From the Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism, ed.

Donald Pizer

LOUIS J. BUDD

The American Background

INTRODUCTION
Although realism and naturalism could have sprung up independently in the
United States, the historical fact is that they flourished earlier in the Eu-
ropean countries all the way eastward to Russia and that American writers
were especially stimulated by British and French models. O n the other hand,
though a still provincial, moralizing culture might have rejected realism and
naturalism as alien or profane or harmful, nevertheless they did become
established in the postbellum United States. Even Richard Chase, whose The
American Novel and Its Tradition (1957)had argued that the romance was
the quintessential mode of fiction in the United States, felt compelled to
declare:
After all, realism, although it was there from the beginning, did "rise," or at
least became conscious of itself as a significant, liberalizing and forward-
looking literary program. Whole areas of the American novel, both classic and
modern, are closed to any reader who . . . thinks that it contains no meaning-
ful element of realism. The great writers, classic and modern, did not devote
themselves exclusively to translating everything into symbols, myths, and ar-
chetypes, thus removing literature from the hazards of experience and the
vicissitudes of change. These writers functioned in the real world, or tried to;
they reported significant aspects of the real world in their fictions, and often
they had, besides archetypes, ideas - political, cultural, religious, historical.'
American realism did and does matter importantly.
My essay will treat realism and naturalism as joined sequentially rather
than as disjunctive, though either approach has good foundations. More
specifically, though naturalism could have arisen only after absorbing the
insights of realism, it insisted on subjects, attitudes, and techniques that
bewildered and often offended its forerunners. Some literary historians feel
obliged to work out an essentially unique rationale for it. Still, like the
realists, the naturalists saw sentimental and adventurous fantasy and, be-
hind that, the genteel tradition as the main source of miasma.

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Critics favorable toward realism, through hindsight, can explain its rise as
triumphantly irresistible. In fact there was no "movement" as any careful
historian would define that word - no clubs, much less marches or any
other group action. From various starting points a few writers worked
toward a practice that we can class as realistic. After William Dean How-
ells's series of monthly essays that were stitched together as Criticism and
Fiction (1891), he attracted letters and visits from admirers. But the realist
ranks stayed thin and - in the opinion of some Europeans - stunted politi-
cally. In 1888, Edward and Eleanor Marx Aveling's The Working-Class
Movement in America asked accusingly: "Where are the American writers
of fiction?" Karl Marx's daughter and her husband meant to emphasize that
no novelist (Garland, Crane, and Dreiser were still apprentices) had looked
penetratingly at the small farmers and the urban proletariat squeezed by the
corporations, financiers, and speculators. Even rightist Europeans thought
that the Old World realists and naturalists had plumbed far more deeply.
Inclined to feature innovation, literary historians of the New World have
exaggerated the success of realism in the I 880s and I 890s. It met with fierce
resistance in the marketplace, which preferred the gospel of positive think-
ing confirmed by progress - actual or imagined.

T H E INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND
The sequence with which an analysis takes up ideas inescapably implies
judgments about their relative importance. More problematically, the histo-
ry of ideas implies some degree of autonomy for ideas, though they always
interact with their sociohistorical context. Still, there's heuristic gain in
analyzing them as a self-contained system even if novelists are drawn by
temperament toward narrative rather than philosophy. A narrow use of that
temperament could be to extrapolate the origins of the American realists1
naturalists from the Continental masters they admired. But besides blurring
national differences that would treat literature hermetically.
Domestically, the origins of realism can be traced back through famous
passages of Ralph Waldo Emerson (such as "What would we really know
the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the
street. . .") and Joel Barlow's "Hasty Pudding," arriving ultimately at 1620
or 1607 (if we settle for English-language sources). But even adding side-
trail sources like Sarah Kemble Knight would leave such an analysis not just
provincial but too literate, as well as literary. Like everybody else, writers
swim in the ocean of their society, studying (perhaps) its few metaphysicians
and hearing regularly its spokespersons (politicians, editors, and ministers),

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yet interacting, at some level of awareness, with the spottily educated

classes.
Although the illiterate leave no formal record (before the arrival of "oral
history"), Lewis 0. Saum has accumulated a convincing body of evidence
about them rather than balancing an inverted pyramid of inference.2 The
antebellum sources he synthesizes - primarily the letters and diaries of the
barely educated, who spell more by sound than rule - resist high-level
abstractions, but they expressed (during the childhood of Howells, John
William De Forest, or Mary Catherwood) three attitudes that could encour-
age realism. First, they pulsed with an earned feeling that the lifecycle was
far harsher than political rhetoric or literary sentimentalism admitted; such
a feeling, however patient, could welcome the relief of seeing easy optimism
challenged. Second, they recorded a growing egalitarian self-respect fed by
taking election-time bombast seriously; without soaring into Whitmanic
gigantism, a subsistence farmer or a housewife could feel that his or her
story deserved a more authentic telling. Third, they understandably saw that
society and its values were changing, a fact that could open the mind to new
approaches. Of course, countercurrents to these attitudes ran strong, draw-
ing on a sturdy Christian religiosity that was de facto the official dogma.
Although Henry James grew up more remote from the sweaty masses
than any other writer of his time, teeming Manhattan did surround Wash-
ington Square. Although the father of Sarah P. Willis tried hard to block her
off from low people and sights, "Fanny Fern's" readers would wonder at
how closely she knew life down to its grittiest. (Anybody who read the big-
city newspapers imaginatively could intuit the entire spectrum.) Painfully
observant Samuel Clemens matured in a bustling- rivertown; as a steamboat
pilot he saw an underside of antebellum glamour that he pretended to
ignore; out in the mining West he prospered much less but endured much
more than he had counted on. Perhaps overstating out of humility, Howells
remembered an earnest and idealistic family that could never reach mini-
mum security. None of these future novelists needed four years of civil war,
with its festering casualties and its waves of frustrated hope, to learn that
the day-to-day routine in the United States entailed painful problems, that
the larger-scaled society emerging while at least the first-line defenses of a
caste/class system crumbled was bringing changes in deep structure as well
as street manners.
Fred Lewis Pattee stressed the trans-Appalachian roots of Mary H. Cath-
erwood's fresh, honest fiction. More grandly, literary historians of his era
celebrated the effects of frontiering as vital to the rise of realism, but, if
pushed hard, this would imply that realism could arise only in the United

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States (or similar countries). Furthermore, Saum's documents show that the
push westward more often registered as an ordeal under the threat of acci-
dents, sickness, and malign weather than as a path to innovative self-
reliance. Early realistic fiction was midwestern rather than western: Edward
Eggleston's Roxy (1878), Catherwood's "Serena" (1882), and Hamlin Gar-
land's stories collected as Main-Traveled Roads (1891). Farmers, closer to
the despised city, had more quickly soured on the forces sweeping the indus-
trial Northeast.
Their urbanized counterparts, however skimpily educated, were also
learning that the factory and the banks behind it directed, as best they could,
the flow of power. That ethereal Truth so obvious to the antebellum spokes-
persons, North and South, that Truth assumed yet lovingly explicated, that
certainty of transcendent order in a God-guided universe functioning down
to the microlevel, had clouded over, had started to look gilded rather than
solid.3 Extending his research to the later nineteenth century, Saum discov-
ered that "natural," understood as based in observable practice, "was swift-
ly becoming a synonym for good, a change that borders on transmogrifica-
tion." Just as ominous for the cozily eternal certainties, the "confined" sense
of "society" as "companion and things partaking directly of companion-
ship" was capitulating to a "self-centered self" that felt embedded in a
broad, puzzling framework.4
Stephen Crane, who prided himself on avoiding pride of status, learned
quickly from exploring the lower depths, concluding that the Truth pro-
claimed from denominational and secular pulpits had to be unmasked,
especially for the masses who tried to live up to pious dogma while fuzzily
suspecting they were being misled. Dreiser, who started out at the bottom of
the white social ladder, believed utterly - or so he later claimed - in tran-
scendent values that blessed his immediate world; but when he trudged into
disbelief, he thought he was expressing the vague but deep doubts of his
originary class. Such are the mysteries of biography that Mary E. Wilkins,
rather than ridiculing what she perceived as a dying breed of small-acreage
farmers further constricted by religiosity, found cause to respect their quirk-
iness and to memorialize the sturdy yet insightfully skeptical women. In
ways that cannot be "proven," Crane, Dreiser, and Wilkins (later Freeman)
drew much of their strength as realists/naturalists from their interaction
with the anxieties permeating the millions rather than from sequenced dis-
course with intellectuals.
The attempt to demonstrate that mass-democratic attitudes also fed into
realism is both inviting and elusive. Some believers have always received
Christianity as egalitarian if not communitarian; Howells kept his family's

