A STUDY OF THE FEMALE CHARACTERS IN WILLIAM GOLDING'S NOVELS

William Golding has said that he intentionally excluded female characters from Lord of the Flies, his first novel, because he did not believe that "sex has anything to do with humanity at this level." Significantly, however, he not only included female characters in the novels from The Inheritors through Darkness Visible, but he used them to focus attention on the moral nature of the male protagonist. This function of the female characters becomes more evident in the narratives that approximate to the first-person point of view or are told from it, for in these works female characters play central roles in the protagonist's developing awareness of what it means to be a fallen creature. This dissertation analyzes Golding's female characters in an effort to understand more thoroughly their contribution to the delineation of the moral nature of the male protagonists and to note developments in Golding's treatment of female characters.;Golding moves from the exclusion of females and sexual matters from Lord of the Flies to the use of sexual exploitation as an increasingly important means of studying the difference between guilt and innocence, a major theme in all of his works. As he develops the theme of sexual exploitation, his discussion of the sexual aspects of the male-female relationships becomes more explicit. These relationships focus attention on the protagonists' moral natures and echo elements of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and the origin of sin. Females in the works after The Inheritors, Golding's second novel, play the Eve-like role of providing man the opportunity to betray his spiritual potential and to recognize the existence of good and evil.;Although Golding's major female characters are central figures in his exploration of man's moral nature, they are not important in and for themselves. Their primary function is to portray attitudes and decisions that determine our evaluation of the male protagonist. Like Eve, they make moral choices necessary or apparent for the male. But they have no life apart from their association with the male protagonist. Sophy of Darkness Visible seems to be an exception because she has so little contact with Matty, but in reality most of the details of her story are designed to counterpoint elements in Matty's life. Hence, Golding has been consistent in the way he has used female characters in the novels from The Inheritors through Darkness Visible.;Because many of Golding's female characters are important with respect to the protagonists' ultimate recognition of their own moral natures, an analysis of the female roles illuminates the central concerns of the works themselves. In five novels, the loss of innocence, a major theme, is portrayed through the male characters' relationships with one or more female characters; and in his seventh novel, the male character's efforts to do good are counterpointed by the female character's determination to do evil. Thus, female characters are quite important to a comprehensive understanding of the works. Likewise, evaluating the relation of characterization to function is one way of assessing Golding's accomplishment in the works considered. Despite the female's importance in developing the theme, none of Golding's novels is narrated by a female character, and only one part of one novel, Darkness Visible, is narrated from a female point of view. Each of Golding's novels focuses on a male protagonist, and the female characters exist primarily to augment our understanding of the more important male figure.