Roads of Her Own

Spatial Practices
An Interdisciplinary Series in
Cultural History,
Geography and
Literature 8
General Editors:
Robert Burden (University of Teesside)
Stephan Kohl (Universität Würzburg)

Editorial Board:
Christine Berberich
Christoph Ehland
Catrin Gersdorf
Jan Hewitt
Ralph Pordzik
Chris Thurgar-Dawson
Merle Tönnies
 Roads of Her Own
Gendered Space and Mobility
in American Women’s Road Narratives,
1970-2000

Alexandra Ganser

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover design: Bernd Ganser

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9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.

ISSN: 1871-689X
ISBN: 978-90-420-2552-3
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009
Printed in the Netherlands
 The Spatial Practices Series

The series Spatial Practices belongs to the topographical turn in

cultural studies and aims to publish new work in the study of spaces
and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings:
symbolic landscapes and urban places which have specific cultural
meanings that construct, maintain, and circulate myths of a unified na-
tional or regional culture and their histories, or whose visible ironies
deconstruct those myths. Taking up the lessons of the new cultural
geography, papers are invited which attempt to build bridges between
the disciplines of cultural history, literary and cultural studies, and
geography.
Spatial Practices aims to promote a new interdisciplinary kind
of cultural history drawing on constructivist approaches to questions
of culture and identity that insist that cultural “realities” are the effect
of discourses, but also that cultural objects and their histories and
geographies are read as texts, with formal and generic rules, tropes
and topographies.

Robert Burden
Stephan Kohl
 Table of Contents
1. Points of Departure 13
1.1. American Mobilities and Their Discontents 13
1.2. Articulation, Women’s Literature, and Transdifference 19
1.3. Route Map/Travel Plan 32
2. Contemporary American Women’s Road
Narratives: Genre and Gender 37
2.1. The Road Narrative as Genre 37
2.2. The Masculine Legacy 44
2.3. Women off & on the Road 47
3. Space, Gender, Mobility 57
3.1. The Road and the Spatial Turn 57
3.2. Space + Gender: Gendered Space, Engendering Space 65
3.3. Mobility as Resistance 73
4. Questers on the Road 81
4.1. The Quest in America: History and Literature 81
4.2. Frontier Paradigms: Interactions and Interventions 86
4.3. Romance of the Road, or, Manifest Domesticity? 92
4.3.1. Doris Betts’ Heading West 93
4.3.2. Sharlene Baker’s Finding Signs:
Revising the Romance of the Road? 105
4.4. Beyond the Romantic Quest?
Alternative Homes and Other Mothers 110
4.4.1. Escape from Father Freud? 110
4.4.2. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees & Pigs in
Heaven: From Mother-Daughter Negotiation to
Multicultural Fantasy 116
4.4.3. Journey toward the Maternal, Quest for the Past: Hilma
Wolitzer’s Hearts and Chelsea Cain’s Dharma Girl 127
4.5. Interstice: The Wandering Jewess – Anne Roiphe’s
Long Division 144
5. Para-Nomadic Travelers 163
5.1. Nomads Here, There, and Everywhere:
Revisiting Theories of Nomadism 163
5.1.1. Back to the Routes: Deleuze & Guattari’s Nomadology 166
5.1.2. More Routes: Nomadology as Traveling Theory 169
5.1.3. From Paradoxical Metaphors to Para-Nomadism 178
5.2. “Give Me Land Lots of Land”: Diane Glancy’s
Claiming Breath and The Voice That Was in Travel 182
5.3. Floating Worlds: Para-Nomadic Dislocation and the
Public-Private Divide in Cynthia Kadohata’s The
Floating World 205
5.4. Circles and Downward Spirals: Negative Para-
Nomadism in Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays 218
5.5. Interstice: Un-Weaving the Road: Para-Nomad Meets
Postmodern Picara in Aritha van Herk’s No Fixed
Address: An Amorous Journey 227
6. Ex-centric & Wayward:
Picaras of the Late 20th Century 257
6.1. Constant Inconstancy: Theorizing the Picara 257
6.2. Becoming-Woman after the Great Divide: Feminist
Revisions of the 1960s’ Countercultural Picaresque 266
6.2.1. Michelle Carter’s On Other Days While Going Home 267
6.2.2. Trucking down the Road of Adolescence:
Katherine Dunn’s Truck 275
6.3. The Wanderlust of Crossing and Queering: Erika
Lopez’ Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road
Novel Thing 281
Conclusion 305
Works Cited 313
Primary Works 313
Secondary Literature 316
Index 335
 Acknowledgements

This book, which is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation sub-

mitted in American studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Er-
langen-Nuremberg, would not have been possible without the gener-
ous support of my colleagues, friends, and family. First and foremost,
I would like to dearly thank my dissertation advisor, Heike Paul, for
her personal and professional encouragement and support and the
many hours she generously devoted to discussing my project. Her
scholarly advice and her critical commentary guided my work in the
most helpful manner – thank you so much. Likewise, I would also like
to thank my second advisor, Helmbrecht Breinig, who initially ac-
cepted this project for the DFG specialized Ph.D. program “Cultural
Hermeneutics: Reflections on Difference and Transdifference” at the
Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, funding this
study. His careful reading and extensive commentary profoundly
helped me develop my arguments.
The DFG-program provided an invaluable research network
which gave me the opportunity to present and discuss this project at
various stages. Its interdisciplinary focus was both a challenge and an
inspiration. I would like to thank all of its members, but especially
those who kindly gave me their friendship and support: Karin Höpker,
Antje Kley, Claudia Globisch, Christian Krug, Maisun Sharif, Sonja
Altnöder, Christoph Ernst, Fatim Boutros, and Klaus Lösch. Kylie
Crane has provided invaluable help with her skills as both a native
speaker and an astute reader of my manuscript. Eva Semmler is to
thank for her diligence and patience in preparing the manuscript for
publication, and Stephan Kohl and Robert Burden for accepting it in
the Spatial Practices series – the fastest, kindest, and most assiduous
editors one could wish for! Elke Demant, Franziska Fröhlich and An-
drea Gehring have proved an efficient editorial team in the final stages
of book production – thank you.
At the institutional level, I am also grateful to the Austrian Ful-
bright Commission for granting me a year of research at the Universi-
8 Acknowledgements

ty of Oklahoma at Norman for the early stages of this project. At the

University of Oklahoma, I would like to thank my former colleagues
and teachers for inspiration and discussion of my project, among them
Corey Twitchell, Svenja Zander, Jeanetta Calhoun-Mish, Julia Er-
hardt, and Vincent B. Leitch. The University of Erlangen-Nurem-
berg’s Vinzl Stiftung generously funded a shorter sojourn in the Unit-
ed States for research purposes and the attendance of the conference
“The Image of the Road in American Culture” in Colorado Springs.
The Heidelberg Center for American Studies’ Spring Academy pro-
vided another helpful platform to discuss my project with an interna-
tional group of graduate students in American Studies, whom, togeth-
er with the Academy’s chair for literature and cultural studies, Doro-
thea Fischer-Hornung, I thank for their critical feedback and warm en-
couragement. I am also grateful to Carmen Birkle, who initially sup-
ported my project at the University of Vienna’s Department of English
and American Studies.
Timothy K. Conley of Bradley University has been an impor-
tant companion for many years, commenting on my work at various
stages; I am grateful for his friendship and professional advice. I also
thank John David Smith of the University of North Carolina at Char-
lotte as well as Monika Seidl and Astrid Fellner of the University of
Vienna for their continuing encouragement and kindness. For their
big-hearted support I am indebted to my family and my friends in
Austria, Germany, and the United States – especially my parents,
Bernd, Margot, Eva, Oliver & the Neubauers, Steffi, Julia, Iris, Lisi,
Alexandra, Maria, Elliot, and Martin. The memory of the late Kurt
Albert Mayer, preeminent Roads Scholar, was a spectral guidance in
times of need. Thank you all for believing in this project, meeting it
with enthusiasm, and asking countless questions; I could not wish for
better road buddies!

Erlangen, Dezember 2008 A.G.

 i got pulled over in west Texas
so they could look inside my car
he said are you an american citizen
i said
yes sir
so far
they made sure i wasn’t smuggling
someone in from Mexico
someone willing to settle for america
‘cause there’s nowhere else to go

and every state line

there’s a new set of laws
and every police man
comes equipped with extended claws
there’s a thousand shades of white
and a thousand shades of black
but the same rule always applies
smile pretty and watch your back

i broke down in Louisiana

and I had to thumb a ride
got in the first car that pulled over
you can’t be picky in the middle of the night
he said
baby, do you like to fool around
baby, do you like to be touched
i said
maybe some other time
fuck you very much
[…]
a little town in Pennsylvania
there was snow on the ground
parked in an empty lot
where there was no one else around
but i guess i was taking up too much space
as i was trying to get some sleep
‘cause an officer came by anyway
and told me to leave

Ani DiFranco, “Every State Line”

Abstract: On the Road + A Room of One’s Own = Thelma & Louise?

Reading Jack Kerouac’s classic On the Road through Virginia

Woolf’s canonical A Room of One’s Own, as this book demonstrates,
has produced an entire literary subgenre in North America, that of
women’s road narratives. Through a Woolfian lens on geographical
and social mobility, the study shows how women’s literature has in-
scribed itself into the discourse of the Whitmanesque “open road“, or,
more generally, the “freedom of the road”. Such a reading highlights
how women’s writing has participated in a powerful American myth,
yet at the same time also has rejected that myth, to various degrees, as
fundamentally based on gendered and racial/ethnic hierarchies and
power structures. Transdifference, a category of analysis to describe
the dissonant plurality of social and cultural affiliations as well as the
narrative tensions produced by such pluralities, is introduced in this
study to better understand the textual results of women’s multiple be-
longings as they are present in these writings. The book analyzes sto-
ries about female runaways, outlaws, questers, adventurers, kidnap-
pees, biker chicks, travelling saleswomen, and picaras and makes
theoretical observations on the debates regarding discourses of spatial-
ity and mobility, debates which have defined the so-called spatial turn
in the humanities. Roads of Her Own is thus not only situated in the
broader context of a constructivist cultural studies, but also, by dis-
cussing narrative mobility under the sign of gender, combines insights
from social theory and philosophy, feminist cultural geography, and
literary studies.

Key names and concepts: Doreen Massey - Rosi Braidotti - Literary

Studies - Spatial Turn - Gendered Space and Mobility - Nomadism -
Road writing - Transdifference - American Culture - Popular Culture -
Women’s Literature after the Second Wave - Quest - Picara.
 1. Points of Departure

In an essay from the 1980s, French feminist critic Hélène Cixous

reads the fairy tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” as an early story of a
feminine venturing into unknown spaces (cf. “Castration or Decapita-
tion”). Even though the protagonist is eventually punished for her de-
tour, Cixous applauds Little Red Riding Hood’s adventurousness and
transgression, interpreting the story as a journey of sexual self-
discovery:

[In spite of being sent out] not to go into the big world but to go from
one house to another by the shortest route possible, […] from the
mother to the other […], Little Red Riding Hood makes her little de-
tour, does what women should never do, travels through her own for-
est. She allows herself the forbidden … and pays dearly for it. (1981:
43-4)

Little Red Riding Hood’s defiance of the proscribed trajectory creates,

in Cixous’ reading of the tale, a space in which the girl explores “her
own forest” and “the forbidden”. As Cixous asserts, the girl’s final
punishment suggests the fairy tale’s advocation of a normative spatial
behavior dictated by prevalent gender roles; this is reflected in a di-
dacticism suggesting that girls need to safeguard themselves when
they step out of the home. This fairy tale exists in various pre-
Grimmian versions, some of which had Little Red Riding Hood beat
the wolf and thus emphasize female agency, intelligence, and action
(cf. Zipes’ introduction, 1993). In any case, the tale is an early exam-
ple of a road narrative that familiarizes the protagonist not only with
the effects of the patriarchal spatial and symbolic orders on the gen-
dered individual as well as with the resulting limitations of agency,
but also, if the tale is re-read from a feminist perspective like Cixous’,
with the potential pleasures of transgressive mobility.
In the context of anglophone American literature, women’s road
narratives take up this hidden suggestion of a possibility of escape
confining spatial structures through physical movement. Framed by
14 Roads of Her Own

specific social and cultural developments, particularly the impact of

second-wave feminism and the literary practice of feminist rewriting,
contemporary American women’s writers have told cross-country
journeys as pleasurable and empowering, as a chance for personal dis-
covery and exploration, and as cultural critique. In my study, I inves-
tigate how such narratives, from the 1970s to the present, have em-
plotted the journey as a textual intervention into normative spatialities.
In what follows, I focus on interactions of gender, space, and
mobility in order to query the ways in which women writers from var-
ious cultural and social backgrounds have used the matrix and the
formula of the road narrative to challenge dominant literary and spa-
tial formations by means of engaging multiple cultural differences –
differences not only of gender, but also of ethnicity, class, age, reli-
gion, sexual identity, or (sub-)cultural identification. Drawing on new
approaches in cultural geography, I argue that women’s literary texts
rewrite the mythical ‘open road’ as a textual space in which powerful
regimes of gender, cultural and social difference are destabilized. In
women’s road stories, the American highway’s mythical, iconic sta-
tus, signifying the heroic quest for freedom – reproduced time and
again by the adventurous hero’s literary flight from domesticity – is
questioned and challenged, rejected and revised in manifold ways.

1.1. American Mobilities and Their Discontents

In a recently published monograph, Deborah Paes de Barros highlights

the central importance of the literature of the road in a North Ameri-
can cultural context:

The literature of the road is one of the most pre-eminent American li-
terary tropes. From early frontier narratives to late postmodern litera-
ture, the road story has figured significantly. In a sense, to be “on the
road,” is concurrent with notions of Manifest Destiny and the Puritan
“errand into the wilderness”. The road is resonant within the concept
of nation building; it concerns evolution and becoming and is conse-
quently compatible with the Enlightenment idea of progress […]. The
road story, then, is almost a manifesto of American cultural con-
sciousness; it is the mythic representation of history and ideology.
(2004: 2)
 Points of Departure 15

Throughout American history, geographical as well as social mobility,

as allegedly interdependent sides of the same coin, have played a cru-
cial role in conceptualizations of both the nation-state and its subjects;
thus, as Neil Campbell argues, “[j]ourneys have been fundamental to
the formation of the United States” (2001: 285). The specific dimen-
sion of North American ideas of mobility results from the foundation-
al significance of a colonial settler mentality and a variety of journeys,
migrations, and displacements: “Pilgrims, pioneers, immigrants, expa-
triates, Okies, Arkies” as well as slaves and fugitive slaves – Ameri-
can has been portrayed as a “nation on the move” (Wesley 1999: xii).
As a consequence, geographical mobility, tied to social ascent, has
always had a high symbolic value, shaping distinctly American
idea(l)s of freedom and national identity, and supposedly distinguish-
ing Americans from Europeans: “As Europeans moved west, the ar-
gument [of the frontier thesis] went, they confronted savagery and
were converted into Americans in the process” (Cresswell 2001: 19);
freedom of movement thus also became an important element in dis-
courses of American exceptionalism (cf. Hilton/Van Minnen 2002: 3,
Laderman 2002: 22).1 The mythology of American mobility and free-
dom has produced powerful ideological and discursive structures, re-
lying on and (re-)producing a vast array of texts that consolidate a rhe-
toric of territorial expansion linked to the American Dream of upward
social mobility (cf. also Moen 2002).2 Moving into the 20th century, a
number of scholars indeed regard the significance of automobility in
the United States, with the car the “chief carrier of the American
Dream of freedom and plenitude” (Sanford 1983: 137), as an exten-
sion of the frontier experience, whose doctrine of Manifest Destiny
functioned as a unifying power in forming a seemingly coherent na-
tional identity (cf. ibid.; Campbell 2001; Hilton/Van Minnen 2002: 8
& 12; Primeau 1996: 7).
1
Cresswell argues that “Jeffersonian imagery of America as a garden suggested
that space might replace time as the central location for development in
American life. While Europe had developed through time and in a limited
space that had thus become overcrowded and despotic, America could simply
keep expanding west. This would ensure morally upright and democratic citi-
zens” (2001: 19).
2
Such a rhetoric of expansion can be found, for instance, in exploration docu-
ments or the early Western, which Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land
(1975) explores for their gendered metaphoricity.
16 Roads of Her Own

It comes as no surprise that (auto)mobility and its promised li-

berties have shaped the cultural imagination, the literatures, films, and
music of the United States and, to a minor extent, of Canada. Myths of
mobility have been continually enacted in the road genre, which only
at first sight seems to consolidate the idea that America offers more
space and freedom than other nations, and with it, an unparalleled so-
cial and geographical mobility. Indeed, as Tim Cresswell believes,
“[f]ew modern nations are so thoroughly infused with stories of wan-
dering, of heroic migrancy and pilgrimage as are the Americans”
(2001: 20). American myths of mobility, however, largely reflect the
historic perspective of the White (male) Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and
rest on a construction of alterity and hegemonic spatial politics which,
for a number of Americans, has produced territorial confinement: the
slave quarter, the Native American reservation, the internment camps
for Japanese-Americans.3 By and large, critical responses to the de-
ceptive rhetoric of ‘mobility for all’ have therefore come from cultural
minority groups – groups discursively or institutionally denied access
to either social ascent or self-determined geographical mobility. In
fact, one could argue that the increase in mobility of the dominant so-
cial strata has largely been predicated upon forms of exclusion from
mobility of others on the basis of difference and alterity. Social power
relations have thus clearly shaped (auto)mobility as much as any other
social practice. Conventional canonical definitions of the travel narra-
tive obliterate the historical fact that some American journeys – such
as the Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, or forced relocations like the
steerage of indentured servants – are results of imperialism and racism
and usually have no relation to social ascent whatsoever. As bell
hooks and others have argued, any liberatory theorization of travel
thus needs to take into account the diversity of the travel experience
(hooks 1992: 343); any other, less differentiated conception of travel
and travel writing would necessarily reproduce imperialistic episte-
mologies. To get the full picture, then, “[t]he story of mobility in
America needs to include less central stories, often untold: tales of
marginality and exclusion, which cast a different light on the grand
narratives of nationhood, of progress, of democracy and of modernity”

3
More examples of institutionalized restrictions of mobility in an American
context can be found in Hilton/Van Minnen (2002: 13).
 Points of Departure 17

(Cresswell 2001: 20). In such stories, ‘American mobility’ unfolds in-

to a myriad of mobilities that can confirm as well as challenge the
dominant ideology. As Hilton and Van Minnen emphasize, movement
must thus be seen in its double function as affirmation and resistance –
not to be understood as polar opposites, but as a continuum that is in-
scribed in the literary text (2002: 4).
Women’s road narratives form one strand of such tales of mar-
ginality and exclusion, as the mythology of mobility has been marked
by a distinct genderedness, built on the ideological division of spheres
into the private, domestic, and feminine and the public, outward-
bound, and masculine (cf. also Eric Leed’s thesis in The Mind of the
Traveller, 1991). In the context of this gendered mythology, Virginia
Scharff demonstrates how perceptions about gender have continually
shaped American attitudes toward cars and their use, creating an im-
agery of flighty women drivers that collided with Victorian notions of
woman’s nature and abilities. In a study on gender and mobility at the
onset of the motor age, Scharff shows how “the auto has been identi-
fied with masculinity and male mobility”, and how “women’s right
and ability to use cars has been disputed. […] [S]ex has always outdis-
tanced […] other social factors as a focus of public debate” (1991:
166). As late as 1910, laws like the Mann Act,4 for instance, were
aimed against the interstate transport of women ‘for immoral purpos-
es’, reflecting growing concerns about female mobility (Hilton/Van
Minnen 2002: 13).
Studies of women’s travel writing and theories of female sub-
jectivity have started to raise important questions about the complexi-
ties of both fixity and mobility as gendered – and gendering – cultural
and social conditions, such as “how the culture of automobility has
always been organized around and through a complex set of gender
relations and identities” (Smith 2001: 171). It is against this backdrop
that I will examine the specific representations of space and mobility
in North American women’s road narratives from the 1970s to the end
of the twentieth century, analyzing how gendered spatialities are arti-

4
The Mann Act, actually The United States White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910,
prohibited so-called white slavery; its primary stated intent was to address
prostitution and immorality. It is better known as the Mann Act, after James
Robert Mann, an American lawmaker.
18 Roads of Her Own

culated in these texts and how these spatialities are crucial to the narr-
atives’ cultural significance.
The spatial regimes produced by and producing cultures, socie-
ties, and subjectivities have been much debated in culture studies over
the last decade and have brought forth what is now called the ‘spatial’
or ‘topographical turn’ (Weigel 2004) in the humanities. For women’s
cultural production, these socio-spatial orders have traditionally been
a major concern; the tensions experienced by women between the
public and the private realms, for instance, have been negotiated in
women’s literatures for centuries, one site of discursive intervention in
exclusionary socio-spatial structures.
Thus, the aim of my analyses is to show how the hegemonic
construction of gendered space is both reflected and challenged in
contemporary women’s literatures. Cultural investigations into spa-
tial(ized) systems of power (as key constituents of the social sphere at
large) create an awareness of the spatial limitations, regulations, and
restrictions at work whenever women – understood here as subjects
‘perceived-as-female’5 by their environs – leave the realm of domes-
ticity. Thus, I am also asserting the importance of integrating spatial
analyses into the agenda of literary and cultural studies.6
Like their male counterparts, female protagonists react to the
lure of the road and envision cross-country travel as a way to over-
come what they experience as spatial confinement. However, female
protagonists in these texts, once on the road, often find themselves
“prisoners of the white lines of the freeway” (as Joni Mitchell puts it
in the famous road-song “Coyote”, 1976), and as such are not libe-

5
This definition relies on a classical phenomenological division of the body,
such as by Helmuth Plessner or Hermann Schmitz, into the objectified body
(the German Körper) – its visible, concrete gestalt – and the living body (the
German Leib). In Gesa Lindemann’s conception, the living body or Leib can
further be distinguished into an experiencing dimension through which the
body perceives its environment, and an experienced dimension, referring to
the perception of one’s own body (1996: 349).
6
One of the earliest demands for the integration of a spatial perspective into
cultural analyses was made by Foucault (1995) in the 1970s. In the specific
context of the field of American studies, the recently published 800-page col-
lection of essays Space in America: Theory – History – Culture, edited by
Klaus Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt, is a major step in this direction.
 Points of Departure 19

rated by motion but confronted with spatial limitations not entirely

different from those at the hearth. This is not to say that men’s expe-
riences on the road and the literary representations thereof are unre-
strained and untroubled; on the contrary: socio-economic, ethnic and
other factors have always shaped access and representations of the
road adventure and continue to do so, as most studies on American
road narratives acknowledge (cf. e.g. Primeau 1996 or Lackey 1997).7
Nonetheless, women’s textual road adventures demonstrate that gen-
dered constructions of space and mobility impede and complicate any
movement that transgresses discursively assigned spheres. The prota-
gonists’ “lines of flight”, to use a Deleuzian term, are thus characte-
rized by what I am calling ‘confined mobility’. It is exactly this limita-
tion of the freedom of movement that acts as a major incentive for fe-
male-authored re-figurations of the road genre, as the probing of limi-
tations relies, by implication, on the very boundaries experienced as
confining. From this perspective, women’s road literature is indicative
of the fact that prevailing socio-spatial structures are not gender-
neutral and that they need to be questioned and challenged.

1.2. Articulation, Women’s Literature, and Transdifference

My interdisciplinary approach suggests the basic socio-political relev-

ance of symbolic forms in general and of literature in particular. Fol-
lowing Pierre Bourdieu, I understand symbolic systems as one arena
of social struggle; accordingly, social space always also entails sym-
bolic space, for society is structured via symbolic forms of classifica-
tion and perception.8 Literary discourse, then, is socially significant as

7
Cf. for instance the narratives of fugitive slaves in the 19th century, Stein-
beck’s Grapes of Wrath in the 1930s, or contemporary road movies by and
about Native Americans (e.g. Powwow Highway, 1989).
8
Cf. Gerhard Göhler and Rudolf Speth’s explication of Bourdieu’s notion of
symbolic power: “Soziale Kämpfe werden vornehmlich auf der symbolischen
Ebene ausgetragen, weil der soziale Raum ein symbolischer Raum ist und
weil sich erst über die symbolischen Formen, d.h. die Formen der Klassifizie-
rung und Wahrnehmung, soziale Welt strukturiert” (1998: 47). Tr.: “Social
conflicts are primarily played out on the symbolic level because social space
is a symbolic space and, further, because it is only through symbolical forms,
20 Roads of Her Own

it translates, and thereby (re)creates, reality in terms of “nationally

specific cultural symbologies and conclusive narratives […]”, “me-
diat[ing] a cultural imaginary of a different kind” (Sielke 2002: 6-7).9
It is one of the basic tenets of the cultural studies approach I am
taking that culture is continuously articulated through symbolic forms
like literature, and that literary representation is thus intricately tied to
a social context not exterior to representation but deeply ingrained as a
constitutive part thereof. A central concern of such a cultural studies
approach investigates how discursively constructed and articulated
meanings, in the course of history, do or do not acquire cultural signi-
ficance and symbolic power, how they are anchored in webs of power
relations, and how these power relations can be questioned, chal-
lenged, and transformed by way of social and textual articulation. He-
gemony, understood as the ‘consensus culture’ that turns the particular
into the general, needs continuous defense, renewal, and reproduction
in order to retain structural authority over meaning making. Resistant
or marginal acts of signification may potentially intervene in hege-
monic discursive formations, and, further, due to the basic dialectical
relation between materiality and discourse, a change in discourse is
conditional for social practices to change. The basic materiality of dis-
cursive formations should not go unacknowledged here; discourse, in
cultural studies, is understood not only as a set of signifying practices
that determine the way in which society talks about social issues, but
also as constitutive of these very issues. The way in which gender re-
lations are expressed in the media, for instance, not only reflects social
structures, but also creates and reproduces these relations that then af-
fect the material lives of social subjects. One main focus of this study
is thus to explore women’s road literature in terms of its intervention
in and disruption of dominant discourses of literary (auto)mobility and
gendered space.

i.e. forms of classification and perception, that the social world is con-
structed”, AG.
9
Sielke’s notion of the imaginary relies on Winfried Fluck’s definition, accord-
ing to which the imaginary is “a set of meanings that a culture thrives to arti-
culate”; “[t]he fund of images, affects, and desires generated in the process in
turn stimulates the individual imagination anew, thus driving a process of cul-
tural symbology that continuously challenges our sense of reality” (qtd. in
Sielke 2002: 7-8).
 Points of Departure 21

In the context of my study, gender, too, is understood as a dis-

cursive formation structuring the social – including the spatial – signi-
ficance of sexual difference. Thus, when I speak of women’s (road) li-
terature, I am not referring to a basic, essential gender identity shared
by women writers who then produce literary texts in which they voice,
on common grounds, their femininity or express the spatial concerns
of ‘women’ as a subject category. I believe that the persistence of ma-
terial (e.g. economic) and social gender inequalities, i.e. the conse-
quences of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as political categories of subjectivity,
prove perhaps not a shared essence, but a shared consequence of a
body that is gendered socially, even as these limitations concern vari-
ous women to varying degrees. Although material differences are thus
by no means ‘essential’ or ‘stable’, but rather fluctuating and dynamic,
both social and physical realities are clearly not gender-blind. Thus,
the disposal of essentialisms does not preclude the persistence of pow-
er structures which regulate the spatial realm in such a way that a
normative femininity is associated with home and hearth, and are re-
sponsible for what is designated and devalued, in dominant discourse,
as the private realm of the family. If this ideal is disregarded, women
continue to get reprimanded for their transgressions, materially and
symbolically. Women on the road exemplify such a transgression and
consequently are met by obstacles generated by the gendered con-
struction of space; this is the very reason for what one could call my
critical separatism, my specific critical interest in women’s road narra-
tives.
As a social category, ‘woman’ thus continues to exist. I am
suggesting a conception of the female protagonist on the road as de-
fined primarily by her fictionalized physical presence, by a narrati-
vized being-perceived-as-female (a definition that thus might include
transgender and transvestite subjects). It is this embodied presence
that is constitutive of the female subject in what I call, with Louis Al-
thusser, her public interpellation as a gendered being: the public rec-
ognition of her genderedness as constitutive of woman’s place in the
social and symbolic orders. In her recently published monograph Visi-
ble Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (2006), philosopher Linda
Martín Alcoff puts forth a similar notion of gender and racial identity,
emphasizing the interconnectedness of the gendered (and racially
marked) body, visibility, and social interpretations of gender without
fixing the body into an unchangeable essence:
22 Roads of Her Own

In these [gendered and racially marked] identities, that material tie op-
erates through our very physical and visible embodiment […], but [...]
the meanings and implications of even these visible identities will be
determined largely by how the historical events and social structures
that demarcate identities are interpreted and understood. This is an
ongoing, active process involving both individual and collective agen-
cy. Individuals cannot transform the public meanings, effects, and im-
plications of their identities by a sheer act of will, but collective acts
of creative expression and resistance constantly contest and transform
the meanings, implications, and political effects of such identity
markers as skin color, body shape, language use, and role in reproduc-
tion. (288)

Alcoff, arguing from a perspective that tries to combine hermeneutic

and phenomenological philosophical traditions, distinguishes “public
identity” (92; this would correspond to Schmitz’s [1965] “objectified
body”) from “lived subjectivity” (93; Schmitz’s “living body”, cf.
footnote 6). She does not naively repeat the traditional exterior/interior
or public/private binarism in this distinction, but rather argues for an
analysis of the interdependence of the two:

The philosophical project today […] is to rearticulate the picture of

the “inner” self in such a way as to maintain [...] that these disparate
aspects of the self are not always perfectly mapped onto each other in
our lived experience [...] while simultaneously critiquing the tradition-
al binary form of the description that ossified the distinction into total-
ly separate and mutually exclusive oppositions [...]. Accordingly we
need also to explore the ways in which the substantive and particular
nature of a given subjectivity is constituted through its publicly recog-
nized identity. (93-4)

A deep dissatisfaction with the ‘disembodiedness’ of theory has

brought about a turn toward the material dimensions of gender in fe-
minist philosophies such as Alcoff’s; in a different tradition, i.e. that
of difference philosophy, Rosi Braidotti and others have attempted “to
redefine a transmobile materialist theory of feminist subjectivity that
is committed to working within the parameters of the postmodern pre-
dicament […]” (1994a: 2). Indeed, Braidotti’s monograph Metamor-
phoses: Toward a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002), is devoted
in its entirety to that project. Arguing against a separation of the sym-
bolic and discursive from the empirical, material, and historical di-
mensions of subjectivity, Braidotti asserts that “enfleshed” (20), the
subject is both non-unitary and embodied/embedded in power rela-
 Points of Departure 23

tions, with the body understood as “the complex interplay of highly

constructed social and symbolic forces; […] not an essence, let alone a
biological substance, but a play of forces, a surface of intensities”
(2002: 17).10
The visible, public surface of the gendered, ethnically or social-
ly marked body is pivotal for a discussion of women’s road literature
in terms of gendered space. First, I would argue that the concept of
gendered space, to come into effect, must necessarily rely on the sub-
ject’s gendered interpellation through the symbolic system. Gendered
subjects can only be perceived as ‘in place’ or ‘out of place’ via the
visibility and public perception of their genderedness (regardless of
whether this visibility is purely performative or relies on biological
gender difference). Second, as Gesa Lindemann has repeatedly ar-
gued, gender construction is not only a temporal, performative process
of reproduction and citationality (as held by Judith Butler in both
Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter), but in its visible embodi-
ment also a spatial phenomenon (Lindemann 1996: 358 & 1994).11
The gendered body perceived by and visible for others should be un-
derstood here as complementary to the dimension of the living body
(the experienced and experiencing embodiedness of subjectivity);
Lindemann in fact emphasizes the interrelationship between these di-
mensions:

As the modern living body clicks into a reflexive meaning relationship

with the objectified body, the objectified body becomes a vivid, ex-
emplary programme that regulates how the experienced body is felt

10
As Braidotti further explains, the embodied subject is thus understood as a
“process of intersecting forces (affects) and spatio-temporal variables (con-
nections)” (2002: 21), “an interface, a threshold, a field of intersecting mate-
rial and symbolic forces […] where multiple codes (race, sex, class, age, etc.)
are inscribed” (25). In the wider philosophical context, Metamorphoses sets
out to rediscover the “materialism of the flesh”-school, a non-metaphysical,
anti-logocentric tradition of Western philosophy which began in the 18th cen-
tury and includes Friedrich Nietzsche, Gaston Bachelard, Jacques Lacan, Luce
Irigaray, and Gilles Deleuze.
11
In “The Body of Gender Difference” Lindemann cites Teresa de Lauretis’
Technologies of Gender as an early call for the necessity to include the body
as a spatial phenomenon in her analysis of gender construction, but claims that
de Lauretis “did not offer any specific suggestions as to what that would en-
tail” (1996: 360, fn. 13).
24 Roads of Her Own

and is separate from its environment, and how the experiencing body
centres its experiential space, perceives and acts. (1996: 359)

In other words, “I am a gender in that I am one for others” and “I am a

gender in that others are one for me” (ibid. 355). Perception itself is
gendered, as in the experience of being perceived, the felt region of
the experienced body enters a signifying relationship with the objecti-
fied body (cf. 354), depending always, of course, on the “spatial refe-
rential context” (ibid.). In women’s road narratives, the road is the
spatial referential context, the symbolic or discursive social arena of
visibility and experience in which multiple differences collide, are
contested and/or negotiated.
A further basic tenet of contemporary gender studies is an un-
derstanding of gender as inseparable from other categories of identity
such as ethnicity, class, sexual identity, or age, which are also ‘visible’
(present) in the public space the narrative creates as well as narratively
inscribed in the protagonists’ narrated perception. In the texts I am
going to analyze, the road experience is created also as a space in
which the protagonists’ public identities and lived subjectivities are in
a dialogic and dialectical relation, interacting and counteracting in the
narratives. These multiple differences thus produce a variety of rela-
tionships between the two dimensions of female embodiment, Körper
and Leib, discursive and experienced body.
Like many literary texts with multicultural or (cultural) minority
backgrounds, contemporary women’s road narratives, due to their fo-
cus on the road as a social space, enact an often conflicting synchro-
nicity of multiple differences. The multiple, intersecting, and contra-
dictory lines of difference encountered in these texts call the reader to
acknowledge the constructed, fragmentary, dissonant, polyphonous,
and processual nature as well as the performativ aspectsof gender and
ethnic identity.12 The heuristic concept of transdifference allows me to

12
See, for example, the work of Chicano artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Co-
co Fusco, or the performance of hip-hop artists. Judith Butler’s conceptualiza-
tion of performativity has also been applied to studies on racial identity, e.g. in
Sarah Susannah Willie’s sociological study Acting Black: College, Identity,
and the Performance of Race (2003) or Ana Y. Ramos Zayas’ National Per-
formances: the Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago
(2003).
 Points of Departure 25

analyze and understand narrative tensions, contradictions, and deci-

sions created by the collision of differences. Reconsidering difference
categories not only in terms of their historical (i.e., temporal) instabili-
ty but also in terms of their specific spatial structuralizations, narrated
subjectivity as it appears in these works is understood as both transdif-
ferent – interrupted in its alleged unity by a dissonance of narrative
and narrated voices (Walz 2005) – and transient – variously reconfi-
gurable in changing spatial settings.
Transiency, from the Latin transire – to go across, to pass –
highlights the simultaneity of the spatial and the temporal dimension
in narrative subject formations. On the temporal level, it emphasizes
the fact that identity is always already in transition, a constant process,
and historically contingent; as a consequence, this relativity disman-
tles essentialisms and ‘being-s’ by pointing to the performative as-
pects of identity and embodiment – as constant becoming. As a gen-
dered and racial(ized) subject, then, any person is also always acting
out, performing, or even simulating embodied surfaces – surfaces of-
ten taken as the materialization of some inner nature and essence of
gender and ethnicity. At the same time, transiency also calls attention
to the spatial dynamics in which identities are enmeshed, to shifting
borders and territorialities or the transgression of spatial and categori-
cal boundaries. The notion of transient identities and differences can
therefore also figure as an instance of transgressing categorization: in
other words, identity is not identifiable on ontological grounds. Identi-
ty assumes an infinite state of becoming, for it cannot be located or
pinned down but for that minimal moment in time before such loca-
tions start to slide again.
This infinity of becoming, however, is neither a linear nor an
uncomplicated process, which becomes evident in moments when dif-
ferences collide, which at once stall categorical differences (thus inter-
rupting the ever-sliding signifier of Derridean différance) and bring
these categorizations in a position in which their binary structure starts
to oscillate, to become unstable (which is in fact the very condition for
constant ‘becoming’). The notion of transdifference, coined at the
German Research Foundation’s interdisciplinary doctoral program
“Cultural Hermeneutics: Reflections of Difference and Transdiffe-
rence” at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in the context of
which I have developed this study, accounts for such moments of col-
lision. As “the difference of differences” (Breinig/Lösch 2002: 22),
26 Roads of Her Own

the term transdifference aims to analyze and describe all sorts of cul-
tural and textual phenomena that are incomprehensible via binary
models of difference (Lösch 2005: 26):

The term transdifference refers to phenomena of a co-presence of dif-

ferent or even oppositional properties, affiliations or elements of se-
mantic and epistemological meaning construction, where this co-
presence is regarded or experienced as cognitively or affectively dis-
sonant, full of tension, and undissolvable. Phenomena of transdiffe-
rence, for instance socio-cultural affiliations, personality components
or linguistic and other symbolic predications, are encountered by indi-
viduals and groups and negotiated in their respective symbolic order.
As a descriptive term transdifference allows the presentation and
analysis of such phenomena in the context of the production of mean-
ing that transcend the range of models of binary difference. (Brei-
nig/Lösch 2006: 105)

Especially in multicultural settings, binary difference alone “can never

be adequate for defining the identity positions of individuals and
groups in the face of multiple affiliations” (Breinig/Lösch 2002: 21).
As a heuristic analytical tool, transdifference emphasizes the simul-
taneity of conflicting positions, loyalties, and affiliations of the subject
without categorically aiming at or presupposing a subsequent synthe-
sis or hybridization.13 It is thus complementary to – rather than going
beyond – difference: transdifferent tension

[…] does not do away with the original binary inscription of differ-
ence, but rather causes it to oscillate or suspends it whether for an epi-
phanic moment or for the duration of a life lived between the affilia-
tional demands of, say, two ethnicities. Thus, the concept of transdif-
ference interrogates the validity of binary constructions of difference
without deconstructing them. This means that difference is simulta-
neously bracketed and retained as a point of reference. (Breinig/Lösch
2006: 108-9)

To think in terms of transdifference, then, requires the acceptance of

uncertainty, incommensurability, doubt, and indecisiveness (cf. Lösch

13
The term’s prefix might be misleading at first sight, as transdifference does
not emphasize the bridging of differences, but rather a multiplicity (or co-
presence) of differences and the tensions generated in the spaces between (cf.
also Breinig 2006: 72).
 Points of Departure 27

2005: 28). In confrontational situations in which multiple differences

collide, the conceptual borderlines of categories of social difference
start to oscillate and become unstable, but are not necessarily un-
hinged.
One of the concept’s main strengths is that, unlike more estab-
lished terms such as hybridity or transculturation (see, for example,
Welsch 1995), transdifference is open to any category of identity and
difference. Its openness enables the critic to take racial and ethnic dif-
ferences into account simultaneously with differences of gender, so-
cial background, age, global spatial positionings, and so forth. Multi-
cultural feminisms, as a case in point, have shown how plural affilia-
tions complicate political alliances and allegiances, and thus could be
seen as an identity politics based on transdifferent subject-positions.
Necessarily, such a politics also has to acknowledge that for ethnically
and otherwise marginalized subjects, strategic essentialisms, as pro-
posed repeatedly in the work of Gayatri Spivak, bell hooks, or Stuart
Hall, may be a necessary basis for political action without abandoning
anti-essentialist positions. Furthermore, transdifferential thought con-
cedes that differences do not automatically dissolve via syncretism or
hybridization, but may, in contrast, repeatedly and continually pro-
duce tension; intrasubjectively, transdifferences create what Norma
Alarcón has termed “multi-voiced subjects” (1990: 364) who effect
dissonance rather than harmony.
The notion of transdifference as a heuristic analytical tool is
compatible with various subject theories currently theorized and de-
bated. It can, for instance, be understood in association with Rosi
Braidotti’s conception of nomadic subjects, which recognizes the po-
litical advantage of collective identities based on difference categories,
yet argues for an understanding of such identities as moveable al-
liances based on the fictitiousness of a common ground.14 Believing in
“the empowering force of […] political fictions” (1994a: 3), Braidotti
finds “empowering in the practice of ‘as if’ […] precisely its potential
for opening up, through successive repetitions and mimetic strategies,
spaces where alternative forms of agency can be engendered” (1994a:
7). Thus, if women (migrants; ethnic others; the working class; …)

14
On the problematic implications of the nomadic in Braidotti, Deleuze, and
others, cf. chapter four of this study.
28 Roads of Her Own

conceive of themselves as women (as migrants; as ethnic others; as

working class; …) while simultaneously (ac)know(ledg)ing that their
collective basis is but a strategic assumption and using this under-
standing politically, this stance might indeed result in new alliances, in
mobile subject positions and identity formations, and in political as
well as personal agency. Thus implicitly, Braidotti recognizes incom-
mensurable and/or conflicting differences, yet transcends this incom-
mensurability by postulating transient moments of nomadic al-
liances.15 From this perspective, Braidotti’s theory of nomadic subjec-
tivity can be seen as a strategy for creating agency in response to phe-
nomena of transdifference. In Nomadic Subjects, she argues for “a fe-
minist nomadic project that allows for internal contradictions and at-
tempts to negotiate between [these]” (1994a: 31).
In the context of an analysis of literature and other works of cul-
tural production, transdifference can be examined as both a so-
cial/psychological and a textual phenomenon. The manifestation of
the latter greatly varies according to the formal qualities of a narrative;
popular, ‘lowbrow’ road novels articulate conflicting differences more
often on the level of emplotment, while postmodern, ‘highbrow’ narr-
atives or prose poems make use of a broader scope of aesthetic means
to do so. In my readings, I am focusing on the ways these texts articu-
late transdifferential tension, keeping in mind the range of aesthetic
means available to each. The main concern is to address how a text is
troubled, polyphonic, or dissonant due to such tensions, how thus it
might itself acquire a transdifferent quality, and how transdifferent
narrative tension is resolved by diegetic or aesthetic solutions. In her
conception of a transdifferential hermeneutics, Angela Walz argues
that transdifference is useful for a literary analysis focusing on the
“erzähltechnische […] Mittel […], mit denen Texte Ambivalenzen
und Mehrdeutigkeit produzieren oder das Unsagbare im Sinne des

15
Cf. Braidotti: “As a figuration of contemporary subjectivity, […] the nomad is
a postmetaphysical, intensive, multiple entity, functioning in a net of inter-
connections. S/he cannot be reduced to a linear, teleological form of subjectiv-
ity but is rather the site of multiple connections. S/he is embodied, and there-
fore cultural; […] s/he is complex, endowed with multiple capacities for inter-
connectedness in the impersonal mode. […] One of her/his historical tasks is
how to restore a sense of intersubjectivity that would allow for the recognition
of differences to create a new kind of bonding” (1994a: 36).
 Points of Departure 29

kulturell Unterdrückten, Verworfenen erzählerisch zur Darstellung ge-

langt” (2005: 17).16 Thus, a transdifferential hermeneutics sheds light
onto “Brüche und Inkonsistenzen in narrativen Identitäten […], ohne
zugleich – zugunsten der Kontinuität eines Textes – Leerstellen besei-
tigen, Widersprüche glätten oder Ambivalenzen durch feste Bedeu-
tungen ersetzen zu müssen” (ibid.).17 Although transdifferent textual
tensions, expressing the cultural abject,18 might equally lead to a reso-
lution of tension and the suppression of difference, I agree with Walz
that a narratology revised through the lens of transdifference helps lo-
cate suppressed elements and options in a text through its focus on
discontinuities and dissonances (2005: 28-9). In this view, literary
texts tend not to yield a unified interpretation that would characterize
them as either subversive or affirmative – instead, both subversive and
affirmative elements can occur side by side.19 Further, transdifferent
contradictions within the text produce or obstruct meaning-making
significantly; rather than dismissing a work of fiction because of its
inherent contradictions, any analysis drawing on transdifference fo-
cuses instead on identifying and accepting these contradictions as cul-
turally meaningful.
16
Tr.: “narrative means by which texts produce ambivalences and polysemy or
[by which] the unspeakable in the sense of the culturally suppressed [or] ab-
ject comes to be represented in the narrative”, AG.
17
Tr.: “fractures and inconsistencies in narrative identities […], without simul-
taneously – for the benefit of a text’s continuity – having to efface gaps,
smooth out contradictions, or replace ambivalences by fixed meanings”, AG.
18
Walz emphasizes the expression of the cultural abject: “Mit einer narrativen
Hermeneutik im Zeichen von Transdifferenz kommen dagegen jene Erzähl-
strategien in den Blick, mit denen die Ideologie konventioneller Erzählungen
bewusst hintertrieben und dekonstruiert wird, folglich auch Verfahren, mit
denen es gelingt, das Unsagbare, das sind Erfahrungen, die nicht in eine ein-
heitliche Identität rückführbar sind, dennoch zur Darstellung zu bringen”
(2005: 34). Tr.: “With a narrative hermeneutics characterized by transdiffer-
ence, however, those narratological strategies come into view that deliberately
thwart and deconstruct the ideology of conventional narrations, and conse-
quently also methods with which it is possible to represent the unspeakable,
experiences that cannot be integrated into a uniform identity”, AG.
19
Cf. Walz (2005: 29): “Vielmehr ist die Pluralität von Diskursen bzw. von
Stimmen untrennbar mit der Annahme einer Vielzahl von kulturellen und
ideologischen (Erzähl-)Universen verbunden”. Tr.: “Much rather, the plurality
of discourses and voices is inextricably tied to the assumption of a multitude
of cultural and ideological (narratological) universes”, AG.
30 Roads of Her Own

In women’s road literature, female protagonists are usually cha-

racterized by and confronted with multiple differences, and the vari-
ous texts create, handle, and resolve theses tensions in a variety of
ways. First of all, as I have argued above, the gendered body’s move-
ment across the country places the literary subject in a public arena, in
which different and dissimilar subjects potentially cross each other’s
trajectories; these encounters often bring multiple differences into di-
alogue. Second, however, the social space of the road and the roadside
is not equally accessible and usable for everyone, and thus the fiction-
al road itself is structured in a highly gendered, classed, and racialized
way. As a space, the road is thus transdifferentially structured (e.g. ac-
cording to region, demography, economic structure, historical mark-
ers, etc.), bringing certain categories of difference to the fore while
suppressing others. Third, many protagonists in the road novels ana-
lyzed in the following come from multicultural settings that are further
pluralized by their journeys, which lead them to encounter ever more
‘Others’ – identity groups, (sub)cultures, or individuals. In the diege-
sis, this situation can result in conflicts of loyalty as well as in contra-
dictory perceptions, usages, and creations of textually created social
space(s). When conflicting identifications and affiliations are precipi-
tated by the textual setting of the road as a cultural crossroads, the nar-
rated social space is produced in a similarly fragmented and transitory
manner: the simultaneity of identifications in terms of gender, ethnici-
ty, class, or religion, generates conflicting perceptions of self and oth-
er, of social and spatial relationality.
The texts discussed in this study articulate transdifferent ten-
sions and ambiguities largely because of the multicultural, gendered
setting of the American road(side) that acts as a catalyst for irresolva-
ble differences and dissonances located within the narrating and/or
narrated subjectivity of the female itinerant. As I will be arguing
throughout this book, they probe discursive dichotomous boundaries
pertaining to the gendered space of the road. Depending on geograph-
ical, ethnic, and social context, foundational territorial narratives of
U.S.-American and, in one case, Canadian nationhood are questioned
and unmasked as resting on the construction of gendered, ethnic, and
social alterities. Diverging lines of gendered, sexual, ethnic, and/or
social differences (precipitated by the traversal of a ‘homeland’ that is
largely alien to the protagonist) clash, are negotiated and rewritten on
fictional highways. The road as a fictional social space, articulated in
 Points of Departure 31

literary terms, thus becomes a social space contested on both narrative

and formal as well as on diegetic-symbolic levels. The female vagrant
is as much concerned with this contestation as the fictional so-
cial/geographical space. In this view, spatial agency refers not only to
the extension of individual agency by way of mobility, but also to an
intervention in dominant structures of socio-cultural spaces as, in Mi-
chel de Certeau’s (1988) terms, a tactic of resistance.20
By way of transgressing such boundaries, the texts under dis-
cussion not only interrogate a normative separate sphere model of so-
cial space, but also show how this late 18th-century middle-class ide-
ology (Hausen 1977) continues to impact the structure of social space
and gender norms. By the very act of writing the female subject out of
the home and onto the road, these narratives deterritorialize femininity
and revise the discursively ‘masculinized’ road space (cf. chapter
two); in this context, the car itself functions as a vehicle that blurs the
very distinctions between feminine/domestic/private and mascu-
line/public spaces. The confrontation with hegemonic normative spa-
tial structures that attribute certain spaces to cultural minorities and
exclude them from others produces dissonant voices that articulate
painful feelings of exclusion, anger, and fear as well as a pleasurable
defiance, transgression, and adventurousness. Yet transgressive resis-
tance against normative structures of inclusion and exclusion, as they
are variably articulated in these texts, is frequently interrupted by
narrative strategies suppressing or regulating this endeavor, thus em-
phasizing that texts are never autonomous of hegemonic discourses.
Aesthetically, for instance, the generic imprint of the masculine road
novel and road movie, which has arguably turned these genres into
“formula stories” (Cawelti 1976), often seems to limit the potential of
formal transgression in women’s road books. Yet if women’s road
narratives are considered parodies or even imitations in Linda Hut-
cheon’s or Homi Bhabha’s understanding, their function is necessarily
subversive to some extent, for they repeat with a significant (gen-
dered) difference this masculine imprint, thereby denying the mascu-
20
I am aware of the problematic binary structure of de Certeau’s (1988) argu-
ment of hegemonic strategies and subversive tactics, but I am using his
thoughts on spatial intervention for his emphasis on the potential interruption
in hegemonic structures inherent in common social practices (such as the
American road trip).
32 Roads of Her Own

line original its exclusive symbolic power. Indeed, women’s road

narratives make use of various generic formulae and literary registers,
from the conventional quest to picaresque chick-lit. They often fuse or
combine literary forms, thereby producing a deconstructive effect with
regard to the masculine ‘original’.
Thus aesthetically, one commonality of the selected road books
is indeed what Hutcheon (1992) has called “double talking”: women’s
road narratives repeat the dominant masculine model with a difference
(which, in Hutcheon’s conception of parody, is not necessarily hu-
morous). For Hutcheon, “[p]arody is a weapon against marginaliza-
tion: it literally works to incorporate that upon which it ironically
comments” (1986: 226). However, there are limits to this subversive-
ness, for parody “can be both inside and outside the dominant dis-
course whose critique it embodies” (ibid.; cf. also her book Theory of
Parody, 1985).
From this perspective, the function of women’s road novels is
twofold – as renewal and critique. The texts oscillate between these
functions in a transdifferent manner that often results in ambivalent
textual politics, contradictory endings, and brittle narratives. This
transdifferent situation is not only due to formal limitations, however,
but also to this literature’s attempt at revising multiply encoded spa-
tialities. The difficulty of imagining and, even more so, of maintaining
imagined alternative spaces against social norms and power structures
results in awkward textual practices such as unconvincing narrative
closures, affirmative endings, or no closure at all.

1.3. Route Map/Travel Plan

In the chapter to follow, I will explore the gendered cultural history of

the American road novel in the second half of the 20th century, fol-
lowed by an overview of the relevant scholarship. The chapter ad-
dresses the discursive intertwinings of genre and gender as well as the
socio-political context of the emergence of women’s road narratives,
such as second-wave feminism.
In chapter three, I move from literary spaces to social spaces,
or, more specifically, to the concept of gendered space as it has been
developed in feminist cultural geography. I argue that cultural texts ar-
 Points of Departure 33

ticulate and critique dominant gendered spatialities; therefore, it is this

theoretical background that provides a lens through which I read the
road texts discussed in chapters four to six. Arguing from this spatial
perspective, I have identified three main tropes of mobility in wom-
en’s road texts – tropes that structure women’s road literature accord-
ing to three distinct paradigms of movement. These tropes, defined by
the specific narrative journey’s motivation and by the text’s specific
conception of home, by and large determine not only the strategies
used in the telling of a road story, but also the focus of their cultural
critique.
First, the quest narratives discussed in chapter four are primari-
ly motivated by the desire to arrive. This arrival may be linked to an
actual geographical or to an imaginary-metaphorical location that
represents the idea of a better, more meaningful, more liberated life.
The question guiding this chapter is whether the quest in America,
with its master narrative of the white masculine journey west and its
implications of colonization and the subjugation of the land under an
Anglo civilizatory paradigm, can be rewritten by women’s literature to
circumvent colonial and gendered mastery. While Doris Betts’ Head-
ing West (4.3.1.) and Sharlene Baker’s Finding Signs (4.3.2.) both use
the tradition of the romance and the westering tale to articulate their
feminist quests for liberation, the former’s Southern-conservative
background tones down its feminist impulse and ultimately imposes
on the text a narrative return to a rather conventional notion of domes-
ticity. The latter escapes this closure by the text’s suggestion of home
as transitory and dynamic. The cultural baggage of westering narra-
tives is even more apparent in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees
and Pigs in Heaven (4.4.2.), even though these popular novels em-
phasize female community and nurturance as well as cultural diversi-
ty, and envision an alternative version of family, motherhood, and
home. Hilma Wolitzer’s Hearts and Chelsea Cain’s Dharma Girl
(4.4.3.) share this agenda with Kingsolver’s texts, but exemplify more
successful attempts to abandon both the heterosexual romance and the
utopia of the American West in favor of mother-daughter plots that
create the road as a dynamic space of familial connection. These four
quest narratives turn from a search for a geographical destination to a
search for community and understanding. The mother-daughter plot is
also central to Anne Roiphe’s Jewish-American road novel Long Divi-
sion (4.5.), which I will discuss in an interstitial chapter as representa-
34 Roads of Her Own

tive of a subversive appropriation of the quest by way of para-

nomadism, focusing on cultural difference and the creation of alterna-
tive spatialities in a multicultural feminist context.
The second trope of mobility that is of structural importance for
a wide array of women’s road novels is thus that of para-nomadism
(chapter five), a form of mobility that resembles nomadic wanderings.
Para-nomadic journeys, in contradistinction to the current plethora of
theories in which nomadic mobility is somewhat romanticized, are de-
fined here as ongoing journeys motivated by economic or political ne-
cessity (rather than wanderlust and adventurousness). These journeys
are frequently articulated in women’s literatures in order to rewrite
various historical legacies of coerced mobility as empowering; just
how this can be done is the question guiding this chapter. Diane Glan-
cy’s Claiming Breath and various short stories from The Voice That
Was in Travel (5.2.) parallel the Cherokee Trail of Tears with the lack
of spatial agency predicted not only by a normative femininity, but al-
so by economic hardship, motherhood and divorce, and the difficult
legacy of mixed heritages. With a different ethnic background, Cyn-
thia Kadohata’s Japanese-American road novel The Floating World
(5.3.) also appropriates a legacy of coerced mobility by transforming
the historical experience of the nisei generation during World War II
into a story of sansei empowerment and a home on the road. Taken
together, these road texts voice a different experience of mobility of-
ten neglected in discussions of ‘the road’ in America. The last road
text examined in chapter five, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays (5.4.),
may not be troubled with ethnic legacies of coerced mobility, yet also
focus on involuntary movements of a gendered nature. Didion’s book
epitomizes the confined mobility of white women, depicting the pro-
tagonist’s movements as unavoidable, but, at the same time, quest, es-
cape, and self-determined adventure as impossible.
A third branch of women’s road novels written since the 1970s
is concerned with rewriting mobility as a pleasurable and empowering
adventure. Harking back to the literary tradition of the picaresque,
these texts emphasize women’s wanderlust and recklessness, often
with a distinct sense of postmodern playfulness. The ways in which
this tradition is used and transformed by women’s literature in order to
rearticulate the road narrative in different cultural settings is the main
focus of this chapter. Set in a Canadian context, Aritha van Herk’s No
Fixed Address (5.5.) presents picaresque mobility as a strategy for
 Points of Departure 35

survival on the one hand and a way to deconstruct, in postmodern fa-

shion, traditional feminine spatialities on the other. As the picaresque
journey was a common social practice in the counter-cultural context
of the late 1960s, a second sub-group of women’s picaresque road no-
vels, exemplified here by Michelle Carter’s On Other Days While
Going Home (6.2.1.) and Katherine Dunn’s Truck (6.2.2.), focuses on
unmasking the unequal gender relations of this subcultural formation;
both Carter and Dunn thus re-write 60s’ picarismo from a young
woman’s perspective. The humorous quality of the picaresque tale,
which conventionally has been used to alleviate the painful expe-
riences of social subjects marginalized by in-betweenness – ethnic,
sexual, or otherwise – is a significant feature in these road novels. Eri-
ka Lopez’ illustrated road-novel Flaming Iguanas (6.3.) is exemplary
not only for its humorous rewriting of the cross-country adventure, but
also for its innovative formal transformation of the picaresque road
text, fusing it with contemporary pop-cultural forms such as chick-lit
and comic art.
The three narrative patterns of mobility are by no means ‘pure’,
and the narrative and aesthetic diversity of road texts can by no means
be reduced to these three tropes as distinct and separate. For this rea-
son, interstitial chapters focus each on a narrative in which these
tropes interact. In Anne Roiphe’s Long Division (4.5.), as indicated
above, both questing and para-nomadic mobilities are articulated as
interrelated; Aritha van Herk’s No Fixed Address (5.5.) demonstrates
how nomadic and picaresque mobilities can be intertwined.
Each narrative’s individual articulation of the quest, the para-
nomadic, and the picaresque paradigms of mobility – informed by dif-
ferent cultural, ethnic, religious, and other contexts – structures the
specific spatialities created in the text. While the quest is perhaps the
most traditional form, resting on ideas of growing roots and finding
the ideal home, the nomad inhabits a permanently transient space and
dismantles the duality of home and away, private and public; the pica-
resque tale is arguably the most radical of the three by disdaining the
necessity of home altogether. In my readings, I aim to analyze such li-
terary spatialities in order to uncover and theorize socio-spatial power
structures that shape contemporary North American women’s imagi-
nations of the road, spatialities which shape female agency and expe-
rience, in literature and beyond.
2. Contemporary American Women’s Road Narratives:
Genre and Gender

The car is America and America is the car. The car is the myth
and metaphor for America. […] Yet like everything else in
this country that involves speed, power and a lot of reckless
insanity, the car has always been associated with the male: he
got drunk in it and usually wrecked it and miraculously sur-
vived (or didn’t), he used it to augment and bolster a failed
ego, he made it into a dangerous weapon, he transformed it in-
to a substitute for the penis he wondered if he had (enough of),
he used it to ensure upward mobility, he went on the road to
escape in it, and he made time, and babies, with as many
women as he could persuade to explore the back seat with him.

- Lydia Simmons,
“Not From the Back Seat”

2.1. The Road Narrative as Genre

As a literary genre, the road narrative was investigated as early as the

1930s. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s long essay “Forms of Time and Chrono-
tope in the Novel” (1981/1937-38), he argues that chance meetings
and other interpersonal encounters account for the dialogic quality of
the road as a narrative space. In this essay, Bakhtin argues that the
road has been so important for the history of the novel because it is
privileged for chance encounters:

On the road […], the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied
people – representatives of all social classes, estates, religions, natio-
nalities, ages – intersect at one spatial and temporal point. People who
are normally kept separate by social and spatial distance can acciden-
tally meet; any contrast may crop up, the most various fates may col-
lide and interweave with one another. On the road the spatial and tem-
poral series defining human fates and lives combine with one another
in distinctive ways, even as they become more complex and more
concrete by the collapse of social distances. (ibid. 243; my emphasis)
38 Roads of Her Own

The fact that social hierarchies are never completely suspended in the
course of the journey is no concern of Bakhtin’s essay. The argument
that social distance is at stake and rendered precarious in cross-
country travel is convincing, however, suggesting that “roadscapes
provide vibrant cultural contact zones”, as Neil Campbell paraphrases
it (2001: 282). The material quality of the road as a “practiced place”
(de Certeau 1988: 117) in which diverse social, sexual, and ethnic
subjects meet and interact renders it both a dynamic space of mobility
and a symbolic space continually filled with new meaning by a variety
of spatial agents – filled not like an empty container, but articulated in
being practiced. Thus, for instance, the ‘road west’ has been narrated
in multifarious ways, often in contradistinction to the colonialist fron-
tier doctrine of western expansion.
The road narrative’s persistence and expansive nature certainly
has to do with the road’s chronotopic – i.e. temporal-spatial – quality
as a site of encounter, from which its mythical status as allegedly
“democratic, open to all and opposed to the closed” (Campbell 2001:
282) derives. Thus, the road text can be read as an articulation of the
“philosophical capacity to shift views and destabilize assumptions”
(ibid. 284) and has therefore attracted emergent articulations by mar-
ginal social groups. The genre offers what Katherine Mills has called
“an excellent case study of how people at the margins play with the
mobility of meaning” (1999: 24). The genre’s attractiveness for writ-
ers with a socio-political agenda has to do with the fact that it has in-
herited from the picaresque a tradition that depicts the road as a privi-
leged public space in which difference is negotiated and selves and
others are brought into dialogue. Journey and chance encounter, as
they are narrated in the road text, offer the potential to imagine a
community based on communication and negotiation rather than on a
bonding of homogeneous identities on common ground and soil, on
uniformity and shared essences or roots. As Neil Campbell and Row-
land A. Sherrill suggest,

the “roadwork” of journey, encounter, alliance, interrelationship, and

contestation might form some basis for living differently […], moving
people beyond their established patterns of being to other perspectives
so as to overcome “the problems of what to make of and how best to
live in the pluriform human theater that is their country, indeed how to
manage life in relation to their neighbors’ stark othernesses”. (Camp-
bell 2001: 280, quoting Sherrill 2000: 171)
 Contemporary American Women’s Road Narratives 39

Venturing out from this perspective of plurality, I am hesitant to sug-

gest a clear-cut definition of the road narrative, although the inclusion
of certain generic elements seems obligatory. In order to define the
road genre, according to Ronald Primeau’s Romance of the Road
(1996), classification must be descriptive and flexible, for the road
narrative is in itself quite malleable and thus can be used for a variety
of literary and non-literary purposes.1 Perhaps the genre’s expansive-
ness is one of its most distinct characteristics, as Neil Campbell argues
(2001: 280), referring to Rowland A. Sherrill’s observation that road
texts often blur genres and transgress established forms (2000: 55-8).
Although road texts can appear in various cultural forms in
film, music, and literature (such as novels, short stories, poetry, dra-
ma, or hybrids thereof),2 they are sometimes perceived as “formulaic”
(Primeau 1996: 8, Elliot 2000: 203), following certain patterns and
displaying distinctive features. This tendency to formulaity has to be
seen in connection with the fact that road narratives constitute an in-
tentionally popular literary genre (Primeau 1996: 11). However, these
formulaic features are few: specifically with regard to literature, per-
haps the only common diegetic characteristic shared by all road novels

1
The recent bulk of journalistic road narratives mark only one genre develop-
ment that testifies to this malleability. It includes travel writing and adventure
(e.g. Cameron Tuttle’s Bad Girl’s Guide to the Open Road, Irma Kurtz’ Great
American Bus Ride, Richard Grant’s American Nomads, Martha J. Retallick’s
Discovering America. Bicycle Adventures in All 50 States, Melissa Holbrook-
Pierson’s The Perfect Vehicle or Mary Morris’ Angels & Aliens), sports re-
ports (e.g. Virginia Mudd Madden’s Across America on the Yellow Brick
Road, Cindy Ross’ A Woman’s Journey, or Jane Schnell’s Changing Gears),
or political journalism (e.g. Doris Haddock’s Granny D). Despite the fact that
this study is concerned mainly with literary road-narratives in a rather narrow
sense of the term, it is also important to note that the road novel is a typical
genre in which fiction and nonfiction overlap (cf. Primeau 1996: 9, Ette 2000:
37-8). Nonfictional traces – of autobiography, for example – of course affect
aesthetic expression, narrative perspective, style, and register.
2 On the generic effects of medial differences between various forms of road
texts, especially on film and television, cf. K. Mills (1999), whose main thesis
is that road stories have always migrated between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’
forms, “between rebellion and mainstream commodification, between old me-
dia and new” (cf. dissertation abstract, s.p.); she thus calls the road story a
“fugitive genre” (6). A brilliant study of the road movie from a spatial per-
spective has been published by Amelie Soyka (2002).
40 Roads of Her Own

is that the road is the major setting which informs the narrative plot.
Yet, space in the road narrative functions not only as a passive back-
ground, a scene characters pass through, but emerges as a distinct nar-
rated space as people and places interact (Primeau 1996: 3). Themes
are often derived from a rich intertextual genre memory3 and include
the escape from hardship and constraint into a narrated space set off
from the ordinary (Laird 1983: 248), and the search for liberty and the
‘true self’, or discovery and exploration, adventure and wanderlust. In
fact, the fusion with other genres has led Neil Campbell to call the
road novel a “transgenre” (2001: 279): the road narrative’s generic
legacy includes the picaresque, the pastoral, the travelogue, the Bil-
dungsroman, the quest, and the story of initiation (Primeau 1996: IX
& Lackey 1997: 8-10). The list of themes is inexhaustible, however,
as new themes are continually introduced to the genre and older ones
wane. The road novel, like the travel book, conventionally follows a
tripartite structure of departure, actual journey, and arrival. Like the
notion of the ‘authentic self’ to be found somewhere ‘out there’ and to
be brought back from the journey, this structure has been repeatedly
challenged in terms of its linear, teleological implications, especially
in postmodern literature.
Though related, most discussions of the road text as genre tend
to implicitly distinguish it from the travel narrative. They mostly imp-
ly that the road narrative seems to focus on travel within a certain
geographical area and cultural context with which the protagonist is
familiar, whereas travel literature emphasizes alienation and unfami-
liarity by way of geographical distance. Correspondingly, criticism
drawing on this distinction often focuses on the colonial implications
of travel writing (e.g. S. Mills 1991) but leave such implications un-
examined in the context of the road narrative (cf. e.g. Primeau 1996 &
1999, Lackey 1997). The two conventions are thus usually presented
as two distinct literary genres. Mikhail Bakhtin, tracing the road text
primarily back to the picaresque tradition, argued that “one crucial
feature of the ‘road’ common to all the various types of novels [he has
discussed]” is that “the road is always one that passes through familiar

3
The term, coined by Mikhail Bakhtin in “The Bildungsroman and Its Signifi-
cance in the History of Realism” (1986/1937-38) is also used by Primeau
(1996).
 Contemporary American Women’s Road Narratives 41

territory, and not through some exotic alien world […]; it is the soci-
ohistorical heterogeneity of one’s own country that is revealed and
depicted (and for this reason, if one may speak at all about the exotic
here, then it can only be the ‘social exotic’)” (1981/1937-38: 245).
This peculiarity of the road text serves to distinguish it from “that oth-
er line of development” present in “the novel of travel” (ibid.). How-
ever, one could argue against this definition that social differences
render the distinction between ‘one’s own’ and ‘alien’ territories or
cultures highly problematic, a counter-argument in fact anticipated by
Bakhtin’s bracketed insertion. Also, the underlying notion of culture
in his distinction between familiar and unfamiliar territories suggests a
rather static, closed, and uniform conception of the term, thereby ob-
scuring the heterogeneous nature of culture(s), their permeable boun-
daries and ‘traveling’ aspects (which James Clifford has famously
emphasized in “Traveling Cultures”, 1992). Taking these points into
consideration, I do not suggest not to distinguish the road novel from
the travel book at all, but propose instead an awareness of its fuzzy
generic boundaries. Road texts can be thought of as one form of travel
writing (cf. also Enevold 2004: 73); however, one must be aware that
the road text itself is not uniform, ranging from narratives about ad-
venture to stories about coerced movement. Often it is exactly the ten-
sion between adventurous travel and forced movement that inspires
road literature of all variants (Liebs 1991: 263).4
I therefore suggest not dividing travel literature – which por-
trays a range of travel experiences – into fixed, circumscribed itero-
logical categories, as Ottmar Ette (2000) or Michel Butor (1992) do.
Butor, for instance, argues for eleven clear-cut categories of travel
writing, a formalist-structuralist approach I find not only problematic
regarding its contingency, but also because it is not necessarily enrich-
ing for the cultural criticism of travel and travel writing. As it be-
comes clear that the genre is variable, changing, and flexible, I am fol-
lowing Werner Reinhart’s claim that generic affiliation should already
be understood as an act of interpretation rather than mere classifica-
tion (2001: 133). In a similar vein, my focus on road texts by women

4
Especially in the context of women’s and multiethnic travel writing, critics
have increasingly called for the inclusion of narratives of involuntary travel
into the study of travel literature (see e.g. Jedamski et al. 1993: 13).
42 Roads of Her Own

is an interpretative choice; it is not based on the assumption that wom-

en’s writing is self-evidently different from men’s, that it shows
common features, or that it is a uniform genre.
In the specific American context, Ronald Primeau’s Romance of
the Road: The Literature of the American Highway (1996) was one of
the first monographs to analyze the significance of the road narrative
in American culture. Following Raymond Williams’ tripartition of
dominant, residual, and emergent ideologies (cf. Problems in Mate-
rialism and Culture, 1982) that can be articulated in cultural texts,
Primeau introduces road stories as narratives which, as a genre, ex-
press these values simultaneously and in interrelation:

Road narratives might argue for the individual in a mass-dominated

society [i.e., the dominant discourse, AG] by celebrating the residual
values of the pioneers on the frontier. At the same time, the road is a
popular and acceptable place to express new meanings and values that
lie outside what is either dominant or residual. […] On the road, the
emergent is most often manifest as escape, political protest, or social
reform and may be particularly evident in road works by women and
ethnic minorities. (1996: 4)

This threefold dimension of the road text is one major reason why the
road narrative is a popular literary genre today. Since it has also been
said to be a distinctly American genre (Campbell 2001: 279) or even
“[a]n American Archetype” (Barbara Odabashian on the road movie,
1990: 50), one has to examine it, as Williams would have argued, in
its specific cultural and historical context in order to understand, e.g.,
its contemporary transformations by cultural minorities.5
The hegemonic aspects of the myths of American mobility have
already been outlined in my introduction. For the second half of the
20th century, it is important to add that the road story emerged, follow-
ing the publication of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957, as celebratory
of rebellion and as a prominent site of social criticism. Thus, Ke-
rouac’s novel, however conservative in terms of its portrayal of wom-
en, discursively paved the way for cultural minorities to adapt the ge-
5
This revision by cultural minorities is most apparent in the plethora of Ameri-
can road movies with a social concern produced since the late 1980s, such as
Powwow Highway (1989) and Boys on the Side (1995) and, most recently,
TransAmerica (2005) or My Blueberry Nights (2007).
 Contemporary American Women’s Road Narratives 43

nre to their own concerns. Partaking in the mythical American on-the-

road experience, “non-dominant communities use their unique histo-
ries of difference to throw the lacunae of the past road stories into
high relief” (Mills 1999: 10), a fact that has diversified the genre to a
great extent.
The fact that genre and genre criticism are not detached from
social contexts and values becomes evident when we review its gen-
dered generic history as well as literary criticism on the American
road narrative. Though sparse in itself, criticism has foregrounded
male contributions to the genre until recently – despite the fact that the
genre has also traditionally attracted other voices from the social and
cultural margins of America as well. Genre and gender are to be con-
ceived of as related discourses, and this is also true for the road narra-
tive, as Lidia Curti contends: “genre is traversed by the discourse of
sexual difference as if the vicinity of the two English words – genre
and gender […] – recalled coincidence and dislocation, obedience and
transgression at one and the same time.” (qtd. in Enevold 2004: 73)
“The literature of the American highway has been dominated for most
of its history by the values and attitudes of white males”, Ronald Pri-
meau argues: “[w]hen women and minority authors take to the road,
they bring a different perspective and experience to their travels and
writing”, and thus also possibly reshape certain genre conventions
(1996: IX).6 The obvious danger of reducing “the complexity of the
text to one main parameter” (S. Mills 1991: 29) – in this case gender –
is taken into consideration by my use of transdifference as an analyti-
cal category throughout my readings. This in mind, what Sara Mills
has called the “double-voiced quality of women’s writing” (1991: 44)
should turn into an awareness of its “multiply-voiced quality”.7
6
Related arguments put forth in Primeau’s study are less convincing. Not only
does the author erroneously introduce autobiography as a defining feature of
the genre, he also neglects the interplay of generic and social difference by de-
fining “American road narratives” as fiction and nonfiction books “by Ameri-
cans who travel by car throughout the country either on a quest or simply to
get away” (1996: 1). Limiting transportation to driving a car alone for reasons
unclear, Primeau also excludes road novels by non-American citizens, as well
as stories of non-voluntary cross-country journeys.
7
Cf. also Ulla Siebert, who calls for an analysis of the cross-sections of gender,
race, class, sexual identity, and nationality in terms of power structures and
ideological reproduction in women’s travel literature (1993: 150).
44 Roads of Her Own

2.2. The Masculine Legacy

Neil Campbell ends his essay “Road Narratives and Western Identity”
(2001) by expressing his dissatisfaction that despite the road’s sym-
bolic textual potential, road books “could go further” than just to the
point where they shift between memoir and fiction, travelogue, histo-
ry, and myth:

The journeys in road literature must reflect the mobile sensibility evi-
dent in so much western writing, the persistence of ‘routes’ as much
as ‘roots’ as a determinant of identity and belonging, the attention to
hybridity and exile, and the possibilities of contact. (287)

This claim is understandable if, as is the unfortunate case in Camp-

bell’s critique, road narratives by cultural minorities are neglected.
Reviewing the genre’s history since the mid-20th century, however,
Campbell’s oversight is by no means an exception.
Critics agree that the history of the American road narrative in
the second half of the 20th century begins with Jack Kerouac’s On the
Road (1957), which has arguably shaped the genre and its associative
characteristics like no other text. According to Primeau, Kerouac’s
book “brought formal recognition of the cultural ritual [of going on
the road], and the genre began to accumulate its own distinctive fea-
tures” (1996: 8). He continues that “as readers got used to certain road
genre conventions, authors were both restrained to follow those paths
and freed to modify the form” (ibid.). Not only has On the Road been
a best-selling novel with continuing popularity ever since its publica-
tion, especially among younger readers, it is also the work that ap-
pears most often as an explicit or implicit intertext in contemporary
road narratives.
Rereadings of the countercultural literature of the beat genera-
tion in terms of its portrayal of both femininity and masculinity would
draw attention to the ‘all-male community’ that On the Road attempts
to counterpose against prevailing norms domesticity and the bread-
winning ethic of the 1950s (Ehrenreich 1983, esp. 52-67). As Sidonie
Smith has put it, women in the novel are silent passengers whose sta-
sis, if at all, is only momentarily interrupted for the men’s sake:
“[t]hey are momentary points of sessility that bracket mobility, or they
are pawns to be maneuvered in the game of male bonding, a bonding
 Contemporary American Women’s Road Narratives 45

central to renegade masculinity.” (2001: 178; cf. also 176-83) The first
sentence of On the Road is programmatic from this angle as it estab-
lishes the relationship between Sal Paradise, its narrator, and Dean
Moriarty, its mythical hero, as predicated on the absence of women: “I
first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.” (1) Throughout
the book, Dean’s and Sal’s masculinity is redefined by their commun-
al “auto-mobility”,8 the performance of what they perceive to be the
“one and noble function of the time” (134): being on the road.
Throughout the novel, Sal and Dean’s mobility is threatened by the
presence of women who are not satisfied with either staying at home
(‘the beaten wives’) or brief stints in the backseat (‘the beat chicks’).
The “holy road” (139) is indeed envisioned as open; why, Sal asks
himself, think about unhappy relationships “when all the golden land’s
ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to sur-
prise you and make you glad you’re alive to see”? (135).9 At one
point, Dean takes the image of a woman framed by a window – the
antithesis of mobility – as an incentive to continue their runaway jour-
ney: “‘that woman in that window up there, just looking down with
her big breasts hanging from her nightgown, big wide eyes. Whee.
Sal, we gotta go and never stop going…’” (240). This is only one of
many misogynist images of women as static objects of either rejection
or sexual desire in the novel; the housewives are bored (245), every
other woman is a “whore”. Dean advises Sal to be ready “to hook up
with a real great girl if [he] can only find her and cultivate her and
make her mind [his] soul as I have tried so hard with these damned
women of mine” (187).
Although Sal’s statement that “The truth of the matter is we
don’t understand our women; we blame on them [sic] and it’s all our
fault” (122) has often been quoted as if it were a corrective to the
book’s overall gender politics, Dean’s response to Sal that “it isn’t as

8
A term used by Roger Casey to describe the coupling of ideologies of move-
ment and individualism in an American context (1997: 3).
9
Of course, the tone of the novel is manic-depressive, swerving between ex-
hilaration and a somber sadness that betrays the lack of alternatives in the
rigid social conventions that shaped the 1950s in the United States, also with
respect to the possibility of men living outside the nuclear family. In this brief
discussion of On the Road, my focus is limited to the portrayal of women in
the book.
46 Roads of Her Own

simple as that” (ibid.) is significant. Thus, I do not want to suggest

that the book’s gender politics can be reduced to a misogynist dimen-
sion, although both fictional and historical accounts demonstrate that
among the “sordid hipsters of America” (54), women were relegated
to the roles of what Joyce Johnson has termed “minor characters” in
her memoir. Neither am I arguing that On the Road is a conservative
text, as it harshly criticizes normative, mainstream masculinity and
profoundly questions the conformism and racism of the American
1950s. The novel gives voice to masculine insecurities, unacknow-
ledged homosexuality (cf. esp. the narrator’s feminization at the end
of the book, when he is abandoned by Dean), and a desire for the eth-
nic Other (cf. the image of the fellahin and the overall portrayal of
African-American and Mexican cultures) that were unspeakable in
mainstream society. However, its countercultural subversiveness is al-
so clearly predicated on a negative image of women; as such, the ‘beat
chick’ functions, like cars and sex, as a prosthesis for a masculinity in
crisis (i.e., ‘threatened’ both by its own fragility and by domestic con-
finement).
A controversial discussion among cultural geographers Linda
McDowell, Tim Cresswell, and Simon Rycroft summarizes recent de-
bates about On the Road’s construction of gendered mobility quite
well. In 1996, the three authors responded to Cresswell’s essay “Mo-
bility as Resistance” (1993), in which he reads travel as rebellion in
the social context of the 1950s but argues that On the Road reinforces
hegemonic male/female and public/private dualisms. While McDo-
well’s response follows Cresswell’s argument that beat resistance
through mobility was ambivalent in its relation to hegemonic values,
she rejects what she calls “too simple a dualism between masculinity
and femininity, and their respective associations with the road and the
home” (McDowell 1996: 415). Drawing on Carolyn Cassady’s me-
moir Off the Road (1991), McDowell sees Beat women’s resistance in
the alternative version of home Cassady held against the ideal of the
nuclear family of the 1950s. She thereby counters the view that im-
mobility offers no possibility for opposition (ibid. 414-5), an argument
Janet Wolff (1992) and bell hooks (1990) brought forth: “contrary to
the view of women as passive and immobile victims, suffering until
their men returned, the wives and lovers of travelers also challenged
conventional mores in their lives.” (McDowell 1996: 415) Cresswell
in turn responds with the relative obscurity of women’s accounts of
 Contemporary American Women’s Road Narratives 47

the Beats such as Cassady’s and Johnson’s in comparison to On the

Road’s status as a literary classic that presents women as mere carica-
tures (1993: 420), contending that the main gender difference seems to
have been “that the women did not appear to have [had] the choice to
take to the road” (422), a view that Johnson’s and Cassady’s books
certainly confirm. Cresswell concludes with a hesitant response to
hooks’ “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance” (1990):

There is an appeal to taking positions of marginality and affirming

them as positions of resistance against the very asymmetrical power
relations that so often produce spaces of marginality in the first place.
hooks walks a careful line between the marginality that is imposed
[…] and that which is chosen and embraced as a site of resistance.
Occasionally, sites may be both places of repression and resistance.
Frankly, I am not sure where the marginality of the beat women falls.
The space of home is a space that has historically been imposed by the
oppressive structures of patriarchy, not one chosen as a site of radical
openness. The dualism of imposed/chosen is itself permeable. Perhaps
it is more realistic to speak of the subversion of imposed sites. (1993:
422)

In the context of my study, the debate between Cresswell and McDo-

well is emblematic not only because it highlights the danger that lies
in positing the road vis-à-vis the home as a space of resistance, but al-
so because it draws attention to the dilemma of the hegemony-agency
dialectic. At this point, Cresswell’s response is especially significant
for its portrayal of the road as a discursive formation: a masculine ter-
rain that both the continuing popularity of Kerouac’s novel and the
historical, gendered practice of the flight from domesticity have pro-
duced. Moving into the late 1960s, for instance, the road text “solidi-
fied its association with a countercultural movement that overtly re-
jected postwar domestic ideology and its prescriptions for male ful-
fillment” (Talbot 1999: 139), but again, the genderedness of this ide-
ology went largely unexamined.

