Friday, August 20, 2010

Fahrenheit 451: Mildred Montag

Mildred Montag is the wife of Guy Montag. She is, like any normal housewife, distraught and cluttered at the beginning as she attampts suicide. Luckily, her loving husband was right there to stop her and take her to the hospital to save her life. The next day, Mildred denies the whole thing. She thinks she knows she would never do that, but after much reasoning from Guy, she accepts it as what it is and moves on. This suicide attempt shows that she is in great pain and that she is afraid of her own life. The television walls in the parlor provide means for her to escape her life and not have to confront her problems and hardships. Although she does her very best to smother her true feelings, they are always still there. Mildred is also just a scary character. She is cold and distant from her husband; it seems like the couple should be intimate, but there are not any examples of their affection in the novel. Instead, she stays almost as far away from Guy as physically possible. She is one extremely lonely lady. But, what she really needs is a way to figure herself out, like Guy, so she too gets herself into books. When Guy reveals his secret stash of books in the air duct to her, Mildred becomes interested in them and uses them for the same reason as Guy, to get a view into her life and to solve status problems within herself. She feels it necessary to get the books into her life and do something really different with Guy. Still, she is very detached from her life, but she loves being a part of the family in the soap opera she loves to watch in the parlor with the giant television screens. Mildred is one heck of a character, and I do not think I even scratched the surface. Expect another entry devoted to her at some time.

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