scandal of a peasant youth courting an aristocratic woman. The homosexual comedy distracts us from this more disturbing sociological anxiety, and is dismissed back into mere appearance when it comes time for us to learn, to our class relief, that the girl in question, far from being a noblewoman, was in reality merely the porter’s niece! These two related diachronic or intertextual constructs, then, allow us to reread the text, synchronically, as the coexistence, contradiction, structural hierarchy, or uneven development of a number of distinct narrative systems; and it is the possibility of
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Text as a relieving and a reinforcing of ideological stress. Art as a means for a society to reinforce its taboos and structures. Here he takes a queer reading and a gender/power reading of the text as means of making egalitarianism a means of comedy to undermine their validity.
