By Lechi Eke
In this edition of Inside Literature, we will show how a reader or a student of Literature can identify works of realism.
Literal Realism is the literary representation of everyday life of ordinary people or the middle class life. It is also known as the representation of reality. It deals with the close observation of outward appearances.
Doubtless, there is always an element of realism present in Romanticism, Enlightenment and other literary movements, but in Realism however, the subject matter is the middle class, the ordinary people.
What set the realism school apart was the shunning of the exotic theme, the exaggerated emotionalism, the supernaturalism of Romanticism, and its theme of individualism. Realism embraced practical or factual things which presents an accurate description of nature, and the way people lived at the time they were writing, without high speech (poetic or figurative) or embellishing events.
As opposed to Romanticism’s individualism, Realism portrays the conditions of the masses. It presents the individual in a society, not in isolation.
I can say that one of the advantages of literary realism is presenting to us the way life was in especially the 19th century (1800s) without colouring.
Realist writers seemed to be saying through their works, “This is what life is right now for majority of the people, this is how we live.” They centred not on the elite, the court, the aristocrats, but on ordinary people. Okay, so there were industries coming up, great innovations, developments, things to make life easier, yes, but the poor, the have-nots still bore the brunt of these new developments – these things didn’t make their lives better because they worked with little wages to enrich the rich, the already well-off.
So the goal of realism is to portray these evils in the society: social ills, political and the economic conditions of the lower class, their problems as truthfully as possible without embellishments.
Realist artists like Gustave Courbet, presented to the world the reality of 19th century life and people by shunning the aristocrats and the exotic and exaggerated lifestyle of the upper class, and the supernaturalism and emotionalism of Romanticism. Courbet seemed to be saying, “Life is not all about emotions and supernaturalism; majority of people are grappling with lack, with work which wages don’t meet needs; with how to make ends meet.” There are others like Madame Emma Bovary who feels trapped in circumstances they don’t like, and they cannot show that emotion publicly!
So realism portrays identifiable people in real time grappling with real universal problems.
The Features of Realism are:
- A focus on real people in everyday situations, common problems as against aristocratic life and pastime; supernaturalism and emotionalism and the exaltation of beauty and nature as the truth.
- Untouched nature or beauty is not the truth, the truth is how real people, the lower class who are more in number are grappling with life.
- It highlights the behaviour and tough decisions everyday people have to make as seen in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun where an African-American family has a challenge of what to do with an insurance cheque from their father and husband’s insurance life policy. Every member of the family has an opinion of what the $10, 000 cheque can do for them, but at the end, their mother, the wife of the deceased, insists that a house or having a roof over one’s head is the most important need to spend money on, and Emma’s (Madame Bovary) tough decisions in the book named after her.
- Believable dialogue – no flowery language – simple and natural language.
Put on your imagination. The English Princes (William and Harry) do not live ordinary people’s lifestyle. If they exchange their lives with ordinary young men of their age, they would see that what they concern themselves about, are not the same issues their age mates are grappling with today.
So Realism is a literary method employed by writers to illustrate story essentials such as setting, characters, themes, etc. without embellishments of imagery or figurative language which help readers recognize and identify with characters and the world they inhabit.
In Politics, Realism reveals an aggressive conflict side which embraces morality, unlike idealism and liberalism which reinforce cooperation.
In Literature, there are marked characteristics of Realism. These are:
Detail – termed Realism Detail. Detail is that feature that sets Realism apart from other literary schools. Realism Detail exhibits amongst other qualities, precise or detailed and accurate representation in art, of the visual appearance of scenes and objects (tiny details of food, clothes, social habits, landscapes – so that after reading a realist novel set in *Aba, the reader begins to feel he/she’s been there). So detail is the accurate depiction of nature or of contemporary life which is, according to Jules Fracas Champfleury, “objective reality.”
*Aba is one of the commercial nerve centres of Eastern Nigeria (West Africa) located in Abia state.
Others (features of Realism) are: the use of Transparent and Simple Language which ordinary people speak – what regular people speak at home, at work, when they are happy, sad, angry, etc. ordinary people don’t speak verse or poetically.
Omniscient Narrator – realism uses the 3rd person omniscient narrator to limn the 3rd person objective reality without embellishments showing that such reality is free from the character’s conceptual whims and plots – the reality in realism is represented faithfully through the 3rd person narrative. The omniscient 3rd person is everywhere: hears everything, sees everything and knows everything, and represents them the way they appear.
Verisimilitude – having the appearance of truth – realism is heavy on research, on getting facts correctly, so that the writer represents things truthfully.
The Novel – the novel is the genre vehicle that can carry literary realism perfectly because of its detailed nature and its capacity – pages and pages of written stuff! So the author has space to explore the setting, the psychological states of the characters, etc., so novel form is the vehicle of literary realism. Also, because realism is almost reportage in nature it seemed to imitate journalism which was also rising at this time. Plays (drama) because it is reportage in nature also employed realism.
The Quotidian – realism employed everyday occurrences in its narration – the depiction of daily life – no longer the heroic deeds of heaven-endowed privileged men which literary movements of past periods portrayed.
Character – realism attempts to truthfully represent life, society, and the world as they are. And, what vehicle can be best used to limn what was going on than the vehicle of those who were experiencing what was going on – the human beings, the characters in the story? So writers started with the psychological reality of the characters as can be seen in the plights of Emma in Madame Bovary.
The literary realism period was incidentally the period of the rise of psychology as a discipline although it is said that all that Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, *Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) propounded was already contained in the novels of Russian realism novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)!
*Freud is well known for his theories of the unconscious mind, dreams, infantile sexuality, libido, repression and transference (found in the field of psychology).
Class – the rise in the middle class means a rise in the literacy of the middle class, so the characterization of the vehicle of literary realism has to centre not on the bourgeois, but on the ordinary folks.
Note that the middle class wasn’t in existence, initially. There was the upper class and the lower class. The peasants rose to middle class from industrialization and capitalism of the periods they lived in over the years – it was a slow but definite rise from peasantry to middle class. With this rise, also came the rise in literacy that was how things began to balance. It was the peasants turned merchants that became the middle class.
So the middle class were the working class struggling to make ends meet, enriching the upper class the more, and suffering the brunt of developments like industrialization. It was this class that realist writers targeted.
Social Critique – Realist writers like Charles Dickens, Honore de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy raised awareness in their novels by depicting the social conditions of the world they lived in through their characters’ circumstances and situations. These writers criticized the social, political and economic conditions of their world. These social criticisms of course brought some change. As the leaders began to read about the terrible conditions of the led, I’m sure (shame come catch them!).
Still bearing in mind that the goal of Realism is to present things as they are or appear, to present life as it truly is; to portray real typical people dealing with unembellished problems and situations accurately and truthfully as they can be, we examine social realism:
The major ideas of Realism, especially in sociology, are: anarchy (which can necessitate revolution – when people see how things are, it can stir up emotions that can lead to revolution), the balance of power and, National interest.
As we continue with Literary Periods, with a focus on Literary Realism, I recommend you read such plays like John Osborne’s social realism play, Look Back in Anger, Lorraine Hansbury’s A Raisin in the Sun, and some of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels: The Brothers Karamazov, The Possessed (aka The Demons and The Devils), The Idiot, etc.