Summary class 1: Introduction: Realism
This semester: get real
- “Victorian” Realism—American Realism
- novels and short stories—social panoramas, social satires
- Literature of Slavery (2): Civil War, Reconstruction
Today: context
- the Victorian era and its discontents
- post-1865 U.S.
- “Realism” - reaction to romanticism (Show daily life, no romanticized, mythicized lives)
• Courbet, 1850, Les casseurs des pierres: Child working, carrying stones: the first to depict
daily life without idealizing it (romanticism is over)
• Painting is the most influential Realist art form in the second half of the 19th C
• Champfleury saw this painting and started theorizing about this new aesthetic (Eliot, Henry
James did that for literature)
➢ Social panorama; e.g. George Eliot: all aspects of society are captured in it, reader is
immersed completely in society (Darwin: all organisms, everything in nature is
connected)
- many types of realism: American realism (= move towards modernism already), British…
The Victorian Era (1837-1901)
- an “age of transition”
- center of influence shifts from Paris to London
- unprecedented growth—“progress”
• shift from land ownership to manufacturing economy
• urban, industrial (London, Manchester, Liverpool …)
• accelerated rate of change
• BUT: unregulated—unevenly distributed (slums, child labor)
➢ Dickens = innovation, depicting characters at the bottom of life, extreme poverty
- expansion—Britain becomes the world’s “banker”
• migration—Australia, Canada, India (1857)
• colonialism—cf. 1880s: the “scramble for Africa”
• British Empire—by 1890: ¼ of the world
• 25% of the world’s population was British subject
- dominant philosophy: utilitarianism (do the greatest of good for the majority of people (if something
helps 50 people but kills 2 children it is the best option) = a moral calculus – calculation of what the
greatest good would be, but it also creates victims, you are rationalizing ethics)
- science and reason
• geography—old earth
• waning spirituality—Higher Criticism (going back to the bible and looking at the truth value
of these stories – this could not have happened – has to be read as an allegory (1846: George
Eliot’s translation of D.F. Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu)
• “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally
breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on
according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most
beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” (Charles Darwin, On the
Origin of Species, 1859)
, ➢ this is spirituality enough, the fact that the earth is alive and evolving, do not separate
science from religion/spirituality, they are both fundamental to life
➢ Relevance for Realist literature: immense influence on George Eliot, Samuel Butler… and
also: the survival of the fittest – organisms that don’t fit into nature die – we are the
result of a vast, historical trial and error run, not of some divine plan
• Also rise of trades (e.g. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations: if politics keep out of industry,
economy, laissez-faire economy, the economy will regulate itself)
- All these Victorian novels deal with protagonists trying to come to terms with their environments,
to adapt to survive (Darwin) – e.g. through use of technology in Erewhon (If machines are capable of
reproducing themselves = is it proof of consciousness? Is a thought experiment he proposes)
U.S. Civil War (1861-5) and the “Gilded Age”
- slavery—1862-3: “Emancipation Proclamation”
- period of massive disruption
- 620,000 deaths—almost half of all war casualties in U.S. history
- “Reconstruction” in the South, corruption in the North
- “regionalism” (e.g. Mark Twain: imitate regional dialects, slave dialect)
- “psychological realism” (e.g. Henry James: depiction of thought processes > shifts to
modernism: realistically present our experience of reality)
- perhaps more objective form of Realism?
The “Realist” Era (ca. 1850-1900)
- break with Romanticism?
