Beat Movement

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 more for a kind of personal spiritual liberation than for social revolution. Beat writers were the heirs to the legacy of nineteenth-century American Romanticism, drawing especially on the ideas of the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and the poetry of Walt Whitman in formulating their social critiques [Page 50]and personal explorations. Just as Emerson and Whitman responded to an emergent market capitalism by fashioning a concept of manhood grounded in spirituality, spontaneity, and a belief in a transcendent reality, so the Beats constructed their version of a spiritually liberated masculinity in opposition to the perceived oppressiveness of consumer capitalism in the mid–twentieth century. Moreover, Walt Whitman's homosexuality and the erotic energy in his poetry also likely appealed to the sexually unconventional Beats. More contemporary influences on Beat style included the improvisational techniques of African-American jazz musicians, whose marginal status and lifestyles suggested to the Beats a bohemianism and a natural, sensual, “primitive” masculine style that stood in direct contrast to the artificiality and repression of white middle-class gender conventions.

The Beats openly challenged what they considered the oppressive conformist mentality of white middle-class America, from suburban family life to corporate employment to the availability of mass-produced consumer goods. They rejected the suburban ideal that millions of Americans embraced after World War II, perceiving the nuclear family, the rise of materialist values, and the responsibility associated with a steady job and support of a wife and children as threats to the individual male spirit. Rejecting the middle-class ideal of monogamous family life, the Beats were generally interested in women only as sexually objectified “chicks” or as poor non-Anglo “Earth mother” types—in both cases, women who were young, attractive, available, compliant, and silent. In that sense, they reflected more conventional notions of male sexual dominance and gender hierarchy.

As an alternative to widely accepted middle-class ideals of manhood, the Beats nurtured a defiant masculine subculture founded on male comradeship and dedicated to a kind of personal freedom defined by sexual license, casual drug and alcohol use, and literary experimentation. The perceived importance of male friendships to the quest for freedom and to the realization of one's artistic potential is evident in Beat writings and, often, in the explicit dedication of their work to one another. Male bonding for the Beats also extended to various degrees of homosexual behavior. Allen Ginsberg was openly gay, for example, and William S. Burroughs cultivated a homosexual identity that was defiant, rebellious, and masculine—a misogynistic rejection of women and what he saw as their threat to male freedom. Overall, the Beats cultivated their brand of masculinity as a critique of postwar American society and culture. Interpreting middle-class life as a kind of prison for men, they responded by fashioning themselves as maverick adventurers seeking physical and spiritual fulfillment and liberation in the company of other men on the margins of respectable society.

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