Realism

Literary Realism

 

affirmed the primacy of the material world, promoting a style of writing that focussed on the here-and-now, the tangible, the factual, and upon the power of the social to mould individual destiny.

 

 

This account of Realism is divided into the following sections:

1. ‘Force and Matter’: The Context of European Realism.
2. ‘All is True’: The Aesthetic of Literary Realism.
3. Vox populi: Popular Literature in the Age of Realism.
4. ‘Lost Illusions’: Realism and the Experience of the City.
5. The Limits of Subjectivity: The (Female) Self and the Realist Novel.
6. Integration and Community: Poetic Realism and the Bildungsroman.
7. The Problem of Action: Drama in the Age of Realism.
8. The Literary Laboratory: Naturalism.
9. Realism: An Annotated Bibliography

 

 

 

1. ‘Force and Matter’:

The Context of European Realism

 

In 1821, John Keats died; in 1822, Shelley; in 1824, Byron; Ugo Foscolo in 1827; in 1829, Friedrich Schlegel; Constant in 1830; in 1837, Leopardi and Pushkin; in 1841, Lermontov. All dead, and for reasons diverse, which included tuberculosis (Keats), military combat (Byron), duelling (Lermontov), and boredom (Foscolo). Their tragedies were private ones but they contained an important symbolic significance; by 1840, the movement to which they had all lent their exuberant talents was over, its energies dissipated, its idealism now redundant within a new cultural climate that valorised science over art, fact over fantasy, immanence over transcendence, in short, Realism over Romanticism. Even before that date, the death knell of the Romantic movement had been sounded by some of its erstwhile adherents. William Wordsworth was one of them. As early as 1800, the author of The Lyrical Ballads who had attempted to produce poetry that attempted, by returning to ‘the ordinary language of ordinary men’, to bring about a final break with the elitist diction of neo-classicism, had begun modifying both the political radicalism and the pantheistic sentiment of his early verse. The errant energy of this youthful writing was now to be held in check, as in his ‘Ode to Duty’ (1807), by a newly-won moral conscience, that ‘stern Daughter of the Voice of God’, whose presence would come to dominate all of Wordsworth’s later verse. A similar trajectory was followed by Southey and Coleridge in England, Lamartine and Chateaubriand in France, and August Schlegel and Goethe in Germany: all expressed a nostalgia for the religious-based consensus of pre-revolutionary Europe, and all moved towards a more ‘mature’ acceptance of the status quo, elaborating, in works such as Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830) and Lamartine’s History of the Girondists (1847), philosophies that sought to reconcile the individual with God and country, with society and the state. As German Romanticism’s most trenchant critic, Heinrich Heine, noted in his acerbic The Romantic School (1836), by 1830 a movement that had once been libertarian and expansionist in its goals had degenerated into ‘Neo-German-Religious-Patriotic Art’, whose intellectual values were those of the Roman Catholic Church and whose raison d’être lay in providing a quasi-mystical legitimation of the Austrian and Prussian states.[1]

 

The historical forces that brought about the transition from Romanticism to Realism were diverse. In political terms, the most notable was the return of a period of reaction in European politics known as the Restoration (called thus because of the return of the aristocracy in the form of Louis XVIII to the French throne in 1814). Its pragmatic ethos, conservative, aristocratic, Catholic and pre-revolutionary, was enshrined into the protocols of the Congress of Vienna of 1815, ratified by the reigning monarchs of Austria, Russia and Prussia. Where the ideas of Rousseau and Paine had once reigned, now came those of Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the latter had accused the perpetrators of the French Revolution of ‘personal self-sufficiency and arrogance’, condemning their lack of respect for those institutions, Church, Family and Throne, which give solidity and purpose to the lives of individuals and nations alike.   Notions of liberty, equality and the rights of man were replaced by a new focus upon order, consensus and community. Action soon followed rhetoric. Throughout the continent, indications of revolutionary stirring were repressed by governments in a systematic process of reaction, largely orchestrated by the Austrian foreign minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich. He masterminded the suppression of liberal movements in Italy and in Portugal in 1821, and presided over the restoration of the monarchy in Spain in 1823. Metternich’s promise of ‘peace and order’ (Ruhe und Ordnung) became the motto for an increasingly conservative political intelligentsia (as the equation of ‘matter and force’, coined by the pioneering chemist, Ludwig Büchner, provided a catch-phrase for the scientific community). On the basis of Metternich’s policies, there emerged a Holy Alliance between Austria, Prussia and Russia who, proclaiming themselves defenders of a Christian faith threatened by post-Enlightenment atheism, imposed a gospel of obedience upon their intimidated subjects.[2]

 

These efforts found support and theoretical legitimation not only in the writings of traditional conservative thinkers such as Burke and de Maistre, but in the work of a new generation of political philosophers and historians, who grafted on to earlier vindications of absolutist forms of government a modern, evolutionary quality that allowed ‘might’ to be equated with ‘right’. This is particularly true of the German thinkers of this era. They ranged from the military historian, Carl von Clausewitz who, in his textbook On War (1832), formulated the famous dictum ‘War is a mere continuation of policy [politics] by other means’, through to the philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (The Philosophy of Right, 1820), and the historians, Heinrich von Treitschke and Leopold von Ranke. Ranke and Treitschke combined their goal to grasp history as it actually was (wie es eigentlich gewesen) with a firm belief in the world-historical mission of the German nation, convinced that it was the historian’s task to ‘create in the hearts of his readers, joy in the Fatherland’. These historians were the exponents of Realpolitik, an ethos that argued for the supremacy of the state and the nation in internal and external affairs. Realpolitik guided the policies of many politicians in the age of Realism, statesmen such as Guizot in France, Cavour in Italy, and, above all, Bismarck in Prussia. The latter’s philosophy of ‘blood and iron’ represented the most successful manifestation of this ethos of uncompromising pragmatism. Through its implementation, the industrial prowess and military might of Germany dramatically increased in the space of barely two decades, transforming that country from a disunited constellation of semi-medieval principalities into one of the most dynamic and self-confident nations of the modern period.[3]

The ethos that underscored Realpolitik, a scepticism regarding ideals and an acceptance of force and power as ineluctable realities in private and political life, were reflected in the literature of this period, most notably in the historical novel. Walter Scott had established the popularity of the genre in the early part of the century with novels such as Waverley (1814) and Guy Mannering (1815). The success of these novels had helped reawaken national identity in many countries throughout Europe, in Spain, for example, where an entire body of literature (known as costumbrismo) came into existence around depictions of local customs, values and traditions. Noted examples included Mariano Mariano José de Larra’s The King’s Page (1834), Patricio de la Escosura’s Neither King nor Rook (1835) and Enrique Gil y Carrasco’s The Master of Bembibre (1844). The great historical novels of the Realist period, however, such as Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), Alessandro Manzoni’s, The Betrothed (1827) and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867), are both more cosmopolitan and more pessimistic in their bearing, and give voice to a greater feel for the randomness of events and for the absence of moral direction in history. This mood is particularly evident in Manzoni’s epic novel. Set in a mid-seventeenth century Lombardy suffering under the yoke of Spanish rule, The Betrothed describes, in the greatest detail and with the greatest compassion for the two principal protagonists, the village lovers, Renzo and Lucia, a society dominated by avarice, sexual rapacity and political thuggery. In such a world, life has little worth and little meaning. The two lovers survive, through the timely solicitations of Father Cristoforo, but Manzoni’s Hobbesian moral is clear: the political realm is dominated by power and by the anarchic powers of darkness. Even ‘the most prudent and innocent conduct’ is not sufficient to guarantee survival; and Manzoni concludes his novel with an exhortation aimed at protagonists and reader alike: look to God, for He alone can provide a path through and out of history.[4]

 

The novels of Stendhal and Tolstoy have a more contemporary setting: the Napoleonic period, towards the end of the Emperor’s push for control of Europe. The young hero of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma is Fabrizio who, in journeying from the chaotic battlefield of Waterloo to the political tyranny of the state of Parma (and then finally to incarceration), learns, through a series of complicated personal and political imbroglios, that this is an age that knows no essential values but is governed by a ‘horror of enthusiasm and spirit’, and by a calculating pragmatism that is, ultimately, without regard for life or ideals. Tolstoy’s vision in War and Peace is less bleak, and his canvass is broader, but even here the scope for individual action is limited. The novel depicts the titanic struggle of Russia Napoleon’s Grand Army in the period between 1805 and 1812, against which the novel details the more personal trials and achievements of a number of individuals and families. Tolstoy joins the two realms, allowing his characters to move in and out of history, describing a process that sometimes involves personal tragedy (as in the death of Prince Andrew on the fields of Schöngraben), but at other times becomes the condition for self-realisation (as is the case with Pierre Bezukhov, a seeker after true knowledge). Throughout his novel, Tolstoy raises fundamental questions about the relationship between free will and determinism, about the role of the individual in history, and about the very nature of historical change, complex issues that the author directly addresses in his famous second epilogue to the novel. Here, he argues that history cannot be reduced to a series of objective laws or subjective acts of will, but is a complex and frequently irrational process, whose determining mode depends upon the perspective and experience of the individual observer. In the final analysis, action and inaction may produce the same results; all the individual can do is to embrace (as Tolstoy does in his novel) epic irony, that facility to accommodate oneself to ‘a freedom that does not exist, and to recognise a dependence of which we are not conscious’.[5]

 

Although the political energies unleashed by the French Revolution soon dissolved in the cold light of Restoration Europe, the class that the Revolution had brought to power in 1789, the bourgeoisie, continued to grow in strength throughout the nineteenth century, taking advantage of a new political climate in which wealth and property became the sole criteria for political office and social status. This class came increasingly to consolidate its position of power within the state through successive revolutions in France in 1830 and 1848, in Italy in 1860, and in Spain in 1868. (Of all the major European nations, Germany alone failed to stage a successful bourgeois revolution, its attempt in 1848 foundering on strong opposition from the army and monarchy). The values that this new ruling elite embodied: plutocratic power-broking, mistrust of the intelligentsia, and an assertive ethos of moral self-righteousness that combined religious probity and myopic materialism, were frequently mocked in the literature of the period, through fictional figures such as Joseph Prudhomme, César Birrotteau and Podsnap (from works by Henri Monnier, Balzac and Dickens, respectively). The ‘hard wrathful and sordid nature’ of the ethos they embodied was consciously satirised in novels such as Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1843), and Dicken’s Hard Times (1854). But that the bourgeoisie was a dynamic force in world history, none, not even their detractors, such as Karl Marx, could deny. It was (ironically, perhaps) Marx who provided one of the most noted homilies of that class. In his Communist Manifesto (1848), he had described how the bourgeoisie had been a revolutionary force, how it had torn asunder ‘the motley feudal ties’ that had bound man to his ‘natural superiors’’, and destroyed those ‘most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism’ that had prevailed in Europe before 1789. This superannuated aristocratic class had now largely disappeared from the world stage, and a new ruling elite of industrial magnates and international bankers had arrived in its place, figures such as Rothschild and Krupp in Germany, Peugeot and Dollfuss in France, and Brunel and Fairbairn in England. These were the new masters of Europe, ruthless asserting their interests not only over the landed aristocracy, but also over those of that other new class of the modern age: the proletariat. The latter, Marx believed, held the key to the future; but in the meantime it would be forced to cope with the most sombre of realities of this emerging capitalist society: the fact that its labour was worth nothing more than it would fetch on an open and uncaring market.[6]

 

The rise to power of the bourgeoisie possessed both a material base, which lay in the discovery of new methods of manufacture and of new forms of energy, and an ideological one. As the captains of industry grew in importance and self-confidence, they were accompanied by a growing number of philosophers, sociologists and political economists who sought to provide an intellectual legitimacy for their activities. Some such as David Ricardo and J.B. Say celebrated the market economy and the importance of entrepreneurial initiative, defending its right to function on its own laissez-faire terms, independently of state control; others, such as Jeremy Bentham, emphasised the desirability of a quantitative and material assessment of individual and social happiness, arguing for a doctrine of pure Utilitarianism; whilst others still, such as Samuel Smiles, in his inspirational manual, Self-Help (1859), working on a more popular level, sought to elaborate a Victorian version of the Protestant ethic, built around the solid values of ‘common sense, attention, application, and perseverance’. Others still attempted to locate the driving energies of the capitalist mentality not in history or in personal morality, but in the natural laws of biology, those processes of natural selection and struggle, to which all species (it was felt) were subject. The terms of this conflictual model had originally been stated in Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859). Darwin had attempted here to account for the evolutionary nature of animal species in terms of their ability to adapt to their natural environments, but he had formulated his theories within the context of a long-standing debate within the natural sciences and had not sought to apply them to the social or political sphere. For Herbert Spencer, however, Darwin’s views had an obvious relevance to human affairs. In his magnum opus, Principles of Sociology (1876), he argued that societies and individuals were dominated by the same internal laws of development as natural phenomena, being locked into ‘struggles for existence’ that no one can avoid. Many will go under in this process (Spencer clinically observed) but those in whom the power of self-preservation is dominant will emerge victorious, made stronger and more resourceful by their ordeals, becoming members of an ever-evolving society, whose course is continually renewed by ‘the survival of the fittest’.[7]

 

The evolutionary fatalism of Spencer’s social Darwinism was rejected by many who were forced to witness the material impact of laissez faire liberalism upon the working people of Europe. Robert Southey was one such witness. In 1808, he visited Birmingham, and left his impression of its factories and work places: ‘My head aches with the multiplicity of infernal noises, and my eyes with the light of infernal fires, – I may add, my heart also, at the sight of so many human beings employed in infernal occupations, and looking as if they were never destined for anything better. Our earth was designed to be a seminary for young angels, but the devil has certainly fixed upon this spot for his own nursery-garden and hot-house’. Southey’s words were echoed by others equally appalled both by the poverty and misery that they saw around in large cities, and by what they perceived to be the callous indifference of the social theorists of the liberal school, such as Spencer, David Ricardo and Thomas Robert Malthus, to the grim nature of life in industrial England. Malthus, in particular, whose An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) construed poverty as an unavoidable consequence of an expanding population and a diminishing food supply, could find nothing in his theories to gainsay the continuation of such misery. To counteract the fatalism and quietism of the liberal-capitalist position, works such as Harriet Martineau’s Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated (1833), Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843), and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and London Poor (1851) appeared, documenting the plight of London’s underclass, in the hope of awakening the conscience of their middle-class readership to the sorry situation of the poor and destitute. Frederick Engels, in his The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), however, went beyond the emotive humanism evinced in the majority of these ‘condition of England’ studies. What Engels was looking for was not analysis but remedy, and in his later writings he came to align himself with the tradition of radical socialism (soon to be called Communism), whose most sophisticated exponent was the radical political-economist, Karl Marx. The latter had consistently argued, from his early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) through to the ‘scientific’ critiques, The German Ideology (1846), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and finally Capital (3 volumes, 1867, 1885, and 1894), that the injustices of the capitalist system could not be remedied by moral critique or social welfare, but only through the political awakening of the class consciousness of the proletariat. Once this had reached full awareness of itself as the driving force of history, it would (Marx argued) automatically abolish the capitalist system. Marx’s historical materialism (a combination of Darwin’s evolutionary thinking, English economic theory and French Utopian socialism) provided both a model of sociological analysis and an imperative to political engagement for an entire generation of European political thinkers.   Marx inspired figures as diverse as August Bebel and Karl Kautsky in Germany, Antonio Labriola in Italy, and Jean Jaurès in France. These noted representatives of the Social Democratic movement in Europe sought to marry, under the banner of revisionism, Marxist theory to a party-political pragmatism, hoping in the process (in Jaurès’ words) to ‘translate and incorporate the ideal of humanity into reality and history’.[8]

 

