Lust of the Libertines

The Objectification of Women in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

Aster Dieleman
3847632
BA Thesis English Language and Culture
Utrecht University
Supervisor: Simon Cook
June 2014
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I. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 3

II. Jack Kerouac.......................................................................................................................... 5

The Beat Generation............................................................................................................... 6

 
On the Road ............................................................................................................................ 8
 
III. Theoretical Framework ...................................................................................................... 10

Sexual Objectification .......................................................................................................... 10

 
The Male Gaze ..................................................................................................................... 11
 
Patriarchy ............................................................................................................................. 12
 
IV. On the Road ....................................................................................................................... 14

Jack’s Girls ........................................................................................................................... 14

 
Neal’s Girls .......................................................................................................................... 15
 
Feminist Backlash ................................................................................................................ 18
 
V. Conclusion and Discussion ................................................................................................. 20

VI. Bibliography....................................................................................................................... 22

 
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I. Introduction

 
Oh, just a face, and a name on a page.

– Pete Doherty, “Lust of the Libertines”

 
 
The Beat Generation is a literary and cultural movement about which numerous books,

articles and essays have been written. However, little research has been done on the way in

which women are portrayed in novels written by Beat authors. Since the Beat Generation in

its entirety is too broad a subject to explore in so few words, this paper will focus on one

novel in particular: On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Kerouac is widely regarded as one of the

most important Beat writers, On the Road being his most critically acclaimed novel.

When On the Road was first published in 1957, it shocked many people and literary

critics were quite harsh on Kerouac for writing such an obscene novel in which he openly

spoke about, for example, drug use. Nowadays, however, the focus of the literary criticism on

On the Road lies more on the way women are portrayed in the novel and how they are treated

by the male protagonists of the story. During the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and

1970s, women became more and more aware of and dissatisfied with the way power was

divided between men and women. Feminist literary critics began to examine the ways in

which this divide presented itself in literature and how women were portrayed in literature

written by male authors. This paper will explore On the Road from a feminist perspective and

it will look at the way women are portrayed and objectified in On the Road.

The first chapter will focus on some relevant background information regarding Jack

Kerouac, the Beat Generation and the edition of the novel which will be used for referencing

in this paper. Subsequently, a theoretical framework will be given concerning sexual

objectification, the male gaze and patriarchy, and how they are all connected. Then, this paper

will analyse the ways in which those three concepts work in On the Road, focusing firstly on

 
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Jack’s experiences with women and then Neal’s while also paying attention to women who

dared to call out them out on their behaviour. The final chapter of this paper will give a

conclusion and a recommendation for further research.

 
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II. Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts as Jean-Louis Kerouac to French-

Canadian parents who had immigrated to the United States from Québec. Kerouac grew up

speaking French and did not learn English until he was about 6 years old. For Kerouac,

French remained an important language for the rest of his life: “I’m French-Canadian, born in

New-England. When I’m mad, I often swear in French. When I dream, I often dream in

French. When I cry, I often cry in French” (Anctil, my translation). In 2007, journalists

working for Le Devoir, a Canadian Francophone newspaper based in Montréal, discovered

several manuscripts in Kerouac’s personal archives in New York that were written in French.

Among these manuscripts were letters to his mother, a few novels that were not quite finished

and, most notably, ten pages of On the Road dated 19 January 1951. This means that Kerouac

had initially started writing On the Road in his mother tongue before switching to English and

finishing the novel.

Kerouac’s mother Gabrielle was a devout catholic who sent him to a parochial school

where he was taught by nuns: “they initiated him into the ancient cult of the virgin-whore, the

notion that women were either good ... or evil. In later years, the cult would entrap him; any

woman who could associate with so sinful a man as he must indeed be a whore” (McNally 8-

9). It is perhaps this deep-rooted belief that was the cause of Kerouac’s misfortune with

women. Kerouac was married three times and had numerous girlfriends. However, most of his

relationships were rather short-lived. His first two marriages, to respectively Edie Parker and

Joan Haverty, did not last longer than a few months. Haverty left Kerouac while she was

pregnant with his baby, because he demanded the baby were aborted. For most of his life,

even during the times he was married, Kerouac would live with his mother, who turned a

blind eye to most of her son’s shenanigans.

 
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The sudden celebrity that Kerouac acquired after the publishing of On the Road took

its toll on him: “[h]is success had spun into a kaleidoscope of greedy faces, all feeding on him

to steal a little of his new power, too much whiskey and attention” (McNally 243). He

developed a severe drinking habit, seemingly to live up to the image that he had created of

himself in the novel. It was this habit of heavy drinking that would ultimately cause

Kerouac’s death. On October 21, 1969 he died of an internal bleeding as the result of

advanced liver disease (Cook 246).

The Beat Generation

Kerouac was part of a group of writers who called themselves The Beat Generation. They

were a literary and cultural movement that rose to fame during the years after the Second

World War. There are several theories on the origin of the word ‘beat’: some claim that it has

the meaning of ‘weary’, ‘beat down’, while others argue that it stems from ‘beatific’.

According to John Clellon Holmes, author of the 1952 novel Go which is considered the first

Beat novel, “it was Kerouac who christened them all, though no one would ever claim that he

originated the term” (Cook 6). Kerouac uses the term Beat Generation in On the Road to

describe the new group of people Neal introduces him to: “they were ... rising from the

underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining”

(Kerouac 156). Whatever the meaning of the word ‘beat’ may be, the more important question

remains “who were the Beats? Were they truly, as they called themselves, a generation? A

movement? Or were they merely – as was said so often of them by members of the literary

establishment of that day – a fad, a phenomenon of publicity ... ?” (Cook 5).

Some important Beats – besides Jack Kerouac – were Allen Ginsberg, William

Burroughs, the aforementioned John C. Holmes and of course Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s muse

and inspiration for On the Road. Something that all these men had in common was their

 
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“disaffiliation with the American mainstream, its conservative values and measures of

success” (Elkholy 3). The Beats were “widely publicized as rebels against the system” (Cook

10); they were united in their rejection of the establishment. This, of course, led to quite some

criticism and misunderstanding from outsiders: “[e]verywhere people with tidy moralities

shake their heads and wonder what is happening to the younger generation” (Holmes). An

interesting characteristic of the Beat Generation to point out here is that it was a

predominantly male movement. In her essay “‘Adventures of Auto-Eroticism’: Economies of

Traveling Masculinity in On the Road and The First Third”, Mary Paniccia Carden writes:

“Beats who stand out most vividly in American popular culture are men, and the freedom they

enjoyed – a geographical independence combined with creative and sexual autonomy – has

been understood as a particularly male kind of freedom” (77). Female Beat writers did exist,

but they were not nearly celebrated as much as their male counterparts. Women did of course

play a role in the Beats’ works, but they often had little agency and were flat characters,

which is also the case in On the Road, as can be read in the following chapters.

Nowadays, Kerouac is still seen as one of the most important figures of the Beat

Generation. On the Road embodies everything the Beats stood for, for “it was his [Kerouac]

refusal to be ‘sivilized’ that sent him out on the road” (Cook 37). The Beats were a very

energetic and intense group of writers, and Kerouac captures this energy very well in his

writing: “the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad

to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a

commonplace thing.. but burn, burn, burn like roman candle across the night” (Kerouac 113).

His death in 1969 meant the symbolic end of the Beat Generation.

 
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On the Road

The legend goes that Kerouac wrote On the Road in 1951 in a three-weeklong writing frenzy,

from April 2 to April 22, without ever taking a break from writing. As Howard Cunnell,

editor of On the Road: The Original Scroll, puts it: “he wrote it all in three weeks on a long

roll of Teletype paper, no punctuation. Just sat down with bop on the radio and blasted it out”

(1). However, the novel was not published until years later, given that it took Kerouac several

more years to edit it. After some much-needed revision and the dividing of the story into

chapters, the novel had a more “conventional appearance” which made it “more appealing to

publishers” (26). On the Road was finally picked up by publishing house Viking in 1951.

In On the Road, Kerouac tells the story of his travels across America: “it was all true-

life stories, every word, all about riding the roads across America with his mad friend Dean

[Neal, AD], and jazz, drink, girls, drugs, freedom” (Cunnell 1). One might say that On the

Road is a story about “masculine independence” (Paniccia Carden 77): two men, not tied

down by wives or children – choosing not to be tied down, anyway, because there are

definitely wives and children involved in Jack’s and Dean’s lives, but they are quickly

abandoned as soon as they threaten to put an end to their reckless lifestyle. As Eugene

Burdick puts it, the Beats refused to make a “firm commitment to any organization. These

organizations include, it is made clear almost with virulence, the family” (554).

