one who brought about the change in Kerouac´s writing style and who was the vehicle of many events that provided, in the end, the “Beat” topics for Kerouac’s subsequent novels.

Since no one was getting published at the beginning, the 1940´s could be called a “shadow” period. There were give or take five people (including

Cassady and John Clellon Holmes), very close friends who shared each other´s intimacies, but they were totally unknown to the general public. The first swallow and sign of a possible future literary renown came no sooner than with the 1952 publication of Kerouac’s The Town and the City and Holmes’s Go, followed by Burroughs’s Junky in 1953.

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In the 1950´s, the New York Beats merged with the so-called San

Francisco renaissance scene and comprised other authors, such as Lawrence

Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, and Richard

Brautigan. What all of them shared were non-conformist ideas, decrying

“square” (i.e. conventional) society, American materialism and suffocating cold- war mentality; and a passion for jazz music. But, as Holmes comments, “to listen to bop in those days […] was to take sides, to declare membership in a fraternity of undesirables. […] If a person dug Bop, we knew something about his sex life, his kick in literature and the arts, his attitude towards joy, violence,

Negroes and the very process of awareness” (Leland 128). Vlagopoulos suggests that “dissent and contradiction were seen as malignancies threatening the very sovereignty of the nation by bolstering the enemy. The antidote, by implication, was homogeneity and consensus, no matter how compulsory” (55).

Similarly, Omar Schwarz maintains that “1950’s America was a culture in which any deviance was considered moral deviance and was deemed a threat” to the

American way of life (173), which was “menaced on multiple fronts” (ibid.), most conspicuously by plurality (as opposed to middle-class homogeneity).

However, On the Road, and by extension Beat writing in general,

is a call for plurality; it rejects the culture of suspicion and control, […] it

is pro-body, pro-desire, pro-experience. […] [It] takes us through all

parts and experiences of American society — the dirty, the dark, the

alternative rationalities and potentialities, things that were formally alien

to Kerouac’s middle-class reading public (ibid.).

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What needs to be stressed, especially with regard to the thesis’s topic, is that the Beats were a homosocial group that largely marginalized women, who were for the most part excluded from the plurality of their experience since, as indicated by Brenda Knight – author of Women of the Beat Generation (a survey of women involved in the Beat movement as writers as well as companions), “[w]omen of the fifties in particular were supposed to conform like Jell-O to a mold. There was only one option: to be a housewife and mother” (3). As Allen Ginsberg once put it, the “social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang. Not society’s perfum’d [sic] marriage” (quoted in Johnson 77, emphasis added). The men were, indeed,

“the movers and shakers” of the movement (Waldmann xi) while the women

“escaped the eye of the camera [and] stayed underground” (Knight 1). Knight admits that she “always considered the memoir to be the strongest literary genre by the women of the so-called Beat generation, […] for, in a sense, the women were often present as the most observant and sober witnesses” (ibid.) and as Joyce Johnson confirms in her memoir Minor Characters, John Clellon

Holmes (as the first published novelist touching upon the Beat topic) “was writing about people […] who did things […] [she] would never do […] and all of them […] were men. (68, emphasis added). Johnson also sees the women of the Beat Generation as “transitional — a bridge to the next generation, who in the 1960s, when a young woman's right to leave home was no longer an issue, would question every assumption that limited women's lives and begin the long, never-to-be-completed work of transforming relationships with men” (quoted in

Knight 1).

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As Douglas Brinkley states in the introduction to his edition of Kerouac’s journals, the Beat world is “populated by whores, swindlers, hipsters, horn players, hoboes, and charlatans” (xxiii) with no place for a decent, full-fledged, female character. According to Johnson, Holmes pivotal Go (later of course overshadowed by On the Road), reduces the women in the narrative to

“amalgams of several people” and “type[s] rather than […] individual[s]” (77), which is a noteworthy observation that will be examined with regard to how

Kerouac portrays the heroines his seminal novel.

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2) JACK KEROUAC

Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Kerouac on March 12, 1922, was the youngest child of Gabrielle and Leo Kerouac, French-Canadians who had moved from Québec to Lowell, Massachusetts, a small textile manufacturing town, at the turn of the century. Kerouac grew up in a cosmopolitan working class neighborhood inhabited not only by a large community of former Quebecois, but also by Irish-American and Greek-American population. In fact, as Matt

Theado claims in Understanding Jack Kerouac, this heterogeneous cultural background had a deep impact on Kerouac´s language acquisition and use of

English (10). Moreover, it should be stressed that his mother tongue was

French, or rather its French-Canadian sociolect – joual, which was naturally spoken in the Kerouac household and which Kerouac used as the primary means of communication with his mother, affectionately referred to as Memère, till the end of his life. He only started to learn English when he was enrolled to primary school and he did not master the language completely till his late teens. Recently, new research has shown that one of the very first versions of

On the Road was actually written in French as Sur le chemin and, according to

Radio Canada’s web article (“Les textes”), it is supposed to be published in spring 2016 in one volume along with another French novel of Kerouac’s La

Nuit est ma femme.

Kerouac’s early childhood was deeply troubled by the death of his older brother Gerard, which he witnessed at the age of four, and which left him with a constant feeling of guilt and wondering why he had not died instead of

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Gerard, whom he considered to be almost saint. These ideas might have partially been installed in little Jack by his mother: “To Gabrielle there was no question that Gerard was a saint, and Jacky was told so again and again. The implication was that Jack, perhaps, was not” (Gifford and Lee 4). These memories ultimately led to the birth of one of his childhood-inspired novels,

Visions of Gerard.

From an early age, Kerouac was a prolific scribbler writing his own comic books and later contributing jazz reviews to his school magazine, The Horace

Mann Record, and working as a sports reporter for Lowell Sun. Sport was not only Kerouac’s favorite topic for writing, but his athletic abilities won him a scholarship to one of the country’s best college preparatory schools – Horace

Mann School in New York City. He was thus bound for the Ivy League, where he eventually did end up starting his freshman year at Columbia University in

1940.

Although his studies were short-lived (Kerouac decided to leave because of disagreements with his football coach), the two years spent at Columbia’s

Department of English and Comparative Literature provided background for the formation of what was to become known as The Beat Generation. However, it was not exactly in classes that Kerouac met Ginsberg and Burroughs, but it was in the campus neighborhood, which he chose to stick around after he ended his studies. Gifford and Lee explain in Jack´s Book: “Although Jack had left

Columbia in 1942, the University and its fringes provided an arena for his friendships for the rest of the decade.” (61) Rather than the campus, the real

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niche of The Beat Generation was Edie Parker´s (Kerouac´s future first wife) apartment near Columbia:

Edie and Joan [Vollmer-Burroughs] did not keep a salon, but they were

more than tourists in Bohemia, and it was in and around their rooms

that, in the late autumn and early winter 1943, Jack became part of a

constellation with the men and women who would remain close to him

for the rest of his life and who would provide the dramatis personae for

much of his mature work. (Gifford and Lee 32, emphasis original)

In 1944, Kerouac married Edie under quite peculiar circumstances: He was arrested as material witness to the murder that his friend, Lucien Carr, had committed in self-defense. The bail was too high for the Kerouacs to pay and so

Jack asked Edie, who came from a well-off family, to bail him out, which she refused to do unless he agreed to marry her. Although some considered her

“the best woman Jack ever got involved with” (Lucien Carr quoted in Gifford and Lee 54), the matrimony could not last long. Carr pointed out that “money and wealth did impress Jack. [...] six months of dabbling, doodling around the

[Lake Michigan] amused him ... but anything that tended to trap Kerouac, whether it was a woman, or a job, [...] was something he didn’t want to get involved with” (emphasis original, ibid.)

Leo Kerouac died in the spring of 1946 leaving Jack with the responsibility to take care of his mother, a task he could never fully accomplish and certainly one of the reasons why he got married for a second and third time. It was Gabrielle who ran the household and kept a job in a shoe factory to support her son, who was unable to have a decent steady job.

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In late 1946 Kerouac met his most famous “muse” and his inspiration, the “holy goof”, Neal Cassady. Cassady was a key figure for Kerouac in terms of the subject of his most famous novel as well as the method and style. Before

On the Road, Kerouac had written a conventional novel, The Town and the City, but for On the Road he took a different approach based on Cassady’s letter writing: “The discovery of a style of my own based on spontaneous get-with-it came after reading the marvelous free-narrative letters of Neal Cassady, a great writer who happens also to be the Dean Moriarty of On the Road” (Kerouac quoted in Gifford and Lee 85).

In 1947 Kerouac, aged twenty-five, set on the road for the first time with the intention to travel to Denver to spend some time with his new friend. The following three years, quite faithfully chronicled in On the Road (OTR), represented what Kerouac himself called “the part of my life you could call my life on the road” (OTR 4). He also confessed that Cassady was the driving force that made him follow his dream: “Before that I´d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road” (ibid.). Thus begins the series of cross-country trips from one coast to the other and to Mexico, separated by brief stays at various friends and odd jobs on the railroad.

Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, was published by

Hartcourt, Brace in March 1950. The work was written before he adopted his signature “spontaneous prose” style and focuses on Kerouac’s life split between his home in Lowell and his early days in New York. Unfortunately, the book’s

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reception did not meet his expectations and it failed to secure him a place among prominent writers.

In autumn that year, Kerouac met Joan Haverty, whom he married after a two-week romance because “she was beautiful” (Kerouac quoted in Gifford and Lee 154). Unsurprisingly, the relationship was over within six months and he returned to live with his mother. Later, he commented on Joan: “I didn’t like her. She didn’t like any of my friends. My friends didn’t like her. But she was beautiful” (ibid.). However, this short union bore an offspring that Kerouac had not anticipated. After Kerouac and his wife separated, Joan gave birth to a daughter, Janet Michelle – known as Jan – Kerouac (author of Baby Driver).

Kerouac denied her paternity until a blood test was carried out almost ten years later and only saw his daughter twice in his life.

After the break-up, in spring 1951, he started to concentrate on the composition of On the Road. What was, however, rather frustrating was the fact that the release of The Town and the City did not facilitate its publication as he imagined it would. Kerouac had to wait for six more years until the book was accepted at Viking. In the meantime, he wrote other stories, books of notes, poetry and novels, including The Book of Dreams, Visions of Cody,

Visions of Gerard, Doctor Sax, San Francisco Blues, Mexico City Blues, Tristessa, and The Subterraneans, which also remained unpublished until after the success of On the Road.

Later in 1951, Kerouac joined Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn in their home in San Francisco, where he stayed for a few months and developed an affair with her, to which Neal deliberately turned a blind eye. This ménage à

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trois had to stop when Kerouac brought a prostitute to his room driving Carolyn absolutely mad. Later, Kerouac inscribed a famous apology for that night into the Cassadys’ copy of The Town and the City. He then decided to follow William

Burroughs to Mexico City.

He spent most of 1952 moving back and forth between New York and the Cassadys in California until he met, in 1953, Alene Lee who became the central character in The Subterraneans. This romance was doomed right from the start for two reasons: first, Alene got very soon “tired of [...] all the drinking and barging in on people and going this place or another” (Lee quoted in

Gifford and Lee as “Irene May” 175), and second, since she was African-

American, Kerouac’s mother would never have approved of the relationship in any case. After the affair was over and the book came out, Lee refused any connection to Kerouac whatsoever and insisted on being interviewed only under a pseudonym so as her real identity could remain unrevealed as long as possible.

Kerouac spent the summer of 1955 in Mexico City, where he met

Esperanza Villanueva, whose story was immortalized in Tristessa, and in

November that year, back in San Francisco, he attended the famous Six Gallery poetry reading drinking wine on the floor and encouraging the contributing poets, among whom Gary Snyder was also present. The two had met not long before via Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg. Snyder immediately became

Kerouac’s new role-model because he was a student of Chinese and Japanese at Berkeley and shared Kerouac’s newly born passion for Buddhism. Before he could appreciate the havoc that followed the reading, especially because of

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Ginsberg’s performance, he left for the East coast to spend the end of the year with his mother and sister.

Although a great deal of 1956 was devoted to the revision of On the

Road, Kerouac also spent the summer working as a fire lookout on Desolation

Peak (in the North Cascade Mountains, Washington), which he later documented in The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels.

When On the Road came out in autumn 1957, it meant a real break- through in Kerouac´s career. Gilbert Millstein from The New York Times gave an enthusiastic first review of the novel, suggesting that Kerouac was definitely a writer to watch out for:

“On the Road” is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and

the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac

himself named years ago as “beat,” and whose principal avatar he is.

Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, “The Sun also

Rises” came to be regarded as the testament of the “Lost Generation,”

so it seems certain that “On the Road” will come to be known as that of

the “Beat Generation.”

Unfortunately, this rave about the book had fatal consequences in Kerouac´s private life. John Clellon Holmes remembers the ensuing man-hunt that broke out after the publication:

Most books that come out are contained. That is, “I want to read that

book.” But what happened when On the Road came out was, “I want to

know that man.” It wasn’t the book so much as it was the man. […]

Women saying, “I’ve got to fuck him.” People came to Joyce [Kerouac’s

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girlfriend back then] and said, “Look, you’re with him. You’re twenty

years old, but I’ve only got so many years left. I’ve got to fuck him now.”

They just wanted the experience, and all this was so profoundly

confusing to a guy like Kerouac […] that for the rest of his life he never,

never got his needle back on true north. (qtd. in Gifford and Lee 238)

After the unexpectedly zealous reception of Kerouac´s first road novel,

Viking Press was eager to garner more money from its popularity and urged him to write a sequel. And so he gave them Dharma Bums released in 1958.

From that time on until his death, all of his previously written work as well as new volumes were published at an average rate of almost two books per year.

