The Enigmatic Subject: She-Dick or Lady Detective

[alice malice]

Back to Part One of Ch. 36 where , after Christmas Carol is revised,
an allusion to Shakespeare's 12th Night,

"it's a Twelfth Night of late-capitalist contradiction" brings us
round to Daytona's allusion to "All About Eve"

https://www.britannica.com/shakespeare/article-313694



On Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 11:18 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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