The Road Literature Review
The
novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
tells of the grueling struggles of a father and son in a post-apocalyptic
world. Throughout the entire novel there is a surprisingly few number of female
characters. The only female character who is highlighted at all throughout the novel
is “the Woman”, who like the rest of the characters in the novel remains
unnamed besides this descriptive title. The Woman is the wife to “the Man” and
mother to “the Boy”. Many scholars argue that the role of the Woman in this
novel is one that is feeble, uncaring, and selfish. But after reading the novel
and much literature connected to the novel I believe that the women serves a
much larger purpose in the novel. She is a character who is willing to do
whatever it takes to save her child and all though in the end is unsuccessful
she does not leave before assuring that her child will be cared for.
In the article “Post-Feminist
Fatherhood and the Marginalization of the Mother in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road” by Berit Astrom the author
argues that throughout the novel “the man is both the better father and the
better mother” (Astrom 121). The main argument of this article is that “In The
Road, the mother refuses to fulfil such expectations. Interestingly, this
challenge to normative constructions of mother hood is represented as wholly
negative within the novel” (Astrom 115). After reading the novel I would argue
that the Woman, or the mother, in the novel should not be read as an entirely
bad or weak character. Astrom argues to her reader that the Woman is included
briefly in the novel and is constructed “to have been absent from the boy’s
life even before she left physically” (Astrom 122) because of her fall into
despair and her suicide. I believe that the woman believes that the only and
best option left for her son is death. The Woman sees no way to survive long
term in the environmental landscape which the novel takes place. Readers only
read the Mother as being a weak character because many read her character as
being a direct foil to the Man who fights for survival throughout the entire
novel. Astrom wishes readers to see the Man as everything that the Woman should
be and is not.
Astrom argues throughout the article
that the Woman is portrayed “as callous and heartless” (Astrom 120) in the
novel and this leads readers to interpret the character to be a fail as a
mother figure. Just because the Woman does not fit into the traditional mold of
the pure and virtuous mother does not mean that she is a bad mother or is being
used to depict women in the novel as being less virtuous than the male
characters. In The Technology of Gender
by Teresa De Lauretis the author discusses the role of gender and how those
roles are outwardly portrayed. De Lauretis acknowledges “that gender is not
sex, a state of nature, but the representation of each individual in terms of a
particular social relation which pre-exists the individual and is predicated on
the conceptual and rigid (structure) opposition of two biological sexes. This
conceptual structure is what feminist social scientists have designated “the
sex-gender system” (De Lauretis 716). This sex-gender system is made clear
throughout the novel. Astrom also argues that the Woman is used as the direct
foil to the Man, who is portrayed as a strong, virtuous father figure. In this
article De Lauretis holds that “where sexual division refers to the two
mutually exclusive categories of men and women as given in reality: “In terms
of sexual differences, on the other hand, what has to be grasped is, precisely,
the production of differences through systems of representation; the work of
representation produces differences that cannot be known in advance” (De
Lauretis 717). Asserting that the Woman is the foil character to the Man is
problematic because it is based on the assumption that the Woman fails to
conform to her prescribed gender role as mother. I would argue that the Man’s
foil character is not the Woman, but instead another character known as the
Gang Member. Many would argue that the Woman fails as a female character because
she does not fit the traditional definition of a good mother. Through her
suicide they would argue she fails at protecting her young child, but the
discussion between the Woman and the Man show that her suicide was not a
selfish decision, but the only way she could see to escape the brutal reality
she and her family were facing. This novel presents the reader with an
extremely graphic representation of the end of the world and the way each
person responds in times of crisis varies. The Woman and the Man responded
differently to the world and in the end the Man failed as well.
One
of the main issues with the argument presented by Astrom is that throughout the
article the Woman character is constantly compared to the Man character.
Astrom’s analysis of the Woman is based on comparing the two characters and
finding sexual differences. In “The Practice of Feminist Theory” by Elizabeth
Grosz the author discusses what she believes to be the current state and issues
that feminist theory in literature faces. Grosz holds that “feminist theory is
the labor, the practice, of thinking and locating what is other than
patriarchy, what is more than it or beyond it, known and active, able to act
and be acted on. Feminist theory is the labor of producing new thought beyond
patriarchal concepts, above all, elaborating the thought of sexual difference
where it has been foreclosed – in all knowledges up to now, in all forms of
thought that pretend to universal and perspectiveless relevance” (Grosz 105).
