Femenist reading of IV

[alice wellintown]

Perhaps nothing Pynchon has written to date tells us more about how he
developed as an author than his Introduction to the Slow Learner
stories. The stories are, as P admits, novice attempts that expose his
juvenile prejudices and influences. With the exception of "The Secret
Integration", an apprentice's tale that P admits suffers from his
abuse of the surreal, a problem compounded by his then semi-conscious
though largely latent and unexamined racist views of Black Americans,
is P first turn toward seeing the Other. Lot49 explores and GR is a
far more mature and complex product of this turn. Of course P
continues to develop a more mature view of the Other in his more
mature works. After VL was published  critics gave serious
consideration to the feminist P. M&D, AGTD can be read as feminist
works. And IV, P's last published work, is is most feminist to date.



This dynamic — of eroticized male exclusion from, and investment in,
female relationships — was the defining feature of a handful of
women-in-prison films from the 1970s. In these movies, female
sisterhood, generally in the face of oppression, is itself fetishized
— feminism is turned into a kind of masochistic male wet dream. How
this unlikely cathexis occurred, and how it functioned, is the subject
of this essay.
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/61/61womeninprison.html