Couldn’t help noticing in The Da Vinci Code (Part III)
For a book which advocates feminism over patriarchy and champions reverence for the ‘sacred feminine’, The Da Vinci Code's primary female character, cryptographer Sophie Neveu, is surprisingly passive and colourless. Aside from some early displays of ingenuity in the Louvre where she manages to extract Robert Langdon from under the watchful eye of the French Police, she spends the rest of the novel simply reacting to the things that happen around her. Furthermore, because of her ignorance about the Holy Grail, Jesus and Mary Magdalene, she becomes the perfect blank canvas on which Langdon and Teabing paint their extravagant theories about their version of the “truth” the Catholic Church doesn't want the world to know. Presumably Sophie is an intelligent woman; after all, she studied at Royal Holloway, a very prestigious college in the University of London, and she was trained from childhood by her grandfather to solve word puzzles. Why, then, does she accept Langdon and Teabing's version of history without question? Why doesn't she seek verification for herself? Could it be that The Da Vinci Code is really part of a patriarchal plot to keep women in their place up on the pedestal?