NAAL / 1865-1914 / INTRODUCTION

The Transformation of a Nation:

• Industrialization
• Increase in population / Immigration
• Population shift from country to city
• Rise of organized labor

The Literary Marketplace:

New Things:

• Themes
• Forms
• Subjects
• Regions
• Authors
• Audiences

Different Fictional Characters:

• Industrial workers
• Rural poor
• Ambitious business leaders
• Vagrants
• Prostitutes
• Unheroic soldiers
• (middle class)

Different Authors:

• Women, African Americans, Native Americans, and ethnic minorities
• Self-educated pioneers, adventurers, and journalists

Different Publication Forms:

• Newspapers
• Monthly magazines
• Weekly magazines
• Journals

The Leading American Realists:

• Mark Twain
• Henry James
• Edith Wharton
• William Dean Howells

“The Literary Identity of Distinctly American Protagonists”:

• The vernacular boy hero
• The “American Girl”
• The baffled and strained middle-class family
• The businessman
• The psychologically complicated citizens of a new international culture

Forms of Realism:

REALISM

“Realism . . . was, ultimately, nothing more or less than the attempt to write a literature that recorded life as it was lived rather than life as it ought to be lived or had been lived in times past.”

William Dean Howells, the “dean” of American realism: “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.”

“Realism’s preoccupation with the physical surfaces, the particularities of the sensate world in which fictional characters lived.  These characters were ‘representative’ or ordinary characters -- characters one might pass on the street without noticing.”

Howells’ novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)

“Realism . . . seeks to create the illusion of everyday life being lived by ordinary people in familiar surroundings -- life seen through a clear glass window (though partially opened to allow for the full range of sense experience).”

Examples of Realism:

• William Dean Howells
• Mark Twain
• Henry James
• Edith Wharton

NATURALISM

“Naturalism is commonly understood as an extension or intensification of realism.”

“The intensification involves the introduction of characters . . . from the fringes and lower depths of contemporary society, characters whose fates are the product of degenerate heredity, a sordid environment and a good deal of bad luck.”

Naturalists:

• Ambrose Bierce
• Stephen Crane
• Theodore Dreiser
• Jack London
• Frank Norris
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1870), "survival of the fittest," biological determinism

Herbert Spenser applied Darwin’s theory of evolution to social relations, Social Darwinism, social determinism

“Another response to Darwin was to accept the deterministic implications of evolutionary theory and to use them to account for the behavior of characters in literary works.  That is, characters were conceived as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes and habits ingrained by social and economic forces.”

Emile Zola’s essay, “The Experimental Novel” (1880):

• "In short, we must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies. Determinism governs everything. It is scientific investigation; it is experimental reasoning that combats one by one the hypotheses of the idealists and will replace novels of pure imagination by novels of observation and experiment."

“This pessimistic form of realism, this so-called naturalistic view of humankind”

“They were all concerned . . . to explore new territories -- the pressures of biology, environment, and other material forces -- in making people, particularly lower-class people, who they were.”

They “all allowed in different degrees for the value of human beings, for their potential to make some measure of sense out of their experience and for their capacity to act compassionately -- even altruistically -- under the most adverse circumstances.”

“The bleakness and pessimism sometimes found in their fiction are not the same as despair and cynicism.”

Examples of Naturalism:

• Ambrose Bierce
• Stephen Crane -- “Biology, environment, psychological drives, and chance . . . play a large part in shaping human ends in Crane’s fiction.”
• Theodore Dreiser
• Abraham Cahan
• Jack London

See the last paragraph on page ___.

Summary of the Features of Realistic Writing:

• American colloquial prose
• Fascination with the physical surfaces / “documentary” / verisimilitude of setting
• Tendency to select “representative” or ordinary characters
• Use of a point of view that reduces authorial intrusion
• Spoken dialogue: the attempt to render accurately the spoken language
• Plain language and simple syntax (of the writer)
• Ethical idealism

Summary of the Features of Naturalistic Writing:

• Characters from the fringes and lower depths of contemporary society.
• Characters whose fates are the product of degenerate heredity, a sordid environment, and a good deal of bad luck.

Regional Writing:

“Regional writing, another expression of the realistic impulse, resulted from the desire both to preserve distinctive ways of life before industrialization dispersed or homogenized them and to come to terms with the harsh realities that seemed to replace these early and allegedly happier times.”

“At a more practical level, much of this writing was a response to the rapid growth of magazines, which created a new, largely female market for short fiction along with correlated opportunities for women writers.”

“By the end of the century . . . virtually every region of the country . . . had its ‘local colorists” . . . to immortalize its distinctive natural, social, and linguistic features.”

“Though often suffused with nostalgia, the best work of the regionalists both renders a convincing surface of a particular time and location and investigates psychological character traits from a more universal perspective.”

Examples:

• Bret Harte
• Hamlin Garland
   
• Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Sarah Orne Jewett
• Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
• Sui Sin Far
• Constance Fenimore Woolson
• Mary Austin
• Alice Brown
• Rose Terry Cook
• Kate Chopin

A regional writer is “interested in preserving the customs, language, and landscape of a region.”

The best regional writing should offer “thematic richness beyond the visual and aural documentation of a time, a place and varied society.”

Realism as Argument:

Social Problems:

• Women’s rights: see Gilman
• Political corruption
• Degradation of the natural world
• Economic inequity
• Business deceptions
• Exploitation of labor
• Racial inequality: see especially Washington and Du Bois

Major Developments: “the individual and collective dislocations and discontinuities associated with:

• The closing out of the frontier
• Urbanization
• Intensified secularism
• Unprecedented immigration
• The surge of national wealth unequally distributed
• Revised conceptions of human nature and destiny
• The reordering of family and civil life
• The pervasive spread of mechanical and organizational technologies"