IDST 2310 The Fine and Applied Arts in Civilization

UNDERSTANDING THE AESTHETIC OF REALISM

IN LITERATURE

IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

by Dr. Jane Rose

Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies

Georgia College & State University

*Note to students: your assignment for this unit is to read Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills. Clicking on this link will take you to the full-text Gutenberg project version contained within the WEBCT course. You may print the text out or read it online. You may also access the text through http://www.samford.edu/schools/artsci/english/lasseter/editiron.htm or through http://www.selfknowledge.net/b/ironm10.htm . The second link contains hypertext commentaries, which you may find useful and interesting.

Asher Brown Durand, Progress (The Advance of Civilization) from Carol Gerten's CGFA site.

In the nineteenth century, both idealism and realism were powerful forces in European and American literature. We see in the artistic expression of the early century the extreme idealism that led to this period being described as the Romantic Age. But at about mid-century there was a shift in aesthetic sensibility. Artistic expression in the latter part of the century is marked by a scientific objectivity that led to this period being described as the Age of Realism.

We see this in European and American art, such as Thomas Anshutz's STEELWORKERS--NOONTIME or Thomas Eakins= MAX SCHMITT IN A SINGLE SCULL, and music such as Charles Ives's Three Places in New England.

It is even visible in such architectural triumphs as the Brooklyn Bridge. It is perhaps nowhere more visible than in literature.

First, it is important to understand the aesthetic the came before realism--romanticism. The aesthetic of romanticism, which was popular in the first half of the century, was strongly influenced by Neoplatonic idealism.

We see this in several recurring ideas:

(1) that true reality is not found in the mutable, material world.

We see this in Edgar Allan Poe's poem Sonnet: To Science:

Why preyest thou [science] thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee, or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soured with an undaunted wing?

(2) that the soul is immortal and also dwells in all things.

We see this idea in William Wordsworth's poem Ode: Intimations of Immortality:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hast had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come...

(3) that the goal of art is to transcend the mundane and the material to express transcendent truth through beauty.

We see this idea in John Keats's poem Ode on a Grecian Urn:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Then ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty--that is all
Ye know on earth and all you need to know.

At about the middle of the nineteenth century, the influence of many social forces caused aesthetic taste to change from romantic idealism to realism. Many writers felt that the romantics-- with their focus on the spiritual, the abstract, and the ideal--were being dishonest about life as it really was. The realists felt they had an ethical responsibility to be honest. They felt that the romantic impulse had led to escapist literature that presented life as we wished it to be, but not life as it was.

Because this reaction to the earlier romantics was caused in part by changes occurring in their world, and because the realistic writers were trying to depict that world accurately, it is helpful to consider some of the forces at work in the mid-nineteenth century.

1. The industrial revolution had created a society with many new socio-economic problems.

2. Mass production also led to a more affluent, materialistic middle class.

3. Democracy had created a society in which ordinary people were seen as worthy of respect,

4. increased public education created a more literate society.

5. In Europe, there were revolutions, and serious class issues being contested;

in the United States, the Civil War ended slavery, and waves of immigrants created a multi-ethnic society.

6. Women in Europe and the U.S. were challenging their limitations.

7. Technology was transforming countries with railroads and telegraph.

8. Photography gave us a new view of our world.

9. Inexpensive magazine publication brought literature to ordinary people, and made it easier for ordinary people to become published authors.

10. Intellectuals were being stimulated and disturbed by new ideas that were all deterministic:

Charles Darwin's ideas showed that our capabilities were biologically and environmentally determined;

Karl Marx's ideas showed that we are imbedded in a history of battling socio-economic forces;

Sigmund Freud's ideas showed that we are psychologically driven by an inaccessible subconscious.

11. There was an increasing impulse toward social reform in many areas.

Realism was more than an artistic aesthetic; it was an ethical position. Realistic writers felt that is was their responsibility to tell the truth about life as it really is, rather than as we wish it to be.

