I think I did it. . .
Writing a Silenced Revolution: Women of the Beat Generation
Women were not supposed to have such adventures in 1957.
-- Joyce Johnson (Johnson xiii)
Though women have been writingalbeit with an often anonymous pensince the earliest days of literature their work has always been largely ignored by the academy. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Aphra Behn, and Mary Shelley experienced what may seem like shocking popularity during their publishing lifetimes but are often omitted from modern anthologies of literature. Like their veiled predecessors, the women poets and chroniclers of the Beat movement express sophisticated social philosophies and worldviews and show a mastery of the written word; and like the Bluestockings who scribbled before them, the Beat women are ignored and even maligned by both the academy and their own contemporaries.
Those writing from the margins of society often find themselves classified not as artists, but only as persons of the margin. As Nancy M. Grace and Ronna C. Johnson put it in the introduction to Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers: Beat women writers have often found themselves positioned as women but not as writers (ix).
The women of the Beat movement are cast as minor characters in the revolutionary road tales of their male counterparts. These few appearances in the accepted canon of Beat literature allow for little intellectual substance in the women of the tales. Often relegated to the position of either Madonna/mother or whorea common dichotomous character-typing in male-dominated literaturethe women are denied any voice. Elise Cowen, who committed suicide long before her writings or those of her female contemporaries could gain acceptance, commented poetically on the situation of the female Beat: I found my name on every page, and every word a lie (qtd in Girls 119).
Even among those who preached of individual truth and the importance of the outsiders voice, these women are given the same treatment as in the rejected mainstream society that viewed them as little more than prostitutes in black. Acceptance as writersnot merely as women writersis still a challenge for the women of the Beat as the male canon has dominated and defined the movement. That these women not only rejected the stifling gender roles of the Cold War American culture, but produced sophisticated, often experimental poetry and prose in the process places them in the position of feminist literary foremothers.
Writing in the Boys Room
Just because I happened to be a chick I thought.
-Diane di Prima (qtd in Breaking 1)
The subject matter and emotional feel of women Beats poetry, as well as the academys and Bohemias reaction/s to it, is best understood in the proper context. With the end of the second World War came an era of conservative social restructuring. The world had witnessed some of the ghastliest events in human history: the Nazi Holocaust and the atom-bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Western civilization seemed to have been stretched to its outermost limits and had begun to show its cracks and flaws. The American response was isolationism, nationalism and consumerism. Much of the nation was gripped with a fear of the outsider, be that outsider from Russia or the American socio-cultural margins. American social values underwent a stark regression. Women were pulled out of their new positions in the workplace, re-girdled and given a ranch house in the suburbs complete with breadwinner husband, precocious children and a dog named Skip.
This sanitized American Dream was not acceptable to all Americans, particularly the new Bohemians who saw through the phony smiles in the Buick ads and sought after something moresomething dirtier, sexier, maybe uglier, but realer (more real) than the plastic dreams of middle America. Lone wolf writers took to the miles of highways and oceans to find an individual truth. They professed a new reality, sang a jazzier song, made love to strange women and drank cheap wine in dive bars and shared pads. The misadventures of these wild men are well-documented and well-known by many. Writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder are commonly anthologized and studied, giving faces to the literary revolution in which they took part. As time passes, though, it becomes clear that this movement, calling themselves Beat, may have been dominated by males, but was by no means exclusively male. The girls in black that sat quietly behind Kerouacs beatific hipsters (Girls 6) were living and writing their own revolution.
These women broke the social codes of mainstream society and those of the Beat cool. They are neither the domestic goddesses devoted to heart and husband (Breaking 20) nor the vacuous, cool accessories of hipster men. Though the overall message of the Beat movement seemed to be an Emersonian insistence on individual truth (Girls 10) and rejection of the established gender roles, the overwhelming sentiment of Beat males writing is often quite misogynistic. Though not at all apparent in the popular writings of the male Beats, the Beat philosophy nurtured the voices of the marginalized women among them in its embracing of non-conformist dissidence (Breaking ix, Girls 8).
