Description
referencing style is mhra i attached the essay question and formatting as well as the chapter from the theory book we need to reference ‘a rose for Emily’ is available online in pdf form search for it and use references from that to make points and use the Marxist theory to back it up
Introduction to Critical Theory
Essay Brief
Dr Jenny McDonnell
• Essay questions will be based on the texts and theories studied on the module, and will be set by the module lecturer and distributed in January 2021.
• Essays must be submitted on or by Friday 12th March 2021 (5.00pm).
• Essays received after this deadline (without submitting an Extension Request form, and prior agreement with the lecturer) will be subject to the penalties for late submission outlined below.
Please note the following essay requirements:
• Must be 1000-1200 words.
• Must respond to one of the essay questions set by the module lecturer; essay questions will be set in January 2021.
• Must be submitted on or by Friday 12h March 2021 (5.00pm).
• Must be emailed to jenny.mcdonnell@iadt.ie on or by the above date.
• Must be sent as a Word document or a PDF.
• Essay must engage with at least one secondary critical source, as well as the core texts. These sources must be appropriately scholarly; please do not consult non-peer-reviewed, web-based material.
• Essay must provide citations for all references to/quotations from primary and secondary sources.
• Essay must adhere to the MHRA style sheet.
• Essay must include a bibliography.
• Essay must be typed in 12pt Times New Roman or Calibri font and double-spaced. PLEASE do not single-space your essays!
• Please indicate which question you are answering.
• Must be submitted with an accompanying cover sheet (available on Blackboard).
• Please note: you may not reproduce essay material from this module in the Summer Exam/Terminal Assignment.
***
Late submissions:
Late submission of assessments for this module (without submitting an Extension Request and prior agreement with the lecturer) will be penalised as follows:
• Up to one week late: 10% will be deducted from the awarded mark.
• One to three weeks late: Awarded mark will be capped at 40%.
• More than three weeks late: A ‘zero’ grade will be recorded.
Extensions:
Please consult the Programme Handbook for guidelines and regulations regarding
Extensions.
Submission of late assignments:
Please note: late assignments should not be emailed to the module lecturer or left in the
lecturer’s post-box in the Faculty office without prior agreement. Please consult with the module lecturer about the submission guidelines for late assignments.
***
Please familiarise yourself with the regulations regarding submission of assessments as set out in the Programme Handbook.
Please be aware of the regulations regarding collusion & plagiarism as set out in the
Programme Handbook.
Marxist criticism Beginnings and basics of Marxism Karl Marx (1818-1883), a German
philosopher, and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), a German sociologist (as he would now be
called), were the joint founders of this school of thought. Marx was the son of a lawyer but spent
most of his life in great poverty as a political exile from Germany living in Britain (he was
expelled after the 1848 ‘year of revolutions’). Engels had left Germany in 1842 to work in
Manchester for his father’s textile firm. They met after Marx had read an article by Engels in a
journal to which they both contributed. They themselves called their economic theories
‘Communism’ (rather than ‘Marxism’), designating their belief in the state ownership of industry,
transport, etc., rather than private ownership. Marx and Engels announced the advent of
Communism in their jointly-written Communist Manifesto of 1848. The aim of Marxism is to bring
about a classless society, based on the common ownership of the means of production,
distribution, and exchange. Marxism is a materialist philosophy: that is, it tries to explain things
without assuming the existence of a world or of forces beyond the natural world around us, and
the society we live in. It looks for concrete, scientific, logical explanations of the world of
observable fact. (Its opposite is idealist philosophy, which does believe in the existence of a
spiritual ‘world elsewhere’ and would offer, for instance, religious explanations of life and
conduct). But whereas other philosophies merely seek to understand the world, Marxism (as
Marx famously said) seeks to change it. Marxism sees progress as coming about through the
struggle for power between different social classes. This view of history as class struggle (rather
than as, for instance, a succession of dynasties, or as a gradual progress towards the
attainment of national identity and sovereignty) regards it as ‘motored’ by the competition for
