Thomas Pynchon and Gender

When Thomas Pynchon revised the 1961 typescript draft of what became his debut novel, V. (1963),1 he deleted the seven-page pastiche of a typical 1950s television sitcom.2 Judging by the many other cuts and alterations he made to the typescript, it is clear not only that he struggled with the structure of his book but also that he was trying to work through daunting contemporary issues of gender and race. These issues are relevant to the narratology of historical fiction because Pynchon’s brand of that fiction plays on the character Herbert Stencil’s projections of the past from the present and thus calls for a close analysis of how Pynchon puts that present together. We suggest elsewhere that the published novel’s characterisation of the African American McClintic Sphere is still inhibited by the set of liberal clichés marring the typescript’s original (Herman & Krafft, 2023, pp. 115–30). Here we consider an episode eliminated from the published novel that is particularly steeped in sexual politics.

But first, to aid readers who may not already be familiar with V., we offer this broad outline. V. is structured along two main narrative axes, one set in the near or virtual present of 1955–56, the other ranging over twentieth-century Western history from 1898 on. The first of these storylines centres on the picaresque adventures of ex-sailor, former road worker, sometime alligator hunter, sometime nightwatchman Benny Profane among an array of other characters including former shipmates, would-be girlfriends, and the members and satellites of a group of hedonistic pseudo-bohemian New Yorkers known as the Whole Sick Crew. A child of the Depression and a self-styled schlemihl, Profane is constitutionally a drifter, driven, if by anything, by anxiety and appetite. He is likeable enough and capable of kindness, but too self-centred to make any commitments, to welcome any ‘dependents’, or to sustain any mature relationships. The second storyline, anchored in the first, centres on the efforts of the aforementioned Herbert Stencil, the middle-aged son of a British diplomat-cum-spy, to trace the supposed role of the mysterious title figure, V., in the violent and chaotic events of the twentieth century, from the potentially apocalyptic Fashoda crisis of 1898 as seen from Egypt, to the siege of Malta during the Second World War, and perhaps, by implication, to the Suez crisis of 1956. The episodes that make up this storyline are distributed among the near-present chapters in a not strictly chronological order. Whether an actual woman, some other historical entity, or only an intellectual construct, V. (who appears in a variety of guises) does not feature as a historical agent but rather serves Stencil as an explanatory key, index, or symptom. Even if Stencil’s eccentric efforts to make sense of history occasionally border on the absurd, they are explicitly directed toward sustaining his own acutely conscious life in the present. Still, we may wonder whether Profane and Stencil ultimately exhibit more differences or more similarities. Both are footloose wanderers, and the one may not be as strictly present-minded as he pretends nor the other as historically aware as he imagines.

The draft episode we discuss here delineates an instalment of an imaginary family situation comedy in which various constructions of sexual identity vie for dominance and in which women come out on top. We find the overall effect satirical, but we acknowledge that many readers may find the novel’s depictions of both men and women and its representations of their roles sexist if not downright misogynistic. As Richard Hardack observes in a different context, ‘it is sometimes hard to differentiate what Pynchon is critiquing from what he perpetuates’ (2013, p. 592, n. 31). In any case, if the episode had been kept in, it might well have been interpreted as another extrapolation of the role of the enigmatic V. figure in the published novel. Indeed, as they wield power and take a certain pleasure in conspiring to hold down their men, the mother and daughter in the sitcom look like domestic contemporary versions of the elusive female character in the novel’s historical chapters, which provide Stencil’s perspective on events related to his father’s life. Perhaps, then, Pynchon cut the sitcom in part to prevent the narrator of the 1956 plot from accentuating what Pynchon may have expressly conceived as Stencil’s sexist projection of an almost mythological femininity. (A late addition to the novel at the beginning of the first historical chapter – that is, the introduction to the Egypt episode – connects this problematic idolatry with the figure of the White Goddess as described by Robert Graves and so may indicate Pynchon’s deliberate highlighting of Stencil’s fixation on female strength (Herman & Krafft, 2023, pp. 39–51).)

