This is not an isolated example. For instance, Doctor Faustus in Marlowe's play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, perhaps one of the best known dramas of the English Renaissance,
is an atheist hero struggling against the evil power of religion (or something like that), according to my students. I have tried to point out to my students that this interpretation is somewhat unlikely (for one thing, if Marlowe made Faustus an atheist hero to express his own atheism, he would have been risking his life since atheism was a capital offense in Elizabethan England). Nonetheless, even after this, I still find such interpretations appearing in my students' writing. Furthermore, certain literary works seem to be favored to the extent they can be interpreted in an ideologically correct way. For example, Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a favored text because it is (supposedly) a critique of industrial capitalism, as is Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter since it puts the Puritans specifically and religion in general in a bad light. Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby is also popular because it is about the illusionary nature of the "American Dream." Given how strongly such ideas have been inculcated into them, I suspect I will be dealing with this phenomenon for some time to come., despite my best efforts to have my students adapt a more nuanced approach to literature.