The Rise of Realism ppt

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THE RISE OF REALISM:1860-1914
The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) between the industrial 
North and the agricultural, slave-owning South was a 
watershed in American history. The innocent optimism of 
the young democratic nation gave way, after the war, to a 
period of exhaustion. American idealism remained but was 
rechanneled. Before the war, idealists championed human 
rights, especially the abolition of slavery; after the war, 
Americans increasingly idealized progress and the 
self-made man. This was the era of the millionaire 
manufacturer and the speculator, when Darwinian 
evolution and the “survival of the fittest” seemed to 
sanction the sometimes unethical methods of the 
successful business tycoon.
Business boomed after the war. War production had boosted industry in the 
North and given it prestige and political clout. It also gave industrial leaders 
valuable experience in the management of men and machines. The 
enormous natural resources — iron, coal, oil, gold, and silver — of the 
American land benefitted business. The new intercontinental rail system, 
inaugurated in 1869, and the transcontinental telegraph, which began 
operating in 1861, gave industry access to materials, markets, and 
communications. The constant influx of immigrants provided a seemingly 
endless supply of inexpensive labor as well. Over 23 million foreigners — 
German, Scandinavian, and Irish in the early years, and increasingly Central 
and Southern Europeans thereafter — flowed into the United States 
between 1860 and 1910. Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino contract laborers 
were imported by Hawaiian plantation owners, railroad companies, and 
other American business interests on the West Coast.
In 1860, most Americans lived on farms or in small villages, 
but by 1919 half of the population was concentrated in 
about 12 cities. Problems of urbanization and 
industrialization appeared: poor and overcrowded housing, 
unsanitary conditions, low pay (called “wage slavery”), 
difficult working conditions, and inadequate restraints on 
business. Labor unions grew, and strikes brought the plight 
of working people to national awareness. Farmers, too, 
saw themselves struggling against the “money interests” of 
the East, the so-called robber barons like J.P. Morgan and 
John D. Rockefeller.
From 1860 to 1914, the United States was 
transformed from a small, young, agricultural 
excolony to a huge, modern, industrial nation. A 
debtor nation in 1860, by 1914 it had become the 
world’s wealthiest state, with a population that had 
more than doubled, rising from 31 million in 1860 to 
76 million in 1900. By World War I, the United States 
had become a major world power.
As industrialization grew, so did alienation. Characteristic 
American novels of the period — Stephen Crane’s Maggie: 
A Girl of the Streets, Jack London’s Martin Eden, and later 
Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy — depict the 
damage of economic forces and alienation on the weak or 
vulnerable individual. Survivors, like Twain’s Huck Finn, 
Humphrey Vanderveyden in London’s The Sea-Wolf, and 
Dreiser’s opportunistic Sister Carrie, endure through inner 
strength involving kindness, flexibility, and, above all, 
individuality.
SAMUEL CLEMENS (MARK TWAIN) (1835-1910)
Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, 
grew up in the Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, 
Missouri. Ernest Hemingway’s famous statement that all of 
American literature comes from one great book, Twain’s 
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, indicates this author’s towering 
place in the tradition. Early 19th-century American writers tended 
to be too flowery, sentimental, or ostentatious — partially 
because they were still trying to prove that they could write as 
elegantly as the English. Twain’s style, based on vigorous, realistic, 
colloquial American speech, gave American writers a new 
appreciation of their national voice. Twain was the first major 
author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured 
its distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm.
For Twain and other American writers of the late 
19th century, realism was not merely a literary 
technique: It was a way of speaking truth and 
exploding worn-out conventions. Thus it was 
profoundly liberating and potentially at odds with 
society. The most well-known example is Huck Finn, a 
poor boy who decides to follow the voice of his 
conscience and help a Negro slave escape to 
freedom, even though Huck thinks this means that 
he will be damned to hell for breaking the law. 
Twain’s masterpiece, which appeared in 1884, is set in the 
Mississippi River village of St. Petersburg. The son of an 
alcoholic bum, Huck has just been adopted by a 
espectable family when his father, in a drunken stupor, 
threatens to kill him. Fearing for his life, Huck escapes, 
feigning his own death. He is joined in his escape by 
another outcast, the slave Jim, whose owner, Miss Watson, 
is thinking of selling him down the river to the harsher 
slavery of the deep South. Huck and Jim float on a raft 
down the majestic Mississippi, but are sunk by a 
steamboat, separated, and later reunited. 
They go through many comical and dangerous shore adventures 
that show the variety, generosity, and sometimes cruel 
irrationality of society. In the end, it is discovered that Miss 
Watson had already freed Jim, and a respectable family is taking 
care of the wild boy Huck. But Huck grows impatient with civilized 
society and plans to escape to “the territories” — Indian lands. 
The ending gives the reader the counter-version of the classic 
American success myth: the open road leading to the pristine 
wilderness, away from the morally corrupting influences of 
“civilization.” James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, Walt Whitman’s 
hymns to the open road, William Faulkner’s The Bear, and Jack 
Kerouac’s On the Road are other literary examples.
