Objectification in Chapter 19
Objectification in Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen is a bit chaotic. The chapter begins with the narrator being sent to speak on women's rights and ends with a one night stand that throws the narrator’s mind off track. The encounter starts with the narrator engaging in a discussion with one of the women at the seminar. She invites him back to her apartment to discuss the ideologies of the Brotherhood, but this quickly escalates to her intensely and inappropriately flirting with the narrator. Eventually they spend the night together. The narrator is awoken by her husband standing in the doorway. While neither the woman or her husband seem bothered by this interaction, it freaks the narrator out. He quickly flees the apartment terrified of the consequences of his actions.
Chapter nineteen really highlights some important issues and stereotypes that the narrator faces. In an uncomfortable exchange between the narrator and the woman she tells him that his speaking is “so powerful, so-so primitive” and says that she can hear tom-toms beating through his voice (413). The narrator reacts with discomfort and awkwardly laughs it off. Even before anything sexual has happened, we can see that the woman clearly wants the narrator to fill a fantasy for her. The woman’s use of the word primitive shows that she does not see the narrator as an individual, rather she views him through harmful stereotypes. The comment about tom-toms also fits into this uncomfortable fantasy that the woman wants to pursue. Racial fetishization was and still is a big issue in the world whether people want to acknowledge it or not. I found this chapter to be a clear example of how the narrator is always treated as invisible. The woman does not see him, she sees a stereotype.
There is another trope I saw in this chapter. I do not know whether it is the product of being written by a man or the author was commenting on it, but there is a theme of female character’s only weapon and identity being their sexual appeal (from the male gaze). I do not want to defend the woman in the story, she was offensive and also objectified the narrator, she is not the victim in the story. I just want to highlight a constant theme in all types of media. At the beginning of the chapter the first description we get of the woman is “the kind of woman who glows as though consciously acting a symbolic role of life and feminine fertility” (409). I don't even know where to begin. I really hate this description because it places her into a role before she even says a word. She is just a person, not a divine entity who exudes sex. It is that simple. We do not get these odd descriptions of men in the novel. The narrator does not once comment on the fertility of a man when he first lays eyes on them. I feel like the narrator does not view many of the women he encounters with a lot of depth. Many of them are just a stereotype and they do not get the time to be themselves. Just in general, I think we can take a lot from chapter nineteen, though it is short compared to others. It says a lot about the stereotypes of the time and can create a discussion about the stereotypes in place today.
I enjoyed reading your post and I think you brought up some great points in it! I agree that the way that the woman treated him was really inappropriate and that she was clearly objectifying him. I also agree that it's problematic that this is one of the few depictions of women in the entire text. I think that this is an issue with the author and not the narrator.
ReplyDeleteI believe it was definitely not self-awareness on the author's part, as we've seen before in Native Son that male authors are quick to fetishize women and then toss them when they cannot fulfill that sexual role. I always find it so weird when men comment on the "fertility" of women, as if the reason women are attractive is because they can have children; it's just another layer adding to the painting of women as submissive and breedable.
ReplyDeleteThe narrator does get remarkably detailed in his physical description of Tod Clifton, which is a rare exception in this novel (see Doren's discussion of this scene on his blog in the 8th period section). Tod Clifton is hot, and the narrator really dwells on the fact. But you're absolutely right about all of the depictions of women in this book, and what you're describing in chapter 19 seems to me like a kind of *mutual* invisibility, where Ellison seems fully attuned to the ways that this woman's racial ideas distort her perception of him, but where he seems not to be thinking of all of the ways that this woman also remains invisible to the narrator, for precisely the reasons you describe.
ReplyDeleteWe see a kind of replay of this dynamic, only worse, with the Sybil scene in chapter 24. The mutual invisibility is in full effect there, as he keeps trying to exploit his own invisibility to get information from her, but she's a few steps ahead of him, fetishizing and role-casting him before he even gets a chance to put his "plan" into action. I see all kinds of implications for how race and gender and sexuality combine to create a condition of mutual invisibility in that scene, and yet I can never be sure whether Ellison is aware of it. It's hard to distinguish the narrator's forms of blindness from the author's own, sometimes--even as this novel depends so much on the ironic structure, where we see and understand more than the narrator does.