The experiences of the female Beats was far from acceptance and intellectual or artistic nursing. Though Kerouac often encouraged Joyce Johnson to always do what you want/ DO WHAT YOU WANT (Johnson 33), the other women often found themselves as the butt of jokes. Elise Cowen was often referred to as Ellipse or Eclipse by Lucien Carr (Girls 121), a nickname that hardly speaks of acceptance. This marginalization of women undermines the Beat generations myth of rebellion . . . contradicting its claims to antihegemonic status (Breaking 5).
Alan Ginsburg argues:
[T]he men didnt push the women literally or celebrate them. . . . But, among the group of people we knew at the time, who were the [women] writers of such power as Kerouac or Burroughs? Were there any? I dont think so.
Were we responsible for the lack or outstanding genius in the women we knew? Did we put them down or repress them? I dont think so (qtd in Breaking 3).
Indeed, the men of the Beat did not push the women of the movement, much to the contrary there seems to have been a conscious effort to maintain a solidly masculine air to the movement and lifestyle. As ruth weiss, a pioneer of the Beat style, states in an interview with Nancy M. Grace: Somewhere there was an ego thing that was to keep the women out. . . I was never anybodys girlfriend, so they treated me a little better than the other women they were involved with. .. They didnt treat their women well. When it came down to it, we were not invited into the center of things, just the periphery. . . Women were put in the background. . . Some of these men made it a very cliquish situation (Breaking 73).
Joanne Kyger, whose epic poetry is coming to be more widely accepted both within the Beat canon and on its own creative merit, phrased her situation within the movement with anger in her Poison Oak for Allen:
Here I am reading about your trip to India again,
With Gary Snyder and Peter Orlovsky. Period.
Who took the picture of you three
With smart Himalayan backdrop
The bear?
(qtd in Breaking 20)
While much of Beat poetry resists New Critical analysis, the technique reveals Kygers frustration as a marginalized figure. The long breath of the poem is typical of the first-thought-best-thought, conversational style of Beat poetry. The short, plosive word period stands as its own sentence, in contrast to the breathy structure of the rest of the poem, accenting its importance. The poem indicates that Kyger was on the trip with the two more famous writers. The interruption of the long sentence of the first stanza with the word period that stands as a sentence by itself indicates that she is somewhat annoyed by her omission from the subsequent stories and retellings of the trip. Placing the stanza break immediately after the phrase you three adds more tension, drawing attention to the number, one less than the actual number of people on the Himalayan scene. It seems that Kyger has been placed in a position below that of the bear. The short sentence fragment that ends the poem is, like the period before it. Its briefness draws attention to it, adding to the tension and giving the poem an overall feeling of irony and anger. It is rather obvious that Kyger, herself, took the photograph in question.
Building a Canon
What I wanted to write about, women didnt write about.
--Hettie Jones (Breaking 168)
There was little female company for the female writers of the Beat. These women had no contemporary literary sisterhood upon which to draw ideas nor with whom they could discuss their forming philosophies the way the male Beats could. Hettie Jones put it bluntly in her interview in Johnson and Graces Breaking the Rule of Cool: We women did not talk about our work with each other (172).
The attitudes of gender conformity and female repression were so strong among the women of postwar America that nonconformist white women in the fifties found themselves in the company of the older Beat males (Girls 7). Only among these older men could women like Diane di Prima and Joyce Johnson find even remotely sympathetic company. The men did not recognize these women as being so revolutionary in their refusal to accept the prescribed gendered behavior, as evidenced by Ginsburgs argument that they knew no women of such revolutionary zeal as themselves. The contributions of the women Beats aided the movement on the whole by furthering and substantiating its claims to full antihegemonic status. By writing, publishing or simply supporting those who published, [women Beats] improved the circumstances of all (McGee 15).
