Introduction chapter the start of American realism

1.2 Characteristics of critical realism
Let's look more closely at some of the defining characteristics of critical realist literature.
Attention to detail
The most important aspect of American realism is that it depicts reality with close attention to detail. It is essential that the events occurring will appear plausible when compared to their time and setting. The realist writer avoids the sentimental, overly emotional prose favoured by romanticism.
The realist author would design a character's social class, way of thinking, and way of speaking based on the part of the United States in which the novel is set. This complex, authentic characterisation was fundamental to creating literary realism.
Characterisation
The characters are more important than the plot in realist literature. Much of a realist novel is often consumed by a character tackling complex moral issues and dealing with personal struggles related to broader social and political difficulties like war and government.
The pursuit of psychology as a study was emerging simultaneously with the Realist movement. Sigmund Freud developed his concepts during the end of the eighteenth century.
This growing interest in psychological study could account for the psychological character studies commonly found within realist literature.
Social Criticism
Many American realist writers were interested in critiquing the conditions of their societies. Authors aimed to depict the acts of racism, prejudice, or social injustice common to their time.
Specific focus was often placed on the experience of the lower classes, who were vital to the strength of the country, but lived in terrible conditions and were frequently treated poorly.⁴
William Dean Howells - The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
The Rise of Silas Lapham follows Silas, a man chasing materialistic goals and values. He attains good fortune, but through his greedy mistakes, he falls from grace, losing his business and livelihood. Silas must begin a journey to think of others instead of himself, and better himself morally. Howells presents realistic characters in the novel, showing their individual flaws and strengths and commenting on societal issues in the process.
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is likely the most famous work of American realist fiction of all time. The novel recounts Huckleberry Finn's escape from an abusive father, before embarking on an adventure down the Mississippi river alongside Jim, an escapee enslaved person.
Twain's novel is the perfect example of literary realism. He creates a narrative authentic to the time and writes with colloquial dialect representative of the region. The novel also tackles topics of slavery, morality and betrayal, while critiquing the romanticism of the American South.
Stephen Crane - The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
The Red Badge of Courage sought to reveal what life was like on the battlefield during the American Civil War. It follows one soldier's experience and illuminates the harsh conditions he is made to endure. It also brings attention to the psychological struggles associated with war.
In creating his novel, Crane brought attention to a significantly underrepresented area in American literature and encouraged other writers to depict the realities of war, as they were, without patriotism.
Other examples of American realism
Here's a list of other realist novels for further reading!
Author Title Release date
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) The House of Mirth 1905
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) Ethan Frome 1911
Henry James (1843-1916) Daisy Miller 1878
Henry James (1843-1916) The Portrait of a Lady 1881
John Steinbeck (1902-1968) Of Mice and Men 1937
John Steinbeck (1902-1968) The Grapes of Wrath 1939
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) Tales of Soldiers and Civilians 1891
Kate Chopin (1851-1904) The Awakening 1899
Frank Norris (1870-1902) McTeague 1899
American Realism (1830s- 1900s) - Key takeaways
The realist movement originated in France in the mid-eighteenth century, and was popularised in the United States towards the end of the American Civil War.
The brutality of the war, combined with increased literacy, and the power of industrialisation, led to an increased demand for true-to-life, authentic literature to help readers understand the ever-changing world around them.
The most important characteristics of American realism are; attention to detail, complex characterisation and social criticism.
The originator of the movement in America was William Dean Howells.
Some other significant realist authors are Mark Twain, Stephen Crane and Edith Wharton.
One big innovation of Realist literature was the use of simple, transparent language. No Realist novel is going to begin with some fancy-shmancy phrase like, "Behold, thy life and love are the true crown upon the pinnacle of my heart."
Realist writers fit their style to their subject: given that a lot of them were writing about ordinary people, they used ordinary language. Writing in language that echoed the way regular people spoke to each other was revolutionary in the mid-19th century, when Realism really got going. Before that, literary language was often supposed to be elevated, a little bit highfalutin'. But is that kind of language realistic? Not really—so the Realist writers tried something new.
Realist writers really rocked the omniscient narrator. What's that, you ask?
Omniscient narrators are sort of like the superheroes of narrators, and that's because they know everything. They can jump from one character's head to another, they can tell us about one town on this page and then jump to a completely new town on the next. They know when you've been sleeping, they know when you're awake, they know when you've been good and bad, so… Well, yeah. They move from character to character, from scene to scene, from one place to another—because they just know it all.
Knowing it all means these narrators know the details of pretty much everything, which is a pretty convenient thing if what you're trying to do is create a sense of reality in your novel.
