An introduction to the feminine space in the great literary movement
"There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the '50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up. There were cases, I knew them, someday someone will write about them."
Gregory Corso, quoted in “The Beat Generation”, by Cláudio Willer (2009)
The period between the Second World War and the Cold War is a point that intersects the transgression of the lives of many women because of the absence of male figures , and so the effects of that absence will drive different yearnings that escape traditional gender roles.To mention two important authors who have undergone profound changes during this time, I will speak briefly of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
Both were great confessional poets and because of the themes they addressed in their writings, they are still primordial sources for those who seek feminism in literature. They have been revered several times in the pop world by characters considered feminists, such as Lisa Simpson from the animated series The Simpsons and Rory from the series Gilmore Girls. The point I want to make here is how they became, as well as the beat writers, figures who did not fit into traditional roles. Sylvia was as much as Anne, from Massachusetts, and from an early age had the image of her father as an authoritarian figure. Her father's death in 1940 caused Sylvia to feel deeply uncomfortable about her faith and life. As a result, she began to write about her own experience between life and death. Sylvia declared in several of her poems that she was suicidal from an early age. The poem Daddy evokes the image of Hitler and his father, in which she puts herself in the place of a Jewess. In addition, Sylvia was married to the poet Ted Hughes, who many claim to have been one of the triggers for her suicide in the 1960s. The imposition of the roles of housewife and mother was part of a conservative context that prioritized the resumption of the post-war patriarchal environment. In the same poem, she says that she married a man as destructive as her father: '' I made a model of you, / Man in black, with a Meinkampf aspect ''. By confronting the patriarchal ideal of father and husband, Sylvia was beyond her time. Not to mention her posthumous and transgressive work The Bell Jar, which had a great impact on my life.
It is important to note that Sylvia and Anne were admitted to psychiatric hospitals, that is, their problematic lives bring an intriguing contrast to the way they expressed themselves. The diagnosis given to these women who spoke and did more than was permitted was that of madness. In addition, Anne Sexton addressed topics such as abortion, masturbation, incest, menstruation and confessed to having been sexually abused and to have abused family members. Her artistic sensibility came shortly after she became pregnant by her husband, at the time of the Cold War, when he was absent; and she suffered a deep depression that only writing, encouraged by her analyst, could function as an outlet. The examples of these two writers serve to illustrate initially that it was not as easy as it was for men to be an artist at that time. Many women found in art an escape from the symbolic bell jar that imprisoned them. Pop singer Lady Gaga wrote a song called dancing in the dark that portrays women who did not dance to the right beat, referring to those who do not follow the rhythm previously determined in the course of their lives.
Meanwhile, around Manhattan, the apartment of a young mother, intellectual, audacious and eager for new adventures, called Joan Vollmer, would be the scene of a new literary sensibility - aroused from long intoxicating conversations and an intellectual magnet that gathered several visionary minds. Edie Parker was her bar and apartment mate, and both challenged the label of beautiful, maidenlike and housewife by harboring drunks, poets, among others considered marginal by society. Among them were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, names that years after those 1944 meetings, would become exponents of a positively cursed generation. When Joan and William Burroughs - the Kafkaesque junkie - meet, a telepathic interaction takes over the future couple. Jack offers benzendrine, the drug of the moment, to Joan for the first time and at the same time he and his friend Burroughs were in trouble, the last one not so much, due to the death of David Kammerer. The crime was narrated in an exemplary way in John Krokidas' film Kill Your Darlings (2013). Edie and Jack's marriage would help him get rid of the conviction as an accessory to the crime since she would inherit a considerable family fortune. The relationship lasted less than 5 years, but Edie was immortalized in several works by Kerouac, including his first one, The Town and the City (1950). In addition to appearing as a minor element in the Beat works, Edie wrote her own version of her life alongside the dharma bum. In You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac, Edie recalls living under extreme conditions alongside Jack and that she was the one who sustained the cycle of productive minds that would culminate in the Beat group. Although her grief at the admired cycle of boys is one reason why her career has not been recognized, here is one reason why it must be: we have a woman who was there, who can offer another look at this group that only we analyze from a male perspective. As for Joan, unlike Edie, she did not publish anything in her lifetime - but she did share letters with Allen Ginsberg. Despite this, she was undoubtedly the greatest female representative of the Beat literature. The reasons vary. One is that Joan was analyzed in different nuances by almost all Beat writers. Her apt was the amusement park for heads immersed in poetic daydreams.
