When examiners and teachers mark your work, they look for both 'routine' and 'subtle' levels of analysis. Clearly the more 'subtle' areas you hit, the higher your mark!

Analysing any text at the level of ideology is capable of easily producing a very subtle analysis of the kind that gains the highest marks. You'll be able to apply the techniques covered here to texts you are studying for English Literature, English Language or Media Studies.

What is Ideology?

An ideology is a type of idea. It's not the personal ideas we might have 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 each have 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. Together, these many shared ideas - ideologies - create what we could call our 'system of beliefs', which some call our 'world view' or 'mind set'.

It is the ideologies we all share, sometimes referred to as 'dominant' or 'prevailing' ideologies, that mould and shape our ways of thinking about society, the world and its peoples.

• There are many reasons why ideologies are worthy of close study but two stand out as important:

a) we hold to them usually unquestioningly even though they are not our own ideas, i.e. the ideas originated in someone else's mind.

b) we hold to them so closely that we tend to see them as too obvious to question, as common sense or as natural.

• How can it be it that a particular set of someone else's ideas manages to catch hold and exert such a grip, or spread so quickly and widely throughout virtually a whole culture or society?
   
• 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 likely to most benefit from the rest of us holding them?
   
  • Some types of ideology have a religious origin; these often form our society's moral values.
  • Many ideologies seem to have a political origin arising from government and its laws.
  • The media play a part in maintaining and reinforcing certain important 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 supports a particular way of thinking...) and few would disagree that many everyday words are, at least, ideologically loaded.
   
  • When a woman chooses to end her pregnancy, for example, the action she undertakes might be termed 'abortion', 'getting rid of it', 'termination'... Can you see how each of these terms are ideologically loaded - that is, they each carry with them a kind of 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, 'pregnant'. Not so long ago the term used was 'expecting', and before that, 'with child'. The current term might be argued to be ideologically loaded because it is taken from a clinical semantic field - a similar field, in fact, to the word 'abortion'. The ideological implications of this change of 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 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.