Vanishing Women

[Paul Mackin]

On Feb 26, 2006, at 9:22 AM, hilary y wrote:

> okie - dokie, so there is an interesting essay on vanishing women  
> in cinema.  what is the connection to pynchon's books?
>
> I could say that the connex between vanishing women and M & D would  
> be that the most "present' female character in the book is Rebekah  
> and she is only a ghost. She is not there and yet she is. (Also of  
> note, the two main characters spend a lot of time trying to "see"  
> the elusive Venus and the more refined  woman (more-so than  
> Rebekah) that Mason never marries and continues to try to peek at  
> through his telescope- The desired object.)


One might have thought Eliza Field to be the vanishing/disappearing/ 
escaping woman of the story.

Furthermore, at a certain point in the book,  she seems to move from  
the Ghastly Fop story to the Cherrycoke story.

Escape of an escaper.

To Mason, Eliza resembles Rebekah.

>
>
> A case could be made, in a weird way, that Oedipa from "Crying"  
> might be related to Carol Clover's Final Girl of her book Men,  
> Women and Chain Saws.
>
> Anyway, spectatorship is always interesting and it brings up a lot  
> about gender.
>
> (Heh-heh, men are not supposed to be very good at trans-gender  
> spectatorship but, I believe there are a few exceptions out there! .)
>
> cheers,
> Hilary
>
> p.s. Has anybody gotten into the Lacan thing about the "woman" not  
> existing?  I think there is some interesting theory related stiff  
> that talks about race/gender using Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible  
> Man" re: visibility and invisibility in our culture.
>
>
>
> Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Beckman, Karen. Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and
> Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003.
>
> With the help of mirrors, trap doors, elevators,
> photographs, and film, women vanish and return in
> increasingly spectacular ways throughout the
> nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Karen Beckman
> tracks the proliferation of this elusive figure, the
> vanishing woman, from her genesis in Victorian stage
> magic through her development in conjunction with
> photography and fi! lm. Beckman reveals how these new
> visual technologies projected their anxieties about
> insubstantiality and reproducibility onto the female
> body, producing an image of "woman" as utterly
> unstable and constantly prone to disappearance.
>
> Drawing on cinema studies and psychoanalysis as well
> as the histories of magic, spiritualism, and
> photography, Beckman looks at particular instances of
> female vanishing at specific historical moments—in
> Victorian magic's obsessive manipulation of female and
> colonized bodies, spiritualist photography's search to
> capture traces of ghosts, the comings and goings of
> bodies in early cinema, and Bette Davis's multiple
> roles as a fading female star. As Beckman places the
> vanishing woman in the context of feminism's
> discussion of spectacle and subjectivity, she explores
> not only the problems, but also the political utility
> of this obstinate figure who hovers endlessly between
> visible and invisible w! orlds. Through her readings,
> Beckman argues that the visibly vanishing woman
> repeatedly signals the lurking presence of less
> immediately perceptible psychic and physical erasures,
> and she contends that this enigmatic figure, so
> ubiquitous in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century
> culture, provides a new space through which to
> consider the relationship between visibility, gender,
> and agency.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/oavvx
>
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