[In the following essay, Habegger discusses American Realism not as an independent form, but as a reaction against women's fiction of the mid-nineteenth century.]

What was realism, exactly? Up to this point I've assumed that we share a rough sense of what it was. If the reader has followed my contentions without any uneasiness over what I understand by realism, then all is well; there is communality. But if there is only uneasiness, then it is high time I admit that I have adhered all along to René Wellek's description of realism as “the objective representation of contemporary social reality.”¹ Wellek offers this formula as a period concept, strictly appropriate to nineteenth-century European and American literature. With the proviso that there is no reason for not generalizing the concept (in order to take in twentieth-century non-Western literatures, for instance), I find Wellek's formula satisfactory. But it must be understood that it is only a definition based on a well-informed survey of the subject, and not anything more. Too many studies of American realism tend to confuse definition, which serves to point out and distinguish a group of objects (in this case, realistic novels) and to classify them by their common denominator, with certain other activities an intellectual may reasonably undertake to perform with them.² In particular, there is no reason why Wellek's concept cannot lead to the sort of analysis that makes use of the most far-reaching thought on the subject of realism, that of Georg Lukács.

A definition of a period concept in literature is useful if it opens the way to a fuller sense of literary and historical processes, cleavages, identities. Wellek's definition is particularly valuable in enabling one to get past the confusion concerning Mark Twain. If we entertain the idea that this artist was something other than a realist, we find ourselves following an irresistible line of thought. The widespread, though by no means universal, opinion that the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a realistic book begins to look rather questionable. Not only does this work not deal with contemporary society, it presents a view of antebellum life along the Mississippi that is highly colored. The picture of Pokeville or Brickville may be factual and pointed, but it does not seem realistic. The Grangerford chapters are wonderful, but whatever they are they are not realistic, as one immediately sees in comparing them to De Forest's sensitive exploration of a family feud in Kate Beaumont. In none of Mark Twain's “novels” was he “objective” or “contemporary.” No doubt a debunking factuality was one of the tricks in his trade, but I doubt whether his trade was realism. He was too close to popular and folk art to enter that line of work. Mark Twain was a preacher, public exhorter, moralist, satirist, prankster, entertainer, yarn-spinner, and public fool, not to mention newspaperman, traveler, pilot, prospector, investor, and writer-businessman. My wife's grandfather, born into a farm family, was named Mark Twain by an enthusiastic parent. Would that baby have been so named if his eponym had been a realist?

Another consequence of Wellek's definition is that the body of writing known as local color, which flourished after the Civil War, can be sharply distinguished from realism. These two forms were born together and remained in close touch, but the difference—local color's adherence to old times rather than the passing scene—cannot be too much emphasized. James, and to a much lesser extent, Howells looked down on local color fiction (though James came to admire Jewett).³ To some extent they were justified in taking this attitude. Local color's devotion to odd places and speech-ways and curious veins and outcroppings from the past all reflected a deep rejection of the contemporary world. Howells and James knew how important it was for the novel to try to come to terms with modern urban, “middle-class,” civilized life. The local colorists were animated by a nostalgia that is easy to sympathize with, even though it disqualifies their literature from the centrality realism aspired to. The local colorists were well aware of their peripheral status, for they invariably dealt with regions, cultures, and vernaculars that were picturesque survivals. Certainly The Grandissimes is that rare thing, a good historical novel, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's stories are wonderfully accurate and moving, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Oldtown Folks or Oldtown Fireside Stories preserve rural life in fine artistic form, and Sarah Orne Jewett remains one of the best American writers. A story like “The White Heron,” where a country girl protects a bird from a city scientist, deals in an indirect but uncompromising way with the destructive tendencies of modern life. But can modern life, no matter how bad, be understood from a position somewhere off the map? Realism, at any rate, insists that it can't be.

