The Mars Room’s Strange Take on Morality, Causality and Society

Introduction

Morality is the code of conduct that is derived from a particular culture, philosophy, or religion. Causality is the procedure whereby one event causes the development of another occurrence. The cause of the event is partly associated with the effect and the effect is partly associated with the cause. Society is a group of people that are involved in persistent social interaction. Morality, causality, and society in the Mars Room existed if it was beneficial and convenient to the characters. 

Morality

           The Mars Room was a strip club where Romy once worked before she was sentenced to jail. According to Kushner (25), it is a place that she did not have to show up on time, obey any rules, or even smile. Romy once showed up late for work with a black eye and nobody cared. She thought men are to be exploited and they were nothing else rather than losers. The men too thought they were exploiting the women. Romy believed that in the Mars Room you could do whatever you wanted, some girls could not shower, some were pregnant and if not, you were the girl of the night. One time a girl got angry and set the dressing room on fire. Romy says that the Mars Room was a choice and she made that choice but the choice comes with consequences. She says that though everything was fine, nothing was and life was being sucked out of her. Romy is quick to note that it was not a moral problem. The men faded her glimmer, made her angry and numb to touch. She gave and received and extracted from the men’s wallets but that was never enough. Stanville correctional facility is a place where people are persistently flattened and reduces them to one and only one type. A guard in the novel suggests that if the women had wished to be responsible mothers, they would have acted differently. To the state, the judge, and the jury and the prison wardens, the women here were criminals. Despite the intensity of their actions, be it murder, drug offenses, or sex work, they are each given a number and that is all that differentiates them.

Causality

               For Romy to end up in Stanville, there are several times that she thinks that it all started when she started working at the Mars Room which was the most notorious strip club in San Francisco. In Mars Room is where she met Kennedy who he later killed for stalking her. Romy lived with her neglectful mother, was sexually abused when she was a child, and started drinking and using heroin at an early age. She did not attend college and was involved in petty crime and was a sex worker in the Mars Room. She got pregnant and gave birth to her son then moved to Los Angeles to start a new life with her son. A former customer at Mars room who stalked her back in San Francisco follows her to Los Angeles and shows up at her porch and she ended up killing him. She believes that she has no plans on living a long life after having two consecutive life sentences (Kushner 12). It is when she hears that her mother who took care of her son had died and that her son had been put to foster care that she plans to escape from prison.

Society

           Most of the characters in the novel describe what it means to be poor and female in society. Romy got her life sentence a long time and this is because her mother was addicted to painkillers, had several divorces, and did not treat Romy with love. Romy was raped when she was only 11 years old, became a drug addict and a sex worker at an early age. In the Mars Room having had a shower and not being pregnant was an advantage. It was the same in the cells of Stanville where you were to mind your own business and never tell anyone your real name. When Laura Lipp was giving Romy the story of an old couple who kidnapped kids, it shows how society is often misled because the couple was trusted because they were old (Kushner 6). The old lady who could be seated and knitting could wait for a kid’s mother to lose sight of their kids and she could kidnap them. No one could suspect her because she and her husband were elderly. There was Romy’s customer who thought that he could not pay for her services before humiliating her and that led to Romy taking his bag which had expensive clothes that she could not even wear. Because she worked at a strip club, the society could do whatever it pleased including humiliation. Where Romy lived with her mother, a person could hold a gun to her head for no reason. People could do cocaine with strangers by the cemetery. People considered the city she lived to mean everything but to Romy and her friends it meant nothing and they just wanted to get wasted.

Conclusion

           Morality, causality, and the society in the Mars Room paint different pictures of the way they are normally perceived. The choice of working at the strip club was convenient for Romy but it also had its consequences. The causes of being sentenced begin with living with a mother who did not take much care for her and therefore ended up doing what she thought was of interest to her. This led her to have an unplanned pregnancy and eventually killing a person. Being poor and being a female in the society describes how you will be treated. Romy joined the Mars room because she needed money that could make her be able to sustain herself. The men believed that women were to be exploited and even humiliated.

 

 

Works Cited

Kushner Rachel The Mars Room: A novel, Simon and Schuster, 2019