ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVES: A FEMINIST READING

Feminist literary criticism has brought a specific set of questions to literary analysis, focusing on how women are represented in literature. Feminist critics bring questions about the social and historical context of literature to bear, as well as examining the extent to which representations of women in literature perpetuate social and cultural stereotypes. While feminist criticism is a large and complex area in which questions of ethnicity, class, and sexuality have also come into play, some of the earliest points made by feminist critics can be used to develop a reading of how this novel presents women. The extent to which female characters are presented only in relationship to male characters, and the resulting tendency to see female characters as positive or negative because of their relationship with male characters, is stronger in gothic or horror fiction because of the genre conventions. Hazel Pierce, a scholar who places Bradbury’s novels in the genre of gothic novels rather than science fiction, notes, women writers developed the gothic convention of young, innocent women who were in danger because of sexual decadence. Horror stories tend to present women as either victims or villains.

Bradbury, in SWTWC, focuses on innocent (or fairly innocent) adolescent boys. The boys’ relationships with adult men—notably, Charles Halloway, Dark, and Cooger—initiate the process of becoming “men” as opposed to boys. Charles presents the cultural belief that men are completely different beings than women because of the differences in reproductive abilities. In chapter 14 he looks at his sleeping wife and muses that a woman can have true immortality through childbearing, while men cannot really believe they are fathers: “what father ever really believes it? He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in darkness and gets up with child? The gentle, smiling ones own the good secret…. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments….?” (58–59). This image of women is mythic, something other than human. The image also defines women as essentially requiring to bear children to be completely women and, in traditional societies, to marry men rather than to exercise this mysterious power on their own. Charles’s musings also go to the heart of what some feminist critics believe is the reason for social restrictions on women: that men, not able to have conclusive proof that their children are in fact their children, need to control other men’s access to “their” women.

The novel’s main characters are all men, and women play limited roles. The earliest images of women in the novel are not real women at all, but pictures, images, and objects. The first representation of a woman is the poster advertising “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” and the ice block in which Charles sees an empty space that is somehow a woman (in potential?), and in which the lightning rod salesman sees the shape of a woman that, taking substance from the images of women in art and film, lures him into a trap. In this representation, the woman resembles a siren or mermaid, mythical women in water who lure men to their deaths.

The second woman is a character diametrically opposed to the temptress in the ice block. Will’s mother (her first name is never given) is usually shown safe in her home, the one father and son return to after their adventures. Will compares her to a “creamy pink hothouse rose poised alone in the wilderness…. smelling like fresh milk, happy, to herself, in this room” (34). The association of women with roses in British and American literature is centuries old; the additional sense impression of milk, which a woman can produce from her body to feed her child, also shows the positive nature of Will’s mother. Jim’s mother is also described briefly, as someone who wants to keep Jim in the house rather than let him stray outside into danger.

Both mothers are mostly portrayed in the house and in their roles as mothers. The perspective is wholly that of the child, who knows only “Mom” rather than a woman’s name. However, these women have a power or stability that most male characters lack. Late in the novel, when Jim and Will have been captured by Dark, all three see Will and Jim’s mothers walking home from church. Dark tries to orchestrate a meeting and capture them as well, but fails. The women turn away, perhaps because they are coming from church, perhaps because they are together, or perhaps because mothers, by their nature (according to Charles), are completely fulfilled, not “unconnected fools” who can be trapped by time. The portrayal of mothers is not completely positive: Will describes Jim’s mother, who lost her husband, as suffocating Jim because she wants to keep him safe; her love and desire make him want to run away, perhaps to adulthood (93).

The other two female characters in the novel are Miss Foley, the boys’ spinster schoolteacher, and the Dust Witch, one of the carnival people. Miss Foley is tempted by the nephew’s promise that a carousel ride will restore her to youth. The temptation leads her to lay false charges against the two boys, who are among her favorite students. The Dust Witch is essentially an instrument controlled by Dark, but she is described as a blind, poisonous witch who can cast spells.

Considering the ways in which the female characters are constructed in the context of social expectations of women and in the context of genre conventions can lead to a reading of the way they mirror three deeply rooted archetypes of women: virgin (or spinster), mother, and crone (witch). While feminist writers have claimed these identities as having power for women, SWTWC tends to assign simplistic stereotypes to each character type: the mother is presented as positive, but the “virgin” and the “crone” are both negative. Only the woman who fulfills her socially expected role is safe from the threats of Dark and Cooger. Miss Foley is easily tempted, falls, and then, as a little girl, is probably captured by the carnival to become like the Dust Witch, completely evil and dominated by Dark.

Bradbury’s novel, while enlarging the focus on the relationship between sons and fathers, reduces the women characters to little more than stereotypes; whether of good or evil, it hardly seems to matter because of the limited roles they have to play.

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