Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte
Valérie Partoens
From Beat to Bad Connections: Joyce
Johnson’s (Feminist) Response to
Kerouac’s On the Road
Masterproef voorgedragen tot het behalen van de graad van
Master in de American Studies
2014
Promotor
Prof. Isabel Meuret
Vakgroep Letterkunde
Expression of thanks
First of all, I would not have been able to complete this dissertation without the time and
guidance of my supervisor Isabel Meuret. In addition, I would also like to thank the Master
Program of American Studies and its team of professors for giving me the opportunity to gain
more knowledge about a field of studies in which I have always been extremely interested.
Likewise, I would also want to express my gratitude towards my classmates, of whom many
now have become close friends, for their friendship and for their help during this year.
Evidently, I would not be able to finish this thesis and this year of higher education without
the support of my family and friends, who always believed in me even when I did not. Last
but not least, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Joyce Johnson, who took the time
to personally discuss her novel Bad Connections and as a result gave me the opportunity to
gain a more comprehensive insight into the particular setting of the novel and her life within
the Beat movement.
2 Table of Contents
EXPRESSION OF THANKS .................................................................................................. 2
1 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................. 4
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK....................................................................................... 7
2.1 The Beat Generation as a male-centered social and literary movement .......................... 7
2.2 Gender during postwar America and during the counterculture .................................... 13
2.3 Women Beat writers in the limelight: Joyce Johnson .................................................... 18
2.4 Bad Connections............................................................................................................. 22
2.5 On the Road.................................................................................................................... 26
3 A CRITICAL READING OF THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN ON THE
ROAD AND BAD CONNECTIONS ................................................................................... 29
3.1 The position of women in American society.................................................................. 29
3.2 Male-female relationships and escaping “square” society ............................................ 33
3.3 Female sexuality............................................................................................................. 39
3.4 Objectification and stereotyping of women in the patriarchal society ........................... 43
4 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................... 50
5 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................................ 55
3 1
Introduction
The recent success of films such as Howl (2010), On the Road (2012), and Kill Your Darlings
(2013)1 and the rise of the contemporary hipster subculture as a phenomenon that has its roots
in the 1930s and 1940s2 has demonstrated that the themes and values of the Beat Generation
are still of significance and a source of inspiration for the present generations. Nowadays, the
Beat Generation tends to be remembered as a product of and a reaction against the stifling
conformity of the Eisenhower presidency of the 1950s, as a group of intellectuals that
proclaimed a new notion of social and literary freedoms to counter the political and
psychological repressions that characterized the Cold War America of the 1950s3, and as
pioneers of the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s.4 Although this maledominated group of post-World War II writers that is defined as the Beat Generation pushed
forward a progressive agenda, their relationship towards women was rather a confirmation of
the conservative and subordinate position of females within the “square” post-World War II
society.5
Although there exists a wealth of critical resources published over the last decades,6 this
dissertation aims to explore the specific field of gender studies with regard to the Beat
Generation in order to determine how women were portrayed within this movement. In
particular, the objective is to analyze how Jack Kerouac, in his chef-d’oeuvre On the Road,
arguably the “hip-pocket bible of the Beat Generation,”7 takes a rather traditional Western
view of women and thereby places them in a position of marginal importance and power.
Wryly enough, this derogatory attitude of marginalization and objectification by the male
Beat writer towards the other sex mirrors the general attitude of the male-dominant Beat
culture that adopted patriarchal attitudes towards women and celebrated an idealized defiant
1
For an overview: IMDB, http://www.imdb.com/.
2
D. Fletcher, “Hipsters,” Time, 29 July 2009. Web. 16 April 2014.
<http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1913220,00.html>.
3
C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 25; 146-147.
4
D. Halberstam, The fifties (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993), 295.
5
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004); R. Bennett, “Teaching
the Beat Generation to Generation X,” in The Beat Generation. Critical Essays, ed. K.
Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-20.
6
K. Myrsiades, The Beat generation: Critical Essays (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), ix.
7
P. Tamony, “Beat Generation: Beat: Beatniks,” Western Folklore Vol. 28 No. 4 (1969): 274.
4 masculinity.8 According to some anthologies, Beat women writers have often found
themselves positioned as women but not read as writers.9 By and large, it is fair to say that the
voice of the female Beat has been censored by publishers, historians, scholars and indeed the
male Beat, perhaps to serve the larger goal of phallogocentrism.10 In this regard, this
dissertation seeks to re-evaluate a narrative work by a female Beat writer in order to compare
how the depiction of and attitudes towards women in a work of a woman who herself
experienced the gender inequality within the postwar society and Beat milieu contrasts with
the work of a key male Beat author. In particular, I will methodically analyze second
generation female Beat Joyce Johnson’s Bad Connections in contrast with Kerouac’s On the
Road; this again with a focus on the representation of women and their societal position in the
American post-World War II society and counterculture. Although Johnson’s work is set in a
different social context than Kerouac’s novel, it can be seen as a feminist reaction to the work
and values of the male Beats portrayed in On the Road.
As a result, this dissertation intends to contribute to the hitherto limited academic
research that has been carried out on the canon of female Beat literature. In this way, we
found it of particular importance to examine a less well-known work of Joyce Johnson, an
author who positioned herself at the center of the Beat Generation,11 and whose earlier works
today are out of print or difficult to find.12 In addition, the decision to critically analyze
Johnson’s work with regard to Kerouac’s On the Road is of even greater significance
considering their two-year romantic relationship.13 Although the Beat Generation was adept at
promoting homosocial voices, Johnson was one of the few women at the heart of the Beat
Generation who was motivated by Kerouac to write14 and succeeded in publishing novels that
–in line with the work of the male Beat – depicted the struggle against conservative American
society. Despite the fact that Johnson, like many writers of the movement’s second
8
A. R. Lee, The Beat Generation Writers (London; East Haven, Conn.: Pluto Press, 1996),
201.
9
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), ix.
10
G. Thomson, “Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats,” Clcweb:
Comparative Literature And Culture, Vol. 13(1)(2011): 2.
11
G. Thomson, “Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats,” Clcweb:
Comparative Literature And Culture, Vol. 13(1)(2011): 4.
12
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 4.
13
G. Thomson, “Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats”, Clcweb:
Comparative Literature And Culture, Vol. 13(1)(2011): 4.
14
J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
5 generation, undeniably was largely influenced by seminal works of Ginsberg, and Burroughs,
and her former lover Kerouac15, she nevertheless decided to move away from the male Beats’
sexist construction of male identity16 and to formulate her own more feminist response to
Kerouac’s On the Road. As a result, this analytical reading will allow us to study the position
of the woman in a literary work of an iconic male Beat author like Kerouac and a female
author who extensively has been guided and influenced by the former, yet who has
reinterpreted his teachings and made them her own.
In sum, a thematic analysis of both novels will allow us to more fully comprehend the
precarious position of the female not only within the “square” American society in the
decades following the Second World War, but also within a movement that promoted
individual freedom, sexual liberation and the rejection of some white, middle-class values,
yet, that in this regard still held women to a different social standard than men17. In this way,
Johnson writing herself into the Beat and postwar literary history could be seen as feminist act
of subjectivity which connects twentieth-century first- and second-wave feminisms.18 As a
result, the evaluation of Johnson’s Bad Connections will allow us to illustrate how, whilst
struggling herself with gender inequality promulgated by the Beat Generation as illustrated in
On the Road, female Beats such as Johnson attempted to move away from the objectified and
flat representation of women by her former lover and sought to present a more multifaceted
image of women who were struggling with self-definition in an evolving society.
15
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 11.
16
R. Bennett, “Teaching the Beat Generation to Generation X,” in The Beat Generation.
Critical Essays, ed. K. Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-20.
17
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 1-50; 189.
18
Ibid., 4.
6 2
Theoretical framework
2.1 The Beat Generation as a male-centered social and literary movement
For more than half a century, writers and critics have been exploring the controversial nature
of the concepts “Beat Generation” and “Beat literature”.19 In this way the, Beats are often
defined as a “criticism of American complacency under the Ike-Nixon regime, an expression
of new forms of prose, and poetry and an exploration of consciousness, which joined the
dissent of existing Bohemias [...] to produce a distinct style of literature and living, based on
disaffiliation, poverty, anarchic individualism and communal living”, marked by “a relaxation
of “square” (puritan, middle-class, respectable) attitudes towards sex, drugs, religion and
art”20. Although others at the time often defined the movement in a more colored way and
described them for example as a pitiful and passive group of masochistic exhibitionists who
questioned the values of society, rejected the American consumer culture, and hated
conformity,21 scores of journalists and scholars continually have offered their different
interpretations on the Beat movement and its literature.22
Even though the evaluation of the Beat Generation has often been a source of
controversy, there has been a general consensus on the raison d’être and scene of emergence
of the Beat movement. The Beat Generation took shape within the post-1945 American
society, in which a consumer culture that invited conformity alongside restrictive sexual
mores and which was transgression-averse prevailed. The America of the mid-1940s was a
place of rapid political and cultural transition. The iconic figures of the Beat Generation were
children during the Great Depression of the 1930s, grew up to witness America’s involvement
in the Second World War, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945,
and came of age with the dawn of the Cold War. Domestically, however, the postwar era
brought about a rapid improvement in economic conditions and a re-adoption of a consumer
culture that encouraged the standardization of family life and the belief that the United States
was entering a golden age in which science would offer increased leisure and luxury for all.
19
A. Charters, foreword to Encyclopedia of Beat Literature, ed. K. Hemmer (New York:
Facts On File, 2007), vii.
20
D. Daiches, M. Bradbury and E. Mottram, The Avenel Companion to English and
American Literature (New York: Avenel Books: Distributed by Crown Publishers, 1981), 28.
21
P. O’Neil, “The Only Rebellion Around,” LIFE magazine, Vol. 47(22) (1959): 130.
22
A. Charters, “Foreword,” in Encyclopedia of Beat Literature, ed. K. Hemmer. (New York:
Facts On File, 2007), viii.
7 Yet, despite the general mood of economic confidence, the Cold War created an atmosphere
of fear that was marked by intolerance for even the slightest suspicion of political dissidence.
Nevertheless, regardless of the kind of conformity increasingly demanded by state and
corporate authority, resistance surfaced in a variety of places. In this way, the 1940s were also
an age of great artistic innovation that challenged the orthodoxies of the previous decade (e.g.
the birth of Bebop and Abstract Expressionism), which offers an indication of the zeitgeist
that would shape the ideology of the early Beat Generation.23 By and large, the Beat
Generation was a distinct reaction not only to the reactionary politics, lifestyle of the
American ruling class and sections of the middle class, but also to the kind of academic
poetry and academic literature that was being pushed as great works by the American
establishment.24 Instead, the alternatives they sought to this postwar America were inspired by
British Romanticism (e.g. William Blake), American Transcendentalism (e.g. Walt
Whitman), earlier twentieth-century American writers such as Henry Miller, and
contemporaneous figures in other genres such as Marlon Brando and Jackson Pollock.25
Despite being remembered as a product and reaction against the conformity of the
Eisenhower years of the 1950s, it was only after the success of On the Road in 1957-8 that
Beat became beatnik and its most prominent figures became nationally and internationally
known. More than a decade before, however, the leading figures had met and produced a
loose artistic manifesto.26 In this respect, the Beat Generation can be understood as a literary
movement that referred to a group of friends who had worked together on poetry, prose and
cultural conscience from the mid-1940s until the term gained national attention in the late
1950s. The group originally consisted of pioneers such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady,
William Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, John Clellon Holmes, and Allan Ginsberg.27 The
particular phrase “Beat Generation” then arose out of a conversation on the nature of
generations between Jack Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, during which Kerouac, while
recollecting the glamour of the Lost Generation, described his generation as “nothing but a
beat generation”. Later, Kerouac, in an attempt to counteract the abuse of the term in the
media, tried to indicate the correct sense of the word by pointing out its connections to words
23
C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 1-24.
24
A. R. Lee, The Beat Generation Writers (London; East Haven, Conn.: Pluto Press, 1996),
163.
25
C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 10-11.
26
Ibid., 25.
27
A. Ginsberg, foreword to The Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation, ed. A.
Waldman (Massachusetts: Sambhala Publications, Inc., 1996), xiv.
