Conclusion

Abstract

Reading and writing give us some power to think or to avoid thinking about our experience of the world. ‘Politics’ in marriage, at work, or even in government, is about power — how it is exerted or experienced by one person in relation to another, or by one group in relation to another group. So when women read a work of fiction, they are engaged in a political act by which they might gain or lose power, depending on how and what they read. The effect of a work of fiction in increasing or decreasing our power depends on the level of our competence as critical readers. Women, who now live politically under a late decadent patriarchy in which a fortunate minority of women have been co-opted as honorary men, must adopt a reading strategy whereby we examine to what extent each work of fiction supports the structure of unequal power relationships between men and women or to what extent the fiction subverts this unequal structure.