However, despite all the maniacs and vagrants he pictured, Kerouac essentially hoped to live a quiet suburban life writing books in his study and taking care of his mother. That is why he decided to move in with her in Northport on Long

Island, where she could once again assume the role of the head of the family:

“Gabrielle became the guardian at Jack´s door, the censor of his mail and telephone calls, the manager of his money. He reestablished his writing room, which was like a monk´s cell” (Gifford and Lee 254). Joyce Glassman´s memories confirm that he “felt very constraint in his mother´s house” (Gifford and Lee 253).

By and large, Kerouac´s life at the turn of the 1950´s and 1960´s was literally between a rock and a hard place: bullied by his fans outside and by his mother at home. The teenagers that idolized him either tried to get him out of the house and wanted to get drunk with him or, the more tenacious ones, oftentimes broke in and stole his notebooks and other souvenirs. Gabrielle, on

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the other hand, struggled to keep her son at home and out of the reach of those fanatics as well as his friends, whom she had never been fond of. The thirty-eight year old Kerouac was thus treated as a snot-nosed kid, which is well illustrated by Gifford and Lee:

When he was too drunk to come into town, or when Memère denied him

the money, he waited until she was through watching television and had

gone to bed, and then he would telephone them [Ginsberg and others].

[…] Whenever the telephone bill was larger than the money that Memère

had set aside for it, she ripped the instrument’s cord from the wall,

leaving Jack alone entirely. (261)

In the summer of 1960, Kerouac, totally failing to deal with his celebrity status, set off on the road for the last time to get some rest and think through all these recent life-changing events. He decided to accept Lawrence

Ferlinghetti’s offer and make use of his cabin in Big Sur, central California coastline roughly between Carmel and San Simeon, in order to sober up and attempt to write a bit in isolation. Although he initially intended to stay for several weeks, the sojourn in the modest cabin with no electricity or windows, just wooden shutters, proved to be too depressing and so Kerouac left to get together with the Cassadys and other literary friends.

In the first half of the 1960’s Kerouac and his mother kept on moving from the South of the East coast to the North and back, and he kept on drinking. Memories of him being dry are actually very rare among his friends. In

1964, Kerouac’s elder sister died. Two years later, his mother suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed as a result, which meant two things: she could not

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look after him like she had done before and it was increasingly harder for him to take care of her. Now he needed a wife who could do both. He contacted a childhood friend, Stella Sampas, and they were soon married and moved back in Lowell.

At the end of 1968, the Kerouacs moved for the last time to Florida because they decided that the upcoming winter weather in New England would not do Memère good. He felt quite lonely and isolated and wanted to come back, but his mother insisted on staying. On October 21 1969, Kerouac died after a surgery attempting to stop internal hemorrhage probably caused by liver cirrhosis, and so Gabrielle saw her youngest child pass away, too.

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3) ON THE ROAD

3.1 On the Road – plot summary

Being one of the most famous “road” narratives in the English language,

On the Road recounts the travels, adventures and loves of the author (under the name of Sal Paradise) and his circle of friends at the core of the Beat

Generation – Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William Burroughs (aka Carlo

Marx, Dean Moriarty, and Old Bull Lee) who are “looking outwardly for kicks and inwardly for salvation” (Theado 57) and whose “road is a male fantasy that goes back to Huck and Tom or Jesus and his disciples, who all chose starvation and travail over clean laundry and the comforts of women” (Leland

46).

The novel begins with Dean’s coming to New York City in winter in early

1947. Soon after their arrival, Dean and his teenage wife, Marylou, are introduced to Sal, a young aspiring writer, who had been curious about Dean since he first read his letters addressed to a mutual friend. A peculiar friendship develops between Sal and Dean as they seem to be fascinated with each other’s character. Dean admires Sal for his writing skills and insists that he teaches him how to write, and Sal is totally bewitched by Dean’s energy, courage, and “madness” because “the only people for [him] are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace

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thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars” (6). And that is exactly what Dean was.

In July 1947, Sal, full of anticipation, decides to hit the road for the first time and leaves his New York apartment, which he shares with his aunt, to join

Dean in Denver. He is persuaded that the adventure to come will definitely bring him invaluable experience and inspiration: “Although my aunt warned me that [Dean] would get me in trouble, I could hear a new call and see a new horizon [...] I was a young writer and I wanted to take off. Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me” (7-8). After the initial trouble to hitch a ride, he manages to embark several cars and trucks, meeting all sorts of characters, which take him to his destination. In Denver, Sal learns about the new frenetic agenda that Dean has set up in order to satisfy both of his lovers and also the love-struck homosexual poet, Carlo:

The schedule is this: […] Dean is balling Marylou at the hotel […]. At one

sharp he rushes from Marylou to Camille – of course neither one of them

knows what’s going on – and bangs her once, giving me time to arrive at

one-thirty. Then he comes out with me – first he has to beg with Camille,

who’s already started hating me – and we come here to talk till six in the

morning. […] Then at six he goes back to Marylou – and he’s going to

spend all day tomorrow running around to get the necessary papers for

their divorce. Marylou’s all for it, but she insists on banging in the

interim. She says she loves him – so does Camille. (28)

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In spite of the tight schedule, Dean has also time to cater for Sal and gets him a “chick” of his own, Rita Bettencourt, but the romance does not even have a chance to begin not only because of Sal´s sexual failure but also because he is already planning to move on West.

Sal heads to Mill City, close to San Francisco, where he stays for a while with his high-school friend, Remi Boncoeur, and his girlfriend, working with him as a night guard at construction workers´ barracks. Sal´s Californian adventure receives a more romantic feel when he meets Terry, a young Mexican grapes/cotton picker, on the bus to Los Angeles. After the initial misunderstanding and distrust, they truly grow to love each other (for about two weeks); Sal even decides to have a go at picking cotton along with her and her family, but despite his effort, their different backgrounds cannot make the relationship work. What is more, Sal has itchy feet and wants to go back home and so they part and he thumbs the ride to New York, to his aunt´s apartment.

Part II of the book begins around Christmas 1948 that Sal is spending at his relatives´ in Virginia and they are paid a surprise visit by Dean, Marylou, and Ed Dunkel. However unprepared for the visitors, Sal´s aunt and brother eventually make use of them as furniture removers to New York, which brings

Sal on the road with Dean again. Back in New York, there are parties to attend and jazzmen to hear and get ecstatic about.

The company agrees to leave the city for the West coast one more time.

Marylou and Sal, both realizing that Dean is going to come back to Camille once they reach San Francisco, intend to start an affair together, but before they do,

Dean comes up with an astonishing idea – he wants Marylou and Sal to make

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love together while he watches. Despite initial reluctance, Sal goes along with it, but in the end he cannot perform, as with Rita Bettencourt, because his

“heart wasn´t in it” (78). On their way to California, they stop by in Louisiana at

Old Bull Lee´s and his Benzedrine addicted wife. Once they get to San

Francisco, Dean leaves them as Sal and Marylou expected and they stay at a cheap lousy hotel for two days with no food or money. Sal soon realizes that the only reason why Marylou was showing any interest in him was to make

Dean jealous. With Dean gone, there is no need to stick together. Alone and disappointed with his friends, Sal has the “beatest time” of his life (100).

Following a brief stay at the Cassadys, Sal decides it is time to go and departs with some bitterness after saying goodbye to Dean and Marylou: “At dawn I got my […] bus and said good-by to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care” (103).

At the beginning of part III, Sal finds himself in Denver, this time bereft of any friends. He spends a night with a rich girl who unexpectedly offers him a hundred dollars that will cover his expenses for a ride to California. He surprises

Dean and Camille one day as he knocks on their door in San Francisco. Dean gets immediately excited telling Sal the latest news about their second baby on the way, about him and Marylou secretly seeing each other again and about how he hit her one day, hurt his thumb that got all infected and now he has to stay at home with his baby daughter while Camille works at a doctor´s office.

The next morning, Camille throws them both out of the house. Sal´s arrival was only the last straw in the long line of Dean´s reckless excesses. Sal

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still has more than eighty dollars left and so he suggests that they go back to

New York and then to Italy. Before they do, they meet some of their old acquaintances, among whom Galatea Dunkel, who gets mad at Dean for treating Camille so horribly. They spend the last night hanging around several jazz clubs, collect their baggage from Galatea´s the next morning, and then

Dean and Sal, who has barely been it the city for sixty hours, take off.

After a few days, they reach New York via Denver and Chicago. Dean meets another girl, Inez, at a party and makes a series of telephone calls to get a divorce from Camille, who soon gives birth to their second child. A few months later, Inez also has a baby and so, due to Dean’s lack of resources to support all his offspring, his and Sal’s plans for the Italian adventure fall through.

Part IV starts with the coming of spring and Sal’s irresistible urge to hit the road again: “Whenever spring comes to New York I can’t stand the suggestions of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and

I’ve got to go. So I went. For the first time in our lives I said good-by to Dean in New York and left him there” (145). This time, the destination is Mexico.

Dean, however, does not seem to like the prospect of staying in New York alone with Inez and joins Sal in Denver in no time. When Sal asks about what happened between Dean and Inez, this is what he gets for an answer:

“Officially, Sal, this trip is to get a Mexican divorce, cheaper and quicker than any kind. I’ve Camille’s agreement at last and everything is straight” (152).

They whizz through Colorado, Texas, and Mexican towns of Laredo and

Monterey to stop at Gregoria, where Sal convinces a local boy, Victor, to get

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them some “girls.” In the meantime, Victor takes them home where his mother brings them home-grown marijuana, so they spend the afternoon high on weed with Victor and his brothers. When the scorching sun goes down, they finally head for the girls:

We came to the whorehouse. It was a magnificent establishment of

stucco in the golden sun. In the street, […] were two cops […] stayed

there the entire three hours that we cavorted under their noses, until we

came out at dusk and […] gave them the equivalent of twenty-four cents

each, just for the sake of form. (165)

In the whorehouse, they are faced with the harsh reality of Mexican sex-trade and Sal, even though the temptation is great, does not have the guts to go for the youngest girls:

I was trying to […] get at a sixteen-year old colored girl […]. I couldn’t

do it. Stan had a fifteen-year-old girl with an almond-colored skin […]. It

was mad. […] At one point the mother of the little colored girl […] came

in to hold a brief and mournful convocation with her daughter. When I

saw that, I was too ashamed to try for the one I really wanted. (166-

167)

Soon after their arrival to Mexico City, Sal falls ill with a fever and Dean abandons him in a terrible roof-top pad because he needs to go back to New

York after he got his Mexican divorce from Camille. This is something that Sal later regards as ultimate treachery: “When I got better I realized what a rat he was” (174).

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In the last section of the novel, we learn about Dean marrying Inez and illogically fleeing from her right afterwards to live with Camille in San Francisco.

Sal comes back home and meets a new love, Laura. One day Dean reappears in

New York and the last time he actually talks to Sal is a sad scene during which

Sal, Laura, Sal’s friend Remi Boncoeur and his girlfriend are on their way to a

Duke Ellington concert. They are driving in a limousine and they accidentally bump into Dean on the street. Dean asks Sal for a ride, but Remi refuses. Sal does not want to spoil the evening and so he watches Dean walk away in a pouring rain, but he cannot help stop thinking of him and the book closes with the following line: “So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier […] I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean

Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty” (178).

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3.2 On the Road – writing and publication

Legend has it that On the Road was written in spring 1951 in a three- week Benzedrine frenzy, during which Kerouac glued together rolls of teletype paper so as he did not have to interrupt his stream of words flowing out. He indeed did that, but this manuscript is not exactly what got finally published in

1957 as On the Road. What is more, this text was not miraculously heaven-sent or drug-induced, as many a reader likes to imagine, but originated from

Kerouac’s notebooks’ entries documenting his travels. The mythical piece came to light fifty years later, in 2007, as On the Road: The Original Scroll (OS), henceforward referred to just as The Scroll.

Since most publishers refused to deal with the original “spontaneous prose” style narrative, reportedly lacking proper punctuation (Howard Cunnel, editor of The Scroll however claims that “contrary to myth the scroll is for the most part conventionally punctuated” [24]); and Truman Capote famously dismissed the work stating: “That's not writing, that's typing” (Sterritt ix);

Kerouac was obliged to do considerable editing of the novel. Over the years, he added paragraphs, shortened sentences, altered some punctuation nevertheless

(“From scroll to 1957 edition, dashes and ellipses often become commas.

Commas often become semicolons and colons. The flow is interrupted.”

[Vlagopoulos 66]), changed characters’ names or family position, most notably his mother was turned into his aunt, and modified certain scenes to suit the

1950’s taste. For instance, the scene depicting Kerouac’s first meeting with Neal

Cassady had to be trimmed in the following way (emphasis added): “I went to

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the coldwater flat […] and Neal came to the door in his shorts. Louanne [sic] was jumping off quickly from the bed; apparently he was fucking with her” (OS

110) became “I went to the cold-water flat […] and Dean came to the door in his shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch” (OTR 4) in the published version.

Another passage illustrating how many changes had to be done before the editors agreed to publish the novel is the scene in which Sal and Dean get a ride to Denver with a gay driver. Whereas in The Scroll, Dean actually has sex with him in order to make some money and Sal watches them, in the originally published version he only suggests that he is willing to go this way if the man pays up, but nothing happens in the end. Compare:

In Sacramento the fag slyly bought a room in a hotel and invited Dean

and me to come up for a drink, […] and […] Dean tried everything in the

books to get money from the fag. It was insane. The fag began by

saying he was very glad we had come along because he liked young men

like us, […] but he really didn’t like girls and had recently concluded an

affair with a man in Frisco in which he had taken the male role and the

man the female role. Dean plied him with businesslike questions and

nodded eagerly. The fag said he would like nothing better than to know

what Dean thought about all this. Warning him first that he had once

been a hustler in his youth, Dean asked him how much money he had. I

was in the bathroom. The fag became extremely sullen and I think

suspicious of Dean’s final motives, turned over no money, and made

vague promises for Denver. He kept counting his money and checking on

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his wallet. Dean threw up his hands and gave up. “You see, man, it’s

better not to bother. Offer them what they secretly want and they of

course immediately become panic-stricken.” (OTR 121) and

[…] Neal tried everything in the books to get money from the fag,

submitting finally to his advances while I hid in the bathroom and

listened. […] Warning him first that he had once been a hustler in his

youth, Neal proceeded to handle the fag like a woman, tipping him over

legs in the air and all and gave him a monstrous huge banging. I was so

non-plussed all I could do was sit and stare from my corner. (OS 307,

emphasis added)

Interestingly, the director of On the Road, Walter Salles, chose to depict the original scene rather than the edited one in his 2012 film.