The third and most difficult exclusion is within James's own corpus of fiction. James was a realist for a time—roughly 1876 (Roderick Hudson) to 1890 (The Tragic Muse). But he neither began nor ended as one, and the failure to see this has undermined many investigations of American literary realism. In James's early disdainful reviews of Trollope and Rebecca Harding Davis, or his first disparaging references to Flaubert, his original antipathy to realism seems clear.⁴ He later changed his mind on the two male writers and realism, but he never abandoned a certain contempt for lowlife characters, and on the whole his realism remained conservative. It was always modified by a predisposition to picture the world as a high-minded and finely conscious person would picture it. Sometimes James would upset the high-minded view; sometimes he would endorse it. His ambivalence in this matter corresponds to the sort of ambivalence toward Europe that he dramatized in “A Passionate Pilgrim” and analyzed in his memoirs with such tender irony. His 1884 essay, “The Art of Fiction,” is by no means a defense of realism (as it makes a case for Robert Louis Stevenson), but a defense of artistic freedom and an attack on all rules, orthodoxies, cliques, and schools, including the realists. The essays James wrote soon after, on Howells and Constance Fenimore Woolson, clearly anticipated his approaching repudiation of realism in the 1890s, when he wrote a number of rich interiorized fictions. These late books offer a fascinating vision of the world rather than an objective representation of it. I do not see how they can be considered realistic.

The exclusion of Mark Twain, the local colorists, and James's later novels limits the field but still leaves a large corpus of realistic fiction by James, Howells, H. H. Boyesen, E. W. Howe, Joseph Kirkland, John Hay, Henry Adams, Alice Wellington Rollins, and Constance Fenimore Woolson (one of the best of the novelists on the border between local color and realism). The most important and productive of these were clearly James and Howells.

With the field properly marked off, we can now move on to a brief analysis of some essential qualities of the American realistic novel. And first, we must supplement Wellek's definition with a more explicit recognition of the dialectical nature of realism. Wellek concluded his chapter by suggesting that “the theory of realism is ultimately bad aesthetics because all art is ‘making’ and is a world in itself of illusion and symbolic forms.”⁵ This objection must be reckoned with, for it points out that no art can be defined simply by referring to its subject matter, even if that subject matter is objectively represented. The proper response is to recognize that realism was not an independent genre or independent symbolic form or anything of the sort. It belonged to the mid-nineteenth-century genre of the novel, but bore in part an adversary or corrective relation to a major type of novel, women's fiction. Women's fiction was characterized by an idealized heroine, a strong appeal to the reader's fantasies or daydreams, a great deal of “domestic” social and psychological detail, and a plot based on love interest that led up to a decisive speech—“I love you.” As a social institution, this genre was closely tied in to contemporary female roles and definitions of marriage. Once realism is seen as an inevitable reaction within the novel genre, the problem brought up by Wellek vanishes. The detailed verisimilitude, close social notation, analysis of motives, and unhappy endings were all part of a strategy of argument, an adversary polemic. These techniques were the only way to tell the truth about, to test, to get at, the ideal gender types, daydreams, and lies that were poisoning society and the novel. Realism was an analysis of quiet desperation. Attempting to break out, and to help their readers break out, of a suffocated, half-conscious state, Howells and James had to be circumstantial. It was the only way to make their case. One of James's early views, which he would never abandon, was that “when once a work of fiction may be classed as a novel, its foremost claim to merit, and indeed the measure of its merit, is its truth.”⁶ The book that made James sound this battle cry was a woman's novel, Azarian, by Harriet Prescott Spofford. Several years later, James would see that the only way to tell the truth was by means of realism. And several years after that, when American women's fiction no longer dominated the field, realism, for James, also lost its appeal.

But why would James and Howells be so concerned to oppose popular women's fiction? Why would a high mimetic art go to the trouble to be so aware of, so responsive to, an often cheap fantasy art? John G. Cawelti's excellent study of formula stories, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, points to the answer. As Cawelti shows, most formula stories enable the reader to enjoy the pleasures of escape and entertainment by offering him or her a familiar set of stereotypes, a superior protagonist that takes us out of ourselves “by confirming an idealized self-image,” and “an imaginary world that is just sufficiently far from our ordinary reality to make us less inclined to apply our ordinary standards of plausibility and probability to it.”⁷ It may be hard to imagine a supremely talented writer going to all the bother of resisting such literature. The writer might actually enjoy it. But if we imagine a formula literature that insisted its world was not at all imaginary, that exhibited an unusual richness of verisimilitude and contemporary detail, that stimulated a very emotional identification and then appealed to the most respected ethical and religious ideals, the case is altered. Escape literature characterized by an intensely felt confusion between fantasy and reality might easily arouse the best talents to resistance.

