American Realism

The Problem of American Realism William Dean Howells Henry James Mark Twain

The Gilded Age • The Post-Civil War Generation experienced the most thoroughgoing change in American history - wealth and fame and not race • The new machinery of shares, claims, and inventions • The unfinished state of American society 2

Newport Mansions

•The new rich and their taste in art

The Breakers, the grand 70 room Italian Renaissance-style villa built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II, President and Chairman of the New York Central Railroad, after his first house burned down.

The Victorian villa of China Trade merchant William Wetmore, Chateau-sur-Mer, the first of Newport's palatial summer mansions, where the Gilded Age began.

Rosecliff, the home of the silver heiress Tessie Oelrichs with its magnificent ballroom, the largest in Newport. 3

Literature in the Gilded Age

• The changing life of literature as a cultural institution • The changed place of the writer • Literature – something established • A cultural system with a well-provided place in society • The conjunction between women’s writing and a middle-class domestic audience: the domestic novel

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Literature in the Gilded Age

• A literary audience on a mass scale • Mass journalism – “the penny press” • “Conspicuous consumption” – Thorstein Veblen • Erastus Beadle’s Dime Novels • Together with the domestic novel another popular genre: the short and sensational tale of adventures and social rise • Public entertainment 5

Literature in the Gilded Age

• Space for ‘serious’ authorship • “Genteel culture” – George Santayana, 1911 • Members: from old gentry back-ground from Boston, custodians and guardians of high literature • Cosmopolitan in range • To keep the literary field clear from disturbing social and sexual subjects

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William Dean Howells 1837-1920 The most influential promoter

of realism • Editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1871-1881) • An article in The Century (1882) provoked the "Realism War" • Wrote the "Editor's Study" (1886-1892) and "Editor's Easy Chair" (1899-1909) for Harper's New Monthly Magazine

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Howells’s Works • Believed that literature is the chief sustainer of civilization • Wrote over a hundred books including novels, poems, literary criticism, plays, memoirs, and travel narratives • Realistic fiction: • A Modern Instance (1881) • The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) • A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) • Their Wedding Journey (1871) 8

Howell’s Works • • • • • •

Dr. Breen's Practice, (1880) The Minister's Charge(1886) Indian Summer (1886) April Hopes (1887) The Landlord at Lion's Head (1897) The Son of Royal Langbrith (1904) 

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Criticism and Fiction • “Let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires; … let it not put on fine literary airs; let it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know … and there can be no doubt of an unlimited future, not only of delightfulness but of usefulness, for it.”

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Henry James’s Realism • “The Art of Fiction” 1884 • Not unmediated reality but a “sense of reality” • Reality in fiction depends not on the truth of the writer’s material but on the strength of his “sensibility” or “imagination” • Howells: the standard of realism: “the simple, the natural and the honest” – terms of conventional morality

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Henry James’s Realism

• The artist must openly present himself as an artist • “the questions of art are questions of execution” • “the questions of morality are quite another affair” • The morality of the work of art – in the quality of its execution and the quality of the imagination of the author • The civilizing powers of the artistic imagination

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American Realism • Not a coherent school • The three classical texts: • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn • The Rise of Silas Lapham • The Bostonians 13

The New Historians

• Walter Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Capitalism, 1987 • Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, 1988 • Texts not responses to cultural formations but part of them • Not secondary to reality but is as real as reality itself • Still problematic

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American realism • Associated with power • White, male, urban • Local colour writers • The “tea-cup” realism

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Mark Twain /Samuel Langhorne Clemens/ 1835-1910

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Mark Twain’s Importance • The literary figure that embodies all the unresolved issues of American culture • The birth of the conspicuous public figure • Associated with realism, local colour, social satire, morality • The first to become aware of the nihilism latent in crossing cultural borders

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Twain’s Works • The Innocents Abroad 1869 Roughing It 1872 The Guided Age 1873 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 1876 A Tramp Abroad 1880 The Prince and the Pauper 1881 Life on the Mississippi 1883 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1885 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 1889 18

Twain’s Works • The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson 1894 Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Vol I 1896 Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Vol II 1896 Following the Equator 1897 The Man that Corrupted Hudleyburg 1900 The Mysterious Stranger 1916 (uncompleted) • Letters from the Earth 1962 19

Huckleberry Finn • “All modern literature comes from a book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn … it’s the best book we’ve had … There was nothing before. There has been nothing since.” Hemingway • A gallery of voices as in Dickens • A central voice, poetic and humorous • Loosely assembled episodes

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Huckleberry Finn • The small-town world of America • A symbolic journey down the Mississippi • A lyrical masterpiece of American pragmatic exploration • An initiation novel • Travel • The fresh descriptive point of view of the traveller 21

Huckleberry Finn • Running away - in childhood memories: Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn - back in history: The Prince and the Pauper, Joan of Arc, A Connecticut Yankee … - back in time: A Connecticut Yankee …

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Huck Finn

• Viewed as Don Quixote and Odysseus • The power of the visitor, the outsider, the greenhorn • A mirror image: the King and the Duke • Nuanced moral differentiation between the outsiders and tricksters and frauds and invaders • The visitors turns into a demonic intruder 23

Twain’s Realism • The nineteen rules governing literary art • 1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. • 2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. • 3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. . • 4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

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Twain’s Realism

• 5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circum-stances, and have a discoverable meaning and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. • 6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.

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Twain’s Realism • Daniel Davitt Bell, American Realism: - very different from Howellsian realism - not a realistic plot, language and style • Werner Berthoff The Ferment of Realism 1965 - “The great collective event in American letters during the 1880s and 1890s was the securing of realism as the dominant standard of value.”

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