VLVL feminism

[jbor]

Terrance:
> Kinda interesting that the more recent dissertations on VL take this
> position. Pynchon is not being compared with Melville or Gaddis or Roth
> or Nabokov or even with Delillo, but with Toni Morrison & Co.
>
> The texts are often ignored to make these silly readings fit together.
> VL isn't a feminist novel by any stretch.

I think feminist readings of _Vineland_ have been around for a long time,
and they have a precedent in some of those much earlier feminist responses
to _Lot 49_. Granted that sometimes the feminist spin is offered or
regurgitated to try and compensate for the fact that Pynchon's novels, and
_Vineland_ particularly so, don't conform to a particular reader's
particular political expectations. Of course, true feminist and Marxist
criticism is fundamentally politically engaged, so reading selectively, or
against the text, or discarding it altogether, are envisaged as legitimate
approaches to the job of criticism (i.e. reading). Often it's not just
silliness or hot air but a quite deliberate politico-rhetorical act, and
interesting in and of itself.

The starting point for many of the feminist readings of _VL_ is Sister
Rochelle's 'Lilith' stories, but I think it's extremely difficult to argue
that she, or her stories, are being presented unironically in the text.

I'm not sure about the '50s "masculine" vs '60s "feminized" dichotomy, or
where you've situated Pynchon therein, but there's probably a case to be
made for _Vineland_ occupying, in parts, a sort of bridge between _On the
Road_ and, say, _Thelma and Louise_ [1991].

best

> It's not that Pynchon takes a
> traditional position or a conservative male political stance or
> something like that, although his novels are decidedly masculine in the
> 1950's sense and not feminized 1960's androgynous, but his females are
> all caught in the same machinery as his males. Henry Adams, as most of
> Pynchon's more astute critics recognized long ago, haunts every page
> Pynchon writes.