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fondness for such a reading, which he fleshed out with a semimodern social-
ism during the 1890s. Of course, the United States rested literally - through
its founding documents - on the principles of liberty, equality, and impartial
justice. The shrewd conservative, the schoolteacher, the editorialist, and the
politician kept the catchphrases familiar and ready - ironically - for the
reformers to invoke. They could invoke stronger passages from Tom Paine
or the abolitionists or Whitman if they knew Leaves of Grass and, better
still, Democratic Vistas. However, Karl Marx, known at second or third
hand, became anathema; his shadow so melodramatically darkens two early
novels about unionizing - Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Stillwater Tragedy
(1880) and John Hay's T h e Bread-Winners (1884) - that they are seldom
instanced as realistic. But egalitarian ideas, partly as held and exemplified
from below, surely encouraged Howells or Wilkins to present the bottom
classes more empathetically.
Although "serious" writers naturally lived among the literate classes,
realists got little help from them. The American variety of Victorianism
certainly matched its model in believing that sober uplift served the commu-
nity better than probing into its failures. Whereas Howells's David Sewell
attacked only sentimental romances at the dinner party in T h e Rise of Silas
Lapham, rank-and-file ministers were likely to carry on their tradition of
warning against all fiction as sin-inducing frivolity; more importantly, they
were increasingly rounding off their sermons - after the expected scourging
- with a chord of hope that included worldly redemption. Without much
retooling, some ministers doubled as academics, though an overworked
professoriate was emerging. Professors of English who taught any literature
at all favored the classics (Greek and Roman more than British) and ac-
cepted as their mission molding character rather than challenging the inher-
ited ideology. While H. H. Boyesen spoke out for realism during his fifteen
years at Columbia University, none of his colleagues joined him.
Among the other emerging professions, realists might have expected sup-
port from lawyers, who in the I 870s made the crucial passage to defending,
without loss of caste, (high-paying) clients who reeked ethically; the ante-
bellum mold of the gentleman/attorney/belletrist had crumbled. While a
thin layer of raisonneurs was developing a new academic specialty, courses
such as "mental" or "moral philosophy" were typically taught by theo-
logians, were mandatory for all seniors, and were designed to send them out
convinced that virtue was triumphant. "From the pre-eminent mental phi-
losopher of the 1860s and the 187os, Professor Noah Porter, Yale students
learned that knowing was possible because 'the rational methods of the
divine and human intellect are similar.'" Porter "assumed that God was

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beneficent and that He had arranged human and natural life according to
certain uniform principles."s Such confidence sanctioned current principles
of behavior and belief, though the intelligentsia also preached the gospel of
progress - progress that would make everyday life immensely more civi-
lized, not just more comfortable, yet would not erode the underlying Truth.
The most evident proof of progress was the accelerating success of tech-
nology. Both the sophisticate and the bumpkin marveled at the showy ma-
nipulations of a reality that, significantly, had to be uncovered by expert
techniques rather than magic or prayers. Electricity was the most obviously
impressive find. All along it had lurked there somewhere; once the technical
mind found it, it worked for everybody's use and pleasure - the telegraph,
the telephone, the light bulb, and the phonograph. A farmer who had only
heard about these wonders might see a locomotive pulling an immense load.
If the first electric motors seemed less mighty, they did confirm the benefits
of technology. During the nineteenth century these benefits steadily evolved
toward anti-supernatural or merely secular attitudes, eager to accept the
treasures of this earth. Once John Stuart Mill published his Utilitarianism in
1861, the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number soothed
many consciences. Careful, objective thought would discover new facts,
from which induction derived "laws" for the laboratory and also for ethical
choices. In 1866 Robert E. Lee counseled his daughter: "Read history,
works of truth, not novels and romances. Get correct views of life and learn
to see the world in its true light. It will enable you to live pleasantly, to d o
good, and, when summoned away, to leave without regret."6 This advice
could stand as a reprise of Scottish "commonsense" philosophy - the fa-
vored antebellum metaphysics - but it could also sound up-to-date during
the decades ahead.
At the self-consciously intellectual level, scientific thinking, labeled as
such, won supporters for its coherence and rationality, reinforced by usable
results. As the century began, a coordinated universe, planned by a divine
creator, was already revealing manipulable patterns; problem-solving in-
stead of wishful thinking (or the wishful feeling encouraged by sentimental
romances) produced answers beneficial ever after for this world. Closure-
prone historians of ideas tend to make Darwinian biology displace mechani-
cal physics, but even today many lay admirers of science as the path into
functioning reality are fundamentally Newtonian.7
With the return to peacetime discourse, interest in the scientific approach
jumped sharply. Examples so abound as to recall Charles Darwin's astonish-
ment at how nature fills every crack and any crevice. In Boston the Radical
Club started up in 1867 to suit the "desire of certain ministers and laymen

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for larger liberty of faith, fellowship, and communion . . . for the freest
investigation of all forms of religious thought and inquiry." But by the time
the club dissolved in 1880, its meetings had centered "generally upon scien-
tific and educational problems."g As early as 1873, when Whitelaw Reid -
already in control of the New York Tribune - delivered a widely praised
speech at Dartmouth College, he could assert: "Ten or fifteen years ago, the
staple subject here for reading and talk, outside study hours, was English
poetry and fiction. Now it is English science. Herbert Spencer, John Stuart
Mill, Huxley, Darwin, Tyndall, have usurped the places of Tennyson and
Browning, and Matthew Arnold and Dickens."9 Reid, who would have icily
resented the label of philistine, was pleased that "we are no longer sentimen-
tal" but firmly quizzical instead. Although he primarily belabored "senti-
mentalists" about politics, he also cared about literature. To many intellec-
tuals, science taught objectivity, defined both as the patient screening out
not just of prejudices but also useless truisms and as the springboard to
further insights. With a counterbalance of irony, the basis for Howellsian
realism was in place.
Darwin's O n the Origin of Species would prove more important for
naturalism, though it came out as early as 1859. Not that it played to the
stereotype of the epoch-making theory that inches toward notice. When O n
the Origin was soon republished in the United States, the New York Times
ran a very long review that begins: "Mr. Darwin, as the fruit of a quarter-
century of patient observation and experiment, throws out, in a book whose
title at least by this time has become familiar to the reading public, a series
of arguments and inferences so revolutionary as, if established, to necessi-
tate a radical reconstruction of the fundamental doctrines of natural histo-
ry."lo But that revolutionary thrust was soon blunted by a "soft" Darwin-
ism, partly cosmetic and partly optimistic. Like his father a Congregational
minister and long a professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics at Yale
University, Noah Porter, along with his peers, rejected a nature red in tooth
and claw as manifestly false; more crucially, they argued that evolution was
simply God's intricate, patient way of bringing humankind to its almost
perfected state. Ridicule at all levels of print down to filler-jokes and car-
toons doubtless discouraged other minds from bending Darwin's way. Most
viscerally, there was reluctance to abdicate the throne of the chain of being
or to slide from the center of the universe into the animal kingdom - moves
harder to take because Thomas H. Huxley, Darwin's "bulldog," insisted on
facing the brute facts.
Although "hard" Darwinism had to cut across the grain in the United
States, it did spread soon. Enough proof abounds t o have delighted Darwin,