Critics have debated possible sexism in V. at least since the mid-1970s, when Catharine R. Stimpson described what she saw as ‘Pynchon’s sexual conservatism’, a conventional idealisation of stereotypical female fecundity and nurturance (1976, p. 32).3 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, like Molly Hite more recently, sees V. as misogynistic – ‘though it also shows signs of beginning to question’ that attitude (Fitzpatrick, 2003, p. 106, n. 8) – and sees the V. figure as a projection (both Stencil’s and Pynchon’s) of threatening, ‘machinic’ female otherness. Joanna Freer once lamented that V.’s ‘female protagonist is never fully present as a real woman, instead remaining splintered, distanced, disturbingly inhuman, and primarily symbolic’ (2014, p. 130).4 On the other hand, Dana Medoro argues that this figure, a figure of women’s solidarity and power, representing ‘resistance to systems of domination’, is one in whom ‘the promise of cyclical regeneration for a fallen world lies latent’ (1999, pp. 25, 31). Medoro thus denies that V. connives in the sexism it depicts. Perhaps most relevant to our purpose here is Mark D. Hawthorne’s argument that V. ultimately succeeds in blurring and blending gender roles in a critique of the binary sexual and gender differentiations so troublesomely characteristic of the 1950s culture the novel depicts.5 Aptly, Hawthorne ‘locate[s Pynchon’s parodic and humorous] treatment [of immature male characters in the 1950s storyline] in the masculine identity confusion of the 1950s when the two essential masculine roles of sexual partner and breadwinner were being “domesticated” and, at the same time, emasculated by popular media’ fare such as the family sitcom (1997, p. 82, our emphasis). The sitcom Pynchon cut illustrates and satirises exactly such confusion over gender binarism: the male characters neither quite figure out what it is supposed to mean to be a man nor manage to do whatever it would be to act like a man. Furthermore, two tropes prominent in the episode, varieties of inanimacy/dehumanisation and the allure/threat of the road, are central to the gender thematics of the novel as a whole and so appear to help integrate the episode neatly. But Pynchon may have cut it because its treatment of such important issues was at once too heavy-handed and not probing enough, and he wanted his novel to address more complicated gender concerns (as our discussion of the White Goddess mentioned above also shows).

By the time Corlies (‘Cork’) Smith, Pynchon’s editor at J. B. Lippincott, finally got around, in his letter of 23 February 1962, to offering Pynchon three substantial suggestions for improving the 1961 version of the novel, Pynchon had already gone much further in rethinking it. Of the fourteen changes he told Smith on 13 March he intended to make, change number four was to delete the situation comedy in Chapter 27.6 His terse explanation echoed a comment Smith had made about the character Sphere in his letter of 23 February: ‘There is something about him which gives the reader a certain feeling that the book is, at least in part, a Protest Novel’. Pynchon disavowed capital-P Protest in general and, in particular, the heavy-handed social critique he had apparently come to see as objectionable about the TV show.7

Typescript Chapter 12, ‘In which Profane returns to street level’ (Ts, pp. 187–202), provides most of the material for section II of Chapter 6 in the published novel – the section in which Profane realises that his job with the Alligator Patrol is nearing its inevitable end and Fina Mendoza, who rescued Profane from yo-yoing on the subway and took him to live in her family’s apartment, urges him to start looking for a new job. At first reluctant, he eventually obliges her but then backs out of the interview she has arranged for him. A few days later, coming off their job in the sewers, Profane and his friends Angel (Fina’s brother) and Geronimo go to a bar on Upper Broadway. Afterwards, the three of them take part in a long search for the missing Fina.8 She has been ‘out with the Playboys’ (Ts, p. 200; V, p. 150), the street gang she ‘mothers’, and the searchers find her ‘lying on an old army cot, naked, hair in disarray, smiling’ (Ts, p. 201; V, p. 151). Meanwhile, the seven-page sitcom pastiche Pynchon cut from the typescript (Ts, pp. 192–99) is part of the scene in the bar, where the three friends ‘sat and drank beers and watched a family situation comedy on television’ (p. 192). One practical reason for getting rid of the sitcom might have been that it slows down the action relating to Fina, but as we have already suggested, Pynchon may have had more thematic reasons for deciding on the cut.

