American Realism - A Reflection on the Civil War Era

1. Realism 1860-1910

2. Where We Came FromPrevious Literary Movements • Literature of Puritanism – Work Ethic • Literature of the Revolutionary Period • American Dream • The Melting Pot • Basic rights of man • Emergence of the Other (women, native people, African Americans) • Literary Nationalism 1800-1840 • Nationalism (excessive pride) • Self identity • Self examination and criticism • Begins real American literature • Respected in Europe • Professional writers

3. ROMANTICISM • Extraordinary people in extraordinary situations • Truth in absolutes • predicated on stereotypes • Stress on past (Greek Classical period) • Treats subjects emotionally • Celebration of artists • Probe to exaggeration • Nature glorified • Belief in afterlife • Authors • Literary Nationalism • Fireside Poets • Romantics

4. TRANSCENDENTALISM • Truth = communion with God in nature • Belief in individualism • Rejects institutions • Emphasis on simplicity • Importance of experience • "majority of one" • "self-reliance" • "man thinking“ • Non-conformity • language and style influenced by Romanticism Authors • Ralph Waldo Emerson • Henry David Thoreau

5. ANTI-TRANSCENDENTALISM • Belief in the potential destructiveness of the human spirit • Belief in individual truths, but no universal truths, and the truths of existence are deceitful and disturbing • Evil is an active force in the universe • Focus on the man’s uncertainty and limitations in the universe • Nature = indifferent to mankind • Human nature = hypocritical, apathetic • Authors • Herman Melville • Edgar Alan Poe • Nathaniel Hawthorne

6. What Comes Next? • If we accept the pendulum theory of history (that every period moves to its opposite extreme), what type of voice can you predict reacts to the Romantic Period? Washington Crossing the Delaware Emanuel Leutze1851 The Agnew Clinic Thomas Eakins 1889

7. Sectionalism, Industrialism and Literary Regionalism • In 1858, Abraham Lincoln had warned his countryman “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” • Events in the dark winter of 1860-1861 would prove him correct • After Lincoln’s minority election to the presidency: • South Carolina would vote to secede from the Union in December 1860 • Six other states of the Deep South quickly followed suit • When Confederate troops successfully attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor , Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina elected to join their fellows in defense of slavery and the sovereign principles of states’ rights

8. Cost of the Civil War • Cost of the Civil War • The Human Cost • 1,094,543 Casualties • The North lost one out of ten • 110,100 in battle • 224,580 to disease • The South lost one out of four • 94,000 in battle • 64,000 to disease • Two percent of US population died in the Civil War, with only WWII claiming more lives; • Economic Cost • Estimated at 6.6 billion, which would be 165 billion today

9. Historical Overview • While an older generation of historians tended to view the Civil War as the watershed of modern American nationalism (calling it “the second American Revolution), more recent historians suggest that the real factors that determined the future of the nation were the facts that: • The country was still badly fragmented after the war • Congress did little to address this and other problems

10. Historic Overview • And even though the language of the Constitution itself was amended to affirm an expanded – that is, colorblind – definition of individual rights and liberties, meaningful implementation of that vision for African Americans would have to wait for almost another century

11. Historical Overview • At the same time, however, the war did unleash a range of social and economic forces that, eventually, would radically transform American life: • The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 set aside vast tracts of land in the West to finance the construction of a transcontinental railroad • The Homestead Act of 1862 enabled yeoman farmers to have cheaper access to government-held land • The Morril Act of 1862 established Federal support for agricultural colleges

12. Historical Overview • Mobilization for war on such an unprecedented scale also had unforeseen effect on American life: • The need to achieve organizational efficiency in both military and civilian branches of government gave rise to an almost wholly new group of managers able to transfer their increasingly professional skills to the business world after the war.

13. Historical Overview • As an example: Keeping thousands of men in uniform required an entirely new approach to apparel manufacturing. • At the start of the war, when almost all of the troops came from volunteer contingents of various state militias, mothers, wives and daughters would have sewed individual uniforms at home. • Before long, however, the need for additional soldiers made the draft inevitable. The unprecedented demand for huge numbers of identical trousers, jackets, boots, and other mainstays of military regimentation sparked the rapid modernization of the clothing industry by introducing “standard” apparel sizes. • The federal government was the first consumer to make its purchases off the rack. • Take that Old Navy!

