Golding Essay

Piggy as an Indirect Female Figure in Lord of Flies In Lord of the Flies, Golding has excluded women from the society on the island. He also goes further and shows his misogyny. As we have read in the novel, in the midst of a nuclear war, we observe a group of British boys who were being evacuated to an unnamed destination. Their plane crashed, leaving the boys stranded on an unfamiliar island. So far, we know that these boys are from London and therefore highly educated, cultured, and civilized. What is eccentric here is that we observe so much brutality of these so-called civilized boys throughout the novel. Note that there is no female on the island except an indirect female figure named Piggy. Here I want to come to this point that the absence of females in this society (i.e. on the island) is one of the crucial factors, which results in brutality, violence, and such uncivilized behavior of young pupils. In simple word, although females are absent, this absence along with the final message of the novel – which is men’s inclination toward violence_ betrays Golding’s view of misogyny. Golding’s misogyny is obvious throughout the novel. He presents a society populated only by males. We as readers see very few references to females. As an example when Ralph is tired of the island and he is daydreaming about his home, his room and the books in his room, the narrator says that he had never read one of the books because it was about two girls: “There was the bright shining one about Topsy and Mopsy that he never read because it was about two girls” Another example is the scene of hunting in which the hunters choose a mature female pig to hunt. Certainly, the choice is not accidental and the narrator wanted to implant the idea of misogyny: “Under the trees an ear flapped idly. A little apart from the rest sunk in deep maternal bliss, lay the largest sow of the lot. She was black and pink; and the great bladder of her belly was fringed with a row of