Even when writing on the same topics and with the same literary prowess, female writers often receive less attention than men (Quinn 176) from the academy and other readers. This historical trend has resulted in only a few documents from which women writers can draw their historical roots. Kristin McGee in her masters thesis The Beat Behind the Movement: The Motives of and Contributions of Women in the Beat Generation as Described in the Memoirs of Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, and Diane di Prima states the womens situation as being without any matrilineal heritage to draw upon in their writing (6). Alone in history, the women were forced to create their own poetics or to draw upon the masculine traditions of the past.
Sex, Drugs and Literature
The problem with writing about sexual matters, if you were a young woman back then, was that everyone would then draw the conclusion that you had firsthand knowledge of the subject.
--Joyce Johnson (Johson xiv)
Echoing the carpe diem tradition of the early modern period of British literature, a sentiment very much alive in the Beat movement, Diane di Prima writes The Passionate Hipster to his Chick. She replaces Christopher Marlowes passionate shepherd with a smooth cat trying to finesse one of those girls out of her black clothes:
Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove
That railroad flat or hot-rod wheel
Or tea-pads 3 a.m. conceal.
And we will sit upon the floor
And watch the junkies bolt the door
By one cool trumpeter whose beat
Tells real bad tales for the elite.
And I will make a bed of coats
And dig with you the gonest notes.
Youll get a leather cap and jacket
(I know a cat thats in the racket).
Ill get you jeans with straight-cut legs
We all prefer them now to pegs
And engineer boots for the snow
The hightop kind that buckle low
A garrison belt, a flannel shirt
And lots of horse for when you hurt
And if these pleasures may thee move
Come live with me and be my love.
I know a bunch that really blows
From Friday night till Sunday goes
If all these kickes thy minde may move
Then live with mee, and be my love.
(di Prima 22)
The idyllic pastoral scene of Marlowes poem is transformed into 3 a.m. tea-pads and railroad flats. The gown of fine wool that Marlowe offers his nymph is a pair of jeans with straight-cut legs in di Primas Beat revisioning. The poem makes no attempt to clean up the image of the Beat as derelict and dirty. di Prima lampoons the traditional male-female relationship of both traditional and Beat society by placing the drug-laced and jazz-fueled realities of the Beat lifestyle in direct contrast with the romanticized pastoral of Marlowes original poem.
The political art of women Beats poetry lies in the reclaiming of their assigned gender roles. Female subjectivity in the male Beat canon provides only character-typed roles devoid of emotional or intellectual significance. The women redefine female Beat subjectivity by taking advantage of their marginal position within the movement. Sexuality and the domestic life of 1950s womanhood becomes the subject of Beat poetry when written by women. The actual canon of poetry, prose and memoir that the women Beats worked to establish did much to further the cause of womens rights and to lay down paths for the second wave of feminism that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. Much of the poetry is sexually explicit. Fifties America was not prepared to accept this, even while embracing the same sentiments when expressed by men; Elise Cowens parents burned their daughters sexually unconventional poetry after her suicide (Girls 119-120). Cowen shocked her conservative parents with her ambisexual verse, expressive of desire for and from both sexes (Girls 129). di Prima continues, even after the passing of the Beat movement, to write shockingly sexually charged poetry that questions the prescribed sexual/social mannerisms of her society: My cunt a bomb exploding/ yr Christian conscience. (qtd in Quinn 183).
Living the Revolution
We were all thought to be lost, but at least we did what we did what we wanted.
-- Hettie Jones (Breaking 159)
When Joyce Johnson asked her boss about her irregular pay, he seemed to be stunned that she needed money. In his mind, Johnson was being kept by her newly famous boyfriend, Jack Kerouac (Johnson 79). Contrary to the social norms of the 1950s and 1960s, female Beats often worked to support themselves and their male counterparts as well, a serious subversion of accepted gender norms. In fact, many of the achievements of the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s could not have been realized had these enterprising young women not taken the risks they did in both their lifestyles and writing. By identify[ying] the problem of their oppression, their female malaise (Girls 9), the women of the Beat established the possibility for solving the problem.
