times since December 17, 1998.
In Music and Art
As intellectual and artistic movements 19th-Century Realism and Naturalism
are both responses to Romanticism but are not really comparable to it in scope
or influence.
For one thing, "realism" is not a term strictly applicable to music. There are verismo (realistic) operas like Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chénier created in the last decade of the 19th century in Italy, but it is their plots rather than their music which can be said to participate in the movement toward realism. Since "pure" untexted music is not usually representational (with the controversial exception of "program" music), it cannot be said to be more or less realistic.
In contrast, art may be said to have had many realistic aspects before this time. The still lifes and domestic art of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin1 (1699-1779) anticipate many of the concerns of the 19th-Century Realists, and he in turn owes a debt to the Netherland school of still-life painting of the century before him, and one can find similar detailed renderings of everyday objects even on the walls of 1st-century Pompeii. Realism is a recurrent theme in art which becomes a coherent movement only after 1850; and even then it struggles against the overwhelming popularity of Romanticism.
In mid-19th century France, Gustave Courbet2 set forth a program of realistic painting as a self-conscious alternative to the dominant Romantic style, building on earlier work by the painters of the Barbizon School (of which the most famous member was Jean-François Millet), which had attempted to reproduce landscapes and village life as directly and accurately as possible. Impressionism can be seen as a development which grew out of Realism, but in its turn still had to battle the more popular Romanticism. Realism has never entirely displaced the popular taste for Romantic art, as any number of hotel-room paintings, paperback book covers and calendars testify. It became just one more style among others.
In Fiction
Realism's most important influences have been on fiction and the theater. It is perhaps unsurprising that its origins can be traced to France, where the dominant official neoclassicism had put up a long struggle against Romanticism. Since the 18th century the French have traditionally viewed themselves as rationalists, and this prevailing attitude in intellectual circles meant that Romanticism led an uneasy existence in France even when allied with the major revolutionary movements of 1789 and 1830.
Balzac
Novelist Honoré de Balzac3 is
generally hailed as the grandfather of literary Realism in the long series of
novels and stories he titled La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), and
which attempted systematically to render a portrait of all aspects of the France
of his time from the lowest thief or prostitute to the highest aristocrat or
political leader. The title of the series was chosen to contrast with Dante's
Divine Comedy, which had portrayed everything except the earthly human
realm.
His attention to detail was obsessive, with long passages of description of
settings being a characteristic feature of his work. Today readers resist such
descriptive writing, but before films and television were invented, it had a
magical effect on people, causing the world depicted to explode from the page in
an almost tangible fashion. It is important to remember in reading all
19th-century fiction that those people who had the time and inclination to read
novels at all generally had a lot of time to kill, and none of the cinematic and
electronic distractions which have largely replaced recreational reading in our
time. They welcomed lengthy novels (often published serially, over a series of
weeks or even months) in the same way we greet a satisfying television series
which becomes a staple of our lives.
Like such a television series, his works also incorporated a device for
maintaining his audience: the continual reappearance of certain characters from
one work to the next--now as protagonists, now as secondary figures. The idea is
an old one, going back classic bodies of work such as the Homeric epics and the
Medieval Arthurian romances; but it had a different effect in Balzac's work:
readers could recognize a slightly altered version of the world they themselves
inhabited as they moved from story to story.
What is not realistic about Balzac's fiction is his plots, filled with sensational conspiracies and crimes and wildly improbable coincidences. Balzac's works are still essentially Romantic creations with a Realistic veneer.
Gustave Flaubert
It was Gustave Flaubert who in 1857 produced the seminal work from which
later literary Realism was to flow: Madame Bovary.4 Flaubert had begun his writing career as most young
authors in his time did, as a Romantic, laboring on a tale of Medieval mysticism
which was eventually published as La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The
Temptation of Saint Anthony). When he read an early draft of this work to
some friends, they urged him to attempt something more down to earth. He chose
the story of an adulterous woman married to an unimaginative country physician
unable to respond to--or even comprehend--her romantic longings. Drawing on the
real-life stories of two women--Delphine Delamare and Louise Pradier--whose
experiences he was intimately familiar with, Flaubert labored to turn journalism
into art while avoiding the romantic clichés he associated with his heroine's
fevered imagination.
Like Balzac, he engaged in systematic research, modeling the village in his
novel on an actual country town and even drawing a map of it detailed enough to
allow scholars to catch him when he has Emma Bovary turn in the wrong direction
on one of her walks. Unlike Balzac, he avoided the sensational sort of plot
lines characteristic of Romantic novels. To modern readers a married woman
carrying on two adulterous affairs and then committing suicide may seem fairly
sensational, but it is important to note that there was a long tradition of
tales of female adultery in French literature stretching back as far as the
Middle Ages. What Flaubert did with the theme was give adultery the shocking
impact of the tabloids by stripping his tale of the high romantic idealism that
usually justified adultery; instead he systematically satirized his heroine's
bourgeois taste for exotic art and sensational stories. The novel is almost an
anti-romantic tract.
Despite the fact that it is generally agreed to be one of the most finely
crafted works to be created in the 19th century, it would probably never have
had the impact it did if Madame Bovary had not also been the subject of a
sensational obscenity trial. So restrained were the standards of polite fiction
in mid-19th-century France that many modern readers go right past the big "sex
scenes" which got Flaubert into trouble without noticing them (hints: look for
Rodolphe to smoke while working on his harness just after making love with Emma
for the first time while she experiences the afterglow, and for Emma to toss
torn-up pieces of a note out of her carriage during her lovemaking with Léon).