There is thus a noticeably rational element in realistic fiction. Full of sober and comprehensive assessments, Howells and James were very different from the euphoric women's novels that preceded them. These earlier books were full of extreme highs and lows, a passionate brooding over the problem of being female. The male realists tried to deal with this and other problems more dispassionately. But unlike Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and his “medicated” novel about the neurotic Elsie Venner, Howells and James were anything but prying Hawthornesque scientists poking at patients they saw as wholly other. As I have already argued, these two men were themselves strangely feminine and were deeply implicated in their own heroines. The strength of their best realistic work lies in their equilibrium between the passionately felt identity characteristic of women's novels and the detached judgment that was an essential component of realism.

This detachment has misled many later critics, who have been ignorant of the popular fiction against which Howells and James established themselves. One of the serious flaws in many accounts of realism is an extreme emphasis on its rationalistic or scientific component—determinism, environment, heredity, Darwinian evolution, and the evolving technological society in the background.⁸ One must not overlook such matters, but they did not so much inspire the realists as authorize them.⁹ What inspired them was something much deeper, much more strongly felt. One gains a sense of the real animus in realistic fiction only by considering the society and popular art of the time. In particular, the gender roles that were implied both by the major social institutions and the lineaments of the novel's idealized hero and heroine formed the basic source of realism. How did it happen that some of the major realistic novels in various countries—Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, and A Modern Instance—all told the story of a bad marriage? The source of realism lay right on the surface—love interest—and yet ran far deeper than intellectual history can reach.

Of course, one dares not overlook the intellectual currents in Howells and James. To some extent these realists worked to deflate the self-assertive romantic ego. The anti-egotism James got from his father enabled him to study the romantic agony of a Roderick Hudson or the suicidal transcendentalism of the Bostonians. James's strong aversion to the self-culture symbolized by Concord entered deeply into his fiction. Howells attacked romantic egotism in both its overt form and its ironic masks. His adolescent enthusiasm for Heine suggests that his mature realism represented a solution to a malaise not far removed from that in twentieth-century modernism. Yet I think we approach the heart of the matter if we take our cues from the novel as cultural artifact rather than the novel as intellectual history. Essentially, the realists refused to give their readers the sort of satisfaction the novel generally afforded.

Women's novels offered a heroine who the reader could playfully and temporarily become. Popular fiction of all kinds—the sensation novels, Beadle's dime novels, working-girl fiction of the 1880s and 90s, the historical romances of the latter decade—all spotlighted a single leading character, who was of greater intrinsic interest than anyone around her or him. Fiction worked by offering the reader an alternative ego. Thus, the pleasure the reader experienced at the end was an ego-pleasure—a happy embrace, a successful coup, a completed journey, a threat finally averted. This satisfaction, and the fantasies containing it, reflected to some extent the atomization of society, the individual's increasing alienation, and the well-publicized success of a few great achievers. The surge of industrial activity in nineteenth-century America puffed up the ego with dreams of stunning personal success, of inevitably triumphant personal nobility. Realism was a critical response to the simultaneously inflated and privatized ego that was made hungry by contemporary society and fed by the fantasies in popular fiction. That is one of the reasons realism was often “pessimistic”—it insisted that the self was limited and conditioned and not capable of the apotheosis promised by mass fantasy. James told stories in which the protagonist often had to do without his heart's desire. Howells did the same, but he also tried a more radical idea. He prevented the reader from identifying with any one character. James did this in one realistic novel, The Bostonians. Howells did it in a dozen.

