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Esther Smith

Prof. Jeffrey MacLachlan

World Literature

10 December 2023

Patriarchy in Ice

Ice by Anna Kavan features an unnamed narrator searching for an elusive girl in a world

plagued by the speedy imminent takeover of walls of ice due to a mysteriously unspecified

nuclear accident. Kavan gives us a view into the predatory and obsessive behavior that the

narrator asserts as he tracks down the object of his affections. This is commentary highlighting

the dehumanizing effects of the patriarchy in its violent normalized abuse of women, as well as

designation of women as property and their objectification, although it also displays the dually

violent nature of these behaviors.

Frequently the narrator engages in violence and brutal actions on his venture for the girl,

which shows the readers his violent nature alongside his intrusive desires to see his trophy in

pain. When the narrator decides to go back to his previous life and is on the boat to the tropical

island to continue researching the Indris lemurs he thinks to himself on the topic of trying to

forget the girl, “Her face haunted me: the sweep of her long lashes, her timid enchanting smile;

and then a change of expression I could produce at will, a sudden shift, a bruised look, a quick

change to terror, to tears. The strength of temptation alarmed me [...] Something in her demanded

victimization and terror” (Kavan 82). The narrator frequently describes how he desires to see the

girl bruised and crying at his demand and hand, displaying his sociopathic and violent yet

entitled mindset and behavior. We also see this violent, entitled, abuse in the narrator’s pattern of

behavior when he gets anxious around a servant girl leading him around the Warden’s home so
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he could spot the man and talk with him in order to gain more information on how to track down

the girl. When the narrator feels as if he might be caught or miss his window of opportunity to

talk to the Warden he responds as follows, “My nerves were on edge, I wanted to hit her, it was

hard to control myself. I was afraid of being too late.” (Kavan 71). The narrator displays a

violent reaction to this servant girl, not unlike many other interactions with women in the text, he

seems to have to force himself not to hurt the girl, noting it like its an accomplishment not to

inflict pain upon an innocent girl.

We see elements of subjugation and entitlement in junction with this violence when the

narrator is referring to seeing the girl looking dead after battle overtakes the town of the High

House and Warden. In a scattered dreamlike recollection of the battle in the town with the High

House, the narrator describes coming across the girl, or possibly an unspecified lookalike, with

her neck twisted and arms broken, she’d been killed and in response the narrator thinks to

himself, “I felt I had been defrauded: I alone should have done the breaking with tender love; I

was the only person entitled to inflict wounds.” (Kavan 59). Despite the fact that the girl appears

to be dead on the ground in front of him, the first thing that the narrator can consider is how, as

his virtual possession, she should have only been able to be hurt by him. Which as mentioned

earlier, highlights normalized violence, but also illustrates the principle of submission and

ownership that the woman is experiencing under this patriarchal mode of thinking.

We see this principle of ownership also when the narrator elaborates on his way of

thinking about the girl getting sacrificed, after the battle in the town with the High House the

remaining townspeople speak of sacrificing a girl to the dragon in the lake and find the girl out

on the cliff where they are about to hurl her over the edge to the dragon, the narrator watched the

girl getting grabbed and tossed around by her captors and thinks to himself, “Big tears fell from
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her eyes like icicles, like diamonds, but I was unmoved. They did not seem quite real. She was

pale and almost transparent, the victim I used for my own enjoyment in dreams.” (Kavan 61).

While the girl is getting captured and close to getting sacrificed, the narrator watches in a lack of

empathy and merely reflects rather on her place in relativity to him in his dreams, serving as an

object of his fantasies that belongs to him.

On the topic of objects, the girl within the book is frequently reduced to no more than just

the object of affection and fantasy. She is given no name, not much dialogue, and seemingly no

other purpose than to act as a plot point that drives the main character to madness in his search

for her. Her capture and control over her is a craving to be satisfied. The main character

expresses this, “There was no rational explanation for it, I could not account for it. It was a sort

of craving that had to be satisfied.” (Kavan 18). The man elaborates on his strange desire to track

down the girl, despite knowing nothing of value about her outside of her fragility in both body

and mind. He seems to take most joy and reasoning for his chase from the reward of claiming

this girl as a trophy, both in body and mind, although with her frailty it presents no challenge or

reward. She is taken as if a prized hen. Although she is not explicitly illustrated as a hen, she

does seem to have a parallel with the lemurs that the main character specializes and obsesses

over. He emphasizes their fragility and childish likeness in the same way that the girl’s small

frame and innocence is idealized and romanticized in a dreamlike way. The lemurs are the one

consistent thing that he fantasizes about alongside the girl. The narrator notes, “With their

enchanting other-world voices, their gay, affectionate, innocent ways, they had become symbols

of life as it could be on earth, if man’s destructiveness, violence, and cruelty were eliminated.”

(Kavan 62). The irony of the man’s obsession with peace through example of the Indrus lemurs
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is not lost in the way he would dream of the girl’s pain after descriptions of the small animals

later in the writing.

He proceeds to speak on his obsessive thoughts, displaying the internally destructive

nature of violent patriarchy while he is on the boat going to the new land where he can continue

his research into the Indris lemurs, “She corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no

wish to explore. It was no longer clear to me which one of us was the victim. Perhaps we were

victims of one another.” (Kavan 82). Reflecting on his treatment of the girl, the narrator grasps

the severity and destructive nature of his obsession. Not only on her health, by admitting the

nature of her victimization, but also on his own health, admitting his preoccupation with the

desire to chase and hurt her. It had torn him away from the peaceful and domestic joys in his life

such as studying the lemurs and instead made him explore dark places in his head that were

previously left unknown and untouched to him. The narrator himself is a decorated soldier that

overall could have made a fine life for himself if he otherwise had left the girl of his affections

alone and pursued his own ventures post war, rather he spends the book traversing the land in a

goal to capture and abuse the girl of his dreams.

At the end of the book when the narrator tracks down the girl where she’s made a home

for herself in a hotel, before the two of them are engulfed by the ice storms, he becomes enraged

at her lack of gratefulness and courtesy to his efforts that he expended to find her, he lectures and

abuses her. Then he leaves and comes back to find her crying, he asks her why and finds her

explaining that he does this every time to her, he thinks to himself, “I was startled, almost

shocked. The words presented a view of myself I much preferred not to see.” (Kavan 178). He

doesn't consider himself an abuser and a terror, given his anger over the girl’s lack of gratitude,
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he believes that he is doing a service in helping the girl avoid the ice and the Warden, however

he completely skims over the pain he causes.

Kavan’s Ice is a piece riddled with scenes that display the undertones of malicious

patriarchal behaviors and thought patterns. This display of objectification, subjugation, and

endangerment of women’s safety and humanity is prevalent and makes up most of, if not all, of

the narrator’s decisions, thoughts, and dialogue. Further, this work studies, exaggerates, and

spotlights the common yet harmful phenomenon of an entitled radical patriarchal mindset, and

the effect it can take on both the victim and the offender.
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Works Cited

Kavan, Anna. Ice. Penguin Books, 2017.