Invisible Woman

Woman as objects/concepts


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Thus far in The Invisible Man I've noticed that women in the novel are surprisingly invisible themselves. Their roles in Ellison's world are limited to being objects or concepts, but never characters. At the very beginning of the novel women are completely absent and the narrator is limited to his mind space where he contemplates his own invisibility. As the story progresses the first female introduced is the nude dancer previous to the "battle royal". The men see her as an object, a source of their amusement and sick pleasure. As any other object they try to control her, fighting for her as small children fight over their favorite toy, the same toy that they immediately forget when the next exciting thing is introduced.

In the novel the next amusement was the "battle royal" where the black men are treated in the same objective manor as they are to fight each other blindly. I'm not sure Ellison could get more obvious with a metaphor, not to say it was not well done. The black men fight blind folded each being seriously damaged in the process. They do not know who is punching them so they punch the airspace in front of them as a defense. Groups of the men form, then the victim changes. This is a direct metaphor for how the black community makes enemies of themselves without seeing the consequences of their trivial fighting and all the damage they cause each other.

Later the founder of the college was introduced and with him the concept of his daughter. His daughter was ill, but her complaints were ignored and she died. Perhaps this too is a metaphor for women who were fighting for their rights, but were getting nowhere and the feminist movement was dying down. The Invisible Man was first published in 1947 as American culture was approaching the extreme suppression of the woman and the enforcement of the perfect image of the subservient housewife. Nevertheless this girl was an inspiration for starting the college. She was merely an elevated concept, not a memory of a multidimensional person.