Marxist Ideal's & Sarah Cole

Part One

If one had to choose a sentence that best describes what Raymond Williams essay is about, then it’ll have to be found in the following, "Thus ideas were not to be and could not be understood in any of the older metaphysical or idealist senses. The science of ideas must be a natural science, since all ideas originate in man’s experience of the world" (Pg.123). This is because throughout most of his writing, Williams is constantly trying to make sense of what fundamental characteristics accounts for Marxist ideology.

Aspects of Williams questioning of what ideology is, can be found in his introduction in which he makes point of "ideology" not stemming from Marxism and then gives three broadly associated definitions of just what ideology in a Marxist perspective might be. These being three senses, the first being "a system of beliefs characteristics of a particular class or group", the second being " a system of illusory beliefs-false ideas of false consciousness-which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge, and thirdly "the general process of the production of meaning and ideas" (Pg.122).

Part Two

We are then given Russell Banks "Sarah Cole" and asked to view it from a Marxist perspective. The stories protagonist, Ron seems to fight into the Marxist dominant class group, whether its because of his job or his appearance, which is continually referred to as beautiful, he holds to the concept of being in charge, someone who is powerful. This can be seen when there is a description of the kind of men who sit at Osgood’s, the local preppie bar."Three or four men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five are drinking at the bar, and they, like the man who has just entered, wear three piece suits and loosened neckties. They are probably lawyers, young, unmarried lawyers gossiping with their brethren over martinis so as to postpone arriving home alone at their whitewashed townhouse apartments, where they will fix their evening meals in radar ranges and, afterwards, while their tv's chuckle quietly in front of them, sit on their couches and do a little extra work for tomorrow" (Banks). These men represent what Ron is, they are the representation of capitalists.

We are then given Ron’s love interest who falls under the proletariat, she is a mother of three who works in a factory and lives in a "rough neighborhood". A key description in which one assumes this classification of she being the non-dominant, can be seen with the lines, "Yet here I was inviting myself into her home, eagerly staring at the backs of her ravaged legs, her sad, tasteless clothing, her poverty" (Banks).