The living and working conditions notably absent from Wordsworth s poetry surfaced in the nineteenth-century realism of writers

such as Charles Dickens, George El iot, and Elizabeth Gaskell. These writers further developed the elements of real ism which allowed for a commentary on the political and social context of the da y at the level of the ordinary or mundane subject. According to Alistair Fowler in A History of English Literature (1987), the Victorian realist novel became a n agent for society s growing awareness of itself as an organism with social respo nsibility. Fowler argues that there are three distinct types of Victorian realis m: 1) There is object realism of content, which entails the representation in an empirical manner of social aspects of society as an organism in and of itself, wh ere shockingly real conditions of the working class are outlined, and details of injustice, poverty, class hatred, and slum conditions are portrayed (Alistair F owler, A History of English Literature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987: 290). E xemplified, Fowler argues, by Charles Dickens in such mid-century novels as Hard Times and Oliver Twist, this type of realism was later adopted and expanded by the advocates of socialist realism in the Soviet Union. 2) Realism renders life in its ordinary proportions through quotidian measu re, clarified by thematic patterns but undistorted by any exaggerated emphasis (Fo wler: 291). This realism of normality is illustrated for Fowler in the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot (Fowler: 291). 3) Realism, embodied in the later novels of Dickens (David Copperfield, for example) and the work of Henry James, aims at realism of intensity rather than t ypicality (Fowler291). This realism relies on producing a sense of heightened feel ing in the reader in the depiction of a single intense, often passionate, moment. The third type of realism is the main idea of this present thesis, and will be d iscussed later on in the Chapter II Following his categorization of the types of realism, Fowler depoliticizes the c riticism launched at the Victorian realists by more recent critics as he dismiss es the claims that their fiction contained gaps which sometimes hid a conspiracy of silence or a collusion of class (Fowler: 292). Such criticisms do not fit with h is act of categorization and celebration. This problem in Fowler, in him, points once again to the dangers of classification, However, Fowler s designation of th e slippery nature of realism and distinction between at least three types of Victo rian realism reinforces the claim that realism is not an unchanging monolithic g enre (Fowler: 290). George Eliot illustrates the second type of Victorian realism as she has her nar rator define, and defend, an admittedly unnamed realism in a discussion of the vu lgar details of life in Adam Bede: I might refashion Mie and character entirely after my own liking; I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman, and put my own thoughts into his mo uth on all occasions. But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men an d things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind falsehood is so easy, truth s o difficult I tum to all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life . . . Foh says my idealistic friend, What vulgar details! What good is ther e in taking all these pains to give an exact likeness of old women and clowns? W hat a low phase of life! what clumsy, ugly people! (George Eliot, Adam Bede. 1859. New York: Rinehart, 1948: 150-152) Eliot s emphasis on the vulgar details of the cheap and common things illustrates Fo wler s category of realism of normality. It also resembles Balzac s atmospheric real ism The cheap things of everyday are actually the precious necessities of life (Eliot : 152). If the idealistic friend is seen to represent the traditional der or the critic of realism, then Eliot is preempting her critics by defending her focus o n the quotidian within her own text. In an 1853 letter to Eliot, Anthony Trollop e writes about the place of realism in his own writing: I have attempted to confi ne myself absolutely to the commonest details of commonplace life among ordinary people allowing myself no incident that would be even remarkable in everyday li fe (Gillian Beer, The Romance. London: Methuen, 1970: 68).

