CoL49 - Feminist novel

[J K Van Nort]

The book is feminist, and Pynchon captures that perfectly with Oedipa's experience as she discovers the "reality" of the patriarchal system that she thought she was comfortable within. Coming from the Tupperware party attending wife with an herb garden and a life of preparing her husband's dinners and drinks to the confident woman who can face a Nazi shrink, spend a night wandering the Bay area feeling safe, and by the end, ready to face the representative of the mysterious Trystero head on.

The excluded middle, while it is where "she has been told" bad shit happens, is the new reality that she has discovered outside the binary track of the patriarchal system. 

This reality isn't necessarily more comfortable, in fact she feels waves of nausea, but it comes closer to reality, one that has many directions for her to discover, even as the patriarchal system no longer provides the comforting answers. Like an existential moment, when the ground has fallen away revealing the void, she must now discover her own reality. 

In solidarity,
James

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