Living as they did in the McCarthyite fiftiesalone and self-supported, with multiple male visitors; keeping odd hours and consuming drugs and large quantities of alcohol; moving around constantly, even taking to the road for extended periods of timewas a risk for these women. They thought I must be a whore because women didnt live alone, you know (Breaking 88), says Diane di Prima of her neighbors at the time. Being kept by a famous male lover, as Johnsons boss had assumed of her, was far more acceptable than working to support oneself as a woman.
That their female gender roles made it impossible to live the romantic, often nomadic, life of the male Beat was well-known by the women. In a letter to Jack Kerouac, Joyce Johnson describes this bind: You know what narrow lives girls have, how few real adventures there are for them; misadventures, yes, like abortions and little men following them in subways, but seldom anything like seeing ships at night (Johnson 42).
Brenda Frazer (Bonnie Bremser), Hettie Jones, Diane di Prima, Elise Cowen, and Johnson herself did not accept this limiting of their opportunities. Later, in the commentary to the letters that Johnson published as Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letter, 1957-1958, Johnson notes, Id have my own adventure with or without Jack (34). The other women shared this sentiment.
Some women even went so far as to live and write their own road tales. Brenda Frazer, then known as Bonnie Bremser, wrote her earth-shattering For Love of Ray or Mexican Memoirs which was later renamed Troia by her editor. This renaming demonstrates the problems faced by female writers of the 1950s and before. The word troia translates as sexual adventurer (Breaking 111). The narrative is composed from a series of letters that Frazer sent to her then husband Ray Bremser from Mexico while he was in prison, documenting her travels and adventures in Mexico and the eventual descent into prostitution that led Frazer to give up her infant daughter for adoption. This deviance from social mores tends to be the focus of many when reading or discussing the out-of-print narrative. However, that the book is an account of a woman taking to the road in much the same way that her male counter-parts did remains as its lasting legacy. The story, though sordid in some of its subject matter is about a woman retaining her feminine, thereby marginalizing, traits while acting in a male manner. It is the rawest example of the beat women using their subjection to their own literary advantage.
Conclusion
Unlike any women in my family or anyone Id ever actually known, I was going to become
something, anything, whatever that meant..
--Hettie Jones (qtd in Breaking 155)
The story of Troia destroys the false dichotomy of mother and whore, the character binary so prevalent in male Beat literature. However, by titling the resulting book Troia, the editor reduced the narrators role to simple prostitute. The over-simplification and reduction of the female role in literature, as both creator and subject, continues. Literature remains a male-dominated field. The ironic chauvinism of male Beats, compounded by the continuing erasure of the female voice, has resulted in a wide ignorance of the contributions of the women writers of the Beatcontributions both social and literary in their nature.
Another reclaiming and redefining womens literary space is necessary in order to move these women from the shadows of Kerouac and Burgess. The women of the Beat might never be recognized as such. Hettie Jones and Diane di Prima are still producing work, more widely published than their Beat contributions. Women Beat writers reinvent Beat writings language, method, imagery, and discursive modes by their practice and production in literary texts (Breaking 38). For this reason--this reinvention--the women of the Beat stand separate from the men. Though they were a part of the movement, their battle was different, and more difficult. They were forced to do battle with not just society on the whole, but with their assumed brothers in arms.
The most obvious benefactors of these women are not just other female writers who followed, but the second wave feminist who came to the fore shortly after the end of the Beat movement. Because women like Hettie Jones and Diane di Prima supported themselves, because women like Brenda Frazer took to the road, because women like Elise Cowen wrote graphic, pan-sexual poetry, were the young women of the 1960s and 1970s able to achieve the sexual revolution that had been pioneered by these girls in black.
Writing a Silenced Revolution: Women of the Beat Generation
Women were not supposed to have such adventures in 1957.
