Realism (literature)
Realism in literature emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as a response to the social, scientific, and political upheavals of the time, particularly in Europe. This literary movement marked a significant shift from the romanticized portrayals of the wealthy and powerful to a focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people. Influential figures in this movement included French authors Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac, as well as Russian writers Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Realism sought to depict life with honesty and detail, addressing themes of struggle, moral complexity, and the human condition without idealization.
This approach resonated with readers who found relatable characters grappling with similar challenges faced in their own lives. In the United States, realism flourished post-Civil War, with writers such as Mark Twain and Kate Chopin offering local color fiction that depicted various regional experiences. Realism eventually branched into two schools: one that maintained a more optimistic outlook on human behavior, and another that presented a bleaker view of existence. This genre paved the way for naturalism, which introduced a more scientific lens to character analysis. Over the decades, realism has remained a significant force in literature, although it has faced challenges from movements like magic realism and postmodernism, which explore different narrative techniques and perspectives.
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Realism (literature)
Born of powerful currents of social, scientific, and political change in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, literary realism represented the revolutionary concept that life as it was lived by ordinary people was not only worth investigating, but also worth recording. Until that point, art had served largely to portray the singular and exotic, most often the rich and the powerful, in elegantly wrought prose or poetry. Realism—a movement of an international coterie of novelists, painters, poets, playwrights, and journalists—upended traditional notions of worthy artistic subjects, arguing that art and literature should commit itself to the accurate portrayal of the sufferings and the joys of the everyday in an immediately accessible and direct manner.
Background
Realism had its roots in Europe, particularly France and Russia, and was born of discontent among young artists with the elitist assumptions that had guided the arts for more than a century. Writers, most prominently Gustave Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac in France, and Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Russia, argued for the worth of depicting, with panoramic detail, the lives of the men and women who daily struggled to maintain their families, work jobs, and make difficult moral choices. The rising influence of journalism in the public sphere and the realists’ conscious rejection of literary ornamentation resulted in a careful, honest prose that resonated with audiences. Readers were drawn to characters driven by the same passions and needs as they were. Realists were willing to treat frankly various darker urges—most prominently greed, dishonesty, and pride—that were largely ignored by the more idealistic romantics.
Literary realism soon found its adherents in Britain, where writers like George Eliot and Charles Dickens enjoyed a wide readership and great popularity for their depictions of workaday life. Savvy publishers began producing a wide range of magazines that ran realistic stories—often accompanied by sketches—that found an eager audience in those long sated on happy-ending stories of sensation and romance. Much like documentary television and film, literary realism appealed to the reader’s curiosity. Realist writers painted a vivid picture of life in the countryside or life in the cities, experiences that readers were unlikely to have given the limits of transportation systems.
After the grim realities of the Civil War, the United States was primed to embrace realism. In an era of economic expansion and the rise of the American city, readers were eager to consume realistic stories from different regions of the growing country. This type of tale would come to be called local color fiction. Readers in Boston or New York could read Bret Harte’s stories of the rugged Western mining towns, or the lush bayou love stories of Kate Chopin’s Louisiana, or Mark Twain’s rollicking tales of life along the Mississippi. For a generation that had long seen entertainment as escape, here was a new kind of experience. Reading about characters that, despite living in faraway regions, faced money and family problems just as they did gave a certain depth to the art. Realist stories were of such an accessible nature that readers with even minimal education could enjoy the experience. By the end of World War I, a generation of American playwrights, most prominently Eugene O’Neill, brought a similar, often troubling vision to theater audiences in experimental depictions of ordinary life.
Impact
Of course, given the complex nature of reality, there evolved two broad schools of realism both in Europe and America. In America, for instance, led by the influential editor William Dean Howells, a school of realists sought to brighten up the portrayal of the everyday, to permit the characters to rise above their moral dilemmas and make heroic decisions in a generally optimistic universe that seemed to reward right behavior and punish the morally malignant. Another group of writers—in America, it included Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, Henry James, and later, Robert Frost and John Steinbeck—took a far dimmer view of the world, and wrote of an indifferent universe where good and evil are often the same impulse, and even the most heroic and virtuous of actions could end up meaningless. Naturalism—a loose literary movement exemplified by the writings of Émile Zola—expanded upon realism, applying a scientific perspective to its conventions to illustrate how social environment and heredity can shape the character and actions of a person. Influenced heavily by thinkers in the burgeoning field of biology, the naturalist writers saw humankind as a product of the environment and believed that subjects should be presented and analyzed from a morally impartial stance.
Given its ties to the middle class and the marketplace, realism has dominated literature for more than a century, although significant challenges have been raised by magic realism (also called magical realism)—which infuses otherwise realistic storylines or images with elements of the supernatural—and postmodernism, which rejected the concept that contemporary life, with all its absurdity, could ever be captured by artists or storytellers, and turned to radical experiments with form itself.
Bibliography
Barrish, Phillip J., ed. The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism. Cambridge UP, 2011.
Fore, Devin. Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature. MIT Press, 2012.
Jameson, Frederic. The Antimonies of Realism. Verso, 2013.
Lucie-Smith, Edward. American Realism. Abrams, 1994.
Newlin, Keith. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Realism. Oxford University Press, 2019. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=3968487&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed 14 Nov. 2024.
Norris, Pam. Realism. Routledge, 2003.
Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940. U of North Carolina P, 1989.
Shi, David E. Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920. Oxford UP, 1996.
Villanueva, Darío. Theories of Literary Realism. State U of New York P, 1997.