Marxist Criticism

According to Marx, people’s lives are determined by their economic circumstances. Material circumstances and historical situations, among other aspects, form a society. He believed that the owners of the means of production can manipulate politics, government, education, arts and all other aspects of a culture.

A key figure is the first major Marxist critic Georg Lukács who developed the critical theory of ‘reflection’, seeing literary works as reflections of a kind of system that was gradually unfolding.

In his view, the novel, for instance (and he had much to say about this genre), revealed or ought to reveal underlying patterns in the social order and provide a sense of the wholeness of existence with all its inherent contradictions, tensions and conflicts.

Some of the most common questions that a reader should keep in mind when reading a text from a Marxist perspective are the following

• Are both the classes depicted with equal care and attention? Is the working class ignored or devalued in any way?
• Is there any exploitation or manipulation of workers by their owners?
• Does the dominant class in the text, consciously or unconsciously, repress and manipulate the working class?
• What does the setting tell you about the distribution of wealth and power in the society?
• Is the text a product of the culture from which it has originated?
• Does it support or condemn capitalism?
• What were the economic conditions during the publication of a text and how was it received in the society at that time?

Jane Austen lived in a society which was ruled by strict codes of conduct and where class and social standing held immense importance. Austen belonged to the class that the historian David Spring calls “pseudo-gentry”as her father was a clergyman. Pseudo-gentry were the upper-professional families living in the country who had connections with the wealthier landed-gentry families oin the area. Their economic situation, however, was below the families of the landed-gentry.

Austen’s novels revolve around the life and events of the upper classes of the society. She wrote about the people and the class that she was familiar with and readers wanted to read abour. The characters of her novels belong to the classes that she was in close contact with i.e. the clergy, minor landed-gentry and upper landed-gentry.

Cuddon, J. (2013) A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Fifth Edition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell