Apropos of some of our gender talk here: Marilyn French reads Pynchon(!?) ..not really

[Mark Kohut]

Marilyn French was a novelist and second-wave feminist theorist
of 70s and beyond. She wrote "The Women's Room" and

"Shakespeare's Division of Experience" from which I get this stuff:

"Works concerned with the masculine principle..are linear and transcendent..
that is, the narrative progresses chronologically and the protagonist has a
specific worldly goal"....

"Literature concerned with the feminine principle is circular and eternal: it 
juggles time
or ignores it. It presents incidents which have no apparent causal (rational) 
connections.
["You're going to want cause and effect..."--GR...]  Cause and effect and 
chronology may
be entirely suspended in favor of psychological, emotional, associational links. 
"
Feminine works are not mainly concerned with progress towards a goal, but with 
depiction of
the texture of life, its quality. They focus on interior experience....and are 
synthetic rather than
analytic in their thinking. ......

"There is [often] no cosmic order...even power-in-the-world is largely 
nullified. Power may be 
evaded, mocked, parodied or converted...

In addition, "feminine" worlds [in Literature] are essentially anarchic."  

Discuss among yourselves in realtion to Pynchon's works...