IVIV (12): 195-197

[alice wellintown]

> After all as Keith says it's fiction and fiction needs conflict if not
> between  characters then between ideas.

And there is plenty of both to go around in those P-texts. The
political reading is, as politics always is, an approach that can not
abide the plurality of readings or any other disciplne that would
claim a higher ground. But in a Romance, it is the imaginative reading
that is closest to "the truth of the human heart". The scientific
reading of texts and the world is satirized in P-texts. This is a
standard in Romance. That the political readers would dismiss an
imaginative reading of a Romance, of a fiction, by attacking the woman
and not the argument, exposes them. The ideas are poetic, are
fictionalized. The stuff of imagination and dream. To reduce a text to
its political hammer blows is a obtuse. A blunt instrument can not a
poem open.