The plot of the sitcom will sound familiar. Its stereotypical prosperous suburban nuclear family, the Marshalls, living the ‘safe and happy’ consumerist ‘good life’ (p. 196), actually consists of an ambitious but clueless white-collar father, an indulgent but controlling wife and mother, an egotistical teenage daughter (notably if implausibly buxom for her supposed fifteen years) with an adventure-seeking but still more clueless boyfriend, a ‘small obnoxious son’ (p. 192), and even a hapless family dog. The mother firmly resists her husband’s plan to move to the West Coast in pursuit of a promotion, and the daughter vehemently objects to her boyfriend’s plan to go to South America in search of adventure and fortune.9 Despite the father’s advice to the boyfriend to ‘Go home […] and stand up to [opposition] like a man’ (p. 195), neither the father himself nor the boyfriend shows much backbone, and both their plans come to naught. The son, too, afflicted by the same ‘Wanderlust’ (p. 194) as the older men, runs away from home but doesn’t get far ‘out on the road’ (p. 196) and is happy enough to be rescued and brought home by, of course, the boyfriend.10

Most of the New York storyline in V. is set in 1956, when family sitcoms were still relatively new, just as commercial television itself was. This may explain why, a page or so into the episode, Pynchon’s narrator feels the need to expound on the artificial merriment, canned laughter, added to the programme: ‘The laughter was dubbed into the sound track, either from a real tape-recorded audience or from a machine Profane had read about in the Daily News a few days back. This was an all-electronic device which could duplicate various kinds of audience reaction, from applause to snickers to mob scenes to loud hysteria’ (p. 193). Then a network executive is quoted explaining why all of this is so useful: ‘The dramatic or comic impact of a production cannot be lessened by any improper audience reaction’, and ‘the viewers at home will now get the full benefit of knowing what a large-scale response is supposed to be’, to ‘aid […] their own appreciation’ (p. 193). With its disdain for the dehumanisation this technology implies, this passage and the allusions to it later in the episode are oddly moralistic, something Pynchon may also have realised while waiting for his editor’s comments. Needless to say, if the passage had stayed in, V. would have looked more dated, perhaps already by the time it was published. The same is true of the description of the family’s material luxury that opens the TV programme:

A marvellous family it was. They lived in the suburbs and were at peace with their two cars, washing machine, clothes dryer, refrigerator, dishwasher, disposal unit, electric stove and television set. The things worked all the time. […] Every comic situation in this family arose from the actions of human beings, in accord with classical principles, and the appliances and objects were there only as willing and amiable servants to facilitate the plot’s movement; no gods ever emerged from the machines. [Ts, p. 192]

This is all very knowledgeable and nicely observed, but who needs to know? The sitcom pastiche as a whole may not fail as satirical social observation; and it does manage to convey the silliness of this relatively new form of popular art, the television sitcom. But perhaps it is both too heavy-handed and not silly enough to belong in a book that tries hard to avoid didacticism.11

Family sitcoms in the 1950s had subversive potential, but they typically served as vehicles of indoctrination in the current social norms concerning gendered power relations and in the resulting distribution of responsibility for supporting the conventional values of labour, accumulation, domesticity, and tranquillity. A sassy stay-at-home wife-and-mother might have the better lines of dialogue, but her ridicule was licenced by her relative weakness rather than by real power. Her gainfully employed husband, befuddled or not, was unlikely to want to trade his economic power for her licence. We can tell from record executive Roony Winsome’s denunciation of ‘Raoul the television writer’ that Pynchon understood the subtly subversive potential of the medium – ‘Raoul […] can produce drama devious enough to slip by any sponsor’s roadblock and still tell the staring fans what’s wrong with them and what they’re watching’ (Ts, p. 554; V, p. 360) – even if Raoul doesn’t write for sitcoms or make use of his subversive talent. Pynchon’s satire is an ambiguous vehicle, but we think in the case of this pastiche it does more to criticise current gender norms than to valorise them. Yet Pynchon must not have thought it did enough, one way or the other, or must have thought such heavy-handed critique would be ineffective.

