Ellison Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man depicts women as marginalized either as maternal or sexual figures. The stripper, Edna, Hester, Sybil, Emma, the rich woman, and Mattie Lou Trueblood are seen largely as sexual objects. In contrast, Mary Rambo is a maternal figure who cares for the narrator. Overall, the female characters are seen as secondary, with little character development in comparison to the male characters. This treatment of women in Invisible Man as primarily sexual or maternal objects largely reflects the traditional views of women's roles in society during the 1950s.
Women are often seen as sexual objects within Ellison's Invisible Man. The most obvious examples of this sexual identification of women is seen the characters of Hester and Edna. Edna and Hester are both black prostitutes at the Golden Day. Hester hates white men, while Edna is convinced that white men make better sexual partners. In either case, both of these women are defined through their sexual relationships with the male characters in the novel.
The stripper that appears at the beginning of the novel also illustrates Ellison's depiction of women as sexual objects, and in a way that is perhaps even more graphic and obvious than his depiction of the prostitutes Edna and Hester. The narrator is asked to give a valedictorian speech to a number of his town's leading white citizens, and is surprised when he is confronted with a white, female stripper. He and the other black boys are alternately repelled and attracted to the stripper. He feels "a wave of irrational guilt and fear," and notes "I felt a desire to spit upon her as my eyes brushed slowly over her body." The narrator notes, "I wanted at one and the same time to fun from the room, to sink through the floor, or to go to her and cover her from my eyes and the eyes of the others with my body; to feel the soft thighs, to caress her and destroy her, to
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