2.3. Women off & on the Road

Critical engagement with the masculine legacy of the beat genera-

tion’s politics of gendered mobility began with the publication of
Joyce Johnson’s and Carolyn Cassady’s memoirs in 1983 and 1990,
48 Roads of Her Own

respectively, of excerpts of lesser known Beat narratives by women

such as Brenda Frazer’s Troia,10 and with the seminal collection of es-
says edited by Ronna Johnson and Nancy M. Grace, Girls Who Wore
Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation in 2002. Although not a
homogenous group of texts, Beat literature by women articulates their
feelings of exclusion and the struggles against social and geographical
confinements and normative domesticity. While Cassady may have
expressed her rebellion in her unconventional life style, her book also
articulates her dreams of leaving home, of joining Neal Cassady in
Mexico, for instance, and the sobering reality of her responsibilities as
a wife and mother: “When I was able to think clearly again, I knew for
sure I’d never go to Mexico, never leave the children. But I’d have to
wait for Neal’s return to find a way out and not lose the ground I’d
gained.” (Cassady 1991: 202) Joyce Johnson, who received the 1983
National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir Minor Charac-
ters, captures the beat generation’s women writers’ battles against
speechlessness, the lack of serious acceptance as artists, and their sta-
tus as decorative ornaments, “anonymous passengers on the big Grey-
hound bus of experience” (83). Such critical accounts of ‘woman’s
place’ in the beat generation were a first step toward what Jessica
Enevold has identified as women’s “appropriative turn in the evolu-
tion of the road narrative” (2004: 79).
These women’s creative engagement with the post-Kerouac,
masculinized genre began in the 1970s (Talbot 1999: 190), a decade in
which second-wave feminism radically questioned the domestic ideals
of the 1950s on a broader scale. Not entirely dissimilar to the first
women’s movement’s political agenda, challenging spatial boundaries
became part of the feminist demand of access to the public; “taking
back the street” marches, for instance, are and continue to be manife-
stations of feminist theory put into spatial practice. This preoccupation
with spatial categories such as the public and the private, domesticity
and the nuclear family, resulted, in the field of literature, in a number
of women’s narratives of the road, both by Anglo and non-Anglo
10
Though written in 1959, Troia has not been published except for excerpts like
“Breaking Out of D.C.” (in Peabody 1997: 60-4). Predating Peabody, Brenda
Knight’s anthology Women of the Beat Generation: the Writers, Artists and
Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (1996) made lesser-known texts by female
Beat poets and writers accessible to the public.
 Contemporary American Women’s Road Narratives 49

women, which, on the one hand, affirm movement as a liberatory

practice, but on the other hand emphasize that women’s spatial limita-
tions extend beyond those of hearth and home11 as they are ingrained
in all arenas of society (cf. chapter two). This double-bind is evident
in the vast majority of women’s road-stories and has indeed been used
to criticize women’s travel narratives as unable to break free from
conventional patterns (see e.g. Jennings 2004: 114, in reference to
Holland/Huggan 1998: 132). Yet from another perspective, the gen-
dered tension between liberation and containment is exactly what has
challenged the road formula:

The female road trip […] constructs female identity as both mobile
and situated, exercising agency and recognizing boundaries. In refus-
ing to romanticize women on the road, […] women writers open up
the space for women with cars to follow new paths that can re-shape
gender and domesticity[,]

as Deborah Clarke asserts (2004: 124). Thus, these writings are at-
tempts to drastically alter the genre in gendered terms; again in
Clarke’s words, “if western culture and western literature have been
predicated upon the woman in the house, then the presence of women
on the road radically unsettles assumptions of domesticity, gendered
identity, and gendered literature” (101).
Despite the steady production of North American women’s road
literature since the late 1970s and 80s, women have remained ‘off the

11
Due to historical reasons, contemporary African-American women’s literature
often envisions the home as empowering rather than as confining, as bell
hooks argues in “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance” (1990). As private prop-
erty, enslaved African-Americans, up to emancipation after the Civil War,
were denied the right to privacy or a home; subsequently, the home has fre-
quently provided the only shelter from a racist society (Rose 1993: 126,
McDowell 1999: 89). However, mobility and migration is also central to Afri-
can-American women’s writing, as Carole Boyce Davies’ chapter on “Mobil-
ity, Embodiment and Resistance” in Black Women, Writing and Identity as-
serts (1994: 148-50; on the topic of mobility in African-American literature in
general, cf. Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?” The African-
American Migration Narrative, 1995). In any case, I have not been able to lo-
cate an African-American woman’s cross-country road novel written since the
1970s. Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road (1991/1942) could be
considered an earlier road narrative fulfilling these criteria.
50 Roads of Her Own

road’ in literary criticism for much longer. Apart from a small number
of recently published monographs and a number of unpublished dis-
sertations,12 women’s road texts have experienced an incredibly poor
history of critical reception, which again reflects that the genre has
been constructed as predominantly masculine.13 In tune with this dis-
course of the road as a manly terrain, women – writers and protagon-
ists – have repeatedly appeared as either wholly absent or present only
in terms of a negative difference in the majority of critical studies of
the road narrative. Many of the road stories I analyze in this book
were written by successful, productive, and at times award-winning
authors; yet, in the few critical accounts of the road narrative as a ge-
nre, these books are usually treated as token texts. Cynthia Golomb
Dettelbach’s In the Driver’s Seat: The Automobile in American Lite-
rature and Culture (1976), often seen as the first study of the genre,
fails to examine even a single text by a female author; for all his help-
ful insights, Ronald Primeau’s Romance of the Road groups women’s
re-mappings of the road experience into one (out of eight) sections,
together with “other minorities” (1996: 107) like African-American
and Native American (male) writers. Furthermore, Primeau’s study
sees women’s road texts as a homogeneous group deviating from his
own generic expectations (cf. Paes de Barros’ criticism [2004: 3-4]),
thereby reflecting the general tendency to overlook traditions like the
feminine picaresque or early women’s travel writing as possible
sources and intertexts for, and as cultural kin to, women’s road stories.
Kris Lackey’s RoadFrames: The American Highway Narrative
(1997), another major study of the genre, mentions only a single con-
temporary road text by a female author, Katherine Dunn’s Truck, and
rarely addresses sexual difference.14 This absence is blatant also in so
12
See Slettedahl Macpherson and Paes de Barros (2004); cf. Ph.D. theses by
Lynn Jill Talbot (1999), Katherine Lawrie Mills (1999), or Lyn Elizabeth El-
liot (2000).
13
One of the first collections that draws attention to women’s road writings was
Elinor Nauen’s Ladies, Start Your Engines (1996), an anthology which hints
at an abundance of material, beginning in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The
book demonstrates that from the 1970s onwards, road adventures have been a
major theme in cultural articulations by American women of diverse back-
grounds.
14
At one point, Lackey states that “[s]haring most of the picaro’s qualities, [the
picara] may additionally use her sexual charms to get along in the world”
 Contemporary American Women’s Road Narratives 51

far as Lackey does not romanticize the open road at all; in the context
of his reading of African-American road writings, he finds that “free-
dom on the road is not mainly a product of will and space but of privi-
lege bestowed by race and class” (1997: 21).
Ronald Primeau himself tries to set the record straight in his
1999 essay “From Ma Joad to Elizabeth Berg: Women on the Road in
America”, an attempt to rescue female characters on the road from
their assigned place in the back seat, as mere companions of the ‘all-
American hero’. In this essay, Primeau addresses the complex “history
of women’s involvement with automobile travel and the literature
emerging from it” (1999: 138), at the same time lamenting the “post-
ponement of women’s rightful places in the shaping of our road litera-
ture” (ibid.). Among others, Primeau cites Janis Stout’s and Dana A.
Heller’s studies of women’s narratives of mobility for having ana-
lyzed women’s critical reshaping of the literary highway in terms of
structure and foundational mythology. While his commentary remains
problematic as it compares women’s to the ‘standard’ male road rules
and makes essentialist assumptions (“women on the road revise the
genre by slowing the pace and celebrating exploration over reaching a
destination […]. [W]omen seek relationships over conquest”, 145),
Primeau was nonetheless one of the first to highlight critical engage-
ment with the road genre by women writers, and their questioning of
the cultural construction of the road as a masculine space.
More extensive studies on women’s (sub-)versions of the genre
were published after 2000 in monographs by Heidi Slettedahl Mac-
pherson (Women’s Movement, 2000), Sidonie Smith (Moving Lives,
2001), and Deborah Paes de Barros (Fast Cars and Bad Girls, 2004),
works that will be important throughout my readings of contemporary
women’s road stories. Building on earlier accounts of women’s litera-
ture of mobility by critics like Dana Heller (The Feminization of
Quest-Romance, 1990) and Janis Stout (Through the Window, Out the
Door, 1998), these studies counter the notion that women’s literature
of the road is an exception to the male rule and instead focus on wom-
en’s (re)significations of the genre. Slettedahl Macpherson basically

(1997: 8); at another, he argues that female road novelists “know that the sex-
ual vulnerability of traveling women is naturally fascinating” (29; my empha-
sis).
52 Roads of Her Own

reviews thirty years of women’s narratives of escape by identifying

characteristic patterns for each decade: the “runaway housewife” of
the 1970s (2000: 20), the darker, fragmented stories in the context of
the feminist backlash of the 1980s (ibid. 147), and the 1990s’ “post-
feminist pragmatism” that playfully re-enacts previous narratives of
escape (ibid. 192). Furthermore, Slettedahl’s study is one of the few to
emphasize the need for a socio-spatial analysis of escape texts, as
“[w]omen writers use the motif of escape […] to interrogate the femi-
nine space and the choices made within that space” (ibid. 227). The
book highlights the idea that gendered spatial regimes result in biased
evaluations of escape: “When male characters leave relationships in
order to embark on heroic quests, journey-making and desertion are
naturalized and normalized; when female characters do the same,
journey-making and desertion are seen as evidence of abnormality or
malice” (ibid. 231).
Sidonie Smith’s Moving Lives: 20th-Century Women’s Travel
Writing similarly questions “vehicular gender” (2001: IX) by demon-
strating how the meanings identified with journeying have resulted
from “itinerant masculinity” (ibid.) and “spermatic travel”, a term
coined in historian Eric J. Leed’s The Mind of the Traveller (1991):

Travellers affirm their masculinity through purposes, activities, beha-

viours, dispositions, perspectives, and bodily movements displayed on
the road, and through the narratives of travel that they return home to
the sending culture. Thus, travel can function as a defining arena of
agency. (Smith 2001: IX)

Nonetheless, Smith purports that women have used the car as a ve-
hicle of resistance to conventional gender roles and the strictures of a
normative femininity. The car has furthered access to job markets,
education, and recreation for women, thus allowing them to seize op-
portunities outside the domestic that have also offered new possibili-
ties for feminine identities (2001: 175). A substantial part of Smith’s
study is devoted to the gendering of travel and transportation technol-
ogies, not without a problematization of race and ethnicity (XIV-XVI)
and the various forms of mobility that can produce ‘travel’ writing,
 Contemporary American Women’s Road Narratives 53

from choice and exile to displacement and homelessness (XIII).15

Smith also distinguishes between various vehicles of motion in terms
of their power to “organize space, time, passage, perception, and en-
counter” and thus define “the logic of mobility” (25), an idea that,
though in a different vein, I take up in my distinction of the three
tropes of movement of the quest, the para-nomadic, and the picares-
que.
Nomadism, a notion that has received much critical attention
recently (cf. chapter five), is also the guiding term of Deborah Paes de
Barros’ Fast Cars and Bad Girls (2004). Her study convincingly trac-
es women’s road stories back to early feminine subversions of the
frontier mythology, although ‘nomadic’ is not always a befitting label
for the plethora of texts Paes de Barros analyzes, from Mary Row-
landson’s captivity narrative to Mary Austin’s Land of Little Rain or
Sandra Cisneros’ “Woman Hollering Creek”; at times, the study for-
gets its definition of the nomadic as “going, but going nowhere or,
perhaps, anywhere”, an “oppositional aesthetic and narrative purpose
[…] outside heroic consciousness […], resist[ing] the linear mobility
of the conventional road” (Paes de Barros 2004: 7). The book sees
women’s road literature and travel narratives as illustrative of the no-
madic subject position (ibid. 11), but obliterates the fact that a road
novel like Chelsea Cain’s Dharma Girl, for instance, has a definitive
goal (cf. ch. 4.4.3. of my book); Annie Proulx’ – consistently miss-
pelled as “Proulix” – Wyoming Stories can hardly be categorized as
road narratives. The main problem with this study, then, is its homo-
geneous view of women’s road stories as resisting, subversive, and an-
ti-bourgeois “invisible outsider” (ibid. 11) voices:

Outside the “desiring machine”, these nomadic women fail to produce

“surplus value” – typically expressed as inheritance, citizenship and
the reproduction of bourgeois culture […]. Instead, women nomads
ignore the regulating effect of masculinite and reject the definition of-
fered by the phallic signifier. Disorderly and disjunctive, nomadic

15
Smith uses a very broad definition of travel writing, yet distinguishes between
(often involuntary) journeys and travel as a movement of choice that often
privileges white, middle-class subjects.
54 Roads of Her Own

women are dangerous to the patriarchal landscape of capital. (Paes de

Barros 2004: 8)16

Similarly, the text continues: “[i]nvisible, and inhabiting space in a

radically different way, women became associated not with the heroic
travel between borders, but with the silent navigation of the borders
themselves.” (10) The study’s approach to women’s road literature
thus reflects the common fallacy of viewing women’s literature as lo-
cated beyond patriarchy, hegemony, and dominant social discourses; it
therefore falsely presents a romanticized reading of the nomadic road
as countercultural per se.17 The notion of transdifferent tensions be-
tween conformity and rebellious discourses as well as between various
difference categories that I will engage with in my study shows a way
to escape the either/or argument of subversion and affirmation as polar
opposites (cf. also Laderman 2002: 20); as I will demonstrate, wom-
en’s road stories’ spatiality is informed by rather than beyond patriar-
chal notions of gender, space, and mobility, although they also probe
resistance to the dominant narrative of a gendered spatial division.
Despite these points of criticism, Paes de Barros’ study is in-
formative in many respects, and certainly deserves praise as the first
monograph to deal explicitly and extensively with women’s road
narratives. Paes de Barros highlights a number of recurrent themes
and motifs in women’s road stories, such as the refusal of or flight
from domesticity, the renegotiation of motherhood, or the recreation
of subjectivity in terms of mobility and fluidity rather than identity
and essence. I would add to the list of common themes the experience
of female embodiment and sexuality as both pleasure and danger, and
the effects of loss and divorce. Further, much of this fiction displays

16
In the context of her discussion of nomadism, Paes de Barros (2004) also dis-
torts a number of Deleuzian coinages and philosophical traditions: for in-
stance, she sees the “desiring machine” as a notion referring to an embodi-
ment of structured, and therefore patriarchally controlled, desire (8); at an-
other point, she claims that “feminist theory questions the materiality of the
body” (90), neglecting differing traditions within feminist discourses.
17
The opposite argument – no less homogenizing – that women’s road narra-
tives commonly buy into mainstream American individualism by focusing on
individual liberation and self-discovery so much so that they cannot function
as cultural critique has been brought forth in Lyn Elizabeth Elliot’s thesis
(2000).
 Contemporary American Women’s Road Narratives 55

traits of autobiographical writing, a fruitful, major tradition in wom-

en’s literature. Perhaps the most significant overarching theme in all
women’s road narratives, however, is the exploration and negotiation
of gendered space and mobility, notions examined in the following
chapter.
 3. Space, Gender, Mobility

Public spaces are sites that mark rites of passage and are sub-
jected to culture-specific imperatives such as schedules,
rhythms of production, allowed or forbidden directions, load-
ing and unloading, areas of transition, and spaces of transac-
tions. Space is an abstraction ruled by the logic of the market
economy and, as such, it is permeated with social relations.
- Rosi Braidotti,
Nomadic Subjects

[T]raffic is not only a technique; it is a form of consciousness

and a form of social relations.
- Raymond Williams,
The Country and the City

3.1. The Road and the Spatial Turn

The road as both literary and social space has been theorized across a
broad terrain of cultural discourses and academic disciplines (cf.
Campbell 2001: 285). As early as the 1970s, cultural geographer John
Brinckerhoff Jackson gave the field of ‘road studies’ a name of its
own, coining “odology” as the study and discourse of roads. He ar-
gued that the road’s “potentialities for trouble – aesthetic, social, eco-
nomic – are as great as its potentialities for good, and indeed it is that
ambidexterity which gives the highway and its margins so much signi-
ficance and fascination” (qtd. ibid.). As Campbell summarizes:

Brinckerhoff saw the roadscape as the site for alternative traditions,

for new diasporic ‘languages’, often ugly and banal, but rarely lacking
in surprise and energy, where the layers and anomalies of history
could be ‘read’ and ‘reread’. The road was, for him, the heterogeneous
space of ‘exchange’, ‘transshipment’, and ‘contract’, of interactions
and encounter where the ‘uniformity of taste and income and interests’
is countered by ‘this ceaseless influx of new wants, new ideas, new
manners, new strength’. (2001: 288-9, quoting Brinckerhoff Jackson’s
Landscape in Sight: Looking at America)
58 Roads of Her Own

The road as a space of transition, clashing mobilities, and heterogene-

ous encounters – a contact zone in a broad understanding of the term –
is defined less by structural determinants than by human usage, the
“practice” of this space. Bakhtin’s, but also de Certeau’s, Michel Fou-
cault’s,1 Henri Lefèbvre’s, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
writings on space have immensely influenced a recently postulated
spatial turn, a turn toward theorizing and critically rethinking space,
noticeable in a flood of recent publications on this topic throughout
the humanities, but especially in critical social theory and geography
(cf. Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies [1989], for instance).2
Soja summarizes the “transdisciplinary spatial turn” of the late 1990s
(2000: 7) as follows:

For perhaps the first time in the past two centuries, critical scholars
[…] have begun to interpret the spatiality of human life in much the
same way they have traditionally interpreted history and society, or
the historicality and sociality of human life. Without reducing the sig-
nificance of life’s inherent historicality and sociality, or dimming the
creative and critical imaginations that have developed around their
practical and theoretical understanding, a reinvigorated critical pers-
pective associated with an explicitly spatial imagination has begun to
infuse the study of history and society with new modes of thinking
and interpretation. (ibid.)

As Kathleen Kirby has noted, the turn to space came as a logical con-
sequence of the prior turn to the body that accompanied the critical re-
vision of Enlightenment subjectivity as disembodied and of the Carte-
sian dualism of body and mind (1996: 18). Current spatial thought, as
diverse as it may be, has thus made it possible to emphasize the nexus
of space, embodiment, and representation.3 Since they take heed of
difference theory and postmodern philosophy, recent studies of space
depart from earlier ideologies of place that have often focused on the

1 Cf. esp. Foucault’s essays “Of Other Spaces” (1986) and “Questions on Geog-
raphy” (1995), in which the author famously called for a turn to the spatial
dimension of history and human existence.
2
For an excellent overview of the development of spatial thinking in Western
philosophy from antiquity to today, cf. Günzel (2005).
3
Notably, this triad is theorized as closely intertwined by the Munich research
group Raum – Körper – Medium; cf. Dünne/Doetsch/Lüdeke’s edited volume
(2004).
 Space, Gender, Mobility 59

homeland and on spatial rootedness in a problematic blood-and-soil

rhetoric.
In the context of cultural studies, the analysis of spatiality fre-
quently relies on two major conceptions of space: Lefèbvre’s empha-
sis on the trialectic production of space and de Certeau’s understand-
ing of space as practiced place (1988: 117). Without limiting them-
selves to a strictly phenomenological approach to space, both theorists
draw on embodied experience as well as on the material and discur-
sive production of space. Therefore, their writings serve, first, as a ba-
sis for the concept of gendered space, developed in the field of the
‘new’ cultural geography, and second, for my discussion of mobility
and transgression as resistance to unequal gendered spatialities and
thus as a form of spatial agency.
The question of spatial agency, of whether spatial structures
shape humans more than humans shape spatial structures, or, on
another level, whether spatialities as social and discursive construc-
tions are sites that individual and collective intervention can change,
informs one of the crucial debates in this context (drawing out the
ideological opposition of materialism and idealism), as is the relation
between space and time. Both these debates also inform the theoretical
framework of this study, as one always has to ask whether and how li-
terary texts can be agents in the transformation of spatial relations to-
ward a more egalitarian society. To this question, one can respond by
arguing that literary texts bridge the opposition of structure and agen-
cy, being structurally informed in language, narration, and plot, but
simultaneously allowing the reader to imagine alternative spatialities
and societies.
Despite the numerous studies of the role of space in the fields of
geography, architecture, history, cultural theory and cultural studies,
the role of spatialities for literary criticism has only recently attracted
interest as an analytical lens through which textual articulations of so-
ciety can be read. Prior to this development, which reflects the dimi-
nishing influence of formalist literary theory and the increasing in-
roads that cultural studies have made in literary criticism, space in lite-
rature had been mainly examined from a structuralist and narratologi-
cal perspective. Foundational texts in the structuralist tradition would
be Jurij Lotman’s writings on semiotic space (his “semiosphere” in
which communication and culture takes place), or Gérard Genette’s
60 Roads of Her Own

“La Littérature et l’espace” (1969) on narrative space, among others

(cf. e.g. Smitten building on Genette, or Elisabeth Bronfen on Lot-
man). Jeffrey Smitten, in “Approaches to the Spatiality of Narrative”
of 1978, for instance, recognizes how Genette sees spatiality in a ra-
ther limiting manner as only signifier, not signified, but at the same
time asserts that “the notion of spatiality is weak because it is a transi-
tional idea, incapable of fixed definition” (297). Also structuralist in
approach, Ruth Ronen’s essay “Space in Fiction” in Poetics Today
(1986), which intends to “describe the relations between various cate-
gories of space-constructs and their surface (linguistic) manifesta-
tions” (421), is symptomatic of formalist treatments of space.
In a similar fashion, Carl Darryl Malmgren’s Fictional Space in
the Modernist and Postmodernist Novel (1985) relates “the imaginal
expanse created by fictional discourse” to the world “outside the text”
(29): he develops the formula “SF = SW + SS + Sr” (33), with “total fic-
tional space” (SF) made up by the space of the fictional world (SW),
the space of the speaker (SS), and the space of the reader (Sr). His is
one of the first studies in this field which initiates a slight turn to so-
cio-spatial discourses in the study of literature: “fiction and its space
are inextricably bound up in the sociocultural and literary matrix” (ib-
id.), Malmgren asserts, although social space as part of this “sociocul-
tural matrix” is not at the center of his analysis. Echoing Malmgren’s
formalized model, Bronfen (1986) analyzes space in three categories:
physical space as described in a text, metaphorical space as the spatial
semanticization of abstract terms, and the text itself as a spatial di-
mension (5). Like Malmgren, she relies on structural analysis and in-
depth description of the spatial universe of the literary text, yet in
Bronfen we also see an interest in the social dimension of space in its
meaning for literature, in the tension between space and subject as
well as between perceived, lived, and written spaces.
Bronfen and others, writing on space and literature in the 1980s,
seem to have been mainly interested in the description of how a lite-
rary text aesthetically and linguistically creates a spatial realm of its
own rather than in how broader discourses of social space are articu-
lated and challenged in literature and how space is thus always a
 Space, Gender, Mobility 61

product of discourses and practices.4 Such studies are therefore often

unable to depart entirely from the Kantian notion of space as an a pri-
ori, empty, given, objective container ‘filled’ by human activity and
cultural practice. The critical refutation of this notion has been at the
heart of most theories in the context of the spatial turn in the humani-
ties of the following decade, theories which are interested in spatial
metaphors predominantly in their associative, social, discursive di-
mensions (cf. writings on spatial metaphors by Geraldine Pratt [1998],
Caren Kaplan [1996], or Janet Wolff [1992]).
The spatial turn has brought about a critical re-examination of
space from mainly two philosophical traditions, cultural materialism
on the one hand, influential mainly in the English-speaking world
(Shields 2006: 208), and phenomenology on the other, often in French
and German contexts. These approaches are represented, respectively,
by Henri Lefèbvre’s The Production of Space (1974) for a materialist
approach, and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), Boll-
now’s Mensch und Raum (1963) in the German context or Yi-Fu
Tuan’s Space and Place (1977) for a strictly phenomenological ap-
proach. Anglo-American cultural studies, informed by post-Marxist
thought and the credo of interdisciplinarity, takes the former approach
of cultural materialism: it is interested in space as a site and a means
of cultural power, informed by a set of historically and culturally spe-
cific notions that are loaded in terms of gender, ethnicity, and class. In
this view, space can discipline the subject by restricting access and
empower it by giving presence. Following Lefèbvre, spatial organiza-
tion is a historical and cultural product of power struggles, of meshing
and clashing a myriad of discourses, e.g. of the body or of morality.
Therefore, the everyday spaces of the home, the workplace, the city
and the country, the shopping street and the interstate road not only re-
flect social relations but also actively produce and re-produce them.5

4
Cf. Henri Lefèbvre’s criticism of semiology and spatial theory for not exceed-
ing the descriptive level (2003/1974: 7).
5
It is impossible to even briefly sum up Lefèbvre’s opus magnum, a 400-page
treatise that establishes the author’s famous notion of a “trialectic” spatiality
consisting of perceived, conceived, and lived space. Yet as it informs, together
with Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life (1988), the bulk of theo-
retical conceptions of gendered space, I address both books here, however se-
lectively.
62 Roads of Her Own

Lefèbvre’s main concern was to add space to the agenda of

Marxist social theory, which had long been primarily concerned with
temporality and the historical progress of class struggles, from Marx
to Lukács; his book indeed is heretic in view of the Marxist privileg-
ing of historical progress and linear time. (It retains, however, the
classical Marxist pitfalls homogenization and teleologization). The
reason for this negligence is that space has been thought of as static
and immobile, while Lefèbvre is convinced that space is a dynamic
variable as important to social power struggles as time, and thus ar-
gues against evocations of space as emptiness, e.g. in geometry and
mathematics, as an absolute, e.g. in Descartes, or as a transcendental
relative, as in Kant (Lefèbvre 2003/1974: 1-2). He also turns against
space as a seemingly extra-ideological mental construct that envelops
its social and physical dimensions (ibid. 5-6); instead, he emphasizes
that space is instrumental for the exercise of hegemony:

Is it conceivable that the exercise of hegemony might leave space un-

touched? Could space be nothing more than the passive locus of social
relations […]? The answer must be no. […] I shall demonstrate the ac-
tive – the operational or instrumental – role of space, as knowledge
and action, in the existing mode of production. I shall show how space
serves, and how hegemony makes use of it, in the establishment, on
the basis of and underlying logic and with the help of knowledge and
technical expertise, of a ‘system’. (ibid. 11)

Language is an issue in Lefèbvre’s model as it represents a spatial

code, characterizing particular spatial/social practices, which were
“produced along with the space corresponding to them” (ibid. 17).
Lefèbvre can be read as interpreting linguistic conventions as a valua-
ble socio-historical source for the investigation of an epoch’s spatial
system and relations – though this is of course not Lefèbvre’s focus.
The spatial system is thus always inscribed in a historical ‘text’, a
document of a certain period, and literary texts can thus function as
both expression of and, by convention, commentary on a society’s
spatial relations as they shape and regulate human existence.
(Lefèbvre is too much a materialist, on the other hand, not to vehe-
mently oppose the idea that the spoken and written word constitute
social practice, that writing can transform society by transforming
language and discourse; 2003/1974: 28-9).
 Space, Gender, Mobility 63

The two main theses that have influenced thinking on space in

the aftermath of Lefèbvre’s book and its English translation, which
only came out in 1991, are, first, the author’s emphasis on a dynamic
conceptualization of space; he conceives of space as a product of
changing social forces, a “tool of thought and of action”, a means of
production and as such also “a means of control, and hence of domi-
nation, of power” (ibid. 26) that, however, can hardly be fully mas-
tered (here, agency comes in). Second, Lefèbvre triangulates space
and thus brings together mental, physical and social space as well as
spatial semantics: he sees three planes of space – the perceived space
of everyday spatial practices and (re-)production, conceived represen-
tations of space or theoretically conceptualized and planned space, and
the lived representational space of the imagination, “embodying com-
plex symbolisms” and “linked to the clandestine or underground side
of social life, as also to art” (33; the third plane resonates in de Cer-
teau’s idea of resistant spatial tactics). This third level “not only tran-
scends but has the power to refigure the balance of popular ‘perceived
space’ and official ‘conceived space’”, as Rob Shields holds (2006:
210). Together, the three planes of social space comprise a never-
ending “triple dialectic”, a dialectical process (cf. Lefèbvre
2003/1974: 34), and are thus inseparably bound to each other, with the
shifting balance between them defining historical spatialization
(Shields 2006: 210).
Perhaps more critically debated than Lefèbvre’s trialectics is
geographer Edward Soja’s concept of Thirdspace,6 though it mainly
conforms to Lefèbvre’s triad by translating it into a continuum of what
Soja calls “real-and-imagined” space (cf. his monograph Thirdspace,
esp. chapter one).7 Soja’s project proposes the interjection of “a criti-
6
In Soja’s work, Firstspace refers to the material world, Secondspace to the in-
terpretation of this materiality through the imaginary, creative representations
of spatiality, and Thirdspace to “a multiplicity of real-and-imagined places”
(1996: 6).
7
Perhaps more than Lefèbvre, Soja asserts a structure balanced by agency. He
starts his book somewhat celebratory, voicing his belief that “the spatial di-
mension of our lives has never been of greater practical and political relevance
than it is today” (1996: 1) and that we are “intrinsically spatial beings”, but as
such, “active participants in the social construction of our embracing spatiali-
ties” (his term for the networks of social spaces; ibid.; my emphasis). Soja’s
books have triggered off debates on spatial theory throughout the social
64 Roads of Her Own

cal spatial imagination into the interpretive dualism [materiality and

the realm of ideas, AG] that has for the past two centuries confined
how we make […] sense of the world” (1996: 5), and in this respect is
similar to Lefèbvre’s.
Somewhat surprisingly, gender plays a fundamental role in the
regulations of social space in Lefèbvre (cf. also Massey [1994: 182-3],
whose argument runs counter to Shields’ assertion that Lefèbvre’s
book is gender-blind [2006: 211]). Lefèbvre asserts that

social space contains – and assigns (more or less) appropriate places

to – (1) the social relations of reproduction, i.e. the bio-physiological
relations between the sexes and between age groups, along with the
specific organization of the family; and (2) the relations of production,
i.e. the division of labour and its organization in the form of hierar-
chical social functions. These two sets of relations […] are inextrica-
bly bound to each other. (2003/1974: 32, my emphasis)

That dominant discourses, through the organizing structures of social

space, contain and assign “appropriate places” to the sexes is funda-
mental for the development of the concept of gendered space. What is
equally important for my discussion of gendered space and mobility is
to see spatial relations represented in “conceived” (Lefèbvre) or “im-
agined” (Soja) space such as in a literary text, as indicative of, build-
ing on, and dialectically intervening in dominant discourses about so-
cial relations. Thus, I am interested in the textual articulation of spa-
tialities as they are (re-)presented always in a duality of perceived and
produced spaces, out of which a third, interstitial dimension arises –
the potential of the “real-and-imagined” (Soja) or the “lived” products
of representations of space in everyday spatial practice (Lefèbvre).
Here I see a way to avoid the dualism between spatial material forms
and mental constructs of space.

sciences, and he has been thoroughly criticized for his rather superficial inte-
gration of various spatial theorists without developing a substantive, complex
theory of space himself (cf. e.g. Stuart Elden’s 1998 Erlangen lecture, “‘Es
gibt eine Politik des Raumes, weil Raum politisch ist.’ Henri Lefèbvre und die
Produktion des Raumes” [tr.: “‘A Politics of Space Exists, Because Space Is
Political.’ Henri Lefèbvre and the Production of Space”, AG]), as well as for
his neglect of feminist contributions to spatial theory in Postmodern Geogra-
phies, cf. Massey’s “Flexible Sexism” in Space, Place, and Gender (1994:
212-48).
 Space, Gender, Mobility 65

Lefèbvre’s “representational space” – the space that emerges by

living it, by our usage and development of sign systems and other re-
presentations of space – also resonates with Michel de Certeau’s
“practiced space”. Place, for de Certeau, is an “instantaneous configu-
ration of positions” and implies stability as the “law of the ‘proper’”
rules it (1988: 117), while space “exists when one takes into consider-
ation vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables”:

Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is […]

actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space oc-
curs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it,
temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflic-
tual programs or contractual proximities. […] In contradistinction to
place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a “proper”. (ib-
id.)

While de Certeau’s structuralism is apparent in this dichotomy of

place as the stable and space as the fluid – a dichotomy challenged in
current spatial criticism like Doreen Massey’s or James Clifford’s –
his definition of space as made up by shifting relations and contested
by different agents and agendas directly informs my reading of wom-
en’s road novels: they, too, contest patriarchal divisions of space by
moving in the “polyvalent unity” of the road. De Certeau’s emphasis
on mobility as spatial intervention is helpful for my discussion of fe-
minist transgression and will be addressed again later in this chapter.

3.2. Space + Gender: Gendered Space, Engendering Space

If one follows Soja’s line of reasoning, social space can be conceptua-

lized in a tripartite structure that includes the real-and-imagined and is
the product of social relations; thus, dominant structures of space re-
flect social power relations as well as hegemonic discourses that shape
these relations. Such spatial structures or spatialities crucially rest on
mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion from both physical locations
(ascertained increasingly through surveillance technologies that regu-
late access to private and public spaces) and social spheres like public
discourse or media representation. This kind of spatial structuring
evokes the Deleuzian notion of striated space, a space ordered in grids
which produces a spatiality of regulation and control. Examples of
66 Roads of Her Own

striated space can be found in historical and contemporary forms of

spatial segregation, of restrictive border controls and the simultaneous
dissolution of borders in the globalized economy, of newly emerging
‘no-go’ areas or of the gendered division of labor, which reflects do-
minant discourses of gender roles and women’s and men’s ‘appropri-
ate’ spaces.
In my discussion of women’s road novels, I am critiquing the
masculinization of the road as a physical and social space by exposing
a masculinized discourse of travel and the road genre. Thus, the lite-
rary representation of space as a gendered phenomenon (cf. Higonnet
1994: 1) and its reinforcement of the gendered inflection of genres is
one of my main interests. The preceding chapter’s review of critical
studies of the road genre demonstrates that spatial access and agency
are distributed unequally due to powerful dominant discourses about
‘man’s world, woman’s place’8 – and thus to the crucial nexus of
place, space, and gender created.
This nexus is at the center of the concept of gendered space,
which was developed in the 1990s by feminist geographers like Do-
reen Massey, Gillian Rose, Daphne Spain and others in the context of
a ‘new’ cultural and critical geography9 with a feminist slant. Studies
on gendered space focus on profound and intricate relations of space
and the construction of a gendered reality (although Massey and oth-
ers also emphasize other cultural difference categories such as class
and ethnicity in this context, which often radically alter the theory). A
basic starting point for any research in this direction is to be found in
the analysis of specific discursive interactions of gender, place and
8
Cf. the title of Elizabeth Janeway’s 1971 study, Man’s World, Woman’s
Place.
9
Critical geography is defined in the glossary of Hubbard, Kitchin, and Valen-
tine as “[t]hough diverse in its epistemology, ontology and methodology, and
hence lacking a distinctive theoretical identity, […] brings together those
working with different approaches […] through a shared commitment to ex-
pose the socio-spatial processes that (re)produce inequalities between people
and places […]” (2006: 345). The ‘new’ cultural geography shares this critical
stance (thus the ‘new’) while relying on the tradition of cultural geography; it
also emerged in response to Geertz and Clifford’s Writing Culture debate and
thus marks the textual turn in geography (new cultural geographers, for in-
stance, read landscapes, cities, or buildings as ‘texts’ produced by social rela-
tions).
 Space, Gender, Mobility 67

space and its effects. As Massey, in her seminal collection of essays

Space, Place, and Gender asserts: “From the symbolic meaning of
spaces/places and the clearly gendered messages which they transmit,
to straightforward exclusion by violence, spaces and places are not on-
ly themselves gendered but, in their being so, they both reflect and af-
fect the ways in which gender is constructed and understood” (1994:
179).
Massey sees a clear correspondence between the common view
of dynamic temporality and space as static to the traditional, patriar-
chal construction of masculinity and femininity, where men are
represented as the active, women the passive part in a dichotomous re-
lation (ibid. 6-9).10 She therefore advocates breaking both dichotomies
by thinking in terms of “space-time” as “the spatial is social relations
‘stretched out’” and considering these relations as “inherently dynam-
ic” (ibid. 2). As Massey argues in “Politics and Space/Time” (1992) as
well as in her latest book (For Space, 2005), space is as important as
time for questions of both mobility and social change. Thus, space-
time is defined as

a configuration of social relations within which the specifically spatial

may be conceived of as an inherently dynamic simultaneity. Moreo-
ver, since social relations are inevitably and everywhere imbued with
power, meaning, and symbolism, this view of the spatial is as an ever-
shifting social geometry of power and signification. (1994: 3)

Thus arises the political impetus of her project: “social change and
spatial change are integral to each other” (ibid. 23). In terms of gend-
er, she formulates this as follows:

Space and place, spaces and places, and our senses of them (and such
related things as our degrees of mobility) are gendered through and
through. Moreover, they are gendered in a myriad different ways,
which vary between cultures and over time. And this gendering of
space and place both reflects and has effects back on the ways in
which gender is constructed and understood in the societies in which
we live. (Ibid. 186)

10
Massey relies on Foucault’s argument that space has been thought of as “the
dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile” in his essay “Questions on
Geography” (1995: 70).
68 Roads of Her Own

Not only does Massey abandon space and time as opposites, she also
thinks of place as dynamic, not as the static opposite of dynamized
space (cf. also McDowell 1999: 4).
Gillian Rose’s Feminism and Geography (1993) represents
another ground-breaking publication in feminist cultural geography
that critically evaluates geographical traditions and methods from a
feminist standpoint and develops the concept of “paradoxical space”.11
Rose argues that women are constituted as explicitly embodied, lo-
cated subjects. In contrast, the dominant discourse of masculinity
creates in many men the feeling of freedom from the body and its in-
evitable locatedness. These differential, gendered forms of subjectifi-
cation, she continues, give rise to specific experiences of space:

Women of all kinds are expected to look right, and to look right for a
gaze which is masculine […]. The threatening masculine look mate-
rially inscribes its power onto women’s bodies by constituting femi-
nine subjects through an intense self-awareness about being seen and
about taking up space […]. Women’s sense of embodiment can make
space feel like a thousand piercing eyes; […] it is a space which con-
stitutes women as embodied objects to be looked at. (1993: 145-6)

Anna Mehta and Liz Bondi have also suggested that “women embody
discourses that construct them as […] vulnerable and physically po-
werless, particularly in the face of male violence, and as the object of
aggressive male sexuality” (1999: 77). This sexualized constitution of
the female body underlies women’s navigations of space and also the
structuration of space into the allegedly safe home – the private – and
the public as always potentially threatening and dangerous. The pub-
lic/private dichotomy, though highly culture-specific, has been a po-
werful white middle-class interpretation of gender relations that be-
came fundamental for the general discourse of women’s and men’s
‘proper places’; as a normative topography of the feminine which

11
By paradoxical space Rose refers to the many-faceted spatial paradoxes that
women live in, as prisoners and exiles or as simultaneously inhabiting centers
and margins, for instance. In the tensions produced by these paradoxical
spaces, Rose sees the chance to articulate a sense of going beyond oppressive
dichotomies and patriarchal control (1993: 151). Again, it is the interstitial
movement between poles that destabilizes geographies of power; cf. also Des-
biens 1999.
 Space, Gender, Mobility 69

places women on the inside of the domestic realm, it is thus also cru-
cial in discussions of gendered space. Thus discursively, the doorstep
becomes a sort of demarcation line between the separate spheres, re-
gardless of the fact that real middle-class women have continually
crossed this threshold, be it in order to attend church, make visits, or
travel (it comes as no surprise that women’s travel writing, predicated
as it is on leaving the ‘safe haven’ of the domestic realm, critically en-
gages with this dichotomy).
In Putting Women in Place (2001), Mona Domosh and Joni
Saeger not only trace the gendered separation of social spheres to the
public vs. private dichotomy that emerged in the modern age and in-
tensified in the wake of Western industrialization (cf. e.g. McDowell
1999: 73),12 but also connect the dichotomous socio-historical con-
struction of public/male vs. private/female to limitations in women’s
mobility.13 Stating that “[i]t is hard to maintain patriarchal control
over women if they have unfettered freedom of movement through
space” (Domosh/Saeger 2001: 115-6), they evoke Doreen Massey’s
earlier contention that “[t]he limitation of women’s mobility, in terms
both of identity and space, has been in some cultural contexts a crucial
means of subordination” (1994: 179). Domosh and Saeger name both
openly political and more subtle social forces that keep women in
their place, such as driving restrictions and fashion conventions.14
Domosh and Saeger then take a closer look at the ideology of home as
the ‘feminine sphere’ where women are ‘in’ place and conclude that
the separation of spheres reveals itself as both a false dichotomy and a
‘lose-lose’ situation: if the home was where ‘woman’ categorically be-
longed, where she was safe and protected by the patriarchal system,
one would have to wonder why most violence against women does not

12
Already in 1977, historian Karin Hausen traced the division of spheres into
the masculine public and the feminine private to the dissociation of family and
work life in the 18th century. cf. “Die Polarisierung der ‘Geschlechtscharak-
tere’. Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben”.
13
Importantly, Domosh and Saeger qualify the ideology of separate spheres in
terms of class, yet unfortunately obliterate ethnicity in this respect (2001: 3-5;
race is again brought into the discussion later on in the context of female mo-
bility).
14
As Mary Morris notes, it is telling that women’s corsets were called “stays”
(1992: 25).
70 Roads of Her Own

happen in public but at home (a statistic Hille Koskela’s study of 1997

confirms). According to Domosh and Saeger, domestic violence is an
effective method used to keep women confined (2001: 117) and thus
to uphold the private/public dichotomy that has served as a discursive
tool of control over women. In Gill Valentine’s words, women’s asso-
ciation with the domestic as their proper place in this ideology makes
them vulnerable to patriarchal violence both in- and outside the home;
“inside, it’s no one else’s concern, outside, she deserves it” (qtd. in
Rose 1993: 35).
Thus, the home, itself a historically and culturally contingent
concept, can be both a site of shelter and oppression for women and,
as various theorists have argued, should no longer be equated with the
private or domestic realm, as it is a nexus where public discourses and
social relations flow together and shape ‘private’ lives. The binary re-
lation of home/stasis and travel/mobility, is impossible to uphold from
such a perspective, as the home itself is a dynamic site of social rela-
tions, a site of “unrestful differences […], not, in any event, a site of
immobility” (Clifford 1997: 85).15
It is the falsely polar ideological construction of the public as
dangerous and the home as safe, together with the female body as fra-
gile and the male as sovereign, that is responsible for the continual re-
production of this dichotomy and its cultural authority, and thus ulti-
mately for many women’s experience of confinement. In the words of
Trinh Minh-Ha,

the general cliché by which [women] feel exiled […] is the common
consensus (in patriarchal societies) that streets and public places be-
long to men. Women are not supposed to circulate freely in these male
domains, especially after dark (the time propitious to desire, the drive,
the unamenable and the unknown), for should anything happen to
them to violate their physical well-being, they are immediately said to
have ‘asked for it’ as they have singularly ‘exposed’ themselves by
turning away from the Father’s refuge. (1994: 15)

15
On feminist debates about home as an oppressive space or a site of resistance,
cf. also Martin and Mohanty’s “Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do
with It?” (1986) or Janice Monk’s discussion of “Home Space: Protective or
Constraining?” (1992: 126-33).
 Space, Gender, Mobility 71

Such a discursively produced “geography of fear” results in feelings

of insecurity, angst, agoraphobia, vertigo, claustrophobia, vulnerabili-
ty, and in panic attacks, as studies in both geography (e.g. by Gill Va-
lentine, Mehta and Bondi, or Koskela) and psychology (e.g. by Mau-
reen McHugh) have shown.16 The psychological research on agora-
phobia demonstrates that it is indeed not an individual fear but a cul-
tural phenomenon which strongly relies on the separation of spheres:
due to a radical internalization of normative ascriptions of gendered
spatiality (in this case, domesticity), more than three-fourths of clients
with agoraphobic symptoms are women (cf. McHugh’s summary of
related clinical studies, 1996: 344). Thus, examining agoraphobia as a
cultural construct, McHugh traces the history of the disorder, links it
to prevalent gender roles and lists a number of public spaces – among
them gas stations – that are uncomfortable for a majority of women.
She follows psychologist I.G. Fodor by arguing that “[a]goraphobic
women are […] oversocialized into the female role, receiving over-
doses of feminization training to be fearful, emotional, avoidant, non-
assertive, and nonadventuresome” (ibid. 347). Koskela’s study con-
cludes that “while men have more experience of violence in public
space women are more fearful there” (1999: 3).
This social production of fear is, as Koskela notes, “a question
of power in space (or lack of it)” (1997: 314), rather than a question of
physical weakness or statistical facts, though this is not to say that the
fear of rape, for instance, is not grounded in the actual experience of
violence – a violence that is, however erroneously, discursively linked
to the public rather than the private sphere. In a Foucauldian under-
standing characterized by its relationality and permeative force, social
power in its relation to gendered geometries of space accounts for the
fact that in patriarchal societies women, rather than men, are asked to

16
One of the few scholars on agoraphobia in literature is Gillian Brown, who
links it with anorexia and women’s resistance to the 19th century market econ-
omy in the United States, thus also unmasking the intricate links between
‘private’ diseases and ‘public’ discourses and developments (1987). More re-
cently, Paul Carter has published a monograph on Repressed Spaces: The Po-
etics of Agoraphobia (2002), in which the agoraphobe is represented mainly
by male texts of high modernism (his claim that the disease is on the decline
seems to apply to men only, if we believe McHugh’s summary of clinical
studies on this topic).
72 Roads of Her Own

avoid allegedly dangerous spaces in order to prohibit the occurrence

of rape; thus, women’s relation to space itself becomes inimical as
“[s]paces are felt as part of patriarchal power” (Rose 1993: 146). Yet
Koskela’s study also highlights ways of resistance to these structures
that have been internalized, physically and psychically, as fear:

using space can be a way of de-mystifying it. If one does not use the
space, […] the ‘mental map’ of the place is filled with indirect de-
scriptions[,] the image of it is constructed through media and the sto-
ries heard […]. Making use of space as part of one’s daily routine
erases the myth of danger from it. (1997: 308-9)

In this vein, then, the “negotiation of danger is in many ways the ne-
gotiation of power” (Mehta/Bondi 1999: 78).
Seemingly fixed notions of dangerous/safe and public/private
spaces are destabilized, as Koskela’s study implicates, by making
space dynamic, i.e., by movement: “By daring to go out, […] women
produce space that is more available for other women. Spatial confi-
dence is a manifestation of power. Walking in the street can be seen as
a political act: women ‘write themselves onto the street’” (1997: 316).
It is significant that owning a car, a vehicle that, as Virginia
Scharff (1991: 170-3) has demonstrated, combines and brings into di-
alogue public and private spatialities, has facilitated female mobility;
while female automobility did not necessarily “disrupt fundamental
patterns of gender” (ibid. 173), it nevertheless “meant contesting
gender stereotypes, muddying the distinction between public and pri-
vate […] and creating new forms of control and vulnerability for
American women” (170). The car thus provided an “unpredictable ve-
hicle” (ibid.) for contests over women’s access to public space.
 Space, Gender, Mobility 73

3.3. Mobility as Resistance

I have always been at the same time

woman enough to be moved to tears
and man enough
to drive my car in any direction
- Hettie Jones,
“Teddy Bears on the Highway”

Beat poet Hettie Jones’ poem “Teddy Bears on the Highway” asso-
ciates unfettered mobility with masculinity, with being “man enough”;
women, instead “are moved”. Eric Leed’s notion of the “spermatic
journey”, of traveling as a gendered and gendering activity (1991: 90),
comes to mind; “[t]here is no free and mobile male without the unfree
and sessile female” (217). Though I would add that the static position
of the sessile, against which the active, hegemonic self is defined, can
be filled by other groups as well, from ethnic Others or the poor,17 and
that these groups are often discursively feminized as irrational and
subservient. The powerful association of the feminine and the docile,
predicated on the division of spheres, has structured Western concepts
of travel, gender, and space, and helped produce a number of social
and political inequalities: “[m]an in motion is the dominant image of
Western thought[, for] accounts of travel have served as vehicles for
our deepest notions of progress and purpose.” (Wesley 1999: xii)
Massey’s conceptual mobilization of place and space, associated as
both terms are with femininity, thus leads her to propose mobility as a
form of feminist resistance to patriarchal spatialities: “the limitation of
women’s mobility, in terms of both identity and space, has been in
some cultural contexts a crucial means of subordination” (179); fe-
male mobility “does indeed seem to pose a threat to a settled patriar-
chal order […]. One gender-disturbing message might be – in terms of
both identity and space – keep moving!” (11).18

17
The class aspect significantly influences women’s mobility, as wealth and
class position guarantee certain interpretations of a woman’s presence in pub-
lic. Also, space is not only gendered, but also classed, as privileged upper-
middle class norms define propriety in public space.
18
The challenge is, in Massey’s phrasing, to achieve mobility while also recog-
nizing locatedness and embodiedness (1994: 11). She meets this challenge e.g.
74 Roads of Her Own

Again, as Domosh and Saeger (2001: 120) and others have

noted,19 it is important not to see mobility as inherently empowering
and immobility as a disadvantage; yet it is crucial to remember that
first, the historical limitation of women’s mobility has served as a tool
of control and oppression, that secondly, the domestic continues to be
seen as inferior in economic and cultural value in contemporary west-
ern cultures and that third, it is above all the freedom of choice at
stake here. By addressing women’s road stories from various cultural
and ethnic backgrounds, I hope to emphasize the situatedness and cul-
tural diversity of female mobility and its variability in terms of literary
articulation. The texts all speak from a certain ‘proper place’ which
they articulate ‘improperly’ by presenting an act of moving out of
propriety. As “relations between individuals and places” are mediated
“through the regulation and control of movement and property”, and
as “[e]ven the most marginal or deviant have their proper place in
modern society[, namely] the homeless shelter, the insane asylum, [or]
the prison” (Kawash 1998: 137), movement is central to resistance to
normativity. Thus, if we imagine interventions into restrictive spatial
patterns that inhibit the freedom of choice of motion or stasis, of home
or away, practiced physical mobility nevertheless always appears to at
least potentially disrupt such patterns, as Massey proposes (implicitly
relying on de Certeau’s definition of space) – and thus seems able to
produce space differently.

Der Raum ist nicht nur Raum für meine Bewegung – er ist […] auch
Raum durch meine Bewegung […] – wodurch der Raum nicht bleibt,
was er soeben war, sondern augenblicklich verwandelt wird, wie ich

in her essay “A Place Called Home” in Space, Place, and Gender, in which
she re-reads home as an open, dynamic site of interrelations rather than a stat-
ic location that is always confining (157-73); cf. also Ardener (1981: 19).
19
Irene Gedalof’s (1996) critique of Braidotti, Geraldine Pratt’s criticism of
margin/center vocabularies (1998), or Janet Wolff’s “On the Road Again”
(1992) all warn against the privileging of mobility, reflected in the general
trend of cultural criticism to turn to metaphors of movement. Wolff’s essay
has repeatedly been criticized for its overstatement of masculine mobility and
neglect of travel by women or people of color, cf. K. Mills (1999: 14); Debo-
rah Clarke addresses Wolff’s problematic claim of an intrinsic relationship be-
tween masculinity and travel (2004: 102). As Marilyn Wesley notes, however,
Wolff does propose the reappropriation of travel metaphors as a means of
subversion, cf. Wolff (1992: 235-6,) Wesley (1999: xviii).
 Space, Gender, Mobility 75

im umgekehrten Falle nicht nur aufnehmendes Gefäß für seine Gehal-

te bin, sondern seine Atmosphäre in meiner Bewegung mittrage und
allererst präge. (Elisabeth Ströker qtd. in Bronfen 1986: 79)20

According to Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life, the foot-

print is the basic element of a language that articulates space by mov-
ing through it (1988: 97-8); in the 20th century, the footprint, especial-
ly in the American context, seems to have been superseded by tire
marks on the highway; in any case, ordinary, everyday movements
through space are where de Certeau sees the potential to escape nor-
mative regulations – one of the core arguments in his oft-quoted mo-
nograph. Following de Certeau, the space of the road is continually
(re)produced by the mobile presence of its users, but also, on the
“real-and-imagined” level, by the way the road is textually represented
as space. My postulation is that women’s road novels intervene in the
discursive genderedness of oad-space; they thus contest this gende-
redness on a symbolic level that is as integral to culture and society as
are actual practices of travel. At the same time, of course, they cannot
do so in an unfettered and free-floating manner, as their articulations
are themselves informed by existing social discourses, not only with
regard to gender, but to a range of difference categories.
Through their road writings, women symbolically contest the
notion of the road as a masculine space and produce what cultural
geographer Tim Cresswell has called “heretical geographies” in In
Place/Out of Place (1996: 11). Their stories can be seen as a renegoti-
ation of spatial politics by which they counter physical as well as
symbolic borders and enclosements. As Marilyn Wesley contends:

In taking her figurative journey, the woman traveler moves out of her
traditional position as object of masculine culture, and her active ca-
reer controverts the fundamental opposition of masculine mobility in
an exterior area to feminine restriction to a domestic space. Not only
does the metaphor of her journey inscribe a place for women in the
world, but by challenging the range of privileges and restrictions au-

20
Tr.: “Space is not only space for my movement – it is […] also space due to
my movement […] – thus space does not remain what it just was, but is mo-
mentarily transformed, as I am in the reverse case not only a receptacle for its
contents but also carry its atmosphere by my movement and shape it first”,
AG.
76 Roads of Her Own

thorized by gendered spatial orders, the trope of the woman’s journey

is a narrative reconstruction of the meanings of that world. As her own
subject, the woman traveler goes beyond subversion to construction of
alternative possibility. (1999: xv)

Women taking to the road are often deemed erratic misfits, which is
reflected in expressions like ‘streetwalker’, ‘wayward girl’, ‘tramp’,
and ‘loose’ (or ‘fast’) woman, all of which connect female bodies,
public space, and mobility, and, via their negative connotations, iden-
tify the ‘public woman’ as improper, sexually available, disturbing the
gendered organization of the public sphere, and as thus out of place
(Soyka 2002: 21); “[i]f the woman [in the West] goes outside the
house she becomes more dangerously feminine rather than more mas-
culine. A woman’s interest, let alone active role, in the outside calls
into question her virtue.” (Wigley 1992: 335) As Mark Wigley’s ar-
gument in an essay on the “housing” of gender suggests, such expres-
sions have served, from their etymological beginnings, to control
women’s bodies in the West and to create the male, as woman’s polar
opposite, as excessively mobile and dominant (ibid. 337). Female sex-
uality is privatized, he contends, simultaneously with her domestica-
tion, the internalization of the spatial order that confines her (ibid.
340, 342). The spatial structures of the house are theorized here as re-
placing the controlling eye of the patriarch, with walls of enclosure,
locks and gates installed to keep her ‘in place’.
In Cresswell’s conception, to construct any subject as either ‘in
place’ or ‘out of place’ is a powerful instrument of hegemony that ul-
timately aims at keeping dominant social groups in their place, on top
of the social ladder. Cresswell’s observations on the intersections of
place, hegemonic power, and resistance to that normative force (by
what he terms “transgression”) combine ideological and spatial di-
mensions. Looking at instances that disrespect the expectations im-
bued in certain places, he argues that “space and place are used to
structure a normative landscape – the way in which ideas about what
is right, just, and appropriate are transmitted through space and place”
(1996: 8), and furthermore that the spatially transgressive defiance of
these ideas “serves to foreground the mapping of ideology onto space
and place” (ibid. 9). Following Cresswell, discursively produced ex-
pectations of masculine and feminine behaviors in certain places are
clearly a form of the ideological structuring of space, and hence of
domination, aiming at keeping subjects in their ‘rightful’ and ‘natural’
 Space, Gender, Mobility 77

places. However, I disagree with Cresswell’s contention that such a

normative geography is “always already existing” (ibid. 10). In my
reading of his study, his focus on transgressive acts in fact even relies
on the very notion that place is never natural or pre-social, but only
made natural by spatial systems that are in need of constant reproduc-
tion and reassertion in order to keep their powerful force.
How can such normative geographies be disturbed? How can
spatial agency question and contest normative structures of gendered
spatialities? Cresswell differentiates transgression from resistance in
that the former “does not […] rest on the intentions of actors but on
the results” (ibid. 23), but acknowledges that the question of intentio-
nality remains an open one (ibid.); for literary texts, we have to disre-
gard this distinction. Focusing on the text (rather than doubtful au-
thorial intentions), spatial transgression and expatiation in literature
offer potential trajectories for resistance not only within the narrative
but also beyond, by way of reader reception. Resistance, a notion that
itself has to be formulated as always situated, can thus be defined as a
conscious or unconscious, effective or ineffective reaction to a domi-
nant order, as a dynamic process that emerges in the dialectics of
agency and structure, articulation and discourse. Road narratives, by
turning the road into a site of feminine presence, at the same time map
dominant gender ideologies onto space, but also allow for fictional
spaces that oppose order and social regulation.
Also, while the very notion of transgression arguably affirms
the dichotomy of public/private (Siebert 1993: 159), the transgression
of this boundary can be articulated as destructive to this very dichot-
omy, especially when women’s journeys are depicted as a continuum
between these spaces – when, for instance, childcare, certain domestic
duties, or ‘private’ issues are written onto the road rather than left be-
hind in a clearly defined domestic sphere. Thus, gendered spaces and
dichotomous spatial boundaries are contested via the spatial transgres-
sions enacted in women’s road narratives, and, in turn, spatial agency
is created through the articulation of physical movement that constant-
ly defies geographical and symbolic centers; hence, acts of spatial re-
78 Roads of Her Own

sistance are capable of disturbing and upsetting normative geographies

of gendered space.21
Cresswell’s notion of transgression as the breaking-up of hege-
monic spatial semantics also resonates with the concept of deterrito-
rialization, developed by the French poststructuralists Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari as a strategy to contravene “striated” space and
produce “smooth space” (spaces that escape structuration and norma-
tive control), and thus to oppose hegemonic regulations of fixity (cf.
their “Treatise on Nomadology”, chapter twelve of A Thousand Pla-
teaus). Via what they call “lines of flight” – unpredictable and unruly
routes of escape that defy spatial control – and “nomadic war-
machines” – the dispersal of warrior-herders across open spaces,
which, historically, generate war when confronted with limits imposed
by sedentary nation states – normative spatial structures are contested.
Importantly, their term territorialization, comprising both deterritoria-
lizing and reterritorializing movements, refers to a process rather than
a system or structure. This process describes existence as it simulta-
neously constitutes and defines itself (“territorializing”) while already
dissolving (“deterritorializing”) these definitions and building new
ones (“reterritorializing”). Thus, these de- and re-territorializations
highlight the processual, ephemeral modes of transgression, in tune
with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s project to retheorize the subject (or
what they call “Body without Organs”) without having to rely on sta-
ble identities and identifications. In their view, the subject is always
about to constitute and define herself while simultaneously already
dissolving these acts of self-definition, as Guattari explains in his
Three Ecologies (2000/1989: 38). Deterritorialization, thus, can only
refer to the momentary, unstable unsettling of fixed hierarchical spa-
tial structures: “write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deter-
ritorialization” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987/1980: 11). Subjects constitute
themselves and create rhizomes22 – networks of unstructured offshoots

21
Cresswell’s example in the chapter “Putting Women in Their Place” is a case
study of a women’s peace camp in Great Britain, which examines why and
how the peace activists there were represented as being unwomanly and out of
place, and how these women disturbed normative spatialities by their mere
presence “at the front” of a public-political discursive site (1996b: 136).
22
The Deleuzo-Guattarian rhizome was developed as an opposition to the tree
structures predominant in Western epistemology, e.g. the “tree of knowledge”
 Space, Gender, Mobility 79

and trajectories across smooth spaces which form an alternate process

of mapping that turns against the colonial practice of cartography to
chart and measure territories – to turn “smooth” into “striated” space. I
will examine the terms of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s nomadology more
closely in chapter five; for this section on mobility as resistance, I
have introduced the Deleuzo-Guattarian vocabulary of (de)territoriali-
zation as it will appear in various readings of women’s road narratives
throughout this study in order to help define the way some of these
narratives appropriate space in non-normative ways. A number of pa-
ra-nomadic and picaresque road stories, for instance, deterritorialize
and alienate23 their protagonists in order to propose women’s transient
anchoring in self-definitions while momentarily subverting these defi-
nitions by transgressing their categorical boundaries, by moving on
and in-between.

that, since Plato, has remained the central model for a hierarchical organisa-
tion of science and learning.
23
Cf. Annegret Pelz’s main argument in Reisen durch die eigene Fremde: Reise-
literatur von Frauen als autogeographische Schriften (1993), in which she
discusses the double alienation from society and self as a major element in
women’s travel writing.
 4. Questers on the Road

[D]irections in America are different: the search for arbores-

cence and the return to the Old World occur in the East. But
there is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry,
its ever-receding limits, its shifting and displaced frontiers […].
America reversed its directions: it put its Orient in the West […].
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus

Geography in the United States is mythological.

- Leslie Fiedler,
The Return of the Vanishing American

4.1. The Quest in America: History and Literature

The first narrative of mobility I examine is that of the quest, one of the
oldest forms of narrating human movement. Often in the form of a ri-
tualized passage, the quest has played a major role for the formation
of Western – and some non-Western – cultures and literatures, from
the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic and Homer’s Odyssey to medieval
knight-errantry and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (cf. Enevold 2003:
79). In this context, “[t]he road”, as Delia Falconer contends, “promis-
es progress along a fixed spatio-temporal path toward a future goal.
[…] The route map, with its narrative of beginning and end, guaran-
tees the future by subordinating the presence.” (1992: 43) This future-
or goal-orientedness is the main characteristic of the quest (cf. Stout
1983: 89, 99), whose destination – a person or place, the attainment of
answers or (usually fetishized) objects – is imagined as granting social
improvement or personal regeneration and the possibility to redefine
oneself. Such a striving for a better place, as well as the pilgrimage for
spiritual renewal, has a more or less clearly defined motivation, often
resulting in a structure of departure as escape, a flight from something,
and a yearning for something and/or someplace else resulting in the
geographical movement of the literary protagonist.
82 Roads of Her Own

In the context of U.S.-American cultural and literary history, the

quest motif remains a vital, if ambivalent, element in national mythol-
ogy, harking back to the colonialism of the Puritan Pilgrims in the 17th
century, the expansionist doctrine of Manifest Destiny in the mid-19th
century, and various 20th-century versions of upward mobility asso-
ciated with the American Dream. Accordingly, the heroic quest for
freedom from hardship and oppression on the one hand and the free-
dom to explore, to ‘light out for the territory’, on the other is also at
the heart of the American literary canon, from Whitman’s “Song of
the Open Road” and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to
Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (though these texts also articulate the
failure of their questing endeavors). The sheer size of the continent
has, throughout U.S. history, often been understood as promising the
freedom to always be able to start anew, almost synonymously con-
flating personal, socio-economic, and geographical mobility and dis-
regarding prior inhabitants.
Historically, the quest is thus probably the most traditional narr-
ative form of Anglo and European mobility in the Americas, entailing
many stories of emigration and immigration that have shaped a co-
lonial past and a postcolonial present. In the United States, Delia Fal-
coner sums up, “the historical consciousness […] is often spatialised
as the road leading to California, the ‘open road’ into the future […],
guaranteed by constant forward movement and a Romantic ideal of a
predestined supernatural order” (1992: 46). With social or personal
utopias as the main impulse for the questing individual, a teleological
ideology of progress and discovery is inseparable from the quest ge-
nre’s legacy; as Kris Lackey argues, “[t]he rhetoric of discovery – is-
suing from the wish to reenact pioneer hardships, to recreate an inno-
cent country, and to imaginatively possess the land – remains vital af-
ter almost a century of American […] road novels” (1997: 4);
“[a]utomotive Manifest Destiny”, he further asserts, “is an internalized
revisiting of the historical fact” (ibid. 31).
When Leslie Fiedler, in The Return of the Vanishing American,
characterizes U.S.-American geography as mythological (1968: 16),
he is referring to the fact that American letters have defined the coun-
try often topologically in terms of the four geographic directions –
North, South, East, and West. Fiedler defines four interwoven myths
that created the image of the Far West in literature: the myth of “Love
in the Woods” (50), essentially the Pocahontas story; the myth of “The
 Questers on the Road 83

White Woman with a Tomahawk” (51), fighting her way out of cap-
tivity; the “Myth of the Good Companions in the Wilderness” (James
Fenimore Cooper’s main theme), and the “Myth of the Runaway
Male”, deserting his wife and civilization: Fiedler states that “wester-
ing, in America, means leaving the domain of the female, since in our
classic books fathers are usually invisible or conveniently dead” (ib-
id.). These escapees from domestic responsibility have shown a predi-
lection for an East-West movement in tune with the national myth of
Manifest Destiny, emerging in the revolutionary era and resulting in
19th-century expansionism (Price 2004: 40), when the famous Horace
Greeley slogan exhorted young men to go west and grow up with
country.1 The belief in a road to fame and fortune was grounded in the
promise of cheap or free land; to this day, the image of California as
El Dorado, the ‘Golden State’ and Edenic Land of Cockaigne, and a
somewhat less restrained place than the East, has not lost its mytho-
logical force.
The frontier narratives Fiedler describes are a particularly in-
fluential form of the literary quest in the U.S.-American context; the
concept of the frontier, which Frederick Jackson Turner considered
the central paradigm of American nation-building and identity forma-
tion, has retained much of its power, long after the frontier’s official
closure in 1893. Testimony to the ongoing mythological weight of the
West, road narratives by men and women of various ethnicities have
taken up and refigured the concept in the second half of the 20th cen-
tury.2 As Ronald Primeau contends, “[v]arious myths – paradisal,
frontier, individual, success, growth – reinforce one another” (1996: 8)
in American road narratives; Charles L. Sanford also associates car
1 The expansionist ideology of the time responded to a variety of economic and
political concerns: a rapid increase in population due to immigration and the
scarcity of undeveloped land in the densely populated urban centers of the
east; the need for increased agricultural production; and Southern desires for
an expansion of agriculture and thus the slave economy, for which additional
markets were needed.
2
A second paradigmatic destination is Mexico (see Roiphe’s Long Division or
Thelma & Louise), which is increasingly seen in criticism as another frontier
functioning in similar terms; cf. cultural geographer Patricia Price’s juxtaposi-
tion of the Western and the Southern border zones of the United States (ch.
one and two of her monograph Dry Place: Landscapes of Exclusion and Be-
longing, respectively).
84 Roads of Her Own

culture with a “neo-frontier spirit” (1983: 138), and Kris Lackey ac-
knowledges the vitality of the rhetoric of discovery in contemporary
road narratives: “Automotive Manifest Destiny is an internalized revi-
siting of the historical fact” (1997: 31).
However, the quest of European-Americans has always oscil-
lated, in dialectical fashion, between dominant and resistant spatial
practices (Falconer 1992: 46-7), between dissent with dominant orders
in Europe and the continuation of the colonialist spatial ideology of
expansionism. This ideology has claimed territories yet unincorpo-
rated into the nation-state, at the cost of the lives of millions of Native
Americans who were spatially contained and forced into controlled
territories, of African-Americans displaced to newly emergent slave
states, and of Mexican Americans, who suddenly became second-class
citizens after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded half of Northern
Mexico to the United States in 1848. Oppositions between utopian vi-
sion and individual isolation, liberal and conservative values, curiosity
about and fear of the Other, have shaped the figure of the white Amer-
ican hero canonized in the national literature (Heller 1990: 7). These
contradictions are also fundamental in order to grasp the complexities
of the quest: the settlers’ abandonment of home in order to claim
another territory as their new home place corresponds to the fact that
the quester can never be certain about what s/he will find (and hence
whether it was worth leaving at all) – the ensuing disillusionment is
documented, for instance, in women’s pioneer diaries.
It is significant for the general argument of my study that the
notion of women not belonging in (presumably) dangerous territory is
implied in the frontier concept. While there has been critique of the
over-use of the frontier-metaphor (e.g. Patricia Nelson-Limerick
[1994]), the parallels between the 19th-century frontier myth and the
construction of the American road genre as a masculine territory in the
second half of the 20th century are neither negligible nor coincidental.
The term ‘frontier’ is, as Nelson-Limerick quotes Jackson Turner’s
classical 1893 definition, “‘an elastic one, and for our purposes does
not need sharp definition’. One hundred years later, despite earnest
scholarly efforts to define the frontier”, Limerick continues in her own
 Questers on the Road 85

words, “‘elasticity’ and confused meaning formed its one constant

characteristic” (78).3
The confused, complex gender-economy of the historical, 19th-
century western and the 20th-century asphalt frontiers is of particular
interest here: both concepts posit “gender on the edge”, as Rachel Bo-
rup put it in her dissertation on women “writing” the American fron-
tier in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Following the vein of New
Western History, Borup asserts that the historical frontier functioned
as a central paradigm through which gendered identities were consti-
tuted, and that it was ideologically produced as an exclusively mascu-
line territory (1997: 1-2), yet she also accounts for “the social com-
plexity and variety of gendered experiences that attended westward
expansion” (vi). This view follows Annette Kolodny’s seminal efforts
to expose the naturalization of the frontier as a ‘manly terrain’ as a
cultural construction, criticizing the universalization of white male
experience of the West in both The Lay of the Land (1975) and The
Land Before Her (1984; see also Borup 6 and much of the work of
Virginia Scharff, e.g. 1991, 1999, or 2003).
The frontier has thus evolved into a border-territory and a con-
tact zone which is not only ethnically and socially contested, but also
unsettles the man/culture vs. woman/nature dichotomy (cf. also Price
2004, ch. one). The dominant tradition of cultural representations of
this liminal terrain show nature and wilderness as both feminized – a
space to be possessed, ordered, and ‘cultured’ by patriarchal pioneers
– and masculinized – a manly terrain set in opposition to a domesticat-
ing, feminine cultural force. Wilderness has been conceived of as a
space of individuation, a testing ground for the independent seeker,
and an ‘outside’ to the protection, as well as the surveillance and dis-
cipline, of the dominant social order. In the United States, wilderness
has also been seen as constitutive of a national exceptionalism and as

3
While Limerick’s uneasiness with the fuzziness of the term is understandable
from a Western historian’s perspective, any attempt at de-elasticizing the fron-
tier-concept seems inappropriate simply because the frontier has always been
invested with multiple meanings and a dynamic symbolic economy. The al-
most mythical force of the concept is, one could argue, an effect of this “con-
fused meaning”, and it is such “confused meanings”, rather than neat, dicho-
tomous structures, which allow for the subversion of patriarchal symbolic sys-
tems.
86 Roads of Her Own

a formative element of a uniquely ‘American’ character. As the 19th

century arrived and continued, a growing tendency to conflate ‘the
West’ with an empty, feminine wilderness developed along with the
trend to inscribe these terrains as manly. And yet, a feminine gender-
ing of wilderness and the natural world has a long history in America
(cf. Kolodny 1975). While many women writers have found the natu-
ral world to be rich territory for examinations and expressions of gen-
dered and racialized identities, classical Westerns testify to the ten-
sions the oppositional forces of the masculine and the feminine, which
generate the frontier as a gendered space. However, these confused
gender relations are usually negotiated in the Western in a way that ul-
timately restores the dichotomous, patriarchal system of separate
spheres.
A number of contemporary quest narratives set out to substan-
tially distort this gendered and colonizing pattern in order to produce
different versions of the literary quest west (Primeau 1996: 116). As I
argue here, it is often exactly such multiple differences and allegiances
in terms of gender, ethnicity, and class, as well as the transdifferent
tensions arising from these multiple (be)longings, that complicate
such plans of revision.

4.2. Frontier Paradigms: Interactions and Interventions

With one eye on the rearview mirror, perhaps we will chart a

path to a better place, farther along.
- Virginia Scharff,
Twenty Thousand Roads

The dream of and quest for freedom has always been cast in a roman-
tic vein tightly linked to dominant ideas of masculinity: “In the popu-
lar mind, the myth of freedom is associated with sturdy pioneers […],
brave men in whaling boats, and at least one irrepressible young boy
on a raft”, as Cynthia Golomb Dettelbach puts it in her classic study of
the road genre (1976: 34). Women writers have revised, though by no
means abandoned, the quest narrative and the rhetoric of westward
expansion in various ways, as both Kolodny in The Land Before Her
(1984) and Brigitte Georgi-Findlay in The Frontiers of Women’s Writ-
ing: Women’s Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion
 Questers on the Road 87

(1996) have demonstrated. Modifying the claims of Kolodny’s semin-

al study to some extent, Georgi-Findlay indeed argues that the rhetoric
of the frontier was itself heterogeneous and contested rather than a
monolithic masculine formula women subscribed to or contested, de-
picting “women positioned ambiguously within relations of power and
authority” (13). This claim can likewise be advanced for discussing
the quest narrative as a gendered genre; however, Georgi-Findlay does
not erase gender differences on the level of discourse and authority,
where she asserts that women’s writing of the west was affected and
effected by different discursive constraints complicating women’s
access to the rhetoric of empire building and colonization (12).
Similarly affected by such constraints, women’s quest narra-
tives often pose the question of arrival, of attaining the imagined goal,
as a diegetic point break at which the sheer possibility of a ‘better
place’ within the bounds of the realist narrative comes under scrutiny.
Reading these stories through the lens of gendered discourses, one
major question they pose is the (im)possibility of a rhetoric ‘beyond’
the patriarchal. In the majority of realist quest fiction, a projective des-
tination of ‘beyond’ ultimately turns out as a mere romantic narrative
construction. Though the projected destination of the journey func-
tions as a vital precondition and motivation for departure, they can
rarely be plausibly narrativized in the end; in Slettedahl Macpherson’s
words, “[w]ithin the boundaries of feminist fiction, escape can be at-
tempted, enacted, celebrated, but never finally or safely contained”
(2000: 235). As the film Thelma & Louise has exemplified prominent-
ly, the yearning for a better place is frustrated by the realization that
moving beyond or stepping outside the social and symbolic order al-
together is indeed impossible – while its internal revision is not.4
Women’s road narratives have thus sought, not always success-
fully, to create different routes for their quests: the more conservative
among them solve the tension between normative and rebellious femi-
ninity in women’s quest stories by a return to the romance plot, with
4
Of course, Thelma & Louise – and especially the film’s ending – has been
much debated, as the final scene opens up a variety of possibilities for inter-
pretation. For a good overview of the issues at stake, cf. Laderman (2002:
184-94); for an overview of its reception by feminist critics, cf. Enevold
(2004: 76-9). A spatial analysis of the film is provided by Soyka (2002: 49-
68).
88 Roads of Her Own

marriage as the endpoint of their protagonist’s journeys (cf. 4.3.); a

major group of road-quests parallel geographical movement with the
renegotiation of mother-daughter relationships on the road (cf. 4.4.);
others, mixing the quest with literary para-nomadism, emphasize that
the road itself can be refigured as the destination, thereby sustaining
contradictory impulses of realist convention, gendered spatialities, and
feminist aspirations to question and transform these textual bounds
(cf. ch. 4.5.; when the main character decides to keep moving after her
destination has proved disappointing, the narrative might eschew ul-
timate fixation, denying the possibility and significance of arrival al-
together, and thus approaching the para-nomadic mode of movement
discussed in chapter five). Nevertheless, as these quest narratives pre-
suppose female departures, “moment[s] of rupture of so many bounda-
ries”, as Janis Stout has characterized them (1998: xi), all of them
probe the extent to which social realities can be challenged and
changed in the course of the protagonist’s journey. Since the quest in
America has been such a formative element in national mythology,
women’s quest narratives undeniably partake in this mythology while
at the same time critically examining its genderedness.
In Selves at Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American
Letters (1990), Ihab Hassan addresses the genderedness of the quest,
paraphrasing Michael Nerlich’s assertion of the West’s “systematic
glorification of the […] adventurer as the most developed and most
important human being”, an “ideology of adventure” that “trans-
gresses boundaries of class, abets change, tolerates uncertainty, and
entails confrontation with others” (5) – yet significantly excludes
women as legitimate subjects of such adventures. Equating women
with nature, “[the] American hero [sic] loves nature but must also vi-
olate ‘her’” (7), Hassan explains, an ethos that affects the hero’s atti-
tude toward women (he cites Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the
American Novel, 1984). Though Hassan acknowledges that women
increasingly have become intrepid travelers (cf. 7), he associates
women’s errands with “pure motion in space, without inner need or
visionary gleam, without a quality of awareness that gives resonance
to narrative, indeed without narrative itself ” (8) and thus without the
capability to “serve us as a model for quest. Hence the relative scarci-
ty, in Selves at Risk, of postwar women writers.” (8-9) Hassan goes as
far as to argue that “[m]en also seem more prone than women to cata-
strophic fantasies, feelings of insecurity, hence to striving and strain”
 Questers on the Road 89

(9), that women abhor risk and thus “feminize” the quest by turning
inward (cf. 10).
In another discussion of the genderedness of questing, Heidi
Slettedahl Macpherson confirms this male bias seemingly inherent in
escape stories, but exposes how literature (and criticism alike, one
might add) has “naturalized” this assumption in “masculinized genres”
such as the adventure story (2000: 41). Whilst recognizing Hassan’s
observations, she also uncovers his implicit recreation of the quest as
masculine by bemoaning the paucity of women’s quests without ex-
amining women’s travel narratives on their own terms (cf. 45):

If “adventures” have been by and large denied the female character,

she has marginally more luck with the quest, though her exploits are
not recognized as “true” quests as often as they perhaps should be.
This is because they may take a different form than that of the male
quest. The male quest is generally considered linear; it may have its
inevitable diversions, but the male quester is assumed to pursue his
goal until he accomplishes it; only then is he welcomed back to the
hearth. […] [T]he female quest rarely follows this pattern. (2000: 88-
9)

Slettedahl is perhaps too essentialist and monolithic when she speaks

of “the male quest”, excluding also factors of ethnic differences in
quest literature, yet the gist of her argument, a critical response to the
gendered bias of genre criticism, is significant. Relying on Dana A.
Heller’s influential study The Feminization of Quest-Romance: Radi-
cal Departures (1990) in her argument, Slettedahl identifies the diffi-
culties of women’s narrative escapes entailed by the necessary trans-
gression of her ‘proper sphere’ (8-9, 88) and the resulting limited op-
tions for the questing protagonist: in the end, she often (re)turns to
house and husband (11), thus reinforcing patriarchal gender norms, as
“few escape novels are able to maintain an indefinite quest or escape”
(Slettedahl 2000: 89), though a space outside of patriarchal ideology is
sometimes envisioned in a final retreat to wilderness or marginality
(ibid. 91). Yet regardless of their ending, Slettedahl sees the escape
narrative as “clearly involved in questioning the roles of women, and
their ‘traditional’ placement within the domestic sphere” (ibid.).5

5
Slettedahl’s study focuses indeed on escape rather than quest narratives, with
escape preceding the questing mode of movement (thus, the final observation
90 Roads of Her Own

Heller’s book, despite its dated, essentialist rhetoric centered

upon women’s “quest for authentic self-knowledge” (1990: 1) and sto-
ries “that attempt to speak authentically in woman’s own voice” (ibid.
9), was one of the first major studies examining the change of the
quest pattern predicated by female literary subjects. Historically, Hel-
ler asserts, male quest narratives, privileging aggressive libidinal
drives and individuation through victory over same-sex rivals, were
made possible by a mastery of women relegated to domesticity and
passivity: “Women have been blocked from identifying themselves
with the active subject of quest-romance because they have interna-
lized an image of themselves as passive objects, framed by the classic
structure of the myth, removed from the very symbols and activities
the quest traditionally evokes.” (6) Heller then locates a shift in the
American literary landscape, beginning in the 19th and fully emerging
by the late 20th century (121), in what she titles “the feminization of
quest-romance” (6), with “woman’s motion toward the door” occa-
sioning “a radical departure from […] social and literary convention
[such as 19th century domestic fiction] alike” (10). Transcending the
limits of an enclosed space, female questers begin their journey first of
all by recognizing “that society neither expects nor wants her to test
her powers, prove her autonomy, or step outside the line of ‘proper’
feminine behaviour” (ibid.).
Though Heller’s dichotomous rhetoric of ‘women’s’ and
‘men’s’ narratives suggests two highly monolithic patterns of quest-
ing, she draws valuable attention to the gendered conditionality of the
quest as a mode of narrative movement. Her observations on the dif-
fering intra-narrative conflicts encountered in women’s quests are
likewise centered upon binary relations of autonomy vs. dependence,
world vs. home, rebellion vs. submission, active vs. passive, and in-
ternal vs. external exploration (12): that these oppositions are indeed
“recurrent obstacles” (ibid.) in this literature is indisputable, as is the
claim that many female quests end as “thwarted or impossible jour-

I cite here is not limited to women’s quests, but can applied to the nomadic
and the picaresque journey as well). The way she links escape to the quest in a
rhetoric of discovery (“If one leaves in order to negate an existing order,
surely one then wishes to discover a new order away from the site of entrap-
ment”, 2000: 90) is debatable. On the relation of the teleology of discovery
and the quest, see below.
 Questers on the Road 91

neys” due to a “rude awakening to limits” or their ultimate reconcilia-

tion to society’s expectations of passivity and immobility (14). Fur-
ther, Heller’s analysis does not remain bound to these dichotomies; on
the contrary, she grants women’s literary quests the capacity for both
opposites; the feminization of the heroic quest, in her own words,

has provided women writers a narrative means to acknowledge and

accept indeterminate processes that the masculine myth attempts to
determine through rituals of closure, aggression, exclusion, and indi-
viduation – rituals that help preserve an exclusively masculine do-
main. (13)

Of course, female quests are not free from “closure”, “aggression” or

“exclusion” – in this respect, Heller’s account is idealized. It is only in
her conclusive remarks that the author contends there is no “outsider
position” (120) to the dominant gender discourse available.6 Still, her
belief that the “women’s quest openly addresses this paradox in its ef-
fort to portray the need for political agency in the quest to expand the
limiting available categories of identity” (120-1) can be embraced un-
equivocally: in a shift from passivity to action, from stasis to mobility,
the questing female protagonist transgresses the boundaries of home.
Textual attempts at feminine expatiation critically engage with
dominant patterns of the U.S.-American quest such as the pioneer spi-
rit or the flight from familial commitment. They remain within the
bounds of the traditional quest by sharing with it a similarly strong
utopian moment – the moment of escape and the belief in “the geo-
graphy of hope” that Wallace Stegner attributes to the movement west
(qtd. in Scharff 2003: 151); they also retain travel writing’s traditional
structure of departure and arrival, although, as I have argued, these ar-
rivals are often complicated by the fact that a feminist utopia is at
odds with the conventions of the realist narrative. Yet female quest
narratives also transcend or even parody these generic bounds, infus-
ing the quest with the awareness of the discourse’s genderedness as
well as of transdifferent “coalitional tension[s]”, the “unattainable bal-
6
Heller addresses the essentialist debate in feminist scholarship during the late
1980s in the conclusion to her study, granting that women’s texts “exist not as
sites of a substantive category of woman, but as culturally specific performa-
tive acts that speak from within and in relation to the very complex discursive
and material structures that create the effects of gender identity” (1990: 120).
92 Roads of Her Own

ance between individuals and cultures […] indelibly marked and

measured by differences of sex, race, class, religion, region, expe-
rience, human capacity” (Heller 1990: 123). On the one hand, these
tensions are variably negotiated by the quest narratives discussed be-
low, as they open up “the lure of the road, goal orientation, and the na-
ture of the quest hero” (Primeau 1996: 89) for debate or revision. On
the other, however, they can also result in transdifferent frictions the
narrative is unable to control and resolve.

