4. Realism and Regionalism （1865–1914）

With the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, the start of the American Civil War in 1861, and the deaths of Henry David Thoreau in 1862 andNathaniel Hawthorne in 1864, the literary landscape was ripe for a new generation of American writers who emphasized verisimilitude （similarity to truth） or Realism in the arts. These writers—among them, Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and John William De Forest—chose not to allegorize or sentimentalize or sensationalize experience in their fiction, preferring instead to represent the world as objectively as possible. “Let fiction cease to lie about life,” Howells declared in Criticism and Fiction （1891）; “let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know; …let it not put on fine literary airs; let it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know—the language of unaffected people everywhere.” Ambrose Bierce facetiously defined Realism in his Devil’s Dictionary （1911） as“The art of depicting nature as it is seen by toads.”

Many Realists （for example, Twain, Howells, Bierce, Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, and Stephen Crane） began their careers as journalists, and they addressed the questions of “who, what, when, where, why, and how” in their fiction no less than in their newspaper reporting. Purporting to offer a transcript of life, the Realists often depicted middle-class experience. They shared with such pragmatists as William James a philosophical attitude that affirmed freedom of the will, deliberate and purposeful behavior, and individual responsibility. In addition to Howells, many other novelists of the period defended the aesthetics of Realism. James compared realistic fiction to painting in his essay “The Art of Fiction” （1884）.

Dominant Genres and Literary Forms

The literary landscape in the late nineteenth century featured no monolithic school of Realists. There were, in effect, many realities or varieties of Realism, including local color or Regionalism （for example, the tales of Twain, Jewett, Freeman, Kate Chopin）, psychological Realism （James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman）, critical Realism （Howells）, and Naturalism （Crane, Upton Sinclair, Jack London）. The various Realists did not necessarily appreciate all contributions to the form: Twain wrote Howells in 1885 that he “would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven” than be forced to read a novel by James （ Selected Letters of Mark Twain , edited by Charles Neider, 1982）. With their interest in local customs, mores, and dialects, local colorists were, in a sense, local historians. Their tales often took the form of the anecdote or character sketch （for example, Freeman’s “A New England Nun”, 1887）. James’s psychological Realism was a more aestheticized form of fiction written in a prolix and periphrastic style （thus prompting the joke that James “chewed more than he bit off”）. By experimenting with refined narrators or “centers of consciousness”, James presumed tore-create the play of their imaginations. The reader of James’s “Daisy Miller” （1879）, for example, knows nothing more than the thoughts of the prim and stiff-necked expatriate Winterbourne. In the novella, James subverted the sentimental plot of love triumphant by contrasting the social codes of the parvenue Daisy and the Euro-Americans, and the tale ends not with the reconciliation of the young lovers but with the unexpected death of the heroine.

The forte of the Realists, especially of the critical Realists, was topical fiction. All Realists adopted a quasi-scientific method of detailed observation, but in the case of the Naturalists the science was rooted in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. As Malcolm Cowley¹explained, “The Naturalistic writers were all determinists in that they believed in the omnipotence of abstract forces. They were pessimists so far as they believed that men and women were absolutely incapable of shaping their own destinies.” Most literary Naturalists were also social Darwinists who applied Darwin’s biological theories of natural selection to models of social organization, arguing by analogy that just as the fittest of each species in nature struggles for existence by adapting to its environment, the fittest human competitors best adapt to social conditions and thrive. Theoretically, the Naturalistic tale might be a success story, but in practice it was almost always a failure story, with the unfit protagonist doomed to death, as in “To Build a Fire”. Cowley concluded that the net effect of Naturalism was “to subtract from literature the whole notion of human responsibility.”

Few American poets of the period are remembered today, justifiably so. Howells, Harte, and other Realists wrote poetry, to be sure, but most of it was utterly conventional. Still, the major American poets of the late nineteenth century, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, rebelled against the didacticism and formal conventions of the midcentury Fireside Poets （for example, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell, and William Cullen Bryant）. At the turn of the twentieth century, both Crane and Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote a brand of Naturalistic poetry that deserves to be resurrected from the footnote.