Of course, not all Realist literature is told from the omniscient narrator point of view—there are plenty of first-person narrators, for example, in Realist literature. But the fact is that most of the great 19th-century Realist authors wrote from an omniscient narrative point of view: Leo Tolstoy, Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, to name just a few.
Leo Tolstoy is famous for his use of the omniscient narrator. Check out how the omniscient narrator moves between different characters in these examples from Anna Karenina.
The omniscient narrator of George Eliot's Middlemarch makes all kinds of general statements about men and women in these quotations from the novel.
Verisimilitude is a sexy word meaning truthiness. Realist literature is famous for the way it tries to create a world that seems real or true; Realist writers want us to believe that we're watching real life unfold on the page.
Hey, it's called Realism. Is anyone surprised?
Realist writers go out of their way to make sure that they get their facts straight. If a Realist writer is writing about London in 1870, you can bet that writer either lives in London or has done some serious research on London, because he or she would want the London of the novel to be as true to life as possible.
In fact, Realism was heavily influenced by journalistic techniques, and that's no surprise, given that journalism at the time was also taking off. Realist writers often write like journalists, and their attention to specific facts and specific details only adds to the sense of verisimilitude in their fictional works.
Check out how Leo Tolstoy creates verisimilitude when writing about warfare and battlefields in War and Peace (Quotes #2 and #3).
And here is Tolstoy again, this time showing us just how horrible it is to visit the doctor in his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
You can't talk about Realism without talking about the novel. The novel is the one genre that is most closely associated with the rise of Realism as a movement: if we tick off on your fingers the most famous works of Realist literature, you'll probably come up with the titles of a bunch of novels, like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, The Brothers Karamazov, and so on.
Realist writers do write in other genres, too, but it's the novel that is at the heart of the Realist tradition. Realist writers were drawn to the novel for several reasons, but most of all, the novel is big, and it's flexible. Realism is all about detail, after all, and you can fit a whole lot more detail into 300—or 1,300—pages of writing than you can fit into the fourteen lines of a sonnet.
The novel also gives you space to talk about loads of different issues and different characters. In Tolstoy's gigantic novel War and Peace, for example, there are over 500 different characters. That's like having all of your Facebook friends covered in one single book.
Realist writers are really into describing, analyzing, and dramatizing personality. They delve deep into their characters' psychologies and dig into their motivations, actions, and emotions. Realism was all about understanding life, society, and the world. Often, the first place these writers started was with the psychological reality of individual people.⁵
It's good to remember that when Realism was emerging, psychology as a discipline was also emerging. Towards the end of the 19th century, Sigmund Freud—whom you may know as the dude who came up with the theory that we all want to sleep with our parents—was developing many of the central concepts in psychology, including theories about the unconscious, dream life, and repression.
Realist writers during this period—and even before Freud (one person said that everything Freud said was already in Dostoevsky's novels)—were already interested in psychology, and this is reflected in Realism's obsession with character.
Realist writers are all about critiquing the social and political conditions of the worlds that they write about. Authors like Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Honoré de Balzac, and Fyodor Dostoevsky depicted economic and social inequalities in their novels as a way of raising awareness about the plight of poor people, for example, or about the inequalities that affect women.
In fact, there's a whole subset of Realism called Social Realism, which developed in the early 20th century and was inspired by the work of the big guns of early Realism like Tolstoy and Dickens. Social Realism comments on social and political conditions in a uniquely straightforward and hard-hitting way. John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath is a great example of Social Realism as it developed into the 20th century.
Class is a huge deal in Realist literature. Sometimes Realist writers will delve into the intricate etiquette of the upper classes, and sometimes they'll focus on the trials and tribulations of the lower classes.
But the class that Realism is most concerned with, at least in Western Europe, is the middle class. Now, it's important to remember that the middle class didn't always exist. Way back in the day, there was the aristocracy (all of those rich landowners with powdered faces and fancy wigs) and there was everyone else (peasants, mostly, who worked their butts off on land owned by the aristocracy).
Well, in the 19th century, the middle class began to rise. Thanks to industrialization and the rise of capitalism, a peasant could, over a little time, become a wealthy merchant and start living a little more comfortably. Society was changing, social structures and classes were being transformed, and Realism reflected these changes.
Around the time that Realism got going as a literary movement in the mid-19th century, more and more people were reading. Education was no longer the special privilege of fancy aristocrats wearing wigs and face powder. Thanks to the printing press, books and reading materials had become much more accessible.
In fact, many of the early Realist authors didn't even publish their works as "books." Their novels were serialized in journals for mass readership, which meant that the journal would publish one installment of a novel with each issue. Realist literature was popularized in this way: it was easily accessible, and it provided long-term entertainment for a growing reading public.