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VII. American Realism

1. 1. Characteristics of Realism

Realism is a movement in art and literature that began in the 19th century France as a shift against the exotic and poetic conventions of Romanticism. Literary realism allowed for a new form of writing in which authors represented reality by portraying everyday experiences of relatable and complex characters, as they are in real life. According to William Dean Howells, "Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material" (qtd.in Carter 36). Literary realism depicts works with relatable and familiar characters, settings, and plots centered around society’s middle and lower classes. As a result, the intent of realism developed as a means to tell a story as truthfully and realistically as possible instead of dramatizing or romanticizing it. This movement has greatly impacted how authors write and what readers expect from literature. For example, playwright Anton Chekhov reflects in most of his writing a rejection of his romantic contemporaries and predecessors that tended to falsely idealize life. Chekhov’s plays and stories, instead, are made up of characters that are frustrated by the realities of their social situations and their own behaviors and feelings. His characters represent real, ordinary people who want happiness, but are limited by and entangled in everyday circumstances (Britannica)
      Realism in its broad sense has comprised many artistic currents in different civilizations. In the visual arts, for example, realism can be found in ancient Hellenistic Greek sculptures accurately portraying boxers and decrepit old women. The works of the 18th-century English novelists Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett are realist in approach.
     Realism was not consciously adopted as an aesthetic program until the mid-19th century in France. Indeed, realism may be viewed as a major trend in French novels and paintings between 1850 and 1880. One of the first appearances of the term realism was in the Mercure français du XIXe siècle in 1826, in which the word is used to describe a doctrine based not upon imitating past artistic achievements but upon the truthful and accurate depiction of the models that nature and contemporary life offer the artist. The French proponents of realism agreed in their rejection of the artificiality of both the Classicism and Romanticism of the academies and on the necessity for contemporaneity in an effective work of art. They attempted to portray the lives, appearances, problems, customs, and mores of the middle and lower classes, of the unexceptional, the ordinary, the humble, and the unadorned. Indeed, they conscientiously set themselves to reproducing all the hitherto-ignored aspects of contemporary life and society, its mental attitudes, physical settings, and material conditions ("Realism"). For the principles of realism, they are as follows:        
1. The philosophy of Realism is known as "descendental" or non-transcendental. The purpose of writing is to instruct and to entertain. Realists were pragmatic, relativistic, democratic, and experimental.
2. The subject matter of Realism is drawn from "our experience," - it treated the common, the average, the nonextreme, the representative, the probable.
3. The style of Realism is the vehicle which carries realistic philosophy, subject matter, and morality. Emphasis is placed upon scenic presentation, de-emphasizing authorial comment and evaluation. There is an objection towards the omniscient point of view.
4-Realistic Complexity and Multiplicity: Complexity refers to the interwoven, entangled density of   experience; multiplicity indicates the simultaneous existence of different levels of reality or of many truths, equally "true" from some point of view.
Characteristics
  • Emphasis on psychological, optimistic tone, details, pragmatic, practical, slow-moving plot.
  •  Rounded, dynamic characters who serve purpose in plot.
  • Character more important than plot.
  • Attack upon romanticism and romantic writers.
  • Emphasis upon morality often self-realized and upon an examination of idealism.
  • Empirically verifiable
  • World as it is created in novel impinges upon characters. Characters dictate plot; ending usually open.
  • Time marches inevitably on; small things build up. Climax is not a crisis, but just one more unimportant fact.
  • Causality built into text (why something happens foreshadowed). Foreshadowing in everyday events.
  • Realists show us rather than tell us
  • Representative people doing representative things
  •  Events make story plausible
  •  Insistence on experience of the commonplace
  •  Emphasis on morality, usually intrinsic, relativistic between people and society
  • Scenic representation important
  • Humans are in control of their own destiny and are superior to their circumstances
     The years following the Civil War symbolized a time of healing and rebuilding. For those engaged in serious literary circles, however, that period was full of upheaval. A literary civil war raged on between the camps of the romantics and the realists and later, the naturalists. People waged verbal battles over the ways that fictional characters were presented in relation to their external world. Using plot and character development, a writer stated his or her philosophy about how much control mankind had over his own destiny. For example, romantic writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated the ability of human will to triumph over adversity. On the other hand, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and Henry James were influenced by the works of early European Realists, namely Balzac's La Comedie Humaine (begun in the 1830s); Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches (1852); and Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856).These American realists believed that humanity's freedom of choice was limited by the power of outside forces. At another extreme were naturalists Stephen Crane and Frank Norris who supported the ideas of Emile Zola and the determinism movement. Naturalists argued that individuals have no choice because a person's life is dictated by heredity and the external environment. ("Realism")
There are a few different types of literary realism, each with its own distinct characteristics.
a- Magical Realism: A type of realism that blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. Magical realism portrays the world truthfully plus adds magical elements that are not found in our reality but are still considered normal in the world the story takes place. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967) is a magical realism novel about a man who invents a town according to his own perceptions (“What is Literary Realism”)

b- Social Realism: A type of realism that focuses on the lives and living conditions of the working class and the poor. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862) is a social novel about class and politics in France in the early 1800s.
c- Kitchen Sink Realism: An offshoot of social realism that focuses on the lives of young working-class British men who spend their free time drinking in pubs. Room at the Top by John Braine (1957) is a kitchen sink realist novel about a young man with big ambitions who struggles to realize his dreams in post-war Britain.
d- Socialist Realism: A type of realism created by Joseph Stalin and adopted by Communists. Socialist realism glorifies the struggles of the proletariat. Cement by Fyodor Gladkov (1925) is a socialist-realist novel about the struggles of reconstructing the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution. Socialist Realism, which was the officially sponsored Marxist aesthetic in the Soviet Union from the early 1930s until that country’s dissolution in 1991, actually had little to do with realism, though it purported to be a faithful and objective mirror of life. Its “truthfulness” was required to serve the ideology and the propagandistic needs of the state. Socialist Realism generally used techniques of naturalistic idealization to create portraits of dauntless workers and engineers who were strikingly alike in both their heroic positivism and their lack of lifelike credibility.
e- Psychological Realism. A type of realism that’s character-driven, focusing on what motivates them to make certain decisions and why. Psychological realism sometimes uses characters to express commentary on social or political issues. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866) is a psychological realist novel about a man who hatches a plan to kill a man and take his money to get out of poverty—but feels immense guilt and paranoia after he does it. (“What is Literary Realism”). 

f- Naturalism. An extreme form of realism influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Naturalism, founded by Émile Zola, explores the belief that science can explain all social and environmental phenomena. “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner (1930), a short story about a recluse with a mental illness whose fate is already determined, is an example of naturalism. (“What is Literary Realism”)