Marxist Criticism

The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin’s Russia: it’s like blaming Jesus
Christ for the Inquisition in Spain.

A comment that has made the rounds of many English departments over the past few years is that since
the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent opening of Russia to the West, Marxism has died a quiet
death—except in English departments, where it is still alive and well. Even if it weren’t for Cuba and
some other places in the world, where Marxist theory is securely in place, this idea would be inaccurate;
but it does point to the lasting viability of Marxist literary criticism, which continues to appeal to many
readers and critics. It is interesting to note, however, that the principles of Marxism were not designed
to serve as a theory about how to interpret texts. Instead, they were meant to be a set of social,
economic, and political ideas that would, according to their followers, change the world. They are the
basis of a system of thought that sees inequitable economic relationships as the source of class conflict.
That conflict is the mechanism by which Western society developed from feudalism to capitalism, which,
according to Marxism, will eventually give way to socialism, the system that will characterize world
economic relationships. Since its inception, Marxist theory has provided a revolutionary way of
understanding history.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Marxism has a long and complicated history. Although it is often thought of as a twentieth-century
phenomenon, partly because it was the basis of the Soviet Union’s social-governmental system, it
actually reaches back to the thinking of Karl Heinrich Marx (1818–1883), a nineteenth-century German
philosopher and economist. The first announcement of his nontraditional way of seeing things appeared
in The German Ideology in 1845. In it Marx argued that the means of production controls a society’s
institutions and beliefs, contended that history is progressing toward the eventual triumph of
communism, and introduced the concept of dialectical materialism, the theory that history develops as a
struggle between contradictions that are eventually synthesized.

When Marx met the political economist Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) in Paris in 1844 and they
discovered that they had arrived at similar views independent of one another, they decided to
collaborate to explain the principles of communism (which they later called Marxism) and to organize an
international movement. These ideas were expounded in the Communist Manifesto (1848), in which
they identified class struggle as the driving force behind history and anticipated that it would lead to a
revolution in which workers would overturn capitalists, take control of economic production, and
abolish private property by turning it over to the government to be distributed fairly. With these events,
class distinctions would disappear. In the three-volume work Das Kapital (1867), Marx argued that
history is determined by economic conditions, and he urged an end to private ownership of public
utilities, transportation, and the means of production. Despite the variations and additions that
occurred in the century that followed, on the whole, Marx’s writings still provide the theory of
economics, sociology, history, and politics called Marxism.

Although Marxism was not designed as a method of literary analysis, its principles were applied to
literature early on. Even in Russia, where literature was sometimes accepted as a means of productive
critical dialogue and at other times viewed as a threat if it did not promote party ideology, literature
was linked to the philosophical principles set down by Marx and Engels. Although the place of
literature was uncertain and shifting—culminating finally in the Soviet Writers’ Union, founded (and
headed) by Joseph Stalin to make certain that literature promoted socialism, Soviet actions, and its
heroes—it was apparent that Marxism provided a new way of reading and understanding literature.

The first major Marxist critic, however, appeared outside of Russia. Georg Lukács (1885–1971), a
Hungarian critic, was responsible for what has become known as reflectionism. Named for the
assumption that a text will reflect the society that has produced it, the theory is based on the kind of
close reading advocated by formalists. But it is practiced by the reflectionists for the purpose of
discovering how characters and their relationships typify and reveal class conflict, the socioeconomic
system, or the politics of a time and place. Such examination, goes the assumption, will, in the end, lead
to an understanding of that system and the author’s worldview, or weltanschauung. Also known as
vulgar Marxism, reflection theory should not be equated with the traditional historical approach to
literary analysis, which provides background and context for a work. Instead, vulgar Marxism seeks to
determine the nature of a given society, to find “a truer, more concrete insight into reality,” and to look
for “the full process of life.” In the end, the reflectionists attribute the fragmentation and alienation that
they discover to the ills of capitalism.

Another important figure in the evolution of Marxism is the Algerian-born French philosopher Louis
Althusser (1918–1990), whose views were not entirely consonant with those of Lukács. Whereas Lukács
saw literature as a reflection of a society’s consciousness, Althusser asserted that the process can go the
other way. In short, literature and art can affect society, even lead it to revolution. Building on Antonio
Gramsci’s idea that the dominant class controls the views of the people by many means, one of which is
the arts, Althusser agreed that the working class is manipulated to accept the ideology of the dominant
class, a process he called interpellation. One way in which that manipulation takes place is by
reinforcing capitalistic ideology through its arts. Althusser went on to point out, however, that the arts
of the privileged are not all the arts that exist. The possibility remains that the working class will develop
its own culture, which can lead to revolution and the establishment of a new hegemony, or power base.
Althusser’s ideas are referred to as production theory.

