The Road: Post 2

4. Consider both novels. What do you notice about the treatment of women? The characterization of women? Or the omission of women? What might it suggest or signify in either novel?

In McCarthy's The Road, women are not mentioned much, when mentioned, it is not a virtuous image. When McCarthy does bring in the mother figure, it is hard to find anything positive in her portrayal. She essentially abandons the family, taking her own life. Is McCarthy casting her as a representation of women and an attempt to reverse the traditional stereotype of mother as selfless caregiver?

I was struck by the negative portrayal of the boy's mother. She wanted to kill him to spare him, but she ends up taking only her own life. Later in the narrative, we encounter the mother who sacrifices her own child to stave off her hunger. This, in my eyes, is cruel and inhumane, however, it is a desperate choice made in a desperate situation. It's either her life, or the child's. I guess it is a choice made driven by madness. One could and would criticize as morally wrong but one has not been in such terms to know how it really is to have to choose between life and death while striving for survival in such a stark and dead world.

At the least, this complicates the male archetype because in having to be both father and mother to the boy, the man takes on typically female-oriented roles such as cooking, bathing, and nurturing the boy. Is it possible McCarthy is saying that in the future (the novel is post-Apocalyptic), role reversals will be a norm because of the instability of the familial unit? I see it as an illustration of the kind of courage and self-sacrifice it takes to raise a child in a world gone mad. It's a man's job. I don't mean that a woman can't raise a child,(it is supposed to be a woman's responsibility as a mother), but that it takes the vigilance and self-sacrifice and courage that are typically ascribed to the role of father and defender to bring a child safely into community with others who live for the good of mankind.