Percy's despairing female in the "Unmoved Mover"

But ... it in no way follows that [Eve's] guilt is greater than Adam's, and still less that anxiety is an imperfection; on the contrary, the greatness of anxiety is a prophecy of the greatness of perfection.

-Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

KIERKEGAARD'S statement on anxiety could encapsulate, as his statements do for so many of Walker Percy's novelistic themes, the relationship between men and women in Percy's fiction, especially The Moviegoer. Just as various interpretations regarding the culpability of Eve in Genesis have prompted the ire of feminists, Percy's portrayal of women has in recent years attracted some feminist criticism. But the emphasis needs to be on some, for most of the Percy criticism ignores the issue of Percy's attitude toward his female characters, and by inference, women. Instead, quite rightly, remaining true to the prevailing concerns of the novels, the critics have focused on their philosophical and theological themes. In fact, the objections to Percy's treatment of women or issues of gender seem to come up most often in the seminar room, where such analysis is considered de rigeur by students who have already been steeped in the ideas of postmodernism and politicized analysis, seemingly now from kindergarten on. In light of the fact that virtually no "text" escapes feminist analysis, the relative silence on Percy's feminine characters is telling.

Even in the more traditional analyses, Percy's portrayals of women have been criticized, not for sins of commission, but of omission. For example, Gary Ciuba writes, "although Percy's typically male seekers seem more open to discovering their life in God, the women they have loved are never clearly shown to have come as far in their wayfaring." Ciuba then claims that the disappearance of Allison Sutter at the end of Percy's unpublished novel, "The Grammercy Winner," "almost sets the pattern" for the absence of Kitty, Anna, and Lucy at the conclusion of "Percy's later apocalypses." Even the "women of faith" who do manage to make it to the end "never achieve a religious understanding that receives the same affirmation in the novel as the spiritual vision of Binx, Tom, and Will" (21). In Ciuba's analysis, the women in Percy's fiction never participate as fully in the spiritual awakening as do the men, and in light of the prevailing concerns of the novels, are thereby relegated to secondary roles.

Eddie Dupuy, though focusing his analysis more on the secular, like Ciuba, sees an ancillary, helpmate role for the female characters:

It is largely the male characters who suffer bouts of angelism/bestialism. The female characters are, to paraphrase Sheila Bosworth, "something to wonder at." They help the male protagonists find their way back to the ordinary world. (60)

Dupuy goes on to assign the role of double for the major female characters in The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins, and The Second Coming, but asserts, "despite this doubling . . . the male perspective dominates almost exclusively." The "transcendence/immanence continuum" tends to divide "along gender lines" (60).1

Joseph Campbell, the scholar and compiler of world mythologies, has described the traditional and widespread association of the female with the earth and the material (and the immanent), and the male with the sun and the abstract (and the transcendent). This elevation of the male into the sphere of the transcendent, the philosophical, and the godly, has been the staple of feminist criticism since the 1960s. Similarly, the concomitant relegation of the female to the earthly has been viewed both negatively and positively. Early feminists criticized the banishment of women to the kitchen and domestic duties, where their intellectual outlets were restricted to the culinary and their literary talents to the epistolatory. Lately, however, women's identification with the immanent, expressed as immersion in the biological by virtue of childbearing and traditional ties to Mother Earth, have been celebrated in such political notions as ecofeminism.

Though Dupuy admits that "some exceptions to this division of continuum do exist," including Kate, who as Binx's double suffers "from too much transcendence," he goes on to conclude, "that [Percy] writes predominantly from the male (abstracted) perspective suggests that he is writing from what he knows best" (61). Dupuy then refers to Percy's own statement in Conversations on this purported shortcoming in his writing and I quote it to a further extent than does Dupuy. In response to the interviewer's remark that the women in The Last Gentleman get a "particularly harsh treatment," Percy replies,

Yes, and those in The Moviegoer, too. I don't know whether that is anti-feminism on my part, or the difficulty for a male novelist to create a woman. Good women writers have an easy time creating men .... Maybe it is because men do not understand women. I didn't have any sisters, and maybe if I'd had sisters I'd do a better job. But to me "a normal" woman is an absolute mystery. I can only understand her if she is as neurotic as I am. (212)