The woman has a powerful and ambiguous symbolic function in the novel: she represents both the giving of life and the temptation of death.

As well as the woman falling for the temptation of death, she can also be viewed as the temptation for the man. On page 17 the man refers to his dreams as “siren worlds” and this is directly after he dreams of the woman in her wedding dress. Sirens in mythology are depicted as women that tempt sailors to their death; they are the destruction of men that use their beauty as a tool to tempt them, and in this way are very similar to the woman. She is his own personal siren; whenever he dreams of her he dreams of her in a very sexualised way as he is always thinking about her beauty and her body. There is very little mentioned in terms of her personality, it is a usually physical description.

Many times during the novel, the man tells the boy of the temptation you can find in their dreams and how if your dreams are good then you are living in the nightmare. The man often dreams of beautiful worlds and his memories of the woman. It is a juxtaposition between the happiness of his own memories and the nightmare they are living in. His dreams make the real world seem even worse because he is constantly reminded of how good things used to be in the past, and how good things are in his dreams. The thought of this phantom happiness is constantly taunting him, and tempting him to leave this deathly world and join his wife.

As well as this, the woman is also representative of the giving of life. In one of the man’s flashbacks, he remembers when the apocalypse happens, and in this scene the woman is pregnant with the boy she is “cradling her belly.”  She is shown as a naïve and weak in this scene, reliant on the man because of this. Her naivety is shown when she asks the man why he is “taking a bath.” Women are symbolic of reproduction and life bringing, and so is she in this scene. Before the death and darkness of the apocalypse corrupts her, she is a bringer of life. The apocalypse changes how she is perceived by the man, as she changes from the symbol of life and purity to the more dominant person in the relationship and is eventually tempted by death.