European Scientific Journal July 2017 edition Vol.13, No.

20 ISSN: 1857 – 7881 (Print) e - ISSN 1857- 7431

The Concept of Ideology in Marxist Literary

Criticism

Lutfi Hamadi, (PhD)

Lebanese University, Lebanon

doi: 10.19044/esj.2017.v13n20p154 URL:http://dx.doi.org/10.19044/esj.2017.v13n20p154

Abstract
This paper attempts an exploration of the development of the Marxist
literary theory in general and the concept of ideology in particular. Showing
the significant role this theory plays in the field of literary criticism, the
paper focuses on remarkable Marxist figures, explores their most notable
works, and sheds light on their contributions to the theory and the field of
literary criticism. For this purpose, the paper starts with basic Marxist
principles of reading literature set by Marx and Engels and examines the
changes that occurred with other critics, mainly Althusser, Jameson, and
Eagleton in their attempts to show the importance of ideology in explaining
literature and understanding its backgrounds, goals, and methods. Thus, the
methodology will include an historical overview, shedding light on early
Marxist perspectives, comparing and contrasting the contributions and
adjustments added by remarkable Marxist thinkers, and illustrating by
examples of literary texts and how they are seen and analyzed by these
Marxist scholars.

Keywords: Ideology, Marxism, Literary Criticism

Introduction
Literary criticism in Western universities has been profoundly altered
in the last few decades to the extent that it seems it has almost become
impossible to restrict criticism to pointing out the beauties in poems, novels,
plays, or even in paintings and architecture. An academic critic nowadays
has to make it clear whether his point of view is structuralist, semiotic,
deconstructionist, psychoanalytical, feminist, or Marxist. According to
Raman Selden in Theory of Criticism (1988), ‘The Moderns appear to regard
traditional critics (even new critics) as prehistoric moles working in the dark
before the dawn of” (1) these new theories. Because of the increasingly
significant role Marxism has been playing in literary criticism, this paper is
an attempt to throw light on Marxist literary criticism in general and on the

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development of the concept of ideology in the works of Marx, Althusser,

Jameson, and Eagleton in particular.
Concerning methodology, several methods will be consistently
employed in this study, mainly the comparative method, which will be
extensively used to show the similarities and differences in the Marxist
thinkers’ points of view while tracing the development that Marxist literary
theory has undergone. Consequently, this method is necessary to compare
and contrast such views in order to examine, interpret, and conclude.
Historical materials and allusions will be employed in order to shed light on
the influence of the dominating ideology during a certain period on the
literary works of this or that period. Besides, this study will be supported by
a number of examples of such works, showing how they were interpreted by
Marxist thinkers or other critics, a fact that necessitates the use of books and
articles written by major theorists and scholars.

I.
Marxism views works of literature or art as the products of historical
forces that can be studied by looking at the material conditions in which they
are produced. This theory generally focuses on the conflict between the
dominant and repressed classes in any given age. In other words, Marxist
literary theory starts from the assumption that literature must be understood
in relation to historical and social reality of a certain society.
As a matter of fact, Marxist literary theory has passed through a
variety of changes and developed by a notable group of critics since Marx
and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848. In his Twentieth
Century Literary Theory: A Reader (1997), K. M. Newton distinguishes
between Marxist and Neo-Marxist criticism, saying that the most direct form
of Marxist criticism, or the so-called ‘vulgar’ criticism, takes the view that
‘there is a straightforward deterministic relation between base and
superstructure” (158). The base, to Marxists, is the economic system on
which the superstructure rests, while cultural activities, including philosophy
and literature, belong in the superstructure. Marx believes that because the
superstructure is determined by the base, it inevitably supports the ideologies
of the base. Ideologies are the changing ideas, values, and feelings through
which individuals experience their societies. They present the dominant ideas
and values as the beliefs of society as a whole, thus preventing individuals
from seeing how society actually functions. Literature, according to
Marxists, is a form of ideology, one that legitimizes the power of the ruling
class. In A Critique of The German Ideology (1846), Marx emphasize that
Marxist critics have to tackle literature, literary education, criticism, and
theory as integral parts of economic, political, and social life, not produced

