ATDTDA (9): Refined to an edge, 267

[bekah]

Yes, there certainly seems to be a certain amount of deliberate 
ambiguity in this "virgin bride" / "child of the storm." thing. 
But what is a virgin?  As I said in that long post about Lake,   "a 
virgin to what?"  And who's telling us this, Lake?  She wouldn't be 
the most reliable of narrators but Pynchon is,  as you said,  being 
"coy."     (Was that Deuce thinking "Women could protest from now 
till piss flowed uphill, the truth was, there wasn't one didn't 
secretly love a killer."? -  We're not told.)

I  suspect that  Lake is a technically a virgin at this point 
because, for one  the text says she is and also perhaps,  although 
she is by no means a "good girl,"  she's not been actually been 
deflowered.     Remember,  "I did not have sexual relations with that 
woman."?   Girls sometimes play games with  definitions, too. 
Technically to herself,  she's "good"  and  "innocent."   To her 
father she's certainly not.    Lake does have a way of "not knowing" 
the reality of things.

But she might have just re=invented herself in time for the wedding, 
too.  Like she was trying to get Deuce spruced up for respectability.

Bekah

At 9:21 AM +0100 5/30/07, Paul Nightingale wrote:
>Was Lake sexually active, as Webb suspected at the time they argued
>(189-191)? Was she "a badgirl" in Silverton (191)? The most obvious point to
>make is that there is rather more (unambiguous) detail in the earlier
>passage, eg ". hard to say which of them . had less sense about who she went
>upstairs with". On 267, however, one might wonder about the opening ("She
>was a virgin bride") juxtaposed to the final sentence ("Child of the
>storm"): the latter takes the careless, forgetful reader back to the
>argument with Webb, that is to say, back to the moment she ceased to be his
>daughter. Parallel worlds, landmarks and anti-landmarks? Perhaps this brief
>section is simply designed to emphasise/confirm the (anti-realistic)
>reinvention of character that seems to be Lake's narrative function.