Chapter Thirteen
The Working
Class and the
Bourgeoisie
The Conditions of Modern Life
The New Realism
• During the first half of the nineteenth century, Paris doubled in size,
to nearly 1 million people. The gutters were so full of garbage and
raw sewage that cesspools developed overnight, producing an odor
that was strong enough to induce vomiting
• By 1848, these conditions prevailed throughout the urban areas in
Europe, made worse by food shortages and chaos in the agricultural
economy
• The working classes suffered the most from the miserable living
conditions in cities
Marxism
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed that since the conditions in
which one earns a living determined all other aspects of life—social,
political, and cultural—capitalism must be eliminated because of its
inherent unfairness
• In their Communist Manifesto, they called for “the forcible overthrow
of all existing social conditions”
• Their communist revolution would pit the proletariat (working class)
against the bourgeoisie to achieve “the end of history” – a utopian
society without classes or class struggle
• Ironically, Marx’s later Das Kapital, a forceful critique of the effects of
the free market, would become an influential factor in advancing
reforms in working conditions as well as providing higher wages and
greater social equality
Literary Realism: Charles Dickens
• The novels of Charles Dickens illuminate the enormous inequities of
class that existed in nineteenth-century England
• While his sentimentalism sometimes verged on the maudlin, Dickens
also had an unparalleled ability to vividly describe English reality
• In depicting the lives of the English lower classes with intense
sympathy and great attention to detail, Dickens became a leading
creator of a new type of prose fiction, literary realism
Gustave Doré,
Orange Court–Drury Lane, 1869
• In his earliest published book,
Sketches by Boz, Dickens, writing
under the pen name Boz, describes
one of the worst slums in London,
on Drury Lane
• By the beginning of the 1800s,
Drury Lane was dominated by
prostitution and gin houses
• In trying to make the unimaginable
real, Dickens’s aim was not simply
to entertain but to advocate
reform
French Literary Realism
• In France, realist writers such as Honoré de Balzac and Gustave
Flaubert were committed to examining life scientifically—that is,
without bias—and describing it in as straightforward a manner as
possible
• In The Human Comedy, Balzac linked together 92 novels so that they
would reflect the whole of French society. The more than 2000
characters come from all walks of life—servants, workers, clerks,
criminals, intellectuals, courtesans, and prostitutes
• Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the story of the adulterous wife of a
country doctor, is at its core a realist attack on Romantic sensibility
Literary Realism in the United States
• Much literature of the nineteenth century in the United States
centered around the issue of slavery
• The abolitionist movement supported both slave narratives (works
written by former slaves about their lives) and works such as Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Arguably one of the greatest American novels, Mark Twain’s The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn also deals with the issue of slavery in
American society. Set in the years just before the Civil War, the book
is vigorously opposed to slavery and portrays those who supported it
in a uniformly unflattering light
Realist Art
• One of the leading proponents of a new realist art was Honoré
Daumier, a French artist known for his political satire
• In his focus on ordinary life, Daumier openly lampooned the idealism
of both Neoclassical and Romantic art
• Daumier’s Rue Transnonian is a direct reporting of the killings
committed by government troops during an insurrection by Parisian
workers in April 1834. Everyday experience was not always an
attractive proposition
• In The Third-Class Carriage, Daumier clearly illustrates his interest in
the daily lives of working people
Honoré Daumier
Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834
Lithograph, 11½"  17-5/8", 1834
The Third-Class Carriage
Oil on canvas, 24¾"  35½", ca. 1862
Gustave Courbet
• Undoubtedly the leading French realist painter was Gustave Courbet,
a farmer’s son and a self-taught artist
• His goal was to paint the world just as he saw it, with no additions or
subtractions, no romanticizing or idealizing
• His subject matter, the mundane and the everyday, startled and
shocked his audiences, especially since he used a grand scale for such
common subjects
• In The Stonebreakers, Courbet depicts two workers pounding stones
to make gravel for a road. Everything in the painting seems to be
pulled down by the weight of the physical labor, and the older man
and his younger assistant seem to suggest that such backbreaking
work has afflicted generation after generation
Gustave Courbet,
The Stonebreakers
Oil on canvas 5' 3"  8' 6", 1849
Courbet explained this work as “a complete expression of human misery.”
Photography
• That the invention of photography coincides with the rise of realism in
the arts is no coincidence
• The scientific principles required for photography had been known in
Europe since at least 1727. But while the camera could capture an
image, it could not preserve it until in 1839 inventors in England and
France discovered a means to fix the image
• Pioneers of the process included William Henry Fox Talbot and LouisJacques M. Daguerre, who developed processes for preserving images
created from exposure to light
Battlefield Photography
• Prior to the American Civil War Battle of Antietam, no American
battlefield had ever been photographed before the dead were
properly buried
• In July 1863, Gardner and an assistant, Timothy O’Sullivan, shot at
the site of the Battle of Gettysburg the most famous photograph to
come out of the war, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
• Photographed images, combined with the comments of the
photographers, powerfully conveyed the horrors of war
Timothy O’Sullivan and Alexander Gardner
A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1863
Albumen silver print, 6¼"  7-13/16"
"Realisms Characteristics"
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From Realism: The Artistic Form of Truth (length: 3:12). Item #35428
Charles Baudelaire
• The poet Charles Baudelaire recognized the bourgeois culture as his
audience
• He sought to expose their hypocrisy with his consciously shocking
subjects
• His Les Fleurs du mal (“Flowers of Evil”) was the subject of a court
case for “offense to the public.” He lost the case, was fined, and was
forced to remove six poems concerning lesbianism and vampirism,
all of which remained censored for the next century
Édouard Manet
• Édouard Manet, like Baudelaire, was a flâneur, a man-about-town,
strolling the city, studying it dispassionately
• Another important trait of a flâneur, according to Baudelaire, is that he
holds the bourgeoisie’s vulgar, materialistic lifestyle in contempt, and
his greatest devotion is to shock them
• Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) was a
prominent feature in the Salon des Refuses—an exhibit of works
rejected by the official Salon of 1863
• The contrast between the nude female and her clothed male
companions utterly confounded and dismayed audiences
Édouard Manet,
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
Oil on canvas, 7'  8'10", 1863
Édouard Manet, Olympia
Oil on canvas, 51"  74¼", 1863
Manet used the same model for Olympia as in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.
The Politics of Opera
• The confrontation between nationalist composers and conservative
aristocracy was played out in Paris at the new Paris Opéra
• The building itself was created to suggest a new imperial style,
allowing aristocracy and bourgeoisie to display themselves and their
social position and wealth
• Italian composer Guiseppe Verdi believed that opera should be
dramatically realistic. Certain changes had to be made for his opera
to succeed in Paris, notably the addition of a second-act ballet
• German composer Richard Wagner was far too unconventional and
Germanic for success in Paris. Wagner’s opera Tannhauser seemed to
the French to be deliberately constructed to inflame French/German
hostility
Charles Garnier,
Façade of the Opéra, Paris
1860-1875
Impressionist Paris
• Painting in plein air (“open air”) was a feature of a new group of
painters who come to be known as the Impressionists, and most
particularly of one of its founders, Claude Monet (1840-1926)
• The present moment was the subject, and the object less important
than the color
• Each painting had to be quick, emphasizing improvisation and
spontaneity as the fleeting quality of sensory experience was
paramount
Claude Monet,
Grainstack (Snow Effect)
Oil on canvas, 25¾"  36-3/8", 1891
Other Impressionists
• Monet’s work and techniques were echoed in the works of many
other artists
• Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissarro explored color, light, and vision
in their paintings
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas preferred to
paint the crowd in the cafés and restaurants, at entertainments of all
kinds, and in the countryside, to which the middle class habitually
escaped on weekends via the ever-expanding railroad line
Berthe Morisot, Summer’s Day
Oil on canvas, 12"  29¾", 1879
Auguste Renoir,
Luncheon of the Boating Party
Oil on canvas, 51"  68", 1881
Edgar Degas, Dance Class
Oil on canvas, 32¾"  30¼", ca. 1874
• Dance Class depicts 21 dancers
awaiting their turn to be
evaluated by the ballet master,
a moment of great stress
• Work is one of Degas’s primary