economic, social, and political advantage. The exploitation of one social class by another is
seen especially in modern industrial capitalism, particularly in its unrestricted nineteenth-century
form. The result of this exploitation is alienation, which is the state which comes about when the
worker is ‘deskilled’ and made to perform fragmented, repetitive tasks in a sequence of whose
nature and purpose he or she has no overall grasp. By contrast, in the older ‘pre-industrial’ or
‘cottage industry’ system of manufacture, home and workplace were one, the worker completed
the whole production process in all its variety, and was in direct contact with those who might
buy the product. These alienated workers have undergone the process of reification, which is a
term used in Marx’s major work, Das Kapital, but not developed there. It concerns the way,
when capitalist goals and questions of profit and loss are paramount, workers are bereft of their
full humanity and are thought of as ‘hands’ or ‘the labour force’, so that, for instance, the effects
of industrial closures are calculated in purely economic terms. People, in a word, become
things. There were various influences on early Marxist thinking in addition to that of the political
experiences of its founders, including the work of the eighteenth-century German philosopher
Hegel (especially his idea of the dialectic, whereby opposing forces or ideas bring about new
situations or ideas). Marxism also built upon the socialist thinking which was produced in France
at the time of the French Revolution, and it inverted some of the ideas of early economic theory,
especially the view that the pursuit of individual economic self-interest would bring economic
and social benefits to the whole of society (the belief which was and is the underlying rationale
of capitalism). The simplest Marxist model of society sees it as constituted by a base (the
material means of production, distribution, and exchange) and a superstructure, which is the
‘cultural’ world of ideas, art, religion, law, and so on. The essential Marxist view is that the latter
things are not ‘innocent’, but are ‘determined’ (or shaped) by the nature of the economic base.
This belief about culture, known as economic determinism, is a central part of traditional Marxist
thinking. Marxist literary criticism: general In fact, though, Marx and Engels themselves did not
put forward any comprehensive theory of literature. Their views seem relaxed and undogmatic:
good art always has a degree of freedom from prevailing economic circumstances, even if these
economic facts are its ‘ultimate determinant’. Thus, Engels, writing to the English novelist
Margaret Harkness in April 1888, tells her that he is ‘far from finding fault with you for not having
written a point-blank socialist novel … The more the opinions of the author remain hidden the
better the work of art’. As cultured and highly-educated Germans, Marx and Engels had that
reverence for ‘great’ art and literature which was typical of their class, and there is an obvious
desire in such pronouncements to emphasise the difference between art and propaganda. All
the same, Marxist literary criticism maintains that a writer’s social class, and its prevailing
‘ideology’ (outlook, values, tacit assumptions, half-realised allegiances, etc.) have a major
bearing on what is written by a member of that class. So instead of seeing authors as primarily
autonomous ‘inspired’ individuals whose ‘genius’ and creative imagination enables them to bring
forth original and timeless works of art, the Marxist sees them as constantly formed by their
social contexts in ways which they themselves would usually not admit. This is true not just of
the content of their work but even of formal aspects of their writing which might at first seem to
have no possible political overtones. For instance, the prominent British Marxist critic Terry
Eagleton suggests that in language ‘shared definitions and regularities of grammar both reflect
and help to constitute, a well-ordered political state’ {William Shakespeare, 1986, p. 1).
Likewise, Catherine Belsey, another prominent British left-wing critic, argues that the form of the
‘realist’ novel contains implicit validation of the existing social structure, because realism, by its
very nature, leaves conventional ways of seeing intact, and hence tends to discourage critical
scrutiny of reality. By ‘form’ here is included all the conventional features of the novel –
chronological timeschemes, formal beginnings and endings, in-depth psychological
characterisation, intricate plotting, and fixed narratorial points of view. Similarly, the ‘fragmented’,
‘absurdist’ forms of drama and fiction used by twentieth-century writers like Beckett and Kafka
are seen as a response to the contradictions and divisions inherent in late capitalist society.