The literary response to the rise of industrial society was without the philosophical baggage of Marxism but possessed, nevertheless, its own political acumen. Novels that engaged with contemporary social themes included, in England, Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), and North and South (1855), Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), and George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical (1866); in France, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), J-K Huysmans’ The Vatard Sisters (1879), Émile Zola’s L’assommoir (1877) and Germinal (1885); and in Germany, Gerhart Hauptmann’s play, The Weavers (1892). These were all works of social conscience, which took to heart the plight of the dispossessed and the impoverished, the outcast and the persecuted. Certainly, there were here differences of emphasis and style; the aristocratic Disraeli, with his social panacea of noblesse oblige, would have rubbed shoulders uncomfortably with that social historian of prostitutes and criminals, Zola; and likewise, the comic satire of Dickens would have meant little to the politically engaged young Gerhart Hauptmann, for whom the exploitation of the Silesian weavers was no laughing matter. But this literature shared a common trajectory, which was of its age; away from imagination and a utopian construction of the world through dream and fantasy, and towards a recognition, made, however reluctantly, of the importance of material factors in human affairs. These writers describe the impingements, intellectual, moral and material, against all must struggle and most must fail, their ‘lamentations and tears’ captured both objectively and, as in the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, often with compassion.[9]

 

There was, however, a second body of literature whose engagement with the social sphere was oblique but which was, nevertheless, equally telling. It included, in England, the work of a group of artists and poets known as the Pre-Raphaelites: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Poems, 1870), Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (1862), and William Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1868); and some of the work written by major poets such as Tennyson (Poems, 1830 and 1833), and Robert Browning (The Ring and the Book, 1869). This literature evinced a nostalgia for a pre-modern, medieval past, whose values, spiritual, authentic and ornate, it juxtaposed to the ‘philistinism of modern society’, with its standardisation and mass production, which these writers rejected and even (as in the later writing of William Morris) politically repudiated. A similar critique was launched by writers in France such as Théophile Gautier (Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1835), Charles Baudelaire (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) and by a group of poets known as the Parnassians, whose most notable names were Charles Leconte de Lisle (Ancient Poems, 1852), and Theodore de Banville (Odes funambulesques, 1857). Under the rubric of ‘art for art’s sake’ (l’art pour l’art), these writers confronted the cultural and intellectual inanities of their nouveau riche public with an aesthetic of formal self-sufficiency, which denied all utility to the work of art, but stressed instead its transitory beauty and its contact with a higher realm beyond. Their goal was to float free (as Gautier noted in his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin) of the ‘progressive, moralising, [and] palingenetic’ tendencies of a society that had committed itself to material progress and consumerism.[10]

 

In spite of their aristocratic distance from the social realm, these advocates of aesthetic purity bore witness to the problems of the modern age. Baudelaire’s writing, in particular, such as The Flowers of Evil, and the prose work, Artificial Paradise (1860), reflects the ambiguous empowerments of urban existence, describing a world that is crisscrossed by criminals, the homeless and other denizens of a city ‘where/ everything – horror too – is magical’. It is a ‘city gorged with dreams’, its reality is a sur-reality, where ghost and vagrant, prostitute and nurse, exchange identities under its pallid gloom. Baudelaire’s Paris, oscillating between fantasy and squalor, beauty and corruption, would have been hardly recognisable to Dickens; but it possesses the same elemental energies, transfiguring and destroying, which are found in Dickens’ London or Dostoyevsky’s Saint Petersburg, or in the cities described by the other great Realist writers. The city is as amoral as it is indecipherable, except to the poet alive to the ‘correspondences’ that exist between the material and immaterial realms. In the city-scapes of Baudelaire, Realism (understood in the broadest sense of the term) emerges both as a style, a dispassionate and, at times, clinical rendering of the travails of disorientated interiority, and as a sombre pessimism regarding absolute values, religious, moral and personal. Coming to terms with the city produced in Baudelaire a spiritual emptiness and a lack of purpose that the poet called ‘ennui’. It was an emotion, vague but intense, that would become for many the sickness of the age.[11]

 

 

2. ‘All is True’:

The Aesthetic of Literary Realism

 

‘The ideal is gone, lyricism has run dry. We are soberer. A severe, pitiless concern for truth, the most modern form of empiricism, has penetrated even into art’, noted the critic, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1857, writing, in effect, a valediction for the Romantic movement in France and Europe. What came in the place of that movement was a type of literature that aimed to integrate the external world into the text, breaking both with the visionary impetus of the Romantic text, and with its confidence in the primacy of self. The emergence of Realism as a distinct literary discourse took place without the elaborate metaphysical and aesthetic deliberations that had accompanied the rise of Romanticism. When Balzac asserted in the opening pages of his novel, Old Goriot (1834), in an act of narrative self-justification: ‘All is true’ (words significantly uttered in the new lingua franca of scientific and philosophic prose, English) he was expressing not only the central tenet of the Realist aesthetic: its concern for verisimilitude, for probability, and for ‘close observation and the careful reproduction of minute detail and local colour’ (as the author went on to explain), but also the modest pre-theoretical nature of its artistic ambit: the world is simply there; we need only open our eyes to see and describe it.[12]

 

Not only Balzac but also those that followed him stressed the epistemological innocence of the Realist aesthetic. The operative terms of Romantic literature: ‘imagination’, ‘fantasy’, and ‘dream’, with which poets as diverse as Novalis, Coleridge and Blake had attempted to unite the objective and the subjective spheres, found their equivalents in the infinitely more passive mechanisms of ‘reflection’, ‘mirror’ and ‘reproduction’, terms which appeared wherever Realism required a theoretical defence. George Eliot, for example (an early adherent to the Realist movement, and a defender of its moral probity) declared in an interlude in Adam Bede (1859) that her aim in writing that novel had been ‘to give no more than a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind’. These were sentiments echoed by many writers, such as Anthony Trollope, who typified his novels (Barchester Towers, 1857, and The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1867) as ‘Realistic’ because they embodied ‘truth of description, truth of character’; whilst Stendhal, that most individualist of writers, and an author with at least one foot in the Romantic school, could, in one famous passage in his The Red and the Black (1830), describe the novel itself simply as ‘a mirror journeying down the high road’. Even George Sand, whose early novels Indiana (1832) and Lélia (1833) possess a clear social, and even feminist message, reached towards the metaphor of mimetic compliance in order to justify the critical focus of her work. As Sand argued in her preface to the first edition of Indiana, what she was trying to do in her fiction was neither to proselytise nor to provoke, but simply to describe contemporary domestic mores. If such mores seemed to be entirely repressive of female identity and ambitions that was not her fault. For as she explained, ‘the writer is no more than a mirror that reflects [such injustices], a machine that traces them; and he owes no one apologies if his prints are exact and his images faithful’.[13]

 

Many, however, felt liberated by the Realists’ concern for objective truth and by their engagement with the modern world. The Danish scholar and critic, Georg Brandes, was one such person. He was the foremost spokesman of the Realist movement in his country, and responsible for inspiring writers throughout Scandinavia, such as the playwright Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (The Editor, 1875, and Beyond Human Power, 1883), and the novelist Alexander Kielland (Working People, 1881), to broaden the focus of their work, and to look outwards towards Europe for the great issues of the day, rather than inwards, towards parochial or purely national concerns. In his major work, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (six volumes; first published in 1871), Brandes launched himself into a ‘struggle for freedom and modern enlightenment’, into whose cause he enlisted writers of the Realist school, and most notably the great Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen. In Ibsen, Brandes found an author who was committed to the ‘new life that will rise out of social convulsions’. His plays were (Brandes noted in enthusiastic words) ‘in contact with the fundamental ideas of the age’, and hence will live forever; for ‘the modern is not the ephemeral, but the flame of life itself, the vital spark, the soul of an age.’[14]

 

Realism, both as a style of writing and as a preference for certain types of subject matter, became the dominant literary mode in mid-nineteenth century Europe. Even in the work of writers who held themselves distant from theoretical debates and controversies the new literary discourse made its presence felt, and these included some of the most noted novelists of the age: Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant, in France; Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Gogol, in Russia; Manzoni and Verga, in Italy; Keller, Stifter and Fontane, in Germany; through to Galdós and Pereda, in Spain; and Dickens, George Eliot and Trollope, in England. For these, the Romanticism espoused by the preceding generation was at best redundant, at worst a distracting irrelevance in an age faced by radically social, political and ethical challenges. To depict these, the writer had to move away from the focus upon self and subjectivity, and acquire a greater sense of compassion and understanding for those who lived in the mundane world. George Eliot spoke for many in her essay on the pre-Romantic poet, Edward Young (author of Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, 1745) when she argued that Young embodied the worst aspects of the Romantic taste for fantasy and self-absorption, committing itself to an ‘imaginary journey amongst the stars’ rather than to the realities of the here and now. ‘That impiety towards the present and the visible’ meant that Young was incapable of ‘moral emotion’, that facility to divine the spiritual depths that lie hidden in the affections and feelings of ordinary people, which Eliot explored in her own fiction. Such reservations regarding the limitations of the Romantic mind, with its tenuous grasp on the world of recognisable reality, were shared by all the major Realist writers; even Balzac (whose novels indisputably exude their own extravagant energy) criticised the prevailing taste for melodrama, for those extravagant situations and ‘terrible sensations’ that the reading public had come to expect in the wake of popularised Romanticism.[15]

 

Few Realist writers sought to ground their writing in a consciously formulated ‘Realist’ aesthetic, although there were exceptions. George Eliot (once again) wrote a substantial justification for Realism in her review of the writings of the art historian and critic, John Ruskin, whom she saw as expounding ‘the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality’. The German novelist, Theodor Fontane, came to similar conclusions in his 1853 essay ‘Our Lyric and Epic Poetry since 1848’, as did the Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós, who saw in Realism the sole literary form capable of capturing ‘the present-day social situation with all its confusion and nervous disquietude’. Even Thomas Hardy, whose epic novels of character and environment, such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 1891, Jude the Obscure, 1895, seem to possess a timeless tragic dimension, also committed himself to a form of Realism, albeit one that could ‘distinguish truths which are temporary from truths which are eternal, the accidental from the essential, accuracies as to custom and ceremony from accuracies as to the perennial procedure of humanity’.[16]

 

The most systematic attempts to formulate a theory of Realism came, however, from France, and it is significant that from the very beginning the movement was associated with the pictorial arts and not with philosophy, which had been (particularly in Germany, but also in England, through Coleridge) the discipline that had theoretically underpinned Romanticism. For, Realism was essentially epistemological rather than metaphysical in its ambit; it was concerned with perspective, ways of viewing the immediate world of the here and now rather than with speculations about the spiritual transcendence and the otherworldly. So much is clear in the earliest theoretical formulation of Realism, which came from the pen of the critic, Jules Husson (otherwise known as Champfleury). Written in defence of the work of Gustave Courbet, whose paintings exhibited in a private collection in 1855 had shocked a Parisian public accustomed to the conservative Salon style of Classicists or the sentimental idealisations of the Romantics, Champfleury’s manifesto drew attention to the modest goals of Courbet’s art: its simple aim to ‘represent the customs, the ideas, the appearance of [his] times’, without prejudice or value judgement. As Champfleury later argued in a volume of essays simply titled Realism (1855), Courbet had extended the range of art by depicting figures normally deemed unworthy of artistic treatment: captives of misery, socially outcast and common in appearance. Such lowly figures attain in the latter’s paintings (and the critic is thinking here of works such as ‘A Burial at Ornans’, 1850) not only a dignity and vitality which transfigures their poverty; they also acquire a human representative value that transforms them into agents of Courbet’s ‘tactile allegory’ (allégorie réelle). By focussing upon the here and now, and upon the materials that surround us in the ordinary world, Realism has made possible, Champfleury contends, the expansion of the aesthetic into the social.[17]

 

Champfleury’s enthusiasm was, however, not shared by all. There were many detractors from Realism, and none more enigmatic than Gustave Flaubert. His position within the Realist movement is a paradoxical one: his Madame Bovary embodies many of the defining traits of the Realist novel: narrative objectivity, a focus upon the banal and quotidian, an accurate reconstruction of milieu, and, above all, a fundamental pessimism regarding the ability of the individual to assert himself (and, more particularly, herself) in the face of an uncomprehending and indifferent world. And yet, Flaubert repeatedly distanced himself from the Realist movement, rejecting it on account of its ‘materialism’ and populist tendencies, and stressed that Madame Bovary was above all a work of style. Equally dismissive was the poet Baudelaire who, in his famous review of Flaubert’s novel praised for it because he saw it as a transfiguration of reality, calling Realism ‘a degrading insult flung in the face of all analytical writers, a vague and over flexible term applied by indiscriminate minds to the minute description of detail rather than to a new method of literary creation’. The reservations of Baudelaire and Flaubert (uncompromisingly elitist in their aesthetic standards) were, however, balanced by expressions of support for the Realist project from other French writers, who felt artistically liberated by it and stressed the new possibilities unleashed by the widening scope of its subject matter that growing urbanisation and industrialisation had made possible. For writers such as Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola, the Realist (or, as it was soon to be named, the Naturalist) novel provided an exemplary medium in which a ‘social examination’ of contemporary society might, through ‘analysis and psychological research’, be carried out, allowing the novel to reach the status of ‘contemporary moral history’. With Realism (the Goncourts concluded), literature had finally come to undertake ‘the studies and obligations of science’.[18]

 

The Goncourts’ reference to science was neither incidental nor accidental. The Romantics had largely evolved their conceptual framework out of the German Idealism of Kant, Schelling and Schleiermacher, who had largely construed the world as the product of hermeneutic interpretation, the result of the active and creative agency of a perceiving feeling individual self. The Realists, however, looked to an entirely different set of thinkers, not philosophers but sociologists, economists, psychologists, architects of the new ‘sciences humaines’ who believed not in the ethereal workings of subjectivity but in the mechanical, the deterministic, and the quantifiable. The most influential figures were August Comte (sociology), Charles Darwin (evolutionary theory), Thomas Huxley (eugenics), Karl Marx (political economy) and Hippolyte Taine (intellectual history). In France, it was Comte who provided the most influential paradigm: Positivism. In his Course in Positivist Philosophy (1842), he wrote fulsomely about the victorious march of science, which had come to replace firstly theology and then metaphysics as the dominant form of knowledge in the Western world. Comte’s insistence that true ‘positive’ knowledge can only be based on observable facts, on ‘natural laws, the discovery of which, and their reduction to the least possible number, is the aim and end of all our efforts’, received further elaboration through Ernest Renan and Hippolyte Taine, who showed how the Positive method could be applied to the realm of ideas and to matters as intangible as culture and art. In his famous introduction to A History of English Literature (5 volumes, 1863-1869), Taine argued that a work of literature was subject to three conditioning factors: the racial identity of the author (la race), his or her social, political and geographical environment (le milieu), and the historical juncture at which he or she wrote (le moment). Here, environmental determinism, which had been an assumption throughout Comte’s work, was developed into a full-blown methodology. Taine’s assertion that ‘vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar’ became a catchphrase for a generation of writers seeking to distance themselves from the idealism of the Romantic tradition.[19]

 

Almost all the great novelists of the nineteenth century came within the ambit of this new scientific spirit, none more so than Balzac. As is evident from the preface to his novel sequence, The Human Comedy (published between 1829 and 1848), Balzac hoped to reproduce in the area of literature the insights won by contemporary scientists, such as the noted zoologist, Geoffroi Saint-Hilaire, and natural historian, Charles Bonnet. Just as they had approached the animal kingdom through a taxonomy of types, so too would Balzac attempt to classify the ‘human animal’, detailing how it behaves within the social sphere, following ‘the rudiments of the great law of Self for Self, which lies at the root of Unity of Plan’, and which organises all animal life around urges of self-preservation, self-aggrandizement and material acquisition. In the carrying out these scientific goals, the novelist becomes (Balzac assures us, alluding to his own project) not only a ‘narrator of the dramas of private life, an archaeologist of social furniture, a cataloguer of professions, [and] a registrar of good and evil’, but also an analyst and discloser of the ‘causes’ that bring these ‘social effects’ into being.[20]

 

Other European novelists were influenced by scientific thinking, including George Eliot (in England), Theodor Fontane (in Germany) and Ivan Turgenev (in Russia). The attitude of Eliot to the growth of scientism and to its application to the social sphere was complex. She remained alive throughout her life to the potentially destabilising effect of scientific theory upon religious and ethical values but, nevertheless, was able to appreciate the importance of the work carried out by naturalists such as Charles Lyell (Principles of Geology, 1833), whose organicist methodology she saw as demonstrating ‘the working of laws by which the earth has become adapted for the habitation of man’, a reading that was to influence the way Eliot in her novels described her characters and how they related to their environments. Fontane’s greatest influence was Ludwig Feuerbach. The latter’s anthropological theology (formulated in The Essence of Christianity, 1841), which took its cue not from ideas or spiritual values but ‘from the opposite of thought, from Matter, from existence, from the senses’, formed a central part of Fontane’s own humanism and an essential part of his Realist art. The Russian Realist, Turgenev, on the other hand, took the contrary path, away from the empiricist humanism of Eliot and Fontane, towards a darker, less optimistic encounter with the new scientific spirit of the age. His mentor was Vissarion Belinsky, the major viaduct in mid-nineteenth century Russia for Western ideas, an exponent of ‘science, progress, humanity, [and] civilisation’. Turgenev, however, became increasingly disaffected with the cult of scientific inquiry, believing, as he made clear in his famous novel, Father and Sons (1862), that the rationalist-analytical ethos had degenerated into an arrogant and nihilistic credo, which was being used by Russian youth (such as the hero of that novel, Bazarov) to support its destructive campaign against tradition and natural piety.[21]

 

No such doubts beset the French writer, Émile Zola. His work represents the most ambitious attempt made in the nineteenth century to combine literature with scientific inquiry. In his extended novel series, the Rougon-Macquart cycle (published between 1871 and 1893), Zola set out not only to paint a detailed picture of life in the Second Empire, much as Balzac had done for Restoration France, but also to demonstrate his faith in a fundamentally new way of conceptualising behaviour and human character. Zola took his cue from the French behaviourist, Claude Bernard, who had argued in his Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865) that psychology should be seen not only as a mental process, but also as an expression of physiology, being a product of the biological and genetic make-up of the individual. Such theories, it is true, were not new: Taine had elaborated his own views on environmental determinism several years earlier. What was original was the demonstrated quality of Bernard’s work: its detailing of the personal and medical connections between social generality and the specificity of individual behaviour, which combine, according to Bernard, to make possible a composite science of ‘physiology, pathology and therapeutics’. Out of this methodology, Zola developed his ‘experimental novel’, the terms of which he outlined in the famous preface to the second edition of his Thérèse Raquin (1868), and in essays such as The Experimental Novel (1880). Here we learn that great novelists, such as Balzac, do not simply ‘photograph’ reality, but seek rather to uncover the deeper causes, rules and laws which govern behaviour. As Zola explains: for the novelist, ‘the whole operation consists in taking facts from nature, then studying the mechanisms of the data by acting on them through a modification of circumstances and environment without ever departing from the laws of nature. At the end, there is knowledge, scientific knowledge, of man in his individual and social action’.[22]

 

Zola’s Naturalist method represented the culmination of the Realist aesthetic in the nineteenth century. The clinical objectivity of his writing, and the focus upon previously taboo areas of experience, influenced an entire generation of writers, from Gerhart Hauptmann (Before Sunrise, 1889) in Germany, through to George Gissing (New Grub Street, 1891) in England, Henrik Ibsen (Ghosts, 1882) in Norway, and August Strindberg (The Father, 1890) in Sweden. In their work, Realism elides into a complex social philosophy, deterministic, Darwinistic, and fatalistic. The growing dominance of the social sphere over the personal, a process that the great Realist novelists charted in France, England and Russia, has now been fully internalised by characters whose very psychological coherence and sense of self have been destroyed by the irremediable effects of syphilis, alcoholism or genetic weakness. As Strindberg noted with respect to his own problematical creations: ‘living in a period of transition more feverishly hysterical than its predecessor’, these ‘heroes’, ‘vacillating, disintegrated’, ‘scraps of humanity’, the products of a cheap and debased culture, no longer possess the heroic grandeur of Julien Sorel or Emma Bovary (who at least harboured the desire to be individuals), but face the world convinced from the very start of the hopeless nature of human action and the redundancy of all ideals, social, political and ethical. With such characters, we reach the end of the Realist trajectory, and the beginning of a new one, called Modernism. Its major exponents, such as Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, will attempt, modestly and not without philosophical reservations, to re-invest the individual with a modicum of self-determination and intellectual self-sufficiency, reclaiming in their work the viability of subjective experience out of the apparently unfathomable depths into which it had been placed a generation before by the exponents of the Naturalist method.[23]

 

 

3. Vox populi:

Popular Literature in the Age of Realism

 

Unlike Romanticism, which largely cultivated a minority aesthetic, intended only for those sensitive enough to understand and absorb its rarefied idiom, Realism sought to meet the reader on his or her own terms: it was demotic, populist; it engaged with the concerns of ordinary people, took the dramas of their private lives seriously, explored sexual and domestic relationships, and concerned itself with the legal entanglements of marriage and divorce, of property, politics and the machinations of power, and did not shy away from matters that the Romantics would have regarded as vulgar and grossly unworthy of literary treatment, such as money. Realism had been called forth through a growing population that had come to enjoy better health, greater prosperity, higher rates of literacy (made possible through the expansion of education as, for example, in England by the 1870 the Education Act), and a greater participation in politics and the running of the state (as evinced by the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 in England, and the granting of full male suffrage in Greece in 1830, in Spain in 1869 and in Germany in 1871). These changes were not only reflected in the Realist literature of the mid-to-late nineteenth century; they made that literature possible.

 

This was an age in which publishing entered an industrial mode, through the expansion of the book trade and through technical innovations such as mechanical typecasting and typesetting (duplicating set type, so that popular books could be reprinted without resetting), improved methods of reproducing illustrations and the production of cheaper materials through papermaking machines. More efficient systems of distribution, such as the use of railways, helped bring down the price of books and expanded the market for literature. At the same time, the rationalisation of the book trade took place through the founding of publishing houses such as Routledge and Macmillan (in England), Hachette (France) and Reclam and Cotta (Germany), and the establishment of the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland in 1895. The formation of the Society of Authors in 1884 in England helped facilitate fair dealing over contracts and the payment of royalties to authors. Through the Berne Convention of 1885, copyright was put on a firmer base through a uniform international system. During the same period, the reading market expanded, as witnessed not only by the increase in book sales to individual readers but also through circulating libraries, such as Mudie’s Lending and Subscription Library, formed in 1852 in England, and in Germany Reclam’s Universal-Bibliothek, established in 1867. In 1849 the publishing house Routledge started the first Railway Library, catering to the ever-increasing market for travelling readers.

 

These changes in the book industry went in tandem with the emergence of new ways of writing and new types of literature. In England, this gave rise to two discrete but thematically related genres: the ‘penny dreadful’ and the ‘triple-decker’ novel. Some best-selling penny dreadfuls, such as Varney the Vampire, or; the Feast of Blood (1847), co-authored by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest, drew upon the Gothic, depicting a dark and foreign world where unnatural acts were perpetrated (often with clearly erotic undertones) on feminine innocence; whilst others, including The Blue Dwarf (1861) by Esther Hope, and Edward Viles’ Black Bess; or, the Knight of the Road (1868), depicted the fate of notorious criminals, such as the highwayman, Dick Turpin, who features in both narratives as half villain, half hero. The String of Pearls (1850), written by Rymer and Prest, featured the notorious barber Sweeny Todd (who murdered his clients while shaving them), and whose garish deeds are accompanied in the text, in a way that was normal for the genre, by vivid visual depictions.

 

Triple-decker novels (Walter Scott’s Kenilworth, published in 1821, was the first) also depicted sensational events (hence their alternative designation as ‘sensation’ novels), and were issued in monthly parts and often framed by advertisements, news reports, critical articles and reviews. Triple-decker novels, because their vast wordage alone, made use of extensive character networks and complicated plots, which typically reached their conclusion through marriage, the acquisition of property or the disclosure of hereditary background. Their dénouements were often left open to encourage readers to buy the next volume. Such novels combined a variety of fictional genres, from domestic melodrama and crime thrillers to historical novels and studies of contemporary life (‘social issue’ novels). Their diverse themes were sentimental and yet often factually based (at times on ‘documentary’ evidence), and exploited elaborately scientific discourses, particularly in forensic matters. Plots involved characters that were either respectably English, often from the upper class, or exotic, from distant climes and hence morally dubious. Some novelists, such as Edward Bulwer Lytton, produced work across all of these genres. His first novel, Pelham; or, Adventures of a Gentleman (1828), which depicts the progress through society of a quintessential character of the age, ‘a fop and a philosopher, a voluptuary and a moralist’, brought him public acclaim and established his reputation as a sharp observer of contemporary mores, a reputation that he consolidated through his next novel, the political-satirical Godolphin (1833).[24] Bulwer Lytton’s subsequent fame lay, however, as an historical novelist with The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), Rienzi: Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835) and Harold, the Last of the Saxons (1848), which dramatised heroic moments (and obviously concluding ones) from the past, for a Victorian readership in search of role models for the present.

 

Some writers exploited multiple genres within a single novel, such as William Harrison

Ainsworth, whose Rookwood (1834) combined romance, the Gothic, murder, intrigue and preoccupations with family inheritance, in a rich narrative that included characters taken from the penny dreadful, such as Dick Turpin; whilst Charles Reade’s rather more substantial Hard Cash: A Matter-of-Fact Romance (1863) drew on the penny dreadful tropes of maritime adventure, pirates and shipwrecks before proceeding to deal with the more serious theme of sanity and the treatment of the insane within the context of nineteenth century medical health practices. Two of the most popular English female novelists of the period, Mary Braddon and Ellen Wood, took the domestic environment as the setting for their novels imbuing, as in Wood’s Danesbury House (1860) and East Lynne (1861), her largely upper-class environments with an almost oppressive atmosphere, the result of unhappy marriages, the premature death of children, contestations for power and the family inheritance, doubts regarding paternity, and jealousy and marital hatred: it is a world of grim entrapment, a fatalistic universe reminiscent of Greek tragedy. Such works were viewed as ‘sensational novels’ because of the degree and frequency of the transgressions described in them, as, for example, in Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), which treats of bigamy, the desertion of children and murder of husbands. The novel might be read as an anti-patriarchal text, but any latent feminism it possesses was undone in her next novel, The Doctor’s Wife (1864), which was effectively a rewrite of Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, but this time from the point of view of a female protagonist who, in spite of her wish fulfilments, leaves the conventions of moneyed patriarchy entirely unchallenged.

 

Ultimately, the distinction between ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ fiction in the nineteenth century is a slim one (and arguably the product of the canon building of later literary historians). Novelists that we now regard as ‘major’ wrote fiction that was ‘popular’, Charles Dickens, for example, with The Pickwick Papers (1837), whose the episodes were serialised in monthly instalments, and Thomas Hardy, whose Desperate Remedies, published anonymously in 1871, employed many of the devices of the popular novel: births out of wedlock, the off-spring of aristocrats whose aristocratic paternity has been kept from them, blackmail, impersonation and the exchange of identity, improbable coincidences, violence, theft and murder. Other ‘popular’ novels have transcended their popular status and have come to be accepted as important works. This is the case with Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860), a novel of insanity, of love, betrayal, subterfuge, guilty secrets, exotic villains and inherited money, whose narrative is told by multiple narrators. The novel’s frequent movement between enigma and resolution anticipates the genre of the detective story proper that Collins was to go on to write in The Moonstone (1868), which provided in its array of what are now familiar characters (the incompetent police versus the insightful amateur sleuth) and in its complex plot (the use of the red herring and the sudden revelation in the dénouement), a model for subsequent works in the genre of the ‘who done it?’, but it did so within a sophisticated narrative that questions notions of personal identity and the knowledge of selfhood.

 

Popular fiction in England reflected the society from which it came and its particular type of readership, with its characteristic values, interests, aspirations, obsessions and phobias, which were the product of that society. Writers elsewhere in Europe exploited the themes of popular fiction but refracted them through their own national psyches, as with the Italian, Edmondo de Amicis (Military Life in Italy, 1868, and Heart, 1886), the Swedish novelist, Viktor Rydberg (The Freebooter of the Baltic, 1857, Singoalla, 1858), and the Hungarian, Zsigmond Kemeny (The Widow and her Daughter, 1857, The Fanatics, 1859). These were works that combined the exotic and the historical, the sentimental and the profane, and often possessed a strong moral point embedded in their melodramatic narratives. But the countries that excelled in the production of popular literature were the countries that also excelled in industrial expansion: Great Britain and France (and, after its unification in 1871, Germany). In France, Alexandre Dumas achieved fame by providing a romanticised version of episodes from French history in The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1848), an idiom continued by his son in the romance The Lady of the Camellias (1845), which later became a popular success when performed as a play in the Theatre Vaudeville in Paris.

 

This movement not only across genres (historical fiction and romance, for example) but also across modes of publication (the novel and drama) was a defining characteristic particularly of French popular culture in the nineteenth century, as Henri Murger’s Scenes from Bohemian Life (1847–49) illustrates. Originally published as a set of stories, it became a play and finally the libretto for Puccini’s opera La Bohème (1896). Set amidst a group of ‘bohemians’ (aspiring artists) living in Paris, Scenes from Bohemian Life is formed around the romance between Rodolfo and Mimì, which ends when she dies of tuberculosis. But what might have been simply a mawkish melodrama is transformed by the energy and humour of the characters who, in spite of their poverty, life live to the full, basking in their social displacement and distance from the bourgeois world. Murger’s work deals with the familiar theme of love blighted by the illness and death of the loved one; but the emotive range of the work is broader than is usual in such works, moving across comedy and tragedy, sentimental evocation and social comment. Running throughout Scenes from Bohemian Life is a sympathy and respect for the disadvantaged and a conviction that they too have a right to self-affirmation. It is an ethos that emerges even more persuasively in two other popular works of this period: Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris, a serial novel published in ninety parts between 1842 and 1843, and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862). The poor, who too often appear in the English fiction of this period either as a ‘Lumpenproletariat’, vagrant and potentially dangerous, or simply as objects of pity for the gaze of a middle-class readership, are granted in Hugo’s novel a self-determining agency (and it is significant that they provide the title for the novel). In the many essays that criss-cross the plot, Hugo’s vents passionate position on religion, the state, architecture, transport, poverty and the homeless of Paris, those destined to live in a ‘physical and spiritual night’, but who now find their fleeting moment of glory in Hugo’s epic novel.[25]

 

It was not until the late-nineteenth century that the social issues broached by Sue and Hugo in France, and Dickens in England, could find expression in the drama of Shaw, Ibsen and Hauptmann. In England drama was slow to free itself from the prohibitive effects of censorship and government scrutiny. Until 1843, the restrictions of the Licensing Act of 1737 meant that plays could be performed at only two theatres in London: Drury Lane and Covent Garden. These monopolies were eventually revoked by the Theatres Act of 1843, allowing an expansion in the number of theatres in London from nineteen in 1851 to sixty-one in 1899. Nineteenth century theatre was dominated by actor-managers, such as Henry Irving, Charles Kean and Beerbohm Tree, who ran the theatres and played the leading roles. Although Shakespeare received frequent performance, light comedies, operas and pantomimes were also popular, together with translations of French farces. The most successful dramatists were James Planché, (The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles, 1820, Charles XII; or, The Siege of Stralsund, 1828), the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault (London Assurance, 1841, and The Corsican Brothers, 1852) and T. W. Robertson (David Garrick, 1864, Caste, 1867).