Critics, according to Matt Theado,

have suggested that if the original typescript were unveiled, readers

might have access to a work with a greater stylistic achievement than

what was published. Even before the book’s publication, rumors

circulated for years that Viking editors had hacked away at the prose,

sacrificing Kerouac’s loose, jazzy, and inspired writing for the sake of

readers—and thus better sales. (54)

This original typescript now available, it will also be considered for analysis and comparison in the following chapter.

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3.3 Women in On the Road

Unlike for example The Subterraneans and Tristessa (where the plots each revolve around a single female character), On the Road is populated by numerous women who seem to be rather marginal to the story as a whole and only accompany the main male-bonding line, or as Roland Primeau puts it: “the women remain in the background, never portrayed as central to the important business the heroes pursue” (107).

The novel is one of the prime examples of so-called road narratives, which, according to Byrd, share a common trait regarding the portrayal of female characters: “Women, if they appear in these road narratives at all, are depicted as abstractions or playthings that can be tossed aside when the road calls. Women on the road take a back seat to the men’s adventures” (Byrd 3).

To support her argument, we can draw from Primeau who maintains that most

“American road narratives have been lived, written, and published by white males” (107) and the automobile journey has been dominated by them, too

(ibid.).

In this chapter, the above-mentioned issues will be addressed, attention will be drawn to the detailed analysis of the heroines of the novel, also taking into account their real-life background, and discussion will be focused on the way in which they affect the principal male characters, and what they reveal about them.

This section will also deal with the comparison of the portrayal of female characters in On the Road and in On the Road – The Original Scroll.

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3.3.1 Marylou

Marylou is undoubtedly one of the most prominent female characters in

On the Road. She is based on Neal Cassady’s first wife, Lou Anne Henderson, whom he married when she was fifteen. Her mother agreed with the marriage principally because there was a risk of sexual abuse from her step-father and she wanted her out of the house (Nicosia 195).

The first time Marylou is mentioned in the text, she is described as a

“beautiful little sharp chick” (OTR 4), more details are provided a few lines later:

Marylou was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of

golden tresses; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her hands

hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare

because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she’d heard about

back West, and waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist

woman in a serious room. But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she

was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things. (ibid.)

Consequently, the first impression of Marylou is not very positive. Even though she might be beautiful, she is also a personification of all evil. This is further illustrated by the fact that, after a fight with Dean, she calls the police and flees to Denver: “she was so mad and so down deep vindictive that she reported to the police some false trumped-up hysterical crazy charge, and Dean had to lam from Hoboken” (5). When Sal later asks about Marylou’s whereabouts, Dean replies that “she’d apparently whored a few dollars together and gone back to

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Denver – the whore!” (5, emphasis added). Barely two pages into the novel,

Marylou is already labeled as “awfully dumb,” “mad,” “vindictive,” “hysterical,” and a “whore,” which is not a very good start.

Moreover, Dean’s chauvinistic attitude towards her is also clear right from the beginning as Kerouac shows in the following extract: “Dean got up nervously, […] and decided the thing to do was to have Marylou make breakfast and sweep the floor” (4). A similar example can be found further in the novel where Dean requires that Marylou prepares food for the company:

“‘All right, now,’ said Dean, […] ‘what we must do is eat, at once. Marylou, rustle around the kitchen see what there is’” (70); or when she sews the holes in his socks (71).

Marylou’s primary role thus seems to be being a caregiver and, more importantly, a provider of sexual pleasure, which she remains even after Dean starts living with Camille. What is rather concerning, too, is the fact that she falls victim to Dean’s physical assaults more than once and this is presented as a legitimate way to treat a woman because the narrator does not seem to be surprised or worried about it at all (which is, according to Leland [95],

“shocking now but was not in Kerouac’s time”): “Marylou was black and blue from a fight with Dean about something; his face was scratched” (OTR 78); at another point Dean himself confesses to beating her: “I hit Marylou on the brow on February twenty-sixth at six o’clock in the morning” (108). In the interview with Gerald Nicosia, one of the foremost Beat scholars (author of

Memory Babe – an excellent biography of Kerouac – and One and Only – a unique book-length analysis of Lou Anne Henderson’s role in the Beat

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movement), Lou Anne confirms that beating was quite a common occurrence between her and Neal: “Neal was not a violent person, and most of the time he didn’t get mad enough to use physical violence – except with me. And when

Neal would hit me, that was simply emotion. I mean, that’s the way it was with us. It was either loving or fighting” (Nicosia 99, emphasis original). What is even more startling is Henderson’s own attitude towards being beaten. It looks as though she accepted that kind of behavior because she thought that she might have even deserved it, or she took it as just another character trait of

Neal’s that nothing could be done about. This probably hints at the general

1950’s patriarchal worldview of women’s subordination.

So far, Marylou has been discussed in relation to exploitation and abuse, but this is not the whole picture. It needs to be stressed that she is the only female character in On the Road that can parallel the male protagonists in terms of personal freedom, and anti-establishment and sexually unrestraint behavior.

As far as her sexual life is concerned, her multiple partners are repeatedly mentioned in the novel (which is rarely the case of the other heroines), and that is the reason why she is often branded as a “whore.” On the other hand, this label does not necessarily need to be viewed as a flaw, for it makes her probably the only woman in the novel on her way to sexual liberation as we know it from the 1960’s. In contrast to most other women in

On the Road, she takes pleasure in sexual activity and demonstrates a great deal of open-mindedness in this respect (cf.: Rita Bettencourt). Marylou and

Dean thus complement each other. Gerald Nicosia recalls Al Hinkle (a close

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friend of Cassady’s and Kerouac’s) telling him about Neal’s excitement about

Lou Anne: “‘I’ve just found a perfect woman!’ Neal told Al. ‘She’s got everything

I ever wanted.’ [Then] a dark cloud suddenly passed across Neal’s face. ‘So what’s the matter, then?’ Al asked. ‘The only trouble with her […] is she’s too much like me.’ He had found his female equivalent, and he knew it would be trouble for both of them” (Nicosia 46, emphasis added). In On the Road

Marylou sleeps with numerous men, sometimes even with Dean’s consent – it was indeed one of his peculiar habits to offer “his” women to Sal. In On the

Road, this only comes to light in the scene in which he asks Sal to make love to

Marylou so as he could watch (OTR 77-78), but in reality, a similar strategy was applied to Neal’s wife Carolyn, who became, for some time, Kerouac’s lover, too. Dean is not any different and the number of girls he slept with is sky-high.

Marylou accepts the idea of having sex with Sal very gladly, with no reservations or surprise:

Dean told her what we had decided. She said she was pleased. I wasn’t

so sure myself. […] Marylou lay there, with Dean and myself on each

side of her. […] I said, “Ah hell, I can’t do this.”

“Go on, man, you promised!” said Dean.

“What about Marylou?” I said. “Come on, Marylou, what do you think?”

“Go ahead,” she said.

She embraced me and I tried to forget old Dean was there. […]

“We must all relax,” said Dean.

“I’m afraid I can’t make it. Why don’t you go in the kitchen a minute?”

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Dean did so. Marylou was so lovely, but I whispered, “Wait until we be

lovers in San Francisco; my heart isn’t in it.” I was right, she could tell.

(78)

On another occasion, she does not hesitate a minute to take-off her clothes while all three of them are driving in a car, all of them naked in the end:

“Now Sal, now Marylou, I want both of you to […] disemburden

yourselves of all that clothes – now what’s the sense of clothes? […] and

sun your pretty bellies with me. Come on!” […] Marylou complied;

unfuddyduddied, so did I. We sat in the front seat, all three. Marylou

took out cold cream and applied it to us for kicks. Every now and then a

big truck zoomed by; the driver in high cab caught a glimpse of a golden

beauty sitting naked with two naked men: you could see them swerve a

moment as they vanished in our rear-view window. (94)

In spite of the general assumption that it was rather Dean who constantly demanded that Marylou consents to his sexual urges, she voiced her needs, too: “Marylou’s all for it [the divorce], but she insists on banging in the interim.

She says she loves him [Dean]” (28).

Marylou’s and Dean’s relationship is also characterized by a large amount of jealousy, especially on Dean’s part, but on Marylou’s as well. In a party scene, for example, she tries to seduce Sal in order to separate him from his current girlfriend. This would, however, be just a side-effect of her conduct. Her real goal is much more far-reaching. This is the key passage: “Marylou began making love to me; she said Dean was going to stay with Camille and she wanted me to go with her. ‘Come back to San Francisco with us. We’ll live

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together. I’ll be a good girl for you.’ But I knew Dean loved Marylou, and I also knew Marylou was doing this to make Lucille jealous, and I wanted nothing of it” (74). Marylou’s primary purpose here is saving her San Francisco scheme of making Dean jealous, rather than truly getting at Sal, because if Sal stayed with

Lucille, he would not go for the intended affair with Marylou. On the other hand, Dean proves his insane jealousy when he literally stalks Marylou when she is seeing other men while he is married to Camille and living with her under one roof:

[Dean] had gone crazy over Marylou again and spent months haunting

her apartment […], where every night she had a different sailor in and

he peeked down through her mail-slot and could see her bed. There he

saw Marylou sprawled in the mornings with a boy. He trailed her around

town. He wanted absolute proof that she was a whore. He loved her, he

sweated over her. (107)

Henderson further corroborates this in the interview with Nicosia:

Neal was always so crazy and jealous. It was alright for him to live his

own life, but he was an insane man where I was concerned. If he even

thought someone was interested in me, he’d go crazy. […] one time he

stood across the street in a telephone booth for eight solid hours

watching me, to see who I was gonna talk to. (qtd. in Nicosia 126)

Dean’s jealousy reaches its peak when he attempts to kill Marylou and himself afterwards. He admits to Sal:

Then I knew I loved her so much I wanted to kill her. […] I got the gun,

I ran to Marylou, I looked down mail-slot […], I barged in, […] – and

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gave her the gun and told her to kill me. She held the gun in her hand

the longest time. I asked her for a sweet dead pact. She didn’t want. I

said one of us had to die. She said no. I beat my head on the wall. Man,

I was out of my mind. She’ll tell you, she talked me out of it. (108)

In actual fact, this episode was yet more frightening. Nicosia states that

Cassady brought the revolver in order to make Lou Anne sign the marriage annulment papers (which had to be done before she turned eighteen). As he got to her apartment, he wanted her to pack up and go and live in Denver with him again or die along with him. When she refused, he took her out and raped her on the beach. Back in the apartment, she managed to slip away leaving him alone to attempt and fail to commit suicide (92).

All in all, Dean and Marylou in On the Road undeniably have a sort of love-hate relationship going on between them. Despite the fact that they are trying to prove what a rat or whore the other is at several points in the novel, e.g. Dean is convinced that she is “knitting his doom” (72), somewhere deep inside they sincerely love each other in their own idiosyncratic way:

Marylou was watching Dean […] as though she wanted to cut off his

head […], an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all

raging and sniffy and crazywayed, a smile of tender dotage but also

sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never

bear fruit because when she looked at [him] she knew he was too mad.

Dean was convinced Marylou was a whore; he confided in me that she

was a pathological liar. But when she watched him like this it was love,

too. (96-97)

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Sal certainly notices that Marylou is the only and irreplaceable girl for Dean:

“Marylou was the only girl Dean ever really loved. […] She understood Dean; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad” (66).

In comparison with the other girls in On the Road, Marylou is the only one who actually hits the road with the men and enjoys it (cf.: Galatea Dunkel and Sal’s aunt). She is not a mere passive passenger in the car at all, but she sometimes takes the wheel and drives the car herself (e.g. p. 80 and 94).

Brenda Knight supports this idea, too, stating that “LouAnne [sic] wasn’t just along for the ride, however; she was an equal participant” (58, emphasis added). Marylou is all in for the drunken parties and exhibits all sorts of non- standard behavior for a 1940’s eighteen year old, including accessory to theft

(OTR 82) or drug taking. The following passage can serve as a fine example; during a visit to Old Bull Lee in Louisiana, the group decide to have a ball:

That night Marylou took everything in the books; she took tea, goofballs,

benny [Benzedrine], liquor, and even asked Old Bull for a shot of M

[morphine], which of course he didn’t give her; he did give her a martini.

She was so saturated with elements of all kinds that she came to a

standstill and stood goofy on the porch with me. (OTR 87)

Overall, although the character of Marylou is partially pictured as still trapped within the 1940’s patriarchal system, she displays much more independence and resistance to that code than the other female characters in the novel, “using the men as much as they use her” (Vlagopoulos 61); and

Nicosia even sees her real life model, Lou Anne Henderson, as a precursor, albeit uneducated, to Friedan and the feminist movement that surfaced two

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decades later – first because of her ways mentioned above, but mainly because of her attitude: he explains that “far from feeling shamed, humiliated, doomed, etc., as she was supposed to – according to the tenets of American society at the time – she […] loved her life, [and] she rejoiced in the ever-widening spectrum of experience that came her way” (186-187).

3.3.2 Camille

Camille’s first appearance on the scene is in every respect analogous to

Marylou’s. Sal pays a visit to Dean in Denver, and this is what happens: “Dean opened [the door] stark naked. I saw a brunette on the bed, one beautiful creamy thigh covered with black lace” (OTR 28). In case of Marylou, Dean came to the door in his shorts while she was jumping off the couch (OTR 4); in

Denver, he is not wearing anything at all and Camille is lying on the bed. The two pictures could not have been more similar. The first glimpse of Camille indisputably refers to the classic erotic posters picturing models in sexy underwear and is one of the perfect examples of the constant presence of the male gaze in the novel.

