Neville’s relation to the female physique and his own sexual frustration.
From the novel we are able to look inside Neville’s psyche and see the experience of being the last man on earth, with everything that entails. What stands out immediately is his sexual frustration, mostly expressed through his disgust with the female vampires who behave crudely to try and entice him.
This paper will examine the fixation with the feminine throughout the novel
We see some different portrayals of women in the novel, most notably are of course his wife Virginia, his daughter Kathy, and the woman Ruth. They each encompass different categories; Virginia as the Mother, and the Wife, Kathy as the Daughter, and Ruth as the Femme Fatale (Creed, 151). The women vampires who leer at him can in a sense be categorised merely as Whores, but Ruth differs from the female vampires from the beginning in the sense that she does directly cause the death of Robert Neville, but only because Neville indirectly caused his own downfall.
Neville’s relation to the feminine is also addressed by Neville himself, when he tries to convince himself it is merely a coincidence that he commits his experiments on women only. “Why do you always experiment on women? He didn’t care to admit that the inference had any validity.” (Matheson, 49-50) he discusses with
…show more content…
His eyes were riveted on the ungainly form of his old friend inching up the brightly lit roof.” (Matheson, 148) the fact that Neville was shedding a tear for his old neighbour and friend as he is shot implies that Neville may, although his initial hate was apparent, have come to care about Cortman, and grown accustomed to him. It had been a past time activity to chase Cortman looking for his hiding place, but had it really come to it, Neville may not have been able to kill