Marx at Haworth

Reviews Marx at Haworth w.J. KEITH Terry Eagleton. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes London: Macmillan 1975· 148. £6.95 We are confronted, first of all, by a violently scarlet dust~jacket on which the photograph of a virile Marx dominates symbolically over reproductions of three portraits of the frail Bronte sisters (all in red-white-and-blue frames), 'A Marxist Study' is announced prominently on the jacket's front and spine, We then proceed past the dedication, celebrating 'the working-class movement of West Yorkshire,' to the opening page on which Dr Eagleton remarks breezily that 'we are all Marxists now.' But ifthat were so, one wonders why such a study is offered as either radical or new, The blatancy of all this may well frighten away more potential readers than it attracts. That would be a pity, since we do not need to share Eagleton's doctrinaire politics to gain numerous benefits from a discriminating reading of his book. The approach is far less narrow than we might expect at first sight. [n fact, Marx is only mentioned fleetingly (in the introductory chapter), and Eagleton takes pains to distinguish his own position from what he calls 'vulgar Marxism,' which, 'by reducing the author to some anonymous "class-representative," the passive, replaceable bearer of historical forces, fails to understand the dialectics whereby an individual life actively transforms the historical structures which determine it into a unique artistic product' (p 7). The language proves cluttered (a point to which I shall return), but the distinction is theoretically important. Eagleton generally, but not always, maintains it in practice. In facing fairly and squarely the tensions and dichotomies that pervade the Bronte novels - the split between rebellious passion and submissive obedience in Charlotte's work, the uneasy relations between social and metaphysical readings of Wuthering Heights, the separation of the personal and the social in Anne's fiction - Eagleton has written a lively, challenging, often brilliant book about the Brontes and their writings. The run-of-the-mill academic concentration on thematic patterns and related trivia looks feeble indeed by comparison with Eagleton'S bold grappling with significant issues. At the same time, reservations need to be made, and these transcend Eagleton 's specific study to question the ultimate validity of even a sophisticated VTQ , VOLUME XLVII, NUMBER 1, FALL 1977 MARX AT HAWORTH 87 Marxist criticism. Since we appear to be going through one of those recurrent periods when such a politically oriented literary approach is again fashionable, it seems worthwhile to explore these doubts a little further. The reservations articulate themselves into two basic and related questions: can Marxist criticism be sufficiently objective not to distort the 'unique artistic product'? and can it command a vocabulary precise and flexible enough to deal adequately with works as complex as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights? Eagleton's ideological bias is most obvious in his discussion of Shirley, where he finds the political convictions manifest in the novel particularly uncongenial. How many readers would recognize this book when it is characterized, with a placing sarcasm, as 'the glorious legend of a heroic capitalist class' which 'strives to conjure a Romantic myth out of real history to create a mythology of bourgeois enterprise' (p 85)? Eagleton must needs identify the working class as 'the major protagonist' in the book, though he acknowledges that it is 'distinguished primarily by its absence' (p 47); he can thus convert what may well be a deficiency in his literary method into a criticism of the novel. The inter-related love-stories, which for most readers occupy the centre of interest, look strange indeed when translated into Marxist rhetoric: 'A considerably more pronounced dialectic of power and submissiveness .. . is at work in the strongly sado-masochistic relationship between Shirley and Louis Moore' (p 57). What seems to me unfortunate about Eagleton's approach here is that it obscures the issue. One does not need to invoke ideological criteria to isolate Shirley's weaknesses; they reveal themselves in terms that literary criticism is wen equipped to deal with. Eagleton's strictures about Charlotte's alleged transferring of a contemporary situation into the safer perspective of an...