ATDTDA (18): More sinister than that, actually, 501

[Paul Nightingale]

If Girton College represents the confinement of women then the Silent Frock
offers the possibility (one considered "sinister") that their movements will
be difficult to track. Hence the "gynecophobia". In the previous section
"the principle of wave interference" is connected to the "periodic
phenomenon" of walking (500). That "periodic phenomenon" is something akin
to the moving film as a sequence of still images that, run together at
speed, give the illusion of movement: see Merle's analysis on 451. So the
technology producing the Silent Frock runs parallel to that producing
cinema. Another parallel is provided by the Kafkaesque paranoia of "[t]hose
whose job it was to keep track of any recent invention with any weapons
potential" (501). On the one hand something (the Frock, someone wearing it
and walking) has had the soundtrack removed; on the other, that something
has been imbued with Meaning, the arbitrary assignment of signifiers. On 445
there is "the infant science of counter-terrorism" and Sands' "drift into
legend". The reference to suffragettes on 501 recalls Sands' own inference
("Damned Suffragettes again I shouldn't wonder") on 447.