On The Road Again: The Female
American Road Trip
by Elissa Pugh
Due to the very nature of the United States, as a growing, colonizing and "melting
pot" nation, the road trip, and travel in general, has become symbolic of the nation's
ambitions and essence. As a younger nation, Americans have much need to further their
individual and national identities. It is hard to separate the two. Americans seem to grasp
for an identity and it is easy to adopt “American” as a crucial piece to the puzzle. It seems
that usually a national issue will spur personal confusion for an individual. For example, a
white teenager who was friends with a black teenager during the Civil Rights movement
might have experienced confusion over what was going on around him or her and what his
or her parents thought. When this happens many find that a road trip is beneficial in
working out these issues. The road trip helps to achieve the liberation from lack of identity
or a forced and false identity that many American road trippers are aching to escape from. A
physical place or location ties a person to a situation, which therefore binds him, or her to
responsibility, obligation and other identity inhibitors but the freedom of travel allows
freedom from these inhibitors.
In American culture and literature men were usually the ones having adventures,
women were confined to the home. In the American Road trip this was pretty much the
case, except for certain exceptions such as young women going abroad (Little Women) and
women's travel narratives (Edith Wharton.)
Since its publication in 1884, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn has become, in some
road scholars’ opinions, the quintessential road novel. Twain uses the travels of Huck to
criticize and analyze his own society. Huck interacts with Jim the slave as a friend and equal
throughout their journey together. Even when Huck plays on Jim’s lack of education and
Jim eventually gets upset, Huck apologizes.
Twain is showing his opinions on slavery and how he feels that it is unnecessary and
demeaning, yet slavery ended thirty odd years before the publication of Huckleberry Finn.
Twain further plays this out when he allows Huck, a child who is not very educated, to trick
the two slave catchers into thinking that Jim is Huck’s father with small pox.
Unlike some other road works, after Huck’s adventurous journey he is still unhappy
and disillusioned with society. Huck has not entirely experienced self-discovery and he is
not satisfied with attitudes and characteristics associated with his region. So Huck figures he
will ”light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, Because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me
and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I've been there before.” (405)
Huck had escaped a situation and was restless when placed back in one. Huck had
found his identity and was comfortable with it but was not comfortable with America’s
identity and needed to escape from it.
Mark Twain’s accurate portrayal of American society still holds true today in many ways.
The White Man is still dominant in American culture, though statistically whites are quickly
becoming the minority.
Despite Huck’s desire to continue traveling after his river adventure and the overall lack
of resolution with the problems raised, Huckleberry Finn helped to establish many of the
patterns that would later show up in most road works. Road Scholar Ronald Primeau
describes these patterns as the following:
1. The desire to go on the road most often arises from some dissatisfaction or desire for
change. The ensuing adventures and the writing of the narrative often take the form of
social and political protest.
2. American road authors feel strongly that their country’s history is short by world
standards. This need for defining a national identity sends many writers on the road in
search of their country…The search for national identity turns, therefore, to the study of
regional attitudes and values.
3. Many road travelers take to the road for the freedom to explore or redefine themselves;
they then tell their stories as a way of finding out who they are so far and where they are
or could be going.
4. One of the continued attractions of road literature has been its reliance on older and
more traditional narrative structures at a time when readers may tire of what they see as
pointless experimentation. (15)
These patterns not only established what would show up in later road works but also
established the male road trip paradigm. Many other road narratives came into existence
which fit the above patterns. Most were stories of men but during the 1960’s, women’s
liberation and the Vietnam War put the entire nation in a tailspin and the Female Road Trip
came into its own. The two novels, In Country and Dharma Girl, are concerned with 1960's
America and the Vietnam War. Both fit into the paradigm of male road trips but there was a
shift on the focus of the road trip and its purpose. While men were searching for themselves
and exploring within a (usual) national and American context, women were searching for
identity with a/their family and within a community of other women. During the growth of
the women’s revolution and the 1960s, this is particularly relevant. As American women
were struggling to define themselves as women in a national effort, the new shift in the male
road trip helped this process.
The 1996 non-fiction book, Dharma Girl: A Road Trip Across the American Generations,
portrays the story of a young woman traveling from California with her mother to reconnect
with her Iowa roots from when she lived on a commune with her hippie parents as a small
child. Rebelling from incredibly radical parents, she went to straight-laced Irvine, California
but by the time college graduation approached Chelsea wanted to try “finding some
alternative to spending two hours a day sucking down espresso drinks at Starbucks.” (30)
Chelsea knew that her roots were based in the attitudes and ideas of the 1960’s but she was
unique from most people her age in how these influenced her interpretation of that era. The
following quote is Chelsea's thoughts on this difference between she and her peers.
I leaned forward. “My-life-is-meaningless.”
I repeated that same conversation with several friends that year. All that changed
was the coffeehouse. And they tried to understand, they did, but their notion of the
sixties did not have the same origin as mine. The frame of reference they were
working from was what they had gathered from the occasional Hair revival, not life.
To them, the sixties were a greatest-hits collection on a late-night infomercial; Julie
Christie in go-go boots; John F. Kennedy’s head snapping forward in an Oliver
Stone film. (27)
Chelsea realizes there is more to the era than the superficial things her friends
associate with it. She realizes that the deeper meanings of the 1960's are part of her identity
and history and she needs to find these deeper meanings to fully find herself.
In addition to understanding herself and her identity, like the male road trip, Chelsea
is recovering and refiguring her relationship with her mother.
My mother was dying. But not yet.
Looking back now, my journey back to Iowa began with that one cancer cell that
grew and multiplied in a mole on the back of her left shoulder. (24)
The threat and severity of her mother's situation helps to push Chelsea to take her
road trip. She and her mother have always had a special connection. When Chelsea was
little, and going by the name Snowbird, Chelsea's mother pretended to be a fictional
"Snowqueen" who watched over Chelsea and gave her gifts.