As novelist George Eliot, explains in a critical essay, Aour social novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of their representation is a great evil."

1. Many realists--like Theodore Dreiser, and Leo Tolstoy, and Henrik Ibsen--wished to depict life honestly in the hope that seeing social conditions accurately would lead to improving those conditions. For instance, the demise of a seemingly happy middle-class marriage in Ibsens's play A Doll's House calls into question the highly gendered, patriarchal ideals of the nineteenth century, when Nora explains to her husband why she must leave him to find herself:

I went from Papa's hands into yours. You arranged everything to your own taste, and so I got the same taste as you. . . . I've lived by doing tricks for you, Torwald. But that's the way you wanted it. It's a great sin what you and Papa did to me. You're to blame that nothing's become of me. (Act III)

2. Many realists-- like Henry James and Gustave Flaubert--asserting that writers should accept their human limitation and not assume to know an ideal, they felt compelled to remain objective--to depict life as it is, without commenting on it. For instance, Flaubert does not try to make Emma, the title figure of his novel Madame Bovary perfect, but she is also not evil. She is real. He depicts a complicated woman in a complicated situation--an extra-marital love affair has led her to be withdrawn from family into her private world. His challenge is to present the realities of this human drama without judgment. In scenes like the one below, he dares to depict dramatically an ambivalence that leads Emma to less-than-ideal behavior for one in that most idealized role--mother:

"Let me alone!" Emma cried, thrusting her [toddler daughter] away. The expression on her face frightened the child, who began to scream. "Won't you let me alone!" She cried, thrusting her off with her elbow. Bertha fell just at the foot of the chest of drawers, cutting her cheek on one of its brasses. She began to bleed. Madame Bovary rushed to pick her up, broke the bell-rope, called loudly for the maid; and words of self-reproach were on her lips when Charles [her husband] appeared. "Look what's happened, darling," she said, in an even voice. "The baby fell down and hurt herself playing." (Bk. II: Chap.4)

The writing of the realists reflects a shift in values from the idealism of the romantics. The list of characteristics below are not necessarily present in all realistic texts, but they show common ways that realistic values changed literature.

1. Realism focuses on the common, everyday life of average, ordinary people here and now.

Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie, for instance, opens with a scene being enacted daily in the last decades of the nineteenth century as young people sought opportunity in the burgeoning cities:

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She as eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth.

In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy makes his protagonist's ordinariness thematic when he declares, "Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible" (Chap. 2).

This is very different from the romantic novels, like Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, stories of idealized heroic knights and pure damsels and in long-ago time.

2. Authors of realistic fiction see themselves as scientists.

As the French novelist Emile Zola explained, they tried to write "scientifically" by inventing realistic characters, placing those characters in realistic situations, then imaginatively recording how those characters realistically responded.

A classic example of this technique is seen in Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, which is not a book thematically focused to condemn or celebrate war, but simply to examine what can happen to a young man, reared on heroism and patriotism, when submitted to the real horrors of battle:

The youth had been taught that a man became another thing in a battle. He saw his salvation in such a change. Hence this waiting was an ordeal to him. . . . He wished to go into battle and discover that he had been a fool in his doubts, and was, in truth, a man of traditional courage. The strain of present circumstances he felt to be intolerable. (Chap. 3)

But battle, when it comes, is not what he has expected:

His impotency appeared to him, and made his rage into that of a driven beast. Buried in the smoke of many rifles his anger was directed not so much against the men whom he knew were rushing toward him as against the swirling battle phantoms which were choking him. (Chap. 5)

This is very different from the idealized "romances," like Nathaniel Hawthorne 's Scarlet Letter, in which characters and situations are constructed to illustrate abstract human qualities.

3. Most realists attempt to provide an objective reproduction of life.

They use descriptive language to describe sights and sounds, creating a texture that suggests meaning, but they avoid explaining the meaning or interpreting the significance of a scene.

Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence immerses the reader in the material opulence of New York's elite. Entire paragraphs are spent directing the reader's attention to telling atmospheric details, as is the case in this description of the opera stage in the opening chapter:

The foreground, to the footlights, was covered with emerald green cloth. In the middle distance symmetrical mounds of woolly green moss bounded by croquet hoops formed the base of shrubs shaped like orange-trees but studded with large pink and red roses. Gigantic pansies, considerably larger that the roses, and closely resembling the floral penwipers made by female parishioners for fashionable clergymen, spring from the moss beneath the rose-trees; and here and there a daisy grafted on a rose-branch flowered with luxuriance prophetic of Mr. Luther Burbank's far-off prodigies.

This is very different from the symbolic, mood evoking descriptions of romantics like Edgar Allan Poe, which are to be affecting but not depicting.

4. They often use dialect to depict real, ordinary speech.

They take great pain to reflect the way a characters from a certain region would truly speak.

While we think of Mark Twain as a realist in his social satire, we are less aware of his desire for regional accuracy in speech. When he wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain was aware that readers might wrongly approach this novel as another "boys book." To prepare his readers for novel's careful attention to dialect, he begins the novel with this note:

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary "Pike Country" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

Twain's concern that readers "would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding" is the concern of a realist.

Because of its focus on flawed actuality, the material present, the prosaic, the aesthetic of realism has not stimulated much great poetry. But in the stylistic innovations of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," we see the realist's grounding in ordinary speech about ordinary subjects:

The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market,

I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and breakdown.

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,

Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire. (St. 12)

This poem illustrates a change from the elevated language that marks traditional verse and prose as "literature."

5. Realists are often impelled by the urge for social reform.

They attempt to expose situations in order to change them.

When Rebecca Harding Davis opens her story Life in the Iron-Mills, she expresses this desire, shared by many realists, to disabuse her genteel readers of their smug innocence. She want us to know what life in America is like for immigrant laborers:

A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? . . . The air is thick, clammy with the breath of crowded human beings. . . . I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,--here into the thickest of the fog and mud and four effluvia. I want you to hear this story. . . . I want to make it real to you.

6. Realists focus on people in social situations that often require compromise.

They develop characters that are unheroic--they are flawed, and often cannot be "true to themselves."

William Makepeace Thackery gaves his novel Vanity Fair the subtitle "A Novel without a Hero," and George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, subtitled "A Study of Provincial Life," shows with the life of Dorothea Brook that people of noble ideals are compromised by the imperfect society they dwell in. This is particularly true for women, who can only achieve social and economic status through marriage. Using Saint Theresa as a model of the ideal, Eliot explains,

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life. . . perhaps only a life of mistakes . . . perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order. . . . (Prelude)

The poet Robert Browning's dramatic monologues reflect the realistic impulse. His speakers ironically reveal their own very natural human frailties. For example, the friar in "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" shows the way petty jealousy has compromised his ideals and led to hypocrisy:

Gr-r-r--there go, my heart's abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God's blood, would not mine kill you! (St. 1)

The aesthetic of realism rendered the terms "hero" or "villain" inappropriate. Unlike Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre or Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, protagonists in realistic novels often cause their own problems, or accept compromised solutions to them.

7. While realists emphasize external, material reality, they also recognize the reality complex of human psychology.

Their characters are complicated personalities, whose individual responses to situations are influenced by many external and internal factors. Henry James's fiction is extremely psychological, both in his treatment and in the character's proclivities. His highly sophisticated characters constantly play mind games, and analyzing nuances of speech and gesture. Daisy Miller: A Study, is not just a study of Daisy, an ingenuous young American who fails to understand European society; it is also a study of how the cosmopolitan Europeans are not prepared to understand her. The close examination of Winterbourne, a neglected suitor, shows James's focus on the psychological dimensions of the drama:

He had perhaps not definitely flattered himself that he had made an ineffaceable impression upon her heart, but he was annoyed at hearing of a state of affairs so little in harmony with an image that had lately flitted in and out of his own meditations; the image of a very pretty girl looking out of an old Roman window and asking herself urgently when Mr. Winterbourne would arrive. (Chap. 3)

As nineteenth-century realists explored the inner reality of human experience, they depicted new psychological understanding, like the impulse to repress socially unacceptable desires. As Edna Pontillier, in Kate Chopin's The Awakening discovers her sexuality, we see this awareness:

She could only realize that she herself--her present self--was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changed her environment, she did not yet suspect. (Chap. 14)

The complexity of normal human psychology as depicted by the realists is very different from the focus on abnormal and occult psychology of the Gothic romantic writers like Mary Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe.

Related to Realism are three literary genres that reflect the realistic values:

SATIRE:

The objective tone necessary to humor, combined with the urge to criticize human and social weakness has led many realists to write satire.

Probably the best known satirist of the nineteenth century was Mark Twain, whose light satires of human hypocrisies like became increasingly less humorous (Juvenalian) satires of social cruelties in the Mysterious Stranger and Letters form Earth.

NATURALISM:

Naturalism is an extreme, usually pessimistic form of realism. It emphasizes determinism--biological, environmental, or socioeconomic--and sees humans driven by their own instincts, like animals. They are reactors, not creators of their destiny.

The French author Emile Zola pioneered this "extreme realism." But it was also developed by writers like Thomas Hardy. In novels like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, he shows how people are "determined" by hereditary, social, and economic circumstances.

REGIONALISM:

Realism encourages the recording of regional details in stories because people are not the same everywhere. Also a deterministic perspective places increased importance to the characters'environment as affecting the personality as well as the situation. This "local color" emphasis in fiction became more popular in England and America as society became more industrialized. People began to realize that advancements in transportation and communication were causing the gradual lessening of quaint village life and provincial peculiarity.

In America, regional fiction became extremely popular after the Civil War. Joel Chandler Harris (Georgia) and Kate Chopin (Louisiana) wrote of the South. Life on the Midwest Plains was captured by Hamlin Garland. Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman both focused on New England village life. The West was treated by Bret Harte and Jack London. And various ethnic enclaves were depicted by writers like Sui Sin Far (Chinese), Abraham Cahan (Jewish), and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Sioux).

IMPRESSIONISM:

As writers strove to depict "the truth," they began to lose faith in one shared objective reality. Some realist turn inward to depict life as it seemed to one perceiving consciousness, and this inward turn is known as impressionism.

Like many realists, Thomas Hardy gradually moved his focus toward inner reality, believing that "in getting to the truth, we only get at the true nature of the impression that an object, etc., produces on us" (notebook 1892). Henry James, too, moved his focus increasingly inward, with stories like "The Figure in the Carpet," "The Beast in the Jungle," and "The Jolly Corner."

This inward turn to subjective, individual impressions of reality led eventually to the next aesthetic development in art and literature: modernism.

The realistic aesthetic was expressed in other art forms, as well.

Below are a few illustrations of realism in ninetheenth-century paintings:

HONORE DAUMIER -- THE THIRD-CLASS CARRIAGE (1863)

GUSTAV COURBET THE PAINTER'S STUDIO, A REAL ALLEGORY (1855)

JEAN-FRANCOIS MILLET -- THE ANGELUS (1859)

THOMAS EAKINS --

THE GROSS CLINIC (1875)

MAX SCHMITT IN A SINGLE SCULL (1871)

WINSLOW HOMER-- FISHERWOMAN (1882)

P RISONERS FROM THE FRONT (1866)

Musically, the aesthetic of realism encouraged the tradition of "verism" in opera. Verism refers to the depiction of everyday life, told without high-flown rhetoric.

Below are a few nineteenth-century operas that have this realistic quality:

GIACOMMO PUCCINI-- LA BOHEME (1896) and TOSCA (1900)

LEONCAVALLO--Leoncavallo--I Pagliacci (1892)

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