Patriarchy in Not Wanted on the Voyage

1577 Words7 Pages
Individual Oral Presentation A patriarchal society is where the actions and ideas of males are dominant over those of females. This condition of male dominance is reflected in inequalities throughout the society. In the atmosphere of the family, the father or eldest male is considered the patriarch or "head of the household". Patriarchal societies have customs or laws where wives and children in a family are owned by the patriarch. Today we can still see traces of patriarchy in our society, for example, only the last name of the father is passed on. In the book Not Wanted on the Voyage, Timothy Findley uses the Noyes’ family to show the corruption of the distribution of power within a patriarchal system. He stresses the idea that the patriarchal system of power and order reflects the dysfunction of the Noyes’s family. In the Noyes’s family, the patriarch is obviously Noah. As Timothy Findley tried to emphasize that the distribution of power in that family, or in the patriarchal system, is deformed, where full power is in Noah’s hands. With that power, Noah can virtually do anything he desires. Through the innocent eyes of the personified animals in the book, Noah is the demon and the only source of evilness. He is stubborn over his own ideals in which he believes that everything he does is correct. Therefore no one can truly communicate with. If a group of people, especially a family, cannot communicate properly, it is obvious that they will not function. Lastly, Noah also thinks that he is closer to heaven than anyone else, and no one shall come close in challenging him. - “Later, Mottyl had been able to reciprocate by leading Whistler during the drought to drink at the pond in the Noyes’s yard. Whistler had been alarmed at the prospect of going all the way to the river because the drought had left him ill and weak. He was very grumpy and he kept
Open Document