Class conflict and its construction of identity : a comparative study of Batman: A Death in the Family and A Tale of Two Cities

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the notion of expendability is not a moral condition but a structural one: certain figures are rendered disposable not because of personal failings, but because the ideological structures they inhabit have no genuine place for them. Reading Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) alongside Jim Starlin’s Batman: A Death in the Family (1988), it argues that both texts, though they could hardly seem more different in form, era, and cultural standing, enact the same logic of class-based expendability, dressing structural necessity in the language of sacrifice, tragedy, or readerly choice. The methodology draws on three interlocking theoretical frameworks. Marx’s materialist conception of history establishes the structural conditions from which class conflict arises; E.P. Thompson’s understanding of class as lived experience illuminates how those conditions are felt and internalised; and, finally, Althusser’s theory of Ideological State Apparatuses explains how class domination is reproduced through culture and representation. Applied to A Tale of Two Cities, these frameworks reveal how Sydney Carton’s death resolves an ideological problem the novel cannot otherwise solve: the removal of the subject the apparatus has hailed but for whom it has no use. Applied to Batman: A Death in the Family, they exhibit how Jason Todd’s working-class habitus renders him structurally incompatible with the elite values Batman’s apparatus demands, and how the reader vote that determined his death manufactures the appearance of agency whilst foreclosing any genuine challenge to the apparatus’s logic. By bringing a canonical Victorian novel into dialogue with a superhero comic, the dissertation argues that both texts perform the same cultural work: naturalising the removal of the disruptive working-class subject whilst ensuring that readers mourn the individual rather than interrogate the system that necessitated their removal.