VLVL2 (14): Feminine Zoyd and the Moral Dilemma

[Tim Strzechowski]

295:  "Oh Captain, can I at least, please, call up my mother-in-law to help me with the baby?"

"That is called a favor."  Grotesquely kittenish.  "Favors have to be paid back."

"Inform on my friends.  Sure would put me in a squeeze."

"Your child's well-bein against your own virginity as a snitch, oh yes, quite a close decision indeed, I should say."



from Molly Hite, "Feminist Theory and the Politics of Vineland."  The Vineland Papers.  1994.

[...]  

"Unlike V., in which "the feminine" was a force aligned with deathward-tending natural and historical processes -- and against human agency; unlike The Crying of Lot 49, in which an allegorically feminine (i.e., open, passive) figure of the reader traversed an equally allegorical landscape of America's disinherited; unlike even Gravity's Rainbow, in which, after all, the preterite condition could be glossed by a technological figure of castration, "the penis he thought was his own," Vineland is informed by a meditation on power and gender" (136).

[...]

"The masculine becomes by definition that which oppresses, that which creates it's own subject class, thereby constructing the feminine.  This account of the construction of masculinity in turn indicates how relations between men, and ultimately masculinity itself, are thereby dependent on the woman, and ultimately on femininity.  Just as the woman is necessary to enable relations between men, the feminine here is necessary to the constructed masculine identity, which is threatened and may even disintegrate when the feminine eludes or exceeds its control.

"One index that masculininty is a social construction in the world of Vineland is the way in which various people, not all of them biologically female, come to occupy the subject position of the woman . . . Zoyd Wheeler can choose only between female roles when Hector sets his virginity as a snitch against his maternal responsibility for his child's well being [295]" (138).

[...]

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20040410/270de3aa/attachment.html>