8 like “beatitude” and “beatific”- the necessary beatness or darkness that precedes opening up
to light, egolessness, and giving room for religious illumination.28
Fast-moving as they were, this initially select group of creative individuals were in the
vanguard of some sweeping and far-reaching changes in the arts and in the social sphere.29
The fact that many Americans during the 1950s felt a sense of widespread – and often hidden
or articulated – alienation helps to explain the transformation of the Beats from a small group
of artists working mainly in New York and San Francisco to artists suddenly reaching out to a
fully fledged “Generation” that saw works like On the Road and Howl as the articulation of
their discontents. As a result, a whole new wave of Beat writers emerged during the late
1950s and early 1960s of whom many were born in the early 1930s. This second generation
of Beats, however, was represented by a more diverse group of voices of which some quickly
became integral members of the core Beat community, whereas others either worked in other
geographical regions, remained relatively unknown or sought acceptance elsewhere. Some of
the notable second generation Beats – all male according to most of the reference works –
would include writers such as Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Ken Kesey, and more
generally, figures such as Bob Dylan.30 What is important in this respect is that their work and
activities, together with the work of the original Beats, helped to catalyze what would be
called the second phase of the impact of the Beat Generation: the controversial counterculture
of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. The influence of the Beats, who were considered the
prototypes and mentors of this anti-establishment cultural phenomenon, could be observed in
nearly every aspect of the counterculture, such as the rejection of commercial values and of
conceptions of status and career, the interest in psychedelic drugs as a mode of spiritual
exploration, the fascination with Oriental and spiritual religions, the pacifist-anarchist
political orientation, the emphasis on natural and primitive models of community, and the
rejection of traditional American society altogether.31 The Beats started challenging the
stifling conformity and thereby gave way to various forms of grass-roots activism that since
28
Ibid., xiii-xiv.
29
G. Stephenson, The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation
(Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 13.
30
Ibid., 13.; C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008),
119-124.
31
G. Stephenson, The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation.
(Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 13-15; J. McGeehan and M. Gall,
Let’s Review: U.S. History and Government (Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s Educational Series,
2001), 524-525.
9 have challenged and altered many fundamental assumptions about American culture, from
gender roles to foreign policy32.
However, the enthusiasm for and extending appeal of the Beat Generation was not
shared nor appreciated by everyone. While writers who earlier struggled to have their works
published were now increasingly enjoying widespread support, conservative critics were more
anxious to protect their own version of American culture and therefore labeled anything that
challenged that very culture deviant or un-American. While the Beat Generation went to great
lengths to explain the spirituality at the heart of their work and sincerity of their vision, the
media were rather interested in satirizing a community that they characterized as lazy,
inarticulate, and a threat to national stability.33 In a context in which every deviation from the
norms of American life was identified as part of a wider communist conspiracy to undermine
American values, “beat” soon became “beatnik,” of which the suffix sneered at these young
bohemians being as “far out” as Sputnik and associated them with idleness, hoboism, nonpatriotism, and, ultimately, communism. Ironically enough, the transformation of “beat” into
“beatnik” sparked the commercialization of and capitalization on the rebellious image of the
Beats. The beatnik was a caricature stripped bare of the personal idiosyncrasies of the Beats
and represented a marketing opportunity for corporations that increasingly became aware of
the youth market.34
Despite being “pioneers of what would eventually become the counterculture,”35
Bennett emphasizes that the commercialized and stereotyped images conveyed by the media
have led many to develop a rather naïve and romanticized view of countercultural
movements. The cultural complexities of the 1950s are often misunderstood and cannot be
reduced to a simplistic confrontation between the Beats and the Squares, the latter in this case
defined by values such as an all-consuming work ethic, sexual repression, cultural
xenophobia, militaristic patriotism, and suburban materialism.36 The “square” and Beat worlds
not only crossed and interpenetrated but also enabled and sustained each other in ways that
32
G. Stephenson, The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation.
(Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 13-15; J. McGeehan and M. Gall,
Let’s Review: U.S. History and Government (Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s Educational Series,
2001), 524-525.
33
C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 121.
34
Ibid., 121-122; J. Campbell, This is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 245.
35
D. Halberstam, The fifties (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993), 295.
36
R. Bennett, “Teaching the Beat Generation to Generation X,” in The Beat Generation.
Critical Essays, ed. K. Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-20.
10 neither side would readily admit. This implies that the reality of the stereotyped images of
“square” America that again and again have been delivered to us by the media was far more
painful and complex and marked by more violence, terror or misery than might have appeared
at first sight. In like manner, the Beat Generation cannot simply be reduced to a movement
that entirely rejected the dominant, white, middle-class, and suburban “square” culture of
1950s America. This suggests that the Beat Generation was not always that “far-out” and
“free” as it presented itself.37
One of the repercussions of this oversimplified contemporary perspective on the
relationship between the Beats and the traditionalist society is that contemporary America
often remembers and celebrates only certain dimensions of the Beat Generation such as its
advocacy of recreational drug use and sexual experimentation. Besides the Beat Generation’s
often meager contribution to the Civil Rights Movement, one of the crucial elements that has
unfortunately been overlooked and has remained uncriticized is its sexist construction of
masculine identity.38 Although the Beat Generation denounced the values of conservative
America and works like On the Road, Howl, and Naked Lunch challenged a prevailing
national climate of racism and homophobia, the Beats depicted women in traditional gender
roles.39 Likewise, while the Beats were adept at promoting homosocial (and often
homosexual) voices, the construction of a Beat canon has tended to marginalize women.40 In
this respect, one could argue that the focus on masculinity and consequent marginalization of
women both within their writing and in the movement and the omission of women within the
Beat legacy may be due to male dominance among the Beats. Indeed, Lee affirms that the
Beats have never been seen as a movement engaging with women or responsive to feminist
critique. The discourse, definition and the often punishing lifestyle were set by men, even
more than in other literary avant-gardes since the male members tended to live together and
support each other actively.41 Ecstasy for these men was to a large degree phallic and
37
Ibid., 1-20; C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008),
119-126.
38
R. Bennett, “Teaching the Beat Generation to Generation X,” in The Beat Generation.
Critical Essays, ed. K. Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-20.
39
A. Charters, foreword to Girls who wore black: women writing the beat generation, ed. R.
Johnson and N. G. McCampbell (New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 2002), ix.
40
C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 123.
41
A. R. Lee, The Beat Generation Writers (London; East Haven, Conn.: Pluto Press, 1996),
178-179.
11 associated with the Greek connections between knowledge and sperm.42 As a result, women to
a large degree were marginalized from their existence and were relegated to the role of
caregivers or sex objects.43 Additionally, given that some of the pivotal figures of the Beat
Generation such as Kerouac, Cassady, and Ginsberg all engaged in homosexual
relationships,44 one could argue that this excessive celebration of masculinity and
disparagement of femininity was a natural effect of their predilection for men.
Nevertheless, the omission of female Beats from the Beat canon should by no means
imply that we should belittle the contributions of female writers to the legacy of the Beat
Generation. Although a considerable number of women writers were part of the scene, but
dismissed or overlooked, they did write privately and publicly. As could be expected, several
of the women writers of the time rejected the Beat category or resisted their investiture as
Beat writers. Many of them refused to be silenced by assumptions about their fitness as
subjects and authors of Beat writing, and about their literary strategies.45 In this respect,
among the first generation of women Beats were Madeline Gleason, Carolyn Cassady, Ruth
Weiss, Carol Bergé, and Helen Adams. The women writers of the second generation, a decade
or more younger than the first generation Beats included Joanna McClure, Leonore Kandel,
Elise Cowen, Diane di Prima, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Joyce Johnson, Ann Charters, and
Brenda Frazer. Interestingly enough, the work of this second generation is marked by a
radical critique of traditional literary genres and forms that have been based on women’s
subordination to men. The third and last generation of Beat writers was born during World
War II and came of age in the 1960s. While the second generation of female Beats anticipated
the second wave of feminist activity of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this third generation
clarified the Beat movement’s continuity with the hippie counterculture and progressive
activist movements.46 Paradoxically, it was the Beat masculinist insistence on individual truth
42
As evidenced in Greek art, homosexuality was widely practiced in Ancient Greece. These
behaviors were based on a belief that semen was a source of knowledge and, as such, sexual
relations a means of passing on wisdom (Burns and Covington 213). This is a particularly
evident theme in much of Ginsberg’s poetry (Swartz 106).
43
O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 17.
44
See Stimpson (1982) for a study of homosexuality among the major writers in Beat culture.
45
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), ix-xiii.
46
H. Mlakar, Merely being there is not enough: women's roles in autobiographical texts by
female Beat writers (Boca Raton: Dissertation.com, 2008, 2007), 17-18; G. N. McCampbell
and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 3-34.
12 that included feminism in its reach. In addition, these female writers literally and figuratively
wrote themselves into Beat and postwar literary history, which could be seen as a
(proto)feminist act of subjectivity that connects twentieth-century first- and second wave
feminisms.47
Even though the female Beats have produced a variety of written work, their
contribution to the literary canon has often been neglected and insufficiently reflected upon in
academic research. The fact the literary works of a prominent female Beat such as Joyce
Johnson will be reissued decades after their first publication48 might suggest that there is a
revival of interest in these formerly forgotten texts. Therefore, a reexamination of one of her
books will help us to better understand the position of the female within this iconic Beat
movement and counterculture and will enable us to gain a significant insight into the status
and psyche of the female within the considerably paternalistic yet ever-evolving American
postwar society and counterculture.
2.2 Gender during postwar America and during the counterculture
While examining a group of writers whose texts and attitudes generally fostered a
domineering patriarchal attitude towards women, it is crucial to perceive and comprehend the
nature and significance of the consciousness that was operating underneath the texts and that
reflected the zeitgeist of postwar America. In this respect, the recognition of the Beat
movement as a boy gang implicitly requires us to reflect upon how the cultural discourse of
gender affected the real political subject –man, woman. What did it feel like to be a woman at
that particular period in time? How did the postwar American society construct and maintain
the way the sexes were supposed to define themselves? How did the Beat Generation then
responded to the prevailing conception of masculinity and femininity?49 It is vital to explore
the position of women and the social construction of gender within post-World War II
America and the counterculture in order to better grasp the male Beats’ attitude towards
women and “square” society as well as the female struggle against white male supremacist
patriarchy.
47
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), ix-xi, 3-18.
48
J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
49
A. R. Lee, The Beat Generation Writers (London; East Haven, Conn.: Pluto Press, 1996),
178-179.
13 The first generation of Beat writers grew up at a time during which most of the adult
population was trapped in an intricate edifice of social conformity made of fear, suppressed
by hostility and the simple desire to get along. In addition, it was a time when many adult
Americans as a result of the post-World War II economic expansion experienced personal
prosperity and some degree of affluence for the first time in their lives. As a consequence, the
middle class was expanded by many millions who were still well aware of the extreme
poverty they had endured during the Great Depression. Most of them had worked hard and
waited a long time to finally get were they were. Once comfortably established, they
embraced the values and symbols of middle-class life with all the fervor of religious
converts.50 Meyerowitz argues that, “for some, this postwar story is a romance steeped in
nostalgic longing for an allegedly simpler, happier, and more prosperous time [whereas] for
others, it is an ironic story of declension, in which the housewife finds herself trapped in a
domestic cage after spreading her wings during World War II.”51 According to Meyerowitz,
either perspective reduces the multidimensional complexity of the past to a snapshot of
middle-class women in suburban homes. What is often overlooked is that in the years
following World War II many women were not white, middle-class, married, and suburban,
whereas many of the women who did fit this stereotype in fact were neither wholly domestic
nor quiescent.52 Although postwar culture was not as inextricably tied to the domestic ideal as
some historians may have pictured, many sources, however, agree that postwar conservatism
shaped women’s identities to a certain extent, weakened their limited protests, and contained
their activities within traditional bounds. An early and influential formulation of this position
appeared in Betty Friedan’s bestselling liberal feminist controversial work The Feminine
Mystique, published in 1963. In her book, Friedan criticized the conservative ideal promoted
by educators, advertisers, and social scientists that damaged American women and trapped
them in the suburban home.53 In like manner, Reumann adds that this postwar conservatism
also deeply affected the way sexuality was brought into the public arena in the decade
following the war. As a result, in the postwar years, political and sexual respectabilities were
closely linked and the social and political order that many saw as crucial to national stability
was based upon deeply polarized gender roles and a conservative deployment of sexual
energy. Taking into account the Cold War ethos, sexual deviance – whether understood as
50
B. Cook, The Beat Generation (New York: Scribner, 1971), 10.
51
J. J. Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 1-12.
52
Ibid., 1-12.
53
Ibid., 1-12.
14 homosexual activity, promiscuity, interracial sex, or any other arrangement that violated the
prescribed path of monogamous sexual expression within marriage – was coupled rhetorically
with political subversion.54 As could be expected, the postwar prescriptive literature targeted
women in particular. Not only unwed mothers, but also women who sought or performed
abortions, prostitutes, and lesbians challenged the dominant sexual order.55 At the same time,
however, the marital bond and the sexual satisfaction identified with it were viewed as
cornerstones of family happiness and – as a consequence – national stability.56 Nevertheless,
as mentioned above, there were plenty of women that did not fit the conservative stereotyped
image often portrayed to have been prevalent during postwar America. Meyerowitz
emphasizes that despite the conservatism of the era the activism of postwar women was wideranging. Women of varied background, for instance, participated in trade unions, the peace
movement, and civic reform. Yet it should be noted that – as in earlier eras – they rarely
achieved positions of leadership in organizations in which they worked alongside men.57
A particular group that self-consciously challenged the middle-class culture was the
Beat generation bohemians. While the movement was largely dominated by men young
women were attracted to it too. In this respect, white middle-class women bohemians
expressed strong objection against the restrictions of the domestic ideal and pursued
“authenticity” in the Beat culture, even though they not openly attacked its sexist attitudes
towards women.58 As a result, their works represented women asserting autonomy from the
1950s gender roles, as well as from the Beat Generation’s male-defined requirements and
domination, by appropriating, transforming, or correcting Beat discourses to inscribe their
own subjectivity.59 In this respect, the work of the second-generation women Beat writers in
particular was marked by a radical critique on the narrative subordination of women and by
the rejection of the 1950s “feminine mystique,” which has been interpreted as a significant
move towards the emergence of the second-wave women’s movement. Betty Friedan,
however, saw the Beat generation as another product of American culture’s iniquitous sexism
54
M. G. Reumann, American sexual character: sex, gender, and national identity in the
Kinsey reports (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1-16.
