2.The literary characteristics of the Realistic Period in American literature
Guided by the principle of adhering to the truthful treatment of 1ife, the realists touched upon various contemporary social and political issues. In their works, instead of writing about the polite, we11--dressed, grammatica1ly correct middle--class young people who moved in exotic places and remote times, they introduced industrial workers and farmers, ambitious businessmen and vagrants, prostitutes and unheroic soldiers as major characters in fiction. They approached the harsh realities and pressures in the post-Civil War society either by a comprehensive picture of modern life in its various occupations, c1ass stratifications and manners, or by a psychological exploration of man's subconsciousness.
The three dominant figures of the period are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Together they brought to fulfillment native trends in the realistic portrayal of the 1andscape and social surfaces, brought to perfection the vernacular style, and explored and exploited the literary possibilities of the interior life.
3.The three dominant figures of the Realistic period differed in their understanding of the “truth ”
(1) While Mark Twain and Howells paid more attention to the "life" of the Americans, Henry James laid a greater emphasis on the" inner world" of man. He came to believe that the literary artist should not simply hold a mirror to the surface of social life in particular times and places. In addition, the writer should use language to probe the deepest reaches of the psychological and moral nature of human beings. He is a realist of the inner life.
(2) Though Twain and Howells both shared the same concern in presenting the truth of the American society, they had each of them different emphasis. Howells focused his discussion on the rising middle class and the way they lived, while Twain preferred to have his own region and people at the forefront of his stories, which is known as “ local colorism”, a unique variation of American literary realism.
4.What is Local Colorism?
Post-Civil War America was large and diverse enough to sense its own local differences. Regional voices had emerged. “ Local colorism” is a unique variation of American literary realism. Generally, the works by local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well--defined region or province. This kind of fiction depicts the characters from a specific setting or of an era, which are marked by its customs, dialects, costumes, landscape, or other peculiarities that have eacaped standardizing cultural influence. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions. They worked from personal experience; they recorded the facts of a unique environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the loca1e. Their materials were necessarily limited and topics disparate, yet they had certain common artistic concerns. Writers whose works are characterized with local colors are Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Joseph Kirkland and Hamlin Garland.
5.The influence of Darwinism and French naturalist writers on American literature in its Realistic Period
The impact of Darwin's evolutionary theory on the American thought and the influence of the 19th century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to yet another school of realism: American naturalism. Darwin, in his The Origin of Species(1859) and Descent Of Man (187l ),expounded his theory of natural selection. The American naturalists accepted the more negative implications of this theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were conceived as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces. And consciously or unconsciously the American naturalists followed the French novelist and theorist Emile Zola's call that the 1iterary artist “must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies.” They chose their subjects from the lower ranks of society and portrayed the people who were demonstrably victims of society and nature. And one of the most familiar themes in American Naturalism is the theme of human “bestiality”, especially as an explanation of sexual desire. For example, Frank Norris, in his McTeague (l899), described the relations of a crude dentist with a superficially refined German-American girl, who, awakened by his desires, is drawn into an animalistic affection.
三．应用 ：1.What is Naturalism? (or American Naturalism)
In literature, the term refers to the theory that literary composition should aim at a detached, scientific objectivity in the treatment of natural man. The movement is an outgrowth of 19th –century scientic thought, following in general the biological determinism of Darwin’s theory, or the economic determinism of Karl Marx.
American Naturalism is a more advanced stage of realism toward the close of the 19th century. The American naturalists accepted the more negative implications of Darwin’s theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were conceived as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces. And consciously or unconsciously the American naturalists followed the French novelist and theorist Emile Zola's call that the 1iterary artist “must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies.” They chose their subjects from the lower ranks of society and portrayed the people who were demonstrably victims of society and nature. And one of the most familiar themes in American Naturalism is the theme of human “bestiality”, especially as an explanation of sexual desire.
Artistically, naturalistic writings are usually unpo1ished in language, lacking in academic skills and unwieldly in structure. Philosophically, the naturalists believe that the real and true is always partially hidden from the eyes of the individual, or beyond his control. Devoid of rationality and caught in a process in which he is but a part, man cannot fully understand, let alone contro1, the world he lives in; hence, he is left with no freedom of choice.
In a word, naturalism is evolved from realism when the author's tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more detached, ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a different philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence. Notable writers of naturalistic fiction were Frank Norris, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Driser.
2.The distinction between Realism and Naturalism
Naturalism is evolved from realism when the author's tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more detached, ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a different philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.
