American Literary Realism

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The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism Edited by M. A. R. Habib Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139018456 Online ISBN: 9781139018456 Hardback ISBN: 9780521300117 Paperback ISBN: 9780521317221
Chapter 17 - American literary Realism pp. 331-339 Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139018456.022 Cambridge University Press
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American literary Realism

Carol J. Singley
I dont care for what people call art, William Dean Howells wrote to S. Weir Mitchell, whose new novel Howells praised in 1885, I like nearness to life.1 Thus Howells, acknowledged Dean of American letters, established the parameters for Realism, a literary style that ourished in the years bracketed by the end of the American Civil War (1865) and the beginning of the First World War (1914). Howells, an inuential critic, novelist and editor, helped to shape the perception which continues today of Realism as an objective or transparent representation of ordinary life. An aesthetically complex literary form, Realism developed partly in response to certain accelerated social and economic changes in American culture. It ranges from good-natured, even sentimental, renderings of manners to psychologically dense and near fatalistic representations of human strivings. Realism somewhat resembles Naturalism, a style of writing that reached its height in the 1890s and portrays literary subjects as powerless in the face of external or internal forces. Popularly understood, Realism is the literature of the average and everyday, the result of viewing the world neither with the rose-tinted spectacles of Romanticism nor with the dark shades of Naturalism, but with the clear lenses of scientic objectivity and photographic accuracy. Realism was less concerned with formal qualities than with social context and arguably produced more notable ction than poetry, although critics such as Henry James worked to dene a poetics of Realistic ction. American Realism has its roots in Europe, dating from the fteenth century. These roots include quattrocento Realist painting; the more general impact of the ideologies behind representational political institutions and the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 in America and France respectively; the increasing emphasis on empirical science; and the growth of historical narrative. As Paul Schellinger notes, Realism is not the rendering of detail and the ordinary but experimentation with a single coordinated system or single-point perspective that produces the illusion of neutrality. In
1
W. D. Howells to S. Weir Mitchell, 20 October 1885, in William Dean Howells, Selected Letters. Vol. 3: 18821891, ed. Robert C. Leitz III (Boston: Twayne, 1908), pp. 134, 152.
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Realism, authors present action and issues as shared, objective or true.2 For nineteenth-century writers in England, France and Russia, these verities could be found in previously unexplored aspects of social life. In England, the popularity of Dickenss Realistic, sometimes melodramatic, depictions of factories, slums and prisons expanded the denition of what constituted appropriate subject matter for literature. In France, Balzacs stories and novels set new standards for literary observation, while Flauberts Madame Bovary (1857) demonstrated artful style in combination with Realistic detail. Russian writers Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky inuenced generations of American Realist writers with their depictions of class and their concerns with social justice. Most inuential were the writings of Zola, whose doctrine of Naturalism, formulated in The Experimental Novel (1880), studied human behaviour as if it were under a microscope, subject to the same forces of nature as all functioning organisms. Borrowing ideas from science and medicine, Zola equated the writers world with the laboratory. Novelists, he wrote, by their observations and experiments seek to possess a knowledge of the mechanism of the phenomena inherent in man, to show the machinery of his intellectual and sensory manifestations under the inuences of heredity and environment.3 A focus on the deterministic qualities of natural and social conditions has led critics to equate Naturalism with fatalism, although technically Naturalist writers are concerned with exploring causes and effects. In Europe and the United States the terms Realism and Naturalism have sometimes been used interchangeably, but critics debate whether Naturalism is merely Realism in extreme form or a distinct literary mode. Realism is often used to describe the ction of Howells and James in the 1870s and 1880s, and Naturalism that of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser in the 1890s. Such designations, however, inadequately account for the work of writers such as Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin, which displays elements of Realism and Naturalism. Nor do they fully describe the voluminous regional literature produced by African Americans and Native Americans during this time. American Realistic writers developed an interest in documenting the world around them in conjunction with their experience of profound changes in society at the end of the nineteenth century. In general, American Realism is dened more by history than by ideology, as it is in Europe. Industrial development was advancing at an unprecedented
2 3
Realism in Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. Paul Schellinger, 2 vols. (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998), vol. ii, pp. 10734. Emile Zola, The Experimental Novel and Other Essays (New York: Haskell House, 1964), pp. 17, 201.