14. Historical Overview • These new concepts of scale, efficiency, and organizational complexity would eventually make possible what one influential historian referred to as “the incorporation of American” – or the way we live now. • Politically, the goal of securing equal rights for freed slaves largely failed. • Likewise, failure to integrate the high-minded ideals of New England into effective public policy also proved a crucial turning point in America’s intellectual history

15. Historical Context • Indeed the period following the Civil War was marked by an affronting sense of the hard realities of life and the more sobering aspects of the human experience. • By the End of the Civil War: • The Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment had abolished slavery • The industrial North had defeated the agrarian South • Social order grew based on mass labor and mass consumption; • Steam power replaced water power • Machines replaced hand labor • Extreme contrast between the rich and poor (the Gilded Age) • The Industrial Revolution had begun

16. Historic Overview • Migration westward expanded the U.S. from the Atlantic to the Pacific • Native American populations displaced and subjugated; • Growth of Industry • Steelmaking, the nation’s dominant industry • Alternating electrical current (1886) • American petroleum industry begins • Growth of population • Total population doubled from 1870 to 1890 • National income quadrupled • Gap between rich and poor widened

17. Historic Overview • The Effects of the Industrial Revolution: • Migration from rural to urban areas • Independent, skilled workers replaced by semi-skilled laborers; • Large corporations were established, devaluing the personal relationship between management and workers or company and customers. • Mass Communication and Migration • Coast-to-coast communication • Pony Express (1860)—10 days Telegraph (1861)—just seconds to communicate across country Transatlantic telegraph cable (1866) allowed instant communication with Europe Telephone patented (1867) By 1900, 1.3 million telephones in U.S. Coast-to-coast travel Transcontinental Railroad (1869) By 1889, coast-to-coast travel—4 days Citizens witnessed the entirety of there country and grew curious for more

18. The invention ignited an artistic and scientific frenzy… Best portrait makers could bring out the very human essence of a subject… The advantages of photography: immediacy, reliable representation, low cost, etc… Massive social changes reflected in literature & photography. 1861-65 - Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner: honest photographic record of the Civil War. Photography, like literary Realism and Regionalism showed TRUTH. Photography and Realism

19. Historic Overview • Intellectual Revolution: Changes in Thinking brought about by Changes in Society • Changes in science • Charles Darwin and the Origin of Species • Changes in psychology • Sigmund Freud - unconscious system of ideas that governs human reactions and response • Changes in philosophy • Karl Marx - human history as the result of class struggles (The Communist Manifesto) • William James – American pragmatism – truth is: • tested by its usefulness or practical consequences • a commodity accessible on the surface of things • perceptible to the senses and verifiable through experience

20. Historical Overview • During this period, America’s literary traditions also shifted. By the time Lee surrendered at Appomattox, his army’s ranks were severely depleted, and the same was true of the roll call of American authorship. Washington Irving, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne had died. Herman Melville was in professional exile and Ralph Waldo Emerson had published his last book. • The nation now looked to new literary voices whose accents were not always so comforting. The cultural supremacy of New England, so long taken for granted was now open to challenge.

21. Historical Overview • In essence: • The experience of war had expanded American awareness of its boundaries, physical, emotional, and spiritual. • The world of the naive, innocent, optimistic, and contained past appeared hopelessly outdated and absurdly idealistic. • America enters adulthood: Realism is born

22. Realism “Nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” William Dean Howells

23. Historical Overview: Realism • As the novelist Henry James had occasion to observe in 1879, “…the Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind. It introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult. At the rate at which things are going, it is obvious that good Americans will be more numerous than ever; but the good American, in the days to come, will be a more critical person than his complacent and confident grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge.”

24. A Powerful Reaction Against Romanticism • The Civil War and the social, political, and cultural events following the war created an environment that demanded a literary voice that honored that experience. Romanticism with his dreamy, optimistic, and highly emotional emphasis proved false in light of the turmoil of the period. • This voice would serve as a reaction against Romanticism • rejected heroic, adventurous, or unfamiliar subjects • Note the unmistakable mocking treatment of Romantic ideals - Emmeline, Tom, and the traditions of the South in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) • Authors sought to portray life as they saw it, insisting that the ordinary and local were just as suitable for art as the sublime. “Nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” William Dean Howells

25. From these social changes come two literary movements • Realism, • first begun as the local color movement • Includes regionalism • The tall tale • Naturalism • Realism • Denotation – a literary movement that developed towards the end of the Civil War and stressed the actual (reality) as opposed to the imagined or fanciful • Begins in France, as realisme, a literary doctrine calling for “reality and truth in the depiction of ordinary life.” • Grounded in the belief that there is an objective reality which can be portrayed with truth and accuracy as the goal; • The writer does not select facts in accord with preconceived ideals, but rather sets down observations impartially and objectively.