The distinction lies, first of all, in the fact that Realism is concerned directly with what is absorbed by the senses; Naturalism, a term more properly applied to literature, attempts to apply scientific theories to art. Second, Naturalism differs from Realism in adding an amoral attitude to the objective presentation of life. Naturalistic writers, adopting Darwin’s biological determinism and Marx’s economic determinism, regard human behavior as controlled by instinct, emotion, or social and economic conditions, and reject free will. Third, Naturalism had an outlook often bleaker than that of Realism, and it added a dimension of predetermined fate that rendered human will ultimately powerless.
3.What is (Social) Darwinism?
Social Darwinism is a belief that societies and individual human beings compete in a struggle for existence in which natural selection results in “struggle of the fittest.” Social Darwinists base their beliefs on theories of evolution developed by British naturalist Charles Darwin. Social Darwinists typically deny that they advocate a “law of jungle.” But most propose arguments that justify imbalances of power between individuals, races, and nations because they consider some more fit to survive than others. The theory had produced a big impact on Naturalism.
The major writers in the Realistic Period
I. Mark Twain (1835--19l0)
Mark Twain is a great literary giant of America, whom H.L.Mencken considered “the true father of our national literature.” With works like Adventure of
Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Life on the Mississippi (1883) Twain shaped the world’s view of America and made a more extensive combination of American folk humor and serious literature than previous writers had ever done.
（一）一般识记Mark Twain’s life and writing:
Mark Twain, Pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born on November 30, 1835, in Missouri, and grew up in the river town of Hannibal. After his father died, he began to seek his own fortune .He once worked as a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a newspaper colunist and as a deadpan lecturer. Twain's writing took the form of humorous journalism of the time, and it ennabled him to master the technique of narration.
(二) 识记Mark Twain’s major works:
In l865, he pub1ished his frontier tale “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which brought him recognition from a wider public. But his full literary career began to blossom in 1869 with a travel book Innocents Abroad, an account of American tourists in Europe which pokes fun at the pretentious, decadent and undemocratic Old World in a satirical tone. Mark Twain’s best works were produced when he was in the prime of his life. All these masterworks drew upon the scenes and emotions of his boyhood and youth. The first among these books is Roughing It (1872), in which Twain describes a journey that works its way farther west. Life on the Mississippi tells a story of his boyhood ambition to become a riverboat pilot. Two of the best books during this period are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The former is usually regarded as a classic book written for boys about their particular horrors and joys, while the latter, being a boy’s book specially written for the adults, is Twain’s most representative work, describing a journey down the Mississippi undertaken by two fugitives, Huck and Jim. Their episodic set of encounters presents a sample of the social world from the bank of the river that runs through the heart of the country.
His social satire is The Gilded Age, written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner. The novel explored the scrupulous individualism in a world of fantastic speculation and unstable values, and gave its name to the get-rich-quick years of the post-Civil War era. Twain’s dark view of the society became more self-evident in the works published later in his life. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), a parable of colonialization. A similar mood of despair permeates The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), which shows the dis
astrous effects of slavery on the victimizer and the victim alike and reveals to us a Mark Twain whose conscience as a white Southerner was tormented by fear and remorse. By the turn of the century, with the publication of The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (l900) and The Mysterious Stranger (1916), the change in Mark Twain from an optimist to an almost despairing pessimist could be felt and his cynicism and disillusionment with what Twain referred to regularly as the “damned human race” became obvious.
(三) 领会1.Twain as a local colorist
Twain is also known as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. Consequently, the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became the endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi
valley and the West became his major theme. Unlike James and Howe1ls, Mark Twain wrote about the lower-class people, because they were the people he knew so we1l ancl their 1ife was the one he himself had lived. Moreover he successfully used local color and historical settings to i1lustrate and shed light on the contemporary society.
2.His use of vernacular
Another fact that made Twain unique is his magic power with language, his use of vernacular. His words are col1oquial, concrete and direct in effect, and his sentence structures are simp1e, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken 1anguage. And Twain skillfully used the colloquialism to cast his protagonists in their everyday life. What's more, his characters, confined to a particular region and to a particular historical moment, speak with a strong accent, which is true of his 1ocal colorism. Besides, different characters from different literary or cultural backgrounds talk differently, as is the case with Huck, Tom, and Jim. Indeed, with his great mastery and effective use of vernacular, Twain has made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable 1iterary medium in the literary history of the country. His style of language was later taken up by his descendants, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and influenced generations of letters.
