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Acknowledgments
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Chapter 8 - “Certain facts of life”
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Summary
For much of the nineteenth century, a set of codes and conventions defining proper femininity, so-called “true womanhood,” was articulated and enforced by culturally authoritative sources such as ministers, politicians, and teachers, as well as by wide-circulation magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book and popular domestic fiction. Influential figures and texts defined “true womanhood” by the key values of female purity, submissiveness, piety, and domesticity (Welter, “Cult of True Womanhood”). Directed primarily at middle- and upper-class white “ladies,” but also affecting working-class women and women of color, true womanhood ideology held that the nation’s public arenas of business, professional life, politics, and governance were and should be reserved for men, who were by nature smarter, stronger, and more competitive than women. A woman’s realm was the home, where she was supposed to nurture her children and provide an attractive space of tranquility and spiritual refreshment for her husband when he returned from his difficult work in the outside world of men. True womanhood ideology assumed women’s spiritual and moral superiority over men, but at the same time its emphasis on purity, domesticity, and submissiveness was used to justify women’s exclusion from the full rights and responsibilities of American citizenship. Instead of participating in democratic debate (including voting) or trying to create private wealth, women should strive to embody the idealized figure that an immensely popular 1854 poem by Englishman Coventry Patmore dubbed “The Angel in the House.”
In 1848, the United States’ first organized Woman’s Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, NY. A total of sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, which was written on the model of the US Declaration of Independence and called for equal rights for women. Such calls grew in number during the latter part of the nineteenth century, as a wide range of women writers and activists actively challenged aspects of true womanhood ideology. For instance, Victoria Woodhull declared herself a candidate for president in the 1872 election (the same presidential election in which both Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony made unsuccessful attempts to vote) and wrote articles supporting “free love” in a newspaper she and her sister edited. Woodhull and other feminists argued that marriage was simply a form of legalized prostitution too hypocritical to recognize itself as such. They made the radical assertion that, in Woodhull’s words, “ownership and control of her sexual organs” should belong to a woman herself both before and after marriage, and never to a man, including even her husband (Woodhull, Reader 40).
Chapter 7 - Crisis of agency
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Summary
“Naturalism” is a peculiar term in American literary studies. Although it arises frequently in discussions of late-nineteenth-century literature, the term’s meaning is not a settled question. Equally unsettled in critical and scholarly discourse is the term’s precise relevance to the works most often called “naturalist.” The four American authors whom scholars most frequently associate with late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century naturalism are Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Stephen Crane. Over the years, critics have also suggested numerous other fiction writers from the same period whom they believe should be considered literary naturalists as well, including, for example, Kate Chopin, Upton Sinclair, Hamlin Garland, Edith Wharton (in some of her novels), Paul Laurence Dunbar, David Graham Phillips, and Abraham Cahan. With the important exception of Frank Norris, however, almost none of the period’s writers whom critics have subsequently dubbed literary naturalists used the word to describe their own writing. Writers such as Crane and Dreiser, for example, preferred to identify themselves as literary realists, with Crane specifically designating Howells as his most important literary influence. For that matter, as Nancy Glazener has pointed out, no evidence exists that critics or reviewers of their own era regarded the specific works written between 1890 and 1910 that today often get linked together as “naturalist” as belonging to any sort of distinct grouping, whether within or separate from the more general category of realism (Reading for Realism 6).
Further complicating matters, when US literary critics of the 1920s and 1930s did start using the term “naturalism” to distinguish certain turn-of-the-century fiction writers from the larger American realist movement that had become prominent in the 1870s and 1880s, these critics tended to adapt their understanding of naturalism from the more easily recognizable French “school” of naturalism, whose widely acknowledged chief was Émile Zola. In France, naturalism was associated with dispassionate or “scientific” depictions of the more lurid aspects of everyday urban and industrial life, with a special focus on lower-class criminality, sexuality, and alcoholism. The view of human existence that Zola sought to convey with his fiction was, as summarized by critic George Becker in 1960, “pessimistic materialistic determinism” (“Modern Realism” 35). This concept was used fruitfully for several decades by US literary critics as a key to understanding American writers they grouped together as naturalists – in particular, Norris, Crane, Dreiser, and London – and it is still considered the standard view of the category. Since at least the 1970s, however, major scholarly works have appeared on a regular basis making persuasive arguments for substantially overhauling the long-standing interpretation of American naturalism as pessimistic materialistic determinism. Rather than settling on a new definition, these revisionist works have advanced conflicting visions even of how to define “naturalism” (see, e.g., Michaels, Gold Standard, Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity, Link, Vast and Terrible Drama).