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by totally independent writers. “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of

consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and
the material intercourse of men, the language of real life” (9). To Marx,
‘ideology critique’ is the exposure of how class interests really operate
through cultural forms, whether political, legal, religious, philosophical,
educational, or literary. According to Leitch in The Norton Anthology of
Theory and criticism (2001), Marx believes that ideology tries to hide “the
reality of class struggle from our perception and consciousness; and insofar
as working-class people unconsciously absorb bourgeois values, they are
unwitting carriers of ‘false consciousness’” (762). Because such ideologies
do not usually show themselves clearly and directly in literary works, a critic
should less analyze what a text says than what it does not say. Marx believed
that all mental systems, or ideologies, were the products of social and
economic realities. Thus, to Marxism, analysis and understanding of a
literary work has to refer to the modes of production in a certain society
during a certain historical period. In Economic Manuscripts (1863), Marx
argues that "A writer is a productive labourer not in so far as he produces
ideas, but in so far as he enriches the publisher who publishes his works, or if
he is a wage-labourer for a capitalist" (304). Relating literature to the
prevailing social and economic conditions in his Introduction to the Critique
of Political Economy (1859), Marx compares Greek art to that of the present
time showing that the importance of mythology (not the Egyptian, for
example), and nature in the Greek culture made it possible for them to
produce certain forms of art. Then Marx asks, “Is the conception of nature
and of social relations which underlies Greek imagination and therefore
Greek (art) possible when there are self-acting mules, railways, locomotives
and electric telegraphs” (128)?
Therefore, according to Marx, the history of humankind is that of
struggle between social classes, where what is considered the culture, or the
superstructure of a certain society is actually the articulations of the
dominant class. In the Communist Manifesto (1848), as S. S. Sprawer writes
in Karl Marx and World Literature (1978), the term literature refers to "the
body of technical books, pamphlets, etc., that treat a given subject, and the
writers who produce it” (140). According to the Manifesto, with the
emergence of the bourgeois and their arrival to power, the aristocracies
found a serious political struggle out of the question, so "a literary battle
alone remained possible" (141), thus starting to write pamphlets against
modern bourgeois society. The Manifesto asserts that literature is turned to
serve the ideology of the dominant class __ the bourgeoisie in this case __ that
"has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of
science, into its paid wage labourers" (142). So, for Marx, literature is not a
separate, self-enclosed region, and literary works are not isolated from social

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and political conditions. The Manifesto goes further to show how the
bourgeoisie has changed modes of production surpassing national boundaries
to every quarter of the globe, turning literature in the process to a world
literature. Leitch sees that ideology, according to Marxism, "consists of the
ideas, beliefs, forms, and values of the ruling class that circulate through all
the cultural spheres" (14). He adds that culture and arts in the Marxist view
can never be innocent entertainment, nor can they be independent of social
forces, as they play a significant role in relaying ideology.
Benefiting from the advances in various sciences, a succeeding
generation of Marxist thinkers and critics pursued the effort to extend and
systematize the theoretical work of Marx and Engels. Among these
remarkable names are Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin. Georg Lukacs,
Theodore Adorno, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson
and Terry Eagleton. These and other Marxist thinkers have developed both
the positive and negative senses of ideology. Gramsci, for example,
describes ideology in his Prison Notebooks as "the terrain on which men
move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc." (qtd in Leitch
762). Nevertheless, he also contends that by using ideology, those in power
can attain cultural hegemony and their thoughts and values prevail.
The concept of ideology has been a central idea in the works of
several Marxist critics, mainly Althusser, Jameson, and Eagleton for its
influential role in literary criticism. These critics, however, haven't restricted
their ideas to the basic cultural constructions of Marxist thought, as they
have also contributed to the diversity of Marxist intellectual life, enriching
and developing its inherited canon. According to Mulhern, "'contemporary
Marxist literary criticism' is not a stable entity, or even a phase in the history
of a settled lineage" (2).
The French theorist Louis Althusser (1918-1990) was well-known for
his anti-humanist Marxism, where his essay "Marxism and Humanism"
(1964) condemns ideas like "human potential" and "species-being," which
are often put forth by Marxists, considering them as an outcome of a
bourgeois ideology of "humanity." In this respect, Vincent Leitch believes
that "Althusser's interventions changed the face of Western Marxist theory,
shattering the pieties of Stalinist dogmatism and the newer Marxist
humanism." (1476). Instead of humanism which stresses human freedom and
self-determination, Althusser emphasizes the scientific aspects of Marxism,
"in particular its investigation of how societal structures determine lived
experience" (1476). In For Marx (1965), Althusser sees that art is something
between science and ideology, the latter being a representation of the
imaginary relationship of individuals to the real conditions of their existence.
Art, for him, is therefore not entirely a fiction, nor of course the view of its

