Saramago's Blindness

Female leaders are not the most common thing in the world, in fact out of 142 nations only 63 of them have had a female leader in the past 53 years (Kent). That makes the novel by Jose Saramago a very unique novel. In the novel, Blindness, the only character that can see is the Doctors’ Wife, therefore making their leader a female. Some of the reasons Saramago had picked a female to be the leader of the story is because it is easy for women to see a problem within in a society rather than a male, mainly because it is the males who are usually causing the problems to happen. They have a tendency to fix those problems in proper ways and not by violence. That leads up to another reason why Saramago chose to make the leader of the story a female,
Once they got out of the asylum they were even more starved, the Doctors’ Wife refused to allow her group to die of starvation she kept telling them, “We won’t die of hunger, I will find us food, clothes, and shelter” (Saramago 224). She had found them a safe place to stay and then ventured herself to a store. While she was looking for the store the hardest part was for her to try and remember where she was coming from, she had kept repeating to herself the way to get back to the store. After the Wife had gotten her group their food she found her way back and made sure they were all taken care of before she would eat. Not only does that show that the Doctors wife was good at seeing the problems and fixing them, it shows that she wants her group to know that even though they don’t see themselves as people she still looks at them like they are. This book is behind the idea that the world is dehumanizing people in a society because of power (Esmaeil and Zohdi 2539). Throughout the story everyone who is blind are getting treated very poorly by those who can see. The only person that can see that doesn’t treat the blind like they are trash is the Doctors Wife. She chooses to see the people around her as people and not like animals, even though that’s what the rest of the world is choosing to look at them like
They wanted them to figure out what to do with the body because the soldiers did not want to have to do anything with the dead blind man. All the blind internees did not know what to do with the body, they were considering doing nothing. The doctor’s wife did not want to do nothing, she was the one that was insisting on burying the man. She told the group of people, “We must see if there’s a spade or a shovel or whatever there is around, something we can dig with,” she wanted to bury the blind man and give him the proper burial to rest (Saramago 77). The Wife felt the need to bury him because she felt it was the right thing to do, she did not want him to just be lying there for everyone to see that would make him equivalent to a dead animal on the side of the road. To be a good leader you must make decisions that will benefit your group and make you feel like you did what they wanted you to do. The Doctors wife was in this situation two different times in the book, there was another time when they came across an old lady dead that they barely knew. The group didn’t know that the old lady was dead, either did anybody else that passed by but the wife decided to bury the lady anyways so she was not like an animal. The fact that the Doctors wife had felt the need to bury these people even though nobody could see them but