Comparison Of Women In Invisible Man And Spike Lee's Bamboozled

Despite the different representations and portrayals of female characters in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, women in both of these works are overlooked and marginalized by African-American male characters who fail to see the parallels between their situations.

In Invisible Man, Ellison introduces numerous one-dimensional female characters, who fall into sexually driven stereotypes. During the Battle Royal in the beginning of the novel, an unnamed white stripper provides the pre-show entertainment. The narrator describes her as a “circus kewpie doll, [her] eyes hollow and smeared a cool blue, the color of a baboon’s butt” (19). This paints an extremely unflattering and uncomfortable image, with the woman being compared

to two non-human and undesirable objects. Invisible Man then says, “I had a notion that of all in the room she saw only me with her impersonal eyes” (19). He feels that he is both above her, the non-human, and connected to her. This contradiction is further seen by the narrator’s desire to “caress her and destroy, to love her and murder her” (19).

The woman is brought out by the white community leaders and the narrator is able to see “the terror and disgust in her eyes” much like that of “[his] own terror” (20). The two are connected in their oppression by white men, but part of the narrator feels that he is above the blonde stripper because of his masculine ability to destroy, love, or murder her. Similarly, after Invisible Man is sent out of Harlem to discuss the Woman Question, he meets a second unnamed white woman. He is invited back to her apartment, where the woman begins to seduce him. He says, “I wanted both to smash her and to stay with her and knew that I should do neither” (415). The narrator feels the same confliction he felt with the stripper, but he now also believes that this woman is a distraction “trying to ruin [him]” (415) with her sexual motives and divert his attention away from the Brotherhood. One of the most powerless characters in Ellison’s novel is Matty Lou Trueblood, a young black woman who is raped and impregnated by her father, Jim. He sexualizes his own daughter, thinking,

“I’m realizin’ that she’s a woman now…I feel her turn and squirm against me and throw her arm around my neck…She said somethin’ I couldn’t understand, like a woman says when she wants to tease and please a man. I knowed then she was grown and I wondered how many times it’d done happened” (56). Instead of supporting and sheltering her, the white community gives Jim “more help than they ever give any other colored man” (67). They offer him money and food and “instead of things gittin’ bad, they got better” (68). Black women seem to not be important enough to warrant the morally and legally correct response to a father sexualizing and raping a daughter. Toward the end of the story, the narrator attempts to undermine the Brotherhood by attaining specific information from a wife of one of the important leaders. He settles on Sybil, a white woman who he learns is a self-proclaimed “nymphomaniac” (519). It becomes clear that she is of no use to Invisible Man, but instead wishes for him to fulfill her desire to be raped by a black man. Sybil is entirely characterized by her desire for sex, the lack of sex in her marriage, and her fantasy of being raped. The narrator muses, “but why be surprised, when that’s all they [white women] hear all their lives.

When it’s made into a great power and they’re taught to worship all types of power” (520). He sees women “worshipping” this power, but doesn’t connect it to his own situation of worshipping a different type of power. The white woman and black man are oblivious to the fact they are stereotyping each other in the exact way they themselves are trying to escape. Finally, at the Golden Day, the brothel that Invisible Man takes Mr. Norton, the black prostitutes are seen as so submissive that they “usually [get] away with things a man never could” (93). The narrator refers to these women being able to speak more freely to an important white man than he feels he, or any other black man, is able to. While there is a fleeting sense of power in this, in the same way the narrator says invisibility “is sometimes advantageous” (3), it becomes clear that the only reason the women are able to say whatever they want is because the men see them as invisible, dumb, insignificant and associated purely with sex. As with the prostitutes, Edith Windsor of “The Perfect Wife” realizes the power that can come with exploiting certain

stereotypes. Her “long nails,…long strand of pearls” and “platinum blonde…carefully blow-dried bob” set Windsor up as the most stereotypically heterosexual women. She uses this to fly under the radar and be successful at her IBM job, as well as be un-offensive enough to win her case against DOMA.
The one exception to the slew of overtly sexual female characters in Invisible Man is Mary Rambo. She represents the complete opposite to the other women, showing Invisible Man comfort and security: “You ever decide you want a room somewhere…try me, the rent’s reasonable” (255). The name Mary is Jesus’s mother in the Bible, and Mary Rambo is the closest thing the narrator has to a mother figure. Ellison is creating a Madonna-whore complex within his novel, with women being limited to two mutually exclusive identities. This traps women in a similar way the Ellison describes black men to be trapped.