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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Thomas pynchon's oedipa maas sees in the Varo triptych echoes of her own Rapunzel-like state, her world a tower from which Pierce Inverariety has ineffectually tried to rescue her. Pynchon does not comment on the other two panels of the triptych. In the first, the young women (more slender than frail) file away on bicycles from their conventlike towers – out for exercise or a trip to town; in the last, one of the maidens departs with her knight of deliverance. Nor does Pynchon observe that in the middle panel the young women, embroidering the tapestry of the world in their communal solitude, create the world. In which panel, one might ask, are the young women most free?
The work of Remedios Varo is filled with women in towers; spinning, weaving, writing poetry, composing music – creating the world. All of the women are the same woman. She frightens Pynchon. “Such a captive maiden,” he writes, “soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant.”
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