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Practicum instructor: Dr. Lorelei Caraman Student: Apostol Maria

Course: Text Analysis (Criticism and theory) English-German, 3rd year

An Ecocritic and Feminist Interpretation of The Road by Cormac McCarthy

As students at the Faculty of Letters, reading is our favorite hobby, probably. This is the

reason why the subject of this work is centered on an intriguing book, that won the Pulitzer Prize,

written by Cormac McCarthy. The setting is a “post-apocalyptic desert-like [American] landscape

that appears to transcend both time and place.” (Søfting 706). In fact, the narrator does not mention

a particular year or decade or a particular place: the reader knows from the beginning only the fact

that the two protagonists, a father and a son, are heading somewhere towards the sea in the south

and probably it is October (McCarthy 4). Many of the critical theories that we have learned about

during the Text Analysis course can be appropriate to analyze several aspects of McCarthy’s

dystopian novel, but I consider that Ecocriticism and Feminism the most intriguing ways of

approaching The Road. First of all, I will proceed presenting, from an Ecocritic point of view, the

landscape (or what is left from it) in which the action takes place, how it is, how it may have been

and how it will be in the future. Afterwards, I will try to present, under a Feminist light, the three

main female figures in the novel and their behavior towards family, motherhood, life and death.

As it is known, Ecocriticism revolves around the idea that we, as readers, as writers, should be

less egocentric and consider nature and environment itself as a separate, living being (Shmoop

Editorial Team). Plants, flowers and trees breath too after all, don’t they? Unfortunately, in the case

of McCarthy’s novel there is no healthy, green, blossoming environment, not even an animal. The

reader can understand this right from the beginning of the novel: the view provided is one of

desolation, destruction, loneliness. There is a “soft ash blowing . . .” (McCarthy 4), the river in the

valley is “motionless” and there are “dead reeds” everywhere (5). Nature is not dynamic and

colorful, it is grey and still, dead. The first question that one may ask is “what happened”? The

author never explains what really happened, but from the fact that there are ashes everywhere, we

can deduce that a big, great fire destroyed everything. What- or who- provoked the fire? No one
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knows. We can speculate about this aspect and think that maybe the frenetic development of cities,

industries and technology may have been the cause of this major disaster: pollution, experiments

(on animals and on nature itself), replacement of natural elements with robots and

machineries…Therefore, we can think that the environmental disasters are the result of men’s desire

to progress and evolve and, thus, their alienation from nature. The contrast between the current,

grey environment in which the father and the son push a cart with all their goods on a desolated

road and the vivid past, the “greener landscape and . . . familiar topographies” (Godfrey 165) is

underlined by the memories of the father who, from time to time, daydreams about childhood places

and how different they were from the present and how happier he was back then. A relevant

example is the episode in which at a certain point, after entering a desolated city in search for food

and goods, the father remembers, through a flashback, about the almost idyllic environment nearby

his uncle’s farm: a lake, tumultuous falls, birch trees and evergreen trees (McCarthy 11). The father

realizes that his son, born after the destruction of the environment, will never be able to understand

the happiness and tranquility of merging with nature and enjoying the water, the sun, the wind, the

singing of birds. Moreover, we may say that the father involuntarily identifies the beginning of the

destruction of nature that can be expressed with the following words: “The trees themselves had

long been sawed for firewood and carried away.”(11) Again another proof that men are directly

responsible for the destruction of the ecosystem and of the environment.

To conclude, we may ask: “[h]ow have people related to nature in different ways at different

points in history? What's all that got to do with evolving technologies, industrialism, and post-

industrialism?” (Shmoop Editorial Team). The answer is quite simple: in the beginnings, men used

to have a very harmonious relation with nature and its (four) elements, but, with the discovery of

new technologies, something has gone wrong and the continuous desire of creating and building

and demolishing and rebuilding has slowly disintegrated nature and damaged the environment. We

should see The Road as an example of what our own world may become if we do not stop polluting
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it, if we do not stop cutting trees and “play with fire”, like Romanians use to say when someone is

risking too much by doing something bad or illegal.