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who liked to pile up examples stupefyingly.11 Before the monthly Galaxy,

Mark Twain's chief outlet, gave a rich survey, it predicted:
The Taine of the twentieth century who shall study the literature of the nine-
teenth will note an epochal earmark. He will discover a universal drenching of
belles-lettres with science and sociology, while the ultimate, dominant tinge in
our era he will observe to be Darwinism. Not only does all physical research
take color from the new theory, but the doctrine sends its pervasive hues
through poetry, novels, history. A brisk reaction betrays its disturbing presence
in theology. Journalism is dyed so deep with it that the favorite logic of the
leading article is "survival of the fittest," and the favorite jest is "sexual
selection." In the last new book, in the next new book, you will detect it.12
The Galaxy's particulars included: "At New Orleans, last Mardi Gras, what
did the 'Mistick Krewe of Comus' choose for their sport but the 'Missing
Links' of Darwin." Although playfulness more than anxiety must have
motivated that sport, the members of Boston's Radical Club were perturbed
by a lecture on "Evolution," which pointed out that the skulls of some
extinct human species "did exactly resemble the corresponding features of
our monkey." Discussion drifted on into "the relations of human nature to
that of the lower animals."
The questions that Darwin stimulated were far-reaching yet intensely
personal, gritty yet exciting, obvious to wits and journalists yet profound
to philosophers of science. He "established a theoretical framework for
integrating biological thought with the mechanistic structure of physical
thought," thus supplying "grounds for a unified system of knowledge."13
Lay thinkers, including novelists, absorbed Darwinism more painfully. Even
those who stood immovably on religious faith had to cope harder with the
possibility that science and religion are not compatible. Before Darwin, the
lecturer in moral philosophy might rhapsodize that the physical world keeps
offering up evidence of how the Creator had designed it to serve His flock,
- -

or still cozier evidence of how the physical and human worlds serve each
other. The literal accuracy of the Bible - already clouded by the textual
"higher criticism" and the comparative study of religions - grew dimmer;
Heaven as both goal and endpoint also dimmed while secular values made
for a better wager than in Pascal's time. As increasingly understood just
before Darwin, God's design had incorporated moral order, which no longer
meant predestination but a freedom of will within mutual benevolence.
Huxleyan humankind competed to survive for - arguably - no demonstra-
ble purpose beyond producing members of the species who would repeat the
process.
Although basic Darwinism proposed a coordinated pair of principles, it

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implied consequences so wrenching that individual acceptance varied dizzy-

ingly. Still, the stance of realists and naturalists differed fundamentally from
that of Jane Austen, often made the exemplar of how the Newtonian world-
view could shape a novel. They tried to discipline themselves to a stricter
level of objectivity, even that of the scientist poised to consider any reason-
able idea - such as that the ancestors of Homo sapiens may include simians
but not angels, that Homo may act far less from sapience than from instinct,
that physical needs may override the conscience, that life is a chancy process
rather than a path toward redemption, that nurture within an inescapably
specific environment shapes organisms in fascinating but sometimes grim
ways. In the pre-Darwinian United States the boldest novelists, and espe-
cially Herman Melville, had sensed most of these ideas, but nobody could
combine such loomings into an integrated vision and technique.
Melville came close because he resonated to some of the same ideas that
educated Darwin. When the other sciences get a fair hearing, On the Origin
blurs as the massive turning point. Once mostly a hobby, geology as prac-
ticed by Charles Lyell established the principle of uniformity, that is, the
consistency of earth-shaping processes over aeons, over "deep" time. Like-
wise, chemistry was discovering other underlying processes or structures,
showily demonstrable in the kitchen or the factory or, in ten seconds, at a
popular lecture. More crucial at first than any metaphysical iconoclasms
was the impact on general knowledge. Sciences of the nineteenth century
were of course less abstruse than today, and their leaders wrote for the
weekly and monthly magazines. By 1871,.when Howells took over as chief
editor, the Atlantic Monthly carried the subtitle "A Magazine of Literature,
Science, Art, and Politics." Furthermore, readers eagerly labored to keep
pace, and Popular Science Monthly, featuring articles that now look dully
formidable, reached a print run of eleven thousand soon after 1872. Its
publisher had already started an "International Scientific Library" that
would grow to over fifty volumes through offering the leading thinkers, not
their interpreters.
E. L. Youmans (1821-87), the organizer behind those two enterprises,
zealously promoted Herbert Spencer into one of the most spacious intellects
since humankind began t o reason - though his books are now ignored as
wordy, opaque, and free-floating. His disciples took him as proving that a
system of interrelated "forces" guides an evolutionary sweep upward.
Building the symmetrical mansion of certainties that they yearned for, he
supplied more of an emotional than a logical experience. Whereas Howells
and Crane were indifferent, Dreiser and Norris realized that they had been
groping to find his "universe of force." Norris's grandiosity causes later

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readers to skim without recognizing that The Octopus could not have been
written without Spencer. He would help lead less ebullient minds such as
Henry Adams to what Herbert Schneider, in a history of American philoso-
phy, labels a "desperate naturalism."
Intellectuals willing to consider the scientific approach could feel that
they were discovering how their world is put together, could feel proud of
exploring caves that stand-fast religionists shunned, and could grow eager
to apply empiricism everywhere. Getting up from armchair introspection or
from prayer for a humankind that had in Adam's fall sinned all, they started
to observe how individuals develop, to record how consciousness actually
works, and so to move toward William James's functionalism. Gordon 0 .
Taylor has concluded succinctly:

Roughly between 1870 and 1900 fictive psychology in the American novel
undergoes a fundamental shift. . . . The basic view of the mind underlying the
representation of consciousness in fiction moves away from a notion of static,
discrete mental states requiring representational emphasis on the conventional
nature of particular states, toward a concept of organically linked mental
states requiring representational emphasis on the nature of the sequential
process itself.14

Although biographers profitably debate the influence of William James as

psychologist on his brother Henry's novels - and possible reciprocity -
other writers doubtless learned from the essays commissioned by the maga-
zines that considered themselves conduits of the latest expertise and kept
increasing their audience in the decades after the Civil War.
By the 1880s James and Howells were berated for cutting, as coldly as a
scientist, into the mind of the girl-woman, endangering her ideals along with
those of her admirers. We have to wonder whether that stopped James and
Howells from cutting deeper, down to the libido, and whether their critics
felt threatened more by biology than by current psychology. In 1871 Dar-
win had released The Descent of Man, bothersome enough with its pictures
comparing the facial emoting of simians and humans. But when read care-
fully, it confronted the effects of pairing for reproduction, which On the
Origin of Species had discussed inconclusively. The public was uneasily
fascinated, according to the Galaxy essayist who complained that "the
favorite jest is 'sexual selection.' " Although hit-and-run historians overstate
Victorian prudery, literary realists, and much more naturalists, felt charged
on behalf of objective fact to scrutinize the professed standards for sexuality
and, most egregiously, for courtship and marriage.
Less traumatically, post-Darwin biology, by supporting the principle that

