When examiners and teachers mark your work, they look for both 'routine' and 'subtle' levels of analysis; but it is only the 'subtle' areas you investigate that gain the high marks and move your grade up towards an "A".

All texts can be analysed at the level of the ideologies they contain and such an analysis will reveal the most subtle details that can easily gain the very highest marks. The techniques you're about to discover can be applied easily to very many of the texts you will be studying whether for English Language, English Literature or Media Studies.

What is an ideology?

An ideology is an idea - but it's not a personal idea such as, 'I have an idea what Laura would like for her birthday'; for an idea to be labelled as an ideology, it needs to be one of the many widely held and shared ideas we hold to such as, 'I have a right to choose what I do with my life' or 'All people have a right to be treated equally' and so on.

• Ideologies are the ideas we rarely even consider consciously but which powerfully affect the way we think and live.

Together, these many ideologies create our 'system of beliefs' (some call this our world view or 'mind set'. It is the ideologies we share as a society and culture - often called dominant or prevailing ideologies - that mould and shape our ways of thinking about society, the world and its peoples.

• Why study ideologies?

a) we hold to them often unthinkingly - and therefore unquestioningly - even though they are originally someone else's ideas. This means that we implicitly trust in the person or group who originated them.

b) we follow them unthinkingly because we see them as being too obvious to question, as common sense or as being a natural way to think. They create a world-view that suggests to us something akin to "this may not be a perfect  world but it's the best possible of all worlds".

• How can it be it that a particular set of someone's else's or another group's ideas manages to catch hold and exert such a grip on individuals who otherwise might likely view themselves as able to think freely? And how do such beliefs spread so quickly and widely throughout whole cultures and societies?
   
• And when we do accept someone else's ideas about how we ought to think and live our own lives, shouldn't we ask whose ideas they are, what possible motives lie behind them and who is most likely to benefit from the rest of us holding to them?
   
  • Some ideological beliefs have a religious origin - it is these that help forge our society's moral values.
  • Many ideologies have a political origin and arise from government and its laws.
  • The media play a part in maintaining and reinforcing certain key ideologies.
  • Literature is thought to be unique in the way it can expose ideologies.
     
• It can be shown that texts of all kinds - literary texts such as novels, plays and poems, most non-fiction writing and all media texts - can be convincingly argued to work at an ideological level. This simply means that they work in various ways - and always transparently (i.e. not obviously) - to support and reinforce a particular way of thinking about and viewing the world.
   
• It is convincingly argued by political thinkers called Marxists that Western dominant ideologies act to support a particular kind of social structure or society, one that is hierarchical and, thus, competitive, rather than one that is co-operative and egalitarian. Two important modern theorists worthy of further study at A-level are Louis Althusser and Theodor Adorno.
   
  • If you think, to take just a few examples, of how women were once viewed in relation to men... of how the educated are viewed in relation to the uneducated... of how the rich are considered in relation to the poor... of the old compared to the young, and so on... these are all key dominant ideologies. Each of these could be viewed as not only ways of thinking but of a system of thinking that could be argued to act in ways that keep our culture as a highly competitive rather than a highly co-operative place in which to live out our lives... and competition could be argued to tend to favour the few rather than the many - the rich rather than the poor, for example?
     
• Some would argue that all language is ideological (i.e. it arises out of and thus tends to support or reinforce a particular 'cultural' way of thinking...); and few would disagree that many everyday words are, what is called, ideologically loaded. Here are examples that will help you to grasp this important idea:
   
  • When a woman chooses to end her pregnancy, for example, the action she undertakes might be termed 'abortion', 'getting rid of it', or 'termination'. Can you see how each of these terms might be called, with good reason, ideologically loaded? This means that they hold within them more than their literal meaning. It can be said that they carry with them a kind of cultural or ideological 'baggage' that creates, reinforces or suggests a particular mind set.
     
  • Another example is the current term used for a woman who is going to have a baby, i.e. we would usually say that she is 'pregnant'. Not so long ago, however, the everyday term used was 'expecting', and before that a pregnant woman was usually described as 'with child'.
    
    The current term is taken from a technical and clinical semantic field - a similar field, in fact, to the word 'abortion'. The ideological implications of this change of everyday usage could be argued to support a particular way of thinking - in this case that abortion is an acceptable choice. If you link the current term 'termination' with the older term 'with child' you should be able to recognise that that particular combination acts to foreground a rather less easily acceptable way of thinking or ideological standpoint.
     
  • It is interesting to consider how and why such older terms fall out of usage. Just when did we stop saying 'expecting a child' or 'she is with child' - and why? Were politicians or the media involved in this change? And if so, how and why was this done? Was it merely fashion or is it to reinforce a particular way of thinking that supports a political view? It is this kind of questioning that makes studying ideology important and fascinating.
     
• Ideologies pervade our minds at every turn; they guide our thoughts; they determine our actions - in ways that can be surprising, sometimes shocking, and occasionally tragic.