Alienation, Confrontation And Subversion

Jack London’s The Iron Heel occupies a very prominent position in the literary works of American proletariats. Jack London in the novel demonstrates the nature of American capitalism and humanitarianism and reveals the startling class contradiction in American social life. At present, scholars in domestic and foreign academia study The Iron Heel mainly from the content, structure, character, theme, technique and other aspects. Their attentions to ideological issues reflected in the novel are inadequate.The French Structralist Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser profoundly reveals the materiality and entity of ideology and the specific function and mechanism of ideology as a soft state apparatus. Based on these theories of criticism, this dissertation is emphatically from American domestic and foreign social economy, political and ideological background in the late 19 th century and the early 20 th century to explore the religious, philosophical and political ideology reflected in the novel in depth and to reveal the specific function and mechanism of ideology behind the text.The main body of the thesis includes three chapters. The first chapter mainly analyzes the reasons concerning the alienation of American proletariats represented by worker Jackson by bourgeoisies’ ideological state apparatuses and illustrates that bourgeoisies with the help of the dominant conceptual state apparatuses for the control of proletariats’ ideologies within their scope of rule to safeguard their political leadership and ideological hegemony that the reproduction of the capitalist production relations are essential needed. The second chapter mainly discusses the confrontation of American proletariats represented by socialist leader Ernest with bourgeoisies’ ideological state apparatuses and illustrates Jack London’s view that only from the viewpoint of class struggle is it possible to explain various kinds of ideologies that exist in a certain social form. The class struggle in the soft state apparatuses is an important part of class struggles. The third chapter mainly elaborates on the subversion of American proletariats revolutionaries represented by Ernest’s wife Avis over bourgeoisies’ ideological state apparatuses and illustrates that the novel conveys the idea that proletariats must seize state power to win the leadership of the repressive state apparatuses and the conceptual state apparatuses so that to break the existing bourgeoisies’ state apparatuses andto replace it with the different proletariats’ state apparatuses.The ideological struggles between proletariats and bourgeoisies incarnated in the novel reflect that although Jack London is affected by the social and historical situations at that time and is necessarily restricted by the mainstream ideologies, yet those do not mean that his literary works can only play the function of social stability or his literature is inevitable isomorphism with the ideologies of the ruling classes. On the contrary, Jack London is in the hope of his shape of the world in literature to establish a fair and reasonable society and to struggle against the dominant ideologies. Therefore, Jack London’s novel has important enlightening significance for American proletariats to get rid of the suppression, deception and digestion of bourgeoisies’ mainstream ideologies, thus to revive proletariats’ ideologies and to promote socialist movements in the United States.