The Things They Carried - Relationship between Women and Men - Essay Example

?Literary Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s Novel, “The Things They Carried” – Relationship between Women and Men. The women in Tim O’Brien’s book The ThingsThey Carried play a very important role because they represent the world that the young men have left behind when they came to war. Each character thinks of their home, including family members and sweethearts, when the reality of their experience gets too much for them. This paper examines the character of Mary Ann Bell and other women, showing what influence they have on the men, and how the men construct these women in their imaginations while they are far from home. The reader is introduced to Mary Ann Bell as part of a story told by Rat Kiley. This is warning enough that the story may not be true, but it nevertheless portrays a certain kind of fantasy about women that the soldiers have. She is described in sexist terms as “This cute blonde…she’s got on culottes. White culottes and this sexy pink sweater” (p. 86) The importance of this character at the beginning is that she is sweet and innocent, and her clean pink and white clothes are a sharp contrast to the dirty green uniforms that everyone wears on the battlefield. Her boyfriend Mark Fossie is supposed to have arranged for her to come over to join him, and no doubt this is the dream of every soldier. The whole episode is obviously fantasy and wish fulfilment. The story of Mary Ann Bell’s corruption by the horrors of war is symbolized in her appearance when she is found in the creepy cave. The author stresses that she is the same person that she was before, and yet something dreadful has happened to her: “She was barefoot. She wore her pink sweater and a white blouse and a simple cotton skirt.” (p. 105) This cheerleader image is shattered, however with the revelation: “At the girl’s throat was a necklace of human tongues.” (p. 105) The story of Mary Ann Bell is important because it provides a focus for the desires and hopes of the men who know that their girlfriends back home will never be able to understand what war was like: “They’ll just stare at you with those big round candy eyes. They won’t understand zip.” (p. 108) The tongues symbolize the inability that the soldiers have to talk about the gruesome experience of war. The innocent eyes of girls at home are contrasted with the fictitious Mary Anne Bell who did share the boys’s experience: “She was there. She was up to her eyeballs in it.” (p. 108) The legend of Mary Anne Bell is the legend of the girlfriend who turned into a better soldier than all of the young men and actually enjoyed the terror and the gruesome body parts and awful smells. Mary Anne Bell is both the idealized dream girlfriend, and the terrifying nightmare girlfriend who loses her cuteness and becomes just as depraved and hardened as the men. Neither version is a real person, of course. It seems that the men need these psychological extremes to love and to hate. Mary Anne Bell is a harmless target of their strongest emotions and thinking about her helps them to work through difficult feelings. Some of the male characters pretend that they are great lovers who can attract many women, and this betrays an attitude of seeing women as sex objects. An example of this is the stories that Rat Kiley told about his exploits: “If Rat told you, for example, that he’d slept with four girls one night, you could figure it was about a girl and a half.” (page 85). All of the women characters in the book are presented through the eyes of the soldiers and they are all to some extent used by the soldiers as objects. This kind of objectification can be insulting to women, but there are many occasions where the reader can see that there is real love going on between the soldiers and their wives and girlfriends. There is obviously a difficulty in doing this because the men are separated from their female friends and relatives, but in this situation small tokens are used instead. These are more than just souvenirs, but they become holders of deep meanings. The title of the book The Things They Carried indicates that small possessions like photographs, letters or pieces of clothing from loved ones carry a deep symbolic meaning. In the case of Martha’s photograph, which is another image of a girl in a short skirt, this time playing volleyball, the photograph is even transferred from Ted Lavender to Jimmy Cross. It is as if the real woman is not relevant, and the image has taken over to replace her in the weird world of war. The soldiers share their emotional resources just in the same way that they share their food and their gear. One of the most touching female characters in the book is Linda, who was a friend of Tim’s when he was a child. She died at the age of nine, and it is significant that since that time Tim makes her come alive again and again through telling stories about her. There is a sense in which these distant, or even dead, female characters comfort the soldiers, and help them through the war. As Tim says: “Or they say, ‘Timmy stop crying,’ which is what Linda said to me after she was dead” (p. 219). In the ending of the book this saving power of story- telling is made clear, since the single memory that keeps Timmy sane is the memory of skating with his dead childhood sweetheart Linda. The real girl is dead, but her existence in Tim’s mind is enough to heal his distress. The women in The Things They Carried therefore all play very much traditional female roles. They are idealized and demonized when they have a sexual connotation, as in the case of Mary Anne Bell and they offer comfort and care by means of souvenirs, whether these are in the form of small tokens such as the photograph of Martha or memories in Tim’s head, like the images of Linda skating with him at the age of nine. References O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Mariner Books, 2009. Read More