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pace, and with it a new commercialism and an unparalleled growth of cities, whose populations swelled with immigrants from Europe and with African Americans from the South. Westward expansion added to a sense of incessant mobility, while a post-Darwinian emphasis on science rather than religion, as well as technological advances, fundamentally changed the character of knowledge and communication. Realistic literature is in constant dialogue with professional discourses of the time scientic, reformist, legal and commercial and uses these ways of knowing as reference points. Writers reect not the Romantic idealism of previous decades but the contemporary pragmatic Realism of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey. They examine ideas as solutions to specic problems that occur within a social context, and they develop theories of knowledge based on empirical observation of facts and actualities rather than on deductive truths. Attention to the pressures of everyday reality not only characterizes Realistic ction but also points to literature as a vehicle for social reform and social awareness. Regardless of their orientation towards their subjects, Realistic writers shared a belief in the social consequences of reading and writing literature. They took it upon themselves to investigate the workings of society, making Realism as much social critique as social observation. Implicit in their work is the notion that literature serves not just an aesthetic but a public function. There was a close relationship between ction and journalism at this time, evidenced by the fact that many writers, such as Twain, Crane and Dreiser, worked as reporters as well as novelists. Their visits to slums, factories, railroad operations and meat-packing plants constituted empirical research for their works of art. The notion that literature, like the democratic ideals which are sometimes related to Realist aesthetics, could redeem or improve human character is demonstrated in the writings of William Dean Howells (1837 1920). As editor of the inuential magazines the Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers Monthly and Cosmopolitan, and as the author of numerous novels, Howells played a major role in advancing the careers of dozens of writers, including Twain and James, as well as regional and ethnic minority writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett, William Chesnutt and Abraham Cahan. Howellss Criticism and Fiction (1891) celebrated literature of the commonplace, as in his declaration that the talent that is robust enough to front the every-day world and catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face, need not fear the encounter.4 His preference for the ordinary and his concomitant suspicion of aristocratic leanings aligned Realism with a nineteenth-century tradition of
4
W. D. Howells, Criticism and Fiction in Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, eds. Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolf Kirk (New York University Press, 1959), p. 67.
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Jeffersonian and Jacksonian faith in vigour and common sense. Although Howellss later ction was criticized for being too genteel, he eschewed the romantic and the sentimental, and he facilitated the linkage between literature and social justice. Whether recording the social and moral quandaries of business or divorce, Howells believed that moral purpose was essential to good art. In well-known novels such as The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and The Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) as well as in his criticism, he demonstrates both optimism and objectivity, exhibiting an evolutionary faith in social progress and in characters abilities to remake themselves. Some Realist writers made it a point to depict the middle and lower classes of society, often in a spirit of egalitarianism. Describing this tendency, Charles Dudley Warner noted in 1883 that Realistic ction leads us to examine the seamy side of life and force[s] us to sup with unwholesome company.5 In 1893 Maurice Thompson similarly noted that in Realistic poetry and ction we are hobnobbing with persons with whom we could not in real life bear a moments interview.6 Defenders of Realism such as Hamlin Garland (18601940) found nobility in the commonplace, argued for authenticity, and promoted Realism as a vehicle for democracy and social progress. Advocating literature based on experience in Crumbling Idols (1894), he lambasted Easterners who wrote about the West without ever having visited it. His views, reecting a lingering Emersonian and Whitmanian idealism, helped unite the local and national aspects of Realist literature. Theodore Dreiser (18711945) joined Garland in criticizing those who turn away from the more mundane or distasteful aspects of life, going so far as to suggest that their refusal to see life as it truly is reected blindness and denial of parts of themselves. In Sister Carrie (1900) and The Financier (1912), he describes the ill-fated dreams of characters defeated by circumstances. For Realist Edith Wharton, however, the demand that ction address the commonplace created its own tyranny. Wharton objected to the dictum that only the man with the dinner pail shall be deemed worthy of attention and rebelled against such prescriptions in her portrayals of the elite New York society of her childhood.7 Her descriptions of characters ruled by social convention and her bleak endings are vivid reminders that environment and biology affect all ranks of society. In The House of Mirth (1905), Lily Bart is oppressed by wealth as well as by poverty:
5
6 7
Charles Dudley Warner, Modern Fiction, Atlantic Monthly, 51 (1883), 46474; rpt in Donald Pizer (ed.), Documents of American Realism and Naturalism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), p. 41. Maurice Thompson, The Ethics of Literary Art (Hartford Seminary Press, 1893); rpt in Pizer, Documents of American Realism, p. 126. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Scribners, 1934), p. 206.
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the links of her sapphire bracelet seemed like manacles linking her to her fate.8 Recent critics have elaborated on Realisms capacity also to record and exert power within arenas not expressly political. As Nancy Bentley writes, both literary Realism and ethnography strove to document events in a way that gives the observer mastery over a cultural territory.9 Amy Kaplan explores the role Realism played in helping middle and upper classes distinguish themselves from the lower classes. Kaplan writes that Realism has turned into a conservative force whose very act of exposure reveals its complicity with structures of power.10 Marxist critic Fredric Jameson notes the Realist novels role in a properly bourgeois cultural revolution . . . whereby populations . . . are effectively reprogrammed for life and work in the new world of market capitalism.11 Alan Trachtenberg charts the growth of a corporate business system that was welcomed by the genteel classes and resisted by populists and the working classes.12 And Phillip Barrish explains how literary Realism conferred intellectual