The Woman

The woman is mentioned for the first time in a ghostly but erotic way. She is described as a "pale bride" which implies that she isn't healthy or has a ghost like quality to her which perhaps indicates the way she sees death as a lover that can give her what the man cannot. The man then goes on to remember the woman as her "nipples pipe clayed and her rib bones painted white" this is erotic and detailed. The man seems to focus mainly upon the way the woman looks which could reveal a shallow nature to the man but most probably is due to the fact the man would want to remember beautiful things and images as he lives in a bleak world where all natural beauty and sublime elements have died or been burned. When the woman is remembered or described the text is disjointed and mainly occurs in the silence of the night when the man struggles to sleep. He dreams about the woman coming towards him which , if Freud's theories of psychoanalysis and dream analysis are applied, a psychological reading of the text would indicate that the man deeply desires to have the woman with him and that he either wants to die to be with her or regrets the way events panned out.


The woman is some how inferior to the man as he speaks bluntly to her and displays her ignorance as she asks why he is taking a bath. Also it seems the man has almost given up caring about the woman as when giving birth "her cries meant nothing to him" this is clearly a subversion of normal conventions which heavily indicates that the boy is the key character and 'good guy' and is central to the religious aspect of the book. The woman, however, is more realistic about the man and she is aware of how society will descend and fall as she states "They will kill us. They will rape me" this insight is most probably the reason that she calls death her "lover" and "empty nothingness" becomes her "only hope".

The woman also represents the cyclical nature of life, she gives and takes away life in what appears to be a relatively short space of time. McCarthy uses the woman as a device to reveal the life that existed before the apocalypse. The woman also is symbolic as the absence of hope, the man is firm in his belief that the boy will lead him to death and what the reader can only assume to be a more positive after life or an empty liminal space.

Structurally the woman is used by McCarthy to change the time in which the novel falls. She enables the man to reveal parts of his past, a possible survivalist background as he instinctively runs a bath for water, and bring colour into an otherwise bleak and hopeless world. McCarthy also provides an alternative reaction to the event as she is clearly not able to strive an work to find the south and for her suicide is the only way to escape the horrors of the world.

Its possible that the woman has a prominent absence because the novel focuses upon a father son relationship. However it is more likely that it is a way of a specific viewpoint and genre being conveyed. She is a counter- example of  post-apocalyptic fiction as she is unable to adapt to the new situation.