Essay On The Portrayal Of Carmen In Starship Troopers

Female characters are often absent in SF as there is rarely any need for romance. In the portrayal of Carmen in Starship Troopers, the body does not automatically make a character masculine or feminine. Given the lack of real women, feminine substitutes may fill the void, these substitute figures connecting the narrator of The War of the Worlds and Juan to their femininity before being eradicated or accepted. In The War of the Worlds, the curate shows up just as the narrator thinks about his wife. He is described with a ‘thin white hand’(70) and ‘almost a complaining tone’(70), both feminine traits. Arguably he becomes the replacement of the narrator’s wife, requiring the narrator’s protection and reassurance. This is what the narrator does with his wife
The curate takes over his wife’s role as caretaker, ‘dabbing water(124)’over the narrator. In ‘the weakness and insanity of the curate warned me, braced me’(144), the curate grounds the narrator in reality. Taking over the roles of a wife, the curate is subjected as the substitute. As Bradley Deane relates the curate’s hysteria to the ‘unmanly refusal to fight’, one may agree with his argument that the curate’s death is for ‘purging unmanliness’. Femininity and madness in the narrator surfaces with the babbling of the curate, the narrator admitting that his mind wanders sometimes. He has to reclaim his masculinity by eradicating the feminine source, and by striking down the curate, he reconnects with masculine brutality, fierceness and to a certain extent, sanity. One may see that with ‘not-real women’, femininity is brought out in the male, affecting the construction of masculinity until the feminine man is wiped out. In Starship Troopers, there are no female troopers. Juan portrays the lack of females in his description of the troopers’ conversations, how they talk about