Why would I avoid steak and eggs over ricin being somewhere else?
You’re foundering in the middle of your all-or-nothing mentality. Furthermore, this discussion isn’t about a work shot through with images of debauchery, which I’d naturally avoid, but about a work that was just fair, on it’s own being tarnished after completion by its own author; her dropping the ricin into the tank, if you will.
So, what once I’d have consumed unhesitatingly has now been rendered non-potable.
Tewnty thousand Leagues Under the Sea was pretty good writing, and I don’t recall any subsequent discussion by the author about Nemo’s sexuality.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been a lasting favorite, despite the fact that Twain never explored the sexual relations between Tom and Huck, Tom and Becky, or Huck and Jim.
Only in a modern University could you even remotely hope to find the kind of twisted minds that would go back and do such things all these years down the road; there’d be some class like “Hidden Homosexuality In World Literature: Coming Out of the Library”.
Who needs it? Why take a completed work and go back to try and sully it with repulsive suppositions?
Yet, here we have, not some voyeur of a Lit prof, but the author, herself, introducing the poison into her own inkwell, or, perhaps as she more likely intends, revealing that it was there, all along; at least in her mind.
So, you’re there with the half-empty glass at yourlips, and I come around the corner and tell you, “Oh, by the way, there’s Ricin in that water.”
Now what do you do; keep drinking?? Invite others to imbibe with you?? Malign the one who hangs the “NON-POTABLE” sign at the spigot??
I’d think you would do the first, yet you are here, on this thread, doing the last.