However, they were enough to outrage the defenders of middle-class morality. The
prosecution was particularly indignant that Emma did not seem to suffer for her
sins. Flaubert's clever lawyer successfully argued that her grotesquely
described death made the novel into a moral tale; but the fact is that she dies
not because she is an adultress but because she is a shopaholic.
It is not only the literary style of Madame Bovary that is
anti-Romantic, it is its subject as well. The narrative clearly portrays
Emma as deluded for trying to model her life after the Romantic fiction she
loves. The novel is a sort of anti-Romantic manifesto, and its notoriety spread
its message far and wide. It is worth noting, however, that Flaubert returned to
Romanticism from time to time in his career, for instance in Salammbo, a
colorful historical novel set in ancient Carthage.
Influence of Realism
Realism had profound effects on fiction from places as far-flung as Russia
and the Americas. The novel, which had been born out of the romance as a more or
less fantastic narrative, settled into a realistic mode which is still dominant
today. Aside from genre fiction such as fantasy and horror, we expect the
ordinary novel today to be based in our own world, with recognizably familiar
types of characters endowed with no supernatural powers, doing the sorts of
things that ordinary people do every day. It is easy to forget that this
expectation is only a century and a half old, and that the great bulk of the
world's fiction before departed in a wide variety of ways from this standard,
which has been applied to film and television as well. Even comic strips now
usually reflect daily life. Repeated revolts against this standard by various
postmodernist and magical realist varieties of fiction have not dislodged the
dominance of realism in fiction.
Naturalism
The emergence of Naturalism does not mark a radical break with Realism,
rather the new style is a logical extension of the old. The term was invented by
Émile Zola partly because he was seeking for a striking platform from which to
convince the reading public that it was getting something new and modern in his
fiction. In fact, he inherited a good deal from his predecessors. Like Balzac
and Flaubert, he created detailed settings meticulously researched, but tended
to integrate them better into his narrative, avoiding the long set-piece
descriptions so characteristic of earlier fiction. Again, like Balzac, he
created a series of novels with linked characters and settings ("Les
Rougon-Macquart: Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le second
Empire"--"The Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family During
the Second Empire") which stretched to twenty novels. He tried to create a
portrait of France in the 1880s to parallel the portrait Balzac had made of his
own times in the Comédie humaine. Like Flaubert, he focussed on ordinary
people with often debased motives.
He argued that his special contribution to the art of
fiction was the application to the creation of characters and plot of the
scientific method. The new "scientific novel" would be created by placing
characters with known inherited characteristics into a carefully defined
environment and observing the resulting behavior. No novelist can actually work
like this, of course, since both characters and setting are created in the
distinctly unobjective mind of the writer; but Zola's novels do place special
stress on the importance of heredity and environment in determining character.
They are anti-Romantic in their rejection of the self-defining hero who
transcends his background. History shapes his protagonists rather than being
shaped by them. This leads to an overwhelming sense of doom in most of his
novels, culminating in a final catastrophe.
Zola further tends to create his principal characters as representative types
rather than striking individuals. He also places great emphasis on people acting
in groups, and is one of the few great writers of mob scenes. Humanity in the
mass is one of his chief subjects, and his individuals are selected to
illustrate aspects of society.
Zola can be said to have created in Germinal the disaster narrative
exemplified in the 20th century by Arthur Hailey's novels (Airport) and
movies like The Towering Inferno and Titanic. The formula is a
classic one: assemble a varied group of representative characters together in
some institution or space and subject them to a catastrophe and watch how they
individually cope with it.
Zola also took frankness about sexual functions much further than the early
Realists had dared; and it is this, combined with a pervasive pessimism about
humanity, which chiefly characterizes the Naturalist novel.
Unlike Flaubert, Zola was not a meticulous craftsman of beautiful prose. At
times it seems as if he is writing with a meat ax; but he undeniably infused
French fiction with a refreshing vigor, giving it a tough, powerful edge far
removed from the vaporings of high romanticism.
If Zola often startled the French with his frankness, he shocked readers in
other lands, where his works were often banned, regarded as little more than
pornography (an assessment which is quite unfair, but unsurprising given the
temper of the times).
Zola has had an enormous impact on the American novel. Americans with their
preference for action over thought and for gritty realism were strongly drawn to
his style of writing. Early 20th-century writers like Theodore Dreiser applied
his approaches to American themes successfully, and Frank Norris practically
stole large chunks of Zola's novels in some of his own works. The mainstream
American novel is preponderantly naturalistic, and gives rise to another genre
which still lives on: the hard-boiled detective story.
For all these reasons, Zola strikes us as far more "modern" than Balzac, or
even Flaubert. It can be argued that the "default" style of modern narrative is
Realist, with the various forms of fantastic narratives which dominated the
writing of earlier ages relegated to the margins; and even fantasy is often
judged as to its plausibility. Without altogether banishing Romanticism, Realism
and Naturalism have had considerable success.
1 For a brief survey of Chardin's work with examples, see http://sunsite.unc.edu/wm/paint/auth/chardin/.)
2 For more on Courbet's life and works, see http://sunsite.unc.edu/cjackson/courbet/.
3 For more information about Balzac, see http://members.aol.com/balssa/balzac/balzac.html.
Created by Paul Brians March 13, 1998.
This page has been accessed times since December 17, 1998.
Last revised June 24, 2002.