prestige and cultural distinction on its practitioners.13 Realistic writers with a penchant for Naturalism, in addition to Dreiser and Wharton, include Frank Norris (18701902), Stephen Crane (1871 1900) and Jack London (18761916). They subscribe to a darker form of Realism as found in the writings of Zola, which depicts characters devoid of agency and overpowered by biological and environmental forces. As Presley, in Norriss novel The Octopus (1901), reects, Men were nothings, mere animalcules, mere ephemerides that uttered and fell and were forgotten between dawn and dusk.14 Norris developed a theory of Romantic Naturalism in which writers represent the actuality of life commonly associated with Realism but also go beyond the surface value of experience to seek a greater truth, such as the kind found in romance. Some of Norriss works combine sordid details with what Richard Gray terms an almost poetic celebration of the primal rhythms that . . . drove through nature and the primal urges that pulsed through man.15 London
8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, ed. Cynthia Grifn Wolff (New York: Penguin, 1988), p. 7. Nancy Bentley, The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 2. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 1. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 152. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982). Phillip Barrish, American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 18801995 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 17. Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (New York: Bantam, 1963), p. 425. Richard Gray, A History of American Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 300.
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sets The Call of the Wild (1903) in the Klondike and depicts the brutal indifference of nature to human aspiration. Crane similarly documents the power of environment as well as the moral hypocrisies of society in his deterministic novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), about a girl in the Bowery who blossomed in a mud puddle.16 Reliance on the force of natural laws in Realistic ction produces pessimistic endings that some readers found morally objectionable or in bad taste. It also prevented characters from self-reection, a fact that led Henry James to charge that Zola strikes the reader as magnicent but ignorant.17 Social changes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century society set writers seeking the presumed stability and permanence found in local life. Realism developed alongside an interest in regionalism, which represents customs, values and language patterns of a particular geographic area. Often small-town life is presented through the central consciousness of an urban outsider, whose cosmopolitanism serves as counterpoint to the local experience. Sarah Orne Jewett, for example, writes in The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) about towns in Maine depopulated because of Civil War casualties and westward or urban migration. Her accounts of coastal life simple, profound and often elegiac in tone convey deep respect for individuals and their communities, past and present; her unadorned prose anticipates the minimalism of Modernism. Mark Twain produced a complex form of Realism that combines humour and social satire in his ction about antebellum Southern life. His attention to dialect and detail in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) captures the innocence of childhood as well as the brutal effects of slavery. Twain eschewed sentimentalism, but Hucks questing spirit, na vet e and yearning for nature make the novel Romantic as well as Realistic. Kate Chopin focused on Creole society and sexual politics in her controversial novel The Awakening (1899), which explores a womans restless desire to escape the bonds of marriage and motherhood. Not strictly a regionalist, Louisa May Alcott (183288) wrote of genteel poverty and childhood challenges in her best-selling Little Women (18689), set in Concord, Massachusetts. A focus on local colour, in the opinion of critic Alfred Kazin, fostered a sense of belonging to a native way of life and promoted an elementary nationalism.18 However, some critics judge these claims to be simplistic and nd in regional writing a resistance to dominant economic and social systems. Whereas industrial society homogenizes difference and destroys
16 17 18
Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (New York: Bantam, 1986), p. 16. Henry James, The Art of Fiction, Longmans, 4 (1884), p. 21. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942), p. 17.
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localities, regionalist writing keeps the local alive. Working from marginal positions, these writers add alternative, sometimes subversive, voices to those of the mainstream. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, as well as Josephine Donovan and Kate McCullough, argue that female local colourists were actually proto-feminists whose work was undervalued because it challenged the status quo.19 They describe an antihegemonic strain of regionalist discourse that Tom Lutz nds through the genres entire history.20 Cautions against literary tourism appear in Garlands writings as well as in recent work by Richard Brodhead and Amy Kaplan, who charge regional writers more educated and sophisticated than their subjects with violating or appropriating local material in order to serve the tastes of an urban, elite readership.21 Lutz places regionalism in dialogue with cosmopolitanism in a manner designed to include the values of both. Nowhere are issues of appropriation more salient than in writings about racial and ethnic minorities, especially African Americans. Joel Chandler Harris (1845/81908) earned praise for his depictions of antebellum plantation life and his Uncle Remus character, but in juxtaposition with writing by African American regionalist Charles W. Chesnutt (1858 1932), Harriss renderings can seem sentimental, even whitewashed. In The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales (1899), Chesnutt presents the Old South through the eyes of an ex-slave, Uncle Julius McAdoo, whose savvy, subversive struggles against white power undermine any romantic myths of chattel slavery. African American writer Frances E. W. Harper wrote realistically about post-Civil War family life. Julia A. J. Foote (18271900) and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (18591930) experimented with several genres, Foote sometimes returning to earlier literary forms such as the spiritual autobiography, and Hopkins relying on more contemporary forms of writing. Mexican American writers expressed resistance to white domination with the corrido, a narrative form with roots in the romances of medieval Spain. Native Americans also tried to counter racial and ethnic injustice.
