The Enigmatic Subject: She-Dick or Lady Detective

[alice malice]

Chapter 36 has six parts. In the first part, I quoted from it the
previous post, Maxine dreams of A Christmas Carol and the story, as it
does every year, "slops over into work" (395).  The Chapter is wrapped
around Christmas and slops over into the job. In Part 4 Daytona drops
in a very big allusion: "All About Eve"

Thematic content

Critics and academics have delineated various themes in the film.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_About_Eve

On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 10:44 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> In Bleeding Edge, a book by Thomas Pynchon, author of several novels,
> in Chapter 36 of the novel, 394 pages into it...and, yes, I
> know...most of you haven't read this far and don't plan to, but there
> in Chapter 36 is Maxine, a secularized Jewish New Yorker, doing what
> all good New Yorkers do during the Holiday Season, watching the Tube
> and wishing she could be watching a revised version of an old classic,
> a revisionist Christmas Carol...and since I know you're no gonna go
> get the book:
>
> where Scroodge is the good guy for a change. Victorian capitalism  has
> hustled him over the years for his soul, turning him from an innocent
> entry-level kid into a mean old man who treats everybody like shit,
> none worse than his apparently honest bookeeper Bob Cratchit, who in
> reality has been systematically skimming off of poor haunted and
> vulnerable Scrooge, cooking the books, and running off periodically to
> Paris to squander what he's stolen on champagne, gambling, and cancan
> girls, leaving Tiny Tim and the family in London to starve. At the
> end, instead of Bob being the instrument of Scrooge's redemption, it
> turns out to be by way of Scrooge that Bob is ransomed back to the
> side of humanity again.
>
>
>
>
>
> Trouble with She-Dicks: Private Eyes and Public Women in "The
> Adventures of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective"   Victorian Literature
> and Culture Vol. 33, No. 1, 2005, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
>
> As one of the earliest professional female detectives in English
> literary history, Brooke's career was marked by conflicts with
> territorial male officers and the ever-present pressure to keep her
> detective work “inside the house.” Emerging at a historical moment
> when understandings of women, criminality, and law enforcement were
> rapidly changing in Britain, Pirkis's stories offer an interpretation
> of these intersecting cultural shifts that is surprisingly different
> from her contemporaries. In a decade rife with scientific
> interrogation into the nature of criminality, such as in the work of
> Havelock Ellis and Francis Galton, detective fiction of the 1890s
> tended to mimic scientific discourse in its representations of
> criminals. The Brooke stories, however, challenge such conceptions of
> deviance and reveal the poverty of their underlying understandings of
> crime as well as gender.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l