Indeed, the sitcom story is not subtle, and can even be pretentious. Its narrator holds himself above the lowly entertainment, not only by lampooning the show but also by explaining some of the unimaginative reactions of the watchers in the bar and by providing insights into the composition of the audience at large. Some of the narrator’s comments are simple displays of knowledge, for instance, about prime time: ‘You could be sure that kids watching coast to coast (it was prime listening time – before the hour, established by numerous surveys, when the normative American child is sent off to bed) were laughing as uproariously as the dubbed-in audience’ (Ts, pp. 193–94).12 Other comments, however, suggest something more than innocent and wholesome entertainment. When the father dictates a letter at the office, his secretary’s skirt is described as ‘tight and [riding] up a blond, healthy-looking pair of crossed thighs’ (p. 194). The narrator is keen on parenthetically lifting the veil on the show:

(This was a ‘family’ program, but surveys had pointed out that paperback books with erotically conceived covers and dealing exclusively with eccentric-sadistic sexual behaviour sold best among men with wives and children. So to please the male segment of the families who watched families in comic situations, the net was opened wide enough to include the closed thighs of Bob’s secretary, with the implication that what can be crossed can also be spread.) [Ts, p. 194]13

Earlier in the episode, when Sharon, the teenage daughter, stamps her foot ‘so hard it made her well-developed breasts shimmer alluringly’ (p. 192), the expert narrator readily comments on Angel’s admiration: ‘The usual shifting scale applied here: any girl character over the age of thirteen is played by an 18 year old actress. If the character is 18 or over, however, she can be played by anybody up to 40 plus. Sharon was supposed to be around 15’ (pp. 192–93). The narrator’s connoisseurship reveals a commodifying interest in women Pynchon may have wanted to eliminate from the final version of his first novel in order to distinguish between a more neutral narrative voice and the sexism of some of his male characters. However, further evidence from the sitcom episode complicates this suggestion.

Even if the narrator’s desire to explain is over the top (and was perceived to be so by Pynchon), the pastiche of the sitcom’s story and its characters does reveal certain aspects of the genre that average viewers may not readily have recognised, especially if those viewers were eager to imitate the role models displayed on the screen. The parental roles are typical of those in family sitcoms of the 1950s. Father works outside the home and is good at his job. He is the provider who knows it all (as in the series Father Knows Best). He solves the household’s problems (albeit sometimes, as here in the typescript, after creating them himself) and amounts to the sympathetic manager of his little family unit. Mother is really a glorified servant who prepares food, does the cleaning, educates the children, and obeys her husband (although, again as here, she can be uppity, sarcastic, and the real brains of the family). Her role is perhaps best summarised in the opening sequence of The Donna Reed Show, in which the heroine answers the telephone and passes it on to her husband, hands the children their sweaters and lunches on their way to school, and then kisses her husband goodbye while helping him to his doctor’s bag. Already in the 1950s there were exceptions to this pattern: for instance, in I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball is always trying to convince her old-school husband that she needs a job in show business, and in The Adventures ofOzzie and Harriet, Ozzie often appears to be a wimp while his wife, Harriet, occupies the power position. The pastiche in the V. typescript echoes these exceptions in that it questions the compatibility of the stereotypical roles, the tensions between which almost result in a crisis. But in the end, the dominant ideology prevails, and order of sorts returns.

Pynchon’s narrator seems to lament this outcome, even expressing a degree of frustration at the conclusion: ‘And the last dissolve left you looking in on a kind of collective love-feast, in which sexual identity wasn’t really as important as Togetherness’ (p. 199).14 The narrator’s problem with this outcome is not necessarily that ‘sexual identity’ as such should be ‘important’, but that the stereotypical gender roles and responsibilities that, as we will see, are such a source of confusion to the men are ultimately reaffirmed rather than undermined. This reaffirmation might not be sophisticated enough for the intellectual commentator the narrator clearly wants to be, and it might also offend his own male gaze because the men lose in the episode’s rivalry between the sexes. Or perhaps, on the other hand, the sitcom on the whole is not sexual enough for the narrator, and he does his best to compensate for the lack by commenting (albeit sophomorically) on the teenage daughter’s breasts and the secretary’s thighs. In the latter case, the conclusion would let the narrator down because it could have been much less mellow: it could have become the climax of a story that relates to the novel’s V. figure at large through the erotically charged power the women in the family are shown to wield over their men, who are by no means sure of their own masculinity and might therefore need or desire women’s control to negotiate their sexual attraction. Of course, this last possible reading might be an overly dramatic interpretation of the effect of history as imagined by Stencil; role-play in the family sitcom may hark back to a version of the past, but the genre’s primary function of entertainment prevents it from having a positive influence on the present. In that case, Pynchon may have cut the sitcom episode not because he wanted a neutral narrator for the 1956 plot but rather because he didn’t want to trivialise Stencil’s historiographical work. Then again, sitcoms may not be as banal as that interpretation makes them seem (see, for example, Olson & Douglas, 1997). If Pynchon had become more concerned with sitcoms’ potential to indoctrinate (not merely to entertain, much less to subvert), his 1956 versions of V. would then be role models he might have decided not to feature because they were too cartoonish.