Throughout Astrom’s article the author reads the Road as providing a commentary
on patriarchal concepts that is based on sexual difference and literary foils.
The idea of sexual difference is highly problematic because it is based on the
idea that there is a standard for sexuality and gender and then there is the
difference. Astrom analyzes the Woman character as if all female literary
characters are the same and that they all conform to all established
patriarchal concepts of what it means to be a good mother and strong female
character. Throughout Astrom’s article the author holds that the Woman is the
foil character to the Man character. In this foil Astrom is holding that the
Man is the strong character and fills the void that is created by the Woman in
the Boy’s life.
Another issue that arises from
Astom’s traditionalist analysis of the role of the mother and how the Woman
plays this role is that this role was created in a hierarchical structure that
is based on masoginistic ideals. In “Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of
Interruption” by Lisa Baraitser the reader is introduced to the idea that
“feminist mothers challenge patriarchal and heteronormative concepts of
mothering, creating alternatives that transform the lives of mothers and
children, and in the process changing the meaning of both mothering and
feminism” (Baraitser 701) and the idea that “feminism and motherhood have often
been thought of as incompatible” (Baraitser 703). Motherhood is not and should
not be viewed as a universal experience. Astrom desires to categorize all
motherhood and what it means to be a “good” mother. Although the Woman does not
fit into the traditional mold of what Astrom considers to be a “good” mother
she does fit the feminist mold of what it means to be a good mother in the
post-apocalyptic, violent world that the novel is set.
Another
important theme and plot point in The Road is cannibalism. In this
post-apocalyptic world most food sources are gone so survivors have turned to
cannibalism in order to survive. In Capital
by Karl Marx the author discusses commodities and the process of
commodification. Marx argues that “A commodity is, in the first place, an
object outside us, that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or
another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the
stomach or form fancy, makes no difference” (Marx 268). In the novel before the
Woman decides to commit suicide she discusses her fears of being victims of
cannibalism with the Man. It is important to analyze the reasons for the
Woman’s suicide because in the novel the characters have been placed in an
unimaginable position. The commodification of the human body as a food source
drove the woman to her decision. Astrom argues that because she left her son she
is a selfish and a bad mother. But the Woman understood that the human body was
now a highly valuable commodity for many different reasons and knew that her
family and their bodies would be victims of the cannibals that surrounded them.
In
“Eating at the Empire Table: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the Anglo-Irish Gothic” by Lydia Cooper the author
argues that “McCarthy paints a viciously dark picture of utter loss” (Cooper)
throughout the novel. This article argues that “The Road is replete with images
of consumption, from evocations of a fossil fuel-driven economy to depictions
of cannibalism, the form of consumption most commonly employed as a shorthand
for unchecked cultural depravity or the breakdown of civilized society
altogether” (Cooper). This “unchecked cultural depravity” is part of the reason
the Woman felt that there was no hope for either her or her family, especially
the Boy. The novel presents a world that is so forsaken and destroyed that
people have turned on each other and actively hunt each other down for food.
Throughout the novel the reader sees many people that have been driven to
cannibalism and sees how hard the Man and the Boy fight against cannibalism.
The reader sees the Woman struggle with accepting this new world reality and how
much strongly she wishes for her son to not have to experience the horrors
around him.
Works Cited
Berit
Astrom (2018) Post-Feminist Fatherhood and the Marginalization of the Mother in
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Women: A Cultural Review, 29:1, 112-128, DOI:
10.1080/09574042.2018.1425539
Cooper,
Lydia. “Eating at the Empire Table: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the
Anglo-Irish Gothic.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 63, no. 3, 2017, pp.
547-570. EBSCOhost,
bulldogs.tlu.edu:2048/login?url=http;//search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2017400380&site=eds-live&scope=site.
De
Lauretis, Teresa. “The Technology of Gender”. Pp. 713-721.
Grosz,
Elizabeth. “The Practice of Feminist Theory.” Difference: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 1,
2010, pp. 94-108. EBSCOhost,
bulldogs.tlu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=msh&AN=2010641280&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Longhurst,
Robyn. “Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption. By Lisa Baraitser and
Feminist Mothering in Theory and Practice, 1985-1995: A Study in Transformative
Politics. By FIONA JOY GREEN and Feminist Art and the Maternal. By ANDREA
LISS.” Hypatia, vol. 25, no. 3,
Summer 2010, pp. 696-703. EBSCOhost,
bulldogs.tlu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=66399461&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Marx, Karl. “Capital”. Pp. 268-275.
