Chapter II. THE LITERATURE OF REALISM
                             

Section One. American Realism

I. Historical background

1.Effect of the Civil War:  
Political and social events influence writers in both theme and technique. We are dealing with the period following the most important single influence on American Literature- the Civil War. The industrialized Hamiltonian North fought the agrarian Jeffersonian South like two separate countries for supremacy. The factory defeated the farm, and the United States headed toward capitalism. In a way the surrender at Appomattox marked the beginnings of a course which America has followed to this day. The war led many to question the assumptions shared by the Transcendentalists- natural goodness, the optimistic view of nature and man, benevolent God. It taught men that life was not so good, man was not and God was not. The war marked a change, in the words of Lionel Trilling, in the quality of American life, a downfall, in fact, of American moral values.

2. Development of Industry and Trade:
In the first decades after the Civil War, Americans ceased to be isolated from the world and from each other. Telegraph lines spanned the nation, and in 1866 a trans-Atlantic cable joined America and Europe. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in l869, linking the Atlantic and the Pacific. Soon the United States had the most extensive railroad system in the world, which in turn generated enormous commercial expansion. The cost of transporting raw materials and finished goods dropped. Inexpensive goods replaced products once made locally by costly handwork.

As the population doubled, the national income quadrupled, and by the mid-l890s the United States could boast 4,000 millionaires. The rich prospered mightily, and immense power came to such industrial and banking magnates as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. Pierpont Morgan. Yet the growth of business and industry a1so widened the gulf between the rich and the poor, giving rise to reform movements and labor unions that voiced the complaints of debt-ridden farmers and of immigrant workers living in city slums and laboring in giant, impersonal factories. It was a time of radiant prospects, when ministers preached (and congregations believed) a belief of wealth, suggesting that riches were at last in league with virtue and the age of unlimited progress had finally dawned. What had been expected to be a "Golden Age" turned out to be a "Gilded Age."

3. Closing of Frontier:
The frontier had been a factor of great importance in American life. As long as the frontier was there, people could always hope to escape troubles over the next hill and have a better life ahead. Now that the frontier was about to close and the safety value was ceasing to operate, a reexamination of life began. The worth of the American dream, the idealized, romantic view of man and his life in the New world, began to lose its hold on the imagination of the people.

II Literary Scene of the Age:
Although Americans continued to read the works of Irving Cooper, Hawthorne, and Poe, the great age of American romanticism had ended. By the l870s the New England Renaissance had waned.

A host of new writers appeared, among them Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Hamlin Garland, and Mark Twain, whose background and training, unlike those of the older generation they displaced, were middle-class and journalistic rather than academic. Influenced by such Europeans as Zo1a, F1aubert, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, America's most noteworthy new authors established a literature of realism. They sought to portray American life as it really was, insisting that the ordinary and the local were as suitable for artistic portrayal as the magnificent and the remote.

As in most liteary rebellions, the new literature rose out of a desire to renovate the literary theories  of a previous age. Realists had grown scornful of artistic ideals that had been trivialized, worn thin by derivative writers eager to supply the "great popular want" for sentiment, adventure, and “tinging excitement." 1n contrast, the realists had what Henry James called  "a powerful impulse to mirror the unmitigated realities of life." Earlier in the nineteenth century, James Fenimore Cooper had insisted on the author's right to present an idealized and poetic portrait of 1ife, to avoid representations of "squalid misery." But by the last of the nineteenth century the realists, and the literary naturalists who followed them, rejected the portrayal of idealized characters and events. Instead, they sought to describe the wide range of American experience and to present the subtleties of human personality, to portray characters who were not simply all good or all bad.

Realism had originated in France as realism, a literary doctrine that called for “reality and
truth" in the depiction of ordinary life. "Rea1ism" first appeared in the United States in the literature of local color, a combination of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things immediately observable: the dialects, customs, sighs, and sounds of regiona1 America, Bret Harte in the 1860s was the first American writer of local color to achieve wide popularity, presenting stories of western mining towns with colorful gamblers, outlaws, and scandalous women. Thereafter editors, ever sensitive to public taste, demanded, and such writers as Harte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin, Hamlin Garland, and Mark Twain provided, regional stories and tales of the life of America's Westerners, Southerners and Easterners' local color. Local colorism is derived as having such a quality texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native.

The representative of nineteenth-century literary realism in America was William Dean Howells. He defined realism as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material," and he best exemp1ified his theories in such novels as A Modern Instance (l882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) Howells spoke for a  generation of writers who attempted to sustain an objective point of view and who found their subject matter in the experiences of the American middle class, describing their houses, families, and jobs, their social customs, achievements, and failures. The bulk of America's literary realism was limited to optimistic treatment of the surface of life. Yet the greatest of America's realists ,Henry James and Mark Twain, moved well beyond a superficial portrayal of nineteenth-century America. James probed deeply at the individual psychology of his characters, writing in a rich and intricate style that supported  his intense scrutiny of complex human experience. Mark Twain, breaking out of the narrow limits of local color fiction, described the breadth of American experience as no one had ever done before or since, and he created, in Huckleberry Finn (1884), a masterpiece of American realism that is one of the great books of world literature.

In the l880s, Howells spoke out against the writing of a bleak fiction of failure and despair. He called for the treatment of the smiling aspects of life" as being the more "American," insisting that America was truly a land of hope and of possibility that should be reflected in its literature. But at the end of the century. a generation of writers arose whose ideas of the workings of the universe and whose perception of society's disorders led them to naturalism, which is a theory applied scientific concept and methods to such problem as plot development and characterization . America's literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were dominated by their environment and heredity. In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that their lives were controlled by heredity and the environment, that religious “truths” were illusory, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death.

Important features of American realism are as follows:
1. objective description of reality life and concern for the commonplace;
2. exposure of dark side in human life and human nature;
3. creation of typical character in typical surroundings and pursuit for verisimilitude;
4. more or less influenced by American Bourgeois democracy.

Another literary phenomenon that is worth mentioning is the Muckraking Movement which started in the 1900s with the aim to expose corruption and evil existing in American social, economic and political life.