What is “realism,” anyway?
English 519, Karen Roggenkamp
I. Definitions
a. “Realism” describes an artistic style, “a literary method, a philosophical and political attitude, and a particular kind of subject matter” (Soo Yeon Choi).
b. Donna Campbell: “Broadly defined as ‘the faithful representation of reality’ or ‘verisimilitude’”—a mimetic theory of art, striving toward a one-on-one correspondence between verbal representation and the subject being representation
c. William Dean Howells: “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material” (“Editor’s Study,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine [November 1889]: 966).
d. Bliss Perry: Realism is “that which does not shrink from the commonplace . . . or from the unpleasant . . . in its effort to depict things as they are, life as it is.” It is used “in opposition to conventionalism, to idealism, to the imaginative, and to sentimentalism.”
e. George Parsons Lathrop: “Realism sets itself at work to consider characters and events which are apparently the most ordinary and uninteresting, in order to extract from these their full value and true meaning. In short, realism reveals. Where we thought nothing worthy of notice, it shows everything to be rife with significance.” (Atlantic Monthly 34 (Sept. 1874): 313-324.
f. Lilian Furst: “As an artistic movement realism is the product and expression of the dominant mood of its time: a pervasive rationalist epistemology that turned its back on the fantasies of Romanticism and was shaped instead by the impact of the political and social changes as well as the scientific and industrial advances of its day.”
II. Emergence
a. Daniel Borus: It’s a “deceptively simple question: why did significant numbers of serious novelists choose to write realist texts in the late nineteenth century? Put another way, why was the privileged literary form of the late nineteenth-century United States one that proclaimed as its aims accurate notation and natural expression?” (1-2)
b. Time frame: Civil War to very early twentieth century
i. First starts emerging 1850s, with Whitman, Alcott, Davis, et al.
ii. Greatest influence in 1880s and 1890s
c. Emerges first in France (Flaubert, Balzac); popularized in England by George Eliot; popularized in United States by William Dean Howells (“the dean of American letters”)
d. Reaction against nineteenth-century romanticism
i. Mid to late nineteenth-century “literary civil war” over how to portray life/characters
ii. Romanticism
1. Focused “upon the extraordinary, the mysterious, the imaginary” (Bliss Perry, 1903)
2. Writing with symbolic and allegorical import.
3. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The writer of romance has “a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation” (Preface to The House of the Seven Gables).
iii. Realism
1. “A reaction against romanticism, an interest in scientific method, the systematizing of the study of documentary history, and the influence of rational philosophy all affected the rise of realism” (Campbell).
2. “While romantics transcend the immediate to find the ideal, . . . realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence” (Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 428).
(More on differences between realism and romanticism under Point V.)
III. Characteristics
(Adapted from Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition and Donna Campbell, “Realism in American Literature, 1860-1890,” and Daniel Borus, Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market)
a. Depicts reality closely and in comprehensive detail.
i. Selective presentation of reality with an emphasis on verisimilitude, even at the expense of a well-made plot
ii. Series of plausible events—avoid coincidence and the sensational, dramatic elements of naturalistic and romantic works
b. Character
i. Character more important than action and plot
ii. Characters control their own destinies—they act on environment, rather than environment controlling character
iii. Complex ethical choices often key subject
iv. Characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive
c. Social class
i. The novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of a rising middle class (cf. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel)
ii. Emphasis on democracy—use of everyday, common, everyday materials and corresponding elevation of the “common man”
iii. Vernacular language, as opposed to poetic or elevated tone
d. Objective narrative point of view
i. Avoidance of overt authorial commentary or intrusion
ii. What realists really aimed for was “art that appeared artless” (Borus 78)—keep hand/voice of the creator out of the text
iii. “Realist craft was at its base the striving for pure, direct communication. Any textual element that gave to the reader a sense that it was not natural failed to meet this end” (Borus 91).
iv. Novelist an unattached observer of real life—the recorder, journalist, scientist
IV. Cultural Milieu
a. Age of Realism also called The Gilded Age, the Age of Energy, the Age of Darwin, La Belle Epoche, the Age of Colonialism and Empire, Progressive Era
b. Social factors
i. Increasing democracy and literacy
ii. Rise in middle-class affluence and leisure time
iii. Rise of advertising and consumer culture—“growing emphasis on tangible realities as opposed to spiritual or poetical ideals” (Shi 87)—Victorian culture of STUFF
iv. Time of unbelievable wealth for some, incredible urban poverty for others—unprecedented and widening gap between the “haves” and the “have nots”—robber barons
v. Labor strife (i.e. Haymarket Riot, 1886); economic depression (i.e. bank crash and economic depression, 1893)—increasing disillusionment with America
vi. Increasing ideology of capitalism, countered by solidification of ideology of socialism—is individual or community more important?
