DIANA TRILLING
519
quantities of Vuiton luggage, confidence-ra ising personal secretaries,
and silicone inj ecti ons, no t to mention a variety of French omelette
pans geared to the size o f the entertainment. But even the less well-fixed
heroine lives in unspecifi ed solvency: money is never a problem, let
alone
th e
problem. Whil e the enterp ri se of fema le self-discovery may
not be solely a middl e- bracket phenomenon , the imagina ti on of
selfhood and o f freedom in these novels is an imaginati on of selfhood
and freedom as adumbra ti on s of middl e-class sta tu s and security. And
educa tion is simil a rly status-linked. The talk , when it is no t of sex and
self, is of Descan es and geneti cs, of anthropo logy and archeology. But
why no t?
If
Pynchon can go on as h e does with the postal system of
T hurm and Taxis and with hi s in-j okes about J acobean drama, surely
women h ave the ri ght to as k equal time for their displays of learnin g.
And finally there is th e sexual experience itself and what it revea ls
or suggests about th e na ture of contempora ry culture. Although sexual
desire and potency, both in men and in women, were subj ects expli citl y
dealt with in med ieva l and Renaissan ce writing, usuall y with special
emphasis on the ferocity of female sexual des ire, the moral design of
bourgeo is life as it took shape after the seventeenth century no longer
permitted thi s image o f women. Women changed from bein g an asset
to being a property, and it was in men , the proprietors, tha t sexual
power a nd need came to be excl usively vested. I alluded earli er to the
sexol ogies tha t appea red in the earl y years of thi s century, restoring
women to their full but now cautio usly supervised p lace in the anima l
kingdom . These manua ls parall el in the sph ere o f sex th e many other
effo rts of social renovation which were fo rmul a ted in Victorian
thought. There had developed a sha rp divi sion between bad women
and good , prostitutes and wives, whi ch failed to comport with the
egalitarian emoti on s which had begun to mo bilize themselves aga in st
the socia l injusti ces of the entrenched bourgeois order.
If
for no o ther
reason than tha t thi s rift encouraged the sexual explo ita ti on of the
poor, it had to be hea led. Even a t the ri sk of an ex treme of hi stori cal
over-simplifi ca tion , I think that our women's movement of the sixti es
and the seventi es mu st be viewed as yet ano ther step in the egalitarian
process initia ted a century ago. And if wha t started as soc ial reformism
has now become a revoluti on whose suita bl e slogan could be " Expro–
p ri a te the exp ropri ators," well, tha t's what happens when push comes
to shove.
But the unhappy fact is tha t like other kinds o f revolution, sexual
revolution a lso has its T hennidor: o ne is libera ted to a new tyrann y.
Certainl y it is diffi cult to find the sex ual analog to democracy or even
