GRGR (3): A Tangled Brassiere

[keith woodward]

During the slapstick of 1.7, Jessica notes amidst the rubble "a brass
bedpost, [...] and twined there someone's brassiere, a white, prewar
confection of lace and satin, simply left tangled . . . . For an instant,
in a vertigo she can't control, all the pity laid up in her heart flies to
it, as it would to a small animal stranded and forgotten" (43).  The
passage is perhaps the most moving in the entire episode.  Jessica sees the
war on very personal terms: the brassiere and bedpost reveal the private
lives of a person(s) now absent.  They appear within the rubble of the
destroyed homes like open wounds.  This seems to me also to be an instance
of her attempts to cling to and identify with a kind of (pre-war?)
domesticity (which resurfaces in her attempts to remember what it was like
before the war [58-9], her eventual, final return to Beaver, &c.)

The passage is curious, however, as there is an (though perhaps not
"small") "animal stranded and forgotten" within the episode.  The dog
recalls the blast that wiped out the surrounding buildings (45), indicating
that he was apparently once a resident of them.  Why doesn't her pity also
fly to the creature who is actually being persued, if it is indeed like a
pity for this type of creature.

It also seems that Jessica is rather focused on the feminine relative to
the war.  The brassiere is obviously connected to the feminine, but it is
also apparently her dream about something that stalks through London
snatching up girls (53).  Later (I can't recall exactly where), it will be
Jessica who, amidst speculation that Slothrop is causing rockets to fall,
will ask, "What about the girls?"  Meaning, probably, the girls that
Slothrop has slept with and who were probably struck by the rockets (and,
of course, those girls that Slothrop will potentially sleep with).  It
seems to me to be rather important that Pynchon does attempt to give the
feminine a voice in the text, but is it enough amidst an otherwise rather
masculine (I'm avoiding "phallocentric") text?  Or is Jessica even a proper
voice for the feminine?

Keith W