In his essay “What America Would Be Without Blacks,” Ralph Ellison argues that the nation could not survive without his presence [ of blacks] because, through the implicit Irony of the dynamics of American democracy, they symbolize both its most rigorous tests and the possibility of its greatest human freedom. While Ellison's novel Invisible Man makes visible the struggle for social equality through the narrative of an invisible black man in order to demonstrate this point, what about the women in the text whose characters often seem invisible or underdeveloped? Although Ellison's views on the so-called woman question are ambiguous given his near silence on gender equality in his essays and interviews, the novel's female characters, particularly the white female characters , illustrate how the majority of American democracy marginalizes, uses and sacrifices certain groups of people. people, especially women and racial minorities. In fact, despite the lack of development of the female characters who seem to play relatively minor roles in Invisible Man, Ellison's problematization of American democracy in the image of the protagonist, hereafter called I Am, could not work without the female characters who simultaneously link destinies. characters from the novel together and elucidate the gap between democratic ideals and reality. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get an original essay The function that the female characters play in Invisible Man can be seen in the recurrence of the trope of the woman as a trafficked sex object throughout history. novel, as I am, remarks such as . . . and how did I guess there was a woman in it, suggest. When I make such statements, he reveals that he suspects that a man, usually a black man, has identified himself in a particular way or been convinced to do something in exchange for another man's wife , most often, the wife of a white man. In this regard, trafficking in women offers us a way to understand how I am in relation to the other men in the novel and attempts to identify with them through women and discourses about women. However, although I am's encounters with white women suggest that he primarily views white women as both forbidden objects of his desire and a means to become more like white men, a closer look at Predicaments of some female characters in the novel indicates that statements such as the one mentioned above also reveal how women are used or sacrificed by a man for his own ends. Thus, rather than being negligible, women, despite their invisibility, can be seen as essential to the functioning of a democracy dominated by white men. Because women are considered a common currency that all men are expected to accept and desire, women are sacrificed, exchanged, and used throughout the novel by men who seek to maintain their privileged position in a supposedly democratic society. their subjectivity by treating black women and men as exchangeable or sacrificial objects, the male and female characters in the novel bond. Therefore, as Ellison's novel reveals, this trafficking implicates the humanity of both the novel's female and male characters and highlights how they share a common desire to fully realize their humanity despite their racial and/or racial differences. gender. Claudia Tate argues that the narrow margin of differencebetween I Am and the female characters aids the Invisible Man in his journey to freedom while his interactions with the women shed light on their shared fate since these women, like me, are the means to another's end. While I don't boldly claim that these characters help me achieve freedom, I will argue that it is the interactions of me with the naked woman at the Battle Royal, the Trueblood women, Emma, ​​the Question speech Woman, the Nameless Woman I return home from her speech on the women's issue, and Sybil illuminates the complexities and shortcomings of American democracy in a way that ultimately allows me to understand democracy as a process rather than as a fixed state with a predictable end point. In his essay "On Initiation Rites and Power," Ellison's quest to define democracy as a struggle becomes evident. Here, Ellison argues that the function of literature... is to remind us of our common humanity and the cost of this humanity This cost of humanity that Ellison speaks of assumes that, although humans are vulnerable by nature, they must persist in the fight for freedom and pressure others to accept their humanity, even in the face of potential defeat Although, like the female characters in the novel, I am vulnerable and prone to sacrifice, he initially lacks perception of this reality, unaware of how he is used by the Brotherhood and others for purposes. of someone else Although I don't initially realize how much his own fate is tied to that of women, when Ras asks him what the white men of the Brotherhood gave him to abandon the black race, Ras fumes: What do they give you for betraying their wives? Do you fall for this? . . . Women? Good God, mahn! Is this equality? Is this the freedom of the black mahn? A pat on the back and a piece of shit without any passion? . . . He takes one of those trumpets and tells the black man his freedom lies between his skinny legs "while this son of a gun, he takes all the power and capital and don't let the black man do nothing . Because I am conditioned by the Brotherhood to oppose Ras politics, it initially lacks the perception necessary to recognize that the trafficking of white women by white men does not serve to make a black man a man. white, but rather to test the black man and keep him in his place. Created to fall into the trap of the white woman or rather the white man, black men are treated as a suspect class or a misstep. with a woman makes the man a criminal once the black man violates the cultural taboo against miscegenation, he is reminded that he is not a real man or human since he is not white and. that trafficked women are not his property and do not share his race or class position. Because some of the women in