In The Road, the biggest representation of women is the negative space created by a lack of "the woman/wife/mother" of the man and the boy. She is showed in only a few flashbacks, the most prominent of which being the one in which she kills herself. To the extent to which one would allow oneself to acknowledge character archetypes and gender roles, there is a huge hole both in the parenting of the boy and the characters of the novel as a whole. Of the many interpretations of "carrying the fire", the woman might be one. My father always told me that I may be the last person alive to have memory of my Oma. She, he said, would live on in my memory. Perhaps the fire they man and boy carry is the memory of the woman. Also, "The Woman" at the end of the book who is part of the family that picks up the boy and speaks to him about God is very deliberately sparsely described, so as not to fully fill the empty role of mother.
All the living women we see in the man and boy's present are commodities. They are either pregnant, being kept alive to be eaten, or both. In a world where society degrades to animalistic physical supremacy, women have little choice but to be used.
3 comments:
Hey Hens!
Okay, so first:
Though you say that in the desolate world of "The Road," women have been reduced to commodities, I'm not sure this is so so true. I, like you, assumed that the pregnant woman mentioned in the novel traveling with the small band of "bad guys" was being kept alive purely to procreate. However, McCarthy goes out of his way to describe, "All of them wretchedlooking beyond description." (195) Key word here: all. I remember being surprised at reading this, but when you think about it, the woman can't possibly be being kept for the sole purpose of fostering children. In a world where food is scarce enough for cannibalism, it's unlikely anybody, particularly the "bad guys," would want another mouth to feed. Even if the woman was just a sex object the mens' hunger would probably win out in the end over their lust.
Also, though I see where you're coming from with fire being the metaphor of woman, but I'm not sure I agree with it. For one, the boy has little memory of his mother. For another, women are still alive in "The Road," as exhibited by the pregnant "bad guy," the woman tending to the man the father shoots with a flare, and the woman at the end. Again, it's difficult to determine if somebody is deliberately being sparsely described when you're reading a book by Cormac McCarthy. There's no description of the man either, save one of his trimmed beard. There aren't even quotation marks for God's sake.
What about the dreams the man has of the woman too?
I don't know, the role of women in this novel is pretty tricky, and not one I have entirely figured out either.
When reading these boooks I also noticed the low degrading representation of women, especially in the book In The Road. In this book, women were loved in the sense of sex and a good time, but they never really made it to the end. There was always a moment when the women seemed to mess up the relationship, not the man. In this way the women weren't treated as the men were in the society. They were instead seen as equipment and unworthy.
Post a Comment