The Realism War
James, Twain, and Howells
Nineteenth-century Definitions of
Romance
Romance focuses “upon the extraordinary,
the mysterious, the imaginary.” –Bliss Perry
(1903)
Nathaniel Hawthorne: the romance “has fairly
a right to present that truth under
circumstances, to a great extent, of the
writer’s own choosing or creation” (Preface
to The House of the Seven Gables)
Romance and Realism
 Events may be implausible or
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


heightened versions of reality.
Characters may be symbolic
rather than realistic; they may
be obsessed with an issue or
problem.
Language may be lofty or
poetic.
Class and background are less
important than the relationship
of the individual to the main
theme of the text.
Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter,
The Blithedale Romance
 Renders reality in detail.
 Character is more important



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than action and plot.
Complex ethical choices are
often the subject.
Language is vernacular,
sometimes with dialect.
Class and background are
important and play a role in the
plot.
The Rise of Silas Lapham, Daisy
Miller, The Portrait of a Lady
Romance and Realism: Taste and
Class
 Romance
 Realism
 Aspired to the ideal
 Thought to be more
 Thought to be more
democratic
 Critics stressed the
potential for vulgarity
and its emphasis on the
commonplace
 Potential “poison” for the
pure of mind
genteel since it did not
show the vulgar details of
life
W. D. Howells
 Editor of the Atlantic
Monthly, 1871-1881
 “Editor’s Study” in
Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine (January 1886March 1892)
 Criticism and Fiction
(1891; collected from
“Editor’s Study”
columns)
Howells on Realism
“Realism is nothing
more and nothing
less than the
truthful treatment
of material” --William
Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,”
November 1889
.
The Ideal Grasshopper
“We hope the time is
coming when not only
the artist, but the
common, average man .
. . .will reject the ideal
grasshopper wherever
he finds it . . . Because it
is not like a real
grasshopper” --W. D.
Howells, 1887
The Smiling Aspects of Life
We invite our novelists, therefore, to
concern themselves with the more
smiling aspects of life, which are the
more American, and to seek the universal
in the individual rather than in the
commonplace.” –W. D. Howells, 1886
Howells on James (Century 1882)
 The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in
our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray . .
. . These great men are of the past.
 The new school derives from Hawthorne and
George Eliot rather than any others . . . . This
school, which is so largely of the future as well as
the present, finds its chief exemplar in Mr. James.
The Reaction
A Literary Combination.
Mr. H-w-lls: Are you the
tallest now, Mr. James?
Mr. J-mes (ignoring the
question): Be so
uncommonly kind, H-wlls, as to let me down
easy: it may be we have
both got to grow.
Attack on Howells I
 H. C. Vedder. “Can it be
that Mr. Howells gives us
in his books a fair
representation of life as
he has known it? Has his
whole experience been
of this stale, flat
unprofitable sort?”
 “Has he never known
anybody who has a soul
above buttons?”
American Writers of Today,
1894.
Attack on Howells II: William Roscoe
Thayer
 French realism should be called “Epidermism,”
not realism, because it reduces “literature, art,
and morals to anarchy.”
 The Rise of Silas Lapham was “produced by
Epidermist methods” by an author who
“smacked his lips” over Zola’s filth.
Maurice Thompson: Realism As Disease.
 Realists represent “literary
decadence” and worship “the
vulgar, the commonplace,
and the insignificant.”
 The best part of Howells is
“romance disguised as
realism. His literary tissue is
healthy, the spirit of his work
is even, calm, just, and his
purpose is pure,” so he
cannot be a realist.
 Picture is Thomas Eakins’s
The Gross Clinic (1875).
Howells to James, 1915
“I am comparatively a dead
cult with my statues cast
down and the grass
growing over them in
the pale moonlight”
(Selected Letters 6: 31).