COL49 and feminism (was: Roseman)

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Lots of great points have been made (see below) re COL49 and feminism.  Feminism (outside of the ferocious academic scene) is a pretty amorphous term, a now-it-when-I-see-it type of thing.  Doris Lessing hated the "feminist" label being attached to her book The Golden Notebook, which was about the clash of intellect and ideology.  One can understand why.  Labeling a book "feminist" marginalizes it, shoves it towards the realm of chick lit.  That is, if it's written by a woman.  Lessing wanted men to read her book and feared the feminist label accordingly.  A male writer can afford the label and even benefit from it.

Personally, I think the Golden Notebook IS feminist, in that, like COL49, it portrays an intelligent female protagonist grappling with issues unrelated to mere femininity.  It's a difficult balancing act:  to portray a character who's more than a male character with a female name tacked on, female but not an object for men, intellectual but still able to have sex without emotions taking over the story.  That Pynchon pulls this off is, IMO, attributable to his using Varo's paintings as a starting point.  From the poor glimpses one gets of the paintings via the internet, as well as Pynchon's description in COL49, a central theme that Pynchon's picked up on is using the confinement of women to specific roles as a STARTING POINT for exploring the confinement of all of us to the limited roles society allows us.  Pynchon successfully creates a woman, Oedipa, and turns her into EVERYMAN.  It's no mean feat, but he couldn't have done it without Varo's visions (No, I don't have any "proof" -- just a gut feeling from his long description of Oedipa's reaction to Varo's paintings up front in chapter one).

One thing that Pynchon didn't get from Varo's work, and certainly wasn't able to pick up on in the mid '60s, was the feminist concept of sisterhood.  It's this concept of woman as EVERYWOMAN that Lessing wanted to avoid, but which has driven women's movements whenever and wherever they occur.  You need the EVERYWOMAN concept to fight for feminist change, but the penalty is marginalization, the intellectual nightmare of "chick-lit," based on emotion over intellect, sisterhood over human-hood.  Pynchon had no feel for this, didn't know how to portray female friendship and solidarity.  Doris Lessing did, and suffered for it.  No wonder Oedipa doesn't encounter too many women on her journey. 

Laura 

Rich:

Oedipa is simply human--let's not put her on a pedestal. the fact that
she is female is irrelevant.

Mark:

Oh, the wrinkles of meaning, the differing definitions are so hard to go back and forth on.....yes, the pre-feminist 60s, second wave feminism (of the 20th Century) but now in the 21st, What do we mean when we say feminism? (Y'all read Judith Thurman in The New Yorker on the Oxford Univ Press bio of Helen Gurley Brown, FEMINIST? )

After that preamble, I just want to see if this hits anyone: Yes, Oedipa goes man to satirized man hunting answers---only she and Remedios Varo are (kinda) pure....so, I see TRP as SO "feminist" in The Crying of Lot 49......the two women are presented without irony.....good qualities--Oedipa's kindness and compassion, open-ended quest; Varo's suffering art, etc......

I think TRP, as we see in V. and would come to see in GR, sees the Man-run world, patriarchy, old-boy interlocking networks of business and war-mongering as a big part of the Historical Problem. I would say, she must try to get answers from all the men who
are supposed to have the answers, but she gets nada from them. Purposely by OBA. 

(On the other hand, Oedipa has nothing but "gut fear and female cunning" to understand.   (Is 'female cunning" supposed to be a compliment, ya think?) 



Heikki:

>My tentative answer to the question "Is OBA falling into easy sexism?"
>is no. At least not because of the absence of other non-subservient
>woman characters. Oedipa's certain loneliness may even turn crucial to
>the way the novel is able to keep emancipatory possibilities "bouncing".
>Possibilities that enable the novel to exceed the conditions of its
>time and place.
>


Tore: 

>> But it's an interesting question. On the one hand, I think Lot 49 could in many ways be
>> considered a feminist novel, or at least a proto-feminist novel, but on the other hand it WAS written
>> in the largely pre-feminist '60s, as Laura points out. A good comparison here would be Joseph Conrad's
>> "Heart of Darkness" - a stark critique of racism and imperialism, but still inevitably tinged by the period
>> in which it was written and by the paradigm it was trying to escape. Still, first steps can only go so far,
>> and Chinua Achebe is way off the mark, IMHO, when he calls Conrad a "bloody racist."
>>
>> In much the same way, Pynchon's feminist novel does carry traces of the easy sexism of the period,
>> and I think Pynchon would be the first to admit that. In the introduction to "Slow Learner" he says of
>> "Low-lands" and the character Dennis Flange:
>>
>> "[M]aybe I was picking up on male attitudes that were then in the air - more documentably, inside the
>> pages of men's magazines, Playboy in particular. I don't think this wagazine was the projection,
>> exclusively, of its publisher's private values: if American men had not widely shared such values,
>> Playboy would have quickly failed and faded from the scene."
>>
>> - and of Pig Bodine he says:
>>
>> "Modern readers will be, at least, put off by an unacceptable level of racist, sexist and proto-Fascist
>> talk throughout this story. I wish I could say that this is only Pig Bodine's voice, but, sad to say, it
>> was also my own at the time. The best I can say for now is that, for its time, it is probably authentic enough."
>>
>> When Lot 49 was written, society (and Pynchon) had moved several steps away from the sexism captured so
>> wonderfully in the tv series "Mad Men", but it was still a transition period, and I believe a novel like
>> Lot 49 helped bring about this transition, even though it still had a foot in the early sixties. Tellingly,
>> the two excerpts of the novel that appeared before its publication were printed in men's magazines: Esquire
>> and Cavalier (the latter could even be termed a 'girlie magazine'). To me, that sums up this transition
>> period perfectly: an excerpt from a proto-feminist novel published in the girlie magazine Cavalier, side by side
>> with images of a nude Miss World (a Miss Langley from Wales), and with a 'reportage' (complete with photos,
>> of course) of the struggling East Village artist Sharon Kent, who "supports herself by nude modeling" (guess what
>> those photos show!).
>>
>> A-and at the same time, one of the most unsympathetic characters in Lot 49, Winthrop
>> Tremaine (the racist seller of surplus swastikas) puts his ads in girlie magazines:
>>
>> "Got this little factory down outside of San Diego," he told her, "got a dozen of your niggers, say, they can
>> sure turn them old armbands out. You'd be amazed how that little number's selling. I took some space in a couple
>> of the girlie magazines, and I had to hire two extra niggers last week just to take care of the mail."

 Laura:
>>
>> > By the way, it's interesting that there are few (not one? - correct me, someone) named female characters
>> > outside of Oedipa (and Remedios Varo)in the book. She journeys from man to man looking for answers. Is there
>> > a reason for this, other than Pynchon falling into the easy sexism of the pre-feminist '60s?