When the novel was first published it was met with shock and disapproval of

Kerouac’s contemporaries. Literary critics thought it vulgar and even obscene: “[t]he havoc

Jack wreaked on the contemporary rules ..., they interpreted as madness” (McNally 247).

However, the scenes that would have shocked the public in the 1950s would not be

considered as offensive today. Nowadays, the thing that stands out most for many critics is

the way Kerouac’s male protagonists treat the women in his novel. In online literary magazine

The Millions Stephanie Nikolopoulos writes that many female readers of On the Road “saw

 
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him [Kerouac] as a misogynist vagabond, the bad boy who had left their broken hearts in a

trail of exhaust fumes. He didn’t like being tied down by responsibilities, or women”

(Nikolopoulos). Furthermore, she states that when a male author writes about a female

character, she “is usually going to be the subject of the male gaze. If that work happens to

be On the Road, you’re going to end up with women like Marylou and Camille, flat characters

being two-timed by hyperactive car-thief Dean Moriarty” (Nikolopoulos). In the following

chapters, this paper will go into more detail regarding the male gaze and it will explore the

way the male gaze presents itself in On the Road.

On the Road can be seen as a fictionalised autobiography. Kerouac had a habit of

writing about his own life, about his close friends and family, and he used aliases for them in

his novels. In the version of On the Road that Kerouac wrote in April 1951, he had originally

used all of his friends’ and acquaintances’ real names. However, his publishers forced him to

change their names to made-up ones. In 2007, publishing house Penguin released a new

edition of the novel containing the original scroll version of On the Road, which means that it

gives “Kerouac's fellow travellers, the writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, and his

muse Neal Cassady, their real names instead of the pseudonyms that generations of fans have

had to decode” (Bignell and Johnson). According to poet and critic Joshua Kupetz, the scroll

manuscript is “a more authentic version of On the Road” (95), as it includes several scenes

which have been removed from the 1957 edition of the novel. In short, On the Road: The

Original Scroll is “as close as possible to the one Kerouac produced between April 2 and

April 22, 1951” (Cunnell 101). This paper will reference The Original Scroll, thus using the

characters’ real names.

 
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III. Theoretical Framework

Sexual Objectification
 
During the 1960s and 1970s, the second wave of feminism emerged in the United States.

Women became dissatisfied with their assigned roles, they were tired of being perceived as

inferior to men: “everywhere and in every organization women were responsible for keeping

records, producing leaflets, telephoning, cleaning offices, cooking, organizing social events,

and catering to the egos of male leaders, while the men wrote manifestos, talked to the press,

negotiated with officials, and made public speeches” (Baxandall and Gordon 416). For years,

this division of labor and power had felt natural to both men and women. However, slowly

but gradually it began to seem “no longer natural at all” (416).

Around this time, women became interested in the portrayal of women and the power

relations between men and women in literature as well. Feminist literary critics started to

examine the way in which fictional female characters were depicted in male-centric literature.

They found that sexual objectification of women commonly occurred in many novels written

by male authors; women were often portrayed as being sexually submissive and subservient

to men. In their article “Sexual Objectification of Women: Advances to Theory and

Research”, Szymanski, Moffitt and Carr define sexual objectification as follows: “sexual

objectification occurs when a woman’s body or body parts are singled out and separated from

her as a person and she is viewed primarily as a physical object of male sexual desire” (8). In

short, when a woman is objectified, her worth is equated with “her body’s appearance and

sexual functions” (29). It is often forgotten that women, too, are human beings: “[o]ne is

treating as an object what is really not an object, what is, in fact, a human being” (Nussbaum

257).

In literature, sexual objectification occurs when female characters are described by

their physical appearance. Usually, the author pays no attention to the inner workings of the

 
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female characters’ minds, their thoughts and desires, but only focuses on their outward

appearance. These sexually objectified female characters generally have little agency and are

only exist for the gratification of the male protagonists.

