Oedipa as Androgyne in Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49"

Abstract

Androgyny, the perfect union in one person of characteristics conventionally designated as either male or female, can never, in a sexist society, be perfect. Moreover, because our culture has traditionally insisted that women are less capable than men and that their lives are more determined by biology, the female hero must find the road to any approximation of androgyny more difficult and more distant than does her male counterpart. This was true in our past. The mythic tradition of the androgyne is, as Barbara C. Gelpi has argued, definitely one-sided. We see numerous nearly perfect men completing themselves by symbolically absorbing selected aspects of femaleness but very few women who act in a converse fashion.' And the present is little different. C. G. Jung, one of the most notable recent proponents of the androgynous vision, insists, for example, that the man who would achieve psychic harmony must integrate himself and his anima. The woman, however, should as diligently strive to repress her animus. The newly androgynous but nevertheless wholly male man must maintain, Jung argues, a delicate balance that will, apparently, be easily upset by an encounter with a woman not suitably-i.e., passively-feminine.2 Clearly, even in terms of its