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The Girl Gang: Women Writers of the New York City Beat Community

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The Girl Gang: Women Writers of the New York City Beat Community THE GIRL GANG: WOMEN WRITERS OF THE NEW YORK CITY BEAT COMMUNITY A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Tatum L. Petrich May, 2012 Examining Committee Members: Miles Orvell, Committee Chair, English and American Studies Sue-Im Lee, English Eli C. Goldblatt, English Laura Levitt, External Member, Religion and Women’s Studies, Temple University © Copyright by Tatum L. Petrich 2012 All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT The Girl Gang: Women Writers of the New York City Beat Community seeks to revise our understanding of the Beat community and literary tradition by critically engaging the lives and work of five women Beat writers: Diane di Prima, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Carol Bergé, and Mimi Albert. This dissertation argues that, from a position of marginality, these women developed as protofeminist writers, interrogating the traditional female gender role and constructing radical critiques of normative ideas in fiction and poetry in ways that resisted the male Beats’ general subordination of women and that anticipated the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. A project of recovery and criticism, The Girl Gang provides literary biographies that explore how each writer’s experience as a marginalized female writer within an otherwise countercultural community affected the development of her work; it also analyzes a range of works (published and unpublished texts from various genres, written from the early 1950s through the turn of the twenty-first century) in order to illustrate how each writer distinctively employs and revises mainstream and Beat literary and cultural conventions. The dissertation’s critical analyses examine each writer’s engagement in various literary, cultural, and social discourses, drawing attention to their incisive and provocative treatment of thematic issues that are central to the postwar countercultural critique of hegemonic norms—including fundamental Beat questions of identity, authenticity, and subjectivity—and that are developed through experimentation with literary conventions. Ultimately, The Girl Gang argues that the literary achievements of the New York City women Beats collectively reconceptualize the prevailing notion of the Beat community and canon. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………...………iii INTRODUCTION: REDEFINING THE IMAGE OF THE BEAT WRITER: WOMEN BEATS AND PROTOFEMINISM IN THE BEAT LITERARY COMMUNITY……….........................v CHAPTER 1. “SO HERE I AM THE COOLEST IN NEW YORK”: HIP SLANG AND THE FEMALE BOHEMIAN IN DIANE DI PRIMA’S THIS KIND OF BIRD FLIES BACKWARD………….…………………………………………...………………1 2. “THE OUTLAWS WERE ABOUT TO WELCOME ANOTHER MEMBER”: FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY AND (UN)GENDERED SOCIAL SPACE IN JOYCE JOHNSON’S COME AND JOIN THE DANCE…………....…...…........67 3. “THE OBJECT OF EVERYONE’S ATTENTION”: INTERRACIAL MOTHERHOOD AND THE POSTMODERNIST DILEMMA IN HETTIE JONES’S IN CARE OF WORTH AUTO PARTS…………………………….…128 EPILOGUE: “WE ARE MEMBERS OF THAT ANOMALOUS GROUP OF THE 50S”: CAROL BERGÉ AND MIMI ALBERT………………………………………….........203 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………....243 iv INTRODUCTION REDEFINING THE IMAGE OF THE BEAT WRITER: WOMEN BEATS AND PROTOFEMINISM IN THE BEAT LITERARY COMMUNITY The social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the girl gang. Why, everyone would agree, that’s absolutely absurd! —Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters When the Beats emerged in the late 1940s and 1950s, mainstream American literature was generally considered “traditionalist” and “academic.” In contrast to representative writers of the period, such as poets T.S. Eliot and Richard Wilbur, and novelists Saul Bellow and John Updike, Beat writers experimented with literary form and subject as part of their overt condemnation of contemporary society’s social and political values.1 With the movement’s defining and controversial publications in the mid- to late 1950s—Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959)—and the obscenity trial of Howl in 1957 as well as the ban of Naked Lunch in 1962, the Beats established themselves as antithetical to the mainstream’s “academic” literary culture.2 They were lauded and admired by young rebellious readers, yet criticized and even mocked by the mainstream media and leading intellectuals. However unwittingly, Ginsberg and Kerouac (and Burroughs to a lesser extent) quickly became spokesmen for the Beat Generation, and this literary community and cultural movement as represented by these writers and their publications became synonymous with a decidedly male ethos. The