Menstruation and Melancholy

[Dave Monroe]

>From Dana Medoro, The Bleeding of America: Menstruation as Symbolic
Economy in Pynchon, Faulkner, and Morrison (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2002), "Menstruation and Melancholy: The Crying of Lot 49," pp.
29-44:

   Imitating the twenty-eight-day cycle of the moon, Oedipa's quest
leads her through realms of darkness and light to the god of the moon
[i.e., Mr. Thoth] in the twenty-eight year of her life ["I'll be 35
(CL 41)].  There is a cyclical nature to her quest, where she often
finds herself back where she started and where she moves along the
edges of an "invisible yet congruent" world (CL 180).  Her quest is
transformative, a process of becoming and, like the moon, it is tied
to the rhythms of larger, possibly sacred, realms.  In The Sacred and
the Profane, Mircea Eliade investigates the lunar symbolism of sacred
rituals and concludes that "in general most of the ideas of cycle,
dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of
contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or
clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism" [Eliade, p. 56].  And this
symbolism is closely linked with the menstrual cycle ....  the process
of her "sensitization" to the clues around her involves not nly a
sense of alternating between saturation and emptiness, but also
"headaches, nightmares, menstrual pains" (CL 177, 171)....
menstruation emerges as an intriguing semiotic code; it provides an
alternative symbolic economy to the tower/void opposition and the
male/mail system, through which Oedipa experiences "all manner of
revelations" (CL 20). (Medoro, p. 35)

http://www.greenwood.com/books/BookDetail.asp?dept_id=1&sku=GM2059

Eliade, Mircea.  The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion.
   New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959.

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=1189795
http://books.google.com/books?id=zBzzv977CLgC
http://www.ziplink.net/~pcb/and/nat00107.htm