REALISM AND LITERATURE

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

I was powerful lazy and comfortable didn't

want to get up and cook breakfast. Well, I was
dozing off again when I thinks I hears a deep
sound of "boom!" away up the river. I rouses up,
and rests on my elbow and listens; pretty soon I
hears it again. I hopped up, and went and looked
out at a hole in the leaves, and I see a bunch of
smoke laying on the water a long ways upabout
abreast the ferry. And there was the ferryboat
full of people floating along down. I knowed what
was the matter now []You see, they was firing
cannon over the water, trying to make my
carcass come to the top.
MARK TWAIN, ADVENTURES OF
HUCKLEBERRY FINN(1884)
Basic set-up:
Huck has just managed to escape his abusive alcoholic father by faking his own death and
running away. He hides on Jackson's Island, in the Mississippi River, and here we see him
waking up the morning after his escape.
Thematic Analysis
Huck Finn is adventurous, he's gutsy, and he's smartbut he's also just your regular
teenager. Mark Twain is writing about a boy who isn't some special somebody. We mean,
yeah, of course he is special because he's so cool, but he's not a prince or an aristocrat or a
trust fund baby or something.
Huck Finn comes from a poor background, and that's deliberate: Twain wants to show how
good someone coming from the lower classes of society can be. This also reflects Realism's
preoccupation with class, and especially with depicting characters who come from all sorts
of different class backgrounds.
Stylistic Analysis
There was a lot of controversy around the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when it was first
published in 1884. A lot of the controversy centered around the language of the novel.
When you read the passage above, you probably noticed immediately how slangy and
ungrammatical it is. For instance, Huck says, "I was dozing again when I thinks I hears a
deep sound of 'boom!'" This isn't fancy or grammatically correct: it's Huck's spoken
language.
Mark Twain is giving us the language of everyday speech in this bookand specifically, it's
the spoken language of a lower-class teenager. It's spoken language, it's simple language,
and it may not always be grammatically correct, but Twain is showing that this kind of
language is poetic and beautiful in its own way.
OMNISCIENT NARRATOR IN
REALISM
Realist writers really rocked the omniscient narrator. What's that, you ask?
Omniscient narrators are sort of like the superheroes of narrators, and that's
because they know everything. They can jump from one character's head to
another, they can tell us about one town on this page and then jump to a
completely new town on the next. They know when you've been sleeping, they
know when you're awake, they know when you've been good and bad, so
Well, yeah. They move from character to character, from scene to scene, from
one place to anotherbecause they just know it all.
Knowing it all means these narrators know the details of pretty much
everything, which is a pretty convenient thing if what you're trying to do is
create a sense of reality in your novel.
Of course, not all Realist literature is told from the omniscient narrator point of
viewthere are plenty of first-person narrators, for example, in Realist
literature. But the fact is that most of the great 19th-century Realist authors
wrote from an omniscient narrative point of view: Leo Tolstoy, Honor de
Balzac, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, to name just a few.
Chew on This
Leo Tolstoy is famous for his use of the omniscient narrator. Check out how the
omniscient narrator moves between different characters in these examples
from Anna Karenina.
The omniscient narrator of George Eliot's Middlemarch makes all kinds of
general statements about men and women in these quotations from the novel.
 Realist writers really rocked the omniscient narrator. What's that,
you ask?
Omniscient narrators are sort of like the superheroes of narrators,
and that's because they know everything. They can jump from one
character's head to another, they can tell us about one town on this
page and then jump to a completely new town on the next. They know
when you've been sleeping, they know when you're awake, they know
when you've been good and bad, so Well, yeah. They move from
character to character, from scene to scene, from one place to
anotherbecause they just know it all.
Knowing it all means these narrators know the details of pretty much
everything, which is a pretty convenient thing if what you're trying to
do is create a sense of reality in your novel.
Of course, not all Realist literature is told from the omniscient
narrator point of viewthere are plenty of first-person narrators, for
example, in Realist literature. But the fact is that most of the great
19th-century Realist authors wrote from an omniscient narrative
point of view: Leo Tolstoy, Honor de Balzac, George Eliot, Gustave
Flaubert, Charles Dickens, to name just a few.
VERISIMILITUDE IN REALISM
Verisimilitude is a sexy word meaning truthiness. Realist
literature is famous for the way it tries to create a world
that seems real or true; Realist writers want us to believe
that we're watching real life unfold on the page.
Hey, it's called Realism. Is anyone surprised?
Realist writers go out of their way to make sure that they
get their facts straight. If a Realist writer is writing about
London in 1870, you can bet that writer either lives in
London or has done some serious research on London,
because he or she would want the London of the novel to be
as true to life as possible.
In fact, Realism was heavily influenced by journalistic
techniques, and that's no surprise, given that journalism at
the time was also taking off. Realist writers often write like
journalists, and their attention to specific facts and specific
details only adds to the sense of verisimilitude in their
fictional works.
THE NOVEL IN REALISM

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

Realist writers are really into describing, analyzing, and

dramatizing personality. They delve deep into their
characters' psychologies and dig into their motivations,
actions, and emotions. Realism was all about
understanding life, society, and the world. Often, the first
place these writers started was with the psychological
reality of individual people.
It's good to remember that when Realism was emerging,
psychology as a discipline was also emerging. Towards the
end of the 19th century, Sigmund Freudwhom you may
know as the dude who came up with the theory that we all
want to sleep with our parentswas developing many of
the central concepts in psychology, including theories about
the unconscious, dream life, and repression.
Realist writers during this periodand even before Freud
(one person said that everything Freud said was already in
Dostoevsky's novels)were already interested in
psychology, and this is reflected in Realism's obsession with
character.
SOCIAL CRITIQUE IN REALISM
Realist writers are all about critiquing the social and
political conditions of the worlds that they write
about. Authors like Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy,
Honor de Balzac, and Fyodor Dostoevsky depicted
economic and social inequalities in their novels as a
way of raising awareness about the plight of poor
people, for example, or about the inequalities that
affect women.
In fact, there's a whole subset of Realism called Social
Realism, which developed in the early 20th century
and was inspired by the work of the big guns of early
Realism like Tolstoy and Dickens. Social Realism
comments on social and political conditions in a
uniquely straightforward and hard-hitting way. John
Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath is a great example of
Social Realism as it developed into the 20th century.
CLASS IN REALISM
Class is a huge deal in Realist literature. Sometimes Realist writers will delve
into the intricate etiquette of the upper classes, and sometimes they'll focus on
the trials and tribulations of the lower classes.
But the class that Realism is most concerned with, at least in Western Europe,
is the middle class. Now, it's important to remember that the middle class
didn't always exist. Way back in the day, there was the aristocracy (all of those
rich landowners with powdered faces and fancy wigs) and there was everyone
else (peasants, mostly, who worked their butts off on land owned by the
aristocracy).
Well, in the 19th century, the middle class began to rise. Thanks to
industrialization and the rise of capitalism, a peasant could, over a little time,
become a wealthy merchant and start living a little more comfortably. Society
was changing, social structures and classes were being transformed, and
Realism reflected these changes.
The rise of the middle class also meant that there was a rise in literacy.
Suddenly, the audience for literature expanded: it wasn't just rich people who
had the time and the ability to readnow the middle class could, too. It's no
surprise, then, that Realist literature often reflected the concerns of the middle
class.
Realism's emphasis on class, and on society in general, is a departure from the
concerns of the literary movement that preceded Realism: Romanticism. In
fact, Realism was partly a reaction against Romanticism. While the Romantics
liked to write, for example, about solitary individuals independent from society,
Realists chose to focus on social networks and the individual's place within
these social networks.
RISING LITERACY IN REALISM
Around the time that Realism got going as a literary
movement in the mid-19th century, more and more
people were reading. Education was no longer the
special privilege of fancy aristocrats wearing wigs and
face powder. Thanks to the printing press, books and
reading materials had become much more accessible.
In fact, many of the early Realist authors didn't even
publish their works as "books." Their novels
were serialized in journals for mass readership, which
meant that the journal would publish one installment
of a novel with each issue. Realist literature was
popularized in this way: it was easily accessible, and
it provided long-term entertainment for a growing
reading public.
REALISM AUTHORS
HONORE DE BALZAC
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

LEON TOLSTOI

GEORGE ELLIOT

CHARLES DICKENS Dickens was big on social

critique. In his numerous novels, he critiques the
miserable conditions that poor people lived in in
Victorian England.

REALISM TIMELINE

1760-1860: The Industrial Revolution

Life in Europe changes dramatically when
industrial machines transform the way people
work and live. The Industrial Revolution is the
catalyst that leads to the rise of the middle class
in the 19th century.