Women in Mordecai Richler’s Novels: Is There a Problem?

ABSTRACT:Although it has been more than half a century since it was first noted that author Mordecai Richler writes novels with a problematic portrayal of women, there has been little critical work closely examining this aspect of his works. This essay examines the construction of women characters in Richler’s corpus and whether there are textual grounds for reading his novels as a body of work threaded with sexist overtones. Despite a temporizing tendency in Richler’s development as a novelist in relation to several social issues, including gender roles, I conclude that the idealized patterns of male-female relations are always traditional, based on conventional notions of beauty, femininity, and women’s subordination.