The Girl Gang: Women Writers of the New York City Beat Community

Abstract

The Girl Gang: Women Writers of the New York City Beat Community seeks to revise our understanding of the Beat community and literary tradition by critically engaging the lives and work of five women Beat writers: Diane di Prima, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Carol Bergé, and Mimi Albert. This dissertation argues that, from a position of marginality, these women developed as protofeminist writers, interrogating the traditional female gender role and constructing radical critiques of normative ideas in fiction and poetry in ways that resisted the male Beats' general subordination of women and that anticipated the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. A project of recovery and criticism, The Girl Gang provides literary biographies that explore how each writer's experience as a marginalized female writer within an otherwise countercultural community affected the development of her work; it also analyzes a range of works (published and unpublished texts from various genres, written from the early 1950s through the turn of the twenty-first century) in order to illustrate how each writer distinctively employs and revises mainstream and Beat literary and cultural conventions. The dissertation's critical analyses examine each writer's engagement in various literary, cultural, and social discourses, drawing attention to their incisive and provocative treatment of thematic issues that are central to the postwar countercultural critique of hegemonic norms --including fundamental Beat questions of identity, authenticity, and subjectivity-- and that are developed through experimentation with literary conventions. Ultimately, The Girl Gang argues that the literary achievements of the New York City women Beats collectively reconceptualize the prevailing notion of the Beat community and canon.