Much has been written about the Beat generation, especially about the hold its radical freedom has exerted on the American imagination. The Beats who stand out in most of our minds are men and the freedom they enjoyed--a freedom of movement, of creativity, of sexuality--is coded as a particularly male kind of freedom. My paper will suggest that in their autobiographical texts On the Road and The First Third Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady construct a travelling masculinity in an attempt to escape bourgeois patriarchal structures without abandoning traditional patriarchal definitions of masculine power.
In the American imagination, the archetypal national hero is a travelling man: the frontiersman, pioneer, cowboy, scout, who subdued the wilderness and inscribed "America" over the continent. Moving unfettered through American frontiers, they exemplified the freedom of complete self-creation. Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Editor's Note," which serves as an introduction to Neal Cassady's The First Third, positions Cassady in the American heroic tradition as representative of the authentic American man. Ferlinghetti equates Cassady with "an early prototype of the urban cowboy who a hundred years before might have been an outlaw on the range," and notes that "as such Kerouac saw him in On the Road." My essay examines this linkage of powerful masculinity, freedom of travel, and rediscovery of authentic Americanness, exploring the ways in which the figure of the travelling man reinscribes dominant models of male identity even as it is deployed to resist them.
In The First Third Cassady separates himself from social structures he associates with women and transfers male power from bourgeois men to travelling men. But, while he insists that real American men must be resistant men, he posits that resistance in the terms of value underlying traditional discourses of masculinity. Cassady creates himself as a travelling sex machine and defines himself in terms of cars stolen and women had. Stealing cars, he disrupts middle-class men's hold on status-conveying material property--cars--and on status-conveying sexual property--women. His "adventures in auto-eroticism" demonstrate his ability to appropriate, use, and discard cars and women--other men's property--thus undermining the authority society vests in bourgeois men. For Cassady, travel means unconstrained male virility. He opposes his circulating virility with the performance of masculinity possible within the structure of the traditional couple, and deems himself more free, more masculine, more truly American than men who allow themselves to be trapped in female-controlled, bourgeois-structured relations.
In On The Road, Neal Cassady, thinly disguised as Dean Moriarty, initiates Sal Paradise (Kerouac) into the life of the travelling man. However, Kerouac's development of Cassady's theme of travelling virility takes some unexpected turns. The text attempts to posit travelling masculinity, with its freedom of movement and of sexuality, as the antidote to the frantic grasping for "a buck" that has become the "mad" American dream. But as Sal comes to assume the feminized role of Dean's worshipper and victim, he finds himself negotiating not only the homosocial bonds of a male travelling community, but the gender/power dynamics encoded in traditional heterosexual arrangements, as well. Although Sal sees himself as a strange "Prophet" bearing the new "Word" that will rewrite the "story of America," he finds that this persona lacks value in American culture and experiences an eerie disconnection from the ground of self in the absence of traditional signifiers of masculinity. As the alternate communities created through travel reproduce the structures they would replace, he recasts Dean from an American hero to a figure of fearful and unredeemed outsiderness. The text's elegiac conclusion expresses Sal's nostalgia for Dean's original promise: the possibility of racing past a dead society to find "something new," a "long-prophesied" reconnection with a frontier spirit through his "wild yea-saying overburst of American joy." Romanticizing the lost travelling man from a safe distance, Sal simultaneously valorizes an impossible masculine identity and retreats from its ambivalent and ambiguous gender/power arrangements.
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