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Throughout the years of recorded history, women have continuously been overshadowed by their male counterparts. Even though the roles of women throughout the ages of literature have differed, they still encompass the same ideas. From the beginning, they’ve had many degrading roles: from sexual objects to forbidden fruit, to home-centered. Ralph Ellison’s invisible man is no stranger to these criticisms. Although the story circulates an invisible man, the female characters are also deprived of their visibility. It has been argued that the portrayal of women is an accurate representation of the period, but this is not true. In the novel, there is a direct parallel between the mistreatment of the female characters and the Invisible Man’s journey towards enlightenment. The female characters are deprived of their visibility at the expense of the Invisible Man’s journey. The Invisible Man's journey toward finding his true identity will be focused on a comparison between his invisibility and the invisibility of the women.
From the start, it’s evident that the theme of invisibility in the novel functions to highlight racism in American society. But it also encompasses the novel’s underlying text of gender erasure. Both black and white females throughout the novel are underdeveloped; they’re practically invisible. Many critics argue that the women in Ellison’s Invisible Man play a vital role because they’re a key ingredient in the development of the male characters. It is undeniable that the women shaped the male characters, especially the narrator himself. Unfortunately, the women themselves were quite underdeveloped, solely serving as a “carver” to the male characters. Although Ellison suggested solutions to racial oppression and displayed sympathy for the female’s situations, he failed to apply those solutions to the female characters in Invisible Man. This weakens his main purpose. Ellison writes, “I felt a wave of irrational guilt and fear. My teeth chattered, my skin turned to goose flesh, and my knees knocked. Yet I was strongly attracted and looked despite myself. (Ellison, 15).” To the narrator, the image of a naked white woman
is quite terrifying, despite being alluring. He begins to feel guilty as he reacts to her sensual dancing, this is because she is forbidden to the black men. The naked woman’s role here is that of a seductress, she is fully aware of her effect on the boys and continues to anguish them by “smiling at their fear (Ellison, 16).” Ellison’s initial purpose here is to highlight how the white men have the upper hand, and the blacks had no choice but to follow their orders. But if Ellison’s overall purpose is to deracinate the invisibility of the black man, the narrator’s blindness to women undermines the effectiveness of his purpose (The Blindness of an Invisible Man: An Exploration of Ellison’s Female Characters, Madison Ellis). The results are more hypocritical than heroic. The blonde stripper is reduced to a sexual object to tempt the boys, further proving that Ellison failed to add any significance to his female characters. The narrator himself tends to degrade humans, continuing to undermine the overall purpose of Ellison’s novel. The narrator states, “I want to feel the soft thighs, to caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her (Ellison, 16). Even in the narrator’s eyes, the woman is not fully human; she is merely an object of sex. The stripper scene intended to showcase the white man’s reign and the black man’s oppression, but the subtext unraveled the dark truth of gender erasure and Ralph Ellison’s hypocrisy. Overall, the narrator is extending the same discrimination that he encounters himself to the female sex (The Blindness of an Invisible Man: An Exploration of Ellison’s Female Characters, Madison Ellis). The woman is merely a shell or a vessel; she’s anything but human.
While Ellison does convey some form of sympathy for the female characters in his novel, he still manages to remain “unaware” of the humanity of his female characters. Further proving that the representation of his female characters is sacrificed to develop the Invisible Man himself.
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