The Realism War

1. The Realism War James, Twain, and Howells

2. 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)

3. Romance and Realism • Events may be implausible or 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 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

4. Romance and Realism: Taste and Class • Romance • Aspired to the ideal • Thought to be more genteel since it did not show the vulgar details of life • Realism • Thought to be more democratic • Critics stressed the potential for vulgarity and its emphasis on the commonplace • Potential “poison” for the pure of mind

5. W. D. Howells • Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, 1871-1881 • “Editor’s Study” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (January 1886- March 1892) • Criticism and Fiction (1891; collected from “Editor’s Study” columns)

6. Howells on Realism “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material” --William Dean Howells, “Editor’s Study,” November 1889.

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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-w-lls, as to let me down easy: it may be we have both got to grow.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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).

14. 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).