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all experience operates under "laws," contributed to the rise of sociology,

already proposed by Auguste Comte as a science for codifying a fresh con-
cept, which appropriated the term society. "The older disciplines had failed
fully to explain human conduct, not only because of their reliance on ideal,
rather than observed, categories but also because they were limited in what
they investigated. In 'society,' the new intellectuals of the later nineteenth
century hit upon a concept that described a space between the State as
described in political theory and Man as understood in philosophy." This
"recognition of society as a rule-bound entity that was greater than the sum
of its individual parts" lay behind the founding in 1 8 6 ~of the American
Social Science Foundation, which stressed reform but increasingly debated
theories of development.15 The so-called genetic method began tracking the
individual within the shaping context that might be changing too. While
psychologists groped for the discrete individual, the sociologists discovered
typicality. As Jerome J. McGann encapsulates the matter: " . . . it came to be
believed that if one wanted to understand 'human nature' in general, one
had to proceed along two dialectically related paths: along the path of a
thorough sociohistorical set of observations and along the path of the, now
so-called, sciences of the artificial. For 'human nature' was not (is not)
'made' by God, it was (and continues to be) artfully, artificially constructed
by human beings, within certain given limits, in the course of their social
development."16 The realistic writers' dilemma had arrived, though they
saw it as an invigorating challenge: how to create unique characters who
nevertheless stand for more than themselves, stand for an occupation, a
class, a "type."
Some, if not most, of the mainline spokespersons during the 1890s chor-
tled at the dilemma. William Roscoe Thayer, then eminent as an editor,
historian, and biographer, jeered at the novelist who pretended to "scientific
impartiality," precision, and also breadth.17 Others professed to accept cur-
rent science yet insisted on a God enthroned just behind its laws, a step from
where He had reigned at mid-century. Edith Wharton's slyly titled short
story "The Descent of Man" (1904) sympathized with a biologist who,
irritated by "soft" uses of science, tried to "avenge his goddess by satirising
her false interpreters" and their "hazy transcendentalism"; but his book,
which heaped "platitude on platitude, fallacy on fallacy, false analogy on
false analogy," was welcomed seriously into bestsellerdom. Although ac-
claimed painters like F. E. Church absorbed the geologists' concept of uni-
formitarian process within deep time, their landscapes depended on a "nat-
ural theology"; Darwinism only sharpened their sense of the intricate
variety of the Nature planned by the Creator.18 Taking our own lesson from

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evolutionary thought, we must focus on how novelists behaved both indi-

vidually and typically within their particular ambiance.

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Major shifts of ideas occur within broad, visible processes. Still, it sharpens
insight to distinguish the historical from the intellectual sources of realism,
to specify the events and groupings that elicited or else supported it. Getting
specific must start, however, from the recognition that attitudes toward
history itself were changing. Collectively, nineteenth-century science under-
cut the ancient theories that humankind moves in recurring cycles; instead,
the doctrine or myth of progress sprang into many-faceted dominance. In
even minimal terms this scotched any harking back to some golden age. The
field marshals of progress orated with positive gestures that embraced all
viable troops, including novelists. In 1870 Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
now remembered mainly for his interchange with Emily Dickinson, pre-
dicted an "advance along the whole line of literary labor, like the elevation
which we have seen in the whole quality of scientific work in America,
within the past twenty years"; soon after, he joined the chorus anticipating
the "Great American Novel" that such an advance would surely produce.19
Progress also meant discarding the outmoded as much as it demanded open-
ness to the new. While scientists used some facts discovered in the past, it
was essentially prehistory for the bustling, superior present.
A fortified thesis holds that the modern novel, inherently mimetic, arose
along with the middle class of a commercial, industrializing society. That
middle class began craving to be presented respectfully and encouraged that
end by buying the obliging novels. In turn, it encouraged middle-class secu-
larism, which found that practical economics can pay off at a rising rate.
Otherworldliness faded before the pleasures of consumerism and reaching
shorter-term goals.
The middle class professed religious (synonymous with Christian) values.
However, the realistic classics of the later nineteenth century would rarely
show such values as happily directing the mainstream of experience. In fact,
the genteelist critics attacked those classics as impious or actively destructive
of idealism, and romances about faith that conquers all, usually through a
woman's tenacity, far outsold those classics. Especially in the United States,
the middle class had entered into its schizophrenia: its split between laissez-
faire economics and a rationalizing denial of the brutalities entailed. As one
result, men - the "breadwinners" competing head to head - belittled fiction
as a toy for sheltered women, while realists tried to win respect for what

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 THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND

they considered the highest potential of the novel, its "fidelity to experience
and probability of motive," according to Howells. Since the middle class
had built its success upon practicality, H. H. Boyesen, a would-be peer of
Howells, argued craftily, in "The Great Realists and Empty Story-Tellers"
(1895), that their mode of fiction helped toward "survival and success in
life."
Although the middle class was more powerful in the United States than
elsewhere, it was less self-conscious than in England or France. With some
sincerity, its rhetoric for onshore politics ignored or minimized the sorting
by income in a New World of equality. "I affirm," wrote Higginson in
"Americanism in Literature," "that democratic society, the society of the
future, enriches and does not impoverish human life, and gives more, not
less, material for literary art. Distributing culture throughout all classes, it
diminishes class-distinction and develops distinctions of personal charac-
ter7'(6z).Early admirers of Howells declared Silas Lapham the embodiment
of Higginson's vision, especially as he elaborated it: "To analyze combina-
tions of character that only our national life produces, to portray dramatic
situations that belong to a clearer social atmosphere, - this is the higher
Americanism." But Higginson's future could not later welcome Carrie
Meeber (of Columbia City) as a product of "our national life" nor the
Bowery as part of our "social atmosphere"; it had retained too much of his
antebellum world.
The Civil War, we now recognize, ended in victory for Northern capital-
ism and its centralizing bureaucracy, its network of railroads, and - most
important at the time - its factories. Its captains trumpeted the visible
changes, certified as Progress, and for the Centennial played loud Te Deums.
The festivities of 1876 presented American history as a quickening march, a
sequenced narrative. In actual demography, postwar industrialism lured
people from farm to town and then to pell-mell cities, inviting yet myste-
rious to outsiders. Editors saw an urgent need as well as profitable op-
portunity to document the new social contexts - the city more than the fac-
tory - and the way that Americans were adapting to assembly lines and
horsecars, electric lights and apartment houses. The competing, burgeoning
metropolitan newspapers featured the twists of daily survival or success;
periodicals featured breathless essays on changing facts and attitudes. Ephem-
eral fiction also exploited such approaches, though it more often played up
to nostalgia.
Serious novelists likewise felt the impulse to explain, or at least to record,
the onrushing changes. But any documentation is selective and therefore
implicitly judgmental. The realistic temperament turned toward the disjunc-

