Post-Feminist Fatherhood and the Marginalization of the Mother in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Abstract

Critics have tended to dismiss feminist analyses of Cormac McCarthy's works as misguided, labelling investigations of potential narrative misogyny in his novels as irrelevant. In this article, the author argues that such investigations are, on the contrary, highly relevant in the current climate of mother-blaming. The author specifically explains how McCarthy’s 2006 dystopian novel The Road uses post-feminist fatherhood to valorize the father and vilify the mother, thus participating in a continuing cultural trend of privileging fathers over mothers. The Road invokes traditional cultural expectations of motherhood and fatherhood, presenting the mother as unable and unwilling to care for the boy, in stark contrast to the very competent and able father. Many literary analyses of this highly acclaimed novel have unquestioningly accepted the post-feminist marginalization of the mother, and critics have elaborated on and developed the mother-blaming in the novel in a move that the author terms ‘critical co-writing’. Critical co-writing occurs when critics ally themselves with an author, rather than retaining a critical distance, and represent the author's ideas without problematizing them. In the case of The Road, many critics build on post-feminist cues in the novel, adding their own, unreflected, understandings of motherhood and fatherhood. In so doing, they reinterpret and rewrite the novel into an even more forceful presentation of flawed mothering. In a critical discussion of these readings, the author demonstrates how these critics transform the novel's implicit criticism of the mother character into explicit condemnation.

Keywords:

• Cormac McCarthy
• dystopian fiction
• fatherhood
• motherhood
• post-feminism

ORCID

Berit Åström http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7243-0059

Notes

1 The novel also invites in-depth analysis of men's appropriation of women's reproductive capabilities, but for reasons of space this cannot be investigated here.

2 A single father and child are often presented as a complete family, whereas a single mother and child tend to be constructed as an incomplete one (Åström 2017: 253–4). Morgenstern, for example, refers to the father and son as a family (Morgenstern 2014: 34).

3 One example Mary Douglas Vavrus discusses is how so-called ‘Mr Moms’—men who became homemakers while their wives worked—were still presented within a heteronormative framework of ‘paternal dominance’ (Vavrus 2002: 353).

4 Throughout the novel, the boy is concerned with the concept of ‘carrying the fire’, which he sees as something that defines good people. He seeks reassurance from his father that they are, indeed, ‘carrying the fire’ (83), and he will not join a new group of people after his father's death until he is reassured that they, too, are ‘carrying the fire’ (283).

5 Critics interpret the son’s age as between 6 and 10 (Ellis 2008: 29; Spurgeon 2011: 18).

6 One particularly gruesome scene often referenced by critics is of ‘a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on a spit’ (McCarthy 2006: 198).

7 Phillip A. Snyder, opting for a ‘straight hospitable reading’, suggests that her suicide is a true gift—that the term is not ironic, since her death is intended to ‘relieve’ her husband and son of ‘their responsibility for her responsibility’ (Snyder 2008: 78).

8 This is the only reference in the novel to the character as mother: ‘my mom’. All other references are to ‘his wife’ or ‘she’.

9 Carole Juge notes that the father's love gives him a ‘resilience that overcomes many obstacles in the way’—that he fails in some of his efforts is less important, since ‘at least he has tried’ (Juge 2009: 24). Cooper also notes the father's resilience and that, although he does not quite succeed, ‘at least he tries’ (Cooper 2011b: 142). It is unlikely that such a comment would be made about a mother character.