4.3. Romance of the Road, or, Manifest Domesticity?

White women’s response to and participation in “westering”, as Ko-

lodny, Nelson-Limerick, Georgi-Findlay and others have shown, has
been manifold, and women’s fiction about the quest west has ad-
dressed and given voice to the impact of the westering ideology on
women. With regard to women’s road narratives, female protagonists’
belief in a better life and a new beginning in the American West often
functions prominently as the motivation for going on the road, al-
though some texts simultaneously counter the very belief in such an
imaginary tabula rasa.7 The binary opposition of a ‘domesticated’
South and East and the ‘open range’ of the West is most obviously de-
constructed in westering novels with a strong romantic subplot; Doris
Betts’ Heading West (1981), the first text discussed in this chapter, is
exemplary for such quest narratives. Thus, what I call “Manifest Do-
mesticity”, borrowing Amy Kaplan’s term,8 seems to be predicated on
the infusion of the literary road-quest with the (heterosexual) romance,
which accounts for the strong re-territorializing force of domesticity.
The less such subplots are focal and idealized in the narrative, the
weaker the pulling force of the home place becomes, as my briefer,

7
Cf., for instance, Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but Here (1987) or Kate Bra-
verman’s Wonders of the West (1993).
8
In her highly perceptive article “Manifest Domesticity” (1998), Kaplan argues
that domesticity, not as a static condition but as the process of domestication,
is related to the imperial project of civilizing. Analyzing a number of
women’s literary texts from antebellum America, she reveals how the ideol-
ogy of separate spheres contributed to U.S. imperialism and how this ideology
depended on racialized notions of Otherness.
 Questers on the Road 93

contrastive analysis of Sharlene Baker’s Finding Signs (1990) will

demonstrate.

4.3.1. Doris Betts’ Heading West

Doris Betts’ Heading West establishes, but ultimately fails to redeem,

the promise of a revised feminine spatiality that the protagonist’s road
trip can engender. Betts’ protagonist initially displays a strong belief
in the myth of going west in search of better or more opportunities and
freedom (even though her departure from the South is initially not her
own decision). The novel’s second part focuses on a romantic plot that
unsettles the emancipatory agenda of the first half; at this point in the
narrative, the protagonist returns to a domestic arrangement that ap-
pears just as confining.
The main character’s journey is not triggered off by wanderlust;
to the contrary, her movement away from a home depicted as over-
whelmingly confining and suffocating is relatively passive, as it is
forced by a kidnapper. Yet soon Nancy adopts the road trip as her
own, determined to head west to find freedom from old social roles: at
home, she is identified solely via these roles – as the stereotypical
middle-aged spinster town librarian and the caretaker of both her sick
mother and her mentally disabled brother Beckham. It is not until she
is kidnapped that she steps out of these internalized “slots into which
she fit”, (18) slots marked “Big Sister, Elder Daughter, Virgin Spin-
ster” (ibid.).9 Yet at the end of the novel, her traditional social role is
reiterated, albeit on different terms: Nancy is engaged to a domineer-
ing man she then follows to live with in the West. Swerving between
narratives of emancipation and submission, Heading West abounds
with irresolvable transdifferent tensions.
Doris Betts’ novel presents Nancy Finch, a 34-year old North
Carolina librarian, as a well-read and witty woman who, like every

9
Another ‘spinster’ road novel worth mentioning is Pagan Kennedy’s Spinsters
(1995); contrary to Betts, Kennedy subverts the stereotype from within, de-
veloping a rather positive vision of unmarried women and emphasizing sister-
hood as a road to personal growth. Coincidentally, Kennedy also leads her
protagonist sisters to the Grand Canyon.
94 Roads of Her Own

preceding summer, is about to spend her vacation with her rather igno-
rant sister Faye and her imbecilic brother-in-law Eddie on a trailer trip
through the Blue Ridge Mountains. During a lunch break in a state
park, a kidnapper appears, ties up Faye and her husband, steals their
money, and pushes Nancy into his car. Heading west together, they
move through Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizo-
na. Nancy’s numerous attempts at escaping her captor are half-hearted
at best; rather, she is relieved to have left behind “living death” at
home without having to justify this step to her family (Ferguson 1983:
72); “free of all choices”, she retrospectively recounts, she was “tak-
ing a vacation from conscience” (Betts 1981: 291). Nancy does not
see any possibility to determine for herself a place in the socio-spatial
web of her world; she fears being drawn back into her old life and
“was almost glad to think she might die, at least, at a distance” (14).
Thus, she is hesitant to disembark from the journey, for it is not until
the fifth chapter that can she imagine an escape without having to go
back home (61).
Nancy is continually torn between the terrors and the pleasures
of her abduction, at times even feeling grateful toward her kidnapper,
Dwight Anderson: “When the man with the gun stepped out of a laurel
thicket, she knew that part of her had been waiting for him ever since
she memorized ‘The Highwayman’” (11). The subtext to the first part
of Nancy’s story (parts one and two in the book, from her abduction in
chapter two to Dwight’s death in the Grand Canyon in chapter thir-
teen) is one of Nancy’s favorite poems, Alfred Noyes’ “The High-
wayman” of 1913. The ballad retells a Scottish legend in which Bess,
a landlord’s daughter, is assaulted by highwaymen, one of whom she
becomes romantically attracted to. They tie her up and leave; when
her love-object does not return to fetch her, Bess kills herself. The
highwayman is gunned down, and together they are said to appear as
ghosts on moon-lit winter nights, united in death. In Heading West,
the narration repeatedly hints at this masochistic attraction that clearly
exceeds Nancy’s thankfulness for getting away from her family on the
one hand and is not warded off by the violence of the assault on the
other (Dwight “had yanked Nancy to her feet and slapped her face on
both sides” to make her get in the car, and Nancy experiences physical
fear as “[h]er body began to shake”, 14). Following this initial assault,
Nancy immediately reflects on what she gains by being freed from her
family:
 Questers on the Road 95

Nancy’s wish to be free of doing all the thinking for all her family had
grown desperate. Some days their dependence ate her alive. No longer
choosy as she had been at twenty, she had stopped wishing for Prince
Charming or miracles. She had prayed to be free of them on any
terms. (15)

The paragraph ends here, leaving the reader with the impression that
Nancy accepts her new victimization happily, even somewhat ironi-
cally equating it with the advent of “Prince Charming or miracles”, i.e.
with a positive version of liberation from family loyalty and spinster-
hood (understood as forced upon her by her social surroundings).
However, the subsequent paragraph counteracts this impression, mere-
ly representing the expected reaction of a crime victim: “Now as Nan-
cy sucked on a bloody flap in her mouth she switched prayers: Just get
me out of this, she broadcast to Heaven, and I won’t complain again.
[…] This man is not what I meant, she prayed” (15).10
This passage is programmatic for the first half of the book:
Nancy’s emotional state constantly oscillates between happiness and
dismay, her fear of rape manifestly reflecting Gill Valentine’s thesis
of a “geography of fear” pervading women in public space. Even
though her kidnapper seems not to care much about Nancy as a sexual
object – he once says “[i]f I wanted to touch you I would” (18)11 – his
hostage constantly imagines sexual assault; when Dwight, for some ir-
relevant reason, cups his hand in the air on the first stretch of the road
he spends with Nancy, it is enough of a gesture for her to imagine her
“breast, or thigh, or more […] being tested in that hand” (15). At the
same time, Nancy feels relieved and enjoys the adventure, arguably
due to her partially favorable view of Dwight as a liberator. Many of
the first-person stream-of-consciousness passages even adopt a hu-
morous, sarcastic tone, clearly expressing a state of adventurousness

10
As a religious woman, the protagonist, especially in the first half of the book,
heavily relies on her prayers, believing that God (rather than Nancy herself)
can change her destiny.
11
Other than a hinted-at desire for a traveling companion to take turns at the
wheel (29), Dwight’s motives for taking hostage remain unclear to the reader
as well as to Nancy, who repeatedly imagines that “there was something about
me he wanted” (120). It seems Dwight has to prove his masculinity by con-
trolling a woman in order to set himself apart from his weakly twin brother
(315).
96 Roads of Her Own

rather than of apprehension. Furthermore, the self-reflective humor

Nancy displays also counters the “virgin spinster” stereotype, as does
the novel’s emphasis on Nancy’s body, her sexuality, and her physical
reactions, noted also by Slettedahl Macpherson (173). Remembering
that her period is due soon, for example, Nancy “could almost feel
[…] her circulatory system constrict. All point bulletin: Be on the
lookout for a man, dementia praecox, and a woman, premenstrual ten-
sion. Approach with caution” (31).
A few pages earlier, imagining her fate in Dwight’s hands, she
jokes just as morbidly about the possibility of rape, evaluating her
kidnapper’s attractiveness:

she imagined the closed coffin as empty, her body never found. Be-
cause? Because Nancy did not get murdered at all, merely raped!
Merely? At that Nancy opened her eyes to steal a glance at the gun-
man’s bony, nondescript profile. I could live through that. […] Noth-
ing required that she follow his schedule for rape. (18-9)

Unlike Nancy’s subtle humor, the fact that her transgressive desire for
Dwight is narrated merely in a fictional undercurrent of transdifferent
situations perpetuates the “old maid” stereotype of the unhappy, pas-
sive woman who is afraid (or unable) to express her needs. This is also
illustrated when Nancy escapes from a motel room in order to get a
prescription for contraceptive pills, telling herself that “rape would
have shorter consequences than pregnancy” (89); after her return to
the room, she is thrown back into passivity, “willing to wait [for
Dwight] in the motel” (90). And although Dwight never assaults her
sexually, Nancy keeps imagining; alone by a river off-camp in the
New Mexico night, she fantasizes about “being delivered to strangers
who had won her by lottery”, admitting that “[t]hose sexual fantasies
which canceled out all question [sic] of volition usually worked best
for her. […] Neither Mama nor the church elders could hardly blame a
helpless wench in some circumstances” (114). Yet when a stranger
(who later turns out to be Dwight) does appear, Nancy is full of fear,
“will[ing] herself into a geological formation” (115). The contrast be-
tween Nancy’s sexual fantasy, however masochistic or passive, cannot
compare to the threat of sexual violence in which Nancy would have
no control over the situation.
Otherwise, the narration portrays Nancy as sexually active –
e.g. when she remembers how she masturbated while observing her
 Questers on the Road 97

sister having sex with Eddie (30) or lists all the men she has slept with
(58-9). Yet it is also made clear that her surroundings view her as de-
viant from ‘healthy’, heterosexually regulated femininity (e.g. 29).
That Nancy’s fear of rape is expressively voiced in Heading West
while her ‘unhealthy’ desire for Dwight is sublimated by humor con-
firms Sabine Sielke’s argument that although rape no longer remains
unspoken in 20th century fiction, new silences have emerged (2002:
10). Sexuality, for Nancy, remains largely imaginary, solitary, or a
matter of silent desires.
Noticeably, it is mostly in the few pages that depict the enclosed
space of the car in which both Nancy and Dwight cautiously transcend
their roles of criminal and victim, demon and spinster. In conversa-
tion, Nancy manages to establish a delicate personal connection with
Dwight: she actively negotiates the terms of her capture (e.g. 26-7),
while her captor, more or less willingly, tells her personal details of
his life (e.g. 106-7), calls her “Queen of the Road”, (43) and grudging-
ly permits her to let Judge Harvey T. Jolley, a middle-aged widower
and former judge, join them on their road trip (34-5). Similarly,
Dwight confronts Nancy with existential questions about herself.
These trigger off uneasy thoughts in Nancy – about her life at home,
her femininity, her ‘crazy’ spinster co-worker Evaline Sample, her de-
sires, and her future.
It is primarily the road trip’s space for self-reflection and for
communication that allows the protagonist to gain strength and self-
assurance. In Betts’ novel, the various places and spaces on and off
the road clearly serve a heterotopic function in the Foucauldian sense:
the spatiality of the road operates differently than the social space the
protagonist inhabits at home.12 In contrast, the journey’s spatiality is
produced by the combination of dissimilar strangers: Dwight, Judge
Jolley, various roadside encounters, plus Nancy herself are all agents
that open up this ‘other’ type of space – the heterotope – by communi-
cation and negotiation. It is here that Nancy, via her verbal skills, feels
powerful and appropriates the trip as her own, telling Jolley that she
“had been in the car without ever being on Dwight’s trip. […] ‘He’s

12
Foucault defines heterotopias as “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted
utopia in which the real sites […] that can be found within the culture are si-
multaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (1986: 24).
98 Roads of Her Own

always thought he was taking me for a ride but I’ve taken him for one,
you see?’” (42) Her appropriation of the journey constitutes another
reason why she sees no need to contact the police when she has the
chance to, e.g. when she finds a telephone in a trailer home on a
campground (51) or when a policeman checks their car in Memphis:

[T]he [Mississippi] river boundary seemed to mark a dividing point

between this part of her life and the next. She stared ahead through the
misty rain trying to see the country’s second, western half. […] What
she had done, not done, was irrevocable. She had committed herself to
everything she had heretofore told Dwight only to goad him; she had
made the trip hers. (68)

Nancy eventually acknowledges her commitment to this road trip,

probably her first active decision in a long time. Nancy is heading
west with a purpose now: transformed, she claims for herself the
promise of the west as a Garden of Eden, evoked by the notion of Ma-
nifest Destiny:

[Nancy] moved down the trail almost muttering aloud. I only want to
be happy [...]. What’s wrong with that? People promised me that. Eve-
rybody. I’m going to write that in my declaration of independence, not
the pursuit but the capture of happiness. Heading west to Nancy’s
Manifest Destiny. (140)

Even if arguably affirming the myth of the West, Nancy tries to rene-
gotiate its gendered spatiality, countering the masculinist paradigm of
the frontier as ‘unwomanly’, dangerous terrain by her willingness to
wander off and to explore the landscape on her own (cf. Nancy’s soli-
tary descent into the Grand Canyon in chapter thirteen). Thus, Betts’
novel follows the quest pattern in women’s road narratives – the
yearning for a better place, frustrated finally by the realization that a
mere moving beyond social realities is impossible. That these realities
could probably be changed by her own actions escapes Nancy until
late in the novel, when she wonders “how many of her […] long-term
wishes might have been […] easily granted if she had only requested
them with firmness” (301). It is instead an accident that changes those
confining realities when after various roadside/campground adven-
tures and near-escape episodes, the novel reaches its decisive moment
with Nancy witnessing Dwight die with “barbaric pleasure” (259). In
 Questers on the Road 99

a cathartic episode, he falls off a cliff in the Grand Canyon during a

fight with Nancy (208), whereas she survives a severe heatstroke.
Heading West’s second part (i.e. parts three and four in the
book) harshly brings Nancy’s temporary escape from socio-spatial
control to a halt. Nancy’s breakaway and her timid plans for a pica-
resque life (“Next time I’ll pick a man for no reason at all, somebody
disposable”, 110) are thwarted upon meeting Hunt Thatcher, after
which a highly conventional romantic plot unfolds. Hunt, divorced,
and the son of Chan (who earlier helps Nancy escape from Dwight
and takes care of her after Nancy has been rescued from the Grand
Canyon), is the typical Western loner, a breeder of wolves depicted as
incredibly patronizing, even disrespectful at times: a guy who has
“never been drawn to women with large vocabularies” (253). Early in
the romance, Nancy finds Hunt’s “kitchen so empty of female atten-
tion” it “almost [makes her] comprehend the territorial sensations of
the wolf ” (280). Thus she begins her return journey to traditional do-
mesticity, which she had tried to escape while still on the road, e.g.
when Dwight reminds her of her domestic duties by ordering Nancy to
do the laundry.13
Quite fittingly, Nancy’s submission and Hunt’s controlling pos-
sessiveness mark their first sexual encounter:

Both her eyes stabbed once and then reabsorbed tears she refused to
shed on behalf of this kiss, this ultimate male argument, […] and long
fibers tightened in her throat where the roar was nested. So much con-
cealment, she thought, slipping her arms around him. Nothing quite as
it should be. But pretty good, she decided. […] This was the last inten-
tion clear to Nancy’s will, which was already blurring into sound and
touch. […] [S]he saw right away that Hunt knew sex was a power and
that he wanted her given over to it, lost to it, made helpless by it. […]

13
For Nancy, Dwight’s orders “set off echoes. Time for my medicine, Nancy.
Bring me a glass of tea. Is breakfast ready yet? […] Help me upstairs. Fami-
liarity made her cry out, ‘Stop ordering me around!’ ” (94) In this context, the
historical caretaking role of pioneering women on the journey West parallels
her experience of the journey (they are explicitly referred to when Nancy in-
serts a tampon, thinking “of centuries of women and the inconvenience of
crossing the Sinai wilderness or the Rocky Mountains while constantly boiling
rags” [80] and thereby demystifying the pioneer adventure).
100 Roads of Her Own

She had to close her eyes on the bright outdoors as his sweet delays
controlled her until she was spread open and starved. (298)

After a visit back home in North Carolina, knowing that “she has to
make her peace at home before she can make a home with [Hunt]”
(Veach Sadler 1992: 105), Nancy finally decides for a home of her
own in the West, marrying her new lover; eventually, Judge Jolley’s
remark that “[i]t won’t be easy [for her] just to keep moving away
from home” (Betts 1981: 122) proves right.
The way the story’s ending is narrated constitutes a severe rup-
ture in the narrative. Nancy’s inner monologization, her voice of self-
reflection that accompanies her journey well into the Grand Canyon
(e.g. her “declaration of independence” quoted above, 140) gradually
falls silent as it is subdued by the subsequent “back-to-normal narra-
tive” (starting with Nancy’s rescue from the Grand Canyon, 225) and
the fictional space the incipient romance occupies (from p. 253).
Slowly recovering from heatstroke, italicized memories, fantasies, and
“real events float[ing] […] by” (246) are told from Nancy’s perspec-
tive, yet already in the third person. The narrator’s distance to the pro-
tagonist continues to grow after Nancy has recuperated from her deli-
rious state; even though the reader witnesses scenes much more inti-
mate than ever before in the book (as in the quotation above, for in-
stance), Nancy’s thoughts are, if at all – much of the narration is now
taken up by dialogue – subsequently presented in the third person.
Nancy’s own voice of self-reflective interjections thus falls silent, the-
reby hinting at a socially sanctioned, conventional future in which
self-awareness is no longer necessary once the romance is settled.
Betts draws the limits to the feminine quest; the breakout, culminating
with Nancy’s breakdown in the Grand Canyon, does not lead to Nan-
cy’s independence, but to a relegation of her will to her future hus-
band. In retrospect, this development seems to imply that Nancy may
never have yearned for freedom in the first place; it echoes the general
ambivalence of the book in terms of its feminist agenda.
On the one hand, Betts’ novel (or at least its first part), like
many literary quests by female authors, echoes the American captivity
narrative and traditional feminist escape stories; they share a concep-
tion of escape that has to do, to some degree, with normative gender
roles, as Slettedahl Macpherson notes in her extensive study of escape
in American feminist literature (2000: 6). On the other hand, Betts’
 Questers on the Road 101

main character can be interpreted as “a depoliticized symbol” (171), a

“relatively passive protagonist” who “refuses to escape from a kid-
napper’s car” (170), in Slettedahl’s words. Yet although it is true that
Nancy does retreat from most attempts at escape, slowly realizing her
collaborative behavior, the way the narration presents this reluctance
on Nancy’s part can also be read as a preventive reaction: escape, for
Nancy, might mean having to return to the enclosed social space she
inhabits at home, where she is the strong daughter and her sister the
pretty one (Betts 1981: 339). Slettedahl’s study concludes that Head-
ing West remains disappointing in its final praise of domestic con-
tainment (2000: 174).14
That Betts relies on the device of a kidnapper as a catalyst for
the protagonist’s escape in order to deflect potential criticism of a
woman’s decision to leave is significant in this respect. Uncomforta-
ble with what would be a radical feminist choice, especially with re-
gard to ideals of Southern femininity,15 Betts strategically assigns re-
sponsibility for the escape to another figure (88); as a consequence,
the experience of captivity oscillates between the spirit of adventure
and a geography of fear.16 Such a “double-voiced” narrative quality, as

14
While Slettedahl Macpherson’s study offers many insightful analyses of vari-
ous escape novels since the 1970s, these are mostly judged against a contem-
porary standard, placing little attention on how feminist literary politics de-
pend on a variety of contextual factors. Heading West’s conservative ending
was noticed with disappointment by male reviewers, too (cf. Leonard 1981
and Yardley 1981, contrasting Scura 1983 and Gutcheon 1982), who then take
the novel as evidence against Betts’ qualities as a novelist. Yardley claims that
Betts “has yet to demonstrate a firm grasp on the structural complexities of the
novel”; these reviews dispute Betts’ status as “a very important figure among
those Southern writers who have come to prominence since the ‘60s” (Yard-
ley 1981).
15
Although womanhood in the South certainly cannot be considered apart from
general American notions of femininity, the region’s legacy of an almost ob-
sessive preoccupation with the “‘proper’ boundaries” of gender roles is clearly
articulated in Betts’ novel, swerving between the “freedom of textuality” on
the one and the “tragic incarceration of gender” on the other (Donaldson/Jones
1997: 17).
16
Nancy’s fantasy of herself as a “bare-breasted Indian” (Betts 1981: 200) free
to roam the West is evidence for its embeddedness in this tradition. Slettedahl
Macpherson correctly notes the impropriety of this metaphor (174), which lo-
cates Native Americans in a mythical past and neglects the rigid control sys-
102 Roads of Her Own

Rebecca Blevins Faery notes in Cartographies of Desire, is a prime

characteristic of early American captivity narratives: Faery argues that
Indian captivity represented an expansion of experience rather than a
limitation for Puritan women (1999: 31), with the result of fictional
ambivalence: “[Mary] Rowlandson’s narrative is indeed a profoundly
dialogic text in which conventional puritan ideologies contend with
experiences that Puritanism could not accommodate.” (ibid. 14) Much
of this holds true for Betts’ novel, written 300 years later and also lo-
cated in a tradition of female captivity. In view of the Southern Chris-
tian context of Betts’ writing, ideologically informed discursive re-
straints imposed by conservative ideals of femininity may account for
the seeming incoherence of the novel, and may have hindered what
starts out as an ambitious road-novel from realizing its radical feminist
potential. The cultural legacy of Southern femininity and religious
convictions, it seems, clashes with Betts’ attempt at a feminist road
novel, with the result of transdifferential tensions that ultimately are
resolved into a romantic narrative closure at the end of the book.
As much disappointment as it may provoke, taking the socio-
political and regional-cultural circumstances in which Betts’ novel
emerged into account is crucial when considering its conclusion – the
new conservatism of the American 1980s, a long tradition of Southern
femininity, and Betts’ Christian background (cf. Scura 1987: 54).
What is at work here is what Slettedahl Macpherson calls a pattern of
“return to adult domesticity” (2000: 191) characteristic of much wom-
en’s literature of the 1980s, the decade being characterized by an anti-
feminist backlash, as a result of which female narratives of escape of-
ten adopted somewhat darker visions of the future than their 1970s’
predecessors (ibid. 147 & 150).
In Revolution of Poetic Language (1974), Julia Kristeva argues
that even fictional space is subject to repressive forces; what cannot be
said in the text forms, so to say, the textual subconscious. Arguably,
the Kristevan “forbidden discourse” in Heading West could refer to
the narrative expression of Nancy’s sexual attraction to Dwight (her
younger captor), or to the possibility of Nancy falling in love with
Judge Jolley (an older widower) or Chan, her female rescuer (and

tems the American colonizers have devised in order to restrict Native freedom
and mobility.
 Questers on the Road 103

Hunt's mother). Thus, what the text presents as the protagonist’s libe-
ration must be relegated to a conventional heterosexual relationship in
order to adhere to traditional ideals of femininity, particularly the pas-
sivity of the Southern lady. Ironically, this is also what Robert Brink-
meyer notes in his praiseful reading of Heading West: “The golden
dream of heading west has become in the end the golden mean of
marriage, a balancing of love, commitment, and freedom. Or more
simply, the best of the West and the best of the South” (2000: 71; my
emphasis).
As Nancy’s Manifest Destiny is, in coherence with the classical
Freudian model of female development, domesticity rather than the
‘open range’ of the west, the novel attempts to uphold the myth of the
west as a place of personal fulfillment. The tensions and ambivalences
I have highlighted in my reading of Heading West, however, counter
this vision of feminine domestic bliss, for Betts’ novel fails to estab-
lish an alternative feminine spatiality in which Nancy Finch would
remain a mobile and active female hero: indeed, she becomes a rather
conventional heroine. Once the female protagonist seems ‘destined’ to
return to the domestic sphere, an alternative vision of home seems
beyond reach.
All of these contextual factors limit the feminist stance the story
expresses, though the novel was clearly marketed with a feminist ap-
peal and female reviewers and critics of the novel indeed did celebrate
Nancy as a feminist female hero.17 Scura’s “Doris Betts’s Nancy
Finch, a Heroine for the 1980s” (1983) is a case in point, praising the
book’s “feminine perspective” (ibid. 3) and Nancy’s willingness to
“undergo a spiritual and physical ordeal traditionally suffered by men
in our literature” (ibid. 6; see also Gutcheon’s [1982] review). For a
Southern Christian audience in the 1980s, the book might have been
considered highly provocative indeed (e.g. in terms of sexual explicit-

17
The dust jacket of the first edition summarizes the plot as “ t ak[ing] us into the
life of a bright, spiky, vital woman in her thirties, fleeing the murderous bore-
dom of her spinster life – and into her deepening and mysterious complicity
with the unbalanced stranger who has kidnapped her”. As if it were Nancy’s
willful decision to leave, Heading West is presented as the story of a strong
woman out for adventure, and undertones of a tale characterized by Nancy’s
fear about her endangered body and the relegation to Hunt are silenced.
104 Roads of Her Own

ness),18 even though Heading West “praises domestic containment as a

woman’s ultimate goal” (Slettedahl 2000: 174).
In Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twen-
tieth-Century Women Writers (1985), Rachel Blau DuPlessis has criti-
cally examined both conventional romance and quest scripts as they
have been transformed in 20th century women’s writing. DuPlessis ob-
serves that in 19th century fiction, “successful quest and romance
could not coexist and be integrated for the female protagonist” (1985:
x), and that “[t]his contradiction between love and quest […] has […]
one main mode of resolution: an ending in which one part of that con-
tradiction, usually quest or Bildung, is set aside or repressed, whether
by marriage or by death” (ibid. 3-4). Her observation that the romance
plot separates love and quest, values sexual asymmetry and “evokes
an aura around the couple itself ” (ibid. 5) holds true for Betts’ 1980s’
road narrative and thus marks it as obviously tied to such 19th century
romance conventions. DuPlessis also makes clear that the narrative
resolution subordinating quest to heterosexual coupledom has often
revealed much tension, as the quest is often vital within the narrative,
and the ending, “obeying […] social and economic limits for middle-
class women” (ibid. 7) is at odds with the trajectory of the novel.
However, since the quest then occupies more narrative space and
might thus be at the center of the reader’s attention, the ending is not
necessarily counterproductive – it may be demystified by the romance
reader as mere formula.
In light of these issues, it would be unjust, I believe, to simply
condemn Heading West as antifeminist. Rather, Betts’ story bears
witness to the transformation of a woman’s road story emerging in as
well as commenting on conservative social settings, in which a total
escape from the geography of fear and a binary model of gendered
spatiality is hardly possible. Thus, on the one hand, the novel stakes
out the limits of the realist fictional mode for telling women’s road
narratives against a conservative social backdrop. On the other hand,
however, it demonstrates the irreconcilable contradictions that emerge
when the road narrative is blended with a romantic formula characte-
ristic of women’s popular literature.

18
See also Scura’s characterization of Betts’ life as “grist for a feminist’s mill”
(1990: 163).
 Questers on the Road 105

4.3.2. Sharlene Baker’s Finding Signs:

Revising the Romance of the Road?

At first glance, a brief contrastive reading of Sharlene Baker’s Finding

Signs (1990) supports the thesis that the romance plot inhibits the po-
tential of women’s quest narratives to revise the public/private binary
and to advocate feminine mobility.19 However, the book also reveals
that the romance plot may simply function as a mere diegetic prop: in
Baker’s novel, it acts as the incentive for the protagonist to embark on
a road trip, but is then continuously deferred in order to uphold the
protagonist’s mobility. By using the romance as nothing but a framing
device, the journey takes center stage; although the text remains with-
in the quest structure of departure and arrival, the many stages in be-
tween that are the narrative focus of the book emphasize that ‘the
journey is the reward’. Hitchhiking from San Diego to Spokane in the
1970s to visit her high-school boyfriend Al Righetti, whom Baker’s
protagonist believes to be the “love of [her] life” (1990: 108), 23-year
old Brenda Bradshaw is repeatedly sidetracked, working as a sales
clerk, a seasonal fruit picker in an Arizona apple orchard, and as a
truck driver. When the journey takes her farther and farther away from
her destination, she begins to wonder if her restlessness stems from
wanderlust or fear of commitment. This question is resolved in the end
by positing mobility and domesticity not as binary opposites, but as
options that are not mutually exclusive.
Zigzagging across the map from San Diego to Philadelphia and
Boston to Reno in often adventurous episodes, Brenda’s first-person
narrative focuses on three major themes: first, her relationship to her
older brother Will, a Vietnam veteran who is at the center of the first
third of the book (before Brenda starts hitchhiking on her own), as
well as her mother-role in this relationship; second, her ‘legacy’ of
restlessness inherited from an air-force family that moved from bases
twelve times when she was a child (139) and her quest to “find signs”

19
Baker thanks Doris Betts in the preface; it might well be that Heading West
served as an inspiration for Finding Signs.
106 Roads of Her Own

to tell her how to handle this legacy; and finally, contrasting her res-
tlessness, her search for a new home in a romantic relationship.20
These three themes are closely connected to Brenda’s role as a
woman of “a very different breed” (226), as she is characterized by
both Al and the owner of a Caribbean-bound boat Brenda plans to
work on. Like many women’s road stories, Brenda’s story reflects on
the dilemmas of cultural agoraphobia as well as the inscriptions of
gendered spatialities on the (diegetic) female body – and consequent-
ly, the narrative. Time and again, Brenda is faced with a fear projected
onto her that she subsequently internalizes; in chapter twenty-five, for
instance, a traveling sales representative starts talking to her in a road-
side diner:

“[…] Are you hitchhiking?”

“Yes.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“I get asked that by everyone. I guess if I were really afraid, I
wouldn’t be doing this, would I?”
He shrugs. “You ought to be afraid. Lot of kooks in this world. Better
for a man.” (77-8)

Subsequently, it is exactly because this man himself is a “kook”, try-

ing to convince her to spend the night with him, that Brenda expe-
riences her first night, sleeping in the roadside shrubbery, full of fear,
even though she tries to tell herself it is irrational:

20
In a queer reading, the suppressed lesbian subtext of the novel is evident at
various points in the narrative; when she introduces her friend MaryEllen to
the reader, Brenda parallels Al and MaryEllen in terms of importance for her
trip, for instance, yet is all too eager to repudiate any possible homosexual
tendencies: “It was Al who got me out here on the road […]. Or maybe it goes
back further, back to when I first met MaryEllen Keen. MaryEllen had wanted
my body, no doubt about it. I never wanted to mess with hers, even though
MaryEllen was the sort of woman I would have gone nuts over if I were a
man. It’s nice to know, for sure, that you haven’t got homosexual interests.
Just to know.” (1990: 6) Some lines later, Brenda describes MaryEllen’s
body: “MaryEllen was deceptively lean, and muscled, with a long brown po-
nytail that stuck to the sweat on her back between sharp shoulder blades, and
with long brown legs, and sinewy arms that could hit a nail blam! once to set
it.” (ibid.) While the description reveals a homoerotic gaze of admiration for
her bisexual friend, the possibility of a lesbian relationship is constantly writ-
ten out of the narrative.
 Questers on the Road 107

Stop it, Brenda, I tell myself. He’s a goddamn lonely telephone com-
pany worker who tried to pick up on you. Big deal. I push into the
bushes. Even though I’m in the dark, I’m sure he has seen just where I
have gone. […] I cry cold tears for myself alone and lonely, lonelier
than the telephone man, pitifully alone in the bushes while dozens of
people drive past me, drowsy from just having left their warm mar-
riage beds […]. (79-81)

With most people’s reactions to her transient life on the road empha-
sizing her physical weakness and inferiority as a woman, Brenda
draws her own disillusioning conclusions. In contradiction to Ronald
Primeau’s characterization of the free-floating road experience, the
text thus openly dismantles the assumption that the open road is un-
gendered, albeit without giving up transgression as a strategy to coun-
ter its genderedness: Brenda continues moving. Yet, as the quote
above also exemplifies, she is continually torn between her quest for
Al and her own “warm marriage bed” on the one hand and adventure
on the other:21 her nomadic girlhood has prepared and perhaps predes-
tined her for a picaresque life on the road, but the overarching quest
for stability and an answer to what she really wants in life – signifi-
cantly, the boat that she plans to take to Jamaica gets named “Bren-
da’s quest”, the accompanying smaller vessel “Brenda’s Question” –
compromises picaresque aspirations – and vice versa. These tensions
are the major propelling force of the entire narrative.
Like Nancy Finch of Heading West, Brenda openly alludes to
the paradoxical situation of a spatial confinement pertaining to both
public and private arenas: while on the one hand cross-country travel
is glorified as the mythical U.S.-American experience of freedom,
mobility, and agency, it confronts her with her embodied-ness and its
consequences in the public sphere on the other. As she explains to one
of the men giving her a ride:22 “It’s something, isn’t it? There you are,
21
Significantly, in Love Always, the 1997 film version of Finding Signs which
Baker co-scripted, this conflict is the single focus, setting the protagonist’s in-
volvement with Righetti against her adventurousness, while the brother-sister
relationship is no longer at issue.
22
It is interesting that the 15 different people stopping for Brenda are all male.
This clearly heightens the possibilities for both heterosexual romance and as-
sault, while blocking the potential for female bonding on the road. It is one of
the many clichés in the book that Maureen Corrigan’s Washington Post re-
view (1990) notes.
108 Roads of Her Own

just a private person thinking private thoughts, walking down the

street, then you turn and stick out your thumb and you’re suddenly
public property. That moment when you cross the line from pedestrian
to hitchhiker… it’s weird.” (76) The protagonist’s awareness of her
body as “public property” is clearly gendered, as its movement
through public space is linked to sexual vulnerability and the threat of
rape (cf. esp. chapters twenty-five, twenty-six and fourty-seven). Con-
sequently, hitchhiking is reconfigured as a form of giving up control
over the protagonist’s corpo-reality, thereby revising and qualifying
the countercultural myth of the freedom of the hitchhiker.
Throughout the novel, Brenda is haunted by this paradox of
physically confining mobility, which makes obvious to her how she
cannot simply leave her en-genderedness as a woman behind. Early in
the narrative, her representation of life on the road, which she charac-
terizes as a territory of dependence rather than independence, reads
like the antithesis to the beat generation’s claim of freedom through
mobility (although significantly, Brenda starts her journey right after
reading Kerouac’s On the Road, 53). This description of dependencies
ridicules the celebration of the open road the road genre traditionally
evokes:

On the road you belong to the world. You depend on strangers to take
you places, and often to feed you and take you in; you depend on the
weather not to be too cruel to your highly vulnerable self; you depend
on your own body not to betray you with sickness or depression. I’m
always a little hungry and a little cold. (4)

Toward the end of the novel, Brenda is significantly weary, “so tired
of moving [she] could scream” (187), and yearns for “the end of the
road” (192). Baker’s protagonist simultaneously feels in and out of
place on the road throughout the book; from the beginning of her
journey, she knows “a woman can’t make it for long, out here” (5), yet
in spite of herself continues her road trip even beyond the last page of
the book (as the ending suggests). Finally reaching Spokane, she
learns that Al has married another woman and heads back to San Di-
ego to visit her brother, where she briefly rests. On the road again,
Brenda decides that commitment to another person does not necessari-
ly preclude mobility. She sets out to stay with David, a kind, quiet il-
lustrator she met in Seattle and notably the only man who did not
make “the obvious remarks about a woman traveling alone” (198).
 Questers on the Road 109

Although Brenda, like Nancy Finch in Heading West, has fallen

in love by the end of the novel, Baker’s narrative succeeds in eschew-
ing traditional domestic confinement at the end of Brenda’s quest.
Even if one cannot refute Maureen Corrigan’s argument altogether
that “Finding Signs opens by challenging the sexism of a genre” and
“ends by reaffirming that there is only one fitting conclusion to a
woman’s story” (1990), one has to take into account that the romantic
conclusion is narratively marginalized – it is implied rather than nar-
rated – and left with an open end: thus, it is not presented as a passage
into stability and stasis, but as another episode on a journey, whose
duration and outcome remain entirely open. While Betts’ novel ends
in patriarchal re-domestication that is the narrative focus of the entire
second part of her book, Baker affirms her protagonist’s self-
determined spatiality and mobility by using the romance plot as a
mere narrative backdrop against which Brenda’s journeys take place.
Brenda’s quest is accomplished by her learning to live rooted in space,
to practice the “spot-in-space theory” (Baker 1990: 67) her brother
told her about when she was a child:

everyone has a spot in space, a spot where the very core of you lives,
your home. Nothing can knock you out of that spot […]. [W]hen you
think you’re walking down the sidewalk, propelling yourself through
space, you’re not. You’re in your spot. You’re pulling the sidewalk
beneath you with your feet. (66)

By way of travel, the narrative ultimately produces both geographical

place (David’s house) and social space as dynamic rather than static
notions. Brenda’s insistent defiance of expected spatial behaviors
eventually turns into an experience of self-empowerment and regain-
ing control, as the very last sentence of the book demonstrates, sug-
gesting Brenda will remain active and mobile despite her new com-
mitment to David: “Then I step outside, and start pulling toward me
what I need” (241).

***

The quests both Nancy and Brenda embark on oscillate between vi-
sions of old and new homes, between escape and return. Both Betts’
and Baker’s novels are infused, although to different degrees, with the
spirit of “Manifest Domesticity”, but the protagonists are torn between
110 Roads of Her Own

their desire for adventure and freedom from social constraints on the
one hand and the urge for rootedness in a traditional (heterosexual) re-
lationship on the other. The question that remains for the rest of this
chapter is whether women’s quest narratives can envision different
routes, routes perhaps uncompromised by romance plots, in order to
revise normative gendered spatialities within the framework of this
narrative mode of mobility. Can character constellations and narrative
solutions different from Betts’ and Baker’s deterritorialize the mascu-
line legacy of the American quest narrative? In the following, I will
address these questions by looking at a second major strand in wom-
en’s road quests that focus on the renegotiation of mother-daughter
plots for alternative versions of familial relationships.

4.4. Beyond the Romantic Quest?

Alternative Homes and Other Mothers

Ideally, the process of creating another life would be freely

and intelligently undertaken, much as a woman might prepare
herself physically and mentally for a trip across country by jeep […].
- Adrienne Rich,
Of Woman Born

4.4.1. Escape from Father Freud?

In the context of 19th century women’s frontier literature, Brigitte

Georgi-Findlay claims that “different women on ever new and differ-
ent frontiers continually had to face the challenge of writing about the
West anew, confronting their own restrictions and creative possibili-
ties in the […] genres that were available to them” (1996: 66). As
Georgi-Findlay’s Frontiers of Women’s Writing also argues, pioneer
and 19th-century women’s writing about the west often drew on estab-
lished literary conventions, but also accommodated women’s expe-
riences to larger contemporary discourses about the frontier. Similarly,
I argue in this chapter that the road novel has been one genre that
women have repeatedly used for articulating their quests for better
lives and alternative versions of domesticity and mother-child rela-
tionships, quests that often lead west. These literary journeys, too, are
frequently enmeshed in more established formulas like the romance
 Questers on the Road 111

plot. Thus, textual renegotiations of the mother-daughter plot in quest

novels can also be viewed as a merging of formulas and themes. The
question, however, is whether this apparent production of a hybrid,
new form of the quest – the mother-daughter-quest – can entirely es-
cape both premeditated Freudian paths and the cultural baggage of
American mythmaking of the west, imbued as it is with colonial fanta-
sies and paternalistic attitudes.
A broad survey of a corpus of women’s quest narratives written
since the 1970s suggests that mother-daughter relations are particular-
ly compatible with the road genre, as they are more common a theme
than heterosexual romance. This strand of women’s road literature
challenges the convention that the “mark of motherhood” (Boyce Da-
vies 1994: 135) leads to women’s inability to travel. Mother-daughter
quests such as Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees (1988) and its
sequel Pigs in Heaven (1993), Hilma Wolitzer’s Hearts (1980), Chel-
sea Cain’s Dharma Girl (1996) and Anne Roiphe’s Long Division
(1972), analyzed in the following, all set out to rewrite the road as a
space for maternal negotiations. These kinds of quests, narrative jour-
neys of mothers and daughters on the road together, try to escape the
oedipal drama Freudian psychoanalysis has cast women into, creating
spaces outside of the normativity of the oedipal triangle.
Put somewhat simplistically, the Freudian oedipal scenario of
penis envy, change of love object, and ultimate mother-daughter sepa-
ration, generally divides women into mothers and daughters. Relations
between them are, according to Freud, necessarily jealous and hateful
because the (heterosexual-‘normal’) girl blames the mother for all its
‘lacks’ – of the desired love-object (her father) as well as of the phal-
lus (cf., for instance, Freud’s 1931 essay “Über die weibliche Sexua-
lität”). As the texts discussed in the following show, a number of
women’s road narratives question this logic and foster a redefinition
of women’s relationships as mothers and daughters.
Feminist psychoanalytic theory has been criticizing and revising
Freudian assumptions for decades, and has done so from various an-
gles. But although Freud himself already hinted at his own uncertainty
about the importance of the pre-oedipal late in his life (Freud
1974/1931: 170), the re-evaluation of the pre-oedipal, pre-symbolic
phase in the girl’s development (characterized by a close bond with
the mother and the pre-linguistic) is generally seen as the most signifi-
112 Roads of Her Own

cant merit of feminist psychoanalysis. However, some critics have be-

gun to ask to what extent any psychoanalytic approach can manage to
repudiate the founder of the field or his successors (such as Jacques
Lacan) without questioning the binary structure of psychoanalytic
views of development (oedipal vs. pre-oedipal) and the validity of
Freudian terminology as such.
Critics like Marianne Hirsch point out how Julia Kristeva, as
one among many psychoanalytic critics, continues to use oedipal, bi-
nary terminology: even when she substitutes the oedipal with the
“symbolic” and the pre-oedipal with the “semiotic” (or pre-linguistic)
phase, she inadvertently remains within the same binary structure.23
Against her best intentions – a main concern in Kristeva’s work is a
rewriting of the mother-function (i.e. what she calls “maternality”) –
and despite her impressive re-reading of subjectivity, her theory thus
depends on the oedipal structure of the child’s development as the de-
cisive point of reference. Does this involve, indirectly at least, the af-
firmation of a male standard, associated with the logos, (non-poetic)
language and culture? If the maternal remains in the realm of pre-
linguistic, bodily signification (sound, rhythm, babble), how can this
assumption escape from involuntarily confirming ‘Woman’s’ mysti-
fied cultural value as the natural, the dark continent, the unspeakable
that cannot be accessed without translation into the symbolic order of
language?24 While these questions are impossible to answer here, both
Hirsch’s and Domna Stanton’s (1986) criticism of Kristeva point to
her theoretical dependence on the role of the phallus. Luce Irigaray,
too, Hirsch contends in The Mother/Daughter Plot (1989: 136-8), pri-

23
See, for instance, Revolution of Poetic Language (1974). Kristeva’s concept
of maternality is developed in “Stabat Mater” (1976) and “Death-Bearing
Woman” (from Black Sun, 1987), where she begins by defining matricide as
“biological and psychic necessity”, “our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non con-
dition of our individuation” (2002: 197). In addition to Hirsch, a critical read-
ing of Kristeva’s, Irigaray’s, and Cixous’ concept of the maternal is provided
by Domna Stanton (1986).
24
In “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini” Kristeva writes that “[a]s
long as there is language-symbolism-paternity, there will never be any other
way to represent, to objectify, and to explain this unsettling of the symbolic
stratum, this nature/culture threshold, this instilling the subjectless biological
program into the very body of the symbolizing subject, this event called
motherhood” (qtd. in Hirsch 1989: 172).
 Questers on the Road 113

vileges daughters-as-sisters relations while excluding the mother yet

again: “Daughter and mother are separated and forever trapped by the
institution, the function and role of motherhood.” (137) In Hirsch’s
view, the “feminist family romance”, the feminist alternative to the
traditional family plot that has as its basis the dislocation of the mas-
culine, only frees daughters – not mothers – from a Freudian legacy of
guilt and abhorrence (1989: 138). For a whole generation of feminists
in the 1970s, says Hirsch, the mother represents a collaborator of pa-
triarchy and its institutions rather than an ally against it.25 Referring to
Jessica Benjamin’s work, Hirsch further argues that it is for this con-
tinuing neglect of motherly subjectivity that psychoanalysis finally
does abandon the oedipal scenario (1989: 161).
The turn to a more positive re-evaluation of motherhood occurs,
for one of the first times, in Adrienne Rich’s famous autobiographical
treatise Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
(1976), in which Rich reviews the relationship between mothers and
daughters from a (future) mother’s point of view:

The cathexis between mother and daughter–essential, distorted, mi-

sused–is the great unwritten story. Probably there is nothing in human
nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between
two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss
inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other.
The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful
estrangement. […] Yet this relationship has been minimized and tri-
vialized in the annals of patriarchy. (1976: 225)

In her book, written as a reflection on the author’s personal experience

of motherhood and thus to a certain extent implying the cultural speci-
ficity of the mother-child relation – one of the basic neglects of psy-
choanalytic theory – Rich initiates a rethinking of the fundamental
significance of both daughter- and motherhood. Also attributing ma-
trophobia to many contemporary feminist discourses, she argues
against the division of women into mothers and daughters, thus paving
the way for overcoming the oedipal scenario of psychoanalysis which

25
Hirsch mentions Nancy Friday’s best-selling account of the relationship with
her mother, My Mother/My Self of 1977 in this respect, a book which is
mostly written from the daughter’s point of view about mothers and their col-
laboration with patriarchal society.
114 Roads of Her Own

had been unable to account for the subjectivity of mothers. According

to Rich, the emphasis of moments of transition (as daughters become
potential mothers and thereby remember their connections to their
own mothers) breaks this traditional dualism and enables a new con-
ception of adult femininity that tries neither to privilege motherhood
(as the only legitimized role of women in patriarchal societies) nor to
prescribe an ideal vision of the maternal; “[w]e are, none of us, ‘ei-
ther’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater
complexity, we are both.” (1976: 253) The mother is both subject and
object at the same time, always a multiple subjectivity, a nexus of var-
ious dialogical selves.
From this point of view, culturally institutionalized expectations
of idealized mothers and obedient daughters are open to contestation:
if mother and daughter are both granted subjectivity alike, a psycho-
logical space is created that houses ambivalent emotions, anger as
well as affection. Also, the dialogue between mothers and daughters
can be envisioned as a medium to negotiate lines of separation and
connection. Hirsch claims the need to abandon the psychoanalytic
frame, in which the mother’s desire – the desire for the phallus, with-
out which language and representation are impossible in both Freu-
dian and Lacanian theory –

can never be voiced because her desire exists only in the fantasy of the
child as something the child can never satisfy. […] The mother herself
is and remains absent even to herself. The place she inhabits is vacant.
Although she produces and upholds the subject, she herself remains
the matrix, the other, the origin. And the child’s own narrative – the
narrative of our culture – rests on that “othering.” (1989: 168)

In this traditional picture criticized by Hirsch, both mothers and

daughters (as mothers-to-be) comprise a matrix rejected by the child.
The narration of mothers and daughters – biological or surro-
gate – together on the road highlights the journey’s potential to pro-
duce a space in which seemingly stable psychological and cultural pat-
terns of the mother-daughter-relationship can be interrupted and re-
negotiated. Jessica Enevold refers to this emergent space as a “matero-
topia” (2003: 99). Endowing mothers with narrative voices, such road
stories mobilize motherhood, with the effect that women’s bodies are
portrayed not as wombs and vessels, matrices that the “spermatic”
voyager (cf. Leed 1991: 220-36) encounters and overcomes, but as
 Questers on the Road 115

dynamic and ambivalent agents transcending both biological and psy-

choanalytic naturalizations. Unsurprisingly, in the majority of these
narratives the Freudian mother-daughter plot is significantly altered.
Thus I disagree with Deborah Paes de Barros’ contention in a chapter
on the “Search of the Maternal” (2004: 89-125) that “[e]ach of these
[road] texts searches for an aspect of the idealized maternal; the prota-
gonists find not simply their own lost mothers but the perfect maternal
that is vanquished or hidden in the prosaic reality of the functional
world” (97). While Paes de Barros rightly views the maternal body as
central in the negotiation of the “space between the extremes” of life
and death (91 & 96), the maternal may also function to renegotiate
mother-child relationships in a way that these become viable for both
mothers and children rather than that in a way that idealizes either of
the two.
Paes de Barros observes how the process of pregnancy and birth
itself is referred to, in a number of English expressions, metaphorical-
ly as a journey, a major reason for her to define the road as a womb in
her book: “in women’s road literature, the passage is more than theo-
rized; rather, the road depicts the birth process [...]. The road becomes
the womb” (2004: 112). In an analysis of works by Barbara Kingsolv-
er, Dorothy Allison, and Beverly Donofrio, she suggests that it is often
only within the limits of this road-womb that a new mother-daughter
relationship can emerge.
Though women’s mother-daughter quests, as de Barros correct-
ly suggests, focus on this familial relationship as dynamic and negoti-
able, the concept of the road as womb-space again seems to translate
mother-daughter relations back to the pre-symbolic realm. Thus, the
road becomes an idealized space of regression to a time when the
mother-daughter bond is seen as unbroken and ‘whole’, uncorrupted
by the symbolic order and, by extension, its cultural embeddedness.
Thus, the road-as-womb paradigm essentializes women by implying
the universality of the psychoanalytic narrative of mother-daughter-
relations and by therefore erasing cultural difference. In contrast, lite-
rary emplotments of these relations, as I am going to argue in the fol-
lowing readings of mother-daughter quests, are indeed troubled by
transdifferential tensions that arise precisely because of the fact that
mother-daughter relations are negotiable only if other realms of differ-
ence – of ethnicity, class, and generation, for instance – are dealt with
as well. Seen through such a lens, the road as womb-space is a some-
116 Roads of Her Own

what idealized theoretical paradigm which is qualified by the more

complex, transdifferential spatialities narrated in and through the lite-
rary texts I analyze. In these narrations, the potential creation of a dy-
namic space of negotiation for mothers and daughters, while it is con-
ditional upon the transgression of borders between the public and the
private and of the patriarchal home, never fully escapes the ‘Law of
the father’, the symbolic order and the social-cultural dimension of
human existence.

4.4.2. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees & Pigs in Heaven:

From Mother-Daughter Negotiation to Multicultural Fantasy

Barbara Kingsolver’s best-selling novels The Bean Trees (1988) and

Pigs in Heaven (its sequel of 1993) articulate the urge of a Southern
woman to leave behind a home that is experienced as socially confin-
ing and geographically confined, and to establish a new life in the
U.S.-American west. In both books, the road is a crucial site of cultur-
al and maternal negotiation, which, however, is continually compro-
mised by gender, class, and ethnic differences. While on the road the
protagonist appears as an uncontested mother, her intimate connec-
tion, gradually established in the course of the two books, to her
adopted Native American daughter is rendered precarious whenever
she leaves the road. Structurally, this opposition of mobility and stasis
is reflected in the fact that the books are divided into chapters in
which Taylor and the girl, Turtle, are together on the road on the one
hand or struggling to stay together in various places on the other.26
Kingsolver’s stories focus on the journey as a dynamic womb-space,
intersecting the public and the private, complicating notions of home
and belonging, and conditioning a refraction of maternity; yet they fail
to successfully negotiate cultural difference precisely because the road
is a space which is enmeshed in social and symbolic orders and thus

26
Though the road chapters make up only a small part of the narratives, the road
is a crucial site in the negotiation of differences rather than a mere setting. The
Abacus paperback edition of both novels, showing a white-lined road on the
front (The Bean Trees) or back (Pigs in Heaven) covers and focusing on the
road narrative in the short summaries on their back jackets, for instance,
clearly direct reader expectations toward the genre of the road novel.
 Questers on the Road 117

affected by transdifferential tensions. Finally, the displacement of

multiple differences by way of privileging the mother-daughter bond
distorts the novel’s textual politics.
The Bean Trees starts with Taylor Greer’s quest for freedom
and a new start in the West – as far as her worn-out car will take her
away from her home in rural Arkansas. After having been raised by a
single mother, Alice, and having graduated from high-school, “Missy”
Marietta Greer vows not to end up pregnant and trapped in unhappy
marriages and poverty like the bulk of her classmates; she also re-
solves to take on a new name (and thus a new, self-fashioned identity),
determined by the town where her gas will run out – Taylorville. At a
stop in Oklahoma, a Cherokee woman leaves her little niece with Tay-
lor, who thus, against her original intentions, is cast into the role of a
mother – a parallel to the involuntary motherhood of many of Taylor’s
peers (Novy 2005: 191). At first, Taylor is overwhelmed by this re-
sponsibility and cannot see herself as a nurturing, maternal figure; the
toddler “attached itself to me by its little hands like roots sucking on
dry dirt” (Kingsolver 1988: 22). The child is extremely shy and seems
retarded, but clings to Taylor (who names her Turtle “on account of
her grip”, 36); bathing her in a motel further down the road, Taylor
learns that Turtle has been physically and sexually abused. Stranded in
Tucson with no money on her hands, the new surrogate mother finds
help in the maternal character of Mattie, owner of Jesus Is Lord Used
Tires and a secret shelter for ‘illegal’ Central American refugees, who
gives Taylor a job. Mattie figures as an older and more mature version
of Taylor; she has no children of her own, but has become an impor-
tant nurturing figure in her community.
Gradually, the main character is able to set up a modest home
with another single mother, Lou Anne, and to gain Turtle’s confidence
and love (Rubenstein 2001: 54). Yet she also learns that she will not
be able to keep the child she has come to love without a legal adop-
tion. As Taylor realizes that she will have to forge this adoption due to
the fact that Turtle’s biological parents are untraceable, a Guatemalan
Indio couple living with Mattie, Esperanza and Estevan, who lost their
own daughter in their home country to a regime of political terror,
agree to step in as the alleged Native American parents. After the
adoption is finalized, Taylor drives them to another secret shelter in
Oklahoma; the book ends with mother and daughter on the road back
118 Roads of Her Own

to Tucson and the happy prospects of an accomplished quest for a new

home.
In Pigs in Heaven, the first-person narration of The Bean Trees
changes to a multiperspectival third-person narration, corresponding
to the novel’s emphasis on personal and cultural conflict rather than
on the bildungsroman-esque development of Taylor from an adoles-
cent loner into a community-oriented female adult.27 Three years later,
Taylor and six-year old Turtle are on another road trip, this time recre-
ational; while this journey also functions as a safe womb-space of
mother-daughter-bonding, its aftermath starts a bulk of legal problems
which set the agenda for a road trip that will only come to a halt at the
very end of the novel. At Hoover dam, Turtle witnesses how a mental-
ly handicapped man jumps into the spillway and alerts Taylor, thus
saving the man’s life. When Oprah Winfrey invites Taylor and Turtle
to a show on children who have saved lives, Turtle is recognized as
Cherokee and brought to the attention of Annawake Fourkiller, a
young Cherokee lawyer who works for the Nation in Tahlequah, Ok-
lahoma. She immediately doubts the legality of the adoption, knowing
that the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 grants Native American tri-
bes sovereignty over adoption processes where their children are in-
volved (84). Annawake visits Taylor and supplicates that the child
should grow up among the Cherokee, but Taylor is frightened of los-
ing Turtle and runs away once more, this time from the new home in
Tucson and her partner Jax. Her mother Alice, fleeing from another
dissatisfying marriage and worried about Taylor, briefly joins them on
the road but then decides to intervene on her daughter’s behalf. While
Taylor struggles to make a living in Washington State, Alice visits her
cousin Sugar in Heaven, Oklahoma, who married into the Cherokee
tribe and knows Annawake. In the meantime, Annawake believes she
has identified Turtle as the child of tribal member Cash Stillwater’s
deceased daughter; her sister and her abusive (Anglo) boyfriend took

27
The genderedness of the concept of the loner in U.S. culture and its resignifi-
cation in The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven is examined by Loretta Martin
Murrey, who argues that “[f]emale characters in American literature often
move away from and back to the community and, to a larger extent than male
characters, seem to be linked to previous or future families” (1994: 156); thus,
the traditional role of women as domestic caretakers and mothers often quali-
fies their escape stories.
 Questers on the Road 119

Turtle in after the mother’s death. The young lawyer, trying to solve
the situation by also taking Taylor’s perspective into account, also acts
as matchmaker between Alice and Cash, who promptly fall in love.
Living with the Cherokee and learning of a history of ethnic oppres-
sion, Alice slowly starts to adopt Annawake’s and the tribe’s point of
view and convinces Taylor to settle the case. Once in Oklahoma, Tur-
tle recognizes her grandfather and a compromise is reached by the
joint custody assigned to Cash and Taylor; in a Ceres-Pluto arrange-
ment, Turtle/Proserpina will live with Taylor and Jax in Tucson and
spend summers with her grandfather and grandmother on Cherokee
grounds (Martin Murrey 1994: 159).
As Deborah Clarke states in her essay “Domesticating the Car:
Women’s Road Trips”, Kingsolver’s road novels, written in colorful
idiomatic language and rich in metaphors,28 “unsettle the masculine
boundaries of automobile culture” (2004: 116) – not simply because
Taylor learns to drive a push-start wreck and to change and repair tires
(a feat given her traumatization by an exploding tire in her childhood),
but because she uses the car for her “own exertion of will in re-
naming and re-locating herself ” (ibid. 117). Clarke reads The Bean
Trees as exemplary in depicting how women’s fiction has appro-
priated the car as a domestic space, representing women with children
on the road and thus transforming the idealized quest for freedom:

28
These are often drawn from Kingsolver’s professional background as a biolo-
gist (cf. Epstein): the title of The Bean Trees, for instance refers to the wisteria
vine, a bean plant whose characteristics are its endurance under harsh envi-
ronmental circumstances and great skills for adaptation due to its symbiotic
relationship with rhizobia; a Chinese-American grocer gave seeds to Mattie,
who planted them in her Tucson backyard. The plant seems to be a symbol for
Turtle‘s tortured life and her persistence in a symbiotic, nurturing relationship
with her adopted mother; but as “bean” is Turtle’s first word, later extended to
“humbean” for “human being”, it also suggests “the organic continuum of all
living things” (Rubenstein 56). Pigs in Heaven‘s title refers to the Cherokee
term for the Pleiades, disihgwa, the Six Pigs in Heaven (cf. 87), based on one
version of a mythical story of six boys who value themselves more than the
community and get punished by being transformed into pigs; the seventh star
of the Pleiades, in Annawake‘s interpretation, is the mother who regrets her
punishment and abides by her boys. The title is programmatic, in that the book
tries to find a middle road between Native American community values and
Anglo-American individualism.
120 Roads of Her Own

Kingsolver tweaks women’s traditional roles [as caregivers] without

eradicating them. Cars may help to re-shape women’s lives, but they
do not radically transform them. The refugee subplot also foregrounds
Kingsolver’s awareness of the many forms of mobility and unsettles
what may otherwise be read as a sentimental tale of female empower-
ment. [...] Kingsolver avoids an uncomplicated presentation of the
road trip as the path to maturity and self-awareness that complements
her realization of the limited power of automobility for women. (ibid.
119)

The road and the roadside are domesticated with a critical difference:
domesticity, in Kingsolver’s reformulation, which echoes Sharlene
Baker’s Finding Signs, does not imply stasis and confinement. Motels,
for instance, are depicted as what Clarke calls a “domestic transit-
place”, a “serial domestic space that does not ground or confine”
(2004: 120).29 Taylor’s quest seems predicated on the protagonist’s
very ability to domesticate the car and the journey, which also implies
a revision of the public/private dichotomy on the one hand and the
mythical westering rhetoric on the other. Here, the Southwest might
be harsh in terms of environmental conditions, to which the texts fre-
quently allude, but it nevertheless is transformed into an alternative,
care giving and nurturing social space, the “matriarchal community”
(cf. Martin Murrey’s 1994 essay title) upheld by women like Mattie,
Lou Anne, and Taylor herself.30
Arguably it is the protagonist’s working-class background which posi-
tions her at a critical distance from bourgeois ideals of domesticity.
Ruth L. Smith, who briefly discusses Kingsolver’s work against the
backdrop of a critical evaluation of the nexus of home and morality in

29
In this vein, Clarke also notes how the novel transforms conventional expecta-
tions about technology and nature: as Mattie’s junk yard is used as a wild
vegetable garden, it is the pastoral that infiltrates technology rather than vice
versa (2004: 118).
30
In this context, Roberta Rubenstein cites Taylor’s stunned observation of a
bird nesting in a hostile-looking cactus with ease (2001: 56 and Kingsolver
1988: 124), and of Taylor’s fascination with the wisteria vine: “The organic
world [...] offers a model for Taylor’s moral growth [...]: the ‘miracle’ of mu-
tuality and community that makes both home and attachment possible.”
(Rubenstein 2001: 58) On the power of women’s networks in the book, see
also Clarke (2004: 122).
 Questers on the Road 121

Western philosophical traditions such as liberalism and phenomenolo-

gy, claims that home

[in Kingsolver] is not an innocent, sentimental place that stands as the

polar opposite of alienation or that is dangerous because it can im-
pinge on autonomy. Home is not an undifferentiated repository of the
emotions, senses, and experiences that rationalism cannot incorporate.
Rather, home is a place of complex activity; it is many places and
never the only place. (1998: 189-90)

While The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven succeed in revising tradi-
tional middle-class ideals of home and the nuclear monocultural fami-
ly, Kingsolver’s fictional gender politics are not without problems.
For one, it can be argued that her texts depict male characters as either
absent or one-dimensional (cf. e.g. Epstein’s [1996] criticism), but
what hampers her alternative vision of motherhood more severely is
the fact that she marries off both Alice and Taylor at the end of Pigs in
Heaven, thus displacing the mother-daughter narrative by a traditional
romance ending – and with romance, as I have argued in the preceding
chapter, the road usually ends. Rather than abandon the heterosexual
nuclear family, Kingsolver re-authorizes its normativity in the form of
what one could call a multicultural fantasy of unions across cultural
and ethnic difference (Jax Thibodeaux has Cajun roots; the Cherokee
are traditionally clan- rather than nuclear-family oriented). Taylor
concedes some of the maternal power established in the preceding
novel for the sake of a traditional familial structure that is expected to
create stability for her daughter; the permeability of family relations is
substituted by the alleged permanence of the nuclear family, though
unconventionally, nurturance is now the responsibility of more cha-
racters than just the adoptive mother (Novy 2005: 211-2). While The
Bean Trees in fact explores the idea of the Tucson all-female commu-
nity with no biological ties as an alternative, nurturing form of family,
its sequel suggests that this form is too unstable for a child to grow up
healthily – hence there is a major contradiction between the two texts.
Critics often find Kingsolver’s work too obvious and compla-
cent about its political agenda and have described it as “aggressively
politically correct, yet fundamentally conservative” (Ryan 1995: 77)
and as “low-fat fiction” (ibid.). However, Kingsolver’s representation
of Native America, I would argue, is neither obvious in its cultural
implications nor politically correct. While Kathleen Godfrey has noted
122 Roads of Her Own

her essentialist idealization, commodification, and positive exoticism

of the Cherokee in the essay “Barbara Kingsolver’s Cherokee Nation”
(2001: 259), one has to add that Kingsolver also uses negative stereo-
types in The Bean Trees that she tries to make up for – not entirely
successfully – in its sequel.31 Kingsolver herself admitted her ignor-
ance of “a whole moral area when I wrote about this Native American
kid being swept off the reservation and raised by a very loving white
mother” (qtd. in Rubenstein 2001: 59). The texts are negligent of and
insensitive to Cherokee culture in many other ways as well, not com-
prehending the system of qualification by way of the tribal rolls,32
demographic facts (“as we drove east we saw fewer and fewer white
people. Everybody and his mother-in-law was an Indian. All the child-
ren were Indian children, and the dogs looked like Indian dogs”,
Kingsolver 1988: 204), and the history of the Trail of Tears (in Pigs in
Heaven); also, on the road through Oklahoma Taylor, Estevan, Espe-
ranza and Turtle see a Cherokee policeman they do not take seriously
because he is Native American: “[…] a police car came up behind us
and we all got quiet and kept an eye out, as we had grown accustomed
to doing, but when he passed us we just had to laugh. The cop was an
Indian” (ibid. 204). The Bean Trees further suggests Turtle was sex-
ually abused by her Cherokee relatives, who are not given a voice to
speak for themselves at any point in this text. The Cherokee remain
flat, inarticulate, and exoticized throughout the novel – one major rea-
son for Kingsolver to write Pigs in Heaven was the author’s objective

31
This is of course not to be understood as a reproach against Kingsolver as an
individual author. What is at stake here is the general ethical dilemma of how
to represent the Other when it is impossible to move beyond hegemonic dis-
courses pervading the dominant culture. As Godfrey states, Pigs in Heaven is
thus only one example “of Anglo-authored texts about Native peoples that are
tainted by hegemonic practices, reflecting contemporary America’s ongoing
difficulties reconciling itself to its ethnic diversity” (2001: 261). Following
Godfrey, one also has to acknowledge Kingsolver’s attempt to “create a mul-
tivocal text […] that conceives of American Indians as subjects” (ibid. 262) –
however flawed it might be.
32
Alice’s belief that one-eighth of ‘Cherokee blood’ is the basis for tribal en-
rolment is left uncommented (Kingsolver 1988: 13); the reader is thus not in-
formed that the claim to Cherokee identity is predicated upon finding a rela-
tive in the tribal rolls.
 Questers on the Road 123

to correct this picture (cf. Kingsolver qtd. in Rubenstein 2001: 59),

perhaps in response to the criticism the book received.
In some respects the second novel accomplishes this task; how-
ever, Pigs in Heaven transfers the problematics of ethnic and cultural
identity onto the Cherokee child rather than the central maternal figure
of Taylor: although the reader learns early in The Bean Trees that Tay-
lor herself has a Cherokee great-grandfather,33 this legacy remains
largely unacknowledged throughout The Bean Trees and in much of
its sequel, despite its potential importance for the adoption case in
Pigs in Heaven. When Annawake tells Taylor that Turtle, according to
Cherokee law and worldview, must grow up among the Cherokee, this
could have been a starting point for a different quest altogether – a
quest for the protagonist’s Native American legacy, foreshadowed in
the Bean Trees,34 which might have led to the erosion of seemingly ir-
reducible cultural differences in terms of values of individuality,
community, and family. Instead, the negotiation of multiple alle-
giances is displaced from the central narrative revolving around Tay-
lor,35 whose hostile and fearful emotions with regard to the Cherokee
claims paradoxically trap her on the road (and in fact endanger Tur-
tle’s safety and well-being; she has to wait for hours in the car while
her mother works because Taylor cannot afford a babysitter, 290).
Taylor remains defensive, “resisting the implications of Annawake’s
beliefs concerning cultural identity and historical loss”, as Roberta
Rubenstein puts it (2001: 61), and agrees to the custody compromise

33
On page 13, the reader learns that Alice, rather naively, has taught Taylor the
Cherokee Nation was their “ace in the hole” and that if they “run out of luck
[they] can always go live on the Cherokee Nation”.
34
Taylor associates her Cherokee heritage with Turtle’s in the first novel rather
than its sequel, as Novy also mentions (2005: 192). Taylor explains early in
the novel to a stranger that “[Turtle’s] great-great grandpa was full-blooded
Cherokee. […] On my side.” (Kingsolver 1988: 71) It is also in The Bean
Trees that Taylor reflects upon her own Cherokeeness when she first drives
through Cherokee lands (15).
35
Even though Kingsolver’s decision to employ varied perspectives in Pigs in
Heaven tries to establish multiple narrative centers, the reader identifies with
Taylor, whose story remains the main plot, also as a consequence of reading
The Bean Trees before (cf. also Novy’s [2005] reading) – though the second
book does focus more on the daughter than the first.
124 Roads of Her Own

for her own rather than her daughter’s sake.36 Taylor delimits herself
from her multi-ethnic heritage by defining herself against the Chero-
kee throughout the books. Ruth L. Smith contends that “[e]ven though
Taylor is part Cherokee herself, it is only in relation to the Nation that
she begins systematically to see herself as a white person” (1998:
193), although her self-definition increasingly rests on rocky founda-
tions as she realizes she “might not always know what is best” (ib-
id.).37 Thus, the road’s liberatory potential is compromised by mo-
ments of transdifference that arrest the main character in flight, as
Taylor is unwilling to negotiate cultural difference. Similarly reluctant
to take her own or her adopted daughter’s multiple affiliations into ac-
count, Taylor clings to the womb-space of the road as if it were
beyond the grasp of either patriarchy or cultural conflict – a belief the
narrative ultimately cannot uphold.
The child herself, transplanted from one cultural environment to
the other and only slowly learning and willing to speak, is too young
and frail to negotiate these conflicting cultural allegiances. Moments
of transdifference are inscribed in her mumbled narrative voice, which
could be seen as a symbolic means to muffle such intrapersonal con-
flicts. One of the few transdifferential moments appears, for instance,
when Turtle disassociates herself from her Cherokee heritage, telling
her story as “[w]e had to run away from the Indians” (248) – sounding
like the stereotypical white pioneer-child of the 19th century. The child
is too young to understand these contradictions, and, most significant-
ly, her adoptive mother makes no effort to explain their own ‘Indian-
ness’.

36
In contrast to Kristina Fagan’s view of adoption as a utopian national fantasy
in her reading of Pigs in Heaven that resolves cultural conflict in an all-too
neat, personalized manner, Taylor’s implicit dissociation from her Cherokee
heritage, which I view as an important issue in the book, suggests that the na-
tional fantasy of cultural reconciliation rests on the culturally dominant
group’s agenda to ensure its own safety rather than on the genuine acknowl-
edgment of cultural difference and the care for the well-being of future gen-
erations.
37
It is necessary to note that Ruth L. Smith does not read the two books as prob-
lematic in terms of their larger implications regarding cultural and ethnic dif-
ference, but as evidence for complexity and uncertainty in terms of identity
and allegiance (1998: 194).
 Questers on the Road 125

Only Alice, Taylor’s mother, sets out to explore her Native

American ancestry by spending time at the reservation and learning
about the tribe and her relatives. When she examines the tribal rolls
with Sugar, who clearly functions as the mediator between White and
Native, she tells Alice blood quantum is not important: “being Chero-
kee is more or less a mind-set” (Kingsolver 1993: 275). Alice’s reac-
tion upon finding her grandmother – instead of the Cherokee grandfa-
ther the reader remembers from The Bean Trees – in the tribal rolls re-
flects such a moment of instability: “Alice stares at the book of names.
She can’t put a finger on who, exactly, she feels she’s cheating [...]. ‘It
doesn’t feel right to me’, she says. ‘I always knew we were some little
part Indian, but I never really thought it was blood enough to sign
up.’” (Kingsolver 1993: 275) Another time, she tells Sugar she knows
“‘[...] we had the same grandmother [...]. But you’re fogetting I’m not
Indian.’” (270) Only when she participates in a stomp dance, related
to the reader through Anglo eyes that enjoy what they believe to be an
authentic experience of Cherokee culture – “music that sounds like the
woods [...], [n]o artificial flavorings” (269) – is she initiated into her
new tribal identity and feels “completely included” (271). In contrast
to Alice’s, Taylor’s genetic connection to the Cherokee remains by
and large unspoken and unexplored in the text.
It is indicative of Kingsolver’s political agenda that her prota-
gonist’s quest for a new home, while it might be threatened by Native
American laws, is endangered even more by the single mother’s po-
verty. Despite working full time, Taylor can barely pay the rent and
buy food: “it’s not like getting into anywhere at all. It’s working your-
self for all you’re worth to get ahead, and still going backward”, she
thinks (251) before realizing that she will not be able to continue a life
in flight, separated from her supportive matriarchal community in
Tucson (Martin Murrey 1994: 158). Existential threat is the reason
why Taylor confronts the Cherokee claim to her daughter – rather than
any understanding on her part of the necessity for her daughter to con-
nect with her heritage. With the consent of the law, her quest is ac-
complished: the road’s dynamic space is abandoned as soon as the
mother-daughter relationship is legally sanctioned (cf. also Paes de
Barros 2004: 114); the road as a womb-space, limited, as I have ar-
gued, in its potential as an alternative spatiality exactly because it rests
on a displacement of cultural (trans)difference, is integrated into a
normative socio-spatial order.
126 Roads of Her Own

From this perspective, it is consistent with the logic of the

narrative that The Bean Trees more firmly establishes an alternative
vision of home and family, at the cost of a complex portrayal of Na-
tive America. In contrast, Pigs in Heaven ‘legalizes’ this alternative
vision by introducing two father figures, yet manages to give a voice
to the Cherokee, their history of expulsion, social situation, colonial
and cultural conflicts, and tribal worldview38 – a shift also recognized
by Marianne Novy (2005: 188). In The Bean Trees, thus, the expan-
sionist doctrine of Manifest Destiny remains largely intact: in order to
accomplish her quest to claim new territory for femininity and mo-
therhood beyond dominant patriarchal patterns of the nuclear family,
Taylor has to ‘win against the Indians’ (cf. also Godfrey 2001: 275).39
Whether Kingsolver is entirely successful in “suggesting the possibili-
ty of movement that is neither masculinist nor imperialist nor classist”
(Clarke 2004: 121) is thus debatable. Though the texts embrace a mul-
ticultural, patchwork family closure, popular with many readers and
critics, the structural confines of the quest west are oddly repeated.
By the end of the story, the idealized fantasy of a pre-oedipal
womb-space of the road has to be abandoned, and heterosexual bonds
are embraced as the novel has subtly expressed that mother and
daughter are not sufficient to constitute a family (cf. 291 & 324; Novy
2005: 203 & 206); in Paes de Barros’ words, “[t]he mother-daughter
dyad of the road is ruptured; traveling, Turtle and Taylor bond solely

38
This history is not always presented accurately, however; the Trail of Tears is
known to have taken place in an extremely harsh winter rather than in sum-
mer, as Pigs in Heaven has it (281).
39
In his reading of Kingsolver’s novels, Robert Brinkmeyer claims that The
Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven distance themselves from, rather than partake
in, the frontier legacy: “Kingsolver revises the American dream of individual
freedom into the dream of putting down roots, building families, and estab-
lishing communities. […] [She] suggests that the American experience of
moving west has less to do with the dream of starting anew in a world of end-
less possibilities than it does with being a refugee, with being displaced.”
(2000: 98-9) He fails to take into account the price that Native Americans
have had to pay for Anglos who have “put down roots” in the West as well as
to understand that this settler mentality has been central for the powerful
rhetoric of the frontier. His celebratory interpretation resembles Bob J. Frye’s
praise of Kingsolver in “Nuggets of Truth in the Southwest: Artful Humor and
Realistic Craft in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees” (2001).
 Questers on the Road 127

with each other but off the road they are embraced by the [...] paternal
demands of heterosexual culture” (2004: 115).40 When confronted
with the moral dilemma of acknowledging cultural difference at the
cost of personal loss, with Taylor’s new motherhood as the catalyst,
the success of Taylor’s quest becomes questionable. As hard as King-
solver’s protagonist tries to “make this work here” (244), to “keep a
roof over [her] own head” (246) and care for her child without the
support of her partner and her community, Taylor is eventually inte-
grated into the symbolic and spatial patriarchal order: “Surrender Do-
rothy”, as one chapter is titled in reference to The Wizard of Oz.

