Professional Documents
Culture Documents
IN A NUTSHELL
When you think about the classics of world literature, some of the first things you think of
are probably humungous novels like War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Great
Expectations, Madame Bovary, or Middlemarch.
So do those meganovels have anything in common besides the fact that they are mega and
novels?
Sure do. They're also works of Realism.
Realism is a literary movement that developed in the middle of the 19th century in France
and then spread like wildfire throughout the rest of Europe, all the way to Russia, and
then overseas to the US.
Realism, as you might guess by its title, is all about portraying real life. Realist writers
write about regular folksbored housewives, petty government officials, poor spinsters,
poor teenagersliving ordinary lives. Let's face it: most of us don't live crazy exciting lives,
after all. What Realist writers are really good at doing is showing us how even ordinary
lives are meaningful, andhelloalways full of drama.
Some of these writers were reacting against the Romantic movement, which often stressed
nature over culture, the solitary individual against society. Realist writers, unlike the
Romantics, like to focus on groups of people. They give us the big picture: a panorama of a
village, a city, or a society. And because Realism is about giving us the big picture, it tends
to be associated with the novel genre, which is huge and flexible. Most of the famous
Realistslike Tolstoy and Dickenswere novelists, who wrote pretty gigantic works.
Realism as a movement with a capital R ended sometime around the turn of the century,
but the techniques of Realism have lived on. Lots of novels written today are written in
straightforward language about contemporary issues, for example. Hey, who can resist the
soap operas of daily life, all packaged up as a 500-page slice-of-life novel?
WHY SHOULD I CARE?
Ever get curious about the lives of people you don't know?
Like, what's up with those neighbors of yours who scream at
each other all the time? And what about that cute boy in
biology class, who never says a word to anyone? Does he have
friends? And what about that woman you see laughing to
herself every day on the subway platform? Is she crazy? Or
just crazy happy?
Strangers are fascinating. We know that they're like us, but
we also know that they're different from us. They've got their
own little dramas, dilemmas, crises, hang-ups. We're always
interested in hearing about why that woman left her husband,
or why that guy ended up an alcoholic, or why that kid ran
away from home.
This is why Realist literature is so great. Reading it is like
peeping through a keyhole into the lives of others: these may
be ordinary lives, but like ours they're full of drama. After all,
who doesn't have family drama, or boyfriend or girlfriend
drama, or frenemy drama? When you read Realist literature,
you don't just learn about other people, you also learn a whole
lot about yourself.
DETAIL IN REALISM
Detail is that special something, that je ne sais
quoi that sets Realism apart from other literary
schools. Detail is the stuff that Realist writers use to
weave their magic with: these writers immerse us in
so much detail that we can't help but believe that
what we're reading is real.
How did this technique start? With a couple of
Frenchies, actually. Honor de Balzac and Gustave
Flaubert took the use of detail to a new level in their
novels about French life. Open up Cousin
Bette or Madame Bovary, and you'll find an
encyclopedia of teeny-tiny details: food, clothes,
landscapes, social habits: you name it. These works
became models of Realist technique, both in France
and abroad.
Check out how Gustave Flaubert dishes the
details about Madame Bovary's appearance in
order to indicate aspects of her character and
mood in Madame Bovary.
And here we have Lev Tolstoy going inside his
characters' heads to detail their thoughts and
emotions in Anna Karenina.
TRANSPARENT LANGUAGE
One big innovation of Realist literature was the use of
simple, transparent language. No Realist novel is
going to begin with some fancy-shmancy phrase like,
"Behold, thy life and love are the true crown upon the
pinnacle of my heart."
Realist writers fit their style to their subject: given
that a lot of them were writing about ordinary people,
they used ordinary language. Writing in language
that echoed the way regular people spoke to each
other was revolutionary in the mid-19th century,
when Realism really got going. Before that, literary
language was often supposed to be elevated, a little
bit highfalutin'. But is that kind of language realistic?
Not reallyso the Realist writers tried something
new.
Anton Chekhov, famous for his Realist short
stories, used simple, clear language, as we can
see in these examples from his short story The
Lady with the Dog.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn was revolutionary in its use of ordinary,
spoken languageincluding slang and
ungrammatical usagesin the narration of a
tale. Check out these quotations
from Huckleberry Finn to see how Huck's
narrative voice works.
QUOTE
You can't talk about Realism without talking about the novel.
The novel is the one genre that is most closely associated with
the rise of Realism as a movement: if we tick off on your
fingers the most famous works of Realist literature, you'll
probably come up with the titles of a bunch of novels,
likeAnna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, The
Brothers Karamazov, and so on.
Realist writers do write in other genres, too, but it's the novel
that is at the heart of the Realist tradition. Realist writers
were drawn to the novel for several reasons, but most of all,
the novel is big, and it's flexible. Realism is all about detail,
after all, and you can fit a whole lot more detail into 300or
1,300pages of writing than you can fit into the fourteen lines
of a sonnet.
The novel also gives you space to talk about loads of different
issues and different characters. In Tolstoy's gigantic
novel War and Peace, for example, there are over 500 different
characters. That's like having all of your Facebook friends
covered in one single book. Do you even know all of your
Facebook friends? Tolstoy sure does.
THE QUOTIDIAN IN REALISM
You wake up. You pour your Cheerios into a bowl.
You add milk. You eat and think about all the stuff
you have to do today: walk the dog, finish your
English essay, grab a coffee with your friend. Yeah,
not that exciting right?
Guess again. The daily stuff that we all live through
is the meat of Realist literature.
One reason Realism was so revolutionary when it
emerged in the mid-19th century was that it rejected
the idea that literature had to be about larger-than-
life heroes doing heroic deeds. Realist writers wanted
literature to reflect the true, daily reality of our
livesstuff that smarty-pants scholars like to call the
quotidian. One of the biggest preoccupations of
Realism is the depiction of daily life, the dramas and
routines of regular people.
CHARACTER IN REALISM
LEON TOLSTOI
GEORGE ELLIOT
REALISM TIMELINE