55
J. J. Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 9.
56
M. G. Reumann, American sexual character: sex, gender, and national identity in the
Kinsey reports (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1-16.
57
J. J. Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 1-12.
58
Ibid., 1-12.
59
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 21.
15 and the act of joining the movement as a defeat of 1950s woman by patriarchal culture.60
Although not all female Beats read The Feminine Mystique when it came out, they disproved
the author’s skepticism, for they saw and rejected the repressive gender codes she
documented in her book, and their dissent against the traditional values women were to
conform to helped to seed the second-wave feminism.61
As a result, the radical questioning of gender roles that was initially being carried out
by isolated scholars and marginalized groups such as the female Beats eventually received
national attention and coincided with the emergence of political movements that came into
being in the 1960s.62 Whereas first wave feminists were inspired by the abolition movement,
their great-granddaughters were swept into feminism by the civil rights movement, the
attendant discussion of principles such as equality and justice, and the revolutionary ferment
caused by protests against the Vietnam War.63 In addition, the fact that women were educated
during the 1960s at a higher rate than ever before, together with the start of a sexual
revolution aided by the birth control pill and later by Roe v Wade (1973)64 increased women’s
sexual independence and professional career options.65 Further, others argue that the seeds of
women’s liberation that was prevalent during this counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s
were also sown during the first several years of the John F. Kennedy’s presidency (19611963), which in part influenced the politically based women’s movement.66 Although women
during the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s achieved great leaps of liberation, they were
60
Ibid., 13-14; B. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), 74.
61
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 12-15; J. J.
Meyerowitz, Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960
(Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1994); W. Breines, Young, White, and Miserable:
Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon, 1992).
62
L. J. Nicholson, The second wave feminism reader: a reader in feminist theory (London:
Routledge, 1997), 1-5.
63
Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “feminism,” accessed April 26, 2014,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/724633/feminism.
64
A Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion (Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v.
“Roe v. Wade,” accessed May 23, 2014,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/506705/Roe-v-Wade.)
65
J. Holt, “The Ideal Woman,” California State University Stanislaus. Web. 26 April 2014, 2,
<http://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/honors/documents/journals/soundings/Holt.pdf>.;
Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. "United States," accessed May 23, 2014,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/616563/United-States.
66
J. E. Perone, Music of the Counterculture Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004),
1-10.
16 still bound by the oppression of the domestic ideal of the previous decade.67 From the moment
this new feminism emerged it met immediate resistance by both men and women. In this way,
the rise of the counterculture also reinvigorated a coalition of American conservatives often
referred to as the New Right. Many sympathizers of this conservative wing were frustrated
with a perceived decline in morality during the 1960s and 1970s, including rampant drug use
and more open and public displays of sexuality. Because of this reactionary backlash, it
comes as no surprise that many of the women who rejected these conservative notions still
struggled with the dilemma of how to achieve greater power and fulfillment within a culture
that was (and still is) dominated by men.68 Likewise, women such as Kate Millet (and many
other women affiliated to the emergent radical feminism of the late 1960s) in her work Sexual
Politics (1969) denounced the fact that the counterculture’s advocacy of resistance to
hegemonic norms did not preclude its complicity with mainstream imposition of patriarchal
authority. Indeed, Millet rightly so hinted at women’s discontent with countercultural, as well
as hegemonic, norms.69 Whereas Betty Friedan had written about the problem that had no
name, Kate Millett named it, illustrated it, exposed it and analyzed it70. Millett showed that
sexual practice was constructed out of patriarchal power relations and both reflected and
served to uphold male domination. She wrote from within a feminist movement in the US
developing out of the left with outrage at the way that women were treated by the left,
particularly as objects for sexual use71. It can thus be argued the position of women within the
counterculture tends to be oversimplified. On the one hand women were fighting for and
gaining new levels of freedom; on the other hand, they had to face a renewed wave of
conservatism that immediately denounced these newly gained privileges and experienced that
the left was not always as liberal as they presented themselves. As a result, it seems quite
67
J. Holt, “The Ideal Woman,” California State University Stanislaus. Web. 26 April 2014, 2.
<http://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/honors/documents/journals/soundings/Holt.pdf>.
68
J. E. Perone, Music of the Counterculture Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004);
E. L. Ayers et al, American passages: A History of the United States (Fort Worth: Harcourt
College Publishers, 2000); Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “New Right,” accessed May
23, 2014, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1968758/New-Right.
69
C. Gair, The American Counterculture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007),
150-151.
70
A. Dworkin, “Great thinkers of our time—Kate Millett,” New Statesman, 14 July 2003.
Web. <http://www.newstatesman.com/200307140019>.; S. Jeffreys, “Kate Millett's Sexual
Politics: 40 Years On,” Womens Studies International Forum, Vol. 34(1) (2011): 76-77.
71
S. Jeffreys, “Kate Millett's Sexual Politics: 40 Years On,” Womens Studies International
Forum, Vol. 34(1) (2011): 76-77; A. K. Shulman, “Sex and power: Sexual Bases of Radical
Feminism,” in Women, Sex and Sexuality, ed. C. R. Stimpson and E. S. Person (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 21-86.
17 plausible that women in the midst of this counterculture and “counter counterculture” must
have felt quite torn between the dilemma of whether to rebel against “square” society or to
conform to traditional values.
1.3 Women Beat writers in the limelight: Joyce Johnson
Although the work of female Beat writers has often been overlooked or been lost from the
record, some of these women have attempted to (re)tell Beat generation life by using the
genre of the memoir, a narrative discourse in which they are the Beat subjects and yet still
women colonized by the norms of Beat culture. Considering the public’s over-interest in
biographical aspects of the Beat Generation, these women’s self-inscription in their memoirs
ironically has been a means of placing themselves in the limelight. One of the women who is
generally seen as a key member of the second generation of Beat writers and who has used
the literary genre of the memoir to tell Beat tales to her own ends is Joyce Johnson.72
Although Johnson in the past claimed to have been an observer rather than an active member
within the Beat movement73, her two-year relationship with key Beat figure Jack Kerouac and
her fiction and non-fiction writing have undeniably enabled her to foreground herself as one
of the prominent women of the Beat Generation. This vantage point allows us to get a more
nuanced view of the male-dominated Beat Generation and the women associated with it. With
the 1983 publication of Johnson’s ironically titled Minor Characters, a memoir of her
experiences as young writer coming up in the nascent Beat scene in New York City, women
associated with the movement became visible.74 In her story, Johnson shows what it was like
to be a young woman coming of age in the tumultuous and transitional 1950s, as the youth of
postwar America chafed against the constraints of a buttoned-up, conservative society.75
72
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 3-41.
73
G. Thomson, “Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats”, Clcweb:
Comparative Literature And Culture, Vol. 13(1)(2011): 4.
74
G. N. McCampbell, and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 181; G. Thomson,
“Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats”, Clcweb: Comparative Literature
And Culture, Vol. 13(1)(2011): 4; G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of
Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2004).
75
B. Knight, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, And Muses at the Heart of
a Revolution (Berkeley, Calif.: Conari Press, 1996), 167.
18 Strangely enough, Joyce Johnson (b. 1935) – born as Joyce Glassman – grew up on
West 116th street just around the corner from the apartment salon of William and Joan
Vollmer Adams Burroughs where key Beat figures such as Kerouac and Ginsberg were
frequent visitors during the late 1940s. Born into a hardworking, rather conformist Jewish
family, she devoted her adolescence to theatre and the piano, after which she quit her
composition studies and decided to write. She left Barnard College in 1954 one course short
of the degree requirements, found a job in publishing, and began to focus on becoming a
novelist. Through her Barnard classmate Elise Cowen, who was in a relationship with Allan
Ginsberg, Johnson became romantically involved with Jack Kerouac from 1957 to 1958 and
found her way to the heart of the Beat scene.76
Although recent anthologies such as McCampbell and Johnson’s Girls Who Wore
Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (2002) and Breaking The Rule of Cool:
Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (2004) have tried to reevaluate the literary
works of female Beats, Johnson emphasizes that it seems to be rather hard for the present
generation to understand women’s relationships with the Beats.77 She argues that not just
within the Beat Generation, but in general, there “was a pervasively bad attitude towards
women at [that] time […] throughout the culture as there still is today in America.”78
According to Johnson, women were to conform to the traditionalist ideals, since “the
Depression decade, when millions of the hungry, homeless, and unemployed had roamed the
U.S. landscape, hopped freight, slept in open fields, was still grimly, unnostalgically alive in
people’s memories” and the “status and security [that] had been so recently won […]
[therefore] still seemed tenuously held.”79
Not surprisingly, nonconformity, in this dissertation defined as a rejection of the allconsuming work ethic, sexual repression, cultural xenophobia, militaristic patriotism, and
suburban materialism that marked postwar society, was not easy80. To be unmarried, a poet,
an artist, to go on the road was doubly shocking for women, and social condemnation was
76
J. Johnson, Minor Characters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983); B. Knight, Women of the
Beat generation: the writers, artists, and muses at the heart of a revolution (Berkeley, Calif.:
Conari Press, 1996), 167-168; G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of
Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2004), 181.
77
Joyce Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
78
Ibid.
79
J. Johnson, Minor Characters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 25.
80
R. Bennett, “Teaching the Beat Generation to Generation X,” in The Beat Generation.
Critical Essays, ed. K. Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-20.
19 high.81 Johnson, too, confirms that women who followed a different path than the one
prescribed by traditionalist society often faced cultural barriers caused by gender. In this
respect, she experienced it to be “very difficult for women to be writers, just in general in
those days.”82 Personally, Johnson got her biggest discouragement about being a writer while
being in college. Going to an all women’s college, she solely had male professors who
instructed the female students in writing, yet at the same time discouraged them from ever
thinking about pursuing the idea of becoming a writer. According to these male scholars, the
things women wrote about were of no interest.83 Taking into account the derogatory attitudes
of men towards their (literary) capacities these women had to deal with on a regular basis, it
does not surprise that female writers such as Elise Cowen, Hettie Jones, and at some times
even Joyce Johnson, often did not really talk much about their writing and instead preferred to
keep it to themselves. As she explains, they, as women writers, all went to reading after
reading, yet only male writers got up the stage and read.84
Contrary to what is done in the few works published upon the issue of gender within the
Beat scene, Johnson deems it rather unjust to draw a generalized and destructive conclusion
from what is often considered the patriarchal and sexist attitude of male Beat writers towards
women. According to her, it is of crucial importance to take into consideration the atmosphere
of repression and conformity that was so prevalent at the time. Women’s relationships with
the Beats were not – as some of the anthologies seem to suggest – entirely negative, but had
their positive aspects too. The message to liberate oneself from conformity as is so often
repeated in a fundamental Beat work like On the Road was not just directed to men, but also
to women.85 Along these lines, Johnson urges to abstain from reducing all male Beats to the
same simplistic macho caricature. She therefore stresses that not all male Beats shared the
same disparaging attitude towards women. To her, Jack Kerouac, in this respect was different
from the other Beats. According to Johnson, “he was very encouraging and urging me to give
myself over to the writing more, […] to create more space to write, […] [and even] to quit my
job. […] He read what I wrote and said good things about it.”86 Nevertheless, Johnson
acknowledges that other Beats simply were not interested in her literary work or that of other
81
B. Knight, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of
a Revolution (Berkeley, Calif.: Conari Press, 1996), 4.
82
Joyce Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
83
Ibid.
84
Ibid.
85
Ibid.
86
Ibid.
20 women writers. A key figure within the Beat Generation such as Allen Ginsberg, for example,
cancelled out women in general, something which according to Johnson must have had much
to do with his homosexuality and consequent predilection for men. In addition, she argues that
this general lack of interest of male Beats in the work of women writers and the fact that these
women often have been overlooked could be explained by their coming of age at a relatively
late stage. Whereas the prominent figures of the Beat scene had been writing for quite a while,
Johnson argues that she and her female contemporaries at the time just were in a different
place with their writing. In this respect, she attributes this lack of attention to their work
simply to the fact that writers like herself and Hettie Jones only developed into mature writers
in their late forties, years after the publication of some of the most-celebrated Beat novels.87
For the simple reason that Joyce Johnson was so closely connected with the Beat scene
and comprehended the zeitgeist of the moment, she seems to be able to put things more in
perspective and therefore has a more nuanced view of the portrayal of gender roles by the
Beats. As a result, unlike most feminists (and most probably unlike most readers today) who
consider a pivotal Beat novel like On the Road to be a specimen product of male hegemony,
Johnson is able to make an appraisal of it that is more generous and somehow more maturely
balanced. In this way, she makes a point of drawing attention to the social context in which
the book was written and to the sense of prophecy it pioneered.88 Yet, this does not imply that
she minimizes the difficulties she and other women who aspired to write had to face. In this
way, it took Johnson quite a while to produce another novel after her first work Come and
Join the Dance89 (1962)90–generally considered to be the first Beat novel by a woman- for the
simple reason that she, as a woman, just got swamped by the demands on her, such as taking
care of a small child and having a demanding job, without any household help.91 Even as a
writer during the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, generally considered being a time in
which ideas of liberation were more widely embraced92 she argues that, “it was much harder
to do what you wanted than what you had to do.”93 In this case, Johnson goes even further by
arguing that to her the “sixties […] seemed anticlimactic, for all their fireworks”. She saw the
87
Ibid.
