The Road Post 3

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?


From what I saw, women in The Road were mainly portrayed as one thing: mother. However, though these women shared similar circumstances in terms or pregnancy/childbearing, they acted in completely different ways. On one hand, there were women who we saw during The Man and The Boy’s journey. These include the woman who appeared along with one of the hordes of people The Boy and The Man encounter on the road, “perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant…” (pg 92) and in the pregnant woman who cannibalized her newborn child. These women seemed to symbolize an apparently amoral society, forced by their desperate circumstance to set aside their humanity. This can be seen in the way that McCarthy portrays the women in the horde as faceless; using close to no descriptions regarding their appearance, a literary move which seeks to depict people who have been stripped of their humanity. In the case of the woman who appears with the two other men, the symbolism for an amoral society is obvious. After all, what isn’t amoral about a mother killing and then cannibalizing her newborn child?

On the other hand, there is the mother who takes the boy in at the end of the book , who “put her arms around (the boy) and held him” (pg 286) and “said that it was all right” (pg 286) when the boy wouldn’t forget his father. Though this woman is also a mother, she seems to represent a completely opposite spectrum of humanity than women which The Man and The Boy encountered on their journey. While these women seem to represent mankind’s loss of morals in the post-apocalyptic world, the mother that appears at the end of the book seems to represent new hope, and the possibility that people might just regain their humanity once again. It seems that, in his portrayal of women, McCarthy is trying to express the different the different actions which people take when faced with conflict , and what the results of those actions will be. The women which The Man and The Boy meet earlier in the book represent loss of human dignity/morals, with the results of their actions being an uncertain future (we never discover what happens to the children of the women who they see on pg 92) or death (symbolized by the murder and cannibalism of the baby by it’s mother). This contrasts with the woman who the boy meets on pg 286, who seems to represent hope and peaceful steadfastness in the face of adversity, which apparently results in life/good health (the woman has two children of her own).

Sorry if this was rambling/redundant…