The Realist Settlement: What the Period Decided

The idea

Between the Civil War and the turn of the century American writing decided that ordinary life was enough, and the decision holds for a century afterward. Realism's programme, which Howells promoted from the editor's chair at The Atlantic and Twain and James practised in different directions, was that fiction should show life as it is lived, with plausible motives and consequences that follow from character rather than from a plot's need. The conditions made it possible: a war that ended a romantic idea of the country, railroads and industry that changed it fast enough to need describing, immigration that made it various, and a magazine market that paid for short fiction. Twain supplied the movement's most consequential technical act by writing American speech as people spoke it and letting that speech carry a whole novel, so that Huckleberry Finn is narrated by a boy whose conscience has been formed by the society the book indicts, and whose decision that he will go to hell rather than betray Jim is the climax of American fiction's argument with itself. Alongside realism ran regionalism, which took one place and recorded its speech, work and customs before they went: Jewett's Maine villages, Chopin's Creole and Acadian Louisiana, Harte's mining camps, Freeman's thin-soiled New England farms. The women of the period wrote the sharpest work about what the arrangements cost: Chopin's Edna swimming out past her strength with no narrator willing to name what she is doing, Gilman's narrator creeping around a room she was confined to for her health, Freeman's farm wife moving into the barn. James took the other road entirely, following consciousness rather than locality, and left the technique of the limited centre that the next century used as standard.