The Male Gaze

An important concept with regard to the objectification of women in literature and other mass

media is the male gaze. Firstly coined by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975

essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, the male gaze is a term that implicates an

imbalance in gender relations and power, meaning that in novels written by male authors,

women are often passive, gazed at, while men are active “gazers”. Mulvey primarily applied

the concept in film theory, but it has since been used in the field of feminist literary criticism

as well.

According to Chong, Molyneaux and Fournier “all viewers, regardless of gender, look

at media images with an inherently male gaze” (420). Furthermore, they state that “media

images ... affect our ways of seeing ourselves and others, and have in turn engendered

perceptions to the point where we see male images as active and female images as passive.

Men see women as objects” (420). In short, “women ... passively perform for the pleasure of

the active male gaze” (420).

In literature, the male gaze occurs when a story is told from the perspective of and

written by a heterosexual man. When a female character is introduced into the story the author

will focus on her physical appearance: “women are simultaneously looked at and displayed,

with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact” (Mulvey 11). The male

author will look at his female character with a male gaze, describing the woman so that she is

attractive to both her male antagonists and the reader: “[t]he determining male gaze projects

its fantasy onto the female form which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey 11). In conclusion,

 
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when the male gaze occurs in literature, women are “displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of

men, the active controllers of the look” (Mulvey 13).

Patriarchy

Sexual objectification and the male gaze find their roots in the male need to feel superior to

women. Feminist sociologist Nancy Chodorow claims that the male tendency to place

themselves above women is the result of external influences, one of these influences being

their very own mothers: “the very fact of being mothered by a woman generated in men

conflicts over masculinity, a psychology of male dominance and a need to be superior to

women” (214). Masculinity is a significant concept to take into account with regard to this.

Especially in the 1950s, when On the Road was written, men were still expected to live up to

a certain stereotype: that of a masculine man, a man able to provide for a family.

This need for men “to be superior to women” and to be very masculine is in turn

rooted deeply in a social system called patriarchy. Literally meaning “the rule of the fathers”

(Tickner 1197), feminists nowadays use the term to denote “the rule of men over women

more generally. Patriarchy so defined encompasses all systems of male dominance” (Tickner

1197). These systems of male dominance have been in place for years and years and it is very

hard for feminists to break down the patriarchy. Chong, Molyneaux and Fournier blame the

media for this: “[t]he media reflects and perpetuates the socialized gender norms of

patriarchal society” (420).

Second-wave feminist writer Kate Millett remarks in her book Sexual Politics that “it

can be said scientifically that women are inherently subservient, and males dominant” and

that a woman “enjoys her oppression and deserves it, for she is by her very nature, vain,

stupid, and hardly better than barbarian, if she is human at all” (203). She then goes on,

however, to proclaim this statement “bigotry” (203), and she sees it as a reason for women to

 
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stand up against these prejudices. As Chong, Molyneaux and Fournier argue, “gender is a role

that men and women perform according to the expectations of society” (420-21), meaning

that the respective roles men and women take on are not biologically determined, but that they

are merely a social construct, enforced by patriarchy. In a society with a patriarchal structure

“[w]oman then stands ... as signifier for the male other” (Mulvey 7). Carol Pateman, feminist

and political theorist, claims that this structure has consequences for the way men and women

live their lives: “the patriarchal construction of the difference between masculinity and

femininity is the political difference between freedom and subjection” (207).

An interesting aspect of patriarchy is the way male and female sexuality are regarded.

Female sexual desires are often neglected: “[p]atriarchal myth and belief had always assumed

greater sexual capacity in the male and argued from it a greater need” (Millett 119). Although

women are solely seen as sexual objects, the very idea that they, too, have sexual needs is

seen as absurd: “while patriarchy tends to convert woman to a sexual object, she has not been

encouraged to enjoy the sexuality which is agreed to be her fate” (Millett 119). In this way,

patriarchy reinforces the idea that women should be sexually submissive to men, that their

only purpose is to satisfy men, because men are supposedly “more strongly sexed and

therefore entitled to sexually subjugate the female” (Millett 203).