3.His humor
Mark Twain's humor is remarkable, too. It is fun to read Twain to begin with, for most of his works tend to be funny, containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty remarks, etc., and some of them are actually tall ta1es. By considering his experience as a newspaperman, Mark Twain shared the popu1ar image of the American funny man whose punning, facetious, irreverenl articles filled the newspapers, and a great deal of his humor is characterized by puns, straight-faced exaggeration, repetition, and anti-climax, let alone tricks of travesty and invective. However, his humor is not only of witty remarks mocking at small things or of farcical elements making people laugh, but a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism.
(四) 应用 Huckleberry Finn What is the book about?
Huckleberry Finn, by general agreement, is Twain’s finest book and an outstanding American novel. Its narrator is Huck, a youngster whose carelessly recorded vernacular speech is admirably adapted to detailed and poetic de
scription of scenes, vivid representations of characters, and narrative renditions that are both broadly comic and subtly inonic.
Huck, son of the village drunkard, is uneducated, superstitious, and sometimes credulous; but he also has a native shrewdness, a cheerfulness that is hard to put down, compassionate tolerance, and an instinctive tendency to reach the right decisions about important matters. He runs away from his persecuting father and, with his companion, the runaway slave Jim, makes a long and frequently interrupted voyage floating down the Mississippi River on a raft. During the journey Huck meets and comes to know members of greatly varied groups, so that the book memorably portrays almost every class living on or along the river. Huck overcomes his initial prejudices and learns to respect and love Jim.
The book’s pages are dotted with idyllic descriptions of the great river and the surrounding forests, and Huck’s exuberance and unconscious humor permeate the whole. But a thread that runs through adventure after adventure is the theme of man’s inhumanity to man---of human cruelty. Children miss this theme, but adults who read the book with care cannot fail to be impressed by an attitude that was to become a reiterated theme of the author during his later years.
The significance of the novel
The book marks the climax of Twain's literary creativity. Hemingway once described the novel the one book from which “all modern American literature comes.”The book is significant in many ways. First of all, the novel is written in a language that is totally different from the rhetorical language used by Emerson, Poe, and Melville. It is not grand, pompous, but simple, direct, lucid, and faithful to the colloquial speech. This unpretentious style of colloquialism is best described as “vernacular”. Speaking in vernacular, a wild and uneducated Huck, running away fom civilization for his freedom, is vividly brought to life. Secondly, the great strength of the book also comes from the shape given to it by the course of the raft's journey down the Mississippi as Huck and Jim seek their different kinds of freedom. Twain, who knew the river intimately, uses it here both realistically and symbolically. Thirdly, the profound portrait of Huckleberry Finn is another great contribution of the book to the legacy of American literature. The novel begins with a description of how Widow Douglas attempts to civilize Huck and ends with him deciding not to let it happen again at the hands of Aunt Sally. The climax arises with Huck's inner struggle on the Mississippi, when Huck is polarized by the two opposing forces between his heart and his head, between his affection for Jim and the laws of the society against those who help slaves escape.
Huck’s final decision -- to fo1low his own good--hearted moral impulse rather than conventional village morality -- amounts to a vindication of what Mark Twain called" the damned human race," damned for its comfortable hypocrisies, its thoroughgoing dishonesties, and its pervasive cruelties. With the eventual victory of his moral conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows.
3.Selected Reading: An Excerpt from Chapter 3l of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1) the story:
This novel begins with Huck under the motherly protection of the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson. When his father comes to demand the boy’s fortume, Huck pretends that he has transferred the money to Judge Thather, so his father catches him and puts him into a lonely cabin. One night, ahen his father is drunken, Huck escapes to Jackson’s island and meets Miss Watson’s runaway slave, Jim. They start down the river on a raft. After several adventures, the raft is hit by a steamboat and the two are separated. Huck swims ashore and is saved by the Grangerford family, whose feud with the Sheperdsons causes bloodshed. Later, Huck discovers Jim and they set down again, giving refuge to a gang of frauds: the “Duke”and “King,” whose dramatic performances culminate in the fraudulent exhibition of the “Royal Nonesuch.” Huck also witnesses the lynching and murder of a harmless drunkard by an Arkansas aristocrat on the shore. When he finds that some rogues intend to claim legacies as Peter Wilks’s brother, Huck interferes on behalf of the three daughters, and the scheme is failed by the arrival of the real brothers. Then he discovers that the “King” has sold Jim to Mrs Phelps, Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally. At the Phelps farm, Huck and Tom try to rescue Jim. In the rescue, Tom is accidentally shot and Jim is recaptured. Later, Tom reveals that the rescue is necessary only because he “wanted the adventures of it.” It is also disclosed at the end of the novel that Huck’s father has died, so Huck’s fortune is safe.
