REBELLIOUS WOMEN

Rebellious Women

Rebellious Women

Introduction

One of the sustaining ideologies of the United States is that America is a home for the homeless, a nation built on immigration and migration. Therefore, it is not surprising that the mythology of the homeless figure is a significant part of the American cultural imagination, and that prominent images of displacement, exile, and drifting exist in every period of American literature.

Homelessness is a central theme in some of the canonical works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, including the writings of Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, William Kennedy, Toni Morrison, and Paul Auster. Homelessness emerges as a tacit social and political concern; a metaphor for subjectivity, race, and identity; a symbol of moral or social transgression and redemption; an icon for the challenges endured by the working class; and a portal for migration, travel, and adventure narratives. Although there are some notable exceptions, these texts often present contradictory images of homelessness, some offering oppressive tales of urban poverty, others romanticized stories of rural adventure.

Historically, representations of homelessness in literature, film, and popular media have shifted with changing attitudes about homelessness in America. Highlighting the changing vision of homelessness from the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, the historian Kenneth Kusmer suggests that “while the image of the tramp changed and became more complex, its function as a mirror for the society's divisions and anxieties remained unaltered” (Kusmer 2002, 169).

Literary conceptions of the homeless figure often consist of stereotypes or icons: “dangerous” outsiders and immigrants; sentimental orphans and runaways; romantic wandering hoboes, drifters, and heroes; “lazy” waifs; emblems of suffering; and representatives of contemporary street life. Furthermore, homelessness is a lens refracting the meaning of “America” and its connections to ownership, the constitutional right to property, vagrancy laws, and the relationship between landholders and civic empowerment. Images of the homeless not only reveal cultural and historical attitudes about homelessness, but also, by extension, the ideologies associated with notions of “home” as well.

The Beat movement, which spanned from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, emerged from the stylistic example of a small group of unconventional writers known collectively as the Beat Generation or, more simply, the Beats. The meaning of beat for these writers combined a sense of being socially marginalized, oppressed, and cast-off with the saintly, spiritual connotations of beatific. Critics debate who rightly belongs in the Beat category, but most agree on the importance of three young white men who formed a kind of literary community in New York City in the 1940s: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. In their major works—On the Road (1957), Howl (1956), and Naked Lunch (1959), respectively— they adopted innovative styles marked by spontaneity, improvisation, and self-expression to convey both their deep alienation from consumer society and their rejection of a post-war masculine ideal that stressed hard work, family responsibility, and strict heterosexuality.

Unlike the explosion of political activism in the early 1960s, the Beats stood ...