Thesis Literature Review

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.