This concept was first introduced in film theory by Laura Mulvey in her

1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she argues that female characters in films function as erotic objects for the male characters in the story as well as the viewers (838). She also categorizes the men as active on-lookers and women as passive objects “displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men” (840, emphasis added), and maintains that the “male gaze

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projects its phantasy [sic] on to the female figure which is styled accordingly.

[…] [W]omen are […] looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can […] connote to-be-looked-at- ness” (837, emphasis added). As can be implied from the quote above,

Kerouac’s description of female characters in On the Road proves that the male gaze theory can be extended to literature as well because, regardless of the medium, the narrative strategy is the same.

Although the introductions of Camille and Marylou are almost identical, on another occasion, Sal puts Camille in a sharp contrast to Marylou and declares that she was “a relief after Marylou; a well-bred, polite young woman”

(OTR 102), which she indeed was. At the time of meeting Cassady in 1947,

Carolyn Robinson, on whom the character of Camille is based, had gained a bachelor’s degree in Stanislavsky drama from Bennington College, back then an elite women’s school in the United States, and moved to Colorado to pursue a master’s degree in theatre and fine arts at the University of Denver (Knight 58).

In On the Road, Camille is not given so much space as Marylou, partly because she is not an active participant in Dean’s and Sal’s adventures like

Marylou. The reader sees her primarily at home, waiting for Dean or making a scene.

Sal has not even met her yet, but he already knows that she hates Carlo for spending too much time with Dean (OTR 28). The first thing that Sal hears

Camille say is asking Dean what time he will be back when he is getting ready to show Sal round the bars of Denver. Reacting to Dean’s reply, she insists:

“Well, all right, Dean, but please be sure and be back at three” (ibid.). This is

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certainly not a picture of an ideal woman’s behavior in Sal’s and Dean’s eyes

(cf.: Walter’s wife).

Soon enough, while Dean lives with her relatively happily in San

Francisco, Camille gives birth to a baby daughter and she is growing even more discontent with Dean’s ideas of travelling across the country: “‘I’m going to

New York and bring Sal back.’ She wasn’t too pleased at this prospect. ‘But what is the purpose of all this? Why are you doing this to me?’” (65) With their second child accidentally on the way, Camille’s rants intensify and Dean complains:

“She’s getting worse and worse, man, she cries and makes tantrums,

won’t let me out […], gets mad every time I’m late, then when I stay

home she won’t talk to me and says I’m an utter beast.” […] I [Sal]

heard Camille yell, “You’re a liar, you’re a liar, you’re a liar!” […] It was

horrible to hear Camille sobbing so. We couldn’t stand it and went out to

buy beer […]. (107)

A few days later, Camille has a complete breakdown and throws both, Dean and Sal, out of the house:

Camille came in from work at the doctor’s office and gave us all the sad

look of a harassed woman’s life. I tried to show this haunted woman that

I had no mean intentions concerning her home life by saying hello to her

and talking as warmly as I could, but she […] only gave a brief smile. In

the morning there was a terrible scene: she lay on the bed sobbing […]

A few moments later Camille was throwing Dean’s things on the living-

room floor and telling him to pack. (107)

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In the end, Dean has to proceed in the same way as with Marylou – he gets a divorce from Camille so as he can marry another woman that he got pregnant in New York, Inez. After this is settled and he indeed marries Inez, the novel ends in a sort of happy-ending for Dean and Camille, as she sends him a letter forgiving everything he has done and inviting him to join her and the children in San Francisco.

The problem with Camille is that, even though she has to endure terrible things from Dean, one cannot really feel sorry for her. If we assume that the main protagonists of the novel, with whom the reader is supposed to identify, are two male Beats looking for kicks and laughing at “square” America, we have to come to the conclusion that Camille is their exact antithesis. Raised in a good middle-class family, educated, and accidentally in love with someone absolutely incompatible with her, she recourses to hysterical scenes in vain attempts to keep her husband by her side. But once the readers accept the pact with the novel and become “Sal’s travel budd[ies]” (Leland 47), who decide that Sal and

Dean are the embodiment of cool; Camille will always be perceived as the annoying wife who does not let her man have any fun.

3.3.3 Lee Ann

Spouse of Remi Boncoeur (Henri Cru), Lee Ann (Diane) is the third wife in On the Road that the reader sees lying in bed, albeit only sleeping (OTR 38), when Sal mentions their first encounter; this consequently seems to be an emerging pattern in the novel since we could notice similar exposés in the case

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of Marylou and Camille. As regards her appearance, she is depicted as a

“fetching hunk” and a “honey-colored creature” (39). The expression “fetching hunk” is particularly interesting because the word “hunk” normally refers to attractive males, and when used to designate a female, it has rather the opposite meaning, which makes the whole expression oxymoronic.

Lee Ann is indubitably the most quarrelsome woman in the book, certainly reminiscent of Kate of The Taming of the Shrew. As Sal observes, she

“had a bad tongue and gave [Remi] a calldown every day. […][T]hey yelled at each other all week” (OTR 39) and he declares that he “never saw so many snarls in all [his] born days” (ibid). What is more, at one point, he actually refers to her as an “untamed shrew” (46). The cause of Lee Ann’s conflicting demeanor is her frustration with her cohabitation with Remi, which does not meet her expectations:

Her ambition was to marry a rich man. […] She rued the day she ever

took up with Remi. On one of his big showoff weekends he spent a

hundred dollars on her and she thought she’d found an heir. Instead she

was hung-up in this shack, and for lack of anything else she had to stay

there. She had a job in Frisco; she had to take the Greyhound bus at the

crossroads and go in every day. She never forgave Remi for it. (39)

She is thus pictured as a plain gold-digger, which is further reinforced by the fact that she “looked forward to meeting [Remi’s] stepfather; she thought he might be a catch, if his son wasn’t” (47), who is not able to look after herself and totally relies on the others to support her; and when they fail, she is enraged.

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In this episode Sal also witnesses a fighting scene, not unevocative of the ones that Marylou and Dean had: “Remi pushed Lee Ann. She made a jump for the gun. […] Lee Ann began screaming, and finally she put on her raincoat and went out in the mud to find a cop” (46). All in all, Henri and Lee Ann represent another explosive couple in On the Road although it is disputable whether there is any love left between them at all.

3.3.4 Rita Bettencourt

Sal’s encounter with Rita, “a fine chick, slightly hung-up on a few sexual difficulties” (OTR 29) is a product of Dean’s scheming during Sal’s first visit to

Denver. Dean, who plans to “get into her sister Mary” (ibid.), wants to ensure that his friend enjoys himself, too, and so he has “Rita lined up” for him (36).

Similarly to the case of the sex with Marylou, Dean is the initiator of the action which Sal would not otherwise have taken, and the outcome is comparable, too

– Sal is unable to perform. It seems as though it was Dean’s curse: anytime Sal is pushed by Dean into sleeping with a girl, it never works out.

Sal describes Rita as “a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex” (ibid.). He attempts to convince her that there is nothing to be afraid of, but after his sexual failure, they just end up talking in bed.

Interestingly, as Knight argues, this kind of disclosure of male’s deficiency, albeit it occurs two times in On the Road, is extremely rare in Beat literature and is “never ascribed to such sexual heroes as Dean Moriarty” (94).

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The episode with Rita reveals two facts: first of all, it proves that Rita is indeed a “simple” young lady because when she is asked what she wants out of life she responds “I don’t know. […] Just wait on tables [she is a waitress] and try to get along” (ibid.), and when Sal tells her excitingly about his life and plans she turns away with no interest. Secondly, as Sal confesses that he “used to ask that all the time of girls” (ibid.), his conduct shows that he is positively after a connection that goes deeper than plain sex; and further on, he complains about the lack of communication among contemporary young people: “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk – real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious” (ibid., emphasis added). This one night stand with Rita is thus another example of Sal trying to treat women in a less abusive way than Dean does.

3.3.5 Terry

The character of Terry (Teresa) is based on Bea Franco, a woman

Kerouac met on his way from Bakersfield to Los Angeles when he could not hitch a ride and decided to take a bus instead (Gifford and Lee 117). Her initial description starts in the way that could already be called emblematic of On the

Road. Kerouac begins with the depiction of Terry’s physical appearance and her most attractive features: “I […] was waiting for the […] bus when all of a sudden I saw the cutest little Mexican girl […]. Her breasts stuck out straight

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and true; her little flanks looked delicious; her hair was long and lustrous black; and her eyes were great big blue things with timidities inside” (OTR 49).

Terry is a young single mother who left her husband because of domestic violence and is on her way to join her sister. Sal falls in love with her at first sight and they decide to stick together when they get to L.A. However, as soon as they get off the bus, he starts getting insane ideas about Terry being a prostitute, who regularly picks up clients on the buses (50). Apparently,

Sal’s mind is not open enough to imagine that a good girl could travel on a long-distance coach alone, so he concludes that Terry has to be a common hustler. He only gets rid of these thoughts after he downs a shot of whiskey in their hotel room. No sooner does Sal calm down than Terry begins thinking the same way about him, which results in an open fight. They eventually reconcile and stay together for two more weeks before, failing to find a job in L.A., they opt for a trip back north hoping for a better luck earning money up there, but all they can get is a terrible cotton-picking job. Although Sal is very enthusiastic at the beginning, he soon realizes that he is not as dexterous as the other pickers and the money he is making only suffices to buy the daily groceries. As a result, he suggests that Terry go back to live with her family since the winter is coming and it is no good for her and her little son to stay in their shabby tent. Upon seeing her, Terry’s relatives start yelling at her calling her a whore because she ran away from her abusive husband and left her son with them, but she is allowed to come back in the end. Sal and Terry part soon afterwards as he is going to travel back to New York.

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This episode illustrates Sal’s idea of a perfect romantic relationship, which is in a sharp contrast to Dean’s. Whereas in Dean’s conception women are mere disposable objects that he uses for his gratification, Sal seems to seek a deeper connection with his female counterparts, as can be also inferred from his apparent discomfort, at several points in the novel, when Dean pushes him into treating women the way he finds entirely acceptable (e.g. sex with

Marylou). James T. Jones shares a similar perspective on the matter claiming that “Sal’s two-week relationship with [Terry] represents his first successful attempt at being a responsible husband and father and so escaping the orbit of

Dean’s gravitational pull” (150). On the other hand, Carole Gottlieb Vopat sees this surrogate marriage more critically, suggesting that Sal is too immature to take up such a responsibility: “Sal is far more comfortable in the role of wayward child than as […] father and husband […]. He finds Theresa [sic], another child, and plays house with her. But this too collapses; the chill of winter is in the air and he tires of playing at husband and father” (5-10).

What Sal longs for is basically a monogamous pastoral. When he and

Terry leave the urban “jungle” of Los Angeles, Sal rhapsodizes about their modest life to come: “The thought of living in a tent and picking grapes in the cool California mornings hit me right” (OTR 54) and he loves the prospect of being a family man: “There were a bed, a stove, and a cracked mirror hanging from a pole; it was delightful. I had to stoop to get in [the tent], and when I did there was my baby and my baby boy” (56). Moreover, the life with Terry and her son seems to fulfill his dream of a bucolic existence: “I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be” (58). However, even though

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Terry has the potential to offer him what he has been aspiring to in terms of an amorous relationship, the idyll comes to an end because of Sal’s failure to provide for his “family,” which he later deeply regrets: “All my life I’d had white ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San

Joaquin Valley” (105).

This quote also brings up the issue of race and interracial relationships, which are an integral part of several Kerouac’s major works, such as Tristessa and The Subterraneans, written at the time when anti-miscegenation laws were still existent in more than fifteen U.S. states (Mlakar 10) and depicting the protagonists’ affairs with colored women. As far as On the Road is concerned,

Kerouac’s narrator clearly demonstrates a great sympathy for and identification with the underprivileged and ethnic America (e.g. p. 105: “At lilac evening I walked […] in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.”); and the encounter with Terry and her community is Sal’s first significant exposure to what he calls

“the great fellahin peoples of the world” (58).

Kerouac adopted the term from the German philosopher Oswald

Spengler who, in The Decline of the West, envisions three types of people within what he calls “morphology of peoples.” The most evolved, in his opinion, are so-called “Culture-peoples,” who are “more distinct in character than the rest” (emphasis original), their predecessors being primitive peoples, and those who exist within a Culture, as largely uncultivated, and survive it after its collapse, are named fellah-peoples (169). Spengler maintains that since both

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the primitive and the fellaheen are inferior to Culture-peoples, their life is “just the zoological up-and-down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in time, wherein occurrences are many, but […] devoid of significance”

(170-171).

According to Holton, “Kerouac employs [the term “fellahin”] very generally to designate all those peoples […] who appeared to him to be culturally situated outside the structures and categories, the desires and frustrations, of modernity” (79). Moreover, the fellahin of On the Road “exist in a more authentic, more real and vital space beyond the confines of a consumer culture” (ibid.). Richardson suggests that “in the passages describing Sal’s life with Terry, Kerouac essentially crosses the color line, as by an act of sophisticated minstrelsy: he puts on a mask of color” (212), which can be endorsed by Sal’s overt identification with the Mexicans referring to the group as “we Mexicans” (OTR 58) and admitting that “[the Okies] thought I was a

Mexican, of course; and in a way I am” (ibid.).

However, no matter how hard he tries to pass as a black cotton picker or a Mexican migrant worker, Sal is still just a “nice college boy” that Terry took him for when she first saw him. Their significantly different cultural heritage cannot be denied and it is also one of the reasons why their romantic interlude must fail when Sal starts to “feel the pull of [his] own life calling [him] back”

(58). As Trudeau suggests, it is Sal’s white privilege (and accessibility of capital through his aunt) that allows him to easily exit one life and enter another as needed, which is an option that Terry and her son do not have (103). In the

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end, as Tim Hunt agrees with Vopat, Sal only wanted the “experience” while

Terry deserved a husband and father for her son (30).

