Review: Terry Eagleton – Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës

Method: Marxist literary criticism

Conceptual apparatus
Thesis:
Aim
What it is not
Organisation
Aspects of the style: lexicon – contradiction & contradictory, conflict, tumultuous, turbulent

The Brontë sisters lived and created at a time of deep social changes. “The Industrial

Revolution began on their doorstep, almost within sight of their parsonage windows” (p. ),

states Terry Eagleton in Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. This troubled age is

precisely what helped shape the “deep structure” of the Brontë novels. The social conflicts that

stem from these tumultuous times and their relation to the sisters’ novels is precisely what

Eagleton sets out to explore, not as simple correlations of literary and social facts, but as a

recurrent structure that mediates between fiction and history.

Only one methodology allows for this type of interpretation, maintains Eagleton, quoting

Graham Hough: “[t]o think of this subject at all requires some application of Marxism”. This

critical method allows the fiction to be “rooted in, without being reduced to, specific social

conditions”.

However, the connection between history and literature cannot be based on merely

relating facts from one sphere to the other. There needs to be “some concept of structure”,

claims Eagleton. Thus, one of the aims of these essays is

to identify in the Brontës’ fiction a recurrent ‘categorial structure’ of roles,

values and relations, and, since this informing structure seems to me distinctly

ideological, to claim this as primary mediation between the novels and

society, a crucial nexus between fiction and history.

 Eagleton borrows the term ‘categorial structure’ from the Marxist critic Lucien

Goldmann, but refines its meaning. If Goldmann used the term to refer to “the shared categories

which inform apparently heterogeneous works, and shape the consciousness of the particular

social group or class which produces them”, Eagleton employs it as a mediator between the

novels, the social environment and the historical forces. The purpose of this mediation is to

shed light not only on the ideological structure of the works examined, but also on “its relations

both to what we call literary ‘form’ and to an actual history”.

Another key term in Eagleton’s analysis is Louis Althusser’s “overdetermination”: the

way in which major social conflicts are never expressed directly, but rather give rise to a series

of subsidiary conflicts that complicate more the initial situation. In the case of the Brontës, the

major historical conflict – the rise of the Industrial Era – is further complicated by a series of

factors: their social position, their gender and education, and their social and geographical

isolation.

The book is made up of seven chapters, preceded by an Introduction to the Anniversary

Edition, an Introduction to the Second Edition and an Introduction. The three Introductions

present the thesis, method, aims and justification for Eagleton’s study. The first four chapters

analyse Charlotte Brontë’s novels Jane Eyre, The Professor, Shirley and Villette. The fifth

chapter applies the method described in the Introduction, identifying The Structure of Charlotte

Brontë’s Fiction. The sixth chapter is a study of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and the

last chapter focuses on the work of Anne Brontë.

In his Introduction to the Second Edition, Eagleton argues that the choice of Marxist

criticism as his method was influenced in part by the resurgence of Marxist criticism in Britain

as a reaction to the political events of the late 1960s, and explains a certain “necessary

methodological pluralism” employed in the analysis. Furthermore, the author adopts a critical

stance and discusses some “negative judgement[s]”expressed on Charlotte Brontë’s fiction, or

rather “multiple fictions”. Another critical method, such as feminist criticism, might have shed

a more positive light on what otherwise might seem incoherencies and discrepancies in

Charlotte’s novels. Also missing in Eagleton’s analysis, the author notes, is the voice of

psychoanalytical theory.

The thesis of Eagleton’s essays is that the Brontë sisters, “transitional” figures emerging

as writers at the dawn of the industrial era and in the twilight of Romanticism,

inherit both the turbulent and traditionalist aspects of the age which precedes

them. As I try to show, they are both rebels and reactionaries, pious

conformists and passionate dissenters; and this is more than simply a

temperamental matter. It reflects the contradictory history they lived through,

as well as the conflictive vantage-point from which they lived it. It also shapes

the inner structure of their novels. It is not just a sociological fact, but a

formative influence on their sensibility.

Thus, these contradictions constitute themselves in the forces that shape the Brontë

sisters’ fictional world and, paradoxically, make them “typical of a whole historical epoch”.
 From a naïve perspective, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights reads as “a story of

passionate love”1; as a myth- and fairy tale-like story, in which “a gypsy foundling, named for

a dead son, usurps a father’s love”2; as a story about innocence and loss; as a classic battle

between opposite poles, good and evil, dark and light; or even as a tragedy.

