Such structuralist approaches need not be limited to popular texts, and can be
applied with equal usefulness to the work of authors at what is often regarded as the
‘quality’ end of the market. To take an example, the character of Toad in The Wind in the
Willows (Grahame 1908) could be seen on the one hand as a rounded psychological
creation, in turns blustering and repentant, selfish, self-seeking and replete with hubris.
His exploits can then be seen entirely in terms of his personality. Structuralist analysis,
on the other hand, might see him as comic hero, archetypal overreacher, functioning as
the disruptive element in the social order that is necessary for the book’s main plot to
develop, and thus acting as a pivotal point for the articulation of the conflict between the
uncertainties of the newer machine age, and the more settled life of the rural idyll, a
conflict which is one of the major themes of the book.
Robert Leeson (1975/1980) led the attack on the application to children’s fiction of the
then prevailing tradition of adult literary criticism. He writes: ‘these days, turning to adult
lit-crit is like asking to be rescued by the Titanic’ (209). He locates the debate about
characterisation in a specifically ideological context, suggesting that enthusiasm for
psychological characterisation is a bourgeois trait. The old tales, he argues, echoing
Propp, didn’t need psychology, they had action and moral. The claims made by
traditional ‘lit-crit’ for such characterisation are elitist, and have little application for the
general reader. J.S.Bratton, too, rejected the Leavisite tradition in her study of Victorian
children’s books: ‘the liberal humanist tradition of literary criticism offers no effective
approach to the material’ (Bratton 1981:19) although she draws on Frye as well as
Propp in her resort to structuralism (see also Sarland 1991:142).
The critique of the position which sees character as the source of meaning and action
comes from a wider and more ideological perspective than that of structuralism alone,
and structuralism itself has more to offer than insights about character and action.
More widely, structuralism draws on semiotics to explore the whole range of codes that
operate in texts and by which they construct their meanings; it also takes a lead from
Lévi-Strauss (1963), who related structural elements in myths to structural elements in
the society that gave rise to them. This becomes a central tool of ideological critique,
allowing parallels to be drawn between ideological structures in the works and those in
society at large.
The underlying ground of ideological valueMarxist literary criticism analyses literature in the light of prevailing economic class
conflict in capitalist society. This conflict is not slavishly reproduced in the ideological
superstructure, of which literature is a part, but it is always possible to trace it in some
form in individual work. The liberal humanist tradition, by contrast, sees not class
conflict as the major determining structure in understanding history and society, but
materialism itself. The ideological conflict then becomes materialism versus humanism
and the paradigm distinction to be made about the work, pace Henry James, is that
between art and commerce. Terry Eagleton (1976) and Catherine Belsey (1980) are
among the major critics of the Leavisite tradition, identifying its liberal humanist roots,
and analysing its escapist response to the materialism of bourgeois capitalism.
Furthermore, they argue, by ‘naturalising’ its values as common sense, liberal
IDEOLOGY 45