However, it is probably true to say (as Ken Newton does, p. 244, Theory into Practice) that
traditional Marxist criticism tends to deal with history in a fairly generalised way. It talks about
conflicts between social classes, and clashes of large historical forces, but, contrary to popular
belief, it rarely discusses the detail of a specific historical situation and relates it closely to the
interpretation of a particular literary text. As Newton implies, this suggests one of the main
differences between the Marxist criticism of the 1960s and 1970s and the cultural materialist
and new historicist criticism (Chapter 9) which came to the fore in the 1980s, since the latter
very often dealt closely with specific historical documents, attempting, in an almost
archaeological spirit, to recreate the ‘state of mind’ of a particular moment in history. ‘Leninist’
Marxist criticism A much harder line about literature than Marx and Engels themselves would
have approved of was generally pursued by officially sanctioned Marxists, at least until the
1960s. In the 1920s, during the early years after the revolution in Russia, the official Soviet
attitude to literature and the arts was very enlightened and ‘experimental’, and characteristically
modern forms of art were encouraged. The 1930s saw reaction throughout the whole of Soviet
society, and the State began to exert direct control over literature and the arts as well as
everything else. At the first Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934 liberal views were outlawed and a
new orthodoxy imposed, based on the writings of Lenin rather than those of Marx or Engels.
Lenin had argued in 1905 that literature must become an instrument of the party. ‘Literature’, he
said, ‘must become Party literature … Literature must become part of the organized, methodical,
and unified labours of the social-democratic party’. Experimentation was effectively banned:
writers like Proust and Joyce were stigmatised as exemplars of ‘bourgeois decadence’ (Joyce’s
Ulysses was denounced at the 1934 Congress as ‘a heap of dung crawling with worms’), and
straight realism was imposed (known as ‘Socialist Realism’). In George Steiner’s words, these
conditions made literature impossible above the level of, say, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Steiner calls
the two main streams of Marxist criticism, the ‘Engelsian’ kind, which stresses the necessary
freedom of art from direct political determinism, and the ‘Leninist’ which insists on the need for
art to be explicitly committed to the political cause of the Left. (The above discussion of the
views of Engels and Lenin draws on George Steiner’s chapter ‘Marxism and the literary critic’,
pp. 271-90 in his book Language and Silence). Those abroad who were sympathetic to the
ideas of Communism tried to follow the ‘Moscow line’ on matters where an official Party policy
existed, hence the international influence of the ‘Leninist’ views which crystalised at the 1934
Congress. Thus, in what came to be called the ‘Vulgar Marxism’ of the 1930s, a direct
cause-effect relationship between literature and economics was assumed, with all writers seen
as irrevocably trapped within the intellectual limits of their social-class position. A much-cited
example of this rigid kind of Marxist literary criticism is Christopher Caudwell’s Illusion and
Reality (written in the 1930s and published in 1946). Caudwell’s writing is both very generalised,
in the sense that there is little detailed textual reference to the works under discussion, and very
specific, in the sense that every facet of a writer is linked to some aspect of her or his social
status. Thus, in Caudwell’s discussion of Victorian poets (extracted in Newton’s Twentieth
Century Literary Theory) we read that ‘[Browning’s] vocabulary has a foggy verbalism which is a
reflection of his intellectual dishonesty in dealing with real contemporary problems’. Thus, a
particular kind of vocabulary is the direct product of the middle-class writer’s evasiveness on
sensifive social issues. All poets have their own form of escape from modern reality: Tennyson
laspes into a Keatsian dreamworld, Browning writes constantly on Italian medieval themes: To
Tennyson the Keatsian world of romance, to Browning the Italian springtime; both are revolting
backwards, trying to escape from the contradiction of the class for whom they speak. (Newton,
p. 87). The overall result is to provide little more than ‘sound-bites’ on literature for use in
political argument. Engelsian’ Marxist criticism From the 1930s, however, a rich variety of what
Steiner calls ‘Engelsian’ Marxist criticism flourished, either in exile, or in suppressed or
underground form. The group now called the Russian formalists had flourished in the 1920s,
until disbanded by the Party, and should be mentioned here, even though their work is not
strictly Marxist in spirit. The most prominent members of the group were Victor Shklovsky, Boris
Tomashevsky, and Boris Eichenbaum, whose work can be sampled in Russian Formalist
Criticism: Four Essays, edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (University of Nebraska
Press, 1965). Their ideas included the need for close formal analysis of literature (hence the
name), the belief that the language of literature has its own characteris-tic procedures and
effects, and is not just a version of ordinary language, and Shklovsky’s idea of ‘defamiliarisation’
or ‘making strange’ (expounded in the essay ‘Art as Technique’, which Lemon and Reis reprint)
which claims that one of the chief effects of literary language is that of making the familiar world
appear new to us, as if we were seeing it for the first time, and thus laying it open to reappraisal.