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author. In his most influential essay "Ideology and Ideological State

Apparatuses" (1970), Althusser analyzes how controlling social systems
shape human subjects through ideology, believing that both the base and
superstructure are intertwined. He asserts that our desires, choices,
intentions, preferences, judgments and so forth are the consequences of
social practices, so it is necessary to realize how society makes the individual
in its own image. Like Marx, he thinks that our values are inculcated in us by
ideological practice, thus constituting individuals as subjects. So, to him, the
human individual in capitalist societies is regarded as being able to see
himself as a conscious responsible agent. Yet, as a matter of fact, this is,
definitely, not an innate property, but is rather acquired or even imposed on
him within the structure of established social practices. To shed more light
on this perspective, Althusser explains how capitalism reproduces the labor
power it needs through not only wages but also outside production by the
capitalist education system, and by other instances and institutions.
To Althusser, what children learn at school is a number of techniques
"of 'scientific' or 'literary culture', which are directly useful in the different
jobs in production" (Leitch 1485). In other words, the education system, as
well as other ideological ‘apparatuses’ such as the church and the army,
devised by the ruling class, teaches subjects how to be morally and
professionally useful to this system through "rules of respect for socio-
technical division of labour and ultimately the rules of the order established
by class domination" (1485). This simply means subjugation to the rules of
the established order and sincere performance of their duty towards the
system. All these institutions generate ideologies, which we as individuals
then internalize and act in accordance with, having the illusion that we are in
control, and that we are free to believe the things we believe. But the truth,
according to Althusser, is that the material alienation of real conditions
drives people to form representations, to make up stories, and invent
illusions that distance them from these real conditions.
An essential aspect of Althusser's perspectives is the relationship of
his theory of ideology to literature. A literary work, as production of
ideology, also constitutes us as subjects and speaks to us directly, exactly as
a commercial does and makes us feel that it is addressing us personally. So,
dominant ideology works through the messages of the mass media, which
means that ideologies exist in the very 'apparatuses' and practices of the
cultural institutions of the dominant forces __ the state. Through such media,
individuals believe they are willingly and freely participating in certain
practices such as voting, not realizing they are subjected by ideology.
Althusser calls this 'interpellation', as ideology interpellates individuals as
subjects through, say, a literary work, which addresses them directly or
indirectly by some mechanism or another.

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Perhaps the best work in which Althusser's explains the relationship

between literature and ideology is "A Letter on Art in Reply to Andre'
Daspre" (1966). Admitting that this is a very complicated and difficult
relationship, he sees that this necessitates an understanding of hegemony.
Suggesting that ideology and hegemony, like literature, reconstruct reality
without necessarily reflecting the actual conditions of life, he believes that
literature may be located within ideology, but it can also be kept at bay from
it, allowing the reader to gain an awareness of the ideology on which it is
based. So a novel may present the world in a way that seems to support
dominant ideologies, but, as a work of fiction, it may also reveal those
ideologies. Thus, literature neither merely reflects ideology, nor can it be
reduced to it. In other words, Althusser rejects the notion that art works are
wholly determined by socio-economic forces, arguing that they have a
relative autonomy determined by a complex set of factors. Advising the
reader to read carefully Pierre Macherey's article, "Linen as a Critic of
Tolstoy", Althusser reasons that authentic art makes us feel, see, or perceive
something that alludes to reality, but it doesn't make us know reality. Unlike
science, according to Althusser, what art "gives to us in the form of 'seeing',
'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not the form of knowing), is the ideology
from which it is born, and to which it alludes" (Leitch, 1480). He asserts that
ideology slides into human activity, and that it is identical with the lived
experience of human existence itself. He contradicts the saying that Balzac,
for example, was forced by the logic of his art to abandon certain of his
political conceptions in his work as a novelist, asserting that Balzac's
peculiar "reactionary political positions played a decisive part in the
production of the content of his work…. Only because he retained them
could he produce his work, only because he stuck to his political ideology
could he produce in it this internal 'distance' which gives us a critical 'view'
of it" (1482). Althusser concludes that while reading a work of art, and in
order to know the mechanisms which produce the aesthetic effect, we should
spend a long time and pay the greatest attention to the basic principles of
Marxism; otherwise, what we will get to is not knowledge, but “ideology of
art” (1483).
In short, before Althusser, Marxist criticism was mainly of interest to
those committed to Marxism as a system, but with him, Marxist criticism has
had a much wider influence, having in mind that Marxist thinking has
reached productive interaction with other sets of ideas. Newton assures that
"Althusser's work created mental space for critics who were sympathetic to
the political aims of Marxism but unhappy at the restrictive nature of most
earlier Marxist criticism" (159).

