IVIV (12): Yakkin' Broads

[alice wellintown]

> ________
> on the whole its downright awful. that alice thinks IV is Pynchon's
> most feminist work must be a joke--what because of more women getting
> head than giving--is that the criteria we're using--strictly the
> sexual?--that's gotta be another joke.

I'm serious. P turned feminist in VL and his texts have taken up
feminist issues and concerns since. Contrast P with Roth (A Dying
Animal) and Marquez (Momories of My Melancholy Whores). P doesn't
write about an old guy, a guy his age, getting young women. His
protagonist in IV is a parodic figure; he still writes about a thirty
something dude but the dude is trapped in the masculine American world
of Natty Bumpo and what Joyce W. Warren calls "American Narcissus."

This simply doesn't work very well.

The development from V. to GR to M&D to AtD is what distrinuishes this
author. His California experiements, TV versions of American History,
are interesting only because they are the poroducts of the same
author.

see Elizabeth Boyd Jordan Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other
Glorified Outcasts, and: Sex, Politics, and Science in the
Nineteenth-Century Novel

see Joyce W. Warren, The American Narcissus: Individualism and Women
in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction