VLVL2(10) DL's Disguise (The Effete Sisterhood)

[Terrance]

No sex. 

Back to V. 


V. shows up on Malta during W.W.II.  She is DISGUISED as the
  Bad Priest. We learn of her plan  from Fausto's diary and
  his comments. On Malta, Pynchon links the colonialism in SW
  Africa with the siege on Malta and to all the sieges that V.
  has witnesses. It should be clear that V., as she becomes
  more and more an inanimate being, also becomes more and
  more, an abstraction. On Malta she has reached the apex. Her
  worship of Death, violence, murder, rape, torture, now seeks
  to  break cycle of Nature and replace it with a Kingdom of
  Death.  She is dressed as a man, a priest, for she is
  become, simultaneously, the high priest  and  symbolically,
  the  degenerate goddess of Death. Renouncing the last
  vestiges of the feminine life principle, she  poses as a 
  priest and  preaches chastity and abortion in the name of a
  supposedly God-ordained sterility.
  She is, at least according to rumor, in league with the Dark
  One. So it is not surprising that she would tell  Fausto's
  wife Elena to abort her child and become exclusively the
  Bride of Christ by entering a convent. Remember, that
  Victoria Wren, a RC girl, enters the convent as novitiate,
  but her perverse "catholicism," which includes a staging
  during the Mass of a colonial god at war with an aboriginal
  satan causes her to leave. 
  Note that now the Lady V., if we have not guessed it
  already, is in love with a girl whom she dresses as a boy
  whose head she has shaven as a symbol of the days when she
  formed her perverse "catholicism" as novitiate. 

  Note the wide brimmed hat of her disguise, her uncle's we
  discover.  note also that the "hat" the WSC passes to collect
  money for Esther's abortion is the Pith helmet of the same
  "Historical Chapter" wherein Miss Victoria decides to leave
  the convent because she wants to be the one and only lover
  of Christ and she will have sex with men-- prostitution &
  decadence being a common theme here--as if she were HIS
  bride. 

   The usurpation of traditional Catholic symbolism and
  sacrament includes the sacrament of Penance--reconsiliation
  and Unity ... a sacrament in that includes contrition,
  confession to a priest, acceptance of punishment, and
  absolution, but the bad priest tell Elena to have an
  abortion and to enter the convent. One suspects that in this
  convent her hair would also be shorn. The important point
  here, I think, is that their is no real absolution, the
  women would abort, ending her life cycle-- her fecund and
  fertile and  "Natural" state-- and enter a convent of STERILITY
dedicated
  to the Kingdom of Death and V in love. 

  Slab, in his  debate with Esther, calls her pregnancy a
  "complex protein molecule" and accuses her of turning RC
  because she says, abortion is murdering your own child."
  I do not agree with Mendelson, who goes too far,
  extrapolating from  the symbolism here to argue P's own
  personal views of abortion, but the Catholicism of the novel V. is
instructive. 

  


  The Bad priest tells Elena, for whom sin "had been
  heretofore as natural as breathing, eating, or gossiping
  (gossiping the  God Parents) that the the child she carried
  inside of her womb was  "the shape of an evil spirit: alien,
  parasitic, attached like a black slug to her soul." Elena
  has sinned, she has, (ironically  Mary the mother of Jesus,
  conceived a child outside wedlock too) conceived in "sin."

What will Brock Vond say about Frenesi's pregnancy? 
Why do Frenesi's friends tell ehr to abort Prairie?