This particular difference between the two writers is worth noting. While James studied Isabel in great detail so that she became “an easy victim of scientific criticism,” he also hoped the reader would feel “an impulse more tender and more purely expectant.” That is to say, James still allowed us, though just barely, the old pleasure of “becoming” Isabel and getting some of the traditional shivers of fear, anticipation, anxiety, and so forth. But Howells did not permit the reader to feel much tender expectancy in A Modern Instance.¹⁰ Refusing to tell a story that lined up with a major fantasy, he began with a familiar courtship situation that gradually petered out into a naturalistic world devoid of satisfaction or unity and with an inherent centrifugal tendency. Hoping to sever the novel from its rooted daydreams, he wrote time-bound narratives populated by people infinitely richer than those of any other nineteenth-century American writer.¹¹ Yet the mainspring at times seemed broken. Unlike James, who told a familiar story over and over, Howells told the non-story of people trying to live by false ideals and fantasies and getting tripped up by them. The point of the novel was to let us escape into a fully imagined world, one held together by a single thread of narrative movement and thus assimilable by an ego reading in time. Howells insisted that the novel was not dessert but meat and potatoes, for he wanted to use it to represent a people partly ruined by the dream of transcendence.

The strong ethical concern in American realism has often been noted. Ben Halleck, Silas and Penelope Lapham, Isabel Archer, and Hyacinth Robinson all have to make a difficult decision with important consequences for themselves and others. The distinctive contribution of realism in representing ethical choice was to insist on its importance even while hedging it about with enormous material and obligatory compulsions. In realism the self was free, but just barely. All the characters listed here can and must choose, but each of them has only two choices, and only one of these (except for Ben) seems in each case to be correct. Even more striking is the fact that in every case except Penelope's, the correct choice enforces a painful discipline on the self (in Hyacinth's case, death). Here we see a reflection of the massive Victorian content in Howells' and James's realism—but we also see a denial of the faith, dramatized in so many popular novels, that the straight and narrow path leads to warm embraces and valuable stock certificates. American realism was an extremely moral fiction. But its insistence that we live in society rather than in the wonderful fantasy-world of so much popular fiction was sane, practical, and truthful.

Thackeray had pretended that Vanity Fair was a novel without a hero, even though it obviously had a heroine, however bad. But in A Hazard of New Fortunes and to some extent in April Hopes, The Minister's Charge, and The Quality of Mercy, Howells succeeded in making novels in which no one person was preeminent. These novels asserted that the essential thing about our lives is the way we are associated, and attempted to counter the exaggerated and dreamy egotism that had been a genre quality of the novel. Henry James was overwhelmed by the richness of A Hazard of New Fortunes, yet he thought it lacked form and style. In spite of everything there is to be said for the novel, James may have been right. While Hazard does have certain formal principles of order, it also lacks a primitive story unity, which is purposely withheld. What makes the novel all the more significant is its close engagement with the modern world and the egalitarianism implied in its following several independent but linked careers. Howells was our ultimate democratic writer: he refused to tell us what to think about his characters' lives in his own voice; he tried to consider each of them as important as the others; and he managed to enter into almost every one in a magnificent way.

The fact that our first great realist also happens to be our most democratic writer shows that realism was not just a negative force combating the narcissistic ego, or the mystification of marriage, or the falsity of the period's ideal gender roles. The positive side of American realism was its vision of democratic action.¹² Howells was able to achieve what he did partly because he emerged from a people living in a roughly democratic system under conditions of relative ease—a people with some power to direct their own lives. It was because of this power that realism turned to the causal and material world and insisted on the primacy of what ordinary people, living under recognizable pressures, try to do. Realism never tells us what is to be done, but it assumes, fundamentally, that choice, regardless of the difficulties, exists.

Because realism reflected a limited but genuine sense of individual power to act in the world, realism occupied, historically and logically, a middle position between mid-Victorian women's fiction, with its powerful wonder-working heroines, and the modernist tradition as represented by James Joyce. What differentiates these three groups of fiction from one another is their varying use of the kind of projected activity we call daydreaming. In Susan Warner and Augusta J. Evans, the daydream was able to triumph over harsh social necessity. In Joyce on the other hand the world triumphs over the daydream in such a way that the most the daydreamer can possibly achieve is a moment of insight into his folly and the world's darkness.¹³ “Araby” and “The Dead” end, not in action, but in moments of stunned, immobile understanding in which the protagonist perceives the utter vanity of his dreams. It is because the Joycean epiphany precludes all relevant action that The Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are not, in spite of all their exact historical and psychological detail, finally realistic. Realism minus the potentially effective human will is no longer realism.

