On The Absence Of Women In Lord Of The Flies

Lord of the Flies, published in England by Faber and Faber in 1954, is generally considered to be William Golding's masterpiece. It tells a seemingly simple yet thought-provoking story. It takes place within an imagined atomic war. A group of English boys are evacuated to a safe place. On their way, the plane they are on is shot down by the enemy's bombs. The boys reach a tropical island and soon organize themselves into a reasonable imitation of highly civilized English society. At first they enjoy their new life, but under the strain of their total isolation, they develop tensions which finally break out into conflict, even to the point of killing each other. They reject their original idea of establishing a civilized society, and instead develop an aggressive community around a brutal boy with absolute authority. When rescue finally comes, the boys have completely lost their civilized values of their former existence. They have become savages who take great enjoyment in killing their friends, and their paradise-like island is destroyed by the fire they once used for cooking, protection and rescue. Lord of the Flies is not a bedtime story as it seems, but a story of instruction: not for children, but parents are the real target of its education. Golding's concern is to present a vision of human nature and also the nature of the world through the experiences of a group of children cast away on a desert island.Since its publication, Lord of the Flies has been a hot topic in academic research of literary works. Literary critics have elaborated on its human nature motif, its symbolism or allegorical meaning, and its narrative structure. Some critics have focused on myth and archetypal reading while others have adopted an approach to feminist reading in the pig-hunting episode of the novel. Patrick Reilly and Yu Haiqing have made brief comments on the absence of women, but their critiques are not all-inclusive.This paper intends to make a tentative study of the absence of women in Lord of the Flies. The question has been probed within the scope of the island literaturetradition in the history of English literature and reexamined in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis. The paper consists of three major parts. A survey of the previous critiques on Lord of the Flies in China as well as in English-speaking countries is made in Chapter One. In Chapter Two, the absence of women or the repression of female characters are numerated in the scope of English island literary canons as Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, and The Coral Island, to demonstrate that Lord of the Flies has carried forward the island literature tradition relating female characterization. In Chapter Three, a psychoanalytical approach is taken to examine the absence of women in Lord of the Flies and it suggests that the absence of women provides an ideal situation for the boys to free themselves from cultural constraints and return to natural behavior. Moreover, the absence of women intensifies the doubt about the boy's rescue at the end of the novel. The boys are "saved" in a world without women. They may survive for the time being, but sooner or later the human world will perish for lack of women, for boys or men alone fail to give birth to children. In this sense, the absence of women in this novel reflects the very need for the presence of women. The importance of women is highlighted by the absence of all real female characters but not female representations. An ideal world is a place where men and women live harmoniously.