Gender Inequality In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

As much as Invisible Man focuses on the invisibility of the black race, the novel fails to acknowledge the same invisibility and gender inequality faced by women. Their roles are very faint and usually unnamed in the novel, most likely providing a service to men. Ralph Ellison additionally reinforces this mistreatment through the hypersexualization and dehumanization of both white and black women in Invisible Man. Ellison manipulates the novel’s mistreatment to convey how white women use their invisibility to remind black men of their subordination to white men,conversely, black women’s invisibility is exploitable by black men, being consumed to fuel themselves. In the setting of Invisible Man

Chapter 1 introduces a white prostitute being seen as bait by the hungry dogs around her at the boxing party. This scene opens up

Immediately after expressing his dream of a white women where he was “[I’m] scared to touch her ‘cause she’s white” (68) he justifies his fantasization about his black daughter as “[although maybe’ sometimes a man can look at a little ole pigtail gal and see him a whore” (59). Matty Lou’s rape is both an effect of her being seen as the seductress, yet still seen as oppressed. Unlike the whore in the first chapter, the only difference between her and Matty Lou is their skin color. Her father recognized her as a black women and had no boundaries when it came to exploiting her body, inversely, he made the white seductress in his dream seem as the forbidden fruit. Trueblood’s inability as a father to cope with her introducing another man into her life leaves him with no choice but to excerpt his dominant “father figure” upon his daughter’s body. The oppression of women is shown through trueblood’s actions by showing how women are expected to live their sole purpose dedicated to providing for one man, despite it being her