• beauty in literature
• literature as part of well-rounded education
• literature and the market—new: serialization
• subjectivity vs. objectivity—consciousness representation
• novel becomes dominant literary form
- BUT emphasis on “common sense”
• link with early photography—“daguerreotype”
• link with science—Auguste Comte’s “positivism”
• “Realism” as new literary term
- Realism naturally became outdated and flowed into modernism, which is focused on
perspectivism (but realism as a foundation) = your reality is not the same as mine
• Also because photography replaced Realist painting (Bazin)
- Realist literature is an art of identification (sympathizing = still present in realism like
romanticism)
➢ Art of identification, inversion: what is a difference with modernist literature (e.g. Kafka,
Brecht…)? >> Realist authors want to make you identify, find something recognizable,
whereas modernist authors want to alienate the reader (Verfremdung)
➢ Some Realist authors are already playing with that (Melville Bartleby, Huckleberry Finn,
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon = nowhere backwards, wants to hold a mirror to society)
➢ Erewhon speaks of artificial intelligence, a machine that speaks for itself (cf. Frankenstein)
- Break with Romanticism? Not necessarily
➢ They both react to a changing world, but still in an aesthetically pleasing way (no longer
‘romantic’, but still attention to beauty)
➢ Education is even more important, studying literature became important
, ➢ Literature still focuses on this dialogue between subjectivity and objectivity (cf. Austen)
and the novel became the dominant form in literature
Summary class 2 - The Realist Novel (1): George Eliot
This week:
- “Realism” continued
- George Eliot’s literary program
- Adam Bede (1859); Middlemarch (1871)
The “Realist” Era (ca. 1850-1900)
- French Realism—link between painting (Courbet) and literature
- Jules Champfleury (1821-1889)
• confidence in language to represent truthfully
• BUT: always conflict, drive for objectivity will always clash with a certain subjectivity
➢ Find some kind of balance between objectivity and subjectivity >> solution to this =
sincerity, try to represent things as realistically, sincerely as you can
• “What I see enters my head, descends into my pen, and becomes what I have seen.” (preface
to Contes Domestiques, 1852) - The writer = just a channel
• “The reproduction of nature by man will never be a reproduction nor an imitation, it will
always be an interpretation.” (“De la réalité dans l’art”, 1857)
• Link between FR realism, painting and literature started to become more clear with Fleury
- Roland Barthes, “L’effet de réel” (1966): reality effect, one of the things that makes them realistic, is
much attention to detail
• Flaubert = 1st FR realist: clear depictions of the environment, information that is not
necessary for the plot, but it adds realist effects
George Eliot (1819-1880)
- Mary Evans (cf. George Henry Lewes) – pen name because she was already famous, and scandalous
affair – but there was already a venue for female writers at the time
- Introduced Realism in English literature and theory (essays)
- essayist, translator, critic, novelist—intellectual, humanist
• David Strauss’ The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1846)
➢ German High Criticism introduced in English
• Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1854)
• Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (finished 1856, posthumously published)
• avid reader of Darwin—cf. her notebooks (extensive notes on Darwin’s works)
• journalism—met leading intellectuals before writing fiction (e.g. John Stuart Mill, Herbert
Spencer, Ralph Waldo Emerson)
- 1851-4: assistant editor of Westminster Review
• “Natural History of German Life” (1856)
• “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856)
➢ These two can be seen as her realist manifestos
- Novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), Felix
Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-2), Daniel Deronda (1876)
“The Natural History of German Life” (July 1856)
, - review of two German novels:
• W.H. Riehl’s Land und Leute (1854) and Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft (1851)
- in praise of Riehl’s representation of common folk (no longer idealized)
- BUT also an occasion for Eliot’s literary program
• “How little the real characteristics of the working classes are known to those who are outside
them […] is sufficiently disclosed by our Art” (1)
• “The notion that peasants are joyous […] are prejudices difficult to dislodge from the artistic
mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead of life” (2)
• “To make men moral something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass.” (3)
➔ ‘we claim to be artists, but how little do we know about ordinary life that we depict’
➔ Emphasis on morality – the argument she is building in natural history is familiar to defense
of poetry: sympathy – poetry enlarges the circumference of our imagination – art confronts
us with something that lies beyond the boundaries of our own world of experience and
allows us to empathize with what is depicted
The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, - Art can do much more than data, sermons,
whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the because it allows us to sympathize (it is the
extension of our sympathies. Appeals nearest thing to life)
founded on generalizations and statistics
require a sympathy ready-made, a moral Idea that art makes us sympathize begins with
sentiment already in activity; but a picture ppl like Shelley and is theorized by ppl like Eliot
of human life such as a great artist can give,
surprises even the trivial and the selfish into
that attention to what is apart from
themselves, which may be called the raw
material of moral sentiment.
[…] more is done toward linking the higher
classes with the lower, toward obliterating
the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by
hundreds of sermons and philosophical
dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to
life; it is a mode of amplifying experience
and extending our contact with our fellow-
men beyond the bounds of our personal
lot. All the more sacred is the task of the
artist when he undertakes to paint the life
of the People. (3)
• Suzanne Keen, 2007:
➢ “the most eloquent advocate for the moral usefulness of fiction was the unbelieving and
officially immoral George Eliot. […] Novel readers might learn, by extending themselves into
the experiences, motives, and emotions of fictional characters, to sympathize with real
others in their everyday lives.”
➢ “the transformation of novel reading from a morally suspect waste of time to an activity
cultivating the role-taking imagination”
➢ “This legacy of Romanticism passes directly to theories of Victorian fiction.”
“If any man of sufficient moral and intellectual - If artists can be sincere, depict things
breadth, whose observations would not be realistically, their work can be useful
vitiated by a foregone conclusion, or by a