26. Characteristics of Realism • Subject matter—ordinary people and events; • Purpose—Verisimilitude, the truthful representation of life; • Point of View—omniscient and objective • Characters—middle class, psychological realism • Class is important; the novel has traditionally served the interests and aspirations of an insurgent middle class. • Diction is natural vernacular, not heightened or poetic; tone may be comic, satiric, or matter-of-fact. • Focus away from New England and other intellectual centers and out to the Midwest and West (regionalism) • Plot de-emphasized • Focus on everyday life • Complex ethical choices often the subject • (“I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.”) • Events are made to seem the inevitable result of characters’ choices • (“Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before. ”)

27. Characteristics of Realism, cont... • Subject matter drawn from “our experience” – the common, the ordinary, the probable • Focuses on the norm of daily experience – dialect, geography, regional manners.

28. Romance and Realism: Taste and Class Romance • Aspired to the ideal • Thought to be more genteel since it did not show the vulgar details of life • Harks back to the noble past • Emotional Realism • Thought to be more democratic • Critics stressed the potential for vulgarity and its emphasis on the commonplace • Potential “poison” for the pure of mind • Exists in the unfiltered present • Neutral (observant)

29. Themes in Realism • Humans control their destinies • characters act on their environment rather than simply reacting to it. • Slice-of-life technique • often ends without traditional formal closure, leaving much untold to suggest man’s limited ability to make sense of his life. • Pragmatism • Social Criticism • Importance of place--regionalism, "local color" • Sociology and psychology • Rejection of Romanticism

30. Defining Strain VOICE: the tonal qualities, attitudes, or entire personality of a speaker as revealed directly or indirectly through sound, diction, and other stylistic devices "Voice reminds us that a human being is behind the words of a poem, that he is revealing his individuality by means of the poem, and that this revelation may be the most significant part of what we receive from the poem."

31. Published in 1885 Set in pre-Civil War years (40-50 years before publication) Slavery ended, but racism still rampant (Jim Crow Laws) Mark Twain, a Southerner, undergoes moral transformation. Suggestion (via Ken Burns’s American Voices) is that this transformation sprung from a trip along the river years after Twain left the South. Here, along the shore of his beloved river, Twain witnessed the great failings of Reconstruction and the ubiquity of Jim Crow (a new slavery). The impression stuck with him. Huckleberry Finn and Realism

32. FULL TITLE ·  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn AUTHOR · Mark Twain (pseudonym for Samuel Clemens) TYPE OF WORK · Novel GENRE · Picaresque novel (episodic, colorful story often in the form of a quest or journey); Satire (of multiple themes, traditions, art forms and time period); bildungsroman (novel of education or moral development) LANGUAGE · English; frequently makes use of Southern and black dialects of the time TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN · 1876–1883; Hartford, Connecticut, and Elmira, New York DATE OF FIRST PUBLICATION · 1885 NARRATOR · Huckleberry Finn POINT OF VIEW  · Huck’s point of view, although Twain occasionally indulges in digressions in which he shows off his own ironic wit TONE  · Frequently ironic or mocking, particularly concerning adventure novels and romances; also contemplative, as Huck seeks to decipher the world around him; sometimes boyish and exuberant TENSE · Immediate past SETTING (TIME) · Before the Civil War; roughly 1835–1845; Twain said the novel was set forty to fifty years before the time of its publication SETTING (PLACE)  · The Mississippi River town of St. Petersburg, Missouri; various locations along the river through Arkansas Key Facts

33. The Novel is divided into 43 chapters and three distinct sections Section 1: Captivity and Civilization The first section introduces Huck and his current life living with Miss Watson and Later with his father.  Huck is kidnapped by Pap, secluded and beaten. This section ends were Huck fakes his death and flees to Jackson Island. Exposition begins with a warning – “Persons attempting to find meaning… Explains his transition from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Establishes mood, tone, character immediately. We come to know a distinctly different kind of protagonist: A child, poor, uneducated, crude, unwashed, impressionable, rebellious, “white trash”  "idle, and lawless, and vulgar, and bad,"  But keenly observant, profound sense of decency, curious and alert, logical, kind, moral, and innately intelligent, innocent, charming and delightful Makes clear tension and conflict in Huck’s life Structure of the Novel

