Implicit Rape and Female Consent in Thomas Pynchon’s V

Abstract

Over the years, Thomas Pynchon’s writing has been deemed sexist or misogynistic. Pynchon’s explicit sexual imagery, in particular, has been the topic of much debate. In one of his first famous novels, V., Pynchon includes a description of a surgery that seems to have many parallels with and much of the symbolism of such writings, without explicitly calling it rape. As the decision to include undertones of sexual violence have meaning regarding the author’s stance on rape and female consent, there is merit to a comparison between this scene and the many rapes or rape-coded scenes in the rest of the novel. With a detailed analysis of the surgery scene as a base point, and the other scenes as clues into his stance on rape and female consent, we can construct an image of any obscured misogyny in Pynchon’s early work.