Apart from Sal’s lack of ability to work hard enough to be a successful breadwinner, his lack of commitment, and a certain naiveté towards racial issues – for instance, Mlakar observes that Kerouac “totally overlooked the misery and poverty of the Mexican ‘fellahins’ by depicting them in an oversimplified way as authentic, primitive, truly happy, and nature-loving” (4) – there is probably one more explanation why his relationship with Terry did not last, but besides Sal’s remark about his “white ambitions,” this is not, however, fully reflected in the novel and we must go back to real Bea Franco and Jack

Kerouac to find out. The “white ambitions” that Kerouac refers to might very well be his mother’s ambitions rather than his own. Gabrielle Kerouac had always been overprotective of her son and wished to see him step higher up the social ladder. As a first generation working class immigrant, she was more than pleased to watch Jack enroll to Horace Mann as it was always her goal to get him to befriend “better” people (Gifford and Lee 8); G. J. Apostolos,

Kerouac’s childhood friend, remembers Gabrielle say: “Now Jack’s going to meet the people he should have grown up with. Jack’s much better off” (qtd. in

Gifford and Lee 18). It can be naturally concluded that Bea was not the kind of woman that Memère would have appreciated. Apostolos also recollects

Kerouac’s perplexing emotions regarding his mother’s expectations: “`I can never be what she wants. I can’t live with her. I’m disappointing her,’ he’d say.

Jack always tried to please his mother. It seemed to eat him away. He went off with the Beat Generation, but he always worried about his mother” (qtd. in

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Gifford and Lee 8). It is, therefore, more than clear that Bea’s social and ethnic background constituted a major hindrance in the development of their relationship even though Kerouac might not have been fully aware of it and did not mirror it completely in his novel.

3.3.6 Lucille

After Terry, Sal’s next attempt at playing a family man comes with a girl called Lucille, “a beautiful Italian honey-haired darling” (OTR 69) whom he met in New York. The romance with Lucille further supports the presumption that

Sal intends to settle down in a conventional marriage. Sal admits to Dean and

Marylou: “All these years I was looking for the woman I wanted to marry. I couldn’t meet a girl without saying to myself ‘What kind of wife would she make?’ […] I want to marry a girl […] 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”

(ibid.).

Like Terry, Lucille is another damsel in distress: she is poor, she has a little daughter, and she is married to a man who “treats her badly” (OTR 74).

Sal, as it seems, tends to pair up with women who find themselves in a rather miserable situation – with no money or proper father figure for their children – and although he aspires to being their prince charming, neither he can manage to save them from their ordeal. This is principally due to Sal’s lack of resources, as he confirms in the following quote: “I was willing to marry her and take her

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baby daughter and all if she divorced the husband; but there wasn’t even enough money to get a divorce and the whole thing was hopeless” (ibid.).

In addition to that, Sal is still too Beat to give up his lifestyle and his friends for one woman, and he knows that Lucille would never come to terms with his ways. Contrary to Sal, she is looking for real commitment, not just excitement:

When Lucille saw me with Dean and Marylou her face darkened – she

sensed the madness they put in me.

“I don’t like you when you’re with them.”

“Ah, it’s all right, it’s just kicks. We only live once. We’re having a good

time.”

“No, it’s sad and I don’t like it.” (ibid.)

After this exchange, Sal realizes that there is no future in the relationship because Lucille is from a totally different world, unable to grasp why he acts so strangely: “I knew my affair with Lucille wouldn’t last much longer. She wanted me to be her way. […] Lucille would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up […] I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion” (ibid.)

3.3.7 Galatea Dunkel

Galatea Dunkel, a stand-in for Helen Hinkle, wife of Cassady’s friend Al, who became his and Kerouac’s road companion for a brief time, is a rare example of a female character in On the Road who is not introduced by a

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depiction of her physical appearance. On the other hand, that does not make her debut in the novel any more flattering. She is ushered to the scene as a woman whom Dean and Ed (Al) are trying to persuade to come along with them so as they could use her funds to back up their trip from San Francisco to the East, and who basically extorted marriage from Ed as a consequence (OTR

66). Further on, when Sal actually sees her for the first time at Old Bull Lee’s, she is merely described as a “serious” girl (84) and any commentary on her looks is limited to being pale and teary-eyed (ibid.), which she had a good reason to be as will be explained shortly.

Unsurprisingly, the girl does not prove to be an ideal co-passenger as she incessantly laments about something and thus the two confreres abandon her in the middle of their journey: “she was tired and wanted to sleep in a motel. […] Two nights she forced a stop and blew tens on motels. By the time they got to Tucson she was broke. Dean and Ed gave her the slip in a hotel lobby and resumed the voyage alone, […] and without a qualm” (66). James T.

Jones argues that it is Galatea who “unlike the fabled creation of Pygmalion, has no intention of allowing herself to be molded to suit someone else’s needs

[and] after Dean had used up all her money […] [she] abandoned them” (153), as can be, nevertheless, understood from the previous citation, it is not Galatea who leaves them of her own will, but it is Ed and Dean who escape her perpetual whining.

Galatea is, hence, one of the few women in On the Road who get in the car with Dean and discover what it is like to be on the road with him. However, contrary to Marylou, she does not enjoy it one bit. Although her pleas to stay at

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a decent place overnight, as presented in the novel, may sound like a moaning of a spoilt kid, the real Helen Hinkle certainly had a right to complain because her husband and Cassady did not even let her use a bathroom at a filling station (Gifford and Lee 121). Before they left her behind, Al and Neal gave her the directions to William Burroughs’s farm in Algiers, Louisiana, where they would pick her up on their way back. As Helen testified in Jack’s Book, she was quite puzzled by the occurrences in Burroughs’s household (hinting at Joan

Burroughs’s chronic Benzedrine-induced intoxication): “Being so naive, I had no idea what was going on. I had no reason to be suspicious, although it was odd behavior. Joan’s raking lizards off a tree all night long is odd. Bathing thirteen cats and tying them up in strings is rather odd [OTR 89]” (130).

Later on in On the Road, Galatea finds herself at Old Bull Lee’s place, much to his discomfort which he expresses during a phone call with Sal:

Say, what do you boys expect me to do with this Galatea Dunkel? She’s

been here two weeks now, hiding in her room and refusing to talk to

either Jane [his wife] or me. Have you got […] Ed Dunkel with you? For

krissakes [sic] bring him down and get rid of her. She’s sleeping in our

best bedroom and’s run clear out of money. This ain’t a hotel. (79)

When Dean, Ed, Sal and Marylou finally arrive in Algiers, Ed and Galatea make peace and Bull is soon disemburdened from them.

Altogether, the character of Galatea exhibits two qualities: a great deal of love for Ed and a considerable amount of hatred towards Dean. Even though, Ed, principally under Dean’s influence, does not treat her as an exemplary husband, she shows a great interest in his well-being at several

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points in the book and the thought of leaving him does not even cross her mind

(e.g. p. 70). Galatea knows that the origin of all evil happening not only to her, but other women, too, is Dean; and one day she rises and overtly reprehends his acts. The scene takes place after Camille, pregnant for a second time, kicks

Dean and Sal out of the house and they seek refuge at Galatea’s. The place is packed with their friends, and Galatea, not feeling intimidated at all by Dean’s presence, as Sal observes – “[she] was the only one in the gang who wasn’t afraid of Dean” (114), decides to scold him in front of everyone:

“Dean, why do you act so foolish? […] Don’t you realize you have a

daughter? […] For years now you haven’t had any sense of responsibility

for anyone. […] You have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself

and your damned kicks. All you think about is what’s hanging between

your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people and

then you just throw them aside. […] Camille is crying her heart out

tonight, but don’t think for a minute she wants you back, […]. Yet you

stand here and make silly faces, and I don’t think there’s a care in your

heart. (113-114).

Upon hearing that tirade, Dean, contrary to the general expectations and despite his usual eloquence, sheepishly walks out of the apartment and waits for Sal in the street leaving all the “bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality,

[and] sadness” (114) behind. Sal, trying to mitigate the tension, proposes that they all go out and have fun: “‘Come on, Galatea, Marie, let’s go hit the jazz joints and forget it. Dean will be dead someday. Then what can you say to him?’” (ibid.), however, the answer that he gets is certainly not an anticipated

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one: “‘The sooner he’s dead the better,’ said Galatea, and she spoke officially for almost everyone in the room” (ibid.). In this way, Galatea Dunkel becomes the only woman in On the Road who dares openly criticize Dean’s attitude, not from a position of a desperate wife, but as a relatively disengaged onlooker.

She stands up, not for her own right, but to defend someone else, as a symbol and champion of all oppressed and maltreated women who succumb to Dean’s hedonism.

3.3.8 Jane

Jane, molded on Joan Vollmer Adams – William Burroughs’s companion, is a prime example of a junkie. It seems that her addiction is an inherent part of her character in On the Road and the narcotic aura veils her through her entire appearance in the novel. When she is introduced early on in the novel, the reader discovers “Jane wandering on Times Square in a benzedrine [sic] hallucination, with her baby girl in her arms” (OTR 6), which is one of the worst portrayals that a woman could possible get. Such a description strips her off any respect and dignity since the only thing that it evokes is a human wreck incapable of taking care of her child. Later on, when Sal sees her at Old Bull’s, he adds that “she ate three tubes of benzedrine [sic] paper a day. Her face, once plump and Germanic and pretty, had become stony and red and gaunt”

(84) and completes thus the picture of the addict.

Despite, or maybe because, of being perpetually drugged, Jane manifests total devotion to Old Bull: “She loved that man madly, but in a

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delirious way of some kind; there was […] a very deep companionship that none of us would ever be able to fathom. […] Jane was never more than ten feet away from Bull and never missed a word he said […]” (91), which probably makes them the most harmonious couple in On the Road.

3.3.9 Walter’s wife

Walter is a man of color whom Sal and Dean accidentally befriend one night at a bar, and when they get drunk together, he invites them to his home.

Although the character of Walter is of no importance at all in the novel, the way his wife is pictured needs to be brought to attention. Sal recounts: “His wife was asleep when we came in. […] she lay smiling there. She was about fifteen years older than Walter and the sweetest woman in the world. […] She never asked Walter where he’d been, what time it was, nothing. […] [She] smiled and smiled […]. She never said a word” (OTR 118). Although it is not quite clear whether the wife was sleeping all the time and smiling in her sleep, or whether she woke up and did not complain about her husband bringing home two unknown drunkards at all, and neither can this be ascertained from On the

Road – The Original Scroll, it is important to stress that her silence is what Sal and Dean appreciate the most. For Dean, she is the antithesis of his wife

Camille and he does not hide his excitement: “Now you see, man, there’s real woman for you. Never a harsh word, never a complaint, […] her old man can come in any hour of the night with anybody and have talks in the kitchen and drink the beer and leave any old time. This is a man, and that’s his castle”

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(ibid.). This quote reveals the fact that Dean likes his women quiet and obedient and certainly restraining from any criticism or reproaches.

3.3.10 Frankie

Frankie is doubtlessly the only woman in the novel that Sal and Dean truly admire and respect not for her beauty assets but as a person. This mother of four puts them up for a while when they have nowhere else to stay in

Denver. Sal speaks of her as a “wonderful woman in jeans who drove coal trucks in winter mountains to support her kids” (OTR 124). Frankie definitely represents the disadvantaged white America and works as a contrast to the mainstream middle-class: “[Frankie and her children] lived their ragged and joyous lives on the little new-settlement street and were the butt of the neighbors’ semi-respectable sense of propriety only because the poor woman’s husband had left her and because they littered up the yard” (ibid., emphasis added). She lives in direct contact with the “respectable” citizens, but she is a thorn in their flesh because she is a single mother. Moreover she engages in several activities not typically associated with women in the late 1940’s, such as wearing jeans, driving a truck and drinking in saloons (e.g. p. 127) and that is why Sal thinks of her as a remarkable woman.

Curiously enough, in On the Road – The Original Scroll, this woman is called Johnny which seems to erase gender boundaries altogether. Kerouac presumably kept real names when he was writing the scroll version, at least as far as the main protagonists are concerned, and this detail certainly allows for a

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different reading of the character. It is impossible to establish whether Johnny was her real name and thus the link between her name and character a pure coincidence, or whether it was just a nickname that people gave her based on her nature, as might be suggested by the following quote: “the woman, Johnny everyone called her” (OS 312). Not even Kerouac’s journals can bring any definite proof because the entry of May 26 1949 says “Johnny they call her”

(Brinkley 195, emphasis added). Either way, it is not hard to understand why she enjoyed such respect from Sal and Dean – it was probably because the only thing that distinguished her from a man was her sex, which she managed to hide wearing trousers; and they considered her their equal as a result.

3.3.11 Inez

Dean’s third wife in the novel, Inez is a fictionalized version of Diana

Hansen, a New York fashion writer who was in a relationship with Cassady approximately from fall 1949 to summer 1950 (Brinkley xxxvi). Inez is one exception to the rule of Dean picking girls for Sal because this time it is Sal who brings the two together at a party in New York (OTR 143). According to Sal, she is “a big, sexy brunette – […] straight out of Degas, and generally like a beautiful Parisian coquette” (ibid.) and Dean immediately succumbs to her charm to such an extent that, within a few days after meeting her, he starts persuading Camille, pregnant at the time, to grant him a divorce, which he eventually arranges in Mexico.

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Inez seems to fit the idea of a perfect conjoint very well as she cooks and smiles all the time because, as Dean proudly announces, she “loves [him]

[and] she’s told [him] and promised [him] [he] can do anything [he] want[s] and there’ll be a minimum of trouble” (145). All that despite the fact that she has got in touch with Camille and they had regular chats on the phone and exchanged letters about “Dean’s eccentricities” (ibid.). Soon enough, Inez gets pregnant and insists on keeping the baby in spite of Dean’s reservations. That is why he needs to speed up the divorce process and decides to take a trip to

Mexico, where he can supposedly get the divorce much cheaper and faster. In the end, Dean proves to be the ultimate traitor: as soon as he finally marries

Inez, he gets on the bus the very same night and flees back to Camille (176).

