Why Women Aren't Important (According to IM)

According to Invisible Man, the real women question is this: Why do women want to use me as a sexual object, and why should they have rights? Not only is that largely offensive to myself and anyone else who has read Wikipedia articles on feminism on any given night, it’s not the right questions that should be posed about women. Some better questions could be posed from many archetypal women, especially many that Walt Disney decided to animate.
1. Why do women need to be saved by men riding a gleaming white horse? Well, that’s an easy and simple question. See, in the archetypal sense, women did not actually gain independence nor brain function until approximately the 16th century. Before then, women were burned at the stakes for such grievances, and just to make sure we got all the witches we still burned women later on for not being married by 20. Anyways, women have always been considered somewhat helpless, and that they need saving of some sorts. Take a look at nearly any Disney movie involving a princess. Cinderella, she needed saving by the prince to escape her ugly family who abused her mercilessly – women weren’t granted loans back then. Ariel the mermaid, see she needed to escape from her underwater playground to go marry a man she has never had a serious conversation with. These are the morals that need to be instilled in our children today, Invisible Man, not that we are all fighting white man’s oppression.
2. Why do women only appear at inappropriate moments to demand things from me, unless they’re acting as a Mary figure? Good question, IM, good question. See, the tricky thing about women is that they like to use men – oh wait, maybe the fact that you’re in a very open political movement about fighting oppression isn’t the greatest way to start out a dinner conversation. See, politics and religion are two things you do not need to bring up on a first date. Do you know what you’ve just talked about for the past 350 pages? The fact that the only woman you’ve ever liked was named Mary, and you are the member of an organization extremely dedicated to getting black rights. In fact, there’s so much serpent imagery around that I feel as if you’re intending to just relate characters in your past to religious figures in order to illustrate your race’s subjugation to white men and the religion forced on them generations ago. Maybe you should join a book club or something; that should help your relations with the ladies.
3. Why do women only wear red? Okay, Invisible Man, we all know most of the encounters you have with women involve them wearing either a red robe or having red nail polish. But, considering that you are so caught up on the religious imagery, we usually find that red means either lust or the devil – or both in your cases! I would find a nice girl that is wearing a nice green or blue dress, in fact go with the blue dress. She’ll match your innards, according to your relation to Louise Armstrong songs.

Ideologies

Why do ideologies so epically fail in Invisible Man? When he joins the Brotherhood, he later discovers that he doesn’t actually fit into their scientific mold and their black and white (pun intended) guidelines for speaking to the people. Yet, he hasn’t fit in with any other ideologies either – his Grandfather traumatized him for life, and Mr. Norton’s way of giving to people didn’t exactly appeal to him either. He wasn’t even a fan of the union at the factory hospital, so much so that Brockway threw him in a machine that in turn gave him a lobotomy. Yet, why is it so hard for people to find one ideology and stick to it? This applies to people across the board, in my opinion. The only people that can really stick hard core to certain ideologies are those heavily up in the ranks of said ideology, and those that envy said people. Take for example political parties. Most people are somewhat lenient on an issue within their given party. Although some people may claim to be democrats, they may fall conservative on the issue of gun control or taxation. Yet, there are a few radicals that claim that they are extremely aligned with the party – how does this happen? Well, the affirmation of one’s identity has to also be aligned with the party, no matter how direct. That doesn’t mean that you have to be the next nominee for the Democratic Presidential Ticket to be a staunch liberal. What that means is that some part of you has to be connected. In AP US GOV we learned that nearly 60-70% of all people show a direct relationship with how they vote and how their parents vote. Obviously, their parents instilled values in them that continued throughout their lives, and this continued to affect their identities under that party ticket. Yet, theres also a statistic that those who always rebelled from their parents on other issues like religion and clothing style usually directly rebelled from their parents politically. So, whatever your identity is connected to, whether it be for or against your parents - social scientists can accurately predict whether your were a McCain or Obama fan. How does this go back to Invisible Man? Well, because the narrator never really had a staunch identity to begin with, and if he did he certainly doesn’t remember after his lobotomy, he is a blank slate, a tabula rosa if you will. So, he doesn’t really have any basis to start off his identity with, and less likely to stick keenly to one ideology. That being said, he also could have gone in the complete opposite direction. He could have found his identity within the Brotherhood so much so that he embedded his entire identity into becoming the ideology of the party, and forgo any misgivings that the party is too scientific and cold blooded. Yet, the narrator opts to go a different route – one of disattatchment and hiding in a hole.

Invisibility in Literature

So, by now we all should have read Invisible Man front to back - which is a task I know all however many AP LIT students have accomplished. Invisible Man obviously is a book about a man isolated from society, and in a sense is a coming of age book. Yet, there are many other novels that also use a motif of invisibility to convey a loss of identity and a suppossed persona. Take for example the first book titled Invisible Man, but it was by a simple man - H.G. Wells. Ever hear of the Time Machine? Or War of the Worlds? Yeah, exactly. This novel is also pretty intense, (and I actually bought a copy of it before Mrs. Clinch clarified that is was the wrong book...and read most of it because it was really good) and its about, obviously, a literal invisible man. In this story an invisible man, wrapped in bandages, shows up at an Inn to stay for a few weeks. Yet, when the land lady discovers he's literally an invisible man he flees, leaving the towns people hanging. Yes, they were pretty freaked out - so the best option of course when you get scared is to beat him to death! Although he was invisible, the town's people anger acted as a sort of "Invisible-man-dar" and found Griffin (his name) and beat him until their arms got tired. Invisibility in this book acts as a deformity, and illustrates how people hate other people not exactly like them. Which is a commonality in most literature before 1900.
In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, a very indepth tale of a boy's magical quest from child abuse, invisibility is also used for a defensive move (an invisibility cloak). But invisibility can be benign. Harry's cloak of invisibility was given to him by Dumbledore in the first Potter novel (it belonged to his father) and is used in every subsequent volume to allow him to get up to his virtuous tricks without his schoolfellows noticing. I'm not really sure if there's a literary purpose here, other than maybe being invisible for the sake of defense shows futility of war? Yeah...that seems like a bit of a stretch. An additional story that makes use of invisibility is “The Headless Horseman”, where the horses remain either invisible or skeletons, and the rider has a pumpkin head. Most students read this at some point in American Lit, and I read it last year for AP LANG. This story seems a tad bit more archetypal than it is deep, but basically the point of invisibility in this story is that the horses are invisiblie to frighten people. See, people are scared of what they do not know. That’s basically why racism exists, and nearly every other fear imaginable. In fact, I do recall from a Doctor Phil show that all fears are based on the fact that you do not have control over the situation. The headless horseman inspired fear because he was indestructible, invisible, and a deathly force to be reckoned with – quite a good theme to convey when writing a horror story. Invisibility works on many frontiers, and not just to illustrate that a man can be completely cast out of society. That would take a volleyball named Wilson…I know bad reference.