REALISM 1860-1910
Where We Came From
Previous Literary Movements
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Literature of Puritanism – Work Ethic
Literature of the Revolutionary Period
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American Dream
The Melting Pot
Basic rights of man
Emergence of the Other (women, native people, African Americans)
Literary Nationalism 1800-1840
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Nationalism (excessive pride)
Self identity
Self examination and criticism
Begins real American literature
Respected in Europe
Professional writers
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ROMANTICISM
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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
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Authors
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Literary Nationalism
Fireside Poets
Romantics
TRANSCENDENTALISM
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Truth = communion with God
in nature
Belief in individualism
Rejects institutions
Emphasis on simplicity
Importance of experience
"majority of one"
"self-reliance"
"man thinking“
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Non-conformity
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language and style influenced
by Romanticism
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Authors
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
ANTI-TRANSCENDENTALISM
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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 man’s uncertainty and
limitations in the universe
Nature = indifferent to mankind
Human nature = hypocritical,
apathetic
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Authors
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Herman Melville
Edgar Alan Poe
Nathaniel Hawthorne
What Comes Next?
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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?
Washington Crossing the Delaware
The Agnew Clinic
Emanuel Leutze 1851
Thomas Eakins 1889
Sectionalism, Industrialism and Literary
Regionalism
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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 Lincoln’s 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
Cost of the Civil War
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Cost of the Civil War
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The Human Cost
 1,094,543 Casualties
 The North lost one out of ten
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The South lost one out of four
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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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110,100 in battle
224,580 to disease
Historical Overview
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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:
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The country was still badly fragmented after the war
Congress did little to address this and other problems
Historic Overview
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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
Historical Overview
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At the same time, however, the war did unleash a range
of social and economic forces that, eventually, would
radically transform American life:
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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
Historical Overview
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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.
Historical Overview
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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!
Historical Overview
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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.
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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
America’s intellectual history
Historical Context
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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;
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Steam power replaced water power
Machines replaced hand labor
Extreme contrast between the rich and poor (the Gilded Age)
The Industrial Revolution had begun
Historic Overview
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Migration westward expanded the U.S. from the Atlantic
to the Pacific
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Growth of Industry
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Native American populations displaced and subjugated;
Steelmaking, the nation’s dominant industry
Alternating electrical current (1886)
American petroleum industry begins
Growth of population
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Total population doubled from 1870 to 1890
National income quadrupled
Gap between rich and poor widened
Historic Overview
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The Effects of the Industrial Revolution:
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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
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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 travel—4 days
Citizens witnessed the entirety of there country and grew
curious for more
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Photography and Realism
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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.
Historic Overview
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Intellectual Revolution: Changes in Thinking brought about
by Changes in Society
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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:
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tested by its usefulness or practical consequences
a commodity accessible on the surface of things
perceptible to the senses and verifiable through experience
Historical Overview
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During this period, America’s literary traditions also
shifted. By the time Lee surrendered at Appomattox, his
army’s 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.
Historical Overview
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In essence:
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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
Realism
“Nothing more and nothing less than the
truthful treatment of material.”
William Dean Howells
Historical Overview: Realism
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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.”
A Powerful Reaction Against
Romanticism
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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
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“Nothing more and nothing less than the
truthful treatment of material.”
William Dean Howells
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.
From these social changes come two
literary movements
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Realism,
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first begun as the local color
movement
Includes regionalism
The tall tale
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Naturalism
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Realism
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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
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Begins in France, as
realisme, a literary doctrine
calling for “reality and
truth in the depiction of
ordinary life.”
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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.
Characteristics of Realism
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Subject matter—ordinary people and events;
Purpose—Verisimilitude, the truthful representation of life;
Point of View—omniscient and objective
Characters—middle class, psychological realism
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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
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Focus on everyday life
Complex ethical choices often the subject
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(“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
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(“Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before. ”)
Characteristics of Realism, cont...
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Subject matter drawn from “our experience” – the
common, the ordinary, the probable
Focuses on the norm of daily experience – dialect,
geography, regional manners.
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)
Themes in Realism
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Humans control their destinies
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Slice-of-life technique
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characters act on their environment rather than simply reacting to
it.
often ends without traditional formal closure, leaving much untold
to suggest man’s limited ability to make sense of his life.
Pragmatism
Social Criticism
Importance of place--regionalism, "local color"
Sociology and psychology
Rejection of Romanticism
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."
Huckleberry Finn and Realism
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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 Burns’s
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.
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.
Huckleberry Finn as a Literary Milestone
“Something new happened in Huck Finn that had never
happened in American literature before. It was a
book…that 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 vernacular…it was a
book that talked. Huck’s voice, combined with Twain’s
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
The Linch Pin Between the Movements
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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
Walt Whitman: America’s Poet
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His poetry celebrated...
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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
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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.
Walt Whitman, cont…
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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 rhyme—all
the accepted forms of poetry in the 19th
century.
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."
Whitman’s Themes
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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
Whitman’s Poetic Techniques
Whitman declared his poetry would have:
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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
Poet’s Society – (boys on desk upon
seeing their “captain” and his passing)
Use of repeated images, symbols, phrases,
and grammatical units
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Use of enumerations and catalogs
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Use of anaphora (initial repetition) in
lines and “Epanaphora” (each line
hangs by a loop from the line before
it)
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Contrast and parallelism in paired
lines
Whitman’s Use of Language
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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
What’s So Shocking about the “Good
Grey Poet”
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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.”
Whitman’s Influence
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Along with Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman stands as one of two giants
of American poetry in the nineteenth century.
Whitman’s 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.
Whitman’s 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.
Let’s listen: From Favorite Poem Project, “Song of Myself” as read by
Boston’s John Doherty
Mark Twain and Realism