Marxism established itself as part of the American literary scene with the ec onomic depression of the
1930s. Writers and critics alike began to use Marxist interpretations and evaluations of society in their
work. As new journals dedicated to pursuing this new social and literary analysis sprang up, it became
increasingly important to ask how a given text contributed to the solution of social problems by the
application of Marxist principles. Eventually the movement grew strong enough to bring pressures to
bear on writers to conform to the vision, resulting in a backlash of objection to such absolutism from
such critics as Edmund Wilson in “Marxism and Literature” in 1938.

Currently two of the best-known Marxist critics are Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton. Jameson is
known for using Freudian ideas in his practice of Marxist criticism. Whereas Freud discussed the notion
of the repressed unconscious of the individual, Jameson talks about the political unconscious, the
exploitation and oppression buried in a work. The critic, according to Jameson, seeks to uncover those
buried forces and bring them to light. Eagleton, a British critic, is difficult to pin down, as he continues to
develop his thinking. Of special interest to critics is his examination of the interrelations between
ideology and literary form. The constant in his criticism is that he sets himself against the dominance of
the privileged class. Both Jameson and Eagleton have responded to the influence of poststructuralism;
in the case of the latter, this resulted in a radical shift in his thinking in the late 1970s. (For definitions
and a discussion of poststructuralism, see Chapter 8.)

In some ways, Jameson and Eagleton are typical of the mixture of schools in literary criticism today. For
instance, it is not uncommon to find psychoanalytic ideas in the writing of a feminist critic or
postcolonial (see Chapter 10) notions influencing a Marxist. As groups that share an active concern for
finding new ways of understanding what we read and the lives we live, their interaction is not surprising.
The borrowing back and forth may make it difficult to define discrete schools of criticism, but in practice,
it makes the possibilities for literary analysis all the richer.

READING FROM A MARXIST PERSPECTIVE

To understand the discussion that follows, you will need to read the short story “The Diamond
Necklace,” by Guy de Maupassant, which begins on page 332.

Many of the principles of Marxism, and the approach to literary criticism that it spawned, have already
been mentioned in the brief historical survey you just read. Now it will be helpful to examine them in
more detail and to see how they can be applied to literary texts.

Economic Power

According to Marx, the moving force behind human history is its economic systems, for people’s lives
are determined by their economic circumstances. A society, he says, is shaped by its “forces of
production,” the methods it uses to produce the material elements of life. The economic conditions
underlying the society are called material circumstances, and the ideological atmosphere they generate
is known as the historical situation. This means that to explain any social or political context, any event
or product, it is first necessary to understand the material and historical circumstances in which the

In Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Diamond Necklace,” we are given a clear picture of a society
that has unequally distributed its goods or even the means to achieve them. Madame Loisel has no
commodity or skills to sell, only her youth and beauty to be used to attract a husband. Without access to
those circles where she can find a man with wealth and charm, she is doomed to stay in a powerless
situation with no way to approach the elegant lifestyle she desires. The material circumstances of her
society have relegated her to a dreary existence from which she can find no exit. Her husband is so
conditioned to accept the situation that he does not understand her hunger to be part of a more
glamorous and elegant world. He is content with potpie for his supper because he has been socially
constructed to want nothing more.

If a society is shaped by its “forces of production,” the way in which society provides food, clothing,
shelter, and other such necessities creates among groups of people social relations that become the
culture’s foundation. In short, the means of production structure the society. Capitalism, for example,
has a two-part structure consisting of the bourgeoisie, who own property and thereby control the
means of production, and the proletariat, the workers controlled by the bourgeoisie and whose labor
produces their wealth. (Although in American society today, we have come to use the term bourgeoisie
to mean “middle class,”
it originally designated the owners and the self-employed as opposed to wage earners.) Because those
who control production have a power base, they have many ways to ensure that they will maintain their
position. They can manipulate politics, government, education, the arts and entertainment, news media
—all aspects of the culture— to that end.

The division of the bourgeoisie and proletariat in the society depicted in “The Diamond Necklace” is
firmly established and maintained. Mme. Loisel’s husband is a “petty clerk,” and although she has a
wealthy friend from her convent days, she has none of the accoutrements that would fit her to attend a
reception to which her husband has (with some manipulation) managed to be invited. The haves are
separated from the have-nots in this story by what they own and what they lack and by their ample or
limited opportunity to acquire wealth and power. The division grows more apparent and unbridgeable
as the couple works at increasingly demeaning jobs to acquire the money to pay off their loans. Because
of the debts owed to the bourgeoisie, incurred because of the loss of the necklace owned by Mme.
Loisel’s well-to-do friend, they sink lower and lower in the social scale, losing what little hold they once
had on social position or physical comfort. In the end, Mme. Loisel has become old and unkempt,
unrecognizable to her friend. And in the most unjust irony of all, she learns after ten years that her
efforts have been in vain. The bourgeoisie has tricked her once again by lending her a necklace not of
diamonds but of cut glass.

