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.

• Writers were from the middle-class or

poor families.

• Some leading writers like Bret Harte,

Sarah Orne Jewett, Emily Dickinson and

William Dean Howells were not collage

educated and other like S. Clemens did

not have even 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’s)

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 Monthly, 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.

Hamlin Garland wrote:

“ Nothing is stable, nothing absolute,
all changes, all is relative. Poetry,
painting, the drama, these too are
always being modified or left behind
by the changes in society from which
they spring.”

Unpublished essay The Evolution of
American Thought (1882).

Howells famous analogy in

1891 collection 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.

Garland 1894 collection of

essays “Crumbling idols”

“Literature will not deal with crime and

abnormalities, nor with diseased
persons. It will deal … with the
wholesome love of honest men and
women, with the heroism of labor... ,
a drama of average types of
character…”

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.”
( H.H. Boyesen) , that is a local-color
literature

Function of literature:

• universal progress
• rejection of the outworn values of the

past in favor 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

Function of literature:

“These writers functioned in the real life , or tried to;

they reported significant aspects of the real world in

their fictions and often had, besides archetypes,

ideas- political, cultural, religious, historical.”
Richard Chase The American Novel and Its Tradition

(1957)

• 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 they real complexity

of temperament and motive.

• Characters are more important than action

and plot; complex ethical choices are often

the subject of writing.

• Class is important; the novel has

traditionally served the interests and

asprirations of an insurgent middle class.

More characteristics of

Realism

• Relistic 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.

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 nd now, the
specific action, and the verifiable
consequence.”

– A Handbook to Literature

Variant forms of realism

• Reticent realism- William Dean 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

(Henry James, Edith Wharton).

Naturalism

Fiction of grim realism, in
which the writer observes
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 Rougon-Macquart
traced a case of syphilis through
several generations.

• In Emile Zola’s phrase, human beings

are „human beasts”. Characters can
be studied through their relationships
to their surroundings.

In America

• Stephen Crane wrote an early

naturalist novel Maggie: A Girl of the
Streets (1893) and showed the way
for later novelists such as:

• Theodore Dreiser
• Frank Norris
• Upton Sinclair
• Jack London

Naturalism

It was strongly influenced by 19th century

scientific studies:

• heredity predetermines character
• „Environment is a tremendous thing in the

world and frequently shapes lives

regardless,” S.Crane

• Human beings are seen as „products”

studied impartially, without moralizing

about their nature. Consequently the

naturalists were fatalists, often pessimists

Naturalists

• Studied human beigns governed by

their instincts and passions.

• Studied the ways in which the

characters’ lives were governed by

forces of heredity and environment.

• They were facing up to life’s coarse

and brutal disgusting aspects .

• They expressed ideas about life with

stark honesty.

Characters

• Naturalists show the extraordinary and

excessive, revealing the bestiality of Man
in Nature.

• Their novels are populated by characters

from the lower middle class or the lower
class.

• Their novels show characters’ heroism or

adventures; acts of violence,
passion;desperate moments, violent
death.

Characters

• They are conditioned and controlled by

environment, heredity, instinct, or
chance.

• The characters are frequently ill-

eductated.

• They attempt to exercise free will or

choice but are facing forces beyond
their control.

Setting and plot

Frequently an urban setting

Offering a „slice of life”,
„chronicle of despair.”

Themes

• The „brute within” each person

(strong emotions: lust, greed, desire

for dominance or pleasure.

• The fight for survival in an amoral,

indifferent universe.

• The conflict „man against nature” or

„man against himself.”

• Characters struggle not to release

the „brute within”.

Themes

• Nature as an indifferent force acting on the

lives of human beings.

• The forces of heredity and environment

as they affect and afflict (to inflict upon
someone something hard to indure)
individual lives.

• An indifferent, deterministic universe- the

futile attempts of human beigns to exercise
free will, often ironically presented.

• Free will is an illusion.

