Lila Mae Watson

Lila Mae Watson faces drastically different challenges of modernity than those James Axton recognizes. Where Axton is an upper middle class caucasian man with the means and ability to move about the globe and hold a somewhat prestigious job, Lila Mae is the most talented Elevator Inspector in the city and can glean little to no respect from her peers and society due to Whitehead’s pre-civil rights setting. Lila Mae’s central test stems from her gender and race. The other African American or mixed characters in the novel, Fulton and Pompey, are also inspectors but both of them are male and “pass” as white ensuring them a degree of respect not granted to Lila Mae. Watson, however does not hide her lineage or race but yields to societal rules
By this Lila is conflicted with a deep issue of self as she maneuvers the tricky world which is set so far against her that her failure is taken as a given rather than a freak accident or sabotage. At the start of the novel Watson herself falls prey to the institutional racism present in the Elevator Guild believing that Pompey, her only black colleague, was the culprit of the incident, on the opposite front she trusts Natchez who turns out to be working for the Guild suggesting that it is not other African American characters she distrusts, but the Guild itself. She, much like James Axton, is so ostracized that she has a mistrust of most everyone around her but, unlike Axton, Watson has every reason to expect this sort of treatment and fall into a pit of self
The tension between the Empiricists, and the Intuitionists, the seemingly inferior competitor who treats inspection with passion and gut feeling, elicits a symbolic comparison to a more palpable reality of racial hierarchical divisions. Within The Intuitionist Whitehead hides a seemingly insignificant reference to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he is referred to as the “man who is so loud down South” This brings the fictional novel in an alternate world back to reality. Discussing Dr. King also reminds the reader that this alternate way still has an undetermined future. Whitehead returns his audience to the past, giving Lila Mae potential at the start of the civil rights movement that in reality she might not have had. The implied future inspires hope for a different world today if the reader is able to trust in Watson’s final act of inscription. By doing this Lila Mae is able to give the reader a faith in Fulton’s dream of unity making it clear that Lila Mae is entering into a new, transcendent, modern