 

These playwrights were the authors of ‘melodrama’ (a term formed from the Greek ‘melos’, meaning song or music, and ‘drama’, meaning action), which first appeared in France in the late-eighteenth century to characterise plays in which orchestral music and song were used to accompany the plots. Later melodramas such as those by René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (The Dog of Montarges, 1814) and Louis-Charles Caigniez (The False Alexis; or, Marriage by Vengeance, 1807) retained the emotive and sensationalist themes of the earlier works, with romantic triangles and bigamous marriages, and plots that were built around often phrenetic action and extreme behaviour and often involved heroines in physical or moral danger. Characterisation in such plays was simple: protagonists who were either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Melodrama was formulaic: it followed a prescribed acting style and predictable scenarios, and made use of striking scenic effects made possible by increasingly sophisticated stage equipment. The plot moved forward through stock devices, such as the giving of false information, well placed coincidences, misdirected letters, characters in disguise, the revelation of long forgotten deeds in the past, and the deus ex machina of the strategic appearance of a person long since thought dead. Melodrama set out to shock by presupposing a world of ‘normal’ values, which it then depicted being transgressed, often in violent or morally outrageous ways. Readers were drawn into this fabricated world through empathy with the characters and through the experience of outrage at their fates. Melodrama have been superficial in its portrayal of character, unsubtle in its language and simplistic in its morality, and yet it was precisely because of this that it appealed to its audiences, who wished to see that in life’s struggle good would eventually triumph against evil, right against wrong, the virtuous underdog against the (often socially superior) villain, in a world that, contrary to appearances, was essentially founded on benevolence and providence, and could stand firm against evil.

 

France, whose theatres had enjoyed a greater freedom in the wake of the abolition of theatre monopolies in 1791, also witnessed an expansion of play-houses in the early nineteenth century, such as the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique and the Théâtre de la Gaîté in Paris. During this period, melodrama slowly gave way in popularity to the plays of Eugene Scribe and Georges Feydeau, authors of the ‘well-made play’ (la pièce bien faite). This was a tightly constructed dramatic unit: the plot moved forward in a chain of actions using minor reversals of fortune to create suspense, building towards a scene a climactic reversal of fortune, a dénouement (literally, an ‘unravelling’), in which the hero triumphed, and all remaining mysteries were resolved. All was sustained by witty dialogue, executed with a care for mise en scène and illusionist detail Strictly speaking, the well-made play was simply a less crude and better organised form of melodrama, retaining many of the devices of the latter but weaving them into a logically consequential form, and constructed according to a formula, which the British critic William Archer described in detail in his book, Play-Making (1912), analysing its key components into what ‘an audience expects and ardently desires’, and what the ‘logic’ of the play requires.[26]

 

The well-made play celebrated the well-made world of the nineteenth century, which was founded on the entrepreneurial energy and aggressive self-confidence of the bourgeois class in its financial, political and private spheres. It drew successive generations of audiences into the domestic machinations of private lives, and into the uncritical acceptance of this world that possessed a solid reality that was made even more real by the shoddy nature of its power politics and sexual mores as in Eugène Scribe’s Glass of Water (1842), Émile Augier’s The Fourchambault (1879), Georges Feydeau’s Hotel Paradiso (1894) or, to choose a Spanish example of the genre, Adelardo Lopez de Ayala’s The New Don Juan (1863). This is not to argue that these plays were uncritical of their subject matter. On the contrary, these plays brought to the fore the hypocrisy, sexual duplicity and amoral careerism that was a part of private and professional ethics in the age of industry and empire, cultivating a satirical perspective, but they did so by translating the inner contradictions and moral shortcomings of this world into vaudeville or bedroom farce. The well-made play remained a model for playwrights up to and beyond the turn of the century, and was used even by those who rejected the values that underscored the genre. But as Oscar Wilde, whose A Woman of No Importance (1893) and The Importance of Being Ernest (1895) also belong to the popular drama of the age, would discover the artist could not depict the solidity of the bourgeois world whilst transgressing, on the stage or in his life, its morality, however duplicitous.

 

 

4. ‘Lost Illusions’:

Realism and the Experience of the City

 

The Realist project begins and ends with the city. Real or imagined, delimiting or exhilarating, complex or monolithic, the city dominated the imagination of almost every writer in the nineteenth century. Balzac had Paris, now evoked as the site of Darwinian struggle, now as that ‘shining world’ of prosperity and rewards, whose bounty the youthful Rastignac (hero of Old Goriot) commits himself to possessing, even by sexual force. Dostoyevsky felt haunted by the infinitely more sinister, almost Kafkaesque world of St. Petersburg, ‘the most abstract, the most deviously-minded, city on this terrestrial sphere of ours’, whose dark corners and labyrinthine ways, (moral and geographical) he explored in Letters from the Underground (1864) and Crime and Punishment (1866). Dickens depicted London, both as a world of sombre contrast between poverty and wealth, destitution and achievement, and as a pulsating metropolis, a commercial, administrative and industrial centre, and part of the ‘mighty course of civilisation and improvement’ that defined progress in the nineteenth century. And Jan Neruda (the most accomplished Czech novelist of this period) explored the city of Prague, caught somewhere in time between the medieval period and early modernity, in his Tales of the Little Quarter (1878). Even in those novels set in the countryside or in the provinces, such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Fontane’s Effi Briest, the city is often present, not as a material reality but as a set of internalised values, dreams, wish fulfilments and fantasies. Like Effi in Fontane’s novel, these heroines are fired by ‘a deep longing’ to escape from the limitations of patriarchal conservative society, wishing to flee to the city, in whose cosmopolitanism and exotic culture they dimly glimpse the chance for autonomy and self-realisation. [27]

 

The Realist novelist could hardly have avoided confrontation with the city. Between 1802 (the year of publication of Novalis’ Henry from Ofterdingen, and Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’), and 1881 (the year in which Flaubert published his last novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet), the major cities of Europe went through a process of massive and unparalleled expansion: London grew from a population of 864,000 to 3.3 million; Paris, from 547,000 to 2.2 million; and Berlin, from 183,000 to 1.1 million. With these increases came a plethora of industrial, social, and medical problems, whose impact upon the social fabric of the nation seriously threatened to undermine the ethical and political communality of societies that had (as Ferdinand Tönnies argued in his Community and Society, 1877) broken with the traditional ties of pre-modern Europe without finding an alternative source of order and legitimation. In England, it was Dickens who engaged most directly with the problems associated with the changing social and physical environment of a swiftly urbanising nation. Dickens attitude to the city was a complex and, ultimately, ambiguous one. He shared the concern of humanists such as Godwin and Carlyle with the factory poor and the destitute, focussing upon the Lumpenproletariat, those dark figures of Victorian life, who, living on the edge of society, subsisted either on crime or charity. He also documented how the ‘labouring classes’ (upon whose energies, after all, England’s rapid industrial transformation had been based) were treated with scant respect, forced to lead abject lives amidst the ‘foul smells, disgusting habitations, bad workshops and workshop customs, want of light, air, and water, the absence of all easy means of decency and health’. In Oliver Twist (1838) and Bleak House (1853), Dickens injected into his account of urban poverty a tactile immediacy, a feel for the colours, smells, and sounds of deprivation, which was to make him famous throughout Europe, and encourage writers as diverse as Maupassant and Dostoyevsky to acknowledge him as the master of urban Realism. But as Hard Times (1854), set in the imaginary industrial landscape of Coketown, demonstrated, Dickens was also aware of the political, social and even intellectual causes of this deprivation. The novel is a bitter satire upon the ethos of Utilitarianism, but also (by implication at least) upon the profit motive, increasing productivity and the mindless accumulation of wealth upon which the economy of nineteenth century England was based. Uncaring in its impact and rigid in its application, laissez faire liberalism had produced an industrial system both inhuman and chaotic, its curious combination of functionalism and anarchy writ large in the ‘wilderness of smoke and brick’, that ‘dense formless jumble’ which oppresses the inhabitants of Coketown.[28]

 

And yet even here all is not loss; for running in tandem with Dicken’s bleak analysis of industrialised England was both a recognition of the importance of modernisation, and an admiration for its material achievements, evident in the new buildings, roads and railways that were coming to dominate the urban landscape. This is less obvious in Hard Times (whose focus is not London but the monotonous industrial North), but it forms an essential element of novels such as Dombey and Son (1848) and Our Mutual Friend (1865). Dombey and Son retrieves the city as the place of dynamic movement, of progress, whose material advances Dickens welcomed even as he despaired of their human cost to society. None can resist those vital energies that exist at the ‘heart of this great change’; those ‘throbbing currents’ of the new age: electricity, the railway and entrepreneurial zeal. They disrupt and displace, but provide, nevertheless, the city with ‘its life’s blood’, without which the modern world cannot live or prosper.[29]

 

The city opened up possibilities for some, as it closed them down for others, providing the social site for that evolutionary struggle that Herbert Spencer and others saw as an inescapable force within the life process. And this is how Balzac depicted his Paris of the Second Empire (French society between 1815 and 1848) in his compendious Human Comedy: not as Dickens had done, as an industrial, urban reality which put human kind and human values in danger simply through the expansion of its internal mechanical logic, but as a sphere of moral and immoral action, the source of a bewildering array of ethical, financial and sexual challenges that the individual must meet if he or she is not to go under. Like other great Realist novelists, Balzac also described his city with detail and accuracy, believing in the determining nature of the material environment to which he tied his characters (as in the famous description of Grandet’s house in Eugénie Grandet, 1833) in a process of symbolic symbiosis (the appearance of the house reflects the values and behaviour of its inhabitants); but Balzac’s gaze (as his near contemporaries, the brothers Goncourt observed) was also capable of penetrating beneath the surface of urban society, of uncovering its underlying values and mores: ‘the fact beneath the word, the anarchy of unbridled interests beneath the apparent order in the competition of talents’. Balzac’s world was that of nascent bourgeois France, which witnessed ‘abuses replaced by influences, privileges by more privileges, [and] equality before the law annihilated by inequality before’; in other words, the aristocracy of birth replaced by the plutocracy of money. Balzac was both the semi-official historian of this society, and one of its greatest admirers.[30]

 

The focus upon wealth, the struggle for its acquisition and the moral sacrifices that must be made in the process, appears in each of the subdivisions into which Balzac divided his novelistic output: ‘scenes from private life’, ‘scenes from provincial life’, ‘scenes from Parisian life’, ‘scenes from political life’, ‘scenes from military life’ and ‘scenes from country life’. This was a sequence of novels (an early model for the roman-fleuve) written in a style that captured with verve and empathy the energetic forward and upward momentum of French society and, which read in conjunction with his ‘philosophical studies’ and ‘analytical studies’, provided a nuanced picture of life in nineteenth century France which the Marxist philosopher, Friedrich Engels (amongst others) held to be ‘superior to all purely historical accounts of the period’. Novels such Father Goriot (1835), Lost Illusions (1843) and Cousin Bette (1846) articulate their own version of Realpolitik, seen now not as the political or military ethos of force majeur, but as a form of moral pragmatism underscoring behaviour in the social and personal spheres. As the criminal Vautrin advises in Old Goriot: ‘Paris, you see, is like a forest in the New World, where you have to deal with a score of varieties of savages – Illinois and Hurans, who live on the proceeds of their social hunting’. It is a lesson that all of Balzac’s heroes must learn, such as Lucien de Rubempré in the aptly named Lost Illusions, who comes to Paris dreaming of art only to discover that nothing (written or made) has value beyond its market price: lyrical poetry must needs survive as journalism. Lucien recognises the new rules of the game but fails, ultimately, to master them, returning to his provincial origins in a mood of despair that brings him to the brink of suicide. Where de Rubempré fails, the young Eugene de Rastignac, the hero of Old Goriot, succeeds. As a witness to misplaced paternal love and daughterly avariciousness, he soon learns that simple moral virtues are out of place in a world that prizes status over duty, wealth over fait and social extravagance over moral integrity. In the famous last scene of the novel, looking out beyond the fresh grave of Goriot to the glittering night-scape of Paris, Balzac’s young hero commits himself (in a gesture of typical bravado) to mastering this society, winning from her, through an act of ‘pillage’, the rewards that she has to offer.[31]

 

Balzac and Dickens represented the two poles around which the connection between the novel and society was formed in the nineteenth century. Writers such as William Makepeace Thackery (Vanity Fair, 1848), Anthony Trollope (The Way We Live Now, 1875), and George Meredith (The Egoist, 1879), in England; Wilhelm Raabe (Chronicle of Sparrow Lane, 1857), and Gustav Freytag (Debit and Credit, 1855), in Germany, and Péréz Galdós (Fortunata and Jacinta, 1887), Leopoldo Alas (La Regenta, 1885), and José Maria de Eça de Queiroz (The Maias, 1888), in Spain and Portugal, followed Dickens and Balzac in exploring the political and financial mores of their times. Their novels highlight the complex relationship between property, marriage and social advancement in the age of the amoral careerist and parvenu. And yet, for all the complications that define the personal and social tensions evoked in these novels (complications frequently reflected in their convoluted plot structures and elaborate character networks), the social problems that these texts explored were (so to speak) of a linear rather than a vertical nature; their plots develop upon the surface of a world, whose values, fought over, disputed and contested, belong, nevertheless, to the clear-cut priorities of money, power and sex. Elsewhere, however, in the nineteenth century novel, the city provided the context for the emergence of a set of deeper, more obscure values, which dwelt not on the centre stage of bourgeois society but in its wings. The novelists who engaged with these values focussed not upon the material component of urban culture but upon its effect upon personal identity, and when they spoke about the loss of illusions, they were referring not to the failure of an individual to secure his or her place in the world, but to that widespread feeling of alienation and disorientation that was coming to dominate the modern consciousness. Dickens had given glimpses of this structure of feeling, in his many depictions of the criminals, social outcasts and problematic natures who circulate in a shadowy way throughout his corpus; Baudelaire likewise had seen a certain majesty in the ‘poetry of evil’ that emanated from the demi-monde of his native Paris, whose sordid inclinations he had transformed through a highly personal aesthetic of symbolic correspondences. But it is only in the work of the three great Russian Realists, Ivan Turgenev, Nickolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoyevsky that (in Baudelaire’s words) ‘man approaches his bestial metamorphosis’, banned from the moral city to re-emerge on the edges of society as criminal, madman or saint.[32]

 

Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) focuses upon a character who represents this particular direction within European Realism: Yevgeny Bazarov. The latter is a representative of new Russian youth; confrontational, intellectually analytical and socially aggressive, he lives his life in ‘the absolute and ruthless repudiation’ of existing social norms, dismissive of all form of authority, personal and intellectual, a spiritual negativity that came in this period to be known as nihilism. Certainly, generational conflict was not new to the Realist novel: the major Hungarian novelist of this period, András Fáy, had written precisely about this theme in his epic study of social manners, The House of Bélteky (1832). Turgenev’s interests are, however, philosophical rather than domestic. Set at a critical moment in Russian history, when medieval serfdom is giving way to modern liberalism, Fathers and Sons uses the figure of Bazarov and his clash with the paternalistic conservative figure, Nikolai Kirsanov, to dramatise the tensions within the Russian propertied classes at this time. The latter are caught between delusions of grandeur and a debilitating perception of their own worthlessness, between spirituality and rationality, between a commitment to progress whilst harbouring an innate scepticism regarding the value of all material works, and have become the victims of inertia and spiritual turpitude.