-- Joyce Johnson (Johnson xiii)
Though women have been writingalbeit with an often anonymous pensince the earliest days of literature their work has always been largely ignored by the academy. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Aphra Behn, and Mary Shelley experienced what may seem like shocking popularity during their publishing lifetimes but are often omitted from modern anthologies of literature. Like their veiled predecessors, the women poets and chroniclers of the Beat movement express sophisticated social philosophies and worldviews and show a mastery of the written word; and like the Bluestockings who scribbled before them, the Beat women are ignored and even maligned by both the academy and their own contemporaries.
Those writing from the margins of society often find themselves classified not as artists, but only as persons of the margin. As Nancy M. Grace and Ronna C. Johnson put it in the introduction to Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers: Beat women writers have often found themselves positioned as women but not as writers (ix).
The women of the Beat movement are cast as minor characters in the revolutionary road tales of their male counterparts. These few appearances in the accepted canon of Beat literature allow for little intellectual substance in the women of the tales. Often relegated to the position of either Madonna/mother or whorea common dichotomous character-typing in male-dominated literaturethe women are denied any voice. Elise Cowen, who committed suicide long before her writings or those of her female contemporaries could gain acceptance, commented poetically on the situation of the female Beat: I found my name on every page, and every word a lie (qtd in Girls 119).
Even among those who preached of individual truth and the importance of the outsiders voice, these women are given the same treatment as in the rejected mainstream society that viewed them as little more than prostitutes in black. Acceptance as writersnot merely as women writersis still a challenge for the women of the Beat as the male canon has dominated and defined the movement. That these women not only rejected the stifling gender roles of the Cold War American culture, but produced sophisticated, often experimental poetry and prose in the process places them in the position of feminist literary foremothers.
Writing in the Boys Room
Just because I happened to be a chick I thought.
-Diane di Prima (qtd in Breaking 1)
The subject matter and emotional feel of women Beats poetry, as well as the academys and Bohemias reaction/s to it, is best understood in the proper context. With the end of the second World War came an era of conservative social restructuring. The world had witnessed some of the ghastliest events in human history: the Nazi Holocaust and the atom-bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Western civilization seemed to have been stretched to its outermost limits and had begun to show its cracks and flaws. The American response was isolationism, nationalism and consumerism. Much of the nation was gripped with a fear of the outsider, be that outsider from Russia or the American socio-cultural margins. American social values underwent a stark regression. Women were pulled out of their new positions in the workplace, re-girdled and given a ranch house in the suburbs complete with breadwinner husband, precocious children and a dog named Skip.
This sanitized American Dream was not acceptable to all Americans, particularly the new Bohemians who saw through the phony smiles in the Buick ads and sought after something moresomething dirtier, sexier, maybe uglier, but realer (more real) than the plastic dreams of middle America. Lone wolf writers took to the miles of highways and oceans to find an individual truth. They professed a new reality, sang a jazzier song, made love to strange women and drank cheap wine in dive bars and shared pads. The misadventures of these wild men are well-documented and well-known by many. Writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder are commonly anthologized and studied, giving faces to the literary revolution in which they took part. As time passes, though, it becomes clear that this movement, calling themselves Beat, may have been dominated by males, but was by no means exclusively male. The girls in black that sat quietly behind Kerouacs beatific hipsters (Girls 6) were living and writing their own revolution.
These women broke the social codes of mainstream society and those of the Beat cool. They are neither the domestic goddesses devoted to heart and husband (Breaking 20) nor the vacuous, cool accessories of hipster men. Though the overall message of the Beat movement seemed to be an Emersonian insistence on individual truth (Girls 10) and rejection of the established gender roles, the overwhelming sentiment of Beat males writing is often quite misogynistic. Though not at all apparent in the popular writings of the male Beats, the Beat philosophy nurtured the voices of the marginalized women among them in its embracing of non-conformist dissidence (Breaking ix, Girls 8).
