Women in GR

Throughout my reading of the novel, female characters have at times appeared to be within a slightly chauvinistic framework, but I think that this idea is all around quite limited. The common thread of the most significant female characters in the story is their relationship with whiteness and Light. First and foremost, white is the color of Death in Gravity's Rainbow, which is most significantly seen in the character Blicero or Captain Weissman (literally "white man") who is the director of V-2 manufacturing. The color white weaves in and out of the story, casting light on landscapes in the novel, and is exuded by several characters. What's interesting here is that within the context of women in GR, white gears away from a virginesque meaning, and transforms these characters into vessels that link the living to the Other World. This theme is most prevalent in the characters Katje Borgesius, Greta Erdman and her daughter Bianca.

We discover Katje as an agent of the White Visitation. Pynchon fleshes out her personal history, Blicero's using her as a sexual device along with Gottfried and her wide knowledge of mathematics. After her escape she meets Pirate against "an enormous sky all sea-cloudes in full march, all and plum, behind her, detects danger in her loneliness, realizes he's never heard her name, not till the meeting by the windmill known as 'The Angel'" (106), which completely frames her as a preternatural being. Through Pirate she eventually comes to help Osbie Feel in order to seduce Slothrop through a staged octopus attack. Her eventual sexual relationship with Slothrop reveals her mysterious qualities, "Katje's skin is whiter than the white garment she rises from. Born again..." (196). She is rather angelic here ("her fair eyebrows, plucked to wings" 224), and this enigma gives way to her slight omniscience that is exhibited by her physical being. The white of her skin and radiance portray her as a bridge between the concrete world and the paranormal. Beyond her glowing whiteness Slothrop is able to see another side that exists inside her:

"the moonlight only whitens her back, and there is still a dark side, her ventral side, her face, that he can no longer see, a terrible beastlike change coming over muzzle and lower jaw, black pupils growing to cover the entire eye space till whites are gone and there's only the red animal reflection when the light comes to strike" (196)

As we see here, the intimacies between Katje and Tyrone convey an unfamiliarity in Katje's being. While the moon reflects her angelic essence, the obscurity of light reveals her dark energy, which may function as an anti-gravitational force that could possibly challenge the Rocket. Katje's mystical traits illustrate her as having a power beyond this world, she is of "the Other Order of Being" (222). When she turns away from Slothrop in their post-coital state, Slothrop is more in tune with the hidden realities of her character.

Much later after Katje abandons Slothrop, he finds himself in the Zone and meets the former German actress Greta "Margherita" Erdman in Neubalbelsberg, and later aboard the Anubis, her daughter Bianca. He learns of Greta's self-proclamation as Shekhinah, the female representation of God in Judaic mysticism. She proclaims that "my home is the form of Light," which reveals her feminine god-like presence. As Shekhinah, Greta embodies the light of God but also contains dark side, which makes her vulnerable to evil powers. She then wreaks destruction by murdering children. Bianca is another White goddess that Slothrop keeps on trying to maintain a firm grasp on. Her power over Slothrop during intercourse forces him to feel as though he is "inside his own cock" (470). Her omniscience is exhibited through sex, "she has him all figured out" (469). After Bianca's disappearance Slothrop feels the same void as he did after Katje left him. Encountering Bianca's dead body, Slothrop sees the "mortal possibilities for light" (532), in other words, the extent at which this Light, which seems to be immortal, can have a demise.