Amen the thunderbolt and the dark void: Spirituality and gender in the works of male and female writers of the Beat Generation

The Beat Generation typically has been considered an all boy's club, from which women were excluded except as sexual objects. The Beat icons' relationships to women were troubled at best and misogynistic at worst. My reading of the women who were living and writing their own Beat experiences convinced me that the definition of the Beat Generation should encompass these not so "minor characters." Because so little scholarship has been done with these women writers, a large portion of my dissertation is recovering the women Beats and reintegrating them into the Beat canon. By placing these writers and their works in conjunction with their famous male counterparts, I explore how gender informs, limits, and expands the spiritual searches of Beat writers. I place the works of little known women writers Joanne Kyger, Janine Pommy Vega, Bonnie Bremser, Diane di Prima and Joyce Johnson in dialogue with their more famous male contemporaries Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac to illustrate that a complete and realistic picture of the Beat Generation must include women writers. I consider a variety of genres, including poetry, novel, memoir, and travel narrative.; To illustrate the complex relationship between the works of these male and female writers, I focus on the Beats' spiritual searches. With the collapse of meaning after the world wars, Americans sought new contexts and new ways of imbuing life with meaning. The vast majority of Americans turned towards the homogenizing culture of suburban, material, consumerism, but the Beats explored other subterranean avenues of travel, drugs, sex and nature. What is often overlooked is the spiritual impetus at the heart of this prototypical "beatness." As Jack Kerouac famously stated, "Everything is God," and indeed most Beats would agree with some version of this statement of overarching divinity. His fellow Beats sought the divine both within and without themselves, and they used their writing to make the private spiritual experience public. The spiritual, then, is the basis for potential transformation.; I use a variety of feminist approaches throughout my dissertation to illustrate how travel, drugs, sex, and nature were tools the Beats' used to reach this level of spirituality. My dissertation covers both the successful and failed spiritual searches that cover the range of "beaten down" and "beatific" experiences. I argue that an embodied feminist spirituality is most effective because it focuses on interconnection and inner divinity. My thinking as a feminist scholar has been largely influenced by feminist philosopher Winnie Tomm who articulates a theory of women's embodied spirituality, which I argue is also applicable to men.