Bold Irish girls

[Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican]

Fragment # 95


Audaces fortuna juvat. 

James Joyce wrote, "Red headed woman buck like goats."
But to attribute this nasty racist stereotype to Joyce and not to the
character who says it in Ulysses is not good reading.  
Dixon has sex with a leprechaun or a fairy or I don't know what that
red-headed girl in green is, but she's not an Irish lass. Bold as the
Irish women in this novel are, hanging about in Pubs and cursing the
crimes of the British with Brogues as thick as oatmeal, they can't be
all so stupid as to risk pregnancy by a surveyor passing through. Can
they? Are they?  The girl has  got a good job and she can bake a cake. 
Imagine that!  What would the locals do if she got pregnant? Could be my
own partiality, but Pynchon has got a soft spot for women and for Irish
women, his mother having been one I think, and I doubt he's make them
out ot be a bunch of whores. 

And what has Dixon got that gets all the milkmaid's a-pumping? A paunch?
Maybe, like Slothrop, his sexual Don Juanism is not at all what it
seems. Slothrop gets cold and numb and he ends up having sex aboard the
ship of fools with a young girl. Dixon is loaded up with booze and daffy
elixir it's a wonder he can even find north on his compass. He travels
in Virginia and doesn't see slaves. 


Austra tells Mason that English Marriage is not different from slavery.
He can't see it. At the Docks the gang of Mics and half-breeds remind
Mason that Wolfe may be a hero to his people for his conquests, but he
is worst kind of Cromwell to the Irish and to Catholics and Mason's own
people at Stroud weaving a life.  Dixon advises Mason to look for a new
wife. Well, he does have motherless children, but Dixon says 'tis
against nature not be looking for a second.  So what is Dixon looking
for? He's a regular Tom Jones, is he? And what of the girls he
impregnates? Amelia, dear Henry? Do Mason and Dixon, men of science, 
even know how women get pregnant? Oh, they've a pretty good idea, but
how good are the ideas about sex and childbirth and the like in the age
of reason? If  Dixon has some sort of charm that gets girls in bed let
us hope he has some Jesuit contraceptive device to protect the ladies. 

Cape girls? A debt (religious and sexual) they owe not to the men, but
to the African women.  The RC, that ironic distance of broken memories
and tall-tale telling, that satire of the younger man by the elder and
the distance by which the author creates wonderful ambiguities and
ironies throughout.  He nearly rips his collar off in that Jesuit  coach
heading for a desperate prairie, drooling over the heavenly pietists
buttoned up to their nostrils but he only observes the perversity of
white cape girls sitting on the stoep, their male slaves paraded about,
the girls at the end of the world, like some theatre of the Japanese,
more aware of their sins as the commit them and more pleased for being
aware of their transgressions, off to Church on a Sunday just like Mr.
Mason at Trinity and oh, oh, Monday, Monday, Monday night, the Battery
is the place to be. Join the parade? 

What of the girls on St. Helena? Why they include "Convicts being
transported to the South Seas for unladylike crimes in England." What
are those crimes? 

English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (Social History in Perspective)
by Tim Hitchcock


Editorial Reviews
The eighteenth century witnessed the birth of the first recognisably
modern sexual identities. This book charts the development of those
identities through the examination of pornography, sexual practice,
medical belief, social policy, and the cultures
of homosexuality, lesbianism, and heterosexually. 
It concludes that the century saw a sexual revolution in
which sexual practice itself changed.

>From a culture in which mutual masturbation and mutable sexual categories were
the norm, eighteenth-century England became a society increasingly
concerned to foster penetrative and procreative sexual 
behaviour. In the process, newly harsh divisions 
between men and women were created and reinforced,
and new models of both femininity and masculinity were created. 
This book charts a series
of complex interrelationships between changes in language and practice,
and suggests that men were increasingly encouraged to invest their
masculinity in an exclusive desire for the opposite sex, while women
were pushed towards a sexual identity in which motherhood came to
dominate, and in which female lust was
denigrated or denied. At the same time, new homosexual and lesbian
identities were likewise created and denigrated.


Raymond Stephanson 
"The Symbolic Structure of Eighteenth-Century Male Creativity: Pregnant
Men, Brain-Wombs, and Female Muses (with some Comments on Pope's
Dunciad)"

http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~lesleyah/trumbach.htm

Trumbach posits - and convincingly substantiates - significant changes
in sexual mores during the eighteenth century. His focus is on London,
the obvious location for new trends to manifest, for which copious
archival resources survive enabling the reconstruction of sexual
narratives for a range of social groups as well as both genders. He
provides a dense account of the areas indicative of changing sexual
mores: libertinism and prostitution; the vast increase in venereal
diseases (a small quibble is Trumbach's use of the term 'cure': the most
obvious symptoms of both syphilis and gonorrhoea disappear even without
treatment); rising illegitimacy; the incidence of rape; adultery,
violence and desertion within marriage.