Offbeat and Beyond the Road: Beat Women and the Freedom to Write
Open Access
- Author:
- De Paull, Grace
- Area of Honors:
- English
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Richard Matthew Doyle, Thesis Supervisor
Claire Mary Colebrook, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Beat
Beat Generation
Women
Women writers
Poetry
Freedom - Abstract:
- The Beats ignited a major cultural, artistic, and literary revolution in 1950s America that became a prominent staple in 20th-century literature. The works of its founders—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs—led many to believe that the movement solely celebrated literature defined by globe-trotting and travel across the nation. Due to gender norms and cultural circumstances that restricted women’s freedom to travel in the 1950s, the literature of the women of the Beat Generation did not emulate or reflect the notions of Kerouac’s popular and widespread 1957 novel, On the Road. Thus, these women writers are chronically underrepresented in the understanding of the movement. Through close textual analysis of the literature written by various Beat women, this thesis intends to offer a more complete understanding of the literary contributions of the Beat Generation by drawing attention to the notion that the women writers wrote under different circumstances and with varying degrees and forms of freedom. The works of Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima, and Hettie Jones reveal how each writer created and documented their explorations of freedom and how it manifested in the literature that they produced. In doing so, Beat aesthetics and themes are reconceptualized and work towards a more inclusive understanding of the generation while uncovering the neglected works of its women.