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 LOUIS J. BUDD

tures between optimistic rhetoric and what was actually happening. Its next
phase - "critical" realism - emphasized the mismatches between the boast-
ings of laissez-faire industry and the workers ground up in the dark satanic
mills; Rebecca Harding Davis's still familiar short story had already moved
in 1861 beyond documentation to pained protest. Little known today are
some texts of countercritical realism that showed factory "hands" resisting
their own best interests. But by the 1890s its genial foremen and owners
appeared seldom. The realists we still respect, Howells especially, would
increasingly indict either the logic of Manchester Liberalism or those who
carried it into a practice that refused a livable wage and a safe workplace.
The Jeffersonian-agrarian ideal collapsed so slowly that, into the twen-
tieth century, farmers attracted wider sympathy than factory workers. Their
troubles had differentiated them from the quirky trailblazers, ennobled in
I 893 as Frederick Jackson Turner's "pioneers," and the get-rich-quick pros-
pectors of Mark Twain's Roughing It. They battled nature to function as
productive units of the nation but were exploited by bankers, railroads, and
"trusts" (industrial monopolies). Although the farmers producing for the
commodities market were in fact gambling, they had no chance against the
speculators in Omaha, Kansas City, Saint Louis, or Chicago - who looked
to Manhattan for the bank of last resort. Although the Grangers and the
Populists protested the farmers' entrapment sooner than did the intellec-
tuals, by the later 1880s Hamlin Garland was writing short stories that still
resonate. Historians also honor E. W. Howe's Story of a Country Town
(1883) and Joseph Kirkland's Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County
(1887).
Before the Civil War the major novels had ignored current affairs. While
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) made a sensation, neither chattel nor wage slav-
ery inspired a genre of social-justice fiction. The promise of romantic de-
mocracy to set all wrong matters right for whites still sounded believable.
After the Civil War, however, many of those matters not only looked but felt
different; the age of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and even Abraham Lincoln
seemed almost quaint. Overriding a chaotic increase in population, modern-
ization crunched onward without a pause. However, historians agree on its
exclamation points. Grantism, the deep corruption in federal affairs, upset
revered symbols: the chief hero of the war had degenerated into a President
conned by his cronies. In 1873 a depression ended the dream that the
postwar prosperity would go on expanding forever. Too soon after the
Centennial, the railroad riots of 1877 proved that American workers -
perhaps even the native-born - could destroy property, could defy the regu-
lar army called in to rescue the police. Violence punctuated the 1880s more

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 THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND

regularly, as the Knights of Labor led strikes and the Populist militants
stirred. A judicial lynching after the Haymarket Affair astounded Howells.
The bloody Homestead strike of 1892 horrified several differing constituen-
cies; the Panic of 1893 reminded those who had prospered lately that the
economic machine had structural flaws; labor unions and their allies con-
cluded during the Pullman strike of 1894 that the wealthy made up law and
order to suit themselves. If the campaign against the Filipinos in 1900 had
inspired memorable fiction, that would have seemed the climax of the edu-
cation that middle-class liberals had accumulated during the last thirty-five
years. Instead, economic history had compiled a more dangerous liability: in
Dreiser and Jack London the city's victims were starting to produce their
own writers, mordantly skeptical toward what the ruling elites told them to
believe.
Between 1865 and the First World War, three movements that never built
to a famous crisis disturbed, nevertheless, the hymns to progress. The freed
slaves themselves began contrasting the promises made (and sometimes
proclaimed as kept) and the reality that was eroding the ground won during
Reconstruction. White women began joining organizations that cam-
paigned for their legal and political rights; more illuminating for novelists,
the bravest women announced that the genteel version of their character
and desires hid the facts. Finally, immigration, growing exponentially,
flooded in a melange of humankind whose values and behavior shook
WASP complacencies. Moreover, those immigrants who had believed de-
mocracy's promises began resisting their mistreatment; a few - numerous by
comparison with homegrown reformers - imported a leftist critique of
capitalism.
A novelist could perceive such movements as an opportunity, a challenge,
or even a responsibility. At first Howells, like others, talked about the duty
of literature to help heal the wounds of the war. Next, he urged middle-class
readers to enter empathetically the maze of religions, ethnic enclaves, jobs,
and regional mores. Pushed programatically, this added up to a wholly fresh
way of looking at American society, not just through literature; minimally, it
called for an objective, accurate picture of who and what was out there.
Cultural historians have documented the lightning spread and deep popu-
larity of photography, of taking and looking at pictures.20 During the last
decades of the century the trompe-l'oeil precision of William Michael Har-
nett and his school fascinated public taste; portrait painters, alert to the
rampant diversity, understood the "anxious need" of Americans "to know
what was going on beneath the masks of those strange others with whom
they were bafflingly yet inextricably bound."21 In newspapers and maga-

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 LOUIS J. BUDD

zines, fresh targets of humor emerged: mystics, ethereal poets, hermits,

fortune-tellers, and gallants looked spurious in a steam, steel, and stock-
market age.
During the 1880s the realist dynamic pushed beyond the ideal of percep-
tive accuracy toward a criticism of the dominating consensus - criticism for
its failures not only of vision but also of motives that had blinded it to its
harmful results. Howells, responsive to the evolving political-economic
struggle, solidified into a gentle force for social justice.22 Among the ongo-
ing coinages the term liberal realism fits his later fiction best. It exemplified
his faith in achieving a shared referentiality that can function humanely and
correctively. Such a faith was historically conditioned, but it continued to
condition history.

THE M A R K E T P L A C E
Although the term marketplace is still common, it was already an anachro-
nism for the publishing business in the later nineteenth century. Technology,
finance capital (in I 899 the venerable Harper & Brothers fell into the House
of Morgan's net), and advertising (aggressive, grand-scale "marketing")
would often determine what readers bought and so what got published
next. That a diagram for these interactions comes harder than one for
science or social conflict does not impugn their power. Of course, while
publishing as a business shaped the literary realists more subtly than they
could be expected to perceive, they would agree that we must consider its
effects on the fiction preferred by successful editors and their customers.
However manipulated in their choices, readers ultimately exerted their
own effects among the many tiers of taste available during the postbellum
decades, as technologies of manufacture and distribution made more kinds
of materials affordable.23 But no technocrat has proved whether or why
they will prefer one book over another. Since genuinely enthralled readers of
a novel engage with it subliminally, they themselves cannot explain their
preferences. Furthermore, postbellum readers, as always, switched from one
clientele to another as their moods or needs oscillated.
It is clear how the realists envisioned the audience they hoped to reach.
Respecting fiction as a potentially constructive discourse with social as well
as private consequences, they aspired to encourage a "common culture in
which all classes could partake."24 Doubtless calculating royalties too, they
aimed for a readability that would win and hold a following against fierce
competition and developed a professionalism that analyzed more coldly
than had the antebellum writers the dialectic of supply and demand.25 More

