ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book considers the freedom of readers to interpret texts in the way suggested to them by their particular situations. It demonstrates that Le Dernier Stendhal's texts lend themselves very easily to a sympathetic reading of heroines that have often been seen as unsympathetic or unworthy of the love of heroes and readers alike. The book argues that Stendhal's independent young heroines can be understood to enact a mode of freedom that is recognizably grounded in the science of Ideology, by which the author was heavily influenced, while also anticipating the thinking of French existentialism. But all of Stendhal's young and fearless heroines have something of Hans Holbein's anamorphic skull about them. However, Stendhal's fiction places the feminist reader in an unusual position, because it gives extraordinarily free rein to strong and fearless heroines.