4.4.3. Journey toward the Maternal, Quest for the Past:

Hilma Wolitzer’s Hearts and Chelsea Cain’s Dharma Girl

Like Kingsolver’s Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, Hilma Wolitzer’s

Hearts (1980, re-published by Random House in 2006) depicts a
young woman as a surrogate mother-figure setting out to start a new
life in the West. Similarly, Chelsea Cain’s Dharma Girl (1996) cen-
ters on a mother-daughter-relationship on the road, although it leads
east rather than west and toward the past before it continues into the
future. With ethnic conflict displaced as a literary subject in both of
these novels, they seem to opt for an ‘easy way out’ of the predica-
ment of the U.S.-American quest narrative by focusing, almost exclu-
sively, on the gradual evolvement of mother-daughter bonds; in tune
with most quest-narratives of the early 1980s, (hetero)sexual relation-
ships are structurally significant again in Wolitzer’s novel (cf. Elliot
2000: 219). The two quest texts are analyzed in my study for their dis-
similar literary strategies that lead them to establish alternative moth-
er-daughter trajectories – and, in turn, alternative forms of the literary
quest, countering prevailing myths of the open road to the west. In
contrast to Wolitzer’s novel, Chelsea Cain’s Dharma Girl, the most
recent of the four texts discussed in chapter 4.4., seems programmatic

40
Paes de Barros (2004) unfortunately neglects the issue of cultural conflict al-
together and does not differentiate between Anglo paternalism and patriarchy
and tribal society, itself a victim of white political paternalism; cf. also Craig
(s.d.).
128 Roads of Her Own

for its redirection of the quest, leading toward a coming-to-terms with

the past rather than toward a future, tabula rasa-like destination.
Focusing on the relationship between Linda Reismann, a dance-
instructor and widow at age 26 after only six weeks of marriage, and
her adolescent stepdaughter Robin, Hearts is told in the third person
from both the stepmother’s and the stepdaughter’s perspectives, which
opens up the possibility for reader identification with both characters.
The book follows Linda’s and Robin’s journey: from Linda learning
to drive shortly before her husband dies in New Jersey (cf. 3-5 & 16; a
fact that anticipates her growing independence, as Elliot claims [2000:
219]) to their arrival in California, when driving has become a form of
dancing for Linda.41 Ronald Primeau sees this depiction of automo-
bility, together with the fact that the protagonists travel slowly, stop
whenever they want, and reject straight trajectories as a “dramatic re-
vision of male road symbols” (1996: 111-2); although Primeau thus
simplistically affirms the notion of a dichotomous binary system of
road symbolism, there is no doubt that Wolitzer’s novel questions the
road narrative’s masculine legacy.
However, Hearts also interacts with, rather than just counte-
racts, this legacy. Drawing on the national fantasy of California as an
Edenic h(e)aven, Linda is determined it is her “ultimate destination”
(19):

Her mother had spoken of going to California during her last years,
“to get away from all this”, with a vague gesture that might have in-
cluded the house [...], the harshness of Northeastern winters, and the
inexorable downward path of her life. Everybody wanted to go to Cali-
fornia. Linda believed it was a migratory instinct, apart from the ra-
tional arguments for its good weather, geographical beauty, and gla-
morous movie industry. Yet she was excited by the idea of seeing
palm trees and redwoods, the Pacific Ocean, and famous stars pushing
shopping carts in those all-night supermarkets. And if happiness is to
be found somewhere, isn’t it likely to be at the furthest distance? She
imagined herself driving in bluish evening light to the very edge of the
coast, stopping short at a place where small waves would break at the
Maverick’s fenders. (19-20)

41
The last sentence reads: “Linda’s right foot pressed the accelerator and her left
one was braced against the floor of the Maverick, but she believed she was
dancing” (324).
 Questers on the Road 129

Even natural disaster experts, who predict severe earthquakes in the

state, cannot deter her from her destination (150). Significantly, it is
her deceased mother who appropriated the national myth in the spatial
and gendered context of a confining house and home and has bequea-
thed her dream of the west to Linda, who then tries to live her mo-
ther’s fantasy. The myth of the Golden West thus appears not as ex-
clusively masculine, but as the matrix of all sorts of American fanta-
sies of escape. This legacy of an imaginary land of Cockaigne in the
West, both national and maternal, provides her with a continual moti-
vation to drive on: “Linda had a sudden desire to get away. She’d had
enough, more than enough, of the survival of things. And she wanted
to stay mobile, anyway, to keep moving toward her destination before
California broke away from America and drifted off . ” (175) Linda’s
belief in California as offering a second chance in life is sustained also
by singing along with the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Drea-
min” on the radio (149); further, she plans to start reading books
(178), as well as swimming and jogging (217) – a healthy lifestyle she
associates with the national culture: “It would be her initiation into the
real America” (ibid.).42
In the beginning, Linda has no intention of including Robin in
her projected new life. They are virtual strangers to each other and
their relationship is nothing if not hostile and jealous, competing for
the love of Dwight Reismann (cf. chapter three in the book). On the
journey, as Linda, who plans to drop the girl off with her husband’s
relatives in Iowa, and Robin, a sullen, precocious thirteen-year old,
share the closed spaces of cars and motel rooms, this reciprocal anger
gradually dissolves. Cast together by these womb-like spaces that nei-
ther mother nor daughter-figure can ever fully control, the classical
oedipal jealousy for the male love-object disappears – albeit with in-

42
Linda’s plans for a future in which she cares for herself rather than a husband
and family are interpreted by Elliot, together with the importance of a non-
marital sexual encounter during the road-trip, an adolescent girl prologue, and
the representation of female friendship, as evidence that the book “subordi-
nate[s] claims of female independence to the rhetoric of ‘true self ’ ” (2000:
204). The grounds on which her interpretation of Hearts is based remain un-
clear; as a matter of fact, Elliot contradicts her claim in a conclusive remark,
arguing “[t]hat [Linda] turns down Wolfie is intended as further proof of her
convictions, and that she has arrived at them independently” (ibid. 220).
130 Roads of Her Own

terruptions (they compete for the attention of a hitchhiker they both

find attractive, for instance) and temporary feelings of resentment.
These tensions between (surrogate) mother and daughter and, from the
maternal perspective, between escape from and commitment to re-
sponsibility, often result in phenomena of transdifference. This can be
seen in Wolitzer’s sarcastic tone, bitter-sweet metaphors and disturb-
ing similes such as the following, when Linda and Robin’s relation-
ship is portrayed as a process resembling difficult peace negotiations
between countries at war: “[i]t would be possible to part soon with
some feeling of friendship [...], shaking hands warmly, perhaps even
embracing, the way Begin and Sadat had done at the airport after the
Mideast Peace Treaty was signed.” (217) The narration swerves be-
tween being drawn back into the “striated space” of the oedipal trian-
gle and moving toward an alternative, “smooth” space for mother and
daughter. With the womb-like spaces they share forcing them to
communicate and overcome their hostilities, however, they do not
have to part but will stay together at the end of the book.
In Hearts, the communal space created by a shared road-
adventure in cars and motels is the most important structural device
that is highlighted as creating a bond between Linda and Robin, and
thus also can be seen as ‘feminizing’ the road. Yet the road is also
significant for Linda’s growing attachment to Robin as a traditionally
masculine space, as she recognizes her responsibility for her step-
daughter’s physical safety, propelled by her own obsession with vi-
olence against women: “Whenever Linda read an article in the news-
paper about the unidentified body of a young woman found in the
woods somewhere, or dragged from a river, she felt a disturbing affin-
ity.” (37) Suspicious of the large number of hitchhikers they encoun-
ter, Linda projects her fear onto Robin:

Linda knew better than to pick anyone up, no matter how innocent
they might seem. In their newspaper photos, captured murderers and
rapists didn’t always appear sinister or different, either. [...] Not that
she was worried so much about her own safety; she was too miserable
by now to care. [...] But she was still responsible for Robin [...]. (70)

Clearly, this is a fear culturally conditioned by media reports, film,

and literature (she refers to both Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood im-
plicitly and Bonnie and Clyde explicitly, 155) as well as by Linda’s
personal experience of being stalked by a client (39). Even when they
 Questers on the Road 131

meet Wolfie, a hitchhiker and pacifist who helps them change a flat
tire (71) and shares his ‘road wisdom’ with them (74), this fear is not
entirely overcome; through Wolfie’s name alone, the Little Red Rid-
ing Hood fairy tale – on which, in the introduction to this study, I have
drawn as one of the earliest road stories with a female protagonist – is
evoked.
Although after Wright Reismann’s death, fathers are absent
from both Robin’s and Linda’s life – Linda lost her own father when
she was a teenager – father-figures are not absent on the road. From
the truck-driver who draws their attention to their flat tire (cf. 70) to
Wolfie and the pharmacist from whom Linda buys a pregnancy test
(60), she seeks masculine approval as long as a bond with Robin is not
established. Symbolic of paternal guidance, Linda also carries her de-
ceased husband’s ashes with her because she is unable to decide on an
appropriate resting place.
As Linda soon finds out, another ‘legacy’ she struggles to leave
behind is her pregnancy to her deceased husband, which she tries to
terminate in an abortion clinic along the road – a plan which fails, as
the clinic gets violently attacked by anti-abortion activists while Linda
is waiting for her operation (cf. chapter seventeen; she realizes that the
operation has failed only later). Rather than giving up her unborn child
like Wright’s ashes, she gradually embraces and ultimately accepts not
only her unborn child but also her stepdaughter as her own.
As Linda finds out that Robin’s unknown relatives in Iowa are
selling their house and are not eager to care for Robin either (cf. chap-
ter fourteen), her emergency plan is to leave the girl with her biologi-
cal mother Miriam, who had abandoned her family when the daughter
was little. When Robin learns where they are going, her anger at her
biological mother manifests itself in a (rather child-like and unrealis-
tic) plan to kill her and to pay her back for having been abandoned:

They were finally on their way to Glendale, the last stage in Robin’s
journey toward her mother. Thoughts of her mother occupied her en-
tirely now, driving out the still-fresh news of Linda’s pregnancy. [...]
[She] couldn’t work up the fantasies she had found so comforting only
yesterday. All she was left with were the grim probabilities of reality
[...]. That woman who had gone away eight years before would be a
stranger because eight years had happened and because she had cho-
sen to go. But she would still be Robin’s mother, the one who had
given birth to her and, before that, carried her everywhere in the shel-
132 Roads of Her Own

tering ark of her body. Robin, who was set now to reject her, to turn
away a belated appeal of love with violence, wondered if she would
get the chance. To be rejected twice was unthinkable. In all her
dreams of their reunion, it was her mother who experienced joy, and
Robin was closed in on that joy with the deadliness of her resolve.
(297-8)

“Grim probabilities of reality” and the maternal “sheltering ark”,

“love” and “violence”, dreams of rejection and reunion: Wolitzer
creates a narrative space for Robin’s feelings of transdifference at this
point in the story – expressing her hurt and anger, but also her almost
physical yearning for her mother, her literal affiliation. While a diffe-
rential dichotomous either/or-relationship of pre-oedipal connection
on the one hand and oedipal rejection is not dissolved here, these bi-
nary positions begin to disintegrate as Robin approaches her biologi-
cal mother geographically and thus physically. The co-presence of
both a positive and a negative attitude toward her mother results in the
oscillation of the mother/daughter difference.
When the two finally meet, however, the narrative focus briefly
shifts to Miriam, who gets a voice to explain why she left her family
and to relativize the ‘good mother’/‘bad mother’ binary; Robin’s
thoughts are again marked by transdifferential ambivalence:

“I know I’m not the best mother in the world, but I’m not the worst,
either,” Miriam said. “When I was there, we were very close [...].”
Robin thought that if her mother had never left she would have grown
up listening to that laugh, that it would have become as casual and
familiar as a language. But now she despised its sound, its inappro-
priate punctuation of Miriam’s narrative. Robin knew it was an eva-
sive technique, that it replaced the truth that could only be told
through language. (310; emphases mine)

Significantly, “the truth”, which in Robin’s view can only be commu-

nicated in the symbolic realm, refers to the girl’s negative vision of
the mother who left her when she was a child; the daughterly truth, if
negligent of the maternal perspective, can only correspond to the stan-
dard oedipal rejection once the realm of the ‘unspeakable’ is left be-
hind. However, the text continues to create narrative space for the
mother as Miriam’s voice goes on to explain why she left: paradoxi-
cally echoing Robin’s negative image of the mother role, Miriam dec-
lares that she did not want to become like her mother, who “stayed at
 Questers on the Road 133

home and made everybody miserable”, “missed her chance in life [so]
she wanted everybody else to miss theirs” (310). Married and with a
baby at age 21, Miriam realized “I might as well have been back with
my mother; you know, trapped, and being good” (311) and thus left.
Both Linda (and the reader perhaps, too) sympathize with Miriam, but
although Miriam eventually does connect with Robin on both an emo-
tional and physical level – Robin almost falls asleep and “lose[s] her
fierce and precious guard” (312) – and asks Linda to let her daughter
stay, Robin refuses reconciliation. Although she abandons her mur-
derous plan, the mother-daughter-(trans)difference is not entirely obli-
terated or translated into familial harmony. Eventually, Linda and Mi-
riam accept Robin’s decision, and the meeting between biological
mother and daughter becomes the turning point of the novel, after
which Robin, little by little, begins to embrace her new, surrogate
mother. Thus, the negotiations between Robin and Miriam appear to
be crucial for Robin to be able to accept other maternal bonds and,
consequently, for the narrative to uphold an alternative mother-
daughter spatiality. It becomes clear they will stay together:

[Linda] took the girl’s arm and led her into the living room. Robin was
like the victim of a street accident, a hit-and-run. There was no blood
or other evidence of injury, but she seemed to be in shock, and who
knew what damage was unseen. [...] “It’s all right,” she repeated.
“Nobody will make you stay. I’ll take you with me.” “You don’t have
to,” Robin muttered. “I know that, Robin,” Linda said. “I want to.”
(315)

Back on the road approaching California, Linda and Robin bury

Wright Reismann’s ashes in the woods together (318-21), a ritual that
strengthens their bond and suggests an ultimate escape from patriar-
chal control.43 It is similarly significant that when Linda falls in love
and sleeps with Wolfie, a hitchhiker, earlier in the story, she decides
to leave him despite of his offer to take care of her, Robin, and the ba-

43
Similar in structure, another such ritual is performed when Robin offers to
share her last joint with Linda (285-8). In this episode, the mother-daughter
roles are reversed, as it is Robin who initiates Linda into the drug experience
and tries to console her exhausted stepmother, sad after breaking up with
Wolfie. Linda, in turn, “accept[s] with ease their reversal of roles”, which
makes Robin feel “a sense of power [that] led to a reckless generosity” (287).
134 Roads of Her Own

by (269). In chapter ten, this turn in the plot is foreshadowed after

Wolfie leaves for the first time (they will pick him up again later on):
Linda and Robin become closer for the first time, leaving the jealousy
that had arisen because both young women felt attracted to Wolfie, in
a repetition of their relationship to Wright, temporarily behind. Spatial
relations mirror this development: “When they were ready to leave
again, [Robin] climbed into the front seat next to Linda, for the first
time since they’d left New Jersey.” (78) The chapter ends, and chapter
eleven notably begins with Linda and Robin descending into Hidden
River Caverns in Ohio, a womb-like space characterized by “damp-
ness” and “physical closeness” (79).
Linda decides for a family without father upon arriving in Cali-
fornia,44 where she naively believes “if you feel like having a snack in
the middle of the night, you just go out and get it” (323). Like the pio-
neers she remembers, “[a]lthough they couldn’t tell when they crossed
into another state” (322), she and Linda, the narrative makes clear,
have crossed into another “state” in the course of their journey as well.
Their relationship progresses from hostility to maternal and daughterly
affection, literally over Dwight’s dead body. Thus, Wolitzer’s novel
re-writes rather than repudiates the mythical journey west as a move-
ment not from civilization to wilderness, but from patriarchal to matri-
focal homes without predication on biological ties.45 Correspondingly,
it is only on this last stretch of the road that Linda realizes her feelings
for her stepdaughter:

44
Linda’s memory of the troubled relationship with her own abusive father (e.g.
207) can be read as contributing to this decision: “If Linda had been a man of
draft age when her father was still alive, she believed she would have gone off
without protest to whatever war they happened to be waging, in a last-ditch ef-
fort to please him. And she would have been killed, probably, because nothing
less would really have done it.” (75) Linda’s development culminates in aban-
doning this desire to please various male love-objects.
45
The fact that Linda’s abortion is unsuccessful, however, clearly does affirm
biological mother-child ties as well. Though Wolitzer sympathizes with
women’s reproductive rights in a Random House interview and with the femi-
nist movement in an interview with Aruna Sitesh, it is in fact the attack on the
abortion clinic that makes Linda’s future patchwork family possible, as it is
her pregnancy which makes Robin regard her as a potential mother for the
first time.
 Questers on the Road 135

Why am I talking so much, Linda wondered, and decided it was to

avoid speaking the unspeakable [my emphasis]. It was because she
could not say aloud that she was bound to Robin, that you can become
a family by the grace of accident and will, that we have a duty to con-
sole one another as best we can. [...] Linda thought that she had out-
grown some of that despised sentimentality, and would become
tougher and more disenchanted as she went along. Finally she would
be old and tired of everything, and ready to face death with resigna-
tion, if not courage. But then someone would probably come in at the
last minute [...]. And Linda would want more, the way she did now.
[...] Linda looked up and found Robin looking back, her eyes alive
with tears.
“We’re here!” Robin said, and they were. (323-4)

Although motherly love is associated with the “unspeakable” ties be-

tween mother and child here, echoing psychoanalytic accounts of the
pre-oedipal stage, the scenario Wolitzer develops at the end of the
novel does not imply a regressive development of either Linda or
Robin. Instead, their story follows the classical progressive narrative
of the quest, albeit a quest that is not about conquering and taming,
but about overcoming familial trauma, personal crisis, and oppressive
relationships by way of mutual support and friendship, which also al-
ways leaves room for more ambivalent emotions. This revision of the
mother-daughter plot even reverberates with Linda’s attitude toward
her own pregnancy, which is similarly ambivalent.
The quest is thus also a quest for alternative domestic arrange-
ments beyond the nuclear family. It is no coincidence that Wolitzer
states in a recent interview she had “been thinking a lot about domes-
tic life” while writing Hearts: “I wondered what truly binds people to-
gether for good, and if you can form a solid family without a blood re-
lationship” (Random House interview) – a question her novel certain-
ly answers in the affirmative. All in all, Wolitzer’s novel is thus more
successful than Kingsolver’s texts in feminizing both the car and the
road as womb-space, but like Kingsolver’s, it affirms rather than re-
pudiates the legacy of the quest west.

***

Hilma Wolitzer’s Hearts resembles Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and

Pigs in Heaven by transforming the road-quest into a quest for the ma-
ternal from the point of view of protagonists who are in the process of
136 Roads of Her Own

becoming social (rather than biological) mothers. Contested in their

role by both their surrogate daughters and their social surroundings,
the main characters struggle for a coming-to-terms with the maternal.
By looking at Chelsea Cain’s Dharma Girl: A Road Trip across the
American Generations (1996), I am now turning to biological mother-
daughter relations, asking how a road quest can re-signify these ‘natu-
ral’ relations as socially constructed and changeable. Both mother and
daughter interact with each other in order to create a dynamic shared
space on the road; the maternal eventually emerges not as a universal,
uncontested ‘given’, but as the outcome of a process of negotiating
(trans)difference. The notion that biological factors are enough to es-
tablish an eternal bond between the two main characters is contested
in this novel, as its focus is on shared (hi-)stories the daughter tries to
understand, to reflect on critically, and thus to appropriate as her her-
itage. At the same time, Dharma Girl is significant for the U.S.-
American quest narrative in that it abandons the idea of the West as
the quintessential place of new beginnings, thus shedding the cultural
baggage of empire-building and westward expansion. Instead of privi-
leging the notion of progress and futurity, Cain’s autobiographical
book has a daughter and her biological mother embark on a quest for
their family’s past.
In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida argues for heritage to be
understood not as a given, received passively (1994: 54), but rather as
having to be actively acquired, selected from a multitude of heritages,
since heritage is always heterogeneous (ibid. 16); “never one with it-
self”; “[i]ts presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the in-
junction to reaffirm by choosing” (ibid.). Of course, a multiple inherit-
ance is constituted not only by a variety of personal heritages and li-
neages, but also by the collective legacies within a specific cultural
framework, the legacies – yet also “the weight” – of generations.
What is at stake, then, is the critical reception of the personal and cul-
tural past, vital, according to Derrida, for human existence: “[t]o be
[...] means [...] to inherit. All the questions on the subject of being or
of what is to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance.” (54) The
act of inheriting, in this view, is a creative narrative act that filters out,
adopts, and dismisses certain aspects while emphasizing others. This
“principle of selectivity” (87) is always already an act of both inclu-
sion and exclusion. From this perspective, Cain’s decision to write her
quest narrative in the form of a mother-daughter road trip is highly
 Questers on the Road 137

significant. Tracing the stories of her childhood in an Iowa commune,

the narrator-protagonist-cum-implied-author, Chelsea Cain, seeks to
come to terms with her past as well as her present in the context of the
cultural and social contexts of the late 1960s and the 1990s:

this had gotten to be about more than just me. What I was trying to
uncover involved my parents and the core values of the culture I was
living in. It was about seeing if any of the old lessons I had learned
were still relevant. It was about finding some alternative to spending
two hours a day sucking down espresso drinks at Starbucks. (30)

Growing up in a hippie commune with a father trying to evade the

draft (29) and an unconventional, free-spirited, loving mother, Chelsea
rejected this countercultural legacy as a young adult, changing her
name from Chelsea Snow (her parents wanted her to have her own last
name) to Chelsea Elizabeth Cain (her mother’s last name, 5), hiding
her past from her friends (ibid.), and championing conformism, such
as “a look that took her four years to cultivate, although it is exactly
the same as everyone else’s […], which was, of course, the point” (6).
Studying at the University of California at Irvine, she is confronted
with the news of her mother’s cancer and becomes restless and de-
pressed. The book starts with the narrator looking back to this moment
in her life:

June 1995. I have been walking a lot lately. It is an odd compulsion. I

leave my apartment. I start walking. I have no idea where I’m going.
[…] [S]ometimes, I will walk and walk, and not recognize anything at
all.
[…] I want to understand who we all were. Who we are.
It is, I think, the reason why I walk. (3-4)

Confronted with the “meaninglessness” (26 & 27) she sees in both her
personal life (“I was twenty years old, living off my college loans, not
learning anything, owned about nineteen baseball caps from the Gap
and had absolutely no plans for the future”, 25) as well as in her gen-
eration “of dull-eyed, slack-mouthed losers” (ibid.) – thus also the
book’s subtitle – her restless wanderings soon obtain direction. Con-
vinced that she will “find something” (19) in her past to root her in the
present and that she will “run into herself” (7) by going back to her
childhood, Chelsea becomes a “psychonaut – a voyager into the soul”
(ibid.) at the end of the prologue: “[…] [I]n order to find herself, she
138 Roads of Her Own

first has to create a self to identify. She has to tell the story. […] She
has to see if she can find what she has lost track of, before she can go
on to anything else.” (7) From the beginning, then, the self is a con-
scious narrative creation in the book, which has to start with the past
before it can point to the future.
In her quest for her roots, the protagonist decides to re-settle in
Iowa and to turn her moving away into a road trip with her mother, as
going back in terms of time and space, for Chelsea, also entails rene-
gotiating the mother-daughter relationship. The Sixties are important
for her, she explains, not out of nostalgic longing and backwardness,46
but because “those years were my connection to that woman sitting on
the grassy hill next to my father [in a photograph]” (28), the woman
whose life she now sees endangered by cancer.
However, traveling with the mother in Dharma Girl is not, in
psychoanalytic terms, a return to the maternal womb in which mother
and daughter are one again and difference is erased. The spatial-
geographical return does not entail regressive fantasies of an idealized
pre-Oedipal, ‘natural’ bond. To the contrary; sharing the closed, nar-
row space of the car and spending days on end with each other, the
road is depicted as highlighting difference:

This is what it’s like traveling with my mother. She is a Buddhist and
wants to “experience the place”. I am an atheist and want to find the
nearest, cheapest lodge with coffee, where I can sleep eight hours and
then get back on the road. This slight difference in priorities has led to
some discomfort in the past. My mother passes rest stops and wants to
rest. I’d rather not make more than one stop per state. My mother gets
hungry and wants to find a restaurant she likes and eat, I get hungry
and want to go through a drive-through the next time we stop for gas.
But this trip has been different. I think we have both been so lost in
our own thoughts, that worrying about details – not to mention chit-
chat – has seemed incidental. That sort of thing is for tourists. We are
travelers. (35)

46
This does not mean there is no Sixties nostalgia in Dharma Girl. It is perhaps
most obvious when Chelsea, in an inner monologue, asks her parents to “[t]ell
me about evading the draft. Tell me about running away to Mexico. Tell me”
and in the next sentence mistakes the seriousness of draft evasion for “free-
dom” and “adventures” (29); on the same page, she says she “wanted to roll
naked in the mud at Woodstock or protest something, anything”.
 Questers on the Road 139

Whereas tourism, it is implied, is about outward appearances, physical

surroundings and concerns, mother and daughter are travelers into
their own minds. Inspired by a light-hearted interest in Buddhism that
her mother is much more serious about, Chelsea becomes a “dharma
girl”, a seeker on “the path to knowledge or something” (19); it is no
coincidence that, reversing the future-oriented American quest pattern
headed west, mother and daughter are going east, the direction of
Buddhism’s origins as well as their own: “Toward Iowa. Toward
Snowbird. […] We weren’t just returning. We were voyaging, passag-
ing and pilgrimaging.” (19) Recalling her nickname as a little girl,
Snowbird, Chelsea wants to seek the help of her old self as well as of
her guardian angel, “spirit guide” and “bodhisattva” (20), the Snow-
queen, a figure invented by her mother when Chelsea was a little girl.
As Deborah Paes de Barros has noted, the dharma of the book’s
title is also, in the context of the road genre, a direct reference to Ke-
rouac’s Dharma Bums, reminding the reader, she contends, “of the
fact women were largely excluded from Jack Kerouac’s homosocial
space” (2004: 97); unlike Kerouac’s literary characters, the road takes
Cain’s protagonist “not […] to rugged individualism and separation,
but […] toward fulfillment, community and attachment between
mothers and daughters” (96). Not only is de Barros’ reading of Beat
literature somewhat simplistic; she also constructs a questionable op-
position between The Dharma Bums and Cain’s novel rather than a
continuum. Cain’s book indeed resonates with Kerouac’s and other
Beat poets’ fascination with eastern spirituality, e.g. by casting the
geographical journey as always also an inward journey, leading Chel-
sea “into her own psychic landscape” (Paes de Barros 2004: 97).
This juxtaposition of geographical movement and inner quest is
reflected also in the novel’s narrative structure. Written as a memoir
of certain moments in Chelsea’s life – from her earliest childhood, the
time after moving away from the commune and the split-up of her
parents, to the move to the West Coast and Irvine and finally back to
Iowa – it is told mainly in first person, including a number of interior
monologues. It is significant that Snowbird, the protagonist as a child,
appears as a split character in dialogue with the adult protagonist, em-
phasizing how Chelsea has tried to evade the integration of her child-
like self into her current identity, a means of repression to escape
transdifferent tension between multiple generational and (counter-)
cultural affiliations. This tension, which relates both to the intraper-
140 Roads of Her Own

sonal (her attempt to get rid of her former, girlhood self) and the inter-
personal (disconnecting herself from her parents and their legacy) le-
vels – is activated and erupts when her mother’s life is endangered,
the point when Chelsea and Snowbird begin a dialogic narrative.47 The
structure suggests that if Chelsea’s mother passes away before Chel-
sea has revisited her family history, the latter will lose every connec-
tion to the former and her family’s past and will never again have the
chance to find out about it; such is the logic of her quest for the past in
order to make the future possible. Without erasing the difference be-
tween past and present, Chelsea recognizes she is still connected to
Snowbird:

I am sitting on the bed remembering […] when Snowbird comes in.

Her wild blonde hair is wilder than usual and her red dress is dirty.
She sees me and stands in the doorway on the sides of her feet, the
way that I still do sometimes. […] “It’s me,” I tell her. “I’ve come
back to help you look for berries.” (70)

Snowbird becomes an important helper-figure in Chelsea’s quest for

the past – her search for the “berries” she collected with her mother
when she was a child. Yet the narrative does not depict a strictly linear
development in the process of integrating this former self into the nar-
rator’s present (Paes de Barros 2004: 99); once, for example, when
Snowbird haunts Chelsea as a spectral figure, following the car in a
red station wagon and then passing it, they fail to connect: “In the
second it flies by I catch a glimpse of Snowbird in the passenger seat.
She is looking through a red plastic viewfinder and doesn’t see me. I
glance toward my mother, who is asleep, and then back toward the
station wagon, which is quickly disappearing.” (81)
A number of elements signify Chelsea’s active embrace of her
legacy: remembering and narrating childhood episodes, looking at old
photos and asking questions about life in the pastoral idyll of the
commune, and visiting important sites of this time as well as the town
where her family of German settlers established their first home in the

47
On transdifference as a generational phenomenon, cf. Ralf Schneider’s essay
“Literary Childhoods and the Blending of Conceptual Spaces. Transdifference
and the Other in Ourselves” (2006).
 Questers on the Road 141

United States (cf. chapter fourteen);48 and, on a culturally collective

level, trying to grasp the turmoil of the Sixties and the hippie ‘project’
as well as recognizing the parallel reality of social, political, and eco-
logical problems in the United States of the 1990s (cf. ch. eight). Most
importantly, though, is Chelsea’s re-establishment of the connection,
physical and psychological, with her mother. As Paes de Barros ob-
serves, “[t]o locate that lost girl of the past, Chelsea has to find her
mother, a woman once revered as the ‘Snowqueen’” (2004: 98).
It is the time on the road together with her mother that creates a
communal space in which Chelsea can reflect upon her mother’s
background and history (cf. chapters seven & sixteen), recognizing
her spirituality (“her freedom and spontaneity come from a very se-
rious place within that says, incessantly, quietly, this: be today, be-
cause you have it, and you might not have it tomorrow”, 48) but also
how this active spirituality was changed by the harsh reality of raising
a kid as a single working mom (after splitting up with Chelsea’s fa-
ther): “She did not have space in her head to consider taking an after-
noon off and bicycling hard downhill just for the hell of it.” (ibid.)
Cancer changed her mother back into the “free spirit” (ibid.) of her
young adult years; she moves again and plans to travel in Mexico,
where Chelsea will later visit her (166-7). Revaluing the roots of her
political activism and her philosophy of life, Chelsea actively embrac-
es her mother’s legacy: “Now it is my turn to try to live by [my moth-
er’s] example: Starting with this trip back to Iowa, from here on in, I
am going to exist in the moment, to Be Here Now” (51); further, she
resolves to become politically engaged for the same reason. Gradually
approaching her childhood home, the protagonist thus revalues the
maternal by contextualizing her mother’s story both historically and
geographically.
Revisiting the commune in remembrance and approaching it
physically, Chelsea also approximates a heterotopic space as defined
largely by the women inhabiting the commune (Paes de Barros 2004:
99), as well as by the nurturing activities, shared by men and women

48
That the critical evaluation of Cain’s family’s “pioneer” (87) legacy remains a
minor issue in the book is perhaps a result of the genderedness of this legacy:
it was the great-great-great-grandfather who went west during the Civil War
(88), built a house and founded the family.
142 Roads of Her Own

alike, of gardening and cooking, supporting each other in a communi-

ty that functions like a loving surrogate family.49 In this pastoral
community, nurturance was not at odds with decay; instead, her moth-
er explains death to the little girl as an integral part of the natural cycle
(ibid. & 79). Arriving in Iowa, Chelsea becomes aware of how both
her mother’s physical beauty and her frailty (120-1) are one. Remem-
bering how she buried a doll and dead birds when she was a girl (77-
8), the adult Chelsea loses her fear of death when her mother, diag-
nosed with metastases that will most probably claim her life, tells her
shortly after the completion of their road trip that she lives without
fear and regret (169). Chelsea, threatened by the continuation of her
mother’s mutating cells in her own body, has to remind herself not to
let her life be governed by the constant fear of death: “So I think about
what is important. About how I want to be. About those summer
nights on the farm and my mother and how the Snowqueen always
said she would watch over me. And I think about living” (ibid.).
One material reminder of maternal wisdom is a drawing of the
corn goddess by her mother which Chelsea keeps over her desk. On
the road, mother and daughter have shared a journal in which they
portrayed each other visually and verbally, e.g. by writing down funny
sayings and anything they found memorable during their trip. Retros-
pectively, the notebook, for Chelsea, “tells a story” (153) – the story
of the reunion of Snowbird and her mother, the Snowqueen, the be-
nign corn goddess that remains the daughter’s spiritual guide. “By the
end of the text”, Paes de Barros states, “Chelsea’s mother is once
again installed as the Snowqueen, and Chelsea has reclaimed her
name.” (2004: 101) In the epilogue of Dharma Girl, Chelsea reflects
on how both she and her mother, on their respective journeys to Iowa
and Mexico, have “both looked for, and found something, […] recov-
ered the unrecoverable” (Cain 1996: 165). Now that both the fictiona-
lized journeys and the narrative are drawing to a close, the roots narra-
tive – a term coined by Rüdiger Kunow (2002) in the context of mul-
ticultural American literature in order to describe the journey of a cul-
turally uprooted protagonist trying to recover his/her roots – is re-

49
As Paes de Barros also notes, it is “patriarchy in the form of the law” that “in-
trudes upon and wrecks paradise” (2004: 100), with the FBI prosecuting Chel-
sea’s father until he turns himself in.
 Questers on the Road 143

versed and approaches what Kunow, in contradistinction, names the

“routes narrative” – a more dynamic and open story focusing on the
future rather than the past. This dichotomous separation is contested
by Cain’s text, as it is Chelsea’s quest for the past, by way of the reu-
nion with both her mother and her girlhood alter ego, which makes the
integration of her girlhood possible in a way that Chelsea can move on
into the future. Her name is Chelsea Snow once more (166), and she
has yet again taken to walking, this time, however, not out of an es-
capist restlessness, but for the pleasure movement can bring. The last
memory of her childhood presented to the reader is when her mother
took Chelsea on a night-drive to enjoy, just the two of them, the natu-
ral phenomenon of the harvest moon, which they finally discover just
“[b]ecause we had gone looking for it. Because we had driven into the
dark, trusting the experience. Because [my mother] kept driving.”
(170) This is what Chelsea vows to continue:

So I walk. And I remember. As I tap my umbrella against the pave-

ment, I feel I am moving forward. I am learning. Do I know anything
more about the universe than when I started out? No. […] [But] I
know this:
I am still a product of this place. And as I go out into the big world to
hunt for berries, it is with my parents’ joy, cynicism, rage, revelry,
hope, honesty, conviction and devastation. […] And it is with the
knowledge that somehow I am still that blonde, little girl running
naked through the vegetable garden.
I am still Snowbird. (170-1)

As this paragraph succinctly suggests, forward movement is not inhi-

bited by the baggage of the past but rather predicated upon its renego-
tiation. While Dharma Girl can thus be read as a quest for personal
and cultural roots, it does not end in physical rootedness or psycholo-
gical stasis. Cain’s active appropriation of her legacy instead acts as
an incentive for personal transformation as well as for social criticism
of the status quo via the willingness to live with rather than repress in-
tergenerational transdifference, as Chelsea becomes politically enga-
ged and reflects on the consumer-capitalism of her present. In this
way, the text also criticizes the repression of the past in the national
narrative of progress, in which the American westward quest narrative
is deeply ingrained. Unlike other quests, the text also makes use of the
road trip in order to recover a broken connection without erasing dif-
ference, regressively idealizing the maternal, or privileging the daugh-
144 Roads of Her Own

terly over the mother’s perspective. Therefore, Cain’s Dharma Girl

not only “provides a lyrical account of how the road becomes the road
back toward reconnection with the maternal” (Paes de Barros 2004:
98), but also fundamentally rewrites the quest narrative by creating the
road as a dynamic space not of territorial discovery but of spiritual re-
covery.

4.5. Interstice:
The Wandering Jewess – Anne Roiphe’s Long Division

As Chelsea Cain’s Dharma Girl demonstrates, seeking a road out of

the oedipal triangle that prescribes certain norms of femininity can al-
so work to transcend the limitations and cultural baggage of the quest
formula. Yet there are also other possibilities for the expansion and
revision this legacy: in what follows, I discuss Anne Roiphe’s Long
Division (1972) as a mother-daughter quest that is rewritten by the
transdifferential tensions arising from multiple ethnic affiliations on
the one hand and by making use of a different paradigm of mobility –
nomadism – to counteract the goal- and achievement-oriented quest
plot on the other. It is thus a text that is located in the interstice be-
tween the questing and the para-nomadic paradigm in contemporary
women’s road literature.
The changing relationships between mothers and daughters are
a key theme not only in women’s road novels, as I have argued in
chapter 4.4., but also in contemporary Jewish American literature by
women (cf. Janet Burstein’s monograph Writing Mothers, Writing
Daughters: Tracing the Maternal in Stories by American Jewish
Women, 1996). Janet Burstein notes that one endeavor of Jewish
American women writers today is to “re-vision traditional imperatives
by drawing the mother to the center of her own narrative” which is
particularly important “in light of ethnic imperatives that both silence
and subordinate mothers, relegating them to the margins of their hus-
bands’ and children’s lives” (1996: 8). The cramped mother-daughter
quarters depicted in Jewish women’s literature – Vivian Gornick’s
Fierce Attachments (1983) is a case in point – are expanded via the
 Questers on the Road 145

dynamic spatiality of the road in Anne Roiphe’s Long Division.50 That

the mother is placed at the center of the novel can be read as a delibe-
rate political stance which, as I have argued in 4.4.1., was not the
norm in the 1970s, a time when many second-wave feminists vented
anger and disappointment about mothers they saw as complicit with
the patriarchal establishment.
The mother-daughter connection is only one thematic focus,
however, as Long Division also draws heavily and explicitly on the
cultural archetype of the Wandering Jew, a Christian legend that, in its
various versions, explains the ‘eternal wanderings’ of the Jewish
people as a punishment inflicted on the Jerusalem shoemaker Ahasu-
erus for taunting Jesus on his way to Crucifixion (Maccoby 1986:
250). In numerous ways, the legend, which has inspired Western lite-
rature into the 20th century51 as well as Jewish-American re-writings
(Glazer 1997: 81), informs the protagonist’s perception and produc-
tion of space in Roiphe’s road novel. Its ethnic and gendered spatiali-
ty, however, is as much constructed upon the novel’s positive revision
of the Wandering Jew by way of the nomadic as upon transdifferential
tensions present throughout the narrative; furthermore, the fact that the
protagonist is a single mother accompanied only by her little daughter
on a cross-country trip lends itself to an interpretation emphasizing the
narrative contestation of conservative Judaism’s disregard of female
mobility.52
The female road hero in Long Division, Emily Brimberg John-
son, is a middle-class Jewish woman from New York who sets out
with her daughter Sarah, age ten, to drive to Juarez, Mexico, in order

50
See also the gender-specific Jewish immigrant experience from the shtetl to
the “Promised Land” that Gisela Ecker describes in her essay “Einzug in das
Promised Land oder Lost in Translation? Osteuropäische Jüdinnen auf dem
Weg vom Shtetl zum American Dream” (1994).
51
In Anglo-Saxon literature, the Wandering Jew appears most notably as a Ro-
mantic hero, as in Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner”, Wordsworth’s “Song for
the Wandering Jew”, and Shelley’s “Queen Mab”, but also in Kipling’s “The
Wandering Jew” and Joyce’s Ulysses.
52
Roiphe explicitly refers to this in Generation without Memory (1981: 148).
The ‘place of woman’ in traditional Judaism also explains why so many activ-
ists in the second women’s movement in the United States were Jewish
women trying to change the status quo.
146 Roads of Her Own

to obtain an immediate divorce from her husband Alex, an unfaithful

gentile painter.53 Rather than letting its protagonist passively wait for
the official recognition of her freedom from unwanted marital ties, the
text decides to render divorce a goal she can actively approach. Emily,
who is also the first-person narrator of the novel, begins the story of
her journey by venting her anger at her former spouse:

What I’m doing in this car flying down these screaming highways is
getting my tail to Juarez so I can legally rid myself of the crummy
son-of-a-bitch who promised me a tomorrow like a yummy fruitcake
and delivered instead wilted lettuce, rotted cucumber, a garbage of a
life. I’m not going gently into this divorce, but yelling and kicking all
the way with blood and skin under my fingernails and hate balled up
inside like a gallstone fouling up my vital functions. (7; my emphasis)

Her fury at this marriage, evoking Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gen-
tle into That Good-Night”, and the pain of confronting her personal
past are Emily’s steady companions on the “screaming highways” of
her journey. Yet it is that same anger that also incites reflections on
the meaning of being a Jewish-American woman that are eventually
vital for Emily’s escape from negativity and bitterness.
Along the way to Mexico, Emily and Sarah encounter all kinds
of cultural archetypes of the 1970s: told in episodes that are at times
surreal and farcical, the narrative depicts the main characters together
with unsympathetic tourist families at the Pennsylvania Hershey facto-
ry (13-24) and hitchhiking Jesus freaks (35-55), getting lost in a poor
African-American ghetto in Indiana (98-103) and in a bizarre retirees’
53
Unlike Evelyn Gross Avery, I do not read Emily’s journey as a running away
for a “quickie divorce” (1980: 50), since it appears that at least the emotional
separation between her and her husband has gone on for some time. While it
is true that the novel implies that Emily goes to Mexico because divorces are
less bureaucratic there, it is not a spontaneous separation Emily describes, but
a long and tiresome division. Avery’s reading of Long Division is generally a
little harsh. She states, for example, that the novel depicts the journey of “an
insecure, self-destructive third generation Jewish-American woman. Terrified
of living, she blames her inadequacies on family and heritage.” (50) Though
Emily might be bitter (as anyone going through a divorce might be), she is
taking control over her own future by setting out on the road. Of course, this
act of taking control does not constitute an overnight, clear-cut caesura in
Emily’s life, but a non-linear process that is at times painful and includes self-
doubt as well as blaming others.
 Questers on the Road 147

trailer park (named “Settlement Tomorrow”) in Texas, whose inhabi-

tants try to hold Emily and her daughter captive (131-66). As singular
as they might be, every one of these (and other similarly surreal) epi-
sodes contributes towards the expression of Emily’s multiple aliena-
tions from both the mainstream and the countercultural American
landscape of the early 1970s. At the Hershey factory, for instance,
Emily is immediately singled out as deviating from the norm of the
nuclear family:

The other families were staring at me peculiarly; a certain hostility

was clear. I was the only parent alone with a child. […] Like an unna-
tural mutation, I felt awkward in the normal universe. Like a pilloried
adultress, or a stockaded petty thief, I felt exposed, my vulnerable
pants pinned down. (17)

In the universe of early 1970s’ family tourism, Emily clearly stands

out as alien, an “unnatural mutation” of the norm, implicitly convicted
of adultery and immorality because she is without a husband. Emily
feels “awkward”, “exposed”, and “vulnerable”: in other words, totally
out of place. Her deviance from the norm further estranges Emily
from “feeling-at-home in America”, initially her second motive for
embarking on this cross-country trip. The same feeling occurs when
passing the 4-H Club Headquarters:54 Emily thinks of taking a tour,
“but felt out of place in such a wholesome grouping. Grass-roots
Americans might not welcome a divorcée from New York of immi-
grant stock.” (69) The narrator-protagonist implicitly knows that her
Jewish legacy – “I’m only an American until they decide to move
again – cremating, gassing, crating in boxcars” (8) – warns her from
attaching too closely to land- and/or nation-scapes, to any soil that the
4-H Club is so keen on cultivating. Her personal quest for the future,
for starting over “into new orbits” (29), makes her wonder whether
“everyone else” was “nicely screwed down in one place or another”
(ibid.) – an idea she first envies, but later on strongly detests.

54
An organization sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture chiefly to
instruct young people in modern farming methods and other useful skills, so-
called from the aim of the organization to improve head, heart, hands, and
health.
148 Roads of Her Own

“Daughters of Refugees of the Ongoing-Universal-Endless Upheaval”

From the very beginning, it is clear that her cross-country trip, “this
sad journey to end the past” (8), has little to do with untrammeled
wanderlust. Nevertheless, the quest paradigm is apparent every time
Emily expresses an adventurous hunger for the open road that is laden
with the promise of a better future, hinged on the imaginary reversal
of the gendered romance of the masculine suitor and the feminine
love-object: “I will go dragonslaying […] and bring back the hand of a
new Prince.” (10) To a certain extent, the protagonist relies on the
road’s mythical promise to make a clean break, start anew, and find
freedom in overcoming the past (cf. 170, 183, 190). Freedom, for
Emily, also implies freedom of social control, of “the eyes of friends
and acquaintances off my back” (10). For the most part, of course,
these promises turn out to be illusionary, as mere parts of a masculine
myth that veils both its whiteness and its genderedness. On the road,
Emily finds out, social control is as prevalent as in the protagonist’s
city environs, although varying according to geographical location and
changing in scope and form. Sometimes it is merely the stares she
receives, as in the Hershey factory episode, and sometimes it is her
own concern for “repercussions of [her] lost reputation” (108-9) that
make her aware that the social spatiality she traverses hampers unfet-
tered movement.
Still unaware of these mechanisms of social control on the road,
Emily initially searches for a being-at-home in a country that has a
long tradition of inhabiting Jewish refugees as well as of valuing so-
cial and geographical mobility. Soon, however, Emily finds herself
alienated from the mythic American quest for a better life, realizing
that the wide open spaces of the road are not at all hospitable, but ac-
companied by tension, conflict, and danger. As the novel continues,
these experiences increasingly lead to an enhanced awareness of the
protagonist’s fragmentariness – as a mother with a feminist con-
sciousness and as an ethnically ‘invisible’ American, privileged by
class, yet oppressed by legacy. When Emily and Sarah visit a statue
called “Madonna of the Trail”, a monument in honor of American
pioneer women journeying West, Emily feels connected to the travels
of these brave women at first, but then the statue reminds her of her
own purposelessness as a reflection of Jewish women’s historical dis-
location (Glazer 1997: 80). Emily remarks:
 Questers on the Road 149

I felt jealous of the stone statue whose life had had purpose, enemy
and friend – not like mine, that of a wandering Jewess, covering the
globe, belonging only peripherally to one culture or another […]. Per-
haps contemporary Jewish women should form their own society,
Daughters of Refugees of the Ongoing-Universal-Endless Upheaval.
We could meet on boats […] and not allow anyone whose ancestors
had lived in less than four countries to join. (71)55

Throughout the journey, Emily is haunted by a collective memory of

socio-spatial deprivation of Jews in general and of her Jewish fore-
mothers’ lives in particular. “The pioneer story is not her story. Like
the colonized, she experiences herself not as an agent of history”, Mi-
riyam Glazer asserts (1997: 81). As a Jewish woman, she is twice de-
prived of historical agency and thus feels victimized, like “[Job’s
wife], [her] sister of ancient times, Jewish and cursed – surely the next
victim in God’s metaphysical game in which [Emily] was not even a
principal player” (18).56
Though Emily’s initial declaration was to find freedom in
movement, “something really new, another way” (8) and “a man to
come and love me wild till I can give birth again to something or oth-
er” (ibid.), the trip soon leads to a confrontation with her heritage as a
‘Wandering Jewess’. In this way, the conventionally individualized
quest narrative is brought into dialogue with a collective legacy of pa-
ra-nomadism, understood here not literally but as a form of continual
displacement generated by economic and/or political pressures (cf. ch.
five). The “long division” of Roiphe’s title thus refers to more than the
evident divisions between husband and wife and mother and daughter
(cf. her narration of giving birth as “start[ing] this division”, 173).
From a socio-spatial perspective, the protagonist has to negotiate a
legacy of homelessness, diaspora, and exile: an age-long division from
the concept of a geographical home(land), which has created manifold

55
In her non-fiction book Generation without Memory: A Jewish Journey in
Christian America (1981), Roiphe writes that “Jews identify with boat people
everywhere” (54); Glazer argues convincingly for Roiphe’s use of the boat as
beyond “the colonized land of masculinized consciousness” (1997: 84).
56
In her article on Long Division, Suzy Durruty analyzes the role of the many
biblical women that Emily calls on thoroughly and thoughtfully, though I am
not convinced by Durruty’s conclusion that with the help of these figures, the
protagonist is able to “mend” (“comblée”) her initial divisions (1995: 205).
150 Roads of Her Own

cultural affiliations and multiple divisions within Emily.57 It is the

U.S.-American road that catalyzes her awareness of many of these
outer and inner divisions, “the cultural chasm between the […] Jewish
and the WASP America” (Gross Avery 1980: 51); but as a public
space that is heavily gendered, the road also confronts her with the
physical and psychical inhibitions pertaining to “unprotected”, “pub-
lic” women, who are seen by “Jewish law” as nothing but “dangerous
temptations to men”, in the words of Cynthia Ozick (qtd. in Burstein
1996: 10).
Roiphe’s female hero experiences a number of transdifferential
moments, in which conflicting identifications collide. As an invisible
ethnic Other and a woman alone on the road, Emily’s journey is
marked by a distinct ambiguity that concerns her personal feelings
(such as toward her own heritage – cf. Gross Avery 1980: 50) as well
as her relation to the space she is traversing. The roads she travels
create conflicts of cultural as well as of personal belonging, taking
Emily into geographical and social spaces completely alien to her the-
reby confronting her with her own socio-cultural dislocation as well as
with a country that itself bears many divisions.58 Discovering America
on “an educational tour” (8) sparks the main character’s critical
awareness of the surrounding socio-historic landscape. Emily has
vowed to

tunnel like a mole through the mountains and the plains of this artifi-
cially inseminated country till I find down under the ground, forgotten
by this nation of non-spelunkers, a treasure, a constitution, a declara-
tion of independence, a liberty bell cracked but ringing […]. (ibid.)59
57
For a similar view with regard to the book’s title, see also Gross Avery (1980:
50), although she does not mention Emily’s geographical divisions as an im-
portant aspect in the book.
58
In Ohio, Emily observes that “[t]he road was flat and straight, bisecting the
empty land into two irreconcilable halves”, 42; the same metaphor of bisec-
tion occurs on page 167. On a more personal level, the separation of the road
by its middle line clearly reflects Emily’s divorce: what has once been a
shared path becomes split “into two irreconcilable halves” (42).
59
Like in Doris Betts’ road novel Heading West, Roiphe frequently (and some-
times ironically) relates to the Declaration of Independence; see also the end
of Long Division or Roiphe’s novel The Pursuit of Happiness, a “richly at-
mospheric novel about the Jewish immigrant experience” (Steinberg 1993:
58).
 Questers on the Road 151

That the United States is an “artificially inseminated country” built on

the Anglo invasion of Native American territory and on legal docu-
ments which, to Emily, seem archival rather than effective, is a criti-
cism recurrent throughout Long Division (e.g. 83, 112), especially in
the episode in which Emily and Sarah visit a Cherokee reservation in
Oklahoma (118-26). Seeing the poverty-stricken reservation grounds
instead of the Hollywood Noble Savages Emily has been dreaming
about,60 the rulers of the country appear as

despisers of those who are different, at odds, colored or poor – they

always are in power, making plans for the others; they have all the
strength, standing like Uncle Sam, straight and tall, smiling into the
future, while we […] hover about the lips, searching […] a way to be-
come American ourselves […]. The most we can hope for is to drive
the righteous Mr. America crazy. (121-2)

Her awareness of “Mr. America[’s]” historical legacy of injustice on

the one hand and the asylum he provided for Emily’s immigrant
grandparents on the other (13) marks the protagonist’s undecidedness
in her attitude toward the United States as her “homeland”, an ambiva-
lence that, according to Jay Halio, “is recurrent throughout much of
[Roiphe’s] published work and reflects the uncertainty that many
American Jews of her generation experience” (1997: 98). Being the
granddaughter of Jewish immigrants, the narrator identifies with any
ethnic minority she encounters (e.g. Roiphe 1972: 113), yet as a well-
situated woman indistinguishable from the ‘white’ majority, she also
feels repelled, even guilty of oppression at times: “Here we were, rep-
resentatives of the destroying race, cultural barbarians ourselves, kill-
ing the buffalo, killing the long night of Indian memory” (ibid. 119).

Blue and Red Is White

It is not only Emily’s attitude toward the United States that is ambi-
guous: her emotional landscape is just as confused. The confrontation
with the multiple socioscapes of the United States, always within a
60
The way Emily relates to Native Americans, African-Americans, and “gyp-
sies” is indicative of the 1970s, when political correctness (especially in lan-
guage) was not (yet) an issue.
152 Roads of Her Own

certain geographical context, shapes Emily’s moods throughout the

book, instilling in her hope and despair, harmony and unease, peace-
fulness and anger, as well as keen anxiety and paralyzing fear. The
simultaneity of these emotions characterizes a story of multiplicities
that is too divided to be synthesized into eventual coherence by narra-
tive means. Guilt is especially prominent in this array of sentiments:
like in the episode on the Cherokee reservation, Emily is frequently
haunted by a feeling of guilt, either in encountering poverty and op-
pression from her privileged economic position, or for not fulfilling
the traditional role of housekeeper-mother (e.g. 68, 73, 82).
To a large extent, Emily’s mood-swings thus concern her
daughter Sarah, who is not always happy about her mother’s decisions
in general and their road trip in particular; she would much prefer to
stay in one place and not have to move on, or take a plane to Juarez
(174). Emily’s ire contributes to disputes and disagreements with her
child, although she is very much aware of how she is dragging Sarah
along, yelling at and scolding her repeatedly.

The very second I yelled at her, I wept with guilt: my poor baby, no
family, no brothers or sisters, no big dog or horse or home in the coun-
try – just a screwed-to-the-breaking-point mother, and a father re-
moved. Poor baby, who had not chosen to come to Texas in a car with
a wilting woman […]. (151)

In the first half of Long Division, Emily uses and arguably misuses her
daughter as her anchor,61 her “last link to the everyday world” (24)
and the single person whose movements she can supposedly control:
“I could move with Sarah anywhere”, she says (12), inconsiderate of
the girl’s actual wishes: “I could take her out of […] school, and we
could re-settle in Hershey, Pennsylvania, or anywhere else on the map
that pleased me.” (13)
An important part in Long Division’s plot is dedicated to the
way the mother-daughter relationship develops along the road. In
Long Division, the connection between mother and daughter is nar-
rated not as stable, but as shifting, an evolving process taking place on
the road. A key theme in the depiction of this relationship is the dif-
ference in heritage between the Jewish mother and her half-Jewish
61
The anchor-metaphor appears on pages 24 and 65.
 Questers on the Road 153

daughter, whom Emily “had intended […] to be the child of the future,
the gold at the bottom of the melting pot” (40). Emily is stunned when
Sarah, at the Jesus meeting in Ohio (the hitchhikers’ destination) em-
braces the preacher just as the Christian congregation does, telling him
– Emily assumes – that she believes in Jesus (55). On the road again,
she confesses to her mother that she “just wanted to say so like every-
body else” (56), thereby confronting Emily with the forces of cultural
conformism, and, as a follow-up, with her “planned escape” from a
legacy she evaluates as primarily negative, characterized by “a capaci-
ty to survive, to suffer” (57). Jewishness, to her, means but “[a]n end-
less pain, an insecurity bred into the bones […] that expect to be
crunched in the next social upheaval” (ibid.).
Yet there is another aspect of her heritage as a Jewish woman
against which Emily rebels merely by setting out on a road trip. In
Generation without Memory, Anne Roiphe writes about her own
mother that she “[…] was not an admirer of free motion. She was cor-
seted, garter-belted, high-heeled, painted, waxed, coiffed, plucked.
She was not one to run in the breeze like a deer or climb a tree like a
squirrel” (1981: 149).62
On Saturday night dates as a teen, Roiphe reports how “the fel-
low was supposed to bring me home, lead me safely through the as-
phalt jungle, protect me from slithering snakes, rapists and the like”
(Roiphe 1972: 73). This legacy of women’s need for protection, re-
sulting in the construction of their physical immobility and domestic
confinement, resonates similarly in Long Division. On the one hand,
Emily continually narrates the “guilt” she feels for her shortcomings
as the traditional housekeeper and caretaker (e.g. 68, 73, 82, 149-50,
154, 172); on the other, she embraces transgression as an attempt to
counteract spatial limitations. These attempts at resistance are por-
trayed mainly in two episodes in Long Division: the first relates to the
earliest years of her marriage, when Emily frequently went swimming
in the ocean, which she describes as “a strange odd tendency in a Jew-
ish girl – we are ordinarily not athletic” (20):

62
Interestingly, Generation without Memory: A Jewish Journey in Christian
America apparently received mixed commentaries; especially “[t]he male es-
tablishment of Jewish reviewers were very hard on it” (Roiphe qtd. in Stein-
berg 1993: 58).
154 Roads of Her Own

Just a generation or so removed from the sheitl that covered and

bound a wife’s head, a Jewish woman’s hair does not fly free in the
breeze, but is tied in kerchiefs, ribbons, rollers, hairspray. Our bodies
move in small concentric circles, from stove to bed and back again,
though the mind is free […] to leap into dark chasms and run the eve-
ryday facts of life down the streets […]. (20)

Subverting the racist stereotype of the unathletic Jewess, Emily adopts

shikse behavior – that of a gentile woman – and thus quite clearly
leaves behind the ties that, by tradition, bind Jewish(-American) femi-
ninity.63
In a second episode, Emily, “suffering from a noble-savage
syndrome” (104), contrasts her romantic vision of “Indian” women
with a rather bleak image of the traditional Jewess:

[m]ost Jewish women are twice deprived. They don’t run naked in the
woods following the wild spirits of nature, and they don’t get to share
in the legal Talmudic store; so they remain ignorant and empty, crea-
tures bound, knotted up by rules without reason […]. (104)

Revisiting her personal history, Emily realizes how she tried to disso-
ciate herself from these “ignorant and empty”, “knotted up” women
by marrying out, thus hoping to leave behind a legacy of oppression
and dislocation and the “terrible tale of Jewish history” (57). Howev-
er, since the Jewish tradition of homebound mothers runs parallel to
the hegemonic role of women as angels of the hearth still prevalent in
much of the world – “victime[s] d’une double exclusion, exclue à la
fois de la tradition hellénique et de la sagesse talmudique” (Durruty
1995: 201)64 – Emily’s gentile spouse Alex kept her body just as con-
strained. Posing as the free-spirited artist-flâneur, he went roaming the
cities, “plucking what he could from the streets”, while Emily stayed
home, “sat in bed like a clam with a crushed shell” and “oozed onto
the sheets a little death” (45). Neither could her marriage to a gentile

63
In a similar fashion Emily describes her body as “no longer cold, but beauti-
ful, mobile, the essence of woman alive in all the right organs” (81) when she
is in bed with a dentist she meets in a hotel bar. The episode ends ironically:
the dentist blames his impotence on Emily’s bad breath.
64
Tr.: “victims of a double exclusion, excluded simultaneously from the Hel-
lenic tradition and from Talmudic wisdom”, AG.
 Questers on the Road 155

painter provide her with the roots she feels are missing; “under his
ground no roots were pushing upwards, carrying the buds of future
beets or hopeful stringbeans” (44). Upon reconsidering the past and
her plans for her daughter, she now deems her marrying out a stance
of “escape – a painless genocide, a pleasure-filled life that would
guarantee the future would hold no terrors of persecution” (57). As a
result from the “painless genocide” Emily has construed, Sarah is as
far removed from her Jewish heritage as possible and thus seen by her
mother as more American:

I couldn’t help feeling […] that I could drop her off at any stop along
the route and she could adapt, culturally merge with her fellow Amer-
icans, more easily than I. She was the strange conformist product of a
union that had temporarily merged several traditions. The result of
mixing blue and red appeared to be a bland white. (83)

Culturally, then, Emily feels a certain opposition, perhaps also a cer-

tain jealousy, toward her daughter’s conformism and her cultural
whiteness, which is characterized also by Sarah’s adoption of
WASP/hegemonic stereotyping (e.g. “stinking Indians”, 34). As a re-
sult, Emily’s strong ambivalence toward her own motherhood is ex-
pressed constantly (e.g. 56, 82, 145, 173, 185).
Her ambivalent emotions notwithstanding, being a mother also
directly influences her perception of space and her mobility within this
space, especially in situations where she needs to protect her daughter.
In one of the most stunning incidents of the book,65 Sarah gets ab-
ducted by a band of ominous itinerant gypsies, whom Emily considers
her “kin”,

wanderers, outsiders, stubborn, isolated persisters in a culture always

alien to the countryside, always passing through, accused of crimes,
persecuted, hounded and yet proud, secretly feeling superior. No won-
der we rubbed shoulders on the way to the crematorium. Jews are just
word-burdened gypsies. (178)

65
I find it odd that this episode is not commented upon once in the few pub-
lished readings of Long Division. Since it occurs toward the end of the book
and comprises a larger number of pages than any other episode, I see it as the
novel’s decisive moment and a major turning point in Emily’s relationship to
her daughter.
156 Roads of Her Own

Upon the capture of her daughter in the desert of New Mexico, Emily
feels both related to and repelled by a people that is marginalized, op-
pressed, and in a state of diaspora in so many ways similar to the
Jews.66 Yet, although Roiphe employs the racist stereotype of the gyp-
sies as child-stealers in this episode, she does so in a self-reflexive
and, again, ambiguous manner. The shared experience of the Holo-
caust, one of the most important issues in contemporary Jewish-
American literature, is pertinent for Emily to see herself connected to
the gypsies: “Jews and gypsies together near the border to Texas!
How marvelous – we survive and travel about, no matter who despises
us, who tries to eradicate our particular color, our life style” [sic]
(178), Emily thinks, associating with them while feeling “curiously
excluded and nervous” (179) at the same time. Having no voice of
their own,67 however, the gypsies remain enigmatic, not only to the
gun-crazy New Mexican WASP who tries to help Emily fix her tire
when the gypsies arrive, but even to a ‘wandering Jewess’.
The abduction episode, located near the end of the novel, clear-
ly marks the culmination of Emily’s realization of her social, cultural,
and ethnic dislocation. Emily faces a double loss of kin, both literally
and figuratively: on the one hand, she is alienated from the gypsies as
“kin” who remind her of her Jewish legacy of travel and displacement,
for she herself has no clan: “I am a Jewish woman so without tribe
[…] that I doubt if I ever will find a home, that my exile will ever

66
In his article on the Wandering Jew, Hyam Maccoby dissociates the relations
to the soil of nomadic peoples (including the gypsies) and of Jews, making the
point that the Jews, unlike the gypsies, were deprived of a homeland and thus
not restless out of choice (1986/1974: 252). “The Jews, indeed, have always
been great travelers”, Maccoby says, “but there is a great distinction to be
made between travelers and nomads. The aim of a traveler is always to return
home.” (253) While I heartily embrace Maccoby’s admonition to distinguish
between nomads and travelers as well as between nomadism and exile, his
statement that nomads and gypsies “wander because they wanted to” (ibid.) is
rather simplistic, neglecting economic and historical factors that also forced
these peoples to move. Thus, I would argue that both Jews and gypsies have
inherited a “similar but different” history of place- and restlessness (cf. also
Glazer’s [1994] reading of Long Division).
67
There only appears a single full sentence by one of the gypsies in the book,
explaining Sarah’s abduction: “We like your daughter, Madam. She will be
happy with us.” (181)
 Questers on the Road 157

end.” (168) On the other hand, she faces the loss of Sarah, who, in the
context of a matrilinear (but patriarchal) tradition, connects her to her
own fore-mothers. The experience totally paralyzes her and delimits
her mobility: “I was […] frightened, helpless, sitting on the ground
beside my car, I held my knees close to my chest and rocked myself.”
(182) Consecutively, Emily envisions life without child:

Sarah, Sarah, do you want me to come for you, or do you want me to

go on my way? The thought crossed my mind to leave her – impossi-
ble, but possible. Let her be her own person. Let her find her own
way, gypsy or not. Cut the cords […]. Tomorrow would be mine to
devour alone. […] The idea gathered force. Leave her be, and drive on
[…]. (184-5)

Even upon the retrieval of Sarah with the help of the police, this vision
of having lost her “anchor” has affected Emily’s mourning for the
home she has lost and the roots she feels she has never had (114): she
is now inclined to find a home on the road – almost as if the gypsies
had freed her from the pressure to provide a home for her child. The
legacy of domesticity no longer weighs like a shadow upon her, but
has entered a process of active negotiation. Home, thus, is para-
nomadically de-territorialized, without Emily having to foreclose re-
territorialization. Finally, Emily is able to let go of her wish to control
her daughter’s movements, thereby revising her relationship with Sa-
rah (Primeau 1996: 112). “We were one piece of flesh with different
movements, but united” (Roiphe 1972: 187), Emily says, thereby ac-
cepting difference as well as responsibility.

Visible and Invisible Others

Long Division’s protagonist experiences cultural marginalization not

only due to the traditional subordinate status of Jewish mothers, but
also because she is invisible as an ethnic Other. As such, Emily feels
estranged from the American socio-cultural landscape and ambivalent
toward an itinerant people like the gypsies, despite of the inter-
connectedness she constructs at first sight. Thus, she is not only torn
between “tradition and independence”, as Gross Avery entitles her es-
say (1980), but also between other social categories that are supposed
to define her as a liberal middle-class woman and a member of the
158 Roads of Her Own

Jewish American minority. All of these socio-cultural tensions, which

collide in Emily’s narration, have a major impact on the novel’s con-
struction of space. In this respect, one of the most interesting episodes
in Long Division is the Terre Haute, Indiana, story, where Emily gets
lost in a black ghetto. Within a couple of paragraphs, the protagonist’s
perception and production of space varies enormously according to
her momentary identification. First, she tells the reader, “I began to
feel afraid, because I didn’t know how to get out – afraid, I reassured
myself, of nothing, of other human beings going about their normal
day. I despised myself for feeling strange.” (Roiphe 1972: 99) In this
paragraph, her liberalism clashes with her fear of being trapped, en-
closed, and deprived of her mobility. She summons her courage and
gets out of the car to ask for directions, but agoraphobia overcomes
her again a few lines later:

I walked to the corner, feeling all eyes on me, a woman lost, a lost
woman, an alien – I am not what you think, I am a refugee interna-
tional socialist failure. I am not responsible for anything. Am I not re-
sponsible? I could feel the stares on the back of my legs, on my hips.
(ibid.)

Realizing her gendered body and her economic privileges, Emily is

seized by a panic which results in the justification that she has no re-
sponsibility for racial oppression and poverty whatsoever. But she
immediately questions her own conviction, and these contradictory
reactions culminate in a paradoxical narrative sequence in the follow-
ing paragraph: “I held tight to my purse [i.e., her privileges, AG]. By
nature, by upbringing, I am of the oppressed, not of the oppressors,
but that doesn’t show in my color, in my clothes, in my car.” (100)
Within a couple of pages, multiple and conflicting identifica-
tions occur (via the protagonist’s contradictory narration), and it is in
these transdifferential moments that hegemonic constructions of space
are contested and negotiated, particularly given that multiple mechan-
isms of exclusion collide in these textual instances. In a manner re-
flecting the gypsy episode, Emily is unable to take sides in the scene
related above. Again, undecidability irritates her perception of space,
this time by rendering her simultaneously fearful and approachable.
Space must thus be produced anew, acknowledging and enduring
these contradictions; correspondingly, space is created in multiplicities
on the one hand and as a process that is bound to remain unfinished on
 Questers on the Road 159

the other. The subversion pertaining to these moments of conflict lies,

first and foremost, in the fact that they are constitutive of an altered
perception of space and spatial relations; this change of perspective af-
fects both the traveling protagonist’s identity and that of the particular
location she is traversing: therefore, spatial agency is not limited to
individual agency (further empowerment by moving through space),
but extends to the spatial network that is traversed (and thus altered).
A major effect of this traversal is that, by and by, Emily makes
herself at home in spatial multiplicities and dislocations, thus increa-
singly rejecting the quest and embracing para-nomadism. Initially, she
merely describes herself as a “wandering Jewess” (see pages 18, 65,
71, 103), characterized by archetypal restlessness and territorial root-
lessness on the one hand, and reflecting, on the other hand, Miriyam
Glazer’s statement that “[e]ven that archetypal creature of the gentile
literary imagination, the Wandering Jew, could have found communi-
ty in any […] prayer quorum […] – not so his mother, sister, daughter,
or wife” (1994: 128). Once at home in dislocation and travel, howev-
er, Emily actively appropriates the archetype and uses it subversively
against a territoriality which is constructed in tune with hegemonic so-
cial values: on polarities between sexes, ethnicities, and classes; be-
tween centers and margins.
The protagonist’s questing traversals are headed in the direction
of a new beginning by approaching, in the course of the novel, the
nomadic mode of travel that I examine extensively in the next chapter.
Even in the beginning, Emily’s geographical wanderings across
America are more a necessity, a consequence of her wish to quickly
divorce her husband, than a choice based on wanderlust. Thus, being
on the road is not experienced as mostly adventurous and fun: “[a]
wandering Jewess gets very tired”, the narrator-protagonist ambi-
guously remarks at one point (103). That the narrator repeatedly ad-
dresses the physical and emotional fatigue of driving long hours (e.g.
29, 36, 113-4) only furthers this impression. Also, Emily learns to ex-
pect this symbolic renewal more from being on the road than from set-
tling down in Mexico – which she (unlike the questing protagonists of
Thelma & Louise, for instance) intends to do at no time in the novel.
The last episode, which concludes the novel in a highly ironic
manner, links the promise of freedom and independence, characteriz-
ing the constitutive myths of the United States, to the reality of her
160 Roads of Her Own

experience on the road. A Mexican border guard sells her an envelope

of what he claims to be “dirty pictures – the real thing”, which she
opens upon arrival in Juarez.68 In the last paragraph, Emily “pulled
some paper out of the cardboard cylinder” and finds “a cheap tourist
copy of the Declaration of Independence 1776, signed by John Han-
cock et al.”: she feels “cheated again” (190).
In many respects, this ending might justify Gross Avery’s
statement that “Emily’s desire to protect herself and her daughter is
doomed to failure. Fleeing New York, her ‘Nazi’ husband, and her
Jewish past, she makes the same mistakes, by seeking salvation in the
American dream.” (1980: 51) The blatant irony of the novel’s last
lines, however, suggests that Emily is neither a victim of her husband,
whom I would much rather call macho or sexist than “Nazi”, nor of
the American dream. She has learned to keep a distance from both and
is now telling her own story, thereby attempting to take control over
her life.69 Finally, she has kept the promise that her “world will open
and the forms of things change, and there will be no returning, no ho-
vering about the empty nest” (Roiphe 1972: 60), thereby rejecting re-
gression to both an idealized pre-Oedipal connection to her daughter
and the domestic ideal of femininity prevalent in both Anglo and Jew-
ish contexts.

***

Emily’s road trip across America enables her to translate psycho-

spatial anti-centricity into the narrative production of a center-less
physical and socio-cultural spatiality. As inner and outer space con-
verge, the narrator-protagonist transforms these polarities into lines of
flight on her own terms: while Emily’s journey is initially tied to a
personal goal and has a clear motivation, she transforms the journey
into a collective existential condition, with any potential destination
68
In a bizarre subplot, Emily repeatedly buys envelopes that she thinks contain
pornographic pictures, a gesture that suggests her desire to appropriate the
male gaze.
69
The significance of Jewish women’s storytelling is noted by Glazer: “the in-
herited stories of Judaism were told by and for men […] and […] women to-
day must re-invent them, refashion them, or discard them and write stories
anew.” (1994: 132)
 Questers on the Road 161

continuously deferred, by embracing mobility and rejecting stasis as a

state of mind. Oscillating between individual and collective levels of
experience and history, her quest is interspersed with the para-
nomadic as her decentering of the desire for territorial roots abandons
the quest formula. Traveling the country, Emily creates home with a
vengeance by becoming nomadic, by creating not a home on the road,
but the road as a home. This version of the traveler has no desire to ar-
rive, to settle: if there is any home for the nomad, it is in movement it-
self. All in all, Roiphe’s protagonist can thus be read as developing
from a quester to a nomad, contrasting these two as different ways of
travel. The problematics, analytical potential, and spatiality of para-
nomadic mobility are the focus of chapter five.
 5. Para-Nomadic Travelers

5.1. Nomads Here, There, and Everywhere:

Revisiting Theories of Nomadism

In both contemporary popular culture and cultural criticism, the varie-

ty of (con)texts in which nomads appear as rhetorical and metaphori-
cal figurations is striking, even though this is perhaps no surprise in
view of “the ubiquitous concern with figures and tropes of mobility in
theoretical discussions of postcolonialism and postmodernity” (Paul
2001: 217).1 Over the last two decades at least, the contention that
‘we’ increasingly live in an age of universal mobility has turned no-
madism into a buzzword of – apparently – global dimensions. The ev-
er-growing reception of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatta-
ri,2 who introduced the figuration of the nomadic into poststructural
philosophy in the early 1980s, is a key factor in this development. In
fact peoples on the verge of extinction, as Syed Manzurul Islam notes
(2001: 3), nomads are simultaneously experiencing a metaphorical
‘population explosion’ these days: they live as ‘nomadic intellectuals’
in many (usually Western) countries at once (e.g. Braidotti 1994 or
Lawrence Grossberg’s “Wandering Audiences, Nomadic Critics”,
1988); as ‘urban nomads’, they roam the cities either as the homeless
poor (James P. Spradley, 1999) or as so-called ‘sofa-surfers’ hopping
from one friend’s apartment to the next (Juliette Torrez, 1998). There
are ‘economic nomads’ in the form of migrants and refugees (May’s

1
A search in a popular internet bookstore in July 2008 under the keyword ‘no-
mad’ resulted in more than 39,000 titles.
2
One of its main attractions being an almost universally applicably terminology
on the one hand and its eclecticism on the other, Deleuzo-Guattarian theory
has been used and developed in such diverse fields as philosophy, psychoana-
lysis, media studies, cultural and gender studies, and literary criticism, and is
reflected upon by various contemporary theoreticians such as Seyla Benhabib,
Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Manuel DeLanda, Fredric Jameson, Chantal
Mouffe, Antonio Negri, Edward Said, Peter Sloterdijk, and Slavoj Žižek.
164 Roads of Her Own

Nomadic Identities, 1999) and long-distance truck-drivers (Richard

Grant’s American Nomads, 1994), ‘nomadic users’ of mobile commu-
nication networks (Küpper 2001), ‘nomadic’ poet(ic)s and writers
(Pierre Joris’ A Nomad Poetics [2003] and Richard Powers’ “Im La-
bor der Nomaden” [2003])3 and, finally, restless ‘nomadic’ tourists in
search of adventure (as the guidebook series The Practical Nomad
[Hasbrouck 1997] testifies). One cannot help wondering what it is that
all these alleged ‘nomads’ share, with each other as well as with tradi-
tional nomadic herdsmen and -women across the globe. The various
publications on nomads suggest a certain ‘chic’ attached to all these
‘nomadic’ lifestyles, no matter whether they refer to the affluent or the
subaltern. From the perspective of the (Western) writer, it might be
desirable to jet around the world, from one luxurious hotel to the next,
without ever growing roots, yet in reference to those less prosperous
subjects on the move, i.e. the average migrant or refugee, ‘nomad’
sounds ideologically veiled, although evoking, in the Western mind,
connotations of adventurous travel, harmony with nature, ‘authentic’
spirituality and/or escape from Western economic and socio-political
pressures.
The ideological veiling is even heightened once the nomadic
becomes associated with the mobility of the academic (Braidotti) or
the jet-setter. Too rarely do contemporary ‘nomadologists’ distinguish
between and problematize divergent forms of mobility; even less do
they call into question if and how all these itinerants experience home
and homelessness. With few exceptions, this often results in a confla-
tion of, say, the homeless poor and of those traditional nomads who
actually carry their homes with them and experience home in terms of
movement rather than of sessility.4 Both cultural specificity and social
difference are thus glossed over. Consequently, it is pertinent to re-
view the concept of the nomadic critically in order to be able to, in
Mieke Bal’s words, “productively engage” (2002: 17) it in interaction

3
Powers’ short introductory essay to the April 2003 issue of Schreibheft:
Zeitschrift für Literatur was published in a German translation by Gerd Bur-
ger only.
4
Along with critical ethnographic work like Urbain’s (2000) and Miller’s
(2001), one of the few exceptions is Thomas H. Macho’s earlier essay on con-
temporary nomads, “Fluchtgedanken” (1990), which I will address again later
in this chapter.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 165

with my object of study; for concepts, Bal argues, “are never simply
descriptive; they are also programmatic and normative” (ibid. 28).5
Within the context of critical theory and contemporary cultural
criticism, the attraction of nomadic theory lies in the fact that, through
its evocations of movement and counter-territoriality, ‘nomadologies’
seem well-suited to theorize pertinent issues of place, space, and mo-
bility while also corresponding to poststructuralist anti-essentialist no-
tions of border crossings, fluidity, the processual, and the like. Gener-
ally understood as a “theory that is rootless, homeless or moves across
disciplines” (194), as Richard Osborne succinctly put it in a recently
published reference work (Megawords: 200 Terms You Really Need to
Know, 2002), the nomadic is

an idea that is important in post-colonial and poststructuralist thought,

in particular in its theorizing of the nomadic subject which trans-
gresses boundaries. […] [N]omadic subjectivity is seen as fluid, trans-
gressive and resistant to hegemonic discourses of fixity. […] To be a
nomadic subject is to be homeless, to exist in an imaginary and sym-
bolic realm that subverts the accepted definitions of what is and rep-
laces them with categories of fluidity and possibility. (194-5; my em-
phasis)

One of the major points of criticism of nomadology relates to the dis-

torted view (expressed in Osborne’s summary) of nomads as home-
less, existing in an “imaginary and symbolic realm that subverts” do-
minant modes of thinking. Nomadologists tend to forget that their ob-
ject of study, nomads – regardless of the fact that the term is originally
Greek for “pastoral tribes” – do not exist only in imaginary and sym-
bolic realms but also in marginalized social and geographical spaces,
areas that are usually excluded from the map of Western thought (cf.
Patton 1988: 137 & Paul 1999: 30-1).
Before delving into these and similarly controversial issues,
however, I will return first to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s figuration of
‘nomadic’ thought, paraphrased by Osborne as working to “‘deterrito-

5
Following Bal (2002), traveling concepts (like the nomadic) always need revi-
sion and critical engagement with one’s object of study (rather than mere “ap-
pliance” to this object) in order to remain productive. One of the main incen-
tives for the reconsiderations made here was Paes de Barros’ monograph
(2004) on women’s road stories, which postulates – haphazardly in my view –
“nomadic subjectivity” for all the texts the study examines.
166 Roads of Her Own

rialise’ forms of thought, to unravel and oppose dominant ideas” (194)

governed by state apparatuses.6 Thus in the following, I aim to locate
the nomad’s transition from the socio-geographic to the philosophical-
theoretical realm in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory. For it is in their
transitional move that I situate this transfiguration of the nomad,
launched in order to serve then-current philosophical concerns. My
inquiry centers on two questions: how nomads have been turned into
metaphors and whether nomadological writings following Deleuze
and Guattari manage to escape the problematic triangulation of repre-
sentation, romanticization, and exoticism.