88
R. Rogoveanu, “Reconsidering Margins – The Women of the Beat Generation,” Annals of
Ovidius University Constanta - Philology, No. 16 (2005): 364.
89
Published under the name Joyce Glassman.
90
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 181.
91
J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
92
C. Gair, The American Counterculture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
93
J. Johnson, Minor Characters (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 175.
21 “hippies replace beatniks” and “observed the emergence of a ‘lifestyle’.” To her, “the old
intensities were blanding out into ‘Do your own thing’,” which she saw as “the
commandment of a freedom excised of struggle,” as a “revolution [that] was in the wind, but
[that] [would] never [come][…].”94
2.4 Bad Connections
As one of few the women who found her way through the heart of the Beat movement,95
Joyce Johnson succeeded in sharing some of her experiences of being a woman who strayed
from the path of conventionality in her literary works. Although being more generally known
for her more recent memoirs Minor Characters (1983), Missing Men (2004), and The Voice Is
All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (2012)96, Johnson stood out from other Beat women
as she got a book contract at a rather young age and consequently was able to publish three
novels.97 In this way, she published her first novel Come and Join the Dance at the age of
twenty-six. Her second novel, Bad Connections, came out in 1978 after a hiatus from writing
during which she was widowed, then remarried and had a child, and began her editorial
career. Her third novel, In the Night Café, a portion of which won the O’Henry Prize for short
fiction, was published in 1987. All three New York novels map key cultural and gender
discourses of their eras, portraying adventurous middle-class white women in the 1950s and
1960s.98 Although Johnson is well known for her famous literary connections, it should be
noted that her works are of even greater significance since they dissipate the silence generally
attributed to the female character in postwar literature.99 While Johnson made history by
publishing the first Beat Generation novel by and about a Beat woman, all three novels have
94
Ibid., 276.
95
B. Knight, Women of the Beat generation: the writers, artists, and muses at the heart of a
revolution (Berkeley, Calif.: Conari Press, 1996), 167-168.
96
“About the Author,” Joyce Johnson Books. Web. 02 May 2014.
<http://www.joycejohnsonbooks.net/about-the-author/>.; G. N. McCampbell, and R. Johnson,
Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 2002).
97
J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
98
“About the Author,” Joyce Johnson Books. Web. 02 May 2014.
<http://www.joycejohnsonbooks.net/about-the-author/>.; G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson,
Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 2002), 69.
99
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat
Generation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 69-71.
22 been out of print for many years and have been largely invisible in discussions of postwar
American women writers, and even to feminist critics who have begun to identify and assess
works by women Beat writers.100 Although McCampbell and Johnson were one of the few
scholars to critically analyze Johnson’s Come and Join the Dance and its pivotal emendations
of the Beat field and its signification of a feminist movement in the 1950s,101 it should be
noted that in particular her second work Bad Connections has generally been largely
overlooked in critical evaluation within the academic field. In this case, it is quite self-evident
that the general unavailability of the novel in part accounts for the lack of critical academic
attention it has received, yet the particular sociopolitical context in which the book was
written and in which the story is set would undeniably offer valuable insights in the zeitgeist
of the counterculture and the mind of one the few women who was at the center of the Beat
movement.
Unlike Johnson’s first novel, which is considered to be rather a proto-feminist novel,102
her second work seems to have a more outspoken feminist agenda. Indeed, Bad Connections
is a novel that is set within the counterculture and is to a certain degree based upon the
author’s own experiences.103 Just like her two other (semi)fictional works, Bad Connections
features a female bohemian who is struggling with the newly gained, yet still controversial
position of women within the context of the American counterculture of which nearly every
aspect is marked by the influence of the Beat Generation.104 In this way, the main character
Molly leaves her unhappy and destructive, yet very traditional marriage. Nevertheless, after
she finally found the courage to liberate herself, she would quickly find herself trapped in
another unhealthy relationship with her bohemian lover Conrad. What’s more is that in this
story we do not only witness the female character struggling with her newly gained freedom
within the context of a counterculture inspired by the Beats,105 even men such as the left-wing
activist Conrad or the university professor Malcolm seem to have difficulties with the
discrepancy between life as a non-conformist and leading a life according to the norms of
100
Ibid., 69-71; L. Barton, “I never met anyone else like Jack Kerouac,” The Guardian, 12
October 2007. Web. 02 May 2014.
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/oct/12/fiction.jackkerouac>.
101
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat
Generation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 69-95.
102
Ibid., 70.
103
J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
104
G. Stephenson, The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation
(Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 13-15.
105
Ibid. 13-15.
23 traditional conformity. According to Joyce Johnson, “this was an experience that women [and
apparently men too in some cases] had, because they would liberate themselves, but they
would still want to have men in their lives. And then they would find that the male-female
relationship had still a long way to go.”106 After – literally and figuratively – a long journey,
Molly seems to have come to terms with herself and has had an emotional breakthrough, after
which she decides to leave both her lovers behind in the hope of living a “life uncomplicated
by longings” together with her son Matthew.107 According to Smårs, the author of one of the
only sources that to a certain degree includes Bad Connections, “the novel tells the story of
complicated relationships, of ordinary society mixing with the external part of the normative
community. The progressive academic, represented by Conrad, is put next to feminism,
bohemia, and other things [that] can be regarded as commonplace.”108
Although Bad Connections is set within the American counterculture, the story in
multiple respects reminds of Kerouac’s pivotal road tale of the Beat Generation. In a similar
fashion as the male main characters in On the Road struggle with straying from the path of
1950s conformity, the female protagonist in Johnson’s Bad Connections, too, is faced with the
difficulties of liberating herself from the life that traditionally is laid out for women. In
addition, despite the fact that Johnson argues that she did not feel consciously influenced by
Kerouac in this novel,109 there are various other thematic elements to be found in the book that
remind us of Kerouac’s road narrative. Not only does Johnson create a female protagonist
whose journey leads her to San Francisco and Mexico, some of the places that played a
crucial role in On the Road, she also incorporates the Beat Generation into the novel through
allusions to “some of the best minds of her generation”110111 and to authors like Ezra Pound
and Ernest Hemingway, whose work exerted an influence on Beat authors like Kerouac.112
Taking into consideration the fact that Bad Connections is loosely based upon
106
J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
107
J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978): 223.
108
L. Smårs, “Female Conditions: Social Distancing and Beatnik Culture in Joyce Johnson's
Come and Join the Dance, Bad Connections and In the Night Café,” Dissertation in Literature
– Department of Literature at Uppsala University Page. 2012. Web. 02 May 2014, 5.
<http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:531241/FULLTEXT02>.
109
J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
110
This passage is a clear reference to Ginsberg’s famous poem Howl; Ginsberg as Carlo
Marx in On the Road (K. Kelley, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. MAXnotes (Piscataway, N.J.:
Research and Education Association, 1996), 2).
111
J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 68.
112
Ibid., 78, 88; W. Lawlor, Beat Culture: Lifestyles, Icons, and Impact (Santa Barbara,
Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 153-154.
24 Johnson’s own experiences after some years after her first encounter with the Beats113,
analyzing the novel in terms of the portrayal of women sheds a light on how a woman,
imbued with the ideas of this particular movement, portrays a female protagonist in large part
on the margin of the rapidly evolving American society. Considering the fact that Johnson’s
point of view on life was undeniably influenced by Kerouac and the Beats, and their societal
attitudes towards women, it is worth examining how Johnson in this respect (whether
deliberately or not) decides to foreground a woman and consequently moves away from the
flat and superficial representation of women by a male Beat like Kerouac. Ironically, although
most of Johnson’s non-fiction work recounts her experiences as one of the few women within
the Beat Generation and her relationship with Kerouac114, all of her fictional prose narratives
seem to be a (proto)feminist reaction to the patriarchal and sexist construction of women
depicted in the work of a male Beat like Jack Kerouac115. Her hipster protagonist in Bad
Connections reconfigures the dominant Beat discourse and intervenes in reactionary Beat
culture as well as the establishment culture constructions of female inferiority and
marginality, thereby enlarging Beat movement radicalism116. As a result, Bad Connections
could be regarded as a female response to Kerouac’s On the Road, yet this time depicting the
confusion and controversy accosting the white, middle-class protagonist in a still patriarchal
sixties context as she struggles to maintain a home for her child and participate in the
liberation movements of her day with a free sex life and enlightened political and spiritual
consciousness117. The spiritual journey of Johnson’s female protagonist could then be
compared to the journey of the male protagonists in On the Road, yet, unlike Kerouac,
Johnson takes a political stance towards the attitude towards women in a society – as
mentioned earlier – heavily influenced by the philosophy of the Beat Generation as promoted
in On the Road.
113
J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
114
“Joyce Johnson Books,” Joyce Johnson Books. Web. 02 May 2014.
<http://www.joycejohnsonbooks.net/>.
115
For an overview of her fiction work: L. Smårs, “Female Conditions: Social Distancing and
Beatnik Culture in Joyce Johnson’s Come and Join the Dance, Bad Connections and In the
Night Café,” Dissertation in Literature – Department of Literature at Uppsala University
Page. 2012. Web. 02 May 2014.
<http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:531241/FULLTEXT02>.
116
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 183.
117
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 183.
25 2.5
On the Road
Arguably, Jack Kerouac was the central visionary and spokesperson of the Beats. Willingly or
unwillingly, since the publication of what is considered to be the counterculture bible,
Kerouac became a cultural “hero” who gave spirit to an age and an identity to those resisters
who struggled against the forces of postwar conformity that can be defined by values such as
an all-consuming work ethic, sexual repression, cultural xenophobia, militaristic patriotism
and suburban materialism.118 Born in Lowell, MA, in 1922 as the son of French Canadian
immigrants and consequently distanced from the “norms” of American life by a combination
of language, religion and custom, Kerouac had always found himself to be on the margins of
dominant US culture.119 Yet, it was his enrollment at Columbia University – where he was
recruited to play football – that would remain one of the most decisive events in his life, for it
was there that he was exposed to the excitement and lure of New York City and to men and
women of the criminal underclass – figures such as William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, Hal
Chase and Allan Ginsberg – whom he would romanticize in many of his novels. Together
with Burroughs and Ginsberg, Kerouac belonged to a larger collection of men and women, in
major cities throughout the United States, which had an informal network of liaisons and
influence. Picking up on this small but highly visible subculture in the United States, the
media, using Kerouac’s cue, identified it as the “Beat Generation.” In the decade following
his departure from university, Kerouac wrote novels and rambled through the United States
and Mexico, following his friends and getting his “kicks” where he could. Although his
travels had brought him through the armed services and marriage, neither of which kept his
attention for long, he made a career out of being a wanderer and a hobo, all the while
recording his thoughts and sights in his journals.120 Having published earlier works that were
not necessarily well received, the eventual 1957 publication and success of On the Road
118
J. Tytell, Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1976), 30; O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of
Jack Kerouac (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 3-14; Encyclopedia of
American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014),
s.v. “Counterculture” (by Morris Dickstein), <http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=404>.; R.
Bennett, “Teaching the Beat Generation to Generation X.” in The Beat Generation. Critical
Essays, ed. Kostas Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-19.
119
C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 78-80; O.
Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 15.
120
O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 15-26.
26 surprised Kerouac, who was very shy, and left him with a reputation that turned increasingly
hostile. Later, many of the books that he had been hoarding all the years while on the road
were published in rapid succession, as well as a few new ones. However, within a few years,
the pressures of his fame and celebrity, along with his accelerated use of alcohol and drugs,
exacted their toll. He died a sick and broken man in 1969.121
The overwhelming attention paid to On the Road, Kerouac’s masterpiece, has tended to
deflect attention from his other writings. While most are now in print (which was not the case
in the years immediately following his death), they remain relatively unknown. As a result,
the full range of Kerouac’s formal experimentations is not apparent to readers familiar solely
with the published version of On the Road. In this way, Kerouac’s books are written in
distinct, often very different styles, designed to capture the “sounds” of whatever subject
matter –Bebop, the road, childhood dreams, etc. – is represented in the narrative.122 Despite
this variety of styles, Kerouac’s work nevertheless is characterized by a nostalgic yearning for
the prewar days. Most of his narrators look back to an age of innocence, of “not knowing” the
horrors that they believed confronted the modern world, but can only do so as a kind of
symbolic compensation for their own knowledge that America has unleashed the atom bomb,
is living through the “Plastic Fifties”123 and has bred what his narrators perceive as the
“illiterate generation” of the 1960s.124 Kerouac lamented that he could no longer recognize
Americans “as people any more”,125 loathed cars and television, “with everybody looking at
the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time”.126127
Nevertheless, with the 1957 publication of On the Road, a vision of social revolt was
named and became identified as a national movement. More specifically, On the Road is a
thinly veiled travel diary that chronicles Kerouac’s experiences during the years 1946 to 1950.