As previously mentioned, the two protagonists are a father and his son, and the question

“where is the mother?” comes almost naturally in the reader’s mind, at least it happened to me. This

happens because we think in terms of what Derrida call “binary opposites” (Caraman, “Instability

of Language”): two terms that are juxtaposed and one of them is preferred to the other. In this case,

the binary is “mother/father” and “mother” is preferred to “father”. Why? Because, in a traditional,

patriarchal point of view the mother is the one who takes care of the family, of the children and of

the house. Cormac McCarthy destroys, somehow, this traditional concept of “motherhood” and, as

B. Åström claims, “[t]he mother character is neither a traditional mother nor a ‘new’mother.” (114).

In The Road, the mother of the boy kills herself, giving up on motherhood, but it should not

be interpreted as an act of rebellion for freedom-from-patriarchy’s sake: it is an act made out of

cowardice and fear of living in a world of destruction and death. Another feminine figure in the

novel is a woman who lives (or better, survives) with a gang of men and the scene in which she

appears is a particularly horryfying one: the father and the boy witness a scene in which a new born

is being cooked, the one she gave birth to (175). We may again speculate on this episode and ignore

the horrible image and think that in this dystopian, post-apocalyptic world, the woman either prefers

to die (like the boy’s mother) or prefers to survive at the expense of others, sacrifying others, the

infant, in this case. Like the first mother, this mother also doesn’t fit either the image of the

traditional mother or that of a ‘new’ mother. Feminists would probably disapprove both behaviours

because none of them are justified and they do not fight for a value, like women in the three waves

of Feminism. They rather let themselves guided, in Psychoanalytic terms, by their instincts: the Life

Instinct and the Death Instinct (Caraman, “Psyche”). Last but not least, a third woman appears

towards the end of the novel: she is the only “good” example of mother figure throughout the book.

Wife, and mother of a girl and a boy, she takes under her wing also the protagonist boy after his

father dies. This model of woman, in other contexts, probably would not make Feminists happy
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about her achievements, but in such a chaotic and dangerous world, probably even Feminists would

prefer this solution instead of the other two.

In conclusion we may say that women in McCarthy’s novel fade away and are replaced by the

male figure, by the father, but not in a mysoginistic way: post-feminist studies claim that women

can be other than mothers and wives and a father’s masculinity is no longer dictated by hard work

and hunting, for example, but rather by parenting. So, parenting equals masculinity! (Hamad qtd. in

Åström 116). Therefore, we may say that women here exert the freedom of choosing their destiny,

but the way they do it can be debatable, especially in the case of the first two women.

I also touched a few concepts belonging to other critical theories – Deconstruction and

Psychoanalysis- but I will not develop them because of lack of space. This is only to show how

many different points of view the reader may adopt in the interpretation of an artistic product and

how all these critical theories are intertwined. After this brief analysis of McCarthy’s novel, we can

see how complex and diverse our reactions and interpretations as readers may be, at least mine, and

this brings me to the Reader-response theory, but that’s another story.

Works Cite

Åström, Berit. „Post-Feminist Faterhood and the Marginalization of the Mother in Cormac
McCarthy's The Road.” Women: A Cultural Review, vol.21, no.1, Routledge, 29 Mar. 2018,
London, pp 112-128, PDF File

Caraman, Lorelei. “Working with the Instability of Language. Post-structuralism and

Deconstruction”, Text Analysis Course, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iași, Received 22
Nov.2018. Course handout
Caraman, Lorelei, “Working with the Psyche. Psychoanalysis: Freudian and Lacanian”, Text
Analysis Course, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iași, Received 01 Nov. 2018. Course
handout

Godfrey, Laura Gruber. „“The World He’d Lost”: Geography and "Green" Memory in Cormac
McCarthy's The Road.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction,vol.52, no.2, Routledge,
10 Mar. 2011, London, pp 163-175, PDF File
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McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, PDF File

Søfting, Inger-Anne. „Between Dystopia and Utopia: The Post-Apocalyptic Discourse of Cormac
McCarthy's The Road”. English Studies, vol.94, no.6, Routledge. 03 Oct. 2013, London, pp
704-713, PDF File
Team, Shmoop Editorial. "Ecocriticism." Shmoop. 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 15 Jan. 2019.
<https://www.shmoop.com/ecocriticism/>