The application of a critical method, though, may reveal different interpretations. The

perspective of psychoanalytical criticism, for instance, may interpret the characters, Catherine,

Heathcliff and Linton, as aspects of human personality (Freud’s id, ego and superego), or (in

Jungian terms) as archetypes. From another perspective, it might read as a metaphysical novel,

exploring the “collision between two types of reality, restrictive civilization and anonymous

unrestrained natural energies or forces”. From yet another perspective, Wuthering Heights

might read as a feminist novel, concentrating on the female protagonist’s struggle to forge her

own destiny. And yet from another perspective, Marxist criticism, it is a novel about conflict

and power struggle, about the clash between the lower and the upper class. Following

Eagleton’s study, it is this perspective that we are analysing in this subchapter.

In the Introduction to his essays, Eagleton emphasises the contradictions in the Bronte

sisters’ personal background (their historic, economic, social, political, and cultural

environment) that shaped their fiction. As we stated before, the main purpose of Eagleton’s

Myths of Power is to show how the contradictions, the conflicts, the tumultuous, turbulent and

ambiguous3 times lived by the sisters reflected in their work. Caught between two worlds, the

sisters explore these conflicts in their writings. In Charlotte’s case, it seems that conflicts and

ambivalences can be resolved by somewhat traditional means (e.g., marriage in Jane Eyre).

Conversely, Wuthering Heights “makes no attempt to resolve these antinomies” (op.cit.: xvi).

1
www.enotes.com, consulted on 18.10.2015.
2
Joyce Carol Oates, “The magnanimity of Wuthering Heights”, http://celestialtimepiece.com/2015/01/27/the-
magnanimity-of-wuthering-heights/, consulted on 18.10.2015.
3
Eagleton’s choice of language emphasizes his thesis: the terms cited above, and variations thereof, are key-
words, recurrent throughout the collection of essays.
 The main issues in the novel are class struggle and social conflict. This shifts the focus

from the “love story” that the naïve eye might be drawn to, to Heathcliff’s journey from

classless outsider to landowner and oppressor of those who had oppressed him in the past.

Nevertheless, even in this transformation there is ambivalence: Heathcliff can only get his

revenge by joining the class that abused him4, but he remains an outsider and finds that his

revenge is forever elusive. In the same manner, Catherine (who identifies with Heathcliff) tries

to transcend her own class and becomes trapped and oppressed by it.

The main contradiction of the novel, Eagleton states, is Catherine’s choice between

Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. This means that Wuthering Heights is based on a social conflict:

Catherine rejects Heathcliff because he is socially inferior to Linton.

This is, we believe, the “categorial structure” that Eagleton mentions in his Introduction,

the mediating concept between text and historical context, the “inner ideological structure”

embedded in the novel.

All the interactions in the novel can be interpreted through the conceptual apparatus of

Marxist class struggle. The two houses, Wuthering Heights and the Grange, can be seen as

different points on the scale of exploitation. As a place of culture, the Grange “veils the hard

labour and exploitation on which this culture is based. At Wuthering Heights, on the other hand,

the brutality and violence of exploitation are much more visible. However, throughout the

novel, the houses also become displaced depending on the perspective: for Heathcliff and

Catherine both, Wuthering Heights is a place of oppression, but also a haven that they return

(or long to return) to.

Culture and labour are the attributes of the two opposing houses. Throughout the novel

these attributes are interwoven with another duality, that of bondage and freedom. Culture is a

4
“His rise to power symbolises at once the triumph of the oppressed over capitalism and the triumph of
capitalism over the oppressed”. (Eagleton a: 112)
weapon, and the opposite of labour for young men like Heathcliff and Hareton; but we see that

it is a double-edged weapon. For the Lintons, and later for Catherine, culture becomes

imprisonment. The aristocracy dominates the working class, but becomes a parasite of it, and

that is emphasized by the Lintons’ delicacy and frailty.

This critic of culture can be seen as a reflection of the Bronte’s own relation with culture.

They are outsiders in the world that they aspire to, not because they lack culture, but because

they lack the economical means to support it. They are forced to become governesses and

teachers, a sort of cultivated lower class.

The relationship between Heathcliff and the Earnshaw family can also be interpreted

through the lens of class conflict. Heathcliff has no place within the family, Eagleton claims.

He is an outsider both biologically and economically; thus his presence disrupts the balance of

the Heights economy, where “work is socialized, personal relations mediated through the

context of labour” (op.cit. : 106). Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship, far from a Romantic

ideal, actually exists in a “limbo of social relations”.

The novel’s ending, Eagleton claims, offers a “tentative convergence between labour and

culture, sinew and gentility” (op. cit.: 118). Still, although on a symbolic level his might

represent an ideological reconciliation, on a literal level Hareton is, as Heathcliff and Catherine

before him, “swallowed up into the hegemony of the Grange”.