Notes on Marxist Criticism

In his primer Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976), Terry Eagleton defines Marxism as "a scientific theory of human societies and of the practice of reforming them."1 Marxist criticism, he states, "analyses literature in terms of the historical conditions which produce it" (vi). The business of this criticism is "to understand ideologies—the ideas, values and feelings by which men experience their societies at various times," some of the ideologies of the past being accessible only in literature. An understanding of ideologies, it is argued, helps clarify the process of social control and "contributes to our liberation" (viii). Ideologies, as socially generated and historically relative ways of apprehending reality, are understood to reflect and underpin the status quo; or, as Eagleton puts it in a more sophisticated study, ideologies are "modes of feeling, valuing, perceiving, and believing which have some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power."2 Not every Marxist critic would accept Eagleton's formulation, but his definition of ideology is consistent with the practice of most of the critics who have written on Shakespeare's tragedies from a Marxist viewpoint, and when the expression "the Marxist" is used in the following account it is in the restricted sense of those who have contributed significantly to the Shakespearean debate. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, for example, consider ideology to be "composed of those beliefs, practices, and institutions which work to legitimate the social order."3 In common with many Marxist theoreticians, Eagleton, Dollimore, and Sinfield conceive of ideologies not as "a set of false beliefs capable of correction by perceiving properly," but as "the very terms in which we perceive the world."4 Ideology works to maintain existing power relations and mitigate class conflict by providing a system of apparently natural forms of consciousness that actually interpret reality in particular ways and inhibit alternative interpretations.