He only sees Inez once again begging for pardon, but she refuses to listen and throws him out, like he deserves (177).

This episodic romance with Inez underlines Dean’s impulsive and often illogical behavior and makes him a definite villain in the eyes of most female readers. Switching back to reality, it comes as a surprise that Henderson views this, confessing to Nicosia, as evidence of Cassady’s concealed responsibility:

“Neal had a large sense of responsibility, or he would never have married

Carolyn. He would never have married Diana either. He would never have gone through the whole bullshit of annulments and divorces just so he could keep getting remarried and taking care of his different families” (Nicosia 171) and defends him on the grounds that he grew up on the street with no parents to teach him how to handle responsibility.

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3.3.12 Laura

Laura is the last girlfriend of Sal’s in On the Road. He meets her quite accidentally when she pops out of the window of a flat where he expects his friends to be having a party. He goes upstairs and beholds the “girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that [he] had always searched for” (OTR 176), and they immediately agree “to love each other madly” (ibid.). Laura, thus, symbolically closes the book with a new hope for a happy relationship. The novel’s first line goes: “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up”

(4) and, as demonstrated above, throughout the whole story, Sal is in search of another woman whom he could marry. Maybe Laura could be the one.

According to his own account, Sal has told her “everything about Dean,” (178) suggesting that she is a person that he trusts and to whom he feels comfortable confessing; and she, instead of condemning him, showed utmost sympathy as she began to cry. It could be thus assumed that Laura is one of the more suitable matches for Sal. In reality, the woman who served as a model for Laura was Joan Haverty who eventually became Kerouac’s second wife.

John Leland suggests that Laura, together with Sal’s aunt, “bracket the novel, looming over Sal’s travails in between. One nurtures him like a child until the other welcomes him as an adult” (105). Also, Laura is the one who finally seems to get Sal out from under Dean’s influence (ibid.).

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3.3.13 Sal’s aunt

Sal’s aunt in On the Road is a fictional representation of Kerouac’s mother, “the most constant figure in his life, [who] barely figures in his writing”

(Leland 107). She is the only woman in the novel whose physical description is entirely omitted and the reader has no clue whatsoever regarding her appearance, facial expressions, or clothing. She takes care of Sal’s New York base; she is his guardian angel – sending money any time he needs to get out of trouble (e.g. OTR 36) – and the only anchor in his reckless life. When at home, Sal feels that he is under her constant supervision and he rather gets out than having friends over at his place: “we went out to have a few beers because we couldn’t talk like we wanted to talk in front of my aunt” (5). She is also very suspicious of Sal’s acquaintances, especially Dean: “She took one look at Dean and decided that he was a madman. […][She] warned me that he would get me in trouble” (5-7). Although this may be seen as a mere prejudice of a conservative elderly woman, it must be admitted that, in light of later events, it was a brilliant judgment.

Apart from one episode in which Dean and the company pay a visit to

Sal and his aunt at Sal’s brother’s Rocco’s place, Sal’s aunt is mentioned very sporadically in the novel. However, most of the time she does surface in the narrative, she is somehow connected to finances: either in the way suggested above – as a provider of funds who saves Sal’s “lazy butt” (OTR 60) – or as the receiver of the money that Sal tries to pay her back. This shows that, contrary to popular belief, Sal was not just living off his aunt’s resources, but he actually

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supported her any time he could, e.g.: “I was making fifty-five bucks a week and sending my aunt an average of forty” (44), “Lately I’d been sending so much money to my aunt that I only bought four or five dollars’ worth of groceries a week” (46) and “I came into some money from selling my book. I straightened out my aunt with rent for the rest of the year” (105).

There are three women altogether in On the Road who find themselves in a car driven by Dean, and, astonishingly, Sal’s aunt is one of them. This ensues from Dean’s arrival to Rocco’s, after which it is decided, among other things, that Dean will drive Sal and his aunt from Virginia back to New York.

Surprisingly, the aunt, contrary to Galatea Dunkel, does not moan or complain about anything, she is even pleasantly fascinated for a while by Dean’s garrulousness. Although this trip with Dean must have been the craziest in her entire life, she even pays for Dean’s speeding ticket. What is more, she bravely faces the cop who is suspicious about the peculiar company and tells him:

“Don’t worry, I’m not a gun moll. If you want to come and search the car, go right ahead. I’m going home with my nephew, and this furniture isn’t stolen; it’s my niece’s, she just had a baby and she’s moving to her new house” (72).

There is actually a little inconsistency in this sentence because the furniture in question belonged to her other nephew (Sal’s brother) and his wife, not her niece – unless she considered his wife her niece. More likely, Kerouac just neglectfully kept the female gender here since the scroll version, of course, contains “my daughter” instead of “my niece” because Kerouac, having lost his only brother at a very early age, refers to his sister Carolyn here.

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At several points in the book, Sal’s aunt demonstrates her “motherly” feelings and shows how much she cares for Sal, as he admits, “All she wanted was for me to come back in one piece” (9). When he finally returns from one of his trips, she exclaims: “Poor little Salvatore. […] You’re thin, you’re thin. Where have you been all this time?” (63).

At times, she also provides some wisdom concerning the relationships between men and women, which is a topic that Sal deems oftentimes confusing: “My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness” (72). On another occasion, she appeals to Dean to have some sense regarding his soaring number of progeny:

“Well, Dean […] I hope you’ll be able to take care of your new baby that’s coming and stay married this time. […] You can’t go all over the country having babies like that. Those poor little things’ll grow up helpless. You’ve got to offer them a chance to live” (147).

All in all, the aunt symbolizes domesticity as she prepares breakfast for

Sal and Dean (72), tradition, and a link with the ancestry as she speaks Italian with Sal (63) and works on “a great rag rug woven of all the clothes in [the] family for years” (ibid.).

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3.3.14 Other women

Apart from the above-mentioned, On the Road is populated by plentiful other female characters who are purely random and episodic. However, there is a certain pattern of the portrayal of these “no-name” women that needs to be examined.

First of all, strikingly enough, there are six other aunts in the novel, and most of them perform a similar function to the one of Sal’s. For instance, there is a character named Roll who “lives in a nice house with his aunt; when she dies the house is all his” (OTR 75). Obviously, this aunt provides her nephew with a place to live and a prospect of some non-negligible inheritance, so Roll will probably not have to worry about money that much in future. Also Old Bull

Lee mentions his aunt who was robbed of her diamond ring in Tunis – actually, her finger was cut with the ring still on it (88) and since diamonds are not a common sight, we can assume that this aunt was quite well off, too. Since he receives a fifty dollar check every week from his relatives, Bull also lives off his family’s funds instead of his own (84). Another aunt in the novel looks after a female friend of Sal and Dean’s while her mother is away, this “chaperon” aunt, as they put it, is called Charity (151). One could not ask for a better name for an aunt because all of them mentioned so far are charities in a way. There is, however, one aunt that carries yet another connotation: a young hitch-hiker that Sal and Dean pick up tells them about his aunt “who owned a grocery store and as soon as [they] got there she’d have some money for [them]” (96).

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Once again, there is an equal sign between an aunt and a potential source of money in the narrative, but in the end they discover that this aunt “shot her husband and went to jail” (99). The circumstances are never specified, but since it would not be the first example of domestic violence in the novel, one of the possible explanations could be that she shot him because he had beaten her. This is, however, pure speculation.

The other female characters in the narrative are usually incidental girls that the boys meet or catch a glimpse of as they travel. These women are only brought up because they possess some kind of physical attractivity that makes them worth mentioning. There are multiple examples to be found in the text, e.g.: Terry’s sister Margarina was a “lovely mulatto” (OTR 53), another girl was

absolutely and finally the most beautiful girl Dean and I ever saw in all

our lives. She was about sixteen, and had Plains complexion like wild

roses, and the bluest eyes, the most lovely hair, and the modesty and

quickness of a wild antelope. At every look from us she flinched. She

stood there with the immense winds that blew clear down from

Saskatchewan knocking her hair about her lovely head like shrouds,

living curls of them. She blushed and blushed. (132-132), yet another had a “beautiful body [that] was matched only by her idiot mind”

(93), once a door is opened for them by a “beautiful colored girl” (112) or they see “one amazing little girl about three feet high, a midget, with the most beautiful and tender face in the world” (125). At one point, Dean is caught “not taking his eyes off [a] man’s wife whose beautiful brown breasts were barely concealed inside a floppy cotton blouse” (136), in Chicago, they notice a

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“woman in [the] window […] just looking down with her big breasts hanging from her nightgown, [with] big wide eyes” (138), and on a bus to Michigan, Sal engages in a conversation with a “gorgeous country girl wearing a low-cut cotton blouse that displayed the beautiful sun-tan on her breast” (141). All of these instances illustrate how deeply the concept of the male gaze is manifested in the novel and that it is one of the author’s signature procedures.

The last observation regarding the women in the novel concerns the protagonists’ appetite for teenage/underage girls. As of 2007, according to

“Children and youth in history” website (“Age of Consent”), the age of consent in the U.S.A. varies from 16 to 18 depending on the state, it was 16 in the

1930’s, but no record can be found for the period of the 1940’s and 1950’s.

However, the 1957 song’s Jailbait lyrics (found on “Children and youth in history” website, too) suggest that the age variance was similar to today: “15,

16, 17 that's jail bait / [...] 17 and 1/2 is still jail bait.”On the Road contains manifold examples of the male protagonists licking the lips at young girls (e.g. pp. 131 and 141) and even engaging in sexual activity with them (albeit in a

Mexican brothel). When Dean picks Marylou up and marries her, she is actually fifteen (135), merely three years older than Nabokov’s Lolita (the novel was published in 1955 in Paris and 1958 in New York), but it seems that On the

Road did not stir such a controversy. Sal, even though an equal admirer of the teenagers’ sex appeal, is generally more reluctant to take the action, possibly because of Kerouac’s own catholic upbringing. At one point he even warns

Dean “no to touch” little Janet, Frankie’s thirteen year old daughter, (124) and in the Mexican whorehouse, he opts in the end for an older woman (about

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thirty) instead of the sixteen year old that first caught his attention while his friend goes with a fifteen year old (166).

3.3.15 Women in On the Road – common traits

All things (and women) considered, it must be concluded that there is a definitive pattern and a few clichés that Kerouac sticks to when dealing with female characters in On the Road.

To begin with, all of the women in the novel except Sal’s aunt are sooner or later categorized according to their looks, and thus presented as objects of sexual desire. On the other hand, although many may dismiss this approach as patriarchal and chauvinistic, starting a description of a person mentioning their appearance is rather hard to avoid and it is quite natural when it is all the information available in case of a first meeting. Not to defend Kerouac, it needs to be highlighted that he wrote the novel retrospectively making use of his journal entries and thus he did have the final sum of information; and he, as the author, decided what to put in or what to edit out, as well as which expressions to use. What is more, it must be stressed that this procedure is much less frequent with male characters in the book. For example, the readers first get an idea of what Dean looks like only after they learn what he does and where he comes from (OTR 1) or Terry’s brother is only described as “a wild- buck Mexican hotcat with a hunger for booze, [and] a great good kid” (55), and as far as one of the principal male characters, Carlo Marx, is concerned, the

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readers discover that he wears glasses only on page 6 (although he is first mentioned already on page 1) and the rest is left to their imagination.

Secondly, most of the female characters are portrayed as very passive, only taking part in those activities that the men assign them; or even suffering from men’s physical aggression (e.g.: Marylou, Terry, Lee Ann, Lucille), which might hint at how frequent domestic violence was in the late 1940’s, particularly in the lower social classes.

Another common trait that can be observed in Sal’s behavior towards his girlfriends is that he often parts with them making very hazy promises of reuniting with them later somewhere else, e.g. when he says goodbye to Terry in California, he closes the conversation in the following way: “‘See you in New

York, Terry,’ […] She was supposed to drive to New York in a month with her brother. But we both knew she wouldn’t make it” (60). Similarly, after Sal leaves Rita, he admits that they “made vague plans to meet in Frisco” (36) but they never meet again either.

Lastly, some of the female characters (e.g. Camille and Galatea) could be also labeled as “desperate housewives” who are trying to keep their men on a leash, but since they have apparently chosen partners that cannot be tamed, they often give way to their frustration in angry outbursts, fights or mental breakdowns; and at one point, Sal realizes that “all these women were spending months of loneliness and womanliness together, chatting about the madness of the men” (109).

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3.4 On the Road – The Original Scroll

Although The Scroll and On the Road are more or less the same in overall content, there are, as was pointed out earlier, some differences regarding syntax, punctuation and choice of expressions, as well as the length and nature of the individual episodes. In this section focus will be directed towards the possible nuances in the representation of women in the two versions of the work.

Starting with Marylou/Louanne [sic], the first difference that one notices is that instead of being referred to as a “sweet little girl,” she is described as a

“pretty, sweet little thing” (OS 110, emphasis added), which further underlines the play-thing aspect of her representation. On the other hand, no other details of her appearance are provided in this part of The Scroll, these were furnished at a later stage of editing in the regular version of the novel.

Kerouac is much more overt in The Scroll as far as Louanne’s background is concerned; Henderson evidently confessed to her friends about her abusive step-father, and Kerouac did not hesitate to include it in the first version of his masterpiece: “Her own father was a cop in L.A. who had made many an incestuous hint” (233), which, again, puts her in a position of a victim of men’s desires. This passage was later removed possibly because Kerouac decided not to disclose such confidence in public, or just plainly because the editors deemed it inappropriate.

