THE AGE OF REALISM AND NATURALISM

source: Norton Anthology volume C

Settlements pushing US’s borders westward

Mexican-American War (1846-1848): annexing Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada,
California
The discovery of gold in California (1848): football team SF 49ers
White Americans, mostly of English, Scottish, German and French descent, settling
across the western regions, consequently government forces Native Americans to
relocate to places further west – Indian Removal Act had begun in the 1830s.
Extermination of buffalos and other wild game in favor of cattle and sheep.
Settlers in the West establishing farms, villages, cities and railroads.
New technologies (electric lightbulb in 1879, telephone in 1876, telegraph in 1840,
etc.) converted the country’s natural resources into industrial products.
The Civil War (1861-1865): the seemingly inevitable result of growing economic,
political, social, and cultural divisions between North and South (600000 people died
at war).
The Transcontinental railroad (1869).
Mineral wealth: coal, oil, iron, gold, silver.
Urban growth: immigrants in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco.
FRONTIER the extreme limit of settled land beyond which lies wilderness, especially
referring to the Western US before Pacific settlement.
Spanish-American War (1898): annexing Hawaii as a colony.
Industrial monopolies, the ‘robber barons’: a small number of men controlling
enormously profitable enterprises, such as steel, oil, railroads, meatpacking, banking,
finance – Jim Hill, Leland Stanford, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, ‘the
new millionaires formed a wealthy class whose style of life, reported on in the mass
media, offered a startling contrast to the lives of ordinary people’.
 Population growth: in 1870, 38.5 million; by 1910, 92 million; by 1920, 123 million
(mostly due to the arrival of immigrants): “By 1890, New Englanders and their now-
scattered descendants were no longer numerically dominant”.
HOMESTEAD ACT (1862) provided that any adult citizen who headed a family could
qualify for a grant of 160 acres of public land by paying a small registration fee and
living on the land continuously for 5 years. If the settler was willing to pay $1.25 an
acre, he could obtain the land within 6 months.
 but few families had the resources to start farming, even on free land.
The grants did give new opportunities to many empoverished farmers,
but much of the land granted fell quickly into the hands of speculators.
 Hamlin Garland’s short story “Under the Lion’s Paw” (1891)
“These cities were also, as the socialist novelist Jack London and Upton Sinclair
argued – adapting the ideas of Darwin [The Origin of Species, 1859]to the social field –
‘jungles’ where only the strongest, most ruthless, and luckiest survived. Wages were
low, and workers faced inhumane and dangerous working conditions; at this time
there were few laws regulating safety and working hours”.
 SWEATSHOPS a pejorative term for a workplace that has very poor,
socially unacceptable working conditions. The work may be difficult,
dangerous, climatically challenging and underpaid.
“Legislators usually favored business and industry, sometimes in the honest belief
that a healthy economy required capitalism, sometimes via bribery and kickbacks 1.
“Early attempts by labor to organize were often violent, and such groups as the
Molly Maguires, active in the 1870s and 1880s in the coal-mining area of northeastern
Pennsylvania, bolstered2 the conviction of those who believed in open markets and
free enterprise that labor organizations were un-American”.
 MOLLY MAGUIRES was an Irish 19th century secret society active in
Ireland, Liverpool and parts of Eastern United States, best known for
their activism among Irish-American and Irish immigrants coal miners in

1
a payment made to someone who has facilitated a transaction or appointment, especially illicitly.
2
support or strengthen; prop up.
 Pennsylvania. After a series of often violent conflicts, twenty
suspected members of the Molly Maguires were convicted of murder
and other crimes and were executed by hanging in 1877 and 1878. This
history remains part of local Pennsylvania lore.
 But although part of Pennsylvania’s folklore, historians disagree on the
existence of this society, and on the fact that the Mollies were violent.
 “But not until collective bargaining legislation was enacted in the 1930s
did labor acquire the right to strike”.
DAWES ALLOTMENT ACT OF 1887 authorized the president of the US to survey
Native American tribal land and divide it into allotments for individual Native
Americans. Those who accepted allotments and lived separately from the tribe would
be granted US citizenship. The act emphasized severalty, the treatment of Native
Americans as individuals rather than as members of tribes. When the allotment
process began in 1887, the total land held by American indian tribes on reservations
equaled 138 million acres. By the end of the allotment period landholdings had been
reduced to 48 million acres.

THE LITERARY MARKETPLACE Literature after Civil War

The rapid transcontinental settlement and new urban industrial conditions

summarized above had a significant impact on the literature of the time. New
themes, new forms, new subjects, new regions, new authors, and new audiences all
emerged in the half century following the Civil War. In fiction, characters rarely
represented before the Civil War became familiar figures: industrial workers and the
rural poor, ambitious business leaders and vagrants, prostitutes and unheroic
soldiers. Women from many social groups, African Americans, Native Americans,
ethnic minorities, immigrants: all wrote for publication, and a rapiclly burgeoning 3
market for printed works helped establish authorship as a possible career for many.

3
begin to grow or increase rapidly; flourish.
  Joseph Pulitzer, Hungarian newspaper publisher, became a leading
national figure in the Democratic Party and was elected congressman
from New York, crusaded against big business and corruption, and
helped keep the Statue of Liberty.
Many of the noted authors of the period started as newspaper journalists: Abraham
Cahan, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Sui Si Far,
Joel Chandler Harris, William Dean Howells, Frank Norris, and Mark Twain, among
them. Perhaps of equal importance to the development of literary careers and
literature as an American institution was the establishment of newspaper syndicates
in the 1880s by Irving Bachelor and S. S. McClure. These syndicates distributed
material to newspapers and magazines in all sections of the country, publishing
humor, news, and serialized novels such as Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895).
Magazines had become important in American life by the mid-eighteenth century,
but they too increased in number. […] published work by Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne
Jewett, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Sui Si Far, Zitkala Ša,
and Mark Twain. In San Francisco, the Overland Monthly (1868) emerged as the
leading western literary periodical with a regional focus: it published Bret Harte,
Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Mary Austin, Sui Si Far, and Mark Twain, among
others. Without these periodicals, many writers would not have been able to support
themselves; the income and audiences were crucial to the further formation of the
complex literary tradition of a vast nation undergoing modernization.
Periodicals also contributed to the emergence of what the critic Warner Berthoff has
called ‘the literature of argument’ – writings in sociology, philosophy, and psychology
impelled by the spirit of exposure and reform.
[…] editors and readers welcomed (in translation) works by the leading European
figures of the time, such as Russians Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, Norwegian
playwright Henrik Ibsen, and French novelist Emile Zola. American writers during this
period increasingly adopted THE FORM OF REALISM. […] Gustave Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary (serialized in 1856, published as a book in 1857). […] Among the most
 critically praised American writers of the period were Mark Twain, William Dean
Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, who encompassed literary style from the
comic vernacular through ordinary discourse to impressionistic subjectivity, while still
under the sway4 of literary realism. These writers […] recorded life on the vanishing
frontier, in the village, small towns, and turbulent metropolis, as well as in European
resorts and capitals.
These writers established the literary identity of distinctively American protagonists,
specifically the vernacular boy hero and the ‘American girl’, the baffled and strained 5
middle-class family, the businessman, and the psychologically complicated citizens of
a new international culture. They set the example and charted the future course for
the subjects, themes, techniques, and styles of the US fiction we still call modern.
[…] enhancing the reputation of prose fiction – the idea of a ‘great’ American novel
was first enunciated soon after the Civil War.
But two of the most important American writers of their time and beyond, both of
whom began working before the Civil War, were devoted to the idea that poetry was
a crucial expression of the human spirit. In different ways each pointed towards the
huge renaissance of poetry after WW I. Walt Whitman promulgated an expansive,
gregarious open form fit for the ‘open road’ of American life. Emily Dickinson’s tight,
elliptical verses reflect a sense of the psychological interior where meanings are
made and unmade: ‘internal difference, where meanings are’.

FORMS OF REALISM AND NATURALISM

The two great literary movements of the late 19 th century were Realism and
Naturalism. The term ‘realism’ refers to a movement in English, European and
American literature that gathered force from 1830s to the end of the century. As
defined by William Dean Howells – the magazine editor who was for some decades
the chief American advocate of realist aesthetics as well as the author of over 30
novels, including The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)

4
control or influence (a person or course of action).
5
(of a person) showing signs of tiredness or nervous tension.
 – realism “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of
material”. But the truthful treatment of material depends on the material in
question:
Henry James spoke of the documentary value of Howells’s work, thereby calling
attention to realism’s preoccupation with the observable surfaces of the world in
which fictional characters lived, surfaces that made the world seem lifelike to
readers. Characters in Howells’s novels were ‘representative’, that is composites of
the sort of people readers thought they already knew, people without fame or huge
fortunes, without startling accomplishments or immense abilities.
By contrast, the realism practiced by Edith Wharton and Henry James focused on the
interior moral and psychological lives of upper-class people, although always taking
care in describing these people’s surroundings. Wharton and James hoped to
convince readers – most of whom were from the middle class – that inner lives of the
privileged were in accord with the truths of human nature. Wealthy people had what
working people did not – time to develop and display their inner selves; they were
just like everybody else, although more so.
In novels such as The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The
Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton depicts the intangibles of thwarted desire, self-
betrayal, hostile emotion, and repressed voices. […] an almost Darwinian view of
upper-class life, a naturalistic vision of human struggle, this is not the pleasant world
of Howells’s well-meaning6 characters, but it is no less ‘realistic’.
Realist writers believed in the power of language to represent reality in ways that
were aesthetically satisfying and true to their sense of the world. […] Two of the
most acclaimed artists of the era – Mark Twain and Henry James – understood that
language was interpretation of the real rather than the real thing itself.
As a western writer, Twain worked within a tradition of vernacular tale-telling, which
some later writers [like Ernest Hemingway] saw as the essence of a truly American
style. Because this style was already an exaggeration, it could not truly be called
‘realistic’ in the Howellian sense; and Twain’s later work is infused with pessimism
6
Having good intentions.
 and social critique well beyond the realistic norm. James, beginning with
recognizably realistic fiction, using a large cast of individualized, although usually
upper-class characters described by an all-knowing narrator, as in The American
(1876), developed increasingly subtle metaphorical and proto-modernistic
representations of the flow of a character’s inner thought – the so-called ‘stream of
consciousness’ – as in The Golden Bowl (1904).
Literary naturalists, unlike the realists for whom human beings defined themselves
within recognizable settings, wrote about human life as it was shaped by forces
beyond human control. For them, their view was truly realistic, while Howellian
realism was a form of prettifying. Naturalism introduces characters from the fringes
and depths of society, far from the middle class, whose lives really do spin out of
control; their fates are seen to be the outcome of degenerate heredity, a sordid
environment, and the bad luck that can often seem to control the lives of people
without money or influence.
Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1870) theorized that
humans developed over the ages from nonhuman forms of life, successfully adapting
to changing environmental conditions. […] Herbert Spencer applied Darwin’s
evolutionary theory of the ‘survival of the fittest’ 7 to human groups. The idea was
enthusiastically welcomed by many leading American businessmen. […] unrestrained
competition was the equipment of a law of nature […].
For the novelists, naturalism was thought to make their work scientific – thus truly
realistic – rather than romantic. Émile Zola (1840-1902) […] wrote in his influential
essay ‘The Experimental Novel’ (1880):
 “We must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as
the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist

7
Survival of the Fittest. It was Herbert Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the phrase 'survival of the
fittest' due to the fact that he believed human behavior was designed in a way that strives for self-
preservation. Darwin later used the term 'survival of the fittest' in his edition of Origins of the Species.
[…] Herbert Spencer first used the phrase – after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species – in
his Principles of Biology of 1864 in which he drew parallels between his economic theories and
Darwin's biological, evolutionary ones, writing, "This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to
express in ...
 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”.
[…] At some level, they all understood they were all fabulists, not scientists, and
ultimately none of them was willing to sacrifice some idea of human life as
meaningful. […] Naturalists wanted to explore how biology, environment, and other
material forces shaped lives – particularly the lives of lower-class people, who
supposedly has less control over their lives than those who were better off. In this
respect, naturalism is an intervention that strives to make lower-class lives
comprehensible to the middle-class readers who comprised the main audience for
fiction. […] Eve though, therefore, they were challenging conventional wisdom
about human motivation and causality in the natural world, the bleakness 8 and
pessimism sometimes found in their fiction are not the same as despair and cynicism.
Careful reading of such Ambrose Bierce stories as “Chicamauga” and “An Occurrence
at Owl Creek Bridge” reveals his awareness of fiction as a tool to explore inner truths.
Stephen Crane, too, did not believe that environment counts for everything, though
he said of Maggie: a Girl of the Streets (1893) that it does count for a great deal in
determining human fate. Not every person born in a slum becomes a criminal,
drunkard, or suicide […]. In “The Blue Hotel”, the earth is described in one of the
most famous passages in naturalistic fiction as a “whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked,
disease-stricken, spacelost bulb”. […] In Crane’s Civil War novel The Red Badge of
Courage, the main character Henry Fleming responds throughout to the world of
chaos and violence that surrounds him with alternating surges of panic and self-
congratulations, not as a man who has fully understood himself and his place in the
world [Jack London’s Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea Wolf (1904); and William
Goldin’s Lord of the Flies (1954) are examples of naturalistic novel]. And yet, Henry
has learned something; Crane, like most naturalists, is more ambiguous, more
accepting of paradoxes, than a simplified notion of naturalism would suggest.
8
the quality or state of being hopeless, discouraging, or unlikely to have a favorable outcome.
 Biology, environment, psychological drives, and chance play a large part in shaping
human ends in Crane’s fiction.
[…] “The Open Boat”: that precisely because human beings are exposed to a savage
world of chance where death is always imminent, they would do well to learn the art
of sympathetic identification with others and how to practice solidarity, an art often
learned at the price of death. After all, a belief in the meaning of deeply felt human
connection is Crane’s final sense of reality in this story.
[…] Like Crane, [Theodore Dreiser] tended to see men and women as victims of their
destinies rather than creators of their lives. But his significance for readers lies in his
cumulative technique that represents the solidity of the world in which his characters
are entrapped.
[…] Cahan’s major novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) explores the tensions
entailed in attempts to reconcile traditional values and ways of living with American
modernity in an urban work that, in the manner of literary naturalists, puts into
conflict individual agency with larger social and natural forces, while providing new
perspectives on ethnicity.
Most of [Jack London’s] short story “The Law of Life” (1901) recounts Old
Koskoosh’s memories, especially his youthful encounter with a dying moose set upon
by wolves. Koskoosh himself, an imagined recreation of an indigenous person, has
been left to die by his tribe as is customary, London suggests, when people reach
extreme age. He thinks: “Nature did not care. To life she set one task, gave one law.
To perpetuate was the task of life, its law is death”. This thought suggests a
deterministic view of life, but what London underscores in the overall story is that
acts of imagination and identification lend meaning and dignity to human existence.
[…] urban America and the sparsely populated hinterlands 9 proved to be fertile
ground for realistic literary techniques and naturalistic ideas, though the ideas were
often inconsistently applied and the documentary techniques usually interwoven
with other literary strategies.

9
an area lying beyond what is visible or known.
 REGIONAL WRITING
[…] By the end of the 19th century, virtually every region of the country had one or
more ‘local colorists’ dedicated to capturing its natural, social, and linguistic features.
[…] Bret Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp”, which made Harte a national celebrity
in 1868, is sometimes treated as an example of local color, but it is more concerned
with creating myths of the colorful West than it is in realism. Like other literary forms,
it is a hybrid rather than a pure example of a strategy rigorously applied.
Writers as diverse as Owen Wister, author of the popular novel The Virginian (1902),
Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Mary Austin, and Jack London all contributed to the
work of depicting the West as a legendary region – or (as in the case of Twain and
Bierce) to the work of debunking such a legend).
[…] Hamlim Garland’s farmers are not the vigorous and thoughtful yeomen 10 of
Hector St John de Crèvecoueur’s Letter from an American Farmer (1782), but bent,
drab figures. In Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw” […] local color is not nostalgia but
realism in the service of social protest – another indication that realism could never
be only ‘realistic’ but was always something more.
[…] Many women initially associated with regionalism expanded their interests to
write about the world of women: Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sui Si
Far, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, arah Winnemucca, and others. Mary Austin was a self-
declared feminist […] Land of Little Pain (1903), invites readers to see the world from
a woman’s perspective. […] she introduced the desert country of southern California
to readers and showed how the characters who live in this inhospitable terrain are
product of it.
[…] their female characters suggest the capacity of human beings to live
independently and with dignity in the face of community pressures, patriarchal
power, and material deprivation.
[…] Edna Pontellier of The Awakening (1899) looks back to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
(1857) and forward to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). […] The Awakening, in
particular, a novel that has served to crystallize many women’s issues at the turn of
10
a man holding and cultivating a small landed estate; a freeholder.
 the century and since, testifies to the fact that regionalism, despite its avowed focus
on lives outside of the urban mainstream, is by no means a marginal genre.
REALISM AS ARGUMENT
[…] Women’s rights, political corruption, the degradation of the natural world,
economic equity, business deceptions, the exploitation of labor, tenement housing –
these became the subjects of articles and books by numerous journalists, historians,
social critics, photographers, and economists.
Jim Crow laws and the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” decision in the case of
Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)
[…] In their short fiction and novels, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James
Weldon Johnson investigated the very nature of ‘race’, pointing to its contradictions
and (especially in the case of Hopkins) its promises for the regeneration of black
community. […] the widely admired autobiography of Booker T. Washington, Up
from Slavery (1900), and the richly imagined The Souls of Black Folk (1903), by W. E. B.
Du Bois, with its powerfully argued rejection of Washington’s assimilationist
philosophy.
[…] It is fair to say that in very different ways Up from Slavery and The Souls of Black
Folk – admirable literary achievements in themselves – carried forward the
antebellum traditions of such writers as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and
Harriet Jacobs, and set some of the terms of the cultural debates that would become
central to the Harlem Renaissance.
[…] Sometimes the shock is expressed in recoil and denial – thus the persistence, in
the face of the ostensible triumph of realism, of the literature of diversion: nostalgic
poetry, sentimental and melodramatic drama, and popular swashbuckling 11 historical
novels such as Charles Major’s best-selling When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898).

11
engage in daring and romantic adventures with ostentatious bravado or flamboyance.