Women And Women In Jack Kerouac's On The Road

In this book there are three major women Linda, Martha, and Mary Anne. Linda's role is positive yet very saddening because she in a way has given Tim O'Brien the power to tell stories so in depth using memories. Mary Anne's role is encouraging because she comes to Vietnam and throughout the journey she discovers herself; she redefines the typical role of women. Martha's role in this book could be considered positive because she is keeping up Jimmy Cross's morale but, at the same time it could be negative because she leads him on. So the role of women in the book is very influential in a positive way.

Women are primarily objects of sexual pleasure for the male protagonists. Their characters are always filtered through the men's perspective, with the exception of the maid Bertha, Charlie’s maid, who at times makes fun at either of the brothers. (Perspectives on How Women Internalize the Ideal Beauty Standard, Year Unknown).

Older literary works such as book or plays have always been used as a way for feminist literary critics to understand and examine gender roles portrayed in these books and how much significance is given to the females and to what extent they are shown as victims of patriarchy at the time the book was written. “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams is a great work for this use of literary analysis. Throughout the book Tennessee uses his play to display the different stereotypical relationships that existed in the era, he critiqued this stereotype and other gender based formalities that were present and or originated in the 1940s.

hese women from the book “ Women Hollering Creek”, were abused and taken advantage of their own men. Sandra Cisneros explores the stories “Never marry a mexican”, Woman Hollering Creek”, and “One holy night”. The women in this stories made a mistake by being with the wrong men in their life. They became careless when they met their own men. These girls have lost their respect for themselves. They have destroyed their own self, for the guy who never really loves them. No one stood up for their rights as a woman. Love and hate made these women vulnerable.

The women of the story are not treated with the respect, which reflects their social standings. The first image of the women that the reader gets is a typical housewife. They are imaged as “wearing faded house dresses and

Does deviating from one’s gender norms inevitably doom one down a spiral of moral corruption? Tim O'Brien, author of “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” and Ernest Hemingway, author of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, certainly seem to hold this view, as evident by the fates of the major female characters in their respective works. The deviance of the major female characters in both works appears to corrupt not only themselves, but also pollute their partners, causing them to suffer injury or harm as a result. The degree of injury ranges from negligible, like Fossie’s demotion and broken heart, to fatal, like the bullet that rips through Macomber’s skull. It begs the question, are these stories meant to serve as cautionary tales for their female readers, or possibly for their husbands, so they may recognize gender deviance and stop it in its tracks before their wives transform into Margot Macomber or Mary Anne Bell? This essay will analyze what such characters say about pervading views of women, both in society and in literature.

During the nineteenth and twentieth century there was a number of changes made in America. Woman were looked at as less than back then and to a certain degree they still are today. There was a number of women that died or went insane because of the standards that they had to meet in order to be considered good women. In this research paper I will talk about the experience of the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper and Blanche DuBois from the story A Streetcar Named Desire. It will be shown within these pages how the moral and societal standards for women were far different than they were for men, and how the standards changed over the years. Furthermore it will be shown how this effected the women of those two stories.

Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is a book in which he dealt with the issues of racism, sex and authority that is going on in a mental institute. In the novel, the women are depicted as the power figures who are able to significantly manipulate the patients on the ward. There are four ways of Ken Kesey’s using of “woman” as a subject: Superiority of male sexuality over female authority, matriarchal system that seeks to castrate men in the society, mother figures as counterpart of Big Nurse and “Womanish” values defined as civilizing in the novel.

In this book there are three major women Linda, Martha, and Mary Anne. Linda's role is positive yet very saddening because she in a way has given Tim O'Brien the power to tell stories so in depth using memories. Mary Anne's role is encouraging because she comes to Vietnam and throughout the journey she discovers herself; she redefines the typical role of women. Martha's role in this book could be considered positive because she is keeping up Jimmy Cross's morale but, at the same time it could be negative because she leads him on. So the role of women in the book is very influential in a positive way.

Many different depictions of gender roles exist in all times throughout the history of American culture and society. Some are well received and some are not. When pitted against each other for all intents and purposes of opposition, the portrayal of the aspects and common traits of masculinity and femininity are separated in a normal manner. However, when one gender expects the other to do its part and they are not satisfied with the results and demand more, things can shift from normal to extreme fairly quickly. This demand is more commonly attributed by the men within literary works. Examples of this can be seen in Tennessee Williams' “A Streetcar Named Desire”, where Stella is constantly being pushed around and being abused by her

In recent decades, Cormac McCarthy has staked his claim as one of the all-time titans of American literature through publishing masterpieces like Blood Meridian, Suttree, and The Road. In his works his advanced level of technical mastery becomes apparent through his expertly harmonized coordination of literary elements toward certain narrative ends, such as the generation of suspense. In this light, McCarthy’s literary style is a practical one, in that he organizes literary elements in his works toward actualizing particular goals. In The Road, for instance, McCarthy directs his style throughout the text so as to maximize the feeling of suspense that readers experience throughout the book. This kind of stylistic maneuvering is expressed on pages 105-110 and pages 118-123 of the the text. But, it must be noted here that the generation of suspense in these passages does not result from similar stylistic approaches. McCarthy uses style in differently in Passage A and Passage B but ultimately toward the same end, namely generating suspense for readers of The Road. Passage A relies on dialogue to develop its suspense, whereas the style of Passage B relies on narrative action for its suspense.

In a novel set in 1920’s patriarchal society dominated by the obsession of wealth, power, chasing dreams and an enigmatic narrator, just how independent can a woman really be? This is the context for the characters in ‘The Great Gatsby’ where, in the aftershock of a world war, there is celebration and the incarnation of women left at home into ‘flappers’, but it is debatable how far they have really changed from traditional housewives. For Jordan this is an exciting transition but more traditional characters such as Tom cling to the past. When a threatening situation looms over them will they run and hide or confront the problem head on, the only way they know, as in ‘No Country for Old Men’? These contrasting reactions could be a result

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is his post-apocalyptic magnus opus which combines a riveting plot along with an unconventional prose style. Released in 2006, the novel has won awards such as the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award (Wilson). Oprah Winfrey also selected the book for her book club ("Cormac McCarthy”). The author, Cormac McCarthy, was born in 1933 in Rhode Island and is said to have wrote the novel because of his son and their relationship. The Road centers around a boy and his father while they try to survive after an unknown disaster occurs. While some people may argue that the unusual style takes away from the novel, it adds to the tone and meaning of the work.

Jack Kerouac was one of a group of young men who, immediately after the Second World War, protested against what they saw as the blandness, conformity and lack of cultural purpose of middle-class life in America. The priorities of people of their age, in the mainstream of society, were to get married, to move the suburbs, to have children and to accumulate wealth and possessions. Jack Kerouac and his friends consciously rejected this pursuit of stability and instead looked elsewhere for personal fulfillment. They were the Beats, the pioneers of a counterculture that came to be known as the Beat Generation. The Beats saw mainstream life as a prison. They wanted freedom, the freedom to pick up and go at a moments notice. This search for

       The women in Jack Kerouac's On The Road were, it seems, not afforded the same depth in character which the author gave the men. The treatment of the women characters in both word and action by Sal and Dean seems to show that women could only be a virgin/mother figure or a whore. Throughout the novel there are many instances in which women and their feelings or actions are either referred to flippantly or blatantly degraded. It can be said, however, that Sal (Kerouac) did not necessarily agree with this narrow female identity, and there is evidence to support this claim. The novel also shows though that Sal did participate in this male forced female stereotyping whether he