Fahrenheit 451 - The Fireman's Women

Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing. –Guy Montag

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop. There is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
–as read by Guy Montag (from James Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson)

What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives. –Captain Beatty

It doesn't matter what you do, [my grandfather] said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

–Granger

Barnes & Noble.com's book description:

Guy Montag was a fireman whose job it was to start fires. The system was simple. Everyone understood it. Books were for burning, along with the houses in which they were hidden.

Guy Montag enjoyed his job. He had been a fireman for ten years, and he had never questioned the pleasure of the midnight runs nor the joy of watching pages consumed by flames... never questioned anything until he met a seventeen-year-old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid.

Then he met a professor who told him of a future in which people could think... and Guy Montag suddenly realized what he had to do!

One of my favorite things about this book is Bradbury's clever spin on the word 'fireman.' In today's world, of course, a fireman is someone who rushes to a burning building, saves those inside and works tirelessly to extinguish the fire. In Bradbury’s futuristic world, however, a fireman is the starter of fires, and his job is to destroy whatever is inside, including – at least in one instance in this novel – the people who wish not to leave. His twist on the word is such a simple one, but how it changes things entirely!

In this world where fires are created by the fireman, there is but one reason to burn down a building: the occupants possess and read books, an act which is against the law. The thought of reading being an illegal act floors me. I just can't comprehend in my sheltered little anti-censorship world that books could ever possibly be forbidden, that reading them could be prohibited.

Shaking that incomprehensible thought aside, I want to focus this post the women in this book. There are not many women mentioned: Mildred Montag, Clarisse McClellan, Mrs. Bowles & Mrs. Phelps and a nameless woman whose house Montag's unit is sent to burn. While their space in the book's pages is limited, their impact is huge.

Clarisse is the first one we meet, on Montag's journey home after a day's work. She only exists a few days in the story before reportedly being hit by a speeding car. It is Clarisse who sets to motion the change in Montag. She, unlike most people in their world, is happy, optimistic, reflective. With her incessant questions, she leads Montag to begin analyzing his life, his happiness and his job. Her sudden disappearance only serves to deepen his introspective scrutiny.

The day after meeting Clarisse, Montag's fire squad is called out to a house ripe for destruction. The woman Montag encounters inside – a woman whose book-hoarding has brought them in the first place – chooses to set fire to herself rather than live a life without books. This leads Montag to wonder why books hold such power (see the first quote above).

The woman with the most page space devoted to her is Mildred Montag, our hero's wife. The relationship these two share is very strange, in that they seem quite detached from each other with little to nothing in common, yet Montag assures us he did at one point love her very truly. But Mildred is everything Clarisse is not: she blindly believes what she's told to believe, she has stopped thinking on her own, she questions nothing. Mildred accepts life as it is, no more, no less. She spends most of her free time with "her family" on the parlor walls. There is little need for human interaction when you can be constantly surrounded by walls of, essentially, television screens that have the ability to virtually converse with you.

The final two women – Mrs. Bowles & Mrs. Phelps – are more or less clones of Mildred Montag. They are the only human contact Mildred requires (as her husband's presence doesn't seem to mean much to her one way or the other).

Why are all these women important? Because their very presence propels this story forward. With Clarisse, we see Montag begin to question his whole world when she asks him if he's happy; with the book-hoarding woman, we see him start to question the worth of books and therefore the validity of the laws against them; with Mildred, we see him explore the boundaries by asking her if she remembers how they met and seeing her reaction to his hidden books; with mindless Mesdames Bowles & Phelps, we see him reach the conclusion that things have gone too far when he explodes at them and recites poetry, to their horror. Each of these women make an impact on his journey to enlightenment.

That is the only reason I can accept Clarisse's disappearance, the book-hoarding woman's death by fire, Mildred's maddening complacency with her life, and the Mesdames' brainwashed devotion to the world as it is given to them and the laws set forth by those in authority. If they were merely unnecessary dressing to the story, I don’t think I'd much have been able to stomach these things.

My takeaway: You cannot live without questioning the world around you; nothing should be taken as truth until you've made it a truth within yourself. And a character's literary importance cannot necessarily be judged by the number of pages on which he or she appears.