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What is the role and importance of women in the novel Invisible Man?
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In Invisible Man, women play complex roles, often highlighting racial and gender tensions. Mary, an older black woman, is a positive figure, providing support and encouraging the narrator's racial identity and activism. In contrast, white women like Sybil are depicted as complicit in racism, using the narrator for their own desires. Overall, the novel portrays women largely as secondary characters and instruments in a male-dominated world, reflecting societal inequalities.
It is not a coincidence that Ralph Ellison makes Mary, the most sympathetic woman in the novel, an older black woman. She is also one of few people in the novel with whom the narrator does not have a contentious relationship.
The narrator's relationships with white women and black men are fraught with tension. His grandfather's last words to "undermine 'em" [white people] with "grins and yeses" haunt the narrator, setting a standard in which it becomes difficult for him to develop a genuine sense of selfhood outside of others' expectations. At college, he encounters Dr. Bledsoe, a president of a historically black university who is exemplary of black people who maintain their lofty stations by cutting down other black people; he shows the white patrons only those images which are compatible with their stereotypes.
White women, such as Sybil, are presented as being just as racist as their male...
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counterparts. While the narrator plies her with alcohol to get her to spill information about the Brotherhood, she calls him a "black brute," creating the fantasy of the sexually ravenous black man with a particular appetite for white women. Her name, Sybil, is the same as that of the prophetesses in Ancient Greek legend who revealed predictions in an ecstatic frenzy.
In other instances, white women are instruments of racism, as is the case of the nude blonde in the ring at the battle royal. The white male spectators use the sight of the nude blonde, who, in the text, bears a striking resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, to tempt and mock the young, black men who fear expressing their desire for the attractive white woman.
Ellison establishes a relationship between black men and white women in which the former cannot trust the latter due to their complicity with racism. However, Ellison sees the parallels between their conditions. They are both instruments of one another's oppression at the hands of white men.