Invisible Man are also vulnerable to miscegenation. being sacrificed and objectified based on their gender, the similar predicaments experienced by the female characters and I become apparent as both must struggle to find their place in a nation dominated by white men. While Carolyn Sylvander insists that the black and white female characters in Invisible Man reflect the distorted stereotypes established by the white American male, I argue that the female characters in the novel do not necessarily passively embody these stereotypes. On the contrary, since the supposedly inferior female characters make them candidates for trafficking by men who stereotype women as passive and inferior to justify the inhumane treatment of women, they highlight, as I am, that people must fight both asas individuals and members of a collective group to negotiate their invisibility in order to prove their humanity and pressure American democracy to embrace them. What exactly is this notion of humanity that Ellison assumes all people potentially embody? Why does this article include Ellison's notion that humanity is universal rather than gendered? Although Ellison never explains her conception of female humanity, we can better understand her notion of humanity by first problematizing Sylvander's understanding of Ellisonian humanity as something that separates the genders rather than as something something that is shared. Because Sylvander examines only one aspect of Ellison's definition of what it means to be human, his thesis that Ellison redeploys stereotypes of women in ways that oppress women proves problematic. Citing Ellison's essay, Richard Wright's Blues, Sylvander reveals that Ellison indicates that human life has an innate dignity and that [human beings] have an innate sense of nobility; that all men have the tendency to dream and the compulsion to dream and realize their dreams. Sylvander concludes that Ellison denies humanity to the women in the novel because, as she argues, the female characters in Invisible Man do not have the capacity to dream. While it may be that the novel's female characters understand themselves and are understood by others primarily in terms of their relationships with men, it is necessary to recognize another facet of Ellison's definition of humanity. which he explains in The Little Man at Cheehaw. Station. Here, Ellison explains that we are only human and therefore given over to the fears and temptations of the flesh. The implication is that because humans are marked by imperfection, confusion, and desire, Ellison's notion of humanity cannot be truly understood or experienced without exploring sexuality. Significantly, sexuality is something that all the characters in the novel theoretically possess and must confront. with as they struggle to reconcile the relationship between the political and the personal/sexual. It is precisely this struggle that ensures that the sufferings of heterosexual male and female characters are intertwined. Therefore, the role that women play in Invisible Man cannot really be understood independently of analyzing I Am's relationships with female characters and the stereotypes of the animalistic black male that he must contend with as a black man . Although Houston Baker rightly argues that black male sexuality is a central theme of Ellison's novel, he understands that sexuality in rather stable and monolithic terms surrounding the phallus. Yet, as this article indicates, even in I am's encounters with women, the white man's normative assumptions regarding both black men's sexuality and the sexuality of women, particularly white women, are problematized. Although the black man may be more dynamic than the one-dimensional sexual creature he is stereotyped as, white female characters are sexualized by others and often sexualize themselves despite the rigid gender roles of the late 1940s and 1950s that required women to contain their sexual urges and remain private with children. The first time I have to wrestle with sexual desires for a trafficked white woman in the novel is in the Battle Royal. If I remember correctly: A sea of ​​faces, some hostile, some amused, surrounded us, and in the center, facing us, stood a beautiful, completely naked blonde. . . Some boys stood with their heads bowed, trembling. I felt a wave ofirrational guilt and fear. . . If the price of looking had been blindness, I would have looked. . . I felt the desire to spit on him as my eyes slowly roamed over his body. . . I wanted to. . . loving her and murdering her, hiding from her, and yet caressing the place where, under the little American flag tattooed on her stomach, her thighs formed a capital V. I had the impression that of all the people in the room, she only saw me with her impersonality. eyes. The feelings I express here seem as contradictory as what the woman herself represents. From the outside, naked blonde/America may appear to represent the American dream for any black or white man and may appear to symbolize democracy given the American flag tattoo on her stomach. If the woman can simply be reduced to a symbol of democracy, why do the men in this scene find her so attractive? As Tate argues, this woman represents the forbidden white woman. Yet this woman is not just any upper-middle-class white woman. Given that she is a stripper in this scene, this woman is taboo for both white and black men. Because the woman is a stripper, she is probably of a different social class than the white men in the Battle Royal. Therefore, rich white men could never marry such a woman; they can only access it by paying for its services which excite them and remind them of their virility. However, because the white men are paying the woman to turn them on, they can still dominate and exploit her female sexuality since she is allegedly of a lower gender and class. For me and the other young black men in the Battle Royal, however, this woman's appeal is compounded by her white feminine flesh. She is banned not only because she is white, but also because the young men are not white and have not paid for her services. These young men may try to look at her, but as I indicate, they are constantly haunted by the specter of Jim Crow laws, which seek to protect the integrity of the white woman. Yet if I am and other boys don't look at and recognize their desires for the flesh, they risk sacrificing their humanity and manhood. This double bind leads me to experience competing desires to touch and possess the woman and to destroy her. Since reaching the woman might make me more like white men, he wants her to appear to represent the American ideal. However, he also wants her as a body, because such desires are an indispensable component of humanity, especially for heterosexual men in this case. I might even want to watch it to test the limits of democracy and see if he can violate the cultural taboo against penetrating a white woman with his gaze and survive. At the same time, I want to destroy the degraded humanity and the white man's domination over the sexuality of others that the stripper represents. Citing the terror and disgust in the woman's eyes as she is thrown by the other men, I seem to identify with his predicament as he experiences guilt and fear at the same time. idea of ​​violating Jim Crow laws by looking at her and seeing her dehumanized by the other. men. I am's fear may reflect anxiety about violating Jim Crow gender policies, but it may also indicate his apprehension about realizing that the democracy he aspires to be a part of is not as democratic as he imagined. Because me and the woman are minorities in this scene since neither would have been present at the reserved gatheringto white men if they hadn't been part of the entertainment, I seem to briefly realize that democracy as he knows it in the South doesn't work. embrace true humanity. In fact, the Battle Royal scene illustrates how the white privilege that governs democracy thrives by creating a spectacle of difference, whether gender or racial difference (or even a combination of both, although there are no black women in this scene). As Ellison's inhumane treatment of black women and boys by white men in the scene shows, some people have more access to and control over definitions of democracy than others. Just as the woman was asked to strip to entertain the white men at the rally and make the black boys uncomfortable, I and the other young black men were asked to participate in the Battle Royal to entertain the men white people who exploit his humanity. . It thus becomes clear that this event represents a ritual that governs behavior. Rituals become social forms. . . Battle Royal represents an essential part of Southern behavior that both blacks and whites accept without thinking. It is a ritual of preserving caste lines. . . Because white men assert their civility and superiority by degrading black men across these caste lines, the Battle Royal is akin to castration, excision, or lynching, as Houston Baker argues. Likewise, the white woman, although presumably paid for her services, is dehumanized and objectified by white men who make a spectacle of her female sexuality and throw her around like the victim of a college hazing ritual. By making a spectacle of black boys and white women, this gathering therefore prevents black women and men from becoming the puppeteers of democracy. Although I can't explain how he and the woman are in a similar, dehumanized situation, Ellison's inference that the woman is paid to be there and the boys have to rush to find coins after participating in the Battle Royal demonstrates how both were denied their humanity by these white men who took pleasure in treating them like white men. a spectacle. In fact, when I talk about the woman, I felt like out of everyone present in the room, she only saw me with her impersonal eyes, implying that they shared some sort of bond. Even if this woman does not know or does not speak to him, her look at him seems to imply that she tacitly recognizes that they face the same struggle to free themselves from their slavery to the white man and make democracy more accessible and more responsible. Accessibility can be attributed to the gender politics of Jim Crow, which sought to prevent I am from fulfilling certain desires by forbidding him from touching, much less looking at, white women. Given this, the Battle Royal scene can be interpreted as showing that desires are an inevitable and uncontrollable part of the human experience, regardless of what the laws and norms that govern a democracy allow or prohibit. If democracy refused to make me human in Battle Royal, his struggle to recognize his sexual desires might make him feel human for a moment. Perhaps, then, these desires are a natural response to the gap between democratic ideals and reality that Ellison frequently cites. While most of the trafficked women in the novel are white, two black women, Kate and Matty Lou Trueblood, are victims of both black and white trafficking. and white men. Infamous in their region for their familyincestuous, these women embody what Ellison means by being outside of history. Because these women are neither white nor male, they are treated as if they are invisible. Furthermore, even though it is these women who bear the burden of Trueblood's incestuous efforts, they are not given the opportunity to tell their stories. Rather, their story is told and disseminated to other men by their incestuous father/husband. In fact, the Trueblood women and their story, if anything, are victims of both implicit and explicit trafficking by many different men, including, among others, M . Norton who asks and pays Trueblood to tell his story. who tells the story, and I'm the one listening to Trueblood's story. As Michael Awkward points out, the incestuous acts of purebloods are judged almost exclusively by men. This male judgment is carried by a cast that includes the black school administrators who wish to remove the sharecropper from the community and the white protectors of Trueblood who pressure the administrators to