humanism conceals its reactionary political role, though the idealist nature of its
position is often clear enough in its claim of transcendent status for those same values
and for a universal ‘human nature’ in which they inhere.
To take an example, a liberal humanist reading of The Wind in the Willows might see it
as celebrating the values enshrined in notions of home and good fellowship, in
opposition to the threatening materialism of the wide world with its dominant symbol of
the motor car. A case might be made that the recurrent plots and subplots, all of which
involve explorations away from, and successive returns to warm secure homes,
culminating in the retaking of Toad Hall from the marauding weasels and stoats, have a
universal appeal, since such explorations and returns are the very condition of
childhood itself. An ideological perspective might note, by contrast, the resemblance of
those secure warm homes to the Victorian middleclass nursery, and comment upon the
escapism of the response to the materialism of the wide world. Such an approach might
further recognise the underlying feudalist presuppositions that are hidden within the
‘common sense’ assumptions of the book, and might identify in the weasels and stoats
the emergence of an organised working class challenging the privileges of property and
upper-middle-class idleness. Jan Needle’s re-working of the book, Wild Wood (1981),
starts from just such a premise. In addition the celebration of fellowship is an entirely
male affair, the only women in the book—the jailer’s daughter and the bargee—have
distinctly subservient roles, and claims for universality just in terms of gender alone begin
to look decidedly suspect.
In her continuing ideological critique Belsey suggests that from the liberal humanist
perspective people are seen as the sole authors of their own actions, and hence of their
own history, and meaning is the product of their individual intentions. In fact, she
argues, the reverse is true: people are not the authors of their own history, they are
rather the products of history itself, or less deterministically, engaged in a dialectical
relationship with their history—both product and producer. The grounds for Leeson’s
argument, above, are now clear, for a criticism that espouses psychological
characterisation as a central tenet of ‘quality’, and that insists that the stories in which
those characters find themselves should be rooted in the intentionality of those
characters’ psyches, is liberal humanist in assumption, and will fail to expose the
ideological nature both of the fiction to which it is giving attention, and of the fiction
that it is ignoring.
In liberal humanist criticism it is the author who takes centre stage, and Belsey
identifies ‘expressive realism’ as literature’s dominant form over the past 150 years:
reality, as experienced by a single gifted individual is expressed in such a way that the
rest of us spontaneously perceive it as being the case. Grahame’s intention is assumed
to be that readers should see childhood as a time and place of adventure within a secure
framework, and readers are to take his word for it. The resort to the author’s intention
as the source of meaning in the work, known to its critics as the ‘intentional fallacy’, had
already come under attack for circularity from the New Critics, since the primary
evidence for the author’s intention was usually the work itself. Belsey takes the
argument one step further, suggesting that expressive realism operates to support liberal
humanism, and thus, effectively, in support of capitalism itself. Ideological perspectives
insist, in contrast, that texts are constructions in and of ideology, generally operating
46 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES