Lecture 13. Realism and critical realism

Literary Features of Realism
Realism is theoretically a movement to portray life with fidelity or to represent reality truthfully. In practice, it often depicts subjects as they appear in everyday life, without embellishment or interpretation, and without personal bias. Naturalism is a belief in every existing thing as a part of nature and thus as explainable by natural and material causes. In practice, naturalism is no other than realism, as both want to observe and analyze “a slice of life” objectively, and both work on the assumption of material determinism, stress the influences of heredity and environment, accept the all-inclusiveness of the subject matter, and take special interest in the contemporary, everyday life that is observable, pragmatic, normal, and considered “real.” In reacting against romanticism, realism and naturalism both try to avoid writing on the historical, the remote, the imaginary, the fantastic, the idyllic, the idealistic, the unsullied, etc. More than realism, however, naturalism is preoccupied with “ugliness”: it becomes “sordid realism,” as it sees mostly the seamy side of life and seeks particularly to present the criminal, the fallen, and the down-and-out as seen in the slums and other places where poverty, disease, crime, sex, etc., mark the usual
existence.
Realism or naturalism as practiced in the 19^th century found its best expression in the novel and the drama. Since fiction and drama are usually written in prose rather than in verse, it is apparent that prose triumphed over poetry in this period. Although there were good poets (e.g., Tennyson and Emily Dickinson) who produced poems with truthful feelings of life and there were important essayists (e.g., Arnold and Carlyle) who expressed topical criticism of the society, this period was chiefly a period of realistic/naturalistic fiction and drama written in prose. It produced many of the world’ s greatest novelists and some great dramatists and short-story writers, who perceived a person’ s fate as the product of environmental and hereditary forces. In their works, however, chance also plays an important role at times in shaping one’ s fate. Therefore, it is sometimes said that in realistic or naturalistic works, Heredity
plus Environment plus Chance equals Fate (H + E + C = F).
In fact, realism has two types and develops in two ways. Social realism emphasizes the accuracy of providing external detail. It makes strenuous efforts to clarify the social, environmental factors that influence the life depicted. This school of realism develops towards the social consciousness of Marxism. In contrast, psychological realism focuses on depicting the complexity of the inner workings of the mind. It develops towards the “stream of consciousness” technique used later to depict a protagonist’ s psychology. Dickens, Tolstoy, and Steinbeck, for instance, belong to the first type of realism; George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Henry James belong to the second type.
Following the steps of the women writers in the Romantic Period, there in this period also appeared some important female novelists such as George Sand in France and the Brontë sisters and George Eliot in England. Besides, there was a great poetess, Emily Dickinson, in America. In these women writers’ works, very often realism is tinged with romanticism.