When he deals with the sex-scene involving Louanne, Neal and himself,

Kerouac writes that Louanne “grabbed” him (OS 232) instead of “embraced” as

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he later decided to change the wording. This seemingly trivial detail makes a big difference in the reading of Louanne’s participation in the act. While

“embrace” evokes a gentle, almost innocent, gesture, “grab” in this context suggests more action, sexual appetite and lasciviousness on Louanne’s part.

By and large, sex acts in general are, according to Vlagopoulos, “more explicit and egalitarian in the scroll” (61). The original version also “explores women’s sexuality and freedom in an era when […] [w]omen did not have the same degree of mobility as men and the costs of rebellion were much greater”

(ibid.). This is well illustrated when Marylou insists on having sex with Dean despite their divorce because she “loves him” (OTR 28), while Louanne’s reason in The Scroll is that she “loves his big cock” (146), which allows for a different interpretation: here Kerouac puts Louanne’s sexual urges out in the open without concealing them under a veil of romantic feelings as in On the Road.

Another noteworthy shift concerns the character of Laura/Joan. Laura in

On the Road is just another girl that Sal falls in love with and hopes to marry but no further development is hinted at as the couple merely agrees to “love each other madly” (OTR 176). In The Scroll, however, Kerouac admits having married Joan very promptly after their first encounter: “That night [the night he first saw her] I asked her to marry me and she accepted and agreed. Five days later we were married” (405) and further on refers to her as “my wife” (405,

408). Kerouac probably decided not to mention this in the finished version because he and Joan Haverty separated soon afterwards.

Other female characters were left almost intact and there are, thus, no differences in the way they are portrayed in On the Road and its precursor.

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3.5 On the Road (film)

Although there were plans to put Kerouac’s seminal work on the silver screen as early as in the 1950’s with Kerouac imploring Marlon Brando to play the role of Dean Moriarty (Huffington Post – “Jack Kerouac’s Letter”), or later on with Francis Ford Coppola looking for the ideal scriptwriter (Nicosia 20), the novel did not make it to the movie theaters until 2012, directed by Walter Salles

(also known for another road movie – The Motorcycle Diaries about Che

Guevara).

Even if On the Road is probably one of the best attempts at shooting a feature film on the Beat topic, one thing needs to be stressed: Salles’s On the

Road is certainly not a film rendering of Kerouac’s On the Road, and this is not only for the sake of brevity, but principally because it is saturated with scenes that the novel does not contain. These are collected either from On the Road –

The Original Scroll or from various biographical materials. The movie is thus an amalgam of reality and fiction, mingling the adventures of the novel’s characters with their real-life counterparts’ stories, which is rather problematic and might be confusing for an uninformed viewer. As a result, the film plot is oftentimes inconsistent with the book’s. This section will focus on the instances of such discrepancies with special attention paid to the representation of female characters.

Five minutes into the film, the viewer watches a scene of Leo Paradise’s

(Sal’s father’s) funeral. However, there is no such scene in On the Road. Its origin lies in On the Road – The Original Scroll, which begins: “I first met Neal

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not long after my father died” (OS 109); Leo was Kerouac’s father’s real name, but this is never mentioned in neither version of the novel, and so it obviously comes from biographical sources outside of the texts. What is more, Gabrielle

(Leo’s wife) is introduced in this scene, too, which implies that the character of

Sal Paradise (from On the Road) lives with his mother (not his aunt) as in The

Scroll. The priest also mentions Gerard, Kerouac’s dead brother. All in all, right from the beginning of the movie, Salles makes it clear, mostly by the choice of characters’ names, that his work will be a strange brew that carries the name

On the Road probably because it sounds catchier than anything else that he could have come up with. Actually, all of the Sal’s relatives’ roles correspond to reality and they have their real names, but all the other characters retain their a.k.a’s from On the Road.

As regards the principal heroines, almost none of them was left intact, i.e. entirely corresponding to the novel. The director certainly plays with their representation on the screen, the extent of which will be subject of the following discussion.

As far as the character of Marylou (played by Kristen Stewart) is concerned, like in the novel, she is definitely the main star here. Her visualization is, nevertheless, much less flattering. While the reader of On the

Road imagines her as a blond pin-up and one of the sex-symbols of modern literature, her movie representation looks like a stoned junkie when the camera focuses on her first close-up (8.58, 9.05). Her hair is messy, the color far from the “ringlets of blond hair” that one would expect, her eyes are red and puffy, her make-up smeared, and she is rolling a joint. Most viewers must be

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consequently rather disappointed because, instead of their poster-girl, they get a girl high on marihuana looking accordingly.

The first words that Marylou utters in the movie are: “Dean, some of us need the occasional doughnut to survive” (9.38) which Dean ignores altogether and proceeds to dance wildly with Carlo. When Sal sits down next to her on the floor and smiles at her, she tells him “It’s nice to have someone paying attention” (10.02) and a few moments later repeats the same sentence louder so as Dean hears it, but she gets no reaction. This initial scene makes Marylou a sorry sight both by the way her appearance is rendered and by the way in which Dean treats her – overly neglecting her and not paying any attention to her voice at all. This scene also marks the beginning of a very close bond between Marylou and Sal as he immediately notices how much she needs someone who cares more for her than for the “kicks.” That is why he joins her on the floor, ready to listen rather than mess around with the others.

Salles is also much more open regarding Marylou’s sexuality – what is only hinted at, or not mentioned at all, in the novel is nearly fully shown in the movie. For example at about 1.10, she gives Dean oral sex while he is driving

(which does not seem to excite the other two occupants of the car, Sal and Ed, at all), and even though the camera takes only Dean’s face, it is evident what is going on down there. A little while later, after the arrival at Bull Lee’s, Marylou demonstrates some deviance, more in the eyes of Ed and Galatea than the others, when she asks them: “Can I watch you guys screw?” (1.14.37), which is, nevertheless, something nowhere to be found on the pages of the novel;

Salles probably got the idea for that from Helen Hinkle’s interview that she gave

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Gifford for Jack’s Book (130). In another car scene, Marylou, driving, hits at Sal, unzipping his fly while Dean is sleeping on the back seat. Sal stops her gently asking “Can’t you wait till we’re in Frisco?” (1.23.09). However, as soon as

Dean wakes up, he suggests that everyone take off their clothes, and so, after a cut, Sal, Dean and Marylou find themselves sitting in the front seat all naked

(there were not two separate seats in the front of the car as we know today, but rather one piece similar to the usual back seat, so three people could easily fit in), the camera only taking their torsos behind the dashboard, and Marylou in the middle stimulates them manually. In the last scene we see Marylou in the film, she and Sal are making love in a San Francisco hotel room. This is paradoxically the only moment when Marylou is actually shown having sex with someone, and the person is not Dean. The next morning, she disappears from the room leaving a note saying “No more road for me […] I love you” (1.33.17) and explaining that she is going back to her fiancé in Denver. This denouement suggests that Marylou, fed up with the Beat life, opted for a mainstream existence, but both On the Road and The Scroll tell a different story:

One night Marylou disappeared with a nightclub owner. I was waiting for

her by appointment in a doorway across the street, […] hungry, when

she suddenly stepped out of the foyer of the fancy apartment house with

her girl friend, the nightclub owner, and a greasy old man with a roll.

Originally she’d just gone in to see her girl friend. I saw what a whore

she was. […] She […] got in the Cadillac and off they went. Now I had

nobody, nothing. (OTR 100)

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This passage suggests that Marylou was far from leaving her Beat ways behind and shows her as an opportunistic bitch. In reality, Henderson arranged to meet her friend because she was hoping that she could get her a job and she could thus support Jack and herself and pay for their hotel bill (Nicosia 137), but this somehow did not get into the novel or movie either.

All in all, the Marylou from the movie seems emotionally much closer to

Sal than the Marylou from the book. This is because the relationship of Marylou and Dean is presented as essentially flawed in the movie. More often than not, she is rather desperate about, even tormented by, the whole “Dean situation.”

As pointed out above, she never gets enough attention from him; she is very well aware of the fact that there is no bright future for them, e.g.: “Dean’s gonna leave me anyway” (1.23.16), “I just want a house. A baby. You know, something normal” (1.23.56); she refers to him as “the bastard” at several points in the movie (e.g. 47.42 or 1.29.32) and expresses a desire for Dean to change: “I gotta tell you [Sal] how nice it is to see a sane face” (47.33), “I wish

Dean wasn’t so crazy right now” (1.23.45). The only appreciation that Marylou gets from Dean is being “the only honey-cunt [he]’ll ever adore” (46.44), which cannot even be taken as a serious compliment, and reduces her whole personality to one organ. And that is what Dean basically takes her for: a vagina without a brain or free will. This is very well illustrated in the scene in which Sal is supposed to have sex with Marylou with Dean watching. When Sal asks her: “Do you really want to this, Marylou?”, Dean does not even let her open her mouth and replies instead of her: “She thinks it’s swell” (1.01.43) as though she did not have any say in the matter, and since Dean considers her a

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“dumb little box” (1.37.48), he surely assumes she does not. That is why

Marylou leans to Sal throughout the entire movie as to someone who has got a shoulder for her to cry on and who is ready to listen.

As for Camille, she appears in two sequences altogether in the film, which are quite contrasting. The first one shows her as a very sophisticated, educated woman, quite above Dean’s idiosyncrasies. As in the novel, the first shot of her is in bed, but the movie does not show any lacy underwear, Camille is covered in a white blanket, and the scene seems to be on the whole more chaste than the novelized version. When Dean is getting ready to leave and hit the bars with Sal, her question “Right now?” (27.48) does not sound at all reproachful, and when she starts listing Dean’s vices: “Works all day, runs around all night. He never eats, he never sleeps … the man thinks he’s

Superman” (27.53), she is smiling and generally giving the impression of a mother speaking of her cute but naughty son. Just before Sal and Dean leave, she says to Sal: “I bet you’re wondering what he sees in me,” Sal replies

“Respectability?” and she closes the conversation with “Very good. I’m impressed,” which makes her sound as a condescending teacher. When she finds herself with Dean, Sal and Carlo in a pub, Camille speaks about her studies and degree, and as soon as Dean directs his attention more to Carlo than her, she asks Sal for a dance. This particular scene, however, never appears in the novel and the director (or the screenwriter) had to come upon it during the scrutiny of biographical resources, but, like in Marylou’s case, it reveals that women in the film regularly take recourse to Sal when they feel ignored.

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Camille’s second appearance an hour later is much more pitiable. The young classy blonde conversing about Eugene O’Neill is gone; with one baby crying and the other on the way, she is teary-eyed and visibly frustrated with the way things have turned out. When Sal appears at the door one day, he is a perfect pretext for Dean to slip the house again and it is the last straw before

Camille’s breakdown. The next morning, she kicks him out asking “Do you realize how much I’ve given up for you?” (1.43.25) clearly alluding to the halt in her studies.

Terry is another character who made it to the silver screen, but her role is immensely reduced. She delivers four simple sentences in total and vanishes: when Sal demands whether he can sit next to her on an empty bus, she laconically replies “If you wish” and after he introduces himself, she says just

“Terry” (38.07), the next time she utters something, she is asking her father in

Spanish if he is hungry (39.29), then, when Sal and Terry retire to their tent, she asks “Do you wanna love me now?” even though her little son is watching them, and in the end, before Sal’s departure, she says “We screw one more time then you leave.” In the whole Terry sequence, the screenwriter as well as the director entirely omitted the stormy beginning of Terry’s and Sal’s romance and completely failed to deliver the fragility and tenderness of their short love.

Moreover, neither did they reflect the importance of these few bucolic days in

Sal’s vision of a perfect relationship.

If Bull Lee’s wife, Jane, was portrayed as the greatest junkie in the novel, Salles’s movie definitely does justice to that picture. When Sal, Dean,

Marylou and Ed arrive at the farm, she greets them messy-haired, puffy and

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red eyed, and totally confused. When the company asks about Galatea’s whereabouts, the answer they get is certainly an unexpected one: “Excuse me.

Lizards” (1.13.08). She constantly carries a broomstick and tries to get rid of lizards in the garden, her babbling never makes any sense except, paradoxically, when she is reciting an old nursery rhyme to her children: the rhyme is called “Old women with a broom tossed up into the sky,” and even though its name is not pronounced in the film, the choice of the rhyme is probably not a coincidence because it perfectly matches Jane’s image. In addition to that, the verses that she recites echo her raking the lizards off a tree a moment earlier: “Old woman, old woman, old woman, quoth I, / Oh whither, oh whither, oh whither so high, / To brush the cobwebs from the sky”

(1.15.10).

At Bull Lee’s, there is also one scene that contrasts the male and female world; while the men are discussing Céline, the women are scrubbing the kitchen floor and washing the children (1.18.35–1.19.40). Although some reviewers, such as Philip French, claim that Salles treats the female characters in a less misogynist way than Kerouac, this scene definitely proves the opposite. A similar trend can be observed with the portrayal of Walter’s wife

(the one that never complains about anything). In Salles’s rendition, Walter’s wife is sleeping in bed in the morning sun wearing a red dress, Walter wakes her up with a gentle kiss and introduces Sal and Dean as “boys from work”

(15.50) to which she sweetly replies “Hi, boys from work.” While Sal and Dean listen to Walter telling one of his crazy stories, she keeps on stretching sexily and smiling in bed, her white bra showing off from under the red dress. The

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reader never finds out what this woman looked like (actually, since she was reportedly fifteen years older than Walter, one could imagine a middle-aged matron) or what she was wearing in the novel, but Salles chose to represent her as a subject of male objectification. The red dress is such a powerful image in popular culture symbolizing, among other things, passion and carnal pleasure, which makes this woman quite memorable. The viewers might not recall what any of the main female protagonists were wearing, but they will definitely remember this woman in the red dress.

Last but not least, the way the character of Rita is rendered needs to be analyzed because it is something the director did not nail at all. As we know from the novel, Rita is a girl with some sex-related issues that Sal is trying to help her overcome, but the two of them eventually end-up just chatting in bed.