vii. “American realism . . . was intentionally aimed at [the] new tide of middle-class readers, eager to read about life as they knew it: life in contemporary cities and small towns, and the aspirations and struggles of people like themselves in an era of mobility and social dislocation. The realist had a moral and social role: to hold a mirror up to ordinary life, and help an emerging society understand itself and achieve its own voice” (Norton Anthology of American Literature).
c. Industrialization and urbanization
i. Incredibly rapid advances in industrial, technological fields
ii. Exploding urban population base—immigration, removal from family farms/agrarian ways of life (partly because of Northern victory in Civil War)
iii. 1860—only 16 cities with population over 80,000; by 1910 over 80 cities
iv. 1850—15% of population live in towns larger than 2,500 people (3.5 million); by 1900 40% of population lives does (over 30 million)
v. 1870-1920—11 million Americans left farms/rural villages for cities
vi. 1870-1920—over 11 million immigrants
vii. The Machine—that which could be calibrated, measured—empirical and objective
viii. Idea that society could be perfected because of technological and industrial advances
ix. “What was important was coming to be defined as what works, and what was real was what could be demonstrated physically” (John Lye, “Some Notes on Realism”).
x. Inventions: Atlantic telegraph cable 1866, transcontinental railroad 1869, early telephone 1876, early automobile 1890s
xi. Further developments in camera/photography
1. A “means of capturing the realities of a single instant, unvarnished by sentimentality” (Patricia Penrose)
2. Realism “the transfer of the photographic principle to fiction” (Borus 75).
d. Literary marketplace
i. Explosive rise of mass-circulation magazines and newspapers creates an unprecedented mass audience for authors
ii. 1840—138 daily newspapers with total circulation under 2 million; 1870—574 dailies; 1900—2600 dailies with total circulation over 24 million
iii. 1860-1910 publishing firms increase fourfold
iv. End of coterie system—literature truly becomes a mass-market phenomenon—literature as a commodity
v. First best-seller list published 1895
vi. International copyright law, finally, in 1891
vii. Growth of investigative journalism, muckraking
e. Philosophical outlook
i. Increasingly, humans seen as secular beings—world not seen as influenced principally by spiritual realm
ii. Rising influence of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer
iii. Rise of social sciences in academia—psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology
iv. Faith in human progress and the perfectibility of human institutions—schemes to solve social problems
v. Faith that HUMAN WORDS/LANGUAGE could faithfully represent “the real thing”
f. In general, then . .
i. A “flood of the real” across all aspects of American culture” (Shi 85).
ii. Realism a way of dealing with such rapid changes in culture—ameliorate social tensions, attempt to draw increasingly diverse America together
iii. Realism a “strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change” (Kaplan ix).
iv. Realism intended “as a form of political intervention designed to repair the fissures that had run through nearly every aspect of American life” (Borus 139).
V. A Highly Contested Form
a. Romance
i. Aspire to idealism; genteel form (shy away from harsher realities of life)
ii. Romantics transcend the immediate reality to find the ideal, while realists center attention on the immediate and the specific
iii. “Fundamental truths rested in the unseen realm of ideas and spirit . . . rather than in the accessible world of tangible facts” (Shi 13)
iv. Belief that art should reinforce upper-class values
v. “Feminine” or “emasculating” form, in view of realists—womanly sentiment
b. Realistic novel
i. Modeled as a more “democratic” genre—“literary realists . . . saw themselves as tour guides on behalf of American ideals” (Shi 117).
ii. This idea alarmed some high-toned critics and readers; critics feared potential for vulgarity and emphasis on commonplace life—potential “poison” for the pure, innocent reader
iii. “Masculine” form—Howells, James, et al. see realism as “antidote” for emasculating romance and Victorian culture
iv. Idealists see Howells and friends as “cultural radicals” (Shi 9).
c. Charles Dudley Warner: readers (especially young women) should focus on the ideal. Both art and women degraded by “servile imitation of nature.” We need to be saved from “a realistic vulgarity and commonplace” life.
d. Maurice Thompson: Realists filled with “literary decadence”—their concern is only “the vulgar, the commonplace, and the insignificant.”