This “road book” captures the adventures and lifestyles of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty,
the fictional counterparts to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. Kerouac traveled together with
Cassady, lived with him and – in order to understand the depths of his euphoric existence –
121
Ibid., 15-26; Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “Jack Kerouac,” accessed May 4,
2014, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/315512/Jack-Kerouac.
122
C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 78-80; O.
Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 77-78.
123
J. Kerouac, Maggie Cassidy (St Albans, England: Granada, 1982), 9, 48.
124
C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 78.
125
J. Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46 (New York, N.Y.:
Coward-McCann, Inc., 1968), 9.
126
J. Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (St Albans, England: Granada, 1982), 31.
127
C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008), 78-80.
27 even tape-recorded their conversations. Kerouac, as represented by Sal Paradise, was bitten
by the bug of Dean’s madness and joined him in his quest for experience and freedom, and
eventually in his search for his father. In On the Road, Sal and Dean embark on an exhausting
foray that brings them through places like New York, San Francisco, and Mexico while
exploring the bohemian underworld of vice, sex, drugs, and nonconformity.128 Not
surprisingly considering the sociopolitical context in which it was written, the publication of
the novel was followed by the appearance of a generation of converts who, like Kerouac and
his alter ego Sal Paradise, became enraptured by Cassady’s embodiment of movement and
freedom over the limitations of societal constraints, and followed with their own imitations.
As a result, the social movements that Kerouac later was identified with, calling for reform,
freedom, sexual liberation, and a new and less materialistic cultural outlook, were powerful
enough to make a permanent mark on US culture and to promote a lifestyle so at odds with
1950s traditional values.129
Although Kerouac’s On the Road is often seen as a celebration of freedom and praised
for it redefining the norms of sexuality in 1950s America, it should be noted that this sexual
freedom also implies the promotion of a male privilege of sexual conquest.130 Whereas
Johnson argued that the Beats conveyed a message of personal liberation for both men and
women,131 Kerouac’s vision of sexuality in On the Road could rather be summarized as
“abusive, sexist, and degenerative” towards women.132 In this respect, Swartz argues that, “to
a large extent, Kerouac’s perspective is an act of extreme social and moral irresponsibility,
free license and fallacious justification for the acquaintance rape and sexual abuse that has
been committed in the name of sexual freedom.”133 Ironically, one cannot but take note of
how the aforementioned objectification and marginalization of women in On the Road implies
that the Beats’ idea of social deviance in large part was only a message intended for men.
Although a female Beat writer such as Johnson might indicate that this narrative is to be better
understood within the particular societal context,134 one cannot deny that this particular road
128
O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 3-26.
129
Ibid., 3-26.
130
Ibid., 78.
131
Joyce Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
132
O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 1-26, 61-81.
133
Ibid., 74-81.
134
J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
28 tale could be seen as a product of a macho culture that – despite the Beats’ attempts to stray
from the path laid out by 1950s America – still had a large influence on men.
3
A critical reading of the representation of women in On the
Road and Bad Connections
3.1 The position of women in American society
As both On the Road and Bad Connections are set within a time of tumultuous change in
American society, the two stories accurately illustrate the standard of behavior prescribed by
the traditional society at the time. What strikes in this respect is that both stories subtly
succeed in conveying to what degree the main characters’ behavioral patterns and philosophy
contrast with the traditional social expectations of men and women within the postwar
American society. In particular, both novels provide the reader with clear clues about the
position of women within crucial moments in the evolving society. In this way, both stories
implicitly (Bad Connections in this case more explicitly) speak out against a society that is
characterized by the incongruity between the traditionalist modus vivendi and the alternative
way of life promoted and inspired by the Beat Generation.
One of the predominant rhetorical visions laid out in Kerouac’s On the Road is his
vision of Social Deviance. Nevertheless, the immediate postwar America in which the novel
is set was a culture in which any form of deviance from the social norm was considered moral
deviance and was deemed a threat to the American nation. Not surprisingly, American
propaganda constantly maintained that the American way of life was about to end, that it was
menaced on multiple fronts, and that plurality itself was its greatest threat. In order to guard
the established order and institutions that were held as the cornerstones of society, like
marriage, formal education, and the military, agents of the status quo policed the sociocultural realm. As a response to these traditionalist societal pressures, On the Road was a call
for social and cultural pluralism and a direct rejection of this culture of suspicion and control.
To the alienated youth of America, Kerouac provided an alternative way of life within his
book. In this way, the reader witnesses how Sal Paradise, the main character, clearly desires
29 to be outside of the institutions that forced their hold on him and struggles for a new life.135
Nevertheless, Sal and Dean’s rejection of the conservative societal standards of postwar
society and their pursuit of an alternative way of life requires a direct acknowledgement of the
social conditions they were rebelling against. If Sal stresses that all of his York friends “were
[…] putting down society,”136 this implies that in order to transmit a message to liberate
oneself from society’s constraints, Kerouac overtly had to delineate the American society and
the position of men and women within it. In this way, life on the road is presented as a mode
of escape from the spiritual poverty of traditional American life, from the world of work,
marriage, school, the military, capitalism, and repressive social control.137
Sal’s initial attempts to escape the traditional value system, however, were ill-fated.138
At the beginning of the novel, Sal lives a rather static existence according to the norms of
traditionalist America. Not only had he – as many other Americans – served in the American
forces during World War II, but he had also begun going to school on the GI Bill of Rights
when living with his aunt again.139 Sal’s road trip could then be seen as an effort to escape the
traditional and stable life his aunt was living in Patterson, NJ. In this respect, his aunt can be
identified as the embodiment of small town and conformist America. In addition, the
traditional role that was assigned to this female character might be indicative of the particular
conservative expectations for women created by postwar society. Indeed, the character of
Sal’s aunt is largely defined by her role as caregiver. She does not approve of Sal’s exuberant
travels and Dean’s unruly behavior, yet continues to take care of Sal without much
complaining whenever he returns from his travels.140 In addition, the qualities ascribed to this
female character only seem to be related to housework traditionally done by women,
illustrated by a passage like:
Dean had come to my house, slept several nights there waiting for me; spent
afternoons talking to my aunt as she worked on a great rag rug woven of all the clothes
135
O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 61-81.
136
J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959), 7.
137
O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 61-73.
138
Ibid., 61-73.
139
J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959).
140
Ibid., 63.
30 in my family for years, which was now finished and spread on my bedroom floor, as
complex and as rich as the passage of time itself.141
Further, as Dean and Sal have their own vision upon the institution of marriage, On the Road
illustrates that women in this case were not held to the same standard as men. Whereas Sal
and his friends on a regular basis flout the bounds of heteronormative marriage, women seem
to be forced to stick to their husbands in even the most abusive relationships. By way of
illustration, Terry, the Mexican girl Sal fell in love with, is judged by her family for being a
whore because, “she’d left her no-good husband and gone to LA.”142 Although Kerouac
throughout the story does not take an actively political stance towards the unequal treatment
of women at the time, he does acknowledge the challenges women are faced with. According
to Holton, Kerouac purposely chooses not to explore in depth the difficulties and insecurities
the female characters in the novel were struggling with, because this would call into question
his own complex and fragile relationship to women, including not only wives and lovers but
also his mother (from whom he never managed to separate) and daughter (whom he refused to
acknowledge). As a result, gender and sexuality seem to exist in the author’s life and work as
a site of fear and confusion and his resort to stereotypes may in many instances appear as an
attempt to ease those fears and reduce those complexities.143 Yet, very sporadically Kerouac
sheds some light of what he thinks is beneath the surface of the female character in an attempt
to understand the female psyche; as he does when Sal meets a girl on the bus to Detroit:
Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached
back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to
be done –whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was. […] She was eighteen and
most lovely, and lost.144
By and large, the portrayal of women in On the Road confirms the gender differences
prevalent during the immediate postwar American society. Whereas it seems to be more
accepted for men to stray from the path of conformity, women are more likely to be portrayed
in accordance with the traditionalist family roles. Yet, the fact that in some rare cases,
141
Ibid., 63.
142
Ibid., 58.
143
R. Holton, “Kerouac Among the Fellahim: On The Road To The Postmodern,” MFS
Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 41(2) (1995): 275.
144
J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959), 141.
31 Kerouac depicts them as victims of patriarch society might indicate that the author in this
respect did not fully approve of the gender inequality of the time.
In contrast to the marginal role assigned to women in On the Road, the female appears
to be the central focus within Bad Connections. In her novel, Johnson explicitly spotlights the
role taken up by women within the period of the counterculture. Although Johnson portrays
women who are more independent, they still seem to struggle with the great changes
promoted by the New Left. In the novel, the main character Molly – like several of the female
characters in the book – had a job, but still found herself to be stuck in an abuse marriage.
Even though she finds the courage to leave her husband, she admits to feel under pressure to
assert the new found (sexual) freedom women had been fighting for:
Sometimes I asked myself what I wanted – which I knew wasn’t the same as what I
was supposed to want. I was supposed to want freedom. The runaway wife was the new
cultural phenomenon. […] Now I was free – free to have as many lovers as I wanted
of whichever sex or to live with a vibrator in celibacy […].145
Nevertheless, despite the changes brought about by the new wave of feminism that marked
the counterculture,146 Molly – as presumably many of her female contemporaries – was “still
wrestling with the double standard”.147 In this way, Molly recognizes the difficulties women
faced within the counterculture:
There is such a think line for women between adventure and misadventure. It is still
hard for us to be heroes in the active, external sense of, say, climbing mountains,
hopping freights. We tend to be heroes of our own imaginations.148
In like manner, Molly describes how women at the time were supposed to be “swept along by
the Sexual Revolution,”149 yet at the same time she still sees the STD she got as a result of her
more adventurous sex life as an “act of civil disobedience.”150 Not only Molly, but also even
145
J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 51.
146
Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “United States,” accessed May 24, 2014,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/616563/United-States.
147
J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 40.
148
Ibid., 39.
149
Ibid., 38.
150
Ibid., 73.
32 her most sexually liberated friend and coworker Felicia, who, too, had to deal with sexually
transmitted infections in the past, still sees them as a form of “sexual punishment.”151 This
implies that for women there were still puritanical or even religious restrictions associated
with the notion of casual sex. What’s more in this case is that even men who claim to be part
of the great social movement and who present themselves as progressive to a certain extent
cannot but uphold the traditional gender differences:
Even in Conrad’s realm of theoretical freedom, there were boundaries as well as a
definite hierarchy. Conrad was on top, of course. Just below him there was Roberta
and sometimes me-our positions kept fluctuating.152
Female main character Molly attributes this general struggle with the – apparently surface –
changes of gender roles to what appears to be the prevailing “restlessness” that marks the
period of the counterculture.153
Although Bad Connections is set in a later period of American history than On the
Road, and this counterculture is generally seen as a period marked by the sexual revolution
and the start of the second-wave feminism,154 the female characters in Bad Connections to a
degree are still held – and hold themselves – to the same conservative standards prevalent for
women in the immediate postwar society as portrayed in On the Road. As a result, women –
despite having gained more liberties – seem unsure how to deal with these newly prescribed
norms of behavior, while they undoubtedly consciously or unconsciously still felt pressure to
conform to what only recently by the New Left had been rejected as the traditional societal
standards.
3.2 Male-female relationships and escaping “square” society
One of the main themes emerging throughout both On the Road and Bad Connections is the
conflict between conformity to the conservative society and individual freedom. In both
novels, male and female characters come to the conclusion that conforming to non-conformity
151
Ibid., 70.
152
Ibid., 81.
153
Ibid., 132.
154
“United States.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic
Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 01 May. 2014.
33 is harder to achieve in practice than it was in theory. As a result, this apparent incompatibility
between “going along” versus “going alone” in On the Road as well as Bad Connections is
marked by the pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships. In this way, both
stories are characterized by relationships that still – despite the stories being set in different
significant periods of American history – reinforce social privilege for men and subjection of
women.
