Teacher: Mrs.

Ounis Groups: 11+12

Realism ( Part 1)

The French realist school of the mid-i9th cent, (for which the novelist Champfleury,
1821-89, produced a manifesto, Le Réalisme, 1857) stressed 'sincerity' as opposed to the
'liberty' proclaimed by the Romantics; it insisted on accurate documentation, sociological
insight, an accumulation of the details of material fact, an avoidance of poetic diction,
idealization, exaggeration, melodrama, etc.; and subjects were to be taken from everyday life,
preferably from lower-class life.
This emphasis clearly reflected the interests of an increasingly positivist and scientific age.
*Balzac and *Stendhal were seen as the great precursors of realism; ^Flaubert (though he
disliked the label, and was also claimed by the naturalists) and the *Goncourts as among its
practitioners. French realism developed into naturalism, an associated but more scientifically
applied and elaborated doctrine, seen by some later critics (notably *Marxist critics) as
degenerate. In England, the French realists were imitated consciously and notably by Moore
and Arnold *Bennett, but the English novel from the time of *Defoe had had its own unlabelled
strain of realism, and the term is thus applied to English literature in varying senses and
contexts, sometimes qualified as 'social' or 'psychological' realism etc. (See also SOCIALIST
REALISM.)

Historical Context:

1/ England: Victorian Period:

The beginning of the Victorian Period is frequently dated 1830, or alternatively 1832 (the
passage of the first Reform Bill), and sometimes 1837 (the accession of Queen Victoria); it
extends to the death of Victoria in 1901. Historians often subdivide the long period into three
phases: Early Victorian (to 1848), Mid-Victorian (1848-70), and Late Victorian (1870-1901).
Much writing of the period, whether imaginative or didactic, in verse or in prose, dealt with or
reflected the pressing social, economic, religious, and intellectual issues and problems of that
era. (For a summary of these issues, and also for the derogatory use of the term "Victorian,"
see Victorian and Victorianism.) Among the notable poets were Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard
Manley Hopkins (whose remarkably innovative poems, however, did not become known until
they were published, long after his death, in 1918). The most prominent essayists were Thomas
Carlyle, John Ruskin, Arnold, and Walter Pater; the most distinguished of many excellent
novelists (this was a great age of English prose fiction) were Charlotte and Emily Brontë,
Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, George
Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Samuel Butler. For prominent literary
movements during the Victorian era, see the entries on Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetìcism, and
Decadence. (A Glossary of Literary Terms)

Victorian and Victorianism: In its value-neutral use, "Victorian" simply identifies the
historical era in England roughly coincident with the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837-1901. (See
Victorian period, under periods of English literature.) It was a time of rapid and wrenching
economic and social changes that had no parallel in earlier history—changes that made
England, in the course of the nineteenth century, the leading industrial power, with an empire
that occupied more than a quarter of the earth's surface. The pace and depth of such
developments, while they fostered a mood of nationalist pride and optimism about future
progress, also produced social stresses, turbulence, and widespread anxiety about the ability of
Teacher: Mrs. Ounis Groups: 11+12

the nation and the individual to cope, socially, politically, and psychologically, with the
cumulative problems of the age. England was the first nation to exploit the technological
possibilities of steam power and steel, but its unregulated industrialization, while it produced
great wealth for an expanding middle class, led also to the deterioration of rural England, a
mushroom growth of often shoddy urbanization, and massive poverty concentrated in slum
neighborhoods.

The Victorian age, for all its conflicts and anxieties, was one of immense, variegated, and often
self-critical intellectual and literary activities. In our time, the term "Victorian," and still more
Victorianism, is frequently used in a derogatory way, to connote narrow-mindedness, sexual
priggishness, the determination to maintain feminine "innocence" (that is, sexual ignorance),
narrow-mindedness, and an emphasis on social respectability. Such views have a valid basis in
attitudes and values expressed (and sometimes exemplified) by many members of the
expanding middle class, with its roots in Puritanism and its insecurity about its newly won
status. Later criticism of such Victorian attitudes, however, merely echo the vigorous attacks
and devastating ridicule mounted by a number of thinkers and literary writers in the Victorian
age itself. Refer to G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (republished 1977);
David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century (1950); Jerome Buckley, The Victorian
Temper (1951); W. E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (1957). On Victorian attitudes
to love and sexuality see Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, Vol. 1,
Education of the Senses (1984), and Vol. 2, The Tender Passion (1986); and on the undercover
side of Victorian sexual life, Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (republished 1974).