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Among the notable critical figures influenced by Althusser is the

American literary critic and Marxist political theorist Fredric Jameson (1934-
). According to Newton, Jameson has been much influenced by Althusserian
concepts, and he supports using Marxism together with contemporary
theories such as post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, but he differs from
Althusser by believing in the Hegelian totalizing type since, for him,
"Marxism can subsume and incorporate within itself all other forms of
thought" (159).
Influenced by several other Marxist thinkers, Jameson is best known
for the analysis of contemporary cultural trends, viewing cultural criticism as
an integral feature of Marxist theory. He has been concerned to show
Marxism's relevance to current philosophical and literary trends, thus his
involvement in Western Marxism, which, unlike the vulgar Marxist view of
ideology, sees that the culture "superstructure" is not totally determined by
the economic base. Using the Hegelian concept of immanent critique, new
Western Marxists believe that the best way to analyze and criticize a
philosophical or cultural text is to employ the same terms used by the text
itself. Jameson believes that cultural objects must be understood according to
cultural rules, arguing that careful and detailed analysis of cultural practices
would reveal the interrelation between culture and economic realities.
Believing that mainstream in literary and academic life is tending toward
detachment from reality, he agrees on neither studying the work of art
separated from the context of its production, nor restrictively using the
structuralist method and the anti-historical formalism. So he insists that the
work of art should be seen in terms of historical literary practices and norms,
not merely in purely aesthetic terms. In this respect, he criticizes, but does
not reject, postmodernism on the basis that it suffers from a crisis in
historicity while trying to show that what is done in the lived experience has
nothing to do with history. In interviews with Jameson, excerpts from which
are published on the Stanford Presidential Lectures Website, he criticizes the
approach of teaching literature to undergraduates, believing that students
never really confront the text in all its material freshness. On the contrary,
they analyze it depending on a whole set of previously acquired and
culturally sanctioned interpretive methods, or ideologies, which are proposed
to them. He suggests using what he calls "the fruitful Althusserian concept"
and "make those interpretations visible, as an object, as an obstacle rather
than a transparency, and thereby encouraging the student's self-
consciousness as to the operative power of such unwitting schemes, which
our tradition calls ideologies" (1). Consequently, Jameson affirms, the
student's first confrontation with a classic by Conrad, for example, doesn't at
all involve an unmediated contact with the object itself, "but only an illusion
of contact, whose terminus turns out to be a whole range of interpretive

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options, from the existential one … all the way to ethics" (1). Jameson
concludes that using these various liberal ideologies contribute to the
repression of the social and the historical, and "in the perpetuation of some
timeless and a historical view of human life and social relations" (1). What
he calls for is a critical struggle which is more moralistic, and which takes a
more combative position in order to "restore a presence of social struggle to
texts, some of which may be exceedingly rarefied" (2).
In his article "Fredric Jameson", Douglas Kellner analyzes Jameson's
first published book, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961), seeing that
Jameson attempts to enforce himself as a critical intellectual against the
conformist currents of the epoch. Kellner believes that Jameson turns against
the literary establishment, and that all Jameson's works "constitute critical
interventions against the hegemonic forms of literary criticism and modes of
thought regnant in the Anglo-American world" (1). Not unlike Althusser,
Jameson has shifted his focus from a vertical emphasis on the many
dimensions of a text, "its ideological, psychoanalytic, formal, mythic-
symbolic levels … to a horizontal emphasis on the ways texts are inserted
into historical sequences and on how history enters and helps constitute
texts” (2). Although Jameson has used a wide range of theories in his literary
studies such as Structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and
postmodernism, Marxism remains the master narrative of Jameson's corpus,
in which he criticizes "the ideological components of cultural texts, while
setting forth their utopian dimension" in an attempt to "produce criticism of
existing society and visions of a better world" (2).
In the introduction to his remarkable book Theory and the Novel
(1998), Jeffrey J. Williams explores how different critical theories, including
Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, and postmodernism, analyze classic
novels according to specific limited methods, emphasizing the role of
ideology in such texts and critics' attempts to deconstruct and analyze this
role for a more comprehensive understanding of these texts. Very similar to
Althusser, Jameson, according to Williams, believes that such works of
literature advertise not only how people should behave, how love and
marriage and other social relations should properly proceed, but also how
necessary and desirable the narrative itself has become. Referring to what
Williams calls "a magisterial synthesis of the formal and historical strands of
reading Lord Jim (1900), Fredric Jameson construes [the novel] along the
axes of a set of structural oppositions … that reveal what he calls ideology of
the form" (174). Williams goes on to consider that Jameson's both
poststructural and historical reading leads to perspectives which symbolically
enact "the ideological cohesion of the community of imperial managers,
joined by their narrative investment," where Lord Jim "foregrounds the

