At first glance, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian offers little for female readers to connect with. This gritty anti-Western follows the nameless kid, a teenage runaway in the 1840s who falls in with the Glanton gang, a group of American mercenaries and scalp hunters wreaking havoc along the US-Mexico borderlands. The few women encountered are either victims of the endless violence or nameless figures passing through.
However, upon deeper reflection, I found McCarthy’s subtle development of the central characters and philosophical themes revealed profound insights into human nature that defied gender.
The kid, our teenage protagonist, begins the novel as a tabula rasa – a blank slate, having lost his family in childhood. He drifts from job to job until he joins up with the ruthless Glanton gang, perhaps seeking community or simply a means of survival. McCarthy traces the kid’s gradual desensitization to violence and descent into moral ambiguity. Yet the kid maintains a kind of essential innocence and instinct for compassion lacking in his compatriots. His moral awakening and eventual resistance against the gang’s leader hints at the resilience and continuity of the human conscience across generations, even amidst unparalleled cruelty.
In contrast, Judge Holden stands apart as the most vividly drawn character. Toweringly tall and completely hairless, this mercenary intellectual towers over the story as a Satanic allegory. His prodigious learning and philosophical wit lend him a powerful charisma, yet the pleasure he derives from casual murder and pedophilia provides chilling glimpses of humankind’s capacity for evil.
Through the judge, McCarthy asks profound questions about morality, free will, and human progress across time – topics still widely debated today. Yet while utterly lacking conscience, even the unfathomable judge seems to meet his match in the kid’s latent morality, serving as a kind of counterbalance.
The other gang members provide a spectrum of cultural backgrounds and temperaments against which to understand the two main protagonists. The gang leader Glanton and his Native American deputy David Brown are ruthless opportunists, profiting from the genocide of Native peoples without remorse, yet little match for the greater madness of the Judge. Border outcast Toadvine begins as a crude, violent figure but later earns redemption through small acts of loyalty. Mysterious ex-priest Tobin seems to share the Judge’s learning and literary references, but casts his lot with mercy and in support of the kid in the end.
Through this violent microcosm on the edge of civilization, McCarthy vividly captures the American West’s historical brutality while asking timeless questions about human morality.
Are we doomed to endless cycles of violence, advancing scientifically while ethically stagnant? Are we free agents in control of our destinies?
McCarthy leaves such questions intentionally unanswered, preferring to immerse the reader in the moral ambiguity of lived experience.
While lacking in sympathetic female characters, upon deep reflection Blood Meridian still speaks profoundly to readers of any gender. The resilience of our moral compass against unthinkable violence, the role of choice and accountability in shaping our character, and the, at times, miraculous endurance of hope and conscience in even the most hardened souls all resonate universally.
McCarthy’s sublime descriptions of the landscapes the characters traverse take on a transcendent, spiritual significance as well, dwarfed by sun and stone. His Western anti-heroes may inhabit a savage world, but their internal struggles channel generations of universally human conflict.