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specifically, they felt a mission to displace fiction that inspired destructive

fantasy through paragons of courage, honesty, or chaste courtship.
Because the novel offered much more room for detail, carried higher
prestige, and could pay better, the realists aimed primarily at the book trade.
Their desired publishers were the firms with an ongoing list for the educated
general reader, who supposedly detested pulp fiction or near pornography;
such a list included cutting-edge books that would bring status along with
passable sales. But sentimental romance in its several varieties sold by far
the best. As Scribner's Monthly reminded Boyesen, his breathless, exotic
Gunnar (1874) continued to attract more buyers than novels darkened by
"the objectionable influences allied to the so-called realistic schoo1."26 Not
yet labeled by George Santayana, the genteel tradition gained strength
throughout the last decades of the century. The mainstream firms resisted
fiction that clearly questioned the reigning code or just lacked the klan of
ideality. Quite consciously, they supported the principle that social institu-
tions - very much including the print-agencies - are interdependent, and
that each must instill the basic truths that empower a progressing human-
kind.
Boyesen gave the boldest analysis of how the unofficial censorship
worked. "The average American has no time to read anything but news-
papers, while his daughters have an abundance of time at their disposal, and
a general disposition to employ it in anything that is amusing. The novelist
who has begun to realize that these young persons constitute his public,
naturally endeavors to amuse them."27 Boyesen was constantly aware that
editors of the "paying magazines" mediated between him and those daugh-
ters; they acted for "that inexorable force called public taste." Still, behind
them loomed "the young American girl. She is the Iron Madonna who
strangles in her fond embrace the American novelist. . . ." Boyesen also
came closest to stating a related complaint: literature was being emasculated
because its determining readers were women. More calmly, Howells pon-
dered how to reeducate rather than dethrone the Iron Madonna; further-
more, he thought her less influential than the hardening pattern of the wife-
mother as the docent of fine culture. Although recent analysis agrees that
realistic fiction sold to both genders,28 publishers doubtlessly worried about
the reviewers who invoked feminine tastes, and Howells tried for a more
masculine appeal.
In fusing the magazine and book business Boyesen's analysis fit the facts.
Novelists with any leverage first sold the serial rights; moreover, short sto-
ries paid well and quicker as the monthlies reached their peak of prosperity.
They earned it by fashioning a "family" magazine, whose contents kept up

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 LOUIS J. BUDD

with major trends and with advice for positive thinking. Alert to their moral
superiority over the National Police Gazette and its ilk, they rejected ads for
improper merchandise, including such books. Of course they favored up-
beat fiction, as Edith Wharton learned young when Scribner's turned down
her novella "Bunner Sisters" because it did not have a cheerful episode at
the break between installments.29 Writers held back a gloomy story for a
collection that might include it as counterpoint; when an editor asked for a
"holiday" piece, they knew what chords to play. Boyesen grew sardonic:
"The editor, being anxious to keep all his old subscribers and secure new
ones, requires of his contributor that he shall offend no one. He must not
expose a social or religious sham. . . he must steer carefully, so as to step on
nobody's toes. . . . However much he may rebel against it, he is forced to
chew the cud of old ideas, and avoid espousing any cause which lacks the
element of popularity." Even so, this indictment understated how quickly
subscribers protested that a story or essay had violated some point of pro-
priety.30
Richard Watson Gilder could have proved that Boyesen had also oversim-
plified. His Century Magazine, the leading monthly, published stories and
novels that are still respected; in the 1880s it serialized A Modern Instance
and The Rise of Silas Lapham - and Henry James's The Bostonians to
noticeably light applause - and in the next generation, Jack London's The
Sea-Wolf. After Howells had made his staunch liberalism clear, Harper's
Monthly renewed his contract for "Editor's Study." Although firmly prefer-
ring ideality, the dominant magazines printed essays that lifted the torch for
realism. More importantly, because they sold continuous freshness, they
wanted fiction that broke through predictable stereotypes. An interplay
developed: realists probed the limits while watching their income; editors
strained to predict subscribers' tastes and to outshine competitors while
holding on to some margin of principle; readers expected fiction that suited
their values but were liable to cry clichi.! On the edges, latecomers probed
for a share-grabbing distinctiveness. In the early 1890s the new owner of
Cosmopolitan tried to climb along a reformist route; crusading editors of
second- and third-rate magazines, most notably B. 0. Flower of the Arena,
sought out young dissenters like Hamlin Garland; a band of livelier, lower-
priced monthlies inched toward the muckraking of the early 1900s that
encouraged franker, more probing fiction.
Historians of realism identify journalism as the common road of appren-
ticeship.31 The pattern works well enough for Howells, E. W. Howe, Am-
brose Bierce, Crane, Harold Frederic, Dreiser, and Willa Cather, among
others. Certainly, reporters routinely see and hear facts that contradict offi-

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 THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND

cial morality. Just turned twenty, Howells found the sordidness of his stint
on the Cincinnati Gazette unbearable. Dreiser recalled a ghastlier trauma:
"I went into newspaper work'' at the age of twenty "and from that time
dates my real contact with life - murders, arson, rape, sodomy, bribery,
corruption, trickery and false witness in every conceivable form."32 But,
raised two generations later, Dreiser could add, "Finally I got used to the
game and rather liked it."
Less sensationally, newspapers once gave much space to reviewing books.
In playing to a mass audience they were likelier than the magazines to praise
native writers; calling for, predicting, the Great American Novel made the
term a catchphrase, and realism was potentially the most indigenous
mode.33 Far more influential, probably, were the so-called literary come-
dians. Between 1870 or so and 1920 many a newspaper had its own
humorist-columnist groping for the angle needed daily. Furthermore, liter-
ary burlesque had a popularity that strikes us as idiosyncratic, and drab
realism made an inviting target. In the Chicago Daily News, Eugene Field
poked fun at Hamlin Garland's heroes who "sweat and do not wear socks"
and heroines who "eat cold huckleberry pie and are so unfeminine as not t o
call a cow 'he.' " However, sentimental or historical romances overreached
worse, with characters and rhetoric that struck cynical journalists as de-
manding ridicule.34 Aside from such burlesque, the literary comedians fea-
tured an honestly colloquial language seldom used elsewhere in respectable
print. Boyesen's "average American" who "has no time to read anything but
newspapers" was absorbing a protorealism, not just from the crime stories
but also the columns meant to be amusing.

THE MOVEMENT
In any argument on whether nineteenth-century realism was concerted
enough to rate as a "movement" both the positive and the negative are
easily attacked. Many intelligent polemicists assumed that "realism" signi-
fied a clear and present breakthrough or else danger.35 O n the other hand,
the roster of novelists who explicitly endorsed that catchword is short and
conspicuously lacks the names of Mark Twain and Henry James.
The "realism war," as Howells called it, first grew sharp during the
1880s. Because art for art's sake showed no American panache until the
189os, the debate posed realism against "ideality." While it never reached
the sophistication or intensity of its earlier climax in France, it had a far
stronger moral-ethical tone. For the historian, to highlight particular debat-
ers itself turns into a test of objectivity, because either side could sound

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 L O U I S J. B U D D

naive. Gilder's record as editor of Century Magazine makes his "Certain

Tendencies in Current Literature" the fairest exhibit: Since "realism is, in
fact, something in the air . . . the Time-Spirit . . . the state of mind of the
nineteenth century," it "is at this moment vitalizing American literature and
attracting to it the attention of the world." Having overstated generously,
Gilder orated onward to a compromise: "The pronounced realist is a useful
fellow-creature, but so also is the pronounced idealist - stouten his work
though you will with a tincture of reality."36 At the least Gilder shows that
the opposing terms operated then as intrinsically significant.
Deepest down, Gilder sided with the idealists, some of whom debated far
more testily. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who kept rising in prestige from the
I 860s until after 1900, sniped away. His "An Untold Story" ended provoca-
tively: "A gloss of grim fact might have spoiled the finer text"; "At the
Funeral of a Minor Poet" condemned the "Zolaistic Movement" for its
"miasmatic breath." In the magazines, satiric verse consistently favored the
side of ideality. Because of Boyesen's temperament and European training he
emerged as realism's fiercest champion in a string of essays that his death cut
short in 1895.
Besides his polemics, younger novelists could draw enough strength from
the essays collected by Howells as Criticism and Fiction, by Garland as
Crumbling Idols (1894), and by Norris as The Responsibilities of the Novel-
ist (1903)~'to believe that they lived in the age of realism.38 Kate Chopin,
Harold Frederic, and Edith Wharton could stand on what seemed a liber-
ated rationale, though today we see them as having been conditioned by the
same society they urged their audience to judge objectively. That society
taught the dignity of self-support along with sincerity and altruism but
awarded fame for strenuous personal achievement; while advising the mass-
es to nurture themselves on "good" literature, it shaped tastes toward im-
mediate profits, on which authors had to live. The realists, who never came
close to dominating sales or critical opinion, struggled with problems they
sometimes could not define, much less master. For instance, Howells puzzled
over the dilemma of how to improve best-sellers by belittling them without
reinforcing elitism.
Historians who hold that a movement did coalesce have to stretch when
inscribing its honor roll, especially if they exclude native American humor
and the larger school of local color. Some would include Harriet Beecher
Stowe's turn into a household-centered "domestic" realism that they find
already active by the 18 50s; her Oldtown Folks ( I869) opens with a memo-
rable manifesto for plain-folks mimesis. Others would resuscitate Oliver
Wendell Holmes's three "medicated" novels, particularly Elsie Venner