image of On the Road’s Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, for example, escaping normative male expectations for work and marriage and instead pursuing “girls, visions, everything” on their own terms3 became the epitome of what it meant to be “Beat.” In this representative text and in the Beat v community itself, women were generally considered by the men as mere “experiences,” or as Kerouac writes, as “girls [who] say nothing and wear black.”4 Many of the male Beats expected women to play the role of lover, housewife, mother, or secretary, and in fact, several of the women Beats were romantically involved with and helped support the men. As such, women Beats are often positioned in the background of prominent Beat texts—fictional and nonfictional—as well as in photographs, letters, and interviews documenting the period. However, many women Beats were also aspiring writers who set out, like the men, to radically redefine normative ideas through writing and through their involvement in various literary endeavors, such as the publication of small magazines. Nevertheless, women Beat writers were subject to conservative postwar notions of the female role and were largely marginalized by their male counterparts accordingly. The attitude of the male Beats toward women writers is aptly expressed in a “dream letter” by John Clellon Holmes (recorded by Allen Ginsberg in 1954): “The social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the boy gang.”5 The male Beats’ assertion that the “true” organization of artists is a “boy gang” reflects their perpetuation of the dominant gender discourse of the period, and in light of this attitude, Beat women consistently faced gender-based discrimination—from male Beats as well as from the press, critics, and publishers—in their efforts to become writers. Importantly, in the epigraph to this chapter, we see how female Beat writers resisted their subordination as women within the Beat community and their exclusion from the role of artist. The passage in the epigraph comes from Beat writer Joyce Johnson’s 1983 memoir and represents her attempt to claim social status for female artists: “The social organization which is most true of itself to the artist is the girl gang. vi Why, everyone would agree, that’s absolutely absurd!”6 In the italicized line, Johnson revises the passage by Holmes/Ginsberg quoted above, appropriating for female artists the recognition of male artists as defining the “true” social organization. The subsequent line in the epigraph, however, illustrates how her effort is ultimately undermined by society’s general attitude toward the idea of the female artist as on par with the male artist; such a possibility, Johnson suggests, is considered “absolutely absurd!”7 Significantly, despite the prolonged struggle of women Beats to overcome society’s limited assumptions about female writers, the act of revision itself demonstrated in the epigraph—Johnson’s attempt to speak for and claim status for the female artist by rewriting the quotation that epitomizes the male Beats’ gender discrimination—signifies what Adrienne Rich referred to in 1971 as an act of “survival.”8 “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched,” Rich writes, “we cannot know ourselves.”9 Johnson’s deliberate confrontation of the male Beats’ attitude toward and treatment of the female artist, and her attempt to “refus[e] the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society” through writing signifies the fundamental achievement of women Beat writers.10 They refused to be resigned to the margins of the Beat literary community and instead set out to develop their own voices as writers and their own critique of postwar society, including a critique of hegemonic—and countercultural—gender norms. Much of their work, however, has been ignored by literary scholars due to the pervasive image of the Beat as an iconoclastic male figure. The Girl Gang: Women Writers of the New York City Beat Community addresses this limited attention to and the narrow portrayals of these writers as it examines the lives and works of five women Beat writers in New York City. I set out to redefine prevailing conceptions of the New York vii City Beat literary community by arguing that Beat women played an integral role, not merely as support for the male Beats, but more significantly as female figures who sought to develop social and political status as artists within this largely male homosocial community. That the women writers were generally marginalized by the male Beats and did not foster a female literary community amongst themselves points to the complexity of their experiences within this context and underscores the particular significance of their individual efforts to pursue their literary endeavors while confronted with the limited expectations of their male counterparts.
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