C of Lot 49 or Whether/Whither feminism?

[Mark Kohut]

Seconded and thirded,etc., imho: 
Laura writes: 
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.

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Confinement in the magic tower (that was everywhere) included Mucho, Roseman and Half-Pierce at least (so far) so C of Lot 49 is a quest beyond---IF all is not the magic 'conspiracy".....................stating the almost obvious.