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continual confirmation of their ideological bond, spurred by and dispelling

the negative ideological example of Jim" (175). Needless to say, such
analysis of Conrad's novel clearly reminds of Edward Said’s Orientalism
(1978), in which he shows the effect of imperial ideology which stereotypes
the Orient and Orientals, so “standardization and cultural stereotyping have
intensified the hold of the nineteenth-century academic and imaginative
demonology of the ‘mysterious orient’” (26). Similarly, Elleke Boehmer in
Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995) analyzes Conrad's Lord Jim
arguing that although Jim was a flawed protagonist, he was given another
chance to prove his manhood and heroism on a lesser type of human beings,
the natives in the Malayan archipelago. According to Boehmer, “Despite his
failings, Marlow sees Lord Jim as possessing an internal nobility and quality
of leadership that distinguishes him from the people of Patusan" (86). If this
proves something, it does illustrate the inescapable influence of ideology on
literature and even on great literary figures like Conrad. Williams concludes
that those with whom Marlow identifies are those of professional positions,
the ones who manage the imperial mission, rather than the ruling class.
In his landmark The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act, Jameson focuses not on the literary text itself, but rather on the
interpretive frameworks by which it is now constructed. So, instead of
viewing the work of art in purely aesthetic terms, it is seen in terms of
historical literary practices and norms. This book argues that political and
economic history forms the subtexts and allegorical meanings of literary
works. Leitch sees this book as an "ambitious synthesis of contemporary
structuralist theory and Marxism" (1933). Like Althusser and other Marxists,
Jameson argues that to decipher the meaning of a text, the critic should
examine in turn the political history to which a text refers, social history, and
the history of modes of production. Following this procedure, one can read
Shakespeare's Macbeth as a presentation of the agitating political condition
of its historical moment, short after James VI of Scotland had assumed the
English throne. At another level of interpretation, the object of investigation,
Leitch contends, is "the ideologeme, that is, the smallest intelligible unit of
the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes" (1942).
Accordingly, in Hamlet and King Lear, "the dramatic struggle between the
major characters stages the ideological conflict between old, medieval ideals
of kingship and the state and the modernizing tendencies of an emergent
absolutist power that advances the interests of the bourgeoisie against the
prerogatives of powerful feudal landlords" (1934). Similarly, Hamlet's
"tendency toward obsessive individualistic reflection" (1934), under the
influence of the new habits he acquired during his university education,
conflicts with the feudal ideals embodied in his father and results in what
seemed hesitation to kill his uncle. "The play stands, thematically and

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formally, on the cusp of a major historical transformation __ the transition