1.6 Reality Effect in (Modern) Realistic Fiction The general structure of narrative is essentially predictive, but descriptions s eem to lack any predictive feature. They also seem to hinder the logical movemen t of the mind. The descriptive language incorporates neither in the presented co mmunication of the story nor in the forward movement of its action. In addition, M. H. Abrams ascribes no cognitive role to the descriptive mode in narratives. He quotes John Ruskin as saying that descriptions do not represent the true appea rances of things to us but the extraordinary or false appearances when we are un der the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy (M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms. (1978). 3rd ed., New Delhi: Macmillan India Limited, 2005: 126) . Thus, in the process of signification the descriptive mode seems isolated and futile. However, Roland Barthes does not believe in the futility of descriptive language in realistic narrative. In Reality Effect, where his theories are both structural ist and post-structuralist, he discusses the employment of the descriptive mode in the works of fiction. He considers three or four roles for the descriptive mo de in realistic literature. The first role is aesthetic, since although descriptive details seem to be a narr ative luxury, lavish to the point of offering many futile details and thereby in creasing the cost of narrative information, they are likely to connote the atmosph ere of the story. (Roland Barthes, The Reality Effect. (1968), In The Rustle of Lan guage. trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968. 149- 154: 141). This role is justified, if not by the work s logic, a t least by the laws of literature (Barthes: 145). In an aesthetic sense, descript ive passages provide an atmosphere in the story in which the reader perceives it as readable. If the abundance of rhetorical language in the story can make it a nnoying, and if understanding it can therefore be problematic, by adding to the embellishment of the story, and by bridging between the present language of it a nd the language that is ideal for the reader, descriptions render it more beauti ful and more acceptable to the reader. The second function of descriptions in realistic novel is semiotic, because thro ugh a condensation of concrete reality, they throw signification to a far off dist ance. They represent the real by causing it to appear as a resistance to meaning, and thus justify speaking in search of meaning. On the one hand, the descriptive mode causes the real reach the threshold of signification, while on the other h and it never lets it pass the threshold. This means that a realistic story refer s us to an abundance of concrete realities while it suspends signification at th e same time. Thus, it can be proposed that in modern realistic fiction descripti ons are for the privilege of form rather than content that they are in the servi ce of language, but not in the service of meaning. To say it in another way, the y are for speaking, but not for meaning. Being there for the creation of languag e, they give the character and reader a chance to speak, an occasion to embody t he function of language. In Barthes we read, All this shows that the real is supposed to be self-sufficient, that it is strong enough to belie any notion of function , that its speech-act has no need to be integr ated into a structure and that the having-been-thereof things is a sufficient pr inciple of speech. (Barthes: 174) The descriptive mode takes role to blur the presented picture in the story so as to make decoding a more professional process. It is as if the abundance of conc rete data wants to transmute the narrative into a system of non-signification. T he great abundance of concrete reality around us justifies the abundance of desc riptive language in the realistic story. This is to mean that the abundance of i nsignificant information in the novel is not to salvage life from its overwhelmi ng nastiness but mainly to help the reader realize the existence of an abundance of trite and trivial things in it. Lilian Furst admits with Barthes that any th orough analysis of modern narrative fiction should give a place to the function of descriptions. She suggests that the descriptive mode is, for Barthes, the use of notations which no function (not even the most indirect) will allow us to jus tify (Furst, 1992: 135). In her view, what is regarded in realistic fiction as use less details (Furst, 1992: 135) gives it not only a structure, but also a luxurio

