Solo-Women

For the women-folk in Song of Solomon, there is a common tie among the women: they are each flying solo. Though Pilate looks after her daughter and granddaughter, she is still the only one of the three like herself, and by being so she is alone. Ruth, though she has a husband, two daughters, and a son, she too is alone and without the love that she so desperately craves. Pilate and Ruth are the embodiement of two types of women, though similar, different. As mothers, they both strive to keep their own safe and make life better.

Pilate is strong, as can be seen in the passage on page 57. "She arrived with suitcases, a green sack, a full-grown daughter, and a granddaughter, and found her brother truculent, inhospitable, embarrassed and unforgiving." Yet despite her brother's obvious coldness, Pilate chooses to stay in the same town he lives in. Her strength is further shown through her past, traveling across the country and raising two girls on her own. Pilate is the strong women, the one who wants to make all the problems in the world go away, particulary for her children. However, in trying to accomplish peace, Pilate sometimes allows the girls to get into real trouble, or causes more trouble. When she helps Ruth to have a baby, Macon Jr. isn't happy and it is this child that causes Ruth pain in his loss of love for her. Ruth is the woman that wants love, in any way, she craves it. Visiting her father's grave, nursing Milkman beyond the proper age, all that she does is a cry for love; however, what she deems as acts of love are viewed as out of place, or taboo by others around her and, in the end, cause her to loose more love then she has gained.

The "plight of women" is shown in the above passage, and throughout chapter 5, through the suffering experienced by Pilate and Ruth. The form of suffering for want of love, or the need to protect those that are most important to one's self is a feeling all women are capable of understanding. For centuries women have searched for a place they belong and that they feel wanted, but also free in. The irony is that in trying to protect others you make them almost incapable of protecting themselves, and in trying to make others love you, the more they are driven away.

In Song of Solomon, even though both Pilate and Ruth want only to protect those they love and improve their lives, the pair end up pitted against each other at times, like when Hagar is trying to kill Milkman, which is the ultimate irony. No longer is the enemy the men that opressed women for centuries, for now it is none other then ourselves. Fellow women who want what all others want. We are all holding ourselves back.