Her mother squats down on the linoleum beside her. "The Snowqueen is your very
own guardian angel, " she explains. "She is your bodhisattva. Do you know what that
means?"
Snowbird hakes her head.
"It means she is someone who will help you on your dharma path. She will guide
you."
"Like Mother Bear?"
"She is kind like Mother Bear, and wise like Miss Clavel. She is tall like the man in
the big yellow hat, and clever like Sal and Madeleine."
Snowbird looks up from the viewfinder. "Can she see me right now?"
"Always," her mother says. "And when you need her, she will be right there to help
you find whatever you are looking for." (20-1)
Not only were Chelsea and her mother close as mother and daughter, Chelsea’s
mother was Chelsea’s spiritual guide. Without consciously knowing it, it was crucial that
Chelsea’s mother accompany her on her journey. She wouldn’t be able to connect with her
old Iowa self without the presence of her spiritual guide. Through this connection with her
mother and her surrogate Iowa family, Chelsea is able to not only reconnect with her older
and more fulfilled self, she is also able to recover and recognize past relationships.
I have recovered something, but it is not my parents or the farm---I have always had
those. It is more a recognition of my relationship to them. (165)
After her travels Chelsea is fully aware of her past, present and future. She sees and
understands how her upbringing and her relationship with her parents have helped to form
who she is today and where she is headed. The novel In Country shows a similar journey and
revelation.
The 1985 novel by Bobbie Ann Mason entitled In Country portrays nineteen year old
Sam (antha) and the two journeys that help Samantha come to terms with Vietnam, both on
a personal level (her father’s death and her uncle’s changes) and a national level.
The primary journey, spilt into two parts and flanking the rest of the story, is based
in Kentucky, and involves Sam, her Uncle Emmett and grandmother. They travel to
Washington, D.C. to visit the Vietnam Memorial. Sam watches Emmett sit “there crosslegged in front of the wall, and slowly his face bursts into a smile like flames.”(245) Emmett
is sitting in front of the Vietnam War Memorial and has finally come to terms with his
struggles. When Emmett comes to term with his struggles, Sam is able to come to term with
her own. It is not that Sam cannot come to terms on her own, it is simply that Sam’s life is
so intertwined and in tune with those around her that when her uncle resolves his struggles
she is able to do the same.
Sam has a better understanding of Vietnam’s place in American culture after she
finds her name on the wall; “She touches her own name. How odd it feels, as though all the
names in America have been used to decorate this wall.”(245) Beyond personal
relationships, Sam feels connected to the nation as a whole. During this turbulent time for
the nation and herself, she is able to find her place in the chaos.
The secondary journey is Sam’s trip into the swamp to camp out for an evening. She
has just read her father’s journal from the war and is disappointed in his ease towards killing.
This disappointment represents Sam’s constant need to relate to her father and her inability
to do so.
The boy in the picture was nineteen. Lonnie was going on nineteen. Sam looked at
her face in the mirror—fat, sassy, stubborn. Her father’s face was so scrawny. She
couldn’t see any resemblance to him. (58)
In order to understand who she is, Sam needs to figure out who her father was and
how that influences her identity. In order to do this Sam attempts to recreate Vietnam. She
hopes to experience for herself what her father and uncle had experienced but refused to tell
her. When Emmett comes to find her, she finally pushes him to the point of talking, and it
is at this point that Emmett begins to deal with his residual feelings for the war. It is also at
this point that Sam is really beginning to understand the intensity of emotions surrounding
veterans and the war.
Unlike the traditional male road trip, the female road trips in Dharma Girl and In
Country, are not only about the female character’s search and understanding for personal
identity but a realization of how those (family members) around them play into this identity.
The male road trip focuses on the individual and the female concentrates on the
relationships surrounding the individual. It’s not that women’s road trips are less effective
for the individual, women are simply more holistic in their approach to identity. They take
pleasure and solace just as much with their relationships as they do with personal revelation.
They find many forms of identity with friends, relatives and communities of women.
Eric J. Leed feels that travel is “a gendering activity,’ a source of behaviors and
representations definitive of masculinity in many cultures and periods.” (217) Leed relates
the dominant image of “man in motion” to a “spermatic journey,” contrasting man’s motility
and women’s stability. Leed continues his argument to say that women’s and men’s travel is
in binary opposition. Though the road trip paradigm is primarily male, I feel that the female
road trips beginning in the 1960s,and continuing to the present, were not in opposition to
the already established paradigm, but a shift within it.
Considering these women’s narratives are circular, this thought is also applicable to
men’s and women’s approaches to road trips. It is not an issue of whether one gender’s road
trip is “better” than the other, but it can be argued that women are incorporating their past,
present and future into their quest and are returning with a fuller identity.
She doesn’t know it yet, but she is about to run into herself. She is a psychonaut—a
voyager into the soul—and since she has read the Tibetan Book of the Dead she will
soon realize that in order to find herself, she first has to create a self to identify. She
has to tell the story. She has to find the child she was and the girl she became to get
the answers she wants. She has to see if she can find what she has lost track of,
before she can go on to anything else. (Cain 7)
The above quote exemplifies why the shift in the male road trip paradigm provided
by contemporary female road trips has been significant. Women have had to struggle and
fight to define themselves as a whole and as individuals. This shift in the male road trip
paradigm has allowed women to take the power of discovering identity into their own hands.
Women can now discover their past, present and future. They can discover the depths that
they can go with relationships. Women have had to "travel" to tell their story. Women have
had to tell their story to "find what they lost track of" and then they "can go on."
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