Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association

Abstract:

The Crying of Lot 49 overlays its obsession with delivery systems, cycles, and inheritance on its choice of protagonist, a young married woman propelled forward by a history that seems unreal into a future marked by simulacra. This lens allows for a reading of Crying wherein the search for meaning is gendered by Oedipa's bodily potentiality and her interactions with the world around her. Beginning with her return from the Tupperware party, her sexual gamble with Metzger, the novel's names, and its cyclic movement, Crying points to changing birth control technology and the ideological shifts this change both highlighted and circumvented. In this article, I use gender as a lens through which to examine Oedipa's historical and social position in Crying's Californian circuit. Furthermore, I argue that the text is driven by an anxiety over reproduction and replication. Internal and external, social factors at flux surround Oedipa with representations of meanings, institutional and structural meanings, and reproductive meanings that operate internally and externally, driving Oedipa along in her attempt to trace origins, track codes, and understand her own identity in a world of shifting reproductive choice. In this grammatical cacophony, the motifs of pregnancy and contraception, and themes, both economic and postal, highlight the way meaning refuses to mean, particularly in regard to Oedipa's identity in The Crying of Lot 49. (210)