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

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,

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