Eddins, "Depraved New World"

[Dave Monroe]

... from Dwight Eddins, The Gnostic Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1990), Chapter Three, "Depraved New World," pp. 50-88.  Warning:
contains spoilers ...

In the Western Rose Window of Chartres, [Henry] Adams had seen "a
confused effect of opals, in a delirium of color and light, with a
result like a cluster of stones in jewelry" [Henry Adams, Mont Saint
Michel and Chartres].  This epiphany of transcendental hope in the name
of the Queen of Heaven stands in parodic contrast to the brutal end of
V. on Malta.  Transformed by this point into the Queen of the Inanimate,
the spokeswoman of death, she has literally become artificial gaudiness
and bedizenment.  Her dismemberment by children who remove a clockwork
eye, jeweled teeth, and a star sapphire navel--this last with the point
of a bayonet--symbolizes the sterile crucifixion of a false god, a
violent death without hope of resurrection: and is, in that very lack,
an ironic testament to the preeminence of violence and daeth in the
gnostic religion that she serves with increasing awareness as she
approaches her end.  (61)

... cf. Felicia Miller Frank on "Baudelaire and the Painted Woman" ....