Where do women fit into an organization called “The Brotherhood?” Though it isn’t hard to believe that women wouldn’t have positions of power in the Brotherhood, Invisible Man fails to represent politically active women at all, to the fault of author Ralph Ellison. The women The Invisible Man encounters in the Brotherhood are strangely disinterested in politics and overall negatively represented.
The Invisible Man has a troubling interaction with a white woman in the Brotherhood in Chapter 19. The novel states:
Her problem… had to do with certain aspects of our ideology. ‘It’s rather involved, really,’ she said with concern, ‘and while I shouldn’t care to take up your time, I have a feeling that you –’ ‘Oh, not at all,’ I said. ‘But Brother, she said,’ ‘it’s really so late… my problem could wait until some other time…’ … ‘unless,’ she smiled, ‘I can induce you to stop by this evening (409-410).
The woman makes it seem like she’s interested in discussing the Brotherhood and having an intellectual conversation with The Invisible Man. However, she slyly offers to talk at her apartment which makes it obvious to the reader that she’s looking for sex. At the apartment, the two talk: “Please go on, tell me your ideas,’ she said… her hand light upon my arm. And I.. [was] carried away by my own enthusiasm and by the… wine… only when I turned [towards] her… I realized… she was leaning only a nose-tip away” (412-414). Every political topic the two discuss eventually leads back to the woman flirting with the Invisible Man. Ellison does not portray this woman as an authentically passionate member interested in discussing politics, but as a woman feigning political interest to lead a black Brother to her apartment for sex, which she accomplishes.
The next time The Invisible Man describes women in the Brotherhood is when female members find out about Tod Clifton’s death. Ellison writes, ‘‘Take me home,’ a girl screamed. ‘Take me home!’… I… caught her… ‘No, we can’t go home,” I said, ‘… We’ve got to fight’… One of the girls was still crying piteously” (448-449). The girls are stereotypically emotional about Clifton’s death. The screaming girl fits the “hysterical female” trope especially well. The girls, supposedly members of a political organization (The Brotherhood), appear to have no concern about what Clifton’s death means politically, unlike The Invisible Man who is calm, collected, and insightful about the situation. Though The Invisible Man later begins to question whether the best response to Clifton’s death is to be emotional or to only think about his death in a political context, the female members are still written unjustly. IM vaguely mentions that at the funeral, “There were tears and muffled sobs and many hard, red eyes” (451). However, these people are genderless. Ellison singles out the women when the despair surrounding Clifton’s death is discussed in more detail. These women are stereotypically emotional; their emotional despair is their only character trait. These youth members show no political intelligence or knowledge about the Brotherhood but are driven by their tears.
Ellison reduces female characters in the Brotherhood to either women controlled by their emotions or driven by sexual desire. Ellison doesn’t justly portray the large number of female activists in the early 20th century, especially when the novel takes place less than 20 years after women won the right to vote. He instead makes women out to be either too emotional or too sexual to be authentically concerned about political issues. Though Invisible Man fantastically covers the social complexities of being a black man in America, it’s essential to note the novel’s limitations. We can evaluate the novel critically by appreciating its strengths, accepting its flaws, and understanding that we can’t assume every sentence Ellison writes is credible.