2/ America: Realism and Regionalism (1860-1910)

Post- Civil War:

In 1858 Abraham Lincoln had warned his countrymen “a house divided against itself cannot
stand.” Events in the dark winter of1860–61 would prove him correct. After Lincoln’s minority
election to the presidency, South Carolina voted to secede from the Union in December 1860;
six other states of the Deep South quickly followed suit. When Confederate troops successfully
attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee,
and North Carolina elected to join their fellows in defense of slavery and the sovereign
principle of states’ rights.

Regionalism

Post-Civil War America was large and diverse enough to sense its own local differences. With
increasing urbanization and more accessible transportation, small, rural communities became
a subject of literary interest. As early as 1820, America had developed a taste for fiction with
specific, localized settings and topics. Toward mid-century, regional voices had emerged from
newly settled territories in the South and to the west of the Appalachian Mountains. In many
of these works local dialects, sayings, and spellings were used for humorous effect. Among the
successful publications of early regionalists were Georgia Scenes (1835) by Augustus Baldwin
Longstreet, an anthology called The Big Bear of Arkansas and Other Sketches (1845) and Some
Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845) by Johnson Hooper, which was set in Alabama.
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Mary Wilkins Freeman, best known for A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), and
Sarah Orne Jewett, best known for Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), both wrote about rural
northern New England. The first audiences for their stories were not their own communities,
however. The stories found their readership among the urbane readers of New York City’s
Harper's New Monthly Magazine and Boston’s Atlantic Monthly magazine.

Tales of the West also became a popular form of regional writing and created frontier outlaws
and heroes, such as Billy the Kid. These tales were especially suited to the short-story form.
Foremost among writers who contributed to legends about the West was Bret Harte, especially
in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870), a collection of stories about
California. Beginning in 1860 the publishing house of Beadle and Adams introduced dime
novels—inexpensive tales with exciting plots intended for popular consumption. The first dime
novels were set during key events of early American history such as the Revolutionary War,
but plots soon incorporated frontier lore, conflicts between cowboys and Indians, and the
taming of the West for white settlement. Dime novels may be seen as precursors of the Western,
a genre that would reach the height of its popularity in the first half of the 20th century.

. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, is sometimes called
a regionalist for his vivid portrayals of Southern character and dialect. However, he also ranks
among the great American realists because he scrupulously included so many sides of life in
his works and refused to make the horrifying look palatable. He published from 1865 until
1910, but his literary fame was firmly rooted in the 19th century and its crises of racism, class
conflicts, and poverty. Twain's works also include some of the best American humor, starting
with the short story 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which was published
in a newspaper in 1865. Twain’s best-known works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), are seemingly simple stories that also offer
searing indictments of corruption at all levels of society. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
celebrated boyhood at the same time that it cleverly revealed the workings of small-town
America—small-minded at times, generous in spirit at other times. The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn is considered Twain’s masterpiece. In it, the boy Huck Finn learns about
human nature’s evil side as well as its kind side. As a result of his close friendship with a black
man who is escaping slavery, Huck also must confront the conflict between individual intuition
about what is right and the prevailing views of society on the subject.

In both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Twain's genius comes through in his realistic depiction of
the psychology and the moral development of his two young characters. Both works are similar
in this way to Little Women (1868-1869), a novel by Louisa May Alcott that records the moral
and intellectual coming of age of four young women. Alcott was the daughter of
transcendentalist Bronson Alcott. Her still-popular novel is one of a series of works that show
her serious concern with childhood and adolescence.