 

In the Russian literature of this period, this mental set came to be identified with one protagonist above all: the character Oblomov from the novel of the same name by Ivan Alexander Goncharov, published in 1859. Long before Goncharov’s novel arrived on the scene, however, the same vagaries of the Russian soul had been depicted in the epic allegorical masterpiece, Dead Souls (1842), by Gogol. The title refers to the names of deceased serfs that the grasping hero of the novel, Chichikov, acquires to bolster the financial assets of his estate. But the novel (left incomplete at Gogol’s death) uses this Realist cue purely as a pretext for an extensive description, executed in exuberant and fantastic detail, of the individuals, classes and functionaries who thrived in the rural Russia of autocratic Tsar Nicholas I, and of the greed, cynicism, and ignorance that are the dominant values in that society. Many of the events described in Gogol’s novel border upon the absurd and, as such, represent an extension of the peculiar logic of disembodied consciousness that the author first explored in ‘Diary of a Madman’ (1835), ‘The Nose’ (1836) and ‘The Overcoat’ (1842). These stories introduce a new type of hero into European literature, characters who belong to the underworld of the self; the anonymous hero of the ‘Diary of a Madman’ calls himself an ‘absolute nobody’, and he means the term to be understood not only in social terms but existentially, as a definition of a personality that lacks any continuity of selfhood. Such characters are defined purely through negativities: madness, pain and (as in the case of Akaky Akakievich in ‘The Coat’) that ‘feeling of dread’ which borders upon the psychotic, often leaving the world as they enter it, without real identity, their downfalls or deaths left unobserved and unremembered.[33]

 

Gogol’s stories depict the contours of a type of alienated subjectivity that would only be fully developed in the novels of the greatest Russian Realist: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The moral relativism, intellectual nihilism and psychological insecurities explored by Turgenev and Gogol in their fiction find in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), The Devils (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) their most systematic treatment. The problems faced by the anonymous protagonist of the Letters from the Underground (1864) is typical of the plight that confronts all of Dostoyevsky’s heroes. He is ‘a man of the nineteenth century’, the product of an urban culture (in this case St. Petersburg), a denizen of a world in which the firm convictions of an older rural past have given way amongst many to insecurity, introversion and aboulia. A radical non-conformist, the man from the underground rejects all attempts to alleviate his misery. Degradation is the key note in the self-image of this figure, which he drains to the full, enjoying that ‘pleasure in a consciousness of his self-abasement’, cultivating those ‘unsatisfied wishes that forever penetrate inwards.’[34]

 

At one point in his confessional narrative, the man from the underground explains his personal philosophy: ‘I wish, in particular, to try and see whether one can ever be really open with oneself – ever be really fearless of any item of truth’. The issue of the ethical consequences not only of truth-saying but also of truth-doing informs Dostoyevsky’s entire oeuvre. It characterises the dialectic the author sets up between sin and expiation in Crime and Punishment, between social dejection and moral idealism in The Idiot, or between atheism and the emotional need for spiritual transcendence, explored in The Brothers Karamazov. All of these novels chart a path through a world dominated by the darkness created by scientific rationalism and ethical nihilism. But they do not leave us there; as with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (with whom he had clear affinities), Dostoyevsky often compels his characters and his readers alike to confront darkness in order to recognise the minimal existence of light. In this sense, his novels, in spite of their apparent pessimism, possess a positive core: they are attempts to win through (against the obvious lessons of Realism) to a new vision of a mankind, which will see it re-born out of its sufferings and its despair, prepared to meet the future, open to the possibilities of ‘gradual regeneration’ and of ‘initiation into a new unknown life’.[35]

 

 

5. The Limits of Subjectivity:

The (Female) Self and the Realist Novel

 

By 1815, the Napoleonic era had come to an end, and with it the period of revolutionary turmoil in European politics. In the age that was to follow, the radical politics of the sans culottes would give way to stability and order, military expansionism to religion, rampant individualism to Realpolitik, and a rapprochement would take place between a striving self-assertive bourgeois class and a precariously restored aristocracy. One of the closest observers of this age of transition was also one of the first major novelists of the Realist movement: Henri Marie Beyle, known as Stendhal. In his The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), Stendhal had depicted the historical transformation of the Napoleonic era, sketching the political and military events that had helped bring that age to an end. In his most famous novel, Scarlet and Black (1830), he engages with the same theme, not directly but symbolically, through the fate of its hero, the young parvenu, Julien Sorel. Sorel is one of the great representative characters of the early nineteenth century: with his elemental energy and force of personality, he clearly looks back both to the Byronic hero of European Romanticism, and to the revolutionary élan embodied in the French revolutionaries and Napoleon. That age has, however, (as Sorel soon realises) irrevocably gone. The dominant values now emanate not from the imperious and charismatic little Emperor, but from the calculating statesmanship of Metternich and his ilk. Sorel becomes accordingly a child of his times, socially mobile, cynical, and manipulative, donning the black of the ecclesiastical cassock over the scarlet of the soldier, giving full rein to those ‘transports of the most unbridled ambition’, which propel him out of his petit bourgeois background and into the new world of social privilege and aristocratic favour.[36]

 

Sorel lives between the two poles of Romantic self-assertiveness and cynical Realism, without ever reconciling them. In spite of his own mercurial rise, he ultimately becomes a victim both of the irrational and unpremeditated assertiveness that adheres to the former mode (and which is exemplified in his attempted murder of his former mistress), and of the moral relativism of the latter, where notions such as sincerity and play acting, truth and fiction, have become irretrievably intertwined. Even as his execution approaches, Stendhal’s hero remains unable to see that the ‘charlatanism’ and ‘hypocrisy’ (with which he claims to have been surrounded throughout his life) are, in fact, facets of his own personality, products of a careerist mind that has sought to reach its objectives not only through the exercise of will-power and sexual charm, but also (as Madame de Renal laconically notes) by making ‘use of phrases from novels’, which is also a source of Sorel’s rhetorical assertion of self.[37]

 

Julien Sorel awaits his execution and dies in a spirit of defiance, refusing all offers of mediation, viewing himself as a victim of that ‘middle-class aristocracy’ that has become the new ruling class in post-revolutionary France. In spite of his chosen tragic mode, Sorel does, however, come to understand that in the age of Realism romantic individualism is no longer capable of negotiating the limits that society imposes upon the ethos of self-assertion. In this respect, Stendhal’s hero anticipated the plight of many who would follow him, and who would likewise find themselves on the wrong side of history, or on the wrong side of an increasingly triumphalist bourgeois society: artists, criminals and women. Women, in particular, found that the libertarian political ethos espoused by men during the revolutionary period meant quite the opposite when applied to the personal or domestic sphere. As Stendhal noted elsewhere, women in post-revolutionary France were victims of educational and cultural ‘ignorance’, and unable to escape through legal and moral restraint from unhappy marriages held together through ‘fear of hellfire and religious sentiments’. Their predicament was to form a recurring point of focus in many of the novels of the nineteenth century, such as George Sand’s Indiana (1832), Carl Jonas Love Almquist’s Sara Videbeck and the Chapel (1839), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), Luigi Capuana’s Giacinta (1879), Benito Pérez Galdós’ Fortunata and Jacinta (1887), Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1894).

 

These novels raised issues that went well beyond the domestic sphere, with its necessarily narrow focus upon courtship, marriage and property, to engage with matters that centre on the absolute rights and possibilities of the individual for intellectual and emotional self-realisation. In the 1832 preface to Indiana, George Sand spoke for many women when she described the ‘powerful instinct of protest’ against patriarchal power, which led her to pit her heroine against ‘the injustice and barbarity of those laws which still govern women in marriage, in the family, and in society’, depicting in her novels female protagonists, ‘the powers of [whose] souls are drained in the ruthless combat with the reality of life’.[38] And yet, the final message of Indiana is a conservative one: the heroine of Sand’s novel survives by replacing one husband with another, resolving her sexual crisis by marrying the man who has helped free her from matrimonial control. In offering the reader such an ending, Sand, in the final analysis, leaves the institution of patriarchy both unexplained and intact. This is also the final effect of Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Péréz Galdós, Fortunata and Jacinta which, together with Leopoldo Alas’ La Regenta, formed the pinnacle of Realism in Spain. The former disperses its feminine consciousness across not one but two female protagonists: Jane Eyre herself, who is an orphan, and displaced thus from social centrality; and the ‘mad woman in the attic’, who is the lawful wife of Mr Rochester, but unable to play out her domestic role in his life. In the end, Jane comes to bridge these inclusive-exclusive notions of female identity, becoming (almost literally) a part of her new but blind husband, encumbered with the duty of mediating between him and the world, a task which she fulfils without ‘painful shame or damping humiliation’. Fortunata and Jacinta, in Galdós’ novel, likewise represent two alternative models of female identity: the former is a girl of the people, warm, spontaneous, an earth-mother; Jacinta is middle-class, closed to experience and infertile. What they have in common is their affiliation to the spoilt, but self-confident bourgeois, Juanito Santa Cruz, who is the husband of the latter and the lover of the former. The novel revolves around this triangular relationship, and around the moral, familial and legal complications that it engenders. Fortunata never escapes the social stigma of her origins, and the restraining bonds of society are as clear in this novel as they are in the other great Realist novels of the nineteenth century; but Fortunata does finally find acceptance on her own terms, her transgressions tolerated by a conservative Catholic Spain where motherhood and the nurturing values of traditional femininity are invested with a quasi-religious mystique. As her husband Maxi explains at the end of the novel, after Jacinta’s burial, it is nature, not society, which is the final arbiter of human destiny, that ‘grandmother and teacher who rectifies the errors of those of her children who go astray’.[39]

 

Other heroines in the Realist novel experienced the confrontation between the potency of femininity and the containing nature of bourgeois morality with a greater, even tragic intensity. The social and ethical terms of this confrontation were most fully explored in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Fontane’s Effi Briest. The protagonists of these novels represent two divergent modes of female subjectivity: Effi is a confused mixture of naive romanticism and proprietorial pragmatism, who naively embraces the liberating potential of marriage to an older husband of status and wealth in a confused mixture of ‘love of pleasure and ambition’. Anna is a more substantial personality, self-questioning and self-liberating, and possessed by a greater sense of her personal identity. Where the two converge female characters is not only in the personal sources of their misery (which they seek to survive through adultery), but in the way that they come, at the end of their sorry tales, to internalise the patriarchal values that they have spent the greater part of their lives either consciously (Anna) or unconsciously (Effi) struggling against. What Effi and Anna must learn is that ethical values and social customs, embedded in religious, political and family institutions, are not simply minor obstacles to be overcome through a wilful and self-confident assertion of self, but are institutions which confine and, ultimately, define individual agency. Effi is made to understand by the conservative Fontane that the search for personal happiness is a form of egotistical utopianism, because it neglects ‘that something which forms society’: in this case, a Prussian code of honour that compels Effi’s husband, Instetten, to revenge himself on his wife’s ex-lover, and on his wife and child, six years after the brief act of adultery, entered into out of boredom and marital neglect, has taken place; whilst Anna finds herself forced into suicide, dying as the result of a similar categorical imperative, whose source lies in the reification of the notion of the family and familial duty, which she has offended by leaving husband and child, and whose observance constitutes (Tolstoy leads us to believe) ‘the meaning of life and human relations’. Anna Karenina must die, and with full consciousness of a guilt that raises the bonds of marriage to a religious mystery that cannot be questioned.[40]

 

The heroine of Flaubert’s novel also dies after a life spent in unsuccessful adultery, her claims to independence and identity left unrecognised by an estranged husband and a community intoxicated on Schadenfreude. Emma Bovary has neither the innocent charm of Effi Briest, nor the moral stature of Anna Karenin; she is petit bourgeois: a product of provincial France, a doctor’s wife, whose ambitions and fantasies have been nurtured on popular romance and sentimental fabulation. The limits imposed on the liberation of her sexuality emanate not from the rigid ethics of Prussian aristocracy, nor from the religious ties of Tolstoy’s holy family, but from the banal restrictions of country life: from grass roots puritanism, common jealousy and gossip. And yet, Emma is one of the few female protagonists of the nineteenth century novel to possess genuine psychological depth, enjoying an intensity of lived emotion that allows her to transcend both her intellectual shortcomings and the banalities that surround her. Every turn of her inner life, from her frustrations and feelings of impotence to her transports of amorous delight, are registered with nuance and subtlety by Flaubert’s famous narrative impassibilité, which creates the impression that we have unmediated access to the inner life of the character. Emma’s external world is reconstituted with equal technical proficiency. In the novels of Fontane and Tolstoy, the bourgeois world confronts the heroine as a hypertrophied set of rules, whose unimpeachable integrity is consolidated through their abstract ethereality; in Madame Bovary, the bourgeois ethos is reconstituted as a material culture, a stultifying regime of personal habit, public ritual and political custom. Flaubert charts the oppressive nature of this world, from the ‘fumes of nausea’ which emanate from the gross gastronomic dimensions of Emma’s domestic life, to the ‘sombre monotony’ and pomposity of the annual rural show, whose achievements range from grandiloquent celebrations of France’s industrial might to the more prosaic presentation of animal livestock. Emma, in the end, does die, becoming a victim of the quixotic, but not inauthentic, nature of her desires and complicated wish-fulfilments; but her failure casts as much doubt upon the largely male world that surrounds her, as it does upon her own personality, a fact that the public prosecutor, who brought Flaubert to court for offending public decency in his novel, would have recognised. For despite of Flaubert’s innate pessimism and his Olympian distance from his characters, his novel constitutes an argument for the moral necessity of revolt, even as it asserts (in the final analysis) the inevitability of its failure.[41]

 

 

6. Integration and Community:

Poetic Realism and the Bildungsroman

 

As Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Effi Briest showed, the Realist novel had as its focus the dissolution of the religious, moral and familial structures that had traditionally bonded individuals together. These novels gave expression to the centrifugal forces of the period, which they invested not in classes or institutions but in individuals whose desires, dreams and energies they offered as emblematic for the historical trend of the era. Not all Realists, however, accepted that trend, or sought to represent its corrosive moral thrust in their work. In Germany, a counter movement was taking place, known as Poetic Realism. Its exponents argued that literature did not have to restrict itself to representations of alienation and isolation, or entirely feature individuals torn through doubt, homelessness and sexual frustration, and prone to suicide, but could equally deal with integration and consensus, and with characters prepared to follow social custom and tradition, happy souls who recognise within themselves (in the words of Instetten in Effi Briest) ‘what has got to be done’. For the Poetic Realists, the external world exists not merely as the brute objectivity that Emma Bovary vainly strives against, caught as she is within the bleak environment of provincial France, but as a living reality that both moulds and is moulded by the individual in a process founded, as the Poetic Realist, Gustav Freytag, argued, upon ‘the secure basis of ethical feelings’.[42]

 

Germany, it is true, also had novelists who wrote about personal dislocation and social alienation: the work of Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow (The Woman who Doubted, 1835), Jeremias Gotthelf (The Black Spider, 1842) and Otto Ludwig (Between Heaven and Earth, 1855) communicates the pessimism and the same feel for social disintegration that can be found in the French and Russian Realists. But the Poetic Realists were more representative of the German literature of this period. Characteristically, they focussed not upon the urban, cosmopolitan context of the mainstream Realist novel, but upon the more parochial world of the small town or the village, where they hoped to find a source for stable political and moral values. In the work of its minor adherents, such as Karl Spitta, Alexander Weill and Joseph Rank, Poetic Realism produced a type of sentimental writing known as Biedermeier, but in the more substantial literature of the period, in Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (1809), Franz Grillparzer’s play Dream, a Life (1834) and in the poetry of Eduard Mörike (Poems, 1838), Poetic Realism gave voice to a more sophisticated philosophy, one which directed the individual away from the pains and confusions of city life, and towards the more manageable private sphere of home and domesticity. There, the individual, freed from the travails of external world, could cultivate the small joys of life, enjoy (as Mörike countenanced in his famous poem, ‘On a Lamp’) the ‘laughter’ and the ‘gentle spirit/ Of gravity’ that dwells within the simplest things and simplest events.[43]

