i n f i n i t e    s u m m e r

I think Joelle's Madame Psychosis voice is something she affects for the show. In the section about how she and Orin met it says she always had a weird kind of flat intonation but that she still sounded like she was from Kentucky. I think the Madame P voice extended from that flatness, but when Mario met her she probably sounded Kentuckian. Maybe one of the reasons he likes the show so much is that her voice is familiar, but not familiar enough to be recognizable.

But... isn't Joelle credited as Madame Psychosis in all the films? If her voice didn't give her away, that would, right?

Familiar + foreign = uncanny, like you described in another post!

was just re-reading the first scene where Joelle and Gately talk (531-38) and was struck by how she seemed to start the scene with a heightening of her Kentucky accent, then noticed that Gately calls her on seeming to change her voice when she is trying to avoid certain topics ("you're all of a sudden talking different again" 536), so dioramaorama is probably right that her radio voice is a bit of a purposeful affectation/veil -- after all, this is a woman who does a radio show from behind a screen!

Which means that her affected voice/accent while on the radio as Madame Psychosis is also just another veil from which she hides behind!

Still don't know but this is pretty compelling evidence that she was disfigured. If there was no incident, others might assume she was hiding her beauty/sadness/something non-flung-acid-caused. We've all mentioned earlier the flung acid references. She wasn't veiled when she was the P.G.O.A.T. There's no corroboration of her still being flawless, post-veil; it's her word against nobody's.
And, Hal is not necessarily narrating here, since 634's paragraph is about him, but not necessarily by him.

Plausible deniability all 'round, but I am even more convinced now that she veils a physical facial alteration.

So what to make, then, of the reference in the JVD suicide-attempt scene:

" ... deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl of All Time ..." (p239)

I'm still confused.

I was guessing she had to take off her veil to do the show (imagine her talking into one of those big microphones that you sit right up close to; the veil might flutter and hit it and make noise or something), but she didn't want the technician to see her unveiled, because of her ugliness/beauty (pick one).

Well, PGOAT says it herself. She is so pretty that she is deformed. I'm going with this because of the parallel it draws to the section of Canada that we're chucking garbage into. It eats up all the garbage, and is said to be too lush to support life.
This is all wrapped up into one of the major themes of the book, which is beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Mario is probably the most beautiful character in the story, and he is deformed. Etc, Etc.

I'm starting to understand the beauty of this book. When you can take an issue like JVD's appearance and spin a thread of this length off of something that is not even really a central issue to the book. It makes you appreciate the breadth, width, and complexity of the work.

That preamble aside I am still casting a vote for P.G.O.A.T. being disfigured.

PS.
Anyone interested in the effects of feminine beauty on men needs to familiarize them self with the 1933 film Babyface starring Barbara Stanwyck. Interesting on many levels; I caught it on TCM last weekend and it made me think of JVD.

I like the idea that it doesn't matter if Joelle is horrendously disfigured or horrendously beautiful. It does end up being all the same.

On previous readings (this is my third), I'd had the theory that somehow the acid throw had made her even more beautiful than she had been previously.