Realism in American Literature, 1860-1890
Broadly defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. Although strictly speaking, realism is a technique, it also denotes a particular kind of subject matter, especially the representation of middle-class life. 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. According to William Harmon and Hugh Holman, "Where romanticists transcend the immediate to find the ideal, and naturalists plumb the actual or superficial to find the scientific laws that control its actions, realists center their attention to a remarkable degree on the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence" (A Handbook to Literature 428).
Many critics have suggested that there is no clear distinction between realism and its related late nineteenth-century movement, naturalism. As Donald Pizer notes in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, the term "realism" is difficult to define, in part because it is used differently in European contexts than in American literature. Pizer suggests that "whatever was being produced in fiction during the 1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting, and roughly similar in a number of ways can be designated as realism, and that an equally new, interesting, and roughly similar body of writing produced at the turn of the century can be designated as naturalism" (5). Put rather too simplistically, one rough distinction made by critics is that realism espousing a deterministic philosophy and focusing on the lower classes is considered naturalism. In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts. As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in industrialism and urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture. In drawing attention to this connection, Amy Kaplan has called realism a "strategy for imagining and managing the threats of social change" (Social Construction of American Realism ix).
Realism was a movement that encompassed the entire country, or at least the Midwest and South, although many of the writers and critics associated with realism (notably W. D. Howells) were based in New England. Among the Midwestern writers considered realists would be Joseph Kirkland, E. W. Howe, and Hamlin Garland; the Southern writer John W. DeForest's Miss Ravenal's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty is often considered a realist novel, too.
"The basic axiom of the realistic view of morality was that there could be no moralizing in the novel [ . . . ] The morality of the realists, then, was built upon what appears a paradox--morality with an abhorrence of moralizing. Their ethical beliefs called, first of all, for a rejection of scheme of moral behavior imposed, from without, upon the characters of fiction and their actions. Yet Howells always claimed for his works a deep moral purpose. What was it? It was based upon three propositions: that life, social life as lived in the world Howells knew, was valuable, and was permeated with morality; that its continued health depended upon the use of human reason to overcome the anarchic selfishness of human passions; that an objective portrayal of human life, by art, will illustrate the superior value of social, civilized man, of human reason over animal passion and primitive ignorance" (157). Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1954).
"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. It would apprehend in all particulars the connection between the familiar and the extraordinary, and the seen and unseen of human nature. Beneath the deceptive cloak of outwardly uneventful days, it detects and endeavors to trace the outlines of the spirits that are hidden there; tho measure the changes in their growth, to watch the symptoms of moral decay or regeneration, to fathom their histories of passionate or intellectual problems. In short, realism reveals. Where we thought nothing worth of notice, it shows everything to be rife with significance."
-- George Parsons Lathrop, 'The Novel and its Future," Atlantic Monthly 34 (September 1874):313 24.
"Realism, n. The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads. The charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story written by a measuring-worm." --Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Realism in Victorian age
England in 1841 was at the very dawn of the Victorian Age. It was the decade that would come to be known as "The Hungry Years," as industrialization spread and the lower classes became more firmly established. During the years preceding, the gradual spread of industry had led farmers away from the countryside, and eliminated at single strokes the jobs of countless workers with such inventions as the power loom and the combine. These people found themselves competing for few jobs in what was becoming a highly mechanized economy. A middle class of merchants was formed out of the aristocracy who found their taxes dwindling and the lower class that aspired to more. Business ventures such as the South Seas Bubble company collapsed, but other commercial ventures, such as the China Tea Trade, flourished. However, even for these businesses, times were changing, as the steam ship took over from the mighty and glorious clipper ship, queen of the seas. Ideologically, this was a troubled time, as a crisis of faith in God resulted from the many discoveries of science. Soon educated men divided themselves into two principal schools: Utilitarians, the followers of Jeremy Bentham, who based everything upon the utility of objects, and who managed a quick reform of the Civil Service; and the followers of Coleridge, firm believers in faith. Although we have a lingering impression of the Victorian Age as a repressive and repressed society, it was one of the most vital periods of English history, lively and full of controversy. Belief in technology was at its height, and the superstitions of magic had been swept away, reserved for gothic horror novels. Medical science was improving by leaps and bounds. Living conditions were terrible for many in 1841, and it was not long before Marx produced his _Communist Manifesto_, but England was by that time well ont he way to becoming the dominant nation in the world, and London the jewel in the crown of the British Empire.