19
20 21
Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Introduction in American Women Regionalists, 18501910: A Norton Anthology, eds. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. xiiixiv; Josephine Donovan, New England Local Color Literature: A Womens Tradition (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), pp. 210; Kate McCullough, Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Womens Fiction, 18851914 (Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 59. Tom Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 25. Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in NineteenthCentury America (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Amy Kaplan, Nation, Region, Empire in Columbia History of the American Novel, eds. Emory Elliott et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
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Ponca chief Standing Bear (18291908) delivered a momentous speech protesting the removal, or relocation, of Indian populations; tribal performances of Ghost Dance Songs announced a vision in which injustices enacted by the US government would be redressed; and Charles Alexander (18761938) described experiences Eastman (18581939) and Zitkala-Sa of dislocation and assimilation in white boarding schools. Illinois-born Mary Austin (18681934) migrated westward and described the Wests liberating landscape as well as the clash of Anglo, Native American and Spanish cultures. Immigrant literature appeared in ctional and non-ctional forms. Abraham Cahan (18601951), Mary Antin (18811949) and Anzia Yierzerska told the story of Jewish immigration; Upton Sinclair featured a Lithuanian immigrant in his muckraking novel about the stockyard, The Jungle (1906); and sisters Winnifred Eaton (18751954) and Edith Maud Eaton (18651914) narrated Chinese immigrant experiences. Realism is a historically accurate term for these writings, but issues of social justice rather than matters of literariness predominate in their construction. The literary forms of American Realism were profoundly shaped by Henry James (18431916), whose critical theories and works of ction became more inuential in the twentieth century than those of Howells. Friends as well as fellow writers committed to the craft, Howells and James talked endlessly to settle the true principles of literary art.22 Matters on which they agreed included writing about the ordinary; eschewing romance, melodrama and exoticism; appealing to the higher faculties of the reader; and relying on character rather than plot for effects. However, whereas Howells focused on American life, James pursued an international theme and was absorbed by European theories of art and representation. If Howells was taken by the commonplace, James was affected by the special case23 and delved deeply into the psychological complexities of human experience in order to arrive at truth for a given character or situation. A fundamental difference in attitude towards the masses also distinguishes their work. According to Howells, the problems of modern society stemmed from a failure of fraternity and unity that could bring all Americans together. The Realist, Howells wrote in Criticism and Fiction, feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men.24 James, on the other hand, instinctively ed the masses despite his best democratic intentions, suspecting the grossness of their judgements and aesthetic sensibilities.
22 23 24
W. D. Howells to E. C. Stedman, 5 December 1866, in Selected Letters of W. D. Howells. Vol. i: 18521872, eds. George Arms et al. (Boston: Twayne, 1979), p. 271. Gray, American Literature, p. 287. Howells, Criticism and Fiction, p. 15.
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James also differs from Howells in his devotion to craft. Whereas Howells relied on the tools of the reporter or journalist, James experimented with narrative technique. He became an innovator in the articulation of inner consciousness. There is no more nutritive or suggestive truth . . . than that of the perfect dependence of the moral sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it, he wrote in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1881).25 Point of view was essential in order to convey this quality of felt life, and James worked assiduously in his ction to clarify the positions from which his characters saw and experienced the world. The house of ction, he explained, has . . . not one window, but a million . . . every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable . . . by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.26 His aesthetic theories privileged perspective, which ultimately not only shaped but also dened character, and led to ction that became increasingly nuanced and psychological. Although not a relativist, James was inuenced by contributions in modern psychology, including those of his brother William James, who argued in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) that an idea has meaning only in relation to its consequences. Realism in the United States owes a debt to European models, but historical and social forces in the post-Civil War era, including political corruption, westward expansion, immigration and the legacy of slavery, contributed to the construction of distinct literary forms and themes. American Realistic writers not only chronicled and interpreted but also sought to change the dimensions of the rapidly altering society in which they were immersed. Their work is not easily summarized or generalized, but Henry Adams (18381918), who wrote that the world into which the child of 1900 was born would not be a unity but a multiple, conveys the sense of mobility, diversity and social uncertainty to which American Realistic writers responded.
25 26
Henry James, Preface, The Portrait of a Lady (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 7. Ibid., p. 8.

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Cambridge Histories Online

American literary Realism

American literary Realism

American literary Realism

American literary Realism

American literary Realism

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