from feudalism to capitalism" (1934). Jameson sees that the play’s
ideological and formal contradictions are not resolved because it was too
early to imagine the triumph of capitalism. At the same level, we cannot
understand the conflict in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, mainly
between Ranyevskaia, the landlady, and Lopakhin, the businessman, except
as the social and economic conflict between the declining Aristocrats and the
rising bourgeoisie by the end of the 19th century.
Terry Eagleton (1943-), the prominent English critic largely
influenced by Louis Althusser's Marxist concepts in literary criticism, has
also played a crucial role in developing the field of literary criticism,
particularly the Marxist literary theory. Mulhern believes that Althusser's
influence was so evident on Eagleton, who followed, though at a critical
distance, with a "more comprehensive analysis centered on the notion of the
literary as work in and on ideology." (13)
In his Marxism and literary Criticism (1976), Eagleton shows
discontent with realist aesthetics and structuralism as a tool for literary
criticism, shifting to the idea of literature as a social practice and to ways of
determining the ideological conditions under which the literary work is
produced. Asserting his belief that Marxist criticism has its significant role to
play even in the transformation of human societies, he ironically claims that
critics are not just analysts of texts, but they are also academics hired by the
state to prepare students ideologically for their functions within capitalist
society.
Similarly, in Criticism and Ideology (1976), Eagleton examines the
relationship between literature and ideology, writing that the text may appear
to be free in its use of ideology, or systems of representation, which shape
the individual's picture of lived experience. In "Towards a Science of the
Text" published in Criticism and Ideology, Eagleton contends that the
"literary text is not the 'expression' of ideology, nor is ideology the
'expression' of social class. The text, rather, is a certain production of
ideology" (qtd in Newton 171). He believes that a dramatic production does
produce the text rather than 'express', 'reflect', or 'reproduce' it. This process,
he reasons, transforms the text into "a unique and irreducible entity" (171),
which, in turn, produces ideology. Similar to Althusser, he sees that Ideology
“clearly signifies a 'false consciousness' which blocks true historical
perception, a screen interposed between men and their history" (172). So, for
Eagleton, history enters the text as ideology, which is destructured by the
text to be reconstituted again as an artistic product. This complex relation
means that a critic's task then is not to study the laws of ideological
formations, but the laws of production of ideological discourses as literature.

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This is obviously based on the basic Marxist concept which analyzes

literature according to modes of production dominant at a certain historical
moment, governed by the prevailing ideology of the ruling class. To shed
more light on this point, John Holcombe quotes Eagleton saying, "When
Shakespear's texts cease to make us think, when we get nothing out of them,
they will cease to have value. But why they 'make us think', why we 'get
something out of them' (if only for the present) is a question which must be
referred at once to the ideological matrix of our reading and the ideological
matrix of their production." (8).
In "The Rise of English", published in Literary Theory: an
Introduction (1983), Eagleton argues that literature concerns not simply
beauty and spiritual elevation, but the social control of the middle and
working classes, asserting that literature, like formal religion, is deeply
involved in the reproduction of the dominant social order. Leitch sees that,
"this survey of the discipline [English Literature] combines broad historical
overview and ideological analysis" (2242). Going further than Jameson and
Althusser, Eagleton believes that it is not necessary to speak of literature and
ideology as two separate phenomena because "Literature, in the meaning of
the word we have inherited, is an ideology" (2243). Exploring the role of
religion in the Victorian age as an immensely powerful ideological form, and
showing the trouble this ideology was facing in the Mid-Victorian period,
especially under the effect of scientific discovery and social change,
Eagleton believes that the philistine middle class, who were unable to bolster
up their rising power with a powerful ideology, found the solution in English
literature. So, what gives rise to English to become an academic subject was
failure of religion to play its role, at least in its Victorian forms, as "a
pacifying influence, fostering meekness, self-sacrifice and the contemplative
inner life" (2244). To support his view, Eagleton quotes George Gordon, an
early professor of English literature at Oxford, declaring that as the Churches
have failed to offer remedies to England's social sickness, "English Literature
has now a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, […] and
above all, to save our souls and heal the state" (2244). Considering Mathew
Arnold as the key figure in using English literature for such a project,
Eagleton harshly criticizes him for his relentless urge to "throw" the
working-class children a few novels which "could provide a potent antidote
to political bigotry and ideological extremism … curb in them any disruptive
tendency to collective political action…give them a pride in their national
language and literature… so the pill of middle-class ideology was to be
sweetened by the sugar of literature" (2245-2246).
However, in a revision of his previous views concerning the
importance of theory, he says in a 1990 interview that this was a kind of
fetishism of method, thinking then that he and other critics have to get a

