Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes (review)

1 14 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW Brancusi to Rauschenberg, and the role of deüberate randomness in modern poetry. Neither flaunting nor denying his scholarly and poütical credentials, working with considerable modesty and wit, open to experience, seeking contradictions to overcome, Morawski is aware that "no monopoUstic, dogma-oriented interpretation can do justice to the wealth of the marxist heritage," (xvü) and that marxism itself is at best "the apt heir to the long humanist tradition." (287) At one point he sets out his working principles: [The aesthetician] has to confront patiently the old aesthetic categories with the emerging ones, and to seek the continuity, in the discontinuity. If he is eager, as he should be, to check his own procedures again and again, to seek out the results of every competing school (even if they refute his own premises and conclusions), to avoid consciously the temptation to systematize the aesthetic sphere once and forever, and always to stick to the evidences of Ufe and of the painstaking advances made by the exact sciences and by psychology and sociology-in this case, the aesthetician's phUosophy of value might grow more sure. The assumptions he accepts will then be defensible to a considerable extent, even though there can never be any assuredness of total accuracy. (175) Those attitudes deserve the widest pubücation and imitation. However, a book which codes Marxism into its title as 'fundamentals,' and which costs $25.00, is perhaps not Ukely to reach those in the several disciplines who can turn to use its prudent yet powerful theory. MIT Press might be urged to find a wider readership by bringing out a paperback edition. There is a final aspect of the book which seems directly to express the axiological commitment of its phUosophy. I refer to the lucid construction of the essays. These embody a method of presaging, unravelling, and recapitulating arguments, sometimes by numbered schémas, always with a level of key terms defined and embroidery of recurrent themes which is fully admirable. ImpUcitly and throughout, these inquries refute the contention, or hope, that Marxist writing on the arts is unsubtle, infeUcitious, unscholarly, and unwilling "to seek out the results of every competing school." DONALD WESLING Terry Eagleton. Myths ofPower: A Marxist Study of the Brontes. Barnes & Noble, 1975. 148 pp. $23.50. We are all accustomed, in reading (and writing) Marxist critical analyses, to such sentences as "The very form of the work reflects the contending social forces (or major contradictions, or class conflicts) of the age." Too often such statements promise more than they deliver; Marxist critics recognize but do not always meet the obligation to examine art systematicaUy in ways that embrace both the work itself as artifact and its context (historical, social, personal) without impücitly severing the two. Those influenced by structuralism have made a significant contribution to critical methodology in this regard, and Terry Eagleton's study of the fiction of the Brontes belongs to this camp. Eagleton freely adapts Lucien Goldmann's concept of "categorical structure" (summarized by Eagleton as "those shared categories which inform apparently heterogeneous works, and shape the consciousness of the particular social group or class which produces them," p. 4) to elucidate the relations among literary text, social consciousness, and historical forces. Goldmann's aesthetic is built on the hypothesis that the "structures of the universe of a work are homologous to the mental structures of certain social groups or stand in an intelligible relation to them" REVIEWS 115 ("Genetic-Structuralist Method in History of Literature," in Marxism and Art, edited by Berel Lang and Forrest Williams, New York, 1972, p. 247). Eagleton differs from Goldmann on certain points but Uke him looks to the "deep" structure of a work to mediate among text, author, ideology, social class, productive forces. Eagleton identifies the crucial ideological structure in the Brontes' fiction as "a fictionaUy transformed version of the tensions and alliances between the two social classes which dominated the Brontes' world: the industrial bourgeoisie and the landed gentry or aristocracy" (4). He finds this conflict, central to the history of the West Riding in the first half of the nineteenth century, embedded within their fiction as...