Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Fifth Edition. New York: Norton, 1999.

American Literature, 1865-1914

The result was that between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I the country was wholly transformed. Before the Civil War, white American had been essentially a rural, agrarian, isolated republic most of whose idealistic, confident, and self-reliant inhabitants believed in a Protestant God. By the time the United States entered World War I in 1917, it was an industrialized, urbanized, continental world power forced to deal with some of the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution as well as with profound changes in social institutions and cultural values. Increasingly, it would be obliged to acknowledge (if not to remedy) racism that emancipation had not eradicated, military expansionism initiated by the war of aggression against Mexico in 1846-48, and the policy of Indian removal that was a prominent fact of its pre-Civil War life. 1241

Some of this urban growth was the result of population shifts from country to cities, but even more of these new urban dwellers were immigrants. 1242

During his long literary career, James evolved from a recognizably “realistic” writer to one concerned with the complexities of the inner life and the instability of subjective perceptions on which meaning-making depends. No small part of the pleasure in reading The Ambassadors (1903), for example, comes from observing the deepening perception and subtle but certain growth of its protagonist, Lambert Strether. James’s fiction still makes demands on readers even after many of his innovations—stream of consciousness, limited point of view, and so forth—have become commonplace. But as the continuous flow of first-rate criticism of James suggests, the taste for his fiction is worth acquiring. 1245

Broadly speaking, realism is used to characterize a movement in European, English, and American literature that gathered force from the 1830s to the end of the century. As defined by William Dean Howells, who not only practiced realism but argued powerfully in support of its esthetic and ethical rightness, realism “is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” While this definition does not answer every question that may be raised about truth, treatment, or even about material, it offers a useful point of departure. When Henry James, in the letter quoted above, spoke of the “documentary” value of Howells’s oeuvre, he called attention to realism’s fascination with the physical surfaces, the particularities of the sensate world in which fictional characters lived. 1246

This same novel illustrates another aspect of American literary realism—its tendency to select “representative” or ordinary characters—characters one might meet on the street without noticing them. Unlike their romantic counterparts, they don’t walk with a limp, their eyes don’t blaze, they don’t emanate diabolical power. 1246

To verisimilitude of setting and ordinariness of characters living conventional lives as markers of realism, we may add the use of a point of view that reduces authorial intrusion. In Lapham the proportion of dialogue—all of it attempting to render accurately the spoken language of individuals—is very high. And on occasions when the author intrudes, he or she does so in plain language and simple syntax. 1247

Naturalism is commonly understood as an extension or intensification of realism. The intensification involves the introduction of characters of a kind only occasionally to be found in the fiction of Howells, James, or Wharton—characters from the fringes and lower depths of contemporary society, characters whose fates are the product of degenerate heredity, a sordid environment, and a good deal of bad luck. 1248

One of the most far-reaching intellectual events of the last half of the nineteenth century was the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. This book, together with his Descent of Man (1870), hypothesized on the basis of massive physical evidence that over the millennia humans had evolved from “lower” forms of life. Humans were special, not—as the Bible taught—because God had created them in his image, but because they had successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions and had passed on their survival-making characteristics. 1248

They were all concerned on the one hand to explore new territories—the pressures of biology, environment, and other material forces—in making people, particularly lower-class people, who they were. 1249

Regional writing, another expression of the realistic impulse, resulted from the desire both to preserve distinctive ways of life before industrialization dispersed or homogenized them and to come to terms with the harsh realities that seemed to replace these early and allegedly happier times. At a more practical level, much of the writing was a response to the rapid growth of magazines, which created a new, largely female market for short fiction along with correlated opportunities for women writers. 1251

Kate Chopin, not unlike Samuel L. Clemens, may be thought of as a regional writer interested in preserving the customs, language, and landscapes of a region of the south. We have no better record of antebellum lower Mississippi River Valley than Clemens provided in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, and Chopin’s short stories and her novel The Awakening pick up, almost literally, / where Clemens’s books leave off—in the northern Louisiana countryside and, downriver, in New Orleans. 1251-52

so too does Chopin, in The Awakening, give us unique access to the interior life of a Protestant woman wakening to her oppressions and repressions in the context of a Catholic community still marked by less conscience-stricken Old World attitudes. That The Awakening also has crystallized many women’s issues of the turn of the century and since is testimony to the potential for regional realism to give the lie to attempts to derogate it as a genre. 1252

Chesnutt’s black people, by contrast, are clearly post-Civil War in outlook; even if they live on plantations, they are as much concerned to serve their own interests as they are to please their “master.” 1252