34. Section 2: Escape and the River Huck meets Jim at Jackson Island and starts down the river They discover that Jim is pursued as a runaway slave.  Huck runs from civilization and Jim runs from slavery.  This section ends when both Jim and Huck make it to Uncle Silas’ farm. Huck and Jim are established as refugees from society. The River, its natural beauty, its solitude and its splendor mean freedom for both runaways. Huck and Finn engage in many conversations and experience many adventuresas they navigate the deep and muddy river. They also learn much about the nature of humanity along the shore. Huck comes to know life in a different way Huck comes to know Jim in a different way In this environment Huck struggles against what he is taught and what he feels and arrives at a hard truth. This truth will be tested throughout the remaining chapters of the novel. Sturcture of the Novel, cont…

35. Section 3: Return and Renegotiation Huck returns to civilization Huck reunites with his Tom Sawyer Discovers the truth of Jim’s situation Lives with Tom in Uncle Silas’ farm And escapes again Huck and Jim are separated Jim undergoes much cruelty as a captive. Huck is influenced by Tom An unsatisfying, some might say genuinely flawed ending ensues. Up to you: Flawed or fantastic? Resigned or real: Structure of the Novel, cont…

36. Of all of Mark Twain’s works up to 1885, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn received the greatest pre- and post notification. And though the novel was greatly anticipated as the sequel to the celebrated The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the critical reviews were mixed. Early criticism focused on what was perceived as the book's crudeness. One incident was recounted in the newspaper, the Boston Transcript: The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain's latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The library and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slum than to intelligent, respectable people. 1885 Twain later remarked to his editor, "Apparently, the Concord library has condemned Huck as 'trash and only suitable for the slums.' This will sell us another twenty-five thousand copies for sure!“ Later criticism focused on the racial component: “It constitutes mental cruelty, harassment, and outright racial intimidation to force black students to sit in a classroom to read this kind of literature . . .” 1992 Reception of the Novel

37. Critical Reception of the Novel, cont. • Much of modern scholarship of Huckleberry Finn has focused on its treatment of race. Many Twain scholars have argued that the book, is an attack on racism. Others have argued that the book falls short on this score, especially in its depiction of Jim. They argued that Twain was unable to fully rise above the stereotypes of black people that white readers of his era expected and enjoyed, and therefore resorted to minstrel show-style comedy to provide humor at Jim's expense, and ended up confirming rather than challenging late-19th century racist stereotypes. • In the long controversy that has been Huckleberry Finn's history, the novel has been criticized, censored, and banned for an array of perceived failings, including obscenity, atheism, bad grammar, coarse manners, low moral tone, and antisouthernism. Every bit as diverse as the reasons for attacking the novel, Huck Finn's detractors encompass parents, critics, authors, religious fundamentalists, right­wing politicians, and even librarians.

38. And yet… • For whatever controversy and criticism the novel drew and continues to draw, it is undeniable that the work ranks at the top of the American canon of literature. Words waxing poetic on the novel: "Huckleberry Finn took the first journey back. He was the first to look back at the republic from the perspective of the west. His eyes were the first eyes that ever looked at us objectively that were not eyes from overseas. There were mountains at the frontier but he wanted more than mountains to look at with his restive eyes--he wanted to find out about men and how they lived together. And because he turned back we have him forever.“ – F. Scott Fitzgerald All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.' But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." -- Ernest Hemingway "I believe that 'Huckleberry Finn' is one of the great masterpieces of the world, that it is the full equal of 'Don Quixote' and 'Robinson Crusoe,' ....' I believe that it will be read by human beings of all ages, not as a solemn duty but for the honest love of it.” – H.L Mencken “All a man ever had to do to achieve immortality was to write a book like Huckleberry Finn, which in the end is sort of a hymn without sentimentality to the solidarity of the human race and it has its significance in that, period.” – William Styron

39. Huckleberry Finn as a Literary Milestone “Something new happened in Huck Finn that had never happened in American literature before. It was a book…that served as a Declaration of Independence from the genteel English novel… …[It] allowed a different kind of writing to happen: a clean, crisp, no-nonsense, earthly vernacular…it was a book that talked. Huck’s voice, combined with Twain’s satiric genius, changed the shape of fiction in America, and African-American voices had a great deal to do with making it what it was.” - Dr. Shelley Fishkin, 1995

40. Why the Disparity in Perceptions? • Confusion between the literal reading of the novel and the interpretation of its message. • It is a novel that advocates its message by showing its opposites. • In other words, it is a novel of foils, juxtapositon, and contrasts

41. Indeed Twain once described TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn, as a story where “a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers a defeat.” Or What do you do when you’re torn between what people want for you—or from you—and what you want for yourself?

