his or her own meaning to the text. Ronald Nash identifies the touchstone proposition of deconstruction as this: “It is impossible ever to know the meaning of any written text.”22 For literary deconstruction, language itself is an arbitrary, social construct that is often used as a tool of oppression. Borrowing some ideas from Marxist thought, deconstructionists argue the path to liberation and freedom is to throw off the constraints of language, particularly in relation to gender. In our current