The Objectivity of Realism: Literature

Sources

Laissez-Faire Capitalism and Realism in Literature. While Romanticism continued to hold sway in music until the rise of Modernism in the twentieth century, European writers, like their contemporaries in the visual arts, turned to Realism and Naturalism to depict the life of their times. Composers of music believed their medium to be a purer form of expression than painting or writing, and thus, almost by definition, no “realist” music could be written. During the 1830s and 1840s various European nations (notably England and France) established political regimes whose economic policies encouraged the development of free-market capitalism. A market economy had already been coming into existence for decades, but during the 1830s and 1840s its development was hastened by experiments with laissez-faire capitalism. In such an economic system the prices goods could command in an unregulated market were the sole guiding principle for establishing value, and supporters of this kind of capitalism believed that the market would regulate itself toward equilibrium. In such an environment, competition dominated. Success or failure could hinge on close attention to detail and was measured in the accumulation of wealth. The production and consumption of literature operated within this context. Authors such as Charles Dickens (1812–1870) and Honore de Balzac (1799–1850) wrote novels that were either published serially in affordable periodicals or in inexpensive paper-covered monthly installments that the reader could later have bound together as a book if he or she so desired. These methods of publication gave writers access to an ever-growing reading public. Balzac supplied the periodical La Presse with a serialized novel annually from 1837 to 1847. The value of a novel was determined by demand (how well it would sell), and the author’s pay was proportional.

Dickens’s first full-length serial novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), sold forty thousand copies in cheap monthly installments. Since Dickens met with immediate success, largely with a new class of readers who had never read novels before, the demand for his works was enormous. Not only did the publication format of Realist novels fit their economic context, but so did their style, philosophy, mood, and subject matter. In France during the 1830s and 1840s preoccupation with money dominated public and private life, and Balzac portrayed the power of money and the workings of finances in minute detail, conveying his characters’ insecurity about their precarious money-linked social status. Money is a despotic master, and for Balzac the capitalistic world was one in which his characters are constantly surrounded by enemies and rivals. Success is measured through the property, social position, and political influence that only money can obtain. Balzac’s novels, and some of Dickens’s, are realistic representations of the social world in which free-market capitalism operated. They are also social commentary. In Hard Times (1854) Dickens exposed the negative social effects of capitalistic industrialization, while Balzac portrayed capitalism as a destructive force unleashing egoistic human ambition, which breaks down traditional institutions (such as the church and the family) that held society together in the past. The messages of these novels are all the more compelling because of their unremitting Realistic style. By a sober and extraordinarily detailed examination of the facts of social and economic life, Balzac, Dickens, and other Realist writers broke with the dream and fantasy of Romanticism and focused on the material factors of life, against which their characters struggle and often fail.

Positivism and Realist and Naturalist Literature. Between 1830 and 1842 Auguste Comte (1798–1857) published Cours de philosophic positive (Course in Positivist Philosophy). At the core of this philosophy is the assertion that true, “positive” knowledge can be based only on observable facts, which in turn illustrate the operation of immutable natural laws. This assumption had guided scientific endeavor for more than a hundred years before Comte, but Comte extended the principles of scientific analysis to the examination of society. Realist literature embraced this philosophy. In La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), a series of novels and stories published between 1830 and 1848, Balzac created more than two thousand characters and made them subjects of his minute analysis and classification. Balzac described his approach: “There is but one Animal since the creator used a single pattern for all organized beings. This basic animal takes its variations in form from the environment in which it is obliged to develop....Society is seen as resembling nature, producing social species comparable to zoological species.” Through a positivistic presentation of these “human animals” in his novels, where they are arrayed and displayed against their material world, Balzac exposes the general laws that bring “social effects” into being and then govern the characters. For Balzac the one general law that underlies all the rest is “the great law of Self for Self.” The novels of Naturalist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) are equally positivistic; yet, he believed that to arrive at objective truth the author must not only allow the material data of life to dictate causality, but he must also remove himself as much as possible from his creation. As he said in 1866, “great art is scientific and impersonal.” For this reason, Naturalist writers such as Flaubert employed third-person narrators and withdrew to a position of ubiquitous observer. As Flaubert wrote in an 1852 letter to his friend Louise Colet, “I am in a ... world ... of attentive observation of the dullest details. My eyes are fixed on the spores of mildew growing on the soul.... In my book I do not want there to be a single movement, or a single reflection of the author.... Let us be magnifying mirrors of external truth.” The Russian Realist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) echoed these same principles in his novels, including Voina i mir (War and Peace, 1865-1869). Like Balzac and Dickens, Tolstoy was an unerring observer of social reality and a critic of capitalism, and, like the Naturalists Flaubert and Emile Zola (1840–1902), he claimed that facts spoke for themselves. About War and Peace, for example, he wrote, “everywhere in my novel that historical personages speak and act, I have invented nothing, but have made use of the materials which I have found and which in the course of my labors have amounted to a whole library.” The well-known French literary critic E. M. de Vogüé (1848–1910) summed up Realism in 1886 as “an art of observation rather than of imagination, one which boasts that it observes life as it is in its wholeness and complexity with the least possible prejudice on the part of the artist. It takes men under ordinary conditions, shows characters in the course of their everyday existence, average and changing.”

Women and Realist Literature. Realist writers often showed how the conditions of life affected women. Frequently, female characters in Realist literature are portrayed as victims trapped in tragic lives by male ignorance and arrogance, legal and moral restraints, and unhappy marriages. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) Emma Bovary escapes from a deadening, monotonous, provincial marriage through sexual fantasy, adultery, and suicide. Tolstoy’s main character in Anna Karenina (1875–1877) follows the same tragic yet inevitable trajectory. Her escape also leads to adultery and, with the shame that accompanies it, inexorably to suicide. Not all women in Realist literature, however, were hapless victims. George Sand (Armantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, 1804-1876) wrote in the preface to her novel Indiana (1832) that she was motivated by “a powerful instinct of protest” against patriarchal power, which led her to cast her heroine against “the injustice and barbarity of those laws which still govern women in marriage, in the family, and in society.” In his play Et dukkebjem (A Doll’s House, 1879) Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) sounds the same note of protest against patriarchy. His female protagonist, Nora, a bourgeois housewife, attacks and ultimately rejects the social convention that she must unquestioningly and totally submit herself to her husband.

Sources

George J. Becker, Master European Realists of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Ungar, 1982).

Henry Raynor, Music and Society since 1815 (New York: Schocken Books, 1976).

Martin Travers, An Introduction to Modern European Literature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).