Chapter 6
POLITICAL CRITICISM:
FROM MARXISM TO
CULTURAL MATERIALISM
 Karl Marx did not invent the idea that economic equality-
the notion that social wealth should be distributed equally
throughout a population- is better than inequality.
 The purpose of the ideas, then, was to ensure that
dominant group or class remained in power.
 Literature is one important way for ideas to circulate in a
culture.
 Marx contended that all societies are organized around the
production of the means of sustaining life.
 Because material inequality is difficult to justify in itself,
ideas and cultural values have become increasingly
important for maintaining the unequal distribution of
wealth.
 For example, during the Middle Ages in western Europe,
the social arrangement whereby the feudal aristocracy
owned all the land while a class of landless peasants did
all the labor was sustained by the circulation in the culture
of ideals such as honor, fealty, and duty.
 A few hundred years later, a new group- the capitalist
class-assumed economic power, and the social dominance
of these shopkeepers, manufacturers, and merchants was
accompanied by new ideas such as individual liberty and
political equality.
 A Hazard of New Fortunes, business people are portrayed
as being justified in their wealth, while those who argue
for economic equality are depicted as disturbers of a
social order that is deemed essentially right, despite
imquality.
 At their most determinist, Marxists hold that culture
always is an expression of the prevailing social and
economic situation.
 And he is killed while his more aristocratic brother
triumphs and is made king.
 Later refinements of the Marxist position argue that
culture is more complicated than this reflection theory
makes it out to be.
 Fissures of this kind are inevitable, and they constitute a
contradiction that the society cannot resolve.
 Some Marxists argue that ideology is similarly fissured
and contradictory.
 Wealth is made by the underpaid labor of large masses of
people.
 Marxists in the dialectical tradition such as Theodor
Adorno also argued that art can play an antithetical and
critical role in capitalist culture: that culture turns
everything into a commodity, and commodity culture
creates a way of thinking or consciousness appropriate to
it.
 Being fulfilled as a human being consists of owning a car;
being creative consists of choosing the right cellphone.
 Art serves a negative function in relation to this culture of
uniformity, routine, and pacification.
 Then, returning to the sense data armed with better
concepts, the mind can perceive the data anew and look at
them differently.
 Our consciousness is naïve when we take in messages
from consumer culture without questioning them.
 As an act of negation, it opens up for consciousness other
possibilities of awareness and of being.
 Materialist Marxism, best represented in the work of
Antonio Negri, differs from dialectical Marxism in that it
emphasizes the anchoring of culture in materiality.
 The scenes of an egalitarian and democratic sailor
community aboard the whaling vessel in Melville’s
Moby-Dick.
 The theory of ideology has also been refined in recent
years.
 We misrecognize our true place in the world.
 Marxism survives as a tool of literary criticism in the
insight that literature is produced in societies
characterized by class differences and that such difference
leave their mark on literature.
 Capitalists may proclaim the utopia of freedom, but that
exhilarating feeling presupposes the slavery of millions in
factories all over the world.
 Not all scholars who emphasize the social and political
dimension of literature are Marxists strictly speaking.
 On the other are such upper class figures as Daisy
Buchanan, whose remark I think she’s lovely uses a
phrasing that one would never encounter in Wolfshiem’s
world.
 Novels, according to Bakhtin, are inherently heteroglossic
in that they record a variety of different speech forms.
 Having compared the Irish literary aesthetics of his era to
a used handkerchief, Joyce is suggesting a similarity
between the two poetic works Stephen has just produced.
 Bakhtin also introduced the concept of the carnivalesque
into literary-critical discussion.
 It is dialogic rather than monologic.
Exercise6.1
Willian Shakespeare, King Lear(1)
 Does King Lear give expression to the ruling ideas of the
ruling class?
 A little historical information always helps when dealing
with such questions.
 A new group of landless nobles came into being.
Economic power has shifted, but political power remained
in the hands of the nobles.
 The merchants insisted on a role in governing the country
through Parliament.
Exercise6.1
Willian Shakespeare, King Lear(2)
 The economic fissure between old feudal nobility and new
merchant bourgeoisie erupted into a political and military
conflict led, by the century’s end, to a new political form
in England, the constitutional monarchy.
 How might this information aid a reading of the play?
 How else does he embody feudal ideas regarding
obedience, loyalty, duty, and the like?
 Does Lear play by the feudal rules?
Exercise6.1
Willian Shakespeare, King Lear(3)
 That would seem to be the vocabulary of the new
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capitalists, not the language of honor and fealty.
Nobles felt that their value was inherent.
Is she placed in an exchange economy at odds with the
values nobles are supposed to adhere to, at least in their
ideology?
What is France’s role in all of this?
Well may you prosper?
Exercise6.1
Willian Shakespeare, King Lear(4)
 In the frame of the conflict between the feudal worldview
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and the emerging capitalist worldview, how should the
actions of Goneril and Regan be interpreted?
Edmund is likened to the sisters by the word prosper?
How does he embody the new skeptical rationalism?
