MDMD5: Cute meets

[Paul Nightingale]

On Mason's involvement with the female Vrooms in Ch7: "One Morning, the
Clock having misinform'd him of the Hour ... Mason only just avoids a
collision with Johanna Vroom" and "Resentment" replaced by apparent
"Fascination". Preceding this moment, Ch7 describes the frosty welcome that
Mason and Dixon receive from Bonk, his lack of enthusiasm for their
scientific venture (denounced as "English Whiggery"). Hard to believe, but
Mason is perhaps "dangerous"; a file will be opened on him as a "Person of
Interest". We cut to "the sudden defection of half the Zeemann kitchen
Slaves" and dining arrangements in the Vroom household.

Suspicious, or what? The narrative certainly invites a paranoia-reading as
Mason is, first, tantalised by a series of desirable women he is not allowed
to touch; then approached by one he is expected to impregnate. Austra
arouses him while undermining his male ego ("ev'ry white male who comes to
this Town is approach'd by ev'ry Dutch Wife, upon the same Topick").

Again, I think we should consider the way Pynchon uses paranoia to frame the
action. A closed society (the role played by slavery, the antipathy to any
kind of free circulation of 'ideas') is presented as hostile; authority is
represented by Functionary" (bureaucratic) and "Patriarch"
(traditional/charismatic). Jet/Greet/Els are subject to parental authority
("forbidden ... to eat any of the native Cookery") as are the members of
Cherrycoke's audience (as established in Ch1 - the confinement of "Juvenile
Rampage"). What might, at first, be a case of male paranoia is complicated
by the possibility that the youthful audience of Cherrycoke's tail will be
more interested in the possibility of (sexual) liberation as a valid form of
self-expression. Cornelius is tormented by the sounds of "slave laughter" (a
phrase that emphasises the subversive possibilities of laughter, and perhaps
recalls the carnival of Ch3): then, in the passage following, Mason is
tormented by the girls, before being interrupted by their mother (Johanna's
role emphasising the absence of the patriarchal figure from such domestic
affairs). Yet, before we get carried away with visions of a proto-feminism -
this alternative universe, of course, a matriarchy, continues to serve the
interests, within the marketplace, of the patriarchy.