Another key Formalist idea is Toma-shevsky’s distinction (again expounded in the essay
reprinted in Lemon and Reis) between story (Russian fabula) and plot (Russian sjuzhet), the
former being an actual sequence of (perhaps imaginary) events as they would have occurred,
while the latter is the artistic presentation of these events, which might involve reorderings,
juxtapositions, repetitions, and so on, in order to heighten their effect in a work of literature. As
with the concept of defamiliarisation, there is a careful distinction here between reality itself and
its verbal representation in a work of literature, so that we are steered away from any notion that
literature simply mirrors reality in a documentary way. Later, in the early 1950s and 1960s, these
Formalist ideas were of great interest to the early structuralists, partly because of their emphasis
on the distinction between language and reality, and on literature as a set of systematic
procedures and structures. Some of those associated with Formalism, like Mikhail Bakhtin,
remained in Russia, but others went into exile and continued their work abroad, thus sowing the
seeds of the new forms of Marxist criticism which emerged in the 1960s. One such exile was the
linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), who continued his work in Prague, founding the Prague
Linguistic Circle, the members of which included Rene Wellek. Wellek, like Jakobson, went to
America shortly before the start of the War, and was influential in the movement known as ‘New
Criticism’ which built upon a number of these Russian Formalist ideas, especially those
concerning the need for close verbal analysis of literary texts and the special recognition of
literary language as a medium with its own characteristics that set it aside from day-to-day
language. The suppressed Russian Formalists also had an influence in Germany, on the
Frankfurt School of Marxist aesthetics. The school was founded in 1923, as a political research
institute attached to the University of Frankfurt. They practised a form of criticism which tried to
combine Freud and Marx, as well as aspects of Formalism. The best-known figures here are
Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide while fleeing from the Nazis in 1940, Herbert Marcuse,
a major influence on the radical thinking of the 1960s, and Theodor Adorno. Also forced to flee
from Germany was the playwright Bertolt Brecht, another opponent of the simplicities of the
doctrine of Socialist Realism. His notion of the ‘alienation effect’ in drama involves devices which
draw the attention of the audience to the fact that what they see on the stage is a constructed
literary image, not a natural reality. For example, a ‘director’ figure might sit at the side of the
stage throughout a play, following the script in a book (as in Brecht’s play Galileo). Such a
device is closely linked to the Formalists’ idea of defamil-iarisation, since, again, it emphasises a
boundary or ‘shift’ between literature and life. The present: the influence of Althusser Much
recent Marxist thinking on literature has been influenced by the work of the French Marxist
theoretician Louis Althusser (1918-1990), and his contribution will become clear if we outline
some of the key terms and concepts he introduced. One such is the notion of overdeterminism,
a word borrowed from Freud, which designates an effect which arises from a variety of causes,
that is, from several causes acting together, rather than from a single (in this case, economic)
factor. This concept of linked and interacting causes is intended to undercut simplistic notions of
a one-to-one correspondence between base and superstructure. A related term is the notion of
relative autonomy, which is the view that in spite of the connections between culture and
economics, art has a degree of independence from economic forces. This concept too is a way
of attacking simplistic views of a superstructure entirely determined by the nature of the
economic base. Ideology is a key term for Althusser, as for all Marxists. It is a broad concept
variously defined within Marxism. Althusser’s definition (quoted by Goldstein) is as follows:
Ideology is a system (possessing its logic and proper rigour) of representations (images, myths,
ideas or concepts according to the case) endowed with an existence and an historical role at the
heart of a given society. (Philip Goldstein, The Politics of Literary Theory: An Introduction to
Marxist Criticism Florida State University Press, 1990, p. 23). We can pare this to ‘a system of
representations at the heart of a given society’ to give a concise definition which makes culture
(including literature) a crucial vehicle of the values which underpin the status quo in any society.