Millett remarks that “patriarchy as an institution is a social constant so deeply

entrenched as to run through all other political, social, or economic forms” (25). This means

that literature, too, cannot escape the patriarchy. Patriarchal norms and standards have found

their way into the literature of many authors, resulting quite often in the sexual objectification

of women.

 
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IV. On the Road

The most useful way to go about exploring the objectification of women in On the Road is to

divide the research into two parts: one part focusing on Jack’s girls and another part focusing

on Neal’s girls. First, this paper will analyse Jack Kerouac’s relationships with the girls in the

novel and then it will take a closer look at Neal Cassady’s ways with women. Finally, there

will be a small part on what can be called the feminist backlash against Jack and especially

Neal.

Jack’s Girls

The concept of the male gaze can easily be applied to the way Jack Kerouac deals with the

women in his life and by extension his novel On the Road. The first girl he meets while he is

traveling is a girl called Ruth Gullion. Neal introduces Jack to her and Jack describes her as “a

nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex” (159). Within minutes of

meeting her, he takes her back to his apartment to show her that sex is not something to be

afraid of. All he wants is to get her into bed with him, because that is all that she is good for in

his eyes. However, when he finally succeeds, he fails to live up to his promises.

The next girl Jack encounters is a girl he meets on a bus to Los Angeles: “I saw the

cutest little Mexican girl ... Her breasts stuck out straight and true; her little flanks looked

delicious; her hair was long and black’ and her eyes were great big blue tings with a soul in

it” (183). This is a description from a heterosexual, male point of view: a clear example of the

male gaze. The girl is diminished to merely her physical features. Jack and this girl, Bea, get

to know each other and decide to travel together for a while: “[f]or the next fifteen days we

were together for better or for worse. When we woke up we decided to hitch hike up to New

York together; she was going to be my girl in town” (186-87). The added “in town” implies

that Bea is replaceable, like an object; Jack probably has a different girl in every city. At one

 
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point, Bea refuses to have sex with Jack and he in return gets angry: “I got mad and realized I

was pleading with a dumb little Mexican wench” (186). He also says that Bea has “a simple

and funny little mind” (186). Basically, when Bea does not wish to sleep with Jack, he

decides that she must be “simple” and “dumb”.

One very obvious example of sexual objectification occurs when Jack is reunited with

Edie Parker, his ex-wife, whom he has not seen in a long time: “[t]he moment I saw her I

knew I’d never go back to her: she was fat, her hair was clippt short, she wore overalls and

munched on candy with one hand and drank beer with the other” (342). He looks at her with a

male gaze and finds that she is no longer attractive. He then decides that he no longer desires

to be with her.

Eventually, Jack settles down with a girl. Her name is Joan Haverty. Their meeting is

quite unconventional: “a pretty girl stuck her head out of the window and said ‘Yes? Who is

it?’ ‘Jack Kerouac’ I said” (405). The girl invites him up and “there she was, the girl with the

pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long” (405). Even when

describing what is apparently Jack’s dream girl, he focuses on her eyes: a physical feature.

Furthermore, the objectification of women in On the Road creates a certain division of

the girls into groups of bad girls and good girls, as it were. Louanne – who will be discussed

more extensively below – for example, is a “whore” and therefore a bad girl, whereas Joan

Haverty is a good girl, with her “pure and innocent dear eyes”. This is again an example of

women being defined from a male point of view, while not taking into account their actual

actions.

Neal’s Girls

When Neal Cassady is introduced in the novel, it immediately becomes clear that his sexual

desires are of paramount importance to him, more important even than food or a roof above

 
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his head. Kerouac writes that Neal is standing in the kitchen, making coffee “while he

proceeded with his loveproblems...for to him sex was the one and only holy and important

thing in life, although he had to sweat and curse to make a living, and so on” (110). Part of

Neal’s “loveproblems” at that moment is his marriage: “there was talk that he had just

married a 16 year old girl named Louanne” (109). Louanne is described as “his beautiful little

sharp chick” (109), which can certainly be seen as objectification for she is only described by

her physical features. Also, a certain degree of ownership is implied by the use of the word

‘his’, which further shows that Louanne is thought of as an object. This becomes even more

clear when Kerouac writes that Neal is walking around in his apartment, slightly nervous, and

he decides “the thing to do was have Louanne making breakfast and sweeping the floor”

(110), as if she were Neal’s to order around.