The experiences of the female Beats was far from acceptance and intellectual or artistic nursing. Though Kerouac often encouraged Joyce Johnson to always do what you want/ DO WHAT YOU WANT (Johnson 33), the other women often found themselves as the butt of jokes. Elise Cowen was often referred to as Ellipse or Eclipse by Lucien Carr (Girls 121), a nickname that hardly speaks of acceptance. This marginalization of women undermines the Beat generations myth of rebellion . . . contradicting its claims to antihegemonic status (Breaking 5).
Alan Ginsburg argues:
[T]he men didnt push the women literally or celebrate them. . . . But, among the group of people we knew at the time, who were the [women] writers of such power as Kerouac or Burroughs? Were there any? I dont think so.
Were we responsible for the lack or outstanding genius in the women we knew? Did we put them down or repress them? I dont think so (qtd in Breaking 3).
Indeed, the men of the Beat did not push the women of the movement, much to the contrary there seems to have been a conscious effort to maintain a solidly masculine air to the movement and lifestyle. As ruth weiss, a pioneer of the Beat style, states in an interview with Nancy M. Grace: Somewhere there was an ego thing that was to keep the women out. . . I was never anybodys girlfriend, so they treated me a little better than the other women they were involved with. .. They didnt treat their women well. When it came down to it, we were not invited into the center of things, just the periphery. . . Women were put in the background. . . Some of these men made it a very cliquish situation (Breaking 73).
Joanne Kyger, whose epic poetry is coming to be more widely accepted both within the Beat canon and on its own creative merit, phrased her situation within the movement with anger in her Poison Oak for Allen:
Here I am reading about your trip to India again,
With Gary Snyder and Peter Orlovsky. Period.
Who took the picture of you three
With smart Himalayan backdrop
The bear?
(qtd in Breaking 20)
While much of Beat poetry resists New Critical analysis, the technique reveals Kygers frustration as a marginalized figure. The long breath of the poem is typical of the first-thought-best-thought, conversational style of Beat poetry. The short, plosive word period stands as its own sentence, in contrast to the breathy structure of the rest of the poem, accenting its importance. The poem indicates that Kyger was on the trip with the two more famous writers. The interruption of the long sentence of the first stanza with the word period that stands as a sentence by itself indicates that she is somewhat annoyed by her omission from the subsequent stories and retellings of the trip. Placing the stanza break immediately after the phrase you three adds more tension, drawing attention to the number, one less than the actual number of people on the Himalayan scene. It seems that Kyger has been placed in a position below that of the bear. The short sentence fragment that ends the poem is, like the period before it. Its briefness draws attention to it, adding to the tension and giving the poem an overall feeling of irony and anger. It is rather obvious that Kyger, herself, took the photograph in question.
Building a Canon
What I wanted to write about, women didnt write about.
--Hettie Jones (Breaking 168)
There was little female company for the female writers of the Beat. These women had no contemporary literary sisterhood upon which to draw ideas nor with whom they could discuss their forming philosophies the way the male Beats could. Hettie Jones put it bluntly in her interview in Johnson and Graces Breaking the Rule of Cool: We women did not talk about our work with each other (172).
The attitudes of gender conformity and female repression were so strong among the women of postwar America that nonconformist white women in the fifties found themselves in the company of the older Beat males (Girls 7). Only among these older men could women like Diane di Prima and Joyce Johnson find even remotely sympathetic company. The men did not recognize these women as being so revolutionary in their refusal to accept the prescribed gendered behavior, as evidenced by Ginsburgs argument that they knew no women of such revolutionary zeal as themselves. The contributions of the women Beats aided the movement on the whole by furthering and substantiating its claims to full antihegemonic status. By writing, publishing or simply supporting those who published, [women Beats] improved the circumstances of all (McGee 15).
