‘Girls in their Summer Clothes’: transgressive liminality and outsiderhood in Bruce Springsteen’s and Philip Levine’s female protagonists

Philip Levine and Bruce Springsteen have regularly been credited for their delineations of ‘familiar’ and ‘authentic’ (Rauch 1988: 33) characters, whose individual struggles to negotiate their identities are exacerbated by the pressures arising from workplaces, social and familial expectations, and notions of cultural propriety. Nevertheless, in asserting that Levine and Springsteen render naturalistic characters who conform to their respective social structures, current scholarship has neglected the multitudes of liminal characters in their narratives, particularly their marginalised female protagonists. By undertaking an analysis of their songs and poems from the framework of liminality discourse, this paper demonstrates how Springsteen’s and Levine’s females are routinely situated outside of dominant, male-oriented structures, and enact the transgressive and inversive attributes of liminal identity. Extending the liminality paradigm established by anthropologists Victor Turner (1967; 1969; 1974; 1978) and Arnold van Gennep (1960) to contemporary scholars exploring liminal identities from manifold disciplines, including social anthropologist Mary Douglas (1970) and spatial scholar Doreen Massey (1994), this paper contests the evaluation that either Levine or Springsteen articulate female experience in ways material or verisimilar. Instead, it applies theoretical concepts of liminal identities, outsiders, and relationality to a close comparative reading of Levine’s verse and Springsteen’s lyrics, positing that their female characters denote an infraction of dominant male structures. While occupying a peripheral position that promotes the definition and delimiting of normative masculine identities, their stories are both told by and for the male protagonists whose centrality is reaffirmed by these women’s outsider status.