Huckleberry Finn has inspired countless literary 
interpretations. Clearly, the novel is a story of death, 
rebirth, and initiation. The escaped slave, Jim, becomes a 
father figure for Huck; in deciding to save Jim, Huck grows 
morally beyond the bounds of his slave-owning society. It is 
Jim’s adventures that initiate Huck into the complexities of 
human nature and give him moral courage.
The novel also dramatizes Twain’s ideal of the harmonious 
community: “What you want, above all things, on a raft is 
for everybody to be satisfied and feel right and kind 
toward the others.” Like Melville’s ship the Pequod, the raft 
sinks, and with it that special community. The pure, simple 
world of the raft is ultimately overwhelmed by progress — 
the steamboat — but the mythic image of the river 
remains, as vast and changing as life itself.
The unstable relationship between reality and illusion is 
Twain’s characteristic theme, the basis of much of his 
humor. The magnificent yet deceptive, constantly changing 
river is also the main feature of his imaginative landscape. 
In Life on the Mississippi, Twain recalls his training as a 
young steamboat pilot when he writes: “I went to work 
now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding 
and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or 
hands on, that was the chief.”
Twain’s moral sense as a writer echoes his pilot’s 
responsibility to steer the ship to safety. Samuel 
Clemens’s pen name, “Mark Twain,” is the phrase 
Mississippi boatmen used to signify two fathoms (3.6 
meters) of water, the depth needed for a boat’s safe 
passage. Twain’s serious purpose combined with a 
rare genius for humor and style keep Twain’s writing 
fresh and appealing.
COSMOPOLITAN NOVELISTS
Henry James (1843-1916)
Henry James once wrote that art, especially literary art, 
“makes life, makes interest, makes importance.”
James’s fiction and criticism is the most highly conscious, 
sophisticated, and difficult of its era. With Twain, James is 
generally ranked as the greatest American novelist of the 
secondhalf of the 19th century.
James is noted for his “international theme” — that is, the 
complex relationships between naïve Americans and cosmopolitan 
Europeans. What his biographer Leon Edel calls James’s first, or 
“international,” phase encompassed such works as Transatlantic 
Sketches (travel pieces, 1875), The American (1877), Daisy Miller 
(1879), and a masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In The 
American, for example, Christopher Newman, a naïve but 
intelligent and idealistic self-made millionaire industrialist, goes to 
Europe seeking a bride. When her family rejects him because he 
lacks an aristocratic background, he has a chance to revenge 
himself; in deciding not to, he demonstrates his moral superiority.
James’s second period was experimental. He exploited new 
subject matters — feminism and social reform in The 
Bostonians (1886) and political intrigue in The Princess 
Casamassima (1885). He also attempted to write for the 
theater, but failed embarrassingly when his play Guy 
Domville (1895) was booed on the first night. 
In his third, or “major,” phase James returned to international subjects, but 
treated them with increasing sophistication and psychological penetration. 
The complex and almost mythical The Wings of the Dove (1902), The 
Ambassadors (1903) (which James felt was his best novel), and The Golden 
Bowl (1904) date from this major period. If the main theme of Twain’s work 
is appearance and reality, James’s constant concern is perception. In James, 
only self-awareness and clear perception of others yields wisdom and 
self-sacrificing love. As James develops, his novels become more 
psychological and less concerned with external events. In James’s later 
works, the most important events are all psychological — usually moments 
of intense illumination that show characters their previous blindness. For 
example, in The Ambassadors, the idealistic, aging Lambert Strether 
uncovers a secret love affair and, in doing so, discovers a new complexity to 
his inner life. His rigid, upright, morality is humanized and enlarged as he 
discovers a capacity to accept those who have sinned.
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
Like James, Edith Wharton grew up partly in Europe 
and eventually made her home there. She was
descended from a wealthy, established family in New 
York society and saw firsthand the decline of
this cultivated group and, in her view, the rise of 
boorish, nouveau-riche business families. This social
transformation is the background of many of her 
novels.
 
Like James, Wharton contrasts Americans and 
Europeans. The core of her concern is the gulf 
separating social reality and the inner self. Often a 
sensitive character feels trapped by unfeeling 
characters or social forces. Edith Wharton had 
personally experienced such entrapment, as a young 
writer suffering a long nervous breakdown partly due 
to the conflict in roles between writer and wife.
Wharton’s best novels include The House of Mirth 
(1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), Summer 
(1917), The Age of Innocence (1920), and the 
beautifully crafted novella Ethan Frome (1911).
Excerpts from: VANSPANCKEREN, Kathryn. Outline of American Literature. 
Rev. Ed. Washington: The United States of Department of State, 2006. 
Disponível em: <https://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/oal/oaltoc.htm>. Acesso 
em: 04 de fev. de 2021.
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