These values and assumptions are usually implicit, often unrecognised, but suffuse all the
artefacts and all the culture of a given time. So this definition, too, departs from the crudity of the
base/ superstructure model, in which the former determines the nature of the latter. Now, says
Goldstein, ‘the economic infrastructure still influences ideological practices, but only in the “last
instance'” (Goldstein, p. 23). Decentering is a key term in Althusser to indicate structures which
have no essence, or focus, or centre. Again, this is partly a way of avoiding the view that the
economic base is the essence of society and the superstructure merely a secondary reflection.
The notion of decentering implies that there is no overall unity: art has a relative autonomy and
is determined by the economic level only ‘in the last instance’. These ‘Engelsian’
pronouncements do not cancel out the Marxist tendency to imprison art within economics, but
they do release literature on bail, so to speak, and allow it a high degree of day-to-day freedom.
Althusser makes a useful distinction between what we might call state power and state control.
State power is maintained by what Althusser terms repressive structures, which are institutions
like the law courts, prisons, the police force, and the army, which operate, in the last analysis, by
external force. But the power of the state is also maintained more subtly, by seeming to secure
the internal consent of its citizens, using what Althusser calls ideological structures or State
ideological apparatuses. These are such groupings as political parties, schools, the media,
churches, the family, and art (including literature) which foster an ideology – a set of ideas and
attitudes – which is sympathetic to the aims of the state and the political status quo. Thus, each
of us feels that we are freely choosing what is in fact being imposed upon us. This Althusserian
distinction is closely related to the notion of hegemony, which was given prominence by the
Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1934). Gramsci contrasts rule, which is direct political
control, which uses force when necessary, and hegemony, which is (as defined by Raymond
Williams) ‘the whole lived social process as practically organized by specific and dominant
meanings, values and beliefs of a kind which can be abstracted as a “world-view” or “class
outlook'” (Williams, Marx-ism and Literature Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 101). Williams
relates hegemony to culture in general and to ideology in particular. Hegemony is like an
internalised form of social control which makes certain views seem ‘natural’ or invisible so that
they hardly seem like views at all, just ‘the way things are’. The ‘trick’ whereby we are made to
feel that we are choosing when really we have no choice is called by Althusser interpellation.
Capitalism, says Althusser, thrives on this trick: it makes us feel like free agents (‘You can have
any colour you like…’) while actually imposing things upon us (‘… as long as it’s black’). Thus,
democracy makes us feel that we are choosing the kind of government we have, but in practice
the differences between political parties, once in power, are far fewer than the rhetorical gulfs
between them. Interpellation is Althusser’s term for the way the individual is encouraged to see
herself or himself as an entity free and independent of social forces. It accounts for the
operation of control structures not maintained by physical force, and hence for the perpetuation
of a social set-up which concentrates wealth and power in the hands of the few. The general
purport of these Althusserian ideas is to enable a much more subtle view of how society works
than that provided by traditional Marxism. Instead of force crudely applied from a single source,
as from a lever, there is assent secured in many different and complex ways, and ideological
power is shown to be of ultimately greater significance than material power. Thus, literature is
shown to be of crucial importance in its own right, not just a helpless and passive reflector of the
economic base where the real business of society goes on. Hence, the attraction of Althusser to
recent Marxist critics is that he offers ways of by-passing the crude base/superstructure model
without giving up the Marxist perspective altogether. Althusser’s views represent what we might
call revisionist Marxism, which is to say that they rethink and repackage the basic concepts in a
form which is more subtle and more flexible. This is not to say that Althusser was a flexible
thinker generally: on the contrary, he was a particularly dogmatic one, much attacked on the left
for his promotion of ‘theory’ as a separate realm which is above experience, practice, or activism
(see especially The Poverty of Theory by the British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson). But he
did provide terms and formulae when they were needed, in the liberalising 1960s, which
loosened the monolithic fabric of Marxist thinking and therefore made it acceptable to the
radicals of that period. Without these ‘loosening’ moves Marxism might have been widely
rejected as just one more form of rigid traditional thinking which the ‘counter-culture’ of that time
needed to reject. Since the 1970s the best-known British Marxist critic has been Terry Eagleton,
whose work has reflected a wide range of influences, including for a time that of Althusser.
