Gender Roles In Far North By Marcel Theroux

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Recommended: Studying gender roles in literature

Through his novel, author Marcel Theroux creates a dystopian era revolving around war, and man’s need to control and dominate over others. Through the life of one particular character, the audience is able to experience this world through the eyes of a woman. Makepeace, the protagonist, takes the reader on a journey through her past to reveal how these men demonstrate such characteristics. In contrast to her fellow characters, Makepeace manages hold on to humanity and continues to see the beauty around her. In the novel, Far North, I believe the protagonist’s desires were driven by her female gender, and the author used Makepeace to portray the differences between men and women.
Every detail about the protagonist, Makepeace, leads the reader to believe gender roles have a significant impact on the behavior of an individual. I believe the author does an excellent job at creating a novel that displays the differences in genders, and how ones gender effects the way they go about …show more content…

A few examples would be her father, Eben Collard, Tolya, and the Boathwaite brothers. Each of her encounters with these men sheds light on how she thinks differently. She acknowledges in several instances that these men conduct their actions in specific ways in order to obtain or remain in control. For example, since she was taught to read people it was easy for her to pick on Tolya’s objectives. “Suddenly it seems to me like he’d planned everything this way: the drinking, the stories…just as he must have planned the services he read on the altar” (Theroux 210). While the other men were in a trance listening to words they all wanted to hear, she was able to make out the reason Boathwaite used Tolya on these trips. He was able to effectively gain control over these men, and convince them to follow his

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