Still searching for the Promised Land: placing women in Bruce Springsteen’s lyrical landscapes

Abstract

By telling stories about the unevenness of the ideal of the Promised Land, Bruce Springsteen drenches landscapes with individualized renderings that speak to a collective sense of being American and living in America.Yet what is lost in this detail is the awareness that males dominate the American imaginary, that Americans are men, and that their America is masculine. A close, critical reading of Springsteen’s lyrics via Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of ontological positivity and becoming-woman reveals complexities embedded in his American imaginary, ones rife with iconic images that assist in figuring out how women come to be an intricate part of the story without being the subject of the tale. In reading Springsteen’s lyrical landscapes, ones crafted through the ideal of the Promised Land, I use the unexplored hook of man as subject as a positive mechanism of becoming to show how the lyrics work to place women vis-a-vis men’s journeys to the Promised Land.