why the narrator can’t be a woman

As plenty of people have pointed out, the depiction of women in Invisible Man is flat and disappointing. Although I wholeheartedly agree with that, I was thinking about the narrator himself, and how his experience is not as universally relatable as perhaps Ellison intended. Although the narrator’s name is never given, and we know nothing about his physical appearance except for the fact that he is black, we can say for sure that he is a man. But we know this not only because of the pronouns used to address him. If we went through and changed every boy to girl, every man to woman, and every him to her, the novel would no longer work, because the ideas it presents are fundamentally the experiences of a black man.

As I thought about this idea, I tried to think of a single episode in the novel that would not be significantly changed by changing the narrator's gender.

            To start, so much of the start of the novel revolves around the narrator aspiring to be someone great. From B.T. Washington to Bledsoe, he has these iconic figures he tries to emulate. But if the narrator were a woman, there would not be anyone she could look up to – throughout the novel, there is not a single woman in power mentioned. Even if there was, there are no black women of the time that call to mind the same well-known and iconic image as B.T. Washington, so Ellison would have had to reply on entirely fictional characters.

            Even if Ellison somehow figured out a person in power for the female narrator to fixate on, as soon as she was kicked out of the college, where would she go in New York? The real narrator goes to the Men’s House in Harlem, and although a similar institution might have existed, it was not typical for women to live and function alone, without a family or husband. In addition, it was looked down upon for women to work, so the idea that the narrator could get work at Liberty Paints or a similar institution.

            Then, as for our narrator’s iconic role as a  speech-giver, social activist, and overall face of the Brotherhood, I think that job would have been close to impossible for a woman to land. To point out a simple irony, it would be strange to have a woman championing the Brotherhood. If anything, a female narrator would have been sent to talk about the “Woman Question”, but something tells me that her experience would have been wildly different from the real narrator’s.

            There are plenty more examples I could bring up, but I think it’s pretty clear just from these that Invisible Man is not the universal narrative it wants to be. It’s not really something Ellison could have accounted for in any way without just writing two books, because the experiences of men and women at the time were so different, but for all of his care to include many perspectives, he leaves out the glaringly obvious one. It seems strange to me that the novel seems to be regarded as a pretty universal representation of the African-American experience, but at the same time it is unable to relate to half of the population.