           

German Poetic Realism remained largely tangential to the main development of European Realism, although it found an echo in other countries, notably in Scandinavia, where writers such as the Norwegians Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (The Fisher Maiden, 1868) and Jonas Lie (The Family at Gilje, 1883), combined a certain pastoralism with sharply observed studies of peasant and middle-class Norwegian life; Aleksis Kivi came to national prominence in Finland through his epic novel of rural life, Seven Brothers (1870), whilst the Dutch writer, Nicolaas Beets, continued the Poetic Realist tradition in his humorous scenes of social life, Camera Obscura (1839) . Poetic Realism did, however, give an impetus to one of the most important novelistic forms of the nineteenth century: the Bildungsroman (novel of personal development), such as Theodor Storm’s Immensee (1849), Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer (1857) and Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry (1855; revised 1879). These novels countermanded the centrifugal trends evident in French, Russian and, to a lesser extent, English Realism. Not dissonance and alienation, but integration and moral maturity form the focus of this writing, and when the authors of the Bildungsroman dealt with the conflict between individual and society, they did so to resolve it at a higher level in the final phases of their narratives. As the critic and philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey, was later to note: in the Bildungsroman ‘life’s dissonances and conflicts of life appear as transitions to be withstood by the individual on his way towards maturity and harmony’. One of the earliest examples of the genre was Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, which appeared in two volumes over a period of thirty years: Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship (1796), and Wilhelm Meister’s Travels (1821). Both novels are structured around a series of rites de passage, initiations, awakenings, lessons and experiences, which the young hero, must pass through if he is to reach maturity, and which initially halt, but then expedite, his journey through life. In the process, Wilhelm must overcome not only external obstacles, but internal ones as well: an intellectual self-sufficiency and egotism that allows him to acquire cultural attainment but not a balanced attitude to himself and others. It is only at the end of his journey that he proves able to unite the objective and subjective spheres, attaining that capacity for ‘sympathy, love and orderly free activity’, which (Goethe’s narrator assures us) is ‘the highest form to which man can develop’. [44]

 

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister might be read as a moral allegory rather than a novel: its roots lie in the schematic symbolism of German Romanticism rather than in the more material engagements that Realist authors made with the world. This imbalance is rectified in the two major Bildungsromane that followed Goethe’s early model: Stifter’s Indian Summer, and Keller’s Green Henry. On the surface, both novels espouse the moral direction of the Biedermeier movement: a belief in mental balance and self-restraint, a concern for justice, a love of simplicity and local life and a commitment to practical application in one’s immediate circle, values which provide, as Stifter noted in the foreword to his collection of short stories, Precious Stones (1853), ‘that gentle law that guides the human race’. Stifter regarded it as self-evident that such a law would exclude ‘powerful movements of the soul, the terrible eruption of anger, the desire for revenge, the inflamed spirit that presses for action, tears down, effects change, destroys, and in its agitation often surrenders its own life’, indeed, that entire gamut of highly-charged emotions that provided the staple diet of the Realist novel in England and France. In the place of such destructive (and self-destructive) passions, Stifter countenanced a greater feeling for the stability of the object world, for the spiritual integrity of nature and for human artefacts, both domestic and aesthetic, whose facticity does not confront the individual in the spirit of determining otherness (as it does in Madame Bovary), but reflects both human values and human intentionality. It is amongst such values that the protagonists of Stifter’s most famous novel, Indian Summer, move. The novel’s young hero, Heinrich Drendorf, learns through a series of life experiences to appreciate the immanence of the rational in the real, and to recognise the presence of moral qualities in even the most mundane actions and events. The completion of Drendorf’s spiritual journey is marked both by his acceptance into the home of his aristocratic mentor, von Risach, and by his marriage to Nathalie, an event which, in unifying the physical and spiritual in his nature, helps Risach see that there is an ‘order within ourselves’, which may remain hidden but can never be lost.[45]

 

Stifter’s novel is a semi-utopian idyll; as a narrative it possesses a chronological shape, a forward momentum; but as an intellectual statement it remains curiously static, initiating no new values, developing no new arguments, eschewing surprises, tension and suspense, fixing all attention on the perpetual here and now through the development of a number of key themes and leit motifs. The Realism that it gives voice to is a transcendental Realism which views (following Goethe’s famous sentiments) everything transitory as a parable. The smallest things are valued in Stifter’s novel because they, as much as the larger ones, derive their value from their fixed place in the cosmic order. Keller’s Green Henry (subtitled ‘a novel of development’) also expresses that ‘outgoing love for everything that has come about and lasts, a love which honours the rightness and the significance of everything and which feels the connection and the depth of the world’; but here the element of struggle that was missing in Stifter’s serene work comes to the fore. For its hero is a problematic and divided individual, self-conscious and aware of his limitations both as a man and as a putative artist. His achievements are both fewer and won with greater pain. Keller describes the trials and tribulations of Henry with clear auto-biographical sympathy until he reaches that point in his quest where, his artistic ambitions abandoned, and his relationships ruined through accident and poor judgement, Keller’s hero finds the consummation of his life in a return to a minor administrative post with the State. Here, amidst the calming atmosphere of rural Germany, he learns to carry out his humble duty ‘with modest but manifold effect, living in peace and quiet’, alone but content. His reward is not the perfection of sensibility that the heroes of other novels in the genre achieve, but the attainment of self-consciousness, which he now exercises in the form of a retrospective analysis of his life.[46]

 

The novel of personal cultivation was not the sole property of German writers; in England, Dickens (David Copperfield, 1850, and Great Expectations, 1861), George Meredith (The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, 1859) and Samuel Butler (The Way of all Flesh, written between 1873 and 1884; published 1903), all brought elements of the genre into their work, as did Flaubert in his second novel, Sentimental Education (1869) (albeit in a largely ironic fashion). In England, the uniquely ethical worldview that underscored the Bildungsroman found its most convincing representation in the novels of Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility, 1811, Pride and Prejudice, 1813, and Mansfield Park, 1814). On the surface, these novels appear to move within the familiar terrain of Poetic Realism: the domestic sphere, romance and marriage, the small town and rural setting, a world that is largely motivated by the familiar ethos of ‘elegance, propriety, regularity, [and] harmony’, values which allow personal relationships and the paths of courtship to be negotiated around the twin poles of personal attraction and social standing. But that Austen’s poetic Realism was part of a deeper moral and even political worldview is clear from Mansfield Park, her final novel. Here we can see that the concern for manners and decorum that she had extolled throughout her writing was not simply a trivial matter of polite observance, but an ethos that she regarded as forming that very structure of ethical life (‘moral taste’, her narrator calls it), without which a civilised nation such as England could not survive. As Austen’s novel demonstrates, those who mock such conventions (as Mary and Henry Crawford do through their play acting) seriously endanger the legitimacy of traditional society, whose values must be upheld at a point in history when ‘noise, disorder, and impropriety’ (the disturbing side effects of an increasingly urbanising England) are posing the most serious threat to law, order and social stability. The observance of form is not just a social duty; it has become a political necessity.[47]

 

Jane Austen’s conservatism was essentially defensive in nature; it was intended (as Edmund Burke’s had been) to bolster the traditional ties of pre-revolutionary Europe against the destabilising influences of laissez faire capitalism and political radicalism, whose amoral energies were threatening to open a Pandora’s box of social discontent and unrest. For George Eliot, writing half a century after Austen, such changes had become fait accompli. In her major novels, Adam Bede (1859), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) and Middlemarch (1871), she analysed the effect of these changes and others (such as the displacement of religion by scientific positivism) upon personal relationships. Eliot had written her own version of a Bildungsroman in Mill on the Floss (1860), in which she had sought to demonstrate that, in human affairs ‘the highest striving is after ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the greatest’. The same integrationist philosophy underscores her most ambitious novel, Middlemarch , but the unity to be attained here is not one between the humble and the mighty (the story unfolds almost exclusively within the middle class community of Middlemarch), but between the conflicting philosophies and lifestyles that exist within this provincial world, which range from Tertius Lydgate’s scientific optimism through to Rosamond Vincy’s self-satisfied materialism, and Casaubon’s arid High Toryism. At the centre of the novel is Dorothea Brooke. She learns through her contact with these individuals to abandon the abstract designs that she had held for world betterment (and which she hoped to further by marrying the Reverend Casaubon), and embrace a more modest but eminently more serviceable attitude to the world. Through the formation of Dorothea, Eliot gives voice to her conviction that a moral life is only achievable through the individual’s experience of community: not the specific community of mid-nineteenth Victorian society, but community as a principle, as a form of social and ethical organisation capable of mediating between desire and duty, between the practical achievements of the phenomenal world, including scientific ones, and the more mysterious, but no less real, needs of the spiritual realm: between, in short, Realism and Idealism. Linking these two worlds is Dorothea’s achievement, and that of George Eliot, whose insistence upon the importance of ‘great feelings’ and ‘great faith’ was won against her experience of the precariousness nature of ideals in the age of Realism.[48]

 

 

7. The Problem of Action:

Drama in the Age of Realism

 

The individual in the age of Realism had little scope for heroic action; the options (it seemed to be) were integration or exclusion, constructive participation or unredeemable alienation, marriage or suicide. Nowhere was the impossibility of heroic action more evident than in the theatre. From the drama of historical pessimism of Georg Büchner in the 1830s to the plays of personal crisis and social impasse of Ibsen and Chekov at the end of the century, drama in the age of Realism gave itself over to an analysis of the insecurity, introspection, confusion and discomfort of a generation increasingly unable to avail itself of a stable worldview, and which charted a growing distance between certain forms of subjectivity and the social sphere. This distance is evident in the work of the Austrian playwright, Franz Grillparzer, and the German, Friedrich Hebbel. With their classical topoi and measured metrical form, Grillparzer’s major plays (Sapho, 1818, The Waves of the Sea and Love, 1831, and A Dream is Life, 1834) clearly look back to the plays of Goethe and Schiller, whose heroes and heroines likewise found themselves drawn between the competing claims of art and life, sensuality and the spirit, reason and instinct. What Grillparzer adds to the work of these earlier masters is a greater sense of the isolation of the self, which he deepens (as in Libussa, published posthumously in 1874) into an almost existential despair for those who ‘lose the context of totality’, and in whom ‘the voice of the heart speaks no more’. Grillparzer’s pessimism is even more marked in the work of Hebbel, most notably in Judith (1840), Maria Magdalena (1844) and Agnes Bernauer (1855). Hebbel underpinned his dramatic output with essays such ‘My View of Drama’, in which he speculated upon the problematic relationship between the individual and history in an age characterised by ‘the gradual disintegration of the religious and political forms of the world’. Hebbel explored the implications of this process of disintegration in his plays, where female protagonists must struggle against the impersonal march of history in full knowledge of the hopelessness of their task. Maria Magdalena dramatises the consequences of this predicament within the more recognisable domestic terrain of family duty, personal honour, right and wrong. The protagonists of this play represent distinctly defined ethical positions: Master Anton (Maria’s father) holds to the superannuated ethos of patriarchal morality, whose uncompromising values he exercises with ‘a clenched fist’; whilst his son, Karl, and Maria’s suitor, Leonard, are representatives of the new generation of ‘Realists’, for whom ‘being reasonable’ means abandoning all moral positions when necessary. Maria is caught between these two diverging codes and, unable to bring about a compromise between them, commits suicide. Her death is offered as proof of the impasse that bourgeois custom has reached in the age of political pragmatism and fiscal utilitarianism. The concluding words of the play – Anton’s despairing: ‘I don’t understand the world any more’, gave voice to the concerns of an entire generation (and it would have included Hebbel) for whom Realism meant not the advent of new values, but disorientation and nihilism.[49]

 

Hebbel’s worldview was deeply pessimistic; but it was, at least, articulated within a framework that posited some higher historical sense to individual suffering, examples of which could be read as evidence of the Hegelian ‘cunning of reason’ at work in the world. For Georg Büchner, history possessed no such sense or reason, and its cunning lay not in the agency of unforeseen providence but in the malicious exercise of its own inherent and unfathomable irrationality. Büchner was the leading dramatist of the Vormärz movement (called thus because of its role in preparing the political insurrection of March 1848), whose emancipatory cause he promulgated through his tract, The Hessian Courier (1834). Like Ludwig Börne, Karl Gutzkow and, initially, Heinrich Heine (representatives of a cultural-political group known as Young Germany), Büchner combined an early form of socialism with a militant belief in liberal and democratic politics. Büchner’s plays, however, the historical drama, Danton’s Death (1835), the romantic comedy, Leonce and Lena (1836) and the domestic-social tragedy, Woyzeck (1837), reveal little faith in the merits of political activism. On the contrary, these plays are marked by a deep-seated conviction that history is a random process, that personal action is futile, that (as Büchner put it in a letter of 1833) ‘individuals [are] but froth on the waves, greatness a mere coincidence, the mastery of geniuses a dance of puppets, [in] a ridiculous struggle against an iron law that can at best be recognised, but never mastered’. This is also the message of Danton’s Death. The play follows its hero, one of the seminal figures of the French Revolution, from his disillusionment with the conduct of the Revolution to a world-weary cynicism that merges into total fatalism. Tired of the machinations of power, and convinced of the essential futility of all political action, Danton chooses death on the guillotine rather than continue with the charade of revolutionary idealism. His parting words, ‘the world is chaos, nothingness its due messiah’, sounds a note of nihilism that, in the work of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, would become increasingly strident through the nineteenth century.[50]

 

Büchner’s scepticism regarding the power of ideals to influence human affairs is further evident in his final play, Woyzeck. The focus now is no longer upon the experiences of world-historical individuals such as Danton and Robespierre, but upon those of a lowly soldier, cuckolded husband and part-time object of scientific experiment. Woyzeck is a victim both of circumstance and of a personality that is the plaything of uncontrollable energies and fears, suspicions and insecurities, which launch him down a path of emotional excess. His process of derangement is made even more effective by the ‘open form’ of the play which, in dispensing with conventional divisions between acts and scenes, condenses the action into a dramatically short time-span. In an act bloody and irrational, Woyzeck kills his common-law wife for being unfaithful; but in spite of the enormity of his act, he alone in the play seems to possess authenticity, his animal passion and his primitive vision of ‘men and women, man and beast’, which, however incoherently expressed, stands out against the spurious rationalist-idealist model of man that is pompously mouthed by the representatives of authority in the play.[51]

 