Although On the Road is a clear reaction to and rejection of the negative culture of
suspicion and control that permeated postwar America, the two protagonists Sal and Deal to a
degree relentlessly struggle to completely leave behind the responsibilities and expectations
of the systematic world.155 As the road trip in the novel can be interpreted as a metaphor for
the spiritual journey of liberation of Dean and Sal, it should be noted that it is Dean Moriarty
who was the catalyst of Sal’s salvation.156 Whereas Sal had been living a life consigned to
predictable conformity before the trip, Dean had always led an existence on the margins of
society. Nevertheless, despite their desire to break from conservative American society, both
men had been bonded in the institution of marriage. In this way, Sal had been married and
split up with his wife not long before first meeting Dean, whereas Dean was trying to divorce
Marylou, while at the same time being engaged in a relationship with Camille.157 What strikes
in this respect is that Sal and Dean lament men for being trapped in the traditional institution
of marriage and thereby feeling morally compelled to stay faithful – as illustrated in the
following passage –
Poor Victor, all this time he stood on the brass rail of the bar with his back to the
counter and jumped up and down gladly to see his three American friends cavort. […]
His eyes gleamed for a woman but he wouldn’t accept any, being faithful to his
wife.158
yet at the same time realize that this legal union might be the only cure for their restlessness:
I want to marry a girl,” [Sal] told them, “so I can rest my soul with her till we both
get old. This can’t go on all the time-all this franticness and jumping around. We’ve
155
O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 61-73.
156
Ibid., 65.
157
J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959).
158
Ibid., 167.
34 got to go someplace, find something.” “Ah now, man,” said Dean, “I’ve been digging
you for years about the home and marriage and all those fine wonderful things about
your soul.159
This illustrates that Dean and Sal despite their quest for freedom realize that their journey is
finite and that they will eventually have to settle for a static existence. However, the two
protagonists are not particularly concerned with marital fidelity. Surprisingly enough, taking
into account their endorsement of social deviance,160 any form of sexual promiscuity, and
therefore social deviance, seems exclusively reserved for the male counterpart. Whereas Dean
sees no harm in him fooling around with Camille while still being married to Marylou, he
does not tolerate Marylou getting sexually involved with other men and therefore brands her
as a “whore.”161 Therefore, On the Road appears to endorse the institution of marriage and
family as the only remedy for the nervousness of the vagabond, yet, at the same time, the
novel accurately delineates the act of marriage as a legal union that is marked by male
dominance and unrestricted power for the male to act at his own discretion, and female
subservience. Kerouac throughout the book conveys the impression that the essential
condition for a marriage to be successful is male headship and male sexual freedom, and
female subordination and female faithfulness. In this case, the marriage of Walter, a colored
guy Dean and Sal met at a bar, is a clear illustration of the protagonists’ definition of a happy
marriage. When Walter invites the two for a beer at his home in the middle of the night, his
wife “never asked Walter where he’d been, what time it was, nothing”; “Walter’s wife smiled
and smiled as [they] repeated the same insane thing all over again. She never said a word.” To
Dean, this woman’s behavior constituted a model for other women within the bonds of
marriage: “ [Walter] [was] a man, and that [was] his castle.”162 In accordance with this clear
vision of what the union between a man and a woman should be, Dean cannot seem to cope
with Camille giving him a taste of his own medicine when sleeping with other men. Only
when Camille was finally ready to fully comply with his conditions for marriage, Dean could
eventually settle “with his most constant, most embittered, and best-knowing wife
Camille.”163
159
Ibid., 69.
160
O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 61-73.
161
J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959), 107.
162
Ibid., 118.
163
Ibid., 177.
35 Although many of the women in On the Road find themselves trapped in restrictive
relationships in which men have the final word, there are some rare portrayals of women who
have found the courage to escape their abusive marriages. Ironically, as these women try to
live a life free from societal restrictions, as is the case of the two protagonists, they are often
not held to the same standards as men. When Sal meets a young Mexican woman on the bus
who told him that she had left her abusive husband, he almost instantly assumes she had to be
“a common little hustler.”164 Strangely enough, the prerequisite for an independent woman to
be accepted on an equal footing with her male counterparts is to be a “man’s woman.”165 In
this way, Frankie, a rather masculine woman they meet during their trip, seems to be one of
the only women in the novel who is worthy of men’s respect. Not only is she “always
agreeable to anything”166 – as generally expected from women throughout the novel – but also
her foul language and alcohol abuse make her the ideal female counterpart of Dean and Sal.
In like manner as in On the Road, the restrictive relationship is a prevalent theme
throughout Bad Connections. Even though the story is set in a period of time in which
traditional codes of sexual behavior were being challenged by the sexual revolution,167
Johnson in her novel decides to foreground the female against the background of the
counterculture in order to demonstrate that many of the female characters at the time still felt
uncomfortable dealing with the new expectations set for women by the social movement. In
this way, female protagonist Molly plucked up the courage to break loose from her confining
and abusive marriage with Fred, only to immediately find herself ensnared in a dysfunctional
relationship with Conrad. At first, Molly perceived the social activist Conrad as the
embodiment of the anti-establishment and their relationship as a means to break free from the
restrictions of “square” society. Even though the notion of the counterculture today is often
regarded as a period of time in which bohemian adventures were taken up on a mass scale,168
Johnson offers the reader a more nuanced picture by stressing that running away from home
was no simple matter for a “thirty-five years old” mother like Molly.169 In this regard, the
protagonist’s internal conflict between her desire to free herself from the institution of
marriage and the unequal gender dynamics within it, and her romantic nostalgia for the
164
Ibid., 49-50
165
Ibid., 124.
166
Ibid., 124.
167
J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 38.
168
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2014), s.v. “Counterculture” (by Morris Dickstein), <http://easref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=404>.
169
J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 43.
36 nuclear traditional family could mirror the struggle with the seemingly incompatible extreme
standards of the social spectrum and the gender inequality still prevalent throughout society.
Feeling too self-conscious as a woman and unmistakably still dependent on men, Molly
“waited for [Conrad] to invite [her] to abandon [her] predictable and sedentary existence”.170
What she then describes as a sort of “restlessness”,171 even after having left her husband,
might be understood as the confusion resulting from on the one hand the pressures of the
counterculture pushing women to liberate themselves, and on the other hand, from the desire
to lead a peaceful and thus stable existence that was still troubled by the patriarchy that
marked male-female relationships. Even when having escaped from the restraining bonds of
marriage, the female protagonist has to come to the conclusion that even a relationship with a
man who claims to incarnate the rejection of conformist America is still complicated by
gender inequality and female dependence. In this way, Molly’s relationship with bohemian
Conrad was marked by “bad connections – missed appointments, late trains, […] abruptly
cut-off phone conversations”172; a relationship in which she was “denied […] existence.”173 In
this case, Johnson, too, argues that at the time many women like Molly undertook the struggle
to liberate themselves from the restrictive situation their were in, yet learned that while they
still needed a male presence in their lives the relationship between women and men still had a
long way to go.174
Strikingly, more than a decade after Kerouac put in words the difficulties Sal and Dean
faced in their attempt to challenge postwar conformity, Johnson gives the impression that
men, too, were still troubled by what turned out to be the mutual exclusiveness of a
conservative existence and a life free from the restrictions of this conservative society. In this
way, many of the male figures featured in Bad Connections attempt but fail to reconcile the
dichotomy between “peace” –in the novel represented by the nuclear family and monogamy,
and a sense of “restlessness” – experienced when leading a life of debauchery:175
170
Ibid., 16.
171
Ibid., 132
172
Ibid., 16.
173
Ibid. 208.
174
J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
175
J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 132, 157.
37 […] [Malcolm] abhorred the institution of the family and nevertheless had fantasies
of moving in with me and Matthew, that he’d actually desired to impregnate me when
we’d gone to bed […].176
In like manner, Johnson, by means of the figure of the political activist Conrad, seeks to
demonstrate that even the most socially progressive men, when trying to engage in a
relationship with a female, fall again into the traditional pattern of patriarchal male supremacy
and female dependence.
Nevertheless, the significance of Bad Connections in this respect is that, unlike Kerouac
in On the Road, Johnson goes further than simply acknowledging and touching upon the issue
of gender discrimination and posits a clear feminist agenda. Through the female protagonist
Molly, Johnson illustrates how the rhetoric of liberation promulgated by the spirit of the
counterculture in large part was aimed exclusively at men and was still lacking efficiency to
address and change gender-based social vulnerabilities. In stark contrast with the male and
female characters in Bad Connections, it is the female protagonist Molly who succeeds in
breaking loose from her the countervailing pressures from society and her constraining
relationships with men and therefore achieves self-realization and spiritual maturity without
compromising her ideals and gender-specific behaviors. According to Johnson, this does not
necessarily mean that she will never have a relationship with a man again, yet the outcome of
the whole process is that she has learnt to be less dependent on men.177
Although both On the Road and Bad Connections deal with the sense of restlessness felt
when attempting to leave behind the restrictions of conservative America, Bad Connections
focuses on the fragile position of the female within a turbulent period of change within
American history. Whereas Kerouac foregrounds the male journey away from conformity and
therefore only passively acknowledges the issue of gender discrimination without being
political, Johnson forthrightly describes and criticizes the difficulties women experienced due
to conflicting societal standard they were held to. Unlike Sal and Dean, whose fate and
potential self-actualization is left unsettled in the novel, Johnson’s protagonist Molly appears
to be the only character who is truly capable of achieving her nirvana and mature female
subjectivity. As a result, Bad Connections could be understood as radical critique on a novel
like On the Road that maintains and unconsciously promotes the conservative values of the
patriarchal society. Whereas the women in Kerouac’s novel remain the muted object of the
176
Ibid., 192.
177
J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
38 male characters’ desires, the female protagonist in Bad Connections takes an active stance
against this gender inequality and decides to no longer be dependent upon her male
counterparts. In this respect, Johnson offers a radical alternative to the pattern of patriarchal
oppression and domination in which women at the time still found themselves constrained by.
3.3 Female sexuality
Extending from the general notion of social deviance, which forms the leitmotiv of On the
Road and Bad Connections, is the more specific vision of sexuality.178 Given the particular
stormy periods of time in which the two novels are set, sexuality in both books is political and
categorized into systems of power. The previous chapters already indicated that women
experienced gender discrimination when attempting to follow in the footsteps of the male
bohemian. An analysis of the construction of female sexuality in both books displays that
female sexual deviance was still a subject of controversy and that the female sexual identity
was in large part still troubled by and dependent on complexities of gender.
As Swartz explains, “in mid-century America, much human sexuality was considered a
form of social deviance, as it is today (although less so), since sexual activity that falls outside
of the traditional bounds of Christian morality is a potential threat to many cultural
institutions.”179 In this way, the perverted attitudes towards sex of the two male protagonists in
On the Road could be evaluated in terms of its implicit threat to the larger social fabric.180
Although the ethos of liberation and celebration of the libido is a central theme in the novel, it
should be noted that this sexual energy is regarded as a male privilege and abusive to all the
women the protagonists meet.181 In On the Road, Kerouac describes a morality that is at odds
with the one experienced by most people in mid-century America, yet, it should be noted that
what the male characters in the novel assume to be the appropriate female sexual behavior
largely still corresponds to the conservative societal norms for women.182
In line with Kerouac’s general focus on the adventures and experiences of Sal Paradise
and Dean Moriarty and – as mentioned above – the Beats’ general neglect of the female as an
active agent, the author hardly gives any insight into the female psyche and the way the
178
O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 74.
179
Ibid., 74.
180
Ibid., 74.
181
Ibid., 76.
182
Ibid., 74-81.
39 female characters perceive attraction and sexuality, but rather portrays these women as the
muted object of Sal and Dean’s desire. One of the few instances in which the reader gets an
indication of the female stance towards sex is when Sal is introduced to Rita Bettencourt, a
“fine chick, slightly hung-up on a few sexual difficulties which [Dean] [has] tried to
straighten up […].”183 Besides Rita being “a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously
frightened of sex,” she indicates that she does not want anything particular out of life and just
wants to “try to get along”184 Sal perceives her fear of sex as a result of her “fears about
men,”185 and, given that she is in this case the embodiment of “square” society, this behavior
could be read as a result of her being part of that society. Yet, as Sal tries to correct her
usefulness, which in this case is severely compromised by her sexual timidity,186 Rita – like
most of the women in On the Road – is reduced to a simple victim of the protagonist’ sexual
conquest.
In contrast with the character of Rita Bettencourt, female figures like Terry, Marylou,
and Camille do not seem to have any trouble with sexual intercourse. Nevertheless, despite
their intense sexual activity, it should be noted that these women are not yet sexually liberated
and rarely seem to be the active agents or fully in control within sexual encounters. In this
way, while both Camille and Marylou are engaged in a sexual relationship with Dean, they
are still emotionally dependent upon him:
At one sharp he rushes from Marylou to Camille –of course neither one of them knows
what’s going on –and bangs her once […]. Marylou’s all for it, but she insists on
banging in the interim. She says she loves him –so does Camille.187
In this passage, Kerouac illustrates how both women cannot seem to emotionally detach from
the dominant male figure, who does not seem to share their emotional affection, yet only
cares about his own sexual satisfaction. Besides being portrayed as sexual objects, the women
in On the Road most of the time are reduced to passive attributes that serve the men’s
seemingly insatiable sexual hunger.
183
J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959) 29.
184
Ibid., 36.
185
Ibid., 36.
186
O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 78.
187
J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959) 28.
