The Problem of

American Realism

William Dean Howells

Henry James
Mark Twain
The Gilded Age
• The Post-Civil War Generation
experienced the most
thoroughgoing change in
American history
- wealth and fame and not race
• The new machinery of shares,
claims, and inventions
• The unfinished state of
American society
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 Newport Mansions
•The new rich and their taste in art
The Breakers, the grand
70 room Italian
Renaissance-style villa
built by Cornelius
Vanderbilt II, President
and Chairman of the New
York Central Railroad,
after his first house burned
down.
The Victorian villa of Rosecliff, the home
China Trade merchant of the silver heiress
William Wetmore, Tessie Oelrichs with
Chateau-sur-Mer, the its magnificent
first of Newport's ballroom, the largest
palatial summer in Newport.
mansions, where the
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Gilded Age began.
Literature in the
Gilded Age
• The changing life of literature as a
cultural institution
• The changed place of the writer
• Literature – something established
• A cultural system with a well-provided
place in society
• The conjunction between women’s
writing and a middle-class domestic
audience: the domestic novel

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Literature in the
Gilded Age
• A literary audience on a mass scale
• Mass journalism – “the penny press”
• “Conspicuous consumption” –
Thorstein Veblen
• Erastus Beadle’s Dime Novels
• Together with the domestic novel
another popular genre: the short and
sensational tale of adventures and
social rise
• Public entertainment

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Literature in the
Gilded Age
• Space for ‘serious’ authorship
• “Genteel culture” – George Santayana,
1911
• Members: from old gentry back-ground
from Boston, custodians and
guardians of high literature
• Cosmopolitan in range
• To keep the literary field clear from
disturbing social and sexual subjects

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 William Dean Howells
1837-1920
The most influential promoter
•
of realism
• Editor of the Atlantic Monthly
(1871-1881)
• An article in The Century
(1882) provoked the "Realism
War"
• Wrote the "Editor's Study"
(1886-1892) and "Editor's Easy
Chair" (1899-1909) for Harper's
New Monthly Magazine

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 Howells’s Works
• Believed that literature is the chief
sustainer of civilization
• Wrote over a hundred books including
novels, poems, literary criticism, plays,
memoirs, and travel narratives
• Realistic fiction:
• A Modern Instance (1881)
• The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
• A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890)
• Their Wedding Journey (1871)

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Howell’s Works

• Dr. Breen's Practice, (1880)

• The Minister's Charge(1886)
• Indian Summer (1886)
• April Hopes (1887)
• The Landlord at Lion's Head (1897)
• The Son of Royal Langbrith (1904) 

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Criticism and Fiction
• “Let fiction cease to lie about life; let
it portray men and women as they
are, actuated by the motives and the
passions in the measure we all know;
let it leave off painting dolls and
working them by springs and wires; …
let it not put on fine literary airs; let it
speak the dialect, the language, that
most Americans know … and there
can be no doubt of an unlimited
future, not only of delightfulness but
of usefulness, for it.”

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Henry James’s Realism
• “The Art of Fiction” 1884
• Not unmediated reality but a “sense of reality”
• Reality in fiction depends not on the truth of
the writer’s material but on the strength of
his “sensibility” or “imagination”
• Howells: the standard of realism: “the simple,
the natural and the honest” – terms of
conventional morality

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Henry James’s Realism
• The artist must openly present himself as
an artist
• “the questions of art are questions of
execution”
• “the questions of morality are quite
another affair”
• The morality of the work of art – in the
quality of its execution and the quality of
the imagination of the author
• The civilizing powers of the artistic
imagination

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American Realism

• Not a coherent school

• The three classical texts:
• The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn
• The Rise of Silas Lapham
• The Bostonians

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The New Historians
• Walter Michaels, The Gold Standard
and the Logic of Capitalism, 1987
• Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of
American Realism, 1988
• Texts not responses to cultural
formations but part of them
• Not secondary to reality but is as real
as reality itself
• Still problematic

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American realism

• Associated with power

• White, male, urban
• Local colour writers
• The “tea-cup” realism

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Mark Twain /Samuel
Langhorne Clemens/
1835-1910

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Mark Twain’s
Importance
• The literary figure that embodies all the
unresolved issues of American culture
• The birth of the conspicuous public
figure
• Associated with realism, local colour,
social satire, morality
• The first to become aware of the
nihilism latent in crossing cultural
borders

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Twain’s Works

• The Innocents Abroad 1869

Roughing It 1872
The Guided Age 1873
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 1876
A Tramp Abroad 1880
The Prince and the Pauper 1881
Life on the Mississippi 1883
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1885
A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court 1889

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Twain’s Works
• The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson
1894
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
Vol I 1896
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
Vol II 1896
Following the Equator 1897
The Man that Corrupted Hudleyburg
1900
The Mysterious Stranger 1916
(uncompleted)
• Letters from the Earth 1962

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Huckleberry Finn
• “All modern literature comes from a book by
Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn … it’s the
best book we’ve had … There was nothing
before. There has been nothing since.”
Hemingway
• A gallery of voices as in Dickens
• A central voice, poetic and humorous
• Loosely assembled episodes

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Huckleberry Finn
• The small-town world of America
• A symbolic journey down the
Mississippi
• A lyrical masterpiece of American
pragmatic exploration
• An initiation novel
• Travel
• The fresh descriptive point of
view of the traveller
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Huckleberry Finn
• Running away
- in childhood memories: Tom Sawyer,
Huck Finn
- back in history: The Prince and the
Pauper, Joan of Arc, A Connecticut
Yankee …
- back in time: A Connecticut Yankee …

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Huck Finn
• Viewed as Don Quixote and
Odysseus
• The power of the visitor, the
outsider, the greenhorn
• A mirror image: the King and the
Duke
• Nuanced moral differentiation
between the outsiders and
tricksters and frauds and invaders
• The visitors turns into a demonic
intruder
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Twain’s Realism
• The nineteen rules governing literary art
• 1. That a tale shall accomplish something
and arrive somewhere.
• 2. They require that the episodes of a tale
shall be necessary parts of the tale, and
shall help to develop it.
• 3. They require that the personages in a tale
shall be alive, except in the case of corpses,
and that always the reader shall be able to
tell the corpses from the others. .
• 4. They require that the personages in a tale,
both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient
excuse for being there.

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Twain’s Realism
• 5. When the personages of a tale deal in
conversation, the talk shall sound like
human talk, and be talk such as human
beings would be likely to talk in the given
circum-stances, and have a discoverable
meaning and a show of relevancy, and
remain in the neighborhood of the subject in
hand, and be interesting to the reader, and
help out the tale, and stop when the people
cannot think of anything more to say.
• 6. When the author describes the character
of a personage in his tale, the conduct and
conversation of that personage shall justify
said description.

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Twain’s Realism
• Daniel Davitt Bell, American Realism:
- very different from Howellsian realism
- not a realistic plot, language and style
• Werner Berthoff The Ferment of Realism
1965
- “The great collective event in American
letters during the 1880s and 1890s was the
securing of realism as the dominant
standard of value.”

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