while ‘our’ side is again merely applying common sense. In the history of Marxist thought
there has been a convoluted development of usage of the term, not unrelated to the
distinction just outlined. For the purposes of this chapter, however, ideology will be
taken to refer to all espousal, assumption, consideration, and discussion of social and
cultural values, whether overt or covert. In that sense it will include common sense
itself, for common sense is always concerned with the values and underlying
assumptions of our everyday lives.
Volosinov (1929/1986) encapsulates the position when he argues that all language is
ideological. All sign systems, including language, he argues, have not only a simple
denotative role, they are also and at one and the same time, evaluative, and thus
ideological. ‘The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs’ (10). From this
perspective it will thus be seen that all writing is ideological since all writing either
assumes values even when not overtly espousing them, or is produced and also read
within a social and cultural framework which is itself inevitably suffused with values,
that is to say, suffused with ideology. In addition, in Marxist terms, considerations of
ideology can neither be divorced from considerations of the economic base, nor from
considerations of power (that is, of politics), and that too is the position taken here.
Representation: Gender, Minority Groups, and Bias in the 1970sIn eighteenth- and nineteenth-century didacticism the promotion of values had often
taken the overt form of direct preaching, while in the 1970s the specific form of the debate
was to do with questions of character representation and character role. The analysis
consisted in showing how children’s fiction represented some groups at the expense of
others, or how some groups were negatively represented in stereotypical terms. The
argument was that by representing certain groups in certain ways children’s books were
promoting certain values—essentially white, male and middle-class, and that the books
were thus class biased, racist and sexist. The fact that the protagonists of most
children’s books tended to be white middleclass boys was adduced in evidence. Black
characters rarely made an appearance in children’s fiction, and working-class
characters were portrayed either as respectful to their middle-class ‘betters’, or as stupid
—or they had the villain’s role in the story. Girls were only represented in traditional
female roles.
Geoffrey Trease (1949/1964) had led the way in drawing attention to the politically
conservative bias of historical fiction, and had attempted to offer alternative points of
view in his own writing. Nat Hentoff drew attention to the under-representation of
teenagers in children’s books, and saw the need to make ‘contact with the sizeable
number of the young who never read anything for pleasure because they are not in it’
(Hentoff 1969:400). Bob Dixon’s work (1974) was characteristic of many attacks on the
most prolific of British authors, Enid Blyton, and commentators were becoming
increasingly aware of the white middleclass nature of many children’s books, and of the
sex-role stereotyping to be found within them. Zimet (1976) drew attention to the
exclusion or the stereotypical presentation of ethnic minorities and women in children’s
fiction, and incidentally also in school textbooks, and espoused the use of positive
images of girls and of ethnic minorities. Bob Dixon (1977), in a comprehensive survey,
IDEOLOGY 41