themes
• Almost all the young women
were from lower-class families
and normally entered the
ballet corps at age seven or
eight
The Gilded Age in America
• New York City in the late nineteenth century was a boomtown of
extraordinary diversity. In 1892, 30 percent of all millionaires in the
United States lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn side by side with
millions of the nation’s working-class immigrants
• In order to allow the rapidly growing population to escape the rush and
sometimes harsh conditions of urban life, in 1856, New York City hired
Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to develop a 840-acre tract in
central Manhattan as a civic park
• Modeled on the concept of the English garden, Central Park was
planned to suggest leisure and grace
John Bachman, View of Central Park
ca. 1870
Economic Woes
• By 1890, 11 million of the nation’s 12 million families had an
average annual income of $380, well below the poverty line ($380
would buy about the same as $7,600 in today’s dollars)
• Jobs were lost and wages cut
• Workers responded with strikes and walkouts and by beginning to
organize labor unions
• These measures were mostly unsuccessful because of the power
and wealth of the corporations and their owners
Robert Koehler, The Strike
Oil on canvas 71-5/8"  9‘ 5/8", 1886
The Romantic Self
• In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Unitarian minister in Concord,
Massachusetts, wrote his first book, Nature, which became an
intellectual beacon
• Members of the ensuing “Transcendental Club” felt that the human
spirit was possessed of a certain oneness with nature. In the direct
experience of nature, the individual is united with God
• From 1845 to 1847, Harvard-educated Henry David Thoreau lived in
a small cabin on Emerson’s property at Walden Pond, practicing the
individualism and self-reliance about which Emerson had written
Walt Whitman
• Whitman, self-defined as “the American Poet,” revolutionized
American literature, linking Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and
Realism
• His free-verse poetry made use of alliteration, assonance, and other
repetitive devices, but seldom used rhyme or conventional meter
• “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass represents the dynamic diversity
of the American people—from immigrants to African Americans and
Native Americans, from male to female, from heterosexual to
homosexual
• By the time Whitman issued his final edition of Leaves of Grass in
1892, the work had grown from 96 printed ages in the 1855 edition to
438. It was as expansive and as ever-changing as its author
The Role of Women
• Women had made some important gains – in education and in the
development of specific “feminine” professions of nursing and
teaching
• Tensions between the genders remained high, a state embodied in
Winslow Homer’s The Life Line, which depicts the strong, active male
rescuing the weak, passive female
• The painting positions women in a condition of total dependency on a
man, which is precisely where the American male, in the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, thought she should be
Winslow Homer, The Life Line
Oil on canvas, 28-5/8"  44¼", 1884
The American Abroad
• With the advent of steam turbine engines, screw propellers, and steel
hulls, by the end of the nineteenth century it took less than a week to
cross the Atlantic, a trip that fifty years early had taken two to three
weeks
• Europe, and France in particular, appeared to offer Americans a kind
of liberation from the cramped Puritan morality they found at home
• American novelist Henry James lived much of his life in Europe. His
novels, such as Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors, present the
contrast of American innocence and European experience
• James Abbott McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent were
American painters who primarily lived and worked in Europe
John Singer Sargent
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit
Oil on canvas 87-3/8"  87-5/8", 1882
• The painting depicts the
four daughters of an
expatriate patrician couple
in their Paris apartment
• Henry James described this
work as having “the sense
of assimilated secrets”
• On some level, the painting
is a parable of the coming
of age of late nineteenthcentury young women
Mary Cassatt, In the Loge
Oil on canvas, 32" by 26", 1879
• Cassatt was one of the most
successful of the American
expatriate painters
• In the Loge is a witty expression
of Opéra society
• Cassatt’s woman is as active a
spectator as the male across
the way; she is a “modern”
woman, and Cassatt celebrates
her modernity