The evidence of this claim is to be seen in Joyce's career, with its steady drift from realism toward allegory. Why was Joyce's climactic work a timeless dream (entirely different from daydream) at a wake? Because decent political activity had been excluded from his fiction from the beginning of his career. Joyce the exile became an allegorist for the same fundamental reason Boethius and many others have turned to this form. Unlike realism, the literature of writers with some democratic freedom, allegory is the literature of exiles, prisoners, captives, or others who have no room to act in their society. While realism pays close attention to the facts of the contemporary social scene, corrects some of the current stereotypes, and tries to represent the causal flow of events, allegory offers a timeless scene, a universe of static types and symbols rather than causal change, a view of behavior that sees the actor or hero as the matrix for competing absolutes or abstract types, and facts that require interpretation rather than recognition followed by action. Allegory is the product of mind living under absolutism and hence projects an implacable world of abstract types—precisely the type of world projected by the violated will. Allegory is one of many human artifacts expressing a sense of individual powerlessness.¹⁴ The reason why The Consolations of Philosophy begins when the hero is thrown in prison is identical with the reason why Pilgrim's Progress begins at the point when the hero learns that his city is to be destroyed and that he can do nothing about it except seek another country. It is the same reason why so many medieval allegories begin as dream, consolation, vision, or escape for the soul that is doomed, helpless, or consumed by hopeless love. The reason is that in allegory, unlike realism, the individual is in chains.

Realism attacked abstract types because abstract types are the mind-forged manacles immobilizing the human will. In 1882 Thomas Sergeant Perry defended Howells' kind of fiction in the way that seems most fitting and true: “Just as the scientific spirit digs the ground from beneath superstition, so does its fellow-worker, realism, tend to prick the bubble of abstract types. Realism is the tool of the democratic spirit, the modern spirit by means of which the truth is elicited.”¹⁵ It is not hard to understand why abstract types should seem implacable to a cultivated mandarin living at a time when the res publica gets weaker and bullies get stronger, or to a Puritan overwhelmed by an arbitrary sovereign deity and endowed with a depraved will incapable of doing good. It is also possible to understand (though my own sympathies are strained) why early twentieth-century expatriates who felt swamped by the rise of the “vulgar” common man should prefer forms of literature that deny the possibility or importance of ethical-political activity. But I cannot sympathize at all with writers and intellectuals of the post-World War II era who live in the Western democracies (speaking loosely) and yet declare that realism is dead. Realism is far too important to let die, for if it does we do.

Notes

1. René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 240-241. E. B. Greenwood tried to invalidate Wellek's approach in “Reflections on Professor Wellek's Concept of Realism,” Neophilologus (1962), 46(2):89-96. For rejoinder, see Wellek, “A Reply to E. B. Greenwood's Reflections,” Ibid. (3):194-196.

2. The chief studies of American realism are: Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1954); Robert P. Falk, “The Rise of Realism,” Harry Hayden Clark, ed., Transitions in American Literary History, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1953), pp. 379-442; Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism (New York: Free Press, 1965); Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966); Harold H. Kolb, Jr., The Illusion of Life: American Realism as a Literary Form (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969); Edwin H. Cady, The Light of Common Day: Realism in American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971); Olov W. Fryckstedt's survey of Howells' movement towards realism in In Quest of America: A Study of Howells' Early Development as a Novelist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), ch. 4; C. Hugh Holman, Windows on the World: Essays on American Social Fiction (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979).

   For broader discussions of realism, see especially the summer 1951 issue of Comparative Literature; Damian Grant, Realism (London: Methuen, 1970); Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Willard Trask, trans. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957); and Joseph Peter Stern, On Realism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). Wellek, “Auerbach's Special Realism,” Kenyon Review (Spring 1954), 16:299-307, has shown that the concept of realism in Auerbach's superb book is somewhat contaminated with existentialism. Stern follows Auerbach in taking realism to be, not a period-concept, but “a perennial mode of representing the world and coming to terms with it” (p. 32). The strength of Stern's book is in its patient teasing out of the nuances of realism and its wide-ranging exploration of “the realistic mode” as a timeless quantity. I hope I am not flattering myself in thinking that one main difference between my and Stern's approach is similar to the difference, in biological nomenclature, between splitters and lumpers, I being the splitter. At any rate, Stern's is the best book on realism as a perennial mode of writing.