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 THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND

(1861). Historians posted on Southern literature reach back further to Wil-

liam Gilmore Simms, for the raw, lusty detail of his works set on the "Bor-
der" - the frontier of the antebellum Southwest.
Nevertheless, when John W. De Forest surveyed current fiction in 1868 he
found no major movement in sight.39 Actually, he could have puffed his
own Miss Ravenel's Comersion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) for its
war scenes, fitfully natural dialogue, and ironic undertone. His Kate Beau-
mont (1872) and Playing the Mischief (1875) moved further toward a quiz-
zicality and self-discipline that would have improved Edward Eggleston's
novels. Although the sentimentalism runs too deep for surgery in the once
famous Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), Roxy (1878) boldly accepts a Dar-
winian descent; its narrator comments on village folk enjoying the antics of
caged monkeys that they "were not conscious that there might be aught of
family affection in this attraction" and laughed "without a sense of gambol-
ing rudely over the graves" of "their ancestors" (chap. to).Working toward
its climax, Roxy explodes a steamboat: a "young Baptist minister, who with
his bride had just come aboard, stood . . . waving his handkerchief to the
friends on shore, when in an instant the boat flew into a thousand
pieces. . . . The bar-keeper alighted on the inverted roof of his bar, away in
the stream, and was saved. The young Baptist minister and his wife were
never found. A mile away . . . in a tree-top, there was found a coat-collar,
which his friends thought belonged to him" (chap. 57). More crucially, the
future of the worthy heroine, who married for love, looks troubled rather
than happy.
By the 1880s the realistically persuaded were focusing on complexity of
motive. S. Weir Mitchell, better known as a clinician and medical psycholo-
gist, kept readers of In War Time (1884) unsure how to judge the protago-
nist; deservedly, he ends up "broken" in mind and spirit, but that result was
not predictable and was constructed with enough empathy to block any
effect of a villain. For a while Henry Blake Fuller, in The Cliff-Dwellers
(1893) and With the Procession (1895), promised to outdo Howells. Admir-
ers of Boyesen's polemics had yet stronger hopes, supported less by the
qualities of The Mammon of Unrighteousness (1891) than by its preface,
which pledged to avoid "sensational incidents": "I have disregarded all
romantic traditions, and simply asked myself in every instance, not whether
it was amusing, but whether it was true to the logic of reality - true in color
and tone to the American sky, the American soil, the American character."
Although Boyesen's star dimmed quickly, Robert Herrick, another professor
of literature, was soon impressing reviewers with intellectually ambitious
novels, known today only to scholars. Harold Frederic's The Damnation of

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 L O U I S J. B U D D

Theron Ware (1896), which also has only such readers now, deserves better
for its low-key, tolerant, slow defrocking of a Methodist preacher.
Lately, historians have been rediscovering writers such as Charles
Chesnutt and Frances E. W. Harper - for Iola Leroy; or Shadows Uplifted
(1892). However, postbellum Afro-Americans fought for other such vital
causes as to leave realism secondary. Primary enrichment has come through
the latest wave of feminism, which has analyzed Kate Chopin's The Awak-
ening (1899) up to canonical status and has shown that Sarah Orne Jewett's
Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) and short stories deserve a roomier,
better respected category than local-color or regionalism. Overall, Jose-
phine Donovan contends that postbellum women were marginalized in both
ambition and subject, that local color was their self-censored realism.40

NATURALISM I N T H E TWENTIETH CENTURY

Realism became an integral source of naturalism without, however, losing
its own vitality. Although the post-Howells generation almost inevitably
thought they were rejecting their mentors, they continued in practice to take
sentimental romance as the chief, long-lived enemy in literature. The most
productive questions are ( I )what sources led beyond realism? and ( 2 ) how
did the two ism's differ?41
The naturalists were the first cohort to consider without surprise the
processes the Civil War had made dominant. They recognized that indus-
trialism and urbanism, now clearly irreversible, were accelerating; iron mills
had expanded into steel mills run by corporations scheming toward monop-
oly; not just the fitful pains of growing up, the conflict between capital and
labor was getting bloodier at the seams of a hardened class structure; in
1894 Coxey's Army looked like formidable guerrillas. Naturalists framed
politics in economics-oriented, more systematic and explicit terms than the
reformism implied by the realists. They also recognized that science had
cornered Homo sapiens by tracing his animal heritage and chemical mecha-
nisms. More willingly than grudgingly, the business of publishing had
changed as drastically. Garish facts peddled in the mushrooming tabloids
had punched gaps in the reticence that the public supposedly demanded of
novelists; though his enemies had shown Howells the foolishness of a static
mind, he received Maggie gingerly as the next stage of iconoclasm, which he
could not mount. Publishers and editors, competing for a readership ex-
panding in diversity and boldness of taste, accepted brighter colors, louder
tones, grubbier characters, and more brutal action; Norris felt born in the
nick of time.

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 THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND

Because critics disagree sharply, the sane conclusion is that the naturalists
wrote out of a loose gestalt of values and techniques rather than a coordi-
nated metaphysic or aesthetic. They surpassed the realists qualitatively in
exploring humankind's animal sides; their approach to psychology could let
instinct overpower conscious will. Most distinctively, they pushed further
toward determinism - economic or biological or cosmic - than American
novelists had cared or dared to go before.42 In method - secondary to
content insofar as the choice could or had to be made - they intensified the
ideal of objectivity; at documentary length, tabooed attitudes got not merely
a hearing but a self-justification. Although the naturalists' rhetoric turned
back toward intensity of tone and metaphor, readers were now manipulated
to regret the fate of a working-class dentist or accept the rise of fallen
women. Illiterate characters suffered as consciously as the rich and fluent,
and struggled with guilt as painfully as a Puritan minister, though naturalis-
tic closure brought pessimism instead of redemption. Within the protean
genre of the novel, a sympathetic reader easily distinguishes a naturalistic
from a realistic work, and either, through method as well as attitude, from
any other mode.
No American novelist moved from realism to naturalism, leaving a neat
exhibit for taxonomy. Nor did naturalism fit the metaphor of a gathering
stream. The shift was not accretive but qualitative. Naturalism burst out
with Crane, and then Norris and Dreiser, all more indebted literarily to
foreign than to native masters. Along with realism, it merged into the per-
manent background for the art of the nove1.43 Likewise, it has kept its own
ongoing vitality. It is the foreground for John Dos Passos, Ernest Heming-
way, William Faulkner (arguably),John Steinbeck, James T. Farrell, Richard
Wright, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Up-
dike's "Rabbit" tetralogy.