us atmosphere. She claims that the structure guarantees the existence of the sto ry, while the luxurious atmosphere makes it more digestible (understandable) for the reader. Descriptions give a chance to the writer to show how good she is in her work. Such superfluous details also characterize the protagonist. Realism is achieved through the analysis of the minute details of life in a work of fiction. Furst believes that for Barthes description is like a photograph, f or he considers the matter of textuality as a main division between narrative an d history. Fiction produces a model or an effect of reality, not reality as such but an effect of reality. But such an effect tries to deny that it is an effect or a model. But history is a kind of resistance. Things occur, and we wonder wh at sense we can make of them. The realist writer produces a model of reality in which he tries to make his readers believe. Barthes believes that descriptions m ake the fictive world recognizable to us. To produce a plausible sense of reality, the writer provides a lot of details an d descriptions in his work. But this task is not at all easy to carry out. If an aspect of reality is (an effect of) randomness and superfluousness, how can a s tory-teller produce such an effect? For this purpose, he may show the everyday l ife like a pile of ruins. By doing this, he conveys the impression that a major part of life is (like) a pile of ruins, and is therefore useless, superfluous. T hus, we read descriptions in the novel perhaps in order to forget the ruins of l ife, to relieve our pains about life as ruin. Lisa Zunshine ascribes cognitive roles to the descriptive mode in fiction. In Wh y We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, she discusses the function of t hose parts of fictional narratives that have ostensibly nothing to do with repor ting or with guessing the minds of the characters. By such non-functional parts, Sunshine preferably means descriptions of nature in the story. Descriptions of nature are quite scarce even in those works of fiction where they seem to be ove rrepresented. (Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbia: The Ohio State UP., 2006) Descriptive passages are brief and few; and they are, more often than not, shot through with pathetic fallacy and personification. When it does not explicitly a scribe human thoughts and feelings to natural events and objects, the descriptiv e mode is frequently focalized so as to provide an indirect insight into the fee lings of the characters that perceive them. We like reading fiction because it l ets us try on different mental states and provides us with mental access to the thoughts, intentions, and feelings of the real and/or illusory people in real an d/or illusory social environments. Descriptions can also derive their meaning fr om the social context of a typical scene in a work of fiction, as they set off v arious emotional states experienced by several characters. They accentuate the s tates of mind of the character; and this requires the reader s cognitive effort to understand how the discourse works. The reader may find some descriptions super fluous and/or tedious. But as his taste gets vitiated by hard working, he takes them into stride and enjoys them. Thus, if we conceive of the fictional narrativ e as a cognitive artifact in progress, we can suggest that narrative constantly diversifies the ways in which it engages the working of our mind or our theory o f it. Imagined landscapes, with their pathetic fallacies, personifications, and anthropomorphizing, and with their tacit illuminations of human minds perceiving those landscapes, prompt us to exercise our theory of mind. The relative popula rity of such descriptions depends on the specific cultural circumstances in whic h they are produced and disseminated. Another dimension of the realistic novel is that it is a process of problem solvi ng . It is a portrait of the interiority of a people, of what is inside them. In t his sense, a key question is how a character thinks and feels, or how he manages to solve the problems in critical situations. A realistic novel is also a space for the fusion of the voices of narrator and characters. The narrator may take the function of an analyst who describes the details of the story and the interi ority of the characters in a certain language. The novel provides us with a fict ive interiority of the character in the medium of observation. In reading such a novel, a main subject is the identity of the main character, if he is life-like , and if he can manage a crisis and lead it to a solution.

Thus, in order to recognize the truth or plausibility of certain discourses in t he story, the reader has to use his own knowledge and experiences also. By produ cing characterization and atmosphere, and even by providing the redundant detail s of life, the novel makes a realistic copy everyday life. In realistic novel, t his double capacity of representation, this suspension between visibility and in visibility, makes it perhaps even more qualified than painting, because the real istic novel is more deeply concerned with characterization than with plot. Its u nique concern renders it a space for the fulfillment of a social commitment of r epresentation. This means that for creating meaning, a realistic text circulates concrete knowledge of every-day life, and presents us with certain construction s of reality, with certain orders of shared knowledge. On the one hand, we reali ze the presence of an authoritative writer in the story who stands at the apex o f the triangle of representation and supports it. On the other hand, there is the subject of representation as a space of interact ive interpretation in which the author and reader come to a mutual understanding on the basis of a set of social and generic conventions. There is also the read