‘Why does this ‘decrepit society of today’, Büchner asked in a letter of 1836, continue to exist? ‘Its entire life consists solely in attempts to escape the most appalling boredom. May it die out – that’s the only new experience it is capable of having.’ The major direction of drama in the nineteenth century deepened Büchner’s sense of an ending into a virtual eschatology of bourgeois society. This was notably the case in the work of the two most powerful dramatists of the Realist age: Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen sought to disclose the atrophy and hypocrisy that he saw at the centre of bourgeois society, showing in plays such as Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll’s House (1879) and An Enemy of the People (1882), how the high moral image cultivated by the patriarchal family, the business community and the press, serve to hide the deep-seated realities of the profit motive, exploitation of women and the invasion of personal liberty upon which such institutions were based. This dissonance between respectable appearance and inner decadence was given a more literal inflection in Ghosts (1881) and Hedda Gabler (1890). Oswald Alving’s syphilis, in the former play, and Hedda’s unwanted pregnancy, in the latter, act as signifiers of a more general malaise besetting those characters and, by extension, the social class to which they belong. In this world of inauthenticity, unpalatable realities are repressed, and forced to emerge (almost in a Freudian way) through channels that are dangerous to the health of individual and society alike, returning to haunt those (like Mrs Alving in Ghosts) who ‘are so pitifully afraid of the light’. Some do escape this claustrophobic world, such as Nora in A Doll’s House, who leaves husband and children, unprepared to accept the straitjacket of the institution of marriage. The sculptor, Arnold Rubek, in Ibsen’s final play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), likewise has become ‘completely free and independent’ of the moral inhibitions and repressive social conventions of his native land. Yet even here, where artistic achievement has permitted a transfiguration of quotidian attachment and earthly duty, Ibsen foregrounds the inescapable realities of disillusionment and frustration. Although he has achieved much in his life, Rubek cannot rid himself of the feeling that the artistic vocation is ‘empty and hollow’ and ‘fundamentally meaningless’. With Irena, his erstwhile model, Rubek chooses to end his life with a final grand gesture, disappearing into the stormy mountain peaks of his native Norway, seeking a death that will liberate him from his past.[52]

 

Ibsen’s work is pervaded by a sense of an ending, and by an intimation of new forces, political, economic and social, that are emerging to hasten the demise of bourgeois society. Engstrand in The Ghosts (self-seeking, street-wise and ruthless), represents these forces, being an early harbinger of a type of personality that will be responsible for those political and social revolutions which will dominate the twentieth century. The dramatist who most sharply caught this mood of decline was Anton Chekhov. His The Cherry Orchard (1904) comes towards the end of nineteenth century Realism, as it did towards the end of a rich period of dramatic achievement for the author. In his The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1899), and Three Sisters (1901), Chekhov had, with a complex mixture of irony and humour, dealt with characters adrift in a world that has lost its traditional bearings. Three Sisters, for example, (perhaps the most famous of these three plays) paints a picture of a family martyred by the collective awareness of its own impotence. Dominated by their memory of past glory, and feeling unable to go forward into the future, the sisters fall victim to the ‘rot of boredom’, a state of spiritual atrophy which replaces ideals and action by habit, loneliness and silence. The spiritual collapse suffered by Chekhov’s characters in Three Sisters is the result of a purely personal predicament: the female protagonists of the play find the prospect of an unhappy marriage, or, even (the implication is) of a happy one, a poor solution to their intellectual and spiritual needs. In The Cherry Orchard, the same predicament takes on an historical significance. The play depicts the plight of an aristocratic family, which finds itself unable to respond to the threat posed to the continuing existence of its ancestral home (and to the orchard which constitutes the sentimental core of the property) by the spirit of economic rationalism that has taken hold of modern Russia. In this new world, tradition and continuity have been forced to give way both to the fiscal pragmatism of the nouveaux riches, represented by the businessman, Lopakhin, and to a socialist meliorism, espoused here by the student radical, Trofimov. Caught between historical forces which they cannot master and only dimly comprehend, the aristocratic proprietors of the crumbling estate finally succumb not only to the economic realities with which they are faced, but to an ‘oppressive sense of emptiness’ that renders them incapable of action. With The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov brought the European stage to a point from which it could not return. Subsequent dramatists, in the Modernist and Postmodernist periods, would further develop Chekhov’s perceptions, delineating characters who would increasingly find themselves forced into passivity towards history and their own fates.[53]

 

 

8. The Literary Laboratory:

Naturalism

 

Although Realist writers largely rejected the social, political and moral content of the bourgeois worldview, they accepted one of its central philosophical tenets: scientific objectivity, the attempt to produce an image the external world without recourse to subjective interpretation. Few Realist writers had sought, however, to put this tenet on any theoretical basis, being content simply to assert the value of the mimetic principle, or embody it in their work. For this reason, Émile Zola is both an exception to the modus operandi of the Realist school, and yet its greatest theoretical exponent. From his early preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin (1868) through to his lengthy essay, ‘The Experimental Novel’ (1880), Zola sought to persuade the public of the scientific, analytical and disinterested nature of his literary project. He did this by aligning his work with that of the physiologist, Claude Bernard, who had attempted in his Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865) to deduce social behaviour from certain physiological ‘facts’ of human nature. Zola took two things from Bernard: firstly, a deterministic model of human behaviour: the conviction, as he noted in his famous preface to Thérèse Raquin, that ‘people [are] completely dominated by their nerves and blood, [and are] without free will, drawn into each action of their lives by the inexorable laws of their physical nature’; and secondly, a strictly experimental methodology, which placed hereditarily determined individuals, such as the two protagonists of that novel, Thérèse and her lover, Laurent, within an highly charged situation (an unhappy marriage and an adulterous relationship), so that ‘the profound modifications of an organism subjected to the pressure of environments and circumstances’ might be judged. As Zola made clear, this was a project that forced him to override the inhibiting concerns of ‘morality and literary decency’.[54]

 

Zola’s concept of ‘naturalistic evolution’, which posited a causal connection between biology and individual behaviour, formed the central principle around which his magnum opus, the Rougon-Macquart series turned. Published in twenty volumes between 1871 and 1893, Zola’s novel sequence (an epic example of the genre of the roman-fleuve) offers an comprehensive picture of private and public life in France during the Second Empire (1848-1870), linking the treatment of matters as diverse as alcoholism (L’Assammoir; literally The Gin Shop, 1877), industrial confrontation (Germinal, 1885) and prostitution (Nana, 1880), through the genealogy of two blood-related families: the upper-middle class Rougons and the proletarian Macquarts. In spite of their different social standings, the members of these families are equal victims of their genetic destinies, forced to pay for the sins committed by their predecessors, propelled through depravity and corruption, violence and sensuality by hereditary traits over which they have no control. The character Nana (in the novel of the same name) typifies their predicament. She is born into poverty and moral destitution, and into a world that is subject to the ‘filth of promiscuity, [and] to the progressive neglect of decent feelings’. She has beauty and a resilient spirit, but this can take her no further that the vaudevilles of Paris and the bedrooms of its brothels. Nana becomes ‘that Golden Creature, blind as brute force’, whose animal sensuality moves between an earthy sympathy for the downtrodden and the innocent, and a destructive antipathy towards the men in her life, to whom she responds with a mixture of fear and hatred. In Zola’s deterministic model, where biology is destiny, Nana remains unable to purge herself of ‘the poison that she [has] assimilated in the gutters’, ending her brief life, prostrate with disease, her face and body reduced through a terminal illness to ‘a heap of matter and blood’.[55]

 

Zola was immensely influential upon the course of European fiction, and equally controversial. In France, Joris-Karl Huysmans (Marthe, 1876, and The Vatard Sisters, 1879), and Guy de Maupassant (Boule de suif, 1880); in England, George Gissing (Workers in the Dawn, 1880, and New Grub Street, 1891) and George Moore (Esther Waters, 1894); in Denmark, Herman Bang (Families without Hope, 1880); in Norway, Alexander Kielland Garman & Worse, 1880); in Spain, Leopoldo Alas (La Regenta, 1885); in Hungary, Lajos Tolnai (Dark World, 1898); and in Finland, Minna Canth (A Working-Class Wife, 1885) adopted, to varying degrees, Zolaesque preoccupations: the focus upon the milieu of the socially deprived or the criminal; the depiction of tabooed subject matter, incest, alcoholism, prostitution; the assumption of environmental and biological determinism; and the employment of documentary and journalistic materials to validate the social authenticity of their fictional accounts. Some, such as Tennyson, were appalled at the amoral and salacious nature of the Naturalist method, accusing its practitioners of ‘wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism’; others, such as the Italian critic, Emilio de Sanctis (Study of Zola, 1878) and the Spanish writer, Emilia Pardo Bazán (‘The burning Question’, 1883), felt liberated by its techniques and themes, as if the final restrictions to a complete literary engagement with the world had been removed. That the Naturalist method could be applied to situations urban and rural was demonstrated by the Italian novelist, and the leading representative of the verismo movement, Giovanni Verga. In his collection of short stories, Little Novels of Sicily (1883), and in his major novel The House by the Medlar Tree (1881), Verga depicted characters who were, as the author explained in his preface to that novel, ‘defeated by life’, victims both of the harsh natural environment of their native land and of instincts, rapacious and unforgiving, from which they prove unable to free themselves. In Germany, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arno Holz, Heinrich and Julius Hart and Paul Ernst saw in Naturalism a belated opportunity for their culture to regain contact with the mainstream tradition of European Realism. Johannes Schlaf and Arno Holz, in particular, were enthusiasts, supplying the most original theoretical defence of the Naturalist text, which they cryptically defined as ‘Art = Nature minus x’. In jointly authored stories such as ‘Papa Hamlet’ (1889), they elaborated their own ‘telegram style’ (Sekundenstil), seeking to capture the minute intonations and conversational idiom of colloquial speech. The result, according to the reviewer, G.M. Conrad, was an entirely original literature which, in focussing on ‘the unmediated, brittle and strident’ nature of its subject matter (in ‘Papa Hamlet’, the pathetic decline of a superannuated actor), offered the reader access to the ‘tragic banality’ of everyday life.[56]

 

In drama, Gerhart Hauptmann and the Swedish playwright, August Strindberg, employed the Naturalist method to great effect. In his first play, Before Sunrise (1889), Hauptmann described the culture of the down-trodden and used dialect and colloquial speech to reconstruct their milieu, in a work whose unremitting biological fatalism (which posits hereditary traits, in this case, alcoholism, as ineluctable determinations of personal fate) outraged audiences at the play’s first performance in 1889. His play had a simple message: youthful idealism (represented by the two lovers, Helene and Loth) cannot survive in a world where ‘belief, love, hope and all that is pure ‘rot’. Hauptmann’s subsequent plays, notably Lonely People (1891), The Weavers (1892) and Rose Bernd (1903), also dealt with the failure of idealism in a world governed by the crushing discourse of scientific determinism and moral cynicism. In The Weavers, which tells of a revolt of a workers’ revolt in 1848, social determinism and political repression come to form an unholy union. The claims of the weavers for humane work conditions and basic rights are treated with sympathy, and their personal misery is described from within, using their own language and admittedly unsophisticated worldview (even more attenuated in the dialect version of the play, De Waber) to produce an image of an entire class and an entire community in crisis. Hauptmann affirms the right of the weavers to rebellion, even as he asserts the impossibility of their position: in the final analysis, they learn (as every protagonist in a Naturalist play must learn) that ‘law and justice and righteousness’ are pure chimera, ideals that cannot withstand the realities of political injustice and military repression.[57]

 

If Hauptmann’s Naturalism looks outwards, to political confrontation and revolt, a direction further developed in his Florian Geyer (1896), the plays of August Strindberg look inward, into internecine struggles for psychic dominance and sexual control fought out within the libidous-personal sphere of domestic life. To the audiences of Ibsen and Chekov, this terrain would have been familiar; Ibsen’s Doll House, in particular, gained a notoriety throughout Europe for its uncompromising treatment of a sexually unrequited husband-wife relationship. But Strindberg brings the subterranean tensions explored by these earlier dramatists graphically to the surface, eschewing the moral problematising of Ibsen and the gentle quietism of Chekov in favour of a dramatic reconstruction of persecution complexes, unconfinable obsessions and cynical and naked power politics. His aim was to create a theatre devoted (as he wrote in 1888) to ‘the strong and cruel struggles’ that constituted (for the Nietzschean-inspired Swede) ‘the joy of life’. Strindberg’s conflictual worldview finds its most memorable dramatisation in the plays The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888). In the former, he deals with one of the major preoccupations of the Realist novel: the emancipation of woman from patriarchal control. Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Fontane, amongst others, had dealt with this theme. Here, in The Father, a play written towards the end of the period of bourgeois legitimacy in Europe, the world of patriarchal control is imploding from within, its pretensions to dominance undermined by the ‘new woman’ of the age, represented here by the Captain’s wife, Laura. She is the driving force of the play; articulate and self-confident, she alone knows the true facts of the paternity of their child (whose custody she is determined to win). She exploits this knowledge, slowly pushing her husband, unsure in his role as father, over the edge into madness, committing in the process an act of ‘innocent murder’ that the law cannot recognise and only nature can sanction. [58]

 

Both the captain and his wife live in their relationship through the ethos of ‘eat or be eaten’: as Laura says: ‘what has all this life and death struggle been about except power’. That gender power resides in sexual conquest is precisely the theme of Miss Julie; but here the conflictual animus that drove the earlier play is supplemented by a social and potentially, at least, a political dimension. The play centres on the attraction felt by the aristocratic Julie for Jean, the footman. The latter is a character rare in European literature: a member of the lower orders, whose nature, vulgar, brutal and erotically dynamic is here allowed to triumph (as it was not with Zola’s working-class heroes, such as Nana) over a superior social class. Jean takes sexual possession of Julie, who succumbs as she realises to ‘the attraction the weak feel for the strong’. Jean’s conquest represents the victory not only of a new class but of a new breed of person, whose values (held incoherently perhaps but with force) combine the neo-Darwinistic ethos of the survival of the fittest with a simplified Nietzscheanism, which recognises no moral order beyond that constructed through self-assertion. In Miss Julie, drama has moved beyond the terrain of the bourgeois sphere altogether, to a world where individual confronts individual, man confronts woman, servant confronts master, in a spirit of bitter and irreconcilable hostility. Strindberg’s plays, written at the end of the Realist tradition proper, bring us into the era of modernity, and hint darkly at a future that will see human behaviour first analysed, and then motivated, by forces and energies that are irredeemably irrational, and violently so.[59]

 

 

Realism

An Annotated Bibliography

 

Realism lacked both the Messianic fervour and the philosophical impetus of the Romantic movement. As a concept, it first appeared in France in 1856, in Louis Edmond Duranty’s journal Réalisme, founded explicitly to promote the painting of Gustave Courbet, and then by the critic Champfleury in his book Le Réalisme in 1857, as a way of characterising the writing of Balzac and Flaubert. The term was first used in Germany in 1856 with reference to the hybrid genre of Poetic Realism; in England in 1858; and in Italy in 1878. Its emergence is described by René Wellek in ‘The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship’ in his Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963, pp. 222–255), by E.B.O. Borgerhoff in his ‘Réalisme and Kindred Words’ (PMLA 53, 1938: 837–843), and by Bernard Weinberg, French Realism: The Critical Reaction, 1830–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937). A valuable selection of primary documentation, manifestoes, essays and reviews, is provided by George J. Becker in his Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). In her succinct account of the origins, theory and practice of Realism in France, Colette Becker cites much primary (French) material in her Lire le Realisme et le Naturalisme (Paris: Dunod, 1998).

 

Introductions to Realism and its kindred movement, Naturalism, include Damian Grant’s Realism (London: Methuen, 1970) and Lilian Furst’s Naturalism (London: Methuen, 1971), although both focus upon the theoretical parameters of the movement rather than upon its literature. With a greater literary focus are George J. Becker’s Master European Realists of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Ungar, 1982), the essays collected in F.W.J. Hemmings’ The Age of Realism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), those in a similar volume edited by D.A. Williams, The Monster in the Mirror: Studies in Nineteenth Century Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) and, with a greater degree of theoretical self-reflexivity, the essays in Realism in European Literature, edited by Nicholas Boyle and Martin Swales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). This volume was published in honour of J.P Stern whose study, On Realism (London: Routledge, 1973), captures the Janus face of the Realist aesthetic, the fact that it can be seen both ‘as a liberation and an emblem of the riches of the world [and], at other times, as a restriction and a prison-house’ (Stern, p. 32). In his Man and Society in Nineteenth Century Realism: Determinism and Literature (London: Macmillan, 1977), Maurice Larkin focuses upon the intellectual origins of the Realist aesthetic, stressing, as did many Realist writers themselves, the relevance of scientific methodology to their work.