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certain kind of systematic method to build on it. Yet, he came to know later
that a "Marxist has to define certain urgent political goals and allow, as it
were, those to determine questions of method rather than the other way
around" ( 2241).
As a matter of fact, Eagleton's revision of his views was not limited
to the literary theory, as he has also reconsidered his very concept of
ideology and literature. In his The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1991), he
emphasizes that with the emergence of the early bourgeoisie, aesthetic
concepts began to play an unusual central part in the constitution of a
dominant ideology. However, he makes it clear that he does not mean that
“the eighteenth century bourgeoisie assembled around a table over their
claret to dream up the concept of the aesthetic as a solution to their political
dilemmas” (qtd in Regan 4). What he is trying to do in this book, as he
assures, is to argue against “those critics for whom any linkage of aesthetics
and political ideologies must appear scandalous or merely bemusing [and,
strikingly enough,] those on the political left for whom the aesthetic is
simply ‘a bourgeois ideology’, to be worsted and ousted by alternative forms
of cultural politics” (8). He admits that certain works of art can be considered
as a strong challenge to the controlling ideological forms. (3). It seems that
in this same sense Eagleton reads D. H. Lawrence, seeing him “as unusual
among twentieth-century writers in presenting both an intimate
understanding of English society and a comprehensive radical criticism of its
forms and directions” (4), where Sons and Lovers (1913) is his first major
exploration of the problem of a man’s relation to his own culture. The
violence of Morel in Sons and Lovers, for example, might be seen just as
brutal and degrading according to the bourgeois values, which Mrs. Morel,
the “superior” daughter of an engineering foreman, embraces. However,
Eagleton believes that Lawrence, unlike many middle-class observers,
understands that “Morel’s sullen obstinacy is more than animal stupidity: it
is also the reflex habit of a long defensive tradition, developed by the English
working class as a protection against patronage and manipulation from
outside” (13). On this same basis, it seems, as James Smith writes in Terry
Eagleton: A Critical Introduction (2008), that Eagleton studies the Brontes’
works, uncovering political structures in different levels of the novels and
using them to compare ideology in the sisters’ works, thus “formulating a
basis for a more objective aesthetic judgment concerning the superiority of
Emily’s Wuthering Heights over Charlotte’s novels” (40). In this respect,
Newton summarizes the shift in Eagleton's views, considering that his "more
recent work has engaged with Althusserian Marxism and post structuralism
without rejecting traditional Marxian concepts" (159).

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However, the inevitable question that rises here is: doesn’t this apply
too to Marxism itself? Weren’t the Marxist ideologies in the former
communist regimes in the Soviet Union and East European countries
integrated in all aspects of life, including education and literature? This is not
unlike what the ruling class did during McCarthyism in USA, interfering in
every field of artistic production and leaving its impact not only on media
but also on movies and literature. Unlike the American previous critical
concept of comparative literature, for example, it has been proved later by
many thinkers that studying literature and art is inextricably linked with the
historical, social, and political moment of their production. Thus Edward
Said wonders how colonial European countries can study and teach their
history and, consequently, their artistic production of that period, separable
from the history and culture of their ex-colonies. For him, both histories –
and literary, artistic, and philosophical production – of the colonizer and the
colonized are inextricably linked and cannot be studied from a unilateral
point of view. Thus it is undeniable that ideology does leave its fingerprints
on literature and art as it does on all other aspects of life, despite the fact that
there have always been novelists, poets, and playwrights who rebel against
the discourse and hegemony of the mainstream and depict their own
concepts of reality, which explains why many of them were persecuted in
their own countries or become expatriates somewhere else.

Conclusion
To summarize, what one can conclude from the different views
explored in this paper is that the Marxist literary theory has always been
subject to considerable changes, yet with one constant invariable factor: the
role of the ideology of the ruling class and the dominant system of values
and beliefs is undeniable, thus ignoring this while analyzing and
understanding literature, as well as other human artistic production, will be
awkward, unrealistic and misleading.
To highlight the views discussed in this paper, it is suitable perhaps
to quote Eagleton in Ideology: An Introduction. He writes:
For some thinkers, like late Karl Marx, ideology is less a
matter of thought or discourse than of the very objective
structure of class society itself. For others like Althusser,
it is less consciousness than unconsciousness; for others
again, ideology is less a 'tool' of a ruling power than an
effect of a social and political situation as a whole , a
complex field in which different groups and classes
ceaselessly negotiate their relations rather than a well-
bounded form of consciousness which can be neatly
assigned to this group or the other…For the moment,

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however, we can stay with the conception of ideology as

a set of discursive strategies for legitimating a dominant
power, and enquire more precisely into what these
strategies consist in (234).
In a word, despite all the diversity in how Marxist literary critics see
the concept of ideology, still what they have in common is that "ideas are
weapons in a field of struggle” (234). In short, it seems accurate to say with
Walter Kendrick that literature "is an ideological term, all the more so
because it pretends not to be. And professors of literature are ideologues,
whether they call themselves deconstructionists or Arnoldians" (3).

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