er (and characters), who not only absorbs the provided knowledge by representing the scene to himself but also evaluates the represented life and symbolically c ontrols the appearance of the new modes of intelligibility. In this way, a reali stic novel provides us with a higher degree of knowledge, and helps us uncover t he deeper secrets of the existence. It helps us, it seems to me, to visit the Ge ist of existence and keep it in ourselves, because a goal-oriented interaction b etween the three factors of representation creates a space for a concrete illust ration of the most internal orders of life. Therefore, realistic representation is the possibility of a collective consciousness to set itself into action and c reate order out of chaos. Like a poet, the writer of a realistic novel is a cult ural institution, a cultural office. He uses the human capacity to make a full r ealization of the imitative capability which every man has. But it is only the p oet and the novelist who are conscious of their advantage. They have the romanti c idea of a genius that recreates order. This is perhaps what Prendergast means when he speaks about the idea of totality in realistic novel. The subject of representation can also be discussed. How can we recognize the re ality in a text? The characters do not exist on the bases of cause and effect, o r motivation, or the norms of stereotype. They should be created for specific pu rposes. They need to be composed and set to interaction with one another. They a re compositional units that are created in a way that we understand them. A real istic literary text helps us understand stereotypes in the character. Realism is prescriptive as well as descriptive, a learning exercise and a civilizing pract ice. A realistic story educates us how life goes on in the cultural world. Such an educational dimension is not necessarily moral, but is important for the issu e of knowledge also. The novel helps us to undermine the previous frames of thou ght and reform our systems of intelligibility, because although the characters h ave limited knowledge and can make mistakes, many of their mistakes are correcte d. The novel makes (is) a system for the characters to meditate on the meaning o f life which perpetually faces them with dilemmas. 1.7 Literary Realism in America European realism does not apply neatly in America. Although European realism was a neoclassical movement, American realism was not, for contrary to the former, which originated mainly from the classical Greek and Roman heritage, the latter borrowed almost nothing from it. Instead of reflecting back to the antiquities, American realism was concerned with the reality of the American life in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the nineteenth-century no widely accepted definiti on could be bestowed upon American realism, for it was yet quite new. In this ce ntury, there was still no series of concepts available for American realism, and no manifestoes, literary models, or schools of thought that could organize and differentiate the upcoming original works and scholarships. Thus, it can be sugg ested that American realism used to grow by trial and error, by accumulation rat her than by design, and for explaining its influence on the American fiction, it would be advisable to consider different stages of its development. In this way

, when we discuss American realism, we should deal with a course of development rather than a collection of concepts and theories. This kind of fiction in ninet eenth-century America goes in divergent ways. But its more significant writers h ave many things in common. Romance is not yet a genre of the past times, and the naturalistic and realistic story is getting established by making its social re pertoire, defining its subject-matter, and addressing a middle-class consumer. H owever, in America the romance is not separate from the novel. This claim is in agreement with Richard Chase s viewpoint when he contrasts the English and America n romance. He affirms that, Although most of the great American novels are romances, most of the great Engli sh novels are not...that the tradition of romance is major in the history of Ame rican novel but minor in the history of the English novel (R. Chase, The America n Novel and Its Tradition. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1957: xii). Chase also assumes that the American novel is obviously a development from the En glish tradition (Chase: 3). However, he approves that the English imagination has followed a middle way through cultural contradictions to produce a fiction of uni ties and harmonies, while the American imagination has captured the cultural opp osites and disharmonies to produce a fiction of extremes and contradictions. It is perhaps for the illustration of such contradictions in the American humor tha t the American novel has actively involved itself with romantic elements, the el ements which it has perhaps not attempted to reconcile. Such involvement with po larities excited Nathaniel Hawthorne to admit in the preface of The House of the Seven Gables (1967) that although the realist novelist feels committed both to the probable and the possible, the romancer