5.1.1. Back to the Routes: Deleuze & Guattari’s Nomadology

As the sequel to Anti-Oedipus (volume one of Capitalism and Schi-

zophrenia),7 A Thousand Plateaus (1980) propagates a new form of
subjectivity, de-centering the individual as made up by flows and bor-
derless assemblages: as haecceities – literally translated as ‘beings-
here’ – subjectivity is only a momentary individuation of a larger as-
semblage, characterized by heterogeneity, fluidity, multiplicity, and a
Body without Organs (cf. Deleuze’s explanation in “Brief an Uno”,
2003: 191).8 Subjects, in this view, are rhizomatic processes rather
than rooted figurations; both in their interiority and exteriority, they
are made up by interconnecting planes Deleuze and Guattari, with

6
A term Deleuze and Guattari use in the sense of Louis Althusser’s theory of
interpellation.
7
In brief, volume one (1972) presents a critique of Freudian and Lacanian psy-
choanalysis, which, for Deleuze and Guattari, appears as an instrument of af-
firmation of the dominant system and its repressive forces by means of subor-
dinating the subject under the phallic structure of culture. As an alternative,
Deleuze and Guattari create the desiring machine, a machinic subconscious
that is not structured linguistically. Thus, the subject’s main drive and force is
(positive) desire rather than (negative) lack.
8
The Body Without Organs, a phrase coined by Antonin Artaud, refers to a
conception of the body as a flowing, desire-producing, a-centered system – an
“uninterrupted continuum” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987/1980: 154) rather than an
organ-ized, goal-oriented, stable physical structure. Thus, the body is not de-
fined by the organs it contains but as a “product of a larger mapping of forces”
(Kaufman 1998: 6).
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 167

Gregory Bateson (158), call plateaus:9 “a map and not a tracing” (12;
see also Kaufman 1998: 5).10 This conception of the subject-as-
assemblage undermines the notion of the self as author/itative, unified,
or controllable. Yet although Deleuze and Guattari attack the notion of
subjectivity in general – understood as the achievement of individual
agency and autonomy through the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in
enlightenment and liberal theory – , their actual concern seems to be a
broader understanding of the subject, one that is able to account for a
plurality of intersecting lines of difference: by deterritorializing and
decentering traditional subjectivity, human beings are now defined as
theoretically limitless, ever-shifting arrays of possibilities and poten-
tials.
The continuous deterritorializing movements of such rhizomatic
assemblages of haecceities generate what Deleuze and Guattari call
“nomadic” trajectories in chapter twelve of A Thousand Plateaus,
“1227: Treatise on Nomadology: – The War Machine” (1987/1980:
351-423).11 Thus, one of the basic tenets underlying A Thousand Pla-
teaus is that spatial concepts always parallel ways of thinking; that
“arborescent” thought generates hierarchy and perpetuates an empha-
sis on roots and fixity, while “rhizomatic thought” produces lateral
network relations. In their “Treatise on Nomadology”, the nomad is
translated from geographical to mental space; it is here that ‘nomadic’
thought is generated. Nomadic pathways instantiate the latter, recog-
nizing stationary points along these routes, yet always subordinating
these points to dynamic paths: “The life of the nomad is the intermez-
zo […]. [T]he nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence
and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along

9
A Thousand Plateaus itself is also structured as a network of connected pla-
teaus, thus tempting the reader into a non-linear reading experience: “We will
never ask what a book means […]. We will ask what it functions with, in con-
nection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in
which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed.”
(1987/1980: 4)
10
It is no coincidence that as a historical practice, map-making has similar colo-
nialist implications like the current nomadic discourses of the West.
11
Deleuze and Guattari’s use of war terminology is stunning and appears unref-
lected; particularly from a post-9/11 perspective, one cannot but think of the
resemblance of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s much-praised warrior-herders to con-
temporary agents of global terrorism.
168 Roads of Her Own

a trajectory.” (ibid. 380) Therefore, the nomad’s route is different

from other roads:

[E]ven though the nomadic trajectory may follow trails or customary

routes, it does not fulfill the function of the sedentary road, which is to
parcel out a closed space to people […]. The nomadic trajectory does
the opposite: it distributes people […] in an open space […]. (ibid.)

Following this proposition, A Thousand Plateaus defines nomads pri-

marily according to their relation to space and their mode of move-
ment rather than to movement as such: nomadic movement “holds
space and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being held
by space in a local movement from one specific point to the next” (ib-
id. 363). Clearly inspired by traditional herds(wo)men, Deleuze and
Guattari conceive of nomads not via restlessness and journeying, but
via the nomadic way of creating space as “smooth” (as opposed to
“striated”, linear and ordered):

The nomad distributes himself [sic] in a smooth space; he occupies,

inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle […]. The no-
mad knows how to wait, he has infinite patience. Immobility and
speed, catatonia and rush, a ‘stationary process’, station as process –
these traits […] are eminently those of the nomad. (ibid. 381)

Thus, the nomad’s salient characteristic is to perceive even the statio-

nary as a process, and, consequently, being as always a state of be-
coming. Yes, Deleuze and Guattari assert, nomads do move, but travel
is not necessarily nomadic: there is “tree travel” and “rhizome travel”
(ibid. 482), and only the latter is considered a trait of nomadism, for it
entails unexpected lateral connections and multi-directional networks
(see also my introductory chapter on spatial theory). Nomadic space,
then, is an alternative space mainly because of its anti-centric, non-
linear nature, which allows for multiplicities and lines of flight, for
traveling in “smooth” rather than rigidly segmented, restricted space.
Also, in this conception of the nomad, territoriality is no longer a basis
for identity and ideological formations based thereupon: “The land
ceases to be land, tending to become simply ground (sol) or support.”
(ibid. 381) Deleuze and Guattari argue that contrary to the migrant
(though migrants are explicitly conflated with nomads earlier in the
book; ibid. 228) and other human itinerants, nomads do not reterrito-
rialize (ibid. 381), since “deterritorialization […] constitutes the
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 169

[ir]relation to the earth” (ibid.), the earth itself being deterritorialized

in specific locations, i.e., dissociated from evolution, history, and ge-
nealogy. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s emphasis on movement and smooth
space wards off any reterritorializing gesture; thus, in A Thousand
Plateaus, nomadic practices are conceptualized as acts of resistance
against hegemonic control over space as well as over the subject and
its socio-cultural location.
In this context, it is also important to note that sedentaries, no-
mads, and migrants are not envisioned in any evolutionary relation to
each other; nor do they exist in any kind of “purity” (ibid. 384; see al-
so Urbain’s ontology of travel [2000: 144]). There are only hybrid
forms of the sedentary, the migrant, and the nomad; yet somewhat ob-
scurely, Deleuze and Guattari claim that because of this real-life im-
purity, nomads “remain an abstraction, an Idea [sic], something [sic]
real and nonactual” (420).12 This abstraction conflates the abstract and
the concrete and constitutes the basis for the nomads’ metaphorization
in the course of their journey through academia and popular culture.
While Deleuze and Guattari clearly aim to translate their ontology of
the nomad into epistemology, claiming to delimit themselves from any
real-life basis, many subsequent nomadologists paradoxically re-
connect or merge ‘nomadic’ thought and nomadic existence (cf. Kap-
lan 91).

5.1.2. More Routes: Nomadology as Traveling Theory

Following Mieke Bal’s 2002 conception of “traveling theory”, nomad-

ism is a traveling concept that has been imported into various academ-
ic and literary contexts and accordingly has acquired a discursive his-
12
“[…] [C]’est plutôt les nomades qui restent une abstraction, une Idée, quelque
chose de réel et non actuel” in the original (Deleuze/Guattari 1980: 523). This
characterization relates to the three ontological planes in Deleuzian philoso-
phy: the actual (which refers to the material), the virtual (which is real but not
material), and the real (which perpetually needs to be realized). This distinc-
tion between the real and the actual goes back to his revision of the real/unreal
opposition by means of the actual/virtual distinction. The virtual and actual
are both real, but not everything that is virtually contained in this world is or
becomes actual. Thus, the virtual (fantasies, dreams, memories, etc.) is real as
it has an effect on us, although it is not actual, i.e., realized. The virtual is al-
ways real, but not (yet) actual.
170 Roads of Her Own

tory of its own (ironically despite A Thousand Plateaus’ problematic

claim that “nomads have no history; they only have a geography”,
393).13 Developed by Deleuze and Guattari as a figure which resists
spatial regulation, the nomad has frequently been embraced for its al-
leged subversive potential. However, nomadologists have not aban-
doned the representational arguments that Deleuze and Guattari
sought to overthrow; Sadie Plant, for instance, describes a contempo-
rary British free festival movement as “the most striking and literal
example of nomadic resistance” (2001/1993: 1101), understanding the
Deleuzian nomad as refusing to settle within existing codes and con-
ventions (ibid. 1102).
Others use the nomad-figure to account for travel, restlessness
and/or hyper-mobility as allegedly global social phenomena of the late
20th and 21st centuries.14 In The Songlines (1987), What Am I Doing
Here (1990), and Anatomy of Restlessness (1996), Bruce Chatwin,
British travel writer and self-proclaimed nomadologist, uses the rhe-
torical figure of the nomad to describe his own traveling practice. Be-
fore his death, Chatwin had planned to write a book on nomadism as a
universalist yearning opposed to a life constrained by time and place.
Humans, according to him, wander even contrary to economic reason
(cf. Holland/Huggan 1998: 167-8). Thus in Chatwin’s writings, the
nomad becomes a generalized metaphor for his own restlessness and
(masculinist) escapism – even if Chatwin recognizes, unlike many
other nomadologists, that nomads dwell in continuous movement, ra-
ther than traveling with a clear beginning and end (Urbain 2000: 150).

13
The problematic nature of this claim, inviting primitivist and universalist in-
terpretation, is somewhat relativized considering that Deleuze and Guattari
view history as a state-controlled and state-made linear (arborescent) dis-
course; cf. 1987/1980: 23.
14
Cf. also the introductory sentences to a collection of philosophical essays col-
lected by Andreas Leutzsch, Nomaden: Interdisziplinäre ‘Wanderungen’ im
Feld der Formulare und Mythen (2003); oddly, the quote characterizes no-
mads primarily as available and flexible: “In Zeiten der Auflösung durch-
schaubarer Strukturen, zunehmender Mobilität und der Tendenz alles und je-
des zu vernetzen, scheint die Lebensform des Nomaden wieder an Aktualität
zu gewinnen. Ganze Existenzen gründen sich darauf, jederzeit verfügbar und
flexibel zu sein.” (3) Tr.: “In times when discernible structures are dissolving,
mobility is increasing, and when there is the tendency to link everything and
anything, the life-form of the nomad seems to gain in topicality again. Whole
existences are based on being available and flexible all the time.” (tr. AG)
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 171

In a 1996 lecture, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk speaks of the

contemporary obsession with “automobilism” (“Automobilismus”) as
an expression of revitalized “neo-nomadic” (19) impulses that charac-
terize the age of “late sessility” (ibid.),15 which he attests, in a univer-
salizing gesture, to the present state of humanity (“gegenwärtige Men-
schheit”, 19).16 The same ontological proposition of neo-nomadism is
made in an earlier book Sloterdijk also contributed to: in Auf, und, da-
von: Eine Nomadologie der Neunziger (1990), central European phi-
losophers like Vilém Flusser, Peter Strasser, and Thomas H. Macho
view this decade (the 1990s) as an age of renewed nomadism in the
West. Redefining the neo-nomadic as experiencing the world in mo-
bile network relations (Flusser) or as a new era of itinerancy and mo-
bility (Macho), part of the volume is exceptional in so far as it at least
problematizes this mobility as a divergent social phenomenon of the
20th century:

Wir leben im Jahrhundert der Flüchtlinge und der ‘neuen Nomaden’,

aber auch im Jahrhundert einer – touristisch bewirtschafteten – Reise-
faszination. Wir leben im Jahrhundert der Massenvertreibungen, aber
auch im Jahrhundert des Hochgeschwindigkeitsrausches und einer
wahnwitzigen kinetischen Euphorie, die mit expressiver Bewegungs-
armut paktiert. (Macho 1990: 134)17

Macho recognizes the disparate experiences of mobility and accor-

dingly suggests calling this new age “mobile” rather than nomadic,
thus acknowledging the romanticized proposition entailed in the use
of the latter that we are, universally and progressively, going back in
history to a pre-sedentary age.
The disparate experience of tourists and less voluntary itinerants
has led to a widespread discussion of travel as a cultural practice of

15
“Spätstadium [des] Projekt[s] Seßhaftigkeit” in the original; tr. AG.
16
This view of a universal neo-nomadism is in itself problematic, excluding
nomadic tribes (who have never been sedentary) as well as people with lim-
ited means of (auto)mobility.
17
Tr.: “We live in a century of refugees and ‘new nomads’, but also in a century
of a – touristically marketed – fascination with travel. We live in a century of
mass displacements, but also in a century of high-speed frenzy and a lunatic
kinetic euphoria, which is in cahoots with expressive akinesia.” (tr. AG)
172 Roads of Her Own

predominantly Western cultures.18 Within the context of Cultural Stu-

dies, Lawrence Grossberg, in an essay entitled “Wandering Au-
diences, Nomadic Critics” (1988), argues with Meaghan Morris
(1988) that “specific vocabularies of travel are never innocent” but
“always implicated in and articulated to larger structures of ideologi-
cal, cultural, and political relations” (377). In the same essay, howev-
er, his use of the nomadic seems somewhat misplaced, as it conflates
people’s actual movements and mobile ways of thinking:

The task of cultural criticism is less that of interpreting texts and au-
diences than of describing vectors, distances and densities, intersec-
tions and interruptions, and the nomadic wandering (whether of
people in everyday life or as cultural critics) through this […] field of
tendential forces and struggles. […] The nomadic cultural critic finds
that the strange is always and already familiar. (383, my emphasis)

It remains unclear why the (metaphorical) movements of cultural crit-

ics are labeled “nomadic” rather than “itinerant”, “traveling”, “va-
grant”, or perhaps “drifting”, for example. In a footnote, Grossberg
acknowledges Deleuze and Guattari as his source for a theory of the
nomadic subject that “exists within its nomadic wandering through the
ever-changing places and spaces, vectors and apparatuses of everyday
life” (384) while also claiming that “coherent subjectivity is always
possible, even necessary” (ibid.). Grossberg further digresses from the
Deleuzo-Guattarian original not only by defining the nomadic primari-
ly via movement, but also by arguing that the nomadic subject “has an
effective shape as a result of its struggles to win a temporary space for
itself within the places that have been prepared for it” (ibid.; my em-
phasis). In the same essay Grossberg comments on his and Morris’ no-
tion of the billboard (a much less problematic metaphor to describe
the spatio-temporal structures of everyday life), yet his use of the con-
cept clearly demonstrates how the nomadic has traveled from Deleu-
zo-Guattarian radical anti-structuralism to the concerns of Cultural
Studies in the late 1980s to relocate a subject previously shattered to
pieces by poststructuralist discourse.

18
Tourism studies have produced a lively, interdisciplinary academic discursive
field; see, for example, the volumes edited by Leed, Hanna/DelCasino, Cole-
man/Crang, or Holland/Huggan (1998). Critical studies of travel writing are
also central for this issue; see, for instance, Sara Mills’ study Discourses of
Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (1991).
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 173

Similar concerns have provoked feminist theory and criticism to

make use of the nomadic as an alternative concept for theorizing
women’s subjectivities (Kaplan 1996: 92). Most prominently, Rosi
Braidotti’s much-cited book Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sex-
ual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994) claims the
potential for a feminist politics inherent in strategies of nomadism,
thereby offering a way out of the dilemma between essentialism and
radical poststructural contingency. For Braidotti, the mobile nomadic
subject

functions as a relay team: s/he connects, circulates, moves on; s/he

does not form identifications but keeps on coming back at regular in-
tervals. The nomad is a transgressive identity, whose transitory nature
is precisely the reason why s/he can make connections at all. Nomadic
politics is a matter of bonding, of coalitions, of interconnections.
(1994a: 35)

According to Braidotti, a feminist-oriented nomadism is characterized

by “an acute awareness of the nonfixity of boundaries” rather than by
a “fluidity without borders” (1994a: 36). Braidotti’s, similar to Tim
Cresswell’s argument (1996b, cf. my discussion of Cresswell in the
chapter on spatial theory), uses “nomadic” transgression of such bor-
ders as a strategy: consequently, a feminist nomadism entails “the in-
tense desire to go on trespassing, transgressing” (Braidotti 1994a: 36),
which women can use to create new subjectivities. These subjectivi-
ties would then be founded – but not fixated – in space and time, thus
allowing for political agency without having “to be settled in a subs-
tantive vision of the subject” (ibid. 34-5). Similar claims are made by
Chantal Mouffe, who argues that identity is a process of “permanent
hybridization and nomadization” (1994: 110). Both Braidotti and
Mouffe embrace nomadic theory as generating rhizomatic constella-
tions of multiple identities and affiliations, as a transgressive strategy
that goes against fixity and limiting structures. Following this feminist
turn of the Deleuzian nomad, analyses like Paes de Barros’ Fast Cars
and Bad Girls (2004) also claim nomadism as a way to create wom-
en’s subjectivities and alliances as mobile, thereby rejecting any es-
sentialist grounding of feminine identity – unfortunately without spe-
cifying or critically examining their notions of the nomadic.
To some extent, all these recastings of living human beings as
abstract figurations raise the ethical dilemma of writing about nomads
174 Roads of Her Own

as always already constituting ethnographic practice, as Syed Manzu-

rul Islam notes (2001: 1), raising James Clifford’s question: “Noma-
dology: a Form of Postmodern Primitivism?” (1997: 39). The com-
plete obliteration of traditional nomadism from contemporary noma-
dological discourses, governed by educated Western philosophers, via
the conflation of nomadic tribes and metaphorical nomadism (as just
any form of resistance against dominant systems) eventually eradi-
cates the voices of traditional nomads altogether (Manzurul Islam
2001: 1). Paul Carter, an Australian theorist of space, place, and tra-
vel, rejects nomadism for similar reasons:

[n]omadism, whether it takes the form of Chatwin’s elite romance or

of [Iain] Chambers’s uncritical theorizing, fails to give a satisfactory
account of movement as problematic. (Living in a New Country, 1992,
qtd. in Holland/Huggan 1998: 170)

Likewise, Jean-Didier Urbain distinguishes between travel, as a prob-

lematic Western concept and practice, and movement, arguing that
nomadism is in fact the opposite of travel. Urbain cites a Touareg poet
he once met who

was opposed to this appropriation of the nomad by the Western gaze

which, seeing in nomadism a model of restless wandering or of travel,
denies its specificity. The nomad only becomes a traveller in the out-
sider’s eyes; as this Touareg reminded me, people in his culture move
about within a particular territory according to an established itine-
rary fixed by tradition. (2001: 150, my emphasis)

Thus it is crucial to distinguish the epistemological perspective of mo-

bile thought and ‘becoming’ subjects from the ontological basis of
traditional nomads when employing a term that has habitually referred
to non- or semi-sedentary peoples in various parts of the world: these
might in fact, like the Touaregs, consider their paths and borders as
fixed by traditional customs.
It does make a difference whether one is a subaltern, voiceless,
deprived nomad in Mongolia or China, or a Euro-American ‘nomadic’
intellectual, endowed with a multilingual education and an academic
voice, if not with secure means of subsistence. To turn the intellectual
into the epitome of the nomadic (“we move in and out of several cul-
tures, political traditions, and languages: we are perfect examples of
hybridity and cross-culturalism”, Braidotti 1997: 25), I would argue,
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 175

also means to use the nomadic in an inappropriate metaphorical fa-

shion (or as a fashionable metaphor, for that matter): today, actual
nomads mostly do not move in and out of several cultures and coun-
tries, even if they historically did so at a time when nation-states were
only emerging. Thus, this use of the nomadic entails a certain episte-
mological violence that evokes colonialist stances of hegemonic ap-
propriation.19 The nomadic refers to an actual, everyday reality cha-
racterized by the economic necessity to live in movement rather than
by freedom of travel, and by hardship rather than an adventurous life-
style of moving smoothly between cultures and societies. When Brai-
dotti talks of herself as a nomadic intellectual, she thus projects the
spatial experience of the contemporary multicultural intellectual onto
nomadic lives in general: celebratory of a cross-culturalism that is
considered fashionable in well-educated, multilingual circles, she si-
multaneously turns the nomad into a romantic, idealized metaphor, de-
fining her predominantly by hybridity, transcultural global mobility,
and agency (see e.g. Braidotti 1997: 31).20 While Braidotti’s vision of
the subject is quite useful on a conceptual level, as I have argued ear-
lier in this study, one has to find her choice of a term charged with
such an orientalist semantic baggage problematical at least.
Contrary to Braidotti, Mouffe, and others, many commentators
have come to disapprove of the now-prevailing overuse, and subse-
quent inflation (e.g. in Paes de Barros 2004) or even catachresis of the
nomad as a metaphor of mobility.21 The nomad, as developed by De-

19
On the crucial role of the “metaphors we live by” for our structuration of real-
ity, see Lakoff and Johnson’s classic study on the construction and use of
symbolic language (1980).
20
In her essay “Toward a New Nomadism”, Braidotti closes by saying that
“[n]omadism is […] neither a rhetorical gesture nor a mere figure of speech,
but a political and epistemological necessity for critical theory at the end of
[the 20th] century” (1994b: 182). While privileging the epistemological di-
mension of the nomadic, she thus counters her own definition of the nomadic
intellectual, whose real-life experience is associated with that of nomads.
21
The unreflected overuse of geographic metaphors (e.g. in feminist theory) is
harshly criticized by Geraldine Pratt (1998), arguing that there is a static as-
pect of geographic metaphors violating a reality that is all but static; see also
Janet Wolff’s (1992) criticism of metaphors of mobility, which adopts an op-
positional stance by problematizing the normativity of mobility as resistance,
and Paul’s essay “The Rhetoric and Romance of Mobility” (2001). As men-
tioned previously, Paes de Barros’ book (2004) locates all of the women’s
176 Roads of Her Own

leuze, Guattari, and their followers, is a problematic ethnic figure, for

it seems to embody the desirability of an-Other, closer-to-nature, ro-
mantic, and idealized life: a fantasmatic existence that is imagined as
countering the monotony of everyday life routines many Westerners
have apparently become weary of (cf. similar points of criticism in
Macho’s [1990], Gedalof’s [1996], and Paul’s [2001] essays). It is
therefore resonant with the romantic topos of the infinite journey ex-
amined in Manfred Frank’s seminal study, Die unendliche Fahrt: Die
Geschichte des Fliegenden Holländers und verwandter Motive (1995).
With a critical view of this Orientalist problematics, Caren Kap-
lan asks: “Can colonial spaces [such as deserts and steppes] be re-
coded or reterritorialized without producing neocolonialisms?” (1996:
90) Kaplan, identifying in Deleuze and Guattari a modernist critical
tradition “emphasizing the benefits of distance and the valorization of
displacement” (ibid. 86) concludes that the critic cannot utilize “such
charged […] figures [like the nomad] without accounting for them as
sites of colonial discourses, as spaces constructed by specific power
relations” (ibid. 91).22 Furthermore, Christopher L. Miller’s essay de-
monstrates how Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that their figuration of
the nomad takes place on a non-representational level and has nothing
to do with anthropology is thwarted by the ethnographic and historio-
graphic sources they cite – despite their alleged anti-historicism – for
chapter twelve of A Thousand Plateaus, without critically reflecting
on these sources.23 Miller finds that this claim “liberates Deleuze and
Guattari and their followers from the ethical burden of representing
real, actual nomads, who might eventually have something to say in
response” (2001: 1119)24 – this argument is reminiscent of Kaplan’s,

road stories she discusses within the realm of the nomadic, even when the nar-
rative is a goal-oriented quest.
22
While Kaplan’s criticism of the nomadic in Western theory is extremely in-
sightful, her vindication of “nomadic subjectivity” (as used by Grossberg, for
instance) in the concluding pages of her chapter on nomadism comes some-
what surprisingly and abruptly. While I follow her in her claim for a histori-
cally grounded use of the nomadic, I am not entirely convinced that such
grounding is sufficiently established in the essays she cites in this section of
her book (1996: 99).
23
As Caren Kaplan notes, a similar argument is brought to the fore by Paul Pat-
ton (1996: 90).
24
In the context of their claim to nonrepresentation, Miller also notes the
Deleuzo-Guattarian problem of authority: “the problem is the denial of author-
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 177

who in turn finds that to erase the subject position of the theorist is a
classical, highly problematic anthropological gesture (1996: 88). Mil-
ler, looking at the footnotes of A Thousand Plateaus, demonstrates
how the book’s “fundamental, unshakable sympathy for nomadism”
(2001: 1140) eventually leads to the actual nomad’s disappearance
“into horizonless space” and historical metaphorization (ibid.). In the
end Miller concludes that “A Thousand Plateaus sets out to ‘strangle’
but winds up at least partially reproducing all of the following: repre-
sentation, anthropology, evolution, primitivism, universalism, dual-
ism, Orientalism” (ibid. 1142).
Like Syed Manzurul Islam, Miller echoes a debate that ques-
tions the unproblematic nature of non-representational philosophy
when using figures of the Other for abstraction. The claim not to
represent (in the sense of the German darstellen) the world and its in-
habitants – the basic epistemological tenet of non-representational phi-
losophy – while using a term that has been connoted, ever since its
Greek coinage, as highly representational, distinguishing sedentary ci-
vilization from barbaric nomads (the non-sedentary Other), conflates
the abstract and the concrete a little too smoothly. For as soon as ques-
tions of representation are in some way connected to cultural construc-
tions of alterity – and the nomad certainly denotes such a construction
– they cannot be reduced to Darstellung alone, but, following a basic
hermeneutic tenet, also have to address issues of Stellvertretung, the
sense of ‘standing for, speaking for’ somebody. Thus, especially from
the postcolonial viewpoint that both Manzurul Islam and Miller ad-
dress, it is the mixing of the metaphorical-philosophical and the his-
torical-ethnographic lines of argumentation of A Thousand Plateaus
that is crucial and critical. From such a critical perspective, it seems
that the nomadic is, more often than not, used as a (chronotopic) me-
taphor that disregards the humanity of nomads. But whether or not one
accepts the Deleuzian metaphorization of the nomad as unproblemat-
ic, the overuse of the metaphor by various ‘nomadologists’ proves, in
my view, that one needs to be careful and specific in the deployment
of ethnographic terminology.

ity, the claim to be nonauthoritarian, and the consequent failure to come to

terms with the consequences of the authority that the authors put into prac-
tice.” (2001: 1129)
178 Roads of Her Own

5.1.3. From Paradoxical Metaphors to Para-Nomadism

Harking back to the Deleuzo-Guattarian definition of nomadic

“smooth” spatiality, the particular relations to space of all these al-
leged nomads requires an in-depth examination; in all probability, one
would find that while the ‘nomad’ poet and the academic intellectual
might envision space as smooth, the subaltern refugee and the migrant
worker are faced with a network of spatial striation, from border con-
trols and surveillance mechanisms to ostracism, expulsion, and dis-
courses of global undesirability. Certainly, these groups do not share a
common space: class, race, gender, global position, age and ability
clearly alter spatial relations, productions, and perceptions. A reconsi-
deration of the nomadic in light of the problematic issues I have ad-
dressed would thus re-literalize this figuration, claiming that any criti-
cal analysis using this concept must be specific in its definition of no-
madism, wary of its latent exoticism and idealization, and modest in
attributing it to diverse contemporary cultural phenomena.
Therefore, an unidealized figuration of the nomadic posits no-
madic space as not necessarily desirable; it can be applied only to a
particular mode of movement: along circular, premeditated routes,
nomadic itinerants live in movement rather than “travel” the Western
way; these (here, literarily mediated) lives take place in spatial transla-
tion, and likewise, their being is also always in translation, in becom-
ing – a Deleuzian claim adopted by Braidotti’s and by my own notion
of the nomadic. Also, nomadic fiction does not involve the tourist-
like, ethnographic gaze characteristic of the travel narrative (e.g.
Chatwin’s) and many literary quests, as nomads do not continuously
confront the cultural/ethnic Other in the course of their itineraries, but
are themselves part of the Other-ed in the American landscape, not on-
ly as ‘public’ women on the road but also as unsettled, and unsettling,
citizens.25 For nomads, movement is usually a socio-economic neces-
25
An example from Japanese-American history illustrates the connection made
between sessility and the state order quite well: in 1905, the Journal of the
Senate of the State of California complains that “Japanese laborers […] are
mere transients [who] do not buy land [or] build houses. […] They contribute
nothing to the growth of the State. They add nothing to its wealth, and they
are a blight on the prosperity of it and a great […] danger to its welfare.” (qtd.
in Daniels 1988: 137) This sentiment subsequently led to the introduction of
anti-Japanese land bills, barring Japanese immigrants from owning land. Simi-
lar arguments shaping Anglo-Native American relations are cited in Heike
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 179

sity that even often constitutes their traditional way of life.26 Move-
ment, for them, is a mode of existence rarely chosen voluntarily as a
subversive strategy – although they might attempt to use movement in
a subversive manner, especially when informed by a (feminist) politi-
cal agenda. Thus, nomadic movement is – and I am following the De-
leuzian definition in this respect – not defined by restlessness or a de-
sire to travel. Rather (and here I digress from Deleuzo-Guattarian non-
representation), nomads do face rules and regulations of movement,
not only by the limitations of the stately spatial order but also by their
own traditions and/or economic necessities. As such, they are not per
se subversive or revolutionary on an ontological level.
In order to distinguish a more metaphorical nomadism from tra-
ditional nomads, para-nomadism might be a better terminological
choice than neo-nomadism, expressing a “close-to” relation between
figural and actual nomads rather than echoing a questionable evolu-
tionary development (postulated by Sloterdijk and others). Para-
nomadism, as I construe it, exposes rather than veils the Western gaze
that, as I have shown, always accompanies ‘nomadic’ thought to a cer-
tain extent. This self-reflexive potential might be worth the neologism,
even if the para-nomad’s heuristic value may exceed her conceptual
merit. The para-nomad, I would suggest, is at least one possible way
of rethinking a terminology that is fundamentally Eurocentric without
abandoning its attractiveness for critical studies of subjects, spaces,
and mobilities altogether.
From a strictly epistemological perspective, feminist para-
nomads should be of interest not because they are supposedly free-
roaming warriors, but because nomadism, even when characterized by
a mobility that is premeditated, strained, or challenged, implicitly res-
ists traditional Western binary structures such as departure and arrival,
movement and rest, central and marginal, or public and private spaces.
The nomad is tied to territory and her (tribe’s) body in a mobile way
as she continually roams this territory; from a hegemonic perspective,
such bodies in motion – moving bodies rather than bodies moved from

Paul’s essay “The Rhetoric and Romance of Mobility: Euro-American No-

madism Past and Present” (2001).
26
Of course, itinerant female protagonists in literature cannot but deviate from
“traditional ways of life” in patriarchal cultures, however this deviation can be
understood as an engagement with the cultural heritage of gendered spaces.
180 Roads of Her Own

point to point – might be disturbing indeed, even though nomads do

not escape the striations of a globalized economy. Allowing for a
community of shifting alliances and in-between subjectivities on an
epistemological level (Braidotti’s main claim; see also Manzurul Is-
lam 2001: 7), thinking beyond dichotomies clearly enhances social
practices of agency against the dominant social and spatial order.
Epistemological para-nomadism therefore offers to dismantle
binary structures of center and margin in both a postcolonial and fe-
minist context without denying the existence of a center altogether.
Nevertheless, one needs to be alert to the fact that by their acts of
moving, real-life nomads may not always eschew politico-geographic
limitations and borderlines and thus might not be able to realize this
potentiality of resistance. Left behind like so many others by the
forces of globalized economies and networks, the Touaregs, for ex-
ample, are now forced to give up their traditional economic basis of
salt-production, and thus nomadism altogether; Afghanistan’s Kuchi
tribe needed to campaign in order to win a seat in parliament in the
2005 elections, as a recent New York Times article reports (Gall 2005).
Thus, I follow Manzurul Islam’s claim that “without bringing histori-
cal minorities into the equation and without bringing their point of
view to bear on the ethical project, nomadism cannot shed its exotic-
ism and aestheticism and become a model of liberatory practice”
(2001: 4).
According to this reformulation of the nomadic as para-
nomadism, the protagonists of the road stories in the following ana-
lyses embody the opposite of the vanguards of freedom of mobility
and the adventurous traveler: they are forced onto the road by external
(economic) coercion, which frequently translates, by way of its dis-
cursive inscription onto the body, into internal pressures. The routes of
these para-nomadic women are circular and premeditated: like the
nomads’ paths, they are chosen under pressure more than out of plea-
sure. While the para-nomadic trope is a common denominator of these
texts, each female itinerant re-fashions her wandering under specific
ethnic, economic, and gendered circumstances.
Diane Glancy and Cynthia Kadohata narrate journeys by ethnic
‘Others’, minorities in the lands they traverse, and present them with a
collective legacy of travel, migration, and/or displacement. In 5.2.,
Glancy’s Claiming Breath (1992) and The Voice that Was in Travel
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 181

(1999) are read as para-nomadic road narratives informed by the re-

signification of a Native American legacy of coerced displacement
and moments of transdifferent tensions due to a mixed heritage also
with regard to gendered spatialities. As I will argue, Glancy, who is
(or, rather, ‘became’) part Cherokee, critically engages with the forced
movement of her Native American ancestors from the American East
to Oklahoma and the tradition of white (male) American mobility.
Similarly generated tensions of dissonant differences can also be
found in Japanese-American writer Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating
World (1989), analyzed in 5.3., which describes the “floating world”
of motels, rest-stops, and temporary homes in which the protagonist
spends most of her childhood, on the road with her extended family.
In Kadohata’s book, the para-nomadic movement of the protagonist
also results from the forced displacement of Japanese-Americans dur-
ing World War II, but the story also focuses on the legacy of immigra-
tion, on economic migration und gendered hierarchies of the public
and the private.
In 5.4., Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays (1970) is read as an in-
verted version of para-nomadic agency that, unlike Glancy’s and Ka-
dohata’s books, is unable to resignify involuntary movement into an
empowering narrative. Didion’s wealthy protagonist’s inner coercion
to move in temporary stints of escape is arrested in depression and a
mental home. My reading of Canadian writer Aritha van Herk’s No
Fixed Address (1986) is located between chapters five (the para-
nomadic) and six (the picaresque) because the moment of coercion
characteristic of the para-nomadic road narrative develops into a po-
werful postmodern picaresque tale of subversion in this text.
The road stories discussed in these subchapters construct their
protagonists as at home on the road, their movements as an often
transgressive way of life from the point of view of a gendered, ethnic,
and classed spatiality of public and private segregations, without ro-
manticizing the characters’ movements. On what terms is para-
nomadic subjectivity constructed in these texts, and can such subjec-
tivities provide for the production of an alternative, para-nomadic
space? How far do multiple, often conflicting cultural differences
trouble these narratives and their attempts at resignification? The key
aspect of the following analyses is how the trope of para-nomadism
relates to and alters ethnic, classed, and gendered spatialities in wom-
en’s road narratives.
182 Roads of Her Own

5.2. “Give Me Land Lots of Land”:

Diane Glancy’s Claiming Breath and The Voice That Was in Travel

As I have argued in the theoretical discussion of gendered spatiality

and mobility, the claiming of space, in Michel de Certeau’s sense as
“practiced place” (1988: 117), is of social, political, and cultural ur-
gency for ethnic minorities in general and people of mixed descent in
particular. As a matter of fact, a minority politics of spatial depriva-
tion and regulation habitually aims at keeping ethnic Others ‘in their
place’, or at rendering them publicly invisible altogether. Spatially and
culturally, however, multiethnic subjects are deprived in further ways,
since they are often marginalized not only by the dominant cultures
but also within their respective minority communities. Theirs is an in-
terstitial, in-between space of displacement and trespassing – always
already an out-of-placeness in the material and symbolic orders. How-
ever, a spatial politics of physical as well as symbolic borders, walls,
and fences can be effectively countered by un-authorized, transgres-
sive movements, as Tim Cresswell argues convincingly in In
Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (1996;
cf. chapter 3.3.).
For a spatial analysis of texts informed by mixed-ancestry
themes, both transiency and transdifference, as heuristic concepts, of-
fer invaluable insights, as, for people of mixed descent, the process of
claiming social space (other than that assigned to the interethnic sub-
ject by a hegemonic system) involves taking into account multiple be-
longings and heritages. Yet these belongings always occur transiently
in space, as routes and roads rather than as rootedness to particular lo-
calities.
American-Cherokee author Diane Glancy, a major yet also
marginal voice in contemporary Native American literature,27 perfect-
ly exemplifies transdifferential position(ing)s in her work. In her road
narratives Claiming Breath (1992) and The Voice That Was in Travel
(1999), the textual spatial politics of inter-ethnicity are complicated by
27
Although Glancy’s voluminous and award-winning work establishes her, on
the one hand, as a major contemporary Native American author, very little
scholarship has been devoted to her writings thus far, which might have to do
with her controversial status within the Native American community (ad-
dressed later in this chapter). Exceptions are essays by Karsten Fitz and Brew-
ster E. Fitz.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 183

the spatial restrictions and limitations structurally imposed on women

in patriarchal societies. Claiming Breath, which won the 1991 North
American Indian Prose Award, is Glancy’s personal journal chronicl-
ing a year (from December to December) she spent mainly on the
road, supporting her children by driving throughout Oklahoma and
Arkansas to teach poetry in schools for the State Arts Council of Ar-
kansas and Oklahoma (Abner 1995: 244); The Voice That Was in Tra-
vel is a short story collection that similarly portrays female characters
on the road. Through para-nomadic practices of mobility, Glancy’s
road stories defy the binary opposition of central vs. marginal space;
by emphasizing ethnic identity as a multiplicity always under con-
struction, Claiming Breath and The Voice That Was in Travel embrace
a transient concept of subjectivity.

Living in/with Transdifference

In much of her work, Diane Glancy addresses the multiple loyalties of

Native and white women struggling economically, as divorced moth-
ers, storytellers and travelers, Christian and pagan.28 Often, these ref-
lections occur while her lyrical I, her first-person narrative voice, and
her fictional characters, all of whom continually embody cultural and
personal dislocation, are on the move and on the road, searching for
spaces they can claim as counter-sites, similar to the Foucauldian he-
terotope. The discourse of the traditional Native American as closely
connected to land and territory is not an option in Glancy’s writing,
also because the Cherokee’s traumatic removal from their territories in
the East has significantly loosened the ties to the land due to the expe-
rience of violent expulsion. In Glancy’s work, both physical and spiri-
tual travel have always been significant, from the early Traveling On
(1980) to the two books I focus on in this chapter, the journal-

28
In Glancy’s work, the Christian faith offers consolation by providing spiritual
refuge. Her positive depiction of Christianity is unusual in contemporary Na-
tive American literature, yet Glancy perceives its healing power always in
combination with tribal traditions and spirits (e.g. in “The Bird Who Reached
Heaven”, 1999a: 64, or in “Sumac”, ibid. 54). That this troublesome combina-
tion creates transdifferent tension is not surprising. See also Karsten Fitz’s es-
say “Native and Christian: Religion and Spirituality as Transcultural Negotia-
tion in American Indian Novels of the 1990s”.
184 Roads of Her Own

chronicle Claiming Breath and the short-story collection The Voice

That Was in Travel. Devising a dynamic fictional space, the mobile
world of travel is the appropriate platform from which Glancy’s hy-
brid Native American characters speak.29
The quandary of multiple in-between-nesses in Glancy’s texts is
reflected also in the fact that the author is considered a controversial
representative of Native America; in discussions of her tribal status,
the vexatious question of ethnic authenticity is often raised. Of course,
this is largely a community issue for which there is no written docu-
mentation, but apparently, Glancy has only very slowly gained recog-
nition by the Cherokee tribe.30 In my view, this controversy is evi-
dence that Glancy herself constantly swerves between Anglo and In-
dian loyalties (expressed also in Claiming Breath), and that, like her
fictional characters, the author herself is located in an ethnic “danger
zone” (a term coined by Rüdiger Kunow).31
While claiming ethnic authenticity might certainly be a political
necessity for the disenfranchised in specific contexts, ‘the authentic’,
from my perspective, can only work as an instance of strategic essen-
tialism: as a provisional, transient claim on political grounds. Thus, I
consider Glancy’s work not as representing Native America or the
Cherokee nation. Following Gerald Vizenor’s reflections on the post-
indian,32 I consider Glancy’s narrative voices as performing or even
simulating multiple identities; transiently, her narrators perform Che-
rokee-ness, White-ness, femininity, Christianity, and so on in simul-
taneity. “To simulate is not simply to feign”, Vizenor quotes Jean
29
Arnold Krupat, in “Nationalism, Indigenism, Cosmopolitanism”, argues for
calling the “halfbreed” a Native American rather than merely a “hybrid” per-
son (100), but the painful alienation of many of them from their tribes seems
to necessitate “hybrid” at least as a qualifying adjective.
30
I am grateful to Jeanetta Calhoun-Mish and Helmbrecht Breinig for informa-
tion on Glancy’s standing within Native America.
31
While Kunow’s figuration of the ethnic “comfort zone” versus the “danger
zone” is perhaps too neat a binary conception, his dialectic understanding of
“roots” and “routes” narratives is highly useful for an analysis of fictional
space in so-called “ethnic” literatures.
32
In Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, Gerald Vizenor ar-
gues that any ‘true’ representation of Native America has been rendered im-
possible because of the “manifest manners” with which American Indians
have been depicted by Anglo-American and Western discourses (see Vizenor
2001/1994).
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 185

Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation in Manifest Manners, since

“[s]omeone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the
symptoms” (2001: 1983). Likewise, Glancy’s diary-chronicle Claim-
ing Breath talks about struggling for both her Anglo and Native heri-
tages, emphasizing heritage as a cultural process – not as a given but
as a task, to recall Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx.33 One of Glan-
cy’s voices in “Ethnic Arts: The Cultural Bridge”, a prose poem from
Claiming Breath, for instance, speaks about becoming rather than be-
ing American, summoning the historical migration of Native Ameri-
cans:

Now Re: The ethnic land bridge

like the Bering Strait my ancestors migrated over
some 15,000 years ago, following the mammoth.
I would not want to raise the Strait
& go back to my Oriental origins, if that’s where we
came from.
But forward into America.
I have a part of it now
& it’s worth the struggle it took to get it. (64; my italics)

At first glance, Glancy refers to Native American history in this poem,

yet two lines before the last she evokes the ideology of America as the
‘promised land’, a notion predominantly associated with European co-
lonization and immigration to the New World: “forward into Ameri-
ca”. However, though this poetic moment of transdifference, in which
migration is doubly coded as Native and white, leads the lyrical I to
conceive of both ethnic heritages as legacies that have to be struggled
for and over, this struggle is not presented as ongoing; by saying she
“has a part of it now” and using the simple past (“it took to get it”),
the poetic voice brings transdifferential tension to a halt, as if an
American identity were something one could “get”.
In contrast, the poem “Ethnic Arts” addresses conflicting ethnic
identities as mobile, dynamic, and groundless; the lyrical I talks about
“what it’s like to think as a Native American” while admitting that she
stands “[b]etween 2 cultures” (59), the most prominent theme in

33
The autobiographical dimension of this struggle is apparent in this context; in
an essay Glancy entitled “Give Me Land Lots of Land”, she explains that “[i]t
was as difficult [to write about the white part of her heritage] as writing about
the Indian.” (1999b: 114)
186 Roads of Her Own

Glancy’s writing. She describes how she builds her own home-space
from nothing but “a blind spot where the floor didn’t meet”:

I pulled up some mud, put it on a turtle’s

back, as the creation myth says. It grew into
land. A solid place to stay, yet capable of
movement. The dream of it traveling. (59)

Land is no longer territorially fixed in this vision and thus does not
provide stable roots, but merely “a place to stay” that should be “ca-
pable of movement”. While the creation of such a place gives the lyri-
cal I the feeling of solidity, this place must be able to shift between the
“2parts” (59) of herself and her surroundings; thus, home itself be-
comes a bridge.34 For Glancy, it is art that creates this “land between
2places […]. Art is the link between them.” (60) Thus, the ethnic land
bridge is both the artist’s way of communicating cultures and the
physical bridge (i.e., the Bering Strait) that has made migration,
movement between (and thus within) cultures, possible. Art itself is
conceived as a way of traveling between time – “the was & will” –
and space “the line moving through the medicine of stars, planets”
(64).
Yet “Ethnic Arts” is not only celebratory of ethnic hybridity as
a cultural bridge. In the last three stanzas, the bridge is also seen as
signifying separation, and as something that the poetic voice did not
choose for herself to embody (cf. 65). This darker side of being in the
middle ground – the concomitant tension and alienation – resonates
throughout the book, especially when the voices are not traveling. In-
terestingly, being on the road equals a being-in-place for the charac-
ters and voices in both Claiming Breath and The Voice That Was in
Travel, while stopping confronts them with their socio-cultural out-of-
place-ness; “I hold the crossed trails of white settlers & Indians, en-
dure two heritages, & in these trips, the healing of our tribes” (“Mi-
gration to Summer Camp”, 1992: 42; my italics).
In Claiming Breath, narrated in unconventional mixtures of
poetry and prose, the lyrical I traverses a distinct area of the United
States – the prairie flatlands of the Midwest and the rolling hills to-

34
As a metaphor, the bridge has been used mainly by Chicana critics and writ-
ers; cf. Moraga and Anzaldúa’s edited collection This Bridge Called My Back.
Writings by Radical Women of Color (1983).
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 187

ward the East. Out of economic necessity, she is driving week after
week, sleeping in motels, working in isolation (cf. “February \ The
Iron Cranberry”, 1992: 26-31), a stranger everywhere she goes. In a
manner similar to Anne Roiphe’s protagonist, the narrative and poeti-
cal voices in the book reflect on the land around her as well as on her
contentious identities on the road: as an Anglo-Cherokee, a divorced
woman, a working mother, and a daughter in mourning (her mother
dies of cancer during this year; cf. “Against Dark Clouds”, 1992: 38).
Her cultural, social, and emotional struggles connect the fragmented
text and accompany the narrator, like the truck drivers on the lonely
highways in “Ontology & the Trucker \ or, The Poem Is the Road”
(1992: 11).

Moveable (W)holes

On the very first page of the book, the text in the center of the page is
shaped like a capital I; it splits the page and functions as both pro-
grammatic announcement and metafictional commentary (s. p. 188).
In Glancy’s conception, “some sort of a whole” can be created
only through an experimental literary aesthetics which must account
for its artificiality and the fact that reality (“the sky with its stars”) re-
sembles what one could call, appropriating a Deleuzo-Guattarian me-
taphor, “holey”-ness (1987/1980: 414) rather than a wholeness which
writing, via mimesis, could somehow grasp. Still, artistic practice is
privileged by Glancy as offering the means to experiment with semiot-
ic expression, to establish an experimental, fleeting “sort of whole”. In
accordance with this opening proclamation, the book defies traditional
Western genre expectations and boundaries by mixing and intermin-
gling poetry and prose, journal writing and storytelling, and Native
American and Anglo-Christian voices. Fragments dominate, reflecting
Glancy’s credo that if style is a vehicle carrying fragmented history,
“the vehicle should reflect its cargo” (1999b: 118).35 She proclaims a

35
Glancy’s stylistic innovation has been commented upon repeatedly: see Abner
(1995: 245) and Elias’ essay on Glancy’s “Coyote Aesthetics”: “a narrative
technique of fragmentation that both recuperates a living oral literary tradition
based in non-European tropes and serves a specifically Native American post-
colonial agenda” (1999: 192).
188 Roads of Her Own

feeling of wholeness only provisionally and fleetingly throughout the

texts under consideration.

I often write about

being in the middle
ground between
two cultures, not
fully a part of ei-
ther. I write with a
split voice, often
ex p er i m e nt i ng
with language un-
til the parts equal
some sort of a
whole. I would say
a pencil is a buffa-
lo migration under
the sky with its
stars turning like a
jar-lid poked with
holes. […] (1992:
xiii; my italics)

It is no coincidence that figurations of wholes and holes appear to-

gether repeatedly, especially in Claiming Breath. When the voice in
“Ethnic Arts: The Cultural Bridge” talks about art and writing as
communication between cultures, she says she deals “with ghosts […]
REAL ghosts” (61), and it is unclear whether she refers to the spiritual
world or the cultural condition of people of mixed descent:

The invisible ones struggling to become visible.

To themselves as much as others.
The tension between.
Until the holes be made whole.
& until the wholes be made hole
to see the other world. (61)

Juxtaposing these wholes and holes, she describes “[t]he dependency

of the incomplete & complete. The fluidity of states” (ibid.) – in other
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 189

words, the transience of identification. “January 5 \ Wrioting” is a

short diary sketch that also juxtaposes the whole and the fragment –
“the wholeness of writing that emerges from the fragments” (1992: 9).
In a fourth example (the prose piece “October \ From the Back Screen
of the Country”), the open (i.e. the hole) and the closed, as two ways
of experiencing the physical space of the land, interpenetrate each oth-
er; the narration is spurred by the narrator’s reaction to her mother’s
voice, advising her not to leave the yard, which is “to break thru the
prairie into pockets of the world around me” (ibid. 66).
The open prairie and the (closed) pocket are rendered indistin-
guishable when she says how she feels “enclosed” “on the flat space
of prairie” (66), which she shortly after describes as “[i]solated. Emp-
ty” and yet “[n]arrow” (67). She thinks “of writing from the prairie as
being in a colander. As I am aligned with the holes, I see the different
views thru minuscule openings. Never the whole scene.” (67) So
while in some moments she constructs a wholeness out there, “the
fullness of this land” (68), she can never arrive at the “whole scene”,
being aware of her entrapments and her fragmentariness. This juxta-
position is symptomatic of the transdifferential cultural locations of
her characters and poetic voices that swerve between multiple, con-
flicting identities without ever really feeling at home and without be-
ing able to dissolve concomitant identitarian paradoxes and contradic-
tions. Thus, the shifting between wholes and holes is yet another de-
territorializing movement, repeated continually in Claiming Breath –
the necessary, repetitive journey of the nomad without center or end
point, a becoming (w)hole: “to become hole [sic] is to deterritorialize
oneself following distinct but entangled lines” (Deleuze/Guattari
1987/1980: 32).
In a similar fashion, Indian-ness in Glancy’s writings is not just
a socio-cultural reality characterized by distinct historical relations to
space – such as an intense connection to the land, migratory move-
ments past and present,36 and territorial enclosure in the reservation

36
These movements span the time from the Bering Strait migration and the
forced migrations to “Indian Territory” of the 19th century, but also include
the post-World-War-II urban dispersal that was actively solicited by the Bu-
reau of Indian Affairs in the context of the melting pot ideology of ‘white-
washing’ Native Americans; Glancy’s own father was one of these urbanized
Natives who tried to ignore their heritage and did not pass it on to their chil-
dren (cf. Thompson).
190 Roads of Her Own

system – but also a “fugitive pose”, to use Gerald Vizenor’s phrase; a

transient ethnic positioning.37 This transient conception of ethnic iden-
tity is presented in metaphors and narrations of travel throughout
Claiming Breath as well as in The Voice That Was in Travel, although
many of the stories in the latter collection are about entrapment, the
absence of mobility or ‘a space of one’s own’ (e.g. “In the Burrito”,
“The Great House”, “She”, and “A Woman Who Sewed for Me a
Dress That Sleeves Didn’t Fit”).
At the end of the 20-page novella that concludes The Voice That
Was in Travel, “America’s First Parade”, Indian Territory is explained
to mean “[s]urvival. Or struggle for survival. Or retrieval. Or reckon-
ing with what had passed. It had a movable meaning, depending
where you were in the parade” (116); in the prose poem “December 1
/ Fragments / Shards” (1992: 86-7), the narrative voice relates her be-
coming-Indian after her divorce: “I picked up my Indian heritage &
began a journey toward any-yun-wiyu, or translated from the Chero-
kee, ‘real people’. […] I am on the journey to the any-yun-wiyu.” (86)
This journey is interspersed with fragments of her non-Indian identity
and her becoming a divorced woman. From “fragments \ shards”, she
“had to find a homestead within [her]self, or invent one” (86), and
does so by claiming the land via travel: “I found acceptance of myself
\ the strength to travel prairie roads & talk about poetry in towns
where farmers in the cafés stare.” (87)
Glancy’s characters’ and poetic voices’ claim to space, ex-
pressed frequently by way of para-nomadic travel, bears an ironic his-
torical twist. The migrations and travels narrated in The Voice That
Was in Travel and Claiming Breath invoke not only the traditional tri-
bal (semi-nomadic) migrations from summer to winter camp and back,
but also the collective historical trauma of Glancy’s Cherokee ances-
tors, the Trail of Tears of 1838/39, the genocidal massacre for which
the Anglo side of her ancestry holds responsibility.38 Thus, her inter-
ethnic consciousness constructs the textual journeys in the two books
– whether they are undertaken for business or vacation, in Oklahoma,

37
Cf. Vizenor’s Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Pres-
ence (1998).
38
The 900-mile journey that more than 11,000 Cherokee were forced to under-
take in the winter of 1838/39 is the basis of Glancy’s historical novel Pushing
the Bear, another ‘road novel’ told through a plurality of first-person voices.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 191

Arkansas, Australia, or Europe – as always filled with ghosts, sha-

dows, memories of the traumatic tribal migration, with “old visions
my Indian ancestors left along the road” (“Ontology & the Trucker”,
1992: 14). The road, therefore, is also the site where heritage as be-
longing and the experience of “not belonging” clash: “Tribal means
belonging, but not belonging to civilization. This is the tension that re-
sults.” (“December 29”, 1992: 7)

Cafés, Cars

In a manner similar to the ‘I’ in the “December 28” poem from Claim-
ing Breath (6), the protagonist in “America’s First Parade” (1999a:
89-116), whose title ironically refers to the Trail of Tears, still feels
the trail of her Cherokee ancestors within herself as “a small, hard part
of her that had to keep moving because it relieved her brokenness, her
separateness” (109). Told in 21 episodes, the story begins in the car of
Cherokee café owner Janet, who has just bought an old truck from
Yellow Bud, a local small-scale used cars dealer in Tahlequah, capital
of the Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma. Her son is with her:

[Janet] pulled away from the stoplight in the dust of the boys next to
her. She slowed at the next corner, but not enough. She made the turn
a little fast. He opened the door. “I’m getting out, Mom, if you don’t
slow down.” She slowed and the truck jumped. “What’s the matter?”
“You got to shift.” “Again?” “You got to shift all the time, Mom. Why
didn’t you take me with you to look at cars? Here – look. Hold the
brake down. Put your foot on the clutch.” He shifted to show her. […]
A car behind them honked. “Why didn’t you get an automatic?” “I
want to feel the power in my hands.” (90; my italics)

Driving is a means for the protagonist to “feel the power in [her]

hands”, to relocate herself within her movement through space, even if
driving a car without automatic transmission is an awkward expe-
rience (and thus is dissociated from revving the car’s engine as a ges-
ture of affirming power or leadership on the road). In the first part of
the novella, the protagonist develops a special relation to her truck,
which connects her to the spiritual world. In the context of Native
American negotiations of dominant American cultural practices,
Helmbrecht Breinig has argued that the pickup truck is one example
of the genuine appropriation of an “alien” (“fremden”, tr. AG) cultural
192 Roads of Her Own

artefact, including a shift of function of this artifact rather than a sim-

ple borrowing (2005: 375). This appropriation is eminent in Glancy’s
story, in which the truck is multiply coded as a vehicle of Native
American spirituality on the one hand and of female empowerment on
the other.
When she cannot get it started, the spirits from “the ones who
walked the trail” (90) come, wearing masks on the back of their heads,
and try to help her get the engine going again. Although she cannot
see them in this particular situation, she starts telling the car a story –
“and because of the woman’s tinkering, there was an alignment be-
tween the spirit realm and the engine. The truck snorted on the road.”
(92-3)39 The combustive effect gives Janet confidence in her compe-
tence to handle cars (of which her son remains thoroughly doubtful):
“‘WUUUUUUH!’ She let out a war cry and drove down the road.
Yes, she thought, women were the warriors of the world” (93). While
the story, like “In the Burrito” (1999a: 41-2), depicts both Janet’s fa-
ther and her ex-husband as absent travelers whose “interest had moved
on” (98) and Janet as the one who is left behind, it devises a mobility
that is not at odds with familial responsibility and commitment. Ja-
net’s mobility is not that of a cross-country traveler, but one that func-
tions within her own ‘territory’. Moving around her hometown in her
truck helps the protagonist to build her confidence as an independent
divorced woman.
That Janet’s truck is also a “spirit truck” (99) out of a past reali-
ty that sends her smoke signals from the engine and connects her to
her ancestors is crucial in this context; the past becomes the present
via the connecting space of the automobile that picks the spirits up and

39
Two traditions contextualize these recurrent fantastic elements in Glancy’s
writings. First, these elements are often reflective of a worldview that does not
separate past, present, and future (thus ancestral ghosts are part of reality
rather than imaginary). Second, the fantastic has a long history in women’s
writing as a strategy of opposing “consensus reality”, thus constituting a self-
empowering moment in women’s literature; cf. Carpenter and Kolmar, eds.,
Haunting the House of Fiction, and Anne Koenen’s Visions of Doom, in
which she asserts that “[f]antasy as a mode, the discourse of the repressed, ar-
ticulates and illuminates the ‘underside’ of a culture, challenging and correct-
ing hegemonic constructions of gender and gender-relations” (312). In view of
the quest narratives discussed in chapter three, Koenen’s conclusive argument
that female quests are only possible in the fantastic mode (cf. 313-4) is per-
haps overstating the case.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 193

takes them into the next world (100).40 Even when her son eventually
convinces her to sell the truck (102), Janet retains this spiritual rela-
tion and immediately transforms her newly bought automatic into
another “spirit truck” (cf. 103). When she is in Yellow Bud’s garage
to have her first vehicle repaired, she

offered her truck some tobacco. She offered a prayer. She had the
power of the spirits. She had the visions of her ancestors. She had a
truck. She’d received part ownership of Redland’s Cafe when she di-
vorced, though she felt it all should be hers because her father had
started the cafe. But her father had been a vacant booth behind her.
(94)

Thus, her truck functions as a means of empowerment in more than

one way; not only does it create a bond between Janet, the spirit
world, and the traumatic migration of her ancestors (the old ‘road’ of
the Trail of Tears), it also literally connects her to the concrete(-ness)
of the road on which she is traveling. The vehicle and the road are
even imagined to constitute a dialogic relation – with the road as “a
tongue” (110) actively talking to her truck and the spirits it inhabits.
The road-space is clearly an active, communicative force rather than a
passive background or a mere setting for the story; the dichotomy be-
tween static, feminized space traversed by a dynamic, masculinized
machine is dismantled.
Via physical and dialogical relations, the vehicle extends the
main character’s mobility and thus her territory, both in a geographi-
cal sense and in terms of agency.41 “Once her life had been the size of
the hole in the top of the glass milk bottles they used to have in the
cafe” (95), the narrator recounts; especially after her divorce, Janet
feels trapped in the café, a “place [that] seemed suddenly smaller”
(98). She realizes that she needs to expand in space in order to feel
alive again:

40
In this context, it is important to know that non-linearity is one in a plurality
of elements characteristic to Native American conceptions of time; the past,
the present, and the future are inseparable entities in this model.
41
The spatial aspect of agency is also reflected in the title of Glancy’s essay
“Give Me Land Lots of Land”, in which the importance of “[c]reating new
ground after the old was covered” (114) is emphasized.
194 Roads of Her Own

Well, she had to have space.

Space.
But it was all right here in Tahlequah. (97)

This vital extension takes place through a local intertwining of spatial

and temporal factors rather than by large-scale travel: in the story, it
requires the entwined reconsideration of personal, tribal, and Ameri-
can histories, which is also brought about by the truck via its connec-
tion to the spirit world, the world of the dead. Important in this respect
is that the connection to the ancestral spirits emerges in movement;
only on the road does she meet the spirits in their trucks (e.g. 96, 99),
wearing masks on the back of their heads. The masks constitute a
doubly-coded element in the text’s transcultural negotiations as they
symbolize that there is no turning away from history for the Native
American protagonist – the spirits always see her – on the one hand,
and for white America on the other, as non-Native readers associate
masks with parades: in this way, the masks function as a reminder of
America’s “first parade”, “[t]he trail of the ancestors no one wanted to
talk about”, which needs to be acknowledged lest the country be
“caught up in its mask of history” (96). Thus, Janet feels the need to
look back, like the masks, “so nothing could take her from behind”
(96) and in order to be able to move on (cf. also 115); “[t]he only
thing she didn’t want was to stand still” (107).
For this reason, the protagonist decides to look for her grand-
mother’s place where she often stayed as a child and listened to sto-
ries.42 By now, the energetic tone of the novella has been re-tuned to
correspond to the slow motion of situational recollections. Driving
there, the main character “was in a parade of her memories. That was
what Indian Territory meant sometimes. It was a looking back.” (108)
Janet’s looking back triggers off a number of emotional tensions and
makes her question whether history is meaningful, more than “a small,

42
Once again, a strong autobiographical element enters the story at the point
when Janet’s family history is told: “Her grandma had spoke [sic] a combina-
tion of Creek and Cherokee and English. Her family had intermarried. She in-
herited mixed and erased bounderies [sic], merging into one another. Her fam-
ily wasn’t on the Cherokee rolls, but bypassed and sidestepped the toll takers.”
(“America’s First Parade”, Glancy 1999a: 109) Glancy herself also does not
have an “established” Cherokee family; also, her Cherokee grandmother
seems to have given her comfort when she felt out of place in non-Indian so-
ciety; cf. Sonneborn (1998: 55), in spite of ‘growing up white’.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 195

hard part of her” (109), but then the protagonist concludes that it is not
historical destination or teleology that matters, but change and move-
ment for their own sake: “[s]ometimes she didn’t care where she was
going as long as she was going” (ibid.).
By and by, Janet comes to the conclusion that she “felt a place
within her as long as she was on the move” (116), as long as she is re-
figuring the space around her as a moving parade: “When she looked
with parading eyes, even failure and setbacks were the fuel for more
migrations, more parades across time.” (113) The main character is
said to have these eyes from her father (ibid.), who the narrator, earlier
in the story, refers to as a “parade of absences through her birthdays”
(95). Through these eyes, personal and U.S. cultural history appear as
“a parade of boyfriends” and “a parade of ships” (113); outer space
becomes a parade, too: “There was the parade of the earth across the
sky. Of planets around the sun” (ibid.). But the dark side of her fa-
ther’s eyes, Janet realizes, is that these eyes “saw no one but himself”
(115), and so, with conscious effort, she eventually casts aside her
own self-centeredness (116).
Clearly, it is the processional, performative aspect of traditional
(tribal) parades that Janet appropriates for herself as a source of em-
powerment. A second appropriation is that of the male gaze – the eyes
of her father (113). Since Janet realizes their self-indulgence, adopting
the male gaze is empowering only if done in a self-reflexive, perfor-
mative manner.
Thus in “America’s First Parade”, the protagonist is reassured,
eventually, of her agency as a contemporary Native American woman,
and her historical legacy of trauma is transformed by the re-writing of
movement as empowering.43 This process of de-victimization also ap-
plies to the protagonist’s personal history that she reconsiders by con-
stant self-deterritorialization, in both a physical and psychological
sense. The narration of her circular, repetitive movements through
space does not deny the existence of spatial centers: for instance, Janet
43
In this context, one of the masked spirits in the story re-constructs history as a
way out of the passivity of “dominance-induced victimhood” (Abner 1995:
246), re-signifying the traumatic meaning of “America’s first parade” by spe-
culating that “[m]aybe America’s first parade was a trail of spirits from the
sky to the earth. Maybe we came to look things over. To see if we could […]
[g]et the people going again.” (92; cf. also Abner’s review of Claiming
Breath, 1995: 246)
196 Roads of Her Own

has to return repeatedly to the café, her source of income. Yet her lo-
cational practice emphasizes circles rather than centers, the road rather
than the café, thus countering centricity by circularity.

Locution and Location

The title of The Voice That Was in Travel already hints at how loca-
tional practice always involves locutional practice as well. Evoking
the title of her second short story collection, Firesticks, Glancy writes
in the preface to The Voice That Was in Travel that she

wanted to reflect the broken context of native life. A heritage nearly

erased in places. Firesticks, the words that travel between genres, be-
tween places like headlights on a dark road, are the unifying force. In
this collection, the light from the firesticks comes from the frictions
between silence and voicings. The jaunty excursions into variable
perspectives. The erosion of actual experience into moving emblems
of realizations. (vii)

The view that language constructs rather than reflects social and cul-
tural realities is of course deeply embedded both in Western postmo-
dernist philosophy as well as in the Native American part of Glancy’s
heritage. The belief “that words have the power to actuate” (Abner
1995: 245) is also common in the works of contemporary Native
American authors such as Leslie Silko, N. Scott Momaday, Linda Ho-
gan, and Gerald Vizenor. Consequently, Glancy’s narrators adopt the
view that agency comes through words, and accordingly, it is words
that are the medium of their spatial politics, “[c]reating new ground
after the old was covered” (1999b: 114). In “December 26” from
Claiming Breath, the poetic voice states that “[y]ou speak the path on
which you walk. Your words make the trail.” (1992: 4) Words con-
struct the land and routes through it: “I also have this tall grass prairie,
his prayer-ee for my territory & always in travel, in the act of migra-
tion, is the POEM.” (“February \ The Iron Cranberry”, 1992: 28) The
function of poetry, in turn, is again linked to movement: “Poetry is
road maintenance for a fragmented world which seeks to be kept to-
gether” (ibid.), a belief that echoes Claiming Breath’s opening proc-
lamation that literary experimentation can join disparate linguistic
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 197

elements into a transient wholeness which is created out of the world’s

“holey-ness”.
The narrative voice in “December 26” also makes clear that her
words oppose the hegemonic spatial practice of fences and borders by
calling them “non-linear non-boundaried non-fenced open-prairied
words” (ibid. 4). Yet counter-hegemonic locutional practice in Glan-
cy’s writings also works against the Western politics of privileging the
written word over the spoken.44 This can be considered a transdiffe-
rential moment in Glancy, and indeed in all Native American writing:
while she says that written words are not part of her (Cherokee) inhe-
ritance (“January 13”, 1992: 19), it is writing that she operates with in
her books and that makes her accessible to a larger audience. Howev-
er, the split between the written and the spoken word itself can be con-
sidered alien to Native American writing. As Amy Elias argues, any
deconstruction of the speech/writing opposition within a Native Amer-
ican context should rather be seen as “a statement of how the Native
alternative text (the natural world and Native traditions) stands behind
and sustains the phenomenal text (the printed word)” (1999: 194-5).
Hence, world and text are neither separate nor a matter of mimetic re-
lation. Still, the way words are used in Glancy’s writing – in torn syn-
tax, connected by ampersands, interspersed with Cherokee letters (e.g.
in “America’s First Parade”), but especially in misspelled versions
(e.g. the “bounderies” in the quote in footnote 172) and nonsense ana-
grams or vocabulary – constitutes a conscious political gesture. Glan-
cy shares her politics of linguistic intervention with Gerald Vizenor,
as both express and address, metafictionally, transdifferential tensions
in Native American writing (cf. Breinig’s 2005 analysis of Vizenor in
this context, 383-4).
In “January 16 \ Tomatos” (1992: 21), tomatoes turn into “a
tribe” of “tamoots”, “matoots”, “ototams”, “matotos”, and “Red
skinned \ ottomas”; here, the linguistic order, created by binary differ-

44
Of course, Jacques Derrida’s argument in “Plato’s Pharmacy” from Of
Grammatology runs to the contrary – i.e. that speech has always been privi-
leged over writing in Western philosophy. In the Native American cultural
context, however, one has to acknowledge the violence with which the Amer-
ican government has tried to dismantle oral traditions by trying to erase tribal
languages (and thus, oral knowledge) via the boarding school system; Western
ethnographical practice, too, has participated in this erasure by translating oral
stories into written English.
198 Roads of Her Own

ences and the split between signifier and signified, is negated, since all
the letter arrangements above refer to “tomato”. Other major instances
of locutional intervention frequently occur when the narrator speaks
about (illiterate) ancestors, oral stories, and tribal traditions, thereby
evoking all the hegemonic language policies that were used to destroy
Native American tribal cultures, aiming at the dispersal of American
Indians all over the country so that “Indian Territory” would be shat-
tered from within.45 In the beginning of “Badlands” from The Voice
That Was in Travel, for example, one of the main characters, a rhetor-
ics teacher in South Dakota, consciously evokes the language policies
that have contributed to the image of the dumb, illiterate Indian, an-
nouncing to her class that

we’re going to feel like we can’t do anything. Get used to it. It’s the
way we’ll always feel against them. We can’t put a sentence together.
We can’t hold a straight thought. We just talk in clumps. (1999a: 9)46

A statement that evokes mimicry as a subversive tactics of articula-

tion, the teacher draws on the fact that white language policies have
always had a decisive component of hegemonic colonial/territorial
politics; likewise, Glancy’s writings link the locational and the locu-
tional as a way to turn against this kind of territoriality. Hers is a de-
fiant language, a language that is neither tied to the territoriality of the
nation state nor to straight-forward categories of race and ethnicity. It
is, in Amy Elias’ words, a “Coyote Aesthetics” that cannot be pinned
down – an aesthetics of escape that “particularly attack[s] colonial his-
tory” (1999: 195): “Coyote lives in alternate dimensions that offer al-
ternative models of space and time to western paradigms; perhaps for
Native American women writers, this coyote space is the space in
which the subaltern may speak.” (ibid.)

45
Cf. also what Deleuze and Guattari call “minor languages” in A Thousand
Plateaus: “Minor languages are characterized not by overload and poverty in
relation to a standard or major language, but by a sobriety and variation that
are like a minor treatment of the standard language […]. It is a question not of
reterritorializing oneself on a dialect or a patois but of deterritorializing the
major language.” (1987/1980: 104)
46
By telling her students that they are “[m]en of war” and “[w]omen warriors”
whose “voice will be in travel” (1999a: 9), the teacher eventually manages to
take a class of meek Native American high-school students to a debating con-
test in the Badlands, teaching them a compelling lesson in self-esteem.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 199

Yet Glancy does not always write within such a coyote aesthet-
ics and often reverts to rather traditional western forms of narration;
some of her diary entries and stories, especially those which do not
immediately refer to Native American contexts, use conventional writ-
ing styles and a highly linear prose form (such as “December 23 \ Alia
Bowman”, 1992: 1; “December 27 \ Delay”, ibid. 5; “In the Burrito”,
1999a: 41-2). The subversive gesture of playing and experimenting
with western literary, semiotic, and orthographic conventions a coyote
aesthetics would emphasize is thus frequently broken by moments of
locutional, or perhaps rather stylistic, transdifference. The headers to
her diary entries in Claiming Breath are a case in point, as Glancy fre-
quently juxtaposes a conventional, linear succession of dates to mark
the episodes with poetic titles evoking associations with Native Amer-
ican existence (such as “Migration to Summer Camp” or “Fragments \
Shards”). A consequence of what Glancy calls her “split” (rather than
hybrid) voice, the copresence of dominant and subaltern literary strat-
egies also characterize her texts aesthetically.

Multiple Differences: Gender

Apart from the (trans)differences that occur along the shattered lines
of Glancy’s dispersed ethnicities, however, her travel narrations are
also marked by their acute awareness of the traditionally masculine
space the road presents. This is why a plurality of intersecting differ-
ences collides on Glancy’s roads, confronting the narrative and poetic
voices with multiple Otherness-es. In “SHEdonism” (1992: 51), for
example, the generational aspect is added to ethnic and gender differ-
ences; Glancy’s voice reflects on her generation’s homebound moth-
ers in contrast to their fathers and husbands, the absent centers of the
family:

While he [her father] was at work and we were at school, my fretful,

punctual mother waxed floors and baked cookies. She endured her
isolation with complaint if I remember correctly. For most of those
years she didn’t have a car and even after she did and we were grown,
she still stayed at home and felt uncomfortable with the freedom to be
her own person. (ibid.)
200 Roads of Her Own

The reader learns of an absent, drunk husband succeeding the father,

but also that “[b]eing a minority also enlarged my difficulties. Maybe
it’s the reason I stayed married so long. I didn’t know what else to
do.” (ibid. 52)47 The combined difficulties of the ‘doubly Other’ are
rendered even more explicit a few lines later: “my structure has al-
ways been one of conflict and ambivalence. Aren’t all of us made of
paradox and diversity, anger, hurt, hope, guilt, endurance? Aren’t we
all fragments of opposition, especially women?” (ibid.) Marked by
transdifferential tension as a consequence of conflicting affiliations,
these two passages demonstrate how Glancy’s texts are frequently
broken by universalizing gestures that are then again disrupted by a
re-introduction of categorical specificity: “[b]eing a minority” –
“[a]ren’t we all” – “especially women?” Arguably, the texts’ critical
edge is thus softened; by stating that fragmentation concerns not just
ethnic minorities or women, but in fact everybody, “SHEdonism” ex-
presses a general view of life as an ongoing process of fragmentation
and reconnection, of constant becoming, yet at the same time obscures
how people marked by plural cultural differences are specifically af-
fected by such processes.48 This, however, does not preclude the
emancipatory creative force in Glancy’s text that tries to grapple with
transdifference as a social and psychological phenomenon of fragmen-
tation, pluri-affiliation, the copresence of multiple differences, and the
deviance from WASP and patriarchal norms. By means of wayward
mobility and by what she calls “SHEdonism”, for instance, her charac-
ter eventually recovers “the enjoyment of oneself as a woman” (1992:
52) who has taught herself independence.
For the main character in another short story of the same collec-
tion, “Road” (ibid. 21-8), life on the move stands for an assertion of
independence that also erodes traditional concepts of femininity. Car-

47
Considering the fact that Glancy learned of her Cherokee heritage only as an
adult, this quote might sound preposterous; yet it can also be read as indicative
of the difficulty to ‘author’ one’s crisis of ethnic identity, a major concern of
Glancy’s writing. Self-fashioning might even be part and parcel of textual
self-representation in the context of such moments of crisis.
48
In this context, Glenn Rochon’s reading of Glancy’s poem “Well You Push
Your Mind along the Road” addresses Hegel’s dialectic of Be-
ing/Nothing/Becoming, arguing that Glancy’s “you” in the poem embodies
thesis/antithesis/synthesis all at once: “a new self will be brought into exis-
tence and reckoned with, again and again.” (2002: 60)
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 201

leen, a divorced grandmother, constantly moves in a circle from Okla-

homa, where she and her “boyfriend” (ibid. 22) live, to her adult
daughters in Missouri and Kansas. Even when at rest in her daughters’
homes for brief amounts of time, she cannot settle down mentally,
watching broadcasts on far-away places like Africa and Australia on
TV. In one of these, she sees a young elephant unable to stretch his
legs in order to walk; on his knees, he cannot even reach his mother in
order to be nursed. The story deeply affects Carleen, reminding her of
the suffocating immobility she experienced as a married woman and
young mother. The painfulness of these stories of immobility goes
beyond the personal, however. It is heightened by Carleen witnessing
how the same thing happens to her daughters, one of them jobless, the
second at home with a sick child, living “constrained in a small box of
a life” (ibid. 21). Starting with Lot’s daughters in the book of Genesis,
Carleen observes, generations of women have been arrested in patriar-
chal homes, with no right to a room of their own, to move freely, or to
take control of their lives. Drawing a parallel between the elephants’
strong sense of relationship and their loyalty with their herd on the one
hand and her own children on the other, Carleen asks: “Didn’t the ele-
phant know their own bones and when they found them they had a
ceremony? She thought about her daughter who had a daughter who’d
have a daughter who’d have. Weren’t they bound together?” (ibid. 26)
The personal is political here, extending first beyond Carleen’s person
to her foremothers in the past and the generations of daughters to
come in the future, and second to all women who feel the suffocating
narrowness of a femininity strictly tied to immobility. The protagonist
herself begins to question her very femininity due to her driving abili-
ties, asking herself whether she was

becoming a man as she aged? She could keep up with them on the
highway. She could drive with them after dark and keep going, rise
early, move on. She could be part of the momentum of migration over
the land. Not some wiggler over the road. (1999a: 27)

Carleen wonders that, as a woman on the road, she is so much like a

man in her behavior, not fulfilling the stereotype of the woman driver
as a “wiggler” (a Southern colloquial word for ‘earthworm’). The pa-
ragraph is continued, however, by probing her question further. Why
does she make this association, Carleen asks herself,
202 Roads of Her Own

why did she define that independent part of herself as a man? Her
ability to drive. Her willfulness. Her self-centeredness. It was what
she’d seen in men. She wasn’t going to move over and make room for
someone. (ibid. 28)

Swerving between masculine and feminine identifications, Carleen

decides that she would try to “see her anger and her strength as part of
her womanliness” (ibid.), which she associates with her caring, her
gentleness, and her religiosity. Although these attributes are clearly in-
formed by rather traditional gendered qualities, the main character is
consciously trying to transgress these dichotomous cultural construc-
tions of gender by summoning and communicating with what she
thinks are her ‘masculine’ qualities: “it was a man’s voice that
emerged from her now as she traveled. She was her own friend.
Women were women for a while, then the man in them took the
wheel” (ibid. 28). At this point the protagonist’s transgression sudden-
ly appears limited rather than radical, as the story reveals how much
Carleen relies, after all, on conventional attributions of gender roles: it
is still “the man” who is considered to be driving, even if he is now
part of the woman. Simultaneously, then, Carleen’s character is break-
ing up gendered expectations by her travels – which would be consi-
dered ‘unwomanly’ according to the quotations above – yet re-
affirming these expectations by writing automobility outside of her
identification as a woman. What she physically deterritorializes in
movement, in the refusal to settle down with her boyfriend, thus is
metaphorically speaking reterritorialized in her figural narration – or-
dered again according to dominant gendered spatialities. This hege-
monic reterritorialization can be read as both a strategy to de-
radicalize Carleen’s transgression and a moment of gendered transdif-
ference, a moment when the man/woman binary oscillates without
dissolving the opposition between the two. In any case, it stands in
stark contrast to Claiming Breath’s “SHEdonism”, in which indepen-
dence is written onto femininity, not out of it.
Finally, “Road” ends with the protagonist finding solace only in
the metaphysical world, imagining God as a “God of the Road” who
helps the generations of her homebound female relatives to “pull
through” like Carleen herself (ibid. 29), to endure and survive. This
“God of the Road” gives her strength, and the narrator attaches sa-
credness and a heavenly dimension to Carleen’s travels: “Carleen felt
as if she’d turned into the universe and was crisscrossing the stars.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 203

Yes, if there was one road left, she’d take it herself.” (ibid.) Carleen is
depicted as strong and mobile in this conclusion to the story, although
it remains questionable whether her turn to religion will work towards
active emancipation or towards a submissive, painful form of endur-
ance.
Like “Road”, the prose piece “Ontology and the Trucker \ or,
The Poem Is the Road” (1992: 11-6) also emphasizes the protagonist-
narrator’s bonding with the traditionally masculine community of
long-distance truck drivers. In “Ontology”, Glancy’s narrative voice
constructs truckers as her guides and protectors, sheltering her from
the storm (13). She calls the text

a tribute for truckers who like to be followed. They are the ones who
[…] let you know when to slow down & when to go fast. It’s like
finding broken pieces of my father along the road. Part Cherokee, in-
tuitive, he was the surest guide I ever had. (11)

Although truckers do not necessarily have to be male, linking them to

her father is clearly a sign that she posits them as masculine. That the
highways, for her, are “a universe where my car follows the trucks”
(ibid.) unmistakably places these male drivers in the lead. She even
imagines their bonding as a silent love affair: “Our road game is a si-
lent one, as though we were lovers who could not speak in public.”
(ibid. 14)49 The fact that the text also emphasizes the fragility of such
a relation is merely a side-effect of her narration; waving good-bye to
a trucker after the narrator has followed him for hundreds of miles re-
minds her how nothing is permanent and how relationships vanish,
how “everything has to move on” (ibid. 12). Both “Road” and “Ontol-
ogy”, then, are not openly subversive texts, but in conflict with the
hegemonic spatial economy of the road.

49
The romantic connotations of these temporary relationships emphasized in
this simile are also detectable in the detailed descriptions of how the narrator’s
partners are chosen: on the one hand, she selects her company according to a
speed similar to her own (1992: 13); on the other, she feels it is the truckers
who decide whether she is “worthy to travel with them” (ibid. 15).
204 Roads of Her Own

Survivance

In Diane Glancy’s writing, the textual spatial politics of inter-ethnicity

are complicated by the spatial restrictions and limitations structurally
imposed on women in patriarchal societies. Accordingly, in her essay
“Give Me Land Lots of Land”, Glancy’s claim to open space requires
qualification: “give me land lots of land, spoken open. But even open-
ness is sectioned” (1999b: 119). The intercultural conflicts Diane
Glancy’s characters and voices embody are thus further complicated
by the intracultural Otherness of femininity.
Deterritorialization characterizes the spatial strategies of many
of Glancy’s wandering Cherokee ‘cross-bloods’: it is through a recon-
sidered version of the nomadic, through para-nomadism, that we can
understand her characters’ defiance of the binary opposition of central
vs. marginal space. For one, their physical travels are mostly an eco-
nomic necessity, just like their traveling between cultures (which
Glancy calls “transveillances”: “the crossing of cultures. Passages not
necessarily of choice but necessity”; 1999b: 115).50 Furthermore, by
emphasizing ethnic identity as a multiplicity always under construc-
tion, Claiming Breath and The Voice That Was in Travel embrace a
postindian, transient concept of subjectivity, thus working against
‘natural’ essentialisms and authenticities that perpetuate psycho- and
socio-spatial hegemonic regulations along categorical lines of race,
class, or gender. Also, their moving bodies never revolve around sta-
ble centers, but rather always de-center and re-center without ever as-
suming fixed locations in the texts.
Thus, the spatial politics in Glancy’s writing creates ethnicity as
a transient and transdifferent aspect of identity that one cannot hold
onto, but which needs to be performed through spatial practices of
movement. “There’s no permanency here except the highway & toll
gates & road construction”, the speaker says in “Ontology & the
Trucker” in Claiming Breath (1992: 12). In Diane Glancy’s road
work, her character’s claim for space by means of movement through
50
Another way to define transveillance is as textual misrepresentation: texts that
seem “outside” of a culture are taken into that culture and appropriated. Tradi-
tionally, Glancy says, Native American stories have been exported into white
culture – she cites Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” (Vizenor would perhaps
call this an instance of “manifest manners”). But of course it also works vice
versa, e.g. in Glancy’s retelling of Bible stories (cf. Glancy 1999b).
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 205

space turns into a claim for breath, into an act of what Gerald Vizenor
calls “survivance”, thereby combining survival and resistance to cha-
racterize contemporary Native American – postindian – femininity.