 

Larkin’s book might be read as a sober counter-measure to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). Written in German in 1946, and translated into English in 1953, Auerbach’s epic study ranges over two thousand years of European literature, from Homer to Virginia Woolf. It focuses upon those writers who have dealt with ‘individuals from daily life in their dependence upon current historical circumstances and made them the subjects of serious, problematic, and even tragic representation’ (Auerbach, p. 554). Auerbach’s work is perhaps too inclusive (Realism seems to describe all that is positive in Western literature), but his chapter on Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert (pp. 454–524) does take up many of the themes and preoccupations that characterised nineteenth-century Realism. Equally humanistic in its inspiration is Harry Levin’s The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), although its focus is exclusively upon French fiction. With insight and scholarship, Levin offers convincing readings of some of the great novels of the Realist movement, those ‘monumental glories’ of the nineteenth century, which (Levin argues) were written both to critique the societies from which they came, but also, in a strange way, to honour them (Levin, 1966, p. 471). Pam Morris, Realism (London: Routledge, 2003) locates the major figures of British and French Realism within the broader context of what Realism meant as an aesthetic and as a form of knowledge, citing material from a wide number of literary theorists and philosophers. The volume, Approaching Literature: The Realist Novel, edited by Dennis Walder (London: Routledge, 1995), includes a variety of essays that aim to involve the reader in the mechanics of reading Realist fiction. In the scholarship on the subject, discussions of Naturalism are normally appended to the subject of Realism. For that reason, David Baguley’s Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University press,1990) adds a vital work to the scholarship. Its focus is exclusively French, but the issues that it broaches, both formal and thematic, can be applied to Naturalist writing throughout Europe.

 

It was the residual humanism of the great Realist novels that attracted the distinguished Hungarian Marxist, Georg Lukács, whose engagement with the Realist aesthetic came towards the end of a long tradition of appreciation that had its origins in the seminal theorists of Communism: Marx and Engels. Engels appraised the ability of Realist writers to capture the forward momentum of history, writers who often went, as Balzac did, ‘against their own class sympathies and political prejudices’ (Engels in Becker, Documents of Modern Literary Realism, p. 485). In his own appropriation of the Realist tradition, Lukács followed his mentors, elaborating their insights into a finely accented assessment of the nineteenth-century Realist novel. In his essays, ‘Reportage or Portrayal? Critical remarks á propos a novel by [Ernst] Ottwalt’ and ‘Tendency or Partisanship?’ (both 1932, republished in Essays on Realism, edited by Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), and in ‘Realism in the Balance’ (1938, republished in Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Ronald Taylor, London: Verso, 1980), Lukács defended Realism both against the proletarian-propaganda Reportage novel of writers such as Ernst Ottwalt and Willi Bredel, and against the avant-garde experimentation of the German Expressionists. In his later more extended works, Studies in European Realism (London: Merlin Press, 1950, originally in German in 1948), and The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1962, German edition, 1955), Lukács allocated to the Realist tradition a central position in European literature, celebrating a broad body of fiction that lay between what he regarded as the mystical excesses of Romanticism and the studied disfigurations of Modernism. The Realist novel alone (he argues) proved capable of capturing the totality of life in nineteenth-century bourgeois society, of mediating between the personal and the public realms, between the individual and history, capturing in the process the ‘three-dimensionality’ that adheres to the dialectic of historical change (Lukács, 1950, p. 6).

 

In contrast to the enthusiastic defence of Realism made by Marxist critics, recent British and French Structuralists and Post-Structuralists have subjected the Realist aesthetic to a sustained critique, criticising both its lack of theoretical self-reflexivity and its essentialist reading of history and human nature. The seminal works are Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967, first published in French in 1953), and his S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974, first published in French in 1970). In theseworks, Barthes established the distinction between a ‘readerly’ and the ‘writerly’ text. As Stephen Heath explained in The Nouveau Roman: A Study in the Practice of Writing (London: Elek, 1972), the former type of writing found its paradigm in the Realist novel, in a style that sought to obscure its fictionality. The function of the Realist narrative was ‘the naturalisation of that reality articulated by a society as the ‘Reality’ ‘, which was to be achieved by constructing a ‘certain social seeing’, projecting (explicitly or implicitly) social forms and values that must be ‘learned, repeated and consumed’ by the reader (Heath, pp. 20 and 21). How this process took place is analysed by Colin McCabe in his James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan, 1978), where McCabe attempts to establish a paradigm for the classic Realist text (the ‘CRT’), using novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch to show how the reader of such novels is manipulated through narrative devices into absorbing the ‘self-evident reality’ of the author’s worldview (MacCabe, p. 18). Within this post-structuralist paradigm, Realism loses the emancipatory function that Auerbach, Lukács and others saw in the genre, and assumes the status of a ‘practical ideology’, a negative totality which, through its very self-seeming naturalness, holds the reader in perpetual captivity (Heath, 1972, p. 20).

 

But perhaps, as Katherine Kearns argues, Realism was a more complex aesthetic than the post-structuralists would have us believe. As Kearns argues in Nineteenth-Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking-Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), the concrete conditions of discursive intelligibility in which the subject matter of realist novels circulated drew upon a complex web of social and interpersonal discourses that transcended their supposedly mimetic aims. One particular discourse, the construction of femininity, is explored by Naomi Schor in Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), whilst Armine Kotin Mortimer in her Writing Realism: Representations in French Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2000) highlights Realism’s complexity as an act of writing. The essays included in Realism/Anti-Realism in 20th Century Literature, edited by Christine Baron and Manfred Engel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), testify that Realism, at least as an aesthetic if not as a literary movement, need not be shunted off into a simplistic and reactionary discourse superseded by the theoretically subtler discourses of Modernism and Post-Modernism. As the texts discussed in that volume show, Realism has persisted into the twenty-first century as a practice of writing capable of transformation and inflection, with a potential for the re-inscription of the modern world and our engagement with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Wordsworth, Poetical Works, p. 385; and Heine, The Poetry and Prose, ed. Frederic Ewen (New York: Citadel Press, 1948), p. 725.

[2] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 193; and Ludwig Büchner, Kraft und Stoff (Leipzig: Kröner, 1855).

[3] Clausewitz on War, ed. Anatol Rapoport (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 119; and Treitschke, History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century [1879], trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, 7 vols (London: Jarrold, 1915), vol. 1, p. ix.

[4] Manzoni, The Betrothed, trans. Bruce Penman (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 720.

[5] Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), p. 146; and Tolstoy, second epilogue to War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford UP, 1941), p. 537.

[6] Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 146; and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works in one Volume (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968), p. 38.

[7] Smiles, Self-Help (London; John Murray, 1892), p. 94; Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 3 vols (London: Williams and Northgate, 1897-1906), vol. 2, p. 241; and Spencer, Principles of Biology, 2 vols (London: Williams and Northgate, 1884), vol. 1, p. 444.

[8] Robert Southey, Letters from England by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst et al, 1808), vol. 2, p. 57; and Jaurès, ‘Idealism in History’ [1895], in Socialist Thought: A Documentary History, ed. Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders (New York: Anchor Books, 1964), p. 407.

[9] Gaskell, Mary Barton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 38.

[10] Morris, letter of 5 September 1883 to Andreas Scheu, in William Morris: Selected Writings and Designs, ed. Asa Briggs (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 32; and Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. Joanna Richardson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 49.

[11] Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. Richard Howard (Boston: Godine, 1982), pp. 94 and 155.

[12] Sainte-Beuve, Selected Essays, trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York: Anchor Books, 1964), p. 276; and Balzac, Old Goriot, trans. Ellen Marriage (London: Everyman, 1907), p. 2.

[13] Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth; Penguin, 1980), p. 221; Trollope, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1953), p. 196; Stendhal, Scarlet and Black, trans. Margaret R.B. Shaw (Harmondsworth; Penguin, 1953), p. 365; and Sand, George Sand in her own words, ed. Joseph Barry (New York: Doubleday, 1979), p. 5.

[14] Brandes, Creative Spirits of the Nineteenth Century [1886], trans. Rasmus B. Anderson (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1923), p. 347; and Brandes, Henrik Ibsen: A Critical Study, trans. Jessie Muir, revised by William Archer (London: Macmillan, 1899), pp. 56 and 79.

[15] Eliot, ‘Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: the Poet Young’ [1857], in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia UP, 1963), pp. 370, 385 and 375; and Balzac, Old Goriot, p. 2.

[16] Eliot, in Westminster Review , 65 (April 1856), p. 626; Galdos, ‘Contemporary Society as Novelistic Material’ [1897], in Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. George J. Becker (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963), p. 153; and Hardy, ‘The Profitable Reading of Fiction’ [1888], in Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences, ed. Harold Orel (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 118.

[17] See Champfleury ‘Léttre `a Madame Sand sur M. Courbet’, in Le Réalisme (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967), p. 279.

[18] Letter to Turgenev, 8 November 1877, in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1857-1880 trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982), p. 242; Baudelaire, Selected Critical Studies of Baudelaire, ed. D. Parmée (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1949), pp. 72-73; and Edmond and Jules Goncourt, preface to Germinie Lacerteux [1865] (Paris: Charpentier, 1901), p. vii.

[19] The Essential Comte: Selected from ‘Cours de Philosophie Positive’, trans. Margaret Clarke (London; Croom Helm, 1974), p. 24; and Taine, History of English Literature, 4 vols (New York; Ungar, 1965), vol. 1, p. 17.

[20] Balzac preface to The Human Comedy [1848] in The Works of Honoré de Balzac, 18 vols (Philadelphia: Avil Publishing Company, 1901), vol. 1, pp. liv and lviii.

[21] Eliot, ‘The Progress of the Intellect’ [1851, in Essays of George Eliot, p. 31; Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans (London: Trübner, 1881), p. ix; and Turgenev, Literary Reminiscences and Autobiographical Fragments, trans. David Magarshack (London: Faber, 1958), p. 121.

[22] Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. Henry Copley Greene (New York; Henry Schuman, 1949), p. 1; and Zola, ‘The Experimental Novel’, in Becker, Documents of Literary Realism, p. 167.

[23] Strindberg, ‘Naturalism in the Theatre’ [1892], in Becker, Documents of Literary Realism, p. 398.

[24] Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Pelham, or The Adventures of a Gentleman (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1862), p. viii.

[25] Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, transl. Norman Denny (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 17.

[26] William Archer, Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship (New York: Dover publications, 1960), pp.148- 149.

[27] Balzac, Old Goriot, p. 308; Dostoyevsky, Letters from the Underworld [1864], trans. C.J. Hogarth (London; Everyman’s Library, 1913), p. 9; Dickens, Dombey and Son [1848] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 121; and Fontane, Effi Briest, trans. Douglas Parmée (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 87.

[28] Dickens, Miscellaneous Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 105; and Dickens, Hard Times (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 127 and 145.

[29] Dickens, Dombey and Son (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 290.

[30] Edmund and Jules Goncourt, Journal, 4 vols (Paris: Flammarion, 1956), vol. 1, p. 398.

[31] Engels to Mary Harkness, April 1888, in Marx, Engels, Lenin: Über Kultur, Ästhetik, Literatur, ed. Hans Koch (Leipzig: Reclam, 1973), p. 436; and Balzac, Old Goriot, pp. 121 and 308 (my translation).

[32] Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1947), p. 116.

[33] Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, p. 30; Gogol, Diary of a Madman and other Stories, trans. Ronald Wilks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 22 and 93.

[34] Dostoyevsky, Letters from the Underworld, pp. 7, 20 and 15.

[35] Dostoyevsky, Letters from the Underworld, pp. 46-47; and Crime and Punishment, trans. Ernest J. Simmons (New York: Dell Publishing, 1959), p. 576.

[36] Stendhal, Scarlet and Black, trans. by Margaret R. B. Shaw (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 451.

[37] Stendhal, Scarlet and Black, p. 452.

[38] Stendhal, Scarlet and Black, p. 497; Stendhal, Love [1822], trans. Gilbert and Suzanne Sale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), pp. 193 and 195; and Sand, George Sand In Her Own Words, pp. 219 and 8.

[39] Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 476; and Galdós, Fortunata and Jacinta, trans. Agnes Moncy Gullón (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 816.

[40] Fontane, Effi Briest, pp. 43 and 215; and Tolstoy, Anna Karenin, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p. 796.

[41] Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Alan Russell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), pp. 79 and 145.

[42] Fontane, Effi Briest, p. 215; Freytag, ‘Neue deutsche Romane’ [1853], in Realismus und Gründerzeit: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur, 1848-1880, ed. i.a. Max Bucher, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1975), vol. 2, p. 72.

[43] Mörike, Sämtliche Werke, 2 vols ed. Helga Unger (Munich; Winkler, 1967), vol. 1, p. 735.

[44] Dilthey, Poetry and Experience , trans. Rudolf A Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), p. 336; and Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, trans. Edward Bell (London: Bell, 1911), p. 421.

[45] Stifter, Gesammelte Werke, 6 vols (Frankfurt am Main:Insel, 1959), vol. 3, p. 10; and Stifter, Der Nachsommer (Augsburg: Kraft, 1954), p. 213.

[46] Keller, Der grüne Heinrich, second edition (Munich: Goldmann, 1974), pp. 262 and 585.

[47] Austen, Mansfield Park (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 384, 244 and 381.

[48] Eliot, Mill on the Floss (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 238; and Eliot, Middlemarch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 896.

[49] Grillparzer, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Peter Frank and Karl Pörnbacher, 4 vols (Munich; Hanser, 1961), vol. 2, p. 342; Hebbel, ‘A Word about the Drama’, in Masterpieces of the Modern German Theatre, ed. Robert W. Corrigan (New York: Collier Books, 1967), p. 71; and Hebbel, Maria Magdalena, trans. Carl Richard Mueller, in Corrigan, pp. 87, 120 and 130

[50] Büchner, letter to Minna Jaeglé, 10 March 1834, in Complete Plays, ‘Lenz’ and Other Writings, trans. and ed. John Reddick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), pp. 195-196; and Danton’s Death, in Complete Plays , p. 69.

[51] Büchner, Complete Plays, p. 128.

[52] Büchner, Complete Plays, p. 205; Ibsen, Ghosts and other Plays, trans. Peter Watts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 61; and Ibsen, When We Dead Wake, in Ghosts and other Plays, pp. 229 and 259.

[53] Chekhov, Three Sisters, in Plays, trans. Elisaveta Fen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), p. 253; and Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, in Plays, p. 386.

[54] Zola, Thérèse Raquin, trans. Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), pp. 22, 26 and 25.

[55] Zola, L’Assommoir, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), p. 3; and Zola, Nana, trans. Victor Plarr (London; Elek Books, 1957), pp. 206-207 and 446.

[56] Tennyson, ‘Locksley Hall: Sixty Years After’, in Poems and Plays (London: Oxford UP, 1968), p. 524; Verga, I Malavoglia (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1972), p. 4; Holz, Die Kunst: Ihr Wesen und ihre Gesetze [1891], in Literarische Manifeste des Naturalismus, 1880-1892, ed. Erich Ruprecht (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1962), p. 210; and Conrad, in preface to Holz and Schlaf, Papa Hamlet (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1977), p. 12.

[57] Hauptmann, Before Sunrise, trans. James Joyce (Marino: Huntington Library, 1978), p. 124; and Hauptmann, The Weavers, in Three Plays, trans. Horst Frenz (New York: Ungar, 1977), p. 92.

[58] Strindberg, preface to Miss Julie, in Becker, p. 396; and Strindberg, The Father, in Three Plays, trans. Peter Watts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), p. 63.

[59] Strindberg, The Father, pp. 69 and 56; and Strindberg, Miss Julie, in Three Plays, p. 97.

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