feels freer from them. This is to me an that while the truth-seeking imagination of the novelist impels him to show f idelity to the minutes of man s experience, the opinion of the romancer is more la titudinal, and his truth is the result of his own choosing or creation to which he shows an indirect fidelity through a range of language resources like myth an d symbolism. Before the Civil War in America, the romancers attempted to break away from the romantic tradition and compose stories in the style of Dickens and Thackeray for example, that had dominated the American market. However, to speak with Perry M iller, a cultural lag kept them back from doing this. Comparing the English and Am erican fiction from this perspective, Miller says, In England we can see how the rapid urbanization forced upon the generation of Di ckens and Thackeray themes arising from the turmoil of London, the black smoke o f Manchester and Birmingham, the social competition of Barchester and Grosvenor Square. But the creative imagination of this country had taken shape amid the si ngle reality of vast, unsettled traces of wilderness. Crowded and noisy as New Y ork seemed to country visitors in 1850, it was still not sufficiently a pile of c ivilization to make imperative a writer s forsaking the wilderness for the urban sc ene. The dream of Arcadia died hard. A civil War was required to shatter it. (Mil ler, 1967: 258) If the lack of civilization was a major reason for the jointly presence of romance and realism in American fiction, local colour fiction was also influential in the ir embedding. This kind of story implies man s nostalgia to unify with his regiona l environment, and shows how he manages his relations with (external) nature, ho w he comes to terms and feels at home with it (when it is fierce and hostile). O f the external landscape, the writer of a local colour story creates all the par aphernalia of an imaginary situation. Now, if it can be suggested that in the pr actice of reading one internalizes the values of such a created fictitious world , it can also be proposed that the local colour fiction has been effective in pr eserving the romance in American fiction. The romancer has occasion to re-enlive n the ideals of a feudal hierarchical society through portraying the fantastic a nd superhuman characters of heroes, warriors, kings, and courtly lovers in a ser ies of fabulous incidents. However, the realistic novel is beginning to organize or periodize our literary h istory, (Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism, Studies in the Cul tural History of a Literary Idea. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1993) and to find its way to the reading public by opening up new areas of subject matter that be

longs to the lower and middle class people. During the 1880s and 1890s realism d ominated American letters as a secure, standard value, giving birth to a literar y generation that included William Dean Howell, Mark Twain, and Henry James. No consistent definition of realism can be derived from their novels and declaratio ns as s definite literary represent. Bell comments that to characterize American realism through classification of books and authors according to theme and form is a tiring and ultimately futile endeavor, since one is surrounded by immateri al differentiations and insignificant details (Bell: 1-2) Donald Pizer accepts some criteria that offer a more specific definition of real ism, yet even these vary and change within the literary production from one cent ury to the other; one criterion of the realistic mode is verisimilitude of detai l derived from observation and documentation; the second is based on a reliance upon the representative rather than the exceptional in plot, setting, and charac ter, including, however, and a great diversity in subject matter; a final criter ion is an (artistically) objective, rather than a subjective or idealistic view of human nature and experience, with, however, an ethically idealistic aspect al so at times (Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth Century American Literature. Carbondable: Southern Illinois UP, 1984: 1-2). Cathy N. Davidson de fines realism according to its application on various levels, thus referring to the verisimilitude of the fictional dialogues, the when and where in the novel, and the construction of the characters personalities. She claims that There is also a hard core of formal realism in the novel [...] realism operates o n numerous levels: linguistics (characters sound as if they are talking to one a nother), situational (in Bakhtin s term, chronotropic, or within the time/space of f iction), and personal (characters are viewed as individuals not types by the reader) . (Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the World, The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1986: 52) In the criticism of the late nineteenth-century realism produced between the two World Wars, a paradox appears: on the one hand, the depiction in the writing of the period of the new actualities of post-Civil War America was widely approved of; while on the other hand, with an analogous rigor, critics objected to the r ealism in choice of