Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) has been called “the most famous woman photographer” and “the finest woman photographer of our times.” Indeed, in a photographic career that spanned nearly five decades, Bourke-White demonstrated great professional versatility, registered many photographic firsts, and in a male-dominated field set standards by which others were measured. During the 1920s, Bourke-White carved out her first reputation in architectural and industrial photography. Her pictures of steel mills, shipyards, packing houses, logging camps, quarries, auto plants, skyscrapers, banks, and terminals captured the atmosphere of the industry and the dynamics of the capitalist system. Her industrial photography was of such outstanding quality that, as one critic observed, it “transformed the American factory into a Gothic cathedral.”

Henry Luce was so impressed by her early work that he hired her as the first photographer for his business magazine Fortune. Under a unique arrangement she was allowed six months out of the year to pursue her own private studio practice for advertising agencies and corporations. When Henry Luce added the pictorial magazine Life to his growing publishing empire in the 1930s, he selected Margaret Bourke-White to become one of the four original staff photographers. At Life she established the tradition of negatives printed full frame and proved by black borders, and pioneered the synchronized multiple flash picture. Bourke-White revealed the range of her photographic talents in photo essays, murals, and documentary travelogues. “As a result of her twelve- and fourteen-page essays,” Carl Mydans noted, “her monumental work became known throughout the world — beyond that of any other photographer.”

I often have heard boxing fans remark that the prize ring reveals life the way it really is. The elemental combat between two individuals, the primal physical struggle, the quest for glory and fear of humiliation, all contribute to the belief that men in the ring are in touch with life's underlying realities. Significantly, depicting “life the way it really is” is precisely the role anthropologist Clifford Geertz ascribes to religious worldviews. Religions, Geertz tells us, do not just buttress social systems or justify conditions as men and women find them. They also explain the way the world works, cut behind surface appearances, and offer visions of underlying order which give meaning to daily life. Through drama and ritual, religion depicts the “really real” with idealized clarity. Religious symbols unmask the way the universe is in sheer actuality and demonstrate the moving forces behind mundane affairs. The truism that America's popular religion is sports takes on new significance in light of Geertz' observation. And in the pantheon of the 1920s, no gods shone more brightly than the heroes of the ring.

“But he has no sense of history!” is a cry that is all too familiar in many Jamesian commentaries. The following essay attempts to provide a corrective to this complaint by reading Washington Square as a critique of a particular moment in the development of the bourgeois temperament. It is not insignificant that this is the only novel for which James chose a specific locale as a title, because historical time and geographical place are the issues which overtly confront the reader, to an extent (excepting The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima) insisted upon as nowhere else in James's works. The time is, predominantly, the difficult period of the late 1830s and early 1840s, and the place is that area of lower Manhattan which awkwardly bastions itself against contemporary turbulence.

Dr. Sloper's deliberate choices of resistence are carefully located within a changing landscape, choices which match the period of Manhattan's most rapid expansion whereby the Island below Canal Street was condensed by overwhelming commercial pressure.

Nineteenth century novelists felt constrained to supply their readers with well-chosen epigraphs, and the personal canons from which they drew them, whilst seldom exclusively Biblical, provided a convenient index to their individual literary and philosophical predilections. Thomas Pynchon's canon is wilfully idiosyncratic and frequently apocryphal, but his epigraphs are no less apposite than George Eliot's; for in creating a fictional world out of what is largely palpable history Pynchon produces a homogenous medium which is neither fiction nor history. I have chosen the epigraph above because in addition to illustrating this admixture of fiction and history it also intimates to the reader an aspect of Pynchon's technique which may go some way towards explaining the rationale behind it. Some parts of Gravity's Rainbow, I think, might best be described as an attempt at writing a twentieth century “gospel.”

The Oxyrhynchus papyri, referred to in the epigraph actually exist. They were discovered in 1898 and 1904 in Egypt, and were fragments of purported sayings of Jesus of Nazareth dating from the second century A.D. Not until 1956, when the translation of a gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammedai in Egypt was completed, did it become clear that the Oxyrhynchus papyri were fragments of a work calling itself the Gospel of Thomas.