SMITH, CHRISTINA JEAN. What Disappears and What Remains

This androcentric and largely fruitless landscape (for there are very few children aswell) is reflective of Miller’s and his generation's pessimism in regards to the postapocalypticpossibilities, their fears about what a post-apocalyptic landscape would look like(mutants, aberrations of nature) and of the marginal place that women would occupy in thisworld. By hiding but not completely hiding the women in his world and by striking those wedo see with disfigurements or injuries - Miller makes the point that women (and by extensionchildren and the family unit) will not be safe in a post-apocalyptic world. 10Post-Apocalypse ObjectsIf his decision to underline the deterministic techno-primitive cycle and to cut women out ofthe narrative point strongly toward Miller's negative view of the post-atomic possibilities,then the ways in which post-apocalypse relics (and, specifically, the Leibowitzian blueprint)are regarded and utilized show a more open-ended view on Miller's part. He uses theseobjects to highlight man's potential for innocence and goodness and to provide his readerwith an objective vantage point from which they may view the events of Canticle (a vantagepoint that Miller, fatalistic as he is, surely hopes his reader will use to understand the lessonsCanticle has to offer and to avoid the fate of its fictional inhabitants).Miller roots his positive view of humanity in Canticle's "novice". Francis is "new" inevery sense of the word. He is young (approximately 17 years of age), impressionable but,10 Because of his near complete exclusion of women in the text, Miller also manages to avoid the subject of sexual violenceand predation with which many of the writers who follow him will deal. In all of his portrayals of male violence in Canticle(the men rob, shoot and eat one another and wage wars), Miller never directly examines how that violence and socialdisorder might have affected the women and children of Fiat Homo and Fiat Lux (periods which correspond with our ownMiddle Ages and Renaissance, respectively). Certainly the idea that women and children could be the victims of rape andviolence in this type of world occurred to Miller and, yet, instead of exploring the effect that a sudden and catastrophicdissolution of modern society would have on men and women's familial and sexual interactions with one another, Millernearly pushes women and children out of the world altogether by rooting his story in the walls of an abbey. This could beout of respect for his 1950s era audience, which might have been uncomfortable with allusions to rape or incest, or becauseadventure and science fiction novels during this time were told largely from a male point of view.19