Raymond Williams Theory of Cultural Materialism   pt2

In Marxism and Literary Critism,, Eagleton notes, “Books are not just structures of meaning, they are also commodities produced by publishers and sold on the market at a profit” [xxvi] .

The production of written word within itself is not materialist, but literature caters a demand which is what makes it materialist. The writer isn’t the individual who produces capital. The transformation, as the writer’s material becomes mass produced, is what makes it capital, and through this William’s explains the difficulty in separating “the development of literary form, from the highly specific economics of fiction publication” [xxvii] Although there’s no doubt Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights for her own enjoyment, “capital, wage-labour, and production of commodities” [xxviii] through the selling of the novel, meant that she would have had a material gain from it’s publication. Through this, the glorified trans-individuality that signifies the author is smothered by the fact that “they are also workers hired by publishing houses to produce commodities which will sell” [xxix] . An impending team of lower class labourers, described by Marx as “an appendage of the machine” [xxx] of consumerism, are therefore working for the material production that enables a middle class woman to have her creative work published.

Williams consistently links literature to polite and humane learning. Tradition such as the reading of Greek and Latin, something which Cathy does, and Hareton attempts to do in Wuthering Heights, expresses further class division and snobbery at a time when literacy amongst people was still a minority. Even in today’s society, reading classical literature is said to be expressive of a bourgeois or higher class taste, as Latin is often only taught in private schools, and therefore could symbolise a prosperous economic situation. “Thus these forms of the concepts of literature..are, in the perspective of historical social development, forms of a class specialisation” [xxxi] , as William’s notes that specialisation such as this which is economically effected, leads to social limitation. This restriction is emphasised by the rationality, in terms of literature that applied to the working class, as they relied on the passing of informative messages. This contrasts to the Bourgeoisie, such as the Bronte sisters, who were liberated in class and in terms of literature, allowing themselves to enjoy the “im