Cosmic Irony

When a writer uses God, destiny,
or fate to dash (ruin) the hopes
and expectations of a character
or humankind in general.

Stephen Crane

(1871- 1900)

Life

• He was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of

a Methodist minister, in a very large family

• Known as an erratic student at both Lafayette

College and Syracuse University, interested

more in athletics than academics

• He spent most of his time in New York,

studying the life in salons and flophouses in the

Bowery. He saw the lives of laborers and

prostitutes , the principles of violence and

conflict that are common to the modern city,

brutal industrial machine that grinds human

lives.

Life

• He established contact with the leaders of

American Realism, Hamlin Garland and

William Dean Howells.

• Crane lived with Cora Taylor, an older

woman who was a war correspondent.

• He covered the Spanish- American War,

traveled to Cuba and to Puerto Rico, and

came under fire at Gauntanamo and San

Juan Hill. He had a first flare-up of

tuberculosis. He was exhausted and ill.

Life

Crane returned to England in 1899,
enjoyed a circle of distinguished
British writers as friends, and
continued to publish war stories and
children’s stories. He suffered his
first T.B. (tuberculosis) attack. In
1900 traveled to a sanitarium in the
Black Forest, in Germany, where he
died the same year. He was 28.

Crane introduced new style

into American literary

tradition:

• - images of unheard violence and distortion
• - cacophony of noise
• - rendition (interpretacja) of events that

brings the objectivity of journalism and the
immediacy of experience into narrative
discourse

• - looking at critical, violent situations with

the kind of anatomy look of a scientist, to
see what principles work here. This look is
combined with visionary imagination.

Crane introduced new style

into American literary

tradition:

• Crane can be seen as the first American

naturalist. He does not subscribe to the tenets
of determinism, but he is drawn by the same
kinds of forces (situations where human
beings are coerced, squeezed). He wants to
write about the fictions of willpower, the myth
that people have some sort of control over
their lives.

• Crane is perhaps best defined as an

impressionist ( the brilliance of images), not
a naturalist. Hear this extraordinary image.

Crane as imprssionist

“In the darkness he saw visions of a
thousand-tongued fear that would babble
at his back and cause him to flee, while
others were going coolly about their
country’s business. He admitted he
would not be able to cope with this
monster. He felt every nerve of his body
would be an ear to hear the voices, while
other men would remain stolid and deaf.”

Crane’s works

• Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) a brutal

‘naturist’ account of prostitution and sordidness in

the modern urban setting. Crane published it at his

own expense .

• The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

- It made the 23-year old writer a celebrity overnight.
- The book was a sensation, an immediate bestseller,

especially in England.
- Crane said he had written the book in 10 feverish

nights
- It is a literary account of Civil War, seen from the

battlefield.
- The book changed the way people thought about

the war.

The Red Badge of

Courage

• Henry Fleming- is a young romantic, hungering for

glamour and glory, expecting grand events, wanting

to believe in heroism.

• Crane deflates the expectations over and over:

Henry’s mother sounds the cautionary note (“You’re

just one little feller amongst a whole lot of others”),

by the end Henry himself sees clearly the flaw in his

vision, this need to idealize and romanticize war.

• Crane juxtaposes the inner, private view of war with

the external world of others and nature.

• Here is carnage, fire, smoke, guns, noise and killing.

You look around and the sun hasn’t stopped shining.

Crane’s true subject is:

A crises, a set of circumstances
in which a human being is
placed. We come to realize that
human behavior is fundamentally a
question mark. Henry Fleming does
not know how he will behave in the
battle. His own future behavior is a
riddle. And he is obsessed to find out
the answer.

Crane’s true subject is:

• War is an absurdity, a senseless noise and

killing in a nature that has no connection
with it, a war is a kind of perceptual and
experiential chaos. Crane shows us what
war really looks and feels like.

• War is a kind of theatrical event. How do

you see yourself ? (inside perspective) How
do others see you? (outside perspective,
mum’s comment, officers talking “They fight
like a lot of mule drivers.”).