Even when writing on the same topics and with the same literary prowess, female writers often receive less attention than men (Quinn 176) from the academy and other readers. This historical trend has resulted in only a few documents from which women writers can draw their historical roots. Kristin McGee in her masters thesis The Beat Behind the Movement: The Motives of and Contributions of Women in the Beat Generation as Described in the Memoirs of Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, and Diane di Prima states the womens situation as being without any matrilineal heritage to draw upon in their writing (6). Alone in history, the women were forced to create their own poetics or to draw upon the masculine traditions of the past.
Sex, Drugs and Literature
The problem with writing about sexual matters, if you were a young woman back then, was that everyone would then draw the conclusion that you had firsthand knowledge of the subject.
--Joyce Johnson (Johson xiv)
Echoing the carpe diem tradition of the early modern period of British literature, a sentiment very much alive in the Beat movement, Diane di Prima writes The Passionate Hipster to his Chick. She replaces Christopher Marlowes passionate shepherd with a smooth cat trying to finesse one of those girls out of her black clothes:
Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove
That railroad flat or hot-rod wheel
Or tea-pads 3 a.m. conceal.
And we will sit upon the floor
And watch the junkies bolt the door
By one cool trumpeter whose beat
Tells real bad tales for the elite.
And I will make a bed of coats
And dig with you the gonest notes.
Youll get a leather cap and jacket
(I know a cat thats in the racket).
Ill get you jeans with straight-cut legs
We all prefer them now to pegs
And engineer boots for the snow
The hightop kind that buckle low
A garrison belt, a flannel shirt
And lots of horse for when you hurt
And if these pleasures may thee move
Come live with me and be my love.
I know a bunch that really blows
From Friday night till Sunday goes
If all these kickes thy minde may move
Then live with mee, and be my love.
(di Prima 22)
The idyllic pastoral scene of Marlowes poem is transformed into 3 a.m. tea-pads and railroad flats. The gown of fine wool that Marlowe offers his nymph is a pair of jeans with straight-cut legs in di Primas Beat revisioning. The poem makes no attempt to clean up the image of the Beat as derelict and dirty. di Prima lampoons the traditional male-female relationship of both traditional and Beat society by placing the drug-laced and jazz-fueled realities of the Beat lifestyle in direct contrast with the romanticized pastoral of Marlowes original poem.
The political art of women Beats poetry lies in the reclaiming of their assigned gender roles. Female subjectivity in the male Beat canon provides only character-typed roles devoid of emotional or intellectual significance. The women redefine female Beat subjectivity by taking advantage of their marginal position within the movement. Sexuality and the domestic life of 1950s womanhood becomes the subject of Beat poetry when written by women. The actual canon of poetry, prose and memoir that the women Beats worked to establish did much to further the cause of womens rights and to lay down paths for the second wave of feminism that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. Much of the poetry is sexually explicit. Fifties America was not prepared to accept this, even while embracing the same sentiments when expressed by men; Elise Cowens parents burned their daughters sexually unconventional poetry after her suicide (Girls 119-120). Cowen shocked her conservative parents with her ambisexual verse, expressive of desire for and from both sexes (Girls 129). di Prima continues, even after the passing of the Beat movement, to write shockingly sexually charged poetry that questions the prescribed sexual/social mannerisms of her society: My cunt a bomb exploding/ yr Christian conscience. (qtd in Quinn 183).
Living the Revolution
We were all thought to be lost, but at least we did what we did what we wanted.
-- Hettie Jones (Breaking 159)
When Joyce Johnson asked her boss about her irregular pay, he seemed to be stunned that she needed money. In his mind, Johnson was being kept by her newly famous boyfriend, Jack Kerouac (Johnson 79). Contrary to the social norms of the 1950s and 1960s, female Beats often worked to support themselves and their male counterparts as well, a serious subversion of accepted gender norms. In fact, many of the achievements of the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s could not have been realized had these enterprising young women not taken the risks they did in both their lifestyles and writing. By identify[ying] the problem of their oppression, their female malaise (Girls 9), the women of the Beat established the possibility for solving the problem.