Only later do we learn a thing or two about Louanne’s character, but not after once

again her physical appearance is emphasised: “Louanne was a pretty, sweet little thing, but

awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things” (110). What these horrible things are,

becomes clear a little later on in the story: “‘And where’s Louanne?’ I asked, and Neal said

she’d apparently whored a few dollars together or something of that nature and gone back to

Denver... ‘the whore!’” (111). Throughout the story, Neal sleeps around quite a bit, goes from

one girl to another and is not faithful in the slightest. There is very little comment on Neal’s

adulterous behaviour. However, when Louanne leaves Neal because he treats her badly, it is

immediately assumed she is sleeping with other men which makes her a whore, apparently.

This is a perfect example of the patriarchal idea that women are objects who only exist to

please men, whose sexuality is more important.

The male gaze occurs quite regularly in On the Road. Every time new female

characters are introduced, the narrator focuses on their physical appearance and omits a

description of their inner features. When Jack and Neal get to Chicago for the first time, Neal

 
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is completely entranced by the women there: “[a]nd that woman in that window up there, just

looking down with her big breasts hanging from her nightgown. Just big wide eyes waiting”

(336). He turns his male gaze up at the woman in the window and focuses solely on her

breasts and eyes. When Neal’s second wife is introduced in the novel, Jack sees of her “on the

bed, one beautiful creamy thigh covered with black lace, a blonde, look up with mild wonder”

(146). Something similar happens when Jack describes Diane, Neal’s girlfriend later in the

story: “[s]he was a big sexy brunette ... and generally like a beautiful Parisian whore” (350).

The focus is entirely on her body, seen through the eyes of a man.

To Neal, women are sexual objects even when they are already married. At one point

in the novel, Jack and Neal meet their friend Freddy, and they try to get him to come with

them to New York. Freddy, however, declines because his wife is waiting for him at home.

The conversation that follows is typical of Neal’s attitude towards marriage and relationships

in general, and it shows that the only thing on his mind is sex: “‘Oh yes? said Neal lighting

up. ‘And where is the darling tonight.’ ‘What do you mean’ said Freddy looking at him out of

the corner of his eye. ‘I tole you I was married to her didn’t I?’ ‘Oh yes, Oh yes’ blushed

Neal. ‘I was just asking. Maybe she has friends? or sisters?’” (298). Neal lusting after married

women is a regular occurrence in On the Road. It happens again when Jack and Neal get into

a small car accident and get out of their car to exchange details with the driver of the other.

Neal does not pay attention to the whole ordeal, because he is too busy gazing at the driver’s

wife: “and Neal not taking his eyes off the man’s wife whose beautiful brown breasts were

barely concealed inside a floppy cotton blouse” (333). Neal himself is married multiple times

and has two children, but he has little regard for them. He abandons his wife when she is

pregnant and later when she has two small children at home. It turns out that when a woman

is tying him down, when he can no longer objectify her and only use her for sex, he no longer

has any interest in her.

 
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Unlike Jack, Neal does not settle down eventually but he remains a wanderer. He does

not want to choose between Louanne, Carolyn, and Diane. Neal simply wants every woman

he can get his hands on: “‘[o]h I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I live

women!’” (242). His lust for women is too big to simply pick one and stay with her. There is

a certain tension in the novel between the search for “kicks”, for girls, jazz, and drugs on the

one hand, and domestic life on the other hand. Their traveling is inherently masculine. They

are free to go wherever they want to go, unlike most of the women they meet, who are forced

to stay at home because that is what is expected of them, after all, in a patriarchal culture.

Whereas Jack eventually succumbs to the need to found a family, to give up a piece of his

masculinity, Neal keeps hopping from girl to girl, leaving wife and children behind. Family

life is not something Neal is particularly suited for. He does nothing to change his ways. At

first, he goes back to Caroly but soon finds that he misses the traveling, and, of course, all the

girls: “[s]o now he was thrice-married, twice-divorced, and living with his second wife”

(404). Diane, his mistress at that time, is pregnant. Neal has a considerable amount of paternal

duties to fulfil, but he refrains from ever making a commitment to one girl.

