The Rise of Realism: 1860-1914

T he U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) between the industrial North and the agricultural, slave-owning South
was a watershed in American history. The innocent optimism of the young democratic nation gave way, after the
war, to a period of exhaustion. American idealism remained but was rechanneled. Before the war, idealists
championed human rights, especially the abolition of slavery; after the war, Americans increasingly idealized
progress and the self-made man. This was the era of the millionaire manufacturer and the speculator, when
Darwinian evolution and the "survival of the fittest" seemed to sanction the sometimes unethical methods of the
successful business tycoon.
Business boomed after the war. War production had boosted industry in the North and given it prestige
and political clout. It also gave industrial leaders valuable experience in the management of men and machines.
The enormous natural resources -- iron, coal, oil, gold, and silver -- of the American land benefitted business.
The new intercontinental rail system, inaugurated in 1869, and the transcontinental telegraph, which began
operating in 1861, gave industry access to materials, markets, and communications. The constant influx of
immigrants provided a seemingly endless supply of inexpensive labor as well. Over 23 million foreigners --
German, Scandinavian, and Irish in the early years, and increasingly Central and Southern Europeans thereafter
-- flowed into the United States between 1860 and 1910. Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino contract laborers were
imported by Hawaiian plantation owners, railroad companies, and other American business interests on the West
Coast.
In 1860, most Americans lived on farms or in small villages, but by 1919 half of the population was
concentrated in about 12 cities. Problems of urbanization and industrialization appeared: poor and overcrowded
housing, unsanitary conditions, low pay (called "wage slavery"), difficult working conditions, and inadequate
restraints on business. Labor unions grew, and strikes brought the plight of working people to national
awareness. Farmers, too, saw themselves struggling against the "money interests" of the East, the so-called
robber barons like J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. Their eastern banks tightly controlled mortgages and
credit so vital to western development and agriculture, while railroad companies charged high prices to
transport farm products to the cities. The farmer gradually became an object of ridicule, lampooned as an
unsophisticated "hick" or "rube." The ideal American of the post-Civil War period became the millionaire. In
1860, there were fewer than 100 millionaires; by 1875, there were more than 1,000.
From 1860 to 1914, the United States was transformed from a small, young, agricultural ex-colony to a
huge, modern, industrial nation. A debtor nation in 1860, by 1914 it had become the world's wealthiest state,
with a population that had more than doubled, rising from 31 million in 1860 to 76 million in 1900. By World
War I, the United States had become a major world power.
As industrialization grew, so did alienation. Characteristic American novels of the period Stephen
Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Jack London's Martin Eden, and later Theodore Dreiser's An American
Tragedy depict the damage of economic forces and alienation on the weak or vulnerable individual. Survivors,
like Twain's Huck Finn, Humphrey Vanderveyden in London's The Sea-Wolf, and Dreiser's opportunistic Sister
Carrie, endure through inner strength involving kindness, flexibility, and, above all, individuality.
SAMUEL CLEMENS (MARK TWAIN) (1835-1910)
S amuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew up in the Mississippi River
frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Ernest Hemingway's famous statement that all of American literature
comes from one great book, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, indicates this author's towering place in
the tradition. Early 19th-century American writers tended to be too flowery, sentimental, or ostentatious --
partially because they were still trying to prove that they could write as elegantly as the English. Twain's style,
based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation of their
national voice. Twain was the first major author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured its
distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm.
For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was not merely a literary
technique: It was a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out conventions. Thus it was profoundly
liberating and potentially at odds with society. The most well-known example is Huck Finn, a poor boy who
decides to follow the voice of his conscience and help a Negro slave escape to freedom, even though Huck
thinks this means that he will be damned to hell for breaking the law.
Twain's masterpiece, which appeared in 1884, is set in the Mississippi River village of St. Petersburg.
The son of an alcoholic bum, Huck has just been adopted by a respectable family when his father, in a drunken
stupor, threatens to kill him. Fearing for his life, Huck escapes, feigning his own death. He is joined in his
escape by another outcast, the slave Jim, whose owner, Miss Watson, is thinking of selling him down the river
to the harsher slavery of the deep South. Huck and Jim float on a raft down the majestic Mississippi, but are
sunk by a steamboat, separated, and later reunited. They go through many comical and dangerous shore
adventures that show the variety, generosity, and sometimes cruel irrationality of society. In the end, it is
discovered that Miss Watson had already freed Jim, and a respectable family is taking care of the wild boy
Huck. But Huck grows impatient with civilized society and plans to escape to "the territories" -- Indian lands.
The ending gives the reader the counter-version of the classic American success myth: the open road leading to
the pristine wilderness, away from the morally corrupting influences of "civilization." James Fenimore Cooper's
novels, Walt Whitman's hymns to the open road, William Faulkner's The Bear, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road
are other literary examples.
Huckleberry Finn has inspired countless literary interpretations. Clearly, the novel is a story of death, rebirth,
and initiation. The escaped slave, Jim, becomes a father figure for Huck; in deciding to save Jim, Huck grows
morally beyond the bounds of his slave-owning society. It is Jim's adventures that initiate Huck into the
complexities of human nature and give him moral courage.
The novel also dramatizes Twain's ideal of the harmonious community: "What you want, above all
things, on a raft is for everybody to be satisfied and feel right and kind toward the others." Like Melville's ship
the Pequod, the raft sinks, and with it that special community. The pure, simple world of the raft is ultimately
overwhelmed by progress -- the steamboat -- but the mythic image of the river remains, as vast and changing as
life itself.
The unstable relationship between reality and illusion is Twain's characteristic theme, the basis of much
of his humor. The magnificent yet deceptive, constantly changing river is also the main feature of his
imaginative landscape. In Life on the Mississippi, Twain recalls his training as a young steamboat pilot when he
writes: "I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that
ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief."
Twain's moral sense as a writer echoes his pilot's responsibility to steer the ship to safety. Samuel
Clemens's pen name, "Mark Twain," is the phrase Mississippi boatmen used to signify two fathoms (3.6 meters)
of water, the depth needed for a boat's safe passage. Twain's serious purpose, combined with a rare genius for
humor and style, keep his writing fresh and appealing.
FRONTIER HUMOR AND REALISM
T wo major literary currents in 19th-century America merged in Mark Twain: popular frontier humor
and local color, or "regionalism." These related literary approaches began in the 1830s -- and had even earlier
roots in local oral traditions. In ragged frontier villages, on riverboats, in mining camps, and around cowboy
campfires far from city amusements, storytelling flourished. Exaggeration, tall tales, incredible boasts, and
comic workingmen heroes enlivened frontier literature. These humorous forms were found in many frontier
regions -- in the "old Southwest" (the present-day inland South and the lower Midwest), the mining frontier, and
the Pacific Coast. Each region had its colorful characters around whom stories collected: Mike Fink, the
Mississippi riverboat brawler; Casey Jones, the brave railroad engineer; John Henry, the steel-driving African-
American; Paul Bunyan, the giant logger whose fame was helped along by advertising; westerners Kit Carson,
the Indian fighter, and Davy Crockett, the scout. Their exploits were exaggerated and enhanced in ballads,
newspapers, and magazines. Sometimes, as with Kit Carson and Davy Crockett, these stories were strung
together into book form.
Twain, Faulkner, and many other writers, particularly southerners, are indebted to frontier pre-Civil War
humorists such as Johnson Hooper, George Washington Harris, Augustus Longstreet, Thomas Bangs Thorpe,
and Joseph Baldwin. From them and the American frontier folk came the wild proliferation of comical new
American words: "absquatulate" (leave), "flabbergasted" (amazed), "rampagious" (unruly, rampaging). Local
boasters, or "ring-tailed roarers," who asserted they were half horse, half alligator, also underscored the
boundless energy of the frontier. They drew strength from natural hazards that would terrify lesser men. "I'm a
regular tornado," one swelled, "tough as hickory and long-winded as a nor'wester. I can strike a blow like a
falling tree, and every lick makes a gap in the crowd that lets in an acre of sunshine."
LOCAL COLORISTS
L ike frontier humor, local color writing has old roots but produced its best works long after the Civil
War. Obviously, many pre-war writers, from Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne to John Greenleaf
Whittier and James Russell Lowell, paint striking portraits of specific American regions. What sets the colorists
apart is their self-conscious and exclusive interest in rendering a given location, and their scrupulously factual,
realistic technique.
Bret Harte (1836-1902) is remembered as the author of adventurous stories such as "The Luck of
Roaring Camp" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," set along the western mining frontier. As the first great
success in the local colorist school, Harte for a brief time was perhaps the best-known writer in America -- such
was the appeal of his romantic version of the gunslinging West. Outwardly realistic, he was one of the first to
introduce low-life characters -- cunning gamblers, gaudy prostitutes, and uncouth robbers -- into serious literary
works. He got away with this (as had Charles Dickens in England, who greatly admired Harte's work) by
showing in the end that these seeming derelicts really had hearts of gold.
Several women writers are remembered for their fine depictions of New England: Mary Wilkins
Freeman (1852-1930), Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), and especially Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909).
Jewett's originality, exact observation of her Maine characters and setting, and sensitive style are best seen in
her fine story "The White Heron" in Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Harriet Beecher Stowe's local color
works, especially The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), depicting humble Maine fishing communities, greatly
influenced Jewett. Nineteenth-century women writers formed their own networks of moral support and
influence, as their letters show. Women made up the major audience for fiction, and many women wrote popular
novels, poems, and humorous pieces.
All regions of the country celebrated themselves in writing influenced by local color. Some of it
included social protest, especially toward the end of the century, when social inequality and economic hardship
were particularly pressing issues. Racial injustice and inequality between the sexes appear in the works of
southern writers such as George Washington Cable (1844-1925) and Kate Chopin (1851-1904), whose powerful
novels set in Cajun/French Louisiana transcend the local color label. Cable's The Grandissimes (1880) treats
racial injustice with great artistry; like Kate Chopin's daring novel The Awakening (1899), about a woman's
doomed attempt to find her own identity through passion, it was ahead of its time. In The Awakening, a young
married woman with attractive children and an indulgent and successful husband gives up family, money,
respectability, and eventually her life in search of self-realization. Poetic evocations of ocean, birds (caged and
freed), and music endow this short novel with unusual intensity and complexity.
Often paired with The Awakening is the fine story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(1860-1935). Both works were forgotten for a time, but rediscovered by feminist literary critics late in the 20th
century. In Gilman's story, a condescending doctor drives his wife mad by confining her in a room to "cure" her
of nervous exhaustion. The imprisoned wife projects her entrapment onto the wallpaper, in the design of which
she sees imprisoned women creeping behind bars.
MIDWESTERN REALISM
F or many years, the editor of the important Atlantic Monthly magazine, William Dean Howells (1837-
1920), published realistic local color writing by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, and others.
He was the champion of realism, and his novels, such as A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham
(1885), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), carefully interweave social circumstances with the emotions of
ordinary middle-class Americans.
Love, ambition, idealism, and temptation motivate his characters; Howells was acutely aware of the
moral corruption of business tycoons during the Gilded Age of the 1870s. Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham
uses an ironic title to make this point. Silas Lapham became rich by cheating an old business partner; and his
immoral act deeply disturbed his family, though for years Lapham could not see that he had acted improperly. In
the end, Lapham is morally redeemed, choosing bankruptcy rather than unethical success. Silas Lapham is, like
Huckleberry Finn, an unsuccess story: Lapham's business fall is his moral rise. Toward the end of his life,
Howells, like Twain, became increasingly active in political causes, defending the rights of labor union
organizers and deploring American colonialism in the Philippines.
COSMOPOLITAN NOVELISTS
Henry James (1843-1916)
Henry James once wrote that art, especially literary art, "makes life, makes interest, makes importance."
James's fiction and criticism is the most highly conscious, sophisticated, and difficult of its era. With Twain,
James is generally ranked as the greatest American novelist of the second half of the 19th century.
James is noted for his "international theme" -- that is, the complex relationships between na‹ve
Americans and cosmopolitan Europeans. What his biographer Leon Edel calls James's first, or "international,"
phase encompassed such works as Transatlantic Sketches (travel pieces, 1875), The American (1877), Daisy
Miller (1879), and a masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In The American, for example, Christopher
Newman, a na‹ve but intelligent and idealistic self-made millionaire industrialist, goes to Europe seeking a
bride. When her family rejects him because he lacks an aristocratic background, he has a chance to revenge
himself; in deciding not to, he demonstrates his moral superiority.
James's second period was experimental. He exploited new subject matters -- feminism and social
reform in The Bostonians (1886) and political intrigue in The Princess Casamassima (1885). He also attempted
to write for the theater, but failed embarrassingly when his play Guy Domville (1895) was booed on the first
night.
In his third, or "major," phase James returned to international subjects, but treated them with increasing
sophistication and psychological penetration. The complex and almost mythical The Wings of the Dove (1902),
The Ambassadors (1903) (which James felt was his best novel), and The Golden Bowl (1904) date from this
major period. If the main theme of Twain's work is appearance and reality, James's constant concern is
perception. In James, only self-awareness and clear perception of others yields wisdom and self-sacrificing
love. As James develops, his novels become more psychological and less concerned with external events. In
James's later works, the most important events are all psychological -- usually moments of intense illumination
that show characters their previous blindness. For example, in The Ambassadors, the idealistic, aging Lambert
Strether uncovers a secret love affair and, in doing so, discovers a new complexity to his inner life. His rigid,
upright, morality is humanized and enlarged as he discovers a capacity to accept those who have sinned.
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
Like James, Edith Wharton grew up partly in Europe and eventually made her home there. She was
descended from a wealthy, established family in New York society and saw firsthand the decline of this
cultivated group and, in her view, the rise of boorish, nouveau-riche business families. This social
transformation is the background of many of her novels.
Like James, Wharton contrasts Americans and Europeans. The core of her concern is the gulf separating
social reality and the inner self. Often a sensitive character feels trapped by unfeeling characters or social
forces. Edith Wharton had personally experienced such entrapment as a young writer suffering a long nervous
breakdown partly due to the conflict in roles between writer and wife.
Wharton's best novels include The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer
(1917), The Age of Innocence (1920), and the beautifully crafted novella Ethan Frome (1911).