BLOG 3: Gender in Salvage the Bones

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward is a story told through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old girl named Esch Batiste. Esch is entangled in a world of men who do not understand her feminine nature, and others who take advantage of her sexually. Ward draws a line between the roles of a female and male in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage. The distinction arises throughout the novel from the direct observation of the minimal female characters compared to male characters. In fact, every female character in the novel, except Esch, China, and Mudda Ma'am, are caricatures who evoke strong feelings in Esch’s imagination, unlike the male characters who have substantial human presence. When Esch’s dad forces her brother Skeetah to use her as a ladder to reach the ceiling, Esch describes how Skeetah’s “foot grinds into [her] skin”(63). She cannot help but “breathe hard, ashamed.” Esch recalls “when [they] were little and would fall and skin a knee and cry, Daddy would roll his eyes, tell [them] to stop” encouraging her to “straighten up” and take the pain without objection. Though Esch is feeling pain due to the pressure of Skeetah stepping on her leg, the pain can also be seen as the pain she feels throughout the novel being motherless, misunderstood, and alone. As a female she feels embarrassed that she cannot hold her own, so to say, as her father wants her too. However, we can start to see that gender roles in the novel aren’t actually characterized as females being passive and males as rugged. In actuality, the female characters, Esch and China, are expected to be just as strong as their male counterparts. China expresses this through her title of being a champion dog fighter while Esch isn’t originally portrayed this strong, but is expected to be one of “the boys”. The difference between the females and males is really motherhood. China and Mudda Ma'am in some ways portrayed this sense of motherhood, while Esch is struggling to even wrap her head around being pregnant. Another example can be portrayed through the pain Esch continues to feel substantially from her infatuation with Manny. Although she seems to love everything about him, he does not reciprocate the same feelings, constantly reminding her of his absence of affection towards her. Male and female roles don’t differ due to stereotypical characteristics of how each gender should act or do in Salvage the Bones, but instead identifies females as fitting in or being left out without questions or concerns.