40 Nevertheless, it is of crucial importance to understand that the two protagonists engage
in different types of sexual relationships. In this respect, Sal’s relationships are marked by a
more clearly prescriptive sexuality, whereas Dean’s liaisons are more extravagant and
manifest the ideologies and attitudes of sexuality that would become more popularly
identified as the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s – in particular its more abusive,
phallocentric, and misogynist tendencies.”188 Consequently, the sexual zeitgeist of Bad
Connections, a novel set in a period of time in which Americans were “swept along by the
Sexual Revolution,”189 then should be seen as a large-scale realization of the sexually
perverted behavior exhibited by Dean Moriarty. Yet, as Johnson’s work already indicated, the
cultural complexities of the time could not be reduced to a simple clash between conformity
and nonconformity. Bad Connections also illustrates that sexual emancipation was still not a
self-evident appropriate cultural norm and to a large degree still rooted in the patriarchal
concept of male heterosexuality.
As Bad Connections recounts the struggle of female protagonist Molly to break loose
from the confining constraints of society, Johnson particularly zooms in on Molly’s unhealthy
sexual engagements with different male characters. Strikingly, in spite of the spirit of the
sexual revolution, virtually all sexual relationships featured in the novel are of hierarchic and
phallocentric order. In this way, Molly’s relationship with Fred, the representation of the
“outmoded configuration […] [of] the nuclear family,”190 as well as her relationship with
Conrad, a product of the sexual revolution, are both marked by male dominance and violence.
During her abusive marriage with conservative Fred, it was she who had to engage in his
sexual fantasies; during her rollercoaster affair with liberal Conrad it was again she who had
to acquiesce to the particular rules he set for their sexual encounters. In addition, in like
manner as On the Road, the novel suggests that despite the wave of feminism that by then had
swept the country,191 women were held to a “double standard.”192 In this way, Molly
experiences the societal pressures to break away from her abusive marriage, while at the same
188
O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 77.
189
J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 38.
190
Ibid., 53.
191
Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “United States,” accessed May 24, 2014,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/616563/United-States.
192
J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 40.
41 time, her unfaithful husband curses her as a “little whore”193when finally leaving him for her
lover Conrad.
Although most of the sexual affairs in the novel are characterized by a pattern of male
dominance and female dependence, it is the woman who is held accountable for the male’s
sexual impotence and aggression. In this respect, this aspect of gender inequality maintained
support from men all across the social spectrum. Even when Conrad, who at first sight seems
to be the most liberal male figure in the story, experienced erectile dysfunction, he lays the
blame on Molly and “decided finally the problem was that [she] didn’t know how to be
seductive.”194 Not surprisingly, this constant victimization of women for any type of male
sexual deficiency keeps women like Molly trapped in a pattern of self-blame:
That, if only combined with the ability to be stimulating to him both sexually and
intellectually, would have made me the perfect companion to share his life.195
What’s more, this pattern of scapegoating even extends to the issue of sexual assault. When
the female protagonist gets raped by an unscrupulous male intruder, she “[remembered]
feeling that [she], too, was some kind of a suspect” since she “didn’t look much like the
victim of a rape.”196 The fact that the police even inquired about the particular outfit she was
wearing at the moment of the transgression suggests that male power and female
victimization remained key concepts within society at the time. In this case, Molly’s friend
Tessa reminds her friend of the self-evident inferior position of the female and the extreme
violence towards women:
You never could tell, Tessa said –as if rape was something you had to take into
account all the time. You kept a gun in the house the way you kept aspirin.197
Taking into consideration Tessa’s sexual independence as displayed in the novel, this
previous statement casts doubt upon the legitimacy of her depicting herself as a female
product and warrior of the sexual revolution. Although Tessa was “always shedding lovers
like outgrown clothes” and had no problem “[turning] [them] loose at the slightest sign of
193
Ibid., 40.
194
Ibid., 133.
195
Ibid., 133.
196
Ibid., 181.
197
Ibid., 183-184.
42 restlessness on either part,”198 the fact that she sees rape as natural fallout of the dysfunctional
male-female dynamic could indicate that her constant attempt of being in control and having
the upper hand in her relationships is a way to cope with the prevalent gender discrimination.
For the most part, On the Road and Bad Connections are similar in that they depict (and
– in the case of Bad Connections – actively unveil) the gender imbalance in sexual
relationships between men and women in the decades following the Second World War.
Whereas On the Road largely focuses on the male sexual conquest and as result constructs
female sexuality as transgressive and aberrant, Bad Connections gives a valuable insight into
the female psyche and the woman’s struggle with the conflicting attitudes promoted by the
sexual revolution and upheld by “square” society. Although Bad Connections is set within the
context of the counterculture and therefore second-wave feminism and sexual liberation,199 the
gender discrimination that marked sexual relationships in On the Road is still highly prevalent
in Bad Connections, even in relationships between the most liberal minds, which echoes Kate
Millett’s Sexual Politics and Johnson’s statement that “the male-female relationship had still a
long way to go”.200
3.4 Objectification and stereotyping of women in the patriarchal society
Although one should always take into account the particular zeitgeist in which a particular
story is set, it is most likely that the contemporary reader will be struck by what he perceives
as the patriarchal and sexist orientation in both On the Road and Bad Connections. Even when
both novels are set in a different historical and social arena and are written from a different
gender perspective, they depict a social organization in which women are molded to fit the
gender stereotypes and reduced to passive objects of the male gaze.
According to Swartz, the sexual aggressive behavior of the protagonists in On the Road
should not simply be denounced as a form of “machoism” or “phallocentrism”, but rather as a
means of transcending the constraints and limitations placed on sexuality by society.201
Nevertheless, Swartz admits that Kerouac’s perspective is an act of extreme social and moral
irresponsibility, free license and fallacious justification for the acquaintance rape and sexual
198
Ibid., 172.
199
Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “United States,” accessed May 24, 2014,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/616563/United-States.
200
J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
201
O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 74.
43 abuse that has been committed in the name of “sexual freedom.”202 In this way, the egocentric
and androcentric nature of Sal and Dean’s pursuit of “getting the kicks”203 entails that a
woman’s usefulness is reduced to her body and her being an object of the male gaze and
virility. As a result, Kerouac does not make a conscious effort to explore the female psyche,
but rather presents them as muted sexual commodities. In this way, women only occupy a
marginal position in the novel, while their identity mainly is defined by their physical
appearance. Strikingly, most female figures featured in the book do not even have a name and
are identified by their looks or by their limited intellectual capacities, as demonstrated in the
following passage:
We picked up two girls, a pretty young blonde and a fat brunette. They were dumb
and sullen, but we wanted to make them.204
Yet, even when the female characters in the novel are given a name, they often are still
reduced to commodities and defined by the men they depend upon. In this case, Kerouac
particular linguistic and rhetoric choices, such as the use of a construction like “Dean had Rita
lined up for you tonight”205 suggests that women are mere objects whose task it is to serve a
man’s purposes and pleasures.
Besides the act of reducing the female characters to anonymous commodities, another
way in which On the Road purposely sexually objectifies women is by depicting them as the
passive object of the male gaze. As Fredrickson and Roberts assert, “the male gaze [or visual
inspection of the body] [is] the most subtle and deniable way sexualized evaluation is
enacted.”206 In this way, the sexual gaze is a form of sexual harassment that is not under
women’s control, but is used by men to demonstrate their right to physically and sexually
evaluate women.207 Kerouac makes no pretense of portraying the female as an active agent in
202
Ibid., 79-80.
203
“Getting the kicks” is a prevalent theme throughout the novel.
204
J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959), 23.
205
Ibid., 36.
206
B. L. Fredrickson and T. Roberts, “Objectification theory: Toward understanding women’s
lived experiences and mental health risks,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21 (1997): 175.;
D. M. Szymanski, L. B. Moffitt, and E.R. Carr, “Sexual Objectification of Women: Advances
to Theory and Research,” Counseling Psychologist, Vol. 39(1) (2011): 6-38.
207
B. A. Quinn, “Sexual harassment and masculinity: The power and meaning of girl
watching,” Gender & Society, 16(3) (2002): 386-402; D. M. Szymanski, L. B. Moffitt, and
E.R. Carr, “Sexual Objectification of Women: Advances to Theory and Research,”
Counseling Psychologist, Vol. 39(1) (2011): 6-38.
44 the novel, yet instead expressly accentuates the gender inequality by catering the “male gaze”
in the visual representation of female characters. As a result, verbs of visual perception to
describe the protagonists’ ogling at women are prevalent throughout the text, as illustrated by
the following excerpt:
A group of girls walked directly in front of us. […] “Well, let’s go back and pick em
up!” I said. […] They were headed for work in the fields; they smiled at us. Dean
stared at them with rocky eyes.208
Strikingly enough, Kerouac at the same time unconsciously identifies the risks of this type of
objectification. As objectification theory posits, reducing women to the passive object of the
male gaze can result in them internalizing this outsider view and beginning to self-objectify
by treating themselves as an object to be looked at and evaluated on the basis of
appearance.209 In this way, Camille, the young woman Dean has an affair with, does not seem
to bother when Dean’s friends show up at the motel where she and Dean were having sex.
Instead, she remains lying on the bed in the same sensual way and apparently has no problems
being the object of the men’s gaze.210
Besides the objectification and marginalization of women, On the Road reinforces a
stereotypical image of the female as hysterical and intellectually inferior to her male
counterparts. Not only does Kerouac portray women as too intellectually challenged to
understand the way of life and adventures of the male bohemian, but he also tends to dismiss
every sort of active female resistance to the male supremacy as “hysteria”. When Camille is
crying and making tantrums simply because Dean is getting mad again and is not able to
sustain a stable relationship and to be a reliable partner, Dean and Sal can no longer deal with
her behavior and decide to leave her alone and to buy beer.211 Likewise, many of the female
partners and acquaintances of Sal and Dean and their male friends are associated with words
such as “crying,”212 and “squealing,”213 and “hysterical,”214 while their alleged hysterical
208
J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959), 161.
209
B. L. Fredrickson, and T. Roberts, “Objectification theory: Toward understanding
women’s lived experiences and mental health risks,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21
(1997): 173-206; D. M. Szymanski, L. B. Moffitt and E.R. Carr, “Sexual Objectification of
Women: Advances to Theory and Research,” Counseling Psychologist, Vol. 39(1) (2011): 638.
210
J. Kerouac, On the Road (New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1959) Web. 28-29.
211
Ibid., 107.
212
E.g. Ibid., 58.
45 behavior does not appear to be terribly unreasonable considering the men’s irresponsible and
unpredictable behavior. Other types of non-hysterical reactions to the unreliable conduct of
the male partner are often associated with the stereotypical image of the woman as being
naïve and ignorant. In this case, Galatea Dunkel’s resort to fortune cards in a response to her
husband Ed leaving her again could be perceived as a clear illustration of the female naïveté
that seemingly characterizes many of the women in the novel.
Apart from being reduced to a stereotyped object, the female characters in On the Road
are often portrayed as being a creation that can be molded to meet the male needs.
Throughout the novel, men appear to display the pygmalionesque tendency to regard the
woman as an unfinished piece of art that still needs to be worked on; or as Dean explains to
Sal:
[…] and now in fact you’re ready to hook up with a real great girl if you can only find
her and cultivate her and maker her mind your soul as I have tried so hard with these
damned women of mine.215
Strikingly enough, as Dean seemingly succeeds in this project and ends up settling “with his
most constant, most embittered, and best-knowing wife Camille,”216 it is Ed Dunkel’s wife
Galatea who – despite her name being a direct reference to the myth of Pygmalion217– is one
of the only female figures to show no intention of allowing herself to be molded to suit the
needs of her husband and his friends.218
Although, in contrast to the women featured in On the Road, the female protagonist in
Bad Connections eventually succeeds in becoming the active agent of her own destiny, a great
share of the denigrating attitudes towards women depicted in On the Road (and indicative of
the attitude of the male Beats towards women?) are also present in Johnson’s Bad
Connections. Yet, whereas Kerouac only offered the male perspective prevalent within the
patriarchal traditionalist postwar society and the Beat movement and aimed to be “subversive
213
E.g. Ibid., 92.
214
Ibid., 122.
215
Ibid., 109.
216
Ibid., 177.
217
Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “Pygmalion,” accessed May 24, 2014,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/484560/Pygmalion.
218
H. Bloom, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004),
153.
46 without being political,”219 Johnson goes further into the question of gender inequality and
gives an insight into the journey of a woman who suffered from this discrimination, yet
eventually succeeded in empowering herself within the gender differentiated society.
The objectification and commoditization of women is a recurring thematic element
throughout Johnson’s Bad Connections, just as it is in On the Road. Although the woman and
the female psyche are central to the novel, it should be noted that the narrative reveals that
women still held a rather marginal and vulnerable position in the America of the late 1960s
and early 1970s. In this way, the different encounters between the female protagonist Molly
and the men she was romantically involved with illustrate how women were still frequently
reduced to the object of male needs. Not surprisingly, as already indicated in the previous
chapters, Molly’s traditional marriage was marked by her selfless submission and various
incidents of domestic abuse. Her husband Fred does not seem to respect her as a wife and as
the mother of his children, yet rather treats her as a sexual object created to please him and to
satisfy his physical needs. The following excerpt, which contains a very explicit sex scene,
demonstrates how Molly’s usefulness is completely reduced to her body parts and her
functional sexual function:
[…] Directing her in attempting different positions, turning her from one side to the
other with varying placements of knees, his orders brusque and impatient. […]
Tonight he is very angry with her because her legs are too short. That is the reason
they have been having such difficulties. He is convinced that their bodies just don’t fit
each other. A cruel trick of fate from him to have ended up with such a short-legged
woman!220
Another manner in which the female in Bad Connections is presented as a physical thing
deprived of personal qualities or identity is through the implicative power of the male gaze.