Courbet painted figurative compositions,
landscapes,
seascapes, and
still-lifes. He courted controversy by addressing social issues in his work, and by painting subjects that were considered vulgar, such as the rural bourgeoisie, peasants, and working conditions of the poor. His work belonged neither to the predominant
Romantic nor
Neoclassical schools.
History painting, which the
Paris Salon esteemed as a painter's highest calling, did not interest Courbet, who stated that "the artists of one century [are] basically incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century ..."
[2] Instead, he believed that the only possible source for a living art is the artist's own experience.
[2]
His work, along with the work of
Honoré Daumier and
Jean-François Millet, became known as
Realism. For Courbet realism dealt not with the perfection of line and form, but entailed spontaneous and rough handling of paint, suggesting direct observation by the artist while portraying the irregularities in
nature. He depicted the harshness in life, and in so doing challenged contemporary academic ideas of art.
[edit] Biography
Courbet was born in 1819 to Régis and Sylvie Oudot Courbet in Ornans (
Doubs). Though a prosperous farming family, anti-monarchical feelings prevailed in the household. (His maternal grandfather fought in the
French Revolution.) Courbet's sisters, Zoé, Zélie and Juliette, were his first models for drawing and painting. After moving to Paris he returned home to Ornans often to hunt, fish and find inspiration.
[3]
He went to
Paris in 1839 and worked at the studio of Steuben and Hesse. An independent spirit, he soon left, preferring to develop his own style by studying the paintings of Spanish, Flemish and French masters in the
Louvre, and painting copies of their work.
Self-portrait (The Desperate Man), c. 1843–1845 (Private collection)
His first works were an
Odalisque suggested by the writing of
Victor Hugo and a
Lélia illustrating
George Sand, but he soon abandoned literary influences, choosing instead to base his paintings on observed reality. Among his paintings of the early 1840s are several
self-portraits, Romantic in conception, in which the artist portrayed himself in various roles. These include
Self-Portrait with Black Dog (c. 1842–1844, accepted for exhibition at the 1844
Paris Salon), the theatrical
Self-Portrait which is also known as
Desperate Man (c. 1843–45),
Lovers in the Countryside (1844,
Musée des Beaux-Arts,
Lyon),
The Sculptor (1845),
The Wounded Man (1844–1854,
Musée d'Orsay,
Paris),
The Cellist, Self-Portrait (1847,
Nationalmuseum,
Stockholm, shown at the 1848 Salon), and
The Man with a Pipe (c. 1848–1849,
Musée d'Orsay,
Paris).
Trips to the Netherlands and Belgium in 1846–1847 strengthened Courbet's belief that painters should portray the life around them, as
Rembrandt,
Hals and other
Dutch masters had. By 1848, he had gained supporters among the younger critics, the
Neo-romantics and Realists, notably
Champfleury.
[4]
Courbet achieved greater recognition after the success of his painting
After Dinner at Ornans at the Salon of 1849. The work, reminiscent of
Chardin and
Le Nain, earned Courbet a gold medal and was purchased by the state.
[5] The gold medal meant that his works would no longer require jury approval for exhibition at the Salon
[6]—an exemption Courbet enjoyed until 1857 when the rule changed).
[7]
In 1849 Courbet painted
Stone-Breakers (destroyed in the British bombing of Dresden in 1945), which
Proudhon admired as an icon of peasant life; it has been called "the first of his great works".
[8] The painting was inspired by a scene Courbet witnessed on the roadside. He later explained to Champfleury and the writer Francis Wey, "It is not often that one encounters so complete an expression of poverty and so, right then and there I got the idea for a painting. I told them to come to my studio the next morning."
[8]
