Marxism in Williams and Banks

Reading Russell Bank’s “Sarah Cole” with a Marxist perspective, the most obvious fixation would be the economic dissimilarities which fated the romance of Rob and Sarah. Ronald belonged to a class of “”lawyers, young unmarried” and he was residing in “whitewashed townhouse apartments”. Conversely, Sarah braved a “rough neighborhood… [with] shabby apartment buildings”. Sarah belonged to the laboring proletariat, “She spends her days packing “TV Guides”, but Ronald could not “connect the magazine in his hand to the woman”. It would be impossible for the different working classes to mix and perhaps more than physical appearances, this was the reason Ronald would not be seen with Sarah publicly.
However, sympathy should not quickly be assigned only to Sarah Cole. It is suggested that she enjoys the happier lifestyle. Sarah boasts children and the reader sees her socializing with her friends. Ronald, for all his money and education, was “moderately unhappy”. Ronald’s only accomplishment, that the reader is aware of, is his divorce and his failed relationship with Sarah. Furthermore, although others from his class frequent the bar, we always only see Ronald sitting alone. There is the suggestion that happiness belongs to the proletariat.
Raymond Williams is a modern Marxist critic whose work, “Marxism to Literature” offers a thorough analysis of the term ideology. “More significantly, perhaps, ‘ideology’ in its now neutral or approving sense is seen as introduced on the foundation of ‘all human knowledge… science…etc’ of course brought to bear from a class point of view. The position is clearly that ideology is theory and that theory is at once secondary and necessary; ‘practical consciousness’, as here of the proletariat, will not itself produce it. This is radically different from Marx’s thinking, where all separate theory is ideology, and where genuine theory- ‘real positive knowledge’- is by contrast, the articulation of practical consciousness.’”
Williams will study the term ideology, reverting to it’s “historical development”. He benefits from, and quotes in his working ideology definition, the abundant Marxist theorists who wrote before him. Williams is also concerned, and he approaches it at the end of the essay, about the application of the theory to “literature and ideas”.