allow the sharecropper to remain in his house. . . They are formed. . . an all-male evaluation circle that views Trueblood's act as shamefully repugnant. . . or meritoriously salacious. . . With the exception of mother Kate's violent and memorable reaction to seeing her husband on top of their daughter, the female perspective on Trueblood's act is effectively silenced and relegated to the periphery in the story's narrative. story by the sharecropper. So while the Trueblood women's pregnant bellies may be evidence of Trueblood's incestuous act, these women are trafficked to such an extent that Trueblood and Norton take advantage of their plight while the women carry babies they are ashamed. As Trueblood proclaims, except my wife and daughter don't talk to me, I'm better than ever. Although Trueblood discusses Matty Lou and Kate in his account of his daughter's impregnation and his wife's response, this statement demonstrates how he primarily focuses on his own survival rather than the hardships these women faced. endure. Although it is conceivable that the Trueblood women find power in their invisibility when they punish Trueblood by refusing to interact with him, the novel's inability to shed light on the Trueblood women's version of their experience makes it difficult to the reader to understand. Evaluate the productivity of this energy. Readers can assume, however, that any power these women might wield in distancing themselves from Trueblood does not allow them to rewrite their story for other men to hear since Trueblood is circulating its own, male-biased narrative of the family's incestuous history to many other men. As I listen to Trueblood share his story with Norton, he has yet to realize how much he has in common with Trueblood women, whose invisibility prevents them from accessing democracy to challenge the dominant male narrative about their story and tell their story in their own words. While I share a racial identity with the Truebloods and seek to protect them from having to share their story with a white man who might avoid them, he distances himself from the Truebloods by emphasizing the tension between the Truebloods and the people of the region. school. As a result, I fail to understand how the humanity that Kate and Matty Lou Trueblood's characters implicitly problematize relates to one's own struggle to be recognized, listened to, and embraced by democracy. However, just as Trueblood women become invisible when a male version of their story is broadcast to other men, I Am becomes invisiblewhen the Brotherhood deliberates over I'm's fate without truly considering his own testimony after he allegedly acted opportunistically in an interview. Just as Kate and Matty Lou's voices are muffled while Trueblood tells the story of incest to assert its own subjectivity and entertain others, I am's voice is completely ignored based on what the Brotherhood asserts to his subject for his own political purposes. consider him human when he asks himself: what was I, a man or a natural resource? Because this question follows Emma's question? But don't you think he should be a little darker, it seems I'm starting to question his humanity in the North when he meets this woman who seizes his humanity through her free will to speak and ask questions as if she were part of the Brotherhood. Although Emma's role in the novel can be primarily understood in terms of her relationship with men, as the question of I Am, who is she anyway, Brother Jack's wife, implies her girlfriend, is the first woman in the novel who, although trafficked by men, negotiates her position for her own ends by manipulating the terms of the male/female binary system that predominated in the 1940s. Emma's agency can, at least in part, be attributed to his somewhat masculine behavior. Described as an elegantly dressed woman with a tough and beautiful face, Emma appears masculine on the outside. Yet Emma is also a feminine temptress who I think would happily give in, even if she would only do it to satisfy herself. Characterized as a woman who has become sexualized, Emma therefore resists the dominant assumptions about femininity that predominated in the late 1940s, when women were urged to repress their sexual desires and avoid promiscuous behavior. By portraying Emma as someone who chose to have sex for her own pleasure, Ellison calls into question the gap between the image and reality of American democracy, which sought to define womanhood and manhood in terms narrow by projecting rigid gender roles for both sexes throughout society. in the late 1940s. This gap is complicated because Emma, ​​as a woman, acquiesces to the masculine ideals of the Brotherhood in order to extricate herself from her subordinate position as a woman. As I note, Emma is far too sophisticated and adept at intrigue to compromise her position as Jack's mistress by revealing something important to me. As the awareness of I Am suggests, Emma disciplines herself to not allow herself to become a victim or sacrificial lamb, used by I Am or anyone else for purposes from which she will not benefit. Rather than understanding Emma as a feminine other, I portray her as someone who, psychically, is essentially not a human being, different from the members of the Brotherhood. Lively and manipulative, Emma would not compromise herself in a way that might force her to sacrifice her privileged position. Instead, his own interest is inextricably linked to that of the Brotherhood, as Brother Jack's declaration, "We Are." . . interested 2E. . in his voice. And I suggest you, Emma, ​​make it your interest too. . . suggests. To the extent that Emma sacrifices her ability to exercise free will independent of the Brotherhood's puppeteers, she embodies the Brotherhood's doctrine that discipline is a sacrifice. So while Emma can try to resist the idea of ​​being used by others for purposes that will not benefit her, she cannot completely abandon the male power structure in which she operates since she sometimes takes advantage of his position in this.