As the next excerpt illustrates, Molly’s marriage almost seems the prototypical product of the
conservative patriarchal society:
219
B. Gifford and L. Lee, Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac (New York: St.
Martin's, 1978), 232.
220
J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 11.
47 As I lay sprawled on the floor that morning, with my husband towering above me
like a righteous and avenging archangel, I reflected rapidly upon our history […].221
While Bad Connections ingenuously contrasts the traditional institution of marriage and the
unconventional and open relationship inspired by the spirit of the time that in return was
largely influenced by the values promulgated by male Beats like Kerouac,222 men’s attitude
towards the female does not radically differ despite their contrasting sociopolitical view on
life. Although leftist Conrad does not refrain from pointing out how his attitude towards
women is different than that of Molly’s conservative husband and claims that he never felt
like he possessed a woman,223 he nevertheless denies both of his girlfriends’ existences and
expects them to devote themselves to his needs and his principles. Eventually, Conrad admits
to his own failure of male chauvinism and acknowledges that the fact that it is Molly who
always “wants”224 – which consequently would upset the patriarchal pattern of male
supremacy in their relationship – is the main reason why their relationship would never work
out.
In addition to the marginal and objectified position the female is placed in, the novel
also portrays how some of the male characters regard women and their struggle in society as a
part of a common project for reformist change. In this respect, Conrad, a symbol of the radical
counterculture, sees it as his duty to educate the intellectually underdeveloped woman who
previously was trapped in a traditional and abusive marriage. In this case, he patronizingly
speaks of women in terms of their “development”225 or “restoration.”226 The figure of Conrad
in this perspective, as well some of the male figures in On the Road, could be regarded as a
modern Pygmalion who aimed to mold women – in particular women who still held “the
peculiarly virginal status of a woman just liberated from marriage”227 – to suit his particular
idea of what his Galatea should look like, i.e. incarnating the spirit of the social revolution,
yet not too emancipated.
Further, Johnson demonstrates how the female characters in Bad Connections still
suffer from negative stereotyping. As already suggested in the case of On the Road, the
221
Ibid., 38.
222
G. Stephenson, The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation
(Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 13-15.
223
J. Johnson, Bad Connections (New York: Putnam, 1978), 206.
224
Ibid., 202.
225
Ibid., 206.
226
Ibid., 26.
227
Ibid., 81.
48 molding of women into a generalized and oversimplified conception could be interpreted as a
sort of coping mechanism created by the male characters in order to deal with the female
trying to upset the conservative gender construction. In this way, it is the figure of Conrad,
who finds himself engaged in a sexual affair with Roberta and Molly at the same time, who
tries to reduce the female attempt to overthrow gender discrimination to being a product of
female hysteria. While it does not seem unnaturally for a woman to no longer want to be
denied existence by her male partner, Conrad brands Molly’s attempt to do so as indicative of
her “suspicion and anxiety.”228
While Johnson aims to provide the reader with a valuable inside into the mind of
women in the midst of the counterculture, she cannot but acknowledge the patriarchal attitude
towards women by even the most (self-acclaimed) liberal male figures. Even though the
narratives of On the Road and Bad Connections are set in a different social and political
context, it should be noted that the general male-female relationship is still marked by a
fundamental tension in power and contradicting values. As a result, it appears as if the
marginalization and objectification of women is a means of maintaining the patriarchal
pattern of male hegemony and female inferiority that characterizes many of the relationships
portrayed in both novels. It is Johnson in this respect who creates a female protagonist who
succeeds in empowering herself and overcoming gender discrimination.
228
Ibid., 74.
49 4
Conclusion
More than half a decade after the publication of Betty Friedan’s international bestseller The
Feminine Mystique, which has been widely praised for igniting the women’s movement of the
1960s, gender discrimination still seems to be a pervasive issue within our modern Western
society.229 Although the Beat Generation in this respect is generally credited for challenging
the political and psychological repressions that characterized 1950s America and for
promulgating notions of freedom that inspired a counterculture of which feminism and the
sexual revolution were organized expressions,230 it turns out that the Beat Generation in
respect to the issue of gender was not as radical and free as it presented itself.231 As a result,
this dissertation aimed to examine the position of the female within the Beat Generation and
two literary works of a closely associated male and female Beat writer, and its sexist
construction of masculine identity, a crucial aspect that today is often overlooked and
unchallenged.232 In this case, laying bare the patriarchal ethos of the Beat Generation
implicated shedding a light upon the position of the female within the particular Beat
movement. As a result, we sought to provide not only a critical reading of a literary work of
key Beat Jack Kerouac, but in order to provide a more comprehensive overview of gender
discrimination within the movement we also decided to critically analyze a literary work by
one of the female Beats Joyce Johnson. Ironically she was one of the women who was subject
to the gender inequality within society and the Beat movement herself, yet, at the same time
she has depended on her association with these Beats and her two-year relationship with
Kerouac throughout her entire literary career.
When providing a comprehensive overview of the history of the Beat Generation and
the social context in which it emerged, the aim was to accentuate that the romanticized and
rather naïve view of countercultural movements conveyed by the media has led many to
229
E.g. S. Coontz, “Why Gender Equality Stalled,” The New York Times, 16 February 2013.
Web. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/why-gender-equalitystalled.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>.
230
C. Gair, The Beat Generation: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2008. Print), 146147; Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “United States,” accessed May 23, 2014,
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/616563/United-States.; G. Stephenson, The
Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1990), 13-15.
231
R. Bennett, “Teaching the Beat Generation to Generation X.” in The Beat Generation.
Critical Essays, ed. Kostas Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-19.
232
Ibid., 1-19.
50 reduce the Beat Generation to a movement that radically rejected all of the traditional values
promulgated by the established “square” culture.233 This view was nevertheless nuanced by
demonstrating that the Beat movement was a male-centered social and literary movement in
which women were often marginalized and relegated to the role of caregivers or sex
objects.234 This could be seen as a reassertion of the conservative patriarchal society the Beats
sought to challenge.
Further, contrasting On the Road, a novel by Beat icon Kerouac, with Bad Connections,
a novel by Johnson, was motivated by the fact that Johnson was one of the few women who
was not only at the heart of the male-dominated Beat generation, but who was also active as a
writer and (un)consciously inspired by the Beat spirit through her two-year relationship with
Kerouac235. Although Bad Connections was set in the period of the American counterculture,
which followed the heydays of the Beat movement, a critical reading of this novel allowed us
to gain an insight into the mind of a female writer who has been part of and unmistakably
influenced by figures like Kerouac. Further, contrasting Bad Connections and On the Road
provided us with the opportunity to study the position of the female within the American
society not only from a different gender perspective, but also within a society that, despite the
different historical setting of the novels, was still largely permeated by a gender inequality
that characterized “square” pre-World War II society and to a large extent the Beat
movement236. What’s more, a personal interview with Joyce Johnson provided invaluable
insight into the male-female dynamics within the particular Beat movement and helped us to
understand that what we now perceive as the sexist and denigrating attitude of the male Beat
towards the female should be nuanced within the particular sociopolitical context237.
In order to define to which extent Johnson’s Bad Connections differed from On the
Road with respect to the depiction of and societal attitude towards women, a thematic analysis
was used for the critical analysis of both narratives. Four thematic criteria were identified to
233
Ibid., 1-19.
234
O. Swartz, The View From On The Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 17.
235
G. Thomson, “Gender Performance in the Literature of the Female Beats”, Clcweb:
Comparative Literature And Culture, Vol. 13(1)(2011): 4; G. N. McCampbell and R.
Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004).
236
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004); R. Bennett, “Teaching
the Beat Generation to Generation X.” in The Beat Generation. Critical Essays, ed. Kostas
Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 1-19.
237
J. Johnson, interview by V. Partoens, 30 April 2014.
51 approach the female and the societal conditions that determined the position of women. What
stood out in this case was that whereas Kerouac’s On the Road centered on the struggle of
two male protagonists with leaving behind square society – and therefore in large part
marginalized the female character – Johnson purposely chose to foreground a woman in order
to portray the difficulties she was faced with in order to gain a deeper and more
comprehensible insight into the female psyche.
When critically examining both novels in terms of how they shed a light on the
particular position of women within the American society, both narratives revealed how
women were still held to an entirely different standard than men and how gender
discrimination was a concept that was still prevalent within the American postwar society and
counterculture. In addition, both novels laid bare the fundamental conflict between social
conformity and individual freedom by which many of the male and female characters were
troubled. As a result, the apparent incompatibility between conformity to conservative
societal norms and nonconformity appeared to be marked by the pervasive pattern of
instability in interpersonal relationships. Whereas the male and female protagonists in both
narratives denounce (or in case of Bad Connections feel socially pressured to condemn) the
traditional institution of marriage, they still seem to see it as a possible cure for their general
sense of restlessness. Nevertheless, Johnson’s novel could be perceived as an active platform
against the gender discrimination depicted, yet not politically challenged, in On the Road.
Unlike Kerouac, Johnson goes further than simply acknowledging the dysfunctional malefemale relationship and by means of the self-actualization and emancipation achieved by the
female protagonist posits a feminist alternative to the patriarchal construction of women in On
the Road. In line with my findings regarding the position of women within the sociopolitical
setting of On the Road and Bad Connections, a critical analysis of the concept of female
sexuality within both works affirms the presence of a double standard in terms of attitudes
and beliefs about gender appropriate conduct. Although On the Road particularly focuses on
the concept of the male sexual conquest and both narratives are set in a different period of
American history, both novels reveal how the concept of sex was categorized into systems of
power in which gender discrimination in terms of sexual interactions was still highly
prevalent. Not surprisingly and in line with the phallogocentrism that marked the Beat
Generation238, Kerouac’s protagonists view sexual energy as a male privilege that implies the
marginalization and subordination of the female character. Strikingly enough, as Bad
238
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004).
52 Connections is set within the counterculture associated with second-wave feminism and the
sexual revolution, the narrative illustrates that the traditional discriminatory construction of
sexuality as portrayed in On the Road still has a significant influence on the male-female
relationship. Lastly, a critical reading of the narratives of the two Beat authors with an eye on
the particular male perspective upon the female character illustrated how both novels include
parallel processes of objectification and stereotyping of women. In this case, Kerouac in
particular does not make a conscious effort to explore the female psyche and, as a
consequence, presents the female as a muted sexual object whose usefulness is determined by
her ability to fulfill male (sexual) desires. Ironically enough, despite the spirit of the sexual
revolution and freedoms of the counterculture promoted throughout Bad Connections, even
the most self-acclaimed progressive male characters seem not able to let go of the patriarchal
and conservative pattern of male hegemony and female superiority. In addition, the male
characters reduce the female figure to a work of art that should be molded to suit the male
needs and an object that can only be brought into existence by her male counterpart.
In conclusion, the critical reading of On the Road and Bad Connections illustrates that
despite both of the stories being set in a period in American history marked by tumultuous
change the male-female relationship was still heavily influenced by the conservative
androcentric pattern of male headship and female subservience. Despite being one of the few
women at the core of the Beat Generation239, Joyce Johnson’s work offers a feminist
alternative to the sexist and objectified construction of the female as presented in On the
Road, and could be interpreted as a radical critique on the Beat’s denigrating attitude towards
women. By means of writing herself into the canon of Beat and counterculture literature –
which also can be seen as an expression of feminism – and foregrounding a female
protagonist, Johnson herself actively moves away from the marginalized and objectified
image of the female and as a result offers an alternative for the passive female character that
is denied existence by the norms of male supremacy. What is unique is that Johnson in Bad
Connections allows us to gain an insight into the struggle of the female within a society in
which conformity and nonconformity appear to be two incompatible standards of life.
Strikingly, it is Johnson’s female protagonist who, unlike the male protagonists in On the
Road, succeeds in throwing off the yoke of gender inequality that the patriarchal society
placed upon women. Johnson’s protagonist succeeds in reaching self-actualization and
emancipation. Ironically enough, as Johnson indicated that the novel in part was inspired
239
G. N. McCampbell and R. Johnson, Breaking The Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading
Women Beat Writers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004).
53 upon her own experiences within the counterculture, the author to a large extent appears to
have always remained dependent upon her connection to the Beat Generation in order to
define herself as an author. After all these years, Johnson is still extremely dependent upon
her past relationship with Kerouac and her association with the Beat milieu, as is indicated by
the various memoirs written on this topic. Whether it be for marketing reasons – considering
the everlasting cultural fascination with the Beat movement – or not, Johnson, in contrast with
her female protagonist in her novel Bad Connections to a certain extent has always had to rely
on the men against whose philosophy she initially reacted for self-identity and to establish
herself as a well-known writer within the Beat niche.
54 5
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