subject matter imposed by the literary and social convention s of the late Victorian American life. Thus, the terms Puritanism and genteel tradi tion were assigned, emphasizing an inconsistency that Pizer in The Cambridge Comp anion to American Realism and Naturalism summarizes in one phrase: Writers of the time, in short, were described as seeking to be free but as still largely bound (Donald Pizer, ed., Introduction, The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howell to London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 1-18: 9). In finding solid footholds and formulating itself, it should have had hard times . After the civil-war, the writers with their critics and audience started to fe el interested in a culture that was to be exclusively American, the ways of life and thought that were native entities rather than imported products. If this di d not necessarily mean that the American new generations had firstly to reject a ll cultural folds imported by their forefathers from Europe, at least it meant t hat for creating a specifically American civilization, they had to address Ameri can thought and feeling. These principles and conditions enable a fresh spirit i n the literary production of the time; nevertheless, this attempt at novelty did not eliminate the controlling Victorian mindset, dominant not only in the socia l state of the affairs, but in literary production as well. Thus, no matter how fresh and free, the inspiration, topics and themes in the realistic fiction of the period were, they had to be restrained, bond, within the limits of the Victorian frame of standards. However, the new empirical vision in the 1860s that was the outcome of the triumph of science and patriotism, and that would mingle with a h eightened national consciousness, is another ground for the emergence of realism . In Documents of American Realism and Naturalism, Pizer acknowledges that even in a more conventional debate over realism, different poles of perception still ex isted, one emphasizing the writer s need to be reactive and sensitive to the condi tions of his time by stressing the character, plot, social life and moral values ; to others, however, this analytical method produced dull novels of a debates so

ciety and ethical character (Donald Pizer, (ed.), Documents of American Realism a nd Naturalism. Cabondale: Southern Illionois UP, 1988: 11). George Parsons Lathr op, one of those who appreciates eloquent representation because it supplies the visual distinctiveness which is one great charm of the stage (George Parsons Lath rop, The Novel and its Future, Documents of American Realism and Naturalism. ed. D onald Pizer. Cabondale: Southern Illionois UP, 1988. 18-32: 28), supports the fi rst viewpoint. Considering the difference between realism and merely literalism, Lathrop believes that the novelist examines the characters feeling and reactions in such a detailed manner because these are the forces that dominate the charac ters. He contends: The novelist will investigate the functions of all those complicated impulses, e motions, and impression which we experience from hour to hour, from day to day, and by which our actions and characters are continually controlled, modified, or explained. With his investigation of psychological phenomena, or insight into t he mysteries of spiritual being, he must unite the study of all that accompany t heses in the individual; as corporeality, which that curious net-work of appeara nces, habit, opinions, in which each human person is enveloped. (George Parsons Lathrop: 28) As Bernard R. Bowron JR. quotes from William Dean Howells, in America of the lat e nineteenth century the new life was a commonplace prosperity, (Bernard R. Bowron , Realism in America. In Comparative Literature Vol. 3, No. 3 (Summer, 1951): 268285: 268), a sharp break between the past and the present would be another meani ng of realism. Rejecting the past as unreal and as irrelevant to the present, wo uld imply that the real is limited to the tangible, to the palpable, to whatever man could learn only through his sense impressions. In this way, the here-and-n ow becomes not only the object of dramatization but also the great source which inspires the realistic story-teller through his own intelligence. The author wou ld necessarily zoom in on the foreground where there are the smiling aspects of life, for in the background are the streaks of the past life that is full of haz ards and wanderings. European culture did not ignore the past as dead or insignificant. On the contra ry, Europe would embed one cultural period within another so that the past was c ontained in the present. This meant that a cultural continuum was the novice of realistic literature which would hold up a mirror for reflecting the whole histo ry of civilization. However, in America, although there was a meaningful involve ment with the past, but fiction would re-enliven the spirit of the past in the c ontext of the present which the modern reader, in his turn, could recognize only with the sensibilities of his own time. This policy of embedding the past in the present had a certain reason: that, as Roger B. Salomon says, the picturesque tradition was unable