Salvage the Bones

Ward presents different attitudes towards women and femininity that are realized in her main character, Esch, and in her counterpart, China. Esch is surrounded by me and clings to the memory of her mother as her only female influence. Unfortunately, this isn’t very enlightening for Esch. As she ponders her own impending motherhood, she looks to the classical figure of Medea and the family pit bull for guidance because there is nowhere else to turn.

There are two characters that present explicitly misogynistic attitudes in the novel: Claude and Manny. Claude rejects any kind of weakness that may be associated with women and refuses to let his children cry when their mother dies. When the Hurricane is given the name Katrina, he suspects it will be “the worst [because] she’s a woman” (124). Manny also speaks of motherhood and femininity as inherent weaknesses. For example, when he considers China’s ability to fight now that she is a mother, he suggests that it “‘[takes] a lot out of an animal to nurse and nurture like that. Price of being female’” (96). However, Skeetah sees this uniquely feminine ability to create life and give birth as a form of “power… [because]… To give life…is to know what’s worth fighting for” (96).

When Esch hears various disparaging comments about her gender she absorbs them and lets them affect her, to the point of trying to purposefully miscarry her pregnancy. However, near the end of the novel, when she puts her nurturing arms around Skeetah, she thinks she “had never been so strong” (238). She enjoys the thought that China will know “she is a mother” (258) and she draws strength from the idea herself.