Realism and Naturalism.doc

Realism and Naturalism (1865 – 1914)

Civil War (1861 – 1865)

Before the war

-          most writers had lived on the Eastern seacoast, particularly in New England

-          most prominent writers had been aristocrats

-          most writers had been educated in some Eastern colleges – a large share of them in Harvard

After the war

-          writers were from the South, the Middle West, even the Far West

-          some leading writers like Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, Emily Dickinson and William dean Howells were not college educated and other like S. Clemens did not have a high school education

New writings were

-          less scholarly

-          less genteel (not mannerly, befitting the upper classes)

-          less polished

-          more robust (strong, lusty)

-          more full of life

-          less influenced by Europe and more by the new American nation

Post-War America

In the half century between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I the American nation:

-          set its continental boundaries

-          opened its doors to throngs of immigrants

-          developed into an industrial giant

-          moved toward leadership in world affairs

Such unprecedented change gave rise:

-          to political problems

-          to social disorders

-          intellectual upheavals (tumult, unrest, commotion)

American writers forced to assess and to reflect the realities of their times:

-          failure of Reconstruction in the post-Civil War South

-          brutal scramble for wealth and power among corrupt and ruthless financiers in the North

-          corruption, bribery, maladministration

-          introduction of revolutionary inventions

-          new theories of scientific thought

All of this cries out for literary interpretation.

FICTION OF THE GENERATION OF

-          Realism: William Dean Howells and Henry James (the 1870-1880)

-          Naturalism: Frank Norris and Dreiser (the 1890)

Realism and Naturalism constitute a critical response to the conditions of late-nineteenth-century American life.

William Dean Howells Criticism and Fiction (1891) monthly essays

-          W.D. Howells argued in his “Editor’s Study” column in Harper’s Magazine, that

-          literature ought to reflect and play a major role In encouraging the social and political progress that characterized nineteenth-century life, progress that had received its fullest expression in the American effort to unite scientific inquiry and political democracy into a means for a better life for all men

-          nineteenth century thought loosely joining social, material, and intellectual life into a triumphant forward march

Howells famous analogy in 1891collection of “Editor’s Study”

To be true and honest in fiction, within a realistic aesthetic in which the writer, like a scientist with  democratic values, discards the old heroic and ideal, and therefore false, cardboard mode of a grasshopper and depicts the commonplace activities of a commonplace grasshopper.

Middle – class

The underlying beliefs of this first generation of critics of realism were firmly middle-class. Realism of American fiction was portraying “the widely divergent phases of our American civilization.” That is the local color literature.

Function of literature

-          universal progress

-          rejection of the outworn values of the past in favour of those of the present

-          rejecting the romantic material and formulas of earlier fiction (limited beliefs and social life of their moment of origin)

-          contemporary life objectively depicted

-          literature made Americans known to each other in their common political and social progress (later Howell added defects)

-          literature expressed above all of middle-class taste and values

-          literature was devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts

Relishing the facts

-          realists were less concerned with their subjective responses and more with the tangible (palpable) world outside their psyches

-          they were generally not concerned with absolutes or ideals

-          they were dealing with the social problems of real persons in real places, in the present

More characteristics of Realism

-          reality is presented closely and in comprehensive detail

-          characters appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive

-          characters are more important than action and plot; complex ethnical choices are often the subject of writing

-          class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class

-          realistic novels avoid the sensational, dramatic elements

-          diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact

-          objectivity in presentation becomes increasingly important: overt authorial comments or intrusions diminish as the century progresses

Variant forms of Realism

-          reticent realism – W.D. Howells (novelist, playwright, literary critic) called for truthful treatment of the material but at the same time was against showing drastic situations, murders, ugliness

-          psychological realism – interior realism, mysteries of human passion, human motivation, decisions, subtlety of insight, studying mental and emotional traps that limit people’s desire and ability to change

Naturalism

Fiction of grim realism, in which the writer observers human characteristics like a scientist observing ants, seeing them as the products and victims of environment and heredity.

The founder of Naturalism

-          French novelist Emile Zola (1840 – 1902), who In vast series of 20 novels about the family