to deal with the pres ent, and so realism made a religion of newness and contemporaneity (Salomon, Reali sm as Disinheritance: Twian, Howells, and James. In American Quarterly, Vol 16 (W inter, 1964): 531-544: 537). The fiction of Mark Twain opens a way for the reade r to comprehend a meaningful relationship between past and present by representi ng the past as reduced from the heroic to the sordid. The ambitious look of Amer icans to the future, that focused on their rapid scientific and technological de velopments, caused its realism to ignore the romantic heroisms of its past, for the American republic was fascinated mainly with innovations in science and tech nology. It is this diversion of realism in America away from the moral (past) th at Salomon calls the aesthetic of disinheritance (Salomon: 533). If Howells shows the present as inadequate to renovate the soul of the heroic pa st, Salomon admits that Twain eventually gave up trying, and Henry James, by and large, never made the attempt (Salomon: 539) to do so. The realist, Twain perhaps does not even remain split between past and present. He mainly zooms in on the present life. In his realism there is no feeling of nostalgia about a lost past that was full of heroic and romantic values. In his fiction we may come across s ome nostalgic characters, but it is obvious that they never grow to maturity. Th ey are denied the possibility to unite imagination and rational experience to de velop a socially integrated personality. However, Salomon sees Twain as nostalgi c also:

We are face to face, of course, with Twain s nostalgia, his homesickness for the hom e that had been destroyed, his sense of wondering in exile from a lost country . Th e sentiment is common to the century and is the product of the same forces that were to produce realism: change, disorientation, the hateful sense, as James put i t of personal antiquity , of being able to trace in one s lifetime where an age has co me out . ...The crucial fact to remember about Twain is that he was intellectually committed to realism and emotionally committed to a nostalgic sense of the past (Salomon: 540). In contrast, there is an anti-romantic attitude from the realist, who are not co ncerned with the ideal or the superhuman, like the romanticist were, but neither are they interested in naturalistically oriented vast forces, heredity, ultimate re duction and the subhuman. Their vision focusing upon spiritual significance, ess ence and human life in the world becomes in fact their humanism, with important technical and ethical effects: realist focus more on the character as a person t han on the plot, and eliminate the elaborated element in action and emotion. In r ealistic hands, Edwin H. Cady notes, the tools of the novelist would be devoted to the main end of bodying forth characters in their habits as they lived . (Edwin H . Cady, Realism : Toward a Definition, Documents of American Realism and Naturalism. ed. Donald Pizer. Cabondale: Southern Illionois UP, 1988. 324-335: 327) This new vision of the common man in his world engendered the realists favored te chnique known as the dramatic method. As the playwright was set aside from all dra ma, so the author was excluded from the scenes in the novel. This technique requ ired translucent narrators, who never interfered between the reader and his/her pe rception of the characters, and who employed a middle voice in the scenes that cou ld not be presented otherwise. Thus, the novel involves the reader in the proces s of its creation, effacing the distance between text and reader, author and rea der: the reader is present at the conversation, and he/she feels privileged and welcomed in a relationship to the text. 1.8 Naturalism A generation after the realist, the naturalist sharply rejected the view that su pports responsibility and moral worth in the face of the demands of everyday lif e; instead, they introduced a rejection of this ethic, and explored the dominanc e of the instincts (what the realist would call amorality ), in order to liberate f iction and the general mentality of the times from outmoded Victorian ethics. Ch arles C. Walcutt cites three main patterns of ideas that constitute naturalism: reason is worshiped as an ultimate principle; the values of the past are attacke d as unscientific; and an awe/fear of natural forces is cultivated in the realiz ation that man might study them, but could never control them. Walcutt labels th e major themes and motifs of naturalism as determinism, survival, violence, and taboo. The first and basic theme of determinism maintains that natural law and s ocioeconomic influences are more powerful than human will and intention. The the me of survival applies the ideology of determinism to biological competition, pe rceiving survival to be the decisive motive in animal life, thus connecting man to his physical roots. The theme of violence moves the focus and even the worshi p from the supernatural tradition to the lower nature of man, in other words, th e survival of one force over another, as a matter of violence. Finally, naturali sm rejects taboo and refuses to ignore it rather promotes topics that had been consi dered improper, such as sex, disease, bodily functions, and obscenity. (Charles C. Walcutt, New Ideas in the Novel, Documents of American Realism and Naturalism. ed. Donald Pizer. Cabondale: Southern Illionois UP, 1988. 