On the Road, Q4

4. Consider both novels. What do you notice about the treatment of women? The characterization of women? Or the omission of women? What might it suggest or signify in either novel?

The role of women in "On the Road" is sort of an interesting paradox.
Sal Paradise, along with his love of life and the road and the mad, has this endless and fantastic reverence for women. This is evident everywhere. "And dig her! I love women! I love love women!" (131) Clearly, Sal loves women.

However, though Sal is perfectly capable of loving women as a species, it seems impossible for him to truly love a woman as another human being. His reverence for the gender is exactly what keeps him from wholly giving himself to a particular girl. To both Dean and Sal, women are this great and warm hobby--something to experience, something to come back to, but not something to truly bring into oneselves existence.
With this in mind, we can look at the different viewpoints on women presented by Sal and Dean in the book.

The first is the most clear example of this reverence for women; a love for their beauty. "She was a fetching hunk, a honey-colored creature" (57), "had Plains complexion like wild roses, and the bluest eyes, the most lovely hair, and the modesty and quickness of a wild antelope." (215) Sal is certainly capable of seeing the art in a woman's beauty. However, his physical wants to experience women are pretty run-of-the-mill for anything with a y-chromosome. It becomes clear how much he adores women when he reveals his desire too, for emotional experiences with them.

"A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world." (74) Sal Paradise is actually a romantic. Though many of the posts I've read on this blog answering this question have said the treatment of women in "On the Road" is a mere reflection of the dominantly sexist views of the time period, Sal truly does want to love women intimately. Sex for him is much too poetic for his views on women to be so derogatory. "Then, two tired angels of some kind, hung-up forlornly in an LA shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep and slept till late afternoon." (78) As fleeting as Sal seems, he is completely open to marriage and finding a home. "I want to marry a girl...so I can rest my soul with her till we both grow old. This can't go on all the time--all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to go someplace, find something." (108)

However, it's Dean's response to this that again embodies that thin line of separation from truly being married to another person. "Ah, now man...I've been digging you for years about the home and marriage and all those fine wonderful things." (108) Dean also loves a warm woman and a house to come home to--over the course of the book he has three. It's an experience for them more than an actual lifestyle. This is why Sal ultimately leaves Terry. He's completed the experience. He's ready to get back to the road.

This brings us to the criticisms of Sal and Dean for being sexist; justified complaints. "Now you see, man, there's real woman for you. Never a harsh word, never a complaint, or modified, her old man can come in any hour of the night with anybody and have talks in the kitchen and drink the beer and leave any old time. This is a man, and that's his castle." (192) This, obviously, is the more traditional opinion on the woman's place--in the house.

This is also what women come to signify in the novel; houses. They are, for the most part, characterized as points of stability on the road. They provide money, food, love, and shelter. It is always the men fleeing from the houses of women, not men kicking women out of their property. It should be said that this is a materialistic view of women. They are there to provide. A good house doesn't talk back. However, in the same way that materialistic love for a house can become a sentimental love for a home is presented in Old Bull Lee and his wife.

Old Bull Lee was once a drifter to rival the transcience of Dean and Sal, but he finally settles down in New Orleans with his wife Jane. "She loved that man madly, but in a delirious way of some kind; there was never any mooching or mincing around, just talk and a very deep companionship that none of us would ever be able to fathom...Love is all." (136) Jane isn't beautiful. She's even addicted to benzadrine tubes that eat away at the family budget, but Old Bull Lee finds an existence with her to transcend the reverence for women as a whole gender, and (cheesy as this sounds) turn her symbolically as a house into a home.

In a way, this is also an answer to question 6--what question is "On the Road" trying to answer? Dean and Sal are constantly moving, moving down the road at breakneck speed, ultimately I think what they're trying to find is anything that can make them stop. The road is this endless maze for them that is rich in adventure, but ultimately meaningless because they pass by it all so quickly. What they want is a spot to mark on the map as a home, something to give shape to the map of their travels.

Sorry this is so rambling.