Introduction: American literary realism
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Summary
Heated debates about realism and art often take place outside of university classrooms. After watching a movie, for example, we may find ourselves questioning – perhaps even arguing over – how “realistic” the movie seemed. We praise certain films for how closely they appear to reflect actual, off-screen life, even if the “real life” they depict is quite distant from our own experiences. Other movies we reject for their implausible plot twists, over-the-top acting, contrived dialogue, or clumsy special effects. Sometimes we don’t mind admitting that a movie isn’t realistic and defend it on other grounds, perhaps for its beauty, romance, suspense, or humor. Regardless, evaluating a work’s realism (or lack of realism) has become close to second nature for most movie viewers today, maybe because the only expertise it seems to require is something we all possess: the ability to observe the world around us.
Has it always been second nature for people to comment on how close to actual experience a work of narrative art seems? Aspects of realism as a literary mode, of course, can be traced at least as far back in Western literature as Homer’s epic poem, The Iliad, where Olympian gods with supernatural powers coexist with graphic depictions of battlefield mayhem that still ring true. The Iliad also includes notably detailed accounts of rituals, weaponry, and some aspects of daily life among the Greek army. Similarly, many of Shakespeare’s characterizations have long been praised for their likeness to life. The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism focuses on the surprisingly recent moment in American literary history, however, when realism – as opposed, for example, to universal Truth – came to be regarded as a paramount value in fictional narratives: something to be striven for by fiction writers, celebrated or criticized by reviewers, and judged by readers. Over the course of this book we will explore the historical causes underlying literary realism’s rise to prominence in the United States. We will also examine the different, and often contradictory, forms realism took in literary works by different authors; technical and stylistic questions involving how fiction writers actually go about creating what theorist Roland Barthes has called “the reality effect” (Rustle of Language 141); the philosophical issue of what relationship, if any, exists between realism produced on the page and reality outside the book; and, finally, literary realism’s relationship with powerful, often violent conflicts in late-nineteenth-century America involving race, gender, social class, national origin, and geographic region, among other factors. As we will see, American realism’s intense engagement with its social and cultural context has always been integral to its power as literature.
Chapter 10 - New Americans write realism
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Summary
In 1895 Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who had served as editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1881 to 1890 (the same position previously held by Howells), published a new collection of poetry. The collection’s lead poem was also the book’s title: “Unguarded Gates.” The poem takes the form of a warning and plea to the Statue of Liberty. The statue had been dedicated in New York’s harbor only nine years earlier in 1886 and did not yet bear its famous inscription (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”). But it had already come to serve as a symbol of the United States’ historic policy of welcoming immigrants as they completed their long journeys across the ocean.
“Unguarded Gates” begins by praising America for no longer tolerating slavery on “an inch of earth within its bound” and for offering democratic liberties and freedom of opportunity to all its inhabitants. Aldrich also confirms for the Statue of Liberty that an important part of her mission is to “lift the down-trodden.” But the main thrust of the poem is an admonition to the “white Goddess” about immigration:
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them presses a wild motley throng –
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav,
Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn;
These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,
Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws.
In street and alley what strange tongues are loud,
Accents of menace alien to our air,
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well
To leave the gates unguarded?…
The poem expresses the combination of hostility, fear, and disgust that Aldrich and many other upper-class Anglo-Americans felt toward the unprecedented – and unprecedentedly diverse – millions of immigrants who arrived in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Chapter 5 - “Democracy in literature”?
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Summary
“Sally Parson’s Duty,” a short story by Rose Terry Cooke, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly’s debut issue of November 1857, almost ten years before the young William Dean Howells would begin his official association with the magazine. Cooke’s story opens, “The sun that shines on Eastern Massachusetts …” The first bit of dialogue a reader encounters is spoken by ’Zekiel Parsons, who addresses an old friend: “I expect, Long, you sailors hev a drefful hard, onsartain time navigatin’, don’t ye?” (24). In specifying from the start the region in which her story will occur (not simply Massachusetts, but Eastern Massachusetts) and in using non-standard phonetic spelling and symbols such as apostrophes (even in ’Zekiel’s name) to convey not only what her rural characters say but what they sound like, Cooke immediately marks the story as belonging to an emerging genre in the United States, known at the time as local color and subsequently also called regionalism (we will return to the question of nomenclature below). Put simply, a local-color or regionalist story is one in which place – that is, the story’s geographic setting – not only serves as background but also plays a prominent role in the story’s foreground. A reader is always aware of the setting: it becomes an inextricable part of the story’s texture, influencing such elements as plot, theme, atmosphere, characterization and characters’ speech. Local-color settings, moreover, are usually depicted as someplace outside the mainstream, at a distance from national centers of financial, political, or cultural power.
Though local-color fiction was being written and published at least twenty-five years before a self-conscious movement for literary realism existed in the United States, it enjoyed its greatest public and critical success in the 1870s and 1880s during the period when literary realism became prominent. In those post-Civil War decades, younger writers such as Mary Murfree (who used the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock), Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Hamlin Garland moved away from the local-color genre’s antebellum association with humorous stereotypes and aligned their own regionally focused writing with realist principles as they were being practiced by figures such as Howells. Sarah Orne Jewett, for example, told her readers in 1877 that to enjoy her portrayal of “a quiet old-fashioned country town” on the Maine coast, they must care to look closely at “every-day life,” and take “an instinctive, delicious interest in what to other eyes is unflavored dullness” (Novels and Stories (Deephaven) 37).
Notes
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Frontmatter
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Chapter 9 - “The unjust spirit of caste”
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Summary
In white Southern writer Thomas Nelson Page’s short story “Marse Chan,” which appeared in New York’s prestigious Century Magazine in 1884 and was then widely reprinted, an elderly African-American character named Sam waxes nostalgic to a white visitor from the North. The Civil War has ended and Sam’s former owner is dead, but he still resides on the once wealthy, now dilapidated, plantation where he used to be a slave. Speaking of his life before the war, Sam insists to his visitor,
Dem wuz good ole times, marster – de bes’ Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in fac’! Niggers didn’ hed nothin’ ’t all to do – jes’ hed to ’ten’ to de feedin’ an’ cleanin’ de hosses, an’ doin’ what de marster tell ’em to do; an’ when dey wuz sick, dey had things sont ’em out de house, an’ de same doctor come to see ’em whar ’ten’ to de white folks when dey wuz po’ly. Dyar warn’ no trouble nor nothin’. (935)
The heavily marked rural African-American dialect spoken by Sam identifies this story as part of the local-color movement that became so popular in the 1880s, especially in the short-story form. As we saw in Chapter 5, late-nineteenth-century local-color fiction, later also called regionalism, was characteristically set in places removed from the nation’s centers of economic, political, and cultural authority, and it made the speech, manners, and geography local to its setting inseparable from the story being told.
“Marse Chan,” however, along with the other stories Thomas Nelson Page collected in a volume he titled In Ole Virginia (1887), helped constitute a distinct sub-category of local-color writing often referred to as the “plantation school.” Other plantation-school writers included Joel Chandler Harris, author of the immensely popular Uncle Remus stories, the Louisiana writer Grace King, and, in the twentieth century, Margaret Mitchell, whose Gone with the Wind achieved blockbuster status first as a novel and then as a movie in the 1930s. Plantation-school writing by these white Southerners painted nostalgic, sometimes humorous pictures of the South before the Civil War. It depicted the so-called “Old South” as a stable world in which the noble values of honor and chivalry thrived and loyal, happy slaves lived on beautiful plantations, where their benevolent owners regarded them as members of their own extended families – as “overgrown children” in the words of one nostalgic author (Avirett, Old Plantation iv). We saw in Chapter 5 that critics still heatedly debate the social meanings and cultural functions of regionalist works such as Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. By contrast, there is today little debate regarding the pernicious cultural work performed by most plantation-school writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Contents
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Chapter 6 - “The blab of the pave”
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Summary
Describing downtown Chicago (birthplace of the modern skyscraper in 1884) in his novel The Cliff-Dwellers (1893), Henry Blake Fuller metaphorically compared its cityscape of tall buildings and narrow streets to the spectacular cliffs and canyons of America’s rugged Southwest, whose natural formations scientists working for the US Geological Survey were only just beginning to study. “Each of these cãnóns,” Fuller wrote, referring to the city streets,
is closed in by a long frontage of towering cliffs [i.e., tall buildings], and these soaring walls of brick and limestone and granite rise higher and higher with each succeeding year, according as the work of erosion at their bases goes onward – the work of that seething flood of carts, carriages, omnibuses, cabs, cars, messengers, shoppers, clerks, and capitalists, which surges with increasing violence for every passing day. (1–2)
Though playful, Fuller’s comparison of Chicago’s business district to an imposing geologic phenomenon registers the startling magnitude of the transformation American cities underwent during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Chicago metropolitan area’s growth was especially stunning – from not quite 110,000 people in 1860 to over 1,700,000 by 1900 and then to 2,366,000 people by 1910. During the same period, New York City’s population more than quadrupled, from just over a million people in 1860 to a total of 4,766,883 inhabitants in 1910 (Gardner and Haines, “Metropolitan Areas”). Fuller’s comparison with canyons and cliffs provides his readers with a natural lens through which to view the changing visual profile of the modern city. Just as moving water erodes and reshapes rock, a “seething flood” of mixed crowds and modern conveyances has forced the cityscape into a striking new form. For Fuller, the “increasing violence” of its “surges” suggests a frighteningly destructive potential. The torrential urban flow sweeps up everything in its path, jumbling together objects and people, even wealthy “capitalists” who might normally be thought of as somewhere above, controlling the flow. Late-nineteenth-century realist writers took as one of their primary challenges to represent in literature a phenomenon – that of the rapidly changing, rapidly expanding American city – that in the eyes of many Americans combined menacing dangers with new and exciting, if disturbing, forms of spectacle.
Chapter 2 - The “look of agony” and everyday middle-class life
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Summary
In 1861, the same year that the Civil War (1861–65) began, the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson wrote,
I like a look of agony,
Because I know it’s true;
Men do not sham convulsion,
Nor simulate a throe.
Dickinson’s poem asserts that the “look” or appearance of agony – sharp, intense pain – carries with it a conviction of reality.
Chapter 1 - Literary precursors, literary contexts
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Summary
As with so many other areas of American life, the publishing world underwent dramatic changes in the years following the US Civil War. These changes affected the ways in which authors understood their audiences and markets, their possibilities for generating income, and their own professional identities. Such wide-ranging shifts in authors’ thinking could not help but have an impact on how and what they wrote. Publishing in the decades prior to the Civil War was still in the early stages of its development as a modern industry, at least in the United States; most books in America were either imported from Britain or else were pirated editions of books first published there. Most of those creating what we today think of as classic early American literature – from the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet to Benjamin Franklin up through the American literary “Renaissance” (as it has become known) of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s – saw themselves not primarily as professional writers but as ministers, statesmen, reformers, lecturers, or simply citizens. Very few of these figures ever imagined supporting themselves by their writing.
It wasn’t until the middle decades of the century that technological innovations – printing from metal plates, new processes for casting type and for manufacturing paper – allowed books to be produced quickly and cheaply enough, and in sufficient quantities, that they could begin to be purchased by consumers in large numbers, which allowed for the possibility of meaningful profits both to publishers and (at least in theory) to authors. The reading population was expanding at the same time as public education increased literacy. The producers of fiction who most immediately benefitted from these changes were those who published, and to a lesser extent those who wrote for, the period’s cheap and immensely popular “story papers” (available for mere pennies) and “dime novels.” Although most early dime novels targeted male readers with adventure tales (westerns, high seas, crime), growing numbers of women readers quickly boosted the sales of fiction focused on love and romance (whether in pioneer, urban working-class, or high-society settings). Written as escapist entertainment for the masses, this fiction was unapologetically formulaic and sensationalistic: it made no attempt to present itself either as art or, for that matter, as an accurate portrayal of Americans’ real lives.
Works cited
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Index
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Illustrations
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Conclusion: realisms after realism
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Summary
This book has focused on the period during which realism rose to eminence as the cutting edge of literary innovation in the United States and enjoyed arguably its high point of critical prestige and creative productivity: from about 1865, when the American Civil War ended, to about 1914, when the First World War began. Realism has continued to play a major role in American fiction since then as well. Even in recent decades, several of the United States’ most successful writers of literary fiction have chosen to work primarily in the modes of realism, regionalism, and naturalism (including intersections and overlaps among these) first developed in America by writers this book has discussed. A short list – which might easily be expanded – of recent and contemporary fiction authors who write mostly in such modes would include (in no particular order): John Updike, Eudora Welty, Barbara Kingsolver, Tom Wolfe, Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Russell Banks, Junot Diaz, and, especially in her early novels, Nobel-prize winner Toni Morrison.
In the years following the First World War, however, realism as a genre began to lose the high-culture luster that it had earlier accrued through, for instance, its association with such prestigious nineteenth-century publishing institutions as the Atlantic Monthly. Realism’s status as a prominent object of controversy in the pages of elite magazines, especially during the 1880s, the decade of the “war” fought between realism’s advocates and critics who rejected it as vulgar and mundane, had significantly contributed to its public recognition as an “advanced” form of literature even by those who disliked it. The years during and after the First World War, however, brought forth new fiction by young American and European writers – much of it first published in avant-garde “little magazines” devoted to Art with a capital A (including the Chap-Book, Poetry, and the Dial) – that struck reviewers and critics, many of them associated with universities, not only as more daring in content but also as far more radically innovative in form than earlier styles of realism that, by the 1920s, seemed commonplace (Glazener, Reading for Realism 237). Indeed, for many writers of this period whom we now classify as “modernist,” the realism that had emerged into visibility on the American literary scene during the latter decades of the nineteenth century signified a worn-out tradition, one they lumped with other middle-class bourgeois conventions it was past time to jettison – including, for instance, traditional religious observances, hypocritical attitudes toward sexuality, and a naïve belief in the progress of Western civilization. All of these, to literary modernists, papered over what was actually most primal and authentic about human experience. This new generation rejected what they saw as artificial systems of meaning, including both the false sense of order that traditional realism seemed to impose on the flux and chaos of individual experience, especially in a fragmented modern world, and the legitimacy that such realism, in their view, too often accorded to hollow social conventions. Modernists wished to re-conceive art – in the words of poet Ezra Pound to “make it new!” – and in so doing to revitalize both individuals and society.
Chapter 3 - Creating the “odour” of the real
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Summary
Like other writing, realist literature consists at its most basic level of words on pages. The pages are usually bound into magazines or books (or, these days, reproduced on screens). When we read novels or stories, we generally do so sitting down or reclining in a physical space – a living room or bedroom, a café, an airplane – that bears little resemblance to the scene portrayed in the text we are reading. No matter whether we are reading in a bus full of noisy people or alone in bed, however, we will be unable fully to enter into the fictional narrative unless we can shut out the world around us, at least temporarily. In a more complex process, we also must simultaneously keep looking at but, in another sense, stop “seeing” what is literally in front of our eyes – the gray or black ink, the quality of the paper, our own thumbs as they hold the book open – in order to “see” instead the fictional world (the place, the people, the objects) the author uses those physical materials to evoke.
Among the differences that distinguish the fictional modes of literary realism, literary sentimentalism, and literary sensationalism from one another are the techniques that each employs to help the reader enter imaginatively into the worlds they create. Sensationalist works use, among other devices, a quick succession of dramatic, even shocking events with the aim of creating such bodily responses in the reader as shortened breath and a pounding pulse. Chapters frequently end on suspenseful notes to encourage the reader to quickly turn the next page. Sentimental literature strives to prompt strong emotional responses, often manifested in physical tears, as readers sympathize with characters’ suffering. Realist writers certainly included both sentimental and sensational elements in their work, and they were by no means averse to provoking strong responses in readers. At the same time, however, realist authors such as William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Edith Wharton publicly defined their writing against these (in Howells’s derisive term) “romanticistic” genres (see Chapter 1). If romanticistic fiction can appeal to readers’ desires temporarily to escape their own quotidian existences for fantasized lives of passion, danger, and excitement, where good and evil are easily identifiable (and good usually prevails), realism has the burden of inviting readers into a world whose governing claim to their interest is to be as plausible, as actual, as the readers’ own world.
The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism
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Between the Civil War and the First World War, realism was the most prominent form of American fiction. Realist writers of the period include some of America's greatest, such as Henry James, Edith Wharton and Mark Twain, but also many lesser-known writers whose work still speaks to us today, for instance Charles Chesnutt, Zitkala-Ša and Sarah Orne Jewett. Emphasizing realism's historical context, this introduction traces the genre's relationship with powerful, often violent, social conflicts involving race, gender, class and national origin. It also examines how the realist style was created; the necessarily ambiguous relationship between realism produced on the page and reality outside the book; and the different, often contradictory, forms 'realism' took in literary works by different authors. The most accessible yet sophisticated account of American literary realism currently available, this volume will be of great value to students, teachers and readers of the American novel.
Chapter 4 - Conflicting manners
- Phillip J. Barrish, University of Texas, Austin
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Summary
Speaking at an influential and portentously named “Conference on the Heritage of the English-speaking Peoples and Their Responsibility,” hosted by Kenyon College in 1947, literary critic Lionel Trilling tried to explain a term that he believed was “nearly indefinable” but nonetheless fundamental to any attempt at articulating the identity of a nation or people. “Manners,” Trilling asserted, should not be understood as synonymous with the rules of politeness, which can be written down and mastered. Nor are manners equivalent to easily identifiable customs or any other “highly formulated departments of culture,” such as morals (“Manners, Morals, and the Novel” 11–12). Rather, the term manners refers to “what never gets fully stated” but instead constitutes “a culture’s hum and buzz of implication.” Manners are the “evanescent context of [a culture’s] explicit statements.” Insofar as manners consist of “that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered or unuttered or unutterable expressions of value,” they reveal truths about the inner workings of a culture that are inaccessible if one reads only official documents or standard histories. Manners, Trilling continued, are indicated by “small actions,” such as the posture and bearing of a waiter while he is putting down a plate on a customer’s table. They include such subtleties as “the tone of greetings and the tone of quarrels” in a given culture, as well as “slang and humor,” “the arts of dress or decoration,” and even “the way children play” and “the nature of the very food we prefer” (12).
As no doubt seemed appropriate for a conference held at a moment just after one war had ended (the Second World War) and another was beginning (the Cold War), Trilling’s speech initially asserted that manners “are the things that for good or bad draw the people of a culture together and that separate them from the people of another culture.” Trilling’s wording here may have appeared to suggest a jingoistic vision of “English-speaking” culture as homogeneous, unique, and in some sense opposed to non-English-speaking cultures (the Germans? the Russians?). But he immediately went on to complicate things by adding, “in any complex culture there is not a single system of manners but a conflicting variety of manners.” He continued, “what we mean by a culture is the adjustment of this conflict.” Turning to literature, whose relation to “manners” he had in fact been invited to address, Trilling went on to argue that both “conflict” and attempted “adjustment” between differing sets of socio-cultural manners have been a key focus for the novel, ever since its founding as a literary form.