The European Roots of Realism

In Europe, realism developed in the work of such writers as Daniel Defoe, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope-, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, and Leo Tolstoy. All of these writers faithfully reproduced the environment and the manners of everyday life: the way ordinary people lived and dressed, and what they thought and felt and talked about.

But realism was not simply concerned with recording wallpaper patterns, hairstyles, or the subjects of conversations. It sought also to explain why ordinary people behave the way they do. What, for example, fuels the ambitions of a young man who has come from the country to the city to make his fortune? Why does an apparently happily married woman decide to have a love affair? What leads a woman to accept or reject a particular man? In trying to answer these questions, realistic novelists often relied on the emerging sciences of human and animal behavior—biology, psychology, and sociology—as well as on their own insights and observations.

American Regional Writing

In America, realism had its roots in—though it was not synonymous with—regionalism, literature that emphasizes a specific geographic setting and that reproduces the speech and manners of people who live in that region. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) is an example of a regional writer (though her greatest novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was one of the few that did not take place in her native New England). Joel Chandler Harris, Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mark Twain also recorded the peculiarities of speech and temperament in their parts of a rapidly expanding nation.

However, while regional writers might be realistic in their depiction of speech patterns and manners, they were often unrealistic in their depiction of character and social environment). For example, a Southern writer like Thomas Nelson Page, who wrote very popular post-Civil War novels about the South, stressed the romantic "moonlight and magnolia" environment at the expense of the realities of a social world that relied on slavery. Realism as a literary movement in the United States went far beyond regionalism in its concern for accuracy in social conditions and human motivation.

Mark Twain is the best-known example of a regional writer whose realism far surpassed local bounds. Although he first established his reputation as a regional humorist, Twain evolved into a writer whose comic view of society became increasingly satiric. His best novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, describes the moral growth of a comic character in an environment that is at the same time physically beautiful and morally repugnant. Huckleberry Finn combines a biting picture of some of the injustices inherent in pre-Civi 1 War American life with a lyrical portrait of the American landscape.

William Dean Howells

The most active proponent of realism in American fiction was William Dean Howells (1837-1920). The editor of the influential magazine The Atlantic Month. He was also the author of several novels, including The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). In both his fiction and his critical writings, Howells insisted that realism should deal with the lives of ordinary people, be faithful to the development of character even at the expense of action, and reveal the strength of good over evil. In The Rise of Silas Lapham, for example, the nouveau riche character Silas Lapham, whose fortune is based on manufacturing paint, must choose between bankruptcy and shady business dealings. Although Silas is tempted, his integrity wins out, and he returns to his former life as a farmer, a poorer but morally better man.