[Heikki Raudaskoski]

OBA's later works tend to, well, engender more essentialist, direct
interpretations that are often based on characterization rather than,
e.g., the narrative structure [and/or, say, the baffling movement of
signifiers, what have you...]

These more traditional, often moral critical ways of reading are
arguably not as easy to apply to, say, _V._.  And yet - even if
_V._ were neither feminist nor anti-feminist in any direct way,
it is, nevertheless, emphatically about the question of woman.
As Alice Jardine writes in _Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and
Modernity_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985):

"_V._ is a novel *about* interpretation, *about* the possibilities
and impossibilities of "making sense," of "making plots." And it
is *a* woman who is at the source of those (im)possibilities.
_V._ is about how a woman is narrative's problem, about how a
woman is the object of the subject-in-narrative's quest. This
woman is, however, not a "character" in the novel. Rachel
Owlglass, Paola Maijstral, Charisma, and Esther pose only
traditional problems for now traditional antiheroes. The woman
who serves as matrix for this novel about interpretation may
or may not exist; does and does not exist; must and yet cannot
exist if narrative is to continue." (247)


Heikki