5.3. Floating Worlds: Para-Nomadic Dislocation and the Public-

Private Divide in Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World

What do you know, Kerouac? […] I’m the American here. I’m
the American walking here. Fuck Kerouac and his American
road anyway.
- Wittman Ah Sing, in Maxine
Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey

We are a wandering people, due to the nature of our lowly oc-

cupations which take us from place to place, following the
seasons.
- Carlos Bulosan

People of mixed descent as well as immigrants are dislocated not just

within the dominant American culture but also in relation to either the
minority community or to the cultural contexts left behind in the home
country, respectively. Diverging spatialities of class and gender fur-
ther complicate this interstitial spatiality of a multiply colonized sub-
ject, as divergent cultural norms of feminine behavior and/or of social
structuring collide, thereby producing complicated views of America
(see Rachel Lee’s 1999 study, esp. 140-1). On the fictional level, such
collisions frequently result in transdifferential moments of narrative
tension and may explain contradictions, indecisiveness, and inconsis-
tencies in the portrait of a fictional character (as I have argued with re-
spect to Doris Betts’ and Anne Roiphe’s protagonists). As I argue
throughout this book, the telling of stories of mobility and of being on
the road constitutes one way of breaking these ties that bind; even in-
voluntary, para-nomadic movement (largely constituted by being on
the road out of necessity) can be written in a way that movement is
narrativized as empowering.
206 Roads of Her Own

Japanese-American Dislocations and The Floating World

Like Diane Glancy’s road stories, Cynthia Kadohata’s autobiographi-

cally-inspired debut novel The Floating World (1989) is informed by a
historical legacy of displacement and restrained mobility. Three phas-
es of dislocation form the cultural-historical backdrop of the novel, the
first being the actual immigrant experience of first-generation Japa-
nese-Americans (or issei), beginning in the second half of the 19th cen-
tury with main settlement areas on the West Coast. Especially after the
turn of the century, anti-immigration sentiment toward the Japanese
and other Asian populations accounted for semi-institutionalized se-
gregation in education, public facilities, labor (which Lisa Lowe refers
to as Asian American proletarianization, 1996: 103), church, and law.
Territorial and exclusionary laws like the 1913 Alien Land Act, prohi-
biting Japanese-Americans from owning land, had disturbing psycho-
logical effects (Daniels 1988: 143) and insulated the issei generation
against Americanization more than many other contemporary immi-
grant groups (ibid. 164).51
The second – and arguably pivotal – experience of Japanese-
American dislocation followed during World War II, when more than
100,000 West Coast Japanese-Americans were deported to so-called
relocation camps in desert areas of the West, “[g]odforsaken spots in
alien climes where no one had lived before and no one has lived
since” (Daniels 1988: 225). As Cynthia Sau-ling Wong (1993: 125)
and others have argued, the camp experience fundamentally altered
Japanese-American relations to space and mobility. Not only did it se-
verely complicate Japanese immigrants’ relationship to the United
States as a new homeland, it also gravely affected their sense of cul-
tural identity and self-esteem. Asian-American histories of oppression,
of which the Japanese-American camp experience is clearly part, per-
haps help explain the need for over-achieving within this “model mi-
nority”, an often stereotyped phenomenon among Asian-Americans
echoed also by The Floating World’s protagonist and her parents’ ex-
pectations (Kadohata 1989: 145 or 193).
The experience of deportation has also generated among Japa-
nese-Americans the fear of repeated dislocation (mentioned in Kado-

51
On problematic relation of historiography and Asian American culture, see
Lowe’s Immigrant Acts (1996), esp. 104-8.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 207

hata’s novel after an illegal gambling bust in which the protagonist’s

father is involved, for instance, ibid. 136-7). In this context, Wong
contrasts the immobility of the immigrant settlers – an expression of
their desire for stability and at-home-ness in a new country – with the
immobility of coerced movement related to the Japanese-American
experience of internment: “the laws could undo the life’s work of the
Issei overnight. Whatever at-homeness the Japanese immigrants and
their children managed to attain was illusory, and forced dispersal
turned out to be the group’s true fate.” (1993: 126)
The internment of the issei and nisei (second generation) also
affected third-generation Japanese-Americans, the sansei to which
Kadohata’s protagonist Olivia belongs, by creating a Japanese-
American diaspora: the formerly interned were often unable to return
to their former homes and thus settled in other areas of the United
States (Daniels 1988: 268-86). Thus, Olivia and her family reflect the
economic disadvantage many Japanese-Americans faced after World
War II, now working, for instance, in temporary engagements in the
agricultural sector (which frequently included seasonal traveling) or in
industries like meat-processing, engagements that often foreclosed
long-term settlement.
Against the historical backdrop of immigration, internment, and
diaspora, a tradition of Asian-American literature focusing on move-
ment and motion has emerged (and has for a long time been neglected
by literary scholarship on American mobility, as Wong argues, 1993:
119). Kadohata’s novel is located within this context: beginning in the
1950s, The Floating World portrays a Japanese-American family liv-
ing on the road, traveling from one job and one temporary home to the
next. Told retrospectively through the eyes of sansei Olivia, “percep-
tive, playful, and deceptively naïve” (Yu 2000: 121) but also full of
curiosity, the story follows the narrator-protagonist’s coming of age
on the road in a series of rather disjointed, loosely structured – per-
haps even “floating” – chapters, and ends with Olivia at age 21. Criti-
cally revising the Western tradition of the Bildungsroman, The Float-
ing World ends not in the protagonist’s acceptance of and successful
integration into the dominant social order, but offers, as I argue in
what follows, other modes for articulating immigrant subjectivity and
community. These emerge, as Lisa Lowe has put it in her discussion
of Asian American cultural politics, “out of conditions of decoloniza-
tion, displacement, and disidentification – and refuse assimilation to
208 Roads of Her Own

the dominant narratives of integration, development, and identifica-

tion” (1996: 101).
Generally, the novel is marked by the multiple tensions, arising,
for one, between three generations of Japanese-American immigrants
– 12-year old Olivia and her three brothers, their mother Mariko and
father Charlie-O (the nisei),52 and her issei grandmother (or Obsan)53
– and their communal struggle to break the pattern of dislocation and
alienation that has characterized the family’s relationship to the Unit-
ed States.
The generational conflict between Olivia and Obsan, the back-
drop of the entire narrative and at the center of parts of it, is aggra-
vated by their living together in the tight spaces of the family car and
motel rooms (e.g. 66-7), with the granddaughter swinging between ab-
solute rejection (e.g. 18) and bonding (8).54 “Sometimes I ran from
her, but I never ran hard. I didn’t want her to catch and hit me, but I
didn’t want to lose her either” (20-1), Olivia remarks, thus expressing
also how she “cannot [and does not want to!] completely free herself
from the ethnic heritage represented by Obasan [sic]” (Yu 2000: 122;
cf. also Grice 2002: 72). Significantly, it is after her grandmother’s
death (which Olivia blames on herself, not getting help in time when
she collapses) that this complicated relationship is transformed and
Obsan’s function as a role-model and advisor takes the fore, both in
Olivia’s memory and also through the former’s diaries the latter con-
sults for advice on relationships and sex. When in one entry Obsan
describes how she was naked in an argument with her (fully clad) lov-
er, yet felt strong rather than vulnerable, her granddaughter knows:

52
Charlie-O is Olivia’s stepfather; Mariko was forced to marry him by her
mother when she was pregnant with Olivia. Through most of The Floating
World, however, Olivia calls Charlie-O “father” and “Dad” and her biological
father by his first name, Jack (e.g. 193). To avoid confusion, I will use the fa-
thers’ given names here.
53
Obsan is the Japanese name for a female relative such as a grandmother or
aunt. As the narrator informs us in Kadohata’s novel, the more endearing term
would be Obchan (5).
54
As Roger Daniels’ historical study on Asian America suggests, generational
tension between the issei, nisei, and sansei was also incited due to differences
in legal status, which credited citizenship only to the American-born genera-
tion (1988: 173). On (grand-)mother-daughter relationships in Asian Ameri-
can literature, see Grice (2002: 35-73).
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 209

“That’s what I wanted, to feel the same strength, more than I wanted
love” (Kadohata 1989: 115). The fact that the dead grandmother re-
mains such a central character in The Floating World indicates that the
connection between the dead and the living itself is of a floating, drift-
ing nature, with death not so much erasing the ancestral presence as
enforcing it (84); this is further intensified when Olivia meets the
specter of Jack, whose vending machine route she has taken on after
his death at the end of the novel.
The title’s floating might further hint at how changes in political
circumstance and geographical movement render markers of identity
and difference unstable (resonant perhaps even with the ‘floating sig-
nifier’ and the trace of the Other in Derridean deconstruction). The
family’s long history of naming and re-naming illustrates this:

You can trace some of the changes in my family through the changes
in our names. In 1875, for the first time, the parents of all my great-
grandparents took family names […]. Before the 1870s, most com-
moners in Japan were not allowed family names. When the names fi-
nally were allowed, sometimes everybody in a village was ordered to
take the same one […]. My mother’s mother was born Sat Hisae in a
village of Sats. But though Hisae was her given name, my great-
grandparents called her Shimeko, which isn’t a real name. […] When
Hisae’s family came to the United States, her father changed their
name to go with their new life. The new name was Fujiitano. Fujii had
been the richest man my great-grandfahter had ever known, and Itano
the happiest. Years later, in Hawaii at the start of World War II, the
local school made my grandparents change their children’s first names
before they could enroll. Satoru, Yukiko, Mariko, Haruko, and Sada-
mu became Roger, Lily, Laura, Ann and Roy. Today their original
names are just shadows following them. My brothers and I all have
American names. (2)

The family’s history is inscribed in these name changes, with the pre-
vious names remaining as personal traces of a collective past.

Adaptation and Segregation

Ranging from Obsan’s rejection of the dominant culture to vain at-

tempts at assimilation by Mariko and Charlie-O (Yu 2000: 122), who
wants the kids to call Obsan “grandma” (6) and desperately tries to
embody what he believes to be the archetypal American business
210 Roads of Her Own

owner (Kadohata 1989: 70), each generation has developed different

strategies of cultural adaptation. These strategies not only reflect how
the particular generation relates to the United States, they are also in-
tertwined with the family’s futile attempts at upward social mobility
(which are then projected onto Olivia, the first-born sansei of the fam-
ily and thus the most American in her parents’ view; ibid. 114 & 188).
In The Floating World, strategies of cultural adaptation – fragile
as they may be – encompass the desire to create such a space of be-
longing via rather than in movement, regarding both the issei’s immi-
gration from Japan and Olivia’s parents’ travels; Olivia is ultimately
the only character who rests in travel. Dictated mainly by economic
pressures and circumstance, the family’s wandering is often un-
planned for and forecloses their settling down year after year; the dis-
course of mobility is clearly one of necessity. Having internalized the
moving condition of almost a century of continual migrancy and so-
cio-geographic displacement, the family has turned para-nomadic;
they come from “here and there” (21), and their only home is on the
road, in movement (cf. also Lee 2003: 156).55 Even though Olivia
speaks of their movement as “travel”, the family moves not for plea-
sure’s or adventure’s sake, but “often for three reasons” (Kadohata
1989: 4) – two of them economic, the third apparently personal:

One was bad luck – the business my father worked for happened to go
under, or the next job we headed to evaporated while we were in tran-
sit. Also, it could be hard even into the fifties and sixties for Japanese
to get good jobs. […] The third reason was that my parents were dis-
satisfied with their marriage, and, somehow, moving seemed to give
vent to that dissatisfaction. (ibid.)

The socio-economic difficulties of Japanese-American families after

World War II are a major thread running through Kadohata’s road
narrative. In fact, Olivia’s family is not the only one on the move, as
we encounter other extended nisei families on the road, looking for
jobs and homes (e.g. 19, 24), none of them escaping the temporariness
of agricultural labor (what Sau-ling Wong has termed “nomadic loop-
ing”, 1993: 132) or sweatshop industries (e.g. Kadohata 1989: 34,
55
That Obsan tells Olivia “never to tell people where I came from or what my
name was” at this point (21) is further evidence to the “floating” status of the
family in the US-American landscape and its precarious social and political
position.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 211

120). In this sense, the floating world refers to a world of the collec-
tive travels of para-nomadic immigrant families, predominantly
around the Northwestern states of Oregon, Washington, and Califor-
nia, but also extending, for instance, to the all-Japanese chicken hat-
cheries in Arkansas (where Olivia works part-time before she leaves
for Los Angeles at sixteen, 68-136). These para-nomadic Japanese-
Americans are only geographically dispersed, however, forming a
translocal collective support network sustained by phone calls and
gossip: “The men who spent hours on the phone always knew where
there were jobs, who got married and had kids, which hatcheries were
thriving.” (93) For these families, travel has become a way of life, part
of a profession. It is Obsan who explicitly refers to this unstable
world as “floating”; as a child, Olivia experiences a paradox stability
of her family life within this world:

We were traveling then in what [my grandmother] called ukiyo, the

floating world. The floating world was the gas station attendants, res-
taurants, and jobs we depended on, the motel towns floating in the
middle of fields and mountains. In old Japan, ukiyo meant the districts
full of brothels, teahouses, and public baths, but it also referred to
change and the pleasures and loneliness change brings. For a long
time, I never exactly thought of us as part of any of that, though. We
were stable, traveling through an unstable world while my father
looked for jobs. (3)

Obsan has transplanted the traditional Japanese ukiyo of the Edo era56
onto her perception of the American cultural landscape: teahouses and
brothels have been replaced by restaurants and motels, public baths by
gas stations. Growing up, Olivia starts to realize the shadow side of
her family’s surface stability as she witnesses Japanese-Americans’
economic instability and its accompanying psychological strains, re-
sulting in excessive gambling (see esp. chapter ten), in drinking and
substance abuse (120) as well as in mental breakdowns (e.g. of her
boyfriend Tan’s father, 125-7).

56
The Edo age (1603-1868) was marked by a strong urban citizenry (the
chonin), in turn accompanied by a boom in book printing (which included a
plethora of manuals on decency and morals for women as well as practical
travel guides for the Edo tourist). Today, ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating
world”) are well-known, representing the stylish imagery characteristic of the
period. Cf. Bell 2004.
212 Roads of Her Own

The family inhabits a variety of spheres that constantly overlap

and intersect: the world of the factory, the local ethnic community, the
translocal Japanese-American network, white America, or the petty
criminal Asian community in L.A. (where Olivia moves to). Even the
ancestral world in Japan and the world of the dead inform their lives;
Olivia “felt amazed at how all those varied worlds out there co-
existed, including the world I lived in” (168). With her moving mostly
through rather than in and out of these worlds, they often appear only
“randomly touching” (ibid.), even “not real” (188) to Olivia: “Watch-
ing the street, I felt very hopeful, not about anything in particular. It
was a feeling cut off from all logic and reality” (165). At the same
time, she realizes how quickly one of these worlds may come to the
fore, as for example when her L.A. boyfriend Andy gets beaten up:
suddenly “[t]he street was barren […]. I felt really scared, not exactly
of what had happened but of the scope of the world, the violence”
(167).
Throughout the narrative, Olivia sways between the desire to
abandon her world of in-betweenness, the interstitial space she occu-
pies and cannot escape, and the desire to leave any temporary home
again. She seems to want to both stay and leave simultaneously: “My
family had lived many places, and traveled many places. I thought
then that Arkansas was the most beautiful place I had ever been in, yet
I wanted badly to leave.” (133) Ironically, these contradictory yearn-
ings articulate the tension between the desire to participate in the
American myth of unfettered social and geographical mobility on the
one hand and the forces of an exclusionary hegemonic order that inhi-
bits mobility as well as belonging on the other. Here, Kadohata’s nov-
el voices the transdifferential dilemma between conflicting yearnings
that text and protagonist are unable to resolve. The Japanese-
American workers at the hatchery are all outsiders, yet not even this
commonality is able to create communal belonging: “being one of
them was being an outsider. To be part of their group you couldn’t get
close to them.” (132)
Not only does the temporariness of belonging and home con-
trast with the 1950s’ domestic ideal of the American nuclear family
and with the reinforced private-public spatial divide of the decade
(Olivia notices, for instance, how her family was “always the only
family at the motels we stayed at”, 3), but even when Olivia’s family
settles down in Arkansas and her father starts a small business (68),
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 213

socio-spatial segregation continues to divide Japanese-America from

the rural, white Arkansas society. The Japanese newcomers are very
careful in their behavior, almost as if they were illegal immigrants lia-
ble to deportation; they are well aware of their precarious status in
U.S. society:

When my family was out with a relative’s family, you always felt
people were staring if you weren’t looking. There were no blacks liv-
ing in Gibson [Arkansas]; only whites and the few Japanese. We were
all very quiet in public. […] We had thought of moving to a town
called Ashland, but no Japanese lived there, and we didn’t want to be
the first. (72-3)57

Yet socio-geographic segregation does not stop at the color line. It

moves on and divides the Japanese community itself in terms of class.
The paragraph continues:

My father said that the fourteen Japanese, including the six of us, who
lived in Gibson all came from families who owned small businesses,
and the twenty or thirty Japanese in the next town over […] all came
from families in which someone worked as a chicken sexer. But no
chicken sexers lived in Gibson, and no business-owner Japanese lived
in Lee. I don’t know why it was divided that way. (73)

Assimilation, for Olivia’s family, refers first and foremost to accep-

tance among the Japanese-American community: “[o]ur assimilation
into the community was easy enough. Most Japanese in Arkansas live
in Gibson or Lee.” (74) The juxtaposition of these sentences implies
that Olivia does not refer to integration within white America but to a
close-knit network of Japanese-Americans much more vital for sur-
vival: “We were bound to the Japanese in Arkansas just as my mother,
father, brothers, and I were bound to each other. […] So in this way
my family was rooted in a community. I felt safe.” (94)
Socio-spatial divisions are not only interethnic; on an intraeth-
nic level, both class and gender constitute a major dividing line. Char-
lie-O forbids Olivia’s mother Mariko to work and, along with the
chicken-sexer and gambler Toshi, she is one of the few Japanese
57
Similarly affected by hegemonic spatial regimes and the attempt to blend in
with mainstream society, Obsan frequently scolds the children when they
hang out in front of motel rooms: “What will people think, with Japanese
hanging around like hoodlums at night?” (27)
214 Roads of Her Own

women in the community who subtly rebel against their assigned

place by reading books “in a community where men rarely – and
women never – read” (73) and by refusing the spatial divides imposed
upon her. Like the “presidents’ wives” she so admires (26-7), she
moves away from the hearth. Her transgression causes shame and con-
fusion in her young daughter, yet also incites Olivia’s imitation of her
behavior, thus Mariko also functions as a female role model:

When the women went into the kitchen to clean [after parties], my
mother remained in the living room to talk, and I felt faintly ashamed,
and unsure whether I ought to stay in the living room or go into the
kitchen. Usually I stayed in the living room […]. (73)

While the men’s world consists largely of work, poker games, and the
occasional horse race or prostitute (94), the women are depicted in
their domestic caretaking roles (ibid.), and Mariko herself is not com-
pletely untouched by this ideology of separate spheres, reminding Oli-
via repeatedly of her kitchen chores (83). But with both Mariko and
Obsan as strong female role models – her grandmother was smoking
cigars when “it had been considered scandalous for young Japanese
women” (1), had run a boarding house in California (31-4) and had
many affairs even at age 73 (115) – Olivia herself grows up self-
confident, feels comfortable in her body and possesses a curious mind
(she “liked to talk to strangers” on the road, for instance, 9). Counter-
ing the stereotype of the submissive, domestic Asian American wom-
an, she travels to Los Angeles by bus, still in her teens, and starts a life
on her own toward the end of the novel (Kadohata 1989: 153). Olivia
supports herself first by working at a “fancy-shmancy lamp shop” (ib-
id.), then by taking over Jack’s vending machine route through Cali-
fornia, Nevada, and Arizona (183-96), thus continuing (but also sig-
nificantly altering, as I will argue in the following) her family’s histo-
ry of a para-nomadic life on the road. Olivia’s traveling constitutes a
re-visiting of her ethnic group’s, her family’s, and her own diasporic
displacement, by means of which she also re-signifies these forced
movements.
The American highway – “spread[ing] itself through quiet, hu-
mid land, curling with two lanes through the Ozarks, and later opening
to four lanes and passing through the centers of towns” (105) – con-
tinues to structure not only Olivia’s life; it retains its function as the
aorta of para-nomadic existence for the (im)migrant workers who have
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 215

gradually transformed their seasonal travels into a condition. The

highway has formed an “obsessive locus” in Japanese-American lite-
rature, Sau-ling Wong notes (1993: 120), perhaps also due to its
double potential to either connect or separate the parallel worlds Japa-
nese-Americans inhabited in the 1950s – their ethnic communities and
worlds of work on the one hand and the American public, which
largely excludes them as sovereign citizens (cf. Park/Wald 1998: 609)
yet decides over their fate, on the other. On a vacation trip to Oregon,
Olivia, her Chinese-American boyfriend Andy and her brother Walker
decide to drive up Highway 99, a route significant for the prior gener-
ation of Japanese-Americans of that area:

Though […] less scenic than the ride up the coast, I’d driven on it
many times as a child, so we took it up. Some of my parents’ friends
used to live on the east side of 99, but when the war started, there was
a law that Japanese had to move west of the highway, so they packed
up all their things and moved across the street. The next year they
were interned. (Kadohata 1989: 171)

Although not intentionally, the fear of internment and coerced dis-

placement is transmitted from one generation to the next and thus af-
fects Olivia against her will:

My parents had taught me many things they hadn’t meant to teach me

and I hadn’t meant to learn. One of those things was fear; their big
fear, during the war; and when my father was arrested; […] [their]
concern that I would be all right in the future; and a hundred other in-
terwoven fears. That was what I wanted to leave. (146-7)58

Their fearfulness is perhaps another cause for being on the road: by

never settling down, never rooting oneself, one escapes authority and
remains alert against threats by a hegemonic order.

58
I would disagree with Yu’s interpretation that Olivia’s refusal to accept this
fear necessarily “implies that she will erase her Japanese identity” (2000:
122). If the erasure of “Japanese identity” is a purpose at all in the novel, it is
Olivia’s parents’.
216 Roads of Her Own

Public/Private: Divisions and Revisions

It is the “pleasures and loneliness change brings” (3) that constitute

the central antithetical forces throughout Kadohata’s book – change
certainly also referring to the process of Olivia’s coming-of-age. The
very limited privacy on the road, vital for the average teenager, vague-
ly recalls the internment experience of the nisei generation. Together
with the precarious relations of Japanese-Americans to the public
sphere in post-World-War-II America – mainly due to hegemonic
constructions of racial difference and enmity prevailing after the end
of the war and into the 1950s – this lack of privacy renders family life
precarious.59 Not only do they ‘float’ in terms of geographic space but
also in terms of cultural identity, literally moving between (and often
falling through the cracks of) ‘Japanese-’ ‘American-’ and ‘Japanese-
American-ness’.60
The public/private divide plays a major role in both the cultural-
historical context of the time Kadohata’s novel is set as well as of the
time it was published. Written during another phase of anti-
immigration sentiment in the United States (Park/Wald 1998: 609),
The Floating World addresses issues of belonging topical again in the
late 1980s:

[Olivia tries to] negotiate both a domesticized femininity and a public

Japanese identity. During the war the public definition of Japanese
Americans as Japanese – and thus the enemy – keeps Olivia and her
family from taking root as “Americans.” Their position as noncitizens
is signified in their failure to gain access to the private sphere. (ibid.)

59
In chapter one of Immigrant Acts (1996), Lowe argues that immigration and
naturalization laws have been means of policing citizenship on the one hand,
yet on the other have also partaken in an orientalist discourse defining Asians
as foreigners in times of U.S.-Asian conflict.
60
The tensions between a racial and national identity, described famously by
W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness, have always undermined
the racial ‘Other’s’ identification with narratives of Americanness. As Chan et
al. put it: “We have been encouraged to believe that we have no cultural integ-
rity as Chinese- or Japanese-Americans, that we are either Asian […] or
American (white) or are measurably both. This myth of being either/or and the
equally goofy concept of the dual personality haunted our lobes while our re-
jection by both Asia and white America proved we were neither […]. Nor
were we half and half or more one than the other.” (1982: 197)
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 217

As Park and Wald thus suggest, the denial of citizenship results in a

failure to reconstruct the private in the aftermath of the internment ex-
perience, which becomes manifest in Olivia’s uneasy relationship with
dichotomous conceptions of the public and the private. In fact, this po-
lar opposition is continually blurred in the book: Olivia stays in motels
and cars and with family friends serving as foster parents (Kadohata
1989: 13-7), sleeps in the hatchery at times, taking her toiletry as well
as her awakening sexuality into the workplace (112), and meets her
boyfriend in a rusty school bus (122) or a nearby field (111). This in-
terstitiality unmasks the ideology of the separate sphere model as
clearly contextualized by the white middle classes (as Park and Wald
argue in their essay), both in its historical emergence in the 19th cen-
tury and its suburban heyday in the 1950s. In Kadohata’s novel, the
protagonist turns this exclusionary binary model upside down, as Oli-
via creates the privacy she is denied by actively appropriating her in-
betweenness. Feeling at home in cars and motels empowers her to
create public-private-interstices largely on her own terms – even in
odd places such as the hatchery – and make use of them according to
her own needs. Her L.A. apartment, for instance,

gave me that old feeling of being displaced and safe at the same time,
like when I used to play in the small woods back of my house at night.
I could close my eyes and from any point at the edge find my way to a
certain tree in the center. (155)

As Park and Wald have argued, The Floating World thus “offers a
possible refiguration of the public and private spheres that neither re-
legates women of color to the private sphere nor makes them vulnera-
ble by publicizing them” (1998: 625). The on-the-road experience has
empowered Olivia to both delicately transgress spatial borders marked
by the public/private divide – and therefore by a gendered economy of
exclusionary spaces – and to create the paradox of transient belonging.
Olivia ultimately belongs in routes and roads rather than in particular
localities, ending her narration, in my view, not on a bitter note but by
expressing spatial self-empowerment; the book ends with Olivia’s
embrace of the floating world of her in-between existence: “I tried to
calculate from the night sky what time it was, but then I gave up. It
didn’t matter; it was high time I left.” (Kadohata 1989: 196)
In sum, America is constructed in terms of “unbelonging” (Sau-
ling Wong’s term, 1993: 118) in The Floating World: the young Japa-
218 Roads of Her Own

nese-American narrator-protagonist embodies ethnic, class, and gend-

er differences that shape a view of America articulated in the text as
“real yet floating” (Lee 2003: 157) rather than as a unified vision of
home. The differences between the parallel worlds Olivia moves
through are irresolvable and foreclose any unitary portrayal of the
United States. Although Olivia is often troubled by this heterogeneity,
she ultimately finds herself at ease only by imagining her home in
homelessness. By transforming a collective ethnic experience of
coerced dislocation into self-determined para-nomadic wandering,
Kadohata’s novel articulates the copresence of conflicting mobilities
and spatialities, or, differently phrased, transdifferential tensions be-
tween these in a Japanese-American context. Proposing a home in
movement and movement as home, The Floating World eventually
creates para-nomadic interstitiality as a self-controlled, potentially li-
berating heterotope.

5.4. Circles and Downward Spirals:

Negative Para-Nomadism in Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays

Unlike narrative quests, para-nomadic road stories dismiss the idea of

arrival as well as of its binary opposite, departure, as the structure of
the narrated journey. Quite to the contrary: what I have so far sub-
sumed under the para-nomadic paradigm of fictionalized mobility are
tales that privilege a sense of movement for movement’s sake. In these
narratives, the creation of a moveable home on the road can be empo-
wering; however, there is an underside to this version of para-
nomadism to be found in road narratives that end on a less optimistic
note.61

61
Writing this section of my study, I am haunted by a woman I met in the smok-
ing court of the Greyhound station in Amarillo, Texas, in April 2005. Dishev-
elled and drunk at five in the morning, she was on her way to Oregon where
she had “folks”. We had boarded the same bus when, before departure, Grey-
hound officials made her step out and searched her sparse belongings, appar-
ently for alcohol. All eyes upon her, the woman started to cry as she was
turned into a suspect, desperately arguing that she needed to get on this bus,
having “nothing, nowhere to go”. This section is dedicated to this woman, to
whom I could give nothing but a cigarette and some change.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 219

In Joan Didion’s apocalyptic Hollywood novel Play It as It

Lays (1970) – which I will briefly discuss as a contrastive foil to para-
nomadic road narratives in the following – an inverted, bleaker ver-
sion of such narratives emerges from an unsuccessful quest for escape.
This quest is so rigidly thwarted in Didion’s book, voicing a distinct
postmodern condition of constant transition, that the idea of escape
gradually loses its motivating force. The permanence of being-on-the-
road is not embraced (as it is to some extent in Glancy’s or Kadoha-
ta’s road narratives) in the absence of a geographic home place or cen-
ter of belonging. In such pessimistic versions of para-nomadism, for
which Didion’s book is exemplary,62 the idea of home is beyond even
the protagonists’ imaginary geography.
Play It as It Lays, the earliest road narrative discussed in this
study, can be characterized as an early second-wave feminist text that
deals with the 1950s’ legacy of female depression and psychological
disorder of white women in the U.S.-American middle class, of “the
problem that ha[d] no name” (cf. the first chapter of Betty Friedan’s
Feminine Mystique). The protagonist, Maria Wyeth, is trapped by
trauma, loss, and despair, but nevertheless keeps moving. Maria is an
unsuccessful actress who tries to keep her cool in her outward appear-
ance while slowly breaking down on the inside – until these exter-
nal/internal distinctions finally collapse. At age 30, she has lost both
her parents, has been cheated on by her husband Carter Lang, an emo-
tionally abusive film producer, and yearns for her genetically ill little
daughter, Kate, who has been permanently hospitalized.63 Maria drifts

62
Bleak or even dystopian versions of para-nomadism constitute a minor strand
of road narratives, which is the reason why this chapter is not as extensive as
others in my study. In addition to Didion, Jan Kerouac’s Trainsong (1988)
could be mentioned here; perhaps more prominently, negative para-nomadism
informs a number of road movies, such as Butterfly Kiss (1996) or Monster
(2003).
63
Perhaps also echoing the overwhelmingly negative attitudes toward mothers
and maternity among second-wave feminists in the late 1960s and 70s, Di-
dion’s narrative is full of absent mothers and solitary daughters. Maria’s rela-
tion to her children, born and unborn (her husband forces her to terminate her
second pregnancy), is tragically complicated; she yearns for both her daughter
and her own mother, who appears repeatedly in a dream from which she
wakes up crying (60-1). Although Maria’s first name reflects the archetypal
Christian mother, her last name is a question that, like many others, remains
unanswered in the narrative: Wy-eth/why is? (an aspect Paes de Barros [2004]
220 Roads of Her Own

into apathy and depression in the course of the novel, yet survives (un-
like her only close friend BZ, who takes an overdose of sleeping pills
to the soundtrack of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” while Maria
holds his hand, 213). In a story characterized by Maria’s emptiness
and the numbness of the wealthy, sexist Hollywood society surround-
ing her (cf. e.g. 36), Maria “plays it as it lays” without any reason to
continue doing so. In her own voice, she ends the novel saying that
she knows “what ‘nothing’ means”, and “keep[s] playing. Why, BZ
would say. Why not, I say.” (214) Maria does not believe in some
higher meaning of life, but neither does she believe in death as a mea-
ningful act (Winchell 1989: 98).
The protagonist in Play It as It Lays finds short moments of
peace only in what Didion, in the essay collection The White Album
(1979), has called “the freeway experience”:

Actual participation [in the freeway experience] requires total sur-

render, a concentration so intense as to seem a narcosis, a rapture-of-
the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over. A distor-
tion of time occurs. (83)

Driving numbs her pain. Maria’s habitual taking to the freeway is mo-
tivated by an inner compulsion, constituting an act of almost psycho-
pathological dimensions, as the Los Angeles freeway system seems to
be the only stable element in her universe (Winchell 1989: 93); for
small periods of time, the road turns into a space of regeneration:

It was essential (to pause was to throw herself into unspeakable peril)
that she be on the freeway by ten o’clock. Not somewhere on Holly-
wood Boulevard, not on her way to the freeway, but actually on the
freeway. If she was not she lost the day’s rhythm, its precariously im-
posed momentum. Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered
her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she
drove. […] She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more at-
tuned to its currents, its deceptions […]. (15-6)

Maria attunes herself to the currents and deceptions – i.e. that there is
some order that regulates space – of the freeway as her daily medica-
tion, relying on a regular dosage of it for her emotional health. From a

can only miss because she consistently misspells Maria’s last name as
“Wyatt”).
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 221

psychoanalytic angle, the book suggests that driving time provides her
with the singular moments when she does not repress her inner drives,
when she lets go of control.
Without destination, Maria’s routes are circular, “the San Diego
to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the
Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the
Ventura” (ibid.). Time and again, it is the consoling thought of the
freeway that eases her emotional torture and soothes her so she can
manage to sleep at night:

[S]he imagined herself driving, conceived audacious lane changes,

strategic shifts of gear, the Hollywood to the San Bernardino and
straight on out, past Barstow, past Baker, driving straight on into the
hard white empty core of the world. She slept and did not dream.
(162)

Paes de Barros contends that only on the road can Maria “hope to re-
cover her self and to perhaps find some alternate way to live” (2004:
136), even though this space is perhaps less “blank” and “unnamed”
than Paes de Barros suggests (ibid. 135). However, in this fictional
1960s’ silver screen world, where every effort to communicate is
thwarted; driving is “the last illusion of control over her life” (Chabot
1980: 56).64 Maria’s isolation and solitude are aggravated by every
new attempt at establishing some connection with her surroundings.
Therefore, any quest for new directions and peace of mind is carica-
tured by Didion (Primeau 1996: 92) and turned into compulsive para-
nomadism.
Her “compulsive automobility”, as Hugo Caviola calls it (1991:
192), not only expresses Maria’s restless need to move, but also subs-
titutes both home and a sense of place. The romance of the nuclear
family is beyond reach for Maria, who is highly uncomfortable within
the domestic sphere (Winchell 1989: 94); she rejects her own house
by sleeping out by the pool “in a faded rattan chaise left by a former
tenant” (16).65 The way her Hollywood surroundings as well as Silver
64
Despite many differences to the interpretations of Chabot and Paes de Barros,
see also Geherin’s reading, which asserts that the car is an “appropriate sym-
bol of her escape: self-contained and womb-like” (1974: 67).
65
Focusing mainly on Didion’s famous essays (such as “On the Road” and
“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” from The White Album), Janis Stout notes
Didion’s dread of immobilization in the home; yet in A Book of Common
222 Roads of Her Own

Wells, a former mining town and her childhood home in the Nevada
desert which is used as a nuclear test range, are portrayed in Play It as
It Lays remind the reader of what Marc Augé would call “non-lieux”,
non-places: in these arid wastelands that reflect the emptiness of the
novel’s characters, Maria cannot create a space of belonging (see e.g.
187, 201); to speak with T.S. Eliot, they are merely a “heap of broken
images” (qtd. in Geherin 1974: 75). Caviola, in his study on space in
postmodern literature, observes that unlike (male) heroes, postmodern
female protagonists fail to trade uprootedness for a “heroic” commit-
ment to placelessness; due to the typical lack of social relations and
stable places in postmodernist literature, they “veer toward mental col-
lapse” (1991: 192) in a downward spiral, as Maria does. Thus, he
reads Maria as a late-modernist female hero in a postmodern world,
struggling to understand and relate to the world, for order and orienta-
tion (57, 193).66 Unlike Caviola, I would suggest that Maria is well
aware of the futility of this struggle: “there is no Silver Wells”, she
says at the beginning of the narrative (9), sounding, with a notable
rhythmical similarity, like the reverse of Dorothy’s “There’s no place
like home” from The Wizard of Oz. Hence the struggle at the heart of
Didion’s narrative is not one for order, but much rather for finding a
way to create a viable and livable space for female subjectivity in
view of postmodern disorder and fragmentation – e.g. by reveling in
the deceptive order of freeway traffic and by embracing the notion of
life as a game, of playfulness. It is indicative of Didion’s black-
humored sarcasm that the text eventually creates this kind of livable

Prayer and Democracy, Stout contends, “freedom of movement is reinter-

preted as the curse of movement – an inability to remain still” (1998: 203).
66
By linking this endeavor to the protagonist’s gender, Caviola of course im-
plies that women need this sense of home more vitally than men in order to
stay mentally sane. He concludes that Maria represents the new type of wom-
an of the Sixties who, by being “cut off, or freed from social norms” becomes
“vulnerable” (1991: 58). However, in my reading of Play It as It Lays, social
norms for women created in the Hollywood star system are highly oppressive,
resulting in Maria’s eating disorders, drug abuse, and despair. As Katherine
Mills states, Didion depicts “the New Hollywood woman as a sort of com-
modity – the ‘trophy wife’ – caught in the gap between the promise and pit-
falls of Women’s Liberation” (1999: 186). Caviola further claims that Maria
“has cut herself off from harmony with nature through the abortion of her
child” (1991: 55), disregarding that the termination of her pregnancy is forced
onto her and thereby creating a view of maternity as natural, woman’s biolog-
ical destination.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 223

space in a mental institution; at the end, Maria is hospitalized and

finds peace: “Now I lie in the sun and play solitaire and listen to the
sea […] and watch a hummingbird.” (10)
Mark Royden Winchell has argued that while the overall tone of
the novel is “spare, bleak, nihilistic”, irony and humor serve a crucial
function, undercutting “the sentimental, self-pitying nihilism inherent
in Maria’s story” (1989: 97). Yet its recalcitrant sarcasm, in addition
to the plotline, is not the only distinctive features of Didion’s postmo-
dern aesthetics. As its title already suggests, the novel also draws on a
postmodernist playfulness with respect to structure and form (cf. Ro-
nald Sukenick’s understanding of postmodern literature from the
1970s): an overall disjointed, retrospective story filled with numerous
narrative gaps, the individual chapters are organized in a paratactical
and elliptic manner, with hardly any transition between each and
many near-empty pages and blank spaces on the printed page, paral-
leling the “hard white empty core” of the world that the protagonist
longs to make sense of, but finally accepts as impenetrable.67 The
reader has to accept emptiness and ellipsis as constitutive of the story.
Play It as It Lays thus seems to deny the existence of a bigger picture
in which all the gaps would be filled; it programmatically negates the
possibility of making sense of the world through narrative. Instead, the
novel emphasizes that life resembles a succession of card-game mo-
ments and situations which are never fully transparent and to which
one can only react spontaneously by finding temporary relief: “Auto-
mobility symbolizes the autonomy and mobility […] that Maria loses
in New Hollywood” and that gives her, if only for short periods, “so-
lace […], meaning and direction”, Katherine Lawrie Mills contends
(1999: 188).
That the book, like most of Didion’s work, is set in California is
not surprising in this respect. Both in spatial theory and American lite-
rature, Los Angeles has emerged as the epitome of postmodern urban
conglomerates in the western hemisphere. For instance, in Postmetro-
polis and Third Space, geographer Edward Soja has famously argued
that Los Angeles is the main site of, even the main protagonist in, fu-
ture developments of urban planning and environments. Los Angeles,
Soja’s main argument goes, is the prototype of a post-Fordist, post-

67
On Didion’s textual constructions of whiteness, which is immanently based on
a displacement of the racial Other, cf. Bröck (100-14).
224 Roads of Her Own

modern cityscape, a global city with restructured urban forms and new
spatial polarities, an example of fragmented social and geographical
space marked by gated communities as well as revised enactments of
urbanity. The historical transformation of L.A. into a postmodern city,
Soja contends throughout his work, has also affected the cultural im-
aginary of this urban locale – his proof for the entanglement of the
“real” and the “imagined”.
Spatial descriptions in Play It as It Lays clearly reflect on these
developments, portraying Los Angeles as a series of disjointed, cen-
terless places seemingly without connection, coexisting on a horizon-
tal, deeply fragmented plane. Freeways become all the more important
in this context, for they emerge in the book as the life veins of L.A.
and its inhabitants, generating at least the illusion that connection is
possible. Maria is sensitive to that “deception” (16), yet although the
freeway simultaneously embodies the protagonist’s sense of disloca-
tion and irrelevance, it remains, from her perspective, the only oppor-
tunity to get away from what is demanded of her, from social expecta-
tions of upper-middle class Hollywood femininity so severe they emo-
tionally suffocate and crush her. Gradually, Maria’s driving therapy
yields unexpected results; instead of finding meaning in the highways,
their deceptive suggestion of order is revealed and the protagonist’s
autonomous self that, throughout the book, is but a frustrated promise,
melts into air entirely: “By the end of a week she was thinking con-
stantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the ex-
act point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and
other.” (170)
The fact that Maria keeps on playing a game with no discerna-
ble name or rules evokes at least a modest amount of optimism in the
end. Even though Maria ends up in a mental institution (from where
her story is told), she emerges as an almost heroic player in a game
without winners, just survivors. That her para-nomadic wanderings on
the L.A. freeway have familiarized her with the “hard white empty
core of the world” plays a major part in Maria’s survival.
At times mourning the loss of home and hope in seemingly un-
nomadic fashion, road stories like Didion’s reflect and emphasize des-
pair in women’s continuing struggles with the limitations pertaining to
a narrow, profoundly gendered conception of domesticity and the pub-
lic-private divide. In Didion’s book, Glancy’s and Kadohata’s gestures
of resistance are frustrated by isolation, incarceration, and death, and
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 225

feminist spatialities are generated on the level of narration and form

rather than in plot development and diegesis. The protagonist in Play
It as It Lays cannot escape; even on the road, she is in many ways
doomed by the complex entanglements of a gendered domestic and
public sphere. Not only do road stories like Didion’s thus craft a much
bleaker view of para-nomadism, they also re-articulate major dilemma
negotiated in women’s writing ever since the ideology of the public-
private divide began to shape, to historically varying degrees, white
western women’s lives in the second half of the 18th century.

Exit: Para-Nomad

At one point in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly

discuss the road as an example of “striated”, linear, rigidly regulated
space: roads are systematically structured, point into certain direc-
tions, and are controlled by the state (1987/1980: 380). The concrete
of the road is a smooth, “nomadic” space, they assert, but not roads
themselves. Is it possible, then, to read (fictional) roads as para-
nomadic space, open for re-figurations and -articulations, that can be
appropriated in movement and even fashioned subversively?
While in Diane Glancy’s and Cynthia Kadohata’s road stories
the protagonists make use of the road experience to transform, on their
own terms, an ethnic legacy of displacement as well as the gendered
spaces of the American highway, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays is an
example of a much bleaker version of para-nomadism, in which spa-
tial regulation inhibits any such transformation. Paradoxically, Maria
Wyeth recedes to the closed, striated, and highly regulated social
space of a mental institution to escape the equally claustrophobic
landscape in which both the public and the domestic sphere are entan-
gled. In this postmodern tale, female transgression no longer typifies
agency or resistance against a dominant order; Maria’s bare survival is
the most heroic statement of the text, and only in self-imposed incar-
ceration and seclusion can the protagonist finally rest, having rele-
gated any reasoning to doctors and officials: “To look for ‘reasons’ is
beside the point. But because the pursuit of reasons is their business
here, they ask me questions.” (3)
What Glancy’s, Kadohata’s, and Didion’s main characters share
is that on the road, they experience manifold social and psychological
226 Roads of Her Own

regulations and restrictions that limit their movements. These regula-

tions are conditioned not by the genderedness of the fictional road-
space alone (as in Didion), but also by ethnicity and social class
(Glancy, Kadohata). Although a certain desire for a better place, typi-
cal of the quest narrative, is occasionally observable here, all of these
protagonists move due to coercion, none of them bound for a final
destination; thus, their wanderings are para-nomadically constructed.
The familiarity of the territory in which these textual move-
ments take place is another important fictional element in this context.
The facilitation of transgression and appropriation in order to weaken
the “geography of fear” can be seen as a para-nomadic strategy that
also pervades quest-narratives, as I have shown, as well as many pica-
resque texts. As all of the protagonists discussed in this chapter feel at
home in movement – even though this feeling is fleeting in the more
pessimistic versions of para-nomadism – they appropriate the spatiali-
ty of the road. Yet the para-nomadic female hero does not aim to grow
roots or to form permanent connections to a territory that itself can on-
ly be transiently produced as social space through repetitive articula-
tions of fictional movement and deterritorialization. Thus, these narra-
tives dissociate themselves from the gesture of conquest (theorized by
Sara Mills [1991] and other scholars of travel writing); they produce
space not as a place on the map for their protagonists to mark and en-
trench, but rather counter the effects of ethnic, gendered, and econom-
ic spatial dislocation in flight. In this sense, Rüdiger Kunow’s conclu-
sion to his analysis of three novels by Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong
Kingston, and Gerald Vizenor could be easily applied to the road narr-
atives I have called para-nomadic in this chapter:

The inconclusiveness of ethnic [and other subaltern, AG] placements

in […] fluid spaces is also reflected in the trajectory of movements
represented in the texts: these movements are never really “homeward
bound” but instead lead to positions in transit […]. (2002: 216)

Both the constant transitoriness of a movement that does not lead to

any stable place and the transiency of the subject are radicalized, how-
ever, once the notion of home-space itself is abandoned; this is a de-
fining feature of the picaresque paradigm in women’s road-narratives,
as I will argue in the following.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 227

5.5. Interstice: Un-Weaving the Road:

Para-Nomad Meets Postmodern Picara in Aritha van Herk’s
No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey

[F]iction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly per-

haps, but still attached to life at all four corners […]. [W]hen
the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the
middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair
by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human
beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health
and money and the houses we live in.
- Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One’s Own

Dutch-Canadian novelist and critical essayist68 Aritha van Herk’s

novel No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey (1986) ends with the
death of the protagonist by way of a gradual narrative disintegration.
The novel can be read in the context of a distinct feminine version of
what Linda Hutcheon has termed the “Canadian Postmodern” (1988).
Hutcheon asserts that the distinctiveness of postmodern women’s lite-
rature – sometimes viewed by literary criticism as women’s aesthetic
conservatism – is largely due to its commitment to the feminist project
of creating female subjectivity that must precede the project of post-
modern deconstruction. She then parallels this gendered differentia-
tion with the national differences between contemporary Canadian and
U.S.-American postmodernism: what critics see as “important to
postmodernism in America – its deconstructing of national myths and
identity – is possible within Canada only when those myths and iden-
tity have first been defined” (1988: 6). This is of course an important
observation regarding the background of Canadian women writers’
“obsession” (ibid.) with parody – of historical myth, colonial history,
and western literary genres.69 In conclusion, Hutcheon emphasizes

68
Van Herk’s collections of critical essays include In Visible Ink: Crypto-
Frictions (1991) and A Frozen Tongue (1992), which mainly discusses
women writers’ difficulties in patriarchal societies (Rocard 1995: 92).
69
Besides van Herk, Hutcheon mentions Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro in
this context; Atwood’s recent re-writing of the Odyssey as The Penelopiad
(2005) confirms the ongoing vitality of this tradition. I can only summarize
Hutcheon’s findings here and thus would like to point out that she differenti-
ates in detail among Francophone and Anglophone traditions and thus paints a
less monolithic picture than my summary might suggest.
228 Roads of Her Own

commonalities in women’s and Canadian literature: “[p]arody and

irony […] become major forms of both formal and ideological critique
in feminist and Canadian fiction alike” as “they allow writers to speak
to their culture, from within, but without being totally co-opted by that
culture”, due to the cultural “distancing” that is involved in these tex-
tual strategies (ibid. 7); hence also her reading of van Herk’s novel as
an insistent intertextual response to Victorian women’s travelogues of
the Canadian West as well as to the dominant interpretation of Cana-
dian prairie fiction (cf. Kroetsch 1979).
Aritha van Herk’s novel epitomizes this type of Canadian pa-
rodic postmodernism on a number of levels. First, No Fixed Address
playfully engages with generic conventions – of prairie fiction, the
road novel, the romance, the gothic, and the picaresque – and diegeti-
cally ridicules stereotypically gendered behavior – such as masculine
sexual adventures, or the separatist radicalism of “Women First”
groups and fundamentalist Christian wives. Furthermore, the text pa-
rodies the Greek myth of Arachne and Athena, its main intertextual
reference.70 Just as important is its deconstruction of colonial concepts
of and approaches to geographical space, of ‘discovery’ and explora-
tion as well as their implications in the Canadian context. Van Herk’s
text thus reflects a fundamental distrust of space as “never an easily
negotiated thing” (van Herk qtd. in Rocard 1995: 91).
Before turning to the picaresque road narrative in chapter six, I
am going to argue, in what follows, that No Fixed Address mixes para-
nomadic mobility and postmodern ‘picarisma’ (Kaler 1991) in its ne-
gotiations of space on both an intradiegetic and a metatextual level.
Typical of postmodern literary strategies, these levels are engaged
with each other in a playfully dialogic manner and thus cannot be se-
parated. No Fixed Address is a text that unfixes binary logic, narrative
conventions and securities, and questions the historical legacy of con-
ceptions of both ‘Woman’ and landscape in a colonial context.
In a Deleuzian reading of No Fixed Address, Marlene Goldman
argues that van Herk “rejects the desire to ‘fix’ the prairie by imposing
this type of ‘grid’ [that Rudy Wiebe talks of in ‘Passages by Land’],
fashioned from a male perspective”; instead, Goldmann argues, the

70
Parody is understood here in Linda Hutcheon’s sense of “repetition with criti-
cal distance” (1988: 6), discussed in more detail in my reading of Erika Lo-
pez’ Flaming Iguanas in chapter 6.3.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 229

author creates alternative relationships between women and place

based “not upon the capture and mastering of the landscape, but upon
the impulse toward deterritorialization (1993: 22). Goldman concludes
that this gesture is an instance of Deleuzian nomadology, an “ideolog-
ically subversive stance” (ibid.; see also Howells 2004: 204). Thus,
van Herk’s “portrayal of women who flee to or create unmapped terri-
tory is an attempt to escape the grid which fixes the image of Wom-
an”, as Goldman puts it (1993: 23), in No Fixed Address as well as in
its sequel, Places Far From Ellesmere: a Geografictione (1990).

Narrative Uncertainty

No Fixed Address presents the reader with a frame narrator who is,
contrary to literary convention, far from omniscient; her lack of con-
trol and extremely limited knowledge of the story is another distinctly
postmodern element in No Fixed Address.71 Introduced in four itali-
cized sections, all entitled “Notebook on a Missing Person”, a second-
person narrator traces Arachne Manteia72 in what is ultimately an un-
successful endeavor.73 In contrast, the third-person narration that
makes up the rest of the novel mostly adopts Arachne’s point of view;
here, the reader learns of her story as a successful underwear sales rep-
resentative who travels around British Columbia and Saskatchewan in
her black 1959 vintage Mercedes. This part of the story, told in 64 ep-
isodes, traces back the events from before the protagonist’s birth up to
her disappearance. The narrative does not follow a coherent logic or
linear storyline as the episodes progress, inserting a number of fantas-
tic elements in(to) the story and leaving many gaps: when Arachne
suffers from temporary fits of amnesia (e.g. in “Ferryman”, “Cedar

71
Ian MacLaren even equates the second-person narrator with the realist reader
(qtd. in Goldman 1993: 29), whose efforts to plot Arachne’s movements are
ultimately thwarted; Eva Darias-Beautell, in an unusual (auto)biographical
reading of the novel, sees her as Arachne’s biographer (2001: 86).
72
Arachne’s last name refers to mantics, the art of divination her mother Lanie
practices, as well as to the praying mantis, the insect that devours her partner
after mating (in a manner similar to Arachne ‘devouring’ her sexual ‘road-
kill’).
73
On the narratological effects of second-person narration, cf. Dieter Meindl’s
essay “You and I: Concerning Second-Person Narrative” (1998).
230 Roads of Her Own

Sleep”, and “Aerial”), for instance, the reader, like the protagonist
herself, is denied an explanation of events. In similar non-linear fa-
shion, the narrated events continually switch between various episodes
from the protagonist’s past on the one hand and the diegetic present of
her life as a sales representative on the other.
Arachne’s mother Lanie is an orphaned British “war bride” (van
Herk 1998/1986: 40-1) who emigrated to Vancouver with Private To-
to Manteia and becomes a reader of tea-leaves, while Toto transforms
into a “shy young man with little education and no special skills”,
working in a sawmill. Pregnant with Arachne, Lanie unhappily looks
“into desultory life; only in movies did characters long for adventure,
follow it, seize it” (63). Gabriel Greenberg, a wealthy customer of La-
nie’s who later bequeaths his Mercedes to Arachne, names the unborn
child. Embodying the arch-angel Gabriel, he visits the pregnant Lanie
at home and detects an “Arachnid”, a “large spider with a belly as ro-
tund as Lanie’s” and “only seven legs. But that did not hinder [the
spider’s] design or ambition” (64) – once Arachne is born, she will
likewise allow no obstacles to obstruct her plans. Lanie takes a job as
a waitress, leaving Arachne “without a mother hovering over her
progress” (66); as a consequence of this lack of parental control,
Arachne grows up a runaway child, climbing fences (31) and disco-
vering her surroundings on her own. Arachne later “isn’t convinced
that she has a mother; Lanie’s connection to her feels tenuous and un-
proven” (28); yet she realizes that “[s]he and Lanie wanted the same
thing” (30): freedom of mobility. In that sense, Arachne continues her
mother’s story.74
Unsurprisingly, Arachne feels stuck both in school – “relentless
captivity” (135) – and the world at large, learning the limits of a gen-
dered spatial economy at age eleven when she tries to get a newspaper
route but is rejected due to her sex (143). From Toto, she learns to
transgress these boundaries imposed upon her: initiating Arachne into
disguise as a practice of resistance, he tricks the newspaper clerk into
giving his daughter a route by getting her a boy’s haircut and renam-
ing her Raki (a nickname her mother continues to use). When she gets

74
My interpretation of Arachne’s relationship to Lanie is not quite as negative as
Susanne Becker’s, who, in a discussion of gothic elements in No Fixed Ad-
dress, detects “gothic doubleness” in the novel’s ever present “imprisoning
mother-daughter relationship” (1992: 121).
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 231

beaten up and robbed by a neighborhood boy in the street, she realizes

that “[t]his then was life. It would never change” (145) and, this time
on her own, takes revenge on the boy (156).75 She leads an all-boy
gang of “misfits and discards” (155), the Black Widows, at age 15,
and gets involved in petty criminality, “celebrat[ing] the end of school
by stealing hubcaps that she sold” (133). At age 19, Toto throws her
out when she suggests Gabriel might be her biological father (128).
She becomes a bus driver in Vancouver and falls in love with
her “savior” (58) Thomas Telfer, a Calgary cartographer of upper-
middle class background and lover of old maps like those that deco-
rate his house.76 Arachne decides to leave Vancouver “without fare-
well” (73) and moves in with Thomas, who helps her find the sales
representative job.77 Although Arachne refuses to wear any underwear
herself, “adamantly determined not to be her own best advertisement”
(6), she is the most successful seller in her company. Driving from
small-town to small-town, she is happy about “traveling to travel” (the
title of one chapter, 132), also almost compulsively embarking on nu-
merous sexual adventures on the road.
During lunch break at a cemetery,78 Arachne meets Josef, an old
Serbian refugee who is infantilized by his daughter and detained at
home most of the time. Having experienced displacement earlier in his

75
As Strobel notes, this scene is adapted from the classic Spanish picaresque
Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), in which a similar street robbery initiates the hero
into picarismo (1998: 217).
76
Thomas’ name recalls the Scottish engineer Thomas Telford (1757-1834), af-
ter whom a form of road pavement, composed of compacted and rolled stones
of various sizes, was named (cf. also Hutcheon 1988: 123).
77
Darias-Beautell convincingly argues that Thomas represents Arachne’s “only
hook to reality and perhaps the text’s only reason for realism” (2001: 92), yet
both are abandoned as the novel progresses (and Arachne ultimately leaves
Thomas). That Arachne sees him as her savior, asking him also to “turn her
into a respectable woman” (van Herk 1998/1986: 137), is not a plea for inner
transformation but for a necessary layer of disguise, as Susanne Becker argues
(1992: 123).
78
The cemetery is a typical setting in Canadian literature, as Margaret Atwood
states: a site of exploring the past for the “symbolic purposes of unity and
identity” and exemplary of a “distinct archaeological motif in Canadian litera-
ture” (2004: 134). That Arachne and Josef – both with a family history of im-
migration behind them – are both drawn to a skull that surfaces from the
ground also marks that they are both explorers of Canada and its past.
232 Roads of Her Own

life, Josef is deprived yet again of the freedom to go and stay where he
pleases. Arachne clearly identifies with him: “She knows nothing of
what he speaks, but she recognizes a chord of the same bitter dis-
placement that she remembers tasting. East-ender Raki shredded by
her own time and place.” (186) Arachne takes Josef with her on the
road to help him escape his home ‘internment’ until she is arrested for
“kidnapping, transportation out of the province and intent to extort”
(191). Thomas bails her out and Arachne starts her flight, first going
west along the Trans-Canada highway into the Rocky Mountains
(198), where she gets stuck overnight in a resort hotel hosting confe-
rences of both fundamentalist Christian women and “Women’s lib-
bers” (204). There, she tricks one woman into giving her a check for
the Mercedes Arachne promises to sell to her, but she escapes in it the
next morning, headed south. Without aim, she changes directions re-
peatedly, winding up at the dead end of an island before taking a ferry
to proceed north. The last twelve episodes depart from a realist narra-
tive mode (see e.g. Lutz/Hindersmann 1991: 15), reflecting Arachne’s
fragmentary consciousness, as she suffers from amnesic fits after an
episode in which she eats fugu at a sushi restaurant.79 Though the last
episode, “Aerial” (52-3), suggests that two geologists she accidentally
meets near Macmillan Pass (“the end of the fucking road for every-
body”, 250) might be undercover policemen who force her into a heli-
copter to take her back to the realm of the l/Law – a possibility com-
pletely disregarded by the critics – the final “Notebook” section of No
Fixed Address presents a different story. The frame narrator’s, trying
to track down Arachne, finds her last traces on a dirt road:

A few miles up the road a flash of color makes you slam on your
brakes. You slide out and step into the ditch, bend to retrieve it. The
panties are gray with dust but their scarlet invitation has not faded.
Ladies’ Comfort. Another few miles and you find a peach pair, then a
turquoise, then sunshine yellows. Each time you stop, shake the dust
from their silky surface and toss them on the seat beside you. There is
no end to the panties; there will be no end to this road. (260; italics in
the original)

79
Fugu is not only the name for a toxic puffer fish, but also recalls fugue, an
amnesic phenomenon: the affected person seems to be conscious, to make ra-
tional decisions, but upon recovery remembers nothing. That the word stems
from the Latin fuga (‘flight’) is perhaps most obvious (see also
Lutz/Hindersmann 1991, who further suggest the musical fugue as yet another
linguistic trace that defers hermeneutic closure).
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 233

The ambiguity of its ending is perhaps the novel’s most ‘carnivales-

que’ moment, in the Bakhtinian sense of a rupture of convention, log-
ic, and the symbolic order (cf. Rabelais and His World, 1968). As I
will discuss in the next chapter (6.1.), the carnivalesque has also been
an important element in the picaresque literary tradition, a tradition
that No Fixed Address has been said to act upon and play with (see,
for instance, the studies of Strobel [1998] and Carrera [1994]). By de-
nying narrative closure to Arachne’s story, the frame narration high-
lights ambiguity instead, suspending the process of interpretation on
the side of the reader: in the end, the book leaves us with questions ra-
ther than answers.

(Un)mapping

Conceptually, mapping and unmapping are central to No Fixed Ad-

dress, as a number of critics have argued (e.g. Darias-Beautell 2001:
152-62). On the one hand, mapping produces orientation necessary for
many forms of travel (especially for the sales representative’s) and
thus helps Arachne with her process of “learning travel” (van Herk
1998/1986: 132) – Arachne “thinks of maps, their legends, their size,
their measurement of distance […], imagining the shape of the map
that would lead her straight home to [Thomas’] house” (37); she ca-
resses Thomas’ maps, “covets them the way he does, images that trace
out hope, mapping an act of faith, a way of saying, I have been here,
someone will follow, so I must leave a guide” (94). The novel is thus
consistent with Canadian literature’s obsession with maps as a neces-
sary instrument of orientation and survival, as Margaret Atwood ob-
serves in her seminal study Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian
Literature of 1972 (2004: 26-7). As Arachne becomes a professional
traveler, however, she finds the maps available to her increasingly un-
helpful: “the roads have potholes, signs are changed, her maps are out
of date […]. Where there were once bridges, there are ferries; where
there were once ferries, the road runs itself into a muddy flat of river.”
(van Herk 1998/1986: 23) As maps capture space and translate it onto
grids on paper, Arachne realizes their unfaithfulness to what they
claim to represent; the map as text cannot guide her anymore and
Arachne develops a radically different relation to space. Her own ver-
sion of (un)mapping subsequently contradicts Thomas’ cartographies,
234 Roads of Her Own

which appear to immobilize both territory and subject: during her

flight, she wishes “she could take Thomas with her, but he is drawn by
his maps, outlined by the lines that shape landscape. Arachne wants to
sink into it.” (214) Arachne wants to explore, not to tame geographical
and psychological space – a profound difference between the settler
and explorer mentalities that Margaret Atwood draws attention to:
“explorers enter chaos and emerge from it; they do not try to impose
order on it” (2004: 144): exploration, like picaresque travel, is also
never-ending: “you can’t find anything or get anywhere permanent”
(ibid. 139).
In No Fixed Address, mapping and cartography are, though not
wholly rejected, reconceptualized in a way that they do not impose
state-sanctioned order and control on geographical space (cf. Hut-
cheon 1988: 124). The map is transformed by Arachne’s “sink[ing] in-
to” the land. The map as product and mapping as process are con-
trasted in Arachne and Thomas: while Thomas orders space by way of
cartographic practice, Arachne’s mode of creating space is rhizomatic;
she does not conceive of herself as the observer, the measurer of land;
rather, she collapses interiority and exteriority, subject and object
space:

From Calgary roads spider over the prairie. Arachne pores over Tho-
mas’ maps, the lines enticing her to quest beyond the city’s radius.
[…] She is learning to travel, the pace and progression of journey, the
multifarious seduction of movement. […] [Thomas] is the author of
those maps but he has never known their ultimate affirmation, the
consummation of the pact between traveler and traveled. He only
draws them; she traces them for him, leaving the pen-line for her pass-
ing. (132)

Thomas maps the roads, Arachne drives them: “His is the product;
hers is the process”, as Linda Hutcheon aptly puts it (1988: 130). The
land is not viewed as a separate entity from Arachne’s perspective as
she develops her spidery qualities of weaving space in a “centrifugal,
uncentered, alternative pattern outside the requirements of ‘shape’ at
the heart of both female underwear and cartography” (Darias-Beautell
2001: 154). Women’s underwear, giving shape and tying the female
body, parallels the instruments of cartography in this way in the text,
as the land parallels Woman’s body. Arachne’s sinking into the land
not in stasis but via movement, as well as her refusal to wear the
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 235

product she represents, is thus also her defiance of Woman’s repre-

sentation:

No Fixed Address’s interrogation of cartography does not only imply a

rejection of […] the map as paradigm of territorial control […], this
questioning also signals an escape from the framing of the female
body/subject. This issue of a double colonization haunts the text […],
subtly alerting the reader to the complicituous relation between West-
ern phallogocentrism and cartography. (Darias-Beautell 2001: 155)80

The topos of Woman as land, Man as traveler is contested by

Arachne’s alternative cartography. Maps, in many of van Herk’s
books and essays, are an important site for challenging the spatial or-
der. With it, colonial and patriarchal legacies are confronted, and
against it, alternative relations to nation, land, and geographical space
are envisioned (Darias-Beautell 2001: 19). Although Arachne’s spatial
practice of para-nomadic wandering uses maps as a means of escape
from systematized, gendered space at first (Goldman 1993: 28), she
consequently radically transforms them into “map-webs”, as Darias-
Beautell calls them (2001: 1), emphasizing the “unbridgeable gap be-
tween drawing (the cartographer) and racing (the traveller), […] be-
tween spatial representation and the specific experience of space in the
text” (ibid. 153).
Unsurprisingly, the protagonist is reluctant to adopt a ‘see-all’
perspective of totality on two separate occasions, in the helicopter epi-
sode at the end of the novel and when Thomas takes her on a hot air
balloon for her birthday (181-2). While intrigued by the view from the
balloon, her thoughts immediately drift back to the ground: she
“thinks of traveling, spidering her own map over the intricate roads of
the world” (182). This difference of perspective is reminiscent of Mi-
chel de Certeau’s famous remarks from the 110th floor of the World
Trade Center, observing New York City:

The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. […] I wonder what
is the source of this pleasure of ‘seeing the whole’, of looking down

80
The notion of phallogocentric cartography does not rely on a biological divi-
sion of men and women into phallogocentric and non-phallogocentric prac-
tice. Women can of course also partake in hegemonic cultural enterprises –
one only has to think of the tradition of female exploration and complicity in
colonial projects.
236 Roads of Her Own

on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts. […] It allows one
to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of
a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this
lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more. […] The voyeur-god created
by this fiction […] must disentangle himself from the murky intert-
wining daily behaviours and make himself alien to them. The ordinary
practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at
which visibility begins. (1988: 91-3)

Arachne dislikes this kind of immobilization, with respect to both her-

self and to the territory she travels. As an arachnid, a spider-figure,
she is a weaver rather than a viewer, “foreign to the ‘geometrical’ or
‘geographical’ space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions”
(de Certeau 1988: 93). On the other hand, spatial practice (i.e., the tac-
tics of lived space), in de Certeau’s view, resists and eludes immobi-
lized “disciplinary space” (96; cf. chapter two in this book). Similarly,
Arachne is intrigued by “webbed maps” (van Herk 1998/1986: 140),
and her spatial practice consists in a weaving of a net-work of roads, a
spatiality transgressing the departure-arrival dichotomy by always
shooting yet another thread, resembling a spider’s restlessness (see
Lutz/Hindersmann 1991: 16, Darias-Beautell 2001: 101):

Arachne travels to travel. Her only paradox is arriving somewhere, her

only solution is to leave for somewhere else. Still, she returns to Tho-
mas. The maps he draws and colors that year are unimaginably beauti-
ful, while Arachne travels a smorgasbord of roads, turning corners at a
whim, seeding the car’s stately body with prairie dust. […] [S]he is
drawn into a canvas; now the road curves this way, now that. […] She
has never been so deep in country […]. (van Herk 1998/1986: 132-3)

In the course of the novel, this being “deep in country” marks the dis-
solution of Arachne’s subjectivity. The collapse of self and space into
each other becomes a threatening experience, resonant with the nega-
tive para-nomadism of Joan Didion’s Maria Wyeth. At this point,
Arachne’s ultimate vanishing in space is foreshadowed: “She’s rele-
gated the leader of the Black Widows to a broom closet, […] the paper
route to childhood, the bus driver to experience. She is not Raki at all
but a tied and tagged creation of a world she doesn’t belong to” (174).
Her para-nomadic spatial deterritorialization is at odds with the
world’s ordering of space, so much so that Arachne’s alienation leads
to disappearance. As Goldman observes, the protagonist’s transforma-
tion, from this rather bleak perspective, draws “relationships among
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 237

mapped and unmapped territory and female identity”; the novel “ex-
amines what happens when women do not ultimately align themselves
with the State” (1993: 27). Yet Arachne’s eventual disappearance is
narrated neither cynically nor nostalgically as is the case with Maria
Wyeth (in Play It as It Lays); rather, van Herk suggests the defiance of
Woman’s (and the landscape’s) conventional textual representation,
envisioning an alternative relation between women and the Canadian
landscape based not on a (masculine) “erotics of space”, the subtitle of
Robert Kroetsch’s 1979 reading of prairie fiction, nor on the literary
representation of geographical space per se (Darias-Beautell 2001:
153). Here, van Herk distances herself from her mentor Kroetsch, who
interprets “The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction” in terms of a
man/motion – woman/stasis opposition, offering a specifically West-
ern-Canadian, feminist alternative (see Kröller 1991: 197). Instead of
symbolic penetration, possession, and taming, van Herk suggests an
experience of merging, a dissolution of borders to be celebrated. In
addition to the novel’s ending, a second episode in which this textual
politics becomes evident is when Arachne and Josef visit a rock
named “Wild Woman”, shaped “like a word volcano”: they “disap-
pear, vanish into another element […]. Arachne looks at the sky, at the
circle of world below them, and begins to dance” (189). From “this
nipple of land on the breast of the world, immensely high and
windswept”, she briefly realizes “she can see everything, everything”,
but then prefers to take Josef’s hand and pull “him with her, down to
one of the hill’s folds, flanked against the nose of the cone. And there
they find the Wild Woman” (189-90). Notably, this “vanish[ing] into
another element” is not depicted as an exclusively “feminine” expe-
rience, yet it is just as significant that the protagonist is accompanied
by an immigrant man: the text thus suggests this approach to the land
– ‘becoming-land’ rather than being apart from it, or inhabiting and
cultivating it as exterior environment – as an alternative to hegemonic
spatial practices, which rest on the exclusion of any ‘Other’.
Apart from the novel’s deterritorializations, another para-
nomadic element consists in the protagonist’s relation to travel. For an
arachnid creature, life rests in the production of webs, of roads for the
spider’s travels and bounty-hunting; thus, like the spider’s, Arachne’s
life on the move is compulsory rather than based on an autonomous
choice for adventure. Already at an early stage in the novel, she tells
238 Roads of Her Own

her “confidante” (124) Thena81 that her car “drives her” (127) rather
than vice versa, and that she loves her sales rep job for the mobility it
provides her with, exceeding, in a circular manner resembling the
spider’s weaving of her web, the limited territory of the bus routes of
Vancouver and Calgary (yet remaining within specific Canadian prai-
rie regions).
Although this territory seems to be Arachne’s natural habitat,
the genderedness of travel inhibits her from feeling at home on the
road:

Arachne wishes that she were a man. Driving seems so much easier
for them, reaching, turning the wheel. She wants to drive a bus be-
cause it is safe […]. Arachne loves to drive, she lives to drive, it is the
only activity that convinces her that life is not static and fuzzy. […]
Driving seems to be the only sensible way to deal with the world. […]
She is infatuated not with machines but with motion, the illusion that
she is going somewhere, getting away. (51-2)

Like her bus driving, all of her traveling jobs confront Arachne with a
gendered spatiality, yet she refuses to abide by spatio-social laws,
aware that as the driver she actively intervenes in this restrictive spa-
tiality. The stereotypical masculine fetish for machines she harbors
early in the novel, resonant with “a legacy of conquest” (P. Nelson-
Limerick), is replaced with a fetish for motion. Driving a city bus and
later her Mercedes, she takes advantage of her role as the driver – to
attract men, for instance (e.g. when she picks up Basilisk, an African-
American pianist, or Thomas), or to escape. As the story develops and
Arachne is charged with having misused her automobility to ‘abduct’
Josef, she recognizes her own compulsion to flee, unable even to stop
and face a trial unlikely to sentence her to imprisonment:

Where is she going? If she stopped to answer that, she would stop
moving, the irrevocable and intractable hum of the tires, the swish of
wind through the open window, the hot smell of the car’s upholstery

81
The Thena-character is very close to the implied author, figuring as the major
source for the researcher and insisting, in her interview, on Arachne not being
dead (cf. 195); in a metafictional commentary, we further read: “Only Thena
knows the whole truth. For what is a traveller without a confidante? It is im-
possible to fictionalize a life without someone to oversee the journey.” (125)
Clearly, van Herk also follows the picaresque convention of confidante-
characters here.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 239

and the pedals under her feet providing the impetus, the urgency to
continue, follow the carved pavement, the twist of metal guard rails on
and on and on. Farther, not toward but away, on the one hand the im-
age of the old man’s face […]; and on the other hand the image of he
concrete cell where she spent the night, and all for giving that one old
man a small escape. She does not think of where he must be now. She
drives relentlessly, driving in and out of herself, a fierce evasion that
can bring her nowhere but is itself enough. (222)

Perhaps a dire consequence of her extreme horror of immobility and

rest, Arachne imagines a new geographical space in the north, an im-
agined territory she could “settle in, colonize. But what has she to of-
fer to a raw place?” (248). The mere thought of colonization seems so
at odds with herself that again, Arachne can only think of moving.82
Wondering “if there are other roads, or if she has reached the last, the
final one” (ibid.), she intuitively continues her escape north, a plot de-
velopment that suggests that the notion of destination is beyond her
imagination, for her movement is without aim and does not follow the
logic of departure and arrival.
Two possible readings of No Fixed Address’ ending have been
proposed, one in which van Herk’s female hero Arachne Manteia dies,
another in which she merely disappears.83 As contradictory as the end-
ing’s interpretations might appear at first glance, both acknowledge
that the female hero cannot and will not be captured – both diegetical-
ly and narratively. Echoing postmodern detective fiction, the narrative
does not fill the gaps in the story and offer a ‘bigger picture’ in which
all questions are answered and the mystery (in this case, Arachne as
“missing”) is resolved. Instead, disappearance is suggested as the suc-
cessful end-point of the attempt to escape the social and symbolic or-
ders. We will never know whether the geologists are undercover po-
licemen, whether Arachne is arrested or escapes; closure is denied to
both her traveling and to her story as these become one: Arachne (and,
by extension, the female subject per se) is alive only while moving;

82
Echoed here is van Herk’s uneasiness with notions of conquest, colonization,
and the frontier that she has expressed in a 1995 interview (Rocard 1995: 90).
83
The former conclusion is suggested in the readings of No Fixed Address by
Goldman (1993: 29) and Hutcheon (1988: 125), while Carrera (1994: 438) as
well as Lutz and Hindersmann (1991: 19-20) point out the protagonist’s defeat
of death. The ending’s ambiguity is acknowledged, however, by all of these
studies.
240 Roads of Her Own

the text envisions her as a figure who cannot be pinned down, who de-
fies conventional narration and thus cannot be captured by the striated
spatial and linguistic regime of the phallogocentric system.84 Similar
to the linguistic signifier in poststructuralist thought and reminiscent
of Cynthia Kadohata’s Floating World, the protagonist is a metaphor
of the ‘floating signifier’, created by a never-ending process of defer-
ral that will infinitely produce traces. Thus, the ending’s ambiguity
must necessarily remain so both on the diegetic and metatextual level:
Arachne will be forever a “missing person” (e.g. 1), neither (or both)
dead nor alive.85 Her status cannot be ascertained as she is continually
escaping from the l/Law of State and society (in the diegesis) as well
as that of narrative closure, gender, and genre (metatextually). Not
even the second-person frame narrator, who researches the protagon-
ist’s whereabouts, has any authority over Arachne’s story – quite to
the contrary, she is finally trapped by her object of study, who tricks
the narrator to abandon her search for “the real story” (195) and to
follow her into the unknown, just like the reader is lured from conven-
tional beginnings into the uncertainties of postmodern fiction.86 Again,
this is a markedly gendered appropriation of a tradition of exploration,
of “venturing into the unknown” (Atwood 2004: 135) in either a psy-

84
With Spivak (1983: 170), phallogocentrism can be defined as a structure of
argument centered on the sovereignty of the engendering self and the determi-
nacy of meaning. Jacques Derrida’s emphasis on the trace works against this
structure, focusing on the indeterminacy of meaning instead.
85
As Linda Hutcheon states, this act of simultaneously rewriting and challeng-
ing subjectivity has been one of the major forces in rendering postmodernism
a paradoxical enterprise for feminists (1988: 6). In this context, note also the
cyclical structure of the novel, which begins and ends with the frame narra-
tor’s “Notebook on a Missing Person”.
86
Following Howells (2004: 204), I would argue here that the unknown refers
much more to the “unknown” possibilities of women’s textual (self-) repre-
sentation than to the space where “the mapped road ends in northwestern Can-
ada” that Hutcheon proposes (1988: 127). While it is true that the roads in the
north are no longer “concrete” (in both meanings of the term) but have turned
into disordered and shifting gravel paths – and thus from striated into smooth
space – Arachne finds, at the end of her story, a bronze marker pin from the
National Geodetic Survey in the northern wilderness, bearing Thomas’ insig-
nia. Her prior overlooking of a “valley untouched, unexplored, uncivilized”
(van Herk 1998/1986: 253) is thus starkly contrasted by her realization that al-
legedly “blank” spaces have seized to exist, as even the “wilderness” has un-
dergone colonization.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 241

chological, cultural, or geographical sense, in Canadian literature (ib-

id. 136).

