Question 4. Post 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?

In the 1950s, when On the Road was published, following Kerouac and Moriarty’s formidable escapades of the 1940s, women were precious dolls who cooked and cleaned without even wrinkling their petticoats. But in Kerouac’s book, they were equivalent with good/fast times, so long as they were anonymous and unconnected to the past (see the Mexican whorehouse and Terry). Dean himself was almost brought down to earth by the worries of marriage, all his children and their respective monetary demands began to add up. Women are complications: money, food, and worries. Kerouac was always on a quest for a good woman, but when they were at their peak, he was also at his most desperate, and marriage became a source of conflict for those on the road with him at any given time. Kerouac would look down on Ed Dunkel, who “married a girl for gas fare,” and would spot the mortal shortcomings of Dean when he left wife or woman with his screaming child, but could still be moved enough by Kerouac’s musings (“I want to marry a girl so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. This can’t go on all the time...all this franticness and jumping around. We’ve got to go someplace, find something.”) to launch into a rambling of his own about the goodness of marriage (“Ah now man, I’ve been digging you for years about the home and marriage and all those wonderful things about your soul.” p.219). But women drag down the momentum of the road, as seen here---they cause hesitations and arguments, they crush hopes, like his ex-wife, because they have aged while living by the roadside and can’t fulfill expectations, they make the men desperate. Now and then they serve as temporary destinations, a purpose, before the men discover that their destination is freedom and happiness, and the only way a woman can contribute to any of this is if they are perfect, and as Dean, the source of wisdom, has it: “There’s a REAL woman for you. Never a harsh word, never a complaint, 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.” (p.302) Other than that, to Paradise and Moriarty they are either beautiful or a no-good whore and we knew it all along. There are, however, women who enhance their journey, and make it possible, and those are Kerouac’s aunt and sister. They don’t really offer anything in themselves besides frowned-upon shelter, and Kerouac never sticks along with them for long. They are a responsibility in the back of his mind, their errands something to be checked off before he can be free to live for happiness again.

Because The Road is pretty biblically-themed, there are going to be less women. There are five who are featured: one isn’t brave enough to continue living for her son, and commits suicide, becoming the subject of the man’s fantasies (which give him hope), and a symbol of a hole in the plans, because her suicide means one less bullet. Hers is the only death that holds any real significance for the majority of the book. Three are reminders of fear and death and lack of a god: two are wandering cannibals, one of which eats her own newborn. The third follows an attack which reminds the man and the boy that danger is always present, and always after them. She can’t provide any information when they need it most, and is only deepens the wedge that has developed between man and boy, one of distrust that distances them. The last is a member of the community that adopts the son after his father’s death, she shows him the brook trout and is his entry into hope, and closes the circle from death to life which is carried by women throughout the book, which begins in death and ends in life. They are the creators and destroyers. They shape the road into a full circle. Women track the climate of this novel, they are its framework and mark its key developments.