English 4, Hurst Week 5 Reflection
This week’s reflection may seem a bit long. Please bear with me. I am attempting to refine some of the ideas in a couple chapters of the book An Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory
(“Narrative” and “Ideology;” 1 I have had you read a couple chapters already: “The Uncanny” and “Sexual Difference”). Because the book is a graduate-level text, some of the ideas it expresses use language and refer to ideas you may not have encountered before. Generally, this doesn’t bother me too much (you should push yourself to understand new ideas/language), but I do not want to overwhelm you with it. So, I’m going to try to distill it a little.
We started reading The Girl , this week, and I think it is important to discuss narrative form and structure, as well as the way a narrative expresses (or makes apparent) social power structures and ideology. Meridel LeSueur was an activist, and wrote as an activist, so her ideology is important to understanding her writing. But, in a certain sense, all literature is ideological and in the craft of the narrative, there are many ways an author can challenge, subvert, rebel, or poke at our social or political “norms” and expectations.
We are reading fiction, but a story is not necessarily fiction—the chapter on narrative says we are surrounded by stories of many types: stories we tell ourselves to feel good, stories about how the world is, how things work, etc. Some of these stories are scientific, some are religious, some are political, some are just fun. This will be important to remember as we read nonfiction and drama later in this module. The chapter lists five important things to keep in mind about stories and I want to focus on two of these: “The telling of a story is always bound up with power, with questions of authority, property and domination” and “Stories always have something to tell us about stories themselves: they always involve self-reflexive and metafictional dimensions” (52).
As we read LeSueur, one of the claims in the “Narrative” chapter strikes me as particularly apropos: “More often, of course, it is the dominant ideology which is able to tell stories about, for example, how it got to be the dominant ideology…
Narrative power, then, may be the only strategy left for the weak and dispossessed: without narrative power, they may not be heard”
(58). LeSueur is particularly interested in giving narrative voice to those with the least power in society. We will examine the ideological aspects of narrative in a minute, but first, let’s discuss the “reflexive” aspects of narrative.
What does it mean to say stories tell us about themselves, that they always have “metafictional” aspects to them? The chapter mentions Jonathan Swift’s 18 th
century text, “A Modest Proposal,” as an example of the use of satire and irony: it seems to propose serving poor Irish children as food for the rich. But we understand the author holds different views—that is the function of satire and irony—and so the meaning the reader gets from the essay is powerful because of our thinking about the essay. In other words, we understand the essay is not literal and this gives it its power. When we search for meaning in a narrative, remember that the author is probably not hiding it: what emotions do you get from the setting and descriptions, what does the story make you think twice about, what is the subject of the narrative? It may not seem clear on the first read, and sometimes we need to know more about a style, a historical period, or an author to fully understand a work, but as we read in this class, think about what the story seems to be saying to you.
1 This book is available as an electronic download from the Course Materials section of our Blackboard class.

English 4, Hurst Week 5 Reflection
One way to think about what a story seems to be saying is to look at it from a particular point of view, a particular literary critical theory. There are many schools of literary criticism and each seeks to explore the meaning of a story through a particular lens. Since we’ve discussed it a bit, you can probably see how Feminist Criticism can be applied to a work — concerned with women's power relations, social place, and other cultural factors, it is a critical lens that helps us understand Susan Glaspell's "Trifles" and Alice Munro's "A Wilderness Station" and many other texts. Authors do not have to be feminist (or even a woman) for the critical lens to identify feminist issues in their writing. It is a way of looking that can be applied to many texts.
Another school of criticism closely related to Feminist Criticism is Marxist Literary Criticism.
This is a critical lens primarily concerned with power structures between classes, with oppressors and oppressed, and with the economics of human relations. This field of criticism is based on the theory of dialectical materialism by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A dialectic is essentially a debate or argument or conflict; the philosophy of materialism posits there is a real world out there that that we sense and form ideas about, but which exists independent of our thoughts about it. In their “historical materialism” and “dialectical materialism,” Marx and Engels essentially theorize the "rules" of the way the "real world" works, including natural laws and social constructs. Although the theory is complex (and has been updated and refined since Marx), for our purposes think of it as a theory that says history is a record of economic class struggle — a
"debate" or conflict between the haves and have-nots for power. It specifically claims that capitalism inherently pits the laborer against the corporation (and its representatives). It further claims that these conflicts are resolved only in a certain violence—old ways die and a new society arises.