Arachnology

The un-fixing and deterritorialization of (traditional representations

of) Woman also presents the context in which van Herk rewrites the
mythological story of the Lydian weaver Arachne, who challenges the
goddess Athena, parthogenetically conceived from Zeus’ forehead, to
a weaving contest in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.87 While Athena pleases
the gods with her weaving, Arachne exposes the Olympian gods’ le-
chery, which drives Athena into such a rage that she finally transforms
Arachne into a spider, condemning her to continue weaving forever.88
For one, the hostility between Athena and Arachne is rewritten in No
Fixed Address as friendship, “in order to correct [the myth’s] fatalism
and its prejudiced view of female relationships” (Kröller 1991: 196-7),
yet without collapsing difference:89 Thena upholds a middle-class life-
style, even though she is definitely more radical and disillusioned in
her view of men than Arachne, thus reversing Athena’s role of pro-
tecting patriarchy (Strobel 1998: 222). Yet they are “equally disillu-
sioned with the world” (van Herk 1998/1986: 114): thus, van Herk
implicitly endorses women’s solidarity across lines of difference, at
least on an individual level (while ridiculing feminist groups based on
sameness such as the Christians conferring to “talk about women’s
ministry in the world”, 202; notably, these groups appear in the en-
closed interior of a hotel; cf. Becker 1992: 127).
Second, by sending Arachne on the road, van Herk’s book has
her break away from conventional ideas of domesticity, symbolized
by the loom. Instead, the text “weav[es] [her] into the Canadian land-

87
As Karin Beeler states in the introduction to the 1998 edition of No Fixed Ad-
dress, the revision of mythical and Biblical female characters is an ongoing
enterprise in van Herk’s fiction and women’s writing in general, an endeavor
to foreground women’s experiences as well as to rewrite classical representa-
tions of Woman.
88
My sources for recounting this classical story were the essay by
Lutz/Hindersmann (1991: 15-6) and Darias-Beautell’s study (2001).
89
The chapter in which Arachne and Thena are contrasted is entitled “And dif-
ference”.
242 Roads of Her Own

scape” (Beeler 1998: ii) and transforms the loom into the (spinning)
wheel of the car. Arachne’s weaving is no longer emblematic of pa-
triarchal oppression (here, the prohibition against criticizing the fa-
ther-god Zeus); she also does not wear the woven goods that have tra-
ditionally tied and bound women’s bodies into separate spheres (Da-
rias-Beautell 2001: 19) – Ladies’ Comfort Ltd. underwear – but sells
them. The comic un-weaving of the story of fashion as a potential ac-
complice in women’s oppression – “important to remember” (van
Herk 1998/1986: 3) – is therefore another emancipatory aspect of No
Fixed Address. As we are told by the second-person narrator in the
novel’s prologue: “We have forgotten our imprisonment, relegated
underwear to the casual and unimportant. […] No art, no novel, no
catalogue of infamy has considered he effect of underwear on the lives
of petty rogues” (3) – thus starts the story of van Herk’s ‘petty rogue’
protagonist. Her condemnation to endless weaving is transformed
from a verdict into an asset, ethnological nomadism into para-nomadic
writing, as she captures “road jockeys”, her sexual ‘prey’, in the im-
aginary net she is ‘spinning’ with the wheels of her black Mercedes
(e.g. 19, 84), a “magic” car (127), a “blessing from the past, one ta-
lisman against her uncertain future” (58). But not only is the car a
symbol of sexual and socio-spatial emancipation, allowing Arachne to
expand the radius of her operations as well as her professional suc-
cess, it is also erotically charged for the protagonist (Lutz/Hinders-
mann 1991: 17), a “vibrating machine” (van Herk 1998/1986: 208)
that constantly reminds her of the erotic adventures of the road.90
Spider, spinning wheel, loom, and shuttle are dissociated from
their historical domestic emplacement, and likewise, women’s fiction
is dissociated from the domestic novel, now playing with (convention-
ally masculine) Canadian prairie fiction and road novels, as well as
with the picaresque tradition (cf. also Carrera’s essay, 1994). This is
the third and perhaps most significant aspect of the rewritten mythical
spiderwoman Arachne: storytelling itself as the weaving and un-
weaving, the territorialization and deterritorialization, of words. It is

90
While Lutz’ and Hindersmann’s reading of the car in the novel as an affirma-
tion of the American dream on the one hand and a “gender-specific refutation
of the male dream” (1991: 17) sounds somewhat confused, their indication of
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman as an intertext for No Fixed Address is
important in the context of a feminine appropriation of the car as a symbol of
fetishization and mobility.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 243

perhaps not a coincidence that Nancy K. Miller, in a 1986 essay that

examines theoretical works by Freud, Barthes, and J. Hillis Miller, has
termed her conception of feminist textual practice “Arachnologies”:91

[W]e are now emphasizing, in the tissue, the generative idea that the
text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving; lost in this tis-
sue – this texture – the subject unmakes himself, like a spider dissolv-
ing in the constructive secretions of [her] web. […] The subject in this
model is not fixed in time or space, but suspended in a continual mo-
ment of fabrication. (1986: 270)

Recalling Roland Barthes’ erasure of the author-subject, this is what

Miller calls “hyphology” (hyphos being the tissue and the spider’s
web, ibid. 270). By contrasting this hyphology, then, with an “arach-
nology”, Miller tries to bring the “writerly” back into textual practice
by recasting the author-subject as a spiderwoman “against the weave
of indifferentiation to discover the embodiment in writing of a gen-
dered subjectivity” (271). Miller’s essay reads like a response, from a
feminist philosopher’s perspective, to poststructuralist literary theory
of the 1970s and 80s, which was often perceived as countering literary
criticism’s emerging problematization of the author/artist as a gen-
dered being. For Miller, thus, the “task of feminist criticism [is] to
read for Arachne […], for emblems of a female signature, […] to re-
store woman to her text” (287) and to therefore construct “a poetics at-
tached to gendered bodies that may have lived in history” (288).92
At first glance at least, and against this arachnology, van Herk’s
novel seems to be more of a hyphological kind (Darias-Beautell 2001:
226), concerned with the textual web itself and the complete erasure
of notions such as subject, identity, and center (cf. Strobel’s reading of
the novel), rather than with the embodiment of a gendered subjectivity
in literature. That No Fixed Address attacks these concepts is certainly
true; however, van Herk’s staging of the ‘death of the author’ works
not within, but rather against Barthes’ framework: weaving the
second-person narrator along with the reader into the making of fic-
91
Miller’s essay is referred to briefly also by Strobel (1998: 235) and exten-
sively by Darias-Beautell (2001: 223-7).
92
Miller’s claim to a “female signature” leans heavily on Hélène Cixous’ notion
of l’écriture feminine (though Cixous is not mentioned in her essay). For a
reading of No Fixed Address in the context of French feminist theory, cf. esp.
Strobel (1998: 236-55).
244 Roads of Her Own

tion by using the (in)difference of the pronoun “you” in the “Note-

book on a Missing Person”, No Fixed Address renders the distinction
between author/narrator and reader impossible (cf. Hutcheon 1988:
131-2, Strobel 1998: 248-50) – not by erasing, but by interweaving
the two and thus practicing Miller’s “arachnology”. This parallels the
interweaving of mythical and diegetic past and present – which often
become indistinguishable, Arachne having “no fixed address” in this
play of intra- and extra-diegetic levels. Implied author and narrator, in
turn, are conflated in the first and last chapter, when it is revealed that
we are following someone interested in women’s fashion whose rela-
tion to Arachne is based on a newspaper article about her disappear-
ance, the incentive not only for tracing her wanderings but also for the
narration.
As the main part of the novel is the invention of a non-
omniscient narrator (Strobel 1998: 231) who mostly disappears behind
the story, the narrator herself has thus “no fixed address”. As Katja
Strobel argues, the “missing person” then refers to both Arachne and
the first-person narrator, the grammatical first-person:

Die Negation des sprechenden/erzählenden Ichs erweist sich so als

Negation des Subjekts, das sich nicht nur als Ich, als Ursprung seiner
Rede bzw. seines Texts und Garant seiner Bedeutung in der Ordnung
der Zeichen etabliert, sondern die Geschlossenheit der grammatischen
ersten Person in sein Selbstverständnis als außersprachliche Person,
als einheitliches Subjekt seines nicht-sprachlichen Wollens und Han-
delns überträgt. Daß gerade diese Vorstellung von Subjekthaftigkeit in
No Fixed Address radikal verabschiedet wird, zeigt sich, über die Auf-
lösung der Figuren […] des Texts hinaus, an der Verabschiedung des
Ichs als sprachlichem Repräsentanten des Subjekts […]. (1998: 233)93

93
“The negation of the speaking/narrating I thus proves to be a negation of the
subject, which establishes itself not only as an I, as originator of its speech or
its texts and guarantor of meaning in the order of signs, but which confers the
consolidation of the grammatical first person onto its self-conception as an ex-
tralinguistic person, as the unitary subject of its non-linguistic desires and
acts. That it is this particular concept of subjectivity which is radically aban-
doned in No Fixed Address can be seen, in addition to the dissolution of the
characters […], in the dismissal of the I as a linguistic representative of the
subject […].” In the following, all translations from Strobel’s book are my
own.
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 245

Drawing on this reading, the “ultimate frontier” the frame narrator

mentions (van Herk 1998/1986: 258) thus refers perhaps more to the
potential of feminist postmodern aesthetics and literary representation
than to any geographical region:

This is the ultimate frontier, a place where the civilized melt away and
the meaning of mutiny is unknown, where manners never existed and
family backgrounds are erased […]. You’ll be nowhere, at the end of
a road built by the American army […]. You have fallen off the edge.
There is no ocean or continent beyond, only the enormity of spectrum
and range and latitude of, dear God, four-dimensional nothingness.
[…] Although you know you must turn back, you continue, no longer
on a quest for an ill-defined traveler but for the infinite anguish of un-
civilized territory. You’ve lit out and now you can’t stop. (ibid. 258-9)

The quest for the female subject is abandoned for what the narrator
characterizes, tongue-in-cheek, as ‘uncivilized’, unexplored territory,
as any notion of self as a knowable identity derived from difference
from an-Other is progressively denied in No Fixed Address; bounda-
ries between self and other are gradually liquefied (Strobel calls this
“progressive Selbstentgrenzung” [“progressive self-delimitation”];
1998: 226). With narrative authority and unity displaced and self and
subjectivity dismantled, the title of the novel refers not only to the
protagonist’s para-nomadic, anti-centric mobility and overall picares-
que shiftiness – which disavows concepts of home, arrival, or settle-
ment – but also to (implied) author, narrator, and (implied) reader, all
of whom can only follow the traces of difference (“arachnological”
embodiment rests, it appears, in the fact that all three dimensions are
constructed as female; cf. Hutcheon 1988: 131). That these traces lead
the reader into the Arctic north of Western Canada is all the more tell-
ing in view of van Herk’s conception of the North as a space of poly-
vocality that forecloses essentialism by an often conflicting jumble of
narrative and narrated voices (cf. van Herk’s essay “Piloting North”,
qtd. in Rosenthal 2004: 306).94
Van Herk’s un-weaving and unmaking of the traditional distinc-
tions in literary theory and practice notwithstanding, No Fixed Ad-

94
One could argue here that van Herk’s is a highly idealized, romantic notion of
the North, although the geodetic survey marker Arachne finds indicates oth-
erwise, as I have argued above (for a further discussion of this issue, cf.
Darias-Beautell 2001: 160).
246 Roads of Her Own

dress subtly creates, I would argue, the “poetics attached to gendered

bodies” Nancy K. Miller (1986) argues for. Not only are the main cha-
racters, narrator and author women – men are displaced from the narr-
ative center, the center as such under erasure – the “we” of the prolo-
gue unambiguously calls upon women’s representation in texture and
text: “We have come to be what we are after years of changes in cut
and color, drapery and form adapted and re-adapted in variations on
camouflage […], the goal, it is important to remember, to aid physical
attractiveness, a standard inevitably decided by men” (van Herk
1998/1986: 2). Woman has been fashioned in this way to appear as a
“Leerstelle” (Strobel 1998: 233), an empty place in language, yet No
Fixed Address uses this emptiness to create a feminine text that plays
with this distinct literary and cultural legacy. Ultimately, then, the
novel’s critique, on a metatextual level, is of a patriarchal structuring
of society in terms of hierarchies, centers and margins, presence and
absence. From this perspective, flight refers to a flight from the sym-
bolic order and thus from a society that rests upon the unambiguous
location of the subject. Thus, gendered space, as a concept, must tran-
scend physical and social space to also include the symbolic and lin-
guistic realm in this context, as the text transgresses established gen-
dered boundaries not only in the geographic sense (on the diegetic
level) but also, metatextually, in the context of language and (wom-
en’s) writing, voicing the paradox of a “doubled act of (literally) ‘in-
scribing’ and challenging subjectivity” (Hutcheon 1988: 6).

Enter Picara: Drive(s) and Amorous Journeys

In van Herk’s postmodern road narrative, a number of picaresque

elements, in interaction with the para-nomadic features outlined in
chapter five, are constitutive of the critique of (b)orders based on phal-
logocentric binary relations (such as that of center vs. margin). Most
obviously perhaps, Arachne is linked to the traditional female rogue
by the nickname her parents use, Raki, reverberant of the English
“rake”, a “dissolute or profligate and usually licentious man [sic]; a
roué; a libertine”, according to Webster’s College Dictionary. The
nickname is programmatic in two ways: for one, Arachne’s rakishness
results in a series of petty crimes, from lying and dishonest money-
making to kidnapping, characteristics also of the traditional picara
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 247

(Strobel 1998: 218).95 Arachne has a “troublemaker’s nature” (van

Herk 1998/1986: 80) that renders her, together with her class back-
ground (see above) and non-conformist behavior, a social outcast; she
dismisses normative gender expectations not only by her ‘unfeminine’
jobs, but also by her sexual and social behavior (Hutcheon 1988: 128).
Her ‘troublemaking’ is also linked to her sexual desire, a typical ele-
ment of the picaresque,96 upon which Arachne seldom hesitates to act:
she “has a needling gaze; she uses it with a disregard that has always
gotten her in trouble.” (van Herk 1998/1986: 10-1)
The double meaning of “drive” as verb and noun that appears
repeatedly in the book points to the importance of sexual desire as a
motivating force for Arachne’s travels: when her friend Thena asks
her what she was actually doing on the road, Arachne retorts: “‘I just
drive around the country. I ran into that carnival’. How can she ex-
plain her inordinate lust to drive, to cover road miles, to use up gas?
There is no map for longing.” (138) Again, the map is exposed in its
illusory claim to truthful representation; an instrument of cartography,
it is incapable of charting, directing, or merely representing female de-
sire. Challenging prescribed social standards – in terms of both law-
fulness and gender roles – van Herk’s main character’s unruly sexual
behavior partakes in the postmodern transformation of the picaresque
tradition: sex no longer functions as an instrument for upward social
mobility (as it did in Moll Flanders, for instance), but is the postmo-
dern picara’s playground in her game of defiance. As Darias-Beautell
notes, No Fixed Address’ “questioning of literal and metaphorical
framings of the female body/subject as well as its daring presentation
of a politics of sexual desire provide a co-ordinated challenge to the
absence of female sexuality in Western discourse” (2001: 87). Al-
though the picaresque tradition usually has portrayed, at least to a cer-

95
My reading does not see Arachne going beyond picaresque roguery by killing
a man, as Darias-Beautell suggests (2001: 96). In the revenge episodes (“Ac-
cidents of Birth” and “Ambush”), she robs and knocks out – literally immobi-
lizes – her enemies; in the ferry episode (“Ferryman”), the “man” she stabs
with a hatpin is the mythical ferryman across the river Styx; Arachne defeats
him and remains, for the rest of the book, in the interstice between life and
death.
96
Cf. Monteser: “The contrast between the high flights of poetry about love and
the simple fact of sexual intercourse form a satirical contrast which is one of
the strongest of all picaresque effects.” (1975: 17)
248 Roads of Her Own

tain extent, women’s sexual behavior (a detail Darias-Beautell fails to

mention here), the picara, except for a few exceptions,97 is usually mo-
rally judged (again, cf. Moll Flanders). As Carrera explains:

The picaresque, in its traditional formula, contains examples of fe-

males, but their discourses are usually filtered through the moralizing
voice of a male narrator or the exemplary outcome of their adventures
[…]. It is only in the 20th century that a few pícaras begin to speak
freely. But even today, the genre in its modified form is strongly asso-
ciated with mobile men, as shown in the fact that No Fixed Address
was immediately compared to Kerouac’s On the Road. (1994: 433)

Van Herk thus transforms the picaresque also by relegating moral

judgment to minor characters (such as Lanie and Thena), but also by
denying closure to Arachne’s errancy as well as the story that is told.98
Thus, the narrative abstains from punishing Arachne by refusing to
narratively fix her into one place.
Speaking of picaresque sexuality, it is important to note that the
para-nomadic compulsion to move, resulting from Arachne’s mythical
sentence to endlessly weave the road like a spider as punishment for
her taunting of the social order, is turned, by means of sexual desire,
into a series of road adventures full of (wander)lust and pleasure. The
men Arachne picks up on the road are usually attracted by her Mer-
cedes, and she uses the stereotypical car-fetishism of men who “are
led to their cars like conquerors” (van Herk 1998/1986: 125) for her
own interest (thus also the car’s libidinous cathexis for herself), there-

97
Both Strobel (throughout her study) and Darias-Beautell (2001: 89) note that
in its earliest Spanish versions, the picaresque sometimes was void of the
moralist undertone later considered characteristic of the genre.
98
Cf. Strobel: “Im Medium einer literarischen Gattung, in der die Vagabunden
zu Pikaros bzw. Pikaras werden, kann das erzählte geographische und soziale
Mäandern der Figuren – bezeichnenderweise vor allem der weiblichen Figu-
ren – auf der Ebene des Erzählens im Mäandern der Zeichen und ihrer Bedeu-
tung nicht nur reflektiert werden, vielmehr wird hier den Leser/innen die ‘vag-
rancy of the signifier’ [Taylor Berry’s term] als solche vorgeführt.” (“In the
medium of a literary genre in which vagabonds become picaros or picaras, the
narrated geographic and social meandering of the characters – significantly
predominantly the female characters – on the level of narration is not only po-
tentially reflected in the meandering of signs and their significations; much
rather, the ‘vagrancy of the signifier’ as such is demonstrated to the reader.”
[1998: 254])
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 249

by turning the logic of gendered space upside down:99 When she

leaves for Calgary with Thomas, they “trembl[e] with desire. Put them
alone in an enclosed space and they begin to leak, to steam, to breathe
shallow and unsteady” (77). Thomas, however, enclosed in the womb-
like vessel, resents losing control: “Thomas is furious with himself for
what he perceives as lack of control, an uncivilized reaction” that goes
against upper-middle class decency of “social foreplay” (ibid.). He
blames the car: “the car contributes, having to sit with her in this en-
closed space without hope of relief for hundreds of miles. She is tanta-
lizingly close, he is saturated in her smell” (77-8). Thomas notices
Arachne’s difference here in terms of what could be called class ex-
oticism – “[n]ot the smell of women he is familiar with; they exude
perfume and antiperspirant, the faint turpentine of expensive makeup
[…]. Not the texture of the women he has always known, but the
darker glaze of those who keep their skin as substitute for fur.” (78)
Thomas links Arachne’s body to the animal realm here, to the natural,
the bestial, the wild and ‘uncivilized’. In her sexual appetite, Arachne
conforms to Thomas’ perception, and although Thomas becomes her
“Apocryphal lover” (89), a person of uncertain origins like herself
whom she (thus?) fully trusts and always returns to, she will not re-
strain this appetite: “Occasionally Thomas’ love hits hard enough to
make her wish herself different; she swears she will give up road
jockeys and traveling, sell the Mercedes and buy a Ford, stop taking
the pill and get pregnant, subscribe to ladies’ magazines” (89). Here,
class and gender differences construe a moment of transdifferential
conflict for the protagonist: her affiliation with Thomas (and thus
middle-class norms of gender roles) runs counter to her independence
as a working, sexually unbound woman. Although Thomas never
pressures Arachne to marry him, the middle-class stipulation of seal-
ing the heterosexual love-relationship by marriage nevertheless exerts
distress on her. Aware of the fact that her lifestyle is at odds with
middle-class respectability, Arachne nevertheless does not change her
behavior; thus, she spurns love not on an emotional level but as an
ideologically saturated discursive system which potentially transforms
mobile, independent women into ladies’ magazines’ readers who
“would spend hours making casseroles and buying laundry soap” (90).
99
As Arachne rewrites the alignment of machine and (colonial) conquest, this
subversion also relates to van Herk’s critique of relations to land based on co-
lonial possession.
250 Roads of Her Own

The Death of the Déclassée

Sexuality has lost its traditional function as a means for the picara to
ascend on the social ladder, as Arachne shows no desire to belong to
the (upper) middle class. Quite to the contrary, Thomas’ upper-middle
class background scares Arachne, his house reminding her again of
her originary and perpetual social displacement (voiced already in her
doubts about her parentage): “She does not belong here. She will nev-
er belong here. Respectable men do not adopt stray women who have
no abilities except their bodies” (van Herk 1998/1986: 92). The pover-
ty of the conventional picaro is matched by Arachne’s interstitial so-
cial situation (“a major cause for both her vulnerability and her tough-
ness”, Hutcheon avers in The Canadian Postmodern [1988: 128]): al-
ways out of place, Arachne’s choice, unlike van Herk’s rewriting of
Canadian colonial and gender narratives, is not appropriation – the
creation of a feeling of social and spatial belonging by conquest, ad-
justment or subversion – but disguise. Remaining painfully aware of
her originary displacement, Arachne merely passes while remaining
displaced by a multiplicity of differences.
When Arachne attends Basilisk’s piano concert, her own preca-
rious social position is reflected back by a man of African descent
who does not meet her stereotypical expecations: she had “fit […] him
into the scheme of stereotypes she has absorbed, seeing him picking
jazz in a café, like Sam in Casablanca” (van Herk 1998/1986: 57) and
is suddenly stunned by the black man’s talents, the “razor blades of
his damnable breeding, his culture, his learnedness” (56):

For days Arachne is shredded. She drives the bus. She eats, she sleeps
with frozen limbs, knowing that she has been snatched from the edge
of a chasm with nothing to spare, that the looseness in her stomach is
the closest she will come. To what? Dissatisfaction? She is perpetually
dissatisfied, she has always been dissatisfied. Ambition? To better
herself, to culture herself? What good would it do? She only knows
that she has stepped perilously close to another knowledge. And that is
dangerous.
She will drive the bus and stay out of trouble. (57)

The dangerous knowledge here, associated with the looseness in

Arachne’s stomach, arguably refers to the possibility of her falling in
love with Basilisk – another mythical creature with a death-bearing
gaze both in fable and in No Fixed Address (where he “doesn’t charge
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 251

at her, barge into her. He just looks, as if he gets more pleasure look-
ing at her body than he would handling it”, 53). The peril, however, is
one of class aspiration. Knowing she will never be able to be ‘cul-
tured’ like Basilisk, Arachne resolves, at this point, to remain the si-
lent bus driver, whose uniform keeps her at a distance from the pas-
sengers. Nevertheless, personal confrontation with members of the
‘cultured’ upper middle class (such a Thomas’ family) is painful for
Arachne:

Arachne knows she is working-class. She has never thought of her

narrow life as disabled. She is concerned with survival, self-
protection. She knows what pleasure is: the coil of urgency in her
breast when she’s driving […]. All the other urges in her life have
come from hunger: to be fed, clothed, loved, to possess this thing or
that. […] The idea [of Thomas as her lover] is insidious as disease.
What does she think? That she can become middle class, respectable,
a wife, a mother […]? With her inclinations? With her background?
(59-60)

With Thomas’ help, Arachne continues her bus driver’s strategy of

distancing herself by surface camouflage that facilitates passing.100 In
congruence with the picaresque tradition, shape-shifting becomes her
great talent, in spite of – or perhaps due to – its side effects of dissolv-
ing (female) subjectivity:

She is herself puzzled at the persona who steps in, takes over, the
mask that falls into place when she pushes open the myriad general-
store doors. Is it the challenge of a role? Is it her love for disguise? Or
a reversion to some innate gene that she does not know she has inhe-
rited, that of a bourgeois shopkeeper eager to do business […]? There
are moments, standing in a plain dress with black pumps, her hair
combed, her nails clean, jotting down an order, when she does not be-
lieve that the body she inhabits is hers. (154)

100
Arachne’s clothes, worn neither for reasons of self-expression nor aesthetic
considerations, can be said to function performatively, in Judith Butler’s
terms, with gender (and class!) identity as merely an effect of repeated social
practices (linked to women’s underwear and fashion in the prologue to van
Herk’s novel). Arachne’s unease with Thomas’ help is expressed a little later:
“She wonders […] if she should have let Thomas manage her […]. She is dis-
gusted by women who need men to rescue them.” (114)
252 Roads of Her Own

By Arachne’s questioning of even her origins, difference is not in-

scribed gradually by an external reality in the course of the novel but
is always already inherent in Arachne, echoing what Gayatri Spivak
(1983) has called the categorical “displacement” of Woman. Finally,
Arachne metamorphoses into a spider (a reading suggested by the fu-
gu episode, as Darias-Beautell notes [2001: 97-8], as well as by the
protagonist’s mythical namesake) and can even live among the dead,
as seen when she confers with a drowned World-War-II soldier on the
western ocean shore (cf. van Herk 1998/1986: 243-5).
Even death, the ultimate boundary or ‘neither/nor’ difference, is
thus defied; as a metaphor for the unknown, the radically Other (cf.
Strobel 1998: 228), it also unites the mythical and the fantastic with
the realist narrative. Arachne’s initial refusal to drive westward (cf.
van Herk 1998/1986: 35) stems from her fear of enclosure and immo-
bility associated with the coast, the fear of death as well as of return-
ing, at least geographically, to her Vancouver past (Darias-Beautell
2001: 156). Thus, when Arachne finally decides to go west after all,
her “inevitable direction” (van Herk 1998/1986: 237), it is clear that
the ‘death of the subject’ is imminently at hand. Shortly after surviv-
ing the ferryman’s rape attack, Arachne suffers another episode of
amnesia; she “is afraid now that sleep might become permanent. […]
If she pulls over and sleeps, will she wake up or will she be truly
dead?” (ibid.) When she reaches Canada’s westernmost point and
meets the dead soldier, she might be ‘dead’ in her fictional universe,
but remains neither dead nor alive in the narrative as she instead be-
comes a “missing” person. As such, she crosses back onto the main-
land and, feeling uneasy about her journey, starts heading north: “This
is the edge; not end but edge, the border, the brink, the selvage of the
world. She can no longer go west. She is going north now but that will
end soon; she has retraced her steps into this ultimate impasse and
reached not frontier but ocean, only inevitable water.” (239)101
Van Herk suggests that the ‘death of the centered subject’, im-
plied by the acknowledgment of radical, internal difference in both
101
Wilderness, North, water – these are the habitual settings for Canadian rom-
ances that Margaret Atwood opposes to realistic, ironic, or comic modes
(2004: 137), but I would argue that van Herk consciously plays with these ge-
neric boundaries, as we can find elements of the romance, the realistic, the
ironic, and the comic narrative mode in No Fixed Address. On the association
of women and water in Canadian literature, cf. Hutcheon (1986: 220-1).
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 253

subjectivity and language, does not foreclose but rather opens up new
directions in writing: North instead of West, a turn to the Canadian
tradition of journeying rather than the American, experimental literary
exploration rather than inscription into a masculine formula of prairie
fiction and Westerns. Again, it is not a “belonging to” but a radical
“decentering of” that is at stake here; the picaresque subject no longer
‘authors’ herself (Strobel 1998: 233) as the I dissolves into multiple
lines of flight associated with female creativity and set against histori-
cal ideas of ‘masculine’ authorship.102
In this context, as Strobel also argues (1998: 219), No Fixed
Address digresses from the classical picaresque in that Arachne’s
transgressions do not result from her desire to belong or a motivation
for social ascent, which is exposed as impossible (cf. the above quote).
Arachne demonstrates that any attempt to overcome her radical, origi-
nary difference – ‘difference without identity’ – by creating a home or
a sense of belonging would be futile. Thus, the protagonist’s changing
camouflage is merely the means to pass, to quickly adapt to her sur-
roundings, and not to become part of it:

Die räumliche und soziale Mobilität der Pikaros […] ist [ungleich der
klassischen pikaresken Bewegung von den Rändern ins gesellschaftli-
che Zentrum seit dem 18. Jahrhundert] in van Herks Roman in ihrer
ursprünglichen Bedeutung erhalten, nämlich die Nicht-Einnahme ei-
ner festen gesellschaftlichen Position und Identität. […] Arachne
[wird] als proteische Figur konzipiert, die im permanenten Rollenspiel
aufgeht, […] sich vom Wechsel des Glücks und von spontanen Impul-
sen treiben läßt. (Strobel 1998: 220)103

102
As Strobel notes (1998: 235-7), van Herk’s construction of female creativity
on poststructuralist terms in No Fixed Address is resonant with contemporary
feminist philosophy’s ideas on this issue, from Cixous’ écriture féminine to
Kristeva’s semiotic chora. That such conceptions of creativity are linked to
female desire gives further meaning to Arachne’s libidinous relationship to
her car, the instrument for her creation of space.
103
“The spatial and social mobility of the picaro […] is [unlike the classical pica-
resque movement from the margins into the center of society since the 18th
century] retained in its original significance in van Herk’s novel, i.e. in the
non-adoption of a fixed social position and identity. […] Arachne [is] concep-
tualized as a protean character that is absorbed in permanent role-play, […]
that lets herself be driven by change of luck and spontaneous impulses.”
254 Roads of Her Own

As social mobility, always parallel to spatial mobility in the picares-

que tradition, can no longer offer a destination in the postmodern pica-
resque, geographical movement, too, cannot retain a clear sense of
orientation. The point is to move between and across a differential or-
der rather than upwards within that order.
Thus, the social criticism voiced by the picara does not concern
concrete reality in as much as it is directed toward those structural
principles that order the subject into hierarchies of classes, genders,
and other social categories (see ibid.). As these lines of difference in-
tersect throughout the novel – Arachne’s displacement concerns both
class and gender – they are similar targets of critique, whose initial
destabilization might be seen as resulting from these transdifferential
moments in which differences intersect, collide, and overlap. Thus,
structural principles of center-margin (and similar binary) distinctions
are destabilized:

Arachnes fortwährende Durchkreuzung geographischer und sozialer

Räume, ihre ständige Überschreitung der Markierungen, die diese
Räume gegeneinander abgrenzen und in ihrer Abgrenzung identifi-
zierbar machen, wird als subversiver Prozeß präsentiert, als Auflösung
einer Ordnung, die auf Etablierung und Sicherung von Grenzen be-
ruht. (Strobel 1998: 221)104

That traditional language use and storytelling is viewed as a gatekee-

per of these borders becomes obvious not only in the ambiguity of the
novel’s title and van Herk’s play with words and narrative situation,
but also in the fact that Arachne herself is presented as uncomfortable
with linguistic sign systems (Darias-Beautell 2001: 100), especially if
institutionalized in schools and libraries (not coincidentally spaces
easily associated with the charity of the ruling classes toward the
working poor). In two episodes, both entitled “incursion[s] between
tomes” (117, 161), Arachne’s unruly behavior occurs in a library
(where she is soon asked to leave) and a bookstore; a poet she sleeps
with is ridiculed (167-71); paper in Thomas’ home study or at the mu-
seum is used like sheets on lovers’ beds. As they ‘conserve’ language
and thus the social status quo – a consequence postulated by postmo-
104
“Arachne’s continual crossing of geographic and social spaces, her recurrent
transgression of demarcations which delimit these spaces and render their
borders identifiable, is presented as a subversive process, as the dissolution of
an order which is based on the establishment and securing of borders.”
 Para-Nomadic Travelers 255

dernism’s linguistic turn – these spaces associated with the written

word are derided by Arachne’s “ungrammatically” (83) bodily plea-
sures and desires.105 In bed with the poet, she “has a hard time pre-
venting herself from laughing” but finally says “‘[t]hat was lovely’”
(169) before falling asleep. Again, Arachne subtly transgresses the
borders of propriety, with language used as a mere means of social
disguise that facilitates transgression.106
The picaresque – especially in its original Spanish version, of-
fers, to van Herk and many other contemporary writers,107 a tradition
of shape shifting and trickery as a literary strategy to dissolve such
borders and markers of identity. Thus, although van Herk’s protagon-
ist in No Fixed Address para-nomadically creates smooth spatial webs
in continual movement on the one hand, she is turned into a picara, a
trickster figure that defies and escapes categorization. As such,
Arachne refuses categorical, normative femininity, “refuses to carry a
purse, she refuses to wear a nightgown, she refuses to thin her rather
shaggy eyebrows. She refuses and refuses all impositions of childhood
and mothers. She is still refusing now, even though she has learned to
smile.” (29) Due to her originary social displacement, especially in
terms of class and gender, she is unable to settle, but turns this nomad-
ic compulsion into a picaresque asset. Her refusal to acknowledge
boundaries by way of superficial disguise, however, does not recur to
a picaresque tradition that, by the 18th century, had come to embody at

105
In the fugu episode, Arachne even loses language altogether as her tongue and
mouth swell into numbness from the fish’s poison; while it is initially associ-
ated with death (see Darias-Beautell 2001: 96-7) – Arachne is unsure whether
she is still alive – the rest of the book breaks this association, opting instead
for Arachne’s (textual) life and an ongoing taunting of representation through
language.
106
In this context, lying appears as an instance of verbal picaresque treachery.
The narrative recounts how Arachne learned to lie in school in order to escape
disciplinary sanctions: “It was then she decided that the only reliable things in
the world are tangible.” (van Herk 1998/1986: 134)
107
Examples of contemporary picaresque novels can be found in various national
and cultural contexts. In the context of U.S.-American women’s writing, much
of Kathy Acker’s works, Erika Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) and Fanny. Being
the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones (1980), as well
as Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) are most frequently described
as picaresque; Canadian examples would include Marian Engel’s Lunatic Vil-
las (1986).
256 Roads of Her Own

its heart the picara’s aspirations to belong. Arachne, by opting to re-

main out-of-place, thus rather resembles the earlier Spanish picares-
que (Strobel 1998: 219-22).
As Coral Ann Howells argues, Aritha van Herk’s project to ex-
pand the imaginative territory for feminist fiction, vividly drawn out
in No Fixed Address, set the tone for a transgressive shift in 1980s’
Canadian women’s literature (2004: 203). It is by way of both diegetic
and narrative transgression that van Herk has un-mapped female de-
sire and abandoned realism as well as cartography for a weaving and
un-weaving of myth, fantasy, and the picaresque.
 6. Ex-centric & Wayward:
Picaras of the Late 20th Century

i love the aloneness of the road

when i ascend descending curves
the power within my toe delights me
and i fling my spirit down the highway
i love the way i feel
when i pass the moon and i holler to the
stars
- Nikki Giovanni,
“The Beep Beep Poem”

Always taking a place not his own, a place one could call that
of the dead or the dummy, he has neither a proper place nor a
proper name. His propriety or property is impropriety or inap-
propriateness, the floating indetermination that allows for
substitution and play.
- Jacques Derrida,
on the Egyptian god Ra as an epitomous trickster figure

6.1. Constant Inconstancy: Theorizing the Picara

Unity of world and word is especially challenged in literary genres

which emphasize the carnivalesque moment, which, in the Bakhtinian
sense, defies regimes of logic and order, privileging instead polyvo-
cality, ambiguity, and the foreclosure of single meanings. The pica-
resque has traditionally constituted such a genre, often allowing also,
since its Renaissance Spanish beginnings, for a “nonheroic, nonidea-
lized female protagonist” (Hutcheon 1988: 124) who alters male pica-
rismo in order to explore feminine roguery. Studies by Linda Hut-
cheon and Katja Strobel have emphasized the connections between
postmodernism and the picaresque tradition, as they share the parodic,
satiric, and ironic impulses both as a reaction toward literary realism
and as social critique: the picaresque rogue is an ancestor of the post-
258 Roads of Her Own

modern trickster figure,1 a shape shifter of uncertain or ‘illegitimate’

origins often involved in petty criminality and ‘indecent’ (sexual and
otherwise) behavior whose travels are coerced by her displacement on
the one hand (thus its relation to para-nomadism), yet desirable as an
adventurous escape on the other. While often fleeing from the L/law
of society, the picaresque rogue embarks on the road adventure also
out of the desire to transgress social boundaries, classically between
rigid class distinctions. All of these elements are used in van Herk’s
postmodern picareseque in order to support her feminist literary
project of de-centering subjectivity and territoriality.
In what follows, I argue that picaresque wandering is the third
paradigm and trope of movement structuring contemporary women’s
road stories. Providing a rich generic tradition of literary deviance and
errancy to act upon and to revise, the picaresque, in its feminine ver-
sion, serves as a source of inspiration also for a number of other ge-
nres women writers have challenged and altered in the 20th century
(see Strobel’s study), such as autobiography, stories of initiation, or
travel writing. Conventionally speaking, the picaresque shares with
the para-nomadic road narrative a defiance of a diegetic logic based on
departure and arrival and an emphasis of constant ‘becoming’ on the
road. Like the para-nomad, the picara is always on the move, always
already in transit without a clear aim, although interstitial locations of
departure and arrival along the road are more important for the pica-
resque than the para-nomadic road narrative, and at times alter plot
and/or character development.
Emphasizing interstitiality as such, the picara may draw upon
rogue and trickster-figures, both of whom defy and dismantle binary
categories by unremittingly dislocating themselves from any place
within a symbolic system based upon identity and difference. Usually
in a playful and humorous manner, boundaries are transgressed and
ridiculed; the trickster-picara acts out of place, outlandishly, refusing
propriety. As a border crosser – Strobel uses the German “Grenz-
gängerin” in the title of her study – the picara is persistent only in this
1
One could argue here that the mythical weaver Arachne is herself an ancient
female shape-shifter, as she is turned into a spider by Athene. Also, as Lutz
and Hindersmann point out in their reading of No Fixed Address, the spider
not only has a distinctive meaning as the weaver of stories – and thus as a
Creator – in Native American/First Nation cultures, but also as a trickster fig-
ure (1991: 20); cf. also Blaeser (1996: 138).
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 259

out-of-place-ness, in her commitment to questioning socio-spatial as

well as symbolic (b)orders. To a certain extent, these are characteris-
tics the picara shares with the quester and the para-nomad. Unlike
these, however, the picara as a feminist spatial agent on the road fol-
lows adventure and ‘the fun of the road’ (though this does not prec-
lude her encounter with the road as gendered space); her journeys are
neither quests nor are they coerced.
What is additionally unique about the protagonist’s unruly
crossing of borders in the picaresque is that the picara’s performative
disguise (often in the form of masquerade, cross-dressing, or even
shape shifting, as in van Herk’s novel) greatly facilitates both circum-
vention and transgression of social laws and hegemonic (b)orders on
the one hand and exposes their constructedness on the other. The pica-
resque character, who is usually a rather disempowered, subaltern fig-
ure, becomes an agent of subversion by acquiring trickster strategies
of survival. As the trickster (linked to postmodernism and deconstruc-
tion by Gerald Vizenor in the context of Native American cultures)
escapes identity, fixity, and categorization – and perhaps thus even re-
presentation as such – she displays what Rowland A. Sherrill has aptly
called “constant inconstancy” (2000: 23); this characteristic, however,
is not an invention of the New Picaresque in the subtitle of Sherrill’s
study but can be traced back as far as to the early modern rogue narra-
tive.
Studies of the picaresque genre abound, and with regard to the
main focus of this study, the picara’s literary history can only be dis-
cussed selectively here.2 What becomes evident, in looking at generic
analyses of the picaresque like these, are the differing definitions as
well as the struggles over the cultural significance of the picaresque.
There are some points of agreement, however. Most scholars of the
picaresque emphasize the sociohistorical backgrounds of picaresque
writing as one major concern for interpretation. Also, they acknowl-
edge the genre’s ability for cultural mobility, i.e., its capability to be
transplanted into and adapted to various cultural and historical con-

2
The following observations are based on an overview of selected writings by
leading scholars of the picaresque: Alexander Blackburn, Elisabeth Frenzel
(1988), Anne K. Kaler (1991), Julio Rodriguez-Luis (1979), Frederick Monte-
ser (1975), Ulrich Wicks (1988 & 1989), and Werner Reinhart (2001), in ad-
dition to Strobel (1998) and Sherrill.
260 Roads of Her Own

texts. Thus, the picaresque has its origins in Spain in the mid-16th cen-
tury, had a literary career in 17th century German states, 18th century
England and France, and in both Europe and the United States in the
second half of the 20th century (see esp. Strobel’s [1998], Sherrill’s
[2000], and Reinhart’s [2001] monographs).
To a large extent, the feminine version of the picaresque –
gender relating traditionally to the protagonist rather than the author –
has undergone a similar geographic development, sharing major
themes, motifs, and characteristics with the masculine picaresque: the
protagonists’ nonheroic status as a social undesirable, an outsider es-
pecially in terms of class; resulting class aspirations and petty crimi-
nality used mostly for this purpose; the traditional realist rather than
idealist and usually also autobiographical mode; its use of satire and
parody; the motif of disguise and deception; its “panoramic structure”;
the observatory voice commenting on society; and, last but not least
(horizontal) spatial in addition to (vertical) social mobility.3
These characteristics, at least to some extent, show a certain de-
gree of variation in scholarly studies. That the gender difference of the
picara influences the plot development, thus producing a special case
of picarísmo, however, seems unanimously agreed upon. This as-
sumption, too, has been set in relation to the social context of the
work. As a case in point, Julio Rodriguez-Luis, in “Picaras: The Mod-
al Approach to the Picaresque”, argues that the change from the 16th to
the 18th century picaresque occurred largely due to the improved status
of women in society:

A destitute woman had, of course, much less chance for success in a

picaresque career than a man because of such factors as her inferior
education, her absolute dependence on men, and the mistrust of the
law toward her. […] Pícaras, as opposed to mere whores, were in fact
implausible in a society which placed such heavy constraints on the
social mobility of the common woman. (1979: 39-40)

Only in the 18th century, he argues, can a “believable” picara emerge,

as “the natural evolution of European society permitted women to de-

3
I largely follow the classical “eight characteristics of the picaresque” by Clau-
dio Guillén here, cited by Rodriguez-Luis (1979), Frenzel (1988), and others.
Not among them is the picaresque struggle for survival that Monteser sees as
essential (1975: 17-8).
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 261

velop more freely, thus making possible the believable portrayal of an

ambition which culminates in success” (ibid. 41). It is hard to share
Rodriguez-Luis’ romanticized view of the Enlightenment period and
not to wonder about his assumption of “European” society’s “natural
evolution” in that period; moreover, Luis’ underlying understanding
of literature as a mere “portrayal” of social conditions is certainly
overly deterministic, underestimating literature’s potential for social
criticism and subtle cultural subversion of the status quo. It is a conse-
quence of this assumption that in his essay he intends to “try to dis-
cover why pícaras do not become fully developed pícaros” by “de-
termining what is not there and why” (33). Ambition and travel, for
instance, are mere plot devices in the picaras’ story, Rodriguez-Luis
asserts, as her movement is rather geographic than social (37); like-
wise, the picara is “incapable of attaining any serious level of moral
thinking” (33) and of the picaro’s in-depth observation (34). It is from
this multi-faceted lack in the feminine picaresque that Rodriguez-Luis
concludes its marginal position in the genre.
Despite the obvious androcentrism and datedness of this essay
(which appeared prior to the plethora of political picaresque novels
published in the 1980s, as discussed in Reinhart’s study), many points
in Rodriguez-Luis’ 1979 analysis have been addressed anew in subse-
quent studies on contemporary feminine picaresques, such as the pica-
ra’s standing within the genre or her cultural development in the social
context of women’s history, especially with regard to class and spatial
mobility. Unsurprisingly, one central concern of many of these studies
(among them Strobel’s, Kaler’s, and Friedman’s) is to expose the an-
drocentric assumptions underlying traditional views of the feminine
picaresque like Rodriguez-Luis’ (or Monteser’s [1975], for that mat-
ter).
Anne K. Kaler, in stark opposition to Rodriguez-Luis, refuses to
define the picara merely as a counterpart of her male version (1991:
1), searching instead for a genuine feminine picaresque tradition that
starts with the ancient Hera figure and reaches up to the contemporary
“Fantasy Heroine”. Proposing adventure, thievery, deception and dis-
guise, sexual excess, lack of maternal and marital feeling, the confi-
dante figure, and isolation and inferiority as defining elements of the
feminine picaresque (ibid. 27, 41, 54), Kaler proposes the picara’s au-
tonomy, her control over her destiny, as a central concern of this tradi-
tion. Even though Kaler thus rejects a definition of the picara in terms
262 Roads of Her Own

of a lack, her proposal of an archetypal, homogenous figuration of the

picara (which is notably devoid of humor and parody)4 and the focus
on an autonomous subject conceived from Enlightenment notions im-
plicitly undermine Kaler’s endeavor (see also Strobel’s reading of Ka-
ler, 1998: 14).
Similarly, Edward H. Friedman acknowledges the picara’s gen-
dered difference, as she “fuels the myth of male superiority while con-
tributing to its destruction, or deconstruction”. Thus her “act[s] of de-
fiance [are] double-edged, for crime and punishment kept the antihe-
roine’s identity alive” (1987: XI). Yet by setting the male-authored pi-
cara, whose transgression is checked by an authorial masculine voice,
in opposition to contemporary women’s picaresques that are assumed
as freed from patriarchal judgment, Friedman, like Kaler, implies not
only authorial sovereignty – in stark contrast to Rodriguez-Luis’ ma-
terial determinism – but also subjectivity as the object of the picara’s
ultimate desire (Strobel 1998: 15). Regarding the latter implication,
one can object that while subjectivity – a place in the symbolic order
as a full legal and social subject – and the development of a ‘voice of
one’s own’ have certainly been major goals in women’s writing,
women’s literatures, perhaps due to a more recently developed post-
modern agenda, have also questioned this very notion of the subject
(cf. van Herk’s or Erika Lopez’ texts). Also, the alleged autonomy of
a literary text is as questionable as its complete determination by ‘out-
side’ social conditions it mimetically depicts or reflects. As the notion
of transdifference suggests, the collision of multiple lines of difference
produces polyvocal, brittle, even contradictory texts beyond authorial
control – authorial voices in turn harboring a multiplicity of differenc-
es (cf. also Walz’ [2005] notion of transdifference as a narratological
element in literary analysis; similar ideas, as noted earlier, have been
expressed in the Bakhtinian conception of polyvocality).
Picaresque mobility stands for her refusal of an identity (over-)
determined by territory, class, ethnicity, and gender (Strobel 1998:
224); the refusal of such a fixed position in social and geographical
space, in turn, conditions the nature of picaresque travel, “indem sich
mit dem Ursprung und dem Ziel der Reise (und des Texts) auch die

4
Cf. Kaler: “Where the trickster-picaro can laugh away the cruel reality of his
world with a masculine shrug, the picara does not laugh. Ever. Survival is too
serious.” (1991: 202)
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 263

Reisende verflüssigt” [“by the fact that, together with the place of de-
parture and the destination (as well as the text), the traveler herself be-
comes fluid”, tr. AG; ibid. 251]. Acknowledging, however, the hete-
rogeneity of the contemporary picaresque exemplified in her study,
Strobel concludes: “Die Pikara erscheint so als Figur, die sich zwi-
schen der Inanspruchnahme des Subjektstatus und dessen Verneinung
zugunsten der (weiblich-) lustvollen, pikaresken Dezentrierung des
Selbst hin- und herbewegt” (ibid. 256).5
Looking at the picaresque tradition, Strobel finds that the Span-
ish picaresque had already expressed a similar socio-spatial anarchism
in the 16th century. Therefore,

[…] liegt die Vermutung nahe, daß an den Gestalten der Pikareske das
Prinzip neuzeitlicher Mobilität nicht bestätigt, sondern durch seine in-
flationäre Verwendung ad absurdum geführt wird: Das pikareske Her-
umvagabundieren steht in markantem Kontrast zu der kontrollierten,
bewußt und absichtsvoll gesteuerten (Körper-) Bewegung, die als
sichtbare Manifestation neuzeitlicher Selbstgestaltung gilt. (1998: 51)6

In the context of the American picaresque, Cathy N. Davidson has

called attention to a second picaresque tradition, namely women’s
“domestic picaresque” (qtd. in Reinhart 2001: 97) of the 19th century.
Resulting from women’s extremely limited mobility in the Early Re-
public, it depicts the (white upper middle-class) female protagonist’s
picarismo as female quixotism in the home, with her escape usually
relegated to her obsessive reading.7 Following Strobel and Davidson,

5
“The picara thus appears as a figure who oscillates between the claim of oc-
cupying the subject position on the one hand and its negation in favor of a
(feminine) pleasurable, picaresque decentering of the self on the other.”
6
“[…] one can assume that picaresque characters do not confirm the principle
of modern mobility but, through its inflationary usage, render it absurd: pica-
resque wandering is distinctively contrasted with the controlled, deliberative,
and intentionally directed (physical) movement, which is considered a visible
manifestation of the modern design of self.”
7
Reinhart questions Davidson’s category of the domestic picaresque: he finds it
“problematic” and “confusing” (2001: 97) to apply the name of the genre to
what he sees as merely a special case of domestic realism. However, he ac-
knowledges that Davidson points to the general issue of generic definition and
social difference – here, the exclusion of women’s contributions due to their
alleged textual difference (ibid. 98). For a more inclusive account of the pica-
resque in this respect cf. Kröller (1991: 192).
264 Roads of Her Own

one thus needs to qualify one of Werner Reinhart’s theses – especially

in the context of the feminine, ethnic, or Canadian picaresque. Ar-
guing that the U.S.-American picaresque of the 1980s upholds a spa-
tiality based on an American expansionist doctrine, he redefines the
frontier as it appears in this literature:

[D]er Grenzraum [wird] zu einem Ort, an dem Differenz, Diversität

und Dissens eine Heimstatt finden. […] Mit der adamischen Flucht
aus dem realen sozialen in den geographischen Raum bewahrt sich der
amerikanische Pikaro einen Rest von Unschuld. […] Die räumliche
Fluchtbewegung ist allerdings nicht nur ein Akt der Befreiung, son-
dern auch einer der Verdrängung. (2001: 601-2; my emphasis)8

This border zone, Reinhart further explains, functions as a place of a

concrete utopia and thus becomes “the actual homeplace of the Amer-
ican picaro” (ibid. 602, “[d]er eigentliche Heimatort des amerikanis-
chen Pikaros”, in the original; tr. AG). The utopian dimension, in his
view, is in turn important for the politicization of the contemporary
U.S.-American picaresque (ibid.).
That Reinhart uses the masculine form in this quotation – de-
spite his discussion of Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote in this context – is
important, as I would argue, for Reinhart indeed makes no distinction
between the picara and the picaro, subsuming both under a universal
model. With strong sexual expressivity as a core feature of “picaris-
ma” (cf. e.g. Defoe’s Moll Flanders) throughout the centuries, it is
unclear why he attributes innocence to the adventurous female hero.
Also, as I am going to show in the following analyses of contempo-
rary picaresque road narratives by women, differences, in these texts,
never find a home ‘out there’, with the texts perhaps less concerned
with geographic expansionism than with the destabilization of the so-
cio-spatial hegemony. Close to para-nomadism in this respect, con-
temporary picaresque travel stands in strong opposition to the tradi-
tional questing movement also characteristic of frontier expansionism,
which is, in turn, centered on a civilizatory impulse as well as on ideas
of spatial and social improvement, purpose, and arrival in a “concrete
8
“[L]iminal space [becomes] a locality in which difference, diversity and dis-
sent find a home. […] With the Adamic escape from real-social into geo-
graphic space, the American picaro retains a residual innocence. […] How-
ever, escape is not only an act of liberation, but also of repression”; my em-
phasis.
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 265

utopia” (see also Frenzel 1988: 636). Therefore, the picaresque also
diverges from the tripartite structure of departure/journey/arrival, of-
ten favoring loosely connected episodes and adventures instead
(Lackey 1997: 8).
It is a distinct characteristic of the postmodern picaresque that
social improvement as a desired destination is abandoned. Even
though the picaro/a has always been geographically flexible rather
than bound to a certain location, social ascendance was the concrete
goal of pre-postmodern picaresque protagonist’s wanderings. In Rein-
hart’s account, this is typical of the entire “American” picaresque (he
cites Daniel Boorstein’s famous study on the Columbiad’s errancy and
its opening of spaces for exploration; 2001: 101). Resonant with a
generally assumed post-revolutionary spirit of the early American
1970s – post-Vietnam, post-Watergate and post-countercultural post-
modern literatures, in contrast, tend to expose social aspiration as
downright illusory, senseless, or unimportant. Michelle Carter’s On
Other Days While Going Home and Katherine Dunn’s Truck (cf.
chapter 6.2.) illustrate this development in a bleak manner; Aritha van
Herk’s Arachne Manteia, as I have argued, and Erika Lopez’ queer pi-
cara (cf. ch. 6.3.), transform it in that they aim at rejecting the social
ladder rather than moving along their well-trodden upward and
downward steps.
The main elements crucial for the following analyses of spa-
tiality in women’s picaresque road narratives are the picara’s originary
displacement(s); the performance of shape shifting and trickstering;
the function of ridicule and parody; the transformation of para-
nomadism into adventurous vagrancy while retaining its basic de-
fiance of the binary logic of departure and arrival; and her social as
well as sexual adventures. Taken together, these foci of discussion
point to the more general generic principle that the picaro/a’s licen-
tiousness refers to the transgression of customary, proper bounds, re-
gardless of the nature of these bounds. Transgression as a metaphor of
movement, then, is constitutive of women’s road narratives in their
questing and para-nomadic as well as their picaresque mode, and thus
can be said to be constitutional for women’s re- and subversions of the
genre as such. It is obviously due to the genderedness of the fictiona-
lized spatiality of the American highway that both a literal and more
metaphorical transgression of the L/laws of space become vital in
women’s writing on the road.
266 Roads of Her Own

6.2. Becoming-Woman after the Great Divide:

Feminist Revisions of the 1960s’ Countercultural Picaresque

In the context of late 1960s’ counterculture, picaresque traveling expe-

rienced a heyday as a practice of dissent, often in the form of drug-
sustained road adventures that were not geared toward any pre-defined
destination; as a case in point, Ken Kesey’s and the Merry Pranksters’
famous day-glo colored bus, driven by speed addict Neal Cassady
(Kerouac’s model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road), was simply
destined to be headed ‘further’. This widespread countercultural phe-
nomenon – the spontaneous journeying of poets, writers, musicians,
and flocks of hitchhiking teenagers who sought to live Timothy
Leary’s motto of “turn on, tune in, drop out” – continued well into the
1970s, following the Sixties’ violent finale.9 Many American women
affiliated with counterculture woke up to the bitter realization that
sexual liberation did not mean much more than the assumption of their
sexual availability; in this and similar ways, they had replicated the
fate of beat generation women, who, a decade earlier, had likewise en-
countered the power of mainstream gender norms, pervading even
subcultural formations. After the 1960s, this awareness resulted in an
anger that would not only fuel feminist activism and women’s libera-
tion, but also lead to revisions and re-writings of the countercultural
experience and its continuing effects on the American cultural land-
scape.
Against this socio-cultural background and responding to the
revival of picaresque travel in the late 1960s, revisions of this form of
countercultural journeying in the following decades were of major
importance in women’s popular music (cf., for instance, Joni Mit-
chell’s album Hejira, 1976), film (e.g. the independent film Me &
Will, in which two motorcycling protagonists embark on an adventur-
ous search for the mythical Harley Davidson of Easy Rider), and lite-
rature; as the counterculture had been a predominantly white, middle-

9
The 1967 Summer of Love was followed by a series of events that demon-
strated how the countercultural revolution was ‘devouring its children’: the
Charles Manson murders; the brutal killing of an African-American by the
Hells’ Angels at the Altamont rock festival; the 1968 race riots and the Chica-
go Democratic Convention, which ended in the ‘Battle of Michigan Avenue’;
as well as the drug-induced deaths of many of the countercultural icons of the
decade.
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 267

class phenomenon, it was, correspondingly, mostly white women res-

ponding to their exclusion by way of ‘writing back’. Michelle Carter’s
On Other Days While Going Home (1987) and Katherine Dunn’s
Truck (1990/1971), both road narratives depicting a female protagon-
ist coming of age in a post-1960s environment, typify this response:
both novels articulate the picaresque journey on the road as part of a
countercultural identification doomed to bitter dissociation from ro-
mantic notions of the road trip as a liberatory act. In these books, the
traditional picaresque aspiration to belong is dismantled in the course
of the stories, which, unlike van Herk’s or Lopez’, focus not on the
exploration and articulation of alternative spaces but on the prior stage
of narratively appropriating the space of the road-book and thereby
opening up the picaresque road discourse for exploration by a subse-
quent generations of women writers. Thus, while Carter and Dunn
propose their protagonists’ adventurous road trip as necessary for their
further development – a classical motif of the story of initiation and
the Bildungsroman – they stop short of re-writing the road as feminine
space. Their cultural significance, then, lies primarily in the way these
texts expose the picaresque journey as a romantic, masculine, and
countercultural myth, offering few viable perspectives for female trav-
elers.

6.2.1. Michelle Carter’s On Other Days While Going Home

Michelle Carter’s On Other Days While Going Home is the first-

person narrative of teenager Annie, who lives in the back room of her
Aunt Marie Frazelli’s San Francisco bail bond office, her mother
“long dead”, her father “long gone, God knows where” (1987: 15). Set
in the early 1980s, it portrays a search for home and belonging that, as
the title of the book explains, will always happen “on other days” –
any such thing resembling a destination continuously deferred and un-
tenable.10
10
The book’s title is taken from the Grateful Dead song “Box of Rain” from
their 1970 album American Beauty, a song about transition (“Walk out of any
doorway / Feel your way, feel your way / Like the day before / Maybe you’ll
find direction / around some corner where it’s been waiting to meet you”), in-
terpersonal connection (“Look into any eyes / You’ll find that you can see
clear to another day”), and individual vision (“Maybe it’d been seen before /
through other eyes, on other days while going home”). In the credits to her
268 Roads of Her Own

In the book’s prologue (13-28), Annie describes her childhood:

one of the main themes in this section is Annie’s awareness of being
different from her classmates. Growing up with a range of surrogate
parents – Marie, Marie’s friend Jotta, and B.R. and Gloria, an African-
American couple – her family situation deviates from the normative
nuclear family model. Nevertheless, Annie has internalized the domi-
nant family pattern as desirable:

Jotta would say she had no use for the kind of woman who’d stay
home all day picking up toys and cleaning baby vomit off her shoes.
Marie was always telling me to bring friends from school over. I could
just see Sharon and her mother walking in this dumpy office in their
fancy homemade dresses. (16)

Comparing her home to her friend Sharon’s, Annie expresses a sad

longing for stability: “At Sharon’s house it all had been fun somehow.
Here everything seemed to turn into mess and trouble […]. I looked
out over the room, which was like a living room except that I slept
there too. It was a disaster area” (18). Going through the instability of
puberty, Annie is all the more affected by living at the back of an of-
fice, where she is invisible to the customers yet lacks a ‘room of her
own’, as well as by the only role models available to her: these are her
single aunt and the former alcoholic Jotta, who seems completely de-
pendent on her abusive, violent boyfriend Tom Cleaver, member of
the Hell’s Angels. When Annie accidentally inhales too much ammo-
nia while trying to clean the “disaster area” (18), her worries jumble in
her head: “My head wouldn’t clear. There was Sharon’s mother cook-
ing in her cotton dress and slippers, the two men in the office looking
right through me at the clock, Jotta not bringing my present for me.”
(18-9)
Lacking any sense of a sheltering home despite of her surrogate
family’s warm-hearted kindness, she is drawn to the road early on,
dreaming of escape and the possibility of belonging somewhere out
there; she “craned [her] neck as far down the street as [she] could”
(20) and naively enjoys riding on the back of Tom’s Harley Davidson:

novel, Carter mentions that “[l]ines and phrases from the Grateful Dead lyrics
are excerpted throughout this work” and “very gratefully acknowledges the
role of the band and its music in fueling and firing the writing of the book”.
That the Hell’s Angels served as the band’s bodyguards is well-known, yet
this appears quite paradoxical in the context of Carter’s novel (see below).
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 269

I rode a long time with him, not even thinking about falling or getting
the tangles out of my hair. I couldn’t make any sense of it, of Marie’s
not wanting Jotta to be with Tom. I could see just riding and looking
at the things he’d point to, going fast as a rocket for the joy of holding
on. (21-2; emphasis mine)

Annie vicariously experiences the feeling of freedom of mobility,

which for her also denotes the possibility of change. Both Annie and
Jotta are attracted to the vicarious adventures Tom offers with their
concomitant illusion of freedom, although dependent in fact on his
will and perception (Annie looks at the things he points out), even to
the price of emotional abuse and various forms of punishment. His
control of the motorcycle alludes to Tom’s dangerous, yet magical
power over women like Jotta and Annie: “his was a different kind of
power. There was nothing like it. […] ‘How come you can always
turn that thing on like magic?’ I yelled above the revving.” (60-1) This
evolving behavioral pattern – Annie’s fascination with Tom even in
situations in which she is afraid of him – continues to the very last
page of the book.
Annie’s first small road trips on her own lead her to the neigh-
borhood’s ‘no-go areas’, as she draws pleasure from perceiving her-
self as adventurous and disobedient:

I wanted to take off somewhere […]. I thought I might as well shoot

the works and leave by myself without asking. I knew the streets, and
it was […] still daylight out […]. It was exciting to be so bad, to mess
up to where I couldn’t stand it anymore, then just leave and hit he
streets on a real-live mission. (22)

A second recurring motivation for running away is Annie’s search for

her true mother, which frequently has her see Jotta in this role: at age
fourteen, Annie presents Marie with a list entitled “Evidence That Jot-
ta Is My True Biological Mother” (33), yet has to accept her list is
evidence only of her wishful thinking. Significantly, her search for her
mother results in getting lost: trying to find Jotta’s apartment, she ends
up in a ‘no-go’ area of “hookers” (25), men wearing “boots with tall
heels” and “shiny black jackets” (ibid.), and “[o]ld people, some white
and some black” (ibid.). The adolescent narrative voice is fascinated
with these shady characters, yet at the same time expresses feelings of
insecurity as it is getting dark. In this area, she realizes Tom is observ-
ing her – another plot element that will persist throughout the novel.
270 Roads of Her Own

“It would be eight years and a different highway before I’d

come looking for Jotta again” (28): the prologue ends, and in chapter
one, the reader learns that Jotta has started a new, married life in Mas-
sachusetts (30). Annie, grown up with a sense of uprootedness, seeks
escape: “push […] away – Marie and everything about the world that
made me feel like I didn’t belong” (51). After graduation, 18-year old
Annie, always “looking like trouble” (53), embarks on the road to fol-
low her lover, her former English teacher and blues musician, Carter,
to Wyoming, defying both her aunt and Carter, who wish for her to go
to college. Annie believes education will not be able to assimilate her
to middle-class standards:

You lock yourself up with books and papers for the best years of your
life. You come out middle-aged and horny, but boy can you talk cute
at cocktail parties. I knew these people, I’d grown up watching them
trot across Bryant Street from the Hall of Justice to the office. They
were good people; they deserved to be happy, and I deserved to leave
them. (63)

Despite its mocking tone, this passage demonstrates that Annie de-
fines herself in opposition to the majority, the “good people” who “de-
served to be happy”. It clearly voices her understanding of herself as a
social outsider who does not belong with the ‘respectables’ of her so-
cial surroundings: “these people” are not her people, as throughout her
childhood, Annie has found herself on the outside of this class she
“deserved to leave”, a mere onlooker who was always out of place in
the town where she grew up.
Her relationship to the 34-year old divorced teacher is emotion-
ally as abusive as Jotta’s is physically, and it seems it is mostly An-
nie’s fascination for the blues, appropriated and embodied by white
outcasts in On Other Days While Going Home, that draws her to
him:11

“I got no true name,” [Carter]’d sung, “no mama give me birth. Seems
like I was hatched from the cold, dark, witherin’ earth.” I’d grabbed

11
Interestingly, Carter reproaches Annie time and again for imitating blues dic-
tion in her language (cf. e.g. 34), while he himself does not reflect at all on his
and his friends’ appropriation of an African-American musical tradition.
Though Annie likes The Supremes, she does not dare choose them from a ju-
kebox: “I knew Carter had no use for those kinds of songs.” (38)
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 271

[my friend] Fitz’s elbow. “Motherless child he roam. Ain’t nothin’

here to tie me to this des’late orphan’s home.” […] “Listen,” I’d whis-
pered. “This teacher. He knows me.” (31-2)

In Homer, Wyoming,12 Annie meets Carter’s musician friends, who

seem to live for booze and the blues alone. Not only is Carter, clearly
suffering from depression, unable to provide Annie with any sense of
home; she also realizes she “was in unusual company in more ways
than one: There were no women there.” (77) Thus again the odd one
out, Annie soon understands her love affair has no future and takes off
together with one of Carter’s friends, Poppa Dad, for New Hampshire,
where Poppa Dad’s girlfriend Rose lives with her children George and
Kimberly.13 Soon it turns out that Poppa Dad has used Annie, who had
naïvely trusted, even “loved” (151) this stranger, to give his cocaine
transportation venture an unsuspicious air. Annie’s disappointment is
reiterated when the police discover the deal and arrest her. Surprising-
ly, it is Tom Cleaver who bails her out: it turns out he has been stalk-
ing her all along the way, with the aim of locating Jotta. Running
away again, Annie’s final destination has a telling name: Terrapin,
Massachusetts, the terra that has pinned Jotta – now pregnant and
domesticated – down, and is about to do so with Annie.14 Although
Annie is fully aware now that Tom, apparently still obsessed with his
former girlfriend, has followed her across the country, she puts Jotta’s
new life into jeopardy by leading him to her new home. The narrative
arrives at its climax when Tom sets fire to the record store/residence
of Hunter, Annie’s sensitive, reggae-loving new boyfriend.

12
Clearly, Carter’s use of Homer as the first stop on her journey is selected in
reference to the author of the Odyssey, arguably the most influential travel
narrative in the Western literary tradition that had an enduring effect on the
gendered spatiality of the journey (Ulysses traveling, his wife Penelope faith-
fully waiting for him at home; cf. Pelz 1991: 174).
13
That Kimberly suffers from a drug-induced psychosis and thus cannot care for
her baby son Benny arguably draws attention to a dismal consequence of late
60s’ counterculture on women’s lives; from this perspective, the fact that
Kimberly’s situation does not stop Poppa Dad from drug dealing can be read
as a bitterly sarcastic narrative commentary.
14
Terrapin is actually the name of a (now endangered) water turtle inhabiting
the Cape Cod area (after the Algonquian word torpew, for turtle); it is also a
reference to the 1977 Grateful Dead album Terrapin Station, named in refer-
ence (and reverence) to this turtle, which in various folk mythologies is said to
carry the entire material world on its back.
272 Roads of Her Own

The pace in which On Other Days While Going Home draws to

its close is excessively fast and the diegetic events jumbled and con-
fused: Tom appears and tells Annie to “remember […] where you
learned about love” (228); suggests he is stalking Annie not for Jot-
ta’s, but for her own sake (242); Marie reveals that Tom has forced
Jotta to have an abortion in Mexico after he had found out she was
carrying his child (247-8) and announces a second secret that remains
untold (248); Annie persuades Jotta, deeply disturbed by the recent
events, not to have another abortion (255), but instead to wait for one
month, in which she prophesies Tom will not show up (256). The last
page and chapter of the book suggest that Annie, as much as she
would have liked to settle with Jotta and her new family, sacrifices
this new-found belonging for Jotta’s safety, leaving Terrapin in order
to lure Tom away:

The first hours of waiting [for Tom to follow her], I went through all
the highway songs. I thought of as many as I could and put them in
groups: Lonely and On the Road, Free and On the Road, On the Road
Hungry, On the Road Looking. But there was no highway song for
me. This was part of what I knew different now. As homely and low
as they thought they could be, songs were made of charm and air, of
faith in someone listening. I wanted to make something out of words
while waiting, but it wouldn’t be a song. It would be something just
said: I grew up among women, and left everything I knew. I followed
a man to a world full of men, where I could have lived out a life with-
out ever belonging. I learned I wasn’t the kind of strong I wanted to
be, and that I hated weakness more than fire. I loved another woman
best. So I left her, and waited. […] I saw us gunning full throttle, siren
wailing, onto the highway and over the bridge, I saw us gliding with
the engine silent, his motorcycle glistening like a toy. Those things I
saw while waiting were more important than what it was like to leave.
What mattered most was my having been there, and then, even more,
my having gone. (257)

What this ending seems to suggest is, on the one hand, that Annie has
realized she will not find belonging in a “world full of men” (cf. also
Primeau 1996: 123). Yet in spite of these insights, Annie’s resolution
implies that for the sake of the safety of a world of women, exempli-
fied by Jotta, in which she potentially could have found belonging, she
must sacrifice herself to Tom so as not to cause any further “trouble”.
On the other hand, like van Herk’s postmodern picaresque, An-
nie’s self-sacrifice is yet another act of self-annihilation, which un-
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 273

derstandably leaves the reader, as one reviewer puts it, “wonder[ing]

[…] just what she has accomplished”.15 The question of accomplish-
ment is beside the point, however. The novel’s last two chapters are
perhaps the only stretches of the narrative one can call postmodern at
least in part, as they play with narrative undecidability – as a case in
point, Marie never reveals the second secret – and thus defy narrative
and interpretative closure. On Other Days While Going Home, in con-
trast to No Fixed Address, does not use annihilation as an escape from
an androcentric or logocentric order; to the contrary, it is this order,
embodied by the Hell’s Angel Tom, which ultimately annihilates a
female misfit.16
It is here that the text’s critical view of the countercultural for-
mation can be located. It was the Hell’s Angels who ended the long
Summer of Love in California at the Rolling Stones’ concert in Alta-
mont; they came to stand for the violence, terror, and patriarchal con-
trol the pacifist hippies had nothing to hold against. Like the ghost of
these Hell’s Angels who helped terminate the 1960s’ attempt at coun-
tercultural revolution, Tom haunts Annie throughout the book, con-
stantly reminding her how she cannot escape patriarchal control. An-
nie is on the road across a country that makes her feel not at home but
rather “like a tourist in a foreign country, listening in while the locals
joked” (192); she repeatedly and with every new departure tries to es-
cape the gendered social order, but time and again is defeated. Marie,
notably the most sensible elder in the book and a first-hand witness of
the late 1960s, tries to teach her niece what she has learned:

“When you think of riding fast and living on the streets, you remem-
ber that things are different for us.”
“Different for you,” I said.
“Us,” [Marie] said. “You, me, Jotta, Gloria, your girlfriends from
school, the hookers on Sixth Street. You want to live on that dark side
you’ve read about in books and heard about in songs. But what I’m
telling you to remember is that it’s not there for us – sleeping in bus
stations, hitching rides with truck drivers, sharing stories shoulder to

15
This is a quote from the Publisher’s Weekly review published in July 1987 (no
author given).
16
That Carter’s novel, by letting the female protagonist “have the last words”,
reflects the changes women brought to the genre of the road novel in the
1980s, as Ronald Primeau argues (1996: 123), is an interpretation that over-
looks the novel’s negative representation of women on the road.
274 Roads of Her Own

shoulder, living dime to dime. The streets are all about power, Annie,
and the closest we can get is the back of a motorcycle and what they
offer us in exchange for spreading our legs.” […]
“I’ve never heard you talk like this,” I said. “I’ve never heard you say
there was anything we couldn’t do.” (205)17

Arguably, Carter’s authorial voice can be located in the down-to earth

character of Marie, an experienced, rational businesswoman, rather
than in Annie, who at times behaves so inconsiderately and unreason-
ably she cannot but lose the reader’s sympathy and understanding: as
a case in point, she tries to bond with Jotta in a kind of secret circle of
women who understand “the magic” (198) of a violent, abusive rela-
tionship, “the thrill of not knowing what would happen next” (254).
Carter’s novel displays most of the main characteristics of the
picaresque – the protagonist’s originary displacement as a de-facto or-
phan and outsider; her adventurous vagrancy, retaining the para-
nomadic defiance of the departure-arrival binary by way of reiterative
displacement; her spatial and sexual transgressions, and, to a certain
extent, trickstering (e.g. inventing her CV when she applies for a wai-
tressing job) and humor (which appears mostly in the form of mock-
ery of herself and others). Annie’s troublemaking nature and petty
criminality (running away, stealing, faking a CV) and her association
with other social outcasts living on the fringes of society also have to
be read in this context. However, the textual politics of this picaresque
seem to be made from a highly pessimistic, perhaps even reactionary,
view of the chances of feminine rebellion and escape. The female
trickster is unsuccessful, as the gendered spatiality of the road is too
powerful to be outwitted; the outcast will never find happiness in dis-
location, yet her continual dislocation is necessary in order to guaran-
tee the domestic happiness for the ‘homegirls’.
Annie’s narrative voice is distinctly marked by transdifference:
on the one hand affiliating herself with countercultural icons like the
Grateful Dead, this affiliation, though voluntary, is at odds with the
narrative’s dismantling of countercultural formations in terms of their
17
As a child, Annie was taught a sense of spatial regulation and lawfulness, but
also how to get around the law if one knows the right secrets: “I recognized
every illegally parked car […]. I’d learned on excursions with Marie […] why
they never get ticketed: the two-way hand-mike slung over the rearview mir-
ror was a secret cue to meter maids that the driver was on a hot case, usually
lunch or a Macy’s white sale.” (58)
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 275

gendered exclusiveness on the other hand. It is this contradictory posi-

tion that produces an ‘uneasy’, ambiguous ending, comparable to the
denouément of Doris Betts’ Heading West and theoretically accounted
for by Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Writing beyond the Ending (1985). The
finale of Carter’s novel suggests – in contradistinction to its beginning
– that the road has lost its mythical promise to provide opportunities
and to procure a space of regeneration and catharsis, summoned by the
novel’s inscription: “Come, wash the nighttime clean / Come, grow
the scorched ground green”.18 The fact that the mythical cross-country
journey’s directions are reversed and Annie goes from west to east is
the appropriate consequence. In this, spatial progress runs parallel to
historical change; born in 1967 in San Francisco, the place and year of
the Summer of Love, Annie closes the narrative in the touristy Cape
Cod area during the conservative 1980s.

6.2.2. Trucking down the Road of Adolescence:

Katherine Dunn’s Truck

Katherine Dunn’s novel Truck (1971), in comparison to On Other

Days While Going Home, is much more experimental in style and di-
verges from the picaresque road novel structure in that most of the
narrative is set at the location of departure (Portland, Oregon) and ar-
rival (outside Gaviota State Beach in Northern Califonia), with Los
Angeles as the only place in between. However, the first-person tale
of a tomboyish runaway girl, Jean “Dutch” Gillis, can be seen within
the genre of the picaresque road novel “in which the protagonist is
cast as a resourceful and sometimes even hapless vagabond living on
the edge” (Lackey 1997: 8). Truck belongs, according to Lackey’s
RoadFrames, among a group of writings of the 1960s and 70s which
“refine and enlarge antidomestic themes in grim road noir narratives
that anticipate the final collapse of the road romance” (1997: 28). Like
On Other Days While Going Home, Truck’s commentary on the gen-
dered landscape of the late 1960s counterculture from the perspective

18
This is a quote from the song “Cassidy’s Tale”, written by John Barlow for
Robert Hunter’s 1972 solo album Ace. It commemorates Neal Cassady’s and
Barlow’s father’s death as well as the birth of a daughter to Eileen Law, a
close associate of The Grateful Dead. The song unites the dualities of birth
and death, celebrating the return of lost spirits in the newborn.
276 Roads of Her Own

of a fifteen-year old misfit is indeed bleak and gloomy, again reflect-

ing the ‘death’ of the Sixties.19 While its protagonist-narrator starts out
as a resourceful trickster, frequently passing for a boy and following
her adventurous spirit and her own will at any cost (Sherrill 2000:
226-7), Dunn’s quick-witted youthful picara emerges from her adven-
ture “invisible […]. I’m glad but it hurts” (1971: 210) at the end of the
book. This development of the picara makes sense, I would argue, in
view of the narrative’s late-1960s post-countercultural context, which
is similar to Michelle Carter’s On Other Days While Going Home as
discussed above.
Although Dutch grows up in a sheltered home with her parents
and brother, she is socially alienated at school. Like Geek Love,
Dunn’s third and much more widely acclaimed novel (1989),20 Truck
focuses on its narrator-protagonist’s physical Otherness. With her an-
drogyny as the main reason for her loneliness, Dutch’s running away
is motivated by a dream of escape into a wilderness where no-one will
see or bother her. The narrative starts with an italicized inner monolo-
gue: “Going to go up on the mountain and be king. If I’m the only one
up there, I’m the king […]. Nobody will own me anymore.” (1) Dutch
is in love with Heydorf, an older fellow student and outcast at the lo-
cal high school, but is convinced he accepts her as his friend only be-
cause her femininity is physically invisible: “He lets me talk and listen
and be here because there are no tits and my Levi’s hang from my
pelvis and my hands are scruffy” (5); “[h]e doesn’t know I have a
cunt. He wouldn’t be here if he did” (7). After graduation, Heydorf
leaves town and starts the (stereo)typical life of a beatnik-hippie,
going away to study philosophy and hypnotism (6-7), wandering
around the American West and living the life of a hobo. Dutch, yearn-
ing to leave with Heydorf, knows about the limited options for girls to
do so – even if they can pass for a boy by their looks:

19
I disagree, however, with Lackey’s (1997) observation on the “collapse” of
the road novel, which is correct only when disregarding women’s, multicul-
tural, or queer road novels.
20
Geek Love was finalist nominee for the National Book Award in 1989 and has
acquired cult status as a postmodern tale about freaks, monstrosity, and the
grotesque among both the reading public and in academia (the MLA biblio-
graphy lists ten essays on Geek Love and none on Truck).
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 277

He’s going. Going away and I’ll be here forever, scraping excitement
out of Portland, Oregon, with no one to help and no way out and I’ll
marry a service station attendant and never see or go or know anything
or do anything or ever feel myself all over full of possibility like now
because he is so possible and anything is possible now but when he
goes it will be high school again and the nothing and the nothing after
that in the rain because girls cannot. Even girls who are not, because
secretly they are. And will always be trapped and I want to be free.
Why couldn’t girls be? (23; emphasis mine)

In a style reminiscent of Kerouac’s prosody, Dutch articulates she

does not know what it is exactly she wants to be free from, but she
does know she “is not” (ibid.). She is horrified by seeing the women
around her trapped at home, fearing she will not be able to passively
endure domestication herself. Like Arachne Manteia in No Fixed Ad-
dress, freedom of movement seems to Dutch the only possibility to
feel alive. If she does not run away, she is sure

I’ll end up being a good girl and staying here. Stop going out at night.
Stop walking on the tracks. Stop laying [sic] under the trestle when
the freights come through. Stay here with Mama and let my hair grow.
Get a job at the supermarket and never nick anything. […] Spend all
my money on clothes and sit at night with Maw in front of the TV
sewing my hope chest and waiting for the right Flying A man to come
along. Too much. Too much to stand. I really would end up killing
somebody. Feeling the knife one day and red and anger and all the lost
minutes and wasted hours come pouring out. (67)

“End up”, “stop”, “stay”, “end up killing”: in order to forestall (hete-

ro)normative white middle-class feminine development, Dutch, who
seems to understand this development is socially constructed rather
than natural, sees no other choice but to run away, carefully planning
not to worry her parents too much by writing them a note she posts in
advance. A fifteen-year old high-school student, her only way to raise
money is petty crime such as selling stolen goods. She steals books
and sells them at school; Dutch mentions Don Quixote and a study of
Freud – The Great Books: Freud (8). By selecting these two titles, the
text suggests, as Katherine Lawrie Mills has observed, “that women
are burdened not simply by patriarchal society, but specifically by
means of the literary canon touted by patriarchal society. Women
learn to travel by converting these ‘Great Books’ to cold cash, but not
by reading them” (1999: 278). While I agree with Mills’ general ar-
278 Roads of Her Own

gument, the appearance of Don Quixote also fulfills a second function,

namely that of linking the text to the picaresque and the fantastic lite-
rary modes simultaneously. The fact that it is mentioned at the begin-
ning of the novel hints at the narrative’s engagement with both these
modes, foreshadowing the end of the story.
After a long Greyhound ride along the coast, Dutch meets Hey-
dorf in Los Angeles. They live in the parks of the city for a few days
and then take the bus to camp on a deserted Northern California
beach, where they start living like hermits. When Heydorf leaves with
her money to fetch some things back in L.A. and to procure food but
fails to return, Dutch, bitterly starving, waits faithfully until the police
find her and, after a brief interlude at a home for juvenile delinquents,
is restored to her relieved parents. For Dutch, this is not a happy end.
With bleak prospects ahead (“There’s no getting out of it. I don’t want
out but it wouldn’t make any difference if I did”, Dunn 1990/1971:
210), she learns that a young couple has been killed near their beach
hangout, the girl raped; Dutch imagines Heydorf and herself as being
involved in the crime on the very last page of the book (213). Due to
Dunn’s construction of parallel diegetic realities, the reader is left un-
sure whether there is (diegetic) truth in Dutch’s fantasy, or if it is
merely a violent psychic reaction to her involuntary return home.
One of the first novels to focus entirely on a young female pro-
tagonist seeking adventure on the road (Mills 1999: 277), Truck antic-
ipates the anger that would soon erupt in U.S.-American women’s
writing in the 1970s (ibid. 278). Written in spontaneous prose – remi-
niscent of beat generation literature – and in a fragmented, jumbled
narrative structure which does not allow the reader to clearly distin-
guish between reality and fantasy, inner life and outer action, the pica-
resque adventure turns sour: Dutch’s wish to make inroads into a male
tradition of outlaws, vagabonds, and hobos21 by way of her androgyny
is frustrated as soon as the ‘male bonding’ she tries to perform with
Heydorf becomes sexually charged (149). Even though it is Heydorf
who suggests “it is tougher being a girl” (136), Dutch sees her earlier
fantasies of trapped adult womanhood confirmed:

21
On the genderedness of the hobo tradition, see Tim Cresswell’s extensive
study on The Tramp in America (2001).
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 279

[Heydorf:] “[T]here are a lot of ready-made escape routes for boys.