Living as they did in the McCarthyite fiftiesalone and self-supported, with multiple male visitors; keeping odd hours and consuming drugs and large quantities of alcohol; moving around constantly, even taking to the road for extended periods of timewas a risk for these women. They thought I must be a whore because women didnt live alone, you know (Breaking 88), says Diane di Prima of her neighbors at the time. Being kept by a famous male lover, as Johnsons boss had assumed of her, was far more acceptable than working to support oneself as a woman.
That their female gender roles made it impossible to live the romantic, often nomadic, life of the male Beat was well-known by the women. In a letter to Jack Kerouac, Joyce Johnson describes this bind: You know what narrow lives girls have, how few real adventures there are for them; misadventures, yes, like abortions and little men following them in subways, but seldom anything like seeing ships at night (Johnson 42).
Brenda Frazer (Bonnie Bremser), Hettie Jones, Diane di Prima, Elise Cowen, and Johnson herself did not accept this limiting of their opportunities. Later, in the commentary to the letters that Johnson published as Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letter, 1957-1958, Johnson notes, Id have my own adventure with or without Jack (34). The other women shared this sentiment.
Some women even went so far as to live and write their own road tales. Brenda Frazer, then known as Bonnie Bremser, wrote her earth-shattering For Love of Ray or Mexican Memoirs which was later renamed Troia by her editor. This renaming demonstrates the problems faced by female writers of the 1950s and before. The word troia translates as sexual adventurer (Breaking 111). The narrative is composed from a series of letters that Frazer sent to her then husband Ray Bremser from Mexico while he was in prison, documenting her travels and adventures in Mexico and the eventual descent into prostitution that led Frazer to give up her infant daughter for adoption. This deviance from social mores tends to be the focus of many when reading or discussing the out-of-print narrative. However, that the book is an account of a woman taking to the road in much the same way that her male counter-parts did remains as its lasting legacy. The story, though sordid in some of its subject matter is about a woman retaining her feminine, thereby marginalizing, traits while acting in a male manner. It is the rawest example of the beat women using their subjection to their own literary advantage.
Conclusion
Unlike any women in my family or anyone Id ever actually known, I was going to become
something, anything, whatever that meant..
--Hettie Jones (qtd in Breaking 155)
The story of Troia destroys the false dichotomy of mother and whore, the character binary so prevalent in male Beat literature. However, by titling the resulting book Troia, the editor reduced the narrators role to simple prostitute. The over-simplification and reduction of the female role in literature, as both creator and subject, continues. Literature remains a male-dominated field. The ironic chauvinism of male Beats, compounded by the continuing erasure of the female voice, has resulted in a wide ignorance of the contributions of the women writers of the Beatcontributions both social and literary in their nature.
Another reclaiming and redefining womens literary space is necessary in order to move these women from the shadows of Kerouac and Burgess. The women of the Beat might never be recognized as such. Hettie Jones and Diane di Prima are still producing work, more widely published than their Beat contributions. Women Beat writers reinvent Beat writings language, method, imagery, and discursive modes by their practice and production in literary texts (Breaking 38). For this reason--this reinvention--the women of the Beat stand separate from the men. Though they were a part of the movement, their battle was different, and more difficult. They were forced to do battle with not just society on the whole, but with their assumed brothers in arms.
The most obvious benefactors of these women are not just other female writers who followed, but the second wave feminist who came to the fore shortly after the end of the Beat movement. Because women like Hettie Jones and Diane di Prima supported themselves, because women like Brenda Frazer took to the road, because women like Elise Cowen wrote graphic, pan-sexual poetry, were the young women of the 1960s and 1970s able to achieve the sexual revolution that had been pioneered by these girls in black.
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
faceforradio:
I used a colection of their writings, plus the only the only two books written on the matter. I'll email the bib to you if you're really interested.
souspire:
That is brilliant social and literary commentary. As sportdeath says, the writing is wonderful. So lucid, crisp, and direct, with no fluff so common in the products of the academy. Thanks for the opportunity to learn who the genuine Beats were, and about the genesis of their lasting significance.