Realism 1860-1910

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Realism 1860-1910
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Where We Came FromPrevious Literary Movements

• Literature of Puritanism Work Ethic
• Literature of the Revolutionary Period
• American Dream
• The Melting Pot
• Basic rights of man
• Emergence of the Other (women, native people,
  African Americans)
• Literary Nationalism 1800-1840
• Nationalism (excessive pride)
• Self identity
• Self examination and criticism
• Begins real American literature
• Respected in Europe
• Professional writers

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• ROMANTICISM
• Extraordinary people in extraordinary situations
• Truth in absolutes
• predicated on stereotypes
• Stress on past (Greek Classical period)
• Treats subjects emotionally
• Celebration of artists
• Probe to exaggeration
• Nature glorified
• Belief in afterlife

• Authors
• Literary Nationalism
• Fireside Poets
• Romantics

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• TRANSCENDENTALISM
• Truth communion with God in nature
• Belief in individualism
• Rejects institutions
• Emphasis on simplicity
• Importance of experience
• "majority of one"
• "self-reliance"
• "man thinking
• Non-conformity
• language and style influenced by Romanticism

• Authors
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau

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• ANTI-TRANSCENDENTALISM
• Belief in the potential destructiveness of the
  human spirit
• Belief in individual truths, but no universal
  truths, and the truths of existence are deceitful
  and disturbing
• Evil is an active force in the universe
• Focus on the mans uncertainty and limitations in
  the universe
• Nature indifferent to mankind
• Human nature hypocritical, apathetic

• Authors
• Herman Melville
• Edgar Alan Poe
• Nathaniel Hawthorne

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What Comes Next?

• If we accept the pendulum theory of history (that
  every period moves to its opposite extreme), what
  type of voice can you predict reacts to the
  Romantic Period?

The Agnew Clinic Thomas Eakins 1889
Washington Crossing the Delaware Emanuel Leutze
1851
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Sectionalism, Industrialism and Literary
Regionalism

• In 1858, Abraham Lincoln had warned his
  countryman a house divided against itself cannot
  stand.
• Events in the dark winter of 1860-1861 would
  prove him correct
• After Lincolns minority election to the
  presidency
• South Carolina would vote to secede from the
  Union in December 1860
• Six other states of the Deep South quickly
  followed suit
• When Confederate troops successfully attacked
  Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor , Virginia,
  Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina elected to
  join their fellows in defense of slavery and the
  sovereign principles of states rights

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Cost of the Civil War

• Cost of the Civil War
• The Human Cost
• 1,094,543 Casualties
• The North lost one out of ten
• 110,100 in battle
• 224,580 to disease
• The South lost one out of four
• 94,000 in battle
• 64,000 to disease
• Two percent of US population died in the Civil
  War, with only WWII claiming more lives
• Economic Cost
• Estimated at 6.6 billion, which would be 165
  billion today

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Historical Overview

• While an older generation of historians tended to
  view the Civil War as the watershed of modern
  American nationalism (calling it the second
  American Revolution), more recent historians
  suggest that the real factors that determined the
  future of the nation were the facts that
• The country was still badly fragmented after the
  war
• Congress did little to address this and other
  problems

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Historic Overview

• And even though the language of the Constitution
  itself was amended to affirm an expanded that
  is, colorblind definition of individual rights
  and liberties, meaningful implementation of that
  vision for African Americans would have to wait
  for almost another century

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Historical Overview

• At the same time, however, the war did unleash a
  range of social and economic forces that,
  eventually, would radically transform American
  life
• The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 set aside vast
  tracts of land in the West to finance the
  construction of a transcontinental railroad
• The Homestead Act of 1862 enabled yeoman farmers
  to have cheaper access to government-held land
• The Morril Act of 1862 established Federal
  support for agricultural colleges

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Historical Overview

• Mobilization for war on such an unprecedented
  scale also had unforeseen effect on American
  life
• The need to achieve organizational efficiency in
  both military and civilian branches of government
  gave rise to an almost wholly new group of
  managers able to transfer their increasingly
  professional skills to the business world after
  the war.

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Historical Overview

• As an example Keeping thousands of men in
  uniform required an entirely new approach to
  apparel manufacturing.
• At the start of the war, when almost all of the
  troops came from volunteer contingents of various
  state militias, mothers, wives and daughters
  would have sewed individual uniforms at home.
• Before long, however, the need for additional
  soldiers made the draft inevitable. The
  unprecedented demand for huge numbers of
  identical trousers, jackets, boots, and other
  mainstays of military regimentation sparked the
  rapid modernization of the clothing industry by
  introducing standard apparel sizes.
• The federal government was the first consumer to
  make its purchases off the rack.
• Take that Old Navy!