Army and forest ranging and the merchant marine. Nobody even
thinks it’s that weird if a guy wants to be a hermit. All part of the male
image. There’s really no place in society for a woman like that. She
has to either operate underground or else totally outside the society.
[…] Working underground is a waste […]. You’re always running
around maintaining a façade […].”
[Dutch:] “Yeah, I get it. They’re wifey and mothery and get their hair
done and shave their legs and then they think they’re accomplishing
something in their secret lives by working part time or taking litera-
ture courses at night.” (136)

As Katherine Mills has argued in this context, the fact that it is Hey-
dorf who speaks for Dutch here, although it is she who craves auton-
omy and the freedom of mobility throughout the novel, characterizes
the “anomie of all the women in the (non-)road stories of the era”
(1999: 278). From the perspective of a narratology of transdifference,
it seems that textual instances like the above are anchored in the dis-
course of the male outsider who critically distances himself from so-
ciety – a discourse that reached another peak in the context of Sixties’
counterculture – while similar passages simultaneously attempt to ar-
ticulate the genderedness of this discourse on the level of diegesis.
Written not in the aftermath of but rather antedating the heyday of
second-wave feminism, Truck is informed by the struggle to find a
voice through which to reflect American women’s experiences of the
60s. That Truck transforms anomie into anger, as Mills also argues
(ibid.), even if only in the narrator’s consciousness, might be an ex-
planation for the ambiguous final passages of the novel.
Dutch’s longing for solitude and wilderness (a major topic of
the book) is another result of this discursive struggle, as the text utiliz-
es the tradition of projecting wilderness as the ultimate ‘outside’ of
society where the symbolic order is suspended. Dunn’s novel, howev-
er, also disappoints this utopian vision. That Dutch, metaphorically,
transforms into an invisible person after a period of sunburn and star-
vation – at the end of which her skin peels fully (Dunn 1990/1971:
198-200) – is the consequence of her inner withdrawal, the defeat of
her adventurousness in face of the slim chances of surviving ‘outside’
of society, without money or male company.
280 Roads of Her Own

***

At the advent of U.S.-American postmodernity – if defined as a histor-

ical period of political disillusionment that developed in the United
States in the course of the Vietnam War and the aftermath of the
1960s – spiritual and spatial quests for countercultural space are trans-
lated, in both Michelle Carter’s and Katherine Dunn’s novels, into
gloomy picaresque adventures. In both novels, the initial search for a
home on the road and for alternative spaces of living is forestalled by
repeated disappointment in countercultural collectives and traditions
that are exposed as a romanticized sphere of male bonding, impenetr-
able to ‘the second sex’.
At the end of Carter’s tale, the reader is left with the protagon-
ist’s suggested self-sacrifice to the “magic” of a cruel motorcyclist and
the narrative indeterminacy that characterizes the concluding chapters;
similarly, Dutch’s violent fantasies are impossible to differentiate
from diegetic reality. What remains at the end of these roads is not the
importance of destination, accomplished feats, or improvement of cha-
racter, which characterize the traditional story of initiation and quest;
it is also not the maturation and the successful integration into society
that the Bildungsroman conventionally ends with. On the contrary, the
empowerment of the protagonists lies merely in the fact that the road,
in its function as a testing ground for the negotiation of multiple dif-
ferences, has taught these girls the physical and metaphorical mobility
at stake in the ‘survival game’ of a society based on inequality and
(in)difference. The reader, initially sharing the protagonists’ hopes in
their journeys, must thus also share their eventual disappointment –
and wait for Aritha van Herk’s or Erika Lopez’ texts to find alterna-
tive roads and more sanguine adventures.
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 281

6.3. The Wanderlust of Crossing and Queering:

Erika Lopez’ Flaming Iguanas:
An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing22

Culturally speaking, women have wept a great deal, but once

the tears are shed, there will be endless laughter instead.
Laughter that breaks out, overflows, a humor no one would
expect to find in women – which is nonetheless surely their
greatest strength begause it’s a humor that sees man much fur-
ther away than he has ever been seen. […] And her first laugh
is at herself.
- Hélène Cixous,
“Castration or Decapitation?”

Recovering the joyful, adventurous aspect of the picaresque in the

1990s, Puerto Rican-Anglo-American graphic and performance artist-
writer Erika Lopez has created her alter ego Jolene Gertrude (aka To-
mato “Mad Dog”) Rodriguez as a humorous trickster-figure who pa-
rodies the quest for authentic selfhood and belonging (cf. Elliot 2000:
204). In a trilogy of illustrated novels – Flaming Iguanas. An Illu-
strated All-Girl Road Novel Thing (1997), They Call Me Mad Dog! A
Story for Bitter, Lonely People (1998), and Lambda Literary Award
finalist Hoochie Mama: The Other White Meat (2001) – transdifferent
tensions of conflicting ethnic, sexual, and gender alliances are sus-
tained by way of what I would like to call Lopez’ queer picaresque
textual politics. With this term I refer to narrative and visual strategies
of generic transgression (‘queer’ as going against categorization), of
parody and pastiche (in the sense of ‘queer’ as ‘counterfeit’), of per-
formative shape-shifting (the trickster element), and of self-mockery
(i.e. Lopez’ writing and drawing her textual alter-egos as ‘queer’ in
the sense of odd, eccentric, disadvantaged, and suspiciously resistant
to categorization and order). With the help of these strategies, Lopez’
texts fundamentally ridicule cultural stereotypes and disrupt any es-
sentialist conceptions of identity-based categorizations such as eth-
nicity, class, sex, and gender. Particularly prominent in her road book
Flaming Iguanas, Lopez rewrites the tensions generated by the mul-

22
I would like to thank my students Rebecca Maulbeck and Stefanie Ziegler for
their original readings of Lopez’ book, as well as my audience at the Univer-
sity of Hamburg, whose comments on my lecture on Lopez’ work have also
helped shape this chapter.
282 Roads of Her Own

tiple differences with which her protagonist is confronted as a chance

to create trans-different routes, pathways that navigate between and
across cultural difference by way of the picaresque anti-heroine’s
journey.

Narrative PaROADy

Lopez’ first-person narrator and protagonist Tomato is a struggling,

yet fun-loving bisexual mestiza who criticizes the white male claim to
hegemony by way of parodic subversion and comic ridicule. In this
manner, Flaming Iguanas follows to some extent the so-called “ethnic
picaresque” of the mid-20th century, exemplified by authors like Ish-
mael Reed (Reinhart 2001: 102). Lopez’ first book,23 it parodically
“appropriates and revises the American male genre of literary road
writing” (Laffrado 2002: 406; cf. also Enevold 2004: 86-7). This pa-
rodic revision – according to Linda Hutcheon’s definition of the pa-
rodic as a “repetition with critical distance” (1985: 6) – is already
present in the book’s title and outlook: Lopez does not write a road
novel, just something like it: a road novel thing, an “all-girl” parody of
the all-American cross-country journey, illustrated and in quadratic
format, with a colorful bright yellow, blue and orange cover that is
dotted with little stars sparkling around the image of a coffee-colored
woman sitting on a motorcycle and smiling at the prospective reader.24
Lopez’ picaresque narrative mocks literary seriousness, infusing
the road with a trickster spirit, parody, and laughter. Yet in the course
of the novel, the narrator-protagonist also tones down her mockery by

23
In her web-(auto)biography, Lopez, who started out as a graphic artist, reports
that when she received a grant to write she “read bad books to inspire her […],
learned to ride a crappy motorcycle in a week, and rode cross country so she
could at least write about doing something” and that she “faked her way
through her first novel” (cf. http://www.erikalopez.com). Lopez admits how
Tomato “is based on me, of course”, but how she “can put more stuff on her
and have her say more things that I can’t say” (qtd. in Wilkinson).
24
One of the stars hides the nipple of her right breast, which she proudly expos-
es. The gesture openly plays with the reader’s voyeurism: Lopez depicts the
woman holding down her colorful, frilly flamenco blouse and thus implies the
figure’s control over what we get to see. That the nipple is covered by a little
star adds another layer of visual control, this time exerted by the artist herself,
who covers and uncovers as she pleases.
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 283

incorporating issues of multicultural, gender, and class conflicts in her

humorous statements that are at times painful and irritating to her tex-
tual self as well as to the reader. The book thus exemplifies a distinct
version of parody as playful mockery (Hutcheon 1985: 15), yet also
introduces serious criticism and a self-ironic stance to this version –
one reason for Lyn Elizabeth Elliot to call the book a “semi-parody”
(2000: 204). “An imitation characterized by ironic inversion” (ibid. 6),
Lopez’ text plays with generic conventions, using “ironic trans-
contextualization” (ibid. 8) to transform the road genre by reworking
its established formulaic outlook and themes (such as ‘a man in search
of his country’; a ‘heroic quest for freedom/sexual adventure/...’ etc.;
cf. Elliot 2000: 222-3). As Hutcheon asserts, parody thereby creates
new levels of meaning, “mark[ing] the intersection of creation and re-
creation, of invention and critique” (1985: 30).
Another key feature of the parodic text, according to Hut-
cheon’s Theory of Parody, is the necessity of bonding with its au-
dience: for the parody to function, it relies on creating pleasure in its
readers who have to recognize it as parody by sharing its textual codes
(1985: 19); even if accepted norms exist only to be transgressed in the
parody, its hermeneutic status is based upon them (ibid. 95). In the
context of a typically postmodern predilection for popular art forms
(such as the graphic novel), the parodic mode’s “appropriation (bor-
rowing or pirating)” further “questions art’s accepted status as indivi-
dualized commodity” (1985: 75) as well as the notion of authorial
control by acknowledging its dependence on the reader’s shared back-
ground of an “accessible, textually incorporated culture” (ibid. 81).25
In Flaming Iguanas, this shared code consists mainly of a large
repertoire drawn from popular culture – from references to popular li-
terature, film, and music, to the use of pop-cultural icons and a verna-
cular register, all of which are used for the purpose of humorous re-
signification. This resignification is further linked to a confessional
narrative mode fundamental for the establishment of a close, if not in-
timate, narrator-audience-bonding, as Lopez’ alter ego’s narrative
voice is staged as immediate and unmediated, candid and shameless as

25
In this respect, Hutcheon correctly adds that parody is conservative in the
sense that it guarantees the continued existence of the mocked art form (1985:
75); in this case, Lopez’ mockery of the road novel fills the genre with a new
agenda and thus basically affirms the generic formula.
284 Roads of Her Own

well as self-ironic.26 The pop-cultural frame of reference also results

in the use of innovative metaphors which break representational ta-
boos regarding women’s bodies and female sexuality, as well as the
more serious aspirations of the multicultural quest-narrative (contrast-
ing with, for instance, Anne Roiphe’s Long Division (1972), or Audre
Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name [1998/1982]).

Picaresque Mockery of the Quest:

On the Road with the Flaming Iguana

Although Flaming Iguanas focuses on its protagonist’s picaresque ad-

ventures throughout the rest of the book, Jolene Gertrude’s initial mo-
tivation for embarking on a cross-country motorcycle trip is not entire-
ly free from questing aspirations. As a strategy to counter her loneli-
ness in New York and to boost her courage and self-esteem, Jolene
decides to start a biker gang, the Flaming Iguanas, find a motorcycle,
and ride cross-country to visit her sick father in San Francisco. She
persuades her newly-won Puerto Rican friend Magdalena “D-cup” Pe-
rez to accompany her. Initially, hesitation and doubtfulness hamper
her intention to “run, live, and have no regrets” (20), and she asks her-
self what she is actually trying to prove:

What was so wrong with watching TV? Why was I doing this? What
was I proving? What the fuck was this myth that said you have to
leave your job, your life, your tear-stained woman waving good-bye
with a kitchen towel behind the screen door so you can ride all over
the country with a sore ass, battling crosswinds, rain, arrogant Vol-
vos, and minivans? (26; my italics)

Doubting the validity of the masculine myth of escape she alludes to

and dismantles here, Jolene is nevertheless convinced that the journey
will make her “more responsible, powerful, and amazing” (26). She
decides she must experience the mythical American road for herself in
order to judge “what was so wrong with watching TV”. By applying

26
The confessional mode of a flawed heroine, the use of humor and self-
mockery, the taboo-breaking, demystifying discourse on the body, sexuality,
and relationships, as well as the intimate bonding with its audience are core
features of the recently established genre of “chick-lit”, with which Lopez’
work is therefore generically linked.
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 285

the discursively masculine position of the “you” (“this myth that said
you have to leave your job…”) to herself, the narrator immediately
questions the genderedness of road discourse. Thus, the reader is in-
vited to witness Tomato’s mock-performance of the masculine posi-
tion in the road narrative.
At this early point in the book, Lopez dissociates Tomato’s mo-
tivations from those of her male literary ancestors – Kerouac, Hunter
S. Thompson, and Henry Miller – and not just implicitly; Tomato
openly admits how she “just couldn’t identify with the fact that they
were guys who had women around to make the coffee and wash the
skid marks out of their shorts while they complained, called them-
selves angry young men, and screwed each other with their existential
penises” (Lopez 1998/1997: 27). With harsh sarcasm, this passage cri-
ticizes the ambivalent gender politics of the beat generation, whose
epitomic protagonists rejected the prevalent social norms of the 1950s
on the one hand, yet were by and large conservative in their views of
women and homosexuality on the other hand (with the notable excep-
tion of Allen Ginsberg). Judging from the above quotation, one can
observe that Tomato is well aware of the literary ancestry that will ac-
company her cross-country road trip even before she actually leaves
(Enevold 2004: 86). In view of this cultural baggage, she deliberately
neglects expectations of heroism not only by calling her plan, self-
mockingly, an “embarrassingly cheesy-brown low-budget adventure”
(Lopez 1998/1997: 130), but also by the mere fact that she not only ar-
ticulates insecurity about her motorcycling skills but also about her
ethnic and sexual identity.
The theme of multiple cultural differences is central throughout
the book: born half-Anglo and half-Latina and insecure in her eco-
nomic position and sexual identification,27 Tomato wonders:

Where the fuck was I supposed to be? I never got what I was looking
for or where I was looking to go. I wasn’t a good blue-collar hetero-
sexual in a trailer home, I wasn’t a real Puerto Rican in the Bronx, I

27
Tomato comments on economic and other hardships for the female artist as
follows: “The life of a woman artist isn’t exactly what anyone in her right
mind would choose if anyone told you the truth of it on career day” (44), im-
plicitly criticizing an art world traditionally dominated by male artists and fe-
male muses.
286 Roads of Her Own

wasn’t a good one-night stand lesbian. I wasn’t a good alcoholic artist,

and I wasn’t a real biker chick because I didn’t want the tattoos. (241)

From the trailer-home heterosexual to the Puerto Rican in the Bronx,

Tomato finds it is impossible for her to embody any of these types, al-
though she apparently envies them for having a place to be and places
to go. Throughout the book, she recollects her aspiration and desire to
belong to one of these groups: as a child, she tried to pluck her eye-
brows like the Puerto Rican women she knew (146-7) and regrets not
being able to speak Spanish (29), and in a conversation with her les-
bian mother, a “real strong woman” (51), Tomato tries to find out if
she was perhaps a lesbian herself (172) but finally remains ambivalent
in her sexual preferences (251). Her physical features are also repeat-
edly described as markers of her cultural in-betweenness: “gray
brown” skin, large breasts, black curly hair, but “pointy nose features”
that sometimes made others think she was “originally white” (54).
While initially (and retrospectively) the narrative suggests that
Tomato is looking for spaces in which she would feel she belonged, it
emphasizes Tomato’s development into a picaresque character who
has learned, on the road, to see through and outwit the rules of collec-
tives predicated upon a rigid categorization of identities and alterities.
The search for a national ‘American’ character and one’s own ‘Amer-
icanness’, for instance, considered by many critics to be a major rea-
son for geographic movement in American road literature (e.g. Pri-
meau 1996: 15), may have motivated Tomato to replay the mythical
journey in the beginning; yet, as a narrator, she relates this quest nev-
er without self-mockery and the awareness of the contingency of all
collectives (e.g. when she talks about the tattoos without which one
cannot be a true ‘biker chick’). Thus the narration counteracts the no-
tion of identity-based collectivity by portraying the country with a
‘queer eye’ that uncovers a ‘queer nation’28 to which Tomato can tru-
ly – transiently and without grounding herself in any particular sexual
28
I am appropriating the name of the radical direct-action organization which
was founded in 1990 in New York City in order to counteract anti-gay and
lesbian violence on the streets and prejudice in the arts and media as well as to
increase gay, lesbian and bisexual visibility through a variety of tactics (in-
cluding the reclaiming of the term queer). Their visibility actions became
known as “Queer Nights Out”; another prominent slogan used by Queer Na-
tion was “Out of the Closets and into the Streets”, which also emphasizes the
organization’s socio-spatial agenda.
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 287

identity – belong. Thus, as Jessica Enevold has noted, the book is not
content with a mere regendering of the road novel: it claims a “further
expansion of the territory of subjectivity” (2004: 88), territory in be-
tween and across categories of socio-cultural differentiation rather
than a ‘rightful place’ or the establishment of alternative social cate-
gories within the social order.
In this context of picaresque transgression, the iconography of
the motorcycle plays a major role. As Ronald Primeau justly observes,
the vehicle in road novels usually expresses power, speed, and status,
and offers a space for adventure, sex, and success (1996: 4). In Flam-
ing Iguanas, Tomato’s motorcycle parodies this vehicular fetishism,
expressed famously in American road narratives à la Easy Rider (Ene-
vold [2004: 87-8] cites Easy Rider as an intertext for Flaming Igua-
nas): the protagonist rides a borrowed, out-of-fashion motorcycle in-
apt for showing off status and success. Performing the role of the
masculine rider who aims to impress the ‘biker chick’ in order to get
her to ride on his backseat, she mockingly believes in this downtrod-
den bike’s power to make her attractive to other women: “I would find
out how much girls found riding on the back of my bike sexy. It
wasn’t me. It was the bike, the ride.” (Lopez 1998/1997: 181)
Consistent with her overall strategies of parody and pastiche,
the narrator-protagonist also performs the role of the ‘dyke on bike’,
but also ridicules this stereotype eventually when she wants to impress
Hodie by riding up in front of her San Francisco office: “Feeling very
sexy with cheap burgundy lipstick on, I walked out of the store
squeezing my own butt. I made a whole ceremony of swinging my leg
over the bike.” (245) But her bike will not start, and so she ends up
taking a bus that “smelled entirely of urine” (ibid.) to Hodie’s.
As an inexperienced, unskilled biker (“Clutch? First, second,
third, and fourth? What was everyone talking about?” 71) who does
not even know she needs a special license to legally ride her motor-
cycle, she only slowly learns to ride at an average speed in the begin-
ning of the book: “Thirty miles [to the campground]? At my top speed
of twenty-five miles an hour – with six or seven cigarette and bath-
room breaks – it’d be morning by the time we got there.” (81) With
the image of the biker chick in her mind,29 her developing skills make

29
The “biker chick” image usually relegates women to the back seat of a man’s
motorcycle. Here, Lopez intervenes visually when Dave, a mechanic who re-
288 Roads of Her Own

Tomato feel strong and “cool” (189); yet these skills are also a meta-
phorical expression of her expanding strategies to smoothly navigate
through the striated spatialities engendered by dominant discourses of
identity. Again with both literal and metaphorical implications, she
enjoys the feeling of transient belonging to the motorcycling commu-
nity which, due to the brevity of road encounters, the element of pica-
resque masquerade (or even drag) in the biker’s leather outfit and its
counter-cultural reputation of sanctioned deviance, incites this senti-
ment: “I’m telling you, I felt cool just riding behind [the two guys on
Harleys] on the cracked yellow highway. […] [N]ow that I was a real
live biker, I demanded notice.” (189) However, exhilaration is fol-
lowed by disappointment, as the community’s rigid genderedness re-
minds Tomato of her originary displacement: “I wanted to see other
women riding so I’d feel less like a freak, but I only ran into girls who
rode on back. They never really waved or gave me cool directions.
They just smiled exactly as much as their boyfriends or husbands did.”
(191)
The biting humor with which even the most painful events in
Tomato’s life are narrated pervades Flaming Iguanas and emotionally
engages the reader: her make-believe honesty, her self-mockery and
sardonic wit render Tomato’s transgressions not only forgivable but
exciting and enjoyable. Yet her humorous tone is just as fundamental
as a strategy for disempowering cultural stereotypes. In the following
passage, it is her self-mockery which brings Tomato’s transdifferent
predicament to the point:

I don’t feel white, gay, bisexual, black, or like a brokenhearted Puerto

Rican in West Side Story, but sometimes I feel like all of them. Some-
times I feel so white I want to speak in twang and belong to the KKK,
experience the brotherhood and simplicity of opinions. / Sometimes I
want to feel so heterosexual, hit the headboard to the point of concus-
sion […]. I want the kid, the folding stroller. Please, let me stand for-
ever in a line with my expensive offspring at Disney World. / Some-
times I want to be so black, my hair in skinny long braids, that black
guys nod and say “hey sister” […]. / I want the story, the rhythm, the
myths that come with the color. Sometimes I want to live with my
hand inside of a woman so I can hear her heart beat […]. Other times I
wish I was born speaking Spanish so I could sound like I look without

pairs Tomato’s motorcycle, rides with her on the backseat: the passage is fol-
lowed by a picture of a pair of scissors (180), suggesting the possibility (or
male anxiety) of castration from the backseat.
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 289

curly-hair apologies. But I try all that and I quit it, and I try again. (28-
9)

In a play of self-conscious affiliation and disaffiliation, the narrator ri-

dicules stereotypical representations of both dominant and minority
social types in this passage, setting her (unstable and changing) de-
sires to belong (“I want to” / “sometimes I want to”) in antithetical re-
lation to the mocking description of the images desired (e.g. the “ex-
pensive offspring at Disneyworld”). “Try” – “quit” – “try again”:
while opening up a variety of identifications, the passage thus empha-
sizes the interstitial subject’s continual dislocation and the tensions
arising as a result of her transdifferent affiliations; the last sentence
adds temporary bitterness as a core ingredient to Tomato’s humor.
In response to these transdifferential tensions, Lopez’ book de-
velops from a quest for roots – which is signified by the protagonist’s
desired return to her Puerto Rican father in order to anchor herself
within a collective – into a picaresque “routes narrative” (Kunow
2002), which focuses on the viability between cultures and categories.
When Tomato learns of her father’s death, she realizes she has gradu-
ally abandoned her initial destination: “I hadn’t decided how far I was
going or where I was going.” (Lopez 1998/1997: 223) As her need for
collective identification decreases,30 Tomato forgets the aim and des-
tination of her road trip and turns into a picaresque wanderer cruising
the American highways – a development interrupted only by faint
memories of her desire to belong. Similarly, on the road from Phila-
delphia to California, Tomato’s need for ethnic and sexual alignment
vanishes; after Magdalena disembarks from their journey following a
minor argument (93), Tomato experiences a sense of what could be
called a rhizomatic community with strangers – truck-drivers, travel-
ers, and bikers encountered by chance.

30
Her abandonment of collective identification also paradoxically leads to a
fleeting moment of cosmic belonging, a feeling based on her resentment of
environmental exploitation (in which the motorcyclist nevertheless partakes!):
“I breathed with the trees and felt separated from the collective human con-
sciousness: I didn’t want to conquer anything, didn’t want to build cheap alu-
minium developments or shopping centers. I felt I belonged and would’ve
asked for permission to stay if I’d known how […]. These unplanned mo-
ments of actually feeling like a natural part of the planet […] are so few and
too far between.” (195)
290 Roads of Her Own

Although Tomato also celebrates these communities and her

own interstitial, transient belonging in the course of her narrative de-
velopment, convinced that hybridity will steadily increase in the future
of the United States, she is well aware of the limitations imposed on
the individual by the capitalist commodification of this trend: “They
say I’m a child of an AT&T café olé telephone commercial future
where your nose is not flat enough to offend / and not pointy enough
to cut the glass ceiling. Future child, that’s me.” (28) Correspondingly,
the text does not present an idealized, utopian vision of hybridity;
voicing also the painful moments in which Tomato encounters various
glass ceilings, it is less hybridity that is celebrated than the radical
openness that transdifferential conflict, continual change, and narra-
tive parody can produce.

Visual PaROADy and the Queer Mestiza

Flaming Iguanas does not limit parodic play to the diegesis and a
transgressive, taboo-breaking language, both of which repeat the road
formula with a critical distance. Parody is also detectable in the book’s
material, paginal space from front jacket to back cover, weaving to-
gether black and white graphic art and a typographically experimental
text of jumbled lines and blurred fonts, as well as in its unusual qua-
dratic formatting.31 These graphic elements are not, as Lopez’ subtitle
might suggest, purely illustrative, but create another level of significa-
tion that potentially ruptures the narrative and puzzles the reader.
A major element on this level is Lopez’ visual commentary on
the image and iconography of the Latina by way of graphic parody

31
The original hardcover edition was printed on brown paper, which Lopez had
chosen for its similarity to wrapping paper used by the U.S. Postal Service
(Laffrado 2002: 409). As an aspiring “stamp artist”, she has designed a series
of “penis stamps” printed at the end of the book. Commemorative stamps enti-
tled “St. Valentine’s Day Penis Massacre”, “Bulimic Penis”, or “Penis De-
scending a Staircase” ridicule phallic power visually; in the narrative, the pe-
nis-shape is appropriated for lesbian sex as Hodie, who owns a sex-toy store,
offers Tomato a job: “ ‘ You mean you want me to come up with a new line of
dildos?’ The modern day Electra complex was playing itself out more ele-
gantly than I could’ve ever imagined. And I’d be able to pay for my bike with
penis money.” (256)
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 291

and pastiche.32 Bluemich and Cedeño (2005) label two of the most
common Latina stereotypes “the virginal señorita” and the oversexua-
lized “loose Latin spitfire”, both serving as objects of entertainment
and sexual pleasure. Often, they argue, Latinas are additionally de-
picted as dumb, funny, and laughable.33 Quite fittingly, Erika Lopez
fashions Tomato Rodriguez after the iconic Portuguese-Brazilian ac-
tress and entertainer Carmen Miranda in order to distort Latina stereo-
types. Miranda (1909-1955) enlivened Hollywood films of the 1940s
with staccato singing and frantic dancing; following her Broadway
successes of the late 1930s, she was billed the “Brazilian Bombshell”
and was used primarily to add ‘exotic spice’ to musical films, typical-
ly performing in extravagant costumes and high headgear, a hat she
had designed herself, adorned by an assortment of tropical fruit (e.g.
in Nancy Goes to Rio, 1950).34 As Bluemich and Cedeño summarize:

Miranda with her cute accent and tropical fruit and banana costumes,
reached the epitome of the Latin women as hip-swinging, fractured
English-speaking, ditsy sex objects. […] Notoriously known as “the
lady in the tutti-frutti hat,” her multicolored costumes and fruit-
covered hats instantly mocked the folkloric costumes and customs of
Brazil and Latin America in general. 35

At this point, Lopez’ illustrations intervene in the exoticist, misogynist

discourse, as she gives voice to these tensions of cultural in-
betweenness in her Carmen Miranda/Tomato Rodriguez portrayals in

32
Pastiche – repetitive imitation without the “critical distance” that defines par-
ody (cf. Hutcheon 1985: 12) – is one visual strategy of appropriation that Lo-
pez uses for the text’s overall parodic intent.
33
See Bluemich/Cedeño (2005): http://www.skidmore.edu/~g_bluemi/ com-
mon_stereotypes2.htm.
34
The blatant exoticism that shaped Miranda’s American career reduced her to a
pure embodiment of Latina stereotypes. The fact that Miranda suffered from
severe depressions throughout her time in the United States hints at how deep-
ly this stereotyping affected her. The impossibility of escaping the clichéd ex-
otic sex-bomb in the States and the criticism she received for her appearances
by Brazilian and Argentine authorities seems to have led to cultural disloca-
tion and uprootedness: too exotic for Anglo-America but too Americanized to
represent South America, Miranda was torn between two cultural hemispheres
(see Miranda’s biography by Martha Gil-Montero, 1989).
35
Cf. Bluemich/Cedeño (2005): http://www.skidmore.edu/~g_bluemi/ com-
mon_stereotypes.htm.
292 Roads of Her Own

Flaming Iguanas.36 The hoop earrings and fruit hat as well as the fla-
menco-style blouse clearly evoke the Brazilian actress; the front cover
image, briefly described above, lends color to the black-and-white pic-
ture of both Miranda’s filmic appearances and the stereotypical, black-
and-white image of the Latina woman. From waist down, Lopez tran-
scends the representational tradition of the semi-nude entertainer
‘prostituting’ herself for the pleasure of the (WASP) audience by
dressing her female hero in red pants and polished black boots,
echoing military uniforms or sado-masochist costumes. Together with
the motorcycle, the character is thus visually empowered by the phys-
ical and social mobility suggested (Laffrado 2002: 411). Visually as
well as narratively, this Miranda figure is now endowed with agency
and confidence; where Carmen Miranda was staged primarily as an
object of scopophilic gratification, Tomato-Miranda returns the gaze
and talks back. Further, the Tomato-Miranda figure ruptures the diffe-
rential relation between ‘original’ and ‘copy’, as the reader/spectator
is unsure whether Tomato mimics Miranda or vice versa. The text thus
suggests here that there is no such thing as an original, authentic Lati-
na; by transplanting Miranda into Lopez’ generation of mestizas,
blending her with the picaresque narrator-protagonist, this illustrated
road narrative disrupts representational claims to ‘authentic’ ethnic
femininity altogether.
The title page of the book shows a similar drawing, this time in
black and white (in accordance with the rest of the book). The Miran-
da-Tomato figure is posited on a wooden gate, entertaining us by play-
ing the guitar and singing, clad in a typical country-singer fringy shirt,
skirt and cowboy boots, and again, the mixed-fruit hat and large ear-
rings. “Lopez’ incongruous situating of this Carmen Miranda figure”,
Laura Laffrado observes,

signals its disalignment from Latina stereotypes. Her conflation of im-

ages of the cowgirl, country-western music, and Latina women con-
founds our stereotypic expectations of Latina locations and activities.
Positioned outdoors, alone, and confident, Tomato Rodriguez an-

36
It should be noted here that Lopez’ resignification of the Carmen Miranda im-
age was preceded historically by drag shows of American World-War-II sol-
diers overseas, which rendered Miranda an icon of gay subculture (cf. Allan
Bérubé’s Coming Out Under Fire: the History of Gay Men and Women in
World War Two, 1990).
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 293

nounces underrepresented possibilities of Latina agency and indepen-

dence. (2002: 411)

In this context, one might perhaps speak of mestiza rather than “Latina
agency” and independence (Smith 2001: XV), knowing that the main
character/narrator is of mixed Anglo-Latina descent. These heritages
are translated visually into the combination of the Anglo country outfit
with typical Carmen Miranda attributes in the image discussed above.
In any case, the gate Tomato-Miranda sits on certainly alludes to the
borderland trope, perhaps the most important metaphor in Latino/a
and Chicano/a writing in the second half of the 20th century. The
daughter of an absent Puerto Rican father overly present in Tomato’s
physical features and an Anglo mother who raised her, Tomato devel-
ops during her road trip what Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) has called a
“new mestiza” consciousness from her interstitial position on the
fence, in the borderland of ethnic identities. Like the new mestiza,
Tomato cannot (and does not want to) be located fully in the ‘here’ or
‘there’ of the border zones, transcending dualistic relations: thus, An-
zaldúa’s (1987) conception of this in-between position must also be
seen in relation to sexuality (and possibly other social categories). De-
veloped against the background of her own multiple cultural dis-
placements as a working-class Chicana lesbian, Anzaldúa’s notion of
a mestiza consciousness, however, ultimately attempts “to work out a
synthesis” (1987: 80) or thirdspace hybridity, but in order to do so,
must bear conflicting subject positions: “This assembly is not one
where severed or separated pieces merely come together.” (ibid. 79) It
is from the sustenance of contradictions – which can be located also
within Anzaldúa’s writing (Yarbro-Bejarano 1994: 24) – that she de-
velops “a new paradigm that permits the expansion of categories of
analysis in such a way as to give expression to the lived experience of
the ways race, class, and gender converge” (ibid. 6). As a conse-
quence, border zones remain ambiguous by definition, opening up
possibilities while at the same time confronting potentially painful op-
positions:

The topography of the borderland is not only a space of multiple op-

pression but also a potentially liberatory space […]. [T]he new mestiza
[is] constituted by […] acts of crossing and recrossing the border […].
Mestiza consciousness is a constantly shifting process […]. This con-
sciousness embraces multiple voices and multiple positionings in rela-
294 Roads of Her Own

tion to gender, class, sexuality and membership of competing cultures

[…]. (Fellner 2005: 102-3)

“To live in the borderlands”, Anzaldúa herself writes, “means you are
[…] caught in the crossfire between camps […] not knowing which
side to turn to, run from; […] it often produces a feeling of being torn
between different subject positions” (1987: 216). This characterization
certainly captures Tomato’s initial quandary well; however, and di-
verging from Anzaldúa’s much-celebrated conception of a hybrid
mestiza that ultimately annihilates the predicament of transdifferential
identifications by producing a new, albeit fragmented, unity, Lopez’
figure responds to pain with humor, (self-)mockery, and sarcasm.
Conceiving Tomato as a trickster-picara, Lopez instead focuses on the
new mestiza’s transdifferential and queer aspects, from which she de-
velops her performative parody of the border.
The term ‘queer’ is understood broadly here, in the sense of
shaking up dualisms and notions of categorical purity, authenticity, or
normalcy. (Regardless of its elasticity and resistance to definition, the
term cannot be used for post-identity agenda without acknowledging
its roots in lesbian and gay studies and activism.) Its greatest potential,
in my view, lies in its provocative embrace of the ambiguous, indefin-
able, even the inappropriate, as an oppositional practice to any kind of
dualism and conceptual order – and it is in this light that a queer agen-
da can be disclos(et)ed also in the picaresque literary tradition. Cer-
tainly, I would thus argue, there is no reason to confine the use of
queer theory to issues of sexuality alone.37 Indeed, a major develop-
ment in queer theory has been the challenge to account for transdiffe-
rent dissonances based on the intersection of sexual orientation,
race/ethnicity, class, and gender (Sedgwick 1990: x, Warner 1993: vii
& xvii).
Tomato, a bicultural bisexual biker at times easy, at other times
uneasy, about her confused ethnic and sexual identities, can therefore
be read as a postmodern queer picara, a post-identity model to over-
come a life in images, a life full of fear “that she has no names / that

37
For a recently published overview that conceives of the term in a similarly
broad manner see Hark, who understands the queer critique of normalizing
discourses as extending also to the questioning of other binary relations rele-
vant for the social order (such as true/false, un-/natural, public/private, etc.;
2005: 295).
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 295

she has many names / that she doesn’t know her names / She has this
fear that she’s an image / that comes and goes” (Anzaldúa 1987: 43).38
By way of her queer agenda and her new mestiza consciousness, the
inter-cultural picara is equipped to create mobile spatialities of disson-
ance and dissent. Similarly, Lopez’ graphic novel (de-)scripts multiple
subjectivities in a transgressive travel narrative, which is vital to sus-
tain multiplicity as well as transience; thus, she defies the expectation
that autobiography declare a coherent I, opting instead, by way of vis-
ual and narrative performance, for a range of potential identifications
(Laffrado 2002: 423; Solomon goes even further and proposes, fol-
lowing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, to view Lopez’ narrative ‘I’ as a
mere “heuristic device”, 2002: 209).39
In Flaming Iguanas, Lopez takes her readers on a verbal and
graphic tour through Tomato’s particular mestiza universe: on the one
hand, she has the protagonist sing Don McLean’s “American Pie” and
the national anthem when she is scared (Lopez 1998/1997: 104), thus
mocking U.S.-American hymns – one popular, one official – by way
of irony and parody; on the other hand, she articulates Tomato’s
childhood attraction to the Puerto Ricans because the narrator-
protagonist “wanted to be one” (147). Out of touch with her Latina fa-
ther and thus with her minoritarian cultural heritage, Jolene/Tomato
looks for Latina role models in the streets and beauty parlors of Puerto
Rican New York: “I wanted to belong / look like the other women in
the grocery store” (146). As a child, she

38
Note that the quote ends on a line emphasizing not only the historical change-
ability of images and stereotypes, but also a latent agency implied in the new
mestiza’s physical as well as metaphorical coming and going. Issues of space
and agency – with the border zone as a continuing spatial referent on both
metaphorical and geographical levels – have a long tradition in Chicana litera-
ture and criticism; Trujillo (1993), Quintana (1996), and Brady (2002), for in-
stance, stress issues of domesticity, interstitiality, and spatial expansion, re-
spectively.
39
In this context, Laffrado calls the text a “performance of multiplicity”, citing
Chéla Sandoval’s observations in “Mestizaje as Method”: “The cruising mo-
bilities […] demand of the differential practitioner commitment to the process
of metamorphosis itself: this is the activity of the trickster who practices sub-
jectivity-as-masquerade, the oppositional agent who accesses differing iden-
tity, ideological, aesthetic, and political positions.” (qtd. in Laffrado 2002:
424)
296 Roads of Her Own

had a guardian angel I named “Chiquita” because I wanted to get in

touch with my Puerto Rican heritage and have a Puerto Rican guar-
dian angel, and the Spanish word I knew was from the bananas, so I
called her “Chiquita”. My childhood guardian angel wore fruit on her
head, felt sorry for me like a tragic TV show, and got me out of all
sorts of scary shit […]. As I got older and too cool for her, she packed
the fruit in her suitcase and moved on. (107-8)

Across pages 108 and 109, Lopez has drawn, in succession from left
to right, a compass, a peach, cherries, a pineapple, grapes and a straw-
berry on their way toward an open suitcase. Not knowing her Puerto
Rican family or any Spanish, Jolene, as text and image jointly express,
is positioned as a displaced cultural orphan who adopts a guardian an-
gel that embodies Latina culture for the little girl. Her in-betweenness,
however – conditioned by her Anglo features, lack of Spanish lan-
guage skills, and mestizaje – remain a “barrier[…] to telling her story
through Latina scripts and, consequently, to membership in an identity
group” (Laffrado 2002: 408). Thus, the narrative voices in Flaming
Iguanas offer disparate and multiple autobiographical possibilities:
“In crossing genres and media to extend the tradition of Americans
writing life on the road” (ibid.), Lopez has created an intermedial
space that adds emphasis to the narrator-protagonist’s transgressive in-
terstitiality.
Interestingly, the fact that Chiquita is merely a banana trading
company’s brand name does not concern little Jolene; even as a child,
cultural belonging does not require authenticity for Tomato, but rests
in performative acts – such as the oft-repeated Spanish name (meaning
’the little one’) of her guardian angel or the shaved-off eyebrows
drawn back in thin black lines like the Puerto Rican women around
her (147). Later, Tomato continues this Latina self-fashioning by re-
inventing her first name, eating Latino-style (17 & 63) and using
Spanish words.40 The name of her one-girl motorcycle gang is similar-
ly connected to her Latina heritage:
40
This usually happens in Tomato’s descriptions of women and of sex: she calls
her sister Elena “pollo” (54) for the color of her skin, her first lesbian affair
Hodie “Hooter Mujer” (248) for her large breasts, and even alters Spanish
grammar by using the Spanish word for snipe, chocha (151, 216) for ‘vagina’
(the Spanish chocho); obviously, Lopez did not want to use a masculine noun
to describe a female sexual organ. The fact that Spanish vocabulary is often
used in the context of feminine sexuality and bodies makes use, perhaps too
eagerly, of the stereotype of the Latina sex bomb.
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 297

“I’ve always wanted to be in a gang called Flaming Iguanas in honor

of our flamboyant little South American brothers and sisters who are
penned in like tiny lizard cows, but want to run free. All because the
locals think they taste like chicken and take up less space.”
[Magdalena:] “Iguanas don’t run, Tomato.”
“That’s my point. Since they can’t, we will run for them. Feel the fire
of death and time nipping at our butts, making us run, live, and have
no regrets. I bet you cows and iguana food-prisoners have many re-
grets.” (20)

This passage evokes a certain analogy between the situation of the

iguana and the American Latino. As Oscar Hijuelos remarks in his
preface to Iguana Dreams, iguanas usually go unnoticed, sitting un-
derneath stone heaps and shrubs, and are highly adaptable to their sur-
roundings – some specimen can even change their skin color (1992:
xi). Tomato feels connected to these creatures because the fact that
they take up so little space puts them at a disadvantage (and in danger)
against larger breeding stock. Put this way, Tomato’s obsession with
the iguana – the “iguana thing” (21) she has going on41 – can also be
read as a satirical comment on heteronormativity, with the ‘hidden’
homosexual as both endangered by not taking up more space, yet si-
multaneously protected by a survival tactics such as camouflage invi-
sibility. In addition, the oxymoronic ambivalence of the Flaming Igu-
ana emphasizes both the negative and the empowering aspect of the
metaphor, with the flames of fire connoting its destructive component
as well as intensity and passion. Thus it is already in the title that the
transdifferent tensions, which appear throughout the text, are hinted
at: painful moments of conflicting identifications and affiliations. Si-
multaneously, the performative parody Lopez creates from these mo-
ments is also foreshadowed.
Tomato’s love for the iguana “food-prisoners” also emphasizes
that spatial expansion and freedom of mobility are the top priorities of
her road trip agenda, proclaimed in the book’s preface, which she also
narrates:

Magdalena and I are gonna cross America on two motorcycles. We’re

gonna be so fucking cool, mirrors and windows will break when we
pass by. […] [W]omen wearing pink foam curlers in passing RVs will

41
Cf. also Tomato’s iguana ‘cross-dressing’; Magdalena talks about “that green
spiky hat you always wear looks like an iguana” (21). Also, her love for exotic
hats obviously connects the protagonist to Carmen Miranda.
298 Roads of Her Own

desire us […]. The sun wouldn’t dare melt us because it would be a

big, huge, major mistake. We’ll be riding the cheapest motorcycles we
can find / stopping every forty-five minutes for gas. Truck stop wai-
tresses will wink and jam dollar bills in our happy little beautifully
tanned fists, but we’ll whisper “no thanks,” because we don’t need it /
we’ll live off the fumes from our estrogen. And we’ll be spitting out
mango pits like fucking bullets if anyone says anything about our
huge Latin American breasts. (s.p.)42

Her mission statement expresses how Tomato does not want to fight
or plead for spatial agency and recognition: rather than as a means to
bargain for space, estrogen and mango pits – metaphors for the female
Latina body – are weapons to defend a position of spatial agency
claimed as rightfully hers.

Dismantling the Culture of Fear

In Flaming Iguanas, humor and parody do not, however, obviate the

seriousness of the various concerns the text investigates. Much rather,
the use of a humorous narrative voice can be seen as a means to facili-
tate the articulation of painful feelings like loneliness, uncertainty, or
alienation. The interplay between serious subject matter on the one
hand and picaresque playfulness and disruption on the other becomes
evident, especially in the first seven chapters which express the diffi-
culties accompanying Tomato’s claim to space and the impossibility
of a position outside dominant discourses of gendered space. The fe-
male body is refigured here as being inscribed by these discursive
forces when Tomato’s almost agoraphobic fear of the journey is arti-
culated. For one, she admits she needs Magdalena’s company because
she “was too chicken to go on [her] own” (22): “We’d go together and
save each other from a world that seemed full of the kind of serial
killers they make compassionate TV movies about.” (ibid.) In the
course of the narrative, Tomato then discerns the cultural geography
of fear as responsible for her initial agoraphobic fantasy of “discreetly
jump[ing] down a flight of stairs and break[ing] my legs so I wouldn’t
have to go” (25). These contradictory impulses – her eagerness to de-
part vs. her fear of doing so – result from the fact that Tomato is sub-

42
The opposite page shows a watermelon and a cantaloupe, clearly a pun on
Magdalena’s and Tomato’s “huge Latin American breasts”.
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 299

ject to, painfully aware of, and in opposition to dominant cultural con-
structions of female socio-spatial confinement (Laffrado 2002: 416);
they can also be explained by the ambiguous position of a female bi-
ker simultaneously drawn to the masculine myth of the open road yet
held back by socio-cultural as well as physical restraints.43 Visiting the
Grand Canyon, she confronts a similar fantasy, but the humorous tone
of the passage immediately makes clear Tomato will not give in to it:

“C’mon… Jump…Jump…” [the Canyon] whispers like a very large

baking pan. It’s hard to be free / I’m so scared to do whatever I want.
It’s like the gravel in the road or the oil slicks and trucks that I’ve
never actually experienced crashing into myself, but other people have
warned me about. I’m afraid of crashing yet I want to blaze through
life, so I live by pithy double-dare one-liners [like “Carpe Diem!”]
that I pull into as parking spaces, but can’t back out of. (110)44

In a gendered parody of the lines “I’m free / to do what I want” from

the song “I’m Free” by the Rolling Stones,45 this passage problematiz-
es this claim. In the same chapter, the narrator-protagonist realizes
how her fears are part of a culturally institutionalized discourse of fear
– in which media representation plays a major role:

There is this myth that if you’re a woman traveling alone people will
instantly want to kill you. This is an example of where you shouldn’t
listen to anybody. So much of the way we live and the decisions we

43
Tomato refers to her “D-cups” as an obstacle of bodily activity (99) and re-
peatedly makes her lack of physical strength responsible for her “battles” with
her motorcycle (e.g. 195-6).
44
Tomato’s fear of death is a recurrent theme in Flaming Iguanas: “I think
about death too much […]. I’ve got to get to some kind of spiritual point
where I won’t give a shit and blow through life without thinking one day
these are gonna be ancient times.” (158-9) As Primeau and others have noted,
road novels often address such fundamental questions, thereby opening a
“dialogue about who we are, where we’ve been, and where we might yet still
go” (Primeau 1996: 16). Retrospectively taking pride in her successful ven-
ture, Tomato finally stops worrying: “I felt alone and I loved America […].
I’d really, really done it. I’d made it and I felt the peace of living in the here
and now and not worrying about where I’d be tomorrow or in fifty years.”
(237)
45
The song starts “I’m free to do what I want any old time / I’m free to do what
I want any old time / So love me, hold me / love me, hold me / I’m free any
old time / to get what I want” (from the Rolling Stones’ 1965 December’s
Children album).
300 Roads of Her Own

make in this world are based on fear. […] I highly doubt you’d find a
traveler pumping you full of psycho-killer fear. No. Only people who
stay at home and watch too much TV will pump you full of that shit.
(111-2)

As she gains the confidence of a female biker who temporarily suc-

ceeds at unmasking a discourse that installs women at home or on the
back of motorcycles (191), Tomato, as both narrator and protagonist,
reclaims the traditionally masculine space of the road by way of pa-
rodic repetition. Her credo is never to act “vague” and to “take up
space because it’s not a school dance” (112). This strategy finally
makes her “feel alone in the best way” (185) – competent, courageous,
and strong (200).
“The louder you laugh and the farther apart you plant your feet,
the more respect you’ll get” (112) aptly sums up Tomato’s road phi-
losophy, based on strategies of queer intervention in gendered spatial
practices. The text’s claiming of space seems incompatible with the
spatial separatism characteristic of feminist/lesbian/Latino/a political
agendas of the 1970s and 1980s.46 And accordingly, Tomato’s road
narrative does not counter mainstream spatiality with exclusionary al-
ternative zones, but reconstructs the United States as a queer nation.
While on the road, the protagonist’s interest is neither in the landscape
nor its mythical markers – Route 66 is merely a welcome diversion to
“busy [her]self with romantic thoughts of all the famous people who’d
ridden the same road” (206), and an Amarillo sunset is described by
“the striated clouds [that] covered the purple sky like the stretch marks
on my hips” (209) – a ruthless parody of romantic descriptions of the
American night that can be found in Kerouac, for instance.47 Instead,

46
In this context, Enevold (2004: 87) also notes Lopez’/Tomato’s ambivalence
toward her mother’s generation’s feminism, which is illustrated by her ridicul-
ing of some of its core manifestos such as Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second
Sex (1949), Ellen Frankfort’s Vaginal Politics (1972), and Erika Jong’s Fear
of Flying (1973; cf. Lopez 1998/1997: 27).
47
Cf. the last paragraph of Kerouac’s On the Road: “So in America when the
sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long,
long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbe-
lievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the
people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the chil-
dren must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the
stars’ll be out […].” (1976/1957: 307)
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 301

Tomato enjoys encountering queer relationships on road and road-

sides, “funny couple[s]” (209) such as a French lesbian who married a
gay man with a liking for straight guys so she could stay in the coun-
try (ibid.), two inseparable Canadians bikers both named John, and fi-
nally her father’s lesbian wife Hodie, with whom she “br[eaks] on
through to the other side” (219) of heteronormativity – thus even
queering the Doors’ famous song lines (“Break on Through,” from
their 1967 debut album).
Tomato’s desire for a relationship with a woman is not idealized
by the narrative. When Tomato visits her mother to talk about her les-
bian relationship, Lopez’ text immediately subverts her protagonist’s
romantic view of lesbian relationships:

“I’m wondering if I should be a lesbian. You and Violet get along so

well. You both are like friends, and well, that’s what I want. Like you
probably totally trust each other and stuff. I think it’s a woman thing.
You both really know how to be sensitive with each other.” (swoosh –
bam!) Violet slid back the sliding glass door […] and yelled across the
deck.
“Jane! I thought you were going to buy the turkey! Where’s the damn
turkey?” (173-4)

Jane and Violet pick a fight that ends in “another therapy appoint-
ment” (175) and Tomato’s realization that they both actually live “in
denial” (176). Mocking ‘lesbian’ identity, she is relieved when, the
morning after her first sexual experience with Hodie, she “didn’t feel
like a member of a lesbian gang […], didn’t feel this urge to subscribe
to lesbian magazines, wear flannel shirts, wave DOWN WITH THE
PATRIARCHY signs in the air, or watch bad lesbian movies to see
myself represented” (251).48 Here, again, the text undoes “lesbian” as
an objective, empirically determinable category in favor of performa-
tive acts of sexual and personal association (Solomon 2002: 212). Dis-
sociating herself from the identity-based activism of previous genera-
tions of American homosexuals, Tomato jocosely demands “a Bisex-
ual Female Ejaculating Quaker role model” (ibid.) to represent her. A
third instance in which the narrative uses a post-identitarian queer eye

48
This critique of “bad lesbian film” might arguably hark back to queer theory’s
critique of representation as an expression of some ‘inner’ truth or identity
(Hark 2005: 290) rather than as a repeated performance that constructs – and
potentially interrupts – social discourse.
302 Roads of Her Own

is when Tomato, implicitly dissociating sex, gender, and sexual prefe-

rence, recounts her affair with “a nice boy in the spring I could prac-
tice lesbian sex with” (220; cf. also Solomon 2002: 210).49
Lopez’ visual and narrative exaggerations of stereotypical Lati-
na/biker/lesbian/feminist representations can be read as a strategy to
unveil ideas of identity as always based upon confining stereotypes.
Interrupting such stereotypes (e.g. by the placement of stereotypical
images of women in unexpected environments), she does not aim her
criticism at Latina femininity exclusively,50 but attacks various models
of normative femininity and feminine sexuality throughout Flaming
Iguanas. From the 1950s’ iconography of the housewife happily
cleaning her kitchen (44 & 52) and smiling cowgirls (70 & 77) to nuns
(96), nurses (98), cheerleaders (76), and Marylin Monroe (99) – such
images are distorted either by lascivious, transgressive gestures such
as smoking (99), raised forefingers (98) and fists (231), or by figural
expressions (the bull-riding cowgirl on p. 70 says “wish I’d worn pan-
ties”; two women proudly present the word “Bullshit”, 28). Lopez vi-
sually counterpoints these images also by adding props such as hand-
guns (77 & 122), or by juxtaposing them with visual and/or verbal
comments: the happy housewife is immediately followed by a pair of
hands tied up with ropes (44-5) or titles such as “naked method actors
and the rumors started about them” (113), suggesting the opposite of
happy domesticity. Furthermore, Lopez intermingles these traditional
icons with pictures of unruly women – a pirate girl (231), a uniformed
woman on a motorcycle laughing out “Heh, heh, heh, heh!” (189), as
well as Robert Crumb’s Devil Girl in acrobatic poses (138, 182, 235);
on the last page, Devil Girl performs a handstand on her motorbike,
below which Lopez prints “after”, thus celebrating Tomato’s acrobatic
feat of riding cross-country.51 These queer(ed) images create a herit-
49
In other instances, her ‘queer eye’ imagines American icons of masculinity
such as the park ranger as part of a closeted “queer nation”, “out for a quiet,
unheterosexual fuck in the woods” (195).
50
Much of the deconstruction of Latina stereotypes is based on Lopez’ culinary
imagery. It would exceed the scope of this chapter to analyze food imagery in
Flaming Iguanas beyond its relevance for the book’s queer strategies in con-
structing spatial agency. On the role of food in Latina/o literature, see Martín-
Rodriguez, “The Raw and Who Cooked It: Food, Identity and Culture in U.S.
Latino/a Literature” (2000).
51
This picture contrasts the “before”-image on the first page of the book, a huge
tomato that references the protagonist’s self-chosen pseudonym. A core ingre-
 Ex-centric & Wayward: Picaras of the Late 20th Century 303

age of picaresque misfits like Tomato, who says of herself that “[i]t’s
tough being born without an ‘appropriate’ barometer” (52). Thus in-
terfering with classic icons of the ‘All-American Girl’, Lopez creates
visual(ly) transgressive spaces in which ‘anything goes’ and binary
oppositions are ridiculed by her joining of antithetical oppositions.
The graphic dimension of Flaming Iguanas could therefore be charac-
terized as a queer visual picaresque intermedially buttressing its narra-
tive dimension.
With her multidimensional text, defying categorization and em-
phasizing performance and process rather than representation, Lopez
can be positioned in a broader artistic counter-discourse that links her,
for instance, to the ethnic and gender interventions of Guillermo
Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco. Both these artists have, since the late
1980s, fought the commodification of ethnic minorities by dominant
discourses, devising a performative aesthetics that abandons classical
strategies of representation in favor of an emphasis on the artificiality,
mediation, and fetishization of the Other in what one can call corpo-
rate multiculturalism. Like Fusco’s, Lopez’ language is informed by
the “intersubjective and performative uses of language – their local,
vernacular expressions and imaginative, vivacious capacity for resis-
tance and transformation” (Fisher 2001: 225).52
In sum, Flaming Iguanas articulates transdifferential moments
of conflict, which usually demarcate a crisis of identity and self-
esteem, as a source of queer empowerment. Thus, the book dodges ca-
tegorizations of ethnic, gender, and sexual differences, while at the
same time disrupting generic and literary conventions: as Laffrado as-

dient of Latino food, the tomato, along with raw fruit and vegetables in gen-
eral, is used in Latina/o literature and poetry “to represent the elemental, sen-
sual pleasure associated with them, thus relating food and sexuality” (Martín-
Rodriguez 2000: 44). Cf. also Lopez’ various images of flan, which, topped
with a cherry or other dark garnishments, often take the shape of a woman’s
breast (39, 57, 207).
52
With Emily Hicks, who draws on both Deleuze/Guattari and Anzaldúa, Lo-
pez’ text could also be placed in the “border writing” tradition of “minor lite-
rature”. Hicks defines border writing as an “operation” rather than a defini-
tion, based on any bi- or multicultural experience, on multi-dimensional texts,
narrative non-linearity, and decentered subjects (1988: 47). From this angle,
Flaming Iguanas ‘deterritorializes’ the major language (here, visual and narra-
tive codes) by way of ironic “trans-contextualization” (Hutcheon 1985: 8), a
defining element of parody.
304 Roads of Her Own

serts, “Lopez links the disruption of conventional female self-

representation to the visual disruption of the conventional appearance
of the page” (2002: 408). Lopez’ “road novel-thing”, while arguably
presenting a story of homosexual initiation, defies the teleology of
‘finding’ an identity, making sure that Tomato’s lesbian affair is “not
‘progress’, […] not part of an evolutionary sequence […], nor […] the
mark of a new, stable, instantiated identity” (Solomon 2002: 214-5).
Rather than a quest for ethnic and sexual identity, Flaming Iguanas
thus abandons, by way of its narrative and visual queer picaresque
strategies, centered essence in favor of transgressive performativity.
Ultimately, the book can be read as an attempt to de-script difference
in order to surmount a politics of identity characteristic of prior gener-
ations of Latina, lesbian, and feminist activists. While this politics is
not completely delegitimized in the text, the discursive critique ex-
pressed by Lopez attacks the easily commodifiable ‘authentic’ Other-
ness that resulted from identity-based strategies of intervention, even
if only as an involuntary side effect.53 In view of the multiple affilia-
tions and conflicting cultural groundings that inform the text, the
space-making project of Flaming Iguanas seeks instead to think the
politics of difference anew by way of performativity and shape shift-
ing, parodic tricksterism, and transgressive picarisma.

53
Gomez-Peña and Fusco have both addressed this problematic in two of their
recent publications (Ethno Techno, 2005, and The Bodies That Were Not
Ours, 2001, respectively).
 Conclusion

After the movie Thelma & Louise had been released in 1991 and had
become an immediate box-office success in the United States, a popu-
lar t-shirt spelled out that the film was read as a statement of women’s
empowerment by many of its (predominantly female) viewers: “I saw
Thelma & Louise – so back off!” Even if critical responses to the film
have been highly controversial, there can be no doubt that this road
movie made a critical difference in the public negotiation of gender
roles, social and sexual power relations, space, and mobility. By dec-
laring that women had a right not to be approached as sexual objects
without their consent, the t-shirt thus not only references the impor-
tance of a spatial agenda for emancipatory discourses, but can also be
understood as a materialization of such discourses. In such a Foucaul-
dian conception of discourse as articulation, materialization, and prac-
tice, women’s road narratives have been conceived in my study as lite-
rary articulations and textual materializations of the gend-
er/space/mobility nexus, and as textual interventions in dominant con-
ceptions thereof.
Since the 1970s, American women writers have appropriated,
parodied, and subverted the genre of the road novel. Their road narra-
tives have taken up and reconfigured traditional generic themes such
as the quest for new beginnings or picaresque adventure; simulta-
neously, a number of new themes have been introduced, such as the
forced mobility following economic necessity, the ‘geography of fear’
(Gill Valentine), the rewriting of mother-daughter-relationships as
well as alternative conceptions of family. There is clearly no single,
unified narrative that guides all the road texts I have discussed in this
study; in fact, they are shaped by heterogeneous cultural frameworks.
However, some similarities persist.
Women’s road narratives question femininity as tied to home
and hearth and probe the boundaries of gendered spatialities by means
of transgression. Responding to their various historical, cultural, so-
cial, and geographical contexts, these works critically relate to the
306 Roads of Her Own

strong ties between ideas of mobility and American foundational

myths like those of the Promised Land and the Golden West, demon-
strating how these have tended to disregard gendered, ethnic, and oth-
er differences. In the texts considered here, American highways and
backcountry roads, envisioned as distinctly gendered spaces, do not
appear as pre-existing playgrounds for exploration detached from so-
cial circumstances; in these literary representations of the road, the
complex realities of gendered space and mobility are instead reflected,
challenged, and negotiated in the context of a number of emancipatory
discourses.
Gillian Rose enlightens the connection of spatial discourse and
fantasy in “Performing Space” (1999), harking back to Doreen Mas-
sey’s notion of place as an articulation of social relations and Judith
Butler’s concept of performativity. For Rose, space is “the articulation
of collisions between discourse, fantasy and corporeality” (247), and
she argues that this articulation can be radically altered by different
performances. If fantasy is understood as fundamental to literature,
Rose’s conclusions clarify how women’s road literature can impact
the discourse of space and mobility:

The body […] is entangled with fantasy and discourse; fantasy mobi-
lizes bodies and is expressed through discourse; and discourse […] is
disrupted by fantasy and interrupted by the bodily. And all of these re-
lations are articulated spatially; their performance produces space.
(1999: 258)

Rose understands complex performances that counteract phallocentric

spatialities as a way of thinking, dreaming, and practicing other spac-
es, spaces marked by alternative differential relations. Women’s road
writings imagine such other spaces, spaces which are not bound by
public/private, center/margin, and similarly exclusive dichotomies.
They literally take cultural constructions of femininity to the streets,
displacing them and opening them up for contestation and negotiation.
Accordingly, my focus of inquiry was the analysis of how he-
gemonic conceptions of space, hierarchically structured not according
to a single category of identity but to a multiplicity of differences, im-
plicate female (im)mobility in road narratives. On the one hand, they
articulate the experience of immobility and the internalization of he-
gemonic structures. On the other hand, this experience is transcended
in women’s road stories in that the narratives send their protagonists
 Conclusion 307

on the road and thus have them transgress discursively dichotomous

spatial boundaries. In the course of the narrated journey, the clash of
contradictory cultural and gendered identifications emerges as a cen-
tral transdifferential moment of tension. In contradistinction to post-
modernist texts, which tend to devise post-identitarian models of
women’s subjectivity in response to these tensions, narratives written
in the realist mode seem to be unable to seize these in a creative man-
ner and thus frequently consolidate rather than challenge social differ-
ence. With regard to the aesthetic dimension, it has been shown that
formally more innovative texts critique the nexus of space,
(trans)difference, and spatial representation more radically, e.g. with
the help of intermediality or metatextual commentary. To highly di-
vergent degrees, then, the texts engender a literary spatiality that di-
egetically, narratologically, and formally challenges existing spatial
semantics.
One of the central theses of my study has been that the genre of
American road literature has been perceived and constructed in lite-
rary criticism as a masculine territory until recently – despite of the
plethora of road narratives written by women. This critical discourse
often implicitly affirms an essentialist and binary understanding of
space as a social category that structures (or even determines) literary
production. Thus, one of the aims of my study has been to show how
American women’s road literature from various cultural backgrounds
effectively revises this genre history, in which a universal norm
against which to judge women’s road writing is implicitly asserted. As
it articulates the formulaic road narrative with a critical difference, one
could argue that there is a parodic dimension to all of these works (al-
beit not necessarily a humorous one).
In my readings, I have identified three paradigms of mobility
which have structurally informed American women’s road narratives
since the 1970s, while the two interstitial chapters have emphasized
that these paradigms can easily blend into each other within a text. In
chapter three, I discussed the quest as a traditional form of mobility,
centered around the notion of a ‘better (home)place’. The attainability
of such a place, however, remains questionable; the closer the quest-
ing protagonist seems to get to her imagined, Edenic destination, the
more points of rupture disturb the narrative, emphasizing the unans-
werability of the question of how the road trip can end successfully.
What became clear in my explorations of women’s quest narratives is
308 Roads of Her Own

that an imaginary location beyond social norms and power structures,

at least within realist narrative conventions, can only fulfill the func-
tion of a motif, a rationale for escape. Furthermore, I have argued that
one central problem with which women’s quest narratives are con-
cerned, explicitly or implicitly, is the colonial and gendered legacy of
the journey West and the concept of the frontier; the quest of these
narratives thus also consists of finding new ways to come to terms
with this legacy. While transdifferential tensions are sometimes seized
as opportunities to revise self/other relations, they can just as well lead
to the disavowal of transdifference and the consolidation of difference.
In my second chapter, I devised the term para-nomadism in or-
der to counter the (post)colonial problematic pertaining to most uses
of the Deleuzian paradigm of nomadic movement. Para-nomadism
emphasizes, by way of a self-reflexivity introduced with the prefix,
the construct character of the nomadic figuration. The specification of
para-nomadic mobility resulted in the recognition that nomadic
movement has little to do with homelessness or Western notions of
travel (in the sense of the idea that the journey begins with a departure
and ends in arrival), but that it does not abandon the idea of home; ra-
ther, the nomad constructs her home on the road. In addition, I argued
the spatial resistance ascribed to the nomad is not her inherent charac-
teristic, as nomads travel out of economic necessity and along fixed
routes. Not surprisingly, para-nomadism frequently structures road
narratives concerned with a legacy of collective displacement, stories
that attempt to use this legacy creatively, appropriating and rewriting
it in empowering ways – although bleaker versions of para-nomadic
mobility are also possible.
The third paradigm of mobility I have identified in contempo-
rary women’s road narratives is the picaresque, which creates the pro-
tagonist as an adventurer across gendered spaces who is confronted
with the phenomenon of transdifference by her originary out-of-
placeness in terms of her cultural – ethnic, gendered, sexual, social,
etc. – Otherness. Ridiculing conventional discourses of masculine ad-
venture, picaresque road narratives often use humor and parody as
important elements in such tales of aimless wandering. Bodily and
sexual pleasures, shape-shifting, roguery, and trickstering are impor-
tant elements of transgression and survival in these stories. Like the
nomad, the picara refuses a fixed place in a system of identity and dif-
ference, of self and Other, but in contrast to the former, she goes even
 Conclusion 309

further in rejecting the idea of home altogether. Her only constant cha-
racteristic consists in her continual out-of-place-ness and restlessness;
arguably, the picara is thus the most radical ‘border crosser’.
The narrative design of more fluid, permeable, and transient
conceptions of space operates to a large extent via interstitial spaces
(such as the car as a simultaneous fusion of private and public spatiali-
ties) and is highly influenced by the protagonists’ pluri-affiliations and
multiple differences. Through the construction of such spaces, wom-
en’s road literature is witness to, and highlights, the importance of
spatial experiences for the construction of identity as a transitory
process (rather than something to be embodied or attained) and of the
subject as a temporal, relational individuation of a rhizomatic network
of discourses (rather than as an autonomous entity).
As a heuristic analytical concept, the notion of transdifference
has led me to rethink the spatial negotiation of conflicting lines of cul-
tural differences. On these grounds, one possible future development
of the concept of gendered space could be to review it through a
transdifferential lens: as my study has shown, other categories of dif-
ference also need to be brought into account when we study social as
well as fictional spatialities. The fictional production of space in the
narratives I have analyzed is often of a transdifferential nature, as it is
affected and effected by the tensions generated by the clash of mul-
tiple affiliations and identifications. Such a development may be of
great consequence for future scholarship following the spatial turn in
the humanities, which brought literarily mediated and generated spac-
es in view but which did not necessarily pay attention to the nexus of
space and cultural difference.
Connected by the discourse of the road genre, the texts I have
discussed in this study articulate the concatenations of gender, space,
and mobility in their specific cultural contexts; these articulations,
however, are never independent of each other but have to be seen as
interconnected specifications of collective claims and desires – in this
case, the claim to expatiation and the mobilization of concepts of fe-
mininity. From a feminist perspective that aims at a democratization
of space and spaces of agency, such alternative designs to hegemonic-
patriarchal discursive constructions of space are highly important. In
this way, the attempt of women’s road narratives to imagine ‘other
spaces’ can be regarded as the counter-discursive “cultural work”
310 Roads of Her Own

(Jane Tompkins) these texts are doing. Questioning residual ideas

about the freedom of the road, women’s road writing can be regarded
as discursive interventions in the cultural imaginary rather than as
simple reflections of socio-spatial configurations.
Gendered space and mobility have been negotiated in multiple
discursive forms, from semiotic articulations to material culture (like
the Thelma & Louise t-shirt) and performative bodily practices. Wom-
en’s road writings constitute only one such semiotic form; road mov-
ies, music, cartoons and comics, photography and visual art, even road
architecture could be objects for further analysis in this context. With-
out a doubt, these would require different parameters of study and
changed methodologies, yet it would be worthwhile to examine how
the specific (inter-)mediality of these cultural products affect and
shape the negotiation of gendered space and mobility. Another area
for further research would be the analysis of women’s transatlantic or
transnational road narratives in terms of space, mobility, and cultural
difference. In Simone de Beauvoir’s L’Amérique du jour au jour
(1948; tr. as America Day by Day, 1952), for instance, gendered spa-
tialities and mobility are prominent themes, but earlier transatlantic
travel narratives, such as those by the German writer Clara von
Gerstner (1842) or the Swedish Fredrika Bremer (1854), also come to
mind as possible objects of study. More historically oriented analyses
like these could examine how the literary genre of travel writing has
influenced, informed, or altered by road narratives in the 20th century.
As one of the oldest American travel books by a female author, Sarah
Kemble Knight’s Journal about A Woman’s Treacherous Journey by
Horseback from Boston to New York in the Year 1704, so its subtitle,
would be a possible starting point for such a project. Early automotive
travel narratives of the 20th century like Emily Post’s By Motor to the
Golden Gate (1916) have also been understudied, as has the subfield
of genteel road travel, in which Post’s book belongs. Similarly, road
scholars could ask whether there is a paradigm shift in the articulation
of gendered space between second-wave and third-wave feminist road
narratives, a question I have only briefly touched upon in this study. In
a study of this subfield, one could further explore how the develop-
ment of ‘chick-lit on the road’, exemplified by Cameron Tuttle’s The
Bad Girl’s Guide to the Open Road (1999) or Erika Lopez’ works,
constitute a reworking of those more serious road narratives written in
the context of second-wave feminism.
 Conclusion 311

In the context of the recently emerged field of cultural mobility

studies (cf. Cresswell 2006), all of these projects would contribute to
further establish both gender and narrative as fundamental for the pro-
duction of space and mobility. Female protagonists on the road –
across media, national, and generational boundaries – have always
confronted the limits of what is conceived as acceptable ‘feminine be-
havior’ in certain spaces; both physical realities and ascriptions with
which female bodies are confronted on the road have been imprinted
on cultural representations of this spatial experience. Yet it is exactly
in the act of facing these gendered spaces that women’s road narra-
tives remap the road: by questioning, subverting, and appropriating
paradigms of mobility, they create transient, deterritorialized subjects
and envision not ‘a road’, but many ‘roads of their own’.
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 Index

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Bollnow, Otto 61

(Twain) 82 Bourdieu, Pierre 19
Agoraphobia 71, 106, 158, 298 Boyce Davies, Carole 49, 111
Alarcón, Norma 27 Braidotti, Rosi 11, 22-23, 27-28, 57,
Alcoff, Linda Martín 21-22 74, 163-164, 173-175, 178,
Alien Land Act 206 180
Althusser, Louis 21, 166 Bronfen, Elizabeth 60, 75
American exceptionalism 15, 85 Burstein, Janet 144, 150
American dream 15, 82, 126, 145, Butler, Judith 23-24, 163, 251, 306
160, 242
Anzaldúa, Gloria 186, 293-295, 303 Cain, Chelsea 33, 53, 111, 127, 136-
Atwood, Margaret 227, 231, 233-234, 137, 139, 141-144
240, 252 California 82-83, 128-129, 133-134,
Augé, Marc 222 137, 178, 211, 214, 223, 273,
278, 289
Bachelard, Gaston 23, 61 Carter, Michelle 35, 265, 267-268,
Baker, Sharlene 33, 93, 105, 107-110, 270-271, 273-276, 280
120, 221 Carter, Paul 71, 174
Bakhtin, Mikhail 37-38, 40-41, 58, Cartographies of Desire (Faery) 102
233, 262 Cassady, Carolyn 46-48
Bal, Mieke 164-165, 169 Chatwin, Bruce 170, 174, 178
Barthes, Roland 243 Chick-lit 32, 35, 284, 310
Baudrillard, Jean 185 Chronotope 37-38, 177
Bean Trees, The (Kingsolver) 33, Cixous, Hélène 13, 112, 243, 253,
111, 116-119, 121-123, 125- 281
127, 135 Claiming Breath (Glancy) 34, 180,
Beat generation 44, 47-48, 108, 226, 182-186, 188-191, 195-196,
278, 285 199, 202, 204
Betts, Doris 33, 92-94, 97-98, 100- Clifford, James 41, 65-66, 70, 174
105, 109-110, 150, 205, 275 Cooper, James Fenimore 83
Bhabha, Homi 31, 163 Cresswell, Tim 15-17, 46-47, 75-78,
Bildungsroman 40, 118, 207, 267, 173, 182, 278, 311
280 Cultural geography 11, 14, 32, 59, 66,
Body 18, 21-24, 30, 54, 58, 61, 68, 68, 298
70, 78, 94, 96, 103, 106, 108,
112, 115, 130, 132, 134, 142, De Certeau, Michel 31, 38, 58-59, 61,
154, 158, 166, 179-180, 214, 63, 65, 74-75, 182, 235-236
224, 234-235, 247, 249, 251, De Lauretis, Teresa 23
284, 298, 306
336 Roads of Her Own

Deleuze, Gilles 23, 27, 58, 78-79, 81, Gendered space 11, 18, 20, 23, 30,
163, 165-170, 172, 176, 189, 32, 55, 59, 61, 64-66, 69, 77-
198, 225, 303 78, 86, 179, 225, 235, 246,
Derrida, Jacques 136, 185, 197, 240 249, 259, 298, 306, 308-311
Descartes, René 62 Geography of fear 71, 95, 101, 104,
Dharma Girl (Cain) 33, 53, 111, 127, 226, 298, 305
136, 138-139, 142-144 Georgi-Findlay, Brigitte 86-87, 92,
Didion, Joan 34, 181, 218-226, 236 110
Différance 25 Ginsberg, Allen 285
Domesticity 14, 17-18, 31, 33, 44, 46- Glancy, Diane 34, 180-187, 189-190,
49, 52, 54, 69-71, 74-77, 83, 192-200, 203-204, 206, 219,
85, 89-90, 92-93, 99, 101- 224-226
105, 109-110, 118-120, 135, Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 24, 303-304
153, 157, 160, 212, 214, 216, Gornick, Vivian 144
221, 224-225, 241-242, 263, Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck) 19,
271, 274, 277, 295, 302 82
Double talking (Hutcheon) 32 Greeley, Horace 83
Du Bois, W.E.B. 216 n60 Grossberg, Lawrence 163, 172, 176
Dunn, Katherine 35, 56, 265, 267, Guattari, Félix 58, 78-79, 81, 163,
275-276, 278-280 165-170, 172, 176, 178-179,
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 104, 275 187, 189, 198, 225, 303
Dust Tracks on a Road (Hurston) 49
n11 Hall, Stuart 27
Hassan, Ihab 88-89
Easy Rider 266, 287 Hausen, Karin 31, 69
Heading West (Betts) 33, 92-94, 97,
Faery, Rebecca Blevins 102 99, 101-105, 107, 109, 150,
Fiedler, Leslie 81-83, 88 275
Finding Signs (Baker) 33, 93, 105, Hearts (Wolitzer) 33, 111, 127-130,
107, 109, 120 135
Flaming Iguanas (Lopez) 35, 228, Heterotope 97, 141, 183, 218
281-284, 287-288, 290, 292, Hicks, Emily 303
295-299, 302-304 Hirsch, Marianne 112-114
Floating World, The (Kadohata) 34, hooks, bell 16, 27, 46-47, 49
181, 205-211, 216-218, 240 Humor 32, 35, 95-97, 222-223, 258,
Flusser, Vilém 171 262, 274, 281, 283-284, 288-
Formula stories (Cawelti) 31 289 294, 298-299, 307-308
Foucault, Michel 18, 58, 67, 97 Hurston, Zora Neale 49 n11
Frazer, Brenda (Bonnie Bremser) 48 Hutcheon, Linda 31-32, 227-228,
Freud, Sigmund 103, 110-115, 166, 231, 234, 239-240, 244-247,
243, 277 250, 252, 282-283, 291, 303
Friedan, Betty 219 Hybridity 26-27, 44, 111, 169, 173-
Frontier 14-15, 38, 42, 53, 81, 83-87, 175, 184, 186, 199, 290, 293-
98, 110, 126, 239, 245, 252, 294
264, 308
Fusco, Coco 24, 303-304 Immigration 82-83, 181, 185, 206-
207, 210, 216, 231
 Index 337

Johnson, Joyce 46-48, 175 Mother-daughter plot (Hirsch) 33,

Journalism 39, 142, 178, 183-184, 110-112, 115, 135
187, 310 Morris, Meaghan 172
Mouffe, Chantal 163, 173, 175
Kadohata, Cynthia 34, 180-181, 205-
210, 212, 214-219, 224-226, New mestiza (Anzaldúa) 293-295
240 No Fixed Address (van Herk) 34-35,
Kant, Immanuel 61-62 181, 227-230, 232-235, 239,
Kaplan, Caren 61, 92, 169, 173, 176 241-248, 250, 252-253, 255-
Kesey, Ken 266 258, 273, 277
Kingsolver, Barbara 33, 111, 115- Nomadism 11, 27-28, 34-35, 39, 53-
117, 119-123, 125-127, 135 54, 78-79, 90, 107, 144-145,
Kolodny, Annette 15, 85-87, 92 156, 159, 161, 163-180, 189-
Kristeva, Julia 102, 112, 253 190, 204, 210, 224-225, 229,
Kroetsch, Robert 228, 237 242, 255, 308
Noyes, Alfred 94
Lacan, Jacques 23, 112, 114, 166
Leary, Timothy 266 Off The Road (Cassady) 46, 97, 127
Lefèbvre, Henri 58-59, 61-65 On Other Days While Going Home
Lindemann, Gesa 18, 23 (Carter) 35, 265, 267, 270,
Little Red Riding Hood 13, 131 272-273, 275-276
Long Division (Roiphe) 33, 35, 83, On the Road (Kerouac) 11, 42, 44-47,
111, 144-146, 149-153, 155- 108, 248, 266, 300
158, 284 Odyssey (Homer) 81, 227, 271
Lopez, Erika 35, 228, 262, 265, 267,
280-285, 287, 289-292, 294- Paes de Barros, Deborah 14, 50-51,
297, 300-304, 310 53-54, 115, 125-127, 139,
Lotman, Jurij 59-60 140-142, 144, 165, 173, 175,
Lowe, Lisa 206-207, 216 219, 221
Para-nomadism 34-35, 53, 79, 88,
Macho, Thomas H. 164, 171, 176 144, 149, 157, 159, 161, 163,
Manifest Destiny 14-15, 82-84, 98, 178-181, 183, 190, 204-205,
103, 126 210-211, 214, 218-219, 221,
Manifest Domesticity (Kaplan) 92, 224-228, 235-237, 242, 245-
109 246, 248, 255, 258-259, 264-
Mann Act (United States White-Slave 265, 274, 308
Traffic Act) 17 Parody 31-32, 91, 227-228, 260, 262,
Massey, Doreen 11, 64-69, 73-74, 265, 281-283, 287, 290-291,
306 294-295, 297-300, 303-305,
McDowell, Linda 46-47, 49, 68-69 307-308
Middle Passage 16 Pastoral 40, 120, 140, 142, 165
Miller, Christopher L. 164, 176-177 Performativity 23-25, 45, 91, 133,
Miller, Henry 285 184, 195, 204, 251, 259, 265,
Miller, Nancy K. 243-244, 246 278, 281, 285, 287, 291, 294-
Mills, Sara 40, 43, 172, 226 297, 301-304, 306, 310
Miranda, Carmen 291-293, 297 Picaresque 11, 32, 34-35, 38, 40, 50,
Mitchell, Joni 18, 266 53, 79, 90, 99, 107,181, 226-
Moll Flanders (Defoe) 247-248, 264 228, 231, 233-234, 238, 242,
338 Roads of Her Own

245-248, 250-251, 253-267, Striated space (Deleuze/Guattari) 65-

272, 274-276, 278, 280-282, 66, 78-79, 130
284, 286-289, 292, 294-295, Sukenick, Ronald 223
298, 303-305, 308-309 Survivance 204-205
Pigs in Heaven (Kingsolver) 33, 111,
116, 118-119, 121, 123-124, Thirdspace (Soja) 63, 293
126-127, 135 Thelma and Louise 11, 83, 87, 159,
Pilgrim 15-16, 81-82, 139 305, 310
Plant, Sadie 170 Thompson, Hunter S. 189, 285
Play It as It Lays (Didion) 34, 181, Topographical turn see Spatial turn
218-220, 222-225, 237 Trail of Tears 16, 34, 122, 126, 190-
Plessner, Helmuth 18 n5 191, 193
Postindian (Vizenor) 184, 204-205 Tramp 76
Powwow Highway 19, 42 Transculturation 27, 175, 183, 194
Psychoanalysis 111-115, 135, 138, Transdifference 11, 19, 24-30, 32, 43,
163, 166, 221 54, 86, 91-93, 96, 102, 115-
117, 124, 130, 132, 139-140,
Rich, Adrienne 110, 113-114 143-145, 150, 158, 181-183,
Road movie 19, 31, 39, 42, 219, 305, 185, 189, 197, 199-200, 202,
310 204-205, 212, 218, 249, 254,
Roiphe, Anne 33, 35, 83, 111, 144- 262, 274, 279, 281, 288-290,
145, 149-151, 153, 156-158, 294, 297, 303, 307-309
160-161, 187, 205, 284 Travel narrative 16, 40, 49, 53, 89,
Rolling Stones, The 273, 299 178, 271, 295, 310
Rose, Gillian 49, 60, 68, 70, 72, 306 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 84
Trickster 255, 258-259, 262, 265,
Schmitz, Hermann 18, 22 274, 276, 281-282, 294-295,
Second-wave feminism 14, 32, 48, 304, 308
145, 219, 279, 310 Truck (Dunn) 35, 50, 265, 267, 275-
Seperate spheres 31, 69, 86, 92, 214, 276, 278-279
217, 242 Tuan, Yi-Fu 61
Sherrill, Rowland A. 38-39, 259-260, Turner, Frederick Jackson 83-84
276
Sloterdijk, Peter 163, 171, 179 Van Herk, Aritha 34-35, 181, 227-
Smooth space (Deleuze/Guattari) 78- 231, 233, 235-243, 245-259,
79, 130, 168-169, 240 262, 265, 267, 272, 280
Soja, Edward 58, 63-65, 223-224 Valentine, Gill 66, 70-71, 95, 305
“Song of the Open Road” (Whitman) Vizenor, Gerald 184, 190, 196-197,
82 204-205, 226, 259
Spain, Daphne 66 Voice That Was in Travel, The
Spatial turn 11, 18, 57-58, 61, 309 (Glancy) 34, 180, 182-184,
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 27, 240, 186, 190, 196, 198, 204
252
Stanton, Domna 112 Wandering Jew 144-145, 149, 156,
Stegner, Wallace 91 159
Story of initiation 40, 267, 280 Wilderness 14, 83, 85-86, 89, 99, 134,
Strasser, Peter 171 154, 237, 240, 249, 252, 276,
279
 Index 339

Williams, Raymond 42, 57 Woolf, Virginia 11, 227

Wizard of Oz, The 127, 222 Wolff, Janet 41, 61, 74, 175
Wolitzer, Hilma 33, 111, 127-128,
130, 132, 134-135