Marx saw history as progressive and inevitable. Private ownership, he said, began with slavery, then
evolved into feudalism, which was largely replaced by capitalism by the late eighteenth century. Evident
in small ways as early as the sixteenth century, capitalism became a fully developed system with the
growing power of the bourgeoisie in the mid-nineteenth century. At every stage, it had negative
consequences, because it was a flawed system that involved maintaining the power of a few by the
repression of many. The result was ongoing class struggle, such as the one depicted in the “The Diamond
Necklace” between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The Marxist, then, works to reveal the internal
contradictions of capitalism so that the proletariat will recognize their subjugation and rise up to seize
what is rightfully theirs. As Marx stated in a famous passage from The Communist Manifesto, “Let the
ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their
chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!” Although Mme. Loisel makes no
move to create a revolution, she is keenly aware of the source of her sufferings. As she tells her affluent
friend, “I have had some hard days since I saw you; and some miserable ones—and all because of you.”
The fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat Marx deemed to be “equally inevitable,”
and the new system born of such a revolution would be a classless society in which everyone has equal
access to its goods and services, such as food, education, and medical care.

Some of the damage caused by the economics of capitalism, according to Marxists, is psychological. In
its need to sell more goods, capitalism preys on the insecurities of consumers, who are urged to
compete with others in the number and quality of their possessions: a newer car, a bigger diamond
engagement ring, a second house. The result is commodification, an attitude of valuing things not for
their utility (use value) but for their power to impress others (sign value) or for their resale possibilities
(exchange value).
 BothMme. Loisel and her wealthy friend are victims of their society’s emphasis on sign value. The
former is so dazzled by the glitter of jewels and gowns and fashionable people that she can find little
happiness in the humble attentions of her husband-clerk, and her friend’s interest in the necklace
apparently extends no further than the fact that it is impressive evidence of her wealth, for she
substitutes glass for the real thing. When the acquisition of things that possess sign value and/or
exchange value becomes extreme, an individual can be said to be practicing conspicuous consumption.

Because the economic system shapes the society, the methods of production are known as the base.
The social, political, and ideological systems and the institutions that they generate—the values, art,
legal processes—are known as the superstructure.

Because the dominant class controls the superstructure, it is, by extension, able to control the members
of the working classes. Marxists are not in complete agreement as to whether the superstructure simply
reflects the base or whether it can also affect the base. The group known as reflectionists (who
subscribe to the vulgar Marxism mentioned earlier) see the superstructure as being formed by the base,
making literature (and other such products) a mirror of society’s consciousness. In a capitalist society,
for example, the superstructure would exhibit the alienation and fragmentation that, according to the
Marxists, the economic system produces. Controlled by the bourgeoisie, texts may, at least superficially,
glamorize the status quo in order to maintain a stable division of power and means. Readers may not be
aware of manipulation, especially when it appears in the form of entertainment, but it is no less
effective for its subtle presentation.

Other Marxists, who assume that the superstructure is capable of shaping the base, recognize that
literature (as well as art, entertainment, and such) can be a means for the working class to change the
system. By promoting their own culture, they can create a new superstructure and eventually a different
base. Even Marx and Engels admitted that some aspects of the superstructure, such as philosophy and
art, are “relatively autonomous,” making it possible to use them to alter ideologies.

The economic base in “The Diamond Necklace” is significant to all that is depicted in the story. Mme.
Loisel’s husband is a clerk whose employers have power over his professional life and over their social
relationships with him. He and his employers lead very different kinds of lives. The bourgeoisie give
elegant parties, while the clerk and his wife eat potpie. The “petty clerk” is not expected to fraternize
with his betters except by the rare invitation (so eagerly sought after.

by him) that comes his way. And on such occasions, it is with difficulty that Mme. Loisel can achieve the
appropriate appearance—dress, jewels, wrap. As they take on less attractive jobs to pay back what is
owed, they are even less acceptable in the corridors of wealth and power. In the end, as noted, Mme.
Loisel’s friend does not even recognize her.

To examine the economic forces in a narrative, you can begin by asking questions such as these:

■ Who are the powerful people in the society depicted in the text?

■ Who are the powerless people?

■ Are the two groups depicted with equal attention?

■ Which group are you encouraged to admire?

■ Why do the powerful people have their power?

■ Why is this power denied to others?

■ From what is the power in the narrative derived? For example, is it inherited? Based on money?
A result of violence?