   The Stalinist view of realism may be represented by the assertion in Boris Suchkov, A History of Realism (Moscow: Progress, 1973), p. 143: “It was the conflict between the individual and his environment that underlay the action in works of critical realism, and this reflected the process of atomisation of bourgeois society, since the gradual advance of alienation also entailed a widening of the gap between the individual and his environment. The conditions for genuinely epic literature were only created in our own time by socialist realism, the main feature of which is analysis and portrayal of the process of reconciliation of the individual and society as a result of socialist transformation of private ownership social relations.” For an excellent analysis of critical realism cum Lukács versus socialist realism cum Gorky, see George Bisztray, Marxist Models of Literary Realism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).

   Lukács for the most part fought socialist realism. Although I have taken more from this critic than from any other writer on realism, I have essentially reassembled certain fragments of his system for my own constructions. The finest quality of his work is what Bisztray calls its “theoretical-methodological clairvoyance” (ibid., p. 96). I cannot accept his use of certain Marxist categories or the Hegelian concrete universal, or his ignoring folk and popular literature. Certain vital elements in Lukács' thought, such as his grasp of modern bourgeois decay, may be abstracted from their Marxist context and integrated in other system. In particular, for the concept of the concrete universal as embodied in the historically significant character type, I substitute a particular culture's ideal gender role as embodied in a male or female character-type. See Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and Others, Edith Bone, trans. (London: Hillway, 1950); The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, John and Necke Mander, trans. (London: Merlin Press, 1963); The Historical Novel, Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, trans. (London: Merlin Press, 1962).

   For a recent defense of realism with which I am in full agreement, see Gerald Graff, “The Politics of Anti-Realism,” Salmagundi (Summer-Fall 1978), no. 42, pp. 4-30.

3. A remark in an 1876 review by James illustrates his patronizing view of local color: “The author has bravely attempted to write a characteristic American novel, which should be a tale of civilization—be void of big-hearted backwoodsmen and of every form of ‘dialect.’” Review of Charles Henry Doe's Buffets in “Recent Novels,” Nation (January 13, 1876), 22:32. Howells was generally more favorable and discriminating. The same year, in accepting “Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence” by Rose Terry Cooke (whom he did not always care for), he wrote: “I am very glad to accept your story which I think extremely well wrought throughout” (unpublished letter, June 6, 1876, owned by Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford). Ten years later he called this story “a masterpiece”—“Editor's Study,” Harper's (February 1887), 74:484. Howells' support of various local and local color writers—E. W. Howe, Cable, Murfree, Jewett, Wilkins Freeman, Woolson, etc.—is known. Less well-known is that the four most distinguished writers he singled out in his “Editor's Study” essay on the short story in America were all women local colorists—Cooke, Murfree, Jewett, Woolson. In fact, as Ann Douglas has pointed out, many of the local colorists were the impoverished though more polished heirs of the women novelists of the 1850s; see “The Literature of Impoverishment: The Women Local Colorists in America 1865-1914,” Women's Studies (1972), 1(1):3-45. On the other hand, Claude M. Simpson, Jr., traced local color in part to frontier humor in his comprehensive introduction to The Local Colorists: American Short Stories, 1857-1900 (New York: Harper, 1960). Douglas persuades me that the local-color short story was to a large extent a diminished version of the earlier women's novel, muted but better pitched; yet I think she underrates Jewett and Wilkins Freeman.

4. The proof-text here is James's review of The Schönberg-Cotta Family in Nation (September 14, 1865), 1:345. At this time James equated realism with local color and scorned both: “It is just now very much the fashion to discuss the so-called principle of realism, and we all know that there exists in France a school of art in which it is associated with great brilliancy and great immorality. The disciples of this school pursue, with an assiduity worthy of a better cause, the research of local colors, with which they have produced a number of curious effects. We believe, however, that the greatest successes in this line are reserved for that branch of the school which contains the most female writers; for if women are unable to draw, they notoriously can at all events paint, and this is what realism requires. For an exhibition of the true realistic chique we would accordingly refer that body of artists who are represented in France by MM. Flaubert and Gerome to that class of works which in our own literature are represented by the ‘Daisy Chain’ [by Charlotte Yonge] and ‘The Wide, Wide World’” [by Susan Warner]. The sarcasm of this recommendation reflects Godkin's editorial policies and James's own early hostility to realism. James was saying that the final, absurd consequences of the realists' program could be foreseen in the unspeakably bad “domestic” novelists. One of several critics who take this passage to express approval is Henry Nash Smith, “The Scribbling Women and the Cosmic Success Story,” Critical Inquiry (September 1974), 1:68.

5. Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, p. 255. Stern's analysis of realism offers an alternative, possibly preferable, response to Wellek from my own.

6. North American Review (January 1865), 100:272; italics James's.

7. John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 18, 19.

8. This is the flaw in Maurice Larkin's generally quite authoritative survey of European realism, Man and Society in Nineteenth-Century Realism: Determinism and Literature (London: Macmillan, 1977). An exaggerated view of the influence of science on realism has led an astonishing number of thinkers to declare that the obsolescence of nineteenth-century science has led to the obsolescence of realism.

9. Quoted from Cady, Light of Common Day, p. 70.

10. George William Curtis, “Editor's Literary Record,” Harper's Monthly (January 1883), 66:314-315, felt the “defects” of the hero and heroine of Modern Instance were “so palpable and obtrusive” that the “story fails to awaken genuine sympathy for any one of its actors.” The reviewer in “Literature / A Woman's Reason,” Critic (December 22, 1883), 3:518-519, regretted that this novel and Modern Instance did not “carry our imaginations and hold them long captive in spite of themselves” (Eichelberger, Published Comment, pp. 46-47).

11. Gary Stephens, “Haunted Americana: The Endurance of American Realism,” Partisan Review, (1977), 44:71-84.

12. Cf. Stern, On Realism: “the democratic ideology” is “a more natural habitation for the practice of literary realism than any other ideology I know” (p. 57); and realism “cannot help being interested in the political scene” (p. 53).

13. Cf. Robert L. Caserio, Plot, Story, and the Novel from Dickens and Poe to the Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. xiii: “When writers and readers of novels lose interest in plot and story, they appear to lose faith in the meaning and the moral value of acts.”

14. Among many modern instances, there is David Caute's The Illusion: An Essay on Politics, Theatre and the Novel (London: André Deutsch, 1971). This book attacks a premise of realism and naturalism—the idea that it is possible and okay for art to provide an illusion of life. Caute's essay is pervaded with the familiar hysteria that insists it is “radical,” displays a commitment to something that is vague but very sweeping, admires Sartre, Brecht, and Chernyshevsky, but is afraid, finally, that there is nothing to be done after all. The author has a chronic impulse to undercut himself: “Let me offer an assertion which I shall instantly retract” (p. 21). He comes out fighting for the idea that literature must commit itself to social change, but rejects realism's mimesis of imperfect society precisely because this mimesis is a “mirage” (p. 96) that reenters the world and “reshapes” (p. 97) it. He argues for “the dialectical novel,” which “must inevitably de-mystify fiction by recognising its fictitious nature” (p. 265). What sort of fiction does Caute like most at the end of his book? “In the political novel,” he tells us, more truthfully than I think he realizes, “the allegory is the most commonly employed metaphor of alienation” (p. 259). He cites several modern allegories, singling out Orwell's Animal Farm for high marks. Further, he rather unoriginally sees anti-utopia as “the authentic political allegory of our age” (p. 260), with its “singular individual who has not yet succumbed or been crushed or been totally absorbed by the prevailing totalitarianism” (p. 261). I think Caute's book inadvertently supports my contention that allegory—and the praise of allegory—grows out of a desperate sense of helplessness.

15. T. S. Perry, “William Dean Howells,” Century (March 1882), 23:683.