Marxist criticism seems to conflict in its basic assumptions with those of post-structuralism and
postmodernism, and the most significant Marxist writing in the 1980s and 1990s had involved a
process of intricate interaction with these movements. Marxist criticism has also traditionally
been opposed to psychoanalytic explanations of conduct, on the grounds that psychoanalysis
falsely isolates individuals from the social structures in which they exist. All the same, the
American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson (in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act, 1981) has tried to reconcile the two. Essentially, Jameson offers political
extensions of basic psychoanalytic terms like ‘the unconscious’ and ‘repression’. Literature, in
his view, often tries to repress historical truth, but analysis can reveal its underlying ideology
(that is, its unconscious). A basic starting point on Eagleton, Jameson, and this whole area of
debate would be to read Jameson’s essay ‘The politics of theory: Ideological positions in the
postmodernism debate’ and Eagleton’s ‘Capitalism, modernism, and postmodernism’, which are
reprinted as items 22 and 23 in David Lodge’s Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. STOP
and THINK General: The main tenet of Marxist criticism – that the nature of literature is
influenced by the social and political cirumstances in which it is produced – might well be
immediately accepted as self-evidently true. The difficulty and controversy lie entirely in deciding
how close the influence is. Are you going to adopt a ‘determinist’ position, and argue that
literature is the passive product of socio-economic forces, or do you take a more ‘liberal’ line and
see the socio-economic influence as much more distant and subtle? Your main difficulty will be
to show the operation of these economic forces (no matter whether you take the ‘strong’ or the
‘weak’ model) in a given literary work. What exactly do directly operating, or indirectly operating
socio-economic forces look like in a literary work? Specific: These are difficult questions to cope
with in the abstract, and you will find it helpful to think about them in the context of a specific
example. In the example below, therefore, is a ‘determinist’ or a ‘liberal’ line being taken, and
how is this indicated? Is the socio-economic influence seen by the critic in the plot content of the
play, in the characterisation, or in the literary form itself, and if so how? What Marxist critics do
1. They make a division between the ‘overt’ (manifest or surface) and ‘covert’ (latent or hidden)
content of a literary work (much as psychoanalytic critics do) and then relate the covert subject
matter of the literary work to basic Marxist themes, such as class struggle, or the progression of
society through various historical stages, such as, the transition from feudalism to industrial
capitalism. Thus, the conflicts in King Lear might be read as being ‘really’ about the conflict of
class interest between the rising class (the bourgeoisie) and the falling class (the feudal
overlords). 2. Another method used by Marxist critics is to relate the context of a work to the
social-class status of the author. In such cases an assumption is made (which again is similar to
those made by psychoanalytic critics) that the author is unaware of precisely what he or she is
saying or revealing in the text. 3. A third Marxist method is to explain the nature of a whole
literary genre in terms of the social period which ‘produced’ it. For instance, The Rise of the
Novel, by Ian Watt, relates the growth of the novel in the eighteenth century to the expansion of
the middle classes during that period. The novel ‘speaks’ for this social class, just as, for
instance, Tragedy ‘speaks for’ the monarchy and the nobility, and the Ballad ‘speaks for’ for the
rural and semi-urban ‘working class’. 4. A fourth Marxist practice is to relate the literary work to
the social assumptions of the time in which it is ‘consumed’, a strategy which is used particularly
in the later variant of Marxist criticism known as cultural materialism (see Chapter 9, pp. 182-9).
5. A fifth Marxist practice is the ‘politicisation of literary form’, that is, the claim that literary forms
are themselves determined by political circumstance. For instance, in the view of some critics,
literary realism carries with it an implicit validation of conservative social structures: for others,
the formal and metrical intricacies of the sonnet and the iambic pentameter are a counterpart of
social stability, decorum, and order. Marxist criticism: an example As an example of Marxist
criticism we will take chapter five, on Twelfth Night, in Elliot Krieger’s A Marxist Study of
Shakespeare’s Comedies (1979). As it is discussed here, the example mainly shows the first of
the five Marxist critical activities just listed. The play centres on the love between the Duke
Orsino and the Lady Olivia. His love is extravagantly and persistently expressed but she at first
rejects him, having dedicated herself to a period of protracted mourning for her dead father.
