RALPH ELLISON: Invisible Man Comment on the character and role of Mary in the novel

Answer Details

In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Mary Rambo is the warm-hearted black woman who takes in the narrator after he collapses following his ordeal at the Liberty Paints factory hospital. Though a minor figure, she plays an important role as a symbol of nurturing, of racial memory and of ordinary black endurance in Harlem.

Her character

• Mary is motherly, generous and morally grounded. She feeds and shelters the narrator without demanding rent when he has no money.
• She is proud of her people and of their history, urging the narrator to remember where he comes from and to do something worthwhile for the race.
• She is practical, patient and strong, a stabilising presence after the confusion and violence the narrator has suffered.

Her role in the novel

• Refuge and recovery. Mary's home is a place of healing where the narrator regains his strength and sense of self after being nearly destroyed by the factory and hospital.
• Link to roots and identity. She represents the folk values, the Southern black heritage and communal warmth from which the narrator has drifted; she reminds him not to lose himself in the city.
• Moral touchstone. Her selfless kindness contrasts with the exploitation the narrator meets from the Brotherhood, the college and white employers, throwing their manipulations into relief.
• Spur to leadership. Her hope that he will become a credit to the race helps push him towards a purpose, even though he later abandons her home when he joins the Brotherhood.

Significance

• Mary embodies the dignity and resilience of the ordinary black community that the various ideologies in the novel try to use.
• Leaving her house marks a stage in the narrator's loss of authentic identity; remembering her marks his lingering conscience.

Conclusion

Mary Rambo is the nurturing mother-figure of Invisible Man. Her kindness, pride in her race and moral steadiness make her both a refuge for the narrator and a reminder of the roots and communal values he risks betraying in his search for recognition.