A Mother’s Power

The first chapter of “The Round House” was different than any other first chapter I have read. Right away the audience is introduced to the fact that the mother figure in the novel is a victim of rape. Joe, the main character, and his father are shown to heavily rely on her as they both express the idea of how she would’ve returned by that point to start dinner.  “Women don’t realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones. Our pulse is set to theirs, and as always on a weekend afternoon we were waiting for my mother to start ticking away on the evening” (Erdrich 3). The two ideas highly contradict themselves which displays the irony behind women’s rights in society. The mother is shown as the backbone and is described as a figure of unity and power within her family but the idea is later diminished by the images of her body which I believe acts as one of the main conflicts within the novel. On the first page of the novel, Joe is shown plucking away small tree roots from their house which grew all of a sudden. He refers to the roots as “invaders” (Erdrich 3) and “hidden rootlings” (Erdrich 3) which could symbolize his mother’s attacker and how he wishes to remove every single trace of trauma and return to their normal life. Unfortunately, he describes these roots as “almost impossible to break from their stubborn hiding place” (Erdrich 3). Quite potentially, the problems Joe and his family suffered may never be fully disclosed. The idea suggests the sad truth that some people may never come to realize the power of women. It comes to show how women in today’s society are needed but still struggle because of the fact that some people still view women as minorities.