Bianca and the females V room

[Joseph T]

Intriguing thread. I think Pynchon is always finding ways to connect  
the personal to the cultural. The commercial and cultural   
exploitation of sex are embedded in human history and it is  
impossible to find complete purity or safety even in the most  
admirable attempts to create protective zones of  love,  shared  
idealism and human respect. What is saddest to me in the Bianca/ 
Slothrop affair is Slothrop's unwillingness to act on the protective  
instinct which seems to be his deepest emotional response to Bianca.   
I think she is drawn to TS because sees in him   someone fleeing  
exploitation,  sexual abuse, power games. Bianca has the same needs  
but is even more vulnerable. Bianca's most powerful tool to get the  
protection she needs from  a sympathetic and sufficiently powerful  
adult like Slothrop would be words, honesty, but she has been taught  
to think of powerful people in terms of their sexual needs, and to  
think of her survival in terms of  meeting those needs.  In some ways  
Slothrops resistance fails because it fails to expand to connect with  
others as the need and opportunity comes.

  It's iffy to equate protected female youthfulness with innocence.  
The Vroom sisters in M&D were protected from hardships by slaves,  
their "protected" environment was directly related to their  
willingness to exploit both slaves and visiting white men.   The  
security they got from being the family(posession) of the rich white   
slaveowner was as dull as their food. The insecurity of the free  
blacks, malays and mixed race folk was characterized by a more joyful  
sensuality symbolized by their exotic spicy diverse foods.

In GR  most movements toward the classic forms of love-  friendship,  
family, community(national, tribal), romantic -are failing  
tragically,  because they are being expertly exploited and and  
subverted by the comforts of power and privelege associated with  
technology and by the individuals internalization of of  unhealthy  
social models. Sex will always be the wild card, but in GR its'  
tragic failures to lead toward more enduring forms of love is made  
particularly palpable in the destruction of Bianca and the Pokler  
child whose name I forget.