V. (Ch 3) Max's (other) disgrace/Alice, Mildred and Victoria

[jbor]

Yes, the juxtapositions of the young women in the text -- Alice-Victoria and
Alice-Mildred, each of them virgins -- reinforces the sexual paradigm
Pynchon is attempting to construct imo. "Myopic and stocky" (71.33),
pre-pubescent Mildred's interests lie with her trilobite fossil; she is not
sexually-aware, and so advances made towards her are not 'fair play', either
for Max, or as Porpy intuits when Bongo-Shaftsbury accosts her on the
south-bound train. But both Alice and Victoria "know what it is, what
they're doing" (70.16), and this changes all the odds (and this would be
particularly so in the Arab/Muslim world/s, I would imagine).

best

> we seem to have in Max's (Ralph's) Alice only yet another
> in an army of Pynchonean tykes who can never qualify as poster child in a
> Mothers Against Child Abuse campaign.
>
>                                                 P.