There is yet more evidence to consider. When Schuyler, the would-be adventurous boyfriend, replies to Sharon’s angry ‘How can we ever get married if you’ll be off for years and years wandering around in the jungle?’ (p. 192) with a ‘morose […] “Gee, […] I figured you’d wait for me”’ (p. 193), Geronimo and the bartender as well as the canned audience laugh, presumably to underline the young man’s naïveté about the power women hold over men. Everybody knows better, and nothing in the entire episode really challenges this conventional wisdom, which is, after all, as much of a cliché as the servant role of mothers in the average 1950s sitcom. Sharon ‘throw[s] a temper tantrum’, and the narrator doesn’t hesitate to spell things out: ‘It was Punch and Judy in reverse’ (p. 193).15 Sure enough, after the dictation scene in Bob’s office, the family’s ‘two females […] [discuss] the situation’ by putting down the men: ‘The conversation was filled with all manner of wit […]: “The best cure for an itchy foot is to cut it off”, and “You’d think he was a cross-country bus, to hear him snore”, and “About the only rooting your father does is when he’s acting like a pig”’ (pp. 194–95).

The men’s impotence is exposed during a scene in which they meet in town. Schuyler has been shopping for jungle clothes but ‘reveal[s] an all-embracing incompetency for dealing with the opposite sex in a fumbling speech about how confused he [is]’ (p. 195) as a result of Sharon’s reaction to his ambitious plans. ‘Bob admit[s] he [does]n’t know much about women either’ (p. 195), and when Schuyler learns that Bob hasn’t yet got Betty (his wife) to agree to move the family to the West Coast, ‘with of course a chance for [Bob] to move up on the executive ladder’ (p. 194), the two men find some comfort in each other: ‘“I didn’t [persuade her]”, said Bob, putting his arm around the lad’s shoulders’; and, mustering some courage, he says they should ‘go home […] and stand up to it like a man’ (p. 195).

When Bob arrives home, he ‘find[s] his small son Chip with a duffel bag about to run away from home […] just to see what [the road is] like’ (p. 196). Bob immediately acts the part of the wise suburban father, explaining to Chip ‘how in order to live the good life you had to stick around to enjoy it, and how the road’ – ‘where bums lived’ and ‘inanimate automobiles […] [ran] you down and kill[ed] you’ – ‘was not like the street’, which ‘was safe and happy’, just like their home (p. 196).16 Having thought and dreamt about the Street earlier in the typescript, Profane, watching television in the bar, finds this distinction ‘interesting’ (p. 196) if not, we might assume, spurious (cf. Ts, pp. 637–38), but the narrator stays with the sitcom story. Bob is apparently unaware of two things: the glaring contradiction between his own travel plans and the supposed wisdom he imparts to his son; and the fact that, in true vaudeville fashion, the women of the family have been hiding behind the TV set (where else!) to overhear the conversation between Bob and Chip. Taking advantage of Bob’s professed values, Betty tries immediately to foreclose the matter of a move, and Sharon ‘ask[s] him to talk some sense into Schuyler too’ (p. 197). Here is the chance for Bob to assert himself ‘like a man’, but he only ‘blurt[s]’ confusedly ‘that he was supposed to be going, the deal had gone through, that is if anybody didn’t mind’; and at that moment Schuyler enters ‘in a mountain-climbing costume’ and asks confidently, ‘Did you give them the word yet, Mr. Marshall?’ (p. 197).

