Our reading “set” toward the social and historical interpretations which can be allegorically derived from the narrative is thus something like a lateral by-product of our initial attention to the sexual comedy; but this allegorical by-product, once established, reorients the narrative around its new interpretive center, retroactively returning upon the sexual farce to assign it a henceforth marginalized place in the narrative structure, where it comes to seem a relatively inessential or arbitrary “bonus of pleasure.”
