MARXISM AND LITERARY CRITICISM 87 Eagleton identifies in the Brontes' fiction a recurrent ideologically oriented categorial structure of roles., values and relations which function as the primary mediation between their novels and the social reality icflected in them. He demonstrates convincingly that the historical conditions of the West Riding in the early nineteenth century gave birth to two sets of mutually contending values. ^On the one hand are ranged the values of rationality, coolness, shrewd self-seeking, energetic individualism, radical protest and rebellion; on the other lie habits of piety, submission, culture, tradition, conservatism" (p 4). He reads Charlotte's novels in terms of the fictional tensions which are imaginative transformations of frictions between the industrial bourgeoisie and the landed gentry or aristocracy. Eagleton does not mechanically simplify the class character of the Bronte sisters. Nor docs he reduce the structural tensions of their novels to the level of a mere antagonism between different sections of the ruling class. A detailed analysis of the functions of the leading characters in Charlotte's novels leads him to the conclusion that in each work we discover ^an inherently complex system where roles arc fluid and permutable, where characters may embody degrees of fusion and overlapping between two or more functions. And this liability of the structure which allows roles to be combined, displaced and inverted within a controlling order of literary types, is a major clue to the novels' meaning9'' (p 74). / Most comments on Wuthfring Heights tend to isolate it from its social context and analyze it in terms of eternal categories devoid of socio-historical content. Eagleton brings to light the social implications of the basic contradiction in the novel exprtssed in the choice between Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. The tragedy, according to him, arises from Catherine's attempt t® square authenticity with social convention.. ^an ontological commitment to Heathcliff with a phenomenal relationship to Linton" (p 101). Eagleton's doctrinal intolerance of a pluralist approach to criti^ cism is particularly interesting in view of the general West European tendency to argue in favour of a pluralist society with a multiplicity of political parlies and, by implication, competing but co-existing ideologies. These arc times when even many leading lights of the European communist parties readily abandon some long-cherished principles of Marxism-Leninism. In this context the Oxford scholar's refusal to treat Marxist criticism as merely one of the possible approaches to literature and his insistence that it should be approached as the many-sided contribution to the great Hegelian totality of truth arc likely to evoke only a faint response till a considerable corpus of Marxist practical criticism emerges that can substantiate its theoretical claims. MOHAN THAMPI