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Historical Overview

• These new concepts of scale, efficiency, and
  organizational complexity would eventually make
  possible what one influential historian referred
  to as the incorporation of American or the
  way we live now.

• Politically, the goal of securing equal rights
  for freed slaves largely failed.
• Likewise, failure to integrate the high-minded
  ideals of New England into effective public
  policy also proved a crucial turning point in
  Americas intellectual history

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Historical Context

• Indeed the period following the Civil War was
  marked by an affronting sense of the hard
  realities of life and the more sobering aspects
  of the human experience.
• By the End of the Civil War
• The Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment
  had abolished slavery
• The industrial North had defeated the agrarian
  South
• Social order grew based on mass labor and mass
  consumption
• Steam power replaced water power
• Machines replaced hand labor
• Extreme contrast between the rich and poor (the
  Gilded Age)
• The Industrial Revolution had begun

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Historic Overview

• Migration westward expanded the U.S. from the
  Atlantic to the Pacific
• Native American populations displaced and
  subjugated
• Growth of Industry
• Steelmaking, the nations dominant industry
• Alternating electrical current (1886)
• American petroleum industry begins
• Growth of population
• Total population doubled from 1870 to 1890
• National income quadrupled
• Gap between rich and poor widened

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Historic Overview

• The Effects of the Industrial Revolution
• Migration from rural to urban areas
• Independent, skilled workers replaced by
  semi-skilled laborers
• Large corporations were established, devaluing
  the personal relationship between management and
  workers or company and customers.
• Mass Communication and Migration
• Coast-to-coast communication
• Pony Express (1860)10 days
• Telegraph (1861)just seconds to communicate
  across country
• Transatlantic telegraph cable (1866) allowed
  instant communication with Europe
• Telephone patented (1867)
• By 1900, 1.3 million telephones in U.S.
• Coast-to-coast travel
• Transcontinental Railroad (1869)
• By 1889, coast-to-coast travel4 days
• Citizens witnessed the entirety of there country
  and grew
• curious for more

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Photography and Realism

• The invention ignited an artistic and scientific
  frenzy
• Best portrait makers could bring out the very
  human essence of a subject
• The advantages of photography immediacy,
  reliable representation, low cost, etc
• Massive social changes reflected in literature
  photography.
• 1861-65 - Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner honest
  photographic record of the Civil War.
• Photography, like literary Realism and
  Regionalism showed TRUTH.

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Historic Overview

• Intellectual Revolution Changes in Thinking
  brought about by Changes in Society
• Changes in science
• Charles Darwin and the Origin of Species
• Changes in psychology
• Sigmund Freud - unconscious system of ideas that
  governs human reactions and response
• Changes in philosophy
• Karl Marx - human history as the result of class
  struggles (The Communist Manifesto)
• William James American pragmatism truth is
• tested by its usefulness or practical
  consequences
• a commodity accessible on the surface of things
• perceptible to the senses and verifiable through
  experience

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Historical Overview

• During this period, Americas literary traditions
  also shifted. By the time Lee surrendered at
  Appomattox, his armys ranks were severely
  depleted, and the same was true of the roll call
  of American authorship. Washington Irving, Henry
  David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne had died.
  Herman Melville was in professional exile and
  Ralph Waldo Emerson had published his last book.
• The nation now looked to new literary voices
  whose accents were not always so comforting. The
  cultural supremacy of New England, so long taken
  for granted was now open to challenge.

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Historical Overview

• In essence
• The experience of war had expanded American
  awareness of its boundaries, physical, emotional,
  and spiritual.
• The world of the naive, innocent, optimistic, and
  contained past appeared hopelessly outdated and
  absurdly idealistic.
• America enters adulthood Realism is born

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Realism

• Nothing more and nothing less than the truthful
  treatment of material.
• William Dean Howells

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Historical Overview Realism

• As the novelist Henry James had occasion to
  observe in 1879, the Civil War marks an era in
  the history of the American mind. It introduced
  into the national consciousness a certain sense
  of proportion and relation, of the world being a
  more complicated place than it had hitherto
  seemed, the future more treacherous, success more
  difficult. At the rate at which things are
  going, it is obvious that good Americans will be
  more numerous than ever but the good American,
  in the days to come, will be a more critical
  person than his complacent and confident
  grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of
  knowledge.

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A Powerful Reaction Against Romanticism

• The Civil War and the social, political, and
  cultural events following the war created an
  environment that demanded a literary voice that
  honored that experience. Romanticism with his
  dreamy, optimistic, and highly emotional emphasis
  proved false in light of the turmoil of the
  period.
• This voice would serve as a reaction against
  Romanticism
• rejected heroic, adventurous, or unfamiliar
  subjects
• Note the unmistakable mocking treatment of
  Romantic ideals - Emmeline, Tom, and the
  traditions of the South in The Adventures of
  Huckleberry Finn)
• Authors sought to portray life as they saw it,
  insisting that the ordinary and local were just
  as suitable for art as the sublime.

Nothing more and nothing less than the truthful
treatment of material. William Dean Howells
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From these social changes come two literary
movements

• Realism,
• first begun as the local color movement
• Includes regionalism
• The tall tale
• Naturalism
• Realism
• Denotation a literary movement that developed
  towards the end of the Civil War and stressed
  the actual (reality) as opposed to the imagined
  or fanciful

• Begins in France, as realisme, a literary
  doctrine calling for reality and truth in the
  depiction of ordinary life.
• Grounded in the belief that there is an objective
  reality which can be portrayed with truth and
  accuracy as the goal
• The writer does not select facts in accord with
  preconceived ideals, but rather sets down
  observations impartially and objectively.

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Characteristics of Realism

• Subject matterordinary people and events
• PurposeVerisimilitude, the truthful
  representation of life
• Point of Viewomniscient and objective
• Charactersmiddle class, psychological realism
• Class is important the novel has traditionally
  served the interests and aspirations of an
  insurgent middle class.
• Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or
  poetic tone may be comic, satiric, or
  matter-of-fact.
• Focus away from New England and other
  intellectual centers and out to the Midwest and
  West (regionalism)
• Plot de-emphasized
• Focus on everyday life
• Complex ethical choices often the subject
• (I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide,
  forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.)
• Events are made to seem the inevitable result of
  characters choices
• (Aunt Sally shes going to adopt me and sivilize
  me, and I cant stand it. I been there before. )

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Characteristics of Realism, cont...

• Subject matter drawn from our experience the
  common, the ordinary, the probable
• Focuses on the norm of daily experience
  dialect, geography, regional manners.

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Romance and Realism Taste and Class

• Romance
• Aspired to the ideal
• Thought to be more genteel since it did not show
  the vulgar details of life
• Harks back to the noble past
• Emotional

• Realism
• Thought to be more democratic
• Critics stressed the potential for vulgarity and
  its emphasis on the commonplace
• Potential poison for the pure of mind
• Exists in the unfiltered present
• Neutral (observant)

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Themes in Realism

• Humans control their destinies
• characters act on their environment rather than
  simply reacting to it.
• Slice-of-life technique
• often ends without traditional formal closure,
  leaving much untold to suggest mans limited
  ability to make sense of his life.
• Pragmatism
• Social Criticism
• Importance of place--regionalism, "local color"
• Sociology and psychology
• Rejection of Romanticism

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Defining Strain

• VOICE the tonal qualities, attitudes, or entire
  personality of a speaker as revealed directly or
  indirectly through sound, diction, and other
  stylistic devices
• "Voice reminds us that a human being is behind
  the words of a poem, that he is revealing his
  individuality by means of the poem, and that this
  revelation may be the most significant part of
  what we receive from the poem."

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Huckleberry Finn and Realism

• Published in 1885
• Set in pre-Civil War years (40-50 years before
  publication)
• Slavery ended, but racism still rampant (Jim Crow
  Laws)
• Mark Twain, a Southerner, undergoes moral
  transformation. Suggestion (via Ken Burnss
  American Voices) is that this transformation
  sprung from a trip along the river years after
  Twain left the South. Here, along the shore of
  his beloved river, Twain witnessed the great
  failings of Reconstruction and the ubiquity of
  Jim Crow (a new slavery).
• The impression stuck with him.

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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a

• COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL moral growth of a comic
  character in an physically beautiful yet morally
  repugnant setting
• PICARESQUE NOVEL typically satirical story that
  illustrates with realistic and witty detail the
  adventures of a roguish hero of lower social
  standing who lives by their common sense in a
  corrupt society.

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Huckleberry Finn as a Literary Milestone

• Something new happened in Huck Finn that had
  never happened in American literature before. It
  was a bookthat served as a Declaration of
  Independence from the genteel English novel
• It allowed a different kind of writing to
  happen a clean, crisp, no-nonsense, earthly
  vernacularit was a book that talked. Hucks
  voice, combined with Twains satiric genius,
  changed the shape of fiction in America, and
  African-American voices had a great deal to do
  with making it what it was.
• - Dr. Shelley Fishkin, 1995

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The Linch Pin Between the Movements

• Linch Pin - "something or someone that holds
  the various elements of a complicated structure
  together."
• The transition between two contrasting movements
  can be clearly identified in one man, Walt
  Whitman, who incorporating both views in his
  works

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Walt Whitman Americas Poet

• His poetry celebrated...
• The individual
• common man
• American democracy
• American industry
• American ingenuity
• mystery of existence (not to be feared, but
  embraced)  
• The body and its functions
• He was
• A humanist
• A teacher
• An optimist
• Supporter of the Union
• Among the most influential poets in the American
  canon
• Highly controversial
• Gay

• And your very flesh shall be a great poem
• I celebrate myself, and sing myself,And what I
  assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging
  to me as good belongs to you.
• Be curious, not judgmental
• Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I
  contradict myself, I am large, I contain
  multitudes
• Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road,
  healthy, free, the world before me.

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Walt Whitman, cont

• The genius of the United States is not best or
  most in its executives or legislatures, nor in
  its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or
  churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers
  or inventors, but always most in the common
  people."

• Leaves of Grass (1855) collection of poems
  attempt to reach common person through an
  American epic
• "Father of Free Verse" -- sought to capture
  America's voice through his poetry
•  
• Whitman created new poetic forms and subjects to
  fashion a distinctly American type of poetic
  expression.
• He rejected conventional themes, traditional
  literary references, allusions, and rhymeall the
  accepted forms of poetry in the 19th century.

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Whitmans Themes

• Transcendent power of love, brotherhood, and
  comradeship
• Imaginative projection into others lives
• Optimistic faith in democracy and equality
• Nature and return
• Belief in regenerative and illustrative powers of
  nature and its value as a teacher
• Equivalence of body and soul and the unabashed
  exaltation of the body and sexuality

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Whitmans Poetic Techniques

• Whitman declared his poetry would have
• Long lines that capture the rhythms of natural
  speech.
• Free verse lack of metrical regularity and
  conventional rhyme
• Vocabulary drawn from everyday speech.
• A base in reality, not morality.
• Exception O Captain My Captain
• Written on the passing of Abraham Lincoln
• Traditional Forms
• Traditional Subject
• Invoked in the last scene of Dead Poets Society
  (boys on desk upon seeing their captain and
  his passing)

• Use of repeated images, symbols, phrases, and
  grammatical units
• Use of enumerations and catalogs
• Use of anaphora (initial repetition) in lines and
  Epanaphora (each line hangs by a loop from the
  line before it)
• Contrast and parallelism in paired lines

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Whitmans Use of Language

• Idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation.
• Words used for their sounds as much as their
  sense foreign languages
• Use of language from several disciplines
• The sciences anatomy, astronomy, botany
  (especially the flora and fauna of America)
• Businesses and professions, such as carpentry
• Military and war terms nautical terms

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Whats So Shocking about the Good Grey Poet

• Why were so many writers shocked by Whitman?
• His lack of regular rhyme and meter (free verse)
  and nontraditional poetic style and subject
  matter shocked more traditional writers.
• He also wrote poetry with unabashedly sexual
  imagery and themes, some of them homoerotic.
  Examples include the Calamus poems and I Sing
  the Body Electric.

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Whitmans Influence

• Along with Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman stands
  as one of two giants of American poetry in the
  nineteenth century.
• Whitmans poetry would influence such Harlem
  Renaissance writers as Langston Hughes and James
  Weldon Johnson.
• Whitman influenced Beat poets such as Allen
  Ginsburg.
• Chilean writer Pablo Neruda claimed to have been
  influenced by Whitman.
• Whitmans poetry was a model for French
  symbolists, such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul
  Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud.
• Modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot,
  and W.H. Auden were also influenced by Whitman.
• Lets listen From Favorite Poem Project, Song
  of Myself as read by Bostons John Doherty

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Mark Twain and Realism