Subsequently she falls in love with Viola, a young noblewoman who is temporarily disguised as
a man and acting as his servant and go-between (under the name Cesario). Olivia is also loved
by her steward, the strict and punctilious Malvolio, who is tricked by her uncle, Sir Toby Belch,
into believing that his love for her is returned. The essay begins by citing the dominant critical
view of the play, which is that it presents various extremes of self-indulgence (such as Orsino’s
wallowing in fantasies of romantic love and Toby Belch’s selfabandonment to physical appetites)
and contrasts these with an extreme puritanism and resistance to pleasure, as seen in Malvolio.
The play is seen as recommending a balance and decorum in which these extremes are
avoided and proper human fulfilment becomes possible. Krieger points out that this ignores the
question of class in the play: when ‘order’ is restored at the end, the aristocratic characters
suffer no particular ill effects, while Malvolio’s fate is much more severe, yet Malvolio’s
self-interest differs from the obviously narcissistic preoccupations of Orsino and Olivia and the
egoistic revelry of Sir Toby only because decorum forbids one of his rank to ‘surfeit on himself
(p. 99). Thus ‘only a privileged social class has access to the morality of indulgence’. Indeed, by
definition, ‘the members of the ruling class find their identities through excessive indulgence in
appetite’ (p. 100). Each of the members of the aristocratic class, he continues, has a private
‘secondary world’. For Sir Toby it is the unfettered world he reaches by drink, for he ‘forces
everyone to care for him while using the enforced incompetence of drunkenness and the willed
oblivion of time in order to protect himself from the possibility of caring for others’ (p. 102).
Likewise, Olivia protects herself from the needs of others by retreating into a private world of
bereavement, and Orsino into a wholly subjective world of love obsession in which everything
becomes ‘an adjunct of, and accompaniment to, the Duke’s psychological condition’ (p. 104). In
these ‘privatised’ ‘second worlds’, each becomes, not part of a community, but ‘one self king’ (p.
103). Viola, too, attempts to retreat into one of these second worlds, but though she is actually
aristocratic, the disguise she adopts enables her to choose a temporary non-aristocratic status
(‘I’ll serve this duke’), and she thus becomes ‘an object within the second worlds of Orsino,
Olivia and Sir Toby’ (p. 107), someone they assume is available for their use or manipulation.
Within the world of the servants in the play, there is much emphasis on ‘aspiration’: the new
servant Cesario/Viola displaces Valentine and Curio from their positions of privileged access to
Duke Orsino, and in Olivia’s household there is a constant struggle for prime position between
Maria (another of the servants) and Malvolio. Both, in fact, aim to marry into the family, which
Maria eventually achieves by marrying Sir Toby as a reward for her decisive humiliation of
Malvolio. Krieger therefore sees her as a significant element in the play: Maria is hardly a
proto-bourgeoise, in that her aspiration supports and confirms rather than challenges the
continued validity of aristocratic privilege, but with her abilities to separate self from vocation, to
express self apart from imposed duty, and to earn by her actions advancement in social degree,
only Maria in Twelfth Night indicates the bourgeois and Puritan emphasis on independence,
competition, and the association of stature with merit. (p. 121) In contrast, Malvolio is much less
of a representative of any kind of change in the social order, since he has an extreme reverence
for all the trappings of aristocracy, and attributes the circumstances which, he thinks, have made
possible his own elevation to the aristocracy to ‘fortune’ and his ‘stars’. Thus, fortune in the play
is a force, like ‘nature’ which is often an alibi or a rationalisation of inherited aristocratic privilege.
For the Marxist critic, then, the play demonstrates the gulf which exists between masters and
servants and manifests something of the state of mind that is characteristic of each class. The
Marxist feature of this essay is the way it introduces the notion of social class into interpretations
of the play: this is its special ‘intervention’ into the large body of critical writing on the play, in
which the topic is never raised. Very little indeed is said in the essay about the specifics of the
precise historical moment in which it was written: rather, a subtle and original reading is woven
round the generalised notions of social-class conflict, class privilege, and aspirations towards
what would now be called upward social mobility