Jacobean Tragedy and Oedipa

[Tim Strzechowski]

Discussing the phrase "Francesca is Pasquale's mother" (Harper
Perennial, 66), J. Kerry Grant states:

"Quite apart from its function as an accurate component of Pynchon's
parody, this incest motif serves as a symbolic pointer to the
closed-system charactistics of the world of the play, while at the same
time it establishes links with Oedipa's own world --- mostly explicitly
through the "endless, convoluted incest" that horrifies Mucho during his
time at the car lot.  Readers may be reminded of Duke Ferdinand's desire
for his sister in _The Duchess of Malfi_, the incestuous union of
Giovanni and his sister Annabella in Ford's _'Tis Pity She's a Whore_,
and Spurio's affair with his stepmother in _The Revenger's Tragedy_. (_A
Companion to CoL49_, 60).

Check out  "I Love you To Death: Desire and Violence in Jacobean
Tragedy"
http://www.twics.com/~jupiter/luv2deth.html

"According to a tradition that was already hundreds of years old when
Shakespeare wrote _Romeo and Juliet_, perfect love implied a perfect
union with an idealized figure--the most beautiful, the most virtuous,
the fairest of them all. The merging was
bliss, completion; the lover was perfected in the union of two souls.

But when we idealize the one we love, what we are actually doing is
fashioning our own Ego Ideal, essentially our own model of perfection,
and endowing the other person with those attributes. This means that the
other person is not really an other for us, so much as a space that we
fill up with a blindingly bright (as when Romeo says "Juliet is the
sun") image of our own creation--the best of us that we can imagine. So
in a certain way, to the extent that we idealize our beloved, to that
extent do we deny the subjectivity of that other person, and to that
extent are we, in a way, in love with ourselves. No wonder we think so
much in terms of a total union, as Giovanni says: "One soul, one flesh,
one love, one heart, one all." It really is one soul, one flesh, one
love, one heart, one all . . ."

To a certain degree, then, this ties Pynchon's use of Jacobean drama to
the enigmatic final paragraph of Chapter One, in which Oedipa recalls
her Repunzel-like prisoner role with the magical Pierce Invararity, only
to realize her sense of "confinement of that tower" had shifted over the
years.  Oedipa's idealization of Pierce prior to the action of the
novel, and her subsequent "revelations" about him and his connections
with Yoyodyne, bones, etc., perhaps parallel the Narcissism suggested in
the aforementioned link.

Gotta run.  I'll mull this more.  Have a nice weekend, all.

Tim