Now ‘infuriated’, the women ‘harangue their respective menfolk’ and assert their own power, sending the men for that night literally to the doghouse, albeit an ‘air-conditioned’ one (p. 197), much to the distress of the family’s Irish setter, Clancy. When the men wake up, their conversation quickly turns to identity politics. Bob expresses a marked insecurity: ‘It’s hard to figure out what a man is, these days’, he says, and women make life difficult because ‘they [keep] changing their minds about what they [are]’ (p. 197). Since men, in Bob’s mind, are supposed to be the opposite sex, they have to wait patiently for women to decide what they themselves are and then just ‘be the opposite’ (p. 197). ‘Be the opposite’ as a solution is so obviously shallow and rings so hollow coming from a wise father that it sounds like an admission of defeat. Is that all it means to act ‘like a man’: to ‘be the opposite’ of a woman – a strong, determined woman at that? Pynchon’s calculated refusal to take this question more seriously suggests that he had already come to see its precisely gendered terms themselves as suspect. No peculiarly manlike and notably laudable behaviour, whether as husband, lover, brother, friend, or even ordinary human being, is illustrated seemingly anywhere in the novel. Instead, Profane kills alligators in the New York City sewers; Angel Mendoza beats his sister, Fina; Pig Bodine attempts to rape Paola Maijstral; the Venezuelan Gaucho leads a mob of rioters in Florence; and Foppl murders Bondels in South-West Africa.

Schuyler, however, undeterred as well as unenlightened, doesn’t give up immediately. He calls Sharon to say he is leaving for South America. But then both he and Bob quickly revert to type in connection with the missing Chip, who had left the house with his duffel bag while everyone else was having the vehement and violent argument. Bob promises Betty he will turn down his new job because he has ‘realised it was better to stay here in Laurel Acres and live the good life than go out on the treacherous road, which may have done in his only son’ (p. 198). It is only then, of course, that Schuyler and Chip can bring each other home, Schuyler having found Chip ‘sleeping by the side of the road’, and Chip having convinced his sister’s boyfriend not to go to South America by telling him ‘about the mosquitoes’ (p. 198). So much for masculine bravery on the road. The women and Chip (who may or may not be too young to understand) have made sure that stereotypical male behaviour can be exercised only within the supposedly safe confines of the home and street. It is no coincidence that the episode has a scene or two in the doghouse, because the men’s leash is very short indeed. If it does reach from the ‘safe and happy’ home to the street at all, it most certainly does not stretch as far as the dangerous road, with its apparently excessive demands on masculinity.

In a letter of 22 March 1962, Smith replied point by point to the changes Pynchon proposed in his letter of 13 March. Here is what he said about the family sitcom: ‘I found the TV show in Chapter 12 (not Chapter 27) very entertaining. I did not read it as Social Commentary. I kind of wish you’d leave it in’. A mere two days later, Pynchon acknowledged the chapter-number mistake but didn’t give in. While he half-promised to reconsider dropping the sitcom, he belittled the qualities Smith attributed to it and denied its value as entertainment (24 March 1962).17 His sarcasm prefigured the reaffirmation of his decision to cut the sitcom. That decision may have been influenced by another change to the typescript he must already have been in the process of making: adding the new introduction to the Egypt episode mentioned above. The image of Woman in Pynchon’s novel is controversial because the historical chapters in particular may seem to reduce women to manipulative temptresses bent on creating havoc. Insertion into the published novel of a clear allusion to the female archetype of the White Goddess (albeit problematic in its own right) complicates and enriches that image considerably, so the sitcom and its female characters may have come to seem counterproductive.

Meanwhile, although Stencil’s projection of V. resembles outdated historiographical constructs like Graves’s, he may cling to it in deference to his father, who wrote in his journal that ‘there is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected’ (Ts, p. 60; V, p. 53). Stencil creates a ‘grand Gothic pile of inferences’ (Ts, p. 340; V, p. 226) and a suitably monstrous, possibly mythical, or possibly historical V. figure to inhabit it. He admits that V. is not necessarily a woman, a human being, or anything concretely real at all (Ts, p. 341; V, p. 226); but ‘even as a symptom’ (Ts, p. 588; V, p. 386) his V. figure serves as a powerful metaphor (if still, to be sure, a tendentiously female one) for the dehumanised and dehumanising culture of the novel’s present. Yet, the male characters’ loves and lusts represented in the contemporary chapters are so diverse that it is implausible to suppose Pynchon offers the Western worship of Woman (any more than her demonisation by Sgherraccio, for example)18 as an answer to the sexual woes of Americans in the 1950s. If the White Goddess is Stencil’s problem, she is not Pynchon’s solution.