How does this new skeptical rationalism connect with the
capitalist ideal of class mobility?
Edgar parallels Cordelia, and like her he embodies feudal
ideals.
Exercise6.1
Willian Shakespeare, King Lear(5)
 How else is he associated with feudal values?
 How should the character of Kent be understood in the
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frame of this argument?
And how do you read the Fool?
How might it be said to take sides with the aristocratic
ideological position?
Does it show you, by denying it, a revolution about to
happen?
Can you see this on the horizon in the play?
Exercise6.2
Elizabeth Bishop, A Miracle for Breakfast(1)
 This might be called Bishop’s protest poem.
 How can one have a miracle for breakfast?
 What does Bishop’s attitude seem to be toward the
difference between rich and poor?
 And what does it signify that she compares those about to
serve the meal to kings of old?
 The first stanza concludes with an explicit, if humorous,
reference to the Christ story- One foot of the sun/ steadied
itself on a long ripple in the river.
Exercise6.2
Elizabeth Bishop, A Miracle for Breakfast(2)
 The next stanza makes the Christ reference more explicit.
 Or does she mean nature?
 What does Bishop seem to think of him?
 What are the final two stanzas about?
 How do you interpret the final two lines?
 Utopianism is a positive term in Marxist thinking.
 How might the poem be said to be utopian?
Exercise6.3
Alice Munro, Oh, What Avails(1)
 How does this story register the effects of poverty?
 It begins by noting that is not much furniture in the house,
and later we learn that only certain rooms are used to save
money on heat.
 Which do you think Munro is emphasizing more here,
chance or choice?
 Wealth is often associated with fine manners, and poverty
with their absence or lack, but one suspects that wealth
allows one more easily to afford certain things.
Exercise6.3
Alice Munro, Oh, What Avails(2)
 What is wrong with Mrs. Loony Buttler?
 The other emblematic character in the story is Matilda.
 How does Mrs. Buttler rationalize refusing Morris?
 Is it possible to understand Joan’s situation in part 2 of the
story as somehow connected to her impoverished
childhood?
 What in the mean time has Morris become?
 What it meant by that image?
Exercise6.3
Alice Munro, Oh, What Avails(3)
 It or its absence can make or break relationships, and
apparently it can make or break people.
 Why is it significant that Matilda more or less becomes
her mother?
 Finally, how do you read the relationship between the
poem and the story?
 And what then would be the meaning of Morris’ final
remark that I wasn’t wrong?
Exercise6.4 Working Girl(1)
 The ideology that is most powerful in the United States is
the ideology of freedom.
 The trade- off is that workers gain money to give them the
freedom to do certain things like eat, own a house, and
take vacations for a few weeks out of the year.
 So can one really say that workers under capitalism are
free?
 The large portion of their lives will be spent in routine,
uncreative, unfulfilling work for someone else whose
resulting wealth provides him or her with the real basis for
freedom.
Exercise6.4 Working Girl(2)
 In order to live and work and survive in a society, one
must adopt its reigning ideas and adapt one’s behavior and
beliefs to them.
 It is the cognitive equivalent if the lottery, the ticket that
might make one instantly rich if the numbers by some
trick of fate turn out in one’s favor.
 The best way to achieve acquiescence in a system of rigid
economic inequality is to make it appear as if the system
is open to all and that ultimate placement in that system is
the product of a simple competition between varying
talents or skills.
Exercise6.4 Working Girl(3)
 Chains are made to seem a pleasing part of one’s
wardrobe.
 Consider Working Girl, a film about a young woman, Tess
McGill, who works as a secretary in New York and takes
night classes in business and proper English in order to
better her station.
 Formerly middle-class Americans, in other words, were
being pushed into menial, low-income lives with little
change of significant changes in income or status.
Exercise6.4 Working Girl(4)
 Why would so painful a reality be represented altogether
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differently in a major film of the era, one that takes
suffering and anguish and transforms it into a chipper,
feel-good evocation of hope, success, and transforms?
Working Girl is a very good example of this.
Here is the story of the film: Tess’ boss Catherine is a
wealthy, well-educated, and successful businesswoman.
What are the signs of her class location?
How does she contrast with Catherine in this regard?
Exercise6.4 Working Girl(5)
 Tess breaks out of the routine of her life by assuming
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Catherine’s identity.
What is the significance of Trask?
Or does she really not contend against them? Is her story
meant to reinforce them?
Moreover, who gains from Tess’ idea?
The film takes the structural inequality between his station
as owner and her station as worker devoted to increasing
his wealth for granted.
What about her relation to her former friends in the
secretary pool?
Exercise6.4 Working Girl(6)
 Tess can look down at her friends and be grateful she is no
longer stuck with the mass of secretaries.
 On this particular ladder of success, they rest comfortably
on her head.
 In watching the film and appreciating uncritically its story,
we must endorse and celebrate inequality as much as
individual success.
 Tess rebels against her old life in order to be respectfully
obedient in her new one. That apparently is all that system
allows.