In future posts, I will focus on Joan Vollmer's participation on the movement's literary works. Not to mention the fundamental importance she had in Burroughs' writing. The two lived together for a few years amid needles, benzendrin and tequila. They wandered through New Orleans, Mexico and Texas because of psychiatric problems - Joan had a nervous breakdown - as well as because of growing marijuana (a prohibited drug) in her home. Burroughs did not hide his sexual predilection for men, which frustrated Joan and led her to languish more and more; she became lame and hunted lizards with a broom in the backyard of her farm at dawn. Amy Adams incorporates this vision of Joan in the film adaptation of On the Road by Walter Salles. The Burroughs had a son of the same name as the father, but who years later spewed in literary works his contempt for his father due to a fatal accident that took him from his kind mother. In 1951, the Burroughs couple drunk around Mexico when they decided to play the William Tell act, which consists of putting an object in the head so that another person can shoot with a revolver. However, the game resulted in a bullet in Joan's skull and this trauma was vital for Burroughs to find in writing, an outlet for dealing with remorse. Both Joan and Edie transgressed imposed places for good American citizens, and while one experienced viscerally and intensely unruly life, the latter put her own story into words in a highly masculine medium.
Like Edie Parker, another Jack Kerouac's lover wrote her own participation about the time beat generation gained notoriety. Joyce Johnson was with Kerouac before and after the success of On the Road (1957). She went beyond Edie and not only wrote about Jack, as in the biography The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, but also published a work on correspondence that she exchanged with her former lover , called Door Wide Open : A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957–1958. In addition to this, Joyce is considered to be the pioneer among the movement's female writers. Eat and Join the Dance talks about a girl named Susan, who is actually Joyce herself, who subtly discovers herself in an attempt to fit the misfits' lifestyle in society. The New York author goes beyond her own narrative and elaborates one of the most important works in the exploration of the female space of the beat generation. Minor Characters seeks to praise the group's missing names, the female names. I highlight the importance of Elise Cowen in the book; Elise was Allen Ginsberg's last heterosexual experience before he met his life partner, Peter Orlovsky. However, she was more than just Ginsberg's shadow, it was Elise who typed the maternal poem Kaddish, and her transgression was unbearable for her neighbors who burned her writings seen as lustful in order to hide them from the girl's parents. These writings translated the sordid soul of a girl who questioned traditional paradigms. Elise and Joyce were college friends at Barnard, which was also attended by Joan Vollmer.
It was Joyce who introduced Elise to Ginsberg. Joyce tells in Minor Characters how her friend was driven by an existential crisis. Her full name, Elise Nada (nada= nothing) Cowen, already offered a strange look. A home accident left permanent marks on Elise's body, which corroborated her derogatory nature. She dedicated herself to the ones she loved and wrote a poem of spiritual order to one of her lovers, who was a teacher: "(...)you body my Kabbalah"; but it was after joining the beat circle that Elise was able to expand her identities. She loved both women and men and saw in Ginsberg someone she could resemble without being afraid of objections. Her poems account for around 88, found in remains of what was not burned. Sylvia Plath and Elise Cowen's stories interesct because their freedoms were blocked by moral principles, which confined them to psychological treatments. Death was a common theme between the two poets who knew how to use different metaphors for a friend so intimate and comforting in the midst of a moralistic bell jar that made them ill without being guilty; both gave themselves up to the only possible freedom in their lives. In subsequent posts, other beat writers will be presented and this first introduction still does not simplify the complex and rich representation that these women offered to Western culture and today it is urgent to rescue the voices of subjugated women. It is with pleasure that I try to contribute to new horizons in the course of women's history in arts.
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