42. Huck’s journey highlights these conflicts as Huck and Jim make their way down that deep, muddy, serpentine river. Look for Death vs. Rebirth Religion vs. Superstition Realism vs. Romanticism The River vs. Shore The individual vs. Society Youth vs. Maturity And other motifs/foils Consider what Twain might really feel about: Slavery Religion Government Parenting Education Civilization Southern Traditions Romantic Notions Human Nature

43. Rhetorical Elements and Conflict This conflict is conveyed through Satire. The use of wit or exaggerated humor to ridicule a subject, usually a human weakness (foible), or some social institution with the intention to inspire reform. (Making a serious point about the subject’s defects, with the intent of improving them.) Twain uses it to point out common human failings. Dialect: Irony The contrast between what appears to be and what really is. Verbal irony: when someone says one thing but really means something else. Situational irony: when there is a discrepancy between what is expected to happen, and what really does happen. Dramatic irony: when a character thinks one thing is true and the audience or reader knows better.

44. Language Another way furthers conflicts and confusions is through the use of language. He employs: The vernacular everyday spoken language informal language non-academic, non-standard language Dialect The version of a language spoken by people of a particular region or cultural group. Dialects are cultural or regional Differs from the “standard” language in grammar, vocabulary, and usage. Different from an “accent.”

45. Language in the Novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is told from the first person point of view an only-partly-educated thirteen-year-old southern boy in the 1830s or 40s. As narrator, Huck describes the story in his natural, everyday voice, and he addresses his readers directly during his storytelling with a friendly, trusting attitude. Taking that into consideration – along with Huck’s age, education level, and social background – Twain’s choice of a colloquial style makes perfect sense. Example-”I didn’t want to go back no more. I had stopped cussing, because the widow didn’t like it; but now I took to it again because pap hadn’t no objections.” The grammar isn’t perfect, and clearly Twain writes the way Huck Finn talks (hence all the apostrophes subbing for unpronounced letters). It’s also important to note that Huck’s voice – as well as the era and the location in which the novel is set – is why the n-word pops up so often.

46. Language as a Rhetorical Form Besides nailing Huck's education level, social background, and personality, Twain succeeded in telling the story convincingly through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old. (At least, we think so.) The novel drips with dramatic irony, when we can pick up on certain subtext even when Huck doesn't. Like all those conversations where Huck thinks he's fooling somebody into believing one of his lies? Or where he thinks he is instructing Jim, but the reverse is more likely the case. But language in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the many dialects defined by region, social conditions, race, and age, also serve as message about conditions in the South, indeed in America, during this period.

47. The Time Period Remember that the novel was published in 1885, some 20 years after the Civil War and that “romantic” Southern lifestyle it depicts. As the Ken Burns documentary noted, Twain was inspired to return to the novel after a trip down his beloved river. Years after he left the South and years after living in Connecticut, Twain see the river and life along the shore from a very different perspective. He sees the failure Reconstruction and of the noble ideals of the Emancipation Proclamation. The novel, begun years earlier and intended as a sequel to the Romantic boyhood adventures of Tom Sawyer, becomes a very different work (America’s Homeric epic, a novel or face and space, the first real American American novel).

48. And so we return to the dichotomy Even years after the abolition of slavery, American society had changed little. In the period from 1876-1883 during which Twain wrote the novel, America was divided between two seemingly separate and contradictory belief systems: one official and one unofficial. The official system preached freedom and equality between men; the unofficial, the opposite. This was a dichotomy that divided Americans into two distinct groups: the so-called civilized and the savages. It is fair then to think of the novel as an allegory for the American experience at this time. Consider how or if America has paid off on its promise of equality, on the opportunity for happiness, on the City Upon a Hill think, and most profoundly, on the American Dream. How is Huck’s story ultimately America’s story? What can we as Americans learn from Huck? Where does Twain leave Huck and America at the end of the work?

49. The Linch Pin Between the Movements • Linch Pin - "something [or someone] that holds the various elements of a complicated structure together." • The transition between two contrasting movements can be clearly identified in one man, Walt Whitman, who incorporating both views in his works

50. Walt Whitman: America’s Poet • His poetry celebrated... • The individual • common man • American democracy • American industry • American ingenuity • mystery of existence (not to be feared, but embraced)   • The body and its functions • He was • A humanist • A teacher • An optimist • Supporter of the Union • Among the most influential poets in the American canon • Highly controversial • Gay And your very flesh shall be a great poem I celebrate myself, and sing myself,And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Be curious, not judgmental Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me.