The notion of “ideology” comes out of this context.
Ideology , in a Marxist sense, is a social construct. The “real world” just is; we apply “ideology” on top of that. In Marxist terminology, we are “subjects.” Just as peasants were subjects to kings, we are subjects who must obey the natural laws of the universe; additionally, we are also subject to the ideologies we create. The chapter says, subjects – people – make their own ideology at the same time as ideology makes them subjects. The implications of this idea are enormous because it means that ‘ideology’ goes to the heart of personal identity, of how we conceive ourselves as subjects in the world and all that this involves (173).
And think about it, isn’t it true? We conceive of ourselves as young, old, students, professors, environmentalists, nurses, political scientists, etc. These are ideologies and they shape us as much as they define us from others. We cannot not be ideological. Which means, in an odd way, that our writing must also be ideological. It can’t help it either. Works of literature “are sites of conflict and difference, places where values and preconceptions, beliefs and prejudices, knowledge and social structures are represented and, in the process, opened to transformation”
(177). And the point of all of this is (from a Marxist perspective), that the true meaning of a work of literature will be found in its contradictions and assumptions and values—its ideology.
Like Feminist Criticism, authors need not be Marxists to be examined under the lens of Marxist
Criticism. But Meridel LeSueur was certainly Marxist-leaning, so meaning, in her work, is certainly going to be tied to the economic/social theories of Marx. And as we open our reading, you can see clear evidence of this. On page 7 (of my edition of The Girl ), as the cat is having

English 4, Hurst Week 5 Reflection kittens, Amelia says, “One thing comes out of another one. I say the same with society, one gives birth to another. One dies, another is born…” This is a clear reference to Marx’s historical materialism which says that each society has within it the seeds of conflict that will eventually overwhelm it and create a new society. Although this textual reference is about a cat, it doesn’t take much to see that the entire novel is a critique of the way the poor are used and abused and pitted against each other by industrial society—and that a new society must be born.
This is the sort of thing literary criticism does. It looks for evidence in the text to support a particular idea about meaning. But in Marxist criticism, one doesn’t just look for the ways a text displays obvious ideology, one looks for subtle contradictions and assumptions. It doesn’t take long to see that the strikers, who ought to be the good guys here (labor vs. capitol), have shot and killed Butch’s brother, Bill, and beaten Butch for being “scabs” (workers who have crossed a picket line). Throughout the book, the men are always against each other, working at cross purposes, or scheming for personal gain. It isn’t hard to see the ideology of manhood here, as
LeSueur sees it.
So what, in this book, would you say is the ideology of womanhood? This question is the one that, for me, separates LeSueur as literary as opposed to being a mere political hack (well, that and her descriptive writing). Her story is literature largely because it does not fall into the party line—its ideology is designed to be transformative to the reader in ways the party might not approve. Communism does not save anyone in the novel, at least, not the male-structured communism of the labor movement of the time. Instead, LeSueur relates a vision of how a society created by women might handle such a thing as an economic downturn, and how it might lend power to the powerless. She gives us a vision of woman-centered action. The Girl chooses to sleep with Butch before she is raped by Ganz (and she surely knows that is her possible fate); she chooses to keep her child rather than have an abortion. In many ways, this initially naïve girl grows into a powerful force by the end of the novel. What is the meaning of that?
I will not be asking you to write an essay on this novel (though you could write your final on it if you wanted). But, I would like you to write a response this week thinking about the ideology you see in The Girl . Specifically, if you could summarize it, what would you say is LeSueur offering as an ideology of womanhood? Is it transformative? If a story tells us about itself (as the chapter on Narrative says it does), what is this story’s point? If you think back on all the women writers we’ve read so far, is there a common thread of womanhood in them? In what ways are women economically (or otherwise) oppressed? If a “male” ideology is about violent conflict, physical strength, and independence, how does LeSueur suggest that ideology is untenable? Use these questions as a guide to your thinking as you write your response.