We recognise that something untoward about Stencil may cause him to construct a female figure of power as monstrous, threatening, and destructive, or to project a destructive figure as female. Yet if V. is a woman and Stencil does fear her precisely as such, his being comfortable with a ‘casual’ ‘father–daughter agreement’ with Rachel Owlglass and Paola’s roommate Esther Harvitz (Ts, p. 80; V, p. 102) also suggests not so much that he has a problem relating to adult women as instead that he is able to meet them on their own terms, unlike other men in the novel, who so often try to subdue and use them.

Eliminating the family sitcom did reduce the number of powerful – domineering – women in the published novel. Maybe Pynchon wanted to limit their presence outside of Stencil’s mind, or maybe he wanted simply to eliminate some obvious stereotypes: here, the kind of overbearing women who were familiar butts of comedy and targets of satire. Either way, there is still room for female strength in Pynchon’s fictional world. Indeed, if some readers of the published version think of V. as misogynistic because it features an antiquated archetype of Woman and/or many contemporary sexist stereotypes, we should remember a very different kind of relatively strong woman character in the novel – relatively in the context of the novel’s 1950s present – namely, Rachel Owlglass.19 In revising the typescript, Pynchon smoothed out some inconsistencies in Rachel’s character: for example, by toning down some clumsy flirtatiousness, would-be manipulativeness, and a certain collegiate insipidity (Ts, pp. 180–82; cf. V, pp. 25–27), and by cutting out both a bit of racially charged banter and a set of pretentious circuitry metaphors (Ts, pp. 335–36; cf. V, p. 223).20 Rachel does have some inclination, up to a point, to romanticise the rolling stone Profane, for whom she appears to have a genuine affection. She wants him as a friend before she takes him as a lover. The ‘maverick daughter’ of sheltering wealth and privilege (Ts, p. 550; V, p. 358), she longs to hear about ‘your boy’s road that I’ll never see’, assuming he must know much about ‘the world’ she cannot know (Ts, p. 180; V, pp. 26–27).21 She is also ready to use her strength on his behalf (more than to take charge of him) when given the opportunity, Profane’s sense of being subject to her ‘umbilical tug’ on his yo-yo string revealing more about him than about her (Ts, pp. 3–4, 29; cf. V, p. 29). As much as Profane dreads encroachments of the inanimate – sometimes including, in his mind, Rachel (see, for example, Ts, pp. 174, 400, 550; V, pp. 24, 288, 359) – he wallows in his self-image as ‘a schlemihl, […] somebody who lies back and takes it from objects, like any passive woman’ (Ts, p. 399; V, p. 288). In fact, he also takes it like a sponge. Rather than cultivate complicated human relationships, he prefers to be ‘an object of mercy’ (Ts, p. 135; V, p. 137, our emphasis), and he can be ambivalent about the responsiveness of a sexual partner. He believes ‘inanimate money [is] to get animate warmth’ (Ts, p. 319; V, p. 214), but in the typescript he loses his desire for a prostitute when she responds energetically instead of remaining passive like his idea(l) of a virtual rape victim (see Ts, p. 169). At one point Profane even fantasises, ‘Someday, please God, there would be an all-electronic woman. Maybe her name would be Violet. Any problems with her, you could look it up in the maintenance manual’ (V, p. 385; cf. Ts, p. 586).22

Profane might be content for Rachel only to feed him, to become the same kind of stereotypically indulgent, selfless, there-to-serve Jewish mother as his actual mother apparently is (see Ts, p. 334; V, p. 222). We see the latter only in the abundant evidence of her ‘compulsion to feed’ literal appetite (Ts, pp. 578–79; V, p. 379). After Profane loses his job, he refuses to take responsibility for ‘two dependents’, even though one of them is himself (Ts, p. 579; V, p. 380).23 But while Rachel does have a few cringe-inducing lines, not all of which may be explainable as self-ironising, she eventually refuses merely to serve, to sacrifice her dignity, her integrity, or her independence to try to hold on to Profane.24 Thus the nuanced behaviour of this real character contrasts notably with the enigmatic fantasies Stencil develops in the historical chapters. This contrast highlights Pynchon’s awareness of character construction as a device to bring out the special practice of historiography, even if he seems keen to associate some of its more outré constructions only with Stencil.

