Discovering Fahrenheit 451′s “Girl Montag”

Guy Montag is the hero of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451, but you have to wonder how the novel would have turned out if there was a “Girl Montag.”

Bradbury’s vision of a hedonistic and anti-intellectual future, where books are burned to suppress critical thought and any rumblings of rebellion, may be stock full of strong male characters, but this doesn’t mean that we can’t find hints of feminism in the novel.

The first character that we meet, after Guy of course, is a seventeen-year-old girl named Clarisse McClellan. She immediately strikes Montag as being different from the other women, especially his wife and her friends who are complicit of a repressive government and live comfortably in a false reality. Like Guy, Clarisse, who we can interpret as Bradbury’s “Girl Montag,” has intellectual curiosity.

In the novel’s first scene, Guy talks with Clarisse who asks him questions about his life and happiness. She’s deeply interested in reality rather than watching the “parlor walls.” “Is it true that long ago firemen put out fires instead of going to start them?” she asks Guy. Clarisse is far from complicit.

Her search for the truth and distrust of a regime that wishes to burn all remnants of human intellectual life is evident in her face and gestures. “Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity but – what?” Guy wonders to himself as he ponders why she is so “odd.” When she asks Guy, “Are you happy?” it’s clear that our Girl Montag is one of the rare characters in the book who reflects upon the human condition.

Obviously the stirrings of rebellion that are clear in her physical features and her language, as cryptic as they may seem at the beginning of the book, don’t go unnoticed. After the first scene, Clarisse is gone without a trace. Readers are led to the only possible conclusion — she was killed by the state for her curiosity, which is equal to dissent.

However, we hold onto hope that we will see her again at the end of the novel when Guy escapes and finds the community of intellectual outcasts. Sadly, the outlaws, keepers of literary masterpieces, philosophical and sacred texts, are only men. Girl Montag was apparently not strong enough to survive.

But in an alternate movie ending, Clarisse is one of the exiles. Bradbury liked this ending so much that he incorporated it into his later stage edition. Even though his vision may have been of a strong male character, he doesn’t deny that women are also independent thinkers. He may give us Mildred Montag, a vapid, hysterical and ultimately delusional woman, but in this feminist version of the novel, Girl Montag lives.

Bradbury’s other strong woman may be a symbol more than anything else, a woman who really makes Guy question the meaning of life, but her rebelliousness is another hint that Bradbury’s novel doesn’t have an inherent female bias. The “firemen” come to her house and order her to burn all of her books, but she refuses. Instead, she sparks a match she has been saving for this moment and lights her house and herself on fire in an act of martyrdom. This makes Guy wonder what it is that’s in books that makes them something to die for.

It seems that the old woman’s sacrifice really finishes the job Clarisse set out to do, although in a more dramatic way. Where Clarisse started peeling open Guy’s mind with her questions and implicit suggestion that happiness is manufactured to appease the people, the old lady takes Guy out of his hedonistic haze and truly starts the process of critical thought that frees him.

Thus, it is these two powerful women in the novel who really get the wheels turning on the intellectual movement. Their influence leads to Guy’s daring rebellion when he refuses to burn his books, kills Captain Beatty, destroys the mechanical hound and joins the exiles.

As Guy sits back and watches the city burn from the outskirts, we can’t help but think of the two women who made it all possible for Bradbury’s hero.

Contact the author here: tinybart@morningquickie.com