I almost feel as if this question has caused people to over search for some underlying meaning in McCarthy's larger omission of female roles. Many of the responses I've read have chocked up the significance to McCarthy dismissing the capabilities of women, because of the mother's implied suicide, or keeping them around simply as commodities. I felt like a lot of the logic here was forced; it's hard for me to see any overarching message about women that McCarthy was sending home about not having any prominent female characters. So, the biggest female character in the book killed herself (implicitly). Seeing as the amount of living people left on the earth could probably have been counted on your appendages, and that "There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead." (230), it doesn't seem to me that suicide was at all a sign of weakness, or inferiority. At this point, everyone had considered it, and probably many people acted on those considerations.
I don't really see much merit to the commodities argument either. People have said repeatedly that the only appearances women made in The Road was for sexual or food-related purposes. In the handful of times the Man and Boy encounter women, sure, once they were being kept alive to be eaten.
"Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous." (110).
But the fact that there are women in this passage is more of a side note, there are men there too, and really that takes more of the focus, as he goes into detail about that one particular fellow. And then literally the next page, he says "Coming across the field toward the house were four bearded men and two women." (111). So, yes, the women were among the hunted, but they were also the hunters.
True, women really didn't play huge roles, but there weren't really any other huge roles to play. If McCarthy's exclusion of major female characters was purposeful, I think it was probably because they weren't as important as the established relationship between father and son.
3 comments:
What do you make of the post (can't remember whose) that states women in the novel represent humanity or life? We see women in shackles or horse collars, woman as breeders (for food), the boy's mother (not to mention his new "mother figure" at the end).
Do you think it is in anyway significant that a man finds the boy at the end? Not a woman? I tend to agree with you--that McCarthy is likely not making any screaming statements about women--but no writers' choices are accidental--so there may be something to what others are saying. McCarthy is often categorized as having a particularly male voice. Would you agree with that?
I agree with you, when you said that the importance of women in the story was not that big because the author was trying to center the story on the relationship between the father and the son. However, even though there may not have been huge roles for women to play, that is entirely because the author did not write in a part for them. I think that if McCormack wanted to, he could have added important women. However I think that if he had, the relationship between the son and the father would not have come out so stressed.
I don't think I read that post, but it sounds really interesting and I'll try to find it. I'd like to see how they spin the suicide of the mother, and her essential abandonment of her child as humanitarian. I definitely think that McCarthy has a male voice, that could be intentional and he could be saying something about women in doing so. Or, he could just be writing what he knows.
Isabella, it's true that if he wanted to he could have added an important role for women, but one could make the argument that there weren't really any other important roles period; male or female. It's pretty much just the man and the boy the whole time. They meet people in brief encounters, like Ely and the thief, but their appearances are so brief one could compare them to the woman at the end, or to the deceased wife in size. I just don't see that much significance in excluding a main female role, because there really weren't any other main roles.
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