The film version shows her as one of the most lascivious characters. We can hear her say “Bless me father, for I will sin” (29.44) as Dean passes her a cup of tea with a Benzedrine paper and after she declares “It’s nice to have you guys” and everyone gets high and drunk, she willingly has sex with Dean (!) and lets Carlo join them, too. The reason why this character came out so distorted is unclear, but it is sure that this is where Salles employed the greatest dramatic license.

Even though some reviewers, such as Stephen Holden from New York

Times, maintain that Salles’s On the Road is a “scrupulously faithful screen adaptation,” such claims seem to be quite exaggerated in view of the above- stated facts, and another Holden’s statement appears as a more apt conclusion:

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“If there is little to actively dislike about On the Road, there is a great deal to be disappointed in.”

3.6 Heart Beat (film)

The other film surveyed in this thesis is Heart Beat (1980), based on

Carolyn Cassady’s autobiography of the same name published four years earlier, directed by John Byrum and starring Nick Nolte as Neal, Sissy Spacek as

Carolyn and John Heard in the role of Jack Kerouac. The film will be examined because its first half overlaps with the plot of On the Road, and although it is narrated from Carolyn’s perspective (who was also a consultant for the movie), it can be thus considered as another film adaptation of the novel.

Heart Beat only features two principal female characters (apart from brief appearances of Kerouac’s mother, the Cassadys’ neighbor, and a black prostitute): Carolyn and Lou Anne (under the name of Stevie). If Lou Anne came out from Salles’s version as a rather sloppy individual (most of the time dressed in shorts, a t-shirt, and sneakers), Byrum’s portrayal definitely succeeds at meeting the reader’s/viewer’s expectations. Heart Beat’s Stevie is a sexy platinum blonde wearing red lipstick and smoking graciously in the car (4.40), with her hair combed in a stylish updo when she, Neal and Jack are waiting to meet Carolyn and her current boyfriend in a posh restaurant (8.06). In another scene, when Neal is spying on her in her hotel room, the viewer gets a glimpse of the blonde spread on the bed, her red dress (cf.: Walter’s wife in Salles’s On the Road) pulled up showing black stockings and garters – there is no better

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eye candy for the male gaze. What Stevie’s portrayal, nevertheless, shares with

Salles’s Marylou is total disrespect from Neal. Like in Salles’s film, Stevie’s questions are sometimes ignored while Neal continues chatting with Jack (e.g.

22.00), and she is definitely taken more as an object than a person. The following scene demonstrates it very aptly: when Stevie expresses her concerns/jealousy about Carolyn, Neal pulls her hair and warns her in a quite intimidating way: “Listen, I’ll tell you something Stevie, I don’t want you to think about things you’re not supposed to think about, you understand?”

(15.40).

Whereas Stevie’s portrayal in the movie is rather slutty, Carolyn, on the other hand, comes across as a classy débutante who lets the rebellious Neal, who seems to be much more fun compared to her boyfriend, seduce her. In the initial voice-over, Carolyn introduces herself as a student at an art institute

(8.06), and in her first appearance she emanates almost a Hollywood star radiance as she walks in the restaurant, where everybody is waiting for her, wearing a smart suit, a wide brim hat, gloves, a fur and a clutch – all in white, which leaves Stevie staring at her with an open mouth.

From the beginning, she shows equal interest in Jack as in Neal. She is inquisitive about the book that Jack is writing, she enjoys his attention (e.g. when she finishes her drink in a pub, Jack automatically offers her to bring another one while Neal does not care at all and remains sitting – 11.20), and she gladly dances with him when Neal spanks other girls’ butts. Analogously to

Stevie, Neal does not forget to remind Carolyn that her intellectual processes

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are not very welcome: “We’ve got a deal, you’re not supposed to think”

(12.02).

In contrast to Stevie, who willingly participates in sex with Neal and Ira

(Allen Ginsberg) at the same time, Carolyn cannot deny her conservative middle-class upbringing, and when Ira confesses his love for Neal to her, she replies: “I’m sorry, I’m not accustomed to hearing men saying things like that”

(34.37). However, she changes her mind rather quickly when she establishes the love triangle with Neal and Jack. She does not go as far as to having sex with both of them at the same time, but she opportunely changes the bedrooms (Jack’s in the attic and her and Neal’s downstairs) as she likes, much to the neighbors’ amazement (the couple is invited to dinner where both Neal and Jack play the role of the husband). Before the start of this peculiar affair, she is just a suffering wife, sobbing “I’m just tired of being treated like a piece of garbage” (1.05.53), but when Jack turns up and acts as her savior from the good-for-nothing Neal (after having been previously turned down by Carolyn), she is, however, once again unable to leave Neal and accepts this settlement.

The subsequent scenes show a kitschy sun-lit idyll of the three of them going for walks together with the children and Jack and Neal happily planting marihuana in the front yard. This interlude only comes to an end with a cut to

1957 and the announcement that Jack’s book is going to be published, and he thus has to hurry back to New York.

Heart Beat as a whole gives a distorted image of the events and contains many factual errors, for instance Jack already typing On the Road in a room he shares with Stevie and Neal whereas the novel was put together much later.

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Also, the way the film encompasses two decades (from 1947 to approximately

1967 – the year before Neal Cassady died) without a single change in the looks of the characters is rather unfortunate. Actually, the whole cast of Heart Beat was a huge misstep. While Salles’s On the Road radiates youthful energy thanks to the choice of the actors, Byrum’s Heart Beat oozes a sort of stuffy late 1970’s odor mainly because of the actors, make-up and costumes. The youngest star of the trio, Sissy Spacek, was 31 when the movie came out

(which was about ten years older than Carolyn at the time of meeting Cassady) and looking fortyish in some scene due to her styling; and the male actors were indeed pushing forty, no make-up needed. Ridiculously enough, Kerouac’s mother in the film, with her long, ginger hair, looks more like his older sister than the elderly white-haired lady one expects.

The overall impression of Byrum’s creative initiative is an abominable mess. Since Byrum heavily relies on Carolyn Cassady’s book, which is a “gossipy memoir of interest solely as the result of her association with Kerouac, […] he misses the man that motivated it” and delivers a film which is “sometimes a feeble comedy and sometimes a factually laughable and nearly incomprehensible summary of Kerouac's career,” as Scott Jay put it in his review.

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CONCLUSION

Kerouac’s On the Road, now existing in two book versions – the 1957 edition and the scroll edition (2007), which is a rather peculiar situation, and at least one cinematic adaptation, has fascinated readers since its publication especially because it is considered one of the founding texts of the counter- culture that emerged in the 1960’s. While the Beat texts in general demonstrated a great deal of civil disobedience in times when it was regarded as the ultimate vice, with On the Road heralding the cause, it has been argued that this defiance was only limited to men as leaders of the movement and vehicles of dissent whereas women were denied the participation in the Beat revolt.

Invisible in the public discourse, women are, therefore, of a feeble presence in Beat narratives, as was suggested for instance by the remark about

Holmes’s sketchy and depthless female characters in Go. Kerouac, being one of the few Beat prose writers, who anchored his novels in real life events and people with whom he was on intimate terms, is of a particular interest in this debate because his work can be, thus, taken as a paradigm of the stance, sensibility and attitudes of the Beat Generationas a whole. Due to the scope of this thesis, other novels of the author were excluded from the scrutiny, which would assuredly bring invaluable insights to the topic, and On the Road was chosen as his best known and most widely read work.

Although Leland claims that after “Sal’s affair with Terry, [Kerouac’s] depictions of women get shorter, until they are no more than blurs on the

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highway” (95), the thesis has proved that most of the novel’s heroines are allotted sufficient space, also due the largely autobiographical nature of

Kerouac’s writing, to be able to stand out as individuals rather than “types” or

“amalgams of several people.” The “blurs on the highway” that Leland talks about certainly do apply to the haphazard girls and women listed in chapter

“Other women,” but the more prominent characters, albeit not always entirely developed, bear distinctive features that single them out from one another.

Although Kerouac’s male heroes are the prototypes of rebels, women rarely take part in their adventures and remain confined to their conventional roles; which resonates with the general Beats’ attitude towards the opposite sex. If, occasionally, a women does show some signs of some non-standard behavior, she is either a drug addict like Jane, a masculine woman like Frankie, a “fellahin” like Terry, or labeled as a whore like Marylou; which proves that the men were not yet able or ready to accept women behaving in the same way as they did. The women’s subordination was still around and sustained. This is further accentuated in movies like Heart Beat whereas Salles’s On the Road, relying more on The Scroll, gives the character of Marylou more control over her sexuality and freedom from the 1950’s morals, but in the end she is banished from the Beat circle all the same when the director makes her exit the scene leaving a good-bye message “no more road for me” (with “road” being a stand-in for the Beat life-style).

Both films discussed in the thesis also show how deeply interconnected

Kerouac’s life and work are in popular culture because none of the directors, especially not Salles (since he is the one who took on the task of bringing

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Kerouac’s novel on the screen), managed to separate the two from one another.

In the end, Leland argues that “Sal and Dean both have conventional ideas of family” and it is only “popular wisdom” that “celebrates the guys’ flight from family responsibilities, but in reality; they just have trouble getting there”

(106). Kerouac was indeed a very conservative person deep inside, which is reflected in his approach to the representation of female characters, and makes consequently his portrayal of women quite understandable.

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WORKS CITED

Primary sources:

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. N.p.: Penguin Classics, 1957. Print.

---. On the Road – The Original Scroll. Ed. Howard Cunnel. N.p.:

Penguin Classics, 2008. Print.

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“Age of Consent Laws [Table].” Chnm.gmu.edu. Web. 2 Apr. 2016.

Brinkley, Douglas. Introduction. Windblown World: The Journals of Jack

Kerouac 1947 – 1954. Ed. Douglas Brinkley. N.p.: Viking, 2004. Print.

--- ed.Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947 – 1954. N.p.:

Viking, 2004. Print.

Byrd, Meredyth L. Women, the Road Narrative, and American Culture. N.p.:

George Mason University, 2008.Pwr.gmu.edu. Web. 11 May 2015.

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Byrum, John, dir. Heart Beat. Perf. John Heard, Nick Nolte, and Sissy Spacek.

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Cunnel, Howard. “Fast This Time: Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the

Road.” Introduction. On the Road – The Original Scroll. By Kerouac. N.p.:

Penguin Classics, 2008. Print.

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Dittman, Michael. Masterpieces of Beat Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press,

2007. Print.

French, Philip. “On the Road – review.” Rev. of On the Road, dir. Walter Salles.

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Gifford, Larry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack

Kerouac. N. p.: Penguin Books, 2012. Print.

Holden, Stephen. “Thrill-Seeking Beats Take the Scenic Route: On the Road,

Directed by Walter Salles.” Rev. of On the Road, dir. Walter Salles.

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Jay, Scott. “Heart Beat misses with look at Kerouac.” Rev. of Heart Beat, dir.

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Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters. London: Picador, 1983. Print.

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On the Road. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers,

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at the Heart of a Revolution. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 1998. Print.

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What You Think). N.p.: Penguin Books, 2007. Print.

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Kerouac. New York Times. 5 Sept. 1957: 27. ProQuest Historical

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Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen.

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Resumé (English)

The present master thesis analyzes the way women are portrayed in the most widely read novel by Jack Kerouac, On the Road, and how two film directors approached its screen adaptations with regard to the depiction of female characters. At the beginning, the thesis provides theoretical background concerning the Beat Generation and the role of women in the movement, and it also includes biographical information on Jack Kerouac as well as a plot summary of the novel.

The analysis itself relies on a close reading of the novel as well as the recently published On the Road – The Original Scroll, taking into account biographical data about the women who served as models for the heroines, and various theoretical concepts ranging from Oswald Spengler’s morphology of peoples to Laura Mulvey’s male gaze. Each character is treated in a separate sub-chapter discussing the role of the woman in the narrative as well as in the author’s real life, her interaction with the heroes, the way she is shaped by them and influences them, and the author’s approach towards the literary portrayal of female characters. In the end, Byrum’s Heart Beat and Salles’s On the Road are scrutinized in order to compare the directors’ approaches towards the subject matter.

In the conclusion, it is suggested that despite the fact that the men in the novel are conform to the general Beat idea of rebellion against the mainstream homogenous American culture, the women rarely demonstrate such tendencies and stay confined to their traditional roles.

Resumé (Czech)

Předkládaná magisterská diplomová práce analyzuje způsob, jakým jsou

ženy vyobrazeny v nejčtenějším Kerouacově díle a v jeho dvou filmových adaptacích. Teoretická kapitola v úvodu práce nastiňuje Beat Generation jako literární hnutí a rozebírá roli, kterou v něm zaujímaly ženy. Následuje životopis

Jacka Kerouaca a stručné zpracování dějové linie románu.

Analýza románu se opírá především o kritické čtení a interpretaci samotného textu románu Na cestě s přihlédnutím k nedávno vydané původní verzi (Na cestě – původní svitek). V práci jsou využity životopisné informace o

ženách, které sloužily jako předlohy pro hrdinky románu, a teoretické přístupy např. Oswalda Spenglera nebo Laury Mulveyové. Každá postava je analyzována v samostatné podkapitole, která se zabývá rolí dané ženy v samotném románu stejně jako v autorově životě, její interakcí s mužskými hrdiny, způsobem, jakým je postava těmito hrdiny formována a jak zpětně ovlivňuje je. Současně je sledován i autorův přístup k literárnímu zpracování ženských hrdinek. Závěr práce je věnován zkoumání filmových adaptací románu (Heart Beat Johna

Byruma a Na cestě Waltera Sallese) s cílem porovnat literární a filmové verze díla se zaměřením na ženské postavy.

Z analýzy vyplývá, že i přesto, že mužské postavy v románu odpovídají všeobecné představě o beatnících protestujících proti americké většinové společnosti, ženské postavy, až na skromné výjimky, zůstávají stále ještě zakořeněny v tradičních rolích touto společností podporovaných.