Feminist Backlash

There are a few scenes in the novel that should be mentioned in which women actually speak

up against Neal and his womanizing ways. Helen Hinkle, Al Hinkle’s wife, for example, calls

Neal out when he leaves Carolyn with their young daughter: “‘Neal why do you act so

foolish?’ said Helen. ‘Carolyn called and said you left her. Don’t you realize you have a

daughter’” (292). Neal, however, is fairly indifferent to her accusations, which only angers

Helen Hinkle more: “[y]ou have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your

damned kicks. All you think about is what's hanging between your legs and how much money

or fun you can get out of people and then you just throw them aside... Not only that but you're

 
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silly about it. It never occurs to you that life is serious and that there are people trying to make

something decent out of it instead of just goofing all the time” (292). Although Jack proceeds

to defend his friend, he also feels a kind of admiration for Helen: “Helen Hinkle was the only

one in the gang who wasn’t afraid of Neal and who could sit there calmly, with her face

hanging out, telling him off in front of everybody” (293).

Another woman who is fully aware of Neal’s terrible behaviour is Gabrielle Kerouac,

Jack’s mother with whom he lives when he is not on the road. Towards the end of the novel,

Jack brings Neal home and it is obvious that Gabrielle is not too fond of Neal: “‘Jack’ said my

mother ‘Neal can stay here a few days and after that he has to get out, do you understand

me?’” (349). She even talks to Neal about her concerns with regard to his lifestyle: “‘[w]ell

Neal’ said my mother ‘I hope you’ll be able to take care of your new baby that’s coming and

stay married this time. ... You can’t go all over the country having babies like that. Those poor

little things’ll grow up helpless. You’ve got to offer them a chance to live.’” (354). It seems

that Neal actually is a bit ashamed of himself: “[h]e looked at his feet and nodded” (354).

Another interesting thing to point out is a scene in which female sexuality is not

neglected or denied, but actually put out in the open. Louanne and Neal are filing for a

divorce, but “Louanne ... insists on screwing in the interim. She says she loves his big cock –

so does Carolyn – so do I” (146). Here it is acknowledged that women, too, have sexual

desires and needs, which goes against the patriarchal idea that women’s sexuality is

something to look down upon.

 
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V. Conclusion and Discussion

While the Beats prided themselves on being open-minded, free-spirited and sexually liberal,

rejecting mainstream American values, Jack Kerouac was still stuck in the old patriarchal

views of the relation between men and women. On the Road is a very good example of this,

taking a look at Jack and Neal’s relationships with women and how they treat them, how they

talk to them and about them. They are sexually objectified; they only serve the gratification of

men and are subservient to them. By objectifying the women in On the Road, Kerouac

perpetuates and reinforces the patriarchal views of the relations between men and women that

feminists have tried to break down so fervently over the years. This goes to show that maybe

the Beats were not as liberated and “hipster” as they thought themselves to be.

The male gaze is a phenomenon that occurs quite regularly in On the Road. Both Jack

and Neal gaze at women, only noticing their physical appearance and paying no mind to their

feelings and the inner workings of their minds. Every time a new female character is

introduced, the narrator only focuses on describing her appearance, which means that these

fictional female characters are sexually objectified. It is also very obvious that Jack and Neal

view women as replaceable objects by the way they go from city to city and search for new,

pretty girls to sleep with in every single one of them.

However, the objectification of women by Jack and Neal does not go unnoticed by the

women themselves. Several female characters in On the Road speak up against Neal and

condemn his unfaithfulness. Both Helen Hinkle and Gabrielle Kerouac find the strength to

call Neal out on his behaviour. Neal, in turn, does not want to listen to them and continues

living his life the way he has always done.

It would be very interesting to extend this research to more works by Beat authors, to

examine the ways in which they portray fictional female characters. In that way, a general

statement can be made about the way Beats treated the female characters in their novels. It

 
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could very well be that in other Beat novels, women have more agency and attention is paid to

their feelings and thoughts, and their sexuality.

Finally, the way in which language is used by the male protagonists who objectify

women would be an interesting topic of research. Jack and Neal often use words as ‘little,

‘dumb’, and ‘whore’. Exploring the exact connotations these words carry could possibly yield

some very interesting results. This, too, can be extended to a whole array of Beat novels for a

more representative outcome.

   

 
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