277-295: 288-289) Conflict arises in contemporary theoretical criticism about the optimistic or pessi mistic nature of naturalism. Walcutt talks of pessimistic determinism, but also of a celebration of man s progress via scientific mastery. He argues: Some critics insist that the essence of naturalism is pessimistic determinism, exp ressing resignation or even despair at the spectacle of man s impotence in a mecha nistic universe; other claim that the naturalistic novel is informed with a brig ht, cheerful, and vigorous affirmation of progress of man s ability through science to control his environment and achieve Utopia. (Charles C. Walcutt: 291) The naturalist, then, dared to go a step further than the realists and explored

issues such as the animal within man, and the influence of psychology in explain ing the battle between instinct and conscious will. They broadened tabooed attit udes by accepting working class people and fallen woman, even if this was accomp lished in an atmosphere of pessimism rather than redemption. Louis J. Budd belie ves that, within the protean genre of the novel, a sympathetic reader easily dist inguishes a naturalistic from a realistic work, and either, through method as we ll as attitude, from any other mode .( Louis J. Budd, The American Background, The C ambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howell to London. ed. Don ald Pizer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 21-46: 43) In fact, realism differs fr om naturalism in the movement s assumptions of the individual: in the former, the individuals are responsible for their lives, whereas in the latter there seems t o be no realization of the self as far as duty and obligation are concerned. Cla rk Lee Mitchell finds that a more flexible approach exists in the way that each conceives a person. He contends that Realist characters [...] were provided with as full an illusion of selfhood as p ossible, having been granted the powers to choose and to act in contexts readily familiar to readers. When naturalist occasionally placed their characters in co ntext similarly familiar, it was always to deny them recognizable capacities, wi th the effect of making their circumstances seem themselves somehow alien. (Clar k Lee Mitchell, Determined Fictions, American Literary Naturalism. New York: Col umbia UP, 1989: 3) No strictly cut boundaries exist, however, between the literary movements, espec ially when one succeeds or reaches the other in definition, chronology, properti es and literary productions. Walcutt states that when the same authors and novel s are considered naturalistic in philosophy, romantic in effect, and realistic i n style, these three terms become mutually inclusive. No one of them can define by expelling the other two. (Charles C. Walcutt: 290) 1.9 The Rationale of the Study This chapter has been about defining some of the strengths and weaknesses of the ways in which realism has been seen in the past. As Dennis Walder convincingly writes that despite recent attempts to undermine the idea of realism as outdated or infected by humanist ideology, its use persists (Walder: 18).It is a truism to note that the many theories of realism often contradict each other in their cla ims about the characteristics of the form. This thesis is not to come down on on e side or the other of the debate but, rather, to show the contradictions in the theories of realism that form the backdrop to present study. This is particular ly useful to bring Realism in the Novels of Henry James, the main point of the p resent thesis. For Henry James represents heightened realism. He does not adhere to the distinc tion between the novel (realism in this case) and romance or the distinction bet ween the novel of incident and the novel of character; instead, there are bad nov els and good novels (AN: 6). He maintains that it goes without saying that you wil l not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality; but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being (AN: 5). While the good novel must be anchored in reality, for James there is no formula for g ood realism. James argues that the goal of fiction is an intense representation of a personal impression of life . (AN: 4) The form of the novel, then, is only im portant in that it provides mess to the intensity of the impression/illusion. I n his essay The Art of Fiction, first published in 1888, he writes that literature should be either instructive or amusing (AN: 3). His view of literature as a mann er of instruction and delight. The element of delight comes from the degree of i llusion. The title of one of his short stones, The Figure in the Carpet, has been used as a phrase to summarize the pattern informing an author s entire work as s/ he searches for the highest degree of illusion (Art of the Novel, 228). The foc us of his work is the achievement of dramatic intensity in the production of the illusion of life (AN: 12). The next chapter brings Henry James and realism into m ore closure of the thesis.