Crane’s true subject is:

• Also seen as an exemplary case of

rites of passage, consisting of:
separation, initiation and
incorporation.

• Death the ultimate truth and quarry

of Crane’s novel, inevitable
rendezvous.

Crane uses:

• vivid, stunning, disorienting colors

(impressionist writer)

• a kind of outlandish color symbolic

parade, the color of the smoke, of the

sun, of the trees, or the leaves, the

color of the flags. All of these are

doing battle with each other. It looks a

bit mad (sensory perceptions). The

human moral conceptual lines tend to

disappear.

Frank Norris (1870-1902)

Writing

• McTeague (1899)- about a dentist

who loses his job, murders his wife
for her money, and runs away to
Death Valley in California.

• The Octopus (1901) – strangulation

of Californian wheat growers at the
hands of railroads.

Jack [John Griffith] London

(1876-1916)

Jack [John Griffith] London

(1876-1916)

• The Call of the Wild (1903)- considered his masterpiece.

Classic quest story using a dog as a protagonist. Buck- name of

the dog is shipped to Klondlike to be trained as a sled dog,

eventually reverts to his primitive wolflike ancestry. He

undertakes journey, leaves safty of his familiar world to

encounter danger, adventure and fantasy. Transformed into

„Ghost Dog” of Klondlike and becomes a true hero.

• The Sea-Wolf (1904)- The story concerns Humphrey Van

Weyden a refined castaway put to work on the Monthley

schooner Ghost. The ship is run by brutal , intelligent and strong

but antisocial and self-destructive Wolf Larsen. Humphrey

develops strength of both body and will, protecting another

castaway Maud Brewster- facing down increasingly deranged

(uncontrolled or dangerous) Larsen.

• White Fang (1906) – a wolf dog that is rescued from its brutal

owner and gradually becomes domesticated through the

patience and kindness of his new owner Weedon Scott. White

Fang eventually defends Scott’s father from attack by an escaped

convicts.

Theodore Dreiser (1871-

1945)

• Sister Carrie (1900)- first of his novels. It

tells the story of rudderless but pretty
smalltown girl who comes to the big city
(first Chicago and then New York) filled
with vague ambitions. She is used by men
and uses them in turn to become a
successful Broadway actress, while George
Hurstwood, the married man who has run
away with her, loses his grip on life and
descends into beggary and suicide.

Sister Carrie

• Grittily factual presentation of the

vagaries (unexpected changes that

you cannot control)

• Ingenous heroine , who goes

unpunished for her transgressions

against conventional sexual morality

• The emotional disintergration of

Hurstwood in a much-praised

triumph of psychological analysis

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)

• Main Street (1920)- The novel presents a

satirical portrait of Gopher Prairie, a dull

and conservative midwestern small town.

• Babbitt (1922)- set in a fictional small

town called Zenith and nicknamed Zip city

by its residents. George F. Babbitt, a

middle-aged real-estate broker, a typical

conformist (‘babbitry’-uncritical conformity

to prevailing middle –class standards. Lewis

was the first American to be awarded the

Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930.

Social Realism

• Social realists looked at working conditions,

often for the purpose of social reform.

• In 1930, he became the first writer from the

United States to be awarded the

Nobel Prize in Literature

, "for his vigorous and

graphic art of description and his ability to

create, with wit and humor, new types of

characters." His works are known for their

insightful and critical views of American

society and

capitalist

values, as well as for

their strong characterizations of modern

working women.

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968)

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968)

• The Jungle (1906) – It described immigrant

workers in the Chicago stockyards
(enclosure where cattle are kept
temporarily- before being slaughtered) who
undergo a series of horrors and tragedies.
Sinclair exposed the terrible conditions in
Chicago’s meat-packing industry which let
to the introduction of the Meat Inspection
Act by Congress. He used fiction as a form
of propaganda, the message for reform.