ABSTRACT
The image of John Bunyan on the postcard is, of course, a representation of a representation. The postcard re-presents a twentieth-century representation of a scene from the seventeenth century. Bunyan's 'universal', 'wondrous' text is presented by Offor as a gift to diverse races, characterised in different ways, as 'enlightened', 'savage' or 'voluptuous' recipients of divine truth translated into their own languages. Bunyan's "wondrous narrative' and 'universal language', to employ Offor's terms, clearly had limitations as a means of enlisting at least one colonial subject. The key to the possibility of different readings of the position of women, and of other subjects, from that ostensibly offered in Bunyan's texts may lie, paradoxically, in the attempts in the texts to enforce correct reading. Bunyan's insistence that his supplementary marginal texts serve to illuminate his main texts, just as his writings as a whole, in supplementing the Word, serve to enlighten the reader, may be read as an attempt to police interpretation.