NOTES

I "Leslie Fiedler and American Culture," Chicago Review 14 (1960): 17-8.

2 The Popular Mood of Pre-Civil War America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood,
1980). Another path to in-depth materials is through local history, as in the
richly excellent Jean Bradley Anderson, Durham County (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1990).
3 Janet Gabler-Hover, Truth in American Fiction: The Legacy of Rhetorical Ideal-
ism (Athens:University of Georgia Press, ~ g g o )recapitulates
, the reigning opti-
mism before it wavered. In a broader context, the same attitude is sketched by
Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture,
1860-1880 (New York: Twayne, 1991), p. 139.

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 LOUIS J. B U D D

The Popular Mood of America, 1860-1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska

Press, ~ g q o )pp.
, 169-71.
Stevenson, p. 108; the italics are Porter's.
Quoted in Burton J. Hendrick, The Lees of Virginia (Boston: Little, Brown,
1935), P. 413.
A deeply informed exposition of the differences between the early and late
nineteenth-century western philosophy of science is David B. Wilson, "Con-
cepts of Physical Nature: John Herschel to Karl Pearson," in U.C.
Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson, eds., Nature and the Victorian Imagina-
tion (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977).
Mary Elizabeth (Fiske) Sargent, ed., Sketches and Reminiscences of the Radical
Club of Chestnut Street, Boston (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1880), p. [I].
"The Scholar in Politics," Scribner's Monthly 6 (1873): 608.
Quoted in Sender Garlin, "John Swinton, Crusading Editor," in his Three
American Radicals (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991), p. 9.
The best overall analysis is Cynthia Eagle Russett, Darwin in America: The
Intellectual Response 1865-1912 (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976). Par-
ticularly relevant here is "Evolutionary Ideas in Late Nineteenth-Century En-
glish and American Literary Criticism," chap. 7 of Donald Pizer, Realism and
Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, rev. ed. (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).
Philip Quilibet, "Darwinism in Literature," Galaxy I S (1873): 695-8. Quilibet
wrote a regular "Department" headed "Driftwood." Each issue of the Galaxy
also carried "Scientific Miscellany."
Roger Smith, "The Human Significance of Biology: Carpenter, Darwin, and the
vera causa," in Knoepflmacher and Tennyson, p. 217. In "Charles Darwin's
Reluctant Revolution," South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (1992): 525-55, George
Levine, who has been pondering the subject for decades, explicates the human-
istic implications of Darwin's work.
The Passages of Thought: Psychological Representation in the American Novel
1870-1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 5-6.
Daniel H. Borus, Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass
Market (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 13. See also
Stevenson, pp. 175-80, and Susan Mizruchi, "Fiction and the Sense of Society,"
in Emory Elliott, ed., The Columbia History of the American Novel (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991).
Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 127-8.
"The New Story-Tellers and the Doom of Realism," Forum 18 (1894): 470-80.
See especially pp. 76-7, 133-4, and 189 of Barbara Novak, Nature and Cul-
ture: American Landscape Painting, 182 5-187 j (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1980).
"Americanism in Literature," Atlantic Monthly 25 ( I870): 63; "American Nov-
els." North American Review I I 5 (1872): 366-78. < ,

~ o s recent
t is Alan ~ r a c h t e n b e r ~~; e a d i American
n~ Photographs: Images as
History: Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989);
Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture,

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 THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND

1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 25-
30, discusses the literary realists' drive for photograph-like detail. More gener-
ally, see Borus, Writing Realism, p. 4.
On the school of Harnett, see Barry Maine, "Late-Nineteenth-Century Trompe
L'Oeil and Other Performances of the Real," Prospects 16 (1991): 281-95.
David M. Lubin, Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 9, comments on other painters.
William Alexander, William Dean Howells: The Realist as Humanist (New
York: Burt Franklin, 1981), best states the case for the depth of Howells's social
or liberal conscience.
Borus, Writing Realism, pp. 38-9, 109, and elsewhere, develops this point
convincingly. Michael Denning's Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and
Working-Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987) demonstrates that
when analysis proceeds beyond the mainline books, publishers, and periodicals
it encounters still more intricate problems and imponderables.
Borus, Writing Realism, pp. 4, 138-9, 172-3, 187-8.
Christopher P. Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the
Progressive Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), develops this last
point, especially as it applies to the 1890s and later.
Quoted in Clarence A. Glasrud, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen (Northfield, Minn.:
Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1963), p. 59.
Boyesen's essay "Why We Have No Great Novelists," Forum 2 (1887): 615-
22, was reprinted in his Literary and Social Silhouettes (New York: Harper,
1894) as "The American Novelist and His Public."
Borus, Writing Realism, p. I I I .
Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton's Argument with America (Athens: Univer-
sity of Georgia Press, 1980), pp. 12-13.
Arthur John, The Best Years of the "Century": Richard Watson Gilder,
"Scribner's Monthly," and the "Century Magazine," 1870-1909 (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1981), pp. 154-66. A superintendent of schools would
complain that the Century's already expurgated episodes from Adventures of
~ u c k l e b e r Finn
r ~ were "destitute of a single redeeming quality."
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writ-
ing in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1 9 8 ~ )covers,
this approach, though she prefers to describe the emerging "contours" of a
"distinctively American aesthetic."
Robert H. Elias, ed., The Letters of Theodore Dreiser (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), I : ~I.I
Benjamin T. Spencer, "The New Realism and a National Literature," PMLA 56
(1941): I I 16-3 I, develops this line of analysis with more sophistication than is
needed here.
Despite the title of William R. Linneman's "Satires of American Realism,"
~ m e r i c a nLiterature 34 (1962): 80-93, he begins with fine examples of bur-
lesques of sensationalist, sentimental, or morally pretentious fiction.
The chapter on "critical realism" in John W. Rathbun and Harry Hayden
Clark, American Literary Criticism, 1860-1903 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979),
sums up the matter judiciously. Among the many other relevant articles and

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 L O U I S J. B U D D

books, the most insightful, as well as interesting, is Edwin H. Cady, ed., William
Dean Howells as Critic (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
New Princeton Review, n.s. 4 (1887): 1-13. In "The Realism War," chap. z of
The Realist at War: The Mature Years, 1885-1920, of William Dean Howells
(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1958), Edwin H. Cady critiques the
debate convincingly.
Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,
pp. 70-85, 97-102, 107-11, expounds their critical principles lucidly.
Robert P. Falk, "The Rise of Realism 1871-1891," in Harry Hayden Clark, ed.,
Transitions in American Literary History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1953), best states the case for realism as a movement. Likewise, Falk's
The Victorian Mode in American Fiction, 1865-1885 (East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press, 1965) makes the best approach to realism as a "period"
in American literature.
"The Great American Novel," Nation 6 (1868): 27-9.
New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition (New York:
F. Ungar, 1983). Elsie Miller, "The Feminization of American Realist Theory,"
American Literary Realism 1870-1910 23 (1990): 20-41, argues that Howells
and others increasingly accepted women as potential realists.
Donald Pizer has analyzed incisively the ongoing controversy; see especially
chap. 3 of his Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Litera-
ture.
Chap. 2 of June Howard's Form and History in American Literary Naturalism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) deals capably with
determinism in the fiction.
Donald Pizer's Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Inter-
pretation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982) extends into
the 1930s and later. In his "Realists, Naturalists, and Novelists of Manners," in
Haruard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, ed. Daniel Hoffman
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), Leo Braudy, without pur-
suing definitions, lists many prominent living novelists as naturalists.

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