Some anthropological, sociological fairy tale perspectives, this reading

[Mark Kohut]

Crying of Lot 49 alludes meaningfully to the Rapunzel tale. Oedipa sees
herself as a prisoner like Rapunzel and this image merges with the girls
in the tower of the Varos painting.  

Tower, a symbol of strength, permanance, mind and spirituality----Religion anthropologically. 

It is "magic, anonymous and malignant visited on her from the outside and for no reason at all."
The society's cultural norms are founded on....nothing. 

The tower, in Oedipa's case, a 'sunned gathering' paradisical Garden [of Eden] so to speak.
Where she lives 'without intensity', buffered, insulated, "as if out of focus".  She is still in the repressed
50s hangover. 

With Pierce, although genuinely in love with him, she "had never really escaped the confinement of that tower."

To understand, she might 'marry a disk jockey'---she did---or use "gut fear and female cunning" to measure 
magic's field strength, to count its lines of force. 

Then, as if a syllogism, the last sentence of Chap 1 suggests: the tower is everywhere and Pierce [a knight/night]
of deliverance could not penetrate the magic, so....................

now comes the adventure....