We are sensitive to Hite’s assertion that Pynchon in V. necessarily shares in the pervasive sexism of mid-twentieth-century US culture and so is more apt to perpetuate the gender stereotypes of his time than to challenge them. But we do not assume Pynchon must subscribe to all the clichés his characters utter or enact, and we see him as (nearly) an equal-opportunity satirist: Paola is no more Pynchon’s ‘real woman’ than Stencil’s V. construct is, any more than the Randolph Scott whom Profane admires but cannot emulate (Ts, p. 135; V, pp. 136–37) is Pynchon’s ‘real man’. We recognise the justice of Mary Allen’s observations that weak male characters in US fiction of the period rarely seem as vapid or unsympathetic as weak female characters, and that men may even ‘project a kind of horrible blankness of the age onto the image of women, an idea epitomised in Pynchon’s V.’ (1976, p. 7). Yet we note that Allen herself goes on to acknowledge that ‘the women of V. are as corrupted but at least as interesting as their male counterparts’ (p. 40). Likewise, Hawthorne observes, on the one hand, that ‘although [Pynchon] satirises [extreme stereotypes of masculine domination], his satire itself is grounded in phallocentric attitudes’, and, on the other hand, that ‘few Second Wave Feminists drew a picture so demeaning of men in general’ (1997, pp. 81, 83). Thus we argue for a certain undecidability or ambivalence in Pynchon’s representations of men and women. In the case of the deleted sitcom, if we assume Pynchon understood that sitcoms were intended for an audience made up primarily of women, as Muriel G. Cantor’s ‘Prime-Time Fathers’ (1990) says they were, we may infer either that his satire comes down at least a little more heavily on the men than on the women or that he skewers this form of popular entertainment as harshly, perhaps indeed as misogynistically, as he does Mafia Winsome’s novels about ‘Heroic Love’ (Ts, p. 119; V, pp. 125–26).25

If the sitcom pastiche had remained part of the novel, it might have provided an additional signal that the White Goddess was an antiquated, no longer viable notion. But its presence in the 1956 plotline might also have complicated the issue, since there Pynchon seems intent on exhibiting a somewhat greater variety of gender roles. In any case, there was other (snide) social observation in the sitcom that made him want to delete it, and the Smith–Pynchon correspondence does not indicate that Pynchon regarded the sitcom characters as particularly significant to the rest of the novel. In fact, a remark in his letter to Smith of 24 March about the pointlessness of the stuffed monkey in ‘Millennium’ (see note 15 above) might imply that he was oblivious of any connection between the women of the sitcom and the V. figure in the historical chapters. But, obviously, Pynchon’s statements to Smith do not have to be taken as definitive, nor do they limit what readers may conclude.

One further reason Pynchon rejected the sitcom episode may be that it places more emphasis on the content of the medium and less on the effects of media, effects that would come increasingly to interest him. About how viewers consume and are affected (often negatively) by the media and whole media environment, Pynchon has, indeed, been acute from the start. Consider, for instance, Fergus Mixolydian’s making himself into ‘an extension of the TV set’ and Profane’s naive admiration for westerns in V. (Ts, pp. 64, 135, 399; V, pp. 56, 136–37, 288); the ‘nation of starers’ and the ‘fanatical movie hound’ Franz Pökler in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973, pp. 374, 577); Hector Zuñiga’s addiction to and Howie’s ‘feed[ing]’ from ‘the Tube’ in Vineland (1990, pp. 33, 236); Denis, Doc, and Jade’s rapt ‘gazing’ at a twenty-kilo package of heroin as if it were a television in Inherent Vice (2009, pp. 339–40); and the false or betrayed promise of the internet in Bleeding Edge (2013, passim). The sitcom in the typescript may have been a false start, but it was a promising start.